With a single swipe of Orion’s divine sword, he cleaved the last of the iron chains in half, then sliced through the handcuffs that bound his former lover to the stake. Her body fell toward him.
He grabbed her shoulders—her flesh sizzled against his. He pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around her waist so he could pick her up. She was light. So light. Embers and ashes and air. He knew as he carried her off the altar that pieces of her were floating away, and he didn’t let himself look.
When he reached the mithraeum’s aisle, he laid her down gently. Scooter, face drawn and coated in sweat, had removed his stepbrother’s gag and unlocked the chains with his picks.
Flint didn’t speak; he bellowed. Animalistic and hoarse and full of volcanic wrath. He crawled across the platform, dragging his withered legs behind him, then tumbled into the aisle beside the corpse. He grabbed one blackened hand, his flesh hissing—he only held on tighter, even as a thin coil of smoke rose between his palm and hers. He lifted crimson eyes to Theo.
“I couldn’t stop it,” he panted. “I’m the God of Fire. And I couldn’t stop it.”
Theo had no words for Flint. Even Scooter sat silent, frozen, his legs dangling over the platform’s lip, his eyes trained on this black mannequin. This ravaged statue. This cracked thing that could not possibly be Selene.
When Theo had lain in a hospital bed after the battle on the Statue of Liberty, Scooter had told him that he felt Selene pass from the world. The tides moved, the Trickster had lied. The moon cried.
And now? When she was truly gone? Where was the ripple effect on the world? We’re too far underground, Theo realized. There is no moon here to weep, no animals to mourn. She’s simply gone. As if she never existed. Her death no more momentous than that of a mortal woman. Even thinking the words felt like a betrayal.
“No,” he said aloud. “No. She’s not gone for good.”
He cast a quick glance around the mithraeum. Large frescoed panels of snakes and starry night skies hung on the walls, their crumbling borders showing where they’d been ripped from their original locations. Slabs of mosaics displaying the attributes of different Mithraic ranks covered the aisle. A hydraulis sat in the corner, ready to play hymns worthy of Orpheus himself. In a niche beside the tauroctony stood a statue of Aion, the lion-headed god with his crossed keys, promising entrance to another world.
“Mithras, Orphism, Birth, and Death—it’s all here,” Theo murmured. “This is the place.”
“The place for what?” Flint demanded.
“Theo …” Scooter began warily.
“This is why I’m here.” Theo fumbled through his bag. The moment he pulled out the case of syringes, Scooter hopped down into the aisle, ready to stop him. “If you want Selene back,” Theo ordered Flint, “stop him.”
Flint obeyed. He snatched Scooter’s ankles, tumbling the slighter man to the ground, and pinned him in place with a massive forearm and a deeply terrifying scowl.
“What’s your plan?” Flint rasped.
“The same one I had when I came down here. Nothing’s changed,” Theo answered. Everything’s changed, the voice in his head screamed in protest. But he kept talking, drowning out his own doubts. “I’m going to inject myself with the concentrated venom of a Greek sand viper.”
“No,” Scooter wheezed from beneath Flint’s arm. “Don’t.”
“Snakes have always held the secrets of the Underworld,” Theo went on, willing his voice to stop shaking. “They understand the mysteries of death and healing. Dennis says they hold the boundaries of Time itself.” He raised his eyes to Flint. “They’ll take me into the Underworld.”
Flint nodded silently. All the jealousy that had once flared between them was now extinguished by their determination to bring back the woman they’d both loved.
Scooter groaned. “This is absurd! If you’re dead, how is that supposed to help Selene?”
“I’m not going to stay dead,” Theo shot back. “Give me five minutes and then inject the antidote in the second syringe, okay?”
