Minerva made a lot more changes when she got back - moving out of HDI Tower, doing more solo missions, even taking control of her own media, obviously with Kyle’s help.
HDI had American media locked down, so he outmaneuvered them by having Minerva do streaming appearances in Europe.
No traditional interviews, no more cheesecake shoots - she started doing game shows, panel shows with older comedians, where she could play the straight man and count on these old guys to cover for her.
She had to deal with a ton of shameless flirting, of course, but it was old-fashioned flirting, clever and British instead of American and crude, allowing her to sidestep it and even get a few zingers off on her own.
I wasn’t expecting to hear from her again, until her thumbnail popped up on my HUD on my day off. “Hey, can you catch an express cab to New York?” She didn’t waste time saying hello.
“You want me in New York?”
“I’m tracking down some missing kids and it’s starting to look like one of my old dance partners. He’s kind of a magic guy, so I want to see how you handle him.”
“You want me to fight one of your villains?” I said, showing a bit more fear than I intended.
“I think you’re ready. Are you up for it?”
“Hell, yes!”
“Good. But Tim, this isn’t just a straight fight. We’ve got to hunt this guy down, so if you have any magic stuff or technical stuff or ancient family tracking voodoo, bring it with you. This guy is no genius, but he’s tricky. Smarter than me, but hopefully not smarter than you.”
* * *
I had seen lots of videos, even played some interactive games set in the ruins of New York, but pulling up drone footage, seeing it from the air, with all the damage spread out in the clear light of day, it was astonishing to see what the demis had done to this place.
The ancient pantheons had used the city as a dumping ground for all their unwanted grandchildren, making giant portals in the sky and dropping them like bags of trash.
After centuries of trying to police the behavior of individual godling brats, the old gods had all come together and decided to imprison any divine child with one human parent, or any child who had been the result of a forbidden coupling.
Hera has a fling with a bartender and has a demigod kid? Jail. A Norse god and a Greek goddess get together and make an unauthorized superbaby? Jail.
But the old gods needed a place to put all their divine castoffs, and a big, juicy Earth with a weak dimensional membrane had just become stable enough to support them, circulating just enough ambient power to keep them alive, but not enough for them to escape, or grow into any kind of cosmic threat.
These wayward demigods had been running wild since the late ‘90s, overwhelming conventional law enforcement, fighting each other like kids on a playground, casually tearing through bridges and buildings and monuments like they were made of paper.
Bluestar heroes held the line for a decade until they finally gave up, evacuated everybody, and sealed the city off, blowing up bridges and locking down airspace so only authorized vehicles were allowed in or out.
It takes a god to stop a god, so the city cut a deal with the Church of Olympus and got Poseidon to claim dominion over the waterways to keep the prisoners contained. But Poseidon wouldn’t let us evacuate any human that had been claimed by the gods, either.
Some of the prisoners still tried to test the blockade, of course, only to be grabbed by giant tentacles and flung back onto dry land. It looked really cool in the video game.
There weren’t many innocent people left to abuse in New York, but you can’t completely evacuate a city that big. The stragglers had learned the only way to survive was to become worshippers of some random demigod and accept their “protection” while they toiled in weird divine factories or tended crops on the roofs of what used to be office buildings.
People survived, somehow, as the children of IT guys and finance bros carried on life as tenant farmers, trapped in a ruined city, with the lucky ones being used as peasant labor and house slaves by the spoiled children of gods.
And if their lives weren’t hard enough already, one of these demigods was now stealing peasant children from his rivals, luring them away with promises of junk food and video games, spreading tales of this magical arcade he had set up in the ruins of Westfield Mall.
Minerva gave me the rundown while I was waiting on my cab.
Children were coming from all over the city, led away by sprites who came to them at night and helped them sneak away from their parents.
Minerva had captured and interrogated one of these sprites and discovered they weren’t faeries, but spirits of the dead, animated by a grandson of Hades and put to work snatching children.
The asshole’s name was Erebus, too weak to carve out his own kingdom, doing odd jobs for any demi who would hire him, seen whispering in the ear of a dozen of his more powerful brothers and sisters until he inevitably betrayed them and got kicked out.
Minerva said Erebus was one of the weaker demis but warned me not to take that literally. He was still a god, still damn near invulnerable, and still blessed by a god of death - unkillable, so he could only be banished for a while if he was stabbed by a spear made for Athena.
I got really excited when I heard about the magic spear, but Minerva said she was only allowed to summon it for a few minutes at a time, until Hephaestus noticed it was gone and snatched it back.
