by David Welch
“I see you’re having fun,” Hera said.
“Of course,” Zeus said, sending Bane through the air again.
“Kei is up. We can head out whenever you guys are finished with your ‘important business’ here,” Hera said.
“I don’t know,” Zeus said as he tossed Melika into the water. “This could take a while. All this energy to bleed off before a long car ride . . .”
“Well, I’m thinking I can help you with that,” Hera said.
She pulled her shirt over her head, and stepped out of her shorts. Zeus paused. Despite having been married to or living with this woman for the better part of six thousand years, he still couldn’t help looking at her. She looked resplendent in a modest bikini, one of those where the bottoms were more shorts than panties. She leapt into the deep end, then swam underwater toward him, reemerging behind Bane. The boy splashed excitedly and grabbed her arm, as kids are wont to do when in the water. She pulled the little one up into her arms. He was shivering a bit, but in no way looked ready to quit the pool.
“Well, I think I can throw you just as far as Daddy. What do you think?”
“Yeah!” he cried defiantly. “Throw me!”
She nodded knowingly to her husband. He smiled and grasped Melika. As one they launched the two children, watching them sail a short distance before splashing back into the water.
Five minutes later Melika was still flying joyously through the air. Bane, however, had reached his limit. The little boy had simply cuddled into Hera’s arms and buried his face in her shoulder. So she’d retreated from the pool to the patio, sitting on a chaise next to her clothes, holding her stepson.
Biologically speaking, Bane was Keilana’s child. Hera and Zeus had stopped trying to have children of their own long ago, unable to bear the pain of watching them grow to the cusp of adulthood, then collapse into death. She and Zeus had borne more surviving immortals than any other couple. Ares, Hebe, Eris, Eileithyia, and Hephaestus: five immortals who had survived to know immortality. Fifty-three of their brothers and sisters hadn’t been so lucky.
She’d had mortal children since then, in between their “marriages.” Every few decades they’d separate, out of necessity. Even the most successful of marriages could grow strained and tense. Happily married mortals usually died before this point was reached, luckily. She and Zeus didn’t have that luxury. So they would part, and have relationships and families with others. And she’d had her share of children with mortal husbands.
But they always came back together, as they were now. This was not the first “three-way” marriage they’d been involved in. It was harder to do. Most mortals didn’t deal well with jealousy. But Keilana was a jewel. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t mind sharing her lover with another, it was that she was bisexual, and had found herself falling in love with Hera as well as Zeus. Hera mostly preferred men. Had she lived a single lifetime, she’d have been considered straight. But in her long life she’d had her share of female lovers, and wasn’t one to say no to Keilana’s touch.
She’d been there, with these children, their entire lives. So even though they called her Aunty, she felt more like a stepmom. She couldn’t look on Bane or Melika with anything other than motherly affection. In her arms the little boy dozed off, his tiny form wrapped in a towel to protect him from the sun.
Her phone rang. She dug through her pile of clothing, finding her phone under a sandal. She brought it to her ear.
“Yes?”
“Hey, Hera, it’s Dio,” a familiar voice said.
“Ted, hi,” she said, remembering that she was in public and had no way of knowing if anybody was listening.
“Yeah, Ted’s gone. Had to visit one of the caches. Girl I picked up in Amsterdam turned out to be an assassin,” he said.
“What?!” she said, gasping, then calmed down to avoid waking Bane. “What do you mean? Was it Lenka?”
“No idea,” he said.
“Are you on your way to Ares’ place? We’re headed there now,” Hera said.
“Ares? Wasn’t planning to, why?”
“Didn’t you get the message from Artemis? She found one of Lenka’s people prowling her place, dressed as a cop,” Hera explained. “We think Lenka has Athena. That's how he knew where to find Hermes and Artemis. Ares just moved into his place three months ago, so Athena can’t reveal where he lives. She doesn’t know.”
“Ah . . . damn. I saw I had a message from her but I didn’t check it, then this bitch pulls a gun on me . . .”
“Are you okay?” Hera asked.
“Yeah. Got away intact. Gonna lie low for a while, make sure she hasn’t picked up my trail again. She seemed to know what she was doing, so it could be a little while ’till I know if I’m in the clear or not. Don’t know when I’ll be able to get to the airport, but send me Ares’ address. I’ll meet you guys out there, sooner or later,” Dionysus said.
Hera paused, thinking. He could be perfectly “okay,” but with a gun to his back.
“Paris?” she asked, tentatively. To anybody listening it sounded like a question about which airport he was leaving from. In truth it was code.
“Miserable this time of year,” he replied. She breathed a sigh of relief. He was okay.
“I’ll send you the location,” she said. “Your phone is secure?”
“It’s one of yours,” he replied.
“All right,” she said. “Stay safe.”
“Thanks. You too. Tell Dad I’m okay.”
They cut the line. Zeus stood at the edge of the pool, Melika clinging to his back. He raised an eyebrow, curious.
“Dionysus was attacked,” she said in ancient Minoan, one of many ancient languages she knew that the kids did not. “He’s all right, heading back to America.”
