by Chuck Wendig
Alison closes her eyes.
Then she knows what she has to do.
COYOTE SITS ON his haunches and watches as the cop loads her into the back of the cruiser. She didn’t use the weapon he gave her. It would’ve been so easy. It would’ve done all the work for her. Sprayed him with blinding coyote urine. Animated and beaten the cop about the head and neck. Then slithered away like a snake while they made their getaway.
Coyote’s got a great penis. It always gets him out of trouble.
Of course, half the time, it’s the thing that got him into trouble, but whatever.
For a while she sits in the back seat. The cop roves back and forth on his radio. In the car. Then out of the car. Does a walk around the Mustang, checking it for... well, whatever it is that a cop would look for in a stolen car.
Alison stares forward until, finally, she lifts her head and looks out the window.
She sees him out there. Their eyes meet. He wonders how puzzled she must be, seeing not the man, but the animal. A ragged, skinny coyote with tortoiseshell fur. And a cigarillo sticking out of its muzzle. Recognition flares in her eyes.
He really thought she had it in her to make the brave choice. The interesting choice. She’s made so many before now, he just figured...
It was the penis, wasn’t it? That took it one inch too far.
Coyote pads away. Stalking the margins of the highway for a while until he’s out of sight and can hide behind a berm of earth covered in dead grass.
There he becomes human again and pulls out his phone.
To Old Man Shu he texts:
I think I lost the thread.
Shu texts back:
IS IT BROKEN?
I don’t know.
THEN FIND OUT.
Coyote figured that would be the answer.
Besides, the cops have his penis, so he’s going to need to get that back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Farm
THE GODDESS PACES the floor. Her feet make no sound on the polished wood of the farmhouse. She pauses by the great stone fireplace, in which burns a primal flame that needs no kindling and gives off a gauzy greenish glow. Aphrodite flicks a small piece of black lint off the fabric of her white dress. Imperfections will not do.
This, the gathering room. Exposed beams two stories up, the second floor overlooking the first. A cursory glance makes it look like a farmhouse renovated by the rich—and that’s true, to a point. Artifacts and animal rugs, Brazilian hardwood floors and crossbeams, smells of lavender and spice. But a deeper glance shows things that don’t add up—the green fire; soft violin music that plays, not from speakers, but from a Stradivarius violin on the wall; a Grecian urn that whispers blasphemies as one walks past.
No one god or goddess owns the Farm. This is where they meet.
Usually to discuss problems.
Such as this newest: Cason Cole. Now truly a murderer of the gods.
“I know what we do with him,” says a pale, wormy man sitting in a wicker chair by the corner. His long, oily limbs are pulled up around his body. Slogutis. Of the Lithuanian pantheon. His mouth pulls back into a wretched half-smile, half-sneer, gray-pink tongue sliding over nicotine teeth. “I just need five minutes.”
Pain and misery. Always his solution.
Aphrodite sniffs dismissively. “To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. No. This will take something else. He’s a... special case.”
Movement from above.
Dana, once more at the railing overhead. The older goddess’s hands sway back and forth like the tides, appropriately passing a thread of salt water between them—it floats from one hand to the other like a serpent made of the sea. That’s my trick, Aphrodite thinks.
“We must do something,” Dana says. Voice commanding. Irish bitch. Aphrodite is tired of her. Acting like the mother of all, the voice of reason—it’s a power-play. Of course it is. She’s tired of playing second fiddle to Aphrodite, the Deity Regent of the City of Brotherly Love. Dana continues: “We cannot sit idly by as this... interloper runs amok, murdering our kind. Who even knew we could be so dispatched?”
Aphrodite tries to maintain calm and clarity in her voice, but even as she speaks, she hears how each word has sharp teeth: “We are not sitting idly by. We have him in our custody. He’s chained in the barn, his body broken. We’re not feeding him tea and cookies, are we?”
