Eight Million Gods-eARC Read online

  eARC

  Advance Reader Copy

  Unproofed

  Baen Books

  by Wen Spencer

  Elfhome Series

  Tinker

  Wolf Who Rules

  Elfhome

  Endless Blue

  Eight Million Gods

  Dedication

  To June Drexler Robertson

  We met when I was an awkward teenager.

  Through thick and thin, you’ve always supported me.

  Thank you for your friendship.

  I value it greatly.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to the many people that made this book possible: Ann Cecil, Joshua Frydman, Nancy Janda, Deleyan Lee, Laurel Jamieson Lohrey, Susan Petroulas, Hope Erica Ring M.D., Traci Scroggins, June Drexler Robertson, Cheryl C. Whitemore, PsyD.

  Special thanks to David G. Kosak

  for stuffing himself into the trunk of a BMW Z4 to prove it could be done,

  1

  Bounce

  “Your mission, if you chose to accept it, is escape your powerful, control freak mother,” Nikki whispered to the mirror hung on the back of the apartment’s door.

  “Miss Delany,” the policeman said on the other side of the door. “I have a court order for your commitment to a psychiatric center for evaluation. Please open the door.”

  Considering Nikki was in a flannel Hello Kitty sleeping shirt, her hair looked like a rat’s nest, and her roommate’s fox terriers were barking up a storm, escaping was truly going to be mission impossible. Taking off nearly naked was not an option; she was going to have to be clever. She grabbed a hair tie from the hall closet doorknob and stalled as she fought with her long blonde hair. “Under the New York State Mental Hygiene Law, Article Nine, Hospitalization of the Mentally Ill, I have the right to appropriate personal clothing and safe storage of personal property. Do you understand my rights?”

  For some weird reason, quoting law to some policemen was like hitting Superman with kryptonite. They just couldn’t cope with material from their home planet. She totally lucked out—there was complete silence from the other side of the door. Score!

  She did a mad loop around the tiny living room that currently doubled as her bedroom, snatching up clothing. Bra. Sweater. Blue jeans. She dashed back to the door, dropped the clothes on the floor, and stripped quickly. Over Yip and Yap, she could hear her mother arguing with the policeman—probably telling him to grow a pair of balls and just break down the door. It was a really good thing that the officer was waffling before he even got in the door.

  “Please, miss, open the door or I’m going to have to break it down.”

  Nikki had learned young that escalation to force was a bad thing; it led to restraints. She had taught herself how to escape a straightjacket, but it involved dislocating a shoulder. She really wanted to avoid that if possible. Opening the door while nude, however, would be very bad.

  “Okay, okay!” she cried to give herself more time. “There’s lots of locks and they stick, so be patient!”

  Luckily, like any good New York City apartment, the door did have multiple locks. She fumbled loudly with them between yanking on pieces of clothing. Of course her bra ended up inside out, but she could just suffer. At least the sweater pulled on without a problem. The jeans attempted to be an octopus of alternating reverse and right side out legs. Panic was trying to set in, which would be very bad. While she wasn’t dangerously insane like her mother would like the legal system to believe, to the causal observer, her hypergraphia certainly made her seem crazy. If she didn’t have pen and paper in hand, her compulsion would make her write on walls with anything available. Time to go to her happy place. She took a deep breath and imagined ocean waves against white sand. Wind through palm trees. Colorful drinks with paper umbrellas.

  “Miss Delany?” The officer knocked again.

  “I’m opening the door!” She hopped in the foyer, tugging on the jeans one leg at time. “This last lock is sticking!” She gave the top lock a half twist, zipped up her jeans, and looked into the mirror. A Ford model at a fashion shoot she wasn’t, but she’d pass as a normal, sane coed about to head out to class. “As always,” she whispered, “this message will self-destruct in five minutes. Cue the Mission Impossible theme music.”

  She jerked open the door.

