8: Joshua
Joshua had never been to a supermarket late at night. It seemed like a totally different place—in a weird alternate universe kind of way. On the plus side, there were no screaming babies nor any little old ladies slowly pushing squeaking carts, managing to block an entire aisle for minutes on end. On the downside, the store had a creepy postapocalyptic zombie vibe. Most of the long, gleaming aisles were empty but lurking around every corner were shambling mounds of flesh. The smelly, heavily bundled people were either homeless, addicts, drunks, insane, or some combination of the above. It was difficult to tell. They could even be zombies; Joshua was a werewolf food shopping with a vampire in tow. It was ten below zero outside. Whatever the aimlessly shuffling beings were, they were in the warm store to keep from freezing.
Joshua’s furry other half didn’t like the zombies. It had growled at two of them so far. He could feel his wolf pressing outward on his skin, wanting to transform into something larger and more impressive looking than a five-foot-two high school senior. He wasn’t sure why it felt so intimidated by the other shoppers; even if they were zombies, they probably couldn’t hurt Joshua. He’d been shot last week half a dozen times by a Wicker. By the next day, he couldn’t even find the bullet wounds.
Even if he wasn’t a werewolf, he had a brown belt in judo. He could defend himself without supernatural strength and speed and invulnerability.
What made it all especially annoying was that it was all the wolf’s fault that they were at the store so late. Joshua was an honor roll student. He’d been in the running for valedictorian of his class. He had good study habits and normally got his work done quickly and efficiently. The wolf blew all that out of the water—taking over every time it got bored—and it had gotten bored often. Instead of finishing his homework in an hour or two, it had taken nearly six.
He’d been afraid that the supermarkets would all be closed but luckily this one recently had become twenty-four hours, apparently attempting to cash in on pre-Christmas sales. All signs of Thanksgiving had vanished. In its place was a huge selection of stocking stuffer candy, displays of candy canes (he had no idea that they came in so many flavors) and rolls of wrapping paper. The sound system played holiday tunes, which only served to remind him that he wasn’t going to be seeing his family during the holidays.
While Joshua was distracted by this thought, the wolf beelined for the meat section and tried to wrangle a six-pound leg of lamb into the shopping basket.
“No!” Joshua shouted as he fought with himself. “I was just going to get lunch food. I don’t even know if we like lamb. I don’t know how to cook it and I’m not eating it raw. Put it back! It won’t even fit in the basket!”
“I’ll get a cart.” Decker went off, leaving Joshua to deal with his inner monster alone.
“No, no, we’ve got a big pack of ribeye steaks coming tomorrow!” Joshua managed to drop the lamb back into the cooler, but his wolf countered by grabbing a filet mignon multipack that cost nearly two hundred dollars. “If you want meat, we can get one steak and cook it when we get home. We can get two and have steak and eggs tomorrow for breakfast.”
The wolf cooperated enough for him to get the filet mignon back into the cooler, but they ended up with three individually wrapped steaks in the basket.
Joshua sighed. “Fine. Fine. Fine.”
One of the zombies came up the aisle, muttering darkly. “The sun is setting. The moon is rising. The stars will wheel about in the sky.”
When Joshua was younger, his mom and sister would make dolls from dried apples. They’d carve faces on apples and then let them dry. The apples would shrink and shrivel up. This old person looked like one of those carved apples. It seemed as if they had had no teeth, the gums withering inward. The head was topped with spare gray hair, so thin and short that it didn’t cover their skull. They were so old that it was hard to tell their sex. Joshua decided that based on the person’s small size, they were female. Maybe.
The old woman wore a patch over her left eye. She smelled of age and seawater.
The wolf didn’t like the woman. It pulled the basket closer and growled.
“She’s not going to take your steak!” Joshua whispered at the wolf. “Be nice.”
“Listen to your wolf when it warns you that creatures of power are near at hand,” the woman said.
Joshua jerked back. She knew he was a werewolf? She was a creature of power? She didn’t look powerful but neither did Decker or Elise. “What are you?”