“Yes, but he should be made an example of. We should take him and crucify him. Flay his body and animate the parts in the skies above the city so that all know it is unwise to move against us, the Exiled—”
“This again,” Aphrodite says, voice carrying. “We have rules. We have laws—”
“Laws that come to us from above, not from within!” Dana twists her hands, and the sea-made snake between her hands turns to mist and is gone. “It is time we go against the Ways once more, and show the Great Usurper that we will not be bound, that we seek our rightful place in the tapestry—”
From the leather couch by the fire, a man with skin like dark chocolate barks an incredulous laugh. His suit—a blue the color of slate, so blue it’s almost black—fits him like a shadow. “All this over Nergal? He was barely one of us.”
“But he was one of us!” Dana cries.
“He was a lunatic,” the black man—Shango—says. “An exile among Exiles. He did nothing. He was nothing. To him, good riddance.”
Slogutis hacks, coughs in his hand. “You’re just happy to see the world with one less storm god. Maybe you want to see them all dead, yeah? Who you want to go next? Lei Gong? Thunderbird? Oh, fuck, Thor?” The god of pain and misery cackles. “Thor. I’d like to see you two mix it up.”
“I could take Thor,” Shango says, nodding with some certainty. “He needs his hammer. I only need my fists.”
A sylph-like Chinese woman from across the room scoffs: Long Mu, mother of dragons, the tattoos of five colored dragons rising up each arm and crossing each shoulder to meet in the center of her back and her chest. “Thor,” she sneers. “Lei Gong is the only true thunder god I know. You could not take him.”
Shango stands, chest puffed out—the air around him warping, stinking suddenly of ozone, the ground trembling just slightly, as if a distant herd of bison came tumbling across the plains. Aphrodite claps her hands.
“Nobody is taking anybody else,” Aphrodite hisses. “Especially not here. This is neutral ground. None shall violate its sanctity; unless anyone wishes to spend time in the Barn?” Nobody moves. Nobody wants to back down. That’s how they are, gods. Ego-driven. Megalomaniacal. How could they not be? “Well?”
Long Mu sniffs, and breaks the tension with, “Has anyone told Nergal’s consort?”
“Ereshkigal?” Shango asks, moving over to the sidebar. He begins fixing himself a drink—golden nectar and a splash of 151 rum, stirred with a cinnamon stick. “No. I won’t go near that one.”
“I’ll tell her,” Dana says. “If I can find her, I’ll tell her.”
“She is not the order of our business. She chose to once again leave the embrace of our protectorate—she refuses to participate in our society.”
“Good for her,” Slogutis mumbles, offering a crooked thumbs-up.
“Our business tonight is what to do about Nergal’s killer?”
“We need justice,” Dana says. Again conjuring water from her hands—this time in two threads that she braids and unbraids.
“Before justice, we need answers,” Long Mu says. “We must interrogate.”
“I concur,” Aphrodite says.
“As do I,” Shango says.
Dana says nothing, chin aloft, nose in the air.
Slogutis chuckles, claps his hands like a child eager to pluck the legs off a beetle. “Then let’s go have ourselves a conversation!”
HIS MEMORIES LIKE pages, flipping faster and faster.
His first car: Chevy Camaro, early 80s, white, dirty, pink dice hanging from the rearview.
His first fight: not MMA,
but behind the green wall outside the high school, near the alley where all the cats lived. Eddie Pistone said that Cason had a ‘queer’s name,’ then ‘accidentally’ poured hairspray all over the Camaro’s windshield, shellacking it good. The fight was longer than most of the MMA bouts Cason ever had—two untrained idiots pawing at each other like drunken orangutans. Eddie got Cason in the nuts with a kick. Cason headbutted Eddie in the teeth. Cut up Cason’s head (he still has little scars), but Eddie’s front teeth were knocked down his throat. Cason knew then that he liked fighting. Made him feel good, strong; like it was something he could do. Like an animal lived inside of him and wanted to come out.
His mother’s funeral. Gray day, pissing rain. Father drunk. Conny late.
