Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods

by Michael R. Underwood

  I looked to Carter and Antoinette. “Maybe there is a chance of redemption for humanity.” I looked over to the abyss, the blood on the precipice. “Even for those like me.”

  EPILOGUE

  With Esther unable to challenge my power as the scion of the Greene clan (as a long-standing precedent declared that the defeated could not rechallenge for a period of a year and a day), and unwilling to endanger the infant god (it would be blasphemy of an order so high even she would not dare it), she merely stormed off, cursing my name as she left the three of us with the crying conundrum inside the bowels of the earth.

  We followed Esther, lest she decide in spite to close the portal on us and strand us in the Deeps, and parlayed for safe passage through the portal—arguing that if the god was left in the Deeps, there was no chance for her or any of the Greenes to reap the benefits of its nascent power.

  Not that the infant god seemed terribly powerful in any way but lung strength, continuing to wail. But none of us had any food, just mostly-empty water bottles.

  Returning to Central Park, we parted ways with Esther as quickly as possible. She headed east, and we made our way down from the hill, bearing west. I held the baby inside my coat, turning the collar up to shield it from the winds. We shared our heat, though in truth, the process was rather one-sided, the tiny god sapping my warmth.

  And then, at the bottom of the hill, I saw a dead woman.

  Dorothea stood at the ready, with a most odd assortment of belongings.

  Before her was a functional but unimpressive baby stroller, containing a bag filled equally with diapers and liquor.

  She had one hand in her pocket, the other holding a muted floral-print bag.

  I wished to race down the hill to embrace her, but as I was holding an infant divinity, I curbed the intent.

  Carter had no such limitations, nor did Antoinette. They hurried down the hill, leaving me to make my way slowly, always sure to brace the infant’s neck, remembering lessons learned as an older brother back in North Dakota. It may be a god, but while it was human, I dared not risk exposing it to any mundane threats.

  In my years of study, I had never come across a single text that would indicate that the Younger Gods would be born as human children. We were far off of the script of prophecy, scholarship, and expectation.

  The future was our own, in all of its terror and possibility.

  “You did it,” Dorothea said, her voice seeming to carry neither praise nor condemnation, though it was the latter I deserved.

  “I thought I had a solution,” I said. “But even with my cleverness, Esther still got what she wanted in the end.”

  “But not the way she wanted it,” Antoinette said. “And we’re the ones with the god.”

  “So you are. City told me to expect that. I brought supplies. Let’s get the baby out of the cold.” She led us toward the entrance of the park.

  “Colt 45?” Carter asked, holding up a bottle of malt liquor.

  “Seemed appropriate, since I’ve got a real Colt .45 in my pocket. That baby so much as sprouts one tentacle and I’m ending it sooner than you can say Ia.”

  I reeled at Dorothea’s unapologetic pragmatism. But my entire emotional equilibrium was shattered, not only by her return, but by the blood on my own hands, despite my cleverness. Another death that I could not blame on anyone, not really.

  The choice was mine, and I had taken the long view, sacrificing my humanity in the short term for a chance to protect all of humanity in the long term. Cutting corners to serve my own agenda, unafraid to get my hands bloody, to sacrifice allies along the way.

  Truly the scion of the Greenes.

  The tiny god gurgled, arms waving. I held the baby up, hands steady where they should be shaking.

  I was thankful for my younger brothers and sisters, who had prepared me for this eventuality in small, if not sufficient ways. The child god spat up on my coat, which was already torn and stained, and therefore made no real change to its condition.

  “Little god. Whatever are we to call you?” I asked myself, supporting her head with one hand. She was so tiny, fitting entirely in my hand and forearm, her swaddled feet curled up by my elbow.

  The god reached out with one hand, eyes closed, and grabbed my nose, yanking with uncommon strength. I shrank inward with pain, pulling her off my nose.

  Carter chuckled, but it was a pained laughter.

  Shortly, we reached a coffee shop, and Dorothea used her impressive stare to clear off a table for our use.

  Antoinette emptied the carriage seat, and I placed the god into it, tucking her into the blanket Dorothea had placed in advance, maintaining the swaddle as best I could. I considered the contradictory facts of the child’s divinity, barely-contained infinite potential, and the seemingly very real fragility of infancy, of a tiny mammal far from ready to fend for itself.

  Each movement was considered, given that I was holding the hope or doom of humanity in my arms.

  And that was it, wasn’t it.

  “I know what to call you. Ahri,” I said, watching the child. Tears came then, hot, conflicted tears, my emotional buffers completely overwhelmed, letting any and every feeling flood over me.

  “Ahri?” Antoinette asked.

  “It’s Enochian. For ‘hope.’”

