The Banished Gods Box Set: Books 1-3

by L. A. McGinnis

  She never thought she would. Not like Fen. He’d never belonged. He might have carved himself out a place among those immortals.

  But no, he’d never really belonged.

  A kernel of hope unfurled within her. Maybe, they might learn to belong together.

  The crowd carried her down Michigan, across the iron bridge and onto the Mile. Thinking about everything she’d say when she got back, Celine never noticed the lamplights flickering on, or the sun falling behind the buildings, or the shadows cutting long silhouettes all the way to the lake.

  And when they grabbed Celine off the street and forced her into the sleek, black car that pulled away smoothly into traffic, no one noticed that either.

  Chapter 24

  Celine fought from the second she felt hands yanking her toward the open door of the car. She flailed and punched and kicked while the door slammed shut behind her. She bit and scratched until she felt the cold, sharp bite of a gun, and then she did exactly what she was told. She stopped.

  “Excellent reflexes.”

  The car smelled brand new, an expensive luxury brand she wasn’t familiar with but seen on TV. It was fancy, everything chrome-shiny and leather-soft. But it was also filled with four very large men, who she now sat wedged between, wishing she hadn’t left the Tower in the first place.

  “Damn.” She hunched in, pushing her hair behind her ears. “This day really and truly has gone completely to shit.”

  “Yes, if I were in your shoes, I would have said the very same thing. Unfortunately for you, it hasn’t begun to go to shit yet.” The man beside her gave a dark chuckle, and there was a certain humor to it, vicious and ugly. Her heart seized up. It was the man from the alley. The same man who still sported a series of red, angry scratches down his cheek. She was well aware of him pressed against her, as they headed west out of town, past the factories and the low, flat apartments and then in the darkness, as they reached the long, sunken hotel. It had been nice once, fifty, sixty years ago. Back when people stayed in little places like this. For the rest of the ride, Celine did what she was told. She didn’t argue, she didn’t ask. She cooperated.

  One lived longer if they cooperated. Generally speaking.

  When they pulled into the gravel parking lot, there were two more beefy looking guards outside on either side of a rusted door. And when she was pushed into a dilapidated room, outfitted with a sagging, stained bed lit by a single, bare light bulb, she froze at the sight of who was sitting in the chair awaiting her arrival.

  The man in the car had not lied. Her day was about to get much, much worse.

  “Hello, Celine,” said her father.

  There were many things that Celine had overcome. Poverty, for one. Hunger for another. She’d learned how to go for days and days without eating. How to fill her stomach with water so it didn’t ache so sharply. How to steal, first out of desperation, and then out of simple need but never without regret. She’d learned to lie and to manipulate. She’d learned to fight, to use weapons to defend herself against men bigger and stronger than herself. To survive in a world where it seemed everyone wanted to hurt her.

  And finally, how to construct a carefully organized world to keep all these dangerous memories at bay.

  But there were some things that she had never fully left behind. Things that were meant to stay locked away in the darkness. And the biggest, baddest of those was currently sitting in this room, face-to-face with her.

  “You’ve grown to be quite beautiful.” Her father stood, glancing at the man behind her. “I see Buchanan wasn’t exaggerating, when he told me what you looked like.” The quaking probably started somewhere around her knees, she decided, before moving up through her body. By the time he towered over her, circled slowly around her, fear consumed her completely.

  “Cat got your tongue, kid?”

  Fen would never find her, she realized. He’d search and search for her body but no one would ever find her. Her father had always warned her of the consequences. That someday, he’d kill her, and even her mother wouldn’t have anything to bury. He’d make her disappear completely.

  He lifted a strand of her hair while she shook violently. “Ah, you do remember, don’t you? When your mother took you away, I searched for you for a long, long time. I never found you.” He breathed in her scent, long and deep. “Until a few weeks ago. When I located you in this godforsaken city.”

  Fear clogged her veins, thick and heavy, anchoring her feet to the ground. She couldn’t have screamed if she’d wanted to. Couldn’t have run if she’d had to. It was the damn alley, all over again.

