As they made their way to the dance floor, he patted his chest. “Stefano,” he said by way of introduction. He was easily ten years younger than Theo, and had ten times his fashion sense, but something about his guileless smile reminded her of the man she’d loved.
I hope you’re somewhere dancing today, she prayed. Then she realized she didn’t even know if Theo liked to dance. She’d never gotten the chance to find out. Stefano, however, was clearly enjoying himself. His shining eyes locked on hers as he led her through the unfamiliar steps.
The guests around her clapped and shouted, encouraging the stranger in their midst. If anyone minded her leather pants, they certainly didn’t say so. Normally a paragon of grace, Selene found herself discomfited by her own awkwardness as she tried to match the rhythm.
“Relax,” Stefano said, his hand warm in her own. “Enjoy, yes?” He beamed at her and, for once, she listened to a mortal’s advice.
Millennia ago, her worshipers had named her She Who Leads the Dance. She hadn’t had much use for the epithet in recent centuries. Dancing involved people and music and crowds—all things she studiously avoided. But in a different age, her feet had pounded out the rhythm that her twin, Apollo, coaxed from the strings of his lyre. The girls who worshiped at her ancient sanctuary at Brauron had followed her lead, the youngest children dressed as bear cubs, covered in robes of yellow fur. The teenagers had shed their clothes entirely and danced with wild abandon among the sacred groves, reveling in their last days of freedom before returning to Athens for marriage and motherhood.
Selene closed her eyes and let herself fall back into that ancient rhythm, not so different from the one currently filling the hall. She released Stefano’s hand and found herself in the center of the circle. She pulled the green shawl from around her neck and danced with it as she would a partner, twining it around her hands, her body, letting it swing through the air. The crowd around her stopped to watch. They stamped their feet, urging her on. Stefano stood with parted lips, panting softly with exertion—or perhaps desire.
Sweat pricked her temples and the hollow between her breasts; the band picked up speed and spurred her feet to fly. She now wished she hadn’t worn her boots. She longed to feel earth between her toes, moonlight on her upturned face, the cypress-scented wind on her bare skin. She barely noticed the faces around her, but if she had, she would’ve seen their delight transform to something akin to awe.
Unaware of her own body, she felt the music course through her like a rushing brook. Leaping now, twisting in midair, then landing to trace intricate patterns on the floor while her hands spun the shawl into ever more fantastical shapes. She danced not for joy—but for release. All the emotions she’d kept bottled up since she’d left New York poured forth: fear for her father, rage against Saturn, longing for Theo. But most of all, she danced for Apollo, whose death had ripped the music from her life. She danced to honor her twin, to bring his melody back to the world, to prove to his shade that she had not forgotten the lessons he’d taught her: how to dance, how to love.
The music crescendoed, slowed, stopped. The guests broke into wild applause. Panting, Selene closed her eyes, clinging to the image of her twin, his fingers dancing across his lyre, his honeyed voice wrapping her sacred grove in its warmth.
After a beat, the band launched into a cheesy popular love ballad, dragging Selene back to the present, where the soaring cypress trees were merely plaster pillars and the soft earth thin parquet.
The sweating guests paired off. She felt someone approaching and knew Stefano would ask her to dance again. She could smell his cologne, too strong for her liking, but not entirely unpleasant. How would it feel to have a man’s arms around her?
But Flint got to her first.
“What are you doing?” she murmured as he swept her away from the young mortal and into his embrace.
“Listening to my mother.” He moved without grace, swaying just a beat behind the music. The callouses on his hand tickled her palm. His barrel chest brushed against her own as they moved. He wore no cologne, but the odor of sweat and embers washed over her. He stood only an inch shorter than she; she had to turn her face to avoid his simmering gaze. He’d never once held her like this. On any other day, she wouldn’t have allowed it. But Apollo had told her to open herself to love. She’d spent months keeping Flint at a distance, and he’d spent months respecting her wishes. Now, with her heart still pounding from the dance, and the memory of Apollo’s music still thrumming through her heart, she wasn’t yet ready to return to her life of solitude.
