Slay

by Matthew Laurence

  Harv glances at his friends, then shrugs. “Eh. We were already on duty. Ms. Riley’s place isn’t far.”

  “You pulled daughter dearest’s security for me? I’m flattered.”

  He smirks at that. “You should be.”

  There’s a distant thrum of thunder, and we all look up again. “Seriously,” I say. “That little voice in the back of your head telling you this isn’t your fight? You should listen to it.”

  Harv snorts and gives me another shrug. Thunder booms again, a lot closer this time, and I turn to Nathan and Sekhmet. “I don’t suppose I have a hope of getting you two to save your skins?”

  Nathan shakes his head, and I feel a little stirring in the back of my mind as he draws some priestly juice, readying himself for a fight. Sekhmet just rolls her eyes and sets her suitcase against the car.

  Lightning cracks in the sky directly above us, and the thunder that follows is like a deep, booming laugh. The pressure starts dropping as a wind kicks up, sweeping a charge of ozone through the air. The sky is almost black now, filled with roiling, angry thunderheads. More lightning flashes, ripping in and out of those storm clouds, and pieces of paper dance across the street on sharp gusts. There aren’t many people out at this hour to begin with, and the few who are begin picking up the pace and moving indoors, seeking shelter from the unnatural weather.

  Honestly, I wish I could join them.

  The storm builds, and a misting rain begins to fall, obscuring the block and dampening the sounds of a waking city with the ceaseless hiss of water. Then a bright, blinding slap of light cuts through the haze. A heartbeat later, a fork of electricity touches down in the middle of the street, shaking the ground and washing out the world in a flare of white.

  I blink rapidly, trying to clear the afterimage of the bolt, and when my vision returns, there’s a man standing in front of us, sandal-wrapped feet astride a new rift in the asphalt. A spotless white toga snaps in the wind, cinched at the waist with a golden belt. Long slate-gray hair streams from his head, and a luxurious white beard rolls down his barrel chest. Electric eyes set in a face of staggering strength regard us with merriment and disdain.

  Have you ever watched a gnat settle on a window beside you and decided to destroy it? How much effort and planning did you put into that moment, that impulse to end a life? You could crush it from the world with the barest twitch of your hand.

  That’s how he looks at us: with eyes of thoughtless death.

  Marble lips crack into a grin, sending laugh lines sweeping across that immortal face. “Ah, a beauty,” he says in a voice of thunder and mirth. “I assume I require no introduction?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, knowing full well who this is. “You meet so many gods in this business, it’s hard to keep track.”

  He chuckles, and the sky seems to pulse in time to his glee. “Is that so? I must strive to be more memorable, then.”

  Lightning builds behind his eyes. Without warning, he raises an arm, gives a casual flick of the wrist, and sends a wall of electricity lancing through the air to fry me and my friends. I barely have time to grit my teeth before the attack tears into me. I feel muscles clench and rip as the voltage picks me up and launches me off my feet, smashing me against the side of the hotel in a spastic heap of twitching limbs. I’m momentarily thankful the assault didn’t knock me unconscious, but that gratitude flips to sorrow as I watch Harv and his two pals go down. Arcs of energy bubble through their bodies, crackling and ricocheting between them and the car they were using for cover—they’re dead before they hit the ground.

  Sekhmet is the only one who’s prepared. In one absurdly fast motion, she seizes Nathan with both hands, clutches him to her chest, and spins to put her body between him and the lightning. It shouldn’t work—flesh is an excellent conductor of electricity—but Sekhmet is a goddess of protection and healing, a creature of boundless magic and rage, and if she says Nathan isn’t going to get hurt, then the laws of physics can pound sand. The energy splashes against her back like a breaking wave, standing her hair on end and doing little else.

  I draw a shuddering breath, berating myself for giving in to my rebellious side and getting Harv killed. So damn senseless. “Zeus,” I choke out. “Yes. I—I know you.”

  “Ha. Jogged your memory, did I?” he says in a happy rumble. “Funny, that. Now be a good girl and come along. I so dislike these errands.”

  “Busywork for the Father of the Gods?” I say, managing to reach a sitting position. I notice Sekhmet has uncurled herself from Nathan, but she’s keeping him close. Good. “How unbecoming.”

