Winter of the Gods

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

Selene just glared at his antics and tried to pretend he hadn’t completely freaked her out. Paul was on his feet now, his fingers twitching anxiously. “All we’ve got for divine defense are our bows and a few of my silver arrows.” He swung to his sister. “What happened to Orion’s sword after we killed him?”

  “I hid it in my house,” Selene answered. “But we shouldn’t go back there. And besides, what good would it do us? I’ve never used a sword, and surely any magic talent it might’ve once bestowed on its holder doesn’t work anymore.”

  Dash tutted. “Then pour some wine on your heads and bare your necks, because we’re the next sacrifices—unless we can find some more divine weapons.”

  “All right, so maybe we should go after the Smith,” Theo proposed. “He could give us weapons, right?” Selene shot him a wary glance. Something told her Theo imagined himself carrying a golden spear and shield like the heroes of old. Once, she would’ve wanted him that way. Now, she rather liked him with his laptops and books. He was quite enough of a hero already.

  “Theo’s right,” Dash concurred. “Flint is fading pretty badly these days, but I try not to underestimate He of Many Arts and Skills. So, let’s just call him and see what he’s got for us.” A moment later, cell phone pressed to his ear, he crowed, “Flint, dude! How is my broadest, brawniest, stepbrother doing? … No, never! … I have a teensy weensy question if I could …” He pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it. “That did not go well.”

  Selene grimaced. “Dude? You call him dude?”

  “What else am I supposed to call him?” Dash asked helplessly. “He’s a little hard to communicate with, okay? He doesn’t like being bothered, so you’ve gotta play it cool.”

  “And how did that go?”

  “He said he was in the middle of an experiment out in the woods and how dare I interrupt and that he wouldn’t be home until tonight and … well, then there were some expletives that I don’t think are necessary to repeat. Like I said, he doesn’t like to be bothered.”

  “Great.” Selene slapped her hands on her knees and then rose to her feet. “Well, I’m not waiting around. I’m going after him. If he isn’t our culprit, at least he can make me some new gold arrows to take down whoever is.”

  “Wait,” Paul interjected. “Remember, I’ve had this feeling that something bad was coming. If the Smith is behind this …”

  The glazed look of despair that she’d noticed when he first came offstage was back. Selene knew she should be worried about him, but impatience overwhelmed her concern. “If I can’t defend myself against the Lame One, then I’m really in trouble,” she scoffed. “Can you tell me his address, Dash? Or are you going to be as cagey and unhelpful as usual?”

  Dash looked deeply offended. “Me? Unhelpful? Have you ever gotten a job in this city without my help? Or a new ID card? I demand an apology, most ungrateful of sisters.”

  “Your help entails having to deal with you, so it seems unhelpful … even if it isn’t,” she grumbled. “How’s that for an apology?”

  “Execrable. But considering it’s you, I’ve heard worse. So, I usually don’t hand out addresses, but the Smith has always had a soft spot for you, so I’ll make an exception. He’s up in the Catskills—about a three-hour drive. I can give you directions.”

  “Then we rent a car, and we go now,” Selene decided.

  Theo got unsteadily to his feet. “I’m right behind you, I swear … but you don’t have a driver’s license, and if you make me drive to the Catskills right now, I’m going to crash us right into the nearest deer.” He yawned. “And once I kill one of your sacred animals, you’ll have to kill me as punishment. And then it all gets very Greek tragedy very fast.”

  “You can rest here for a few hours before you set out,” Paul offered. “I’ll see if I can rustle up a shirt and coat for you in the meantime.”

  Dash looked dubiously around the musty room. “And I’ll secure some less pungent accommodations for when you get back. If I have to spend another minute here, I’m never going to get the percussionist funk out of my suit.”

  Theo’s eyes had already fallen shut. He must be truly exhausted if he can sleep at a time like this, Selene thought. She wasn’t doing much better herself; she was used to sleeping with the sunrise. If she wanted to be awake for their confrontation with the Smith, she’d need to get some rest, too. But right now, she was too riled up. There were simply too many questions and too few answers. She couldn’t shake the feeling that if they delayed one more night, this new cult might strike again. She followed her twin out into the hall.

