The God's Wolfling (Children of Myth Book 2)

by Cedar Sanderson

  Sekhmet winked at Linn, who was stunned speechless, and held out her hands to Pele, who rose to give her a hug.

  “I thought you were on vacation,” Heff hugged his right-hand woman in turn.

  “Oh, you know how that goes.” The lion goddess stooped to kiss her sons, then held out her arms to Linn. Sekhmet smelled faintly spicy, and she rested a cheek on Linn’s hair in a rare moment of stillness. The big cat was more industrious than any tame tabby.

  “I need to talk to Heff and Pele, brave girl.” Sekhmet murmured to Linn. Still in her arms, Linn could hear her heart pounding. She resented being treated like a child, but something that frightened Sekhmet was a scary thought.

  “Go ahead, Sek. Linn can hear this: she’s going to go to work for us,” Grandpa Heff said.

  Linn bounced out of Sekhmet’s grasp, excited. “Really?”

  Pele laughed. “First job: settle and listen.”

  Linn plopped down on the sand cross-legged and put a hand on her chin, fingers over her mouth.

  “Ok,” Sekhmet laughed, “new recruit is inducted.”

  She stood with her arms clasped behind her back and her face dropping into seriousness. Linn could feel a tingle as the Power surged through Sekhmet. The tall woman was gathering herself.

  “Steve took me to the Grand Canyon, his idea of being funny. I hadn’t been there – one of the few places I haven’t visited-” she began.

  Grandpa Heff interrupted her quietly. “Get to it. No easier for delay.”

  “Ran into Coyote.” Sekhmet cut right to the point.

  “Ran into? More like he intercepted you.” Pele interrupted with a sniff. “He never does anything by accident. Sorry, we keep interrupting you. I’ll imitate Linn now.” She propped her elbows on her knees and put her chin on her hands, covering her mouth and smiling at her granddaughter.

  Sekhmet chuckled, her tension broken. “Oh, I know. He was pretty transparent, just strolled out of the canyon we were hiking past. But what he wanted was to get a message to you.”

  Linn blurted out, “why doesn’t he come himself?” She felt her cheeks burn as all three adults looked at her.

  “Good question,” Heff grunted.

  “He said he couldn’t leave the area, he’s keeping an eye on it, that he’d come too far already just for a visit with Steve and I.”

  “He’s using too much power to look through animal eyes, he can’t get too far from his network,” Pele interjected, looking at Linn, who nodded that she understood.

  She had learned that technique, pinching off a little Power and letting it go into an animal and hitch a ride. It was tiring for her, but she was only a demi-god.

  Sekhmet went on. “He said to tell you the game is afoot in the Great Caldera.”

  “Oh. Pele, where is Theta right now?”

  “Iceland. She went to the lamia’s grave.” Pele and Sekhmet both looked sad. Linn wondered what that was about.

  “We have to go.” Pele’s voice was as firm as Linn had ever heard her.

  “Steve went to Quetzalcoatl with the message, and I came to you.” Now, Sekhmet just sounded tired.

  “Good.” Heff nodded. “That will speed things along. If Coyote is worried, something is in the wind.”

  As he said wind, a little bird dropped out of the air into his lap. Heff jumped.

  The tiny brown plover looked dead at first, and Linn stood up, wondering what had happened to it. Heff scooped it into his palms and lifted it to his face, blowing on it. Linn could see a little spark of Power go into it. Gradually, it righted itself, looking around with beady eyes, but it didn’t fly away.

  “Speak,” Heff commanded it gruffly.

  It opened its mouth—beak, bill? Linn wasn’t sure—and a man’s voice sounded loudly. “Haephestus, Smith, Artificer, I beseech thee for assistance. I, Manannan Mac’Lir, call upon the bonds of the sea, through which we are brothers, to draw thee to me. I await thee in my home, heart lain low until thy succor is at hand.”

  Linn looked at the adults, confused. She had never seen this kind of thing, a sort of bird voice mail, she supposed, and not too hard with Power. But who was Manannan Mac’Lir?

  “I need to find Bes. Is he still here?” Heff looked at Linn and Pele. Both nodded, and Heff headed for the tunnel entrance to Sanctuary, still holding the bird.