  “And then I sent Buchanan to recover the stone. He failed, but Jesus. He told me you were a beautiful little thing. And I must say, words did not do you justice.” He ran a finger down her face. She wanted to gag then, to purge herself of everything in her past, to purge herself of him. This tall man, almost gangly, with his handsome, faded looks, was the worst of her past, black and oily and evil. She thought of the week after the alley. A few scant days, free of him.

  Remembering how oddly adrift she’d felt without any of those memories, something inside of her hardened. Solidified. Strengthened.

  She might hate those memories, but she fucking needed them. Raising her eyes to meet her father’s, she understood that fact perfectly well. Whatever this was, whatever piece she’d become in whatever game was being played, if she was to survive, thank God she had those horrible memories. And her wits and her calculating mind. All valuable weapons.

  But even though she was no longer eight years old, even though she was twenty-two, even though she’d just bargained her life back from the king of the immortal gods, her knees trembled. Deep down inside, the child shook. The child cowered. And there wasn’t a damn thing Celine could do about it. Fear paralyzed her like a toxic poison.

  The man, the one who she would never, ever call father, rounded her. She knew he would smell it on her, the fear, the helplessness, and the weakness underneath fracturing her to pieces. It was what fed him. It was what made him stronger than her. It was what made him…him. Evil walked on two legs, and its name was David Alexander Barrows. She cowered, bracing for his touch because she knew he would, fingers like grating nails would scratch against her skin. And then, at the next brush of his fingers…she blanked out. Her brain went to that foggy, dusty place where it always disappeared to when thoughts of him threatened.

  “Jesus. Look at you.” He let out the hollow-sounding chuckle again. “I did quite the job with you, didn’t I?”

  She waited for the pain. She braced for whatever horrors he was going to inflict, but instead he just…sat down again, facing her. “As much as I would like to pick up where we left off, there is something more important I need from you, Celine.” He glanced over at the bed.

  Something inside her broke then. A helpless little moan escaped.

  But the door to the motel room opened and Njor stepped inside, his gaze skimming over the scene. Any remaining strength leached from her, as if a nail had just been pounded into her coffin. “It’s in her pocket,” The gray god said with a nod. “She’ll need to take the stone in with her, he wants it returned.”

  “And then what?” Her father demanded as one of the men fumbled in her pocket, drawing out the black rock.

  “And then you can do whatever you want with her. She’ll be of no more use to us.”

  Celine’s insides turned to liquid. Njor snorted in derision at the look on her face.

  “You thought you’d humiliated me in Odin’s throne room, girl? As if that mattered. All your precious gods will be dead in weeks, months at most.” He crossed his arms, never breaking his stare. “As for you mortals, present company excluded, you’ll all end up as slaves.”

  He father’s voice turned oily as he looked again toward the bed. “I am going to need you to go to sleep for me.” The man deposited the stone next to the bed. It rocked gently on the tabletop where she couldn’t take her eyes off of it.

  Celine
shook her head with the slow cadence of one slightly addled. “Sleep? You want me to sleep? Here?”

  “Yes. I want you to sleep, and then I want you to write.” He grinned as realization took hold. “That’s right Celine, I need the words the god of shadows gives you. I need you to write them down for me. And after you do…then we’ll be together.”

  “The words won’t do you any good…” She was trying to get her sluggish mind to work. It was like trying to jump-start a Model T. “You can’t possibly know what is going to…”

  “Happen? Oh yes, I know all about it. I’m here to help Njor finish this. He was right about one thing. You never should have taken this.” David Barrows picked up the stone and held it out, the rounded shape black and faintly menacing in his palm. “This little item is the reason he sent us after you. Locating you gave me the keys to the kingdom. And more money than I’ve ever had. You’re just a bonus.”

  “How…how did you find me?” Ah yes, the proverbial wheels were starting to turn. Finally.

