Rome is not Manhattan.
Selene sent the silent thought to Theo and imagined him laughing at the understatement. Classicist that he was, he probably preferred Rome. But as she stood on a bridge over the Tiber after returning from her adventures in Ostia, the former Roman goddess Diana found the city’s famous river, for all its languid beauty, a creek compared to the mighty Hudson. The dome of Saint Peter’s looked like a squat dwarf beside the graceful spire of the Chrysler Building. And the public transportation—from the rattling, barely air-conditioned buses to the paltry metro—paled beside the intricate web of New York’s immense subway. Yet at night, when the city’s heat lifted and the floodlights set the Coliseum aglow, she had to admit that Rome felt, just a little, like home.
She looked down the river’s length. Walkways crowded with pop-up restaurants and boutiques ran along either side of the water, part of the city’s summer market. In the predawn hours, the tents stood dark, the sidewalks empty. The only movement came from the treetops that bordered the nearby roadway, their leaves rustling in the faint wind like whispers from a long-forgotten past. More than the broken pediments of the city’s Roman ruins, it was the trees that reminded her of her time as a goddess. Great flat umbrella pines, soaring columnar cypresses, gracefully drooping plane trees. They, at least, she thought, still carrying on her silent conversation, haven’t changed.
But she had. She glanced at the bloody stain at her hip, where the Mithras-worshiping syndexios had stabbed her with her own wooden arrow. When the Romans had called her Diana, Selene couldn’t have been harmed by a mortal weapon. Now her leg had stiffened so badly she could barely walk.
She limped down the bridge and onto the riverside walkway, grateful to still retain at least one supernatural ability: The Tiber’s waters would heal her as no mortal medicine could.
Beneath the arch of the bridge, deep in the shadows, Selene lowered herself gingerly into the gritty water. Compared to the night’s clinging heat, the tepid Tiber felt deliciously cool. She hung from her elbows, submerged only chest deep.
“I call upon you, mighty Tiber,” she prayed. “Remember your birth from a mountain spring. Do not forget the Goddess of the Wilderness. She Who Dwells on the Heights. Lend her your aid.”
Power flooded through her, stronger than the river’s sluggish current. Her hip itched where the skin knit closed, and she felt a sharp shock through the length of her leg as the tendons and nerves healed. After a few minutes, she knew she should haul herself from the water and return to her apartment to discuss the night’s events with Flint. They needed to plan their next move, to comb through any new clues that might help them track Saturn or find Zeus.
Yet still she clung to the riverbank, her legs floating motionless in the water. On the back of Flint’s motorcycle, clutching his broad chest, she’d been content to take comfort in his nearness and avoid any difficult conversations. If I go back to the apartment now, she mused, will he finally admit how he feels about me? She still wasn’t sure what she’d say if he did. She valued him, depended on him—loved him, even. But the thought of kissing him—she released the ledge, dunking her head quickly beneath the water as if to wash the image from her brain.
When they’d gotten back to Rome, she’d used her injury as an excuse to leave him in their apartment and go to the river alone. Flint hadn’t objected. In fact, he’d remained silent the entire trip from Ostia, as if he, too, wasn’t sure what to say.
Selene propped herself once more on the ledge. She rolled the thick necklace he’d forged for her between her fingers. A simple gold chain when clasped around her neck, but when it unfurled into a whip or telescoped into a javelin, the carvings along its surface burst into view. Flint had engraved the entire length with images from her past: her carefree youth dancing on the shores of Delos with her twin; her centuries of power, wreaking supernatural vengeance on the men who dared to defy her; her wanderings through Europe after the Diaspora; her lonely attempts to build a life in New York. Flint had cared for her all that time, and she’d never known.
Despite his feelings, often the whole night would pass before they exchanged ten words. Maybe we’re too much alike. Selene couldn’t repress a small sigh. For most of her existence, she’d thought a silent man the best kind. She wasn’t so sure anymore.
If you were here, Theo, you’d already have offered your opinions on everything from the hunt for my father to the plotline of the latest Star Wars movie. For months, she’d been plagued by guilt, worried that Theo would never get over her. Now, despite knowing it was for the best, she worried that he had. The warm breeze on her cheeks reminded her that they’d never shared a summer’s day. In our one frigid winter together, the only warmth came from your body pressed against—She stopped herself from imagining it any further. It would only hurt more.
With a groan more of weariness than pain, she climbed back onto the walkway. Clothes wet and clinging, hair dripping streams of water down her back, she headed to the apartment she and Flint shared. She couldn’t help thinking of the path from the Hudson River to her brownstone in Manhattan, a walk she’d taken with Theo countless times in the few months they’d known each other. Stop dreaming about someone you’ll never see again, she told herself. Start imagining a reunion with someone you will. Yet thoughts of Zeus made her feel equally guilty.