  Pele looked at Linn and Sekhmet and sighed. “Shall we go pack for me to leave, since the men are off chasing wild birds?”

  This made them all laugh, and Linn followed them into the rooms her grandparents shared, a rather book-cluttered suite in a quiet corner of the refuge Pele had carved – literally – out of the heart of a mountain. She helped pack a suitcase, wondering how on earth her grandmother planned to carry it, and then watched with wide eyes as the bag was made to vanish.

  “Where…” she asked in confusion, looking around the room.

  “It’s sort of... inter-dimensional.” Sekhmet explained. “You know how the High Plane and the Low, or Earth, works, right?”

  “Parallel universes, right?”

  “Simply put, yes. The High Plane actually isn’t higher than Earth, it’s just what we named it when we learned how to access it, with a little jump upwards and a boost of Power.”

  Linn nodded. She could do that herself, now, although for long trips she would need someone with more Power to help. “There are at least three, that you- we,” she corrected herself, “know of, and we can only access two.”

  Pele nodded. “Most of us have lost all memory of the third plane, our homeworld, except as dreamy, magical memories. Anyway, my bag is right there.” She pushed a hand upward over her head, and it disappeared for a second, eerily, and then she pulled the case halfway into reality to show Linn before restoring it to the other, unseen dimension. “I can access it whenever and wherever I want it. Saves a lot of effort.

  “Now that’s done, I want to gather up Heff and get going. Don’t think I can’t see you itching to get out of here.” Pele addressed the other goddess.

  Sekhmet was sitting, but had she been in cat form her tail would have been twitching violently. She sighed. “I wish I could say I didn’t have a very bad feeling.”

  “What’s the Great Caldera?” Linn ventured, as they headed for the common area.

  “Oh... I think your mother could answer that best.”

  “Cell phones don’t exactly work in Sanctuary.” Linn replied dryly.

  “Look up the Yellowstone Volcanic Caldera, dear.” Her grandmother told her as they reached the big room, not looking at Linn, but for Heff. “Consider it homework. There they are.”

  Linn pulled out her phone and made a note of it. She didn’t have cell service, but it made a decent personal organizer anyway. She was looking down and following Pele and Sekhmet with her peripheral vision, weaving through chairs and couches.

  “Ah, there you are.” Her grandfather got out of the chair he’d been sitting in, leaning forward to talk intently to Bes. “Linn, find out what Manannan needs. I’m sending you, Blackie, and Spot along with Bes. Think of it as a training mission.”

  Bes, slouched comfortably on a couch, smirked. “That means there will be rain. It’s not good training unless there is rain.”

  Heff shot him a look. “Yes, there will likely be rain. He’s probably on the Isle of Man.”

  Linn, standing in front of her grandfather now, shifted her stance to relax a little. She could feel the adrenaline crackling like lightning in her veins. She was going to get out and do something. Even if it was training, that was a good start.

  The little bespelled bird hopped off her grandfather’s finger and chirruped, cocking his head slightly and fixing a beady eye on Linn. She smiled. He was a cute little puffball of feathers, and the contrast of his softness next to her grandfather’s callused, scarred palm struck her as ironic. He fluttered into the air suddenly, startling her.

  Bes laughed and the little bird came and perched on his bushy hair. He held up a hand and coaxed it down. “We will
take you home, little one.” He promised it gravely.

  “How did something so tiny make such a long flight?” Linn wondered aloud.

  “Use your sight,” Heff suggested.

  “Ok...” she squinted carefully at the bird. “Oh, it’s a bit of Power...” the shifting aura was a gray-green, the color of a stormy sea. She had realized that Power signatures were somehow related to the affinity of the god that generated them. Heff’s was red as fire, for instance. Her own attenuated power signature was pink.

  Heff nodded. “Another reason to return him, so Manannan can reabsorb that. He was never the strongest of us, but cunning.”

  Lin was reminded of a fragment of power she had in keeping for him and asked, “Should I take Lambent?”

  Bes nodded. “Always armed.”

  “Pack light, though. You ought to be back within a week.” Her grandfather instructed.

