Rules of Seduction

by Jenna Mullins

  “Bailed. Probably at home bleaching his bathtub or whatever.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Dean says. He tilts his head at Lola and the kid who’s all over her. “What’s up with Delta Tau Douchebag?”

  Nike smirks. “I leave him alone for two seconds, and he falls under her spell.” She heaves an exaggerated sigh. “Why couldn’t Lola be the goddess of old age or poverty or venereal disease?”

  “Because there is no goddess of venereal disease,” Dean says, tipping the last of his amber drink into his mouth.

  “You’d have met her,” Nike laughs. “But seriously, the goddess of love? Just my luck. It’s a good thing she’s my best friend. Otherwise I’d kill her.”

  “So this is about that game, right? How many points is that guy?” Dean feels himself getting antsy. He’s heard so many stories about Nike and Mark’s sex competitions, it all starts to blur together.

  She shrugs. “His name’s Astor. He’s just some guy from one of my classes at Columbia. He’s only about half as stupid as he looks. And Mark hardly plays anymore.”

  “Mark doesn’t like when you play the game of sleeping with every mortal you see? Shocking.” Dean rolls his eyes. It makes the room spin even more.

  She winks and plants a friendly kiss on his cheek. “Don’t go too hard tonight, Dean-o, okay? I’ve got brunch plans tomorrow that don’t involve scraping you off some barroom floor.”

  He doesn’t dignify her with a response.

  The music picks up, somehow louder, as Nike shimmies over to Lola and Astor, easily sliding between them. Lola looks happy to be left alone, and ducks off the dance floor to say hello to Dean.

  “Playing Nike’s games? Really?” he slurs but the music is so loud at this point that he can barely hear his own voice.

  If he hadn’t known Lola for a thousand lifetimes, he could swear she was trying to seduce him, the way she curls her fingers into the leather cord around his neck and leans in to whisper in his ear. For a brief moment, he’s caught; he imagines turning his head to kiss her, claiming her mouth and pressing against her body…

  “Had a weird day at work. Nadia came by,” she says. She says something else, but whatever it is she wants to tell him, it’s lost in the noise and the fog in his head, just a puff of her breath against his ear. He shakes his head, and she turns away and heading back to Nike.

  It’s not a bad idea to put some distance between them, because he knows better than to take her flirtation as invitation. He pulls out his cell phone and checks the time—it’s not even eleven o’clock yet. The message from Nadia pops up. Been a while. Can you meet up tonight? And then another one: It’s important.

  Dean frowns, runs a hand through his too-long brown hair, and heads for the glowing (if decidedly blurry) exit sign. In two thousand years, Dean can’t recall one time Nadia has ever asked him—or anyone—for help. She’s the one who does the helping. He blinks a few times, trying to clear his vision and his head. That drink he swiped from Nike was full of sugar and fruit and soda—he needs something basic, next. Water. Actually, maybe gin.

  He’s almost made it through the dancing, pulsing horde when Jane and Jenny pop out of nowhere, blocking his path. He’s so wasted that for a fraction of a second, he thinks he’s seeing double. “You’re not leaving,” Jane says. “Are you seriously trying to leave? Jenny, he’s leaving and he didn’t even say goodbye!”

  “Just gotta step out and call a friend,” he says apologetically. He reaches up to press his thumb to her generous lower lip, just because he can. “I’ll be right back. Maybe.”

  “But we brought you shots,” Jenny whines—and it’s true. Tiny glasses of tequila and lime wedges are caught between their fingers. She tilts her head, and he sees a line of salt sprinkled on her collarbone.

  He sighs, and tells himself, as he has so many times before, that it’s not his fault. There are two women standing, literally, between him and the door. And they bought him drinks! Just one more, for the road… If Nadia does need help with something, he’s going to need some fuel. He opens his mouth against their collarbones, Jenny first, then Jane, and lets them pour the shots down his throat.

  Before he knows what has happened, the girls have set the glasses aside and grabbed his hands, dragging him up to the DJ booth. Apparently they’ve decided that they want to dance at the highest possible point in the room. “I’ve got to go make a phone call!” he shouts, but his words are lost in the pulse of the dubstep blaring through the speakers. Jenny eases Dean’s leather jacket off his shoulders and slips it on.

