“What about your great love? What about Sophie?” she asked, desperate to break through his sadness.
“Sophie.” He said the word slowly, like an incantation. “Yes. A bright flame of beauty amid the fog.” He seemed to hearten a little, but then a shadow crossed his face again. “Extinguished so soon. So soon …”
He walked faster, as if to escape from her concern. She let him go, unsure how to help, wishing she had Theo’s gift of knowing what to say.
She hadn’t realized how much she’d slowed her pace until she sensed Flint hobbling beside her. She could feel his eyes on her before she could wipe the expression of anguish from her face. She kept her gaze on Paul, who walked alone, his arms clutched across his chest. “I’m worried about him,” she said in an undertone.
Flint’s thick brows drew low above his dark eyes. “I’m worried about us all.”
Dash led the Athanatoi straight to the Tuberculosis Pavilion. Leafless winter vines covered its brick facade—in summer, jungly growth would hide the entire building, but in the depth of winter, it lay revealed. A circular four-story tower stood in the center, its large windows mostly broken, but much of its art deco brickwork still intact.
Flint made a hasty torch from some fir branches and a jar of black goo he pulled from his duffel—none of the other gods shared Selene’s gift for seeing in the dark.
Holding the torch, Dash took them through the front entrance, its wooden door long since rotted away, up a rickety staircase, and into a top-story room in the central tower. Paul took the one chair, sitting with his hands clasped in his lap. Flint settled down awkwardly on the ground, his gadgets, both electronic and mechanical, spread before him. Philippe paced in nervous circles, watching his stepfather work.
Dash stuck the base of the torch into a gap in the floorboards and sat cross-legged, clucking. “The Four Seasons it’s not, but at least it’s dry. Wouldn’t mind a bigger fire, though.” He looked at Flint reproachfully.
The Smith only glared at him. “Then don’t just sit there. Get me some firewood.”
Dash rose to his feet with a dramatic sigh. “You know the problem with this family? We like ordering people around too much. But whatever the Smith needs, the Smith gets.” He gave Flint a gallant bow. “I, for one, am actually adaptable. I’m off for wood. Come with me, Philippe, before you wear a hole through the floor.” Philippe just shook his head distractedly and continued pacing. “Seriously, Phil, my friend,” Dash insisted. “This whole place is about to collapse. Come on.”
Selene followed them out, determined to find dinner.
Little game roamed the island—she found the prints of a family of raccoons in the snow, the only mammals intrepid enough to swim the river. But birds aplenty nested there, even in the winter. Nuthatches and finches hopped through the trees around her, more curious than afraid of the strange giant intruding on their peaceful idyll. She looked for bigger prey. A moonshadow on the snow drew her gaze upward, where a bald eagle soared effortlessly overhead, only its white head visible in the darkness. Some of the island’s decay felt suddenly less threatening. This was a place of wild things. Selene took a deep breath of the frozen air, letting it brush away the lingering unease from her conversation with Paul.
She paced toward the shore, following her own tracks in the snow. There she spotted a pair of hooded mergansers. A single arrow took the male duck in his dramatic black-and-white chest. The chestnut-colored female fell only a few seconds later. She wished Hippo were there to retrieve them for her, but then reckoned her boots were already soaked through. Another dousing would do her no harm.
On the way back to shore, she noticed a bank of tall reeds at the water’s edge. She sliced a few with an arrowhead and bundled them under her arm beside the ducks.
When she returned to the hospital, Flint had started a fire. Dash asked him if he was going to set the whole building ablaze—the Smith just gave him an angry stare.
“Sorry!” Dash chuckled. “I shouldn’t question the God of Fire.”
Flint’s face brightened when he saw Selene’s ducks. She skinned and dressed the birds quickly with the edge of an arrowhead while he carved a spit from a branch, and soon their dinner crackled above the fire.
The Athanatoi gathered around, holding their damp clothes toward the flames. As sensation rushed back into her feet, Selene welcomed the sharp needles of pain. Duck fat dripped and sizzled in the fire, and the meat warmed them all. It wasn’t enough food to sate five normal people, much less gods with supernatural appetites, but it dulled the keen edge of their hunger.
