“Why are you always trying to figure out what kind of something someone is, lady, huh?”
“Are you for real? I should throw you out there with the razorwings!” she growled.
“Hey, why don’t we?” Leif asked. “Did he do something to Thalia?”
“No, Leif. Thalia’s just useless.”
The thief laughed. “At least Thalia knows when to shut up!”
Leif blinked. Thalia knows when to shut up? Okay, so the guy hadn’t been around them very long at all.
“Who are you?” Tracy shot.
At that moment the amulet flipped up out of the pack. Tracy shot forward as if to snatch it. It was already too far out of reach; she’d never make it. Leif grabbed her arm on instinct as the razorwings sprang into the air after it, their tiny, grasping paws knocking it higher and higher. Buffeted about like a plastic bag in a windstorm, the amulet flew farther upward and tumbled out of sight in a swarm of fur and glowing eyes.
The thief shot from the alcove with Tracy and Leif at his heels. They dashed along the riverbed and up onto higher ground, stopping there to watch fruitlessly as the creatures drifted off. Leif turned to Tracy, unsure what to do as she screamed out a curse.
The shirtless man reeled on them, his face contorted as if struggling for words until he finally burst out with, “I don’t deserve this!” A second later he was sprinting off after the swarm, yelling a parting message as he went.
To Leif’s surprise, Tracy wasn’t moving. “What’d he say?” she asked.
“He said he’s Thad Freaking Winslow, and his feet hurt.”
“Who the hell is Thad Freaking Winslow?”
“I don’t know, but shouldn’t we be chasing after him?” He really didn’t want to. Please say no, please say no . . .
“No.”
Bonus. “Why not?”
“I don’t know who he is—”
“He’s Thad Freaking Winslow, he said.”
“I don’t know who he is,” she repeated, “but he’s at least as mortal as we are, or he’d be able to do something more than just chase after those things, right? So let’s press our advantage and get the Muse on our side.”
“I thought she was useless?”
“She is. But she can fly, so if we can snap her out of wherever she’s blissed off to . . .” She left the sentence unfinished and turned to jog back the other way. Distracted by a sudden realization, Leif just watched her go. She stopped a moment later to turn her flashlight back on him. “Well? C’mon!”
“You called me ‘Leif’ back there.”
“Excuse me?”
“You called me ‘Leif,’ not ‘Karlson.’ First-name basis! That’s symbolic! Means you’re starting to like me!”
She stared a moment, shook her head, and then continued. “Move your skinny ass, Karlson, or I’m leaving it out here.”
“Move your skinny ass, Leif,” he corrected.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Welcome to Mount Olympus. Trespassers will be tribulated.”
—sign, Mount Olympus
TRANSITING TO OLYMPUS without the benefit of godhood was a greater hassle than Apollo had expected.
Though few who don’t live there are aware, the gods’ abode on Olympus isn’t really in Greece so much as it is in a quasi-alternate space, tucked away in what’s best described as a glove compartment of reality. It is no more possible for a mortal to climb the slopes of Mount Olympus and reach the home of the Olympians than it is for someone to reach the moon using a trampoline, a snorkeling mask, and a very tall ladder— unless, that is, one of the gods willed it to be so or that mortal got very, very lucky. While it is true that more than one ancient myth records the tale of a mortal who climbed to the gods' abode, not recorded are the tales of hundreds if not thousands of mortals who failed.
In other words, never was something such as this written: “Stavros climbed the slopes of Olympus intent on petitioning Zeus for vengeance on the neighbor who hit one of his cattle with a two-by-four. He slipped and impaled his skull on a rock because he’s a loser and Zeus was off boning some king’s daughter anyway.” Such tales held little appeal to myth recorders of the time. They were short, they were dull (despite use of the word boning), and no one much enjoyed hearing stories about failure, as the Germans had not yet invented the concept of schadenfreude{1}, perhaps owing to the fact that no one had yet invented the concept of Germans.