“Hungry. What else would I be? We’re in a supermarket. I’m Enyo Graeae and you’re the lost heir. What name did you decide to keep?”
“Joshua. Joshua Tatterskein.”
“Oh, what an odd name,” Enyo said. “Nice to meet you, Joshua Joshua Tatterskein.”
“No, my name…” Joshua started to protest and then realized that he shouldn’t argue with creatures of unknown power. He took a step backward. “You’re only here for food?”
“Fate and random chance are two different things.” Enyo wagged her finger as if pointing at two objects far apart. “You being a werewolf is fate; there’s no way you could have escaped your destiny no matter what odd twists your life took. It is random chance that we’re meeting now. Nothing I could say or do would influence your fate—although I could make the road a more interesting journey.”
He backed up some more. “I’d rather have a nice boring life.”
“Who cares what you want? The universe doesn’t care. I don’t care. The universe might like a good old-fashioned brawl. I have my suspicions. I think if the universe was pacifist by nature, I would have a harder time stirring things up.”
“The universe?” Joshua said. “Do you mean, like, God?”
“Pfft.” Enyo waved off his question. “You need to study religion, boy. If you studied enough, then you’d realize there’s a pattern to them all. There’s always a big nothingness that gets bored with being nothing. It makes gods. They make a world to play in and littler gods to push around. The names get changed but the pattern remains.”
“You mean like Odin and Thor and Loki?” He knew those from the movies. “They’re just stories. Myths. Legends.”
“Reality is like a box of tissues,” Enyo said. “Layers upon layers. Not everyone can see into the other layers. Not everyone can move from one tissue to the another. Myths are just events that involve multiple layers, outside the ken of the people you consider ‘normal.’ Where do you think your power comes from? Where do you think your wolf lives when you’re not all furry? Just because you only catch glimpses of the forest that is your Source does not mean it doesn’t exist.”
The “box of tissues” sounded like what Winnie had told him when she tried to explain how she could talk to the dead.
“The green is a real place?” Joshua said.
“The green?” The old woman cackled at the name. “It is as real as the Wolf King. It is the Wolf King. The Wolf King is it. When the universe shattered itself out of sheer boredom, ‘the green’ became its own little universe that then created its own god, like a clam making a pearl. The Wolf King used his power to make the alphas like your ancestor, the Prince of Boston, who then made their pack members. Gods beget demigods who beget heroes who beget kings who beget knights who beget serfs. It’s a diminishing chain. The power degrades even as it’s passed on. Copies of copies. We’re not talking about digital here. Flaws are inherent in the creation.”
What was taking Decker so long? Surely getting a shopping cart in a nearly empty store should only take a minute or two! The wolf picked up the basket and attempted escape by heading down the aisle in the direction Decker had gone.
The old woman followed Joshua. “Where do you think the angels came from?”
Angels? “Do you mean the Grigori?”
“The god of the Jews made little gods and called them angels. Those angels made children with the daughters of men—demigods called Nephilim. Their god is all about law and order, and the Nephilim were too flawed—copies being copies. Their god wiped almost everything out in the Great Flood, so he could start over again. He only kept the most orderly of his demigods. Dominions. Virtues. Powers.”
“Elise is a demigod?” That didn’t sound right. Joshua realized he shouldn’t believe everything that some random stranger said to him.
Enyo cackled, nodding her head. “Yes, she is. She could have been Power, but she chose to carefully chain her power with limits and behavioral restraints. The world would be much more exciting if there were hundreds of Powers wandering around loose, using their strength to erase whatever they wanted. I like a good brawl. I’ve seen some epic ones. Currently it’s like a game of Marco Polo where everyone is blindfolded. Soon the blindfolds will come off and the knives will come out and things will get interesting. I’m looking forward to it.”
Marco Polo was hide-and-seek played in water. Not that he actually played it—you needed friends who you could trust not to be jerks while your eyes were closed.
“There’s more Wickers?” Joshua asked.
