The Banished Gods Box Set: Books 1-3

by L. A. McGinnis

  She knew three things when they discharged her. That her name was Celine Barrows. That she lived above the Chesterfield Bakery on West Taylor. And that if you don’t have insurance, you don’t get to stay in the hospital more than two days, no matter the circumstances. “Good riddance,” Celine muttered when the cab pulled away from the hospital. She swiped a huge bottle of aspirin on her way out, hoping it would last her for a while, at least until she figured out how to survive in this huge, noisy city.

  She had her backpack, which she’d carefully unpacked and repacked several times. Everything was dirty and torn, as if it had all been tossed in the mud. Two books, a couple of broken pencils, three black spiral notebooks filled with careful, precise writing that she tried to copy and found, to her delight, she could. Another notebook filled with strange, foreign writing she couldn’t read at all, a pass-worded laptop with a cracked screen that wouldn’t let her in, no matter what she tried. Same with her old beat up phone. And a handful of keys on a long, blue fob that said “Pure Michigan.”

  She was assuming one of them would open her apartment, but she’d only know that once she arrived at the address written on the sticky note in her hand.

  “So this is what I have to work with.” Celine had gone through everything one last time before being discharged, in the hopes that somewhere in here was a clue that would tell her what to do next. “Like a freaking puzzle. And I’m no good at puzzles.”

  Although she really didn’t know that.

  Thanking God for the sympathetic nurse who had given her the address, the tourist map, and twenty dollars for a cab home, Celine stood in front of what she assumed was her apartment building. Hit with an unsettling feeling of déjà vu, at least the first key she tried fit into the lock, so yeah, there was that.

  “Wow. Okay, just…wow.”

  Circling the tiny apartment she decided she was either a robot or a neat freak, as everything was lined up, stacked, organized and arranged in neat, orderly little rows. “Wow. I must be a neat freak or completely, totally compulsive.” Neither of which seemed quite right. Which was the problem, nothing seemed to fit. She had some residual, nagging memories, but none were of an alley.

  Instead, she remembered a roaring, black river, an endless darkness under a gleaming moon, and someone who was not a man at all, but something huge and dark and somehow comforting. Her thoughts circled back to one word.

  Wolf.

  How crazy was that?

  And then everything faded away into nothingness. The way dreams do. Slipping out of the hospital scrubs, she searched through the closet, felt a faint shift in her memories at the scent of a familiar shampoo, but then everything became blank as she fell into what had perhaps once been her own bed but now felt foreign and lumpy.

  Fenrir roared out of the wolf’s skin the same way he tore through everything, like a fucking force of nature. Somehow, some way, he’d found something alive in the Otherworld. He’d discovered something real in there. And the memories of the girl were clawing at him like a demon. He pulled on clothes and stalked downstairs, searching for Mir.

  “Mir, where the fuck are you?” He pounded on the infirmary door, feeling the wood begin to give under his fist. “Damn it, get your ass out here, I need you.” He flung open the door and found nothing except pristine, gleaming stainless steel tables. No sign of Mir.

  “They’re all out tonight. And you need to calm down.” Morgane stood behind him, hands on her hips, a faint smile of relief on her face. She was dressed for fighting, her blonde hair pulled back, revealing her green eyes and open, inquisitive face. “Good to see you up and about Fenrir, it’s been awhile.”

  Something about the way she said awhile gave him pause.

  “How long?” He licked his lips, feeling how dry and cracked they were. “Shit, how long was I out?”

  “About three days as of tonight. Since you went after Odin, I don’t know how long after that you crossed over to the Otherworld. But if you want any of the guys, they’re all out, scouring the city for demons. I was on hunting rotation with Mir but got sent back early.”

  “Fine, I’ll talk to Odin.”

  “Him too.”

  Fen turned on his heel, his eyebrows practically disappearing into his inky hair.

  “Odin’s hunting,” she clarified, “with the rest of them.”

