Mortality Bites - The COMPLETE Boxed Set (Books 1 - 10): An Urban Fantasy Epic Adventure

by Ramy Vance

  The gods’ departure had thrown faith—and, by extension, the faithful—into disarray. On the one hand, it had confirmed that the gods and capital G God existed. But on the other hand, they had abandoned us. What was the point in worshipping something we knew wasn’t there?

  Still, faith may have left us, but its guiding tenets hadn’t. Some held onto those with furious fervor. Some, like this captain, weighed the cost of life against his orders. He was weighing the chances of peace against the chances of victory through destruction.

  He pursed his lips before nodding. “Amendment to your proposal, soldier. I watch the hell out of the island and if I see any of them leaving, I rain holy hell on the place with everything we’ve got. If all is silent, then we follow your plan until dawn.”

  “Dawn?” I said.

  “Dawn is the cut-off point. The bombs drop then, no matter what.”

  “But—” I started, but Jean lifted a silencing hand. He gave me a look that said, “Don’t push it, because this deal won’t get any sweeter.”

  Then Jean saluted Captain Donnelly—properly—and said, “Thank you, Captain.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Keiko and I chimed in.

  He grunted. “I’m not doing this as a favor to any of you. I’m doing this because, strategically, it makes the most sense. Now, if you don’t mind.” He tucked his hat under his arm as he turned on his heel and headed for the door.

  And with that, he left Jean, Keiko and me in the metal tomb of this battleship’s bowels.

  “That went well,” Jean said.

  I shrugged. “I don’t really care how it went. We’ve got to figure out how to stop these guys.”

  “Agreed,” Jean said, before scratching his head. “So how do we do that?”

  Yep—my whole “pulling a plan out of thin air” theory about everything Jean had just spouted off to Donnelly had been 100% correct.

  We sat in silence for a long minute before Keiko said, “Can I get to the water? I shall call the makara—”

  “Meres Griffin,” Jean chimed in.

  “You’re like a dog with a bone,” I said. “Please Keiko, go on …”

  She gave me a curt bow. “I shall call the makara and ask the great sea creature what is happening. Such information will be valuable to us.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Not so simple,” Jean said. “These guys are trigger-happy. A giant sea creature shows up and they’d be all pew pew.” He gestured with his pointer finger and thumb out as he made the laser gun sounds. “But we can get that grunt to speedboat you far enough away to avoid any friendly fire.”

  “Make it so,” I said.

  “Star Trek joke?” Jean asked.

  I nodded.

  “Because me and the captain of the Starship Enterprise share the same name?”

  Again, I nodded.

  “But I’m not the captain of any ship, Starship or otherwise. You know that, right?”

  I gave him a blank look.

  “Just to avoid any confusion: Jean-Luc Picard, him. Jean-Luc Matthias, me.”

  “Now you’re trying to annoy me,” I groaned.

  He pointed at me. “Pew pew.”

  ↔

  JEAN CALLED IT IN, and within minutes Keiko was whisked away to have her little chat with Meres Griffin (hey, the name worked), leaving Jean and me alone in the USS Destroy Everything at Dawn.

  “Now what?” Jean asked.

  If we were back in Montreal, I would have suggested going to the Other Studies Library and hitting the books. But given we were on a ship on the other side of the planet, that wasn’t really an option. Still, we weren’t without resources. Or rather, we weren’t without access to those with resources. “Does this floating bathtub have Wi-Fi?” I asked.

  WHAT’S THE PLAN, PHIL?

  J ean logged me into one of the terminals using his login details. The first scene that came up had three folders on it, which were labeled: Active Missions, Classified and Toys Yet To Be Purchased.

  “Toys yet to be purchased, huh?” I said. “RPGs, semi-automatics … an iron maiden from Medieval Torture ‘R’ Us? You know, I was put in one of those and—”

  Jean was clearly annoyed by me chiding him, because he clicked on the folder and said, “No, just toys.” In the folder, images of He-Man, Cabbage Patch dolls, G.I. Joes, Transformers, Voltron and Smurfs appeared on the screen. His eyes lit up on seeing them. “That’s what I’ve either collected or kept from my childhood. This folder is what I have left to collect and—”

  “I get it,” I said. “You’re a geek.”

