She stepped over the ring of still-smoldering brush and approached the victim sprawled across the bull. She desperately wanted to turn his body over. She needed to see how they’d killed him, but she knew the entire First Precinct would rush to stop her the second she tried. She’d have to leave it to the Medical Examiner’s Office to do the autopsy and content herself with examining the rest of the crime scene instead.
She squatted to peer beneath the bronze belly of the bull. Decades of tittering tourists had rubbed its large dangling testicles to a golden sheen.
“Don’t tell me you’re about to take a selfie with the bull balls.” Theo crouched just beyond the circle of brush. Hansen and Freeman had moved out of hearing range, convening with a cluster of uniformed cops and forensic investigators.
Selene relayed her findings in a low voice. “Someone performed haruspicy on the dog.”
“Yeah, that’s what I told Freeman, what with the entrails pulled out. Which means we’re definitely looking at something Greco-Roman. Did you read anything in the liver?”
“Do I look like a haruspex? I used to send mankind omens; that doesn’t mean I know how to interpret them.”
He gave her a vaguely disappointed look. When he’d discovered Selene’s true identity, Theo had instantly demanded answers to every question classicists had debated for centuries. He’d been more than a little frustrated that Selene’s own memories of her godhood were often as patchy and confused as the remnants of texts in which men had recorded her deeds. She’d tried explaining it to him: Just as Theo couldn’t tell if his childhood memories were merely confabulations inspired by his parents’ stories, she couldn’t trust that her knowledge of the past had not been altered by the poets’ retellings.
“I’m not seeing much of a pattern yet,” Theo admitted, still scanning the crime scene. “There are lots of references that could mean something, but nothing cohesive. The timing makes sense for Saturnalia or Dionysia, but they were both primarily harvest festivals, and there’s no bread here. No wine, no food at all. Did you find anything?”
“The remains of two reed torches buried in the wood.”
“Huh. Could indicate a reference to a god or goddess who lights the way to the Underworld. Persephone, Demeter—maybe even you in your incarnation as Hecate.”
“Another aspect of myself I never enjoyed.” That much, at least, she remembered. She only ever thought of her realm as forests and mountains, not the caverns of death. “What did Hansen say about video footage?”
“Nothing useful. Our perps pulled up a ConEd vehicle to block the site, the kind with a tent on the back to cover manholes. Then, if that weren’t enough, they managed to disable the security cameras on the surrounding buildings.”
“So these guys aren’t amateurs. They may even have someone inside the utility company.” She took a step back, noting the orientation of the three animal sacrifices. The dog lay due north of the bull statue, the crow due east, and the viper due west. Most New Yorkers judged directions by the street grid: North would mean pointing directly uptown. But whoever organized this murder had oriented the sacrifices according to the geographic poles. Selene didn’t need a compass to tell her their accuracy—her status as Goddess of the Moon gave her a flawless sense of direction. But why lay sacrifices at three of the cardinal points and not the fourth? Unless …
She circled back to the southern side. There, just under a large burnt branch, she spotted a black glimmer.
“Tell me if anyone’s watching,” she murmured to Theo.
“Why are we sneaking around?” he hissed. “I thought we were helping the cops this time.”
“Not until we know for sure that there’s not a god behind this.” She pulled a pen from her pocket and used it to move aside the brush and reveal the small black creature.
A scorpion.
Staring over her shoulder, Theo let out a low whistle.
Selene let the branches fall back into place, a prickle of fear creeping across her spine. In some versions of the Artemis and Orion myth, she’d sent a giant scorpion to hunt down her lover as punishment for his misdeeds, later placing the constellation Scorpius in the heavens to chase Orion for eternity. In reality, the first time he’d died, she’d shot him herself after her twin brother Apollo accused him of raping one of her nymphs. But humans—and many Athanatoi, for that matter—didn’t know the full story. They’d know the version repeated by poets instead—and they’d immediately associate the scorpion with Orion.
