Ayla groaned and tossed the menu back onto the desk, but Thomas held up a hand and assured her, “No worries, lovely goddess. I’ll order a pizza.”
“Don’t they tell the front desk what room they’re going to?”
“Huh… well, if they do, I’ve got the key. And don’t ask: I’m still not telling you where I got it.”
“You’ve already told me where you got it,” she pointed out. “Just not from whom, specifically.”
“Is it whom?” he asked.
Ayla blinked at him then slowly pointed to the phone. “Pepperoni. And peppers.”
“I don’t like peppers,” Thomas argued. “They’d better stay on your half.”
Ayla laughed then hurriedly covered her mouth with a hand, and he gave her a peculiar look but picked up the handset. No matter what he did now, she wouldn’t — she couldn’t — let her guard down around anyone. She hadn’t survived three hundred years of being hunted to let one handsome young god disarm her, trick her into admitting her mother was still alive, then slaughtering them both, assuming he could ever reach her.
If there was one secret she would take to her grave, it would be the one to protect the sun goddess who had given her life… even if the cost was her own.
Chapter Three
In sleep there is beauty where none lies beyond. There is peace and comfort and days of borrowed pasts where you wait for me…always, you wait.
Ayla watched Thomas sleeping, the silver crescent moon peeking in through the small crack in the curtains she’d formed just so she could see it. The moon cast long, slender shadows across his body. Her pen hovered above the page and she yawned, tired but not wanting to sleep in the same room as another person. That took a kind of trust she hadn’t possessed in centuries. She looked down at the words she’d scrawled on the blank page and reread them, and she considered ripping out this page and burning it right now. But when he woke up, how could she explain what she was doing? And would he try to take the notebook from her?
It had also been a long time since she’d written a message to her mother, even one as cryptic as this, and truthfully, she didn’t want to destroy it. She wanted to tear this one out and find a safe place to tuck it forever, or better yet, a safe way to send it through the veil to wherever her mother had been trapped.
Sometimes, late at night when the world stilled and the only sound was the beating of her own heart, she could feel her, and if she pressed her eyes closed tightly, she could see the radiance of her face framed by those waves of golden hair, a vision of the sun itself. But tonight, she fought sleep, even if it meant she would lose the chance to feel her mother’s love reaching out for her from beyond the veil.
Thomas sighed and rolled over, facing her now, and as the moonlight fell across his face, his eyes slowly opened and he blinked at her. “Ayla?” He sounded groggy and confused. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”
Ayla pushed the curtain back and showed him the moon. “It’s singing to me, and its song is like a lullaby. I wish you could hear it.”
Thomas sat up and yawned, running a hand through his tussled hair. “Does it keep you up every night?”
“No,” she admitted. “Usually, it helps me sleep.”
“But tonight?”
“You’re keeping me up.”
Thomas seemed to think about that then nodded. “Fair enough. I suppose we don’t really trust each other, and maybe we shouldn’t.”
Ayla arched an eyebrow at him and asked, “Planning to kill me after all?”
“Are you planning to kill me?” he shot back.
“I never was,” she pointed out.
Thomas turned the lamp on beside his bed and squinted from the sudden light, but he kept his attention on her. “My parents died when I was still a child. I’ve been on my own a long time. Shortly before the god hunters found my father and murdered him, he gave me this key and told me to use it to run from them and the other gods who were trying to annihilate people like me, and for a long time, I believed I was the last one. And then I heard about you. I’m not going to hurt you, Ayla, because for the first time since I lost my family, I don’t feel alone anymore.”
Ayla’s throat burned and her eyes stung. She wanted to cry for him. She wanted to cry for herself. “And the humans slaughtered the demigods,” she whispered. “It’s been a massacre of anyone who doesn’t quite fit in.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Somehow, both gods and men got the idea they’d have this purified world without the other. And the poor bastards that blurred the lines of both worlds were the first to go.”
“But we are gods,” Ayla said. “Our parents just broke the rules and had the terrible misfortune of falling in love with someone from a different pantheon.”
Thomas nodded and ran his fingers through his hair, and Ayla realized she’d never even asked him what kind of god he was. If he were truly a lost god like her, he would have two completely different gifts, making him more powerful than most gods, which was why the lost gods had been targeted first. She bit her lip as she tried to think of a way to ask him about his connection to the earth and the cosmos without mentioning his ancestry, but he saved her the trouble.
“You’re wondering what kind of god I am, aren’t you?”
“Are you psychic?” she demanded.
“No,” he laughed. “You’re just easy to read.”
“I am not,” she pouted, but she suspected he was right.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You basically just admitted you’re connected to the moon, so I’ll tell you half of mine. Then we’re even and all is fair, and maybe you’ll even try to get some sleep.”
Ayla glanced at the bed then back at him. She was exhausted, and he seemed so sincere. “All right,” she said.
“My father was… complex. But I think he’d best be described as a god of trickery.”
“Oh,” Ayla whispered, wishing she had some magic key to disappear at that moment.
But Thomas held up a hand and assured her, “First of all, my dad wasn’t Loki. That bastard disappeared long before I was born. And my dad wasn’t nearly so bad.”
