I give him a parting wave, then return to my research on San Francisco’s hot spots. With a drink in hand and the air still warm from the fading sun, it seems like a great way to spend the night, but only a few mojitos later, I find myself getting bored and decide to pack up. There are some popular clubs nearby I’ve been meaning to visit, and Mahesh tells me I should start baiting the paparazzi when I get the chance. Having my face on a tabloid magazine is apparently one more rite of passage I’ll need to hit sooner or later, and my feud with Kirsten will probably escalate that timing.
Various potential outfits make their way through my mind as I head upstairs. I’m debating between a miniskirt and top or a dress as I unlock my room and head inside. I toss my laptop on the closest convenient surface and reach to turn on the lights when the skyline beyond catches my eye.
I pad across the carpet and slip out onto the veranda to watch night fall over the city, clutching the railing and letting the warm breeze play with my hair. A handful of stars have made an appearance, twinkling dimly through Los Angeles’s light pollution, and a sad smile tugs my lips as I settle my arms on the balcony and watch them. A deep, unexpected longing hits me in that moment, an impossible craving to wind back the clock, to watch those same stars shine on my ancient kingdoms and return to a time of steel, superstition, and strength.
I think of the clubs, the music, the storm of camera flashes this evening promises, and shake my head. Not tonight. I spare a last glance for the heavens, then go back inside, shower, and throw on some nice jeans and a simple top before heading for the lobby. I hail a cab at the hotel’s taxi stand and ask him to take me to Griffith Observatory. I’d been meaning to visit, and tonight’s as good as any to spend with the heavens.
My driver tells me it’ll be near closing time, but the thought of having a mountaintop refuge all to myself just makes the idea more enticing. A little over half an hour later, we arrive in the observatory’s parking lot on the slope of Mount Hollywood. There are still a good number of tourists and locals alike wandering the grounds as we pull into the roundabout in front of the building. I pay the driver and strike out across the entrance lawn. The concrete Astronomers Monument looms above me, its art deco renderings of six of the field’s most famous figures turning my head before I continue to the main building.
It’s a beautiful place, tastefully lit at night, and the cool wind here helps banish the summer heat rising from the city below. I’ve heard wonderful things about the facilities inside, but I only have eyes for the view beyond. Los Angeles sprawls before me, a garden of light greater than anything my medieval heart could imagine. I linger on the etched towers of finance and success that frame its downtown before turning to the distant glimmer of moonlight on the waters off Santa Monica’s shores. I can’t tell you the last time I took an evening off to watch the stars. A touch of liquid gold begins to gather at the corners of my eyes from the unending splendor of it all.
I beeline for the curved ramps that lead to the observatory’s terrace and make my way to the iconic arches that encircle its planetarium. The tourists’ ranks thin as closing time approaches, and security guards start hustling the stragglers away, breaking the serenity of the place with loud calls of “Park is closed!” and annoying sweeps of their flashlights.
A handful approach my post on the promenade’s wall, aiming to escort me off the hill alongside the rest of the visitors, but I send them away with a touch of my magic, encouraging them to pick a cozy spot for a long nap. Soon, it’s just me, an empty walkway, and the sky above.
I can almost imagine I’m back in my homelands, watching the heavens spin above the farmlands of my flock. I put a hand on the railing, intending to lever myself onto it so I can lie down and immerse myself in the night sky, when a soft click stops me. I freeze, recognizing it in an instant.
It’s the sound of a gun being readied.
“Evening, miss,” a deep, professional voice says from the shadows of one nearby arch. “A moment of your time, if that’s all right.”
I sigh and turn away from the magnificent view. Why can’t I be the one on a date?
10
STARRY-EYED
NATHAN
Nathan drums his fingers on the tablecloth and hopes for death.
Sekhmet stares at him.
Nathan checks the menu again, finding its contents unchanged from the last six times he’s looked, which sadly implies that “Deadly Fast-acting Poison” is not among them.
Sekhmet continues to stare at him.
