Cassie laughed, unable to not be affected by Melanie’s infectious joy.
Melanie guided Cassie onto the field and showed their tickets to the attendant.
The hulk of a dude raised his eyebrows and whistled. “Down to the front,” he said, pointing toward the stage. “Your seats are in the front row, near the center.”
“Eeeeeee!” Melanie squealed, hopping up and down on both feet. And then she was back to the dragging thing.
Once they were finally in their seats, Cassie started to get into the excitement. It was all around her; the place practically thrummed with it. And when Tarsi Tiff came out on stage, the crowd exploded, Cassie included.
“I’d like to welcome you all to the inaugural Survivors Concert!” Tarsi said as she took center stage, her voice booming all around Cassie.
The roar of the cheering crowd grew louder.
Tarsi held her mic up, and the sound of the crowd reverberated through the gazillions of speakers. It was so loud that Cassie had to cover her ears.
“Alright!” Tarsi yelled into the mic. “Alright, let’s bring it down a notch . . . or ten!”
The crowd quieted, and after a few seconds, music kicked on, and Tarsi launched into her first song of the evening: “Girl of Stone.” It was Cassie’s all-time favorite song, and she lost herself to it, singing and swaying and crying. It was literally the best moment of her life. Literally.
Cassie’s older brother, Garth, must’ve showed up at some point during the song, because he was sitting in the seat beside Cassie’s when she finally came out of the song’s spell.
Cassie threw her arms around her brother. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou!”
Garth’s laugh was lost to the roar of the crowd, but she could feel him shake with it.
“Let’s hear it for all of you survivors!” Tarsi said, and once again, the crowd went wild. After a few seconds, she made a quiet-down gesture with her hand, and the noise cut in half. “We’ve got an amazing show planned for tonight,” she said, “but first, there’s a very special person I’d like you all to meet.” The enormous screen behind Tarsi showed a close-up of her face, but Cassie didn’t need to look at the screen to see Tarsi’s sassy wink—one that Cassie was pretty sure was aimed at her.
Cassie totally died a little bit in that moment.
“She’s my aunt, sort of . . . or my cousin?” Tarsi laughed, and the crowd laughed with her. “Relationships are confusing in my family. Anyway, how about a big round of applause for our special guest!”
Of course, the crowd obeyed, clapping wildly, Cassie included.
The woman who walked out of the shadows and onto the stage was wearing jeans, combat boots, and a black leather jacket over a sweatshirt, the hood pulled up and her head bowed to hide her face.
The hush that fell over the crowd was almost instantaneous. There was no denying the resemblance of this woman’s outfit to that of the Goddess, and everyone there knew it.
“Now this is super important,” Tarsi said. “I need you all to stay in your seats. Do not rush the stage. This is for the safety of all of you. You’ve all survived so much, it would be tragic for anyone to get injured here tonight. I hate to play bad cop, but if you leave your seat, you’ll be thrown out. Got it?”
There were yeses shouted and people nodding and murmurs of assent all around.
Cassie looked at Garth, her mouth hanging open. Was it really her?
“You’re about to see history in the making, munchkin,” he said, wrapping his arm around Cassie’s shoulder and hugging her to his side. “Enjoy the ride.”
Eyes opened wide, Cassie returned her attention to the stage. She wouldn’t blink. She couldn’t. She was too afraid of missing any single thing.
“I’d say I’d like you all to meet my Aunt Kat,” Tarsi said, “but I think most of you have already met her.”
The woman standing beside Tarsi raised her head and pushed her hood back, and the roar of the gasps that filled the stadium was almost as loud as the cheering had been. And then, once again, there was silence.
It was her—Kat. Her face filled the big screen behind her, and nobody who’d been visited by the Goddess during the miracle would be able to deny that this was her, standing on the stage before them. That she was real.
Cassie didn’t think the crowd could be any more stunned. In a stadium full of thousands upon thousands of people, it was pin-drop silent.
Until Kat—the Goddess—started to glow.
People all around Cassie sat down. Many started crying, or reaching their hands out, like they might be able to touch Kat from their seats. Melanie took a step forward but stopped when Cassie grabbed her arm.
