Goddesses of War (The Guardians of Tara Book 4)

by S. M. Schmitz

  London pointed to the picture and explained, “But it’s the same statue, the same church, the same square. Twice in one paper. Centuries ago, none of these buildings or monuments were here. Something drove Perun to this area to bury it, thinking it would be forever hidden since the Irish and their allies had nothing to do with this continent.”

  “Why do you think it’s buried in Jackson Square then?” Badb asked. “Just because the picture is also on the front page?”

  London shrugged. “Call it a hunch.”

  “More digging?” Thor groaned. “On a hunch?”

  “We could split up,” Athena suggested. “What other landmarks are in that paper? We’ll divide them.”

  “No,” Badb said. “We need to stick together in case Huitzilopochtli comes after us. Danu won’t lead us astray.”

  “Fine,” Cameron sighed. “Give me my shovel. Again.”

  Badb handed him a shovel as the hotel room transformed into the grassy area between the St. Louis Cathedral and the monument to Jackson. London grunted at the ground and muttered, “Well, this is a much larger square than I thought. Any chance one of you knows an earth god who can just… turn the soil for us?”

  “We’re looking for buried treasure, not planting corn,” Cameron snapped then thought about what he’d said and decided he liked sounding like a pirate.

  Selena heard that thought and arched an eyebrow at him, giving him a look that came a little too close to, “Why am I dating you?”

  Thor stuck his shovel in the ground and removed a sizeable chunk of dirt and grass, so Cameron began to dig as well. All around him, the Guardians labored in the hopes London’s intuition had been a sign from Fate while Selena slowly walked through the square, hoping she’d sense something, just as she and Cameron had known they were around the enchanted objects that would turn them into gods.

  With time no longer passing, Cameron had no way of measuring how long they dug. Even the digital numbers on his watch had stopped when he’d frozen the Earth. But the longer they dug, the higher the mounds of dirt piled, and they formed deeper and wider holes, but still, this last Treasure of the Tuatha Dé eluded them.

  Selena stopped her frantic pacing beside Cameron’s pile of dirt and stared into the empty hole. “At what point do we admit it’s not here and move on?”

  Cameron glanced at Badb who shook her head, either as a way of saying, “Never,” or, “No idea.”

  From the opposite side of the square, Athena called out, “Selena?”

  Seven shovels dropped to the ground as the other gods rushed to Athena’s side, too, and a dispassionate Loki looked on from where he sat on the walkway near Jackson’s statue.

  Cameron thought about punching him as he passed by—for no particular reason other than being Loki—but didn’t want to miss whatever had excited Athena.

  As the Guardians gathered around her, she flipped her shovel over and tapped the rounded side against a dirty, gray mound still buried at the bottom of the hole she’d just dug. Selena carefully dropped to her knees and reached toward the rounded piece of stone, gently brushing the dirt off with her fingertips. Cameron was about to ask Badb if she recognized it when a low humming rose from the pit and all of the gods except Selena gasped and backed away.

  “Huh,” Thor murmured. “I thought it would be bigger.”

  “That’s what she said,” Cameron replied automatically then grinned at his friend who flipped him off.

  The humming changed pitch, whirring upwards toward Selena like leaves caught in a whirlwind. It rippled and danced, rising and falling, hypnotic in its simplicity.

  Selena smiled up at Cameron, but their joy at finally finding the last Treasure was broken when a voice that was both familiar and strange disrupted their celebration before it could even begin. “Do you think,” he said, “the Lia Fáil will do you any good before your child is born?”

  Cameron’s Spear appeared in his hand before he even turned to face the voice that he suspected he knew but couldn’t place. From those murky memories of a life lived centuries before, the face of Étain’s father, a god he’d never particularly liked since he’d only agreed to their marriage because Aonghus had offered him so much land in Murias, tiptoed to the front of his mind, joining his newer memories so that he knew this face and voice and hated both appropriately.

  Beside Ailill stood another face from his past, the face of the druid Bresal Etarlám whose daughter Midir had once promised to marry in exchange for the druid’s help in ending a war that was devastating Falias. And beside Bresal Etarlám, Koschei, a god of chaos whose soul had either been destroyed along with the vessel or had returned to its body, smiled wickedly at the Guardians.

