“Bee-Dee?” he questioned, all traces of ire gone from his voice. She could see hope spring to his face. It battled with mistrust over the emotions she revealed. What could she say? Obedience reached a hand down and ran it through the thick curls that rested above one ear.
“Have I told you how much I like your hair this length?” She watched him closely. He shut his eyes, and let loose a small sigh.
“I’m not sure what you’re playing at,” his voice emerged gruffly, “but it’s obvious we have to talk.”
“I thought we’d gone past talk and moved on to more interesting things.” Obedience couldn’t help her body’s response to the delicious god. She refused to think and worry about the Chosen thing, but lusting after his body? All her good sense fled when she saw him lying sorely injured at the quarries and lamented that she might never have the chance to be with him again.
She brushed her hand down the side of his neck, across his clavicle, and into the middle of his chest. He should be quiet and get naked, she thought. She wanted his body one more time, then she could leave.
His quick, forceful grab of her wandering fingers surprised her. “No.” His tone commanded, but he softened his grip while moving her hand to the side of the bed. “I need you to know that I’m glad about earlier when…things were interrupted before we…before anything happened.”
“You are?” Obedience puzzled. She thought that, like her, he would have welcomed a physical release. His prick had certainly been on board.
“Yes,” he revealed. “I disrespected you once, taking your innocence and then leaving you with no explanation, but I’m not going to make that mistake again. I mean to make it up to you this time, and that includes finishing my monument. Now you need to listen to how things unraveled, in our past.”
Damn the gods and their holier-than-thou morals. What if she didn’t want to wait until the ziggurat’s completion? What if she didn’t like his explanation of their long separation? What if she hated him for it? Couldn’t she just become lost in the fantasy of his arms one more time before she had to make such important decisions?
“What if I don’t buy into your grounds for leaving?” She didn’t honey coat her words. “What if the reason you skipped out sounds like bullshit? You can’t leave it for now and give me a few minutes to remember what we had, physically?”
Now his face took on the look of thunder. If she didn’t know that his friend Marduk had that element firmly in his domain, she would have sworn Kulla brewed a storm. “You just want to fuck me?” His face grew beet red. “Is that all I am to you now? A hard cock?”
Obedience turned away from his accusing eyes, but then whirled back to him, angrily.
“What do you expect?” she shouted. “I waited years for you to come back. You left me alone to cope with the danger of the witch-hunts. Every glimpse I got of a man with your color hair set my heart beating faster. Every broad set of shoulders that matched yours made me cry out with expectation. I looked for you for decades,” she wailed. “I even swallowed my pride and traveled to Merrymount, only to find it had been abandoned and resettled as Mount Dagon. No one knew where you were; or if they did, they weren’t saying.” Obedience hadn’t meant to reveal so much, but now that she’d opened her emotional floodgates, she couldn’t stop.
“How long did you look for me?” His words were quiet.
“Fifty years,” she allowed, hissing quietly. “And after that I figured, because I didn’t know what you were, you must be dead.” She went on, relentlessly, determined to get it all out. “Oh, yes. I knew, before you left that you weren’t human, but I had no reason to think you were immortal. Because if you were, I figured nothing would have stopped you from finding me.” She said it accusingly, with tears in her eyes.
“But my love, I never did stop looking for you.” He urged her to hear the truth in his words, and indicated the space on the bed. “Sit down, Bee-Dee. It’s time you let me explain.”
She didn’t want to listen. She wanted to hold onto the anger and the mistrust she’d nurtured for centuries. Didn’t he know his desertion of her had fueled a different woman? A woman hardened to life and love, who left her family and friends behind to forge an independent existence. She’d done a damned good job, too, hiding away and disguising herself as a human. Even her powerful cousin Dorian hadn’t been able to find her, and how surprised he’d been when she’d turned up, so many hundreds of years later.
She couldn’t take it. She had to go. Obedience spun about, but Kulla lunged for her and caught her arm, nearly pitching out of bed with the movement. He grimaced in pain, but held on.
