by David Welch
He nodded, resting his head on the back of the canoe.
“Well, I find that reassuring,” he said. “I mean, what’s the point of investing in a relationship if you’re tired of life and want out?”
He felt one of her feet caress his thigh.
“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “In fact, I’m as close to a sure thing as you’re gonna get.”
His head perked up at that.
“Oh?”
“Come on, Des, it’s been what, three weeks now? And you’re already spending half your time at my place? And we’ve pretty much ‘christened’ every room in my place?”
“Okay, so we’re going a little fast,” he said with a shrug. “I still haven’t gotten you to my place yet.”
“True,” she said. “But you gotta think, a woman who’s had so many husbands, and so many lovers, gets pretty good at knowing what she wants. Do you think we’d be at this point if I didn’t see something I want in you?”
He smiled broadly, feeling his ego puff up a bit.
“And do you think a man who has as little time here as I do wants to putter around when he sees the real thing in front of him?” he asked.
Now it was her turn to smile. She crawled across the canoe, leaning over him. Their lips met.
“You know who you remind me of?” she said as they broke the kiss.
“Some long-dead guy?” he replied.
She shook her head.
“Nobody,” she replied with a lusty smile, then kissed him again.
Things might have gone further, but the sound of a nearby fishing boat reminded them that they were in a somewhat public place. Artemis slumped back to her side of the canoe.
“Next time we find a lake with some privacy,” she declared.
“Well, don’t tell anyone,” Desmond said. “But I know this woman who owns a place on this lake . . . and I think she might let us use it.”
“Oh, really?” Artemis replied playfully, grabbing her paddle and sitting up. “So what’s this woman like?”
“Well, she’s the best-looking broad in this town, hell, this state. And she’s so delightfully ‘not boring.’”
“Not boring? What type of women have you been dating before you met ‘this woman’?” Artemis said, paddling. Desmond joined her, steering the canoe toward her house.
“Run-of-the-mill pretty ones,” he said. “But ‘this woman’ I know . . . damn if she ain’t a mystery wrapped in a conundrum.”
“You have no idea,” she said seductively, looking over her shoulder at him with the sexiest gaze he’d seen since . . . well, since last night. But given how few quality “sexy” gazes he’d seen before her, it still burned itself into his memory.
They approached the dock. Her house loomed above them, perched upon its slope overlooking the lake. As they drew near, Artemis lifted her paddle out of the water and paused a few yards short of the dock.
“What is it?” Des asked.
“There’s a police car in the driveway,” she said.
Des looked up, seeing the shape of a black-and-white county sheriff’s car next to his SUV. As they pulled the canoe to the dock, they saw a figure appear around the side of the house. It was a policeman. He waved, but made no motion to come to them.
“Any problems in the neighborhood?” Desmond asked.
“No,” Artemis said suspiciously.
“Maybe some rich kid got busted with drugs,” Desmond offered. “And this is just overreaction.”
“I doubt it,” Artemis said. Her voice still had a cold edge to it. Desmond wasn’t sure what to make of it. Sure, cops generally didn’t engender warm and fuzzy feelings. You usually dealt with them only when a crime was committed against you or you were committing the damn crime. As far as he knew, Artemis had done nothing.
Do you know that? Des asked himself.
He hated that nagging voice inside his head, no matter how many times it had saved his ass before. It was so damn suspicious. First it had led him to accept in his mind, despite his best efforts, the idea that Artemis was really six thousand years old. That had been difficult enough. And now it was doing this, adding a nice new dose of uncertainty to everything. Annoying as it was, though, he couldn’t deny the logic of it. A person who’d been alive as long as she had probably had done something illegal over the years, maybe many things. She’d told him she changed identities every twenty years or so. If she’d committed a crime some time long ago, maybe somebody had figured out what she was, and in that case he had to imagine that whoever had cracked the secret would’ve sent more than one policeman.
Unless her crimes are recent . . .
Uncertain, he followed her up the steps, to the top of the hill. The cop smiled, going out of his way to show he wasn’t here to cause trouble.
“Hello, ma’am,” he said as she reached the top of the hill. “Sorry to bother you. I’m Officer Gannon. I just wanted to talk to you for a minute.”
“About what?” Artemis said, acting the part of a concerned citizen. Desmond stood back, feeling a slight suspicion now. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something did seem off about the man. Something in how he spoke.
“Just going door to door. We got reports of things being stolen off porches and decks. Petty stuff mostly, but a kid down the street had his bicycle taken,” the cop continued.
“Poor kid,” Artemis said.
“Yeah. We just want to let everybody know, and see if anyone’s seen anything suspicious,” the cop continued.
“Well, I did see something . . .” Artemis said.
Desmond cocked his head, wondering what she was up to.
“Oh?” the man asked, taking out a notepad. “What was that?”
“I saw a Ukrainian man pretending to be an American police officer,” she said.
The man’s eyes opened wide. He went for his gun, but was too slow. Artemis’ fist flashed out, slamming hard into his windpipe. The fake cop gasped for breath, clutching at his damaged throat. Artemis’ leg swept out in an arc, knocking him off his feet. The man fell on his back, slamming hard against the pavement of the driveway.
