Zeus stood on the rocky summit with a self-satisfied smile, watching as his siblings discarded their frailty as easily as spent rags. Once more, they clothed themselves in the glory of godhood.
Selene wheeled toward him, her fury tempered by a sudden hope. “Step through the portal and you’re the omnipotent King of the Gods again, right?” she demanded. “So go in there and use your power to bring Theo back to life.”
“No need,” a familiar voice croaked.
She spun back to the portal. Theo’s arm stuck out from among the barley stalks.
Scooter clapped his hands. “I underestimated you, my friend!”
The lightning bolt, no longer a blaring white column of energy but just a mass of twisted metal, rolled free of Theo’s grasp to rest among the grain. He stretched his arm beyond the portal’s boundary, out of one world and into another. His fingers floated just above the rocky ground of Olympus, reaching for Selene.
She rushed forward to grab his hand. The portal hovered an inch from her face; she could feel the heated air, smell the rich soil, hear the cicadas hum. She dragged Theo out of ancient Athens and into her embrace. He was solid and real, and although he smelled of electricity and his fair hair waved in a wild halo, he seemed unhurt. She threw an arm beneath his shoulders and helped him stagger away from the field.
“I thought—” she began.
“I know,” he finished. “But I’m a Makarites. If Theseus could defeat the Minotaur and Hercules could survive twelve labors, I can get past a little bad weather.” He laughed shortly, then caught her gaze in his. “I stood there burning up from the inside, and I made a choice. I’m not leaving this world again without a damn good reason. At least not while you’re still in it.”
His green eyes were warm. Finally, the answer she’d been waiting for since the moment in the Phrygianum. She tightened her arm around him, desperate to finally restart their life together.
Theo looked over her shoulder at the barley field. “Now will someone explain to me what’s going on?”
Cora giggled. “Isn’t it obvious? That’s home in there. And I’m going back to it.” She took an eager step toward the open portal.
Selene disentangled herself from Theo, who swayed but remained upright, and grabbed the older woman’s elbow before she could pass through. “Wait! We don’t know what—”
“I know what I see!” Cora answered, trying in vain to wrench her arm from Selene’s iron grip.
Selene turned to Zeus, still refusing to let go of her cousin. “But what about Tartarus? What about Saturn?”
At the sound of his name, the grain shivered, and the God of Time struggled upright. Unlike the others, Saturn hadn’t regained his youth. Burns no longer marred his face, but the crossed scars on his stomach remained, and the golden chains still bound his wrists.
Cora waved away Selene’s protests. “Look at him. He’s not Saturn anymore, beloved god of the Mithraists and Romans. He’s just Kronos, the Titan that our parents overthrew. He can’t hurt us.”
As if to prove Cora’s point, Poseidon and Hestia grabbed the old man before he could take a step.
This time, when Cora yanked her arm away, Selene let her go.
As she entered the field, Cora’s hair tumbled free in soft blond waves; her round cheeks flushed with youth. She was unspeakably beautiful. Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her face to wet her smiling lips.
“Mother!” she cried, stretching out her arms to Demeter. “Do you see? Hurry! Hurry!”
Demeter took a cautious step forward, her face full of longing as she stared at her newly youthful daughter. Yet she paused and looked out over the mountaintops, her gaze resting for a moment on the green valley below.
“I will miss this time, and it will miss me. Yet where my daughter goes, I must follow.” Demeter walked into Athens. She moved slowly through the stalks of grain, resting her hands atop the feathery heads of barley.
Cora—Persephone, now—scampered forward to throw her arms around her mother; the two looked longingly westward.
They will head straight for Eleusis, Selene knew. There, the two goddesses had presided over their own powerful cult for thousands of years. They’re going home.
And if I enter, she couldn’t help wondering, if I walk south to Brauron, will the little girls await me there? Will they don their bear robes and dance at my arrival? She remembered the rush of power she’d felt striding through the glories of Delphi with Apollo. Would she feel that again?
Zeus put a hand on her shoulder. For now, he was still shorter than she, his fingers crooked with age. She didn’t throw him off: All her anger had drained away with Theo’s return.
“It’s not a trick,” he said quietly, answering her unspoken question. “When you enter, you will be Artemis again. Artemis at her best. Not some twisted version born of a cult’s imagination, nor a barbaric proto-goddess, but Artemis at the absolute height of Greek civilization. Worshiped. Adored. Feared. Able to protect the women and girls of your domain from any threat.”
