Chapter 49
THE PERFECT NUMBER
Selene whipped toward Theo. “Open it again! Hurry!”
He took a step back, shaking his head. “I can’t. Zeus took the lightning bolt with him.”
She spun in a circle, holding out her hands.
“Someone, please! We have to help them!”
But Theo had already seen what Selene did not: Philippe’s crumpled body lay sprawled across the ground right where the portal’s opening had been. Esme cradled his bloody head in her hands, keening softly.
Maryam ripped her spear out of the ground. “The cure is the spear …” Her voice sounded mechanical, but the weapon trembled in her grasp. “But not for all of us.”
“What happened to Philippe?” Selene asked, her face drained of all color.
“He tried to stop June,” Maryam said. “He didn’t fall in, but that close to the portal, the rocks … the storm.” Her clenched jaw twitched. “It was a stoning.”
Theo reached out to soften Selene’s fall as she sat down heavily on the rock.
“No.” She shook her head. “No. Not Philippe too …”
Theo forced himself to look at the bloody wreck that had once been the beautiful God of Love. His legs lay half-buried beneath a cairn of boulders. Esme’s fingers stroked the bright yellow hair from cheeks scraped raw by flying debris. His shirt had been ripped to shreds, revealing a grotesque dent the size of a tennis ball where a stone had caved in his chest. Only Hephaestus’s hammer, still clutched over Philippe’s head, had prevented the rocks from doing the same to his skull.
Maryam moved to crouch beside the young man. She placed her own hands atop his heart and closed her eyes. “He’s still alive,” she murmured.
Esme turned bloodshot eyes to her cousin. “Help him,” she rasped. “Please.”
Maryam took a deep breath and moved her lips. Theo wondered if she prayed to Mary or Jesus—or perhaps to Apollo, God of Healing. If she’d renounced her Christian piety, did she still retain any of her miraculous power? But whatever she said seemed to help—at least a little. The blood clotted on Philippe’s chest, and the dent grew a little shallower.
When Maryam opened her eyes, she looked paler than she had before; the healing had stolen some of her strength. “He’s still hurt badly. But I think his chances of recovery are …” She stopped herself, as if aware that whatever mathematical probability she was about to impart wouldn’t help Esme any. “His chances are good.”
“You need to get him off the mountain,” Selene insisted. “Where he can heal.” She reached for the rope harness that had carried her father, clearly intending to secure it to Philippe. But Esme threw her body across her son’s and glared at Selene with eyes so red they seemed almost demonic.
“If it weren’t for you, Saturn would’ve killed Zeus back in the mithraeum and none of this would’ve happened. My husband wouldn’t have followed you here like one of your loyal hounds, and my son wouldn’t have followed him.”
“That’s not fair—” Theo began.
“And now Flint’s gone,” Esme spat. “And June, too. My son has done this to himself for nothing. Look at him! Look at what you’ve done!”
Theo tightened his grip on Selene’s shoulders, trying to offer what comfort he could. “This is not your fault,” he said to her sternly. Her body was rigid in his arms, as if the force of Esme’s rage had pinned her in place. “We all agreed to come here. Flint could’ve walked away at any point. Esme too. She’s just lashing out at you because she’s mad at herself for not seeing the trap.”
“I know,” Selene replied stiffly. “But if Flint had known this would happen to his stepson, he never would’ve come.”
He could hear the regret in her voice; he knew she wanted desperately to help Philippe. But Esme wouldn’t let her anywhere near her son.
Maryam took the rope harness from her and fastened it onto Esme’s slim shoulders. Theo helped them maneuver Philippe’s limp body inside. Maryam lent her spear to the Goddess of Love, who used it to balance herself as she headed swiftly down the mountain.
Theo moved to follow them, but Selene stood rooted in place. “I can’t leave. This is where the portal opened. If it opens again, I have to be ready to go through.”
“It won’t open again,” Theo said gently. “Even Maryam can’t fashion a divine thunderbolt to control the storm, and even if she could …” He pointed to the spires of rock that had served as the organ’s pipes. The force of the wind had sliced long fissures along their sides. The hydraulis would never play again.
