by Molly Ringle
“If she can sense the wards, she’ll know exactly the areas we’re protecting. They’re leading her straight to the bloody chrysomelia tree!”
“Hm. There is that. Ah—I see them.” Zoe and Niko had reached the outermost pomegranate trees in the orchard. He pointed ahead to what looked like two souls walking through it. She realized they must be wearing glamours, and that the dead, Niko among them, wouldn’t be fooled by glamours.
Zoe slammed a glamour-dissolving spell at the pair. Their appearances rippled and morphed into the ordinary solidity of the living: a middle-aged man and woman, who were now a mere twenty meters or so from the chrysomelia tree. They jolted and looked at one another, then glared back at Zoe and Niko, who kept sprinting forward. Zoe had dropped her glamour when she started running here. Not much point using any power to maintain it.
But she rather wished she had when the man casually lifted a rocket launcher and fired it at her.
She had a split second to fling up a magical shield. The bubble of protection formed around her, fire and deafening explosion searing around its outsides. Trees burst into flame; branches fell.
Niko’s soul leaped into the bubble with her—he was unhurt, of course, but apparently worried about her safety. “You all right?” he said.
She had been crouching with her arms over her head. She lowered them and nodded. With another sweep of magic, a special indoor rain moved in to douse the flames, its water pulled from the nearby river. She squinted through the smoke and steam. “What are they doing?” She cloaked herself in a soul-like glamour again, and she and Niko rushed forward.
Another wallop through the air: the woman had knocked down the protective ward around the chrysomelia tree. But she and the man couldn’t actually see it yet, Zoe realized—they were looking around everywhere except at the little tree itself. At least her spell of “invisibility except to the right people” was still holding. Zoe didn’t count on it lasting much longer, though. This woman was dangerous, and worked fast.
“That one,” Niko said to Zoe quietly. “She’s the one who killed us. Are you prepared to do the worst?”
Ripping someone’s soul out. Two someones, possibly. She had to gulp to make her throat swallow properly, but she nodded. “If they won’t stop, yes. May the Fates forgive me.”
But before she could prepare the spell, Niko warned, “Look out!”
Zoe flung up another bubble of protection, again just in time. Another explosion crashed in brilliant orange flame around her. A grenade? She couldn’t tell, nor did it matter much. But it was setting more of the Underworld’s gardens on fire, and it hadn’t come from either the man or the woman in front of her.
She threw her glamour back on, swept the flames aside so she could see, and soon spotted the culprit: another woman, curvy and blonde and a bit younger than the sorcerer. Grenades studded the harness across her chest. She raced up to the pair.
“Yuliya,” the man said sharply. “Why did you follow us? What’s going on?”
“The others are all defeated. We must do this and run. Quick, where is the tree?”
“Here somewhere, we think.” He hesitated. “But…”
“It must be right here,” the other woman said. “It is cloaked somehow.”
Still a couple of paces from them, and hidden under a soul-glamour, Zoe shot a spell at all three of them that should have knocked them unconscious. It had worked fine on Krystal and this Yuliya woman the day they kidnapped Landon. But the sorcerer had apparently put a shield on them, because they only jolted a bit and looked at Zoe, startled and squinting.
“Bugger,” she swore. She pulled together the earth energies that would shake apart the shields, but before she could throw them forward, the sorcerer glared at her and began pronouncing a word wrapped with palpable, lethal evil.
“Sormaja-”
“Zoe, now!” Niko shouted.
Panicking, Zoe flung her senses toward the woman’s soul, seized at its connecting edges, and tore it from its body. The body crumpled, leaving the soul gaping at Zoe, who staggered, weakened by using such a blast of death.
The woman’s soul was already being drawn toward Tartaros. Zoe could almost physically see the dark tendrils reaching for her, like shadows of the vines that would soon hold her.
“Wait!” the woman called. “You have powers. There is a way to revive me, I am sure of it. We will call a truce. Anything.”
Leaning over with hands splayed on her knees, Zoe gave a weak laugh. “And get in the way of the Fates? I wouldn’t dare. They’re dying to sink their claws into you, mate.”