“Tim, you’re playing in a whole new league here, and I need you to be careful. I don’t expect you to go toe to toe with this guy. I’m bringing you for your eyes. Erebus likes to use illusions and decoys and magic tricks to waste my time.
“Every time he comes up with a new scam it takes days to find him, and he runs me all over town chasing ghosts until I finally get to punch the real thing. I’m hoping if I bring you, I can skip that part.”
* * *
Something in my HUD went ping as a sleek HDI shuttle landed on my lawn, as close as it could get without crossing into the Zone.
I stepped inside and had a flashback to the HDI cab that snuck me and Dad out of the compound when I was twelve.
By the time we crawled in there, we had essentially been starving for weeks. When you’re that hungry for that long, you develop a sixth sense for food. You can smell food cooking from incredible distances. You can see and hear food advertisements from blocks away.
And you can instantly identify boxes, baskets, cupboards, and refrigerators that might potentially contain food. So, when I crawled into that cab and saw an entire armrest filled with HDI-branded snack bags, I almost lost my mind.
I didn’t even realize I was reaching for it until I heard a sharp cracking sound and realized Dad had smacked my hand against the armrest, hard enough to leave a mark with his big gold ring.
This cab looked identical, and it contained, I shit you not, the exact same collection of snacks, like it was all stocked by an automated inventory system that hadn’t been updated in twenty years.
The trip from Boston to New York was a lot shorter than the one from Texas to Rhode Island, so I only had time to guzzle some tea and scarf a bag of chips before I landed.
Minerva’s location dot was still a few minutes away from me when my phone lit up with a call from everybody’s favorite DMA supervisor, Harrison Moore.
Without saying hello… why didn’t anybody say hello anymore? Harrison said, “Kovak, what the hell are you doing in New York? How did you get through the cordon?” Harrison was really mad, yelling at me like I was in serious trouble.
“Minerva asked for me,” I said, sounding petulant and defensive like a school kid.
“Minerva brought you to New York?” Harrison said, like he couldn’t believe he heard me right. Then he yelled, “Fuck!” and hung up, with no explanation.
Minerva appeared on top of a nearby building and I got to watch as she launched herself off the roof and did one of her famous three-point landings right in front of me. It had only been a couple days, but it was still great to see her.
“Hey,” I said. “I just got an angry phone call from Harry. Was this little field trip authorized?”
“Everything I do is authorized,” Minerva said. “They just don’t know it yet.”
* * *
“So, I’m here to track this guy and check for traps? Why don’t you just use your owl for this?”
“Can’t use the owl in New York. Can’t use the brand, either. It’s… family politics. If another Olympian catches me using things I got from Athena, they’ll go crying to Hera at the Church of Olympus and great grandpa will take them away from me. He might even exile me to someplace worse or maybe even imprison me in Tartarus like he did my mother. Hephaestus only lets me use the spear for a few minutes, and only after the foe has been defeated without it.”
“So, basically, I’m here to be your owl?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Are you insulted?”
“No way,” I said. “That owl’s a badass.”
* * *
The Westfield Mall had been a giant shopping complex nestled between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The towers were still standing in 2058, but superheroes love to fight around monuments, so they had definitely seen better days.
There were giant holes punched in them from top to bottom. Mostly man-sized shapes of gods who had flown through them or been thrown through them during battles.
The Westfield Mall had been frozen in time, left just as it was in 1995, when the first portal opened up and the old gods dropped their first load of grandkids off.
It really did feel like a festive occasion at first, like real grandparents dropping their kids off to play video games while they went shopping. The first wave of kids who saw them fall welcomed them with open arms. They thought these new arrivals were going to be heroes, as the son of Thor lifted arcade cabinets over his head and helped a young girl win everything you could win from playing Skee-Ball.
But the portals kept opening and the delinquent gods kept dropping, until the son of Hercules squared off with the son of Thor and forced them to evacuate the mall while they fought.
They fought for three days, until Magni finally got the jump on Hyllus and snapped his neck. In those three days, they caused a billion dollars’ worth of property damage, and the first part of the city was cordoned off.
The other godlings tried to form a series of divine street gangs, with Norse, Olympian, and Egyptian gods banding together in rough groups, until, inevitably, egos clashed, and factions broke off, proving that even gods from the same pantheon can’t really stand each other.
