Urban Mythic: Thirteen Novels of Adventure and Romance, featuring Norse and Greek Gods, Demons and Djinn, Angels, Fairies, Vampires, and Werewolves in the Modern World

by C. Gockel

  Silence.

  I struggled to open the bottle until I realized that the top was a screw off and not a cork. Yanking the corkscrew out, I wondered if I could just pour the wine through the hole I’d made in the cap. The alternative was probably the better choice, so I screwed off the mangled cap and poured a bit, sniffing the glass in what I hoped was a knowledgeable way. The stuff smelled like air freshener. Seriously. Like something I’d hang in my car. Or possibly one of those scented candles that everyone gave me at Christmas.

  “Ah, the bouquet,” I said, trying to keep a straight face.

  I swirled it around in the glass. It coated the sides in a purple sheet and slowly oozed down like a gelatinous monster from a horror movie. If it were any firmer, I’d be having nightmare Jell–O flashbacks from that wild gate yesterday. I’ll try anything, so I took a swig.

  “I can see why it says ‘serve chilled’ in huge letters on the bottle,” I told the angel, grimacing at the taste. “I’m not a wine critic, but this tastes like grape juice with a couple pounds of corn syrup mixed in. I can smell the blackberry, but I can’t taste it at all. Fuck, this stuff is sweet! I hope you brought your insulin. Ugh.”

  Silence.

  I poured him a glass and sat it down by him, arranging myself on the dirt. I filled up my glass and took another gulp, shaking my head at the strange acidic aftertaste.

  “I don’t blame you if you don’t drink it. It might be good for discipline, though. Better than a hair shirt. You should at least give it a shot. Who knows, I could be totally wrong. This could be the best wine ever. One of those secret treasures of the cheap liquor store.”

  Silence.

  Fuck, I was babbling like an idiot. What was wrong with me? I left a hot guy, whose company I enjoy to run over here and bring wine to an asshole who wants to kill me, thinks I’m an abomination, and now won’t talk to me. If Wyatt were here instead of this angel, he would be rolling on the ground laughing with me right now. We’d be daring each other to drink the swill, taking bets on who could sip it the slowest without puking. Wyatt was fun. This angel was not. I should just shoot myself because I clearly had no sense left in my head whatsoever.

  I sat there beside him, drinking the horrible wine and braiding blades of grass. After a few moments, I dropped onto my back and stared at the thick, dark clouds moving in. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t even glance at me. He shifted occasionally, so at least I knew he wasn’t dead. I thought of all kinds of inane things to say, but I’d made enough of a fool of myself, so I just sat there in silence and watched the storm clouds gather on the horizon.

  I’d killed about half the bottle of wine. He hadn’t touched his, hadn’t spoke to me, looked at me. Hell, he didn’t even grunt at me. I plopped my empty glass next to the bottle and his untouched wine, got up, dusted off my rear, and just walked off. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make me seem like even more of an idiot that I already appeared. I really wanted to bash my head against something. It’s not like we’d ended last night on friendly terms, and he’d made it clear in the conversation with Candy that he wasn’t feeling kindly toward me. I don’t know why I was sort of hurt by all this, why I was at all surprised by his reaction, or lack of reaction, to me.

  I drove back to the cabin, and unloaded my purchases. No one was there. I glanced through Candy’s paperback, only to toss it down and pace the cabin. I don’t deal well with boredom, and there was nothing to do in this stupid cabin. Things were starting to get a bit dark and I heard the distant rumble of thunder, so I went out into a big field by the tent area to watch the approaching storm.

  Electricity and plasma are near and dear to our hearts. They are some of our first talents as children, and we always have an affinity for them. Storms here in this realm are just amazing. The smell, the power, the rain, even that strange yellow color the air gets. I was feeling really down and needed a good storm to bring me right again. Was I homesick maybe? Humans are awesome, but there are some things you just can’t share with them. Things that would freak them out, or things that are just beyond their understanding. We have such different lives. Our skills, our talents, our culture and society, how we’re raised, what we value. Maybe that’s why I was tagging around after this angel like a half–starved stray dog. I missed my own kind. And I was rusty. Forty years over here and I had an angel beating up on me and one that had twice eluded my grasp. Shameful. Dar would never let me live it down.