Selene handed the reeds to Dash. “I thought maybe …”
“Say no more!” His eyes lit up, and he immediately began to cut them into shorter lengths.
Flint sat with the pieces of his phone spread before him, working by firelight with the small tools he pulled from his duffel. Selene kept her eyes on her twin, who stared blankly into the flames.
“Will you tell us what happened when you saw my father?” Philippe asked Paul. “Why didn’t he try to escape? I’ve never seen him like that.”
Paul glanced up—not at Philippe, but at Selene. “What’s happening to Martin,” he began softly, “is happening to me.” His eyes flicked to the others around the fire. “I went into the castle, and a guard took me down many stories below the part the tourists see. Martin was sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, holding his spear in his hands and just … staring at it. He looked horrified. When I came in, he looked up and that’s when I saw—” Paul stopped and swallowed hard before he continued. “He was crying. He thought I’d come to save him. Before I could even ask about Hades, he started talking about the visions he’d been having. Flashbacks to Marathon, Thermopylae, Actium. And to Troy. That was the worst of all, he said. He’d forgotten the horrors, for war to him had only been glory and bloodlust. But now he could not banish the memory of the night Odysseus led his men from the wooden horse to sack the city. Blood ran in torrents. All the earth lay drenched.”
Paul slipped into the ancient rhythms, his words echoing the tale as poets had told it for millennia. “The Trojans wandered in wretched plight around their homes, and with groans unutterable crawled amid the corpses. And all about the city dolorous howls of dogs uprose, and every home rang with the cries of women, like to the screams of cranes, which see an eagle stooping on them from the sky and scream long terror-shrieks in dread of Zeus’s bird.”
Selene felt herself drawn back to that night of horrors, when all the gods of Olympus witnessed the gruesome consequences of their hubris. Around her, the others sat silently as Paul finished his tale. “The wine left in the mixing bowls blended with blood. The fire-glow mounted upward to the sky, the red glare spread its wings over the firmament … and all the city sank down into hell.”
Tears ran down Paul’s cheeks. Selene felt the sting of grief in her own eyes. “You see,” her brother said, coming back to himself. “For the first time in all his life, Mars saw war from the victims’ eyes. He looked at his spear not as an instrument of strength, but as a symbol of his own savagery. And he no longer wanted to live. When the men in black armor burst into his fortress, Mars handed them his spear himself.”
“But they were just visions forced on him by the cult,” Selene said, explaining to the others about Morpheus’s crown.
“Perhaps,” Paul said with a weary nod. “But that didn’t make them any less true.”
Silence fell once more. Philippe’s face was carved of stone, as if he dared not allow any emotion into his heart. Flint kept his focus on his tools, still tinkering with the tablet in his hands. And then, after a long moment, Dash began to play the reed pipe he’d fashioned. Not a simple shepherd’s tune, but a melody Selene only dimly remembered. Only once Paul began to sing along did she recognize it. The Hymn to Ares.
Ares, chariot-rider, golden-helmed, shield-bearer, harnessed in bronze, mighty with the spear,
O defense of Olympus, sceptered King of manliness,
Who whirls your fiery sphere among the planets in their sevenfold courses,
Hear me, helper of men.
Paul’s voice began softly, hesitantly, as if he barely remembered the words. But it grew in strength as the song drew to a close.
Shed down a kindly ray from above upon my life,
That I may drive away bitter cowardice from my head.
She knew the prayer came from his heart. And though Mars would never hear the words, they seemed to help. Paul dashed the tears from his eyes and looked imploringly at his sister. “We have to find him. Before it’s too late.”
He spoke with a sudden certainty—as if he were the God of Prophecy once more. She wondered suddenly if she’d been wrong—could the cult really kill Mars tonight? What would that do to his son? His brother? What would it do to her city?
She glanced out the window, where the moon had started its descent: It was already after ten. Just as she’d begun to worry that all hope was lost, a loud pulse issued from Flint’s hands. A red flash shone on his suddenly grinning face. “I found him.”
