The Gods Defense (Laws of Magic Book 1)

by Amie Gibbons

  Yeah, we were putting on good faces, but there was no question, we weren’t friends here.

  I wanted an ice cream scoop to dig some of the tension out of the air.

  “Alright,” Millie said, not bothering with a fake smile, “speaking my language. And what contract are we forming?”

  Ravena gave her a hard look. She kept her hands propped on her hips and stared back.

  “Was that a difficult question?” she finally said.

  “Just wondering who the hell you are,” he said with a little sneer.

  Tyler growled, moving from a few groups away where she’d been checking out the fountain back to his side as fast as I could move.

  “Don’t speak to my friend that way,” Tyler said.

  Ravena met my eyes, fear obvious.

  He reached like he was hoping I could save him but Tyler slid her hand across his chest, turning him towards her as gentle as she would handle a kitten.

  She stared him straight in the eyes, lips moving, whispering something so light I couldn’t hear even the shush, swish of it.

  Ravena stumbled back, magic sweeping out of him in a wave of white.

  “Give me one good reason not to kill you right here,” he said, pulling himself straight.

  The roughly two dozen others gathered around, forming a semi-circle around us, blocking us from the fountain. Well, so nice to have an audience.

  “Because I know something you don’t know,” Tyler sing-songed.

  “So you keep claiming,” Ravena said. “Here we are.” He raised his arms dramatically, including the whole room in this conversation. “Please, do tell this great secret you say you have.”

  “Now that would be telling.”

  Millie snorted next to me and I squinted, focusing my power on this strange slice of the gods dimension. It was dwindling now, the most I’d ever pressed it. A yellow glow shifted and swirled around the splotches of light that were the gods and Tyler, but it slipped away like water in cupped hands.

  I bit back a frustrated grunt. There was a reason they were meeting here. Definitely a reason there was a doorway to this place from Nashville. The door was either already there, which would mean this was Apollo’s domain in Olympus, or somehow the door was made and transported us directly to a different area of the gods dimension.

  I couldn’t even begin to guess how much power that would take.

  No, something about this place… felt like Apollo. It was his style, his…

  It smelled like him!

  The place had the slight hint of lemons and salt water mixed with the cologne Apollo liked to wear. I knew it. Knew there was a reason I was so sure this was his.

  Not only were we in Olympus, we were on Apollo’s land. In some room he probably wouldn’t want these people in.

  So why? What the hell was so important they’d risk infiltrating Olympus for it? Not just Olympus, but the home of a psychic who could discover them at any moment?

  Why did I have a feeling I just answered my own question?

  Ravena implied something about needing psychics. Maybe there was more to it than just needing psychics, the tools of the Greek God of Psychics would probably be pretty powerful, too.

  So what psychic thing did they need? And why?

  “You may notice you are surrounded, girl,” Ravena said, jarring me back to this reality. “Now is perhaps not the best time to assert this independent streak you Americans seem so fond of. Answer the question.”

  “And which question would that be?” Tyler asked. “You were asking me so many a minute ago. Some of which should not be repeated in polite company.”

  “What are you? What are your powers?”

  “Now, this is where we’re going to play let’s make a deal,” I jumped in before Tyler could start working whatever magic she had. “You tell us what’s going on here. Just a hint, or a general idea. Just to explain why we’re here. Start building some trust.

  “Then Tyler can tell you something about what she is. And we’ll go from there. The more you bluster and threaten, the more she pushes back, and if you haven’t noticed, that’s not getting any of us anywhere. Let’s just assume for a moment we have similar goals and want to find a way to work together and go from there. Okay?”

  Ravena nodded once and Tyler followed suit.

  “Okay, so Ravena, what…” I paused.

  What did I want to ask first? Nobody knew better than lawyers the power of phrasing a question correctly to get the answer you were really looking for. You could do a lot of damage with a witness on the stand when they didn’t know what you were going for, or did and wanted to wiggle around it.

  So, if Ravena was a witness for the defense I was cross-examining, what would I ask him?

  “Why do you want psychics in on whatever you’re planning?”

  He seemed to consider that for a moment. “We are looking for certain things, psychics help find them.”

  I smiled, bowing my head. “Touché. What would you like to ask Tyler?”

  “Considering she’s a lawyer, I’m not sure I can trust her answers,” Ravena said, making me smirk. “So I would like to test her powers for myself rather than trust her to give me a straight answer.”

  “No deal,” I said before Tyler could, my hands talking with me for extra emphasis. “That’s not out of the question later, but during our little trust building exercise here, that’s asking for too much. It gives you too much power over her and possibly even the ability to hijack her head. Try something easier.”

  “What if I were to tell you our plan? Then would you allow me to test her myself?” He held up his hands, the basic ‘I’m harmless’ gesture he seemed to think he had down pat. “You ask me your questions, I tell you what we’re up to, and then I get to look for myself what she is.”

  I looked at Tyler, trying to keep my smile down. This was going better than I thought. She nodded and turned to Ravena, “Okay, deal.”

  “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

  Ravena paused. He wasn’t going to tell us, not really.

