The Blood of Athens

by Amy Leigh Strickland

  Jason was trying to help, but the normal procedure of reporting to DHR wouldn't work here. Peter didn't want to leave Olympia Heights in case another Titan popped up. He also didn't want to end up in a foster home in case his cover was blown. That left few options. Peter had caught a beating on tape and was blackmailing his father with it. Jason knew that this solution wasn't going to last and had been working on an alternate plan.

  “Listen,” Jason said, “When you get back, come to my office. I have a friend you need to meet.”

  “A friend? You mean a lawyer?”

  “He specializes in emancipation of minors,” Jason explained in a hushed tone.

  “I’ve got it under control,” Peter said.

  Jason shook his head. “The tape is a stopgap. We can get you a room at the Youth Initiative, you pay expenses with your wages from work, and everyone in The Pantheon helps out a little.”

  “I dunno.”

  “Think about it. You have a whole week in Greece to decide.”

  “He’s afraid of me now,” Peter said. “He hasn’t laid a hand on me in two weeks.”

  “Peter,” Jason shook his head.

  Peter didn't let him finish his thought. “I gotta go. We're moving.”

  Indeed, the crowd of students from Olympia Heights had started to move towards the security lane. Peter darted back to where Penny stood, guarding his black duffel bag.

  Jason watched as Celene herded twenty-four teenagers towards the back of the line.

  He checked his watch. Jamie and Scotty would be waking up soon. He waved one last time to Celene and headed for airport parking. Maybe, if he was lucky, he could plug in My Neighbor Totoro and get an hour nap before all hell broke loose.

  “As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.”

  -Socrates

  iii.

  The bird sat on a branch outside her window,

  carefully nursing its outstretched, wounded wing.

  With a cream colored breast and grey crested head,

  it was beautiful.

  Hera spotted the damaged Cuckoo and brought

  it into the small, seas-side hut where she lived.

  Once inside, the little bird shifted and changed:

  Zeus stood before her.

  Impressed with his trick, the goddess let him stay

  and before very long they fell into bed.

  This is how mighty Zeus, the king of the gods

  won himself a queen.

  “When a match has equal partners then I fear not.”

  -Aeschylus

  III.

  Zach Jacobs heard the front door close. His mother was on her way to church. He looked over at the glowing red numbers on his alarm clock. The plane had already left. Two thirds of the football team and half of The Pantheon were on their way to Greece.

  Zach climbed out of bed, gently turning back the black t-shirt sheets, careful not to disturb June, and crossed the hall to get a drink of water from the bathroom. The tiny bathroom had tile that ran half-way up the walls and then gave way to yellowed white paint. Zach turned the ceramic knobs on the sink and dipped his head under the tap, drinking chlorinated town water. When he came back into the room, June was awake, quietly watching him. A look of maturity had settled on her features over the last two years. She was growing into a woman. Her tight ponytail had come loose in the night and June tugged at the covered elastic, letting her fire red hair fall to her shoulders.

  “Are you alright?” she asked, sitting up.

  “I'm fine,” he said. Zach sat down on the bed. “Thirsty.”

  “Fine? You're not still bummed that your Dad wouldn't pay for Greece, are you?”

  “You could have gone, you know,” he said. Zach set the water on his night stand. “I can last one week on my own.”

  June slipped her hand into his and nodded, “I know. But what fun would it be, seeing Greece without you?”

  Zach raised an eyebrow. He still suspected that June had stayed home to keep an eye on him. He didn't exactly have a chaste past, but he had been faithful since their August reunion. “I dunno. It's Athens. I guess I just hoped that being there would spark some memories. We still don't have very many answers. We know what we are, but why?”

  June let go of his hand and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, leaning on his back. Her red hair tickled the back of his neck. “That's a stretch, Zach. It might be where we come from, but Greece these days is no more spiritual or mysterious than America. Besides, who wants to go visit a country with a collapsing economy and spend the entire week with teachers breathing down their necks?”

  “When you put it that way...”

  “Seriously, Zach. Can you honestly say you'd rather be on that plane with Nick than sitting in your bed here, with me?”

  Zach grinned. He turned around and wrapped his arms around his girlfriend. His stubble scratched her face as he kissed her. “This is better,” he said, breaking the kiss so that his lips could venture down to her neck. “Sexy girlfriend, beautiful weather, no adult supervision.”

  June laughed as he nipped at her ear. She had learned to relax quite a bit over the past few months. The summer before had nearly resulted in a complete mental break down, but June had learned to recognize when she was being irrational or uptight.

  Zach didn't care that his face felt like sandpaper or that June had morning breath. He could feel her breasts, free from the constraints of a bra, just below her tank top, pressed against his chest. Zach pressed his hips forward and let out a little moan. This was way better than Athens.

  June's arms tensed. “Zach,” she said, hesitating. She could tell that she had accidentally started something. “Zach, wait.”

  “June,” he whined.

  “Zach,” she said, a little more severely.

