Winter of the Gods

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  They drew near, Dash’s speedboat an easy match for the larger yacht. Hand over hand, Selene made her way across the bouncing boat, climbing over the cockpit and coming to perch on the bow. The man with the hawk face who’d appeared out of thin air turned at their approach. He still held Hades’ helm in one hand and Mars’s spear in the other. From beneath the hem of his coat peeked a loop of green, waxy bulbs.

  The hawk-faced man met her eyes, then shifted his coat with a smug smile, as if to grant her a better view of the strange object. A wreath of poppy bulbs, she realized with a start. Suddenly the visions tormenting Paul made sense—they had been sent by someone using the crown of Morpheus, the God of Dreams. This man is not an Athanatos I recognize, she decided, but if he can wield Morpheus’s poppies, then he might be more than human. Her heart full of icy rage, she sent one of her last golden arrows rocketing toward his chest.

  At the same instant, the man donned Hades’ Helm of Invisibility. And the boat vanished.

  Selene roared her disappointment.

  “Follow their wake!” Flint shouted, pointing to the frothing water that marked the yacht’s movement. Selene leaned forward, eager to shoot at something, anything. Then the waves all around them turned to whitecaps. Their own motorboat rocked dangerously from side to side, threatening to dump them all overboard.

  “They’re using the trident again!” she cried, grabbing on to the rail while her feet slid out from under her. For a full five minutes, the boat tossed and pitched in the sudden whirlpool. When the sea subsided, all signs of the yacht or its wake had disappeared.

  She threw her bow onto one of the benches and slumped down beside it. “Now what?”

  “Use the tracking device, Papa,” Philippe urged, his voice shaking.

  But Flint didn’t respond. He frantically jabbed at the screen of his tablet, trying to get it to turn on. Finally, he looked up and shook his head. “Waterlogged. Whole thing’s busted.”

  Dash cut the engine. In the sudden silence, Selene felt all hope slide away. Then Paul raised an arm and pointed silently toward Manhattan. Selene spun around, hoping the yacht had reappeared. Instead, she saw the Staten Island Ferry lying on its side not far offshore, surrounded by helicopters and rescue boats. In the skittering circles of searchlights, hundreds of people floated in the icy water. From this far away, Selene couldn’t hear their screams for help. But she could imagine them. “The tsunami,” she breathed.

  Paul rose to his knees to peer over the gunwale. “It looks like the buildings downtown are standing,” he murmured.

  “But flooded, no doubt,” said Dash. “Like in Hurricane Sandy. The subways too.”

  He tuned the boat’s radio to WNYC. Selene found herself gripping her bow so hard the metal cut into her hands. The emergency response vehicles had surrounded the wrecked ferry like a herd protecting its young. Another boat would just get in the way. According to the news reports, the water had already receded from downtown. There would be massive property damage, but the flooding had only reached a few feet deep—no one there had drowned. But at least one child and one old person had been proclaimed dead at the ferry site.

  “Is there anything we can do?” Flint asked quietly.

  Selene let out a long, shuddering sigh. “I think we’ve already done enough.” And then, for a long moment, the gods simply sat in silence, listening to the reports of the havoc a war between immortals could wreak on a city of men.

  Chapter 23

  PLAGUE BRINGER

  As the gods bounced across the harbor toward nothing in particular, Flint shook his head. “Too much salt, too much water.” He grabbed his tablet in both hands as if he would crack it in two. “Even if the tracking device is transmitting, I can’t pick up the signal.”

  Selene was still reeling, unable to block the images of the flailing men and women in the harbor. She forced herself to pay attention to Flint’s words, though she barely cared anymore about Mars’s fate. What was one god’s life compared to that of a hundred mortals? It was a calculus she undoubtedly saw differently than the others. But then she remembered how Hades’ murder had caused the suicidal stockbrokers on Wall Street and the rotting corpses in the morgue. If they kill blood-thirsty Mars, she wondered, what will happen? Would the world mourn him with an end to violence—or an outpouring of it? The ferry accident might be only the beginning of the terror.

