Days of Borrowed Pasts

by S. M. Schmitz

  Something crashed from within followed by loud cursing and the sounds of heavy footsteps as he approached. “Who’s it?” he slurred through the door.

  “Deedee,” she called back.

  “Goddamn it,” he muttered, but the locks slid out of place and he pulled the door back just enough to peek through the crack.

  “‘N who’re these assholes?” Dionysus asked.

  “I’m Thomas, Hermes’s son. We’ve met many times, remember?”

  Dionysus squinted at him then grunted as a way of acknowledging he sort of remembered this young god, even in his inebriated state, which Ayla assumed was his permanent state.

  “And Ma’at, whom I’m sure you’ve met many times before as well,” Aphrodite added.

  Dionysus looked the Egyptian goddess over and leaned against the edge of the door as if standing were consuming too much concentration and energy. “’N this girl?” The Greek god opened the door a little wider, and Ayla could see now that Thomas hadn’t been joking — the god of wine had, in fact, come to his door with a shotgun.

  “My name is Ayla. My father was Kaskuh. We simply need a place to stay for a few days. Our intention isn’t to inconvenience you.”

  Dionysus snorted and tried to focus his attention on her but finally gave up. “You already incon… unco… put me out.”

  “Oh, come on,” Aphrodite sighed. “Your own nephew is standing out here, as well as an old friend. Just open the damn door and let us in.”

  “Half-great-nephew,” Thomas corrected.

  “Godly family trees are so bizarrely messed up,” Ayla added helpfully.

  Thomas nodded. “I suppose a war that’s killed so many gods has helped thin the potential lines of descent.”

  “Dude,” Ma’at scolded, “a little respect for the dead.”

  Thomas flashed her that impish grin and said, “I guess you would know a lot about that.”

  Ma’at blinked at him while Aphrodite sighed heavily again and gestured at Dionysus, indicating she wanted him to open the door. He grunted at them all, but ambled away, leaving the door ajar. Ayla and Thomas glanced at each other as if asking whether or not this was an invitation to enter or just an oversight of a drunken mind, but Aphrodite had obviously decided it was the former and pushed the door open wider to enter. Ma’at quickly followed, leaving Thomas and Ayla alone on the porch.

  “He took the shotgun with him,” Ayla whispered. “Maybe I should wait out here until he passes out.”

  “You probably won’t have to wait long,” Thomas whispered back.

  But Ma’at appeared in the doorway and pulled them both inside, locking the door behind them even though there was an unstable, intoxicated god with a deadly weapon ten feet away from them. Thomas braved approaching the living room, but Ayla stayed against the wall by the door, just in case she needed to leave quickly.

  The Greek god of wine had sunk onto a tattered plaid sofa and was busily tipping a brown glass bottle over a tumbler, even though the bottle was obviously empty. It took a few long, awkward seconds before he gave up and slammed the bottle back down on his equally old end table.

  “Dionysus,” Aphrodite said, “look at this place. Look at you. This is no way for a god to live.”

  Dionysus scoffed and waved his arms around him. “Isn’t this exactly like Olympus?” He then laughed like comparing Olympus to an old farmhouse with 1970s furnishings was the funniest joke he’d ever made. Aphrodite sat back in the tattered chair and crossed her arms, waiting for Dionysus to laugh himself out. When the room fell silent again, she said, “Becoming a farmer and moving around every so often to avoid hunters was a good idea, but I never thought you’d waste your talents like this. You’d been holding yourself together fairly well for the first two hundred years. What the hell happened?”

  “Wha’ happened?” he repeated. “It’ll never end! This’s life now. And I’ve been reduced to growin’ corn. Corn, Deedee!”

  “I know what you’re growing, Dionysus. But a vineyard would be too obvious a place to look for you, and —”

  But Dionysus waved a hand at her and cut her off. “So I ne’er gid my grapes again. And you sit there judgin’ me for losin’ wad I love mos’.” He looked around the room and scratched his head, which was covered in messy brown curls that probably hadn’t been combed in days, and muttered, “Whiskey. I’ve got’d around here somewhere. I brew’d myself, ya know.”