Artemis was on him in a second. She grabbed his gun, then slammed her knee into his sternum, her whole weight behind the thrust. She remained in that position, crouched over the man, his gun in his face. Desmond was caught by surprise, too shocked to know what was happening. Part of him screamed that they were going to be thrown in jail for attacking a cop; another part stood dumbstruck at the fact that Artemis had just kicked the ass of a man twice her size, without breaking a sweat.
“You swallow your vowels too much to be an American,” she said. “Good enough to fool any old guy on the street, but not me.”
That would be what sounded off about him, Desmond realized. He walked up to the man, who still struggled to breathe.
“Where is Lenka?” Artemis asked.
“Lenka?” said Desmond.
“Where is he?!” Artemis demanded, jamming the barrel against the man’s forehead.
The man wheezed something in a Slavic language. Whatever he said, it wasn’t what Artemis wanted to hear. She cracked the butt of the pistol against the wheezing man’s forehead, knocking him unconscious.
“We have to go. Now,” she said, dashing for the house.
“What the hell was that about?” Desmond asked as she disappeared into the house. He stood over the unconscious man, unsure of what to do. Stomp him if he wakes up? Keep him unconscious however possible?
Kill him?
Artemis reemerged seconds later. She had the portrait book in one hand, and a duffel bag filled to bursting in another. Struggling under the weight of the bag, she hobbled toward his car. Desmond followed, glancing back and forth uncertainly between Artemis and the man she’d put down.
“Artemis, what’s going on?”
&n
bsp; “Family troubles,” she said. “When this guy doesn’t report in, he’ll send more. And we can’t be here when that happens.”
They got into the car, Desmond sliding in the key and bringing it to life. He wasn’t sure what the hell he was getting himself into, but he knew he wanted to be far away from here.
“Report in to who?” he said. “Who will send more?”
“My crazy fucking nephew,” she groused, digging into the duffel bag. She removed a pistol in a holster, which she clipped onto her belt. Des’ eyes went wide again, but he said nothing. Artemis’ eyes went to the window, scanning the woods as they drove down the driveway.
“Your nephew wants to kill you?” Des asked.
“He wants to kill all of us,” she said. “Look, I need to be on the lookout. God knows where the rest of them are. When we get away from here, I’ll explain everything, I promise.”
He turned onto the road, casting sidelong glances at her. She examined each car they passed, moving or parked. He felt utterly lost by all this, and couldn’t help but wonder if she was crazy, if all of it was crazy, and if he was crazy for having gone along with it. But he went anyway. The man had spoken something in a foreign tongue, one that didn’t sound like anything you’d normally find a Colorado policeman speaking. And the focus etched onto her face was no delusion. Whatever was going on, she truly was worried.
“Uh . . . okay. Sure,” he said, shaking his head to try to hold back his confusion. “Guess you’ll finally get to see my place.”
Granby, Colorado
Despite Artemis’ being on edge the entire time, the short drive from Grand Lake to Granby had proven uneventful. She hadn’t said a word during the trip, every ounce of her attention focused on the cars ahead of them, behind them, or passing them on the road. Or on people walking down the street. Or on any group of people she happened to notice. Basically, she’d gone full paranoid.
And she still was. She darted about the town house now, pulling blinds closed over all the windows, checking and double-checking every door. When she finished, she dashed down the stairs to the main kitchen/den area, where Desmond waited, his back up against one of a half-dozen bookcases scattered about the room.
“Everything okay?” he said, aware of the stupidity of asking that at this moment, but not sure what else to ask. Granted, the policeman had seemed a little off, but it wasn’t impossible for an immigrant from some Slavic country to become a cop. And nobody else had confronted them or stopped them. No team of mercenaries had shown up, no roving gunmen, nothing.
He wondered again if he was in fact crazy to believe Artemis was immortal in the first place. Seriously, what part of claiming that you lived forever wasn’t crazy? And if she was crazy, was this just another bit of that insanity coming out to play?
The picture, he reminded himself. Of course, if she was really crazy, and had conned herself into believing she was immortal, it wouldn’t be that hard to get an antique-looking photograph made of herself. You didn’t even need Photoshop to do that.
His thoughts unnerved him. He supposed they should. That’s what he did—he thought about things, from every conceivable angle. It drove people nuts, and God knew it cut into valuable daydreaming time, but it’s what he did. He always had. He hated not seeing something that was there. He hated being ignorant of his own reality. So why wait until now to start really asking himself these questions?
You know why, you idiot!
He supposed he did. He liked her, a lot. It was much easier to ignore strange and ominous signs when you were sleeping with a person. And whether she was crazy or not, he had to admit that it felt nice to be connected to somebody again. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed that.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I just don’t know.”
“Artemis, what the hell is going on?” he asked, collapsing onto his couch.
She sighed, sliding into the easy chair across from him.
“I probably should’ve told you . . .” she grumbled. “But I figured you probably wouldn’t want to spend time with me if this was hanging over us.”
