Chapter 29

THE TITANS

The Titan god Prometheus spoke of five hundred years of captivity and torture at the hands of his own creations.

It was hard to hear. They had chained him to a hospital bed, he said, subject to unending torment. Selene could imagine it—it was not so different from what her own father had done to him in another age. Punishment for the crime of putting mankind above the gods.

After Prometheus had created mortals from earth and water, he imbued each of them with the breath of his own spirit. He loved these mortal children of his so much that he dared steal fire from the hearth of Olympus and bring it down to them in a hollow fennel stalk. When Zeus discovered the theft, he chained Prometheus to a rock. Every day, Zeus’s sacred eagle swooped down upon the prisoner and ate his liver. Each night, the organ regrew, so the eagle might feast anew the next day. And so it went for untold centuries, with the kindest and best of gods suffering at the hands of his own kin.

In all that time, the Huntress remembered seeing Prometheus in the flesh only a handful of times. In his prime, he’d been as broad-shouldered as Atlas, but while his brother’s gaze was hard gray stone, Prometheus looked at the world with eyes as warm and soft as the rich soil from which he crafted mankind.

She’d seen him again when she’d happened across the mountainside where he suffered in captivity. Arms pinned above him, he hung naked from the stone. His ribs pumped like a bellows beneath his skin, riding high and swollen so that his bare stomach lay exposed to the eagle’s wicked beak. If he opens his eyes, will they still be warm and kind? she’d wondered. Then she’d heard the shrill cry of an approaching bird and decided she wouldn’t wait to find out. After all, Prometheus deserved his fate.

Once again, Selene realized, I heard only the clarion call of vengeance, not the cries of suffering.

“Why has the cult kept you for so long?” she asked aloud, pushing aside her own recriminations.

“I’m the Praenuntius. The Harbinger.”

“Yes, you said that.” He repeated himself often. I suppose he only has a few stories to tell, she thought, feeling guilty for her impatience. The fact that he’s kept his mind intact at all is remarkable. “What exactly do they expect you to foretell?”

“As I decline, so do you. They have prepared all these centuries so they might be ready when the time was right.”

“Right for …”

“Killing you. And all your kind.”

“Yes, but why?” she demanded, breaking into English. “Is this really all about some cult of Mithras?”

“Mithras and more than Mithras.” He spoke in English now, but with the slight Latin accent that she’d lost a thousand years before.

“Uh-huh …” She didn’t understand. Not at all. But deciphering the Titan’s mysterious pronouncements had at least given her a purpose. A glimmer of hope.

“They made me do it,” he said after a long moment.

“Do what?”

“They needed my pneuma. I gave it to them. Just enough to let them wield the weapons they had stolen.”

Pneuma. The breath of divinity within each Athanatos. She didn’t possess the ability to transfer it to a mortal—if she did, she might have given it to Theo. But Prometheus’s pneuma had brought the very first humans to life. Even more than the sacred coals he stole from Olympus’s hearth, that divine breath was the true gift of the Fire-Bearer. I should be angry with him for giving these madmen the use of our weapons, Selene knew. But she didn’t have the luxury of anger; she needed information. Prometheus represented her only chance of escaping before the Pater killed her.

“Do you know where we are?” she asked.

“No.”

“Where did they capture you?”

“I can barely remember. But at the Diaspora, I did not stray far from our ancient home.”

“Then how did you wind up in New York?”

“New York?” He pronounced the English name carefully, as if he’d never heard it before. “Is that where I am?”

“I certainly hope so. Unless I was unconscious for a lot longer than I thought.”

“I’m unfamiliar with such a place.”

That’s because it didn’t exist five hundred years ago, she realized. Even if she could keep Prometheus’s mind on track, he knew nothing but what his captors allowed.

“What about the Forethought thing? Can you predict what they’ll try next?”

“I have no prescience anymore, child. I live to be tortured and to live again. Such was my fate then. Such is my fate now.”

Selene wanted to scream. Prometheus has resigned himself to eternal pain. Mars resigned himself to death. But I must not do the same. I must fight to survive. Theo will help. He will come for me. As he always has. Even when I push him away. And Paul will help, too. Flint. Even Dash and Philippe will not leave me here to die.

How strange to have so many people caring for her. A week earlier, the list would not have been half so long. Yet now she knew with a sudden certainty that they would all work to rescue her.

Whether or not they would succeed was a different story—with an ending even Prometheus could not prophesy.

Theo stood at the base of the Atlas statue on Fifth Avenue and looked up at the art deco Titan who carried the universe above his head. Despite the dark night, a spotlight revealed every detail of the statue’s bronze flesh. His brow creased with the strain, his pectorals bulged, and a skein of cloth across one hip covered his nakedness. His upraised arms held four massive rings forming the celestial spheres. One clearly depicted the zodiac, marked with the usual astronomical symbols for the constellations. Atlas bore the rings on a bronze yoke resting on his shoulders, embossed with the symbols of the planets themselves, from Neptune’s trident through Mercury’s caduceus. Only Jupiter was missing, obscured by Atlas’s head, or perhaps left off as a sign of the Titan’s eternal hatred for the Olympian who consigned him to hold up the universe in the first place.

Theo scanned the rings, trying to determine which one might represent the celestial equator. Probably the one that intersects with the zodiacal ring, he decided. The two rings should coincide at two constellations, indicating the locations of the spring and fall equinoxes.

He stepped to the statue’s other side and followed the celestial equator’s curve as it arced toward the zodiacal ring at Atlas’s left shoulder. The two rings met at Aries the Ram.

A grim smile spread across Theo’s face. If the statue had been meant to represent Atlas in the modern day, it would’ve shown the spring equinox at Pisces. The choice of Aries meant the sculptor was aware of the movement of the equinoxes and had purposely placed the statue nearly two millennia ago—when Mithraism was at its height.

