Nice? How about if all my friends stop telling me how to live my life? That would be nice, he thought angrily. Ruth wants me to stop researching. Gabi wants me to throw a dinner party. Selene—if she were alive to want anything anymore—would want me to live on without her.
“Screw this,” he muttered, pulling away. He turned toward the stairs, intending to spend the rest of the day up in his bedroom with his research notes, not wasting time on frivolity. Then he heard the clatter of claws on the kitchen floor and the unmistakable sound of Hippo’s tail thwacking against someone’s legs. The huge dog barreled down the hall, bumped him happily in the groin with her head, and gave Ruth’s hand a lick before hurtling back into the kitchen to greet Gabi and Minh once more, her paws slipping and skittering on the hardwood.
Selene might not have liked guests, but her dog sure did—female ones, at least.
As always, the sight of the massive, brindled dog with her floppy ears and wagging tongue softened the edges of his grief. Hippo was the only other creature in the world who’d been as devastated as Theo by Selene’s death. If she was finding a way to heal, maybe he could too.
All right, Hippo, he conceded silently. I’ll be a gracious host—but only for you. “I’m going to change,” he said more calmly. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
Upstairs, he closed the door to the bedroom—the one he’d shared with Selene for a few short and glorious months—and yanked off his tie like a man reprieved from hanging. He was free of his button-down and rifling for a T-shirt when a faint knock sounded on the door.
Ruth stood awkwardly, her eyes darting to his bare chest and then back to his face. “I want to apologize. You’re right. I should’ve asked you first. This isn’t my house.”
Somehow, Ruth’s speed at making amends only annoyed Theo more. “It’s fine, really.” He tried to banish all evidence of impatience from his voice but could tell from the hurt in her eyes that he’d failed.
She took a tentative step closer, and for the first time all day, he noticed that she’d abandoned her usual sensible biologist’s outfit. A soft blue skirt swung around her knees, tanned shoulders peeked from a sleeveless white blouse, and an enamel pendant in the shape of an amoeba hung at her collarbone—a gift Theo had bought her years ago, more as a joke than anything else. At the sight of the pendant, his annoyance dissipated, transformed into something closer to guilt. Ruth had spent the last hour—the last half a year—trying to help him, and this was how he repaid her?
“I didn’t mean to be an ass,” he said.
Ruth’s eyes, large behind her glasses, flitted back to his chest. He lifted a self-conscious hand to the pale Mercury symbol on his flesh, evidence of his run-in with Saturn’s branding iron.
“Sorry. I wasn’t staring at it,” she said quickly.
“Just at my pecs?” he asked, surprising himself with the joke, then immediately regretting it when Ruth looked away, abashed. He knew full well that she had feelings for him, feelings he had no right to encourage—at least not until he knew his own heart better. He pulled on his shirt hastily. I never should’ve let her claim the room down the hall as her own, or leave her toothbrush beside mine. But as isolated as he’d become, he could never completely divorce himself from the extrovert he’d been. Having someone to talk to, or even just to sit in silence with, had eased some of the throbbing loneliness he felt every time he saw something that reminded him of Selene. In Manhattan, that was just about everything.
That spring, the cherry trees had bloomed early in Central Park, their branches heavy with pink puffballs. When the wind blew, the petals drifted down like blushing snow. He’d sat beneath the trees, their drooping limbs forming a secret, wondrous bower, unable to believe that he’d never share such beauty with the woman he loved. Surely, he’d thought, she’ll show up, pushing aside the branches and scowling at the excessive pinkness. She’ll laugh when I say I thought she was dead. “I found a way to be reborn, of course. I’m an Athanatos! One Who Does Not Die. Or did you forget that?” But after two weeks of riotous glory, the petals had turned to brown mush, the trees leafed out and looked like any other trees—and Selene never appeared.
Theo sat heavily on the bed, one hand pressed against the still-tender skin that surrounded the Mercury brand, a constant reminder of Selene’s death. He could smell the burning flesh, the acrid tang of electricity as the lightning bolt struck them both.
