Freya Read online

  Time for a little trip down misery lane.

  See, I can’t make people love me—not really. Love is as much a mental and emotional state as it is a physical one, and the latter is all I can touch: body chemistry and mood. Still, that’s a rather fertile playground. This man strikes me as a fairly loveless individual, but even monsters can feel loss. So I concentrate, reaching out to him with the little spark of power I have left, and push at his brain chemistry. It’s exhausting, but worse than that, it hurts—I’m supposed to inspire love and adoration, not despair. What I’m doing goes against the very core of my being.

  Garen frowns and shakes his head, trying to clear it. His face loses its disturbing, superior cast, breaking down into confusion. “What are you—?” He puts a hand on the table to steady himself before staggering away from it. I think he’s trying to glare, to reassert himself, but he keeps stumbling on the sadness I’m pouring into his brain.

  Either he’s hiding something or I’m weaker than I thought. Maybe it’s both, because he should be on the ground right now, crying for his mother, instead of looking a little tipsy. There’s no way I can keep this going much longer. Hell, I’m starting to tear up from the sheer effort of it all.

  Luckily, my pantheon has a solution for problems like Garen: Hit them again, and harder. While he’s distracted, I launch myself up, sending my chair clattering away. I leap onto the table and run across it, gathering what little speed I can in two footfalls before throwing myself into the air, pulling my legs up, and sending both knees crashing into the man’s chest. The air goes out of him with a whoosh and he topples to the floor. He seems dazed, but I refuse to give him the chance to retaliate. I lean back, grab one of the nearby plastic chairs, and bring it down on his head with a savage crack. His eyes roll and he goes limp.

  This is the part where I’m supposed to run. The bad guy’s unconscious, and everything’s clear for me to make my getaway. Well, how stupid is that? I feel this is one of the many poor lessons Hollywood teaches today’s young women. You don’t leave an enemy behind, not when you have the upper hand.

  I raise the chair high above and bring it down again, bouncing Garen’s head off the floor with the strength of the blow. Blood spatters onto the dingy linoleum. Again. A grim smile begins working its way onto my lips. He’s still breathing, but I figure another hit or two should be enough to—

  Garen’s body contracts, sucking into itself. Fabric, skin, muscle, and bone flow like water into a drain, spiraling down into nothingness. He’s gone in an eyeblink, a blast of air rushing in to fill the void with a sound like a suction cup being torn off a window. There’s nothing left of the man but a bloodstained floor and a dented chair.

  His empty seat clatters to the linoleum, dropping from my nerveless fingers, and I lean against the table for support. Oh, this is very bad. He’s been saved by some sort of contingency magic, his friends will no doubt be back in force to finish the job, and … and I have to be gone before they return. Gone. The thought stabs me, fills my heart with a thunderous jumble of grief and fury. This isn’t fair. I’ve lost everything a hundred times over, been reduced to a shell of a goddess in an asylum, and now I’m about to fall even farther. What, I haven’t been humiliated enough?

  I scream and kick over the table where Garen made his offer, where he changed everything, and stand there for a moment, seething. Then I shake my head. It’s done. I want to sit and pout, to rage against the injustice of it all, but centuries of experience are screaming at me to leave, and I’m inclined to listen. I may be fickle, but I’m not stupid. I spare a moment to glare at the spot where Garen vanished, then dash over to Bill and unclip the keys from his belt. Around here, if you have keys, you can do anything.

  I push out of the cafeteria and nearly trip over Nathan. He and Elliot must have been finishing up their tour beside the nurses’ station. Lucky me; I’m not sure if I remember how to drive a car—twenty-seven years in a mental hospital!—so I’m going to need a chauffeur. Deciding whom to take is easy. I might be a lot stronger than I look, but Elliot’s a giant, and there’s no way I’m getting him out of here without a forklift, so I bend down and haul our newest psych tech off the floor. He groans as I toss him over my shoulder. I think Garen’s sleep spell might be wearing off.

  By the time I’ve made my way out of the Inward Care Center, fumbling with Nathan and more stupid locked doors than I can count, he’s starting to wake up. Good, I was getting tired. This little journey has made me realize I’m nowhere near as strong as I used to be.

