Thomas ran his fingers through his hair and sat beside her. “We definitely need a better lie. I came up with two possibilities on the way back from Dallas. We can tell him my San Francisco friend is actually psychic, or that we have a mole inside the League.”
“A mole,” Ayla repeated.
“Yeah, one of us but pretending to be a human hunter.”
“I know what a mole is, Thomas,” Ayla sighed. “It’s just the dumbest cover story I’ve ever heard. It takes years of training to become a hunter. You don’t think they’d notice she wasn’t aging?”
“So we go with my first idea, although there are a handful of gods who can change their appearance. It could be possible.”
“Or,” Ayla countered, “we tell him there’s another human hunter in the League who wants to escape.”
Thomas thought about it then shook his head. “Won’t work. We could claim a god trying to pass himself off as human doesn’t want to meet Leon, but as soon as he starts pressing us for details about a human hunter, he’ll see right through us. Chances are, he knows a pretty good percentage of the hunters all over the world, so we wouldn’t have a decent reason for keeping that information from him if we trusted him. And we want to keep up the illusion we do just in case he’s really playing double-agent and turns on us way before we’re ready to try opening the veil.”
“Why are humans so difficult?” she complained.
“Probably the same reason gods can be such a pain in the ass,” Thomas decided.
“There is another option,” Ayla proposed. “Not about humans and gods but what to do now. We could go to Xi’an without telling Leon anything.”
Thomas blinked at her as if asking if she were serious, so she shrugged and said, “It’s still a better idea than claiming we have a mole. You have a key that opens doors anywhere. We might even get back before he realizes we’ve taken off again.”
Thomas threw his hands up and exclaimed, “Then how do we explain carrying around yet another ingredient for this spell?”
“We don’t. I’ll keep it in my backpack with the bracelet. By the time we’ve collected all nine items, we’ll have found Ma’at, and we’ll know for sure whether or not we can trust him.”
He groaned but relented and dug the key out of his pocket. “Fine, but if he ends up killing us both when we get back, my ghost will haunt you forever.”
“If one hunter manages to kill us both, we really don’t deserve to call ourselves gods.”
Thomas blinked at her again and asked, “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a bit of a smartass?”
“Today? No. Except you sorta just did.”
He smiled and rubbed the key between his fingers. “This is why we’ll end up the best of friends. Not because we’re both lost gods, but because we speak the same language.”
Ayla blushed and rose from the bed, hoping he hadn’t noticed her embarrassment, but if he did, he was too considerate to mention it. He approached the wall and stroked the textured wallpaper, biting his lip as he concentrated.
“You know this doesn’t always work as well as I want it to, right?” he said.
Ayla nodded and assured him, “Nobody’s chasing us, so if we end up somewhere else, we can just try again. You don’t have to get it right the first time.”
“If my dad had more time to teach me how to use this…” Thomas sighed and shook his head.
“I’m sorry, Thomas,” Ayla said. “About your father. Mine wasn’t always a good person either, but he was still my father.”
“Yeah, well, if he’d bothered to show up more, I would’ve learned how to channel magic better anyway,” Thomas muttered. His resentment, though, apparently transformed into determination, because he quickly stood up straighter and touched the key to the wall. A door shimmered into existence, and like the first door he’d opened with Ayla in Lake Charles, this one appeared as an actual door, closed with a silver handle. Even after Thomas pulled it open, though, neither could see where the door led. Each portal would be a leap of faith, a hope that the key brought them to safety and one step closer to completing the spell that could bring her home.
Thomas glanced at her and took a deep breath. “Ready?”
Ayla nodded even though she most certainly didn’t feel ready at all. Thomas unexpectedly reached for her hand, and she flinched but didn’t pull her hand away from him as they stepped inside the hidden door.
The warm lights of the hotel room gave way to a surprisingly dark but vast space. As her eyes adjusted, she found herself looking up into the face of a pink clay soldier. Startled, she backed away from it, and Thomas whispered, “Well, that’s a little disturbing.”