Months before, lying wounded in Ruth Willever’s apartment, Flint had kissed her. She still remembered the taste—smoke and sparks.
His hand tightened just a bit on her waist, as if he, too, remembered that kiss. His fingers splayed wider, feeling more of her body through the fabric of her shirt. His scent changed, too, so subtly only the Huntress would notice. She stiffened in response.
“You can’t own me,” she said next to his ear.
“I’m not trying to own you,” he rumbled back. “I just like the …” He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t need to.
I like it too, Selene admitted silently, surprising herself, although she wasn’t ready to say the words aloud. For once, it was Flint who kept talking.
“That day on the battlefields of Troy, when you faced my mother—”
“Are you going to make me relive that?”
“Shh,” he chided. “Let me finish for once.” His breath was hot in her ear as he continued. “I watched as Mother grabbed your wrists and called you a hussy and ripped the bow from your grasp. And you ran in tears.”
Selene snorted in annoyance but allowed him to go on.
“I’d never seen you brought low. I took your bow from my mother and sought you out.”
“But you were fighting for the opposite side. I defended the Trojans—you and your mother protected the Greeks.”
“I went to you anyway.” He paused for a moment. “Do you remember?”
“It’s not in the epics …”
“It’s okay. I didn’t think you would.” But she felt his shoulder tense beneath her hand and knew he was hurt. “You were hiding in the forest beyond the city. Sitting by a pond, watching the ducks. I handed you your bow. I thought you’d shoot one of the birds, but instead you just looked at me and said, ‘I’ve seen enough blood today.’ And there was such … softness in you. I hadn’t known you cared for the fates of the thanatoi. I’d thought that, like all our kin, you fought only for your own pride, while I alone, who saw my imperfections reflected in the faces of mortal men, truly felt their pain.”
Did I really care? Selene couldn’t help wondering. The Trojan War was a distant, half-formed memory to her now, the only clear moments those recorded by Homer or Virgil, but she knew the goddess she’d been. She may have wearied of war, but that didn’t mean she empathized with those who fought it. Yet the Selene she’d become did care about the mortal world. She’d risked her own life many times to protect it. Perhaps in that moment outside Troy, Hephaestus saw me not as I was, but as I would be. He knew me better than I knew myself.
“I wanted to take you in my arms and wipe away your tears,” Flint went on quietly. “But you wiped them away yourself and disappeared into the woods. You ran too fast for me to follow.” He took a breath before he said, “I’ve been chasing you ever since.”
His hand moved from her waist, his fingers brushing her ribs with the same delicacy he showed toward one of his intricate inventions. He pulled away, just far enough to meet her eyes. He stopped dancing. The song, Selene realized belatedly, had ended long before.
He looked at her expectantly, his lips tight, defensive, but his dark eyes hopeful. You would’ve smiled at me, Theo, she couldn’t help thinking. But I’ll never see you again. I made sure of that. So why can’t I let Flint into my heart instead?
She stared at him, roiled with uncertainty, her right hand still clasped in his left as if they mig
ht start dancing again at any moment. He pulled it gently between them and laid it on his chest. She felt the swell of his muscle, the pounding rhythm of his heart, fast and urgent as he waited for her reply.
I’m not ready, she wanted to say. I know you’ve already waited for millennia, and I know you don’t have millennia left to wait. His hair was more gray than brown, the lines beside his eyes scored deep. Athanatoi weakened in proportion to mankind’s disdain for their names and attributes. No one worshiped blacksmithing or fire anymore. Another fifty years, a hundred perhaps, and Hephaestus the Smith would fade away entirely. But she couldn’t give him what he wanted. Not yet. She opened her mouth to tell him so when June trotted into view, her gold diadem bouncing.
“Don’t let me interrupt,” she called cheerily. “But if you want to chat, let’s do it before I have to cut the cake.”
Flint turned to glare at her. “This isn’t a good time.”
“Oh, I think it is.” June looped her arm through Selene’s and walked her quickly off the dance floor. In the sudden tightening of her grip, Selene felt a reminder of the goddess’s old strength. June leaned close and whispered in her ear, “My son is the best thing that ever happened to you. I may look like a weak old woman to you, niece, but if you play with his heart, I’ll find a way to kick your ass one more time. Understand?”