He retrieved a container of raw beef heart, procured from a local butcher. “I’m using the Orphic ritual.” He unwrapped the makeshift bandage from around his sliced wrist and let a few drops of his own blood mix with the bull’s. He kept talking, kept explaining, like a lecturer instructing his class, the familiar cadences lulling his rising fear into submission. “I’ll recite the Orphic hymn on the way in to guide my steps. And I’ll have Dionysus’s instructions once I’m there.” He held out the dripping heart to Flint. “But right before you use the antidote, eat this. The Orphics believe consuming the heart can join spirit to flesh once more. It’ll help me—and Selene—get back.”
“I told you I’m not going to let you kill yourself,” Scooter nearly shouted, shoving against Flint’s weight.
In response, Theo handed Orion’s sword to the Smith, who pressed it against his stepbrother’s throat.
“Oh, come on,” Scooter scoffed. “You’re not going to kill me.”
“Try me,” Flint growled.
“But it’s not going to work. And we’re wasting time. It’s too late for Selene, but not for Father.”
Flint shifted the sword, scraping it against Scooter’s bobbing Adam’s apple. “Not until we get her.”
“But—”
“Orpheus almost got his love back,” Theo interrupted. “And Dionysus rescued his mother. I can do this.”
He produced a long match and a small dish of myrrh. The Orphic texts were very clear on the importance of using the correct incense to accompany different incantations. He lit the balls of aromatic resin, grateful that his hands had almost stopped shaking, then removed the first syringe from its case.
“Do it, Schultz.” Flint’s voice carried the rumble of a god’s command. “Bring her back to us.”
But Theo barely heard him; he was too focused on the needle resting on his palm. He pulled the stolen ivy leaf pendant from beneath his shirt. The faint Greek characters on the surface were still indistinguishable. There was nothing he could do about that now.
He clasped the pendant. He knelt before the statue of Aion.
In the background, he could hear Scooter and Flint shouting at each other, but he didn’t pay attention to their words. The thick scent of incense made him want to sneeze.
He focused his energy on Aion, on the snake that coiled from his lion head to his bare feet, the guardian of the mysteries of life and death. He looked to the Roman keys that would open the locked precincts of the Underworld—and then allow him to leave again. In careful Greek, he began a hymn to the proto-god. He’d altered the words, but he sang the melody he’d learned from Dennis—the same one Orpheus himself first played upon his lyre as he walked through the Underworld, seeking passage back to life.
Upon lion-headed Protogonos, I call:
You fly through the world on waving pinions,
All-spreading splendor, pure and holy light,
Dispelling darkness from our darkened eyes.
For this I call you Aion, Unbounded Time.
Shine your joyful light upon my holy sacrifice.
With Scooter’s desperate protests loud in his ears, Theo slid the needle into his vein and pressed the plunger.
Nothing happened at first, only a sharp ache in his arm. Then nausea, rushing from gut to throat in a convulsive wave. He heaved out the airplane breakfast, the morning coffee, and what looked like his stomach lining, the yellow liquid dripping through lips suddenly thick and swollen. Dimly, he watched Scooter twist away from Flint’s blade and crawl forward. But Flint slammed the sword’s pommel against the other god’s head, stunning him into submission.
“It’s too late, Scooter,” Theo slurred as the corners of his vision turned black. His heart felt strange in his chest. As if it pumped molasses through his veins, sluggish and dark. He slumped to his side on a feasting platform, pillowing his head on both arms—one swollen and throbbing, the other slick with cold sweat.
His thro
at tightened. His tongue lay like a fat, dead snake against his teeth. The sand viper crawled inside my mouth … he suddenly knew. He willed his heart to panic, to race. It squeezed out a single beat instead.
He waited for it to beat again, suspended in agonized anticipation.
It didn’t.
Chapter 23
LETHE
Like a man in a dream, the tall figure with sandy hair had no knowledge of how he came to be in the vast meadow of waving grass. He knew neither his own name nor that he should remember it.
Naked, he walked forward through the waist-high grass with only one goal in mind—to see what lay beyond it.
Figures passed on all sides of him, their features unclear, their bodies blurred. When he looked down, he saw that he, too, was a bleeding watercolor, a brushstroke away from eternal formlessness.
