by Molly Ringle
Thanatos.
The leopard beast Agria had been stabbed and killed, her teeth bared but useless now, her spots marred with blood. She was only a mortal animal, after all, like all the spirit realm beasts.
Blood soaked everything, Hekate now found as she touched the sticky hot furs and smelled the coppery scent. Hermes and Dionysos were covered with it too. They snarled and threw punches and grabbed at blades, and kept diving in front of her to protect her, but each time the assassins sliced new blades into them or smacked them aside with clubs. Hekate tried to struggle free from the middle of the fight, or switch realms to get clear of it, but found herself immobilized by another sword that stabbed her through the leg. Lying on her side, panting in agony and scrabbling to pull out the blade, she sent a desperate glance around.
Some revelers fought the masked attackers, trying to protect their honored god, but dead or wounded mortals lay everywhere now. And the invaders kept coming. Hermes and Dionysos moved more slowly, wounded and bleeding all over, though they stayed on their feet and kept fighting.
But they were losing, as was Hekate. Every time she yanked a blade out of herself and started to reach the magical balance necessary to switch realms, another knife stabbed her. Her friends were suffering the same problem. Panic flooded her.
Someone caught her by the legs and began dragging her away. She kicked free, pulled another knife out of her side, and stabbed at the hand closest to her. Someone yelled in pain and the hand let go. Dionysos lunged for her, knocking five attackers out of the way, and caught her arm. But swords hacked at their joined hands until Hekate, gritting her teeth in torment, had to let go or else they would have lost fingers.
The masked people hauled her off the ground and picked her up as Dionysos and Hermes watched from behind a wall of war, their faces warped in fury. She flung all her energy toward them, willing them to regain their strength and get clear and safe.
Whether it worked, she didn’t see: three, four, five more blades lanced through her body. She vomited blood. Several pairs of hands seized her and shoved her into a wooden box, whose lid slammed down with a bang. Blades still impaled her chest, her belly, her throat. With the darkness of the box came the terrifying realization there she could no longer sense where her friends were. Oak. The box must be oak.
It was the last conscious thought she had for quite some time. Blood and pain suffocated her, and her mind fell away.
Strength rushed into Dionysos like a flash flood. The debilitating pain all over him faded, and with a bellow of rage he seized a sword from an attacker and sliced open five of the killers in a single whirling moment. They all fell screaming. At his back, Hermes managed the same—he knocked people down left and right, snatching blades and weapons away to use them against their owners.
Still more fighters surged at them, and neither of them could get past to follow the group that had clapped Hekate into a box and carried her off. As soon as they did it, Dionysos had felt his sense of her vanish, and he realized they must know about the properties of oak. It terrified him, and enraged him into a new bout of murderous defense.
But it took too long to dispatch everyone coming at him, even with the help of Hermes and the worshippers. The moment he finally hacked a clear path to the tent’s entrance, he sprinted forward and looked around to find out where her kidnappers had gone. Dawn hadn’t broken yet; darkness blanketed the world. Sobbing and shouting surrounded him from the poor innocents sprawled upon the ground. The attackers had cut down anyone who stood in their way, even those unarmed and drunk. They were just like Ares that way.
Dionysos had loathed such people before. Now he trembled with the need to send each of them to Tartaros personally, with this stolen sword and his own two hands.
He ran out through the trees to the main road, their likeliest route for escape, and chose the direction that headed into the hills. But running only a short distance in the cold starlight was all his still-wounded body could take. Besides, he couldn’t see much in the dark, and it quickly occurred to him that he could be going the wrong direction. He ran back, thinking to try the other way, into Argos. But he returned to the festival site first to catch his breath and fetch Hermes.
Hermes ran to meet him, similarly gasping and splashed with blood, most notably from a deep cut across his eye and another at his throat. “Where is she?” He coughed.
“They took her. I don’t know. I—” Dionysos stopped as a hand tugged at his tunic’s hem.
