by David Welch
“’Cause I’m not suicidal,” Artemis replied simply. “Ares occasionally has a bad day, but nothing serious.”
“And the sameness doesn’t get to you?” he said.
“Does it get to you?” she replied, pausing from her shots. “You’re implying that since I’ve experienced so much, even the things I like will get boring and old.”
“You told me your life scales up, but how much of your pleasure scales up?” he said. “The way I see it, whenever you find something exciting or fun in life, one of two things can happen. The novelty wears off and you grow tired of it, or it strikes some primal chord in you and you stick with it. I try to put myself in your shoes, I have to imagine you ‘stick with it’ far longer than a normal human life span. That if some scientist extended my life by double I’d still love fried chicken a hundred years from now.”
“You would,” she replied. “And you’re right. You know, you think too much. You take half the fun out by explaining all this stuff.”
“Sorry,” he deadpanned. “I’ll try to be less intelligent for you.”
“You’d do that for me?” she replied with mock sincerity.
“I would. But short of getting hit in the head with a rock, I don’t think it’s possible,” he replied. “So this thing we have, it still excites you, even though you’ve had forty-two husbands and all sorts of other lovers in your life?”
“I’ve never had you for a lover before,” she said. “So, yes. Fifty years or five thousand, the moment is still the moment. The past is gone, and the future always ends up the present.”
“So you focus on living in the present,” Desmond surmised. It was an approach he was not unfamiliar with. It had gotten him through some rough months after his parents’ death. But to be able to do that, day in and day out, for millennia on end? He wasn’t sure if he would have the strength for that.
She nodded. “As much as I can. Keeps me from thinking about it, the enormity of it all. Apollo was always questioning his existence. Trying to figure out why. Never did come up with a suitable answer, no matter what crazy religion or philosophy he tried. Even before Lenka killed him, I was worried, afraid one day he’d decide it was all futile . . . And Dio, he tries so hard to hide from it . . .”
“And those thoughts never occurred to you?” he said.
“Of course they have,” she said. “But I guess I saw it differently. They were always looking for some great purpose in life. I figured life was the purpose. My life is my life, so I’ll do with it what I please. If there is some higher power, then that power gave me agency and will and the ability to choose, so I’ll be damned if I don’t use it.”
“And if that ‘power’ gave you these gifts so you could serve ‘His’ purpose?” Desmond ventured.
“Then he’s an insecure prick,” Artemis replied, nocking and firing off another arrow. It split an arrow already in the target.
“Freaking deity creating life just so it can suck up and praise him?” she laughed. “Is such a being even worthy of being called God?”
“I have no idea,” Desmond answered. “Not sure I ever will. Why try to rationally comprehend something so great and powerful that it created rationality in the first place?”
“You’re an ant in a farm,” she replied.
“So are you, beautiful,” he replied. “But we’re ants with free will, and weapons.”
She took another shot. She’d landed another ring of arrows, each exactly one inch out from where the red bull’s-eye had been.
“Free will and weapons,” she repeated.
“And sex,” he said.
She looked at him as if he were a naughty little boy.
“Well, not all at the same time . . . unless you’re feeling kinky,” he clarified. “By the way, you look hot firing that bow.”
“Oh, do I?” she answered.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I can see it now. We put you in a bikini, get some shots of you posing with that bow . . . we print up a calendar and move a million copies. It’ll sell like hotcakes in the red states.”
She sighed and shook her head.
“How ’bout no bikini, we move one copy, and I sell it to the one man who can really appreciate it?”
He thought for a second.
“Risky business plan,” he said. “But I like it.”
“Good,” she replied, readying another arrow and drawing back.
“So who’s the lucky guy?” he asked sarcastically.
The words caught her off guard, and she sent the arrow flying high, missing the target entirely. She screwed up her face, unaccustomed to missing.
“You did that on purpose,” she said, managing to sound both pouty and vaguely threatening at the same time. He only returned a smile.
“Me? Never . . .”
So far as Ares was concerned, about the only thing better than getting a massage from Aphrodite was making love to her. And while for most people the massages led to the lovemaking, with them it was the other way around. They had tired each other out after only two hours, tonight’s mood being both lusty and aggressive. Sometimes he’d see that defiant glint in Dita’s eye, and each would throw every bit of skill and experience into getting the other to cry uncle first. Ares was no slouch when it came to pleasing women, but being a man, he had a natural disadvantage as far as orgasms were concerned. After a frantic two-hour, back-and-forth “battle,” he’d given up the ghost.
Aphrodite had taken pity on the “loser” and started working over the tight muscles of his back. Her naked form loomed over him, her deft hands kneading and rolling, finding every hidden place his musculature had to offer.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asked.
His mood dimmed. She wasn’t talking about sex.
“Dita, we’ve been through this,” he said.
“And we’ll keep going through it,” she replied. “Once an addict . . .”
“I’m not an addict,” he said. “I don’t go seeking chaos and blood anymore. You know this.”
“But it still seems to find you,” she replied.
