Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A minute can spin out in a flash, or it can contain infinities.
But however much time this minute contained, it was all we had left to finally have our revenge.
Lu picked up the book. She didn’t seem to notice her hands were blistered and burned. She opened the cover.
The page was a lost god spell. Not the violent one that had released the beast. It was the first one we’d cast to transform a simple bottle of water into wildflowers.
I didn’t know if we could cast the spell again.
But I knew exactly how I wanted to use it now.
I didn’t need the mirror. The spell had written itself into me, every syllable, every word, burned and permanent.
I just had to say each word within the seconds we had left.
All through in one.
I focused on the watch in my hand, on its magic that stopped time.
I drew upon the lost god’s magic to transform it.
Lula trembled beside me. I shook as the world went frigid.
Each word was harder to speak, each utterance softer, my voice raw and used until it was nothing, barely a whisper, a gasp, a breath.
All through in one.
Before the last word, Lu grabbed my hand that held the watch.
Except it wasn’t a watch. Not anymore.
It was our hatred, our anger.
It was a pulsing glob of magic and time, a bomb built for one purpose—to snuff out the spark of life in the horrifying creature who had destroyed our souls.
To kill a powerful thing created by a powerful god.
But I did not say the final word. Could not say it until the weapon was buried in that monster’s chest.
Lu knew it. Somehow she knew. She took a step, forcing me forward with her. I couldn’t feel my legs, didn’t know if I lifted my feet or if Lu dragged me there.
She stopped, panting through clenched teeth, and her gaze met mine.
I nodded.
She yelled and thrust my hand upward with enough force that we punched through the monster’s flesh and bone.
My thumb slipped off the watch stem.
I screamed the last word of the spell with everything left in me.
Time snapped back into motion—
—Abbi yelled—
—Cardamom yanked her through the portal—
—Lula laughed as a hundred lightning bolts struck the ground, caging us and the monster in electric fire—
—this was our death. But gods be damned, we were taking that fucking monster out with us.
An inferno of black flames engulfed Headwaters, devouring flesh, bone, and blood.
He twisted and convulsed, scrabbling at his flesh to get away from the agony.
Before Headwaters hit the ground, he evaporated, molecules, atoms, nothing.
Then time itself exploded.
* * *
She was walking down the street and suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. I’d been working since dawn the day before, breaking rock, digging ditches for the farm just east of town. The farmer had sent me on my way with barely a penny in my pocket.
So I was in town, cleaned up as best I could in the stream, and looking for work.
But seeing her stopped me in my tracks.
She turned to look at me, her hair soft autumn fire, her eyes a hazel more gold than green.
She smiled, and I knew my heart would never be my own again.
* * *
The night was bitterly cold, snow up to my knees. But still I kept walking. Lula was waiting for me, said she’d have a cup of coffee ready, even if I got to the bakery after closing hours.
By the time I got there, it was nearing midnight.
I almost turned away.
But I knocked with frozen fingers.
Lula opened the door, a heavy shawl over her shoulders, and ushered me in.
She brewed us both a cup of coffee, but her smile warmed me more than the welcome heat from the Franklin stove.
* * *
I kissed her, a trembling brush of lips asking questions I could not speak.
* * *
She kissed me back.
* * *
We danced. She laughed at my clumsiness, my feet in the wrong places, on the wrong beat, as the band sawed out a summer tune.
* * *
They would be our wedding vows, and we’d say them soon, so soon, beneath the big tree, just her and I and the pastor.
I repeated mine every night like a ritual as I waited to marry the woman I loved.
* * *
I lay dying, watching the monster feed on her.
Our gazes had locked and then…
…then everything had gone black. It was a good blackness. Peaceful, warm.
Until I’d woken into the shattering of her scream.
She: bent over my unbreathing, unresponsive body.
Me: standing above myself—poor dead bastard—unable to close the deal, finish the story.
There was no white light guiding me up, no red flames dragging me down. I wouldn’t have wanted them anyway. All I wanted was her.
* * *
The monster evaporated and time shattered, hammering me, us, reality, into a million pieces that could never be glued back together.
Still, I reached for her, for any shred of her I could hold, protect, love…and she reached for me…
* * *
“The answer,” a low, droll voice I’d heard somewhere, somewhen before said, “is still no, Brogan Gauge. I am, as I have said before, rather occupied with my vacation. You may remind the moon rabbit of such.”
Another voice, much warmer, with power that glowed gold with leaden shadows, said, “You are mine still. This will not be your end.”
Darkness and light, time and stasis, life and death, reality and destruction flickered.
I breathed again, lived again.
I was sitting in our old silver truck, on the twisted road near the hunter’s hideout, Lula—beautiful, living, breathing Lula—next to me. The book was in her lap, the blisters on her hands already healed.
I should be rattled, shocked, reeling from the whiplash of life and almost death. But my head was clear, my heartbeat steady.
Cupid stood outside the truck, his god power so bright, I winced. He was swathed in golden armor, massive pure white wings spread out behind him, a huge bow and brutal arrows in his hands.
“Apep knows where you are,” he said. “He knows you have the book. Casting the spell—both of them—gave you away. You need to run. Now. Back to the hideout. Back to the hunters.”
