A filthy pallet lay against the far wall, the blanket twisted. A bucket sat beneath a dripping finger of rock, filling with milky water. A pile of bones—bats and mice and the occasional goat—lay strewn in the corner.
Her Huntress’s nose led her to a stain barely visible against the rocky ground. She knelt, touching a fingertip to the congealed surface, and took a closer sniff. Only a day or two old. And not animal blood from one of the carcasses. Not human either. At least not entirely. An Athanatos was injured. Maybe dead.
She’d come too late.
“No …” she said aloud, anger coursing through her veins, hot and bitter. She ran to the pallet, ripping back the blankets as if to discover her father’s corpse underneath. Spinning in a circle, she looked for further clues. With a deep breath, she forced away the rage. I must stay calm, she knew. I was a cop once. I just have to follow the clues.
Walking more deliberately around the chamber, she tried to think rationally. I would know if Father were already dead. I would see his passing’s effect on the world, just as I did with my other kin. When her gentle mother had died, the infants in the hospital’s nursery had wailed with grief. When Saturn murdered Apollo, the nearby mortals couldn’t restrain the funeral dirge that ripped from their lungs for the God of Music. If Zeus Lightning Bringer died, the sky itself would sing lamentations, she thought desperately. Storms would lash the earth. The stars would fall from the heavens.
Not far from the puddle of blood, she noticed white guano scuffed into the ground. She followed the trail back to the chamber’s entrance and squatted down to examine the bootprints more closely. They weren’t made by one man, she saw now, but several. And the prints that pointed toward Zeus’s chamber were shallower than those headed back out. Many men went in empty-handed, she decided. They came out carrying my father.
The thought infuriated her—but it also gave her a modicum of hope. It meant that Saturn hadn’t come alone, desperate to enact his final vengeance upon his son. Instead, he’d brought his syndexioi. And since she and Theo had personally killed all the known members of the Host’s Manhattan sect, that meant Saturn had another group of acolytes somewhere in Europe. As much as she dreaded having to face another army of Mithraists, their presence would ensure that Zeus would be sacrificed in a formal ceremony, not murdered hastily in his cave.
They may have taken Father, she knew, but they won’t kill him until their ritual is in place. There’s still time to save him.
She pounded up the metal staircase and stood in the cave’s mouth, looking out over the fields and pastures, where only a scant smattering of farmhouse lights punctured the darkness.
“Hark to my words, Wily One,” she said aloud. “Wherever you’ve taken my father, I will find him. And wherever you’ve hidden yourself, I will hunt you down. You will die at my hands.” She raised her voice, shouting into the silent air, offering up the Olympians’ most solemn oath: “I swear this upon the relentless waters of the River Styx!”
At the time, she’d felt confident of her vow. She and Flint had left Crete and headed to Italy, Mithraism’s birthplace, thinking it the most likely place to find Saturn. At the cult’s height, Ancient Rome had housed hundreds of mithraea. She’d been sure one of them would serve as the Host’s modern headquarters.
Standing now before the door to her Roman apartment with her keys in her hand, water still dripping from her hair and clothes, she felt a wave of helplessness. For months, she and Flint had scanned the mithraea open to the public—and a few others besides—but had found no signs of recent occupation. Possibly, as in New York, the Host had built an entirely new sanctuary rather than repurposing an original one. Either way, tonight in Ostia she’d glimpsed Saturn for the first time since she’d fought him in New York. And he’d gotten away. Again.
Her anger made her throw open the door with no thought of her magnified strength. It crashed against the inside wall of the apartment. From the far bedroom, Selene’s preternatural hearing picked up the rustle of sheets. She’d awoken Flint.
He’d better not go back to sleep, she decided, marching across the small apartment to pound on his door.
“Get up,” she called to him sharply. “We have work to do.” She heard his weary groan, followed by the scrape of a crutch on the floor.
She was taking out her frustration on Flint, and she didn’t care. Until she had Saturn before her and her arrow at his throat, someone would have to bear the brunt of her ire.