  “Oh, I think we’ve all figured that out,” Aphrodite said.

  Dionysus tried to stand but stumbled and fell back onto the sofa, seeming a bit surprised to find himself there, but then he must’ve remembered he’d wanted to search for more whiskey and tried to stand again. Thomas sat beside him and grabbed his arm before the Greek god could stumble away. “We could really use your help. But you’ll have to sober up first.”

  “Sober up?” Dionysus repeated those words as if it were the most absurd suggestion Thomas could’ve made. “Boy, I haven’ been sober since…” He trailed off and narrowed his eyes in frustrated concentration.

  “Exactly,” Thomas said, which only seemed to confuse Dionysus even more. “But we’re working on something that could benefit all of us gods who don’t want to fight. Any maybe you can even get your vineyards back someday.”

  The Greek god’s eyes lit up and he rubbed the stubble on his chin as he thought about being able to grow his beloved grapes again. And since thinking obviously took him a while, Ayla used the opportunity to move away from the door and sat in an armchair that had just as much duct tape as vinyl on it. His hazel eyes settled on her and that frustrated concentration returned. “Did’ya say your father was Kaskuh?”

  Ayla nodded and so did Dionysus. “Decent sorta god. Shame what hap’n to him.”

  “Yes,” Ayla agreed.

  “Didn’ he take up wid —”

  “Beds,” Ma’at interrupted. “Do you have space for us?”

  Dionysus grinned at her and said, “For you, m’dear, yeah. Mine.”

  “For God’s sake,” Aphrodite muttered. “Don’t hit on my friends, stop drinking so much, and clean this place up.”

  Instead, Dionysus yawned, stretched out on his battered sofa, and promptly fell asleep. His snores soon made talking difficult, so the gods moved into the kitchen and sat at his oval table where Ayla was able to open the book Thomas had stolen from Tonnerre. She flipped the pages until she found the third unsolved riddle and read aloud.

  Lions prowl

  the gates secured.

  All who enter

  shall share her fate.

  Ayla scowled at the page and snapped, “Shall share whose fate?”

  “Let me see that,” Aphrodite snapped back. “You probably translated it wrong.”

  Ayla crossed her arms angrily as Aphrodite read the passage aloud, exactly as Ayla had just translated it.

  “We can figure this out,” Thomas claimed. “Let’s start with a list of every region where lions used to live and go from there.”

  All eyes shifted to Ma’at who just shrugged. “I guess it could refer to something Egyptian, but it’s so vague. The Sphinx maybe?”

  “What about the gate part though?” Thomas pointed out.

  “Perhaps it’s referring to the statue itself, since it’s kinda standing guard over the resting places of pharaohs,” Ma’at suggested.

  “The bigger problem is the ‘shall meet her fate’ part then,” Ayla said. “Even if this riddle is pointing to Giza or the Valley of the Kings, there are a limited number of notable women in your history —”

  “In anyone’s history,” Aphrodite supplied bitterly.

  “True,” Ayla acknowledged. “So to whom could the riddle be referring? Cleopatra? And, if so, what are we supposed to be getting from her?”

  “I’m not convinced this is even Egyptian,” Ma’at argued. But Dionysus snorted and rolled over, interrupting her before she could propose any differing theories.

  Aphrodite thumbed through the pages of the book and gla
nced up at Thomas. “Why did you think there were only nine ingredients in this spell?”

  “That’s what Leon and I were guessing,” he answered. “One for each headquarter.”

  “Well, if this is the right spell book, then there are actually twenty-three,” Aphrodite said. “Considering there used to be more headquarters, the original spell could have still housed one ingredient per building. I can’t remember how many there were, let alone where each was located though. I only know as man’s weapons and ability to travel improved, they needed fewer and fewer headquarters and closed all the smaller ones.”

  Ayla groaned and buried her face in her arms while Thomas cursed quietly under his breath.

  “So we could end up wasting months collecting a bunch of useless crap,” Ma’at sighed. “If some of those closed headquarters housed something that’s truly extinct now, we’ll never be able to get the spell to work. Maybe no one can reopen the veil anymore.”

