Sam jumps past Fitz as he pitches forward into the pool of his own sick and squares off against Medeina. Bottom line, she knows she has no chance of stopping the goddess, but she can’t let her slaughter Fitz.
“Step aside,” Medeina says. “I will not brook this insult.”
“Don’t kill him,” Sam says, trying to think of some way to keep her from murdering him. “You tried to kill him before because of the way Zaphiel was treating you. You were a pawn to him, like you were a pawn to El Jefe. Zaphiel and El Jefe want to use him the way they used you. They want to take his choice away, like they tried to take yours away.”
“Killing him will be a mercy,” Medeina says.
Sam sweats, her hands clenched into fists to keep them from shaking. She knows that one wrong word could mean her death and Fitz’s.
“Killing him will make you just like them. All they do is take. Is that who you are? Someone who does nothing but take?”
Is she getting through to her? Is she making any kind of impression? Sam can’t tell, but she isn’t dead yet, so she’s counting it as a win.
“Please,” she says.
It’s clear Medeina’s conflicted, but Sam has no way to tell what that conflict is. She has a glimpse into the goddess’s mind, but she’s not so naïve as to think she really knows her. For all the intimacy of their shared knowledge earlier, the goddess is still very much a black box to her.
“I need to leave,” Medeina says. She looks at Amanda. “Open your door. I came freely and I will leave the same way.” Amanda nods from where she has bent to help Fitz, and there’s a loud click from the front door. Medeina crosses to the door in a few wide steps, Sam close on her heels.
“Where are you going?” she says.
“I must think on your words,” Medeina says. “They are... troubling.”
Sam reaches out, touches Medeina’s shoulder. “Take me with you. I know this isn’t easy. Maybe I can help you.”
Medeina looks at Sam’s hand on her shoulder. For a moment, Sam thinks the goddess is going to cut it off at the wrist, but she keeps it there, anyway.
“I do not know where I am going,” Medeina says. “I have no home to return to.”
“I know.”
“Then come if you wish,” Medeina says, and leaves.
“How’s Fitz?” Sam says to Amanda.
“He’s not gonna feel very good when he wakes up,” Amanda says, “but other than that, I think he’ll be okay.”
“Tell him what just happened,” Sam says. “And I’ll try to get hold of him as soon as I can.”
“Are you sure you want to go?” Amanda says. “You do know she’s killed a lot of people.”
“So have I,” Sam says, and she follows Medeina out the door.
The door closes behind her with a series of clicks as the bolts secure into place, locking her out. She’s worried the goddess has already left, but she finds her standing on the sidewalk looking up into the night sky.
She wonders how different the sky looked to her when she was young, a thousand, two thousand years ago. Sam knows Medeina’s sense of time is different from her own, making sorting through her memories of the goddess’s life difficult. For her there is Today, Yesterday and A Long Time Ago. What do the gods need time for, anyway?
“I need to go somewhere quiet,” Medeina says. “Somewhere I can see more stars, somewhere with trees. This place is called Thousand Oaks, but there is nothing but scraggly brush and a handful of dying trees. This place is brown and dry. I need somewhere where I can feel the Earth breathe.”
“From this side, sure it’s dead. But the Santa Monica Mountains are pretty much the greenest places you’re gonna find out here,” Sam says, nodding toward the dark silhouette in the distance between them and the ocean. She’s suddenly doubting coming out here. Was this a bad idea? What the hell is she doing?
“In my homeland, the mountains are not so high,” Medeina says. “But in the firmament there were mountains that would shame any here on Earth. I had forests filled with trees and game. I do not understand what happened.”
The sadness in Medeina’s voice is overwhelming, and Sam takes her hand. “I know someplace greener,” she says. “Come on. I’ll show it to you.”
She remembers she doesn’t have a car. The Triumph is back at the strip bar where they met up with Fitz. She wouldn’t trust that car, anyway; Blake probably had it bugged, or something.
