In Death We're Gods

Chapter 4: Luke

Chapter 4: Luke

Alyssa's leather sandal squeaks loudly over the polished marble floor as she advances.

I recoil.

The air whooshes around me.

Then there's a thud followed by a loud, heart-wrenching wail.

None of that involves any kind of pain.

Alyssa is lying face down on the floor with her hands on her head, her long, luminous hair resting like a cape on her back.

"We're doomed," she moans before she begins rolling on the floor. "Dooooomed!"

"Drama Queen," Gary silently mouths.

"Alyssa," Dari says. "A little sensitivity here. Luke..." She lowers her voice to a whisper. "Just died, you know?"

"Thanks for being so sensitive," I mumble.

"Do the old gods know?" Alyssa asks, suddenly stopping her rolling and sitting up.

"No."

"And the press?"

"Alyssa," Dari snaps. "He only just appeared like twenty minutes ago."

"So it's only us, the people in this room, who know?"

"Yes."

Alyssa springs to her feet, clapping her hands. "Excellent. As long as it stays this way for the next fifty years or so, there'll probably be another Novi-god by then and—"

"The priests will check the slates," Gary interrupts.

"Excuse me?" I say.

"When did they check them last?" Alyssa asks.

"Day before yesterday," Dari replies.

"Hey, I'm sorry to interrupt, but..." I try again.

"That gives us 12 hours to find somewhere to hide him." Alyssa says.

"Are you serious, Alyssa?" Gary snaps. "He's one of us. He just got here, and you know what it's like when you're freshly dead. You want to ditch him?"

Alyssa deflates and suddenly turns to me. I flinch instinctively, but she doesn't look frightening anymore. She gingerly sits down next to me and awkwardly stretches out a hand to pat my knee.

Pat. "We're not ditching you, Novi..."

"O....Kay," I say stiffly. "Good to hear that. What exactly is the problem?"

The three of them exchange a glance. "It'll just be better for everyone if the media don't find out about you," Dari says. "Especially for you."

"When I died," Gary says. "I had one day to come to terms with being dead before they were parading me down the streets. There's just one other child-looking god and he's an asshole. I have the worst passive-look."

I quirk an eyebrow. "Passive look?"

All of a sudden, Gary becomes a man resembling one of those Korean pop stars. "This is what I'm supposed to look like," he says and melts down into the form of a East Asian child. "This is what I look like when I just exist and aren't thinking about what I look like."

I look down at my body, at the etched lines of abs I could see through the hole Dari's sword left in my dressing gown. At the biceps bulging inside the sleeves. I have a short moment of appreciation followed by revulsion.

This isn't my body.

"It took me 600 years, but I've gotten used to it," Gary says.

"Six hundred years?"