Pursued by the Gods

by Rebekah Murdock

  “Where are we going?” I glanced behind me at Kavi, who was just walking up.

  “No questions,” Toven said softly. He stepped closer to me, rubbing his hands over my upper arms. “Trust me, Ravenna, please?”

  “The last time I trusted you…”

  “…I saved your lives,” he finished. “And I haven’t mentioned it, but if you’d stayed in Vegas like you’d promised me, I might not have had to.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but he shook his head. “It’s in the past, Ravenna. What’s done is done. But now I have to get you to safety, real safety. So, trust me, please?”

  I nodded. We followed him to the plane, Kavi and Isa and I, with Amelie the witch bringing up the rear. We’d only just stepped onto the plane when I stopped dead in my tracks. In front of one of the plush leather seats, a massive snake lay coiled, his head—which was almost as long as my forearm—laying atop those coils. His black eyes fixed on mine, and I shuddered.

  “Toven?” I said, leaning towards him and whispering, “There’s a snake on this plane.”

  “I know,” he said grimly. “It’s Amelie’s. She says her power won’t work without him.”

  “Have you ever seen the Indiana Jones movies?”

  “No?” he said quizzically. “Why?”

  “I hate snakes,” I said emphatically, and stalked past it with no little effort, taking the seat furthest away. I hoped it was a short flight.

  ---

  Exhausted, I fell asleep on the plane. Hours later, I woke to stillness, and sat bolt upright, my heart pounding. It took a moment for me to remember I was no longer in the cell, that I was safe, at least for now. I blinked, and saw the plane was empty except for me—even the snake was gone, to my relief.

  I hurried down the aisle. The door was open, and I scurried down the stairs…and landed in soft sand, the air thick and humid around me. Without thinking, I shucked off my jacket and sweater, stripping down to the tank top beneath, pushing a lock of hair out of my eyes. A fine sheen of sweat had already sprang up on my forehead.

  Some ways down the beach, I saw Toven, Kavi and Isa in a circle talking, and further down the witch and the long, slithering form of her snake, so far away that I could hardly make them out. I jogged across the sand until I reached them, panting.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Is this where we were going?”

  Toven nodded, and I saw Kavi and Isa exchange a glance. “What’s going on?” I repeated.

  “This is where you’ll be staying,” Toven said gently. “This is your new home, the three of you.”

  “What do you mean?” I stared at him. “Here? I don’t even know where we are. On an island? Why?”

  “It’s harder to get to,” Toven explained. “Even without the protections. There’s a small village of people here, they don’t leave the island. They have all they need here—homes, a small store, schools, plenty of livestock, places to graze it. In two centuries, no one else has ever come here, that’s why I felt confident doing this.”

  “Doing what?” I looked at Kavi and Isa. “What is he talking about?”

  “The witch is putting up a protective spell around the island,” Kavi said. “It will prevent anyone from knowing we’re here, and anyone from coming in. The others on the island can leave if they want, and I suppose we could, but we won’t be.”

  “But, what about Vegas? That was going to be our home. It’s a sanctuary city, we would have been safe.”

  “Kavi was right about one thing,” Toven said. “Las Vegas is full of crime. The gods could send an assassin, and kill you, and get away with it without a second thought. Perhaps that won’t always be the case…but it’s not safe there. And anywhere else…you’d still always be on the run, always looking over your shoulder. This is what you wanted, Ravenna. This is what all three of you wanted. A place to call home, a safe place where you could make a life…a real life, and not always live in fear. You can have that here. Forever.”

  “If no one can come in once the spell is finished…” my eyes widened and I swallowed hard. “I’ll never see you again.”

