“Bring down the Gorgon!”
The would-be heroes charged across the dusty desert floor. They brandished every conceivable type of weapon, from guns to knives to shovels. They ran at the Gorgon but were intercepted before they got there by demons, jackals, and the mortals who Samantha had enlisted. None of the heroes’ weapons were military grade, though several carried rifles and shotguns.
Jumis appeared at my side, a large welt above his eye.
“Are you injured?” I asked, alarm rushing through me. Had Jods taken his immortality?
“I will heal,” Jumis said, sounding disgruntled. “I could not prevent Jods from taking the souls. Not when he has a claim on them.” He sighed, his eyes on the humans fighting the Gorgon. “The mortals always start out with the guns before realizing they are the least useful of all weapons.”
He was right. Those who stopped to reload were killed where they stood, the jackals stabbing them through the chest or the demons jumping on them and biting them through their skin. The Gorgon bellowed, his evil stench knocking a few more down.
“They’re all going to die!” I cried. “We have to do something!”
Jumis grabbed my arm before I plunged onward. “This is the point to the trials. They must prove themselves. They will learn, and those who survive will be more prepared for the battles that come.”
The guns had been abandoned. Now all of them fought in hand-to-hand combat, occasionally using a rifle as a shield against a jackal man.
Three mortals got past the vadatajs and ran at the Gorgon, shielding their faces and brandishing swords. They attacked the cow, who bellowed as they stabbed it. Two of them collapsed, but another five leapt forward, and between the six of them, they brought the beast down.
“Now we fight,” Jumis said, and he vanished from my side.
Velu Mate’s laughter rang out across the valley floor, and with a push of her hands, a wall of dirt flew up in front of me, as liquid as a wave from the ocean, arcing over our heads. I turned around, searching out Meredith. I spotted her wearing a gas mask around her neck like a lei.
“Do something with the wind!” I cried.
She stretched forth her hand and shouted, “Run below and earth go!”
The gust of wind whipped my hair forward and blew against my body hard enough that I stumbled. The wind collided with the wall of dirt and pushed it back the other way.
“Earth go?” I quoted, my lips twitching.
“You’re lucky I can rhyme at all under pressure!”
“It’s not over!” Laima cried, re-directing our attention.
I swiveled to see the dirt at our feet rippling forward as if propelled by an underground monster. It rolled underneath the vehicles, flipping several and catapulting others. I cried out, remembering the women I’d sent to safety in the cars.
“What do I do?” Meredith said.
“Let the humans retreat,” Laima said. She pointed her fingers, and a pathway opened up into the solid rock of the mesa. “Take the former goddesses and the deserters from Samantha’s army. They can’t help anymore. Jayne and Beth, go with them. Samantha made try to intercept them and force them to fight for her again.”
“Well, she should tell Jods to stop killing them off!” I said, already taking off for the vehicles to retrieve the women.
Several of the cars had tipped over, but I found it wasn’t beyond my capabilities to push them right side up again. I didn’t smell death, which relieved me.
“What’s happening?” Amy asked when I helped her out.
“Beth and I are taking you guys to safety. Samantha might try to make you fight with her.” I ground my teeth together. “She doesn’t seem to mind using mortals for battle and then letting Jods kill them off on a whim.”
“Take Ragana as well,” Laima said when I returned. “She’s in danger here. Auseklis will follow you, and without protection, Jods could try to take her.”
“What are you doing?” Jumis ran to my side, breathless. “You cannot be thinking of retreat. We have enough humans fighting for us to gain leverage. They even defeated the Gorgon! We can decimate the jackals, turn Samantha’s army against her! We need your former goddesses to join the battle with you!”
“They don’t wish to die this way,” Laima said.
“Help them choose this fate! For power and glory!”
Laima’s eyes slid my direction, and I knew she wanted me to intervene. This was my husband. This was the man Dekla loved.
I turned to Beth. “Take the mortals on the path.” My eyes met Trey’s. “Protect them.”
“I will.”
Jumis made a move as if to intercept my sister, but I stepped in front of him, staring him down.
“Let them go.”
“We can win this fight. We are strong. Force them to stay. One of them could be the hero we need.”
“We will not use their lives the way Samantha has.”
“You cannot always be a crusader for the underdogs!” Jumis snapped, losing his temper. “They are mortals! Death is inevitable for them. If they die, they can be replaced. We cannot!”
Well, I was living proof that wasn’t true. Here I was, replacing the original Dekla. “Their lives are just as important as ours.”
A dark shadow entered his eyes. “I can command you not to retreat. To not escort the mortals from this battle.”
I glowered. “You can command me. But if you do, I will hate you. Nothing you say or do will change that. And my sister will still save them.”
I wasn’t bluffing, and he knew it. He could not command me to love him. If he wanted to win my heart, he would have to find a better way.
He took a step back. “Perkons will not be happy about this.”
“Perkons will agree with me.” I didn’t know if he would. He and Velns had been fighting this war for so long that it was possible he would see this retreat as negligent. It was also possible he would not.
