Harsh Gods
Page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by Michelle Belanger
Title Page
Copyright
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM MICHELLE BELANGER AND TITAN BOOKS
Conspiracy of Angels
The Resurrection Game (August 2017)
HARSH GODS
Print edition ISBN: 9781783299546
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299553
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: August 2016
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Michelle Belanger.
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Did you enjoy this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at readerfeedback@titanemail.com or write to us at Reader Feedback at the above address.
To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our Web site:
www.titanbooks.com
In memory of Michael Wiggins (1965–2016).
You asked to see an early draft of this story, but I thought you had more time. We all did. Journey well, old friend.
1
Three more steps for the perfect kill shot. I checked the ammo on the crossbow to be sure I had the right poison applied to the tip. This had to be quick and neat. I was tired of getting clobbered by the city guard.
The chair squeaked as I hunched closer to the computer screen. A muscle cramped in my neck. I ignored it, shifting my wings. Two hours I’d been at this, and I still didn’t have the damned achievement. Fighting the tension in my fingers, I advanced my character by slow inches.
Flawless victory would be worth the pain.
Across from my character’s position, the target paced a restless circuit on a high balcony at the back of his manor house. The corrupt nobleman paused every six seconds to lean on the railing and peer at a hideously ornate fountain that squatted in the middle of his garden. Fat cherubs erupted like boils from the fountain’s central spire, water cascading around their stunted wings. If I angled the shot just right, I’d be able to pass the crossbow bolt through a small space between a curtain of water and one ugly cherub’s head.
That had to be the way to get this achievement—I couldn’t see any other clear shots that allowed my character to remain hidden, and I’d skulked through every corner of this damned map.
I brought up the targeting reticle, holding down the mouse button till the icon went from gray to red. The nobleman took out a snuff box, dosing both nostrils, then rested a hand on the railing, just like he had every other time I’d fucked up this stage of the assignment. I had approximately three seconds before he started moving again. I took a breath, feeling a tremor in my pointer finger.
Someone pounded on the door to my apartment.
My mouse hand jerked. The crossbow bolt smashed into the head of the cherub, alerting the manor guards. Uniformed non-player characters dashed in from every corner, quickly swarming me. My computer screen filled with splashes of vivid red.
“Fuck me running,” I snarled. Cursing the nobleman, the game designers, and whoever thought it was a good idea to come knocking at nearly eleven o’clock at night, I slammed my fist on the desk.
I almost had that shot!
The four terracotta demon jars sitting at the base of the computer tower jumped with the impact. Anakesiel’s jar toppled right over, rolling dangerously close to the edge. The game forgotten, I snatched up the jar before it crashed to the floor. Breaking it shouldn’t release the spirit, but I didn’t want to chance it.
The person at the door knocked again, louder this time. Briefly, I debated relocating to the apartment’s single bedroom, grabbing a paperback, and ignoring them till they got bored and went away. There weren’t a whole lot of people I wanted to see who might come to my door at this hour of night, not even on a Friday.
The few who leapt to mind didn’t actually qualify as people.
Whoever it was, they were stubborn. The knocking settled into a nerve-shattering pattern of dogged persistence.
“Hang on!” I said loudly. My voice came out all gravel and phlegm. The only talking I’d been doing over the past couple of weeks involved swearing at the computer and ringing up restaurants for deliveries.
Closing out of the computer game, I scooped up the rest of the demon jars from where they rested on my notes. Yanking open the bottom drawer of the desk, I stowed the four spirit-prisons inside. I slammed the drawer, feeling the neat regiment of wards lock into place.
My computer desk was hardly the most secure location for the stolen artifacts, but I’d warded it as best I could until I could come up with a more permanent solution. The demon jars—and the spirits trapped inside them—posed an awkward responsibility. I didn’t like the idea of babysitting them indefinitely, but I couldn’t trust them to anyone else.
Setting them free wasn’t really an option, not with what I knew. Despite the names of the vessels, the spirits imprisoned in them weren’t demons, but angels. That didn’t mean they were nice guys though. They were family—and my family was fucking terrifying.
Scowling, I scrubbed at my face like I could wipe away all my concerns with that simple gesture. As if. A week’s worth of stubble rasped beneath my palm. Normally clean-shaven, somewhere between the insomnia and the nightmares that galloped madly along after it, I’d stopped giving a damn. One sick day had turned into seven, and now I was burning vacation days fast.
The apartment looked like hell, too.
