The Immortals

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  “Where are you?” she demanded.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m watching the graveyards, where do you think?”

  “I gave up waiting for you to call and came down to Trinity Cemetery. I’m unemployed, remember, so I’ve got plenty of time for stakeouts.”

  “Where are the assholes we’re trying to catch? Are you sure they’re going to be at a cemetery?”

  “As I explained, the pattern of evidence—”

  “Right, right. The NYPD are surveilling all over the—hold on.” She turned her attention to the scanner. “Respond to Duane and Elk 10-75 P.” At first, Selene assumed the additional units were being summoned to an unrelated patrol. Then she recognized the address and swore softly.

  “What is it?” asked Theo.

  “They’re watching the old eighteenth-century African slave burial ground downtown.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” Theo sounded distraught. “There must be others like that—graveyards covered up for centuries without visible tombstones.”

  “Dozens. They’re under our feet, under the subway, under all the buildings.”

  “Shit. You’re right. But how many people know enough New York City history to find them?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past this hierophant.” Many of the city’s immortals had called the city home since at least the nineteenth century. They’d remember graveyards long past. “They could be anywhere.” She felt suddenly overwhelmed. Even with her preternatural speed, she’d never be able to search every part of the city. Another woman will die, and I’ll be no closer to helping my mother.

  “Let’s look at this piece by piece,” Theo said, his voice steady. “It can’t actually be any defunct cemetery. It has to be one that’s somehow still accessible. Maybe one that’s connected to the subway or some other underground access so they could get close to the graves.”

  “New York City has over four hundred subway stations,” she snapped. “And those are just the ones currently in use. You’ve got to give me something more, Theo. Tell me again—which cemetery did they use in Athens?”

  “Kerameikos. It stood right outside the main entrance through the city walls—the Dipylon Gate.”

  Selene remembered it now. Many a time, the Huntress had watched in dismay as the mortal masses passed through the gate’s two soaring portals, leaving the wilderness behind for the pleasures of civilization. If Manhattan had a Dipylon Gate…

  “Grand Central.” Sixty-seven tracks carried seven hundred fifty thousand people a day into and out of the city through the train station. “I remember there’s an old burial ground—a potter’s field for the poor—somewhere near Grand Central, but I don’t know exactly where.”

  “The entrance to the city. Brilliant, Selene,” Theo crowed. “Let me check on my phone…”

  She’d attended a burial at the potter’s field in 1849, but the city had looked completely different. She had no idea exactly where the field would lie on today’s grid of city streets. The burial bore no relationship to Hamilton’s stately Trinity Church funeral; it had been for a servant girl, Taryn O’Clare, one of her few friends over the centuries. Usually, the Huntress abandoned her companions before they could abandon her, but Taryn had died young, taken by the cholera epidemic. The Huntress had stood in the rain at the funeral, whispering her own rites as the Catholic priest chanted his. She could still see the white linen shroud sliding into a ditch of unwanted dead. She might have bought Taryn O’Clare a better resting place, but it wasn’t in the Punisher’s makeup to care about what happened to mortals after they died. Before her own fading had accelerated, death wasn’t something she spent a lot of time thinking about.

  “Are you thinking about the pauper’s graveyard at Forty-ninth and Park?” Theo asked. “Wikipedia says the Astors bought up the land in the late 1800s and put the Grand Central train tunnels through it and the Waldorf-Astoria hotel on top.”

  “That’s the one. It’s perfect.”

  “But it doesn’t have any underground access,” Theo protested.

  “Yes it does.” Selene had personal experience with the tunnels beneath the hotel.

  “Then I’m on my way,” said Theo.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she snapped, hanging up on him. The last thing she needed was a clumsy mortal getting in the way of a confrontation between gods. He would only get himself—or her—hurt.

  Selene had only been in the Waldorf-Astoria once, in 1944. She remembered the year clearly because it had been one of Franklin Roosevelt’s visits to New York during World War II. Like the other Olympians, she’d stayed far away from the conflict. It was the first time mortals had truly acted like gods, ravaging earth and sea, massacring men and women by the millions, harnessing the power of flight and farseeing. The gods had stood in the shadows, realizing once again that they’d been permanently replaced. Not by the Church, this time—but by the Machine.