  “I didn’t find you, they found me. Somehow Njor knew I was your father. Pulled me in weeks ago, promised me a big payday, and now, here we are.” The evil thing that had been her sperm donor smiled.

  “Why, though?” She saw a shadow of doubt cross his thin face as he stepped closer. She tried, and failed, to contain her whimper of fear as it escaped. “What would Njor need someone like you for?”

  “Oh, daughter.” He smiled back, fingers gripping her chin. “For motivation, of course.” But his face was tighter than it had been as he searched her eyes. “Why else?”

  Njor cut in impatiently. “Enough of this mortal bickering. He needs her to sleep. Give her the stone, send her inside. He is impatient. He’s been waiting far too long.”

  Njor’s voice was taut. “Hold a knife to her throat if you have to, I do not care. But do it now.” And it was fear, real fear, guttering deep in his eyes.

  In the end, they drugged her. Celine tried fighting them, but it was hard to keep her mouth closed when her nose was being pinched shut. After a couple tries, they poured enough down her throat that everything went blurry, and she felt someone press the stone tightly into her palm and fold her fingers over it. Curled up on the stained cover of the bed, wishing like hell she’d just stayed in the Tower, she slid into sleep.

  Why, oh why hadn’t…she…just…

  And like that, she woke in the mist, walking in a slow, dreamy trance toward the river. It roared louder tonight, raging and dangerous. And she thought she smelled an undercurrent of primordial rot to it that she’d never caught before, like a storm had churned something up from the bottom that should have stayed buried.

  Celine drug her feet, took her time, because once she reached the water, the words would begin. Once the words were implanted into her mind, the wild compulsion would follow, and then she’d wake into a new nightmare of how to get them out of her. At the thought of it, her hands scrubbed her scalp.

  But maybe… “Fenrir?” she called, or rather she thought because that’s how things usually worked in here. For a change, she tried speaking out loud.

  “Fen, are you in here?”

  The words took on an eerie, otherworldly tone, like they were being carried on the wind and then echoing back. She would have been gone for hours by now. Maybe they were searching for her. Or perhaps Odin said good riddance and just let her go? She meandered away from the water into the thick mist, trying to avoid the river, but always seeming to end up closer than before.

  And still no Fen.

  Resigned to her fate, she turned to the water, her stomach going sour at the overpowering stench. She thought maybe she was imagining it, the shadow looming up ahead, but as it took shape, she stopped, wrapping her arms around herself. In here, a shadow could turn into almost anything. Sometimes her fears became shapes, sometimes things that were truly frightening, and sometimes the Orobus almost took form, became something more than a voice that whispered.

  “Celine.” Fen’s voice echoed out of the mists, seconds before he burst out in his beautiful, mortal form, sending tendrils of it spinning away, and she collapsed against him, as much out of fear as out of relief. “I heard you calling me. I’ve got you, love.”

  Oh God, his words, his wonderful, wonderful words. “Please, Fen, please take me out of here. And wake me up. I’m in the worst place. You’ve got to get me—my body—out of the hotel where they have me. Before something bad happens.”

  “Where are you, Celine?” Fen was all around her, big and warm, just like she remembered, and for a second, she felt safe. Protected. But this was only her mind. Her body was lying out there on a stained bed with the stone in her hand, and pretty soon the Orobus would snatch her away and then God only knows…

  “Celine. Celine, baby.” Fen’s voice was calm. Soothing. Hypnotizing. “Tell me where they’re holding you. Tell me where you are in the real world. We’re all out looking for you. Which direction did you leave the city?”

  “West. We drove west. Out past some factories and the train depot. Somewhere close to the airport, I think. I heard jets taking off before they drugged me. An old hotel. Motel. One story. Abandoned. Yellow and…orange, I think. No lights on except one small sign out by the road. Big black car. Five men, I think, maybe six. And my father.”

  Fen shook her a little. “I didn’t hear you right, sweetheart, I thought you said your father?”

