Fitz is out of his fucking league here.
Medeina was one thing. A goddess, sure, but small potatoes. He can see that now. Some pissy little forest sprite that a bunch of tribes huddled around campfires prayed to until she became something more than their collective hope that the wolves wouldn’t eat them, that the bears wouldn’t maul their children, that they wouldn’t all die of frostbite and starvation.
But this guy, holy fuck. This guy.
This is Bacchus, Dionysus. Lord of the Grape, Keeper of the Vine. Son of Zeus and a princess of Thebes. He is Erikryptos the hidden, Briseus, who prevails over all things, the feral Agrios. He is wine and dance and song. He is perversion and salvation.
But most of all, he is madness.
Fitz falls to his knees, vomiting, as if he could expel this rushing knowledge that has flooded his mind, but it just keeps coming. He sees everything Bacchus has done, every twisted story, every travail, every task.
He wants it to stop, needs it to stop. But it doesn’t. This is an old god. A god who was old when the world was young. So many names, so many stories. Before the Romans, before the Greeks. A terror on the land, a monster among monsters.
Fitz’s veins bulge, his body shaking, trying to hold all this knowledge in, trying to expel it. He can feel the capillaries in his eyeballs pop and his vision goes red in one eye. Blood drips from his nose. One of his molars cracks beneath the grinding of his jaw.
“Well, Prophet, like your answer? How much do you see? How much do you feel? Can you take it?”
Fitz looks up at Bacchus through the red film of blood in his eye. The god is smiling, the fucker. Smiling and killing him. Letting it all hang out for Fitz to soak up until he pops like a gorged tick.
“You’ve never felt this before, have you?” he says. “This much knowledge? What it must be like for a mortal to feel all of that. Looks like it hurts.” He squats down and grips Fitz’s chin in a hand like an iron vise and looks him over. “You’re probably going to want to get that eye looked at. Oh, there goes the other one.”
There is no way that Fitz is going to let this smug fucker get the better of him. He focuses down, rides the wave of knowledge coursing through him like he’s surfing in a hurricane. It helps, but not much.
“And this is just a taste of what you can look forward to,” the god says. “All of those maddening god signals you’ve been picking up like the universe’s most broken radio your entire life? They’re nothing. Desert signals on the wind, staticky chatter on a dead station. We know about you now. We know you’re out there.”
Bacchus releases his mental grip and the flood of images stops. Fitz collapses to the floor, blood running freely from his nose. He spits out his shattered molar, vomits some more.
Thousands of years in under a minute. There’s too much data for him to make sense of it all, but one image sticks out. Something about a fall. No, an eviction. The images are still too raw, but he knows there’s something there. Something important.
“Why?” Fitz says, his mouth full of puke and blood and a fattened tongue that it’s a miracle he didn’t chew through.
“Oh, that’s easy, little worm,” Bacchus says. “You’re our ticket to salvation.”
FITZ CLEANS HIMSELF up with a towel. This is his fifth one. He tosses it with the other bloodied and vomit-stained towels on the floor, looks at the logo stitched on it and feels like an idiot.
Took him a while after his ordeal to catch on that he isn’t in a Greek temple. It wasn’t until one of the god’s mad groupies handed him the towel and he saw the logo and made the connection. He’s in a room at the Getty Villa, an art museum filled to the ceiling with old statues, on Pacific Coast Highway.
He’s never been here before, but he’s heard of it enough times to know what it is. All this statuary gives him the creeps. Marble busts staring at him with empty eyes.
“Feeling better?” Bacchus says, sipping his wine and sitting on the backs of two of the yoga moms, who have gotten down on all fours to make a seat. Their eyes are still wild, their bodies still shaking. Fitz wonders what’s going on in their heads. If they even know what’s happening to them.
He hopes they don’t.
“The fuck do you care?” Fitz says. Clearly, humanity’s welfare isn’t at the top of this guy’s list. “And what’s with the yoga moms?”
