Damaged Gods (Monsters of Saint Mark's #1)

by K. C. Cross

  “You are monster.”

  Now, I am annoyed. “Well, last week I wasn’t a monster. Last week I was just a girl. I had a past. It wasn’t a good one, but it was mine. I’m real. And I’m not this…” I look down at myself. Did she use the word gorgon? Wasn’t Medusa a gorgon? I am suddenly very confused, and tired, and I have an overwhelming feeling of defeat. “I don’t think I can deal with this right now.”

  She tsks her tongue at me. “That’s too bad.” Then she sighs. “You did all this work. All this magic to get me here. To save the sanctuary from falling into the hands of these damaged and broken gods. One is as bad as the other. They were banished for a reason. And now you pretend that you’re just… what? Just this girl called Pie who stumbled into the cursed monsters of Saint Mark’s?”

  “I did though. I literally did! I answered an ad—”

  “Whose ad?”

  “What?”

  “Whose ad was it?”

  “It was… Grant’s ad. He called me here. And when I got here, he left. And I don’t know his whole fucking story, so I guess there’s more to it than that”—she actually guffaws at this—“but my point is, I was someone else before I got here.”

  “Grant? You think that ad belonged to Grant?”

  I pause. “Didn’t it? He told me it did.”

  “Don’t believe everything you’re told.”

  I’m about to scream at her for all this cryptic nonsense when I remember that weird conversation with Tarq and Luciano. You answered the ad, Tarq said. He was amazed at my confusion.

  I narrow my eyes, thinking. “It was Tarq’s ad.” I feel confident about this conclusion.

  But Ostanes sighs. “You’re going to make this hard, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not making anything hard! All I want is…”

  She raises an eyebrow when I don’t finish my sentence. “Well?” she finally asks. “What do you want, Pie Vita?”

  “I want these people to stay the fuck out of my sanctuary. I want to break Pell’s curse. And save Tomas. I want him to be saved, and I want—”

  “Stop.” She puts up a hand. And this hand has power. Just like Pell’s hand has power. “Stop it right now. That’s not what you want. That’s what you want to do. What do you want, Pie?”

  What do I want?

  “It should roll off the tongue, child. That’s how long you’ve been wishing for it. Say it. You know what you want.”

  “I want to be normal.”

  “You want to walk away from Pia?”

  “Where is she?” I whirl around, searching for my friend. And there, there on a low branch, full and heavy with bright yellow leaves, Pia sits with her crown of bright red feathers in stark contrast against the foliage.

  She morphs before my eyes. Her body disintegrates, but instead of collapsing into billions of dust particles, every single feather becomes a moth. They swarm, circle each other like a cyclone. And then… they hover there. Waiting.

  I turn back to Ostanes.

  I know her.

  “You know me.” Her words echo my thoughts. “And you know yourself too. Who are you, Pie?”

  I want to say, I am that girl from Philly. Then I want to say, I don’t know.

  But it’s just all lies, and there’s no way to hide from it anymore.

  So I give in. I say, “I am yours.”

  And this earns me a wide smile. “Yes, child. You are mine. I called you to Saint Mark’s. Pell is mine. Tarq is mine and Tomas is mine. And I put you all here for this one moment when you could confront that bastard Saturn and take back what belongs to us.”

  “Is he gone, then?” I ask. “Is Saturn dead?”

  “He is gone for now.” She huffs. “But he’ll be back. We’re not to concern ourselves with him just yet. Let him lick his wounds. We have bigger, better things to do with the monsters of Saint Mark’s. Like set them free. But first, you have to choose, Pie. Because Pell’s magic is only temporary. He has already been holding you in this freeze for longer than he should. Just a little bit longer and you will fall out of it on your own. And if you do not make a choice, you will die. You will not come back from this. You are not the caretaker of Saint Mark’s Sanctuary. Grant was able to leave because you brought your magic with you. And Saturn was able to take over his aging body and make him young again—use him to do his bidding—because his curse was still in place. But you were not the replacement and if you die, you will be dead. You will not come back. Not tomorrow, not next year, not next century. And Pell will live on. Forever, and ever, and ever inside his curse. Knowing that his one chance to be with you the way you were meant to be together is over.”

  There is a part of me that wants to ask a lot of questions about setting the monsters free. Like… are we sure the world is ready for that? And other such important things.

  But Ostanes keeps spilling out information that seems critical, and I just can’t keep up. “Wait,” I say, putting up a hand. “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, you do.” Ostanes holds out her hand, palm up, and the moths that I thought were mine swarm to her. Cover her from head to toe, so that she is nothing but fluttering wings. She speaks and even her words come out with wings. “I made you four to keep my magic safe. Tarq to hold the book. Pell to hold the tombs. Tomas to hold the sanctuary.”

  I blink at her. Because that actually kinda does make sense. “But what about me?”

  “You hold them all, dear Pie. You hold them all. But they hold you as well. The curse has not been lifted, but it has shifted. Pell knows what to do, but he needs a sign from you that this is what you want. And then the two of you can find the new boundaries together. Tell him, Pie. Tell him what you want.”

