War and Famine: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Revelations Book 2) (3 page)

“You’re not getting my fries,” Ian whispered, fixing his eyes on them like he’d never eaten before. “Not unless you plan on taking their place.”

She shook her head, dismissing a dirty thought as a blush spread across her face. “Nope. I’m good.”

“Good.” Ian picked up a handful and shoved them into his mouth. “I’m glad everything is good,” he said in between chews.

Amy glared at him. “You know, you’re being kind of a jerk. I dropped everything to come get you. Hell, I bought those fries for you, and even if you don’t want to share, the least you could do is not be hostile toward me. It’s not cool.”

“Don’t be mad because you just decided you were my girlfriend.” Ian shut his eyes for a long while and when he opened them again, his entire demeanor had changed, going from protective hostility to a weird mix of embarrassment and empathy. He pushed the fries across the table toward her. “Have some fries. Then we need to go see Sabastin. He helped us before. Maybe he can help us again.”

Amy didn’t have any fries. But she did die from shame. Had they really become boyfriend and girlfriend just like that? It wasn’t supposed to be like that, was it? They weren’t supposed to just look up and realize they were together. No, there were supposed to be awkward dates, and well, other things presumably. She wasn’t sure exactly what, but this didn’t seem like how it was supposed to be. Especially not with someone who’d stabbed her last boyfriend to death.

Ian watched her as she cleared her throat and looked away, trying to hide her flushed cheeks as guilt swam over her skin. “We can go see Sabastin now,” she said after the silence between them grew into a living thing. Why did this feel so awkward? Guilt, sure, but there was definitely something more at play, something she couldn’t quite quantify. She’d come to terms with the fact that she was a horrible person already, so that definitely wasn’t it.

Ian stood up and held his hand out toward her. “I don’t really like touching, but I’d like to hold your hand.”

“Okay,” she replied, offering him her hand and letting him help her up. They walked like that to her car. This also was awkward, but less so.

Still, as Amy popped open her glovebox and pulled out the small golden bracelet Sabastin had given her, she couldn’t keep the flush of embarrassment off her cheeks. Had Ian really become her boyfriend just like that? If he had, how did she feel about that? To be perfectly frank, she wasn’t sure.

Why? Because while she liked him, almost pathetically so, there was a little voice whispering in her ear, trying to convince her that the only reason she had feelings for him was because of their mantles. As much as she tried to deny it, there was no way for her to know for certain if it was the force of their mantles pushing them together or if her feelings were real?

After all, hadn’t that been what had happened between Kim and Malcom? Both were clearly terrible for one another, bringing each other nothing but pain, and despite this, their mantles, Conquest and Death, had thrust them back together over and over again.

It was something she couldn’t risk. No matter how much she liked him. Besides, they had an ancient Nordic god named Vidar to deal with. If he was anything like Vali had been, he’d be harder to kill than a water bear and those things could survive the vacuum of space for ten days. This was not the time to be daydreaming about a boy, especially the boy who had gutted her boyfriend a few weeks ago. God, she must be crazy to even consider it.

No. They would not be together. It was impossible. But his hand did feel nice. Way too nice.

Amy pushed that thought out of her mind as she clipped the golden bracelet on her wrist. She gripped Ian’s hand tighter and pressed the green button on the side. Emerald light spilled from the bracelet’s faceplate as symbols in a language she didn’t understand danced across the metal. Sabastin had given her this bracelet when she’d left his super-secret base in the clouds, and while she’d used it to teleport back there on occasion, the experience still weirded her out. Teleportation wasn’t exactly pleasant feeling.

Her stomach nearly revolted, twisting into a knot inside her as light streamed over their bodies. Ian squeezed her hand, and the feeling passed under a wash of cool air. Amy turned toward him and found him looking at her, a sly smile on his lips.

“I always hate this part,” he said before the scenery around them faded away, and their disassembled particles shot toward Sabastin’s distant headquarters in the sky.

“Me too,” she tried to say, but found it impossible because her body had broken down into teeny, tiny bits of light.

