99 Gods: War
Page 30
On the other hand, after what Dubuque had labeled them, did they have any other choice?
And who in the hell had enough juice to give these two overpowered crazies a mission?
Atlanta backed off and dragged Dana with her. “So are we. At least to stop some of them,” Atlanta said.
“Portland’s on her way here,” Dana said. Meaning Dubuque and the other three.
“Another day, then?” Atlanta said. “Get us out of here,” she whispered to Dana.
They took off and flew south.
27. (Nessa)
Nessa kept a close eye on Atlanta and Dana as they rose into the stratosphere and took off to the south-southeast at well over the speed of sound. Fifty miles to the north, she sensed the Gods the bitch had mentioned on the way toward them, poking along at about two hundred miles an hour. “We did it, Ken,” Nessa said and flopped herself to the ground. She took off her sunglasses and gazed up at the twilit sky. A thick deck of black clouds bore in from the west, portending rain. Little flecks of dust raised from Atlanta and Dana’s rapid ascent rained down on her and she smiled. “We did it without any breakdowns or explosions from either of us. That was clean.”
Ken sat down beside her and Nessa maneuvered around to put her head in his lap. Scrubby brown grass wounded by early frost tickled her back. A quarter mile away trucks rumbled by on the Interstate, punctuated by the occasional hiss of air brakes and the rumble of the noisy engine brakes, trucks slowed from their cross-continental gallop by the minor rush hour of the Quad Cities. The smell of Chinese food from a nearby strip center restaurant wafted by, and Ken’s stomach rumbled into Nessa’s ear. “We did good. Was Dana right? Is there another God on the way?”
“Uh huh,” Nessa said. “Four of them, along with another hopped-up normal like Dana and three hopped-up normals of an entirely different stripe.” She sifted emotions through her mind, back and forth, and decided she liked Dana. A lot. For one thing, she didn’t reek of evil. If anything, the young woman was a serious goodie-two-shoes, deeper into the light than Nessa herself. Which made her pairing with Atlanta quite strange…
“Four? Plus hopped up normals? Shit shit shit!” Ken said, with a sudden high squeak voice of surprise. “Are they more or less dangerous than Dana? Do we need to get out of here?” He didn’t have Nessa’s range. However, Nessa didn’t understand what she picked up, other than ‘too much information all at once she couldn’t understand’, and she didn’t have the slightest sense of the danger involved, or what they might do about the situation.
By her estimation, Atlanta had significantly more oomph in her than Miami, and she still hadn’t been too much of a problem. But four? Four Miami-level Gods would plaster them. Four Atlanta-level Gods? Disaster didn’t come close to describing what would happen. Nessa didn’t trust her senses at all at this range, but all four had a weaker mind-glow than Miami. However, this new variety of hopped-up mortal might tip the confrontation. Ken was right.
“They’re different,” Nessa said. She scanned the three mortals with care. “I’m not sure, exactly, what their power level is. I can tell they have totally internal gifts.”
“That doesn’t sound bad,” Ken said, and chuckled. “They’re probably set up so they can survive Godly temper tantrums.”
“Given what we’ve seen, they need it,” Nessa said. “These Gods remind me of puppy dogs. House-training them is going to take far too many whacks on the nose. What happened to their sense of ethics and morality, anyway?”
“From great power, great hubris is expected,” Ken said. Nessa giggled. “Damn if I know. Perhaps they were turned into Gods without them.”
A spray of mist drifted out of the sky on to Nessa’s face, not even enough to wet all her face before it passed. Nessa smiled. The wind rose a little, kicking up dust. This place needed some rain.
“You’re beautiful, you know that, don’t you, Ken?”
“Me? You’re the one who’s beautiful.”
Nessa rolled her eyes and ran her fingers over Ken’s body until she found a pocket with a chocolate bar in it. She extracted it, unwrapped it, and started to eat. She started each day with four of them in her fanny pack, but by the end of the day they were always gone. Day. Bah. As soon as they found a place to settle down she would flip their day-night schedule again.
Ken went jogging in the evening when they weren’t otherwise occupied. Nessa had taken to coming along, trying not to show off, because she badly needed the exercise. Everything worked better when she exercised.
She munched chocolate. “My headache’s gone, even the residual one after Atlanta removed the curse or whatever it was.” The jogging nearly always got rid of her headaches. She made sure to eat well, beyond chocolate, and she hadn’t lost the weight she had gained before she joined Ken on his jogs. It seemed to be the right thing to do, but she didn’t know why, or care.