It’s a good thing you’re not here, Theo, she decided. You wouldn’t have put up with such treatment. Flint, on the other hand, never complained. He accepted her ill temper and impatience with the same surly reserve he accepted the other hardships in his life.
Listening to his shuffling gait through the bedroom door, she smothered a wave of guilt. If he doesn’t like my bossing him around, he can leave, she assured herself.
But she knew he wouldn’t.
And somehow, rather than making her grateful, that just made her angrier.
Chapter 7
DAUGHTER OF ZEUS
Without a word, Flint emerged from his bedroom. Shirtless.
He smelled like sleep and sweat and smoke.
Selene followed his hooded gaze, belatedly aware of the way her wet clothes clung to her body. She fought the urge to cover herself—she’d done that for far too long. Let him look, she decided. His appetites aren’t my problem.
After so many millennia of avoiding men, she still wasn’t sure how to deal with them. Sometimes she felt like she was thirteen years old instead of three thousand, first exploring her effect on men and theirs on her, behaving erratically, even cruelly, in her attempts to navigate her own feelings. Flint, on the other hand, had many lifetimes’ worth of experience with women. He had, after all, once been married to Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love.
His bloodshot eyes flicked away from Selene; he limped into the kitchen on a simple aluminum crutch. She heard the clatter of the moka pot against the gas burner and retreated to her own bedroom to change into dry clothes, telling herself it was only because she didn’t want to drip on the furniture.
A few minutes later, she returned to find Flint hobbling to the table with a cup of coffee in one hand. He lowered himself into a chair half as wide as his frame required.
I see he hasn’t bothered to put on a shirt, she noted with annoyance.
She sat across the table from him anyway, trying to keep her eyes from wandering to the broad planes of his chest or the bulging muscles of his arms.
“We need a new plan,” she began without preamble. “Killing members of the Host may be thinning their numbers, but it’s not getting us any closer to finding my father.”
Flint stared pensively at his coffee, his lips a flat line. He’d never been fully on board with rescuing Zeus in the first place—she knew that. He wanted her to focus solely on killing Saturn, both as revenge for the deaths of so many Athanatoi and to prevent any future murders.
“We have to rescue the King of the Gods,” she repeated now in reply to his unspoken remonstrance. “When Saturn finally sacrifices him, there’s no telling how powerful he’ll become. You saw how quick he was to discard one of his own loyal syndexioi. How do you think he’ll treat the millions of humans who’ve forgotten all about him for the past two thousand years?” She shook her head angrily. “We’ve seen what gods do to the mortal world when they’re trying to regain their power. Innocents die, Flint. How much worse will it be once one actually gets the power he seeks?” She shuddered. “Even the strongest Athanatos won’t be able to stand against our grandfather once his Last Age begins. The mortals will have no one to protect them.”
Flint nodded slowly. “All the more reason to kill him without delay.”
“And leave my father to rot in some Mithraic cell that we’ll never find? Or let the syndexioi kill him as revenge for the murder of their Pater? No. We find Zeus first. We save him and prevent Saturn’s rise at the same time. Then we go for the kill.”
Flint grunted noncommittally. Over and over, those first few weeks after Crete, he’d reminded her of all her father’s failings. Zeus had been a shameless womanizer, a negligent parent, and a wrathful god.
“He’s my father,” Selene insisted heatedly. “He may be imperfect, he may have done unforgivable things—but so have we all. I punished women I should’ve protected; I cared only for my own glory; I killed innocents. I’ve tried to make up for those crimes by helping the mortals I once disdained. If I can forgive myself, don’t I owe my father at least that much?” Flint didn’t respond. “I can’t abandon him,” she went on. “I just can’t. You wouldn’t understand. You never had a father.”
She watched the muscles of Flint’s forearms pop as he squeezed his cup, wondering if the ceramic would shatter. Not the best time to remind Flint of his unusual parentage, she realized belatedly.
