An old man stood in the shadows of one of the Pantheon’s wall niches, a pitiful simulacrum of the statues that once paid him homage.
Theo wanted to just keep walking. Leave the temple and all its gods behind. Yet something about Zeus’s faded majesty compelled him to pause. He felt, somehow, that he owed at least that much to his former self, the one who’d dreamed of coming face-to-face with the deities he’d read about his entire life. The eager classicist who gave a shit what the King of the Gods might do or say.
Zeus walked slowly forward. In a Flint-sized trench coat, he looked even smaller than he had wrapped in his blanket from the mithraeum. He still smelled faintly of urine, and his half-shattered glasses made him seem cyclopean, blinking at the world through one enormous, visible eye.
He held out a hand. His fingers, despite the swollen knuckles, remained half again as long as a normal man’s—the sort of hand that once needed a lightning bolt to look complete. Theo took it warily.
Selene got to her feet. “Father, what are you doing out of bed? You should be resting.”
“I asked the Messenger to bring me here,” he replied. “I needed to speak to Theodore.” Still holding Theo’s hand, he walked slowly to the center of the room and cricked his skinny neck awkwardly to look up through the oculus. He stood that way for a long time before he finally spoke. “You see stars up there. I see my half-mortal children—the heroes who once walked the earth.” He squinted nearsightedly at Theo. “You are not my child. Yet you are as much a Makarites as Hercules or Perseus.”
“Not anymore.”
Zeus made a sound between a chuckle and a cough. “It’s not something you can turn off.”
“Well, I can damn well ignore it.”
“For my sake, I’m glad you haven’t.” Zeus smiled like a doting grandfather reveling in his grandson’s report card. “It takes a Makarites to wield my brother Hades’ helmet. I hear you earned the title of ‘Blessed One’ through study. Now you earn it over and over through heroism.”
Pin a gold star on my chest and let me get the hell out of here. “I’ve already booked a flight back to New York. It leaves tomorrow morning, and I plan to be on it. Blessed One or not, I’m going home.”
“I have one more favor to ask of you.”
He needs me to find a Golden Fleece or battle a Minotaur or cut off my own balls, Theo thought. He wanted to protest that he’d done the gods enough favors for his one mortal lifetime, but he waited, curious.
“Saturn must be punished for what he did to my family.”
Theo felt mildly queasy. “Look, I know my opinion here doesn’t matter, and I certainly want to make sure he can’t hurt anyone again, but I’m not exactly pro–death penalty. Selene said you’ve got him locked up, and he’s still passed out. If you’re asking me to use Orion’s sword to execute him while he’s unconscious—”
“No, no.” Zeus looked flustered. “He’s spent centuries with his resurrection cult. Who’s to say there aren’t more syndexioi somewhere else who would find a way to bring back their Pater? No, there’s only one way to control my father. One prison that only we have the keys to.” He clasped his gnarled hands together like a man in prayer and stared at Theo intently. “Tartarus.”
Theo couldn’t stop himself from gaping. He wondered if Zeus’s mind had grown as feeble as his body. “You mean the mythological pit where you cast your father the last time you deposed him? That Tartarus? The one full of the terrifying monsters you conquered in the Gigantomachy?”
Zeus nodded, the slight tremor in his chin making a mockery of his grave expression.
“But, Father,” Selene interjected. “Surely Tartarus doesn’t exist anymore. If it ever did.”
“Of course it existed.”
“But so much of our past is just tales the poets told,” she pressed. “If Tartarus is one of those—”
“Has your mind grown so narrow?” he said sharply, spit flecking his lips.
“Has yours grown so confused?” she shot back.
Zeus thrust out his skinny chest in a pathetic attempt at pride. He pushed back the lapels of his trench coat to display the golden tassels of Athena’s aegis. “Do Gorgons walk the streets of Rome today? No! And yet Medusa’s face screams from this cloak. You deny that?”
“No,” Selene admitted stiffly.
“The arrows from the armory—they defy this world’s laws.”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t talk back to me.” He sounded like a senile old man, snarling at his well-meaning nurse. Yet the force of his own convictions gave his wheezing voice a new resonance. “We can open a portal to Tartarus. We can cast Saturn through.”
“Uh …” Theo had to ask. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Men still worship wine and thievery and the ways of the flesh—many of my children will stay strong for decades, centuries even. But the Sky?” Zeus looked up through the oculus once more, a grim smile on his face. “Mankind does not worship it, doesn’t even notice it. All those stars, planets, the immensity of the universe. It might as well be”—he paused, as if searching for a vile enough description—“ wallpaper.” He sniffed, a sound more of illness than scorn.
“As for my other domains—fate, kingship—no one believes in them anymore.” He looked down at his own shaking hands, the constant reminder of how old he’d grown through man’s disdain. “For such a mighty task, we’ll need all the gods, strong and weak alike. Only a united pantheon can finally defeat the Titan who has always been a cancer, eating away at what little worship remains.” He linked his fingers together as if to stop their trembling. “With him out of the world, we may regain what we have lost.”