  At the look of absolute shock on his face, Morgane rolled her eyes. “Yeah, it’s a new thing.”

  “How’s that going for him?”

  She grinned, and this time there was enjoyment there. “Not as well as he’d like. Came back last night stinking of diesel fuel and oil. I’d love to watch, but Mir sent me back early tonight to double check a faulty camera.” Their shared grins were proof enough that there was no love lost between either of them for Odin. Each had good reasons for their animosity. “So why do you have a bug up your ass looking for Mir?”

  “Because I found someone in the Otherworld when I crossed over, and I think I brought her back with me to this realm.”

  “You mean…like we brought back Ava and Balder from the Underworld?” A shadow flickered across her lovely face when Morgane mentioned her sister’s name.

  “No, not like that, not exactly. More like I did something that I shouldn’t have. Or I changed something in that realm that’s going to affect this one. All I know is, I might have screwed up or should have left well enough alone. Now I’ve got to run the situation by Mir, see what he thinks.”

  “Well, Mir’s not going to be back for hours.” Morgane tilted her head at him. “So I’m afraid you’re going to have to make do with me.”

  After a moment’s pause, Fen ran the events through with her, from beginning to end. Quick and neat, exactly as he remembered it. Hoping because Morgane was human, maybe she’d hear something, think of something he hadn’t.

  “Well shit, that really doesn’t sound good.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So this river, it’s the same one we crossed when you guys rescued me and Ava from the Underworld, right?” He nodded. The very same cesspool. “You found this girl on one side and you carried her through the water, right?” Again with the nodding. Look at him go, turning into a bobble head. “But I don’t get it? We fell in the same river. So why did nothing happen to us? We came out just fine.”

  “You and Ava fell in, Loki and I dragged you both out. Then we crossed the bridge, after being granted safe passage by Modgud. By bargaining for passage, we negated the magical power of the river below.

  “That’s not at all what happened last night. I crossed the waters, and therefore, the magic. I carried this girl through both, from one side to the other.” He jolted. “Could it be the enchantment on the river itself?” Fenrir wondered aloud. Noting Morgane’s confusion, he explained.

  “Okay, from what little I remember about mortal death, legend has it, the dead go to the afterlife cleansed of their sins, their burdens—and their memories. Part of that journey entails them crossing the Gjoll River…to forget their past.” Meeting her eyes, they reached the same understanding at the same time. “Shit. I think I really screwed up, Morgane.”

  “You truly believe when you carried her across the river she forgot everything?”

  “You don’t understand, Morgane, she behaved like a child once we reached the other side. When I first encountered her, spoke to her, she was…amazing. There was an awareness to her—I’ve never met anyone that affected me like she did. But when we came up out of the water? It was as if there was nothing left of who she had been. I noticed the difference immediately, but before I could do anything about it? I got yanked out and ended up back here, in my room.”

  After a moment of consideration, she reluctantly agreed. “If what you’re saying is true, if her memories really were wiped away, then she’d have zero life experience, she’d be completely innocent, almost childlike, right? Which would make sense, according to the way you’re describing the way the river works, at least.”

  “So
how do I find her?”

  “What if you went back into the Otherworld?”

  He shook his head. “That’s part of the problem. She wasn’t a ghost or a spirit, Morgane. She was alive.”

  “I don’t understand, Fen… What exactly are you saying?”

  “Right after I brought her across the river, I was hurled back to this plane, into my body. What if the same thing happened to her?” His eyes grew worried. “What if she’s on Earth? What if she’s here, like…that?”

  Morgane smiled gently. “Come on, you can’t bring a living person out of a dream, Fen. That’s got to be against the law of physics.” As Fen stared at her for a long moment, realization dawned. “Oh…and that’s why you’re looking for Mir. Got it.”

