Olympus Bound

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  She gripped him harder as the song grew louder and deeper, thrumming through every bone, turning her skeleton to a sounding board, her limbs to lyre strings, her heart to a tuning peg.

  Above her, the sun grew brighter and larger. The Greeks shielded their eyes and bowed their heads in fearful awe, but Artemis and Apollo turned their faces to the light.

  The world flashed into blinding, white brilliance.

  Yet Apollo remained before her, his golden face the only color in a blank world. He looked at her with infinite regret and pressed her to his breast. They had never needed words, these two. She saw the truth in his gaze.

  “No …” she whispered. “You’re not coming …”

  “Even your love cannot pull me back after so long away.”

  “But—”

  “At least this time we get to say good-bye. This time, when you’re ready, I’ll be waiting right here, in Delphi. For you.”

  She could do nothing but nod. She felt the relentless pull of another universe. At any moment, she’d be ripped away.

  Apollo backed away slowly, his hand still trapped in hers. “But don’t come too quickly. Take what time you need. And Moonshine—when death comes for those you love, remember my prophecy.”

  Her hand slipped from his grip. Already, he was fading from view. He whispered one last request:

  “Live your life in song. Promise me.”

  Selene placed her hands over her own breast in a silent vow. Her heart pounded in time to the rhythm of Apollo’s hymn.

  She was reborn in the aisle of a mithraeum, staring upward into Flint’s tear-streaked face.

  Chapter 28

  ARROW-SHOWERING

  Selene felt her limp body yanked into Flint’s strong arms.

  She remained hollow, unreal, unsure of who or what she had become.

  The world spun. Her limbs felt heavy and numb, while her heart knocked against her rib cage like a desperate fist. She lay naked, although a few scraps of charred fabric fell away from her as she moved. For once in her life, she didn’t care who saw her bare flesh.

  “What happened?” she managed.

  “A minute after Theo came back, your body just … changed, like a snake shedding its skin. And then you were here.” Flint clutched her to his broad chest, his arms like iron bands.

  Another voice added, “There are more worlds than we know of.”

  She turned to see Scooter sitting cross-legged, his face more grave and his voice more solemn than she’d ever heard it. “And the portals between those worlds are not yet closed.”

  Theo sat nearby, shirtless, his chest streaked with vomit. He stared at her gravely. Only he understood what had just happened. “Apollo?” he asked.

  She shook her head, blinking back tears. “It’d been too long. He … couldn’t come back.”

  “I’m sorry,” Theo said with a tenderness Selene knew she didn’t deserve.

  There was so much more she needed to say to him, but now that he stood waiting, listening, she couldn’t find the words.

  “Here.” Flint shrugged out of his T-shirt and handed it to Selene. She tried to put it on, but her hands wouldn’t obey her commands. He gently lowered it over her head; it reached to mid-thigh. Even as Flint maneuvered her into the shirt, his hands didn’t leave her body for more than a breath at a time. He seemed unable to stop touching her, staring at her.

  “We have to find Father and get out of here,” she said, extracting herself gently from his grip. “Before they kill him.”

  The mithraeum’s door suddenly swung open, freezing her in place.

  Saturn strode through, accompanied by two syndexioi dressed as Swiss Guards. Despite Flint’s voluminous shirt, Selene felt naked without her bow. From the corner of her eye, she saw Theo lift a familiar dark helm, grab Scooter’s arm, and then pop out of existence before the guards noticed them standing at the back of the room.

  Saturn regarded Selene, slack-jawed. For once, the Wily One looked completely astonished by someone else’s ruse. “How?”

  She didn’t bother responding. Thinking they’d come for Flint, the guards carried only tall halberds. More important, Saturn had left his sickle behind. A jolt of adrenaline cleared some of the fog from Selene’s mind and the heaviness from her arms. She scrambled to her feet, ready to claw out the guards’ eyes with her bare hands if they came at her.

  Luckily, she didn’t have to.

  Saturn’s head flew back, an invisible hand grabbing him by the hair. His eyes widened as a thin line of blood crawled across his throat. The guards started toward their Pater just as Scooter materialized before them, pressing the barrels of two semiautomatic pistols against their foreheads.