* * *
Minerva didn’t break stride as we approached the mall. Kids or no kids, she seemed determined to walk straight in. I was getting increasingly nervous as we pulled aside fallen trees, abandoned cars, and slabs of concrete on our way there.
Maybe kids were small enough to squeeze past the debris, but there’s no way an adult could have made it to this entrance.
The Westfield Arcade was in suspiciously good condition, strangely clean and whole, with all the rubble cleared away. The surrounding structure was still a crumbling wreck, and still looked dangerous as hell, but there was sunlight pouring through the old skylight, shining all around, but not quite inside, the dark room still filled with old game cabinets.
I sent some drone cameras in when we were still a mile away and was shocked at how clean it all was. Like the game room had just been closed up for the night, instead of being abandoned for sixty years.
There was something beautiful and eerie about it, with shafts of sunlight shining through thick motes of dust, feeding the mass of overgrown trees that had been recently cut away to create a clear space through the wreckage, for any kids who wandered here seeking the arcade.
I slowly panned my camera around and said, “Minerva, I don’t see any kids here. I don’t even see evidence of kids here. There should be trash and toys and a hundred muddy footprints in this atrium, but it’s spotless. Somebody definitely used cleaning spells here.
“Maybe the kids are underground, but I don’t see anything with electric power here, and I would be able to hear a big generator for a mile, unless he brought in a bank of power crystals or something.”
Minerva made it all the way to the interior entrance to the arcade before I made her stop. “This is way too easy. Give me a minute.
I squinted my eyes and slowly shifted my vision into the gray. “Really wish we had Denise for this. I’m still not great at detecting stuff.”
“No backup,” Minerva said, “this has to be you and me.”
I took slow, measured steps forward, only waving Minerva up after I was sure nothing was going to explode or turn me into a pig.
We made it to the first row of game cabinets, and I yelled, “Stop! There’s something magic in the floor!”
There was a softly glowing layer of something hidden under the old green carpet of the arcade. I tried throwing a variety of inanimate objects on it before I finally took Minerva’s hand to brace myself and gently placed one toe down inside. Then I had to jump back as a pulsing fiery net sprang up out of nowhere, phased through the carpet, and rose instantly to the ceiling, blazing with the same kind of Olympian fire Athena had used to make her brand.
Minerva groaned. “Do you know how many times he’s caught me in one of those fucking— Thank you, Tim. Thank you for saving me from a very long afternoon.”
“My pleasure,” I said, shaking my head, after finding and carefully triggering three more nets scattered around the mall. “This whole place is a fake-out. There are no kids here. And look at these video games. Even if they had electricity they wouldn’t work. Somebody used repair magic on these, but magic can’t repair complex machines. He just used enough to make the cabinets look pretty. Probably just enough to fool you, or whatever B2 guys they sent in. I should have taken some extra time and learned how to disarm those instead of triggering them. He probably knows we’re coming now.”
“I doubt you would have been able to dispel Olympian magic,” Minerva said, “and he didn’t need traps to know we’re coming. We’ve been doing this dance for years, Tim. Of course, he knows I’m coming, but I don’t think he knows about you. We can still surprise him, because he thinks I’ll be squirming around in that net for three hours, waiting for backup to come and cut me down.”
* * *
“But if they’re not here, where are they? What sent you here in the first place?”
“I followed one of the ‘sprites’ that was leading the children away and it turned out to be the spirit of a guy who died in one of these towers sixty years ago. I followed him to his grave, just the place where his body fell, really. Erebus recruited him and gave him permission to leave the site of his death for a while, to do this mission. I ordered him to tell me where he took the kids, and I guess he lied to me.”
“So, he’s still stuck where he died? Can you take me there?”
The spirit looked pretty good for a ghost, just hanging out in a pile of rubble at the site where one of the smaller World Trade buildings fell. He manifested as a simple translucent shape, mostly white, still dressed in slacks and a dress shirt, but it looked like he had loosened his tie, and his feet were still obscured, stuck in the ground.
I would have been freaked out if I had seen a ghost just standing around last year, but a lot had happened since then, so I just walked up to it and said, “What’s your name, dude?”
“I don’t remember,” the spirit said, revealing himself to be a young man, about college age, damn close to the same age as me, dressed like a finance intern from sixty years ago.
“I need you to tell us where the kids are. Erebus told you to find certain kids and lead them somewhere. We need to know where.”
“I’m dead but I’m not stupid,” the spirit said. “I don’t have to answer you.”
“But you have to answer me,” Minerva said. “This territory is claimed by Olympus, and that means we all have authority here.”