Ayla exhaled slowly and pulled her knees to her chest. Gods of magic and trickery had historically been the most duplicitous. After all, it had been the Norse god of mischief who taught humans spells in exchange for his freedom from a cave where he’d been bound.
Thomas sighed and added, “If I tell you too much about him, you’ll immediately be able to figure out who he was, and I thought we were avoiding that over-sharing thing. But he never worked with the hunters, Ayla. I swear. That’s why they killed him.”
Ayla lowered her eyes and bit her lip. It was happening anyway. A small part of her wanted to trust him, and an even smaller part already did.
“Anyway, what my father taught me, what I’m able to do naturally… you have to admit, that does come in handy when on the lam,” he said, flashing her another impish grin. “Of course, it won’t help at all if there’s a sniper I don’t notice in time.”
“Yeah,” Ayla agreed. “And they’ve certainly gotten a lot smarter and deadlier over the years. Have you had any close calls?”
“Not recently. But the hunter who followed you here, I’ve seen her before. I think she’s been following you for a while.”
“I know she has. Several months at least. But if she’s been after me since Chicago, before I even knew she was on to me, she should’ve had a chance to kill me. Why didn’t she?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Thomas answered. “Unless they want to capture you first. They may believe you have something they want.”
Ayla’s mouth fell open as she stared back at the young god who’d proposed such a ridiculous idea: everything she owned was stuffed into a backpack and was almost entirely mementos from her youth. But whatever Thomas’s mysterious lineage was must’ve conferred powers of perception as well, because he said, “I’m only guessing, Ayla. But it could be something that’s within you.”
; A small squeak escaped her throat and she forced her mouth closed. “And you?” she finally asked. “Do they know you’re following me, too? Or who you are?”
“They will now,” Thomas replied. “I’m sure that hunter got a good look at me at the bus station.”
“Oh,” Ayla breathed, realizing for the first time that this young god had just signed his death warrant to save her.
“Hey,” he assured her, “it’s fine. With gods after me, too, it was only a matter of time before the hunters figured out what I am.”
Ayla pulled the curtain back and glanced outside where it had started to rain again. “We should get out of Lake Charles then. If the hunters know we’re here, it’s only a matter of time before the gods follow.”
“You’re quite the optimist, aren’t you?”
Ayla smiled at him and closed her notebook. “I like to think I’m a realist.”
“Well, considering they’ve been right behind you since Portland, yeah, it’s probably a good idea to get out of here,” Thomas agreed.
Ayla’s eyebrows pulled together and she repeated, “They’ve?”
“Yeah, the blond woman and the tall guy in a black trench coat.”
Ayla felt the blood draining from her face as she gasped, “Thomas, I never knew she had a partner… and there’s a tall man in a trench coat in the parking lot right now.”
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed then adding, “Where the hell are my shoes?”
She pointed to the floor at the foot of the bed and zipped up her backpack. “Where should we go?”
“Honestly? I think we’re running out of options,” he sighed.
Ayla thought about it then agreed. “I think I’ve been out of options for years. I just keep moving, and sometimes, I think about just staying where I am and letting them find me. But the gods finding me scares me into action again.”
Thomas slipped on his shoes and grabbed his coat from the back of a chair where he’d draped it to dry. “I’m not letting you give up or surrender, not even to the hunters. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.”
“Tricks,” Ayla repeated. “Any chance your mother —”
“My mother,” Thomas interrupted, “will remain as secretive as yours.”
Ayla tilted her head at him, but grabbed her backpack and followed him out of the motel room. The hallway was empty, and as they quietly headed toward the elevator, Thomas suddenly stopped and grabbed her arm. His pale blue eyes narrowed toward the door leading to the stairs, but she didn’t need to ask who had found them.
The door swung open and the pretty blonde with fiery eyes stormed through it. She already held the pistol in her hand, and she aimed at Ayla first. Thomas gasped and yelled, “Wrong floor, woman.” The hunter’s arm faltered then lowered as she blinked at the god, but Thomas grabbed Ayla’s hand and pulled her toward the emergency exit on the opposite side of the hallway.
Ayla only glanced over her shoulder once to see if the familiar god hunter had somehow followed them through the haze of confusion Thomas had cast, but there was no one there, which meant she was following them outside where another hunter was already waiting.
Chapter Four
In darkness, there is safety, because in darkness, we disappear.
The asphalt that covered a portion of the parking lot outside the hotel was still slick from the rain that had fallen earlier, and Ayla struggled to keep pace with Thomas’s longer strides. He’d occasionally pause to search the street in front of them or the hotel behind them then he’d start running again, and Ayla would fall behind.
“Come on,” he complained. “How can a goddess be so slow?”
“I’m trying,” she complained back, but Thomas was awfully fast, even for a god.
“Try ditching the backpack,” he suggested, that roguish grin returning. “It’s probably weighing you down.”
“You’re not nearly as funny as you think you are,” Ayla mumbled.
Thomas nodded and stopped beside an old Dodge Caravan, fishing in his coat pocket again until he found his key. Ayla snorted and asked, “It opens car doors, too?”
