He landed on the muddy ground instead.
Lying on his back, he lifted his head up and saw the car following Lucy wasn’t the vampire’s. It was Donnie Cricketkiller’s car. They drove by, laughing, splashing mud on him and throwing their trash at him.
Loki saw why they were cheering victoriously; they had Dork Dracula staked in the backseat.
Still stretched out on the ground, Loki’s back ached from the fall, so he closed his eyes on the world where nothing really went right for him.
“You think it’s him? The One?” Loki thought he heard an owl on the tree talk to another.
“Nah, he’s a doofus,” the other owl replied.
Loki didn’t bother checking if he was hallucinating. He heard Lucy trot closer.
“Loki Blackstar,” Lucy stood in her devil outfit, her hands on her hips “How can anyone be as pathetic as you?”
Loki said nothing. The last thing he needed was someone to remind him of his failures.
“You know why I asked you to kill Dork Dracula?” Lucy said. “Because some people in my town think that you’re the only one who can kill the Snow White vampire, but you turned out to be a real loser.”
“You’re from the same town Igor called from?” Loki frowned.
“Yes,” Lucy said. “He is like our town’s council representative. He insisted on calling you even when I told him that you failed the test of killing Dork Dracula.”
“This was a test?” The hits kept on coming.
“Some ancestors in our town wrote a prophecy claiming that a fifteen year old vampire hunter would kill Snow White. Clearly, it couldn’t be you,” Lucy said. “If you want my advice, forget about vampire hunting. Stick to wearing that stupid kilt of yours.”
Loki was speechless. Lucy knelt down and pulled a small card from her pocket. She wet it with her tongue and plastered it on Loki’s forehead. “It’s our town’s address. Our town’s council still thinks you should give us a visit,” she held Loki’s head between her hands and looked at him, “Loki Blackstar,” she sighed. “What a waste of a cool name.”
Lucy left and Loki didn’t bother standing up. His time in this Ordinary World was painful. Even though he thought people were stupid and mean, there was no denying he was a total failure. When Lucy’s spit dried, the card fell and he picked it up. It read:
Welcome to the Island of Sorrow
East of the Sun West of the Moon
3
A Town Called Snoring
Loki didn’t have the luxury to return to a house or a family like other teens. He spent nights sleeping in his Cadillac, one of the few gadgets the Council had provided him with on his journey in the Ordinary World.
In the beginning, Loki thought he’d be able to park his car in the suburbs and sleep in it, but he was wrong. House owners mistook him for a creep or intruder and woke him up in the middle of the night, prompting him to leave. A ninety-year-old woman once accused him of being a peeping tom. She tried smashing his window with a frying pan as the rest of the neighborhood threw eggs at him. He had lost his money to a hole in his pocket that day so he didn’t mind the raw eggs. They tasted good as long as he licked them from his face and not from the ground.
Loki couldn’t afford parking lots for his Cadillac, and he didn’t have friends who’d let him sleep over and park in their garages. For weeks, he ended up guarding his car at night instead of sleeping in it. Carmen was old, unregistered, had broken headlights, and out of the ordinary plates, which read:
H… is Where the Heart is.
The space after the letter ‘h’ was worn out, and Loki thought the missing letters would make the word: home.
He thought it was such a clichéd phrase. To him, home was Heaven where he came from and belonged to. This awful Ordinary World wasn’t home, and was never going to be. Home had nothing to do with the heart. It was just a place where he could be treated with dignity, get some decent sleep, and remember who he really was.
Loki also avoided the police. Almost sixteen, he hadn’t applied for a driver’s license yet, and the police usually suspected Carmen of being a stolen car. Also, the police didn’t believe vampire hunters existed, so Loki didn’t know how to explain the stakes and hunting tools in the trunk of his Cadillac. To the police, everything about Loki had ‘lunatic’ written all over it, and he didn’t want to end up in jail. His life was a bad joke already, and a night in jail was a night wasted without trying to kill a vampire so he could leave this stupid world and go back to Heaven.
At some point, he decided he’d sneak into the garages of abandoned houses. He thought he’d roll up the windows, lock the car from inside, and hide under a blanket until the morning sun came.
He was wrong again.