“Who’s that guy?” a voice piped from beside him, interrupting his reverie.
The little boy’s head barely cleared the statue’s base. Theo looked around for a parent and saw a woman in sweatpants sitting cross-legged on a bench, staring at her cell phone.
“Is that your mom?”
“Nanny,” the boy said, not bothering to look. “She doesn’t know anything about statues. Do you?”
Theo cleared his throat. “I know about this one.”
“I like it,” the boy said, pointing a chubby finger at the marble man. “I just want to know why he’s covering his eyes.”
“He’s Orpheus,” Theo began. He remembered the first time he’d read the myth. He’d been only a little older than this boy, but it had stuck with him for the rest of his life. “He had a lyre. That’s like a—”
“Like a harp,” the boy interrupted.
“Yeah,” Theo said, surprised. He liked young children; he just wasn’t sure whether to treat them like puppies or colleagues. “Well, they say Orpheus played music so sweet that the animals would gather at his feet to listen. Even the rocks rolled close to hear his song.”
The boy nodded. “Cool.”
“He fell in love with a girl named Eurydice. But they were only happy for a few short months before a viper rose up and bit her on the foot. She died.” He stopped, wondering suddenly if this story was too scary for a kid. But the boy just stared up at him expectantly. Theo went on. “Orpheus traveled all the way to the Underworld to get her back. Hades, Lord of the Dead, and his wife, Persephone, laughed at him. No one who dies can be resurrected. But then Orpheus began to play a dirge. A song of mourning so bittersweet, so beautiful, that Persephone, cold Queen of the Dead, dissolved into sobs. ‘Make him stop,’ she begged her husband, ‘or I’ll drown in my own tears.’ So Hades relented. He let Orpheus lead his love out from death, on one condition.” Theo paused for effect. The boy was still listening. “On the journey from the Underworld, Orpheus must never look back to check that Eurydice followed him. True love requires trust.
“So, lyre clutched in his hands, Orpheus began the long trek back to the world of the living.” Perhaps, if Steve is right, Theo thought, Orpheus wasn’t alone. A snake-twined, four-winged, lion-headed god might have flown before him, leading the way. But for now, Theo stuck to the myth he knew.
“Orpheus couldn’t hear Eurydice’s footsteps behind him, but he trusted that she followed—at least at first. Then a cold dread gripped him, and he grew convinced that she’d turned back or fallen behind or had never chosen to come in the first place. Just steps from freedom, from life, from happiness … Orpheus looked back.”
The boy’s mouth gaped open.
“He caught one glimpse of his love’s horror-stricken face before the hand of death swirled forward and snatched her away once more.”
Sudden tears sprang to the boy’s eyes. He gave a tiny, hiccupping sob.
“Oh shit,” Theo began. “I mean, darn, I didn’t mean—”
The nanny jumped up from the bench, finally attentive, and grabbed the boy by the arm. “Come on, Ben.” Theo was convinced he was about to be arrested, but the woman seemed angrier with the boy. “Stop bothering the gentleman.” She dragged the kid off to the next gallery, leaving Theo alone with Orpheus.
I know how you must have felt, he thought, staring at the marble man with his covered eyes. To have love ripped away just as you thought it’d be yours forever. There was only one difference.
I trusted, he reminded himself. I wouldn’t have looked back, I didn’t look back. I trusted her with my heart and she broke it in half. His last memory of Selene returned: her silver eyes full of tears as she pried herself free of his arms and plummeted through the night. Snatched away by the hand of death.
Orpheus himself, if he’d ever existed, was no Athanatos. He was long dead. Yet Theo couldn’t resist offering a prayer to his shade. You found a way. You almost brought back your love.
“Please,” he whispered aloud. “Teach me the secret of resurrection. Tell me if it’s you or your religion or your lion-headed god. And I swear, upon the dark waters of the Styx, that I will succeed where you failed.”
Beside the statue hung a set of headphones. The nearby placard explained that scholars had recently uncovered the musical notation for the Orphic Hymn to Protogonos.
