The Game of Gods: Series Box Set

by Lana Pecherczyk

  Mortal. The word bounced around my skull and an idea began to form.

  “He asked for souls,” her eyes glazed over as she continued. “But I don’t think he will mind that I deviated from his plan. After all, liberating the world from the rotten fruit of his loins is a favor. Yes, he will thank me. He didn’t want you after all, and he will keep his end of the bargain to negotiate with the Ferryman.”

  What the hell was she talking about? This man she seemed to work for—she was afraid of him. But she was helping him… fruit of his loins? Shit, I grabbed my head. She’s insane. Marc must be the Ferryman—he carried souls between Earth and the Empire. Then the words, “He didn’t want you,” sunk in. I clutched my chest… he didn’t want me!

  The sirens stopped. Help had arrived.

  Petra stopped her circular dance and whipped her head around as if seeing me for the first time. “I am here, and you are there.” She waved the knife, wild eyed. “You are alone. No one is left who cares for you. No one will keep you safe. Come.” She held out her hand, baubles chinking. “Come with me, and I will keep you safe.”

  “No. You’re wrong.” I glanced at Tommy’s lifeless form, and then at Cash. He lay hunched over, eyes closed. As if sensing my gaze, his lids opened to display cloudy irises. He was remembering the past. Blind. The tension left my shoulders at the sight. Deep down, I knew I had done the right thing. Cash was whole again. The first time the two parts of his soul joined, he’d also gone blind, causing the accident that killed his father. His blindness was temporary. Achingly temporary.

  Petra followed the direction of my gaze and her face contorted in fury. She stalked towards Cash’s form and stopped a few meters away.

  “What—him?” She pointed the knife at him. “He can’t keep you safe. He can’t even keep himself safe. You may have healed him, but you have also lit the beacon. The avenging angels will find him. They’re already on their way. He escaped them once, he will not be so lucky a second time. Stop wasting your time. He is weak, a liability. Hurry, we must go.”

  Suddenly, I felt his essence softly pulsing at me from where he lay, his aura no longer invisible once I focused on it. His tattoo had grown to cover his entire neck and both arms. I imagined his star map was complete. Marc would know who he was in the before. Even though Cash’s body was in pain, his soul was not.

  Perhaps I’d done something right. The thought spurred me on and I stepped between Cash and Petra. “You will not touch a hair on his head.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t going for his head.” Her eyes met mine, sparkling.

  My stomach spasmed, a painful reminder of my need for sustenance and my eyes sought the vein throbbing on Petra’s—Leila’s—neck. William’s blood had satisfied my hunger. My stomach gurgled, and I licked my lips in anticipation. It was wrong to think like that but I couldn’t help it.

  Petra stepped forward, and I leapt away. She was only a meters from my outstretched arms. “Not another step, Petra.”

  “Do you think he will want you after this? Do you think he will forgive you for what you’ve done to his soul? Of course not. You violated his trust and put him in harm’s way with your rashness. If you stay, he’ll leave. You’ll be alone—hated like me.” Her smile faltered, worried. “You surprised me. I thought you’d die from the fall into the hole, but you survived. This time, I’ll kill you myself, then follow you back to paradise. You won’t survive when I cut your heart out.”

  Petra leapt at me with her knife angled for my throat. Adrenaline scattered in bursts through my body. I knocked her arm sideways, sending the knife into the sand. But she was quick and brought her left hand to my neck and squeezed. The swift pressure made my eyes bulge. I pulled at her hands with mine and kicked out with my foot, but she straddled my body and squeezed her thighs, squashing my middle. Her skin heated under the touch of my fingers. Smoke curled at the connection and she screamed in pain. The insanity in her eyes turned to shock when her body was jerked away from me.

  “Run,” Cash urged hoarsely. Still blind, he fell to the ground, groping his temples in agony.

  Petra scrambled to retrieve the fallen knife then slashed at the closest body—Cash.

  “No!” I vaulted over Cash and tackled her, knocking the knife out of her hand. My muscles ached with strain, black dots swirled across my vision. I was running out of reserves with no one left to supplement me. Now was the time to play my hand. “There is something you haven’t taken into consideration,” I said. “Turns out, I’m not a complete failure as my father initially thought. I’m a Soul-Eater, Petra. You seem to know about the Nephilim world, I’m sure you’d know about that too.”

