Olympus Bound

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  “Protect Father!” Selene shouted.

  Instantly obeying, Flint ripped Zeus from Theo’s grip and slammed his broad shoulder into a nearby door, bursting through the wood and dragging the old man to safety.

  Theo donned his helmet and winked out of sight. Scooter let Saturn’s body slip to the ground so he could shoot more freely. His movements were a dance: The Many-Turning One spun in the air, leaping and dodging as the bullets flew thick around him.

  Selene shot without bothering to aim. She had never felt weaker, yet the arrows continued to soar with supernatural accuracy. One after the other, the syndexioi fell before the Huntress’s grievous shafts.

  With her focus on the men with guns, she didn’t notice the Heliodromus until he was hard upon her, his thick whip whistling through the air toward her face. Still shaky from her time in the netherworld, she dodged out of the way no faster than a mortal; she couldn’t prevent the barbed tips from striking her cheek and drawing blood.

  She took a step backward and loosed an arrow—but the Heliodromus flew to the side like a marionette yanked offstage.

  She heard Theo’s grunt of effort just before his helm rolled off and he materialized on the ground with the Heliodromus captive beneath him. Selene’s black-fletched arrow jerked, pivoted ninety degrees, and hurtled toward the Heliodromus’s heart. Nothing could stop its flight.

  Not even Theo.

  Chapter 29

  THE UNSEEN

  Holy FUCK, Theo cursed in silent agony as he tried to yank himself free of the arrow pinning his arm to the dead Heliodromus. The pain of his movement nearly blinded him; he gave up on stoicism and shouted aloud. His cry reverberated in the sudden silence. The gunshots had stopped, the syndexioi all fallen. Even the blaring alarm had ceased. There was no one left to summon.

  Selene dropped to her knees beside him and reached for the arrow’s feathers. Black feathers, he saw now. One of her nightmarish, magical, leaf-bladed arrows.

  “No, don’t—” he began, envisioning her dragging the arrowhead back through his arm. But she merely steadied the shaft with one hand and pulled the dead Heliodromus away with the other. The arrow stayed in Theo’s arm, but at least he was free of the corpse.

  “I didn’t mean to …” she started, her cheeks flushed.

  “You’ve done worse,” he said through gritted teeth. In fact, accidentally shooting him was about the least horrible thing she’d done to him all day.

  She flinched but didn’t bother defending herself. She reached for the bloodstained arrowhead protruding from the bottom of his arm and tried to snap it off, but even she couldn’t break solid metal.

  Scooter huffed in dismay. “Those arrows are a little too good.”

  “Flint!” Selene called, her voice rising in desperation. “Can you break this?”

  The Smith emerged, somehow managing to support Zeus with his shoulder while using Mars’s spear and Poseidon’s trident as crutches.

  “I don’t have my hammer. I left it back in our apartment.”

  It was Scooter who strode forward, holding one of Apollo’s gruesome silver plague arrows.

  “Hey!” Theo backed away.

  “Hold still,” Scooter demanded. He held the gold shaft in one hand and sliced the head away with the silver blade.

  Selene drew the shaft up and out by the fletching so fast that Theo barely had time to shout with pain. She ripped the hem from her already dangerously short T-shirt and bound his arm with expert speed. Theo could only shake his head at her obvious concern. “Now you’re worried about me.”

  Scooter had the nerve to laugh. “Let’s just be glad that wasn’t one of Apollo’s plague arrows. You’d be bleeding from more than your arm.”

  Selene rounded on him, but her father put out a hand to stop her.

  “Please,” he begged weakly. Between the half-shattered glasses and his spindly bare legs, Zeus looked like an escapee from an especially barbaric nursing home. Nothing like what Theo had expected from the King of the Gods. Then again, he was getting used to disillusionment.

  “There’s no time to fight each other,” Zeus warned. “With all the noise, the other Swiss Guards might finally find this place. We have to hurry.”

  “The Makarites will use the helmet to take us up,” Flint said. “We’ll go with him one or two at a time, so we remain invisible.”

