Holy FUCK, Theo cursed in silent agony as he tried to yank himself free of the arrow pinning his arm to the dead Heliodromus. The pain of his movement nearly blinded him; he gave up on stoicism and shouted aloud. His cry reverberated in the sudden silence. The gunshots had stopped, the syndexioi all fallen. Even the blaring alarm had ceased. There was no one left to summon.
Selene dropped to her knees beside him and reached for the arrow’s feathers. Black feathers, he saw now. One of her nightmarish, magical, leaf-bladed arrows.
“No, don’t—” he began, envisioning her dragging the arrowhead back through his arm. But she merely steadied the shaft with one hand and pulled the dead Heliodromus away with the other. The arrow stayed in Theo’s arm, but at least he was free of the corpse.
“I didn’t mean to …” she started, her cheeks flushed.
“You’ve done worse,” he said through gritted teeth. In fact, accidentally shooting him was about the least horrible thing she’d done to him all day.
She flinched but didn’t bother defending herself. She reached for the bloodstained arrowhead protruding from the bottom of his arm and tried to snap it off, but even she couldn’t break solid metal.
Scooter huffed in dismay. “Those arrows are a little too good.”
“Flint!” Selene called, her voice rising in desperation. “Can you break this?”
The Smith emerged, somehow managing to support Zeus with his shoulder while using Mars’s spear and Poseidon’s trident as crutches.
“I don’t have my hammer. I left it back in our apartment.”
It was Scooter who strode forward, holding one of Apollo’s gruesome silver plague arrows.
“Hey!” Theo backed away.
“Hold still,” Scooter demanded. He held the gold shaft in one hand and sliced the head away with the silver blade.
Selene drew the shaft up and out by the fletching so fast that Theo barely had time to shout with pain. She ripped the hem from her already dangerously short T-shirt and bound his arm with expert speed. Theo could only shake his head at her obvious concern. “Now you’re worried about me.”
Scooter had the nerve to laugh. “Let’s just be glad that wasn’t one of Apollo’s plague arrows. You’d be bleeding from more than your arm.”
Selene rounded on him, but her father put out a hand to stop her.
“Please,” he begged weakly. Between the half-shattered glasses and his spindly bare legs, Zeus looked like an escapee from an especially barbaric nursing home. Nothing like what Theo had expected from the King of the Gods. Then again, he was getting used to disillusionment.
“There’s no time to fight each other,” Zeus warned. “With all the noise, the other Swiss Guards might finally find this place. We have to hurry.”
“The Makarites will use the helmet to take us up,” Flint said. “We’ll go with him one or two at a time, so we remain invisible.”
“Good idea.” Scooter holstered his pistols. Neither he nor his stepbrother, Theo noticed, bothered to ask if the Makarites wanted to help. As usual.
Scooter hefted Saturn’s limp form back onto his shoulder. “We should use the necropolis exit. It’ll still be empty this time of night.”
I should just leave, Theo thought. Let them figure out their own escape. But for all the other Athanatoi’s treachery, Zeus had done nothing wrong. After everything the old man had been through, he deserved help.
And so, despite his bleeding arm, throbbing wrist, and vomit-covered bare chest, Theo made two trips back through the tunnel, into the necropolis, then out into Saint Peter’s Square with a pair of gods in tow. First Scooter, carrying Saturn’s limp body, then Flint and Zeus. Finally, only Selene remained.
She slipped her hand into the crook of Theo’s good elbow. She wore a dead syndexios’s pants and boots and held out a stolen shirt. “I don’t know what happened to your other one.”
He started to answer, then thought better of it. How could he explain that he’d wrapped it around his hands so he could pull her still-smoldering body from the pyre? He hadn’t had the stomach to put the ash-smeared shirt back on. He accepted the new shirt from her without a word.
As soon as he donned the helm, he couldn’t see her anymore. For that, he was grateful. If he had to look at her for another minute, he might break apart. When her charred body had shed its black crust and Selene had emerged, whole and alive, on the mithraeum floor, Theo had never felt so relieved. Or so angry. The two emotions warred within him so fiercely that he felt as if he’d injected himself again: The venom’s cold chill pumped through his veins, surging ever closer to his heart, threatening to stop its beating. This time for good.
As they walked awkwardly through the necropolis, the cypress smell of her surrounded him. Her unseen hand tightened on his flesh; it was all too familiar, this sensation of being dragged down by her invisible presence. He’d felt that way for half a year.
They emerged into Saint Peter’s Square, where the other Athanatoi stood waiting for them in the shadows of the colonnade, and he felt Selene stop. Her disembodied voice whispered so close to his ear it sounded like his conscience.
“Theo …”
He’d never heard her plead like that. He stopped walking and waited for her to go on. Yet she said nothing more. As usual, she wanted him to do the talking. He had no intention of fulfilling that request.
“Let’s go,” he said gruffly, pulling her toward the others.
Only once they were hidden by the columns did he remove the helmet. He caught Selene staring at the gold and silver arrows in her quiver, many of them bright with the syndexioi’s blood—one broken shaft stained with his own. Narrow red lines striped her cheek from the Heliodromus’s cat-o’-nine-tails. She looked haggard, dismayed, exhausted.
Zeus looked even worse, holding his hands out as if to steady himself on a rolling ship. A second later, his face turned the color of clay. His eyes rolled back in his skull. Scooter grabbed him before he could slam into the ground.
Selene rushed to her father’s side. “He’s still breathing.”
A scowl carved a deep trough between her brows. Theo understood—he still remembered every nuance of his lover’s expressions. She wasn’t angry at her father, just at herself for not protecting him better.
“We need to get him somewhere to recover,” she insisted. He could hear the unspoken entreaty in her voice: And you will come, too, won’t you?
“I’m glad you’re both safe,” he managed. That much was true. He looked down at the dark helm in his hands. Its cold surface pulled the water from the humid air. The black metal wept.
He wanted to give the helm back to the gods, but to what end? Faded as they were, they couldn’t use it. Selene might be able to command her twin’s terrible arrows, but she couldn’t wield the helm of Hades, the Unseen One, any more than she could her father’s thunderbolt.
Regretfully, he placed the dark helmet back in his bag beside Orion’s sword. He would keep both for now, but he didn’t intend to ever wield them again. Too many men had already died, victims to the gods’ manipulations. He wanted no part of further killing.
“Theo—” Scooter called after him as he walked away.
“Whatever you’re going to ask of me,” he interrupted, not bothering to turn around, “the answer is no.”
Let the gods fight their own battles. I’m done with heroism.