  Her eyes opened wider, the whites glaring in the morning sun.

  “I’ll just eat you up,” I said, and jumped on her, knees digging into her middle. “You’ve picked the wrong soul to attach to. You’ll devolve into nothingness, like me.”

  A movement near the path brought us back. Armed, masked soldiers dressed in black trooped toward the beach. Their high-tech guns pointed towards us. They would capture me, I knew. But first I had to finish Petra.

  And then, she laughed. I had her, but her cackle disarmed me.

  “Why are you laughing?” I screamed and shook her body. “You’re going to die!”

  “Ha! You are only furthering my plan. Don’t you see? I’ve known exactly what you can do, sister. I just needed you to want me bad enough to deplete your stores, to hunger for me.” She lowered her voice. “You know you are more than a Soul-Eater. They’re extinct. Take me in! When you die, whenever you die, I’ll be with you, part of your flock.”

  “I’ll end you first.”

  “You won’t kill me.” She coaxed me as one would encourage a child to take her first steps. “You won’t risk your sister’s soul to the universe with me attached to it. No, you want to drink me in, make me a part of you. Save her soul.” She bared her throat to me, daring me to take a bite. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  Action exploded around me. Voices barked orders.

  “No,” Cash called from behind me. “I need her alive.”

  “Show me your hands,” a soldier called from the base of the pathway. His insignificant energy niggled at me.

  I gritted my teeth, not taking my eyes off Petra, my true enemy.

  “Miss, I have a gun pointed at your head. Show me your hands.” The closest soldier jerked his gun and two more appeared beside him. Metal weapons clicked as the soldiers fell into place. One pointed his gun at Petra, the other soldier aimed at me.

  I lifted my palms, in surrender. She stilled beneath me. She didn’t want this. My muscles coiled, my fingers curled, and I snarled. My hunger called. So I pulled secretly on Petra’s life-force, letting her essence trickle in. Like a punch to the stomach, I jerked, winded, when her double-strength life-force hit me, but I kept pulling. If paradise was the afterlife, then maybe hell was inside me—if she wanted a lifetime trapped there, that’s what she’d get. I’d make it my mission to live as long as possible and, with my inner souls gracing me with additional chances at life, that could be a long time.

  A shot cracked in the air—a warning. I didn’t flinch.

  “Hands in the air,” a soldier boomed. “Last warning.”

  Petra clung to her chain of souls and I drew harder on her energy. It hit the back of my tongue and I tasted metal, reminding me of blood, firing my appetite. My eyes rolled with pure pleasure and my skin tingled. I felt alive—invincible.

  Vaguely, I knew I needed to sever Petra’s link with Leila’s soul, but instead, I kept draining, unable to stop. Her energy felt too good and, with her supercharged soul, I became hypersensitive to other energy: from the soldiers, from nature and the earth. Voltage danced over my skin, like happy fireflies.

  But something was missing. I was doing it wrong. I needed to physically connect on a deeper level to cut her parasitic connection with Leila. I needed, I needed…

  Blood roared in my ears. The need was all I felt.

  Cas
h grabbed my shoulder, the pain snapping me out of my trance. His fingers tightened as he took a breath, and when he exhaled, he straightened. From the way he relaxed, I was sure my touch had lessened his pain. “I need her alive, Roo. She has information about my… situation. I can’t afford to let her go. Let the soldiers take her. Please, let them take her.”

  I stiffened, trying to grasp the meaning of what he’d just said.

  It wasn’t the soldiers, or the witch, it was… I held my breath. He’d called me Roo. Tommy used nicknames, Cash called me La Roux, or Urser. For a moment I forgot the witch, the guns and the hunger. I turned and his white eyes met mine.

  “Hunter, need we remind you we’re on a shoot to kill mission?” the soldier said. Wait—he knew Cash? To his comrades, the soldier said, “Shoot the witch.”

  “Stop!” I cried out.

