“Makes sense. And you said you were a military kid, right? I approve. Which of your parents was in the army?”
Nathan hesitates, and it seems like he’s having a small internal debate. Then he sighs. “My dad.”
“Not a happy subject?”
“Well, no, I mean—my dad was awesome. I stuck with him after my parents split up. Mom was a flake. Still is. But my dad, it was like he was trying to win Father of the Year every second. We did everything together, when we could. He was away a lot, but when he came home … it was really good, Sara,” he says with a distant look in his eyes.
“Past tense,” I say softly.
“Yeah,” he says, leaning back in his seat and looking gloomy. “He went out on deployment, didn’t come back. Well, we got him back, but … you know what I mean.”
I nod, saying nothing. I know all too well what he means. War never changes.
“It happened back in high school, and it’s just … it’s like I never got a chance to know him. Hell, I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye. I wanted to grow up and make him proud, make him laugh, but I’d … have settled for good-bye.”
“Oh, Nathan,” I say, reaching across the table for his hands. He clasps mine, and I look into his eyes. They dart away, but not before I notice them shining in the dim light of the restaurant. Poor guy. I know his loss—I’ve seen it countless times before and been just as powerless to do anything about it.
But that’s not quite true anymore. He’s a worshipper of mine now, and that means something. I don’t want to give him false hope, but he seems so dejected I feel I have to say something. “Nathan, I need you to understand I can’t do anything yet,” I say, lowering my voice. “I’m far too weak. So take this with a grain of salt … but your father was a warrior, and that matters a great deal.”
He looks back at me, confused.
“I’m the Lady of the Slain, Nathan. Half of those who die in battle belong to me.”
There’s a moment where he just frowns, and I worry I’ve offended him. Then a look of comprehension dawns, and he fixes me with this fantastic expression of joyful hope. I glance over his shoulder and notice the waiter heading toward us, bearing our food. I smile, both for Nathan’s sake and my stomach’s, and I’m about to continue telling him exactly what I can offer when fear rips through me like a knife.
Just over the waiter’s shoulder, I can see a man standing in the entrance of the restaurant, scanning the crowd. The dark gray suit is the same. His patrician features, seemingly locked in a self-confident sneer, show no signs of the damage I inflicted a day ago. I can even make out those frightening, intense brown eyes of his as they dart back and forth incessantly, searching for me.
Garen is here.
4
RAZOR’S EDGE
“What? What is it?” Nathan asks. The terror engulfing my body has obviously registered on my face in some way.
Garen moves a little farther into the restaurant, and his eyes slide down to some device in his hands. It looks like an oversize version of Nathan’s cell phone. Is that what he’s using to track me? But how—
I gasp and glance back at Nathan. The phone. Of course. He hasn’t gotten rid of it yet—used it to find this restaurant, even. I want to be annoyed at him for not being careful enough, but first I need to figure out what to do about my gray-suited stalker. I look up again, and my jaw drops in dismay. I’m too taken aback to be certain, but I think I might’ve even released a small squeak of alarm.
Garen’s looking right at me, that oily grin of his creeping across his face as he moves forward. The waiter stops by my table, and even half a restaurant away, I can see Garen glancing at our order, appraising it, and then looking back at me with a smug expression, as if to say, The filet? Nice choice. Then, while the waiter moves to set Nathan’s plate down in front of him, I watch as Garen smoothly extracts a long sliver of metal from his pocket.
The needle. He’s about to put the restaurant to sleep. I can’t let that happen.
I lunge up, bolting out of my seat. My stomach screams in outrage as I wrench the serving platter from the waiter’s upraised hand, hurling my dinner away. With one smooth motion, I whip the metal disk around and send it tearing through the air on a tight arc.
Garen’s expression changes in an instant to one of surprise as the platter crashes into him, knocking him back and sending the needle clattering to the floor. I don’t waste a second, snatching my steak knife from the table and dashing across the restaurant. Dumbfounded waiters and shocked patrons blur past me, screaming and shouting as I pick up speed.
