by Carmen Kern
“No. Nothing. The police had cleared this street earlier in the day, so there were very few people around.” Hera paused, choosing her words carefully. “Have you identified the victim?”
“Not yet. We’re questioning the man who found the body right now. We need to ask that you stick around until we get some of the facts sorted.” He turned to look out her window. “We’re taping off the area. You might want to reschedule your clients. There’ll be no one allowed in or out for the time being.”
Hera tsked, slapping her hands against her tight thighs. “If you—”
“I’m sure you can appreciate the delicate nature of what’s happened here.” He stepped closer to her and lowered his voice, leaning in as if to tell a wonderous secret, “I would consider it a personal favor if you stayed put for now.” He grinned, sly and a little cocky. “I’ll be back soon as we know more.” He unhooked the arm of his sunglasses from his soft armor vest. “Thanks for your cooperation.” He seemed to pause while he held the door open, and then continued outside.
The musk of his aftershave lingered. “Did you just…are you trying to play a player, Officer Thomas?” Hera whispered to herself and watched him put on his mirrored glasses before addressing the growing crowd. She spun around on her heeled boots and strode through her shop to her office. Snatching her phone from her purse, she made a call. “Sarah Lynn, put me through to Zeus. Now.”
Hera pushed a stack of papers around on her desk while she waited, her hands nervous to do something, anything. “Flames,” she mumbled. She stormed into the small kitchenette she had installed a year earlier, taking out the imported coffee from a small freezer.
“Zeus here.”
She set the bag on the marble counter. “Someone was found dead in the dumpster behind my shop. The RCMP are asking questions. They told me to stay put.” She took the phone away from her ear and pressed the speaker button.
“Who the hell is it?” Zeus growled.
“I don’t know,” Hera propped up her phone against the toaster oven and filled the coffee pot with water. “They don’t know. But there’s a man outside. Tall. Too tall and too big. Looks not quite human. He’s the one that found the body.”
“Cronus’s arse!” The speaker crackled. “You think Thanatos did this?”
She dumped water from the pot into the coffee maker’s well. “Who else? After his TV stunt, I’d say he’s stirring us up any way he can. But I can’t bloody well go out there and ask if I could just take a wee peek at the body so I can tell if the god of death was sniffing around my shop…taunting us all with another kill.”
There was a loud crash on the other side of the phone, and then he said, “Stay put.”
“That’s what the officer said.”
“I’m coming to you.” Then Zeus yelled out, “Sarah Lynn, I’m going out. Cancel what you can—”
Hera looked over her shoulder at the commotion outside. Someone banged on her front window as an RCMP officer guided the straggler back behind the crime scene tape they put up. “Zeus, they’re tapping off the area. I don’t know—” Hera’s phone cut out. She stared at the call screen until it went dark. With her right hand, she pressed the on button on the coffee maker, the glint of her ten-karat wedding ring gaining her attention. She rolled it back and forth under the cabinet lighting, thinking about the day Zeus gave it to her. The day they were forced to leave Olympus, as if the diamond could make up for any of this. Hera sighed and waited for her coffee and the god of thunder.
Zeus parked in a loading zone half a block away from Hera’s shop. Police cars, a fire truck, and two ambulances blocked off the street on both ends. The god had opened his door before jamming the car into park. He clicked the lock over his shoulders and stormed toward the crowd of people corralled behind police barricades. On the other side of the fence, Hera’s shop sat in darkness, crime scene tape spanning from the middle window to the other side of the alley.
“What a shit show,” he mumbled, weaving his way through the rubberneckers who held their phones overhead, videos taping anything and everything. Zeus looked like an oncoming storm in his gunmetal gray power suit and navy wool coat. He was in a cold fury. The large maple trees canopied over the street shook as he passed beneath their branches, silver leaves falling like coins from the heavens.
