Chapter 22

PROTOGONOS

With Scooter’s hand pressed against his mouth and nose and his arm squeezing the air from his lungs, Theo couldn’t breathe. Part of him was happy enough to suffocate so he wouldn’t have to face the truth. The other part of him wanted to use all his growing rage to beat Scooter senseless. But mostly, he wanted to race after Selene. To save her. To scream at her. Both.

Theo slammed an elbow into the god’s invisible stomach and wrenched from his grip. Scooter burst into view, his face drenched in sweat, looking more panicked than guilty.

“They were armed,” he insisted. “They would’ve killed you.”

A thousand thoughts whirled through Theo’s head. He lied to me. She lied to me. All my grief, my suffering. All a lie. But one thought pierced through the cacophony like a siren’s wail.

They’re going to burn her alive.

And though the voices in his head cried out in furious warning, he felt like a tractor trailer without brakes, unable to stop hurtling toward her even when he knew he should leap to safety. Selene was about to be taken away from him. Again. And he couldn’t let that happen.

He scrambled to his feet and ripped open his satchel, grabbing Orion’s sword.

“Stop!” Scooter cried, his eyes scanning the empty air before him. “I can hear you pulling out that sword. You can’t go after her, Theo! We have to find Zeus and then get the hell out.”

“Zeus?”

“Saturn’s got him trapped down here.”

“Something else you didn’t tell me,” Theo snarled. “Afraid I’d get too close to the truth, huh? Afraid I’d realize Selene was alive this whole time?”

“She hid herself to protect you.”

“Stop it. Stop lying, Trickster.” He made for the door.

“I told her I’d get you out!” Scooter begged.

Theo spun toward him. “Now you’re a man of your word?” He hefted his sword, resisting the urge to slam it through Scooter’s chest. “Come or don’t. But don’t get in my way.”

The syndexioi carried Selene into a sanctuary far larger than any she’d seen in her hunt through Rome. Feasting platforms decorated with intricate mosaics of stars and planets lined the wide aisle. Overhead, darkness shrouded a ceiling too high to see. A massive sculptural tauroctony sat beside the altar, Mithras in his seven-rayed crown proudly straddling his bull. Beside the altar stood Saturn in his crisp white robes, tapping the handle of his sickle in his palm. And on the altar itself …

A careful pyramid of wooden logs surrounding a tall stake. The reek of lighter fluid burned her throat.

The Heliodromus and his men dragged her forward and onto the pyre. They looped more heavy iron chains around her waist and chest, securing her to the stake. Saturn hadn’t gagged her, no doubt wanting to hear her scream again. Selene refused to give him the satisfaction.

A wheezing music began, the strange, atonal melody a counterpoint to her own sucking breaths. A hydraulis, she saw now. An ancient Roman water organ.

A veiled syndexios crouched beside the instrument, pumping water into its base, while another dressed in a crow’s mask sat at the keyboard. Copper tubes rose from short to tall, like the reeds in Hermes’ shrill pipes. The song that emerged was no shepherd’s tune, but a dirge for Rhea, the Mother of Gods. A dirge for her.

Yet even then, even when the Heliodromus struck the match and laid it against the wood, when the smoke curled like blood in water and the rising flames licked at the toes of her boots, Selene didn’t really believe she would die. After all, she never had.

“You think you’re still an Athanatos.” Saturn raised his voice above the gasping music and the crackling flames. “But this is no wound, no bruise, no broken bone. There will be no rushing river to heal your flesh. Not when there’s no flesh left.”

He gestured for his syndexioi to join the crow-masked musician in song. The hymn to the Magna Mater grew louder, more insistent, rising along with the flames.

The first finger of fire reached the cuff of Selene’s pants. The fabric smoldered for a moment before igniting. She kicked her feet against the chains, but the jerky motion only fanned the blaze. The fire reached her skin an instant later, the sensation like a thousand bees stinging her ankles one after the other. She still didn’t scream.

Then the door at the end of the aisle opened, and two men dressed as Roman legionaries appeared, dragging Flint between them.

He screamed in her stead.

A ragged, desperate bellow as his bloodshot eyes met hers. He struggled in vain against the thick iron binding his arms to his chest and crisscrossing his pitiful, withered legs. The veins popped on his forehead, his face flushed as red as the flames of his forge. They threw him to the ground like a sack of flour. He lay prone, craning his neck to see her better, even as the tears coursed down his cheeks and into his beard.

