“Zeus was god of law, of justice, and of lightning. He was not merely the king of the gods but also the master of the sky and an unrepentant philanderer. As Zeus is now dead (a fact checked numerous times before we included that ‘unrepentant philanderer’ bit), mentioning him at all in the temples of other Olympians—Poseidon’s and Hera’s especially—is exceedingly unwise, and that’s pretty much all the time we’ll waste on him here.”
—A Mortal’s Guidebook to the Olympians’ Return
THE NIGHT WAS HUMID.
That was his first thought. It was also his only thought for another ten minutes. Immortal or not, when one wakes up after being dead for the greater part of a year, a little disorientation is natural. Of course, being dead when one is supposedly immortal isn’t natural at all, but neither is being immortal in the first place, so there’s no point in getting priggish.
After a while Zeus became aware of lying on his back in a field of tall grass located—judging by the visible stars—somewhere in the northern hemisphere. He struggled to sit up and found he could not. Yet he could feel strength begin to stir in his limbs, as surely as memory trickled its way into his thoughts.
The last thing he remembered was . . . what? A present left unopened, Aphrodite, an amulet that both annoyed him and gave him hope; all of these images floated through his mind, trying to sort themselves out and not having much luck. Something was important, but Zeus couldn’t put his mighty finger on it. (At least his fingers were still mighty. Somehow that comforted him.) He concentrated and willed it all back. He’d been watching someone on the big screen, hadn’t he? Someone hiking . . .
Tracy!
Zeus lunged to his feet as the memories flooded in. The amulet, the god-killer, Tracy . . . and the two millennia-old prophecy he was now certain he’d misinterpreted. He cursed his mistakes even as he praised his foresight in preparing the amulet. And he was alive! Tracy— his child, his champion, his ace in the hole—must have completed the ritual to return him to life, and with incomplete instructions on top of it all!
Pride swelled him to bursting. If he’d known daughters were so useful, he’d have sired more than one in the past four thousand years.
And then there was the other side of that, the reason he’d needed Tracy at all: Someone had dared to murder him! Him! Their rightful king, perhaps even their father!
Fury exploded through him at the very thought. Wrath tore its way out in a bellow. Lightning erupted from his palms, his mouth, his eyes―scorching the entire field, blasting it apart in showers of soil, and streaking up to the sky in barely controlled arcs. In his rage Zeus unleashed an electrical storm of such power that it would have driven Nikola Tesla mad, were he able to somehow get close enough to witness the display and survive (a hypothetical situation perhaps rendered moot by the fact that Tesla was already dead, but there it is).
By the time Zeus regained control, he’d carved a crater out of the field. The god’s hands remained clenched as he surveyed the destruction, his breath still ragged. Cathartic as such violence was, it might well attract attention. He could ill afford to be so foolish. The others might come to investigate and force a confrontation before he was ready.
“So now must I hide?” he grumbled to himself. The idea stung nearly as much as the blow of the god-killing weapon itself. Yet Zeus, no blustering fool like Ares, was smart enough to realize the truth of the situation.
“Murderers!” he screamed in an aftershock, unable to stop himself. He seized an unearthed boulder, poured his surplus rage into chucking it up to the stars, and then, somewhat more calm for it, took to the sky himself.
In hindsight Zeus hoped he’d given the boulder enough of a kick to get it out of the atmosphere; if it wound up landing on some innocent mortal somewhere, he’d feel rather bad about it. Was there time to track it and see? Should he even bother? Should he try to get his money back from those anger management classes he secretly took in the nineties?
Zeus pushed the questions aside. There were far more important things to deal with. He’d been dead for more than nine months; that much he could sense. What transpired in that time? Who stole the god-killer and used it on him? Who would stand with him now that he’d returned? And a more immediate concern: why in the dryads’ armpits had he woken up in a field instead of one of his temples, (up) on an altar?
Come to think of it, Tracy ought to be around too. Or so he thought, anyway.
It was his first resurrection, after all.
On the plus side, while he did not wake in his own temple, neither did he wake surrounded by murderous fellows who might seek to instantly recommit their original crime. Their absence also indicated that they didn’t know where he’d appeared. Or, he supposed, they were unaware how vulnerable he would be immediately following his resurrection. Whatever the reason, now safely away from the immediate area, he had time to get his bearings.
