“We’re up to the Pompe, right?”
“You remember.” He looked pleased. The lights in the theater dimmed to black. Selene looked over her shoulder. No sign of police bursting through the doors. Only a few other people sat scattered in rows behind them. It must be a particularly terrible film.
A swell of music accompanied the first preview. Theo leaned over and whispered loudly in her ear: “So far, every ritual’s been amplified. Besides the murders, we have massive porcine entelodont teeth instead of Demeter’s traditional suckling pigs. They use dozens of snakes for the Asklepia instead of just one. Tonight’s Pompe involved a procession to the temple in Eleusis. How will our hierophant amplify a parade?”
“It’s already an intensified ritual,” she whispered back, “because they processed in front of the whole city, while the previous rites were held in secret.”
“You think they’re going to do something tonight in public?” Theo clutched at the armrest, his elbow brushing hers. “You think they’ll kill someone where everyone can see? That’ll throw the city into a complete panic.”
She could see the crease of concern behind the bridge of his glasses. “We need to stop them,” she said, aware of her breath fanning the fair hair on his forehead. She turned away, back toward the movie preview, where a superhero ran through the streets of New York, dispatching three masked thugs with a magic whip, then flew through the air, chased by fighter jets. If only being a real hero were so easy.
“Then Trinity churchyard it is,” Theo said. “I bet we’ll catch the bastards there.”
“Why Trinity?”
“It’s the most famous cemetery in Manhattan, and the Pompe always started at Kerameikos, the most important burial ground in Athens. Leaving the graveyard symbolized a progression from death to life, remember? They’re not going to change that part.”
Selene knew Trinity churchyard: She’d stood there feeling smug the day they laid Alexander Hamilton in his grave. But she’d also lived in Manhattan long enough to know that many other cemeteries lay scattered throughout the city. “You’re forgetting about the two nineteenth-century Marble Cemeteries off Second Avenue and the Jewish graveyards near Sixth Avenue—one of those is from the late 1600s. And Trinity Church has an overflow graveyard way uptown, too.”
Theo whistled appreciatively. “You’re certainly a font of morbid knowledge. Hopefully, after my conversation with the cops, they’ll stake out all the cemeteries, but I’d like to have eyes on them. You have any discreet friends who might help?”
Selene laughed abruptly. “I don’t have a whole lot of friends, in case you couldn’t guess.” She couldn’t call the city’s other immortals her friends—she hadn’t spoken to most of them in years. Besides, one of them was likely the very killer they were seeking. “And don’t go dragging your friend Gabriela or any of your adoring students along. You don’t want them getting into trouble with the cops, too, do you?”
Theo turned back to the screen, chewing his lip. He was clearly devising some plan, but she, on the other hand, found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. The main attraction had begun, and for just a few minutes, she longed to escape into a fantasy world where the enemies and heroes were clear. To stop worrying about the ancient stories that defined her existence and to start enjoying the new ones mankind created instead.
A spaceship roared across the screen, spurting laser fire. Ahead of it, a blue-white nebula surrounded a red-orange planet. A burst of fire struck the spaceship, exploding the vessel into a thousand fragments of molten metal. The deafening sound thrummed through Selene’s bones. She reached a hand down to pet her whimpering dog. Was the pilot dead? No, a figure in a spacesuit ejected from the blast, falling toward the planet. After shooting down a passing enemy ship with a handheld laser gun, the pilot finally landed on the planet’s surface. When the space helmet’s visor flipped up, the face underneath was that of a young woman. She pulled off the helmet and shook out long orange hair that contrasted strikingly with her ebony skin. Then she stalked off into the orange jungle, her gun at the ready.
Half an hour later, as the heroine met up with her long-lost, half-alien love interest and was about to engage in some interspecies eroticism, Theo tapped Selene lightly on the wrist. She turned to him sharply, as if awoken from a dream, her cheeks flushed.
He bent toward her, “Earth to Selene. Come in, Major DiSilva. We should get going.”
As they walked into the theater lobby, Theo chuckled. “You were totally transfixed.”
