Epilogus

THE NEW MOON

New Year’s Day

Theo Schultz sat on a bench in Riverside Park, the winter sun weak on his upturned face. The blanket around his shoulders did little to dispel the cold. He was always cold now. Even indoors. Even sitting before a roaring fireplace in the parlor of Selene’s brownstone—the brownstone Dash had told him she would’ve wanted him to have.

The Messenger had appeared at Theo’s hospital bedside to tell him the deed to the house would be waiting for him when he got out. “Give me a call, Makarites,” he’d said. “If you ever need anything.” Theo had passed back into unconsciousness, as he often did those first few days after crash-landing in downtown Manhattan.

When he came to, Dash was gone. He’d thought the visit a dream until he saw the large, neatly wrapped gift box on the floor by the bed. The attached business card read, “Scooter Joveson: Cybersecurity Consultant and Venture Capital Entrepreneur.” Beneath a layer of folded tissue paper lay Hades’ Helm of Invisibility and Orion’s sword. Theo hadn’t taken them out of the box. He wasn’t sure he ever would.

From his spot on the bench in Riverside Park, he watched Ruth appear at the end of the path, carrying a grocery bag in one hand and Hippo’s leash in the other.

Hippo spotted Theo and began to run, dragging Ruth behind her. The dog licked his bandaged hand then settled her bulk beneath the bench.

“Brrrr!” Ruth said, sitting beside him. “You sure you didn’t want to picnic indoors?”

“I like it here.”

She peered at him through her glasses. She’d taken to wearing them, Theo noticed, rather than her contacts. Perhaps because she rarely went home anymore. She’d been staying in one of the many spare rooms in Selene’s house, playing nursemaid. On the few occasions she’d left, Gabriela had come in her stead. Theo didn’t have the heart to feel guilty. He didn’t have the heart to feel much of anything.

“This is where you met her,” she said quietly.

He nodded reluctantly, thinking, And where we made love. That night, he’d felt like he’d flown on rainbow wings. Now, the wings had been torn from his back, leaving only ropy scars behind.

Ruth pulled out a sandwich and handed it to him. He let it rest, untouched, in his lap. A smattering of pigeons flapped down to the path and paced in nervous circles, waiting for a crumb. Hippo sighed and ignored them. She, too, had barely eaten since Christmas.

They sat in silence, staring out at the slate gray water. A new year. A new beginning. But to Theo, it only felt like the end. After the holiday, he planned to tell the university that he’d spend the next semester on sabbatical. They’d have to get someone else to take over the department. He wasn’t sure he’d ever come back. How could he spend his days speaking of Ares and Apollo, Prometheus and Hades, as if they were mere myth? As if a goddess named Artemis hadn’t taught him to love and then broken his heart?

In the hospital, Dash had told him how the world mourned her death. Not through a convulsion of violence, but through an outpouring of grief. “That night, on the boat,” he’d said, “the tide swelled, as if the Moon herself cried out in agony and dragged the waters to her breast. And then I knew Artemis was gone.”

Theo felt a shudder that had nothing to do with the cold passing through his body. Ruth put a tentative hand on his shoulder. He wanted to shake her off.

He finally understood why Selene always wanted to be alone. His grief was too complete a thing to share. If he let someone else take even an ounce of its weight, he’d split asunder. He’d never be able to gather the pieces together again. He wasn’t sure he’d want to.

Something sharp pierced the side of his arm. He swatted it away.

Ruth looked at him quizzically. “A mosquito? In January?”

“I don’t know. Felt almost like an electric shock. Some leftover lightning bolt pissed that it never got a turn.”

“Not sure that’s scientifically possible,” she said with a smile.

“I’ve given up on scientifically possible,” he said, surprising himself with a small smile of his own. “From now on, I believe only in the supernatural.”

“Oh? You’re going to fly around in that winged cap and speak to the pigeons?”

“The winged cap’s busted. And the pigeons probably don’t have much to say besides, ‘Stop wasting that sandwich, asshole, because if you don’t want it, we do.’”

Ruth laughed, a delighted chortle of glee, long repressed. Theo felt a chuckle in his own throat. Not ready to emerge, not yet. But it was there.

Hippo got up suddenly, distracted by something in the distance. Theo looked over his shoulder, but saw nothing. “Here, girl,” he said. He tore off the corner of the sandwich and waved it at the dog, who trundled back and wolfed it down whole before settling back beneath the bench. Then he took a bite himself, suddenly ravenous.

Ruth’s hand remained on his shoulder.

After he’d finished the sandwich, he placed his own hand on top of hers and drew it down to hold it against his heart. The lightning had burst the vessels on his chest, leaving behind branching lines of red that mirrored the bolt itself, all radiating from the Mercury brand. The slowly-healing flesh felt new and raw and painful to touch. He pressed Ruth’s hand against it anyway. She grounded him. Right here on this bench, on this shore, in this city.

And for the first time since he’d held Selene in his arms and then watched her slip away, he felt a glimmer of hope.

Philippe ducked back behind the stone wall that overlooked the riverside path and lowered his bow. “And voilà. That should help.”

