Cities of the Gods (The Unbreakable Sword Series Book 2)

by S. M. Schmitz

  Cameron sat up straighter and put the menu down. “Of course I worry about it. Sometimes, it feels like that’s all I think about anymore. If Quinn weren’t a traitor, he’d vouch for me here: I wasn’t all that invested in his group until you came along. Wait. That sounds weird and creepy again. Let me think how to reword that.”

  Selena smiled at him and stopped picking at her fingernail. “I know what you mean. You never wanted anything to do with any of the gods, but you can’t completely fight what’s in you. When you saw me, it started changing you.”

  Cameron sighed and picked up the menu again, but his eyes weren’t even scanning it. He seemed to be looking through it.

  “Why were you trying to find out more about your ancestry if you wanted nothing to do with them?” Selena asked.

  Cameron flipped the menu over, but she didn’t think he was reading that side either. “Curiosity, I guess. And maybe some absurd hope that one of our gods could make me different.”

  “Oh, Cameron,” Selena breathed.

  He looked up at her and smiled, but it wasn’t his playful, sexy smile. “I don’t regret it now, Selena. I’m glad I met you and I wouldn’t change myself now. You need my help and if I were different, then how could I protect you or help you find the Unbreakable Sword?”

  “But you would have never known. If it were possible to switch off these gifts and you’d never met me and learned about any of this, you could have just had a normal life and been happy.”

  Cameron lifted a shoulder and pretended to study the menu again. “I doubt it. I think a part of me would have always known something was missing. Some things are just in us, Selena. And I think you’re just in me.”

  Some things are just in us, Selena. And I think you’re just in me.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Some things are.”

  Chapter Six

  Selena felt a hand touch her shoulder and heard someone whispering her name. Before she even opened her eyes or her brain fully awoke, she knew Cameron, as if she would know his presence anywhere, but she tried to place herself amidst these other unfamiliar sounds: a low steady humming, the canned laughter of a sitcom audience. She rolled over and saw Cameron standing beside her bed, fully dressed with Mjölnir in his other hand. She sat up and blinked at the television and was only mildly surprised that a rerun of Cheers was playing.

  “What…?” she tried to ask, but Cameron quickly hushed her.

  “Ukko and his men are outside. I have to get you out of here. Now.”

  Selena pushed the blankets off her and sat up, her eyes searching the curtains of the window as if she could see through them and spot the gods outside who had come to kill her and Cameron. “What about Anita? We can’t just leave her here.”

  Cameron shook his head. “Badb will have to help her escape. You said you trust her. I need you to trust me.”

  Selena grabbed her shoes from the floor and shot Cameron a sharp look. “Of course I trust you. But if they’re out front, how are we going to get out of this motel?” She stifled a groan and looked at the ceiling. “Please don’t tell me we’re escaping by rooftop again.”

  “Can’t. We’re on the first floor. We’d just be breaking into someone’s room, and I’m pretty sure all the screaming would alert Ukko that we’re escaping that way again. But there are no rooms behind us.”

  “There’s also no door behind us. All the noise of blowing a hole in the wall is going to alert them, too.”

  Selena heard muffled voices on the walkway outside her room and backed into the counter next to the bathroom. She gripped the edge and shot Cameron another sharp look, this one intending to tell him, “Hurry up and explain what the hell we’re doing.”

  Cameron lifted the golden hammer and raised an eyebrow at her. “I’m going to knock a hole through this wall, and we’re going to run to the nearest car. And you’re going to have to drive almost as badly as Badb to get us out of here before those assholes kill us both. I’ll try to slow them down, but as soon as they hear us, they’ll be on the back side of the motel.”

  “Why haven’t they broken into our rooms yet?” Selena whispered.

  Cameron pointed the hammer at the wall she shared with Badb’s room. “They know she’s here. I’m sure Ukko sensed her as soon as he arrived, and Badb is almost certainly awake and waiting on me to get you out of here. So can we stop talking and go already?”