“No,” he shouted. “I will tell it all now, and you will listen.”
“I will not.” She hissed at him in disgust. “You can’t tell me what to do. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong to you.”
Kulla kept her arm imprisoned and silently drew to sitting, using all his godly strength and will. Upright, the atmosphere in the room changed. The air went dead, as it did sometimes when the barometer suddenly dropped and a violent storm approached. Then, before her eyes, all hell broke loose.
Obedience felt a burn where Kulla touched her, and gasped. His fingers glowed, and began turning to stone. His chest. His face. All rock. And from his shoulder, his long-dormant amulet―with which Obedience had become apprised―came to life. It flared and sent shards of light streaking out across the room. The air turned ghastly crimson and she choked on the acrid smell that accompanied the charring of the walls where the angry beams hit. Kulla’s stone body glowed brighter than any fire, and his voice became thick as the oxygen was sucked from his mouth. “You do belong to me.” he rumbled.
The flares of red surrounded her, and she became trapped in the middle of a raging conflagration.
“I found you once, and was forced to let you go, even though I knew you were my Chosen”. Kulla’s hard voice scraped from his throat. “Every minute of every day, my mind and body were in torment without you. Do you think that if I’d had a choice, I would have left you? Never,” he whispered, then the single word turned into a howl. “Never.”
Obedience sank to the bed, heedless of the flames, knowing that somehow they wouldn’t burn her. She reached forward and dared to lay a hand on the stark glow of his left shoulder. Instead of being blistered, her hand melted into him. She breathed the essence of Kulla as she never had before. All at once, she became assaulted by his past, overridden by his emotions and seared with his pain. My gods. He’d suffered as greatly as she.
Obedience slowly put her head down on his chest of granite, and sobbed. They’d lost so much time, so much to make up for. Could they manage it? Kulla’s body softened under her cheek. The glow slowly seeped from the room, dwindling to be confined to his shoulder. His arms, no longer hard, moved up around her and she lay quietly, ready to listen to his story.
****
“When I met you, I was no more than an indentured servant.”
Obedience held in her shock. She’d heard a version of his story before, but never that he’d been indentured.
“Thomas Morton, the founder of Merrymount, purchased me in England. Along with my twelve friends, he brought us all to the new world.”
She received a clear picture in her head of the sailing ship that had carried them across the ocean.
“Once on new world soil, we cleared land and built our colony from nothing. We were hard working and loyal. Thomas quickly came to trust our group.” He snorted. “Even more so, once we caught his partner, Richard Wollaston, selling off some of his manpower for his own gains. After that bit of business, we became indispensable.” He sounded proud.
“By the time you met me, we were helping Morton run the colony. We had established trade relations with the local native tribes, and were doing a brisk business in furs.”
Obedience blushed, remembering some of the things she and Kulla had done on those pelts he’d brought to market. Kulla stopped talking for a moment, and Bee-Dee got the impression tha
t whatever he would say next, remained difficult for him.
“We had been sent to earth after a long confinement in the Underworld.”
He looked to see if she judged, but Bee-Dee kept her face impassive.
“Our task was to protect Thomas Morton at all cost, but we were forbidden to use the majority of our powers. It would be a breach of the contract that had been drawn between our champion, Queen Ereshkigal and her husband King Nergal, along with the caveat that we never speak of who we were, or of our purpose on earth. If we disobeyed, a fast trip back to Hell would be our reward.”
“Hence, your inability to tell me then, that you are a god,” Obedience filled in, understanding dawning.
“Exactly.” He sighed. “I tried to show you in as many ways as I could that I was more than human.”
“And a fine job you did of that.” Obedience waggled her eyebrows and glanced down toward his crotch.
“Yeah, well, that too.” He grinned, relaxing into his story. “But really, I used my strength and powers of persuasion all the time to let you know. And to get you out of more than one jam,” he reminded.
