The last words he spoke aloud. “Let me hold her in my arms once more.”
The door slammed open.
As light flooded the room, Scooter jammed the helm back on Theo’s head. Four syndexioi burst in dragging a limp woman between them, her hands bound, her head covered with a dark sack. They threw her forward. Her body slammed against the bloody ground, forcing the air from her lungs in a faint moan.
“She’ll wake up soon enough,” one of the guards grumbled.
“She better,” returned another. “The Pater wants her conscious for the next ritual.”
“Then we should go get the good chains.”
They left again, a bolt clanging into place as they shut the door behind them.
Theo wasn’t sure what was going on, but he removed the helm and hurried forward, pulling free of Scooter’s grip.
“Wait,” the god urged, sounding suddenly panicked, but Theo paid him no heed. He wasn’t about to let Saturn’s men hurt anyone else, not if he could help it. And no matter who this woman was, she didn’t deserve what the Host would do to her.
Scooter’s hand shot out, grabbing Theo’s arm to stop him in his tracks. “Theo, you have to listen. Let me explain.”
The fallen woman groaned and sat up, pulling off the hood with her bound hands.
She raised her head, her black hair falling away from her face to reveal a pair of silver eyes, glowing with fury.
Theo’s prayer had been answered.
Selene snarled at the closed door and rose to her feet, stumbling a little as she fought the effects of the Taser’s charge. She had every intention of ripping the door from its hinges.
She was stopped by a scent.
A thin thread, barely perceptible beneath the stench of stale blood. A wisp of something so faint only the Huntress could’ve detected it.
She froze, sniffed the air once more, wondering if she could trust her senses with Rhea’s memories still clouding her brain. Perhaps she was hallucinating. Or still unconscious. It must be a dream. That’s the only explanation.
But the scent was too real, too familiar. Wonder and fear and shock sent cold sweat prickling beneath her arms.
“Theo …”
A clatter of metal on stone. Selene wheeled around in time to see Hades’ helm rolling down the steps—and Theo hurrying past it.
Her heart leaped. You came to rescue me. I knew you would.
“Selene,” he gasped, rushing toward her with outstretched arms. Her scholar, always so logical, so practical, looked like a man in a dream, his eyes wide and mouth open in reverent awe. “I prayed, and you—”
He didn’t bother finishing the sentence. His lips crushed hers; his hands threaded through her bloody hair. Every fiber of her ached to step into his embrace, to feel the curve of his shoulder blades beneath her palms. Her body hummed in response to his touch. Her mouth softened, opened. He thinks I was really dead, she realized, but his lips soothed away her tremor of foreboding. I can explain it all when we get out of here. We will have time.
She extricated herself gently, pushing against Theo’s chest with her bound hands. Then she noticed Scooter for the first time. “The only way I’m going to forgive you for letting Theo come here,” she snapped at him, “is if you get us all out alive.”
Her half brother gave her a sheepish grin and brandished his lock picks. “Sorry I didn’t follow your orders. Handcuffs first. Recriminations later.”
Theo looked from Selene to Scooter and back. “Your orders …” In an instant, the joy on his face crumbled into confusion. Then horror. Selene’s dream crumbled along with it. “You …”
He stood only three feet away now, but she felt as if a mile-wide chasm had cracked open between them. Blood from her lips had stained his. He looked, in every way, like a man who’d just had his teeth knocked out. “You weren’t …”
“Theo …” she began, the word desperate, beseeching. Not now, her mind screamed. Don’t make me face this now.
He stumbled backward, repulsed. His shoes slipped on the bloody stones, and he sat down hard. She could hear his teeth clang together with a hollow echo, but his eyes never left her face. “Six months. Six months. I almost died.”
“Theo …” she tried again. A broken record, stuck on the same useless groove. After so many months of silent conversation, now she had nothing to say.
Footsteps in the hallway. The guards returning. Too soon. She jerked toward Scooter. “Too late for me. Just get him out of here,” she hissed. Her half brother nodded, scooping up Hades’ helm just as the door swung open behind her.
