99 Gods: War Read online

“Whether superstition is the father of humbug, or humbug the mother of superstition (as well as its nurse,) I do not pretend to say; for the biggest fools and greatest philosophers can be numbered among the believers in and victims of the worst humbugs that ever prevailed on the earth. … If children are permitted to feast their ears night after night (as I was) with stories of ghosts, hob-goblins, ghouls, witches, apparitions, bugaboos, it is more difficult in after-life for them to rid their minds of impressions thus made.

  ” – P.T. Barnum, Humbugs of the World

  “Reality is strange enough as it is. It doesn’t need my dubious help.”

  4. (Nessa)

  “I think this Atlanta’s doing it, too,” Nessa said. Antsy, she turned away from the flat panel display and shook her head. All this new stuff about the 99 Gods, their minor miracles, their long-winded utopian commentaries and their divisions into Territorial, Ideological and Practical Gods clogged her mind. She had learned enough for now. She couldn’t believe she had missed the arrival of the 99 Gods. She suspected her reclusive life in the hills above Eklunta might possibly have something to do with ‘why’, along with her more than occasional acquaintance with insanity.

  “Doing what?” Ken said. She motioned Ken over to her computer and played an obscure video from a site specializing in police and crimes. The video showed a gore-dripping head impaled on a stop sign, a severed arm hanging over a bench, and farther back, the rest of a dismembered body stapled in some fashion to a light pole. “The same as Miami. This. The nasty stuff.” Nessa paused and closed the video before she spewed. Chocolate vomit would indeed mess up her tech setup.

  “All those unsolved disappearances in Atlanta’s Territory and the so-called vigilante killer: it’s her,” Nessa said. “Or should I say ‘Her’? Perhaps a deeper voiced ‘Her’?”

  “Say whatever you want,” Ken said. “I didn’t think you did hunches.”

  “Of course I do. Most of the time, though, they’re inaccessible, hidden down in my subconscious. Stress brings them out,” Nessa said. “I learned this one a few years ago, after settling here in Eklutna.” She sighed. “I’m right, though.”

  “I believe you,” Ken said. He put his left hand on her right shoulder, steadying himself. Fearful. “So what do you think of the Gods and what they’re spouting?”

  “Well…” she said, pausing to gather her scattered thoughts. “I love the new commandment from God Almighty about ‘no more wars between nations’. As you know, I’ve always disliked war. It’s the rest of the stuff hidden in the bowels of their press releases and press conferences that bothers me, the stuff about doing good. Whose good? Who defines what’s good? So I’m not sure.” The Territorial Gods appeared to be the big cheeses, ranking the others, but she suspected that might be only due to the short amount of time they had been on Earth. “I don’t get any feeling of utter evil about them as a group. I sort of like the leader Territorial here in America, uh, Dubuque, and how he’s taken on the fringie fundies and proclaimed himself a Living Saint. He’s cute.” She had always had a thing for liberal ministers, probably having something to do with which churches she had attended with her parents in her childhood. The congregations always liked Nessa, or as she was back then, Vanessa, before she slipped up and made the inevitable scene.

  “He’s a natural leader, I’ll give you, all tall, blond and thin,” Ken said. Nessa would call Dubuque’s hair light brown, but she supposed that sort of thing depended on where you stood. “I’ve heard him talk on the net and television several times. I’ll buy his point about the time coming to end war, even though it’s by fiat. I thought picking fights with the fundies about Christian doctrine from day one was a bit rude, though.”

  “They needed a good slap in the face if anyone did,” Nessa said. She stood. “Ken, if you want to keep talking to me, we need to go for a walk. I go stir crazy if I stay in my trailer for too long.” The warring emotions had built up in her again, and she had the urge to rip Ken a new one.

  “You need some more chocolate?”

  Nessa glared at Ken and rolled her eyes. “I can do a walk,” he said, surrendering.

  She frowned, went over to the metal kitchen drawers next to the range, grabbed a handful of bullets, loaded her old Enfield pistol, and stuck it in her pants. Ken frowned. She also shoved both of her special socks in her purse. He didn’t blink at the socks.

  “Sorry, but I like my guns,” Nessa said. Ken grunted and didn’t otherwise answer, bringing a half smile to her face. A memory flicker of earlier, when they had been dancing, chased away the half smile, and Nessa sighed. “Ken, I apologize.” She paused. She had a lot of practice with apologies. “I didn’t mean to bark at you. Are you still sure you want to deal with me? I’m an antisocial abusive shit without a good bone in my body. You’re too nice.” She paused. “You were always too nice.”

  “I’m too nice?” Ken said, backing away, caught up in her roiling emotions. “You wound me. I’m never going to live it down. Nice? I’ve worked all my fucking life on becoming nice. I work fucking overtime to be nice. You know what happens when I forget to be nice.” Nessa’s trailer home moaned. She sniffed. Some things never did change. “So what, now that I’ve gotten all of those old bad problems of mine taken care of, suddenly I’m too nice?”

  Ken’s tirade brought a smile to Nessa’s face. “You’re still a drama queen, pardon the sexual innuendo.”

  “You’ve always said that,” he said. “Never could figure out why.”

  “You weren’t a girl in high school.”

  “Last I checked, no, that’s right,” Ken said. “Still need to take a walk?”

  Nessa nodded.

  “Let’s walk.”

  “So, why walk?” Ken said, unable to resist once they got outside. “Why not use a car? I’ve got one out front.”

  “I hate cars,” Nessa said, with a ‘fuck you’ voice. Without turning to see if Ken followed, she stalked off at a fast pace down the driveway and down the hill toward the main road to the village of Eklutna. Ken ambled behind her, nicely obedient. A wet sticky scent of mountain hemlock crawled up the hill and past Nessa’s nose. More rain nearby, some morning mist. Mountains did that.

  “Your place is strange,” Ken said. “What’s with the sod?”

  “Couple of years ago, some developers down closer to Anchorage miscalculated how much sod they needed for a subdivision. I bought them out cheap and put the sod around my trailer, like they did in the frontier days, back when they made sod houses.”

  She kept up a vicious pace down the hill and over to the local rural road, which wound through a stand of towering mountain hemlocks that had sold this place for Nessa, many years ago. Ken already sounded winded. Good.

  “One of your schemes, eh?” Nessa didn’t answer. “You wheedled them into a good deal, didn’t you?”

  She still didn’t answer. Instead, she turned off the road, to a steep trail leading downhill that cut about a half mile off the walk. The rough terrain didn’t bother her, or the wet vegetation. She traversed the slope regularly with a full backpack and duffel full of groceries, uphill. Behind her, Ken cursed under his breath. Nessa smiled.

  “How’d you do the roof? Wouldn’t that much sod be too much for a trailer roof?”

  “The roof is timber reinforced,” Nessa said. Arranging the reinforcing had been a bitch and a half and had eaten up nearly all the expected profit in reduced heating costs, a problem typical of her schemes. “The reason I did the sod trick was to cut the heating costs in the winter, which it does.”

  “What about permafrost?”

  “There’s only sporadic permafrost in this area,” Nessa said, gritting her teeth. It pissed her off that Ken knew about permafrost when she had only learned about it well after she moved up here.

  Many things pissed her off. Nessa turned and stalked away, clambering down a thirty-foot boulder strewn slope, the worst p
art of the trail. She hoped Ken would twist an ankle. Perhaps she would leave him for the goddamned bears.

  “There’s only a few feet of soil where I live before you hit rock,” she said, apropos of nothing. “There’s some patches of permafrost down in the valley, though, where the soil is thicker.”

  Ken skidded down the bottom five feet of the rocky slope, landing on his toes. Nessa turned for a moment to see if he needed help, but he didn’t. However, he had muddied up his wing tips and it was only a matter of time before he rubbed his muddy hand on his suit. Heh.