“At least the museum is closed now,” she whispered back. “I feel like we’re going to be smote for breaking one of these.”
“Probably,” Thomas agreed. “Do you think the angry spirits of mortals can smite gods? Because if so, I’m putting my money on this guy smiting us.” He gestured toward the clay soldier she’d been so close to when they stepped through the door, and the clay solider scowled back at them.
Ayla kept her eyes on the life-sized figure and said, “Grab a piece of it and let’s get out of here. This place is freaking me out.”
“Why do I have to break it?” Thomas protested.
“You have all sorts of magic in you, and your dad was a god of speed. You have a better shot of surviving if he comes to life and grabs you.” She thought about adding, “And he was the patron god of thieves, so it only seems fitting,” but decided against insulting the only god who could help her get home.
Thomas frowned at the statue and hissed, “All right, but if it moves, I’m not above opening another door and ditching you here.”
“Seems completely reasonable,” she pretended to agree.
Thomas approached the statue warily, reaching toward its hand with great hesitation. Just before his fingers touched the clay man, Ayla grabbed Thomas’s arm and exclaimed, “It’s alive!”
Thomas jumped and clutched his chest as she laughed, and although she felt a little guilty for scaring him, she was mostly happy for the first time in a very long time. He slowly grinned at her and warned, “Oh, it’s on, Sun-Moon Goddess. Just wait… I can enter any room I want.” Thomas snorted then shook his head. “Wait, that sounded really perverse and creepy. Forget that part.”
Ayla laughed again and nodded toward the statue. “Maybe he won’t mind losing a small piece of that spear.”
“Are you kidding me? A soldier would rather lose a finger than his weapon.”
She sighed and prodded, “Okay, then break off a finger so we can get out of here.”
Thomas reached for the terracotta soldier again, and this time, quickly broke off a piece of its finger. A loud, metallic crash followed, startling both gods. Thomas shot a “What the hell?” glance at her, but she shook her head and said, “Wasn’t me this time.”
They both slowly turned toward the scowling terracotta soldier, whose scowl hadn’t changed and whose body hadn’t moved. The same metallic banging echoed through the museum, and they gaped at each other as they realized someone was trying to break in.
“The key, Thomas!” she whispered frantically.
He stuffed a hand into his pocket to retrieve the key, but a section of ceiling creaked, its metal hinges giving way. The thick metal sheet was directly above them, and as it broke away, falling terrifyingly fast toward the gods below, Thomas threw himself on top of her, shielding her with his own body.
Ayla screamed and as she hit the hard ground, the air was knocked from her lungs. She screamed again when she realized Thomas would be crushed. But the sheet of metal unexpectedly changed course and crashed atop a section of terracotta soldiers, reducing the priceless artifacts to pinkish-orange rubble.
Above them, voices shouted, but they were speaking Chinese, and she’d never learned that language. But they were most likely human.
“Hunters,” she whispered. “Oh my God, Thomas, we have to get out of
here. Open a door to anywhere.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. He sat up and glanced at his hand then looked up at her, his eyes wide and scared. “Ayla, it was in my hand. My key! It’s gone!”
“No,” she groaned. “You must have dropped it when we fell. It has to be around here somewhere.”
Both gods ran their fingers through the powdery earthen floor as they searched for his key, but the hunters who’d somehow found them weren’t finished with their assault. The dim security lights cut out, throwing the museum into complete darkness.
“What the hell?” he muttered. “This just got a lot harder.”
Those voices moved closer, followed by the sounds of metal snapping. They’d just opened the main entrance, which meant the hunters were now in the museum with them.
Thomas’s hand found hers in the darkness and he gently pulled her along the tunnel toward a cross-section that might lead them to an exit. Those voices moved closer, following the sounds of their footsteps even though they’d been muted by the packed dirt of excavated paths. Thomas and Ayla paused by the intersecting tunnel, because the hunters’ footsteps had stopped, too.