He wove and shoved his way through the crowd, receiving dirty looks and the occasional curse that quickly died out when they were met with a fierce look from the god. He was almost to the barricade when he stopped. Zeus stood taller than the others in the crowd, but a man standing at the mouth of the alley, behind the yellow tape, was taller still. Broad like an ox. A giant warrior. The god of thunder saw through the man’s meat shell. Ghostly outlines of fifty heads and one hundred arms fanned out from the giant’s body. A fearsome sight on the battlefield, even to this day.
The man looked over the head of the RCMP talking to him and out to the crowd, and his eyes locked on Zeus. They hadn’t seen each other since that day in the bowels of Tartarus when Zeus released Cottus from his post as the Titans’ warden. The warrior had asked for only one thing: to be free of the Underworld. Like many of Zeus’s actions, through the politics and wars of each of the ages, of women taken and children hidden and enemies destroyed, the warrior Cottus had been forgotten.
Zeus pushed his way to the front of the crowd and hurdled the cement barrier as if it were but a small curb. To Cottus, the thunder god expanded beyond the confines of his clothes, outgrowing his human form, winds thrumming through his fingers, clouds rushing, circling, rolling white and gray and black above his head like a crown.
“Always did like a show,” the giant mumbled. He sighed, shoulders drooping. “Damn gods.” He met Zeus’s eyes, waiting for whatever came next.
To the unbelievers in the street, they saw a large man, a rich man with silver hair and silver eyes crossing the very lines they were forced to stand behind. Many shouted out cusses and vile names, others held their phones higher to catch the action of the RCMP officers confronting the man.
“Sir,” Officer Thomas called out, oblivious to the gale force coming at him, “you need to get back behind the barricade.” The two men met in front of Hera’s shop window, facing off, one looking up at the other.
The windowed door cracked open to their left. “Officer Thomas, this is my husband, Zeus.”
“Nice to meet you, sir. Now, could you please step—”
“What is he doing here?” Zeus thrust his finger at Cottus.
Hera stepped out onto the sidewalk. Some of the men and women in the crowd were momentarily mesmerized by the way her silk skirt foamed over her hips.
Officer Thomas took another step closer to Zeus.
Cottus and Hera felt the gathering of electricity, a pulsing energy squeezed together in a massive fist of clouds above them all. Hera hurried to Zeus, her heels clicking on cement. She reached out and slid her arm around her husband’s. “Zeus, why don’t you come inside out of the cold? We’ll wait together.”
Officer Thomas glared at Zeus. “You know that man over there?” He glanced over his shoulder and back again.
“I know him as Cottus.”
Hera jerked around to look at the man she’d noticed earlier. “Cottus.” She saw him now, the same hideous monster he’d been in the battle between the Olympians and the Titans. She sucked in her breath and shifted her focus to his human shell.
“He told us his name is Marlo. No last name. Are you sure you know this man?”
Hera turned to Zeus with a look of warning. “Maybe that isn’t him. It just looks like him.” She gripped his arm tighter.
But Zeus ignored her. “No, that’s him. What does he have to do with the murder?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, sir. So, if you would kindly wait in your—”
Zeus pushed past the officer, closing the distance between him and the giant with a long fluid stride. Two of the officers in the alley on either side
of Cottus went for their guns. Zeus blew through the taut yellow tape.
“Stop!” Zeus commanded. The street, the wind and clouds, and every human froze.
Hera took a deep breath and followed her husband.
Cottus stood tall but didn’t move from his spot. He strangled the plastic handle at the top of his backpack. “Thunder god,” he said in greeting.
“It is you.” Zeus stood in front of the giant.
Hera sashayed up beside Zeus. “I wondered what happened to you, well, for a minute anyway.” She blew on her manicured fingers to keep them warm.
Cottus shifted his dark eyes to the goddess of marriage but said nothing.
Zeus glanced around the alley at the first responders, the forensic team, and the waiting gurney nearby. And within a heartbeat, he turned on Cottus, thunderbolt extended and rammed across the giant’s chest, pressing him back against the brick wall. “Are you working with Thanatos?”
Still, the giant hung onto his pack, submissive to the thunder god. The volcanic anger he had wielded in his youth was but a tired spark that had no fuel to make it roar. The thunderbolt pressing against his windpipe was welcome. “Finish me,” he whispered.
