Days of Borrowed Pasts Read online

  Days of Borrowed Pasts

  The Lost Gods Book One

  S.M. Schmitz

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Mythology Glossary

  Also by S.M. Schmitz

  Chapter One

  What world awaits you mortals when the last of us are gone? But if our deaths bring peace as you believe, then lead me to the gallows.

  Ayla closed her notebook and slipped it into her backpack along with her favorite pen, which was almost out of ink. When this notebook was filled with her thoughts, she’d burn it as she had the hundreds of notebooks before it. She finished her coffee and tossed a crumpled dollar bill onto the table then slipped a backpack over her shoulders. She’d been in Portland long enough.

  The god hunters had caught up to her again, and it was time for her to run.

  The Greyhound bus station in Lake Charles, Louisiana, was attached to a convenience store. Ayla glanced at the ticket counter and wondered, briefly, if she should continue heading east or stay in what seemed like an unremarkable city for a while. She decided to find a hotel and get some proper sleep first. Besides, early November in Louisiana apparently meant mild, only slightly chilly temperatures, and after Oregon, it felt like paradise here.

  She’d stopped near the ticket office as she deliberated heading just a few more hours east to stay in New Orleans when a man bumped into her, causing her to stumble. Another passenger from the bus she’d taken to get to Lake Charles caught her arm and steadied her, but the man who’d bumped into her just scowled and told her she was holding up the line.

  “Sorry,” she offered. Ayla backed away from them and pulled her phone from her pocket to call a cab. It was already late, and through the windows of the service station she could see the light drizzle that had begun to fall. She sensed the skies would soon open and that drizzle would transform into torrential rain.

  Once, when she was a child, she’d stood at the gate of Hattusa with her father as the rain fell in thick, heavy sheets around them. The night was dark, moonless and starless, and within the city, people screamed as the water rose and invaded their homes. She felt their fear like ants marching across her skin, biting and stinging as they moved, and then, not being satisfied, digging beneath the surface until they found the marrow in her bones.

  Her father had reached down and taken her hand, instructing her, “Find the moon, Ayla.”

  “I can’t,” she’d insisted. “It’s too dark and the clouds have hidden it.”

  “Find the moon,” he’d repeated.

  Ayla had begun to panic, because people were dying. She felt that, too.

  “Father, bring the moon back!”

  “Find the moon, Ayla,” he’d instructed for the third time.

  Ayla had tipped her face toward the black sky, the rain pelting her skin, and searched for the moon again.

  A car’s horn blared loudly from the interstate, and Ayla jerked and realized she was standing in the rain. She backed up beneath the overhang that covered the gas pumps to wait for the taxi, and listened to the constant, rhythmic humming of the fluorescent lights. The door to the service station opened and a man she recognized as a passenger from the bus joined her beneath the tin roof, his icy blue eyes watching the interstate in front of them. But something about this man unnerved her.

  Ayla pulled the zipper up on her jacket and tugged on her backpack then pretended to check her phone for messages even though no one ever called her. The taxi service had told her the cab would arrive in fifteen minutes.

  She checked the time. Twelve more minutes to wait.

  She pulled up a web browser and scrolled through a list of hotels, but at that moment, she didn’t care where she stayed. She just wanted to get away from the man who stood six feet to her left.

  Eight more minutes.

  Ayla put the phone in her pocket and tugged on her backpack again as she watched cars pull next to gas pumps and late-night travelers dart inside. As the door swung open then closed, the bells jingled and quieted, jingled and quieted, jingled…

  Two more minutes.

  And the man never spoke or moved.

  As she counted down the seconds then minutes beyond the time her cab was supposed to arrive, she realized it wasn’t coming.

  And the man finally spoke. “Aren’t you going to do something about this rain?”

  After so many minutes of silence, his voice startled her and Ayla looked at him even though she’d been trying so hard to pretend like he wasn’t there. Over the deafening patter of raindrops against the tin roof, she could only hear the beating of her heart. “Like what?” she asked. “Build an ark?”

  He didn’t think she was funny, and his attention still seemed riveted to the interstate, as if she were hardly worth the effort of conversation. “Make it stop,” he suggested. “How are you going to keep running in the rain?”

  Ayla gasped and glanced over her shoulder toward the parking lot where a Greyhound bus was leaving the station, heading out of Lake Charles, out of the city where she would finally stop running because they’d caught her. She wasn’t sure if that bus represented freedom or a prison, but she wanted to be on it. She only knew she didn’t want to die.

  “Who are you?” she whimpered. Her voice sounded so childlike, so naïve. Why was he waiting? Why was he talking to her? It was torture, a mind game. He was obviously taking his time to enjoy the smug satisfaction that he’d won.

  The man finally looked at her, those icy blue eyes studying her, and she shivered. He was a man of contradictions, beautiful yet fearsome, calculated yet wild. “Who are you? Or should I say, ‘What are you?’”

