Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods

by Michael R. Underwood

  We reached the fifth floor without encountering signs of blood, maiming, or other wanton destruction. Tension I hadn’t realized was there bled out of my shoulders as we walked through the halls of the fifth floor to knock on the door of 5F.

  Dorothea knocked three times, then leaned in and said something, again in a language I didn’t know. If I were to continue living in Queens, I would need to become a far quicker study at languages. However, that would have to wait in the mental room that was labeled “Wise courses of action to embark upon having already survived the week.” Perhaps I could start with Tagalog under Tessane’s tutelage.

  The door opened, revealing a woman wearing a gold-and-red sari, holding a very large sword. Far too large for a woman her size, but she moved the blade like it was a paring knife. “Good,” she said in English through a bright Indian accent. “She just beat you here. Are you ready to go?”

  “Who beat us here? Where are we going?” I asked.

  Dorothea waved us all in. “You don’t need to understand, Jake. Just try to keep up. This is Sveta. Sveta, the kids.”

  The woman nodded and led us down a narrow hall that I expected to open out into a larger room, but never did so. The entire apartment was no more than three hundred square feet. We passed one door immediately, then congregated in an instantly-crowded area beside a bed. The apartment had several posters of contemporary films, some Indian, some American. A small altar stood shoved up against a bookshelf, and a kitchen beyond.

  The place was incredibly cramped. I’d had more space to myself as a child at the compound than this woman had as an adult. Turning to look back over the room, I realized that there was another Indian woman on the bed, curled up in the covers, rendered nearly invisible under the chocolate sheets and her brown hooded sweatshirt. She held something clutched very close to her chest.

  The Heart. It glowed golden, with flecks of gray, but the light refracted in on itself, contained like a closed circuit, plasma under a microscope, or a nebula in a marble.

  “Is she hurt?” I asked, trying to catch someone’s attention. It was the only good reason I could imagine that someone on the run from a catastrophically dangerous sorceress would be curled up under the covers.

  “Yes, she needs to sleep,” the woman, Sveta, said. “That’s why this is going with you.” Sveta crossed the two steps to the bed, leaned over, and whispered something to the other woman. The covered figure unwrapped a chain from around her arm and passed the Heart to Sveta.

  In the middle of the bundle was an ochre-colored sphere, racked through with stars and brushstroke arcs of color, like an entire nebula contained in a bauble. The Heart of Queens. If we only could manage to keep this one artifact out of Esther’s hands, the city and the world might yet be spared.

  “Okay, time to go. Who’s good at climbing?” Sveta asked.

  “What?” Carter, Antoinette, and I all responded at once.

  Sveta went to a door and opened an overburdened closet. Ropes, harnesses, and other unidentifiable equipment spilled out. She sorted through the pile and tossed them at us, seemingly at random. “Can’t go back down the elevator, and she’ll have something guarding the stairs. My friend used a great deal of power getting here, and the magical trail will be very easy to follow.” Sveta threw a pile of clasps and cord at me, which I caught. However, I had no idea what to do with them. “Our best option is to go up and across to another tower before the Greene woman can find this apartment.”

  “She’s tracking the power here?” I asked.

  Dorothea worked with a harness of her own, extending here, pulling there, clasping and retying. “Yep. And unless you want to try to take your sister head-on in an enclosed space with a thousand bystanders, put the harness on.”

  I looked at the harness again. “I don’t know how this works.”

  Sveta stepped over and said, “Here, let me.” Which is how it came to be that a woman I’d known for all of one minute began taking every physical liberty with my body, wrapping cords and clasps around what seemed like every inch of me. I was thankful that it was winter, and we had coats, lest the intimacy be such that my physiological response would have more clearly shown.

  Shouting reached us from down the hall.

  “Out the window, now!” Sveta said. Dorothea was already on the balcony, working with the black-corded rope.

  Antoinette went first, scaling the rope with ease. I turned and watched the door.

  “What about her?” I pointed back inside, to the woman in the bed.