“If what was hanging over you? A nephew named Lenka?” he asked. “’Cause that’s all you’ve told me.”
“Lenka Sidorov,” Artemis said. “Formerly of the KGB. Son of Athena and a sociopathic Russian security officer. The bastard is a psychopath.”
“And why, exactly, does he want to kill you?”
“Because we’re immortal and he’s not. Because he’s mad at his mother for getting thrown in the gulag, leaving him to be raised by his abusive madman of a father. Because he’s one of those people who was just born wrong. Like physiologically there’s something not right in his brain,” Artemis explained. “Look, most of our mortal children make their peace with what we are and find a way to deal with it. Lenka . . . he never did. And you add in all the other stuff that’s wrong with him, plus the fact that he worked for years in a job where killing people was an everyday thing . . . He’s angry to the core. At first he was just resentful. He didn’t talk to Athena for years, even when he was in the West on covert missions. But then . . . after the Soviet Union fell apart, his anger seemed to grow into an irrational psychosis.”
“But how does killing you make him immortal?” Desmond asked.
“It doesn’t,” she said. “He’s entirely driven by spite, anger, and countless other selfish reasons. He wants revenge on the universe for his shitty life. He wants Athena to suffer. He wants to make her watch everyone she loves die, so she can feel as much pain as he does. He’s a psychopath who feels lost without some fucked-up task to fixate on. He wants to make us pay for having the gall to be ‘young and beautiful’ forever. He wants to deny us what he can’t have.”
“Seriously? ‘If I can’t have it, nobody can’?”
“Yes, somewhat,” said Artemis. “Unfortunately for us, he has the rare ability to be both psychotic in his motivations and methodical in his execution. And he’s got enough dirt on people the world over to command all the resources and money he needs to do the job.”
Desmond nodded, still not sure what to think.
“He’s already killed Apollo and Hestia,” Artemis continued. “Just after we met, I got word that he’d found Hermes too . . . and killed him.”
A heavy silence hung over them. Desmond let her have a moment. She struggled a bit, wiping away a tear before regaining her composure.
“So . . . how did he find you?” Desmond asked.
“I don’t know,” she said angrily. “It usually takes him years to find one of us. Most of the time, we figure it out and relocate . . . how he found me so quickly . . . I . . . I think he has her,” she said softly, looking to the gun in her hands.
“Has who?” Desmond asked.
“Athena,” Artemis said, shaking her head. “He must. Damn him . . .”
Desmond watched carefully. The sadness in her face looked genuine. Her gaze shifted toward the floor, then seemed to wander helplessly.
“Why do you think that?” asked Desmond.
“Nobody’s talked to her in eight months,” she said. “Not entirely unusual, at least back in the day, before phones and all that. I’ve talked to all of us that are left since, but not her. And she knew where both I and Hermes live . . . lived.”
“Lived?” Desmond asked.
“I can’t go back to Grand Lake now,” she said. “In fact, we all have to move.”
She dug into her pocket, took out a smart phone, and sent out a text. Desmond watched, thinking that if she was crazy, she sure was going to great lengths to keep up the act.
“There,” she said. “They all know.”
“Who ‘all know’?” asked Desmond. “How many immortals are there?”
“Seven,” she replied.
“Seven?” Desmond asked, surprised at the number.
“Zeus, Ares, Aphrodite,
Hera, Athena, Dionysus, and me,” she said. “So few of us that if Lenka finds us, he might actually be able to kill all of us.”
“Wait . . . I know you said myths aren’t one hundred percent true, but doesn’t that mean all of the remaining immortals are from the same family?” asked Desmond.
“Well, no, not really,” she said. “Aphrodite and Hera were both born to other immortal parents, in different villages. They’re not related genetically to the rest of us, who are children of Zeus.”
“But even with so few, you couldn’t go more than a generation or two without, uh, you know . . .” Desmond said.
“Inbreeding?” said Artemis.
“Well, yeah. Which means your species is functionally extinct?” Desmond asked.
“Subspecies,” Artemis stressed. “And yes. If it weren’t for the fact that we don’t die, we would’ve been gone centuries ago. Around the time of Christ there were nearly eight hundred of us, from at least a dozen different families. More than enough to keep a species alive. It’s just that so many of our immortal children died that after a while people just . . . stopped trying. Any children we had with mortals, we’d have for seventy, eighty years. But so few of our immortal children survived past their teenage years . . . It got so bad . . . first we’d send them away when they became teenagers, so we didn’t have to watch them die. But even that was too painful, so we tried sending them away right after they were born, to be raised by mortals. You know, out of sight, out of mind?”
“I’m guessing that didn’t work,” he said.
“Your children are never ‘out of mind,’ ” she said sadly. “Even knowing they were out there, and still doomed to die, got to be too painful.”
Desmond thought for a second.
“So I have to ask. Since you were always so few in number, does this mean all those stories of you guys screwing family members are true?”
Artemis rolled her eyes.
“No,” she said firmly. “Well . . . mostly no, not anymore . . .”
“‘Not anymore?’ So you, uhm, you know . . . with . . .”