I brought the water and Herb took it with shaking hands. His fingers lacked the dexterity to open the bottle, so Megan gently placed her hands over his and helped him. He took a sip, paused, and then another. One of his hands still held Megan’s. I looked around at the damage caused during the fight. A park bench and some crazed pigeons were the only casualties. Pretty good, by my standards.
“Nice work, Herb,” I said, turning back to him. “You—” I cut off. Herb and Megan were entwined in a very tender kiss. Well, I guess he’d gotten his breath back. I turned away from them and looked up at the sky. “Okay, then. I’ll just go over here,” I said, walking away without looking. I checked my forearm where the brand had been; the mark was still there, but the sunburned feeling was gone. With the draugr defeated, it must’ve lost its power. That was a relief.
It was nearly a full minute later that I heard Megan and Herb break apart with a wet smack. Megan giggled. I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw they were getting to their feet, brushing snow from their pants. “Nice work, Herb,” I said again, acting like nothing had happened. I extended my hand to him. “You really know what you’re doing.”
Herb distractedly took my hand and shook mechanically. “Yeah,” he said, not taking his eyes off Megan. “Thanks.”
I suddenly felt like the biggest third wheel in the history of the universe. “You know what?” I said. “It’s a gorgeous night, I think I’ll walk home. You guys take it easy.”
“Are you sure?” Megan asked, her eyes never leaving Herb’s.
“Yep. It’s a balmy twenty-nine degrees out here, and a walk’ll do me good. I’m one hundred percent positive. I’ll see you guys later. Night.”
“Night,” they both said, taking a step toward one another. They took each other’s hands and just stood there.
I hoped the Keepers assigned to ward Megan weren’t voyeuristic. Otherwise, they’d probably be getting one hell of an eyeful tonight.
The first thing I heard when I got home was raised voices in the kitchen. “And another thing, Petra, your cooking is dreadful. I’m surprised you don’t burn the water when you boil it.”
I froze. That was Aphrodite’s voice. What the hell was she doing here? She wasn’t supposed to be here until tomorrow. I threw off my gore-covered coat and stalked to the living room, fully prepared to give the goddess of love a piece of my mind.
“Now you listen,” Petra was saying, “I’ve been trained by gourmet cooks from every century, and even Epicurus himself enjoys my food. There must be something wrong with your taste buds.” I froze again, this time in surprise. Go, Petra!
The sight that greeted me when I walked into the living room wasn’t what I’d been expecting, however. Petra stood with her hands on her hips, facing a ghostly image with a rough approximation of Aphrodite’s face. Gearstripper sat next to the coffee table, fiddling with a bunch of wires connected to a small black box with a picture of a raspberry on it. Gears adjusted a microphone headset and spoke. His words were echoed and reproduced through a speaker sitting on the table, somehow synthesizing Aphrodite’s voice. “How dare you speak that way to me! I am the goddess of love and beauty.”
“You’re the goddess of lust and debauchery,” Petra countered. “You don’t know a thing about real love.”
“I know I love Twinkies,” Aphrodite said. Petra’s stern countenance quivered, then shattered as she started giggling.
“Gearstripper,” she said, smiling. “Can you stop thinking about food for five minutes?”
“Actually, that was six and a half minutes, Petra. I’m famished. Where’s this lamb you were talking about? Is that what I can smell coming from the kitchen?”
Petra saw me and walked through the holographic Aphrodite. She gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“You sounded really good there,” I said.
Petra smiled. “That was good advice you had, Vincent. I started thinking about all the mantras you were saying, but I knew that those wouldn’t be enough. So I asked Gearstripper to help me rig up a way to practice responding to Mother.”
“Helluva setup you’ve got there, Gears,” I said.
The holographic goddess vanished and Gears grinned. “Thanks, Vinnie. It’s amazing what you can do with refurbished parts and a bit of know-how.”
“Thanks again, Gearstripper,” Petra said.
“Petra?” Gears asked, squinting his eyes. “Is that you? I’m so hungry I think I’m hallucinating.” He made a big show of grabbing his stomach and then falling over. Petra and I smiled at each other. A moment later, Gears opened one yellow eye and looked at us. He closed it again quickly. “Yep, don’t mind me, just starving to death over here.”