  But whomever the third Irish traitor was remained mysteriously absent from New Orleans.

  “Traitors,” Badb hissed. “You should be glad we have other problems to handle and your deaths will have to be quick.”

  “Our deaths?” Ailill cooed. “I think you’ve overlooked an important fact, Morrigan.”

  Badb apparently had no intention of asking him what point he thought she’d overlooked. She raised her sword, but Ailill disappeared, and Cameron’s stomach dropped as he realized why he’d been foolish enough to confront such a powerful group of gods with only Koschei and Bresal Etarlám at his side.

  By the time Cameron spun around to stop him, it was too late.

  Ailill crouched in the pit, his fingers wrapping around the edges of the Stone of Fal as he pried it loose from its tomb. It hummed and sang the same hypnotic tune, but this time, Cameron thought it sounded mournful rather than joyous. “Finally,” Ailill breathed.

  He tipped his face to the sky and the world around them began to move again, the paralyzed rain falling to the ground as Ailill forced time to march onward as it should.

  “Badb,” Cameron yelled, “take her to Murias!”

  Selena shook her head in protest, but Badb grabbed her hand and both goddesses disappeared. None of the Guardians had sensed this group’s approach, which meant Koschei was still somehow interfering with their power. Before Ailill had even lifted himself from the pit, Cameron threw his Spear at Koschei, the peculiar god who’d defied death by his willingness to become a monster.

  Koschei’s body was still falling to the ground when Cameron’s Spear returned to his hand and he lifted his arm to throw it toward his former father-in-law. But Ailill, who stood at the edge of the hole Athena had dug, simply smiled and waved a finger at him. Cameron jerked his arm forward, but nothing happened.

  His hand was empty.

  “What the hell…?” he mumbled.

  “This is his world now,” Athena said quietly. “It’s like fighting the Norse in Asgard.”

  “Only he won’t honor the rules of our warfare,” Thor added.

  Ailill set the Stone of Fal on the ground behind him and shrugged impassively at the Norse god of thunder, as if honoring those rules were a silly idea conjured by weak gods. He undoubtedly believed that, considering he’d freed Odin in the desperate hope the Norse would kill and subjugate the Tuatha Dé, his own family.

  Cameron glanced over his shoulder where Bresal Etarlám waited silently for some cue from the new master of the Lia Fáil, the only Guardian of Tara that mattered now. “And what world will be yours when the Earth is destroyed?”

  “The Earth won’t be destroyed,” Ailill interjected. “Why would I allow the world to be destroyed after it’s finally mine?”

  “You think you can stop Ragnarok?” Athena scoffed.

  Ailill glanced at Loki and smiled again, which was really more disturbing than when he wasn’t smiling. “And do you think you’re the only gods who can bind him in a cave? Only I’ll do it properly so he can’t possibly get out again.”

  Loki lifted his chin in the air and sniffed. “I’ve outwitted far better gods than you.”

  Ailill rolled his eyes and gestured toward Thor. “You’re congratulating yourself over outwitting him?”

  “Hey,” Cameron w
arned, “I can poke fun at his intellect but not you.”

  “Um… thanks?” Thor said.

  Cameron nodded conspiratorially. “Always got your back, Jötunn.”

  Thor sighed at him and shook his head.

  Ailill looked past him toward Bresal Etarlám and said, “Go to Murias and take care of my… daughter.”

  Cameron’s rage exploded, spreading fire through Jackson Square and into the sky, causing the misty rain to evaporate with a quiet sizzle. Bresal Etarlám screamed as Cameron forced him to remain in this world. Ailill shouted something over the roar of the fire and the flames slowly extinguished, leaving only charred, black grass in its wake. The druid collapsed to the ground, still alive but badly burned.

  But Cameron’s fire hadn’t been able to touch Ailill.

  “You think,” Ailill hissed, “you can save her? That Huitzilopochtli can’t send any number of new gods to the Otherworld?”

  “I think I’ll kill him too,” Cameron answered. “She died twice because of you, and I’ll bring every world down to keep you from hurting her again.”

