Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The darkness grew impossibly large, swallowing the road, the land, the state, and us in one gulp.
Lu must have stopped the truck, slammed on the brakes. She must have killed the engine because I couldn’t hear it, couldn’t feel any motion.
We weren’t driving. We couldn’t be.
The darkness barreled past us, trapping us in a tunnel of black, a massive, endless undulating serpent.
I held my breath, fear so thick, I was drowning in it.
But we were still on the road. Still in the truck. We had to be.
“It’s a god,” Abbi whispered, turning her face into my side. She clutched a silent Hado in her arms, his eyes glowing gold.
I tightened my arm around her, searching for a break in the shifting darkness, a sign it would pass us by.
Dull light flickered in lightning tongues through the black, but there was no end to the dark.
I reached for Lula, and she reached for me, holding tight against the storm.
The darkness slowed, serpentine undulations curling tight, tighter.
And then—
—nothing.
Silence fell, heavy as the last breath before death.
My heart sledgehammered, each slow strike shaking my bones, my nerves, my skin.
“Oh no,” Abbi squeaked as power—god power—filled the air.
Lu squeezed my hand.
Gods—or rather one god—was out there in that darkness.
Ate, the goddess of ruin and misery, who had created horrific monsters and sent them to tear our souls to shreds and rip our lives apart. Monsters who had turned Lula into a thrawn and me into an earthbound spirit.
Ate who wanted what we had—the spell book of the gods. She’d been hunting for it for years. She’d finally found it—and us—last month, killing me, and burying Lu beneath a house.
It had taken the intervention of two other gods—Death, who refused to reap my soul, and Cupid, who had fought Ate—for us to escape.
Ate wanted the spell book to destroy the world.
We weren’t going to let her do that.
The darkness turned rancid. It stank of filth, of corruption, of jealousy gone to rot.
She was looking for us. Looking for the book. I could taste her rage like bitter syrup dripping down my throat.
I knew, as every prey did, that if we moved, if we breathed too hard, she would see us and rip out our throats.
Time ticked as slowly as my heartbeat, fear blowing each second out of shape.
Sweat gathered at the nape of my neck and ran between my shoulder blades, swamping my pits, and sticking my shirt to my skin.
Everything in me screamed to run.
But I knew running would only get us seen, targeted, dead.
An orange flame flared to life, Ate’s power catching fire like a search light aimed into the void. It swept over the truck and beyond, scanning for what she wanted.
The book.
Our world flickered between darkness, orange fire, and darkness again, god power penetrating this strange space, looking for us.
Lu stared straight ahead, utterly still. But she wasn’t prey frozen in fear, she was a killer searching for a killer.
I tugged her hand, just the smallest motion to tell her not to go out there, not to leave me, not to face the god on her own. Lu loosened her grip on my hand, every line set for attack.
Well, hell.
I squeezed her hand, then let up on the pressure.
If she was going to go fight the god, I’d fight the god right alongside her.
But the orange slowly faded from a blinding wildfire to a dim sunset.
Abbi mouthed one word over and over, a prayer against my shoulder: “Please, please, please.”
Then a sweet, clear hum poured out around us, growing louder and louder.
Lula’s eyes widened in panic, her pupils dilated.
The sound was not coming from the darkness. It was coming from the back of our truck.
“Shit,” I breathed.
The spell book of the gods was ringing. The cursed, coveted, dangerous, powerful book we’d hidden in a witch’s box had picked this moment to make itself known.
The witches in Texas said the box would hide the book from gods, devils, monsters, and beasts.
Yet it responded to Ate’s search like a tuning fork.
We couldn’t reach the book unless we got out of the truck, couldn’t throw a blanket over it to dampen the sound, not that a blanket would work.
Not that anything would work.
The hum grew louder, and orange fire burned bright again, scanning the sky.
One of us had to shut the book up before Ate found it.
I reached for the door handle, but Lula grabbed my wrist, her hold punishing, anchoring me to her side.
Her eyes were an inferno of reflected fire. No, she mouthed.
Before I could argue her into letting me go, Abbi ducked under our clasped hands and pulled the handle.
“No!” Lu and I shouted at the same time.
I caught Abbi around the waist, but she was small, squirmy, and determined. She threw her weight into the door, forcing it open a crack.
Just enough to let Hado, the little black cat, now a shadow made of claws and teeth, slip out into the fire and darkness.
Abbi shut the door and pulled her mortar and pestle into her lap. She closed her eyes and inhaled.
Then she shimmered, becoming both the eight-year-old girl and the ancient, celestial rabbit in the moon. She stirred her pestle in the mortar, drawing the soft silver power up from the bowl. It spun like cotton candy, soft, subtle light growing to surround the truck.
She tapped the pestle on the mortar’s rim and the humming stopped.
I twisted to look back at the witch’s box. It was covered in shadow—Hado—who glittered with strands of silver. Abbi’s power was smothering the box, silencing the book.
I didn’t know how long she could hold that silence against a god. I didn’t know how long it would take until Ate gave up looking for us.
I wrapped my arm around Abbi, holding her tight.
The orange fire exploded, a bomb detonating. If a color could scream, it was absolutely ear-shattering.
I squinted and hissed.
Then the light blinked out.
The temperature in the truck plunged, sudden arctic cold. I shivered, and tremors rattled through Lu and Abbi.
The book was still silent. Had Ate given up that quickly? Or had something else scared her away?
Sweat stung my eyes. I swallowed, the rot and bitterness of Ate’s power coating my mouth.
Then the darkness moved, drifting as if a wind stretched and thinned it, becoming lighter and lighter until it was gray mist.
Abbi whispered, “A god.”
At first, I thought she meant Ate. But then the mist cleared, until we were surrounded by clean yellow light.
There was no road. There was no land, horizon, or sky.
But there was a god.
He wore a long-sleeved linen tunic, loose trousers, and sandals made of strips of gold and turquoise. Layers of precious stones circled his neck, fanning out from shoulder to shoulder, the gold reflecting the light of the sun against his bronze skin and midnight hair.
Lu sneered.
We knew this god.
We’d been hounded by him before, nearly killed by him.
It had happened years ago, but not so long we would ever forget, or ever trust him again.
“Mithra,” I growled.
“Broken souls.” He flowed toward the truck, moving with impossible grace. “I’ve been looking for you.”