99 Gods: Odysseia Read online

  After a few minutes, Diana freed herself from the grasp of her fellow Indigo people, chased Tracy out of the comfortable suburban kitchen and took over second banana duty on the food detail.

  “We need to talk,” Diana said to Dave as she stood next to him at the counter and chopped vegetables. He could practically feel her tension and her unnatural power. Logically, anything that pried her away from her recovery had to be important. Likely something to toss him ass over teakettle, which he resolved to take in stride. After seeing Diana dissected, he was willing to take a lot from the short young woman.

  “Fire away,” he said.

  “I mean privately.”

  Dave glanced at Epharis, who refused to meet his gaze as she distantly bird-dogged her daughter. He snorted. “Not going to happen, Diana. Sorry. In mission mode, I can’t stray too far from the others. We need each other too much.”

  Diana licked her lips and hungrily eyed him up and down. “Okay, we can do this here, I guess. Dave, I’m worried about you.”

  “Okay, why?” he said. He couldn’t tell if Diana’s interest was professional or personal. He flashed his wedding band at Diana. She, as uncanny as ever, caught the flash and nodded. “You need someone to confuse, perhaps?”

  “I deserve that, I guess,” Diana said. She chopped up some lettuce to use as sandwich dressing. “If I’d spoken plainly to you when I advised you, back when you were sick, you wouldn’t have lived. I’m sorry, but I had to make you think instead of sulk.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I’m coming on so strong to you, but I’m often attracted to some of the people I advise. Victims don’t turn me on. Assholes do.” Dave flashed wide-open eyes at Diana; she winked back. “Of course, since I’m one myself…” She waved a cutting knife in the air, part of an elaborate shrug. “You’d have done better with us, Dave. Long term. Um, you know you’re an inseer as well as a Psychic, don’t you?” Except for Nessa’s mother, they all had the ‘recruit Dave’ disease.

  He nodded. “I guess I’m flattered that you want to recruit someone as weak as I am, but, um…pardon me for saying this, but I feel far safer with the Telepaths.”

  “If you had joined up with us, you would have kept more of us alive, hun,” Diana said, followed by an aggressive chop through a defenseless green pepper. “Sorry for the anger. I’m not blaming you. You probably kept some other people alive. I know your type. There are a lot of people like you in the Indigo, and if I could get you properly initiated, we’d be able to teach you a hell of a lot faster than Uffie’s been spoon-feeding you.” She half-smiled and leaned over to him. He thought for a moment and realized Jurgen was her father, the man who raised her, but not her bio-Dad. “How much do you trust Persona?”

  “Completely.” She had saved Elorie’s life too many times for him to doubt her.

  “Don’t. You’re in grave danger of having her horribly betray you, perhaps to your death. You and Elorie both.”

  “You can’t help but be cryptic, can you?” Dave said.

  She responded with a bedroom-hot smile.

  Dammit, this woman was trouble. He couldn’t help but mirror her attraction toward him. He liked assholes just fine. Hell, he had married two of them. “You’re having some sort of problem with Elorie,” she said. “Tell me. I can help.”

  Dave sighed. “Our marriage feels too artificial, too Telepath, and it worries me. We don’t have compatible careers, philosophies of life or relationship styles.”

  Diana put down her knife and took Dave’s hand in both of hers. “Relax your mind shields and let me in.”

  He did. Hunches inundated his mind, some of which were Ken-style contingent hunches that might never happen. The hunch parade ended after far too long a time; Diana didn’t let go of his hand. Her hands shook. He suspected he had a similar effect on her.

  “Your self-doubt’s causing more stress on your relationship than Elorie’s itchy feet and her own self-image problems,” Diana said. Dave frowned. Diana shook her head.

  “My mind just got flooded with hunches,” Dave said. “Was that your trick?”

  “My trick, your unconscious power. Well, both of us provided the power, actually. Supposedly, my real strength is still buried inside.” She paused and gazed into his eyes. Longingly, far too personal. He broke the eye contact. “Hell. I’m sorry.” More of a pause. She studied lettuce. Dave noticed that one of his hunches had him married to this young woman. Egad. Talk about a marriage of inconvenience! Diana didn’t have anyone and had always wanted someone, he realized, but no one had ever measured up. He did. Dammit! “So, what did you learn?” Diana said.

