Don’t worry, puppy. Like I said, it’s been attached to me for millennia—and my god powers keep it from doing any damage.
Obie wasn’t lying. It wasn’t him giving Chester his god powers that hurt him.
It was everything that happened afterward.
The bedroom door bangs open. “What the hell is going on in here?” Maggie demands, freezing when she sees Obie struggling to breathe on the mattress.“Obie?—”
Gregorio and Micah are across the room in a flash. “What happened?” Gregorio demands, hovering a hand just above Obie’s shoulder like he’s not sure whether to touch him or not. “Is he hurt?”
“It’s a curse, apparently.” JJ’s hands are trembling. “It—it just activated.”
“Can we break it?” Naomi’s face is pale. “Roma, Ez, can you break it?”
Ez growls with frustration, snatching her hand away from Obie’s forehead. “I don’t know this one. No frame of reference for it. Roma?”
“I—” Roma’s glowing palm is already poised over Obie’s chest, but she lets it drop back down, swearing. “I’ve got nothing, either. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before, but it’spowerful,and?—”
Chester swallows down the panic screaming up his throat. “It’s the curse from the gods.”
Cass and Ez stop dead. “It’s… what?” Cass asks, but the way his face goes ashen says that he knows exactly what Chester means.
“From… the gods?” Micah repeats, squinting at him. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, right,” Bryant says, blunt as ever. “Turns out that Obadiah Smith is your old god Nostringvadha. That was the big secret he didn’t want you to hear.”
“Nehemiah!”Roma snaps, glaring at her.
“What? Not like it’s going to be a secret for much longer, Gutierrez!”Bryant bites out. “I might be new around here, but thiskind ofseems like an all-hands-on-deck situation!”
“That…” Sawyer looks more dumbstruck than Chester has ever seen her. “For real?”
“But that—” Maggie’s eyes narrow. “That can’t be. I would know—all of uswould know. Obie’s powers are similar to Nostringvadha’s, but they have limitations that Nostringvadha’s didn’t, and?—”
“Okay, but like,” Bryant says, “this is one of those times when you just need to accept the new information and move on, Khan.”
Maggie’s jaw twitches. Her eyes flicker to Cass.
Cass nods jerkily. “She’s telling the truth.”
Maggie lets out her breath in a hiss. “Fine,” she says neutrally, and with a jolt, Chester realizes that this might just be the first time Bryant and Maggie have addressed each other directly since their souls were ripped apart and mixed together. “So how do we break a fifteen-thousand-year-old curse that was put in place by thirteen of the most powerful beings inanydimension?”
Ez bolts to her feet and starts to pace, her shoulders tense. “Okay. From the top again. Can we brute-force it off?”
“For a curse this powerful? Doubtful,” Roma says. “Can we mitigate it, maybe? Use healing spells to treat the symptoms and buy us time to break the curse itself?”
Ez gestures sharply at Obie’s trembling form on the mattress. “We can’t mitigatethat,Roma. We need to rip it out by the roots if—” Her voice hitches. “If we want Obie to survive.”
“There has to besomething.”Cass’s voice is strained. “Ez, there has to be?—”
“I don’t know, Cass! There’s no handbook on what to do when your best friend turns out to be agod!”
“How much time do we have?” Chester demands, unabashedlyhauling Obie into his arms and letting Obie’s cheek rest against Chester’s chest. Obie shudders hard, burying his face in Chester’s shirt. “How much time until it’s—until it’s irreversible?”
Maggie’s eyes are fixed on Obie. “Not enough. With how quickly his soul energy is draining, I’ll be impressed if he lasts another hour.”
“No.” Chester tightens his grip on Obie, horror roiling through him. “No, hecan’t?—”
Can’t leave Chester like this. Can’t leave his friends—hisfamily—like this.