Maenads. The Bacchae. The word comes to Fitz as if he’s always known it, but he doesn’t remember ever hearing it before. He’s not even sure how to spell it. Women under Bacchus’ thrall, driven to ecstatic visions and madness, drunk on his wine. Willing or not; something tells Fitz these ones fall into the latter category.
The thought of it makes him sick.
Bacchus looks down at the two women upon whose backs he sits. A look of mild surprise crosses his face, as if he’s just noticed that they’re not actually a chair.
“Followers. Of a sort.”
“Yeah, I got that. But I thought all your groupies were weird hippie party-goers, or—” An image flashes in his mind of drunken revels in the hills surrounding Rome: dances and bonfires, sacrifices and bloodshed, death. He blinks, the images fading from his eyes. “Old-time party people,” he finishes weakly.
“Did you know that the largest number of wine drinkers in this armpit of a city is new, twenty-something mothers with almost, but not quite successful spouses? Can’t afford nannies, and desperate to hang onto their teens like passengers on the Titanic hanging onto life preservers. Seriously, they drink like fish. I take what I can get.”
“They sign up for this?”
“Who would deny a god? Certainly not some Beverly Hills bimbo who’s just popped out some mewling brats.”
Or some would-be prophet? The unasked question hangs in the air. There’s a glaring assumption in the god’s statement and Fitz is certain he wasn’t meant to miss it.
“Where are the children?”
Bacchus gives a half-hearted wave. “No idea. Dead in a ditch, for all I care. But enough about them. Let’s talk about you. And what you can do for me. I have a vested interest in your well-being,” he says.
“Right. You said. I’m your fucking salvation.” That image of a fall, of being forcibly removed from something, that he got from Bacchus just before he cut off the flow of knowledge; it tickles at the back of his mind. There’s something there, but he can’t quite parse it all out. He tries to focus on it, but all of the other images are crowding his brain. He can’t separate the signal from the noise. His nose starts bleeding again and he presses another towel to his face to staunch the flow.
“Did Medeina tell you what you are, or was it Zaphiel? I think Zaphiel. Fool could never tell which facts were important and which ones to keep to himself, and Medeina is such a hot-head I would expect her to murder you as much as look at you. Hell, she probably didn’t even know. Well, I’m glad he told you. At least you came here knowing that much.”
Came here. As if Fitz had any choice in the matter. He has a sudden thought of Amanda. He’s been so pre-occupied with not bleeding from every orifice that he’s almost forgotten about her. He hopes she got away, but something tells him she didn’t.
“What, that I’m this Chronicler? That you’ve all been fucking with my head my entire life? Yeah, he told me.”
Bacchus nods. “But not how it works. Not why it’s always been such a low background hum in your life, rather than the onslaught I gave you. Not why you can hear it loud and clear sometimes and it’s just a buzzing madness the rest.” He takes a long drink of his wine and Fitz notices that the glass doesn’t actually get any lower. Nice trick.
“You’re only half the equation,” Bacchus says. “We’re the other half.”
“I’m the receiver,” Fitz says. “You’re the transmitter.”
“It thinks!” Bacchus says. “That’s too bad, actually. I was rather hoping you were an idiot. Well, I’m certain you are. All mortals are to some extent.”
“All you gods know each other?” Fitz says. “Y
ou all hang out in heaven, shoot the shit, give each other handjobs? That how you know about Medeina and Zaphiel?” If Bacchus is telling the truth then why was he able to pick up the signal from Medeina and the Agent but not from Zaphiel? Guess being a god radio doesn’t always work.
And then it clicks. It works fine. But if he’s just a receiver—
“You can control how much signal you’re transmitting,” Fitz says. “Zaphiel kept it under wraps. Medeina didn’t.”
“I strongly suspect that Medeina can’t,” Bacchus says. “It never occurs to most of us to bother. Why would we? We’re gods.”
“So how come you do?”
“Because I know what a Chronicler can do. I’ve seen your kind come and go. Have you ever read Hesiod? Homer? Euripides? Bit of a bastard, that one. Wrote a tragedy about me. Made me look like a fucking monster.”
Fitz looks at the two women, their arms and legs shaking, backs buckling. “You don’t say.”
