“That she’s a little bit closer to immortality,” Amy said. “The same thing Samantha is trying to accomplish.”
“How many pieces does Samantha have?” he asked.
Amy shook her head. “I do not know. Many. She also has the powers of at least one Auseklis, the energy of the mortal souls, and the backing of the underworld. We need a better strategy.”
“Have you been talking with Laima?” I asked. “Can she help us?”
The three of them exchanged a look, as if there was something they didn’t want to tell me. It was Melissa who spoke.
“Laima gave us one last message for you. But she said not to tell you unless you asked. She’s incarcerated.”
My jaw dropped. “Did Samantha capture her?”
Amy shook her head. “She said it was Perkons. It’s both to keep her safe and to punish her. She is being blamed for not preventing Samantha’s rebellion.”
Great. Now I felt responsible for the goddess who hadn’t been much help to me to begin with.
Trey cleared his throat. “One more thing. Can we help Meredith?”
Oh, Meredith. I turned my attention to her, embarrassed I hadn’t thought of her already. “Her wound won’t heal.” I gestured toward the bandage and looked at Melissa. “How can we help her?”
She leaned forward. “Is it magically infected?”
“No,” Trey said, but he sounded less certain. “I don’t think so.”
“She’s a ragana,” Norma said. “She should be able to heal it.”
“She doesn’t know how yet,” Trey said, frustration in his voice. “We’re a pretty weak team.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Meredith growled.
Amy looked at me. “She’s still a child. You have the power to nudge her fate.”
“She can’t do anything either,” Trey said, speaking for me. I shot him a murderous glare.
“Come, I’ll show you how.” Amy stepped to my side and put her head near mine. “You have to see her soul’s energy. It will be a light yellow or orange. Can you see it?”
I squinted and crossed my eyes, but nothing appeared. I willed myself to see something. Anything.
“It will come. Just keep trying.”
“What do you do when you see it?”
“Summon a vision of her life.”
Of her life. The words jolted me like an electric shock. I’d always thought of it as seeing their deaths. But it really was their lives. All the way to the end. “Then what?”
“Then you find a better path, if there is one. If it serves her better to take it, bring it to the forefront of her mind. She still gets to choose, but you brighten the option.”
“How do I find a better path? How do I see other options?”
“You’ll know,” Melissa said. “You’ll see all of them. In the blink of an eye. All her futures. All her possibilities.”
The idea was mind-boggling, and I pressed a hand to my forehead. “And you don’t get overwhelmed?”
Amy turned her attention back to Meredith. “Not when you have hundreds of years of experience to draw upon, no. Let me show you.” She locked eyes with Meredith, and then Meredith let out a laugh.
“I know what to do now,” she said. “I know what we did wrong.”
“How does she know?” I demanded.
Amy gave me a patient smile. “There were really only two choices here. Either she understood how to do the spell, or she didn’t. It was always in there for her to know. I helped her remember.”
Even as I watched, Meredith unwrapped her ankle. “I have to trace the symbol. I’m the only one who can use the runes.” She traced a symbol on her leg and whispered an incantation. Before our eyes, the wound puckered and healed.
“Wicked,” Beth said. “Can we do that?”
“No,” Amy said. “You are a goddess, not a witch.”
“But your powers are pretty cool, too,” Meredith said, looking at me.
I grunted. “Yeah. If I can figure out how to use them.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Norma wanted to stay with us while we talked battle plans. Melissa worried the concentration of all of us in one place would attract Samantha’s attention, but Amy reminded her that the cathedral shielded us.
“Besides,” she said, “Norma isn’t immortal any more. It’s Beth who is likely to attract the most attention.”
I looked at my younger sister, now brimming with the power of two pieces of Karta’s immortal soul. I felt a tiny stab of jealousy but quickly brushed it down. The only reason she had the extra power was because I caused her to lose the first one to begin with.
“I’ve got a question,” Meredith said. She was definitely more chatty since healing her ankle. “Samantha was able to reach out to the gods. How?” She held her smart phone in her hand. Her finger stroked the case, and I knew she was desperate to turn it on and pull up a search engine.
“We don’t really have a clue how she did it,” Melissa said. “Laima probably does, but even if she could reach us, she decides when to contact us and what to say.”
“And why is that?” I said, jumping on an issue that had been bothering me for months. “Does she see our futures and decide what information we need to know?”
Nobody had an answer. When I met Trey’s eyes, he shrugged.
“The point is, we don’t have any way of finding out,” Melissa said. “We could go to a library, but there’s hardly anything about Latvian mythology. It’s obscure and relatively unknown. And we don’t have time to fly to Latvia and interview the locals.”
“Not to mention we wouldn’t be able to speak their language,” Meredith murmured.
“Wait a minute,” I said, snapping my fingers. Criminy. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? “I know a guy!” I pulled my purse into my lap and began digging through it, tossing gum wrappers and pencil stubs and old receipts onto the bench in my search. “Here!”
I placed the business card face up on my thigh for everyone to see. The contents of my purse had changed it so it was no longer crisp and white, but there was his name and his phone number. Professor Kestovely.
“Who is this?” Meredith asked, intrigued.
