The Banished Gods Box Set: Books 1-3

by L. A. McGinnis

  Leaning in close, he whispered, “Fine. But enjoy it while it lasts, wolf.” Fen’s feet remained rooted to the spot because he understood the underlying meaning in Mir’s words all too well. Get her home and get your ass back here. And never, ever lay your lupine eyes on this girl again.

  The gods, Fenrir thought, had gotten it all wrong. They’d made him monstrous. They’d made him powerful. They’d made a mistake.

  All he wanted was to break out of this mold they’d poured him into. The mold he’d never fit into, no matter how hard he tried. These days, it seemed, everyone was still dead set on controlling him. Funny thing was, over the years, he’d learned to control himself, as well as any of his brethren. The difference was they couldn’t level a building when they lost it, but still he had changed.

  “Fucking right I’ve changed,” Fen muttered to himself, following Celine down the sidewalk.

  Thing was, he’d spent the last millennium taking his own time about it. Changing. It was a slow, gradual process. Irrevocable, in many ways. But now he had a reason to be different. And he had the feeling he didn’t have the luxury of changing slowly. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and followed her down the sidewalk, wondering how she hauled that heavy as hell backpack around every day. He slid his fingers under the strap and lifted it from her arm. “Here, let me carry this for you.” He hefted it over his shoulder. “How do you lug this heavy thing around campus all day?”

  “Wish I knew.” She threw him a quick smile. “So do you have time to hang out with me when we get back to the apartment?” That innocent, hopeful note in her voice threaded its way through his heartstrings.

  “I can’t.” He tried to paste a smile on his face and failed. “I wish I could but I can’t.”

  Ever.

  “It’s okay. You’re just the first…” She went on, her voice sounding brittle this time. “Never mind, I’ve got work to do anyway. Lots of catching up.” As she picked up the pace, Fenrir wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to tell her about the Otherworld, give her back her memory, and take everything back that he’d done.

  Then find whoever hurt her and make them pay. But there would be none of that.

  Because he was a dog and dogs do what they’re told.

  “Told what?” Confused, Fen looked down to find Celine staring up at him, her brow furrowed and her hand wrapped tightly around his wrist. “What are you talking about Fen? And you can’t just stop in the middle of the sidewalk, c’mon, you’re huge and blocking traffic.” She tugged at his sleeve and dragged him along until they stood with their backs flat against the front of a building. “What’s up with you? You can’t stalk along all pissed off, muttering stuff under your breath. If you don’t want to walk me back, just say so. Don’t get made because you got saddled taking me home or something.”

  He looked down at her incredulously. Saddled with her? Her gaze cut through him like steel. “I’m not…gods, Celine. I do not feel encumbered by you. It is just that…” He licked his lips, saw her pale eyes follow the movement and instantly felt a jolt go through him. Changing by degrees was easy, he realized, it took no conscious effort. It was the big changes that caused pain. He stopped himself from glancing back at where Mir still stood, watching them. “I want to go back to your apartment with you. There are things I want to explain to you. But once I do, you’re going to have questions. Too many questions.”

  She smiled, the smile he wished for when he first saw her. So bright, it was made of moonbeams and starlight. “Now that’s more like it, Fen. And you’re right. I’ve got loads of questions for you. And you’d better have a shit ton of answers for me.”

  His heart sank. Oh yeah, I have answers for you. Not the ones you want, but sadly, the ones you need to hear.

  And when she grabbed his hand and pulled him into the middle of the crowd, he swore he felt the heat of Mir’s anger following them all the way back.

  He watched her rattle around the apartment. She finally threw her hands up in frustration. “I don’t know where a single thing is. You’d think I’d at least remember where I put my own stuff, right?” Looking around, all he thought of was OMG how OCD. Before, in the dark, he hadn’t noticed. But everything, and he meant everything had its place. Not a single paper, book, or object out of place. Like her world was Fen Shu’ed within a millimeter of its life. He’d never been in a space that was so…precise.

