by Jenna Black
“I’m afraid I’ve figured out what’s happening to them,” I said calmly, “and it’s not good for any of us. The first two who went missing were a descendant of Zeus and a descendant of Nyx, right?”
Cyrus’s puzzled look told me this was not at all how he’d expected me to take the news. He’d expected fear and excuses, maybe even desperation. It took him a moment to process my words, then he cocked his head. “And how exactly would you know that?”
“Because I was recently in a fight that involved someone who could throw lightning bolts and someone who could create dark just like Emma used to. I made the logical assumption.”
I gave him as basic and brief an explanation of the situation as I could manage. “I’m sorry if I led you to believe on the phone that I had proof of life to give you,” I concluded. “I decided the current crisis has to take precedence. I hope you agree.”
Cyrus snorted. “First you have to convince me that this isn’t all a load of bullshit you’re feeding me to stall for time.”
“Some of it is pretty easy to verify,” I said. “I’m sure you have people who can confirm that we were in Bermuda and that Logan and Jamaal were questioned by the police about a bizarre shooting incident where about a zillion rounds were fired and no one was hurt.”
Cyrus gave one of his flunkies a commanding look, and the flunky took out his smartphone. His thumbs started flying, and in about sixty seconds, he held his phone out to Cyrus. Cyrus read whatever the flunky had found, and his anger and skepticism transitioned into something more like curiosity and calculation. It was very like Cyrus to hear that the human race was in danger of extinction and try to figure out how he could use the situation to his advantage.
“I think Niobe is recruiting your people,” I said while Cyrus tried to process all the information I’d given him. “I don’t know what she’s promising them to make them think wiping out all of humanity is a good idea, but it’s gotta be something. I don’t think even your dad would want that, and he’s pretty much my mental poster boy for Team Evil.”
Cyrus scowled at me, but at least he had the good sense not to argue. That he loved and was loyal to his father didn’t mean he was blind or stupid. Still, it probably wasn’t smart of me to keep poking at him.
“I’m here because I’m hoping your people and mine can put our differences aside long enough to deal with this crisis. It doesn’t mean we have to like or trust each other, and when we’ve finished saving the world we can go back to business as usual.”
“What exactly are you asking us to do?”
“I’m asking you to lend us some of your Olympians to help us get through to the altar in Bermuda. They should be people whose powers can counter those who’ve gone missing, because I think it’s safest to assume they’re all with Niobe.”
“Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?”
“Yes, yes, I know. I have to find another of Niobe’s sisters first and convince her to do the right thing. But that’ll be a lot easier to do if I can offer her a substantial number of Liberi to guard her.”
Cyrus thought long and hard before he spoke again, and I had to fight not to hold my breath. If Niobe now had five Olympians at her beck and call, then there was no way I and the rest of Anderson’s Liberi were getting to that altar without help. If Cyrus turned me down, I had no plan B.
“There’s another problem, of course,” Cyrus said, then raised his eyebrow at me as if challenging me to guess what he was talking about.
Not that it was a hard guess. “What is this, a pop quiz? I think we need to worry about the altar that’s out of juice right now and figure out what to do about the larger problem of Niobe and all those other altars later.”
“Somehow I doubt that’s a problem any of us is capable of fixing,” he said, voicing the nasty truth that I myself was trying not to think about too much. “As long as Niobe wants Anderson dead and this is the only way to kill him, we’ll be fighting a losing battle.”
“I know,” I admitted. I hoped it was a good sign that he had said we. “Finding Anderson and getting him to take care of this mess is on my to-do list. Right after finding another of Niobe’s sisters.”
“I would argue that finding Anderson and fixing the problem at its source is of higher priority.”
“And I would argue that taking care of the immediate problem has to come first. Especially when we know how to solve the immediate problem and we have no clue how to fix the big one.” Not to mention that I’d already come up empty in my attempts to find him.
Cyrus started to say something, but I cut him off. “I’m the one who’ll be doing the finding. Unless you’ve suddenly acquired an Olympian who can do what I do.”
“Touché,” he said, holding his hands up in surrender. “If you find a goddess who’s willing to renew that altar, I’ll lend you a team that’ll help you get to it.”
I looked at him askance. Was it my imagination, or had that been too easy? He wasn’t the kind of guy who did anything out of the goodness of his heart, and though I believed stopping Niobe was in his best interests, I was surprised he hadn’t made any demands.
Not surprised enough to look the gift horse in the mouth, however. When I got back to the house, I took Blake aside and asked him if I should be worried about Cyrus’s seemingly easy cooperation. He gave a snort of laughter.
“Five of his Olympians have deserted, and so far he’s had no luck finding them. You’re offering to draw them all out for him. He’s not in it to save the world—he’s in it for the easy revenge.”
Blake’s humor quickly melted away. “He’s going to try to take them all alive so he can bring them back here and torture them before letting his favorite mortal pets harvest their immortality.”
I shuddered. Suddenly, it all made perfect sense. I was not going to feel good about aiding and abetting the gruesome murders of five Liberi, but we had limited options. Whether I liked it or not, we needed Cyrus’s help. I’d just have to deal with the moral consequences later.
