Hera, Queen of Gods (Goddess Unbound)

by Thomas, T. D.

  It was some kind of warehouse, jammed with boxes that reached to its enormous ceiling. It had a huge, mechanized door on one end, but I couldn’t spot the machinery that opened it. And there was no other way out.

  I was trapped.

  A rumble like thunder and then a colossal crash behind me. The giant. There went my lead.

  I ducked behind the boxes beside the door. With any luck, the giant would plunge ahead, and then I could double-back the way I’d come. If I were really lucky, the giant’s momentum might even carry it right through the mechanized doors and I could run out that way.

  Or maybe it would just find and kill me.

  I waited, trying to force myself not to breathe, willing my heart to stop beating so loudly. I heard the roar of destruction from the hall. The giant was on its way. But all I could do was wait, even though my body was screaming to run.

  Plan. The thought hit me so hard I almost cried out. Plan.

  Athena. I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. Plan what? There was nothing I could do, nowhere to run.

  Look again. Another thought slammed into my mind.

  Gritting my teeth, I scanned the room again. Still nothing. Sheets of plastic hanging off the wooden shelves filled with boxes. Toolboxes littering the floor. The museum was doing some kind of renovation.

  Then I saw it. Or rather Athena saw it through me. I stood up so she could get a better view.

  There was a flurry of images in my mind. I was Athena’s eyes. She was my strategist. Together, we came up with a plan.

  The giant was so close I could hear the rustle of its leg-snakes. I had to move quickly.

  I ran to the shelves and pulled down sheets of plastic. I dragged them over the centre of the room. I carefully stepped just in front of the sheets.

  The giant broke into the warehouse with a roar, splitting the walls. If I didn’t move fast, he’d bring this whole place down on us, and we’d both die.

  But the giant didn’t hesitate when it saw me. It barreled toward me.

  Giants were stupid. Athena was right. And I was counting on that.

  As soon as I was sure the giant had built up too much speed to stop, I threw myself to the side as hard and fast as I could. My life depended on it.

  Snakes, as Athena had pointed out, didn’t stop easily or skid well, particularly when they were intertwined in a writhing mass.

  The giant had too much momentum to change direction when I leapt out of its way. And it saw the hole far too late. It plummeted through the plastic sheets and down into the large excavation pit in the centre of the warehouse.

  It landed with a crash.

  I lifted myself gingerly from the ground. I risked a look into the hole.

  The giant was dead. It had fallen fifty feet onto dozens of vertical girders, impaling itself countless times.

  Before my eyes, its body began to shrivel. Its flesh melted away until it was bone, and then the bone crumbled to dust. Soon, there was no evidence of the giant at all.

  Necessity.

  No exposure to mortals. The Heavens had intervened. I wished it meant that the others were watching over us, but I knew better. Necessity had existed since the beginning, and intervention was automatic. If the Rules were broken, there were instant consequences from the Heavens. The damage was automatically erased, and the other gods wouldn’t even realize it was happening.

  I limped out of the warehouse, too sore to run. Soon enough, I found the others.

  Apollo and Artemis were there; they’d finally caught up. But something was wrong.

  Justin stood awkwardly to the side, his face ashen. Demeter was weeping more wildly than I’d ever seen before. Apollo was crying, too. Artemis keened, a chilling, feral sound I didn’t even know a mortal body could make. But Zeus was the most disturbing of all. He simply stared. Silent. Vacant.

  I was stunned. We had won.

  But these weren’t victorious gods. These were . . . broken mortals.

  Then I saw her. And I froze.

  Athena was lying in the centre of the room. One look at her, and I knew. I’d seen it a thousand times before, and it’d never mattered, because in a thousand years I’d never thought that it’d happen to one of us.

  Athena was dead.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Frozen.

  I was frozen. A chill that radiated out of my very soul. I couldn’t speak. Or move. Or think. Or feel. I was petrified, from the inside out. Frozen solid.