“I’m not surprised, given you got to whack Atlanta’s puppy dog nose several times. I ever tell you how much I love you?”
“Aren’t you jumping the gun by several weeks on the guy schedule?” Nessa said. He had professed his love for her when he proposed. That sort of comment usually lasted awhile, at least in Guy Time. “Okay, I give. How much do you love me? I assume you have it quantified and…”
Ken stuck a hand over her mouth. “I love you beyond the moon and the stars,” Ken said. “Beyond the mountains, above the plains, greater than the oceans…” Nessa licked the palm of his hand for shitting her. “How about I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone else?” Nessa grunted. Not the spontaneous romantic, Ken’s lines felt lifted from another source. Too much time as a private investigator. Too cynical. “You know, all the years we spent apart I always wondered if I would be able to love you, whether what I had was just an infatuation or…”
Nessa took Ken’s hand off her mouth. “Infatuation?”
“The idea of making love to another Telepath was always a secret turn on of mine,” Ken said. “Making love to you was far more than a mere turn on. There were times when I was almost overwhelmed by the desire. I always held back because, well, because I thought it a tiny bit indecent because I’d met you so young. Am I making any sense?” Nessa sighed and took another bite of chocolate. She knew she didn’t have any reason to complain, these days. The entire idea of romance had fled her system after the explosive lead-up to her divorce. At least romance from her perspective. She knew Ken considered her a bit of a helpless romantic at times. “So when we married, I had all these fears in the back of my mind that I wouldn’t be able to, um, perform with you, or I’d go nuts, or I’d find my feelings toward you were only physical. Guess what? None of my fears were correct. I’m closer to you than anyone before, including the best of times with Livie.”
“Uh oh, minus two points for Ken. Never compare your current lover with an ex.” Ken mock-frowned and tapped his long fingers of his right hand on Nessa’s forehead. “That’s very sweet of you,” Nessa said. “I know what you’re trying to say, even if you’re not saying it well.”
“Well, thanks.”
Nessa snorted. “When I’ve paired up before, it always starts out rocky, but over time my love grows. The only good thing about the early parts of relationships is the sex, or it was, until now. My love for you bloomed overnight. It’s so right. I can’t believe I almost turned you down.”
“You did?”
“I almost…” She covered her mouth, remembering a certain carefully loaded handgun. “I was trying to hurt you, you know,” she said, anyway. She had promised herself never to talk about this. The words blurted themselves out on their own. Well, things happened.
“I wondered.”
“Sort of like ‘how dare someone invade my boring and tidy life’ followed by ‘he will pay’ followed by ‘perhaps I can mess up his mind so he doesn’t know his own name any more’ sort of thoughts. Pardon the scattered grammar. I almost tossed your proposal back in your face, but something in it touched me. You cared. I was shocked
anyone still cared about me. My mental instabilities… I’d rather not think about what I must look like from the outside these days.” She hadn’t had time to properly wash her hair in days. No matter how often or thoroughly she brushed it, her waist-length hair refused to behave.
“You’ve never liked mirrors,” Ken said. The clouds above started to mist again, and Nessa opened up her mouth and stuck her tongue out. She liked the taste of the rain, even when it tasted dusty.
“I’ve never liked to look at the minds of people I talk to, and it’s so easy.” Nessa peeked at the progress of the Gods and their entourage, and found them less than five minutes away. “I don’t like to see what people think of me. It’s never any good.”
“Ah, yes,” Ken said. “The bane of us Telepaths. If everyone had to face themselves the way we do, our species would have killed itself off long ago.”
“Which is why I’m crackers.”
“Me too, if you recall. You were the one who taught me…”
“Yah, cutie, I remember,” Nessa said, interrupting.
The mist had grown heavier and the streetlights around the motel’s parking lot had turned on.
Ken had picked them up about a half mile out. The Gods and their entourage had slowed and were weaving about in the air, almost as if they didn’t know quite where to go.
The divine company landed in the motel’s parking lot, about a hundred feet away. They looked around, confused, and talked to each other in whispers.
In fact, the mental aspect of the two Gods she could sense appeared wounded in some unexplainable fashion. Their entourage still confused her. The black dude with Dana-like add-ons sensed as Dana-lite, by far the best of the lot. She still couldn’t figure out the other enhanced mortals, but they didn’t have much of the loaned God-stuff at all.