“I also know what giving my all to a Chronicler will do to them. How are your eyes, by the way? They look terrible.”
The red film in his vision has faded, but his eyes still ache like he’s been punched in the face a few too many times. “S’all right.”
“Hmm. So, as you can imagine, transmitting, as you put it, tends to burn your type out. Most of you can’t handle the signal. And there aren’t a whole lot of you left. In fact, you’re the first relatively sane one of any power I’ve heard about in over a hundred years.”
“Sane one?” Fitz says. “I’ve been in and out of the system my entire life.”
“Yes, but you haven’t chewed through your own tongue, have you? Haven’t pulled together a flock of your chosen ones and force-fed them cyanide. Or held a stand-off in a Texan bunker until someone shot you full of holes. Or murdered a bunch of people until they locked you away for life so you could carve swastikas on your forehead. Should I go on?”
“No, I got it.” It’s weird to think he’s not crazy—well, not as crazy—as he thought. Sane isn’t a term that’s ever really been applied to him before. “But why does that matter? What the hell do you want with me, anyway?”
“Oh, so many things. Why do you think you’re called a Chronicler?”
“Fuck, I don’t know. I don’t even know what the hell that means.”
“It means you’re meant to write shit down. Or sing songs to our glory, put on plays, dance. Whatever. You’re our mouthpiece, our scribe. You tell our stories and the people believe. You will bring back our glory. Not all of us, of course. That’s what prophets do.”
That’s not all prophets do. Fitz has seen enough people in the psych wards who said they were the voice of God to know that’s where they end up, sucking on a Haldol pipe. If they’re lucky.
“Us?”
“Well, me, mostly. But there are others.”
“Like Medeina.”
He laughs, a thick, rich sound that echoes off the marble walls. “Oh, hell, no. Fuck her. And fuck that Cherub, too, and everybody else who’s thrown in with those losers.”
“Don’t prophets get stoned to death, too?” Fitz says. He can see where this is going, and he doesn’t like it. He needs to find a way out of here but he doesn’t see how he can get anywhere with Bacchus sitting there on his throne of Beverly Hills housewives.
“They don’t have the greatest life expectancy, but what more noble thing to do than die in the service of your god?”
“How about not die?”
“That’s not really an option for you. But it could be.”
Fitz has seen enough sales pitches, enough cons, to read between the lines. Bacchus has laid it all out, and is just waiting for Fitz to connect the dots. Lay out the pitch without coming out and saying it, so that when Fitz figures it out, he can feel all smart and smug and see the carrot and jump at it, thinking he’s getting a deal.
But there’s always a stick, too. Something that lets you know that if you don’t take it, if you don’t jump at this brilliant opportunity, you’re going to regret it. Maybe you’ll lose out on this fabulous set of Ginsu knives, maybe you’ll lose out on a lowball price. It’s never a big stick, just enough to let you know you’re losing out.
“And if I’m not interested?” Fitz says. “Being your pet prophet?”
“You could die right here and now.”
Okay, sometimes it’s a big stick.
A weird chopping noise creeps in on the edge of Fitz’s hearing, grows louder with each passing second. Helicopters?
Bacchus looks up at the ceiling, frowning.
“We seem to have guests.” Bacchus stands, and the two women get up, one of them faltering as her knee buckles. She doesn’t seem to notice. Still looking up, the sound of helicopters getting louder, Bacchus heads toward the door. The two Maenads take up positions on either side of the door, blocking it.
“I think somebody called the cops,” Fitz says. “Folks not liking you taking over a cultural landmark? You fill out all your forms for a party at the museum? The cavalry’s comin’, man.”
Bacchus pauses, looks at Fitz. “It’s adorable you think they’re your friends,” he says. “You have no friends.”
The god leaves, and Fitz wonders if things just got better or worse.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE TWO MAENADS watch Fitz as he paces around the room. There’s no way he’s getting past them without getting the shit kicked out of him. He doesn’t think they can feel pain right now, and considering the number they did on him and Amanda in the alleyway, he doesn’t think it would stop them even if they could.