  I stood in the middle of something I didn’t recognize, something immeasurably large and painful, and if I spoke or moved or thought or felt, even for just a second, it’d all crash down on me, and I’d drown. I’d be swept into an abyss of razors and ripped apart so thoroughly that I could never be put back together again.

  So I said nothing. I did nothing. I was frozen.

  Frozen.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The day Athena died, it rained.

  And the rain didn’t stop. Not for hours, not for days. It poured. Streets became rivers. Fields became oceans. Homes became islands.

  Still it rained.

  And still I did nothing.

  I felt the unspoken pleas for help. A chorus of mortal voices reaching out to the Heavens, calling to what little divinity was trapped in this mortal body. The despair was almost tangible. It bathed the town, and we swam in it.

  In a horrible way, it felt right to me somehow. Like the whole world was mourning with us. Our pain, their pain, in the end, it was all the same. We all hurt together.

  We grieved. The world suffered.

  Still it rained.

  And still I did nothing.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  We buried Athena. It was Justin’s idea. A god had never died before. The rest of us didn’t know what to do. Countless time between us all, and none of us knew what to do. Because all that countless time, we’d shared it with her.

  There was no way to measure that kind of loss. There was no way to honour it--or to recover.

  Demeter opened the earth in a remote field under a grove where an owl had made its nest, and she made a small patch of flowers bloom over it.

  There was no marker. Just the flowers. No monument could ever do her justice anyway.

  Zeus had said nothing since it happened. None of us had. There was nothing to be said. We grieved in silence. We buried her in silence. We lived in silence.

  We kept up the charade of being mortal at first: attending classes; returning home to the families of the mortals whose bodies we’d borrowed. But it didn’t last. We didn’t even know how to be ourselves anymore, let alone how to pretend to be someone else. It was simple enough for me to change the memories of the people who would’ve missed us. A semester abroad. Justin’s idea. Simple. Believable. Explained everything.

  Except Athena.

  I went to the parents whose daughter she’d borrowed. None of the other gods came with me. There was no reason for them to suffer, too. It wouldn’t have made it any easier anyway.

  Justin insisted on coming though. And I had no will to fight him.

  He watched and squeezed my hand as I told parents their daughter was dead.

  I considered numbing them to the pain or even erasing the memory of their daughter entirely. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. They deserved to mourn their daughter. They’d loved her. I had no right to take that away.

  Just like I had no right to take it away from the other gods. The pain was paralyzing. It seared and skewered us. But it was right. Love didn’t come free. And somewhere, deep inside, past the horror and the agony and the sick numbness and the desperate, torturous regret, we were keeping Athena’s memory alive. Our sorrow was a small price to pay. I knew that. We all did on some level.

  And we also knew that, somewhere beyond our overwhelming grief, Athena’s killer was still out there.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Nothing lasts forever. Not even unspeakable grief. Not even for gods.

  It was Demeter who
broke the silence.

  She was staring out the window, as she had for the past two weeks.

  Only two weeks since the museum, but it felt like an eternity, like a different life. And yet fresh, too. Raw. As if it’d all just happened yesterday.

  “It’s out there,” Demeter murmured. At first, I wasn’t sure she’d spoken. I thought I might’ve imagined it.

  But then she turned to me. “Whatever . . . whoever . . . did . . . they’re still out there.”

  Hearing words was strange. I hadn’t heard them in so long. Justin spoke, of course. He visited us in the hotel where we were staying. I guess he felt a strange sort of responsibility for us, seeing us adrift in his world, lost. He tried to be our anchor. It was sweet.

  But we were too many and our loss was too profound. When he spoke, I heard nothing. And he knew it, too. So he started to speak less and less. Instead of Justin keeping us grounded, we were dragging him down.

  “Yes.”

  It was the best I could manage. I’d never been silent for so long. I could barely even make a sound.

