“Yeah,” he lied. After fleeing New York, Saturn might have gone after Selene’s father, Zeus, like he’d threatened to. He might be holed up in some dingy mithraeum, scheming with other members of the Host. Maybe he was just enjoying life back in the Old World, reveling in past glories among the ruins of the Roman Forum. Theo didn’t care.
There was only one person he wanted to find.
Selene’s body lies at the bottom of the harbor. He knew that. He hadn’t completely lost his mind, not yet anyway. But in his time with Selene, Theo had learned that nothing was impossible.
The tetractys was more than a pretty triangle. It was a code. A clue. The key to the pattern that defined the universe.
Ruth kept talking as Theo gathered his books. He nodded vaguely at her words as they walked off campus and into the tumult of Broadway, but he heard only the insistent whisper in his own mind:
If the Pythagoreans were right, the tetractys reveals the divine pattern that created life in the first place.
Which means it can create it again.
And I can bring Selene back from the dead.
Chapter 3
WILY ONE
“Do you understand who you’re dealing with?” the Huntress demanded again of the man pinned beneath her arrows on the mithraeum floor.
His lips twisted. “Miss Selene DiSilva, I presume.” His voice carried a faint Germanic accent.
She leaned on the arrows in his hands again, enjoying his gasp of pain. “Wrong. I gave up that name when you and your precious Pater attacked my city.”
The American passport safely stored in her apartment in Rome identified her as Selene Neomenia, born in New York, New York, in 1986. But she wasn’t about to tell that to the Mithraist.
“Now stop resisting and tell me where you’re holding my father.”
His thin lips remained firmly shut, his pale eyes unblinking.
“Do you have him in one of the other temples in Ostia?” she demanded, watching his reaction.
One corner of his mouth twitched into a fleeting smile.
“I’ll take that as a no.” She leaned closer to him, her words a low growl. “You think you’re doing the right thing, don’t you? Protecting your leader? Preserving his plans for your Holy Order? But do you know what your precious Pater Patrum has done? He killed my twin brother before my eyes.”
The memory sliced like a blade even now. Apollo, Bright One, God of Music, Healing, and Prophecy. God of everything civilized and beautiful in the world. Her glorious twin. The Host’s initiates had lashed his back with their whips, striping his tunic with red lines as brilliant as the clouds at sunset. Selene had offered to sacrifice her own life for her twin’s—the Pater killed him anyway.
“Apollo looked at me while he died,” she hissed at the man beneath her feet. “‘I can’t see the sun’—that’s what he said to me. The god who once drove the sun across the sky in his golden chariot was reduced to a bloody corpse, his heart sliced from his body with a sickle.”
The man’s gaze flicked away from her. His jaw tightened.
“You can’t look me in the eye, can you?” she seethed. “You know what you’ve done is wrong.” She eased the pressure on the arrows in his hands. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she lied. “Just tell me where to find my father, before your army kills him, too.”
He shook his head.
“Is that why your Pater cuts the hearts from his victims?” she snarled, losing patience. “Because his men have no hearts of their own?” She wrenched the arrows wider. “Talk to me, and I might not punch two more arrows through your feet.”
His eyes rolled back in his head. She thought he might pass out—not an ideal conclusion to their fight, but something she could work with. Instead, with the strength and speed of a trained soldier, he jackknifed his knees into her gut. Her grip loosened.
One palm swung toward her face, her own arrowhead his weapon. She dodged. Her weight off balance, he hooked a leg over her hip and threw her.
They both scrambled from the ground and hopped onto opposite platforms. The man faced her with bleeding hands outspread—a crucified Christ. Selene held her bow before her like a staff.
He vaulted onto her platform, slapping his hands together as if to impale her on the arrow points like a bear in a trap. Instincts just faster than a mortal’s sent her bow flashing, kicking one arrow aside but only diverting the other. The point sliced into a tendon in her hip. Her left leg went dead—she buckled to the floor once more.
He paused, his smooth face flushed and glistening with sweat, a rosy-cheeked child with arrows in his bloody palms.