Theo tried to rise, but Scooter dashed forward with all his preternatural speed and slammed the helm over his head. They winked out of sight before the guards entered the room.
Selene turned calmly toward her captors, trying in vain to erase the shock written across her features. Six of them now, not four, and one carried an armload of iron chains. They clearly weren’t taking any more chances with her—the barrels of five assault rifles rose toward her face as the men fanned out into tactical positions around the room.
The Heliodromus strode forward. “You look distressed, Diana. Finally realizing your fate?”
His eyes flicked around the chamber, and Selene held her breath, waiting for him to notice something amiss, some hint that Theo and Scooter stood close by. Instead, he simply smiled, his nostrils raised as if enjoying the scent of decay. “This morning’s blood libation worked. You are both Huntress and Great Mother now. Glorious, no? We will send your spirit to the one true God—you will make a most powerful sacrifice.”
He ordered the other men to secure her. One grabbed her arms, another held her legs in place, while a third wrapped a heavy chain around her ankles. Together, they hoisted her into the air like a log. She let them do it all; if they fired their weapons in this room, Theo would surely be hit.
“And you know the only way to send your spirit heavenward, don’t you, Pretender?” The Heliodromus took a step closer to her, resting a finger on her chin to tilt her face toward him. “On a pillar of smoke.”
Selene heard Theo’s intake of breath. He’s going to scream, she realized, and they’ll find him.
So she screamed first.
They hauled her chained body out the door. Writhing, shouting, sobbing. It took the undivided attention of all the men to handle her. None of them even heard the stifled shout, the crash of wrestling bodies, the tortured moan issuing from the seemingly empty room behind them.
Chapter 22
PROTOGONOS
With Scooter’s hand pressed against his mouth and nose and his arm squeezing the air from his lungs, Theo couldn’t breathe. Part of him was happy enough to suffocate so he wouldn’t have to face the truth. The other part of him wanted to use all his growing rage to beat Scooter senseless. But mostly, he wanted to race after Selene. To save her. To scream at her. Both.
Theo slammed an elbow into the god’s invisible stomach and wrenched from his grip. Scooter burst into view, his face drenched in sweat, looking more panicked than guilty.
“They were armed,” he insisted. “They would’ve killed you.”
A thousand thoughts whirled through Theo’s head. He lied to me. She lied to me. All my grief, my suffering. All a lie. But one thought pierced through the cacophony like a siren’s wail.
They’re going to burn her alive.
And though the voices in his head cried out in furious warning, he felt like a tractor trailer without brakes, unable to stop hurtling toward her even when he knew he should leap to safety. Selene was about to be taken away from him. Again. And he couldn’t let that happen.
He scrambled to his feet and ripped open his satchel, grabbing Orion’s sword.
“Stop!” Scooter cried, his eyes scanning the empty air before him. “I can hear you pulling out that sword. You can’t go after her, Theo! We have to find Zeus and then get the hell out.”
“Zeus?”
“Saturn’s got him trapped down here.”
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“Something else you didn’t tell me,” Theo snarled. “Afraid I’d get too close to the truth, huh? Afraid I’d realize Selene was alive this whole time?”
“She hid herself to protect you.”
“Stop it. Stop lying, Trickster.” He made for the door.
“I told her I’d get you out!” Scooter begged.
Theo spun toward him. “Now you’re a man of your word?” He hefted his sword, resisting the urge to slam it through Scooter’s chest. “Come or don’t. But don’t get in my way.”
The syndexioi carried Selene into a sanctuary far larger than any she’d seen in her hunt through Rome. Feasting platforms decorated with intricate mosaics of stars and planets lined the wide aisle. Overhead, darkness shrouded a ceiling too high to see. A massive sculptural tauroctony sat beside the altar, Mithras in his seven-rayed crown proudly straddling his bull. Beside the altar stood Saturn in his crisp white robes, tapping the handle of his sickle in his palm. And on the altar itself …
A careful pyramid of wooden logs surrounding a tall stake. The reek of lighter fluid burned her throat.
