Vulcan's Kittens (Children of Myth Book 1) (19 page)

“What is it?” Sekhmet could tell the crying was uncontrollable.

“So much pain... The children. The laume, their mother, is wrapped around them. They are so afraid...” Her voice dropped to a whisper.

“What do we do?” Steve asked in concern.

“Let’s take them to land, first.” Pele sounded choked up.

Steve and Sekhmet each took her elbows and carried Pele, as both her hands were clasped on the globe, which was the concentrated essences of three immortals, so tightly wrapped together they were actually palpable.

Sekhmet could sense Pele probing with her power at the laume while they ran the high path. She couldn’t feel anything from the globe except pain. Her heart thudded in her chest as they ran, and she could feel herself beginning to cry silent tears.

Sekhmet stumbled when they touched ground and fell to her knees. Steve let go of Pele and doubled over, sucking deep, sobbing breaths in as though he hadn’t been able to breathe for a long time. Pele, tears streaming down her face, continued to walk ahead blindly once they let go of her. Sekhmet changed to cat form and caught up with her, looking around to see where they were as Pele had guided their travels.

“Where are we?” Steve, back in jaguar form, asked her, swinging his heavy black head from side to side. The terrain was bleak. And cold... Sekhmet shivered, not just from the temperature.

“Iceland, I think,” she told him after a moment.

Pele kept walking without looking at anything while the two cats flanked her, constantly scanning for movement. Nothing should be here, and yet Sekhmet knew Steve felt the same way she did. Jumpy, off balance...

Pele wasn’t talking, and Sekhmet was beginning to get worried. Whatever the laume was doing, she might be drawing the Hawaiian goddess into it. The children’s mother was a Lithuanian fairy, a family of immortals Sekhmet was not familiar with. Something was wrong here. Sekhmet had seen immortals withdraw before, shrinking away from pain, but never like this.

“Pele. Pele!” she shouted.

Pele stopped, and then slowly looked at Sekhmet. “I need to put them someplace warm.”

Sekhmet looked in the direction they were going. “You want to throw them in there?” she asked in disbelief. The volcano goddess had been rumored to require certain sacrifices in the past.

“No, no. Just... close,” Pele said reassuringly.

Sekhmet looked back at the volcano. “I’m not sure about this.”

“She wants... warmth. And to be alone. She doesn’t want anyone near her or her children.” Pele didn’t explain how she knew this.

The big cat sighed. “All right. Keep going. Let’s get this done, it can’t be good for you, either.”

They walked on, sometimes stumbling over the rough terrain, until they came to a fumarole, gently steaming from the ground. Pele knelt and scooped a shallow hole in the loose, ashy soil. Steve and Sekhmet helped her dig, as their paws were better prepared for it than her human hands were. Pele laid the globe in it and let go. Murmuring something in Hawaiian, she stood. Then they buried the globe.

Pele gasped when it disappeared from sight and staggered a little. She put a hand to her heart and drew a deep breath. “That was... bad,” she told her concerned companions.

Sekhmet thought that was an understatement from her friend’s pallor. “Let’s go,” she said, wanting to get as far away from here as she could. “Pele, can you get back to the Sanctuary by yourself? I think we need to tell Heff about this.”

The older woman nodded. She looked tired. “I need to get to the other children.”

Sekhmet know what she meant. She could do with a peaceful moment of cuddling, right now, of knowing all was well.

“Go. I will be there when I can. Give them my love.” She licked Pele’s cheek.

“Mine, too.” Steve’s quiet bass rumble was solemn for once.

Pele bent and hugged him. He arched his head into her and purred. “I will be careful,” he said.

Pele hugged Sekhmet next. “I will be careful, also,” the big cat told the old goddess. “This was a fluke. It’s not an attack that will work on us.”

“I know. But still...”

Sekhmet knew what she meant. This attack, on a weak immortal and her children, was something that was rarely done. And the tragic result... the living death of three beings, would have dire consequences.

“We run,” she said finally. She and Steve leapt up into the high path simultaneously.

Pele was left standing in the lonely wind for a long time before she finally gathered her fleeting thoughts and leapt upward onto the Path.

Chapter 27

Linn looked up from her reading and rubbed her eyes. Then she looked back down at the computer clock. “Darn,” she muttered. Then, feeling slightly foolish, she said out loud, “Deirdre? Lunch for two in the Scholar’s office?”

Hypatia didn’t even look up from the book she was handling with cotton gloves on. “Just a salad for me.”

“A sandwich I guess. I don’t care what,” Linn added, then stood up and put the laptop in her chair. “Tia?”

“Yes, child?” The old woman still didn’t look up.

“I’m going to stretch my legs. It’s after lunch time.”

“Go ahead. I’m used to this.” Hypatia looked up finally and smiled briefly. “You are used to a much more active life, I’m sure.”

Linn felt a little sheepish. “Yes, I am. I’ll be back in a few.”

The tunnel here was painted a warm cream, but with nothing on the walls it was very empty. She heard the echoes of her own footsteps. She walked toward the Library. She hadn’t been in it yet, but she knew it was down this way. As she walked, she pulled her phone and earbuds out of her pocket.

Linn had tried to call her mother when she first arrived, and had gotten her voicemail. She wasn’t worried about her. If something were wrong, Hypatia would have let her know. Pele was on her way back, she guessed. Linn would ask her when she was home. She put the earbuds in and started to dance along to one of her favorite songs, letting the movement take the stiffness out of her muscles.

After two songs she stopped and took the earbuds out. She felt better... energized. And starving. She headed back to the office.

Then the doors farther down the tunnel swung open and her grandmother stepped through. “Grandma!”

She ran forward to hug Pele, who held her close for a long time without speaking. Linn waited, dying to know what was going on, but hesitant to speak until she knew her grandmother was ready to talk.