  But then he said, “We are going to use psychics, including myself, to find the areas magic is bursting out early. We have a magical device we’ve been working on that will not only suck the magic in before it can thrust out into the world, but transform it into something we can use.”

  It sounded almost like what the other gods were doing, except…

  “The magic is bent towards destruction,” I said. “It’s made to mess up, destroy and kill. The other gods, I’m sure you already know, have a similar device to get the magic, and it sounded like the difficult part was changing the energy, taking the negative out of it. That’s where all their magic is going to go essentially. How are you guys doing that?”

  Ravena smiled, fast and nasty. A quicky in a dance club’s men’s room type smile.

  I shuddered.

  “We aren’t. We’re perfectly fine with destruction. And you’re right, cleansing it is the hard part. Taking it as is and pointing it at the other gods to kill them is not nearly as difficult.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I gulped. I was a good liar. So was Tyler. It was why we were such good poker players. But this, I couldn’t keep it off my face. This was bad. And he had to have known how I would feel about it.

  This wasn’t him asking us to join him to keep our powers and not be victimized by the bigger, badder bullies on the playground.

  This was him asking us to help aim a nuclear weapon at the bullies without even a warning to stand down. This was murder.

  Worse than murder. This was genocide.

  “You’re not stupid, Ravena,” I said, trying to think fast. How was I going to play this? Simple, I wasn’t. “You must know I would never be okay with that. I won’t help you commit genocide.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  Ravena didn’t twitch, didn’t move, didn’t do anything to indicate magic.

  I fell into his eyes anyway.

  We stood in a rock pit, t
he walls jagged stones poking out, only a foot away and Ravena right in front of me.

  I had nowhere to go. No place I could run, because this wasn’t real. We were still standing in that room, I could see it flicker in and out like a hologram on the stones around us.

  Didn’t mean I knew how to get out and back to it.

  Ravena grabbed my arms, pulling me into him, his face mere inches from mine. His breath smelled of stale coffee and curry.

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  “I’m trying to protect people. I won’t let you hurt them.”

  “You’re trying to play both sides.” He shook me once, grip on my arms bruising. “I warned you when this all started to stay out of it. I didn’t know what you were then. I should’ve. I should’ve known you were one of us, but your powers were muted. I didn’t see until I took a closer look when you were on the field. You’re a god in a mortal’s body. And your powers? They’re blossoming.”

  He leaned in and I moved my face to the side, squirming against him. I’d rather have the sharp rocks against me than him.

  “Help!” I screamed, resisting the urge to squeeze my eyes shut.

  “They can’t hear you. This isn’t real.” He sounded almost annoyed.

  It sure felt real. I swung my knee up at his groin and he let me go, dancing back in the suddenly room sized pit.

  “If you’re going to rape me, wouldn’t you rather it be in real life then?” I asked.

  How the hell did I get myself into this?

  “What?” Ravena actually looked confused. “Don’t flatter yourself. Despite what adulations Apollo may be inflating your head with, not every male wants to screw you.”

  I sighed, sagging a little. Not the best thing to do when trapped and trying to exude confidence, but damn was it hard to keep that relief in.

  “Your friend Tyler on the other hand,” he said, making the relief wash out on a salty tide. “I’m going to have fun fucking her, high on those hormones she produces. I bet she’ll love it. A woman like that? Pretending to be in control of men through sex? Really just wants a man strong enough to pin her down and take what’s his.”

  I gaped. I couldn’t form the words. No matter how much gods seemed to be above gender inequalities since gender had nothing to do with power when there was magic involved, there were still guys like him, who thought a penis was all that ruled at the end of the day.

  I laughed. They probably thought that since the penis was what ruled them at the end of the day.

  “She had you whimpering. Like a puppy dog. A horny one. What makes you think you could do anything to her? She has you pussy whipped already.”

  “Won’t be the first woman I’ve tamed. One hard fuck and your kind rolls over.” He pitched his voice up in a falsetto. “I’ll do what you want, just don’t hurt me again.” He sniffed. “In interrogations, nothing breaks a woman faster than five men taking turns riding her. It’s so easy. You’re all so weak.”

  My stomach rolled and I fought down nausea. Maybe he didn’t do it himself, otherwise he wouldn’t have had a problem raping me to make a point, but I knew he’d ordered it before, encouraged it in his people, used women to reward the men who followed him.

  I’d see him locked up by the end of this. If he won, if he kept his powers, that sort of system would be the norm.

  I put on my best sneer. “You’re scared of her. I saw it. What did you think you were doing by bringing us here? Did you really think you could just kidnap us and what? Convince us to join you in a little genocide? Use our powers? Suck them out of us somehow?”

  “I knew you were never going to align with us,” Ravena said. “And I knew you were desperate enough to walk straight into our trap without backup.”

  “There, you’re wrong,” Apollo said, materializing out of the stone next to Ravena.

  The demon scrambled back, the room of reality snapping back around us.

  Apollo had grabbed my elbow, probably used the touch to anchor himself in our little mind meld, and flashed me a smile before letting me go, strutting towards Ravena.