Bee-Dee allowed with a nod of her head that she’d gotten into a lot of scrapes when with him. Could she help it? She’d always felt safe to be bold with him close by for protection. She settled down to let him continue.
“And you. You had enough troubles of your own that spring with the witch hunts, the year after we came together,” he recalled. “I didn’t want to worry you that things were looking bad in my colony, as well. Myles Standish from Plymouth had taken a strong dislike to Morton and what the Puritans considered Thomas’ pagan ways. Standish kept a vigilant eye out for any reason to come down on Merrymount.”
Kulla’s face softened.
“Do you remember that last April we spent together? I knew things were bad for you in Salem, and I worked up my courage to ask Morton if I could bring you back to our settlement and marry you. I thought I had the answer to all our problems.” He squeezed her closer. “I didn’t want to tell you and get your hopes up if he said no, but in the end I waited too long. We ran out of time.”
“What do you mean?” Bee-Dee couldn’t imagine what had happened. She remembered all the uncertainty at home that April, along with her unfailing expectation that Kulla would make everything better.
“A huge party occurred on the night of May Day in our village. The residents erected a Maypole with pagan antlers attached. Natives joined our gathering―which the Puritans frowned on―and drink flowed like water.”
His face grew hard. “No one was in any state to fight after the amount of alcohol imbibed, and little did we know that we were betrayed.” He grimaced. “One of our brothers had reported back to Standish. The Plymouth militia came that night to raid and shut us down. They met with no resistance. We, along with the residence, were all as docile as children. The humans because of their drunkenness, and the gods due to Hell’s decree. Standish clapped Thomas in chains and we could only watch as he dragged him away to stand trial.”
It seemed like he couldn’t go on, so Bee-Dee cleared her throat and asked.
“What happened then? What happened to all of you?” Her voice shook. “You were still under indenture to Morton, and no more than chattel at that stage.” An idea came to her. “Were you taken to Plymouth to serve out the rest of your time?” It made sense. Obedience hadn’t looked in Plymouth for him, and if Kulla had tended a new master, he certainly hadn’t had the freedom he’d enjoyed under Morton.
“I can only wish.” Kulla shook his head. “Things were far worse than that.” His intonation became flat. “The agreement forged in the Underworld had been broken with our inability to keep Thomas from harm. We didn’t know it then, but May first was our last embodied day on earth.”
She twisted her mouth in consternation. What did that mean? Obedience tensed for his explanation.
“Unbeknownst to us, it had been written that if we failed in our task to protect Morton, we were to be rendered incorporeal; to roam the earth as nothing more than mist for what we then believed would be the rest of eternity.”
“But…but,” Obedience clenched a hand in the front of his hospital gown. “You’re here. Physical. And so are your brothers.” She shook her head.
“Not all of my brothers,” he gently chided. Then Bee-Dee remembered. Some in the household never displayed substance. She’d puzzled that these gods chose to remain invisible, while others spent most of their time embodied. She’d thought it an odd choice, but never imagined it might be involuntary.
“Wait. What makes you solid?” she asked, skipping ahead. She’d hear about their subsequent invisible years and the inception of the Blue Hills compound later. Right now she needed to know the answer to that one question. It seemed important.
“You.” Kulla spoke that one word, and Bee-Dee gasped. Somehow she’d known the truth, but hidden it from herself.
“Which means I’m responsible for…” She pointed to his regenerating legs, horrified at the damage she’d caused.
“Hush. You didn’t know.” Kulla soothed with a calm voice.
“I would if I hadn’t been so stubborn about keeping you from telling your story.” Guilt clutched at her chest.
“A tale which I will continue, if you stop blaming yourself.” Kulla gently offered her total forgiveness, and she grabbed it desperately with the self-caveat that she stop being so headstrong and judgmental. She quieted while he gave her the whole of it.