“My stepfather could’ve been a father to me,” he growled. “But he was too busy throwing me off Olympus.” He glanced up at her, his eyes flashing beneath his thick brows. “Or did you forget that part? The part where my mother birthed me without the help of her husband’s seed, the smallest payback for the dozens of children he’d sired on other women, and in revenge, Zeus tossed me from the mountaintop like a sack of trash. Trash, Selene, not a child.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
She’d watched as her once cheerful young stepbrother had disappeared through the clouds, hurled from Olympus by her own father. Weeks later, when Zeus’s temper had cooled, she watched Hephaestus return, untrusting, bitter, closed. His legs crippled beyond repair, his face creased in a frown that would become his hallmark.
“I was there. I saw it happen,” she said now. “And … like all the rest … I did nothing.”
Flint, always so stoic, winced as if slapped.
“You didn’t remember that part, did you?” she murmured. “You thought I was off hunting, dancing. You didn’t know I witnessed your fall. You didn’t remember I could be so cruel.”
He shook his head, not meeting her eyes.
“And if you had known … would it have changed how you—”
“No,” he said quickly. But he didn’t look at her. And he didn’t explain.
Finally, she began a story of her own, the only way she knew to make him understand why, despite all Zeus’s failings, she still felt such loyalty to him. “When I was merely a child, they say I sat on my father’s lap and asked him to make me a huntress. To give me nymphs for my playmates and a bow to wield and everything else my heart desired. And he said yes. Yes to all of it. That’s the story the poets tell, and I remember it well. But there’s another story, one so faint I see it only in snatches. One never recited by Ovid or Homer or Callimachus.” She turned her gaze to the rustling plane tree outside her window, as if its shuddering green would help her remember.
“I was on the slopes of Olympus, where the wildflowers glowed like flame in the sunlight, but the forest was cool and dark. I’d run away from the summit that day. Probably to escape my stepmother’s hounding.”
Flint snorted, not bothering to defend his mother. Hera was Zeus’s queen. Birthing her fatherless son was one of her less violent attempts to punish her husband for his infidelity. Usually, she took out her rage on Zeus’s consorts and bastards—Artemis, Apollo, and their mother, Leto, among them.
“I found a place where the Queen wouldn’t find me,” Selene went on. “Beneath trees so old and twisted that their branches bent into dryads’ thrones. I had the bow my father had granted me … the one you made for me. But I didn’t know how to shoot it. Arrow after golden arrow went flying through the trees. Those beautiful arrows you’d crafted, with leaf-shaped blades and …” She hesitated, trying to remember.
“Hawk-feather fletching,” Flint whispered hoarsely.
“Yes.” Her face softened at the memory. “Black feathers, while Apollo’s were white. I’d forgotten that. Well, all those arrows went disappearing into the woods, and the woods were growing darker, the sun setting, and then …” Her voice caught at the memory, as if she were a child again, suddenly scared and alone and knowing she’d made a terrible mistake. “I saw two points of light in the shadows. The glowing eyes of a wild boar. Its tusks as long as an elephant’s. Or at least … they seemed that way to me. It snorted, pawed the earth. Then it galloped toward me, and I froze.” She felt Flint’s eyes on her, questioning.
“I was a child still, not a huntress, despite my father’s promise. I was about to be gored. That tusk was an inch away, and I didn’t even have the breath to scream, and then … then my father was there.” A smile tugged on her lips. “Eighteen feet tall, at least. Hair shadow-black and those eyes like a summer sky and arms as wide and strong as tree limbs. The boar skidded to a stop, its sharp hooves digging into the soft earth, its nostrils pumping steamy air into the night. Then it bowed. First to Father. Then to me.” She gave a small laugh. “Then the fearsome King of the Gods taught me how to shoot. Stayed there all night with me, arrow after arrow, showing me how to aim, how to watch the arrow’s flight, how to find the shafts again in the dark. I was never scared of wild animals again. Or the forest. Or the night. He made me who I am. He gave me that gift.”
Her hand strayed to the necklace at her throat. Flint’s gift. “My father loved me,” she said. “He still does. I have to believe that. That sort of love doesn’t just disappear, no matter how many thousands of years have passed. My twin loved me like that. And my mother. They’re both gone. I won’t lose my father, too.”