  “I don’t like all this waiting,” she said.

  “Seems to me you don’t have a choice,” Paul replied. “Dash said Flint won’t be reachable until tonight, and he’s the only lead we’ve got at the moment. But hey … if you want me to come with you to his place …” He didn’t sound very sure of his offer. He still looked rattled from his crack onstage, and Selene had the sudden feeling his bizarre visions were worse than he was letting on.

  “Don’t you have a second set to get ready for?”

  He nodded. “I’m just worried about you.”

  “You’re worried about me? You’re the one with the morbid hallucinations, Sunbeam.”

  To her surprise, he seemed at a loss for words. The God of Poetry usually knew exactly what to say.

  “How’s it going—with Theo?” he ventured finally.

  The reason for his reticence became clear. For millennia, she never would’ve permitted him to ask about her love life. Paul had a tendency to guard his sister’s honor a little too jealously. She settled for a terse, “Fine.”

  “Have you … you know?”

  “Are you going to put an arrow through him if we have?”

  “Not at all—”

  “What’s happening with Sophie?”

  “I’m enjoying every moment.”

  “That’s clear,” she huffed.

  “The connection I have with her, the intimacy—it’s the only point to existing anymore. She may not know my true name, but I try to give her every part of myself. Body and soul.” He emphasized the word “body” with a raised brow. When she just stared at him stonily, he went on. “Love is where my music comes from. Love for her. Love for you. It’s the only thing putting me back together after these visions rip me apart. You could have that with Theo, you know.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she growled.

  “Don’t wait too long, Selene.”

  “We’ve been together for three months.”

  “Look, I spent the better part of three thousand years trying to be the only man in your life. And when you first started seeing Theo, all my old jealousies came right back. But I like him, Selene. And I like who you are when you’re with him. But time passes swiftly for mortals—you have to seize the moment. Theo’s what, in his thirties? He’s going to be an old man soon enough, and you’re still going to look pretty much the same. What sort of nursemaid will you make? No offense, but probably a piss poor one. And what happens when Selene DiSilva gets too well known and has to become some other woman in some other part of town?”

  “I’m not a celebrity like you. This name will last at least another few decades.”

  Paul raised his eyebrows. “A few decades? Theo will still be alive. You’re going to make him change his identity too? Trust me, it won’t work.”

  “Then why should I bother in the first place?” she snapped. “Why not just walk away right now?”

  Paul just shook his head sadly. “At some point, you’ll have to do just that. But when you do, you want to leave with no regrets, Moonshine.”

  Selene laughed shortly. “Sometimes I feel like my whole life has been nothing but regrets.”

  He gave her a pained smile. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  Chapter 13

  DEERLIKE

  “I guess we walk from here,” Theo said, pulling into the empty parking lot of Grossinger’s Golf Course. “Hopefully
, the Smith’s hideout isn’t too far away.” Before he’d even shut off the engine, Selene had fled the car. In the rearview mirror, he saw her shake off the journey with all the vigor of a disgruntled hound, then reach into the trunk to retrieve her bow and wooden arrows, not bothering to hide them in her backpack.

  Theo sat watching her for a moment, struck by her alienness. She’d seemed distant the whole car ride through the Catskills, even more than usual. Seeing her here, amid the rolling mountains, she seemed like an entirely different person from the one he knew. The wilderness was her realm, of course, but he’d only ever seen her in city parks. Is this a different Selene? he wondered. She has so many names, so many lives—how can I ever know them all?

  He climbed out of the car and buttoned Paul’s drummer’s winter coat a little higher under his chin. Gray wool with a shearling lining, military epaulets, and pewter buttons down the sides—Les Misérables meets U2. He felt positively hip. Not to mention warm. Finally.

  He laid a hand on Selene’s shoulder. She turned toward him, curious, and he quickly kissed her on the lips. She pulled back and stared at him for a moment, then kissed him back, harder. He no longer even felt the cold.