“Do you still need a few minutes?” their waitress asks, startling him. “Anything I can bring you while you decide?”
“A gun, please.”
“Pardon?” she says, clearly thinking she’s misheard.
Nathan blows out a sigh. “Nothing. Few more minutes, yeah.”
Ah, well, he thinks as she leaves. Not the worst date I’ve ever been on. At least Dionysus hasn’t shown up to this one. He looks around for a moment, worried. Yet.
Sekhmet watches the waitress go. Then she turns her beautiful dark eyes back to Nathan and … continues to stare at him.
Things had started off so well, too.
They’d both been perfectly chatty on the drive to the restaurant, swapping stories and complaining about the traffic. They’d even had an excited conversation about an upcoming superhero movie they wanted to see, while waiting for the hostess. Then they’d sat down, gotten menus, and everything had gone to hell.
Nathan wasn’t even sure what had happened. One minute they’d been talking and laughing, and the next, he found himself in the middle of a choking silence that had, by this point, stretched to soul-crushing lengths.
He’d tried to lift it, of course, but every topic he tossed to Sekhmet was batted aside by precision grunts or monosyllabic dismissals. It was as if he’d sat down with a completely different person. Once, a lifetime ago and a restaurant away, he could remember being very eager to see where the evening went.
Now he prays for an earthquake to consume it.
“All right, I give up,” he says after a few more seconds tick by. No point in pretending this was anything other than a complete failure, and as long as he was going down in flames, he might as well learn what started the fire. “What’d I do?”
To his immense surprise, Sekhmet releases a throaty laugh and preens like she’s just won a race. “Ha, wonderful,” she says. “This is better now, yes? More … romantic?”
“Wha—?”
“Our date. I ignored you, you capitulated, you like me more now.”
“I—I do?”
A tiny frown makes an appearance. “That … is how it works, yes? Just a moment, perhaps I missed a step.”
She leans over and begins rooting through her purse. After a moment’s search, she retrieves a marked-up fashion magazine coated in handwritten notes, circles, and hieroglyphics. “Let’s see…” she murmurs, paging through the dog-eared periodical. “‘Play hard to get,’” she reads. “‘Be clear,’ and ‘don’t send mixed messages,’ of course. See, I was very consistent, wasn’t I? ‘Wear something sexy, so he’ll know what he’s missing.’” She looks at her short wine-colored mini, then back at him, concerned. “This is attractive?”
“Uh. Very. Sekhmet, what are you—?”
“So the apparel is correct, then. What else?” More riffling through the magazine. “Did I ignore enough of your jokes? You stopped making them rather quickly, so I thought—”
“Sekhmet?” he tries. “Sekhmet, look at me.”
“Hm?” she says, pausing her search.
“Is that a magazine for teenagers?”
She holds it up, and Nathan’s heart drops when he sees the brightly colored cover. “Yes, well, few pieces of comparable literature are targeted at women of my age,” Sekhmet says. “So I chose something closer to yours.”
“Gotcha. Um … why?”
Her lips twist and she lowers the magazine. “I am … oh, this is difficult.”
Nathan w
atches her, feeling it would go better if he didn’t press. After a few seconds of hand-wringing, Sekhmet sighs and says, “I have not done this before. Your world, its society and culture … you must understand how impossibly distant it is from what I know. I want for this to go well, this outing you proposed, yet I do not know how such things are done. I—I feel I am missing so many pieces!”
“But that’s not—”
She picks up the magazine again and shakes it at him. “Look at all these!” she says, sounding distraught. “I do not have any friends with which to ‘dish’ about you, nor do I understand how to speak ‘guy.’ I am unsure what LOL is, or how to make you do it, and we—” She groans, slapping another note-coated article. “Oh, we have not even texted!”
“There’s, uh, a lot about texting in there, I take it?” Nathan asks, unsure how to correct her without laughing.
“Pages,” she says, morose.
“So … look,” he says, trying to find the right words. “All that stuff we were talking about on the ride over? And the lobby?”
