Goddess Investigations

By Nadine Daniels

Marya Waters came into existence in the days of Ancient Sumer.  However, as with all deities that have lost their followers, she now has a day job.  She works with five other goddesses as a private investigator. 

When a demi-god and his pregnant human wife walk into Goddess Investigations, Marya is assigned their case.  It seems routine enough, a portal has opened in their house, something that's been known to happen when a human carries a demi-god baby.

When Marya goes to close the portal, she discovers that this case is anything but routine and is just the start of something much bigger, and worse, when the portal refuses to close. Instead, it creates a fountain of youth when hit with Marya's water powers.  As she awaits backup, a merman escapes the portal. She realizes then that the portal leads somewhere; they'll need to chase down anything and everything that comes out of the portal while they struggle to close it.

It becomes evident that an unborn demi-god is not solely to blame for the opening of the portal which leads Marya to investigate who assisted with its opening and why.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hadena James
• Release date: Jul 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393510086

Book preview

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Epilogue

Chapter One

There was a ghoul running around the cemetery across the street from my apartment building.  I had been watching it for half an hour, willing away any schmuck that had considered taking the cemetery as a shortcut home from the bar.  I didn’t want to wake up and find a crime scene there in the morning.  It would make me feel bad for not going outside and putting the ghoul down. 

After watching it clamor over another tombstone, I got dressed and headed down.  It would eat someone’s cat if it wasn’t taken care of soon.  Ghouls will eat anything that doesn’t eat them first, and since the neighborhood was fresh out of stray tigers, that meant someone had to deal with it.  It might as well be me.

The ghoul sneered at me, showing me yellow broken, rotted teeth.  I had cleaned all the meat out of my fridge and freezer.  I’d had a hog butchered two years ago just for these occasions.  Ghouls didn’t care if the meat was frozen or thawed or partially decayed or scraped up from the road.  They just required it to have once been alive and be unlikely to try and eat them while they snacked on it.

I tossed several pounds of bacon and multiple pork steaks over the fence and waited.  Such a waste.  I’d had plans for some of this stuff.  Now I’d have to go shop at the grocery store until I could get another one butchered.

The ghoul began chomping its rotted teeth on the frozen bacon.  The sound was like nails on a chalkboard.  I waited until it had eaten the offered meat, which took about ten minutes, and then I entered the graveyard, hoping the ghoul was full for a few minutes.  I’d given it more than ten pounds of pork, surely that was enough; it wasn’t a big ghoul. 

Most ghouls look like meth addicts; thin bodies, sallow skin, bad teeth and gums, and jaundiced eye whites.  They smell like a dead Chupacabra and this one was no different.  It hissed at me and I waved my hand in front of my face to get fresh air to my nose. 

They were also rather unimaginative and had very little magic.  This ghoul tried to freeze me, but it was August in Missouri and there was a good chance I wouldn’t freeze no matter how hard it tried. 

The real problem with ghouls was that it took more magic to make them go away than they were worth.  I had one piece of meat left in my bag.  A thawed T-bone that I had intended to cook for my dinner tomorrow night.  I had sprinkled it with go-away juice, a concoction made mostly of fresh fruit that could be used on ex-boyfriends as well as ghouls, depending on ones needs at the time. 

I tossed the steak over the wall and the ghoul set upon it like it had never eaten beef before, which I found unlikely since I was sure its trip to the cemetery tonight had started in the alley a block away, where the Mexican restaurant was. 

The ghoul chittered at me, raised the steak over its head and scurried away, over the back wall of the graveyard heading back toward the direction of the Mexican restaurant.  I made a mental note to check to see if the Mexican restaurant was condemned or an active crime scene in the morning.  Ghouls traveled in packs and they were attracted to magical mayhem. 

But they also lived in the sewer systems of every city in the world; maybe I was getting paranoid about it being close to my house.  I was sweating.  It was ten at night and it was still so freaking hot, you could fry eggs on the sidewalk.  I had moved away from Syria to get away from heat like this. 

