Saviors 101 E-Book

M. L. Buchman

• Herausgeber: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

-a Deities Anonymous novel- The Gods sent Dana Murphy to Seattle to save the Earth. But, no one remembered to tell her that. The problem? In a fit of ennui, the Software that Runs the Universe launches the Armageddon subroutine. Now, all Creation won’t last the week. Dana’s assets: • The Best Friend – dropped out of Girl Scouts to drive race cars • The Boy Friend – an aerodynamics major who goes with the flow • The Nerd – wrote the hottest new on-line game • The Devil – who’s in hiding. • A pint-size angel with a talking disorder—she never shuts up. • A poet and a prophet with over five thousand years combined experience at being dead. The forces of evil are amassing. Then the gods start bickering...

Leseprobe

Deities Anonymous

Saviors 101:First Book of the Reluctant Messiah

byM. L. Buchman

Dedication

To every single person who has made me laugh,

I hope that I gave the gift in return.

Chapter 1-six years until Armageddon--Lap 1-

Dana Murphy hated the rusty old energy spells from her book Tips and Tricks from the Gods, they took so much work to resurrect. At fifteen, her mom’s old one-speed Schwinn was still a bit tall for her to ride. But she could just manage it, and it was quite necessary tonight. Mama kept saying she’d been a late bloomer as well, but Dana was sure getting tired of the pancake-flat, knobby-knee look.

The bike complained as she leaned into the energy current along Seattle’s Ravenna Boulevard. The streetlights shone down through the gaps in the ancient maples leaning over the street. Trees that drew constant complaints of sap and bird droppings from the owners of the BMWs and Audis that now lined the road.

Twenty laps. She’d have to go twenty laps around the neighborhood in a very specific pattern. That was assuming she’d properly reformulated the powers correctly for latitude, longitude, and era.

Dana knew she was different, but at two a.m. on a warm, fall night she was alone, which was her most comfortable way to be. At least she’d come by her role as a misfit honestly.

By the time Dana Murphy was five, she knew her red-haired, deeply-freckled mother was different. It wasn’t the distracted air that sometimes led to Dana eating steaming hot meatloaf with baked potatoes and broccoli for breakfast, or cold, syrup-sodden pancakes sliding out of her Lisa Frank lunchbox at daycare.

It wasn’t even the piano that played itself in the living room, though she’d never been able to find where it plugged in. All it had was pedals and scrolls of paper.

The first really weird thing was that there was no television or video games in the house. Her first after-daycare play date at Theresa Peterson’s had included Barney and Super Mario Brothers which had greatly shaken her firm views on the sensibility of her universe. She hadn’t gotten over it until six weeks later when she’d managed to whip Theresa’s behind at her brother Sam’s Super Car Racer III.

In fact, the only modern device her mother owned was a CD player which held five discs at a time and played music incessantly.

During her entire childhood, the house was never quiet.

She’d wake in the middle of the night to hear Frankie Avalon give way to Frankie Lane then Frank Sinatra and finally Frank Zappa.

She’d learned her alphabet by organizing her mother’s massive collection by the artist’s first name, and her mother played them in order from one end of the collection to the other. For the rest of her life Tina Turner’s pelvis-thumping tones were a natural segue into Tiny Tim’s ukulele. When they reached Zydeco, the Last Twenty Years, she knew that dancing together to ABBA was not far away.

Dana never got over the foreign feel of libraries, as if she’d walked into a world where the last-name-first shelving order had been designed by Salvador Dali.

No, what was really different about her mom was the quiet stream of people who came to visit her. Whispered counseling sessions in the back room that had been converted to a cozy office.

Dana’d learned early on, short of arterial hemorrhage or a significant outbreak of fire, she wasn’t supposed to enter the rose-colored office when the door was closed.

That didn’t mean she was above spying.

The old house had simple floor vents to heat the upstairs bedroom. The metal grates created a hole into the ceiling of the room below for heat to rise into the upstairs room. Dana would lie for hour upon hour on the hardwood floor spying down on her mother’s treatment sessions. Buried beneath the big black quilt from her bed, Dana would stare down through the grate, enjoying the vague puff of warm air on her face.

