Winter of the Gods

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  “She’s my favorite goddess! I mean was my favorite goddess until I met you, obviously. Now I know Artemis would kick her ass.”

  “You’re treading on very thin ice, Theodore. You shouldn’t mess with me at Christmastime. I’m not in the mood.”

  He just laughed. “Christmas trees, candles, feasting … they’re all just pagan anyway. Why not embrace it? The early Christians probably chose December twenty-fifth because the Romans already honored it as the birthday of Sol Invictus, the sun god. And it came with ready-made revelry: They always celebrated the Saturnalia festival the week before.”

  She curled her lip in disgust. “I didn’t like those holidays either. Too many drunk thanatoi reeling around paying homage to trumped-up gods with nothing to do with me.”

  “Okay, but what about your association with Christianity?”

  “My what?”

  “Ready for a little pedantic explication?” He kept going before she could say no. “Remember how some Romans worshiped you as a threefold goddess? They thought Artemis—or Diana, I should say, if we’re being strictly accurate—encompassed the Huntress, the Moon, and Hecate, the goddess of dark magic. Some of that iconography might have influenced the Christian trinity.”

  She shrugged, growing more uncomfortable by the second. But once Theo embarked on one of his cerebral peregrinations, it would take more than her body language to stop him.

  “I keep walking by these nativity scenes around the city,” he went on, “and it reminds me that, in a way, the Romans never stopped worshiping Diana. The Christians see Jesus’s mother as a Holy Virgin who’s the Protector of the Innocent. Sound familiar? She’s just an incarnation of you. Maybe you’ve been enjoying the benefits of that association all this time. Everyone’s saying their Hail Marys, but really they’re paying homage to Artemis. What do you think?” He offered up his scholarly insights like a Christmas gift, expecting her to rip open the paper and exclaim in delight. But this was one package Selene had no desire to unwrap.

  “To assume Mary’s worship, I’d have to assume her characteristics as well.” She pulled away from him. “Is that what you want? To have me weak and mild? Impregnated by a shaft of heavenly light? Conforming to a cult of motherhood so all-encompassing that even virgins have to give birth? No thank you. I’d rather stick to hunting and punishing and leave the holy baby making to someone else.”

  Theo raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay! I didn’t realize it works that way. I don’t want anyone having incandescent coitus with you except me, I swear.”

  She shot to her feet, feeling her cheeks burn despite the cold.

  “Come on,” he pleaded as she headed toward the trapdoor. “I know we aren’t having sex, but can’t we even joke about it? Where are you going?”

  “Inside. It’s cold.”

  “You barely feel the cold!”

  “Barely’s not the same as don’t.” Ignoring the ladder, Selene hopped through the opening in the roof. Her dog, Hippolyta, waited beneath; she jumped to her feet and proceeded to lick Selene’s hand.

  “Yeah, yeah, you can tell I’m in a bad mood,” she said, giving the dog a cursory pat. “All this slobber isn’t helping, Hippo.” But it was, a little. She understood her dog’s love, and she knew what Hippo expected in return—a safe place to sleep, plenty of exercise, and hefty portions of meat to maintain her prodigious girth. But Theo was still a mystery. As a goddess, she’d had only one responsibility to her worshipers: to protect them. Theo, however, wanted her heart, her mind … and her body. Yet another trinity that I’m not about to give mankind any control over. She stomped loudly down the stairs toward the kitchen, hoping Theo heard the fury in every footstep.

  Theo didn’t follow Selene inside. I should know better than to mention motherhood, much less sex, he thought. It’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull and hoping it just sits down and compliments you on your dance routine. Sometimes Selene seemed so relaxed and reasonable that he started treating her like a normal girlfriend—or as normal as a woman with the eyes of a hawk, the nose of a bloodhound, and over three thousand years of emotional baggage could be—then whoosh! She turned into a goddess, liable to pull out her golden arrows at any moment and make him beg forgiveness for provoking her wrath. When they’d first met, he’d found her tempestuousness exhilarating—three months later, he found it exhausting.

