Stormbringer: Book 2 of the Wyrd

Two

The only thing worse than waking up was staying asleep.

Sigmund's head hurt. His head hurt, and his eyes burned, and his throat tasted like sour wine and rotten foie gras. Lying in someone else's bed in someone else's house, and he was pretty sure the room was spinning. Spinning and shrieking, a klaxon saw blade that dragged between his ears until his hand, flailing outward in the darkness, found the vibrating glass brick of his phone and somehow managed to fumble the slider across to "off."

Then silence. Utter, abject silence.

Not the murmur of the television or the hiss of the shower, not the clatter of the kitchen or the hum of Dad's electric razor. Just nothing, an empty, soulless void. Because this wasn't home, this strange, too-big bed in this strange, too-dark room. This was Lain's place, Lain's apartment. Some huge sterile nest perched atop a glass-and-steel pillar in the heart of Pandemonium, filled with too-hip furniture shipped in straight from New York, hand-chosen to present an image, a persona. The shell in a perfectly executed three-card monte of seduction, one with Sigmund at its heart.

It was a nice apartment, but it was a con. The same con as Lain himself, crafted from a CEO's money and a god's single-minded cunning.

And now it was Sigmund's, and Sigmund was alone.

"Hnnurgh!"

Sitting up was almost worse than lying down, but only just. A glass of water and a torn-off silver blister pack of Advil stared back at Sigmund from the nightstand. He returned the expression for a moment, then drank the water, leaving the pills behind.

Even with his brain trying to claw its way out via his eyeballs, it still took Sigmund until halfway to the bathroom to realize he was hungover. That was new. New and unwanted. Definitely unwanted.

He'd had a lot to drink last night. A lot. Sigmund had never really considered himself much of a drinker, and especially not a drinker of wine. It'd always tasted a bit the same before, sort of like kerosene mixed with wood chips. Last night it'd occurred to Sigmund, sometime between the third course and the fifth, that maybe he just hadn't been drinking the right sort.

In the bathroom, the reflection in the mirror was the one he'd always remembered. Brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair. Overweight, under-shaved, forgettable in every detail.

Except that somewhere, beneath the surface, lurked the soul of a long-dead goddess. Sigyn, the Victorious. Wife of Loki and reshaper of Ragnarøkkr. She was quiet this morning—hiding from the hangover, maybe—but if he closed his eyes and felt, Sigmund could find her. An ice-cold core of certainty lurking down beneath the postadolescent anxiety and mishmashed pop culture.

When he opened his eyes again, all Sigmund saw was Sigmund. So he pulled off his T-shirt and kicked off his boxers, turning on the shower and stepping in under the ludicrously oversized spray. Like standing in the middle of a hot, soapy rainstorm, the smell of sandalwood and citrus exploding out from the sort of shampoo that came from shops selling that and nothing else.

With his eyes closed in the heat, Sigmund felt his headache receding, just a little. He stood there for far too long, waiting for the water to go cold and knowing that it wouldn't. Back at home—at Dad's home—Sigmund would get twenty minutes in the shower, tops, before the spray turned to ice. At Lain's place—at Sigmund's new place—luxury was indefinite, an endless waterfall delivered at perfect temperatures and perfect pressure, all controlled by nothing so gauche as taps but rather a large touchscreen panel set into the wall just beyond the glass. Sigmund's perfect shower was already set and stored and fav'd, ready to be recalled with the touch of a single button.

Sigmund's new life. Welcome to it.

Shower, toothbrush, hairbrush, shave. Afterward, the face in the mirror looked damper and less hungover, but otherwise unchanged.