“It finds everybody, Dita,” he replied. “There’s evil in the world. I can’t change that.”
“And you can’t walk away from it,” she said sadly.
He did not reply, just lay there and let her fingers work. The argument was familiar. Heck, given how long they’d loved each other, what argument wasn’t? He’d reassured her dozens of times, whether he’d gone off to fight for the Union or retake Jerusalem, that he only went because he believed the causes just. Aphrodite seemed to know, academically at least, the difference between bloodlust and standing up for an ideal. But on an instinctive level, she regarded all violence as corrupting, like a contagion or taint that ruined a person by sheer proximity.
Yet she’s always been drawn to the soldiers!
The thought nearly made him laugh, but he bit it back. It would only make her think he didn’t take this seriously.
“Besides,” he finally said, “we didn’t hurt her. The only people we hurt were a bunch of criminal thugs trying to hurt us.”
“I know, Ari,” she said,” I know.”
“All to try and stop a psychopath from hunting us down and killing us one by one. I don’t think the use of force in such a situation is beyond the pale,” he continued.
“No,” she said, not sounding convinced. “But even after these good causes you go off on, there’s something different about you when you come back. A bounce in your step . . .”
“You’re imagining things,” he said.
Her fingers stopped their work.
“And when was the last time you held out for two hours when we fucked like that?” she asked.
He paused, thinking. Much as he hated it, she did have a point. He usually didn’t get much past an hour and a half, less when she was using her A game. His tho
ughts were interrupted when she lay flat against him, her breasts pressing snugly against his shoulder blades. Her breath teased his ear.
“It was right after you got back from your last tour in Afghanistan,” she said quietly.
The memory came to him instantly. She was right.
“I am not going back to the person I was,” he said for the millionth time in the last thousand years.
“I know,” she said. “But I still worry. I’ll always worry about you.”
“You don’t need to,” he replied.
He felt her head rest against his neck, nestling under his chin. Her chest rose and fell, her breathing slowly calming toward sleep. She didn’t mention the cause of her worry. She didn’t have to. They’d discussed it a hundred times before. It wasn’t his self-control she doubted. It was his baseline nature. What if the spring in his step she hinted at wasn’t caused by serving a good cause? What if it was just a natural high from acting violently?
What if, at his core, he was at his best when killing and maiming? Then the self-discipline she loved would be the unnatural act, the outside influence. It would be an illusion, a repression he put on himself because who he was truly was too sociopathic for society to tolerate anymore.
Or maybe you’re just a slow learner, he thought to himself. That was his saving grace in arguments like these, a series of words spoken to him in Aramaic two thousand years earlier. He’d brought these fears to Jesus, who’d said perhaps it was possible that he was naturally a violent and terrible scumbag. Or maybe he was a slow learner, and had needed three thousand years to figure out that killing for the fun of killing was a bad thing.
He remembered his reaction. It had involved a lot of swearing. But of course Christ had sat there with a patient smile and let the truth settle in over the next few days. Had he killed and slaughtered for all those eons while knowing, in the full emotional sense, that it was wrong, then he’d be truly and irredeemably evil. He’d be smart, but evil. Were he stupid and slow enough that it had taken him three millennia to understand the enormity of the pain he had caused, then he’d be an idiot, but he would retain some small chance at being a good man. It wasn’t a huge distinction, but he’d come to understand that unknowingly doing evil was better than the alternative. Amoral beat out immoral.
And what had he been if not amoral? He’d convinced himself that being a “god” and of a “higher” sort of humanity than all the rest, common morality was nothing to him. The superstitions of limited and mortal fools. He’d been above such nonsense.
“Such an idiot,” he thought. Not for the first time he realized he’d been “slow” about a great many things.
“Is she down?” Zeus whispered, ducking his head into one of the guest rooms.
Hera rose softly from one of the beds. Melika lay under the covers, clutching her pillow protectively in both hands.
“Yeah,” Hera replied, stepping from the room. She closed the door quietly.
“How bad?” Zeus asked heavily.
“It’ll be rough,” Hera replied. “There’s no other way to put it.”
Zeus fought back the urge to growl, aware that his children were sleeping within earshot.
“I hate this,” he griped softly. “I hate not being able to do anything! I mean, we’ve seen this before! We’ve both had children who lost mortal parents, but . . . but there’s no way to stop it!”
“No,” Hera agreed, letting him vent.
“We’ve seen it, we know what it does, even what it’s like . . . and there’s still nothing we can do to stop it. Nothing we’ve learned . . .”
He stomped away to a window, gazing out upon the night. It wasn’t black outside yet, just a darkening blue, brightened by a huge moon reflecting its silver glow onto the distant ocean. The view didn’t make him feel any better, or any different. But he couldn’t pull himself from it. Foolish as it was, turning away meant turning back to his helplessness, to innocent children scarred forever by their own nephew. Their dying, vengeful, psychotic nephew . . .
“When things quiet down,” Hera said, “we should get Melika to a therapist.”
“You think they know something about grief that we don’t?” Zeus asked sardonically.