  “That’s cheesy,” Carter said.

  I looked to my friends, who shook their heads.

  “Anyone need medical attention?” Dorothea asked, keeping her voice low. The crowds were watching, but no one had spoken up yet. Once more, we benefited from the city’s heterogeneity. That and the fact that the city had to be in shock, following the upheaval of Esther’s attacks and locking away of the islands.

  Those workings were done now that the god was born, and soon emergency forces would take control—FEMA, the Red Cross, and others. We would be well advised to be out of sight in short order.

  “How are you . . . here?” I asked.

  Dorothea mixed baby formula, her hands working with the confidence of an expert. Another wrinkle of her history to unravel. “I guess the city wasn’t done with me. Can’t say I remember much between that fall and waking up in Central Park this morning with orders burned into my head. I had a shopping list and a time, and so here I am: carriage, bag, and twin Colt 45s,” she said, gesturing with her gun to the malt liquor.

  “And the alcohol is for what?” I asked.

  “We just averted the apocalypse. It’s time to get drunk,” Carter said.

  Dorothea nodded. “I think ‘delayed’ is more accurate, sadly.”

  Ahri cried in response.

  “I’m very glad to see that you’re well, Dorothea,” I said.

  “Thanks. And I’m glad to know that you remembered what I said to you on the roof. No one of us is more important than the future.”

  “That is rather difficult to stomach imagining saying it to Nate.”

  To that, Dorothea sighed. “Ain’t that the truth. But you bought the world, and yourself, time to make sure that his death wasn’t for nothing. In terms of consolation, it’s shit. We all have to live with the choices we’ve made along the way.”

  “We need to get Ahri to a hospital. There are immunizations to be done, records to be made . . .” I said, rambling.

  “Leave that to me,” Dorothea said. “Once she’s fed, we get you all home, and some friends will take watch while you three sleep this off.”

  But it couldn’t be . . .

  Carter procured coffee and confections for the group, both of which I promptly inhaled.

  “Esther will not let this go unanswered. Mother and Father will take the family to another city, find another Younger God, and seek to provoke a confrontation. All of the writings agree that the Younger Gods will be responsible for the shape of the Last Age.”

  Antoinette said, “Then we reach out to ou
r friends around the country, and they reach out around the world. The Greenes can’t be everywhere. There’s what, a hundred of you?”

  “Ten close relatives with enough power in the blood to be as dangerous as myself or my sister. But we have cousins and agents and vassals far and wide.”

  “So it’ll be a war,” Dorothea said. “That means that we’ve won the first battle.”

  “Please pardon me if I do not feel like much of a victor,” I said.

  Carter clapped a hand on my shoulder, squeezing in sympathy. “There was no other way, Jake. We know it, Nate knew it.”

  “And yet, another lies dead because of me. Sacrificed to dark powers due to coming into my life. I’m afraid I cannot take solace in the greater good, nor should I pretend that my hands are clean.”

  “It’s war. No one gets through with their hands clean.”

  I lowered my head. “That is what I am afraid of. How far will we go for the greater good? I fear that we may no longer deserve the world once we’ve saved it.”

  To that, they had no answer.

  Once Ahri had finished her bottle, we bundled ourselves up, paid our bills, and walked out into the sunrise of the first day of the last age of man.

  I sent Ahri and the others ahead, searching for a still-functioning pay phone. Upon finding one lone machine, draped in a metallic shell to protect it from the elements, I inserted all of the change I had left, and looking at the keypad, froze. A long moment later, I gathered the will to continue, muscle memory tapping out the number for the main line for Thomas’s house.

  On the third ring, a tired woman picked up. “Sandusky residence.”

  I choked on my words, as I’d done a dozen times before.

  “Hello?” Thomas’s mother, Susan, repeated. “Is this another crank call? Can’t you leave us in peace?”

  “Please don’t hang up,” I managed finally.

  “Who is this?” Susan asked.

  “This is Jacob Greene.”

  “Jake?” she asked, her voice quick.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call before.”

  I could practically hear Mrs. Sandusky shaking with excitement. “What happened? Is Thomas with you?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Mrs. Sandusky. This is a call I should have made a long time ago. I was afraid.”

  “Where is he?” she asked, voice growing louder.

  “He’s dead, Mrs. Sandusky. I’m so, so sorry. My family killed him, and it’s all my fault. The police and the sheriffs are in my family’s sway, and if you try to press the matter, they’ll do terrible things to you and anyone else who comes after them. That’s why I left. I couldn’t face you, I couldn’t stop them. But now, now I am trying to make amends.”

  “What? This is insane.”

  “The world will grow far madder before matters are settled, I’m afraid. I would advise you move the family far away from North Dakota. But not too close to the coast. Arizona should suffice.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Jake.”