“Please. It was terrible,” she said defensively.
“Terribly awesome, you mean,” he said. “Don’t worry, it’ll be online in a month and we can watch the whole thing.”
Selene snorted, but in truth, the idea was oddly appealing. She stopped at a water fountain to hide the smile she could feel creeping over her features. When she straightened up, a little girl, no more than three years old, toddled over to her. In that moment, she felt a pull so sharp she nearly stumbled forward, as if the child had tugged on an invisible rope attached to her rib cage. Selene planted her feet and stared at the girl in wonder. This time, she recognized the sensation immediately—the pull of the worshiper on the worshiped. Artemis reigned over many groups: virgin women, hunters, wild animals, hounds—and children. Of them all, it was the children she’d never really liked, never understood. Maybe because she would never have any of her own.
“Come back here, Lydia!” A harried mother scurried over to retrieve her child. “Sorry, is she bothering you?”
“No, it’s okay,” Selene managed, unable to move. Hippo sniffed curiously at the girl, who completely ignored the enormous dog.
“You glow,” said the child, raising a hand to pat the air around Selene’s body. “Sparkles.” She grinned, showing a gap between her pearly baby teeth.
The mother laughed. “She’s been watching too many cartoons.”
Theo started up a conversation with the woman about the animated movie she’d just left, but the girl’s eyes never left Selene’s. And in that moment, the Huntress knew the truth about why she was getting stronger. The answer lay in the trusting gaze of this little girl.
The cult was actually working. Her strength, speed, aim, hearing—all were gifts from the Eleusinian Mysteries. Now, miraculously, even a hint of her divine radiance had returned, visible only to those whose extreme youth made them able to sense the secret worlds around them.
The boar tusk, the painting of her family, the obsession with virginity. Everything fell into place. She wasn’t just reaping residual benefits from the revived cult: The cult had chosen her specifically as one of the deities it invoked. But could the murders themselves, not just the ritual, be giving her power? No, she decided. The Athanatoi had long made clear their stance on human sacrifice, reserving their most heinous Underworld punishments for those who dared make an offering of human flesh to the gods.
But why invoke me? Who would care enough to help me? And perhaps most important, Selene thought, can I convince them to save my mother as well? In half an hour, Hermes would lead her to the Underworld, and she might find some answers. Persephone and Hades, as central figures in the original Eleusis cult, topped the list of possible suspects to be leading this new one. If they were involved, she’d know soon enough.
“You look so familiar,” the mother was saying to Theo. “Have I seen you on TV?”
Theo shook his head, all innocence, but Selene could see the sweat beading his brow.
“I have to go,” Selene said abruptly.
Theo shot her a grateful glance and followed her and Hippo back onto the street.
Selene looked up and down the block. “No cops in sight.”
“Great. Good thing we’re going to the cemeteries next. At least dead people won’t recognize me.”
“I’m not going to the cemeteries, not yet. The sun won’t be down for another half hour. Nothing’s going to happen before then. Probably not until the dead of night, like the other crimes.”
She couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. What would he say if he knew she was benefiting from the cult? Would he trust her to punish the killer? Did she trust herself? She headed toward the nearest subway. “Right now, I’ve got another lead to pursue.”
“Where to?”
“I have to go alone.”
“You keep saying that, but I—”
“Not this time.” Her tone brooked no argument. This was about Athanatoi now. No mortals allowed. While Theo continued pondering Helen’s research into the Eleusinian Mysteries, Selene would talk to the Goddess of Eleusis herself. Theo couldn’t know that. Now or ever. “I’ll call you later and we’ll make a plan for tonight,” she said, forestalling any further protest.
Selene left Theo at the uptown subway entrance, acutely conscious of her lie. Returning from the Underworld was rarely easy. She might never see Theodore Schultz again.
Chapter 23
CONDUCTOR OF SOULS
In Union Square, Selene’s half brother Hermes waved exuberantly as he spotted her across the plaza.