“Yes…?”
“That was already the start of our date.”
She freezes at that, eyes going wide. “Oh no, then I have already—”
“Made a great first impression,” Nathan says, trying out his most placating smile. “Seriously, you don’t need to be something you’re not. I don’t want a relationship with plain Jane. I asked you out.”
“Then y-you’re aware?” she says, sounding hopeful. “Of this distance? It is not a, ah, ‘downer’?”
“Sekhmet, you’re a multimillennia-old cat goddess from ancient Egypt. I think distance is assumed.”
That gets him a wan smile. “It is more than time or place, Nathan,” she says. “The hearts and minds of your kin … they have changed. I haven’t.”
“So what?” he says immediately. “Who says you need to?”
Her eyes slide to the magazine.
Nathan lets out a small groan. “Screw that noise. I like you. Wouldn’t have asked you out if I didn’t, and—here, let me just…”
Wanting to make a point about how unlike a typical date he was, too, Nathan begins focusing on his link to Freya, drawing threads of spellcraft to himself through that celestial keyhole.
There’s an endless pool of the stuff, a font hidden beneath reality just waiting to be tapped … if you can reach it. Nathan’s connection to his goddess is his ticket in, the foundation for every trick in his growing spellbook. It took a lot of practice to do anything with it, of course, but he’d hit the jackpot when it came to teachers. Freya, Sekhmet, and all the other gods seem born from and to the stuff, and they wielded its reality-warping might as reflexively as a heartbeat.
It isn’t so simple for Nathan, but the flipside, Freya had explained, was that he wasn’t bound by belief in what he could do with it. Enough time and effort, and he could stand among the gods themselves, could surpass even them in the variety and breadth of his designs. And so, to prove to Sekhmet how neither of them needed to be bound by convention, he tries something new.
Carefully, Nathan teases threads of force into existence, looping the invisible strands of energy around the magazine to form a hardened barrier. He frowns as he does it, trying to remember his lessons with Freya and build on the principles she taught.
“It’s all about the rift,” she’d told him, “the breach between your soul and our magic. Widen it, give it a reason to help you, and it will. Don’t obsess over what you’re doing—focus on where you’re getting it from.”
He wraps the magazine a few more times, just to be safe, and then, with a mental twitch that feels a bit like yanking the leg out from under a chair, wrenches them together.
Instantly, the magazine crumples into a quarter-sized lump of smashed paper, sucking into itself as all those strands burst under the pressure he’s applied. The compressed ball spins once, rolls to the side of the table, and teeters on the edge for a moment before falling off.
Sekhmet watches the death of her magazine with amusement, and once it’s gone, returns her attention to Nathan.
“Well put,” she says after a moment. She stretches, laughing to herself, and fixes him with a very different look when she’s done. “So all their advice about letting you make the first move, those prudish tips to restrain oneself and ‘see what develops’…?”
Nathan feels an overjoyed smile begin to make its way onto his face. “Y’know what?” he says. “Might just want to listen to your heart, there.”
“Mm, that is not what speaks to me at this time,” Sekhmet says, and before Nathan can reply, she lunges across the table, wrapping her arms around him and smashing her lips against his as they topple backward onto the floor.
A chorus of gasps from the other diners follows their descent, but Nathan can’t really bring himself to care, busy as he is with an armful of writhing, smooching Sekhmet.
“Sir? Ma’am?” their waitress says as she dashes over, shocked. “Do you, um, need any help?”
Sekhmet breaks away for a moment to give her an amused look. “I think we are prepared to order our meals,” she says, then turns back to Nathan. “I find myself rather … hungry.”
“We could get it to go,” he suggests, hopeful.
She barks a laugh at that, grabs Nathan’s chair with both hands, and springs upward, wrenching them from the floor with inhuman strength and agility. The waitress backpedals as Sekhmet, Nathan, and his chair come off the ground and smack upright with a clatter. Sekhmet picks herself off of Nathan’s lap, traces a finger beneath his chin, and saunters back to her own seat. As she does, he notices she didn’t even knock over the wineglasses in her leap.
