Zeus is Dead

by Michael G. Munz

  —A Mortal’s Guidebook to the Olympians’ Return

  “SO NOW THAT MORTALS are getting more environmentally conscious, are you planning to ease back on this whole climate change thing of yours?” Apollo watched his twin sister draw back her bowstring, sight down the arrow, and hold it.

  “Oh, probably. Or maybe. Well, no,” Artemis answered with a shrug. “Our return has distracted them from the environment. Should I turn the heat down too soon, they’ll forget all about it and learn nothing. Besides, I wish them to go green. That was the whole intent! So many buildings and cars everywhere. It’s not natural.”

  “Shall I point out the irony of your saying so while relaxing atop a skyscraper?”

  “You probably shall, yes.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she let the arrow fly. It sped down from the top of the skyscraper and through two open corner windows of another building before embedding itself in the skull of one of the monsters below. “Ha! Right between the eyes. Beat that.”

  Apollo squinted. Right between the eyes, indeed. “That means little when your target is a seven-eyed beast that’s mostly head.”

  “Stop trash-talking and take your shot. You’re terrible at it.”

  He pulled an arrow. “Trash-talking?”

  She grinned. “That too.”

  “And yet I’m the one Homer called ‘Archer-god.’”

  “Only because you snapped it up first, Brother.”

  “And invented the bow.”

  He nocked the arrow and looked for a worthy shot. The five remaining creatures skittered over the outside of a city bus, looking like nothing more than large, boggle-eyed heads with talons sprouted behind their ears. There was good reason for that: they were nothing more than large, boggle-eyed heads with talons sprouted behind their ears. Funny how that worked.

  “Ha! Right, ‘invented’ the bow. But that’s what you do, you snap things up. ‘Music? I’ll do it!’ ‘Healing? I’ll do it!’ Exactly how full does your portfolio need to be?”

  “Someone has to do it.”

  “Overachiever.”

  “Tree-hugger.”

  Artemis whapped the back of his head with her bow. “Darn right. My question stands.”

  Apollo spotted a perfect bank shot before he could answer and drew back the bowstring, concentrating. “There’s . . . only . . . so many of us . . .”

  Shrill beeping from the phone at his belt dashed his efforts.

  Artemis snickered. “Case in point. Too busy.”

  He relaxed the bow and checked the incoming text message. “More worshippers. A garage band just sacrificed a keg to me in hopes of a blessing.”

  “They drank it on your behalf, of course.”

  “Of course. They’ve yet to get the hang of that ‘sacrifice’ concept. ‘Twig?’ What kind of horrible name for a band is Twig?”

  “Sounds bluegrass.”

  “Country-jazz fusion. It’s new. And not my fault.”

  He put away the phone, drew the bowstring back again, and aimed for a stop sign at just the perfect angle to skip the arrow and hit one of the creatures. Everyone loved bank shots. Well, maybe the thingama- monster he was about to hit wouldn’t, but—

  Another text alert jarred his concentration as he released the arrow. It skipped off the stop sign well enough but caught only a small piece of the monstrous creature.

  “Styx on a stick!”

  “Well, don’t wound them! That’s just unkind.” Artemis quickly sent another arrow after his—without the bank shot, of course—that put the monster out of its misery as Apollo went to check the message. “You know you could try ignoring those for a bit.”

  “Not like I used to. There’s entirely too many now.” Nevertheless, he turned the phone off without checking it, knowing even as he did so that it would grate on him. He was supposed to be relaxing, yet who had time to relax? He couldn’t just ignore those who had the good taste to worship him, could he? “You’re really not having trouble keeping up with everything now?”

  She shrugged. “I never have before. And it’s your shot.”

  “But so many mortals know we exist now. I’m not complaining about the recognition and worship, but there’s a lot more to do. I got rusty.”

  “That’s what you get for being the multipurpose god. Are you going to shoot, or are you going to brood about it?”

