Huntress (23 page)

"Oh, well hello. Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get your attention now for the last forty-five minutes."

"What?" I worked my jaw, making sure he hadn’t broken anything.

"Grace, you’ve been screaming for forty-five minutes. You are wasting time. If we’re going to save Drew, you’re going to have to stay in reality with me."

"Save Drew." It wasn’t a question. The memories came flooding back and I suppressed the crazy that came with them. "What do you need me to do?"

"Finally," he grumbled and materialized a sharp scalpel - handing it to me.

"You have the highest concentration of fresh nanites in your blood right now. I need you to give some of them to Drew. From the bodies of the Abaasy lying about and the lovely bluish tinge to his face, I’m going to assume that he was poisoned by their blood."

I nodded dumbly. I didn’t know what an Abaasy was, but it definitely looked like Drew had been poisoned.

"The nanites in your blood will replicate much more quickly than his will and counteract the poison. Great Zeus! Didn’t he tell you this before he became unconscious?"

I refrained from telling him that he’d just taken his own name in vain. This wasn’t the time to be a smart ass. Not thinking, I sliced into my wrist and pushed it over Drew’s mouth. It seemed like the quickest way to get the nanites into his system.

I may be hard to kill now, but blood loss in any form is not a smart idea and the scalpel was sharp. I cut too deep and blood started spurting from my wrist.

"You are an absolute Moron," he yelled and grabbed my wrist, applying pressure. After a few words, the wound closed and the pain lessened.

"What now?"

"Now, we wait."

Waiting sucked. I watched as he paced through the house, looking at pictures on tables and walls. As he passed one of the Abaasy body parts he kicked it viciously.

The arm, at least I think it was an arm, bounced off the wall and crashed into the door to the basement. The creaking sound it made as it swung open sent shivers up my spine. Scooter’s dead eyes stared at me through the open doorway and I swore.

Scrambling to my hands and knees, I crawled to the doorway and ran a fingertip down his muzzle.

"Is that my damned Golem?"

"You sure do swear a lot."

"Pot, meet kettle," was the sharp response.

"I’d forgotten that Scooter was yours."

"For the last two and a half millennia he has been." He retorted angrily. "What did you do to him?"

When I didn't answer, he knelt beside me and ran a hand over Scooter’s head assessing the damage. "What did you call him?"

"Scooter, his name is Scooter. Drew wouldn’t tell me what his name was, so I just started calling him Scooter."

"Where is his body?"

"Downstairs, they separated it from his head."

"Go get it and bring it back up here, please. I need to fix my Golem who is certainly NOT a Scooter."

"You can fix him?"

"Not if you don’t bring me his body. Now shoo."

The carpet down the stairs squished under my feet. Trying to ignore what that meant, I picked my way past body parts and wondered what it would take to have the blood cleaned from the carpets. Ok, that was unrealistic. I couldn’t just call up Coit and say, "Yes I need my blood soaked carpet cleaned, please."

Scooter’s body lay in a corner curled up on itself. I tried not to think of him as a dog. He was a golem, a creature of another world. This was not the body of my dog… Yeah, right.

Wincing, I bent over to run my hand over the smooth line. He was surprisingly soft considering what he consisted of. The body twitched and I jumped back and screeched in surprise. The tail wagged once.

"Rotten dog!" I yelled.

Bending back over, I took a deep breath and tried to lift the body off the ground. He was surprisingly heavy considering how lethally quick he was. Looking around for something to help lift him, my eyes only found destruction. Drew’s bedroom probably had a blanket that I could drag him up the stairs with.

The thought of entering Drew’s private domain gave me pause. I’d never been in his room before. Grief welled and I decided against invading his privacy now.

He’d get better and then I’d barge in, pretending that I needed something. I wasn’t going to do it while he couldn’t bitch at me about it. That just seemed very un-sportsman-like. Yes, that was it.

"How the fuck am I going to get you up the stairs Scooter?"

I didn’t expect an answer, so the one that came drifting down the stairs startled me.

"Use your damned nanite strength, you nitwit!"

"If I knew how to use my nanite strength, don’t you think I’d be up the stairs by now, you crotchety old goat?"

"Your brains must be in your boobs. I can’t believe your mother wasted an egg on you," floated the reply.

My eyes narrowed as I tried to suppress the anger at this total nincompoop. What did he know? The anger was starting to win, my arms and legs started tingling and the ground rumbled a few times.

"Crap," I bit out.

The last thing we needed was an earthquake because I couldn’t keep it together. It occurred to me that I had no idea what happened when my brain hadn’t been all there.

Being able to completely stuff your emotions and fears is practical. I wanted to say that I normally didn’t have this ability but what happened upstairs was proof enough and I was going to continue with it for as long as it took me to get this body up the stairs.

Bending down, I grunted and just lifted. It seemed that the nanites decided to take pity on me and help me out on this one. Yay for helpful nanites!

Grunting with each step, I made it up the stairs, completely out of breath.

"You’re out of shape. I thought my son was supposed to be training you."

The tone was gruff but there was a hint of something else in there. Was it worry?

"Well, you know – battle to the death and all kind of wore me out."

"Heh."

"Can you fix Scooter or not?"

"Quit calling him that. That’s a horrible name for such a mighty and terrible beast."

"He answers to Scooter," I cocked an eyebrow at him, daring him to dispute.

"Stupid dog," he grunted out and I smiled because he’d just called Scooter a dog. We were making progress.

"Why are you here?" It was abrupt, but I was figuring that this was as good a time to get information as any. This always worked with Dylan - chances were it would work with him too.

"I had something to tell you."