  One of Roosevelt’s bodyguards had gotten a little overzealous with a young woman he’d picked up at the Waldorf’s bar. The girl left the hotel bruised and weeping, nearly bumping into a tall, black-haired woman in a pencil skirt and sensible shoes.

  Now that same woman sprinted up Park Avenue to the Waldorf. The freight elevator was still there on the Forty-ninth Street side of the building, right beside the entrance to the hotel’s underground parking garage. She ran her hands along the seam between the doors. Welded shut. Probably forgotten for decades. But Selene remembered where the elevator led. Deep beneath the hotel, a little-known private “presidential” railroad siding known as Track 61 had once served VIPs. Trains could pass through Grand Central terminal without stopping and discharge their passengers under the Waldorf so they wouldn’t have to contend with the unwashed masses. For Roosevelt, the secret siding provided a way of leaving the city without the public witnessing his crippled body being lifted onto the train. The platform sat directly on top of the old potter’s field.

  That day in 1944, Selene had followed the president’s bodyguard down the freight elevator, but lost him in the mass of Secret Service men readying to depart on the underground train. Even the Far Shooter wouldn’t take on so large a crowd. The abusive bodyguard escaped her bow that day. When she saw the same man three years later, smoking a cigarette on a lonely street corner in the West Village, he wasn’t so lucky.

  The elevator might be defunct, but when Selene pushed on the adjacent fire-exit door, it swung open easily, as if someone had already picked the lock.

  Cursing, she assembled her bow on the run and dashed down the narrow staircase to a dark, abandoned platform. She could feel, rather than hear, trains passing in the distance. The blur of far-off headlights provided just enough illumination for her night vision to function. Arrow nocked, she came to a halt, spinning this way and that, sniffing the air. No scent of man. Only stale air mingled with oil and grease. Then, suddenly, a faint whiff of blood from an old train car. Midnight blue. Just like all the Roosevelt-era Presidential coaches. Had one really been sitting on this siding for the past seventy years? She padded up to it. The smell of blood grew stronger, but she heard no movement inside the car. Bow in one hand, she hauled on the door with the other. It slid open with a rusty squeal.

  She stepped inside. No light of any kind penetrated the boarded-up windows. Even with her newly keen vision, she couldn’t see in such darkness. She stepped forward cautiously into the silent black. Her foot slipped, pitching her forward onto her hands and knees into slick wetness and knocking her bow from her hand.

  Styx, she cursed silently, belatedly fumbling for the flashlight in her pack. She flicked it on. She was kneeling in a wide pool of blood. Not a woman’s blood, by the smell of it, not even a human’s. Probably more pigs or boars, she reasoned. She bent close to examine the puddle. In a violent attack, blood would splatter and smear the surroundings as it projected from the wound, even if the victim didn’t thrash or move. But the droplets around the pool formed near-perfect circles with barely
a spatter, meaning they’d fallen from a distance of no more than eight inches, as if someone had opened an animal’s vein—or from the size of the pool, its throat—and let the blood pour onto the floor.

  The animal sacrifice would only be the beginning. The men may not have captured another human victim yet, but Selene was willing to bet they were about to.

  She sniffed again at the blood. Still fresh. They couldn’t have gotten far. Rising to her feet, she’d gathered her weapon and prepared to leave when two spots of glowing yellow a few feet away caught her eye. Instinctively, she raised her bow with one hand as she swung her flashlight toward the yellow glow with the other.

  In the cold circle of light, a dog’s face stared up at her. For a second, she thought it was Hippo. It had the same square skull and floppy ears. She took a deep breath to calm herself—Hippo was safe at home. The large mutt lying before her clearly had no owner. Patches of mange covered its wide back; its tail was flea-bitten. And despite its shining eyes, Selene knew the dog was dead. The dog’s mouth was closed and its head lolled to one side as if it died peacefully, but the wide gash in its throat told a different story. She knelt and sniffed at its mouth. Anesthesia. They’d drugged the dog before they murdered it. She wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved that it had died without suffering or infuriated that the hierophant had used modern medicine to simulate a willing sacrifice.

