“Hrmph. I also enjoy macramé and Ping-Pong.”
“Ping-Pong’s a funny word,” Tracy observed. “Ping-Pong! Ping-Pong!” She giggled again.
Leif was looking at her strangely. She supposed that wasn’t much of a change. “What’d you do to her?”
“Just lightened her up a bit,” Thalia said. “It’s a Muse thing.”
That stopped Tracy in her tracks. A second afterward she realized stopping wasn’t helpful and hurried to catch up. “You did this to me?” The tone of her voice didn’t have nearly enough outrage as she’d have liked. “What did you do?” There. Better.
“Oh, don’t fret about it, it’ll wear off soon enough. Just enjoy it. It’s better for everyone; trust me.”
Tracy laughed. “I don’t appreciate you messing with my brain!”
“This has nothing to do with your brain. It’s your mood, it’s more of an . . . aura . . . thingy. (Watch out for that rabbit hole, by the way. I said watch out for—Zut! No one listens!) It’s hard to explain.”
“Mood’s controlled by brain chemicals, actually,” Leif pointed out.
Thalia laughed. “Oh, right!” she mocked. “Braaaaaaain chemicals! You mortals are always so cute. Except when you’re not. Which actually is probably more of the time than otherwise, but . . .” She shrugged and continued jogging.
Tracy struggled to cling to her outrage, but the anger rapidly slipped through her fingers. She let it go for the moment, recalling something else. “I have a question,” she tried before bursting into a giggle. “Hehe. Braaaainss!”
No, stop it!
Thalia giggled with her. “Don’t mess with a Muse.”
She forced the curious image of rampaging clown-zombies from her mind’s eye and focused. Hehe. Braaaainss . . . She cleared her throat. “Okay, so this Thad guy’s mortal, right? So is it possible that he’s just some idiot jewel thief? I mean, if there are other gods and such trying to stop what I’m doing, they wouldn’t be sending a mortal after me, would they?”
“Sorting algorithm of evil,” Leif explained. “Can’t send the big-bad at us right off the bat.”
“What do you call Ares?”
“Exception that proves the rule?”
“Or more likely―whoever it is doesn’t want to reveal themselves to us or the other gods on Olympus,” Thalia offered.
“Why not? I thought they were happy to be back? Zeus dying made that possible.”
“Zeus made the edict that forced us to withdraw in the first place, yes. Once he was gone, the edict was gone too. But they’re also outraged— in principle, anyway—that someone would kill him. It’s all politics really, at least in the sense that some of it’s politics and some of it isn’t, but it’s easier to just say ‘It’s all politics’ and save a bit of pedantry.”
“Yeah, you’re real good at that, by the way.”
“You be quiet, Leiffy-dear.”
Tracy scowled. “So they like a good steak, but they don’t want to know how it got on their plate.”
Thalia nodded. “That old saying fits the situation pretty well I’d say. Plus, I would also like a good steak, come to think of it.”
“Why’d Zeus make you go away in the first place?” Leif asked.
“He never said. Which I always sort of wondered at, really, but I figured he had his reasons. It bothered me a little too, but you don’t argue with Zeus—or didn’t, anyway. He was king for a reason, you know. He was the only one of his generation whom his father didn’t eat, which made him more powerful than the rest of them put together, and that, if you haven’t figured it out by now, is just another reason why even the gods who didn’t kill Zeus might not want him back.”
Well, Tracy thought, sucks to be them. She hurried on, following Thalia and giggling occasionally.
Before long the Muse guided them to a halt at the base of a short hill. “What is it?” Leif asked.
Thalia cast a vexed look about the area. “It should be here . . .”
“Should be?”
“This is where the nighthawk said it was! It was very specific! It said—well I don’t need to go into what it said exactly, it said it was here!”
“What did it say?” Tracy pressed.
“It said it was here! Pay attention! I’ve been talking to birds for centuries, and they’re always very specific and exact about locations, especially the predators. They’re very good at marking—uh-oh.”
Leif and Tracy exchanged glances, both returning the requisite, “Uh-oh?”.