  “My, but you are a glutton for punishment,” he says, then tilts his head. “Or a fool. I find myself uninterested in learning which. Hermes. Bring our friends to collect this nuisance.”

  For a moment, there’s just the sound of rain and distant thunder. Then a blur, and a Finemdi agent appears a few feet away from Zeus, looking windblown and disoriented. As he rights himself, the blur returns, depositing another agent. This happens twice more, and after the fourth agent pops onto the street, Zeus nods and holds out a hand, summoning an orb of crackling electricity above its palm.

  “Now submit to these fine men and women, or suffer,” he says, sounding bored.

  “I am no match for you,” I say, swaying to my feet.

  “Wisdom at last,” he says. “Though you have little—”

  “Much as I respect her,” I say, interrupting, “I doubt Sekhmet could defy you for long, as well.”

  He nods. “You are little more than distractions. Yet I sense some doomed attempt at trickery approaches. Tell me, sweetling—what miracle do you hope to produce?”

  I smile and sketch an unstable bow. “A young girl such as myself should not have to face the Father of the Gods. That, I think, is best left to Mother.”

  He arches an eyebrow and opens his mouth to reply, but I cut him off with a shout. “Izanami!” I scream, channeling the name into a prayer. “Queen of the Yomi, She-Who-Invites, goddess of creation and destruction, I call upon you! By my hand you were made free, and now I request the same of you! Izanami! I desire life and death in equal measure! Izana—”

  Zeus’s face darkens as I speak, and the agents begin readying their weapons, stepping forward. The lightning in his hand builds and my hair begins to stand on end, but before he has a chance to fire, before I even finish my prayer, the odds change in spectacular fashion.

  It’s nothing at first—a trick of the light, a flicker out of the corner of the eye. Then a patch of the street lifts, pulling up into a wave of shadows, a curving tentacle of utter midnight. The arc snaps through the air, silent as the grave, and connects with the Master of Olympus in a killing blow so careless, it could have come from him. The shadow whips across Zeus’s chest with blinding speed, carving it in half and sending him toppling to the street in two directions.

  There’s an awkward silence as the Finemdi agents stare at the bisected god thrashing on the asphalt beside them. Then the shadows expand, seeking new victims. Shuddering filaments grow from the road, trailing hands and talons of pitiless void. They twist and elongate, stretching into inhuman arms and sprouting grotesque joints as they lunge through the air to snare agents. The men and women barely have a chance to scream before they’re gone, dragged beneath the street as if into silky black quicksand.

  Zeus levers himself up on one arm, lower half already re-forming like a candle melting in reverse. A half-dozen spheres of lightning snap to life around him, bathing the area in a flickering blue glare and banishing the nearest shadows. At the same time, the blur returns, bringing more agents to the fight. Even as the first wave succumbs to hungry shades, their friends start arriving in seemingly unending numbers.

  A pale white face looms into sight just inches from my own, startling me. “A favor owed,” Izanami whispers, unblinking black eyes boring into mine as her shadows do battle behind her. She looks unchanged from when I mistakenly set her free back at Impulse Station, a rotting porce
lain doll with a superiority complex nearly as big as Zeus’s. Her neck twists, turning her head unnaturally to watch the carnage. “The bearded one offends me,” she says in an absent tone. “He resists. Such hubris is discourteous.”

  There’s a twitch, and she’s staring at me again with no sign of having moved to turn her head. “I will deal with him. Your servants will deal with his. And you will consider my debt repaid.”

  I nod. “By your will,” I manage to say.

  The edges of her lips curve just slightly, producing the vaguest of smiles, and then she whips away, flowing toward the bodies of Harv and his friends on dozens of shadowy hands like a spider with the abdomen of a dead girl. Carefully, she reaches out and touches them, allowing hundreds of tiny threads to seep from her fingers into their corpses. As the tendrils dig into Harv’s body, there’s a momentary pause and something like a voice echoes in the back of my head, asking for permission to take him. I jerk in surprise as I realize what she intends, and that for Harv, I need to allow her to do it—he died believing in me, and that gives me authority over his remains.