The woman’s mouth opened, but she had the dignity to avoid screaming “No!”, or anything at all. She succumbed to the pull of the shadows, and was swept away, out of sight.
Zoe turned her gaze upon the other two, who watched in horror.
The man—surely Erick Tracy—dropped his rocket launcher and raised both hands. “A truce. Or rather, a deal. Anything at all, in exchange for one of those fruits of yours.”
Zoe stared incredulously at him. He seemed completely sincere.
“Not what I expected from a member of Thanatos,” she said.
“Zeus, though,” Niko remarked. “Figures.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Tracy cut in.
Niko and Zoe exchanged brief shrugs, and Niko told him, “Your soul, you were Zeus. We should have known earlier. Smug pain in the arse, and all that.”
“Wait.” Tracy’s eyes gleamed. “Then—well, good Lord, all the more reason we should work together, yes? Tell me more. If I can become like you, then truly, anything, any truce—”
“No!” Yuliya screeched. “That was not the plan! She has corrupted you. No one should ever have it!”
And before Zoe could proceed with knocking them out and handing them over to the police outside, Yuliya snapped two grenades off her gear, pulled the pins on both, and flung them at Tracy.
“Shit.” Zoe ducked and covered, under yet another protection bubble.
One grenade sailed out among the trees. The other bounced off the ground mere centimeters from Tracy’s feet—right near the chrysomelia tree. Both exploded a second later.
Zoe shut her eyes. More fire, heat, deafening noise, even through her protective bubble. When she opened her eyes a few seconds later, and frantically swept a surge of water over the fire, she caught a glimpse of the souls of Yuliya and Tracy being pulled to Tartaros. As for their bodies, those were all but destroyed.
As was the tree of immortality.
She stumbled forward, not wanting to believe it, and fell to her knees in the ashes. Cinders burned holes in her jeans; she flinched at the scorch, but kept digging desperately in the fallen branches and burned leaves.
She found its little trunk, recognizable by the charred cloth tied around it, containing the coil of hairs from each of them. Her spell, which had made the tree invisible but did nothing to protect it from actual harm. The tree was broken off at the top, reduced to a bare stick, its leaves and immeasurably precious fruits incinerated and blasted away. Everything stank of acrid smoke. Behind her, trees and plants still burned, and she sent more indoor rain toward them with a listless wave of her hand to keep the rest of the gardens from unneeded harm. But so much had already been lost.
She bowed her head over her knees, face in her hands. “Oh, Goddess. How am I going to tell Sophie?”
Niko crouched beside her. “Ah, love, don’t despair. Remember how I always have tricks up my sleeve? This time is no exception.”
She raised her face to grimace at him. “How are you going to fix this? When even I can’t?”
“I’ll show you. But first, let’s go fetch that body of mine, and Freya’s, before they get any colder. All right?”
Sniffling, Zoe nodded and dragged herself to her feet.
***
Zoe and Niko met the others on the path beside the river. Adrian carried Freya’s body in his arms, and Tab held Niko’s over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Zoe blink
ed in confusion at the sight of Sophie and Liam hurrying along with them, their faces a mixture of triumph and worry.
“What are you—is everyone—” Zoe began.
“Krystal’s dead, and the rest are knocked out and tied up, ready for the police.” Adrian laid Freya’s body down on the ground. “Sophie and Liam defied orders and jumped down here to help. Did you find the sorcerer, and Tracy?”
“Both dead.” Zoe sighed. “But they set off grenades, and the…the chrysomelia tree…” Her throat closed up as she fought sobs, as if the tree had been a close relative of hers. In some ways it was, or even more important than that.
“Oh no,” Sophie said in a tiny, despairing voice.
“I’m sorry,” Zoe whispered.
“And,” Niko put in, “I’ve instructed you not to give up hope, because of things I’ll explain in a moment, but first, darling, do you mind trying to bring us back to life?”
“Right. Sorry.” Zoe wiped her nose and sent an apologetic glance toward Freya’s soul too.