Ruth sat beside him. After a moment, she laid a hesitant arm around his back, her fingers curving lightly around his shoulder. Her breast brushed his elbow. She smelled like soap and summer grass. When she’d lain beside him on the quad, the bustling students and open air had tempered the intimacy. Now his body responded involuntarily—but he didn’t move. She rested her head against his arm. Her sun-warmed hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, a few unruly wisps tickling his skin.
“Ruth,” he said finally, quietly, not sure what to say, knowing he had to say something.
“I know,” she replied in a whisper, stopping him from having to figure it out. “You’re still thinking about her, and you can’t promise me anything, and you don’t want to hurt me. You don’t know how you feel, you don’t know what you want.” He didn’t bother trying to deny it. She knew him well, this friend of his. “It’s okay,” she went on. “You don’t have to do anything.” She rested her other hand on his thigh, and he could feel its warmth through the fabric of his pants. He sat like a statue, wondering if she’d move her fingers. Wondering if he wanted her to.
Eventually, she turned her head so her mouth pressed against the flesh of his arm. She didn’t kiss him, just rested her lips there. Instinctively, he turned his head in response, his chin just touching the crown of her head. He felt her fingers curl a centimeter tighter on his shoulder, the crescents of her nails pressing into his flesh as her breath quickened. He inhaled sharply, formulating the right way to tell her to stop.
The doorbell saved him. Hippo barked, Gabi laughed, Minh’s footsteps pattered into the foyer.
“More guests to drag me from my work, kicking and screaming,” he murmured before gently pulling away. She looked up at him with a smile so trusting, so warm, that he almost told her the truth about his Pythagoras research right then. But he didn’t.
This was one quest the hero had to undertake alone.
Chapter 6
CHTHONIC ONE
Rome is not Manhattan.
Selene sent the silent thought to Theo and imagined him laughing at the understatement. Classicist that he was, he probably preferred Rome. But as she stood on a bridge over the Tiber after returning from her adventures in Ostia, the former Roman goddess Diana found the city’s famous river, for all its languid beauty, a creek compared to the mighty Hudson. The dome of Saint Peter’s looked like a squat dwarf beside the graceful spire of the Chrysler Building. And the public transportation—from the rattling, barely air-conditioned buses to the paltry metro—paled beside the intricate web of New York’s immense subway. Yet at night, when the city’s heat lifted and the floodlights set the Coliseum aglow, she had to admit that Rome felt, just a little, like home.
She looked down the river’s length. Walkways crowded with pop-up restaurants and boutiques ran along either side of the water, part of the city’s summer market. In the predawn hours, the tents stood dark, the sidewalks empty. The only movement came from the treetops that bordered the nearby roadway, their leaves rustling in the faint wind like whispers from a long-forgotten past. More than the broken pediments of the city’s Roman ruins, it was the trees that reminded her of her time as a goddess. Great flat umbrella pines, soaring columnar cypresses, gracefully drooping plane trees. They, at least, she thought, still carrying on her silent conversation, haven’t changed.
But she had. She glanced at the bloody stain at her hip, where the Mithras-worshiping syndexios had stabbed her with her own wooden arrow. When the Romans had called her Diana, Selene couldn’t have been harmed by a mortal weapon. Now her leg had stiffened s
o badly she could barely walk.
She limped down the bridge and onto the riverside walkway, grateful to still retain at least one supernatural ability: The Tiber’s waters would heal her as no mortal medicine could.
Beneath the arch of the bridge, deep in the shadows, Selene lowered herself gingerly into the gritty water. Compared to the night’s clinging heat, the tepid Tiber felt deliciously cool. She hung from her elbows, submerged only chest deep.
“I call upon you, mighty Tiber,” she prayed. “Remember your birth from a mountain spring. Do not forget the Goddess of the Wilderness. She Who Dwells on the Heights. Lend her your aid.”
Power flooded through her, stronger than the river’s sluggish current. Her hip itched where the skin knit closed, and she felt a sharp shock through the length of her leg as the tendons and nerves healed. After a few minutes, she knew she should haul herself from the water and return to her apartment to discuss the night’s events with Flint. They needed to plan their next move, to comb through any new clues that might help them track Saturn or find Zeus.