She stared up at him, defiant. “Not sure whether to kill me, take me captive, or run away, are you?” She pressed a hand against the wound in her side. “They don’t call me One Who Does Not Die for nothing. You may try to kill me, but you won’t succeed. And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t come alone. My backup will be here any second. And his rage will be volcanic.”
The man whipped his head around with obvious trepidation. Taking advantage of his distraction, she jammed her heel into his ankle. He stayed on his feet but staggered off balance. She surged up, ready to knock her prey out with a well-placed fist. The man in black ducked the blow, but her words clearly had an effect. He ran.
On any other night, she would’ve had him. But her hip gave out, her leg collapsed, and her quarry dashed away into the night.
Selene cursed roundly and grabbed hold of the platform edge to lurch back to her feet. Limping, she gave chase. Back down the alley, past the crumbling brick tenements. The entire city was a necropolis, its crumbled columns lying like toppled funerary urns, its roofless ruins as empty as desecrated sarcophagi.
Instead of a hundred Roman legionaries protecting its gate, a single night watchman, currently fast asleep at his post, guarded the archeological site. The Huntress and her prey had the city to themselves. Nearly.
Flint Hamernik—whom the fifty thousand residents of ancient Ostia had worshiped as Vulcan, God of Volcanoes, and the Greeks had called Hephaestus, the crippled Smith—lay in wait at the opposite end of the city. She spared a second to fumble out her cell phone and call him.
“No good,” she panted. “They’re not holding my father in Ostia, and the Mithraist got away, but I’m sending him toward you. If you trap him, we can still get some answers.”
“Wait,” came the rumbled response. “There’s—”
“Just be ready!” Catching a glimpse of her prey up ahead, she hung up.
Arrow-speared arms pumping, the man in black veered left at the Decumanus Maximus. Selene sent an arrow skimming just past his cheek, forcing him to turn right instead. A moment later, he made for the western border of the city—another arrow steered him to the south. A third shaft stopped him from ducking into a ruined home. A fourth forced him past a round temple to a forgotten god. All the while, Selene kept him just within sight, each arrow a hungry wolf in her pack, herding her quarry toward capture.
One arrow left. She sent it sailing over his shoulder, driving him into a triangular field at the very edge of Ostia.
The wound in her hip shot blinding sparks of pain through her leg like fire from Zeus’s thunderbolt. Wincing, she rounded the corner into the Campus of the Magna Mater, the field where the Romans had paid homage to the Great Mother in an age long past. The chase was almost over, Selene’s part in it complete. She’d once cherished her role as a solitary huntress, but now she was glad she had backup. She staggered forward and waited for Flint to spring his trap.
Except Flint was nowhere to be found.
Her enemy awaited instead.
The man in black stumbled to a halt, the arrows still protruding from his palms. He gave a breathless laugh and said something in German, clearly relieved to have found his comrades. Another man—also clean-shaven, his close-cropped hair dark against pale skin—crouched before a soaring stone sculpture of a pine tree, chiseling it from its foundation. But it was the old man standing near
by who drew Selene’s gaze.
Saturn. The Titan God of Time. The Wily One. Pater Patrum of the Host, murderer of so many. The man Selene had been hunting ever since he escaped her clutches in New York six months before.
Her grandfather.
His lined face bore a branching scar down one cheek that disappeared beneath a neat white beard. His hair had burned away from half his head, leaving only shiny scalp behind. Despite his scars, he towered over his mortal acolytes, his skin glowing faintly in the darkness with a divine aura he should no longer possess. Like so many of her kin, Selene’s grandfather had been willing to do anything to regain his old powers—he’d just been more successful than most. Rather than kill humans, the millennia-old Mithraic cult he’d created had murdered four members of his own family. The sacrifice of so many Athanatoi had granted him power that Selene could never match.
He held his divine sickle with a firm grip, the curved blade reflecting the light that emanated from his flesh. Even now, Selene could hear the bloody ripping sound it had made as it cut the heart from her twin brother’s chest. Apollo. Hades. Mars. Prometheus. All sacrificed to Saturn’s cult.
