Things were bad before, when the old gods were shunted aside by the new, but it’s truly fucked now. Not just for her, for all of them. Ever since they were kicked from the heavens by that assclown Yahweh. Then He went and shuffled off to who knows where. All the gods are on Earth now. All the heavens locked away from them. Gods in exile, gods without thrones. And so many of them are gods without followers.
What good is a goddess if there is no one to believe in her?
Medeina stares at the device in her hand, a thin brick of black glass, considers willing it into a snake that she can squeeze between her fingers until it is nothing but pulped meat and bone. But the last time she did that, she couldn’t change it back. And, distasteful though it might be, she has to make a phone call.
Her finger hovers over the phone. Does she really want to do this? She’s learned to work with her pantheon’s conquerors, to ally herself with their greater numbers and stronger believers. But it rubs her raw to do it. There’s no helping it. She’s thrown in with them, and now is not the time to rebel.
She stabs at the phone’s screen. Misdials, hangs up, tries again. She presses the device to her ear. It picks up on the third ring.
“You have him?” says Zaphiel on the other end of the line. The Cherub’s voice reverberates through Medeina’s skull like the buzzing of a thousand bees, each of Zaphiel’s four bestial mouths lending its own peculiar tone to the words.
“He is in one of their houses of healing,” she says. “In Beverly Hills.”
“It’s called a hospital,” Zaphiel says. “You should learn the lingo. Why is he there?”
“They pulled him in ranting and screaming,” she says, seething. “He is locked away inside.” Learn the lingo. She knows the lingo. She refuses to use it. This age’s terms are ridiculous. YOLO?
She pinches the bridge of her nose. Zaphiel’s voices give her a headache. She hates angels. Worse than mosquitoes, with their constant buzzing and flapping of wings. Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, the whole lot of them. Pompous, self-righteous. Almost as bad as their pig-fucked father, may He rot in whatever corner of the universe He’s hidden Himself in.
“Who is he?”
“A shadow of a man,” Medeina says. “A derelict husk of fetid meat who—”
“Skip the poetry,” Zaphiel says. “A name.”
Medeina glares at the phone until smoke begins to curl out of its shell. She still isn’t entirely sure what Zaphiel wants with this man and she certainly doesn’t trust him. But the Cherub has managed to convince his cohorts that he’s necessary, and so, like a treacherous soldier who knows a winning side whether she likes it or not, Medeina has gone to hunt him down.
“Louie Fitzsimmons, though he is called ‘Fitz,’” she says. Medeina has tracked him, dug into the secrets of his past, pulled the names of his friends from the aether. At least as much as she can. He seems to have a shroud over him, making sight of his movements difficult. It should only have taken her moments to track him down, once she was sent on this task, but it has taken days. It wasn’t until earlier tonight that she could see him.
“What am I to do now? Bring you his head? If I knew more of why I am here, I could—”
Of all the things on this mission—the prey, the cellphones, that she must defer to these cockless buzzards—the fact that she doesn’t even know why this man is important to Zaphiel chafes. She’s accepted many things with this alliance, but it is beginning to try her patience.
“No,” Zaphiel says, cutting her off. “If they don’t already know, the moment you make contact, others will find out about him. We need him compliant. What we need of him he must do for us willingly.”
“I can make him compliant,” Medeina says. “I will strip the meat from his bones and—”
“Enough,” Zaphiel says, his voice punching through the phone and splitting the glass. “Know your place, goddess of the hunt. Or do you forget the last time we fought?”
Medeina remembers it all too well, the thrashing she took at the Cherub’s hands, so many of her pantheon slain.
“I know my place, Zaphiel. Do you know yours? Unlike you, my brothers and sisters died fighting to protect us all. They did not turn on me when my father went missing. They did not fight for an empty throne. And if they had, I would not have run like a coward and let it be destroyed. My father did not doom us all to this existence.”
Zaphiel says nothing for a long time. It’s a sore spot with him, what he did when the heavens were closed off, and Medeina never fails to remind him of it. The silence stretches and Medeina thinks the Cherub must have hung up on her, but then his voice comes across the line.
