Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (145 page)

I looked around, trying to gather my wits.

“What should we do about Graham?” I said.

“Leave him,” Williams said angrily.

“No, we’re supposed to be helping him, remember? If we leave him to die of his injury, we’re not helping him. The luck will turn against us.”

“Not if he’s dead, it won’t,” Williams said.

Kara sighed. “Too big a chance — he could do a lot of damage before he dies. I can heal the head injury but leave him unconscious.”

She put her hands on him for a few seconds, then leaned back. I couldn’t see any difference.

I had to admit that I didn’t really want to see him wake up. Not right then, at any rate. His attack had really rattled me. He’d seemed like a pretty suave guy. I’d have expected some complex and nuanced assault — manipulation, a trick, something like that. Instead he’d just knocked me down like a schoolyard bully.

I gave myself a mental shake. It was dumb to spend time being disturbed about the specific way someone attacked you.

We got ourselves together. Williams staggered up, and Kara and Callie each took hold of one of his hands.

“What are you doing?”

“He needs help making a new barrier,” Kara said. “Getting your working busted that way really takes it out of you.”

“We can share our strength with others this way — skin-to-skin contact, plus intent,” Callie said. “Kara and I don’t have John’s gift for barriers. Kara’s keeping us unseen right now, but she can’t protect us from the fire. John can, but he’ll need to pull on our strength to do it.”

“You should only do this with someone you trust,” Kara added. “Once you open yourself to someone, it’s pretty easy for them to pull more than you want them to.”

I nodded. Even thinking about doing that with Williams made me feel ill.

When they gave me the go-ahead, I stepped toward the wreckage. The fire was picking up again in the center, now that the firefighters had stopped hosing it down. I peered into the fire, trying to see past it.

“Don’t try to look
through
it,” Callie said from behind me. “Look
into
it. Look deep, not long.”

I nodded, though the difference between looking “deep” and looking “long” didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

“Remember, you’re looking for a catch or hitch — an anomaly of some kind.”

I tried to do as she said. I stared at the mound of twisted metal, trying to make out the shapes and colors, the lumps and cavities. I didn’t see anything shaped like a tube, much less a tube with a hitch in it.

Fire sprang up in the spot I was studying. I watched it leap and shimmy like a living creature. I noticed its yellow and orange, and the pale white at its heart. There was more to it than what I was seeing, I realized. What I saw was a tiny outpost of a whole world of fire. It drew me. I wanted to see the whole. It was just a little ways away.

“That’s good, Beth,” Callie said shakily. “I think you’re seeing it. When it pulls you, let your sight follow. It will probably look like a tunnel to you.”

“It doesn’t look like a tube or a tunnel. It doesn’t look like anything.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “Whatever it looks like, try to find something out of place.”

I again focused on the fire until the pulling feeling happened. I
looked deeper. Flames suddenly engulfed me, but they didn’t burn. Distantly, I could hear voices, but what held my attention was what I saw — not a tunnel, but an expanse of black, craggy ground, sloping gently upwards toward a low hump that convulsively spewed white-hot fire. Red embers spouted up from the white heat, settling in graceful arcs, and pale gray smoke drifted up against a black sky. Long tendrils of orange wound down the slope toward me, pooling here and there like fire-licked mirrors. A distant sound caught my attention — a clattering roar punctuated by sharp pops and booms. It swelled until I couldn’t hear anything else. I began to feel heat on my face.

Was this what the strait looked like inside?

I was supposed to look for an anomaly. I glanced right and saw more of the same — blackness and fire. Then I looked to the left and saw the most surprising thing. A folding lawn chair was perched on the jagged rocks. In it sat a man, or rather, a man-shaped creature. His surface was similar to the black rock all around me, except it seemed to be riding on a molten core, which occasionally blossomed through a crack, then cooled and darkened. He was sizzling softly. Impossibly, he was reading a paperback. As I watched, he shifted and crossed his legs, then glanced up. His eyes narrowed and swept over and around me a few times before catching my gaze. A look of astonishment spread over his face. The book in his hands combusted in a puff of ash and smoke.