But Apollo won’t be there, she thought. And he is what made Delphi beautiful. Without his love, what do I care for power?
Her father lifted a hand to her cheek. The pads of his fingertips were as soft as a baby’s. “I’ve opened a new universe, a new Age. The Olympians are already there—and have not yet arrived.”
Selene shook her head, confused. “Are you saying—”
“I’m saying Apollo may exist there even as he’s ceased to exist here.”
She snapped her head toward the portal, searching for her twin’s familiar face. Was it possible? Did his horse-drawn chariot drive the sun above the barley field even now?
Beside her, Theo spoke quietly. “It’s everything you wanted.”
She had not forgotten his words. He wouldn’t leave this world without her again. “You could come with me,” she said quickly. “We could visit all the places you’ve only read about.”
Dennis cleared his throat loudly. “Hey, sister. You know if you go through you might not be able to come back, right? It wouldn’t be just a visit. More like a permanent relocating.”
“I was in there,” Theo said hesitantly. “And Selene pulled me out again.”
Dennis shrugged. “You made the portal, dude. And you’re a Blessed One. Different rules for you.”
Selene still couldn’t move. Every fiber of her ached to seek out her twin. But she needed more time to think.
Scooter moved to stand before her. “Whatever you decide,” he said quietly. “Know that I’m sorry. For everything.” Selene looked into her younger brother’s eyes. The Trickster. He’d known Zeus’s plan would likely kill Theo. He’d been secretly plotting with their father about the hydraulis long before they’d captured Saturn. And he’d lied about the true nature of the portal—although she wasn’t sure why. Yet the regret etched upon his face made her think his apology referred to an even greater crime.
“I …” she hesitated.
Zeus bent double with a racking cough. Blood spattered his lips. The strength he’d summoned during the storm had vanished as swiftly as the clouds.
“I have to go through,” he begged. “Before it’s too late.”
Scooter held out a solicitous hand to his father, but Zeus waved him away. “Go on, my Tetractys. I’ll join you shortly.”
With a deferential nod, Scooter sprinted through the portal. The wings of his hat bounced limply behind him.
Theo’s hand slipped into hers as she watched her brother go. She clutched it like a lifeline.
Scooter stopped running when he entered the barley field. The wings of his cap straightened and spread. He tilted his head up—and flew.
Dennis grunted, watching Hermes hover high above the field. “Show-off.” He twirled his thyrsus. “Wait until I point this thing at the earth and vines start sprouting up to wrench that little twit out of the air.”
“You’re going?” Selene asked.
“Why not?” He shrugged. “Looks better than this shithole.”
“But you …”
“Yeah, yeah, I said you can’t come back out. But why would I want to? If you want to stay here and get older and weaker in the arms of Theo-bore, feel free, hon.”
“I don’t know …” she stammered, flustered.
Theo saved her from having to say more. “Dennis, buddy, you’ve been in grad school for decades. Did you forget already that the Golden Age of Athens lasts for less than a century? Give it another thousand years and the Romans will turn against you, too. You’ll just have to go through the Diaspora all over again.”
Dennis snorted. “You really think Dad didn’t think of that? Please. He said it’s a new Age, remember? Not just the same one over again. Don’t you see? Mankind’s been asking the same question since they looked up at the stars and realized there was more to life than hunting and fucking. The same question we’ve been asking since the Diaspora: How do we transcend these ever-dying meat sacks we call bodies and become something greater? Well, thanks to dear old Dad, we finally know the answer: Don’t fight against Time. Just step through it. Remake the world. Remake yourself. Sounds good to me.” And just like that, he sauntered into the field. He laughed when ivy sprang up around his feet and twined up the barley, the dark, glossy leaves bending the golden stalks beneath their weight.
Theo squeezed Selene’s hand a little tighter and leaned close to whisper, “Why did Zeus call Scooter his Tetractys?”
“Maybe it’s an epithet I don’t know about,” she murmured back.
Theo shook his head, but before he could explain further, Zeus interrupted them. “Come, Aphrodite, Eros. Come Hera, my queen. Artemis, Hephaestus. It is time.” He did not, Selene noticed, ask Athena to join them. “The portal won’t last much longer.”
The line between field and mountaintop, she saw now, wavered like the edge of a mirage.
June shook her head, the pom-pom on her hat waggling. “Absolutely not. I have a honeymoon with Maurizio to get back to.”
