Saviors 101

Chapter 23

Chapter 23

It was baking high noon by the time Virgil idled the Trans Am up to a run-down log cabin high in the Hills. The engine shut down with a final rumbling thud that nearly finished the job of destroying Jeremy’s behind.

“You’re not taking us to who I think you are?” Cassandra’s voice was resigned and weary.

She climbed lightly out of the car and tipped the seat forward for Jeremy. It didn’t help. He would never stand again. Within moments, her face reappeared in the low door.

“Jeremy?”

He managed a groan.

“Virgil, you horse’s hind end. Get over here. I think you may have killed Jeremy.”

It certainly felt as if they had. Maybe that was how it worked then, what with them being in Hell and all. They put you in a fancy car and drove you into the afterlife where you got what you deserved. But he didn’t really deserve Hell, did he? He’d set Mom up for life. And Dad had never been in touch again. Jeremy’s game was popular. That was it. The afterlife had looked his religious farce in the face and shipped him off to eternal—

“What’s the problem, Kid?” The poet peered at him from his long, narrow face.

“I died.” Okay, it might not have been the best life, but he’d been having great fun. Okay, regular fun. Nothing spectacular. Well, it hadn’t been too shitty. And he’d have gotten a girlfriend eventually. But now he was dead. Such a waste. A tear actually slid down his cheek leaving a cool track. His tears were cold here.

A big hand reached into his car-coffin and grabbed his forearm hard enough to hurt.

“Ow!” You weren’t supposed to be able to feel things once you were dead. At least he’d never thought so. But he was in Hell, what did he know.

A quick jerk and he stumbled free of the car-coffin and landed in Virgil’s arms. Then the blood began returning to his cramped legs. He started dancing like a fool-on-a-string puppet as the tingles, then spasms, shot up and down his muscles.

Virgil laughed, but Cassandra came over and took his arm to steady him down.

“I’m alive?”

She nodded. A significant portion of his hind brain didn’t want to believe her so he knew she was telling the truth.

“I’m alive!”

“Congratulations, Kid, now shut up. We’re going to meet an old friend of mine.”

“You’re not going to trust—“

Virgil’s glare cut off her protests.

“Any more complaints and you’ll ride in the back seat next time.”

Jeremy noticed that she didn’t speak another word. He wouldn’t have let her anyway, three thousand-year-old women should not be forced to survive Virgil’s driving, never mind from the back seat, even if she did move well enough to be in one of his mother’s videos. Well, maybe his grandmother’s, but still.

“Who are we here to see?” he whispered to Cassandra as the poet headed for the front door of a ratty wooden cabin that had clearly been deserted back before men were men. Jeremy expected the imminent collapse of the structure when Virgil pounded his fist three times on a cracked oak door. It that should have fallen off its hinges on the first blow.

The woman who answered it made Cassandra look like a babe in the woods. She was bent, withered, and so gray that the color had to be redefined to describe her. She wore an electric red terrycloth headband and a matching Lycra bodysuit that provided way too much information. Sagging breasts with massive n*****s, rolls of fat about her hips, and spindly legs and arms that belonged to a bulimic runway model.

She was one of the grossest sights Jeremy had ever seen.

A near toothless grin cracked open as her voice ground out.

“Virgil,” she rasped in a voice that had seen too much tobacco and whiskey for an entire division of Marines, “you young pup.”

She slapped his arm hard enough to rock him back on his heels. In a blurred motion that Jeremy couldn’t follow, the crone had the poet in a full headlock and drove him down onto his knees on the rickety excuse for a porch until his nose was inches from the mud and rot and the wide gaps that released noxious gases. The old bat probably came out and peed on the porch because she was too old to get out to the latrine.

“Virgil, old friend, old pal. When are you going to give me that hot, hot car of yours?”

Jeremy had to blink twice. The rasp had turned into a deep baritone so smooth that it could have given lessons to honey if it ever tried to pour in her presence. His presence. She’d shifted from one moment to the next. The crone had become a tall, willowy man with a sharp goatee on his olive-skinned face. A mischievous light danced in his dark eyes and his hair was a tousled mess that Jeremy would bet his next royalty check that women couldn’t resist running their fingers through.

“Hello, Cassandra, my beauty. What are you doing riding around with this loser? C’mon, let’s you and I take a month or two in bed together in Asgaard. I’ve been renovating this great castle that Wotan left empty…”

“Loki,” her voice was almost as smooth as his, “just keep your dumb-ass ideas to yourself, or I’ll be forced to show you just what a Trojan spear can do to a Demi-God’s back end.”

Jeremy tried to smother the laugh that erupted from his mouth as Loki’s, the trickster God of the Norse, baleful gaze shifted to him.

He suddenly sobered. If you were going to piss off any of the Gods, pissing off the Norse God of nobody-quite-knew-what-but-he-was-tricky-as-hell-and-then-some was probably not a good idea.