Saturn looked down at his grandson, his mouth twisted in distaste. “The next time I command you to fashion weapons for my army, you won’t refuse. You see now what happens to those who try to stand in my way.”

Flint kept hollering, his words an unintelligible roar of fury and anguish.

Saturn shook his head and motioned for the Heliodromus to gag the Smith.

Forgive me, Selene wanted to beg as she watched Flint spasm beneath his chains. Her friend, her stepbrother, and now somehow her grandson, too. Forgive me for dragging you into this. The gag cut the soft flesh of his mouth, and his strangled cries soon flecked the cloth with red. For not loving you enough.

But the smoke poured thickly down her throat, and when she opened her mouth she could only cough.

She lost sensation in her ankles as the flames seared her nerves; the pain migrated to her calves, her thighs instead. She couldn’t see the devastation—black smoke billowed before her eyes. She tried to hold her breath, then gasped, sucking in superheated air and smoke and the flying ashes of her own flesh before coughing it all out again.

Now she’d lost all sensation in her legs, but as the heated air rose, it blistered the skin of her arms, her chest, her face—an agony far more painful than the flames’ kiss.

I’m going to die. And I’m not ready. Three thousand years and I’m not ready.

There was still so much left to do. She would never free her father. Never see Saturn brought to justice.

Never hold Theo again.

I thought I’d have time.

She couldn’t see the smoke anymore. Her eyes were open, but the cone of flame had scorched her corneas. She reached inside herself—Rhea, Grandmother, Cybele, Great Mother! she screamed silently to the presence in her heart. If you’re there … rise up! Come with your charging lionesses and your queen’s scepter. Lend me your strength to rip from these chains! Please … please help me … help me …

But Rhea was as powerless now as she’d been the first time mortals burned her at the stake in a Prussian village so many centuries before. June had said her mother lived for days after her incineration … I won’t have days, Selene knew. I have minutes.

She opened her mouth to shout a final curse at Saturn, but no oxygen remained to fill her lungs. She sank against the chains, her leg muscles no longer thick enough to hold her weight. A mortal would have died long before, but her semi-divine body still clung to life.

She remembered her own mother, Leto, whose death had come so peacefully in the arms of her children. Let me have the strength to go as gracefully as she did, Selene begged.

As her mind slipped into unconsciousness, she clung to one final prayer. Perhaps I will see those I love again.

I’m coming, Apollo.

Theo raced down the hallway in Hades’ helm, barely aware of Scooter still clinging to his arm. He couldn’t think about the last six months or even the last six minutes—only about finding Selene before it was too late.

He knew the Host would take her to the main sanctuary—the only place sacred enough for such a sacrifice. But where was it? He dashed down one branching corridor, then another, falling deeper and deeper into the underground maze. He tried each door. Some opened onto training rooms and storage closets or crumbled chambers of brick unused for centuries. Many more were sealed; he didn’t leave Scooter time to pick the locks. Why bother locking the door of the sanctuary if all the Mithraists were inside?

He ran until his lungs burned and then ran some more. Finally, he stumbled to a halt, panting hard. Stop. Think, he commanded himself. Mithraists believed in orbits: celestial spheres whirling in their prescribed paths, the equinoxes shifting with regular precision, the solstices cycling in perfect symmetry. If the sanctuary dedicated to the Great Mother lay on one end of their complex, then the mithraeum, dedicated to the Father, must lie on the other.

“The Phyrgianum was …” he began, turning in a slow circle.

“That way.” Scooter pointed to the far wall.

“You sure?”

“God of Travelers, remember? Great sense of direction.”

“Then take me to the exact opposite end of the complex—as far from the Phrygianum as we can get.”

Scooter didn’t question him, just veered right, then left. Theo followed, barely keeping up.

After a mind-boggling series of turns, they stood before a wide door flanked by two statues: torchbearers wearing Phrygian caps. One carried his flame upward; the other stood with his pointed at the ground. Cautes and Cautopates, the Mithraic minor divinities symbolizing Birth and Death.

They could hear the crackle of flames on the other side.

Theo rushed toward the door, his invisible sword outstretched.

It opened before he reached it, and a tidal wave of heavily armed syndexioi poured out, dressed in robes of red and black, some masked like lions or crows, others veiled, still others in legionaries’ armor. Saturn walked in their midst, but Theo paid the scarred old man no mind. Only one thing mattered.

With Scooter invisible at his side, Theo slipped into the room just before the heavy door slammed shut.

