by ST Branton
So, I grabbed the genius inventor with one hand, my sword in the other, and started running. The first few floors were okay, but the lower we got, the more wholesale panic we encountered; not to mention that some congestion was caused by two newly-arriving harpies in cocktail dresses coming up to meet us instead of the other way around. These ladies had their wings out, blocking the path with armatures of feather and bone. I felt Monk balk at the sight of them.
“This is not happening,” he mumbled, somewhat maniacally. “Not happening. Not happening.”
“Stay with me, Monk. We have to get through this together!” It was the nice way of saying he was too important to leave his ass behind.
The stairwells were too narrow and crowded to use the blade, so I resorted to bludgeoning via hilt, and also good, old-fashioned shoving. This was when I discovered that the harpies were built like brick shithouses under all that blinding, ethereal beauty. As I tried to barrel my way past them, they squared up between the railing and the wall, their wings bristling. Claws tore at my hair and clothes.
Monk screamed. I could tell he was really losing it. “No!” he shouted.” Get...get away from me! Get the hell away from me!”
One of the harpies, in direct defiance of his request, thrust her arm over my shoulder in an attempt to grab him. It was a greedy mistake. I seized her forearm, used it to wrench her off balance. The bulk of her wings, formerly a formidable hindrance, now worked against her. I dropped down as she fell forward, driving my shoulder up into her chest. She struck the railing hard, flailing against me. I took a couple serious wallops to the head and shoulders. A hank of my hair came out in her fist.
“Oh, screw you!” I shouted. “That fucking hurts!” Her friend rushed forward, and I braced myself against the steps, shoving with all my might. The harpy’s center of gravity tipped. There was something infinitely satisfying about the wretched screening sound she made as she plummeted down to the first floor.
I wished I could say for his sake that Silas Monk was dashing and helpful, but he wasn’t. He mostly used me as a human shield, which I could hardly blame him for, since I was the one with the sword. This strategy became slightly less effective when the hotel security started flooding up the steps. I almost lost him a couple times just because he couldn’t follow up after I’d whipped a harpy or strong-armed a guard out of his way.
At least he wasn’t crying. Or getting sick anymore.
The first-floor stairwell had two possible exits: one that led into the lobby and one that emptied into the underground parking garage. I grabbed Monk’s elbow. “You got a car in there?”
He nodded, apparently devoid of words as this point.
“Is it fast?” I asked. He nodded again. “Good enough! Let’s go.”
And that was how Silas Monk and I ended up leading a caravan of uniformed security personnel, monster harpies thinly disguised as gorgeous women, and the occasional, very confused luxury hotel guest on a conga line of madness through the Onyx subterranean lot.
If nothing else, I was learning to find fun in the strangest places. Plus, Monk’s car turned out to be a banana-yellow Aston Martin convertible, which would undoubtedly kill us both instantly if we got into an accident.
So, I made him put the top down.
I was determined to die in style.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Monk, who’d been catatonic for at least ten minutes by the time we found his car, came back to himself enough to insist that he had to be the driver. He yanked the top down in a heartbeat, and as his car careened wildly over the brushed-stone paths of the garage, I leaned out the passenger’s side and clubbed anyone who didn’t get out of the way in time.
I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun as hell.
Well, it was fun until Monk nearly decapitated us going underneath the gate to leave the garage. I could have sworn the lady in the ticket window fainted as I ducked to keep the stick from coming down on my neck. He whipped out to the right, and we burned down the street, ahead of a wave of sirens and flashing lights.
I glanced over my shoulder. “Hope you’re a good driver, Monk!”
“Are you kidding me?” A grim smile broke across his features. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“A nerd,” I said.
“Not just any nerd. A nerd with money out the ass!” Spotting a police cruiser coming at us from a side street, Silas punched the gas. The car leapt forward, clearing the police bumper by a scant few inches. He whooped as we left it in the dust.
“You should’ve told me all it would take to cheer you up is to let you almost destroy us both in a flashy car,” I said as I gripped the armrest.
“Hey, I am not almost destroying us. I know exactly what I’m—”
His bragging was cut short by a huge thud and then a frantic shout. At first, I thought we’d hit a large black dog, and my stomach sank with the guilt. Then I saw the glint of eyes behind a thick curtain of hair. The harpy’s claws dug into the yellow hood, and it snarled at Monk and me. This one looked particularly feral.
Monk began to spin the wheel furiously. “What are you doing?” I yelled, over the squealing tires.
“Trying to shake her off! She’s wrecking the paint!”
I glared. My shoulder slammed into the top of his car door. “Ow, dammit! If you don’t cut that ego trip and drive, I’m gonna knock you out and take the wheel. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He took the next right way too hard, and even though I almost fell out of the car, our little hitchhiker actually did fall off, so it was worth it.
Monk zipped down some side streets for a while, winding among houses with trees in the front and playgrounds in the back. The sound of sirens faded in the distance, but as soon as we shot out onto another main road, the cops resumed the chase. But as it turned out, Silas Monk was more than happy to drive his snazzy yellow Aston Martin like a total asshole.
I cringed every time he squeezed narrowly between two cars or took an exit ramp at ninety miles an hour. We made more U-turns than I could count.
