As he neared the river, he began to look on the faces of the spirits, lined up and waiting to drink. Their faces, echoes of the men and women they had once been, were relaxed and complacent as they blindly walked towards the water. Hades' eyes searched for that handsome bearded face, for those crinkled smiling eyes. He walked swiftly as he neared the front of the line, the blunt end of his bident biting the soil as he used it to pull himself along, faster and faster. There was no sign of him. Had he gotten this far? Hades' eyes fell on Jason Livingstone just as his spirit knelt at the water. He ran forward. Hades let his hulking form shimmer away and reached out as Peter to put his hand on the ghost's shoulder. Jason turned around, water dripping from his lips. His gaze was unrecognizing. It was too late.
“Did I fall asleep?” Jason asked.
Peter closed his eyes and nodded. “Only for a little while.”
Peter would do as he was told. He would put Jason's soul in a new body and bring him back. It wouldn't matter. The soul was the same, but Jason was gone. All the waters in the Mnemosyne could not bring back the mortal they loved.
“Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth.”
- Archimedes
Epilogue.
The surface of the long wooden table in the hotel penthouse was made of bamboo, the brushed nickel legs bolted on in a minimalist design. Seven white, fabric-covered chairs were placed on either side of the long table and one at each end. They were lined up along a seamless glass window that looked out onto the furnished balcony. The sun was setting. The guests would be arriving soon.
The first to arrive was their host, a lean, silver-haired news anchor named Macon Keen. He had recently left his job anchoring a nightly news program to replace a retiring host on a morning news program. He swiped his key card on the door of the penthouse and stepped inside, surveying the room to make sure that everything was ready. A row of carts was parked near the door and a server was stirring the contents of a chafing dish. Macon Keen flashed his charming white smile at the young man and handed him a hundred dollar bill. “Thank you,” he said. “That will be all. Please ask the rest of the staff to stay off of this floor for the evening. My guests are coming to a dinner among friends. They don't need photos of their arrivals all over Mother Jones.”
The server mumbled a thank-you and left the room. Mr. Keen took a bottle of champagne from a bucket of ice and popped the cork, letting it launch across the room and laughing. He began to pour glasses for all of his friends.
The lock behind him beeped and the door opened. The first guests were here. A massive man with olive skin and blonde hair stepped through the door. Anyone in the lobby would have recognized him as seven-time Superbowl champion and head coach for the San Diego Chargers, Brutus Pierce. His wife, a Victoria's-Secret-model-turned-actress, Portia Okeanos, followed. When Portia passed through the door, she threw her arms around Macon. “It's so good to see you, what has it been, a year?”
“A year,” Macon agreed, closing the door behind them. “Champagne?”
Brutus Pierce waved away a glass, but Portia took two.
“Starting the party with a bang, I see,” Macon commented.
“Celebrating. We've decided to take new identities.”
“Oh yeah?” Macon asked, raising an eyebrow. “Have you informed the techie?”
“Not yet.” Portia said, “Ares wants to compete again, this time perhaps as an MMA fighter? And I just want to be young again.”
“Forty is hardly old,” Macon said. “Considering…”
“I have wrinkles,” she said, puffing her lips out in a sensual pout.
The door clicked open and two more guests stepped in. The first was Albert Smith, famous for founding the software company that created the operating system, Platform. All of the big game consoles were using it. He was a short man with thick wooden glasses. When he walked, the whirring of a tiny motor followed him; he wore an exoskeleton apparatus on his bad leg that let him walk with ease—his own invention. He carried a tablet with a box plugged into it, and red lights flashed on the little box. Behind him, Xander Pierce, Brutus and Victoria's son and wiz-kid app programmer, walked in. Xander, his curly blonde hair falling in his face (as a teenager he had eventually learned to control his shifting enough that he didn't need to shave off his natural golden curls), looked over Smith's shoulder at the tablet.
“All clean,” Smith said, setting the tablet on the nearest table. “No bugs on this floor.”
“Has anyone ever tried to record this meeting?” Xander asked.
“Once,” Brutus grunted. “Fox News intern trying to spy on the POTUS.”
“He was just a senator then,” Portia reminded him.
“Thought it was funny that his only childhood friends were famous,” Albert Smith explained.
“And that none of his teachers or classmates could find a single photo of him in their yearbooks.” Portia added. “He was a 'quiet' boy,” she said, holding up her fingers in air quotes.
“Speaking of our fearless leader, he's coming in a different form, right? Shaking secret service?” Xander asked.
“He's on vacation, private resort,” Macon Wiles explained. “And the only secret service on duty right now are ours.”
Albert Smith reached to close the door, but he didn't get the chance. A small group of women walked in: Brigadier General Sofia Knight, the Dean of Academics at West Point; Laurel Woolf, a popular survivalist and nature documentarian; and Dr. Christine Lusia, the Secretary of Agriculture.
“We should move out of the doorway,” Wiles said, gesturing to the table at the far end of the room. “Once you get a plate, you can find a seat. There's sixteen of us coming today. We won't all fit if we only come three feet into the room.”
