Cities of the Gods (The Unbreakable Sword Series Book 2) Read online

  “It’s more complicated than memory, Selena.”

  “Well, I’m still kind of surprised the Greeks aren’t the ones in charge here.”

  Badb snorted and stopped on top of the hill. “Having a lot of gods doesn’t necessarily make a group more powerful, just as having fewer doesn’t automatically make them weaker. Look at the Norse. Their pantheon is small but powerful.”

  “And the Slavic gods are bringing in other pantheons to fight with them, right? Ukko is Finnish so he must have allied himself with the Slavs for a reason.”

  “Ukko and the few remaining Finnish gods allied with the Slavs because they thought they would win. They were led by the Norse, and he assumed that alliance was stronger than ours. That’s why we have no reason to think he’ll automatically ally himself with them again. He owes them no allegiance.”

  “No,” Selena agreed, “he has his own pantheon again and it’s quite powerful. What does he need this place for?”

  Badb laughed again and turned Selena around slowly. “One day, Child, this will belong to you as well. All gods want to control the Otherworld, Selena. We can’t help it. It’s a part of us, and it will become a part of you. I think Ukko will wait to see what happens with this war then use the New Pantheon to fight the victors, hoping they are weakened and battle weary.”

  “It’s like Cameron said. Ukko’s not stupid,” Selena murmured.

  “I wish you would talk to me about him.”

  Selena scanned the fields around her again, and even though they were still alone, she shook her head. She recognized that she was growing to love this goddess, but she also knew her well enough now to know that she would try to change her mind about telling Cameron she loved him. And she refused to manipulate him into accepting their damn Spear just so they would have their next sun god.

  “So what’s up with this place? It was daytime when we arrived here, Cameron and I both slept for a while, and it’s still daytime. The sun hasn’t even moved.”

  “You’ve already been told that time moves differently here,” Badb answered.

  Selena stopped walking and stared at the goddess, trying to wrap her mind around just how much time had passed on Earth since she and Cameron had arrived in the Otherworld. “How long have we been here?”

  Badb shrugged. “I’m not sure. We never really know until we go back to Earth. It could be a few weeks or a few hours.”

  “But when we were here last time, Quinn said only thirty seconds had passed. Didn’t you do something to make sure we were brought back to the same place and time?”

  “I sent you back to the same place. How you and Cameron managed to get back to the same time, I don’t know.”

  “Badb!” Selena exclaimed. “God, you’re so full of shit sometimes!”

  “I told you to cut that out,” Cameron warned.

  Selena jumped and looked over her shoulder where Cameron stood behind them, his arms folded loosely over his chest, pretending to scowl at her. Selena crossed her arms and pretended to scowl back at him.

  “First of all, don’t sneak up on people. It’s not nice. And secondly…”

  “Wait,” Cameron interrupted. “What if one of you isn’t a people? Does that make it acceptable?”

  “No. And secondly, she’s trying to make it sound like we somehow managed to bring ourselves back to almost the exact moment we left Earth when we were healing Justin. If this isn’t a good time to invoke some nameless god, then when is?”

  “Never, because it usually ends up in one of those gods trying to kill us. And, seriously, Badb, that’s lame even by godly standards of lying.”

  Selena nodded and turned her pretend scowl into a real scowl as she looked at Badb now.

  The goddess threw her arms in the air and insisted, “Why would I lie about this? Lying about my affair with Cú Chulainn was worth the trouble, but this?”

  “Didn’t you kill him for rejecting you?” Selena asked.

  “Hey!” Cameron interjected. “I don’t like where this is going.”

  Badb waved a hand at him. “It’s not true. After Cú Chulainn’s death, his enemies spread lies about him, saying that the only reason he always succeeded in battle was because of my help and that when he rejected me, I turned against him.” Badb paused then pointed to her head. “I also don’t have red hair. Don’t believe everything you read.”

  “And that was before Wikipedia,” Selena added.

  “You know,” Cameron said, “you’re not funny either.”