Thalia squatted in the dirt. “I . . . think that Thad guy might’ve gotten here first.”
She pointed to a set of footprints in the dirt that stopped right next to an impression that looked vaguely amulet-shaped. As far as Tracy could tell, the indentation might’ve been caused by something else, but she felt compelled to give Thalia the benefit of the doubt. Tracy cursed.
“We’ve got footprints, at least,” Leif offered, pointing to where they led. “They can’t be too old.”
Tracy nodded. “And his feet hurt. Follow me!”
They dashed off, yet again. Thad wasn’t the only one whose feet were hurting. Once they caught up with him, they’d—actually Tracy didn’t really have any idea just yet what they’d do, but once they did it, there would be resting.
The good news was that the tracks remained obvious and didn’t go far. The bad news was that they ended right next to a dirt road and a pair of clear impressions likely caused by the spinning tires of some sort of vehicle.
Tracy cursed again. “He had a car.”
“He might’ve hitched,” Thalia offered.
“It doesn’t really matter now, does it?” Again, Tracy didn’t put nearly enough frustration into her tone as she intended. She tried to focus. “Why didn’t you tell the bird to bring the amulet back when it found it?” It came out in a yell, yet not quite as loudly as she’d have liked.
“Ha!” Thalia cried. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another! Exactly how many animals did you get to aid us, hmm? Got a clan of badgers scouring the hills that you haven’t told me about?”
“Don’t talk to her like that!” Leif came back.
Tracy let Leif’s unasked-for defense go and focused on Thalia. “You’re the one who can talk to them!”
“Exactly!” Thalia cried. “I’m not Artemis here, you know! I can only talk to animals, I don’t have some special stupid slavery-power over them! You think training a cat is bad, try getting a bird to do what you want it to do—there’s a reason flighty means what it means! And for that matter, we’re dealing with jewelry here! Birds do not like carrying jewelry for anyone! Tolkien understood that; why can’t you? Stay here!”
“Where are you going?”
“Up! We’ve got a whole Blair Witch wander-about-the-wilderness- yelling thing going here and I’m putting a stop to that bothersome garbage right now! Plus, I’m going to look for headlights, so sit tight. Go have a fig bar or something.” With that, she was gone.
Tracy turned to Leif with a smirk that she couldn’t help. “I’m starting to think that yelling at the Muse doesn’t help matters much.”
“Got her to look, at least.”
She nodded, chuckling despite herself and trying to think. The fact that Thad got into a car rather than being whisked off somewhere by a god at least gave a cause for hope. Either he really was just a wandering wilderness jewel thief (okay, not too likely) or Thalia was right that whoever sent him wanted to keep their distance. A possibility began to bloom in her tired, giddy mind, a minor epiphany that Thalia unhelpfully interrupted with her return.
“The good news is that I can see headlights in the distance. The bad news is there’re more than a few pairs of them in assorted spots.”
“I think that’s pretty much just bad news, strictly speaking.”
“Leif honey, more good news is that I’m the Muse of comedy, so I won’t be kicking your ass for that.”
Tracy resisted reminding them that slapstick was considered comedy, clinging i
nstead to her previous epiphany. “He mentioned having a suite in Vegas,” she said. “A luxury suite. He’s probably going back there if we’re lucky. If we’re not lucky, we’re screwed anyway.”
“There’s a lot of luxury suites in Vegas,” Leif pointed out.
“Yes, but it’s a start.”
Thalia clapped. “See? See what you can think of when you’re not focused on being all cranky and acrimonious? And we have to go back there anyway to meet Apollo, so this works out great!”
“Yes, great, right? Except for the fact that once we get to Vegas, we’re out of clues. I suppose we could ask around and try to find out where he’s staying, but I don’t know how—”
“Oh!” Thalia cried. “Oh, oh, oh! No, this is good, this is—well, I guess it’s a little risky, but hey, you’re a woman, you can probably manage to—hrm.”
Tracy turned to Leif. “That make sense to you?”
“Trust me; I’m aware you’re a woman already.”
