When it finally ends, the prison’s little more than a mute and blackened void of choking dust and clattering debris. I can still sense the towering might of Meridian One above us, miles of spells and supernatural architecture more than capable of withstanding the loss of even a floor as vast as this, but it’s a very bad day when your silver lining is the fact an entire skyscraper didn’t get dropped onto your head.
Something stabs the base of my brain, primal and insistent. I will it away with a touch of power, putting it off for when I have less deadly things to deal with. In the darkness beyond, the laughter stops, replaced by a contented sigh.
“Oh, I could get used to that,” Apep says, wistful. “Freya, are you—? Ah, there you are, safe and sound. Well, this is where I leave you. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Really, I mean that.”
“So that’s it, then?” I rasp, spitting dust and cement chips from my lips. “Off to destroy the world?”
He scoffs at that, and I hear him move a little closer. “With what? A snap of my fingers? Have I oversold myself?”
“I’m sorry, was that not you showing off just now?”
I can practically hear his grin in the stifling blackness. “One prison is quite a step removed from a planet. Besides, even if that were within my power, you and I have plenty of meddlesome peers with more than enough strength to deny me, to say nothing of this odd little organization.”
A hand reaches out of the darkness to brush some of my hair out of my eyes, and I flinch away. “Such conflicts are a fool’s errand. Centuries of unending defeat taught a bitter lesson: I can never win by going toe-to-toe with humanity’s defenders.”
“Then how do you expect to do it this time?” I ask, hoping an informative monologue is in the cards.
He doesn’t disappoint. “Sweet girl,” he says with an amused chuckle. “I didn’t pick Ares for his potency—I did it for his rank.”
“You—? What?”
“Well, where else was I going to find a god with nuclear authority?”
Despite the oppressive air of the ruined prison, I feel myself go cold. Then that ghostly pain swells in the back of my mind, a call of loss that’s both ancient and achingly familiar.
“It may take some time to turn all the proper keys, but I can be very persuasive,” Apep is saying. “And who knows? A handful may survive! I mean, destroying the world isn’t my job—only snuffing its light.”
“Your job?” I shout, shoving that strangeness down once more. “You’re a god of evil! Don’t hide behind words like duty when you—”
“I thought I was clear,” he interrupts, sounding deeply frustrated. “I have no worshippers. No mandates or mantles. Three thousand years of dust and sand entomb those shackles. All that remains is what I must do.”
The voice gets closer, and I realize he’s moved within a hairbreadth of me. “No morals. No cravings. Only. The. Task.”
“Well,” I say into the silence that follows, acid lacing my words. “I guess Emilia was right: You really are a slave.”
A pause, and then a sad little laugh. There’s a moment of shuffling, a hesitation in the dark, and when his voice returns, it sounds almost … hurt. “Please remember my offer. I truly wish you nothing but the best, and try to understand: An ending will happen, eventually. I’d just like to know we’ll be friends eventually, too.”
Another pause. “It, ah, seems you may need one.”
A familiar twinge of magic follows, a spark in the shadows that carries my new nemesis far from the ruin he’s created.
For a moment, I’m left alone in the gloom, listening to clatters, crunches, and drips as I try to get a handle on just how badly I’ve been blindsided. Then the call returns, stronger, more adamant.
“NATHAN!” Sekhmet shrieks in the blackness, Apep’s spell fading from her eyes.
Take him, the thunder in my mind seems to say, to demand, and I realize with chilling perception exactly what it wants, what it requires of me.
Stonework crashes nearby, and Sekhmet howls, working to free herself from the debris.
Take. Him.
Trembling, I hold up a hand and trigger one of my illusions. Glowing flames unfold in my palm, cutting through the haze, and I toss them to the ceiling so their light can spread. The ruined prison emerges from the gloom, a corridor of tumbled rock and steel cast in warm golden radiance. Little motes of amber drift down, dancing lightly on the wreckage, the—
“No,” I whisper, stumbling across the hall. The call in my mind is a chorus now, a throbbing, unbearable cry for action, impossible to ignore.
