Verdant: The Preterhumans Book 2

Amaranth:

The Preterhumans Book 1

by Katherine Bell

SMASHWORDS EDITION

*****

PUBLISHED BY:

Katherine Bell on Smashwords

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Copyright © 2010, First Printing, by Katherine Bell. Lulu.com Publishing. E-Book Publication, by Katherine Bell, Smashwords.com.

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Chapter One

If Frizzy Hair there had gotten any closer, I declared passionately, plunking my tray of food down on the surface of the booth top and sliding into my seat, I was going to have to tell him to buy me a drink first.

My seatmates grinned, one completely unapologetically. No sense of personal space? Murdock asked, grabbing the parts of the food on my tray that were his. No way were those chocolate chip cookies going to be mine. I valued my blood sugar level, unlike some witches I could name.

Not in the least, I returned, putting his extra-large, extra-spicy, extra-chicken-and-salsa burrito in front of him as well. Again, as long as he was brave enough for it, more power to him; no way I was touching that stuff. It just looked like a fire hazard to me. I would just sit here with my nachos and tortilla soup and be perfectly content to watch him set his mouth on fire. After all, I had him blocked in the booth, so unless he wanted to go over the back, he wasn’t getting more soda.

Treating Murdock to lunch wasn’t exactly frugal, but hey, we had made it six months under the same roof without murdering each other. That was cause enough to celebrate to me. We had even survived the dreaded nineteenth birthday beast and come out none the worse for wear. Okay, well, maybe just a little worse for wear. Mircea was along for this trip since he was off work at the hospital and in the neighborhood when we were leaving. And, we were all still getting used to having him back, which was definitely a good thing, but a little odd from time to time nonetheless.

Living with a witch, I had come to realize pretty quickly the value of late-night restaurants and twenty-four hour grocery stores. I mean, it wasn’t as if I could cook. Oh, occasionally, I could stick something in the microwave and get the desired result, but more often than not… Well, there was a reason there was a fire extinguisher next to the microwave… and one by the stove… and a small one next to the blender. Better safe than sorry, after all, knowing blenders and me. Not that I was going to tell Murdock or Mircea about some of my more spectacular mess-ups. No sense adding fuel to that fire; it would burn well enough without the addition.

So what are you two working on now? Mircea prompted, pushing nachos around on his plate with a fork. There wasn’t exactly a lot of food in front of him, but then it wasn’t like he had to eat. Like Daddy and Rafe, he was full-blooded, so eating was more of a recreational thing than a necessity.

Pass the habanero sauce, Murdock said in lieu of an actual answer. He nodded at the table next to ours that held sauces ours did not. The green one. I leaned over to snag it and set it in front of him… and then watched in utter amazement as he added it to almost all the food before him, including that burrito but thankfully not the cookies, a small relief to say the least.

I shook my head and turned my attention back to my brother. We’ve got a couple jobs lined up, but we’re still debating on which one to take.

I didn’t even have to glance over to see Murdock to know he had just rolled his eyes at me; after the last week, I could sense it. Finding out who hexed that wolf kin with a nasty case of mange pays more.

Somehow I resisted the urge to do the same expression back at him or, worse, make a less than lady-like gesture under the table at him. Yeah, but finding out who beat the snot out of Sif would be better for us in the long run. Getting in good with the gods, even the Norse ones, is never a bad thing. Plus it could mean referrals later.

The kin with the mange could mean referrals. That one’s a moot point.

How the hell did he argue with that much food going into his mouth? It was a bit beyond me, but that certainly didn’t stop me wondering. If anything, it made me more curious. We had lived in the same house for six months and known each other for eighteen months before that. Sometimes it felt like I didn’t know a damned thing about him that I hadn’t overheard or been told about by one of his sisters. I only had a reasonable guess on his age, but I was thinking thirties or so (given that witches tended to look a lot younger than they really were, which was due to the magical energies they channeled on a regular basis. That in turn went hand in hand with why we couldn’t have a handheld phone in the brownstone and I had to keep my new cell phone away from my roommate). I still didn’t know what really happened with his youngest sister (though thanks to his oldest sister Esperanza or Espie, I knew she had died many years ago), or even when his powers had shown up (Espie made reference to the fact that their family tended to be early bloomers, but that didn’t tell me a lot). Hell, I hadn’t known his first name till his sister Aimee said it!

To be fair, though, there were still a lot of things I hadn’t told him about me either. Hell, the most he knew about me started right about the time we went into hiding, from the Seventies onward, and even that was a bit limited. With how overprotective Daddy could sometimes be, we had had it drilled into us from before the time we could walk not to trust people. Rafe and Mircea were better at that than I was, as I figured it; why else would I be living with a witch, when witches and vampires were somewhere between in a cold war and at an uneasy truce? The definition to that depended on whom you talked to.

