“Your”—Poseidon, dressed today in a straight-cut black sweater and expensive jeans, bobs an awkward bow—“new kingdom! Your castle of condiments, your bastion of basil.”
“This is the soup kitchen that you’ll be working at,” Demeter slinks up from behind, cat-silent, tense. She makes eye contact with Poseidon before looking away, the ghost of a sneer mauling her face. “And don’t worry. Poseidon isn’t in charge.”
“Oh, come now, Demeter. Is that how you treat your husband?” He reaches for her, only to have the goddess yank her shoulder away.
“Don’t.”
The faintest crackle of power, earth and ocean, soil and sea, before the two separate, smiles on their faces, tension in their spines, actors who’ve played out the same conversation six million times. I clench my fists, and Bob wakes the legion. We wait. But nothing happens. Demeter prowls forward, enters a door unmarked by signage and bracketed by cloudy windows. Poseidon shrugs and follows, his grin effortless, confident, patriarchal.
We go in. The premises are large, larger than I expected: roomy enough to hold at least sixty men. More, if they’re willing to squeeze into the corners and cram like sardines. Tables and benches are arranged like ribs, bracketed by food stations; the kitchen is partitioned away by a low wall. Sequestered in a narrow corridor, a door with the universal symbol for a defecation-safe zone.
“Impressed?” asks Poseidon.
“That depends. Which answer gets me a bed without bed bugs?”
On cue, he roars his amusement and smashes a hand between my shoulderblades, a blow that nearly crumples me in half. I straighten as he struts away, already indifferent to my existence, his eyes on a new prize: a pair of young women, fawn-like in their restless, leggy beauty. I pick my composure up, walk myself to where Demeter stands in front of a colossal fridge, arguing feverishly with a pale, unsmiling man.
“Hi?”
Demeter doesn’t turn, raises a finger. “One minute.”
The tempo of the conversation accelerates. Demeter and the man dance between languages, slinging English and Greek and something unidentifiable with a liquid, angry grace.
“Um.”
Hand gestures are being mobilized.
“Um.”
“One moment—”
“There’s a roach in the pot.”
The lie achieves its desired outcome. Both Demeter and the man leap, argument discarded in the wake of a common adversary, and I stand quietly until the two figure out my ruse. It doesn’t take long. They glare. I smile. “It kills me to have to interrupt such an important conversation, but someone decided it was very important to have me take a thirty-six-hour flight and then make me go to work the very next day. I feel like there are earth-shattering issues at work here, and I’d hate to cause the end of the world because I was too shy to ask what I’m supposed to do.”
More glaring.
“Too much? I’ll stop.”
To my mild surprise, the pale man laughs; a hacking, machine-gun noise that borders on drugged hysteria. He grins, and like everyone else in my life, his dentition is much too sharp. “I like new toy, Demeter.”
“Employee,” the goddess corrects.
“A mortal?” His gasp is as theatrical as the hand that twitches up to shield his mouth. The man looks me over again. He’s tall. And shaggy. Black hair, threaded into a map of braids, flows from a widow’s peak, carpeting him like a pelt. A musk clings to him, not immediately unpleasant, but I recognize the base notes, an abattoir palette that makes me stiffen instantly. “I thought we only serve mortals.”
He chortles at his joke. No one else laughs. I give Demeter a quizzical look, and she reciprocates with a stare that announces in block letters I’M NOT DOING THIS WITH YOU.
“Veles,” she sighs, clearly unimpressed.
“Come on! Is clever joke. You people need sense of laughter,” he declares, shaking his head, reaching back to tighten the strings of his apron. Forearms bulge below his rolled-up sleeves, the weathered skin tattooed with wolves.
“Humour,” I blurt out.
“What?”
“It’s ‘sense of humour.’ Not ‘sense of—’”
Veles flaps a massive hand. “Same thing. Don’t be pedant.”
I clack my mouth shut. Demeter, too old to roll her eyes, nonetheless displays a hint of churlishness, jabbing a finger at the fridge, mouthing a warning at Veles and gesturing at me to follow. I fall into step behind her, hesitantly returning the man-mountain’s ebullient thumbs-up.