Petra laughed again as she picked the gremlin up and carried him like an infant into the kitchen. I realized then that this was the first time I’d heard Petra laugh since we’d learned of Aphrodite’s impending visit. I followed them into the kitchen, and a few minutes later, we were enjoying Petra’s latest practice lamb.
Petra asked me to grab a couple of last minute items from the store the following morning. I had just checked out and was stepping through the door when the air pressure around me changed. Suddenly I was falling, and then I collided with a snow bank. “Tsk tsk,” Forculus said. “You need to watch where you’re going, Vincent. Doors can take you to unexpected places.” I glowered at him as he closed the portal that had dropped me from five feet off the ground in the alley across from the store.
“Is there a reason you’re antagonizing me?” I asked as I gathered my fallen groceries from the ground and brushed snow from my hair. A bunch of it had gone down the front of my bomber and I swatted at that to clear it out. The snow fell away, leaving damp patches on my shirt and stomach. Great.
“I told you I’d be back soon to continue your training,” Forculus replied. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.” I joined him at a bare spot of brick wall. “All right,” he grinned. “We’re going to try a different approach. I focused you on opening gateways last time. Let’s try closing them.”
He Opened a portal to that same spot in Sicily and we stepped through. The sudden shift to the warm air of Forculus’s domain made my eyes water, and I shrugged out of my bomber and set my bag down. “Closing gates is less abstract than Opening them,” Forculus said as he popped open a gateway to a spot about ten feet in front of us. “You were too distracted by the hellhound last time, so let’s start with something simple. Stretch out with your senses and touch the energies that make this gateway.” I stood completely still, my eyes screwed shut, mentally flailing around while I tried to connect with the gateway. For a long time, I felt nothing, and then…
My eyes went huge. A flowing sensation, like thin streams of water, ran across my face. The water had a feel to it, a flavor almost, of where it had been and where it led. Forculus saw my expression and smiled. “Dawn finally shines,” he said. “Can you figure out how to close it?” I stretched out mentally and imagined I was turning off a tap. The gateway shimmered, shrank, and then finally closed. Forculus applauded. “Excellent. Again.” The gateway sprang back into existence and I closed it, a little faster this time. A third time, and I was faster still.
This wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was easy. A fourth gate opened, and this time the flows that made up the gateway were so strong that I felt like Tigger trying to pull Winnie the Pooh through a particularly narrow hole.
Forculus laughed at my expression. “The farther a gateway reaches, the more energy it takes to Open, and conversely, the more it takes to close. Shutting a portal that goes from one end of a village to another is much easier than shutting one that spans continents or dimensions.” He gestured to the portal I was struggling to close. “This one leads to somewhere in your Pacific Northwest.” I slammed the gateway closed and flicked sweat from my brow. “Nicely done,” Forculus nodded. “You have the basics down now. The next step is to increase your concentration.”
He motioned for me to move back from him. He stretched and gestured out across the field, to the ocean. “People traditionally think of gateways and view them as doors. That is, vertically. Understand, Corinthos, that the clever beings in the universe will make them horizontally as well.” A hole in the air above me snapped open and water gushed onto my head, knocking me over. I rolled to the side, water surging up around me. Fish flopped against the ground as a briny smell assaulted my nostrils.
“Salt water?” I asked as I stretched out mentally and closed the gate. “So you opened one on the bottom of the ocean floor and another on top of me?”
Forculus just grinned. A second portal opened along the ground and the water and fish funneled into it. A slit on the horizon opened to my left, and the stuff splashed back into the ocean. For the next few hours, Forculus opened a variety of gateways around me. If I’d had some music from the ’80s in the background, it would’ve been a perfect training montage sequence. Some of the gateways brought water, others brought lava. Some opened on charging animals. One opened on an avalanche. I managed to slam them all shut, though I did get singed or soaked a few times.
Finally Forculus called a stop. “All right, Corinthos. Do it in reverse. See if you can Open a portal now.” I took a deep breath and imagined turning the faucet on instead of off. Energy built up around me, and I tried to coerce it into opening to a spot just a few yards away.
I felt the beginnings of the portal forming, the energies weaving into something like a tiny wreath that gradually expanded in diameter. I sent more power into it, expecting a window to appear in reality just ahead of me.
