Chapter One

From the Sky

Heavy winds shouldered their way across the icy Arctic. Lazy glaciers crept seaward, propelled by the same internal mechanism that told the ice when to break, the water to go where the wind pushed and the girl plummeting from the sky to scream.

Cassandra Baron’s panicked screech was cut short by the bone-jarring thump of her body crashing into the ground. She lay there for a second, dazed. There was a thick moan, followed by the jerky flutter of eyelids. Blue eyes widened, arcing skyward.

She yelped and scrambled sideways as something small and dark came tumbling down. The dark object lodged itself into the snow, mere inches from her face. On closer inspection, the small object turned out to be her cellphone.

She scowled at the cracked screen. “Toughest phone in the world, my ass.”

She uttered a shaky breath, struggling into a sitting position. Every motion hurt like hell. A metallic wetness blossomed on her tongue. She grimaced, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. Her brow furrowed when her fingers came away sticky with blood.

The young, so-called deity had just learned three valuable lessons.

The first lesson was that an object of a certain mass colliding with an object of much larger mass–say a frozen tundra, might result in greater damage sustained by the smaller, more human-shaped object.

The second was that teleporting without a clear and specific image of her destination in mind, should probably not be attempted again. Fortunately this time, she’d wound up roughly where she intended but she hadn’t meant to materialize in the blasted air. What would have happened if she’d wound up inside one of those frozen glaciers instead? She shuddered to think.

The third lesson–and this was the real kicker–was that even a being with the ability to defy the constraints of space and time was still firmly bound by something as pedestrian as the Law of Gravity.

The phone that had just failed in its dastardly attempt to skewer Cassandra’s face emitted a pitiful wail. She dislodged it from the snow and held it daintily against her ear.

“Hello?”

“This is Shepard.” The voice of the man on the other end was deep and as smooth as honey.

Cassandra idly wondered if it was that low timbre or the cold that made her suddenly shiver. “When can we meet?” She asked.

“How’s today?” His tone implied that it wasn’t really a suggestion.

“Today’s good,” she replied. “I’ll need some time, say half an hour?” She contemplated the eerily barren horizon. “One hour–tops,” she quickly amended, rubbing the red wetness between her forefinger and thumb. “I’ll need to get cleaned up first.”

There was a grunt. “You bring the money and I’ll have no complaints.”

Cassandra’s voice dripped sugar. “You give me what I want and I give you what you want. Don’t you just love how these things fall into place?” Her face soured at the abrupt click in her ear. “No sense of humor, huh?”

She stood and did a slow three-sixty. She closed her eyes, recalling the murky mental imagery that had piqued her curiosity about this place. Twenty two years earlier, the object she was looking for had been looking for had been abandoned in this general area. Considering time, mass movement and the climate, an artifact the size of an SUV would be… She opened her eyes.

“One o’clock,” Cassandra murmured and began her stiff-jointed trek in that direction.

By now, the cut inside her mouth and the bones that she was sure had cracked when she fell were already healing. Not quickly enough, if you asked her but beggars couldn’t be choosers, now could they?

Cassandra happened upon the gaping hole in the ground so suddenly, it was a miracle she didn’t fall in. It was wide, a hundred meters in circumference at least. It was deeper. She knelt at the edge and tried to get a good look inside. The inky blackness that stared back up at her was ominous and magnetic.

It gave her this weird sense of fullness and substance, like she would land on something thick and squishy if she fell in. Intuition said that the object she’d come looking for lay at the bottom of this hole. Moreover, she was filled with a sickening kind of certainty that this gaping maw had not existed before the artifact had come to rest on the ground there, years earlier.

Cassandra stood and took a few cautious steps backward. There was no reckoning just how deep the hole was. Examining, let alone retrieving the artifact was out of the question.

“Oh, Anna.” She murmured achingly to her absent older sibling. “What am I supposed to do now?”

NEXT CHAPTER

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