I leap into the air at Garen, knife upraised, closing the last fifteen feet between us in one giant bound. I’m literally an eyeblink from plunging my blade into the man’s heart when he brings up his wrists, locking them together in an X. I catch a moment’s glimpse of metal bands covered in delicate silver filigrees on his forearms before there’s a staggering flare of light. A brilliant golden explosion catches me in midair and sends me flying away like a piece of paper in a gale. There’s a brief flash of the entire restaurant as I rocket backward before colliding with the far wall with enough force to splinter it. I topple to the floor, dazed and winded, hair spreading onto the tiles around me like a golden net. The steakhouse is spinning; I can barely roll myself onto my back.
Distantly, I’m aware of more screams and stamping feet as the restaurant’s patrons panic and run. Glass litters the floor from shattered windows and drinks, crunching under panicked footsteps. There’s a ringing in my ears, and I can’t seem to get my bearings. Then Garen looms over me, looking down with that awful smile of his. “Fool me once, shame on you,” he says, kneeling and flicking me in the head, right between my eyes.
I moan and try to bring up an arm to bat him away, but succeed only in flopping around like an infant. Garen chuckles and extracts a syringe from his jacket, an antique thing of brass scrollwork and handblown glass. He holds it up to the light, and I see it’s filled with some sort of pale milky fluid. He taps it, then looks back at me. “Fool me twice, shame on—”
There’s a resounding clang that cuts him off midsentence, his head shuddering as if he’s just experienced a very brief and personal earthquake. I have the perfect view as his eyes cross and he tumbles to the floor beside me, unconscious. Nathan’s standing there, panting, a dented serving tray clutched in his hands.
I smile, still dazed, and manage to cough out, “Get me a knife.”
By the time Nathan returns with another steak knife, I’ve managed to pull myself up to a kneeling position. He places the weapon in my hand, and I feel my fingers wrap themselves tightly around its handle. No more messing around with chairs and bludgeoning. I am going to stab this evil freak right between the eyes, split his skull open, and make confetti out of his—
His limbs twitch and lurch inward, spiraling around his torso for the briefest moment before his body folds in on itself and disappears. My knife crashes into the tile right where his head used to be. Garen’s gone again, his form compacting into a pinprick before winking out. I toss the blade away from myself in a fury, unleashing a litany of Nordic curses as I do.
“Damn, was that him?” Nathan asks.
The question brings me out of my rage, and I bite off the rest of the insults as I turn to look at my savior. “Yeah,” I grate, still angry. I take a breath and compose myself. “Yeah, that’s Garen—and you just saved me from him. Nathan, I could kiss you.” Part of me thrashes to the surface, obviously energized by the recent battle, saying Oh yes please do you realize how patiently I’ve waited, and bathes the room in desire before I can cram it back down.
He grins, clearly pleased with himself, and, in a stroke of brilliance I suspect isn’t entirely his own, says, “What’s stopping you?”
I laugh at that and find my footing, levering myself back to a standing position. The warrior goddess in me screams that we should be running, that this isn’t the time for romance. The urges of beauty, vanity, and love cal
l to me as well, though, telling me just how long it’s been, just how pathetic my available dating pool has been lately. They win out in the end.
“Not a damn thing,” I reply, throwing my arms around him and covering his lips with mine. I clutch him tightly, pressing our bodies together for several warm, wonderful seconds before I pull away. Nathan has a faraway, almost mournful look on his face, as if he’s just been rudely awakened from a rather pleasant dream.
I feel a sense of delight bubbling within me and realize I’ve just had my first real kiss in almost thirty years. And I call myself a god of love? I’m about to kiss him again and start making up for lost time when I finally manage to get a hold of myself. We need to get out of here. Garen recovered far too quickly from our last encounter, and I handed him a much worse beating that time. The sooner we make our way onto the open road and toss that stupid phone of Nathan’s, the better. I glance at him and see the dreamy look has faded along with my unanticipated wave of desire, bringing him back to the reality of the shattered restaurant. He looks confused, anxious, and—surprisingly—embarrassed. I think he wouldn’t normally have kissed me out of the blue like that, and now he’s wondering if he’s made things awkward. Well, no time to worry about that now.