Wedding. Church ceremony, fire hall reception. Kerry Coogan got drunk as a snake, knocked over the punch. Everybody laughed and danced. Alison looked beautiful in the dress—the baby bump added to the beauty, made everything feel more complete. Conny came by after it was all done. Handed Cason a check for twenty-five dollars. Tried to sell him some weed. Week later, check bounced. He heard later the weed was oregano. Asshole.
Barney’s first birthday. Cookie Monster cake. Nuclear blue icing. Barney got his hands in it. Then on Alison’s shirt. And the wall. And the white tablecloth. Hardly any in his mouth.
First MMA fight. Versus Muay Thai fighter Pedro Santiago. Over in five minutes. Cason, beaten blue. But one reversal, he got Pedro down, head smashed against the mat. Submission, tap out. Game over. Next day, Cason felt like he’d been wrung out like a washcloth. It’s when he learned that pain felt like victory.
The memories flip faster. Back and forth. Not always in order. Losing his virginity to Missy Calhoun—condom on wrong, came off inside her, a whole month worrying about her being pregnant. First taste of liquor: blackberry schnapps. First baseball game: Phils versus Mets, pulled it out in the seventh, Mike Schmidt grand-slam.
Fast forward to present, flip flip flip flip. Car burning, Alison screaming. Barney just a shadow in the back. Time still. Eros there. Cason weeping on his knees. Weeks, months, Eros bringing lover after lover back to the brownstone—liquor flowing, every kind of drug available, cameras, sex toys, all the moaning and screaming and sounds of bodies on beds and slammed against walls; his memories pause here, flip back and forth over the faces of lovers, men, women, younger, older. Dark hair, freckles, long hair, bald, blue eyes, green eyes, collagen lips, thin smile, scars, pockmarks, perfect skin—hovering over each face like a snapshot held in the hand—then back to Cason, sitting bored in the hallway, body-guarding the boss against a threat that would never come—
Until one day it did. RC car. Bomb. Boom. Arrowheads.
Eros falling apart like a doll. Feathers rising, falling, ears ringing.
Flip back. Eros’ face. One last look in his chambers. After the bomb went off.
Then—
Two thoughts hit Cason, and they’re not his own.
You didn’t kill my husband.
Followed by:
You’re not human.
He’s wrenched up from the darkness.
He smells hay.
And the musk of barn animals.
And old wood.
Cason’s eyes open.
Sure enough, he’s curled up on his side on a wooden floor strewn with hay. Above him, the eaves and lofts of a red barn. Spiders weaving webs in the cracks and corners. Moths circling what few electric lights brighten the place.
He sits. Pain wracks his body. He stops sitting.
Your body is broken. But it’s fixing itself.
“Who are you?” he says, aloud.
He blinks. Looks around. He’s in a stall. Wooden walls. Rusted metal gate. All of it wound with glittering gold chain—thin chain, not thin as a necklace, but the kind from which a pocketwatch might dangle.
And he’s alone.
I’m in your head. Not in your stall.
The words inside his head have a voice.
He pats his chest—but the sigil drawn and redrawn there is long gone, isn’t it?
Here, now, in Cason’s mind—there behind his eyes—that lightshow forms a face.
The woman from the woods.
The woman from Sasquatch-Man’s front porch.
The woman who stole his wife, his son.
He feels his blood rush to his limbs, carrying the blue blazes of a raw red rage—he lurches forth, standing on broken legs, the pain lost in the white wall of fury. “My wife,” he growls. “My son. Where are my wife and my son?” He staggers over to the metal door, legs barely supporting him—he grips it rattles it, tries to climb over it—
A shock goes through his body. Liquid lightning, burnished gold.
He finds himself lying on his back once more. In the hay. Light smoke drifting from his palms and the center of his chest. The anger robbed from him by the surprise.
Unbreakable golden chain, says the voice. Forged by Hephaestus. It traps even the gods.
“But I saw you break it.”
No. You saw it fall away. Aphrodite was controlling the chain with her mind. You distracted her and that was my moment. We won’t be so fortunate again.
