Without a word, Flint emerged from his bedroom. Shirtless.
He smelled like sleep and sweat and smoke.
Selene followed his hooded gaze, belatedly aware of the way her wet clothes clung to her body. She fought the urge to cover herself—she’d done that for far too long. Let him look, she decided. His appetites aren’t my problem.
After so many millennia of avoiding men, she still wasn’t sure how to deal with them. Sometimes she felt like she was thirteen years old instead of three thousand, first exploring her effect on men and theirs on her, behaving erratically, even cruelly, in her attempts to navigate her own feelings. Flint, on the other hand, had many lifetimes’ worth of experience with women. He had, after all, once been married to Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love.
His bloodshot eyes flicked away from Selene; he limped into the kitchen on a simple aluminum crutch. She heard the clatter of the moka pot against the gas burner and retreated to her own bedroom to change into dry clothes, telling herself it was only because she didn’t want to drip on the furniture.
A few minutes later, she returned to find Flint hobbling to the table with a cup of coffee in one hand. He lowered himself into a chair half as wide as his frame required.
I see he hasn’t bothered to put on a shirt, she noted with annoyance.
She sat across the table from him anyway, trying to keep her eyes from wandering to the broad planes of his chest or the bulging muscles of his arms.
“We need a new plan,” she began without preamble. “Killing members of the Host may be thinning their numbers, but it’s not getting us any closer to finding my father.”
Flint stared pensively at his coffee, his lips a flat line. He’d never been fully on board with rescuing Zeus in the first place—she knew that. He wanted her to focus solely on killing Saturn, both as revenge for the deaths of so many Athanatoi and to prevent any future murders.
“We have to rescue the King of the Gods,” she repeated now in reply to his unspoken remonstrance. “When Saturn finally sacrifices him, there’s no telling how powerful he’ll become. You saw how quick he was to discard one of his own loyal syndexioi. How do you think he’ll treat the millions of humans who’ve forgotten all about him for the past two thousand years?” She shook her head angrily. “We’ve seen what gods do to the mortal world when they’re trying to regain their power. Innocents die, Flint. How much worse will it be once one actually gets the power he seeks?” She shuddered. “Even the strongest Athanatos won’t be able to stand against our grandfather once his Last Age begins. The mortals will have no one to protect them.”
Flint nodded slowly. “All the more reason to kill him without delay.”
“And leave my father to rot in some Mithraic cell that we’ll never find? Or let the syndexioi kill him as revenge for the murder of their Pater? No. We find Zeus first. We save him and prevent Saturn’s rise at the same time. Then we go for the kill.”
Flint grunted noncommittally. Over and over, those first few weeks after Crete, he’d reminded her of all her father’s failings. Zeus had been a shameless womanizer, a negligent parent, and a wrathful god.
“He’s my father,” Selene insisted heatedly. “He may be imperfect, he may have done unforgivable things—but so have we all. I punished women I should’ve protected; I cared only for my own glory; I killed innocents. I’ve tried to make up for those crimes by helping the mortals I once disdained. If I can forgive myself, don’t I owe my father at least that much?” Flint didn’t respond. “I can’t abandon him,” she went on. “I just can’t. You wouldn’t understand. You never had a father.”
She watched the muscles of Flint’s forearms pop as he squeezed his cup, wondering if the ceramic would shatter. Not the best time to remind Flint of his unusual parentage, she realized belatedly.
“My stepfather could’ve been a father to me,” he growled. “But he was too busy throwing me off Olympus.” He glanced up at her, his eyes flashing beneath his thick brows. “Or did you forget that part? The part where my mother birthed me without the help of her husband’s seed, the smallest payback for the dozens of children he’d sired on other women, and in revenge, Zeus tossed me from the mountaintop like a sack of trash. Trash, Selene, not a child.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
She’d watched as her once cheerful young stepbrother had disappeared through the clouds, hurled from Olympus by her own father. Weeks later, when Zeus’s temper had cooled, she watched Hephaestus return, untrusting, bitter, closed. His legs crippled beyond repair, his face creased in a frown that would become his hallmark.
“I was there. I saw it happen,” she said now. “And … like all the rest … I did nothing.”
Flint, always so stoic, winced as if slapped.
“You didn’t remember that part, did you?” she murmured. “You thought I was off hunting, dancing. You didn’t know I witnessed your fall. You didn’t remember I could be so cruel.”
He shook his head, not meeting her eyes.
“And if you had known … would it have changed how you—”
“No,” he said quickly. But he didn’t look at her. And he didn’t explain.
Finally, she began a story of her own, the only way she knew to make him understand why, despite all Zeus’s failings, she still felt such loyalty to him. “When I was merely a child, they say I sat on my father’s lap and asked him to make me a huntress. To give me nymphs for my playmates and a bow to wield and everything else my heart desired. And he said yes. Yes to all of it. That’s the story the poets tell, and I remember it well. But there’s another story, one so faint I see it only in snatches. One never recited by Ovid or Homer or Callimachus.” She turned her gaze to the rustling plane tree outside her window, as if its shuddering green would help her remember.
