Chapter 4 #3
Their hands paused on the loom. “Lineages are such troublesome things. Perhaps best forgotten all together, for family will betray you.” Their appearance flickered again.
Nyx caught a glimpse of a trio of rocks, of a naked body and marred face.
“But we all choose our own path, in the end.
Do you wish to know what path you will choose?
What names you will bear in the future? What they will call you, when that name is once again rewritten in the stars?
“I could tell you. For a price.” Their gaze dipped to Nyx’s arm.
She thought at first they were fixated on Constance, formed into a bracer around her forearm.
But when she realized that gaze was a touch lower, where Gleipnir lay wound around her wrist, she stepped hurriedly back, only to realize the portal behind her had closed.
That she had let it close, only she didn’t remember doing so.
She fumbled for Alihana’s hilt, for the portal magic that flooded to her hand.
A laugh split the air. “I will give you one at no cost, in case it should entice you to change your mind in the future,” they said as Nyx reached for her anchor by the Station and the portal opened sluggishly behind her as if an opposing force fought her.
“Pathbreaker,” the stranger said. “When it comes to haunt you, come visit me again.” They smiled, and they looked as if they bore a thousand different faces at once.
Nyx sank magic recklessly into the portal, until it opened just enough for her to jump backwards through it.
Laughter, birdlike and cackling, followed her through.
And as Nyx cut the flow of magic, watching the doorway shrink to nothingness, like a drop of water evaporating on a sun-baked sidewalk, the word Pathbreaker echoed in her mind.
She sucked air in quick, shallow breaths. Her friends were staring at her, and after a moment she realized they were also asking questions about what had happened. Her brain finally calmed enough to make sense of words, to hear Griff’s concerned “Are you alright?”
She wasn’t sure. She felt the wideness of her eyes but couldn’t make them narrow, her hands shaky with adrenaline. Wiping sweating palms on her jeans, she asked, “Griff, was your mother’s name Zephira?”
For the first time she’d ever seen, he looked truly startled. “Yes.” A pause. “Did Jevryn tell you that?”
“No.” She swallowed. “Someone else just did.” Someone who could see things in the stars.
Things like the naming conventions of Hidden families, like the fact that, in every way that mattered, Griff was as much Nyx’s father as Jevryn.
More so, even. Someone who had somehow known the name of Griff’s mother, who had had died over nine-hundred years ago.
Someone who had called Nyx Pathbreaker, a title Nyx did not remotely like, even as she recognized that pathbreaking was, in essence, exactly what she was trying to do—to break the bonds that held the universe together.
“Who?” Evra demanded.
“I don’t know,” Nyx lied. Mythology had been one of her strongest interests in childhood. She had seen enough clues to know precisely who she thought that had been, but she couldn’t quite get herself to believe it.
“Then why did you close the portal before we could come with you?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Where were you?” Morgen asked.
“I don’t know,” she said again. Her plan had been to find the boundary where the pocket of Earth Between met Dead Earth and cross over, where her newly acquired cell phone would be able to get a signal and tell her where she was.
Her intense desire to flee this particular pocket of Earth Between had interrupted that plan, and Nyx had no intention of going back.
Trying to puzzle through where she might have been, she said, “I was somewhere on the coast.” That was promising, at least. She was pretty sure it had been the correct coast. “But too far north, I think. Somewhere in Canada, probably.” It had been far too cold for the New York area at this time of year, according to the weather research she’d done in preparation for their visit.
She was pretty sure it had been too cold even for the upper United States and southern Canadian coastal areas at this time of year, but then weather was strange and she wasn’t a geography expert.
Some tidbit of history tickled at her memory.
Hadn’t the Vikings settled Newfoundland at one point?
And where people went, their gods tended to follow.
Except that when Nyx had been given Gleipnir, Evra had told her that Asgard was a planet, and the Norse gods of Viking myth had only been people.
Yet there was no denying that everything she had just seen lined up very neatly with one particular Norse trickster god.
Just leave it alone, she told herself. Whoever—whatever—she’d just seen, she was certain they were a dangerous thing just left alone.