If I didn’t think about the fact that there was a man out there probably hunting us like animals so he could settle a score with Silas Monk—whatever that score happened to be—riding in a fast car with a billionaire almost made me forget about my troubles in the thirty seconds between cop sightings.
“Nice car!” I shouted over the squealing tires.
“Yeah, but we should have taken the Hummer,” he answered. “Then we could have just run them over.”
Hard to argue with that logic. “I’ll remind you next time.”
After forty minutes of speeding back and forth all over the city, tracing and retracing our tracks, Monk just narrowly avoided a miniature jam getting onto the freeway that cut off our pursuers. Monk cheered as we sailed ahead into the middle lane.
“Hold on,” I said. “You know this isn’t over, right? Now you need to tell me what’s going on with you so I know how deep this goes.”
“What do you mean, how deep? I made a drill that will save Earth huge energy costs in the long run. Things didn’t get weird until I met Eve.” He went quiet for a moment. “I can’t believe that guy hit her with a flaming fucking hammer.”
“Did you not see her transform into a horrible creature of myth right before that?” I sort of couldn’t believe this guy.
He was under her spell, Marcus said.
That made a lot more sense.
“She… transformed?” Monk looked horrified and a little sick all at once. “I don’t remember… wait… I do remember them turning into monsters. Holy shit!” His hand tightened and released on the wheel, knuckles whitening. “Shit. Those weren’t just nightmares. Shit, shit, shit.” He started to lose the color in his lips. “I don’t feel so good, man. It’s like, I thought those were just dreams, or episodes, or something. I thought I wasn’t really there. Oh, man.”
“Do you need to pull over and puke on your shoes?” I had my left arm ready to grab the steering wh
eel in case he passed out. “Cause if not, this sounds like a story I really want to hear. For more reasons than one.”
“Yeah, all right.” He tried his best to take some deep breaths, calm the persistent shaking in his hands. “Look, I’m not that hungry, but maybe...maybe it would be better if we stopped somewhere for a second. Just real quick.” He kept his gaze fixed on the road, as if he thought looking anywhere else would jeopardize his grip on reality. “I need a minute to process all this bullshit.”
“Fine by me. I’m starving.” I was also worried about having him behind the wheel. He’d gotten kind of a wild, unpredictable look in his eye. “Take the next exit. I don’t care what’s there.”
Monk pulled into an old-fashioned burger joint on the side of the road, gave me some money, and we ate in the car while he told me how he’d gotten mixed up in this mess.
“Honestly, I can’t remember exactly where I met Eve. It was sort of like she just appeared one day, and we were suddenly inseparable. A lot of the details are fuzzy in hindsight, and it makes me wonder what was going on during those times.”
Mind control, said Marcus. Quite effective, as far as I can fathom. The harpy’s secret weapon.
I decided to keep that fact to myself. No use freaking Monk out even further when we still had to drive back to San Francisco. He was away from Eve for now, but she wasn’t dead yet. We would have to go back to finish her off.
“What’s going to happen to her?” he asked, intruding almost uncannily on my thoughts. “I know what you think you saw—what I think I saw—but I’m not...it’s just not fucking possible. It’s not possible!”
I forced myself to have patience with this guy, maybe even a little sympathy. In the span of a few short hours, he’d had his charmed-ass life thrown into total upheaval. “Which part?” I asked slowly. “Because I hate to tell you this, but it’s all possible, and it’s all happening. To you. Right now.”
“She’s not a harpy.” Monk sounded angry now, and I guessed I couldn’t blame him. From his perspective, I was little more than a vehicle of slander against his hot lady friend. “Harpies don’t exist! This is ludicrous!”
“I’ll give you that last part,” I said. “About this being ludicrous. But that’s it.”
“Shit,” he muttered. He was still holding onto the wheel with one hand. His face was red. I had to calm him down before he just dropped dead from stress and denial.
“I’m not saying this isn’t tough, or that it doesn’t suck balls. Trust me, I know. But like I said, it’s happening, and we don’t have that much time. The best thing we can do now is move forward. Which means I need you to help me try to figure things out. At least this way you’re being proactive, right?”
At first, I got nothing. Then his shoulders started to slump, the tension leaking out of his body. He leaned back in the driver’s seat and shut his eyes. “Yeah.” He spoke almost gently. “Yeah. You’re right.” The inventor’s chest rose and fell. “Go ahead, then.”
“When did you start working with her?” I asked, feeling like an interrogator with a jumpy witness. I couldn’t lose him until I figured out what the hell the gods thought they were doing, screwing around with a new weapon. And I knew we might need him in the event that we’d have to use the drill in self-defense. Who better to explain how to use it than its inventor?
“It wasn’t until after the production prototype was finalized. Eve came on to me strong, started talking about not getting younger and how that really made her passionate about the planet’s future. All the right stuff, basically. The stuff I want to hear. She told me she had extremely generous investors who couldn’t put a price on innovation. I should have known it was too good to be true. But I let it slide until the first investors’ meeting. That was when I met her.”
Ah yes, her.