  “My father. He’s the one who set everything up. He’s working for the dark god, for Orobus, just like…” Her voice trailed off, something was behind them. Her head swiveled around, scanning the shifting air. “I had the stone with me, Fen, when they grabbed me off the street.” She opened up her hand, showing it him. “I have it with me now. And I don’t know…”

  Neither of them saw the shadow when it came out of the mist. And neither of them had a clue what hit them.

  The Orobus tore Celine away from Fen and tossed her into the water, pushing her below. Beneath the raging eddies, into the heart of the river’s raging black torrent. Choking, drowning, she fought and fought her way upward, clawing her way to the air before she finally broke through the surface. She dragged herself up on shore, scrambling sloppily on rocks and gravel until her bare toes found purchase in the mud on the shore.

  “Fen!” she screamed into the roaring, but it sounded pitiful. Even she couldn’t hear herself, which meant Fen couldn’t. “Fen.” What if the shadow had killed him? What happened if he died in here? Was it like in the movies? Would his body die back on earth?

  “Oh God, Fen.” She spun. “Where are you?” Her feet slipped in the mud, but only the mists parted, shifting away from a looming dark shadow.

  When the Orobus came, he was seriously pissed off. Instead of its usual intangible sort of I whisper-take notes kind of relationship they’d developed over the past months, he came at her like the water. Raging. Uncontrolled. And rough. Celine braced herself, but when the creature’s onslaught buffeted her, it hurt. The thing battered at her, as if it were trying to break her apart, a toy he no longer had any use for. Crouching down into a ball, Celine curled into herself, gripping the stone desperately, while his anger pummeled her body.

  After minutes, hours, so long her bones began to whine, the assault lessened. She lifted her head to see if perhaps he had gone away, but it was still there. A hovering shadow. Even humanlike, to some extent.

  A head atop a body. Of some kind. Strange appendages moved and flowed with each eddy of the mists, merging and absorbing into the central mass before animatingly shooting out as the thing’s rage flared out at her. As if it were learning from its surroundings. This close, Celine absorbed the basic, unchecked emotions emanating from it.

  Fear…hatred…anger…rage at being stymied.

  So the being was sentient, to some extent. But how sentient?

  Curling her hand tightly around the warm oval, Celine gritted her teeth in preparation for another assault. Then quickly flashed an image of the stone into her mind.

/>   The air quickened around her, sending the mists blowing back. And the entity drew close enough to touch her, wrap her in a shroud of inky black. Teetering, Celine rose, hand still clenched tightly around her prize. It was hers. And it was going to remain hers until the thing pried it from her cold, dead hand.

  As if sensing her defiance, the shadow stopped its questing movements. Began to coalesce. And as it took form, its consciousness began worming itself into her mind, learning from her, stealing from her. And when the dark god they called Orobus finally chose a body and took shape in front of her, when David Barrows looked down on her, here, in the only place she’d completely locked him out of, Celine Barrows screamed until she couldn’t scream any more.

  She woke up hours later, foggy and dazed, half sick, mouth dry from the meds they’d force-fed her, curled on the awful comforter. Before she lifted her head, she slid her hand beneath the pillow, and deposited the stone. “Pen,” she croaked. “Paper. Damn it.” She spent the next few hours hunched over in a chair, pad of paper balanced on her knees. Her hand shaking, she scribed the marks down, one after another.

  Light and dark bound themselves together, as the ink flowed onto the paper, her heartbeats pacing the even scribing of her pen, as if both were a countdown to the very end of time. Distantly Celine knew there were others in the room, but her only reality, until everything was out of her head, was this. Covering the pristine white space with blackness as dark as night. Finally, when the last word left her mind completely empty, she threw the pad aside and stumbled to the filthy toilet and threw up.

  The real David Barrows watched dispassionately, the overhead light picking up the silver in his hair. “You did good, kid. The Swede said a couple more days, and we’re home free.” His flat, brown eyes trailed along her body like knives as he pointed her back to the bed.