  “Good idea.” Scooter holstered his pistols. Neither he nor his stepbrother, Theo noticed, bothered to ask if the Makarites wanted to help. As usual.

  Scooter hefted Saturn’s limp form back onto his shoulder. “We should use the necropolis exit. It’ll still be empty this time of night.”

  I should just leave, Theo thought. Let them figure out their own escape. But for all the other Athanatoi’s treachery, Zeus had done nothing wrong. After everything the old man had been through, he deserved help.

  And so, despite his bleeding arm, throbbing wrist, and vomit-covered bare chest, Theo made two trips back through the tunnel, into the necropolis, then out into Saint Peter’s Square with a pair of gods in tow. First Scooter, carrying Saturn’s limp body, then Flint and Zeus. Finally, only Selene remained.

  She slipped her hand into the crook of Theo’s good elbow. She wore a dead syndexios’s pants and boots and held out a stolen shirt. “I don’t know what happened to your other one.”

  He started to answer, then thought better of it. How could he explain that he’d wrapped it around his hands so he could pull her still-smoldering body from the pyre? He hadn’t had the stomach to put the ash-smeared shirt back on. He accepted the new shirt from her without a word.

  As soon as he donned the helm, he couldn’t see her anymore. For that, he was grateful. If he had to look at her for another minute, he might break apart. When her charred body had shed its black crust and Selene had emerged, whole and alive, on the mithraeum floor, Theo had never felt so relieved. Or so angry. The two emotions warred within him so fiercely that he felt as if he’d injected himself again: The venom’s cold chill pumped through his veins, surging ever closer to his heart, threatening to stop its beating. This time for good.

  As they walked awkwardly through the necropolis, the cypress smell of her surrounded him. Her unseen hand tightened on his flesh; it was all too familiar, this sensation of being dragged down by her invisible presence. He’d felt that way for half a year.

  They emerged into Saint Peter’s Square, where the other Athanatoi stood waiting for them in the shadows of the colonnade, and he felt Selene stop. Her disembodied voice whispered so close to his ear it sounded like his conscience.

  “Theo …”

  He’d never heard her plead like that. He stopped walking and waited for her to go on. Yet she said nothing more. As usual, she wanted him to do the talking. He had no intention of fulfilling that request.

  “Let’s go,” he said gruffly, pulling her toward the others.

  Only once they were hidden by the columns did he remove the helmet. He caught Selene staring at the gold and silver arrows in her quiver, many of them bright with the syndexioi’s blood—one broken shaft stained with his own. Narrow red lines striped her cheek from the Heliodromus’s cat-o’-nine-tails. She looked haggard, dismayed, exhausted.

  Zeus looked even worse, holding his hands out as if to steady himself on a rolling ship. A second later, his face turned the color of clay. His eyes rolled back in his skull. Scooter grabbed him before he could slam into the ground.

  Selene rushed to her father’s side. “He’s still breathing.”

  A scowl carved a deep trough between her brows. Theo understood—he still remembered every nuance of his lover’s expressions. She wasn’t angry at her father, just at herself for not protecting him better.

  “We need to get him somewhere to recover,” she insisted. He could hear the unspoken entreaty in her voice: And you will come, too, won’t you?

  “I’m glad you’re both safe,” he managed. That much was true. He looked down at the dark helm in his hands. Its cold sur
face pulled the water from the humid air. The black metal wept.

  He wanted to give the helm back to the gods, but to what end? Faded as they were, they couldn’t use it. Selene might be able to command her twin’s terrible arrows, but she couldn’t wield the helm of Hades, the Unseen One, any more than she could her father’s thunderbolt.

  Regretfully, he placed the dark helmet back in his bag beside Orion’s sword. He would keep both for now, but he didn’t intend to ever wield them again. Too many men had already died, victims to the gods’ manipulations. He wanted no part of further killing.

  “Theo—” Scooter called after him as he walked away.

  “Whatever you’re going to ask of me,” he interrupted, not bothering to turn around, “the answer is no.”