“Linn, I am so glad you are here.”

“I’m happy to be here, too. The kittens are safe, Hypatia is awesome, and the Coblyns are pretty nifty, too. What’s wrong?” Linn let it all out in one breathless rush.

Pele sighed into Linn’s hair, not letting go. “You remember the twins that were flying in from Lithuania?”

“Yeah?” Linn frowned, tipping her head back to see her grandmother’s face.

Pele looked unbearably sad. “The Old Ones brought down the plane.”

“Brought it down?” Linn felt bewildered.

“It crashed in the ocean. Everyone onboard was killed.”

“How many?” Linn whispered, holding onto her grandmother tighter. She couldn’t see her eyes, just the flickers of power.

“Almost five hundred people.”

“All to harm those children. What happened to them?”

“Oh, ku’o aloha...”

Linn felt her eyes well up. “How did they take the plane down?” she demanded raggedly.

Pele shrugged helplessly. “An Old One in insubstantial form could have taken the electrical system down...”

Linn felt like a million light bulbs had just gone off in her head. She pulled away from her grandmother’s arms. “I have to ask Hypatia something.”

She marched back into the office, wiping her eyes roughly. “Tia, are immortals affected by electricity... would an EMP take you out?”

Hypatia looked up at her in confusion. “I don’t know.”

Pele following Linn into the office and lifted her hand to the Scholar, who took it in her own. They stood in silence for a moment. Linn picked up the laptop and sat down, typing quickly.

“Look. There was a test called Starfish a long time ago near Hawaii, it says it affected the electricity here. Grandma, did you feel it?”

Pele nodded. “I was very weak for a long time after that. Your grandfather helped me through that time, which led to your mother.” She smiled at Linn. That had obviously been a happy thought, but Linn really didn’t want to know more.

Linn looked at Hypatia. “Electromagnetic Pulse. It shuts down electrical systems. If immortals are really energy beings who exist by the electromagnetic charge between electrons and can form their own atoms...”

Pele and Hypatia looked at each other.

“She’s brilliant, you know,” Hypatia told Linn’s grandmother.

“I know.” Her grandmother grinned, breaking through her sorrow for the first time.

They both smiled at Linn, who was hovering between embarrassment and a shivery feeling that these women could be scary if they chose. The expressions they were wearing were fierce.

“If we could detonate something like Starfish near them...” she suggested. “We could sting them and persuade them to stop.”

Hypatia rubbed her eyes. “Linn, Deirdre left your sandwich here. I hate to do this, but could you take it to the common room?”

Linn nodded. She understood they needed to talk to Grampa Heff. She wasn’t old enough to be a part of what was coming next. She took the plate and walked out of the room, swallowing the lump in her throat. She had just come up with something that could hurt someone she knew... someone she loved.

In the common room she found a quiet corner and watched kids playing while she picked at her sandwich. Blackie appeared silently at her elbow and she offered him some of the tuna from her meal. He ate it politely, and then flowed into her lap. She could swear he had grown already, as he was hanging off on both sides. She stroked his head and he started to purr.

She sighed and let the tension flow out of her. “Kitten therapy. Thanks, Blackie. You are a sweetheart.”

Juggling him and the plate, she stood. He had definitely grown, and she couldn’t carry him far. “You want to walk, or what?” Linn asked him. He looked at her and flowed down onto the floor. “Thanks, kitten. Come on.”

She turned in her plate at the pass through and decided she wanted to be outside. Returning to her room, she put on her suit, which had been cleaned, and went down to the beach.

It wasn’t deserted out there, but the girls just waved and went back to playing with the kitsune. They had an elaborate sand castle going on. Linn walked down to the far corner of the beach, trying not to think, letting her hair blow in the wind. By the time she had gotten down there she had decided it was impossible to stop thinking entirely.

She stood looking out at the Pacific. The blueness of it reminded her that she had seen Blackie’s power. She looked back up the beach. He had joined the others in playing. Right at the moment he seemed to be digging a hole. She focused on them. Power shimmered like a haze over the whole beach, an aurora of colors. Much of it was her grandmother’s, she saw. Which made sense.

“Power.” Linn whispered. “What is it? A nanite cloud? So what keeps it in check? Why are the children of a human and an immortal even viable, much less only half-strength?”

She realized she might never know the answers unless one of them decided to tell her. One of the oldest, since she suspected the younger generations hadn’t been told everything, either. Walking back toward the Sanctuary, she knew what she was going to be when she grew up.

“I don’t think they even know. Not really,” she said aloud, feeling the wind take the words from her lips as she spoke.

She didn’t say anything else until she was back in her room. She went in the bathroom and looked in the mirror. She was still the same as she had been that morning. “I ought to look different,” Linn told her reflection. ‘It would be more satisfying if I looked different. Older, or something.”

The reflection remained unchanged. Linn was glad, actually. It would have freaked her out to have it start answering back. She walked into the other room and threw herself down on the bed, closing her eyes.

She fell asleep after about the three hundred and fortieth sheep. And woke up falling again, sitting bolt upright on the bed. Someone had been calling her, she was sure. She sat in the now dark room and listened hard. Silence. She rubbed her face. It must have been in her dream that she’d heard her name.

She went out into the other room. Everything was dark and quiet. She looked at her watch, with the tritium hands she could see in the dark. It was after midnight. Linn sighed. She didn’t want to disturb anyone. She started to go back into her room when Daffyd walked out of the tunnel carrying a small lamp.

“Ah, you’re awake. Good...”

“Hello. Um... You were looking for me?” She looked at him in confusion, not sure he had the right person.

“Yes, your grandfather wants to talk to you. You should probably dress.”

“Oh,” Linn looked down. She had pulled a robe on. “Just a minute.”