  “Why are we going, again?” she asked.

  He raised an eyebrow, “I have to go to Yellowstone.”

  Linn could feel herself blush, “No, I meant why not just send messages.”

  “Ah. Bes, you get to explain Manannan to her,” Heff held out his arms for a hug. “I have to run.”

  Linn leaned into his barrel chest, soaking up his warmth and inhaling his faintly smoky smell. He always smelled like that, even when he hadn’t been near his forge, that she knew of, in weeks. Her grandmother always smelled of frangipani. Linn let go, and he was out the door, leaving her looking at Bes. Sekhmet and her grandmother had gone already.

  He wiggled his eyebrows at her and made a ridiculous face. “Ready for an adventure?”

  “I’m not sure I want adventure. I just wanted to be helpful.”

  He stood up, and the little bird went back to his hair. “Everything is an adventure. Now, go pack. And seriously, bring rain gear.”

  She went. She was excited: this really was going to be an adventure, even if all they did was play courier. Blackie and Spot were waiting in the common area when she came back in with her backpack, and she joined them, looking around for Bes. Deirdre made a beeline for her.

  “Hey, guess what?”

  Linn smiled down at her friend. “What?”

  “I get to come along!” The tiny greenish teenager bounced in her excitement.

  “It’s Bes’ traveling school and circus,” that god broke in with an amused chuckle. He addressed Linn’s best friend. “Deirdre, do you have your gear?”

  She nodded, her long pointy ears flopping a little with the force of her enthusiasm. Her fine brown hair, cut short, made her look like a pixie rather than the proto-goblin that she was.

  The coblyns that inhabited the Sanctuary as the main colony and administrators (not to mention builders), were not surly tricksters. Linn had learned that Deirdre's grandfather was their king, a rather laissez-faire ruler who left the actual work to his management team. When they had left Britain centuries before, the clans who chose to remain had become the goblins of legend and lore. Linn realized that she didn’t know much about their history, really. Maybe this trip would be a good time to ask Deirdre about it.

  Linn slung her backpack on her shoulders, thinking that she really needed to learn Pele’s trick, which would be less work. She held out her hands, one for Bes, and the other for Deirdre. It was much easier to get on the High Path, and stay together, if they were in contact. The big cats disdained this, leaping with them as they set off, and becoming ghostly shadow cats once they were in the tunneling space of the inter-dimensional highway. The human forms ran lightly, paced by the cats on each flank of their group.

  Linn realized she hadn’t even had time to properly research the Isle of Man, let alone ask Bes about Manannan Mac’Lir. She did so now, and he responded without breaking stride. He was being slow for them, she knew.

  “He’s a sea god, and a trickster, like Coyote, or me. He’s been... asleep for a long time. Which is why the archaic message and speech when he summoned your grandpa.”

  “And why we need to go to him in person?”

  “Yes, it’s a gesture of respect and also lets us check him out.”

  “For what?”

  “Well, some of the Elder gods are not quite right, anymore.”

  Linn snorted. “So we’re walking into the house of a crazy guy?”

  “Castle,” he corrected, “and yes, but Manannan has always been crazy. Heff just needs to know how crazy. You guys are safe, though,” he assured her, looking at her face and seeing the worry Linn knew she was showing. “Kids are sacred to Manannan. You’ll see.”

  Chapter 3

  The High Path always fascinated Linn. It wasn’t strictly speaking a path at all, and it didn’t go anywhere. The first time she had walked it, with Blackie’s help, she had been too scared and worried to pay much attention, and there had been very few opportunities to examine it closely since that wild night when she and Blackie had saved Bes’s life as he lay helpless on the battlefield.

  Now she looked at the ‘walls’ as they walked. Blackie kept pace with her, and they were a little ahead of the others. The High Path, Linn knew, was an extra-dimensional tunnel through the space between universes. Earth was only one of at least three universes, Linn knew for sure. The others were the long-lost world the gods and spirits of myth had fallen from untold years before, and the world they used as a rest place. Only those who carried the nano-machines which made ‘magic’ possible could use the High Path, and cross between the worlds. Linn, by virtue of the ones she had inherited from her mother, could travel on it, but she needed help to make that first step, still.

