Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Men and immortals had more differences than likenesses. Each juxtaposition was stark, jarring, and when it mattered, godsdamned infuriating.
Priorities blatantly contrasted, to be sure.
Their wink of a life expectancy made their choices, their priorities, their driving force incompressible to those of us who could see the bigger picture.
Gods found pleasure in dissimilar things.
The woes that plagued mankind were vapors, murmurs, and dust compared in the eyes of the Divine.
We received our energy and sustenance from astronomically different sources.
And of grave importance, when the gods procreated, it was a big deal.
The population among gods, angels, demons, fae, and the like changed so seldomly that each death and birth was etched into a tablet and echoed through the lands.
But fuck did humans reproduce.
There were at least thirty million more lives to sift through between the time I’d found my human in the Arctic Circle and the moment she took her last breath on her one-hundred and thirteenth birthday.
As an eternal being, three lives with my human were little more than bubbles and froth in my timeline.
It was hardly enough time to establish a method on how best to discover her soul, in whatever body it had landed.
Combing the earth was my all-consuming frenzy.
Decades passed as I scoured every town, village, home, for my opalescent soul. I spared the minutes, an hour at most, to visit my kingdom and check in with my duties.
I was frequently met with a, “What the fuck are you doing?!” from Izi. “You can’t keep this up. People know, Amagi. Father knows of your weakness.”
Her dark form faded against the black marble as I shot her a fatal glare. Venom dripped from each word. “Are you that desperate for his approval? You have to try to undercut his relationship with his only son?”
But her threats landed. I trekked across the palace, past the Soul Eater, straight into my father’s worried gaze.
Before the door closed behind me, I asked, “How may I assuage your fears?”
There was a gentleness to his eyes as his lips turned down. “Before I answer: I suppose asking you to detach from this obsession with a single mortal is off the table?”
My expressionless silence was answer enough.
“Then…I trust you know what you’re doing.”
There would be other visits, other days, other talks. Now, I needed to return to the surface. I offered the stiffest of shallow bows before pushing through the double doors.
Izi was waiting just beyond the Soul Eater when I exited his royal hall. I flipped my sister a vulgar gesture at her goading over the war, the stakes, my role, the metal-on-metal screech of her endless harping, and then returned to my search.
Hell was doing fine without me. Our war had been stale, political, and operated in the shadows long enough to go on whether or not I wasted my time in Hell. But my human? How fine would she be without a protector?
I had no strategy, save for the process of elimination, but no message from my legions, no infuriated tirades from my sister, no concerned interceptions by deities as I trespassed on their lands, deterred my pursuit.
How had the mortal world changed so much in such a short time?
I began to seriously reconsider my stance on involving the legion under my command. There was no helpless feeling like watching the mortal hours become days become years knowing that she could be anywhere—that anything could have happened to her.
Had she changed her mind once she crossed over, and gone to her people’s afterlife?
Had a new, earthly mother died in childbirth, starting the nine-month-search over again, and again, and again?
I didn’t know if she was happy, if she was suffering, if she needed me.
No, I didn’t like the idea of other immortal beings around her.
Yes, the thought of word spreading as to my affinity for my human made me hostile.
But if humanity continued expanding at this rate, how was I supposed to shuffle mankind through a sieve until I found my one, precious gem?
I was determined to find her, and find her, I did.
In the twenty-ninth mortal year of my hunt, my search came to an end just before giving up on yet another continent and crossing the mountains into kingdoms and peoples I had yet to discover.
The sharp smell of the air above the clouds. The pearly glow that emanated from below the skin. The essence of the one I loved.
It was worthy of a parade, of a feast, of a mandatory holiday to which each of Hell’s citizens should dance in the streets if only to share in my joy.
I hadn’t taken a breath in decades, and there, in a seaside town in chilly Britannia, my lungs filled for the first time since Yuka’s passing.
But there she was, just outside of Durrington, the farm of the deer people, sloping on the edge of a riverbank.
Breathe. It was that voice within myself that I hadn’t heard in a long, long time.
She’s here. She’s alive. You’re together.
I can’t be held accountable for how long I stared in slack-jawed awe.
You found her, you found her, you found her.
