WHEN ONE IN TEN PEOPLE DROP DEAD, GLORY’S ON THE CASE…
As Glory finally thinks her life is settling down, an unseen force starts randomly killing people, all over the world.
That’s when a mysterious woman calling herself a Fate appears, telling Glory that her only solution is to seek something terrible, an ancient creature called the Night Mother.
Now Glory’s on a mission, crossing oceans, exploring Greece, even meeting up with the Knights of the Round Table. All she has to do to get a drink around here is face off with an extra-dimensional entity that wants to turn reality inside-out, right before the myth hits the fan.
You know. The usual.
ANCIENT MONSTERS, ANGRY FATES, WAFFLES APLENTY
An excerpt:
ALL I WANTED WAS A PEPSI
Another hot August day in Manhattan. The pavement cooks. My dehydrated head hurts. Skyscrapers laugh down and every sweaty dude walking the streets tries to get his slick bare shoulders on me. I may be five-four from my head to the ground, but I’ve put flat men pushing six. Put your wet near my arms, I will end you. Fuck off with that shit.
Look here, a lady at a street cart tooling on the guy who sold her lunch. If there’s anything worse than man sweat and sunbaked concrete, it’s picking on someone making less than minimum wage laboring over hot dog water in this blaze.
I forgot my wallet, so though I’m a millionaire, I lack the pocket change for a proper soda. I do, however, still have an overwhelming, often detrimental need to punish the wicked. This has potential.
She’s ranting, something about the importance of her job, how service used to be a thing, a true Shakespearean tragedy of one lacking pickle in the hierarchy of First-World problems. Lament, lament, lament.
“Hey!” I shout. “Bitch lady.”
She turns. Whirls, really.
“You should give me your soda.”
That’s my mind trick at play. The ability to make the false true. I have to phrase it like that, with a “You should” at the start, because if there’s any ambiguity, like “Shouldn’t you give me that soda?” she might start hitting herself on the head with the soda or pissing herself or babbling.
Inclining her head and doing the angry squint, she pops the cap and takes a big swig, about a third of the bottle, punctuating it with a big, smooth “Ahhh.” That’s new. Usually they do what I say right away. It looks so tasty. I didn’t say she shouldn’t take a sip first, or not to backwash. Still.
“You should give me that soda right now, Bitch Lady.” I hold out my hand.
Bitch Lady jacks my jaw.
Then I’m pulling my face off melted gum on this stove-burner sidewalk while she pours soda on my head and people laugh.
“This isn’t funny,” I say to them.
They keep laughing.
“So much for magic in the world.”
I admit, I deserve soda hair a little. Being mean to a hot dog guy is bad, but so is stealing. Still, she got to be mean to that guy without punishment. That burns me more than the sun. It sticks more than high-fructose corn syrup.
###
The gents guarding the mansion from the roof watch me stroll up. They’re dashing, in shape, and for the most part very young. Abel’s guys. Even the old ones are under thirty. It’s one of the pre-requisites for service. They’re all sweet and selfless. They carry that “sir” “ma’am” ardor about them where they open doors and care about the safety of people around them.
They want to be Abel’s new host if he ever has to switch bodies, so they can see the future. It’s not going to happen. Abel has been in his present body since the 1200s. But they’re still signed on. I’m betting it’s the pension. Plus, it beats playing the lotto.
Norman at the door is one of the older ones. And by older, I mean thirty in a few weeks. Everyone’s ribbing him about it. We have this regular thing where I salute him like the president going into a helicopter and he ignores me. He has one eyebrow for some reason. No one ever talks about it. Did he lose it in a boating accident? Did he street fight a werewolf? Who knows? I like that about Norman. I like Norman generally.
“What happened to your hair?” he asks.
“The sugar helmet? Got in a tangle downtown.”
“You get in a lot of those.”
“Yeah, well, it takes two,” I say. “Where’s Cain?”
“Who?”
“Ha ha. Seriously.”
“Is he one of your guests?”
“Norman, Norman, Norman.”
“What?” He’s being straight with me. And now he’s worried. Shit. “Did I do something wrong?”
“You’re fine, buddy. Another one of my bad jokes. As you were.” I pat his shoulder, and in I go.
He’s forgotten Cain. He looks in after me, perplexed, I feel it on my back. Not much I can do about that.
I slop my hair in the master bedroom sink, running fingers through to get the stick out. Rich people sinks. They’re deep enough to do that without hitting your head on the back of the spout. I’ll never get used to it.
I find my phone where I left it, in the sheets. Two voice messages in the last hour, both from Abel. He’s a chronic worry-wart. I bring them up and listen while I dry my locks.
On the first message, we have Abel shouting over the sound of gunfire. Lots of gunfire. And explosions. The second message is much calmer. Abel got away, he’s safe, but don’t call him. He’ll find me. I hope he means there’s a tracker of some kind in my coat, because we have this other way he can find me that’s awkward and often better left unsaid.
