Hera, Queen of Gods (Goddess Unbound)

by Thomas, T. D.

  “The different worlds can’t overlap too much,” Hermes continued, “otherwise, there’d be total chaos. But the two worlds can and do intersect.”

  “And monsters can come to our world,” Justin realized.

  “Don’t worry,” Demeter said. “That’s where we come in. We keep monsters in the Heavens where they belong.”

  “Well, we try,” Hermes amended. “But sometimes they get through.”

  “Even if they do, monsters can’t expose their existence to humanity,” Zeus rumbled. “Otherwise, intervention.”

  “What do you mean?” Justin asked.

  “They’re erased from existence,” I said. “Along with any witnesses. All memories of both the monsters and witnesses vanish. As if they’d never existed.”

  Beth and Justin exchanged a wide-eyed look.

  “You two should be fine,” Hermes assured them. “One or two mortals aren’t a problem. Well, as far as we know.”

  “But I wouldn’t put it on Facebook,” I said.

  “Not that anyone would believe you,” Demeter pointed out. “Mortals don’t want to believe in monsters. Monsters don’t want mortals to know they exist. So mortals ignore or destroy or explain away any evidence left by intervention, which isn’t much to start with; and monsters do their best not to leave anything behind that can’t be explained away.”

  “Okay. But bigger question. You’re gods. Why do you even care about what happens to us mortals anyway?” Justin asked.

  Demeter laughed. “Because we made you. And it’s our nature. And you need us. You have such great potential. You could practically become . . .”

  “More,” I finished, giving Demeter a warning look. “We’re getting off-track. We have worlds to save. Including yours.”

  “Fair enough. But you basically just told us that you can’t narrow the list of suspects, because there are all these monsters out there who hate your guts,” Justin pointed out. He paused. “Kinda funny, if you think about it. You’ve got all this power, which makes you plenty of enemies. But you don’t have enough power to figure out who your enemies actually are.”

  “We’ve got the power,” I shot back. “What we need is knowledge.”

  “What if we need both?” Hermes interjected suddenly, his eyes widening. “What if we need the power to get the knowledge?”

  “I don’t follow,” Zeus said.

  “Hera said it herself. We’re gods. We’ve got loads of power,” Hermes explained. “So what we need is someone who can use that power to get us what we need to know.”

  “Like who?” I demanded.

  “Like witches,” Hermes replied, eyes bright. “They know how to do things in the mortal world that we don’t.”

  I rolled my eyes. “The witch I found barely survived summoning Hecate for me.”

  “That’s because she didn’t have enough power,” Hermes responded. “It drained her. But she had the knowledge. She knew what to do.”

  “So, if we supplied her with our power . . .” Zeus began.

  “She might be able to perform a spell powerful enough to find our enemy,” Hermes finished.

  “It’s a long shot,” I replied, mulling the idea over.

  “A long shot’s better than nothing,” Zeus pointed out.

  Silence.

  We looked at each other for a long time. Then I sighed. “Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “What do you want?” Stella’s voice was barely audible through the closed door.

  “Just checking up on you and Sarah,” Justin lied. He faked sympathy well.

  “I am not letting you in here,” Stella snapped. “Go away before I call the police.”

  Justin looked sidelong at me where I stood out of sight of the door. I’d already guessed that Stella would never let me in. But Justin wasn’t getting any further ahead.

  Zeus could’ve smashed his way in. Artemis could’ve flown in through an open window. Hermes could’ve rang the bell and slipped in unseen. But none of that would get her or Sarah to help us. Even my powers might not be able to force them to do something as complicated as magick on autopilot.

  Time for a new plan.

  I pushed Justin out of the way.

  “You!” Stella hissed.

  She was still watching, which meant she hadn’t actually called the police yet. But something was wrong. She sounded angry. Too angry.

  “Sarah’s not better, is she?” I guessed.

  Silence.

  There was my answer.

  “You have to let me in,” I insisted. “Something’s wrong.”

  “No shit!” Stella snapped.

