Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (143 page)

“But … how could he have known he’d show up in my picture? It was just an accident.”

“That’s just like I said, Beth,” Kara chimed in. “The point is to keep the S-Em secret. That’s all they care about. They send us to take out anyone who creates a risk of discovery, human, Nolander, or Second. It doesn’t matter how or why.”

I said, more to myself than to them, “I don’t
know
that Bob’s dead.”

Bob the bagel monster.

Williams said, “Want to see him?”

Then I knew where Bob was and who had put him there.
Oh god
. I put my head down on my knees, fighting back nausea at the memory of the place.

Things shifted in my mind, and the weight of my belief scraped and groaned over to Kara. I couldn’t have told you exactly why. Graham had been so nice to me. But I just knew. Maybe it was because no world that gave Williams a prime place could be as bright and orderly as the one Graham had painted for me.

As I sat there, my new reality was replaced by an even newer one. It sucked. I’d been wasting my time on pretty lies.

By the time I was able to straighten up and look the latest version of my world in the face, it had gotten pretty dark. That seemed fitting. I had no idea what lay ahead of me. Before, I’d been imagining some combination of my old aspirations and something new — I’d go back to college and protect humanity on the side; I’d eventually be able to afford a new car, but sometimes I’d decide to fly instead. I know that sounds ridiculous, but those were the kinds of combinations my mind had been trying on for size.

Now I realized the rest of my life was going to bear no resemblance to what had come before. I no longer had a likely future stretching before me, a comfortable path through the streets of Dorf. Nor would I be following any of the getting-out-of-Dorf dreams I’d once nurtured. Instead, there was yawning blackness all around. And I was part of that dark unknown. What was I going to become?

I guess I was someone’s slave.

And Graham. Damn it, I’d liked him. I could almost still feel his hand pressing into the small of my back.
Damn
.

I felt used and sad. And very alone. I was nothing to these people. They only wanted me for what they thought I could do for them. Which made sense, if the punishment for failure was death.

“What do you want from me?” I asked Kara.

“We need you to come to the mill,” she answered instantly.

I could’ve guessed that one.

“Graham thought I wasn’t ready. He thought I’d get hurt, like Callie.”

Kara sighed. She went and pulled a milk crate out of the back of the van and sat down on it near me. Williams didn’t move. He was little more than an area of darker darkness.

“Beth, you have to quit thinking that he has your best interests at heart. Graham has Graham’s best interests at heart.”

“So why wouldn’t he want me there? Doesn’t he want that strait thing closed?”

The question was met with silence.

“I don’t get it. Why would he want it left open? He’s just middle-management, right? Won’t he get in trouble, too?”

“We don’t know,” Kara said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. A strait sitting open can attract human attention in a number of ways. But it really seems like that’s what he’s doing. I mean, you know Callie’s predictions are almost always accurate, right?”

“That’s what you keep saying.”

“Our lives are on the line. So why didn’t Graham rush you out to the strait the minute Callie told him your help was essential? It’s weird.”

I opened my mouth to object.

“Look,” Kara cut in, holding up her fingers to count off her evidence. “First of all, he didn’t send anyone up here to close the thing. Callie called him first, but he didn’t do anything, so she called Williams. Williams called me. It’s like Graham was just going to ignore it. Now he’s been here three days, but he says he’s here for you, and he hasn’t tried to do anything about the strait. The fucker hasn’t even gone out to look at it. He’s the overseer for the Upper Midwest. Getting it closed should be priority
número uno
for him. Instead, he’s fucking around with a trainee.”

“No offense,” she added belatedly.

We all sat there for a moment, digesting. It did sound pretty damning.

Finally I said, “I don’t understand how I could help with the strait. I mean, Callie’s much more experienced than I am, and it nearly killed her. What could I possibly do?”

“Callie’s the strongest of us. She can see pretty deep into an open strait. That’s why Williams took her there — to see what it was stuck on. She tried, but she couldn’t see the snag in this one. We’re guessing you’ll have better luck.”

I felt like laughing, it seemed like such a random hope. “Why on earth would you think that?”

“Did Graham tell you that the later your abilities manifest, the stronger you’re going to end up being? Callie saw through at twenty.”

She must’ve heard me stop breathing.

“Yeah, I was guessing he skipped that bit.”

That was what Graham had meant when he mentioned my “potential.” Kara was kind enough to let me sit there a while and come to grips with what she’d said. Again.

I wondered if it was too late to run. If I moved far away, then I could ignore any Seconds I saw and just live as a normal person. Right?

I thought about it and decided my best source of information was right in front of me.

“Could I get away from all this?” I asked, “Go somewhere far away and keep my head down?”