“Orion’s dead and he’s not coming back,” she said aloud, partly to reassure herself. “So why put a reference to him in the ritual?”
“If this is just a bunch of copycats, then they probably put in some Orion stuff because they read that the last cult was dedicated to him.”
“For what purpose? Who are they trying to worship?”
Theo shrugged. “Maybe no one in particular. Maybe they’re just sick bastards who wanted to kill a homeless person, and they thought this was a creepy way to do it. Or they’re neopagans tampering with rituals they think are purely symbolic. Honestly, I don’t think this is the work of an Athanatos. It’s just too scattershot. Besides, since when does a god need to search for omens in an animal’s liver? That’s a mortal’s job.” His eyes lit, clearly inspired by his own theory. “Since a haruspex looks for signs of whether his sacrifice has been accepted and whether he needs to appease any additional deities, maybe this new cult doesn’t even have a specific deity in mind yet. Maybe they’re looking for a message in the liver to tell them which god they should even be talking to.” He finally paused for breath. “You don’t look convinced.”
“I want you to be right. I want this to be some mortal assholes. And I want to help Hansen and Freeman bring them to justice. But I just don’t—”
A collective cry rose from the assembled crowd, pulling Selene’s attention upward to the figure of a woman standing on a ledge twenty stories above their heads.
Captain Hansen immediately started shouting orders, and a mass of officers ran toward the building entrance. Before they even reached the door, the body fell forward, limp and thin like a child’s toy, growing ever larger as it plummeted toward them. Selene heard Theo’s strangled gasp beside her.
She wished she still had a chariot pulled by wide-antlered stags, so she might ride through the air to pluck the woman from her fall. Instead, she could only stand in silence and watch the street around her grow yet darker with blood.
Chapter 6
LORD OF THE DEAD
Theo’s enthusiasm for crime solving had dissolved around the time the stockbroker’s body landed a few yards away from him, her blood spattering the toes of his winter boots. Another trade gone horribly wrong, they said. Another master of the financial markets, seemingly invulnerable, brought to utter despair as millions of dollars disappeared into the electronic ether. She too, her coworkers reported, had seen the victim on the bull beneath her window and felt drawn to join him in oblivion. Theo hadn’t seen her die: He’d screwed his eyes shut the second he saw her jump, unwilling to witness the crude carnage of her death.
Yet here I go, he thought as he approached the Medical Examiner’s Office, walking voluntarily into a charnel house. One dead body was too much. But dozens? Why not.
Theo had never visited the morgue before. Few New Yorkers had. If, in some rare circumstance, they needed to identify a body, the police would show them a photograph. Civilians didn’t get the dubious privilege of viewing the corpse in the flesh. But Selene had managed to convince Detective Freeman that she and Theo should get a crack at the body of the homeless victim. How else could they identify any further clues that would help them understand this new cult?
As Theo walked into the autopsy room, an overwhelming stench of rotten meat nearly knocked him flat. Beside him, Selene clapped a hand over her nose and mouth, her face green. Freeman gagged audibly. A slight, bearded medical examiner rushed over and handed them surgical masks that dampened the worst of the smel
l.
“What in the world, Janz?” the young detective demanded with none of her usual diffidence.
“I know! There must be something wrong with the refrigeration system because the corpses looked fine when I rolled them out, and then a few minutes ago, bam! It was like they’d all been sitting in the heat for days!” He turned to an assistant, panicked. “Let’s get them all back into the drawers!” The coroners rushed about, rolling corpses in various stages of decomposition past Theo like the world’s worst dim sum offerings. Finally, only one body remained in the room, covered modestly with a sheet. Janz came back to them, a sheen of sweat on his brow.
“Sorry about that, Detective. But I’ve got your John Doe ready for you. And let me tell you, he’s as much a mystery as our broken cooling system.”
“Maybe our visitors can help you out,” Freeman said, gesturing to Theo and Selene. “They’re specialists in human sacrifice.”
