Teddy Jo’s face turned dark. He sat in the chair next to me. “Answer me this, how do you exist?”
“Forced theosis,” Christopher said.
“How?” Teddy Jo asked.
“Ask her father. I remember only pain. It probably began as implantation, a forced possession, but how exactly he went about it is beyond my recollection.”
“Did you . . . ?” Teddy Jo let it trail off.
“Absorb the essence of Deimos? Yes.”
Teddy Jo shook his head. “It’s not apotheosis. Apotheosis implies reaching the state of rapture and divinity through faith. It’s not an appearance avatar.”
“No,” I said. “That would imply the deliberate voluntary descent of a deity to be reborn in a human body, and from what I understand there was nothing voluntary about the process. Deimos wasn’t reincarnated.”
“There is no word for it,” Christopher said.
Teddy Jo rocked forward, his hands in a single fist against his mouth. “That’s because it goes against the primary principle of all religion—the acknowledgment of forces beyond our control possessing superhuman agency.”
“With the exception of Buddhism,” Christopher said.
“Yes. The key here is ‘superhuman.’ A deity may consume a human or another deity, but a human can never consume a deity, because that implies human power is greater than divine.”
Just another night in Atlanta. Sitting on my porch between a Greek god who was really a human and an angel of death who was having an existential crisis.
“This shouldn’t be. You can’t be Deimos.”
“But I am,” Christopher said.
“I know.”
“It’s the Shift,” I said. “The power balance between a neglected deity such as Deimos and a very powerful human is skewed toward the human, especially if there are no worshippers.”
“It would have to be a really powerful human,” Teddy Jo said.
“I was,” Christopher said. “I suppose I should say I am.”
“Do you retain any of your prior navigator powers?” I asked.
“No.”
We sat together on the porch, watching the universe strip herself bare above us.
“Theophage,” I said.
“What?” Teddy Jo said.
“You wanted a word for Christopher. Theophage.”
“The eater of gods?” Christopher smiled.
“That word is for the sacramental eating of God, in the form of grains and meat,” Teddy Jo said.
“Well, now it’s for literal eating.”
“We should get going,” Teddy Jo said.
“So, can I come?” Christopher asked.
“Where? Where do you want to go?” Teddy Jo asked.
“To Mishmar. I could carry her. She wouldn’t need a winged horse.”
“No. Even if you could carry her that far, you couldn’t get there fast enough.”
“He’s right,” I added. “The plan is to escape Mishmar before my father arrives, but it’s possible he will catch me there. For whatever reason, he is reluctant to kill me, but he won’t hesitate to fight you. If you saw him, what would you do?”
“I would kill him,” Christopher stated in a matter-of-fact way.
Well, he would definitely try.
“So that’s right out,” Teddy Jo said. “You understand why? You come with her to Mishmar, neither of you might get out alive. She’s safer on her own.”
Christopher nodded. “Well, can I come with you to see the horses? I promise to be good and not scare them.”
“Sure, why not.” Teddy Jo waved his arms. “The entirety of Hades can come. We’ll have a party.”
Christopher stepped off the porch in to the backyard, spread his wings, and shot upward. The wind nearly blew me off my feet.
“Thank you,” I told Teddy Jo.
“He gives me the creeps,” Teddy Jo growled.
“You’re the nicest angel of death I know.”
“Yeah, yeah. Get in the damn swing.”
• • •
THE FOREST STRETCHED in front of me, a gloomy motionless sea of branches sheathed in leaves. The waters of the Blue River streamed past, quiet and soothing, the light of the old moon setting the small flecks of quartz at the bottom of the riverbed aglow. Thin, watery fog crept in from between the trees, sliding over the water and curling around the few large boulders thrusting from the river like monks kneeling in prayer.
I sat quietly, waiting, a saddle and a blanket to go under it next to me. Teddy Jo had dropped me off and retreated into the woods, adding, “Don’t treat them as regular horses. Treat them as equals.” Whatever that meant.
