Winter of the Gods

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  She knew he spoke not of the silent war they waged for the Pater’s favor, but of the greater conflict they’d both dedicated their lives to. The Hyaena’s anger drained away. He is right to remind me.

  She didn’t try to stop him as he stepped to the computer console. “The arsenal is being assembled, even as we speak,” he said as he deleted the video file from the hard drive.

  “Yes, Heliodromus,” she said, bowing her head.

  “The Pater demands you look forward, Hyaena, not back.” His words were as sharp as his whip and just as effective. He no longer toyed with her, and she respected him more for his bluntness.

  With his hand on the door, he stopped to glance once more at the live feed from the old man’s room. “The Praenuntius and his kind are obsolete.” His eyes flicked toward her. A final warning. “See that you don’t become the same.”

  Chapter 8

  THE BARE-FISTED

  That night, deep in the heart of Central Park, Selene stared upward into the light haloing a lamppost. Snowflakes tumbled toward her like slow-motion stars falling from heaven, coming to rest on her eyelashes and cheeks. Around her, the park glowed blue as moonlight reflected off the snow that limned the trees and muffled the sounds of the city beyond. The tracks of an intrepid midnight cross-country skier lay like ribbons across the ground, the lines already blurring beneath the ceaseless flurries. She carried her bow in her backpack, but she’d have little chance to use it. The squirrels were hidden in their nests, the birds had flown south, the humans were tucked warm and snug in their apartments.

  Theo lay asleep in her bed, no doubt dreaming about the evidence surrounding Hades’ murder, trying to find some angle that didn’t implicate the other Athanatoi. But Selene wasn’t interested in Theo’s scholarly take. She felt, deep in her gut, that one of her brothers had tattled about the cult.

  It was foolhardy to venture into the park alone tonight, knowing an Athanatos might be hunting her. Theo would’ve tried to stop her if he’d been awake. But the wilderness was her realm, and she wore a leather quiver of golden arrows at her waist just in case a divine enemy showed up. If they mean to come for me next, she decided, at least they’ll have to do it on my turf.

  She looked to the sky, where once Zeus had ruled, his mighty thunderbolt promising to wreak vengeance on anyone—thanatos or Athanatos alike—who dared threaten his family.

  “Your brother Hades is dead,” she whispered, wishing her father could hear her. “A Son of Kronos has fallen.”

  She’d last seen her uncle three months before when she journeyed into his home in an abandoned subway station to confront him about Orion’s cult. She learned that he and his wife, Persephone, had nothing to do with Orion’s murders—but they were still dangerous. In their descent toward madness, they’d tried to force Selene to live for eternity as their involuntary party guest. She’d had to fight her way free—not an easy task when dealing with a god as powerful as Hades, especially when he donned his Helm of Invisibility.

  Whoever kidnapped him probably took the helmet, she realized. She could only hope the magic item wouldn’t function for anyone but the Lord of the Dead himself.

  Did his killers know what effect Hades’ death would have on the mortals nearby? she wondered, thinking of the stockbroker’s broken body. Most Athanatoi wouldn’t have cared, even if they had known. But Selene had given up drawing strict lines between mortals and immortals when she’d allowed Theo into her life. That woman on the ledge might have stood for all the materialism and greed she despised, but she was still an innocent, still someone Selene had sworn to protect.

  She needed to stop her whirling brain. I’m a goddess of action, not reflection, she thought, hitching her backpack higher on her shoulders and breaking into a jog. I might be slowly growing more like the mortals, but I refuse to take on their neuroses.

  She sprinted past the reservoir, its surface clouded with ice. Past the empty picnic tables on the Great Hill, up into the North Woods, where no lampposts lit the way. Her boots squeaked on the snow, and the flakes whirled faster as the wind picked up, stinging her cheeks like sand. Another storm in a winter full of them. The city nearly groaned with the accumulated weight of weeks of ice and snow, its denizens growing more downtrodden with each successive inch of slush. But tonight Selene refused to let the weather depress her. She opened her mouth, and the flakes fell upon her tongue, tasting faintly of pollution and moonlight.

