The Mythniks Saga
Page 51
I pulled off my ridiculous wig, threw it aside and pointed the hierophant at my would-be attacker.
“Hupakouo!”
Chriss skidded to a stop in front of me. His expression was strangely contented. “Don’t move,” I said to him as I went around his still form.
Prometheus didn’t look alarmed in the slightest. In fact, he looked happy to see me. “Pandora! I’m so glad you— “
“Hupakouo!”
I was happy to see the hierophant could work his magic on even a mighty Titan. Prometheus’ face took on the same drunken cast as everyone else’s. “Will everything he says to me be the truth?” I asked Steve.
“Yep,” he replied. “My power does have that effect.”
I looked down at the godling who’d given Man fire and said, “Why’d you do what you did? Why’d you change the world and release the Evils from my pithos?”
Prometheus’ eyes were glassy, but he smiled. “I was only trying to help,” he replied.
“Help? What do you mean help?”
“I brought fire down from on-high, so Mankind could get out of the caves. I foresaw agriculture. I foresaw cities. I did not foresee the current sad state of affairs.”
“How would you characterize the current sad state of affairs?”
“Soft. Mankind did all the things I wanted him to do, but then he turned inward. He became contemplative and lazy. He no longer challenged himself. Now, instead of seeking adventure and bettering himself, he is sedentary and petty. The men of today are like children. Indolent, cranky children.”
“And how did changing the world back to the way it was in ancient times help that situation?”
“The world as we knew it—you and I—had two sterling virtues. It was beautiful, and it was dangerous. It was, by its very nature, challenging.”
“And releasing the Evils? What was that meant to do?”
“When was the last time you met a hero, Pandora? A hero that wasn’t born during our own time. I myself have looked high and low in the seventy years since I was freed. I can’t find any. Not even one. And why do you think that is? I have my own theory: Without monsters, heroes have nothing to test themselves against. Having fewer monsters means having fewer heroes.”
“Can you change the world back to the way it was before the Conclave of Universal Consciousness?”
He smiled again. “I cannot.”
I was afraid he’d say that. “Can you regather the Evils?”
His smile broadened a little. “Even if I could, where would I put them? I cannot make a pithos. I am not Zeus.”
Well, there it was. I wouldn’t be able to undo the harm Prometheus had done to the world. At least I’d warned my friends ahead of time. I didn’t even bother to ask him what his plans were beyond what he’d already done. They didn’t matter. I kneeled down so he and I were eye to eye. “Disassemble the Church of Reciprocity. Divest all of its wealth and redistribute it to… The American Cancer Society.” (For a moment, I’d struggled to think of a good place to put all those millions of dollars. Cancer research seemed like a safe and worthy option.) “When that work is done, I want you devote the rest of your life to working for… The American Civil Liberties Union.” (I pulled the second one out of a hat. I do lean a little Left politically, but that wasn’t why I said the ACLU. It was the first thing that came to mind.)
“But I cannot die,” Prometheus replied.
“Exactly.”
I stood up and headed back toward the elevator. As I walked past Taylor Chriss, I said, “Stop making such shitty movies.”
That’s where it would have ended if Samoa Joe hadn’t entered when he did. He was carrying several bags from In ’n Out Burger. When he saw me, he dropped the bags and, like Chriss, charged toward me. I had just a moment of panic before I raised the clay charm around my neck.
Steve said, “Hupakouo!” but Joe had a lot of momentum behind his bulk, so I was already out the window.
I closed my eyes and prepared myself for the inevitable splat into Hollywood Boulevard. I remember hearing somewhere that one story of a building equals roughly ten feet, so that meant I had roughly one hundred and ten feet to fall. I know I’ve mentioned to you at least once I’m not a superhero. I don’t have any magic powers, so the same thing would happen to me after a plummet like that as would happen to you—IE guacamole.
About halfway down, I jerked to a stop.
