You have no idea how sorry I am about the delay. I blame Frodo (my laptop) and a faulty internet connection.

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Chapter 1

The bus screeched to a halt as Jamie swung his backpack over one narrow shoulder and gathered up his jacket. He shook the garment out, looking for his hat, before he remembered that he was still wearing it on his head.

“You getting off or what?” the bus driver hollered. Jamie muttered an apology as he made his way up to the front of the bus and all but tumbled down the stairs. The door slammed shut behind him and the bus roared off, a kid in the back seat making a rude gesture as Jamie trudged up his driveway.

“May Loki blast you to the ends of the universe,” Jamie mumbled. He hadn’t seen the gesture, but it wasn’t the first time that someone had given him the finger out of the back of the bus.

His mother had left a note on the fridge. It informed him that she’d be back around four with groceries and a surprise. Jamie already knew what the surprise was. A bag of licorice jelly beans if he was lucky. But Jamie was never lucky, and the surprise was more likely to be a bag of Twizzlers, the strawberry kind that made him nauseous.

“When will she understand that red licorice is not actually licorice?” he asked no one in particular as he dragged himself and his backpack up the stairs to his room.

When the Lamonts had first looked at the house, the real estate agent had skipped this particular room entirely, pointing out the door as a “lovely walk-in closet” and moving on to the more interesting aspects of the house. Mr. and Mrs. Lamont had decided that the tiny room would do perfectly for their eleven-year-old son.

That had been almost seven years ago, and eighteen-year-old Jamie was on the verge of outgrowing his bedroom. Not that it mattered much. Although the door was always closed tight with him inside, he made a point of spending as little time in his room as possible, aided by a variety of fantasy fiction and adventure stories.

Dropping the backpack on a pile of laundry (dirty or clean, it wasn’t completely clear), Jamie flopped on his bed and pulled a dog-eared translation of the Poetic Edda out from under his pillow. He flipped to a random page and began to read.

A few hours later, a slam from downstairs announced that his mother was home.

“Jamie!” she called up the stairs. “I got you a surprise!”

“I read the note,” Jamie called back, not looking up from the book. His door cracked open, Mrs. Lamont’s anxious face peering inside.

“So how many times have you read that one?” she asked in a painful stab at humour.

“Five hundred forty two,” was the reply. At length, Jamie stuck a scrap of paper into the book to mark his place and turned to face his mother. She held a bag of strawberry Twizzlers in one hand.

Jamie was never lucky.

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Having forgotten to turn his alarm on the night before, Jamie ended up missing the bus and walking to school the following morning. As a result, he was not in homeroom when the new student was introduced.

“You’re Jamie Lamont, aren’t you?” Jamie looked up from the frog he was dissecting (by himself, since he had an all-too-noticable disdain for the rest of the class and refused to take a lab partner, not that anyone would have worked with the kid who called himself the High Priest of Loki anyway) and realized that he was not alone at his table.

The newcomer was a tall young man with high cheekbones and a reddish blond ponytail. Very tall. Even perched as he was on the high lab stool, Jamie found that his own 5’4” inches brought him about even with the new boy’s collarbone.

“Yeah, I’m Jamie,” Jamie said.

The new boy nodded, then pulled up a stool. “You’re the one who calls himself the High Priest of Loki, right?”

“Whatever Leighanne told you, it’s a lie,” Jamie informed him. “Yes, I’m the High Priest, but no, I do not do human sacrifices to Loki, nor do I build bonfires in the woods and dance around them naked.”

The new boy merely raised one reddish blond eyebrow. “My sources say otherwise.”

“Sources? Who the hell are you, anyway?” Jamie had no idea where the new kid had found out about his bonfire the previous autumn, and he meant to find out.

“Luke Shifter,” the new kid said. He did not offer to shake hands. It was just as well, since Jamie had a scalpel in one hand and frog guts in the other.

“Shifter? Like shapeshifter?”

“Maybe,” Luke said. “About the bonfire last autumn. You had an audience.”

Jamie felt blood rushing to his face as he stuttered that he’d never had or been to a bonfire in his life.

Luke laughed. “It wasn’t a girl, or your parents or anything. Actually, your audience was the one you intended to reach.”

The blood rapidly left Jamie’s face and settled in the pit of his stomach. “Loki,” he whispered.

“A mutual friend, you might say.”

“But how do you even know about it? It wasn’t from Leighanne. Everyone knows I’m the High Priest of Loki. Hell, it’s not like I make a secret of it. But the bonfire—”

“Let’s just say that a little bird told me and leave it at that.”