  “It’s all very…neat.”

  “Yeah, you think so?” Celine shifted one of the papers over an inch before moving it back. “It’s weird, this isn’t how I am. I mean, it’s not how I think I am. You know, you imagine yourself a certain way, right? And then you see yourself in a mirror and what’s staring back at you is a complete stranger. It’s like this room belonged to somebody else, and I’m just here visiting and I don’t want to mess anything up.”

  She peered around, breathing harder and harder, two bright red spots growing on her cheeks as her breath came faster and faster. “I don’t remember any of this. I don’t know what this is.”

  When her tear-filled eyes met his, there was a wildness in them that he understood all too well. As he understood the hateful, bitter words slithering out of her.

  “What I really want to do is completely destroy it and not even care who gets hurt in the process. I want to tear it apart, rip it to shreds. This place isn’t me, Fen, none of it. I’m different than this, I’m not neat and tidy and…and lined up in little rows. This is not natural.”

  He caught her against him before she completely broke apart. He knew it the second before she did, felt the crack inside her, felt the fissure give way and everything spill out. Everything she’d been holding in, ever since she woke up alone, surrounded by strangers with no answers. “It’s okay Celine, you can cry. Go ahead, just cry. I’ve got you.”

  He’d never held a woman before. Certainly never had one break into pieces in his arms. She cried silently, in big, heaving sobs, and he knew that whatever was trying to escape was so bad, so dark, that when he’d found her in his dream, huddled by the side of that river, maybe forgetting was a blessing. Maybe they had done her a favor by not telling her what had happened that night the police found her.

  Hands curled into his shirt, clinging, while his body curved around hers, he drew her to him and she came, warm and soft. Everything he’d ever dreamed of. He held her for so long that when she finally straightened and pushed away, he felt like a piece of himself had been lost.

  Celine wiped her face with both hands then looked at him, gratitude shining in her eyes. “God. I don’t know where that even came from. I’m not a crier.” She sniffled. “At least, I don’t feel like I’m a crier. I do know I’m not like this, Fen.” She indicated the OCD perfection of the apartment. “It’s only—I don’t understand any of this. I just don’t understand. How could this have happened? One minute I’m living like this…. And the next someone’s trying to kill me? I mean, how does that even happen?”

  “Shitty luck, Celine.” He practically fell backwards onto the couch because he felt like he was filling up the whole room, and she was so small, and he hadn’t slept, he realized, in almost a week. “Just shitty luck is all.”

  She sat right next to him, but this time she had a small, sad smile on her face. “Shitty luck? Is that seriously your idea of a pep talk? I expected far better from you, Fen.” She kicked his leg gently.

  Fen studied her. Really, really studied her. Fragile. Vulnerable. She was so damn young, not more than twenty-two in human years. Even though her eyes painted her as someone far older. “Hold still, Celine.” The bandage was half falling off after all that crying, her face flushed and red. Needing to see how bad the wound was, Fenrir cradled her chin and peeled the bandage off slowly, fighting to keep his face perfectly smooth when he saw the dark bruising and the shrapnel marks on her temple. It would have been fatal, had the bullet had penetrated. Still bleeding in places, though. She’d been lucky, more than lucky. “How badly does this hurt?” he asked, hi
s touch gentle.

  “Not that bad any more. It’s been what, three…no, four days now? So not so bad. Just a little…ow, oh, yeah, ow. Okay, that’s tender.” She winced when his thumb grazed the green-purple bruise spreading across her forehead. Fen let his hands drop away. She needed sleep. She didn’t need him mucking up her life.

  “I should come back later. We should do this later.”

  His willingness to throw caution to the wind and burn bridges that had been standing for a thousand years didn’t mean he should drag this slip of a girl along for the inevitable crash. But the finger drilling into in his chest when he tried to stand up, put him back down in his place.

