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We were alone, but his voice was barely above a whisper.
I frowned. “He’s not the Beast Lord. Not anymore.”
Mr. Keelan rubbed his hands together and smiled again. “Is he not? My mistake. No matter. What if we go inside and find something to eat. I don’t know about you, but I’m fucking starving.”
7
Kate
The Emerald Wave was an enormous ship. The sheer size of it was insane. It had to be about 1,000 feet long, and from my spot on Siren Call Road, I could see nine decks still rising above water. The windows of the third and fourth deck glowed with pale feylantern light from within. The massive cruise ship had run aground about twelve hundred feet offshore. A long rickety-looking pier connected her to the beach, and the whole thing looked absurd, like a whale, caught on a tiny fishing line, being pulled out of the ocean against her will.
According to Thomas, the Emerald Wave had gone off course during a particularly nasty storm decades ago and become lodged in a sand bank. The Coast Guard had tried to pry it lose with tugboats and gotten nowhere. In addition, something had attacked the ship during the magic wave that had killed all its instruments, and two of its compartments had filled with water, flooding the engine room.
Refloating the ship was a complicated process involving draining the fuel tanks while simultaneously pumping in salt water to keep it upright, and the cost of getting the Emerald Wave up and running again would have been astronomical, so the cruise line had left it where it was. It had been looted, stripped, and finally abandoned, and now it supposedly housed a cult.
“Look at that evil lair, Cuddles. No ziggurats, no ritualistic poles with skulls on them, no giant faces carved anywhere or big metal fire braziers. These modern evil god followers just don’t care to put in the work.”
Cuddles remained unimpressed. But then again, a big derelict ship was scary enough. I certainly didn’t want to go in there.
I nudged Cuddles, and she reluctantly walked to the pier.
Aaron didn’t seem to be doing any of the usual things people connected to gods did. But Onyx was well trained and educated. He would’ve recognized divinity, so there was some sort of deity attached to all this. How and in what capacity remained to be seen.
Water gods and their followers were never fun. Gods in general weren’t fun. They were fed by faith and shaped by the beliefs of their followers. If a god was poorly known or too obscure, they couldn’t scrape together enough power to manifest. The leading theory said that they didn’t even exist until their followers’ belief achieved a certain critical mass. One of the articles I’d read recently had somehow brought quantum physics into it, which went right over my head.
If a god was too well known, they couldn’t manifest either. Everyone’s Jesus and Buddha looked different, and the conflicting ideas canceled each other out. The holy people of the larger religions packed a lot of power, however.
That left a lot of mid-sized gods, who were famous enough but not worshipped too widely. Specificity helped, and “functional” gods got the first dibs on followers. Few neopagans prayed to Zeus aside from the annual rites. A lot more people prayed to Eileithyia and with a greater passion, even though some of them had no idea who she was until they were about to become parents. Chances of being struck by lightning were low, but dying in childbirth or losing a baby to some sickness was a real possibility.
If a water god appeared, they were likely in charge of a specific body of water, like a river or a lake, or performing a specific function like Satet, who oversaw the Nile’s floods. Yet here we were, heading toward the ocean. Encountering someone like Poseidon should have been highly unlikely, but it wasn’t impossible.
It might not even be a water god. It could be an animal god that lived in the ocean, although animal gods had yet to demonstrate the ability to speak. I’d run across a few—and Curran had eaten several of them—and all of them were more on the level of abnormally powerful magic animals rather than true deities.
It was pointless to try to figure it out. I simply didn’t have enough data.
We reached the pier. I looped Cuddles’ reins on the rail and tied a run-away knot. If things got scary, and she jerked her head, the reins would come free. Having a horse or a mammoth jenny wander about with several feet of reins dangling over them would be a recipe for a broken leg or some other disaster, but it was still better than getting eaten outright.
“If shit hits the fan, take off like a rocket.”
Cuddles ignored me.