  “Why are you so pissed at me?” Ken said. She turned and continued down the trail. No need to belabor the obvious. “Why?” Ken asked, unwilling to let it go.

  “You’ve got a brain. Use it.”

  Nessa picked up the pace on the gentler slope. She had seen bear sign in the mud below the boulder run. Bears weren’t a problem for her, but she didn’t feel like showing off right now. Ken’s comments about this God shit had her more worried than she let on.

  “Oh,” Ken said, a minute later. “You’re pissed at me because you thought I came to visit you for personal reasons. But since my real reason to hunt you down was to talk about the 99 Gods, I trampled your expectations.”

  “Close enough,” Nessa said. She had gotten lost in the anticipation, in the dance of bodies, before he popped his silly 99 Gods question. “I have to keep things simple to keep my head on straight. This 99 Gods crap’s making things too complicated.”

  All those years ago, after the confrontation, she and Ken had argued about his marriage. She thought it wrong for people like her and Ken to get involved with people who didn’t know about their tricks, but Ken had kept his a secret from Livie, Ken’s then wife. Nessa had been convinced Livie already secretly hated Ken and their marriage was doomed. Ken had disagreed, vehemently. She and Ken hadn’t spoken since. When Ken had given her his formal apology for his mistakes, she had decided he had come up here to hook up with her. He had dashed her assumption when he had told her about the 99 Gods.

  The mountain hemlocks parted around them, revealing a soggy field ahead, already cut for hay. Below lay the village of Eklutna.

  “That’s a strange looking town,” Ken said, sprinting to catch up to her. She didn’t comment about the town’s mixture of Anglos and Native Americans. “Nessa, I wouldn’t take advantage of you. I know you well enough to know how skittish you are about intimacy.” He looked her in the eye. “But since we’re both entanglement free, we could date.”

  Date? ‘Date’ hadn’t quite been what Nessa had been anticipating, or what she thought had been going on earlier. “But what if I no longer want a relationship with you? What if I only wanted a relationship with you because you’d come up here to seek me out for personal reasons? What if I just wanted a one-nighter because I was curious?” Nessa said, thoughts scattered and unfocused. “What if this is all just my crazy getting out of its cage again?”

  Ken put his hand on her shoulder, but Nessa shook off his hand. “I don’t want your goddamned sympathy either!” She turned and strode away, stomping standing water as she power walked, stiff legged, the last two hundred yards to the main road. Mrs. Keith was out on her fat-tired bicycle, and Nessa waved at her. Mrs. Keith eyed Ken suspiciously.

  Anger had never been good for Nessa.

  The world contracted inside her mind and spots swirled about her, clouding her vision.

  Then her world went away.

  Nessa blinked hard, twice, and shook herself until the spots vanished.

  She found herself standing on the main road through Eklutna, on the edge of town, right by the two-pump Conoco station. To her surprise Ken Bolnick stood next to her.

  “Ken? What are you doing here in Eklutna? You on some sort of case?” All of a sudden nothing made sense.

  Ken looked at her in horror.

  “Nessa?”

  “Yah huh.” Pause. “I think.” Most of the time she had known Ken her name had been ‘Vanessa’.

  “You’ve been standing here, unresponsive, for nearly five minutes,” he said.

  “Oh,” Nessa said. “A glitch.” She took a deep breath and wrapped her arms around herself. No wonder nothing made sense. “Was I saying anything?”

  “Nope. Dead silent.”

  “At least that’s something,” she said, softly. “Keyword?”

  “99 Gods.”

  Memories poured back into her mind. “Oh. Right. You came here to take advantage of me. We’ve got some sort of personal problem because of this.”

  She hated her glitches. They were such a pain in the ass. Luckily they didn’t happen every day.

  Ken sighed.

  “What could fix this problem?” Ken said. “What do you need from me?”

  She thought for a moment and stamped her feet on the damp ground to get her circulation moving again. Schemes and ideas ran through her mind, accompanied by the usual mental arguments. “Assurances. I’m not working for you,” Nessa said, eventually.

  “I never asked you to work for me,” he said, exasperated. Nessa smiled, making sure Ken couldn’t see her face.

  “I don’t have any money,” Nessa said. “I can’t go with you on this crazy mission you’ve given yourself. I can’t be a parasite. Being a parasite messes me up worse than anything.” If she allowed herself to be a parasite, that meant she had failed, and she had enough failure in her life. She couldn’t stand any more.

  “Well, okay,” Ken said. “Nessa, will you marry me?”

  Huh? “Oh, that’s romantic,” Nessa said. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  Her comment shut Ken up. She didn’t have to look at him to know she had pissed him off with her cavalier rejection. Maybe he would just go away.

  Don’t be a fool, Nessa.

  Oh, you shut yourself up!

  If Ken went away, she would have to figure out how to help Uffie on her own. To start with, she would have to learn more about the 99 Gods, which meant she would have to use this internet crap without any help. Over twenty years and the annoying fad still hadn’t faded. Such a bother. She did have the odd resource out in the wider world, people who might have calmed down since the last time she pissed them off. Ken would normally have headed her list, if he hadn’t just made a fool of himself by proposing to her.

  “Surely you know I love you,” Ken said.

  Nessa stopped.

  “You actually believe you love me, don’t you,” Nessa said. Damn. She closed her eyes and put her bony hands over her face, fighting for control. Back in LA, after the confrontation, he had told her he loved her, but his comment hadn’t counted because he had been married to Livie at the time. Just one of those male things. Territoriality. Harem formation. Pack dominance. Ken and Ron had never gotten along. Two roosters, one hen. Ron had done a good job at taking care of her for a while. A few too many nips on the neck, perhaps…

  Too much time with the wolves, Nessa.

  I told you to shut up!

  Most people wore their emotions on their sleeves, easy for Nessa to pick up, but Ken hid himself from her. She could only pick up glimpses of this and that. And what he wanted to show her.

  He did love her. She had seen the truth when he said the words.

  She didn’t want to cry. She hated crying.

  She didn’t cry.

  Ken put his arms around her, from behind, and hugged her. “I’ve loved you since the day we met. I’d do anything for you. I let you work for me, despite the problems it caused between us, because with a career and a husband you had stability for the first time in your life. Nessa, I didn’t come up here to threaten you, I came up here to beg you. I’d sacrifice myself to you, if you had been behind the 99 Gods in any way, to get you to call them back. I’m terrified about what they’re going to do to us. That’s one of my hunches. I’ll do anything to help you rescue Uffie. I’ll move mountains. I’ll look around tho
se awful dark corners we know about, where no one in their right mind should ever look. I’ll even pick up firearms.” His voice picked up an actor’s tremolo. “Whatever you need, whatever you want, whatever suits your desires, I will comply.”

  Damn him and his drama!

  Nessa whirled around, grabbed Ken in her arms, and kissed him. A dim part of her mind knew she scandalized the townsfolk of Eklutna, but she didn’t care. He touched her heart and Nessa wasn’t inhuman enough to have rejected love entirely. She had said so on many occasions, but she had lied, and she knew she had lied, so it didn’t matter.

  She did have her limits. As much as she wanted to boink him right here, she couldn’t do that in front of the Eklutnans.

  The Eklutnans kept her sane. Relatively speaking.

  “I still can’t marry you,” she said, after she wiggled out of Ken’s embrace. “At least not legally.”

  “Can you tell me why?”

  She shrugged. Now, she would rather boink than talk, but she suspected she would lose the urge by the time they hiked back uphill to her trailer. However, she knew a few quiet places around town where the local kids boinked in the warmer months. Places crawling with tourists during the tourist season, when all those horrid people with their horrid crying infants and their horrid cameras and camera phones came calling during the summer. She did her odd jobs to make money during the summer, the best time of the year for such work. She worked nights, cleaning like a demon. She got far less than minimum wage from her efforts, but she had other reasons for the jobs. She needed the affection of the people of Eklutna.

