Vulcan's Kittens (Children of Myth Book 1)

by Cedar Sanderson

  “Are safe with the Guardian. She grows apace with them, Vulcan tells me.”

  “Good. The young ones should be spared.” He sighed heavily.

  “They never are,” the big cat murmured in response to his unspoken memories of atrocities long past.

  “The Scholar will give us some answers.”

  Sekhmet snorted. If the creature could be coaxed from its mad lair. Peter would help with that. He was often the only voice the Scholar heard in that cobwebby brain of hers. She believed he was an angel. Even Peter had stopped trying to persuade her otherwise.

  Peter had come to the land above, which legends below named Fata Morgana, Atlantis, and dozens of other names, when he lay dying on a battlefield. The Scholar, known for her mad ways above and below alike, had come upon him, a broken human soldier. She had healed him and brought him here. He was by no means the only mortal here, although it had become very rare for humans to dwell in the higher plane in the last century.

  Sekhmet sighed. She only vaguely remembered her mother’s tales of the time before this plane had been created. When the creatures styled the Titans by the humans had burst through and fallen the long, long way to Earth. In the millennia since, these wars had erupted from time to time.It was like living on one of Vulcan’s mountains of fire, she thought irritably.

  The path twisted oddly, and then deposited them in the valley of twisted glass and stone that was the Scholar’s home. Sekhmet sat down and curled her tail around her paws. This place gave her the creeps. Peter patted her on the head absently, then started forward, leaning on his cane. She looked after him affectionately. Even at this time of life, in what would be his eighties, she guessed, he was a striking figure. He looked back at her, his brilliant blue eyes flashing, and raised a hand in salute.

  Once Peter was out of sight, Sekhmet rose and began to pace across the valley, her tail lashing. Vulcan felt the Scholar would hold the key to their success, she knew.Secret weapon, indeed, she snorted.

  The kittens would be ready soon to travel, and her last message from Vulcan had included that he intended to leave his charges with a babysitter when he came here to finish the organization of the effort. She snorted again. It was going to have to be someone formidable to keep track of that girl, who she read as a person of great spirit and will, and her kittens. Sekhmet’s last litter had been challenging. This was why she had waited a few centuries between kittens.

  A movement far up on the canyon wall caught her attention. With ears pricked forward, she slunk into a cluster of rocks, watching the area closely. She couldn’t quite make out the shape of the intruder, which would be because he was using magic, she guessed. She waited in stillness, even her tail quiet for once.

  She didn’t stare at one spot, merely knowing where he was going, and kept scanning for other threats. There were approaching spots in the sky, too high even for her to see what they were, but she thought she knew. Peter and the Scholar would be no match for one of Zeus’s thunderbolts.

  Calmly she slid through the rocks, keeping to cover as much as she could. No point in drawing fire until she was in the Scholar’s lair, which she was fairly sure had its own protections.

  Under the first glassy arch, she broke into a lope. “Peter!” she roared.

  Her voice echoed weirdly in there. The design of this place, with the glossy obsidian and rough sandstone, made her fur stand on end. The Scholar had died in fire once, and it had twisted her mind.

  “Peter! Scholar! Run!” she roared again.

  The two popped out of a side corridor. Sekhmet skidded to a halt, her claws throwing up sparks. She noted that absently as a cool effect. “They’re coming,” she snarled.

  The Scholar was wearing a knapsack and carried a quarterstaff with brass ferrules that was taller than she was. Peter looked like he was breathless. Sekhmet growled and stretched. She could see Peter’s eyes widen as she suddenly grew taller than a horse. Surely he’d seen enough up here not to be startled at that little trick. She crouched and looked at him expectantly. Not every mortal could be granted what she was offering.

  Peter scrambled onto her back, his lightness surprising her.The old man was... old,she thought fleetingly. Then she was running flat out, stretching with every stride for the entrance of the high path, where they would be sheltered from the deadly firebolts. The path was shielded.Peace bonded, Vulcan had once said.