All the scents her mother used would waft upward. Lavender candles. Almond massage oil. Incense. The sharp nose-tickling bite of burning sage between sessions.

Sometimes Mama’s patients were partly clothed. Sometimes naked. Sometimes they were poked with needles. Sometimes smeared with salves. And sometimes, which were Dana’s favorites, they lay there, fully clothed with a cloth over their eyes.

Mama would stand in her flowing caftan all radiant and beautiful at their side. The candlelight would make her pale skin and freckles all rich and warm. No jewelry. Her hair in its usual snarled ponytail behind her like a chestnut mare’s mane teased bouffant by the wind, and she would wave her hands slowly above the person. Never touching them.

The people would relax, tense, twitch, just like Dana’s string puppets, but she couldn’t ever see the strings no matter how she squinted. Not until one night when her eyes had been really tired from a long afternoon of whipping Theresa’s behind on Doom did she see the strings.

Her mother was unsnarling a long line of snagged white light above Mrs. Crane’s left hip. Dana could see how it was all stuck right where there was a visual break of light in the bone. But she knew the real bone was whole because the woman had limped through the door just fine.

When she’d asked Mama later, she’d tried to change the subject. But five-year old persistence paid off.

Mrs. Crane had never gotten over a hip that she’d broken as a little girl and had healed wrong. Mama was straightening out the mess it had made in her energy. She pointed to a whole shelf of books with titles like: Hands of Light, Energy Medicine, and The Subtle Body. She wasn’t sure what “subtle” meant, but they had really pretty covers and lots of pictures illustrating how to fix people without having to cut big holes in them. It made Dana proud of her mother. They were also the books she’d learned to read from.

But she knew that Theresa’s mom, who served healthy snacks and whose dinners always tasted dinnerish, would never understand. And after Theresa had called her a liar and her mother a faker, she hadn’t mentioned her mother again.

To anyone.

Prologue the First-21 years until Armageddon-

No one thought that letting Escher into Heaven was a mistake, but many questioned Michelle’s decision to put him on the Heavenly architectural committee. The Devil Incarnate admired the result of her efforts to mess with the minds of Heaven and Hell. The redesigned meeting room that spanned the border between Heaven and Hell was Escher’s masterpiece. Few immortals shared her feelings and some couldn’t even form a coherent sentence while here. Which had been part of the point. She was the Devil after all and did have a reputation to uphold.

She dropped into the plush red leather chair at the head of the table.

“Michelle.” Her name echoed nicely in the empty room. It translated out of the ancient Hebrew as “Who is like God?” A joke few understood anymore, nonetheless she gleefully answered her echo.

“Me!”

She followed the path of the second echo as it bounced around the room.

The others she’d managed to contact would be along soon. Most, she suspected, checked their caller-ID and chose to risk her wrath rather than pick up the damned phone. If a half-dozen immortals showed up, she’d be lucky.

She’d been more patient during the early millennia of creation, cleaning up after God’s various disasters. He’d made a fine primordial soup but couldn’t have gotten life out of it to save His soul. The crucial impetus, as usual, had been up to her. The images of life’s progress since that moment were depicted in intricate mosaic above the chair to her left. Primordial ooze, single-cell colonies, swimmers, crawlers, walkers, and eventually tawny teenage tennis pros in short, white skirts endorsing soft drinks.

The Celestials Association for Better Redemption, CABER was coming apart. The council’s title had been invented by the batty Celtic goddess Sheela Na Gig who liked watching burly men tossing telephone-pole sized logs. Of course once they witnessed the sport, many of the other goddesses admitted old Sheela had a point about caber tossing. Even in modern times, it was a popular outing among the female deities to go to Highland games and watch strong men in kilts grunting over something besides women.

And Escher’s design didn’t help appease the hundred thousand petty rivalries. The long, white table folded back upon itself in such a way that no immortal was ever more than two seats from any other, no matter how many were in attendance. It was awkward to carry on a decent grudge by ignoring an immortal enemy when they were sitting elbow-to-elbow. The table looked normal enough as long as you didn’t think too hard. But that wasn’t what invoked the most complaints.