A split second later, the world snapped into focus. They stood in Sabastin’s control room, but it didn’t look like anyone had been there since she’d last come to visit a week ago. The big screens belonging to the super computers Sabastin lovingly called the fates, were dark. It made them look like lava lamps with the light out and all the wax congealed into a sludge at the bottom.

“Looks like Sabastin’s really been keeping up the place. It totally seems like he’s on top of the whole ‘my mission in life is to save the world from horrible monsters’ thing,” Ian said, releasing her hand and taking a few steps into the room. The motion sensors caught him, and the lights flickered on, filling the room with their sterile white glare and illuminating the dust on the consoles and the cobwebs in the corners.

“He’s been sitting next to his daughter most of the time. I don’t think he’s even looked at these monitors since you brought her back,” Amy replied, trying to ignore how cold her hand felt now that he’d let her go.

“I wouldn’t look at them either,” Ian said, glancing back at her and smirking. “Even if it was my job, and I didn’t have an excuse to ignore them.” He pointed at the middle screen. The one that belonged to Lachesis. “The only thing those things can tell you is where you should go to die.”

“So instead, no one is looking out for the world.” Amy sighed. “It’s his job to locate threats and send people to stop them.”

“Maybe the world doesn’t need his protection. Maybe we never did. This planet has been spinning for a while despite all the ancient vampires and such. Maybe a bunch of people living in the sky, trying to look out for us is the height of arrogance.” He shook his head, holding up his hand like he wanted to stop the conversation from proceeding. That was good. She had no desire to get into an argument with him about metaphysical philosophy. Especially since Sabastin had come to the same conclusion and disbanded his people, disregarding their millennia old mission to fight monsters and save the world. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Where is he?”

“Probably in his daughter’s hospital room. Follow me.” Amy moved across the room and pressed a button embedded into the steel wall. A concealed door slid open with a whoosh of compressed air, revealing a hallway lit only by two glowing green strips along the floor.

“She still hasn’t woken up?” Ian asked, following her into the hallway as she made her way through its maze of twisted passages. The first time she had treaded across this path, she’d gotten hopelessly lost and Sabastin had come to fetch her when alarms started going off. The memory still made her shake with embarrassment.

“No. We all thought she’d awaken once she healed from the wounds she suffered when she was possessed by the Nose god Jormungand during our battle, but she has been healed for a couple of weeks, and she’s still asleep. Something is definitely wrong.” Amy shook her head, remembering how the girl had beaten all four of them within an inch of their lives. If Malcom hadn’t sacrificed himself, there was no way they’d have stopped her. Even then, it was a near thing.

“And how do we know that thing inside her is really gone?” Ian asked, reaching out and touching her on the shoulder. She stopped, stiffening. “Maybe it’s still inside her, still in control, and the second she wakes up… well, I don’t need to tell you how hard it was to beat her with all four of us.” He dropped his hand back down to his side. “Now Malcom is gone and Kim? Who knows where Kim is.”

Amy shook her head, trying to ignore the sensation of his touch. “Sabastin says Jormungand is gone now, and I believe him. He’s run more tests than I even have words to describe.”

“He could be wrong. His judgement is likely clouded because it’s his daughter,” Ian replied. His voice was calm, more so than it’d been in the entire time since the battle.

Amy bit her lip. She’d had a similar thought but couldn’t bear to think Sabastin might be wrong. The way he looked at his daughter was enough to break her heart into tiny pieces. She couldn’t imagine what would happen if she woke up and wasn’t herself. She was going to give him the benefit of the doubt. She knew it was stupid but felt she owed him that much. After all, he had helped them win.

“I’m going to take your silence as confirmation that you agree with me.” Ian exhaled slowly and the temperature in the hallway fell a couple degrees. “Still, I suppose we ought to wait and see. We are in the middle of his demon hunter base. If something goes wrong, there’s got to be some kind of gizmo to keep her bound and gagged somewhere around here.”

Amy sure hoped he was right as she turned down the last corridor. If both Ian and Sabastin turned out to be wrong, they were in a ton of trouble. Up ahead, light spilled out from a doorway. It was almost oppressively bright in the mostly dark hallway, and even though Amy had visited Sabastin here many times, she always felt like an intruder when she approached.

