Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (146 page)

Williams picked up Kara, and we all walked to the other side of the lot. As we approached the edge, my car appeared right in front of us.

We got in and headed back to Callie’s.

When we arrived, Callie had Williams put Kara in the center of her king-sized bed. Then she and I crawled in on either side of her and slept like stones until morning.

U
nfortunately
, by “morning” I mean “very early morning.” That’s when Kara woke up, lunged over me, and vomited. She got most of it on the floor. Then she flopped back with a groan.

“Fucking Williams. Goddamn fucking Williams fucking asshole …” She drifted back to sleep.

From the other side of her, Callie propped herself up and frowned at me. “I wish Kara didn’t use language like that. Taking the Lord’s name in vain is wrong.”

I nodded, filing away for future reference that blasphemy was a no-no around Callie. Then I wormed my way out of bed, trying not to touch anything Kara might’ve hit.

I ended up touching it anyway when I cleaned it up a few minutes later. Whatever. Kara’d probably cleaned up what I left in the hallway a few days back.

When I was done showering, Callie had gone back to sleep. I quietly headed for coffee.

Graham was sitting in the kitchen. Damn. Why was he still with us? I’d have thought Cordus would’ve wanted to keep an eye on him or something. It seemed impossible that he was just going to keep hanging out with his old crew. Talk about painful and awkward for everyone.

He looked up at me with dead eyes. It took him a while to speak. It was like he’d forgotten how. “It was your idea, wasn’t it? Calling Cordus.”

I didn’t see much point in lying. “Yeah.”

I waited for him to react, to get angry, but he didn’t say anything.

“Kara said they could be killed if they failed to close the strait. You seemed to be putting all our lives at risk.”

Again he didn’t say anything for a long time, just looked at me. Then he looked down at his hands.

“Callie finding the strait and calling Williams, Williams finding you, Williams calling in Kara — none of that should’ve happened. No one was supposed to know anything about it. No one was supposed to come here. No one was supposed to be in danger. That’s how it should’ve gone. Things always go the way they’re supposed to. Well, almost always.”

Huh. Maybe Callie had ended up testing that Graham-luck-evasion hypothesis after all, without realizing it.

“Why were you trying to keep the strait open?”

Graham shook his head. Some secrets were staying secret, I guess.

“What’re you going to do now?”

He shrugged. “Same thing I was doing before.”

But the look he gave me was so empty my throat tightened. I guess he’d gotten the same sense from Cordus that I had: second chances were pretty much in name only.

I really wished I hadn’t kissed him. I wondered how many more times I’d have that thought.

I made coffee for both of us and sat down. He took a sip or two, then seemed to forget about it and just sat there. I watched him. The day’s first sunlight came through the crack between the window blinds and touched his hair.

“Why did you lie to me?”

I hadn’t meant to ask that. It just popped out.

He looked up at me. For a moment, he looked much older than his years. When he finally spoke, he sounded tired.

“What we do, it’s ugly. It’s easier if you ease new people into it instead of dumping the whole truth on them in one go.”

“Oh yeah? Easier for who?”

He looked away, effectively silenced.

“Graham …”

“Just let it go, Elizabeth. There’s nothing I can say to you that’ll make it better.”

I sat there, surprised and saddened. I wished I understood.

“Beth,” I said.

He looked up at me, confused.

“No one who really knows me calls me ‘Elizabeth.’”

He smiled a little, accepting my olive branch, then looked back down at his cup.

Seeing an opportunity to escape, I took my coffee out to the living room and curled up on the couch to look out the window.

Now that I had no trainer to ask, I was full of questions.

Why would Graham betray Cordus? If we were all little more than slaves, it seemed like a huge risk.

What about the lava man on the lawn chair? Limu. The boss of another region, Callie had said. One of Cordus’s rivals, maybe. Was Graham working with him?

Was Justine truly a Second, and was she being hunted by the person I’d photographed? Cordus seemed to think so, and he should know, right?

If she was, did Ben know? What about the kids? Were they really Ben’s children?

And what was wrong with me, anyway? One moment I couldn’t see some basic thing the others expected me to see, and the next I saw more than I should — all the way into the other world, if I’d understood Callie right.

