by E. A. Copen
“What would your daughter say?”
I froze. He wouldn’t… No, he would. Nothing was below a trickster like Loki. He’d hurt everyone I cared about until I caved. This had to end here and now.
I turned and stepped forward only to have Emma hold me back. “Lazarus, you can’t.”
“He threatened Remy.” I ground my teeth and strained against her hold on me. “I might not be able to kill him right now, but I’m not going to let that stand.”
“If that’s all it takes to get to you, you’ll be the easiest Horseman to bring over to my side,” Loki sneered.
I surged forward. Emma could barely hold me.
“Shut up, will you? Both of you.” Beth started forward. “Nobody is going to hurt Remy, Lazarus, and I’m not letting you walk away without getting what you came for.”
Cool hands pressed against my temples and the familiar comfort of Beth’s healing magic washed over me. It was so warm and relaxing I had to fight the urge to fall over and go to sleep right there. She moved her hands over my eyes, gently wiping her fingers over them as if removing an invisible obstruction.
My eyelids fluttered open on a blurry, hazy world of shadow. I blinked, and slowly, smears of color came into focus: the bright red of the building in front of us, the light brown of Emma’s jacket, a bright blue sky with streaks of feathery white clouds. Beth and Loki wore shades of black and gray, fine cuts of fabric that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a gala or in a business office.
I blinked away tears. There was a faint pounding in my head behind my eyes, but I could see. Suddenly, I wanted to look at everything. I could swear the colors were brighter, lines sharper, the tiniest features more defined.
Light wind picked up strands of Beth’s hair and made it flutter in the wind. The staff in her hand was lustrous, black, and taller than she was. Her pale fingers looked out of place wrapped around it. She smiled and pushed some hair behind her ears before adjusting her glasses. Even with the smile, she still looked sad. “Call it a gesture of goodwill.”
I’d had this picture of Beth in my head: a cold, calculating killer, twisted to Loki’s will. It didn’t match the sad, conflicted woman who stood before me. He had broken her will, but not the core of who she was. There was still goodness in the corner of her mouth and the dancing light in her eyes. Maybe there was a chance I could get through to her after all.
“Walk away,” I warned her. “He’s using you, thinking he can get to me. You know how this is going to end. I don’t want to have to hurt you.”
She pressed her lips together and forced them up into an even sadder smile before cupping my cheek in her hand. “It was always going to be unavoidable. You and me, we’ve always been bad for each other. Some endings are meant to be.” She retracted her hand, stepped back, and turned. “See you at the finale, Lazarus.”
A sad numbness spread out from my chest. The Beth that I’d known since we were kids was gone. All that was left of her was a wish and a memory.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The car ride back to New Orleans was tense. Silence stretched between Emma and me like a thread pulled tight. One wrong move and it would snap. Given the way she closed her fingers around the steering wheel, eyes fixed forward, jaw clenched, she was pissed. I’d said or done something I shouldn’t have.
I turned away from enjoying watching the scenery fly by to look at her. “You know there’s nothing between Beth and me, right?”
Emma didn’t say anything.
Okay, time to try a new tack. I’d rather have her yelling at me than the silent treatment. Anything was better than that. “She’s still a good person. Somewhere deep down, she knows what she’s doing is wrong, and I still believe she’ll come around.”
“You still love her.” Emma didn’t turn away from the road.
I shook my head. “Not like that. I’ll always care about her. That’s never going to change. She was family at a time when I didn’t have much family. She’s more like a sister to me.”
Emma’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. “I know you can’t lie to me, but you can bend the truth when you word it carefully.”
My eyes burned. I closed them and tried to shrink into my seat. She was right. I wasn’t in love with Beth, but there were old feelings lurking. Memories of who we used to be, the life we might’ve had. They were good memories too, things I didn’t want to forget. It was all in the past, though, and that was where it would stay.