  Zach sat up. “Alright.” He held his hands up in surrender as he rose to walk to the bathroom. June pulled the black cotton sheets up and crossed her arms over her chest. “Zach,” she called.

  It was quiet for a minute, and then Zach came back into the bedroom. He grabbed a pair of jeans off the floor and put them on.

  “I'm sorry,” June said.

  “Don't be.”

  “Zach...” she left his name hanging in the air, the opening clause to a sentence she didn't know how to finish.

  “It's fine. I mean... we've been together for how many years?”

  “I don't want to count before, Zach. It wasn't good, then. You-- we weren't good to each other.”

  “And I cheated,” he said. It was something he rarely admitted out loud. “A lot.”

  “And I manipulated you. We weren't good for each other. I'm not blaming you Zach.”

  “We've been together for seven months, then.”

  June shook her head. She climbed out of bed and picked up the large, black, slouch bag that held a change of clothes. Her parents knew she was sleeping over a friend's house. They had assumed it was a girl friend. “It's not about time.”

  “We're eighteen,” Zach added. “Eighteen. And you wouldn't be here if you were worried about your parents.”

  “It's not about being eighteen or being together for a predetermined amount of time, Zach,” June snapped. She took a deep breath and started pulling clothing out of her bag. “Yes, for a while I thought it was about that, but it's not. I've had a lot of time to think and to know what I want. I do want to have sex with you, Zach, but I want you to be the first, the last, the only.”

  “And I've cheated.” Zach crossed to June and wrapped his arms around her. She dropped the pair of jeans in her hand and relaxed against him.

  “I don't want to wait until marriage because society or church or my mother tells me to. I know it's stupid with the fifty percent divorce rate, but I want to wait because I want to be sure that the first person I give myself to is the last. Is the only.”

  “That's not stupid.” Zach had played the field enough this past summer to know that having sex wit
h a lot of different beautiful women, while fun at first, was highly overrated. He held June for a while, letting the tension of the moment fall away.

  “I love you,” she finally whispered, “And I trust you. But--”

  June didn't get to finish. Zach was on his knee.

  “No!” she said. “Get up. You are not proposing to me so that I'll have sex with you.”

  Zach laughed, “I'm not.”

  “You're not proposing?”

  “Oh, no. I am proposing. Will you stop talking long enough to let me do that?”

  June opened and closed her mouth.

  “Good.” Zach took her hand. “Now, I don't know how old we are. Three thousand, four thousand, a million years old? We're already married. I may have seduced a couple of women disguised as an animal and you might have horribly massacred them, but we keep coming back to each other. I'd like to think that after all of these years, I've grown. You have, too. I had you for thousands of years and I couldn't stand six months apart. I love you, and even when we drive each other to do insane things, we always find each other again. So I'm not asking you, June Herald, the eighteen-year-old girl, to run away and marry Zach Jacobs, the horny teenager. I'm asking you, June, my Queen, goddess, to renew your vows to me.”

  There were tears in June's eyes. It was unprecedented.

  “That's really sweet, Zach,” she finally said. “Maybe next lifetime you shouldn't include massacre in a marriage proposal.”

  Zach squeezed her hand. A faint surge of energy passed from his fingertips and along with it, the echo of a memory. It was pure happiness, and she knew that it was associated with some lost memory of her wedding night with Zeus. They were made for each other.

  “Alright,” she said, nodding. A small smile turned up the corners of her lips. “I'll marry you.”

  Zach jumped up, grinning, and picked her up. June clung to him, afraid that he might drop her.

  “Let's go today,” he said, setting her back down on his bedroom floor.

  June shook her head, “You have to wait like, a month, in Florida. You have to file for a license and then wait.”

  “But you don't in Georgia,” Zach said.

  June cocked her head. “You're serious?”

  “Totally. You can tell your mom you’ve gone camping with some friends from school and I’ll tell mine that I’m in Orlando with my dad. It’s only a few hours drive. We can be there by sun down.”

  June chewed on her lip for a moment. She nodded, “Alright. Savannah, Georgia.”

  Zach pumped his fist and ran to his closet for a duffel bag.

  June picked up her jeans off the floor and started towards the bathroom to change. She closed the bathroom door and sat down on the wooden lid of the toilet. She had always planned to graduate from a top college, marry Zach, get him into a political office, and become the first lady some day. Finding out that they were Greek Gods had temporarily derailed her ambitions. She smiled as she thought about this plan, one she had plotted every day for most of her life. It was back on track now. Who cared if it was a little out of order?

  “The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.”

  -Epicurus

  iv.

  The spear of Achilles struck bold Telaphus

  and tore a fatal wound in the soldier's thigh.

  Telephaus knew that, without help, he was dead

  and grew desperate.

  With a terrible fear of losing his life,

  Telaphus snatched up the young boy, Orestes.

  He held the dagger to his throat and threatened

  to end the boy's life.

  The small boy was very dear to his mother.

  Achilles was left with no other option.

  He had to heal the villain, his enemy,

  to save the young boy.

