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“Enough with the chitchat,” said Patricia. “Let’s gather round and figure out what’s to be done to catch that bastard, so I can get back to my chores.”
“There’s nothing to be done.” There was no point in wasting everyone’s time, and I had every intention to make them see that. “We have no clue where he is, he’s probably in some parallel universe by now, and even if we found him, I wouldn’t be able to retire him. We all know why. I don’t even know why we’re here, having this conversation.”
“We’re here because Patty insisted,” said Joel, never taking his eyes off his phone.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Lorna stepped up. Fire blazed in her deep blue eyes. “What kind of hero are you? Is this why we risked everything to bring you back to life? Is this why I let you have the only man I ever loved?”
Sariel scratched the back of his neck in discomfort, avoiding Lorna’s gaze.
“Is this why I joined your stupid secret group? I’m friends with a succubus who makes my breakfast, and a merman who peels my veggies, for crying out loud! My ancestors would turn in their graves if they knew!” She raised her gaze to the ceiling, a silent apology in her eyes. Oh, she sometimes beat my ass so hard at being a drama queen! She shook her head and fixed me again with an unforgiving look. “You promised the Council you’d track down your father. I know you spent your summer drinking and smoking weed. Fine. You needed time to recover, to get used to being a revenant. I gave you a break. We all gave you a break.”
“You gave me a break,” I chuckled sarcastically. “As if I needed you to…”
“You needed us to save your life!” She cut me off. “Now we need you to save everyone from whatever Morningstar’s cooking in his self-imposed exile. Because he’s up to something, and we all know it’s not unicorns and rainbows.”
I sighed, exasperated. “I can’t dream, I can’t find my father, and I can’t find my mother, okay? It’s over. You know what the Council should do? Find themselves another prophecy and another savior.”
“Forget about the prophecy,” Paz said. “That’s not how you’ll defeat him. He’s a hybrid – a nephilim, – he must have a weakness. We just have to find it. GC was supposed to talk to his grandfather, the original Golden Calf.”
“I told you,” GC groaned. “We were all being watched. I couldn’t teleport to the bloody Himalayas.”
“All summer, Apis? You couldn’t go investigate all summer? You had one job…”
“Guys! Knock it off!” Last year, we’d established GC would talk to his grandfather who’d retired in the mountains, Patty and Joel would research the Great Old Ones, and Paz would see what he could find about Valentine’s parents. GC had masterfully failed at his task, too distracted by my insatiable sex drive last summer, and I don’t know what Paz had done. For the most part, I’d been drunk and high, but if I wasn’t mistaken, there’d been days when he wasn’t around. Patty and Joel hadn’t found much on the cosmic gods sleeping in our universe. They concluded that if there was any serious information on them, it wasn’t in written form.
“Come with me, Mila,” GC said. “We’ll visit him together. He’ll be glad to meet my girlfriend.”
“Our girlfriend,” Paz growled, his demon eyes turning red.
“He’s old school!” GC protested. “He doesn’t believe in polygamy!”
Lorna laughed out loud. “He’s from the Old fucking Testament! There was no monogamy back then.”
“A man could have more wives, not the other way around. If I tell him I’m sharing Mila with three other guys, he’ll disown me.”
That made Lorna cross her arm
s over her chest and sneer at him. “Fucking patriarchy.”
GC ignored her. “Mila, will you come?”
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. I doubt we’ll find out anything useful about the nephilim, but whatever makes you happy. I already read the Old Testament. Twice. It doesn’t say how to kill someone like Morningstar.”
“There are things, secrets, they never put in the Old Testament,” said Klaus. “I think it’s worth a shot. If nothing else, you get to see the most beautiful mountains in the world. Merciful Reapers and Neutral Reapers get called there all the time. Violent Reapers… not so much.”
“A vacation in the Himalayas,” I said sarcastically. “That’s what I need. Clear my head… maybe I can come up with a way to dream travel again.”
“Maybe you can come up with a way around that,” Lorna said, tired of hearing me complain about not being able to dream jump and see my mother. What she didn’t know was that I didn’t only want to see my mother again, but to bring her back where she belonged. In this universe, with me. “You think all is lost because you can’t dream jump anymore. So what? There are other dream jumpers out there. Learn to delegate.”
My eyes went wide, and my jaw dropped. I could almost imagine myself as a cartoon character, jaw hitting the floor, light bulb blinking yellow above my head. Good gracious, Lorna was smart! I didn’t have to do it myself. I just had to find someone to do it for me, dream, travel, then travel some more, until they found my mother. I could describe her universe to them.
“It could work, in theory,” Francis said, looking at me worriedly. I pulled myself together and gave him a smile. It was as if he could see the cogs in my head turning, and he was afraid I might come up with a crazy idea. “But where would we find a dream jumper?”
Lorna poked Patricia in the ribs. “You’re half succubus, half human.”
“I can barely remember my dreams in the morning.” Patty said. “That should tell you I’m not as gifted as Morningstar.”
“It can’t be a hybrid,” I reasoned. “It’s too hard for them. We need to find someone who’s a natural.”
