Innovation's Muse (Truth's Harem)

by Allyson Lindt

  The energy that flowed through the room was comforting. Athena was one of the few members of the pantheon who had always sided with the heroes over the gods. And her door was always open to them.

  Unsure how long it would take to get her attention, Actaeon crossed the oak floor to a pair of cushions that sat at the far end of the room. He knelt on one of the pillows and prepared to wait.

  She would know he was here. This was as much a temple as any house of worship for a god—imbued with Athena’s energy and linked directly to her. Which also made the setting as private as possible.

  “It’s been too long.” Her lilting voice startled him. She took a nearby cushion. “I’m glad you’re here.” She folded long legs beneath her, and her dark hair fell in a curtain around her smooth, tan face, draping down her back and almost touching the floor when she sat.

  He hadn’t expected her to arrive so quickly. “I’m sorry I don’t visit more often.”

  Athena squeezed his hand in greeting before resting her own in her lap. “Me too. Social visit?”

  “To begin with. I have an ulterior motive, but I also have time. How have you been?” He didn’t need to rush things. It was nice to catch up with an old friend.

  She gestured around her. “Business has never been better. Zeus may be an asshole, but this Enlightenment thing is doing wonders for my bottom line.” A breeze fluttered through a window, ruffling her lightweight blouse and winding around them before vanishing again.

  Actaeon swore he heard whispers, dozens of them, carried on the wind. “I can only imagine the things you hear and learn.”

  “It’s amazing. It truly is. These people come from all over the world, with their cultures and their technology and their perspectives, and they imbue my little island with all they know and believe.”

  He wouldn’t have the patience for it, but he understood why she loved it.

  “I’m glad you’re back in the game,” she said.

  “Does everyone know?”

  “I haven’t asked them. But you’re hard to miss when you’re not hiding.”

  “So I’ve heard.” It shouldn’t be an unfamiliar feeling, but registering on so many gods’ radars made him feel exposed.

  For centuries, he hadn’t bothered to cover his aura. Then again, man had forgotten who the gods and heroes really were. Actaeon walked among mortals unseen. And because he’d lost his own faith, so to speak, shortly after The Enlightenment, it felt like he’d been masking his true self much longer.

  “What can I do for you?” Athena asked.

  “Can Hades be killed?”

  Her laugh was shaky. “Cut straight to the point, don’t you?”

  “Almost always. I don’t know a better way to ask.”

  She unfolded herself and stood. “Zeus doesn’t believe that he can be. Or, that’s what he says he believes.”

  “That’s not good enough.” Actaeon rose as well, so he could look her in the eye. “If Zeus and Poseidon had left well enough alone, Hades probably would have stayed in the underworld.” Hades never cared about the trials of the living, until The Enlightenment. “That didn’t happen, and he’s going to make everyone suffer for it.” It was information everyone knew, but he had to drive the point home, to ensure the threat was fresh in her mind.

  Athena sighed. “I wish I had more to offer. There are some things even I’ve never managed to learn. Believe it or not, the gods don’t want the means of their destruction being public knowledge.”

  That made too much sense. “Icarus says the only way to bind Hades is with his own energy. I don’t suppose there’s any confirmation on that?”

  “It’s probably true. It sounds reasonable. When it comes to Icarus, though, I never dare guess. He has so many things bouncing in his head, I can’t comprehend half of it. Invention is a different language than knowledge.”

  “Where else am I supposed to look?” Actaeon couldn’t keep the frustration from his voice. He hated to admit that Cassandra and Athena were pretty much his only two decent ideas about where to turn. He could start going down his contact list, the way Cerberus suggested, but that felt like a lot of wheel spinning, and it lacked subtlety.

  There was no telling when he’d stumble on someone who held loyalties he didn’t know about.

  “There’s always the library.” She was talking about the books she’d rescued and hidden before Alexandria burned. Stashes of ancient tomes very few knew existed.