“So, who’s Veles? My Greek mythology isn’t up to snuff, but—”
“Nobody of any significance anymore,” Demeter says, almost sadly. “Once, the Slavic people knew Veles as a god of dark, growing things. The earth and the water, the forest and its wolves. But Christianity tore his worship to shreds. He became their saint, and then their devil, and then nothing at all.”
I have nothing to say to that. Demeter takes the scenic route, lazily winding around food stations, periodically stopping to pop open lids and inspect contents. The buffet, from the little I can see, is unexpectedly wholesome. Roasted aubergines and brie-drizzled asparagus; mushrooms steeped in rich brown stew, a hint of anise and peppercorn wafting in the steam; golden buttered corn, char-grilled cauliflower, thick slabs of herb-crusted lamb, perfectly roasted. There’s even stuffing. And gravy.
“Rich fare for a soup kitchen.”
A sidelong glance and a small smile. “I try to make it worth it for them.”
I shiver.
I’m silent as she points out stove and microwave, oven and freezer, the location of every utensil and pot and article of crockware, my head bobbing in time with every pause. The idea of divine charity is as incomprehensible as thermonuclear physics. What agenda could they have? What are they doing with so much good food? Demeter might be the embodiment of agriculture, but this cornucopia of exquisitely seasoned excess had to have cost her, had to have cost them. Yet at the same time—
“You got everything?”
“Crystal.”
We both pause.
“I’ll just assume that you just said ‘yes,’” she announces drily, then walks away, no goodbye offered, cold again.
Finally unchaperoned, I scan the kitchen, make eye contact with the other staff, a coterie of uniformed men and women, no more memorable than the proverbial man on the street, their plain-faced humanity only slightly too flawless to be authentic. They stare at me in return, silent, their eyes refracting the amber sunlight.
I’m on the verge of salutations when the front door swings open again and everyone swivels, Demeter’s voice pouring out in warm contralto welcome. The people who shamble in are old, young, male, female; every ethnicity you can name and every shade of lost. They’re received without prejudice, however, with Poseidon himself escorting each new arrival into the ever-expanding queue.
And soon, there’s no time for nurturing suspicion, just work, just doling out food and replenishing empty tureens, just good,cleanlabor. To my surprise, I enjoy it. It’s possible that Demeter watered her harvest with the blood of one-armed orphans, but I can’t see any evidence of foul play, nothing bloodier than fresh-plucked poultry and shelves packed with raw beef. For once, my kitchen isn’t a place of murder, and I’m not going through the motions, perpetually careful to not speculate on the origin of the meat I’m marinating. For once, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I feel human.
Thump. The door opens, but it doesn’t shut. I look up. Men in suits pour through the front door, grim-faced, straight-backed, an army of Agent Smiths equipped with briefcases. They assemble in two lines, one on each side of the exit. Stop. Wait.
“Shit”—Demeter’s voice, from the corridor that leads to the bathrooms—“get the fuck down!”
As one, the men snap open their briefcases and extract SMGs, beetle-black and gleaming. There is no posturing, no overture to violence, no commanding the innocent to move out of the way. Before the last syllable of Demeter’s warning can die, they o
pen fire and the world frags into gore and muzzle flash.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
DESPITE THE MEDIA’S hard-on for it, death isn’t glamorous. It isn’t blood in the water, or curds of brain dribbling from a neat round hole, still wisping smoke, or a clean red sickle opening like a smile under your chin. It’s piss and shit and screaming and bodies in hypovolemic shock. It is spluttering gut wounds and grown men crying. It is the smell of compromised intestines, still processing the junk crammed down the gullet that morning. It is fecal matter and bile and so much vomit because it is hard to hold your lunch when your stomach’s honeycombed with fresh holes, and you’ve plugged fingers into every opening, hoping it’ll stop the blood that pisses out with every whimpering breath, but it won’t fucking stop.
The suits are relentless. Theirs is a death by number, eschewing efficiency for quantity, proselytising the idea that if you put enough rounds in something, it will eventually die. They’re not wrong. In the last two minutes, we’ve lost at least twenty-five people: mostly patrons, but also a handful of the staff. The rest of us are holed up behind kitchen equipment, all bashed up with no place to go.
“Who the fuck are they?” I scream as more bullets bang against the food station.