Before she could stop him, the man currently known as Dash Mercer threw his arms around her and pressed a kiss on each cheek.
“Selene, darling. You look spectacular.” The platitudes sprang forth as easily as always. “No one pulls off bulky and baggy quite like you.”
“I don’t like to attract attention.”
Dash had no such compunction. Linen suit, open-necked pink shirt, suede loafers. Large black eyeglasses, of course.
“Nice touch,” she said, pointing at the delicately patterned silk handkerchief peeking from a breast pocket.
He winked. “Hermès. Cost a fortune. But worth every penny.”
“You’ve stooped to branding?”
“Every little bit of name recognition counts, you know,” he said reproachfully. “Our little cousin Victory looks great for her age, even though she’s not one of the Twelve, because a track coach decided to name his sneaker line ‘Nike’ back in the seventies. You look stupendous at the moment, but you know the fading comes for everyone eventually. You should think about it.” He pressed a finger to his lips as he led the way through the square. “Artemis Athletics. A chain of workout clothes ‘for the goddess in every woman.’ Hah! I should go back into advertising.”
Rolling her eyes, Selene followed Dash down into the subway station. At the entrance, she turned to offer him a MetroCard, but he passed effortlessly through the turnstile. She raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t lost all my powers,” he grinned.
Inside the station, Dash led the way to the end of the downtown Number 6 platform. He leaned against a pillar, his cheerful nonchalance contrasting sharply with the heaviness permeating the station. The two recent grisly murders had worried even the most jaded New Yorkers. Lone women stood with their backs to columns, their headphones hanging from only one ear so they could hear their surroundings, their eyes scanning the crowd for suspicious young men.
A train clattered and squealed into the station, blowing Selene’s hair against her cheeks. Dash airily waved her aboard the last car. Crowds jammed the train as if it were rush hour—a time she always avoided. Dash maneuvered his way through with the ease and grace only Olympian gods or seasoned New Yorkers could muster. He leaned against the back wall, and Selene wedged in beside him, his curly hair in her nostrils. Two stops later, a short Latina woman jammed in beneath her arm, and a businessman’s briefcase slammed against her bruised kidney. Selene found the smell of so many bodies, pungent to any human, noxiously fetid. She looked out the window, trying not to breathe. An uptown train flashed by on the adjacent track, and windows passed like frames of film: a dreadlocked white guy with enormous headphones, grooving in his seat; a little girl swinging on a metal pole while her father looked on warily; a woman in pearls, her palm pressed to the glass, as if in entreaty. This was her city. Her people. They might not kneel at her statue as her acolytes had of old, but they worshiped at the same altar she did. We’re all mystai in the same cult, she realized. Bowing to a city that can be as harsh and as compassionate, as fickle and as stalwart, as any Olympian.
“Brooklyn Bridge. End of the line!” blared the announcement as the train squealed to a stop. “Last stop on this train! Everybody please exit the train!” The doors opened and the crowd poured forth like air released from a balloon. Selene could finally exhale. She started toward the exit, but Dash put a hand on her arm and shook his head.
The motorman’s door swung open and a short black woman in an MTA vest and goggles emerged, shouting, “Clear the train! This train is going out of service then heading back uptown!” In a moment, she’d realize Dash and Selene weren’t moving.
“Oh my God!” Dash suddenly cried, pointing to the front end of the car, where a crowd made its way out the door. “What’s that guy doing? Is that a live monkey?” Like marionettes, every head in the car, including the motorwoman’s, turned toward a perfectly innocent Sikh in a yellow turban standing in the doorway, looking as bewildered as everyone else.
As swiftly as only a god once known as Hermes could manage, he’d opened the rear emergency exit, jumped up to grab the top of the doorframe, and swung himself out of the car, his feet disappearing over Selene’s head. She sighed, but hitched her backpack more firmly onto her shoulders, and, before the motorwoman could turn around, seized the lintel in both hands. Using the rubber safety ropes as a ladder, she clambered to the train roof and kicked the door shut behind her.