  “You’re going to be staying with us, Diana,” Dave said, avoiding the personal. “Tracy’s going to go with Abe. We’re going to blunder our way into a big fight and we’re all going to die. Painfully, in terror, knowing humanity likely dies with us.” He wouldn’t ever say those words again. He only wished he could erase those memories from his mind.

  Diana nodded and rubbed his hands. Comforting, expressing her power. Diana was more than just a prophesy engine. Far more, and he was only now starting to understand how far this might lead. What she hadn’t said, but he now knew, was that she considered herself a witch, in addition to being an inseer-style Oracle. “Uh huh.” She had seen something far too similar. “And it won’t matter if I bust the prophesy and go with Abe, because Abe and his team are going to end up in the same damned fight at the end pretty much no matter what they do, if they stay alive until then.” She let go his hands and took a deep breath. “That wasn’t what I’d been looking for, Dave. Damn. I don’t want to die, but that’s about as clear as I’ve ever seen. Not that seeing’s the right word, mind you.”

  Dave willed himself not to bark. “Thanks. So, how are you keeping yourself together, Diana? Considering what you’ve just been through, with Santa Fe’s mad torturers, I’m surprised you’re, um, functional. Then this, right on top of the earlier.” The death prediction.

  “Free will and years of training and experience,” Diana said, avoiding the question. “These crap predictions can be undone, if you understand what you’re doing and have a little luck on your side. Only…”

  “Yes?”

  “I knew Santa Fe and his idiots were going to try and snatch us. I did everything possible to stop the snatch, including the use of several over-the-top tricks nearly as risky to use as the danger from Santa Fe, and all I accomplished was saving the lives of Abe and the rest. And sacrificing our free will to you Telepaths and bringing in my goddamned mother in on the rescue.” Which mortified Diana immensely.

  “We aren’t that bad,” Dave said, and then remembered one of the hunches from the hunch avalanche about his own situation. “I’m sorry, I lied. We are that bad, aren’t we? Why can’t I see it?”

  “That’s the way the seduction works,” Diana said. “This rump group of the Indigo will never escape you. Because we chose this, or because Abe did, we’ll always be hooked on your group, although we might be able to loosen the hook over time. We might even need to initiate all of you into the Indigo to wiggle ourselves at all free. At least I don’t get any premonitions that you’re going to turn into evil rogue Telepaths. If anything, your greatest danger lies in lassitude and in, well, insane things regarding dolphins that I don’t understand at all.”

  “Them.” Dave licked his lips, thinking, planning and remembering a few more hunches. This time he took Diana’s hands in his, his turn to use her. Her eyes opened wide and she saw, using him as power. “The dolphins need to be on my list of places my nose leads us to. What’s going on with them? Their mystery’s been sitting alone for far too long and…”

  “In one you are many; in many you are one,” Diana said, eyes unfocused. When her eyes returned to normal her face reddened. “Sorry. Profoundly. Couldn’t help it.” She extracted her hands. “Get used to me, though. We’re going to be together for the rest of our lives.”

  “Oh my God I messed up!” Diana said.

  Elorie, roughly
pinned between Dave and Diana in the corner of the dining room, did her skittish eyes routine. She still had to work herself up for personal conversations with him; with some random Indigo group member, Elorie didn’t cope well – and Diana had been asking pointed questions for over five minutes and extracting answers with ease. Dave expected Elorie to explode at one or the both of them any second now. Diana had gone into her Madame Xenia mode immediately after Dave had led her over to Elorie, diving right under Elorie’s skin and into Elorie’s psyche.

  Elorie caught Diana’s sudden change in tone and looked away, studying her own feet. “Yes?”

  “I didn’t realize you were a Skeptic, Elorie; I hope I haven’t been insulting you too much by thinking of you as a normal person. I apologize.” Diana got a faraway look in her eyes. “You must have had some healing problems; you had to give your body totally over to get healed. Such a surrender scarred your psyche, and you’re still vulnerable. I’m sorry.” Diana looked at Dave. “Likely these scars happened when Mr. Metrosexual here got his body makeover, I’ll bet.”