Veles, jaw hanging by a twist of muscle, laughs uproariously. “High-interest credit card company!” I’m not sure how I’m hearing him speak.
With that, he vaults over the barricade, skin tearing where it fails to keep up with the sudden multiplication of muscle tissue, frayed hide trailing like gauze. Veles’ body ripples like a column of tumors developing in fast-forward, and he laughs as he rolls his shoulders, cartilage popping even as his spine sprouts another two feet of vertebrae.
“Come! Vanquis! Veles is not scared of you.” He pounds a fist into an open palm, guffaws as his face warps into a muzzle, blood drooling from newly wolf-yellow eyes.
The intruders pause, just for a heartbeat, as though silently conferring; twitching and rocking on their heels, mouths palpitating, Adam’s apples bobbing in concert. A consensus is reached, and the air splits with the sound of twenty-six high-power firearms unloading in unision.
The rounds punch deep into Veles’ neo-nightmare mass. Ordinarily, the bullets would simply bed down in the vitals, pinpoints of metal lodged in a slurry of liquefied meat. But this is a numbers game, and volume’s an ace up its own sleeve. Wounds iris wider with every new perforation, exposing punctured, oozing viscera.
And still Veles keeps laughing, keeps stalking through a sea of chewed-up corpses, arms held wide.
A lucky shot takes his jaw off completely. Veles screams in rapture.
Shit.
“Ham kha—are we really going to sit here while he gets himself killed?” I demand, scrabbling across the floor for a knife. If this is the best that the Greek gods can do, I’d best start evaluating contingencies.
“No.”
Demeter rises, power steaming from her skin, evaporating into filaments of possibility. Reality dithers like an old television set. And for one infinitesimally brief moment, the universe peels open, and I can see everything—how physics and velocity and time intersects with the idea of a heaven above, how meta co-exist with the fundamental truth of their non-existence, how the sun can be a star can be a ball of dung rolled across the galaxy by a gargantuan beetle. Suddenly, it is all so clear.
And then Demeter pulls on the strings of what-is and what-can-be, and the room goes white.
“Fight, Rupert!” Her voice, a command that spears through my breastbone, anchors itself in my ribs and drags me forward through the all-encompassing light. Not a compulsion, but a call to arms, an entreaty to put down fear and arm myself with vengeance. It is the last thing I hear before another detonation—gunshots clipping too close—removes my hearing.
Before I know it, I’ve cut deep into a vein. Blood gushes and with every drop, I pay out another microsecond of my lifespan, another unoccupied neuron. My tattoo-spirits lap it up, drink it down, and regurgitate raw power into my soul. Buoyed by the surplus, Bob drags himself to the surface, wreaths my face in bone, and with a curse between my teeth, I leap over the food station.
Hell unravels in silent, flashing vignettes.
Bang. Veles kneeling atop an agent, fingers on the man’s chest. Pulling until the seams of his skin give out, and breastbone gleams red-slick in the light.
Bang. Demeter, not-Demeter, a thing that could have been Demeter, bearing down on a pair of vacant-eyed men, screaming something that I can’t hear.
Bang. Poseidon, his arm held high, fingers curled. Beatific as he stares at a man floating in the air, legs kicking, water burbling out of his mouth.
Bang. The kitchen staff, shimmering between guises. Swarming. Teeth and talon, threads of black hair, constricting about wrist and throat and—
Bang.
A weight slams into my side and I go down, hand already whipping around to bring the knife on my assailant. The blade cuts cleanly through his chest—a boy, maybe eighteen, hollow but still so achingly young—to emerge the other side, and even though he’s starting to hiccup blood, he doesn’t stop. The youth wedges the muzzle of his SMG under my sternum, pins his weight over the machine, depresses the trigger.
I’d be dead ten times over if it weren’t for Bob, who howls up to swallow the bullets, to swallow the kid’s arm, amputating the limb at the elbow. The suit doesn’t scream, just falls back, more baffled than anything else. He gawks at the stump of his arm, brow rucked, looks up at me, eyes clearing.
I see a jitter of confused terror but it’s too late to stop Bob. United, we twist onto all fours and lunge, landing with our teeth in his throat and our hand cupped around his heart, which spasms in my grip like a terrified hummingbird.