  He stared out over the rooftops, trying not to let Selene’s mood ruin his own holiday cheer. The Christmas lights on the nearby buildings glittered merrily, and he even caught a whiff of woodsmoke from some apartment lucky enough to have a not-just-decorative fireplace. Winters in New York could be vile—even the most magical of snowfalls took only moments to devolve into a morass of gray slush when trampled by the boots of nine million residents. But Theo’d always found that December held more than enough wonders to make up for the weather. The Handel’s Messiah sing-along at Lincoln Center, ice skating in Rockefeller Plaza, the ornate window displays on Fifth Avenue, the menorahs and Christmas trees glowing in every apartment lobby—he almost broke into “Deck the Halls” just thinking about it all. Then his thoughts turned to the woman currently prowling the house below him, and his internal song ground to a halt. Christmas cheer was only one of the things he and Selene could never share.

  But then he remembered the way his heart raced every time he saw her, every time he thought of how her courage and passion inspired his own. He remembered the way her sleek black hair framed the curve of her jaw, its one streak of white a constant reminder of her vulnerability, while the sculpted muscles of her long limbs promised a strength he could never match. He couldn’t help smiling. Who said dating a goddess was supposed to be easy?

  Selene sat at her small kitchen table devouring the last portion of Canada goose from the fridge. She’d have to go hunting again soon: Taking down a pigeon or squirrel in Central Park might lessen some of her current desire to shoot her boyfriend. She knew full well he hadn’t meant to anger her, but it took some particularly violent tearing of gooseflesh before she could regain any semblance of calm. In recent decades, a single goose would last her a few days, but now she could eat an entire bird in one sitting if she didn’t pace herself. Her voracity was a rather inconvenient by-product of a recent uptick in her divine powers.

  Theo appeared in the kitchen doorway. “You sure you don’t want some salad with that? Something, I don’t know … green?”

  She knew from his smile that he had no desire to continue their earlier quarrel. She made a face at him. “Have you ever heard of anyone hunting for lettuce? No? There’s a reason.”

  “If it can’t cower in fear, you won’t eat it. You know you don’t have to take your Huntress epithet quite so literally. Nothing’s stopping you from becoming She Who Occasionally Eats a Balanced Meal.”

  An old argument. Theo constantly nudged her to move beyond the boundaries of her traditional attributes. But she found millennia-old habits hard to break. She tried not to dwell on what other epithets Theo wanted the Chaste One to abandon.

  “Maybe not,” she agreed. “But I spent enough time being what mankind imagined I was. Now I choose which of my attributes to keep and which to discard.”

  “All right.” He nodded solemnly. They were talking about more than hunting, and they both knew it. “As long as I don’t have to watch you butcher the goose next time.” He’d dealt well with her shooting down the bird in the first place, but when it came to slitting its stomach and pulling out the still-steaming entrails, he’d blanched and left the room. She’d given up on any dreams of teaching him to hunt.

  He yawned cavernously.

  “It’s two in the morning,” she said. “You should go to sleep.” As the erstwhile Goddess of the Moon, she normally stuck to a nearly nocturnal schedule. Theo might be a night owl, but he was, after all, still mortal.

  “Yeah, I’m exhausted from all the end-of-semester craziness. Exam period starts tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to sleeping in.”

>   She’d forgotten all about his academic calendar. I’m just as ignorant of his life as he is of mine, she thought with a sinking heart.

  “Wake me if you get a call, okay?” he asked through another yawn.

  “Sure, but don’t get your hopes up.” Her cell phone had remained depressingly silent for a week. In her role as an unlicensed private investigator, she’d always relied on word of mouth to bring her clients. She had a reputation as someone who’d do anything, no matter how illegal, to protect women from the men who abused them. In the past, she’d hunted down rapists, maimed wife beaters, even castrated a child molester or two. Now she was itching to bring down her renewed divine wrath on anyone who looked at her wrong.

  “Don’t worry,” Theo said. “Business will pick up. It’s the holidays—plenty of stressed-out couples arguing over budgets and in-laws.”

  “So you admit Christmas is a pain in the ass?”

  “Not a chance.” He bent to kiss her good night, the blond stubble on his chin scratching her cheek. “I’m off to dream of sugarplum fairies.” He whistled a tune from The Nutcracker as he headed back up the stairs to the bedroom.