She’d gone to find her father six months earlier to warn him that Saturn’s Host would try to capture him. After faking her death in New York, she’d flown to Athens, then Crete. In the dark hours of the morning, she’d reached the Lassithi Plateau high up in the mountains. The bells of goats tocked in the distance—the herds in the village of Psychro searching for fodder among the patchy snow. Above her loomed the legendary Dictaean Cave, a black slash in the pale, moonlit cliffside.
Selene had pulled her leather jacket closer and climbed carefully toward the cave on steps made slick by the chill January rains.
The cave looked utterly deserted—a fitting home for the mad hermit her father had become. She hadn’t seen him in over fifteen hundred years—not since he’d commanded all the gods to wander forth from Olympus, unloved and forgotten, into the mortal realm. Zeus had been imposing, black-haired, with eyes of stormy gray and a beard as twisted as the lightning bolt that symbolized his rule. Yet Selene’s memories of him were not of the fearsome King, but of the doting Father. He’d taken her on his lap when she was little more than a babe. She could still remember the feel of his wiry beard as she twirled it between her fingers.
And now? As the King of the Gods, surely Zeus still retained much of his physical vigor. But his mind—she’d been told that was a different story. Once the ultimate Sky God, he’d devolved from celestial to chthonic—a creature of secrets and darkness and earth—and much of his sanity had fled at the same time.
Before her, the wide entrance to the cave yawned dark and foreboding. She could just pick out the glint of a metal staircase descending into blackness. This was the path the summer tourists took—it couldn’t be the way to Zeus’s home. Nonetheless, she stood at the top of the stairs and called softly into the night.
“Father?”
Better to give an Athanatos of Zeus’s strength fair warning of her approach.
Hearing nothing in response, she pulled a penlight from her pocket and peered into the depths. Stalactites hung like dragon’s teeth from the ceiling, black and dripping and covered in icy moss. She padded down the stairs to the first landing, then hopped over the railing and onto the cave floor, slipping a little on the slimy rock. She steadied herself and called out for her father again.
“Zeus? Jupiter? Jove?” So many names for the Father of the Gods. The King of Olympus. Yet tonight, he answered to none of them.
What will he say when he sees me again? she wondered as she moved deeper into the cave. On the frenzied journey from New York, she’d been too preoccupied with thoughts of Theo’s grief and Saturn’s escape to worry about her relationship with Zeus. That day thousands of years before, when she’d sat upon his lap, she’d asked him to grant her six wishes: a golden bow, matching arrows, and a tunic short enough to run in. A band of nymphs to be her companions and wide-antlered stags to draw her chariot. He’d given her everything, even her final wish, the one that defied every tradition of their patriarchal society: eternal chastity, her most important attribute of all. In that moment, her father’s love had felt like a rainbow meant just for her. Something beautiful and scintillating that seemed to stretch on forever. Now she wondered if that rainbow had long ago faded back into the storm clouds from which it had sprung. She still loved her father—but would he feel the same?
He’ll probably ask me where the hell I’ve been for the last fifteen centuries, she realized. Why I knew he was holed up here, slowly going mad, and did nothing to help him. She didn’t have an answer besides the honest one: I thought we’d have time. I thought we were immortal. I didn’t realize how quickly those we love can be ripped away from us. The thought of her twin’s murder at Saturn’s hand firmed her resolve.
“I’m here now, Father,” she whispered into the dark. “And I’m not going to leave you again.”
With one hand on the dripping wall for balance, she threaded her way through the forest of stone protrusions, searching for a hidden entrance to some deeper recess. It wasn’t unusual for gods to hide in plain sight like this. Perhaps deceiving mankind made them feel more powerful, or maybe they simply couldn’t resist haunting the places they’d once made sacred. Such a tendency seemed pitiful to her now, like rats scurrying gleefully toward a trash heap, happily wallowing in mankind’s unwanted leavings.
She stopped before a particularly bulbous stalagmite, its veins of rock twisting into a braided column. In the beam of her penlight, quartz flakes sparked. The stalagmite narrowed at the center, then widened again, forming the hourglass shape of Zeus’s thunderbolt, so different from the sawtoothed lightning in modern depictions.
Peering around the column, she felt a moment of triumph. Her instincts proved right: Behind it, a narrow crevice stretched to the ceiling.
Her shoulders scraped against the jagged walls as she slipped inside. Beyond the crack, the cave widened into a larger chamber, empty but for the sudden storm of bats rushing past her ears. The pings of their sonar, inaudible to humans, pierced her more acute senses like knife blades. She plugged her ears with her fingers and thought seriously about trying to shoot them down. Unfortunately, the dozen arrows in her quiver wouldn’t make a dent in the colony’s hundreds. Ducking low, she scooted forward to search the cave for signs of non-bat occupation.
White guano covered the floor like thick paint. Between the stench and the sonar, Selene nearly gave up and turned around. She saw no painted symbols or hidden messages, none of the usual clues Athanatoi left to signal their whereabouts to other divinities. The thunderbolt-shaped stalagmite might have been pure coincidence. If Zeus was truly as mad as she’d been told, maybe he didn’t want visitors. Even if he did, he might not have the resources to construct the sort of elaborate hidden lair other immortals enjoyed.