And. I. Squeeze.
POP.
Or, maybe, splorge.
It’s all the same when you’re elbow-deep (both literally and figuratively, ang moh) in the fight. Regardless, the fighting ends almost as quickly as it begins.
“SO, VELES GET share of money, yes?”
The words clatter into the gory silence, innocent, too loud. I’ve an arm around a pudgy man with a flamboyant hat, glasses cracked but somehow still in position. Ropes of dark hair cling to his face in bloodied loops. His name’s either Weasel or Ferrett, or something else that is sleek and deceptively cute. I can’t remember exactly. But he is remarkably ebullient despite his injuries, radiant despite a face bleached of its natural pinkness.
“Money?” I ask as I usher the man out of the soup kitchen. Wobbling, he doffs his hat at me, and shambles away.
“Money. From dead pool.”
“Like in the movie?”
“Veles—” Demeter’s voice again, thick with warning.
“Da. Just like in movie.” Veles resumes, oblivious, once again topically human. “We make bets on who survive each evening. Win big, sometimes. Ariadne won flat-screen television that way.”
I toe at a corpse flipped on his face, arms splayed, face pillowed by a plate of mash. From a distance, congealing blood—especially blood with extraneous bits—could be mistaken for lingonberry sauce. It is not a pleasant revelation.
“That is morbid.”
“Da. But Greek gods don’t pay, and homeless people don’t tip.” Veles shrugs, hefting a body onto each shoulder. He beams. “So, we do what we can. On bright side, Veles get loads of money on main gamble. Thirty-two dead! Right on the cash!”
“I—what?”
“Had to wait for necessary casualties, but was worth it.” Veles thumps his chest with someone else’s foot, the leg itself broken at the knee, white bone jutting from the ruined joint.
I consider the ramifications of his words, and chew out a question that I already know I don’t want an answer to. “You mean we could have saved some of these people?”
“Da. Easy.” Veles begins to stroll towards the kitchen, where he offloads his burden of bullet-torn carcasses. “Vanquis goons are pushovers.”
“Wait. W
ait right there. So, you’re telling me”—my voice trembles towards an octave it can’t quite reach, and I ball my hands into fists, wincing—“that we could have saved aaall these people, but instead we—”
“I don’t think you’re approaching this correctly,” Poseidon intrudes. I turn to find the god sweeping bodies towards the kitchen like so many hairballs, limp arms and legs flopping everywhere. A hysterical laugh saws through my chest. Ragdoll physics; they get you even in the real world. “You could have gone out there all on your own. You never needed a ‘we’ behind you.”
“But—”
“But what? Exactly?” Poseidon is relentless. “But you were afraid? But you weren’t prepared to go out there alone? To risk your life for unwashed strangers? Is that what you were going to say?”
“Poseidon, that’s enough.” Demeter finally stepping in, too late.
His grin is salt-white, cold as the deep. “Before you pass judgment, perhaps spend some time meditating on the fact that you are a dyed-in-the-wool coward.”
“I said, enough.”
That was unfair. Three small words. They hang stillborn from the tip of my tongue. I want so badly to tell him that he’s being unfair, that he was mistaken about my intentions, that the hail of bullets was a perfectly legitimate thing to be afraid of, that the desire to survive is practically constitutional.
But he’s right.
He’s right.
“If it helps, it wasn’t as though they were destined for a long life rich in grandchildren.” Poseidon shrugs and returns to his labour, smile feline. “Cheap fuel for the divine fire.”
Another frisson of dread, echoing my earlier unease, but I swallow it down and tug on the straps of my apron, flattening the cloth.
“It’s fine.” I clear my throat and straighten my spine, head held stiffly, an old line twisting in my thoughts: Fake it until you make it. I can do that. I can feign dignity. I’ve done so before. “Everything’s. Fine. So, what are we going to do with all these bodies?”
Two triangles of corpses lie stacked in the kitchen, one on the counter and one on the floor, limbs still comically splayed. Gore dribbles and drips like so much discolored treacle, while blank eyes gaze up at blood-speckled staff, standing silent as statues. I stare at them, stare at the two piles, breath twitching in second-long intervals, an uncomfortable epiphany skittering multi-legged up my bones.
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