  Just before dawn, Selene finally joined him. A month ago, he’d insisted on replacing her twin mattress so he could actually be comfortable when he slept over. He’d wanted a queen size, but Selene told him a double was more than enough change for one decade.

  She lifted the covers and slipped into the cocoon of his heat. Theo immediately rolled over and slid an arm around her. His eyelids cracked open, and a flash of wonder crossed his face, as if even now he couldn’t believe there was a goddess in his bed. He stroked the side of her arm sleepily, his eyes fluttering shut. But she knew from experience that he’d wake in a heartbeat if she gave him a reason.

  She lay quietly, staring at the familiar slope of his pointed nose, the fall of fair hair over his forehead, and remembered their first night in this room together. Theo had only just learned her true identity. She’d been sure, in that moment, that she would give this new lover all of herself. She’d let him into her house, the first man to have that honor in the forty years she’d owned it. He’d been so consumed with her that he didn’t even gawk at the fact that she owned an entire brownstone for just herself and her dog. Instead, they’d fallen onto her narrow bed in a flurry of kisses and laughter. It was easy, glorious fun. He’d pulled off his shirt, and she’d traced the lines of taut, lean muscle, accusing him of secretly lifting weights amid the library stacks. He insisted his brawn resulted purely from intellectual exercises. Then he reached to slip her shirt from her shoulders—and she’d balked.

  So many millennia of virginity—how could she surrender it to a man she’d known for only a week? She might tell Theo she could choose which traits to keep, but she wasn’t actually sure that was true. She’d long believed that the Athanatoi preserved their power in part by maintaining their defining attributes. Could the Chaste One take such a risk with the precious remnants of strength that she’d so recently regained?

  So that first night, they’d lain in each other’s arms, talking, laughing, kissing … and not much else. Since then, Theo had shown nothing but patience. Over time, she allowed him a little more access, relaxed a little more into his arms. But there were limits—strict limits.

  Curled beside him in bed, watching him sink deeper into sleep, Selene couldn’t resist placing a hand on Theo’s chest, tracing the whorl of hair across his sternum. His eyes popped open, and a crooked smile brought a dimple to one cheek. She placed her finger in the matching dent on his chin, turning his face toward her, and kissed him lazily.

  Ten minutes later, they’d both reached the very edge of her prescribed limits when Theo’s phone rang.

  “Ignore it,” she panted in his ear, grabbing his wrist to stop him from pulling his hand away.

  “We’re not all on the lunar cycle, you know,” he remonstrated. “Normal people don’t call at five in the morning unless there’s an emergency.”

  “I’m the PI. What sort of emergency could you have? Some student doesn’t know the difference between an omicron and an omega?”

  “Let me just see—” He craned his neck over her shoulder, peering at his phone on the bedside table.

  She growled low in her throat, unhappy to be disobeyed, but he pulled away anyway once he caught sight of his screen.

  “Gabi?” he said into the phone, too loudly, near Selene’s ear.

  Theo’s best friend, Gabriela Jimenez, worked as a curator in the anthropology department at the American Museum of Natural History. When she wasn’t monopolizing Theo’s time with overdramatic tales of the vicissitudes of life among the Native American dioramas, she was shooting highly suspicious glances in Selene’s direction. Somehow, it wasn’t surprising that she was the one to ruin Selene’s night. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be right there.” Theo sat up in bed and gave Selene a pointed glance. “Yes, she’s coming, too,” he said into the phone before hanging up and reaching for his clothes.

  “What? She needs you to come help with some recalcitrant Navajo mannequin?”

  Theo ignored the jab. “She needs us.”

  “Us? You sure she didn’t just want you?”

  “Seems a woman just showed up at her door covered in bruises and refuses to go to the cops. In that situation, who would you want? The classicist or the vigilante avenger?” He tossed Selene’s cargo pants at her head. “Gabi’s not dumb. She only called me because she thought you wouldn’t pick up if you saw her number.”

  Selene couldn’t dispute that one.