  “Drop your weapons!” he shouted at the guards, “or my invisible friend slices off your Pater’s head with his divine sword. And trust me, no one will bother to get Grandpa back from the Underworld.”

  The guards dropped their halberds. Selene stumbled forward and snatched up one, Flint the other.

  A pair of open handcuffs lay nearby on the ground. Fighting off a wave of dizziness, she bent to retrieve them. Then, feigning a calmness she didn’t feel, she fastened them around her grandfather’s wrists. From the pocket of his white robe, she pulled out the key to the schoolroom. Not deigning to meet his eye, she looked over his shoulder instead, where she knew Theo stood with his invisible sword at Saturn’s throat.

  “I’ll get my father. Then we can leave.” To Scooter, she said. “Get rid of this old man before I come back. I never want to see him alive again.”

  Despite her wobbliness, she willed her body to move in the semblance of an assured stride. As she entered the hallway, she held the halberd like a queen’s scepter, finding confidence in the feel of the shaft in her hand. No doubt other syndexioi lurked in the mithraeum’s depths, but she had a weapon now. Saturn would die. Her father would be free.

  Theo’s furious, but we’re both alive, she reasoned. I’ll have a chance to make amends.

  She counted the doors until she reached the schoolroom. The key—an old L-shaped iron rod like those Aion held—opened the heavy door. Zeus stood just inside, as if waiting for her. Something like pride beamed from his overlarge eyes.

  She took his arm, fragile as a chicken bone beneath her fingers, and led him back to the sanctuary. He moved with a shuffling step, and she matched her pace to his. “I’m going to get you out of here. Get you some clothes, something to eat. You’ll never have to go back to that cave.”

  Zeus said nothing, but a small, eager smile crossed his lips.

  She opened the sanctuary door to a scene of chaos. Saturn crouched in a fighter’s stance—the broken and twisted handcuffs dangling from his wrists a clear sign that mortal restraints could no longer hold him. Though his grandsons had backed him into the corner of the room, he remained calm—even smug.

  Flint now held one of the pistols; Scooter had the other, along with the divine sword. But the stepbrothers aimed their weapons at each other.

  Selene could barely make out their words for the shouting. The two Swiss Guards stood sandwiched against the wall, a single halberd pinning them both like mounted butterflies, its length sheering through one man’s shoulder and into the other’s. Despite their pained groans, no one paid them any heed.

  Theo, who’d removed Hades’ helm, looked from one squabbling god to the other with an expression that veered between rage and disgust.

  Beneath the clamor, Selene’s keen ears caught the thread of whispered words unspooling from Saturn’s lips.

  “Hephaestus tumbled through the air, thrown off Olympus by wrathful Zeus, and no god reached out to help him. Hermes laughed at his distress—”

  Before the words could suck her into the past, Selene thrust the blade of her halberd at her grandfather’s mouth, ready to silence him forever. Scooter’s warning cry stopped her with the tip an inch from Saturn’s teeth.

  “Not yet!”

  “Why not? Don’t you see what he’s doing?” With her
halberd’s blade leveled at his mouth, Saturn snapped his jaws shut. For the first time since she’d known him, he looked afraid, his eyes darting from one grandchild to the next. “His power as the God of Time is back,” Selene shouted at her brothers. “He’s making you all remember how much you used to hate each other.”

  “I don’t need to be reminded,” Flint growled at Scooter.

  “I’m trying to tell you,” Scooter insisted angrily. “He could be useful!”

  “Useful?” Flint spat. “For what? For trying to murder our family? Twice? Have you forgotten how he swallowed his own children in the beginning of time? And then killed Mars and Hades and Apollo? How he burned Selene alive? Saturn needs to die. Use the sword, Scooter. Now.”

  “No,” Zeus croaked, finally emerging from the doorway. He took two slow steps closer to Saturn. “Even if you use the divine sword, if we kill him here, in the mithraeum, he might come back.”

  At the sight of Zeus, Flint looked only angrier, but Scooter’s face broke into a broad, relieved grin. “Pop’s right,” he offered, sketching his father a quick bow. “The mithraeum’s all about rebirth.”