It was superficial to be sure, but the moment I moved past her soul, I realized that for the first time, her hair was not black.
Her features had changed over names and ethnicities and centuries, of course, but until now I hadn’t fully embraced how everything could change.
I’d had no cause to come this far north, and from pale-haired reindeer herders in the north, to the rich umber of the southern deserts, to the glossy chestnut of the mountains, I wasn’t prepared for how many different kinds of humans there were.
I’d never seen shades of red in human hair.
It was as if a few precious drops of blood had been squeezed into a water basin, then dribbled atop her head.
The pinpricks that remained colored her chill-pinked skin.
Quite like the deer for which her people were named, she had the dotting of a fawn sprinkled over her nose, her cheeks, her forehead.
She looked nothing like Shala or Eleni or Yuka, but she looked everything like Love.
Her pearly aura might as well have been a halo.
It stole the breath from my lungs, filling them with the crisp cloud and sky quality that I hadn’t tasted in nearly thirty years.
I was so excited to find her, to see her, that I hadn’t done a moment of research on her, her people, her village, her culture, her beliefs.
Unlike Yuka, Eleni, or Shala cycles before her, she was in no danger from which she needed saving.
I was the danger.
I burst from the veil with the sort of uncouth elation that, understandably, nearly gave my human a heart attack. I knew my mistake the moment I’d made it. She was my human to me, after all, but to her, I was a stranger.
I stepped backward into the veil the instant her scream tore from her throat.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I could have ripped out my own hair.
Of course, she didn’t know me. Of course, I was not only a stranger, but an apparition where a moment prior only freshwater and grass and solitude had been. She would have screamed even if it had been a bucket of puppies and gold coins that appeared unannounced to ambush her.
It was a fool’s mistake.
I was humiliated by my blunder and unbelievably irritated with myself.
So much so that I couldn’t bring myself to follow her home.
Not that first night. Or through the mist and wind and raindrops of the second.
I sat in scowling, smoldering self-loathing over what I’d done to terrorize my human until a new presence arrived in the wet gloom of my third day on foreign soil.
It would be a mistake to say a woman spoke, for a goddess was no mere woman.
The sodden earth beneath me trembled with the gravitas of her voice.
“Are you going to haunt my lands and prey on my people, or will you introduce yourself?”
I looked into the unflinching face of a being made of sunlight, fire, and earth. Flame-red hair cascaded to her feet. Our realms had yet to formally meet, but her reputation preceded her. I recognized her instantly.
She forewent the immortal language. The scattered temples in her home, the woven mementos to her on the hearth, her name on the tongues of her people, flowed into her as a power source. She outranked me here, on her land, and forced me to speak on her terms.
I was rusty in Goidelic languages but fell into cadence as we spoke.
“Brigid,” I responded with a dip of my head. She outranked me, and I was trespassing. This was not how we were meant to meet. “At long last, I’m grateful to make your acquaintance.”
“Is this how Hell sends its emissary?” she asked, folding her arms over her chest. The red-orange flames of hair showcased a life of their own. Her strands licked around her neck, her chest, tumbling down to her waist as she glared.
“I’m not here as an emissary, though you are owed one,” I replied. “Honestly, perhaps I shouldn’t be here at all.”
“Perhaps not,” she agreed, expression hardening.
The glow of her hair refracted off the burbling river. I hoped the light hit my face well enough to convey my expression.
“I’m here for a human.”
She was unmoved. “Keeva. I’m aware.”
I corrected the lettering in my head, scrambling for my Gaelic knowledge. Caoimhe. That’s how ‘Keeva’ would be spelled.
I swallowed, trying to remember Brigid’s numerous gifts.
A high-ranking deity in her pantheon, she was the goddess of so many things, it was hard to keep track.
Her dominion over fire was a given, and even if I’d forgotten, her hair certainly would have reminded me.
Childbirth, metalworking, healing, homemaking, poetry, and…
Oh.
“You’re a goddess of prophecy and divination,” I said, more for my benefit than for hers. Of course she knew why I was here. “My human, Caoimhe, doesn’t know who I am or why I’m here.”
While her posture remained unchanged, I noticed the slightest relaxation in her face. “Because in this lifetime, she’s not your human.”