  Moments later, they headed out the door, with Hippo pulling excitedly at her leash. Theo’s usually smiling face had hardened to an intense mask, his stride swift and determined. She marveled at the change in his demeanor. Mild-mannered classicist becomes crime-fighting, mystery-solving, death-defying hero. Selene could barely contain the smile that tugged at her lips.

  In her pack, she carried a golden bow forged by Hephaestus himself and a quiver of arrows sharp enough to kill. This was what she was born to do. Peace on earth and goodwill toward men be damned, she thought. As long as the Huntress roamed the streets of Manhattan, there’d be no peace for the wicked … and nothing but justice for the men stupid enough to get in her way.

  Chapter 2

  SHE OF GOOD REPUTE

  The hall outside Gabriela’s apartment, as usual, smelled like chiles and chocolate. Theo noticed Selene’s nose wrinkle as they waited by the door. “It’s not a Christmas thing,” he whispered quickly. “It’s a Mexican one. Spiced hot cocoa. She drinks it all winter.”

  “Sounds highly unpleasant.”

  “Or amazing.” The smell conjured memories of long nights filled with laughter and arguments and the occasional board game. It’s been too long, he realized. This was the first winter in nearly a decade that he and Gabi hadn’t spent any real time together.

  The door finally opened. Gabi looked terrible, her warm skin ashen, her black curls even more out of control than usual. He’d forgotten how short she really was—she nearly always wore heeled clogs. In her fur-lined slippers, she stood barely five feet, and the distraught look on her face, so different from her usual wry smile, added to her appearance of vulnerability. He immediately folded her into his arms. “I’m sorry I finally come visit and it’s because of this.” She nodded wordlessly into his chest, then poked him hard in the kidney.

  “What was that for?”

  “For being an asshole and ignoring me all month. Also, for making me feel all safe and loved just now, which just makes me want to cry because Minh’s not safe and not loved, and I don’t know what to do about it.” He pulled away, thinking she was done, but she grabbed him by his parka and kept going. “And because you’re a man, and right now I hate you for it, even though you know I love you, and it’s not your fault your whole damn gender are dicks.” She finally released him and led them into the apartment. “Oh,” she called over her shoulder, “
and did I mention I’m really glad I’m a lesbian?”

  “No, but it was implied.”

  “You know,” Selene said quietly as she followed behind him, “it’s too bad she hates me, because right now I kind of love her.”

  “She doesn’t hate—” Theo began, but he fell silent when he saw the woman sitting at Gabi’s kitchen table. She held a mug of cocoa, untouched, in her hands. After a glance at Theo and Selene, she quickly turned her head away. But not before Theo saw the massive bruise along her jaw.

  “This is Minh Loi,” Gabi said. “She works in … is it okay to tell them?”

  The woman nodded without looking up.

  “She works over in Earth and Space. You know I usually leave that wing of Natural History to its own torturously boring devices, but we’ve been working together on a special exhibit on Mayan astronomy. She’s even proposing a show at the Hayden Planetarium to go with it, because she’s that awesome. Minh’s an astronomy rock star. Like a Chinese version of that chick from Fleetwood Mac.”

  At that, Minh gave a short laugh that sounded more like a choke. Theo knew Gabi’s flattery was meant to lift the woman’s spirits, but Minh did look a little like a middle-aged Asian Stevie Nicks. Long salt-and-pepper hair cut in bangs across her forehead. Delicate nose and high cheekbones, currently upstaged by her puffy, red-rimmed eyes.

  Theo moved to sit at the table, but Gabi stopped him with a quick shake of her head. “Why don’t you wait in the living room while Selene and I talk to Minh?” She batted her eyelids at him for emphasis. Theo tried not to look surprised by the dismissal—it made sense that the victim wouldn’t want to speak in front of a man. But he was getting tired of every woman in his life lumping him together with his entire sex and all its multifarious faults.

  He left the kitchen and sat in the notoriously uncomfortable wicker armchair in Gabi’s living room. In an apartment this small, he could still hear the women talking in the kitchen. He told himself eavesdropping was unavoidable—what was he supposed to do, hang out in the lobby?—and then shamelessly scooted the chair a little closer to the door so he could hear more clearly.