Goddess Unravelled

Too Many Gods

It was customary for the four of them (Alice and Altair and Maya and Gabriel) to go about exploring the new place as soon as they landed. Normally Azura and Shakra stayed to mind the shop, since the older women had seen nearly every city there was to see in their long lifetimes.

This time, however, Maya declined, saying she felt too dizzy to go walking around, and Altair was busy talking on the phone to someone he called “George”, and Alice noted, someone he was yelling at quite a bit. She wasn’t sure if it was his new quest for “honest work”, but she seriously doubted it. She tried to listen in the on the conversation, but he’d locked himself in the bathroom, and all she could hear were odd hisses and grumpy answers like, “no!” and “you’re not coming here”. She wondered if “here” meant Sidney, or her shop, and decided that if Altair was going to bring questionable friends home, they were going to have to have a serious talk.

It ended up being just she and Gabriel that elected to go walk around Sidney, and Alice breathed in the crisp evening air as they walked down the sidewalk, reflecting that it had been a very long time since it had just been she and Gabriel talking. The last time had been when they went to the magical club and met Tricia and Lacy.

It was sort of nice. Like old times, before everything had gotten so complicated.

So messed up with Gods, is what I mean. Alice glanced over at Gabriel, smiling to see that he was completely engrossed in the front window of a little toy shop. There was a little steam engine running in circles around a track in the center, with real steam coming up out of the smoke stack.

“Wow!” Gabriel beamed at it. “That’s so cool.”

Alice couldn’t help laughing. He was nearly as excited as a child would have been. “Want to go inside and have a look?”

“Yeah? You don’t mind?” He looked anxious. “I feel bad for leaving Maya, but she would have just wanted to go into all the magic shops anyways, I mean, the ones that sell spells and stuff.”

Alice shook her head. “You’re dating a witch, and you’re working for a witch. You’re going to be surrounded by magic all the time.”

“I know, and I don’t mind it. But Maya is approaching it with a single-mindedness that’s almost alarming lately.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at the train, expression mournful. “She wants to be you, you know.”

Alice blinked. She stared at the little steam engine as it went in circles, up a steep incline that was littered with green streamers to look like grass and back down, then into a little brick tunnel. The steam engine reappeared around the bend and then went around the loop all over again. “She…said something like that back there. I’m not sure what to think of that.”

Gabriel crossed his arms over his chest and rocked back on his heels. He didn’t look at Alice, they both kept their gazes firmly on the train. “Not surprising, is it? You saved her, you kicked Ambrose’s butt and set her free and now she sees you as her role model.”

“I don’t know…I don’t know if I can be a good role model.” Alice hunched her shoulders, as if she’d been caught in a biting wind all of a sudden. What if she disappointed Maya? She was used to looking up to Shakra and Azura, not to have anyone look up to her. Why hadn’t Maya picked one of the older women to emulate?

“I’m afraid she’s almost more infatuated with you than she is with me,” Gabriel muttered, and this time Alice did look over at him, shocked.

“You can’t mean that…”

“She’s pushing me away,” Gabriel’s voice was grim, almost resigned. “It doesn’t take a genius to see that. It’s not like she’s come straight up and told me that it won’t work, but she doesn’t have to…”