This did not seem strange.
He walked until a tall cypress tree broke through the featureless plain. White and glowing rather than dark green. At its base, blurred figures bent to drink from a spring gurgling into a small pool.
Throat raw with thirst, he knelt at the pool’s edge. He reached his hand into the cool water. Only then did he notice the glint of gold reflected in the pool’s surface.
Curious, he lifted one blurred hand to his throat. A pendant in the shape of an ivy leaf. The inscription glowed sharp and clear, brighter than the leaf itself, as if penned by a hand of fire. The words scrolled across the small leaf like a Times Square news ticker.
You will find in the halls of Hades a spring on the left,
and standing by it, a glowing white cypress tree;
Do not approach this spring at all.
Find the Lake of Mnemosyne, refreshing water flowing forth.
He looked at the figures around him with new eyes. As soon as they drank, all color drained from their bodies; they became no more than pockets of vaguely man-shaped darkness in the world. Shades.
They moved away from the spring in a great herd, passing farther into the meadow, where one great hole opened in the heavens and another in the earth. Most of the shades walked forward into the earthly portal. Very few ascended through the celestial gate instead. He watched them impassively. Some small part of his brain recognized the portals as exits from this netherworld.
That’s the goal, isn’t it? he wondered. To get out of here?
An indistinct figure, vaguely woman shaped, knelt eagerly beside him and plunged her face into the pool to suck the water. Despite the leaf’s instructions, he wanted to join her. If I drink, he suddenly understood, I can leave through one of the portals.
He cupped his hand in the water and lifted it to his lips. The woman beside him straightened up, now no more than a shadow.
Lethe, he realized. This spring is Lethe, the River of Forgetting. The moment he drank of its waters, he would lose whatever it was that made him … Theodore Schultz.
Yes, that was his name.
If he walked through the lower portal, he would return to life, but as someone—some thing—else. But what is Theodore Schultz, anyway? he wondered, searching his own fading memories. I read old books, he remembered dimly. I have friends who love me. Students who depend on me. I have a home and a dog. A great lumbering, brindled dog with eyes full of grief.
The image sparked something in him, and he fought through the cobwebs in his brain to latch onto the memory, but all in vain. He tried to reach further back. To remember his childhood, his parents, but it was all too hazy. It’s as if I’m a different person, trying to remember a different life.
A woman’s voice echoed in his mind, bright and ringing while all other sounds were muted. My memories of godhood are like images seen through a forest pool.
Who’d said that?
With that single question, Theo remembered his purpose.
“Selene.” He spoke her name aloud; like a spell, the fog lifted from his mind.
His memories rushed back, as sharp and clear as the leaf’s gold words: Selene alive in his arms, Selene falling through the night like an arrow piercing the clouds. Selene kneeling on a bloody floor, the answer to his prayers. Her stunned face, as the dream faded to nightmare. Her charred husk smoldering before him. The mithraeum. The syringe.
His anger returned—anger at Saturn. Anger at her.
He stood up abruptly and shook Lethe’s water from his fingers as if it burned. While the shades flocked toward the portals, their memories forgotten, Theo headed back the way he’d come at a run, shouting Selene’s name, half pleading, half enraged.
He walked against the tide of the faded dead. Back into the waist-high grass. He felt like a sailor in an unending sea, searching the waves for sign of his drowned love.
He had no idea how long he wandered the plain. Hours, days. Years, perhaps. No sun crossed the blank gray sky, no moon either. Time had no meaning.
He thought of Scooter and Flint in the mithraeum. Had the syndexioi found them and confiscated the second syringe? Or maybe, Theo thought, they’ve already injected me with the antidote—and it didn’t work. He made a conscious decision not to panic. I’ll be stuck here for eternity with Selene. That’s not such a bad idea—it will take that long for me to find a way to forgive her.
Thirst tore at him like a lion. He could barely move his cracked lips. Yet drinking from the River of Forgetting would mean giving up on Selene. And somehow, despite everything she’d done to him, he couldn’t do that. Not yet.