  “I couldn’t ask you—”

  “To look on your behalf? You could, and you should. But my answer is no. If you want the information, go find it yourself. You know what you’re seeking.”

  He hadn’t expected that. “You’d let me wander through the library?” He was almost terrified and definitely humbled at the notion.

  “I trust you. I’ll send you in, and if you call my name when you’re done, I’ll bring you back here. But only you.”

  “It could take me eons to sort through so many books.”

  “You’re exaggerating, but it will take a while. Did you have someone in mind to help you?”

  “Her name is Lexi.” She wanted to help, and she’d adore the place. Besides, there was no one he trusted more. He wasn’t sure why it was so absolute, but it was.

  “Persephone’s daughter? The girl who bonded with Cerberus?” Of course Athena recognized the name.

  “Yes.”

  Athena knitted her brows together and pursed her lips. She was silent for a few seconds. “All right. But only if I can meet her.”

  “I’m not sure if she’s up for that.”

  “You, of all people, are familiar with how we work. I’m offering you something big. You can do me this little favor in exchange.” Her voice was kind, but an underlying edge of you don’t have a choice ran through the words.

  He wouldn’t use Lexi as a bargaining chip in any deal. “I’ll talk to her. I’ll tell her that’s the condition. It’s not my trade to make.”

  “That’s fair. I’ll see you in a few days, once you’ve had a chance to work things out?”

  Actaeon agreed. They chatted a little longer, and he wished her farewell.

  As he rode the ferry, he ticked off a rough timeline in his head. He needed another couple of days to talk to Lexi, then get back here. After that, who knew how much time, to sift through the library?

  If Hades was using this string of events to regain his power more quickly, he could be back in a matter of weeks.

  Suddenly time felt as fleeting and temporary to Actaeon as he assumed it did to most mortals.

  A prickle ran up his spine and danced over his skin, and a distinctly non-human scent teased his sinuses. Cerberus?

  Actaeon whirled, looking for the source. He searched faces, but none stood out. Something strange caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. It almost looked like an overlapped image of two dogs, as though the creature had two heads.

  He focused on the dog, but it was a regular Russian wolf hound. Taller than the boy it stood next to, but nothing out of the ordinary.

  Actaeon sniffed the air again, but the not-quite-Cerberus scent was gone. Perhaps it was a remnant, clinging to his clothes, or a vivid memory.

  He looked at the dog again. Not even a Doberman, like Cerberus’ three-headed form.

  Actaeon rubbed his eyes. He needed to take a break if he was jumping at shadows. He would, when this Hades situation was dealt with. He’d take Lexi someplace remote, and spend a few weeks—months—getting to know her.

  A short while later, the ferry pulled into the dock. He disembarked with the other passengers.

  Another scent greeted him, this one unmistakable. It was a smell that had haunted his dreams until recently. He looked up, to see Cassandra waiting for him near the parking lot.

  This ought to be interesting.

  He approached with caution, searching for Apollo. Too bad he couldn’t sniff out rapid mood shifts to crazy-fireball-throwing mode. With the crowds here, he didn’t know if he could p
revent someone from getting hurt.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Icarus pointed Lexi toward a spare laptop and logged her in. It was impossible to miss her etched in scowl.

  “I get it. Research detail isn’t the most super-neato-keen thing you could be doing.” He tried to keep his voice kind. “It’s what we’re all doing, though.”

  She looked at him, and her expression softened. “They get to go on location. I sound like I’m pouting, but I’m trying not to. I’ve spent my life in the shadows, so I understand, but this feels like a whole new kind of prison.”

  “It’s a temporary thing.” He felt bad for her. It would be nice if there was time to come up with a solution.

  She slouched in her seat with a heavy sigh. “Right. Because in the grand scheme of immortality, the next couple of decades will seem like nothing. For now? It’s still a large portion of my life.”