  He scowled at the nickname, apt though it was. Even as he sighted down his arrow and looked for a shot, he couldn’t shake the thought that he really shouldn’t have taken this break. Entirely too much work awaited him: worshippers to care for, musicians to inspire, Muses to manage—not to mention keeping up with Olympian politics. With Zeus’s killer still unknown eight months after the fact, the tension had yet to resolve itself. Officially the gods were all outraged, but most were either too immersed in the thrill of the Return or too afraid of being slain themselves—or both—to look for a guilty party. The very topic had swiftly become taboo.

  Too late, Apollo saw an opportunity and fired. His arrow flew clean through the skull of one of the creatures and out the other side, narrowly missing another creature that had been right in its path only moments before. So close! Still, he smiled, trying to pass it off as being exactly what he’d intended.

  Artemis glanced at him, shaking her head after a beat. “Wow. You really are preoccupied, aren’t you?”

  “I go for a solid shot instead of a fancy one and that means I’m preoccupied, does it?”

  “I speak of you hitting that mortal in the leg.”

  “Oh for the love of—!”

  She was right. His arrow had ended its journey sunk in the thigh of a young man who had been snapping photos of the spectacle a moment before. Apollo considered claiming that the man was a blaspheming oil baron utterly deserving retribution, but doubted she’d buy it.

  “Oh, he’ll be fine. His camera’s okay; look how well he held on to it when he tumbled! In agony.” Apollo sighed. “Listen, do me a favor and finish off the creatures while I fix this, will you?”

  She grinned and nocked two arrows at once.

  Healing the mortal’s wound was simple enough for the god of healing, and the man had the good sense to be gracious about it. (It helped such things that five months ago, a Hollywood starlet had sued Aphrodite over a botched facelift after she’d sacrificed a luxury convertible to the goddess. Aphrodite didn’t bother to show up in court. She collapsed the hillside under the starlet’s house and dared her to keep complaining.) Really, the man would now be something of a local celebrity for a few days, enough for a few free drinks at least. Apollo even posed for a photo. Stern. Dignified. Taking a moment to bask in mortal adulation while his sister quietly dispatched the monsters behind them. She didn’t like city crowds anyway.

  Of course when he joined her atop a nearby hill, he realized he now had even less time to relax than before.

  “I really need to be going now.”

  “Already? I’m telling you, Brother, you must to learn to delegate more.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “I’m serious. It’s not as if you don’t know how. The Muses are quite independent, are they not?”

  “Zeus’s daughters, if you recall. He forced them on me.” You don’t say no to Zeus, after all. Or you didn’t, anyway.

  “Truly, but they’re good at what they do, yes?”

  He gritted his teeth. “Mergh.”

  “I didn’t catch that.”

  “I said ‘Mergh.’ And very well, maybe. Most of the time.” In truth the Muses were his closest friends on Olympus and among the best things that had ever happened to him. They were up there with his automation of the sun chariots and accidentally inventing solar panels, but admitting so would lose the argument. He tried changing the subject. “Did we decide where those monsters came from?”

  “Who knows? Lousy design, though. Hideous, but inept. Perhaps Aphrodite?” She grinned.

  “Shh. She might hear.” It was unlikely, of course, but feuding god
desses had destroyed nations, and cleanup was a bitch.

  “Ha! Like I’m afraid of her. Goddess can’t even take a little knife wound without crying to daddy, and now that he’s . . .” She trailed off at the mention of their slain father. “Anyway, delegating. Just give it some thought before you drive yourself crazy.”

  Apollo’s evening appointment to evaluate an apprentice prophetess for transfer to his Oracle at Delphi was canceled. This was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it gave him a free half hour to catch up on things. On the other hand, the prophetess had cancelled because she’d been hospitalized after an encounter with one of the many swarms of “razorwings” plaguing the southwestern American countryside of late. She would recover, but really, if the apprentice prophetess had any promise whatsoever, the woman should have seen it coming.

  He supposed the evaluation took care of itself at that point.