We’re going to have to keep agreeing to disagree on this one, Murdock, I finally stated. The only thing that kept me from visibly gritting my teeth was years of practice, mostly from trying to put up with Rafe in situations where I couldn’t retaliate for whatever he was doing to annoy me.

Can’t you just divide out who takes which one? Or multi-task and work both of them? came from across the booth. Did Mircea really know what kind of trouble he was begging for asking a question like that? Probably not, or he wouldn’t have asked it.

Would you multi-task two cutting jobs at once? Murdock fired immediately back. At least he took long enough to have not food in his mouth when he did so, but not by much.

Oh yes, he liked Mircea a lot more than he liked Rafe, that was for certain, but there was one major thing he didn’t like about my middle brother. There were so many things he could have disliked – a full-blooded vampire who was very adept at disappearing, having proven said ability to vanish by going off the radar for sixty long years and only reappearing six months ago after reading about us in the newspaper out of Atlanta. It was the fact that he was a doctor, a surgeon like his sister Hannah, which really annoyed him the most, though. Of course, Murdock lived to be contrary.

And personally, when I found out the tiny tidbit about why Mircea left way back then, I had to hit him. It was a moral imperative. Not a full out bitch slap or anything – because mad at him for being stupid or not, he was still my favorite big brother – but more a less than gentle slap on the arm, hard enough to feel but not hard enough to really hurt. Like something little like that, to not like girls, really mattered enough to keep hidden all those years before he left (though I could understand it, given some less than understanding family members we had) nor enough to keep him away since the war. No, little things like that didn’t matter that much as far as I was concerned, not compared to thinking someone was dead for years and years and years. And for the record, Daddy got a smack too. Neither of them really needed it: they were both doing a pretty good job of kicking themselves over the matter. Of all the stupid things to fight about...

Point taken, Mircea smoothly answered. He had been quick to learn that you just had to roll with the punches with Murdock – or at the very least, roll with the mood swings. And he picked on me about them! Yeesh! When do you have to give one of them an answer?

On the day after tomorrow, I answered.

In four days, Murdock said at the same time. And of course, we were both talking about our pet case between the two. This just wasn’t going to end well, I could tell already. And no, I wasn’t growling. Really, I wasn’t. Just completely ignore the rumbling sound coming from my throat that would probably stand the hackles up on any self-respecting kin of any breed. And no, he wasn't glaring at me like a dog defending his bone. It was all purely a trick of the light.

Across the table, I caught my brother wincing. Oh yeah, we weren’t exactly behaving like grown-ups on this, were we? And you’re sure you can’t just each take one of them? That might be about the easiest solution to this problem.

I glanced next to me at Murdock and shrugged. He shrugged as well in response. I suppose the pair of us were just so very decisive that we actually couldn’t make up our minds. We were just a pair of indecisive children, with how we were acting today. Next thing we knew, we might very well have ended up in the age-old argument of he said, she said, and since that was never cool, I think we both wanted to avoid sinking to quite that level. Well, at the very least, one of us didn’t want to risk descending to the mentality of two-year-olds. I saw that enough on campus as it was. Last thing I wanted was to act like some of my classmates.

I guess we could, I finally stated when it seemed like Murdock wasn’t going to voice an opinion, as amazing as that might have been sometimes.

And I suppose if we split our time, we might even end up getting both cases solved. Surprisingly that came from Murdock. Usually he wasn’t exactly big on compromise. And it couldn’t hurt to get in good with both the local kin groups and the gods.

I nodded my agreement. Though I do have to admit, I’m curious about all this happening all at once. I mean, we’ve been seeing hexes left and right for the last three weeks. It’s been hand over fist for jobs lately.

And now two in one day, Murdock continued. Well, a hex – probably the most unusual one I've ever seen at that – and someone attacking a god. He shook his head in dismay. It takes balls of solid steel to do something like that.

I think you have to be nine hundred kinds of stupid to do that, myself, opinioned my brother. Good to know that we were on the same page with this. Attacking a god, it's just... It's ballsy and yet still one of the dumbest things I could anyone would ever dream of doing. Even without the possibility no one finds out who did it, the karma alone has to be bad.

Like 'drop a free-standing stone on them' bad karma or like 'drop a house on them' bad karma? I wondered aloud. I would put bets on a house myself, because pissing off the gods is the quickest way to a painful death and maybe even painful afterlife there is, but attacking them, especially as badly as I heard Sif was... No, I would bet that none of the gods are going to take this sitting down, especially not Thor.

I'm less worried about Thor and more so about Odin, Murdock intoned quietly. At least Thor isn’t a poster child for Prozac, his wife involved or not.

At least Thor isn’t known for listening in on conversations, I put in, barely resisting the urge to glance around nervously. If Odin was listening in, I certainly wasn't going to spot him.