Nor was it the mosaics that covered walls, ceiling, and floor in a mind-bending cacophony of color. In addition to evolution, which had called upon the god of science as its defender, the history of every religion that had a recognized god or goddess was laid out in the miniscule tiles.

And all these flowed together until each turned into the other and almost every one turned into the same tawny teenage tennis pros in short, white skirts endorsing soft drinks. Escher really had a thing about them, somewhere between idolization and stark terror. And there was no way to separate the tennis pros from Zeus. He’d been a rabid womanizer since birth, so this wasn’t as unlikely as your average shmoo supposed. He hadn’t been spotted since entering a go-go bar wearing a paisley shirt in November of 1966. Not that anyone missed the old bastard.

Escher’s portrait of Michelle always made her smile every time she tracked it down in the ever-shifting mosaic. Two hands taller than Yahweh, they stood near each other, but not too close. Yahweh: the short, round man, the creative artist who had thought up so many cool and beautiful ideas.

And herself, the tall woman with long dark hair and vivid green eyes. Not a slip of a woman, but neither Rubenesque. Just a good solid woman, with a figure that had made many a mortal weep. And more than a few immortals when she’d set her mind to it. The portrait showed a woman of stamina rather than a frail wallflower. A woman with muscles made strong by cleaning up the messes Yahweh had left down the ages.

But it wasn’t this swirl of religion and creation that made the brains of the immortals really hurt and go begging for a god-sized dose of salicylic acid.

The feature that really twisted up most of them also happened to be Michelle’s favorite part of Escher’s design. It was the long rows of arched windows that looked down upon all creation. The simultaneous views from varied angles could be disconcerting at first. Out one window, the rolling meadows of Heaven spread forever. The next revealed the Big Bang in that silent instant when pure dark was giving way to pure light but no sound had yet been heard. Another looked down upon a hummingbird’s nest in a lilac bush somewhere along the Oregon coast. A close-up view down the throat of a volcano on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, made the Hell that she’d developed look like a toddler’s paradise.

What really bugged most gods was that while they could walk the length of the room in a few dozen steps, the windows went on forever without limit. And there was still plenty of wall space for the ever-entwining mosaic. It made the controlling-type gods downright twitchy. The few immortals who were at peace in this room either depended on a sense of humor, as she felt herself prone to do, or were so connected with the Cosmic Oneness that they found it beguiling.

Those not so equipped made a point of staring fixedly at the table. That way they saw the world as being entirely in their control; a blank white slate to scribble the future upon its surface in colored crayons, preferably the full sixty-four-color set with the sharpener in the back.

She slouched down in her favorite chair, kicked off her sandals and rested her feet on the table in order to wait more comfortably; immortals were rarely punctual as they thought they had all the time in Creation. Michelle let her eyes rest upon a view of the moon buggy for Apollo 16 sitting idly at the foot of the Descartes Mountains. A brilliant practical joker had turned it around in the direction opposite to the way the astronauts had parked it, but so far no one had noticed. She, at least, appreciated her own humor.

Being the Devil Incarnate had its perks.

Chapter 2-six years until Armageddon--lap 14-

The neighborhood had changed a lot in the decade since Dana had first beaten Theresa at Super Mario Brothers and set out on her quest to become the neighborhood’s premier video-game champ. Now fourteen, she’d taken down so many contenders that the boys avoided her in the halls at school, just in case she might challenge them. Nothing worse for a teenage boy than having his ass whipped by a breastless girl. You couldn’t even pretend that you’d lost on purpose to get her alone.

Ravenna Boulevard now had a lot of twenty- and thirty-year olds who had moved in as the generations ahead of them died off leaving small, run-down, brown-and-gray houses vacant and for sale at incredible prices.

The yuppies, ousted from their social milieu by the hipsters, had descended en masse upon the old neighborhood to stake their new claim. They’d added new stories and vaulted decks. They’d bankrupted themselves for the latest kitchen appliance and entertainment system. That they also had to tear open walls to replace the knob-and-tube wiring to run their computers and espresso machines was almost incidental.