Nessa lowered their protections. “Yoo hoo. They went that-a-way,” she said, pointing south. The entire divine company turned as one – freaky, raising Nessa’s hackles – and stared at her. Nessa stared back, challenging them. They took the challenge and slowly levitated closer. Nessa noticed that each of the four Gods and the one senior flunky had cute invisible divine umbrellas above them. The lesser flunkies did not.
They landed in the grass fifteen feet away. “By ‘they’, miss, you mean Atlanta and her companion?” Dubuque said. After ignoring Dubuque’s subtle mental illusion, she saw that he looked much less impressive in person than in the internet pictures of him that Ken had showed her. Younger, more like a callow politician and less like a suave movie star.
“Yes,” Ken said. “We and Atlanta had a little confrontation.”
“You did well to fight them off,” Dubuque said. “I sensed the conflict from my place in Dubuque.”
“I’d rather we didn’t have to do so again,” Ken said. “I’m Ken Bolnick. This is my wife Nessa.”
“Phoenix,” the other male God said. Nessa got a glimpse of his mind and to her horror saw the twists in his mind marking him as mentally controlled, the weakest God she had met thus far. She scrabbled to her feet and helped Ken up, fighting panic. Ken grabbed her arm and mentally counseled patience.
“Montreal.” Montreal radiated beauty, her mind not as twisted as Phoenix’s, but still under the influence, no doubt about that. Flawed but not weak.
“I’m Portland. Glad to meet you.” The cipher. Even through the contact of an introduction, which should have given Nessa enough of an opening to worm through any set of mental defenses and pick up some approximations, Nessa picked up nothing at all. This one hid her power. Actively.
Neat!
“And I’m Dubuque,” their leader said. The puppet master. “I’m glad to meet the two of you. I’d heard rumors about a few mortals with mental powers who have met some of the other Living Saints, but I hadn’t had the pleasure myself.”
The Gods didn’t introduce the non-Gods. Nessa licked her lips and tried to smile. She didn’t succeed. “So, what’s going on anyway, Dubuque?”
“As you probably are aware, Atlanta’s gone rogue,” Dubuque said. “Why’d she seek you two out?”
“Atlanta wanted to force us to go with her,” Ken said. “We resisted.”
“It isn’t safe for you out here,” Dubuque said. “And it’s wet. Why don’t you come back to my home and we’ll talk some more?”
“I don’t think so,” Nessa said. She tilted her head up to let the light rain bead up on her face, and wiggled in enjoyment. “Pardon my paranoia, but the two of us have been attacked twice by Miami and once by Atlanta, and…”
“You shouldn’t fib to me,” Dubuque said. “That’s unwise around…”
That did it. Nessa despised patronizing bastards in general, and it fit that a mental puppeteer like Dubuque would be yet another one. The r
ain flashed off her face as her battle protections settled in around her. In hand mode her teek could move papers around at best, but as a static protective shield she could bounce bullets. “Fuck you,” Nessa said and glared at Dubuque. What a piece of shit. She readied a mental blast, but Ken gave her a mental ‘not yet’ nudge and she held back. “Okay, Ken was alone when he got rumbled by Miami the first time. I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I misspoke. Better?”
Dubuque puffed out his chest. “Lady, I’m not sure I appreciate your…”
Nessa stalked forward until she was close enough to have to look up to the tall God. “Back off, buster.” She found comments about her attitude as bad as someone patronizing her. Added together, enough was too much. She hit him with a small mental jab to get him to back off.
Chaos. A dozen different varieties of shields flared around all the Gods. Dubuque staggered back, naked for a moment, his clothes mere illusions, his body revealed to be a mottled silver like Miami’s had been and Atlanta’s hadn’t (though Nessa suspected that was because she hadn’t hit Atlanta hard enough). Portland and Phoenix raised arms and yellow clouds of power rolled across the few intervening feet, and bounced harmlessly off Ken and Nessa’s standard outer shields. Montreal, however, projected her divine power right through their outer and inner shields, nothing visible, some sort of insinuation.
Nessa growled and glared. Montreal’s attack hadn’t directly harmed Nessa, but it made her horny as hell and gave Ken an aching urgent hard-on. Nessa took a moment to understand the thrust of Montreal’s attack, and slammed a new set of shields around herself and Ken. The lust evaporated into the misty air. That would have been just ducky, screwing like imbeciles on the ground in front of Dubuque and his divine flunkies.