Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods (24 page)

CHAPTER

FORTY-TWO

T
he room shook as something slammed into the door. I turned, pulling Antoinette with me as I raised my hand. The door cracked under a powerful blow.

“Stand aside!” the Gardener said, passing into my line of sight.

“To Nate,” I said, gesturing with my head. Antoinette helped pull me back into the ritual room, where the actor gripped tight to the handgun, her breaths coming rapid, uneven.

“I will not let her get to you,” I said, instantly regretting having made such a promise. But to take it back would do even more damage than to leave it be, even if it meant making a liar and oath breaker of myself. But if I had to die to uphold it, the oath would mean little.

The door cracked again, and I sat on the table, taking up the ritual knife, pulling my sleeve up, and, with gritted teeth, cutting a long line from my elbow to my wrist.

“Blood of my blood, daughter of my mother, closest kin and greatest foe,” I said in Enochian, beginning an incantation to bind my power to Esther’s. If I succeeded, I could channel her power, shunt it off, and perhaps even the scales of power, allowing the Gardener to triumph.

Gardeners were not the warriors of the celestial schism. They stood apart, still bitter over the exile of humanity from the First Garden. Their influence was vast, their power gathered over millennia, but direct confrontation was as close to their nature as being a social butterfly was to mine.

I tasted blood on my lips, biting tight to control the pain from my self-inflicted wound, the blood dripping into the Gardener’s ancient crucible.

The door shattered, revealing Esther in her flattened, hair-waving form.

The Gardener raised a hand, and spoke in a low voice, the words passing straight into my ear and out, my mind unable to grasp them.

A shadow passed over Esther, her form fluctuating between the flattened state and her real body.

“Fire!” the Guardian said. The two guards complied. I reached out, pulling at the immense reservoir of power bound to my sister. The power pushed me away like a magnet, my working not quite sufficient. Or perhaps it was me who was not enough. I stood, took a deep breath, and pushed forward, pressing through the resistance.

Energy flew and colors whorled in the room as the Gardener and Esther matched their powers. The Gardener’s magic was verdant green and white, matched against Esther’s purple and black.

The Gardener’s guards and Carter closed in on Esther, and for a moment, they had the upper hand, the Gardener’s power flowing into my roommate, guiding his sword, mending his wounds with shimmering light.

Carter’s sword found purchase, piercing Esther’s arm as she brushed aside a thrust. But with the spilled blood, Esther formed a ragged blade and slit the throats of the remaining guards, drawing their blood out to form a cat-o’-nine-tails. She turned the whip on Carter, wrapping around his blade and disarming him.

I’d reached an impasse myself, partially in but unable to touch Esther’s power, like when your arm was just barely too big to reach down the grate to retrieve the toy teetering on the edge of the chute that would carry it away to oblivion.

But I could tell that Esther was struggling against my effort, so I persisted, letting my arm continue to bleed, feeding the cauldron and the working. I would not continue for long without passing out.

Antoinette held me upright, chanting something in French, adding her voice to the blessings protecting Carter.

Esther’s bloody cat-o’-nine-tails tore at Carter as he charged forward, tackling her to the ground. Esther dropped the blood working, reaching for her knife. Carter caught her hand, and the two rolled on the ground.

“We have to get Nate out of here!” I shouted, hoping the Gardener would listen to me.

“The time for running has passed, Greene,” the Gardener said, his voice once again resonant, inhuman.

I felt a momentary lapse in Esther’s concentration and plunged my hand deeper, touching the dark, sticky well of power. I grasped the energy and pulled, drawing it in.

As the power flowed into me, I felt nauseated, like my soul had been plunged into weeks-old offal, despoiled countless times by Vexl and Xoggox. I shunted the power into my peridot, causing it to glow with light-swallowing blackness. I pulled power, drank deeper and deeper, depleting the seemingly-endless well of energy that Esther had accrued.

I collapsed into another coughing fit, my body screaming out its limits. Antoinette braced me, but my concentration was shattered, and Esther ejected my presence, the backlash burning my hand like I’d stuck it into ice.

For several long moments, all I could do was reel, focusing on breathing.

When I came back up, Carter lay with a knife in his gut, the Gardener sat slumped against the wall, his head cracked open, and Esther held Nate up by one hand, grabbing the necklace that contained the Heart of Manhattan with the other. “Stop . . . her,” I said, my voice barely a whispering croak. I grabbed carpet and pulled myself after Esther, achingly slow as she strode away, Nate tossed over her shoulder like a sack of feed.

Antoinette ran after Esther, swiping at her with a machete picked up somewhere along the way. Esther dodged the cut and backhanded Antoinette across the face, knocking her to the floor.