Apollo was not entirely without means of discreetly accessing Olympus, but the usual option of shifting over directly to the front gate was no longer open to him. Not only did he have to hitchhike across the astral plane disguised as an unfinished thought, he missed his exit and had to backtrack (slowly) through the elemental plane of nougat.
Sneaking through the Olympian servants’ quarters disguised as an owl was a fair bit easier. The quasi-immortals who boarded there used trained owls for all sorts of things after becoming enamored with a certain mind-bogglingly successful book series about teenaged wizardry. Athena, fanatical of owls to the point of choosing them as her symbol long ago, especially loved it. It gave the place a definite whimsy, but cleaning up the owl pellets hacked all over every conceivable surface added more work than the birds saved. Apollo was just grateful for a way to slip into the gardens without attracting attention. He only hoped he had timed this right.
Getting in to see the Fates would be even more difficult than getting into Olympus. That the Fates didn’t much care for mortal visits was mostly a guess, extrapolated from the fact that there was absolutely no way for anyone but a full god to actually get through the gate to their abode. No lesser immortal crazy enough to try had ever managed it, to say nothing of a mortal doing so. If he couldn’t beg a bit of help in that regard, he was Styx out of luck.
He shifted from an owl to a wolf—he felt a little dirty borrowing one of Athena’s favorite forms anyway—and dashed through the garden, searching. To his relief, it didn’t take long before he spotted his sister sitting in cross-legged meditation by one of her favorite pools. She took no notice of the wolf coming up to sit beside her. Animals tended to flock toward any manifestation of Artemis, so quite a few had already taken up a nearby position. He never did understand why animals were so comfortable around the goddess of hunting, but he’d long ago stopped trying to figure that out.
For discretion’s sake, he remained in a wolf’s shape and voice as he spoke. “I need your help.”
Artemis opened her eyes to glance at him before returning to her meditation. “I’m sorry, Wolf, but it seems my brother’s gotten himself into a profusion of trouble. No one can find him, and if Poseidon hears not from him in three days, the new king’s wrath will be unleashed. So you’ll forgive me if I seem a little preoccupied.”
“Sister, it’s me,” he whispered. She opened her eyes again and glared.
“Oh, gosh, no kidding! You think me unable to tell my own twin brother from a wolf? Are you trying to be discreet, or shall I simply yell out your name for all to hear so you can be certain I recognize you? Give me some credit, Brother.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re in a fair bit of trouble, I daresay.”
“So I was right to sneak in.”
“Does a bear crap in the woods?”
“You’re the expert,” he answered. “How bad is it?”
“It really depends on the bear’s diet. They’re omnivores, you know. They eat an assortment of things.”
“I meant here, Artemis.”
She sighed. “I know what you meant, Brother, but you made me wait this long to find out what’s going on with you. I shall respond at least a little in kind.”
Apollo sighed. It came out as more of a growl, but then so did nearly everything else with a wolf’s vocal cords. “I don’t have very much time, Sister. Please.”
She sighed back. (Hers worked better.) “It’s bad, Apollo. Ares demands punishment for the attack, screaming for vengeance. I persuaded Poseidon and Hera to wait to hear your side of things,
but they want answers. You’re making things worse by not coming forward, and the fact that they can’t find you has more than a few of the others suspicious that you may have some extra power they don’t know about. Gods are beginning to talk.”
Apollo connected the dots. “I found some power to avoid Poseidon’s gaze, ergo I found the power to kill Zeus?”
Artemis stared into the water. “Did you?” she asked finally.
“Absolutely not! You know how insane my schedule’s been since we came back! And do you think I’m the type to murder any of us?”
“No. Nevertheless, I had to ask.”
“So ‘maybe,’ in other words.”
“Let it go, Brother. I believe you. Yet you see how this all makes everyone wonder about you!”
“Even Demeter?”
“Oh, no, of course not Demeter. She’s all mittens and giggles as usual. She’s on your side, to be sure, but not everyone is. I took some abuse for defending you.”