I have about fifteen minutes, the message says, before “they” arrive. That would be the Minotaurs. Seth’s murder cabal. Soldiers I made our allies with a few choice words that should still be working for Abel. Now they aren’t.
The message came eleven minutes ago.
Pretending to be calm, I go to the master bedroom to check. That’s where we keep Seth, so it’s less of a bedroom, more a cell, but he doesn’t know the difference so long as the music visualizer is on. There’s no lock. We just place a guard. Robert.
He nods me in. “Glory.”
“Bobbo.”
Seth’s still a blank-eyed drooling lunatic. Maybe the Latin Phrase of Doom is no part of this. I definitely need a better name for the Latin Phrase of Doom.
The Goongle? Like a verb. Put the Goongle on him! It has promise. It’s not there, but it’s on the way.
What do I do here?
Robert sees my concern. “Everything okay?”
That’s the question, isn’t it, as precious seconds tick by. I have the immediate sneaking suspicion that everything I’ve said or done using my Archon power has been undone. That would explain the Minotaurs turning on Abel, Abel’s guys not remembering Cain, and soda lady.
But Seth is right here. They’ll be coming for Seth. And me, the woman who hurt their leader. They’ll be very mad. It also occurs to me, if my boon is gone, I may not be invulnerable. Which matters, given their large stock of high-powered weaponry.
“Bobbo!”
“Robert, ma’am.”
“I know. I don’t care. Listen. There’s a thing going on. I think. I don’t know how to give orders.”
“Just tell me what you want.”
“There are going to be men. Lots of men. Coming here. To attack. Probably. Minotaurs.”
“Is this a joke?”
“This is real. Circle the wagons and get Seth the hell out of here. Five minutes ago.”
“Did Abel—”
“Abel left me a message saying that he barely escaped the bastards. I’d replay it, but we don’t have that much time.”
“What about you?”
“Good question. That doesn’t matter. Not to you. Let me do me. You secure Seth. Secure yourself. Get safe.”
Robert doesn’t like it, but he touches an earpiece and enters the bedroom. I head for the tunnel in the panic room.
###
I find a post-it on the panic room door in Cain’s hasty scrawl: CALL ME.
I have my phone, so I can. And I have my wallet with no minotaurs on it. And look. I also have men shooting up the front of the mansion on camera.
Norman. Fuck.
Norman.
###
The screams start two short blocks away from the mansion. When I try to find where it’s coming from, it’s coming from everywhere. Up the long blocks, down the short. Above, even, out through windows.
A mother drops dead in the intersection ahead of me. She collapses into her stroller, spilling a toddler onto the concrete inches from idling cars. The boy wails about his cut head. People walk around. Mom’s phone skitters to hit my foot and stops spinning. A teenager bends to pick it up and disappears.
Bodies drop everywhere. Down the sidewalk. In Central Park.
Two fingers to mom’s neck. Nothing. I cradle the child. The Great American Flogsta intensifies, everyone in Manhattan lifting their voices to the sky in horror. Heads against steering wheels. People get out of their cars and run away. Those who don’t flee look around for the source.
No nukes. No storms. No giant asteroid.
The teenager, now aware, has stopped. I storm up to him and put the sobbing child down.
“You. Watch this fucking kid. Now.”
He starts to object, but I’m already back in the crosswalk, crouching, whispering.
“You should live. You want to live. It’s a great fucking idea to survive this.”
This wouldn’t work back when I could make the false true. I try anyway. I’ve learned that what defines reality is quite malleable. It changes at random. Witness this, for example, the teenager gone, having abandoned a baby for a phone. The presumption that walking upright indicates humanity is now false.
This fucking city.
No service when I try to phone Cain. This makes sense. Abel would be calling otherwise. Scooping the child, I continue down the sidewalk to see if I can help anyone.
An elderly woman in her groceries, the mix of blood and burst milk an awful pink. A young man in a doorway, a hill to climb for residents coming home who don’t even know what they’re running from. A seven-year-old and his middle-aged father slumped on a park bench. A teenager tangled in her bike. I shift the bars to remove her broken ankle from its oblique angle between pedals. Small tennis shoes askance on dirty concrete. She wrote phrases in pen on the white part of her treads:
HANG ON, SLOOPY
SOLID LOVE
That does it. I slide down the side of the building with the boy, wailing with him. The distant cries die down at long last, but I carry on. I’m always a bit late to the party.
Buildings do not burn. No fighter jets scratch the sky. The earth never quakes. Seven planes crash worldwide, which statisticians in their infinite stupidity laud as good fortune by the numbers until the internet comes for them.
The news sells the grief. Was it seventy-five million dead or eighty worldwide? What does this mean for the stock market? OUTRAGE: Thirty-four percent of registered voters strongly agree this was The Rapture. It’s like Germany disappeared, they say. All of Germany.
Except Germany is not gone. One in ten people are dead.