Trailing along like someone’s forgotten kid brother, one last question came into my head: Was Bob really dead?

Well, that was one I might be able to answer.

I got my car keys and headed out the door, moving cautiously until I was sure Williams’s barrier was gone.

Okay, Bob
, I thought, getting in the Le Mans,
I’m coming for that chat, like I promised. Please be alive.

I
sat
down on a slanted stone bench near the sad “Daught.” monument and took a steadying breath.

Time had paid no attention to my personal drama. Early April had shaded into middle of the month. Today was the first day we’d had where I really smelled spring. It was earthy and wet and promised renewal.

I’d made several full circuits of the cemetery. There was no sign of Bob.

I felt a strong sense of loss — far more than what I’d feel for some human citizen of Dorf I’d met once and talked to for a few minutes. It was mixed liberally with guilt and anger. If he was dead, it was because of me.

I reminded myself that while Bob’s presence would’ve proven he was alive, his absence didn’t prove he was dead.

Then again, Williams didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d bother lying.

It’d been silly to come. I’d wanted to escape Callie’s house, with all its tensions and sadness, but really, escape was impossible. The whole situation was dreadful.

I looked down at my hands. My nails had gotten too long. Despite the hot shower I’d taken an hour ago, there was crud under them. I set about cleaning them with my thumbnail.

Depressing thoughts crowded into my mind.

When I’d looked into the strait, I’d done something that had surprised the others. Unless it turned out to be something bad, it would probably make me more desirable to Cordus than I had been before. And I got the idea that my late development had already made me a hot commodity.

So, what would happen to me? What would they try to make me do?

What we do is ugly
.

How ugly?

I didn’t just need a bunch of questions answered, I realized. What I needed was good advice. Even if Graham hadn’t turned out to be a liar, I still wouldn’t have trusted him to advise me, not when I’d only known him a few days. Kara seemed nice, but maybe not stable and seasoned enough to give clear-eyed guidance. Callie couldn’t help me either. Because she read all this stuff through her own religious beliefs, she had no idea what she was actually participating in. Maybe that’s what she needed to do to survive, but it wasn’t going to work for me.

That left me with no idea what my goals should be.

For instance, what should I do about Justine? I felt responsible for her because my brother loved her and she was my nieces’ mother. But if she was bad news, then trying to save her might be the wrong choice. On the other hand, if she was an innocent person being hunted by this green man creature, then I had to try to help her. Then again, if what Kara said was accurate, I wouldn’t really have any choices to make about Justine, anyway. I’d be doing whatever Cordus told me to do.

I’d decided to confront my new reality, but really I was still just reacting to what came down the pike. I felt like a victim, and I didn’t know how to change that dynamic.

I was sitting there cultivating a headache when someone spoke my first name, and I just about fell off the bench. Looking over my shoulder, I found an African American woman standing behind me. She had long black hair gathered in a ponytail and was dressed in a flattering pair of dark jeans, a tan tank, and a jaunty little jacket that came down to just below her breasts. It was made out of some kind of exotic-looking brown fur. She was older than me and extraordinarily beautiful.

I stood up nervously. She was a few inches taller than me, but then again her boots had heels. I realized I was staring and flushed.

She looked me over with a neutral expression. “I’m Zion. Lord Cordus sent me up here to join your team. I’m a tracker.”

“Oh.” Then, because I couldn’t think of an indirect, non-embarrassing way to ask, I said, “What are you supposed to track?”

She looked at me like I was the slow kid in class. “A Second who’s been living in this town under the alias of Justine Ryder, née Jenson.”

“Oh, right. Of course.”

I stood there wondering why she was talking to me instead of looking for Justine. Zion looked like she was just managing to keep herself from rolling her eyes.

“I’m told Justine Ryder’s been masquerading as your sister-in-law. I need you to take me to her home so that I can get her scent.”

“Her
scent
?”

What was this woman, a magical bloodhound or something?

Annoyance blossomed on Zion’s face, and I quickly ran my memory backwards to make sure I hadn’t said the “bloodhound” part aloud.

“Excuse me,” she said in a carefully polite tone, “Given your age, it’s hard to remember you’re … uninformed. ‘Scent’ is trackers’ shorthand for someone’s essence trace.”