Yet still she clung to the riverbank, her legs floating motionless in the water. On the back of Flint’s motorcycle, clutching his broad chest, she’d been content to take comfort in his nearness and avoid any difficult conversations. If I go back to the apartment now, she mused, will he finally admit how he feels about me? She still wasn’t sure what she’d say if he did. She valued him, depended on him—loved him, even. But the thought of kissing him—she released the ledge, dunking her head quickly beneath the water as if to wash the image from her brain.
When they’d gotten back to Rome, she’d used her injury as an excuse to leave him in their apartment and go to the river alone. Flint hadn’t objected. In fact, he’d remained silent the entire trip from Ostia, as if he, too, wasn’t sure what to say.
Selene propped herself once more on the ledge. She rolled the thick necklace he’d forged for her between her fingers. A simple gold chain when clasped around her neck, but when it unfurled into a whip or telescoped into a javelin, the carvings along its surface burst into view. Flint had engraved the entire length with images from her past: her carefree youth dancing on the shores of Delos with her twin; her centuries of power, wreaking supernatural vengeance on the men who dared to defy her; her wanderings through Europe after the Diaspora; her lonely attempts to build a life in New York. Flint had cared for her all that time, and she’d never known.
Despite his feelings, often the whole night would pass before they exchanged ten words. Maybe we’re too much alike. Selene couldn’t repress a small sigh. For most of her existence, she’d thought a silent man the best kind. She wasn’t so sure anymore.
If you were here, Theo, you’d already have offered your opinions on everything from the hunt for my father to the plotline of the latest Star Wars movie. For months, she’d been plagued by guilt, worried that Theo would never get over her. Now, despite knowing it was for the best, she worried that he had. The warm breeze on her cheeks reminded her that they’d never shared a summer’s day. In our one frigid winter together, the only warmth came from your body pressed against—She stopped herself from imagining it any further. It would only hurt more.
With a groan more of weariness than pain, she climbed back onto the walkway. Clothes wet and clinging, hair dripping streams of water down her back, she headed to the apartment she and Flint shared. She couldn’t help thinking of the path from the Hudson River to her brownstone in Manhattan, a walk she’d taken with Theo countless times in the few months they’d known each other. Stop dreaming about someone you’ll never see again, she told herself. Start imagining a reunion with someone you will. Yet thoughts of Zeus made her feel equally guilty.
She’d gone to find her father six months earlier to warn him that Saturn’s Host would try to capture him. After faking her death in New York, she’d flown to Athens, then Crete. In the dark hours of the morning, she’d reached the Lassithi Plateau high up in the mountains. The bells of goats tocked in the distance—the herds in the village of Psychro searching for fodder among the patchy snow. Above her loomed the legendary Dictaean Cave, a black slash in the pale, moonlit cliffside.
Selene had pulled her leather jacket closer and climbed carefully toward the cave on steps made slick by the chill January rains.
The cave looked utterly deserted—a fitting home for the mad hermit her father had become. She hadn’t seen him in over fifteen hundred years—not since he’d commanded all the gods to wander forth from Olympus, unloved and forgotten, into the mortal realm. Zeus had been imposing, black-haired, with eyes of stormy gray and a beard as twisted as the lightning bolt that symbolized his rule. Yet Selene’s memories of him were not of the fearsome King, but of the doting Father. He’d taken her on his lap when she was little more than a babe. She could still remember the feel of his wiry beard as she twirled it between her fingers.
And now? As the King of the Gods, surely Zeus still retained much of his physical vigor. But his mind—she’d been told that was a different story. Once the ultimate Sky God, he’d devolved from celestial to chthonic—a creature of secrets and darkness and earth—and much of his sanity had fled at the same time.
Before her, the wide entrance to the cave yawned dark and foreboding. She could just pick out the glint of a metal staircase descending into blackness. This was the path the summer tourists took—it couldn’t be the way to Zeus’s home. Nonetheless, she stood at the top of the stairs and called softly into the night.
“Father?”