  Ailill clicked his tongue at him and shot him that odd, uncomfortable smile. “Midir, you couldn’t even protect her from a druidess. What makes you think you can protect her from me?”

  Cameron’s fingers curled into fists, but he wasn’t actually sure how to kill a god who’d gained mastery over Earth. He couldn’t summon his Spear, and his fire hadn’t touched him. His friends’ weapons had disappeared as well, and they crossed their arms angrily but everyone seemed to share the same sense of helplessness.

  But Cameron’s anger quickly morphed into bewilderment because more gods joined them… but not just any gods. They’d been joined by themselves.

  “Um…” Cameron stuttered as he stared back at himself.

  “Um…” the new Cameron stuttered back.

  “Okay, are we dead?” Athena asked. “Is this Hell?”

  Cameron had no idea if it was the original Athena or the new Athena.

  “If so, why does Hell look like New Orleans?” the other Athena said.

  Thor and Tyr exchanged a knowing look, but Cameron wasn’t sure what that look meant or if that Thor was his friend Thor or the new Thor. He also wasn’t sure if it mattered, although he didn’t feel like he’d been duplicated.

  “So,” Ares said slowly, “is this how Huitzilopochtli plans to kill us? We’re going to kill ourselves? This is kinda messed up, even for him.”

  Cameron nodded and Cameron #2 nodded along with him. “Stop that,” he said.

  “Stop what?” Cameron #2 asked innocently.

  “Copying me.”

  “Perhaps you’re copying me.”

  “I can’t copy you because I’m me.”

  “As am I,” Cameron #2 said defensively, lifting his chin in the air in a way that seemed so familiar even though he was pretty sure he never did that.

  And then he understood this wasn’t Huitzilopochtli’s deception at all.

  Cameron swallowed and glanced at Ailill, whose nostrils flared as he eyed the doubled Guardians. Bresal Etarlám moaned behind them, but Ailill ignored him. The druid no longer served any purpose for him, so he obviously didn’t care about his fate.

  “Well,” one of the Tyrs said, “I suppose we should get on with it then? You were going to kill us somehow, weren’t you?”

  “If I ever get thrown in Tartarus again and some god shows up offering me freedom, remind me to say I’m good with eternal darkness,” Prometheus told his other self, who just nodded in agreement.

  “All I have to do is snap my fingers and all of you will disappear,” Ailill threatened.

  “Then do it,” Cameron #2 goaded.

  Cameron #1 wanted to tell Cameron #2 to shut up, but Ailill raised his hand and snapped his fingers. Cameron #1 blinked at him and waited. The Guardians shuffled their feet impatiently as they waited too.

  “I think we’re still here,” Cameron offered helpfully. “Snap harder.”

  “I suspect Fate is really pissed off,” Cameron #2 added. “And that if this asshole wants to kill us, he’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

  A spear, but not just any spear, his Spear, appeared in Ailill’s hand and he threw it at Cameron #2, who broke apart like fog as the Spear passed through him. Ailill already had another weapon in his hand, this time Mjölnir, and both Thors growled at seeing their weapon in someone else’s hand. As his famous weapon sailed toward them, one Thor dropped to the ground and the other broke apart as the hammer passed through it.

  But with Ailill distracted now, trying to gauge which gods were real and which were only illusions, Cameron was able to retrieve his Spear on its course back to the god who’d stolen it. He plucked it from the air and threw it at Étain’s father, the god who’d betrayed the Tuatha Dé and had momentarily become a Guardian of Earth, who had almost certainly intended to rule it as a tyrant.

  As his Spear sank deep into Ailill’s chest, he stumbled backward and tripped over the Stone of Fal, which Cameron could have sworn sighed in relief. But none of the other gods seemed to notice. Their attention remained on Ailill, so perhaps he’d only imagined it. Thor retrieved his beloved hammer from the ground behind him and ended Bresal Etarlám’s moaning while Cameron walked around the pit and yanked his Spear from Ailill’s chest then kicked the body to ensure he was good and properly dead.