The spirit scoffed. “You’re a god, but you’re not my god. Go fuck yourself.”
Minerva pursed her lips and turned away, leaving me to try a different approach. “Jeeves, did Jacob have a spell for compelling spirits?”
He pulled it right up, a spell designed to disrupt the connection between a spirit and the Earth it was standing on.
I started to cast it, then forced myself to keep reading, to make sure I didn’t miss any warnings or caveats my ancestor had left behind.
Jacob said this disruption, yanking them free of the Earth against their will, was the closest a spirit could come to feeling pain. I needed information from this guy, but I wasn’t ready to torture him.
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“Why are you bound here?” I asked. “Ghosts linger because they have unfinished business. What’s your unfinished business?”
“I’m guarding a data cache,” the spirit said.
“You’re guarding something that’s not even physical?”
“I’m guarding the server where the data was stored. I can’t leave until I finish the transfer and get the data to my boss.”
“Yeah, but it’s been sixty years. Your boss is dead, right?”
“It doesn’t matter,” the spirit said. “I have to complete my task before I can go.”
“What was your task, exactly?”
“I was on the 25th floor when they sounded the call to evacuate. Two different gangs of gods were fighting outside, throwing stuff that was bouncing off the building, and some of it was heavy enough to break through.
“I was about to evacuate when my boss said, ‘We’ve got six trillion in credit card transactions on this server and last night’s backup didn’t work. I need you to transfer it to a portable drive and carry it out when you leave.’
“I said that database is huge, it’s gonna take ten minutes! And he said, ‘Then I guess you better hurry.’ So, I ran to the server room and finally found a portable drive. I plugged it in, started to copy the database, and realized everybody else was gone. The building was starting to shake in a really scary way, but I couldn’t leave until I got the file.
“It was at 84.3 percent when a metal desk came flying through the window and broke my back. I remember laying there, unable to move, staring up at that screen stuck on 84.3 percent. The impact had knocked the drive on the floor and interrupted the transfer, so all I could do was lay there and stare up at it - 84.3 percent.
“The building took a real beating, but it didn’t fall right away, so I just stayed there on the floor for hours, maybe days, until I got really hungry and thirsty. My back was hurting too bad for me to sleep, and I couldn’t move at all, so I just laid there, staring at the screen until the power went out. I was still alive, in the dark, when everything fell, and I finally died.
“I woke up in the exact spot I was when I died, right under where I’m standing now. I know I should have evacuated anyway. I know I should have told my boss to fuck himself, but I was twenty-three, man. I didn’t know any better. You know how many Ivy League assholes I beat out for that job? They used to joke that if I ever fucked up, they could have a new guy in my cube in ten minutes. They said if I did good I could be a millionaire by the time I turned thirty, and when you’ve got that much on the line, man, when your boss says something, you do it, right?”
“Jesus,” I whispered, trying not to overwhelm the spirit with my pity. “All right, so if we finish this transfer, you can leave? You can go on to wherever you’re supposed to go?”
“That’s what Erebus said he was gonna do. He said he had authority over me, so he could let me walk around all over town as long as it was on his orders. He even said he could get me to the Greek afterlife, maybe even the good one, if I did my job right.”
“But if we complete this transfer, could you go? No matter what he said?”
“Yeah, but my task isn’t just the transfer. I have to get the data to my boss, and my boss is even deader than I am.”
The ghost told me the name of his company, and I looked it up. “Okay,” I said, “if I can grab this data file, and send it to the last surviving member of your company’s old management, would you consider your duty fulfilled?”
“Could you really do that?” the spirit asked, like he was afraid to hope. “But even if you could dig down to it, there’s no way those drives survived the fall.”
“I can’t say for sure,” I admitted, “but if you tell us where the kids are, I promise I’ll try.”
“No way,” the spirit shook his head. “The minute I tell you, you’ll leave me here.”
I said, “I’ll give you my Word,” and the spirit laughed.
“Your Word don’t mean shit to me. Everybody lies to me. My boss lied and my girlfriend lied and now even the gods are lying to me. No,” the spirit said firmly. “You want the kids; you get my file. And it has to be the whole thing.”
Minerva and I attacked the ground like we had a personal grudge against it, trying to dig through sixty years’ worth of debris in ten minutes. We made short work of it, thanks to my levitation and her strength. We dug down to the old server room and got our first real stroke of luck.