  “The resort was abandoned in the 1980s,” he said when they pulled apart. “And a lot of it’s falling down and dangerous. We might want to—”

  She headed off confidently toward a cluster of buildings just visible through the woods.

  “Okay, then.” Theo trotted gamely after her, trying to keep his balance on the icy ground.

  Before them lay a narrow stream rushing silently beneath a layer of frozen crystal. Struck by the wild beauty of the place, Theo pulled out his phone for a photo.

  Selene slammed her boot heel into the creek’s surface, cracking through the ice. She pulled the bandages from her forehead, revealing a thick red scab from the bullet’s graze. Theo watched silently as she knelt and cupped a hand into the current. She took a drink, then lifted the water to her forehead, dribbling it across the wound. A moment later, the scab fell into the stream and tumbled away. The skin beneath gleamed alabaster smooth. Theo knew that, as the Goddess of the Wild, she could gain strength from natural running water, but he’d never actually witnessed its healing powers before. It was fascinating and unsettling all at the same time.

  Selene turned her face toward the skeletal trees around her. Suddenly, her mouth trembled into a smile. Theo followed her gaze.

  A doe. Ears swiveled forward, neck sweeping gracefully skyward. Liquid eyes fixed on the Deerlike Goddess.

  Theo swung his phone toward the animal, realizing he was already in video mode.

  Very slowly, Selene got to her feet. For a heartbeat, Theo wondered if she’d unsling her bow. She was, after all, the Shooter of Stags as well as their protector. But she simply stood there, as motionless as the deer. Finally, the doe broke the connection, pawing at the snow to unearth a few blades of grass.

  Selene murmured something under her breath, then turned and headed toward the cluster of buildings.

  “What did you say to her?” Theo asked, surreptitiously switching off his phone with a guilty pang. It felt wrong to let twenty-first-century technology intrude on such a sacred moment.

  Selene didn’t respond at first. When she did, it was with a quiet reverence. “I told her it was good to see her again.”

  Only then did Theo realize what the encounter must have meant for Selene. As far as he knew, she hadn’t left Manhattan in years, maybe decades. Which meant the woman who’d once ridden a chariot drawn by stags, and who counted deer among the most sacred of her animals, hadn’t seen one in all that time. No wonder she didn’t want to shoot it.

  As they crested a low rise, the main hotel appeared before them, a lumbering 1950s behemoth of boxy yellow concrete and graffiti-covered glass. Theo whistled softly. “Looks pretty deserted. What if the Smith’s not here?”

  She pointed to the ground. “See?”

  “I see ice and pine needles.”

  “I see footprints. Big, crooked footprints, one deeper than the other, and the imprint of a crutch on either side.”

  “You’re making that up,” he said, staring harder at the solid ice.

  “Why would I?” she asked, genuinely bewildered.

  “To show off.”

  Without a word, she unslung her bow and sent an arrow flying into the gloaming. A distressed squeal emerged from beneath a snowbank. Selene retrieved her prey, holding aloft a dead rabbit by its long brown ears. “That’s showing off,” she said with a smile.

  Theo grimaced. “When you didn’t shoot the deer, I thought you’d given up on the killing-innocent-animals thing.”

  “Deer are sacred—I’d never hunt one without ceremony. But rabbits are vermin. Delicious vermin.” She slung the limp body from her belt. “The Smith will love it.”

  “That’s the worst host gift I’ve ever heard of,” he grumbled, following her up to the main entrance of the hotel.

  In the 1950s and ’60s, Grossinger’s had entertained up to 150,000 people a year as one of the premier resorts of the Borscht Belt, the string of Catskills destinations catering to Jewish families desperate to escape the steaming streets of New York but unwelcome in the swankier hotels of New England. Mothers would tote their Baby Boom’s worth of children, park themselves beside the swimming pool or shuffleboard court, and wait for their husbands to arrive on regular weekend visits. Dances, talent shows, comedy acts, buffets—a middle-class paradise. Then, with the rise of air travel and the decline of anti-Semitism, the resort’s devotees sought summer vacations farther afield, leaving Grossinger’s to die an inglorious death. Now the grand main lobby, a hangar-size expanse with a huge stone fireplace and a double-wide staircase, lay abandoned and decrepit. A sea of icy mold covered the carpet; midwinter darkness shrouded the ceiling high above.