“Hera, my greatest love,” Zeus wheedled. “You can rule at my side.”
June snorted at the offer, tilting up her chin. Despite the softness of her fleshy neck, she moved like a queen. “I remember your love. It was so great it needed a hundred women to satisfy it. Never again.”
Esme chuckled. “And I’m not going anywhere near the fourth century BC, but thank you.”
Zeus’s eyes grew hard. “Why not?”
“Because it’s filthy, that’s why,” she replied. “Animals everywhere. And did you forget that the men washed themselves in olive oil? Slippery is all very pleasurable in the right situations, but I’ve gotten used to soap.” She tilted her left hand so the large diamond caught the light. “Besides, I’m enjoying myself. I create my own beauty now. I’m not just a reflection of what men think is beautiful. And I don’t have gods like you telling me who I should and shouldn’t sleep with.”
Philippe put his arm around his mother’s shoulders with a proud smile, but looked at Flint. “What about you, Papa?”
The hunched Smith had eyes only for Selene. His gaze flicked to her hand, held tight in Theo’s, and his lips flattened. She watched his chest heave with all the things he wanted to say to her.
She slipped from Theo’s grip and moved to Flint. “You have been a true friend.”
“But that’s all,” he grunted. “Just a friend.”
“No. More than that. You’ve been a brother.” She searched for the right words. “A partner. The gift of your love …” She swallowed. “It’s more than I deserved. More than I could’ve ever asked for.”
Flint stared at her, hard. “And you didn’t ask for it, did you?”
She could only shake her head.
He balled his massive hands. “I watched you all the way up the mountain. With him. He came back into your life and you forgot I was ever in it.”
Selene started to protest, but he thrust his palm out toward her angrily, cutting her off. “Give it back.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant, not at first. Then she pulled the heavy gold necklace from her pocket.
He shoved it roughly into his own. Then, to her shock, he turned and started walking toward the sunlit barley field.
“Papa …” Philippe warned.
“Please …” June begged.
But Zeus spoke over them. “Yes, Hephaestus! Come, my son, I would cure your lameness!”
Flint rounded on Zeus like a trapped bear. “Now you offer that? Now you call me son? You, who threw me off the mountain, who watched me fall, who broke me and let me suffer as an ugly, unloved god for my entire existence. I AM NOT YOUR SON.”
Selene could breathe again. He will stay here, she thought. He will not leave my life forever.
Flint unslung the wide hammer from his back. Selene was sure he would raise it against his stepfather. Instead, he held it out to Philippe. “Take it,” he said. “To remember me.”
Philippe looked stunned, but he clutched the massive tool to his chest. Flint turned back to the portal. He took a single limping step toward it.
To Selene’s shock, it was Esme who spoke first. “You think you’re unloved,” she said matter-of-factly. “You’re wrong.”
Flint didn’t turn to his wife. Instead, he looked down at his withered legs encased in their titanium braces. “Perhaps. But that doesn’t change the fact that I hate myself.”
Philippe made a sound of strangled protest, but Flint went on. “I can stay here and live another few miserable decades. Or I can try again. Be someone new. Someone whole.”
He looked back at his mother, his stepson. “I am weak,” whispered the mighty Smith. “Forgive me.”
Philippe started forward, but June put a hand on the young man’s arm. Her lined face shone with tears, yet she seemed determined to finally allow her selfless son to do something for himself. Selene could not accept his decision with such equanimity. This is my fault, she knew. If I loved him, he would stay. Instead, Philippe loses his stepfather. June loses her son.
I lose my friend.
She forced herself to stay silent, to respect his decision as Flint hobbled to the portal and stepped inside, though every ounce of her wanted to lunge forward and drag him back where he belonged.
He stood amid the waving barley, facing the distant Acropolis, even as his spine straightened and his grizzled hair darkened to deepest coal. Selene watched his barrel chest heave once, twice, before he reached to rip off a sweater and shirt that could no longer contain his massive torso. Next, he bent and unfastened the braces from his legs. When he finally turned around, she barely recognized him.
Hephaestus was beautiful.
The sculpted muscles of his chest gleamed in the sunlight. No wrinkles scarred his face. His legs were as strong and shapely as his brother Mars’s had ever been. But the biggest difference lay not in his restored limbs nor his suddenly youthful features—but his eyes.
“He looks …” Selene began.
“Hopeful,” Esme finished.
