On the walk back to the hotel, Theo felt like a shard of iron caught between two magnets, trembling with the pull of the opposing forces that nearly shredded him apart. He wanted to be pounding down the door of the police station or trolling the streets looking for the “cops” who’d stolen Selene. But Freeman had assured him that the police were doing everything they could. “The previous victims have been men,” she said, clearly trying to sound comforting. “So let’s hope they’re not planning to use Selene for one of their sacrifices. Maybe they just wanted her off their tail.” Theo couldn’t very well tell the cop that gender mattered far less to the cult than divinity. “The most helpful thing you can do,” Freeman went on, “is help us figure out where they’ve taken her.”
To do that, Theo needed to give himself a crash course on Mithraic scholarship. He knew such knowledge could be useful—he’d based his entire life on the idea that problems could be solved with patient research and investigation. Yet for once, he longed to be Selene: to beat the shit out of someone until they just told him the answers.
Flint, he knew, felt the same way. Theo’d found him still waiting for Selene on the plaza. Now he lumbered along, his limp more pronounced than ever. He wouldn’t meet Theo’s eyes.
“You’re mad at me because I told Selene to go with the cops,” Theo said, deciding he might as well have it out with Flint once and for all. The Smith just grunted. “You can’t be more angry about it than I am,” he went on. “So why don’t you stop sulking and help me figure out how to find her?”
Flint’s head shot up. He glowered at Theo. “I should have put a tracking device on her the minute she came to my forge.”
“That’s a bit—”
Flint cut him off. “I should’ve come to her before. I should’ve never let her be alone.”
Theo felt his hackles rise, sure Flint was referring to more than the skating rink. “She wasn’t alone.”
“She was alone for thousands of years.”
“She wanted to be that way. I don’t think you had any say in the matter.”
Flint grunted again.
“Why don’t you just say what you mean?” Theo demanded.
“I knew her when she was full of joy and light,” he said, his voice husky. “I knew her when stags bowed at her approach and her skin glowed brighter than the moon.”
Theo laughed shortly. “Let me get this straight. You blame yourself for her capture, because you should’ve been with her instead of me—because you know her better than I do … maybe even better than she knows herself.” He didn’t bother to disguise his scorn. “And you wonder why Selene just stood there while you mooned at her on the roof of Rock Center? Why she didn’t fall into your arms as you clearly think she should? Maybe it’s because you’re a pompous ass who can’t trust a woman to make up her own damn mind!”
Theo picked up his pace, not feeling a shred of guilt for leaving Flint limping far behind. He had no energy left for pity, nor even for jealousy. Whatever feelings Flint had secretly harbored for his stepsister all these years weren’t Theo’s problem. And if Selene felt anything in return—well, that was something he’d deal with when he rescued her. Until then, all that mattered was that she not turn up draped across some other New York City landmark with her heart cut out.
“So you actually told her to go with the cops?” Dash asked, incredulous, when Theo related the story back at the Four Seasons. “You’re lucky Paul isn’t here. He’d lose what’s left of his mind.”
“I feel bad enough about that already, thanks,” Theo said as he reached for his laptop. “Now can we please concentrate on rescuing her?”
Philippe had immediately moved to his stepfather’s side. “Papa, I’m so sorry.” He seemed far more concerned with Flint’s feelings than with Selene’s imminent murder.
So he knows the Smith is in love with her, Theo realized, unsurprised. That knowledge put Philippe’s Cupid and Psyche story into a whole new light. If he thinks he’s going to scare me off a relationship with an immortal so that his stepfather can have Selene for himself, he’s wrong, he decided. I’m going to find her, with or without their help.
But it seemed he’d have little choice in the matter. Without asking permission, Dash attached a cable from Theo’s laptop to the television screen so they could all see his research, then sat beside him on the couch, peering unnecessarily over his shoulder. “So the brilliant Makarites doesn’t know how to keep Selene safe, but he’s going to crack the cult, is that it?” He spoke lightly, and Theo couldn’t be sure if he was being sarcastic.
“That’s the idea,” Theo muttered, trying to stay focused.
“Goody. Maybe if you figure out how to find this Mithras, Paul will forgive you.”
“Where is he anyway?”
“He said we were nuts for coming back here—thought we’d be too easy to track—but he’s the one who’s gone mental. Kept fading off into hallucinations, as far as I could tell. So he left—going to hole up with his thanatos girlfriend, I bet. I’m sure he’ll be in touch. I, on the other hand, decided that if they’re going to kill me anyway, I might as well meet my death with a Dead Sea detoxifying treatment and a flat screen facing my marble soaking tub.”
“Mm-hm,” Theo said distractedly while he pulled up a photo from the Vatican Museum of a “tauroctony”: the bull-killing scene found in every Mithraic sanctuary.