“It’s probably too late for that,” Kara said. Her voice held a note of sympathy. “You have to understand that they’ll want you back really bad, since you have a lot of potential. We all know what you look like, and if they sent one of us after you, we’d have no choice. And if they know about your friends and family, they’ll use them to bring you back.”

Well, there went that idea. I might as well sign death warrants for Ben and the girls. Janie too.

Still, it didn’t mean I had to go to the mill. Burned Callie flashed through my mind. I could still refuse.

Or maybe not. If successfully following orders was the only way to stay alive, maybe I had to throw my lot in with Kara and Williams and help them do what they needed to do.

Or I could stick with Graham. But getting wrapped up in whatever game he was playing seemed more dangerous than fire. If I had such potential in these people’s eyes, I might become a bargaining chip as Graham tried to meet his goals, whatever they were.

“If I go to the fire with you, how will you keep me safe? I’m, you know … defenseless.”

I hated to say it, but it was god’s own truth.

Kara’s voice brimmed with relief. “You’ll be safe if you pay attention and do what Williams says.”

Williams. Damn it. “Williams” and “safe” didn’t belong in the same world, much less the same sentence.

“What happened to Callie, that was an accident,” Kara continued. “She was trying to get a better look, and she walked through his barrier. She didn’t notice until it was too late.”

“It was definitely my fault. I just wasn’t paying attention,” Callie said from behind me.

I started, then wondered how long she’d been standing there listening. If she heard that her colleagues understood the other world in non–Christian terms, would it bother her?

“Williams can make different kinds of barriers — it’s his gift,” Kara said. “A protective one should be strong enough to withstand the fire at the mill. If he doesn’t have quite enough juice, I’ll be there to feed him some of mine. You just have to stay inside it.”

So Kara would be coming with us. That made me feel marginally better.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, I’ll go.”

I felt like I was choosing the slower method of suicide. I hoped we left soon. If we didn’t, I was going to chicken out.

O
nce we were
in the van headed toward the mill, Callie started coaching me on what to look for in the open strait. She said openings sometimes “got snagged,” which kept them from collapsing after use. The snags were generally visible in the opening, and once located, they could be unhitched from this end if you “grabbed the strait and shook it just right.” No kidding, that’s what she said.

Snags generally looked to her like a fold or wrinkle in fabric, she said, but some people thought they looked like spots of irritation on skin or like knots in a piece of wood. Basically, I should look for an anomaly. Once I found it, I should tell Williams exactly where the problem was and how big it looked, so he could grab the strait and close it.

When I asked exactly what caused the snags, she said it was “demons who had escaped Hell and were at large in the primordial deep.” Neither Williams nor Kara contradicted her, but I suspected they would’ve offered a different explanation in private.

Even minus the religious stuff, none of it made a great deal of sense. I had trouble envisioning the physical relationship between the worlds and exactly how straits connected them. I’d settled on an elevator-shaft analogy, with the worlds as different floors in a building, but when I ran it by Callie, she explained that the strait here didn’t open into S-Em northern Wisconsin. It might open into an S-Em version of London or Antarctica — there was no way to know. Some straits could connect to just one location, and some could connect to more than one, but they were never just a straight shot between the same spot in both worlds.

I nodded along and hoped it would suddenly make more sense when I actually saw it. If I actually saw it. I was still unconvinced on that front. They all seemed excited about my “potential,” but I sure hadn’t seen much sign of it. Maybe I’d luck out and the strait would be caught on a mouse.

“Do you have a phone I can use?” I asked the car at large. “I should call my brother. I was going to meet him at the mall.”

“Yeah, sure,” Kara said. She handed me a little flip phone. I had to call 411 to get Ben’s number, which was sort of embarrassing. I rang his house, but no one picked up. He must still be trying to get the thing with Tiff sorted out. I left a message for him, telling him that my car had broken down on the way and apologizing.

Poor Ben. He was really having a rough time. Speaking of which … Williams was driving, so I seized my courage in both hands and addressed his right shoulder.

“I want to know if you took Justine.”

“Who’s she?”

“My sister-in-law. She disappeared about the time you were getting out of police custody.”

“Wasn’t me.”

He sounded thoughtful, though. Beside me, Kara perked up immediately.

“Is she a Second?”

“Of course not! She grew up right near me in Dorf.”

Neither one of them replied, but Kara was clearly thinking.

Annoyed, I said, “Why would you even ask that? She’s a normal woman. A great big bitch, yeah, but normal.”

Kara answered. “Well, one thing we’ve wondered is whether the green man you photographed might be what came through the strait. Green men are often bounty hunters — fucking good ones, too. If your sister-in-law took off right about then …”

“No, the picture I took —”

“Did you show her your pictures?” Williams asked.

That stopped me, and not just because it was a complete sentence.