Actually, that’s not true. About halfway down, I was pushed violently in another direction. From down to a more lateral vector. Not only that, but my torso hurt. It hurt because it had big old claws digging into it. I opened my eyes and looked up. I kind of knew what’d happened before I did that, but I still needed the visual confirmation. I was right. I’d been snatched out of the air by the Arae who, thank gods, hadn’t listened to me when I’d told her to fuck off.
The cliché thing to say here would be, “Out of the frying pan, and into the fire”, but that wasn’t true at all. Fate had intervened and, for once, she was on my side. Only my left arm was free, but that was more than enough. I reached up to my neck and grabbed the hierophant. I held him out and, of course, he exclaimed, “Hupakouo!”
Here’s the rub, though. Nothing happened. The Arae flew on down the Boulevard toward Vine Street, completely unaffected by Steve’s mojo. Was she immune? Had Steve used up all his mojo? What was the deal? “Try it again,” I said over the rushing wind.
“Hupakouo!” my necklace said, this time with just a shade more conviction.
Nothing. The little bird woman pushed on, undeterred.
In my right hand, I still held the gladius I’d stolen off the wall at Reciprocity H.Q. It wasn’t the real deal but would’ve been more than adequate—even as bludgeon—against a creature with hollow bones. I say “would’ve” because, my right arm was pinned against my side by one of the Arae’s taloned toes. (Bitch had huge feet.)
I decided to try another approach, weak as it was. “What part of ‘leave me the fuck alone’ did you not understand, you glorified budgie? Put me down right now!”
As soon as I finished shouting the Arae arced upward, flapping furiously to gain a higher altitude.
“I think she’s going to take you up on it,” Steve said. “I think she’s gonna drop you.”
He was probably right. Then again, that didn’t make a whole lotta sense. I yelled up at her again. “Why didn’t just let me fall back there?” I said. “I was already gonna die!”
“I do revenge,” the Arae answered. “Accidental death not revenge.”
Well, she had me there. I developed a sudden, grudging respect for the pride she took in her work. She was gaining altitude. Soon, we were at least one hundred and ten feet high again, and I was damn short of ideas. The only thing I could think of to do was something I’d thought of a short time before but discarded because of its recklessness. Desperation had a funny way of altering plans. I bent up at the waist and grabbed a handful of the plumage on the Arae’s chest and yanked down. Almost immediately, I let go, cocked that same arm and socked her right in her creepy little face. Right away, she lost her bearings and stopped flapping. Because he stopped flapping, we lost altitude. The Arae shook her head to banish the stars in front of her eyes and started flapping again. After we’d regained less than ten feet of altitude, I repeated the action. Grab, cock, punch. Same effect: we fell, she regained herself and then we recovered about half the height we’d lost. “I can do this all night, Tweety. Why don’t you just put me down on the sidewalk and we’ll call it a draw?”
We weren’t nearly as high as we needed to be in order for the Arae to drop me and kill me, but she did exactly what I would’ve done if I’d been in her place: she dropped me anyway.
I didn’t bother to look down. That would’ve been suicide. Instead, as I fell from her grasp, I reached up with my left arm and snagged one of her ankles. With my right arm, I swiped at her with my prop gladius. I did it with the flat edge since I wasn’t sure the blade would cut. The effec
t was still good, though. Imagine you’re a creepy bird woman and, while you’re trying to fly, someone swats you with an oar. The blow caused her to jerk her torso rigid and expel a deep, throaty “oof!”. We dropped another few feet and I did it again. Swat! Oof! Another drop. Again. Swat! Oof! Another drop. By then, we were only ten or fifteen feet off the ground. I did the logical thing: I let go, tucked and rolled. I won’t say impacting with the concrete tickled, but it also wasn’t fatal.
As soon as I was sure I hadn’t died, I raised my head. I did it just in time to see the Arae make a less comfortable landing than the one I’d made. My letting go had jerked her in the air so she hit the ground and rolled end over end. I wasted no time. I rose to my feet and brought up the gladius, holding it like a cricket bat. I took a few steps toward my attacker and said, “We’re back in my element now, bitch. You wanna go another round?”