  Shrieks and gasps filled the room and I looked in time to see other Greeks pop up, grabbing the defectors before they could run two steps or even think about popping out.

  The two dozen or so defectors were held or locked in by some magic before I finished looking around.

  Apollo grabbed Ravena, giving him his own version of a nasty smile.

  “You’re the one who walked into our trap,” Apollo said. “Actually, to give credit where it’s due, Cassandra’s trap.”

  # # #

  We’d been cornered by the gods, Tyler’s secret out, and Apollo had said something very interesting. Something about how we would have to join Ravena just to protect ourselves.

  He’d been panicking and mentally I’d told him to shut up.

  Wheels turned in my head, like a clock starting to work after being hit in just the right place to knock off the dust.

  Apollo looked from me to Tyler to the cluster of gods nearest to us, and the line after them that were turning to see what was going on.

  “Oh, oh. I have an idea,” I told him psychically. I paused, fingers moving with my brain. “I think… yeah, yeah, there’s definitely an idea here.”

  “Is it a good one?” Apollo asked.

  “No. Bad, very bad. It’s all I’ve got though.”

  “Tyler,” I said out loud. “You almost done there?”

  “Not if they keep backing away,” she said, voice low and sultry, like a Dominatrix promising pain men would beg for.

  “Yeah, let’s save some for later. Run!”

  “Apollo,” I thought at him as we hauled ass up the hill. “Still there?”

  “Yes,” he said, concern clearly coating the word.

  “Can you hold them back for a bit? Just enough for us to get away? Tell them I have a plan and this little show was part of it? Silently! Don’t say it out loud.”

  “Done,” he said a moment later. “What’s the plan?”

  “Ravena has bugs planted here to listen in on you guys.”

  “What!”

  I flinched, the yell acid on my brain.

  “No, no, no, stay calm. Listen. He must’ve done it during the explosion, that’s what the distraction was for. So he heard all that. He knows we’re on the run and that there’s something special about Tyler, something he might want to know.

  “We’ll use the bug to tell him we want to join him. He’ll know we’re only doing it to protect ourselves. He might believe it. Or at least want to take advantage of our vulnerability and try to lure us somewhere.”

  I pumped my arms, running faster, trying to keep my legs moving while my mind was half a mile down with Apollo.

  “We can use that to get in on whatever he has planned. Maybe get into their meeting place. Once we do, we can plant one of Millie’s tracer potions in the meeting place or on Ravena, that will leave a magic mark on anyone who comes through and use that to track down the other defectors.”

  “That potion she was talking about yesterday?”

  “Yeah. And this way, you guys know who to arrest, and you can use that evidence to show anyone else trying to defect it’s a bad idea to go against you guys, and show any others who might not believe you have a right to break the treaty that they broke it first.

  “You have magical bindings, right? You just have to get the jump on someone to get them on, usually? This way you would know who to snap them on when you were miles away. It’s perfect!”

  “Except for the part where you’re betting he won’t kill you outright,” Apollo said. “No.”

  “And exactly what are you going to tell the other gods now, then?”

  He didn’t say anything and I wondered if I’d dropped out of range.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said.

  We cleared the top of the hill and kept running. He obviously was holding them off at least for now, otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten even this far. Which Ravena
would probably be able to tell.

  “Hey, send someone after us,” I said.

  “What?”

  “We wouldn’t be able to get away without help. So make it look a little better and like someone at least tried to stop us.”

  A god popped up in front of us and Tyler took him out.

  “Good,” I said.

  “But not enough,” Apollo said. “You have to have a damn good reason for there not being more of us after you if Ravena can hear all this.”

  “I can tell him the truth, that you’re on our side and helped hold them off. I’ll even tell him I’m hoping to get you to defect.”

  “He won’t buy it.”

  “No. He won’t think you’ll defect. I think he will buy me saying I would like to try to convince you.”

  “He’s seen how we interact. He knows how you feel about me.”

  “Exactly.”

  He fell silent and we hit the door.

  “We’ll get in touch with him,” I said. “We’ll try to hide to make it look good. I’ll tell these two after we break the bug what’s really going on. Keep your psychic eyes on us, wait for Ravena to reveal something. Don’t move in before we can plant the tracer.”

  “If it even looks like a trap, yell for help. I’ll hear you. Don’t get hurt.”

  “I won’t,” I said as we flew out the door. “Not with you watching my back.”

  The door slammed shut behind us and I actually felt Apollo’s mind get cut off.

  I never had before.

  # # #

  I’d told Tyler and Millie the plan in a text, typed out on my phone in the bathroom of the restaurant, just in case Ravena had other ears or eyes on us.

  Millie had a vial of the tracking potion ready, and put the pen Ravena had borrowed in it after he left the bar.

  The DNA in the sweat particles left in his fingerprints were enough to trigger the tracking potion, tying it to him. All we had to do after that was put it somewhere where others were and the potion would show up on anyone who had contact with him and came to the place it was.

  Almost like marking money with invisible ink to see not only who stole it, but who got the money after that.