Sadly, the old saying was true; it wasn’t the heat, it was the humidity, and Missouri was like a blast furnace hooked up to a sprinkler system every August.  I had considered moving to Canada, but I didn’t like the cold any more than I liked the humidity.  So, I stayed where I was.  There was plenty of time to enjoy Canada, if I ever decided to take a vacation.  And it snowed here every winter, meaning I wasn’t missing out on that either.

My go-away juice had worked better than expected.  Usually they still put up a little resistance after eating it and had to be convinced to move their butts along with a decent dose of fire magic to the rump.  Rational me was glad to have solved the problem without waking up any of my neighbors.  Irrational me was slightly disappointed.

I stayed near the graveyard for a half hour, just hanging out, to make sure more ghouls didn’t show up.  If they had, I would have blasted them with a fire ball to the butt to make them find a new place for food.  In the distance I could hear sirens getting closer.  No Mexican takeout tomorrow night.  Meaning I’d have to find something else for dinner since I had given away my T-bone and the restaurant was most decidedly going to be closed for a day or two.

I lived in an area full of yuppies.  My building had once been a large four-story shoe factory.  Originally, the shoe factory as it stood had been converted into apartments.  In the 1980s, they had added on to the apartment building, making it a whopping ten stories.  Now, it was slowly being changed into condos, all progressive and whatnot.  The area was improving, and rents were rising everywhere, but nowhere so fast as this area.  Which was weird since when I first moved here seventy years earlier it had not been a great place after dark. 

But progress chases thugs away more effectively than even ghouls could manage.  I was still a hold-out on the whole let’s make the building co-op! movement.  Mostly because I just preferred to rent.  When you rented, maintenance was someone else’s responsibility, and I wasn’t the type to put holes in the walls because I had slept badly the night before. Plus, I had learned to handle my liquor long, long ago and my days of drunken stupidity were very gone. 

Also, I seemed to be the only one in the building that ever saw the ghouls that came out at night around this place.  Not just lowlifes, but actual ghouls like the one that had taken my offered T-bone.  This was one of the older cemeteries in Kansas City and it attracted a lot of attention from the undead.

That attention was getting worse as the area gentrified, because it meant those that roamed the streets in the middle of the night were like Happy Meals because they didn’t carry guns or knives or magical spells or magic wands.  Occasionally someone had a cross, but even the new monotheistic gods were going the way of the old pantheons; victims to progress.

Before long, the archangels would be buying condos along a white sandy beach.  Progress was inevitable.  Much like my building becoming a co-op.  I was sure there was a Zen metaphor in there somewhere, but I wasn’t finding it.

With the metaphor eluding me and sweat still dripping down the inside of my shirt and sirens stopped nearby, I stomped back to my building and the apartment that would soon be called a condo that I would have to pay for, ensuring that the next time the air conditioner had a glitch, I would have to shell out more money on the condo, just so my trendy neighbors could say they owned where they lived.

Chapter Two

Islept horribly.  Dreaming of ghouls and condo maintenance bills.  You’d think a goddess of the old world wouldn’t have nightmares, but I often did.  When my alarm went off, I considered calling my boss, Hathor, and telling her I wasn’t coming in.  She’d probably understand.  I stared at my ceiling for five or six minutes.  I was either going to have to move or buy my apartment. 

The responsible part of me told me I should go to work.  If I told Hathor I’d slept terrible because of a ghoul that had eaten all the meat from my freezer, she might let me sit in my office and sulk most of the day, only meeting with a few clients. 

But if she let me do that, it wouldn’t make me feel any better, it’d make me feel worse.  Here she was paying me, and I wasn’t really working.  Decisions, decisions.  The new thing was to complain about adulting, but I had been adulting for nearly six thousand years and it never got better.  I didn’t even know what childhood was.  Gods and goddesses aren’t born, we pop into being fully formed and mildly confused when a civilization decides to get together and create us.