  “I can help her,” I replied.

  “You’ve done enough!” she shot back hotly.

  I wasn’t offended by her anger. But I was offended by the waste of time. “If something is wrong, I’m the only chance you have of figuring it out. So, stop whining and let me in so I can help you.”

  Justin stared at me like I’d lost my mind. He thought I’d pushed too hard. But what he didn’t know was that I was an expert at anger. I’d been angry, pretty much continuously, for thousands of years.

  The door swung open.

  Stella looked terrible. Her black makeup had streaked down her face, and her eyes were bloodshot and swollen. It was as bad as I’d guessed. Maybe worse.

  I wasted no time. I brushed past Stella and headed to the bedroom.

  Sarah was where we’d left her. Skin ashen. Not white. Grey. She was so still, she might’ve been dead. But she was breathing, barely; her breaths so slow and shallow, they barely moved her chest at all.

  I pulled back her eyelids with one hand. My eyes spun, sparkling like a thousand galaxies, and somewhere, infinitely far away, her mind whirled in response. I was as gentle as I could be as my mind flowed into hers.

  Suddenly, hooks sunk into my mind. First one, then another, then another, then another. Dozens of barbs burrowed into my mind like bloodthirsty mites. I had no time to defend myself.

  Then the hooks began to pull.

  I realized what was happening, and I struggled with all my might against it. But slowly, inexorably, they were dragging me inside Sarah’s mind.

  It was a trap. Someone had known I’d come. Someone had known I’d try to help. That someone had caught me off-guard. Now they were going to trap me inside a hollow shell. Just like poor Sarah.

  That should’ve made me afraid. Instead, it really pissed me off.

  My body spasmed as the ferocious battle waged inside my mind: me desperately struggling to be free, and the hooks slowly tearing my mind out of my body.

  I let the anger take over. It flowed through me like lava. I burned.

  But it wasn’t enough. For once, my anger had failed me. All my thrashing was useless. There were too many hooks and they were too strong. They had struck before I was ready and now it was too late. The harder I fought, the deeper the hooks sank and the faster they pulled. It was like they were feeding off me, using my anger against me.

  This could not be how it ended for me.

  So I did the impossible. I reigned in my temper. At first, it felt every bit as useless as fighting the pull of the hooks. But slowly, ever so slowly, my temper cooled. My mind cleared. I couldn’t overpower this trap. That’s what it expected, what it wanted, how it’d been ingeniously designed. But I could escape it.

  With effort, I calmed myself even further. I relaxed and then slowly, ever so slowly, I cleared my thoughts. I silenced the screaming rage and the overwhelming panic. I didn’t struggle. I didn’t retreat. I just emptied my mind and let go.

  One by one, the hooks fell off. They had nothing to hold on to anymore.

  When the last hook dislodged, I almost cried with relief.

  “Hera?” Demeter ventured, wiping away tears.

  I took a deep breath, and once I was sure I was under control, I answered. “I’m fine.”

  She swept me into a fierce embrace.

&nb
sp; “What happened?” Zeus demanded.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, though it was hard to talk with Demeter squeezing the life out of me. “Whoever we’re up against set some kind of psychic trap.”

  “They knew we’d come here,” Zeus realized.

  “Hecate said we’re being watched,” I said, goosebumps rising on my arms. Which meant, somewhere, somehow, someone was watching us all right now.

  “Magick,” Hermes guessed.

  Everyone stared silently. No one wanted to admit what we were all thinking. We were outmatched. We couldn’t beat an enemy that always knew our next move.

  But we had to try. We had to fight. Existence was counting on us. And I’d never, ever run from doing my duty.

  “Whoever it is, they’re keeping Sarah like this,” I said. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t look at what had almost happened to me. Not yet.

  “Why?” Stella sobbed.

  “They’ve been watching,” I answered softly. “They knew she helped us. Helped me.”

  “And they made sure she couldn’t do it ever again,” Justin finished grimly.

