Green Tea and Black Death (The Godhunter, Book 5) (8 page)

  
I didn’t get it.

  
As a young witch, I knew intimately what the supernatural world held. Now I know that it was also the knowledge my soul carried over from being Sabine. When Odin used his magic to put my soul into my mother, it hadn't been exactly reincarnation. I wasn't reborn to experience the world anew. I'd been born with the memories and knowledge of a full life. I'd just repressed a lot of it so that I could deal with being a child all over again. By the time I met Odin, I'd gotten so good at repressing, I didn't recognize him at first. Seeing him acted like some sort of a trigger though and those memories did break out eventually.

  
Back then though, in that stuffy, stark room filled with children, I didn't know why I had knowledge of things. I just knew. I knew there were no impossibilities, so this gift of speaking in another language without studying it, didn't seem so far fetched. I waited with great anticipation for such a cool magic to overtake me. When the other children finally started to “speak”, I laughed. They were talking gibberish, no proper cadences of any known language recognizable in their speech. They were faking it to get out of the hot room.

  
My uncle scowled at me, then decided I needed one on one help. He sat next to me, praying for hours, but the Holy Spirit never filled me. He finally gave up, muttering under his breath about apples falling close to trees and my general unworthiness. It was my first moment of disillusionment with my grandparents’ religion but more importantly, it was my first insight into my uncle’s personality.

   “
Vervain’s right here,” Grandma’s voice brought me back to the present. “Sure, hold on,” she held out the phone to me as I gave her the universal, cutting the air,
I don’t want to talk to that idiot
, motion. The phone landed in my gesticulating hand.

   “
Hello,” I muttered.

   “
Hey, kiddo,” Uncle Harvey's voice grated on my already flayed nerves. “How you doing?”

   “
I’m doing,” I rolled my eyes.

   “
Well we’ll be out there on Wednesday to help,” he continued as if I cared.

   “
We’re fine, just send Aunty Dorris for the funeral,” I countered. The last thing I needed right now was my crazy Christian relations out here in the middle of a possible plague.

   “
Oh no, I wouldn’t leave her alone at such a horrible time,” my stomach clenched on hearing confirmation of what I knew was coming. “I’ll be flying out with her, Connie, James, and Jacob.” On Grandma’s dime I was certain, since they had no money.

  
My aunt and her husband had been spewing out babies since she’d married him when she was still a baby herself. My cousins started popping up when I was two years old and kept popping up every two years like clockwork, except for the last few, which had come yearly. There were ten kids now, living in a house owned by the church, and supplementing their income with money from my grandmother.

  
Whenever I brought up the fact that she didn't have a lot of money and she shouldn't be sending so much to my relatives, grandma would say “God will provide”. Well she didn't know the gods like I did or she wouldn't be so sure of their help. The only one doing any providing was her.

  
But at least I wasn’t bitter.

   “
Yeah, I gotta go now,” I handed the phone to Grandma while Harvey was mid-preach. I just couldn’t deal with his bullshit at the moment.

  
Kirill’s hand rubbed my lower back and I took comfort in it for a moment, while I watched the EMTs carry my grandfather’s body out of the house. I couldn’t help making a list of grievances in my head. Number one, tiger goddess prowls Chinatown. Number two, ex-rapist gets me drunk or possibly roofied me and tries to seduce me. Number three, current boyfriend catches seduction mid-kiss and leaves me. Number four, tiger goddess tries to kill me with the black plague. Number five, my grandfather dies. Number six, relatives from Hell…that’s the Christian Hell with two Ls not the Viking goddess with one…descend upon my helpless grandmother. Number seven, I get to celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday in the midst of this mess, without my wolf or my grandpa.

  
Weren’t bad things supposed to come in threes?

  
My Uncle David, the baby of the bunch, showed up with his daughter Shannon and I breathed a sigh of relief. Sweet, beautiful Shannon took Grandma’s other side while Grandma started to ramble about the rapture and how if Grandpa had just held out one more month, they would have ascended to Heaven together… but it’s okay because she’ll see him next month when the rapture takes her. My poor cousin’s face blanched.

   “
Grandma,” I patted her, “telling a young girl that God is going to take all the good Christians up to Heaven next month and leave all of us horrid sinners behind to suffer numerous tortures, is not reassuring right now. Let’s hold off on that conversation, okay?”

  
Grandma grimaced at me and broke into a fresh wave of tears. Brilliant Vervain, just brilliant. Sometimes I wished I had a filter.

Chapter Twelve

  
My house was overflowing with flowers.

  
How had the entire God Realm found out about my grandfather in less than eight hours? And why hadn’t an arrangement arrived from Trevor… a card, a note, a telegram, a carrier pigeon, something? The large bouquet from Fenrir and “your Froekn family” didn’t count. Fenrir had delivered it in person and was actually still camped out on my sofa… along with Odin, Vidar, Vali, Blue, Persephone, Hades, Ull, Pan, Finn, Teharon, Mr.T, Mrs. E, Thor, and even Horus. But no Trevor.

  
Kirill was in the kitchen trying to make party trays of the food that people had been dropping off by the truckload. Why does everyone try to feed you when they know food is the last thing you want? They should drop off bottles of alcohol and lots of mint candies because you need alcohol when you're sad and whether I'm drinking or not, my stomach just felt like it was on the verge of throwing up all the time and mint helped with that.

 
Everyone was scrupulously avoiding Trevor as a subject of conversation. It was starting to annoy me. When you lost someone you loved, whether it be to death or their own stupidity(yes, I’d decided that it was Trevor’s fault because it was easier that way. Give me a break, I was in mourning) you didn’t want to be surrounded by sympathetic eyes and ears. I wanted to curl up in bed and sleep until everything had returned to normal, or as normal as my life could be.