It wasn’t just the museum-old wiring in the homes that was causing the problems. The garages were too small for modern cars, unimagined in bygone days when smaller, narrower cars carried whole families across the country rather than individuals zipping to the nearest shopping mall.

So their fancy cars lined every street, clogging up perfectly good energy pathways. Hence the inevitable result of nature’s winged creatures constant target practice upon available windshields.

Dana turned left across the far lane against the light and headed up 15th. The traffic could be dangerous, even at two a.m., but it was more dangerous to stop once the spell’s energy started to move. Sluggishly at best, but the current was finally moving. The warm spring night felt fresh across her brow under the edge of her bike helmet.

This should clear off her mother’s post-partum depression. Talin was almost a year old now, and still her mother was in a deep funk.

Even though Dana was tired, she made herself keep pumping the Schwinn’s pedals. A right into the alley before 65th, a block short of her uncle’s deli, toward the direction where the sun would climb over the snow-capped Cascade mountains, but not for a few more hours.

A shout. A couple kids dodged aside barely in time to avoid a collision. Pounding feet took off in three different directions, scattering DVDs down the alley. Had they stolen some yuppie’s collection for resale or for themselves? Their high-pitched voices hadn’t broken yet, so she suspected the latter. She’d be careful when she came round the corner on her next circuit. Though the Schwinn’s fat tires were okay on most surfaces, a pile of DVDs might be a bit slippery.

Two lefts, three rights and she was once again coming onto Ravenna. Fourteen laps down, six more to go if the ancient formula was to be trusted. She took a deep breath and kept going. Mama depended on her.

The problem was, Dana’s research had revealed that while her Mama wasn’t a deity, she’d certainly rubbed shoulders with one at some point and it had screwed up aspects of her life ever since.

Dana had researched the enhanced powers on her own. Her mother had been a good start, able to see the aura of energy lines that danced around a person, but that’s as far as her vision went. That was the limitation of Mama’s powers, and they weren’t even particularly godly, just unusually clear-sighted. So, where her mother’s knowledge had run out, by the time Dana was seven, she’d had to look elsewhere for her education.

She ground her way back up along 15th. The old leather seat squeaked against her shorts.

Joining the Seattle Society of Wicca and Other Heresies, had been of no help at all. As Uncle Joshua had warned her when she was just seven, most of them were women who were merely looking for a way to control their husband’s fidelity or their best friend’s husband’s infidelity.

Instead it was Joshua who had become her mentor, slipping her the odd manuscript now and then filled with stories of the gods. But they weren’t just the stories that were told in children’s fairy tales. They were like Dummies’ Guide to Manipulating Godly Powers.

She considered asking him where he got them, but thought better of it.

That she’d had to learn Sanskrit and Hebrew in order to read them had been an inconvenience, but not a bad one. She had a knack for it, having learned Yiddish curses at her uncle’s knee.

Her legs burned with the effort of bicycling, but this was the first night in over ten months that she’d had a chance to try the energy spell.

The power of the blue moon, the second full moon of the month, was essential for a young energy worker. She insisted on thinking of herself that way, it was more comfortable than wondering why it was quite so easy for her to manipulate the powers she read in Uncle Joshua’s books that kept referring to gods.

All she wanted to do was snap her mother out of depression. If she were a true goddess, she’d just take her mother for a stroll along the River Styx, or feed her one of Freia’s golden apples. Not having such tools available, she’d had to improvise.

Post-partum depression was bad enough in the ungifted, but in a woman of her mother’s latent power, it was literally killing the roses in the garden. Dana had to gather a fair bit of intent to punch through her mother’s inertia just to get through the front door when coming home from school.

Mama was just an energy worker who had snarled the house into a dark shroud lit only by the violet bubbles of her half-brother’s incessant babbling.

She sighed and turned onto 65th, lap ten.

What Dana really wanted was to just fit in. Just spend time worrying over who would win American Idol, and giggle with her girlfriends. Instead, she had only Theresa for a girlfriend and at fourteen didn’t even have a steady boyfriend for crying out loud. How was that fair?

