The Gods' Day to Die

by David Welch

  About twenty yards across, the clearing was nothing more than a wide gap in the canopy, where some uninterrupted sunlight shone through. In the center was a dilapidated shack, barely the size of a bathroom. For what purpose it was here, Desmond didn’t know. Maybe an old hunting cabin from California’s more enlightened past.

  Artemis motioned for them to stop at the edge of the clearing. Zeus nodded toward a nearby tree, where they dragged Dionysus. They set him down by the trunk and took cover nearby, weapons ready.

  Desmond wondered momentarily if Hera and the kids were inside the shack, then thought better. If you were being pursued in a forest, a building, any building, would be too obvious. It would be the first place her enemy would look. If you knew your enemy would look there, it would be the perfect spot to set up an ambush. Which meant Hera might be somewhere across the clearing, concealed behind trees.

  “Hera?!” Artemis shouted. “Ares?!”

  She clutched her gun at eye level, no doubt aware of how big a risk she’d just taken. Were any of Lenka’s people left, they would hear her, and close on this position.

  Instead there was only a rustling of grass, followed by the appearance of Hera and Ares. They stood up from behind a tree, weapons in hand.

  “Thought it was you,” Ares said. “We didn’t see any more of Lenka’s people.”

  “Where are the kids?” Zeus said worriedly, emerging from his hiding place.

  “Back twenty yards,” Hera said, then turned. “Meli! Bane! Come out now! It’s Daddy!”

  There was a louder rustle, then two small forms darted from the woods. Desmond bit back a smile as Zeus rushed forward into the clearing, sweeping his tearful children into his arms and lifting them up high. He crushed the little ones against his body, his own tears flowing liberally. The captive woman shook her head and made a disgusted grunt. Artemis smashed the butt of her rifle against the back of the woman’s head, knocking her out. When everybody looked over, she just shrugged.

  Hera moved over to her husband, hugging Zeus and kissing his cheek. Her joy was checked, though, her eyes sad. She broke away after tousling the children’s hair, then moved over to Artemis.

  “Where is he?” she asked sadly.

  Artemis frowned, and nodded back toward Desmond. Hera walked over slowly, maintaining a blank expression. When she reached Desmond, he pointed to the nearby tree where they’d put Dionysus down. She looked, and for a moment it seemed as if she would break. A small cry nearly escaped her throat, but was swallowed back, an act of sheer will. She wiped a tear from her eye.

  “We have to keep the kids from seeing him,” she said, struggling to keep her voice even. “They’ve been through too much already.”

  Desmond nodded his agreement.

  “Thank you,” Hera said, her words choking in her throat. She turned away to hide her emotion, and quickly made her way back to Zeus. Artemis moved over to Desmond.

  “So what do we do now?” he asked.

  “Hera has safe houses all over the world,” she said. “But the nearest is probably a few hundred miles away. We have to get—”

  “No,” Ares interrupted. “Not hundreds. I have my own, about three miles from here. We go there.”

  “Figures,” Aphrodite said. “Paranoia pays off again.”

  “That’s kind of close to your old house,” Desmond figured. “What if the cops start canvassing?”

  “A risk, but I have new identity documents there, for all of us. If they come, one of you can answer the door, and I’ll hide until they’re gone,” he said.

  “There’s nothing in the house that will lead them to this safe house?” Artemis asked.

  “No,” Ares said, removing a device from his pocket. “Especially since the house is on fire.”

  “You didn’t,” Aphrodite said sadly.

  “Too much of a risk, love. I had to,” he said. “Set off the thermite the minute I saw you on the ridgetop. It’ll be hours or days before the cops can get into the place. And there won’t be much left for them to find.”

  Aphrodite sighed, kicked at the dirt, and said, “I liked that place.”

  “You torched your own house?” Desmond asked.

  “Isn’t the first time,” Ares said. “And we should definitely get the kids to the safe house ahead of Dionysus, since Mom doesn’t want them to see.”

  “They’re too little to do three miles,” Artemis said.