  Toven looked away, and I saw Kavi and Isa retreat, walking down the beach to give us some space. “Ravenna…”

  “Toven, no!” I grabbed his hand. “We’ve only just begun this and you just saved my life! Our lives! And now you’re going to leave? You said…”

  “I know what I said, Ravenna.” He reached for me, one hand going to touch my cheek, his fingers tracing the edge of my jaw. “And I meant it. I love you. I love you in the way I always dreamed I never would. I would do anything for you, to keep you safe, to know you were happy. And I am doing this. You will live in peace here, with the men you love, without fear or danger. I can give you that, and I will. I am.”

  “And you?” My voice was choked, full of tears. “What will you do?”

  “I’ll live my life as I always have. Giving out good fortune to those who deserve it, taking a little luck away from those who don’t, charming my way through my existence.” He smiled sadly. “But mostly I’ll think of you, Ravenna, and how the time I’ve known you, however short, was the best in all the time I lived. Even if it nearly got me killed.”

  “So this is goodbye?”

  “Not forever,” he said. “Every ten years, the spell will have to be strengthened, to be sure it will hold. And on that day, every ten years, when Amelie comes back to do that, I’ll come with her. I promise, Ravenna.”

  “Ten years is a long time,” I whispered.

  “Not for us. Not when you live forever.”

  He kissed me then, and I tasted the salt on his mouth as the sea wind sprang up, whipping my loose hair away from my face and then around us both, tangling with his as I reached up, my hands on his face, in his hair, touching him everywhere that I could. “I promise, Ravenna,” he whispered as he kissed me, tears running down his face and catching on our lips. “By all the gods, I swear it.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” I whispered. I was crying too, and I pressed my forehead to his, my hands in his hair. He gripped my waist, pulling me against him, and I closed my eyes, trying to remember the shape of his body against mine, the way we fit together. “One night wasn’t enough.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he said. “But we’ll have another.”

  “Yes,” I whispered, and I kissed him again, breathing in the scent of him, leather and lavender, and the salt wind all around us. “We’ll have another.”

  ----

  Some days, I think that this is what heaven would have been for us, if we had ever had any hope of such a thing.

  The island where Toven brought us was small, mostly wild, with a tiny village on the far side of it. A handful of families lived there—ran a small country store, a school, and a church. It was ironic, if you thought about it too hard—the god who made their island a fortress without them ever knowing about it wasn’t the one they worshiped there. It was one they had maybe never even heard of, and certainly didn’t believe in. But the witch’s spell would protect them as surely as it protected us.

  You would think that perhaps we’d miss civilization. We’d hoped once to make a home in Las Vegas, and this couldn’t have been more different from that. But for us, it was the kind of idyll that we’d never dreamed we could have again. For Kavi, Isa, and I, it was as if we’d gone back a hundred and fifty years, to the days when we first met, when I was a young woman who went hunting in the woods and fell in love entirely by accident.

  All that was missing were the other people I’d loved back then—my family, the friends I’d grown up with. Their absence was the only thing that reminded me from time to time that this was not, in fact, paradise.

  But it was very close.

  We built a cottage on a bluff overlooking the ocean, log by log, Isa doing the bulk of the heavy lifting while Kavi and I helped cut and hew the wood. We ventured into the village every week to buy food and the things we needed for our home, and bit by bit it came together. I stood
on the threshold a few months after we had arrived, looking inside the small, one-room building that we had created, a fire crackling at the far end, and felt for the first time since we had left my childhood home that we had one of our own at last.

  The seasons passed, from summer to fall to winter and back again to spring, and we fell into a rhythm, our days full of tending to our garden and the handful of small livestock we’d acquired, all the mundane daily chores that came with an ordinary life. I finally learned to cook, although it was never more than passably good. Isa hunted, and Kavi took pleasure in learning to grow things. We slept in the bed that Isa and Kavi built, and we made love without ever fearing it might be the last time. Sometimes I lay in bed between the two of them, or tangled up with Kavi mid-afternoon while Isa was out hunting, and tried to remember what it had been like to fear their loss. I wanted to forget, but I also knew, somewhere deep in my bones, that I needed to remember. I needed it, in order to know what a precious thing we had.