  The first trio of bolts struck the Lair while they were still short of the entrance, but had been aimed for the center. The Scholar cried out as if she had been hit, but kept pace with Sekhmet, running faster than a human could have managed. Sekhmet knew the loss of her second home had to be hard, given how she’d reacted to the loss of the first one. Now wasn’t the time, though.

  They were running through the jumbles of rocks toward the path when the monster Sekhmet had watched climb down the canyon leaped out in front of them. She reached out a paw as she curved her body to the side, and felt her claws tear through the flesh of the Minotaur like paper. The Scholar on the other side spun her quarterstaff, bringing one end down on his head. He screamed and his knees buckled, then they were past.

  Sekhmet felt her paws strike the slippery tough surface of the path, and the tips of her claws, still extended from excitement, bit into it. She stumbled, almost throwing Peter, then regained her footing. The Scholar was only a step behind and the path closed around them... then darkened as a firebolt made a direct hit on the end. She didn’t even feel the overpressure.

  Sekhmet didn’t stop, but she did slow to a lope. She could feel the Scholar’s hand on her shoulder, not pulling, but keeping contact. Good. She was going to ask the path for help, and if they were all aligned it should be easier. The Minotaur was behind them, still. He was mad. The Scholar wasn’t right, but compared to the half-beast, she was delightfully eccentric. And Sekhmet might be immortal, but it still hurt to die.

  She keened, pitching her voice to the frequency of the path. Her mother had taught her this while she was a kitten, and she’d used it rarely in times of great need. Hopefully she remembered the right notes. The path resonated around them, vibrating her to her bones like a great purr. Sekhmet sang the commands.

  “Oh, I say, well done!” Peter spoke for the first time on this wild ride.

  He went on in a resonant tone. “The valkyrie’s cry checks wild flight and guides us into night.”

  “Not a valkyrie,” Sekhmet told him when she could speak again. They were in night, though. She’d sung them to the far edge of the higher plane. She huffed out a great breath and dropped to a walk. The Scholar patted her shoulder. Sekhmet followed the woman’s pointing finger and saw the glimmer of starshine on water. There was no moon here tonight, but the Milky Way stretched overhead brighter than it was in the human realm.

  “Good idea.” She stepped off the path, flexing her pads against the cool grass. Her feet started to hurt again. Funny how she never felt them when it was time to run. Peter slipped off her back and walked with her to the stream. The cool water tasted good. She lapped, and they lifted double handfuls to their mouths, all three of them keeping watches in different directions while they drank.

  No movement broke the stillness of the night. Sekhmet opened her mouth and scented the air. There was a den of foxes upstream, birds in the trees, but no other warm bodies anywhere near. She sneezed and licked her nose. The dust from the Scholar’s Lair still clung to it. She sneezed again, getting the last of it out.

  “All quiet,” she reported. “I think we should rest, and in the morning I’ll take the Scholar to Vulcan. If she stays on this plane, she will be in danger.”

  She lay down, keeping her head up and alert. She could do without sleep. Peter needed it, and the Scholar might be an immortal, but Sekhmet always thought of her as a little old lady. The two leaned against her side and she could feel them relax as she began to purr.

  In the morning, she would have to find a sanctuary for Peter. Returning to Earth would kill him, she suspected. The Schol
ar was going to have to come to Earth for the first time since her fiery death. That was going to be a scene.

  Her ears flickered at a whisper of noise overhead, but even her great eyes couldn’t pick out where the sound had come from. The stars gleamed down, undimmed by the time passed since they had sent out their light. Sekhmet kept watch.

  Chapter 7

  Linn crouched in the noisy woods waiting for a rabbit to come hopping down the path.Whoever said woods were quiet,she thought crossly,must have been deaf. There were crows, over there, talking to each other in caws. A bold chickadee had been hopping from branch to branch over her head, scolding her anxiously, and a squirrel was chittering loudly across the trail. She knew if she stayed still long enough they would lose interest, but in the meantime, dinner was no closer.