She took a deep breath as a stitch formed in her side. Just the body’s natural weakness. She turned onto 15th again and kept pedaling.

She’d had a knack for applying the skills she’d studied in the manuals, but translating them into the modern world, her real world, had proved more difficult. She once caused her sneaker to turn magenta and only later understood it could as easily have been her dark red hair, that matched her mama’s so perfectly, turning permanently a bright pink if she’d happened to be wearing a hat made of artificial fibers. Gods were so strange.

At least she hoped her mom’s problem was post-partum, otherwise all this effort wasn’t going to help anything. Her second step-dad had called Mama “cracked” right before he climbed into his secretary’s Lexus and roared off into the night. If Dana’d been a bit more quick thinking, she might have created a crevasse across Ravenna Boulevard between 14th and 15th that opened a steaming vent to the very core of the planet.

The best she’d been able to come up with, on the spur of the moment before they roared out of sight, was twisting up her father’s libido into a tight knot of impotency within a five hundred mile radius of the woman. For the rest of existence, even if his new flame were passing by in an airplane, he’d be out of service until she was a couple of states away.

Of course, he’d never suspect that “little Dana” would play such a trick on him, because “Daddy’s little girl,” as he’d called her since the first day he’d slept with Mama, didn’t know such things. Even though she was fourteen and had tried necking with both Tommy and Jeff from school. But Tommy grabbed her too hard with overeager hands and Jeff was a really lousy kisser. He was so bad that it hadn’t taken any further experience to be certain of the fact. So she’d wait until the men her age were older and more mature. She hoped it wasn’t too long a wait.

She almost crashed her bike as she turned once again up the alley. She’d forgotten the scattered DVDs. The handlebars twisted sharply one way on season three of Married with Children as her rear wheel slid the other way on Look Who’s Talking.

If those had taken her down, it would have been terribly ironic considering her baby brother never ever shut up. Of course, he didn’t make any sense yet, but that didn’t slow Talin down for a second.

That’s why Mama had to snap out of it. If she paid more attention to her brother, he might shut up long enough for the energy to settle down, then Dana could complete a thought within the confines of their home.

The current wasn’t fighting her any more, but it should be moving along more sharply than this by now. What lap was she on? She closed her eyes for a moment and let the fresh air of Seattle pre-dawn autumn run across her forehead while coasting down the Ravenna hill back toward 15th. Fourteen laps. She was sure of it. So maybe it was okay.

She leaned against the handlebars and stood up on the pedals. Her calves were burning, but Shiva’s ancient formula for curing Parvati of her depression after she gave birth to Ganesh, the elephant-headed Indian god, was clear. You couldn’t be seated for the first half of lap fifteen or nineteen. Having to bike “no hands” on the eighteenth lap didn’t worry her much, except the alley. She whipped a little Thor-style hammering energy onto the pavement the next time she approached the scattered DVDs and flattened them into the alley’s concrete surface.

It would be worth hanging around later in the morning to watch as the owner tried to figure out how his movies had become a permanent part of the asphalt in his back alley. Not only was his wife’s bad taste there for all to see, but his hidden collection of porn wasn’t so well hidden anymore. He also probably shouldn’t have transferred his own romantic efforts onto so many discs. Or labeled his amateur videos shot with former girlfriends with pictures of the more graphic moments, all now smiling, grunting, or faking it for the camera each with an underlying expression of immense boredom that men never seemed to notice. Be an interesting time in their household over the next few days as he tried to explain away what he’d have to tear up the pavement to remove.

The current slid along beside her nicely as she took the turns that led back to the start of lap fifteen. She stood up to pedal as she passed the bright blue and yellow house in which her mother and brother were now fast asleep. She could hear him over the baby monitor she’d kept in her pocket.

Unbelievable. Talin sang even in his sleep.

Prologue the Second -still 21 years until Armageddon-

“We need to send another Messiah,” Michelle announced to the gathered cohort of CABER.

That certainly got everyone’s attention, mostly as a roar of denial.