  “I stole the lion-headed god’s keys, Father,” Selene insisted. “There’s no coming back for any of us anymore.”

  Some of the old tone of command reentered Zeus’s voice. “The worlds are more connected than we know. The Wily One might find a path others forgot.”

  “So you’d keep him alive?” Selene asked, incredulous. “This man who murdered your children? Who grew stronger from their blood?”

  “We keep him alive only for now, daughter.” The gentle, frail father she’d talked to only hours before now spoke with a new ferocity, as if her own victory over death had given him strength as well.

  He said our deaths ripped him apart, she remembered, so perhaps my resurrection has put him back together.

  “Don’t worry,” Zeus went on. “Saturn will get his just reward soon enough. But for now, we need him alive.”

  “If we don’t kill him,” rumbled Flint, “his followers will chase us across the world to get him back.”

  “No they won’t.” Scooter pivoted toward the back wall and fired his pistol. The guards stopped their thrashing, a single bullet driven through both their skulls.

  “Hey!” Theo shouted. “What’d you do that for?”

  “Flint’s right,” Scooter said mildly. “They’ll come after us.”

  “You just killed two defenseless men,” Theo protested. “Why don’t we just tell the other Swiss Guards that their brethren are secret pagans and have them come down and arrest these guys?”

  “Because they burned Selene alive,” Flint said coldly.

  Theo blanched. He looked sick, rather than appeased, but he shut up.

  “What about Saturn?” Selene began. But before she could form her argument for killing him, Scooter turned his pistol on the old man, squeezing six shots into his heart. She felt no shock—only relief.

  Her father, however, hadn’t given up on his plan to keep Saturn alive. He cried out in anger as the Titan fell.

  “Relax, Pop!” Scooter said with a laugh. “Grandpa’s gotten plenty powerful in the last year, and my guns are no divine weapons. What would kill one of us will only knock him unconscious for a while. He’ll wake up good as new. But in the meantime, we won’t have to deal with his time travel bullshit on the way out of the mithraeum.”

  Scooter handed Orion’s sword back to Theo and heaved his grandfather’s limp body over his shoulder. He started into the hall.

  Flint yanked the halberd from the wall; the guards’ corpses slid to the floor. Using the bloody shaft as a crutch, he hobbled after Scooter, a scowl deepening the lines on his face. Selene followed. She wasn’t happy that Saturn would live, but she had more important priorities at the moment. Like getting Theo and her father out of this hellhole before more syndexioi showed up.

  Theo offered his arm to Zeus. He regarded the god’s frail form with far less curiosity than she would’ve expected, as if still numb from his ordeal.

  Theo and I have just come back from the dead, she worried. Flint’s lame, Scooter’s carrying an unconscious body, and my father’s still an old man. There’s no way we’re getting out of here.

  But Scooter seemed impervious to fear, swinging his gun around like an action hero in one of Theo’s movies, and her father sounded surprisingly confident when he said, “Stop here” before a wooden door.

  Scooter kicked it open, revealing a small armory. Among the rows of modern guns stood a locked glass case—easily opened by the God of Thieves—containing several divine weapons. Two of them Selene had never thought she’d see again: her own golden bow, stolen when the guards captured her the day before, and Flint’s necklace.

  Beside the bow lay two finely tooled quivers. One held five gold arrows—not the modern kind that Flint had made her, but slender shafts tipped with leaf-shaped blades and fletched with black feathers from Artemis’s sacred hawk. Inside the other quiver were three silver arrows of a similar design, the feathers plucked from a rare white crow. Apollo’s divine shafts.

  Yet it was Zeus who reached into the case first and withdrew a narrow, two-foot-long bundle of twisted bronze, copper, silver, and gold. His thunderbolt. Forged by the monstrous one-eyed Cyclopes in another age. Saturn must have retrieved it from the site of the battle on Liberty’s torch.

  In the faded Sky God’s hands, the bolt remained plain metal: Zeus was far too faded now to wield its magic. But Selene had seen it imbued with its true power—a brilliant streak of light, capable of incinerating man and god alike. She still bore its scar upon her chest.

