by Jamie Wyman
“What are you doing?” Astraios snarled.
“Using my birthright,” Marius shouted. “But not for you! Never for you!”
Astraios cried out something in Greek, and with a whirl of his arms, he yanked his focus away from Marius. My satyr fell to the ground and stared at his hands with his normal, leaf-green eyes.
I called his name, but the word was drowned out by renewed horror from Malcolm.
“Stop!” Marius tried to stand but stumbled back to the floor. Without the divine power flowing in him, he was weak as a kitten. He’d fought too hard. Unable to lift a finger to help his brother, he pleaded, “You can’t do this to him!”
The sickly pallor of Hades’s spell seeped out of Mal, replaced by the same wreath of light that just moments ago had encased Marius. Blue radiance shone from him as he rose into the air.. Back arched, screaming, Mal hovered there. And the transformation began.
Astraios’s voice rang out. “I’ve waited too long! We all have! I will not waste this moment when the Sileni will once again have our prince to worship.”
“He won’t understand,” Marius protested. “He can’t!”
“But that also means he can’t fight back!”
Rent apart by the magic at work on his body, Mal let out one last peal of anguish.
“Blood calls to blood,” the Sileni chanted. “And so the mantle shall be passed on!”
Malcolm spun in the air so that his feet pointed to the floor. He, too, had been stripped of his human glamour. Hooves poked out from beneath his jeans, boots clattering to the stone.
Marius pooled all his strength, and with a roar, he barreled into Astraios. He knocked the goat off-balance and into the ring of Sileni. This distracted the two holding me back just enough that I was able to jostle my way into the circle. I made a beeline for my satyr, pushing him off Astraios before Marius ended up killing the old goat. He and I stumbled together, a tangle of limbs falling to the symbols on the floor as the power and life ebbed out of those arcane sigils.
“No,” Marius panted.
“Look at me,” I said. “Are you all right? Look at me!”
Relief flooded me as I touched him. He was real, whole. The skin beneath my fingers was supple, glazed with a cool sheen of sweat. Though he was no longer radiant with power, the sight of Marius brought me to tears. I threw my arms around his neck and clung to him in the fiercest embrace I’ve ever given.
“I thought… Oh gods…Marius…” I said into his shoulder.
Marius shrugged out of my arms, stunned into silence. Confused, I followed his stare.
Bathed in a wash of silvery light, Mal floated gently down to the ground. The clothes he had been wearing burned away in a flash of blue fire that matched his glowing eyes. I could still see Mal in the satyr standing there, but he’d been transformed. The bones of his face were sharper, more like Marius’s natural lines. His eyes looked a little wider, and his hair—though still comprised of tight, unruly curls—had more luster. Dark-brown horns formed wavy lines on either side of his forehead. A billy goat’s beard drew an s-curve from his once-bare chin.
“Mal?” I asked.
That sharp chin of his cut a stern line, and he fixed me with his gaze. “Is that my name?”
I gasped. His voice… Dear gods. Mal’s accent was in there, terrified as a child’s, but another voice trampled it, an older voice with immense authority.
The more I stared at him, the more changes I saw. His ears came to an elven point. The slight paunch he’d carried had been replaced with a six-pack that looked hard enough to chip a tooth. The fur of his goat legs was soft and rich.
“Malcolm,” Marius moaned, tears in his eyes. He approached his brother with care, padding forward slowly. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for this.”
Astraios prostrated himself before Mal and bowed low, nose scraping the floor. “My Lord. We have waited long for your return.”
The other Sileni joined Astraios in supplication.
Mal stared down at them, his face a queer mixture of horrified confusion and haughty entitlement.
“Malcolm?” Marius asked as he laid a gentle hand on Mal’s bare shoulder.
Mal whipped to face Marius, his body blurring with enhanced speed. Marius stumbled, surprised, but stared with terrible understanding.
“Marius?” Mal asked, voice still altered. “What…?” He grabbed his throat. More of that childlike fear quaked out him. “What happened to me?”
Astraios answered before Marius could find the words. “We have lifted you, my Lord. We have raised you to the proper throne.”