“There will be plenty of time to debate the issue.” I turned to see how the evacuation was going. Velu Mate wasn’t interested in us anymore; she attacked the would-be heroes and sprites near Perkons, leaving us to clear the helpless mortals out.
“We could end this now, Jayne. With the help of the goddesses of fate, we can make every death count as a victory. We can’t do that without you.” Jumis’ voice was furious, anger seeping into every word.
It didn’t pass beneath my notice that he referred to me by my human name, but it wasn’t in affection. It reminded me of when I got in trouble as a child and my mother called me by my full name.
He tried again to grab my arm, but I jerked away.
“Don’t you want this war to end?” he said. “Are the lives of the mortals more important than ours? Than your immortal family? Our entire existence is at stake!”
I turned away, not bothering to respond.
“Dekla!” he howled after me.
I saw the sheen of sweat on the faces of the humans we led away, how some of them wheezed, struggling to get a good breath. I urged them onward, ordered Meredith to create a breeze and force the bad air the opposite direction.
Jumis’ injured feelings didn’t matter to me. All that mattered was that I save the lives of these people who gave up their powers for me. They were not destined to die on our battlefield today.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Meredith, come,” I said.
She made one last mighty gale of wind before turning and scrambling into the open pathway behind the mortals.
Jods let out a roar that echoed across the valley floor, ricocheting off the rock walls of the mesa. He crouched on the ground and lifted both fists, then pummeled them into the earth. I braced myself for another torrent of earth to rise like a waterfall and shower down on us, but the rumbling this time sounded deep beneath my feet. It grew like a roll of thunder, magnifying as it traveled outward.
The ground trembled. I shoved a hand out to catch myself before I pitched forward, but Jumis was already prepared, wrapping an a
rm around my shoulders and holding me close.
Laima put her hands against the rock wall, staring at her splayed fingers, then she lifted her head and sniffed the air.
“Death,” she said. “I smell death.”
My first morbid thought was, what does death smell like to her? To me it smelled like lemons, and to my sister like cinnamon rolls. But in the next moment, the thought faded as I wondered what it must mean if she smelled death. “Who? Who is going to die?”
“Thousands. Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Too much death.” She met my eyes. “The mortals here must fend for themselves. Others need us. We must fly.”
She didn’t mean to hurry. She meant to literally fly. Laima reached one hand above her head, and when she lifted the other hand to it so they met with a resounding clap, she transformed into a swan.
“Beth!” I called, spinning around and looking for her.
She had already disappeared into the tunnel.
“Go with Laima,” Jumis said. “I will find her.”
I met his eyes. Our power struggle had ended, and I saw only his desire to help. I nodded and focused on the task of transforming.
I had tried this earlier and failed, but I wouldn’t fail now. Now I had hundreds of pieces of Dekla’s soul instead of only one. I lifted my hands above my head in an exact imitation of Laima’s gesture. In the instant my hands clasped together, I felt the change. It was like my feet sucked up into my torso and my arms fluttered into wings. My gown vanished entirely. But unlike Laima, I wasn’t a large and beautiful swan. I was a little bird with orange-tipped wings, and I was immensely proud and comfortable with who I was.
Laima lifted from the ground and flew into the air, and I followed, reveling in the speed of our travels, feeling the wind beneath my wings. No bird could move as fast as we did, and I suspected we had created a magical pathway between locations, though it was very difficult to tell when traveling through an open sky. Thank goodness Laima was leading the way, because I had no idea where we were going.
The ground beneath us had disappeared as if we traveled in a void of blue. And then in an instant, it reappeared. Golden sand glittered under our feet, and a vast ocean, sparkling blue and green, stretched as far as I could see. I dipped my wings to descend, and as my feet touched the sand, they took human form.
I smelled it now. The lemon scent, so powerful it burned my nose. Death, as Laima had said. Death everywhere.
We were not alone. Fisherman in cut-off pants and straw hats combed the long seashore, dragging massive nets behind them. They spared us no glance as they passed. They couldn’t see us.
Jods’ rumble shook the earth’s core beneath my feet.
“We have only moments to spare,” Laima said. “Save as many as you can.”
Beth hadn’t arrived, but I couldn’t worry about her. There was no question about what I needed to do. I changed myself back into a bird and flew from child to teen, worrying about the precious seconds I lost in transit. Laima would have to care for the adults. With each person, I summoned a vision of their life, horrified to see it cut short by Jods’ temper tantrum. I opened a new door, created new options. “You are not destined to die,” I told each one.
Somewhere inside their souls, they heard me. They didn’t see me, but a few of the children felt the sudden urge to go home and get something, to visit a friend, to use the bathroom half a mile up the road instead of the one by the shore. Some of the teenagers lifted their heads from their work, sensing the telltale trembling beneath their toes, the brief warning of something amiss, and they listened to it. I nearly wept with joy as they abandoned their morning catch, shouting warnings to each other and spreading the news down the shoreline to those we hadn’t reached.
Not all of them heeded my urgings. I hesitated, considering summoning a second vision. We had only minutes before a great tsunami broke against the shoreline. I could still find another option for them. Maybe they would see a floating board and grasp it, or cling to a tree.