  Achilles knew of a kind of old magic

  that allowed the weapon to be the savior.

  He scraped the bronze of his spear onto the wound:

  Telaphus was healed.

  “Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.”

  -Plato

  IV.

  Jason found himself at Tamiami Park that afternoon, watching Haley take turns pushing Scotty and Jamie on the big, red, bucket-seat swings at the playground. He sipped from his thermos of iced coffee and pushed his aviator sunglasses back up his nose. His skin was covered in a thin layer of perspiration and the glasses soon slid back down.

  He had only gotten an hour and a half to nap before the credits were rolling on his My Neighbor Totoro DVD and the twins were trying to get into something messy. At least Haley was smart enough to wake her father before trouble started. She was a good girl.

  Jason pulled out his phone and checked the application he had downloaded to track the flight. Celene and Penny were somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. They wouldn't land until after dinner time here, which would be after three in the morning in Athens.

  Someone sat down next to Jason. He looked up from his phone to make sure that his kids were still playing safely. He glanced casually at the man in his peripheral vision. The stranger wore sunglasses and a suede sports coat. He had dark, receding hair and ears that stuck out. The man cleared his throat. “I think it’s a little toasty for this coat.”

  Jason nodded. “It's supposed to be eighty by mid-afternoon.”

  Jason took a long sip of his coffee and surveyed the playground, trying to guess which kids belonged to the stranger. Scotty was now trying to swing on his stomach and Jamie was copying his twin. Haley had found a big earthworm to poke at in the dirt.

  Jason was just starting to consider calling Frank (to check in on Devon and the baby) when the stranger spoke again.

  “They're all on their way to Greece, huh?”

  Jason's back stiffened.

  “It seems appropriate,” he went on. “Thematic.”

  Jason could hear his pulse behind his eardrums. Keep cool, he thought. Jason tipped his phone so that the stranger couldn't see the screen in the sun and selected the option to record. “Who went to Greece?” he asked, playing dumb.

  “Dr. Davis and her band of misfits. You know, your girlfriend.”

  Jason recalled June and Astin both reporting strange encounters last summer. A man at the cemetery had made a cryptic comment to Astin about the death of Diana's boyfriend, Ryan Bear. A similar-looking man had shown June a passage from a book of mythology at a fair. It had curiously been about Hera. This man seemed to fit that description. “I'm not sure how you know Celene,” Jason said, wondering if he should grab his kids and run, “But she is a teacher, so yes, she's chaperoning a field trip.”

  The stranger laughed. “Do I need to show you pictures?”

  “Pictures?”

  “I do have them, you know. Not here, of course, but we can make an appointment.”

  “Listen--” Jason started.

  “No, you listen,” the stranger said. Jason kept his eyes on his children, but he could see the man looming close in his peripheral vision. “I know. It was really my lucky break. I normally get paid to spy on cheating husbands. Imagine my surprise when I saw them all arrive to spend the night with Teddy junior. One was enough to seal your fate, but I did some digging, too. If you think I'm going to ignore three murders and a whole lot of unique abilities, you're even more naïve than I thought. ”

  “What do you want?”

  The stranger stood up and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. He blotted the sweat from his forehead. Jason turned to watch him, finally getting a real, good look at the stranger. The man put the pocket square away and drew a small metal case out of his pocket. He opened it and handed Jason a business card. “The moment they get back, we need to talk. It's going to take a lot to make me forget what I've seen.”

  Jason looked down at the business card. Mr. Spade. Private Investigator. Jason watched Spade walk back towards the parking lot. His fist balled around the business card. He knew things had been going a bit too smoothly; there was
just no way to keep fifteen super-humans a secret when everyone had cameras on their phones. He cursed and shoved the card into his pocket.

  “Haley, Jamie, Scotty!” he shouted. “Let's go.” This park didn't feel safe any more.

  “It is not enough to win a war; it is more important to organize the peace.”

  -Aristotle

  v.

  When the war between the Gods and the Titans

  had ended, and the Olympians had won,

  it came time for the three brothers to draw lots

  to choose a domain.

  Zeus, the hero of the Titanomachy

  was made to choose first and drew the longest straw.

  For his dominion he claimed the golden throne

  on Mount Olympus.

  For the rest, Poseidon drew the second straw.

  Zeus had claimed the heavens, so Poseidon chose

  to hold dominion over all the oceans.

  Hades had no choice.

  So it fell to him-- against his will-- to claim

  the dark realm that winded deep beneath the earth:

  to guard the souls of the dead after they had

  met mortal judgement.

  “Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.”

  -Aristotle

  V.

  Penelope Davis stood on the west side of the Acropolis in Athens, on the steps of the Propylaea. It was mid afternoon, but to the group from Olympia Heights, who were currently suffering eight hours of jet-lag, it felt like bed time. She looked down the slopes, over crumbling marble hidden between thriving olive trees, cut out against a cloudless, cyan sky. Her classmates compared trinkets from the gift shop at their last stop, but Penny was present in her setting, trying to take it all in at once.