Philippe gave his stepfather a wan, relieved smile. “Voilà! Who needs supernatural telepathy or magical homing beacons when you’ve got the Smith and some good old-fashioned twenty-first-century technology?”
Chapter 24
GOD OF BLOODLUST
The massive Rockefeller Center Christmas tree towered over the ice rink, where the last skaters of the night glided arm in arm in lazy circles as the clock ticked toward midnight. The tree had grown for nearly a hundred years before men cut it down. Now particolored lights obscured its majestic boughs, and a heavy crystal star augmented its natural ninety-foot height. Selene turned her back on it and stared instead at the plaza’s iconic central skyscraper, its soaring sides illuminated by floodlights against the night sky.
Flint looked up from his tablet in confusion. “The tracking device says Martin’s up there somewhere.”
“But where?” Philippe begged. “Hurry, Papa. It’s almost midnight. What better time to commit a ritual murder?”
“I bet I know where he is,” Selene said, a cold knot of dread settling in her stomach. “The Saturday Night Live studios, where Orion’s cult murdered that young actress on live TV. Check the eighth floor.” If they’d already taken Martin to such a public location, then there was no time to waste. It had taken them too long to get off the island, too long to find a place to dock the boat on the East Side, too long to make their way to Rockefeller Center.
But Flint shook his head. “Martin sure as hell isn’t that close.” His eyes traveled upward, from the building’s main entrance all the way to its roof, nearly seventy floors above. “What’s at the top?”
“The Rainbow Room,” Paul answered. “I’ve performed there. Super classy spot with an amazing view. Used mostly for private events.”
“Sounds perfect.” Selene’s pulse quickened. “No one to disturb the ritual.”
Dash hummed thoughtfully. “As a frequent invitee to the city’s most exclusive soirees, I happen to know you can’t get to the Rainbow Room without taking a special elevator that’s only activated by an employee, and the place is crawling with guards. No way we’re getting anywhere without taking a few of them down.”
Selene grabbed him, not bothering to be gentle. “No more innocent mortals will die tonight, got that? These are my people, I will—”
She stopped talking when a woman’s shriek cut the air. She spun toward the skating rink. A brawl had broken out in the center of the ice: One man lay on the ground, a silent bloody heap. Another stood above him, pinning his wrists to the ground with the blades of his skates while a woman screamed and tried to yank him backward. On the other side of the rink, two teenagers held an older man by the elbows while their friend threw punches at his face. Three small children lay on the ice in a scrum, their parents trying in vain to pull them apart while yelling threats at one another. Security guards rushed onto the rink, made clumsy by the ice. An attendant in skates glided across more easily, but he was too scrawny to stop the violence. Selene stood, momentarily frozen in confused horror, before an NBC cameraman nearly bowled her over as he rushed to the edge of the rink, a well-coiffed man with a microphone on his heels. She heard the distant wail of police sirens, growing louder every moment.
She turned back to the skyscraper, her heart pounding against her ribs. The sudden convulsion of violence could have only one cause.
Without a word, she ran toward the entrance, trusting that her brothers would follow her. As they pushed through the revolving doors, the security personnel rushed toward the brawl, leaving the express elevator momentarily unguarded. The Athanatoi crowded in together, staring in silence as the numbers of the floors flashed by. They knew they were too late to save Mars. They could only hope they’d arrive in time to bring his killers to justice.
Selene knew there’d be cameras in the elevator. She couldn’t risk taking out her bow, but the desire to arm herself was like a physical ache. Finally, the doors opened onto a shiny black hallway. A short set of stairs led to closed double doors—the Rainbow Room’s main entrance. Paul pointed to a smaller unmarked door nearby. “That leads to the musicians’ green room,” he whispered. “It lets out onto a balcony that looks over the ballroom.”
“Paul and I will go in from the balcony,” Selene said quietly to the others as she assembled her bow. “Dash, you stay here and stop anyone trying to escape. Philippe and Flint, you take the main entrance.”
She opened the door to the green room with her bow at the ready. She caught sight of herself in the wide mirror. Salt caked her skin and hair, turning the black strands gray and accentuating every crease in her face. For the first time in her long life, she looked like an old woman. She gripped her bow a little harder and hurried out onto the balcony.