Dash lay flat, his head pointing toward the front of the train, his curls a mere foot from the tunnel ceiling. Selene pulled off her backpack so it wouldn’t get ripped from her body when the train began to move and settled herself beside him, one hand holding her bag and the other gripping the side of the car. “This is a terrible idea,” she whispered to him. “Train hopping gets people killed.”
He just grinned. “What’s the fun of being immortal if you can’t cheat death every now and again?”
“I try not to push the limits,” she grumbled as the train headed toward the turnaround loop farther downtown. “You know we’re not completely invulnerable anymore.” Dash just giggled. Stony-faced, Selene shifted her weight to hug the train’s roof more securely. I may be getting stronger, she thought, but this is just foolhardy.
“Ready?” Dash shouted above the rattle a minute later.
“For what?”
“Jump!” He let go. His body flew backward, sliding off the top of the car and disappearing into the darkened tunnel behind them. Dash has grown as mad as the rest of us, she thought with a groan.
Zip lining out of the museum was one thing. This was entirely more stupid. She swung her body around carefully to face the back of the train. Glancing at the electrified tracks rushing beneath her nose, she shook her head and then rolled off the end of the car.
It would’ve been history’s most graceful exit from a moving subway—if it hadn’t been for the rat.
As she flew off the roof, Selene turned a midair somersault, almost floating to the gravel rail bed and hitting the ground feet-first—landing on a scurrying, squealing, subterranean rodent. Then falling on her ass. Dash spluttered from somewhere nearby.
“I can see you laughing, you know,” she snarled. “My night vision’s pretty good.”
“You have to learn to laugh at yourself.”
“And you have to learn to take some things more seriously,” she returned, trying to regain some dignity as she rose to her feet. “You’re telling me this is the only way to get to the Underworld? We couldn’t just get off at the last stop like everyone else?”
“Our stop’s beyond the last stop.”
“And we couldn’t walk down the tunnel from the last station like the MTA employees do?”
“But this was so much more fun! You were always the best sister for adventures, you know, and I haven’t had an adventure like this in decades!”
“You’re ridicu—” She stopped mid-word as another rat ran over her feet. Swift as the wind, she pulled an
arrow from her bag and thrust the shaft through the rodent’s pulsing side. “—lous.”
Dash whistled in appreciation. “Not bad. But where’re your gold arrows?”
“Used up.”
“I could get in touch with the Smith for you.”
Selene wasn’t used to offers of help. She was even less used to accepting them. But since divine enemies required divine weapons, Dash’s suggestion couldn’t have come at a better time. “Thanks. That might be a good idea. I haven’t talked to the Smith in a long time.”
Selene remembered Hephaestus as a child, a strapping boy with a wide grin that softened the coarseness of his features, always investigating and inventing. Puttering around in his forge, playing with fire and iron the way a mortal child might with blocks and string. Hera, Queen of the Gods, who’d defied Zeus himself to birth Hephaestus without the aid of a man’s seed, watched her son with pride. But when the Smith took his mother’s side in one of her many arguments with her husband, Zeus flung him from the heights of Mount Olympus. His body careered from boulder to boulder, landing in a broken heap on the island of Lemnos. The Smith could fashion a gold bow for Artemis, a feast hall for his family, or winged sandals for Hermes, but he could not rebuild his own legs. That day, the Huntress had learned her first lesson about the limitations of the gods: No mortal could defeat them, but the Olympians could damage one another irreparably.
Dash’s smile flashed white in the darkened tunnel as he walked beside her. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear from you. The Smith always liked you best, you know.”
“Did he?”
“You sound surprised!” A dim light from up ahead glinted off his glasses as he turned to her. “For someone with such keen senses, you can be pretty oblivious.”
“When you’re hunting, it only matters if you can find the animal and track it down, not whether it laughs at your jokes or wants to go out for dinner.”
Dash let out a burbling laugh. “Take note. I think you’re funny. That means I like you. As a sister, as a friend. Of course, our Smith actually liked you liked you. Hah! You’re blushing again.”
The Immortals Page 20