“There he is.” He gestured to the marble statue of a man standing astride a bull’s back. He had one knee on the animal’s neck and a foot on its back hoof. “Mithras.”
Dash squinted at the photo. “How come I don’t remember him? I know everybody.”
“He was worshiped for about three hundred years or so, right around the height of the Roman Empire,” Theo said, skimming through an online journal article in another window.
Dash humphed. “Well, that explains it. Three hundred years is nothing. He might’ve never taken corporeal form. And look at what he’s wearing—” He pointed to the god’s soft, conical hat. “That deeply unfashionable headgear is a Phrygian cap. No wonder I didn’t know him—he must be Persian.” He sounded defensive.
“Yes and no, actually,” Theo said as he continued reading the article. He felt himself slipping fully into teaching mode. At least this is something I’m good at, he thought. But it was small comfort when he envisioned Selene as the next sacrifice. He wished his talents lay with something a bit more heroic, like knife fighting or telepathy.
“The name ‘Mithras’ comes from an earlier Persian god, Mithra,” he explained, “so the Romans always portrayed him in a Persian costume: baggy pants and a Phrygian cap. But besides the name, he’s a wholly original creation.” By now, Flint and Philippe had gathered around. The slim God of Love sat cross-legged on the sofa, nervously flicking the ash from a cigarette. Flint sat beside him, bending a piece of wire into ever tighter circles as if fashioning a lasso to reel Selene back into his arms.
Philippe pointed to the photo with the lit end of his smoke. “The hat is pretty similar to the wool stocking cap Hades was wearing when they sacrificed him.”
“Yeah, the whole murder scene looks like a backward version of the tauroctony,” Theo agreed. “A dead man on a living bull rather than a living god on a dead animal. That might relate to the liver divination I performed—”
“You what?” Dash asked.
“Long story. But the omens predicted there’d be some sort of reversal. Maybe this is it.” He turned his attention back to the marble tauroctony and let out a small whoop of surprise. “Oh man, I had a feeling I was on the right track. But not this right. Check it out.”
He pulled up a photo of the Charging Bull crime scene next to the image of the tauroctony statue. With his trackpad, he drew a bold yellow circle around the eviscerated dog, then a line to a carven image at the base of the Vatican Museum’s statue: a hound standing on its hind legs to lick the bloody slash in the bull’s throat. “There’s our dog.” Another circle, another line. “Asp at the crime scene. And look—a serpent in the sculpture, also licking the wound.” He kept drawing. “Dead crow on Wall Street. Crow perched on the marble bull’s back. Dead scorpion in the remains of the sacrificial fire. Scorpion carved at the Mithras statue’s base.”
“Merde,” Philippe swore, clearly impressed. “But what do they mean?”
Theo repeated Minh Loi’s description of the shift of the equinoxes, the movement of the celestial sphere, and the placement of the constellations during the Age of Taurus. Thankfully, the Athanatoi made better listeners than your average hungover college student. As he spoke, he scrolled through other online images of tauroctonies, stopping at a Roman bas-relief now on display in the Louvre. “Look at this one. Two torchbearers on either side of the bull.”
“Damn it,” Dash grumbled. “I don’t recognize those guys either.”
“Cautes and Cautopates,” Theo read. “Cautes holds his torch facing upward. The other, Cautopates, points his toward the ground. That explains the torches found on either side of the Charging Bull.”
Flint started to laugh. Theo had never heard anything like it. A wheezing hiss like air escaping from a volcano, followed by a sharp, explosive bark. He stared, dumbfounded.
Finally, Flint regained himself enough to shout, “If it’s all this obvious, why the fuck didn’t you come up with this sooner?”
Dash jumped in. “Hey, if you and Selene hadn’t been so sure that Mars was behind all this—”
Flint glared at his stepbrother, the cheeks above his beard turning ember red. “The Huntress is only trying to protect all of us. She’s the one putting her life at risk, captured by these maniacs, while you just flit off to meetings and spa days—”
“Hold on!” Dash protested mildly. “Who bought the speedboat?”
Flint snapped the piece of wire in his hand in two. His voice was full of menace. “How dare you joke about this. You always were a mercurial little shit.”
Dash’s smile slipped into something twisted and dark as he rose to his feet, towering over the seated Smith. “Keep talking, Lame One, and we’ll see who—”
Philippe leaped up. “Ne menace pas mon papa!”
“Settle down!” Theo shouted in a voice he usually reserved for rowdy freshmen on the last day of classes. “Listen to yourselves! Even while I’m proving to you that this cult isn’t about the Olympians, you all keep making it about yourselves. I know you’ve got several thousand years of baggage to gripe over, but could we please stay focused on the case at hand? Unless you want the Mithraists to kill off some more Athanatoi so you’ve got fewer relatives to yell at.”