“You see,” Zeus said with a smile. “I tell the truth. The world I’ve created is brand-new. The mistakes of our past will be wiped away. We can create our own future, our own fate! Wouldn’t you like to get your wings back, Eros? The ones you sliced from your own back so long ago? I could make that happen. Aphrodite, you could have any man you wanted!” Zeus swung to Selene next. “Artemis, your twin is waiting for you!”
But it was Maryam who stepped forward, holding her spear now in both hands, as if ready to strike. “Zeus wants this too much.”
A slow worm of suspicion crawled through Selene’s gut. Her gaze flicked to Flint’s glory, then back to her father. “If this is so wonderful,” she asked slowly, “why didn’t you just tell us the truth?”
“I needed your Makarites,” Zeus said easily. “If you knew he could die, you wouldn’t have let me have him.”
“I wouldn’t have. But why lie to everyone else? They’d happily trade one mortal life for an eternity of power.”
Zeus started to answer, but a cackling laugh cut him off. Saturn, still held captive in the barley field, stared directly at Selene through eyes slitted with deranged hilarity.
“You’ve almost got it, granddaughter!” he called through the portal. “I see now that I underestimated my son. He is truly the Wily One, not I. He needed your professor, yes. But he also needed me. And not, old, weak me, mind you, but—”
“Silence, Father,” Zeus snarled while gesturing angrily to his siblings. Poseidon jammed the tines of his trident against Saturn’s throat. The Titan quieted, but his eyes still bored into Selene, daring her to understand.
“Do it now, brother,” Zeus called to the Sea God.
Poseidon Earth Shaker struck the ground with his trident. The field outside Athens trembled even as the summit of Olympus remained firm. The barley swayed wildly. A dark gash split the earth. Persephone let out a shocked gasp and clutched her mother’s arm.
Smoke issued from the cleft, and heat shimmered against the sky. This was no mere crack—this was the entrance to Tartarus.
Selene reached for her bow before realizing the uselessness of the gesture. If any giants stormed up from the pit, the newly glorious Olympians would defeat them without any help from her. Maryam readied her spear anyway, but Selene no longer believed in the oracle’s words. What cure could the Wise Virgin’s spear provide that the new Age didn’t?
Poseidon and Hestia dragged the Titan to the edge of Tartarus. Saturn dug in his heels, carving great gashes in the earth. “No!” he cried. “You already took my Last Age from me! You promised that if I helped you, I could live in this one!”
“I cast you down once before, Father,” Zeus said calmly. “And, against my better judgment, I let you back out. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
At Zeus’s nod, Poseidon flung their father forward. Saturn disappeared into the void of Tartarus, leaving nothing behind but a fading cry of rage.
Selene breathed a sigh of relief. Apollo is finally avenged. My father will be safe in his new world. Flint is happier without me. My job is done. She should have felt at peace. Instead, Saturn’s words echoed in her mind.
Not old, weak me… Suddenly it all made sense. “Dennis had it right, didn’t he, Father?” she asked slowly. “He said you’d stopped fighting Time. You used Time instead—used his power to help you open a new Age. But for Saturn to truly be the God of Time once more … for him to have that much power in the first place, his cult had to—” She choked, unable to finish the sentence.
June did it for her. “You let Saturn kill Mars! You knew his plans and didn’t warn us!”
Zeus took a careful step backward toward the portal, both hands extended, placating. “I knew the Host had Prometheus—but he wanted to die anyway. I didn’t know Saturn would kill the others!”
Selene’s shock quickly melted into rage. “But you knew he wanted to. You knew he’d try. All that time in New York while we were hunting down the man who killed our family, you knew who it was. And you didn’t help. Because you knew that with every death, Saturn only grew stronger. Just like you wanted. Mars. Hades. Apollo. Their blood is on your hands.”
The other Athanatoi tensed beside her; she could almost hear the discordant symphony of their rising fury. Mars had not only been June’s son; he was Philippe’s father and Esme’s greatest love. Everyone had loved Apollo for his music and poetry. Even Hades, the dark Lord of the Dead, had been brother to Hestia, Poseidon, and Demeter, and husband to Persephone.
The view of the barley field shimmered and began to contract, but she could still see Hermes flying overhead, watching her sorrowfully. Surely he’d known of Zeus’s treachery—and helped him anyway.