  Selena smiled at him then remembered why they were standing at the top of a hill rather than sitting at the table inside with the others and stared embarrassedly at her bare toes in the grass.

  “What?” Cameron asked. “Ok, I take it back. You’re funny.”

  “You kids are going to drive me crazy,” Badb muttered.

  “To be fair, it’s a short drive,” Cameron said.

  Selena snickered, and Cameron grinned at her, that sexy mischievous grin that made her watch her wiggling toes in the grass again.

  “You two walk back when you’re ready. I’m going to make sure the Dagda isn’t in a literal pissing match with Poseidon again,” Badb told them.

  “Ew. Gods are gross,” Selena said.

  Badb shrugged at her and waved her hand toward the palace. “You think that’s bad, you should’ve been around when Zeus was still alive.”

  Cameron shook his head as he stared at the palace. “There’s not a single likable quality I’ve ever read about that guy.” He paused and grinned at Selena again. “Assuming I can trust anything I read, even if it was in a book.”

  “Oh, you can trust most of what you read about him,” Badb said, her petite nose wrinkling in disgust.

  “He hit on you, didn’t he?” Selena guessed.

  “I’m a woman. Of course he did,” Badb laughed. “But I’ve always had a fondness for Irish lads.” She winked at her then headed back toward the palace.

  Cameron waited until she was halfway back before leaning closer to Selena and whispering, “We need to figure out how to get more Irish lads up here.”

  Selena giggled and wanted to reach for his hand, but she couldn’t help feeling like everything had changed between them and none of it had been his fault. She was the one pretending not to love him so he wouldn’t feel compelled into accepting a future he couldn’t change once he’d taken the Spear. But that wouldn’t stop him from blaming himself.

  She took a deep breath and reached for his hand anyway and he let her hold it in the same innocent, protective way he’d always held her hand, both to keep her near and to reassure her she wasn’t alone and he wouldn’t abandon her.

  “I’m so sorry, Cameron. About what happened inside with Aonghus. That’s not what I was worried about. It’s just… all these gods around us. I’m not used to it. It’s overwhelming and it seems like half of what we thought we knew by studying mythology turns out to be misleading or even wrong.”

  “Hey, you have nothing to apologize for. I’m the one who acted like a jerk. I should be apologizing.”

  Selena sighed and eyed the castle because she’d known he would do this, assume all the blame when he’d done nothing wrong.

  “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something. This is pretty amazing.”

  Selena followed him up a different hill and they crossed over several more, each covered with the same soft, bright green grass that tickled her bare feet but didn’t crush beneath her weight. They passed a thin brook with water so clear Selena could see the pebbles on the bottom, brightly colored like gemstones that gleamed and sparkled beneath the gently rippling waves. Cameron stooped down by the edge and picked up one of the stones that resembled a ruby and handed it to her.

  “Here, you like red,” he said, smiling at her again and her heart caught in her throat.

  “How did you know?” she whispered.

  Cameron shrugged a shoulder at her and wiped his hand on a leg of his jeans. “Because I pay attention. And every t
ime we’ve passed a woman on the street with a red handbag or a storefront with a red dress, you slow down just a little to admire it. You’d look killer in red, by the way. Which I mean in a completely non-creepy-I’m-not-being-weird kind of way.”

  One corner of Selena’s lips curled into a half-smile as she teased him. “Got it. So what you’re telling me is red leather.”

  Cameron arched an eyebrow at her and told her she’d just made it weird. “And that’s my job,” he added.

  Selena slipped the red stone into her pocket and looked downstream. “Is this what you wanted to show me?”

  “No. This is awesome, but what I want to show you is even more awesome. And if I weren’t a little worried about getting smote by some asshole god over here, I’d go check it out.”

  “We’ll probably be ok. I think the smiting gods are all busy with their pissing contest, which I never thought was an actual thing.”

  “True. In that case, let’s go risk getting smited.”

  “Smote,” she corrected.

