Page 21 of Katya and the Young God

They both nod. Not that they know what truly happened, but that they know she knows.

“And he’s already pretty overpowered.”

“I’ve heard he’s gone mad,” Rory interrupts, and for once Katya is glad someone did. “I don’t even know if he recognized me, and he knew me...before.”

“They say he lives in the middle of nowhere with his dog, staring at the trees all day,” Feketer chimes in, and she wishes to know who ‘they’ are in the sentence but knows better than to interrupt. He picks his words too precisely to not be intentionally vague. “He never talks at any of JD’s meetings, just sits there with that wolf.”

Katya takes another drink, content to let them talk, content to gather information.

“He wasn’t ever the talkative one, Vanya did that,” Rory points out, which is also rather in line with what Katya experienced. “No one knows how he didn’t just...kill everyone when Vanya died.”

And Katya was unconscious for that, but that’s not something she’s going to share, and she got plenty of rundowns from Aimes in the weeks afterwards. “He was scared,” she ventures, and gets identical raised eyebrows from them both. “His brother died instantly, I don’t think he thought it was a possibility.”

It feels wrong, to be theorizing on his mental state like this, but Katya hoards any little bit of data she can get, anything she can use to prepare, to analyze. To wrap her hands around and mold until she can wield it as easily as any of her guns.

Again, the appraising look from Rory. “You would know.”

Katya swallows past the lump again, disguising her trepidation with another sip. “It wasn’t exactly a pleasant day to remember.” As if mocking her, her shoulder aches.

It usually aches most days, but yesterday didn’t help it.

“Which is why I want to know why he didn’t kill you,” the Vampire says, dipping their voice down low. “He should’ve gone ballistic.”

“Don’t have an answer for you.” Katya forces another toothy smile. “Why are you two going down underneath the mountain?”

Feketer blinks at the subject change, but Rory does not. “I think it has the key to immortality,” they say, easily, like that bit of information means nothing. “I’ve been partially down, up to the first lock, and it’s the most alive I’ve ever felt.”

The hair raises on the back of Katya’s arms.

“I just think it’s a power source,” Feketer declares. “But I think, I think Pieter thinks it could get him his brother back.”

Katya sits back. “Nothing can cheat death once someone’s already dead.”

“He thinks it might.”

* * *

That night,while thunder shakes the walls of her tiny cabin, she uploads all the audio bugs she’s been keeping on herself to the cloud and, coding them with her normal amount of paranoia, sets them to email to Miri if she doesn’t hit a kill switch on them after the trip to the cave.

It’s paranoid, she knows that, but as she hugs her knees to her chest she doesn’t know what else to do. She could theoretically redo her will, but it’s currently set to donate any assets to a charity and she can’t quite bring herself to change that, no matter if she can’t actually remember which charity at this exact moment.

But she has no living family, no significant relationships besides a few friends and coworkers, and the small feeling that if she ends up killed no one would miss her entirely too much.

Sure, they’d mourn, Aimes and Miri in particular, but they’d be able to move on, to make their way through it, get support.

It’s not a great feeling, to have that realization while alone in a cabin during a storm, so she flexes her feet and bounces up to them, anything to start moving.

If the Demigod really thinks, really believes that this could bring back his brother, it would explain a hell of a lot. Why he put up with the minor demon. Why he let himself be ordered around. Why he is here in the first place.

And it’d be a disaster.

Katya starts a series of stretches, nothing too complex, just a series of motions she uses to keep her body ready. If she has to spend a day hiking, and another two days at least in a cave, she doesn’t want stiffness holding her back.

Or anything holding her back.

If Pieter—somehow—resurrects his twin, then the whole ‘averting the apocalypse’ part of her resume would probably have to be taken off, and that’s her favorite part. And she’d have to stop him, somehow, again.

Anyone getting that power would be...bad. Most likely. It’s not exactly a thing that people should mess with, in her more than professional opinion. What is dead should stay down, and anything that subverts that could have nearly unlimited power.

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