  “Oh no, you promised me answers, and I’m going to get them, mister. You don’t get to walk in here and waltz back out and give me nothing. I’ve thought about that dream, Fen. Every second since I woke up in the hospital. The memory of it has been driving me crazy. I might have forgotten what came before, but I remember everything about the dream. Most of all, I remember you. So you tell me, how can you be in my dreams and real at the same time?”

  This was the cusp, Fenrir realized, the edge he was willing to go over.

  It was also the line nobody crossed.

  The line of demarcation between his world and the human world. The one no human was ever dragged over. Which, he supposed, he’d already done when he’d carried her across the river in the Otherworld and broken about a hundred different rules. What was one more in the big scheme of things?

  Her face was still wet from tears, and he couldn’t help himself from reaching out and rubbing a thumb across her cheek, drowning in those depthless eyes the entire time. Trying to buy both of them a few more moments before the inevitable, he asked with the preternatural stillness of his beast, “I will. But first, why don’t you tell me what you remember about your dream, Celine? Tell me everything.”

  And once you do, he thought, everything will change. For both of us.

  Chapter 9

  “The first thing I remember was the sound of water. Like a really big river. And gawd, the smell. It smelled rotten, like it was really dirty or polluted. The air was cold and kind of foggy, but I remember the water most because that’s the only thing I could hear, and I couldn’t see anything else so…” She rubbed the wound on her head then pulled her hand away quickly as if she’d forgotten. “And I thought I was drowning because the water was all around me, but I was hanging on to something real tight, my hands were wrapped in black...fur, I think. I looked up and I saw him.” She shook her head. “No, I saw you. You, Fen.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I didn’t recognize you for a moment, when you set me down on the bank. But that isn’t exactly right.” More tears spilled down over her cheeks and she made no move to wipe them away. “Maybe it was I didn’t recognize myself.

  “I felt like all the things that made me up—the memories, the emotions, experiences, were slipping out of my grasp. In their place was an emptiness I’d never experienced before, as if I was turning into a husk that had once been full. But was being carved out. I could almost taste their essence but they eluded me, like butterfly wings. I couldn’t hold on to it. Whatever made me, me.”

  Her eyes softened. “But you were there, Fen. I might not have known your name, but you never left me. I didn’t know much of anything else, but you?” Her voice was firm, resolute. “You, I remember. It didn’t matter what you looked like or what face you wear now. I knew exactly who you were.

  “So then I was trying to figure out how I got there because I couldn’t remember where I’d come from. I was all muddy, and I kept trying to get the mud off me, but it just kept smearing all over and the more I tried to get it off the worse it got and…” She’d jumped to her feet, so Fen put his hand over hers and tugged her back down beside him. She was trembling, nervously rubbing her arms. “Sorry. So. One moment you were there with me, and the next? You were gone, and I was alone. Like poof, into thin air. I looked for you, after you disappeared. I searched up and down the bank of the river, but I never found you.”

  Fen wished he had better answers for her, but in the realms, time was often unpredictable.

  “Until you appeared in my bedroom. Two days later. How is that possible, Fen?”

  Those eyes, those damn eyes of hers were too big, too demanding.

  “I know you have the answers. I want in, Fen. I want you to tell me everything. I know something’s going on here, something inexplicable. I feel it.” Her fingers wound themselves into his jacket, just as they’d wound themselves into his fur. Firm. Inextricable. “Tell me your secret, Fen.”

  “I shouldn’t tell you anything,” Fenrir admitted slowly, “because you’ve already been through too much.” For a split second, he considered a coward’s path, wondering if Loki could come, wipe her memories, and they could just start over.

  She released her hold on him ever so slightly. “Fine. Tell me what happened in your dream, then. You said I was in your dream? Give me that, at least.”

  “I saw you across the water. I’d gone there...”

  “There? Where were we?”

  “It’s a place we call the Otherworld.”

  “We? Who’s we? Is Mir a ‘we’?”

  His voice gentled. “The more questions you ask me, the slower this is going to be, Celine.” Her lips thinned out, but she gestured for him to continue.

