Chapter 54

MOTHER OF DESIRE

“NOW!”

Selene’s voice rang in Theo’s ears like the baying of hounds. She stood nearly twice her usual height, her skin glowing with a goddess’s aura and the white streak in her hair once again as black as a midnight sky.

“Now!” she repeated, pointing urgently to the hammer in his hands.

He raised it overhead and slammed it through the sunbright barley and into the rich earth below. He’d used the hammer before to cave in the windows on the Statue of Liberty’s crown. It had proved more powerful than any sledgehammer. But he still assumed it would take more than one blow to open a rift all the way to Tartarus.

Instead, a dozen wide cracks raced across the ground from the spot of the hammer’s strike, like lightning forking across the sky. He jumped backward as the cracks expanded and the ground crumbled. No gentle wisp of divine pneuma emerged—great columns of gray vapor shot from the cleft to stain the brilliant blue above.

Selene grabbed his arm with a hand as big as his head. She took the hammer from him—no doubt Flint would need it to battle the giants in Tartarus.

“You did it,” she shouted. “Now go!” With her other massive hand, she pointed to the rift in the world, where the Brooklyn Bridge’s walkway and the glimmering Manhattan skyline hung suspended a foot above the ground.

“Not without you.”

Her silver eyes flashed with anger as she raised her arm, lifting him three feet from the ground as if to fling him bodily back through the portal.

“Don’t you dare!” he shouted at her. “We make our own choices. That’s the deal, Selene.”

Athena, standing even taller than her sister, spoke with a voice clarion bright and as resonant as a war drum. “We go now, or you’ll have no choices at all. The portal won’t stay open long.”

Selene gave an exasperated growl and yanked Theo higher so they were eye to enormous eye. He stared into the mirror of her left pupil. That’s me, he thought. Glasses askew, looking just a tad terrified. No way I can convince a ten-foot-tall goddess to listen to me. But Selene must’ve seen him differently, because she pulled him close and pressed her lips against his in a kiss that covered half his face.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, lowering him quickly to the ground.

Golden bow at the ready, a quiver of gleaming gold and silver arrows at her waist, she leapt into the gray cloud above Tartarus and disappeared from view. Athena, who had tied a rope around her waist and secured one end with a spike in the ground, followed suit more cautiously.

Esme—Aphrodite, now—stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the chasm before her. To Theo’s shock, she’d removed her clothes sometime in the last three minutes, revealing ten feet of glowing, creamy flesh. Her body was softer, rounder than modern standards of beauty might prefer, but Theo still couldn’t stop his blood from pumping harder when he looked at her. Her nipples were gilded with gold rather than rosy flesh. Unlike the male gods, whose penises the Greeks had sculpted in loving detail, Aphrodite’s ancient statues usually depicted her covering herself with a robe or her own hand—at most, she displayed only a smooth, unbroken triangle of flesh. But the real Aphrodite clearly didn’t care that the Latin pudendum meant “something to be ashamed of.” Her lower lips swelled from her body, slightly parted in invitation. Her folds blushed a coral pink that matched the color of her upper lips with disturbing exactness.

She looked over at Theo and caught him staring. “It feels wrong to wear clothes here,” she said glumly. “I rarely did during my time as a goddess. But this is all you see, isn’t it?”

Theo didn’t think it would do him much good to lie to her, so he simply kept his mouth shut.

“I’ve spent centuries learning other ways to seduce men, other ways to display my beauty. But here there’s no need. I could have you right here in the field before your lover even returns.”

Theo opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off.

“Don’t bother. You think you’d resist me, and you’d be wrong, but that’s my point. You wouldn’t love me at all. In fact, you’d be racked with guilt and self-loathing the whole time, and you’d have sex with me anyway. Because that’s what happens when the Mother of Desire is standing next to you.” Her face turned hard—or at least, as hard as it could when her features were supernaturally smooth and soft. She scooped up her pile of discarded clothes in one large hand and turned toward the portal. “I knew I shouldn’t have come back.” She strode toward the opening, raising one bare leg to step through into Manhattan.

She stopped short with a lurch. “Damn.”

“What?”

“I can’t. It’s … blocked.” She slammed a palm on what looked like open space, then wheeled back to Theo. “You got out the first time. Go on! Go through and then maybe you can pull me after.”

He shook his head. “No can do.”

Aphrodite marched toward him. He forced himself not to flinch, not to turn away. He didn’t raise his sword, knowing her attack would come not through force but through gentler wiles. But he lifted the iron shield Athena had made for him, bracing himself. “I’m not going without Selene.”

