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“Whaaa????” Johanna rolled over and blearily grabbed for the phone. Ric the Vic, said the display. She would have rather ignored it, but answering it was the only way to make that damned ringing stop.
“Ric?” Her friend, Ric the Vic, would only have called six times in a row if it was a dire emergency, and if it was that dire, she wasn’t going to stop dialing until she got an answer.
“Johanna, you’ve gotta help me get them out!” Ric was breathless, practically crying. Johanna hadn’t heard her so overset before.
“What’s going on?” Adrenaline got her jumping out of bed and slithering one-handed into some tight jeans.
“I… I don’t even know what to say! It’s not me, but…. Come to the Cathedral as fast as you can, please, Johanna!”
“Got it.” She stuffed the phone in her pocket, pulled on a tshirt and her cream-coloured great coat, and ran out the door.
Johanna stood next to Ric on the balcony, leaning on the rail and staring in horrified fascination at the scene below. No wonder Ric was panicking. It wasn’t just her run of the mill demon-possessed parishioner.
The altar was being… desecrated. Yeah, that was a good word for what they were doing. Johanna wasn’t a prude, she’d seen people having sex before, but neither was she a voyeur—rarely had they been as enthusiastic and… inventive as this couple. Yeah, that altar was thoroughly desecrated. And furthermore, the thing that really had Ric on edge? Those weren’t just any hot guys. Johanna was pretty sure the one on bottom was a fae. Probably Robin Goodfellow, or Puck as he was more commonly known. Desecrating an altar was the kind of trick that was right up his blasphemous alley. But it got worse. The one on top? If Johanna wasn’t mistaken, and she very much feared she wasn’t, that one was Loki, God of Mischief. God, what a fitting couple. They deserved each other even more than Hob and Dream did.
But yeah. She could definitely see why Ric wanted them gone. Nothing good could come of this, for the cathedral or the world, for that matter. And her usual demon exorcising tactics weren’t going to work.
Johanna hadn’t gotten very far on working out a plan, when things got worse.
“They’s funny.” Beside them on the balcony, where she hadn’t been before, stood a little girl with flyaway blond hair and makeup smeared all over her face, holding a red balloon by the string.
“Oh no, you shouldn’t be here!” Ric exclaimed, moving as if to cover the child’s eyes.
“No!” Johanna yelled, grabbing Ric by the arm and pulling her away. “Don’t touch her! That’s not a little girl, Ric, that’s Shivering Jemmy, a God of Chaos!”
“Ah. That does make sense,” Ric said with resignation, looking at the scene below them again.
Jemmy looked down as well, tilting her head to this side and that.
“I’s got an idea,” she suddenly proclaimed, pulling her balloon towards her. Johanna watched with dread as she pulled it long and thin and then began to shape it into a balloon animal. When she finally made out what animal it was, her stomach sank like lead. A stork?!?!
Jemmy climbed up onto the balcony railing as Johanna restrained Ric from stopping her, then stepped off and floated down to where the randy couple’s noises had finally died down.
They both roused from their sex-induced torpor at the sight of Shivering Jemmy alighting beside them, holding her stork balloon.
“You’s gets a babby!” she pronounced, then popped her balloon, letting a squalling infant fall from it into their laps. “He be’s Jareth!”
Then she disappeared as quickly as she’d appeared.
“Oh no, not again!” Loki threw up his hands in denial.
Puck shook his head vigorously at the noisy, red-faced infant. “Not it!” He followed Jemmy into nothingness.
“No way!” Loki said, and popped out of existence as well.
The baby lay on the altar, crying.
Ric and Johanna looked down at the baby from much closer quarters.
“We have to take care of it,” Ric insisted. “It was abandoned at the church. We can’t just ditch it somewhere.”
“No, no way. You are not making this my problem.” Johanna tried to walk away, but knew in her heart it was futile.
“Well, I can’t take care of it.” Ric was certainly right about that. “Maybe you can find someone to parent it? You have connections. Don’t you know someone with good boundaries, who could contain the chaos this little guy might bring?”
Will bring Johanna thought, but already a couple names were popping into her mind. The Gods of Order might have a cradle for it. Maybe Titania and Oberon would provide a nursemaid. Odin might be willing to find someone to tutor him. And no one had boundaries like Destiny. She’d start there, if she could get an introduction from Death or Dream.
Yeah. It might just be fun to inflict this little Jareth on Destiny and see what would happen.