“No,” Hera replied, “but we’re her parents. We’re inextricably tied to what happened. Some distance may be helpful to her.”
Zeus made a noncommittal noise, and kept staring at the horizon. He didn’t know how long he stayed there. He only turned when a clamor rose from below. A loud, muffled voice drifted up, followed by a softer, feminine pitch.
Zeus sighed, and headed for the door.
“Don’t lose your temper,” Hera said. “And don’t terrify whatever girl he’s brought back.”
“No promises,” Zeus replied, storming down the hall. He found the stairs, descending to the main floor. They opened onto the great room, where he saw Dionysus, obviously drunk from the way he struggled to sit upright. His face looked tired and beat, with tiny lines forming around his eyes from a long night of drinking. He was seated on a couch, a pretty thirtyish woman perched on his lap, kissing him furiously.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” said Zeus in ancient Illyrian.
Neither jumped to their feet. Their heads just turned, their eyes trying lazily to focus. She was as far gone as he.
“Anderson!” Dionysus said in English, using Zeus’ current alias. “Who knew you were still awake?”
“Who’s he, Patty?” asked the girl.
“My brother,” Dionysus lied. It was their common technique. Since they all looked twenty-five, it was awkward to call someone “my father” or “my son” who looked the same age. At least Dio’s drunkenness hadn’t addled all of his brains.
“Maybe we should get a room,” the girl said, swaying as she spoke.
“Maybe she’ll pass out before she reaches that room,” Zeus continued in the ancient tongue.
“Well, then I should be there to make sure she sleeps on her side,” Dionysus replied.
“You do realize your sister is upstairs, asleep after crying in Hera’s arms for two hours?” Zeus said.
Dionysus sighed, turned to his lady friend, and said, “Why don’t you head downstairs? We can have some privacy there. I gotta take care of something.”
The woman’s glassy eyes went from one man to the other. With a shrug she got up, and staggered toward the stairs to the basement lounge. They waited until she was out of sight.
“Was that really necessary?” Dionysus asked in Illyrian.
“Is she?” Zeus replied. “Is there something this one has to offer that the other ten thousand haven’t?”
“You of all people . . . ,” Dionysus said, shaking his head.
“Excuse me?” Zeus said, reaching the bottom of the stairs.
“You keep having families and children, when you know exactly how it will end. And you criticize me for doing what I like?”
“At a time like this? Yes,” Zeus said. “What if she’d been one of Lenka’s people? Huh? Didn’t one of your conquests just try to kill you in Amsterdam?”
“She’s not one of his,” Dionysus said with a wave. “I asked her after she’d gotten drunk. In vino veritas. She had no idea who Lenka Sidorov was.”
“She could’ve faked intoxication,” Zeus said. “She could still be. How do you know she’s not down there furiously texting Lenka with our location?”
“Because I watched her drink,” Dionysus replied. “A woman her size can’t drink five beers and be sober.”
Zeus grumbled. “You’re still taking too many risks.”
“So I should give up on life and live like a hunted animal?” said Dionysus. “God knows how much time I have left. I’m not going to waste it.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Zeus snapped. “Sidorov is not going to kill us.”
Dionysus stared at
him for a moment, as if he were talking about something entirely unrelated. Then he shook his head clear, no doubt tripped up by the alcohol in his system.
“Sidorov . . . ,” he said, slowly, as if in deep thought. “You say we’ll be fine. He got Hermes, he nearly got you and Hera and Artemis. And let’s face it, Dad, I’m not exactly the military type.”
“Bah,” Zeus said with a wave. “Outside of this family, how many people could beat you in a fight? God knows you’ve been in enough!”
“No, not like you guys,” Dionysus said. “When Hera gets angry, people run. When you get angry, cities burn. Artemis takes out her enemies without them even knowing, usually from a hundred yards away. And Ares? Hah! We may not believe we’re gods anymore, but that man is a force of nature! If I were to put money on which one of us might survive—”
“Knock it off, Dio,” Zeus remarked. “You’re having one of your mood swings.”
“Maybe I am,” Dio said. “But I don’t care. If these are my last days, I’m going to live them the way I want. And that includes spending time with my brother and sister, tomorrow.”
He stood up and headed for the stairs. Zeus watched him go, knowing there was no use in arguing anymore. When Dionysus got indignant there was no swaying him, even if he was doing something sketchy.
“I’ll hold you to that,” Zeus said. “And you better not be hung over.”
“I’ve already drunk a quart of water,” Dionysus said, disappearing down the stairs. Zeus sighed, and headed back toward his room.
23
Monterey, California
The man behind the desk sweated profusely. It wasn’t from the late spring heat; the air conditioning in his showroom was positively arctic. For a split second it had made Lenka think of Moscow. Americans spent so much money on comfort.
No, the man was sweating from fear. He looked up at Ruslan and Grigori, both in navy blue suits and ties, both with sidearms on their belts. Perfect FBI agents. Both spoke with flawless American accents, picked up over the years working in covert circles. They’d handed the man a warrant, fudged with unreadable signatures.