  This was not how Theo’d imagined his first out-of-town trip with Selene. He’d thought they’d jet off to Paris or Rome or even just Cape Cod. I was hoping the Catskills would’ve maintained at least a little of the Dirty Dancing vibe, he thought, stepping gingerly around a torn armchair covered in bird shit. He looked uneasily through the shattered windows at the low sun. “Once night falls, it’s going to be pitch black in here.”

  “Don’t worry,” Selene said, striding forward. “I’ll have found Flint by then. Dash said once we got here, we should just ‘follow the signs.’ How hard can that be?”

  “And then? What if the Smith really is the Pater? I can’t help remembering all those stories about his famous rage.”

  “We all have stories about our famous rage. The Smith is the least of your problems.”

  “He does have that hammer.”

  “He’s also on crutches, remember? And he’s really quite reasonable. I wouldn’t worry about him.”

  Theo didn’t push her further, but he mentally reviewed what he remembered about Hephaestus, God of the Forge. It wouldn’t hurt to be prepared. Stories of his birth varied, as did most myths, but the usual version held that his mother Hera, Queen of the Gods, became pregnant without the help of man’s seed. Probably a way to get back at Zeus, her famously philandering husband. When Hephaestus was born, Zeus—furious at his wife’s hubris—hurled him off Olympus. The fall left the Smith permanently crippled. Among a pantheon of stunning beauty, he was the only Olympian renowned for his ugliness. His bad luck didn’t end there. His marriage to Aphrodite, most gorgeous of goddesses, ended in heartbreak and betrayal when she left him for his brother Ares. Hence the rage.

  “You know the story of Harmonia?” Theo asked Selene.

  “Should I?” As with most of the lesser-known myths, if it had nothing to do with Artemis, Selene hadn’t retained the memory.

  “Aphrodite and Ares have a daughter, Harmonia, and the Smith is so pissed off that he makes her a cursed necklace as a wedding present. She’s tortured by bad luck for the rest of her days. And not just her. Four generations of offspring. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

>   Selene stopped and turned around. “Are you scared to come?”

  “What? No.”

  “That story’s just a story. Or maybe it’s not. It’s not my myth, so I’m not sure either way. But you of all people should know that the gods aren’t always what the legends make us out to be. Harmonia’s descendants are long dead. The Smith is Flint now. He could be a completely different person.”

  Theo raised a hand in submission. “Fine. I’m just trying to get my facts straight, that’s all.”

  She snorted. “You shouldn’t come any farther.”

  “What?”

  “Flint spent most of his life holed up in a volcano. He’s always been antisocial and a little surly. That’s what I like about him. I’ve decided he’ll be easier to talk to if it’s just me.”

  “You’ve decided. I see. And you couldn’t have thought of that before I left the warm, electrified, safe rental car and wandered onto the set of the zombie apocalypse?”

  “I just think it’s better if I do this alone.”

  “I’m not letting you risk your life—”

  “Letting me? I’m telling you I can handle this. We’re just going to talk.”

  “All the more reason I should be there. Your conversational sparring has a bad habit of turning into actual sparring very quickly.” She bristled, but he pressed on. “Look, I’m not trying to pretend like I know more about the gods than you do—”

  “Good. Because you don’t. You may be a ‘Makarites’”—her voice dripped with disdain—“but you’re still just a mortal, Theo.”

  He stopped in his tracks. “What’s that supposed to mean?” When she refused to even reply, he felt an unaccustomed anger flush his cheeks. “You sound like Orion. A mortal will never be able to understand your glory, so you should just go live happily ever after with some immortal lover. Is that it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Then don’t talk down to me.”

  Her eyes flared, but she stalked away without another word. Still, the message was clear: I’m a goddess. I talk down to you by definition.