Only then, when she stopped searching the walls for some secret clue, did she notice the footprints pressed into the guano—long, bare, male footprints, the toes spread wide like those of a man used to going without shoes. Beside them were several partial bootprints from a smaller foot.
I’m not Father’s first visitor, she realized with a tremor of foreboding.
The footprints led to a mossy wall. When she placed a hand on the ice-crusted green, it opened before her, nothing but hanging vegetation disguising another crevice. She passed through to a small chamber.
A filthy pallet lay against the far wall, the blanket twisted. A bucket sat beneath a dripping finger of rock, filling with milky water. A pile of bones—bats and mice and the occasional goat—lay strewn in the corner.
Her Huntress’s nose led her to a stain barely visible against the rocky ground. She knelt, touching a fingertip to the congealed surface, and took a closer sniff. Only a day or two old. And not animal blood from one of the carcasses. Not human either. At least not entirely. An Athanatos was injured. Maybe dead.
She’d come too late.
“No …” she said aloud, anger coursing through her veins, hot and bitter. She ran to the pallet, ripping back the blankets as if to discover her father’s corpse underneath. Spinning in a circle, she looked for further clues. With a deep breath, she forced away the rage. I must stay calm, she knew. I was a cop once. I just have to follow the clues.
Walking more deliberately around the chamber, she tried to think rationally. I would know if Father were already dead. I would see his passing’s effect on the world, just as I did with my other kin. When her gentle mother had died, the infants in the hospital’s nursery had wailed with grief. When Saturn murdered Apollo, the nearby mortals couldn’t restrain the funeral dirge that ripped from their lungs for the God of Music. If Zeus Lightning Bringer died, the sky itself would sing lamentations, she thought desperately. Storms would lash the earth. The stars would fall from the heavens.
Not far from the puddle of blood, she noticed white guano scuffed into the ground. She followed the trail back to the chamber’s entrance and squatted down to examine the bootprints more closely. They weren’t made by one man, she saw now, but several. And the prints that pointed toward Zeus’s chamber were shallower than those headed back out. Many men went in empty-handed, she decided. They came out carrying my father.
The thought infuriated her—but it also gave her a modicum of hope. It meant that Saturn hadn’t come alone, desperate to enact his final vengeance upon his son. Instead, he’d brought his syndexioi. And since she and Theo had personally killed all the known members of the Host’s Manhattan sect, that meant Saturn had another group of acolytes somewhere in Europe. As much as she dreaded having to face another army of Mithraists, their presence would ensure that Zeus would be sacrificed in a formal ceremony, not murdered hastily in his cave.
They may have taken Father, she knew, but they won’t kill him until their ritual is in place. There’s still time to save him.
She pounded up the metal staircase and stood in the cave’s mouth, looking out over the fields and pastures, where only a scant smattering of farmhouse lights punctured the darkness.
“Hark to my words, Wily One,” she said aloud. “Wherever you’ve taken my father, I will find him. And wherever you’ve hidden yourself, I will hunt you down. You will die at my hands.” She raised her voice, shouting into the silent air, offering up the Olympians’ most solemn oath: “I swear this upon the relentless waters of the River Styx!”
At the time, she’d felt confident of her vow. She and Flint had left Crete and headed to Italy, Mithraism’s birthplace, thinking it the most likely place to find Saturn. At the cult’s height, Ancient Rome had housed hundreds of mithraea. She’d been sure one of them would serve as the Host’s modern headquarters.
Standing now before the door to her Roman apartment with her keys in her hand, water still dripping from her hair and clothes, she felt a wave of helplessness. For months, she and Flint had scanned the mithraea open to the public—and a few others besides—but had found no signs of recent occupation. Possibly, as in New York, the Host had built an entirely new sanctuary rather than repurposing an original one. Either way, tonight in Ostia she’d glimpsed Saturn for the first time since she’d fought him in New York. And he’d gotten away. Again.
Her anger made her throw open the door with no thought of her magnified strength. It crashed against the inside wall of the apartment. From the far bedroom, Selene’s preternatural hearing picked up the rustle of sheets. She’d awoken Flint.
He’d better not go back to sleep, she decided, marching across the small apartment to pound on his door.
“Get up,” she called to him sharply. “We have work to do.” She heard his weary groan, followed by the scrape of a crutch on the floor.
She was taking out her frustration on Flint, and she didn’t care. Until she had Saturn before her and her arrow at his throat, someone would have to bear the brunt of her ire.
It’s a good thing you’re not here, Theo, she decided. You wouldn’t have put up with such treatment. Flint, on the other hand, never complained. He accepted her ill temper and impatience with the same surly reserve he accepted the other hardships in his life.
Listening to his shuffling gait through the bedroom door, she smothered a wave of guilt. If he doesn’t like my bossing him around, he can leave, she assured herself.
But she knew he wouldn’t.
And somehow, rather than making her grateful, that just made her angrier.