Thornton stood at the very edge of the temple, contemplating the rest of the mountain range below. Most of the scenery was obscured by a thin film of clouds that wafted far below Sakra’s point. His parents and the Burnsons had just left via the portal created by Sakra himself.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to America?” the mystical little Indian man asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I should wait for her,” Thornton insisted. “Besides, you need someone to guard the temple.”
Now, dusk was falling and he was growing more and more worried. He kept going over his vague memories of the vector zone. It had been about thirty years since he had stepped into that place as a young boy, with his best friend Asher. The two had considered it something of a funhouse at first, excited to see what lay behind the different doors, but they quickly found that it could more easily be deemed a haunted house on steroids. Nonetheless, their fathers had forced them to go through the trials as a rite-of-passage for young devas. It had been expected of them before they could be considered men. That had been years before Pax and Amara had even been born.
A boulder slammed into Thornton’s back, knocking the breath out of him along with his thoughts. He lost his footing and tumbled forward off the edge of the temple and into the abyss below. After a few seconds of falling, he righted himself, and concentrated to levitate and slow his descent. He heard a familiar chuckle of laughter above. Crossing his arms and fixing his face with a sour expression, Thornton levitated back up to the platform.
“Not cool, Ash.”
The dark-haired man scratched the back of his neck sheepishly. “Sorry, bro. So… you got flat-out rejected, huh?”
“She said she was going to think about it,” Thornton corrected. Even though his voice was angry, he was relieved to see that his friend had stayed behind.
“Yeah. You know what that means.” Asher sent his friend a sad smile. “Seriously, man—I told you to lay off my niece. She’s probably the only woman alive who wouldn’t agree to marry you instantaneously for a chance at that sweet Kalgren fortune.”
“Pax knows that I’d give her anything she needed, whether or not we’re together,” Thornton said calmly. Then he cursed under his breath. “Fuck! Not that she would ever ask for my help. She didn’t even care about money before she received the fortune her mom left her. I wish she was greedy!”
“Wow, bro.” Asher’s eyes widened. “You really do want her back.”
Thornton nodded. He levitated to the edge of the temple and seated himself on the tiled floor. He hung his legs off the edge as he stared up at the darkening horizon. “Fuck,” he muttered again. “I wonder how much of her life I’m going to miss.”
Asher cleared his throat and seated himself beside his friend. “What’s going on under that fruity hairstyle of yours?”
After briefly considering hitting his friend, and after biting his tongue to hold back a lecture about how successful adult males in the business world were sometimes required to brush their hair, Thornton shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand. My relationship with Pax is complex.”
“Well, I don’t see any other sympathetic ears around here. Do you?” Asher gestured down to the Himalayas dramatically. “Hey!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, and the sound echoed in the emptiness. “Any goats or leopards wanna listen to Thorn bitch about women? Anyone?”
“Shut up,” Thornton said, and he did hit his friend in the shoulder this time.
“Boys!” Sakra scolded, emerging from the depths of the temple to waggle a finger. “Please keep it down—this is a holy place and there are demigods trying to meditate.”
“Sorry, Sakra,” Asher said guiltily. “That’s my bad.” When the tiny man known as the Lord of the Devas disappeared, Asher frowned. “Geez, I don’t see the point of being way out here if you can’t just let loose and holler sometimes.”
“You let loose in the city too, Ash,” Thornton reminded his friend.
“True,” said the dark-haired man with a grin. “Guess I’ve just got no manners! So, Thorn. Tell me about why you’re moping around silently at a fricking monastery. Where’s the party animal I used to get drunk with a few weeks back?”
Thornton became quiet and could not answer his friend for several minutes. Finally, he was able to form a sentence. “She doesn’t even want to be in the same plane of existence as me. Since her mom died, I’ve been there for her. Since she was fourteen, I’ve hardly left her side. But even before that—I shared every single day of her life. More than her family—more than you. I can’t deal with being shut out.”
“That’s true,” Asher agreed. “I’ll admit to being a deadbeat uncle—but in my defense, it was ridiculous to pretend to take care of the kid when she was smarter than me by the age of four.”