  Cameron waved her off and grabbed her hand again as he led her up a hill, where the water from the stream inexplicably flowed upward. “See? This place is strange.”

  Selena nodded and resisted the temptation to stop again so she could collect more of the rocks from the riverbed. Some of them reminded her of sapphires and emeralds, and she could already envision collecting them in a glass bowl in the bedroom she would apparently be sending quite a bit of time in.

  “Cameron? One of the reasons I was asking Badb about time here and on Earth is that they want to hide us here, but we have no way of knowing how much time is passing back home. What if we accidentally wait too long and Nuada’s heir dies because a hundred years have passed? What if we wait too long and your family…”

  Cameron inhaled slowly and pointed to the top of the hill. “We’re almost there, and then we’ll be able to see it.”

  Selena eyed him carefully as they made their way to the top, but he was clearly trying to avoid looking at her now. “Why do you do that? Why do you change the subject every time I mention your family or you start talking about them?”

  Cameron glanced at her and bit his lip, but she had told him so many stories about her Aunt Tara. Why would talking about his own family make him uncomfortable? Especially since he’d already told her he’d always been close to them, and he had a loving family?

  Cameron stopped before they reached the summit and looked at her, his dark eyes searching hers, and he inhaled another slow, deep breath. “You want to know why I hate the gods, Selena? You’d asked me before you left for Atlanta, and I spent two days kicking myself for not telling you, even though I don’t know if it would have changed your mind. But they’re the reason I hate them. For as long as any of us can remember, we wanted nothing to do with them or any other demigods, and the most we knew about our ancestry came from the human side. Oddly enough, I think I do have some Greek in me, but human Greek.”

  “Cameron,” Selena sighed.

  “When I was little, my father took my brother and me fishing near one of the same bays that one of those dads and his son disappeared in. And he told us why we should never admit what we are, why we should never be proud of it. Think about it: every problem in this world throughout our history can be traced back to religion, and the gods never did a damn thing to stop it. They let people get slaughtered in their names. They sometimes encouraged it. They let people starve while they sat in their ivory towers and gorged themselves. Why would I be proud of belonging to that history? And why would I want to become a part of it?”

  “Oh,” Selena breathed.

  “And what if it changes…” Cameron shook his head and pulled on her hand as he nodded toward the top of the hill. “We’re almost there. You know Irish mythology, so you can tell me if it’s safe for us to go breaking and entering.”

  Selena forced her eyes away from their hands, still clasped together, and focused on the smooth surface of the hill. He’s going to hate me then, too. He’s convinced I’ll be just like them. Think, Selena. Think. Put words together outside of your head.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s never safe to go breaking and entering,” she finally said. Those weren’t the words she wanted to say, but she had no idea what else she could say because Cameron may be right. How could she possibly know if becoming a goddess would change her? Worst of all, what if it changed her love for him?

  “You seem pretty important to these guys. They probably won’t kill you,” Cameron responded.

  “Still an expert at calming me down.”

  Cameron nodded and said he was adding that to his résumé when they got back home.

  They stepped onto the top and Cameron pointed to a different hilltop with a clear palace sitting on top, its walls reflecting the sun in gleaming fractals of brilliant light.

  “The glass castle,” Selena gasped.

  “Well, yeah, that’s what I was thinking, except I don’t know what that is.”

  Selena’s gaze drifted away from the sparkling castle to the cerulean sea, its waves quietly splashing against the rocky cliff. “It’s where Balor supposedly imprisoned his daughter, Ethniu, because of a prophecy that her child would grow up to kill him. And I’ll give you one guess as to who her child was.”

  Cameron sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “So, my great-grandmother a million years ago was locked away inside this tower because my great-great-grandfather a million years ago was trying to prevent her from getting pregnant and giving birth to Lugh? Told you the gods were a bunch of assholes.”

  “Not that it matters, but Balor was Fomorian, not one of the Tuatha Dé, and the Fomorians are often depicted as a bunch of assholes because they were the enemies of the Tuatha Dé. There’s a glass castle in Arthurian legends, too, but those stories combined Celtic mythology with Christianity, so maybe it’s the same place.”