  The blackness was rolling forward in the sky and I could feel the charged ions above me. I smiled and hummed a bit, waiting for the flashes in the sky to get closer. It was a good storm. The campground lights flickered on in the darkness, and cold hard drops began to pelt down on me. A huge flash lit the sky with an almost simultaneous roar of thunder. It shook hard enough to set off somebody’s car alarm, and I laughed as I reached out and called it down to me.

  The bolt shot right to me like a lover to my arms. I let some of it dance along my skin, twisting in colored bands of barbed light up my arms and neck, then down my torso and legs. I kept it moving circling and surrounding my flesh, and then flashed it in a disco ball of light around one arm before pulling it into me with a swick of sound. I called down another bolt, holding it in my hands in a globe shape, where it flashed and darted about in a prism of color. The next bolt I divided into hula hoops of white, swirling them around my hips and arms. I hadn’t had this much fun in, well, in forty years. I hadn’t realized how very bleak my life had become.

  I called down a huge bolt, shaping it into a giant donut above my head, then let it rain down around me, causing a ring of fire in the grass.

  “Be careful, little cockroach, or you’ll set the whole place ablaze,” said a soft voice behind me. I was so preoccupied that I hadn’t felt him near, but I wasn’t startled. Maybe some part of me did know he was close by. I should have known he’d come running the moment I did something like this, no doubt to make sure I didn’t burn the whole town down.

  I extinguished the ring of fire, leaving it blackened and smoldering, and then called another bolt down, letting it dance along my skin. This storm was fast and violent. I’d probably only have a few more bits to play with before it moved on.

  “Gather it closer,” the angel instructed. “It’s leaking out and the humans in their tents will be hurt. You’ve got talent, but you’re sloppy and lazy with this energy. I know you can do better.”

  Asshole. It’s not like others’ safety is ever our priority. Who cared if it leaked out and cooked someone? It’s their fault for being in a damned tent during a lightning storm. Still, I pulled it in around the edges just to show him I could.

  “Can you work the lightning?” I asked, with the bands still flashing around my arms.

  He shrugged. “Most of us can’t, it’s just not one of our talents. I’ve been around a long time though, so I can.” He called down a small bolt from the clouds and shaped it into a fleur–de–lis with nice tight defined edges. Showoff.

  “I used to come with my brothers when the planet was still young and we’d play in the lightning,” he mused. “Everything was pretty much plasma and energy then, all these complex molecules hadn’t formed yet. We had to manifest in an energy form to hold our being.”

  “What type of energy?” I asked, curious. That was so long ago that I couldn’t even imagine what the world was like. I felt very young next to him. A baby.

  “All sorts,” he said vaguely. Then he seemed to make a decision. “I’m most skilled in fire and fire–type energy, so I used to manifest as flame. Smokeless fire, I believe the humans call it. There’s no real word for it in their language, though. Sa. . my youngest brother,” he corrected, clearly not wanted to reveal his brother’s name. “He had great talent with electricity and we’d marvel at the things he would do with lightning. I have some talent, but not anywhere close to his level.”

  “He used to zap us with lightning sometimes, when we weren’t expecting it, just to see us jump.” He smiled fo
ndly at the memory and turned to me. “You remind me of him, sometimes.”

  I looked at him in shocked surprise. I reminded him of his brother?

  “Was your brother a demon?” I asked.

  He laughed. “You weren’t always demons, you know. You used to be angels. Always different from the rest of us, very different, but still angels.”

  “Are we no longer angels?” I asked, thinking that his answer meant all the difference in the world.

  “I don’t know. I thought you had all devolved to a far lesser state. Now, I wonder,” he mused.

  I stared at him with the lightning still rolling over my skin, waiting for him to say something else. I was afraid I’d break the spell and he’d return to the cold enforcer who was ready to kill me at any moment.