Christopher glided above me, somewhere too high to see. Watching him in the sky had made me forget about being suspended hundreds of feet in the air with a whole lot of nothing between me and the very hard ground. Christopher had remembered how to fly. He would climb up, bank, and dive, speeding toward the ground in a hair-raising rush, only to somehow slide upward, out of the curve, and soar. Teddy Jo had rumbled, “You’d think he’d act like he had wings before,” then caught himself, and left Christopher to the wind and speed.
Now all was quiet.
Even if I did manage to bond with a pegasi, I’d have to ride on its back as it flew. My stomach tried to shrink to the size of a walnut at the thought. If it bucked me off, I would be a Kate pancake. Life had tried to kill me in all sorts of ways lately, but falling off of a flying horse was a new and unwelcome development.
I had to get a horse. Not only did my idiotic plan depend on it, but Curran’s did, too. He would walk his mercs into my father’s castle, and he was counting on me to provide a distraction to get them out. Sienna foresaw a flying horse. So far she hadn’t been wrong.
A shape moved to the left, in the woods. I turned. Another. Then another. A single horse emerged from the gloom; first, a refined head, then a muscled chest, then thin elegant legs. A stallion, a light golden palomino, his coat shimmering with a metallic sheen as if every silky hair were coated in white gold. Two massive feathered wings lay draped on his back.
Not a Greek pony. Not any local breed either. He looked like an Akhal-Teke, the ancient Turkmenistan horses born in the desert.
I took the apple out and held it in my hand.
The stallion regarded me with blue eyes, shook his mane, and started toward me.
I held my breath.
He clopped his way past me to the river and began to drink, presenting me with a front and center view of his butt. More horses came: perlino, white, golden buckskin, bay . . . They all headed to the river, drank, flicked their ears, and pretended not to see me.
I was out of luck. I sat there and watched them drink, holding the stupid apple in my hand. Should I go up to them making cooing noises? Teddy Jo said not to move and to let them come to me. Well, they weren’t coming.
What else could I get? What could I do to get there fast enough? A car wouldn’t do it. I had saved an ifrit hound from ghoulism a few weeks ago. Maybe he could carry me away from Mishmar long enough for me to escape my father. No, that was a dumb idea. He wouldn’t be fast enough. My dad would catch us and then we’d both be killed.
A single horse peeled away from the herd. Dark brown and so glossy she didn’t look real, she stood about fifteen hands high. Her crest and croup darkened to near black, while her stomach was a rich chestnut. On the flanks, barely visible under the dark wings, the chestnut broke the dark brown in dapples. She looked at me. I looked at her. She walked three steps forward and swiped the apple from my palm.
“Hi,” I said.
The horse crunched the apple. That was probably as good a response as I was going to get.
I reached out and petted her neck. The mare nudged me with her nose.
“I don’t have more magic apples. But I do have some carrots and
sugar cubes.” I reached into my backpack and held out a sugar cube. “Let me put a saddle on you and I’ll give you one.”
And I was talking to the magic winged horse as if she were a human being. That’s it. I had officially gone crazy.
I reached for the blanket. Her wings snapped open. The left wing took me right below the neck. It was like being hit with a two-by-four. I fell and scrambled to my feet in case she decided to stomp me.
The horse neighed and showed me her teeth.
“Are you laughing?”
She neighed again. Behind me the herd neighed back. Great. Now the horses were making fun of me.
I held out a sugar cube. She reached over and grabbed it off my hand. Crunching ensued.
I extracted the second sugar cube and held up the blanket. “Alright, Twinkle Pie or whatever your name is. I put the blanket on, you get more sugar. Your choice.”
• • •
SWOOPING DOWN TO the Keep’s main tower sounded like an awesome idea when I originally decided to do it. For one, it would let me avoid being seen, and Jim could meet me up there with my aunt’s bones, avoiding most of the Keep’s population. At least that’s how I explained it to Teddy Jo when I asked him to go ahead of me and tell Jim to meet me there.