“This is a professor of mythology who specializes in the Baltic Sea area. I met him at a university in New York.” I beamed at them. “He’ll have the answers we need!”
Beth brightened, but Melissa shook her head. “Nobody has the answers. Nobody knows.”
“We can try,” Amy said.
“But I need a phone,” I said, holding out my hand.
Melissa gave Amy a wan smile as she slapped her phone into my palm. “I’m starting to think I should just give it to her.”
“Might not be a bad idea,” Meredith said. “Jayne and I are both journalists. We can find a lot of stuff.”
Trey snorted, apparently unable to stay quiet any longer. “Jayne and Meredith are both in high school, just like I am. We’re all taking a journalism class.”
“Jayne’s more than that,” Meredith sniffed. “She’s an investigative journalist. She gets to work at the editorial office.”
I only half listened to their defense or lack of it while I put the professor’s number into the phone. Then I hit the call button, anxiety ratcheting up my heart rate and making my throat dry. Would he think I was crazy with my new questions? He’d been very intrigued the first time we met.
He didn’t answer, and I was both relieved and disappointed when the voicemail kicked on. “Hi, Professor Kestovely, this is Jayne Lockwood. We met for lunch a few weeks ago. I had questions about Latvian mythology? You said I could call if I had anything else, and I do. I promise I won’t take up a lot of your time, but please call me back at—” I slid my eyes to Melissa, and she fed me the digits while I spoke into the answering machine. “Thank you very much.”
“Well.” I placed the phone on my thigh, hoping he would call soon. “Now we wait. Why don’t we all go back to our hotel room? As long as we don’t use our powers
, Samantha won’t be able to find us.”
“No powers,” Melissa said. “No magic.” Her eyes swept sideways to include Meredith.
Meredith nodded. “We’ll keep it safe.”
I hopped off the bench, and we moved toward the chapel doors. Trey paused, then bent down and picked up a rock. He bounced it in his hand and squinted at me.
“What are you—” I began, just as he chucked the rock at my head.
My arm shot up reflexively, darting in front of my face before I could even think. The rock slammed into my palm with so much force that I cried out. I dropped it and flipped my palm over, examining the blood leaking from the cut.
“Why did you do that?” I gasped out.
Trey’s expression was grim as he studied me. “That’s the second time I’ve seen you react to danger instinctively.”
“Any normal person would do that!”
“No, any normal person would duck. Maybe cover their head. But they’d also move too slowly and still get hit.”
“That doesn’t mean you can throw rocks at my head!”
“You reacted exactly as I hoped you would,” Trey said.
“Jayne?”
Melissa’s voice called my attention. I looked to where she stood in the doorway to the cathedral, phone to her ear.
“Yes, she’s here. Let me get her.” Melissa stepped up to me and handed me the phone. “It’s the professor guy.”
I took the phone and pressed it to my ear. “Professor, thank you so much for getting back to me!” I followed Melissa and Trey as I talked, through the chapel and out the entrance. Trey gave a quick scan of the area before ushering us toward his truck.
“Not a problem, Jayne,” the professor said, a slight tremor in his voice giving away his age. “I’ve been intrigued by you since the first time we met. What other mythological questions do you have for me today?”
I took a deep breath. “You mentioned that Karta would sometimes make a deal with the other gods. How would she contact them?”
“Well, I imagine they knew how to reach each other. Perhaps they lived in proximity to each other. Maybe they visited frequently. It’s not as if they had cell phones and could text each other.” He chuckled.
“Right,” I said, giving my own little laugh, but the wheels in my head were already spinning. Text message! Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“Of course, at this point I’m simply theorizing. Their ability to communicate with each other is taken for granted, so nothing I’ve read or heard has given me any indication one way or the other.”
I was suddenly anxious to get off the phone, but one thing he said broke through my excitement. “Heard? What do you mean? Hasn’t your research been based on historical texts?”
“I wouldn’t very much be an authority on the subject if I hadn’t gone to the primary sources, now, would I?” He sounded amused. “I’ve gone back to Latvia and the Baltic region many times over the years. A lot of my knowledge is based on firsthand conversations and interviews with the natives.”
I nodded, suddenly confident that I had found the best source of information other than Laima herself, and she wasn’t forthcoming, especially not from jail. “You’ve been amazing. Do you mind if I call you later if I have any more questions?”
We had reached the parking lot now, and Trey held the door of the truck while Beth and Meredith climbed in. Amy and Melissa said goodbye to Norma and came to stand by us. Trey bobbed on his feet, maintaining a vigilant watch on the area.
“Please do. Are you ever going to tell me what this is for?”
I had to smile. There was no way I could ever tell him. “Just satisfying my curiosity.”
“That I understand. I hope to have mine satisfied one day also.”
I barely registered our cordial goodbyes, my mind already tripping. I looked straight at Melissa and Amy and tried to contain my excitement.
“We contact Laima using a cell phone. We can contact the other gods the same way.”
Melissa’s eyebrows shot up. “That makes sense. There’s just one problem. We don’t have any of their numbers.”
Trey tilted his head, a glimmer in his eyes. “This won’t be hard. The other gods’ numbers are probably variations of Laima’s.”