“Well,” Theo began, “that makes it sound a bit grim. I’m a classicist. Human sacrifice is sort of a sideline.” That, he realized, sounded even worse.
“Oh, you’re the folks who tracked down the Classicist Cult this fall?” The examiner reached for Selene’s hand, but she just stared at him coldly.
“That’s us.” Theo proffered his own hand, then fought the urge to wipe it on his trousers to dislodge any corpse cooties.
“Good, because I’m stumped.” Janz looked relieved. “It’s not the cause of death that’s the problem, because that’s pretty clear: His heart has been completely removed.” He spoke as if this shocking fact were all in a day’s work. “But the body itself is a complete anomaly.”
“Why’s that?” Freeman asked.
“First of all, he’s not really a homeless man.” The medical examiner pulled back the sheet. Theo noticed Selene stiffen beside him. She stared down at the body as if she’d never seen a dead man before. Strange, since she’d seen thousands—not a few of whom she’d killed herself.
Theo forced himself not to look away from the gaping hole in the man’s chest. Other than that disfigurement, he seemed like a typical corpse. Sunken cheeks, deathly pale skin. Unlike the other bodies, however, he was relatively well preserved. No blackened flesh, no odor of putrefaction. He was well over six feet tall, his body an amalgamation of bony limbs and loose skin, like a man who’d only recently lost a great deal of muscle mass. A large beaked nose, thinning gray hair to his shoulders. His hands were overlarge, each knuckle protruding like a skeleton’s. They’d removed his ragged clothing, and Theo turned his eyes away from the darker nest of hair between the man’s thighs.
Janz lifted the victim’s ring finger with his own gloved hand. “His fingernails were perfectly manicured and coated with clear polish, like some celebrity or tycoon. And there’s not a spec of sebungual dirt.”
Freeman whipped out a notepad and started writing. “So they dressed him up in rags and smeared his face with dirt to make him look homeless?”
Janz nodded. “Under his clothes, his body was perfectly clean.”
The detective pointed toward the bloody well in his chest. “What could’ve done that?”
The examiner raised his eyebrows behind his glasses. “I was hoping you could tell me. Some sharp object with a serrated blade. Went in through his chest and sliced the ribs before severing the arteries to remove the heart. He would’ve been alive when it happened. Is that common practice among cultic sacrifices, Professor?”
“Um. I don’t actually know,” Theo admitted. “Human sacrifice was exceedingly rare in the classical world. But I can tell you that animal sacrifices certainly weren’t tortured. They were supposed to go willingly to their deaths; otherwise, the sacrifice wasn’t auspicious.” He drew his finger across his throat. “One clean slit. You might see an organ removed for haruspicy—examining the animal’s entrails for omens—but usually the liver, not the heart. Amazing that classical civilization flourished as long as it did while basing all kinds of monumental decisions on the shape of organ meat, but there you have it.” He looked to Selene, knowing he’d get an angry glare for implying the gods’ signs were anything but authentic. But she continued staring down at the victim, her face creased with distress, ignoring Theo entirely.
Freeman didn’t pay much attention to his history lesson either. “Any more progress on the ID?” she asked the examiner.
“No. We ran fingerprints, but no matches. But since he’s no vagrant, it’s likely we’ll get a hit when someone reports him missing.” Janz pointed to an indentation in the flesh of the man’s finger. “Signs of a wedding ring, even though none was found. So maybe we’ll hear from the spouse. But there are other anomalies. Johnny Doe looks like he’s in his seventies, but—”
Selene spoke for the first time, interrupting the examiner with a growl. “Don’t call him that.”
Janz blinked behind his glasses. “What?”
“Don’t act like his name’s already been erased.”
Freeman jumped in before Theo could. “Ms. DiSilva, it may sound harsh, but that’s just standard procedure until we identify him.”
Theo glanced down at Selene’s clenched fists. “Do you want to step outside for a minute?” he asked. “Take a break from the dead bodies?”
“We’re done here,” Selene said, already walking away.