  Nessa grabbed Ken’s hand and led him farther into Eklutna, through what passed as the Eklutna business district. The village had one now, mostly because of the suburbanites, the Anchorage commuters, who had started to fill the community. Past the business district were lawns with grass needing real mowing and lawnmowers to pollute the air to make the neighborhood smell like home. The houses wouldn’t look out of place in a well-off Minneapolis suburb, where they should be, dammit. If she knew of a way to get rid of them, she would.

  “What’s this place?” Ken said, after they passed the center of the village and went on to the manicured town fringe.

  “Historical park.” Its manicured lawn fit in with the expensive commuter houses.

  “That’s a strange looking church,” he said, about the building where she led him.

  “Russian Orthodox,” she said. “The native Athabascans are predominantly Russian Orthodox, and they still make up nearly a quarter of the community, despite people like me who keep coming here.”

  The white clapboard church had turquoise window frames and two steeples, both with gold onion-domes on them, topped with crosses. “I’ve worked here, occasionally,” she said. She had tried being a tour guide once, but she had to quit. Too many random people. She hadn’t expected crowds in Alaska.

  The historical park’s summer beauty had fled, the once glowing green grass perfectly offset by towering pines and distant mountains now chased away by grass browned by early frosts. The tourists hadn’t all fled, much to her annoyance. Three rental cars polluted the parking lot, and if she concentrated she could hear the soft mutters of tourists in action.

  Worse, the clouds above began to spit rain.

  “I can’t marry you because marriage is tied in my mind to Ron,” Nessa said. “I don’t want to hate you. I hate marriage.” She couldn’t marry anyone ever again unless it was part of a scheme. Then the marriage wouldn’t be real. Ken had made it too real for schemes.

  “How about something informal? We could marry ourselves, no witnesses, no minister.”

  Nessa pondered Ken’s words. His desire touched her. She didn’t know if she still loved him, despite her confused mental voices and her physical needs. He had always been in the back of her mind, though, as someone she respected, someone she had once loved. She hoped respect and old emotions would be enough. “I could do that. In fact, I have just the place.”

  She took Ken’s hand and walked him away from the church, down a trail deeper into the historical park. She repressed the urge to skip. Ken held back.

  “You’re nervous.”

  “Of course I’m nervous,” Ken said. “You scare the crap out of me. You’ve always scared the crap out of me.”

  “I thought you said you’ve always loved me.”

  “I’ve always loved you and you’ve always scared the crap out of me,” he said. “I’ve always felt like a twig in a tornado around you.”

  “You have? You, the great private investigator?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever told me,” Nessa said. She practically purred. Perhaps her life wasn’t the failure she feared. “There’s nothing worse than not meeting your own high expectations.”

  “What?”

  “Huh? Oh, damn, I hadn’t meant to say that aloud. Forget I said anything.” She took her hand from Ken’s and hugged herself again. After the big success she had put no limits on her ambition. It wasn’t a question of whether she would make the history books and encyclopedias, but how long the articles would be.

  Life hadn’t cooperated. Her ambitions had diminished, and now she worried about keeping up her used trailer and making sure her rented land didn’t vanish out from under her. Mr. Panechko, the owner, had thoughts in his head about selling all of his land to a subdivision developer who wanted to blast basements into the living rock and put heated swimming pools out back, next to the natural gas barbeque. She had kept him from doing so, so far, but she feared she couldn’t hold off the sale much longer. She expected to fail at that, too.

  “What are those things?” Ken said, as the trail they walked turned around a stand of pines and opened up into a clearing.

  Nessa sighed. “Those, Ken, are spirit houses.” The area in front of them held three dozen or so miniature houses, all about eight feet long and three feet wide, complete with roofs, miniature windows and doors. The caretakers and family had painted the spirit houses in a riot of bright colors, no two the same.

  “This is a cemetery,” Ken said. “What are we doing in a cemetery?”

  Nessa grimaced. When she had found this place, a tour guide had to tell her this was a cemetery. Damn him. “They’re a native tradition that grew up after the conversion of the Athabascans to Russian Orthodox Christianity,” she said, ignoring his question.

  “Strange. The vibes here are immense. What’s that, another church?” Ken said, and pointed.

  “You want to go visit Santa Claus?”

  Nessa turned and smiled perkily at Ken, followed by a few coy blinks. He shook his head. “You’re getting stranger by the moment.”

  “This isn’t my strangeness,” she said. “Reality is strange enough as it is. It doesn’t need my dubious help.” She walked across the cemetery to a larger building, a much smaller and ruder church than the first one, up on cinder blocks and blocked from entry. This church didn’t have gold-painted onion domes on top. “Behold the old Saint Nicholas Church of the town of Knik. Some park service people moved the building here years ago. I don’t know why.” She paused. “Let’s marry ourselves in front of the church. Have St. Nick marry us. His holy Icon’s in the church, and you can even see it from here.” Ken nodded as she pointed. “The witnesses will be respectful and quiet from their spirit houses. I can’t say they all love me, but I am appreciated.”

  Ken shivered. “I’m not sure they like me.”

  “They will afterwards, I promise,” Nessa said. “You still up for this?”

  “Yes.” He closed his eyes, reached into his suit coat pocket, and pulled out a credit card-sized manila envelope. Nessa’s eyes opened wide. “I had a hunch these might come in handy, after I escaped Miami. I wasn’t sure for what. I hope you don’t mind.” He opened the manila envelope and shook out two plain gold rings. Nessa frowned and licked her lips, noting they weren
’t specifically wedding bands, but general multipurpose rings.

  “Freaky as always,” Nessa said. Typical Ken, doing things without knowing why. “But who am I to talk about freaky?” She paused and looked at the rings again. “You got them too big.”

  Ken nodded. “I don’t think they’re meant for us, but we can borrow them for now.”

  “Sure,” Nessa said. She liked being on the inside of the freaky stuff again, though this did edge her toward her old bad memories of the confrontation.

  Ken turned to Nessa, took her hands in his, and moved them so the church opening was to their left and the spirit houses to their right. “I, Kendrick Bolnick, take Vanessa Binglehauser as my lawfully wedded wife, to love and protect, till death do us part.” He slipped the smaller of the rings on Nessa’s left ring finger, where the ring hung loose.

  Nessa paused to question her gut, goose pimples on her arms. Ken stood waiting, patiently understanding her qualms. It didn’t matter that this was her idea. These days she always had qualms about her ideas, part of growing older and hopefully wiser. Even though she didn’t like the part about having gray hairs before she turned forty. She took in Ken, how his perfectly tailored dark brown suit set off his only slightly lighter brown skin, and smiled. His gold ear stud glinted minutely for a moment, lit by a gap in the overcast, for a moment reminding her of LA and her fonder memories of her life with Ken.

  “I, Vanessa Binglehauser, take Kendrick Bolnick as my lawfully wedded husband, to love and protect, till death do us part or until terminal insanity, whichever comes first.” She put the remaining ring on Ken’s ring finger, where the ring also hung loose.

  “Nessa!”