"Well I’m here," planting my hands on my hips and cocking my head, I gave my best impression of listening intently.

"Got to wait until Adonis wakes up."

"He doesn’t like it when you call him that."

"I don’t give a Medusa’s damn what he likes, impudent rat."

The gruffer he got, the more worry I heard. Repressing a smile, I watched as he molded Scooter’s head back to the body. It was like watching a sculptor’s hands at work. He massaged the neck against the shoulders, shaping muscle and veins. I sat mesmerized at this man’s – no this God’s talent.

Even though I knew that they weren’t really Gods, it was hard to combat what I was seeing. Zachary was creating life before my eyes.

Scooter’s chest began to rise and fall in a simulation of breathing. I didn’t think he needed to breathe, but who really knew? Leaning down, I rubbed his ribs and patted him a few times to make sure he was moving on his own and this wasn’t some sort of hallucination.

"Will he be alright?"

"Yeah, he’ll be fine in a few minutes. These are hard to kill, which is why he was SUPPOSED to be my guardian. The Gods only know what Adonis has been doing with him. He’s probably gotten lazy since I last saw him." He patted the golem’s head a few times, belaying the harshness of his words.

This man was a mystery. On one hand he was terrifying, a true being who could destroy entire land masses. On the other, he seemed to be a caring father and master. I still wasn’t entirely sure where I stood in his eyes.  Parts of me were afraid to find out.

One moment he was trying to kill me, the next he was taking care of my messes. Maybe they were right.  Maybe he
was
utterly insane. The mercurial moods didn’t help dissuade that opinion.

"Let’s assume that Drew isn’t going to wake up for a few hours. How about you give me a hint?"

"I think I know where your mother is."  The last word trailed off as I looked at him, my mouth gaping open in shock.

"Well then why are you here and not fetching her?"

"Can’t."

"Why not?"

He scowled at me, his face becoming thunderous.  I steeled myself for a lightning strike or something equally painful. I kept forgetting that making him mad was not a good idea. I’ve never claimed to be the smartest woman I know, but what I did next could have been classified as suicide in the right circles.

"Oh my God, would you just
stop
this," I yelled. "My house has been destroyed. I had Drew die in my arms and there are body parts lying - soaked in blood - in my god damned kitchen!" My chest was heaving in both fear and anger. "I want you to stop this! I’m tired of being afraid of you. Either you kill me or you cut this psychotic god nonsense out. I’m tired of it and I can’t take it anymore!"

The last sentence was a full out bellow. Zachary’s face had gone slack and his jaw dropped open as he stared at me in surprise. My fear spiked because I was certain that he was
really
going to kill me this time. Instead, he threw his head back and laughed.

The longer he laughed, the angrier I got. My life just kept getting weirder and weirder with an endless supply of crackpots wandering in and out.

He was bent over, holding his sides. The urge to brain him was strong. "Oh Medusa’s tits, Grace. You’ve got stones. Nobody has talked to me like that since your mother and that was after I sunk Atlantis."

"The crazy must be in the genes," I muttered. "I’m going to check on Drew, then start cleaning my house. Dylan is going to be destroyed over the loss of his loot and I need to take inventory so I can try to replace as much as possible."

Stalking to where Drew's still body lay, I could hear Zachary’s snorts and giggles. Medusa’s tits, indeed. The corner of my mouth quirked up and I forced it back down into a frown. I wasn’t going to fall into this man’s madness.

Nothing about this situation was worth laughing about. I had a destroyed house, the mostly dead body of a friend and other wreckage surrounding me. This wasn’t the time for normal.

Shame swept through me at how I had been joking and cajoling Zachary only minutes after losing my mind over the death of Drew.  This wasn’t normal and this wasn’t me. What was happening here?

Swiping my hand over my cheek to get rid of a stray tear, I felt the blood and other bodily fluids that had caked into a gritty crust on my fingers and shuddered. Drew wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon and since Zachary had Scooter in hand, I was going to take a shower.

Huddled on the floor of my shower, shivering under water that had grown cold eons ago was where Drew found me. My face was crushed against my knees and the only thing I remember was rocking back and forth, asking God to give me my life back.

It didn’t matter that Brandon had cheated. It didn’t matter that I loathed him. I just wanted my predictable, boring days back.  I’d write a hundred, no – a thousand pages a day for Marisol, if we could just get back to how it was before I’d met my mother.

These creatures had found my house! What if Dylan had been home? How was I supposed to keep my family safe? I knew that I’d only defeated that creature out of sheer dumb luck. There wasn’t skill there. I’d gone into survival mode at the last minute.

They had killed Drew and he was the strongest, fastest, most powerful being I’d ever seen! There was no way I could do this. Self-doubt spun its vicious web lazily through my mind, dropping anchors where they would hurt the most. Nothing was going to fix this or make it better because we were all doomed if
I
was supposed to be the savior.

As if on cue, powerful arms wrapped themselves around my naked body and pulled me into his lap, murmuring and rocking. The water no longer poured down, but now the cold felt more noticeable.

"Shhh, it’s ok. It’s going to be ok," he whispered.

I felt like a small child, wrapped in his arms. I wanted to crawl into that embrace and lose myself, never coming back out. I wasn’t strong enough for this. I could fake it like nobody’s business, but the reality was that I wasn’t cut out for this life.

"Sure you are," he cajoled.

"Stop reading my mind." I burrowed deeper into his warmth and listened to his heartbeat for a few moments.  It dawned on me that it hadn't been all that long ago that I'd been sure I'd seen his last smile, had heard his last heart beat.   I couldn't stop the tears from coming again.