Easy enough to solve. The street is full of newer model cars, Mercedes and Lexus mostly. But there’s an older Corolla a couple of houses down. Before she got into MMA and started fighting professionally, Sam had stolen cars, done some B&E. Did a couple of months in juvie for it when she was a kid, and after she started working for Blake he’d sometimes have her jack a car of somebody who owed him money.
She looks around, then pulls off her jacket and presses it against the car’s driver’s side window. With a quick punch, the glass shatters, setting off the alarm. Some skills don’t fade; she reaches under the dashboard to the alarm unit, and after a moment of finding the right wires, pops it out from under the dash with a quick yank, shutting it up.
Hotwiring the Corolla is even easier. She starts the car, brushes the glass out of the driver’s seat and gets Medeina in the car with her. They’re on the road in less than two minutes.
“Where are we going?” Medeina says.
“Up Pacific Coast Highway. Solstice Canyon. You’re right that there’s no forests like you’re talking about around here, but there are places that are away from the lights and the noise. It’s on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains. Next to the coast. You can see the stars better.”
Sam drives them over the mountains to PCH and heads west along the coast, a thin crescent moon high in the sky and casting a reflection in the dark water. Cold air rushes in through the broken window, blowing through Sam’s hair, and for a little while at least she feels like none of the past couple of days has actually happened.
Medeina’s just some girl she’s met. This is just a late night drive up the coast. Maybe they’ll find a spot near the beach and lay out a blanket and drink wine until the sun peeks up over the mountains.
And just as quickly the thought goes away. Where the hell had that even come from? Sam’s been with other women before, but Medeina isn’t a woman. She’s an idea given form, a deadly concept in the throes of an identity crisis.
“Are you... all right?” Medeina says. She asks it as though the words are foreign, and maybe they are, or maybe just the idea is foreign. Asking someone else—a human, no less—how they are doing. Has she ever done that before, Sam wonders? Has she ever needed to?
“Huh? Yeah. I’m good,” Sam says. She pulls off the road at the entrance to Solstice Canyon. A large barred gate blocks the road, but that’s not going to get in their way.
She stops the car and gets out. “This close to the road, the site’s mostly parking lots and picnic tables,” Sam says, “but there’s a trail that loops deeper into the canyon.” She climbs over the gate and stops when she realizes that Medeina isn’t following her.
“This is better,” Medeina says. “I have been in cities too long. People have forgotten how to look at the stars.”
Sam follows her gaze to the sky and has to agree with her. Though the night sky is a dark blue, never really black this close to Los Angeles, it’s much darker than it is further inland. When Sam was a kid, someone tried to teach her the constellations, but they never stuck. She could never figure out how somebody was supposed to see a bear out of what was clearly a pot.
“Run with me,” Medeina says. “I have been surrounded by steel and concrete for too long. I want to feel the dirt between my toes, the thrill of the hunt.”
“I don’t understand.”
Medeina reaches for Sam and stops just short of her cheek, uncertainty plain on her face. Sam wonders if uncertainty is a new feeling for her. “Do you trust me?” Medeina says.
“Yes,” Sam says. It isn’t until
the word is out of her mouth that she questions it. Does she? Or is this trust something Medeina has done to her? It takes her only a moment to decide she doesn’t care.
“Thank you,” Medeina says and touches her cheek.
Sam’s senses blossom into a vibrant burst of smells and sounds, the world around her exploding into life she hadn’t realized was there. She’s suddenly lower to the ground, down on all fours, confused but feeling glorious.
The scents flowing through her are more powerful than anything she’s ever experienced. She knows where the mice are in the grass, the birds in the trees. There are rabbits in the undergrowth, at least three—no, four. She can sense the movements of the insects on the trees, leaves fluttering in the wind.
It isn’t until she sees the massive wolf next to her where Medeina stood just moments ago that she realizes what the goddess has done. She wasn’t prepared for this, had no idea that this was even possible. Panic engulfs her for a moment, but then Medeina nuzzles her cheek with her own and a deep calm settles into her.