  At the top of the hill stood a roofless one-room building with walls of the same rough-hewn mica schist that marked the city’s dead. The American flag hanging from a pole in the interior clapped sharply with every gust of wind, its colors muted gray in the faint light. On the northern side, the ground dropped off in a steep cliff, providing an unobstructed view of Harlem in the distance. A small plaque explained that New York had constructed this blockhouse to defend against a possible British invasion during the War of 1812, a conflict most modern Americans barely acknowledged. But a silver-eyed, six-foot-tall woman named Dianne Delia had witnessed it all. She’d seen how the city had lived in perpetual fear that a flotilla flying the Union Jack would sail into the harbor, cannons blazing, and destroy their nascent experiment in democracy.

  Only once since then had the Huntress felt such fear pervade her home: a day in September, not so long ago, when she watched two planes strike terror in the city’s heart. Selene had not shared in their panic—at the time, she was too removed from the concerns of thanatoi to mourn another few thousand dead.

  But today, staring at the wound in Hades’ chest, Selene had felt as if those planes had struck once again, and this time, they’d knocked away her foundations and left her teetering and hollow, ready to collapse.

  Once, she would’ve dreaded showing that vulnerability to anyone, much less a mortal man. But Theo had seen her at her weakest, her strongest, and everywhere in between. She still found it hard to share her feelings with him … but it was getting easier all the time. Maybe that’s love, she thought, daring to think the word that neither of them had ever said aloud. Knowing that he sees me not as the goddess the poets sang of, nor as the mortal others take me for, but as something at once less and more than both.

  She shrugged off her backpack and pulled out the two limbs of her golden bow. She screwed them together, making a single curving length that reached from her knees to her shoulders, then strung it. She ran a finger over the fletching of the golden arrows in her quiver. She’d brought them for target practice—they flew differently than wooden shafts, and she needed to be at the top of her game if an Athanatos showed up to challenge her. Only a divine arrow would take down divine prey.

  She peered around at the trees, making sure she was alone. While entering the park after closing time would probably earn her a citation from the police, using a projectile weapon would more likely land her in jail.

  With no one in sight, she chose three trees nearly a hundred yards away at the base of the cliff. Hitting them wouldn’t be a challenge—ever since she’d partially regained her strength from Orion’s ritual sacrifices, her aim had returned to nearly supernatural levels. To make things harder, she slipped three arrows between the knuckles of her right hand. She tried to picture three of her brothers in place of the trees. Dionysus the Wine Giver, perhaps? Drunk and stoned, surrounded by empty pizza boxes. Hermes the Messenger, with his sly grins and his perennial teasing? Her twin, Apollo? No, despite her suspicions, she couldn’t even pretend to kill her kin—not until she knew they were guilty.

  I’m getting soft, she thought ruefully, nocking the first arrow to her bowstring and picturing three wild boar instead. She let the arrow fly, then shifted her fingers and moved the second into place, then the third. They thunked into each tree in quick succession. Satisfied, she unscrewed her bow and put it back in her bag, then skated down the snowy cliff on the soles of her boots to retrieve the arrows; she only owned six golden shafts, after all.

  On the way back up the cliff, she pulled herself hand over
hand like a swimmer racing for shore, enjoying the pounding of blood in her heart. She lowered herself to the steps of the blockhouse, panting only slightly, and leaned back against the weathered iron gate barring the building’s only entrance. Once, the citizens of New York thought such fortifications would protect them. Now, they trusted in cops like Geraldine Hansen and Maggie Freeman to man much less obvious defenses: surveillance and data gathering and other counterterrorism measures meant to thwart any potential threat. Selene almost laughed aloud at the thought. What use is any of that against an Athanatos with the Helm of Invisibility?