I had been created as a Sumerian water goddess. And had fulfilled an important role for a couple thousand years before Sumer was conquered by other civilizations and there was no need for a Sumerian water goddess anymore.  In the last fifty years or so, I’d enjoyed a resurgence of power thanks primarily to ancient alien theorists who were convinced Sumerian gods and goddesses were aliens.  My siblings and I had met one night at a bar and decided to let them go ahead with that notion because it gave all of us former Sumerian deities a decent power boost. 

Then Ma’at had decided one day to publish a book on mythology that dealt specifically with forgotten gods and goddesses, it had turned into a best seller and now the ancient alien theorists used it as source material too, and little kids all over the world had become aware of our names again.

The problem with power is that I felt I needed to use it to better mankind.  And I did that by working as a private investigator for a company called Goddess Investigations owned by the forgotten goddess Hathor from Ancient Egypt, because while people still seemed to have a connection to Bast, most of the other goddesses had been forgotten.

I got out of bed, showered, and dressed in a red suit with a black undershirt and black high-heeled boots.  I threw tennis shoes into my work bag, because high heels just weren’t appropriate everywhere, and headed into the office. 

One of the things I really liked about the modern world was cars.  Horses were not friendly to water goddesses or most goddesses, to be honest.  As I pulled out of the parking garage that served my building, I passed the Mexican restaurant where I got takeout a lot of nights when I was tired.  Sure enough, there was crime scene tape around the front of the building.  All the front windows were busted, and it looked like a bomb had gone off, but I would have heard a bomb.

Our office building was near the Plaza in downtown Kansas City.  I walked in and Ruby immediately grabbed my arm.  Ruby was our receptionist.  A woman in her early fifties with hair to match her name and a big friendly smile all the time.  She was technically a demigod, but not very powerful.  She was comfortable working around four goddesses all the time, and that made her very qualified for the job even without her other skills and personality traits. 

There is a young couple in your office who think a portal to Hell has been opened on their property by their neighbor.  Ruby whispered confidentially.

That seems unlikely.

I know, but Hathor told me to give it to you.

I guessed I was right, and I should have called in this morning.  We handled weird cases, ones other investigative companies wouldn’t take.  I was guessing we hadn’t been the first choice for this couple.

Except he was magical.  I felt it the moment I walked into the room.  The power roiled off him in cascading waves that slammed into me and made me want to turn on my heel and head back out the door.  Somewhere in his ancestry was a god.  Probably Roman or Greek, since they were the most liberal about taking human lovers.

I forced myself to sit down in my chair and put on my best professional smile.  He was now looking at me like he wanted to run away, or like I had sprouted a second head.  He met my gaze for just a couple of seconds and then dropped it and stared at my desk.

I’m sorry, I’ve always known gods and goddesses exist, I’ve just never met one before, he finally said after a moment. 

Your great-grandparent hasn’t stopped in to check on you?  I asked incredulously.

Maybe once when I was a kid, but he didn’t introduce himself and he didn’t leave much of an impression.  Demigods could feel the power of gods, but not if they were related, even in the distant past.

I take it your wife knows about your ancestry and doesn’t think you’re crazy?  I asked.

Yes, he told me, he had to.  I thought our house was haunted after we first moved in together, turned out to be him.  She said.

I’m Marya Waters, how can I assist you?  I asked.

Well, our neighbor is a kook, bordering on crackpot.  Lately, weird things have been happening at our house.  A few days ago, a crack appeared in our basement.  It’s an old house and still has a dirt floor in the basement.  He began.

Something came out of the crack yesterday and ran off.  She said.

I’m sorry, Ruby didn’t tell me your names.

Darren and Nancy Jones.  He said.

Something came out of it; did you see what it was?  I asked.

Not exactly, I could see something, but it looked like shimmering air coming off a heated road.  Nancy told me. 

Then it happened again last night, we were eating dinner when something shot out of the cellar and ran out the front door.  I could see it, it looked like a large, monstrous dog like thing.  Darren said.

I could not see it, it looked like the first thing, a shimmering bit of air.

Okay, so I need to come see what’s happened at your house and then maybe see about rounding up these two things, one of which is a monstrous dog.  I said. 

I’m willing to help, Darren said.  After all, it is our house and our neighbor.

Is your neighbor a demigod?  I asked.