Zeus frowned. Hera knew he was a bit better at suppressing his anger when it came to his adult children, especially the immortal ones. They could handle themselves. But she still saw the stiffening of his forearms, and the lines that formed around his mouth as his expression soured. The protective dad never really went away.
“We should probably get going, then,” he said, in English.
“Can’t we swim a little more?” Melika pouted from his back.
“We have a long drive, Meli,” he replied. “Uncle Ares has a pool. When we get there, you can swim all you want.”
“But it’s so far away,” the girl groused.
“Come on,” Zeus said, pulling her off him and setting her on the pavement. “We gotta go get changed, and make sure your mother is out of bed.”
The girl sighed dramatically, but made no further protest. Zeus walked just behind her, alongside Hera.
“Lenka?” he asked.
“Dionysus isn’t sure but probably,” she replied in ancient Minoan.
“Wonderful,” he said glumly.
They made their way back to the hotel. Neither noticed a man sitting across the street in a blue Honda. It would have been hard for them to notice him. He’d left Connecticut in a red Ford, and would probably change cars again in a day or so. Neither did the two immortals see the man take out his phone and make a call.
13
Somewhere In Western Nevada
“Have you ever been married to a king?”
“No,” Artemis replied. “Draws too much attention. Demeter did, married one of England’s kings.”
“How about a Roman emperor?” he asked.
“No,” she replied. “But I slept with Mark Antony once.”
“Really?” he asked.
“He got lost hunting,” she said. “I hadn’t been with a man in several months . . .”
“Interesting,” he said. “Render unto . . .”
“I never slept with Caesar,” she replied. “Any of the Caesars. Buncha nut-job tyrants.”
They drove through the seemi
ngly endless desert of Nevada. Brown mountains rose around her, displaying only scrubby plants and grasses. The valleys were a little greener, but still more desert than not. It was the type of place Hermes would’ve liked if he were still alive.
“All right, I got one,” Desmond said. She smiled. For the better part of the drive, he’d been asking her questions, hundreds of them. Lots of them she’d never seen coming because most people just weren’t as curious as the man, or as smart.
“Fire away,” she said.
“You’re five thousand seven hundred and sixty-two years old, yet you say you had your last child in the eighteen sixties,” he said. “Mortal women stop releasing eggs in their late forties. So do you constantly manufacture them in your body, or do you just have so many that six millennia later you still haven’t run out?”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t?” he replied.
“None of us have been doctors for over fifty years,” she replied. “And we’re not exactly going to trust some random doctor to look into something like that. Could get us all discovered. So I don’t know how it works, I just know that I’ve been having children ever since I was forty-two, and every month certain things still happen.”
“Forty-two?” he said.
“You don’t exactly rush into things when you know you’ll live forever,” she said.
“I can see that,” he said with a nod. “And you say you stopped aging at around twenty-four?”
“Yep,” she replied.
“And twenty-four-year-old women tend to be quite fertile . . . and we haven’t been using protection . . .”
“I’m on the pill, Des,” she said, then smiled sarcastically. “But thanks for not thinking about that until now.”
“Well, you have a way of entrancing a man,” he replied.
“You’re too rational to be entranced,” she shot back.
“Not if I want to be entranced,” he replied with a smirk. “I have a remarkable ability to ignore things I don’t like, should they get in the way.”
“You’re bragging about being able to selectively ignore reality?” she replied. “After all your talk about wanting to see things ‘how they are’?”
“So I’m a hypocrite,” he said with a confident smile. “I got no problem with it.”
She laughed, shaking her head as she drove.
“Okay, serious again. If all your immortal superpowers came in sometime before you reached twenty-four, you must’ve been young when you got that scar.”
“I was,” she replied. “I was seven. There was a fawn that fed with her mother at a field near my mother’s house. I used to love watching her. One day one of the village dogs saw the fawn and started chasing it, and scared it away. I got mad and started hitting the dog with a stick.”
“Wow. I have an intolerably cute image of all this in my head,” Desmond said.
“Anyway, the dog got angry and knocked me down, and I hit my head on a rock. He was going to bite me, but then my dad came out and kicked the mutt in the ribs so hard that he ran off whimpering.”
“So Zeus is a cat person?” assumed Desmond.
“Don’t ever let him hear you say that,” she replied with mock seriousness. “He likes dogs. Loves them. Just doesn’t like it when they attack his daughter.”
“Right,” Desmond said, mimicking the motion of writing that down in a notebook. “Zeus . . . hates . . . cats . . .”
He reached into the back, pulling out a soda from a six-pack they’d bought at their last stop. He took a long drink.
“What about that whole ‘god’ thing? How’d that come about?” he asked.
“What specifically are you asking? Did we think we were actually gods?” she replied.
“Did you?”
“No. Not in the ‘all-powerful-I-control-the-world’ way. We knew we were people,” she replied. “But remember, Des, this was a world where half of all children died before adulthood. And sickness you wouldn’t miss work for today could kill back then. Nobody knew much about the science of how the body worked. To a mind shaped by such a world, an immortal human does appear to be something unique and divine.”
“And you were opportunistic enough to take advantage of that?” he asked.