He looked down to find a worshipper on his knees, a young stout man, shaking. His cheekbone was bruised and swollen, his lip bleeding, and his hands joined in supplication. “My lord, they instructed me…I’m supposed to tell you…”
Dionysos seized him by the front of his tunic and held him in the air. “What?”
The young man squeaked in fear, then stammered, “I—I didn’t know they were coming! I tried to st-stop them, but they hit me, and then said they’d let me live if I d-delivered this message to you.”
“What message?” Hermes’ eyes looked like green ice as he stared at the man.
He swallowed, still dangling in the air. “They’ll let her go, if you’ll trade her for one of the greater immortals. One of her parents. The gods of the dead.”
Dionysos’ arm weakened, and the pain of his many wounds caught up to him. He let the young man fall with a thud to the ground. He kept staring at him, awaiting the full message.
“Sunset, tomorrow,” the young man continued, sitting on his rump and returning the gaze, wide-eyed. “One of the death gods is to come here by sunset tomorrow, or else they’ll…they’ll destroy her.”
“And if Hades or Persephone do come by sunset tomorrow, Thanatos will destroy them instead, is that the idea?” Dionysos said.
The young man nodded.
“Why?” Hermes demanded. “Why trade for one of them, if they’ve already caught an immortal?”
“They think Hades and Persephone are more powerful, that they control the fates of mortals, that they send plagues to increase their numbers of dead souls. They say those are the immortals that truly must be stopped.” The young man raised his hands again. “Please, my lord, it’s only what they think!”
“They’re idiots,” Hermes snapped. “It isn’t true. None of us has those powers. They—” He stopped and sucked in a breath through clenched teeth, glancing about in despair.
Dionysos shoved the worshipper onto his back, his hand around the young man’s throat. “Which way did they take her? Tell us everything.”
“I don’t know! I swear I don’t. There was so much fighting—all I saw was them carrying the box, then they were gone into the dark.”
Hermes seized a torch and ran toward the road, casting his glance around on the ground. “Damn these dancers!” he shouted. “Footprints are everywhere.”
Dionysos squeezed the man’s throat harder. “Did they have a wagon? Did you hear horses, donkeys, anything? Tell me!”
“I—I think so. They probably put her on a wagon to escape faster, but I don’t know, really I don’t! Please, my lord, I worship only you!”
In disgust, Dionysos let him go and ran to Hermes. “We’re wasting time.”
They plunged through the sea of olives and reached the road. Hermes ran toward the faintly brightening sky in the east. The torch flame rippled in his hand. He was still wounded enough to favor one leg, and limped.
Dionysos chased after him, and they stopped as they looked up and down the road. Wagon tracks and the prints of pack animals covered it in both directions from the countless travelers who used the road every day. There was no way to tell where the latest group had gone.
“They could have gone into Argos,” Hermes said, “or out into the hills, or to the coast for a ship, or…” He paused, closing his eyes in despondency. Then he opened them and shoved the torch into Dionysos’ hand. “Here. You start looking. I…” His shoulders drooped. “I will go tell Hades and Persephone.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
When Hermes rushed in and woke up Persephone and Hades in their bedchamber, his clothes and body streaked with drying blood, Sophie woke with a start too. She lay in the chilly Airstream in the twenty-first century, in the middle of the night, with Adrian asleep behind her. Wind whispered outside the windows. The white holiday lights glowed in fuzzy spots through the closed blinds.
Afraid to move but equally afraid to sleep again, she lay immobile, sometimes closing her eyes and sometimes opening them to seek solace in those gentle strings of lights.
But there was no escaping now. In her mind she turned to the dark gates guarding those most horrible of memories, and opened them.
Half-dressed, Hades stormed across the bedchamber and yanked open the chest against the wall before Hermes was done speaking. Hades strapped on every weapon he possessed—knives, spear, even bow and arrows though he was no good at using them.