  “At your service, ma’am.” He gave me a real salute instead of the half-hearted ones he’d given his superiors. Then he closed the folder with a mutter. “Simpler times. So what do you want?”

  “Chrome.”

  “Chrome?”

  “Or Firefox, Safari … any browser other than Explorer, really.”

  “You want access to the Internet? We literally have the greatest Other database ever conceived and you want … what, Wikipedia?”

  “Actually, Twitter for reliable sites and Reddit for knowledgeable people. I want to talk to some online peeps who actually know their history and mythology. Unlike Captain Crunch out there.”

  Jean clicked on an icon that brought up a screen typical of Windows 10 and clicked on the Chrome icon. “Here you go,” he said. “And as for Captain Crunch, I give him a hard time, but he’s one of the good guys.”

  “In my limited three hundred years of experience, I’ve come to learn two truths. One—the real bad guys are the ones who think they’re the good guys.”

  “And,” Jean said gesturing for me to hurry up with my point.

  “Two,” I said, drawing out the word for an unnecessarily long time … you know, just to annoy the soldier, “good guys have to do bad things to stop them.”

  “Humph,” Jean said. “Cynical much?”

  “You would be, too, after what I’ve—”

  “—seen?” Jean interrupted.

  “Done,” I corrected.

  I clicked on the search bar and logged onto Twitter. “Let’s start with our Norse god, shall we?” I muttered to myself and typed Baldr’s name followed by #FolkloreThursday. Immediately several searches came up with his name. “Before the gods left, this was a pretty cool hashtag created by people who love mythology, legends, old stories. You know, the non-toy geeks.”

  “Hey, it’s a Venn diagram,” Jean said.

  I nodded. “But after the gods did their whole GrandExodus thing, this hashtag exploded, with the diehards archiving everything known. And I have it on very good authority that there are some heavy-hitter Others that contribute to this every week.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Penemue and the Sphinx, to name a couple.”

  Jean ran his hand through his hair. “Holy guacamole. Penemue, I don’t know, but the Sphinx? That’s about as heavy-hitting as you can get knowledge-wise. How the hell does the army not know about this?”

  I shrugged. “I have my theories and you wouldn’t like any of them.” I opened more browsers and repeated the search term for the other two dead gods.

  The initial information that came up was fairly typical stuff, everything we already knew about the three dead gods. Baldr was killed by a spear made out of mistletoe; Izanami was trapped by her once husband Izanagi; Quetzalcoatl slept with his sister and, out of shame, killed himself on a funeral pyre made by his servants.

  Like I said: typical stuff.

  They all died, true, but each came from a pantheon with the power of resurrection. And their counterpart gods chose not to raise them from the dead. Izanami because it was feared that death had corrupted her. Baldr because they believed his death was a sign of Ragnarök. Only Quetzalcoatl’s myth stories didn’t give a reason for why he remained dead.

  Deirdre had mentioned on the plane over to Japan that a deal had been made with the gods after Jesus’s resurrection. No god could return any dead thing back to life, but
that didn’t explain why these dead gods weren’t brought back. They had all died before Jesus—before the accords.

  That gelled with what Aki the tanuki had said about the gods … about how vile they were and more of a liability than anything else. But still, so many gods did so much shitty stuff that these guys’ crimes fell pretty firmly in the bog-standard column of the Horrible Stuff Gods Do category.

  “This is useless,” I said. “We’re not learning anything new.”

  Jean nodded. “I was hoping to find some commonality between the three, but I can’t. You can find common elements between two of them easily enough, but all three?” He shook his head.

  “OK, let’s work on a dual basis. What do we get?”

  “Quelzalcoatl and Baldr were both burned on a funeral pyre. Izanami and Quelzalcoatl both manifested something after their death. Quelzalcoatl manifested flocks of birds and Izanami created monsters called shikome after she died. Baldr and Izanami’s pantheons both believed that their deaths were a sign or stepping stone toward the end of the world—”

  “And all three were left behind when the apocalypse happened,” I added.

