Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods (10 page)

INTERLUDE

Esther

L
imping down the street, Esther kept her head down, avoiding eye contact as people passed by.

These sheep were all too easy to fool. They had less sense than chattel, who at least knew how to run from a predator. They were all caught up in webs of their own pitiful self-importance, ignorant of the coming storm that would wash the earth clean of their offal.

But among the sheep, there were wolves. Their teeth, in truth, could bring her low, especially wounded. Yes, another fight before she could heal would be unwise. Bullets were far harder to deflect than magic, required different stones, different incantations.

Esther kept her eyes open for wolves, always dressed in their blues, as if a cloak of authority could buoy them up like a ship on an ocean. But she was a Deep Thing, and ships were but flotsam and jetsam to be.

As she stepped over a loose grate, steel shuddered beneath her, accompanied by a waft of steam that rose up to warm her legs.

Esther noted the omen, the embrace from beneath, and slowed. She moved in her disguise, acting the part of a countrywoman visiting the city, here to see the big city while clutching to her morals. The layers hid all sorts of implements and supplies. She’d only been able to bring so much with her, so many things to do, so many Hearts to claim, blood to spill along the way.

But the depths of her disguise, the reality beneath the surface, that did not matter, as long as the city people told themselves a story, did not point her out for the hunter that she was.

An alley. Occupied, several figures standing around a garbage can fire, another buried in a mound of belongings. Too many. But she needed only one, no more than one. A single life’s blood would be a sufficient price. The Gatekeepers would take their tithe, but the Greene compacts would stand, centuries of bargains and interdependence. Even here, far from the family stronghold, the Gatekeepers would hear the call, would render service when paid. They were the Greenes’ channel to the gods, their power was her power.

A likely candidate bent around a corner. Sweat chilled as it rolled down her back, beneath layers and layers. The pain was taxing, distracted her from her purpose.

It would be gone soon enough.

Esther looked down the alley, saw it bend around a corner.

She circled the block, making sure that the dead end was just that.

Mother’s words played back in her mind.

“Esther, dear. When you go among them, the sheep, you must be always watchful. Their shepherds are few, and miss much, but when you take sacrifices, they will not be willing. So you must be careful, and you must not be spotted. Until the second circle is complete, at the least. By then, there will be no mistaking that the end is nigh.”

And then Mother had been consumed by rapturous joy, the exultation of the coming end.

There was no time to lollygag, to wait. The stars were waiting, the ley lines converging with the coming winter. It was coming, the proper time. And she had Hearts yet to collect.

Entering the alley, Esther drew stares from the huddled pair warming their hands, and another woman who ruffled through a cart, pulling out a perfectly-preserved diploma of some sort. She stared at it, lost in memory.

Esther turned the corner, and saw the dead end. Fitting. Perfect for her needs. It would take somewhat more power than necessary, but the nearby subway would give her a fine exit pathway, should the wolves catch her scent.

“Know your exits, dear,”
Mother said.
“Great-aunt Salome had learned that lesson the hard way when confronted by a trio of the Nephilim, back in Duluth, you know.”

Though if the lesson was fatal, was it properly learned? I bore the scars and marks of many lessons, bargains made, sacrifices bled out for the family.

First, be rid of the others. Esther turned to the pair at the can and pulled out two $20 bills. She kept her head down, face covered by the hood. She was as unmemorable as could be.

“These are yours, but you have to leave this alley, now,” she said.

Hands covered by threadbare mittens snatched the bills, and the two men disappeared, boots squelching on the wet concrete of the alley.

The figure in the mound was asleep, probably wouldn’t even wake up.

All it would take was a simple incantation. . . .

Esther spoke the words, the harsh beauty of Enochian, the First Tongue. They were but a whisper, but they dug into the earth as if they were a thunderclap.

Down she reached, beneath the pavement, beneath the subway lines, into the depths of the earth. With her mind, she felt a cool familiarity as she touched the Deeps, drank them in with her hands, drawing the power in like a lover.

She used her hands as paintbrushes, painting a net of silence and privacy over the edges of the alley, over the canopy of sky above, until she sealed off the alley, the sound netted in. Passersby would glaze right over the alley, their eyes seeing without seeing.

And with that, Esther was ready to set to work.

“You got one of those for me?” the woman asked, her cart beside her. The diploma had vanished back into her countless bags. The woman was surprisingly young. Haggard, yes. But young. No more than three and twenty.

Even better. Younger blood had more promise, more potential.

“I’ve got something much better for you, my dear.” Esther smiled as brightly as she could, but still the woman shied away. Esther stepped forward and reached out to the young woman with an open hand.

“Give me your hand.”

The woman backed away, her eyes wide, scared. That hadn’t taken long. But no one would come to help her.

“This will be easier if you don’t resist.” Esther drew the family’s sacrificial knife, which caught the weak December sun, light glinting over the curves and forked points. “Though if you do, it’ll be more fun.”

The woman screamed, and the Greene followed. The woman returned to her cart and pushed, getting the wobbly thing moving.

Not so fast, little sheep.