  A sudden whiff of scent brushed her nostrils. Sweat and fear and a hint of cologne. A man. Close by. With her Huntress’s senses, she peered around the clearing. Yet the scent vanished, lost in a gust of wind. She tensed, silently daring the man to show himself, and inched a hand toward her pack. If he’s a cop, he would’ve already approached, she decided. But if he’s one of my brothers—

  Large gloved hands snaked around her throat and dragged her backward against the iron bars. She gasped, but only a choking clack emerged. She clawed at her attacker’s hands, but couldn’t get a good grip on his fingers through his puffy gloves. So she lurched forward with all her strength instead, dragging her attacker’s arms through the grate until his torso slammed against the bars. He grunted in pain, but hung on, his fingers digging deeper into her throat. She relaxed for an instant, letting him yank her back, then jerked forward again. His head smacked against iron with a clang and his grip finally loosened.

  Tearing free, Selene spun around, catching only a glimpse of her attacker before he disappeared behind the wall of the blockhouse. A man in a dark parka, too short and slight to be one of her brothers. Yet he couldn’t be a random mugger—he’d planted himself inside the blockhouse to attack her without risk to himself, so he must’ve known she was a dangerous foe. She picked up her backpack and jangled the gate, but the lock held firm.

  “You think you can hide?” she shouted, her voice rough from her near-strangulation. “You think you’re safe in there?”

  The only other way into or out of the roofless building was over the wall. The crumbling stone slabs didn’t provide much of a handhold, but that didn’t stop her. In moments, she’d crested the top. She could see her attacker now, climbing slowly up the opposite side to make his escape. As the man frantically reached for the next handhold, Selene calmly stalked along the narrow top of the wall and squatted above him.

  When he looked up, she saw his face. He was young, and his hands on the stone wall shook from fear. Olive skin, a flattened nose, a bulging wool cap spherical enough to hold a pile of dreadlocks. Not an Athanatos—she would have recognized him. He had an earring in his right ear, the hint of a tattoo crawling up his throat.

  Maybe he is an ordinary criminal after all, she pondered, committing what he thought was an ordinary crime.

  As he reached for another slab in the wall, she rested her wrists on her knees and stared down at him curiously. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  He didn’t speak, just let go of the wall, falling backward into the snow. He waded through the drifts to the opposite side of the chamber and started to climb again.

  Selene stepped unhurriedly along the building’s perimeter like a gymnast on a beam, reaching the other side before he was even halfway up the wall. She squatted above him once more, balancing easily. He looked up at her, gave a short grunt of surprise, then dropped down again. He went for the barred entrance this time, shaking it futilely. Then he turned back to her, his expression desperate, and drew a small knife from his parka. “Stay back,” he warned.

  Selene merely snorted. “Are you going to throw it at me? Is your aim that good?” With exaggerated slowness, she reached into her quiver and pulled out a shining arrow, rolling it between her fingers so the shaft glinted in the moonlight. He raised one hand to shield his face; his knife trembled in the other. Selene paused, some of her anger dissipating in the face of his obvious weakness.

  “Something tells me I won’t need this,” she said, her voice dripping with careful condescension. She replaced it in the quiver and drew a simple wooden shaft from her backpack instead. No need to waste a divine arrow on a clearly mortal man. “Do you always prey on women in the park?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “I was just desperate. I’m out of cash, and I thought if I could rob you—”

  “Or strangle me.”

  “Just until you passed out. Then I’d climb over the wall, steal your pretty gold arrows, and leave you alone. I swear to Christ.”

  She laughed shortly. “You’re not helping your case.”

  “Come on, lady, I just wanted to buy some presents for my kids.” He looked up imploringly, the large knit hat wobbling comically on his head. “It’s almost Christmas! What would Jesus do?”

  With a hiss, she reached into her pack for her bow. Her fingers closed around the cold metal. She could see the man’s tattoo more clearly now: a large black cross emblazoned between his collarbones, its longer limb disappearing beneath his jacket. She could almost feel the bite of the bowstring on her fingertips, hear the thrum of the arrow as it flew through the night, a burst of light to cleanse her realm of this man and his god. Then she paused. Did he really deserve death? Theo would say no. Killing him would merely make her feel better, knowing there were some adversaries she could easily defeat.