  The policeman seemed impossibly young, although that could be because he was only about five-six. The clean shave, buzz cut, and wide eyes did not help either, effectively rendering him about twelve years old in appearance. His name badge identified him as H. Russell.

  Behind him, her mother was trying to gracefully shove him aside.

  “Officer Russell.” Nikki backed away from the door, heading for Sheila’s bedroom as fast as she could, hands in plain sight. She still needed something on her feet, her wallet, and something warm, since it was freezing cold for early May. “I need a minute to get shoes on and gather my things.”

  Yip and Yap decided that her coming down the hallway meant that they were getting out of their crate and fell silent.

  “Nikki, I don’t have time for you to get your things.” Her mother was in full queen-warrior-senator mode in a black Chanel business skirt suit, more diamonds than some African nations, and Prada three-inch heels. “I’ve got a limo outside. Just put on some slippers and come quietly.”

  Nikki locked down on the first ten things that wanted out. She focused on the policeman instead. Look Officer Russell, I’m cooperating. I’m sane. You can just stand there and be embarrassed for me.

  “Let me pack one bag of my clothes,” she pleaded aloud. “I’m crashing here. My name isn’t on the lease. If I just walk out, my roommate doesn’t have to let anyone back in to collect my stuff.”

  The truth was she didn’t truly “own” anything. Somewhere far back in her childhood, she had a faint memory of having a bedroom full of things that were hers and hers alone, an entire room full of privacy. Currently everything “hers” was actually stuffed she permanently borrowed off of her roommate, Sheila.

  “I will buy you new stuff.” Her mother closed fast, her heels clicking menacingly on the hardwood floor.

  They hit the bedroom door at the same time, and Yip and Yap went ballistic at the sight of a brand-new person to play with. Instantly Nikki was alone in the room. The fox terriers were the main reasons she was crashing with Sheila instead of other friends; her mother was terrified of dogs. She wanted every advantage she could use against her mother, just in case of days like this. Nikki hurriedly yanked open “her” drawer in Sheila’s dresser and grabbed her wallet and passport.

  A quick check confirmed her wallet had everything she needed to start life over. Again. Next time in Japan. That had been her plan since she was fifteen, only she wasn’t supposed to leave for another six months. This wouldn’t be the first time, though, that her mother had screwed up her plans. Nikki shoved her wallet and passport into her jeans’ back pocket and grabbed a pair of socks.

  Officer Russell appeared in the door as she sat on Sheila’s bed to put on her shoes. Sheila’s perfume still hung in the air, making Nikki aware that she was about to vanish out of her roommate’s life without a decent good-bye. This is so fucking unfair!

  Fair or not, it was what she had to work with. How was she going to get out of this? She pulled on her running shoes. She needed time to think, so she grabbed Sheila’s gym bag and made a show of stuffing clothing into it. Yip and Yap would make sure that her mother stayed as far as possible from the bedroom, but Officer Russell was firmly anchored in the doorway.

  “This is for your own good,” her mother called from the living room, nearly shouting to be heard over the barking. “You’re not stable enough to live alone.”


  Nikki breathed out a laugh. This was going to be one of those conversations where the whole point was to influence the interloper, not the person actually addressed. Her mother realized that Officer Russell was the main thing blocking Nikki now and was trying to shift him to her mother’s side. Nikki hadn’t been totally aware of winning him over but trusted her mother’s judgment.

  “I don’t live alone,” Nikki pointed out to both her mother and Officer Russell. “I have a roommate.”

  “She posts homosexual erotica on the Internet,” her mother countered. “Some of it involves underage boys.”

  Nikki heart leapt slightly in fear. “You did a background check on Sheila?”

  “My teenage daughter disappears to go live with a complete stranger she met on the Internet. Yes, I had a background check done on the woman.”

  “I turned twenty last month, Mother.” Nikki picked up her lip balm and used it on her lips one last time. Her hypergraphia begged her to scribble an entire random scene onto the dresser mirror. She controlled the urge and only wrote, “Bounce” onto the glass.