“Oh, the Wickers were only idiots who wanted to be gods. They didn’t understand that their minor mind-tricks made them just above circus freaks. If they had true power, they wouldn’t need a blood sacrifice to power their toys. They couldn’t become gods unless they opened themselves up to a source, and they were too cowardly to do that. The Wakefield coven were simple tools. They were given the spell books of Monkshood coven and let loose to wreak their havoc.”
“Why?” Joshua said.
“Have you ever played the game Battleship? The first attack has no hope of sinking the enemy’s ship. The first attack is to find the enemy.”
Joshua’s wolf wanted to kill Enyo. It was angry and afraid. It took a snarling step toward her before Joshua managed to wrestle control back from it.
“Who gave the Wakefields the books?” he growled.
“If I told you, you wouldn’t recognize the name.”
“Tell me!”
“It’s useless, I tell you,” Enyo said. “You don’t understand how it works. Power from another layer needs a vessel to take form here. A body to give shape to pure energy. It would take whoever it can reach. It cares not who. It could be anyone.”
“What do you mean by ‘anyone’?”
“Anyone.” Enyo waved her hand to encompass all of Boston and the four million people who lived in and around the city. “Most gods don’t care who they take; they just want access to this layer. What do you think the breaches are? It is a source that pours out, looking for a vessel, taking everything in its path. If it can find a vessel that can hold its power, then it’s golden. Of course, if the vessel is too weak, then maybe the resulting turmoil will hit someone stronger. Like it did with Decker. That one might have succeeded if the Wolf King hadn’t raced across the planet to put out the fires, root out the weeds, and stitch up all the holes.” She cackled, rubbing her hands together. “It’s just about showtime again. I’m hoping for sheer chaos. It is almost Christmas and I’m due a good present.”
Joshua backed away from her. The wolf was growling. Joshua wasn’t sure if he could keep it in check. Where was Decker? Joshua was nearly to the front doors. The carts were within sight. There was no sign of Decker. The wolf worked its nose, caught Decker’s scent, and they were off—the wolf, Joshua, and the old woman.
Joshua decided he hated this particular supermarket. It was some weird supernatural magnet. This was where he had met Winnie, who talked with ghosts. She and her spirit guide, Fred, had been giving out samples of organic apple sausage. (A job Winnie quit, saying that they’d met by “fate,” and she had to focus on helping Joshua.) There were other supermarkets in the area. It was just random chance that he’d decided to come here tonight and be ambushed by this weird old woman. Or was it?
“You-you-you know…something,” Joshua said.
“I know everything,” she said. “That’s my secret elf talent. People try to find me, make me tell them things. Sometimes I let them find me. It’s fun to watch them crash and burn. Those Wickers that kidnapped you as a baby—they were so full of themselves. They were so sure that they were going to rule the world. You weren’t their first target. They had had their sights on another when they found me. It was fun to tell them that the messenger boy had tasted the cake that he was supposed to deliver untouched. That they had another thirteen years before the one that they needed would be born.”
“You’re the one that the ghost found. What was her name? Wonder Woman something-or-other.” Joshua winced as he realized that the ghost hadn’t put much weight in “real” names of people either. “She might have used the name Jazmin. She was a scam artist with an eye patch and a parrot. Are you the one-eyed fortune teller that the Wickers had Jazmin find?”
The old woman cackled again, nodding. “Yes, yes, she had a touch of power, that one. A little baby god. She would have been able to defend herself from the Wickers if she was more aware of what she was. She could convince her victims that what she said was true because she had the ability to make almost anything she said to be true. But she was ignorant of the true range of her powers—so she just used it to fleece her victims. Play with the fire; burn by fire. She got up swept up in the chaos. The trick is to sidestep just at the last moment, like playing chicken with a freight train. Fate will not change its course any more than a locomotive.”
Jazmin had broken free of the Wickers’ control after the coven had killed Joshua’s birth mother. She took Joshua and ran. She sold him to his adoptive parents. His life would have been vastly different if she’d left him with the coven.
“You told the Wickers about me,” Joshua said. “You got my birth mother killed.”