  Sveta’s words were short, clipped. “She knew the risks.” Our hostess watched the inside as well, flat of her sword laid across her left arm. She’d grabbed a woolen coat from somewhere, wrapped around the bright sari to block some of the cold. “Hurry!”

  “Carter,” Dorothea said, handing him the rope.

  “Can’t we bring her with us?” I asked.

  “Her job’s not done, Jake,” Dorothea said. “Sveta, you’re next.” The Indian woman sheathed her sword (somehow), then jumped ten feet straight up and grabbed the rope.

  Putting that aside, the seventeenth amazing thing for the day, I looked back to the door and heard the shouting grow in volume, joined by the skittering of nail on tile and the growls of an unknown beast.

  “Kid, you’re up.” Dorothea’s words brought me back inside the room. She held a rope out in my direction. “Clasp this to that, then hold on,” she said, pointing at a green metallic clip. I did as she said.

  Dorothea hauled with all of her weight, squatting to the floor, her face going red as she lifted me from the balcony. From above, I saw Antoinette pulling the rope from the roof, quickly joined by Carter. Sveta scaled the rope with alacrity, hand over hand, and I tried to match her but quickly gave up, clutching to the rope with every bit of strength I had. Heights were another thing we didn’t have much of back home. Standing on a balcony was one thing. Swinging in the chilly wind nearly two hundred feet above the ground was something very, very different.

  “Jake!” Antoinette said. I looked to her.

  “Keep your eyes on me, okay! Just hold on, and relax!”

  “How am I supposed to relax when I could plunge to my death at any moment?” I asked.

  “You won’t! Especially if you relax!” Carter added.

  From below. “Calm that shit down, kid, or I will drop you,” Dorothea said.

  I took a long breath, my eyes locked on my friends at the roof, pulling on the rope. Refusing to look down again, I was safely hauled to the top of the building. With Carter’s help, I pulled myself onto the roof.

  “All clear!” Sveta called down.

  “Start pulling, now!” Dorothea called, her voice seeming more distant, masked by the wind.

  The rope was wound through a pulley, bolted to a smokestack on the roof. I imagined that it’d been installed specifically for escapes like this.

  We assembled in two lines of two, hauling on the rope. Carter and Sveta pulled at the front, anchored by Antoinette and myself, respectively.

  Wood shattered, and Dorothea yelled, “Faster!” We pulled harder, hands moving faster. I kept my eyes locked on Sveta’s hands, timed my motions so that three hands were always pulling at any given time on our side. Moments later, Dorothea crested the lip of the roof, looking down. A shotgun report cracked through the air, firing down.

  The older woman tumbled over the lip, and rolled to her knees. Behind her, the rope slipped, one side cut. “Go! Now!”

  Sveta took off, running across the roof lengthwise. The roof was black tar, with a smattering of lawn chairs, grills, and other items left up by residents for warmer weather. Or, in the case of the overflowing bowl of cigarette stubs, for all seasons.

  Between the furniture and the waste, what I did not see was a way out. “How are we getting away?”

  “Just follow me!” Sveta said. And so I followed. Bu
t my patience was eroding. I’d not had time to catch my breath since we stepped off of the subway, if I could call a sweaty, cloying experience inside a metallic tube with hundreds of strangers and their pathogens a chance to “catch my breath.”

  Checking over my shoulder, I saw Carter keeping pace, and Antoinette lagging behind, helping Dorothea along. At the lip, there was nothing. No one.

  “You cut the rope?” I asked, hoping my voice would carry. Sveta slowed to a stop at the far end of the building.

  “Damn right I did!” Dorothea said.

  At the edge of the building, Sveta pulled off her coat, twisted the ends, and the woolen cloak became a thick bundle of rope.

  I gasped with surprise.

  “You Greenes aren’t the only ones with tricks,” she said, then finished with a positively leonine smile. She tossed the rope over the side of the building, waiting for it to unfurl. Then she held it out at arm’s length by the end, squeezed, then twisted. The rope snapped taut, hanging as if secured.

  “How?” I asked. “Did you anchor the rope with a sympathetic tie?”

  Dorothea put a hand on my elbow. “Doesn’t matter, kid. Let’s go.”