She’d gotten a full half-dozen to attend aside from herself. The days when CABER commanded a hundred or more deities per meeting were long past, thankfully. Those meetings had led to many arguments and little progress. Over the centuries the attendance had tapered off to what she preferred to think of as an Executive Committee.

The Buddha sat quietly, contemplating the richness and depth of the universe, or maybe he was simply smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Apollo, the Greek Sun God, and his buddy Shiva, the Hindu God of Beginning and Ending, she could always get to come by telling the other one that his pal would be there. Neither ever thought to check with each other to see if she was lying, which being the Devil of course she was, so that worked. Dionysus, the Greek God of the grape, always showed up just because he was a good sport.

She’d managed to balance these with three women: Isis, the founding Goddess of Egypt, and Parvati, Shiva’s wife. She used the friend trick with them as well. Though they’d seen right through Michelle’s lies, they showed up pretty consistently to humor her anyway. Mary Magdalene might not be a God in her own right, but she’d married the Son of God, and was a good friend who was always willing to help Michelle.

“I don’t see why we need to keep trying. They’ll figure it out on their own. Or not.” Mary Magdalene sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over the chest that had mesmerized the son of God. Her hair flowed like a fountain of gold and her blue eyes would put gem-quality stones to shame.

“Those are your husband’s words. So, he’s not coming?”

Mary scowled a moment longer and then laughed, a trickling sound that made everyone around the table smile a bit, except for Apollo and Shiva who had made being grouchy into an immortals’ Olympian contest. Michelle knew that Mary didn’t have enough anger in her entire soul to last more than a few seconds.

“You know him too well. You know what he’d say about Messiah-hood, ‘Been there. Done that.’ I get so tired of hearing that he’s ‘paid his dues.’ He tried using it to avoid doing the dishes, but I shut that down right away.”

The first Messiah. Another of Yahweh’s botched jobs. Michelle had tried to intercede, but there wasn’t much you could do with the Romans of that day.

“Okay, so that’s one of our lessons learned the hard way, Ancient Rome was not the best place to send a Messiah. What else do we have for the post-project analysis of the first Messiah project?”

“Well, the media wasn’t quite in place for him.” Apollo the Greek Sun God glowed from his seat by the window, which happened to open onto a view of the surface of the sun.

“Something you’d know all to well.” Shiva growled, from his seat to Apollo’s left, the gold medal in the immortal grouch competition nearly in his grasp.

“Can I help it if you’re a little Indian dweeb who cut off his own son’s head?” The glittering god of gold prodded.

Just as everyone expected, that set off the Hindu God of Beginning and Ending.

“I’d been busy, how was I supposed to know that the boy sleeping in my wife’s arms was our son grown? I was only gone for, what, a decade and a bit.”

“But an elephant’s head? Did you have to replace our son’s head with that of an elephant?” Parvati, a bountifully voluptuous mortal who’d have driven Peter Paul Rubens to his grave, had achieved her godhood through marriage. Though Michelle doubted if Shiva had gotten the time of day, much less any sex, since he’d beheaded their son. She sat to Apollo’s right and leaned forward to glare around him at her husband.

“We were discussing the First Messiah,” Michelle fought for control. “C’mon gang, time to bring the focus back. Anything else on the subject of sending a First Messiah?”

“Well, the media is ready now.” Apollo rapped the pommel of his flaming sword on the table. It worked to break up the scowls crossing back and forth in front of him.

He did have a point. It was more than a decade after the crux of the second millennium after all. And television and the Net did carry electronic preachers, religious jihads, Britney Spears, and innumerable tawny teenage tennis pros.

An awkward silence rattled around the table looking for somewhere to roost. Was she the only one here who thought about these things?

“Okay,” Michelle nodded a thanks to Apollo.

He glowed at the praise. One reason he was placing out of the medals in the Grumpiest God competition, he was, on occasion, a decent guy.

“In summary, the problems facing the Nazarene were manifold. He’d arrived when the Jews were oppressed, but perhaps a bit less than usual. When the Romans were dictators, but fairer than most who had come before and a welcome relief from the disorganization and constant city-state wars of the Greeks.