“Stay at your seat,” Cassie whispered. “Remember?”
Melanie blinked, seeming to wake from a daze, then nodded.
Cassie had to remind herself that not everyone knew what she knew. That almost nobody knew what she knew.
“My name is Katarina Dubois,” Kat said, walking closer to the edge of the stage, “and I am not a goddess.” She stopped and scanned the crowd. “But I’m not human, either. I’m a member of an ancient species of immortals who have been living among you for thousands and thousands of years.
“We are called Nejerets.”
* * *
The end
Thanks for reading! You’ve reached the end of Underground (Kat Dubois Chronicles, #3). Keep reading for more Kat adventures in Soul Eater (Kat Dubois Chronicles, #4).
Soul Eater
Book Four
Chapter One
I stand in a locker-lined hallway, teenagers streaming past me on both sides. Shoe soles squeak on the polished floor. Someone slams a locker shut off to my left.
“Go long!” a guy shouts from farther up the hall just moments before he chucks a football over the heads of the students.
I stumble to the side as another guy bulldozes through the crowd, pushing kids out of the way in an attempt to chase down the ball.
In a wave, students duck. Girls squeal and giggle. Boys shout.
“Blake!” a woman says, voice raised but not yelling. Teacher voice, all the way. “My room. Now.”
I can just see the woman between the breaks in the crowd. She’s young for a teacher, maybe in her mid- to late-twenties, and pretty, in a wholesome, all-American way. She’s standing in the mouth of an off-shooting hallway, fists on her hips and expression stern. In her boots, jeans, and oversized sweater, I can almost mistake her for a student, but her confident, self-assurance gives her age away. She’s comfortable with herself in a way that no high school kid ever is.
The boy who threw the ball flashes the teacher a cheeky grin. He’s big for a high school kid—broad-shouldered and tall. I figure him for a senior, or at least an upperclassman. “Did you see that dime, Ms. C.?”
The teacher narrows her eyes. “Oh, I saw it, Blake.” She turns to the side and points down that other hallway. “Now, get your butt into my classroom. You can eat your lunch in there today.”
Blake’s shoulders slump. “But Ms. C. . . . I’m supposed to meet the guys at—” Blake proves that he’s smarter than he looks and stops talking when the teacher—Ms. C.—cocks her head to the side, eyebrows raised.
“Maybe you should’ve thought of the consequences before pulling that stunt,” she says.
“This is so unfair,” the boy grumbles. He weaves around the other students, feet dragging as he makes his way toward Ms. C.
“You know we’re trying to keep things calmer around here,” she says to him as he approaches. The two fall into step beside one another, walking away down the other hallway and moving out of sight. “The other students look up to you,” I hear her say. “At least try to set a good example.”
“Yeah . . . OK.”
“Thanks, Blake.”
They’re both quiet for a moment, and I wonder if they’ve moved behind a closed door and out of range of even my sensitive hearing. But finally, Blake speaks, his voice barely above a whisper. “Do you
think it’s really ghosts?”
“I don’t know,” the teacher says. “I never really considered myself a believer—of anything—but who knows. If Nejerets—immortals—are real, who’s to say ghosts aren’t, too?”
“Everyone’s scared,” Blake says.
“I know.” Ms. C. is quiet for a moment, then asks, “Are you?” For long seconds, neither of them speaks. The boy must’ve nodded, because the teacher eventually says, “Me too.”
“What are you doing?” a girl asks. She’s standing directly in front of me, which makes me think she must be talking to me. There’s something familiar about her, but I can’t quite place her. “We’re going to be tardy,” she says, linking her arm with mine. “Come on.” She pulls me into motion, dragging me to class.
A bell rings over the loudspeakers.
“Hurry!”
* * *
I woke with a groan and rolled onto my back. The gazillion-thread-count sheets, damp with sweat caused by the nightmarish dream, were tangled around my legs. High school. Ugh.