She wanted to laugh. Or sob. After all this time, all the complicated schemes and fruitless interrogations, Saturn had walked into her reach of his own volition. She would finally have her revenge.
She reached instinctively for her quiver.
Empty.
At her gasp of dismay, the old man looked up.
His scowl only deepened the creases on his ravaged face.
“Not happy to see me?” she called out to him.
He turned back to the man chiseling at the pine tree with a hissed “Hurry.”
She wanted more than anything to send a golden arrow straight through his traitorous heart. But she’d come to Ostia without her divine shafts, hoping merely to find the Mithraists’ lair—not to confront her grandfather directly. Even if she’d had any wooden arrows left, they’d do no permanent damage to Saturn’s immortal flesh. And his sickle would slice her apart if she attacked him hand to hand.
That didn’t mean she was helpless.
She reached under the collar of her shirt for the gold necklace Flint had given her months before. The moment she snapped open the clasp, it unfurled into a long, gleaming whip. She ignored her grandfather and sent the lash whistling toward her original quarry instead. It snaked around the young man’s leg and toppled him to the ground.
Ignoring the searing pain in her hip, she lunged. A twist of the whip’s handle and it hardened, straightened, metamorphosed into a javelin.
She jammed its sharp tip against the soft flesh of the young man’s throat while stomping the arrows in his hands deep into the dirt, anchoring him in place. This time, she stood above his head so he couldn’t knock her loose. He kicked with both legs anyway, succeeding only in tearing larger holes in his palms.
She ignored his agonized groans and called to her grandfather instead. “Tell me where you’ve taken my father!”
“Or?” Saturn asked calmly.
“Or I kill your man.”
“What makes you think I would bother to save him?”
“I killed all your acolytes in New York. You don’t have many more to spare.” She hoped that was true.
“My followers know what future awaits them when the Last Age arrives. Resurrection. Eternal life. Salvation. Why fear death?”
“But perhaps they fear pain.” Selene spun the javelin so its tip drilled a shallow hole beneath the man’s spasming Adam’s apple. She glared down at her young captive. “If your Pater won’t do what I ask, maybe you will. Last chance: Tell me where my father is.”
“I don’t—” he gasped.
“Yes, you do.” She whipped her javelin around to slam it against his jaw. “My father. Don’t pretend you don’t know who he is. Jupiter. Lightning Bringer.” She smacked him again with each title. “Leader of the Fates … King of the Gods … ZEUS.”
“It won’t work,” Saturn said, sounding mildly amused. “He won’t tell you anything. Have you forgotten that I’m his Pater Patrum?”
“And have you forgotten who I am?” She jabbed the weapon’s point into the man’s right shoulder, then his left, twisting it with each shallow cut. “The Arrow-Showering One. The Punisher. The Huntress.”
A grinding of stone interrupted her tirade. She’d nearly forgotten the dark-haired man sawing away at the stone pine tree in the center of the field. He put down his tools and began tying a series of ropes and pulleys around the statue. “Almost there, Pater.”
“Good,” Saturn replied. “Finish quickly. We must take our treasures and leave.” The wary glance he cast at his granddaughter proved he hadn’t forgotten she was the Punisher after all. He’d been fleeing her clutches for months; even now, with his soldiers around him, he’d rather run than attempt to add her to his pantheon of sacrifices.
“Stop!” Selene cried, pressing her javelin once more against her captive’s throat. “I don’t care if this kid is just one more innocent deluded by your lies, dreaming of a Last Age that will never occur. I will kill him if you try to leave.”
“No,” Saturn said, “you won’t.” He gave a brief nod to the wounded man lying beneath her javelin.
With a strength of will she’d rarely seen in a mortal since the battlefields of Troy, the young man ripped his right hand free of her arrow, leaving his pinky and ring finger behind. He tore out the shaft piercing his other palm.
Then plunged it into his own eye.