“That would be too easy. How ’bout I put you back in Tartarus with the Titans? They’d gladly chew you up and spit you out.” Zeus growled, “Where is Thanatos?”
“I ain’t seen the death god. Ain’t nobody seen him. That’s the problem, ain’t it?”
Hera wove through the statuesque forms of first responders. A forensics photographer leaned over the dumpster, zooming in for a closer shot of the victim. Hera poked him with her finger and then stood on tiptoes beside the man, peering over the edge, careful not to touch the filthy metal. “Zeus, it’s Helle. She was killed in the same way as the others.” She stepped back and wrapped her arms around her body. “Her god powers are gone.”
The ground shook beneath them as Zeus cried out, a trumpeting blast that bowed the heavens. “Tell me what you did!” he compelled the giant to answer.
The alley settled into silence.
And then Cottus choked out, “I found her there. I called the police.” Cottus coughed and sputtered, the thunderbolt cutting into his throat.
Hera moved through the frozen humans and stood beside Zeus. “I don’t care what you do to him, husband, but I do believe him. If he helped Thanatos, he wouldn’t have stuck around. This was Thanatos showing off. Rubbing our noses in it,” she hissed. “He’s flying around under our radar while we’re busy helping a world of ungrateful, self-absorbed humans who no longer believe in us, and while we waste time trying to save your arrogant brother from…we don’t even know what from.” She blew on her fingers again and said, “Damn, it’s cold. Can we do this inside?”
Zeus collapsed his thunderbolt, dropping his hands to his side. He took a few steps back, ran his fingers through his hair, and when Hera opened her mouth, he held up his hand to silence her. He walked to the dumpster and looked in. If possible, Helle was even more beautiful in death, her skin a bluish white from the cold. The hum, the fingers of flickering light that lived inside all immortals, was gone.
“We can’t hide this from the world, not now. Too many have seen…” His voice faded.
Cottus rubbed his bad leg to get the circulation going, his backpack still clutched in his other hand. “You say Hades is missing?”
Zeus continued to stare at the dead sea goddess and one of Poseidon’s lovers. “He’s lost in a world Thanatos created.” He tore his eyes away from Helle and faced the others. “Persephone and a few others are trying to find him, bring him back.” Zeus squeezed his hands into mighty fists. “And now I have to tell my other brother that the mother of his children is dead.”
Hera shrugged. “He’s got other lovers.”
“Is that what others will say to me when you are dead?” Zeus thundered at her, his eyes flashing.
A wind stirred beneath Hera’s skirts as she faced off with her husband.
Marlo the human hung his head and wished for a different start to his day. A morning without gods and goddesses and a coffee to warm his cold hands. He watched Hera and Zeus. The elements around them churned, leaves and garbage blew in a cyclone that rose past the rooftops. And beside them, an immortal lay dead. He called out in a steady voice, “I’ve lived apart from your world for decades. I never missed it, that ancient life. But I will watch over Helle until your brother comes.”
The winds began to die down.
“I owe you nothing,” Marlo continued. “But I know what’s wrong and right. And this ain’t right. I’ll keep the truth from the police.”
Leaves and a plastic bag and pages from a book floated to the ground.
Marlo shuffled toward the gods. “Promise that you’ll fix this world. It’s all I got. Hell, it’s all you got. You best start taking care of it.”
Both Hera and Zeus stared at the giant, their fight momentarily forgotten.
“Will you do that for all of us?” Marlo asked in a voice so quiet it could have been a feather floating on the breeze.
Zeus took in Cottus’s dark-rimmed eyes, his shabby jacket with patches upon patches sewn on to cover the holes. He looked back at the dumpster and all the people in the alley and surrounding them. If ever he longed for the summer-warmed days of Olympus, it was now. He caught Hera’s heavily kohled eye and said, “I promise nothing. But I’ll do what I can to bring order to this chaos. As much as I hate to admit it, this is the world we’re stuck with.”
