The drinks were placed on the table, I gave our pizza order, and the cup of chocolate milk was placed in front of Byrid. They even gave her a pink straw. It took her a moment to figure out what to do with it but it finally connected when the liquid hit her tongue. A shiver ran up her body. Her cat ears flattened and her eyes rolled to the back of her head.

“What is that?” she whispered, breathless. She hesitated for only a moment before she tossed the straw to the table and gulped down the drink.

“I don’t understand something,” Maeve said. “Wars, you’re traveling between worlds?”

“We all are,” Auror said stiffly.

“So, what?” Maeve pressed. “You were given a charm too?”

Keeose drew in a slow breath. “We don’t pretend to know more than a goddess does but…I have traveled far and wide to seek you and am an apprentice in portal magic—”

“She’s fucking great at it,” I interrupted.

A blush crossed Keeose’s face and she ducked her head for a moment, struggling to say anything at all. I understood. This was a lot for her.

But an explanation was needed.

“Keeose and I were taken from a parking lot,” I told Maeve and her eyebrows furrowed. “We were tossed through someone’s portal and put towards the other side, into your world. All four of us were tangled with slavers, ones that worked with Byrid’s kingdom and we fought her brother before he called the harvest gods to sacrifice a shit ton of people.”

“The—the harvest gods?” Maeve blinked. “That’s—”

“Impossible, we know.” I shrugged. “I’m just telling you what happened.”

It took long minutes to explain everything to Maeve, about crashing into her world, beating the slavers at their own game, the axe-throwing tournament, claiming the kingdom, and everything in between. Whenever I’d thought about Moruun, the goddess of fire and life that everyone feared so much, I’d always pictured this terrifying goddess. But Morunn stared at me, gobsmacked. When our waiter returned with two pizzas, she didn’t even move from her place, staring at me, shocked.

“What is this again?” Byrid asked, poking at the crust, golden brown. “Piss-ah?”

“I will see if it is poisonous,” Auror announced and picked up one of the slices, fresh from the oven, still with bubbling cheese, and took an enormous bite.

“Woah, Auror.” I tried to stop her. “That’s way too hot.”

The fox girl didn’t say anything but she choked a little, narrowing her eyes in concentration while a fire burned in her mouth. Taking deep breaths through her nose, her eyes watered. “Yes,” she managed. “It is not poisonous.”

I almost laughed. “Auror.”

“Thank you!” Byrid replied happily and threw a piece on her plate, wrapping up a long string of cheese with her finger.

“Wait a minute.” Maeve stopped us and put her fingers to her temples. “There is something I’m really not understanding here—”

I raised an eyebrow. “Besides the fact that you talk like you were born in Chicago?”

She mirrored my expression, raising an eyebrow too and that smug look crossed her lips when I knew she was going to beat my ass in Mario Kart. Her voice dropped down to a whisper. The hairs on the back of my neck rose.

“Shyiuh nespes vurkil,” Maeve said, each word creeping up on each other.

Keeose’s mouth fell open. “The ancient language.”

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“Of course, I’m a—” Maeve stopped herself. “I was a goddess. No longer, I was banished! I made my peace with it.” The more she repeated those words though, the more I had to wonder if she was just saying them for us. She swept back her fiery red hair. “What I can’t understand is where you guys are coming from? You must be jumping between worlds. My home—” She stopped herself. “My original world was…nothing more than dirt and a few villages. Simple people.”

Auror scoffed. “Simple people.”

“You can’t call them simple people,” Byrid said, munching happily on a piece of pizza. “Warrick gets upset.”

I placed my thumb under the chainmail that crept up my shoulder and held it out for her inspection. “Maeve, does this look simple to you? We’re from your world but Keeose and I have figured out that time passes…” Slowly, I glanced over to the goth sorceress and I frowned. “How long has it been since Maeve was there?”