That server room wasn’t just a data fortress, it was a literal fortress, too. Somebody had reinforced it until the whole room was built like a bank vault, protecting the precious machines inside.
That reinforcement probably explained why the ghost had been trapped here. The spirit couldn’t leave because the objects necessary for his task were still here, giving his tether something to hang on to, even after the building collapsed.
The construction was so good, it took both of us to peel the roof off and peer down into the ancient server room. The equipment hadn’t been crushed, but it was filthy and scattered everywhere. It would have taken me hours to find the right server, if the spirit hadn’t been tethered to it, giving me a clear white thread to follow, straight to the box I needed.
I used cleaning spells to brush sixty years of dust away and inspected the case. The server had been sitting in a modular vault, so it looked mostly intact, but that still left me with a bunch of hard problems to solve.
I recognized some of the hardware from Mom’s old hobby projects, USB ports and SAS drives from before the Datacore revolution, but I had no easy way to get power to it, and I had no physical plugs that would have been compatible with it.
I groaned as I realized how easy this could have been, if I had thought to bring a power source and a box of adapters with me. I had a dozen connectors that could interface with old USB, but they were all sitting in my apartment, two hundred miles away. And how could I draw power from an ancient A/C wall plug when I didn’t have a plug that would fit, and the whole area was dead?
But maybe I didn’t need the wall. This server was plugged into an Uninterruptible Power Supply that was basically just a bank of batteries. The batteries were long dead, but as long as the converter still worked, I could just attach the positive and negative leads to my power crystal and pretend it was a new battery.
I did a quick search and found there was a whole community for this, a whole niche market of hobbyists who made boxes to run vintage hardware on new crystals. All I had to do was watch a video.
It took me a few tries, and I made a few heart-stopping mistakes, but I finally figured out how to get power to the server, enough to make the creaky old fans spin up.
My cleaning spell had whooshed all the dust out, but these ball bearings were done. A repair spell couldn’t fix the whole server at once, but could I narrow my focus and just repair the tiny bearings in the fans?
It took a couple tries, as I had to concentrate on the diagram and use a holographic overlay to aim, but it seemed to work, just well enough to let the blessedly redundant system boot up.
But that still left me with a big problem. Even if I could get these drives to spin up, how the hell could I interface with them?
If I had my box of connectors, I could have plugged the drives into Jeeves directly, or bypassed the physical layer entirely, and read the bits right off the magnetic plates, but with no physical equipment to back me up, I had to rely on a series of half-assed kludges and hope for the best.
No way I could cobble a USB connector together in the middle of nowhere, but what about wireless protocols?
The old server board was too secure to have built-in WiFi, but I had Jeeves ping everything in the room and found one working device that could still use Wi-Fi 6 - an old emergency hotspot that could provide a network connection over USB. I hit it with a cleaning spell and used a repair spell to straighten the antennas.
After another ten minutes of fiddling with it, Jeeves said he was getting a signal, although I had no way to see what was happening, since all the old monitors had been smashed or fried beyond repair.
I had Jeeves simulate a touch screen monitor and try to spoof a display connection through this single USB port. I had to hit a dozen ancient hacking sites to figure it out, but I was finally able to simulate an old 16:10 monitor and get a slow, shaky image of a login prompt.
From there it was just software, with Jeeves using brute force processing power to cut through the encryption and find an old password file. Jeeves logged us in as admin and it was time to try the drives.
The system was using a redundant RAID protocol, so I didn’t have to get all these drives working at the same time to get the database. I just needed to get a few blocks from each one and piece it together.
We had everything riding on the question, did this building fall slowly, or all at once?
And then we got our second stroke of luck. Most of the magnetic hard drives had not survived the fall, but the magnetic drives had been accelerated by a bank of solid-state drives that didn’t have any moving parts. Arrays like this typically moved files from slow storage to faster storage in response to a request, so there was a chance, just a slightly better chance, that this data had survived.
The spirit gave a little wail as the transfer window came up again, the same ugly yellow on blue bar that he had died staring at.
The progress bar hung completely at random as the drives made a terrible grinding noise, but eventually, it hit 84.3 percent and hung for five full seconds - just enough time for this poor bastard to relive his death.
Then the transfer hit 85 percent, and he started to cry. Then it zoomed past 90 and 95 and politely said TRANSFER COMPLETE. That file was twenty gigabytes. That boy gave his life for twenty gigabytes.
I had to do some software data correction on the raw recovered file, but Jeeves quickly gave it a green check mark, and I sent the file to the last surviving executive of this deeply suspicious shell company that had probably been a cut-out for the NSA.