Still, Sabastin could spare a few minutes to help them deal with Vidar and his wolf. If he couldn’t, she wasn’t sure who could.

Caden 02:01

The walls of Caden’s almost exceptionally small room were bare except for two objects. The first was a relatively reserved picture of John Calvin above his simple, neatly made bed. The second was a black-framed, red-worsted embroidery of the saying, “Feed My Lambs.” It hung on the wall above the only other piece of furniture in the room, a plain wooden desk that had belonged to his grandfather prior to the man’s death a few years ago.

Caden stood in the middle of his gray carpet, trying to decide what to do. He still had ideas rattling around in his head from his workout in the gym’s pool. He needed to let those ideas out before he forgot them, but for some reason, he couldn’t quite muster the energy.

Still, he’d been told real writers treated writing like it was their job. They didn’t write just when the muse struck them. Real writers had bills, after all. And, just like with his swimming, there was no way he was going to get better without practice.

He sighed, trying to muster up the will to work on another draft of his book and opened his closet door. Just like every time he opened it, he found his closet still very well organized. The left half of it was all but consumed by a large solid oak bookcase. The bottom two shelves were devoted to an extensive set of encyclopedias, he’d admittedly never opened. These, along with the bookshelf, were also a gift from his late grandfather. The newest one was from nineteen seventy three.

The rest of the shelves contained various novels, many of which were classics and nonfiction books. He’d read almost all of them at least a dozen times and filled many of them with his notes. Those notes corresponded to a stack of spiral bound notebooks on the top shelf where he’d deconstructed the stories in the vain hope of learning what made each book tick. After all, how was he supposed to become a writer if he didn’t understand the craft?

Along the opposite wall, hung several shirts organized by color from dark to light. It always reminded him of a rainbow that stretched from black to white.

The only other object in the closet was a battered, wooden chair, which Caden removed before quickly shutting the door. He placed it in front of his desk and sat down. He pulled a small blue notebook and a nubby wooden pencil from the top drawer. He had a variety of mechanical pencils, and if he was being honest, he actually preferred them, but there was something about using an old wooden pencil that made him feel more like a real writer. Judging by his latest foray into writing, he needed all the help he could get.

He’d been trying to recapture the events surrounding his friends’ transition from mild mannered seniors into horsemen of the apocalypse, but try as he might, every word he wrote was horrible. It was a little weird because the words in his head sounded good right up until the moment they were imposed upon the page. Still, he worked on it daily, doing his best to jot down as much as possible by hand. Today was no exception.

After he had written about a page, he threw down his pencil in disgust.

“This is never going to work,” he grumbled, tossing the notebook back into his drawer and slamming it shut. “It’s impossible to make it seem realistic. Who is going to believe my friends from high school are really the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and they fought off a Norse god? Those are two completely different mythologies.”

Caden took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Part of him didn’t know why he was bothering with this at all. At first, he’d tried to ignore what happened, but he just couldn’t, and the more he tried, the more difficult it became. The world was open before him now, and he knew his place in it. He was a mere mortal among supermen. It was horrifying. The only thing he could do to make himself feel better, to make himself feel relevant, was to write it all down.

“This was probably why Jimmy Olsen always followed Superman around, snapping his pictures,” Caden mused as he leaned back for a moment in his chair and stretched. “Documenting the Man of Steel must have been a way to make himself feel like part of something important even though all he wound up doing was getting in the way.”

There was a knock at the door followed by the tough but kind voice of his father. “Hey champ, are you going to church tonight?”

“Yeah dad, I’ll come. Just let me finish something,” he called back, sitting up so all four legs of his chair sat firmly on the ground. He didn’t know why he did it, but he never liked his father to see him leaning back in a chair that had belonged to his grandfather. It was the main reason he kept it. Well, that and he didn’t like to buy stuff. Every time he purchased something, a horrible feeling would well up in his gut and apprehension would creep down his spine. Then he’d wonder if he would need that money later for something else. No, it was just easier to use what he already had.