“Leave him,” Zaphiel says, as if nothing has just happened. “Keep him from leaving the city, but do not touch him. I will send someone to bring him to us.”
“I can bring him.”
“You would slaughter him with your incompetence,” Zaphiel says, an undercurrent of the lion’s roar in his voices, “not protect him from our enemies. I grow weary of your insolence and stupidity, goddess. Do as you’re told.”
Furiously, Medeina twists reality, turning the cellphone into a snake, writhing and squirming in her grasp. “And I grow weary of this alliance, angel. I will teach you your place. How will you like it when I chase you down and skin you like a rat?”
The snake stills, turns its head toward her. Instead of a hiss, Zaphiel’s unearthly voices come from its mouth. “I’m still on the line,” he says.
Medeina squeezes the snake into pulp, its head popping between her fingers. The lifeless thing falls to the ground, landing with a wet plop.
This is the last straw. Zaphiel’s disrespect will not go unanswered. She can see what the Cherub is trying to do. He’ll lock her out of the plan and leave her holding the bag. Well, fuck him. Fuck all of them.
She looks up at the hospital where Louie Fitzsimmons lies in a bed. He is helpless, defenseless.
If Zaphiel wants him, then he’s going to have to bow to Medeina to get him back.
“HEY!” FITZ YELLS, pulling on his handcuffs and shaking the bed. “Somebody! Anybody!” He hits the nurse call button over and over again. They won’t come, but he knows who will.
“Jesus, you better be fuckin’ dying in here,” the cop says, coming into the room with his hand firmly on the butt of his gun. He’s lean and young, with buzz-cut hair and a just-out-of-high-school face, but his eyes say he’s dealt with more than his fair share of emergency room freakouts and he’s not fucking around. Let your guard down on some tweaker you brought in to get some stitches and somebody’s liable to get stabbed. Or worse.
“I gotta take a piss, man.”
“Oh, for fuck sake.”
“No, seriously. I’ve been here for hours. And I’m freezing my ass off. I don’t even know why you haven’t carted me off to jail.”
“Doctor hasn’t cleared you to go, yet.”
“Well, when he does I’d like to not piss in the back of your cruiser.” He holds up the pants Sam left him. “And you don’t want to have to haul me in naked.”
The cop makes a face like he just bit a lemon made of ass. One thing they don’t tell you when they recruit you: law enforcement is loaded with nudity, and none of it’s fun.
“Come on. Sam vouched for me, right?” Fitz hopes this is one of the cops on Blake’s payroll. “What am I gonna do to you besides take a leak on your shoes?”
The cop considers it. “Fine.” He uncuffs Fitz from the bed, taking care to keep himself between Fitz and his gun. “You try anything and I will shoot you.”
“Wow. Community policing at its finest, huh?”
“How much do you remember when you came in here?”
Blood. Fitz remembers blood. The sight of a woman in a green cloak, angels, demons, sights and sounds that he can’t process. It’s all a blur, all a distorted, screaming dream that even now he can only half remember.
He’s never had hallucinations so vivid before. Usually they’re vague images in
his mind that leave him unsettled at best, shaky and lost at worst. But he’s never lost time.
“Waking up. Cuffed to the bed. Hey, you know what happened to the guy I was with?”
“He’s fine. He’s the one called us. The arresting officer and the paramedics, not so much. You broke one guy’s wrist and gave another a concussion. And just so you know, I wouldn’t be letting you out of these cuffs if it wasn’t for Sam. And also because the guy whose wrist you broke is kind of an asshole.”
Great. On top of everything else, he’ll probably land an assault charge. But that doesn’t make sense. Not only does he never lose time when he’s in the middle of one of his episodes, he doesn’t get violent, either. And even if he did, that should never have happened on the opium. What the hell happened back there?
“You’re a true humanitarian,” Fitz says.
The cop shrugs. “He was fucking my girlfriend. Hit the can and I’ll be back in three to cuff you back to the bed.”