  Kavi learned to fish. I took up weaving. And I wrote. I wrote constantly, in between my chores in the afternoons, by candlelight at night after the men had gone to sleep. I was possessed by a deep need to put everything that had happened down somewhere in ink, to remember even in this dreamlike perfection that what we had lived through for so long had been real. That he had been real.

  We hardly spoke of him. Kavi, it seemed, could never wholly reconcile how nearly we had come to our destruction through his misjudgment, and I thought it was difficult for Isa to remember how helpless he had been to protect us. Neither of them liked to think of how much we truly owed Toven. And after all, they hadn’t loved him.

  But I had. On that terrible night when he had laid himself bare to me, body and soul, when he had shown me how much he loved me and how he feared it, I had loved him in return. It had been altogether different from what I felt for Kavi and Isa, and no less true for that. We had one night together, and I clung to that memory, hoping that he did as well.

  Ten years, he had said. Ten years before I could see him again. To me, it should have been nothing, but I often wondered if he would come back when those ten years had passed. After all, he was a god, and a fickle one at that. Perhaps he would forget me, counting the love he had felt for me better if it were lost.

  So I held the memory close to my heart, and I waited, and in the afternoons when I was alone, I would close my eyes and whisper a prayer to the goddess he had told me about, the one who had lost everything she knew for love. We had something in common, she and I.

  In the life I had on the island, Toven had given me a gift every bit as precious as the one Kavi had given me. Kavi had given me immortality, and Toven had given me the means to truly live it, and by extension, Kavi and Isa too. I knew that that gift was a token of his love as surely as the one Kavi had given me was. And yet…the thought always stayed in the back of my mind that ten years was a long time, and longer still when we had had so little time together to begin with.

  I waited. Day after day, night after night, and the years passed. A thousand mundane moments went by in those years, days of happiness and normalcy with Kavi and Isa that I had hardly dared to hope we could have. The days of long roads and cheap motels seemed so far away that we could hardly remember them, another life that someone else had lived.

  I lay in bed with them at night sometimes, awake after they had gone to sleep, and I could hardly believe our good fortune.

  Epilogue

  Ravenna

  Ten Years Later

  They knew to let me be that morning. I choked down breakfast, nibbling at the strawberries we had picked from our garden the day before, and hardly spoke. I saw Kavi and Isa exchange glances, and Isa opened his mouth as if to say something, but Kavi shook his head. When I had picked up a strawberry and set it down for the third time, Kavi reached across the table and touched my hand. “Go to the bluff, Ravenna. If he comes, you should be there waiting for him.”

  I nodded, my throat suddenly so choked with fear and longing that I couldn’t speak. I got up from the table, my legs wooden as I walked across the cottage and out into the bright sunshine, nearly blinding me as I opened the door and stepped outside. I hardly noticed it, hardly heard the chirping of the birds or felt the warmth on my skin. I was cold all the way through, my heart pounding in my chest as I thought one thing over and over:

  Please be there. Please, please be there.

  I strode through the grass, blind to everything except the bluff ahead of me, where I would be able to look down and see if he were waiting for me on the beach below. I couldn’t help but think of another sunny day a century and a half ago, when I had gone to a stream with my heart pounding in my throat, wondering if a man that I loved would meet me there.

  He had, and he had never left my side since. I had no idea if Toven—who had had no choice but to leave—would be there.

  I reached the edge of the bluff and shaded my eyes with my hand, looking down over the sparkling blue water. For a moment I couldn’t see, and then my vision cleared, and I saw two figures on the beach, one a woman striding down the stretch of sand, the other a man looking up.

  He was looking up at me. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was him.

  I think I shouted his name. All I remember is running down the side of the bluff, my blue skirt tangling around my ankles, tripping and stumbling as I rushed towards him, my heart in my throat.

  And then…his arms around my waist, his forehead pressed to mine, and the scent of him all around me, taking me back to the last time we had embraced on that same beach, ten years before.

  It was as if not a moment had passed.