“I’m not upset about that,” Emma said finally. “I’m pissed at Loki. The way he’s jerking you around by your heartstrings, making you dance to whatever tune he wants… All he had to do was parade your high school sweetheart in front of you and vaguely threaten your daughter, and you were ready to throw down with him. If I hadn’t been there to stop you—”
“But you were.” I put my hand on her leg and squeezed, trying to be reassuring. “I need you, Em. You keep me on the right path. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” I pulled my hand away when her shoulders visibly relaxed. “Loki will get what’s coming to him. When I get my powers back, stopping him is my priority number one.”
She didn’t say anything else, so I turned my attention back out the window. We pulled out onto the long section of I-10 that stretched over Lake Pontchartrain. With the sun high and the sky clear, the water glittered as if diamonds floated on the surface. Lush green land fell away, leaving only water rushing by on either side of the highway. The silhouette of a sailboat held steady in the distance, and I tried to imagine who might be out there. A family, maybe, enjoying the sunny day on a holiday weekend. Dad, mom, two kids, and a dog. The typical middle-class American family, unaware that a primordial monster wanted to come into their world and murder them.
Once, I’d have turned a blind eye to that and gone about my life. Not my problem. Leave it for someone else to fix. Someone more powerful, more heroic. I was too caught up in my own problems to be concerned about the big picture. More than that, I didn’t consider myself worthy of solving anyone else’s problems. I barely had my shit together. What I didn’t get was that you don’t wake up one day and decide to save the world. No one sets out to be a hero. It’s just sort of something that happens, the consequences of decisions made. There was no such thing as a hero. Just people making enough of the right choices at the right time to have the right impact.
Emma hit her blinker and slid into the next lane to get around a slow-moving van. “You know what I don’t get? Why did he set the Titan free to begin with?”
I shrugged. “An alliance is what I figure.”
“Explain.”
I gripped the car door and gritted my teeth as she swerved in front of the van. Suddenly, I was missing my blindness. “Loki wants to kill a bunch of gods, right? And the gods know he’s loose and gunning for them, so they’ll be looking for him. Probably sending their people to hunt him down and stop him before he ever gets started. The best defense is a good offense.”
“You sound like Curtis.”
Ugh. That was a comparison I did not need. I loved Emma, but her older brother was a jerk. “Anyway, Loki hasn’t struck out at the gods on his list yet because he’s still gathering allies. He was hoping to rope me in just now. He has Beth. Now that I’ve walked, he’ll do everything he can to convince War and probably have Beth heal Pestilence. She’ll help Loki out of spite for me alone.”
She glanced over at me. “What’s any of that got to do with Titans?”
“There are twenty-one gods on his list. Those twenty-one will have allies, meaning he’ll probably have to take down whole pantheons or at least large parts of them to get his revenge. Even with all four Horsemen in his pocket, that’d be difficult. But with Titans, he’d have a much easier time. The Titans probably hate the gods as much as he does. They’re sort of kindred spirits. Both locked away by people they view as unjust. Both punished just for being who they are. You know the old saying? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. He sets the Titans free, lets them
feed, and in return, they support his war against the gods.”
And his plan would’ve worked too if my father hadn’t died. I’d only gone to Angola and discovered what was going on because of that. If I hadn’t, the murder-suicides might not even have given me pause. I would’ve dismissed them like everyone else as unfortunate tragedies, the result of holiday stress and a downturned economy.
What if my father had done what he did to purposely get me to go there? He knew what was happening, knew he couldn’t combat it. Maybe, somehow, he thought I could. If so, his suicide wasn’t a selfish act of weakness and cowardice, but a sacrifice for the greater good.
I shook my head. The Bill Kerrigan I’d met would never act selflessly. He was an unapologetic racist asshole. Prison had done him no favors. Anything good that came because of his death had to be purely coincidental.
In New Orleans, we stopped to pick up Moses. He slid into the back seat with his cane and gun on his belt. “Good to see you, Laz.” He extended a hand.
I traded grips with him. “I should be the one saying that. Man, is it good to have my eyesight back. How are you feeling?”