  “Hush, you’re supposed to kiss the bride,” Nessa said. Ken did so, rekindling Nessa’s former urge to find a quiet place for them to boink. She knew of a place off the trail, perhaps a bit wet, but perfect for what she wanted. Besides, she told herself as she led Ken to the secluded clearing, I’ll just straddle him. He’ll be the one lying on his back who gets wet…

  Nessa covered her mouth to stifle a giggle as Ken looked at the mud prints on the back of his shirt. “It’s brutally cold out here, at least for me. I have icicles growing in my hair. I know you Snow Queen types don’t mind the cold, but…” The sun was setting behind the endless hemlocks, and taking what little remained of the day’s warmth with it. They lay in a bower of bunchberry and cow parsnips, with the bright purple flowers of fireweed towering over their feet. Nessa looked underneath her to make sure she hadn’t taken them into a bower of poison ivy. That would totally ruin the afterglow. No, a couple of vines clambered up a couple of nearby hemlocks, but none in the small clearing.

  She sniffed at his endless drama. “I left that book behind years ago. I still do like snowflakes, though.”

  “Okay,” Ken said. “So when did you get the sunrise tattoo?”

  “Oh, crap, I forgot you hadn’t seen my tat before,” she said, peering over to look at her right buttocks, which wasn’t easy for her any more. She had grown less flexible with age. “I got some ink when I did the drug dealer thing. Hope this isn’t too weird for you.”

  “For me? You’ve got to be kidding.” Ken paused and took a deep breath. “You still messing with dope?”

  “Hey, how’d you know I…” She rolled onto her stomach and looked him over. “Let me guess. When I went through the period where I thought I could use my little tricks to be a world-class drug dealer and got into sampling the wares, you had the urge as well.”

  “Of course. We’ve always been linked.”

  “True, oh so true. More true now. Hopefully not true blue.” She had needed to use her full kaleidoscope of tricks, on herself, to beat her drug habit, something she was quite proud of. Not that she had ever been able to talk to anyone about it.

  Ken snorted. “So, after what you’ve read on the net, do you think any of these so-called Gods are on the real?”

  Nessa shrugged at the subject change. “You don’t?”

  “No. Something’s wrong with the whole lot of them,” Ken said. “The story they’ve told, about God Almighty just up and deciding one day to send us the 99, doesn’t feel right.”

  “Ken, this isn’t helpful,” Nessa said. She slipped her jeans back on, glad she couldn’t see her face. She had to look like a demon hag right now. No matter how she tried to arrange it, her hair had flopped into the mud at least once. At least she had kept her pistol dry.

  Ken stood up to put his own clothes back on. “It’s a good hunch.”

  Ouch. Ken’s hunches tended to be right.

  “I’m not sure we need to know what’s behind them,” she said. Examining causes never got people like her and Ken anywhere. She tried to straighten her hair, but the more she worked the worse it got.

  “What if we have another Blind Tom type behind this?”

  Nessa growled, radiating hostility. “Come up with a better hunch,” she said, between gritted teeth. She didn’t want to think about anything having to do with the confrontation.

  “Okay.” Ken closed his eyes and concentrated. “I’ll bet Opartuth is involved with this 99 Gods mess,” he said.

  “No way.” She crossed her arms and looked away. A strong gust of wind shook the trees above, dropping a few fat droplets of rain down on her.

  “This is Opartuth’s style. Besides…”

  “Dammit, Ken, Opartuth gave his word. Hell, insulting Opartuth is an opening for him to meddle again.” Ken had the brains, but dammit, he didn’t seem to have any sense.

  “But Opartuth isn’t human. What does…”

  Nessa screamed “Stop!” and turned on Ken. “Look, you have your problems and I have mine, but we’re going to leave Opartuth out of all of our discussions. This isn’t right and it is hateful. You’re being an insensitive clod already and we’ve not been married an hour. Give it a rest, Ken.”

  “It’s a valid thought,” he said, and drew himself up to his full height, crushing cow parsnips under his feet. “We can’t disregard valid ideas just because it makes you a little uncomfortable.”

  “A little uncomfortable?” Nessa snarled. “Look, dickwad, we’re talking a real god here, not in the sense of being worshipped, but in the sense of knowing a hell of a lot and possessing scads of tremendous fucking power. Do not take Opartuth’s name in vain.”

  “I refuse to be blinkered in our investigation by minor bits of sentimentalism, even yours,” Ken said, his eyes practically glowing black coals. “We’re going to have to keep our eyes open and keep all our possible options open. We can’t afford to ignore any possibility. Dammit, the two of us could end up at war with 99 fucking Gods.”

  Nessa balled her fists and glared at Ken. “This is my call. Back off.”

  “You can’t force me,” Ken said. He crossed his arms and glared back. Trees groaned behind him, and began to drop leaves and needles in number.

  “Bets?”

  “Yah. I’ve gotten better,” he said. “Lots better. What the distant ones call full mature power.”

  “Well, me too, asshole,” Nessa said. Only she didn’t use such pompous terms as ‘full mature power’. Overblown windbag.

  Nessa pushed. Not with her hands. An invisible push. Not real, at least not in the ‘catch it on camera’ form of real, or in the ‘you can touch it’ form of real. Ken staggered back, nevertheless. Nessa pushed again. Ken fell to his knees, muddying them further. His eyes bugged out. Leaves swirled around Nessa as Ken fought back with his tricks, which were of the ‘you can touch it’ variety. The leaves picked up speed, to where they roared gale force and hurricane, but they never reached her. She pushed harder, and tears came to her eyes. Invisible forces slapped at her, grabbed at her, but she held firm and kept herself out of their reach.

  Ken slowly stood. “You can’t force me,” he said.

  “And you can’t touch me,” Nessa said. She let go the push and cocked h
er head to the side. With an audible snap, the invisible forces around her vanished and the whirlwind of leaves stopped cold, the leaves falling gently to the ground. Last time he had challenged her she hadn’t been able to slap his trick away. Now such things came easily.

  “Fine,” Ken said. “How about a compromise: we go visit Opartuth and ask for Opartuth’s help against the 99 Gods.”

  “You mean ‘ask Opartuth’s help in rescuing Uffie’, Ken. Right?”

  Ken sighed. “Yes.”

  “Good,” Nessa said. “I agree. We can go and ask Opartuth for help. Politely. But Ken, stop with the ‘let’s go confront all the possible perps and accuse them to their face’ idiot detective routine. Dammit, if we’re doing this, we’re going to be playing with the big boys. Would you hail any of the distant ones and ask them if they’re behind the 99 Gods? What do you think Joan D’Ark would do to someone like you? Hell, would you walk up to John Lorenzi and ask him if he’s behind the 99 Gods?”

  Ken’s face pinched with fear. “No way. I’m not that stupid.”

  “Good,” Nessa said. “I was beginning to wonder.” She turned her back on Ken and crossed her arms again. She spoke in a quiet voice. “Do you think you might be able to sit down and grab me some more safe information using the internet? I’m going to need lots more information about what those 99 Gods have been doing since they showed up if I’m going to make heads or tails about this mess, and the internet seems to me to be the easiest way to learn about them. I don’t see any big problems so far. I need more.”

  “Sure.”

  “After we do, we can go exercise the bed springs.”

  Ken sighed. “I’m forty three years old and I don’t have your never-ending-stamina trick. I’m going to be dead on my feet just from the walk back to your trailer, oh great and wonderful uber-Telepath.”

  “Well, shucks,” Nessa said. She started back home, striding out in front of Ken. She swung her (slightly muddy) hair around back, swayed her nearly non-existent hips and smiled regularly over her shoulder. She figured she had the cure for his exhaustion. “Come on. Home’s not that far.”

  5. (Atlanta)

  “So, is this your lair?” Dana said. Atlanta had flown them back to her Tuscaloosa estate, a converted horse farm she had bought, on mildly illicitly wheedled credit, one week post-Apotheosis. Dana had kept her teeth gritted the entire flight, ignoring the innate beauty of their sub-orbital hop. Too much of a tight ass.