Flint allowed a small, pained nod. Selene held her breath, waiting for him to say something, to acknowledge that Apollo and Leto and Zeus weren’t the only ones to love her. But when he turned to her, his eyes dark and simmering with millennia of unspoken emotion, her heart seized with fear. She was back in that forest again, facing a long-tusked boar. If she didn’t do something, fast, she’d be run through. Gored. And all her immortal powers would never close the gaping wound.
So she broke his gaze and said brusquely, “We still don’t know why the Wily One hasn’t already sacrificed my father. Or why he’s accumulating new artifacts.”
Flint’s face instantly shuttered. He looked away, granting her no more than a shrug.
Selene felt a stab of loneliness, guilt. How much of his brooding silence is because I won’t let him speak? Theo’s face flashed before her. Open, honest. You’d never let me shut you up. You’d insist I listen to what you had to say, even if I wasn’t ready to hear it. You’d talk it all through with me. Your feelings, my feelings, and Saturn’s whereabouts, too. Together, we’d find Zeus.
She’d longed for Theo’s help since she first got to Rome. Her half brother Scooter Joveson—once known as Dash Mercer, and before that as Hermes, the Messenger God—still kept in contact with her former lover. So far, Scooter had kept her secret—Theo still thought she was dead.
Scooter had admitted that he’d requested the professor’s assistance on their hunt for Saturn—against her express wishes. “I faked my own death to keep Theo safe,” she’d shouted at him over the phone. “I want to remove him from this battle between gods—not thrust him right back into danger, you bastard.”
Thankfully, Theo had refused to help Scooter—which was exactly as it should be. I want him to forget about me, she reminded herself now. If he’d agreed to join the hunt, not only would his life be threatened, but she risked running into him on the streets of Rome. The thought made her throat clench. His rage at my lies would break me in half. And I barely feel whole as it is.
The last time she’d allowed herself to spy on her former lover, only a week after her supposed death, she’d had Philippe—aka Eros, the God of Love—shoot a dart into Theo’s arm. Just enough, Philippe had promised, to smooth the jagged edges of Theo’s grief. To make it possible for him, someday, to love someone else.
I should’ve asked Philippe to shoot me too, she thought with a surreptitious glance at the man sitting across from her. Instead, Flin
t and I just hurtle forward, slamming into dead end after dead end. Unable to find my father. Unable to find each other.
She pressed on, seeking distraction in the hunt that had driven her for so long. “We know that Saturn’s plan in New York was to perform a series of Mithraic rituals paired with the sacrifice of Athanatoi. Hades, Mars, Apollo—all killed as steps along the way to the Host’s final goal.” Her old training as a cop taught her that reviewing the facts could help her predict her target’s next moves. “The cult chose Prometheus as the final offering. His murder would’ve completed the ritual and ushered in the Last Age, complete with the resurrection of Saturn’s own omnipotent power. Instead, Prometheus refused to become a willing sacrifice. He died in a lightning blast, rather than at Saturn’s hand—the ritual was left incomplete. So now Saturn and his acolytes have to start over.”
“Except they’re running out of Olympians to kill,” Flint interjected grimly.
“Right. Now that we know he’s after us, we’re not so easy to catch. But he already has my father—the most powerful sacrifice the cult can make. Killing the King of the Gods is the only way to finally complete the ritual and return our grandfather to power.”
“But Zeus is still alive.” Flint didn’t look particularly heartened by that fact.
“Which is a good thing,” Selene snapped. “The problem is, we don’t know what Saturn’s waiting for.” The Host must have an elaborate rite planned. She knew from recent experience that restoring supernatural power required more than just murdering a god. You had to do it right: collect authentic artifacts, find the perfect location, pick the most auspicious time, assemble the most dedicated worshipers. Otherwise the ritual didn’t work.
She took a deep breath as she considered the information they’d just uncovered. “I assume Saturn wanted the black arc from the mithraeum floor as a representation of the celestial spheres that Mithras controls. But we still don’t know why he was so obsessed with the marble pine tree. It’s an attribute of the Great Mother, but Mithraism’s an all-male cult. It doesn’t make sense. How could she help them bring about the Last Age?”
Olympus Bound Page 6