  What I want is to make her explain this shit in tiny little baby words. But it’s just a distraction. I understand what she’s saying. “He needs to know that I want to be a monster.”

  Ostanes’ smile is sad. “You have always been monster. But I put you here to hide you from them. Don’t listen to Saturn when he says you belong to him. You do not. I made you. You are mine.”

  “So… he’s right then. I’m not real.”

  “Do you feel not real?”

  “No, but—”

  “You are as real as you want to be.” She smiles at me. “Listen carefully now. We are getting dangerously close to the end and there are things you must understand. Your human soul is gone. The moment that bullet hit your chest, it died. It cannot be recovered.”

  “Then what the fuck? Why are we even having this conversation?”

  “Because your soul has two halves, Pie. All of my monsters have one soul with two halves.” Suddenly, the moths around her body converge once more and turn back into Pia. She chirps. Flies over to me. Snuggles into the front pocket of my flannel. And everything in this moment feels… inevitable.

  “She is your other half. Your monster half.”

  “You want me to say this is me. This girl with hind legs and hooves. This girl with horns and hide. This is me.”

  “Yes. This is who you are. So you will say it again,” Ostanes whispers. “Say it again, Pie. And this time… you will mean it. And then, dear girl, you will take all the power you were always meant to have.”

  I still want to deny it.

  I want to hold on to my humanity for dear life.

  But I’m having trouble remembering what it was like to be Pie. My past is fading as I stand here. Everything that came before Pell and Tomas seems… irrelevant.

  There is still a small part of me though. A tiny part that want to deny this new me. Guilt, maybe? Fear? That lingering question in the back of my head about Pell.

  Is he evil? Is that what horns mean? And if so, am I evil?

  I am not evil. I do not require a single moment to debate that.

  It’s settled.

  I straighten up. Feel the muscles in my legs. My fingertips absently brush along the side of my thigh. Against fur, not skin. The horns are heavy on my head.

  And somehow
, it all fits. It all feels right.

  So when I say, “This is me,” I really do mean it.

  The woods disappear.

  Ostanes is gone.

  And then… I am alone.

  And this is not what I was expecting.

  I was expecting to return to the sanctuary. To wake up in Pell’s arms. Or find Tomas’s handsome face hovering over me with a look of concern.

  But I am in the nowhere. The in-between. Not in the gray, something worse than the gray.

  There is no air here, so I cannot breathe.

  There is no light here, so I cannot see.

  This is darkness.

  This is emptiness.

  And then I get it.

  I am done and this is the end.

  I have one last breath inside me.

  The breath that Pell gave me that night of my date.

  I use it now to call his name.

  “Pell,” I whisper.

  But the darkness swallows it up.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - PELL

  “Hello?” I call out to the dark emptiness.

  Where the hell am I? And what happened to the sanctuary?

  “Tomas?” I call. “Hey! Can you hear me? Pie?”

  I don’t know how long I stand here doing nothing but listening, but I think it’s a while. Because something has changed. There is a sudden blankness to me. Like… like I’m about to be erased.

  I have heard caretakers complain about the gray over the centuries. When they step outside without that ring, that’s always the wake-up call. It’s the one thing I can count on to wipe away their disbelief and force them to pay attention to my rules and expectations.

  But I am unable to walk through the gates without my caretaker, so I have never experienced it myself. Even if I had, it would not matter now. Because this is not gray, this is black.

  It is the absence of everything.

  “Why am I here?” I yell.

  I do not expect an answer, nor do I get one. But if those damned gods are going to abandon me here in this new hellish purgatory, then questions are all I have left.

  “Who is in charge? What do you want?” My voice is loud and booming and my words bounce back. Like there are walls somewhere in the distance.

  And they stop.

  And there is just… nothing.

  I let out a long sigh, ready for this curse to be over. So done with this bullshit life. What is the fucking point of living when you’re just a toy to them? Nothing more than entertainment. Just a fucking joke.

  But something happens to my breath when I sigh. It glows a little. Lighting up the space around me.

  And then I’m back in the dungeon with Tomas, holding that torch above my head, thinking, This is not how light works.

  Light rules dark. Light needs only to exist to banish darkness. The dark has no such power over light.

  Except when it’s not really darkness, but something else altogether.

  I am in the something else.

  “Tomas?” I call again. Only this time, it comes out in a small, hesitant whisper.

  And again, with my breath comes the light.

  Am I the dragon?

  I breathe harder, but it does not get brighter. No fire comes out of me, even though I am, like Tomas, made of fire. So I am not a dragon.

  I am just me.

  The worthless Pell.

  Joke of jokes.

  The entertainment.

  But just as I think those words, I catch a whisper in the dark. “Pell?” the whisper asks. Just a few letters on the wind. And I am alert again.

  “Pie!” I yell as loud as I can. “Pie!” I call her name over and over as I stumble forward into the blackness. Because that whisper belonged to her. “Pie!”

  She does not answer me back.

  She’s going to die here. She’s going to die here and I will be stuck in the cursed dark for all eternity.

  No. “Think! Think! She’s here! You’re here! How do you find her?”

  I don’t know.