  “You could call it that,” Atlanta said, having never in her mind thought to use the term ‘lair’ regarding her home. She had depleted her bank accounts for the down payment to buy this estate and didn’t have a penny for the upkeep. She didn’t want to steal the money. It felt wrong to do so. Instead, she sold miracles, a slow one-at-a-time and utterly embarrassing process.

  “Thanks for the rescue, Atlanta,” Dana said, cheeky and of all things, exasperated. “Am I free to go?” She looked around Atlanta’s underfurnished living room and wrinkled her nose at the musty air. Atlanta hadn’t been running the AC.

  “We’re going to talk, and if I can arrange it, we’re both going to go talk to Portland and Phoenix.” The intel she had picked up from the Suits disturbed her.

  Dana gave Atlanta a close look, and shrugged. She did something to put up shields around her, shields as strong as one of the Suits’ shields. She walked across the room and found one of the two chairs to sit in, nervous. She picked a comfortable old wing-back, a pleasant enough piece of furniture, but a far cry from the overdone opulence of the Suits’ business headquarters. Nothing in Atlanta’s home was more than reasonable. It was clean, though. Eight years in the Marines made sure Atlanta took care of appearances.

  “My place bothers you, doesn’t it?” Atlanta said. Dana nodded. “Your borrowed shit from Portland is reacting to what I have here.” Dana nodded again. “How about we go talk in a slightly more neutral location? It’s someplace you can get food and drink.”

  Dana stood. “Let’s go. However, I’m not sure I’d be able to eat or drink anything right now. I’m, well, this hasn’t been a good day.” Her voice didn’t say ‘you scare the crap out of me worse than the Suits did’, but her face did.

  Atlanta picked up Dana and they flew off.

  “Where is this place?” Dana said, when they landed.

  “Parking garage roof.”

  “What city?”

  “Athens, Georgia,” Atlanta said. “Don’t worry. Nobody will see us unless I want them to.” She led Dana to the corner of the roof and down the four story stairway to the street. The season had finally turned, Atlanta noted, pleased. No more early fall days in the 90s.

  “This doesn’t seem to be a college town,” Dana said, after they exited through a steel door to a busy sidewalk. She shifted uneasily, obviously outside of her comfort zone. Atlanta suspected she didn’t much trust the Deep South, too far in attitude and distance from the urban areas of the West Coast. Atlanta led them to the left.

  “Look closer.” Many of the buildings were over a century old, making the parking structure they landed on an outlier. Athens was, well, Athens. Not enough trees, generally too much harsh sunshine, regularly too humid and too hot. The student-driven economy changed everything, though. Atlanta smiled as she passed the Georgia Architectural Yacht, a bar whose initials spelled out the desired clientele, and she pointed it out to Dana. The Yacht was a typical College St. low-end storefront, barely twelve feet wide, part of the bottom floor of a three story building, and likely a full hundred feet deep.

  Dana didn’t comment, and continued looking. “What’s with all the dogs?”

  They came to the corner of College and Broad, and turned left again, ignoring the early evening indie-music blare coming from the Hardwired Lounge on the corner to the right. The tree infested north campus quad spread out, blocks wide, across Broad. “This is the University of Georgia,” Atlanta said. To Dana’s puzzled look, Atlanta supplied “home of the Bulldogs.”

  Dana’s puzzled look didn’t vanish, but she did follow Atlanta’s gaze to a small storefront two down from their destination, the ‘Dog Eat Dog World’, which sold baked goods for dogs. Athens had more dogs than anywhere else Atlanta had ever been. “Is everyone in this place crazy?”

  “No, just three quarters white,” Atlanta said. The UGA was a place where you damned well knew you were a minority. A place to build character, if you were black.

  She led Dana past the Grease Guys Burgers and Fries.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Dana said, a politely quiet whisper, when she realized the place next door was their destination. They walked around a sidewalk-parked red and white Vespa and over to the front door, framed by picture windows highlighted by day-glow orange paint. The sign above said ‘Anime Café’ in bold black cursive, above a picture of an anime boy stuffing his face with pizza. Under the picture was the store’s motto, in bright blue cursive, ‘Where Your Eyes Are Always Bigger Than Your Stomach’. The smell of excellent fresh brewed coffee wafted out the door as they entered, and the abnormal ambience of the place immediately quieted Dana’s nerves and allowed her to relax.

  Two women in thin hooded black cloaks immediately noticed them from the far back of the café. The narrow front half of the café widened out to a full forty feet wide in the back, spreading out behind the Tachee Takko next door. Atlanta wove her way through the college crowd set waiting in line at the coffee bar, around the near entry-way tables and chairs, as always unmatched and thrift store in origin, and past one of the flat screens showing anime, this one dedicated to the opening scenes of many an anime production, the main characters endlessly running toward the viewer.

  The back end of the Anime Café was normally less crowded, but today appeared to be holding a convention worth of the just-a-little-different-than-normal-human types who haunted the place. Atlanta hadn’t realized, before, that they had any Blacks or Asians mixed up among their tig
hty-whities and over-represented Hispanics.

  Dana continued to sightsee, distracted by one anime wall hanging after the other, a frown finally settling on her face when she reached the picture-poster of the overly cute anime teen girl in a sailor suit, on a subway, about to punch out a salaryman who was taking an upskirt picture of her with his camera phone. Atlanta ignored the familiar chaos and clamor and watched the two women in cloaks. She didn’t recognize the cloaked woman on the left, but she recognized Jan, the one on the right, as she was one of the local leaders and an old friend of the owner of the café.

  “Hey, Atlanta, what’s going on?” Jan said. Dana nearly leapt on Atlanta’s back when Jan spoke, as if before Jan had spoken she had been invisible to Dana.

  The leaders here had exceptional cloaks.

  “Just need a table and a quiet place to talk,” Atlanta said. “It looks like your gang’s all here. Something bad going on?”

  The cloaked woman on Jan’s left studied Dana intently, before whispering the obvious to Jan.

  “Some of you Gods have been misbehaving, and everyone’s upset,” Jan said.

  “I’ll talk to you later about that, January,” Atlanta said. Jan, who didn’t like her full first name, frowned. She was an athletic, young-looking woman with an eye-catching face, a voluptuous figure, died shock-blonde hair, and she almost matched Dana in height. She led Atlanta and Dana over to the four and a half legged table under a poster of seven mixed-gender anime child soldier types, arrayed with mech weapons, facing off against a leering multi-tentacled monster. Someday Atlanta wanted to know the story behind the added illegible signatures on the poster, one per child soldier, and the one legible block-writing note ‘Montana’, on the tentacled monster. “Coffee for me, my usual, and some calming herbal tea for my friend.”

  Atlanta and Dana sat, Dana bursting out of her own skin with curiosity.

  “So, Dana, where did you get your powers from?” Atlanta said.

  Dana blinked, turned her head back to Atlanta, and sighed. “As I said, from Portland.” Dana didn’t want to talk about what was going on in her life, but Atlanta read obligation in her. She owed Atlanta for the rescue. Which meant Portland had not only given Dana godlike abilities, she had also tied the mortal into Portland’s Mission. Mostly to her Integrity, but also to her Rapture and Congregation, the other two aspects of Mission.

  “I hadn’t realized any of us could do that,” Atlanta said. “This is something I need to talk to Portland about.” She wanted to make a deal and learn how to do the trick herself, if she could and it didn’t conflict with her Imago.

  Dana closed her eyes for a moment, in thought. “The Suits didn’t bleed, they oozed silver,” Dana said, a half minute later. “Portland bleeds and bruises when I fight her. Real blood. Is that only because I’m a mortal?”

  Back to the earlier question. Atlanta realized she liked Dana. Despite being terrified out of her gourd in a hopeless situation, Dana kept her head and could verbally spar with Atlanta, a rarity among the flesh and blood types.