Medeina makes a sound that Sam’s human brain can’t understand but her wolf mind figures out just fine. RUN, she says. HUNT. PLAY. Medeina bolts away from Sam, deeper into the canyon trail, and Sam, overcome with newfound joy, chases after her to share it with her.
Sam runs, her long legs tearing through the soft dirt along the trail, sand between her toes. The night is alive with smells and sounds as she follows Medeina across a dry streambed, through a copse of oak and sycamore.
Medeina freezes, a giant gray and black wolf, and Sam almost slams into her. She smells it a moment later. Something wild and feral, with a biting musk. She can’t place it at first, and then remembers an old boyfriend’s cat who pissed on everything she owned. It’s like that, only cranked to eleven.
She hears the mountain lion a second later, its wide paws gently shifting in the dirt as it tries to move. Whether for escape or to stalk them, Sam can’t tell. But between the scent and the sound, she knows exactly where it is.
Medeina leaps forward into the brush, hitting the mountain lion head on. The beast lets loose a guttural, grinding sound that’s less roar and more scream. Medeina gets its hindquarters in her powerful jaws and now Sam can smell blood, too.
Overcome by the scents, the screams of the wounded lion, the sheer thrill of the hunt, Sam springs into the fray, knocking the mountain lion’s face aside as it snaps at her, bringing her head up under its jaws, avoiding its teeth. She clamps her jaws around the lion’s throat and tears, ripping through muscle and fur, tasting blood, hot and coppery as it sluices into her mouth.
She loses herself in the kill. She is the lion and the blood and trees and the wind. She is the watching animals and the dirt beneath her toes. She is the hunter and the hunted. She feels the tearing of her teeth in the mountain lion’s side, its pain is her pain.
And she is the goddess as the goddess is her.
She and Medeina tear into the mountain lion’s body until its thrashing becomes nothing more than a quiver and it finally falls limp between them. Time disappears for her as the two of them rip into the lion, feasting on its corpse.
Afterward, when there is nothing left but a gutted body and gnawed bones, the sensations of hunting and killing the mountain lion still sing inside her. She has never felt anything so visceral. Not her most vicious fights in the ring, not fucking.
She doesn’t want this feeling to end, wants to stay a wolf forever, wants to hunt with Medeina and kill at her side until the stars burn out and the sky goes dark.
She curls up against Medeina’s flank, the two of them sated, covered in blood, spent, and falls asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“OH, MY GOD,” Fitz says, picking himself up off the floor. “I feel like I’ve been shit through an elephant.” His vision blurs and a wave of nausea washes over him as he tries to stand. He slips back to the floor, missing his own pool of vomit by scant inches.
“You look it,” Jake says, helping him up.
“How long was I out?”
“Long enough for crazy spear lady to bail with your girlfriend,” Jake says.
“What?”
“Medeina was gonna kill you and Sam stopped her,” Amanda says. “Then they left. I don’t know where they went.” She hands Fitz a towel and a glass of water.
“You don’t know?”
“I know where they were headed,” she says. “They stole a car down the street and headed over to the coast. I lost track of them once they got into the canyons. I’m still retasking a satellite.”
“You scare me more and more every hour,” Fitz says.
“It’s a talent.”
“What was that business about asking for you to unlock the door?” Jake says. “Like she was asking permission.”
“She was. I’ve got wards and sigils all over this house to protect against the supernatural. I let her in; she couldn’t leave unless I unlocked the door for her.”
“Good to know,” Fitz says, stifling a burp. He wipes his face and sips at the water. His stomach starts to roil again. “So what now?
“Well, that was a good start,” Jake says.
“I yakked all over the floor and passed out. How is that a good start?”
“For starters, you’re not dead.”
Fitz has to agree that that’s a net positive.