  Petra scrambled from beneath me. She headed for the ocean. I shoved Cash away and hurled myself at the witch. The excess energy skipping over my skin blew outwards like an atomic bomb. I collided with her, splashing into the surf. My dark memories instructed me to rein in the power at the last moment, to funnel it into a wall and pull it tight across at the top like a dome. I did as I was told. A silent boom rippled in the wet sand from where I sat. The wave of energy hit my body, shifting grains of sand into my hair and face. The barrier blocked the ocean, the remaining inside water soaked into the sand and disappeared. Pressure popped in my ears urging me to swallow. Noise became muffled, and I heard the gunshots echo as if from a great, warbled distance.

  I opened my eyes and was alone, together with the witch, in the silent dome.

  I grabbed the fallen knife and held it to her neck, against the bulging vein. One swipe and her essence would run free. Her blood sang to me. My mouth watered. My stomach twisted and turned.

  Drink.

  Drink.

  “Do it, sister,” Petra croaked through cracked lips. She held up her necklace. “Take them. Take the souls as payment for mine. You could absorb their knowledge, you could gain more power. We, could gain more power.”

  I growled. We weren’t one. If I took her, she would be inside me and I would control her. Struggling for my morality, I fought my hunger and smashed each glass bauble with the hilt of the knife. They popped, and each soul escaped with a crackling sound. Even in the shelter of my dome, their spirits dissolved into nothing, finding a way back into the world. I looked away, unable to admit anything until I felt their life-force completely disperse.

  I didn’t want power, I wanted peace.

  Thumping echoed around me, insistent, in my ears and in my head. I held up my arm and saw the pulse in my wrist throb with the beat. The protruding jugular in the witch’s neck pulsated. I lowered the knife to her neck and let the blade rest on top of the vibrating vein.

  “Tell me all that you know about Cash.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” She turned her head away, the action pulled her neck taut and pushed the cords harder into the knife. A small sliver of blood appeared, and I loosened my grip.

  She wanted to die, so I pointed the knife at my own heart.

  “Answer me, or I’ll kill myself. I’ll cut my heart out before you get a chance to follow me.” The souls inside me stirred, one would be sacrificed so that I could live again. They knew that, but Petra didn’t. “I’m your only way to the other side, so answer me. Who split his soul into three all those years ago and why? You said he had escaped, but from who? And who is the beacon lit for? Answer me!”

  I pushed the knife into my chest, releasing a thin rivulet of red. Her eyes flew wide, and she squirmed beneath me, eyes darting briefly to beyond the dome. With my free hand, I ran a finger over the fresh wound in her neck, splitting the skin. I leaned in and parted my lips to drink, then stopped, hovering over her face.

  “Who are you more afraid of, me or Him?” I asked. I wasn’t sure who “He” was, but had a pretty good idea and I wasn’t afraid. “Your best chance is with me.”

  Her eyes fluttered closed. “It was Eve, the first witch. It was her revenge for being chased out of Paradise. The hunter is the one who chased her out. He chased them all out.”

  I pulled back slightly. Eve was the witch Cash had threatened her with at the beach barbecue. The leader of the coven who had made the treaty. “Why?”

  “He was the Queen’s right-hand man, her first commander. Eve wanted to take him away from her, just as Paradise was taken from us. She wanted the Queen to suffer the loss of her lover.” The words tumbled out of her mouth and I sat back on my haunches.

  Cash was the Queen’s lover?

  “Eve wanted her to feel the same pain and suffering we did when he cast us out of her empire. He was the one who enforced her bidding and ended our human lives.”

  Could she be talking about the statues from my father’s story—the ones the Queen had ordered decimated in the great deluge after the Prince betrayed her? Cash smelled like rain, the connection pierced my chest like an arrow hitting home—Cash was the deluge. The myth had been twisted into something humans could understand, a flood. There was more to the story but for now, I had his identity. He was the Queen’s enforcer. But…

  “How can I trust you are telling the truth?”

  “I was her familiar, she was the first—I was in the next wave.”

  “Where is she now?”

  She whimpered and squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. “Please, just take me. You’ve accepted the souls as my payment. You don’t have to tell Him you didn’t use them. There’s still my soul and your sister’s. If you don’t take us, He will. He will take us for his dark army. You don’t want that for your sister, do you?” She rambled, her voice faded.