  Up in the booth, looking down over everyone, something happens to Dean, this sudden overwhelming need for a fix—but not booze, or drugs. He needs power. He knows it’s the only thing that will make the bad feeling in his stomach go away. Then he’ll call Nadia.

  The big new EDM star behind the turntable doesn’t take much convincing when Dean fixes him with a blurry gaze. “Let me take a spin,” he says impulsively, lips shaping the words oddly. He recognizes the sort of struck-dumb awe on the DJ’s face as he makes way. Mortals are so easy sometimes.

  This is the feeling, he thinks, as he looks out over the crowd, fingers nimble on the table, skilled and steady despite how drunk he is, and despite his considerable lack of experience. Below him, two thousand people worship the beat he’s manipulating with his hands, their bodies in sync, a sort of ritual madness inside while the city spins on outside. For a moment, he is the closest he’s been to true godliness in centuries. They believe in him. They revere him. Their bodies spin and convulse as if he’s choreographing it all himself. His veins thrum with the power of it. This is the feeling.

  Worried, suddenly, that the rush will end badly, or just end too soon, Dean fumbles into his pocket for the Shade he’d stashed there earlier. He comes up empty. He left the stuff in his jacket, probably, and now the twins are too far away for him to call them over. Besides, they look pretty happy gyrating against Nathan near the bar.

  Music still filling his ears, he’s nudged by a girl who has somehow made her way past the security and into the booth. “Hi,” she purrs, her blonde hair falling against his skin, and while the club is too loud to actually hear her, he feels the vibration of the word against his lower lip as she closes her mouth around it. He’s pretty sure he’s never seen her before, but he’s all kinds of wasted, so what the hell.

  One hand still on the turntable, he catches the stranger around the waist and kisses her. She’s not what he came here looking for, but they never are, are they? The thing he’s after won’t be found in the mouths of strangers, but he’ll gladly keep searching. He leans into the kiss, her hips bumping his and her hands sliding under the V of his shirt, curling hot around his shoulders. He waves for the DJ to take over again, so that he can get both hands on her slim, strong waist. He mouths along her neck, tastes sweat and sweet vanilla perfume, and he can’t help but moan a little when her fingernails scratch along his scalp, her hands carding through his hair.

  Jane and Jenny show up at some point. They’re not mad about his new friend they’re just laughing, this bell-chime of a giggle that somehow pierces through the throbbing music. He wants to follow them wherever they’re going.

  “Sorry,” he starts to say to the stranger, as he pulls away. “My friends—” But he goes quiet as he sees the girl’s eyes.

  They’re blazing flat and black, black, black in the dim light from the strobe, like her pupils have consumed her irises entirely. Despite the heat and passion that had consumed them, her expression is emotionless and cold. A shiver runs up his spine.

  Then Jane’s hand wanders under his t-shirt, resting against the flat of his back as she and her sister drag him toward the door. He shrugs, forgetting, and he succumbs to the undertow of the twins as they pull him back into the crush of people.

  It’s nearly four in the morning when he finally leaves, the twins pink-cheeked and dark-eyed, one tucked under each of his arms. Outside it’s pouring rain, thunderous and relentless, nearly
as loud as it was in the club, and his T-shirt gets soaked straight through in seconds—one of the girls is still wearing his leather jacket—but the alcohol in his veins does its job, warms him from the inside out. For a second he remembers there was something he was supposed to do, but he can’t think straight as he and the girls run west along the street, drenched by the noisy, heavy rain, waving for a cab, which flies past, already taken.

  In his peripheral vision, Dean catches sight of the Hudson, waters churning from the storm. He squints. He must be really fucked up, because from here he swears the river looks blood red. The water is a deep, violent-looking crimson, foaming gruesome pink where the waves break against the city walls. The world tilts, then. The sky spins. One of the twins pulls her drenched shirt over her head, stands in the rain in her black bra, and they’re dancing and laughing, screaming, singing.