“No, it’s—look,” the Muse went on. “I’m not sure if you know this, but Vegas is pretty much run by Dionysus! Eew, passive voice, strike that: Dionysus pretty much runs Vegas! Better?”
“I’ve never really—”
“Better,” Thalia said. “Anyway, so mostly he just lets other people run it for him and spends his time in a hedonistic stupor, but he knows practically everything that goes on in that town, or he can find out!”
“Apollo didn’t know who to trust. Is it really a good idea for you to bring another god into this?”
“You got a better idea, Miss Fussy-Britches? And I’m not going to bring him into this; you are. Don’t give me that look! It’s simple! Look, you probably won’t even have to tell him why you want to find this Thad person. You’ve got breasts and you’re pretty. He’s not going to care about the rest. Just get him to help you track Thad down and discover what he’s up to. At the very least you can probably find out if he’s left town or not.”
“What’s this about me asking him? You’re the immortal. Where are you going to be?”
“It's better if you do it,” Thalia answered. “He’s drunk more than half the time, anyway, so he might just think you’re some mortal who wants to offer sacrifice in exchange for some help. If I’m there, it gets all political. Plus, I’ve thought of something else that might help us, and it’ll take me a bit to go, um, get it.”
“What sort of something?”
“It’s a surprise—and I probably shouldn’t tell you anyway unless we need it. Don’t worry, it’ll be a piece of cake—talking to Dionysus, I mean, not the thing I’m—anyway, I’ll tell you exactly how to find him and get an audience. I’ll even let you borrow the bangle. He loves women. I’m sure he’ll listen to you!”
Lightened up or not, Tracy didn’t like the sound of that and said so.
“You know, you’re pretty uptight for someone whose mom scored with Zeus,” Thalia teased. “But whatever. I’m sure you won’t have to do anything scandalous. Just flash your lashes, show some leg, wear something low cut, and—don’t glower at me like that, I’m not the one who lost the amulet. Look, do whatever you want. Bring him some wine as an offering. Or a wine truck. I don’t know, it’s up to you. We can talk about it on the way. For now, I say we hitch a ride back to Vegas ourselves, rest up in a nice hotel, and then do our separate tasks. Before you know it, we’ll be reamuletified, meeting Apollo, bringing Zeus back, and living happily ever after. Or something to that effect. Now come on, here’s a car right now. Show some leg!”
Tracy shook her head. “Even if I wasn’t wearing pants . . .” She stuck out her thumb instead.
“Oh, for crying out loud.”
“I’m capable of getting what I want without objectifying myself, thanks very much.” The car drew closer without slowing. It threatened to pass entirely until suddenly the driver hit the brakes and the car skidded to a stop right in front of them. Tracy beamed, satisfied and not above turning around to gloat at Thalia.
The sight of the Muse standing stark naked behind her nicely torpedoed the victory.
“Sorry,” Thalia grinned and pulled her outfit back on. “It does that sometimes. So then, Vegas?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“It is true that anonymous sources within the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) claim to have spoken to Zeus once or twice in 2008. However, such claims may be dismissed as the fabrication of scientists who’d developed a god complex while playing with the building blocks of the universe in their Large Hadron Collider and, now that actual gods were back on the scene, were desperately concocting stories to regain attention. No credible agency of any kind—public or private—has officially claimed knowledge of the existence of the Olympian gods prior to their official return on June 17, 2009. This includes (among others) the European Space Administration, the Vatican, and—despite rumors to the contrary—the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI does acknowledge, however, that there is no way to tell if any pre-Return anonymous tips were made by Olympian entities.”
—A Mortal’s Guidebook to the Olympians’ Return
WHILE TRACY AND THE OTHERS went chasing after a male-model jewelry pirate, and while Apollo was talking his sister into opening the gates to a place usually best left alone, and while the Zeus-murdering conspirators were busy yelling at Ares for both acting openly and failing to be effective in doing so, a small task force of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was acting on divine inspiration.