  I grant the request, releasing my claim like a sigh into those waiting shadows. Izanami clutches her hands over the corpses, and suddenly all three men are yanked to their feet, the breath of life crammed back into dead flesh through shadow and magic. I gasp and grin, thrilled by this unnatural rebirth. She’s opened the gates to the afterlife, called them forth to live and fight anew in a highly practical demonstration of the perks of being a death goddess. Wounds closing, eyes trailing streamers of darkness, the men collect their weapons. Moving with inhuman speed, they pop over the car and begin picking off the Finemdi agents with quick, tightly controlled bursts. Harv bares shadow-wrapped teeth as he mows down my foes, happily trading lives for the new one he’s been granted.

  Sekhmet, meanwhile, is in full blender mode, tearing through the nearest pack of opponents with bloodthirsty delight. She cackles with horrible glee as she fights, exulting in the brawl like a kid at a birthday party surrounded by hostile piñatas. Nathan is putting his talents of aegis to the test, deflecting gunfire with a rippling half-dome shield of pure spellcraft. Whenever he spots an opening, he channels a spike of fire magic into the air around unsuspecting agents, engulfing them in hungry, instantaneous bonfires that Zeus’s rainstorm does little to douse.

  As for our savior, the moment she finishes her resurrections, Izanami lets herself sink into the ground, disappearing into a pool of gloom. A split second later, she explodes out of the street behind Zeus, who’s currently distracted by the sport of destroying her shadow creatures with bolts of lightning. She strikes with a hand cloaked in blades of endless night, shoving her arm through his back all the way up to her elbow. He gasps in shock as those void-wrapped fingers pop out of his chest, then tumbles to the ground as she wrenches her arm up and takes his head with it.

  Then the blur slams into her, hitting so hard I can actually see the concussive shock wave. The hotel windows rattle and raindrops dance as she’s picked bodily from the ground and launched a good eighty feet down the street.

  Damn, Hermes, I think, watching as the blur zips after her and catches up before she can even hit the pavement. It leaps, snatches her from the air and pile-drives her into the blacktop with a hundred deadly blows, the entire barrage a ghostly afterimage caught in an eyeblink.

  The shadows race to her aid, leaving a field of torn bodies and maybe five remaining agents. As I watch, another goes down, unable to avoid the supernatural precision of Harv, Gene, and Vitty, our new undying shadow men. Then Sekhmet grabs my arm, wrenching my attention from the bizarre tableau. “Do we stand?” she hisses.

  The question jolts my brain back into gear. This is massively interesting, but we can’t stay—Izanami has bought me the time I needed, and I’d be a fool to waste it. Zeus is already regenerating, we need to escape, and my options have narrowed to a single choice.

  “Not this time,” I say. “Gather our things. Back inside. We’re getting out of here.”

  She nods and dashes over to snag her suitcase—I notice it’s the hard-sided one with our stolen artifacts—before grabbing Nathan by the hand and bringing him safely back to me. I pause for a last look at the insane brawl, then shake my head and run for the doors to the hotel. As I go, I catch Harv’s eye. He gives me a wolfish smile and a thumbs-up, then returns to his gunfight. Despite it all, I laugh at the fun he’s clearly having with his new empowered lease on life.

  Two staffers are just inside the main door, watching the action with eyes the size of dinner plates. They barely take notice of us as we sprint past them and into the lobby. Quickly, I lead us through the hotel, listening to the cracks of gunfire and ominous rumbles of lightning fade as we run deeper into the building. Confused guests and worried managers are littered throughout the halls, all seemingly unsure if they’re caught in the middle of a war or some madcap viral marketing campaign. I ignore them, racing for the one place I know I’ll be safe.

  The doors to the CURE Salon & Spa smack open under Sekhmet’s bloody hands, and we stride through the entrance to the sound of tinkling glass. The place is deserted and won’t be staffed for hours, but I don’t need help—I know the way. I retrace the route to the thick wooden doors that guard the portal to the Graces’ domain, then reach out with my will. They’re designed to open for the appropriate staff members of the spa, but the magic behind them isn’t hard to hack. There are a handful of weaves here: one to ward the doors, another to open them in the presence of the proper individuals, and a third to verify those people are legit. I just tickle the second spell, telling it the third has already done its job, and the doors swing open with a hum of magic.

