Stolen Fate (The Mythean Arcana 4)

“Fio

na, that was quick,” said a pretty, but transparent, woman. She turned to him. “You must be Ian.”

“I am.” He didn’t offer his hand for fear of offending her if she couldn’t take it.

She gestured to a table surrounded by a dozen chairs. All were occupied, though he recognized no one. Towering bookshelves loomed behind them. He and Fiona took seats next to each other. Her expression had turned to stone.

At the end of the table sat a disgruntled-looking man who glared at Fiona. Fiona’s boss, no doubt.

Lea sat. “We’re here to discuss the matter of the Book of Worlds.”

“Damn straight we are,” said the man who Ian had assumed to be Fiona’s boss. “You were out of line, Fiona! You’re no longer an Acquirer, and you had no business being in that museum.”

“Without her, you’d have no idea who took the book,” Ian said.

Fiona shot him a look that said thank you, but be quiet.

“He’s right, Darrence,” Fiona said. “It’s my fate to find it. I have to find it. I’m the only lead we have on the book, and I’m sure as hell going to retrieve it.”

“You’re in trouble. And as for you, Ian MacKenzie. Don’t think I don’t recognize you. You’re going to be back in that cell before you can blink. You’re a—”

“Enough.” Lea shot Darrence a quelling look. “We have more important problems. Rest assured, the prisoner will be sent back. But we must address the issue of the rogue god.”

Ian’s stomach lurched at the mention of being sent back to that hellhole. There was no way he’d let that happen. Fiona caught his eye and frowned. Darrence grunted but quieted, his look promising retribution.

“Did you identify which afterworld the demon went to?” Fiona asked.

“I did.” A blond woman leaned forward. She sat at one head of the table, across from Lea. Her skin emitted a faint glow. “I’m Aerten, Celtic goddess of fate and leader of the Praesidium. And from the description you gave of the demon’s tattoos, I think I know who stole the book. His tattoos indicate that he’s a minion of Carthe, a god from one of the pantheons that started the Divine War that led to the creation of the covenant thousands of years ago. You recall the stories of the war?”

There were a few murmurs of assent and Ian nodded along with everyone else. He’d never learned the stories as a child like other Mytheans, but he’d been told about them in prison. The war had occurred thousands of years ago in Eastern Europe, at a time when the Roman gods were busy in Italy and the Celtic gods in Britain. But the continent had been a mess. Four groups of gods from four different pantheons—all lost to mortal memory now because they’d destroyed themselves—had erupted into war on earth. The gods had come down to the mortals in an attempt to gain more worshipers. Not unlike the visits that the Roman gods had paid the Romans.

But there’d been too many gods. Too many choices on display for the mortals. It had erupted into war. The mortals fought for their one true religion, and the gods fought to be the leaders of it.

They’d nearly wiped out the entirety of the four pantheons and the mortals who fought the wars, until finally, with few left to worship and even fewer to rule, they’d convened to discuss the future. To save their own hides and ensure that nothing like that happened again, they’d agreed to sign the covenant that would allow gods to visit earth, but only in limited numbers and not for the purposes of war or gaining more worshipers. Other gods who hadn’t been involved in the war had agreed after seeing what had become of the pantheons that had engaged in war on the continent.

“So, Carthe dinna like the restrictions of the covenant?” Fiona asked. She caught Ian’s gaze, then looked away.

“Not at all,” Aerten said. “He was one of the dissenters to the original covenant. He was forced to sign anyway, of course, and agree not to come to earth to seek more followers, and thus more power.”

“So why start something now? It’s been thousands of years,” Ian said.

Several murmurs from the council echoed his sentiment. Darrence glared at him, but he didn’t bother to respond.

“As punishment for the Divine War, Carthe’s afterworld and the others that started the fight were closed off. The sentence was just lifted a couple hundred years ago. That’s probably when he started to look for the book,” Lea said.

“Didn’t anyone foresee that as being a problem?” Darrence asked.

“That they’d go for the book once their afterworld was reopened? Nay, because we never expected to lose it in the first place. We thought it’d be safe with us,” Lea said.

Arrogance had never been in short supply at the university.

“So the book is in Carthe’s afterworld. How do we get there?” Fiona asked.

“I can get you there,” a dark-haired woman said. “But Dalen, as their afterworld is called, is hard to access. It will take me time to find the path through the aether.”

“Vivienne is new to the world of myth,” Lea said. “Barely a month ago she discovered that she’s a Jinn of the Sila subspecies and that she has full access to the aether and all its afterworlds.”

“But because I’ve never been there, it will take me some time to find the path,” Vivienne said.