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He steps toward me, and I lurch up from my stool. “I’ve got to go,” I blurt out, tearing my eyes from him and looking over at Finley as she pops out from behind the refrigerator door.
She stares at me in surprise. “But why? You just got here.”
I throw a thumb over my shoulder, not at anything in particular. “I forgot I didn’t let Uorsin and Mattia out.”
Finley frowns but doesn’t question me. “Um… okay. Why don’t you do that and come back? I’ll have this big oaf gone by then.”
I don’t dare look at said big oaf. His smirk will have intensified with satisfaction for having discombobulated me, a god. I should turn him into a lizard or something, but I keep my cool.
“Maybe,” is all I offer to my sister and steel myself against the disappointment on her face. I don’t come by often enough to see her. “If not today, then tomorrow. I promise.”
At least tomorrow, Maddox will most likely be gone. He doesn’t have a home that I know of and roams the realms, staying wherever he chooses and for however long he wants. Much of the time, though, he stays here in a guest room.
Finley deposits the food items she pulled out onto the counter and moves around it toward me. I brace as she puts her arms around me and pulls me in for a hug.
“I love you,” she says.
I respond by squeezing her. It’s too hard for me to say those words out loud, but she knows how I feel. I gladly gave up my life for her once and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
She hasn’t even fully released me when I bend distance from her home to mine in Switzerland. I appear in the living room of what is an entirely too modest chalet for a deity, but I love it. My windows have an amazing view of the Bernese Alps capped with snow, and the Lauterbrunnen Valley spreads below me in various shades of patchwork green.
Uorsin and Mattia come barreling out of the kitchen where they’d most likely been sleeping on the cool tile floor. Their nails scrabble on the hardwood as they race to me, fluffy black tails tipped in white wagging furiously.
I crouch and accept their warm tongues on my face as I wrap my arms around their thick-furred bodies. I love them with all my might, and I wonder why it’s so easy to admit that about dogs but not people.
CHAPTER 2
Maddox
“We’ll take twomore.” I motion to the bartender between my empty beer mug and the empty wineglass of the woman sitting next to me.
“Thank you,” she says, touching my arm and licking her bottom lip.
“Sure thing,” I reply, my gaze going back to the television screen mounted on the wall behind the bar. There’s a hockey game on and it’s a sport I very much enjoy in this modern world. My favorite team by far is the Pittsburgh Titans. They said “Fuck you” to the Fates when their plane crashed and they had to rebuild from nothing.
“So, what do you like to do for fun?” she asks, trying to start a conversation. We’ve exchanged some words as we sit beside each other drinking, and she’s been a nice diversion.
“Slaughter demons,” I say without a second thought.
And fuck.
I like that more than slaughtering demons but I keep that to myself.
She thinks I’m joking, of course, and she’s more than a little drunk. As a mortal human, she could never hope to comprehend all the dark and scary things that exist in this same dimension with her. “Ooooh, demons! Tell me more.”
I let my gaze slide to my drinking companion. She’s very pretty and I could easily have her. But I decide to tell her about my world instead. “Truly, there aren’t many demons that walk in the First Dimension—your mortal realm—but there are plenty of evil Dark Fae.”
“And you kill them?” she asks, feigning true belief.
“I do. And other nasty creatures.”
“Are you like… a superhero?”
I suppress the urge to roll my eyes because Batman and Iron Man are pure fiction. “A demigod, created to serve at the whim of the gods.”
“There’s more than one?”
“Five. Gods of Life, Fate, Conflict, Humanity, and Nature.”