  “Yes,” Ares replied. “And I think Mom and Dad will probably want some time alone with Dio.”

  They all nodded, and headed over to Zeus. Since the clearing wasn’t that large, he had heard all they’d said. The two handed over the weeping kids, Melika to Desmond and Bane to Aphrodite. Then Ares started into the woods. He paused a moment to hoist the petite form of the captive woman over his shoulder. Desmond wasn’t sure why they had kept this particular mercenary alive, though he got the feeling Ares knew who she was. Somebody valuable to Lenka? Someone who might lead them to him? Desmond didn’t know, but there had to be something special about her for them to lug her unconscious body through the backcountry.

  Desmond moved to follow, then paused, turning to Zeus and Hera. They still stood silently over Dionysus, neither able to move. Zeus looked ready to crumble at any moment. Hera had a comforting hand on his shoulder, and Desmond sensed that her hand was the only thing keeping the big man from collapsing.

  Desmond frowned, turned from the pair, and followed the others into the woods.

  Lenka’s lungs burned as he fought to catch his breath. A harsh pain spread through his chest. As the car sped away, he fought to bring the pain under control.

  Doing this proved difficult, as Lenka was unsure of what pain was physical and what was rage. He’d gone in with twenty men, he’d come out with six. Six! And he had no idea whether he’d killed a single immortal. Ruslan and his team, whom he’d sent after Hera, had not returned. Yevgenny was dead. Grigori had been shot down at the house. Only four of the ten men he’d sent to keep Ares trapped in the home had returned. His best people were dead.

  And Duscha was missing.

  He hadn’t realized until they’d gotten to the car, and his raven-haired daughter hadn’t been among the survivors. There’d just been four nervous men, anxious to get in and drive the hell out of here. The whole reason he’d sent her to the house was because he’d thought that keeping people from leaving was safer than aggressively trying to hunt down immortals in an open field. But he’d been wrong. Ares had been in the house, not on the ridge. He’d escaped the house and attacked Lenka’s men from behind, most likely killing Lenka’s daughter in the process.

  He felt his fist clench tighter at the thought. His daughter, his. The only thing he could say he really cared about, despite all her naïveté and sadism. She was his daughter, dammit! The only part of him that would live on, that would remember him in some sort of positive light after he was gone. Even if she only remembered him for bringing her into this world. That was something.

  And now she was gone. He slammed his fist angrily against the door, relishing the pain the impact brought. It shot through his fingers and up his wrist. He struck the door again and again, his composure crumbling as the reality hit an instinctive level deep inside him.

  “Lenka?” asked the driver. He was one of Lenka’s lesser mercenaries, a former Spetsnaz man in his early forties who went by the name of Sergei.

  “Just drive,” Lenka fumed. “We must change identities and get to an airport. We need to return to Russia and replenish our ranks.”

  “You plan to attack them again?” Sergei asked, hiding his incredulity behind a stoic face.

  “They killed my daughter,” Lenka said bitterly. “I am more certain than ever. Every single immortal is going to die.”

  24

  Northwest of Big Sur, California

  Ares’ safe house was a large cabin tucke
d back into the mountains. Accessible only by a single-lane dirt track, it was ten miles from any main road. Completely off the grid, it relied on a generator and solar panels for electricity, and a deep well for water.

  At any other time, Desmond would have seen it as a nice mountain retreat. But, considering the Olympians were building a pyre to burn the remains of Dionysus, “nice” wasn’t a word that much entered his thoughts right now.

  He stood on the front porch, watching. Ares, Artemis, and Aphrodite piled up branches. The pyre was already four feet high, stacked thick with dead wood they had pulled out of the forest. Zeus sat nearby, watching numbly, unable to contribute or interact with anybody right now. Desmond realized that Artemis had been right: he did feel loss as intensely as any of them, even more so. First his wife, then his son . . . Desmond doubted he himself would be strong enough to survive losses like that. Losing his parents had hurt, but he’d always known he’d have to deal with that pain. Some recess of his mind had made preparation for it. But wives and children weren’t supposed to go before you, children especially. He knew it was a little different, given that Zeus was immortal and knew this day would come, but still . . .

