WE WENT INTO A ROOM DOWN THE HALL WHERE PAINTINGS and photos covered the walls so completely, there was barely an inch of wallpaper exposed. Shelves overflowed with scrolls and books, and cabinets were stuffed with…toys?
In the nearest cupboard, I found a threadbare teddy bear and a G.I. Joe clutching a carved wooden rifle.
“Thought you might discover the corpses of my previous husbands?” She smirked. “Sorry, but I keep them in a warehouse in Queens.”
I hoped she was kidding.
Hundreds of eyes, maybe even thousands, stared back at me from the walls. There were crude charcoal sketches on pieces of whitewashed plaster, carefully transplanted into a frame. On a piece of warped wood, I saw a faded painting of an old man in a toga. I paused at a yellowed photograph of a pair of Native American kids, one sitting on Ishtar’s lap, staring blank-eyed at the camera.
“These are all your children?” I asked.
Ishtar picked a small rag doll from a shelf. “This was Fimi’s. She was the only thing left living in her village—the militia had even killed the livestock. She’d spent two days hiding under her mother’s body.” She kissed the doll and replaced it gently.
I’d never heard her like this. Her voice sounded so fragile, nothing like the Ishtar I thought I knew.
She caught my gaze. “Not what you expect of a goddess, is it? I sometimes wonder what I truly am, how I came to exist. It is so easy to be called a god, yet I have my limits. More than you can imagine, Sikander.”
“But think about everything you can do. The fact you’re immortal. Who wouldn’t want what you have?”
“Immortality is a sickness—a cancer. Your cells renewing and renewing endlessly.” She stood in front of a small photograph in an oval frame. I could make out a smiling young man in a sailor’s hat, posing in front of the USS Arizona. “Jacob always dreamed of being a sailor.”
I heard a deep sadness in her tone. “No mother ever gets over the loss of her child.”
“Why do you do it?” I asked. “Take them in, knowing you’ll outlive them?”
“I am the goddess of love. How can I not?”
And the goddess of war. Was this her way of making amends for that role? Every warrior who died for her on the battlefield had left a devastated family behind. And she’d been at it for thousands of years.
“The stories about you tend to focus on…other aspects of love.”
Her laugh brightened the somber mood instantly. “Ah. You have to remember, many of the archaeologists were lonely Victorian men working far, far away from home and their wives. They tended to get…overexcited in their translations.”
I looked at row after row of faces in photos, portraits, and sketches that stretched back in time—way, way back. Some were laughing, others gazed coolly at the viewer, others seemed distracted by something off to the side, not realizing that the moment would last forever. They came from all parts of the world. Some of her children weren’t young. In one shot, Ishtar sat in the shade of a cypress tree, holding an old man’s dark, wrinkled hand, his head as bowed as the branches. Yet he looked at me from beneath his red-checkered keffiyeh with eyes burning fiercely, refusing to be humbled by his age. Beside it was a photo of the same spot, though the paper had turned ocher with age, with a boy hanging upside down from those same branches while Ishtar laughed at his antics. I realized the old man and the boy were the same person—it was all in the eyes, the vitality undiminished despite the many decades.
Ishtar joined me in looking at it. “Ahmed at his family’s orchard in Jordan. The boy wouldn’t sit still. He’d had a good life, Sikander, but wanted me to be with him at the end of it.”
“How can you bear the pain?” I asked.
She turned. “You tell me.”
Tell her? How? I didn’t know how to begin. Mo had been my world, and the day he’d died, all the memories, all the great moments, had turned into an ache that still lingered. “I don’t have a choice. There are times I wish I could forget him. Forget what he meant to me.”
“Listen to me, Sikander. There are only two things that are truly infinite, that transcend time and space. Love is one of them.”
“And the other?”
“That is not for mortals to know.” She gestured at a small frame. “Here’s Belet.”
She couldn’t have been more than four or five, and she was glaring at the camera, her mouth turned down in a dangerous grimace. While dressed in a sparkly pink tutu.
“Oh, wow. She is never going to forgive you for showing me this.”
“Isn’t she sweet?” cooed Ishtar.
Sweet wasn’t the word that sprang to my mind, but like all moms throughout history, Ishtar had a starry-eyed view of her child. And that’s how it should be with parents, right?
The ballet teacher reflected in the mirror clutched her throat as if Belet was about to launch herself at her. Which, knowing Belet, was quite likely. “She hasn’t changed much, has she?” I asked.
“Would you want her any other way?”
Belet’s fierceness burned. You knew she would fight, no matter the odds, no matter how hopeless it all got. You wanted a Belet in your corner. As long as her blaze didn’t get out of hand and destroy everyone and everything.
“I’m glad you are in her life,” Ishtar went on. “She is going to need you.”
“Why? She has you.…”
“Look after her, will you?” Ishtar patted my hand. “I know I can count on you to stick around.”
“But Nergal is…”
Ishtar took something from her pocket. “I want you to have this.”
She handed me a gold signet ring, and I didn’t need to be an archaeologist to know it was ancient. The image was of a lion and a man facing each other.
“It’s the king’s seal,” she said. “It might help you.”
“Help how?”
“Return it to its rightful owner. You’ll find him in Central Park.”
The ring weighed more than it should. It was heavy with responsibility and power. Judging by its extraordinary size, I had a suspicion the owner was just as extraordinary. “But who is—?”
She turned as Sargon entered the room. “Ah, the plan takes shape,” she said to herself.
More cats arrived. Ishtar crouched down and gazed into the eyes of the black one.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
While still communing with the cat, Ishtar said, “I didn’t have the patience or enthusiasm to hunt down my brother-in-law. Instead, I ran around the city, attracting as much attention as I could. Daoud helped. Such a healthy-looking specimen.”
Oh no. So much suddenly made a lot of awful sense. “You’ve been using Daoud as bait?”
“He is everything Nergal once was, and no longer is. I hoped to provoke Nergal, to attract him to me, and Daoud is very attractive.” Ishtar stood up and the soft, reflective mother vanished. “Go tell Belet I need Kasusu.”
“Are you really going to fight—”
She faced me suddenly. The eyes that had been so warm and compassionate just a minute before were now pitiless black stones, as dark and as dreadful as cold eternity. “Nergal is here,” said the goddess of war.