  
The only bright spark in my darkness to look forward to was the arrival of my mother. She was getting in at 11am. She was getting a rental car and going to Grandma’s to actually help and comfort my grandmother unlike my other relatives who would be staying at a friend’s house, using their van, and hardly seeing Grandma at all even though her money paid for their vacation… oh, I mean their bereavement visit.

  
I edged into the kitchen and rooted through the liquor cabinet until I found the tequila. I uncapped it, took a long pull, gasped for air, took another swallow, then capped and replaced it. Kirill said nothing, pretended to not even notice. Now that was the kind of company I needed… although it would’ve been even better with just the two of us in the bedroom.

  
Horrible I know, but any psychiatrist will tell you that when confronted with death, the natural instinct is to try to reaffirm life. I needed some serious affirmation but even the thought of it started to turn my stomach again when I realized I had my lover and husband from a previous life, our sons, my ex-boyfriend, my ex-potential boyfriend (don’t ask), and my possible future ex-boyfriend’s father all in my living room along with my best goddess friend, her husband, and Anubis' cousin.

   “
Do you vant me to ask zem to leave?” Kirill, as always, knew exactly what I needed.

   “
No,” I kissed him gently. “I’ll do it. I need to go meet Mom soon anyway.”

  
I walked into the living room to start my speech but a knock at the door interrupted me. Now what? I almost groaned as I headed to the front door. Nick went with me to approve or disapprove of the next visitor before they stepped foot in his house. I opened the door to find my mother standing there.

   “
Mom,” I said, stunned. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Mom knew I was a witch of course but the whole godhunting business I'd never bothered to mention. Could I play off all these people as normal?

   “
Are you going to give me a hug and invite me in?” Her dark eyes twinkled a little but there were also new lines of grief around them.

   “
Of course,” I launched myself at her.

  
It had been a year since I’d seen her. She’d married a great guy and they’d moved to California years ago, for him to do his residency. He was now an excellent anesthesiologist and they had two children, my sister Kaitlin and my brother Daniel. When my aunt had got pregnant with her tenth child, my step-dad’s response had been that Uncle Harvey should “Be a man and get snipped.” Richard's held a special place in my heart ever since and I was really happy my mom had such a good man.

  
The hug ended and Mom bent down to give the kitty loving before turning to the rest of the room. She looked at me with a raised brow, then back at the gods. I started forward but Kirill came up first.

   “
I am Kirill,” his clipped Russian accent was softened by the sweetness in his eyes as boyfriend #2 met my mother for the first time.

   “
Uh, Mom,” I interrupted as she took his hand. “This is my boyfriend, the one who lives with me.”

   “
Oh,” she used his hand to pull him into a hug instead, “Very nice to meet you, Kirill.” She gave me an approving look over her shoulder.

   “
And this is Odin,” I paused over the introduction but he smoothly stood and took over.

   “
I’m the next in line if Kirill ever gets the boot,” he joked and winked at her with his one good eye. “Thank you for raising such a wonderful woman, we’re all very lucky to count her as a friend.”

  
He stared at her a little strangely, and then I realized that this would be the first time he'd seen her since he'd put my soul into her body when she was sixteen years old. It must have been an odd feeling for him. He had lost her after the transfer and spent all this time searching for her, never finding her. Now, here she was.

   “
Well,” my mom actually started to blush a little. I hadn’t seen her turn red like that since she’d had a glass of wine back when I was six. “I’m glad she has such wonderful… friends to support her through this.”

   “
We all love her very much,” Odin nodded, then gestured to Vidar and Vali. “These are my sons, Thor, Vidar and Vali.”

  
Thor stepped forward and kissed my mom on the cheek, muttering something about it being nice to meet her. He must've felt awkward, meeting my mom after we had broken up.

  
Vidar came forward and mimicked his brother, giving his grandmother a polite peck on the cheek, even though she had no idea this was her grandson. He started to choke up and turned away suddenly. Vali covered for him, taking Mom's hand and shaking it enthusiastically, but I could see that Vidar was still disappointed. I couldn’t watch it anymore. There was enough misery going around, I wasn’t about to heap some on my son.

   “
Um, Mom,” I took Vidar’s hand and urged him back over. “There’s a little more to this and if anyone can understand, it’ll be you.”

   “
Okay,” she looked back and forth between me and Vidar, with who knows what going through her brain.

   “
I’ve recently discovered… no, that’s a lie. Uh, a few years ago I was attacked and I found out that the gods are really the surviving inhabitants of Atlantis. They used their advancements to prolong their lives and enhance their magic to become god-like.”

   “
Excuse me?” She blinked a couple of times.

   “
I’m not making a joke, just bear with me here,” I took another deep breath. “To sum it up really quickly, I started hunting gods because I believed they were all tricksters, bent on causing war so they could suck up the power human death brought. Then I met Thor,” I waved a hand at Thor and he nodded his head at my dumbstruck mother.

  
The poor woman was completely surrounded by gorgeous towering gods and her knees started to buckle a little, so I led her over to a chair. Nick jumped into her lap to lend his purring support and she distractedly started stroking him.

   “
So you’re saying that these Atlanteans have been causing wars so they can use the energy of all that destruction? They’ve been using us like batteries, like some kinda Matrix movie?” Her eyes had gotten pretty wide and I started having second thoughts of confessing. Maybe this wasn’t the best time for a tell-all but I took a deep breath, nodded, and continued.