“Dekla!” Laima called, motioning for me to follow her down the beach. There were others, hundreds of yards away from us, ignorant to the angry trembling beneath the earth.
But it was too late. The water had already sucked back from the shore, the giant warning becoming a raging cry as everyone read the sign.
Now they ran, all of them, even those who we had warned and hadn’t listened. But they did not get far. The furious waves sucked them into their depths, spinning them around and spitting them back out, plucking trees up by the root, tumbling over stone walls and demolishing them.
The defeat was thick in my mouth as Laima and I returned to bird form and lifted into the air. How many had we saved? A hundred? Five hundred? Out of what, three thousand?
“We are not done,” she said, dragging me out of my mourning and pulling me along with her. “We can still save others.”
Where could we possibly be going? The wave had done its damage here. It already rolled back out to sea with a myriad of twisted bodies and boats and branches floating within.
But a moment later the sand scape beneath us changed into a city scape, with high rise buildings dotting the horizon. We were minutes away from the earthquake hitting these skyscrapers. I had no idea what country we were in, but judging from the characters on the buildings and billboards, we were in Asia.
“Get to as many people as you can,” Laima instructed. “Take that building first.” Her elegant swan-wing jutted out, indicating a clothes line that draped from one six-story building to another directly in front of me.
As I started forward, she shouted, “Dekla! Jayne!”
I turned around.
“Don’t go higher than the second floor.”
My first inclination had been to go to the top story and give those people more time to get out. “Why not?”
“We cannot save them. It’s too late. There is only time for those on the bottom floors.”
My heart sank as I realized she was right. Logic. Who could we get to the quickest? We were not all-powerful.
I fluttered my way inside, quickly returning to human form. I summoned vision after vision, meeting the eyes of every adolescent and child I found. I helped them find the option that would lead to life, either through hiding or evacuating. I moved from one building to the next, from person to person, hallway to hallway. I followed the scent of death. The lemon scent called me onward, showing me who to save.
Then the quake hit, and I escaped through an open window, taking to the sky. I craned my head behind me and watched buildings crumble to the earth, dust rising from the streets. I couldn’t begin to imagine the death toll. All of them were mortals who should not have died, who I might have been able to save with more time. Where was Beth? She could’ve helped us.
“One more place, Dekla,” Laima said, her wingtips stroking my feathers. “It’s you who I need for this next one.”
I didn’t get the chance to question her before she took off, and I followed.
When we stopped again, we appeared to be on a tropical mountainside. The lemon scent smacked me in the face long before I saw any people, and my stomach turned over.
Laima didn’t have to guide me. I was pulled along the citrus trail as if by an invisible string hooked to my heart. I flew faster, leaving her behind when I saw the impoverished village in front of us, a thousand one-room huts clinging to the inclining hillside.
A three-story square building loomed in front of me, made of red brick and clay and reeking of overripe, rotting fruit.
A school. Even from here I could smell the hundreds of children inside. I was tempted to pick them up and carry them out, but I knew that would not be fast enough. I needed to rely on my powers to freeze time from moment to moment so I could save as many as possible.
In the first vision, I saw how the impending earthquake would cause half of the mountain to crumble and bury this little village, including the entire school. I could not force the child to run out the door instead of hide under a desk, but
another option for him was to climb the tallest tree outside. And the child closest to the door, I put the idea in his head to run east as fast as he could. Laima worked on the teachers and then left me, presumably for the people in the village.
I did not stay to watch when the earthquake hit. I couldn’t watch the destruction. I had to believe that most of them survived. I turned my back on the school. I had done the best I could. The final choice was theirs.
Laima, still in human form, slipped her hand into mine. “Come,” she said. “We are not done.”
*~*
I tiptoed silently through the door of the cabin I shared with Jumis. I hadn’t known this new body could be tired, though perhaps it was more the emotional trauma that stole my stamina. It seeped down into my bones and heart, this deep, aching exhaustion.
I didn’t even remove my dress before collapsing face-down on my bed. Laima and I had spent the entire day staving off tragedy, righting Jods’ wrongs, giving people the opportunity to reclaim the fate they deserved.
We were only fractionally successful. The death toll was astronomical. I didn’t have a television here, but I didn’t need one. I felt the souls, too numerous to count, slipping away from mortality into the underworld, upsetting the balance of life and death. The losses weighed on me, grieved me. Was this what it meant to be the goddess of fate for the world? It was a bigger task than I ever imagined, and I realized Dekla must have felt some relief when she finally relinquished immortality and accepted death.
“Dekla?”
I didn’t move when I heard Jumis enter my room. The bed sank when he sat on it, and his hand touched my back between my shoulder blades, gently, before withdrawing. We remained in silence, and then he said, “I know this pain. I bear it too. We could console each other.”
I hadn’t seen him at the sites of the tsunami or earthquakes, but Jumis couldn’t have been far, gathering the souls of the dying and escorting them to the underworld. I rolled over and took in the weariness on his face, the pain in his eyes.
“I don’t like it either,” he said. “The unnecessary death. But I will help restore the balance. I am also god of the harvest. There will be new life.”
Destined (Goddess of Fate Book 4) Page 6