He knew the other gods couldn’t locate him by the usual means. A god could be sensed by only those of an elder generation, and after the Titan War, none of Zeus’s elders were a factor. For the moment, Zeus was both back and hidden. Things had actually worked out for the best. All the same, Zeus hoped his resurrection was at least felt by the others.
He had no experience in such things, of course. No Olympian god before him had been murdered and reborn, but it stood to reason that the other Olympians should sense such a rebirth. Besides, he was the almighty Zeus! That they could be ignorant of his return offended his ego. They’d darned well better know! Let them tremble!
When he first learned someone had stolen the UnMaking Nexus, that cursed god-killer, he’d planned to find the culprit, learn his or her intentions, and inflict punishment accordingly. Creating the amulet had served only as a contingency plan should his suspicions prove true and the worst happened. Now that it had, any punishment he might have given before his death paled in comparison to what the murder (murderers?) would suffer. He would inflict such terrible justice upon them that the Titans themselves, imprisoned in their dark nothingness, would hear of the murderers’ fate and thank their defeated hides that they’d been spared his full fury!
All right, calm down, you godly stud. Intelligence-gathering first, wrath later.
His first order of business was to do some searching of his own. In his flight from the field, he’d passed into mountains. Recognizing the slate mines, the lakes, and the single rack-and-pinion railway that identified the highest peak as Mt. Snowdon in Wales, Zeus landed on the windy mountaintop to choose his next move. Eyes closed, he stretched out his senses and took stock of the locations of every greater Olympian within his power to feel. Aphrodite, his favorite: the Great Hall on Olympus. Ares: also in the Great Hall on Olympus. No surprises yet. Artemis, Athena, Hephaestus: all also on Olympus. No doubt there was some sort of meeting going on about his rebirth, but he kept going.
Dionysus: top floor of the Dionysian Hotel and Casino?
What the Styx? He made a mental note to look into that later. Continuing, he found Hermes also on Olympus. As for Apollo . . .
Zeus opened his eyes, frowned, and tried again. Once more he came up empty. Where was Apollo? Two possibilities came to mind immediately: either the rest of the Dodekatheon found Apollo guilty of Zeus’s murder and banished him to Tartarus (or simply turned the god-killer on him); or Apollo stood up for justice on Zeus’s side and was struck down himself by Zeus’s enemies. Zeus forced himself to not jump to conclusions. In any case he wasn’t going to learn much sitting alone on a mountaintop.
Again he took to the sky.
For the most part, catching up with the mortal perspective on the past nine months proved elementary. A combination of mortal interrogation, Internet searches, and perusal of a book called A Mortal’s Guidebook to the Olympians’ Return brought him up to date. He snooped around the White House, 10 Downing Street, the Kremlin, and (for old times’ sake) the office of the Prime Minister of Greece to see how governments had reacted (predictably, as it turned out).
The most difficult part of it all was keeping his anger in check at everything he learned: Ares had taken credit for the murder. The claim was suspect, knowing Ares, yet deserving of wrath for its sheer boldness. Poseidon had seized his throne in a traitorous instant—Zeus blasted another couple of craters after reading that—and Hera had the nerve to marry him after all of two hours of mourning! (Two hours? Was he not Zeus the Unforgettable? That the faithless harpy was Poseidon’s problem now was scant succor to his ego.)
Perhaps worst of all, the other Olympians seemed to have cast down his decree of withdrawal before his corpse had grown cold; the disloyal curs had all but tripped over his dead body to get back to public life and mortal worship! If that was true, lightning was too good for any of them, murderers or not!
Yet aside from such obvious and public facts, his search bore few details of what had actually transpired among the gods themselves. Zeus soon decided that learning more along those lines would require stepping back onto Olympus itself or finding an ally to do so for him— yet rage clouded his mind too much for him to decide just how to pursue either option. He needed somewhere comfortable where he could cool down enough to think.
Zeus did his best thinking in the middle of a lightning storm. A couple of nights after his return, there was a fantastic one over Paris that led him to perch invisibly on the antenna atop the Eiffel Tower and brood over exactly how to proceed. For more than an hour, he stood watching the storm strike the tower’s lightning rod and letting the tension ebb from his being. He was beginning to calm when he spotted the blond mortal crawling his way up the ironwork above the top observation deck.
