by David Welch
“You told me you guys had foster parents raise them,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “But when they died, we were told. And to tell you the truth, most of my family would sneak peeks. They’d go in as a merchant or a traveler, to see them now and then. They were our children, doomed as they were.”
Desmond nodded, again overwhelmed by the thought of it. How did a person reconcile something like that? Wanting to see your child, yet knowing they would die, that every moment you spent with them would just lead to more pain down the road. Part of him thought they should have sucked it up and been there for their children, especially when the Rot took hold and they lay dying. But he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d have the strength to do that, over and over. And on top of that was the knowledge that if he didn’t bring more children into the world, his species would go extinct. It made him depressed just thinking about it. He wondered how any of the Olympians managed to walk these tunnels without sobbing uncontrollably.
“Artemis!” Zeus’ voice called out, reverberating through the main cavern.
“Come on. You’re getting much too sad,” Artemis said.
“Am not,” he replied defensively.
“Arty!” Zeus’ voice boomed from below. “Can you hear me?!”
She looked over the edge, seeing her father below.
“We’ll be right down!”
“You want to call him on the phone?”
Aphrodite’s words hung in the air. The group sat in one of the rooms off the living corridor. The chamber had been finished and done up as a den. It was a tight fit with everybody inside, but not overly uncomfortable.
“Yes,” Ares said, in a tone that was overly uncomfortable.
“He’ll know it’s a trap,” Hera said.
“Not if we phrase it as an exchange,” Ares said. “Duscha for Athena.”
“He’ll never give up Athena,” Zeus said. “His hatred is absolute. And she’s the center of it.”
“Even for his daughter?” Ares said. “We all know what having a daughter does to a man. Even a sociopath like him.”
“Knowing him, even if he agreed to an exchange, he’d lie and use it as a chance to attack us,” Hera said. “He’d try to get Duscha, keep Athena, and kill whoever went to make the trade.”
Ares smiled. “Yes. If Lenka is going to try and use the deal to get at one of us, we play into it. I go down, pretend to talk, and when it all goes to hell I escape out the back. But I escape slowly and visibly enough that he tracks me back here.”
Artemis chuckled. “You? Escape that sloppily? Maybe we should send Dita.”
Aphrodite shot Artemis a dark look.
“We should ambush him in the woods,” Aphrodite said. “Or on the road somewhere.”
“And have every cop and military officer in Macedonia swarming the area,” Zeus said. “Assuming we’d survive the battle. He’ll outnumber us.”
“We get him here,” Ares said firmly. “Inside. Divide his people up in the caves and pick them off. We know every inch of these caves, we have weapons stashed everywhere, and the confines make it easily defensible. Out in the open, we’ll get a repeat of what happened in Big Sur.”
“And if Lenka escapes, he’ll raise a new gang of mercenaries and try it all over again,” Desmond figured.
“He has to die,” Zeus said in confirmation.
“We should assassinate him in his sleep,” Aphrodite grumbled, clearly uneasy about what was going to happen.
“We’ve been over this,” Hera said, irritated. “The man surrounds himself with commandos and gunmen. We can’t get close to him.”
“Then snipe him!” Aphrodite exclaimed. “Kill him on the road or on the way in!”
“And alert the whole damn area?” Hera replied.
“Well, so be it! It may be worth blowing our anonymity to kill this bastard!” Aphrodite declared.
“And spend a few centuries as freaks in a lab? No, thanks,” Artemis said.
“But this is crazy. Our children are here! And you want to chew up the place with gunfire? One bullet can end this,” Aphrodite pushed.
“And if we try to snipe him and miss? He’d be alive, his people intact, and the local police would be combing the hills trying to figure out who is shooting at whom,” Ares said.
Aphrodite huffed out of the room. Ares closed his eyes and rubbed at his brows.
“She always gets jittery before a fight,” Artemis whispered to Desmond.
“Imagine that,” Des said, his eyes wide in mock surprise.
“She’ll be fine,” Ares asserted. “Thanks to Duscha, we have Lenka’s latest phone number. I’ll make the call and go into town when he arrives. If nobody else has objections?”
“Sounds solid,” Artemis said. “We’re agreed, then?”
They nodded their approval.
“Good,” he said. “Best say your good-byes while you can. We still gotta get this place ready for a fight.”
Later that day, Ares found himself in a familiar tunnel. To an untrained eye it looked no different than the others branching off the main cavern. It was long and smoothed over by human hands. Bas-relief life-sized sculptures looked out from the walls, surrounded by chiseled text.
He’d already been here for two hours, having spent most of the day stashing weapons and ammo, and setting up barricades and obstacles. There was more to do, but he figured with Lenka not knowing their location in Macedonia, he could spare a few hours to spend with his kids.
And there were a lot of them, six hundred seventy-three to be exact. Only Zeus had more. Ares felt a twinge of regret at the numbers. Far too many of them had not been born to wives and lovers, but to women under his power. Women he’d captured in battle, slaves who’d served him in his various palaces and temples. Hell, for centuries he’d convinced his temple attendants that it was a “high honor” to bear his children. And they’d believed him.