“Everyone dies sooner or later. Even gods.” The old woman cackled louder.
The wolf snarled with anger.
Decker was suddenly there. Blood sword out. Eyes full dark. “Get away from him, you heartless old hag!”
“Ah, Silas, still bitter?” Enyo said.
“Yes!” Decker’s voice rumbled deep and dangerous with his power. He pushed Joshua back behind him, keeping the bloodred sword leveled at the old woman. “You can see the danger coming but you never do anything about it except stand and watch it mow everyone down!”
Enyo shrugged. “It doesn’t take an oracle to guess that your precious Virtues would have been killed by a monster sooner or later. Live by the knife, die by the claw.”
“You knew and did nothing to save them,” Decker said.
“Oh, I made popcorn.” She vanished, cackling, just as Decker slashed at her with his blood sword.
“Where did she go? Hey! Whoa!” Joshua caught hold of Decker to keep him from charging off. Decker was as dangerous as the wolf when he got this way. “Calm down.”
They stood a moment, clinging to each other as they struggled with their personal demons.
“She can use her source to teleport.” Decker still held his impossibly long sword. He pressed his forehead to Joshua’s shoulder and took a deep breath. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its deep and dangerous tone. “Step in. Step out. I think she lives in our world but I’m not sure. First time I heard about her was shortly before the Prince of New York went feral and killed a quarter of the people living in the city. That was over three hundred years ago, and I was still human then. Last time I saw her was the night that Elise’s mother was killed along with all the wolves in Boston.”
“What? Is she that dangerous?”
Decker took another deep breath. He hugged Joshua like he was the only safety in dangerous waters. Decker used both hands; his sword had vanished back to whatever reality he summoned it from. “Enyo is like crows gathering before a battle; she doesn’t kill anyone, but she feasts on the dead.”
“She’s a cannibal?”
Decker laughed and let Joshua go. “No. She’s there to see the carnage. It’s like a movie to her. The more dead bodies on the battlefield, the happier she is.”
The comment about popcorn made sense now. No wonder Decker was freaked. She’d sat and ate popcorn as Decker’s lover died.
Grief settled on Decker as if his loss had been recent. Elise’s mother had died three years ago but Decker was over three hundred years old. It probably seemed recent to him.
A security guard came stalking up the aisle. He eyed them with suspicion. The wolf growled at the guard. The man rested his right hand on his pistol. With his left hand, he pointed at his eyes and then at Joshua. I’m watching you.
Joshua looked away, clenching teeth on a louder growl. Getting shot would only piss off the wolf. His inner monster would slip out of his control. “Come on. Let’s get what we came for and get out of here.”
* * *
Joshua would have preferred using a self-checkout lane, but they were all closed. Only one of the lights above the manned cash registers was on. The lanes were near the big automatic sliding glass doors that let in the arctic cold. The cashier was bundled up and seemingly asleep, head down on the unmoving black rubber conveyance belt.
The security guard had followed them through the store. He banged on the counter beside the sleeping cashier. “Hey! Come on! Wake up. I told you: you can’t sleep during your shift!”
“I’m just resting my eyes.” The cashier’s voice sounded familiar. It was only after she looked up, saw Decker, and yipped with fear that Joshua recognized her. It was Winnie. Hat and gloves covered her signature purple hair and fingernails. Her spirit guide, Fred, loomed over her as a faint shadow.
The guard stepped forward, his hand going to his pistol.
“Winnie! It’s okay!” Joshua shouted. “Winnie, it’s us!”
Winnie blinked at Joshua a moment before recognition kicked in. “Oh! Oh! It’s okay, Harrold. I was just startled. They’re friends. I just didn’t recognize Decker. He’s…He’s…” She turned to squint at the vampire. “Brighter? A moon has come out on the starry night, but it’s still full of things that scratch at the windowpanes and want to be let in.”
“Thank you,” Decker said. “I think.”
“What?” Harrold glanced back and forth between Winnie and Decker. “I don’t like them. They’re weird.”