The Heliodromus and his men dragged her forward and onto the pyre. They looped more heavy iron chains around her waist and chest, securing her to the stake. Saturn hadn’t gagged her, no doubt wanting to hear her scream again. Selene refused to give him the satisfaction.
A wheezing music began, the strange, atonal melody a counterpoint to her own sucking breaths. A hydraulis, she saw now. An ancient Roman water organ.
A veiled syndexios crouched beside the instrument, pumping water into its base, while another dressed in a crow’s mask sat at the keyboard. Copper tubes rose from short to tall, like the reeds in Hermes’ shrill pipes. The song that emerged was no shepherd’s tune, but a dirge for Rhea, the Mother of Gods. A dirge for her.
Yet even then, even when the Heliodromus struck the match and laid it against the wood, when the smoke curled like blood in water and the rising flames licked at the toes of her boots, Selene didn’t really believe she would die. After all, she never had.
“You think you’re still an Athanatos.” Saturn raised his voice above the gasping music and the crackling flames. “But this is no wound, no bruise, no broken bone. There will be no rushing river to heal your flesh. Not when there’s no flesh left.”
He gestured for his syndexioi to join the crow-masked musician in song. The hymn to the Magna Mater grew louder, more insistent, rising along with the flames.
The first finger of fire reached the cuff of Selene’s pants. The fabric smoldered for a moment before igniting. She kicked her feet against the chains, but the jerky motion only fanned the blaze. The fire reached her skin an instant later, the sensation like a thousand bees stinging her ankles one after the other. She still didn’t scream.
Then the door at the end of the aisle opened, and two men dressed as Roman legionaries appeared, dragging Flint between them.
He screamed in her stead.
A ragged, desperate bellow as his bloodshot eyes met hers. He struggled in vain against the thick iron binding his arms to his chest and crisscrossing his pitiful, withered legs. The veins popped on his forehead, his face flushed as red as the flames of his forge. They threw him to the ground like a sack of flour. He lay prone, craning his neck to see her better, even as the tears coursed down his cheeks and into his beard.
Saturn looked down at his grandson, his mouth twisted in distaste. “The next time I command you to fashion weapons for my army, you won’t refuse. You see now what happens to those who try to stand in my way.”
Flint kept hollering, his words an unintelligible roar of fury and anguish.
Saturn shook his head and motioned for the Heliodromus to gag the Smith.
Forgive me, Selene wanted to beg as she watched Flint spasm beneath his chains. Her friend, her stepbrother, and now somehow her grandson, too. Forgive me for dragging you into this. The gag cut the soft flesh of his mouth, and his strangled cries soon flecked the cloth with red. For not loving you enough.
But the smoke poured thickly down her throat, and when she opened her mouth she could only cough.
She lost sensation in her ankles as the flames seared her nerves; the pain migrated to her calves, her thighs instead. She couldn’t see the devastation—black smoke billowed before her eyes. She tried to hold her breath, then gasped, sucking in superheated air and smoke and the flying ashes of her own flesh before coughing it all out again.
Now she’d lost all sensation in her legs, but as the heated air rose, it blistered the skin of her arms, her chest, her face—an agony far more painful than the flames’ kiss.
I’m going to die. And I’m not ready. Three thousand years and I’m not ready.
There was still so much left to do. She would never free her father. Never see Saturn brought to justice.
Never hold Theo again.
I thought I’d have time.
She couldn’t see the smoke anymore. Her eyes were open, but the cone of flame had scorched her corneas. She reached inside herself—Rhea, Grandmother, Cybele, Great Mother! she screamed silently to the presence in her heart. If you’re there … rise up! Come with your charging lionesses and your queen’s scepter. Lend me your strength to rip from these chains! Please … please help me … help me …
But Rhea was as powerless now as she’d been the first time mortals burned her at the stake in a Prussian village so many centuries before. June had said her mother lived for days after her incineration … I won’t have days, Selene knew. I have minutes.