“The porterhouse,” Sekhmet says after a glance at her menu. “With the lobster mashed potatoes.”
“Uh, very good,” the waitress says. “For you, sir?”
“I’ll try the Alaskan king crab black truffle gnocchi,” Nathan says, reciting the choice he’d picked out around his third pass at the menu.
The waitress takes their wine orders, exchanges some quick pleasantries, and then moves away as quickly as decorum allows. Nathan has a feeling she won’t be all that broken up when they leave.
“No steak for you?” Sekhmet asks after she’d left. “Are they not famed for them?”
“I’d feel bad,” Nathan says, shrugging.
“For the cow?”
“Ha, no. Well, a little. But mainly for Freya. She’s kind of obsessed with high-end steaks, and I already got the impression she’ll be feeling lonely tonight. Didn’t want to rub it in.”
“Lonely?” Sekhmet repeats, taken aback. “She seemed perfectly supportive.”
“Well, yeah, but she’d never want us to feel bad for going out. I think—eh, it’s hard to explain.”
Sekhmet gives him a look of patient interest, making it clear she’d be happy to hear the long version.
“Okay, you … know how gods influence people, right?” he says after a moment.
“Of course. We are primal—keystones in the foundations of existence. It is only natural we should have an impact on those around us.”
“Right. Sure. Freya’s worried it’s getting to me, affecting my judgment. I-I’m not entirely sure if that’s true, but I do know I’m starting to get a really good sense of how she’s feeling these days, maybe even better than she knows herself.”
“And how is that?”
“Frustrated. She knows Finemdi’s the real threat, but part of her thinks taking Ares out will make everything better since he’s working for them, so she’s bending over backward to focus on that.” He blows out a sigh, feeling a little frustration of his own at the thought. He might have agreed to help, but that didn’t mean it sat right with him.
He’s devoted to Freya—maybe even to a fault—but silly concepts like “sanity” still keep him from applying that same loyalty to her current mission.
“And you disagree with this course?” Sekhmet asks, picking up on it.
“Well, y
eah!” he says, straightening in his chair. “C’mon, they just recruited the guy. He can’t be that important to them yet, no matter what Samantha says. If anything, the focus should be on Finemdi as a whole, because as long as they exist, we’ll always be looking over our shoulders. Freya’s letting anger blind her. Nine hundred years of it, sure, and that sucks, but it’s not like bad ideas suddenly get validated once they hit a certain number of centuries.”
“You speak with great authority on such spans of time,” Sekhmet says, a tiny smile tugging at her mouth, “for one who has seen so little of them.”
Nathan pauses. His first reaction is to apologize and back down, but then he notes his date’s bemused expression and realizes that if anyone might appreciate a touch of conviction, it’s her. “I know I haven’t been around very long,” he begins, “but you did say that the world has changed—maybe those old vendettas deserve a fresh pair of eyes?”
“And hers are not quite so … ‘fresh’?” Sekhmet asks, still seeming entertained.
“Sometimes!” Nathan says, sticking to his guns. “I mean, you’re a god”—Sekhmet smirks at that and feigns surprise, like it’s news to her—“so tell me: Is it better to have a mindless follower who goes along with everything you want, or someone who’s willing to challenge you?”
“A challenge is, of course, always preferable,” Sekhmet says. “Though I believe you have crafted your question knowing my fondness for such things.”
“Ha, maybe. I think Freya’s the same way, though. Open to disagreement, as long as it comes from the right place.”
“You do have a free-spiritedness in you,” Sekhmet says, her tone approving. “A fact she has surely marked, as it is rare for even the most rebellious to question their gods. How, I wonder, did you come to embrace such a trait so thoroughly?”
Nathan thinks it over for a moment. “Probably being a military brat,” he says. “Loved my dad, hated his rules. I’m not sure you can grow up in that world and not want to question authority.”
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