Zeus looked at the shrinking portal, his eyes panicked behind his glasses. She thought he would run, but he seemed unable to give up on his plan. “Please,” he cried, reaching a clawed hand to clutch at the air before him, “I don’t want to go in without you!”
Before Selene could react, Maryam aimed her spear at her father’s aegis-covered breast, right over the wide-mouthed Gorgon’s head that she’d sewn there herself. “We don’t have to do anything we don’t want to, old man.”
Zeus stood well out of the spear’s range, inching ever closer to the portal, but he sounded defiant, rather than intimidated. “I don’t want you to come, Sister Maryam. The oracle was wrong. I have no need of you. Or your spear.”
“Then I will use it to protect my family from your wiles.”
Philippe, still holding Flint’s massive hammer, moved to stand beside Maryam. Selene raised her gold bow. Theo stood beside her, fists clenched. Esme flexed her fingers as if she might rip out Zeus’s heart with her long, painted nails. June joined them, her maternal rage the sharpest weapon of all. Yet none of them moved to attack the man they’d honored for so long.
“I carried you on my back,” Selene said, her voice low and dangerous. “I always thought the father who taught me how to hunt must truly love me. Now I know he would let his own children die. He only loves himself.”
Despite her words, Selene still couldn’t bring herself to loose her arrow at the frail old man.
Maryam had no such compunction. She charged forward, her spearhead darting out to catch one of the serpents dangling from Medusa’s head. She pulled back the weapon, trying to rip her aegis from his shoulders. Zeus yanked it away from her with both hands, falling backward and scuttling crablike the last few inches toward the portal. Maryam lunged after him, but the old man swung one skinny leg over the portal’s lip and tumbled into Athens.
Selene held her breath, waiting to see her father’s metamorphosis. When he finally arose from the barley, he stood both two meters and two thousand years away from her. He towered in the air, easily three times the height of the old man who’d left Olympus. His hair shone as glossy black as Artemis’s, his eyes as stormy gray as Athena’s. The snakes of the aegis writhed to life, their beady eyes fixed on their onetime mistress as they hissed an angry curse in Maryam’s direction.
The King of the Gods bent to pick up his lightning bolt from where Theo had dropped it in the field. Already, Hephaestus was striding toward the man who’d let Mars die, his youthful face red with fury. Persephone moved from the other side, full of righteous wrath over her husband Hades’ murder.
Esme took a step closer to the portal. “He must be punished for what he did to Mars and Apollo.”
“Don’t worry,” Selene assured her, watching as Poseidon, Dionysus, Demeter, and Hestia joined the angry circle surrounding Zeus. For now, they maintained a wary distance, but she knew it wouldn’t be long before they attacked the god who’d betrayed his own kin. Even mighty Zeus wouldn’t be able to withstand the combined power of so many Athanatoi. “He gave the others back their strength. He’s going to regret that.”
Maryam rolled her spear in her hands as if itching for a fight. “You sure you don’t want to go in there and help?”
Selene watched Theo’s jaw clench. He swallowed hard. “You could, you know.” His voice was careful, as if he didn’t want to sway her decision one way or the other. “Apollo might be in there.”
“No,” she said, suddenly sure. “Just another of my father’s lies. The Delphi I left Apollo in isn’t through that portal. It’s a Delphi of my twin’s imagining, not my father’s.”
“And Flint?”
She looked at Hephaestus—she couldn’t think of him as Flint anymore. Glorious and gleaming, possessed of infinite power, about to finally find justice for his brother’s killer. If he was no longer broken, would he still feel compassion for those who were? Had he truly become the best version of himself, as her father promised? And would she even love him if he had?
“You could claim your real name, be Artemis to his Hephaestus,” Theo urged, as if reading the conflict on her face.
The sound of her old name filled Selene with certainty. Regardless of how Flint might change, I know who I would become. I’d be a goddess once more dependent on mankind’s worship. One whose identity was constrained by what the mortal world expected of me. One whose absolute divinity would place an insuperable barrier between myself and those who worshiped me. At the height of her power, she had hurt as many mortals as she’d helped, punished as many as she’d protected—and most had not deserved their fates.
If I pass through that portal, she knew, I will become like my black-fletched arrows. Deadly and unstoppable, unable to tell friend from foe. A power that no longer belongs in the world I’ve come to know.
“My name is Selene,” she said finally. “It’s the name of the woman you fell in love with. It’s the name I chose for myself. That makes it the truest name of all.”