  Her patience was rewarded by a flicker of movement she caught in the corner of her eye. A rabbit was on the edge of the glade eating grass. It looked up every so often, his big ears swiveling. Linn steadied the rifle on the branch and breathed slowly. As it looked back down at the grass, she took her shot, squeezing gently. The rabbit leaped into the air and screamed, but when it hit the ground it sprawled in a boneless heap. She waited awhile anyway.

  When she was quite sure the rabbit was dead and wouldn’t jump up and run away, she walked across the glade and picked it up. She’d made a clean head shot. It had been dead before it hit the ground.

  “Sorry, little guy,” she murmured. Silly to talk to a dead animal, but it seemed right. “I need to learn. Thanks.”

  She put it into the plastic-lined game-bag Grampa Heff had given her so she wouldn’t soil her daypack, and moved on to another likely spot. She only needed two for dinner. The quiet time in the woods was giving her time to think, too.

  If Grampa and the other immortals were real, and they weren’t magic, which is what Grampa had mentioned, what were they? Where did they come from? She’s been reading origin myths of the gods. Many of them had the same theme, that of one generation of gods destroying another, and many referenced falling from one plane to another, trapping the gods here on Earth.

  She also saw in the Orpheic tales of the Titans the origins of the clash that was affecting her. The gypsum gods, the Olympians who had seized power, now wanted to claim the whole Earth. They saw the other families of gods, who had been revered by the Norse, the American Indians, and other peoples, as weak and inferior. This, combined with the rise of humanity and technology, threatened them.

  Linn hunkered down on the little ravine overlooking the stream. Rabbits didn’t look up much, she’d noticed. They should. Hawks and eagles could take them. She glanced up, reflexively. Branches and leaves kept the sky from even being visible here.

  It wasn’t long before two rabbits appeared at the stream edge. When she shot one, the other took off like a streak of lightning. Linn stepped gingerly on rocks across the little stream, trying to keep her feet dry. Even in full summer, the mountain streams of Idaho weren’t exactly balmy. She’d been in this one once before and it was icy all year round.

  With two rabbits in the bag, she headed home, gathering a handful of sorrel at the edge of the trail as she walked. Chicken-fried rabbit, salad, and potatoes, she decided. Simple, but it’d be good. She was hungry already. Actually, she was hungry all the time. She knew it was because she was a teenager, but it didn’t make her tummy rumble less. She pulled a bag of gorp out of her pack and munched.

  The wild strawberries were gone, but she knew where a patch of cloudberries were, and she knew how fond Grampa Heff was of them. She picked them every summer with her Grandma for him. Linn sighed over the fragrant, tender golden clusters. She missed her grandmother’s belly laugh, and the stories she told as they picked together. It wasn’t as fun without a companion.

  The she wondered who was coming to be babysitter. Would it be her grandmother? Who was her grandmother? Linn rocked back on her heels and looked up at the looming mountains. Her grandmother was a goddess, but Vulcan hadn’t said which one. She wasn’t an Olympian, Linn was fairly sure. Her Gramma was too down-to-Earth. Linn chuckled at her inadvertent pun.

  Time to go home and make dinner. Answers would come with time and patience in her experience. It had been years... five, at least, since she’d learned that staying quiet and out of sight meant she could hear adult conversations and learn all sorts of things. The babysitter should be here tomorrow.

  She was walking down the worn path from woods to house through the meadow, feeling relaxed and planning dinner in her head, when the flames caught her attention. She was running through the grass toward them before she even thought why the smithy would be burning. The barn wasn’t alight, she saw quickly. Huge orangy-red flames leaped and flickered up from the shop where Grampa Heff was working.

  Linn didn’t remember screaming, although later Heff told her she had. Which is what had brought him bursting out the doors toward her, through the flames and bringing them with him. Linn kept running toward him, seeing the fire on him, above him, all around the smithy... no smoke billowed up. She caught at his arms, shaking and not feeling any heat although she could see the flames. Her vision sparkled at the edges and she felt her knees give way before everything grayed out like a tunnel receding.