So far so good. But now what? He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Maybe that there’d be a secret map on the statue’s base. Or Atlas himself would be pointing toward the mithraeum’s entrance. Instead, the Titan just stared straight out from blank bronze orbs.

“What d’ya say, Atlas?” he asked aloud. “Show me something. Don’t just stare at me.” Well, not at me, he realized. He’s looking across the street. Theo turned in place and gazed across Fifth Avenue—at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.

The massive stone edifice symbolized the opposite of everything Mithraism stood for. Christian instead of pagan; lofty instead of underground; public instead of secret. Yet it was also the perfect place for a mithraeum. There might be thousands of churches in Manhattan, but only one’s the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York. It made sense that the Mithraists would’ve built a pagan shrine right under the Christians’ noses—the ultimate fuck you to the dogma that had displaced them.

Theo sprinted across the street. The doors to the cathedral were shut and locked. According to a posted placard, they wouldn’t open until 6:30 a.m. Who knew churches closed for the night? he thought to himself. What happens when I really needed to consult with God at four in the morning? He knocked loudly, hoping for some cowled nun with a lantern to unbolt the door for him like a scene out of a BBC miniseries about medieval crime-solving monks.

“Come on!” he shouted. “What if I were being chased by an angry mob like in some Victor Hugo novel? Sanctuary! Sanctuary!”

“Hey, dipshit!”

A woman bundled in three layers of stained coats and a pompomed knit hat stood beside a shopping cart overflowing with cans and bottles. “God ain’t gonna hear ya, but the cops sure will. Whyn’t ya shut up so the rest of us can work in peace?” She lifted a plastic water bottle out of a trashcan and added it to her collection.

“Sorry.” He jogged down the steps. “You usually work around here late at night?”

She shot him a suspicious glance with rheumy blue eyes. “Why? What I’m doin’ is legal, buddy. It’s a public service.”

“Of course. I’m just wondering if you’ve seen anything weird happening around Saint Pat’s.”

“Besides you actin’ like God’s gonna open up the doors for you if you just holler at him?”

“Yeah, besides that.”

She shrugged and reached deep into the barrel for a can. Orange Fanta. She shook it; it rattled icily.

“Is that a no?” Theo asked.

“It’s a ‘what’s it worth to ya?’” She tilted back her head and drained the can.

“How about a night at the Four Seasons?”

She spluttered, the orange soda dribbling down her chin. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“I’m not.” He pulled his hotel key card from his pocket. “I’ll call ahead and give them your name so they won’t stop you in the lobby. Think of it as an early Christmas present.”

She took a step back, and her mouth twisted with amusement. “Okay, buddy,” she said after a moment. “I know this is some prank, but I’ll tell you what I seen. I’m over here at this garbage can and there’s five men groping that naked dude statue over there like he’s a stripper on a pole.” She pointed at Atlas. “Now, maybe it’s late and dark and I’m awful tired after workin’ all day and sleepin’ in the cold, and my eyes ain’t that good no more, but I look down at my cans and then I look up again and they’re just gone. No sign of ’em nowhere. Poof.”

“You see anything else?”

“No. Just snow and slush and frozen garbage.”

She held out her hand. Theo passed her the key. He called the hotel, which patched him through to Dash’s room, and informed the Messenger first that he’d likely found the mithraeum, and second that they’d have a guest for the evening. As she trundled away, Theo thought of warning her that the doormen might not take kindly to her cart of cans. Then he decided Dash deserved to handle that particular headache.

He crossed back to the Atlas statue and watched the snow fall on the mighty bronze shoulders. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he muttered to the Titan. Either there’s a secret entrance in this statue, or the homeless woman is hallucinating. One of those options is much more likely than the other. But he didn’t want to give up. Not yet.

Theo took a quick glance around the street. The homeless woman was long gone, and the block lay momentarily deserted in the wee hours of the morning. He hurried to the base of the statue and heaved himself up to stand beside Atlas. Then he clambered onto his giant bent knee, put his arms around the statue’s neck, shimmied up his naked torso, and finally stood up on his spread arms. The whole thing felt completely ridiculous, mildly obscene, and definitely illegal.

He grabbed the ring of the celestial equator high above his head. He craned his neck, looking at where the massive bronze circle met the constellation Aries. It would take two thousand years for the world to move into the next age. “Let’s speed it up a little, shall we?” Theo murmured. He shoved the ring with all his strength, trying to push it toward the constellation Pisces. He strained, he groaned, he felt sweat pop beneath his arms despite the winter chill. Nothing happened.

Okay, so maybe the securely welded rings of an eighty-year-old statue in plain view on Fifth Avenue aren’t the secret entrance to a pagan temple. Panting heavily, he dropped his arms and rested them on the zodiacal ring.

It shifted soundlessly to the right.

Theo nearly fell off the Atlas statue in surprise. The celestial equator now passed neatly through Pisces, just as it did in the modern day. He looped an arm around Atlas’s muscled neck and twisted to look back at Saint Patrick’s, half expecting the cathedral doors to have magically opened. Then he dropped down to the ground and walked around the statue’s base. There, on the side facing away from the street, a panel had slid away, revealing a three-foot-high opening. Theo stuck his head into the hole and switched his cell phone to flashlight mode. Metal rungs ran down the interior of the statue’s base—a ladder reaching far underground. He was willing to bet it led to a tunnel that would take him straight under Saint Patrick’s.

He sent a quick text message to Flint detailing the Atlas statue’s secrets. But according to the plan, he needed to enter alone. I’m heading inside, he wrote. I’ll give it a shot your way, but if you don’t hear from me, go to Plan B and call the cops. And tell Dash to be nice to the woman with the cans.