Could he distract them? Knock them out, somehow? There’s nothing in this room that he could even lift, much less use as a weapon. If he could pick up a half-ton marble statue, maybe he’d be in business, but at most he might be able to pull a plaque off the wall to chuck at them, and he can’t see that doing much good.
He checks his jacket pockets for anything that might help. Bottles of oxy, Vicodin, the ketamine syringe he filled up at the safe house. Even if it would work on the Maenads—and he has his doubts—he’s only got the one and there are two of them.
There’s the phone he got from his mysterious benefactor, but it’s got no bars. He lifts it over his head and turns in a circle, trying to get a signal, but it stays stubbornly dead.
He starts to put the phone back in his pocket when it buzzes in his hand. He looks at the screen. Still no signal, but a text message flashes on the screen.
THERE IS A PLAN, the message reads.
Great, he types. What is it?
WAIT
“Wait?” he says. “You want me to fucking wait?”
YES
He stares at the screen. He didn’t type anything.
“Can you hear me?” he says.
YES
This is the weirdest text message app he’s ever seen. He’s never seen one that uses the phone’s microphone. This is some Spy vs. Spy shit here. Creepy though it is, Fitz feels a little better. Whoever’s on the other end of this got him away from Zaphiel, had a safe house, warned him when the Maenads were on their way.
But being able to do some hacker NSA shit on a smartphone really impresses him. He wonders if it’s the Agent, but dismisses the thought as soon as it enters his mind. The Agent rarely talks. He picked that up when he met him. And when he does talk, it’s to command, to threaten, to bully.
Not to rescue him.
“Okay,” Fitz says. “I’ll wait.” He pulls the bench toward the two women, who, though they’ve watched his entire exchange, don’t seem inclined to do anything about it. He sits in front of them, rolls his neck until it cracks.
“Ladies,” he says. “This is me waiting.” He looks from one to the other. “So, Bacchus. What a guy, right?”
They say nothing.
“Right. Not big on the talky-talky. I get it. Is anybody even home in there? No? Nothing?”
The phone buzzes. GET DOWN, it reads.
A cylindrical grenade bounces through
the open door past the two Maenads and rolls to a stop at Fitz’s feet. They stare at it, like it’s a bug that’s just wandered into the room.
Panicking, Fitz scrambles back, falling over the chair and crawling away from the grenade in an effort to get out of range before it goes off. As plans go, he’s seen better. Exploding isn’t something he was looking forward to today.
But then, nothing has really gone well, back since the aborted blowjob in the motel.
“That’s your plan?” he yells into the phone.
WAIT FOR IT
A moment later the grenade belches thick clouds of purple smoke that fills the room in seconds. The Maenads start coughing, their bodies involuntarily reacting to the smoke. Fitz can barely see, and that’s only because he’s on the floor. Everything above the Maenads’ knees is nothing but a sheet of rapidly descending purple smoke.
He scuttles between them through the open door. The smoke is filling the other hall, too, and it’s gotten so thick, so fast, that he can barely tell where he’s going, or even which way he’s facing.
The fire alarms go off. Steel grates fall in the doorways, metal shutters slide down to protect rare paintings. A moment later the sprinklers kick in.
“Goddammit,” someone says through the smoke. It’s muffled, like it’s coming through a wall. It’s hard to hear with the high-pitched chirping of the fire alarms, but he knows that voice.
“Amanda?” he says, coughing and soaking wet. “Where are you?”
“To your left. The doorway’s open. I blocked the gate with a trashcan. Come on.”
Fitz turns left and scrambles toward her voice and through the doorway. A hand grabs him and pulls him up into the diminishing smoke. She’s wearing a gas mask and a pair of IR goggles strapped to her forehead, a bandolier of grenades and shotgun shells across her chest, a 12-gauge Remington tight in her hand.
“This way,” she yells and leads him through a set of double doors into the museum’s inner courtyard. The night sky is a dark blue; a fat moon, almost full, perches directly overhead, thin wisps of cloud passing over it.
Mythbreaker Page 7