Esther positioned herself between the cart and the one exit. The woman tried to go wide, brandishing a rusty knife, but Esther had learned knife play before her baby teeth began to fall out.

Grabbing the woman’s wrist, Esther pulled her past and slammed both of their bodies into the wall.

Esther pinned the woman against the concrete with a thrust of her own knife. The blade bit high, sliding gently between the woman’s ribs. Mustn’t damage the entrails; those would be needed for the divinations. One death would have to serve many purposes. “
Use every part of the sacrifice
,”
Father had always said.

“No different from how you treat a cow, Esther. Each sacrifice is a gift, and we cannot be ungrateful, can we?”

No, we cannot.
Esther thought.

There would be no waste, though it would take the rest of the day to be thorough. Part of the power taken would feed the net of privacy, but there would be plenty left over.

Savoring the privacy, Esther sang while she worked.

The woman sang too, in her own way. And it was
beautiful
.

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

D
espite hours of work, the Gardener’s divinations yielded no results. I had suspected as much—Esther would know to cover her tracks, but my statements to that end did little to placate the Gardener.

He sent us away, the door returning us to the street, where we decided to split for the night.

“It’d be a bad idea of pretty epic proportions to go to the Bronx at night,” Antoinette said. “I’ll check in with some friends of mine in Queens, make sure they’re all still okay. We start again tomorrow morning.”

“I regret that I must work until noon at my work-study position. My scholarship depends on it,” I said.

“Priorities, man,” Carter said.

“That is rather easier for one to say with a trust from one’s parents,” I countered.

Carter narrowed his eyes, and Nate laughed, his voice clear and bright.

And so we went. Nate to his tiny apartment in the East Village, Antoinette to Brooklyn, and Carter and I to a series of crowded commuter trains back to our dorms, where the normality of college life felt far too strange given how shortly I’d been away from it.

Students joked and smoked on the front stoop of the building, stomping their feet to stay warm and passing hand-rolled cigarettes between them as they nearly shouted at one another despite being huddled within a hand-span of one another.

Rather than try either of our patience, I went first to the food court and let Carter have the room to himself for a while. Later, we traded, and I paged through the borrowed tomes again, filling several pages of the back of my Abnormal Psychology notebook with annotations, formulae, and critiques. (The Williamson erroneously asserted that agate’s resonance with tourmaline was contraindicated for restorative enchantments, when I’d combined them to great effect on no less than four occasions. It was a criminal mistake, and would need to be corrected in a future edition, barring the end of the world, of course.)

After I’d recovered from the digression of annotating Williamson’s errors, Carter returned to the room. Continuing our pattern of trying to give each other space, Carter went directly to his computer, leaving me to my books.

Several hours later, my eyes would not bear the strain of more reading. It certainly wasn’t fatigue or sleepiness. I merely made the decision to muster my energy, setting my alarm for seven thirty AM and hoping that sleeping deeply might lessen the night’s bout of nightmares, or at least let me get a greater amount of restful sleep before Esther could invade once more.

The nightmare returned, as it always did. But this time, I saw the story unfold from outside.

Earlier scenes began the dream. Thomas inviting me to prom. My parents reacting to the news, telling me what this meant, the incredible gift that he was giving me and the family. I saw the pauses, the looks between the two of them, and wondered why I hadn’t been able to see it then, how they stitched the story together like players on one of the improvisational comedy shows that Carter enjoyed. I’d taken their pauses as excitement, rapturous joy at the incredible occasion.

If Esther was right, then it had been a happy accident, the perfect opportunity to set the prophecy into motion. They’d taken Thomas’s offer of friendship, his attempt to bring me into the world to share an experience together, and they’d twisted it to their own ends.

I watched Thomas’s murder from the outside, saw the world break apart with my father’s betrayal, his cruelty.

He would pay for this. And Mother, and Esther. If I ever went back to my family, it would be to kill them. How could I ever do anything else? The thought made me sick. Seventeen years of what I’d taken to be nourishing, comforting affection soured by the truth behind my family’s actions.

Was it still love if the people that loved you were monsters? Did their actions taint everything they did, or was there some humanity in the family? Had they ever really loved one another, or was it a mask, a role that each Greene has played to further the goals of the Bold and awaken the unborn? There was a film, some film, that matched this feeling. I’d heard someone talk about it in class.

My mind’s eye flew from the bedroom, jumping from memory to memory as my free association broke from the nightly loop of pain and regret.

I could not settle on the name, had no point of reference for the story. After that, my memory of the dreams faded, until I woke to my alarm.

It was seven thirty. My bed was unsoiled. I’d not woken in the night to scream.

I sat up in bed.

“Carter! Wake up! The day is here,” I said, leaping out of bed, hitting my head on the ceiling, then landing with a massive thump on the cold tile of the floor. I managed not to fall over in an ungraceful avalanche of disheveled foolishness, and instead righted myself, moving directly to the closet.

Carter grumbled, turning over in his bed. “The fuck, man? It’s early!”

“It is seven thirty. I slept through the night. And now I must away to work while you head into Manhattan to join the war council.”

“Whatever. I’ll catch up.”

I waited for him to admit his joke. Instead, he rolled over and covered his head with his pillow.