Apollo gave a growl that was intended to be a grumble. Close enough. “Why aren’t they wondering about Ares? I haven’t enough credibility to attack the god of war and be given the benefit of the doubt?”
“I believe if you’d attacked anyone but Ares, you wouldn’t even have this much time to come forward. Demeter’s withholding mittens from him, by the way.”
“Good. His hands are too bloody to be toasty-warm.”
Artemis ignored the chance to commemorate what may have been the first ever instance of the term toasty-warm coming out of a wolf’s mouth. “So why did you attack him?”
“There’s too much to explain right now. The short of it’s that he really did kill Zeus, and I’m pretty sure he had help.”
“Can you prove it?”
“You think I’d be hiding if I could? I don’t even know who worked with him at this point, or exactly how they did it. That’s why I need your help. I need to see the Moirae.”
“The Fates? Why?”
“They’re outside of it all. They may have some insight that could help.”
“Yes, well, I figured that much. Why do you need my help? You snuck in this far, didn’t you?”
“I diminished, Artemis.”
Her wide-eyed gaze hit him as if shot from her bow. “Shut up! Don’t you even joke—”
“I’m not joking! How do you think I stayed hidden?”
“I sensed some sort of difference, Apollo, but I thought you’d found a way to cloak yourself or—Just because of Ares?”
“As I’ve repeated more times than I care to relate, I had no choice! Even now there are those who need protecting that are made vulnerable by my absence. I can’t get to the Fates without your aid. Will you lend it or not?”
He waited for his sister’s shock to fade enough for her to answer him. A trout leaped out of the pool in sheer pointless punctuation of the moment, as trout are wont to do.
“Why do you think the Fates will tell you anything?” she asked finally.
“Blind hope, mostly.”
She turned back to him. “So you’re desperate.”
“Don’t be insulting.” Not that she isn’t right, he thought. “I don’t know who to trust.”
“You’re not telling me the whole truth either.”
“There’s no time for the whole truth. And I’m trying to protect you.”
“Brother, I’m the freaking goddess of chastity. I can protect myself.”
“That’s exactly what Father thought, I’m sure. Are they or are they not casting suspicious glances at the Muses just for working with me?”
She scowled. “Hermes did bring that up.”
Hermes? Apollo wondered if he was connected to the plot at all or just making his usual mischief. No time, he decided. Fates first, wonder later. “I need your answer now.”
She actually made him wait a little longer, but the nice thing about the temporal concept of “the present” is that, when something happens (regardless of when it happens), at the moment in which it does happen, it happens “now”.
Federal judges rarely agree with this, but nobody likes them anyway.
“What part of ‘Muse’ makes you think ‘tracker,’ anyhow?” Thalia demanded. “I mean besides the ‘e’ the words don’t even share any of the same letters in your language! ‘Wake up, Thalia! Help us find the razorwings, Thalia! Oh, they’re somewhere off on the horizon in the dark, but surely you can find them!’ I mean, I appreciate the vote of confidence and it’s really nice to know you think I’m so talented and capable, but I really don’t think I ought to be held responsible for your disappointment if I can’t instantly help, do you? Silly question—of course you do, that’s why you’re frowning like that. You shouldn’t do that by the way, it makes your face all morose and scrunchy.”
The group had paused amid another trek through the dark, their campsite packed and slung over their shoulders. Thalia had just returned from a scouting flight to report that she had no idea whatsoever where the razorwings had taken the amulet.
“Maybe if you hadn’t zoned out in the first place!” Tracy shot.
“All right, first of all no more sentence fragments around me, they’re like nails on a chalkboard, understand?”
“But wasn’t that just a sen—”
“And maybe what, huh? Maybe I’d have been able to help you? Maybe I’d have pulled out the gigantic sword that I don’t have and wrestled the guy to the ground? I’m an artist, not a fighter; I was attending to some very important musing business! The whole world doesn’t stop just because you want it to, you know! I mean, not without bribes to the right people, but they’re really taxing to find, even harder to please, and sometimes they try to eat you so it’s really not even worth it unless you’re into that sort of thing.”