“Oh, you know. Same ol’, same ol’. You ever manage to get any shut-eye?”
“A little.” I gave Emma a knowing smirk.
“I brought what you asked for.” Moses slid a brown paper back up between the seats. “You sure you know how to make one of those things?”
“Not in the slightest, but how hard can it be?” I peeked down into the bag. It contained two ribbon-wrapped sewing hoops, a bunch of colored string, and a bag of feathers.
“What are you going to put in the middle?” Emma asked.
I popped open Emma’s glove compartment and pulled out something I’d stashed there earlier, giving it a little spit polish.
“A pacifier?” Moses removed his hat and scratched his head.
“It’s symbolic,” I explained and put the bag on the floor by my feet. “Has to be something of personal significance, right? Well, I can’t think of anything more significant than my daughter. I haven’t done a whole lot of great things in my time, but I do have her. The people I love are all I’ve got.”
Emma nodded approvingly and put the Escalade in Drive. “There’s just one more person we need to pick up.”
“Who?” I grabbed some white string from the bag and started wrapping it around the pacifier to secure it.
Emma hadn’t said anything about additional backup. As far as I knew, the only person we both knew who could handle things inside a prison if they got ugly was Moses. No one else on the force was privy to the supernatural, and neither of us trusted most of the other cops enough to bring them in. Curtis probably knew his way around a gun, but he was out since he wasn’t a Normal.
“We’re going to need Grammy,” Emma said and put her foot down on the gas.
“Perry,” Grammy screeched, her voice going higher at the end of his name, “where is my housecoat?”
The old woman was bent over a suitcase stuffed full of clothes, the contents shoved in without being folded. She looked up and adjusted her glasses, squinting at me. “Be a dear and hand me dem shoes, will ya?”
I bent and picked up a pair of fuzzy pink slippers. “Ms. Knight, I really think—”
“I told ya. Call me Cozzie or Grammy. Cookie, maybe. Old Edna’s grandbabies call her Cookie, an’ I like da sound of it. Makes me sound sweet. ’Course, we both know that ain’t the case, don’t we?” She snickered and elbowed me before taking the slippers.
I rubbed the sore spot on my ribs, turning to Emma. “Em, I’m not going to say you don’t know what you’re doing, but are you sure taking your grandma into a potential prison riot is a good idea?”
Emma opened her mouth to respond but didn’t get a word in.
“Why?” Grammy exclaimed, shoving a stack of clothes at me. “’Cause I’m old? Oh, honey, bless your heart.”
For any northerners in the audience, the phrase “bless your heart” has a special connotation in the South. It’s a not-so-subtle way of saying you’re an idiot. If her shooting was as sharp as her tongue, I pitied anyone who came our way.
“Grammy’s a champion target shooter,” Emma said, folding her arms.
Grammy shook her finger at me. “Took home the bronze at last year’s Alabama State Shoot-off. You shoulda seen dem strappin’ young boys when ol’ Grammy come up to shoot. Well, who’s laughin’ now, Cleetus Bell? Ain’t him, that’s fo’ sure. Perry James! My housecoat!”
“It’s in the wash, Ma!” Perry shouted from the kitchen.
“Well, that’ll put a damper on things.” Grammy took the pile of laundry back from my arms and dropped it unceremoniously back into her suitcase. “What we shootin’ with, Emmy?”
Emma disappeared into the back of the house and came back with a pump-action shotgun she passed to Grammy. Grammy shouldered the gun like a pro and looked down the sight. “Not bad. How’s she shoot?”
“You’ll like it.” Emma smiled at me.
I stepped back to make sure I wasn’t anywhere near the scary old lady with a shotgun.
Joyce came out of the back of the house with Remy in her arms. Remy had her head back, mouth open, staring wide-eyed at Joyce while she sang Material Girl. Joyce spun and waved Remy’s arm as if they were dancing. She sashayed over and held Remy out to me.
