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Carver chuckled. In a flash his hand darted out to tug on my sleeve. I yelped, shocked at his strength, and caught myself before I stumbled. The three of us were now just inches apart.
I stared at our shoes, uncomfortable with the proximity. “Now what?”
Carver smiled. Too late I noticed the ball of liquid flame he dropped from his open hand. I yelped again, my reflexes taking over as I attempted to dance away from the fire now roaring about our feet, but Gil snatched at me, grasping me firmly by the wrist. The flames licked higher, burning brighter, consuming our bodies and all vision of the restaurant as Carver’s laughter filled my ears –
And then we were somewhere else. Gil let go of my hand and I stepped away from the two of them. I rubbed my wrist and threw Carver a reproachful glance.
“You need to start warning me when you do all this crazy shit.”
“And you need to stop being so jittery about every last little thing,” Carver said, his voice lined with mirth. “If Gil hadn’t held on to your arm, you might have missed your very first proper teleportation.”
Which, now that I thought about it, didn’t feel as gross or disorienting as I’d expected. It was nothing like moving through the Dark Room, and not similar to the descriptions some of the Wings gave me back when I worked at the Lorica. One said it felt like her limbs were wrenched apart and popped out of their sockets, then forcibly reassembled at her destination. Another said it felt like being flayed alive, in a way that was painless, but still deeply disturbing, his body fraying into its components each time he traveled.
But with Carver, all it felt like was a momentary, balmy breeze, the flames hardly burning above anything warmer than the heat of a radiator. That fleeting warmth was even more noticeable because of the chill of the morning, a dewy, damp coolness, not at all dissimilar to how it felt at the arboretum. Which made sense, since, as it turned out, we had ended up in someone’s garden.
“Where are we?”
“Ah, yes. Amaterasu likes to keep her tether here. We’re in the garden of one Mrs. Yoshida, in a residential suburb in, I’d say, northeastern Valero. A lovely woman, I’m told, who has no idea that a sun goddess has deemed her backyard worthy of hosting a portal into another realm. I suppose Amaterasu likes to keep it in the family, as it were.”
I looked around at the stone lamps, at the carpet of smooth, perfect stones, a bamboo water fountain sloshing and clunking with soothing regularity among the foliage.
“And where is that portal, exactly?”
“Shush,” Carver said. “Keep it down. Just wait.”
A stabbing pain took over me, radiating from my wrist. I bit my tongue, careful not to show either Gil or Carver that anything was amiss. I watched in the gloom of predawn as one segment of the flower on Dionysus’s brand faded from black into nothingness. Two petals remained.
The dawn of a new day, and the countdown continued. Just wait, Carver said. I stared at the horizon, wondering how many sunrises I had left, and waited.
Chapter 11
I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for until I saw it. The sun broke through the darkness, sloughing off the black of early morning with the orange and pink of a new day. But I knew we weren’t just there to watch the sunrise. It rose slowly, a fierce ball of flame riding through the sky, and I shielded my eyes as I dared to watch it go, wondering whether it would crash to earth, or send a flare, some spectacular way of opening the gateway to the goddess’s plane.
It was simpler, it turned out, but no less spectacular. A ray of sun pierced the clouds, solitary and bright, reaching through the skies over Valero to strike the spray of water splashing from the bamboo fountain in Mrs. Yoshida’s garden.
A kaleidoscope of light burst as the sunbeam met the drops of water, fragments of rainbow scattering across the garden, then rejoining into a perfect circle on the ground. Carver beckoned us to step into the scintillating disc of color, already running one of his rings across his fingers. He dripped the requisite bead of blood into the circle’s center.
“What about the offering?”
He only smiled and shook his head. Gil looked warily from Carver, to me, then down at the circle, and we stepped in at about the same time. The world burst into fractals of colored light, so much brightness that it felt as if we’d entered the heart of a perfectly cut diamond.
I blinked, clearing the afterimage out of my eyes, and realized that I wasn’t far off. All around us the domicile looked very much like the inside of a giant lantern, its walls like great, mirrored sheets of glass reaching up to a bright blue sky. Wisps of cloud rolled far above us, each a perfect, slender rendition of something out of poetry and art.
But there was no sun. No, the light came from within, from the woman with the alabaster skin, with hair like black silk, and regalia more grandiose than anything I’d ever seen in my life. She sat there, majestic, on a palanquin in the center of this massive lamp, shrouded in the world’s most elaborate garment, half kimono, half battle armor.
“Visitors, so early in the morning?” She held a hand over her mouth as she spoke, feigning a yawn. Amaterasu’s voice was melodic, sweet, and kind. And fair enough to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I’d met enough entities to suspect her true nature.
“But isn’t it always early for you, dear goddess?” Carver smirked. I noted a familiarity in the air between them. “There is a sun in every time zone.”
“Indeed,” Amaterasu said, lifting something from the folds of her robe. It was a smart phone, with a charm dangling from a red thread on its end, a tiny cartoon cat. “Nearly six in the morning in California? Ah. That explains your presence.”
“Bright and early. It is good to see you again. These are my apprentices,” Carver said, gesturing to us. “Gilberto Ramirez, and Dustin Graves.”
Amaterasu’s nod was nearly imperceptible. I made a low bow. Gil followed with a suitably polite gesture of his own.
“There is a fourth,” Amaterasu said. “Or there was. I smell the taint of the undead on you.”
She could detect Sterling even when he wasn’t around? I nudged Gil. “It’s his body spray. I keep telling him to change it.”