I brushed back the strands of hair stuck to my face, then let my hand flop down onto the pillow and stared up at the ceiling. This was the fourth night in a row that I’d dreamt of walking those locker-lined halls. The dream was never the same, but the school itself was.
Strangely, I wasn’t even dreaming of my old high school in Seattle, but that fact hadn’t stopped my mind from recreating this dream school over and over again. I’d only ever had one recurring dream before: of the day my mom was murdered. So why was I having one now, and why the hell was it centered around some random, made-up high school?
I’d left high school behind two decades ago, and I hadn’t exactly had a wonderful time there. The only kids I’d really fit in with were the outcasts—the freaks and geeks. That was the price of having a mom who owned a magic shop. Apparently, according to my subconscious, I had some unresolved issues revolving around adolescence and my incomplete high school career. Me—unresolved issues. Shocker, I know.
With another groan, I sat up, arching my neck from side to side. The base of my skull ached with the promise of yet another headache. That would make three days straight, and this one threatened to be the worst yet. I glanced to the left, finding the bottle of whiskey sitting beside my sword, Mercy, atop the dresser, and wondered if the booze was to blame. The bottle was at least three quarters full. I’d cracked it open the previous night, but I’d been nursing it for hours—hardly enough of that friendly poison to leave a Nejeret with anything close to a hangover.
I rubbed my eyes. Maybe it was the dream. High school had been stressful enough when I was a kid; it seemed unbelievably unfair that it was now giving me headaches as an adult.
Or, maybe it had nothing to do with that. Maybe the headache was a residual aftereffect from dying. I’d been trying really hard not to think about the fifteen minutes I’d spent as a corpse. Or about the conversation I’d had with Isfet, the imprisoned consciousness of the universe, in Duat during that time. And I’d definitely been avoiding thinking about the promise I’d made her—mainly because thinking about devising a way to break her out of Aaru was about as useful as banging my head against a wall. Actually, banging my head against a wall would actually accomplish something—a nice, solid dent in the drywall—which was more than I could say about any attempts I’d made at planning Isfet’s prison break.
Yeah, I had a feeling that particular conundrum was directly responsible for the headache. How could it not be?
Rubbing the back of my neck in an attempt to ease the tension tightening those muscles, I arched my back, then scooted to the edge of the bed. I opened my mouth, popping my jaw, but the ache in the base of my skull persisted, spreading higher to throb behind my eyeballs.
I sighed heavily and stood, dragging my feet to the bathroom. A long, hot shower—that should do the trick. Besides, it wasn’t like I had anything better to do, not when setting foot outside of the Heru compound was likely to result in me getting mobbed by human admirers. Or assassinated by anti-Nejeret fanatics. Or abducted by the Senate.
So, basically, I was stuck here. Just me, my headache, my memories of the hereafter, and my longing for the life of inconsequence I’d left behind. Swell.
Chapter Two
The shower, in fact, did nothing to help the headache. The heat may even have made it worse. Brilliant idea, self. High-five.
Thanks to the pounding in my skull, I wasn’t feeling up to eating. The thought of forking breakfast food into my mouth actually made my stomach turn, so instead of heading down to the kitchen, where Lex no doubt had some egg-based feast prepared, I grabbed my sword off the dresser, opened the bedroom door, and headed straight down the grand staircase to the front door, shrugging into Mercy’s leather holster as I jogged down the final few stairs. Exercise and fresh air would make me feel better. It always did.
“Kat?” Lex called from the kitchen. “Is that you?” I could hear her daughter, Reni, humming. Her toddler voice sounded utterly content; she always hummed when she was eating something tasty. I had no doubt that Bobby was in there, too. Lex had taken the little human-turned-Nejeret under her wing almost as soon as he came to stay with us on Bainbridge Island.
I considered leaving without responding to my big half-sister, but I was really trying not to be a dick these days. I paused with one hand on the doorknob. “I’m heading out to the beach,” I told her.
“No need to shout,” Lex said, appearing in the doorway to the kitchen, a brown paper lunch sack in hand. She scanned me, her eyes assessing the telltale sweats, sneakers, and sword. “Practicing again?” Her eyes lingered on Mercy’s handle, sticking up over my right shoulder. When I nodded, she stepped into the hallway and held out the paper bag. “Take this.”
