Perhaps worst of all, the other Olympians seemed to have cast down his decree of withdrawal before his corpse had grown cold; the disloyal curs had all but tripped over his dead body to get back to public life and mortal worship! If that was true, lightning was too good for any of them, murderers or not!
Yet aside from such obvious and public facts, his search bore few details of what had actually transpired among the gods themselves. Zeus soon decided that learning more along those lines would require stepping back onto Olympus itself or finding an ally to do so for him— yet rage clouded his mind too much for him to decide just how to pursue either option. He needed somewhere comfortable where he could cool down enough to think.
Zeus did his best thinking in the middle of a lightning storm. A couple of nights after his return, there was a fantastic one over Paris that led him to perch invisibly on the antenna atop the Eiffel Tower and brood over exactly how to proceed. For more than an hour, he stood watching the storm strike the tower’s lightning rod and letting the tension ebb from his being. He was beginning to calm when he spotted the blond mortal crawling his way up the ironwork above the top observation deck.
Here is a brave fool.
It was an engaging distraction. The mortal would surely be arrested by the Parisian authorities if he failed to fall to his death, but regardless of the numerous laws he was breaking, he impressed Zeus. (Most of the gods have a soft spot for brave fools, as brave fools are so very often courageous enough to perform the tasks demanded of them and lack the sense to realize how likely such tasks ware to kill them. Entire legions of brave fools who failed to kill hydras, sail through the Cyanean Rocks, or frolic upon the shores of Axe-Murderer Lake at night go unsung and forgotten, but the gods still appreciate the fools’ willingness to try. Such diversions provide them something to watch during dinner.)
And so the deposed king of the gods observed in amusement as the mortal made his ascent. Lightning flashed again, heralding a rush of rain.
The mortal cast his gaze upward into the sudden deluge with a desperate scowl. “Zeus!” he yelled, staring directly at him.
It startled the god so much, he nearly lost his perch. Zeus was invisible—he double-checked to make sure—yet the mortal could see him? Unable to leave the matter unexplored, he released his invisibility completely and finally asked, “How did you find me, mortal?”
“Wow, déjà vu,” the climber answered. The two stared at each other as rain fell from the darkness above, plinking off the tower and drenching them both before the mortal spoke again. “Um, it’s good to see you and all that, but do you think we could possibly go somewhere else to talk? Somewhere, you know . . .” The mortal glanced down just long enough to appear to regret it. “. . . else?”
This one most definitely has nerve, Zeus thought. Yet nerve had its place. “You will first answer my question, mortal, then we shall see.”
The mortal had the temerity to roll his eyes. “I know your daughter! I know Tracy! The rest is a long story I’d rather not tell straddling a giant lightning rod! No offense.”
Zeus scanned for any sign he was an Olympian in disguise. (It would be a foolish ploy doomed to failure were that the case, but it didn’t pay to be careless.) Once satisfied, he snatched the man up by the arm and brought both of them up the Seine River to the shelter of the southern bell tower of Notre Dame Cathedral. It was perhaps an ironic choice to retreat to a church, but Zeus didn’t figure He’d mind.
“I would have your name, mortal, and your answer as to how you knew where and when to find me.”
“Leif Karlson. And I really only knew where. Apollo had a vision of me finding you on the Eiffel Tower, so I figured if I went there, I’d find you. Kind of illogical and circular, but I tried not to think too much about that. I’d have been up earlier, but the line into the tower took me an hour and a freaking half to get through.”
“The stairs would have been faster. Shorter line.”
“Yeah, well, I fell off a cliff a couple days ago when I was helping to bring you back, and my legs hurt.”
“You helped? How? When did you last see Tracy?”
Leif launched into a rambling tale of Apollo finding him in a Bellingham café, of Leif’s immediate willingness to help, and all that proceeded from that point: the amulet, Thalia, the Erinyes, Thad, Dionysus, and the final struggle at the mountaintop temple. Cheered by the new information and the prospect of potential allies, Zeus listened to the entire story before commenting.