As Esther passed the wounded Gardener, she kicked him in the ribs, then spat on his face. Over her shoulder, Esther said, “Farewell, brother. You know where to find me, if you decide to join the winning team.”

And then she was gone.

I crawled several feet after her, my vision growing dark, lungs straining to draw in the tiniest gasps of air. As Esther reached the front door, my body finally gave out, and the world went black.

I shot awake all at once. “Where is she?!” I shouted, my voice rough as sandpaper.

Strong hands pushed me down, and I focused on my breath, lungs cooperating once more. Carter sat above me, his armor discarded, his undershirt torn and bloodied. Antoinette sat beside him, sporting a growing bruise on one cheek.

“Where?!” I said, trying to push myself up.

“She’s gone, Jake. It’s done,” Antoinette said.

“We have to get to the park,” I said. “There’s still a chance to stop her.”

“What do you think we’re doing?” Carter asked, gesturing up.

We were in a car. No, a limousine. I’d never been inside one, but normal cars didn’t have long crushed-velvet seats facing one another.

“Ah, yes,” I said. “Are you hurt?”

“Banged up, but we got off easy. The Gardener got up and started barking orders with his head cracked open, and ninety percent of his staff is dead,” Carter said.

“Along with Igbe. The other two were just banished, but Igbe is gone. I can’t feel his presence, and he doesn’t answer, not even when Agwe calls.”

“The bag?” I asked, reaching for the shoulder-slung satchel that had been my lifeline this week.

“It’s here. Just relax, see if you can rest some more. We had to do CPR to get you breathing again.”

“That would explain the sharp pain across my chest most comprehensively, yes.”

Carter fed me water in sips, and as the driver slowed, lifted me up to a seated position.

“We’re here,” the driver said, a bandage across one eye.

The park was sparsely populated for a weekend midday.

Wait. What day was it? I laughed at myself for losing track of time, then instantly regretted it as the sharp intake spiked the pain in my chest. Rapidly sinking grades in my classes were, fortunately, quite a ways down on my list of priorities.

I kept my breathing shallow and accepted the help from Antoinette as we made our way to one of the entrances, passing by a moss-encrusted cobblestone wall bedecked with art from various street vendors, hawking their wares and trying to make ends meet. As we stepped into the park, I felt waves of power crashing against the threshold of the park.

“Faster. The ritual of the third circle has begun. I can feel it.”

Getting closer to the intermittent crowds, I saw that the faces of the people in the park were all drawn tight. They looked over their shoulders and moved in packs, as if expecting a predator to leap from the brush at any moment.

And then, one did. A smaller Vexl burst from the underbrush off a path and dove at a trio of joggers.

“PAIN!” I screamed in Enochian, my fingers clutching the peridot, the hatred and frustration of countless failures fueling my working. The Vexl crashed to the concrete path, bowling over the joggers. Carter leapt forward and chopped the Vexl’s head off with a single stroke.

The joggers screamed, then scattered.

Carter flicked the purple blood from his sword and rejoined us, and Antoinette led on toward the center of the park.

The sky darkened above us, clouds unnaturally dark and heavy as if a tornado were looming. But there was no rain, no wind. Just darkness, and a heavy sense of wrongness.

I gave directions that led us to the grove where Esther had begun her slaughtering tour of New York, the killing that had jarred me from my now comparatively-idyllic life as a student, unaware of both the coming storm and the many complexities of New York’s occult community.

We rounded the bend, and I saw the portal, a screaming tear in the fabric of the world, eclipsing the tree where Esther’s first New Yorker victim had been crucified. Wisps of Deeps power stretched out of the portal like the tentacles of a spirit Xoggox. The third circle was complete, the ley lines of New York holding the rest of the world at bay while a portal opened directly to the Deeps. And from there, to the Gates that held back the Younger Gods.

Leaving behind the assistance, I started to jog up the hill, taking in the forms and faces of the half-dozen bodies that lay around Esther’s ritual circle, the incantation written out in blood on the grass. I looked, turning over my shoulder several times, but I did not see Nate among the slain, which meant Esther still had him.

And that he was meant to be the final sacrifice. The taste of blood that would awaken the unborn, call it forth from its womb. Another life snuffed out because of my failures.

“We have to go after her,” I said, pointing to the portal.

“Where?” Carter asked.

“The Deeps. Beyond the Gates of the Keepers, to the womb of the world, where the unborn wait for the appointed day. Which, unless we succeed, is tonight.”

I looked to Antoinette and Carter, the beaten and battered friends who had put their lives on the line countless times for me, despite my repeated lack of anything resembling social graces, and in Carter’s case, well-justified active antipathy.