  Selena nodded and Cameron walked into the bathroom, lifting Thor’s hammer above his head then swinging it against the wall. Selena ducked as shards of tile and sheetrock cascaded both inside and outside the room. Cameron reached for her hand and pulled her through the hole Mjölnir left in the motel’s wall. She heard Ukko yelling and the loud stomping of boots against pavement as some of the gods ran toward them.

  She thought she heard her motel room door being blown inward then Ukko yelling again. They were forty feet away from the closest car, and she unlocked the doors in anticipation of reaching it and stealing it so they could get away from the New Pantheon.

  But Ukko appeared before them and blocked their path.

  His bright blue eyes quickly flickered to the hammer in Cameron’s hands and the corner of his lips turned up into the slightest smile. “Impressive. If someone had told me it was possible to steal Mjölnir from Thor, I would have told them they were crazy.”

  Footsteps on the pavement behind them told her one of Ukko’s accomplices had caught up to them. She risked looking over her shoulder to see who had followed them through the hole in the motel room wall and saw the Finnish god with short brown hair.

  Cameron’s fingers gripped her hand tighter and he pulled her closer. “I could have killed Thor, but I let him live. Get out of our way because I have every reason to want you dead.”

  Ukko clicked his tongue at him and shook his head. “You’re still just a demigod, Cameron. A mortal. You think far too highly of yourself if you think you can kill a god like Thor. Quetzalcoatl was temperamental. You got lucky.”

  Nyyrikki stepped closer and Selena noticed every muscle in Cameron’s body tense.

  “I’ll make you a deal, Cameron. Prove I can be a reasonable god, despite the trouble you’ve caused,” Ukko said. “Tyr told me you were in Larken because he assumed I’d want you both dead. But I still want Selena to work for me. Let her go and at least she’ll live. I can protect her a hell of a lot better than you can. In exchange, we’ll leave the Otherworld alone on the eve of Samhain.”

  Cameron sighed irritably and shook his head. “Dude, I don’t even know what that is. And the Otherworld isn’t my problem. Like you said. I’m just a demigod.”

  Movement behind them as Nyyrikki reached for Selena made Cameron spin around and lift the golden hammer of his enemy. He brought it down on the hunting god’s head and Nyyrikki collapsed to the ground, nothing but a mangled bloody stump where his head used to be.

  Selena had only a moment to register the stunned expression on Ukko’s face before Cameron pulled her away, running toward the car again. A third god tried to grab her, but Cameron shielded her with his body, and the god ended up grabbing Cameron’s arm instead.

  “Get in the car!” Cameron yelled.

  Selena ran around to the driver’s side and jumped inside while her heart beat so loudly, she couldn’t hear the sounds of the struggle right outside the car. She saw Cameron push the god away and he stumbled back a few feet but tried to approach him again. Cameron lifted Mjölnir and this time, the god either thought better of trying to fight Cameron on his own or Ukko stopped him. She still couldn’t hear anything except the thundering of her own heart.

  Cameron pulled the passenger door open and as soon as he was inside, Selena hit the gas. In her best imitation of Badb’s driving, the tires squealed as she peeled out of the parking lot, but she didn’t slow down or even speak to Cameron until they were almost thirty miles outside of Mathison, Iowa and had crossed into Illinois.

  By then, the blood rushing through her ears had mostly quieted so she
took a deep breath and glanced at Cameron. “What are we going to do?”

  “Keep driving. I can take over if you need me to. But we need to get far away from Iowa and out of Illinois.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I was talking about Ukko’s warning that he might be planning something on Samhain Eve.”

  Cameron stared at her for a few seconds then asked her, “Did you think I was lying when I told him I had no idea what that even means?”

  Selena almost smiled as she shook her head. “Nope. You almost never lie. I remember.”

  “Besides. There are thousands of gods in the Otherworld. Let them deal with it.”

