Theo watched her go, fighting the urge to shout something cutting, and wondering when he’d become a guy who took cheap shots at his girlfriend. He tromped off toward the parking lot. Did he really want to wander Grossinger’s asbestos-filled halls, fighting off the ghosts of angry Jewish grandmothers swinging their beach bags at the goyish intruder, only to wind up facing the Sooty God swinging his massive hammer instead? Better to get back in the car, turn on the heat, and write some exam questions while waiting for his supernatural girlfriend to finish her little chat with her quasi-divine relative. Just the weekend in the country he’d been hoping for.
Pushing aside her frustration with Theo, Selene headed down a long, windowless passageway, determined to find her stepbrother. With no light to see by, she turned to her other senses. Smell was no good: The scent of mold and decay overpowered everything else. But she could feel an almost intangible wave of heat emanating from somewhere ahead of her. Surely that was one of the “signs” Dash had told her to follow.
She opened a door to an apartment; the dim sunlight leaking through its dirt-smeared windows provided just enough illumination for her night vision, so she could avoid the tumbled furniture and ripped-up carpet in the hallway. She followed the sensation of warmth down a series of long corridors, opening doors on either side for light.
She peeked into one of the rooms. Once, sunburned children would’ve crowded the Murphy beds, dreaming of swimming and hot dogs and endless summers. Now only rat-bitten mattresses remained beneath graffitied walls proclaiming, “Turn back now!” and “I fucked on this bed!” This was the place the Smith called home?
Finally, she found the source of the warmth: a large double door with “Natatorium” written in faded paint across the lintel. A swimming pool. A thick metal chain looped through the door handles: Someone didn’t want visitors. She tapped lightly on the door but got no response. She leaned her ear against the wood, hoping to pick up the slightest noise. Nothing. Impatient, she rattled the door and yanked on the chain, but to no avail.
She looked around for another way in and found a rusted sign reading, “Handicapped Entrance.” But the arrow on the sign pointed only to a bare wall. She scanned the hallway for any reference to her stepbrother’s attributes—hammer, tongs, donkey—but found nothing that might lead her to some secret way of unlocking the door.
“Hey!” she finally just shouted. “It’s the Huntress! Let me in!”
After a final loud pounding on the door, she turned and went back the way she’d come. A swimming pool would certainly have exterior windows; maybe she could see through from outside.
By the time she made it back outdoors, the sun had set. Only the moon illuminated the snow ahead of her. She traipsed around the building until she came to a large, intact structure with walls of paned glass: She could see the pool inside, but no sign of the Smith. Only the deep end still contained water—a black stagnant puddle filled with trash and the floating remains of metal chaise lounges, their legs jutting from the water like the skeletons of prehistoric sea creatures.
She turned to walk away, deciding she must have been mistaken. Then she noticed the lack of snow around the building: a wide bare ring surrounded by melting slush. The chill winter air blew away most of the heat, but when she pressed her hand against the glass wall, it felt warm. Hot even.
She scrounged in her jacket pocket for a scrap of paper and a pencil stub. Selene DiSilva, she wrote. Open up. Then she pulled a shoelace out of her boot and used it to tie the paper to the shaft of an arrow. She broke off the arrowhead—no use trying to gain the Smith’s trust if she wounded him in the process—then took a few steps back from the glass wall. She aimed high, toward the unlit starburst chandelier suspended above the pool.
Even without the tip, the force of her golden bow sent the arrow easily through the glass. She hadn’t quite planned on it shattering an entire large pane, but physics had never been her strong suit. She winced at the deafening clatter, hoping the Smith hadn’t booby-trapped the place. She stepped back, just in case.
As soon as the glass fell away, a bright orange glow burst from the hole in the wall, along with a massive cloud of white steam as superheated air met the winter’s chill. And the noise. A resounding thrumming of machinery, the clang of a hammer on an anvil, and underscoring it all, the indecipherable yowling of some heavy metal “singer.”