“Then we get in some other way.” She stared at him with just as much determination as she’d shown the first day they’d met. “We’ve already passed through death and lived to tell the tale. Will you help me open another rift in the world, Theo? Will you come with me to Tartarus to free Flint?”
Despite everything, despite the loss and the terror and the weeping blisters on his feet, Theo kissed her knuckles and gave her the fiercest smile he could muster. “Just try to stop me.”
Twelve hours later, Theo’s determination to reopen the portal was fighting a losing battle with his burning need to sleep. They’d made it down the mountain in half the time it took to get up. Esme hadn’t said a word the whole way. When they reached the base, she’d simply summoned a taxicab, jumped in beside her wounded son, and taken off.
The others had dragged themselves to a small taverna, seeking somewhere to rest while they planned their next move. The waiter had produced a pot of tea that tasted like earthy chamomile, liberally spiked with honey. “Olympus tea, we call it here, because the leaves grow on the mountain,” he’d said. “It’s good for everything. Inflammation, fungus, infection. Everything.”
But does it cure guilt? Theo wondered, pushing another cup across the table toward Selene and taking a swallow himself. All the fierce joy he’d felt holding her hand on the summit had suffocated beneath the heavy pall of mourning. In that fog of despair, doubts arose. He’d meant what he’d said on the mountainside: It wasn’t Selene’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help feeling like he should’ve seen it coming. Hadn’t he already watched both Orion and Saturn try to destroy the gods to regain their own power? He should’ve known Zeus would do the same.
His own idiocy wasn’t the only thing tying a guilty knot in his stomach. When he’d first met Selene, she’d had almost no contact with the other Athanatoi. He’d been the one to urge her to reach out to them, and in the months since they’d met, she’d finally found a family again. Now only Maryam remained.
Right now, the Gray-Eyed Goddess was staring solemnly into her own teacup. She’s by far the most joyless Athanatos I’ve ever met, Theo thought grimly, and that includes Saturn. Maryam would never be able to fill the gap the others had left in Selene’s life.
And will I? Theo took another swallow of tea, not caring that it burned his throat. He stifled a groan.
“What?” Selene asked. That was the problem with dating someone with preternatural hearing. The slightest shift in breathing gave you away.
“I was just wondering if the Magna Mater was still around somewhere,” Theo lied, unwilling to give voice to his other myriad concerns. “If we’re going to confront Zeus himself, it might help to have some more allies.”
“My grandmother Rhea took over the Magna Mater’s worship,” Selene said wearily. “June told me she was killed in the Middle Ages, already weakened and forgotten by men.”
“But wasn’t she the super-powerful Great Mother?”
Selene snorted. “Maybe in the east, but in our pantheon Rhea was the instrument of her own demise.” The way she bit off the words made clear that she felt the same way about herself. Whatever guilt Theo struggled with would pale in comparison to her own. “Think about it. Rhea’s angry at her husband for dominating the world, so she masterminds the plot to have her son Zeus overthrow him. It works, but that just means that the Titans fall from power and the Olympians arise. Her own daugh
ters become powerful goddesses while she begins to fade into the background. Typical mother—sacrificing her own needs for those of her kids.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Look, no offense to my grandmother—without her help, my siblings and I never would’ve been born. And when Saturn imbued me with her soul back in the Phrygianum, I felt how much she loved her children. But maybe if Rhea had held on to her own power for a little longer, I wouldn’t have been born into a world dominated by men.” She nearly snarled the last word. “She let her son rule in place of her husband. Why not take it for herself? Or at least help Hera or Hestia or Demeter take the crown? Then we wouldn’t be sitting here figuring out how to rescue my family from my own damn father. Notice how he didn’t sacrifice everything to save his kids—he sacrificed his kids to save himself. All the while claiming he loves us and doesn’t have a choice. Typical.”
Theo knew better than to rebut Selene’s sexist generalizations. In her current mood, it would only make her angrier.
