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feet started to hurt again. Funny how she never felt them when it was time to run. Peter slipped off her back and walked with her to the stream. The cool water tasted good. She lapped, and they lifted double handfuls to their mouths, all three of them keeping watches in different directions while they drank.
    No movement broke the stillness of the night. Sekhmet opened her mouth and scented the air. There was a den of foxes upstream, birds in the trees, but no other warm bodies anywhere near. She sneezed and licked her nose. The dust from the Scholar’s Lair still clung to it. She sneezed again, getting the last of it out.
    “All quiet,” she reported. “I think we should rest, and in the morning I’ll take the Scholar to Vulcan. If she stays on this plane, she will be in danger.”
    She lay down, keeping her head up and alert. She could do without sleep. Peter needed it, and the Scholar might be an immortal, but Sekhmet always thought of her as a little old lady. The two leaned against her side and she could feel them relax as she began to purr.
    In the morning, she would have to find a sanctuary for Peter. Returning to Earth would kill him, she suspected. The Scholar was going to have to come to Earth for the first time since her fiery death. That was going to be a scene.
    Her ears flickered at a whisper of noise overhead, but even her great eyes couldn’t pick out where the sound had come from. The stars gleamed down, undimmed by the time passed since they had sent out their light. Sekhmet kept watch.
     
    Chapter 7
    Linn crouched in the noisy woods waiting for a rabbit to come hopping down the path . Whoever said woods were quiet , she thought crossly , must have been deaf . There were crows, over there, talking to each other in caws. A bold chickadee had been hopping from branch to branch over her head, scolding her anxiously, and a squirrel was chittering loudly across the trail. She knew if she stayed still long enough they would lose interest, but in the meantime, dinner was no closer.
    Her patience was rewarded by a flicker of movement she caught in the corner of her eye. A rabbit was on the edge of the glade eating grass. It looked up every so often, his big ears swiveling. Linn steadied the rifle on the branch and breathed slowly. As it looked back down at the grass, she took her shot, squeezing gently. The rabbit leaped into the air and screamed, but when it hit the ground it sprawled in a boneless heap. She waited awhile anyway.
    When she was quite sure the rabbit was dead and wouldn’t jump up and run away, she walked across the glade and picked it up. She’d made a clean head shot. It had been dead before it hit the ground.
    “Sorry, little guy,” she murmured. Silly to talk to a dead animal, but it seemed right. “I need to learn. Thanks.”
    She put it into the plastic-lined game-bag Grampa Heff had given her so she wouldn’t soil her daypack, and moved on to another likely spot. She only needed two for dinner. The quiet time in the woods was giving her time to think, too.
    If Grampa and the other immortals were real, and they weren’t magic, which is what Grampa had mentioned, what were they? Where did they come from? She’s been reading origin myths of the gods. Many of them had the same theme, that of one generation of gods destroying another, and many referenced falling from one plane to another, trapping the gods here on Earth.
    She also saw in the Orpheic tales of the Titans the origins of the clash that was affecting her. The gypsum gods, the Olympians who had seized power, now wanted to claim the whole Earth. They saw the other families of gods, who had been revered by the Norse, the American Indians, and other peoples, as weak and inferior. This, combined with the rise of humanity and technology, threatened them.
    Linn hunkered down on the little ravine overlooking the stream. Rabbits didn’t look up much, she’d noticed. They should. Hawks and eagles could take them. She glanced up,