Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (94 page)

“Looking for this?” Aidan indicated a rack of keys. He fished through them and withdrew one. I hoped it was the right one. We’d rather not wake Pete’s family, so we’d have to roll the car out onto the drive and then onto the road before starting the engine.

The garage door was an ancient one: two large doors, which opened wide. I hadn’t thought about what we’d do if it had been an automatic door. Way too noisy. We would have had to look for an easier car to steal.

I unhitched the door and eased one side open, going slowly and hoping it didn’t creak. It didn’t. Relieved, I kicked a brick in front of it and did the same with the other door.

Aidan got in, set the gear to neutral and got back out, holding onto the door, ready to push. “Get behind,” he whispered.

I wondered who died and made Aidan the boss. Then I wanted to giggle.
He’d
died and I’d made him the boss. The joke was on me.

I did as he asked, and pushed.

The car rolled smoothly forward. We steered to the end of the drive, turned into the road and pushed it all the way to the corner, three houses from Pete’s.

I thought about the garage door standing wide open like a gaping jaw. Pete was in for a surprise tomorrow morning. I’d never pegged myself as vindictive, and my little trip to Asgard had almost made me forget Pete’s attack. But back here in Craven, staring at his car, the memory of that day seeped into my mind, crawling all the way into my bones. Shivers rippled through me. I jumped into the car.

Hugin flapped wildly, in such a crazed frenzy that I was afraid he’d either peck out my eye or scratch me with his sharp little talons. I let him fly out and watched as he ascended and circled above the car. Shaking my head, I shut the door as quietly as I could. The click of the lock echoed up and down the empty street. I shuddered, sure the cops would be on our tail in the next ten seconds.

Aidan jumped in and stabbed the key into the ignition. I held a breath and sent a prayer up to Odin. I breathed again only when the engine turned. It growled loudly and then settled into a low purr, waiting for Aidan to set it in motion. We drove off, leaving the sleeping neighborhood behind while I enjoyed imagining Pete’s reaction when he discovered his car was gone.

“
S
o what’s the plan
? Where are we going?” The cracked blue leather squeaked with every move we made. Pete didn’t take good care of his leather seats. The interior of the Lincoln was otherwise immaculate, even though it was probably made in the late sixties. They made cars well in the old days.

“Washington,” said Aidan, tracing the soft blue leather of the huge steering wheel.

“State or DC?” I asked the dumb question even though it was clear we were on the old Route 66, heading east.

He raised an eyebrow. “DC. Rockville, Maryland, to be specific. The national hub of human gene research. We need to make a quick stop at the institute on the way to New York.”

“The institute?”

My unhappy expression elicited a gravelly laugh. “Marlowe Institute of Genetic Science,” he said.

I got the impression he’d said the full name just for effect. I shivered, remembering the Institute’s emblem imprinted on the lab reports. The place where both our fathers had worked, competed and apparently hated each other enough for one of them to try to kill the other’s daughter.

“I thought you said we have to stay under the radar? I’m not sure going into the lion’s den is the best course of action when the point is to avoid said lion,” I said drily, staring straight ahead to study the dark Missouri night. I tried to stick my elbow on the low armrest, unsuccessfully.

“They have important records stored in their system. We’ll have to risk it.”

“How will we get in?” I stretched out, enjoying the legroom and marveling at my lack of tiredness. The chainmail chinked as I moved, reminding me that we were still clothed in our Asgard getup.

“I have a security pass.”

I snorted. “You’ve been dead for a while. Don’t you think they’d have deactivated your card by now?”

“I have my father’s card.”

“Oh.” I looked at him, unsettled by the deadness of his voice, by the shadow that crossed his face. He’d been doing his father’s bidding when he came to Craven, but the coldness in his voice when he mentioned his father sent a creeping shudder up my spine. “Well, I guess that will help. So, he’s a genetic scientist, huh? Small world, hey? What exactly does he do at the institute?”

“He’s in charge. Took over your father’s role when he passed away.” Aidan threw me a quick, apologetic glance before concentrating on the road again. Not that he needed to concentrate all that much. The road ahead was easy, just point and drive.

“Hey,” Aidan said, “can that bird of yours keep up with us?” He squinted up at the sky.

Way to go on the swift change of subject, Biker-Dude.
I rolled my eyes, shook my head didn’t bother to force the issue. Not yet.

Leaning forward I peered up at Hugin as he swooped in a circle, high above the car. I caught a glimpse of the raven when he crossed in front of the white-faced moon, bemused at the simple beauty of the bird, backlit by the pale moon.

But Aidan had a point.
Could
Hugin keep up with a car? He was no ordinary bird; he belonged to Odin, after all. And he’d made it pretty clear that he wasn’t particularly fond of the Lincoln; he couldn’t fly off fast enough. I shrugged. Nothing we could do now. We couldn’t walk all the way to Maryland. Surely Hugin would keep up. We had to get to the institute, fast. Every minute wasted was a minute of Aidan’s life gone, a minute closer to his last breath.