“The Great Mother was more than Rhea,” Maryam said, staring numbly into her cup. “More than Phrygian Cybele or Roman Ops. She was a Mistress of Beasts, like Ephesian Artemis. A Queen of the Stars, like Hera. A Mother of Desire, like Aphrodite. A Protectress of Cities, like me. She was all that was best in us.”
“Then we haven’t been at our best for a very long time,” Selene said flatly. “We’ve all been idiots. Me most of all. I should’ve known my father wasn’t the feebleminded fool he pretended to be. He knew too much—said it was his gift for prophecy sending him dreams, and I fell for his bullshit. He was probably getting updates from Scooter for years. I bet he never even lived in that cave in Crete. He just pretended to because he couldn’t find Saturn or the thunderbolt any other way, and he needed both of them for his plan. So he lured the Host into kidnapping him, trusting that Scooter and the rest of his children would get him out again. It nearly backfired—the mithraeum was so well hidden that Scooter couldn’t find it without help, and Flint and I were almost too late to save him. But in the end, we all did exactly what he wanted us to.”
Theo could sympathize with her anger. Scooter and Zeus had used him as carelessly as they would an inanimate tool, first to find the mithraeum and then to open the portal. They’d known he’d likely break to pieces in the process—and they’d done it anyway. “Speaking of your deceitful little brother,” he said, “I still want to know why Zeus called him ‘Tetractys.’”
“The perfect number …” Maryam said, slowly stirring her tea as if mixing a potion to unlock all the answers.
“Yeah, it’s a Pythagorean term.”
When Selene looked at him blankly, Theo pulled a pencil from his pocket and began drawing on a paper napkin. Four dots in a line. Three dots above. Then two. One.
“This is the tetractys,” he explained, feeling his gut finally relax as his brain took over. “The word means ‘fourness.’ Ten total dots, forming an equilateral triangle with four dots on each side. Perfectly symmetrical.”
“So?” Selene asked, sounding more curious than dismissive.
“The numbers in each row—one, two, three, four—are special: They also form the harmonic ratios.” He described how varying the length of a string changed the note it produced when plucked. He wished he had his monochord handy to demonstrate, but Selene seemed to catch on nonetheless.
“If you go down the rows of the tetractys,” he went on, “the number of dots mirrors the most pleasant musical relationships.” He tapped his pencil on the top two rows. “A ratio of one to two creates the octave; two to three makes a perfect fifth; and three to four gives a perfect fourth.”
“All right,” Selene said. “Did the followers of Pythagoras ever call a man a tetractys?”
“Not that I know of.” He looked questioningly at Maryam. Athena had, after all, been the patron goddess of philosophers, although the Pythagoreans, at least, had worshiped numbers more than they did any Olympian.
Maryam frowned at the dots. “Not a man … but the tetractys was more than just a symbol to them. They personified it, prayed to it.”
Theo dug through his pack for his research notebook. He flipped to the section on Pythagoras that he’d carefully compiled over the last few months. “I copied down the prayer somewhere.” He didn’t want to admit he’d memorized it long before, hoping it could help resurrect Selene. “Ah … here we go. ‘Bless us, divine number, you who generated gods and men. O holy, holy Tetractys that contains the root and source of the eternally flowing creation. The never-swerving, the never-tiring holy Ten, the key holder of all.’”
“So maybe Father called Hermes the Tetractys because he was the ‘key holder,’” Selene offered. “He’s the Conductor of Souls to and from the afterlife, and he’s the one who opened the portal by inventing a hydraulis.”
Theo shifted uneasily on his chair. Something didn’t fit right. “But the hydraulis didn’t play octaves and perfect fifths, did it? I mean, it’s all a bit of a blur, but I remember it was very beautiful. Just not exactly a standard melody.”
The women looked at him like he’d lost his mind.
“Melody?” Selene asked. “You heard a melody?”