Keeose blinked slowly. A little of her pale color went away and she nodded, focused on the problem. “If Maeve hasn’t been here that long and all that time has passed…”

“Someone else is using portal magic. They’re accelerating time.”

“That’s not how portal magic works for gods,” Maeve pointed out, leaning her seat. “For mortals, sure. But if…if that was true, that’d mean they’d be using my exact footsteps and source of magic…I don’t know. Look, I wasn’t the god of magic spells, but I can tell you that’d be impossible.”

I raised my eyebrow. “Like, impossiblities we’re already dealing with? Harvest Gods coming to fight, impossible?”

“More impossible than that!” Maeve laughed but no one else did. For a moment, she looked less like the effortlessly cool Maeve that I knew and a nervous edge seeped into her voice. She raised her hands. “I mean, if they could follow my path of magic to personally change the timeline, what would prevent them from finding me? You know?”

“Find you?” Auror repeated, narrowing her eyes. “Like you are a hunted beast?”

Maeve wrung her hands. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this.”

As much as I wanted to agree and get back to eating pizza and telling her more about our adventures, I couldn’t ignore the nervous twitch she had now. We couldn’t ignore this. Maybe we’d stopped the Harvest Gods once, and their attempt at taking on a sacrifice, but that was my world now. If there was some greater danger, I needed to know about it.

“Maeve, you have to tell us what’d be hunting you.”

“Wars…”

“Maevey.”

At my rarely used nickname for my best friend in the world, she crumpled. “The Harvest Gods are part of the Gods of Hidden Names, the oldest gods, the bloodthirsty ones. The gods I was a part of, their grandchildren, the ones that overthrew them, wouldn’t exactly be their best friends. If some of the Gods of Hidden Names escaped, they’d be after me too.”

“I know this.” Keeose said, her voice quiet. “The Harvest Gods, those are the twins, the Comfort God, the Unseen Goddess, and the Coiled God. The ancient five.”

Maeve whimpered a little at the back of her throat. She swallowed and turned to face me again. “But you already defeated the Harvest Gods, right? Maybe they…maybe they got away and the others are still…”

Auror and I shared a long look while Byrid tried to confirm it for us. Everything in me wanted to comfort her, to tell her that, hell yeah, we put those sick bastards in their place. But the truth was, I had no idea if we’d killed them, because how the hell do you permanently kill a god if other gods couldn’t do it, or if we just banished them back to where they’d escaped from.

“Okay.” I pushed my plate away, ready to talk strategy. “We need to think about—”

“Earth is safe,” Maeve blurted out. “They couldn’t possibly follow my magic. It’s cloaked. It’s hidden. I promise. None of you can go back, and I’m really, really sorry about that, but we’re safe right now if we just stay here—”

“My goddess?” Keeose interjected, looking like a deer in headlights at the thought of even interrupting her. “The reason I even came to Earth at all was because I tracked the source of your magic.”

I’d expected this grand goddess, and instead, my best friend floundering in front of me, swearing under her breath with every curse word that I knew and a dozen others that I couldn’t guess. Beyond the booths though, something caught my eye.

Outside of Joe And Benny’s Pizza, a hunched over guy in a cloak took weird side-stepping moves on the sidewalk. I stared at him. My hand drifted down to my sword, hidden in its sheath. There was something…not human about the way his head bobbed.

And then, right behind him, two others appeared from the alley, following suit towards the front door.

“Everybody,” I snapped. “Look alive.”

“Look what?” Maeve jerked back.

Byrid craned up in her seat. “Look at what?”

I slid out of my booth and tried to get a good look of the cloaked figure. I didn’t have to. When some customer tried to pass him to leave, and barked at him to move, the figure raised up a hand covered in scales to pull back the hood of his cloak. The head of a lizard cocked his head at him and the customer backed up, swearing loudly.

Maeve sucked in a breath. “Holy shit!”

I unsheathed my sword as fast as I could but the lizard jerked forward and grabbed the customer by his throat, throwing him WWE-style to the wall.