“Just over a year ago, Marduk walked on the beach and regained his body for the first time since that fated May Day.” A ghost of a smile played across his lips. “It turns out that our good queen had been thinking ahead and rooting for us. She had written into the fine-work on the agreement, that if we found our Chosen, we would become corporeal again.” He chuckled. “Of course it took us a while to figure that out, but once we did, all our time since has been spent searching for the ones who will change our lives.”
“And all that time, you knew it would be me. And at first you couldn’t find me, then when you did, I rejected you.” Bee-Dee felt awful now that she had maintained her magical, personal barrier against him. She’d only lowered it during those times when she searched for him. All other times, he wouldn’t have been able to get within ten miles of her. All because of her pride. A mistake that had cost them both.
Kulla kept on. “In truth I thought you had to be dead,” he told her. “I criss-crossed the earth so many times over, hoping to feel just a twinge of your energy, but you kept me shielded. Not that I blame you.”
She turned in his arms, allowing all of her regret to show. “I wanted to be the one who found you. To demand answers before I allowed you back into my life. I believed that if you came across me at a vulnerable moment, I wouldn’t be able to resist any of your lies or entreaties. So I kept up my magic walls.
“And now if all of you don’t locate your Chosen by September, you’ll be sent back to the Underworld forever.” The tears clogged her throat again. “We’ve finally found each other only to have six months to spend together. How cruel can the fates be?”
Kulla moved her out from under his arm, and surrounded her dear, stricken face with both his big warm hands. He rained small kisses across her eyelids and down her nose. “I’m not letting you go that easily this time,” he assured her. “Don’t count my brothers out before our time is up. We will prevail, Obedience. I promise.”
Determination moved through her body like liquid heat. “I’m going to do everything in my power to help,” she returned, forcefully. “And if we fail, I won’t let you go. I’ll follow you to Hell this time, and fight demons by your side.” Obedience spoke with dead seriousness, but her thoughts weighed her down. What if she kept all the gods from mating their Chosen?
Chapter Nine
Intrigue in the compound. Kulla couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so amused. Of course, it could have something to do with the fact that his heart, which had carried such a
heavy burden for so many years, had suddenly grown lighter. Or it might be his status as a captive audience. After yesterday’s excitement with the demons outside, Dani had given him permission to finish his recuperation in his own room, and all through the morning, residents were stopping by to confide in him and get his opinion. Regardless, he hadn’t felt this good in a long time.
Some of the advice he’d been asked to give hadn’t been easy, but he felt downright sage-like talking to Lenore’s mother, the witch Angie.
“I’d feel like a rat deserting a floundering ship.” She chewed nervously on one nail, her lovely red head bent to the task. Did all female witches have red hair, Kulla wondered? The elder Addie-May had gone gray…but no, Lenore had platinum blonde locks. He glanced at his company again. Angie’s was strawberry blonde, which might suggest that non-pure bloods had mixed results. Bee-Dee’s glowed bright copper. He studied the head in front of him. They all had their share of flame…in more ways than one. Drawing his gaze away from Angie’s head, Kulla employed his best wise-man voice.
“You need to go in order to find out if there’s anything between the two of you.” He prodded. “If there’s a chance you love him, don’t let anything keep you away.” On this subject, Kulla spoke from the heart. “I’m sure your daughter and mother will understand. I can’t believe you haven’t confided in them.” Kulla chided gently.
“I’ve always tried to take a backseat to mother’s headstrong ways, and Lenore? Well, you can see that she’s quite the handful. They’re going to be shocked.” Angie blew a piece of hair out of her eyes. “To be fair, it’s been a long time since I’ve wanted anything for myself.” Her lovely little nose crinkled. Another thing she had in common with his witch. Did everything have to remind him of Obedience?
“Does Tiny reciprocate your feelings?” Kulla didn’t want to prod the witch out of the house unless a safe haven for her was assured. Even though she didn’t have goddess blood and couldn’t be tracked by their enemies, better to be certain she’d be well looked after.
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