  There, this time she let her roommate know that she hadn’t been murdered in a back alley. Poor Julie had actually reported her missing before the FBI let her know that Nikki had been involuntarly committed to a mental hospital. And wasn’t that fun to escape from?

  Did her mother know about her plans to flee to Japan? The biggest problem with her plan was how easy it was for a senator to track a US citizen via a passport. Provided, of course, they knew to look. Up to now, Nikki been careful not to cross any borders. She had used a spy level of caution in getting a copy of her birth certificate and applying for her passport. She had researched methods of getting out the country quietly and how movements of citizens were reported. If her mother didn’t have her flagged, then she could hopscotch to Japan. If she did . . .

  Nikki closed her eyes. Breath deep. Happy place. A desert island, far, far away from her mother. Away from the closed-in spaces of a mental hospital. Nikki, a laptop, Internet connection, and nothing but white sand, shifting shadows, and the dazzle of sun off the ocean.

  “Are you okay?” Officer Russell stepped closer, and Yip and Yap howled their disappointment that the second new person wasn’t letting them out of their crate.

  Nikki nodded, opening her eyes. “Just trying to remember if I’d forgotten anything.” Like getting out of this apartment a free woman. Still, she needed to find out first what her mother knew. She made a show of opening drawers and going through the contents.

  “Sheila writes stories based on Twilight,” Nikki called to her mother. “You know—vampires and werewolves? They’re not real people. It’s called fan fiction, and it’s all on a password-protected forum. You have to register with a valid e-mail account and verify you’re over eighteen to read the stories.”

  “And you think this makes a site secure?”

  She knew it didn’t. The question was, in digging through Sheila’s private websites, did her mother’s people find Nikki’s? Did it matter? If Sheila broadcasted Nikki’s “Bounce” command, everything would be abandoned and everyone would move to the new site.

  Nikki took a deep breath and tightened her hands against taking out the lip balm and this time writing on the walls. Fighting with her mother would get her into more trouble. She needed to run, not stand and try to win this argument she had no hope of winning. She never won. Right now, she needed to be clever and quick.

  There was a fire escape outside the window. She had tested it out—once. The open steelwork triggered her mild fear of heights. If she could get a head start, she could be to the subway station before Officer Russell caught her. She needed him out of the room.

  “Here.” She pushed the gym bag into his hands. “Oh, my pills. Can you grab them from the medicine cabinet?” She pointed toward the bathroom and scooped up coins from the dresser top. The one time she attended high school, she lived in dorms. There was a prank that involved the heavy room doors and coins. She had never tried it out on the apartment doors.

  “Pills?” Officer Russell’s eyes went a little wider.

  “Medicine. Mental patient. I know you guys all are a little jumpy about mixing the two. My birth control is in the medicine cabinet with some of my roommate’s prescriptions.”

  “Y-y-yeah.”

  She followed him across the hall.

  “Birth control?” her mother cried from living room—as far as possible from the dogs as she could get while staying within supervision range of the bathroom.

  “Trust me,” Nikki said. “None of us want you to be a grandmother.”

  Officer Russell snickered and opened up the crowded cabinet. “Whoa.”

  “It’s in the back,” she said unhelpfully, pulled shut the door, and pushed coins into the space between the wood and the jamb.

  “Hey!” Officer Russell yelped as he found the door wedged shut tight.

  “Nikki!” her mother shouted.

  Three steps and Nikki was in Shiela’s bedroom. She hit the latch on the dog kennel even as her mother cried, “You stupid idiot! I told you that she was dangerous!”

  Yip and Yap came bounding out, nearly levitating with their excitement. They ignored Nikki; she was familiar and thus boring. Barking madly, they charged toward the living room. Nikki slammed shut the bedroom door and flicked the lock. Two more steps and she was to the window and then out onto the fire escape.

