Chapter 10
By Dagda’s fucking hairy testicles, what had Wren gotten herself into? Fucking Crete? I didn’t know much about Greece, but I did know that all the creatures that had been trying to kill her were from the Greek Pantheon.
There’d been a long-standing rule—a division of territory, even. When humans settled in an area, the gods that were worshiped there all divided up the area. Sometimes, it was fine, and we lived in harmony. Sometimes, it was a bloodbath that spilled over to the human world.
But Boston, up until now, had been pretty uncontentious. There were enough Boston-Irish mammies rolling around who sat in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Sundays, but still celebrated Imbolc and Samhain to warrant a Celtic presence. Mammies like Zelda Byrne, who’d learned the practices and traditions from her mother, who’d learned from her own mother before that.
And that was how the disgraced and supposedly dead Irish God ended up in the new country, living in the house of a God-fearing Catholic, while holding a very pregnant, unwed woman in his arms.
Personally, I stayed the fuck out of the politics. I might be Néit, ancient God of War, but there was a big difference between war and petty political struggles. I left that to the new Celts and the Tuatha. I was happy working with the horses, watching the pretty, broken Wren from afar.
At first, when she had come to live in the house, I’d followed her with my eyes, mostly out of curiosity. She’d just been this sad, pathetic little creature who, for a long time, looked like she just wanted to sink into the earth and never emerge. That Wren didn’t interest me so much. I came from a time when only the strong survived, and if she couldn’t pull herself out, then I had no interest.
Even now, the world was no place for the weak. But still, I felt protective of her, maybe in the way I’d felt protective of Zelda Byrne. She was part of my domain.
But eventually, after grief had stopped marring Wren’s face, and she’d picked herself up, something about her caught me and took hold. The fire returned to her eyes, though there were still shadows of grief that I didn’t think would ever leave. She’d dusted herself off and gone on with her life, spreading her wings after the deaths of her parents, and that woman? She was something special.
When she came home with that gobshite Thomas, I’d had to stop myself from chopping his head off every time he talked to her dismissively. She deserved better, but I couldn’t tell her that. I barely spoke to her. I grunted hello on the stairs occasionally. I was an eternal God, and I had no business becoming obsessed with a mortal whose life would be over in what was essentially seconds in the course of my existence.
Still, I watched. Like a fucking creeper, as the people of this age would say. I got invested in Wren’s life, even as Zelda gave me the side-eye. Celebrated when she broke up with that hoor. Worried when she worked so hard.
But when I’d found her crying on the steps about the babies, my ability to keep my world separate from hers shattered in the wind. I’d had to acknowledge that I was invested in her happiness as more than a bystander. She was strong and so beautiful.
Zelda had noticed my preoccupation, and actually had the audacity to slap me, the God of fucking War, upside the head with her rolled-up TV guide. “She is not for you, Néit,” she’d said sternly. “With you lies only heartache, and Lord knows, that child has had more than enough heartache in her life.” I’d known she was serious when she called me by my real name.
I’d rolled my eyes in her direction. “I’m just helping her out, Zelda. Just like I’d help you. And she’s not a child. She’s about to be someone’s mother.”
She’d just huffed and dismissed me. Even the memory made me smile.
I was going to miss Zelda, who’d been my companion for more years than I could count. I would feel her loss for a long time.
I stroked Wren’s back softly, soothing her. I didn’t understand why she was being targeted, and I wasn’t inclined to ask. I was more inclined to get my ax and thin the number of Mythics in Boston until they got the point that Wren Mahone was off-limits.
I listened to her explain about the woman in her drive-thru, how her eyes had gone white and her voice monotone, and it sounded like an Oracle of some kind. A lot of the Pantheons had Oracles, though, so it was hard to judge if this one was working on behalf of whoever was trying to hurt her, or if she was a separate entity entirely.
I’d never heard of Oracles being able to lie during a prophecy, but was I willing to stake Wren’s life on it?
“What should I do, Nate?”
She should stay here, where I could protect her. But three supernaturals had already breached the outer wards, and even if I extended them to the front door, she would be trapped like a caged animal. That couldn’t happen. She had appointments and had to give birth and shit.
That preemptive bloodbath was back on the table.
My grumble of frustration was almost soundless. I didn’t know what to do, and I could tell she was relying on me to help her decide. I couldn’t take out a whole Mythic faction by myself, and to say I hadn’t made many friends with my own people over the last millennia was an understatement. She couldn’t stay trapped here either.
“What does your gut say?”