  Elorie’s anger vanished with a peal of sudden laughter. “Your explanation’s a grotesque simplification, but it will do for now. And I think of myself as an Immune, not a Skeptic.” She wiped her eyes.

  “Six of one, half a dozen of the other, just different character POVs in the world-as-story,” Diana said, making less sense than usual. “Persona offered the makeover to me when she put me back together, but I turned her down.”

  “Good,” Elorie said. “She didn’t have any choice but to remake me and doing so cost me my humanity. The flesh is real, but I can tell it’s inhuman, unnatural, not quite right.”

  “That’s because you’re a Skeptic. All Skeptics have sort of a sixth sense for the unnatural. One you can train and improve, if you’re interested.”

  Elorie shrugged. “I can’t go back to being who I was. It’s given me issues.” Elorie paused, took a deep breath, and met Diana’s gaze. She smiled. “There are times when it gets to be fun, though, like Persona mucking around to make my breasts give milk or Ken telekinetically mucking around with my body so when I get hit it doesn’t hurt. The rest of the time I spend doubting the sanity of absolutely everyone around me, or doubting my own senses.”

  “You’re right to doubt, Elorie. Telepaths aren’t sane,” Diana said. “The world is and always has been an illusion.

  “Psychics aren’t sane, either,” Elorie said. She turned to him. “Dave should have been an artist or poet.”

  “Huh?” Dave said. This was new.

  “Or a music composer. It’s all locked up inside.”

  Diana nodded. “Uh huh. He’s one of us.” Meaning Indigo. “I knew he was wasted as a money-grubbing businessman.” She squeezed Elorie’s hands. “There’s something eating you. Tell me, so I can help.”

  “I don’t think you can, because you have the same problem,” Elorie said. “I’m caught here. Hooked, in your terms. I don’t necessarily want to leave, but I want to be able to leave if I get the urge – and I can’t.” Pause. “Speaking of leaving, I owe Kara some training on my style of Immune focusing tricks. It isn’t enough to disbelieve – you need to be pissed, real pissed, to project it.” A false smile on her face, Elorie stood, extricated herself from him and Diana, and walked off.

  Dave watched Elorie walk away, his heart sad.

  “Dave?”

  “Yes, Diana?”

  “Did you hack off someone important in a previous life?”

  “No, just this one.” Several, actually. Likely badly. “Why do you ask?”

  “You seem to have attracted some extremely bad karma. I wouldn’t count on your relationship with Elorie being at all easy. Ever.”

  Thank you Madame Xenia. Thanks a whole lot.

  The group sat in the living room of their borrowed home, among framed photos of local wilderness spots on the walls and half-visible children’s toys hiding under furniture. Ken passed out hors d’oeurves in the normal mortal fashion, no teek at all. He stayed quiet, content to watch and to stay out of the way. Every time Dave tried to push Ken back into leading, Ken snarled at Dave and tossed Dave back into the center of the ring. All of the Indigo people gathered around as well. Christine, who had finally admitted she was willing to join the Indigo, based on the Diana rescue, did gleeful grandmother duty with her grand twins, happy not to have a say in the decisions. Too many opportunities for mother – daughter conflicts. She wanted him to lead as well. He didn’t understand why.

  “So, my suggestion for what to do next is to try and find out what’s going on with the Minds of the Sea and get more of their help, or try and direct whatever help they’re giving already,” Dave said, leaning forward from his spot at the end of the sofa and attempting to avoid stepping on the Polly Pocket doll underneath. Everything he had tried or suggested since the Diana rescue had either crapped out or been shot down. Fully immune martial artist types? Kara Minor was as close as anyone knew of, if Elorie could train her in willpower immunities, but it would be years before she was good enough. Getting help from Uffie’s group of others, the Sharp Pencils? That crew had gone underground, changed their names and their faces. The rest of the Indigo, both inner and outer circle? Captive, dead or scattered to the wind. Joining up with some of the other Indigo sub-groups? Most were worse off, and the Gods and their minions had completely wiped out several of them. Reality just wasn’t helping today. “As far as any of us – that is, Nessa – can figure out, they aren’t doing anything.”