  Yet it also made him admire the man. If he truly felt that the joy of having children and family outweighed the agony of such a loss, then he must be feeling things on a level Desmond didn’t yet understand. Desmond supposed this was to be expected. He had no children, and had heard countless parents speak of how you “couldn’t understand it until it happens.” He suspected that if he were to ever possess strength like the man in front of him, it would come on the day he held a crying, wriggling bundle in his arms.

  “How’s he doing?” a voice asked.

  Hera had emerged from the house and stepped up beside him.

  “Still a stone,” Desmond said. “I guess, considering, it could be much worse.”

  “It could,” Hera said. “It has been. When Hephaestus died, he didn’t talk for three weeks, even to me.”

  Desmond nodded. “Are the kids okay?”

  “Sleeping,” Hera said. “It’s their bedtime anyway. Best they’re not awake when we do this.”

  “Understandable,” he said. “The Vesclevi burned their dead?”

  “Most people in that area did, at that time,” she informed him. “Who do you think taught the ancient Greeks how to do it?”

  “They saw their ‘gods’ doing it and imitated them?” Desmond asked.

  “Yep,” she replied. “I know you probably don’t feel like ‘one of us.’ But you’re welcome to take part. You put yourself at risk today for Artemis’ sake. That makes you family in my book.”

  “Uh, thanks,” he said. “I think I’ll just watch. Cremation isn’t really my thing . . .”

  She squeezed his shoulder firmly.

  “I understand,” she replied.

  They walked down the two steps from the porch, toward the pyre. For another twenty minutes they threw on more scrap, waiting for evening to turn to night. No sense alerting local authorities with a giant smoke plume in broad daylight. Desmond helped with that task, then stood back when Ares and Zeus lifted Dionysus’ body and carried it to the pyre.

  Zeus began chanting something in a language Des had never heard. Ares chanted in Latin, a language Des had heard but could make no sense of. Artemis ducked around the pyre, moving to his side. She slipped her hand into his.

  “How you holding up?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he said, confusion in his voice.

  “Well, with all the shooting and running . . . Can’t be something you’re used to,” she said.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, looking down into her eyes.

  “Of course,” she said abruptly, wiping away a tear. “As good as I can be with my brother dead, I mean.”

  He hugged her against him, realizing for the dozenth time how all too human his immortal girlfriend was. She allowed herself to be hugged, snaking her hands around his midsection. The chanting stopped. Hera had wrapped sticks inside rolls of toilet paper, the best they could find for making torches in Ares’ safe house. She passed out five of them, one to each of the other remaining immortals. Aphrodite cried, wiping away tears every few seconds. Desmond realized that she was watching her ex-husband lie dead, about to be burned to ash. He’d forgotten Artemis telling him about Aphrodite and her many loves, having only ever seen her with Ares. She’d been Hermes’ wife once as well. Two ex-lovers dead in the span of a few weeks . . . that was another type of pain he didn’t think he’d ever be able to understand. More and more these people made him reevaluate his own pain, his own loss, or rather his understanding of it. But knowing that these people, this woman in his arms, had faced loss again and again and again . . . Knowing they hadn’t quit. They hadn’t withdrawn from the world. It made him feel small and stupid. It made him feel his age, an inexperienced twenty-nine. It made him want to hold Artemis tighter, as if doing so could make up for all those years he’d spent wandering . . . purposeless.

  As if to drive home his thoughts, Artemis broke from his embrace and moved to take her torch from Hera. Ares walked around with a lighter, igniting each torch. For a moment they stood silently around the pyre, staring at Dionysus. Desmond looked on as well, remembering what the motionless form before him had looked like when alive. He hadn’t known the man long, but it still seemed wrong that he was lying motionless. Just hours ago he’d been a person, alive and well, a going concern. Now?