  She was fairly sure that if she stopped moving, the High Path would still take her where she was meant to go, but she had been cautioned not to stop while on the path. She’d been studying quantum mechanics, just the basics, and was puzzling over how that related to this gray, shimmery stuff that didn’t look, or... she reached out and poked the wall cautiously. It didn’t feel like much, but sort of deformed away from her hand, leaving a bit of a pocket in the smooth wall.

  Blackie made a noise and batted at her leg with his big paw.

  “Oops.” Linn realized she had stopped walking and started up again. Then she stopped, making the big kitten yowl as she stepped on his toe. “Where are the others?”

  He looked behind them along with her. It was sort of foggy, and she couldn’t see or hear anything. Maybe they had walked past while she was checking the wall out. Linn shrugged and started to walk quickly, giving up on the strange other-worldly substance.

  “Bes? Deirdre?” Linn called out. Her voice was just sort of swallowed up. There were no echoes, nor sense of distance. No answering call came out of the foggy tunnel. Linn bit her lip, wondering how far ahead they were, and kicking herself mentally for being so scatter-brained. She really couldn’t do that, and this was undoubtedly Bes’s way of teaching her not to lose track of her surroundings.

  Linn sighed, and kept going. From what she understood of how the High Path worked, they would all come out at the same place, and she wouldn’t stop and get separated from her party again on it.

  “Okay, Bes.” She called out, not expecting an answer. “I learned my lesson. See you when we get there!”

  Chapter 4

  Linn stopped at the edge of the high path, studying it intently. The transition between worlds shimmered, a little, and she knew from experience it would be like stepping through the looking glass into a whole 'nother place, from the gray tunnel of the Path. This metaphor amused her, and she giggled. Blackie butted her thigh with his head, knocking her sideways a step.

  “Oof!” she regained her balance. “You're getting too big for kitten tricks, mister. And yes, I'm nervous, doing this alone. I wish Bes and Deirdre hadn’t gone ahead. “

  That they had gotten separated at all put her on edge. Setting out together on the High Path usually meant you wound up in the same place. When Linn had lost track of them, she wasn’t sure. Probably when she had stopped and been daydreaming. Linn was
afraid they hadn’t come to right place even now. She did know it was time to take the next step, and be fully part of the adult’s world. She was tired of being treated as a child.

  These last two years there had been a lot of interrupted conversations when she or the other young ones were around, and mysterious comings and goings. Which left her and Blackie on this errand, to take Grandpa Heff's apologies to his old friend... although the look on Grandpa's face when he'd said that made Linn wonder how friendly it really was. If she had learned one thing in these illuminating years, it was that odd alliances had been forged over the millennia of the shadowy myth wars.

  Quetzalcoatl, Sekhmet and Bes, Coyote... although Coyote, she understood, was a wild card. No one ever knew when or where he would pop up. And her grandfather, the only Olympian amongst them, and the de-facto war leader. Quetzalcoatl seemed to be the overall leader, but there was a loose council of sorts which would gather from time to time and make decisions. Linn knew they tried to stay out of human affairs as much as possible.

  Two years ago when she had arrived at Grandpa Heff's farm looking forward to summer vacation, she expected the biggest surprise to be the litter of kittens in the hayloft. She certainly didn't expect to find out her mother was the child of two gods, making Linn herself a demi-god. To learn this one night, and be on the run with the kittens practically the next moment had been an education in itself, and there had been a lot more to the summer after that.

  Now, she squared her shoulders and stepped through the veil between worlds, from the High Path inter-dimensional corridor, back onto Earth, a half-globe away from where she had started that morning. It was raining a little, and very, very green. Even the birds were silent, and she could hear the sighing of ocean surf - very familiar after the last two years at Sanctuary in Hawaii - not too far off. But for now, they stood in deep forest.

  Blackie lifted his nose, his mouth half-open. She recognized that he was using his Jacobsen's organ to smell the air deeply, detecting anything nearby. She couldn't hear anything but the raindrops pattering on leaves far overhead in the grove of trees. Maybe oaks? She wasn't sure. The big cat closed his mouth and then licked his nose.