  “Decades?” He didn’t understand where she’d gotten that number from. “We’ll be doing this for a couple of weeks—maybe a month or two—and you won’t be locked up that entire time.”

  “Not like this. There’s always another reason to hide, though. Who I am, where I live, or what my lineage is.” She dropped her head into her hands. “I’m sorry. This is starting to sound whiny. But things like this?” She nodded at the laptop. “Getting online without having to jump through hoops, in the hopes no one discovers me? A foreign concept.”

  He pulled his stool closer to hers and settled in. She wasn’t near enough to touch. He swore he felt the electricity flowing between them, though. “Not anymore.”

  “I’m logged in as you.”

  “You don’t have to be. You’re not a secret anymore. It’s true that getting in the gods faces is dangerous right now, but there’s no reason to keep pretending you don’t exist.”

  “You make it sound easy.” She looked skeptical.

  “It is if you let it be.”

  Lexi shook her head and turned back to the screen. “Not sold.”

  “You know in Actaeon’s company, you’re not hidden anyway.” He was pointing out the obvious, but her replies made him wonder if she’d realized it.

  Her smile was tight. “I do know. But I’m safe with him.”

  Icarus didn’t doubt that. Unless Actaeon was in one of his more fickle save the helpless moods. Icarus could point out that Actaeon didn’t exactly boot Cassandra to the curb, but he suspected Lexi knew that. She was already living in the open. If she admitted it, she’d give herself more freedom.

  “Give it time” he said. “I don’t have a better pitch than that. Either you believe it, or you don’t.”

  “I can’t argue with that.” She paused. “Or, I suppose I could, but I don’t see a reason to.”

  The conversation faded away, replaced with the clacking of keys and the scratch of pencil on paper, as they both dove into their research.

  Icarus wasn’t writing anything specific down, but getting thought fragments out of his head helped him organize them. Sometimes words and images led to more. Other times, like now, he sketched random lines and let his mind work on its own in the background.

  Lexi whimpered, and he looked up to see her frowning at the screen. She was engrossed, so he didn’t bother her.

  After a couple of minutes, there was another sound, this one more like a sobbing gasp.

  He glanced in her direction again.

  “It’s nothing. Just the news.” She met his gaze for the briefest moment before looking away.

  The third time she made a strangled sound of horror, he dropped his pencil. “What is it?” Icarus didn’t snap at her, but he wasn’t going to let her shrug it off as nothing, either.

  “Videos, blog posts, messages, about dozens of different groups—not individuals but multiple people—who are killing themselves in Hades’ name. Hundreds have died in the last twenty-four hours alone. We have to do something.”

  The news burrowed deep under his skin. So many lives lost. For another god’s ego. He had a hard enough time with the solstice sacrifices that came with The Enlightenment, but this was random and chaotic death. “What are we going to do?”

  The way Lexi narrowed her gaze and pursed her lips almost screamed heartless bastard.

  “I care,” Icarus said. “You’ve seen that. But what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Find the next group before it’s too late?” Frustration filled Lexi’s voice.

  He liked the sentiment behind the idea, but not its lack of practicality. “We find one. How many dozens do we miss? If these are just the people going viral, how many more aren’t?”

  “I don’t know.” Her hands sat on the table, and she clenched her fists so hard, her knuckles were pale.

  “You are doing something.” He poured sympathy into his words. “You’re doing exactly what needs to be done. Not every problem can be chewed through with three jaws full of teeth or shot at with arrows. If we get to Hades, this stops. If we take time out to hunt and peck one-off instances, he can get to hundreds more while we save a tenth that many.”

  Her jaw was tight, and she stared at him as though she wanted to say something.

  “What?” he prompted.

  “I feel so useless. I’m sitting here, staring at a computer, while so many lives... That fight with the chimera? I was a liability.”

  “Is that what this is about?” Icarus was on a first name basis with being dead weight in a physical fight. It had been a long time since it was an issue for him. His strengths lay elsewhere, but he remembered the resentment. A hero who couldn’t do anything besides think. Who wanted that?