Before Selene could respond, June gave her a motherly pat on the cheek and pulled away, a bride’s ecstatic smile plastered once more across her face.
Chapter 10
RELEASER
Theo wasn’t sure when he’d lost his clothes. Sometime after the mushrooms and before the drum circle. Mushrooms I did not realize I was eating, he insisted woozily to himself. He’d been in such a hurry to rent a car and get on the road that he hadn’t stopped to eat. By the time he reached the compound outside Woodstock, he’d wolfed down the offered shroom-laced chocolate chip cookie without question.
He tried to remember how he’d wound up sitting in the dirt in the middle of an orgy in upstate New York. If I had half a brain, I would’ve waited for Dennis to return to the city. But when the man once known as Dionysus had texted back the address of his upstate compound, with an invitation to join in one of his monthly bacchanals, Theo’s impatience had gotten the better of him. The sooner he discovered how Orpheus had rescued his love from the Underworld, the sooner he could do the same for his own.
Now, between the initiates gyrating ecstatically around the bonfire and the ceremonial wine making the rounds—or, knowing Dennis Boivin, something more than wine—Theo felt like he’d unknowingly joined yet another cult. The bacchants all wore gold leaf-shaped pendants around their necks—and not much else.
He sat in the circle of revelers with his hands resting over his nakedness, although the mushrooms made it hard to care about modesty—especially while the two men and one woman next to him engaged in a dizzying variety of oral-anal permutations that had Theo alternately wincing and aroused. At least four other initiates had approached him with blissful grins on their faces and asked him to join in. So far, he’d managed to politely refuse.
Finally, the host himself appeared.
Theo had expected Dennis to show up as naked as everyone else, but instead he wore a pair of skintight, groin-high cutoffs and a stained tank top that did little to conceal his potbelly, his copious chest hair, or his bulging crotch. Like his followers, he wore a gold pendant on a leather cord.
“Why do you get clothes?” Theo asked, peering up at him blearily.
“Benefits of godhood,” Dennis said, settling himself on the ground and taking a swig from a plastic cup of purple liquid. “Also, keeps off the mosquitoes,” he added as Theo swatted at an insect gorging on his thigh.
“So is this how you keep your power?” Theo gestured to a woman standing a few feet away, pouring wine over her hair. “God of Frenzy, right?”
Dennis laughed. “You know it. But real power would mean some human-sacrifice shit, and you know I gave that up back in the good old days. This is just for fun.”
“Fun? Honestly, I’ve got leaves up my ass and insect bites on my balls and my brain’s so fried I can barely remember why I’m here.”
“That’s the whole idea, dude.” Dennis stretched his arms overhead. “Let it go. Let it all go.”
“I can’t. I need to know about …” Theo fumbled through his mind and finally came up with, “Orifice? I mean Orpheus.”
“I miss that little motherfucker with the lyre,” Dennis said with a lopsided grin. “Man spread my rites over the earth faster than chlamydia in a whorehouse.”
Theo’s balls shrank as he imagined just how many viruses were currently joyriding inside the bodily fluids streaming nearby. “Your rites? I thought they were Orpheus’s.”
Dennis shrugged. “Both, dude. The whole Orphic cult was inspired by me.”
“Why? Tell me. Why do you know the Orphic hymns? What do you have to do with reincarnation and resurrection?”
“Whoa now! The fancypants scholar needs my help. Finally coming down from that Ivory Tower of yours to play in the mud with me, huh?”
Theo tried to sound angry, but his words emerged slurred and confused. “I’m not playing, Dennis.”
“Uh-huh. That’s your problem.” He rose and dragged Theo to his feet. “Tell you what—if you want to know more about Orpheus, then you gotta dance, bro.” He stamped his flip-flopped feet against the earth, then ground his hips like an over-the-hill Elvis impersonator.