“Yeah. I did.”

It was hard to say the next words because I knew they’d latch onto them.

“She freaked out.”

“What do you mean?” Kara said. “Don’t leave anything out.”

Exactly what I was afraid of — she sounded as keen as a hound on a three-legged squirrel.

I described my visit to Justine’s house, how frightened she’d seemed, and how I’d gotten scared myself and had driven off.

“Damn,” Williams said.

“Yeah, totally,” Kara said.

“What?”

“That’s textbook pre-sighted stuff — you couldn’t see what she was, but you sensed her otherness, and it scared you. Used to happen to me all the time until I started seeing through.”

That was the kind of thing Graham had been talking about on the way home from Denny’s.

But seriously? Justine?

“Look, I know this stuff seems to fit together, but it’s just not possible. I mean, I’ve known her as long as I can remember. She lived around the block from us. She babysat me when she was a teenager.”

“A lot of Seconds can create very convincing disguises. Pretending to be a child wouldn’t be hard.”

I shook my head. “But I’ve never had that kind of reaction around her before, even though I have panic attacks constantly.”

Kara shrugged. “That is strange, but I still think there’s a good chance she’s a Second.”

“Callie,” I said, “I’m sure you’ve met Justine. You’d have noticed if she was different, right?”

Everyone in the car looked expectantly at Callie.

She shifted uncomfortably. “Beth is right — I’ve met Justine, and I never saw anything strange. If she’s a demon, her true form is beyond my perception.”

“So she’s not a Second.” I paused to make sure I had Graham’s explanations straight in my mind. “If she were using a half-working, Callie would’ve seen through it, and if she were using a full working, it would’ve looked like some kind of disturbance in reality. Right?”

“Yeah, that’s how it works.” Kara frowned. “Callie’s one of the strongest Nolanders out there. If she didn’t see anything, I guess there was nothing to see.”

She didn’t sound convinced, though.

“Well, I’m sure there’s nothing weird about her. She’s the most conventional person you could imagine. She’s a housewife. She never misses church. She goes to the gym four times a week and gets her hair highlighted once a month. She makes the nastiest-ass tuna casserole —”

Suddenly the van lurched and started shuddering.

Williams said, “Blow-out,” and pulled over onto the shoulder. For a few seconds, everyone sat stiffly in their seats, as though afraid. I didn’t get it. These country highways did cause flat tires occasionally — sharp stuff sometimes fell off farmers’ trucks.

We all got out and stood around while Williams changed the tire. Then we got back in. There was still a tension in the air that I didn’t quite understand.

We started up again but hadn’t gone more than twenty feet when another tire blew with a bang. This time Williams didn’t pull over. Instead, he put the van in reverse and hit the gas, even though we were obviously riding on the rim. He only paused once, putting on the hazards to let another vehicle go around us. The other three were clearly worried, so I kept my mouth shut. After about a quarter mile, Williams did a U-turn and continued back the way we’d come. We went another mile before he finally pulled over.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“That was Graham,” Kara said. “He must’ve gone to the mill.”

“Graham can blow out tires?” I said, incredulous. I figured he had one of those so-called quirks, but the ability to cause flat tires was even quirkier than I’d imagined.

“Not exactly. Graham’s gift is luck. He’s the luckiest sonovabitch who ever lived. We just drove into his range, which is about a mile. He doesn’t want you at the mill, and his luck is going to keep you from getting there. Goddamn it.”

“You must be joking. Come on — that was a coincidence. Or not even: a box of nails probably fell out of someone’s truck back there and scattered all over the road.”

“Yeah, that’s probably exactly what happened. But it happened because of Graham.”

I shook my head. “Callie, are you on board with this?”

“Oh yes, Beth. What they’re saying about Graham is absolutely true. I used to think it was a sign of his godliness, but I have my doubts, now. Perhaps he bargained with the enemy.”

She shuddered.

“I’m sorry, but this sounds really paranoid.”

“Didn’t you have any weird experiences when you were with him? Like pocket-dialing your boss just when you’re going behind his back?” Kara asked. “Cock-cankers, that sucked.”

“Kara, don’t be disgusting,” Callie said.

I thought about it. I had tended to get interrupted by one thing or another when I tried to ask Graham questions. By his phone, for instance, or a cracked kettle. Or a car accident.

Sticky accelerator
, the other driver had said. I felt cold.

“A couple years ago,” Kara said, “I was on a job with this other Nolander named Kyle. Nice guy, but sort of dumb. Turned out he’d been doing half-workings to make fake lottery tickets. At first he was careful and just gave himself little wins. Then he got greedy, made himself a Powerball ticket. It was a big jackpot, and he got on the news. The boss got wind of it, put the hit out on him. Graham took it on. Anything to make himself look good, the bastard.”