  She stepped back, widening the circle of light across the train’s floorboards, and fury overwhelmed all other emotions. A dozen dead dogs lay in front of open cages, making a rough semicircle around the perimeter of the train car. Their unseeing, unblinking eyes shone red and yellow and green in the dark. Most were smaller than the large mutt. Easier to carry, no doubt. The smallest was a puppy, only a few days old. When she lifted it from the pool of its own blood, it fit into the palm of her hand, its chin wobbling on the tip of her finger.

  Theo had said tonight’s Pompe began with sacrifices to Demeter and Persephone. But the Goddess of Grain and the Goddess of Spring would shun such an offering. This massacre of dogs could only be meant for the Lady of Hounds.

  “Are you trying to worship me or punish me?” she begged in a rough whisper.

  Selene put down the puppy and shone the flashlight on her own trembling hand. She clenched her fingers, pressing her nails into her palm, hoping the sudden pain would banish her fear. She could almost hear the voices of Sammi Mehra and Helen Emerson: He’s killed all you’re sworn to protect. Now he’s coming for you. Beware, Huntress, lest you, too, become prey.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Selene said aloud as her rage burst into flame. “He’s the one who should be afraid.”

  “Stop here!”

  Theo tossed some bills at the cabbie and dashed out of the car. “Did you see a super-tall woman in a baseball cap come by?” he demanded of the hotel doorman.

  But before he could get an answer, Selene burst around the corner, nearly running into him.

  “I thought I told you not to come!” she said furiously. She was even paler than usual.

  “This is dangerous, Selene. I’m not letting you do this alone.”

  “I can take care of myself!” As she pushed her hair out of her eyes, she left a greasy red smear across her forehead.

  “Then what’s this?” He grabbed her hands, turning the bloody palms upward.

  “It’s not mine.” Her hands trembled, and he instinctively grasped them a little tighter.

  “Another woman dead?”

  She shook her head. “Just animal sacrifices.” As she described the scene, her voice quavered. Finally, she pulled her hands away from Theo. He merely moved to grasp her shoulders instead.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said, fighting the urge to pull her into his embrace.

  She stiffened in his grip. “Do you think I need to be comforted?” she snarled. He dropped his hands. “I’m angry, Schultz. And I’m not going to be ‘all right’ until we find them. They can’t have gotten far. Think. Where would they have gone?” Theo had never seen her so filled with rage and urgency—emotions he’d mistaken for fear. Her silver eyes glowed in the light pouring from the heat lamps beneath the Waldorf’s awning, and her gaze banished his tenderness. He felt honed, sharp and bright and ready for battle.

  “Pompe means procession. So they’re moving. From the cemetery, they would have traveled to Demeter’s temple.”

  “Okay, a temple. A church maybe?”

  “Maybe.” The pieces didn’t fit right—not yet. “Why would a pagan cult associate itself with Christianity? Besides, it’s got to be somewhere public, and churches aren’t open this late.”

  “You said they tell lewd jokes, remember, to ease Demeter’s sorrow? A comedy club then?” she pressed. “A theater? Maybe somewhere televised, so they can reach the biggest audience?”

  “Televised?” Theo looked down at his watch. He felt the blood drain from his cheeks as the puzzle piece finally slipped into place. “It’s midnight. It’s Saturday.”

  “So?” she demanded.

  “Saturday Night Live. It broadcasts from Rockefeller Center. That’s only three blocks away.”

  As swift as arrow flight, Selene took off down the street. Theo took a deep breath, then, like an acolyte with his priestess, followed in her wake.

  Chapter 29

  UNTAMED

  “I need to get into the Saturday Night Live taping,” Selene said again, fighting the urge to seize the Rockefeller Center security guard by the collar and shake him.

  “SNL’s already started airing. No tickets, no entry,” the guard recited, his stern tone undermined somewhat by his chipmunk cheeks and obvious youth.