  “I have no idea. As you’ve seen firsthand, our bodies are fake. They’re some sort of divine essence held together by our Imago, our image of ourselves.” Atlanta held up her jet-black arm and willed it to separate in the middle of the forearm, showing the silver. Painful, but not absurdly so. “See? No bones. No blood.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Why are you so scared, Dana?”

  “You’re not what I expected from Portland’s description of you,” Dana said. “Hanging out in a nerd cafe? In a place crawling with more, um, abnormal humans than I knew existed?”

  Truth, but not a real answer to Atlanta’s question. She was surprised Dana had found a way to detect the abnormality of many of the humans in this place. Atlanta tentatively reclassified Dana from ‘tough victim’ to ‘untrained tough woman’.

  “What did you expect of me?”

  “Well, uh, a Marine drill sergeant. A six foot tall muscle-bound Amazon with a militaristic viewpoint on everything. Nasty. Um, not overly brilliant.”

  “Oorah!” Atlanta said. Six foot tall, though? Although Atlanta wasn’t tall, she did tower over the quite short Portland. “Say what you’re really thinking, instead.”

  “You’re evil,” Dana said, her eyes almost inadvertently on the monster-fight poster on the wall above Atlanta. She reddened after she spoke. Atlanta had led her perfectly into her blurt.

  Atlanta sighed. “Why is it anything you self-righteous types strongly disagree with you call evil? Don’t you realize that as soon as you do so, you lose all hope of any sort of rational discussion on the subject?”

  Eyes downcast, Dana sighed. And shivered. “You’re right, Atlanta. I apologize, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have,” Atlanta said, despite the fact she had led Dana to the comment. “What have I done to make you call me evil?

  “I’d rather not answer. You did rescue me.”

  “I want to know where we stand on this, magician,” Atlanta said. She watched sweat drip down Dana’s face.

  Magician was the only word Atlanta could think of to describe Dana. Jan took that moment to walk up with the tea and coffee Atlanta had ordered. Jan was no barista, but she was willing to serve Atlanta. The better to keep an eye on her.

  “Not magician,” Jan said, whispering. “Supported.”

  That would do, despite the fact Atlanta suspected Jan had coined the term on the spot. Dana flinched as the accurate naming pinged her Imago but she took a deep breath and spoke anyway. “If Portland’s correct, you’ve killed thousands of people.”

  Jan didn’t walk away, or flinch. Instead, she smiled at Dana’s assertion.

  “Affirmative,” Atlanta said. She encountered far too many people like the Suits’ pet psychopath. She killed all she found.

  “Killing is evil.”

  Jan backed off, rolled her eyes, and fled. One of the things Atlanta liked about the group running this place, who gathered now in fear on the opposite side of the back part of the café, was the fact they knew how to kill, and knew the right people to kill.

  ‘People’ probably wasn’t the correct word for many, if not most, of their targets, though.

  “Governments kill people,” Atlanta said. “Try, convict and kill people. My mistake rate is far lower than theirs: zero. I can see the crimes people have done.”

  “I don’t believe in capital punishment either,” Dana said.

  “Well, at least you’re consistent.”

  Dana fidgeted. “I fear for my life around you, because you’re a killer.”

  “The people I’ve killed were rapists, murderers and thugs,” Atlanta said. “Are you?” Dana shook her head, radiating her fear. She took a deep breath, and took a sip of her herbal tea.

  “That’s not all you fear, Dana,” Atlanta said. The killing didn’t explain the magnitude of Dana’s earlier flinch. “Tell me.” Atlanta knew normal people found her direct questions difficult to refuse, a trait she shared at least with all the other Territorial Gods.

  Dana squirmed. “I’m afraid you might think I’m someone like John Lorenzi, a mortal with native magical powers. I didn’t lie to you. I do work for Portland and she did give me my, um, what Jan over there called supported powers.”

  Finally. “I believe you,” Atlanta said. “Tell me about yourself, Dana. How’d you come to serve Portland?”

  “I found her and volunteered. I sold her on the idea.”

  Atlanta raised an eyebrow. “Some trick, that.” Portland struck her as too wishy-washy to have decided so quickly to do something as momentous as support for mortal magicians or supported or whatever they were. “How’d you get access to Portland? What were you beforehand, a model?” Atlanta’s undercurrent implied talents abnormal for any human.

  “You’re a tease,” Dana said. She laughed and relaxed. Her worries about Atlanta had vanished, Atlanta realized.
Annoying, but telling. Dana had relaxed when Atlanta said she believed her, implying if not proving that Dana could read Atlanta’s Integrity. “I’d just finished my PhD last year, and I was still hunting for the perfect job when I saw Dubuque’s press conference.”

  Dubuque had been the first North American God to go public, four hours after Apotheosis. When the Territorial Gods had gotten together for a meeting just before the end of Apotheosis, Dubuque hadn’t said a word. He had saved it all for his first press conference, where he tried to paint the 99 into a corner by refusing to use the word ‘God’, naming all of them ‘Living Saints’.

  He failed. His name didn’t take.

  “Go on.”

  Dana took a deep breath. “Dubuque’s press conference bothered me as much as his utopian ideals lifted my spirits. First he demonstrated his ability to do those miracles of his: walking on water, healing the amputee guy and the blind woman, and curing some child’s cancer to boot. Then he said: ‘Venerate us as Living Saints and together we’ll do good, and make the Earth into a paradise’. It just sounded so political to me, like: I’m not a God wink wink nudge nudge don’t worship me call it veneration wink wink nudge nudge followed by a standard quid pro quo.”

  “He didn’t heal the lame man, Dubuque made the guy a willpower prosthesis,” Atlanta said. “The effect will be the same in the long run, though.”

  “You’re avoiding my argument.”

  “You are correct,” Atlanta said. She liked Dana’s attitude. A lot.

  “Anyway, since Dubuque said we had one of the Territorial Gods as a local – I was in Seattle for a job interview – I flew down to the city of Portland and used my head. I found Portland and got her to talk to me. We talked and I convinced her that she, and the rest of you Gods, couldn’t do your jobs alone and needed help. I made the suggestion that she distribute her divine power to mortals, turn it into a cooperative enterprise, and she did.”

  Atlanta raised an eyebrow at Dana’s ahead-of-the curve insight and proactive nature. She interrupted her next comment when Jan and her companion, an even taller cloaked woman, glided over, pulled up chairs, and sat down at their table. “Sorry,” Jan said, to Atlanta. “Bringing someone of Portland’s here has messed up our analysis capabilities. If the two of us sit here, we can cancel out the interference on the others, though.” Atlanta nodded. From what little she knew of the Anime Café crew, they called themselves the Indigo and they primarily worked on the edges of the unnatural and arcane. Minor things involving enhanced senses and enhanced analysis. They hadn’t told her the details, and she hadn’t asked. Not yet. They were too wary of her to cough up anything technical. They did know how to fight, though.

  They wanted Atlanta as an ally, and she similarly wanted them, and she didn’t begrudge them their paranoia. They were being far more forthcoming than Atlanta would have been in a similar situation.

  Jan turned to Dana. “Don’t worry about us passing along any sensitive information. We know how to keep a secret.” Dana nodded.

  Atlanta, who had been eying a new anime poster, of an anime girl with long blonde hair, a bow on her head, and a cute frilly skirt, punching out an innocent looking teen for no apparent reason, swiveled her head back to Dana. “Portland’s leant out her willpower to other mortals?”

  Dana shook her head. “I’m the only one she trusts with the level of support she’s given me, so far, but since I’ve proven myself there’s three others in training and several other experiments with lesser, um, supported.”

  Jan smiled.