He stared thoughtfully at the woman crouched against the wall beside him. “It doesn’t take away his love for you, you know. It can’t do that. It just opened his heart. Enough to let him feel something besides grief.”

She stared down at her knees, her voice a tentative whisper. “So he’ll love Ruth now.”

“Ah, non, ma chérie. He’s still too in love with you for that to happen. But perhaps, given time …”

She nodded quickly, wanting him to stop.

“I thought this is what you wanted,” he said after a long silence.

“It is. I don’t want him to suffer any more than he already has.”

“What about you?” he asked gently. “What about your suffering?”

He’d tried to convince her to go to Theo. “He trusts you,” he’d insisted as she lay recovering, too weak to make him stop talking. “He knows you. When I first met Theo, I thought him just a passing fancy.” He didn’t say he’d wanted her to be with Flint instead, but she knew he had. “But love—true love—is all too rare for us,” he went on. “Don’t throw it away.” He urged her to tell Theo how she’d swum to Governors Island and found Flint, how they’d hailed the motorboat and escaped with the others back to Manhattan. How they’d dropped the dogs back at an adoption agency, then holed up in the hotel with a homeless woman and her can collection while they recovered their strength.

But she’d refused.

She’d thought when she saw Theo in his golden cap and flashing sword that maybe there could be a future for them. But then he’d almost died. Again. She’d saved him, but it would just be a matter of time before she couldn’t.

Already, Dash—or Scooter, as he now called himself—had reported that the police had found only three bodies on the charred torch. They had to assume Saturn was still alive, and likely headed to Greece to chase down Zeus, his final target, with the help of the cult’s other branches. He would have to be stopped.

Flint would come with her. She knew that for a certainty. She’d known it the moment she’d ripped free of his golden net.

When Flint’s whip had transformed into a javelin, she’d finally been able to decipher the pictures etched into the gold. A single, continuous story spiraled its length. Artemis’s story. Her birth on the island of Delos. Sunlit days dancing at her brother’s side on the crest of Mount Kynthos with her mother’s smile to lift their song. Moonlit nights running wild across the groves of Attica with her nymphs beside her. And more. Diana, presiding over her temple outside Rome, then haunting its shattered remains as her acolytes turned to other gods. Wandering through Europe in the Diaspora, finding solace in the wild places. Then Phoebe Hautman crossing an ocean to Mana-hatta. Dianne Delia, watching a country spring to life. And so many others. Cynthia Forrester protecting her city from harm. Selene DiSilva walking the riverside. Alone.

Hephaestus had claimed he couldn’t invent new divine weapons. When the necklace became a whip, she’d wondered at that. But when she’d seen the engravings, she knew he’d been working on it for millennia. The necklace wasn’t new—and neither was his love for her.

Flint walked toward them down the path, his stride steady on new titanium braces but his body hunched against the just-healed wound on his stomach. She would let him love her. She would accept that gift from him, just as she’d accepted the necklace now lying against her collarbone. And in return, she’d found a space in her heart for him. Not a lover’s place, not yet, but something nearly as precious and rare—a friend.

That night on the riverbank, not far from where Theo now sat huddled beneath his blanket with another woman at his side, Selene had opened herself to love. She couldn’t close that door, not now.

Flint stood before her and held out an arm to help her to her feet. She was still weak. She looked older than she had before, but Flint didn’t seem to mind. The lightning had carved a scar upon her chest. A ragged oval, like the outline of Apollo’s laurel tree. It would not heal. She didn’t want it to.

“We should get going,” Flint said in a gravelly rumble as she gently removed her hand from his. “Phil, your flight to Paris leaves in two hours. And Scooter said we can catch a flight to Athens that leaves later tonight.” He looked meaningfully at his stepsister. “He just needs to know what name to put on your passport.”

She didn’t answer. Philippe packed his small bow into a satchel and slung it across his shoulder. Her own bow—recovered by Scooter, the Giver of Good Things, as he ran from the Statue of Liberty—was already packed beside Flint’s hammer, ready for their flight across the ocean.

She turned to look over the wall and down to the riverside. The top of Theo’s head leaned just an inch closer to Ruth’s than it had before. She opened her mouth, desperate to shout his name. Wanting him to turn around so she could see his face one more time. Instead, it was Hippo who tasted the air, then leaped to her feet and turned toward her mistress, tail wagging furiously. Theo twisted around to look in the direction of Hippo’s sniffing.

For an instant, she saw his face. Pointed chin, floppy hair, haunted eyes. A mouth whose taste she still remembered on her lips. She stepped out of sight before he could see her.

Good-bye, my hero, my love.

Flint was waiting for her. As they walked, she said, “Tell Scooter that Selene DiSilva is dead. Tell him Selene Aidnos is going to Athens.”

Philippe frowned at her. “Aidnos? Like Greek for ‘darkness’? So depressing …”

“How about Neomenia, instead?” offered Flint, his voice gentler than she’d ever heard it.

Selene Neomenia. Selene, goddess of the New Moon. Darkness that grows once more into light.

“I like it.”

She couldn’t smile, not yet, but she knew that someday, she would.