  And everything goes white.

  III

  Weston

  Weston startles awake, sitting straight up in bed, muscles already bunched up with anxiety and eyes darting around the sun-drenched bedroom in his obscenely overpriced Lower East Side loft. He knows that in the last few centuries, many gods have started sleeping more often, but he sleeps only one night every couple of weeks. When he does, it’s disorienting as hell. He’s never quite sure, when he wakes up, what century he’s in or what name he’s going by.

  He scrubs a hand through his sandy-colored hair and gets his bearings, fumbling for his phone on the nightstand. It’s Sunday.

  His stomach swoops miserably, nausea crawling in his gut. It’s the same unbearable feeling of fear and dread he’s woken up to every time he’s fallen asleep for the last few months.

  He’s in serious debt—the kind of debt that doesn’t involve money, the kind of debt that only a god can owe. And it’s going to come due very, very soon.

  Weston slumps back against his pillows, pressing a hand to his bare chest. His heart is hammering away.

  He spent the night alone, writing new songs and avoiding texts from his friends. He was supposed to meet up with Dean, Lola, and Nike at that new club, Epiphany. But when Mark messaged Weston to say that he’d be joining, Weston bailed.

  It’s not that he doesn’t want to hang out with Mark, exactly. Lately, Mark just reminds him of something Weston doesn’t really want to remember.

  Now it’s barely past eight in the morning and he’s already got fourteen missed calls from Jared, his overbearing manager. He misses the old softie, Bob something-or-other, who managed him back in the 1950s. Weston was a clean-cut matinee idol then, wooing the soda shop teenagers with his arrogant grin, just a suggestion of a swivel in his hips.

  But in the Internet age, there are only so many times a beloved celebrity can die tragically and reemerge a few years later in another country with a new haircut and a new talent. He’d only been back in the spotlight as his current incarnation—a heartbroken Midwestern kid with an acoustic guitar and a million dollar record contract—for a few weeks when his uncanny resemblance to a matinee idol who’d drowned in 1959 became a favorite topic of Twitter conversation. Buzzfeed dug up a pile of fifty-year-old photos for one of their lists, and Entertainment Weekly stuck him in a “separated at birth” round-up before he’d even dropped his first single.

  Next time, he’ll have to be more careful. If there is a next time.

  Where most of his friends like to wax nostalgic about the good old days, as a god of communication, Wes has to admit the twenty-first century has some perks: millions of Twitter followers desperate for his every word, a hundred journalists clamoring for a quote about the inspiration for his next record, even a handful of doe-eyed singers climbing the country music charts who are begging their publicists for his number. He’ll be sorry to see it go.

  Last week, he told his manager that he was going to duck out of the limelight for a while. “I need to live my life so I have something to write about,” he bullshitted. “Can’t write a record worth of songs about staring at the four walls of a recording studio, now can you? I’ve gotta go have experiences, man. Feel the wind in my hair. Hook up with a cougar or two. Something.”

  It’s not like Weston can tell him the truth. Sorry, homie, I’m just not in the mood to do Ryan Seacrest’s radio show right now. See, my d-bag cousin Chazz is going to come drag my soul to Hades pretty soon, and there’s not a whole lot I can do about it.

  Weston stretches and stands up, instinctively checking that everything is in its place as he makes his bed, checking for tight corners and neat folds. He’s lived in a thousand different places, but there are some things he keeps constant. He likes gleaming hardwood floors, minimal furniture, sleek lines and lots of white, bright light spilling in. He keeps things organized—his closet carefully arranged, books and DVDs tucked out of sight, in alphabetical order. This particular loft costs him an arm and a leg, but like most gods, he’s got a pretty bottomless well of resources. Through thousands of years, you learn how to prepare for economic downturn. Plus, priceless artifacts and gems tend to remain priceless.

  He opens his curtains with one hand and replaces his phone in the charger. It’s all part of his morning routine. He turns on his espresso machine, then showers under water as scalding hot as he can get it, scrubbing every inch of his body methodically. Then he ties a towel around his waist, and brushes his teeth, counting the rotations of his brush. When he reaches into his closet for a pair of artfully faded jeans he had tailored in London forty years ago, he knows exactly where they’re hanging, ironed and carefully hung, spaced evenly with the other pairs.