Before she could ponder her stepbrother’s musical tastes any further, an invisible door in the side of the wall swung open, and the Smith himself stood before her, looking as if he’d emerged from another dimension. Around the door frame, the image of the dark, abandoned pool remained intact, but over Flint’s shoulder she could see a brightly lit room full of machinery. He was shirtless, sweat pouring down his hairy barrel chest. Soot and grease streaked his craggy face. Rather than using his traditional crutches, he wore complicated titanium braces on each of his shriveled legs. In one hand, he held her arrow. In the other, the scrap of paper.
He clenched the note in his massive fist, crumpling it into a small ball, and squinted into the darkness.
“Huntress?” he asked, his voice a low, fierce rumble. Something in his tone made Selene pause. Maybe Theo was right. Maybe he is dangerous.
Cautiously, she stepped into the light.
Then, before she could stop him, he lunged forward, surprisingly fast on his withered legs, and grabbed her by the forearms. Despite his aging, his grip remained as hard as iron, and his eyes burned with a fiery intensity that raised the hair on the back of her neck. She reacted instantly, twisting her arms free and stepping backward to deliver a roundhouse kick to his sternum. The Smith stumbled, his braces squealing in protest. Then his legs crumpled beneath him, and he lay on the ice like a felled beast, his eyes on the ground, his back heaving.
“Why did you attack me?” she demanded, careful not to get too close.
“I didn’t … attack you,” he panted. Finally, he turned his face up to hers. The intensity was gone. Only a deep, weary sadness remained.
She finally understood: He’d been excited to see her. Not exactly the reaction of a man who’d sent someone to kill her.
He turned his face to the ground and started the laborious task of raising himself up. She started forward to help, then thought better of it. All gods, even those who had declined to the state of a thanatos, had their pride.
Once he was back on his feet, he pressed a few buttons on the side of his braces. They released a faint hydraulic hiss, and he could stand straight once more. His expression hardened into a stern mask. “I wasn’t expecting visitors,” he said. “I’m not usually so … demonstrative.” He rubbed at his chest, where the imprint of her boot sole branded his flesh.
“Here,” she said, pulling the rabbit from her belt and thrusting it at him with a belated attempt at courtesy. He accepted it slowly, his small eyes narrowing further.
“I guess you know it’s too hard to catch the buggers with my legs.” He gave her a thin, bitter smile, more accusation than gratitude, then turned back to the open door. “Come.”
Score another one for Theo, she decided. A terrible gift. Next time, just bring a box of chocolates. She hesitated in the doorway to the forge. The Smith might not be dangerous, but he was damn hard to predict, and the last thing she needed was another moody man in her life. Guess I don’t have a choice, she thought, following him inside with a sigh. If I want any more divine weapons, looks like I’ll have to put up with the man who made them all in the first place.
Chapter 14
THE SOOTY GOD
When the door closed behind her, Selene immediately felt sweat popping on her brow. Normally, she was as impervious to heat as to cold, but this was worse than a hundred degrees in August trapped in an un-air-conditioned subway car. This was volcanic. The heat issued forth from the dozens of machines pounding away in the depth of the empty swimming pool. Most were steam-driven, great turbines and pistons flailing like the limbs of epileptic spiders, jetting steam toward th
e ceiling high above. But along the perimeter of the room, large banks of computers and electronics covered the lower half of the walls. Heavy-duty acoustical paneling covered the upper half.
She pointed to the crisscross of blue laser beams shooting out from the computers. They reminded her of something from one of the science fiction movies Theo was always making her watch. “Is that what keeps the illusion going?” She had to shout to be heard over the heavy metal cacophony.
Flint nodded. “Works well, except when an uninvited guest shoots out one of my panes of special holographic glass.” With a gait only slightly stilted by the braces on his legs, he grabbed a massive sheet of steel in one hand, a welding machine in the other, and walked to a large metal plate sitting atop a contraption of gears and accordioned struts. He rolled the welder onto it, yanked a series of levers, spun a few wheels, and was soon zooming upward on an elevated platform. When it reached its apex, the Smith hovered a mere four feet below the ceiling. Six segmented steel legs emerged from the mechanism’s base. It started crawling across the ground with the steady tread of a praying mantis. As if in appreciation of Flint’s invention, a guitar screamed its way through a frenetic riff; Selene finally began to appreciate Paul’s brand of folk rock.