Why is it that every time I have to use my power to find someone, there’s a Countdown of Doom happening in my head?
If I had plenty of time and wasn’t overwhelmed with stress, I was pretty confident I’d eventually be able to find another of Niobe’s sisters. But knowing that even now, women who lived on islands had stopped conceiving—and realizing we had no idea which altar would be the next to come up for renewal and when—made a stress-free search impossible.
Searching for the sister in charge of North America seemed like my most logical choice, as she was the one we’d be able to get to the quickest. But North America was kind of big, and I didn’t know what to search for. Usually I have at least a name and a starting point, but in this instance, I had nothing.
I don’t know how much time I wasted fighting my own panicked fear of failure, but it was hours. I paced my suite and tried to think, to force myself to come up with an off-the-cuff idea that would turn out to be one of those significant hunches that were my trademark. I’d had enough experience with frantic searches already to know that forcing it didn’t work, but there’s nothing like trying relax to make you as tense and strung-out as possible.
Finally, I sat down in front of my computer in desperation and Googled fertility goddess North America.
I listlessly scrolled through the search results. Not surprisingly, they were all links to sites about Native American fertility deities. Completely useless for my purposes. I chewed my lip and considered throwing my laptop out the window to work off some of the stress. Then I began deleting my search terms one character at a time, hitting the delete button with more force than necessary.
For no particular reason I was aware of, I stopped deleting when just the word fertility was left. With a shrug, I hit enter. Not surprisingly, I ended up with a list of fertility centers and fertility treatments along with a few stray fertility goddess entries. Just as useless. And yet I had stopped deleting my search terms and hit enter with no particular t
hought behind it. Was it possible there was some subconscious hint to be gleaned?
I stared at my screen, mentally commanding it to cough up some answers. I was looking for a fertility goddess, and my subconscious had prompted me not to erase that word from my search criteria. If I assumed my subconscious actually knew what it was doing, then I had to think that a search with the term fertility in it would lead me somewhere useful.
“What do I know about this goddess?” I asked myself aloud. That was, after all, how I would perform any search: start with what I knew. It was just that, usually, I actually knew something.
The sum total of my information about Niobe’s sister was that she was a fertility goddess who lived somewhere in North America. I added North America back into my search and hit enter, not expecting to find anything useful.
The first hit on the search terms fertility North America was a map of fertility rates in North America. And a crazy thought hit me: what if having a fertility altar nearby made women more fertile?
I racked my brain trying to remember which African country Rose had said her altar was in. I hadn’t paid much attention at the time, because everything else she’d had to say was so earth-shattering. I did a quick search for the fertility rates in African countries, and found that it was highest in Niger, which I was pretty sure wasn’t the country Rose had mentioned. But just seeing the map of Africa jogged my memory, and I remembered she’d talked about having a home in Johannesburg.
There was no way Johannesburg had the highest birthrate in Africa. And come to think of it, there was no way Bermuda had the highest birthrate of any island. Which logically meant that searching for the place with the highest birthrate in North America should be a dead end.
And yet my power had never once steered me wrong, and I was getting better at telling the difference between an ordinary hunch and one fueled by my divine ancestor. This hunch was one of the latter, I was sure of it. So I dug deeper into my North American search results. I still wasn’t really sure what I was looking for, except that anything I could find that might narrow down my search could only be for the better.
Figuring that the effect of the altar might be pretty localized, I ignored the question of which country had the highest birthrate and focused instead on cities. I made notes along the way, trying to make sense of conflicting data and different methods of reporting, and in the end, I couldn’t tell you which city actually had the highest birthrate. But I did notice that I’d written down one of the candidate cities, Memphis, more than once on my list of notes. Maybe it was just because by the time I got to the end I was so brain-dead I’d forgotten I’d already put Memphis on my list. Or maybe Memphis had some significance?
As was the case pretty much every time I did one of these searches, my results felt flimsy, my reasoning ridiculous. If I tried to explain it to someone, they’d probably laugh at me. But until I found some way to use my power with conscious intention, there was nothing I could do but listen to my subconscious hunches, no matter how silly they seemed.
Apparently, another road trip was in my near future.
EIGHT
I had no further clue how to narrow my search. I can’t say I had a ton of confidence in my own methodology, but since we literally had nothing else to go on, I started organizing a trip to Memphis. I would have been happy to go alone—I was still getting used to this whole working-as-a-team thing—but I knew I needed at least one other person with me to do the driving. With no empirical evidence to follow, I was just going to have to listen to my gut, and that wasn’t something I could do reliably while driving a car.
I didn’t know what to expect from Niobe’s sister even if we found her, so I wasn’t sure who should come with me to Memphis. I finally decided on Jamaal, partly for obvious reasons, but partly because I knew he’d be able to sit in a car with me for hours as we drove around aimlessly without feeling the need to make conversation. If my subconscious homing beacon was going to lead me to the goddess, the last thing I needed was a bored Liberi interrupting my concentration.