She opened her mouth to shout a final curse at Saturn, but no oxygen remained to fill her lungs. She sank against the chains, her leg muscles no longer thick enough to hold her weight. A mortal would have died long before, but her semi-divine body still clung to life.
She remembered her own mother, Leto, whose death had come so peacefully in the arms of her children. Let me have the strength to go as gracefully as she did, Selene begged.
As her mind slipped into unconsciousness, she clung to one final prayer. Perhaps I will see those I love again.
I’m coming, Apollo.
Theo raced down the hallway in Hades’ helm, barely aware of Scooter still clinging to his arm. He couldn’t think about the last six months or even the last six minutes—only about finding Selene before it was too late.
He knew the Host would take her to the main sanctuary—the only place sacred enough for such a sacrifice. But where was it? He dashed down one branching corridor, then another, falling deeper and deeper into the underground maze. He tried each door. Some opened onto training rooms and storage closets or crumbled chambers of brick unused for centuries. Many more were sealed; he didn’t leave Scooter time to pick the locks. Why bother locking the door of the sanctuary if all the Mithraists were inside?
He ran until his lungs burned and then ran some more. Finally, he stumbled to a halt, panting hard. Stop. Think, he commanded himself. Mithraists believed in orbits: celestial spheres whirling in their prescribed paths, the equinoxes shifting with regular precision, the solstices cycling in perfect symmetry. If the sanctuary dedicated to the Great Mother lay on one end of their complex, then the mithraeum, dedicated to the Father, must lie on the other.
“The Phyrgianum was …” he began, turning in a slow circle.
“That way.” Scooter pointed to the far wall.
“You sure?”
“God of Travelers, remember? Great sense of direction.”
“Then take me to the exact opposite end of the complex—as far from the Phrygianum as we can get.”
Scooter didn’t question him, just veered right, then left. Theo followed, barely keeping up.
After a mind-boggling series of turns, they stood before a wide door flanked by two statues: torchbearers wearing Phrygian caps. One carried his flame upward; the other stood with his pointed at the ground. Cautes and Cautopates, the Mithraic minor divinities symbolizing Birth and Death.
They could hear the crackle of flames on
the other side.
Theo rushed toward the door, his invisible sword outstretched.
It opened before he reached it, and a tidal wave of heavily armed syndexioi poured out, dressed in robes of red and black, some masked like lions or crows, others veiled, still others in legionaries’ armor. Saturn walked in their midst, but Theo paid the scarred old man no mind. Only one thing mattered.
With Scooter invisible at his side, Theo slipped into the room just before the heavy door slammed shut.
He froze.
A gentle rain fell from overhead sprinklers onto a tall pyre. The water doused the flames to embers and raised a thick column of smoke that billowed toward an unseen vent. Still Theo found himself choking, gagging, as if he stood within the pyre’s heat.
He could just make out the figure tied to the stake. A blackened corpse, her head thrown back, her hair burnt away, her familiar square jaw clenched shut. Her long arms looked like the remnants of a proud tree after a raging forest fire. Her eyes were hollow pits. The chains across her waist and chest glowed yellow hot. As he watched, the heavy iron links dragged a long sheet of charred flesh from her body; it fell into the embers in a torrent of sparks.
Theo couldn’t move. Scooter slumped against him, silent. He could feel the furious racing of the god’s heart against his own spine. They stood together like supplicants at a shrine, praying that they might unsee the epiphany before them.
A ragged moan floated toward them over the sprinkler’s hiss.
Flint lay bound and gagged on one of the mithraeum’s wide feasting platforms, staring at the smoldering pyre with bright red eyes, his beard flecked with mucus and foam.
The sight of the Smith broke Theo from his stupor. He pulled away from Scooter, dropped the helm unceremoniously to the ground, and walked to the pyre. Ignoring Flint’s confused moans, he clambered onto the still-smoking logs, heedless of the smell of melting rubber rising from the soles of his shoes.
Olympus Bound Page 18