“No thanks.” Theo blinked heavily, but Dennis’s figure remained before his closed eyelids. Impossibly, he no longer wore his shorts and tank top but rather his full regalia as the God of Wine: a leopard skin draped across his hips, his hair twined with ivy, his lips grape-stained. When Theo opened his eyes again, the hallucination didn’t disappear. He moaned softly.
“Hitting you now, is it?” Dennis—Dionysus now—asked, a wicked smile on his purple mouth. “Dance with me. It’s not a request, Professor Schultz. It’s an order.”
The god started to dance again, his figure blurring into psychedelic colors. He turned away, hips swaying. The leopard skin lay across his shoulder now, the feline head staring at Theo with glowing yellow eyes. It blinked at him slowly, then licked its wine-stained jaws with a long pink tongue. It looked more sensuous than threatening, as if it’d rather be licking something else.
Theo felt his own feet move in response to the pounding rhythm of the drums. The others around the circle swung their hair like hippies at a love-in. The gold pendants bounced against their chests. He tried to copy them, flinging his head from side to side, hands raised high, as if to catch the starlight in his palms.
Not all the dancers are human anymore, he noted offhandedly. One had cloven hooves for feet. Another sported small horns on the crown of his head.
Theo turned back to Dionysus, desperate to ask if the satyrs were real or merely another hallucination, but the Athanatos had moved to the other side of the circle and now stood with his hands raised for silence. All the drums quieted but one: a steady, tripping heartbeat.
“You would know what Orpheus taught,” the god proclaimed in a clear voice devoid of his usual indolence. He spoke to the crowd, but Theo knew this lesson was for him. He took a step closer, willing his sluggish brain to focus.
“Orpheus tells us that the only path to resurrection is to follow the God of the Grape.” He lifted his cup of wine in a toast to himself, chugged the contents, and tossed the cup into the flames. His bacchants cheered.
He leered at a young maenad beside him, one of the few still wearing clothes. “The God of the Grape is He Who Unties! The Releaser!” She loosed the belt of her robe and let it drop to the ground as if to illustrate the power of the god’s epithet. Her blond hair brushed against the rise of her buttocks. Her gold leaf pendant nestled between ruby-tipped breasts. Wine and firelight flushed her face. Dionysus cast a lingering gaze on her before turning back to the circle of revelers.
“The Releaser
frees us from more than our inhibitions. He can release us from death itself. You want to know how?”
“Yes!” Theo’s shout merged with the crowd’s.
Dionysus thrust a hand toward the night sky. “Look for the eagle!” His followers’ heads shot up in unison. Even Theo found himself squinting into the darkness, searching in vain for a bird.
“God comes with wide wings and wicked talons.” The alliteration shaped Dionysus’s mouth into a lascivious kiss with each word. “He looks down with eagle eyes and seeks his perfect mate. A woman who has no fear. A woman who wears her hair loose and runs with the beasts upon the mountain slopes! Whose veins pump wine and whose feet never cease to dance. And when he finds her, he dives down in eagle’s guise to take her for himself.”
He held out his hand to the blond maenad beside him. The last shred of Theo’s lucidity started with alarm, afraid Dionysus would reenact his ritual on this unsuspecting woman, but she walked toward him willingly, and when the god placed his hands on her stomach, it was an act more of benediction than possession. Theo was surprised to see something akin to love shining from his eyes.
Dionysus is telling his own birth story, he realized. To him, this woman is Semele, his mortal mother, impregnated by Zeus in the form of an eagle.
“The woman is ripe and full and ready to burst,” the Athanatos went on. “She has God’s love.” He traced the curve of her flat stomach, and it seemed to swell and round beneath his touch. “She should be content with that. But no!” He turned from her with a feline snarl. “A demon convinces her to beg God for a final favor.”
Dionysus didn’t describe this so-called demon, but Theo knew her name: Hera, Zeus’s jealous wife, who’d made a career of torturing her husband’s mistresses.
“God the Father is a loving god, a generous god,” Dionysus continued. “He swears to give his lover whatever she wants. So when she asks to see his true form, he can’t say no.” His voice darkened. The crowd grew silent, afraid. As if they knew what was coming.
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