Chapter 21

PRETENDER

After several hundred yards of crawling through the tunnel behind the grave niche, Theo emerged into a small brick antechamber, spitting cobwebs from his mouth. His sliced wrist ached, dust coated his pants, and his hands shook with a toxic mix of anticipation and dread.

He stood with Scooter before a locked wooden door.

The God of Thieves whipped out his ever-present lock picks and went to work while Theo held him by the waist to maintain their invisibility. Scooter uttered a variety of creative curses at having to work without seeing his own hands, but before long the door swung soundlessly open.

Theo could hear the smirk in Scooter’s voice. “So much for high-tech security at the Vatican.”

“I guess the blood libation was security enough.”

Scooter humphed. He clearly still hadn’t forgiven Theo for slitting his wrist.

A low-ceilinged passageway sloped downward before them, its walls hewn from the archeological past—a conglomeration of brick layers, paving stones, marble slabs, and raw earth. Potsherds and bits of broken statuary peeked out from amid the layers like lettuce between slices of ham. Steve Atwood would be salivating, Theo thought. But he couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for archeology with his own death staring him in the face.

After another hundred yards, the rough passage dumped them into a better-preserved corridor of well-matched brick punctuated by several other hallways branching in every direction. He had no idea how to find the mithraeum’s main sanctuary, but at least no guards patrolled the corridor. He had time to search.

“Where is everybody?” whispered Scooter.

“Maybe off at some pre-solstice ritual,” Theo answered under his breath. Let’s just hope they’re not all gathered inside the sanctuary. Otherwise, I’m going to have to die very, very quietly.

Theo walked cautiously toward the end of the corridor, where a door half again as wide as the others indicated a room of some importance. He pressed his ear against it. Nothing. He took a deep breath and pushed.

The foul stench of iron and rot slammed against his senses. He took a step; the sole of his shoe lifted with a sucking pop. He switched on his flashlight and took off the Helm of Invisibility so the beam could illuminate the ground. Dried blood.

Trying not to gag, he raised the beam to illuminate the walls. Any hope that he’d found the mithraeum’s sanctuary vanished when he saw the shape of the chamber: round instead of rectangular, its floor a wooden grate rather than the usual mosaic aisle.

“What is this place?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” Scooter said, his voice hushed and nervous. “It looks like a charnel house.”

Theo moved the flashlight lower, staring across the chamber’s floor. A single wide brown eye stared back.

A bull.

It lay on its side like a felled mountain, its beige tongue protruding obscenely between its jaws. A slice in its neck gaped like a second mouth, this one coated in sticky red that ran down its white breast like a matador’s cape. A ram lay beside it, the pale curls of its pelt drenched crimson. Theo took an involuntary step back.

Scooter tightened his grip on Theo’s elbow. “Careful. We don’t want you to be the next sacrifice.”

He peered over his shoulder to find his heels an inch from the top of a precipitous stairwell. The grate beneath their feet hung suspended above another chamber. More blood coated the lower floor in a wide, dark puddle, its splattered edges reaching for the walls with inky tentacles. Droplets peppered the flagstones, the walls, the bottom steps. Selene had once explained to him how the police used blood splatter evidence to investigate crime scenes, but Theo didn’t need a cop to tell him that the animals’ blood had poured through the grate in a waterfall of gore.

A marble pine stood at the chamber’s focal point like a Christmas tree hung with bloody tinsel. Theo understood now. “It’s a Phrygianum,” he whispered. “A sanctuary for the Magna Mater.”

Red footprints led from the puddle to a door in the chamber’s wall. Someone, Theo realized with a shudder, stood in the path of this carnage.

The smell of death poured down his throat in a gagging cloud, an undeniable reminder of his fate. This was no game, no adventure. He forced himself to look at the dead bull once more. That’s going to be me. Staring eyes and stony flesh and silent heart.

The reality he’d resisted ever since he’d left Dennis’s bacchanal now brought him to his knees. He felt the cold blood seeping through his pants and didn’t care. Scooter’s voice in his ear, begging him to stand up, seemed very far away. He closed his eyes, reaching for a vision of Selene. The sweep of her black hair. The smile in her silver eyes. He could almost feel her hand in his, her fingers long and cool and strong as they faced life together. She should never have died. He should never have let her go.

There, a kneeling petitioner in an ancient temple, his hands clasped against his chest, he offered up a silent prayer to whatever god or God might listen: Let me find her. Let me bring her back where she belongs.

The last words he spoke aloud. “Let me hold her in my arms once more.”

The door slammed open.

As light flooded the room, Scooter jammed the helm back on Theo’s head. Four syndexioi burst in dragging a limp woman between them, her hands bound, her head covered with a dark sack. They threw her forward. Her body slammed against the bloody ground, forcing the air from her lungs in a faint moan.

“She’ll wake up soon enough,” one of the guards grumbled.

“She better,” returned another. “The Pater wants her conscious for the next ritual.”

“Then we should go get the good chains.”

They left again, a bolt clanging into place as they shut the door behind them.