“That’s my Pax,” Thornton said with a smile. “I’ve never been this far away from her, you know? We traveled everywhere—heck, we even tested that spaceship together. How many couples can say they’ve been into space together? I’ve been there for every major event, every single birthday, and now I’m missing years of her life while she’s in that place…”
“Just hang tight, bro.” Asher thumped his friend on the back merrily. “When she gets out of the Pseudosphere she is going to be so man-starved that she will catapult herself at you and never let go.”
“I pray she does,” Thornton said softly. “After what I did, I understand why she left the planet. I understand that she can’t stand to be in the same realm as me. I don’t blame her; I can’t stand to be around myself either these days.”
Asher struck Thornton on the back again, more forcefully. “Hey! Snap out of that funk, man. Maybe it will amuse you to hear about my pain. Did you see your mom putting the Spanish Inquisition on me earlier today? She drilled me about Amara. Every little detail about the breakup. It was humiliating. I actually got so nervous that I stuttered and said we had ‘irreconcilable differences’—what the hell does that even mean?”
Thornton grinned and leaned back on his arms. “You really said that?”
“Yeah. No kidding, bro. If your dad didn’t get her to lay off me, the headlines tomorrow would have read, ‘Brilliant Scientist Rose Kalgren Dies in Fatal Skydiving Accident: Where Was Her Parachute?’”
The blonde man emitted a low chuckle. His mother was completely human, and if Asher had pushed her off the temple she would have surely died. It was nothing to joke about, but Asher was the one person he would permit to clown around this way. The two men had been childhood friends, their families closely interwoven by their shared secrets and abilities—Rose was as dear to Asher as his own mother. In fact, Amelia Burnson had often encouraged Rose to take the liberties of punishing Asher along with Thornton—which was fitting since the boys had always gotten into the bulk of their troublemaking together.
Thornton knew that his mother had a right to question Asher about his intentions with her daughter—or rather, the sudden lack thereof. Realizing that he did not understand his best friend’s decision as well as he had previously thought, Thornton could not resist some casual questioning of his own.
“Speaking of Mara,” he said lightly, “you seemed awfully concerned about her earlier. What was that about?”
Asher looked disturbed by his friend’s line of questioning. “First your mom, now you. You said you’d leave it alone…”
“Hey, remember why you brought this up? To take my mind off my own shit. It’s your duty as my best bud to tell me about your problems in order to make me feel better—I need to know that as bad as things get for me, I’ll never be as much of a loser as you are.”
“That’s true,” Asher immediately agreed. It was an easy thing to agree with—he would never be on par with the son of the rich and successful Kalgren empire. “You want to know why I seemed concerned? Amara is used to luxury and comfort, not pain. I know her better than anyone, and I can tell you exactly what she’s doing right now: she’s crying her eyes out, man. That was a complex statistical analysis, by the way.”
“I think my little sis is tougher than we suspect,” Thornton mused.
“Nah. Amara is used to everyone around her protecting her and fighting for her. You and me, her dad, and Pax. She’s not going to know how to behave when thrust into the situation of needing to defend herself against the elements. And Pax is super aggressive, and she’s going to want to practice her techniques against Amara—Pax is going to destroy her.”
“Pax may have more control of her aggression than we think,” Thornton said.
“Nah.” Asher waved his hand in dismissal. “Don’t pretend the girls are anything different than they are. Pax has always been a vicious little tomboy, and Amara was the damsel in distress. She’s the one that the enemy captures and traps in a diamond pyramid.”
“Speaking of which,” Thornton interjected, “my research team has not made any progress on that fjuyen material. There is none present on Earth to study so we have no concept of how it will react to stimuli—it’s all hypothetical. How are we supposed to examine the properties of material formed in the core of a White Dwarf Star?”
“I would really love to know how to break that shit,” Asher said heartily.
“In essence, that’s what I just said,” Thornton said with a smile. “In any case, if the Asura ever try to use such weapons against us again—well, we beat them once. We’ll do it again.”
“That was a fluke, man.”
“Yeah,” Thornton said. “Well, that’s why the girls have gone to practice in the Pseudosphere. So that they’re less vulnerable to enemy attacks.”
Asher nodded thoughtfully. The sun had completely set while the men had been talking, and the brightest stars were beginning to pop out of the growing darkness.
“I know I said I wanted you to stay away from my niece,” Asher said in a soft tone, “but I want you to know that I think what you did earlier was really bold. I really respect that you were so honest with her, and that you came clean in front of all of us like that.”