She stood up and stumbled. She was dizzy from the descent and couldn’t find her bearings. She looked at me and, even though I’m sure her vision was still blurry, she took to the air again. For a moment, it looked like she’d crash into one of the buildings on the other side of the street, but she corrected her trajectory and flitted off into the night.
“What now?” Steve said.
I shrugged my shoulders. “We walk back to the car, and we go home.”
7
The Plan
I got up out of Elijah’s bed, bloated and miserable. My feet had swollen and my big, fat middle was lagging behind me. Clearly, my daughter wanted to continue napping.
El came out of the master bathroom, leaving behind the sound of a freshly-flushed toilet. “You’re getting up?” he said.
“What was your first clue? The fact that I’m up?” I was cranky, but he was right to ask. I was on doctor-mandated bedrest for the rest of my pregnancy. El was doing everything for me short of carrying me to the john.
“Where’re you going? What’re you gonna do?” Somewhere around month six, my new husband had moved from “doting” to “domineering”. He was acting in my best interests and the best interests of our child, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t getting on my nerves.
“You know,” I said. “I’ve been hearing good things about this whole ‘vertical’ thing, so I thought I’d give it a try.”
“Okay, great, so you’ve done it. Why don’t you—?”
I was going to let him finish, then I was going to say something disagreeable in response. Callie put a stop to all that by kicking me hard from within. “Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay, okay. I think I better sit back down now.” I was winded and embarrassed from the rebuke by my soon-to-be-daughter.
Elijah came over and helped me ease back onto the king-sized bed. “I knew you were a contrarian when I married you,” he said. “See how I’m not making a big deal out of it.”
“You’re a real saint,” I said, but I kissed him back when he kissed me.
“I’m gonna make lunch,” he said and left the room.
As soon as he was gone, I cradled my gigantic belly with my left hand and said to Callie, “You’re gonna be just like me, aren’t you? Which means I’m in for a world of shit.” Callie—short for Calliope, which means “beautiful voiced”—didn’t reply. She was just being cagey.
My life had an odd flow. I took my meals at more or less regular times, but my sleep came in waves, some of it at night, some of it during the day. The only constants were the TV, Elijah’s mother hen routine, and the Arae’s nocturnal visits. Since I was bedridden, there was no chance I was going out of the Westwood home except for doctor’s visits. That didn’t stop the revenge-seeking bird-woman from her appointed rounds. Every night around eleven, the scratching would start at the window and it wouldn’t stop until dawn. Both El and I were so conditioned we barely noticed it anymore. I’m sure that would’ve been disappointing to the Arae had she known. After all, her job was to bedevil us. Despite being immobilized, I wasn’t feeling particularly bedeviled by much of anything. My husband and I were getting along just fine, and I was only a month or so away from delivering what I was told was a healthy baby girl. Whenever there was something particularly inane on the television, I would drift. Most often I found myself wondering why I’d spent so many years burrowed up my own ass. Things between El and I were just fine, and Keri spend evenings with me and we’d have some serious laughs. Jack didn’t visit much, but that was understandable. Hope and Steve had actually hit it off, but not in a creepy way, more in a brother and sister way. I was glad my old friend finally had a companion more like herself.
Everything was going great until the dreams started. Vague, terrible dreams full of rushing wind and faraway voices. At first, I couldn’t identify either the voices or the shapes I would glimpse through the tunnels of cloudy air. In time, I saw the faces of my friends, calling to me, reaching toward me desperately. They were panicked. They were in trouble, yet I couldn’t make out what they were saying or read the intent behind their terrified expressions. One thing I knew intuitively: I was not the cause of their distress. They were calling to me like I was at the bottom of deep well, and they needed my help.
Every time I would wake up with a shout and covered with sweat. Every time, El would say, “The same dream?”