“It just sounded like a loud roar to us,” Maryam explained. “I thought it might’ve been many chords played at once, like pressing all the keys on the organ at the same time.” She leaned forward, gray eyes boring into Theo. “But if you remember a tune, Professor, maybe we can play it again. The portal would reopen.”
“Hate to disappoint you, but I have no idea what I played. I was a little distracted by the lightning threatening to rip me limb from limb. Honestly, I’m still not even sure what we opened a portal to. It wasn’t really ancient Athens, right? It was a new Age instead?”
“According to the prayer,” Maryam said, “the Tetractys is the key to creation. In other words, Scooter made the pipes, you controlled the breath, and Saturn played the notes. Scooter may call himself the Tetractys, but it took all of you together to make three sides of the triangle. You brought a whole new world into being.”
“Like … a parallel universe?” Theo felt himself slipping further out of his depth, wishing, not for the first time, that he’d paid more attention to the science parts of his science fiction novels. “Or … what do the astronomers call it … a ‘multiverse’?”
Maryam scowled, looking surprisingly like Selene. “I’ve been away from science for too long.” The usually stoic goddess slammed down her teacup with just enough force to make a loud crash without shattering the porcelain. “I have no answers anymore.”
Selene gave her sister a disdainful frown. “That’s what happens when you spend centuries leeching off people who think the Bible explains everything.”
“It’s okay,” Theo said, quickly fending off another spat between immortals. “Let’s just think this through. You know how usually when a god dies they have some effect on the world? At least temporarily?”
“Yes …” Selene said.
“Yet we just watched ten Athanatoi walk through that portal—nine of whom wound up falling into Tartarus—and I didn’t feel any effect at all. That’s because they didn’t die—they just left. They exited the universe.”
Maryam took a deep breath, as if to refocus her anger, and said, “It’s almost like a god’s death causes a wreck on the train tracks of time. The next train has to plow through the debris, causing all manner of accidents. But when a god steps through the portal, there’s no crash. It’s like switching tracks instead. The god takes off in another direction, and there’s no sign he was ever on the first track at all.”
Selene looked back and forth between Theo and Maryam before saying, “Then we just build another damn track to get them back where they belong. If they exited the universe, they’re not dead, they’re just elsewhere. I’m going to get them back, even if it means building our own version of the hydraulis and somehow figuring out the right notes to play.”
“A norma
l water organ obviously won’t do it.” Maryam steepled her hands beneath her chin. “It has to be enormous. Otherwise Scooter wouldn’t have spent months digging tunnels through the tallest mountain in Greece.”
“And it can’t be just any mountain,” Theo added. “Scooter always said location matters. He and Zeus chose Olympus because it was the most sacred, most powerful site for the entire pantheon—and for Zeus in particular.”
“Fine.” Selene pushed herself from the table. “So we find a place that’s powerful for us.”
“Athens,” Maryam said immediately.
“No,” Selene shook her head. “That’s a sacred space for Father, too, or he wouldn’t have opened the portal into a field near the Acropolis. No, when we fight him, I want to do it on my turf.”
For the first time since the gods had disappeared into Tartarus, Theo found a smile curving his lips. “I like the sound of that.”
“Come on.” Selene held out a hand to haul him to his feet. “We’re going home.”
Chapter 50
ONE WHO MUSTERS THE PEOPLE
A long flight from Athens and a short cab ride across Manhattan later, Selene stood on the stoop of her brownstone on West Eighty-eighth Street, listening to the unmistakable sound of a woman’s footsteps behind the door.
“Is someone staying in my house?”
Theo looked mildly uncomfortable. “Ruth has a key.”
How dare she? How dare he? This was not the homecoming she’d imagined. Then again, she hadn’t thought Sister Maryam would be tagging along either. Honestly, she’d rarely allowed herself to think of returning at all. When she did, she’d always pictured bursting through her front door and into Theo’s arms. Needless to say, she’d never imagined any witnesses.
“Hey,” Theo said sternly. “Did you forget that you died and left the house to me? That means I can give a key to whomever I want. And who do you think’s been looking after Hippo?”
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