  The Smith laid his device atop his soaked duffel bag. He stared at it, as if commanding it to repair itself. Perhaps once he’d had such magic powers, but no longer. Now he was just a weary and bedraggled man, hunched in the back of a boat with his weary and bedraggled family, with no idea where to go next.

  A chirp issued from Selene’s pocket. “Guess who’s got the only working cell phone,” she marveled. “It might not have Internet access, but it can withstand a little salt water.” It was the first good news she’d had all day. “I’ve even got a text message.” Be careful! it read. Ruth and I think there’s more to this cult than Mars worship. I don’t know what it means yet, but there are factors at play we don’t understand. Please be safe.

  “Well, that would’ve been nice to know about an hour ago.” She snapped the phone shut, thinking, Ruth, huh? I guess that’s where you went.

  “What?” Philippe asked hopefully.

  “Theo figured out it wasn’t a Mars-worship cult about the same time we did.”

  “Then what is it? Who is it?”

  “I have no idea. But we have to stop them from killing Martin.” She tried to sound confident.

  From the back of the boat, Paul gave a bitter laugh that sounded like her own. “How? They just summoned an earthquake, a tsunami, and a maelstrom. Even Poseidon himself doesn’t have that kind of power anymore.”

  Selene had to admit the thought was disconcerting. She’d regained her own power over the tides briefly at the climax of the Classicist Cult’s ritual, but her resurgence had been both fleeting and dangerous, brought about only by a week’s worth of human sacrifices.

  “This is the Age of Man.” Flint didn’t look up from the tablet in his hands, and the roar of the engine nearly drowned his muttered words. “They have more power in this world than we ever did in ours. They remake the earth itself every day … why not harness earthquakes? What’re my volcanoes to their atomic bombs?”

  “I thought you said only a man elevated to immortality could use our weapons!” Selene flared. “Now you tell me differently?”

  He shrugged. “I told you what I thought was true. But what do any of us know anymore of the powers we once held? Maybe some priest granted them the ability to use our weapons—or maybe they simply seized the power for themselves. Who knows?”

  Selene could barely restrain herself from yelling at him. Yelling at them all. Is this what they had become? Useless? Helpless?

  “What about you?” she demanded of Dash. “Please tell me you’re heading to Manhattan because you’ve got a feeling that’s where they took Martin. Or have you also decided you have no idea what to do?”

  Dash had pushed his thick-rimmed glasses onto his forehead so he could see more clearly in the ocean spray. The lack of his spectacles should’ve made him look younger. But new lines carved his mouth, and exhaustion hollowed his cheeks. His legendary cap lay on the dashboard beside him. When he replied to her, he didn’t smile. “Sorry to disappoint. I’m just heading back so we can get warm, regroup, try to plan our next move.”

  Philippe rose to his feet. “You’re giving up? You’re just going to let them take my father? Kill my father?” His usually light tenor deepened to something black and fierce. For the first time since Selene had known him, he sounded like Mars’s son.

  Dash snapped back at him. “You want to wander in circles around all of Manhattan, New Jersey, and Staten Island, hoping we stumble upon an invisible boat? They could be anywhere. I’d rather go somewhere with room service and wait for Flint to fix the tracking device.”

  “Dash, you’re the Messenger,” Selene insisted, f
or once agreeing with Philippe. “You bring word to the gods no matter how far we roam. Surely you can locate Martin.”

  “I’ve got a cell phone,” he said. “One that’s currently shorted out and full of salt water. I’ve got no supernatural telepathy or magical homing beacons, if that’s what you’re asking. I keep track of you all because it’s my job, not because I’ve got some magic ability for it.” His eyes wandered to the golden cap, its wings of bronze and silver limp and dull. “Even the strongest of us has lost everything.”

  She suddenly knew that he’d tried it on while she’d been talking to Paul—and it hadn’t worked. A thanatos could fly. A god was earthbound.

  “Dash is right,” Flint growled. “You all just need to give me some time.”