“Also, you were able to do it fast,” Amanda says. “And this wasn’t just pushing an angel out of the way or changing a hand of cards. Medeina might be small fry, but she’s still a full-fledged god. That spear isn’t just for show. It’s part of her. And you made it disappear.”
“She made it reappear right away, though,” Jake says.
“Which I’d expect, unless you killed her outright,” Amanda says.
“And that brings us back to your original question,” Jake says. He helps Fitz stand up. “You want these fuckers to respect you, you gotta show ’em what you can do.”
“And that means killing one of them? Medeina? I think that might piss Sam off.”
“Dude, you need to look at the bigger picture here,” Jake says. “Your girlfriend is the least of your worries.”
“She’s not—Look, I don’t know you,” Fitz says. He turns to Amanda. “And you’re not even fucking human. Sam’s my friend. And, yeah, things are weird all around, but I trust her and—I’m not killing Medeina.”
“How many people did she kill in the hospital?” Amanda says.
Too many. One would be too many, but she pushed past that point into fucking insane with all the corpses. By rights he should want her dead. She tried to kill him. But Sam trusts her, and right now the only person he trusts is Sam.
“Not her,” Fitz says. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just—not her. Not yet.”
“Well, that’s good, then,” Jake says, “because we were thinking somebody else.”
“Not the Man,” Fitz says. The idea of going up against him makes his blood run cold. He’s fine with making that fucker pay, but he can’t imagine what he could even do to him.
“No,” Amanda says. “Much as I’d like to see it, I don’t think you can take him.”
“I suggested Internet, here,” Jake says, “but she wasn’t going for it.”
“Well, yeah,” Fitz says. “I can’t even—” He stops, a thought that’s been nagging at him coming to the fore. “How come I haven’t seen these threads around you? These are showing up when I’m stressed and I’ve been pretty much freaking out the entire time I’ve been around you. What’s different?”
“I think it might be because I’m not entirely here,” Amanda says. “This body’s a vessel with a piece of my consciousness in it. Might as well try to make me do something by yelling at a cell phone.”
“Fascinating, I’m sure,” Jake says. “Point is, she’s as close to being on your side as anybody, so I tend to agree with her.”
“We were thinking Big,” Amanda says.
“Yeah,” Jake says. “Internet here tells me he�
��s some kind of money god? I hear you screwed with him before.”
“And he sold us out to his dad, yeah,” Fitz says. “I can get behind that. How do I do it?”
“We have no idea,” Jake says. “But then you’re the one with the mojo.”
“Can we at least find him?” Fitz says. “At his casino?”
“Unlikely,” Amanda says. “I’ve put out some feelers for him, but so far he’s dropped off the grid.”
“How long do you think it’ll take to find him?”
“Long enough for you to take a shower,” she says. “You reek.”
SAM WAKES UP curled up against Medeina, an ocean breeze cooling the sweat from her skin, drying the blood from the mountain lion. Naked and human again, the only thing on her Blake’s key around her neck, Sam presses herself against the goddess’ body as Medeina lazily strokes her hair.
“That was incredible,” Sam says.
“Thank you for sharing it with me,” Medeina says. “I have not had a lover in a very long time. I was... nervous.”
Sam pauses. “Is that what we did?” She’s never felt like that before, never had any experience so indelibly raw.
“Humans are too complicated,” Medeina says. “I know what you felt, just like you know what I felt. We shared in the kill. There is no stronger bond than that.”
“I’ve never had an experience like that before,” Sam says.
“You’ve never killed with another?”
“No,” Sam says. “Always on my own and, well, it’s typically frowned on, so it doesn’t make for a good group activity.”
“As I said, humans are too complicated.”
They say nothing for a long time, just enjoying the night. Sam’s senses as a wolf are gone, but the memories linger. She thinks she can just barely sense other animals in the brush, count the birds in the trees, but she knows it’s wishful thinking.
Medeina toys with the Triumph key hanging between Sam’s breasts. “What is this?”
Mythbreaker Page 19