“So be it,” I said, and headed for the showers, more spring in my step than I’d had since I fled home.

I had a work-study shift first thing in the morning, reshelving books in the university library. It was the very definition of grunt work, requiring only basic literacy and a knowledge of the university card cataloging system. The only saving grace is that Tessane had arranged to share our shifts, working as a team so that we could talk.

Tessane had picked me out of the crowd and taken to calling me her “project.” To her, I was a shy homeschooled kid who had more brains than sense, and that was true enough. I had no doubt she’d discard me if she knew the truth, but in the meantime, her assistance in acclimating to the world was worth three times the tutorial assistance I rendered her for classwork.

When I walked into the library at eight, Tessane was already standing by, ready at a cart laden with books. “Good morning! Clock in; we’ve got a backlog.” She wore a gauzy shawl over a black shirt, and the sort of jeans that were as much tights as anything else. Her hair draped in a manner that was somehow simultaneously messy and carefree.

While I struggled to speak in complete sentences for several hours after waking, Tessane seemed to be chipper from the moment she awoke.

“Morning,” I said, still feeling the exhaustion of the previous day. I’d need a better, or at least deeper, power source if we were to continue the hunt this afternoon. But that was a problem for later.

I clocked in, then followed Tessane to the elevator. The books were already sorted by floor from the shift before us, so we merely had to ferry them to their homes, literary psychopomps of the cheapest order, the true librarians our overseers.

“Sorry to be blunt, Jake, but you look a bit run-down. Rough night?” Tessane asked as we waited for the elevator to climb its way to the tenth floor.

“It was, indeed. I don’t sleep that well, and last night was no exception.”

“Sorry to hear.”

Silence.

“You should say thank you there, Jake,” Tessane said. She had taken upon herself the unsolicited task of correcting my manners and social maladaptation. If I didn’t know how important it was, I might have been upset by the presumption. Instead, I was desperate for the assistance.

“Apologies. Thank you for your concern. I assume you slept well?”

“I did, thank you. Can I ask what kept you up?”

“I’d rather not speak of it, if that is permissible.”

“Of course. How’s that group project coming along?”

She referred, of course, to my doomed attempt at collaboration.

“For lack of the ability to confer with my group, I took it upon myself to complete the project and submit it for the group.”

“Ain’t that always the case. My senior year, we had this huge project in World History, thirty percent of our grade, and my group consisted of me, the soccer captain, his stoner girlfriend, and a kid who had mono and was absent four days a week. Guess how that one ended.”

I waited a moment. A moment later, I asked. “I’m sorry. Was that a rhetorical question, or am I supposed to answer?”

“Either way. But thanks for asking. I did the whole thing myself, and still only got a B-plus. Mr. Land, I swear. That guy.”

The elevator opened onto the tenth floor, and I grabbed the back end of the cart, Tessane taking the front position. Together, we pushed and pulled the cart out onto the carpeted floor, turning into the first row of shelves on the left.

We alternated tasks, with her handing me books and moving the cart while I returned the volumes to their proper homes. It was a calming task, bringing order to chaos, recognizing and sustaining patterns, progressions, and the seamless transmission of knowledge.

“What will you be doing today when our shift is done?” I asked, a question I learned from Tessane to be an appropriate way to make conversation, showing a respectable level of interest without prying too closely. It was also adaptable to other situations in other permutations. “What are you up to today?” is the form she suggested for general interactions on campus but did not recommend using it out and about in the city. The shared context of the university allowed the higher level of assumed intimacy, whereas the preferred opening for other New Yorkers was “How’s it going?”

After the second informal lesson with Tessane, I had started making flowcharts to concretize the advice.

The Greenes had a kind of etiquette, but social niceties were not a priority. Conversation was like ritual. There were very specific ways to speak, topics to address, and everything else was a distraction.

“I’ve got class, and then I’ve got to get ahead of this final paper. Wish I had the time to do the research here before class, save myself the trip.”

“I could finish out the last half-hour worth of work, if you desire.”

“I shouldn’t, but that’s sweet,” she said, and we moved on to the next shelf.

Over the four hours, we returned ten carts worth of books to their proper homes, and then Tessane and I parted ways, her headed for class, me for Manhattan.

The crowds pressed in tighter than ever as I made my way through the Times Square station. Even walking to the far end had not granted me any reprieve on the train in. I’d been pressed bodily up against several commuting businessmen and a woman who managed to hold a purse, a work bag, and an e-reader, while keeping a decent sense of balance and getting some reading done.

I instead focused on breathing, my bag held in both arms, one hand on a pole for balance.

When this was all over, perhaps it would be best if I moved to a smaller city, one less overfull of people.

As I crossed the indoor arena with a thousand other commuters, I took in the kaleidoscope of stimuli that was the city.

A woman in a heavy coat stood by a churro stand, hot confections in paper sleeves wafting their cinnamon scent out into the crowd, steam still rolling off the pastries.

The edges of the arena were lined with shoebox convenience stores and things that might have been boutiques if they’d not been stuffed into the tiny locations, like plants stunted by small pots.