  “I’m sick and tired of being brushed off! Don’t say it doesn’t matter!” Once the anger started pouring, I found myself unwilling to stop. “I wouldn’t ask if it didn’t matter. It’s bad enough that I’m being railroaded around the city, used entirely as a weak counter to my sister’s power, my ideas disregarded and my life constantly at jeopardy. If I’m laying my life down, I think I at least deserve some answers to some simple inquiries!”

  Sveta said, “We’ve prepared for situations like this for years. The rope is anchored to an air spirit, it will hold. The rope will get you down, then you need to put distance between you and her. Play for time. Remember that the whole city is on your side.”

  Dorothea continued. “I get that this is hard on you, Jake. But first we need to get the Heart out of here, okay?”

  “Of course. I . . . There’s just so much I don’t know. I’m used to being able to understand everything, to know not only what, where, when, but why and how.”

  “Welcome to the real world, Jake. We’re lucky if we know one of the five per issue.”

  I turned and saw that Sveta and Carter had vanished, and Antoinette had the rope in one hand, standing at the ledge. My face was hot, a sharp contrast to the chill of the evening. I felt the sting of winter on my nose and at my ears, and quite rapidly felt embarrassed by my untimely outburst.

  I turned for the rope. My motion was cut short by a strained voice ripping across the open air.

  “Sheep! I’ll read the story of my victory on your entrails!” Esther. She’d made the roof.

  Dorothea had her shotgun up before I could pivot on my feet. She spoke in a low voice. “Have to buy time for Sveta. Can’t let your sister go down the rope. You go ahead. Get down as fast as you can. I’ll catch up.”

  “But—”

  “Just go already, kid. And when the time comes, remember what you’re fighting for,” Dorothea said, turning away from me and raising her shotgun. Esther was halfway across the roof already, just walking.

  I stepped onto the lip and took the rope in hand, Dorothea’s cryptic reminder echoing in my head. I tugged, and the rope held fast. I grabbed it with my other hand, reached out with one leg, and then jumped, eyes closed.

  The rope caught me. Or, more accurately, I caught myself, and the rope held.

  I looked down, seeing Sveta and Carter at the ground. Antoinette was half of the way down.

  “Faster, kid!”

  I descended, knees locked on the rope, hands moving slowly. At this rate, I would not make it halfway before Esther reached the edge of the roof. Even if Dorothea could delay Esther, there might still not be time.

  My options were bad and worse, so I chose pain over weakness.

  “This is a terrible idea,” I said to myself, cutting open a vein in my left arm, making a fist with my hand. I let the blood flow out, and focused on the hot, stinging pain.

  I released my fist, then clenched again, willing the blood to change form and create a mass of gelatin directly below me on the ground. And then, I let go of the rope.

  My colleagues on the ground moved away from the mass, getting clear of my likely impact zone.

  The world whipped past me, howling of air covering up all other sounds. For a safer landing, I spun myself as I fell, looking back up at the lip of the roof. Black bursts of energy moved against the early-evening sky, and I saw muzzle flashes from Dorothea’s shotgun.

  Just before I hit the semisolid blood, I saw Dorothea plunge over the roof, hands flailing, gun flying out ahead of her.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  The impact of landing emptied my lungs, my body collapsing in on itself like a rag doll, slicing through the gelatinous half-solid muck. I had to get free, try to do something for Dorothea as quickly as possible.

  I clawed for the way out, keeping my mouth closed to avoid swallowing any of the manifested energy. Swallowing blood tended to go poorly. Esther had tricked me into doing so when she was six and I four. A painful, not overlong stomach pumping later, and I had learned my lesson.

  Reaching the edge of the mass led directly into tumbling gracelessly onto the cold grass of the lawn. Once I was free, I dissolved the power that kept the blood-forged mass in shape, and it dissolved into the ground like a sun-warmed pond, staining the winter-burned grass. I pushed up onto all fours, wiped the blood from my face, and said, “Dorothea? Where is she?”

  A strong grip lifted me to my feet. Carter. His eyes were wide, as if staring at something far away.