  “And for that, I am also sorry,” I said, sobbing. “Know that Thomas was my first and best friend, and everything I do now, I do in his memory. Take care, Mrs. Sandusky. I pray that our paths will not cross again, and that this is the last you hear from anyone in my family.”

  And with that, I hung up and slumped against the metallic shell surrounding the pay phone, taking a moment to regain my composure.

  The call may have done more to upset the Sanduskys than give them peace, but they deserved the truth, deserved what warning I could give them, acknowledgement of what Thomas’s life and friendship had meant to me.

  I hurried on to catch up with Dorothea, Carter, Antoinette, and little Ahri.

  In the end, this Last Age, all we had was one another.

  But like the dawn of any age, it was far too early to determine how it would play out. Would this be humanity’s great last stand, would it be the age when we truly inherited the earth from the divine beings that had ruled from the shadows for millennia? Or would the coming years prove once and for all that we did not deserve the world, that we were no better than the petty gods who had nearly broken the world before it was finished becoming itself?

  The answer lay with us, literally in our hands. My own hands were too stained to ever be washed clean, and would get bloodier still if I were to stand with humanity against the rest of my family.

  But for the first time since I’d left North Dakota, I had a true family, and I had hope.

  Hope alone would not win the day, but with it, we could at least try.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have been an avid reader of world folklore and mythology for my whole life, and enjoy sharing that passion. I always recommend that fans of fantasy, be it urban, epic, or anything in between, respectfully and lovingly engage with world religious texts and folkloric traditions, to see these influences in their historical and cultural contexts. Without these works and these traditions, this book would not exist.

  In The Younger Gods, I used my experiences and training as a folklorist to draw upon world religions, mythologies, and more. I have taken artistic license in several places to make the world my own, creating a distinct cosmology and system of magic by synthesizing multiple sources and narrative threads. It is my intent to do so with all due respect to the people whose cultures have figured in or inspired my work.

  The character of Jacob Greene has been with me for many years, and his story has evolved across a half-dozen tellings. But he came properly alive for the first time in a role-playing game campaign run by Lothair Biederman, with fellow players Blair Burns, Paul Friebus, Carl Short, Barry Welling, Stephen Mar, Ryan Conner, and Meg White. The Jacob Greene of The Younger Gods is not the Jacob of that game, but I wouldn’t have written this book without those many hours of laughter, drama, and shared storytelling.

  A big high five to my beta readers Gary Kloster, Beth Cato, Anaea Lay, Effie Seiberg, and Alyc Helms for their detailed notes, and big thanks to Jose Iriarte, Traci Castleberry, Darusha Wehm, Leena Likitalo, Elizabeth Shack, Kate Heartfield, Laurie Tom, and Luc Reid for their comments.

  My eternal gratitude to my fiancée, Meg White, for endless hours of talking, reading, and pondering with me to make the world work, from the cosmogony down to the characterization. This was a tough one, and without you, I might have given up on the book.

  Special thanks to Emily Dare for the research consultation on Enochian. Any errors in the use of that language are mine, not hers. Because really, it’s my own damned fault for using a language with only the scantest of dictionaries in existence and I ended up having to invent vocabulary.

  Thanks to Angry Robot and Osprey Publishing for giving me the chance to be a New Yorker again, even for a short while. This book is, among many other things, my love letter to the five boroughs that taught me what a city can be.

  Huge thanks to my editor, Adam Wilson, for coming with me on the journey to a very different kind of urban fantasy, for excellent notes on how to make the world come together, and for his patience. Props to behind-the-scenes man Trey Bidinger for all of his assistance in making everything go.

  Props to my attentive copy editor Crystal Velasquez, and cover designer Damon for the impressive packaging.

  Thanks again and again to my agent, Sara Megibow, for embracing the Pitchapalooza approach and helping me bring my best ideas to the fore. Ever onward!

  And as always, thanks to you, my readers, for coming with me on the journey.

  Michael R. Underwood

  Baltimore, Maryland

  August 2014

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael R. Underwood is the author of the Ree Reyes urban fantasies Geekomancy, Celebromancy, Attack the Geek, and the weird-superhero novel Shield and Crocus. By day, he’s the North American sales and marketing manager for Angry Robot Books. Underwood grew up devouring stor
ies in all forms, from comics to video games, tabletop RPGs, movies, and books. Always books.

  Underwood lives in Baltimore with his fiancée, an ever-growing library, and a super-team of dinosaur figurines and stuffed animals. In his rapidly vanishing free time, he studies historical martial arts and makes pizzas from scratch.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Michael R. Underwood

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  First Pocket Star Books eBook edition October 2014

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