“Mr. Karlson, in your time with Apollo, did he never tell you of my ability to discern when a mortal speaks falsely to me?”
“Um, he neglected to mention that, no.”
“Care to revise your story a little bit?”
Leif squirmed, but not to the extent that Zeus lost too much respect for him. “You couldn’t have called me on that earlier?” The mortal shot an annoyed glance at the wall. “Fine, so I wasn’t immediately all for helping Apollo. Can you blame me? But I came around just fine after a while!”
“I opted to give you just enough rope to hang yourself. I shall not fault you much for wishing to appear more heroic, but lie to me at your peril.”
“Er, well, I did come around, like I said.”
Zeus smiled, just a bit. “Indeed. For which you have the gratitude of a god.” The smile turned to a smirk. “You failed to mention just how you know my daughter.”
“Oh. Yeah. That.” Again, he squirmed. “I, ah, love your daughter, sir.”
The declaration only brought Zeus further amusement as he took stock of the mortal in a new light: wanting of any true muscle definition, skinny legs, light hair, and skin more feminine than masculine—yet he was tall, at least, and obviously not without amply demonstrated courage. “Before my murder, she was seeing someone named Kevin.”
“Never heard of him.”
“A teetotaler. I never much liked him, myself. How long have you been dating my daughter?”
Leif swallowed uncomfortably. “We’re not exactly dating.”
More traditional fatherly values battered through Zeus’s amusement like a giant through tinfoil. He drilled scrutiny into the mortal, who was apparently just diddling his precious child on the side. For a long time, Zeus silently let him stew in his own discomfort. To his credit, Leif did not break.
“Excuse me?” Zeus asked finally.
“Er, well—I mean, she doesn’t really . . . feel the same. She’s made that clear. I keep hoping, but I can’t seem to change her mind. So far. I don’t get it; I’m not the sort of guy who can’t get a little action when he wants to—Er, not, not that your daughter is—” Zeus deepened his scowl, and Leif gave a desperate chuckle. “I’d do anything for her. Sir. Which is why I came along on Operation Resurrect Zeus in the first place. Not that I didn’t think bringing you back was a good thing either, of course, but . . .” He trailed off.
Zeus let the half-truth of the final statement slide past without a direct challenge. “So you mean to say that you’re stalking my daughter.”
“No! . . . At least I don’t see it that way.”
“Few stalkers do.”
“I can’t help it! I don’t even really get why. She annoyed the heck out of me when I first met her, but—”
“So my daughter is annoying? She is unworthy of your adoration?” Now he was just messing with the kid. Counterproductive, yes, but a welcome diversion. Zeus did his best to mask his returning amusement.
“Don’t I get any points for keeping her safe? So she could bring you back? Or for climbing up the freaking Eiffel Tower? That’s not easy, you know! I hate wrought iron!”
“Come closer,” Zeus ordered. “I command it.”
The mortal’s compliance was not immediate, nor even existent. “Why?”
Zeus answered with only a stern gaze. Having ordered around gods for millennia, he was quite good at it, and Leif, finally, complied. Zeus took the mortal’s head in both hands to study his features in clinical fashion. He peered into Leif’s
ears, scrutinized his eyeballs, and checked his pulse before letting him go with a nod.
“Please don’t say, ‘turn your head and cough.’”
“The love you feel is Aphrodite’s work,” Zeus said.
“Isn’t all love supposed to be Aphrodite’s work?” Leif smirked. “She claims to be the ‘goddess’ of love, no?”
“Can the air-quotes, boy. And yes, all love is her domain. Your particular case, however, is more directly induced. I expect she’s indulged herself by flinging around quite a number of love-barbs in the general population after the Return. Or perhaps she did it with purpose; a clandestine way of providing Tracy an ally on her quest.”
Yet, Zeus realized, would Aphrodite not have picked a more classically heroic figure than this mortal? The question brought up another possibility. “It may also be the work of Eros. Difficult to tell, as he derives his power from hers, of course.”
“Oh, of course. Who’s Eros?”
