Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  “And neither are you, Lethe,” I said. “Or did you prefer … Valkyrie?”

  She froze. “Either would do. Just don’t call me Lisa, I—”

  “But that was your name,” I said. “Wasn’t it? Lisa—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “This is getting interesting,” Hades muttered under his breath.

  “Shut up,” she warned him. “It’s not funny.”

  Hades held out his thumb and forefinger a few centimeters apart. “It’s a little funny.”

  “Lisa Nealon,” I said, and she sagged, shoulders falling. “That was your name. When you were my grandmother, that was your name. That was your name … before you died.”

  “Yes,” she whispered, not daring to look me in the eye.

  I stared back at her, a thousand questions bubbling to the surface of my mind, to my lips.

  Only one made it out.

  “… Why?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Lethe

  Michigan

  December 1989

  “The Iron Curtain is falling,” Hades said, looking around the living room, picking up a Hummel figurine of a little girl with an angelic face, staring at it for a moment, then replacing it on the shelf with the others. “This presents me an interesting opportunity, you see—”

  “To die? For real, this time?” Lethe asked. She looked upon her father’s face with a mixture of weariness and exasperation. She felt wrinkled even though she wasn’t, at least not much. Over two thousand years she’d lived, and this—this middle-class living room in this middle-class town—this was her reward.

  “I would prefer not,” Hades said, looking away from the wall of figurines. “It is a nice collection, I think. Hardly the prize of your existence, though. Is this what you feel you have come to after all this time? From battles on the frontiers of the earth, from pushing the very boundaries of our existence to … collecting ceramic idols?”

  “They’re not idols,” Lethe said, crossing the room to stand by him. His mere presence used to be intimidating. A lot of that luster had died when he had, so long ago. The man who had come back …

  She picked a Hummel, standing next to him without fear. She’d never feared him for his powers the way others did. He could latch onto a soul at great distance; standing in the room with him while his full attention was upon you? More than a few weak people had been driven to death by the mere vibrato of his powers, even at a distance.

  “I didn’t mean it in the worshipful sense,” Hades said, looking at the collection. There had to be a hundred of them, lining the wooden shelf. “I didn’t think you were bowing to them at night, making sacrifices at an altar before them, doing missionary service in their name—”

  She brought the Hummel in her hand to the shelf, a little too strongly. It shattered, sending porcelain dust all over the place. “I don’t do missionary service in anyone’s name anymore.”

  Hades cocked an eyebrow at her. “Not even James Fries, then? Because I had heard—”

  “Don’t be a pig,” she said, giving him a deathly look all her own. “He’s … a distraction. At most.”

  “He is some distant cousin of yours, I believe,” Hades said, full of mirth. “Not that I judge. What you do in that arena is of little consequence to me save for the fruits it produces.”

  “I’m past my days of bearing fruit,” Lethe said, glaring him down. He didn’t even blink; hardly a surprise. The man standing before her had been glared down by the gods of old. Lived with them, died at the hands of one of them. “Modern science sees to that.”

  “I wouldn’t put all my faith in medicine if I were you,” he said. “Still … I suppose it has been difficult this last two thousand years.” He picked up another Hummel.

  She slapped it out of his hand, obliterating it. “Oh, you think it’s been difficult? Being a succubus? Why yes. Yes. Yes, it has. Doomed to not touch lest I take—”

  “I did not come here to argue with you.”

  “Maybe I’m just glad you’re here so I can slap at you for a time for this curse you visited upon me.” She did not remove her glare.

  Hades did not meet her eyes. “Your mother and I had many discussions in those days about what would befall our children out in the world, given how despised I was, given what you could do. I am sorry that I had no better answer than to send you, at your request—”

  “With a monster as my guide,” she breathed.

  “I sent Wolfe with you because you needed … tempering,” he said. “I did not realize that you would become more dangerous than he. That you would almost put him to shame. But … those days are gone, are they not? You hardly wreak any havoc anymore.”

  “It’s not as easy to get away with it in the modern world. You should know this.”

  “I do know this,” he said. “And that is why I have come to you. I know you have struggled with a path. Tried to find your place in the world … I was sorry to hear about Simon’s passing—”

  “No, you weren’t,” Lethe said. “You never liked Simon Nealon. You never thought he was good enough for me.”

  Hades shrugged. “A common sentiment among fathers, I think. But … I wished him no ill. In fact, I met one of his children of another liaison not so long ago. He came to my castle, in fact.”

  “Oh?” Lethe looked up from the dust of shattered Hummels. “Did you kill him, too?”

  “No,” Hades said. “I let him live, though I expect he will be quite reluctant to speak of our meeting.”

  “You should have killed him,” Lethe said.

  “That would seem more your grievance than mine,” Hades said. “So I let him go, him and his … friends. You may feel the need to track him down, scourge him from the face of the earth if you would like. I would not complain; I would even lend you help if you needed it.”

  “I don’t need your help, thanks,” Lethe said. “If I want to kill the last things that remain of Simon, the things he made while he was catting around without me, I could do it myself.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  “I don’t need to, though,” she said. “I’ve long since made my peace with his … dalliances.”