Flint arrived at the broken pane in the wall, donned a welding helmet, and flipped on his machine. It hissed like a steady wind, and a lightning-bright spark appeared between his torch and the sheet metal he placed over the gap.
Selene shut her eyes to the glare and shouted up, “Won’t that look suspicious from the outside?”
“Better than having light gush out,” he called down to her as he worked, his voice muffled from the helmet. “Google Earth could pick it up. Then I’d have more annoyances pounding down my door.”
Annoyances? It took all her self-control not to burst out with: If you want annoying, I’ll start by ripping out your sound system and shoving it down your hairy throat. But she was here to enlist the Smith’s help, not antagonize him. She took a steadying breath and shouted up, “Speaking of pounding on the door, I tried that. You didn’t answer. You might consider turning down the music so you can hear a little better.”
He didn’t take the hint. He finished his welding job, took off his helmet, and lowered the lift back to the floor as the song reached its screeching climax and then came to an abrupt halt. “You have to ring the bell,” he said into the sudden silence.
“What bell?”
He gave her a black look. “Didn’t Dash tell you to follow the signs?”
“I followed the heat. Is that what you mean?” she asked testily. Between the stifling temperature, the pounding of machinery, and the opening riffs of the next metal anthem, Selene’s stomach had twisted itself inside out.
“Not the heat. The signs. The one that says, ‘Handicapped Entrance.’ If you follow the arrow—”
“I tried that.”
“You see an alarm handle that says, ‘Pull in Case of Fire.’ That’s the doorbell.”
Of course. Hephaestus the Lame One, God of Fire and Forge. She felt like a moron, and from Flint’s expression, he wholeheartedly agreed.
Theo would’ve probably figured out the reference, she realized, but my method worked, too. It was just slightly more destructive. At the moment, she was actually glad she’d resorted to wrecking the Smith’s little hideaway—he deserved it for his condescension.
“I can’t hear myself think in here,” she said through gritted teeth. “Turn off that music—if that’s what you call it. And while you’re at it, shut down all these infernal machines.”
“No.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Then I guess I should just leave without telling you my incredibly vital news.”
“News you couldn’t just leave on my phone, like I’ve told everyone to do repeatedly?” he asked, drawing an oversized device out of his pocket. Rather than the usual static screen of colored icons, the Smith’s phone was in constant motion. He saw her looking and held it up for her. “I still prefer to make things with my own hands, but if I didn’t use other people’s inventions too, I’d be a fool.”
“Or a purist,” she replied archly. “I don’t bother with the Digital Age if I can help it.” And it makes me feel all of my three thousand years when I can’t figure out how to even open the damn “apps,” or whatever they’re called.
Flint raised a grizzled eyebrow. “You must find life in the twenty-first century tough without a little help from gadgets like this. We may not be omniscient anymore, but the Internet’s almost as good.” He swiped his finger across the screen, bringing up a graph covered in scores of jiggling colored lines. “It’s monitoring all my systems here in real time, not to mention tapping into the volcanic seismographs around the world. It’s like I’ve got eyes everywhere.”
“Sounds amazing,” she said dryly. “But I prefer the eyes in my own head. They’re better at telling me when someone is trying to kill me.”
He shot her a sharp look. “Why would someone—”
“Hades is dead. Dragged out of his own lair and left in a ritual sacrifice in the middle of the Financial District.”
The Smith stared at her for a long moment, expressionless. Then he disappeared into the warren of machinery. The song cut off abruptly in the middle of a head-splitting drum solo. The pounding steam engines slowed their rhythm, then ground to a hissing halt. He returned, his face even darker with soot than before.
“You sure?”
“I saw the body myself. Then, the next day, they came for me.”
The sudden intensity of his stare raised her hackles, and she took an involuntary step backward. She tried to read his emotions in the tightening of his lips but couldn’t decide if he was angry, afraid, or merely annoyed at being dragged into the situation.
