In retrospect, the oath had probably been a terrible idea. He’d barely survived his last run-in with a cult—technically, he hadn’t survived. After his classicist comrades had made him their final sacrifice, it had taken a supernatural resurrection by Artemis and her brother Apollo to get him back on his feet.
He tried to focus on what Freeman was saying. “You should come down to the scene right away before they clear all the evidence away,” she insisted. “You might see something we’ve missed.”
Selene grabbed his arm as he ended the call. “It’s happened, hasn’t it? Another dead virgin.”
“No. An old homeless man killed down near Wall Street.”
Selene visibly relaxed. “Then why call us?”
“Freeman said the body’s surrounded by a variety of ritualistic symbols. Not the same thing as last time … but definitely cultic.”
Selene stood up from the kitchen table, her fury instantly reignited.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he said quickly. “This could just be some copycats intrigued by the press coverage from last time. Not some grand plot by an Athanatos.” But his optimism sounded forced even to his own ears.
“Let’s get down there and find out,” she said, already moving toward the hallway.
This would be no romp through the park, bringing justice to the foolish mortals who dared ignite the Huntress’s fury. Theo grabbed his parka from the back of a chair.
If Selene’s suspicions are correct, he knew, this will be a battle between gods. One fought over the right to immortality itself. He couldn’t repress a choked laugh. And I thought bears were scary.
Chapter 5
ANGEL OF DEATH
At four in the morning, Trinity Church stood like a ghostly apparition from another time, a tiny eighteenth-century island amid the soaring skyscrapers that crowded Wall Street. As Selene and Theo made their way from the Rector Street subway station, the church stood just before them, its tall, snow-capped spire illuminated by floodlights. A small cemetery kept the rest of the Financial District at bay. Through the wrought iron fence, Selene could see the gravestones, made from the same mica schist that formed the island’s famous bedrock and allowed its skyscrapers to soar to such vertiginous heights. Two hundred years of wind, rain, and pollution had worn even the hardest stone to sharp flakes and erased the identities of the dead. She felt a shudder of foreboding at the thought, knowing that her own name remained barely legible on the collective memory of mankind, ready to be washed away completely by the next hard storm.
They turned down Broadway. To the south, the great boulevard that traversed Manhattan finally ended with a glimpse of the sky above New York Harbor, a flat, steely gray from the light pollution bouncing off the clouds. Despite the towering buildings, the colonial outlines still constrained the city: Broadway itself narrowed to a mere two lanes, and the side streets wriggled between the skyscrapers like cowpaths. Later in the day, buses, tourists, and investment bankers would throng the street. But in the predawn hush, only a few bleary-eyed stockbrokers walked by. The buildings around them stood mostly dark, although even now, with the New York Stock Exchange closed for the night, some windows remained bright; after all, in today’s interconnected world, the sun never set on the global markets. If Tokyo traded, so did New York.
Selene glanced at Theo. He looked like a hyperventilating athlete, his breath coming in great white puffs. “Stop looking so guilty,” she chided him.
“I can’t help it. Every time I talk to Detective Freeman and Captain Hansen, I feel like they know exactly what happened that night.”
“That we killed Orion? A man they think is no more than a constellation? Then burned his body in Central Park to hide the evidence? Unlikely.” Still, Theo was right. The story they’d told the detectives was riddled with holes. The cops believed Professor Everett Halloran was still on the loose after fleeing the grisly sacrifice of three women and the murder of his four classicist acolytes. Theo had testified truthfully that the cult’s rites honored Orion the Hunter, but the complete story—that Everett was Orion—would never occur to the hardboiled cops of the NYPD. Sometimes, Selene was grateful mortals didn’t believe in gods anymore. It made them much easier to dupe.
But at the moment, she didn’t care about their last run-in with the police. She was more concerned with this one. If the latest murder was the work of mortals copying the Classicist Cult for their own sick purposes, then she’d welcome police assistance in solving the crime. But if, as she feared, an immortal had started a cult in his own honor to restore his strength as Orion had, she didn’t want the cops involved in a battle between Olympians.