“We’ll kill them,” he said. “Anyone who had anything to do with this, anyone we can catch, anyone we have to kill to get her back. I’ll do it, I don’t care if Tartaros holds me for a century.”
Persephone thought she might faint, or start screaming like a madwoman, or indeed, rage out of the Underworld and join Hades in a murder spree. Her daughter, her one child, immobilized by blades and locked unconscious in an oak box somewhere, held by Thanatos scum…
She locked gazes with Hermes, who looked both steely and heartbroken. The blood all over him and the hacked-apart state of his cloak and tunic and boots showed how hard he had fought—to no avail. “But we can’t,” she said, her voice choked. “If we go out killing and attacking, they might hear of it and just kill her, wherever she’s being held. Do we…negotiate somehow?” Persephone swallowed and slid out of bed, shivering. “If it comes to it, they can take me. My life for hers, of course I’d do it—”
“No,” Hades snarled.
“Listen to me.” Hermes held out a hand to stop her, then swiveled to point the gesture at Hades too. “Do not give in to their demands. There is no reason to think they’ll honor anything they’ve said. They haven’t shown a shred of honor or sincerity so far. If you turn yourselves in, they might kill you and then go ahead and kill her anyway.”
“Then we kill them first,” Hades said.
“We need to find her and rescue her,” Hermes stated. “As quickly and quietly as possible. Persephone’s right: if we go cutting a swath through the country, they’ll hear of it within a day and—and could easily destroy her.” His voice broke in the last words.
“But what do we do?” Persephone hugged herself and ran her hands up and down her trembling arms. In her mind she raced through the Underworld’s gardens and orchards, all the magic Hekate had ever demonstrated. She came up with nothing, nothing that would locate her daughter and bring her home safe. Even the spell to trace someone when holding one of their possessions—only Hekate herself could do that. Persephone was powerless.
“Two of us should go out and look,” Hermes said, “and one should stay here, in case she…returns.”
As a soul or as a living person, Persephone thought, and shivered more convulsively.
“I’ll stay,” she said. “But I want to go out looking later.”
“Dionysos is already looking too,” Hermes said. “As will others soon.”
“Let’s go.” Hades threw on his cloak.
“For Goddess’ sake, at least give me the bow.” Hermes shoved aside Hades’ cloak and yanked it from him. “I can use it, unlike you.” He looked to Persephone, and reached out to squeeze her hand with his blood-encrusted one. “We won’t give up. We’ll find Demeter and tell her, and I’m sure she’ll begin searching too, and will recruit others to do the same.”
Persephone nodded, and the thought of Demeter was what did it: her eyes flooded with tears at the thought of how agonized her mother would be to learn what had happened to her darling granddaughter.
“Please don’t despair,” Hermes added, though he sounded desolate himself.
“I’ll try,” she whispered.
Hades moved close to take her head in both hands and kiss her on the lips. When she blinked her tears away to focus upon him, his eyes looked dark and deadly. “We won’t let them,” he said.
She nodded, unable to speak.
Then Hades and Hermes were off. The silence of the Underworld fell around her, alleviated only by its perpetual sound of water trickling behind the walls. Beside her, Kerberos whined. She stroked his head, hoping his presence could somehow summon Hekate home or send strength to her from afar.
But nothing could do that. It was the maddening conclusion she kept circling back to all day as she paced through the fields and orchards with Kerberos, thinking, praying, trying not to break down. She did descend to Tartaros early on, and located several of the murderers. Though she questioned each at length, they couldn’t tell her with certainty where Hekate had been taken.
The group had meant to kill Hermes and Dionysos straight off, they all said. She felt a grim satisfaction at being able to inform them they had failed. But capturing Hekate in order to barter for Hades or Persephone had also been part of the plan, and that part had succeeded. Only a certain subset of the group, the people in charge of the capture, knew the final plan for where to take her. This precaution was precisely so that no one could torture the information out of the others. It also meant, Persephone noted in frustration, that even a soul in Tartaros, unable to lie, couldn’t tell her anything useful.