Finally, he returned to where he’d first emerged. There, the grass dissolved into a great wall of darkness, infinitely tall and infinitely wide. The surface eddied, black upon black, like a whirlpool of ink.
The River Styx, Theo realized. The border of the Underworld upon whose waters the gods swore their most solemn oaths. Vast and impenetrable, rushing in every direction at once—across the ground, toward the sky, beyond the horizon.
A hand emerged from the swirling black, then a foot. A figure stepped through, quickly resolving itself into the hazy outline of a man. He didn’t look confused or lost. He simply strode slowly forward without noticing Theo standing nearby and joined the herd of other ghosts headed in the same direction.
They’re all drawn straight to Lethe, he realized. Just as I was. Selene will go there, too. Panic quickened his pulse. She won’t know not to drink. She’ll return to the world another woman. Forgetting she was ever Artemis. Forgetting that I ever loved her.
He raced back toward the spring, fear driving him faster, faster. I can’t be too late, he begged silently. Not again. He’d never believed in destiny—but if Artemis was real, perhaps the Fates were, too. There has to be a reason I went into the necropolis just before Selene was killed. It can’t have been for nothing. The universe would not be so cruel.
He reached the white cypress and ran from one blurred ghost to the next, grabbing them by formless shoulders, looking for the woman he’d loved. She can’t have drunk from the spring, he decided. She’d know, somehow, that I was coming for her. She would wait. But his faith in Selene had already crumbled in the Phrygianum.
He searched a hundred bland faces—but none were the one he sought.
He felt like a man pushed from a cliff, clutching at air he knew to be empty.
Finally, for the first time since he’d come to this place, Theo sank to the ground in despair. The grass closed above his head, transforming his world into a colorless prison, just as it had been for the last six lonely months. Had his sacrifice been the gesture of a man desperate for meaning in a world that had none?
His adrenaline finally drained away. The obsessive need to find Selene settled into weary recognition that his epic quest had been no more than a fool’s errand. Because even now, when he’d come so far, she didn’t want to be saved. She’d drunk from Lethe’s waters and moved on, happy to forget.
For a long time, he sat with his head in his hands and simply mourned.
Finally the spring’s gurgle penetrated his fog of despair. It seemed to be whispering to him.
You can forget, too.
He stared at the water, obeying the desperate thirst urging him to rise. To kneel before the pool. To reach a hand into the shining deep. To finally forget his sorrow.
Chapter 24
THE FACE OF DEATH
The slender, black-haired woman emerged from darkness into a vast meadow. She stood naked, staring at the blurred outline of her own body, slowly coming to understand that all the nebulous figures streaming by were dead—and so was she.
Around her, the ghosts passed by in an inexorable tide, dragging at her like a lodestone. Some small part of her begged not to go with them. You’ve never followed the herd before—don’t start now. But the urge to move was a physical ache. She felt like a droplet in a stream, bereft of will, unable to withstand the unceasing flow around her. She lifted a foot—and a whisper of melody froze her in place.
Like a flower turning its petals to the sun, she pivoted toward the sound. She couldn’t hear the words, only the gentle rhythm pulsing in her blood, as if the song existed within her more than without.
She took a single step toward the melody, and the sound grew louder, the wisp of tune humming in her bones. She still didn’t know her own name—but she knew the song.
Another step. Another.
She passed through the waving grass, onto parched ground. She could hear the words now.
Hear me, O queen,
Zeus’s daughter of many names,
Torch-bearing goddess, bane of monsters fell,
Huntress, Giver of Good Counsel,
Come, dear Goddess. Be my savior.
Over and over the hymn played, urging her onward.
Torch-bearing goddess.
Huntress.
Counselor.
Savior.
Hear me, O queen.
“I do,” she answered. “I hear you.”
She could see each name, each title, spiraling upward into the featureless sky. She grabbed hold of that rope of linked names and followed it back to herself.
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