He froze.

A gentle rain fell from overhead sprinklers onto a tall pyre. The water doused the flames to embers and raised a thick column of smoke that billowed toward an unseen vent. Still Theo found himself choking, gagging, as if he stood within the pyre’s heat.

He could just make out the figure tied to the stake. A blackened corpse, her head thrown back, her hair burnt away, her familiar square jaw clenched shut. Her long arms looked like the remnants of a proud tree after a raging forest fire. Her eyes were hollow pits. The chains across her waist and chest glowed yellow hot. As he watched, the heavy iron links dragged a long sheet of charred flesh from her body; it fell into the embers in a torrent of sparks.

Theo couldn’t move. Scooter slumped against him, silent. He could feel the furious racing of the god’s heart against his own spine. They stood together like supplicants at a shrine, praying that they might unsee the epiphany before them.

A ragged moan floated toward them over the sprinkler’s hiss.

Flint lay bound and gagged on one of the mithraeum’s wide feasting platforms, staring at the smoldering pyre with bright red eyes, his beard flecked with mucus and foam.

The sight of the Smith broke Theo from his stupor. He pulled away from Scooter, dropped the helm unceremoniously to the ground, and walked to the pyre. Ignoring Flint’s confused moans, he clambered onto the still-smoking logs, heedless of the smell of melting rubber rising from the soles of his shoes.

With a single swipe of Orion’s divine sword, he cleaved the last of the iron chains in half, then sliced through the handcuffs that bound his former lover to the stake. Her body fell toward him.

He grabbed her shoulders—her flesh sizzled against his. He pulled off his shirt and wrapped it around her waist so he could pick her up. She was light. So light. Embers and ashes and air. He knew as he carried her off the altar that pieces of her were floating away, and he didn’t let himself look.

When he reached the mithraeum’s aisle, he laid her down gently. Scooter, face drawn and coated in sweat, had removed his stepbrother’s gag and unlocked the chains with his picks.

Flint didn’t speak; he bellowed. Animalistic and hoarse and full of volcanic wrath. He crawled across the platform, dragging his withered legs behind him, then tumbled into the aisle beside the corpse. He grabbed one blackened hand, his flesh hissing—he only held on tighter, even as a thin coil of smoke rose between his palm and hers. He lifted crimson eyes to Theo.

“I couldn’t stop it,” he panted. “I’m the God of Fire. And I couldn’t stop it.”

Theo had no words for Flint. Even Scooter sat silent, frozen, his legs dangling over the platform’s lip, his eyes trained on this black mannequin. This ravaged statue. This cracked thing that could not possibly be Selene.

When Theo had lain in a hospital bed after the battle on the Statue of Liberty, Scooter had told him that he felt Selene pass from the world. The tides moved, the Trickster had lied. The moon cried.

And now? When she was truly gone? Where was the ripple effect on the world? We’re too far underground, Theo realized. There is no moon here to weep, no animals to mourn. She’s simply gone. As if she never existed. Her death no more momentous than that of a mortal woman. Even thinking the words felt like a betrayal.

“No,” he said aloud. “No. She’s not gone for good.”

He cast a quick glance around the mithraeum. Large frescoed panels of snakes and starry night skies hung on the walls, their crumbling borders showing where they’d been ripped from their original locations. Slabs of mosaics displaying the attributes of different Mithraic ranks covered the aisle. A hydraulis sat in the corner, ready to play hymns worthy of Orpheus himself. In a niche beside the tauroctony stood a statue of Aion, the lion-headed god with his crossed keys, promising entrance to another world.

“Mithras, Orphism, Birth, and Death—it’s all here,” Theo murmured. “This is the place.”

“The place for what?” Flint demanded.

“Theo …” Scooter began warily.

“This is why I’m here.” Theo fumbled through his bag. The moment he pulled out the case of syringes, Scooter hopped down into the aisle, ready to stop him. “If you want Selene back,” Theo ordered Flint, “stop him.”

Flint obeyed. He snatched Scooter’s ankles, tumbling the slighter man to the ground, and pinned him in place with a massive forearm and a deeply terrifying scowl.

“What’s your plan?” Flint rasped.

“The same one I had when I came down here. Nothing’s changed,” Theo answered. Everything’s changed, the voice in his head screamed in protest. But he kept talking, drowning out his own doubts. “I’m going to inject myself with the concentrated venom of a Greek sand viper.”