The possibilities the souls had overheard varied: some said she might be taken to the caves in the hills, some said to a ship that would take her to another coast or island, some said to a house or building tucked away either in the countryside or in the bustling midst of the city. Too many options. Persephone longed to sprint out into the world and investigate every one.
At mid-day, Hades returned alone. He shook his head wearily as he walked to her. “We ran along all the main roads outside Argos, asked after anyone carrying a large crate or box. Threatened and beat up a few people who recognized us and shouted ‘Thanatos’ at us.” He closed his eyes and rubbed his face. “Which we shouldn’t have done, I know, for her safety. But no one knew anything that helped.”
“Is my mother out looking too?”
He nodded. “She’s gone to fetch Rhea, Artemis, Apollo and anyone else near. But without any of us being able to sense Hekate, and with all the places someone can hide in this blasted world…”
“It’s my turn. Let me go look.”
He nodded again, dropping to sit against a tree in exhaustion, and laid his hand upon Kerberos’ head when the dog placed his chin on Hades’ knee. “Here. Take these.” Hades pulled the long knife and sword from his belt and handed them over.
Though she usually only carried a small knife—and so far had never used it to attack any human being—she took the weapons at once. In fact, upon closing her hand around the finely wrought bronze of the sword’s hilt, she experienced a gleam of ferocious eagerness at the notion of driving the blade into a Thanatos captor right before smashing open the oak box and freeing her daughter. If it were as simple as murder, indeed, she’d do it. Even if it meant years in Tartaros later.
But it wasn’t that simple. She entered the living world near Argos, and found immediately how vast and full of a million hiding places the world was—even just one stretch of hilly coastline in Greece. The city of Argos was in a panic, everyone grieving and raging over the massacre at the Dionysia. Some forty local people had been killed, and only a few of the surviving attackers had been captured.
Those attackers had all been stoned to death by the angry citizens before even having a chance at a trial. The trial, she supposed, would only have led to execution anyway. Today she couldn’t spare any concern for the outrage and suffering of the citizens. She could do nothing but scour the world for her daughter.
Disguised in a shabby cloak, Persephone rushed about the city, listening to gossip and news, gathering any hints she could and chas
ing them down.
She heard a few accounts of people carting away a large wood box, but no one seemed sure where they had taken it. Someone else had heard that outsiders just before the Dionysia were asking around for private space to rent in outbuildings or stables. So as grievous wails and shouted speeches echoed in the streets behind her, Persephone scaled walls and peeked into windows and pushed past surprised horses and goats in stables to search corners of buildings. Nothing.
As the sun set, she and Demeter and Hermes gravitated toward one another outside the city gates. Persephone fell into her mother’s arms and they held each other, trembling, a long while. Finally they stepped apart and the three looked at each other.
“Nothing in the caves,” Hermes said, “but there are still probably at least twenty I haven’t explored yet. Why the hell do these mountains have to have so many caves?”
Demeter looked ravaged with grief, her face somehow decades older today. Mud coated her boots and splattered the hem of her cloak. “Nothing in the farms and villages I’ve talked to, either. They say no one’s come by, nothing suspicious…” She raised her hands and let them drop. “But how are we to know if they’re lying? Who do we trust, who do we believe?”
“Who do we torture?” Hermes’ fingers curled around the hilt of his knife until his knuckles whitened.
Dionysos approached too. He wore a rough-spun cloak; he and Hermes had evidently changed out of their alarming bloodstained clothes and washed up a bit. But the dust of the road covered him, and he looked ready to drop in defeat.
He walked to Persephone and wrapped his arms around her, his golden head bowed. She returned the embrace delicately. Hermes had said Hekate was sleeping between the pair of them; he’d said no more, but Persephone had her suspicions. And even if her daughter had been dallying with one or both of these men, that didn’t bother her much, but she fervently wished Dionysos had arranged for better and more efficient guards while the immortals slept.