Hera huffed. “I’m going inside.” She left the men.
“Hold on,” Zeus called out after her. “Come stand with me for a minute while I wake up the world.”
Hera threw up her hands and came back. “Seriously?” she mumbled.
Zeus waved his hand, and the broken yellow tape reattached and strung itself up again. Zeus and Hera backtracked and stood in front of Officer Thomas. Hera hooked her arm through Zeus’s.
Marlo shuffled into place between the two officers who’d drawn their guns.
Zeus gave the scene a once-over and then snapped his fingers.
The world turned on mid-stride.
Officer Thomas’s face creased. He shook his head. “I don’t—”
“You’ll let us know when I can take her home?” Zeus asked.
The two officers, guns pulled and at the ready, looked around and slowly lowered their guns.
Behind the gods and first responders sorting through the crime scene and the ever-growing crowd of people, came three news vans from competing stations. They pulled up, two at one end of the street and another down the other way. The doors opened and cameramen, reporters, and one or two crew spilled out of the opening, stumbling over each other to get to the scene first.
“One good thing about the rotters roaming the streets: it takes longer for the vultures to swoop in.” Officer Thomas watched the TV crews along with everyone else. “Did I just say that out loud?” he asked.
“You said what I was thinking.” Zeus turned to Hera and said, “Let’s get inside. Officer, call my number when you’ve got something for us.” He handed Officer Thomas his business card.
“That’ll work.” The officer tucked the card in his uniform vest. “You might want to lock your door.” He spared a look at Hera before hurrying off to get behind the tape before the reporters descended.
Zeus glanced back at Marlo and escorted his wife to the door of her shop. They locked the door behind them and stopped to watch through the window. There was a strange silence to the moment, as though they watched a silent movie without subtitles, while people outside shifted and shouted, the cold air escaping their mouths in varying puffs of steam. The TV crew worked their way to the front of the crowd. The cameraman edged in to get a shot of Hera’s building, the officers, and turned to sweep across the pack of people.
Hera tugged on Zeus to come away from the window. She led the way back to her office. On the way, she opened a box that ha
d come in yesterday’s shipment and pulled out a package with an earth-toned sweater edged with man-made fur. She shook it out and put it on, continuing to the back. She left her office door open so they could see the street but dimmed the crystal chandelier that hung over her desk. The chrome and glass shelving seemed to float on the far wall behind her desk. Gray and white walls were peppered with fashion sketches, a strange and ever-changing custom wallpaper. A long cabinet of white-painted wood and mirror ran the length of the other wall. Fabric swatches from Hera’s spring line hung from rose-colored ladders above it. Zeus dragged a reading chair closer to Hera’s desk. They sat there together, under the dim light.
It wasn’t a minute later when someone knocked on the front window. And knocked again a minute later. Zeus took off his coat and draped it over the back of his chair. “Looks like we might be here awhile.”
Hera crossed her legs under her white lacquered desk and leaned forward on her elbows. “Before you say anything…we need a drink.” She leaned down to pull open a drawer filled with her favorite brands of gin, bourbon, brandy, and rum. She tried not to play favorites among them; each of them had their uses.
“You don’t have anything Olympian in there, do you?” Zeus slouched in the cushioned chair.
“No such luck. Damn her anyway,” Hera said, speaking of the goddess of fortune, another one of Zeus’s bastard daughters. “But I’ve got Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve.”
Zeus sat up straighter. “You’ve been holding out on me, woman.”
She grinned. “You want it or not?”
He nodded. His muddled thoughts were pushed aside in anticipation of the exquisite bourbon. Hera busied herself with the glasses, the ice, and the pour—all within reach of what most people might call the kitchen triangle. She rolled her chair to the serving tray laden with glasses, then to the mirrored bar fridge, and then back again to her desk.
She slid a glass between her mirrored lamp and the bouquet of pink peonies on her desk. “Bottoms up,” she said, and took a long drink.
Zeus took the offered glass and swirled his drink, sniffed it, savored it, and then drank. They stared at each other from either side of the desk.