Frightened by the realization that he could see me, I pushed the heat and sound away and then pushed harder, reminding myself that I wasn’t actually standing in that landscape.
It’s just a picture in the fire, a picture in the fire
, I chanted in my head,
Go away, go away, go away.
Slowly the scene shrank and lost its sensory richness until it was just an image. I closed my eyes for a long second, and when I opened them, all I could see was smoldering wreckage. I couldn’t see any flames.

I looked away and saw that things around me had changed. Callie was still standing next to Williams, holding his hand, but Kara was lying at his feet. Williams himself looked pretty damned wobbly. The asphalt was slagged to molten tar in an arc around us. I shivered. The fire had come for us, but Williams’s barrier had held.

“Is Kara okay?”

“She will be,” Callie said. “When the fire surged, John pulled enough to drain her. She’ll be back to normal in a few days. Until then, she’ll be weak and ill.”

It was a damned good thing Callie had come with us, I realized. Williams had needed more than what Kara had.

“We need to back off,” Williams said.

It took a while. He gripped Graham by the front of his shirt and dragged him along while keeping a hold on Callie with his other hand. I pulled Kara along by the ankles. She wasn’t big, but I wasn’t strong, so it was hard. We moved back about a hundred feet before Williams seemed to feel safe dropping the protective barrier.

I was bagged, and Williams looked even worse. Callie might not have been so tired physically, but I could see she was mentally exhausted. I didn’t blame her — I couldn’t imagine facing that fire again after what had happened to her. I went and sat next to her and took her hand.

“You were really brave to come back here,” I told her.

She smiled and squeezed my hand.

Williams said, “What’d you see?”

I described it to them, including the guy in the lawn chair.

There wasn’t a moment of stunned silence. There was a full minute of it.

Williams said, “Limu.”

Finally Callie said, “You saw
through
the strait. You saw through and —”

“Talk about that later,” Williams interrupted. “We have to tell Cordus about Limu.”

“Who’s Limu?”

“That’s who you saw,” Callie said, sounding shaky. “The great demons are territorial. This is Lord Cordus’s part of the world. Lord Limu claims the Pacific Rim.”

Williams said, “Call Cordus. Now.”

“Graham has to do it,” I said. “This was all supposed to be helping him, remember?”

“Fuck him. It’s over. It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh my god, don’t be so dense!” I said, my exhaustion making me forget who I was talking to. “If we were faking it, his luck wouldn’t have helped us. But it did help us. That means we really were helping him. Now is the point when we can actually give that help, so we have to do it. From how the luck shook out, we already know what decision we make at this point. We’re just following through with what we already know happens. Got it?”

Williams stilled and focused on me. I felt like one of those red dots from a laser sight had appeared right between my eyes.

Callie interceded. “I don’t really understand it either, John, but I think we should let Beth decide. It was her idea, and it did work.”

If looks could kill, the one Williams gave me would have. It also would have cremated me and scattered my ashes at sea.

I didn’t realize I’d tightened my grip on Callie until she started saying my name and patting my arm with her other hand.

“Sorry,” I said, letting go.

Don’t make him angry
, I reminded myself. Maybe he wouldn’t hurt me with Callie right here, but she wasn’t going to be with me 24/7.

After an uncomfortable silence, I said, “So, any ideas on how to wake Graham?”

Williams hauled himself up and, ignoring Callie’s protests, came over and gave Graham a couple kicks. Jesus, what a monster.

Graham groaned and rolled over, holding his side. Then he saw us, and froze. He looked entirely different than the person I’d come to know over the past few days. The confident, friendly, flirty guy was gone. What I was seeing now was a man stripped of everything — horrified, desperate, like an animal in a trap. It hurt seeing him like that, however much of a liar and user he might be. At that moment, for the first time, I really wanted to protect him.

“Here’s what’s happening,” I told him. “Lord Cordus suspects you of scheming to keep the strait open. You are so deep on his shit list I’m surprised you can breathe. We looked into the opening and saw the other end. We’re going to let you call and tell Lord Cordus about our success. You can take credit for managing the operation.”

“Tell him it’s closed,” Williams added.

Was it really? I hadn’t realized. I looked back at the wreckage. I couldn’t see any flames, but the firefighters were dousing it again. Maybe they’d finally knocked it back.