In theory it all sounded good. In practice, the top of the Keep’s tower made for a very small and very difficult target. Especially from up here.
After the first fifteen minutes of flight I decided that I could stop clutching at Sugar every time she beat her wings, which signaled to her that it was time for aerial acrobatics. She threw herself into it with gusto, neighing with delight every time I screamed. I managed not to throw up, she managed not to kill me, and by the end of the thirty-minute test flight we had reached an understanding. I realized that she didn’t plan to murder me and she realized that I meant every word when I promised to drop the bag with sugar to the ground if she didn’t stop doing barrel rolls. Christopher watched it all from a safe distance. I heard him laughing a few times. I’d never live it down.
However, landing on the Keep’s tower presented a whole new challenge. We passed over the mile-wide stretch of clear ground around the Keep and circled the tower. Below me, Jim, Dali, Doolittle, and Teddy Jo were talking. I couldn’t see Jim’s face from all the way up here, but I recognized his pose well enough. It was his “what the hell is this bullshit?” pose.
Dali looked up, saw me, and waved, jumping up and down.
“Take it easy,” I said. “Let’s land right here . . . oh God!”
Sugar spread her wings and dropped into a swan dive. Wind whistled past my face.
“Sugar.” I put some steel into my voice. We were going to crash. We’d smash against the stone and there would be nothing left of us but a wet spot. “Sugar!”
Teddy Jo threw himself flat. Jim leapt at Dali, knocking her down to the floor. I caught a flash of Doolittle’s face as we whizzed by, Sugar’s wings clearing his head by about four inches. He was laughing.
“You’re a mean horse!”
Sugar neighed, beat her wings, and turned around.
“Control your horse!” Jim snarled.
“You control your horse.” Oh wow, now that was a clever comeback. He’d surely drop to his knees and bow before my intellectual brilliance.
Sugar touched down on the stone.
“A pegasi!” Dali pushed her glasses back on her face and reached out to Sugar.
Jim grabbed her and yanked her back. “What’s wrong with you?”
She pushed out of his arms and gently patted Sugar. The pegasi lowered her head.
“See? She can sense my magic.” Dali rubbed the mare’s neck. “You are so beautiful.”
“I don’t want to dismount,” I told them. “I don’t know if she’ll let me back on.”
Teddy Jo picked up two big sacks sitting next to Doolittle, slowly approached us, and handed them to me. I hooked them up to my saddle.
“Blood is in the left, bones are in the right,” Doolittle said. “The bones are vacuum packed. The blood has been chilled and is split into three different thermoses.”
“Thank you,” I told him.
Dali raised her arms. I bent down and hugged her.
“You can do it,” the white weretiger said. “You will kick ass.”
If only I had her confidence.
“Do you have your food and water?” Teddy Jo asked.
“Yes.” He’d already asked me that this morning.
“And your compass?”
“Yes.”
“And you brought the ski mask?”
“Yes. It’s not cold, though, even up above.”
“It’s not for the cold. The pegasi like to chase birds. Birds don’t like to be chased.”
“Okay.” Whatever that meant.
Jim picked up Doolittle, wheelchair and all, and raised him up. I hugged the Pack’s medmage.
“Good luck,” he told me.
“Thank you.” I would need every drop.
“Remember, try to bond with the pegasi.” Teddy Jo said. “Treat her as a friend, not a horse.”
“I would try to be friends with her but she’s too busy being a smartass.”
“Now you know how the rest of us feel,” Jim said. “Who the hell is that?”
I glanced in the direction he was pointing, where a man rode the air currents on blood-red wings. “That’s Christopher.”
“Who?” Jim looked like he was about to have a heart attack.
“Christopher. He remembered how to fly.”
Dali laughed.
Jim stared at me. I had to go before he suffered an apoplexy and the rest of the Pack, with Dali at the head, came after me. “Bye!”