“Alison. Barney. What have you done with them?”
I let them go. They escaped me.
“Good for them.” In this, a spike of anger. “Because fuck you.”
I made an error.
“Damn right you did.”
I thought... I thought you’d killed my husband.
“I didn’t. He was my boss. He...” Cason grits his teeth, uses the flats of his hands to push his body backward until he’s sitting up against the back stall wall. “You know, fuck him, too. It’s because of him I’m even here. That any of this is happening.”
You’re right, of course. To a point. But I’ve seen inside your head. I moved through your memories and beliefs as if they were my own. Please believe me when I tell you: you’re mistaken about a few things. A few very important things. May I have a few minutes to talk?
“Do I have any choice?”
In this, you do. I’ll be quiet if that’s what you’d prefer. I owe you that much.
He sneers. The skin of his legs itches something fierce. His toes twitch without him asking them to. “Fine. Talk. Anything to get my mind off the pain.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Truth And Consequence
I AM A girl who appreciates determination.
A little about me, then.
Aphrodite despised my beauty. She sent her son, Eros, to me, in the hopes that he would scratch me with one of his arrows when I slept so that when I awoke, I would fall in love with the first horrible creature she placed before my eyes—toad, snake, minotaur, who can say? But the plan failed. Eros accidentally scratched himself with the arrow and fell in love with me.
That was the start of my troubles.
I was just a mortal girl, then. Just a fool in love with a god, a god who was the son of a jealous, overprotective mother who decided she would do anything to keep us apart. She moved hell and earth—separating us time and again, cursing the both of us, ensuring that we could not be together. Illusions and lies. And yet we persisted, and then came the day that I was done with illusions and lies, so I went to Aphrodite in her temple and asked her what I must do to earn her favor.
She set before me task after task, all meant to be impossible. I had to separate grains by hand—thousands upon thousands of them, each impossible to distinguish from the other with the human eye, and so it was that the ants took pity on me and helped me (earning the goddess’s ire in the process). Seeing that I had completed that task, she had me bring to her a snippet of golden wool—another impossible chore given the fact that these sheep were thrice the size of what you and I know, and would crush you against the rocks or buck you off the cliff. And so I waited for them to sleep and instead plucked the snippets of wool from the thorny trees against which they slept.
She had me collect water from a forbidden river.
She had me stalk and behead seven lamia.
She had me bottle the tears of the sea serpent, Scylla.
She had me pluck out the eyes of the one-eyed men and bring them to her.
Those, not in the myths. But true just the same.
Then came the day when she said that the stress of having me in her life had caused her beauty to spoil—“curdled like sour milk,” she said. And so she sent me to the Underworld to reclaim some of her beauty. The only way to the unloving depths was to kill myself, so I leapt off a cliff and died. That allowed me to enter the Underworld and navigate its catacombs, hiding from Cerberus and eating nothing but moldy bread so that I would not be bound to that place. Finally I found Persephone and asked her to gift me with a bit of her beauty.
She complied, and sent me on my way.
That last thing, a trap for my own vanity. I thought to open the box just to see—but contained within was not beauty, but sleep. Endless sleep that consumed me.
But then my husband came. He came to save me. He wiped the sleep from my eyes and took me to a safe place, while he traveled to the Mount to ask Zeus to intervene on our behalf—and the Father God did indeed intervene, and declared that we could be married. To protect me from Aphrodite, he poured for me a draught of nectar and fixed a meal of ambrosia and it changed my humanity to divinity. And, for a time, Aphrodite and I shared a grudging peace.
The point of all this is to say that, to dispel illusions and lies, I had help. I had help from my husband. I had help from the ants. An eagle helped me get the water from the river. Hercules helped me slay the lamia. Glorious Zeus, my father figure among the gods who has now gone from us, helped me marry. Sometimes we require assistance in our quest.
And so I’m here to aid you, by telling you the truth about you, your family, and your so-called ‘friend,’ Frank Polcyn.
A SOUND INTERRUPTS the story.