  “But that’s only three days away, Cameron. Samhain Eve is Halloween. According to Irish legends, on the eve of one the biggest festivals of the year, the passage to the Otherworld opened. The dead could cross over, too, and commune with the living. I don’t know about that part, but I think what Ukko meant is that he’s going to use this opportunity to invade the Otherworld. And because the passage is open, you don’t need to be a god to travel there. He may be bringing an army of demigods with him.”

  Cameron yawned and wrinkled his nose at the gore attached to the end of the hammer. “I need a better weapon,” he mumbled.

  “Cameron, focus.”

  “I’m trying, but it just doesn’t make any sense to me. I think he must have been bluffing. Ukko waiting to see who wins the second civil war makes sense. He’s smart and conniving, and that sounds exactly like something he’d do. But a surprise invasion that he stupidly announces to two demigods he didn’t have in his control yet? He had to have been bluffing.”

  Selena watched the interstate as it stretched before her. The moon must have been new or it was a cloudy late October night because the world seemed so much darker than it should have been.

  “We should go back,” she suggested. “Just in case he wasn’t bluffing. We have to warn the Dagda.”

  “Selena,” Cameron sighed, “we don’t even know how we got there the first time. Badb will eventually find us and it shouldn’t take her three days. We’ll tell her and let her deal with it, ok?”

  “But this is my future home, too, Cameron. I can’t risk losing it.”

  Cameron tossed the hammer into the back of the car and watched the interstate in silence. Selena bit her lip as she tried to think of something to say to convince him they should at least try to warn the Tuatha Dé and Greeks that the Otherworld might be invaded on Samhain Eve.

  “It has to be a trick, Selena. Ukko wouldn’t have warned us like that. If he were planning something, he would have just done it. I spent a week with him after he caught up to me and convinced me I needed his help to get you away from Quetzalcoatl, and he spoke very little no matter how much I pestered him and tried to annoy the hell out of him. I don’t know. It was almost like he was monologuing back there and I’m pretty sure only villains in movies monologue like that.”

  Selena glanced at him and smiled, and Cameron gave her a strange look in return. “Oh, now I’m funny when I’m not trying to be?”

  “No,” Selena laughed. “It’s not that. You can just be really brilliant sometimes.”

  “I think you’ve got me confused with your other demigod protector.”

  Selena kept smiling as she shook her head. “I think that’s exactly what he was doing, and most likely taking cues from cinematic tropes on how to do it. Something is being planned, but I doubt he’s behind it or even a part of it so he couldn’t care less if it fails. He had nothing to lose by throwing it out as a term to negotiate even if he had no control over upholding his end of the bargain. I mean, it’s Ukko. Like he cares if he doesn’t fight fair.”

  “And you wonder why I hate the gods,” Cameron muttered.

  Selena shrugged. “Aside from Badb’s driving, she hasn’t given us any reason to hate her. You do because you resent her just for being a goddess.”

  “Maybe she’s not as bad as the rest of them, but I have been reading about her, and even if half of the legends about her are true, then I still think you trust her too much.”

  “She didn’t conspire to have Cú Chulainn killed just for rejecting her, if that’s what you mean,” Selena said.

  “No. What about all those times she apparently showed up during a battle screeching above men’s heads and causing all sorts of confusion and havoc and death?” Cameron asked.

  Selena thought about it then nodded toward a sign on the side of the road that told them a gas station was only two miles away. “Let’s switch. I’m tired. And I haven’t had a chance to ask her about the battles the Tuatha Dé supposedly fought against other inhabitants of Ireland, but I suspect they’re not true or only contain a little truth. So why should I believe she intentionally caused more deaths in a battle started by humans that had nothing to do with the gods?”

  “Because she’s a god!” Cameron insisted. “Maybe they didn’t sacrifice the right kind of cow or maybe she just felt like entertaining herself and that’s what they all do. Use people as game pieces as a cure for their boredom. They don’t care about anyone.”

  “You know,” Selena said as she pulled off the interstate, “Ukko knows we left Badb behind. He’s going to be looking for us on Earth. If we could get to the Otherworld, it would be a good hiding place for a day or two.”

  “Listen to you. You’re already talking like a goddess… all sly and sneaky and shit.”