“Love, huh?” She snorted delicately. “I can’t fight my own most precious attribute, can I?”

Theo lowered the shield. “Then help her so we can all get out of this place together.”

The Laughter-Loving Goddess threw back her head and chortled. Throaty, sensuous, burbling with delight. “You’re as good at getting your way as I am!”

Still laughing, she jumped feetfirst into Tartarus.

I hope she’s right, he thought, casting a wary glance at the portal. The edges of the opening had already begun to waver.

Tartarus, so the poets said, was as far below the earth as the sky was above it. A brazen anvil would drop for nine days and nine nights before it finally thudded against the bottom of the pit on the tenth. Selene didn’t have that long.

Good thing the poets were wrong.

She fell through storm clouds so thick they clung to her limbs like a shroud. The darkest of them swirled like a giant snake, twisting and rolling through the air in great coils. Typhoeus. The winged Storm Giant with two serpents for his legs and a hundred more for his fingers, whom Zeus had cast into Tartarus for trying to steal the heavens from their rightful king. Now he guarded the pit, making sure that whomever else Zeus hurled into its depths would never emerge again.

One thing at a time, she thought. First, find Hephaestus and the others. Then worry about getting out again.

A breath later, her booted feet slammed into rock. She crouched to ease her landing, resting a hand upon the ground. The stone was slick to the touch, as if covered with a thin layer of wet moss. Perhaps it was, but Selene couldn’t tell. Everything was black. Not like a moonless night or even her mother’s womb, but something beyond dark. Even her own aura had been quenched. This, she remembered, was not just a prison for monsters. It was the home of Night itself. The birthplace of the River Styx. It was, in a word, stygian.

How will I find them if I can’t see my hand in front of my face? she wondered. And why the FUCK didn’t I bring a flashlight?

A thud beside her. Then a shower of sparks and a ringing clash as spear struck shield, announcing the arrival of the Giant Killer. In that brief flash of light, Selene saw her half sister, her flushed cheeks slick with vapor and her brilliant gray eyes gleaming ferociously.

Then the sound of rummaging. A flashlight clicked on, the beam pointed straight at Selene.

She shielded her eyes against the sudden glare. “Hey!”

Athena held out a second flashlight to her.

Selene grunted a thanks.

Even with the flashlights, they could see nothing beyond a wall of cloud on all sides, so dark that it seemed to suck away the light rather than reflect it back at them. Despite the swirling mists, no wind brushed their skin or rushed past their ears.

“Hephaestus!” Selene shouted into the silence. “Hestia! Demeter!”

They didn’t appear. But Aphrodite did, landing lightly beside them, completely nude but for her mirror shield, her golden hair loosed by her fall to brush against her ankles like a superhero’s cape.

“Where are they?” she asked immediately. “We don’t have time to dawdle.”

“I don’t know,” Athena snapped at her.

“You don’t have a plan?” Aphrodite returned.

“Of course I do,” the Goddess of Wisdom huffed. “A plan to get us out. I didn’t think it’d be hard to find them in the first place.”

“Demeter!” Selene called again.

“You really think they can hear us?” Aphrodite scoffed. “The fog swallows all sound down here.”

A distant roar shook the air around them.

“What was it you said about swallowing all sounds?” Selene asked grimly.

Aphrodite blanched. “What is that?”

A piercing scream like the brakes on a New York subway train.

“The giants.” Athena readied her spear. “We need to hurry.”

“I’m the Huntress—I’ll go track them down.” Selene stepped toward the blackness.

“We’ll just lose you, too!” Aphrodite protested.

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Yes, actually.” She tossed back her hair to reveal the full glory of her body.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. No one can see you!”

“Desire is about far more than looks, my dear. It’s about every sense you can name and some you can’t. The gods will come.” She spread her feet a bit wider, opening herself shamelessly, and raised her arms to place them at the nape of her neck so her breasts lifted. The distinct tang of pheromones wafted through the air. She closed her eyes and cocked one knee. Despite the clammy chill, her skin flushed pink.

Selene and Athena, for once, were on exactly the same page.

“Do not tell me this is going to work,” Selene groaned, just as Athena grumbled, “If she’s right, I’m—”

Dionysus was the first to stumble out of the mists, still in the tight shorts and filthy T-shirt he’d worn on Olympus. He held his hands over his eyes, peering out between slitted fingers, blinded by their flashlights.

Selene was shocked by the change in his appearance. When he’d first walked through the portal, the damage that centuries of lassitude had wreaked on his body had fallen away, sloughing off the potbelly, the puffy eyes, the easy slouch. But Dionysus’s stay in Tartarus had ravaged him in a way all his excesses never could. His immortal face remained unlined above his dark beard, but his eyes had sunk deep into his skull, horror etched upon his face.

