The Immortals

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  “Dennis sounded pretty convinced. He also claimed that at some point, the Mystery evolved to a more sanitized version, replacing human sacrifice with Dionysian worship and kykeon—which he thinks he figured out how to brew. That’s what you were drinking up there. If the hierophant also knows the recipe, that may explain how he’s controlling his mystai so effectively.”

  Theo whistled appreciatively. “Who knew a drunk stoner like Dennis could be so useful? Ruth was right to remind me about him.”

  “Ruth?”

  “Helen’s roommate. I saw her at the memorial service this morning.”

  “How was that?”

  “Devastating.” He chewed his lip as if to stop himself from saying more.

  An unfamiliar discomfort nibbled at her, somewhere deep in her chest. He caught her staring.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said, as if he’d read her mind. “Helen and me. I’m not pining for a lost love, just a lost friend. I want to find out who’s doing this.”

  “Theo…” She didn’t know how to tell him that she knew exactly who the hierophant was.

  “If you’re about to tell me to get lost, don’t,” he said, his smile belying his stern tone. “And don’t run away again. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.” He threaded his fingers through hers. Selene looked up into his eyes, bright and green and incredibly warm, and she knew exactly whom Apollo would choose as his Corn King.

  Chapter 38

  LADY OF THE STARRY HOST

  Selene ripped her hand from Theo’s just as the subway squealed to a halt. Before he could protest, she ran out of the car, through the station, and up into Grand Central Terminal. She could hear Theo following her into the soaring main hall of the station. The clamor suddenly subsided as the chamber’s echoing marble expanse muffled and distorted thousands of voices at once. The sound reminded her of her godhood, when the prayers of the faithful came to her in a layered, muted cloud, one barely able to be sorted from the other.

  The air in the hall was different, too, whooshing up from the underground train platforms and subway tunnels and coursing against the painted ceiling far overhead before swirling down once more to brush past her cheek as gently as a kiss. As gently as his kiss.

  She stopped. Orion took me in his arms and pressed his rough, wind-burnt lips to mine. I ran my hands through his black curls. I loved him. Grief was my reward. Apollo took him away. Now, once again, I’ve walked into the trap my twin has set. Again, he uses my feelings against me. He says he wants to protect me, but in truth he cannot bear to see me happy.

  “Selene, what’s wrong?” she could see Theo mouthing, but the rushing of blood in her ears drowned out his words.

  She looked up.

  A painting of the heavens arced across Grand Central’s vaulted ceiling. Gilded stars ornamented with line drawings of the constellations hung against a sky blue background. Aquarius, pouring starry water above the ticket counters. Pegasus, breaching through a cloud. Gemini, side by side. And there, so far overhead that she needed to crane her head to see him—Orion. The stars were still there, right where she’d put them. One for each shoulder. One for each leg. A gilt row of three stars for his belt and a star for his sword.

  She could still hear Apollo’s footsteps as he ran through her sacred grove, bringing her the news that would change her life forever.

  “Moonshine, Moonshine! Did you hear of Merope? A man took her by force beneath the poplars.”

  I seize my bow and my golden arrows, my cheeks hot with wrath. “Who would dare touch my sacred companion?”

  “Orion. The man you call friend.”

  I, most graceful of goddesses, stumble with shock, my bow flying from my grasp, my knees slamming against the hard ground. My twin picks up my weapon and places it once more within my grasp. He holds out his hand to lift me up, but I brush him aside. “Orion wouldn’t betray me! He left here only a day ago with promises of fidelity.” I sound like a child, a lovelorn maiden, but I cannot bear the news. I have not yet given Orion my body, but I have given him my soul. When he left the grove, he pressed his lips against mine. A secret promise. He vowed that when he returned to me, he would bear a surprise. The only other man I’ve allowed so close to my heart is the one standing before me—Apollo, Leader of the Muses, Healer of the Sick, the Bright One.

  “You know how these half mortals are. They cannot be trusted,” my brother says.

  “You speak the truth?”

  Apollo narrows his golden eyes. “From the womb, I have cared only for you. I would not lie.”