My unwanted visitor continued to knock.
“This had better be good,” I grumbled. Murmuring the phrase that obscured all the important items on the desk, I pushed out of the computer chair and headed for the door.
There were wards there, too, and they glimmered faintly in the wan light of the living room lamp. They kept the do
or from being a point of open access over on the Shadowside. Without them, anything wandering that non-physical echo of the flesh-and-blood world could just saunter into my apartment however it pleased.
I’d used the trick often enough myself.
The floor creaked as I approached the door—at six foot three, I wasn’t exactly light on my feet. The knocking slowed, and I paused with my hand above the doorknob. I had a lot of enemies in the world—certainly more enemies than friends. The door to my apartment had the standard fish-eye peephole, but I’d learned not to trust what could be seen.
So I closed my eyes.
Unclenching the imaginary fist I kept tightly wrapped, I let my psychic senses spill forth. Like a belling hound barely broken to the leash, my awareness surged into the hall, spreading to the apartment across the way, then rushing eagerly down the stairwell to the floor beneath. Dizzying and wild, the perceptions threatened to expand beyond my ability to contain them. I’d lost my finesse, and struggled to rein it all in.
“Focus,” I breathed, and I did.
Disjointed impressions drifted in from beyond the door, most of them the dregs left in the wake of mortal lives—worn scraps of emotions, echoes of intent, the sense of ceaseless motion from one space to the next. The instant I recognized anything from a neighbor, I cast that information aside. What remained was a tenuous perception—nothing so clear as a picture. One person.
Slight in build. Human. Nervous. Rushed.
If not for the door, I could have reached out and touched her.
Female. That was another piece.
Young—not a child, though. A young adult. There was more information fluttering at the edges, and I probably could have picked it out, had I pushed, but I had more than enough.
With an effort that felt like sucking a hurricane into a knapsack, I reined my senses back in, shoving them to their regimented corner of my mind. My eyes snapped open, and my fingers still hovered above the handle to the door. A scant few seconds had ticked away.
Satisfied that my visitor offered no threat, I flipped the deadbolt and pulled open the door. The young woman outside blinked up at me with unusually dark eyes, peering through glasses with hipster-black frames. Her puffy winter coat was snow-bunny pink with faux fur trim that hoped some day to meet a real rabbit. Long, glossy black hair spilled out from under a knitted cap with a little pompom on the top. Despite the heavy coat and ridiculous hat, her arms were wrapped tightly across her midsection, as if she was struggling not to shiver.
When she saw me looming in the door, her cinnamon-colored skin went several shades lighter. The hair and whiskers probably made me look like a crazy man, but I hadn’t expected that kind of reaction.
I must have looked worse than I felt.
“You’re Professor Zachary Westland?” she asked. She didn’t sound too sure about it. Leaning a shoulder against the doorframe, I slouched a little in the hope of putting her at ease. I was nearly a foot taller than her, and that height bothered some people.
An anxious little voice in the back of my head whispered that she’d noticed something else about me—my hidden nature. I told the little voice to shut the hell up.
“Just Zack,” I answered. “I haven’t taught at Case for nearly two years.”
She chewed her lower lip and fussed with her car keys. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty. Not old enough to be one of my graduate students, not young enough to be selling Girl Scout cookies—which was a shame. Some thin mints would have seriously improved my mood.
“What can I do for you?” I asked to break the silence. My voice still carried a jagged edge. I cleared my throat, trying to remember how to talk like a normal person. My words could channel a lot of power—literal magic—and this girl didn’t deserve to get hammered just because I’d been cooped up too long.
“Father Frank sent me,” she replied, flashing a nervous smile.
She said it like I should know the name. I didn’t. Then again, it might have been one of the things that had been taken from me. I didn’t want to explain my mutilated memory, and I really didn’t want to hear any well-intentioned platitudes from a complete stranger. Those would just drive me to slam the door in her face. So I played it off.
“What did Father Frank want, exactly?” I asked.
She brightened a little, saying, “He needs your help with a case. He told me to tell you that he understands you don’t want to be bothered right now, but it’s really important. And she lives close—I can take you there tonight.” She held up the car keys like they were some kind of talisman.
I wracked my broken brain for any recollection about Father Frank, and whatever sort of “case” he typically managed—particularly at eleven o’clock on a Friday night. The best I dredged up was a brief flash of an older man, nearly as tall as me, and built like a welterweight boxer. It might have been a memory—or I might have pulled it out of the girl’s head. That usually took physical contact, but catching a stray thought or two wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility.