“Well, yes—sort of,” she said.
“‘Sort of’ . . . you’ve said that before,” he said.
“I know,” she replied. “It was Odin who really got it going.”
“Odin?” he asked. “He was real?”
“Most of the Norse pantheon is based on real people,” she said. “I was married to Thor, remember?”
“Oh yeah, you tried to have children with him,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, a hint of pain in her voice. “Anyway, Odin spent years saying that we were special, that we were meant to rule over these ‘short-lived’ people. That if we weren’t gods, we were sent by them to be the natural rulers of the world. So he started telling mortals he was a god, and slowly they started believing it. And once he was living the life, others started imitating him. Within a few centuries we were all ‘gods,’ living like kings. Hell, better than kings. Kings came to us for sanction and advice.”
She shook her head, a deep regret forming inside her. It always did when she remembered those days. The arrogance of it struck her. She knew more than most people, that much was true. But she still had all the familiar flaws and weaknesses. Jealousy, vanity, pride . . . the whole assortment. And the immortals had been arrogant enough to think they were worthy of being gods. The memory of it always sent a chill down her spine. How many people had died because of “dictates” she’d given? How many women had given up knowing a man’s touch to be one of her “virgin” servants? How many of her harem, men and women, had she put to death for straying?
And I was one of the tame ones, she thought. She didn’t want to imagine what kind of regret ran through Zeus’ mind, or Ares’.
“So what was the deal with Mount Olympus? It’s too tall for people to live up top, even immortal ones,” he said.
“We used to have a place about a third of the way up,” she explained.
“Should I ask what kind of stuff went on up there?” Des said.
“Do you ask your ex-flings what kind of fun they had in the past?” she countered.
“My ‘flings’ are all surprisingly ordinary,” he said. “Even the ones with tramp-stamp tattoos. I gotta imagine your stories would put anything they did to shame.”
“Might change the way you think about me,” she replied.
“More so than ‘Hey, guess what, I’m immortal and a Greek goddess’?”
“Fine,” she replied. “But just a taste. You’ll get more if you’re good.”
He nodded compliantly.
“Once upon a time I had a manservant brought for me from Asia Minor. He was renowned for his skills in oral sex. I used to make him eat me out whenever we dined, but only to just shy of orgasm,” she said. “Why limit myself to only one form of pleasure at a time?”
Desmond stared at her blankly.
“Can’t believe I’ve never tried that,” he said.
“Well, if you want . . .” she said. “I’m always up for a man who’s eager to please.”
“Only if you’ll return the favor,” Desmond said devilishly.
“Oh, I’ve returned worse ‘favors’ than that,” she replied.
“I bet,” he replied. “We probably shouldn’t get all fired up while we’re driving.”
She pouted playfully, but kept her eyes on the road.
“So,” he said, “did you ever meet Marco Polo . . .”
14
Near Algodones, New Mexico
“They’ve gone to ground,” said Lenka. He sat at a desk in the office of the abandoned warehouse. Yevgenny, Grigori
, and Duscha sat in metal chairs nearby.
“We learn the location of three, and we only manage to kill one . . .” Lenka sighed.
“Irina Denilova is not one of us,” Yevgenny said. “Her success was always a long shot.”
Lenka drummed his fingers. He coughed several times, checking his hand for blood. Nothing.
“And now my mother’s information is useless,” Lenka said coldly.
“We could still find their former homes,” Grigori said. “We might find something there that will reveal where they have gone.”
Lenka shook his head slowly.
“There will be nothing,” he said. “You’ll find pictures of past families, fancy antiques . . . but not their locations. They are not stupid.”
Grigori shrugged nervously, and looked to the ground. For a long moment nobody said anything. Then Lenka’s phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket.
“Yes?” he said.
“Mr. Sidorov, it’s Chloe Ezra,” an important-sounding female voice said.
“Miss Ezra,” he said. It was his “new partner.” He had had some trouble squeezing more funds out of his marks in Russia. There was only so much money a politician, even a dirty one, could get for you. But Chloe Ezra had money. The head of the Embrace Human Extirpation organization, she’d made fortunes shaking down celebrities. She pitched her organization as merely seeking to encourage birth control, to help control the population for the sake of Earth and the environment. And of course the shallow celebrities of Hollywood ate it up, along with rich limousine liberals riddled with guilt over being human.
But in truth Miss Ezra was an extremist. She really did wish that humans would die off. Lenka did not understand what motivated a person to want to kill themselves in the name of deer and trees, but he did not need to. When he had shown Miss Ezra evidence of the immortals, and implied how easy it would be for modern geneticists to give all humans immortality, the extremist had literally thrown money at him. For this woman, mortal humans were bad enough. The thought of human beings becoming immortal, of the overpopulation and destruction that would result, had sold her. So she secretly sent money his way, and whatever resources his people needed. Firearms, fake identification, the deed to this empty warehouse . . . Extremist or not, she was a useful asset, and so driven by her ‘cause’ that she hadn’t had the wits to check any deeper into his identity. Blinded by her ideology . . . something he’d seen plenty of, and had no problem using to his advantage.