  “Please don’t,” Ayla begged. She pushed herself away from the side of the service station and backed away from him. “I’ve never hurt anyone. Just let me go.”

  The man arched a golden brown eyebrow, the color of maple leaves in the fall, and said, “Let you go? Where, exactly, do you think you’ll go anyway?”

  Ayla shook her head, her dark hair slipping from the bun she’d tied hours ago while on a bus she thought was taking her to safety, but the man’s eyes darted above her head and he sucked in a hissing breath, and quickly — so unnaturally quickly — closed the six feet between them, grabbing her arm and pulling her back toward the bus stop. She tried to yank her arm free, but his fingers stretched around her forearm, gripping it tightly, and as he pulled her into the rain, she slipped on the wet, oily concrete, causing his grasp to tighten even more until she yelped in pain.

  He slowed long enough to pull her back to her feet but still didn’t let go. His other hand reached beneath the bottom of his coat and Ayla thought about screaming for help, but what good would it do? He would tell whomever came to her aide what she was, and instead of finding a rescuer, she would find an accomplice to her murder. But the man reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out a single key, an old key, large and unwieldy and useless for modern locks.

  They reached the bus terminal and he placed the key against the side of the building. Even though the heavens had opened into a downpour of blinding rain, she saw the door shimmer into existence, and the man yanked on the handle, opening the portal, then pulled her inside, and the world behind her disappeared.

  Chapter Two

  If there’s a Hell, the road there isn’t paved with good intentions but the
borrowed days we stole from man.

  Ayla squeezed the water from her hair and watched the man warily. He’d put the key back in his pocket and pulled off his coat, using his shirtsleeve to wipe the water from his eyes. “Where are we?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Not sure.”

  She wanted to ask the obvious question — “Why did you bring me here, and who are you running from?” or the other obvious question — “Why haven’t you killed me yet?” — but she wasn’t stupid. Instead, she slipped one strap of her backpack off a shoulder and unzipped it just enough to peek inside, ensuring her notebook had survived the rain.

  The edges had warped and become swollen with water, but otherwise, those private thoughts she’d jotted down for the past few months had survived. She let out a sigh of relief because she wasn’t ready to destroy them just yet.

  He tilted his head at her and asked, “Why do you do that?”

  Ayla blinked up at him. “Do what?”

  “Keep a journal then burn it.”

  She crossed her arms angrily and demanded, “How long have you been following me?”

  “A while.”

  “Then why not kill me a while ago?” she snapped then pressed her lips together tightly. She wasn’t sure what was worse: being trailed for so long or having a prolonged confrontation with the man who would kill her.

  He sighed and shook the water off his coat. “I’m not a hunter, Ayla. I’m running from them myself. You’re… different though. Strange.”

  Ayla scoffed and hugged her backpack to her chest. “You’re a god? A god who saved my life just to tell me I’m strange?”

  The man smiled at her, still mysterious and enigmatic, but just as likely to be deadly, even if he wasn’t a hunter. Because gods had been trying to kill her far longer than men.

  “It’s your ancestry,” he said. “Everyone knows about the goddess who should have never been born.”

  Ayla narrowed her eyes at him but said nothing, so he continued. “Look, I obviously don’t agree with them. You’re not dangerous, and at this point, it’s just become a matter of principle. I really do want to help you, Ayla. Maybe we can even help each other. But that stunt you pulled in Chicago… you’ve got both sides on your trail now, and if you want to survive, you’ve got to be more discreet.”

  Ayla’s surprise that he even knew about her brief time in Chicago temporarily muted her. She didn’t know anyone had identified her. She’d thought she’d left the city in time, but she’d obviously been wrong. She hadn’t noticed the blond hunter following her until a month later when she was in Minneapolis, and the woman had been one step behind her ever since.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked. “Knowing the risks, even to save a life, why did you do it?”

  This time, she looked away from him and stared at the worn, navy blue carpet beneath her feet. “She was a child. What was I supposed to do? Let her drown?”

  “You moved part of Lake Michigan to save her. You had to know the consequences. I’m not disagreeing with saving a child’s life, but there were witnesses. If we’re still going to work in this world, we have to be careful.”

  Ayla shrugged and kept her eyes on the carpet. The water dripping from her drenched clothes had formed a deep blue mark around her, as if she were standing on the Mediterranean Sea, her favorite sea from her childhood where her father had taught her to control the tides.

  “What is it you want then?” she asked. “I’m the abomination our kind wants gone, the blemish to be eradicated. Isn’t there a bounty on me?”

  He shook his head and some of that golden brown hair, which had turned auburn from the rain, fell across his forehead. He lifted his arm to swipe his sleeve across his eyes again, and Ayla’s stomach quivered. He no longer seemed quite as deadly, but gods could be far sneakier than humans. They’d had centuries, if not millennia, of practice.

