False Gods (Sins of the Father 2)

“Make me, you peasant.” He strode in, chest puffed out and arms spread wide, his eyes staring daggers at me, then at Loki. “The sword and the staff don’t belong to Loki. They just had similar-sounding names. Are you really that stupid? He tricked you all along. Laevateinn is his to keep, but the other two? Gambanteinn belongs to Skirnir by right, and Mistleteinn belonged to an ancient king, now in Whateley’s safekeeping. Loki has no claim to them. Read a book, Albrecht. Gods, how dumb are you?”

My gaze flitted from Quill to Loki. The god was shrugging, a shit-eating grin on his face. And speaking of eating – the frost giants lining the doorway somehow had open bags of microwave popcorn at the ready. These gigantic cockholes. Loki had planned this all along.

“You did this?” I yelled, getting increasingly furious as Loki’s smile grew wider and stickier. “For your own amusement. For your entertainment.”

Fucking entities, all the same. Immortality, they said, made things so boring. It was why Loki started his own corporation. It was why Odin, the All-Father, had his own bed and breakfast staffed by valkyrie. But Loki would always be worse – no, the actual worst, because he engineered these situations precisely for fun. Schadenfreude, but to a massive, meticulously orchestrated degree.

“You’re a goddamn asshole,” I yelled again, roaring loud enough so he could hear.

Loki’s response was voiceless, but deliberately mouthed with lips and teeth so I could understand him. “Guilty as charged.”

“Damn you all to hell,” I muttered under my breath. My palm was damp as my eyes flitted back to Quilliam. He was smiling, his nose lifted in the air. Not a great sign. Even from afar, I could hear the words of power as they left his lips.

“Libris grandia.”

Out of thin air, seven books materialized, rotating in a slow orbit around him. I licked my lips, tasting sweat, knowing exactly what Quill’s bizarre tome magic was capable of. All the while my blood boiled. I couldn’t leave Sterling to tackle the golem on his own, but I couldn’t ignore the threat of Quilliam’s fire, either.

I fucked up. I knew I fucked up. I shouldn’t have given Loki those artifacts, but what did I know? It was selfish, because all I could see was the end goal of fading away from the arcane underground, making enough money to turn myself invisible. But now, whether or not Loki was still paying me, I had to fix things. Money or no, I had to make this right.

The light of my body spilled into the warehouse as my anger built and mounted. Which, unfortunately for me, meant that I was a big, bright target for the twenty-something-foot-tall giant that was presently bellowing its rage throughout the warehouse.

A fist the size of a sedan came whooshing straight for my face.

Then it stopped.

In fact, everything stopped – the fistfight between Florian and Skirnir, Wyatt Whateley’s tear-stained attempts to rip Mistleteinn from its stand. Underneath the Cube colossus’s legs, Sterling was shouting something at me, eyes wide, veins bulging. Even Quilliam and Loki had stopped moving, frozen in place.

Or rather, frozen in time.

37

The confident, measured footsteps echoing around the eerie stillness of the warehouse confirmed my suspicions. Maharani, Scion of the Lorica, and the only chronomancer I’d ever met stepped out from the shadow of a pile of crates, her eyes boring into mine.

“Mr. Albrecht. I told you to keep your nose clean, didn’t I?”

I planted my sword against the ground, using it for support as I took a breather. “Trust me, this is as clean as it gets.”

She looked around, tutting. “Giving a god of deception access to multiple instruments of power doesn’t sound like staying out of trouble. Very irresponsible indeed.”

“I messed up,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t even know what to tell you anymore. I knew a betrayal was coming, but I didn’t think he’d designed for everything to be quite this big of a clusterfuck from the start.”

The smallest muscle in Rani’s face strained when she heard the expletive. She reminded me of Sadriel, in a way, very much obsessed with order and cleanliness, except that Rani had even less of a sense of humor. She stepped up to my side, the deep blue of her sari drifting as she walked, an odd, dynamic demonstration of movement against the chilling, impossible stillness of everything else around us.

“This won’t hold for long, Mr. Albrecht. I want you to know that I only did this to contain the potential havoc that might have ensued fr

om – gods, that really is the word, isn’t it – from the absolute ‘clusterfuck’ this meeting would have produced. I strongly recommend you pick a course of action while the stasis field holds. Divide and conquer.”

I glanced from every pocket of activity to the next, mulling over my options as quickly as I could. Quilliam first. He stood to do the most damage, after all. We were in a warehouse filled with empty crates and wood pallets, a pile of tinder waiting to go up in smoke.

“Mr. Albrecht. Have you decided? I don’t believed you understand how my magic works. I have to fight to contain these elements in time. The giant creature is proving particularly challenging.”

Rani winced, then faltered. I rushed to her side, holding her up by the elbow as she clutched my arms for support. “Are you okay?”

“It’s nothing.”

She brushed some hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear. Wait. That particular lock wasn’t gray before. It’d turned white right before my eyes. It hit me then. Every use of her magic was aging her.

“Rani, are you sure everything’s fine? I can – ”