She looked up at me, her big eyes shiny. “It says that going to Crete is the right idea, but that’s crazy, right?”
Hell yeah, it’s crazy.“Then I guess we’re going to Greece.”
“We?”
Yeah, fucking we. Because there was no way I was letting a vulnerable Wren walk into an unknown country, into an unknown situation, by herself.
“We.”
She stared at me, the fear and trust in her eyes making something in my chest clench. When she stretched and brushed her lips across mine, I was too stunned to move away. Her lips were so soft, and she tasted sweet. But before I could deepen the kiss, taste her more thoroughly, she dropped her cheek back to my shoulder.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and I wanted to shout at her that she shouldn’t thank me. I hadn’t kept her safe, just fixed problems as they arose.
Instead, I kissed the top of her head gently and held her tighter. We’d make this work, and I would try and keep the hard-on I had for my sweet neighbor to myself, even if it was getting more difficult every time I touched her.
I needed help. That much was clear. And I fucking hated asking for help. There was only one other from our Pantheon that I even associated with, and I knew she was going to give me so much shit about this.
The following day,I brought Wren along, partly because I needed Cliona to meet her and partly because I was worried about leaving her behind. The other supernaturals seemed a little more hesitant to attack Wren when she was in my presence, and I was banking on that fact.
Driving further out of the city and into Revere, I kept casting Wren small looks. She was pale, her eyes smudged by dark circles. I’d watched her toss and turn last night, leaning against the doorjamb like a voyeur.
“So, who are we meeting again?”
I turned off the freeway. “An old friend. Cliona, but she prefers Clio now.”
“And she’s… like you?”
“Irish?”
Wren frowned at me. “You know what I mean.”
I held back a smile. “She’s immortal, yes. She is a bean-sidhe.”
“A banshee! You’re taking me to see a banshee?”
Technically, Clio was the queen of the bean-sidhe, but I didn’t think that would make Wren feel better. “Yes. I want to know what the hell is going on, and Clio keeps better tabs on the politics of the supernatural world than I do.”
Wren nodded. “And by the supernatural world, does that include, you know, things like werewolves and vampires and stuff?” She was putting on a brave face, but I could hear the subtle shake of uncertainty in her voice. It was probably a lot to take in for a human; I mean, they lived their lives as if they were the apex predators. It’d come as a shock that most supernaturals, especially the Mythics, considered them only marginally more interesting than sheep.
Definitely less interesting than cats.
“Those are human labels, and I wouldn’t say that there are exact matches in the world, but humans didn’t come up with these things themselves. At some point, they probably ran across some supernatural being that looked like a wolf—maybe one of the indigenous deities?—and then called it a werewolf.”
Dumb name, but whatever.
Wren shook her head, chewing her lip until it was puffy. I wanted to reach over and kiss her until she stopped. Instead, I consoled myself by patting her knee. “There’s so much history and mythology, even theology, that some humans dedicate their whole lives to a small portion of it, and they still don’t know everything there is to know. You can’t expect to understand it all in a month.”
She looked out the window, and we completed the rest of the drive in silence. Clio lived down a random street in suburbia, which would make you think she was hiding out. But you’d be so wrong, which you’d soon discover as you pulled up to her little colonial house.
Because the whole thing was blacker than a widow’s veil. The cladding, the trim, the door, even the letterbox were all pitch black. The windows were tinted the darkest shade money could buy. There was a spindly fence around the whole place, sharp spikes on the top. It was a foreboding kind of house, the kind the neighborhood kids would dare each other to knock on the front door as a rite of passage.
Clio loved that shit.
“Woah,” Wren breathed, trepidation written all over her face.
Shaking my head, I climbed from the car and walked around to her door. I helped her out, my hands wrapped around her waist. “Don’t let it fool you. Clio enjoys theatrics.” I opened the squeaky gate and strode down the path. There was no Mythic on this planet that scared me, least of all Clio and the bean-sidhe.
Using the knocker shaped like a woman screaming, I slammed it down three times. I held my breath as Clio opened the door, taking in me and then Wren. I waited for her to scream. The wail of the bean-sidhe that would tell me that I was working against the very hands of fate. She opened her mouth, and I tensed.
Instead of the wail that you would feel in your very soul, she laughed in my face. “How’d you manage to knock up a mortal, Néit?”
Wren flushed, and I growled. “Are you going to invite us in?”
“Sure. Welcome, Wren Mahone.”
I didn’t know if it was reassuring that Clio knew her name or not. And I didn’t know how to interpret the shit-eating grin Clio threw my way as we stepped into her house.