  “There is, but I was exiled from my pantheon a long time ago. This war… nobody will win and both sides will lose. So I don’t have anyone to turn to either. I couldn’t care less about your ancestry. If you were going to destroy us all, then, yeah, maybe I’d care, but —”

  Ayla’s laughter cut him off. “I’ve never destroyed anything except a handful of notebooks. I certainly wouldn’t attempt to kill an entire supernatural race.”

  “They claim gods like you are the reason we’ve been at war with men for centuries,” he said. “Because you’re the ones who became unpredictable and violent and made men form the League of Human Safety in the first place. But truthfully, we all know the old gods just wanted to blame someone else for their mistakes, and the lost gods were the easiest targets.”

  Ayla lowered her eyes again, studying the dark blue circle of water around her. She wouldn’t talk about her parents to a stranger. She couldn’t trust this god. She hadn’t trusted anyone in so long, she didn’t even know how to anymore. And she didn’t even know his name. “Who are you?” she asked again.

  He looked skeptical for a moment before apparently deciding there was no harm in sharing a name. “Thomas.”

  “Thomas?” she repeated. “That’s…” Her mouth formed a perfect “o,” and he sighed and rolled his eyes.

  “If you call me a baby, I’m ditching you here,” he threatened.

  “How young are you?” she pressed.

  This time, Thomas looked away and lifted a shoulder at her. “I’m old enough to remember the start of this war.”

  “That’s still pretty young for a god.”

  “What’s your point?” he snapped.

  She smiled at him, because only among gods was age a source of pride. While humans lamented growing older, gods celebrated it, and the younger the god, the more reasons for ridicule.

  “Okay,” she relented. “I’m sorry, Thomas. I won’t mention it again.”

  Thomas glanced at her and pulled the key from his pocket. “I do remember the start of this war, and a lot of gods still alive are far younger than me. They weren’t around three hundred years ago, so they just believe the lies they’ve been told their entire lives. Kind of like the god hunters. Their ancestors have passed down entire books of myths, and they think they have to exterminate us in order to keep Earth safe. But I know gods like you didn’t start this war. Our parents did.”

  “Our parents,” she whispered. “And yours were…?”

  Thomas slowly smiled at her and held up the key between his fingers so she could see it. “Do you know where I got this?”

  “No. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “You’re not the only lost god, Ayla. And my father had a few tricks up his sleeves.”

  Ayla inhaled sharply and waited, but he obviously had no intention of revealing too much about his past either. After so many years of hiding from the world, they were both distrustful of everyone, even if he was telling the truth and he really was a lost god. Or maybe he was just trying to get her to admit she was, but if he was a lost god, too, he’d be the first she’d met in almost three hundred years. “All right, Thomas. Don’t tell me where you’re from. Or how you got that key.”

  Thomas’s pale blue eyes stared back at her as he twirled the key between his fingers and he finally sighed and reached past her, close enough that a drop of water from his hair fell onto her shoulder. Ayla caught her breath as the key touched the wall and a doorway opened behind her. Her arms flung wildly as she lost her balance, but Thomas grabbed her jacket and prevented her from tumbling through the portal.

  “Thought you’d move,” he said, flashing her a crooked grin. He poked his head into the doorway and nodded, satisfied that this new doorway would lead them where he wanted to go and for the second time that night, she passed through a magic portal with a god who had either been following her because he was lost, just like her, or because he was lying and intended to eradicate her kind.

  Thomas grabbed a towel from the hotel room’s bathroom and tossed it in her direction. Ayla caught it and immediately wrapped it around her hair and shiv
ered. Thomas must’ve noticed because he turned up the heat before drying off as well. She watched him as he pulled off his shoes, wrinkling his nose at the wet leather, and tossed them on the floor at the foot of the bed. He seemed far more relaxed and comfortable than she felt.

  “You hungry?” he asked. “Last time I ate was in Amarillo.”

  Ayla thought back to the bus stop in Amarillo, Texas, but she couldn’t place Thomas there. She always watched her surroundings so carefully, and she’d recognized him at the service station in Lake Charles because he’d gotten off the bus with her… but she was sure he hadn’t been on the bus in Amarillo.

  “Where did you come from?” she asked, tossing the damp towel onto the floor.

  He smiled at her again, an impish grin that was boyish and charming yet a bit roguish, and asked her back, “Originally?”

  She held up her hands and said, “All right. I’ll settle for that answer.”

  Thomas seemed to think about it then shook his head. “It’s the key, Ayla. Sometimes, I can get it to work pretty well, and it’ll open doors exactly where I want to go. Other times, especially when I’m in a hurry, it can seem kinda random, like when we needed to get away from the god hunter back at the bus station.”

  “And where did you get that key?” she pressed.

  “I told you. My father.”

  Ayla crossed her arms and waited, so he crossed his arms and waited, too. She gave up first, and nodded toward the phone. “Do they have room service here?”

  Thomas grabbed a menu from the desk and handed it to her. “Looks like it. Of course, they don’t know we’re here, so maybe it’s not such a great idea to call them and let them know we’re crashing one of their rooms.”