  Let the gods fight their own battles. I’m done with heroism.

  Chapter 30

  PANTHEON

  I have a new diagnosis for you …

  Theo imagined some shrink with an Austrian accent, peering excitedly over the rim of his glasses.

  First you exhibited all the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Then manic depression with suicidal ideations. And now… The shrink would nod wisely and stroke the little gray goatee on his chin. Classic masochism.

  Ah, come on, Doc. It’s not that bad …

  The shrink would gesture to their surroundings with a pensive frown.

  Then tell me, Mr. Schultz, why are you sitting in a temple to the Olympians if you just want to forget them all?

  Theo stared up at the sky through the round oculus in the domed ceiling, searching for an answer he already knew: In all his many visits to Rome, he’d always made a pilgrimage here.

  The Pantheon.

  The great Roman temple to all the gods, still intact nearly two thousand years after its construction. Within its enormous, vaulted sanctuary, he’d felt most in touch with the ancient world. For much of his life, that meant he’d felt most fully himself. It had been a place of peace and meditation to him—the closest thing he knew to a sacred space.

  The massive twenty-foot-tall bronze doors remained firmly locked this late at night, but his time with Selene had taught him a thing or two about sneaking in through side entrances.

  Only a few small lights illuminated the interior of the temple. In the dimness, he could easily ignore the crucifixes and oil paintings of saints—reminders of the building’s current function as a Catholic church—and fall under the spell of the original Roman design. The geometric pattern of green, gold, and red porphyry across the floor. The soaring coffered dome of concrete, a masterpiece of Roman engineering. At the very apex, a large circular opening to the sky: the oculus—the eye. In the daytime, as clouds drifted by against the backdrop of pure blue and the occasional bird swooped through like a messenger from the heavens, he’d always thought it a window onto the gods themselves. Now he knew better.

  Theo lay down on the floor directly beneath the opening. The marble cupped him gently, worn concave from centuries of libations poured by the Sky. He stared straight up into the infinite black of space. The stars, he knew, told the stories of Artemis and Zeus—the heroes they blessed, the monsters they created. Yet from inside the temple-turned-church, Theo could see only a smattering of pinpricks, the constellations as broken and hidden as the lives the gods now led.

  Is this what I want? he wondered. To no longer know the gods’ stories? To imagine them as lost figments and fractured tales rather than breathing, feeling flesh?

  When he heard the side door creak open, he knew it was no night watchman. He could smell the sudden breath of pine on the summer air. Her appearance didn’t surprise him. She was the Huntress; she’d always track him down, no matter how far he ran. Perhaps he’d even come to the Pantheon because he wanted to be found. Because he needed to hear the words from her own lips: I had a choice to love you—or to break you. I chose the latter.

  He wondered whether he should sit up. Stand, perhaps, so he could look her in the eye. But what was the point?

  To his surprise, Selene lay down beside him on the floor, her body a careful foot from his.

  She didn’t speak at first, and he didn’t turn to look at her.

  “Saturn is still unconscious, but we’ve got him under lock and key,” she said at last. “And my father’s resting back in our apartment.”

  She said “our” apartment, Theo noted. Hers and Flint’s.

  “I have my father back in my life. Alive and safe. That’s because of you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he retorted. “I didn’t go there for him.” He left the rest unsaid.

  They fell back into a tense silence that he steadfastly refused to break. He could hear her breathing, its slight hitch the only sign of her distress.

  “I’m not going to apologize,” she said finally.

  Of course not.

  “I was trying to protect you,” she continued. “If I’d held on to you that night above the harbor, we would’ve both died. I let go to save you. I was ready to die for that.”

  The thought of her in his arms, making that fateful decision, instantly grabbed at his heart. He knew something about dying to save the one you love. He took a deep breath before saying quietly, “I know.”

  “Then why are you so angry?” she asked. Her voice had sunk to a defensive murmur. He didn’t believe for a second that she didn’t know the answer to that question, but he couldn’t help himself from laying it all out for her anyway.