He felt miserable about it now, the way he had used and tossed aside their mothers. It was one of the many wrongs that could be ascribed to his name. But he didn’t regret his sons and daughters. A large part of him wished he could go back and do right, give his children actual families and childhoods. But since he wasn’t an actual god, he couldn’t go back and change time, so these wishes didn’t really matter. His children had been who’d they’d been, and he’d been the monster who’d fathered them. He took solace in knowing that the actual God was giving them a better life in the next world than he had in this one.
Ares closed his eyes and muttered a prayer in ancient Aramaic. As he prayed, he heard soft footsteps approaching down the tunnel.
“Always in Aramaic,” Aphrodite said. “And I thought ‘He’ knew all tongues.”
“He does,” Ares replied. “But it’s more for me.”
“Makes you remember those three years,” she said with familiarity. They’d had this discussion many times before.
“I guess it does,” he said. His face grew solemn, a change she picked up on instantly. As she always did.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Well . . . when we were at the church, and you said you got a ‘person you could love’ after I returned from Judea . . .”
She frowned, but didn’t look away from him.
“So before that . . .” he pressed.
“Before that, I didn’t love you,” she said quickly.
Silence. The words hung between them. She looked uneasy, almost as if she were afraid he would explode and storm around in a rage. Had she told him this two thousand years earlier, he might have.
“Hephaestus, Dionysus, Hermes, Poseidon, Freyr. I loved them all. I loved Anchises and all my other mortal husbands. But you . . . it was lust. And I was weak, and stupid, and kept coming back,” she explained.
Ares nodded, saying, “I think Desmond would say that ‘women
go for bad boys.’”
“Yeah, well . . . I did. And how many times did it end badly?”
“Too many,” Ares said. “I’m sorry, Dita. For everything I did, everything I was back then.”
“I know you are,” she said, sidling up behind him to kiss his cheek. “And that you truly mean it. That’s one of the reasons I love you now.”
They stood like that for a long moment, Ares relishing the familiar warmth of her body pressed against his.
“Dita?” Ares said.
“Hmm?” she said, nestling her head sleepily against his neck.
“Just so you know, I’ve always loved you,” he said. “Even when I was too much of a monster to deal with it.”
“I know,” she said. “Why do you think I never gave up on you?”
He smiled and clasped her hands where they encircled his waist.
“And here I thought it was my rugged charm . . .”
Her hips swiveled and flexed back and forth as she rode him. Zeus felt her muscles ripple against him, running patterns along his length as he fought his rising passion. Hera was the only woman he’d ever been with who could do that trick, and she only pulled it out when she was really into it.
“Ah, come on, come on . . . that’s it. Fuck me,” she shrieked. “Ah-ah—fuck—ooh—me!”
He was not one to refuse a lady. His hands caressed upward, from her furiously moving hips to her breasts, teasing the thousands of places that he knew turned her on. Sweat sheened her body as she built herself to a furious high. He wasn’t far behind.
“God dammit you bastard—uhn—fuck meeee!” she wailed.
They cascaded over the edge, Hera collapsing against his chest. Her breath came in ragged gasps, her fingers clawing at his shoulders. His wife, so straightforward and practical most of the time, became the most foul-mouthed woman imaginable in the bedroom. Maybe it was all that focus of hers, dedicated to sex. Maybe it was the one place she felt she could ignore the world and let herself go. Maybe it was a trace of the headstrong young woman she’d once been. He didn’t know, but he wasn’t complaining. If the universe were a just place, she would’ve been the “Goddess of Love,” not Dita.
Not that he’d ever say that out loud. Content in the afterglow, he wrapped Hera in his arms. Her small frame was dwarfed against his, her body still rising and falling quickly as she regained her breath.
“You’re lucky no sound gets out of these rooms,” Zeus whispered.
“Like any of them don’t know,” Hera said dismissively. It was true enough.
They lay like that for a moment, coming down from their peak. Zeus’ skin prickled cold as sweat hit air. Hera’s breathing gradually slowed, until it was just a whisper against his skin.
“What do you think our life would’ve been like if we’d grown old and died like everybody else?” she asked.
He smiled in the darkness. The rational part of his mind reminded him that he’d been twenty-nine years old when she’d been born, and nearly seventy when they’d met. Had he not been immortal, he would have most likely died long before they found each other. But he pushed those thoughts aside. She’d asked this question a million times, and it assumed they would have met like some normal couple and lived alongside each other all of their lives.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we’ll find out soon enough.”
“Oh? You expect both of us to make it out of here alive?” she asked.
“I expect all of us to make it out of this alive,” he said confidently.
She shook her head sadly. “Cockeyed optimist.”
“You knew what I was when you married me . . . the first time,” he replied. “I expect to get out of here, get Jedrick’s super-bone-marrow treatment, and live out the rest of my days at your side.”
“I see,” she said. “And what big plans do you have for the final sixty years of your life?”
“Well,” he said wistfully, “I was hoping to give Meli and Bane a whole bunch of siblings.”
“It’ll have to wait,” she said. “Even if we survive. The treatment, the radiation . . . could be months before it’s safe to get pregnant. And there’s always the kids to consider.”