After a stunned beat, Dash applauded loudly. “Well said, Professor!” He sat back down, immediately jovial once more, and rested his chin on his hand in a pose of conspicuous concentration. “Now please, continue. I for one have no intention of winding up the victim of some cut-rate god’s deluded acolytes.”
“Um. Thank you.” Theo glanced over at Flint, whose furious expression hadn’t softened.
Philippe rested a hand on his stepfather’s shoulder. “Recriminations won’t get Selene rescued faster, Papa,” he said quietly. “We’re on the right path now, and Theo led us there.”
When Flint didn’t respond, Theo plowed ahead. “And if we’re going to find out where that path leads, we have to understand where it started.”
Dash nodded. “And why a group of mortals would want to travel down it again.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. The man on the ice skating rink insisted his Pater Patrum was a man like any other—not a god.”
“If he’s not a god, how can he give mortals the power to wield divine weapons?” asked Philippe.
“I have no idea, but maybe he got it through Mithras.”
Dash threw up his hands. “You’re assuming Mithras exists! How is that possible? How could such a weak god still be hanging around?”
“His followers certainly didn’t see him as weak,” Theo insisted. “If I’m right, the Roman philosophers thought Mithras brought about the shift in the Ages—the movement of the equinoxes. He’d have to be a massively powerful deity to control the motions of the heavens themselves.”
He pulled up two new images of the torchbearers: marble statues found on Rome’s Palatine Hill. “Look how the upward torchbearer is shown with a rooster, so he likely symbolizes both Day and Birth. The downward guy gets an owl, symbolizing Night and Death. And here”—he opened a photo of a fresco from a sanctuary in central Italy—“we’ve got a tauroctony with a head of Sol the Sun in the left-hand corner and Luna the Moon in the right. Those same images appear on sarcophagi of the period.”
Dash huffed. “Sounds like a lifecycle thing, for sure.”
Flint finally spoke. “Plato.”
They all turned and stared at him.
“You don’t remember Plato?” he asked grumpily.
“I didn’t know him personally,” Theo said dryly. “What about him?”
“I liked the mathematicians at his Academy,” Flint explained, “so I sometimes visited. And I remember Plato had a theory about celestial spheres and the afterlife.”
“Damn, that’s right,” Theo said, quickly turning back to his computer to confirm the details of a story he only dimly remembered. “The end of Plato’s Republic is a fable about a man who ascends through seven celestial spheres after he dies—seven spheres for the seven celestial bodies recognized by ancient astronomers. Only then can he reach heaven. A god—like Mithras—who has power over those spheres would also have power over salvation. The idea survived for centuries, so it would overlap perfectly with the rise of Mithraism.”
“Salvation? Heaven?” Philippe wrinkled his nose. “Sounds Christian.”
“That’s probably because Mithraism was popular at the same time Christianity gained a foothold in the Roman Empire,” Theo explained. “Some historians even think the Christians based a lot of their theology on it—they call Mithras a proto-Jesus. Seems like they’re both part of a general trend toward religions more concerned with the fate of the human soul than with placating a pantheon of gods. Either way, the two religions have a lot in common.”
The gods fell silent. Finally, Flint heaved himself to his feet, tucking a crutch under each arm. “Then we dare not underestimate this god—or his followers. Christianity has wreaked more destruction on our kind than any weapon I’ve ever devised. Let’s make sure this Mithras doesn’t do the same.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” Theo closed his laptop.
“We will not let them get anywhere near sacrificing the Huntress,” Flint continued. Theo wasn’t sure exactly when the Smith had become the leader of this little band, but for all his physical fading, it was suddenly clear he was in charge. “We will find where they’re keeping her and strike there.”
Dash nodded in agreement, but Philippe looked worried. “Papa, I know you want to save her.” He lowered his voice. “I know how you feel about her. But these men have powers we don’t understand. And how will we even find them in the first place?”
Flint turned his dark, piercing eyes on Theo. “You found Orion and his cult. Time after time, they eluded you, and time after time you tracked them down. You can do it again.”
“Absolutely,” Theo said, although he had no idea how. With Selene’s life on the line, he’d find a way.
Flint looked at each god in turn. “We chop off head after head, but another grows in its place. We’ve killed two of their men, yet still they keep coming. The only way to kill a hydra is to stab it through the heart. We find the Pater Patrum. We kill him. We free Selene and end the cult once and for all.”
Dash whistled. “Sounds very bold. I assume from your tone you’ve got a plan to accomplish all that?”
Flint nodded.
“Et bien,” said Philippe with a sigh, “I hope it’s better than your last plan, where we all nearly drowned and my father still didn’t make it.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Flint said. “This time, we’re sending the professor in first.”