“What does that mean?”
The Sileni reached imploringly to his newly born god. “Sire, you are now as you were born to be. The sacred blood of Pan—”
“I don’t give a shit about sacred blood!” Mal roared, his own voice taking over again. His eyes became human, but the other changes—his beard, the points to his ears, his sculpted body—remained all too real. “Marius, please, just tell me what’s wrong with me.”
“Oh, Mal,” Marius said. “They’ve gone and made you a god.”
One of the prostrate goats rose and approached Mal with a silver robe. Mal went to shrug him off but, instead, backhanded the goat across the room. Mal gaped at his arm, suddenly imbued with more strength than he’d ever known, as if it were someone else’s body. And in truth, it was.
“I don’t understand,” he said. Tears melted down his face. “I don’t understand this. I don’t want to be… I just want to go home.”
“You are home,” Astraios intoned. “At long last, you are exactly where you belong.”
“Piss off!” Mal bellowed. Dust rained down from the high ceiling.
Astraios quailed. As he tried to pull himself together, he cleared his throat. “Perhaps my Lord would like a moment with his kin.”
He and the other Sileni clicked away in a flurry of bows and excited whispers.
“Mal?” I asked. “How do you feel?”
He pawed his hair, felt out to the tips of his horns. “I don’t… All right, I s’pose. But…it’s like I’m…too big for me skin.”
Marius nodded. “And you’ve never worked with power, really, so you don’t know how to control it.”
Mal shook his head. “Is this…? Is this what you feel like when you do all that fancy stuff?”
“You get used to it.” He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “With control and understanding comes comfort.”
“I’ll take that anytime now.” Mal’s voice shook, but the panic had seeped away. He continued to examine the now-tighter contours of his body. “This is a bit different.”
Marius gestured to his own chin. “You’ve got something. Just there.”
Mal grabbed his new beard. “Oh gods,” he whined. “I don’t like beards. Never have done. Why do I have a bloody beard? Now I look like you, you daft twat!”
“Is that such a bad thing?” Marius preened, his voice unctuous. “I have always had the better looks in the family.”
“Have not…”
My satyr was incredulous. “No? They didn’t need to rearrange the bones in my face when they were making me into a god.”
Mal’s hands flew to his own cheeks, feeling frantically at his nose, his chin. “Shut up!”
Marius laughed, sending Mal into another string of colorful epithets, most of which criticized Marius’s parentage. Before Mal could get on too big of a roll, though, Marius grabbed him in a tight hug. Minding the extra long horns, of course.
“I’m sorry,” Marius whispered.
Mal grimaced uncomfortably. But he returned the hug, eyes closing with something akin to relief. When he pulled away, he took in Marius’s nude form and grabbed the silver robe from the floor. “Christ,” he said, disgustedly hurling the robe at Marius. “Put something on, would ya?”
“And hide this light under a bushel?” Marius smiled, but he did put on the robe. They eyed each other, each wearing a divine mantle.
“
Are you all right?” Mal asked.
Marius nodded. “More or less.”
“Cat says it was…that things were rough. But she also said we’d get you back.”
For the first time in this whole crazy maelstrom, Marius looked at me. A smile touched his eyes and made my knees weak. “She’s too right.”
“Oi!” Mal called to me. “How’s about a little taste now? Huh?” He gestured to himself proudly, hands lingering down near his hips. “Are you sure you picked the right brother?”
Marius smacked Mal on the back of the head, and the two set to their puppyish bickering.
“Cat,” Loki barked at me.
Damn! Loki and Hades!
I’d totally forgotten about them, what with all the deification and shit going on. Turning away from the brothers, I ran to Loki’s side. “Where’s Hades?”
“Gone,” Loki said. “Don’t know that he wanted to be around when the Sileni were done. Either way, it didn’t bode well for him.”
I nodded. “So is this it, then?”
“Marius is off the hook. Well, as much as he ever was.” Loki raised his chin to point at the brothers. “This changes things. He’ll have some protection if anyone still holds a grudge.”