“No,” Scooter wheezed from beneath Flint’s arm. “Don’t.”

“Snakes have always held the secrets of the Underworld,” Theo went on, willing his voice to stop shaking. “They understand the mysteries of death and healing. Dennis says they hold the boundaries of Time itself.” He raised his eyes to Flint. “They’ll take me into the Underworld.”

Flint nodded silently. All the jealousy that had once flared between them was now extinguished by their determination to bring back the woman they’d both loved.

Scooter groaned. “This is absurd! If you’re dead, how is that supposed to help Selene?”

“I’m not going to stay dead,” Theo shot back. “Give me five minutes and then inject the antidote in the second syringe, okay?”

He retrieved a container of raw beef heart, procured from a local butcher. “I’m using the Orphic ritual.” He unwrapped the makeshift bandage from around his sliced wrist and let a few drops of his own blood mix with the bull’s. He kept talking, kept explaining, like a lecturer instructing his class, the familiar cadences lulling his rising fear into submission. “I’ll recite the Orphic hymn on the way in to guide my steps. And I’ll have Dionysus’s instructions once I’m there.” He held out the dripping heart to Flint. “But right before you use the antidote, eat this. The Orphics believe consuming the heart can join spirit to flesh once more. It’ll help me—and Selene—get back.”

“I told you I’m not going to let you kill yourself,” Scooter nearly shouted, shoving against Flint’s weight.

In response, Theo handed Orion’s sword to the Smith, who pressed it against his stepbrother’s throat.

“Oh, come on,” Scooter scoffed. “You’re not going to kill me.”

“Try me,” Flint growled.

“But it’s not going to work. And we’re wasting time. It’s too late for Selene, but not for Father.”

Flint shifted the sword, scraping it against Scooter’s bobbing Adam’s apple. “Not until we get her.”

“But—”

“Orpheus almost got his love back,” Theo interrupted. “And Dionysus rescued his mother. I can do this.”

He produced a long match and a small dish of myrrh. The Orphic texts were very clear on the importance of using the correct incense to accompany different incantations. He lit the balls of aromatic resin, grateful that his hands had almost stopped shaking, then removed the first syringe from its case.

“Do it, Schultz.” Flint’s voice carried the rumble of a god’s command. “Bring her back to us.”

But Theo barely heard him; he was too focused on the needle resting on his palm. He pulled the stolen ivy leaf pendant from beneath his shirt. The faint Greek characters on the surface were still indistinguishable. There was nothing he could do about that now.

He clasped the pendant. He knelt before the statue of Aion.

In the background, he could hear Scooter and Flint shouting at each other, but he didn’t pay attention to their words. The thick scent of incense made him want to sneeze.

He focused his energy on Aion, on the snake that coiled from his lion head to his bare feet, the guardian of the mysteries of life and death. He looked to the Roman keys that would open the locked precincts of the Underworld—and then allow him to leave again. In careful Greek, he began a hymn to the proto-god. He’d altered the words, but he sang the melody he’d learned from Dennis—the same one Orpheus himself first played upon his lyre as he walked through the Underworld, seeking passage back to life.

Upon lion-headed Protogonos, I call:

You fly through the world on waving pinions,

All-spreading splendor, pure and holy light,

Dispelling darkness from our darkened eyes.

For this I call you Aion, Unbounded Time.

Shine your joyful light upon my holy sacrifice.

With Scooter’s desperate protests loud in his ears, Theo slid the needle into his vein and pressed the plunger.

Nothing happened at first, only a sharp ache in his arm. Then nausea, rushing from gut to throat in a convulsive wave. He heaved out the airplane breakfast, the morning coffee, and what looked like his stomach lining, the yellow liquid dripping through lips suddenly thick and swollen. Dimly, he watched Scooter twist away from Flint’s blade and crawl forward. But Flint slammed the sword’s pommel against the other god’s head, stunning him into submission.

“It’s too late, Scooter,” Theo slurred as the corners of his vision turned black. His heart felt strange in his chest. As if it pumped molasses through his veins, sluggish and dark. He slumped to his side on a feasting platform, pillowing his head on both arms—one swollen and throbbing, the other slick with cold sweat.

His throat tightened. His tongue lay like a fat, dead snake against his teeth. The sand viper crawled inside my mouth … he suddenly knew. He willed his heart to panic, to race. It squeezed out a single beat instead.

He waited for it to beat again, suspended in agonized anticipation.

It didn’t.