“Don’t you want to hear the rest of the autopsy report?”
“We don’t need to.”
Theo stayed behind for a few minutes, apologizing to Freeman and Janz for Selene’s rudeness, then exited the building. A small concrete courtyard lay before him. Bare trees, a single bench. Selene paced in a tight circle through the snow, talking on her antiquated phone.
“You don’t understand.” She threaded a hand through the white streak in her black hair, tugging with uncharacteristic agitation. “We need to talk right away. Someone blabbed, Paul. And it better not be you. Don’t hang up on me. I don’t care about your concert.” She barely paused for a response before barking, “Sure, I’ll be careful, Paul, don’t worry.” She snapped her phone shut and sat down heavily on the bench, not bothering to brush away the snow.
“What’s going on?” Theo asked, trying not to sound as frustrated as he felt. “And what the hell was that back there? We were about to learn something, and you rushed out like Cerberus hearing a dog whistle with all three heads.”
She ignored the jibe. “The examiner made it all sound like some vast mystery, when really it’s very simple.”
“Oh yeah?”
“He was about to tell us that the evidence so far showed that the victim wasn’t an old man after all. That his body was wrinkled and weak, but he showed few other signs of normal aging: no bone loss, no worn teeth.”
“Oh.” Theo started to understand. His mind spun, trying to reorganize everything he’d observed so far. He sat beside Selene on the bench, searching her face for some sign of grief over the death of one of her kin. She just stared up at the pale blue sky, her face emotionless. He had the sudden impression she sought something—or someone—among the wisps of cloud.
“Is that your father in there?” Theo asked, taking her hand in his. Selene had never told him where Zeus currently resided. She rarely even spoke of him, but he’d always gotten the impression she loved him deeply. After losing her mother so recently, he wasn’t sure how Selene would react to losing her father as well.
But she only shook her head. “The stockbrokers losing their money, the corpses suddenly putrefying … Sometimes, when a god dies, his death has ripple effects on the parts of the world he once controlled. A last little gasp of homage from a place that has otherwise forgotten him.”
Only one god would affect both corpses and bankers. “Hades. Lord of the Dead. God of Wealth,” Theo said, a shiver crossing his flesh. Of all the Athanatoi, Hades was the only one he’d never wanted to meet.
Selene nodded solemnly. “It happened when my mother died. The babies in the hospital cried, mourning the loss of the Goddess of Motherhood. But s
he faded away naturally—she was ready to go. The death of a god like Hades, murdered while still strong, might cause a much greater reaction.”
“If he’s so strong, then why did he look so frail?”
“In his own realm, he was almost invincible—you know how men still worship wealth. But our powers are funny things. They work differently for all of us. An old proscription from my father meant that when Hades emerged aboveground, he lost his strength. An Athanatos would know that.”
“So you’re saying a god did this—one who knew the secrets of Orion’s rites. But your brothers who took down the last cult with us promised not to perform rituals of their own.”
“They can’t be trusted. I’ve been trying to explain that to you. Why do you think I don’t talk to them? Because I like being lonely? It’s because they’re all insane. The lure of unlimited power—it’s just too strong for them to resist, no matter the consequences.”
“I don’t buy it,” Theo insisted. “How could this be a cult in their honor if it’s got none of their attributes? No ivy for the Wine Giver, no laurel or sun emblems for the Bright One, and nothing that would indicate the Smith or the Messenger either.”
She huffed in exasperation. “Then one of my brothers told another god about the cult, and that immortal is behind this. Either way, one broke his promise.”
“You don’t know that. There are humans out there who know about the gods, right? Humans like me. So maybe Hades let the secret of his strength slip to some trusted mortal drinking buddy, and that mortal turned against him. Because, let’s face it, having the Lord of the Dead drop by all the time for trivia night is about as socially awkward as you can get. So eventually this mortal buddy decides that a cult ritual is the perfect way to kill off a god while showing him some respect at the same time.”
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