  “The baggage behind which, I assume, brings us to young Mr. Fries?” Hades asked, one eyebrow perked up. “Is this really all you need anymore? A physical relationship with some young—”

  “I just wanted to know what it would be like,” Lethe said, almost hissing her answer. Her face burned. “This isn’t something I want to discuss with my father, even one as distant and uninvolved as you.”

  “I am only distant because your mother’s friends are very clear about how welcome I am here in your new homeland,” Hades said, touching another figure. This one was a little bigger, two kissing little cherubic creatures. “Otherwise, I assure you, I would have visited long ago.”

  “You know she’s alive, then?” Lethe asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Then you know why I’m still here,” Lethe said and ground another Hummel to dust out of pure spite.

  “Your daughters,” Hades said. “Charlie and Sierra. Quite an interesting pair, those two.”

  “Have you met them?” Lethe asked.

  He nodded subtly. “They don’t know it was me, of course.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course. But if you’ve met them, you know. Charlie’s going to need my help to keep out of trouble—”

  “I find her madness rather … endearing,” Hades said. “I doubt many would see it that way, but … prerogative of my blood, I suppose. What does Persephone think?”

  “That she’s batshit crazy and dangerous, the worst sort of succubus. She doesn’t want Charlie to cross her or anyone else she knows.”

  “A fair assessment. And Sierra?” Here his eyes twinkled.

  Lethe barely looked at him, but knew what he was thinking nonetheless. “Leave her the hell alone, Father.”

  “I would hardly dream of interfering in her life,” Hades said. “Not in any …
large ways. She will have enough trouble come her direction, I expect, from her personality alone.” His eye truly did twinkle. “She doesn’t know when to quit.”

  “Yeah,” Lethe said. “Maybe she got that from her dad.”

  “I doubt it,” Hades said, making his way over to the couch, which had a checkerboard pattern on it, each square only a centimeter wide. There were thousands of them. He sank down. “Ah. Modern upholstery is so much more comfortable than …”

  “The cave?” Lethe asked.

  “Or even the simple wooden items of my upbringing. Straw beds. Terrible.” He shook his head. “I am intrigued to see what they do next with mattresses. I feel there might be great strides in them over the next decades. Comfort is a priority for this late-stage society. The comforts always become great just before a fall.”

  “You would know.”

  “From experience, yes,” he said, “and this couch is … very comfortable. And the society in which I find myself ruling? Well, it is experiencing an upheaval of its own right now. Revelen will come through this crisis, though, and these Soviet pet puppet masters who I have pretended to bow to over the last few years? Well, they are being swept away even now. One curtain falls—iron, you see? Another must rise to take its place, if I wish for Revelen to continue to be my haven.”

  “Why should I care about any of this?”

  “I know you have a comfortable life here,” Hades said, adjusting himself on the couch. He wore a suit, and quite a flattering one at that. It looked like something he’d picked up on Savile Row in London. Perfectly tailored. New, too, which meant he’d dressed up for this. “Living in your widowhood. Enjoying your … creature comforts … couches and Fries and …”

  Lethe turned her back on him. Stared at the Hummels.

  “… figurines?”

  Something about that plinked a chord in her as surely as if he’d reached in with his soul powers and plucked at her heart. He didn’t—because he couldn’t—but he was her father, and he knew her as well as anybody ever had, even in spite of their long estrangement—

  Lethe lashed out at the shelf and shattered the Hummels one by one.

  One for cheating Simon, damn him. She’d tried; truly tried, for the first time, and her best as a wife, as a lover—

  It still wasn’t good enough.

  One for Charlie. Crazy Charlie, doing all the stupid things Lethe had done in her youth, but under the gun of modern society and all its restrictions. “You can’t do this nowadays,” she’d told her youngest daughter, but it fell on deaf ears and Charlie went on drinking and ripping the souls out of men at random—

  Not good enough.

  One for Sierra. Tightly buttoned-up Sierra, who’d looked her mother in the eye and said, “I don’t need you. I don’t need—”

  “Not a good enough mother,” Lethe said, smashing the Hummel to smithereens, and then shattering the shelf. “Not good enough at anything—not even for Wolfe anymore, too tame, too—”

  “Shall I come back later?” Hades asked. She rounded on him, and he was just standing there, thumb at the door. “Would like some more time to destroy your possessions? I can come collect you in a few hours if you would prefer …”

  Lethe kicked back like a mule and the whole shelf shattered down. “What makes you think I even want to come with you?”

  Hades just stared at her, blue eyes glimmering in the shadows of the room’s half-light. “Call it an idle suspicion, but I sense your despair. You have lived a long life, and now … you come to the point of questions, yes? ‘What is the meaning?’ You have lived a full life … lived more perhaps than most even your age. Killed more, for certain, than almost any your age.”

  She bowed her head. “Not more than you, though, have I?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Only an amateur would keep count.”

  She looked up. “What do you want from me?”

  He smiled. “I had the same questions you now face, when I reached my … middle age, they call it now? A cute title, I think. We were gods, my daughter. Now … you are nothing, yes? You see yourself struggle with the role of … wife? Mother? Selfishly, you think, becoming perhaps a true lover for the first time? With Fries? Becoming something you couldn’t even be with Simon?”