She looked at the glowing portal map on the ground, trying to remember where Newfoundland was in relation to New York.
Somewhere above it, obviously, but directly above?
Up and to the right? She accepted that she should have just brought a map with her. “Griff, could I have—”
A map appeared on the ground before him, and he flicked it across the Station boundary with one talon.
“Thanks.” She opened it, and going with her gut found Newfoundland.
Looking between the dot she’d just portaled to and the map, she drew a line down and to the left, choosing a new dot.
The portal yawned open, showing nothing but a wide expanse of water as far as her eyes could see. Not far enough left, then.
She kept the distance she’d gone down and went further left, choosing another location.
This time, instead of wilderness or ocean, neon lights greeted her, the sound of loud, lively country music pouring across the portal threshold.
A man—decked out so thoroughly in cowboy attire that he had to be a tourist in whatever part of the US south this likely was—walked past. He then stuttered to a stop, whipping his head around to stare at the portal in slack-jawed amazement before his body followed suit, turning to face them.
Oh boy. She…had not expected that any portal opened in the Between would be visible to a Dead Earther, because she hadn’t expected that any of them would be magical enough to notice it.
She had a moment to decide whether to snap the portal shut or leave it open.
If she left it open, would he try to come through?
He stumbled as he took a step forward, and Nyx recognized all the classic signs of a man drunk off his ass—stumbling, slow, exaggerated movements, confusion, and the rapid blinking of someone who desperately wanted their vision to focus. Nyx left the portal open.
“Griff,” she said quietly, “can you make the Station look more alien?” Behind her, she heard the sprouting of new foliage, and though she didn’t want to turn her back on the portal to look at what he’d changed, a glimpse down showed the grass had turned an aquamarine blue in her peripheral vision.
She removed the Hiding she’d placed on Alihana and Veritas, strapped at her hip and thigh respectively, along with the Hiding on the weapons the others were carrying.
She hoped the visibility of the weaponry would make them all look more otherworldly.
All though she didn’t know how much it mattered, since there was already a very large griffin and a unicorn-dragon in the background.
She held her hand palm out in a classic request for an advancing party to halt movement, and tried to sound otherworldly and authoritative. “Come no further,” she commanded.
Out of the corner of her eye, Kaden’s eyebrows lifted.
Yes, I know sound ridiculous, she thought.
But this guy’s too drunk to notice. She’d been trying to channel the authority and control of Galadriel from the Lord of the Rings movies, but it had just come out sounding like herself trying and failing at acting.
Oh well. Probably the odder she sounded the better.
If he remembered this encounter at all in the morning, he’d end up telling his friends about the aliens he’d met, and of course no one would believe him when he started talking about blue grass and mythical creatures and women with swords.
Which was possibly unfair to him, because he was meeting aliens.
Miracle of miracles, he halted at her command, looking vaguely in awe of her. “Who-r-you?” He slurred the words, so they all came out sounding like one.
What would an otherworldly being in a movie say? “We are travelers,” she said, still trying—and likely failing—to replicate the perfect diction and cool radiance of Galadriel. “Where have we arrived?”
Her gaze darted to the right at a sense of movement, which was Morgen shuddering in what was no doubt a heroic effort not to burst out laughing.
“Uh, Earth, miss. I mean, ma’am. Lady?” he asked, sounding a little desperate and helpless.
Nyx wanted to slap her hand to her forehead.
She should just drop the playacting and ask him where the hell she was, except that she’d committed to the bit now.
Besides which, Morgen was having so much trouble not laughing that she really wanted to make it harder for him.
“What I am called is unimportant. Where on this ‘Earth’?”
“The United States of America.” He must have seen the irritation on her face because he hastened to add, “Tennessee. Uh, Nashville.”
Well, that explained the country music and the cowboy outfit. “Thank you. Your information has been most helpful.” She withdrew her magic.
“Uh, hey, wait—”
The portal snapped shut. The second it was closed Morgen doubled over laughing, his hands on his thighs for support. “Little Guardian,” he wheezed out between gasps of laughter, “please don’t ever take up acting.”