Time was of the essence, so I decided we should fly into Memphis instead of making the thirteen-hour drive. Leo worked his computer magic and got us a flight within four hours of me coming up with the idea.
Jamaal and I climbed into our rental car at the Memphis airport just after dark. The weather was perfect and the moon was shining bright, so the conditions for the search were ideal.
“Where do you want me to go?” Jamaal asked as we made our way toward the airport exit.
“Just drive toward the city,” I instructed him. “Hopefully, I’ll start giving you directions before we get there, but if not, just keep driving around. If we’re in the right place, and if I can find my Zen, I’ll eventually catch the scent.”
He did me the favor of not showing any hint of the skepticism I was sure he was feeling. Hell, I was feeling plenty of it myself. Maybe someday—a few years, or maybe even decades down the road—I’d develop some confidence in my powers, but I wasn’t close yet. It was with great effort that I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, trying to block out the million-and-one negative thoughts that assailed me.
Jamaal drove in silence for I don’t know how many miles. The soothing hum of the tires against the pavement, the quiet, and the darkness would ordinarily have lulled me right to sleep, but tonight I was way too keyed up. Instead of sitting there peacefully and letting my mind drift, I kept searching my mind for a clue, examining each random thought with way too intense a focus.
This is the way you always start, I reminded myself. Just because I began tense as piano wire didn’t mean I would stay that way. But tonight, the doubts were stronger than I was.
Before when I’d tried this kind of search, I’d always known my quarry was within reach. Maybe my powers were being difficult, but I knew if I could just get them to cooperate, I would succeed.
Tonight, logic kept insisting that there was no way on earth Memphis was the right place to search. North America is so huge, and I never would have found either Jasmine’s or Rose’s altars using the ridiculous method I’d used to pick Memphis. If the goddess we sought wasn’t in Memphis, then this was all a spectacular waste of time. Time that we didn’t have to spare. Time that perhaps I should be using to search for Anderson, although so far my attempts to find him hadn’t produced anything.
I was locked in a vicious cycle of desperation and frustration when Jamaal started singing softly.
He has a voice that simultaneously gives me goose bumps and makes me feel like I’m cuddling up in a warm blanket. On more than one occasion, he’d used that gorgeous voice of his to help me sneak past a wall of trauma and find my way into sleep. Ordinarily, I’d let myself latch on to that voice and drink it in, but tonight I opened my eyes and turned my head toward him.
“Not that I don’t love listening to you sing,” I said, “but if you keep doing that, I’m going to fall asleep, and that won’t do us much good.”
He risked a quick glance at me before returning his eyes to the highway. Traffic wasn’t heavy—especially not compared to D.C.—but it wasn’t nonexistent, either. “You didn’t seem to be having a whole lot of luck,” he commented. “And don’t think I didn’t notice how fidgety you’ve been. You’re not even close to getting into the zone.”
I squirmed in my seat. “You try relaxing when the fate of all humanity is resting on your shoulders.”
The weight of that thought nearly took my breath away. It sounded like a total exaggeration. Certainly way too much to be sitting on my shoulders. Even if I found another goddess and we successfully renewed the altar in Bermuda, the larger problem of Niobe would still exist, and that was beyond my ability to handle. But I felt like it was all riding on me, and maybe that wasn’t completely unreasonable. After all, no one else seemed to be doing anything to try to improve the situation.
“I’m trying to help you relax,” Jamaal said, with a patience I never would have expected from him only a short time ago.
“We’re no worse off if you fall asleep than if you sit there stewing and getting frustrated. And maybe if you start falling asleep, it’ll lower your guard enough to let your power shine through.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He was right, and I felt foolish for arguing. Right now, my mind was practically cannibalizing itself as I tried to force myself to relax. Finding something external and soothing to focus on might be just what I needed.
“Okay,” I agreed. “It can’t hurt to try. But wake me up if I start drooling or snoring or something.”
He smiled without looking at me. “All right, then. Any requests?”
I had no idea what kind of music Jamaal liked. The only thing I’d ever heard him sing was the lullaby I’d just interrupted. It was a song from his childhood, before everything went wrong, and since he didn’t even know what language it was in, he assured me he was butchering the pronunciation. But it was beautiful, and I loved it.
“How about you finish the lullaby and go on to whatever moves you after?” I suggested.
“Agreed. Now close your eyes.”
I came back to myself as Jamaal was pulling up to the curb in front of a stately Victorian house. I blinked to clear away my confusion. I had no idea how we’d gotten here or how long we’d been driving, nor did I feel the grogginess or heaviness behind the eyes I’d expect if I’d fallen asleep.
The house was large without being huge, and it looked old without being decrepit. We were in a neighborhood that screamed suburbs, with the houses sitting on what I’d estimate to be an acre of land and everything neat and well kept.
“Where are we?” I asked, glancing over at Jamaal, who shrugged.
“Don’t know. I was just following your directions.”
I suppressed a shudder. There was something strangely unnerving about me giving driving directions without ever having been conscious of it.