  “So? It wasn’t like the gods leaving ended everything.”

  “True, but maybe that’s out of design. Think about it: immortal beings don’t exactly think in terms of immediacy. Maybe their leaving was step one. Step two is these guys return.”

  “So what? We’re on the Seven Step Plan for the Apocalypse?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe? Two out of three are signposts for the end of days. And as for the third one—Quelzalcoatl—he … he …” I snapped my fingers as I jolted back to the computer. “Where is it? Where is it?” I said as I went through my searches, looking for a tidbit of information I had bypassed. Finding it, I clicked on the link. “Here.”

  “The Book of Mormon?”

  “Yeah.” I smiled. “Our Venn diagram finally has a three-circle overlap.”

  “Again … The Book of Mormon? Outside of scratchy underwear, what do the Mormons have to do with the end of days?”

  “Read here,” I said. “ ‘The story of the life of the Mexican divinity Quetzalcoatl closely resembles that of the Savior’ … as in Jesus Christ.”

  “Yeah,” Jean said, “but it also says that the theory was debunked as folklore.”

  “So? We live in a world that is literally one huge, world-shattering debunking of folklore. What if”—I looked at the name—“John Taylor the church leader is right? What if Quetzalcoatl is Jesus? Then his return is a sign of the Apocalypse.”

  “Our overlap,” Jean said with a groan.

  Normally figuring out something like this would have resulted in a victory lap, but all we really managed to uncover was that the three dead gods shared one common trait: their return meant the end of days.

  ↔

  “OK,” Jean said, “but we’re still no closer to anything we didn’t know already. All we’ve done is upgraded this from a gods-are-coming-to-enslave-us bad to a gods-are-coming-to-kill-us bad. We still don’t have a plan other than that we need to stop them.”

  “Which is something I was doing until you pulled me out.”

  Jean waved a dismissive hand. “Spilled milk and all that.”

  I leaned back in my chair, rubbing my temples. I had no idea what we needed to do other than get me back into the Kami Subete Hakubutsukan, where I stood a fighting chance of taking them down. And all that was predicated on the hope that I could get the god-killing Lance of Longinus back and that the gods hadn’t gathered enough power to be more of a challenge.

  “If ever we needed a miracle, now’s the time,” I muttered. And as if answering my prayers, a radio crackled in the room.

  ↔

  KEIKO’S VOICE came through the speakers. “Jean, Kat … I have spoken to the makara.”

  I looked over at Jean, expecting him to repeat his joke, but the soldier didn’t and I took it as a bad sign. He was giving up, and right now we needed all the fight we could muster.

  “We’re here and listening. Go on,” Jean said.

  “I have spoken to the makara,” she repeated. “Explained our situation. They are willing to help us engage the enemy. A coordinated attack is to happen at midnight—this evening. They will help us find a way back into the museum.”

  That wasn’t good enough.

  “But the bombs will go flying at dawn,” I said. “The last time I was in there, I was gone for thirty-six hours. We’ll be caught in the explosions.”

  The radio didn’t answer; only the crackling sound of wind and solemn contemplation came through.

  For a long moment we didn’t move, didn’t say anything. Until finally the noro priestess’s voice came through: “Three lives for the world. It is a small sacrifice.”

  Jean sighed. “Maybe not. We have no idea how the bombing will affect anyone actually inside the museum. We could all go inside and—”

  “Potentially give the gods two more human souls to amp up their powers?”

  “Yeah, but you were super-charged in there. Control the controllable ...” His voice trailed off as he went through the logic. “We don’t really understand how this works, do we? But the dead gods do. We can’t risk that. Control the controllable,” he repeated.

  “Fine,” I said, “I go alone.”

  “No, Katto-san, you will not go alone.”

  Jean shook his head, too. “Can’t let you do that. What we can do is get you in as soon as possible and then the noro and I beeline it to the shore in the hopes of missing the fireworks. The timing will be tight, but …” From the way he spoke, I understood that he knew full well going on this mission was a suicide mission for him and Keiko. Probably for me, too.