Listen to a musician play the melody on a re-created ancient lyre, it invited, and imagine Orpheus himself playing it to escape the Underworld.
A bit fanciful for the Met, Theo thought, but the patrons will love it. Typical Steve.
He put on the headphones. The lyre twanged percussively, more like an Indian sitar than a modern harp, each new note reverberating into a chord that resonated somewhere deep in his mind. He thought of his paltry Pythagorean instrument with its single string. He’d wanted to simplify his impossible quest to its purest essence—mathematical ratios, numbers on a page. Comprehensible, rational, straightforward. But the mysteries of death and life were not so clear—and neither, for all its grounding in math, was music. The ancient Orphic hymn that pulsed through the headphones was heart and soul and memory.
I remember this tune, he realized suddenly. He looked again at the placard. Archeologists had only recently discovered the musical notation carved into a marble grave marker, so why did he feel he could sing along with the melody? Why did it conjure such a vivid image of a naked man standing in front of an open fridge, humming the song as he twirled his copious chest hair with one hand and pawed through moldy leftovers with the other?
Theo ripped off the headphones with a groan. I knew that if I looked beyond the Orphic Protogonos, I’d find another god. I just really hoped it wouldn’t be this one.
A decade earlier, this particular Athanatos had spent four years as Theo’s grad school roommate, luring him into drunken revelries that usually ended with him feeling both physically ill and morally compromised—when he could remember them at all.
This time, Theo resolved, when Dennis Boivin offers me a cup of wine, I’m going to refuse. But he’d sworn the same thing many times when facing the God of the Grape. It had never worked. Then again, a little immoral hedonism would be a small price to pay for his ultimate goal.
To resurrect Selene, I’ll go wherever I have to, he knew. And unlike Orpheus, I’ll never look back.
Chapter 9
GODDESS OF MARRIAGE
Tight leather pants despite the heat, boots laced to her knees, a sleeveless shirt that showed the corded muscles of her arms. Selene had chosen the outfit with care.
It wasn’t every day she met her ancient nemesis for the first time in fifteen hundred years.
Normally she preferred clothes that concealed her figure from men’s prying eyes, but she needed to make a statement. She wished she could hide the streak of white in her black hair; she was no fading goddess, resigned to death. She was the Huntress still, modern and fierce. From the hungry look on Flint’s face when she left her bedroom, she might’ve succeeded too well.
His gaze traveled appreciatively up her body to the gold necklace at her throat.
“You do realize this is a wedding—not a fight club?” He wore a summer suit that strained across his biceps and shoulders. She could just make out the lines of his titanium leg braces beneath the fabric of his pants. She’d never seen him in anything so formal. He’d left the collar of his shirt open—it barely fit around his neck anyway.
“This whole wedding is ridiculous. Hera’s already married.”
“Not sure she sees it that way.”
“Oh?” Selene demanded. She didn’t fundamentally care about her stepmother’s fidelity, but she found herself defending her father’s honor nonetheless. “How does Zeus see it?” She couldn’t resist using her father’s real name for emphasis.
Flint shrugged. “I’m sure my mother hasn’t asked. And doesn’t care. But trust me, she will care if you show up to her party wearing that. And don’t protest,” he said, before she could
do exactly that. “If she’s offended, she’s liable to throw us out before she answers any of our questions about the Magna Mater. She’s always been touchy.”
You want to see touchy? Selene thought. Try forcing me into a dress. She grabbed a long, gauzy green shawl spangled with mirrored sequins from above the kitchen doorway—one of the apartment manager’s misguided attempts at interior decoration—and draped it around her neck and shoulders. “Better?”
“Yes. But you don’t need to bring your bow,” he said, gesturing to the large bag slung over her arm.
“You clearly don’t remember the Trojan War,” Selene snapped back.
“Oh no, I remember.” A rare glimmer of humor danced in his eyes.
“What’s so funny? You liked watching me get my ass kicked by your mother?”
“I’d always thought you were …” He paused. “Heartless. Invincible. Then I saw you weren’t. That’s all.” He shrugged and turned away, leaving her both curious and annoyed.