Paranoia was always a good habit to be in when gods were involved. Being on their good side was also a very wise idea if one wanted to live a long life. Me, I was shooting for a long life, even by dhampir standards, and hopefully good fortune. That meant getting in good with the gods early and staying in good with them by doing little favors like this. And pantheons didn't really matter: brown-nosing with the Greek, helping out the Norse, hobnobbing with the Celtic. It all amounted to about the same, with the exceptions of my aunt and uncle, Persephone and Hades, who were practically like family: it was almost like insurance. And yes, I did know what had a tendency to happen to the favorite mortals of the gods, but still, I felt better this way. This way, if one of those bad things happened to me that usually did to the gods' favorites, someone would see about my boys – Daddy, my brothers, and Murdock.

Thankfully we were saved from further discussion on the relative merits of Odin versus Thor by Mircea's pager going off. He pulled it off his belt and grimaced. It looks like they need me for a surgery, he apologized as he pushed himself to his feet. Can you two handle yourselves without a referee?

We must have really been acting childish then. How embarrassing. Of course. I stood as well and hugged him tightly. Good luck. I'll see you later.

Later, Lizabet. He kissed my cheek and was out the door quickly, but it wasn't so quickly as to break the careful illusion he was maintaining of being human. That was the fiction he presented to his fellow doctors, but he kept it up all the time. It was probably easier that way, to stay in the role than to switch back and forth.

Lizabet was a cute nickname he had given me, not to mention the closest to my real name that I had been called in a while, excepting of course when Daddy was upset and used it. To Daddy and Rafe, I was Elizabeth – or Beta when Daddy was a bit soused. To Mircea, I was Lizabet and had been even before I changed my name. Auntie Seph, Uncle Hades, and all my college professors and classmates usually used Liz for my name. Only Murdock called me Lizzy, which was coming to be the name I preferred. Sometimes I thought of myself as Lizzy, but I usually only heard that name in my partner's voice.

I slid back into the booth but on the side that Mircea had just vacated, instead of back beside Murdock once more. So do we need a babysitter?

He laughed shortly. Not nearly as much anymore. I glanced down at the booth surface, but I couldn't really be surprised that a large portion of the food was gone. Witches almost always managed to eat amazing amounts of food in what seemed like amazing times. It apparently had a lot to do with the energy used casting spells. When a witch was eating, you could look away for a split second, and a bit more would be gone, just like magic. Do you have a game plan for how you're going to handle your case?

I pulled my tortilla soup over to me, out of the line of fire so to speak, and took a cautious sip. I want to go talk to Sif first and hear what happened from her point of view. There may have been something she didn't want to tell Freyja to pass on to me. And while gods did tend to have remarkable recuperative abilities, I wanted to see for myself how badly she was injured.

Granted, until six months ago, I hadn't known gods could even be hurt, much less hurt badly. We went up against a Dark Lander, a gargouille to be exact, then. It was the reason I had just finished supervised physical therapy on my arm. It was also the reason why Coven Eagle Eye and Coven Talking Brook had had to bury seven witches, not counting the ones Roman dropped at the beginning of the fight, before we all teamed up. And that said nothing of the fact it had broken Morrigan's arm in three places from just a simple toss and fractured three of Uncle Hades' ribs and bruised some of the bones in his upper legs. All in all, we were lucky that only one of those things escaped to our side. Any more than that, and it would have cleaned our clocks. It came close enough as it was.

Lizzy. I pulled myself away from my contemplations and glanced across the table at my partner. Be careful getting involved with anything to do with the gods. You know how weird things get when they get involved. If it looks dangerous, pull out. We don't need brownie points that badly. We're probably still in the plus for finding out about Namshub and the other Lost Gods.

Maybe. It was true. We could still be in the green as far as the gods were concerned since that little escapade six months ago had also produced the revelation that the Lost Gods weren't that terribly lost and were indeed still alive. Unfortunately, they were all – or all the ones still living now – stuck on the other side of the border between this world and the Dark Lands. It had taken four gods, three of whom were fresh and at full power, to help us, Eagle Eye, Talking Brook, and one very impressive sharpshooter to take out just one gargouille, a species which was supposedly pretty low on the Dark Lander totem pole. Even though there were at least three full pantheons of our gods over there that Namshub had known about (the Babylonians, the Sumerians, and the Hittites), as well as a few here and there from others, I couldn't imagine them being even near full strength enough to fight their way back over here.

I mean it, Lizzy. Don't take chances that you don't have to.

I nodded and smiled faintly. The same goes for you, Murdock. I rather like my partner living.

So glad you agree. I rather like me living too. I reached across the table, grabbed one of my nachos that was relatively free of toppings, and threw it at him, grinning unrepentantly. Hey! If you're just going to use it for ammunition, can I have the rest of those nachos?