While Portia was greeting the new guests and Xander was pouring champagne, two men walked in. The first was Marcel Rose. Twenty years ago he started a home-brew of beer in a basement, but now he owned a chain of dinner-movie theaters that served over fifty varieties of beer and wine, all of his own invention. Monsieur Rose was chatting animatedly with Atticus Delphias, the front man of a rock band that had gone solo fifteen years ago and never looked back. He always wore gold leather pants and too many rings, yet every record Delphias made was multi-platinum, and he had taken to spending his fortune on music education for disadvantaged kids.
“Who are we waiting on?” Rose asked. Atticus crossed to hug Ms. Woolf, ignoring the others.
“The POTUS and the FLOTUS,” Wiles said. “The lords of the dead, the traitor, and the newbie.”
“Can we not call her that?” Dr. Lusia asked. “It has been thousands of years.”
“Right, but only twenty since we found out about it,” General Knight said.
“Hey, Zeus told us to let it go,” Smith argued.
The rest came as the first wave of arrivals sat down to eat. There was Megan Hagne, an unknown who lived in cheap motels and tended to show up at notoriously haunted houses, leaving them peaceful when she departed. Then came Ignacia White. She wasn't famous either, except for the news piece one time that profiled her as the foster mother of twelve; an anonymous benefactor paid for everything and Ignacia did not have to work (except to cook and clean for twelve children.) After Ignacia came President Kingston and his wife, Olympia. They came in different forms, but by the time they passed the threshold of the penthouse, they were looking like the President and First Lady.
The next person in the door was Kendra Seiler. She was younger than most of them, a woman in her late twenties. She had made a name for herself as a dolphin trainer at Sea World before becoming an eco-terrorist targeting whaling vessels near Japan. Survivors of a recent boating accident that killed a wealthy oil tycoon (a man on trial for negligence in a massive oil spill on the gulf coast) claimed to have seen Seiler at the site. Of course, they also claimed that the boat was taken down by a giant squid, and everyone knew that was ridiculous.
Lastly came Hades. He didn't don another form. H
e didn't need it because he didn't dwell among the living. He did wear a suit, though, because it was inappropriate and attention-grabbing to walk through the lobby of a five-star hotel in a chiton and fur chlamys.
When Hades sat down at the far end of the table, the gods shifted into their natural forms. It would have meant death to any mortal spying on them through a telescope. At the head of the table, Zeus, his whole form glowing with a light that was deadly to all but the gods, called the council to order. Even seated in his white upholstered chair, he was regal and intimidating. The white cloth draped around his waist was clasped at his shoulder with a golden clip shaped light a bolt of lightning, and his beard was neatly groomed.
“As first order of business, the council would like to welcome Amphitrite to take the place of Poseidon as warden of the seas,” he said, nodding to the goddess who had previously appeared as Kendra Seiler.
“I love the low profile you're keeping,” Hermes said, “What with the Kraken and all.”
Zeus ignored his quip and continued on. “Before we move forward with the agenda, is there any business anyone else would like to bring forth? Something they won't cover in their domain update?”
Aphrodite raised a hand, her elbow staying on the table. “Ares and I would like to take new identities.”
Zeus frowned. “So soon?”
“I want to be young again.”
“I see.” Zeus scratched his beard. “Portia will die first. Make it an accident. Hades will see to letting you out of the underworld. I need a body to bury, you can't just shape-change this one. You'll have to be apart for at least a year. In a year, Brutus can get drunk and pick a fight with someone in a bar. A stranger.”
“Ooh!” Hermes raised his hand. “Can I do it? Can I kill you?”
Ares grunted. “I guess.”
“Eventually we'll all have to take new forms. This will be a good practice run. We can stagger our deaths to avoid drawing suspicion. Xander,” Zeus said, looking to the youngest god. “Can you handle their records?”
“In my sleep,” he said. “Literally.”
“Kid's taking your job,” Dionysus said, slapping Hephaestus on the back.
“I think we should go back to our teen years for each…rebirth. I had problems with people not remembering me as their classmate in the last election. Now, is that all?” Zeus asked.
Silence.
“The next order of business is about the Livingstone children. Haley is getting married.”
“Do you need me to send a gift?” Aphrodite asked.
“I think I should handle that,” Hera said, making a note on the lined yellow pad in front of her. “You can send a bachelorette gift. I think that would be more your style.”
“Keep it subtle. Keep it anonymous,” Zeus said. “We don't want them looking too closely at who paid their college tuition. They must have suspected that Jason didn't save enough for all three to go to Ivy League schools on school nurse salary.”
Dionysus got up from the table and fetched another bottle of champagne from the cart. He came around and topped-off their glasses while Athena took minutes. Each member took their turn updating the rest of the council on the goals and developments in their domain. Hephaestus was working on technology to improve cerebral-linked prosthetics. Zeus was planning to make Athena his Secretary of Education in his next term as President. Hermes thought he had identified a new demigod awakening in Fresno.