I would say that it was nothing and I would urge him to go back to sleep, but, more and more, it didn’t feel like nothing. Not since the visions became more vivid and I could see faces. Ty, El, Keri, Amanda, Connie, Jack. All of them skinny, dirty and sweaty. All of them desperate. I’d never had a truly prophetic dream in my life, so I doubted this one meant anything, but why was it so persistent? Why was it so upsetting? They needed something from me, but they couldn’t get it across. They couldn’t make me see. They were frustrated (I could sense it), and so was I.
The next time we went to the doctor, I asked him for something to help me sleep and to shut the dreams out. He, being a purist, said, “No, ma’am. You’ll just have to hold tight for another month.” I nodded and smiled. The brave soldier on the outside, the increasingly anxious wreck on the in-.
Finally, the dreams became clear enough that I could make out some of what was being said over the rushing torrents of air. Dream El leaned in and, pleading said, “The Arae! The Arae followed you!” I awoke, gasping for air. Real World El mumbled. I told him to go back to sleep and he did with remarkable quickness. Once he was under, I did something I hadn’t done in a long time: I went to the window next to the bed and opened the curtains. There was the smiling Arae, scratching at the glass, patient as ever. The Arae followed me? What did that even mean? Followed me where? The fact she was dogging my every step was hardly front-page news. If I asked her could she clarify what Dream El had said? Callie kicked me, and I whispered for her to settle down. Momma had some thinking to do. I reached out and lifted the window just enough so there was an inch or two of screen between the Arae and myself. Not enough for her to get her hand through. I decided to take the direct approach. “You followed me,” I said.
To my surprise, the mean little creature spoke right up. “Yes,” she replied.
“Followed me where?”
She cocked her head, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind. Do you not know? the expression said.
“Followed me where?!” I repeated, this time with greater urgency.
“Into the Demizoi,” she answered, and my entire world came crashing down. The demizoi? How? What demizoi? Pan’s pinecone? But the world around me wasn’t like Pan’s pinecone. I took three steps backward and almost fell onto my ass. I was trying to reconcile what I knew and saw with what’d happened before the world had changed. At the Conclave, Prometheus had whited-out the world and, when my vision cleared, I was somewhere else. At the time, it looked as though everyone else had gone with me. What if they hadn’t? What if I was the only one, and I was trapped somewhere? Somewhere where I could be contained; put out of commission? I wanted to throw up. I wanted to lock myself in the bathroom and never come out. What was real and what wasn’t?
The Arae nodded. “Yes. The doomed cannot avoid me. Even with clever tricks.”
I put my chin down on my chest and tried to regulate my breathing. I mostly failed. “Take me back,” I said. “Take me back and I’ll fight you. Without tricks. A fair fight. You’ll have a chance to finish your mission.”
“Come outside,” the monster replied.
I had to descend the steps from the second floor one at the time, scooting on my ass. When I got to the foyer, I stood again and had to grab the bannister when I became light-headed. A short wait brought clarity back to my vision, so I walked the short distance to the front door. I opened it and looked out into the stuffy night. The Arae hovered over the sidewalk that connected the porch to the driveway. I exited the home and walked toward her, being careful with the step down from the porch.
“No tricks?” the creature asked.
“No, no tricks.”
“It will be easy to kill you,” she said. “You are with child.”
I nodded but said nothing. I knew something she didn’t. I closed the distance to her and she did something odd. She lowered her palms to me for me to take. It was almost a loving gesture. I took her hands and the world flashed white around us.
We dropped into a field at night. The scene was utterly still. I had no time to process where I was because the Arae immediately yanked me forward. She still had me by the hands and was determined to make use of that tactical advantage. She had surprise on her side, but not physics. I jerked forward, but I didn’t fall. I outweighed the monster by more than double and I quickly repeated what she had done. I planted my feet and yanked, and, since she was tiny, and her bones were hollow, she snapped toward me with so much force her head trailed behind. I let go of her right hand and gave her a hook hard enough to jar her teeth loose. She pulled her remaining hand out of mine and flapped her wings to put some distance between the two of us.