“So…he’s free?”
“Who is free, Cat?”
He let me ponder for a moment, but before I could answer, he blew out a chuff of laughter. “You may have just started a pretty wild fire, girl. They’re hunting for Eris, no doubt. And Hades has the Apple of Discord. Not sure that was the smartest move. Now he has all her secrets.”
“Hoping you’d get a hold of the Apple for yourself?” I asked with a sideways smile.
“Won’t lie, the idea had crossed my mind.”
I shook my head. “Pretty dangerous thing to have floating around in the world.”
“Dangerous is half the fun!” he sang.
“Wouldn’t do you much good right now anyway.”
Loki grinned playfully. “Oh really? Why is that?”
“Well, in techie terms, I wiped the hard drive before I handed it to Hades.”
His eyes wide as saucers, he crossed his arms. “It’s really empty?”
“No more than a pretty paperweight.”
Something akin to disappointment flashed over his features. “All that information is gone?” he whined. “Do you know what could have become of it? What I—or someone else who was so inclined,” he added quickly, “could have done with all those schemes?”
“Yup.” Too well. All Eris’s sins were still filed in my head. I desperately wanted a shower to get the grime of her magic off me—assuming that would help. I wondered if I could download it all somewhere else. That would have to come later, though. There was still business I had with Marius.
Loki stared at me, his expression unreadable. “I underestimated you, Cat. Which I must admit, is difficult to do.”
“Bet you won’t make that mistake twice,” I said, half joking.
“No. No, I won’t. And neither will anyone else.”
I didn’t like the sound of warning in his voice. “By that, of course, you mean everyone will be banging down my door to tell me how awesome and cool I am, right?”
Loki chuckled. “You’re so cute.”
“Speaking of people who dig me…who did that to your face?”
“Still not going to tell you, Cat.”
“Dammit.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Waiting”
After a while, the Sileni surrounded Malcolm and began spouting off all that was expected of him in his new position. Marius backed away and headed up the stairs, out of the Temple with a decidedly morose slump to his shoulders. Loki took off to take care of his own affairs, leaving me in a cave full of satyrs of various stripes. Figuring this might not be the place to linger—especially without Marius’s braid in my hair to keep me from succumbing to Mal’s charms—I mounted the stairs two at a time and shuffled back to the real world.
I looked left and right for some hint of Marius, perhaps a glimmer of that silver cloak. But I didn’t see him. Dusk had descended, and a strip of purple was all that remained of daylight along the western horizon. The constellations glittered above while the lights of a city twinkled below. A gust of summer wind rattled through the dry grass, whispered through the trees farther up the slope.
“Quite an interesting evening, don’t you think, Cat?”
I closed my eyes and drew a breath. As I let it out, I said her name. “Dahlia.”
“Did you get what you wanted?” she asked.
“Did you?” I opened my eyes, and she stepped out of the gloaming, walking up the slope with the grace of an angel and the silence of a ghost.
She shrugged, a dainty yet elegant gesture. “As much as anyone else who came to bid on the satyr. Perhaps more. Perhaps less.”
“You’re so Fae sometimes,” I said with a chuckle.
“I am what I am. No more. No less.”
“So who sent you? For Marius, I mean?”
Another shrug. “No one, really. I heard he was on the auction block and figured you’d be here.”
“Oh, so it’s not about him,” I said, incredulously. “You’re pretending to be here for my benefit?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
Though I don’t think she realized she was doing it, Dahlia gave the slightest of pouts, her lower lip jutting out just so. Her eyes commanded my attention, and in staring at her, I remembered our time together. Nights out on the town. Mornings in her bed.
In her palms, something began to shine with a wan but pure white light.
“You know—” she chuckled as she took a step closer “—you’re the one who left.”
“You’re the one who gambled with my soul,” I simmered. “That’s worse than leaving.”
She looked away, chastened. “Right.”
