I got the impression Tyr approved of killing – under certain circumstances. I wasn’t going anywhere other than school unarmed.

Maybe if they snagged me I could take a couple of them with me. I hadn’t been this scared in, well, ever.

Yeah. These people had me not just on edge, but actively frightened. Which took a lot. It’s easy to get over-confident when you basically have superpowers, right?

Usually I was worried about other people. But I knew I would kill this witch if I had to and call it self-defense. Because it would be.
And it would be revenge. And it would be protecting others. So, I supposed, Tyr did approve. And Loki would approve of anything that helped my survival.

In other words? I felt no guilt whatsoever about contemplating murder. Which it would be, technically, because it was premeditated.

No, another word came into my mind. Assassination.

I made it back to the apartment. I’d had to get internet to study, but I hadn’t bothered with cable.

I could check the news on my computer. And I did.

The family of the little girl had dropped the charges. It had worked. I felt my stomach do several flips. Mixed feelings. What I’d done to them – and the fact that they might never get justice for their child.

Thirty minutes later, somebody knocked on the door. That was rare enough that I picked up my gun and held it behind my back before opening it.

A black couple. “Ms…Doe?”

“Rudi,” I corrected.

“Can we come in?”

I let them in, putting the gun back on its shelf. The woman noticed it and glanced askance.

“This isn’t exactly the best neighborhood,” I noted.

“Which is…I could have sworn it was him.”

“It wasn’t. I know who it was, and I promise, when I find a way to deal with him, he’s going down.”
She glanced at the gun again, then nodded. “He killed our Shania.”

“I know.” And he did it to get to me, and he’d do stuff like it again to get to me. But the alternative was to use a weapon designed to kill us…and work towards his destruction.

Why, really, was it so hard to contemplate that?