*~*
Trey visibly relaxed when he parked the truck at the hotel. “No magic,” he reminded us.
“We won’t,” I said. I crossed my fingers that Jumis’ visit during the night hadn’t triggered any magical alarms.
Meredith hurried into the room and picked up the notepad from the day before. She scribbled Laima’s phone number across the top as the rest of us filed in. “Okay. I’m just going to write down the letters that correspond with these numbers and see if I can make out a phrase or something pertinent.”
“One-eight-hundred-Laima,” I said, cracking up.
“Hey, that’s an idea,” Meredith said. “Let me try to match up her name first.” She wrote Laima’s name underneath the number. “I got it. The first two digits are five-five, and then the last five digits are the letters of her name.” She looked up at us. “I have a file online with all of the gods listed. We can try it to create phone numbers with their names.”
“Hey, you’re smart,” Trey said.
Meredith arched an eyebrow at him.
“What?” he said, tugging on his ear lobe. “It was a smart idea. And you’ve already got the names, so . . . that was clever also.”
“I’m always smart,” Meredith said. “I’m one of the smartest kids in my class. But that doesn’t stop you from being snotty.”
“I’m not always,” he said. He shifted his eyes, casting them to the horizon out the window.
“Fantastic detective work,” Melissa said, redirecting the conversation. “Let’s run with this.”
Meredith used the business center in the lobby to print off her list of names. Trey turned the TV back on while she made up numbers for them, and the rest of us sat on the bed and pretended to be interested.
“I’ve got it,” Meredith said, stretching her arms above her head. “A few of them have names that are too long, but most of them I could create a number for.”
“Let’s test this theory,” Melissa said, standing at Meredith’s shoulder. “Who should we contact?”
Amy leaned in also, reading the names. “Maybe Mara. Perkons. Zalktis. Ursins or Jumis.”
I flinched when she said the last name. Trey glanced at me, but I gave nothing more away.
“Not Perkons,” Melissa said. “I’m sure he’s aware of the situation and would contact us if he wanted. Not Mara either. Sometimes she’s gets so obsessed with winter she doesn’t mind a little death.”
“The other three, then,” Amy said.
“We should make sure the numbers work,” Meredith said, “before we ask for help. Make sure it’s who we think it is.”
“On it,” Melissa said, already sending out text messages.
I bit down hard on a nail. I hoped Jumis wouldn’t respond.
Melissa stared down at her phone and we all stared at her, obviously waiting for an immediate response. When none was forthcoming, Trey roused himself.
“I’m taking Jayne and Beth to the gym. We need to work on skills.”
“Skills?” I sputtered, but he already had me by the elbow and was hauling me out.
“Quit grabbing me,” I growled, pulling free.
He used his key card to open the gym door and waited for us to enter. “I want to see what you two can do.” He left us standing in the middle of the room and backed away.
I glanced at my sister and then looked at him, arching an eyebrow. “What we can do?”
Trey nodded. “I saw your reflexes take over during the battle. Your sister now has twice as much goddess powers as you do. Beth might reawaken to her past experiences before you do, but I need to see that you’re coming along also.”
How did he make that seem like an insult? I looked at my sister, and she shrugged.
“
I guess you should throw a punch at me or something,” Beth said.
“I’m not going to punch you,” I scoffed.
She cracked a grin. “You can try.”
I grumbled, but I was more worried of looking like a helpless idiot in front of Trey than actually injuring my sister. I threw a half-hearted punch her direction, which she easily blocked.
“Come on,” she said. “I saw you hit Samantha harder than that.”
“Yeah, she was threatening my sister.”
Beth’s eyes gleamed. “Pretend like I’m her.”
I let out another long-suffering sigh and aimed for her face this time.
She laughed and batted my hand away.
“Jayne.” Trey strode into the midst of us, not hiding his annoyance. He made a fist and pulled back his arm, and I readied myself. But instead of aiming for me, he directed the punch at my sister.
The observation was instantaneous, and I knew what he was going to do only seconds before his fist connected with her skin.
Except it never did. Somehow my left hand thrust itself in front of his, shoving his arm away from her. I barely registered the action before he swept the leg behind me, trying to knock me off my feet.
This time it was Beth coming to my defense, her right hand karate-chopping down to slam into the back of his knee.
“Who trained you for combat?” I gloated at him.
“My grandpa,” he said, aiming another kick at my sister, which both of us blocked. “What’s your excuse?”
Beth grabbed his arm when he attempted to slam his hand into my neck. She twisted it behind him, forcing him onto his tiptoes. To his credit, the only sound Trey made was a little grunt. Beth placed her hands on both shoulders and shoved him into the ground before sitting on his belly.
“I won!” she crowed.
“Great job.” Trey shoved her off and sat up. “Two goddesses against one human boy. You should feel proud.”
Well, when he put it that way, it didn’t feel like much. “But we were fighting,” I said. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“You guys were just goofing off. You weren’t reacting—” he paused, his jaw squaring. “There might have been one moment,” he said thoughtfully.
Coercion (Goddess of Fate Book 3) Page 16