  Nikki’s heart lurched as she forced herself out onto the steel catwalk and then down the rickety ladder. She couldn’t let her fear of heights slow her down. She hit the street and started to run. She didn’t stop running until she was in Japan.

  2

  The OMG Baseball Bat

  She was living in Japan. Osaka, Japan, to be exact. Two months and it still startled her in a way she found weirdly uncomfortable. She had moved dozens of times before in the States, from suburban mental hospitals, to a dormitory at a private high school in the middle of nowhere, to walk-up apartments in gritty inner city neighborhoods. Never before had she constantly felt like she was being hit in the head with a baseball bat labeled “OMG.”

  Some days it seemed like everything triggered the feeling. Waking up lying on a futon on the floor. Whack! Going pee at a public restroom by squatting over a ceramic trough. Whack! Wandering up and down the levels of a bookstore with thousands of interesting-looking books without being able to read a single word. Whack! Walking through an entire shopping district, surrounded by people, and unable to guess or even ask where to buy a basic cooking knife. Whack! One minute she would be steaming along, enjoying the adventure of living on her own, and then the “OMG” baseball bat of cultural shock would catch her smack between the eyes.

  By lunchtime, she was slightly punch-drunk by the number of hits she’d taken. The only reason she didn’t suggest meeting at KFC or McDonalds was somehow the combination of familiar and uniquely Japanese that the two food chains represented would have been more unsettling than the little hole-in-the-wall traditional okonomiyaki shop. At least the act of taking off her sandals in the restaurant’s foyer, putting them in one of the many cubbyholes, bowing to the waitress, and stepping down into the sitting area around a grill-topped table was now comfortingly familiar despite being totally foreign.

  Nikki waved off the menu that the waitress was trying to offer her. “Sumimasen,” Nikki tried to remember the Japanese word for “menu.” “English—English . . .”

  “Ah!” The waitress smiled as she realized what Nikki was trying for. “English menu. Hai! One minute.”

  The waitress disappeared into the impossibly small kitchen hidden behind a half wall where a cook was already standing.

  Her best friend, Miriam Frydman, laughed in greeting. “One of those kinds of days?”

  “God, yes.” Nikki tossed her backpack onto the seat beside her. “There are days I could just kill my mother. All this would be easier if I’d been able to stick to our plan and learn Japanese.”

  Nikki
had met Miriam the only time she attended “normal” high school. Not that you could really call Foxcroft ‘normal’ as it was an expensive private boarding school. Miriam always had a fascination for all things Japanese. Nikki just wanted to have half the planet between her and her mother. She and Miriam had come up with the detailed plan that would have had both of them fluent in Japanese, employed by the same company, and sharing an apartment together. Her mother, though, had yanked Nikki out of school in her senior year and ruined every later attempt to keep to the plan.

  Miriam tilted her head and squinted in deep thought. Her bright pink-dyed hair, gathered into quirky pigtails, and her high-school outfit were both part of her own battle with all things Japanese. She’d confessed that she had come to the conclusion that as a gaijin—an “outsider”—she would never fully fit in, so she had decided to stand out. Nikki would never have the courage to dye her hair or wear anything as short as Miriam’s miniskirt, but Miriam was fearless. “Nah, I think you’d still be reeling even if you’d learned Japanese first. I felt the same way for the first six months. Really? The toilets alone break all language barriers when it comes to cultural shock.” She slid her glass slightly closer to Nikki’s side. “A stiff drink does help.”

  Nikki snorted. “I’m actually tempted. Much as a drug addiction scares the willies out of me, knowing that something like valium would make it—make it seem better—for a while . . .”

  Miriam dragged the glass back to herside of the table. “My bad. Sorry.”

  The waitress came back with a sketchily translated menu and slightly better phrased “What do you want?”

  They picked their okonomiyaki toppings, Nikki pointing to her selection on the English menu and Miriam ordering from the Japanese one.