Sugar galloped off the edge of the tower and then we were flying again, the remains of my aunt secure in my saddlebags.
CHAPTER
10
BIRDS WERE ASSHOLES. I pulled the ski mask off the nice warm spot in the ruins of a high-rise, where I had laid it out to dry after washing it in a nearby stream, and packed it back into my backpack. Sugar enjoyed flying back and forth through the bird flocks, and they retaliated by diving at me and doing their best to claw and peck the skin off my face and scalp. It took some serious scrubbing against a convenient rock in the stream to get the bird poop off the wool before the mask could go back on my head for the trip back. I’d have to thank Teddy Jo if I made it home. I should’ve brought one of those antique motorcycle helmets.
When my father had cobbled Mishmar together out of the remnants of Omaha, he’d moved high-rises one at a time, fusing them into a monstrous building. The one I waited in now must’ve failed to make the cut, because Dad had left it lying on its side atop a low hill fully two miles from Mishmar. From my vantage point, I could see the prison, towering like some citadel of legend over the plain, massive, wrapped in a ring of walls.
The magic was down, but I could feel it, still. Somewhere deep within its walls my grandmother’s bones waited. Her bones and her wraith. Or was it wrath? Probably wrath.
My grandmother longed for the banks of the rivers, where the sun shone and vivid flowers bloomed, shifting softly in the breeze. Instead my father had stuffed her into a concrete tomb and used the magic she emanated to power up Mishmar. She hated it.
Sugar clopped over and nudged me with her nose. I patted her and offered her a carrot.
The winged horse neighed.
“Too much sugar is bad for your teeth.”
She took the carrot, but her snort made it plain she wasn’t grateful. She was probably bored.
Curran and I had agreed on a simple plan: I would wait until the magic hit and go in just after sunset. If I tried to break in while technology was on the upswing, my father might not feel it or he might decide to stay where he was, since without magic he had no way of getting here
fast enough.
Sugar and I had landed at the ruined skyscraper twenty-four hours ago, but the first night tech held the whole time. It was the second night now, and the big red ball of the sun was merrily rolling toward the horizon, so unless the magic decided to reassert itself in the next hour or so, I would be spending another night curled up next to the winged horse. Right now, that didn’t seem like a terrible thing. Being away from Atlanta cleared my head. It felt liberating.
At least I had stopped worrying about Sugar flying off and leaving me to fend for myself. She seemed to find me amusing and stuck around. I’d learned to sneak off before taking a bathroom break, however, because she decided that pawing at me with a hoof after I found a secluded spot to pee was the funniest thing ever.
The one good thing about the wait was that it gave me time to think of what I would say. Even if it worked . . . I wasn’t even sure my grandmother could understand me. If I failed, there was no Plan B.
“No Plan B, Sugar,” I told her. “If I screw this up, Curran dies. The city burns. All my friends will be dead.”
Sugar flicked her ears at me.
“It’s occurred to me that this would all be much easier if I were evil. I would have serenity of purpose and none of these pesky problems.”
Sugar didn’t seem impressed.
The light turned red as the sun rolled toward the horizon.
The world’s pulse skipped a beat. Magic flooded in.
“Yes.” I grinned and grabbed the blanket. “Onward, my noble steed. To our inevitable doom and gory death.”
Thirty seconds later we took to the air. The tower of Mishmar grew closer, the different textures of its parts flowing into each other as if melted together. Red brick became gray granite transforming into slabs of natural stone, then into gray brick. The amount of magic necessary to pull this off boggled the mind.
Winged shapes rose from the crevices at the top of the tower and bounced up and down on the air currents.
“You’re going to drop me off in the courtyard,” I told her. “On the bridge. We’ll have to do it quickly. Don’t go and play with those flying things. They aren’t birds. They have long beaks studded with sharp teeth and their wings are leather. They’re not nice and cuddly like that flock of geese that tried to take my head off when you flew through it. They will hurt you if you get too close, and I don’t want that to happen. I like you.”