  She gathered the necklace and her weapons, wondering at the arrows. Flint peered at them curiously. “I made those in my forge at Lemnos before the Diaspora. I never had a chance to give them to you. I’d thought them lost.”

  “More like stolen by Grandpa,” Scooter said, tapping Saturn’s skull with the butt of his gun as it dangled over his shoulder. “Guess we know where I inherited my light fingers.”

  Selene collected her twin’s silver arrows next. Flint grabbed Poseidon’s whalebone trident to replace his bloody halberd. True to form, Scooter slid several things into his bag before she even noticed what they were. But even the God of Thieves didn’t dare touch the final item: a folded goatskin cloak edged with a hundred feathery gold tassels. From the center of the cloak stared a woman’s face. Her mouth contorted in a scream, and dead serpents hung from her head like limp hair. The image was no appliqué or embroidery, Selene knew, but rather the flesh of the Gorgon, Medusa, skinned alive and sewn upon the cloak by a goddess equally skilled with both spear and needle.

  “Is that …” Theo began, sounding thunderstruck.

  Scooter whistled. “Athena’s aegis. Grandpa is good.”

  No god moved to pick it up. Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, had never allowed anyone else to touch her famous garment, which served as both cloak and shield, without permission.

  Finally Zeus reached for it. His arms sagged beneath its weight, but he managed to drape it across one shoulder. He didn’t disappear or grow taller or burst into flames. Whatever supernatural properties the aegis might still possess would never work for a god as diminished as he; for the most part, only a Makarites like Theo could elicit such power from a divine item. Yet beneath the golden tassels, the King of the Gods’ skinny bare legs no longer looked quite so pitiful.

  As Scooter led the way back out of the armory, Selene ran her fingers over the divine arrows’ fletching. This is what I wanted, she knew. To be an army again. Reunited with my family to bring justice to our enemies. Yet something felt incomplete and out of place. Not just Apollo, whose absence still felt like a gaping wound, but Theo, whose angry stare burned against her back.

  Footsteps pounded toward them from around the corner, and Selene had no more time to worry. With fingers devoid of their usual deftness, she fumbled for an arrow—one of Apollo’s silver crow-fletched shafts—and nocked it t
o her bowstring. Three syndexioi stormed forward, guns drawn.

  Before Selene could shoot, Scooter had brought down two of them with his pistol. Selene sent her arrow into the third man’s stomach.

  Black boils swelled upon the guard’s neck. His face grew white, his lips blue, and he cried out hoarsely as he clutched at his throat. Red veins burst in his eyeballs, pus leaked from the boils. Only then did he collapse.

  Selene whispered her twin’s most fearsome epithet. “Plague-Bringer.” The thunderbolt might not work for her father, but clearly she could still wield Apollo’s arrows—even summon traits unseen since before the Diaspora.

  She looked down at her own black-fletched shafts, wondering what power they might still hold.

  She found out when a door opened behind them; the armored Miles appeared, holding Mars’s golden spear. Scooter’s first bullet bounced off the solider’s breastplate; the second flew just past his ear and shattered the brick wall beyond. Selene raised her bow, willed her hands to steady, and sent a black-fletched arrow slicing down the hallway.

  The Miles spun to the side, bringing his spear in front of his face like a shield. The arrow sailed harmlessly past him; she reached for a second one, but before she could aim, her first shaft turned in midair like a heat-seeking missile, reversed course, rose higher—and struck the Miles in the soft flesh of his neck.

  No one spoke as the Miles skidded down the wall, blood gurgling from his lips. Selene’s gut clenched as she stared at the remaining arrows in her quiver. No one should have this much power anymore.

  Scooter ripped Mars’s spear from the dead man’s grip, grinning fiercely. He passed the weapon to Flint. “Your brother would’ve wanted you to have it.” Next he pulled the black-fletched arrow from the other man’s neck and tossed it to his sister. Selene caught it more out of instinct than desire.

  The lights in the hallway began to flash. A belated alarm wailed. A door slammed open, followed by several others along the length of the corridor. A dozen men streamed forth, some in their Swiss Guard uniforms, others in the costumes of their Mithraic rank. The Heliodromus bore his cat-o’-nine-tails aloft. The others carried guns.