Then a larger concern began to gnaw at me. It was probably just residual paranoia from the nightmares, but it couldn’t be ignored.
“If it’s that important,” I asked suspiciously, “why didn’t he come here to speak with me himself?”
Something in my look made her back up a step. Anxiety that verged upon fear wafted from her like a sour perfume. I was pretty sure she was responding to my physical appearance—lazy bachelor with a side of Unabomber—but out of reflex I pulled my wings tight against my back. She probably couldn’t see them.
My wings weren’t part of the physical world, and mortals gifted with enough sight to peer through to the Shadowside were few and far between. Nevertheless, I felt oddly naked in front of her, despite my jeans and rumpled T-shirt. Belatedly, I tried focusing on a cowl to tuck my inhuman nature more or less out of sight. I was terrible at the things, though, and half the time I forgot to keep one up.
No wonder so many of my nightmares revolved around having my nature exposed in front of a mob of angry mortals. It was my personal version of naked-in-front-of-the-class.
So I pictured the veil of energy settling over me, wings and all, and tried to radiate just a normal guy. It didn’t seem to help, though, and my late-night visitor still couldn’t meet my eyes.
“When you wouldn’t respond to his texts or his calls, he was going to head up here,” she mumbled in a subdued voice. “But then Halley started seizing again. So he sent me.”
That broke my concentration, and the cowl shivered to pieces. Pompom Hat Girl didn’t seem to notice. Whatever she might be, she wasn’t psychic.
“Hold on,” I said. “Seizing? What kind of case are we talking about?”
A look of confusion flickered across her dark features.
“An exorcism, of course.”
I stammered as thoughts whirled too fast for my mouth to keep up. A priest wanted my help with an exorcism. Seriously? That was a smothering level of irony, considering my many winged relations. Was this a regular thing or was the universe having extra fun with me?
How much did my inhuman nature tie into the request? He couldn’t possibly know about me—could he?
I mentally tallied half a dozen scenarios, few of which I found desirable. Eventually, I managed to reply.
“Why don’t you come inside and tell me the whole story?” I offered, hoping it didn’t make me look like a creeper. “And start from the beginning.”
“No.” She shook her head, and the little pompom at the top of her hat bobbled. “I’m supposed to take you directly to the Davis house, or just head back there myself.”
I started to object. She squared her stance and dragged her eyes to meet mine with a hard-won look of defiance. Her anxiety still quavered beneath the surface—something about me had really rattled her—but she held it back with a steely sense of purpose. Her throat hitched with a convulsive swallow, but when she spoke again, a little of that steel could be heard in her voice.
Fuck.
Had I taken some vow in the distant past, to just drop everything when someone asked for help? If so, I’d forgotten about it—along with nearly everything else—but clearly, forgetting didn’t let me wiggle around the consequences.
I sighed. “Let me grab my leather.”
2
I snagged my biker jacket from where it had fallen behind the couch, then went in search of my cellphone. I’d thrown that somewhere and had done my best to forget about it. Funny thing, me and memory. There was so much I fought to remember, and just as much I struggled to forget.
While I dug around for the phone, the girl lingered awkwardly in the doorway. She hugged herself in her puffy pink coat, though I couldn’t imagine how she was still cold. The super kept the apartment building somewhere next to boiling in the winter—most of the residents were retirees, except for me.
Her obsidian-chip eyes flickered behind her glasses, taking in the whole of my apartment—the packed bookshelves that lined the living room, the framed pages of illuminated manuscripts hung on the walls, the milk-carton-sized TARDIS perched next to the computer tower not far from an old-school Han Solo posed with his blaster.
Han always shoots first.
The books and art and toys were lovingly maintained, everything orderly and in its place—but then there were the stacks of empty take-out cartons scattered across the coffee table. A pile of dirty laundry had made it as far as the easy chair and had sprawled, forgotten, ever since. Half-empty coffee mugs stood like stranded soldiers atop the counters, the side tables, and the mantle over the gas fireplace.
“I know it’s a mess,” I muttered.
“I didn’t say that,” she responded guiltily, looking away from the sink full of dirty dishes.
“Word of advice?” I offered as I finally spied the smartphone half under a pile of notes on the Book of Enoch. I checked the charge—it was in the red—and pocketed it anyway. Striding over to my visitor, I said, “Don’t play poker.”