I grab Nathan by the hand, and I’m about to lead him outside to join the panicked crowd of fleeing diners and staff when I notice a glimmer at my feet. The syringe. I waver between leaving it, destroying it, and taking it, before finally deciding on the latter. If Garen thinks it can put down a god, it might be useful. I scoop it up with my free hand, drop it into my bag, and hightail it out of the building, joining the crowd of shocked onlookers and staff.
From the chatter around us, most of them seem worried about bombs, gas leaks, and so on, but a few begin darting glances my way, no doubt recognizing the girl who got launched over their heads in the initial blast. I start edging Nathan through the swarm, taking care not to look too suspicious, but when I spot the flash of police lights in the distance, I drop that approach, grab his hand, and make a dash for our car.
“How did he find us?” Nathan asks as we peel out of the restaurant’s parking lot and onto a back road before the cops can cordon the place off.
The question brings my annoyance back in full force. “Your stupid phone is how. I told you to get rid of that thing.”
He pulls it out of his pocket, cradling the glossy rectangle of metal and glass in one hand as he keeps the other on the steering wheel. Seeing him so obsessed with the trinket simply irritates me even more. “It’s just a phone. Destroy it now, or I will.”
Nathan sighs. “But I have all my contacts on here. Let’s hit a store first so I can at least transfer them to a new one.”
“No!” I shout, thumping the dashboard. “Do you realize how quickly he found us before? And now you want to go and make a record of the transfer? Get. Rid. Of. It.”
He hesitates again, so I grab it out of his hands. “Hey!” he barks.
But it’s too late. I start lowering the window, ready to chuck the thing onto the pavement.
“Okay, okay! Stop!” he says, slowing down the car. “We need to get it wiped, whatever we do. They might be able to recover stuff from it that’ll lead them to us.”
That halts me. I raise the window with a reluctant tap of my finger. “Fine. How do we do that?”
He shrugs. “Take it to a store?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “We can’t just mangle it beyond repair?” This is, incidentally, the traditional method of solving problems in my pantheon.
Nathan stops the car and looks at the phone in my hands, then at me. “All right, yeah. That ought to do it, too.”
I glance out the window. Strip malls and occasional houses. “Great. Find me an empty lot,” I say, still holding on to the phone.
In a few minutes, we drive up to a sandy parcel of land with a sign proclaiming it to be the planned site of a sprawling mixed-use commercial and residential complex. Considering the weathered look of the place, I get the impression that some economic issues have put a prolonged hold on the construction. I get out of the car and stalk into the undeveloped land, looking around.
“Here we go,” I say, spotting what I’ve come for and moving toward it.
“What are you doing?” Nathan calls out, following me.
“Putting an end to this device,” I reply, showing him the large rock I’ve found. It’s not the cinder block I was hoping for, but it’ll do.
“Well, just make it quick,” Nathan says. “Don’t want the poor thing to suffer, after all.”
I roll my eyes at that, then turn and place the phone on the ground. I raise the hunk of rock over my head and bring it down onto the gadget with crushing force. The screen cracks. It takes a few tries, but eventually I manage to bash the thing into oblivion, pieces of circuitry and glass flying everywhere. All the while, I imagine what I’m really hitting is Garen’s face. It’s surprisingly cathartic. A field of splintered phone fragments surrounds me when I’m done. I toss the rock away and stand back up.
“Better?” Nathan asks beside me.
“Much,” I say. “Now, let’s get something to eat. Killing phones is hungry work.”
We head back to the car. “Can we risk staying in this city?” I ask as we get in, concerned that Garen’s finding us at a restaurant instead of, say, an international airport might lead him to assume we’re not fleeing for safety in foreign lands.
Nathan shrugs. “I don’t think he’s seen anything so far that would tip him off about our plans. Plus it doesn’t seem like the government’s on his side or anything—it’s not like he can put your picture in front of cops and federal agents. The first time he found you, it was probably because of a whole bunch of research. Just now it was a cell phone. A poor, innocent cell phone.”