He turned to the rabbit on the workbench, chose a small saw off one rack and a metal basin from another, and began to gut her host gift with a speed and skill that rivaled her own. A minute later, he’d speared the carcass with an aluminum rod and placed it into a nearby low-burning furnace to cook. He slammed the door shut and turned back to her. Is he actually hungry, she wondered, or is he just taking out his frustration on my rabbit?
“At first, my attacker just wanted my gold arrows—the ones you brought to me this fall,” she offered when it became clear Flint had no intention of speaking. “Stole the whole quiver and then flew off in Dash’s winged cap before I could snatch it back. He was mortal, but he could use a divine item—an item Dash himself said stopped working long ago. How is that possible?”
Flint’s thick beard shifted with the clenching of his massive jaw. “I don’t know.”
“Aren’t you the expert? Didn’t you make the cap in the first place?”
“That was millennia ago. I haven’t invented a new divine weapon since the Diaspora.”
“Because you can’t? Is that one of the powers that’s been lost to you?”
“Because I can’t. Because I choose not to. Is there a difference?” The Smith reached into his pocket and handed her the bootlace she’d used to secure her note to the arrow shaft. Then, as if that marked the end of their meeting, he turned his back on her and opened a drawer in his workbench. He grabbed a fistful of metal wire seemingly at random and started angrily bending each thread with a small pair of pliers. He didn’t even look at his hands as he worked, much less at Selene. He just stared at the wall, as if his brain whirred so fast that it shot off into space like a propeller blade loosed from its hub.
I’ve got little patience for my own bitter musings, Selene thought, resisting the urge to shake him. I’ve got even less for those of my stepbrother, or my cousin, or whatever I’m supposed to call my father’s sister-wife’s parthenogenically birthed son.
The Smith fit a series of small aluminum plates onto his wire mesh, creating a nearly spherical container. She had no idea what it was for, but it clearly wasn’t going to help her figure out more about her mysterious attacker, and it certainly wasn’t any kind of
useful divine weapon.
She stepped close to the workbench so he couldn’t ignore her. “I could use some more arrows if I’m going to hunt down my attacker and his friends.”
The Smith grunted disdainfully. “I don’t sit around all day making gold arrows just in case you run out, you know.” Yet he put down the wire contraption and stomped off into the bowels of his forge, returning moments later with three gleaming shafts. “These are all I’ve got.” He thrust them toward her.
Selene nodded her thanks. Flint went back to his wires, ignoring her. At least the trip wasn’t a complete waste, she thought, tucking the arrows into her belt and preparing to leave. Theo would be waiting, probably still angry at her for dismissing him earlier. He’s right—my conversational skills leave a lot to be desired. Predictably, she’d managed to alienate both him and the Smith in a single hour.
“Any other ideas about that cap?” she asked her stepbrother, giving diplomacy one more shot.
Surprisingly, he actually answered. “Think of Perseus using Athena’s shield. If a god chooses to loan a mortal his divine attributes, then the mortal can use them.” He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Or it could be a man elevated to immortality. Maybe.”
“Well, Dash says he didn’t even know the cap still existed—he certainly didn’t gift it to a thanatos. And it can’t be a mortal newly elevated, because after the Trojan War, Zeus declared the Age of Heroes over, remember? No more handing out immortality right and left.”
“You think the old rules still apply?” He snorted. “Don’t you know that the one constant in this world is inconsistency?”
“Great. Now I know even less than before. Maybe Theo’s first instinct was right, and there’s no god associated with this at all.”
“Theo.” Flint’s hands froze. “Your friend.”
“He’s waiting in the car.” One look at the Smith’s white-knuckled grip on his wire sphere and Selene was suddenly sure she’d made the right decision in sending Theo away. “He’s assisting. And trust me, we need all the help we can get. We’re being targeted, and if I’m right and Hades’ murderer is a fellow Athanatos, then we need to be extremely cautious. We’ve got some evidence that points to someone with a penchant for the Roman Era.”
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