“Did Freeman say exactly what she wanted from us?” she asked Theo as they approached the police barricade.
“She said she wanted my expertise.”
“Your expertise?”
“Would you like to tell her you’re an eyewitness to everything I’ve only read in books?”
Selene just scowled. The thrill she’d felt at bringing Lars to justice now felt hollow and petty. A real fight lay before her—one she wasn’t sure she could win. If one of her kin had revived Orion’s cult, she’d need all her cunning to defeat him—a real challenge for a goddess more accustomed to rage than calculation. The responsibility weighed heavily. The towering buildings around her only seemed to add to her sudden sense of oppressive dread.
“As if a killer cult on the loose wasn’t bad enough,” she grumbled, “you know how I feel about Wall Street.”
“Probably about how everyone else in America does.”
“Worse.” She remembered the street from when she’d first come to New Amsterdam as Phoebe Hautman in the 1600s, when its name referred to the wall meant to separate the tiny Dutch settlement from the wilderness of Mana-hatta. She’d spent most of her time north of that wall, living with the Indians or alone in the forests. Every time she visited the town, it had grown a little bigger. The British replaced the Dutch. Ponds and streams disappeared beneath cobblestones. Ships crowded the harbor, a forest of masts dwarfing the island’s ever-dwindling supply of trees. Eventually, the settlement overflowed its walls, razed the hills, and claimed part of the harbor itself, filling it with dirt to expand the island’s outline. By the 1920s, the biggest, richest companies in the world had built the ornate skyscrapers that still lined the street before her. The area became a temple to greed and wealth: two forces now worshiped with far more passion than she’d ever inspired, even at the height of her power.
The police barricade stood at the intersection of Exchange Place and Broadway. Before them, swirling lights illuminated the street in flashing blue and red: a sick parody of twinkling Christmas cheer. The crime scene seemed to stretch on forever.
At the chirping siren of an ambulance, Selene and Theo ducked out of the way. A policeman moved the barricade aside, and the ambulance sped off down the street.
“They don’t move that fast to collect a dead body, do they?” Theo asked.
“No. Someone’s hurt down there.” Selene shivered, her sense of unease growing.
Captain Geraldine Hansen of the Counterterrorism Division, who’d worked with them on the investigation into the last cult, met Selene and Theo at the police barricade and waved them through. She wore a heavy, shapeless wool coat but no hat. Her short gray hair tossed in the wind, and her nose glowed red with cold. She looked older than when Selene had seen her last, the circles under her eyes a little more pronounced. Her breath smelled of cigarettes, and Selene wondered if the stress of the last case had driven the captain back to the habit.
“Detective Freeman told me she called you, Professor,” Hansen said, shaking Theo’s hand. She offered Selene a curt nod. “I hoped he’d bring you along.”
Selene got chills every time the woman looked at her with such familiarity. During the last investigation, Selene had claimed to be the daughter of Police Officer Cynthia Forrester, Hansen’s old comrade from the 1970s. Supposedly, Cynthia had died after leaving the NY
PD in disgrace. Selene couldn’t very well admit that she was Cynthia, barely aged in the forty years since she’d mentored rookie cop Gerry Hansen.
Detective Maggie Freeman joined them, a young, cherubic-faced black woman in a puffy parka and sensible fleece hat. She’d been the junior detective on the last case and had since earned a promotion to Counterterrorism, working as Hansen’s aide.
“What’s up with the ambulance?” Theo asked.
Freeman blew out a frustrated breath. “Really bad timing. Just after we arrive, a guy crawls out on a ledge on the building next to the crime scene and threatens to jump. Turns out he’d just made some really bad trade on the Tokyo exchange—lost millions in seconds. Then he looks out the window, sees the dead body beneath him, and decides that’s the way to go.”
Theo craned his head to see over Freeman’s shoulder. “Shitballs. Did he make it?”
“We talked him down,” she answered. “But it still feels a little like the Angel of Death passed over Wall Street tonight.”