She had no idea where the hunters were.
Thomas stepped carefully to the bend in the tunnel and listened, but the museum had fallen into an eerie silence. He glanced over his shoulder at her, but two thumps broke the silence. Feet landing on the stone path behind them.
“Run, Thomas!” Ayla yelled. She grabbed his arm and dragged him with her, igniting a fire in the tunnel between them and the hunters, but they heard running again, this time on the ground above them. And without the key, they were trapped in Xi’an.
As they reached an emergency exit, Thomas paused and seemed to concentrate on something. Sounds of confusion among the hunters followed, but she suspected it wouldn’t last long just as it hadn’t in Lake Charles. He pushed the emergency door open, and they tumbled into the cool, night air, where the moon lit a swath of pale light across the concrete entryway.
A gunshot pierced the darkness around them, pinging against the metal pavilion. Ayla bit her tongue so she wouldn’t scream, and Thomas pulled her to the ground. She kept her tongue firmly between her teeth, to prevent any errant screams as much as to prevent herself from asking Thomas what the hell he thought he was doing. They were easy targets now.
The trees and shrubs that dotted the walkways around the museum rustled, and Ayla carefully lifted her head, wondering if multiple snipers had been hiding in the foliage. No breeze disturbed them, but the rustling grew louder, accompanied by snaps like tree branches were breaking apart. Another gunshot, this one sending small chips of sharp concrete onto her skin.
The trees and shrubs rustled and crackled again, growing and moving as if they’d been transformed into giants. The hunters who’d been disoriented inside the museum spilled outside in time to see long, thick branches reaching toward them, unnaturally fast, supernaturally terrifying.
As limbs wrapped around screaming hunters, obscuring them from her sight, Thomas hurried to his feet, pulling her up with him. “I don’t want to kill them, Ayla,” he whispered.
“Then don’t,” she whispered back. “Let’s just run.” She didn’t ask him how he’d commanded the trees to trap the hunters, but she thought back to the university campus, the tree limb splintering and falling toward her uncle. She’d assumed he must have some kind of telekinesis over the world around him, but telekinesis couldn’t command trees to transform into monsters that could trap humans.
Shrubs towered into the sky as they passed them, vines snaking around the figure of a man who struggled against his confinement, but the vines didn’t yield. Like a boa constrictor, they tightened and stretched as he screamed. “Thomas,” she panted. “He’ll —”
“He’s the one who tried to shoot us. Twice.”
“All hunters will try to kill us, Thomas,” she argued, even as they kept running. “That’s what they do.”
Thomas slowed and glanced over his shoulder toward the man trapped in the vines. “All right,” he agreed. He finally stopped running, and Ayla put her hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. “But how are we getting out of China?” he asked. “If we let them live, we can’t go back to the museum to find my key. And we can’t fly out, because I don’t have my passport.”
Ayla groaned and stood up straighter, turning toward the museum with the grotesque trees and shrubs surrounding it, their vines and limbs concealing monstrous secrets. “We’ll become the gods we never wanted to be,” she said, her voice quiet and pained. “And they knew we were here. They must have figured out that book is missing from their library, and now, all sites where we can find the ingredients will be guarded.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Which means we either have to abandon this hope that we can reopen the veil or become as ruthless as they are. I’ll let you choose, Ayla, and I won’t try to convince you otherwise, but we’ve been caught in everyone’s crosshairs for centuries as lost gods. No one will help us. We’re on our own no matter what we do now.”
Ayla closed her eyes and listened to the moon as it sang its lullaby, soothing and peaceful, its song drifting over her like a mother’s caress. “I have to get to the Otherworld, Thomas,” she whispered. “But I can’t lose my soul to get there. Please.”