The room stood empty. Below them lay a gleaming circular dance floor surrounded by soft silver carpet. Chandeliers dripped from the ceiling. Ribbons of crystal prisms hung in each massive window, but they did nothing to obscure the view. Manhattan flared brilliantly on three sides—the Empire State Building to the south, the Chrysler Building to the east, Central Park to the north. Selene’s gaze took it all in in a heartbeat. Only then did she look directly beneath the balcony. From the room’s main entrance, Philippe cried out at the same moment.
The God of Bloodlust lay sprawled naked on a banquet table, a pair of ram’s horns strapped to his head and a great gaping hole where his heart should be.
Philippe stumbled forward and stood trembling beside his father’s body. Selene raced down the stairs to the dance floor, Paul at her heels. Flint just stood frozen in the doorway, staring at his brother.
Selene sprinted a circuit of the room, darted into the kitchen, and back out into the corridor, scouring every inch of the sixty-fifth floor before returning to the ballroom.
“No one here,” she reported to the others. “They must have left immediately after they killed him. There’s got to be evidence here that’ll help us track them, but I’d need a full forensic kit to pick it all up. Which means we need to call in an anonymous tip to the cops. We can’t stay.”
Dash looked pointedly at Philippe, who had laid his hands on his father’s chest, as if to will him back to life. He wasn’t crying, Selene saw, just shaking so violently that he could barely stand. Flint hobbled into the room and took his stepson in his arms. In his strong grasp, Philippe finally stilled.
“I didn’t even know him,” he murmured into the Smith’s broad shoulder. “What Paul said about my father finally understanding the horror of what he’d done … I thought maybe Love and War could finally reconcile.”
Selene spoke to the others with quiet urgency. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here.” Dash stood with his eyes glued on the body, all merriment gone, but she could tell he heard her. Paul, on the other hand, had sunk into the nearest chair, his gaze fixed on the tall window, staring at his own reflection in the glass.
“When Detective Free
man calls me about the crime, I’ll get back in,” Selene went on, “but I want to make sure there’s no evidence that will lead back to us.” Dash nodded, donned a pair of gloves from his jacket pocket, and began to pick Philippe’s stray hairs off the body. Mars’s eyes were open and staring. A bright, crystalline gray. Not unlike mine, Selene realized with a start. She wanted to close them for him, but dared not.
“We should take Mars with us,” Flint said, still holding Philippe. “To give him the proper rites.”
“We can’t,” Selene said. “We’ll never get out of here hauling a body. And we need the cops to run tests to help us figure out who these killers are. If they’re mortals, the police are our best bet to help track them down.”
Once Hansen and her team arrived, Selene wouldn’t be allowed this close to the body itself. She did her own quick examination. The wound in his chest had been carved with a sharp blade—maybe Mars’s own spear. Only a divine weapon would have killed him so easily. His heart had been completely removed—all the arteries neatly severed. Blood had pooled out of the wound and flowed down his muscled rib cage like a curtain to soak the covering beneath. Not a tablecloth, she saw now, but a sheepskin. The ram’s horns on his head made him look more monster than man.
She turned to the rest of the scene. Seven chairs had been placed along one side of the table, facing out across the room as if to take in the view. Crystal goblets stood at each setting, filled with water. An entire bowl of honeycomb sat in the center, crystalline and gleaming in its golden puddle. And on each plate, smears of fresh blood and scraps of raw meat. She bent close to sniff at it, terrified of what she might find, but it was only lamb’s flesh, not a man’s. Certainly not a god’s.
She turned back to the body. From the red glisten of the hole in his chest, she could tell he’d died only minutes ago—just before the outbreak of violence on the skating rink.
Flint was reading from his phone. “There were riots and brawls all over Midtown. At least a dozen killed. Ripple effects from Mars’s death. But now …” His voice trailed off and he looked up, meeting Selene’s eyes. “They’ve already stopped. As if all the bloodlust and rage were simply a nightmare to be woken from.”
Winter of the Gods Page 23