This guy was ninety-five years old now, but he was still alive, and he still had a functioning email address, so I sent the file off and let the spirit hear the distinctive ding noise that indicated it was done.
The spirit mumbled “Thank you,” and started to fade away.
“Wait!” I stopped him. “Where are the kids?”
“The children are in the basement of an old school off Rockefeller Park. Somebody moved in a bunch of vending machines and found fuel for the generator. You can’t miss it, it’s the only school close to the park.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m scared to hear the answer to this next one, but I have to ask: why does Erebus want the kids?”
“He doesn’t want them,” the spirit said. “Hades wants them, and Erebus wants to get back in grandpa’s good graces.”
“Why does Hades want the kids? Does he have some way to channel their powers?”
“Oh, he’s not collecting kids with powers,” the spirit said. “He’s collecting kids who can sing.”
“What?”
“Hades is making a gift for Persephone. He wants to get enough kids to make a choir. He’s gonna put their souls in a cabinet for her, so any time she wants, she can open it and hear them sing.”
* * *
We found the kids in the basement of an old high school near the park, still with an amazing view of the Hudson River.
No magic traps this time, as Erebus had to keep this area clear for any arriving children. This location had all the signs I had been looking for the first time, stray bits of clothing and food trash interspersed with dozens of tiny muddy footprints. Some of them looked like footprints from bare feet, indicating half of these kids didn’t even have shoes.
The doors of the school had all been chained shut, and the padlocks all looked new. Minerva let me kick the front door open and stayed behind me as I stormed inside, a little reckless, a little too fast, with my anger and my magic level growing as I ran.
I found a dozen smashed vending machines on the way to the basement, completely empty now, with all the soda and snacks scooped out. Jesus, was he poisoning these kids with flat soda and sixty-year-old potato chips?
The door to the basement had a shiny new chain on it, but I yanked it open and took both doors off their hinges, tossing them to either side as I stormed in.
I didn’t see an Olympian godling right away, but I saw twenty kids, huddled together around a big screen and an ancient gaming console, clinging to each other like they were terrified of what was about to come through that door.
Minerva ran forward to comfort the children, showing a strangely maternal feminine side that I would not have expected from her.
I stalked through the rooms, hunting for the bad guy. I could see traces of Olympian magic everywhere, but it looked old and faded, like the caster had been gone for a while.
The floors were covered in soda cans and junk food wrappers, and the few uneaten samples I found looked weirdly fresh and new, way too fresh to have come out of those vending machines. But the logos and fonts on them were obviously from the 1990s, and I couldn’t imagine how it had all been preserved.
Then I took a closer look at the magic residue on them and realized he had been using purification magic to make the food safe and bring all the old treats back to life. I remember being grudgingly impressed by that, as the trick had never occurred to me.
There was a higher concentration of junk food wrappers around the kids, mixed with a bunch of stuff that wasn’t meant for kids at all - cough drops and a variety of herbal teas, with piles of fresh teabags sitting in front of a working kettle.
I got another chill as I realized, he wasn’t just feeding them, he was giving them stuff to protect their throats as he made them sing.
Minerva called in an MRT extraction team and had them bring buses to get the kids home. I hit the area with cleaning spells and got permission to use healing and cleansing magic on the kids, since they were all bloody and filthy, covered in dirt and crumbs, with their feet cut up by rebar and barbed wire on their way to the school.
It didn’t look like the god was beating them, but he wasn’t really caring for them, either. He was pulling a source of drinking water from somewhere, but they all had untreated wounds.
Minerva was beaming as the kids piled into the buses, on their way to a field hospital before DMA went hunting for their parents.
“Cheer up, Kovak,” she said with a rare smile. “We saved the kids, and we got the drop on him. You know how long it’s been since I got the drop on him? Find an open space and get ready. We’re finally gonna have the element of surprise.”
But Erebus didn’t come through the front door. A pillar of Olympian fire appeared in the basement and a male figure in black and red stepped through.
Erebus was beautiful. I know it’s weird that I keep describing these bad guys as beautiful, but that’s what he was - beautiful, not handsome. His face was perfect, inviting and non-threatening like a pop star or an actor from a soap opera, with wavy brown hair and black eyes that seemed to twinkle with motes of fire dancing back and forth.
He had the same kind of divine aura Minerva had, but I was so used to that by now, I hardly noticed.
