Chapter 1
I stood beneath a rusted steel awning, anxiously shifting from foot to foot as I mentally prepared myself for the worst possible outcome. It was early December, but the temperatures still hovered in the mid-fifties, so I hadn’t needed to dust off my bulky winter coats.
It also made the pouring rain a lot more tolerable.
A tugboat drifted down the nearby river—the only potential eyewitness, but only if they had a pair of binoculars and happened to be staring toward the mostly abandoned warehouses occupying this forgotten stretch of riverbank.
If things went south here, my Horseman’s Mask wouldn’t help me.
Because a wise man once said that it was generally considered unwise to wear a bomb vest to a wrestling match. Me. I was the wise man who once said that.
Rain poured down mercilessly—as if the old gods had woken up in a shitty mood and wanted to further punish the foolish mortals for how far they had fallen since the time when their lives were managed by the older, harsher, tough-love, creation gods. Like old war vets on a porch, the old gods saw their successor new-age gods as nothing more than hipsters, tree-huggers, and unconditional love gurus.
Mortals these days! When we were running things, those flea-infested meat-sacks knew how to properly respect our Names, devoting their every meal to us through prayer and worship.
Both at the beginning AND at the end of the meal! Hell! They even thanked us at funerals!
Instead of wearing their Varsity Lettergod’s jackets with pride, the old gods had been placed into retirement communities and now wore dirty undershirts, kicked back on their recliners, chugged cheap manna-mead, and shouted obscenities at the static on the glass-tube television screen of humanity.
Because humanity had gotten all intelligent and evolved and didn’t feel they needed to worship the new gods, let alone the old gods. They had lost their fear of the higher powers. Now, humans worshipped—and made fortunes off—technology.
All because the new gods had phoned in their duties, focusing more on their petty dramas and politics than policing the evolving bacteria known as humanity down on Earth.
Like I was writing a screenplay, I imagined the cranky old titans, giants, and celestial beings—the parents of the modern-day gods—grumbling unhappily to any who would listen. The new-age gods never even made their own universes for crying out loud! They’d just inherited—
I blinked slowly. Then I wiped rain from my forehead, muttering under my breath as my imagined godly soap opera struck uncomfortably close to my own upbringing. I’d inherited much, too. And I often bitched about my parents not doing enough for me.
“Where are you?” I growled, now agitated by my own inner psychoanalysis as well as my partner’s punctuality.
No matter where I tried to stand, my feet squelched into puddles, unless I stepped out from the rusted, aluminum, tetanus umbrella—which would only serve to get me soaked and put me in full view from the lone, flickering streetlamp illuminating the worn-down shipping yard.
“Come on,” I murmured again, glancing about uneasily. “You good for nothing—”
A Gateway ripped open a few feet away, and Alucard leapt through before it had even finished opening all the way. He landed in a puddle but managed to roll at the last second, holding up a large object wrapped in plastic.
“You found it!” I hissed excitedly. “Hot damn!”
“Listen,” Alucard urged, rolling to his feet with a panicked look on his face. “We need to get out of—”
From inside the Gateway—but still sounding far away, as if they hadn’t located the opening Alucard had made with his Tiny Ball—a familiar woman’s voice rolled over the sound of pouring rain. “Where did the bastard go?” Callie Penrose demanded. “There’s only the one exit.” My eyes almost bugged out of my head.
“I will slice him into slivers,” a grim, foreboding, male’s voice growled in response.
“I will fuck him,” another man’s cold, dusty voice—sounding as if it had emanated from a long-forgotten corpse—promised.
“Hopefully not in that order, freaking psychos,” a third man chuckled. The third man’s voice sounded familiar, although I couldn’t immediately place it. “He probably has a good reason for stealing it.”
I rounded on Alucard as his Gateway winked out, thankfully cutting off the voices. “They saw you? What the hell, man? No one was supposed to know!”
Alucard shrugged. “How the hell was I supposed to know Starlight had a goddamn alarm system hooked up in his cave?”