  Philippe tensed. “How do I know you don’t want my father to die?” he demanded. “You hate him.”

  “So do you,” Flint said with a strange, cold calm.

  Philippe nodded. “But I always wanted a chance to love him.”

  Flint turned back to his electronics before he said, very low, “So did I.”

  Selene knew what they had to do. Dash’s plan to return to their last hideout was absurd—if the cult had known how to find both Hades and Mars, they would no doubt be able to track the rest of them to the city’s most glamorous hotel. And as much as she shared Philippe’s sense of urgency, she also knew they probably had some time to spare. Hades had been kidnapped days before the cult murdered him. If they planned something half as elaborate as the Charging Bull scene for Mars’s sacrifice, then they’d need time to set it up. Besides, they’d killed Hades in the dead of night, when there would be fewer witnesses to deal with. She checked the position of the moon—it was just past seven o’clock. The city would still be roiling with Christmas shoppers until much later. Even if the cult struck tonight, it wouldn’t be for many hours yet.

  “Take us up the East River, Dash,” she said finally. “Remember your favorite hidey-hole from the 1920s? No one would ever think to look for us there; we can hide until Flint gets the tracking device working again.”

  “Aye aye, Huntress.” Dash turned the wheel, angling away from Lower Manhattan.

  Selene rejoined Paul, sitting down heavily beside him on the floor of the boat. Chilled to the bone in still-wet clothes, exhausted from the swimming and fighting, she inched a little closer to her twin. He might be growing weaker, but he still radiated a subtle heat that had already dried his own clothes and hair in a manner her own natural chill could never manage.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him softly. He still looked pale and shaken. He didn’t answer her, only laid an arm across her shoulders and pulled her close to his warmth. Suddenly, she was no longer taking care of him—he was taking care of her.

  A few minutes later, the boat came to a sudden, bobbing halt. She extracted herself from Paul’s embrace. Before her lay a thickly wooded island. In the distance, a few brick buildings poked above the treetops, their roofs caved in, their walls crumbling.

  “Where are we?” asked Philippe.

  “North Brother Island,” she replied. “Not far from the Bronx. Used to be a quarantine hospital, but it’s been a bird preserve for decades—mankind strictly prohibited. We wanted isolated, right?” She’d never bothered to visit before—she didn’t have access to a boat and there were no ferries or bridges to the island. She knew about it only because she made it her business to keep track of the city’s last remaining scraps of wilderness.

  “Sadly, no dock,” Dash said with a sigh. “So we’ll have to get wet. Again.”

  Selene jumped off the boat and into the chest-high water.

  There’s something solemn about this place, she thought, as her feet sank into the soft sand of the riverbed. She trudged toward shore past the rotting remains of a pier. I should revel in its return to wildness, but there is such decay here, such sorrow, I can barely breathe.

  Even more than Grossinger’s in the Catskills, the island made plain the damage that time could wreak on gods and man alike. Why are we drawn to these places? she wondered, thinking of Mars in his abandoned fort, Hades in his defunct subway station, Hephaestus in his derelict resort. To remind us of our own inevitable decline? Or to assure ourselves that mankind’s work is ephemeral, while we’re eternal?

  She had the sudden impression that this place was more than just a long-abandoned island. That she walked through a time far in the future, when men had perished entirely from the earth, and nature had reclaimed their vast cities. In the moonlight, she could see the vines overrunning the walls, the grass and bushes covering the streets. The very curbs had rotted into the soil, and wind and rain had washed the letters from the signs. She felt herself slipping once more into a waking dream when Philippe’s voice snapped her back to the present. “How do you know where you’re going?” he asked Dash, who strode confidently ahead through the darkness.

  “Bootleggers used it in the twenties. Whole island of tuberculosis victims—perfect place to hide our contraband from curious eyes.”

  “I thought you were a cop in the twenties. You and Selene.”

  Dash grinned at the younger man. “Bootlegger. Cop. In the twenties, it was all the same.”