Winnie threw up her hands. “You should know by now: all my friends are weird!” She made a shooing motion. “Fred says someone is trying to steal booze out of the wine shop. You should go check on it.”
“Don’t try anything, Fred!” Harrold pointed at Joshua, obviously thinking that Joshua was Fred. “I’ve got eyes in the back of my head.”
Harrold walked backward toward the wine. “Try anything, and I’ll see it!”
“I thought you quit.” Joshua started to unload the cart as Harrold bumped into the corner of the aisle and turned around.
“The food-sample lady was a different gig,” Winnie said. “Whole different company. And yes, I burnt that bridge to ash. Nothing left, not even blackened timbers. Why do we say ‘bridge’ when it comes from Cortes burning his boats?”
“I don’t know.” Joshua was glad to see that Winnie looked no worse for wear. He’d last seen her possessed by the ghost of Marie Antoinette, who was keeping her safe from a Wicker’s fetch.
Joshua paused as he discovered an insanely expensive family pack of porterhouse steaks in his cart. Where did they come from? Were they already in the cart when Decker got it? No, there was a lot more than just the porterhouses. Six bone-in chicken thighs. A twin pack of pork chops. How did the wolf get so much into the cart in such a short period of time?
How could he claim to be in control when he did things he couldn’t remember doing? That “he” didn’t do but his furry other was responsible for. And why didn’t his brother Seth seem like he had a split personality problem? Was it because he was mentally better integrated with his wolf, or was his inner self simply better behaved? What did this mean in terms of what Enyo claimed? Was it the Source that wanted pork chops?
“I’ve been thinking about going back to school.” Winnie ignored Joshua’s existential crisis. She swiped his purchases past the scanner, making her cash register beep. “I could have gone to college. I was an honor student at Blackridge.” Beep. “I had a full-ride scholarship; I thought your dad would be pissed off if I didn’t get good grades. He scared me. I could have gotten into any of the local colleges.” Beep. “Except Harvard.” Beep. “Harvard and MIT.” Beep. “Harvard, MIT and—I don’t know! A lot of places!”
“It’s a cash register, not a lie detector,” Joshua said.
“One can’t be sure with machines.” Winnie eyed the cash register with suspicion. “Sometimes they have their own magic. Something has leaked in and changed them. My cousin had a possessed car. It liked polka music and German bratwurst.”
“It ate meat?” Joshua said. It sounded similar to his wolf.
“No, once a month it would drive him to Jacob Wirth’s downtown on Stuart Street. It wouldn’t move until he got three orders of their grill-smoked bratwurst. I think it might have liked the smell. Burnt offerings. The dinners came with red cabbage and German potato salad. Oh, so good! Occasionally he had to pour dark lager on all four tires. That car had attitude. I was so sorry that he lost it.”
Joshua resisted asking how the cousin “lost” the car.
Decker visibly wrestled with temptation before saying, “Did it die? Someone killed it? Or did he just misplace it?”
“It left him. It’s his fault. The endless polka music got to him. He disconnected the radio. It got mad and left him. Who knows where it is now.”
Decker must have been curious. He closed his eyes, lifted his hands, and pointed toward the produce section. “Southwest. Very far away. New Jersey or farther.”
“Pennsylvania Dutch. That makes sense.” Winnie pointed at the large package of porterhouse steaks still in the cart. “Are you buying that?”
Was he? It was insanely expensive and very heavy. They would have to carry everything back to the house several blocks away.
“Yes, we’re buying it,” Decker said firmly.
“It’s over a hundred dollars,” Joshua whispered.
“If the meat is at the house, the wolf won’t come back to the store for it when you’re asleep.”
There was that.
Joshua put the steaks on the conveyor belt. They watched them slide down the counter.
“Anyhoo.” Winnie grunted as she hefted the package and waved it over the scanner. “I didn’t see the point of going to college. People in education don’t believe in ghosts. Even at Blackridge, all of the teachers thought Fred was my ‘imaginary friend.’ They wanted me to see a psychologist. One would think that a school owned by werewolves would have a staff that believed in things that go bump in the night, but I guess it’s safer to hire skeptics. There isn’t a degree that would help with what I want to do for a living. Even something like World Religion seems to take the stance that the supernatural is what uneducated aboriginals believe in.”