Furious at the waste, the stupidity, Selene kicked the body aside and raised her javelin. She knew Saturn was fast enough to dodge the throw. She was counting on it. One more step to his left, she prayed, and he’ll trip Flint’s booby trap. The steel net lay buried in the grass, ready to spring around its captive and inject him with a neurotoxin powerful enough to paralyze even an Athanatos.
Her grandfather took one look at her raised javelin and tsked mildly, as if reading her thoughts. “Put that down, child. You may be too hard to hold captive, but not all the Olympians are quite so fierce.” He took a deliberate step to the side. No steel net rose up around him. Instead, she finally saw what had lain behind him the whole time:
The trap was already sprung. And Flint lay writhing in its grip.
Chapter 4
THE LAME GOD
Selene stood frozen, javelin raised, staring at her captive friend. Flint’s broad shoulders strained against the metal threads of the net, but his massive arms only twitched weakly. She saw no sign of his crutches, and his withered legs lay trapped beneath him, motionless. His head jerked—she could make out the whites of his rolling eyes. With his usual uncanny skill at inventing weapons, Flint had embedded multiple needles inside the net, each one ready to administer a shot of paralytic neurotoxin in case their Mithraist proved recalcitrant. One dose would prevent the captive from either escaping or killing himself. Two doses would knock him completely unconscious so they could transport him. Three would kill him outright.
Saturn raised his hand. He held a button affixed to a long cord stretching from the net. His thumb hovered over it. “I’ve already used one dose to keep the Lame One quiet. If you threaten me further, granddaughter, I’ll have no choice but to use two more.” He moved his thumb a centimeter closer to the button, then another, until Selene finally lowered her javelin.
“That’s right,” he said. “You know I can’t be beaten by your feeble plans. You know who I am.”
“Oh, I know, Grandfather. But does he?” She looked to Saturn’s remaining acolyte. The dark-haired man dropped the complicated harness he’d been securing around the pine tree statue. His eyes darted to his Pater, questioning, while his hand moved toward the gun at his hip. A spatter of moles marred his otherwise smooth cheek like a dark constellation of stars.
“Do you know this man is Saturn?” she asked him. “A pagan god?”
“Saturn, yes,” he replied, his German accent echoing his dead compatriot’s. “But he is
no pagan. The Pater is the Father.”
“Foolish child,” Saturn chided her. “He knows more of my story than you do.”
Selene pointed an accusatory finger at the mole-spattered man. “You’re a Christian, aren’t you? I’ve seen the crosses you wear, the way you genuflect before your god. You think Mithras and Jesus are the same. You think Saturn will bring you closer to them both. You’re wrong. He doesn’t give a crap about your messiah. He only works for his own power.”
“My syndexioi know the truth,” Saturn said, using the Mithraic term for an initiate into their secret cult. “I can bring them closer to Jesus. I brought the world closer to Jesus. Without me, no one would even remember his name.”
Selene gripped the javelin hard, running out of patience. But the longer her grandfather spoke, the more chance Flint had of recovering. Saturn wouldn’t know that the neurotoxin lasted only ten minutes. If she could keep him talking, they might have a shot.
“You have nothing to do with Jesus.” She turned to the dark-haired syndexios. “You claim your messiah is all about love and mercy. Turn the other cheek. I ask you, do you think your Pater believes in such compassion? What kind of Christian would murder his own family?” The young man looked at her blankly. Her voice rose in frustration. “Any ‘Last Age’ he ushers in won’t be a time of salvation and peace. The lion won’t lie down with the lamb. Don’t you see? It will be an age of greed and bloodshed and mayhem—the same horrors Saturn has always wrought on those around him. And if you let him kill my father and make himself all-powerful, it won’t just be my family that suffers. It will be the whole damn Christian world.”
“Since when do you care about Christians?” Saturn asked.
“I don’t,” she spat. “But I do care about innocent mortals. And since a lot of them happen to be Christians, I don’t have much of a choice. Protector of the Innocent, they called me. That’s a title I’m still proud to claim.”
“You think you have me all figured out.” Again, that cold, confident smile on his burnt face. “But I told you months ago that you didn’t.”
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