  “We were five, my brothers and I,” he continued. “The middle three were the least strong, although they have gained in skill and power with time. We’ve always been close, especially back then, but my youngest brother and I had a special bond.”

  I could feel a pain and sadness from him. Actually feel it, like it was inside me. Why was he sad? Did he and his brothers no longer have these good times together? Why should an obviously fond memory bring him pain?

  I pulled the electricity within my stash of raw energy and looked up at the brightening sky. “These things are so fleeting, always over so fast.”

  “Yes, they are,” he replied, and I realized he was talking about more than just the storm.

  I was fairly wet from the big plops of rain. The storm had moved off fast before the downpour could start. The folks about a mile or two down the road were probably getting drenched. I wanted to just walk off and leave him standing in the clearing, or trailing after me. My ego was still smarting from the whole wine thing. Pride isn’t my sin, though, so I stood there squeezing the water from my hair.

  “Do you work with water much? Can you do this?” he asked unexpectedly as he suspended the water drops I’d shaken from my hair and floated them around me like little opaque balloons. It was pretty cool.

  “Wow,” I said, genuinely impressed. “Are you using some kind of force to overcome gravity or are you doing something to negate the effect of gravity in an area surrounding the water?”

  “The latter.” He swirled the little droplets together to make a large sphere, hanging before us. “I’m no expert with water, though,” he said with false modesty. I could tell he was showing off.

  I shook my head. I’d go ahead and stroke his ego a bit, because this was pretty cool. “That’s really delicate, technical work; not something we’re encouraged to do. We tend more towards big and flashy. Or exploding. Back home, no one would bother spending a lot of time to learn this. I mean, what would the point be if others didn’t appreciate it, or it didn’t destroy anything?”

  I walked over to the globe sticking a finger through the gravity suspension field and into the globe of water. Gregory held it in place around my finger, and maintained the integrity of the shape and field as I withdrew, showing his amazing control over the most minute particle. The guy was really fucking impressive. I’d never seen anything like this before. I stuck my finger in a few other places and he held the field perfectly each time. The sphere didn’t even quiver as I moved my finger over and through it. I wondered what else he could do. I’d never been around someone with this much power and control before. I wished I had a few millennia to just trail around after him and watch him work. It would be amazing.

  The outside of the water globe began to take on a solid shape and I realized he’d frozen about a quarter inch of the outer water, leaving the inside to swirl about like an elaborate icy snow globe. The outer rim of ice on the globe was as clear as glass with the inside a churning prismatic liquid. Gregory walked over to pluck the globe from the air and handed it to me, placing it gently into my cupped hands.

  I carefully ran my hands over the cold surface. It was absolutely clear, perfectly round and smooth. The water inside continued to churn and swirl in a pretty dance. He kept it frozen in the heat of the day, but the warmth from my hands created a slick wet surface as I held the globe. I was amazed to notice that the wet against my hand wasn’t cold. Then I realized that he was holding the cold tightly against the surface of the globe, and the wet was actually a created buffer between my hands and the ice. I suppose he did this to keep my hands from sticking to it? Or possibly to keep my hands from being cold? Whatever his motive, it was a skilled piece of work to differentiate the temperature so cleanly and sharply in such thin layers. He made it all seem so easy. Fuck, he was so damned impressive. Damn it all, now I was even more drawn to this asshole.

  I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with the globe. Just admire it? Stick it in my freezer and save it as a souvenir? Instead I sat it in the grass in front of me and tried to raise it. I could shoot it with a burst and blow it across the grass, but I couldn’t get the darned thing to float at all. I kept messing with it while Gregory watched and continued to keep the globe contained and frozen. I attempted different methods to see if maybe I could move it sideways instead, since up seemed beyond my talents.

  “How long have you been here, on this side of the gates?” he asked, abruptly changing the subject.

  “A little over forty years,” I told him, getting the globe to rock a bit. No sense in lying at this point.

  “Wow, I guess that makes me rather incompetent,” he said, as if the idea amused him.