“I was on the slopes of Olympus, where the wildflowers glowed like flame in the sunlight, but the forest was cool and dark. I’d run away from the summit that day. Probably to escape my stepmother’s hounding.”
Flint snorted, not bothering to defend his mother. Hera was Zeus’s queen. Birthing her fatherless son was one of her less violent attempts to punish her husband for his infidelity. Usually, she took out her rage on Zeus’s consorts and bastards—Artemis, Apollo, and their mother, Leto, among them.
“I found a place where the Queen wouldn’t find me,” Selene went on. “Beneath trees so old and twisted that their branches bent into dryads’ thrones. I had the bow my father had granted me … the one you made for me. But I didn’t know how to shoot it. Arrow after golden arrow went flying through the trees. Those beautiful arrows you’d crafted, with leaf-shaped blades and …” She hesitated, trying to remember.
“Hawk-feather fletching,” Flint whispered hoarsely.
“Yes.” Her face softened at the memory. “Black feathers, while Apollo’s were white. I’d forgotten that. Well, all those arrows went disappearing into the woods, and the woods were growing darker, the sun setting, and then …” Her voice caught at the memory, as if she were a child again, suddenly scared and alone and knowing she’d made a terrible mistake. “I saw two points of light in the shadows. The glowing eyes of a wild boar. Its tusks as long as an elephant’s. Or at least … they seemed that way to me. It snorted, pawed the earth. Then it galloped toward me, and I froze.” She felt Flint’s eyes on her, questioning.
“I was a child still, not a huntress, despite my father’s promise. I was about to be gored. That tusk was an inch away, and I didn’t even have the breath to scream, and then … then my father was there.” A smile tugged on her lips. “Eighteen feet tall, at least. Hair shadow-black and those eyes like a summer sky and arms as wide and strong as tree limbs. The boar skidded to a stop, its sharp hooves digging into the soft earth, its nostrils pumping steamy air into the night. Then it bowed. First to Father. Then to me.” She gave a small laugh. “Then the fearsome King of the Gods taught me how to shoot. Stayed there all night with me, arrow after arrow, showing me how to aim, how to watch the arrow’s flight, how to find the shafts again in the dark. I was never scared of wild animals again. Or the forest. Or the night. He made me who I am. He gave me that gift.”
Her hand strayed to the necklace at her throat. Flint’s gift. “My father loved me,” she said. “He still does. I have to believe that. That sort of love doesn’t just disappear, no matter how many thousands of years have passed. My twin loved me like that. And my mother. They’re both gone. I won’t lose my father, too.”
Flint allowed a small, pained nod. Selene held her breath, waiting for him to say something, to acknowledge that Apollo and Leto and Zeus weren’t the only ones to love her. But when he turned to her, his eyes dark and simmering with millennia of unspoken emotion, her heart seized with fear. She was back in that forest again, facing a long-tusked boar. If she didn’t do something, fast, she’d be run through. Gored. And all her immortal powers would never close the gaping wound.
So she broke his gaze and said brusquely, “We still don’t know why the Wily One hasn’t already sacrificed my father. Or why he’s accumulating new artifacts.”
Flint’s face instantly shuttered. He looked away, granting her no more than a shrug.
Selene felt a stab of loneliness, guilt. How much of his brooding silence is because I won’t let him speak? Theo’s face flashed before her. Open, honest. You’d never let me shut you up. You’d insist I listen to what you had to say, even if I wasn’t ready to hear it. You’d talk it all through with me. Your feelings, my feelings, and Saturn’s whereabouts, too. Together, we’d find Zeus.
She’d longed for Theo’s help since she first got to Rome. Her half brother Scooter Joveson—once known as Dash Mercer, and before that as Hermes, the Messenger God—still kept in contact with her former lover. So far, Scooter had kept her secret—Theo still thought she was dead.
Scooter had admitted that he’d requested the professor’s assistance on their hunt for Saturn—against her express wishes. “I faked my own death to keep Theo safe,” she’d shouted at him over the phone. “I want to remove him from this battle between gods—not thrust him right back into danger, you bastard.”
Thankfully, Theo had refused to help Scooter—which was exactly as it should be. I want him to forget about me, she reminded herself now. If he’d agreed to join the hunt, not only would his life be threatened, but she risked running into him on the streets of Rome. The thought made her throat clench. His rage at my lies would break me in half. And I barely feel whole as it is.
The last time she’d allowed herself to spy on her former lover, only a week after her supposed death, she’d had Philippe—aka Eros, the God of Love—shoot a dart into Theo’s arm. Just enough, Philippe had promised, to smooth the jagged edges of Theo’s grief. To make it possible for him, someday, to love someone else.
I should’ve asked Philippe to shoot me too, she thought with a surreptitious glance at the man sitting across from her. Instead, Flint and I just hurtle forward, slamming into dead end after dead end. Unable to find my father. Unable to find each other.