“Don’t get overdramatic, Detective.” The captain frowned at her young aide. “It isn’t the first time men have tried to kill themselves over money, and it won’t be the last.”
Theo looked taken aback by her callousness, but Selene knew Geraldine was right. When the Depression had struck, she’d seen men jump from the windows of these same buildings, plummeting just as fast as the nation’s fortunes. She’d never forgiven them for wreaking such destruction on her city, and had been both infuriated and unsurprised when it happened again a few years back. Now, less than a decade after the recession, Wall Street was at it again, playing with other people’s money without regard for other people’s lives. Before long, Selene knew, they’d bring the whole system crashing down again. Some things never changed.
“Obviously the suicide attempt and the murder aren’t directly related,” the captain went on. “But the crime scene made our jumper uneasy for a reason. Come take a look.” She led the way past a veritable fleet of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances. In the center of a circle of floodlights stood the massive bronze statue that symbolized Wall Street itself. Normally, the Charging Bull served as a photo-op for tourists and a goad for underperforming investment bankers. Tonight it was an altar.
A corpse lay facedown on the bull’s back, its arms and legs draped over the statue’s sides: an old man, by his long gray hair and the bulging veins on his hands. He wore a floppy black knit hat, a ragged army jacket, and dirty parachute pants last popular in the late eighties. A homeless man, probably, maybe even a veteran, a lost soul forgotten by the country he’d served. Selene had no special feelings for such victims—innocent women were her realm, not old men. But this was her city, and she was its Protector. If a new cult was killing mortals in her home, she was going to stop it.
“Tell me who the victim was.”
Freeman raised an eyebrow at Selene’s imperious tone but answered all the same. “No ID yet. Medical examiner’s on his way. Until then, no one moves the body, so we haven’t even seen his face.” She had a quiet voice that some might mistake for meekness but that Selene suspected was mainly a strategy to make her seem less threatening in a profession dominated by white males. She understood the impulse, but preferred Hansen’s unapologetic bossiness.
Freeman went on, describing the victim with calm detachment. “From the look of his hands, he seems to be in his seventies. A vagrant, probably. No visible wound, so it must be on the anterior torso.” Selene could see the rusty rivulets of dried blood striping the bull’s sides. Wherever the wound was, it was big.
“Victim likely died of exsanguination,” the cop continued. “There’re probably four quarts of blood on the ground around the statue.”
“Sounds like a blood libation,” Theo said. “And it looks like they threw in some burnt offerings for good measure.” He gestured to the circle of charred brush around the bull, still wet and smoldering from the fire hoses. “Definitely ritualistic, and the choice of the bull as the central emblem points to Greek or Cretan influence.”
The captain grunted. “That’s what we’re afraid of. But we’re going to need more specifics.”
“Different gods require different forms of sacrifice.” Theo slipped into his lecturing mode. His voice rose; he gestured animatedly. “Celestial gods receive offerings from the fire’s rising smoke.” He raised his hands in waves above his head. “Chthonic ones, those associated with the Underworld, receive them through libations poured into the ground.” He pointed downward. “Not many gods would require both types like this, so that might help us pinpoint the worshiped deity. If we find out what sort of cult they’re reviving, we might understand who these guys are or what their next move might be.”
Gods of the Earth, not just the Underworld, also receive libations, Selene amended silently. Since fleeing Olympus, all Athanatoi consider themselves both celestial and earthbound. So the method of sacrifice doesn’t narrow it down at all.
“Whoever they’re worshiping,” interjected Hansen, “they’re pulling out all the old pagan cult tricks.” She pointed to a dead snake lying on the ground.
Theo groaned. “Not again.” Snakes had featured prominently in the Classicist Cult’s ritual.
Freeman motioned them to follow her around the statue’s base. “There’s more.” She pointed to a black bird, a slit in its throat gaping crimson, blood caking the feathers of its breast. Then a large black dog, its chest opened to display a glistening red and white tangle of innards. Selene felt her skin prickle. She found the similarities between Orion’s cult and this one deeply disconcerting. He had sacrificed a number of dogs as part of his ritual, all in homage to Artemis, Lady of Hounds.