Freya smiled, then focused her attention on the blonde lifeless body lying on the ground. Tab set Niko’s body down next to her.
“So then.” Zoe crouched by them. “You two come over here, and lie back down into yourselves, to start.”
“Or,” Niko proposed, “here’s a thought. What say I take Freya’s body, and she takes mine?” He looked at Freya’s soul. “If you’re up for it, that is.”
Freya lifted her eyebrows and turned to Zoe. “Would it even work?”
“Er. I have no idea. But why would you…? Oh.” Blood rushed to her cheeks again, in that everlasting blush that always came with thoughts of Hekate’s relationship with Hermes. “Hang on. Just for me, you’d get a complete body switch and sex change?”
“Well, not just for you.” Niko regarded Freya’s body with interest. “I’d quite enjoy driving that around, I think.”
“I would like it too.” Freya considered Niko’s body. “I would finally get to have sex with all the beautiful gay men who would not touch me before.”
Zoe laughed in shock, as did Adrian, Sophie, Tab, Liam, and all the souls clustering around to watch this bizarre event.
“Dude, you’d get periods,” Tab reminded Niko. “Are you sure? Really, really sure?”
Niko waved the concern away. “I’ve been a woman in some lives. I know the drill.”
Zoe found herself trembling—out of excitement, not fear. The soul of the maddening but beloved Hermes/Niko, in the perfect-ten body of Freya? That was too awesome a solution to be real.
“It wouldn’t fix everything,” she argued, more for her own benefit than Niko’s. “I mean, we’d still not be the ideal couple. We’d have issues, we’d need counseling…”
Niko shrugged. “Who’s ideal? Other than them, I mean.” He gestured at Adrian and Sophie.
Sophie smiled and sidled over to take Adrian’s hand. He pulled her closer and kissed her on the cheek.
“Okay. In that case.” Zoe drew in her breath, and opened her palm toward the two bodies. “Get situated in whichever one you want.”
They settled in, everyone smiling at the oddity of it: Niko’s soul overstretching the shorter confines of Freya’s body, Freya’s translucent curves spilling out the sides of Niko’s slim frame.
Zoe closed her eyes and found the edges of both souls at once, and felt the fading energies of the unhurt but cooling bodies. “This may take a lot of power,” she said. “Fitting them into spots they didn’t belong to before.”
Please Goddess, please Fates, help me do this, she prayed. Take all my energy if that’s what it requires, but let them live again; and if it’s not asking too much, help me pull off this switch…
And though the response didn’t come in actual words, more of a feeling in the available energies, she would have said the answer was something like: Asking too much? All of you have wandered as mortals for thousands of years before finally finding your immortality again, and you’ve come here to serve this realm once more at last. Daughter, ask whatever you wish. The powers are here to help you.
But it did indeed take an immense amount of power. As she worked at the strange and complicated spell, sweat broke out all over her. Nausea crawled in her belly. She kept at the endless effort, eyes shut in the familiar darkness she had lived in before her sight had been given to her, finding soul-edges and stitching them to resistant bodies, while her friends waited in a hush.
Right before she passed out, she sensed a burst of energy like a match being struck and a flame coming to life.
Two flames, in fact.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Is she going to be okay?” Liam sounded afraid. He and everyone else crouched near the unconscious Zoe, who had collapsed on her side on the white grass.
Sophie rested her fingers on Zoe’s neck and felt the regular tapping of a pulse. “Heart’s still beating.”
“Yeah, she’s still in there,” Adrian said. “Probably just knocked out from all that magic.”
“I’d expect so. That was quite the blast of power.”
Sophie turned with everyone else to peer at the person who had spoken: the resurrected Freya, or at least her voice emerging from her mouth, in her body that was now sitting up and flexing her fingers.
But the accent, the cadence—those hadn’t been Freya’s.
“Niko?” Adrian said in amazement. “Yeah. You’re in there, aren’t you.”
The blonde woman winked at him in a way much more reminiscent of Niko’s sly winks than Freya’s sultry ones.