He stepped out of the fire carrying two giant bags of cotton candy and said, “I don’t hear singing!” The god’s face fell as he stepped into the empty basement and saw me standing there, alone, wearing my Bluestar jacket over civilian clothes.
“Who the hell are you?” he said, putting the candy down with no trace of fear, like I was a repair guy here to fix the TV.
“My name is Tim Kovak, and I’m here to see what color your blood is.”
He smiled as he looked me up and down. “Jacket looks new, kid. Everything about you looks new. You think you’re ready to fight a god?”
“Nope,” I said, hooking one thumb over my shoulder. “That’s why I brought a friend.”
Minerva emerged from a side room and took her place behind me, letting her anger show as she crossed her arms and glared at him. “Stealing children, Erebus? This is a new low for you.”
The godling shrugged. “I was about this age when grandpa sold me to Hecate. I never got a childhood, so why should they?”
Minerva took an angry step forward and Erebus broke into a big smile, “Hey! Whoa! Let’s not get off on the wrong foot here! You’ve already rescued the kids, so there’s really no need for violence.” He held his hands out like he was inviting Minerva to put cuffs on them. “You win. I give up. Take me to Tartarus.”
I looked back at Minerva and waited for her nod.
“No need for violence,” I said, “but I really want some.”
God or no god, I stepped up and tried to knock the pretty right off that face.
Erebus staggered back against the basement wall and said, “You’re using spells but you’re punching me? Are you a wizard or a fighter? Make up your fucking mind!”
I ran forward to punch him again, but this time he was ready. He sidestepped me and caught my arm, twisting it at a weird angle while he peered at my aura. I knocked him away with the other arm, but as I was coming around again, he finally punched back.
My first thought was: Wow, I should have been practicing, taking hits from Minerva all this time.
Although I had done some strength tests with Minerva and some sparring with Sonny Mao, neither one of them had ever just punched me full strength.
Erebus didn’t look particularly strong, but as he hit me, his hands were wreathed in some kind of death god shadow stuff. Whatever it was, that divine shadow seemed to soften my wards and slow my movements, effectively reducing my strength.
His next punch doubled me over and burned, until I had to heal it to put it out. Then he held his arms out and a bunch of shadowy tentacles emerged from his body, reaching out in all directions before they came together and hit me, hard enough to knock me off my feet.
The shadow stuff felt like frostbite on my arms and chest, while I watched my breath condense in front of me.
I got close enough to punch him again, but he punched me first. I was able to turn so his punch hit my shoulder instead of my face, but I fell on my ass as my collar bone went snap.
No idea who this guy’s mother was, but he was somehow mixing Olympian fire with shadows from Hades, alternating hot and cold at me while I tried to stand and block with my left arm, with my right hanging useless at my side.
Minerva was leaning forward like she wanted to jump in. She took a step toward me, and I yelled, “Not yet!” as I healed myself, reforming the bone and snapping my arm up in one smooth motion to hit him with an artillery spell at close range.
The blast of solidified air magic surprised him and knocked him off balance, giving me an opening to run forward and start pummeling him again, over and over until he kicked me away and started burning me with more of that Olympian fire.
My wards were damn near useless against this stuff, so I let them weaken and poured most of my power into healing myself. If I couldn’t avoid the damage, maybe I could heal through it and fight through the pain. His cold stuff made his fire stuff hurt more, but I couldn’t really feel pain when I had magic surging through me like this. The pain was just background noise, annoying but no big deal, as long as that sweet torrent of power kept coming.
I kept moving forward, bent over like I was walking against a strong wind, wreathed in fire, until I got close enough to punch him again and hit him hard enough to break his concentration. Then I hit him with another artillery blast and sent him flying across the room.
Erebus staggered to his feet and gestured at Minerva, yelling like he was personally offended by my presence. “What the hell! This is not a superhero! This is a magic singularity in blue jeans! And you’re teaching it to fight?”
Erebus softened his tone and adopted a serious expression. “Minerva, I know we’re not friends, but we’re still gods, and we still have responsibilities here. Whatever has bonded with this kid, you and me need to kill it while it can still die.”
Puzzled, I looked back and forth between them. “What’s he talking about?”
“Nothing,” Minerva said. “He’s stalling for time because you’re kicking his ass. Just hit him again.”
So, I hit him again. Erebus tried more of his fire and shadow stuff, but he was getting weaker, and I was getting better at healing through it.
I got four or five deeply satisfying hits in and knocked him to the ground. Then I whipped my arm out and yelled, “Spear!”