  By the time he turned around to make sure all of his friends were all right, the duplicate gods had disappeared and only Loki stood among them, his chin lifted high in the air as he glared at Ailill’s dead body. The Norse trickster god sniffed and said, “Outwit me, will you?”

  And for once, Cameron found himself smiling at the slippery little god. “You almost got my personality right.”

  Badb returned with Selena, who also kicked Ailill’s body then spit on it. “What do you want me to do with him?” he asked her.

  Selena’s eyes clouded for a moment then cleared and she picked up Hanna’s Treasure, cradling it in her arms like the baby she’d soon be holding, only this baby happened to be terribly heavy and nearly four feet long. “Burn it. We have one more god to kill.”

  Cameron ignited the body and the Guardians left New Orleans, already suspecting there was only one place they’d be able to find the Aztec god who’d been hiding from them for months. Cameron knew he would be there, because all roads led back to him, and deep in the heart of the Atchafalaya Basin lay the ruins of a camp where he’d first brought a scared and exhausted demigoddess, and where their journey toward the Unbreakable Sword and their destinies had first begun to unwind.

  They had come full circle because this had been their destiny too. Fate had chosen them, and as the familiar charred remnants of the camp he’d once shared with his friends for fishing weekends stared back at him, he finally grasped what had been eluding him for months, ever since he’d taken the Spear and become a god.

  All of his power, his abilities and possibilities spread out in his mind like a blueprint, and for the first time, he understood how to use it all… which meant he could finally summon the Aztec god who wanted his heart.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The blackened remnants of his camp still hadn’t been removed, but Cameron assumed everyone had been a little busy dealing with deadly outbreaks and the end of the world and everything. Badb kicked at what may have been part of a refrigerator and shivered. At least it wasn’t raining here as it had been in New Orleans, but the air was still damp and cold, the kind of cold that seemed to go straight through clothes and skin and burrow deep into bones.

  Selena zipped up her coat and kept her eyes on the line of trees where she and Cameron had once escaped from Ukko and the New Pantheon. “Where do you think our story begins?” she asked. “In New Orleans by the nightclub? Here in your camp? Or out there, running through the forest and marsh and stumbling into Quetzalcoatl’s swamp?”

  Cameron’s gaze swept over the same line of trees, and he shook his head. “I think it starts
way before any of that, before either of us were born, and maybe before Midir and Étain were even born.”

  “But that’s not our story, is it?” Selena pressed. “As powerful as she is, Fate can’t force us to make the right choices. She had to hope we’d follow the paths she needed us to take.”

  “I think,” Badb interjected, “that’s why Midir and Étain’s souls were put into the bodies you now have. Danu already knew she had the perfect spirits. She only needed the right ancestries to form the perfect bodies.”

  “Are you sure you can summon Huitzilopochtli?” Athena asked. “Not one of his pseudo-gods, but Huitzilopochtli himself?”

  Cameron nodded and squinted at a different tree line where Enlil had once materialized then attacked him with a giant, multi-headed snake. He offered a quick prayer to Danu that he was out of multi-headed snakes to attack him with before answering Athena. “It’ll be him. I can feel him now. It’s like I can see him in my mind—where he is, what he’s doing.”

  “I don’t think I want to know what he’s doing,” Badb hurriedly said.

  Cameron snorted and told her anyway. “Not currently eating anyone’s heart, if that’s what you’re worried about. But I told you he’d be here, and he is. His carbon copy Aztec gods are with him, and so are Veles and Tarhunt.”

  “And the other gods whose souls are still hidden?” Thor asked. “Where are they?”

  “Hold on,” Cameron said, “let me check my list.” He pulled the folded paper from his back pocket and opened it, making a deliberate show of reading the entire list carefully before refolding it and putting it back in his pocket. His friends grunted and scowled at him and even Loki muttered, “And you call me an obnoxious asshole.”

  “You are,” Cameron responded. “I mean, I get that you wanted to prove Ailill wrong back in New Orleans, but it did help us kill him, so I don’t want to smite you quite as much anymore, but yeah. Doesn’t mean you’re not an obnoxious asshole.”

  “Cameron,” Selena scolded. “Who else is still out there?”

  “Chernobog,” he said. “And Enlil.”