  Shirtless, Weston settles down at his counter with his latte and his iPad, beginning to scroll through his newsfeed. Most gods don’t bother with the mortal hum-drum, but Weston likes the mortal news. It calms him down.

  Usually.

  Today, he only gets past the first headline before he rockets himself up off his stool and rushes to the big windows overlooking the East River. He has to blink a few times before his brain can even process what he sees. The whole river is a deep, violent red, an open vein gushing between Manhattan and Long Island.

  A chill settles over Weston, an uneasy burn igniting in his lungs. He returns to the news, where speculation on what they’re calling The Red Tide runs rampant—everything from alarmist pundits blaming the president’s environmental policies to expert scientists offering up reassuring perfectly good explanations. One scientist, the face of some new water purification technology called the Chemical Analog Oscillating Structure, has been chosen to head up an investigative committee—and he’s already telling CNN that his team has found that a harmless chemical runoff has caused the phenomenon.

  But Weston can’t shake the unrest he feels. He recalls a distant memory, his usually-drunk grandfather Odin telling him a horror story he never thought would come true.

  The end begins with the death of hope, Odin had slurred, drinking from a clay jug. Write this down, grandson. Truths should be recorded. The end begins with the death of hope. The first plague will be blood for water…

  Weston’s heart slams against his ribcage. His fingers feel stiff and numb as he starts a news search, scouring for something he doesn’t want to find.

  It takes him forever, trying a million different search terms, but finally…there it is. Just a little blurb in on the New York Night’s website, just after the report of a socialite getting out of her limo sans underwear.

  ‘Angel’ commits suicide in hotel pool: Jane Doe found dead by traumatized youths.

  Weston has to read the first paragraph of the article four times before it really registers, and when it finally does, his blood runs icy cold. He runs to the bathroom, suddenly nauseous again. He gags over the sink, presses both palms to the cool countertop, and tries to catch his breath.

  In the mirror, he looks pale. The smattering of freckles beneath his blue eyes and the tattoos—words, mostly, names and places and quotations from the greatest writers and philosophers of all time in elaborate, artful calligraphy
—curling around his ribcage stand out in stark relief against his skin.

  Dead. The word keeps pounding in his head, with an awful kind of finality. Dead.

  Gods are immortal, but they aren’t invincible. They’ll live forever if no grave harm comes to them, but they can, and do, kill one another, and they can kill themselves, if they get desperate enough. That’s when some asshole shows up to chaperone their souls to the darkest bowels of the underworld, where they wander alone, disconnected and disintegrating, never to be seen topside again.

  Weston brushes his teeth again. But are they really clean? He brushes a third time, just in case. Still, he feels horribly sick to his stomach.

  In his bedroom, he pulls the plastic wrapping off of one of the dry-cleaned shirts in his closet. He rolls the sleeves of the blue button-down up only enough to keep the tattoos on his arms hidden, realizing his hands are shaking, just slightly. He chooses a worn leather cuff to cover the tat on his wrist, willing himself to move slowly and deliberately, despite the racing of his heart. The wrist tattoo is the only one he doesn’t like to look at. Chazz did it, a few centuries back, a permanent reminder of a debt that has still gone unpaid. An ornate hourglass, the sand sliding down from one side to the other, one grain a day for the last hundred and fifty years.

  Over the past few months, the tattoo has started to ache and burn beneath the leather. It’s almost time for him to pay up…or face the ultimate consequence.

  He pushes the thought out if his mind. He has to keep it together. He has to stay ordered. He makes sure his hair is cooperating, gelled in all the right places, before grabbing a giant pair of sunglasses, taking a deep breath, and heading for the elevator.

  The elevator only descends one floor before it stops again. The doors slide open to reveal an empty hallway. Weston sighs, hitting the close button with a knuckle.

  As the elevator doors begin to shut, he hears a slam in the hall. Someone wedges a dingy canvas sneaker between the doors and they spring back open.