“Sara?” a broken voice croaks in the dust.
—takehimtakehimtakehimTAKEHIM—
Nathan lies before me, arms and upper body curled around the serving platter that imprisons Loki. A too-large pool of sticky, dust-filmed blood spreads around him, issuing from the pile of concrete blocks and rebar engulfing his lower half. My heart drops as I realize just how much damage he’s sustained, how much of him is really left. He’s dead—or should be. Only my pact, the years of life I’ve promised, keeps his soul in place. Every breath he draws is by my will alone, and that reservoir is draining fast.
“SEKHMET!” I roar, heart pounding. She’s a god of medicine, of healing. She can fix him. Has to fix him. “HURRY!”
“I messed up, Sara,” he pants. “This—Oh, I—It hurts.”
“Shh, you did great, just hold—” I inhale sharply as a surge of lightning snaps in my brain, the screaming now a storm, a howling ultimatum. He should be dead, needs to be dead. I can’t hold off the natural order much longer.
I kneel beside him, heedless of the blood that soaks my legs, and brush the grit from his forehead. He quivers at the touch and looks at me, bright blue eyes filled with incredible pain. I shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t be grappling with destiny to keep him here, with me.
I’m torturing my best friend. I have to—to let him—
His spirit twitches, wavers. Memories leap through him as patches of his soul start to decay, flickering in his mind like negatives in an old camera. “Hannah?” he whispers with a start, staring into nothing. “You’re—no, it wasn’t anything you did—”
He trails off, head trembling, and his eyes refocus on me. “Sara? Oh god, Sara, please, I—” He coughs, a full-body convulsion, and as blood begins to drip from the corners of his mouth, I can almost feel the tempest of pain that consumes him.
I can’t do this, I think as ruin renews its call, deafening, relentless. TAKE. HIM.
“I’ll bring you back, Nate. I’ll—” My breath hitches, and I throw everything into fending off fate’s choir. “Fólkvangr waits for you, warrior of mine. My gates admit none but the worthiest, and it is with pride I bid you welcome to my realm.”
A ghost of a smile plays across his face, and beyond the hurt and shock, I can sense a bit of curious expectation. “Sounds…” He grimaces, licks his lips, and tries again. “Sounds great, Sara. It’s … full of cats, isn’t it?”
I laugh, golden tears cutting tracks through the dirt on my cheeks. “Loaded with ’em,” I say, cradling his head.
“Knew it,” he says. Another spasm of pain grips him, echoing in my own mind a moment later. It’s time.
“Hate to…” He trails off, gasping, with a nod down the hall. “So damn sorry. Tell her?”
I bob my head, not quite stifling a sob, and clutch him close. Liquid gold drips from my eyes to splash on his dust-caked hair. He begins to tremble again, and I accept his soul, releasing him from … everything. His body seems to deflate, going still, and I feel the spark in him fade, rush through me, and flit away, into the afterlife.
He’s gone.
In the distance, Sekhmet screams.
25
FATE’S CALL
FREYA
“Duroc,” I whisper, setting Nathan’s cairn ablaze.
The unnatural flames conjured by my spell will burn what’s left of my friend to ash, consume even the piled cement and steel that e
ntombs him, leaving nothing for Finemdi to abuse.
Sekhmet and I watch the light show in silence, ignoring the sting of its smoke. Around us, the howls and cheers of newly freed gods and monsters echo like it’s feeding time at the zoo. Little tremors and aftershocks rattle the splintered tiles at our feet as the ruined prison settles, and every now and then, the thunderclaps of nearby brawls shake what’s left.
“We must go,” Sekhmet says, voice raw from grief and dust.
“Do you want to say anything?” I prompt, wiping at the mess of wretched gold on my cheeks.
She stares at me for a moment. “I will avenge him,” she says in a harsh whisper, returning her gaze to the pyre. “By the light of Ra, the laws of Ma’at, the crook of Osiris, I swear I will unmake those who took you from me.”
She steps closer, reaches down, and thrusts her hand into the blaze. “Apep, Finemdi, Samantha Drass,” she croons, voice shaking with pain and fury as the flames lap hungrily at her skin.