“You’re saying Saturn’s death will bring us strength.” Selene took a step back. Theo couldn’t tell whether she felt disgust at her father’s ideas or at his wretchedness. “No. We can’t sacrifice him for that. That’s what he tried to do to us. To use our deaths to become invincible. I won’t become that, Father. None of us should.”
“Have you listened?” he demanded, his voice cracking. “We do not sacrifice Saturn—we just open the door to Tartarus and cast him in.” He flung an arm forward weakly, a parody of a hurled thunderbolt. “And we do it together, our strength combined as one. Tartarus is a place of old powers and older magic. A place full of monsters and gods. When we open it once more, some of that magic will seep out—a divine wind, a whisper of pneuma. We will be there to breathe it in, and it will bring strength to us all.” He raised a gnarled hand to stop Selene’s protests before they could begin. “We won’t be invincible or omnipotent—such power is impossible in this world—but we will not be so old, nor so weak. Look at me! I have dreamed my own death, child.” His voice slipped from demanding to pleading. “Even without Saturn’s sickle to cut me asunder, I am not long for this world. Six months, perhaps. A year. Two at most. And every day I grow weaker.”
Selene’s face crumpled. Her mouth worked in wordless protest as her father went on. “If I do nothing, I will slip away into eternal sleep, just as your mother did. But if we go to Olympus …” A racking cough cut short his words. Selene stepped forward, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
Zeus held his hands out to his daughter. “Do not deny me this chance, however slim it may seem.”
“But it makes no sense,” she said gently. “How would you even open Tartarus in the first place?”
“With a Great Gathering on Mount Olympus, where we were always strongest.” He turned to Theo. “You must be there, Makarites, to bear witness to this conclave. Well you know that our stories don’t survive unless there are poets to tell them. You may not be able to share the tale with the world, but it will live on in your mind—your very presence will give the Gathering power. That is the favor I would ask.”
“That sounds …” Theo wasn’t sure what to say. Moments before, he’d decided he wanted nothing to do with any of them. But perhaps Zeus still retained some power as the Leader of the Fates, because Theo suddenly realized that he’d decided to go as soon as the words “Great Gathering” crossed the old man’s lips. “It sounds like something I should see.”
“Theo, it’s insane to—” Selene began.
“Any more insane than thinking I could kill myself, stroll into the afterlife, take you by the hand, and stroll back out?” he retorted. “Honestly, my bar for crazy has gotten pretty damn high.”
Selene’s expression of dismay was barely perceptible; Theo noticed it anyway.
Zeus clapped his hands, as if it was all settled. “Good. There’s a flight at noon tomorrow to Athens.” He no longer sounded senile. “Theodore will take it. I will stay here one more day, gathering the other Athanatoi.”
“Wait,” Selene began. “We should think about this first.”
“No. We must act quickly—the Wily One cannot be held for long.” He threw back his stooped shoulders. “In two days’ time, we will stand together: Artemis and Hephaestus, Dionysus and Hermes, Aphrodite, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter, and Hestia.”
“Um. Didn’t you miss one?” Theo asked.
“Mars is dead,” Zeus said solemnly.
“But what about Athena?” When he was a child, the gray-eyed Goddess of Wisdom had always been his favorite deity. She was not only the patron of scholars but also a goddess of crafts, creativity, and justified war. To Theo, she embodied the best of human civilization.
Zeus’s posture deflated. “That daughter is lost to me.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Theo interjected. “But it seems like someone always knows where the Athanatoi are hiding.”
“Not Athena,” Zeus insisted. “She was always the smartest of my children. Even Hermes, Messenger of the Gods, cannot find her. If she wants to stay hidden, she will.”
“But you said the whole pantheon had to be there to open Tartarus,” Selene said, her brow furrowed. “Will it work without her?”
“We will have to hope so.” Zeus cleared his throat wetly. “Now, we have much to do. Much to plan.”
“What can I do?” Selene asked. “I still don’t see how it will work, but I’ll do whatever I can. Let me help.”
“No, no.” Zeus patted her on the shoulder like a master reassuring his dog. “You saw what happened in the mithraeum. You came all that way and got yourself killed, my reckless child. We must both rest. Recover from our ordeal. We need to be strong for Olympus.”
He turned away and shuffled slowly out of the temple. Selene stood like a statue. Zeus had not offered his daughter a single word of thanks or praise for coming to rescue him. Theo had never seen her so casually dismissed by anyone. He thought that she would shout something biting at her father’s back. Or that her face would turn to stone as she closed her heart to him. Instead, she blinked back tears. Her shoulders slumped. The fierce Huntress seemed little more than a chastened child.
Theo felt an overwhelming desire to go to her, an electric pulse that spurred his feet to move and his arms to open wide, to assure her that her father didn’t know what he was talking about.
He swallowed back the words. Selene would be just fine without his comfort—and it was about time he was fine without hers.
I will see her on Olympus, he resolved, bending down to gather his satchel and purposely avoiding her gaze.
Then I will never see her again.