  As they started forward, Desmond’s gaze rested on Dionysus’ face. He wasn’t sure why. Something seemed off about it. Maybe it was the way it reflected in the firelight. Maybe it was just the fact that life no longer animated it. He didn’t—

  He bounded forward several steps, his breath catching in his throat. The motion caught the others by surprise, prompting them to stop their slow walk toward Dionysus. Desmond dashed up to the body, stopping near the head. He bent close, blinking several times to make sure that what he saw was actually there and not some trick of the light.

  “Desmond, what are you doing?” Artemis asked.

  “Jesus Christ ,” Desmond whispered.

  “Desmond?” Ares said, a little perturbed by the interruption of such a solemn occasion.

  “Look,” Desmond said. “Look right here! He has a gray hair!”

  “What?!” Zeus said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Bring a torch over here, look for yourself,” Desmond said, waving them on.

  The Olympians stood stock still, nervously glancing from one to another. Then Artemis walked forward, pausing next to Desmond to peer at her dead brother. Desmond pointed to the spot, right above his right ear.

  “He’s right,” she said. “He does have a gray hair.”

  “That’s impossible,” Aphrodite said.

  “And the lines by his eyes,” Artemis said, looking close. “They’re slightly deeper than any of ours.”

  This caught Zeus’ attention. He cocked his head quizzically.

  “His eyes? The other day I noticed that. I thought he was just tired from drinking,” Zeus said.

  “These are permanent ones,” Artemis said, then turned to Desmond. She stared closely at his face, then said, “They’re almost as deep as Desmond’s lines.”

  “But he stopped aging at twenty-four,” Ares said.

  “Well, somehow he started again,” Artemis said. “See for yourself.”

  They filed close and looked, each shaking their head in disbelief as they saw the evidence: A single gray hair, the kind men in their late twenties occasionally found. Slight, almost invisible lines around the eyes and mouth, the kind that etched themselves into a person from years of smiling and frowning. They saw it, but they didn’t believe it.

  “How is this possible?” Ares said. “He was the youngest of all of us, only forty-eight hundred years old. Why would he start aging now when the rest
of us aren’t?”

  “I don’t know,” Zeus said. “But we’ve never seen anything like that on an immortal before.”

  “Maybe his immortality was incomplete?” Aphrodite ventured. “Maybe he aged slowly, like a thousand years for every one year of physical aging. Something like that.”

  “Also something we’ve never seen,” Hera said.

  “Maybe he had it done to him,” said Artemis.

  This silenced everybody.

  “For all his bipolarism and drinking, he was never suicidal,” Artemis said. “And medical science advances so quickly these days. Maybe he found a doctor who could undo the effects of his own genes.”

  “You mean he made himself mortal?” Hera said.

  “It’s possible,” Artemis said. “Which one of us hasn’t had that dream?”

  The words struck Desmond as odd. Mortals dreamed of living forever. Immortals dreamed of growing old and dying. But odd as these words sounded to a man of twenty-nine, he could, rationally at least, understand where they came from.

  “We can’t keep him,” Ares said. “Even if he found a way to do this. We have no way of preserving his body.”

  “Do you have any syringes?” Zeus asked his son.

  Ares nodded. “A few in the medical kits I have stowed away.”

  “Take samples, blood and skin,” Zeus said. “We’ll find out what’s behind this.”

  He stabbed his torch into the ground, extinguishing it. He paced over to Dionysus’ body, resting a hand on his head. His fingers lifted up the gray hair and plucked it from his head. A longing filled the man’s eyes as he stared at the slender strand.

  “Dio . . . my Dio,” he said. “How did you do it, son?”

  Outside Santa Maria, California

  Hera drove south, following Interstate 101 toward Los Angeles. It was early morning, the kids sleeping in the back. Ares had only one car at his cabin, a Suburban. They’d crammed in, driving until they came to a rental place. Then they’d picked up another vehicle and begun the trek south to L.A., Dionysus’ last home. There they hoped to find something that would explain his sudden onset mortality.