“So your dad’s the boss now, huh?” I asked, determined to get my answers. “That’s how he got his hands on those old reports.”

“Yeah, he suspected your father was doing something odd right from the start.”

I bristled, remembering that
I
was the thing he’d been suspicious of doing.

The road straightened, and Aidan gunned the engine. “After the DNA results came back negative, everything should have gone back to normal, but your father’s investigations continued and my father became increasingly suspicious, so he looked at the files,” he said. He paused, as if choosing his words carefully. “At that time, he couldn’t find anything conclusive, but when your father passed away, he left a considerable amount of paperwork at the lab. Incriminating paperwork.” A bitter tone laced Aidan’s voice. “He’d done blood tests on you when you were born. To investigate the level of nonhuman DNA in your blood at different stages of your life. Only three of them were ever performed.”

“I still don’t see the need to go right into the institute,” I protested, glaring at him. “What’s so all-fired important to risk our lives to go there?” The ticking time bomb that was Aidan’s life filled my mind.

Aidan’s hands gripped the steering wheel, tension radiating from him. “There are still vials of your blood stored in the lab freezer. Those vials are evidence of your existence, and I intend to remove them. No way am I leaving them any ammunition to use against you again.”

“Oh,” I said quietly.

He looked at me, his eyes pools of blackness in the night’s shadows. When I said nothing and turned to stare at the blacktop racing at us from up ahead, he continued. “My father looked for you for a long time. The problem was you disappeared into the system when your father died, and he didn’t have the connections to find out where you were. And when he eventually found out, it was always after the fact. You moved often enough to keep him just one step behind you.”

I nodded. That’s why the pendant had taken so long to find me, too.

Gazing outside, I watched Hugin as he flew above us. Apparently he could keep up just fine. Our very own sentinel. Just his presence up there made me feel safe.

“I’d always been interested in Norse mythology and my father had arranged for me to go to summer digs around the world,” Aidan said. “I’ve been to the dig site where Brunhilde was unearthed. There’s nothing there now. Everything was taken to New York, to the Neilsson Museum of Ancient History. That’s our next stop after the institute.”

“Don’t tell me you worked for them, too?” I asked dryly.

“Actually I still work there. Well, until I died anyway.” A self-deprecating and sad smile curved on his lips. “It’ll take a while to get used to the whole being-dead-but-not-really-dead thing.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I guessed it would be a bad time to remind him that the whole walking dead thing also applied to zombies. I bit back a smile, silently admonishing myself for those insensitive thoughts, and gazed out the passenger-side window. The silence felt endless. How do you make someone feel better about being dead?

A mile marker sign whisked by on my right. Then another. When I couldn’t take the silence anymore, I asked, “What were you doing for the museum?”

He rubbed his eyes, then returned his hand to the steering wheel. “I was transcribing, and translating. That book you found? Many old books were found at the dig site. The book I had was a copy of one written by a Scottish professor of archaeology who’d gotten quite far with his translations. I was trying to do more of them, using scripts taken from the dig site.”

My thoughts flicked to the back seat where my bag sat. Buried inside was the topic of this discussion. And although Ms. Custer had returned it to me, I hadn’t given it back to Aidan yet. I needed more time. I still felt connected to the book, perhaps because it held within it a painting of me. A painting done hundreds of years before I’d even been born.

Neither had I told him that I’d completed the translations. I didn’t want to tell him. Not yet. I felt like I’d negate all his hard work by admitting it took me only a couple of days to translate the whole thing, and correct his translations where he’d gone wrong.

It all made sense now, where the knowledge had come from.

Another long silence fell as the miles flew by and the milky moon slipped behind a cloud. “So how did you end up in Craven?” I finally got the nerve to ask.

“My father. He told me it was high time I proved myself. That I needed to make a decision as to which direction I was going with my studies. He showed me the reports and implied that if I were to be the one who discovered the existence of a real living Valkyrie I would gain international recognition and I would have my pick of Universities.”

He sighed and glanced at me, his eyes apologetic and shadowed by...what? Regret? “I’m not proud of that lapse in judgment,” he said. “My selfishness came to the fore. But the temptation to be the one to make that discovery...well, I took his offer. Then he sent me to Craven. All he wanted was someone who’d be able to fit in, at the foster home, at the school.”

A quiver of anguish edged his voice, as if behind the pain a memory had come loose, fallen into the pool of his mind, causing rippling waves. I stayed silent. As much as I wanted to know more, I was tired and just a bit shell-shocked.

