Perfect World

Chapter 10: Saving Pete

CHAPTER 10

Saving Pete

            Kaia couldn’t shake the memory from her mind. Each time she was certain it was gone, she closed her eyes and there it was, Pete’s blood-stained body towering over the scarlet remains of Stile Cortez.

            Why did she accept this? Why did she join in this impossible crusade to return Pete to reality if her endeavor would only lead to death?

            It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Pete wasn’t supposed to kill Stile. They were merely going to engage in an innocent battle between gods, draw attention to themselves and initiate a manhunt that would keep Pete off the streets and as disconnected from the reality he’d created as possible. That was the purpose, to convince Pete that he needed to wake up, not to make him a murderer.

            Poor Stile, Kaia thought. He’s always so angry, and now he was actually killed. Death is so painful. I hope he woke in reality without any physical impairments.

            Kaia was a god, and while she wasn’t as old as Holly or even Pete, she’d experienced enough lifetimes for a thousand generations. She’d met so many people, she went on adventures and learned as much as she could, but as a god, she’d also experienced death. Accidents happened, humans were chaotic, and sometimes the gods were worse than others. Sometimes their curse pushed them to insanity, sometimes they were curious or wanted to test the extent of their abilities. Kaia had died six times in her life, murdered twice. Dying wasn’t the hard part, it was the excruciating agony that went along with it.

            Kaia sat on the shabby leather couch in the living room of her decrepit Brooklyn brownstone. It reflected the current state of her mentality. That, and she was poor in this world and her friend Gal that’d pretended to be Leone Gallaway insisted that they live on a dime.

            Kaia sighed. She couldn’t stop thinking about the atrocity that’d happened earlier that day. Why did her favorite god of all unhesitantly murder Stile? Surely he was still the same person as before. The man Kaia adored would never kill… would he?

            Kaia shook her head.

            No, this was different. This was an alternate universe, something Pete had created to escape the pressure of reality. He was a brilliant architect, an expert in psychology, and he’d designed this new world so intricately that even his own personality had been rewritten.

            I was his best friend for twelve years, Kaia thought. I grew up with him. Even I was oblivious at times, but once I saw that he really was the man I used to know, I realized that he was different. 

            Gods were strange in that sense. Most of them were always the same, but sometimes they changed. They could do that. They could do anything imaginable if they thought hard enough. For example, Kaia was once the adopted daughter of a well-off family. She wanted to experience what it was like to be a child again, so she changed. Even though she was immortal and had become immortal at the age of twenty-two, she could look however she wanted and act however she pleased.

            Of course, changing who you were wasn’t that simple. You had to really believe that you were somebody else and make a commitment to maintain this change. Gods didn’t perform magic tricks. They followed the Laws of the Universe exactly how they were written, and it took an exceptionally determined god to set aside their old ways and follow these Laws in a new way.

            Kaia was only busying herself now. What else was she supposed to think about while she waited for Gal to return with the criminal Peter Glass?