“If something happens to me, know that I am honored to have had your help. Thank you, my friends.”

Carter ran a hand through his hair, leaning back from the group, more color in his cheeks. Antoinette wrapped me in a short hug.

Then, as one, we walked through the portal.

CHAPTER

FORTY-THREE

A
t first, there was only darkness.

Antoinette lit her flashlight, but the beam was quickly swallowed by the looming shadows, illuminating no more than three feet in front of her.

“What the hell?” Antoinette said.

“These are no ordinary caves. These are the Deeps. The source of the Greene’s power. And the Deeps do not like light,” I said, drawing my fingers over my eyes and restoring my vision.

We were in a wide-open cavern, a matching ritual circle surrounding us. There was only one way out: down.

“Stand still,” I said, and passed my hands over both of my companions’ eyes, attaching the Deepness to their vision to match my own. Here, I did not even have to take the power into myself, merely grab it from the air, shape it with my will, and attach it to its subject.

“Whoa!” Carter said, raising his hands, then looking around.

“So that’s what you’ve been doing,” Antoinette said.

“Indeed. Now we must hurry.”

Breathing in the Deeps, I knit the power into my cracked ribs, then used the energy to flush my lungs of pollutants. We stopped for a truly unsightly round of purging, which I wished my companions couldn’t have seen, then we made our way down.

And down.

Farther down. The tunnel spiraled downward for thirteen turns, then changed directions, spiraling counter-clockwise for thirteen more.

We walked past rivers of lava, tracked wide to avoid endless pools of boiling water that housed sleeping Xoggox, and crept past fungus-laden fields and the packs of Vexl that ruled over them like lions of the savannah.

After what felt like many hours later, we came to a vast arena lit by the Gate.

My family did not even have pictures of the Gate. It was forbidden, a prohibition I suppose not unlike the Muslim ban against creating representations of Allah or Mohammed, though in practice, the religions could not be more unlike.

The Gate was crafted with thick, layered walls of Deep-forged steel that formed a near-opaque net across a chasm so expansive I could not see its top or either side. The Gate itself sparked with eldritch lightning, something moving, shaking beyond the power-wrought steel.

The cliff leading up to the Gate narrowed to no wider than a subway platform.

And atop the platform were two figures that could only be Esther and Nate. Above them, dozens of half-visible figures the size of buildings watched, flitting back and forth, moving faster than my eye could follow, then sticking frozen in mid-motion for a second before darting forth again.

The Gatekeepers.

Bogeymen saints of my childhood, the sources of my family’s seemingly-limitless power. The handmaidens of the end-times, in the not-flesh. When summoned to the farm, the Gatekeepers were merely faint shadows, silhouettes of unbearable dark light. Here, they seemed both lesser and greater, fully formed but massive. To be more defined, more real, made them somehow less overwhelming despite their literal size.

“Gulp,” said Carter from beside me.

“So, what’s your plan?” Antoinette said.

Words caught in my throat. I’d thought about this moment the entire week, run endless scenarios in my mind, all ending in blood, death, and Armageddon.

I did not have an answer. But when the other choice was oblivion, a poor plan was better than no plan.

Tying my words to the Deeps, my voice boomed out across the football-field-long distance.

“I, Jacob Abraham Greene, son of Ezekiel and Salome Greene, challenge for the position of scion, and the family birthright! Face me, sister, or forfeit your power!”

“Jake, what are you doing?” Antoinette said, her voice shaking.

“It’s the only plan I have left,” I said, striding forward, gathering power. “She can’t refuse a challenge in front of the Gatekeepers, not if she wants to keep their favor, which she needs to open the Gate.”

Esther turned to face me, and I could see the hatred in her eyes across the field, though it was technically impossible. I’d never been able to read the faces of outsiders, but my family had been my world, and I knew them as well as I knew myself. Or, thought I knew. This week had taught me many things, both about the lengths I was and wasn’t willing to go to, and the complete lack of inhibitions and limitations possessed by my sister.

The ground crunched under my feet, volcanic debris in gravel form shifting beneath me as I moved. This ground had been trod upon by giants, by gods, and by my ancestors in the first days, when the unborn were locked away to prevent another turn of the cycle.

Gods had bled on these rocks, and now they would be watered again by the blood of Greenes.

As Esther approached, Nate remained frozen in place, held aloft by cuffs of purple energy.

Esther had to be taxed, given the constant use of power, the exertion of cracking open a portal to the earth’s core, and the willpower gathered to open the Gate. I was in all likelihood no less strained, but I had stopped trying to defeat my sister on her own terms.