“It’ll open any door,” Thomas answered. “Both the kind we can see and the kind we can’t.”
He pressed the key against the locked door, which clicked open in response then told her to hurry inside before he climbed into the driver’s seat. Ayla waited for him to put the old key in the ignition, but apparently, his enchanted key was strictly limited to opening doors. Instead, he pulled the panel off the ignition cylinder and separated the wires leading to the battery and starter. He quickly stripped the ignition and battery wires then coiled them together, and the old van’s engine sputtered to life.
“I’m not even going to ask where you learned to do that,” Ayla said.
Thomas snorted and pulled out of the parking lot. Ahead of them, she could see the interstate, which gave them a fairly good chance of evading the hunter. “You can find anything on YouTube now, you know.” But he didn’t look at her when he spoke this time, like there was more to his ability to steal a car than he was admitting.
“I kinda don’t want to know about everything you’re finding on YouTube.”
Thomas nodded smartly. “Good call.”
As they sped onto the interstate, headlights in the passenger side mirror temporarily blinded her, and she squinted and turned in her seat. They were unusually bright and close and quickly getting closer.
“Thomas,” she said nervously.
“I see it,” he assured her. “She’s persistent, I’ll give her that.”
“She’s going to run us off the interstate!”
“I’m in an old Caravan!” Thomas exclaimed back. “Just how fast do you think we can go?”
“Why didn’t you steal something faster?”
Thomas glanced at her and snapped, “Next time, you steal the getaway car then.”
Ayla grunted but conceded. She didn’t even know how to steal a car. Apparently, she’d have to brave the world of YouTube after all.
“Okay,” Thomas decided, “take the wheel. We need a door. Just try to make sure when this van crashes, it doesn’t crash into a building or oncoming traffic.”
“Thomas,” Ayla yelled, “…what?”
“Wheel,” he repeated. He was already climbing over the center console, so Ayla crawled over him and dropped into the driver’s seat. He’d set the cruise control at eighty-five while they were switching places, so she pressed her foot against the gas pedal, but she doubted the old van could go much faster.
Behind the truck that was quickly closing in on them, blue lights swirled angrily and Ayla offered a quick prayer to no god in particular that the hunter would pull over. But the truck’s headlights loomed closer, and she could see the white Chevy clearly now, as well as the shadowy shape of the driver, a hunter hell-bent on eliminating two targets who continued to evade her.
Thomas gripped the key in his hand and took a deep breath. “Cut right as soon as you reach the bend in the interstate. There’s nothing over there. I’ll pull you with me through the door.”
Ayla groaned as she reached the bend in the interstate because this suddenly seemed like a terrible idea, but the hunter’s truck had caught up to them and tapped their bumper, causing their van to fishtail. “Cut the wheel, Ayla!” Thomas yelled. He’d touched the key to the van’s door and on the other side, a black world with dark mounds and tall feathery shapes appeared.
She yanked on the wheel, sending the van careening into the shoulder of the interstate, but before she could witness its path of destruction, the interstate disappeared because Thomas had pulled her with him through the portal, and they left Lake Charles behind, along with the hunter for whom this chase had become personal, which meant the only way they could possibly survive was by killing her first.
Black rolling hills surrounded them, and the tall, wispy shapes revealed themselves as pine trees. Ayla ran her fingers through her hair and turned i
n a slow circle. “Where the hell are we?”
“Not Hell,” Thomas told her, slipping his key back into his pocket. “Pretty far from Hell, actually.”
She scowled at him and demanded, “Thomas, where are we and what are we supposed to do now? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“We walk to that highway over there and catch a ride. And I think we’re in…” He trailed off and looked around him, running his fingers through his hair, too, before shrugging. “Okay, I don’t actually know. But I still don’t think it’s Hell.”
Ayla groaned but pulled her backpack higher on her shoulders. “At least we’re alone.”
“Please don’t say stuff like that,” he begged. “I’m not gonna lie. I’m more than a little superstitious, and I’m pretty sure you just jinxed us.”
Ayla cringed and apologized then added a silent apology to the universe, begging it not to jinx them because she just happened to be a little superstitious, too.
“Besides,” Thomas added. “We’re supposed to be in Nashville since I know someone who lives there, and he can help us. Just… keep an open mind about it, okay?”
“Nashville or the person who can help us?” Ayla asked.
Thomas pretended to think about it then decided, “Both.”
Ayla shrugged. “Could be worse. You could have taken me to Knoxville.”
Thomas shot her a curious smile and asked, “Anti-Vols?”
“Every goddess worth her name should be anti-Vols,” she answered seriously.
So Thomas pretended to think about that, too. “Fair enough. Guess we’re going to be hitchhiking. Let’s hope he’s not a Vols fan.”
Ayla wrinkled her nose and nodded.
“Maybe you could light a fire while we wait,” Thomas suggested.
Ayla tripped over her feet and he had to catch her again to steady her, but how did he know she could control fire as well? “I’m a moon goddess,” she insisted. “I can’t —”
Days of Borrowed Pasts Page 2