It made Joshua think of his earlier encounter. “Do you know who Enyo Graeae is?”
“The sea hag?” Winnie looked up at her looming spirit guide. “She was here? Fred! Why didn’t you tell me? I wasn’t sleeping, I was…” She trailed off as the guard came strolling back.
“I hate night shift,” the guard announced loudly as he returned. “The crazies come out of the woodwork.”
Winnie ignored the guard, focusing on bagging Joshua’s purchases. “I just started here. It’s just a temporary job during the holiday season. I could have worked as a Santa’s helper at the CambridgeSide mall but that’s kind of dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“It’s a mall!” Winnie said as if that explained everything. Seeing his confusion, she elaborated. “I think Marie Antoinette is in love with some guy. She kept using my credit card to buy stuff for a man. A heavenly smelling men’s cologne by Yves Saint Laurent. A shaving kit with a leather bag and silver-tipped shaving brush. A cashmere scarf that was five hundred dollars! I returned everything I could find and cut up all my credit cards! I’m out a thousand dollars until everything gets cleared up. I would report the stupid things stolen but I’m afraid I’m the one that would get arrested. It really sucks. I haven’t done any of my Christmas shopping yet and I think I’ve lost my phone. I can’t find it anywhere.”
“Can’t you get Fred to find it?” Joshua whispered.
“He’s not a dowser like Decker. He deals with spiritual things. Ghosts. Spirits.”
“He found the winning jackpot ticket.” Joshua pointed at the machine that sold the tickets.
“That was your fate. Anything tied up with you has giant neon signs in the spirit realm.”
“If the ticket was my fate, why is your grandmother keeping it locked up?”
Winnie threw up her hands as she walked to a small freezer case behind the checkout counters. “I don’t know. That’s why she’s the Wise Woman and I’m not.”
All thoughts of the lottery ticket vanished when Winnie thumped a huge, misshaped object onto the belt. It was some lumpy brown thing sealed in plastic, seemingly frozen.
“What’s that?” Joshua eyed it with fear.
“Your total is over a hundred and fifty dollars,” Winnie said as if that answered the question.
“What is that?” Joshua pointed to make it clear that he was asking about the mystery item.
“You get a free ham with your purchase!” Winnie said.
He realized that the unidentified lumpy brown was the cured rind of a large whole ham. It was the biggest ham he’d ever seen; Winnie probably thought she was doing him a favor by giving him the largest that the store carried.
It begins.
Joshua whimpered. He glanced at the plastic shopping bags already holding the expensive family packs of meat. It all had to go into his freezer. Worse, he probably would end up going shopping at least once or twice before Christmas. It was going to be the entire Thanksgiving turkey fiasco all over again.
* * *
One good thing about being a werewolf: he didn’t get cold.
Joshua could tell it was bitterly cold by the fact his nose hairs froze each time he breathed in. His warm breath out turned into billows of mist. He’d worn hat and gloves out of habit, but he didn’t need them. It had started to snow again. It crunched under their feet as they walked. The roads were deserted. The houses were dark, their residents asleep. The night pressed in around them with only the streetlamps keeping the dark at bay. Snowflakes swirled in the light, making him feel like he was in a snow globe recently shaken hard by some giant hand.
Being a werewolf might protect him from the cold, but it didn’t make him invincible. He hadn’t been able to escape the Wickers’ snakelike construct. He hadn’t been able to break free of the cage the coven had trapped him inside. Everyone—Winnie, Decker, Seth, Jack, Elise, and himself—had nearly been killed. If they had died, all of Boston could have died too.
What did Enyo know that she hadn’t told them?
“Who is she?” Joshua asked. “What is she?”
“Enyo?” Decker said in anger. “I have been told that she’s one of the original sea hags.”
Winnie had used the term.
“What’s a sea hag?” Joshua said.
