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Deities, Danger, and Drama

Irushed over to my sister. Tessa was gripping tightly to Gin’s lifeless body. She couldn’t let go. I waved my hand over Gin, trying to heal her with Fairy’s Touch, but she was already dead.

“Stop fussing over her,” Faris scolded me. “We need to get going before the passage closes.”

I turned on him, growling, “My sister is dead, and all you’re worried about is your stupid passage.”

“She is a phoenix. She will rise again. But we don’t have time to wait.”

“You really are a callous son of a bitch, Faris.”

“And you’re an emotional wreck. Pull yourself together, Pandora. We have work to do and no time to waste on useless tears.”

“Faris is an insensitive ass, but he is right, Leda.” Grace pointed at the glowing curtain of magic. “Look, the passage is already closing.”

I saw it. The light curtain was flickering and buzzing like it was about to go out.

And right now I didn’t care. Sure, Gin would live. She would rise again, and it would hurt like hell. But that wasn’t the point. Just because someone was basically indestructible, that didn’t mean you stopped caring about them. Because once you started doing that, you were well on your way to treating all people as disposable. That was the gods’ whole problem. And the demons’ problem too. They didn’t care about anyone. They didn’t understand love, compassion, or anything that connected people to other people.

“If we don’t do this now, we won’t get another chance for a while,” Grace said to me. “Not until the moon is full again. Don’t you want to know who is sending you those visions? Don’t you want to know why?”

Yes, I wanted that. Of course I wanted it.

“It isn’t you?” I had to ask.

“No, Leda. It wasn’t me.”

And for some reason, I actually believed her.

“They’re right, Leda. You need to go,” Tessa said to me. “There’s a reason everything happened this way, a reason we all came to be here on Earth and ended up with Calli. It’s all linked, Leda, and you need to figure out why. Go find your answers. I’ll teleport with Gin. I’ll bring her back home.”

I hesitated.

“Gin would want you to go and figure this out,” Tessa said.

I rose to my feet. “All right.”

I joined Faris and Grace at the glowing magic curtain.

“What is it?” I wondered. “A magic mirror, a passage to another world?”

“Not quite,” said Grace. “It’s certainly similar, though. I don’t think it leads to another world but rather to a secret place here on this one.”

“Wherever it leads, it won’t work for long,” Faris said impatiently.

As we passed through the glowing curtain, I glanced over my shoulder. A winged rat had taken flight; it was trying to follow us through. But it stopped just before it reached the curtain. It whimpered like it wanted to go through but couldn’t. More monsters had arrived. They looked agitated that they couldn’t follow us. Tessa, holding Gin, vanished from sight.

“They got away,” I said happily under my breath.

The ruined city faded away. We popped out the other end of the glowing curtain, suspended up in the air, nothing else but empty space all around us. Then a tornado shot up out of nowhere and swallowed us. Even beating my wings at full power, navigating the wild winds was tough. I grabbed my cat Angel before she got sucked in. The moment I wrapped my arms around her, wings sprouted out of her back.

“You really are a little angel now,” I said fondly.

She opened her mouth to meow, but I couldn’t hear her over the roar of the raging tornado.

That tornado was pulling us down. Down to the ground. Very, very slowly, it was drawing us toward a floating platform in the sky. My feet set down on hard rock.