I held in the words “I’m not hungry” and met her halfway down the hallway to accept the bag of food. It was heavier than I’d expected and I raised my eyebrows once it was in my hand.
“Bagel and cream cheese and a protein shake,” Lex said, resting one hand on her hip. “You’ll need your strength if you’re going to spend another morning out there swinging that thing around.” There was no judgment in her eyes, just sympathy. She understood what it was like to be a prisoner in this place, trapped by circumstance.
Lex’s husband, Heru, was the head of our people, leading not only the Nejeret fight against the Senate, the anti-human branch of Nejeretkind, but also heading up our diplomatic relations with the human world—both roles that left him with plenty of enemies. And thanks to the otherworldly soul bond that Lex and Heru shared, if one of them died, the other would fall soon after. Because of that, Lex was a prime target, right up there with Heru.
And right up there with me—“the Goddess.” Despite my assurances to the human world that I was no such thing during the big reveal at the concert a little over a week ago, the nickname had stuck, and the humans were running with it. A week and a half after appearing to the billions dying from the Cascade Virus, I’d made an encore appearance and told all of humanity that immortals lived among them. And now I was the most famous person alive.
“You’re too good to me,” I told Lex, tucking the brown-bagged breakfast under my arm.
At least, thanks to Lex, I ate well while my new notoriety kept me trapped within our heavily guarded walls. Over the past month, since Heru had declared war on the Senate, she’d taken to cooking for all of the Nejerets residing in the main house. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner had all become gourmet feasts around this place. Usually I’d have been all over that—Lex was an excellent cook—but not this morning. Not with this headache.
Lex shrugged. “What’s family for? Besides, I’ve got to do something around here. Otherwise I’ll go nuts.” Lex’s brow knitted, and she studied my face more closely. She reached out to touch my arm with gentle fingers. “Something’s wrong.” Her carmine eyes searched mine. “What is it, Kat?”
Reni squealed in the kitchen, and Lex glanced over her shoulder before returning h
er attention to me. “I know you’ve been through a lot. You can talk to me . . . about anything.”
“I’m fine,” I said, patting her hand, then taking a step backward.
Lex and Dom were always trying to get me to talk about the big “it”—my death. Their kindhearted persistence kept the incident at the forefront of my mind, stirring up the panic that was never far from the surface. I wished they would stop.
“Didn’t sleep well is all,” I said, turning on my heel and striding back to the front door. “Kiss the kid for me, will you?” I tossed over my shoulder, and then I was outside and taking deep inhales of the fresh, morning air. It was drizzling, but that was the norm for the Puget Sound in March, and the dewy drops soothed my frayed nerves, just a little.
As I made my way along the wooded trail to the beach, I rubbed the back of my neck, digging my fingers in nice and deep and feeling the ache abate, but it only provided temporary relief. The moment I removed my fingers, the dull throbbing returned. The fresh air and exercise might not ease the pain, but at least they would provide a distraction. Better than sitting inside, reminiscing about my old life, being generally miserable and feeling sorry for myself. Both things, it turned out, I excelled at.
The old, familiar trail spat me out onto the rocky beach. I dropped the paper lunch bag and placed one hand on a piece of driftwood for leverage as I leapt over it. I drew Mercy with the melodic ringing of At on At and launched straight into my practice sequence as soon as I landed. My frustrations fell away as I grunted and thrust, twisted and rolled. I sliced through the salty sea air with Mercy’s blade, the unbreakable crystalline length collecting tiny droplets of rain every time I stilled, then flinging them off when I shifted into the next position.
My body took over, and I moved through the forms without thought, just as I’d done thousands of times. This felt normal, the only aspect of my old life that remained the same. My breathing quickened, supplying the blood racing through my veins with the oxygen it needed. Perspiration mingled with rain on my skin and clothing until my sweats were nearly soaked through. The ache in my head throbbed in time with the beating of my heart, pounding a primal rhythm against the inside of my skull.
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