Selene’s pique turned to outright rage when they arrived at the steps of the Church of the Most Holy Name of Mary.
“A church? You’re kidding, right? I won’t step foot in there.”
“Where else did you think she’d get married?”
“Since when has your mother gone over to the enemy?”
“Wait here,” Flint said, not bothering to answer. He walked stiffly up the stairs and into the church.
A short time later, the voice of a priest floated through the open doors. Despite her fluent Latin, Selene had a very shaky grasp of modern Italian. She caught something about Christ and God and love, then just tuned the whole thing out. She sat on the steps, staring across the street at Trajan’s Column instead. The ancient monument towered a hundred feet above the sunken plaza on which it stood, dwarfing the surrounding ruins. The plaza hadn’t originally been below street level, of course, but over the centuries, Rome built upward, covering much of its past beneath avenues and piazzas. Selene felt a shiver run up her spine as she realized that even now, on the steps of this church, she sat atop unknown layers of her own history. Perhaps a temple to Diana once stood on this very spot—a fitting site for a church dedicated to another holy virgin in another age.
Man is fickle, she mused, turning from one god to another. Bad enough they abandoned me for Mary. What happens if Saturn gains such power that they abandon Jesus for him? The thought brought her to her feet. The sooner she could speak to Hera, the sooner she could continue her quest to find her father before it was too late.
She moved to the threshold of the church, peering down the main aisle toward the altar. She knew her refusal to enter was a little silly—it was just a building, after all. She wouldn’t melt or burst into flame just because her foot touched sanctified marble. I’m not a vampire, she told herself sternly. She caught sight of the icon of the Virgin Mary hanging in a massive, gold-encrusted frame above the altar and forced herself to meet her replacement’s mild gaze.
Beneath the painting of Mary stood Selene’s stepmother—Hera, Queen of Olympus, Goddess of Marriage and Families. She looked like a middle-aged housewife from the flyover states. Her famous white arms were rounder than before; the hair that had once crowned her head in inky coils now flopped around her ears in a curly gray mop. She wore a calf-length dress of ivory lace, with no waist to speak of. The only hint of her former status as the Queen of the Gods was a curving diadem made of dozens of tiny gold willow leaves. It looked out of place—a tiara for a youthful bride. Hera should’ve stuck with a sensible hat.
The groom clasping her hands stood a full head shorter than she—not surprising, considering the goddess retained much of her divine height—and looked half his bride’s age. Handsome, stylish, his narrow jaw shadowed with stubble. He wore a neat white suit with an overlarge lotus bud in his lapel, and he stared up at his bride with all the adoration of an acolyte at a shrine. She looked down at him with equal fervor, her cow eyes large and dark and full of love.
Selene grimaced and stepped back from the entrance.
It wasn’t long before the bride and groom appeared on the church steps—Hera holding a water lily bouquet in one hand and her young husband in the other. Selene moved forward to intercept them, but three dozen grinning Italians in rainbow hues blocked her way. Flint emerged next, a dark cloud floating in their wake.
“What are you scowling about?” Selene asked him as the couple pulled away in their waiting limousine and headed toward the reception site. “This was your idea.”
He glared at her from beneath his grizzled brows, and she was taken aback by the anger she saw there. I should’ve remembered that weddings would put him in a foul mood. His own marriage to Aphrodite, Goddess of Erotic Love, had soured early on. She remembered the wedding only vaguely. Even then, the bride had eyes only for Hephaestus’s handsome brother Mars, God of War.
As they followed the crowd down the street toward the reception, she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “So your mother clearly thinks she’s free of her first husband. Do you still consider yourself married?”
“Hephaestus is still married to the Goddess of Love,” he said. “That’s what the stories say, and nothing I do can change that. But as for Flint … no.”
“That’s a bizarre way to look at it.”
“It’s the only way I know how.”
“But Hephaestus …” She paused. One did not bring up a god’s fading, or speak his real name aloud, without good reason. “He doesn’t really exist anymore, does he? I mean,” she said quickly, “Artemis feels very far away to me.”