“Better known as Cupid, her Olympian son. Minor god. Did you receive any word or aid from either during your quest?”
“Not that anyone told me about, anyway. I thought Apollo might have done it somehow,” Leif answered, annoyed. “So this is fake? I didn’t care so much when I wasn’t sure, but now I know I’ve been drugged or whatever . . . Can you fix it?”
Zeus couldn’t hide a smirk. “And now my daughter is unworthy of your love. Is that it?”
“I—Are you just screwing with me or what?”
“Perhaps. To answer your question, your love is no more a faked emotion than the lightning bolts I hurl are fake electricity. Nor can I fix it. Divine gifts, once bestowed, cannot be revoked. It must run its course like any love.”
“Great. Swell. I can’t get enough of unrequited love; it’s a real hoot. What good is being king of the gods if you can’t fix things like this?”
“Even if I could, this love makes you an ally of mine. Why should I wish to fix it?” Zeus frowned, turning away. “And I am no longer king of the gods. My power is not what it used to be.”
Leif snorted, earning a glare from Zeus demanding an explanation. “It’s just that there’s a lot of that going around,” Leif told him. “Apollo diminished himself to stay off the radar after he was forced to attack Ares.”
“Truly? I shall greatly reward the sun god’s devotion when this is over,” he vowed. “But make no mistake, I am not diminished in the way Apollo has chosen. I remain a full god.”
“Then I don’t understand. And, ‘make no mistake’? Who talks like that?”
“You’re dangerously insolent, mortal.” Zeus couldn’t help but admire the quality but kept that to himself. Insolence had a time and place, neither of which involved addressing the rightful king of the gods, as far as Zeus was concerned.
“Yeah, surviving four-hundred-foot falls tends to do that to a person. Though I guess I was like that before too. So what’s with the less-powerful thing if you’re not diminished?”
“Though I am still a full god, make no mistake, I am simply less than I used to be, as I am not holding the throne and my place as the king of the gods. My rightful place, I might add.”
“You’re talking about being able to delegate?”
“Certainly not. I speak of my own personal power, which while still mightier than most, is less than it was when I was on the throne. One of the first things I did upon returning to life was to seek a prophecy of the future. I learned nothing.”
“I thought prophecies were Apollo’s thing?”
“Again, you interrupt,” Zeus warned.
“I do that. It’s a valid question.”
“Apollo has the most aptitude, but all gods have at least some ability. Most are so poor at it that whatever they learn only leads to confusion, so they have long abandoned the art—but I used to have some skill, when I was king. I shall not have it again until I am king once more. Being king shines power upon a god, like standing in the focus of many spotlights.”
“Spotlights of power.”
“So to speak.”
“So Poseidon could do it now? The prophetic vision thing, I mean.”
Zeus shrugged. He disliked shrugging, but it was appropriate. “Possible. But the power gained through ruling is cumulative, and nine months is not enough time to accumulate much. This will work in my favor.”
“Got it. Glad we got that established.”
“Thus do I wish to find Apollo. What became of him after the ritual?”
“You mean what’d I see from my lofty perch in the waves far below?” Leif asked. “No idea. You don’t happen to know where Tracy is either, do you?”
“No. Under normal circumstances, the location of any mortal child of mine should be known to me at any instant I wish to find them, but I cannot see her. She must be somewhere hidden from my sight, intentionally or otherwise.”
Leif faltered a moment. “Does that mean she might be dead?”
Zeus considered his response. The day before, Zeus had tried making that determination himself, though he couldn’t be sure without asking Hades directly. Instead he had disguised himself as Hermes and risked a quick side trip to the Acheron crossing, with the intent of asking Charon if he’d seen her spirit board the ferry. The discovery that some guy named Marcus was running things forced him to shelve the matter until he knew more about what was going on. While it was possible that Tracy died resurrecting him, his gut told him otherwise. In any case, Zeus wasn’t about to tell that to a mortal whose loyalty was tied more to Tracy than to him.
“I have no evidence to think so,” Zeus answered. “It might be helpful to describe what happened when you did see her last.”