  Cameron grabbed her hand again and began to lead her down the hill. “We walked this far. Let’s go see if we can find Sir Gawain.”

  “If there are a bunch of knights sitting around a round table who decapitate us with their swords for breaking into their castle, I will never forgive you.”

  Cameron nodded. “Wouldn’t blame you.”

  Selena reached into her pocket and pulled the clear red stone out, holding it in her palm to show Cameron. She grinned at him and said, “Let’s throw it. When else will we have the chance to live out an adage?”

  Cameron laughed and told her to put the stone back in her pocket; he didn’t really want to get killed by a bunch of drunken knights. The soft green grass of the Otherworld gave way to a rockier terrain as they ascended the cliff as well as the hard gleaming white marble just like the paths they had stood on when they arrived here for the second time. Only this marble didn’t form a path but surrounded the castle, reflecting the sunlight so that it filled the glass palace, illuminating it like a dazzling lighthouse, either beckoning or warning those approaching that something portentous was near.

  They approached the side of the castle and peered into it, but it seemed mostly empty: no knights, no tables or chalices or cauldrons. There weren’t even stairs to ascend to the upper floors.

  Selena searched the side of the castle for a door, but couldn’t find one of those either. “Somebody must have gotten bored and made a huge piece of art. There’s no way in this place.”

  “Yeah, this kicks up the Otherworld to a whole new level of bizarre.”

  Cameron let go of her hand so he could shield his eyes from the sun and look into the castle again. Selena mimicked him, stepping closer to the glass wall so she could study the interior. Movement in her peripheral vision startled her and she looked around the large main hall for the source of it, but the castle seemed just as empty as before. She was about to ask Cameron if he’d noticed anything moving when a translucent ghastly figure appeared before her, banging angrily on the glass wall. Selena screamed and stumbled backwards, falling onto the hard smooth marble ground and hi
tting her head.

  The last thing she heard before she passed out was Cameron calling her name.

  Chapter Three

  Selena awoke in her bed back in the Dagda’s palace. Memories of the glass castle and the frightening creature inside of it immediately returned to her and she touched the back of her head but wasn’t surprised that it didn’t hurt. Of course Cameron would have healed her.

  She heard voices in the hallway and tiptoed to her door, straining to pick out pieces of the conversation. Cameron sounded angry, and Badb sounded defensive.

  “Everything is a big secret to you,” he hissed. “It’s always a secret, isn’t it? You want us to jump at your command but won’t level with us.”

  “This doesn’t concern you or Selena. Not now. What difference does it make?” Badb shot back.

  “Selena got hurt because of it!”

  “I never told you to go snooping around palaces you had no business digging around!”

  “You never told us to stay away either. What the hell is in there?”

  Selena pulled her door open and fixed Badb with her best I’m-completely-on-Cameron’s-side-here look. Badb fixed her with her best I-don’t-care look.

  “Stay away from the glass castle,” Badb warned them. “And hope whatever you did last time to get yourselves back to the same time works again, because we need to start looking for the Unbreakable Sword.”

  Selena put her hands on her hips and scowled at the goddess. “We didn’t do anything. You’re the one who sent us back. And can that thing in the glass castle get out?”

  “No,” Badb answered. “And I’ve already told you I only sent you back to the Basin. I can’t control time.”

  Cameron snorted and rolled his eyes at her. “Oh, and a couple of demigods can?”

  Badb shrugged. “When you work together, you often seem capable of accomplishing the impossible. Haven’t you noticed?”

  Selena remembered all of their desperate escapes from the New Pantheon and Quetzalcoatl that probably shouldn’t have worked, but somehow, had. She glanced uneasily at Cameron, but he was still glaring at Badb, no doubt suspecting the goddess was just lying and trying to deceive them so she wouldn’t have to admit to truths she didn’t want to reveal.