  “It’s one example,” Lexi said.

  “I think I can help.” His solution wasn’t the same as what he’d discovered in himself, but it was similar.

  “How? Please don’t feed me more lines about what we’re doing being important. I understand that, but it’s not comforting.”

  Icarus stood, grasped her fingers, and pulled her to her feet. At the contact, a shock raced through him. “Show me that trick again. The one you did with the screwdriver.” He tried not to think about the fact that she’d summoned a tool she’d never seen, from mid-air.

  “Asking me to perform party tricks isn’t much better.” Her stubborn attitude might be enticing, if it wasn’t counterproductive.

  “Fantastic.” Sarcasm slipped into his reply. “That’s not why I’m asking. I want to see what you’re capable of. You wanted to accomplish something?”

  “How does this—”

  “I don’t know. But we’re going to figure it out.”

  She held out her hand like last time, and a dagger appeared. He recognized the shape and color—it looked like the one Actaeon summoned. It sat on display as if it didn’t have any weight. It shouldn’t be balanced on her hand at that angle.

  Icarus reached for it, and it vanished. “I can’t touch it.”

  “Because it’s an illusion.” Lexi’s retort had a hint of well duh to it.

  “This was explained to you? Just because it’s an illusion doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

  Lexi crossed her arms and stepped back from him. “I’ve heard it. It doesn’t make any sense, though. I know what I summon isn’t there.”

  Icarus wasn’t sure why this was important for him to figure out, but he tended to follow the inspiration, and his insisted he learn what Lexi could really do. A different thread pushed him to focus on her specifically. How kissable her mouth was, even when she was upset. The swell of her breasts when her arms pushed them together. Her sharp wit.

  He closed the distance between them again and tugged her arms apart. He grasped her hands and let the desire flow through him, to dance with everything else inside. “Who did you face in the labyrinth? When you first arrived?”

  “Me? No one. I showed up in a vast void of nothingness, with no one around me.”

  That was interesting. Her description sounded like the space he used to build everything in, before any of it took shape. Her
experience was an unexpected side-effect. He wanted to explore that but tucked the tangent aside for later. Now, he needed to get to a different piece of information, to put her on the same page as him.

  “How did you move past that point?” he asked.

  “I meditated? Basically I focused until I could feel Actaeon and Cerberus, and that was enough to make them... show up, I guess? I don’t have a better word for it. We think we were all in the same place the whole time, but I couldn’t see them because they were part of the illusion.”

  “Fascinating.”

  She frowned. “I don’t like being your science experiment.”

  “You’re not. I promise. Or perhaps a little, but I’m trying not to do that to you.” They were getting sidetracked. He was getting sidetracked. He wanted to kiss her. Claim her. Feel her legs wrapped around his waist and her body pressed to his. “What did you see when you found them? Who were they facing?”

  “I still never really saw that part. To me, they were fighting air. But according to them, it was Heracles.”

  Ouch. “And he was winning,” Icarus said, filling in the next part of her story. He should have guessed Heracles would be the first challenge. The entrance was designed to feed off an individual’s darkest traumas, and he had a hard time imagining a bigger one than Zeus’ champion. Except maybe Hades. The result might be different if Actaeon and Cerberus were to step into a similar situation today.

  And he was getting stuck on another tangent. “He was kicking their asses because he was tangible. They believed Heracles was there.”

  “Until I convinced them he wasn’t.”

  Fucking stubborn. He was wrong—that wasn’t irritating. It was sexy as fuck.

  “Next you need to learn the other side of the coin. How to convince people what isn’t there is.”

  “I can’t.” This time she pulled from his grip and returned to her seat.

  He missed feeling her, and that bothered him. “Have you tried?”

  She opened her mouth, and then snapped it shut again. Silence stretched between them, while he waited for a response.