She pressed on, seeking distraction in the hunt that had driven her for so long. “We know that Saturn’s plan in New York was to perform a series of Mithraic rituals paired with the sacrifice of Athanatoi. Hades, Mars, Apollo—all killed as steps along the way to the Host’s final goal.” Her old training as a cop taught her that reviewing the facts could help her predict her target’s next moves. “The cult chose Prometheus as the final offering. His murder would’ve completed the ritual and ushered in the Last Age, complete with the resurrection of Saturn’s own omnipotent power. Instead, Prometheus refused to become a willing sacrifice. He died in a lightning blast, rather than at Saturn’s hand—the ritual was left incomplete. So now Saturn and his acolytes have to start over.”
“Except they’re running out of Olympians to kill,” Flint interjected grimly.
“Right. Now that we know he’s after us, we’re not so easy to catch. But he already has my father—the most powerful sacrifice the cult can make. Killing the King of the Gods is the only way to finally complete the ritual and return our grandfather to power.”
“But Zeus is still alive.” Flint didn’t look particularly heartened by that fact.
“Which is a good thing,” Selene snapped. “The problem is, we don’t know what Saturn’s waiting for.” The Host must have an elaborate rite planned. She knew from recent experience that restoring supernatural power required more than just murdering a god. You had to do it right: collect authentic artifacts, find the perfect location, pick the most auspicious time, assemble the most dedicated worshipers. Otherwise the ritual didn’t work.
She took a deep breath as she considered the information they’d just uncovered. “I assume Saturn wanted the black arc from the mithraeum floor as a representation of the celestial spheres that Mithras controls. But we still don’t know why he was so obsessed with the marble pine tree. It’s an attribute of the Great Mother, but Mithraism’s an all-male cult. It doesn’t make sense. How could she help them bring about the Last Age?”
Flint scowled. “From what I remember, she wasn’t exactly … pro-male.”
“That’s an understatement.” In her godhood, Selene had rarely paid much attention to cults beside her own, and the Great Mother, whom the Greeks called Cybele and the Romans called the Magna Mater, wasn’t even an Olympian. Just an eastern goddess who eventually joined their pantheon. Still, Selene had always admired her proto-feminist bent. “From what I remember, her Roman priests dedicated themselves through a sword dance in front of her statue. Cymbals crashing, drums pounding, hair flying. Eventually, they threw their offerings onto the statue’s lap.”
“What kind of offerings?”
“Their testicles, of course.”
Flint shifted in his chair, looking ill, but the thought of castrating a few syndexioi made Selene feel considerably better.
“I was thinking,” she went on eagerly, “that next time, we need to have a tracking device ready. If we’d managed to get one into a syndexios last night, we’d be hunting Saturn down right now and finding whatever mithraeum he’s hiding in, instead of sitting here like useless idiots, hoping he doesn’t track us down first.”
“A tracking device might work,” Flint agreed. She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.
She heaved an exasperated breath. Holding up a one-sided conversation was utterly exhausting. How did you ever stand talking to me, Theo?
“If you show the device to me,” she urged, “I can try to attach it to an arrow.”
He mumbled something that sounded like assent, then fell mute.
Five minutes of awkward silence passed before Selene slammed her fist on the table. “If you want to say something, just say it.”
Hurt flashed across Flint’s face. He reached for the pocket of his sweatpants, resting his hand there as if unsure whether to withdraw whatever was inside.
“What?” Selene pressed. “Are you being surly for no reason? Or do you just not care about finding Saturn anymore?”
Flint’s jaw twitched beneath his bushy beard. “He killed my brother, too. Of course I care.”
“So then why the silence? Do you want to talk this through, or should I just go back to the river and talk to myself? Because honestly, it’d be just about as useful.”
His fingers curled around his pocket. Something in his hesitation, in the tension that rippled across his wide forearms, made her worry that she’d pressed him too far. That he’d lash out. Or perhaps just walk away. She braced herself for either, unsure which would be worse.
Instead, he pulled out a piece of card stock, gilt-edged and embossed with a mass of curlicues and flowers. A wedding invitation.
She couldn’t see the names on the paper. Didn’t want to see them. She could feel the boar’s hot breath on her face.
Flint shifted in his seat to face her and braced his hands on the arms of the chair, as if to rise. He had that invitation printed up as a proposal, she knew suddenly. He’s going to kneel down on those withered legs and ask me to marry him.
“I have an idea,” he said finally. “You’re just not going to like it.”
It was Selene’s turn to be speechless. No, please no, she begged silently.
He sighed, a slow exhale like a volcano venting steam. “I know this is the last place you want to go, and the last person you want to see, but she might help us understand the Magna Mater connection.”
“She?” Selene stammered. “Wait … who?”
He passed her the invitation. “My mother’s getting married right here in Rome. Tomorrow morning.”
Selene could breathe again.
Flint’s lips twisted into a grim smirk that she suspected was his attempt at a smile. “So, Selene Neomenia, I’m officially asking … do you want to be my date?”