  “It’s not like I came in with guns a–blazing.” I tried to get the globe to roll further to no avail. “Before this, I’d do like everyone else and pop over to wreck havoc and party, then dart back across the gates. This time I intended to stay, so I was very careful in cloaking my energy signature when I arrived. The biggest thing I’ve done before this week was Owning this flesh, and assuming its form. It was risky, but she was an ideal candidate for a long–term identity to assume.”

  “How did you manage that without detection,” he asked with interest. “We should have been on you fairly fast after an Own and a full body conversion.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I was surprised too. Human’s have made a perfect environment to conceal small energy usage,” I told him. “Cell signals, microwaves, x–rays, power grids. If you’re careful, it’s easy to stay within the parameters of the existing power flow. For big stuff, you can mask under an electrical storm, or blow out a power grid in a surge. The really big stuff is impossible without detection, but you can still get stuff done and run under the radar. I have no idea why you didn’t catch me back then, though.”

  He stared at me, fascinated. It’s not like I was giving any big secrets away. No one would have the slightest desire to repeat what I’d done, and I’d either be dead or unable to return. I might as well spill the beans.

  “Forty years. Why would you want to do that? To live so hindered?” He seemed truly perplexed. “What appeal could this possibly have, to live without the use of your power? To live as a lowly human? You’re a being of spirit. You’re so much more than this.”

  “I have my reasons,” I replied vaguely.

  “Can you not return? Will you be killed? Are you a runaway servant?”

  “No,” I said indignantly. “I have status, and a household awaiting my return.” Not that my household was big. I was just an imp, after all. And everyone had someone gunning for them. That’s just the way life was in my world.

  “Is it the human you’ve marked as yours? Do you stay for him, for love of him?” he asked with a strain in his voice.

  Was he insane? That I could love a human? That I could love at all? Wyatt was my best friend, and I did want to stay here to be with him. But love?

  “He amuses me,” I said slowly. “I know he’s only a human, but he amuses me. The chase, the sexual tension. He’s fun, and I really enjoy his company.”

  We stood there and the silence stretched on between us. I could feel that pain in him again, as if my words bothered him. His dark eyes bore into mine
searching for something.

  “Go home,” he finally said, as if the decision caused him agony. “I won’t come for you, I won’t stop you. I’ll ensure you have safe passage through the gate near Baltimore, the one in the mall in Columbia. It’s the most stable gate on the northeast coast, and the safest. It will put you out near the elf border.”

  You would have thought I’d be gone in a shot, but I remained there with stupid indecision as my hand crept up my arm, stopping just shy of the tattoo. I didn’t want to leave Wyatt. I didn’t want to leave this angel. I didn’t want to go home.

  “Why? Why are you letting me go now after telling me you’d slaughter millions before letting me go?” I asked.

  “I can’t kill you,” he said, a hint of desperation in his voice. “I’m afraid if you stay, that I will kill you, that I’ll find myself in a situation where I have to kill you. I can’t go through that, again.”

  “But what about this?” I asked, touching the tattoo lightly. I was bound to him, his demon.

  “I can’t remove that,” he said. “With some study, I may be able to eventually dull some of its effects, but it’s there permanently. I don’t know how you’re going to explain it when you return home. I’m not usually so rash. I’m sorry.”

  Wow, an apology. From an angel. Pigs truly do fly. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I wandered in a daze slowly back to the cabin and put my bags back in the car. Candy and Wyatt still hadn’t returned, so I sent Wyatt a quick text and headed out. I didn’t see Gregory again.

  Chapter 18

  It was about seventy miles from Waynesboro to the gate. I know I went down through Emmitsburg, then took Route 140 up to Westminster, but I honestly don’t remember the trip at all. I was very close to home, but couldn’t bring myself to go there. Wyatt would take care of everything for me, and be a rich man for his troubles. I hoped it helped make up for me not saying goodbye in person. I had turned off my cell phone to avoid his calls. I just couldn’t talk to him right now. I just couldn’t tell him in person that I would never see him again. I tried to keep my mind off of him and off Gregory as I drove numbly down the road. The back roads from Westminster to Columbia were beginning to fill with late Saturday traffic, but I was driving in the opposite direction and thankfully didn’t hit any gridlock.