“Hey, kid,” I said, taking my daughter and planting a big kiss on her forehead. Joyce had dressed her up in that pink satin dress she hated, and even got the lacy headband on her. “I see you’re being corrupted by the eighties’ princess of pop. Don’t look at your old man like that. This is your fault, you know. If you didn’t throw up on everything, you wouldn’t have to wear the pink dress.”
She leaned back to stare at me like I was the one with an ugly pink bow on my head.
“She’s a dream,” Joyce beamed. “You’ve got a beautiful little girl.”
“Okay, Mom.” Emma patted her mother on the shoulder. “We’re off to kill an evil Titan.”
Joyce made a face at Remy and waved, still grinning. “That’s nice, dear.”
“You won’t be able to get ahold of us for a while, but we should be back in time for me to take you to the airport. Your plane leaves tomorrow at eleven, right?”
“Eleven ten, dear. Boarding should be around ten-thirty.” She held her arms out, and I handed Remy back. “You don’t worry about a thing. Me and Remy are going to get Curtis’ hand all bandaged up, fix the grumpy old bastard a drink, and then sit down to watch my shows, isn’t that right, baby girl?”
“Mom!” Curtis shouted from the back bedroom. “I dropped the remote!”
Joyce sighed. “A mother’s work is never done. Good luck, you three,” she said and whisked Remy away to get the remote for Curtis.
I stared after her, not sure how to react. Remy was probably too young to know she was living in her own private hell, surrounded by pink and soap operas.
“You ready to bail yet?” Emma finished checking her ammo and dropped her gun into its holster. She gave me a skeptical glance while Grammy counted out some shotgun shells and slipped them into her purse.
I smiled to myself. Someone had once told me there was no such thing as a perfect moment or perfect people. Maybe he was right. The best people were perfectly imperfect.
“Not on your life.” I put an arm around Emma’s waist and pulled her to me for a kiss that must’ve surprised her. When it was over, she blinked, wide-eyed, and looked at her grandma.
The old woman cackled, pumped the shotgun once, and gave us a toothless grin. “Just let me get ma teeth in. Then what d’ya say we go bust some caps in this Titan’s oversized ass? Or whatever you kids are callin’ it these days.”
Emma took a deep breath and struck her forehead with her palm.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I made several phone calls on my way up to the prison while weaving my dreamcatcher. The last one was to Warden Kane to advise him of the situation. He still had Angola on lo
ckdown and wasn’t pleased to hear my proposal. Bringing weapons into a prison was almost universally a bad idea. I agreed with him in principle, but this was a special case. Kane was a little more open to the idea when I explained that I wouldn’t be armed, and two of the three people I had with me were off-duty police officers. He still didn’t like the idea and would take some convincing when we arrived.
A whole slew of armed correctional officers stopped us at the gate in full gear. Either the warden was expecting us to fight our way in, or maybe he was worried our presence could provoke an attack. Either way, seeing so many correctional officers decked out in full riot gear made me sweat. Snipers moved on rooftops in full view, ready to shoulder their rifles and fire. They wouldn’t be armed with rubber bullets. Snipers got the real thing along with permission to fire with deadly force if necessary.
Warden Kane himself sat under the shade of a golf cart in a windbreaker, his nose red from the chilly wind. He got out of the cart and walked over to my window, gesturing for me to lower it. We hadn’t even gotten through the gates yet, and he was there to demand answers.
I did as he asked.
He crossed his arms. “Explain to me again why I should let you come back in here at all, let alone armed.”
“Did you ever find out who was behind the riot?” I asked.
His lip curled. “I don’t buy all this supernatural bullshit you’re slinging, Kerrigan. I didn’t buy it from your pa when he tried it, and I won’t take it from you.”
“Like it or not, Warden Kane, you’re not in control of this prison anymore. Ikelos is.”
Nothing I said would convince him, though. He was a skeptic and sticking to it. I had to get him to believe in the possibility of something supernatural. But how?