He snapped his fingers and the truck engine growled.
The wind buffeted us, rocking the truck.
“Run!” Cupid took three great strides and the sky thundered as he disappeared.
“Lu are you? Are we?” I said.
She nodded. “The box. Open the box.”
I spotted the witch’s box by my feet and hurriedly pulled off the shadow cloth and lid.
She dropped the book inside.
I covered the box, and Lula gunned the engine, tearing down the rutted trail at speed.
I slid over the bench seat and wrapped my arm around her.
“Abbi?” Lula asked, as we jerked and jostled down the rough trail.
“Card got her,” I said, searching through my jumbled, scattered memories. “I think he saved her with magic.”
“The Walches?”
“I don’t know.”
The sky was dark, the sun swallowed whole by heavy black clouds crackling with silver-shot lightning.
That wasn’t a natural storm building above us. That was god power clawing across the heavens.
“How did we? Who?” she asked.
“Death,” I said. “Cupid. How far?”
Lula shook her head. “Miles. Ten?”
Ten wasn’t good. Ten was a lot when there was a god on your heels.
The sky caught fire—literal red flames licking across the bellies of the clouds, burning and churning.
A massive serpent—at least a mile long and made of smoke and fire and onyx—slithered out of the sky.
The snake blasted into the land behind us, shaking the world. Its head was the size of a mountain, its scales gold and ivory with onyx bands. It opened its jaw and its fangs dripped with venom.
Apep, the god of chaos.
Lu snarled and glanced in the side view mirror. “Brogan?”
“Give me your daggers.” I couldn’t hold the book to cast a spell. Lula couldn’t stop driving. The watch was gone. Her daggers and my knife were the last weapons we had.
“That won’t be enough—” she started to say. “Look!”
I twisted in the seat, peering behind us.
A tornado of crows, thousands, millions, surrounded the snake, the noise loud enough to drown out the thunder.
When the crows lifted, crying to the sky, the snake was gone.
“Raven,” I said.
I turned back around, just as the giant snake punched up out of the sandy soil in front of us.
“Lu!”
She cranked the wheel, and the truck skittered and fish tailed.
The huge snake sideswiped the truck—
—just as a massive arrow pierced its eye, pinning its head to the ground.
Cupid, thirty feet tall, strode into the fray, shooting arrow after arrow into the snake’s flesh.
The snake writhed free of the arrows and struck.
Cupid winged upward, narrowly avoiding the hit. He drew a massive sword and dove down, ramming the blade into the snake’s head.
The sky bellowed in a cacophony of pain.
The gods disappeared.
Lu kept her foot on the gas. “What do you see? Are they out there?”
“Gone.” I bent to scan the sky through the windows. “I can’t see them. Storm’s coming on strong, coming our way. Sky’s on fire.”
“We can’t,” Lu said. “We can’t go to the hunters. We’d bring this right to their doorstep.”
“If Cupid and Apep are fighting, they won’t see where we go.”
“They’ll always see, Brogan,” she said. “The gods always see.”
The dials in the dash swung wildly. The truck was slowing. The engine died.
“Lu?”
“Not me.”
“Gas?” I asked, my hand on the door latch.
“No.”
“Battery?”
“I don’t—” She turned the key and nothing happened. “I don’t think so.”
“I’ll look.” I opened the door.
“Wait!” Lu snagged my sleeve and held on. “Look.” She pointed ahead of us.
Calmly walking our way was Mithra, the god of contracts.
He stopped in front of the truck. “You have run far enough, broken souls. Your road ends here. Cupid cannot save you. Raven cannot save you. The others are all dead.”
His words twisted in my heart but I knew it had to be a lie. They others were still alive. Had to be alive.
“Give me the book, pledge fealty to me as your one and only god, and I will grant you mercy. The book.” Mithra snapped his fingers.
A hand wrapped around my throat and jerked me out of the truck. Lula was beside me, both of us in front of the truck, the dead engine radiating heat behind us.
On the ground in front of us was the witch’s box.
“Open it,” Mithra commanded. “You. He pointed at Lula.
She stiffened and bent. Her braid with the wild asters woven into it swung in front of her as she drooped like a marionette being dragged by its strings.
Her hands were not her own, not under her own power. I could tell by how clumsily she fumbled with the box, how she fought opening the lid, how they went to rigor when she grasped the book.
She pulled it free and stood.
“Good girl,” Mithra said. “Now, you, on your knees.”
He pointed at me.
I dropped so hard my teeth clacked together. I tasted blood.
“You do not have to sign a contract for me to bind you to me, for me to control you. It is only by my grace that I have allowed you free will all these years. But now, I tire of waiting. You, and the book, are mine.”
Lu, somehow, amazingly, had the strength to open the book.
There was one spell, only one that was written in me I could call upon. I opened my mouth, knowing I didn’t have the breath, didn’t have the strength to cast a third god spell in so short a time.
Not that it would stop me from trying.
“Wild asters?” the odd voice said from behind me. “Of all the choices, you created wild asters?”
Mithra’s face lost all color, and his eyes went large. Panic flashed across his face.
“Lost god,” he breathed.