  Trying to explain what happened in a way that made sense, for both of them, he went slowly. “Usually, when I’m on that plane, nothing feels real, but this time, I knew there was something there that didn’t belong. I smelled her, smelled how alive she was, amongst all that death. She drew me to her, like a magnet almost. And then, when our eyes met, I knew…Her.” He was thinking back through it all, and his inner beast concurred. She had been real. Her hand against his back had been real, her weight, slight though it had been, had been real. And her eyes, brimming over with all those dark shadows, had been the most real thing of all. “If she’s here, I need to find her. She mentioned Chicago. An alley. Is that enough to run a search? I’ve got to try to make this right.”

  Morgane’s voice turned serious. “You don’t know what Ava’s been like since she came back, Fen. She’s hurting, and I can’t figure out how to help her. So if this girl’s here, with no memory of anything…” Morgane’s voice trailed off as she started down the hall toward the computer room. “Come on. We’d better start with local hospitals. We’ll look for female patients in their early twenties brought in with brain trauma, amnesia, head injuries, blackouts, those sorts of things. And then, when Mir’s back, you can ask him about the rest.”

  “I think all I needed was you.”

  Silently, she squeezed his arm. They started in Chicago.

  Hunched over her shoulder, Fenrir watched. First pulling up emergency room numbers, then punching them into her cell, Morgane cajoled and lied and threatened and finally, on the seventeenth call, found who they were looking for. Giving the nurse a description of her “sister,” which he thought was nothing more than a figment of his imagination, the nurse told them someone matching that description had checked out that very morning. It wasn’t difficult to use Mir’s program to hack into the database and find an address.

  Ten minutes later Fen had Celine Barrows’s name in his hand and was out the door.

  Chapter 6

  Celine, which she begrudgingly called herself only because she couldn’t come up with anything better, didn’t remember diddly-squat about muscle memory.

  If she had, she’d have known what to call her reaction when she heard the faint scraping of the outside door closing, waking her. Instantly alert, instantly watchful, she slid out of bed in one graceful motion.

  She crept to the closet, wrapping her hand around the handle of a steel bat, fitting it to her body like another limb, and walked quietly to the far corner of her bedroom, where she knew an intruder coming around into the room would never see her, and tucked herself in tight. She calculated his movements and timed her swing perfectly, except that in the last second she caught a flash of his face and pulled up, so now they stood face-to-face in the semi-dark, her panting like a panicked rabbit and him drawing the slow, steady breaths of a killer.

  Then he dropped the hood and his face came fully into view, his eyes glinting in the half-dark of her bedroom. She managed a shuddering inhale, just enough to get out, “How in the holy hell can you be here?”

  She’d have liked to say her voice was steady, or at the very least firm, but it came out like the last dying squeak of a rabbit. But she didn’t back away and kept her hands wrapped around the bat. Because there was no frickin’ way the guy from her dream could possibly be standing in her bedroom, not all six foot…no, check that, she amended, looking up the entire six foot six inches of him. He was so big he sucked all the air out of the space, leaving barely enough space for breathing, seemingly closer than the two feet separating them, and she hitched the bat a little higher and tightened her grip, widened her stance.

  “I wish I had an answer for you. I really do.”

  Celine noted his voice matched him perfectly, deep and throaty, with an almost feral undertone to it, like a steady, warning growl. The kind that makes you curl your hand back into your sleeve and slowly back away. “Are you Celine Barrows?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  He chuffed out a little laugh. “According to your records, you would.”

  She tried to decide if he was being funny. “What are you talking about?”

  “I looked at your records while I was at the hospital. They released you with post traumatic, retrograde amnesia, after just two days. No follow up, no consult with a neurosurgeon or another doctor. No testing, no MRI’s, no CAT scans. Any reason why?” His voice sounded kind, but when his eyes drifted up and rested on the bandage on her head, his mouth tightened, forming two deep lines alongside his mouth.