  “Smart. They could’ve killed her. But they kept her alive. Used her as a trap for Hera. Two birds, one stone,” Artemis pointed out. She paused. “It’s what I would’ve done.”

  “I guess,” Justin murmured.

  I looked at him. I knew that look. Justin’s mind was whirring. Now that Athena was gone, it was almost painful to see such a familiar expression.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “What if it’s simpler than that? What if whoever this is couldn’t kill Sarah, and that’s why he kept her alive? Not because it’s part of some big, bad superplan,” Justin wondered aloud.

  “He almost killed Hera,” Zeus snapped.

  “No,” Justin replied. “Hera would’ve been trapped, like Sarah, not killed. And even that didn’t work. He was counting on catching Hera off-guard. That’s his strength. He’s always one step ahead. It’s not power. He’s outsmarting us.”

  “Justin’s got a point,” Beth agreed. “I mean, if your enemy’s so powerful, why not just kill you all right now?”

  Hermes stared. “What if he--”

  “Or she,” I interrupted.

  “What if they,” Hermes said, “don’t want to destroy us at all?”

  “What do you mean?” Zeus demanded. He didn’t do well with uncertainty. Or talking. Zeus was a warrior. A fighter. He wanted to act. I watched his fingers twitching. He was literally itching to do something.

  “What if all they want, all they need, is just to slow us down?” Hermes suggested. “Keep us from finding them too soon.”

  “Before they can fully tap into the power of the Fates,” I said. “As long as we’re on the defensive, they’re winning. They just have to run out the clock.”

  “It doesn’t change anything,” Zeus fumed. “We can’t go on the offensive until we actually find them. Which is why we came here in the first place! Only that turned out to be a complete waste of time!”

  Zeus was rapidly heading toward smash mode.

  “Maybe not.” I looked at Stella.

  She cocked her head, and then her eyes widened. She shook her head fervently. “Oh, no. No way. Sarah had all the power. I never . . .”

  “You don’t need power,” I assured her. “We’ve got more power than you’ve ever dreamed of. What we need is knowledge. Gods can’t do magick. We connect to power differently. More directly. But we can’t do that in mortal form. Which means we need magick, and that means we need you.”

  Stella looked torn. She was scared, and I couldn’t really blame her. Like Justin and Beth, she was getting drawn into something far beyond her, somewhere she didn’t belong. It wasn’t right or fair. But there was no other way. And that meant I’d drag her kicking and screaming if I had to.

  “Help us,” Demeter asked gently. “Please.”

  Stella looked back at Sarah. She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ll try,” she said finally. “On two conditions.”

  Gods didn’t normally barter with mortals. One of the advantages of being a god was just taking what you wanted. But circumstances had changed. I had to change with them.

  “Which are?” I asked.

  “One: you help Sarah,” Stella said.

  “And two?” I pressed.

  “When you find this enemy, you kill them.” When she met my eyes, there was nothing scared about her anymore. I smiled. There was a witch inside her after all.

  “Swear it to me, Hera,” Stella continued, her eyes never leaving mine, “by the River Styx, and I’ll do anything you want.”

  Zeus opened his mouth to protest.

  Mortals had no right to demand anything from gods. It was against the order of things. And they especially had no right to bind gods with our most holy vow. They weren’t even supposed to know about it.

  But I cut Zeus off with a raised hand. This was my choice. Not his. The vow would bind me and me alone.

  Even a god can’t break Stygian vow. Not deliberately. What Stella didn’t know, what she couldn’t know because we guarded the knowledge more closely than anything else in the worlds, was that Stygian vows had three weaknesses.

  First, like all things, they eroded with time. With enough time, they simply faded away.

  Second, they bound someone only to the exact words said, and the more general terms, the weaker the vow. Everything in existence, even Stygian vows, flowed toward entropy, toward freedom. Vows were like dams in that great river of free will, which found every nook and cranny possible.

  Third, the stronger someone was, the more they could resist the vow and create loopholes.

  Stella knew a little about Stygian vows, but what she didn’t know, or had forgotten, was that a little knowledge could be a dangerous thing.