  **************************************

  Heff carried his limp granddaughter into the house cradled in his arms. He didn’t know what she had seen, but he’d seen the terror in her eyes as she’d collapsed at his feet. He laid her down on the couch, then raised her legs to lay on the arm of the couch, elevated over her heart. She opened her eyes but he knew she wasn’t quite back yet.

  “Shhh...” When she started to struggle, he leaned over her and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “Lie still. It’s OK.”

  Her eyes closed, then flew open a minute later. “You’re on fire!” she blurted.

  He knew what was going on, now. “It’s OK. Feel.” He took one of her hands and placed it on his bare forearm. She flinched, then grabbed tightly. “No heat, no fire. I’m all right.”

  She gasped and shuddered. “Thought you were burning,” she managed finally.

  Heff gathered her in his arms, forgetting that he was sweaty and covered in soot. “It is all right, child.” She clung to his neck, eyes tightly shut. “You have the Sight. This is my blood coming to the fore in you. It’s a common enough gift.”

  “Gift?” she choked. “I was so scared!”

  “It will be a gift, once you’re used to it and trained to use it.”

  He felt her shaking ease. She still had her eyes closed. “What... what was I seeing?”

  “Not the future, child. You are seeing my power.”

  She slowly opened her eyes, looking up at him. Her face relaxed. “I’m not seeing it now.”

  He nodded. “It will come and go at the beginning. You’ll learn to use it, in time.”

  “So your... power... looks like fire.”

  “Yes. I’m the Smith, and God of Volcanoes, for a reason.”

  She sighed and buried her face in his shoulder for a minute. Then she sneezed. “A stinky one, too.”

  He laughed and let her sit up. “Why don’t I go clean up while you prep for dinner? Feel like you can stand up now?”

  He offered her an arm, but she was back to normal. As she stood up, she realized she was still wearing the pack. “Oh, no! The berries!”

  Heff laughed again as he went out the door while she laid things on the table, checking for damage. It had been a long time since life had felt this good. With the development of her power, the child’s defenses were that much stronger. And she made him laugh. He was going to miss her when he left tomorrow.

  He stripped to the waist and washed in the cold water from the pump. Then he went into the forge and shut it down. Most of the power he pulled from the earth himself, but the fire was still essential to the metal work. He would come out here tonight and finish while she slept. Right now, he felt the need to be near her, and he still needed to teach her how to gut
the rabbits.

  Linn looked up as her grandfather walked back in the cabin, pulling a t-shirt over his head. She raised an eyebrow at the worn Metallica design and muttered. “Figures.”

  “You need your knife, your kills, and to come out to the pump.”

  “Yes, sir.” She grabbed the limp rabbits and followed him. She’d not taken the belt knife off. She all but slept with it on, up here at Grampa’s cabin.

  “Normally, you will want to butcher immediately. You don’t want to leave the carcass intact, it will spoil the meat.”

  She nodded.

  He picked up one by the hind legs. “Cut the skin here and here.” He sliced neatly around the rear hocks, and then from the inner leg all the way between them. “You’ll be able to pull the skin down, like taking off a glove.” He pulled the skin down the legs, then took hold and with one smooth motion inverted the skin completely.

  It looks like a white tube sock coming off, Linn thought.

  “Cut the front feet off. Shears work well for this, too.” He showed her, laying the carcass down in a stump and chopping them off quickly. Then he decapitated it. The hide went onto the woodpile, the feet and head into a nearby bucket.

  “Your turn.”

  Linn quickly realized that it wasn’t as easy as he made it look. Her hide had a couple little holes in it when she finally had it off. Rabbit skin was so thin. He showed her how to cut around the anus and slit carefully from tail to breastbone to remove the guts intact. Those went into the bucket as well, although he kept the thumb-sized hearts aside on the plate for the meat. She was slower than he, but managed not to puncture the gut and contaminate the meat. They washed the rabbits in the cold water and he took the hides and bucket of guts while she went inside with the carcasses to get dinner cooking.

  By the time he came back indoors, she had the fat heated, the rabbits quartered and dredged in a flour mixture, and was cutting potatoes into French fries. She’d fry them along with the rabbit pieces. The salad was on the table already.