  “We knew this whole thing was a long shot anyway,” Aphrodite said.

  Ayla lifted her head and sighed. “I need some air.”

  Thomas followed her out the back door, but before she could disappear into the rows of corn, he grabbed her arm and said, “I’m sorry. I feel like I got your hopes up, and maybe I was wrong about the whole thing.”

  “The only thing that came out of you saving my life at that bus station is Leon’s captivity by my uncle. And that’s far worse than falling into Odin’s or the League’s hands.”

  “Probably,” Thomas agreed. “But I don’t regret helping you in Lake Charles, Ayla. Those hunters would’ve killed you. We can’t negotiate or reason with them. They’ve been conditioned to believe we’re all evil, and they want us dead.”

  “So what now, Thomas? Do we keep going? Should we just figure out how to rescue Leon then go our separate ways since it’ll probably be safer?”

  “Did you really feel safer alone?” he asked.

  Ayla lowered her eyes and shook her head. “No,” she admitted. “But we keep dragging more and more gods into our crazy and most likely suicidal mission, and I don’t want to be responsible for their deaths.”

  “Hey,” Thomas countered, “both Aphrodite and Ma’at have chosen to do this, and as for Dionysus, he’s not exactly living out here. I don’t know if it’s possible for a god to develop cirrhosis or anything, but if it is, he’s trying awfully hard to do it.”

  “Maybe I’m getting discouraged for no reason,” Ayla said. “If there are ingredients that are extinct in the wild now, surely they would have transferred those to other places rather than risking their own ability to ever reopen the veil?”

  “Right,” Thomas agreed.

  The screen door on the back porch squeaked on its hinges then slammed closed, and Ma’at jumped off the stairs and ran toward them. Ayla instinctively reached for Thomas’s hand as Ma’at exclaimed, “You need to come see this. It’s all over the news… the League has released photographs of you from outside some hotel. You two have just become the most wanted gods in the world.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The sun and the moon no longer sing; in the final days of our borrowed world, there is only silence.

  Ayla stared at her image on the television, a clear picture of her running behind Thomas as they escaped from the hunter in a parking lot of a hotel in Lake Charles. Beside her picture was one of Thomas, and it was the first time she noticed how much he’d been holding back, intentionally keeping his body positioned in front of hers, protecting her even though he’d just met her.

  Ma’at broke the silence by cursing at the television and saying, “The resolution on those photos is excellent. They must’ve known there was at least a reasonable chance you’d get away from the hunter who went inside, so they had someone waiting out there to take those pictures. That wasn’t captured by chance.”

  Dionysus had wakened with all the commotion and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. He blinked at the television then at Thomas and Ayla then at the television again.

  Ayla could almost see the light bulb going off over his head, which would have been comical if it weren’t so serious. At best, he would kick them out. At worst, he’d turn them in. Either way, whatever reprieve they thought they’d gotten by showing up on an isolated farm in Nebraska was already over.

  But when Dionysus turned his hazel eyes back to the lost gods, he didn’t look angry or vengeful at all. “You got away from them?”

  “Yeah,” Thomas said. “Barely. My dad gave me this key —”

  “The Key of Cyllene?” Dionysus gasped.

  “Um… maybe?” Thomas answered. “He never told me if it had a name. It opens doors —”

  “Yes,” Dionysus exclaimed, interrupting Thomas yet again. “And every winter when I took Apollo’s place in Delphi, your father would take me there using that key.”

  Thomas was transfixed by this new information, but Ayla was more impressed by how much more lucid Dionysus had already become. Sure, he was a god of wine and all, but how could anyone sober up so quickly? Had he been faking how drunk he was when they arrived? Was it one of his powers to metabolize alcohol ridiculously fast?

  But Thomas pulled the key from his pocket and held it in his palm, staring at it like he held the fate of the world in his hands. Ayla wanted to tell him that he actually may hold the fate of the world in his hands, at least one world, but she’d promised Ma’at not to tell him or anyone else that this key may one day help open the veil.