Fitz dresses quickly. He needs to find a way out of the room that won’t have him trying to sneak past the cop. But besides the door, the only other way out is a window and they’re three stories up. Few options and none of them good.
The window is an awning style, that pushes out from the bottom and hinges at the top. He shoves at it, but it won’t open far enough to get himself out. The only way he’s going out the window is if somebody throws him through it.
“What are you doing?”
He turns to see the cop standing in the doorway, hand tight on his gun. Fitz wonders if he’d actually shoot him. From the look on his face he’d have to say yes.
“Just getting some air,” Fitz says.
“Uh huh. Get your ass back on the bed.”
“Sure, no problem.” Fitz’s mind races, looking for anything that will get him out of there. He could try to run for it, but getting a beatdown from the LAPD isn’t his idea of a good time. Jumping out the window is looking more and more appealing.
He starts over to the bed and pauses when he sees the hallway behind the cop darken, the light not so much dimming as draining away, colors siphoning off of everything, the walls turning gray. And as the light leaches out of everything, a shadow coalesces behind the officer like solidifying smoke.
“Hey, there’s something—” Fitz starts but is cut off by the cop’s surprised gurgle as the head of a bronze spear, its edge serrated with nasty looking barbs, punches through the front of his uniform. The cop clutches at it, wheezing as his shredded lungs refuse to inflate, his ruptured heart stops pumping. Blood runs thick and fast down his chin. And when the saw-like blade is pulled back out, he falls, making a sound like a side of beef hitting a slaughterhouse floor.
A woman in a heavy green cloak and some kind of banded armor steps over the officer’s body out of the inky smoke in the hallway. She is enormous, taller than Sam, curvy and heavily muscled, with pale white skin and hair so black it’s like falling into the night sky. She grins, showing teeth too white and too sharp, her mouth cutting a wide swath through a face that radiates menace.
“You,” the woman says, pointing at Fitz with her spear, spraying blood across the floor as she steps into the room.
“No,” Fitz says, panic making him babble. “Not me. Somebody else. Seriously. I don’t know what your problem is, big scary spear lady, but it’s not with me.”
“You are Louie Fitzsimmons. The man they call Fitz. I know. I have tracked you here. Others are coming for you, and I will know why before they get here. And then I will kill you.” Her voice is heavy, like trees falling in the forest, with a thick Slavic accent.
Fitz backs up until his butt hits the window sill. “You had me up until the killing me part.” Now he has to get out of here. The window’s probably not going to work. He’d need a running start get through it.
“You will tell me why the Cherub wants you. What power do you possess that makes you so important to him?”
“I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.” Cherub? Power? Fitz was crazy, but he was never this crazy. Hallucinations, sure, but not like this. Hallucinations didn’t murder police. Weren’t there more cops in this hospital? Nurses? Orderlies? Anybody?
The woman takes a step closer and her presence fills him, crawling through the nooks and crannies of his mind like smoke. He can feel a buzzing behind his eyes, like radio static slowly rising in volume. Fitz’s eye starts to twitch as he looks for some way out.
“St-stop,” he says. He pushes out with his arms as if to keep her back. She feels so close, so loud, so present, but she’s still only on the other side of the room. His arm starts to twitch, the tempo increasing with each step she takes like a Parkinson’s patient who forgot his meds. The buzzing is an angry hornet’s nest tearing through his head.
“You will tell me,” the woman says, her voice a distant sound over all the noise in Fitz’s ears. “I am Medeina. I am keeper of—”
Something in Fitz’s head pops. He can feel the force of her personality pummeling at him like hail. The pain running through him is excruciating, terrifying. It drives him to the floor, his eyes burning and blood dripping from his nose. The buzzing in his ears thins into a long, high whine and then fades to nothing. Everything is crystal clear. Everything makes perfect sense.