Flint said nothing at first, and a sudden tension thickened between them. She watched his powerful hands clench when he finally spoke. “I see her every time I look at you.”
He means more than the fact that Artemis and I share the same face, the same body, Selene knew. He’s always managed to see the divine in me—and the human, too. It was a rare gift. One she wasn’t sure she deserved … or even wanted.
In the reception hall, an accordion and a mandolin played American seventies pop standards. The dance floor already brimmed with frolicking guests by the time Selene and Flint arrived. A large placard in curling letters read, “Tanti Auguri a June e Maurizio!”
The bride herself came to greet them at the door, throwing her arms around her son. He hugged her back a little gingerly. And I thought my relationship with my mother was complicated, Selene thought. Hera was the only parent he’d ever had, and she’d risked Zeus’s wrath to bring Hephaestus into the world. In return, he’d always shown her loyalty, even though she’d rarely returned the favor.
When the woman turned to her, Selene stiffened, expecting her to be as arrogant and hateful as always. Hera had chased Artemis’s pregnant mother across the world, full of jealous rage and determined to prevent her husband’s latest consort from giving birth. Years later, she’d met Artemis on the fields of Troy and smacked her into submission like she would a recalcitrant child. Yet when the bride reached to take Selene’s hand, she no longer appeared as jealous Hera, nor her Roman incarnation, imperious Juno. She was just June. A woman with a broad Midwestern accent and a smile to match.
“My niece! Thank you for coming, dear.”
Niece? Selene thought. True, Hera was Zeus’s sister (and, in the usual incestuous morass of Olympian genealogy, his wife), but she’d never been much of an aunt to Artemis, Apollo, or any of Zeus’s many other out-of-wedlock children.
“We’re not here for the party,” Selene insisted, taking June’s hand cautiously. “We came to ask questions. Did Flint tell you—”
“Plenty of time for that!” June laughed and brushed a lavender fingernail against Selene’s necklace before turning back to her son. “I see you finally worked up the courage to give it to her. Now you two get out there on the dance floor!”
“I don’t dance, Mother.” Flint’s cheeks flushed above his beard.
June swatted him playfully on one of his bulging biceps. “Don’t be absurd. This isn�
��t the nineteenth century, hon. You don’t have to waltz! Just get up there and sway. It would do you both good.”
“June—” Selene began.
“Aunt June, please. Although don’t say it too loud—the family relationships are a bit hard to explain, aren’t they? And I don’t want to hear another word. If you want to talk to me, you’ll have to wait. I’m a little busy!”
At that, her handsome husband appeared, his arm around the shoulders of an even younger man with the same narrow jaw—probably his brother. Without preamble, Maurizio grabbed Flint’s face and pressed a hearty kiss on each cheek. The God of Volcanoes looked about to erupt.
“This is Flint Hamernik, an old family friend,” June explained in English to her groom.
She hasn’t told Maurizio she’s an Olympian, Selene realized. Otherwise, she’d introduce Flint as her son. With his graying hair and furrowed face, the Smith looked nearly the same age as his own mother, something June couldn’t justify without a complicated lie—or the even more complicated truth.
Maurizio made for Selene next, but she held out a hand to stop him. He grabbed it and pressed a wet kiss on the back. The young man at his side, clearly more attuned to her obvious discomfort, merely gave her a courtly bow. His black hair drifted across his forehead in a Superman curl.
“E questa bella donna?” the brother asked.
“Flint’s date,” said June quickly. Selene didn’t miss the wink she threw in her son’s direction, nor the answering glower he sent back.
The band began an old Italian folk song, one not nearly old enough for Selene to remember. With a joyous cry, the guests made for the dance floor.
“Come!” Maurizio declared in English. “You will join!” He took June by the hand, and the couple jogged off toward the center of the room.
With a brilliant white smile, the groom’s brother reached for Selene. She was about to wrench away when she caught the look on Flint’s face. He was jealous of this young, handsome Italian. Good, Selene decided. Let this remind him that he has no hold over me. She placed her hand in the young man’s.
Olympus Bound Page 8