  Selene glanced across the lobby at the security stanchions blocking the elevators. She’d hoped to get up to the eighth floor without making a scene. That way, in case her suspicions were wrong, she’d be able to continue the night’s hunt without the cops stopping her. But if she had to knock the guard out of the way and bust through the stanchions, she would.

  Just then, Theo tumbled through the lobby’s revolving doors. “Did you find—” he started to ask, but his question quickly devolved into a gasped curse. Selene followed his stunned gaze to the televisions on the far wall.

  A young black woman in a sequined gown and a Michelle Obama wig stood on the set of Saturday Night Live, her face contorted with terror. Sooty tears streamed down her cheeks as her mascara washed away.

  “That’s Jenny Thomason,” stammered the security guard. “Newest member of the cast… She’s just a kid.”

  A short man in a hooded yellow cloak stood with a knife held to her throat. A wooden mask covered his face—the grotesquely carven rictus of Comedy. The camera zoomed out, revealing three other men in identical masks and cloaks. One leveled a short knife at a group of cowering actors in the corner of the set. Another played a small hand drum. A third pointed his weapon offscreen, as if warding off interruption of their ritual.

  And in the center of the set, holding aloft a green glass flask filled with dark liquid, stood a taller man in a purple cloak. He wore the mask of a warrior hero—an exaggerated visage with a curling wooden beard and fiercely drawn eyebrows.

  “The hierophant,” Theo whispered. Selene nodded dumbly.

  Rage boiled within her. Ancient. Untamed.

  In the lobby, alarm bells screamed to life, then a voice boomed over a loudspeaker, “This is an emergency. Please follow lockdown procedures and shelter in place. Await further instructions from police officers or Rockefeller Center Security.” As the message repeated, the young guard’s walkie-talkie squawked urgently, calling for all available security personnel to proceed immediately to the eighth floor. In a single fluid leap, Selene jumped over the entrance stanchion and sprinted to the nearest elevator bank. She slipped inside, jabbing repeatedly at the Door Close button even as the guard, three of his fellow security officers, and Theo wedged themselves in beside her.

  “You can’t be in here,” the young guard insisted
as the doors shut. “And you—” He pointed at Theo. “Aren’t you the guy—” The doors opened on the eighth floor, and animalistic screams drowned the guard’s protests as a mass of terrified audience members swarmed the elevator.

  Head lowered, Selene slammed her way through the crowd, heedless of the frustrated cries of the guards as they tried to keep order. She didn’t know if Theo’d be able to follow her, and she didn’t care.

  She reached the main entrance to the studio just as the large double doors slammed shut in her face. She heard a chain clatter through the handles on the other side. She pounded on the doors, but they held tight.

  “A hillbilly takes his twelve-year-old daughter to the gynecologist for her first exam.” Selene’s head shot up, looking for the source of the rasping voice. Speakers on the wall, she realized, broadcasting the show from inside the studio. The Pompe’s lewd jokes had finally begun.

  “The gynecologist asks, ‘Is your daughter sexually active?’ The man thinks for a moment and replies, ‘Naw, she mostly just lays there like her mother.’” A drum punctuated each word. Not the snare drum accompaniment to a comedian’s punch line, but a slow, steady beat, like the tolling of a funeral bell.

  With a cry of outrage, Selene flung her shoulder against the doors. They swung open a crack before slamming back, held in place by the chain. But in the instant they opened, she saw that Jenny Thomason was still alive, clutched in the initiate’s grasp.

  The hierophant’s voice went on, calm and confident. “What’s the definition of the perfect virgin?” He waited a beat, as if for comedic effect. “She’s three feet tall, toothless, and there’s a flat spot on the top of her head where you can set your beer.” Selene kicked at the door, revealing a glimpse of the mystes pressing the knife closer to Jenny’s throat as the hierophant screamed, “Don’t turn off the cameras or we’ll kill her!” Then, his composure restored, he continued with his jokes.

  “What’s the worst part about having sex with a six-year-old?”