Decker fussed with the collar of his long, dark wool coat. He turned it up against the cold and pulled his long white scarf tighter. His breath didn’t mist in the freezing air. Decker wasn’t warm-blooded enough to create the effect. “There’s a Greek myth about women born to the sea. Their hair is gray at birth like sea foam. They are referred to as the Graeae. They were considered more monsters than goddesses even though their father was a god of the ocean.”
Joshua struggled to remember his Greek mythology. “Enyo’s father was Neptune?”
“No,” Decker said after moment’s thought. He spread his gloved hands in apology. “It’s been a long time since I studied the Greek legends. When I was young, they were considered the classics that any well-educated man should know. Before Zeus and Poseidon and all those famous gods, there were lesser-known ‘primordial’ ones. According to the Greeks, the first god was this unformed mass who fathered Gaia.”
“I’ve heard of Gaia,” Joshua said. “She’s Earth. So out of shapeless chaos comes matter. It kind of sounds like the big bang theory.”
Decker looked uncertain. He probably didn’t know the scientific theory for the beginning of the universe.
“Never mind, go on,” Joshua said.
“Gaia gave birth to Uranus, who is the god of the sky—or, more basically, anything that wasn’t Earth. If you think of it, sky covers Earth like a man lying on top of a woman. The two of them then produced the Titans.”
This sounded like what Enyo had told Joshua. Nothing creating a lone god who creates lesser gods, who created a pantheon of even lesser gods. “Zeus is a Titan?”
Decker thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. Somewhere in this inbred mess, a couple of evil fathers were killed by their youngest son. I’ve lost track of who killed whom. I do know it happened more than once. It’s some weird pattern with the Greeks where sons murder their father—either knowingly or by mistake. Lather, rinse, repeat a couple of times until you get down to the generation that Zeus ruled from Mount Olympus. The generations prior to Zeus are considered ‘primordial.’ Poseidon is the Greek god of the seas that you were thinking of; Neptune was the Roman version of him. The Roman gods followed the same bloody and inbred path as the Greeks but there were different bells and whistles along the way.
“Enyo’s father is said to be a primordial sea god by the name of Phorcys, which means he’s a generation or two before Poseidon. He had a staggering number of monstrous children with his sister. The most famous story involving these offspring was Perseus slaying Medusa. Perseus was given the impossible task by his evil stepfather in an attempt to kill Perseus. The goddess Athena told Perseus to go talk to Phorcys’s daughters, the Graeae, who shared one eye and one tooth between them. They alone could tell him where to find the weapons to kill Medusa.”
“The one-eyed fortune teller?” Joshua said. “Enyo does have one eye—and maybe one tooth. You think Perseus really talked to Enyo and her sisters?”
“Perhaps. The story was ancient before I was even born. I’m not sure if Enyo is a fortune teller or merely that she knows a great many secrets. One has to wonder how prophetic the Graeae could have been if they didn’t know that Perseus meant to kill their sister, Medusa. But then again, considering how the Greek gods killed family members by the score, perhaps the daughters didn’t like Medusa.”
“Wait! Do you really think the Greek myths are true?”
“The Greek gods were as real as the Wolf King or Elise or Fred or me are. They were creatures who drew power from another layer. Some could change shape. Some were immensely powerful. Some were monsters that would devour men. Those who were dangerous monsters have been hunted down and killed by the Grigori. A few somewhat harmless ones like Enyo remain.”
Joshua stood a moment in the falling snow, mind reeling with the implications. “So…what about where the gods lived. Asgard? Valhalla? Olympia? Heaven? Hell? Are those places real?”
“Certainly, literature would have you believe that people used to pop in and out of Hell all the time. The Greeks even had a word that described going to the Underworld: catabasis. They described Hades as located at the periphery of the earth—an invisible other world, accessed by a cave or sailing to the edge of the ocean. Although I doubt that Hell is the tourist destination that Dante made it out to be. The world has greatly changed since those early days. I was born long after those times. As the Wolf King spread his influence, things became much more…secure. Breaches used to swallow whole countrysides. They’re unknown by the common man now. I think the layers were closer in ancient times, allowing for frequent passage between them.”