Minerva summoned her grandmother’s spear and sent it spinning into my hand. I gripped it with both hands, summoned all my strength, and rammed it through the center of the wayward god’s chest, easily piercing through his body, his heart, and the floor of the basement, deep into the concrete foundation underneath. His blood was black, glittering with motes of Olympian fire.
Erebus screamed and disintegrated into wisps of fire and shadow, until there was nothing left but a few burning food wrappers, blowing in the wind.
And then I was standing in this old school basement, holding a divine weapon, crafted literally by the gods. I got a warm, friendly feeling from it, an incredible sense of confidence and power.
Is this what Jason felt? Perseus? Achilles? Theseus? Were these heroes all real people who felt this thrill of victory, just like I was feeling it now? Was I really so arrogant, in that moment, that I was seriously comparing myself to heroes from Greek mythology?
I looked at that magnificent spear, the polished wooden shaft leading to a bronze spearhead, ornate and leaf-shaped, with the grip wrapped in leather. No glowing runes or obvious magic auras, but everything about it felt larger than life. Wood stronger than Earth wood, leather stronger than any leather men could make, with a bronze point so sharp, it could be driven through concrete and emerge without a scratch.
Instead of feeling like an object from fantasy, this spear felt more real than real, like everything I had touched in my “real” world was just a shadow, and this was the first real thing I’d ever held in my hand.
I looked at that spear, felt the power of it, and desperately wanted to keep it. Imagine what I could do with this thing. A weapon that would let me use my full strength without breaking, a weapon that could slice the legs off armored robots and punch through the side of a tank. I would be unstoppable. This spear could carve through demons like they were rotten fruit.
I could have killed Baalphezar in two swipes with this thing. And if I used it right, used it on the right targets at the right time, I could change the whole balance of power on Earth, and set billions of people free.
I saw it all in my mind as I held the spear. Then I walked over to Minerva, and carefully put it back in her hand.
“Is that the real reason you brought me here?” I asked. “To test me with that thing? To see if I would be strong enough to give it back?”
Minerva shook her head. “You were never supposed to touch it, but you defeated him alone, so you were the only one who could send him back. Anything else you saw was between you and the gods.”
* * *
The spear vanished from Minerva’s hand as I was pausing to catch my breath. Then she leaned back against the wall with a weird grin on her face and pretended she was buffing her nails.
I said, “Thanks for your help,” sincerely, as we walked out.
“Yeah,” she said, pretending to wipe sweat from her brow. “Whew. That fight took a lot out of me. I may need to sit down.”
I looked back at her and said, “Was that sarcasm? Two dates with Kyle and he’s already got you doing sarcasm? This guy really is good for you.”
Minerva smiled an uncharacteristically shy, feminine smile and said, “I know you sent him to me, but I don’t know why. Honestly, Tim, how did you know? How did you know he would be exactly what I needed?”
I shrugged. “I spent most of last year living with a succubus. You pick up some stuff.”
* * *
Azael is lecturing me about pride again, but Minerva is the real reason I won that fight, even though she never threw a punch. I fought with incredible confidence in that battle - fearless, even in the face of what should have been a superior opponent, because I knew she had my back.
* * *
Minerva started to look increasingly uncomfortable as we leapt over rooftops on our way back to the landing site. While we were waiting, she looked over and said, “Tim, I have to tell you something. You’re not just my partner, you’re my friend, so I have to tell you something.
“I brought you in on this because Tamerlane called and asked me to bring you with me as a test. He told me to record POV of everything you did in New York and send it directly to him. I recorded that whole fight with Erebus, and I was about to send it up, but if you don’t want him to see it, tell me. I’ll delete the footage and make up an excuse.”
“Tamerlane wanted to see me in action?” I asked, more flattered than concerned. “Is that really a big secret? We fight in public all the time. Anybody with the right clearance can see my fights and know exactly what my powers are. How is this different?”
“It’s different because you just fought a god. If he sees you can do this, he’s gonna make you do it again. Maybe even assign you here permanently, to spend the rest of your life in these ruins, punching demigods for a living.”
“I just keep thinking about that ghost,” I said. “The demis took everything from that kid. Cut his life short by fifty years, and they didn’t even notice. They’re killing innocent people here every day, and it’s not even out of malice. They just don’t give a fuck. So, if the big boss wants to send me back here to kill gods, well, that sounds just fine with me. I’ll kill every fucking one of them if I can.”