  Celine was trying to decide which was weirder, having a standoff with a stranger in a strange apartment that was, but wasn’t hers, or discussing insurance coverage with said intruder. She decided to go with the insurance coverage angle. Maybe Mercy General sent out adjusters in the middle of the night. Sure, right after they appeared in her dreams to dump her onto a muddy riverbank. “No insurance. Does that answer your question?” He opened his mouth and she cut him off. “My turn. Second and last time I’ll ask. Who the hell are you?”

  This time when he smiled, she noticed the teeth. Long, and very, very white. “You can call me Fen.” He gave her a small nod of his head, which seemed almost like a bow.

  “And I guess you can call me Celine. At least, that’s what they tell me.” She relaxed a little. If he was going to kill her, she supposed he’d have done it by now, and he didn’t seem in any big rush. In fact, he seemed almost as weirded out by this whole thing as she was. “Can you back up a bit? Fen?” His name suited him, short and uncomplicated. She kept the bat in one hand while she reached over and flipped on the light switch. Holy hell, he was huge. And the way he moved? Seemingly too smooth and graceful for someone that big. “How did you get in here, Fen?”

  When he picked a corner to face her, she realized it was the farthest point from her. Still, she kept the bat handy. He licked his lips and paused, as if choosing each word very, very carefully. As though everything might depend on it. She waited him out, her chest tight. In this new world of hers, she was cartwheeling forward, a lunatic with no set destination in mind. Maybe, finally, here was someone who had the answers.

  He blew out an unsteady breath. “I had a dream three nights ago, Celine. You were in it.” Then he simply stared across the room, searching her eyes, waiting for her response.

  “Oh.” Tears stung her eyes. “Oh.” She said again, her heart beating far too fast in her chest. “All right. I had a weird dream too, and you were in mine.” Staggered by the revelation, Celine met his unflinching gaze. When he released another slow, heavy exhale, her hand relaxed on the handle of the bat, feeling some of the tension go out of the room. “But then I woke up in the hospital. I don’t remember anything that happened before that.”

  “This is your apartment?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “What else do they tell you?”

  “That I’m a student at Chicago University. That I’m in a bunch of classes, some of which I’ve probably missed. That I’m originally from Michigan. But I can’t get my computer unlocked, or my phone, because I don’t have the passwords. Because I don’t...”

  “Remember them?”

  “Yeah, I guess. No one came to the hospital looking for me after the…accident. One of the nurses sa
id they did an online search and couldn’t locate any family.” She shrugged helplessly. “And with both my phone and my computer locked, I couldn’t help them. I dunno, maybe if I could get them open?” She knew how she sounded. Lost. Pathetic. But damn it, she’d take any help she could get right now. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about iPhones? Could you get mine unlocked? I keep thinking if I could just look at my contacts, then all my friends and family would be in there, right?” She marched past him out into the living room and snatched the old phone from the dining table, her hand trembling as she extended it toward him.

  He towered over her, but his eyes…fixed on her. They seemed so dark, so serious. So sad.

  It struck her, the strangeness of tonight, this hope that maybe a complete stranger might be willing to help. But he’d had the same dream as her. Which meant she wasn’t crazy, after all, just memory-less. Maybe that was the perfectness of tonight, the reason why he was here. Maybe finally, after all the half-interested, overworked people who’d tried to patch her up these past two days, Fen might actually fix something in her life.

  A working phone and computer would sure be a good start.

  He’d done this. He’d taken away her memory.

  Lifting the phone gently out of her hand, Fen said, the words coming through clenched teeth, “My buddy Mir is a genius with technology.” Knowing he was about to break about a hundred different rules, he went on, “Tell you what. Let me see what he can do.” She left and hurried back, carrying a backpack that seemed too large for her, a strange scent clinging to it. “He should be able to get your phone and your computer open.” She sent him a grateful look, her big, gray eyes not nearly as empty as when he’d last seen them. Fen sniffed the air again, the scent rising from the backpack setting off warning bells. “If you’d allow me to call him?”