Hansen’s steely gaze moved from the dog to Selene to Theo. “Looks like Everett Halloran is back. And we need to stop him before he strikes again.” Her voice was only a hair less commanding than Selene’s.
The captain was wrong, of course, but Selene couldn’t tell Hansen that. Then again, she didn’t want the cops wasting time chasing a phantom culprit. Leading them in the right direction without telling them the whole truth will take a fair amount of conversational finesse, Selene realized. Which is why I intend to let Theo do it.
He seemed to have the same idea, jumping in with, “Halloran thought his Mystery Cult gave him power—power that came from reenacting the ancient rituals as accurately as possible. So, if he is back, we should think about December ceremonies. In the Greek calendar, that means mainly Dionysian festivals.”
The captain grimaced. “Great. Dionysus is the God of Wine, right? Does that mean a bunch of drunken murderers roaming the streets?”
“That and sex-crazed maenads.”
“There’d be ivy,” Selene declared. “That’s the main symbol of Dionysus, more than even the grape vine. Did you find any?”
“No plants this time,” Freeman interjected quietly. “Except for the wood and brush for the fire.”
“Honestly, nothing so far screams out any particular ritual to me,” Theo said, rubbing the dimple on his chin. “But I’m not a walking encyclopedia.” Freeman gave him a slanted smile that said she might disagree, but Theo just pointed to the statue of the bull, seemingly oblivious to everything except the mystery at hand. “That’s clearly the main symbolic element. Might point to Zeus, the Sky God. He was known to disguise himself as a bull and have his way with unsuspecting maidens.”
Freeman made a face. “He’d be brought up on charges for that.”
“It was a different age,” Selene said sharply. But yeah, you’re right. If she hadn’t loved her father quite so much, and if he hadn’t been the King of the Gods, she would’ve put an arrow through him for more than one of his exploits. But she didn’t really believe Zeus was behind this new cult—he’d been holed up in a cave in Crete for years, going slowly insane. “The bull’s not just the Sky God’s symbol,” she corrected Theo. “It was a common sacrificial animal for all the Olympians.”
Hansen and Freeman looked at
the professor for confirmation, much to Selene’s irritation.
“Selene’s right,” he nodded sagely.
That condescension better just be for show, she thought. As he continued to pontificate on the iconography of various Greek gods, she gave up trying to explain her own family to a bunch of thanatoi and paced the perimeter of the crime scene instead.
She squatted down to examine the dead bird. Black feathers and legs. Thick, straight beak. A crow.
Next, she moved to the dead snake. Its head lay at an odd angle—it had died from a broken neck, not a knife wound. She couldn’t be sure about its species—she was no herpetologist, and snakes had always lain outside her realm—but its diamond-shaped head proved it a viper. Definitely not native to New York.
Finally, she moved to the dead dog, her anger mounting. Bad enough to pollute our sacred rites with human sacrifice, but to target the animal I’m sworn to protect? She wondered if the men behind this new cult—and she hoped they were men, not Athanatoi—knew they were enraging a very dangerous goddess with very good aim.
The dog was massive—probably a hundred pounds, with thick limbs, short black hair, and a jowly face. It would’ve taken a very strong man or a very foolhardy one to hold the animal down and kill him without getting a hand bitten off. Or maybe the killer did get mauled … it’d serve him right, Selene thought. The dog’s guts lay revealed. The winding beige path of his intestines, the vaguely obscene knob of his heart, the wet red wings of lung. It took her a moment to realize what was missing. The liver. She eventually found the dark brown lobes a few paces away.
All the sacrifices lay just outside the ring of charred branches and scrub. Most of the wood looked to be the kind easily available from any local park—oak branches, pine boughs, the occasional linden twig. But on the east side of the circle, she noticed a burnt bundle of reeds still bound together with a plastic band. She found a similar object on the west side.
Winter of the Gods Page 5