The ride seemed endless and felt like such a waste of all our precious minutes. I wished we’d had a plane or faster transport. I just wanted this whole escapade over and done with. We’d have to ditch the Lincoln soon, probably steal another one.

The hours slipped by and soon we’d traveled the whole night. I kept expecting sirens. The one time we heard them, I tensed and watched the rearview mirror until a police car passed us by and skidded onto a side road. By now, Pete would know his car was gone, but the Craven police chief would first want to rule out pranksters. We were already miles away, somewhere in south Illinois.

B
efore morning hit
the horizon we slid off the highway into a nameless road and ditched Pete’s car behind a dilapidated shed. It would have been so easy to dump it in the middle of a cornfield. Wrong season. Surrounding us were remnants of snow covered dark, furrowed soil, the land bare and waiting for the spring sowing. We borrowed another car from a nearby farmhouse. And got out of town.

Before we’d left Craven, Ms. Custer had handed me money. Which I refused to take until she explained it was mine. The trust had begun to execute my father’s instructions, providing me with a monthly allowance, sent to Ms. Custer at my last known address. She alone knew where I’d gone, and she’d kept every cent in case I returned.
Thank you, Ms. Custer!

At least we were now able to eat. And though we didn’t need to stop to rest, common sense and a good dose of paranoia urged us to lie low during the day.

We spent the first day sleeping like the dead in a decrepit motel I was sure was the set of a bad horror movie. The sign outside proclaiming the hotel name was missing a few important bulbs, so the name was now
la Hell Motel
instead of Black Shell.

Threadbare brown-and-gold seventies carpets, intricately gouged furniture and a TV set bolted to the floor decorated the room. The shower stall looked clean, and I used it to get the grime off. The grime of lies and theft, of dishonesty and guilt, which seemed to have seeped into my pores beyond reach of scrubbing and soap.

Before I jumped into bed I nudged the curtains open a crack and spotted Hugin on a branch in a tree beside the parking lot. Good. I could cross “apologize to Odin for losing his raven” off my list of worries.

I dived under the covers, too afraid to inspect them, preferring to think positive. I plunged straight into a dreamless sleep, waking in the late afternoon as Aidan moved around the room trying not to wake me up. So much for stealth.

“We need food, for now and for the road,” he said. “I’ll go get something, you get ready.”

I nodded, heading into the shower again, wondering when we’d fallen into the comfortable couple routine.

We ate an afternoon breakfast of bland chicken salad sandwiches and brown swill masquerading as coffee. Asgard’s attempt to keep up with the influx of more modern Warriors by providing coffee had turned out better than what the real world had to offer. Unsatisfied but replete, we took to the road again right after sunset, the darkness hiding what scenery we could have enjoyed, but keeping us relatively safe. After a quick stop at a gas station, we were on the move again, night sky and stars watching our every move.

The roads were quiet, with only one other car behind us, a dark SUV, headlights low, keeping pace, seemingly heading east like us. A few hours later, our two-car caravan still sped toward Kentucky, the steady headlights behind us drawing closer. Too close.

A trucker zoomed by, way over the speed limit, advertising the latest technology in whitening toothpaste. Our stolen car rattled, and I gripped the armrest until the truck roared ahead. I checked the mirror and saw our SUV shadow had dropped back, put some distance between us. So I relaxed.

A
gain
, we didn’t stop until dusk. The next motel was equally drab, equally depressing, somewhere off the expressway in West Virginia. Aidan stashed the car behind the motel, while I grabbed my bag and headed off to get us a room. As the gum-chewing, pink-haired, bored-out-of-her-mind clerk handed over the keys and mumbled about ice and keeping the noise down, Aidan moved past me and booked a second, adjoining room.

At first I felt hurt, my teen blood boiling at the insult, but my Valkyrie instinct reined me in. Something was up. A glance from Aidan confirmed my suspicions. He looked worried.

I left the office quietly and waited. Aidan popped out seconds later, a relaxed smile on his face that would have fooled anyone besides me.

We walked to the first room and entered in silence, with Hugin making a last minute landing on my shoulder. Puzzled, I watched as Aidan pointed to an inner door that led to the next room. He fiddled with the lock and it clicked open; then he hustled me into the other room, taking our bags with us, leaving the connecting door wide open.

Grabbing a notepad from the nightstand he scribbled a few lines, then handed it to me.

We’ve been followed. Will stay here. Return to other room, act normal, shower, change, etc. Leave bathroom window open, make them think we escaped the back way.

Icy hot chills ran up and down my spine. How did they find us? I ached to ask Aidan how he knew, but I bit my tongue as he beckoned me to go back to the other room. Hugin stayed behind, perched on the back of a chair. He twitched his head, agitated, as if sensing something was going on. But I couldn’t tell him, and I was pretty sure he couldn’t read Aidan’s note, so I just hoped he’d behave.