“Thanks, man,” Thornton said with a smile. For all of Asher’s simplicity, the younger man was the person he craved approval from the most.
“I couldn’t have done that,” Asher added. He shifted his eyes from the emerging constellations and gazed down at the dark clouds below. “I don’t know how you can just lay it all bare like that.”
“You and I have had a lot of women—and I mean a lot of women,” Thornton said with a chuckle. Asher nodded ardently in agreement as his friend kept speaking. “But at the end of the day there’s only one Pax.”
“Is it because she’s a deva?” Asher asked.
“Nah. It’s because she’s Pax. It’s about what she considers important.”
Asher nodded, not needing further explanation. He sat in a comfortable silence with his friend for a few more minutes before his head snapped around. He glared at the empty place from which the girls had disappeared earlier. “Fuck! I wish we could go in there with them. If we could just open a door and walk into the vector zone right now, I would.”
“Wow, you’re really worried about Amara.”
“I’m just bored,” Asher lied awkwardly. “Dammit. We should have taught the girls how to use the coalescence technique. It might have come in handy if they ever needed to multiply their strength. I wonder what her name would be?”
“Pamara? Amax? Amarax?”
“Sounds like anthrax,” Asher said with a chuckle. “I wonder what she’d be like.”
“Overconfident.” Thornton squinted up into the sky thoughtfully. “It’s a good thing the girls don’t know that technique. When two demigods join their bodies together, they become a highly dangerous entity. The arrogance alone could cook a country. Don’t get me wrong—Ashton is awesome, but he is kind of a creep.”
“That’s because you and I are already dicks on our own. When we join, that gets amplified along with all of our other qualities. The girls wouldn’t necessarily get as big-headed and vain as we do. They’d just be…”
“Powerful,” Thornton finished, thinking of Pax.
“And brilliant,” Asher added.
The men were lost in thought for a moment, trying to picture the goddess-merger, before Thornton shook his head. “She’d probably be hideous.”
“Yeah. Butt-ugly,” Asher agreed. The two men laughed companionably. They could both feel the affection in each other’s meager insults. The coalescence technique was their special, private bond; they did not want to cheapen its sacredness by sharing it with the girls. Both devas were startled out of their laughter when Thornton’s phone rang.
“What the hell? There’s reception here?” he pulled his phone out of his blazer angrily. “For fuck’s sake! It’s the office.”
“We have WiFi too!” Sakra shouted from somewhere in the depths of the temple.
Asher’s eyes widened. “I knew it! I wasn’t interrupting godly meditation. I was interrupting godly porn.”
Thornton hit the answer button and lifted the phone to his ear reluctantly. “Hello?” He listened to his secretary prattling hastily for a few seconds before he glanced at Asher with worry and stood up abruptly. “Thanks, Nina,” he said, before slamming the phone back into his blazer.
“What’s up?” Asher was already rising to his feet, sensing his friend’s stress. “No, wait! Let me guess—laboratory explosion? Some kid choked on part of a K.T. product, and you need to make a public apology to the media and rewrite the labels? Oh, I know! Some idiot spilled his coffee while driving and you need to do a massive recall to fix the cup-holders of doom…”
“None of the above. Death threats.”
Asher chuckled. “That’s all? Don’t you get those all the time?”
“At least once a week. You and I may be tough to kill, but this person threatened our families too.”
“Our families?” Asher asked to clarify.
Thornton nodded, frowning at his friend. “Not just me. You, Pax, and Amara were mentioned by name. The person even asked for our mothers.”
“We should head back to California,” Asher said. He began walking briskly across the temple floor to the enclosure where Sakra had disappeared.
“Hey! Ash, cool down for a second. It’s probably nothing. You tend to overreact when someone threatens Amara, but remember: one, she’s not in this dimension, and two, when she returns she’ll be able to defend herself.”
“Our moms need to be protected,” Asher said angrily. “Pax already lost her mom, and I’m not letting that happen to either of us. Do you think it could be the Asura?”
“Why would omnipotent highborn demons call my office?” Thornton asked.
“Why would the holy Lord of Devas have his temple hooked up with WiFi?” Asher retorted. “I need to get back to Burnson Grove. Hey, Sakra! Pause the porn and get out here—we need you to whip us up a portal.”