  “Whazzit?” he mumbles as I jog into the parking lot.

  “Which car is yours, Nate?” I say, pulling him off my shoulder and giving him a shake.

  He rubs his head, trying to banish the last bits of sleep. “Silver Toyota Camry, why—wait, what’s going on?”

  I grab him by the shoulders, stare into his eyes, and give him my best smile. “You’re about to rescue a god, Nate. Now, get me out of here!”

  He frowns, fully awake now. “What, no, I’m—it’s Sara, right? What are we doing out here? No, we have to go back inside! I just started this job and—”

  I flood his brain with as much happiness, love, and desire as I can manage. His look of confusion slips away into puppy love. It would be adorable if I weren’t so pressed for time. “Oh,” he murmurs, a dreamy expression returning to his face. “’Kay.”

  I hand him his keys and he wanders over to his car, unlocks the passenger side first (what a gentleman!), and lets me in. Then he enters, starts the engine, and pulls out of the lot. “Where to, Sara?” he asks with a silly smile.

  The question stops me in my tracks. After twenty-seven years, the hospital has become my world. I’d never considered where else I might need to go, and now all I know is it’s the one place I can’t stay.

  “I don’t know, Nathan,” I say, the words filling me with terror. “I really don’t know.”

  2

  THE NEW WORLD

  We go to his apartment, of course.

  It’s the only idea I have. For almost thirty years, my only window to the outside has been a limited supply of television and movies, and they’re quite clear on the first step: Everyone runs to the guy’s apartment first, and then they make a plan. So that’s where we go. I almost feel guilty for picking the clichéd choice.

  The first thing Nathan does when we get inside is hug me. “You’re amazing!” he says, still heady from a brain full of pheromones, dopamine, and serotonin. (You can learn a lot about the science of attraction if you hang around doctors for a few decades.)

  I smile, but it’s a sad one. He doesn’t really love me—not with his heart. You’d think it wouldn’t matter, but the empty adoration I’ve forced on him is against everything I stand for. I live for displays of true, genuine love, not this forgery, so I release my hold on his mind and try to bring him back to normal. It doesn’t take long. One moment he’s bouncing off the walls, giddy at just being around me, and the next he’s cooling down, steadying himself against his kitchen’s Formica countertop. A frown replaces the inane grin, and he starts to realize what happened.

  “Wait, why are we here?” he says, looking around. He turns to me, eyebrows shooting upward. “Oh, crap, we have to get back to the center! It’s my first day!”

  “Well, we kind of can’t do that, Nate,” I reply, hitching my shoulders in a bashful shrug. “Sorry.”

  “Oh god,” he says, really seeing me for the first time, putting two and two together. “I kidnapped a patient. I am so fired. Oh, no no no, this is all kinds of fired and sued and arrested and—” He starts heading for the door, but I move to block him.

  “Calm down,” I say. “You’re not in trouble. I kidnapped you.”

  “What?”

  “And I really am a god.” Might as well slip that one in. It’s not like it’s going to make him any more bewildered.

  He laughs and holds up his hands. “Sure you are, um, Sara? It is Sara, isn’t it? Why don’t we get in my car and
head … out?”

  I roll my eyes. “I’m not letting you take me back to Inward, Nate. Now, look, what do I need to do to prove to you that I’m a god?”

  He pauses for a moment. “Go back to the center with me?” He says it with such hope I can’t help laughing.

  “Nate, calm down. I’m not going anywhere until you start taking me seriously.”

  He begins to pace. I can see this isn’t exactly what he was expecting when he went in to work today. “Sara, please,” he says. “I need this job, and it’s going to look really bad when they find out I snuck a beautiful crazy person out of the facility, drove her home, and can’t even remember how it all happened.”

  He doesn’t realize it, but the little compliment he sneaks in next to “crazy person” really makes my day. It’s hard to look nice in an old T-shirt and a pair of jeans, particularly after decades in a place where the “hairdresser” is more concerned with lice than style and the only makeup is already on the nurses’ faces. I sigh and say, “Nate, I’m a goddess of love. The reason you can’t remember what happened is because I was messing with your head.”