It shouldn't have been a surprise to look down and see all that food he had ordered was gone.

Chapter Two

Rather than return home, Sif had apparently opted to rent a posh hotel room until she had recuperated. Hey, room service, cable, and far enough above the city to cut down on the noise of the D.C. traffic far below... What wasn't to like? I couldn't see where it was a bad idea, I thought to myself as I took the elevator up to her floor. Daddy used to have business conferences in this hotel. In fact, he had had the dinner party where I met Morrigan here, now that I thought about it. That was probably why I felt nervous being here. Our first meeting hadn't been entirely pleasant. In fact, it had been just enough on the opposing side of pleasant to make me a little leery of meeting a new goddess here.

It was too late to worry about that now, though. The doors were opening. Sif was staying in one of the suites here, one that was apparently as far from an elevator or fire exit as possible. Not that a goddess really needed either of those when she could just zap herself from place to place.

I frowned to myself in thought as I followed the hallway around, counting down the numbers. I didn't know what Sif looked like. There weren't a lot of breathing mortals who did. Rumor had it she was the most reclusive goddess of our time, but surely that couldn't be true. There definitely had to be goddesses who stayed in hiding more than this, not counting the ones we knew to be dead and the ones still in the Dark Lands, but none of them came to mind. All the legends about her ever said was that she had golden hair and was married to Thor. The latter of that we all knew to be fact. If she was actually blond was a bit beyond what even the most thorough and determined of tabloid paparazzi had managed to turn up in the ten years they had been trying to get an image of her.

Honestly, I was waiting for the day that they actually succeeded, so that Thor could have some of that elusive bit of paparazzi-smiting fun. I mean, it wasn't like some schmuck with an overanxious camera could successfully sue a god if they ended up with a donkey's head or something. It was like the one photographer who tried to sue Auntie Seph for saying that if he didn't get out of her face, someone dear to him would die soon; of course they did, so he tried to take the Goddess of the Greek Underworld to court. Predictably it had been a fruitless court battle for him, and to my understanding, Auntie Seph was counting down the time till he ended up in one of the Underworlds.

Finally I stood in front of the room number she told me. Feeling a bit like my stomach was in my throat, not a sensation I particularly enjoyed, I took a deep breath, raised my hand, and knocked on the door. The sound of it echoing through the halls was enough to make me wince. I knew it was supposed to be quiet in a hotel of this caliber and this far above the bustle of the city at closing time, but this sort of hollow echoing came from entirely too much empty space. Had she rented out the entire floor? I wouldn't be too surprised, knowing what little about gods that I did. They valued their privacy above almost everything else in the world. They could rent the entire fourteenth floor of a hotel to keep people from bothering them.

That oppressive silence continued for a long moment, long enough that I was almost willing to believe she was no longer there, telephoned promise to meet me here or not, before faint noises, hard to hear even in this quiet, came from behind the thick door. Unless my ears deceived me and they were rarely known to, that sounded like someone using the connecting door between two hotel rooms to cross over into this room from one of the rooms next door. Well, that was certainly one way to do it. A bit low-tech perhaps, but it was definitely as effective as many solutions out there.

I resisted the urge to squirm as the peephole darkened just barely. If it weren't for somewhat better than human senses, I probably wouldn't have noticed the change. Sometimes those extra-strong senses were a good thing, like today. It generally was best not to get into when they were more of a hindrance than a help.

I desperately tried not to fidget in front of the door like a child sitting outside the principal's office. After a moment, the door slowly opened just slightly, barely enough for light from the room to brighten the dim hallway just slightly, and a woman's voice demanded, "Any weapons on the floor and hands on top of your head. Slowly."

And suddenly I felt like I was in a really bad cop movie, the kind where the frisky young female officer always ended losing all her weapons and inevitably had to have the hero come save her. Well, not this chick, not anymore. Since Mircea had come back, I had been brushing up on my hand-to-hand methods, including learning new things he had picked up while he had been gone. Apparently I had a more than passing talent for melee.

I hadn't mentioned it to anyone, even Murdock or Mircea, but I had also been taking my .9mm and the Desert Eagle hand cannon that Roman Mozzati had left me down to the firing range and getting better with both. I wasn't great, but even I couldn't miss at close range and those same improved senses went hand in hand with my being slightly stronger than the average human. I couldn't go toe to toe with a kin, a full-blooded vampire, or a god and hope to win, but I could hold my own. But since this was a god I was dealing with, diplomacy first sounded like a wise plan.

Okay. I'm taking out my gun and setting it on the floor. Moving slowly, I pulled the .9mm out of the holster at the small of my back, making extra sure to hold by the grip between two fingers, like I was touching something completely gross. It discouraged some people, made them think I didn't know what I was doing or, at the very least, I found