Sophie—and everyone else—moved their gaze to the male sitting nearby, running his fingertips delicately through his short hair and frowning. “Oof,” he said, and shifted his sitting position, then groped himself between his legs. “Living with these takes some adjustment. I had forgotten.”
Freya’s Swedish accent, through Niko’s windpipe.
“Meanwhile I get these.” Newly-female Niko hefted one of her own boobs and lifted an eyebrow at it in approval.
Tab cracked up, and threw herself upon each of them with a huge hug. “Dudes. What do we even call you now?”
Niko shrugged. “I can still be Niko. I’ll just say it’s short for Nikoleta from now on.”
“And I can be Frey,” the newly-male Freya said. He smiled. “Still a god.”
“Except,” Niko said, “we’re mortal again. I must be. I can’t sense any of you.”
Freya—or rather, Frey—furrowed his brow. “You’re right. Nor can I.”
Desolation swept in once more upon Sophie. “And now we can’t fix you, and Liam and I can’t be immortal either. They killed the tree!”
“Ah. As to that, all may not be lost.” Niko crawled toward Zoe on hands and knees, and grunted. “Oof. Stiff joints from being dead. I hate mortality.”
“What do you mean, all may not be lost?” Sophie demanded. “Can she bring the tree back too?”
“No, it’s not that.” Niko spoke gently, as if his mind weren’t really on it. Rather, her mind. Damn, those pronouns were going to be confusing for a while. Niko sat next to Zoe and drew her head and shoulders up onto her lap.
“Then what?” Adrian said. “How are we supposed to fix this? We won, but we also kind of lost, right?”
“Patience, darlings.” Niko gazed down at Zoe, and stroked a wayward strand of hair off her ear. “It can wait. Trust me.”
Sophie sighed in frustration, and Adrian growled. But they sat down too, and waited, all worried eyes on Zoe.
***
The world was all darkness. Perhaps she was blind again. But she didn’t mind, for she was at peace, and love was wrapped around her. It poured in from someone’s touch, flooding her head, her arms, her back.
As Zoe’s consciousness filtered back in, she recognized whose.
“Niko?” Her lips felt thick; her energy was still at lowest ebb.
A hand stroked her shoulder blades. “In the flesh. Well. Not the original flesh, but even better.”
She finally hauled her eyelids open. Faces illuminated with flashlights formed in her vision. Her sight did still work, then. She was on her side, her head on Niko’s lap. She flopped onto her back to look at him.
Her whole face blossomed into a grin when she put together what she was seeing. Freya, physically: bobbed golden-blonde hair with a fetching degree of bedhead tousle, lips like Eros’ bow, flawless skin, mesmerizing long-lashed eyes, and the swell of generous breasts under her blue knit top. But in the glint of those eyes, and the impish curl upward at the edge of those lips, Zoe saw and sensed the soul of the trickster beaming out.
As if to make it even more certain, the woman’s lips parted and her tongue touched her upper lip as she gazed down at Zoe in the calculating expression Zoe knew well, from Hermes and Niko and others in between.
Zoe dragged herself upright, not taking her eyes off the new Niko. She set her dirt-smeared palm against the woman’s cheek. “Wow.”
Niko tipped her face forward just enough that their noses grazed one another. “Well done, sweet Hekate.” His accent and words in a sultry female voice. Yeah, Zoe had likely died and gone to some delusional heaven.
But all their friends were crowding round, so it wasn’t the time to try snogging her, she supposed. Adrian and Sophie and Tab needed reassuring hugs, and she had to turn and laugh in delighted astonishment at Freya flexing Niko’s lanky limbs and infusing his smile with coyness and his voice with a Swedish accent.
And then she noticed there were more than the usual two dogs, Kiri and Rosie, hanging around and whipping her with their tails. Some third dog, black and brown and smelling pungently canine, was whining and practically crawling into her lap.
“Who—Kerberos??” She seized him by the furry sides of his head and looked into his panting, grinning face.
“Yep.” Sophie stood nearby, arms folded with pride. “I found him outside. Thought I’d let him in.”
“But how—what—”
“He’s been alive for like three thousand years,” Liam said. “How freaking cool is that?”