  “She’s gone,” he said.

  “What about your healing?” I asked.

  Antoinette stepped up and pointed at the ground beyond, closer to the building. “No, Jake. She’s actually gone,” I followed the line indicated by her gesture to an empty patch of grass.

  “Where’s the body?”

  Sveta walked over and said, “She fell into the earth, like it wasn’t even there. But we have to go, now, before Esther comes up with her own way down.”

  Looking back up to the roof, I saw Esther staring down, not moving, seemingly with no intention of chasing us. Or she was preparing a working of her own, and wanted the focus. Either way, our best option was to be very far away.

  “Lead on,” I said, and we started running once more.

  We finally stopped in a Chinese traditional medicine studio tucked away in the basement floor of a side street, with apartments above on all three floors of the brownstone building.

  The owners were friends of Sveta’s. Our hosts were an aging Chinese couple. One woman was bald, with smile-set dimples and a mandarin-collared shirt, the other a more diminutive woman with silvered hair, shrunken features, and a comfortable robe. They led us from the front room, which was bedecked with an assortment of overtly “traditional” Chinese curios, from golden lions to jade statues, silk screens, and more.

  Our hosts led us to sit in a back room that looked more like a living room, its decoration more sedate. There was a traditional Chinese painting on one wall, but it was not as if the entire room was trying to reassure us with its authenticity.

  “Julie, Sarah, this is Jake, Antoinette, and Carter. How are your wards these days?”

  Sarah spoke up first, speaking with only the slightest Chinese accent. “We refresh them every week on Monday. They should be fine.”

  Sveta shook her head. “Not for this woman. We’ve got a Greene after us.”

  The couple’s eyes went wide. Julie turned and headed for a back room. “I’ll get started right away.”

  Sarah went to a teapot and poured liquid into three earthenware mugs, handing one to each of us in turn. I smelled the tea, taking in the mixture of floral scents, lemongrass, and gin
ger. I blew on the tea, watching the ripples flow across the water from my breath. I took another sniff, then a small sip, the water just short of boiling. The heat seared my tongue, but I’d been burned worse before. One was only careless around sacrificial bonfires once.

  “Let it steep,” Sarah said.

  I held the mug in both hands at my lap, making use of the heated mug even if I had to wait for the tea itself.

  The receding adrenaline left me wrung out, shaking. I needed food.

  “Might we trouble you for something to eat? I would happily offer remunerations.”

  Sarah quirked her head to the side. “I’ll order in from the place around the corner. Run by a friend. Any of you vegetarian?”

  Carter said, “No beef, please.”

  Antoinette added, “Veggie, here.”

  “I’m fine,” Sveta said.

  Sarah looked to me. “I’m from North Dakota,” I said.

  She smiled, said, “I’ll be right back,” and departed for the front room.

  Alternating my hands on the mug to repeatedly infuse heat into them, I looked to Sveta.

  “Is now the time for my laundry list of questions?”

  Sveta sighed, eyes narrow. “Go on.”

  “In reverse chronological order: What do we do next? What happened to Dorothea? How did you jump ten feet in the air from a standing start? Why do you have climbing equipment for five people in the closet of your tiny apartment? Why did that woman give her life when she could have escaped? How did she escape from Esther in the first place?”

  I looked up and saw that Sveta was not there anymore. She had moved to the front room, and was massaging her temples.

  “I’m not being unreasonable here!” I shouted in Sveta’s direction.

  “You kinda are, man,” Carter said.

  I flexed my free hand, trying to pull the tension from my head and exorcise it with the nervous motion. Giving up, I stood, spilling hot water on my coat, my pants, and my hand. I dropped the mug, shaking the hot water off of my hands.

  “That’s it! I’ve been running nonstop, drawing more power in an afternoon than a sane sorcerer would do in a week, and my supposed allies seem perfectly content to keep me in the dark, as if I were an attack dog. Given that my family actually keeps attack dogs, and I was personally responsible for having to put several down over the years when they went rabid, I am entirely uncomfortable with this position. Now will someone explain what’s going on, or are you all going to just walk away?”