  Hermes, Artemis, and Apollo, scattered throughout the apartment, all appeared in the doorway. They stared at us like we were mythical beasts. Beasts with the power to break the silence.

  “What’re we going to do?” She hesitated before asking the question. It was one of a thousand questions that had been taunting and tormenting us all since the museum.

  No one spoke. Demeter had exhausted her words. And the others still didn’t have the strength to speak. Their eyes fell on me. I’d never felt such a crushing weight. I could barely breathe.

  But I did. I kept breathing. And the weight didn’t crush me. I wouldn’t let it. I’d failed Athena. I’d never failed the gods before. I’d never failed anyone before. I refused to fail again.

  So I rose from the table. I smoothed out my skirt. Demeter had sounded a call to action. A battle cry. I had to answer.

  “First,” I answered her slowly, “we stop the rain.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Zeus wouldn’t have answered, so I didn’t bother knocking. There was no point.

  Zeus had retreated far deeper into the silence than the rest of us. He hadn’t wept. He hadn’t even moved. I moved him. I led him to the kitchen, where I fed him. I led him back to the bedroom to sleep. Only he didn’t sleep. He just lay there, staring at nothing.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if he would’ve mourned like this for me, if he loved me even half as much as his favourite daughter. I wondered, but I never let myself answer the question. I wouldn’t like the answer. And I didn’t have time or room for any more bitterness right now.

  I sat next to Zeus on the bed. I searched for words and came up empty.

  “It’s time,” I said finally.

  No response. I was relieved, in a way. It was what I’d expected. This new Zeus, this broken, empty man, terrified me. But I was glad that in the middle of this nightmare, there were still some things I could predict.

  “Zeus, it’s time,” I said again.

  Nothing.

  For a second, I was seized by a blind terror that Zeus had somehow died, too. But I could see his giant chest heave as he breathed. He was alive.

  At least physically.

  I crouched down. Zeus was facing the wall. I needed to meet his eyes.

  He didn’t even flinch as our eyes connected, as he became completely and totally vulnerable to my powers. In that moment, I could’ve destroyed him. There were times when I would’ve given anything for a chance like this, to finally pay him back for everything he’d done to me. And he should’ve known that. Still, he didn’t flinch. And that was when I knew how bad things really were.

  I was inside his mind before I even realized I’d summoned my power.

  “Answer me,” I commanded.

  No response.

  I went cold. My powers should’ve worked.

  I went deeper. I had no choice. If I couldn’t bring his mind out to me, I had to go into it.

  It wasn’t easy. My powers weren’t meant to work this way. Mortal minds were alive with thoughts. They exploded everywhere like fireworks, a dazzling, disorienting, dangerous display. Going into a minefield like that bordered on insane.

  But Zeus’s mind was black. Empty. Silent. No fireworks. No thoughts.

  Normally, to control a mind, I just lighted my own fireworks, so large and bright that the mind was filled with my thoughts and my thoughts alone. I ignited it until all that was left was me.

  But, for some reason, it wasn’t working on Zeus. My fireworks faded and nothing happened. They just sunk into the blackness and vanished without a trace.

  So, instead, I explored. I wandered through the emptiness, hoping and dreading what I might find.

  And then I spotted it. A tiny pinprick of light. It could easily have been my imagination, except that it was too steady. Unwavering.

  I headed toward it. And then, suddenly, it was all around me. I was inside it. It had swallowed me whole. I struggled, but it was useless. The light was everywhere. There was nowhere to run. I was blinded.

  When my vision cleared, I found myself standing on a vast plain. Weathered, yellow rock as far as the eye could see. Short scrub grass. A cloudless sky above. The wind swept past me in powerful gusts, whipping up my hair and skirt. No sign of life. No sign of Zeus. It was all so open and bare. I could get lost forever in this barren vastness.