Kara made a disgusted sound, then continued.

“So, I didn’t know about any of this, right? I’m with Kyle on this job, and Graham catches up with us in Des Moines. Now, Kyle might not have been the smartest guy, but he was strong. Double gifts: flight and fire. So the two of them square off, right? And Kyle comes rocketing at Graham with a fireball in each hand. Looks like he’s moving way too fast for bad luck to catch him. Graham’s just standing there like a dope. You know what happened?”

Kara paused for effect.

“A fucking 1959 Cadillac Eldorado fell out of the sky, landed right on top of Kyle.” She shook her head. “Right out of a blue sky. Damnedest thing I ever saw. When the police found him, they called a weather guy. Weather guy said the car must’ve been picked up in a tornado they’d had earlier that day a hundred miles away. Sure enough, it was registered to some old guy in Omaha. That’s the kind of thing that happens when Graham’s around.”

“But you said his range was a mile, not a hundred miles.”

“Kyle wasn’t a hundred miles away, right? That’s what counts.”

“But Graham had to influence an event a hundred miles away to get the car up in the air.”

Kara shrugged. “Yeah, I know. That’s how it works, though. It’s like he controls everything without even meaning to. There’s probably something happening in Timbuktu right now that will end up helping him next week.”

It was hard to believe. Really hard. But all these people believed it, and there was that car accident. I shuddered. Jesus.

“Well, this boss guy you mentioned will just have to come out here and take care of things himself,” I said.

Kara snorted. “Come on, seriously? The Seconds never ‘take care of things themselves.’ If they went around doing workings all the time, they might get discovered, and you know what would have to happen then. That’s why they have us. We’re expendable.”

“So what you’re saying is that Graham’s won? He’s unbeatable?”

“Maybe not,” Kara said. “We’ve thought before that someone with significantly more power might be able to evade the bad luck he sent their way, but we’ve never tested it out.”

“Maybe now’s the time for me to see if it’s true,” Callie said, sounding nervous.

“No,” said Williams.

There was a finality to his voice that I sure didn’t want to contest. Kara didn’t say anything either.

We all thought about Graham for a while.

“So he’s at the mill, and we can’t get any closer to him — not in a car, not on foot, nothing?”

“That pretty much sums it up,” Kara said. “He left Dorf for a while this afternoon, and Callie saw it was going to happen. Otherwise we never would’ve made it out of town ourselves to come get you. We were hoping he’d stay away, but I guess his luck brought him to the mill. Or maybe he figured out what we were doing and knew we’d try to bring you there. Unfortunately, he’s not dumb.”

We all sat there thinking again. Finally, I had an idea. The kind of idea you have when you’re a new set of eyes looking at an old problem, maybe.

“What we need to do is change something so that it becomes lucky for him if we make it to the mill and unlucky if we don’t,” I said.

“I guess that would work,” Kara said dubiously. “But how on earth could we do that? What he wants is the opposite of what we want.”

“Well, you mentioned your boss — the guy who wanted Kyle killed? He sounds plenty dangerous. What if we called your boss up and told him that Graham might be trying to keep us from closing the strait? Then, if we close the strait after all and tell him Graham helped, maybe he’ll be reassured. We’d be doing Graham a good turn by getting him out of trouble. His luck should be on our side. Maybe.”

“So,” Callie said, “we would get him into trouble, then try to get him out of that same trouble?”

“Yeah. And during the getting-him-out-of-trouble part, we’ll actually be on his side. Even if he doesn’t know it.”

There was a thoughtful silence.

Kara said, “Lord knows I hate Graham, but ratting him out … I don’t know. He’s still one of us, not one of them.”

Callie nodded. “He’s a human being, with a chance at redemption.” She paused. “However slight.”

Williams said, “We have to close the strait,” and everyone looked down.

I could see the writing on the wall, then — their own skins were on the line, and no one was going to make that kind of sacrifice.
And why should they?
I reminded myself. Graham was putting them in danger by making their task impossible. If he didn’t care about their safety, why should they care about his?

“We could call Graham and threaten to rat him out,” Kara suggested.

I thought about it.

“I don’t think that’d work,” I said. “If we’re a threat to him, his luck will try to eliminate us, once we get in range. It doesn’t really matter if he agrees to cooperate with us — he’ll still be safer if we’re not alive to tell tales, and his luck will act accordingly. The only way it works is to go ahead and change the game on him while we’re out of his range.”

Another silence followed, but I could tell it didn’t have to do with thinking of other approaches.

Finally Kara said, “We’ll have to call Lord Cordus,” and shuddered.

“I will not speak to that creature,” Callie said flatly. “Not for any reason.”

“Well I sure as fuck am not calling him,” Kara said.