The previous night came back to her in flashes. It had all been too much to handle at once—the secret lair, the combat uniform. She’d attempted to sleep in her bed, but inevitably her racing thoughts had compelled her to return to the secret room, overthinking it all until her brain short-circuited and she passed out.
Squall was still perched on the desk, rigid with delight as he watched the fish endlessly circle the aquarium. Cairn ran a hand over the lynx’s fur. “There are three of us living in this house and somehow you are the most responsible one.”
Cairn reluctantly exited the lair with Squall tucked under her arm. Upstairs, she found the couch empty, her father nowhere to be found. He probably dragged himself back to his office at the university, unwilling to spend more time in their home then he absolutely had to.
After Cairn refilled Squall’s water dish, she downed a handful of aspirin to quell the aches in her joints. Eventually, the haze dissipated from the previous night, and she remembered the number she’d copied from her mother’s landline.
With trembling fingers, she pressed the call button and waited with bated breath, expecting the voice of her mother’s lover to answer.
After three rings, a man picked up the phone—but his greeting was not one Cairn had expected. “Dr. Talia Themis’s office. How can I help you?”
Cairn hung up without saying a word. A quick online search of the doctor’s name failed to return many results, but it did provide a few revealing pieces of information:
Dr. Themis was a psychiatrist.
And she also worked as an adjunct professor at the same university Ahna had attended.
So her mother had been seeking help from a mental health professional before she died. Somehow, this hurt Cairn even more than the possibility of her mother having an affair. If Ahna had been struggling, why hadn’t she turned to her daughter? Why hadn’t she said anything?
Regardless, one thing was clear:
Talia Themis likely knew more about what was going through her mother’s mind in her final days than Cairn did.
This time, when Cairn called back, she didn’t hang up after the doctor’s receptionist greeted her.
“My name is Cairn Delacroix,” she said, “and I’d like to make an appointment.”
Columbia
District Attorney Tane Makoa paced the observation deck of the Custom House clocktower, sullenly staring down at Boston’s streets five hundred feet below. He was still reeling from a brutal loss in court. Tane had been prosecuting Taranis, a Celtic thunder god who moonlighted as a real estate developer. By all accounts, the defendant had summoned an earthquake to destroy a row of homes when their owners refused to sell. Despite an abundance of well-documented threats, the jury ultimately acquitted him. Tomorrow’s papers would spin the verdict as the failings of an overconfident prosecutor, but Tane suspected juror intimidation was to blame.
Tensions between gods and mortals were escalating, and Tane knew the worst was yet to come. The violence worked both ways, too. Just last week he’d been handed a case of a mortal zealot drugging minor gods and branding them with a crucifix.
Tane, himself, had played a role in the city’s fractious mortal-god relations. Tonight, he would put an end to that—and turn the tables on his blackmailer.
Directly beneath the Custom House’s observation platform, one of the tower’s iconic clock faces glowed brightly against the skyline. Both of its massive hands, made of copper-plated redwood, pointed vertically to the numeral 12. Midnight had arrived.
And so had Columbia.
Tane had seen the goddess materialize out of thin air before, but it never failed to unsettle him—even though he was a deity himself, a Māori forest spirit with his own arsenal of supernatural abilities. Watching Columbia teleport was like watching a drop of ink diffuse through a glass of water, only in reverse, obsidian tendrils coagulating until a humanoid form took shape.
Columbia emerged from the undulating darkness, clad in crimson armor that contoured to her tall, muscular body, with a classical gown draped over one shoulder. A Roman war helmet shrouded her head, and a plume of eagle feathers bisected the top like a mohawk.
But the item that commanded Tane’s attention was the gleaming saber sheathed in the scabbard at her side.
Tane steeled himself, but his voice still quavered. “Punctual as always.”
The helmet cloaked all but Columbia’s predatory smile. “One of the perks of being me is that I don’t have to waste away in traffic like the rest of these Plebes.” She swept an arm out over the network of taxis and cars dotting the streets below.
“What’s with the costume?” Tane asked. “You’re a few weeks late for Halloween.” While he’d seen her wear the uniform in news clips, she’d always arrived at their clandestine meetings in civilian clothes. Clearly, the goddess was spiraling deeper into her delusions of grandeur.
Columbia scoffed. “Oh, you’ve got it all backward, my little orchid. What you’ve seen before is my costume. The same way that all this”—she gestured with disgust at his bespoke suit, his ascot tie, his polished leather brogues—“is yours. We all wear them, putting on artifice the way we want the world to see us, the way it benefits us. You’re just finally seeing me as I truly am.”
At last, something we can agree on, Tane thought darkly. He took a swig from his tumbler of scotch for courage, then launched into the message he’d summoned her here to deliver. “I’ll cut to the chase: I’m out. You and your bogeyman can threaten me all you want, but I will not be your slave anymore.”
Columbia tsk-tsked. “Need I remind you that I could lay your entire miserable career to waste with a single headline? If the city finds out about the atrocity you and your little fraternity committed on that island, you won’t be able to land a job dispensing soap as a bathroom attendant.”
“I am prepared to answer for my sins. Maybe I’ll finally sleep well for the first time in nineteen years.” He leveled a finger at her. “Coercing me into altering Sedna’s autopsy report was the final straw. She was the very best of us.”
“Sedna was an errand girl for that blind whistle-blower. She couldn’t see the bigger picture, so while her elimination was regrettable, she was long overdue for a nap in the ocean.” Columbia glanced at her gauntlets. “Besides, if you ask me, she wasn’t a particularly competent ocean goddess if she couldn’t even breathe underwater. No gills, really?
Tane began to tremble. It was clearer to him than ever that this woman needed to die.
Fortunately, the forest spirit had prepared a backup plan in case this meeting went south. On the ledge above, just out of view, he’d planted a sprout of a unique species of ivy, one of his own design that he’d spent the last month perfecting. As he concentrated, the vines took root in the tower’s granite facade. A single tendril unfurled and wove itself into a slipknot.
The makeshift noose descended silently toward Columbia’s head. The vine glistened with a poison that could kill a person simply by contact. Just a few more inches and it would slip around her neck, one of the only exposed areas on her armor-plated body. Even if she managed to teleport away, the toxin should stay with her.
But then the roots above dug too deep into the building. A small handful of granite crumbled and rained down on Columbia’s helmet.