  “That doesn’t mean squat,” Nessa said. She wore a borrowed light blue pants suit that looked hideous on her and sat with her feet curled under her in what was obviously the Daddy chair. The hems of the polyester pants rode up to show knobble ankles exposed by low ankle socks. Dave could sense her focus and effort when she made eye contact with the rest of them. “They’ve always been able to pull the rug over my eyes. Normally they’re too lazy to bother. My bet is that they’ve been too lazy to help us in our adventures.” She giggled. “Now I’m going to piss the lot of you off. Dave, aren’t you forgetting that there’s something else we need to do before we can go do dolphin diving.”

  Dave took a deep breath and counted to ten backwards. Definitely his nose was on break today. Diana winked at him. As she had said at lunch: ‘if it was easy everyone could do it’. He had gotten back at her by explaining some of the technical details involved in environmental geology. The mathematics of groundwater migration had nearly put her to sleep. Heh.

  “Nessa?”

  “Rings, Dave. Remember our wondrous epiphany? Two people trying and I think failing at an instant marriage. We need to help them first.”

  “Those two are definitely a distraction,” Dave said.

  “Not this time,” Nessa said. “If you recall, one of the people involved, using the term ‘people’ loosely, is the Territorial God of the Caribbean, and thus the lord of the dolphins I deal with. If we’re going to do this right, we’re going to need his permission.”

  Dave cursed but said nothing. Instead, he said: “It’s still a distraction, though.”

  “Not all distractions are bad,” Diana said. “Tell me about this.”

  Dave did.

  “Are you positive Orlando’s gotten hooked up in your psi echo craziness?” Diana asked. Both Dave and Nessa nodded. “That means you’re hooking into his willpower and Mission, and with us involved, our story as well. Is that something you want to do? Politically?”

  “I didn’t hook in Orlando at all,” Nessa said. “Orlando initiated his own hookin with his proposal, knowing full well the consequences, which is why it didn’t work at all well. The blame for this botch lies squarely on his shoulders and we need to fix the problem.”

  “Poor man,” Elorie said. “I’m not sure what’s worse, the initial psi echo effect or us trying to fix it.”

  Nessa sighed. Ken shook his head. He deposited the hors d’oeuvres on an end table and sat on the arm of Nessa’s chair.

 
“Okay, then, I think my initial gut feel was correct and this isn’t a bad distraction,” Diana said. “I have another question: what about us, Dave?”

  Elorie frowned at the ‘us, Dave’. Dave straightened up and met Diana’s gaze. “This is about my hunch and your oracular whatever?”

  “Yes. I haven’t told anybody else about it yet, though.” She turned to face the other people in the room. “What I’m wondering is whether we should continue to work together or not.”

  “Diana…” Abe said. “Of course we should.”

  “Uh huh and you’re the boss, Cuz, and I’m just another peon.”

  Abe leaned back in his high backed chair borrowed from the dining room, eyes narrowing. “No, you’re a damned nobody-tells-me-what-to-do runaway without a lick of discipline,” Abe said, stiff. Dave winced at the emotional undertone involved. “Let me guess. You have a point buried in there somewhere?” Hmm. Abe’s Indigo group had as many issues as Nessa’s group.

  “We’ve got associates held by Worcester, Dubuque, Faith and Industry, including some family members. Without them, the Indigo’s toast, long term, no matter what miracles Knot and Aunt Jan are doing this week,” Diana said. “You’ve been given a lesson in how to free them. That is, you can use Kara the same way you used Elorie when you rescued me. I expect…”

  “You expect a lot, Oracle, but if you send or persuade any of your Indigo friends, including the Telepaths, to go against Dubuque, all you’re going to do is add to his already abundant supply of captives.” Dave turned and found Betrayer, the speaker of the nasty comment, sitting calmly behind Christine. Christine turned, yelped, and took a martial arts position Dave didn’t recognize. “Don’t bother,” Betrayer said to Christine. “Bwah hah hah.”