“Okie-dokie, then,” I said, getting annoyed myself.

It wasn’t my fault I was “uninformed.” If these people could get their act together and send me a trainer who did his job, I’d get informed as fast as I could.

“Your car or mine?” I said, probably a little snappishly.

We ended up in her car, but only after she’d taken a good long look at mine and found it wanting. Admittedly, the Le Mans was a little worse for wear. In contrast, Zion had a Porsche Panamera. I was pretty sure the leather inside was too nice to have ever been on a cow, and the engine made a sound that was somehow both a rumble and a purr. I couldn’t imagine how much the thing cost.

B
en was upset with me
. He thought it was terrible that I hadn’t shown up at the mall. I was suddenly glad I hadn’t pulled up in my own car, since it was supposed to be in the shop. Ben also thought it was shockingly insensitive that I’d just left a message the night before and hadn’t called back to make sure Tiff was okay. She was, fortunately, though she’d made it out of the mall, after all. The cops had picked her up trying to hitchhike southeast on I-94.

Clearly, the situation had been a lot more serious than I’d assumed. I was retroactively terrified. “Kidnapped, then out ’til 11:00 p.m. ogling a lava-man,” was unfortunately off-limits as an excuse. I couldn’t think of a reasonable substitute, so I spent a long time apologizing and talking about what an idiot I was.

The whole time, Zion wandered around the first story, touching things. She was using a half-working disguise, I realized: I could see the weird doubleness of presence and absence about her, and Ben was clearly unaware of her. I had a hard time not glancing at her — getting chewed out by my big brother in front of a gorgeous and ultra-competent stranger was excruciating.

Eventually, Ben headed upstairs to hurry the girls along, since they’d have to leave for school soon. Zion drifted over to me.

“I’m having a hard time getting her scent. What I’m sensing seems human to me. Has another adult female been living here?”

“Not so far as I know. No, Ben would’ve mentioned it to me.”

“I need to visit her bedroom. That’s where her scent will be strongest.”

“Okay. Let me offer to stay here with the youngest while Ben takes the other three to school.”

Zion’s eyes widened and darted toward the stairs.

“She has children? Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I’m sorry,” I said sweetly, “I assumed you’d been fully briefed.”

She glowered at me. “They may well be Nolanders. If so, they’ll see through my disguise. I’ll have to hide.”

The thought of Ben’s girls being like me came as a shock. I guess it made sense — if Justine was a Second, her kids would be half. They might’ve inherited some weirdness. It just hadn’t occurred to me.

I headed up the stairs and told Ben I could stay with Madisyn while he took the others to school. That pleased him, since Madisyn, whose preschool started later, was still in her PJs and steadfastly ignoring the order to get dressed.

When she saw me, her face lit up.

“Aunt Beth! Nanny Hansen’s doggie says you can find Mommy! Daddy said I couldn’t tell you. But now I did. So can you?”

I glanced at Ben, who was rubbing his forehead. Actually, he was rubbing his eyes.

“Oh, Ben,” I said, and put my arms around him.

We stood there for a good while with Madisyn looking up at us and occasionally tugging on my pant leg and saying “doggie” in a loud whisper. The other kids gathered at the door and peeked in, looking sad and a little scared. Finally Ben pulled away from me and throatily told Tiff, Jazzy, and Lia to go get in the car. He followed them out without speaking to me. I didn’t hear any shrieks from downstairs, so apparently Zion had gone unnoticed.

Once I heard the car pull out, I knelt down in front of Madisyn.

“Sweetie, do you think I should meet Nanny Hansen’s dog?”

“Yeah!”

She took my hand and led me downstairs and out into the back yard. She looked around carefully, then crossed over to the fence separating Ben’s yard from the neighbor’s to the west.

Whoever lived there — Mrs. Hansen, I guess — had a large, overgrown piece of property. Last year’s dead grass was thigh-high in places and all gone to seed. In other spots, the snow had packed it down into wet humps. A huge stand of sumac had taken over the back of the yard, and a thicket of honeysuckle covered another part. A big maple and a pine loomed over the small house itself, looking like they could take it out completely, given a big enough storm. Compared to Ben’s neatly groomed lawn, it was a jungle.