I stare at him.
“Okay, not ready to joke about that just yet,” he murmurs. “Point is, Garen strikes me as a reactive sort—he probably has a lot of gods to deal with and limited resources. He’ll follow up on a lead when he comes across it, but canvassing an entire city doesn’t seem his speed.”
That makes sense. If he really had a bottomless budget and government connections, after all, he’d have brought a SWAT team to the restaurant, not a pair of magic bracers. “All right,” I say, nodding. “Orlando it is.”
We end up hitting a late-night taco place with a giant mustache for a sign in the heart of the downtown area. If there’s the slightest chance Garen is canvassing upscale steakhouses, this should be as far as we can get from one. Nathan gets a giant quesadilla, I settle for an assortment of fish tacos, and we split an order of nachos. It’s not my poor lost filet, but it’s still quite delicious. Our conversation is casual, focusing on the things we purchased and our plans for the next day. Subjects like his father, Garen, and even our kiss are set aside. On that note, I’m pretty certain I prompted that moment; my powers can get away from me when I’m keyed up. At least he’s not taking it badly—things don’t feel awkward. I wonder if I should apologize, or at least try to explain what happened, but it seems like we’re already past it and I don’t want to be the one to bring it up.
We spend the evening in another free hotel room and then head out bright and early the next day on our errands. Nathan’s credit cards, old driver’s license, and phone have been destroyed. With his Camry abandoned in a parking lot, everything tying him to his old life is gone. Our first stop is the DMV, where we find out we’ll need to wait forty-five days for a new license plate for the car—and it needs to be mailed to our home. Our current IDs only have a fake address on them, but we manage to persuade them to mail the plate to a PO box we set up at the downtown post office the day before.
That just leaves the job. Nathan and I pull up outside the Walt Disney World Casting Center in the early afternoon. There had been some discussion on which park to go with, but Nathan assures me my ideal career is here, not at Universal. I take his word for it. That, and I have encyclopedic knowledge of Dis
ney’s entire archive—the Inward Care Center didn’t allow R-rated movies, so family-friendly films were on almost every day. I saw a lot of Disney, let me tell you, and I liked pretty much all of it, except maybe the one about Hercules. Talk about whitewashing the past. None of the Greek gods were that nice, not even Hades.
The obstacles arise as soon as we walk through the doors. It’s quickly made clear that becoming a face character is normally a difficult task. They hold mass auditions for roles like that; I need references, relevant experience, blah, blah. I barrel through it with overflowing amounts of love and adoration. It seems like I have to charm a lot of people, too. There’s a pretty extensive bureaucracy at work here, and as soon as I have one level completely convinced I’m the most deliriously amazing hire they could ever hope for, I need to move up to their manager so I can get something on such short notice.
The process takes the whole day, and along the way, we learn that Nathan was wrong about the employee housing—it’s only available to college interns. My new friends at the casting center are only too happy to inform us that there are apartment rentals that cater directly to Disney’s workforce, however, so Nathan takes the CR-V and leaves partway through to get us a place.
By the time he returns a few hours later, I have just about everything squared away except our mailing address, which he provides. He informs me he’s put down a security deposit and paid a month in advance at one of the nicer apartment complexes in the area, right near a central bus line to the parks. I start training in a few days as a face character—a princess, of course—and from everything they’ve said so far, I’m cheating. A lot. There’s no way a brand-new addition like myself would be allowed anywhere near such a prestigious role, as they’re usually reserved for professionals and longtime cast members. Everyone wants to be one, and vacancies are incredibly rare.
Pulling this off has taken a lot out of me. I might be feeling better since my “escape” from Inward, but I’m still far too weak, especially considering how much I’ve been relying on these meager powers. Abusing my birthright is just as effective here as it was elsewhere around town, and it’s really becoming clear to me just how hard it would be to get anywhere in this society without it. I need to get stronger, and fast. If you think about it, my only marketable skill is getting people to fall madly in love with me. Without it, I have a hunch that the battle between my hunger for belief and need for safety would end up getting me in a lot of trouble.
Freya Page 5