“Look,” I said after a sigh. I was too tired to fight her, too exhausted to pretend she didn’t infuriate me. “I know that sometimes our paths will cross because of our jobs, but, really, you screwed me over in ways I don’t know that I’ll ever forgive. You lost my soul to Eris, and she wasn’t exactly gentle with it. You bound my powers when I didn’t even know about them. You… Frankly, Dahlia, you broke my heart.”
She stared into the white light, a rueful smile dimpling her cheek. “I know.” Dahlia gazed up at me. “Has there been anyone else, Cat? Since me?”
I thought about Marius and the dance on the balcony. The kiss. The desire. And my fear.
I shrugged.
“I was afraid of that,” she murmured.
Dahlia glided to me, her wraithlike steps silent even on the rocky ground. The light from her hands glowed like a tiny star, illuminating her mahogany skin and raven hair. My chest ached with how beautiful she was. Like a rich dessert, she was too much of a decadent thing.
“Hold out your hand,” she urged, “and close your eyes.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Do you think I trust you that much? I sure as hell don’t think so.”
“Please.”
Something of the old Dahlia—my Dahlia—shone in that one word. Though it went against everything I knew and felt, I decided to give that ghost of my first love a chance. I closed my eyes—and quickly popped one open to look for a dagger. When I didn’t see one, I closed that eye again.
“Okay, now what?” I asked.
“Hold out your hands.”
I did. A moment later, something touched my skin. Warm and fluttering like a tiny bird or a baby rabbit. I opened my eyes to find that she’d laid the small star—the gift she’d offered Hades—in my palms.
I gasped. Before I could question her motives, the light flared from a star to a supernova. I slammed my eyes shut but still saw the bright nimbus of Dahlia’s trinket. Reflexively, I reached out with my senses but saw nothing. No magic, no machinations. Just light. The filaments of this power streamed into me, into my chest, with a throbbing sensation. Without knowing the reason, I began
to cry. Sobs without purpose, emotions without a cause… I fell to my knees under the overwhelming wave of that light.
Soon, that tide washed away, and the light ebbed to darkness. When I looked up at Dahlia, she smiled at me with sincerity. She kneeled before me and wiped the tears away. Then she leaned forward and placed a kiss on my cheek.
“It’s yours again,” she whispered. “I’m sorry to have kept it for so long.”
I remembered that night, that fateful night when I had lain in her arms, flush with emotions. What had I said to her? I love you. Heart and soul, I’m yours.
I hadn’t understood then, but those words had given Dahlia very real possession of my soul. She’d squandered it, gambled with it, lost it to Eris. But I’d never thought about the other part of that promise.
A human heart. Freely given.
I choked. “Mine?”
She nodded. “Enjoy.”
A few soundless steps, a wink beneath the starlight, and Dahlia was gone.
I sat there, trying to quantify what the hell had just happened, when I heard the sound of music on the wind. Pipes.
No shit, I thought. You’re sitting near the Temple of Pan and they just had a ritual. You’re going to hear pipes.
But no. I knew that music came not from Mal or the Sileni, but from another satyr.
My satyr.
I followed the tune up the path, around the other side of the cave, and into the dense trees. The terrain moved down into a sort of valley. The sounds of pipes and a waterfall grew louder, spurring me forward.
After a few minutes, I came to a pool. Stars twinkled in every ripple of the water. Beneath the silvery sheen of the moon, Marius’s cloak gleamed.
He knelt at the edge of the lagoon, his bare feet sinking into the mossy earth. Eyes closed, his lips traced gentle lines over the pan pipes, coaxing sweet music from the reeds. The tune was light and languid, like sunbeams through the window on a lazy Sunday morning. While he played, I took in this place—the place he’d told me about and described so lovingly.
The water flowed around a large boulder, its top carpeted with moss and lichen. Similar rocks surrounded the pool, as if someone had created a stage of it and these smaller stones were seats for the audience. Perhaps, one day long ago, Pan had held court here under the stars. Or hell, even Marius. The trees surrounding the lagoon had droopy branches with cascading leaves. The bark was thin and silvery, casting back hints of light. In the boughs, more than the wind sighed. I caught the twinkling eyes of spirits. Nymphs, perhaps, sitting and listening in awe of the music.