  Ancient myth has long told of how the prophetess stationed at his Oracle at Delphi would seek the divine vapors hissing from the rock fissure. In doing so, went the legend, she would be possessed of Apollo so that she might have oracular visions. Modern scholars theorized that the vapors merely contained a powerful hallucinogen that caused the Oracle to experience what primitive Greek culture misinterpreted as prophecy. Neither theory was more than partially correct, and had anyone thought to ask one of the gods about it, they might’ve learned the truth. (Then again, they might not. Mythology is filled with contradictory versions of the same stories, stemming from various gods’ attempts to spin those stories in their favor. Plus, some gods simply enjoy pulling a mortal leg or two. Ares once convinced one of the more ambitious tribes of Crete that properly grown olives would explode when thrown, a lie which led to the simultaneous destruction of a culture and invention of salad dressing.)

  While it is true that the vapors do contain a hallucinogen, its single curious effect is to make the prophetess see, of all things, lithium batteries amid the rest of the prophecy. To counter this, the prophetess simply omits any mention of lithium batteries before relating an interpretation—a mostly harmless practice, save for when the prophesied future does indeed involve lithium batteries, which was blessedly rare prior to the 1970s.

  Nor was there any distasteful and time-consuming possession involved in seeking visions. Apollo had merely imbued the vapors with his power so they enhanced the prophetesses’ natural gifts, allowing them to seek visions for others. Clearly the apprentice didn’t have enough natural gifts to enhance.

  In any case, the cancellation gave Apollo a little more time to work with than he’d expected. Artemis’s advice continued to weigh on him as well. Combined, the two topics forced the realization that he’d not actually sought a vision for himself in months.

  He’d not done it often, of course, even when he did have time. Despite his superior skill, looking into the future was akin to performing exploratory laparoscopic surgery through a kaleidoscope. Sure, you’d see some things, but while they’d probably look cool, there was no guarantee that they’d be any more useful to you than planning ahead like a normal person.

  But when in doubt . . .

  On the door of his apartments on Olympus, he hung the golden sign Artemis had given him for his 2,000th birthday (Divine genius at work. Do not disturb.) and stole away to the roof. After seating himself on a mat of silk, Apollo looked up to the sky, spread his arms, and willed himself into the trance that would, eventually, produce a vision.

  His breathing slowed. His mind opened. Images of dolphins wearing hats floated by as they always did for some reason. Apollo focused on the mellifluous music of the future made by vibrations in the strings of time (a difficult task when one is simultaneously trying to avoid being bothered by overwrought, melodramatic phrasing that tested the patience of even the god of poetry). He awaited . . . anything.

  The dolphins stuck around longer than usual. One wore a green and purple reindeer sweater. Momentarily recoiling in aesthetic horror, Apollo managed to dismiss the dolphin and its eldritch sweater as mere ethereal rubbish.

  There was floating. There was waiting. There was more floating. There was, perhaps unsurprisingly, more waiting.

  Then with a flash, the vision came. (That is to say the flash was a part of the vision; the vision itself slipped in like a cat and was suddenly just there. Any vision that comes with a separate flash before it is of course a sign of impending brain aneurysm.)

  The flash is lightning. It reflects on the eyes of a young man who clings to an iron frame high above a crowded, brightly lit cityscape. Rain begins to fall, pelting his sandy-blond hair moments before he looks up with a curse.

  No, not a curse. A name. “Zeus!”

  As Apollo ponders the futility of calling to a dead god, the vision widens. He recognizes two things: the structure the young man climbs and the figure perched above him at the very top. The figure gazes down on the man in both amusement and curiosity—the figure whose manifest power and life fill this vision of the future.

  Zeus.

  “How did you find me, mortal?”

  Lightning flashes again, and the vision ends.

  Apollo opened his eyes with a curse. Zeus, alive again? Or never dead? Two possibilities immediately occurred to him: either Zeus had faked his murder to test the Olympians’ loyalty or his killer had been sloppy. Either way, the true king of the gods would be more incensed than a minotaur at a barbeque.

  A knot in his stomach, Apollo rose to look down upon the world and realized that he now had even more problems than when he started. Mortals were right; ignorance was bliss. Total ignorance, at least; partial ignorance was a pain in the ass. Was it really Zeus? Was it some sort of trick or a figurative vision? (He hated those.) He needed to learn more.