Theo wasn’t sure what was going on, but he removed the helm and hurried forward, pulling free of Scooter’s grip.

“Wait,” the god urged, sounding suddenly panicked, but Theo paid him no heed. He wasn’t about to let Saturn’s men hurt anyone else, not if he could help it. And no matter who this woman was, she didn’t deserve what the Host would do to her.

Scooter’s hand shot out, grabbing Theo’s arm to stop him in his tracks. “Theo, you have to listen. Let me explain.”

The fallen woman groaned and sat up, pulling off the hood with her bound hands.

She raised her head, her black hair falling away from her face to reveal a pair of silver eyes, glowing with fury.

Theo’s prayer had been answered.

Selene snarled at the closed door and rose to her feet, stumbling a little as she fought the effects of the Taser’s charge. She had every intention of ripping the door from its hinges.

She was stopped by a scent.

A thin thread, barely perceptible beneath the stench of stale blood. A wisp of something so faint only the Huntress could’ve detected it.

She froze, sniffed the air once more, wondering if she could trust her senses with Rhea’s memories still clouding her brain. Perhaps she was hallucinating. Or still unconscious. It must be a dream. That’s the only explanation.

But the scent was too real, too familiar. Wonder and fear and shock sent cold sweat prickling beneath her arms.

“Theo …”

A clatter of metal on stone. Selene wheeled around in time to see Hades’ helm rolling down the steps—and Theo hurrying past it.

Her heart leaped. You came to rescue me. I knew you would.

“Selene,” he gasped, rushing toward her with outstretched arms. Her scholar, always so logical, so practical, looked like a man in a dream, his eyes wide and mouth open in reverent awe. “I prayed, and you—”

He didn’t bother finishing the sentence. His lips crushed hers; his hands threaded through her bloody hair. Every fiber of her ached to step into his embrace, to feel the curve of his shoulder blades beneath her palms. Her body hummed in response to his touch. Her mouth softened, opened. He thinks I was really dead, she realized, but his lips soothed away her tremor of foreboding. I can explain it all when we get out of here. We will have time.

She extricated herself gently, pushing against Theo’s chest with her bound hands. Then she noticed Scooter for the first time. “The only way I’m going to forgive you for letting Theo come here,” she snapped at him, “is if you get us all out alive.”

Her half brother gave her a sheepish grin and brandished his lock picks. “Sorry I didn’t follow your orders. Handcuffs first. Recriminations later.”

Theo looked from Selene to Scooter and back. “Your orders …” In an instant, the joy on his face crumbled into confusion. Then horror. Selene’s dream crumbled along with it. “You …”

He stood only three feet away now, but she felt as if a mile-wide chasm had cracked open between them. Blood from her lips had stained his. He looked, in every way, like a man who’d just had his teeth knocked out. “You weren’t …”

“Theo …” she began, the word desperate, beseeching. Not now, her mind screamed. Don’t make me face this now.

He stumbled backward, repulsed. His shoes slipped on the bloody stones, and he sat down hard. She could hear his teeth clang together with a hollow echo, but his eyes never left her face. “Six months. Six months. I almost died.”

“Theo …” she tried again. A broken record, stuck on the same useless groove. After so many months of silent conversation, now she had nothing to say.

Footsteps in the hallway. The guards returning. Too soon. She jerked toward Scooter. “Too late for me. Just get him out of here,” she hissed. Her half brother nodded, scooping up Hades’ helm just as the door swung open behind her.

Theo tried to rise, but Scooter dashed forward with all his preternatural speed and slammed the helm over his head. They winked out of sight before the guards entered the room.

Selene turned calmly toward her captors, trying in vain to erase the shock written across her features. Six of them now, not four, and one carried an armload of iron chains. They clearly weren’t taking any more chances with her—the barrels of five assault rifles rose toward her face as the men fanned out into tactical positions around the room.

The Heliodromus strode forward. “You look distressed, Diana. Finally realizing your fate?”

His eyes flicked around the chamber, and Selene held her breath, waiting for him to notice something amiss, some hint that Theo and Scooter stood close by. Instead, he simply smiled, his nostrils raised as if enjoying the scent of decay. “This morning’s blood libation worked. You are both Huntress and Great Mother now. Glorious, no? We will send your spirit to the one true God—you will make a most powerful sacrifice.”

He ordered the other men to secure her. One grabbed her arms, another held her legs in place, while a third wrapped a heavy chain around her ankles. Together, they hoisted her into the air like a log. She let them do it all; if they fired their weapons in this room, Theo would surely be hit.

“And you know the only way to send your spirit heavenward, don’t you, Pretender?” The Heliodromus took a step closer to her, resting a finger on her chin to tilt her face toward him. “On a pillar of smoke.”

Selene heard Theo’s intake of breath. He’s going to scream, she realized, and they’ll find him.

So she screamed first.

They hauled her chained body out the door. Writhing, shouting, sobbing. It took the undivided attention of all the men to handle her. None of them even heard the stifled shout, the crash of wrestling bodies, the tortured moan issuing from the seemingly empty room behind them.