No, he’s just this weird guy, Darren said.  Well that ruled out it being the neighbor unless the neighbor was some other sort of magical being, but magic was pretty much reserved for gods and demigods. 

Ruby has your address?  I asked.

Yes, Nancy told me.  Does this mean you’ll help?

Yes, I told her.

I couldn’t say no. It didn’t sound like a portal to any underworld I knew of, it sounded like there were monsters coming out of the ground at their house.  And no one wanted to deal with monsters.  But if we didn’t capture them, there’d be an uptick in weird crimes as they unleashed themselves on the world.  I thought quickly about the Mexican restaurant and the ghoul I’d seen the night before.  If there were monsters near the city, the number of ghouls in the city would increase and they would become braver.  Ghouls are what happens when a human soul doesn’t go into the afterlife, and I had a cemetery across from my house that already attracted them.  My neighbors could be eaten.  Then again, that might solve my co-op problem.

Chapter Three

Darren and Nancy Jones didn’t live in Kansas City or any of the cities that made up Kansas City.  They lived north and east in Odessa, Missouri, in a big old farmhouse that had been renovated over the years to make sure it had the latest amenities.  Their neighbor lived at least a half mile away, if one cut through the wheat field growing near their house. 

I sat in my car for a few moments, letting the heat slowly creep in.  And as I sat there, I saw the front door jerk open and a little man ran out.  I don’t mean just a short man, I mean little, he was maybe three feet tall and he had bright orange hair.  Except leprechauns aren’t real, even if this one seemed to be.  I climbed out as he ran across the front yard and tossed a little magic at him.  When it hit him, he disappeared, turning to dust and floating away on the small breeze that moved around me. 

Thanks, Darren huffed, as he ran onto his porch.  They have magic.

Probably, but they aren’t real, so if you don’t believe in their magic, they can’t do anything to you.  I answered.

They are getting stronger, Darren told me.  Nancy was able to see that one.

I think I need to see this crack.  I told him.

I followed Darren into his house expecting it to be different than what it was.  Maybe I expected it to be evil or alive or both, I don’t know.  What I didn’t expect was that it would just be a house with stuff in it.  It felt no different than my apartment did.  This was somewhat disappointing.

In the root cellar there was indeed a crack in the dirt.  It was approximately ten feet long and maybe two feet wide at its widest point, but most of it was just a couple of inches in width.  And it was deep.  Lying on the ground shining a flashlight down the wide part did not reveal the bottom.  It also didn’t reveal anything else. 

What do you think?  Darren asked, as I tapped my foot on the ground.

At the moment, I’m as stumped as you guys are.  I think I need to capture one of the things that comes out.  That may help me figure it out.  I don’t think it was your neighbor’s doing and I don’t think it’s a portal to Hell.  The Earth gave birth to new deities in a similar way. Imaginary creations of mankind took form and shape and sprang forth from the ground to go do whatever divine thing people thought they needed to do.  I’d seen many of them come and go during my lifetime. 

I was tall because Sumerians had been convinced gods and goddesses should be tall and lithe, so I was tall and lithe and I had their skin tone, dark hair, and dark eyes, because most civilizations made deities that looked like them.  Well, not the Egyptians, and it had taken a very long time to figure out how to replace all their animal heads with something more human after Egypt was invaded by the Greeks.

Any idea what made it and how to seal it up?  Darren asked me after I had reached into the crack to see if I could feel anything.  I only felt roots and dirt, which is what I had expected.

Not a clue, but I will call someone to get their opinion, I stood and dug my cell phone out of my pocket.  Some gods and goddesses were technophobes.  Not me.  I loved technology and indoor plumbing and cars and computers and cell phones.  Life in the last two centuries had been significantly more enjoyable than most of the last 6,000 years. 

It went to voicemail and I left a message asking her to call me back.  I stood and sent a little magic to the crack to see what happened.  Instantly the crack lengthened and widened.  Obviously, that was not a good idea or an option.  And then the hole filled with water and brightly colored cichlid fish and a fountain began spraying up from it. 