She heard him sighing again, so she opened her eyes. He took her hand and glanced toward the building where their only chance of getting out of China alive remained lost on the ancient brick floor by a row of Qin’s immortal soldiers. “All right, Ayla. I just wish these humans knew how good you really are.”
“Perhaps it no longer matters,” she said. “Perhaps this war is just as much about ridding the earth of gods as it is man attempting to master their world. And as long as we’re in it, they can’t control it.”
Thomas snickered and shook his head. “If that’s what they want, they’ll damn themselves.”
“Oh, Thomas,” Ayla said. “They already have.”
Chapter Fourteen
Through the borrowed days of centuries past, we learned to fear those we once sought to rule. Our fear will bring salvation to none but will destroy us all.
After going back to the terracotta soldier museum and finding Thomas’s key, they’d quickly returned to their hotel, leaving the hunters and security guards entangled in vines but alive. Ayla set her backpack on the bed and unzipped it, checking to ensure the small piece of statue and gold bracelet were still there, as well as the stolen book, and when she’d convinced herself they hadn’t lost what little they had to reopen the veil, she closed it again and took a deep breath, relieved but worried since the League now knew they had the book and were after the ingredients.
“What now?” she asked Thomas.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe we need to come clean with Leon. He may be able to help us figure out where we can find alternate sites.”
But Ayla shook her head and insisted, “No. We can be smarter about this. Let’s decode the next riddle and just avoid the most obvious places to find whatever it is.”
“And if there’s only one place to find it?”
Ayla picked at a fingernail as she thought about a solution that wouldn’t involve telling Leon what they were doing or killing anyone. No matter what, she wouldn’t become the kind of god these mortals sought to eradicate. She’d already lost everything else. She wouldn’t lose herself, too. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “But until we find Ma’at, we need to be careful, Thomas. I want you to be right about Leon.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Me, too. I’m going to see if he’s been looking for us. Xi’an took a little longer than we expected, and we don’t want him getting suspicious.”
Ayla nodded and yawned, the jet lag from her trip to Egypt and pursuit by hunters reminding her she’d gotten little sleep lately. She lay on the bed, clutching her backpack tightly to her chest like a security blanket. Thomas smiled at her and said, “Get some sleep. Deciphering riddles can wait a few hou
rs.”
Ayla’s eyes had already closed as if under their own spell, but she smiled back at him. By the time the door clicked closed, she’d fallen asleep.
When she heard soft rapping at her door, she groaned and rolled toward the clock, blinking at the red digital numbers before making sense of where she was and how long she’d been asleep. Almost four hours had passed, but she still held onto her backpack as if she’d been cuddling a teddy bear. She’d gotten used to sleeping that way a long time ago.
Ayla forced herself out of bed and trudged to the door, where Thomas kept glancing nervously down the hallway. She peppered him with questions as soon as she opened it: What was wrong? Had someone found them? Did they need to run?
Thomas shook his head and held up a hand to stop her. “It’s Leon. I haven’t been able to find him.”
“Oh,” she breathed. “Do you think he’s…” She didn’t want to accuse him, yet again, of betraying them, but what else were they supposed to think now?
Thomas ran his fingers through his hair and groaned. “I don’t know, Ayla. He was here before we left for China, and now he’s gone. No note or anything. If he just went out for lunch or something, he would have left a note, right? Or he’d be back by now.”
“We shouldn’t stay here,” she decided. “Just in case he went after reinforcements. The League knows we have the book, so if he really is working for them still, they may be planning some way not only to kill us but to make sure they get their book back.”
Thomas bit his lip, looking so distraught over the loss of someone he’d considered a friend that Ayla wanted to change her mind, to change his mind, and somehow bring the light back to his pale blue eyes. But she only grabbed her bag so they could open a door to anywhere and hide from the one man who could ruin everything for them now.
“Or,” Thomas countered, “he was captured by either hunters or Odin’s army. He could be in trouble.”
“If he was captured, he’s almost certainly dead.”
Days of Borrowed Pasts Page 11