Oath complete, she backs away, holding up her smoking limb. “I miss you, Nathan Kence,” she whispers to it, watching as it heals. She turns away from me, shifting to face the fire, but not before I catch the glint of tears gathering in the corner of her eyes.
“You—” Her voice hitches, and she motions with her undamaged hand. “Your turn. Please.”
Wiping away more tears of my own, I step up, stare into the furnace. “Nathan, I—” I shake my head, try again. “Damn it, you’re dead, you stupid priest. You weren’t supposed to—I was right there, and … I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Nathan.”
I cast about for something, anything to help me express how badly I feel, how I’d give anything to undo this, how this wasn’t the deal, and come up short. Shaking with sorrow and impotent rage, I turn away.
I couldn’t stop it, and I’m still far too weak to undo it. Do you understand what that means? I’m his god. He was my priest, my responsibility. Sometimes, gods really do have a plan, a reason to allow suffering and despair into the lives of even their most favored followers. I didn’t. This wasn’t some grand design or inevitable prophecy, wasn’t meant to happen.
He’s dead, and for nothing.
Sekhmet puts a hand on my shoulder, drawing me close, and together, we watch the flames consume our friend.
* * *
The premiere is bittersweet.
Switch goes live in a handful of weeks, but we’re already celebrating. They’ve rolled out the red carpet, booked the gorgeous and imposing War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, and crafted a lavish event to entertain cast, crew, and press alike. New shows don’t often get the gala treatment, but with such strong advance buzz and the fact that we’ve already been renewed for another season, the network decided to splurge a little.
I’m seated with the rest of the cast (and their friends and families), watching the festivities with a fixed smile. This is everything my vain little heart could want, so of course I have to feel like someone stabbed it with a fork. Even the occasional glare from Kirsten Riley, seated three rows away with a perfect line of sight to me (I made sure invitations got sent to her and her father) does little to lighten my mood. It’s been a couple of weeks since the disaster at Meridian One, and those wounds are still raw.
It took two days for Sekhmet and me to work our way out of the rubble, gingerly carrying Loki’s prison and our suitcase through collapsed tunnels and around escaped gods. Most of the nastier ones were whisked away by teleportation fail-safes, but there were still plenty of bad attitudes to go around. Of course, we had a little help of our own—before we began working on our escape, I made sure we retraced our route to the Hawaiians’ cell. I wasn’t about to leave them behind, and our reunion was a bright spot amid the mayhem.
After that, there weren’t many solitary threats interested in tussling with five pissed-off goddesses, making the rest of our trek an uncomplicated one. Even with their aid, I imagine it could have taken weeks to dig our way out, but we eventually ran into other friendly deities who’d been freed, including a few spell-casters. We pooled our efforts, created a portal, and got out the easy way. The siblings chose to ditch Orlando for their islands in the Pacific, while we, of course, returned to California and got to catching up on everything we’d missed.
It’s not every day a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan ejects a stadium’s worth of rubble and shattered prison materials from beneath its foundations, and rarer still when the wreckage seems several times larger than a single floor of the original building could have ever held, so the event got a lot of attention. Newscasters, bloggers, meme makers, structural engineers, and more all weighed in on what the cause might have been, but as days passed and the scale of the disaster kept getting revised (always smaller and less critical than it first appeared), the coverage began to slack. In the end, the official story on the mysterious blast closed with nobody hurt, no one to blame, and no apparent property damage beyond the sublevels of one privately owned building. The world moved on with staggering speed … meaning Finemdi did a stellar job of cleaning up.
At least they don’t have their chairman anymore, I think, reflecting on the sealed platter in my safe-deposit box back in Los Angeles, gathering dust. Nathan gave his life for that thing—you can be damn sure I’m keeping it closed till the end of time.
