“This god after you?” he asked. “Did you do something to piss him off? Because I am so here for this. You want to fight a god? I’ll help you fight a god.”
“I don’t want your help to fight a god,” I said.
“Maybe,” Lu interrupted. “Maybe we’d want your help, but not yet.”
“She can see me?”
“Nope.”
“But she trusts me?”
“Nope.”
“Did you call Bo?” Lu asked.
“No.”
“Did he?”
I glanced over at the lanky spirit. “You lying?”
“Not today.”
“Did you call Cupid?”
“That’s Cupid?” The ghost looked the burley god up and down. “I thought Cupid was a baby angel in a diaper with a cute little bow and little heart arrows.”
Cupid was none of those things. He was tattooed down both arms and hands and dressed like a biker who was powering through his sixties. His head was bald, his eyes dark. A diamond winked at the top of one ear, hoops of gold shone from both lobes. His long gray goatee was topped by a handlebar mustache.
He was carrying three beers over to our table.
“Lula, Brogan,” the god of connections and destruction said with a nod, “mind if I sit?”
There was a chair on the other side of the table that hadn’t been there a moment before.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Beer?” He placed two in the center of the table, and I tried to remember my legends and fairy tales. Drinking with the fairy folk was never a good idea, and Persephone gave a lot up for a few pomegranate seeds. But had I ever heard the consequences of drinking with Cupid?
“Didn’t expect to see you here.” Lu reached for the beer, which turned into a bottle of Bludwine. She huffed a short exhale. “I haven’t seen this in years. I thought it was discontinued.”
“It was,” Bo said.
Lu took a sip of the cherry soda, then smiled at the bottle. “It’s been a long time.”
Bo tipped back his own beverage, one of those craft beers I thought you could only get on tap in the Pacific Northwest.
I reached for the remaining bottle. By the time I drew it near, it had become a Hay Stack beer. I’d never heard of it, but the label said it was from some town called Ordinary, which was a dumb name for a town, if you asked me.
I swallowed a mouthful and grunted in approval. It was the best damn beer I’d ever tasted.
“Good enough?” Bo asked.
I rubbed my thumb along the label fighting the urge to drink it all in one go. “Not bad.”
“Good. I need to reassess our agreement.”
Lu and I tensed up, and the ghost’s wolf let out a little growl. “You made a deal with a god?” the ghost asked. “How many kinds of stupid are you? You know gods and all the creatures like them are unpredictable. Vengeful. You know they ignore the people who beg them for help. Just listen to them scream and leave them to die at the bottom of some filthy cave.”