  He gives me “the look.” I’m used to it by now—it’s the one that says, Aww, how sweet. You really believe all this, don’t you? To his credit, though, all he says is “I’m not sure how well that’ll hold up in court, Sara.”

  That gets him another eye roll. I don’t care how “creative” or “open-minded” people claim to be now. Time was, you could do something inexplicable and tell someone it was the result of divine power, and they’d believe it in a heartbeat. Now they just chalk it up to science and sleight of hand. Or drugs. “Back in my day…” I say under my breath. Well, those days are gone. I have to play the hand I’ve been dealt, and right now that hand thinks I’m adorably insane. I decide to try a different tack.

  “Okay, Nate, how about this: I’m going to sit down on that chair”—I point at a metal folding chair next to a beat-up card table—“and you sit on your little futon over there, and I will make you fall in love with me. If you don’t think I’ve done anything after five minutes, I’ll go anywhere you like. Deal?”

  He glances at the couch, then back to me. “Deal,” he says, trying very hard to keep his face neutral. It’s clear he still thinks I’m nuts, but at least he’s being nice about it.

  He moves over to his futon, sits, and gives me an expectant look. I plop onto the metal chair, lean forward, and begin ratcheting up the affection between us. It takes a little longer than the fire hydrant of desire I unleashed in the parking lot, mostly because I want to leave him aware and in control this time and partly because I’m just plain exhausted.

  His eyes widen in surprise and his mouth drops open. He looks at me with a delightful sense of perplexed attraction, and I can see he gets it. I stop what I’m doing to his head. “Apologies sound better with chocolate,” I say, giving him a knowing smirk.

  He laughs, seems like he’s about to say something, then closes his mouth and marches into his little kitchen. There’s some rustling, and after a moment he returns with—Yes!

  “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve had one of these?” I exclaim, holding out my hands.

  “I am very sorry I doubted you,” he says, dropping a Toblerone chocolate bar into my eager grasp. I used to love these things. For some reason, the presence of almond nougat and honey folded into chocolate seems perfectly calibrated to strike at the joy centers of my brain.

  “Apology accepted, mortal,” I say with a grin, tearing open the bar and biting off a succulent triangle.

  “So you’re really a god?” Nathan asks. “Not just, I don’t know … a psychic superhero or something?” He’s not fully convinced, but at least he’s not rushing to get me into a straitjacket anymore. I can work with that.

  “You guys and your fantasies,” I say around a mouthful of chocolate. It’s just as good as I remember it. I decide to count it as an offering in my name, the first in a very long time. “Here, I’ll prove it to you. Get me a knife.”

  “Um, pass?” he says with a frown. I wait a moment, then give him an unamused look when he stands his ground. Okay, he may be open to the idea that I’m telling the truth, but part of him is still clearly unwilling to arm someone he met in the loony bin.

  “Worried I’m one of those teenybop serial killers you keep hearing about?” I ask, setting the chocolate down and heading for the kitchen.

  “Well, no, but—wait. Seriously, you don’t need—!”

  “Your skin does look very fashionable,” I say, rummaging through his knife block. “Ah, perfect.”

  I pull out a large chef’s knife, noting it’s one of the few things in this apartment that isn’t a bargain brand. I add Takes pride in his cooking? to the short list of things I know about Nathan, then sit back down across from him, grinning as I see he’s gotten very still. “Don’t be a baby,” I say, giving the air a few lazy swipes with the knife. “You should see what I can do with a long sword.”

  Before he can react, I draw the blade across the tip of my left thumb. He winces and holds up his hands, saying, “Hey, no! Stop. Don’t do that!”

  I just smile and hold my thumb out at him. “I don’t have many believers left,” I say, directing his attention to the injured digit. “But the ones I do have don’t think of me as a goddess with a cut on her finger. So I change to match their beliefs. Watch.”