I couldn’t decide if it was good or bad that Marcus already knew who Silas was talking about.
“Eve blindfolded me for the ride to the meeting place, which was not completely usual for business meetings, but I mean, I’ve been called quirky a million times over the course of my career. If they wanted to keep their location under wraps, who was I to argue? And I was extremely gung ho about this project myself, so honestly, I would have let them get away with almost anything.” He frowned. “I think Eve must have known that.
“So, they brought me into this room, sat me down in this chair, and took the blindfold off. And at first, there was just an empty chair there that’s obviously nicer than the one they gave me. I was thinking I’d gotten conned, and I was trying to formulate a plan to get out of there. But they finally bring in the person they say is ‘the investor.’” He paused to experience the memory to its fullest extent. “She’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. To be honest, it’s difficult to picture her clearly. But she was an amazingly gorgeous woman, and she made me...certain promises—as long as I told her about the drill.”
“You didn’t think that was weird?” I asked. He really was the perfect target for a pack of power hungry harpies: dreamy, idealistic, wickedly smart, and yet still able to get shit done.
“You know what I thought was weird?” Monk asked. “This woman was like, nine feet tall. Even now, I don’t really know if that’s right or if it’s something I made up. I just recall her towering over everyone else. Maybe that one thing was enough to make everything else seem normal by comparison.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. And I don’t say that a lot.”
Her name is Lysiani. She is a goddess and the master of seduction. Tell the scientist that.
I hesitated. Silas Monk was in a fragile state at the moment, maybe one of the most fragile states of his life. Could his extremely secular world withstand the blow of learning that gods were real? What if his head exploded? What if he flipped out and crashed the car?
If he is to help protect the weapon he has built, he must know about the Forgotten and the true threat they pose. And you had no qualms about revealing this truth to him earlier.
I cleared my throat. “Monk? I need to tell you something that’s gonna make a lot of sense and none at all, at the same time.” He didn’t say anything, but his eyes caught mine, which I took as clearance to proceed. “She was nine feet tall because she’s actually a goddess named Lysiani.”
“A goddess,” he said, his blank eyes fixed on the floorboards at his feet. “What would a goddess want with a geothermal mining tool?”
For all intents and purposes, I had temporarily ceased to exist. His brain required every inch of space it could find to try and make space for the possibility of this new truth. Convincing a “normal” person of the Forgotten was hard enough, a scientist would take some work. Thankfully, he’d seen some really strange shit lately.
I gave him a nudge in the right direction. “Nothing, dude. That’s why I asked about weaponization.”
Okay, so it was less a nudge and more of an impatient shove, but I knew what was at stake better than he did, and while I was totally sympathetic to his maelstrom of feelings, we didn’t really have time to discuss them in a burger joint parking lot on the side of the highway.
“It has a laser in it,” Monk said numbly. “Everything I said back at the hotel is still true. The laser isn’t a weapon, but it could be.” He closed his eyes. “I think she told me what she wanted to do with it. I just… didn’t want to hear.”
“Was it something about killing gods?” I asked. Then I said, “How about we swap seats? You can drool over this all you want as a passenger. I got shit to do.”
All the fuss had gone out of him. We switched places, and he settled back as I started the engine. “So, is that what it takes to kill a god-level being?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I designed that drill from the ground up. I know exactly what it’s capable of. And you’re telling me it would be enough to kill a god?” A wry smile emerged on his lips. “I should be proud of that, shouldn’t I?”
“Depends on who has control o
f the drill.”
“Uh oh,” Monk said.
“What? You never thought of that?”
He pointed through the window of the burger joint at the anachronistically large TV mounted on the wall inside. “Isn’t that you?”
The freeze frame of my face took up most of the screen. It had been ripped from hotel security footage, so the image wasn’t as clear as it could have been. I squinted. Monk only knew it was me because he was involved. The security camera was far too grainy to give anyone a positive ID on me.
“Yeah it is,” I said. “And we gotta get the hell out of here. I’ll give you that. Not your biggest problem, though.”
“Which would be what? That some nine-foot-tall goddess wants to use the tech I’ve practically gifted her to take over the world?”
“Not even.” I turned out of the lot and put the gas pedal to the floor. “If they’ve got me on tape, then they have you, too.”
***
I only drove the Aston Martin for ten minutes before ditching it on some quiet side street in favor of a less conspicuous car. “Just buy another one after this all blows over,” I told Monk. “Or like… buy it back from the police. You’re rich; can’t you do that?”
“No.” He sighed. “Well, maybe.”
“See? Problem solved.”
The nondescript grey hatchback I chose coughed to life, and I took it the long way back to the freeway just in case we’d been followed somehow. Even away from the city center, the alleyways were slanted and narrow. I was navigating purely on instinct, hoping none of my turns would result in a dead end.
That luck held out for longer than I expected, but not long enough to keep us out of trouble.
“There’s no outlet,” Monk said. “Oh shit, it’s the guy from the hotel!”
He stood dead center in the alley, still looking like a dystopian sci-fi extra in trench coat and glasses, still wearing a big-ass hammer across his back. When he saw us, he didn’t flee from the path of the oncoming vehicle. He got down into a fighting stance.