  Atlanta leaned back on her creaky pipe-metal chair and stared at the water-stained ceiling and the hanging racks of industrial fluorescents. “Dubuque wanted maximum publicity, a show, to drive home his anti-war agenda. Any of us Territorials could have done the miracles he did. I’m keeping my head down for now. As you may have noticed, the media hasn’t linked me to the thug killings in my territory and they never will unless someone blabs. Unlike the Suits, nothing I’m doing is impacting the 99’s group Integrity. My long term Mission, as I see it, is security. I want people to be able to leave their doors unlocked at night.” To succeed, the Gods would have to take over everything.

  Which didn’t bother Atlanta one bit.

  Dana nodded.

  “What’s your PhD in?”

  “Economics.”

  “Figures,” Atlanta said. “You’re trouble, Dana. You’re, what, six one?” Dana towered over Atlanta by half a foot, disquieting in another woman.

  “Five ten and big heels,” Dana said.

  “Where’d you come from? You have a funny accent for an Iranian.”

  “I was born in the States,” Dana said, frowning. “But I spent five years in London when I was a kid. My father’s British and my mother’s Iranian, or was until she defected and started calling herself ‘Persian’. I’m twenty five, if you care. I entered UCLA at fifteen and did my graduate work at the University of Chicago.” She sighed. “I’ve never done any modeling. I’m a virgin because I don’t want to disappoint my mother. Any other nosy questions?”

  Jan and the unnamed woman both covered their mouths to repress laughs. Atlanta ignored their amusement at the show. “How’d you locate Portland?”

  “I had one example, Dubuque,” Dana said, her voice back to professional. “I analyzed his actions and the effects on the world around him. In the city of Portland I talked to people and Googled around until I found the same sort of sudden economic disruption Dubuque had caused. It didn’t take me long to find a half dozen in-town condos, right next to each other, that had sold for far less than they should have, leaving no lawsuits behind. I disguised myself as a courier, got in to see the owner and found Portland. As I had hoped she was staffing up her operation, so I told her I was no courier and introduced myself.” Dana smiled. “I wanted the chief of staff job, but Portland wanted to talk, and…”

  “Portland always wants to talk,” Atlanta said. She suspected Portland talked in her sleep.

  “Anyway, I was the first person she’d been able to talk to, for real, since it happened.”

  “The Apotheosis.” Dana’s big trick was to be able to talk to Gods and not get the stammers. A good trick for someone as young and naive as Dana. Even Jan, older than her appearance and well blooded, had stammered at first.

  “Is apotheosis the right term? How convinced are you that you’re a legit God?” Dana said. “I’m not doubting your miraculous abilities, I’m doubting the word. Both Portland and I have agreed to keep an open mind on the subject.”

  “Demigod works better,” Jan said. Atlanta flickered her eyes at the nosy woman. “Just saying.”

  “Portland’s worries mirror my own,” Atlanta said. “And demigod is definitely the wrong term.” Jan’s companion rolled her eyes. Atlanta took a sip of coffee to cover her annoyance. “Continue.”

  “Portland gained a bunch of smarts from, um, Apotheosis and wasn’t sure what to do with them, or what she should be doing with her miraculous powers besides helping stop nations from warring on other nations.” The only job the Angelic Host had given the 99 Gods. “She was afraid she might have what she called an Imago problem. You see, she’d been an atheist before, er, Apotheosis, and wasn’t sure she believed in herself.” Dana covered her mouth to hide a smile. “She was afraid that one day her disbelief in herself might come true and she might vanish. That’s when we had the discussion about the limitations of the 99 Gods and I came up with my idea about distributing her divine power. Instead of ending up being her chief of staff, Portland made me into her first, um, whatever.”

  “You don’t agree with Portland’s assessment that you’d make a better Supported than chief of staff, do you?” Atlanta said. She brought the front legs of her chair back down and leaned forward. She opened herself up to the entire panoply of Dana’s borrowed powers, peering as deeply into them as she could sense. They were intricate, complex and disquieting. />
  “No, I don’t,” Dana said. “But she’s the God and I’m the mortal…and there’s something about being a God, even if you don’t think of yourself as one, that makes for easy we’re doing it my way because I say so decision making. You Gods are all going to have horrific CEO disease.”

  “Except me,” Atlanta said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t even pretend to be as limited as a CEO.”

  Dana winced. “What are your goals?” she asked.

  “Kick asses and take names,” Jan said. Which was fine by her.

  Atlanta laughed. “I already told you. I’m interested in security.”

  “Security is an ideal, not a goal. How do you plan to achieve it?”

  How in the world did someone like Portland luck into Dana? Atlanta thought, a mite greedy. “You want to know a secret?” she asked, avoiding Dana’s question about goals.

  Dana licked her lips, nervous again. “You talk, I’ll listen.”

  “Portland didn’t want you as her chief of staff because you’re too difficult,” Atlanta said. “She was afraid you’d walk all over her.” Dana gritted her teeth. “You want to be my chief of staff?”

  “You’re shitting me,” Dana said. Another blurt, another bit of truth from her. “I can’t. Not without Portland’s permission.” Meaning ‘yes’.

  “We’ll talk to her about it soon. Any interest?”

  “Jesus!” Dana said. “You’re, um, a killer. I’m a save-the-whales save-the-environment anti-globalism anti-capital punishment anti-war anti-tyrant died-in-the-wool leftie. I don’t even want the Suits dead, even after Indulgence promised me he was going to rape me into imbecility after their all-hands meeting…before killing me.”

  The virginal Dana sounded like she ate nails for breakfast. Atlanta empathized.

  “You’d make a better chief of staff than a spy.” For one thing, with all the miraculous power Portland had given her, Dana had still allowed one of the Suits to capture her in a trivial manner. A rather pathetic Suit, in Atlanta’s opinion. Dana needed some real training.

  “I know,” Dana said. “But…”

  “Look,” Atlanta said. “You’ll try and change me. Good. I don’t want a yes-woman, I want another viewpoint. I’ll change you, but not as much as you fear. I’m not setting up Murder, Inc. I have to kill the nasties because I can sense their vileness and it pisses me off. What I need help with are the more mundane aspects of this divinity shit I’ve been stuck with, the basics of being a Territorial God. For instance, I need ways to dispense miracles without it turning into a goddamned circus.” The Host, no matter what you named them, had seen fit to put the ‘dispense miracle’ urge in the back of Atlanta’s head, and she couldn’t do a single thing about it.

  “You want someone to manage your economic disruptions,” Dana said.

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “Well, okay. I’ll think about it.”

  Dana might have a PhD in economics, but she clearly had a post-doc in difficult.

  Atlanta turned to the unnamed woman and pointed a finger. “You are?” she said, doing her unstoppable Territorial God demand.

  “Epharis,” the woman said, blushing when she realized Atlanta had buffaloed her. Epharis had long black hair, a plain round face, pale ghostly skin and deep black soul-sucking eyes.

  The name meant nothing to Atlanta, but Dana said “The Epharis?”, and went off spouting titles of poetry collections and modern snooty lit artsy novels, nothing of the sort Atlanta ever read. Her books had space ships on the covers.

  With a shoo and a “Go have some good fan time” from Jan, Dana and the Epharis went off to talk highbrow lit.

  Leaving Jan with Atlanta. Atlanta leaned forward and put her elbows on the table. “You and your Indigo people need to keep your eyes out for trouble.” Jan frowned. “I know your group uses cute investments to support your activities and support the PTSD people in your group who can’t work anymore.” Jan’s frown curled larger. “I rescued Dana over there from the Seven Suits, and they said, upfront, that they’re out hunting down abnormal people of your ilk. If they find you, they’ll take your money away.”

  “Thanks,” Jan said, relaxing. “Is one of them named ‘Passion’?” Atlanta nodded. “If they’re all as bad as Passion, they’re very bad news.” Jan leaned forward close enough for Atlanta to notice her roots were flaming red, a color so uncommon as to make a person stand out in a crowd and stay in one’s memories. She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “We learned a few days ago about a Telepath who had a run in with Miami. The Telepath won.”