“Like I said, I was outside the temple with Thalia trying to buy Tracy some time and keep the Erinyes from getting inside. Oh, they killed that guardian-tree you made, by the way.”
“Fiends!” Zeus declared. “I liked that tree.”
“Sorry. They didn’t find the key to that barrier thing, though, so I ran out and grabbed it. Then they cornered me in a place I could see her down below in the temple, still doing the ritual. I figured the only way I’d get out of there and keep the key out of their hands was by hurling myself off the cliff, and that’s pretty much all I know.”
Zeus gave the mortal a shoulder slap. “You truly meant to sacrifice yourself to buy Tracy the time she needed, yet your valor and mettle still fail to move her heart? Unbelievable.” Women!
“I don’t think she saw that part, and I haven’t seen her since, obviously.” Leif frowned. “And, ah, I didn’t really think I was sacrificing myself. It looked like a fall no one could possibly survive, so . . . I went for it.”
“You speak of an unsurvivable fall, yet deny intending sacrifice? Your meaning is muddled, mortal.” Zeus frowned. “Perhaps you struck the waves harder than you are aware.”
The mortal, again, had the temerity to roll his eyes. “You don’t see many movies, do you? If it’s a fall ‘no one can possibly survive,’ it’s pretty much guaranteed that a person’ll survive it. That’s just how it works.”
“That is ludicrous.”
“No, it’s called being genre-savvy.”
“It sounds like hubris to me. However, we will pretend for a moment that you have such a power. What would you do were you in my position, Mr. Karlson of the Genre-Savvy?” While dubious, Zeus could ill-afford to dismiss possible assets at this stage.
“Hard to say without knowing a few things.”
“For instance?”
“Why’d you order that whole god-withdrawal in the first place? Apollo said you never explained it.”
Zeus laughed at the mortal’s audacity. “And you believe I shall tell you, a mere mortal, simply for the asking?”
“A mere mortal who risked his life to help you,” Leif corrected. “Who still wants to help your daughter, and who seems to be one of your few allies at the moment. Hey, you asked.”
Again, Zeus could not hide his amusement, though Leif mistook it for refusal.
“Worth a shot,” Leif muttered after a time.
“Hiding the reason no longer matters,” Zeus answered finally. “There was a prophecy.”
“Great. More prophecies.”
Zeus blasted Leif with a tiny manifest of power that knocked the wind out of the mortal with a gasp. After allowing him a moment to recover, Zeus continued.
“My own prophecy, that there would come a time when Olympian lust for mortal worship would swell to disastrous levels. According to the prophecy, such a thing would come hand in hand with an end to my reign. At the time, I took this to mean that the others would somehow devise a way to gain enough power from mortal worship to overthrow me. This led to the natural conclusion that by hiding ourselves from mortals, the others would never reach such a state.
“I now believe that it was denying them access to any mortal worship at all that drove them to murder me.”
“Probably would’ve worked the way you thought it would, if you hadn’t made them withdraw. One of those ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ sort of things.”
“Yes, exactly!” declared Zeus. This mortal understood. There were no such things as self-fulfilling prophecies; sometimes the cosmos was simply out to get you no matter what you did. The mighty Zeus was not at fault! “And my daughter doesn’t like you at all, you say? Unbelievable.”
“Yeah, you know, I think you ought to maybe mention that to her when we see her.”
If she still lives, Zeus thought. “You’ve yet to give your ‘genre-savvy’ suggestion.”
Leif nodded and leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. “Well, you can’t confront everyone immediately. Do that and you’ll just wind up locked in a hole somewhere or killed again. You need to gather allies first. Unless . . .” He trailed off, drumming his fingertips. “Unless you show up at some dramatic point, surprise the crap out of everyone, and immediately take out one of the conspirators in one shot. Say, Ares or something. The sheer awesomeness of that moment ought to help you do what you need to do. But for that you’d need to find somewhere in the shadows to hide and wait for the opportune moment. Or some sort of costume to disguise yourself.”
Zeus is Dead Page 39