  “Because when the Fates smiled on us both and spared your life, when you washed up on the shores of New Jersey or Staten Island or wherever it was, you could’ve come to me and saved me again.”

  “You were saved.” From the corner of his eye, he watched Selene prop herself on an elbow to stare at him. “I made sure of that. Scooter kept tabs on you for me. I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you.”

  At that, Theo sat up. She did the same, looking at him with an expression more indignant than apologetic.

  “Except I died, Selene! And I don’t even mean today, for God’s sake, although that too. I mean when I woke up in a hospital bed after crash-landing in Lower Manhattan and I remembered I’d never see you again and I couldn’t save you—I died. I couldn’t feel anything except pain. For months. I didn’t care about my friends, my students, nothing.”

  “That’s not true, the arrow—” She broke off, looking suddenly ill.

  “What arrow?”

  “Nothing.”

  He stared at her until she relented. He’d learned that technique from her.

  “I asked Philippe to make sure you didn’t suffer too much, that’s all,” she muttered.

  “You told the God of Love to shoot me with one of his damn darts?”

  “It worked!” she insisted. “I watched you look at Ruth and you seemed better. I thought you’d learn to love her and forget about me.”

  “You watched.” He wanted to scream, but the words came out as cold and hard as anything Selene had ever said. “You had to have your way with my emotions even then.”

  “I was trying—”

  “You thought I’d love Ruth.” He couldn’t let her speak. He needed to release his own words first. “I wish. She’s everything I thought I ever wanted in a partner. Kind. Brilliant. Generous. Thoughtful. Loyal.” He spoke the words like accusations, and he knew that to Selene, they would be. “But if you thought a god’s powers would make me forget about you, then you were wrong. I didn’t find any pleasure in life until I decided I could bring you back. That’s what’s kept me going these last months. Not Ruth. You.”

  “Theo,” she began, her face suddenly full of pleading. He knew she understood what she’d done, but he wanted to press home the point. To wound her with an arrow as unerring and terrible as her own.

  “I learned my lesson from Orpheus and Eurydice: True love requires trust. By coming back to life, I think you finally accomplished what you never could’ve by dying. If you could sit there and watch me grieve, knowing it was in your
power to save me, and decide to walk away, then you no longer deserve my love.” He got to his feet, feeling incredibly weary. “I don’t need a love dart this time to help me get over you, Selene. You’re doing a damn fine job all on your own.”

  Before he turned away, he caught a glimpse of her stricken face. For all his brave words, he still felt the pull of her grief. But this time, he obeyed the pull of his own instead.

  Chapter 31

  LEADER OF THE FATES

  An old man stood in the shadows of one of the Pantheon’s wall niches, a pitiful simulacrum of the statues that once paid him homage.

  Theo wanted to just keep walking. Leave the temple and all its gods behind. Yet something about Zeus’s faded majesty compelled him to pause. He felt, somehow, that he owed at least that much to his former self, the one who’d dreamed of coming face-to-face with the deities he’d read about his entire life. The eager classicist who gave a shit what the King of the Gods might do or say.

  Zeus walked slowly forward. In a Flint-sized trench coat, he looked even smaller than he had wrapped in his blanket from the mithraeum. He still smelled faintly of urine, and his half-shattered glasses made him seem cyclopean, blinking at the world through one enormous, visible eye.

  He held out a hand. His fingers, despite the swollen knuckles, remained half again as long as a normal man’s—the sort of hand that once needed a lightning bolt to look complete. Theo took it warily.

  Selene got to her feet. “Father, what are you doing out of bed? You should be resting.”

  “I asked the Messenger to bring me here,” he replied. “I needed to speak to Theodore.” Still holding Theo’s hand, he walked slowly to the center of the room and cricked his skinny neck awkwardly to look up through the oculus. He stood that way for a long time before he finally spoke. “You see stars up there. I see my half-mortal children—the heroes who once walked the earth.” He squinted nearsightedly at Theo. “You are not my child. Yet you are as much a Makarites as Hercules or Perseus.”