  Temptation tugged at him to seek another vision, despite the likely futility. Seeking a second vision on the heel of a first was doomed to failure more often than not. Yet given the stakes, he had to try.

  Apollo returned to the mat, hoping for further clues, for further insight . . . or at the very least for dolphins with better fashion sense.

  That sweater was an abomination.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Magic? Darkness? Secrets? Any intelligent person must agree that Hecate is certainly among the worst of the false gods currently plaguing our world. Let it be known that Hecate—and her worshippers—are now and forevermore on the NCMA’s Top Ten List of Number One Enemies!”

  —members' newsletter from the Neo-Christian Movement of America

  “Numerous Christian organizations have stated multiple times that the NCMA is merely a fringe group of fanatics and should not be taken to represent the viewpoint, manner, or beliefs of Christianity as a whole.”

  —A Mortal’s Guidebook to the Olympians’ Return

  BRITTANY SIMONS KEPT a secret vigil in the light of a single candle. The candle, lit in secret, sat at the center of a temple. The temple? That, too, was secret. To reach it required one to know a secret exit from a secret building that led to a secret path. (The secret exit was really just the back door of a college dorm, but no one really used it except during fire drills, and the dorm itself was really only known to those on campus, so Brittany figured that was good enough.) That very secret path wound its secretive way through some secret bushes to a secret chamber tucked beneath the off-ramp of a secret, heavily used, six-lane interstate highway.

  Okay, so maybe the highway itself wasn’t so terribly secret either, but it was a very secret off-ramp; the sign alerting drivers to its very existence was partially hidden by the boughs of a tree. In the coming spring, when the tree actually had leaves that might block a letter or two, the ramp would be even more secret. Brittany looked forward to that season with secret anticipation.

  Yes, Brittany liked secrets. Dark, secretive secrets wrapped in the most secret secrecy. Indeed, one could say that Brittany’s affection for secrets even eclipsed her aversion to thesauruses, though Brittany would sneer at anyone who made such a suggestion.

&n
bsp; Especially if that person referred to her by the name “Brittany,” for she was Brittany no more!

  Except on her driver’s license.

  And on the nametag they made her wear at her part-time barista job.

  And on the envelopes containing the bills stamped past due that arrived in her mailbox on an increasingly frequent basis. And, yes, fine, on the mailbox too.

  Clearly she needed a secret mailbox.

  But she was no longer Brittany in her (secret) heart. No, she was Wynter Nightsorrow, Priestess of Hecate, and tonight Hecate’s loyal servant would attempt her greatest ritual ever.

  She sat amid the circle of power, reveling in the firelight and the darkness around her, the air thick with the scent of energy, incense, and anchovies from the pizza she’d sacrificed to begin the ritual. She could feel her senses spread throughout the goddess’s temple. Her temple. Her gift to the goddess.

  Yeah, it was funded with the money Wynter’s parents sent for her tuition. But Wynter was the one who had (secretly) dropped out months ago, so she was pretty sure she deserved the credit for creating the temple. If you could ask the seven figures hunting for Wynter out in the darkness beyond her senses, they’d tell you she deserved the credit too. But you can’t, so just ignore them and their pointy weapons for now. They’ll just be our little secret.

  Ah, secrets!

  Wynter always had a thing for them, though she could never say why. (She liked to think that her subconscious knew; it just wasn’t telling.) As a little girl, she loved writing notes to friends in code that no one but she could read, or coming up with private names for her dolls that only she knew. It made no difference that no one had ever cared to uncover such secrets; it was the secrets themselves that mattered.

  Hecate, goddess of night, was queen of secrets. It was a good fit. Wynter first began the whole Hecate-worshipping thing after she graduated high school nine months ago—just prior to the Return. To those who knew her—or to those who hadn’t left town for college, anyway—her transformation seemed to come out of nowhere. “It’s the true dark calling of the secret mysteries of my heart,” she’d explained.