When the talk came around to Hades, he stood up from his seat.
“Always dramatic,” Hermes muttered.
“I have had a request from the jails of Tartarus,” Hades said, his black cape flowing around him. “Prometheus requests a parole hearing.”
The group was silent, then whispers rose up and filled the room like a hive of angry bees.
“He tried to kill us!” Artemis said. “I was stabbed.”
“He put us in that terrifying jar,” Persephone said. “With those creepy statues.”
“How about the whole usurpation before that?” Hermes reminded them. “I mean, we wouldn't have had to fight Kronos if he didn't pull all that.”
“You forgave me,” Hestia said, and the room fell quiet again. Her words, when she chose to speak, had a way of cutting through the room.
“I mean…you opened a door thousands of years ago,” Dionysus said. “He locked us in Tartarus, and then he attacked us again not even twenty-five years ago. We were defenseless kids.”
“Speak for yourself,” Ares said.
“Alright,” Hermes corrected, “We were defenseless kids and you were The Incredible Hulk. Dionysus is right. Twenty-five years is nothing to him.”
“He says that Zeus wasn't worthy of his fealty then,” Hades added, “but he is now.”
Zeus sipped his champagne and sat back in his chair, thinking about what everyone was saying. “Worthy now? What happens if I again become unworthy of the great Prometheus' approval?”
“We have changed,” Demeter said.
“Tell him I'll consider it,” Zeus said.
Hades hesitated, “So delaying the decision, that's the decision?”
Zeus slammed his fist on the table. “He was my friend and he betrayed me. Did I deserve it? Maybe, but it doesn't change that he threw me in Tartarus with prisoners who hated me. It doesn't change that he tried to lock us, a bunch of kids who had no idea what we were, in a vase for the rest of eternity. It doesn't change that his actions almost lead to Kronos taking over the entire planet and sucking away human free will. I will think about it, and he should be glad I've committed to even that.”
The room was silent again.
“So…” Hermes started, tapping his fingers on the table. “Dessert? Did we order dessert?”
A thirty minute taxi drive from the hotel brought Demeter, donning a human-safe form that was not Madam Secretary, to a tiny shop in downtown New Orleans. When the store opened, Demeter walked past the shelves of books and statues of gods from different pantheons and pretended to observe some jewelry. When the shopkeeper turned her back to answer a question from a patron who had just entered the store, Demeter slipped into the back room.
The walls were built with bricks and had been painted to stop mold from growing between the mortar. A hole that was only visible to the gods was carved into the wall on the far end of the room. No matter who built what on this ground, the hole would always appear to those worthy of entering. Demeter crossed through it and into a dark and winding tunnel that lead to the land of the dead.
She traveled for a day to get into The Underworld, and then along the banks of the Styx, the Phlegethon, and around the edge of the pit of Tartarus to the tunnel that lead back out. For another night she journeyed up the dark, winding path. Moisture and mildew clung to the walls, making them slick. Rats scurried past as she walked, but she did not mind them. There were dozens of entrances to the realm of Hades from the surface of the Earth. This one came out in Namibia, one half mile from a place where a group of British philanthropists had built a temporary hospital.
As she walked out under the blazing sun, Demeter changed. Many of the women moving around the village wore their hair in long braids coated in thick, red clay. Ndali, a form of Demeter with dark skin and a round, smiling face, wore her hair cropped very short with a scarf tied around her head. She assisted in the hospital, translating for the patients that only knew their indigenous languages and the doctors who only spoke English. Ndali was known as a wanderer, a strange woman who sometimes lived in a clay hut with a straw roof, but more often was nowhere to be seen. When she was around, she helped with the harvest and acted as a bridge between the native people and the missionaries, but little was known about her origin.
She was expecting him tonight, the young doctor who worshipped her not just as a lover, but as something more. He was twenty-three, young for a licensed physician, but his life had been serendipitous like that. He had always known what he wanted to be and through homeschooling he had earned his diploma and entered medica
l school at sixteen. He had found his way to Africa six months ago, wanting to earn valuable experience. He was a handsome young man with eyes that crinkled when he smiled. He came when he told her to meet, under the light of the full moon, and stayed the night. He did not know where she came from or where she went, but he did not ask for fear that she would go away and never return.
The council had decided that they must leave him in peace. They had ruined his previous life, taken him away from his children. Yet she could not let this mortal go. He was different. He was not Jason in so many ways, but in many other ways he was. As she lay next to him in the night, sweat beaded on her skin, listening to the mosquito buzzing outside the gauze that hung around her bed, she thought that some day she would tell him. Some day he deserved to know that he was loved by the gods. Or perhaps it was easier to not know. She would decide. Some day. Not tonight.
Afterwards
I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has read Olympia Heights from the beginning. I started writing this series back in the spring of 2007. Seven years later, I have reached the end of the novels’ arch, but I am not done telling this story. A few months ago, I made a proposition to my brother, Sam Albro: let’s work on an Olympia Heights comic together. He accepted, and since that day we’ve been putting our heads together on story ideas and designs.
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