“Kids? We can raise more than two kids at a time,” he said, confused.
“True. But what about Ari and Arty and Theni? They’re not spring chickens any more. Making them big brothers and sisters again, at their ages?” Hera quipped.
He couldn’t see her smiling but knew she was.
“Bah,” he said, hugging Hera close. “Artemis will probably have her own rug rats soon enough. They’ll need little cousins to play with. Ahh . . . it’ll be grand. All our get-togethers will be loud and chaotic. We’ll have to dodge sprinting packs of little ones. Somebody will get pushed into the pool or a stream or whatever. Aphrodite will worry too much and run around trying to calm everything down while Ares rolls his eyes and keeps his distance. And I’m sure Desmond will be the victim of a half-dozen dog-piles. He seems like the type little kids can attack with impunity.”
Hera laughed softly.
“Yeah, I could see that,” she said.
“It’ll be good,” he said with a contented sigh, hugging his wife closer to him.
“So long as we hire a maid to clean up after all this madness,” Hera whispered sleepily.
“Agreed.”
28
Carev Vrv, Near Sasa, Macedonia
Ares stepped out from the forest, into the open upper slopes of Carev Vrv. He probably didn’t need to be this far from the cave to make a cell phone call, but he had no idea what kind of coverage they had in Macedonia. Last time he’d been here, cell phones had been huge, ungainly things owned exclusively by rich lawyers and action-movie villains.
He looked at the phone for a long moment, in thought. If he didn’t make the call, how long could they stay hidden here? How long until Lenka found some crumb that brought him to Sasa? They probably had a year’s worth of food in the cave, so they could stay hidden that long.
Would Lenka’s cancer kill him before that time came? Was it advanced enough? Would he kill Athena outright if he suspected his time was near? Would they be able to keep Duscha from escaping and telling her father where they were hidden? Ares didn’t doubt that she spent most of her time trying to find a way out of her bindings. Eventually she would succeed.
He realized, with relatively little emotion, that she’d probably have to die too. If they let her go, they’d have another Sidorov running around who hated them and wanted them dead. Another psychopath to hunt them down, this one without lung cancer.
He turned his head skyward, staring into the cloudy haze of the day.
“A little help would be nice,” he said.
The Almighty did not answer, at least not in any way Ares could perceive. Not knowing if it made God more likely to hear him or not, he knelt.
“Look, I know not one of us can live up to Your standards. And I know there isn’t a person in my family who hasn’t killed to survive, even after I told them all about You. But they could really use Your help right now. And if not for them, for Meli and Bane, and even Desmond. By all rights he shouldn’t be here, caught up in our mess. But he loves Arty, so here he is. That’s gotta mean something . . .”
The pleas faded into the emptiness that surrounded him. No light parted the clouds. No voice came from above. His old friend was as quiet now as he’d been since the day they’d nailed him to that cross. Ares got to his feet, swiped the phone to life, and typed in the number Duscha had given them.
“Do what you will with me, Lord,” he said out loud in Aramaic. “Just protect my family today.”
He tapped the button on the screen of his phone, and the call went through.
Skopje, Macedonia
“So, these people have been here,” said Constantine Katsaros of Interpol.
; He wasn’t officially here as a functionary of Interpol, but Andrei Hristov of Skopje Airport didn’t know that. Hristov was a mid-level security guard, the head of a group of men who watched cameras all day. When Lenka had arrived with his bought-off Interpol agent, the head of security had okayed this man and everyone with him. The visitors had spent the last hour running through security footage at high speed, looking for several “criminals” who had come through the airport a few days earlier.
Katsaros had asked no questions of Lenka. For what he was paid, he shut up and did the job. Besides, if he didn’t know why Lenka was after these people, he couldn’t be coerced into spilling his guts should his corruption be discovered. As far as Hristov knew, the people in the images before him were of a bunch of scam artists who’d been working through the Balkans, selling sugar pills to clinics under the guise that they were antibiotics. Hristov had demonstrated the requisite amount of disgust at the news, and been more than willing to help “Interpol” track them down.
“They have been here. All off one flight that came in from Paris,” Hristov replied, then glanced over to a computer on his desk. “They started off in New York.”
“And no security recognized them?” Lenka asked, pretending to be upset.
“We had no word,” Hristov said defensively. “Whatever alerts were put out about these men were not sent to us.”
“Not surprised,” Lenka said, nodding to show his understanding. “They’re always screwing something up.”
Hristov made a noncommittal sound and looked back to his computer.
“Is there any other information you can provide? Any possible knowledge about their destination?” asked Katsaros.
“According to this, they rented a van,” Hristov said. “But beyond that I can’t help you. You should probably contact the police, see if they can send out word of these scum.”
“It’s our next stop—” Lenka began, only to be cut off by the chirp of his cell phone. He pulled it from his pocket, seeing an unknown number on the screen.
“Can you excuse me for a moment?” he said. Hristov motioned for him to go ahead. Lenka stepped out of the small office into a sterile hallway. He lifted the phone to his ear and connected the call.