Graham knelt there silently for a while, eyes shifting back and forth among us.

“Why are you letting me call him?” he finally said.

“Because we’re just that nice.” No reason to clue him in on his gift’s loophole.

He thought about it, then nodded. Clearly he didn’t see a way out. Being on Cordus’s shit list must be very bad indeed.

I rolled Kara over, got her phone out of her pocket, and scrolled down to “Boss Man.”

“Tell him you were waiting for us here, and that when we got here, you coached me on looking into the strait. Then hand the phone to me, and I’ll tell him what I saw.”

I hit “send” and handed him the phone.

Pale and shaking, he put it to his ear. When Cordus answered, though, Graham’s voice was steady. I watched, a little nauseated, as he smoothly constructed a version of events in which he’d done no wrong. He mentioned the green man, as though he’d seen my photo and made the connection himself. Then he brought up Justine. Clearly he’d been thinking along the same lines Williams and Kara had — bounty-hunter shows up in town, local woman disappears, bingo. All that stuff about checking with his contacts had been bullshit. He’d never believed Williams was the kidnapper.

When he was done, Graham handed the phone to me without meeting my eyes.

“Elizabeth Joy Ryder,” a super-sexy voice murmured in my ear.

My pulse went through the roof.

“I am most impressed. You seem to have found a way to turn Mr. Ryzik’s talent against him.”

Huh. Cordus had a pretty good bullshit meter.

“I will give Mr. Ryzik a second chance, but only because your strategy has obligated me to do so,” he said. “I must ask you not to thus obligate me again. The consequences of such an action would not please you. In addition, I directed you not to approach Mr. Ryzik, and yet there you are, within arm’s reach of him. Reliability is as important to me as results, Miss Ryder. Do you understand?”

I squeezed a “yes sir” past the lump in my throat.

“Now,” he said, “please describe to me exactly what you saw.”

I gave him a detailed account of the place I had seen in the flame. I also described the guy in the lawn chair. I added that Williams said the strait was closed.

He absorbed what I said in silence, then asked, “You heard the sound of the volcano and felt its heat. Is that correct?”

“Yes, especially toward the end. The experience seemed to be getting … I don’t know. Richer. Closer. Also, the guy there saw me. I’m not sure how, exactly, but he knew I was there.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“No. He seemed surprised, though. He burned up his book.”

“Most interesting,” Cordus said softly.

“Miss Ryder,” he said after a few moments, “Mr. Ryzik’s identification of the green man’s quarry is likely correct.”

“Oh,” I said, shocked to my depths. “So it’s true? She really might be … one of you?”

“In the sense you intend, yes.”

He paused. He certainly had a measured, careful approach to conversation.

Finally he asked, “Has Mrs. McCallister received any premonitions regarding Mrs. Ryder’s status or location?”

Mrs.
McCallister? That was news to me.

“Not that she’s mentioned. Do you want to speak to her?”

“I do not believe that would be productive. Should her ability shed additional light on the situation, however, I would appreciate a call.”

“Okay,” I said, already feeling like an informant.

“Your team may retire and rest. I will be in touch soon with further instructions. Before we disconnect, however, I must speak with Mr. Ryzik once more.”

“Okay. Here he is.”

“Thank you, Miss Ryder.”

I passed the phone to Graham, who paled noticeably. He said, “Yes, Lord Cordus?” then held the phone to his ear for about thirty seconds, just listening. At last he said, “Yes, I do,” then closed the phone and sat there staring out into the darkness and shaking. I was really glad not to have been privy to whatever Cordus had said. I had a feeling it would’ve made “threatening” sound like a day at the beach.

Once we’d recovered a little longer, Williams drove the damaged van into the brush at the edge of the parking lot and set a barrier around it that, according to Callie, would keep it invisible to regular people for at least a few days.

“How’re we going to get home?” I asked.

“There’s a working over there,” Callie said, pointing to the other side of lot. “It’s probably a barrier hiding Graham’s car.”

She glanced at Graham, who nodded, looking a little confused. He must’ve been wondering why I hadn’t noticed it myself.