“Even the Gods were doing fairly well back then. Egypt still prayed to Isis, Amun, and Re. The Greeks had their pantheon and the Romans theirs.” Though she’d leave out that the Greek Gods were constantly bickering, but only among themselves so no one else much minded. And that the Romans, who were mostly genetic clones of the Greek and Egyptian gods, were little better.

Yahweh, being the first monotheistic god in the whole Mediterranean, was the butt of innumerable jokes around that time, but it was all just friendly teasing and occasional pranks which he laughed off good-naturedly enough.

“So, the whole reason the First Messiah was sent, the salvation of humanity, rapidly devolved into a complex bollix of cult worship and misunderstandings. For one thing, his literal words became sacred, rather than the content. For another, having more people killed in his name that any other over the next two millennia wasn’t even close to being proper protocol.”

“The whole ‘virgin birth’ concept didn’t work out so well for anyone,” Mary noted. “Almost no one believed my mother-in-law. Then the moderns invented parthenogenesis to explain away that miracle. I think we finally proved it as a failed methodology for introducing a Messiah with Guinevere.”

The night before he was supposed to start on his Messianic mission, Guinevere’s son by virgin birth, Stephen, was beheaded by King Arthur for Stephen’s discovering the king performing a less than virtuous act with a trio of chamber maids. His beheading was the lost historical fact that had sent Guinevere into Lancelot’s arms for solace, causing the whole age of Camelot to collapse before it had a chance to really get going.

“Moving along, that brings us to the failed concept of sending a Messiah who could write their own words.”

“I thought we tried that.” Dionysus raised a waggling head from his close attention to the flagon of wine before him. Michelle never let him drink until after the meetings had collapsed. He simply couldn’t drink without singing and there was no way to run a serious meeting when his gorgeous baritone voice was rippling its way through Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs.

“There was Jeffrey,” Parvati supplied.

Jeffrey had died of writer’s cramp during the First Dark Ages because nobody was doing nothing no how in those times. Too few were educated enough to read the first-ever novels. Perhaps if he’d chosen to write in a genre other than romance. Or maybe it was just that the quill and parchment was a complete and painful failure as a mechanism for a mute to spread the words of the gods. The worst bit, they’d accidentally dropped him off where he’d had to do it in a painfully primitive language called English. The language simply hadn’t evolved sufficiently to properly highlight the message of peace and sisterhood. It was solely suited to the blood, guts, and mead of Beowulf. Not that English was all that much better now.

“And Dante,” Shiva added, not wanting to be one-upped by his wife.

Beatrice had Virgil lead Dante down into the Inferno, but Virgil forgot to bring him back, so the whole Messiah as a third-party method was discarded after that.

“And poor Marlowe,” Michelle listed the last writer they’d sent.

Elizabethan England had been a time of immense turmoil. CABER sent a playwright and poet of unique skills in both the spoken and the written word. A Messiah who could set their own words down properly rather than the illiterate son of an illiterate carpenter made sense even if it hadn’t worked out. Faust was just the first level warm-up exercise. Who knew that he would manage to get himself stabbed to death at twenty-nine over an unpaid bar bill.

“Maybe it’s time we sent a woman again.” Isis had launched the entire Egyptian civilization from her loins, giving her a rather feminist view of all creation.

“Look at what your church did to women in the Bible back in the fourth century.” Isis warmed up to her argument, her low, sexy voice impossible to not pay attention to. “Those weasely old men were scared to death of strong women. They dumped tens of thousands of words, that would have supported Jesus, right down the holy bidet because it made the women seem too powerful. Mary, your marriage to Jesus, flushed. All of his brothers and sisters? No, that might imply she wasn’t a virgin mother, flushed. Like there’s any way Joseph could have kept his hands off your gorgeous mother-in-law once she was done birthing the Son of God.”

“A woman.” Michelle rolled the sound of it over her tongue. No one had suggested that in a long, long time. Not since Cassandra had been sent to Troy, accidentally cursed with the twin gifts of perfect prophecy and the inability to make anyone believe her. A quick glance at Apollo caused him to look away quickly and scowl at everyone. To his credit, he’d tried to remove his curse on Cassandra any number of times to no avail.