“You are keeper of the forest, ruler of the green spaces, tamer of the wilds,” Fitz says. “You are hunter, killer, protector, avenger. Holder of the laws of war and the hunt.” The words tumble out of him, images of blood and battle filling his mind. “You are Zvoruna, daughter of Andajus, sister of Perkūnas. The greatest hunter to exist, the whisper in the leaves, the killer in the fog.” Medeina’s history unspools before him, a great carpet of death, vengeance and rage. She is an angry goddess, a cruel goddess. She is a hunter, yes, but she is a murderer, too.
Fitz shakes himself and the vision fades like a television picture winking out, leaving behind an afterimage of all this intimate and sudden knowledge. This isn’t one of his seizures; he doesn’t know what it is, but he knows that much. It has the shape of it, the taste of it. But the intensity and the clarity is nothing he’s ever experienced before.
What the hell is happening to him?
Medeina stops mid-stride, a scant few steps from Fitz dry-heaving on the floor. “What sorcery is this?” she yells.
“What did you do to me?” Medeina is a goddess. Fitz knows this the way he knows that he has two hands, a face and a dick that shrivels up into a little nubbin when it’s cold outside. A little voice in the back of his mind is saying No, that’s not possible, there are no such things as gods, but he knows that that voice is an asshole and tells him things that everybody knows but are never the truth.
“I did nothing, ” the goddess says. “I merely showed myself to you. The rest is your own doing.”
And just as Fitz knows that Medeina is a goddess steeped in blood and that she was given the task to protect the forests by her king and father Andajus—that she is a brazen warrior who does not know fear—so too does he know that she is going to kill him.
“If you’re going to murder me, at least let me be on my feet when you do it.”
The goddess considers it, poses in a wide stance, twirls her spear and sets the end of the shaft on the floor where it cracks the linoleum, and gives Fitz a curt nod.
“Stand before Medeina,” she says. “Your final wish is granted. Accept your death with the bravery of a warrior.”
CHAPTER THREE
“THANK YOU,” FITZ says. He knows that Medeina stands on formality. He doesn’t understand how or why, just that he knows. She doesn’t brook insult, she doesn’t let a slander go unanswered, and she doesn’t deny a man his dying wish.
Fitz gathers his feet beneath him, but instead of standing, he springs forward between the goddess’s legs, skidding along the cold linoleum floor. Medeina swings her spear, barely missing Fitz’s feet. It carves a smoking swath through the floor, the tile bubbling with the heat of the blade’s passage.
<
br /> Fitz lurches to his feet, grabs the gun from the dead officer’s holster, careens off the hallway wall outside the room, keeps running. He knows the gun won’t do anything to Medeina, but its solid weight makes him feel safer. Of all the stories of her now bouncing through his head like ping pong balls, none of them say that she will die. Or even that she can.
He bolts down the hall, looking for help, realizes it’s not coming when he runs into the first corpse.
The doctor has been decapitated, his severed head set neatly on the top of a trashcan. Just past him is another body, a nurse lying against the wall, his dead hands clutching at a massive wound in his chest. And there are two more, paramedics, and then a patient and another nurse and another and another and...
His eyes travel the length of the corridor, lighting on each body in turn. There are at least twenty people here, all hacked to pieces. The room begins to spin, he fights down the urge to vomit.
Did Medeina kill everyone on this floor? In the whole hospital? She couldn’t have. Could she? There must still be people in the rooms. He resists the urge to check behind any of the closed doors for fear that he’s wrong.
People will have to come up soon enough. And when they do either Medeina will kill them all, or they’ll find Fitz alone with a gun in his hand. Or worse, they’ll just find Fitz lying here among the corpses, his head shoved up his ass.
There has to be an elevator nearby, stairs, something. Then it hits him; all he has to do is backtrack along the trail of corpses and he’ll find his way out.
He starts to pick his way over the bodies, trying not to step in pooling blood. It’s impossible. There’s too much of it. His foot slides out from under him as he hits a patch. His ass hits hard in one of the orderlies’ guts and he panics. He tries to stand, flailing and spreading blood and viscera all over himself in the process. The gun flies from his hand and skitters across the floor.
“I can smell you,” Medeina yells from down the hall. “I have your stink committed to memory. No matter where you run, I will find you. Give up and I will make your death quick.”
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