Better to give an Athanatos of Zeus’s strength fair warning of her approach.
Hearing nothing in response, she pulled a penlight from her pocket and peered into the depths. Stalactites hung like dragon’s teeth from the ceiling, black and dripping and covered in icy moss. She padded down the stairs to the first landing, then hopped over the railing and onto the cave floor, slipping a little on the slimy rock. She steadied herself and called out for her father again.
“Zeus? Jupiter? Jove?” So many names for the Father of the Gods. The King of Olympus. Yet tonight, he answered to none of them.
What will he say when he sees me again? she wondered as she moved deeper into the cave. On the frenzied journey from New York, she’d been too preoccupied with thoughts of Theo’s grief and Saturn’s escape to worry about her relationship with Zeus. That day thousands of years before, when she’d sat upon his lap, she’d asked him to grant her six wishes: a golden bow, matching arrows, and a tunic short enough to run in. A band of nymphs to be her companions and wide-antlered stags to draw her chariot. He’d given her everything, even her final wish, the one that defied every tradition of their patriarchal society: eternal chastity, her most important attribute of all. In that moment, her father’s love had felt like a rainbow meant just for her. Something beautiful and scintillating that seemed to stretch on forever. Now she wondered if that rainbow had long ago faded back into the storm clouds from which it had sprung. She still loved her father—but would he feel the same?
He’ll probably ask me where the hell I’ve been for the last fifteen centuries, she realized. Why I knew he was holed up here, slowly going mad, and did nothing to help him. She didn’t have an answer besides the honest one: I thought we’d have time. I thought we were immortal. I didn’t realize how quickly those we love can be ripped away from us. The thought of her twin’s murder at Saturn’s hand firmed her resolve.
“I’m here now, Father,” she whispered into the dark. “And I’m not going to leave you again.”
With one hand on the dripping wall for balance, she threaded her way through the forest of stone protrusions, searching for a hidden entrance to some deeper recess. It wasn’t unusual for gods to hide in plain sight like this. Perhaps deceiving mankind made them feel more powerful, or maybe they simply couldn’t resist haunting the places they’d once made sacred. Such a tendency seemed pitiful to her now, like rats scurrying gleefully toward a trash heap, happily wallowing in mankind’s unwanted leavings.
She stopped before a particularly bulbous stalagmite, its veins of rock twisting into a braided column. In the beam of her penlight, quartz flakes sparked. The stalagmite narrowed at the center, then widened again, forming the hourglass shape of Zeus’s thunderbolt, so different from the sawtoothed lightning in modern depictions.
Peering around the column, she felt a moment of triumph. Her instincts proved right: Behind it, a narrow crevice stretched to the ceiling.
Her shoulders scraped against the jagged walls as she slipped inside. Beyond the crack, the cave widened into a larger chamber, empty but for the sudden storm of bats rushing past her ears. The pings of their sonar, inaudible to humans, pierced her more acute senses like knife blades. She plugged her ears with her fingers and thought seriously about trying to shoot them down. Unfortunately, the dozen arrows in her quiver wouldn’t make a dent in the colony’s hundreds. Ducking low, she scooted forward to search the cave for signs of non-bat occupation.
White guano covered the floor like thick paint. Between the stench and the sonar, Selene nearly gave up and turned around. She saw no painted symbols or hidden messages, none of the usual clues Athanatoi left to signal their whereabouts to other divinities. The thunderbolt-shaped stalagmite might have been pure coincidence. If Zeus was truly as mad as she’d been told, maybe he didn’t want visitors. Even if he did, he might not have the resources to construct the sort of elaborate hidden lair other immortals enjoyed.
Only then, when she stopped searching the walls for some secret clue, did she notice the footprints pressed into the guano—long, bare, male footprints, the toes spread wide like those of a man used to going without shoes. Beside them were several partial bootprints from a smaller foot.
I’m not Father’s first visitor, she realized with a tremor of foreboding.
The footprints led to a mossy wall. When she placed a hand on the ice-crusted green, it opened before her, nothing but hanging vegetation disguising another crevice. She passed through to a small chamber.
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