Neither the group that stormed the small Neo-Christian Movement of America compound nor their superiors who sent them were conscious of being divinely inspired, of course. So far as they knew, they were acting on actual evidence that one Brittany Simons (a.k.a. Wynter Nightsorrow, a.k.a. the young woman from Chapters Four and Seven) was being held hostage in the compound by a cult that jeopardized the national security of the United States. An anonymous source had delivered to them video footage of Wynter’s abduction from Hecate’s temple and her subsequent incarceration and attempted brainwashing within the NCMA compound. The address of the compound accompanied the footage, along with the secret keypad access code to the back door and a box of chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies—the regional bureau chief’s favorite, though he’d never told anyone about it.
Though it pained her to act so mundanely, it was the best Hecate could do for her disciple. There could be no divine wrath for Wynter’s captors, no creeping avengers of shadow terrorizing them alone in the darkness, no journey into catatonia astride cosmological mysteries the mortal mind was never meant to know. She could not even simply steal into the compound herself to rescue Wynter, for fear that her fellow Olympians would learn of it and realize which secrets Hecate had entrusted to her. No other gods could know that those secrets had fallen, however temporarily, into other hands. If mortals could go through channels, she’d decided, then so could she. Her problems would be solved by the U.S. government. What could possibly go wrong?
It further pained her that the (far more apropos) Secret Service kept putting her on hold and forwarding her calls to the FBI, but those were the breaks.
The Secret Service itself was only her second choice. A particularly clandestine group within the U.S. government made generous sycophantic sacrifices to her on a weekly basis and would jump at the chance to help, but it was impossible to use them anonymously. The Circle Order Society of League Shadow Trust Syndicates was such a closely guarded secret that the knowledge of merely the group’s name was divided into equal and unique parts among its highest-ranking members—the director of West Coast Operations merely knew “The”—and the group’s lower echelon labored under the belief that they were actually unemployed. Simply dialing the group’s primary phone number would likely cause more problems than it would solve.
And so it fell to the FBI. They stormed the compound late at night and burst into the NCMA’s midst in much the same way as the Ninjas Templar had earlier violated Hecate’s temple―albeit with fewer backflips. It pleased the
goddess greatly. They rescued Wynter, arrested her captors, and confiscated the parchment containing the forbidden secrets as evidence. It would soon be placed into an evidence holding facility, which Hecate could later set on fire. If any of the other gods asked, she would claim that her target was the facility’s entire contents, purely for the sake of creating uncertainty in numerous criminal cases. She trusted that they wouldn’t dig any deeper than that.
It never occurred to her that the NCMA might have already made a copy of the parchment. Secrets were her specialty. A copy of something made it that much less secret.
The NCMA had copied the parchment, of course, shortly after getting it back to the compound and realizing their luck at stumbling onto something of such value. The NCMA’s copy wasn’t lovingly decorated with glitter, but it did accurately replicate the original’s drawings, words, and strange symbols. And so it was that during the first moments of the FBI’s rescue operation, the copy was being carried in a cardboard tube out of Philadelphia International Airport under the arm of one Richard Kindgood.
The call from his fellows at Compound 14―where the heathen girl was being held―came through moments before the FBI took the place. Though the call was not a long one, it was enough to give a clear picture of the situation: the compound was about to fall.
It was a blessing, really, Kindgood believed. He never much liked it there, and it was merely a small enclave of righteousness. Those who fell in the FBI’s raid that night would be martyrs to the cause. He doubted anyone would be killed, of course. It wasn’t their job to give armed resistance to the misguided forces of the U.S. government. It’s just that they always over-waxed the compound floors, and there would be much slipping and sliding in the mad dash to escape arrest― especially on the part of that clumsy Higgins fellow.
“Oh, certainly,” Kindgood once grumbled to anyone who would listen, “there’s money in the budget for floor wax, but none for balance training in the ninja camps?”
The heathen girl would be rescued, of course. It was too late to worry about that now, but the failure tasted bitter nonetheless. He sighed, taking solace in one of his favorite personal prayers: “God grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to justify which is which depending on how I’m feeling.”
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