  We stalk through the forest, over hill and across streams, seeking our prey. I find it easy to hate, easy to believe my Hunter is false. I have so little practice with loving.

  Three times, Apollo drives the sun across the sky. Three times, I guide the moon from one horizon to the next. And then we find him. Lying on the shore of the limitless sea, where his father Poseidon rules the deep. I look upon his broad shoulders, the familiar easy grace of his pose, his head pillowed on his crossed arms, his long legs stretched out before him.

  I nock a golden arrow to my bow, the shaft in my fingers as light as it is deadly. I hesitate for one moment only. Just long enough to remember the taste of his lips. Then I let the arrow fly.

  At the thrum of my bowstring, my Hunter sits up and turns away from the sea. His eyes meet mine, wide with shock and disbelief. For an instant, I doubt his guilt.

  The arrow pierces his heart.

  Theo was shaking her shoulders, calling her name.

  “Catasterismi,” she breathed, as if that were an answer to his panicked pleas. Her eyes did not leave Orion’s gilded form on the ceiling above.

  “Catasterismi?” he repeated. “What? Selene?” He gripped her arm, hard. “Look at me!”

  She blinked once and dragged her eyes away from Orion and back to Theo.

  Face pale, Theo took a step back as if he’d been struck. Selene wondered vaguely what she’d done to make him so afraid. Then she realized she was crying.

  “Oh my God. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you. Really, don’t—”

  “It’s not your fault, Theo.”

  Suddenly, she didn’t want to lie anymore.

  “It’s his.” She pointed to the ceiling, but did not look. Theo craned his neck back.

  “Him? Orion?”

  “Catasterismi. It means ‘the placings of the gods among the stars.’”

  “I know what it means, I just don’t understand why it’s so important. Is it a clue? What did you figure out?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Only what I should’ve realized before. That the hierophant will come for you next.”

  “Why? I’m no virgin maiden, I hate to break it to you.”

  Selene didn’t smile. “Because everyone I care for is destroyed. And that… that means you.” She pressed onward as she saw his eyes widen. “And that’s not a good thing,” she insisted before he could speak. “It’s a terrible thing. You have to stay away from me. Get on a train and leave the city. Go far away where he can’t reach you.”

  Theo smiled, gently at first, trying to look comforting, but soon he was beaming. His eyes were very green in the slanting sunbeams pouring through the windows high above. “You care about me, huh?” he said softly, as if he hadn’t heard any of the rest of her little speech.

  “And that’s a bad thing,” she repeated.

  He nodded, still grinning. “Terrible.”

  “Yes, terrible.”

  “Sure. Mmm-hmm.” He moved toward her, his smile aglow. One more step, she realized, and he’ll kiss me.

  She stepped back, one hand raised in warning. “No, Theo. You don’t understand.” She could feel Orion’s eyes on her still. Her tears sprang afresh.

  “What’s wrong?” Theo asked, suddenly all concern.

  “I’ve been trying to tell you,” she snapped.

  Then she turned on her heel and fled.

  For once, Theo didn’t go after her. He stood amon
g the swirling crowd, watching her go, shocked more by his own reaction than by hers. He’d expected her to run away—he just hadn’t expected it to hurt so much.

  The adrenaline of his escape from Dennis’s apartment dribbled away, leaving him hollow, exhausted, and still slightly drunk. Maybe if my head were clearer, I’d understand what Selene was trying to tell me, he thought. I feel like all this time I’ve been unable to hear a conversation she’s trying to have with me. And now, when I’m finally listening, she no longer wants to speak.

  Slowly, he wended his way toward the exit, determined to head toward the Broadway theater district. With or without Selene, he wouldn’t give up the hunt for the hierophant. She said I’m in danger, but what else is new? He’d been in danger ever since she’d walked up to him in Riverside Park and pulled him into her world. Only now losing his life to a murderous cult didn’t seem so important—not when he’d already lost his heart to Selene DiSilva.