  Hundreds of years ago, the wound would have started to heal before I’d even finished making it. Now it takes almost a full minute. Still, for those who don’t know any better, it probably seems very impressive. Bit by bit, the cut stitches itself closed, a few dainty drops of blood oozing out before it seals itself completely. There’s not even the barest hint of a scar; it’s like the gash was never there in the first place. I wipe the remaining blood on my T-shirt (an act I find vaguely ironic, considering the message on it) and raise an eyebrow at Nathan. “Well?”

  “That’s … that’s incredible,” he says, sounding suitably awed. “I mean, you could just be some regenerating psychic superhero, but still. Not something you see every day.” He stares at me for another few seconds, then shrugs. “Okay, maybe you are a god. Whaddaya say we roll with it for now? Hot damn.”

  “You’re taking this rather well.”

  He grins, eyes alight. “Are you kidding? This is just about every childhood daydream of my generation come to life. So which god are you, really? There’s a way higher chance I’ll believe you now, I promise.”

  I barely resist telling him—the urge to gain a new worshipper is so strong—but I can’t yet. We’re not safe here. It won’t take a genius to figure out where I’ve gone and with whom, and telling Nathan all about myself is a long story that can wait for a safer place. I make a little hurt sound and shake my head. “Not now, Nate. I’m in danger. Actually, I think we both are.”

  “We?”

  “Probably, yeah. Sorry.” I really do feel bad about it; he seems like a nice guy, and not someone who deserves to be thrown into the middle of some supernatural struggle, but much like my past, now is not the time to focus on this. “Someone’s hunting me, and since you helped me get here, I think pretty soon they’ll be after you, too.”

  “Oh,” Nathan says, digesting this. Then he laughs, and it’s that crazed sort of sound you make when you’re not sure if you should be amused or appalled. He glances around the utilitarian apartment, at the ID clipped to his waistband, and shrugs. “I have to tell you, Sara, this is probably the best excuse I’ve ever had for taking a day off. The first day of my first grown-up job … and apparently also my last.”

  I laugh with him. It is a bit ridiculous. “Glad I could help you play hooky.”

  “So, who are you running from?”

  No point in keeping him in the dark there. I quickly describe Garen and his nasty organization. When I’m done, Nathan nods and says, “Yeah, I don’t blame you for wanting to get the hell away from that.” He pauses for a moment, then bobs his head as if
he’s made some internal decision. “Well, can’t let a nice goddess like you make a break for it on foot. Where do you want to go?”

  It’s the question that’s been running through my head since we got here. I lean back in my chair and grab for the chocolate again. “Truth is, Nate, I have no idea. I’ve been at the Inward Care Center for twenty-seven years. I don’t have anywhere to run.”

  “Twenty-seven?” he barks, surprised. “You don’t even look old enough to drink.”

  “I did say I was over a thousand. Not bad for a millenarian, eh?” I say, gesturing at myself.

  He taps his forehead. “Aah, right. Goddess. I guess you don’t age.” He frowns as a thought hits him, then gives voice to it. “How come nobody at the center noticed? Your records must have admittance dates.”

  I shrug. “I can tweak how people feel about me, like I did to you. Seriously, it’s not like I’m a hazard to myself or others; they wouldn’t normally keep me in a place like that. My butt has ‘outpatient care’ written all over it.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Nathan says. “So you’re on the run, you have no place to go, and, lemme guess, you have no friends to call, since all your contacts are twenty-seven years out of date.”

  “Right in one.”

  “I’ve got plenty of friends in town,” he says. “And family up in the Maryland-DC area.”

  I shake my head. “Can’t be anyone connected to you, either. Nowhere they’ll know to go looking. I need a nice, permanent place to lie low.”

  “Permanent, huh? That makes things difficult. I’m your classic starving artist, and something tells me you weren’t drawing a paycheck in the hospital.”

  “No, and all my things, well…” It hurts to admit I have nothing left, not even my necklace. If it glitters, it calls to me. I adore bling of all types, the more unique and precious the better. Just a quirk of mine. I have a lot of them, too. As a figment of humanity’s imagination given form, my thoughts, desires, and motivations will always be a little larger than life. “I don’t even have proper clothes anymore,” I finish, looking down at my bedraggled cast-offs. He thinks I’m beautiful? In this?