  If I took both them in, Leila would be safe. I could protect her until I figured out how to separate them. Tears sprung to my eyes when I thought of Leila. I would not abandon her even if she hated me. She was my sister. My stomach cramped, and I sliced Petra’s neck. I bent closer and paused. “There’s something you need to know. I did die when you threw me into the cave, but a soul inside me was sacrificed so I could live again. If you try to kill me prematurely, know that you will only put yourself in danger.”

  She tried to scream. I’d hit the nail on the head. She had hoped to kill me from the inside then hasten her trip back to Paradise. I smiled as she struggled and squirmed with the last of her strength, then drank the viscous fluid from her neck until she stilled in my arms.

  With the blood came memories.

  A little girl played alone, dressed in rags. She watched a group of girls dance by the river’s edge. One, two, three. There were three of them. They laughed and bathed in the sun, braiding each other’s hair and gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes. They were family. The little rag girl looked down at her wooden doll and then back to the girls, dejected. She wanted to have her hair braided too. Maybe she would be loved if she learned to braid hair. She tugged at the beaded hair on the dolly and tried to do the same. When she looked up, the girls had spotted her. They laughed and pointed, faces contorted into cruel masks before turning their backs. She was alone again. The little girl turned to me with tears in her eyes and held out the doll. She flickered in the darkness and faded away.

  A familiar raven-haired beauty sat at our kitchen table surrounded by a halo of light. Leila cast her eyes over the words on a newspaper, folding the pages from one side to the other as she read, lips moving silently. She looked up sharply as if she heard a noise and our eyes locked.

  I gasped.

  She could see me. My heart fluttered. I reached out, but my arms wouldn’t move.

  She smiled. “It’s okay,” she seemed to say. The words echoed in the corners of my mind. “It’s okay.” Her face flickered, and the table disappeared. The kitchen fell away and the darkness of my soul threatened to take her into oblivion. I willed my arms to move and latched onto her arms. We fought—the darkness and I, and I refused to let her go, I couldn’t. “It’s okay,” she said, her body fading
but my hands still clutching. “This is our fresh start. I can help you from this side. I am not afraid. She fooled us both, but I can make it right by bringing light to balance their darkness and you will see clearly. I was wrong, I didn’t need distance for a fresh start, I needed to be closer to you. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better sister.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I should have been there for you,” I cried. “I won’t let the darkness take you.”

  But the darkness I fought was me, it was my own private hell. How could I fight myself? Leila hated witches, despised them, yet she was willing to lock herself in a cage with them to fight for me. My hatred for Petra raged, turbulent and relentless. I would make her pay for this. Someday I would get the souls out, and then I would make the witches pay. Leila was right. Absorbing Petra would make the third dark soul inside me. I needed light.

  I let go, darkness overwhelmed me and I succumbed to the dizzying sensation of falling then opened my eyes and found the empty shell of my sister’s body lying in my arms. Her life-force had gone and so had Petra’s, but I felt them stir in the darkest depths of my soul. A wave of anxiety hit me as though the four souls warred against each other. The conflict echoed in my trembling body; the darkness tried to outweigh the light. But she didn’t fold. Leila held her ground. She was there.

  She was also beneath me with a gaping hole in her neck, evidence of my savagery. The smell of blood and flesh amplified inside my dome of silence. I stood up, stumbling backwards. My body was numb. My mind reeled as I tried to grasp the enormity of what I’d done. My hand covered my mouth. I drank my sister’s blood. I’d killed her.

  I was a monster. My incredible high plummeted like a body-rocking overdose. Darkness stippled my vision. The blur of Leila’s body was all I could see as I staggered backwards. A movement tickled the edge of my consciousness and I whipped around then recoiled from intense vertigo, both hands clutching my head. Soldiers banged on my invisible wall with the butt of their guns, trying to get through the thick energy. Everyone spun around me as though on a merry-go-round, and the earth shifted. My eyes rolled back, and I lost control of the shield, letting it drop with a whoosh. Noise slammed into my being and I fell backwards to land on the shore with a splash, blinking at the blue swirly sky. The cool ocean lapped at my skull, then traveled to my shoulders in a calming and nurturing caress.