Instead, the air tore open and a blast of frigid wind shot out. Shrieks exploded around me, and visions of things with tentacles and claws flared in my mind. Forculus cursed and sealed the rip. I was curled up in a ball on the ground. I tasted copper, and warm streaks ran down the side of my neck and down my lips. The world was spinning and shaking, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
The feeling faded as Forculus stood over me, concern in his eyes. “Something was trying to force its way into my mind.” I said shakily as I pushed myself up to my hands and knees. I rubbed the blood from my face and got to my feet with Forculus’s help.
Forculus shook his head. “Whatever you do, Corinthos, don’t ever let one of those things touch you. It’ll pull you into its home dimension and eat the soul right out of your body.” He stood quiet for a moment and let that little pleasantry sink in. “As far as gateways, I know they’re within your power, but you’re inhibited somehow. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I will speak with some of the other gods and see what I can learn. In the meantime, do not open gateways of your own.” He opened another gateway back to the alley and I stepped through.
“Wait,” he called. “I can’t let you go out looking like that.” I looked down and realized I looked like a ragged rodeo clown. Forculus waved a hand, and my clothes were restored to their original state. He even got the draugr-cat stains out of my bomber. “I’ve taken care of the blood on your face, too,” he said. “Ah, and your bag,” he said as he gestured toward the ground. On cue, a hole opened beneath my groceries and the other half of the portal popped open at chest height. I snatched the bag before it hit the ground. Forculus gave me a wave as he closed the portal between us. I checked my watch. It was quarter to noon. Plenty of time to get home before our lunch guests arrived.
A buzzing against my leg informed me I had a text message. I pulled out my phone and saw two words from Petra that froze the blood in my veins.
She’s early
.
Chapter 6
Bargain 79186 – Contacted by a group of vampires in New Mexico who were about to be publicly exposed. Fulfillment involved arranging a fake UFO crash, complete with synthetic alien corpses outside the town of Roswell. Payment came in the form of an artifact capable of producing semi-sentient copies of oneself known as sycophants. This should prove useful in expanding our reach.
—From Keeper Laras’s Transaction Log
When I got back, the kitchen was cleared and there was harp music playing on the stereo. I dumped the groceries in the kitchen and hastened into the living room, where I found Petra standing topless in front of another woman who was lounging on the couch. Aphrodite tsked as she regarded a spider web of tiny white scars crisscrossing Petra’s chest.
“Shattered by a blast of light, you say?” she asked Petra in ancient Greek. A few months back, Petra had taken me to the Bright Side when I was too sick to get there under my own power. We’d been ambushed by crystal soldiers who had unleashed some hellish kind of Kamehameha wave and shattered Petra into a thousand pieces. If it hadn’t been for Gearstripper, she’d be dead. “Hmmph,” Aphrodite sniffed. “Pygmalion must’ve used a block of flawed marble when he sculpted you. Good Grecian marble was nearly indestructible. And what did your surgeon use to fix you?”
“Gremlin blood,” Petra said quietly. Turned out Gearstripper’s blood had actually been designed to heal golems and other animated material. It worked like a charm on Petra.
Aphrodite wrinkled her nose. “I have no idea what that is, but it sounds positively barbaric. Honestly, mortals lose more and more intelligence every century. A poultice of crushed marble and diamond dust left in the light of a full moon would have been better.” She waved her hand absently, and the scars vanished from Petra’s chest. She leaned back on the couch and sighed. “Just the same, I suppose we’re lucky you were able to recover. Do try to be more careful in the future, child. You should be more like your older sister. She was never reckless.”
I cleared my throat. “If I recall, Galatia was trampled to death by a herd of stampeding cattle.”
“Ah, Janus’s boy,” Aphrodite said, a tone of mild disappointment in her voice as she switched to English. She stood up and sashayed over to me as Petra pulled her white cardigan sweater back on. As flattering as the top was, it was jarring to see Petra in something other than a geek T-shirt. I turned my attention to Aphrodite. She was a few inches shorter than me, and had dazzling green eyes. Her golden hair was tied back with a bit of ribbon and her full lips had a perpetual hint of a mischievous smile. She wore a red silk shirt with a neckline that didn’t quite plunge, but showed off her ample cleavage, and her black pants accentuated her curves. She looked me up and down with a smirk. “You seem well, given your affliction.”