  I walk through the portal, wondering if I should tell the Graces to hire a network security consultant. Even though these are spells, not software, the principles are fairly similar.

  Bright afternoon light streams through the domed roof, but other than that, the palatial spa is unchanged from our previous visits. The Graces lounge on their raised dais, overseeing a field of relaxation and debauchery while scantily clad servants whisk over the marble paths, eagerly carrying out their masters’ mandate of generosity.

  The three goddesses look at us with great interest as we approach, Sekhmet’s suitcase heralding our arrival as it clicks across the mosaics. “You are troubled,” Aglaea, the youngest, says with a frown as we come to a stop before them. A rare note of tension throbs in the air between us.

  “Or just trouble,” Thalia, the eldest sister, says unhappily.

  “What is this?” Euphrosyne asks, halting her dance. “You bring discord to our home, and not of the sort we claim to soothe.”

  “I’m being hunted,” I say, opening my jacket to reveal a surgeon’s nightmare of still-healing wounds. “I have time, but not much. I humbly ask for clothes and cleansing before I take my leave.”

  The three sisters exchange a worried look. “We do not take sides,” Thalia says. “You know this.”

  “Refusing to aid me is taking a side,” I say.

  “Inaction is not the same as opposition,” she says, and the tension ramps. “Please, do not seek to turn us against our purpose.”

  “Your purpose is hospitality,” Sekhmet says, stabbing a finger at them. “Such an aim implies the protection of your guests.”

  A long pause follows, and the sisters exchange another look, somehow communicating in silence. “Friends you shall always be, but guest rights are reserved for those who enter our domain legitimately,” Thalia says at last. “You did not.”

  “A technicality,” I say.

  “And yet,” she says, inclining her head.

  “Oh, this is stupid,” Nathan says. “Look, you opened your doors to us. You said we were always welcome. Well, CURE was closed and there wasn’t any ‘legitimate’ way to enter here. Now, were you lying about that twenty-four-seven invite, or does your super-important hospitality end with the operating hours of a Los Angeles spa?”

  Aglaea s
norts at that and shakes her head. “He’s got ya there, sis,” she says to Thalia.

  “But … we can’t—I mean—” Thalia sputters. Euphrosyne sighs, then resumes her dance, already seeming resigned to the inevitable.

  Thalia’s lip twists, and she looks at her feet. “Hurry, please,” she says in a small voice. “We cannot endanger our guests.”

  “I’ll be fast,” I say. “I promise. And thank you—I understand what I’m asking.”

  She nods and twitches her hand. Alexandra appears a moment later, bearing some clean towels. “If you’ll accompany me?” she asks.

  All three of us are bathed, scrubbed, and swathed in fuzzy cotton. The whole process is a frenzy of soap, water, and oils, taking only a handful of minutes. We each have something like a half-dozen servants assigned, and they move us through the process like a Formula One pit stop crew. My pathetic rags are removed and replaced with a flowing dress of white silk hemmed in crawling cobalt designs that remind me of the mosaics in the main chamber. Sekhmet’s bloodied clothes are also taken away and exchanged with a similar outfit. Nathan, who made it through the chaos without a scratch, returns from his spa trip in the same jeans and button-up he put on after my wake-up call, a world away.

  I emerge feeling halfway decent, certain I’ve left behind about forty pounds of dirt, dried blood, and shrapnel after the servants are finished. Just about all of my injuries have healed, and the remaining ones are hidden by my clothes. Sekhmet collects her suitcase as we leave the baths, looking for all the world like a supermodel valet. “Now what?” she asks as we begin our walk back to the main room. “I assume we choose another portal? How long until they lose your scent?”

  I shake my head. “It could be hours. We take any of those gates, they’ll be on us.”

  “Then we must ensure that occurs at a battleground of our choosing.”

  “No. We’ll still lose. I don’t know what they’ll send after Zeus and Hermes, but you can bet we won’t be able to beat them—and there’s no glorious death waiting, either. We’ll be captured and locked up. How many years did you spend behind glass at Impulse?”