  “Telepath? There are Telepaths as well?” Atlanta said. She swore that wherever she looked, she discovered more varieties of abnormal humans.

  Jan nodded. “They’re a rarity, obviously.” Said by someone who was a rarity herself, implying there had to be damned few Telepaths. “But it’s a slap in the face of those ego-driven Gods who thought nobody could oppose them. We’re afraid they’re going to take it personally, and come after all of us, even people as obviously harmless as we are.”

  “Save your line for someone you can sell it to, woman,” Atlanta said. The Indigo group’s tricks had their uses, even against Gods. Atlanta suspected they were far more dangerous to the Gods than even they knew, a pleasing thought. “You and your peers might want to sit down with me and discuss defensive tactics. You’re mine to protect, if you’re willing.”

  “I’ll pass your offer along,” Jan said. “I’m willing. I don’t know about the others.”

  This fit Atlanta’s knowledge of the Indigo group: fractious.

  “This is no time for petty factionalism, you do know.”

  Jan nodded, sad and exasperated.

  6. (Dave)

  “Dave! Welcome back,” Roger said.

  “It’s good to be back,” Dave Estrada said. At least I back in good, he thought, as he walked backwards across Mirabelle’s large music room, dragging his cello behind him. He sat down carefully in a chair and put down his cello case, ready for some practice. The room was filled with several armless cushioned chairs and a few stools arranged in a circle around a glass coffee table, with music stands in a cluster in the corner, Mirabelle’s piano in another corner, and racks of sheet music and a couple of beautiful framed prints of violins hanging on the walls. The single plate glass window showed a gorgeous view of the full moon lighting up the Rockies.

  “How did the operation go?” Roger said. He worked on his bow frog, some imperfection Dave’s chamber music group’s near-professional violinist could see and Dave could not.

  “Good and bad,” Dave said, waving his right hand back and forth. “Bad that they still don’t understand the source of the headaches, good that they didn’t find any new problems.” Cadmium poisoning was the cause of the headaches, but was also the cause of everything else wrong with him. They couldn’t say why he had so much trouble with the headaches, or what the trigger was, or much of anything about what might help him deal with them. He only wished they had been able to find out the nothing without the bother of the exploratory abdominal surgery. “I’ve still got some tests out at Johns Hopkins, though. My doc thinks they’re going to be able to figure out what’s going on.” Dave, unfortunately, suspected his doctors thought what ailed him was very bad news.

  “I’ve heard one of the Gods is named Doctor,” Mirabelle said, putting a plate of appetizers and various teas down on the coffee table. She sat down beside Dave, patted his knee and gave him a smile. “He might be able to help.” Mirabelle pushed fifty, the oldest member of Dave’s chamber music group. She still played a mean piano.

  “Oh, that’s an idea,” Dave said. Uh huh. Right up there with flying to the moon. “I’ll bet he has one hell of a waiting list.” Roger guffawed. Although the 99 Gods had appeared a month and a half ago, Dave still didn’t know the names of more than a couple dozen of them. At
a ratio of one God per seventy million mortals, they were spread thin.

  Mirabelle’s front door rang and she went to open it. Steve Clement, Dave’s best friend, walked in and waved at them. “Full house for once,” Steve said, rushing over to give Dave a hug. “Hear about what Boise’s decided to do?” Dave attempted not to grimace at the jolt.

  “No,” Mirabelle said. “Tell me!” Mirabelle had connections, primarily through her sister, who held a seat in the Colorado State Senate in the district next door to Dave’s. Because of her sister, Mirabelle had actually met Boise, the local Territorial God, more than once, and lived to tell the tale. Often.

  “He’s decided to chuck it and go live up in the northern Rockies,” Steve said.

  “Well, that’s strange,” Dave said. For a Territorial God, Boise sounded boring, unlike Akron and her media interests, Dubuque with his political activism, and Portland with her unceasing charity work. “Any idea why?”

  Dave expected Steve to respond, but Mirabelle took up the gauntlet. “I was afraid he might do something along those lines. Despite his public cheer, he’s not fully come to grips with his elevation to Godhood. On our second meeting, he told us he wasn’t satisfied with the reasons they had been given by the Angelic Host for their elevation.”

  “Angelic Host?” Steve said.

  Roger cleared his throat, softly. Yes, yes, this is chamber music practice, yes, we remember, Dave told himself. Dave, putative leader and with Mirabelle the money behind their group, wanted to listen to more about Boise, so he signaled for Mirabelle to continue. Given the seventy million to one ratio, Dave wanted all the gossip he could gather on the subject of the Gods.

  “Oh, sorry, that’s just a bit of the 99 Gods mystery they haven’t talked about in front of the media yet,” Mirabelle said. “They, the Angelic Host, are the ones who created the 99 Gods at God Almighty’s behest.”

  “So it wasn’t God himself?” Dave said, dismayed.

  Mirabelle shook her head. “That’s what they implied, but after Boise blurted out his ‘Host’ comment and got asked the obvious questions, he said we should remember that in the Bible and in other religious texts, it’s often Angels who do God’s work, not the Creator himself. He, Boise, said the presence of God in the Angelic Host was self-evident.”

  “That aside tossed aside, you’re saying Boise doesn’t think the new ‘Nations shall not War’ commandment was enough of a reason for the 99 Gods creation?” Dave said. Steve groaned. “I’d think the commandment and their various instructional missions would be enough.”

  Mirabelle took Dave by the hand and led him over to his cello stool, where he tried not to jostle his stitches or his head as he sat. Mirabelle went to sit on her piano bench and Steve took out his viola and started to tune it.

  “It may be enough for us, but then again we’re all perfectly ordinary people, not Gods,” Mirabelle said, not even looking at her fingers as they danced up and down a G Major scale. “We just don’t understand how different the Gods are yet, what with them being so closed mouth about their true capabilities. They can wield what they call ‘willpower’ and make reality bend to their wishes, but what limits do they have on what they can do with their willpower? The largest public example the Gods have shown of this ‘willpower’ is still Akron’s ‘this is how a God paints a house’ demonstration.” Dave had seen the YouTube clip several times and it still appalled him. Akron had taken a five by seven photo of a house, got out a two ounce child’s plastic paint tub and a tiny brush, and wherever she dabbed paint on the photo paint appeared on the real house. Then she led the media around the outside of the newly painted house to confirm the reality of her work. Their greatest work, the forcible disarmament of North Korea, the Gods had done outside of camera range. “Boise, after being asked what he had gained most out of Apotheosis” the 99 Gods term for their creation “said he didn’t make mistakes on IQ tests any more. I found his answer rather telling.”

  “You’re saying stopping war and updating our religions isn’t enough of a challenge for them?” Steve said.

  “I think what I’m saying is that part of what God Almighty put the 99 Gods on Earth to do was find their own challenges,” Mirabelle said. “Or at least that’s my interpretation of Boise’s comments. After war, he talked most about the big problems of our day. Like overpopulation, famines, plagues, poverty, the environment, natural disasters and the side effects of technological change and globalization. He just didn’t know where to go next.”

  “In any event, before we get on with the practice,” Dave said. He hadn’t retrieved his bow yet. “What did Boise say he was going to do in the Rocky Mountains? Did he say where?”

  “Boise’s going to live in the Salmon River Mountains, at least to start with, according to the press release,” Steve said. “He’s going to be meditating. The quote was ‘I’ve always liked the Old Testament wilderness prophets, so much so I think I’m going to become one.’” He smiled. “So, on to Mozart’s 493rd?”

  They made music, or at least practiced it.