  Just before he could exit the terminal, a woman’s voice called his name. Chest tight with anticipation, he swung toward the sound, sure Selene had come back for him. But the young woman before him was short, black, and holding a gun leveled at his chest.

  Chapter 39

  THE DELIAN TWINS

  This is what I’m good at, Selene thought, dodging the crowds on the sidewalk, keeping her eyes on the bright lights of Broadway up ahead. Hunting, punishing. Not loving. Never loving. She banished the image of the pain and disbelief in Theo’s eyes and slammed a door closed over her heart. She didn’t have a choice. The only way to save him was to abandon him. Then, with or without a divine weapon, she needed to face Apollo.

  It came as no surprise when her cell phone registered that she’d missed a call while underground in Grand Central: Her twin had always known when she was thinking of him.

  “Come quickly,” Paul said in the message, his voice thick. “She’s holding on for you, but it won’t be much longer now.”

  It was obviously a trap. But if it meant the chance to confront her twin tonight, then it was a trap she would gladly enter.

  Paul Solson lay on the narrow hospital bed with his mother cradled against his chest. Leto’s breathing, quick and shallow, barely stirred the thin blanket swaddling her narrow frame. She still wore the purple veil Selene had brought her, but the lotus flower lay shriveled and brown on her lap. No tubes snaked from her arms; only a single wire emerged from beneath the blanket, connected to a monitor on which a silent green line jerked erratically with every Titan heartbeat. Trap or not, Paul had spoken true. Their mother was dying.

  “You came,” he whispered as Selene entered. “I didn’t think you would.”

  She hesitated at the doorway, unsure what he meant. He didn’t think she’d come to their mother’s deathbed? He didn’t think she’d come to challenge him? He hadn’t even looked at the javelin in her hand. It was as if he hadn’t seen it.

  “You didn’t save her,” she said, more entreaty than indictment.

  He shook his head, his face crumpling with grief.

  Leto’s eyes fluttered open. When she saw Selene, the merest hint of a smile curled her lips. Slowly, she turned her hand over so it lay palm up on her son’s arm. An invitation.

  “Whatever has been between us,” Paul said softly as Selene hesitated by the door, “whatever harm I’ve done to you, be with me now. For her. For me. I can’t do this alone.”

  Selene’s grip tightened on the javelin as she readied herself to fling his words back in his face. But her mother silenced her angry retort with the faintest of whispers: “Come to me. Let us be a family.” In the words, as quiet as breathing, lay the ineluctable command of a mother to her daughter.

  Deep inside Selene, a thick heaviness, a long-brewing despair, finally broke through in a crack of thunder. Tears sprang like lightning flashes, blinding her, and the sudden storm of misery washed away the hard edges of her anger, leaving her shuddering and hunched beneath its pounding force. She staggered forward, dropped her weapon, and knelt at the bedside. With her face pressed against her mother’s skeletal hip, she listened to her heartbeat grow ever slower.

  “Tell me about Delos,” their mother whispered at last. A final request from a goddess who’d never asked for anything.

  Selene lifted her head and reached for her mother’s hand.

  Her brother took a deep, shaky breath.

  “O far roamed Leto, heavy in travail,” the God of Music began to sing. Selene recognized her twin’s favorite poem: the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. “But none dared receive her—”

  “Not in their words,” Leto interrupted, her voice barely more than a breath. “Yours.”

  Selene raised her head. The desolation she saw in her brother’s face reflected her own. They had always been opposites, she and her twin, but together they had once formed a perfect whole. She knew him better than she knew herself. When he wore a mask in his role as hierophant, she couldn’t trust anything he said. But now, with his face, so like her own, revealed before her, she saw the truth. No matter what he had done, what he had planned, the tears that swelled his eyelids and streaked his cheeks were as genuine as her own. And so, if Leto wanted to hear of an earlier time, before her children had grown to despise each other, then the Delian Twins would give her that gift. But what was their story? Do we even have memories besides those mankind has given us? she wondered. Delos is so faint. So far away. The recollections of a different person in a different age.