Nathan—
I try to cram the memories down again, slapping the lid on that box closed before they can bubble up to drown my mind in anguish. Even so, I feel my eyes water, and dab away the gold collecting there with a handkerchief before anyone can notice. I lost him. What a miserable waste of a god I’ve been. I’m supposed to champion love, and I let an amazingly outdated feud derail everything. He cautioned against it, too, and what did I do? Made the choice for him, forced his feet onto my path, and personally walked him into the meat grinder. How could I have ever been jealous of him and Sekhmet? When the chips were down, I’m not the god he should have been following.
Sekhmet could have healed him; all I could do was let him die.
Remember when I called her a blood-soaked relic? Stars above, the arrogance. Judging by how well I’ve been doing lately, she’s a better fighter and lover, and I’m more grateful than ever to have her by my side, because I’m clearly not up to dealing with the modern world or defeating Apep on my own.
Speaking of our favorite skin stealer, the only news I could find of him was a short article about “General Theo Ariston’s” return to active service. Seems he’s stepped into Ares’s shoes with nary a ripple, continuing his grand design to bathe the world in nuclear fire.
I’ll kill him. I’ll—I grimace, trying to distance myself from those brutal thoughts. See? I’m still doing it. The Valkyrie’s obsessions are what got us all into this mess, and I can’t seem to escape her influence. I’ve had a painfully long time to think about it, and with the crippling benefit of hindsight, I can see how I’ve spent the past months heeding the calls of the divine—and ignoring the reason of humanity.
It’s exactly what I promised myself I wouldn’t do. I thought I could balance the cravings of godhood with the wisdom of free will, but now I see that at every turn, I’ve let my inner berserker and every other empty-headed impulse run rampant.
I should have questioned Samantha, should have listened to Nathan and the Hawaiians, should have fled Meridian One without sating my curiosity, should—well, you get the idea. With every ounce of power I reclaim, it’s as if the urges of stupid, stupid desire and barbarism grow louder. I have to stop this, to find a way to fuel the mind-set of humanity all those years of exile gave me before it slips away entirely. I just hope I’m not too late.
I’ve already lost my best friend, after all.
Sekhmet sighs beside me, paging through her phone. I lean over, checking to see if—yep, it’s pictures of her and Nathan again. Selfies of the two smiling at tourist spots and national parks, hiking, climbing, dining … your standard sorrow sampler. She’s been taking this about as well as I have, and maybe even a l
ittle worse.
Besides glee, audacity, and a lot of lightheartedness, it’s clear the link Nathan forged between us was also nurturing a hefty dose of adoration in my merciless friend. For the first time in her thousands of years of life, Sekhmet had someone she truly, deeply cared for; someone to confide in, to hold, to cover in warm, wonderful, syrupy love, and now … she doesn’t. It’s hit her incredibly hard, and seeing this engine of vengeance playing the role of heartbroken mourner will never stop shocking me.
It’s part of the reason things are so strange between us right now. On one hand, we’re closer than ever. The two of us were truly hurt back there, and sharing that loss has made our friendship stronger. On the other … this was my fault. Oh, sure, Apep pulled the trigger and duped everyone, but deep down, we both know Nathan wouldn’t have been standing on a bull’s-eye if it hadn’t been for a parade of poor decisions on my part.
Not that she holds any grudges for me. Dedicated to punishing the wicked, Sekhmet has an innate sense for those deserving of her rage, and in her eyes, I’m in the clear—morally, at least. It’s certainly better this way, but that’s like saying you’re happier to have lost one arm instead of two. A ball of guilt seems to have made a permanent home in my stomach, and Sekhmet’s nursing a dark desire for payback and no convenient villains in reach.
With nothing left but our original plans—and the clear understanding that Apep is now even further beyond us—we crawled back to Hollywood and set to work on my film career. It’s been going well, honestly. There are plenty of outstanding opportunities on the horizon, and Mahesh is confident my star is on the fast track to the top, but there’s something desperately insincere about it now. I breathe a sigh of my own as I think it over. We need a win, or at least a better goal than this.
“Sekhmet?” I say, giving her a little nudge with my shoulder.
“Hm?” she grunts, not looking up.
“This sucks.”
“The pageantry?” she says in a faraway voice. “I’ve said as much.”
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