  “Ravenna.” He breathed my name, his hands on my face as he searched every inch of it, drinking me in. “Gods, Ravenna, I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you,” I whispered. “I thought of you every day. I thought…I thought you might forget me.”

  He swallowed hard, shaking his head, and to my astonishment I thought I saw tears spring into his eyes. “Never, Ravenna. Not if a million years pass and the earth is swallowed whole! I would never forget you. How could I?” He kissed me then, hard, one hand sliding into my hair as his tongue swept into my mouth. I’d left it down for him, loose and tumbling over my shoulders, and he gathered it in his fist, holding me hard against him. My back arched as I pressed against him, the evidence of how much he wanted me solid between us. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved,” he whispered against my mouth, breathing hard. “You always will be.”

  We ended up at the edge of the trees on the bluff, a blanket spread beneath us. He leaned over me as I lay back, his fingers caressing my face as he looked at me, love and pain and longing etched on every bit of his own. “We don’t have long,” he murmured. “When Amelie is done…”

  “I know,” I whispered. “You’ll have to go again. Ten more years,” I felt tears prick at my eyelids then. “It’s a long time to be apart.”

  “Let’s not talk about it now,” he said softly. “For now, let’s pretend that we have all the time in the world.”

  He unbuttoned my blouse slowly, caressing my skin as each one came free, spreading the thin white material apart so that my breasts were bare to the sun and cool breeze. He pressed his face to my throat as he cupped one in his palm, his fingers tracing over the nipple until it sprang up, hard and sensitive, and I moaned aloud, reaching for him.

  I ran my hands up beneath his shirt, pulling it up and over his head, and then I reached for the button of his jeans, undoing them as quickly as I could manage, pushing them down so I could take him in my hand, hard and throbbing in my grip. He groaned, nipping lightly at the soft skin of my neck, and I writhed beneath him.

  “I wanted to take this slowly,” he breathed, his green eyes gone dark as his hips rocked forward, thrusting into my hand. “Gods, Ravenna, I want you so badly.”

  “Then don’t wait,” I whispered, letting go of him and reaching up to encircle my arms around his neck.
<
br />   He was atop me then, pushing my skirt up to my hips, one hand pushing my thighs apart as he slid his fingers down the apex of them, groaning low in his throat when he felt how wet I was. “I need you,” he whispered, leaning over me, and I arched my hips up to meet him as he pressed against me, sliding into me inch by inch as I gasped, one hand going to the side of his face as I kissed him.

  I came with the first thrust, ten years of longing and anticipation culminating in a wash of pleasure that raced over my body with a strength that took my breath away. I clung to him as if I were drowning, my tongue tangling with his as I kissed him, my moans lost between us as he plunged into me, his every muscle tense with the effort it took to hold back. “I won’t last long,” he whispered against my mouth. “I can’t…Ravenna!” He thrust into me again, and I felt him hot and impossibly hard inside of me as he came suddenly, his body convulsing with the force of it. I held him against me, my nails digging into his shoulders as I ground against him, drawing every bit of his pleasure into me as I lost myself to the sheer bliss of it—skin against skin, the scent of his sweat mingled with the grass and flowers all around us.

  He sighed as he sank against me. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I wanted it to be better…slower. Longer.” He shook his head as he rose up, rolling to his side as he looked at me.

  “It’s alright,” I said. “It’s been a long time.” I felt suddenly self-conscious, now that the moment was over. He was magnificently nude, careless of it, and I knew I must look a mess—my hair tangled around my face, my shirt fallen open, my skirt around my waist. I went to tug it down, but he grabbed my hand. “Don’t,” he murmured. “I want to remember you like this—the way you look after I’ve just been inside you.” He ran one fingertip down my neck, over my collarbone. “Your skin flushed, the way you can’t quite catch your breath, how beautiful you look. I want to remember all of it.” He sighed. “I haven’t been with any other woman since the day I left you on the beach.”