  “Why would he give this to me so long ago then? It was way before he died,” Thomas said.

  “Apollo had the gift of prophecy,” Dionysus explained. “I suspect your father knew his fate and that you’d need one of his most useful tools.”

  “It would be a lot more useful if he’d taught me to use it properly,” Thomas complained.

  But Dionysus shrugged and returned his attention to the television where the reporter was repeating the lost gods’ last known whereabouts and possible accomplices. The League somehow knew they’d gone to Larken, and now, poor Melanie was being blamed for housing them and helping them escape.

  “But…” Ayla stammered. “There weren’t any hunters in Larken! How did they —”

  She shot a sharp glare in Aphrodite’s direction who immediately snapped, “Oh, right, like I’d do anything to get Thomas killed. You maybe, but —”

  “But you happen to show up right before Odin’s army with a Norse goddess’s enchanted necklace,” Ayla interrupted. “One everyone knows she’d never willingly part with.”

  Aphrodite rose from her chair, her fingers curled into fists, and Dionysus sighed and stood up, too. “You ladies need a drink.”

  “Ayla,” Ma’at said, “Aphrodite is telling the truth. Your suspicions are understandable, and we do need to find out how the League tracked you so quickly, but we can’t turn against each other.”

  “Then explain how you got Brísingamen,” Ayla insisted.

  “I already told you,” Aphrodite growled through gritted teeth. “She’s convalescing anyway. She doesn’t need it right now, so she let me borrow it.”

  Ayla scoffed, knowing there was more to the story and the Greek goddess may not have turned them in to Odin’s army or the League, but she was clearly hiding something.

  Thomas stepped between them and yelled, “Enough. We clearly aren’t safe anywhere, including here, so we need to figure out how the League is following us so closely and get the hell out of here.”

  Ayla’s eyes widened with the horrifying realization that she was responsible for the League’s ability to track them. “My backpack,” she gasped.

  “Oh, God,” Thomas groaned. “How could we have been so stupid?”

  “How is your backpack the problem?” Ma’at asked.

  Thomas hurriedly explained the ambush at the hotel and how her backpack had been left in her room, Leon’s willingness to risk his life to retrieve it for her, and the oversight in not searching it carefully enough for a tracking device.

&nb
sp; “They probably didn’t need to put a tracking device in it,” Aphrodite argued. “Just a tracking spell, which means you’ll have to leave it and all its contents behind. Only the person who cast the spell can undo it.”

  “No!” Ayla exclaimed. “I can get a new bag, but what’s inside… it’s irreplaceable. And those items include some of the ingredients Thomas and I have already collected for the only spell that can get us home.”

  “Wait, what?” Dionysus said, but the other gods pretended not to hear him.

  “Ayla,” Thomas tried, but she shook her head and cried, “My mom gave me most of what I carry in there, and if the League gets its hands on my stuff, they’ll destroy it all.”

  Dionysus ran a hand over his face, making a scratching noise as it brushed against the stubble, and he sighed loudly. “Then we’ll keep it all where no hunter would dare go.”

  Ma’at arched an eyebrow at the Greek god. “I don’t think such a place exists.”

  “Of course it does. After all, when they shut us off from our own world, they trapped a lot of our creatures here, too. And they had to do something with them. They’ve got ‘em trapped on an island protected by a border spell so they can’t get out, and no human ever ventures in.”

  Ma’at’s mouth fell open while Aphrodite threw her hands in the air and shouted, “Or gods, because it’s suicide, dumbass!”

  But Dionysus waved her off. “You got a better idea?”

  “Yeah, not risking our lives over a bag full of junk,” she snapped.

  “Hey,” Ayla protested, but Thomas shushed them all, and the gods stopped bickering as they strained to hear whatever had alerted Thomas.

  For several excruciatingly long seconds, nothing happened, then Dionysus’s door exploded into thousands of wooden splinters that left painful scratches over Ayla’s exposed skin. As the fragments settled to the floor, Ayla glimpsed the blond head of the woman who’d been following her since Chicago.