  Selene couldn’t share in Dash’s sudden return to confidence. Nor could she summon her usual indignation at the idea that while she’d been working to prevent crime in her city, her brother had been fomenting it. She was more concerned with her twin. He’d stopped in the middle of the path, his eyes unfocused. His hands, his beautiful long-fingered hands that could strum a lyre with such delicate grace, trembled at his sides like an old man’s.

  “Sunbeam?” she said, touching his elbow.

  He jerked toward her as if startled from a dream. “Huh?”

  “Were you having another vision?”

  He swallowed, and when he spoke, his voice shook. “I feel like I’m drowning in the past. I fight against the memories, but they hold me down until something breaks me free.”

  Selene’s skin prickled, remembering the memory of the Diaspora that had come upon her with the steady, crushing force of the tidal wave.

  “They’ve got Morpheus’s crown,” she said. “That’s how they’re plaguing you. You’ve got to fight it, Paul. Just like you’d fight any other weapon.”

  “You say that like it’s easy,” he groaned. “I’ve always tried to move forward. This getting drawn into the past—it’s killing me.”

  “What did you see?” She half expected him to echo her own vision of the last Great Gathering.

  But Paul surprised her. “I saw myself, here, on this island. A century ago at least.” He spoke hesitantly. “I didn’t want to be the Plague Bringer, my arrows killing with disease. I tried to be the Healer instead, treating children in the typhus ward. I couldn’t cure with a touch anymore, but I knew how to make a child feel better, to bring them hope. Yet when we stepped ashore just now, I didn’t remember my patients safe in their beds—I saw a vision of children wandering the beach instead. Wet and scared and motherless, their hair singed and their cheeks smeared black.” His eyes grew distant, as if seeing once more into the past. “The steamboat was only twenty yards offshore, a fireball still, listing to the side and about to disappear completely. We ran into the water, all of us, nurses and doctors, to try to save them. So many that couldn’t swim. Over a thousand people in their Sunday best, headed to Long Island on a picnic.”

  Selene suddenly understood. The fire aboard the steamship General Slocum. The deadliest disaster in New York City history … until September eleventh. She’d lived far away in Greenwich Village at the time, unable to aid in the rescue. She’d never known her twin had seen it all.

  Paul went on speaking as he walked slowly down the path. “The mothers screamed in German, ‘Spare my child. Spare my child.’ They put life preservers on their babies and tossed them overboard … and they sank like stones. The ship owner had stocked the boat with rotted life jackets. Rotted fire hoses. The pleasure yachts on th
e Manhattan shore wouldn’t come help. The lumberyard at 139th Street wouldn’t let them dock, for fear their wood would catch fire. And so the ship wound up here, with the winds down the channel fanning the flames.”

  Selene wanted to tell him to stop, but he chanted the story like a Greek chorus, bringing the images to life as only the God of Poetry could. “I saw a man jump overboard and get caught in the paddlewheel, blood flying. I saw a boy climb the flagpole on the bow and perch there as the flames got higher before letting go and plummeting into the inferno. And I saw the bodies. Hundreds of them. Mostly women and children, washed ashore right here. And I … a god … a healer … could do nothing to help.” He came back to the present, his eyes bright with unshed tears. “My paltry efforts to help a few sick children—what did they matter in the face of such carnage? I was like a boy plugging a dam with a finger while the whole structure collapsed around me. So I left. I gave up my life in medicine. I became a musician instead. With no pretensions of healing the world. No pretensions of mattering at all.”

  “Don’t say that.” Selene struggled for something encouraging to say. In truth, she understood her brother’s despair. “Your music is healing, Sunbeam. In its own way.”

  He snagged his lower lip between his teeth as if to stop its trembling. “My songs are passing fancies, just like gods. Remembered and worshiped for a month, a year, a decade even … then forgotten as if they never existed. Mortals’ memories are weak—and so are ours. I’d forgotten the Slocum until today. Such horror, such pain … did any of it matter? Those people on the Staten Island Ferry … they’ll be forgotten, too. And so will I.”