Isis nodded emphatically, her golden ankh necklace sliding up and down her deep cleavage of lush olive skin as she did so.

“A normal birth. Give her a mother, a father, and a normal birth right down to the hospital birthing room, the Mozart CD, and the epidural. You’re the Devil, you could give them a big mortgage to cheer you up.”

Michelle considered it for a long moment, but decided she wouldn’t intentionally add to the new Messiah’s burdens. Maybe they’d set up a college fund.

The Buddha cleared his throat, and they all turned to pay attention. On the rare occasions he spoke, it was almost invariably wise, something Michelle really wished she could pull off with a little more frequency.

“We have not addressed the topic of foreknowledge. I think that one of Jesus’ greatest challenges was being born with the full knowledge of what was happening to him right down to his betrayer and the date of his death. It was a mistake for his sake, if not for history’s.” He looked around the table. “We should at least give the kid a break until her twenty-first birthday. No foreknowledge until then.”

Everyone nodded, especially the mothers.

“So it’s decided.” Michelle didn’t even bother calling for a show of hands, a method of getting meetings to agree to her own consensus that had worked very well for her over the eons.

“And,” Loki’s smooth baritone made everyone twitch and turn to the door. Except Dionysus, who continued to gaze longingly upon his wine flagon.

“Late as usual, Loki.” Michelle wasn’t the only one who disliked the Norse demi-god of mischief and fire. No matter how smooth and handsome, he wallowed in his own agenda, and his rich baritone had led more than one of these immortals into harm’s way. People were still wondering what had happened to Wotan, but they were all afraid to ask.

He bowed deeply. His bright red Lycra bodysuit left little to the imagination, and it was all complimentary. His narrow face, neat goatee, and fashion choice had created the popular image of the Devil that Michelle had been burdened with for the last millennium or so. He insinuated himself into the room and managed to oust the Buddha from his seat between the lush Isis and the curvaceous Parvati without apparent effort or obvious intention.

“You must give her the right career for this historical moment. An unemployed carpenter was a poor choice for that time or any other.”

The two women edged as far away from his heat as they could. Parvati was forced to lean far closer to her husband Shiva than she had in centuries. But he was apparently too worried by Loki to notice. It was Loki who’d forced him to dance forever on one foot for fear of putting down the other and ending all creation. A nasty prank, with no basis in reality, but a myth that neither Shiva nor anyone else wanted to test, just in case.

“And you have a specific suggestion?”

“I do.” He was enjoying himself far too much as he leaned back and inspected the bosoms of the women on either side of him before turning his focus fully upon Michelle as if to say, “these are pretty, but you, my dear, are spectacular,” which she knew was a crock—but the heat, the sheer animal magnetism Loki radiated, was hard to ignore.

She resisted the urge to cross her arms in front of herself. Or ram a flaming trident up his backside.

CABER had been at a loss since the Marlowe disaster. Several muses had quit, Music had run off with Dance and joined a lesbian colony. Disco had been born into the resulting vacuum. The four poets had departed for sunnier shores leaving behind Rap. Astronomy, Tragedy, and History still showed up on occasion, though poor Clio was depressed at the events she must record when she did.

“The Second Messiah needs but one true gift to aid her mission on Earth. You must make her a master of words, both written and spoken.”

“A novelist again?” Michelle cringed all the way down to her Birkenstocks hoping she guessed wrong.

“We must send a politician.”

Parvati fainted, Isis broke into tears, and Dionysus took a long drink straight from the flask.

All Michelle could think was, “Please, God, no.”

Chapter 3-a week until Armageddon-

Dana Murphy chose the sky of her birth night twenty years and nine months ago to display on the planetarium dome.

Not that her guest would notice. He wasn’t an astrophysics major. Most of the students in her department wouldn’t be able to tell either, but her own studies had included in-depth research of planetary positions, that affected the proper curve to apply when pitching a godly force.

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!