  “I saw you from across the river. You were nothing but a shape in the mist. You looked like you were going to follow the water to… Well, never mind where it goes. So I yelled and yelled, but you couldn’t hear me. Then I waded across the river to your side. Do you remember any of that?” The emptiness in her eyes told him no, confirmed by the shake of her head. “When I got over there, you were covered in mud, your clothes were shredded. I picked you up and I swam with you on my back to the other side. But when I got you over there…” His voice faltered. “You’d lost your memories, Celine. The Gjoll River carries a spell of oblivion, holds a magic that allows mortal souls to enter the Otherworld without regret because they forget their physical lives. When I carried you across, it caused you to forget everything that had happened before. You see, I did this to you. This is all my fault.”

  The smile twitching at the corners of her mouth spread into a giggle, and before she knew it, Celine was laughing full out, doubled over and gasping for breath.

  “Celine, stop it.”

  “Can’t.” She waved him off. “Sorry, I just can’t. Feel like I’m on a rollercoaster and I can’t get off.” She took a deep breath and held it. Then another. Then another. “So let me get this straight. You think you caused all of this because you carried me across a river in our dream?”

  “Yes, I know I did.”

  She laid her hand on his arm. “You’re serious aren’t you? Well, you didn’t do this, Fen. Somebody else did. Some man hurt me that night and…”

  “How do you know a man hurt you? I thought you said…” She tensed slightly as his snarled words vibrated off the walls.

  “I know what I told you.” Celine let her eyes slide over his like oil, not catching at all before finally settling on a blank place on the wall just over his head. “I know what I said. I’m also aware nobody takes a girl into an alley to shoot her in the head, leaving all of her money, her laptop, and phone behind. I know where my bruises are, okay? I know what must have happened.” Her next words were strangled. “Or might have.”

  Then her voice began to shake terribly, so much so she could barely get this next part out. “I talked with the nurses and the doctor. They told me the rape kit came back negative. That’s all I cared about. But I’m not stupid, either. I know what he tried to do.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off him as she finished softly, “Maybe I just don’t want to deal with that possibility right now. Maybe I’ve got bigger things on my plate at the moment.”

  Her hand smoothed across the front of his coat. “I don’t even know who I am, Fen. That’s the mystery I
have to solve right now. I’ve got to figure out where I came from and what my life was like before I woke up in that hospital room. I don’t remember what transpired in the alley. Not for sure. Maybe I never will.”

  Celine added, firmly. “But first, I’m going to figure out who I am. Then I’ll deal with the rest.”

  “You haven’t pushed me yet on the big question, Celine. How could we possibly both have the same dream?”

  She shot him a confident, blinding smile. “You were there to save me, silly.”

  Fen shook his head, his voice regretful. “No. Not to save you. I went in there for another reason entirely and made a terrible mistake. Now, I mean to fix my error. Let me help you get your life back, Celine. Let me help you put things back together.”

  “And then what?”

  His voice was rough but honest when he answered, “I don’t know. First, I need to talk to someone back home who might know how to undo my blunder.”

  “So you’re still stuck on the fact that it was the dream that wiped my memories?” She offered him a small shrug. “What about the guy who shot me in the head, Fen? What about him?” She pointed to her still healing wound. “Don’t you think he has something to do with my memory loss?”

  “And how can you be so sure it wasn’t me?” he countered. “And how aren’t you totally freaked out by the fact that we had the exact same dream?”

  “Because we did have the same dream,” she shot right back matter-of-factly. “So far, that dream is the only thing I have in common with anyone else. It’s the only thing in my little screwed-up world I trust. Do you see where I’m going with this, Fen? Nobody came to the hospital looking for me.” She indicated the apartment around them. “I live by myself. It appears I have no friends or family. And yes, apparently some control issues. Sure, maybe I’ll go to the university on Friday and meet my professors and figure out what my life was like, but it doesn’t look like I was connected to anyone. I’ve got ten names in my phone, and I’m scared to death to call any of them. What does that say?”