  She let go of the bow. If she wasn’t going to kill him, at least she’d make sure he didn’t get her into too much trouble with the police. But just a little trouble … she thought with a smile … sometimes that can’t be helped.

  Arrow clutched in her hand, she dropped down into the building, sinking two feet deep into a drift. He was weak, scared, a rabbit cowering before the Huntress. She didn’t need to shoot him from above. In fact, she was looking forward to getting her hands a little dirty. They called me Bare-Fisted for a reason, she thought, leaping through the snow like a stag.

  He jerked his knife left and right, as if to ward her off, and reached for her quiver with his other hand. She knocked his forearm aside with her own, pinning it to the stone wall. “Still want my pretty gold arrows, huh? Should’ve gone for my wallet. I might’ve forgiven that.”

  She slammed her shoulder into his chest and held the arrowhead to his throat. A bead of blood appeared just below his Adam’s apple. She pressed a little harder, and the red ran in a thin stream down the shaft and over her knuckles. She leaned against his forearm until the sharp stones dug into his tendons, and he dropped the knife with a gasp. Then she grabbed the front of his coat and pushed him before her toward the flagpole in the center of the clearing.

  Keeping her arrow at his jugular, she unwrapped the flag’s halyard from its cleat and let the Stars and Stripes tumble down the pole. She unlatched the flag, dropping it unceremoniously to the ground, then secured the halyard’s hooks to her attacker’s belt loops instead. Finally, she stepped back, holding the halyard with both hands, and hauled the young man up the pole.

  “You don’t want to do this,” he protested, his voice edging toward panic. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t,” she replied calmly, leaning backward and using all her weight to hoist him another three feet into the air.

  “I’m warning you! Don’t make me come after you. I shouldn’t, but I will.”

  “From up there?” She laughed. “Go ahead. You unlatch the rope and you’ll fall twenty feet. Broken leg at least. But be my guest. Otherwise, just enjoy the view, and in a few hours, when I know your testicles are about to freeze off and you’ll have sworn to your Jesus that you’ll never try to mug a woman again, I’ll call the police and report an anonymous citizen’s arrest, complete with patriotic asshole-raising up the flagpole. I’m sure they’ll take you down before you’re dangerously hypothermic.” She smiled at him cheerfully, her spirits finally restored.

  Then he pulled the bulging wool hat off his head.

  Two
graceful wings unfurled from either side of a round golden cap, each metallic feather shimmering in the moonlight. He unhooked himself from the halyard—and began to fly.

  Chapter 9

  GODDESS OF GOLDEN SHAFTS

  Selene stood dumbfounded as the man in the winged cap swooped toward her. She twisted aside as he barreled forward, but he managed to wrench the quiver of golden arrows from her belt and then launch back into the air before she could stop him.

  Furious, she reached for a large stone and hefted it as if it weighed no more than a snowball. “Come back down here, thanatos! And tell me who sent you!” She hurled the stone at his head, but he dodged easily out of the way.

  Even though he clearly had the advantage over her, he suddenly looked absolutely terrified. He clutched her quiver to his chest like a talisman.

  “The Pater warned me not to use the cap,” he said, his voice trembling. “I was supposed to just get the arrows and disappear. Sorry, Diana. This wasn’t part of the plan.” He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a gun.

  Selene dove around the corner of the blockhouse for cover as the first two bullets kicked up snow at her feet. She half fell, half skied down the cliff side, then took off through the thickest part of the forest, hoping to obscure his aerial view. Then, with all the speed she still possessed, she took an absurdly circuitous route home, ducking into subway stations and back out, entering a drugstore through one entrance and leaving through another, all in the hopes of losing her pursuer.

  When she no longer saw the glint of gold overhead, she resolved to get home as quickly as possible. Her attacker clearly knew she frequented the park—she could only hope he didn’t know her address as well.

  Picking up speed, she moved so fast that her boot soles barely touched the ground. Sweat streamed down her face; she dashed it from her eyes and kept on running. Down Broadway. Right on Eighty-eighth Street. She jumped up her front stoop in a single leap, key at the ready, and slammed the door behind her.