  I’d never experienced a mind this way before, as if it were a place and I were alive inside it. It wasn’t normal, and that made me hesitate, but just for a moment. In the end, it changed nothing. I had a job to do. I was here to get Zeus, and I wasn’t leaving until I did. Let his mind play whatever tricks it wanted. There would be no more lost gods.

  So I walked.

  I walked forever. The landscape around me never changed. The sky stayed the same. If I hadn’t been so sure of myself, I could easily have believed that I hadn’t actually moved at all.

  And then the landscape changed. Not gradually. Abruptly. Like a picture book flipping to an entirely new page.

  I found myself teetering on the edge of a great desert mesa. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I would’ve plummeted off the cliff. I didn’t know what would happen if I died in this place, and I wasn’t eager to find out.

  I tried to step back, but I collided with something hard--but familiar.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” I said, not bothering to turn around. I was irritated, and I didn’t bother trying to hide it.

  “You should go,” Zeus replied.

  He put his hands on my shoulders, and I was painfully aware that, with the slightest push, he could send me careening off the edge of the plateau.

  “I can’t do that,” I replied. “We have a mission. Now, let’s go.”

  He said nothing. I turned around. When I met his eyes, they were the emptiest I’d ever seen them.

  “Zeus, I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you’re connecting to the power you left in the Heavens,” I said, “and you’re drowning the world. You have to stop.”

  Still nothing.

  Then Zeus stepped back. And he jumped off the mesa.

  I reacted quickly, far quicker than I could have in the real world. But here I reacted with the speed of thought. And just before Zeus fell out of reach, I snagged his wrist.

  Even so, I fell to my knees with the weight of holding him--but I held him. My grip was iron; here, strength was based on the mental, not the physical. I was as strong here as Zeus was in the real world, and desperation only bolstered that strength.

  “Have you lost your mind?” I snapped.

  “Let me go!” He tried to sound commanding, but it wasn’t the roar of Zeus, the god-king, the fearsome warrior; it was a kitten mewing.

  “Don’t tempt me,” I shot back.

  He struggled against my iron grip. And I let him. His efforts were futile.

  “She’s gone,” I said.

  Zeus froze. And then his strugglin
g became fiercer than ever. It caught me off-guard and, for a second, he slipped from my fingers. But I dropped to my stomach, and managed to catch him again.

  My heart beat wildly in my chest.

  “She’s gone,” I continued ruthlessly, fighting back tears I couldn’t afford. “Athena is dead. We can’t change that. But we are still alive. And we have work to do. We have a duty to the worlds. To existence.”

  Zeus struggled, but his fighting was weaker now. I knew how to take the wind out of his sails.

  “We need you,” I finished.

  Zeus stopped struggling. He looked at me. The silence between us stretched so long that I thought my arm would break from holding him. I was strong here, but I wasn’t omnipotent. Somewhere, far away, I was still being limited by the mortal body I’d borrowed.

  Zeus started to cry.

  Like me, Zeus never cried. Never. He grieved. He suffered. I knew that firsthand. But he never cried. And if I couldn’t make him cry, no one could. At least that’s what I’d always thought.

  I didn’t know what else to do. So I hauled him back onto the safety of the plateau before the terrible sobs that wracked his body tore him from my grasp.

  And Zeus wept.

  All I could do was hold him as the sadness ripped through him on its way out. He laid his head on my lap, and he let it go. He let it all go.

  Above us, the sky opened up in a deluge of hot rain. I ignored it. I’d gotten used to rain over the last two weeks.

  Zeus cried all day. And I never let him go.

  Finally, when the sun dipped below the horizon, the rain began to slacken. It became a drizzle, and then a mist. The worst of it was over. Zeus finally dried his eyes.

  We laid there quietly for a long time, long enough for the stars to wink into existence above us. I was content to rest, and to wait. Zeus needed a bit more time. And I’d give it to him. I even let him hold me.

  But eventually I started to squirm. I’d never been a fan of being held. Especially not by my husband. Not after learning how many others he’d held in exactly the same way.