  Selene took a deep breath, reaching into the past. “I remember the palm tree beside the Sacred Lake,” she began finally. “When we visited it, you would tell me how you walked across the dusty rocks with me, a newborn infant, on your hip. Wracked with pain, for my brother refused to leave your womb. And I spoke my first words, pointing to the one spot of green in the middle of the island, and told you to seek the trees, for they were our friends.” Leto’s eyes closed, but Selene knew by the smile on her lips that she still heard. “From that time on, every year, we returned to bless the sacred date palm that you’d grasped in your labor, when the Bright One came forth into the world.”

  “You had a temple there, right next to ours.” Paul took up the story. “The Letoön. Always bathed in sun. So much sun. That was my gift to Delos and to you.”

  “We went as priestesses, to listen to the supplicants at your shrine.” As Selene spoke, the old memory returned to her, surprisingly vivid. She could smell the sunbaked stucco on the walls, the sweet smoke of burnt offerings rising from the brazier, the salt tang of the ocean wafting through the colonnade. “A woman, heavy with child, crouched at the foot of your statue. You sat beside her and laid a hand on her shoulder. With a tear-streaked face, she told you she’d lost her first three children to miscarriage and stillbirth and had come to ask the Mother of Twins for a healthy babe. You turned to look at me, and I could see in your eyes that she would never bear a living child. Yet you clasped her head against your breast and stroked her hair, as you’ve done so often for me. And you whispered in her ear—you said, ‘You will be a mother to many, for true motherhood lies in the heart, not the womb.’” Leto nodded imperceptibly as Selene continued. “We saw her again, years later. She’d lost her child, but started a home for orphans. I’d never seen a woman so content, so fulfilled. You did that for her, Mother.”

  “She was only one of many,” said Paul. “Remember, we’d walk through the streets, casting blessings like coins among the crowd.”

  “All those people, crammed into an island only a few miles square,” Selene remembered. “All come because we’d made Delos holy.” At its height, her birthplace had not been that unlike Manhattan, she realized. No wonder she’d always felt at home here.

  “We’d climb to the top of Mount Kynthos, where Father’s temple stood.”

  “The wind rushed from the sea on all sides, whipping our clothes and our hair, so strong it almost lifted us from the mountainside.”

  The twins spoke as if they’d never been separated, thoughts and memorie
s intertwined.

  “As a child, I thought I might learn to fly if I let the whirlwind take me,” said Selene, “but you, Mother, held me down and said even a goddess must learn her limits.” You were right. Even still, I forget that lesson. Even still, I throw myself into danger.

  Paul picked up the memory once more. “The sea cradled our island in its vast blue bowl, with the isles of the Cyclades set into their circle along the horizon. Naxos and Mykonos and Paros, all larger, more fertile, but none so sacred as our island.”

  “Delos, the center of the world.”

  And with that, Leto took one last breath, deeper than the rest, and let it out in a contented sigh. Selene didn’t need to look at the monitor to know that the green line had grown as still and flat as the Sacred Lake on a windless day.

  Delos was never the center of the world for us, Selene realized. She was.

  Somewhere on the floor above, Selene could hear the infants in the nursery wailing. In her death, Leto had found the power she’d long ago lost in life. The new mothers began to moan in response, then to cry with great wracking sobs, although they knew not why. The cries grew in strength until the very walls began to vibrate. Nurses scurried toward the sound, wondering what terror stalked their charges. Not terror, Selene thought. Only lamentation. The Goddess of Motherhood is gone. The mourning reached a crescendo as Selene’s own sobs came ragged and quick. Then the mothers and children subsided into quiet tears and hiccupping sighs, and Selene, too, found she could breathe again.

  Soft rubber footsteps entered the room. A loud click as a nurse turned off the monitor. Selene could feel her taking in the scene: two children clasping their dead mother in their arms. The nurse said nothing, but left them to their grief. Never before had Selene felt such pity in a mortal’s gaze. What would Theo do if he could see her now? She’d told him to leave, but would his compassion draw him to her anyway? She longed for his arms around her, easing her sadness. No, she thought, pulling away from the bed. Theo can’t come to me. As long as Paul lives, it’s too dangerous.