“So…is the Source of werewolf magic a god or a realm?”
“I’m not totally sure if myths and legends are completely accurate,” Decker said. “Nor am I sure if we have the words to describe it.”
Decker took out his smartphone and held it up. “If I suddenly found myself back in New York during the time of King Charles the Second, I’m not sure how I would describe my phone to someone. I could show him it but all he would understand is that it’s a piece of polished glass. I could turn it on and take some pictures—maybe. I’m still struggling with that. I could show him the movies that I know that it can play. And if that person decided to tell someone else about my phone, he would probably call it a magical polished river rock or maybe a mirror of the gods. He certainly wouldn’t describe my phone for what it truly is. Even if he somehow understood the technology—I don’t—he would need to use words not yet invented. Computer. Telephone. Internet. Movie. Netflix.”
“So, you don’t know if the Source of the werewolves’ magic is some kind of god,” Joshua said, “or just kind of a multiversal forest.”
“No. Not really. I hope that there’s no vampire god that will ever reach out and try to use me like the God of the Grigori is wont to do to its people. I’ve seen the power of their God for my own eyes time and time again and know that He is real.”
Joshua wasn’t sure what he felt about…everything. In one conversation, he’d found out that his comic book heroes might be real, that all the silly Greek legends might have actually happened, and that his own god might be just one more tissue layer in the Kleenex box of life. Unsettling as it was, he wasn’t sure what he could do about it all. Enyo did suggest that something big was about to happen. He’d been almost utterly useless in the fight with the Wickers. What the hell was he supposed to do up against literal gods?
“Do you think I should call Seth?” Joshua asked Decker. “Tell him about Enyo?”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“I meant tomorrow—or do you think that he already knows Enyo’s here? She would show up on his Peeping Tom superpowers. Right? His spider sense would be tingling or something.”
Decker squinted at him, probably confused by “spider sense.” He had a weird gap in his knowledge base; he had lived for years without any media input. Decker didn’t know the recent memes.
“She’s a magical creature,” Joshua said. “She should be easy for Seth to spot.”
“If she’s actually in Boston,” Decker said. “She could have teleported to anywhere in the world. It might be why she’s here in the middle of the night—she’s counting on Seth being asleep. Supermarkets are only open all night in big cities. All the other large cities in the world have a lot more wolves.”
“She could be just getting food, like she said? Because she’s hungry?”
“Perhaps,” Decker said as if he only partially believed it.
They had reached the house. Fresh snow lay on the sidewalk. It crunched underfoot. There were no tracks leading up to the door. As they thumped up the front steps, onto the wide wooden porch, it occurred to Joshua that Decker was going to be totally helpless in a few hours and he would be at school.
“The wards on the house?” Joshua put down the bags on the front porch in order to unlock the door. Decker stood rubbing his arms, looking as if he might freeze solid from the cold. “Will they keep Enyo out?”
“Yes,” Decker said with complete conviction. “Even if she knew where I lived—and it’s very possible she does, since knowing seems to be her gift—she could not enter the house in any method.”
One less thing to worry about. Joshua had so many other concerns that he knew he was losing track of them all.
“It turns out that my school is going on a field trip to the aquarium.” Joshua stomped on the welcome mat and walked into the warm house. The furnace was running, rumbling softly, trying to adjust for the rush of bitterly cold air. “We’re going next week. It even has the type of penguins that I dreamed about.”
After Enyo, a penguin cursing in Spanish didn’t seem particularly dangerous.
Decker drifted to the heat duct and stood on it, letting the hot air rush over him. “Next week? Well, we’ll have to check it out before that—maybe with Thane Cabot and Elise.”
Joshua nodded. Seth was coming up Friday night with Cabot to do the whole Christmas tree and condo-hunting thing. Seth would be able to use his super-alpha power to scope out the aquarium and see if there were any dangerous monsters lurking in the fish tanks.