  I’m a formidable enough monster in the real world. But I’m not in the real world. I’m in the magic of Saint Mark’s. And my magic is very limited. I can slam doors. I can freeze the caretaker. I can put my claim on them with a breath. I can chop off a horn and collect the blood and make a magic dragon scale.

  I’ve done all that and I’m still here.

  So what more can I do?

  I sigh again. And again, the breath comes out as a tiny bit of light.

  Light rules dark.

  I am fire.

  Fire is light.

  I am light.

  And I know what to do.

  I bend down, feeling on the ground beneath my feet for the horn I know is there. I grab it, hold it up in front of me like a torch.

  At first, it does nothing. I can’t even see it. But I breathe. I make just enough wind to blow the light inside me onto the horn and the blood glows. I send another breath of encouragement and it glows again. Brighter this time. Little flecks of potential fire appear.

  One more breath and the tiny embers catch and sputter into life.

  I have a torch.

  And I walk forward into the dark emptiness calling her name.

  Because she is the moth and I am the flame.

  And if she can’t come to me, I will go to her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - PIE

  Somewhere, a bell is ringing. It’s calling me.

  A wave of panic rushes through me as I consider who is summoning me now. Grant? Saturn? Sheriff Roth? What asshole is looking for me now?

  The darkness is so absolute that even if I wanted to find that bell, there is no way I could. It’s not possible. I am immersed in a void of nonexistence.

  You’re not real, Pie. That’s the new voice in my head.

  Before Saint Mark’s it was always, You’re crazy, Pie. I thought that was pretty bad. But nope. This is worse.

  Because I am alone, I am afraid, and no one is coming to rescue me.

  I have been forsaken.

  No. No. There’s a better word for that. It’s called ‘abandoned.’

  But just as I think those words, there is a spark in the distance.

  I lean forward and take a step, my feet suddenly underneath me. But they are not feet. They are hooves. And when I brush my hands against my hips, there is fur there. The horns are heavy on my head.

  “You will say it again,” Ostanes whispers into the nothingness. “Say it again, Pie. And this time… you will really mean it.”

  I don’t say it. Because I don’t need to say it.

  I feel it in my half-dead monster soul—this is me.

  The woods appear. Dark, still, but not empty.

  The torch in the distance floats in and out through the shadows of the leaves. Bobbing up and down. This way and that.

  And then there he is.

  Pell.

  Running towards me.

  Lighting the way.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - PELL

  My light grows, the darkness fades, and then, suddenly, I am in the woods. My woods. No. Our woods.

  I run with my horn torch held high. Looking for her. Calling for her.

  At first the crashing of my hooves in the underbrush drowns it out, but then I hear it. I hear her. The small tinkling of tiny bells around her neck, and her wrists, and braided into her hair.

  She is running towards me. Leaping over long-dead trees, leaves smacking her face.

  We race towards each other. But when we meet up, we change. Become small. Become kids.

  I look over at Pie, no longer holding my horn torch, no longer needing it. The sun is shining above the forest canopy and little pillars of light find their way through the web of leaves, illuminating her face with golden light.

  She laughs. We both laugh. And I take her hand so we can run together.

  We run through our forest of white-trunked trees and bright-yellow leaves.

  And we still pause when we get to the boundary of th
e flower meadow.

  We still consider our options.

  But this time, when she calls her moths and sends them forward, I do not let her go without me.

  I take her hand and we step into the clearing together.

  Grown up now, we look at each other one more time, just to make sure.

  “Yes?” I ask.

  “The curse won’t be broken,” Pie says. “But the boundaries will shift.”

  We stop walking in the middle of the meadow and I pull her towards me. “That could mean anything, Pie.”

  “I’m ready for all of it,” she says.

  I kiss her.

  She kisses me.

  I gaze into her wood-nymph blue eyes and she searches my satyr-yellow ones. And then, finally, we really are ready for what comes next.

  There are more monsters caught in this curse than us. And when we turn back to the woods, they are there. Waiting. Monsters of every shape and size. Horns, and hooves, and wings, and tails peek out from behind the burnt-orange leaves of the temple woods.

  We stop at the edge of the trees. And one by one they come forward, some angry, some sad, some just beaten down and tired.

  But they come and they follow us across the meadow. They run with us through the woods.

  We take them back through the darkness, my horns—whole again—lighting the way.

  And when we step out of the darkness and back into the light, we walk back into the sanctuary.

  And we bring all the monsters of Saint Mark’s with us.

  EPILOGUE - PIE

  TWO WEEKS LATER

  So many things have changed around Saint Mark’s Sanctuary.

  First and foremost for me, it was the new look. But getting used to being a full-time monster didn’t take as long as I thought it would. In fact, I pretty much settled right in. And the best part? I’m not the caretaker anymore. The entire Book of Debt has disappeared. We looked everywhere for it and it is just gone.

  At first, I figured maybe Tomas burned it up with half the walls and ceilings. But the walls and ceilings have repaired themselves. You can’t even tell that a blood dragon did his best to turn this place to ashes a few weeks ago. And still that dumb book never came back. Besides, Pell’s little pleasure cave wasn’t affected by the burn at all. None of the magical rooms were. So the book should still be in there, and it isn’t.