  But apparently in the Venn diagram’s overlap of Keiko, Jean and me, we shared one undeniable, frustrating quality: we were all willing to die for what we believed was right.

  NOT ALL GOODBYES ARE CREATED THE SAME

  I t’s not every day that you get to prepare for a suicide mission.

  I mean, I’ve gotten myself into situations where the chances of survival have been in the one- to three-percent range, but this was different. We were facing off against an army of powerful Others who didn’t mind using magic because, by their estimation, when the gods returned so would unlimited access to their magic. We were up against a ridiculously tight timeframe because the non-magical humans were going to drop their bombs in five hours. And to top it all off, we were about to face three dead gods who were more powerful than ever.

  So I put the chances of surviving this one at about a minus four percent. Granted, we had a couple cards up our sleeve: the note and hourglass from Father Time and some Others determined to defend their new home, but somehow I just didn’t think that was enough.

  This was the end. This was how it ended for me: with a boom. My only consolation was that if I did manage to stop the gods, then my death would be the only one.

  It wouldn’t be everyone’s death. It wouldn’t be Deirdre, or Egya, or Justin, or anyone else I loved.

  My other consolation was that if I failed, then I wouldn’t be dying alone. So all in all, a win-win.

  We got on the speedboat and headed toward the Other army. As we cut through the water, Jean handed me a satellite phone. “Anyone you want to call?”

  I thought about it. I could call Justin, but things were so strained between us that I knew speaking to him would only get into my head, and right now I needed to focus on what was happening.

  So no Justin. That left my mom … and she was the last person I wanted to talk to just before biting the big one. She’d probably tell me I was dying wrong. Then there were Egya and Deirdre. I would have loved to speak to them, but they were being held at Camp Kaneda, probably one of the safest places to be … thank the GoneGods for small miracles.

  I shook my head and Jean gave me a pitying look before saying, “You steer. I have someone I need to speak to.” Then he dialed a number and after a couple seconds, I heard him say, “Hi, b
abe.”

  Jean moved to the front of the boat for some privacy, and with the wind blowing, he needed to put his back to the front of the boat, which meant he was facing me.

  I couldn’t hear a thing he was saying. But I could read lips. It was a skill I’d picked up during my hundreds of years of hunting.

  I tried to look away, to give him his privacy. I knew it was the right thing to do, but the alternative was looking at the sea and contemplating my own death.

  So, taking the high road, I eavesdropped (well, eye-dropped) on the last phone call he’d ever make to the love of his life.

  “How’s the hotel going?” he asked before chuckling at something she said. “Well, you tell Miral that she’s an angelic pain in my wingless ass.” He was smiling as he spoke. “And how’s Judith? Not that I care how your ghost of a mother is doing. I only ask because I know that you like it when I do.”

  More chuckles before he said, “That’s good.” Then he paused before his lips pursed. “It’s so good to hear your voice. It will always amaze me how everything becomes OK with just one word from you. Yeah, I know it’s windy. I’m on a boat, heading in for another mission. Dangerous? Isn’t every mission?”

  Jean ran his hands through his hair as he closed his eyes. “Bella, I’m sorry. Sorry I couldn’t be the man you wanted me to be …” He put up a hand. “No, hear me out, please. I’m sorry for not being the man you deserved. I wanted to be that guy—really, I did. Hell, all I ever wanted was to make you proud. You know, help the Others just like you do. I just want you to know that, in my own way, that’s what I’m doing. Helping in the way I believe is best. I know that my job—me hunting some of them down—seems like I’m doing the opposite, but the way I see it is that we have to uproot the worst of them before humans will accept them as part of this world. I may be wrong, but that’s what I’m trying to do.”

  A single tear escaped his closed eyes. “That’s what I will continue to do until the day I die: help the best way I can and hope—pray that I’m making you proud.” There was a long pause as she spoke words I couldn’t hear. He was nodding. “Yeah, I know. I know. I love you, too. In this world and the next—I love you, too.”