Tracy threw up her arms, at a loss for words. She wanted to tell Thalia to shut up. She wanted to tell her to fly her butt back up there and at least try to help. All that came out was, “Hell on wheels! Could everything just stop being so damn difficult for two seconds?”
The words faded to a distant echo in the darkness. The others just looked at her, blinking.
Thalia cracked a smile a moment later and giggled. “How long was that?”
“No!” yelled Tracy at Leif before he could answer. She pushed forward into the Muse’s personal space. The weight of the night’s trials, momentarily lifted when she thought Thalia would help her recover the amulet, had crushed down on her again. Her world had gone to hell in the past day, and all she had for help were a flighty Muse and a devoted stalker, neither of whom seemed to be able to stop talking! She wouldn’t give up. She could deal with it, but . . . “Just—just everyone shut up unless it’s going to help, okay? Geez!”
Thalia cocked her head pensively, then pecked Tracy right on the nose. “You need to lighten up.”
It was a moment before Tracy could react to that. “Lighten up?” she burst finally. “The amulet’s gone, Jason’s dead, there’s God-knows- what going on—”
“Gods know what,” Leif corrected.
“—sending Erinyes and razorwings and idiot stalkers at me left and right and you want me to—”
“Lighten up, yes,” Thalia finished for her. “I mean, ever since I’ve met you, you’ve been bringing the whole mood down, and frankly it’s grown tiresome. No longer funny. I need funny. I work well with funny! So—” She crossed her eyes and waggled her fingers at Tracy, somehow managing to speak with her tongue sticking out. “—lighten up.”
It occurred to Tracy that she had absolutely zero idea how to deal with this woman—this Muse—who stood in front of her. Just one more of dozens of problems, and they all made her so irritated that she couldn’t seem to suppress a giggle. That really made no sense at all, and she wondered how much it had to do with the nighthawk that just landed in Thalia’s hair.
The Muse’s blue eyes flicked up at it. They rolled even as she grinned. “Off the hair, please, thank you.” Obedient, it instead hopped to her shoulder and warbled a series o
f peets in her ear. Thalia’s grin grew wider. “Fantastic timing, truly. Thank you! I don’t suppose you’d be willing to—”
The bird flew off with a cry before Thalia could finish.
“Oh. I suppose not, then.” Thalia began to walk, flashing a giddy smile over her shoulder. “Follow me to the amulet! The little monsters dropped it.”
The corners of Tracy’s lips were quivering upward. “What just happened?” she asked.
Thalia stopped to heave a sigh. “I asked the bird to help me look while I was up there.”
“Why didn’t you say that before?” Tracy demanded.
“Say what before? ‘See this bird that isn’t here? I asked him to help me and he hasn’t come back yet because there’s apparently nothing to report?’ Don’t be silly!” Thalia giggled. “Well—do be silly, but sheesh, roll with the punches, sweethearts! Are you coming or would you prefer to stand there until I can find a horse to give you so you can look it in the mouth?”
Leif and Tracy both jogged to catch up as the Muse giggled again. Tracy found her mood improving and giggled a little with her, which was, again, rather irritating.
It was also somehow heartening.
“So wait,” Leif started up as they trotted along. “You can talk to birds now?”
“And I could talk to them before too, see, because that’s how I asked it in the first place.” She winked.
“I just mean, what’s being a Muse got to do with being able to talk to birds? How’s that connect to writing? Or wait. Is it a music thing?”
“Stop saying ‘wait’; we’re trying to hurry here. And no, it’s not a music thing. It’s got nothing to do with writing. It’s just that things got a little prosaic during the Dark Ages and I took a few extracurriculars. Is there a judgment about that you’d care to express? Does that offend your worldview or something? A Muse isn’t allowed to have outside interests?”
“No, I just didn’t expect it is all.”
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