Sorry, I said sheepishly.  That was not my intention.

You’re a water goddess, right?  Nancy said.

Yeah, but I’m mostly just a goddess, my magic doesn’t always deal with water.  I told her.  But sometimes when I’m not sure what to do, my magic creates oases.

Isn’t that what you were designed to do?  Darren asked.

Yes.

Then wouldn’t an earth god or goddess be better?  Darren asked.  I wasn’t sure I could explain to him that magic wasn’t that picky.  It didn’t care that I was a water goddess, it only cared that I had power and could shape it to my whims and fancies.  And that for many thousands of years, most of my magic had been to create water in places it hadn’t been, so when I don’t fully shape it, I create water. 

I didn’t get the impression Darren used his demigod powers and it would be difficult to make that nuanced difference of understanding since he didn’t.  I could explain it, but chances were he’d still think of me solely as a water goddess. 

It’s very pretty, Nancy said as she bent over and looked into the deep water-filled crevice.  Even in the darkness of the cellar you could tell the water was a crystal-clear blue, the fish brightly colored spots swimming through it. 

Do we need to feed them every day?  Darren asked after a moment.

No, good chance they will disappear within a little while of my leaving.  I wasn’t trying to create water or fish, so they won’t have enough magic to sustain themselves after I’m gone for a while.  I paused.  Do you know exactly how many things have come out of this crack?

At least four, counting the leprechaun today.

Were you home when it happened so I can get a description?  I asked hopefully.

One looked like a dragon, sort of.  It had the head of something I would consider a dragon, but the body of a flying snake.

A wyvern then?  I asked.

Maybe, I’ve never seen a wyvern.  Darren told me.  I considered telling him he wasn’t missing anything; they were a bit like dragon tadpoles.  They had wings, breathed fire, and made mischief and were technically dragons, but they didn’t have arms or legs and the word literally meant fire worm.

Okay and the other?  I asked.

A short man with no skin, made out of bones and muscles, left bloody footprints through the kitchen, but they only lasted about a minute or so.

‘Oh, well, okay.  I told him.  I’ll see if I can find them." 

And the other, Nancy was here by herself.

I didn’t really see anything.  It looked like a patch of extremely hot air moved through the house, it was like looking at the air above asphalt on a hot day.

Good to know.  If that’s what it looked like to you, that’s probably what it looks like to most people and that might help me find it.  I told her, wanting to make her feel like she was contributing to the cause, even if she wasn’t.

My cell phone rang.  The name showed up as Xi Wang.  Since this was who I had called earlier, I took the call, excusing myself by turning my back on Darren and Nancy.

Marya, I got your message, what do you mean a monster-creating crack?

I’m at the house of a demigod and there is a crack in the cellar, dirt floor, crack goes an unknown depth, but the scary part is a leprechaun ran out into the yard when I arrived.

That’s impossible, leprechauns aren’t real.

I know, I told her.  Xi Wang was about a millennium younger than me, but she was a creator goddess.

And you couldn’t close it?

Nope, I managed to create a fountain, I told her, looking into the spring filled with what now appeared to be guppies.  Oh damn.  Possibly the fountain of youth.

My, my, you seem to be coming into your full powers again.

Perhaps, I said quietly.  Ma’at, the Goddess of Justice, and Thoth’s girlfriend, had written a book about ten years ago on ancient and forgotten goddesses called When Goddesses Ruled the Earth.  In recent months it had become a best seller, and as it was read more and more, my powers were getting stronger because I was no longer just a forgotten goddess.  It was happening to most of us in the book, to be honest.  Ma’at had been very selective about the goddesses she had included, leaving out ones that were not all that interested in helping humanity.  Lamashtu had thrown a fit, but Ma’at had looked at her and asked how exactly she was supposed to talk nicely about a goddess that couldn’t be around pregnant women without killing the developing newborn.  Lamashtu had shaken her head and after a few drinks, decided Ma’at was right, there was no way to make her sound not evil.  It was now a running joke with us on Movie Night Fridays. 

There were seven of us goddesses that got together every week for food, alcohol,