  “Screw you,” she said. “You made me this way.”

  “I did not,” he said. “If it were down to my choice, I would have made you like me, not this hybrid between your mother’s powers and mine, unable to touch, unable to feel, unable to live between the moments when you embrace your destiny, your power. Yours is without doubt a harder road than even mine—but that has made you strong, my daughter.” He crossed to her. “You know the darkness of misery. It has tempered your soul. Gone are the days when you sought easy death, easily inflicted on lesser men. You are more now. You should be more than a housewife, a lover, a mother to ungrateful children who have not lived in the world as we have lived in it—”

  “What do you want?” she asked, sagging into the couch. Annoying as it was, he was right: it was comfortable.

  “I want to help you,” he said, and here he offered her a hand, open, his palm waiting for her. “I have experienced what you feel now. That dooming despair that comes when you realize all you have loved is lost. All you have known, all you have wanted is now forever outside your reach.” His hand wavered. “I want to show you what I discovered that saw me through those dark days. I want you to believe again. Perhaps, even … in me? Though if not, that is fine, too. It would just be nice to see my favorite daughter …” The corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled. “… live again.”

  “I am living,” she said, looking up at him with sharp loathing. “Or … at least I thought I was. With Simon. With Fries. With Charlie and Sierra.”

  “Wife? Mother? Lover?” Hades shook his head. “These were never the words that defined you. You were always so much more.”

  “You better not be saying the best I can be is ‘daughter,’” Lethe said, glaring up at him.

  “Hardly,” he said. “Come with me. Find out for yourself. Let us get back to finding you a path, yes?”

  She stared at his hand. It was … inviting. He’d never struck at her, never hit her … and if she touched him …

  He wouldn’t die. Unlike … so many others.

  Minutes passed. She stared at him, he stared at her. Patient.

  Finally … she took his hand.

  “Now,” he said, as she rose to her feet, “we just need to deal with the trivial matter of making sure that Mr. Fries and his employers think you are dead. For I want complications with Alastor like I want a kick in the groin.”

  “How are you going to manage that?” Lethe asked, looking around. The Hummels were shattered, the living room a mess. Good thing she’d just given up on the role of housekeeper, because cleaning this up? Would suck a lot.

  “I have the body of a woman your height, your weight, in my trunk,” he said.

  “Were you carrying that around for fun or did you pick it up specifically for this?” Lethe asked.

  Hades’s eyes twinkled. “Wouldn’t you like to know. I found her in a morgue across town.”

  “How did you know I’d say yes?” Lethe asked. There was a peculiar weight on her shoulders. “What the hell were you going to do with her if I said no?”

  “Leave her in a Christmas display and let the cops chase their tails for a while, probably,” he said with a shrug. “I think we leave her here … set a small fire … and … as the French say, voila! You are now dead. Lisa Nealon will die here, today. All her obligations, all her fears, all her troubling decisions. All you need to decide is what you want to bring with you.”

  “Not a damned thing,” Lethe said and walked away, passing a picture of Sierra and Charlie, as girls, hanging on the wall. She didn’t even look back. “Let it all burn.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Sienna

  “Is everyone I thought was dead still alive?” I asked, staring at my grandmother
and great-grandfather as she finished her story about evading James Fries and Omega in Michigan back in 1989. “Seriously. Is George Washington going to come strolling out here, fresh as a daisy?”

  “I think we can safely say Washington is dead,” Hades said. “Though I did not witness the event myself, I am informed, reliably, he was human, and did die.”

  “Dead is usually dead,” Lethe said, a bizarre melancholy hanging over her, making her way more sedate than even usual. “Hades and I had good reasons to fake our deaths. His brothers’ threat in his case, and … Omega and Fries in mine.”

  “Why not just take on Omega?” I asked. “Why not whip their asses? I did.”

  “Is that why Janus is still rebuilding it from the ground up?” my grandmother asked with a small smile. “Cut off one head …”

  “Captain America fan?” I asked. “You’d get along great with my brother.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I doubt it. I don’t ‘get along great’ with much of anyone.”

  “Well, you haven’t made me kick your ass yet,” I said. “That’s something.”

  “Oh, we’ve fought, granddaughter,” Lethe said. “You just don’t remember it.”

  “Why don’t I remember?” I asked. “Because you’re the stronger succubus?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t know which of us is. Rose was stronger than you, though, and she took your memory of it. Clearly. Because it was a humdinger of a brawl. Best fight I’ve had in a few centuries.” She brushed her jaw.

  Damn Rose, stealing my memory of kicking my grandmother’s ass. And meeting her before, in general. “Seriously, though—who else is alive?” I asked. “Is my mom?” I knew the answer already.

  “No,” Lethe said. “She’s quite dead. You saw the body.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Of course. As is Charlie.” My grandmother reacted, almost imperceptibly, but I couldn’t tell quite what she was thinking.

  “I am … somewhat late in saying this, I think,” Hades said, “but … I am sorry for the loss of your mother. She was everything I have come to be proud of in my brood … and I am sorry I never got a chance to know her better.”