I frowned. “The bear’s name is Starlight?” I asked, momentarily shaken at a thought that should have hit me long before now. Because that had been the song Pan had left behind in his own cave—Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight. Since coincidences were conspiracy theories in my experience, I didn’t even bother analyzing it, going straight to the assumption that it had to be related in some strange way.
But here, right the fuck now, I didn’t have time for a reunion with the Kansas City death-squad.
But my happiness just wasn’t meant to be—and I imagined those old gods excitedly leaning closer to their static-plagued television set, eager to watch humanity fuck itself.
Because at that exact moment, another Gateway erupted into existence, and a woman wearing white canvas pants and top—almost like military BDU’s—stepped out. Her white hair shone in the dim glow of the streetlamp as rain plastered down her stunningly beautiful, ruthlessly cunning, face. Callie Penrose. She held a fox in the crook of one arm, but it appeared to be sleeping. Two more figures jumped through after her, and I froze, staring in disbelief as I momentarily forgot all about my plans for the evening.
Because a damned skeleton with a crimson hood-scarf glared at me, and his eyes were smoking pits of shifting shadow. Also, his ivory bones were marbled with silver streaks in a striated fashion—as if all the cracks of his prehistoric youth had been infused with chrome. He had apparently been a pirate in his glory days, because he also wore a wicked pair of leather boots that looked to have once belonged to Jack Sparrow.
“Skeletor,” I breathed.
“Don’t mention apples. He gets twitchy about apples,” the second man murmured. I turned to look at him and felt my shoulders relax ever so slightly.
“Cain,” I said. He was an asshole, but a familiar asshole. And I knew he had a modicum of common sense. Somewhere. “Haven’t seen you around town for a while. Welcome back.”
He smirked, raking an amused hand through his shaggy hair as he took a deep, nostalgic breath. “Better women in Kansas City,” he chuckled. Then he snapped his fingers as if recalling something important. “Remember that joke you once told me that I didn’t appreciate? I think I’ve matured since then, and I’d really like to hear it again.”
I frowned. The last time I’d seen Cain in St. Louis had been at Fight Club, and I’d accidentally made an inappropriate joke about his origin story. In my defense, I hadn’t known he was even present. I’d been telling the joke to someone else and he’d overheard it.
Alucard was shaking his head adamantly. “Do not tell any jokes,” he warned me.
I’d already decided as much, reading the eager look on Cain’s face, even though I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to set me up for.
Callie waved a hand at Cain, silently commanding him to shut up. He obliged with an amused chuckle. Skeletor faced me full-on, ready to react violently if I did anything he deemed threatening. He must be the new guy to be so suspicious of me. Callie turned back to me and rolled her eyes in annoyance, her shoulders relaxing in mild relief. “What the hell, Nate? This was your doing?” she demanded, blindly pointing at the plastic bundle in Alucard’s arms. “I thought you were in Cairo?” She shot a dark look at Alucard, who instantly averted his eyes. “I’m certain someone told me—this morning—that you were in Egypt.”
I shrugged with mock guilt, allowing myself to sink into a deeper, calmer state. I relaxed my vision so I could view them all at once, focusing on none of them in any specific manner whatsoever, just like Alice had taught me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Callie,” I said slowly.
Skeletor had a crude red balloon drawn on his upper arm bone, and the words well done were written underneath it. As I kept him in my peripheral vision, I realized that I was sensing a strange familiarity with him. I detected a similar bond between all three of the gang from KC. Like a strange trifecta that was tentatively reaching out to me, inviting me into their apparent club. But I didn’t allow myself to focus on it or acknowledge it.
I was busy.
“You could have just asked, Nate. I would have said yes,” Callie muttered, shaking her head as a bemused smile finally split her cheeks.
“Hypothetically,” I began, “theft would indicate that I didn’t want anyone else to know about it,” I said in a distant, hollow tone. Then, without warning, I spun.
Cain cursed and Skeletor roared. I slammed down my hand—which was suddenly encased in my Horseman’s black diamond armor—and I latched onto the end of a silver katana that was about an inch away from my lower spine. The form holding it was just a shifting haze of shadows. Before it could flee, I grabbed its shoulder with my free hand and tore the Shadow Skin away with the sound of ripping cloth.
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