Yet the moment he saw Aphrodite, he managed a feral smile. “Oh, man, you have no idea how grateful I am to see you.” He ignored the other goddesses entirely. “I mean, sorry Dad caught you, but you have no idea the blue balls I’ve got after being stuck down here with no one but Persephone to chase after.”

Aphrodite cocked her other hip. Taking that as an invitation, Dionysus reached for the fly of his shorts like a starving man grasping blindly for food. Athena struck her spear against her shield again, stopping him in his tracks.

He noticed the other women for the first time. “Oh, hello, ladies,” he said with a strained attempt at his old insouciance. “The more the merrier, you know.” He seemed to speak more out of habit than will, barely able to focus on the images in front of him. His eyes kept flicking back to Aphrodite. Yet he saw the items in Athena’s hands and managed, “Wait, Dad let you keep your weapons? His storm ripped away my thyrsus on the way here.”

“Father didn’t cast us down,” Athena said sharply. “We came here to get you out.”

Selene nodded curtly, although the more she looked at the line of drool dripping through Dionysus’s beard, the less she wanted to rescue him. The world might be a little better off without the God of Frenzy.

Dionysus looked from one goddess to the other. “Can you do that?” Selene had never heard him so desperate.

“We can,” Athena said firmly. “Where are the others?”

“I don’t know.” The lust drained from his gaze, replaced with the same raw fear he’d shown when he emerged from the fog. “We … wander. In the dark. Sometimes we run into each other, but sometimes we run into the giants instead.”

As if on cue, the ground shuddered with the drumming of massive footsteps. Selene aimed a hawk-fletched arrow toward the fog but didn’t shoot, tracking the sound as it passed before them and then faded into the distance again. Dionysus clutched his arms across his chest, staring into the black. “We fight. With tooth and nail. Our ichor flows. We feel pain. But then we heal again. There is no end to it. And there is nothing else.”

Selene thought of the Smith stumbling through this eternal night, battling for an existence that was nothing like a life. Come to me, Hephaestus, she prayed silently. Come so I can take you back into the sunlight where you belong.

Poseidon appeared instead, hands outstretched as he staggered toward Aphrodite’s naked body. Athena caught him by the arm.

He lashed out wildly, but she ducked the blow. “Peace, Uncle! I am no giant!” She wrapped her arms around him. “I’ve come to release you.”

The God of the Sea began to weep with relief at the sight of her spear and shield. Torrents of salt water coursed down his face like ocean swells.

Selene turned her flashlight back to the darkness, peering in vain for her aunts Demeter, Hestia, and Hera. For her cousin Persephone. Most of all, for Hephaestus.

“Hurry, Flint,” she murmured. This was the man who had crafted the golden necklace for her over centuries, carving her story upon its links. Surely that sort of love would draw him to her even now.

Her light picked out a dim silhouette amid the swirling fog, and her heart leapt in response. But the figure was too narrow-shouldered to be the Smith, too angular to be a goddess.

Hermes.

He stood just inside the circle of the flashlight’s beam, taking in the scene with a wary expression. He still wore his helmet, but the wings flopped limply to brush his shoulders.

Selene swung her bow in his direction. “You do not get to escape.”

Dionysus rushed forward with his fist upraised. “I’ve been looking for you, douchebag!”

Athena stepped neatly in front of Hermes, raising her shield over him. “Stop! I will not have him harmed.”

“It’s his fault we’re here!” Poseidon cried.

“Our uncle’s right,” Selene seethed. “He helped Father. He watched his own kin murdered and did nothing. The Trickster stays in Tartarus—where he belongs.”

Hermes bowed his head, all his customary lightness gone. “I, too, was deceived. Father didn’t tell me about making Saturn stronger at first—I swear it on the Styx. I only learned about his role after Hades and Mars and Apollo were already dead. I was angry with Father, but I thought if I went ahead with the plan and built the hydraulis, if I recovered the lightning bolt and convinced Theo to use it, it would make up for everything. The portal would save so many of us—the others would not have died in vain.” He stared at his family, hands open and pleading. “You must believe me. I had no idea Father meant to—”

“Shut up, Scooter.” Selene stopped him before he could spin any more lies. “The portal is closing. So unless you can see through this fog and find the others before we all become some giant’s after-dinner snack, I don’t want to hear anything you have to say.”

He looked at her solemnly. “I don’t have to see in the dark. I’m the Messenger once more. I can find any god I wish.”

He turned and sprinted through the wall of mist.