  “I swear by the River Styx that I will do my best to help Sarah and make whoever did this pay with their lives.”

  I could feel the invisible chains of the vow wrap around me. It took my breath away at first, exhilarating and terrifying, but soon the feeling was gone.

  Hermes smiled. “Now that that’s out of the way, what exactly can you do for us?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Stella smacked a thick, leather-bound book onto the floor. The moment she’d pried up a loose floorboard and pulled out the book, I’d felt its power. Not divine, but cosmic in its own way. I should’ve felt that much power sooner. Somehow, this mortal body was numbing my divine senses. But I couldn’t worry about that. At least not yet.

  Stella removed a key from the necklace under her shirt and unlocked the metal binding on the book. I felt a sudden chill. This book had darkness.

  To my surprise, Stella didn’t open the book. Instead, she closed her eyes. She took a small vial from one of the pockets on her elaborate dress. She unstopped it, and poured some of the oil onto her fingertips. Then she dabbed the oil in a line on her body: the top of her head, the centre of her forehead, her eyelids, lips, throat, and heart. Then she spread her hands over the book, and began to chant.

  Her voice was soft, too soft for me to hear the words, but I could feel them. I shivered as her prayer went out to the worlds, pleading and commanding at the same time.

  And I felt the worlds answer. It came all at once, power rushing back. It slammed into the book with such force that its cover flew open and its pages began to flip wildly.

  “SHOW ME!” Stella’s voice had a power I’d never heard in it before. The power of a priestess.

  The pages flipped faster and faster until I thought they’d tear themselves out of the book. Then finally, they stopped. The book lay still. Waiting.

  “I asked for a spell that could help you,” she explained quietly, reading silently to herself. “This is it . . . I guess.”

  “You guess?” Artemis asked.

  Stella shrugged, too numb from the power of her spell to be afraid of Artemis. “It’s some sort of finding spell.”

  “Perfect!” De
meter said.

  “Not exactly,” Stella replied. “The spell doesn’t find anyone you want. It finds someone specific. An Oracle.”

  “An Oracle took the Fates?” Demeter asked.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Oracle? Like a psychic who sees the future?” Beth asked.

  “No,” Stella said. “An Oracle is someone, more like something actually, that sees the world properly. They see past illusions, lies, uncertainties. They see the truth.”

  “So, we find the Oracle and ask where to find our enemy,” Zeus concluded.

  “Or where to find the Fates,” Artemis suggested.

  “That might be a bit tricky,” Stella warned.

  “How so?” Justin asked.

  “Oracles see so much more than everyone else, and so much differently.” Stella explained. “They have a tendency to give you what you need, not what you ask for.”

  “We’ll be careful,” I promised. “Can you do the spell?”

  “Yes,” Stella answered, “with your help. But even if the spell works, it doesn’t end there. Oracles are protected. They’re one of the rarest and most precious gifts in existence. They’ll have guardians.”

  “I think I can handle that,” Zeus said, flexing his hands.

  “And then there’s payment,” Stella finished. “To prove that you value the truth, Oracles expect something in return.”

  “Fine,” I said quickly. “We’ll pay whatever the Oracle asks. Now what do you need for the spell?”

  “I have most of what I need,” Stella said, reviewing the text. She hesitated. “I just need . . .”

  Her face said it all.

  “Blood,” I guessed. “Do you have a knife?”

  Artemis wordlessly slipped a blade out from somewhere up her sleeve, and handed it to me. If she weren’t on my side, Artemis would’ve made me very nervous.

  I didn’t hesitate. I pressed the blade against my wrist. “Let’s begin.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The spell to find the Oracle was much less elaborate than summoning Hecate. Stella lit incense and candles, but there was no fevered chanting. Instead, Stella took a small bowl of our blood and sketched a circle in an arcane alphabet I didn’t recognize. Then she sat inside the circle with a map and a pen. She closed her eyes, dipped her pen in the bowl of blood, and held it above the map.