  Selena shook her head again as she parked the car at the gas station. “Nope. You just don’t want to even try to get there, and I’m making a point that you know is a good one and you don’t like it.”

  Cameron crossed his arms and frowned at her. “It’s only half a good point because we don’t know how to get there.”

  Selena turned off the ignition then reached into the backseat for Mjölnir. She held it out to Cameron, but he kept his arms folded across his chest. “Give me the keys. I’m driving.”

  “Just agree to try. And hold onto this because if it works, we really don’t want to leave this thing lying around a stolen car.”

  Cameron sighed and took the hammer from her, but reminded her that not only was this the worst idea she’d ever had, they needed to be quick about their failure since Ukko and the surviving gods couldn’t be far behind them.

  “Actually,” Selena corrected, “trusting Alan was the worst idea I ever had. Now give me your hand and concentrate on…”

  “I’m going to stop you right there. This is the big flaw in your plan. Assuming I’m capable of concentrated thought.”

  “No, you’re incapable of not being a smartass. You are definitely capable of thinking. And you’re the one slowing us down.”

  “Fine,” Cameron hissed. “But if this works, you owe me two football games. Pull some of your god-strings and get me one of those fancy suites, and I’ll forgive you though.”

  “Deal,” Selena agreed. She held out her hand and even though Cameron rolled his eyes, he took it.

  He stared at their hands for a few seconds before asking her, “How long do we hang out in a gas station parking lot holding hands before you give me the keys so we can get the hell out of here?”

  “It’s not working because the only thing you’re concentrating on is us failing.”

  Cameron lifted his eyes again and met hers and that half-grin crept across his lips. “You want me to focus on the Otherworld? What part? The creepy glass palace with the creepier monster trapped inside?”

  “Not funny,” Selena warned.

  “How about the pissing match between Poseidon and Dagda?”

  “If you’re thinking about that, it’s really calling into question a lot of my beliefs about you.”

  Cameron snorted but didn’t stop teasing her. “Or how about the other weird thing I wanted to tell you about but got interrupted by Badb?”

  Selena glanced at their hands and was ready to admit her idea wasn’t going to work – although she blamed it on Cameron being so unwilling to take it seriously – but now
she really wanted to hear what else he’d discovered while they were at the Dagda’s palace. “Ok… what’s weirder than a glass castle with a terrifying creature trapped inside, a river that flows uphill, and a great hall full of gods who kept staring at us like we were Gambit and Rogue?”

  “Who?” Cameron asked.

  “You need to read more fiction and less Wikipedia.”

  “You need to read fewer comic books.”

  “Cameron!” Selena laughed. “What was so weird? I’d like to hear this before Ukko shows up and kills us.”

  “Those tapestries in the hall. I had to walk through there to get to the kitchen and back and I didn’t even really look at them on my way over, maybe because I was really hungry and Dagda had just told me his chef could make absolutely anything I wanted, so I was deliberating whether I should ask for something really exotic that I’d never otherwise have the chance to eat or what my stomach was telling me it really wanted, and well, you already know which of those won, but on the way back, I was carrying your plate and I swear the tapestry with the spear started to wave like it was in the path of an air current or something. But it’s a freaking castle in the Otherworld. There’s no air conditioning. So I put your plate on the table and approach this tapestry to see if I can feel where the air is coming from…”

  Selena opened her mouth to ask him, “And?” but realized they were no longer sitting in a stolen car at a gas station in Illinois. She didn’t need to look around to place herself: the tapestries in front of them immediately told her they were in the Dagda’s palace in the Otherworld.

  “Let me guess,” she whispered, “when you approached it, the tapestry started doing this?”

  “Yep,” Cameron whispered back.

  Selena let go of his hand and slowly walked to the tapestry of Lugh’s Spear, glowing so brightly it lit up the dark hall. The luminous blue flames flickered and writhed against the background as if the handle of the spear were actually engulfed by the strange fire. She reached out to touch it but Cameron grabbed her hand.