Here is a brave fool.
It was an engaging distraction. The mortal would surely be arrested by the Parisian authorities if he failed to fall to his death, but regardless of the numerous laws he was breaking, he impressed Zeus. (Most of the gods have a soft spot for brave fools, as brave fools are so very often courageous enough to perform the tasks demanded of them and lack the sense to realize how likely such tasks ware to kill them. Entire legions of brave fools who failed to kill hydras, sail through the Cyanean Rocks, or frolic upon the shores of Axe-Murderer Lake at night go unsung and forgotten, but the gods still appreciate the fools’ willingness to try. Such diversions provide them something to watch during dinner.)
And so the deposed king of the gods observed in amusement as the mortal made his ascent. Lightning flashed again, heralding a rush of rain.
The mortal cast his gaze upward into the sudden deluge with a desperate scowl. “Zeus!” he yelled, staring directly at him.
It startled the god so much, he nearly lost his perch. Zeus was invisible—he double-checked to make sure—yet the mortal could see him? Unable to leave the matter unexplored, he released his invisibility completely and finally asked, “How did you find me, mortal?”
“Wow, déjà vu,” the climber answered. The two stared at each other as rain fell from the darkness above, plinking off the tower and drenching them both before the mortal spoke again. “Um, it’s good to see you and all that, but do you think we could possibly go somewhere else to talk? Somewhere, you know . . .” The mortal glanced down just long enough to appear to regret it. “. . . else?”
This one most definitely has nerve, Zeus thought. Yet nerve had its place. “You will first answer my question, mortal, then we shall see.”
The mortal had the temerity to roll his eyes. “I know your daughter! I know Tracy! The rest is a long story I’d rather not tell straddling a giant lightning rod! No offense.”
Zeus scanned for any sign he was an Olympian in disguise. (It would be a foolish ploy doomed to failure were that the case, but it didn’t pay to be careless.) Once satisfied, he snatched the man up by the arm and brought both of them up the Seine River to the shelter of the southern bell tower of Notre Dame Cathedral. It was perhaps an ironic choice to retreat to a church, but Zeus didn’t figure He’d mind.
“I would have your name, mortal, and your answer as to how you knew where and when to find me.”
“Leif Karlson. And I really only knew where. Apollo had a vision of me finding you on the Eiffel Tower, so I figured if I went there, I’d find you. Kind of illogical and circular, but I tried not to think too much about that. I’d have been up earlier, but the line into the tower took me an hour and a freaking half to get through.”
“The stairs would have been faster. Shorter line.”
“Yeah, well, I fell off a cliff a couple days ago when I was helping to bring you back, and my legs hurt.”
“You helped? How? When did you last see Tracy?”
Leif launched into a rambling tale of Apollo finding him in a Bellingham café, of Leif’s immediate willingness to help, and all that proceeded from that point: the amulet, Thalia, the Erinyes, Thad, Dionysus, and the final struggle at the mountaintop temple. Cheered by the new information and the prospect of potential allies, Zeus listened to the entire story before commenting.
“Mr. Karlson, in your time with Apollo, did he never tell you of my ability to discern when a mortal speaks falsely to me?”
“Um, he neglected to mention that, no.”
“Care to revise your story a little bit?”
Leif squirmed, but not to the extent that Zeus lost too much respect for him. “You couldn’t have called me on that earlier?” The mortal shot an annoyed glance at the wall. “Fine, so I wasn’t immediately all for helping Apollo. Can you blame me? But I came around just fine after a while!”
“I opted to give you just enough rope to hang yourself. I shall not fault you much for wishing to appear more heroic, but lie to me at your peril.”
“Er, well, I did come around, like I said.”
Zeus smiled, just a bit. “Indeed. For which you have the gratitude of a god.” The smile turned to a smirk. “You failed to mention just how you know my daughter.”
“Oh. Yeah. That.” Again, he squirmed. “I, ah, love your daughter, sir.”
The declaration only brought Zeus further amusement as he took stock of the mortal in a new light: wanting of any true muscle definition, skinny legs, light hair, and skin more feminine than masculine—yet he was tall, at least, and obviously not without amply demonstrated courage. “Before my murder, she was seeing someone named Kevin.”
“Never heard of him.”
“A teetotaler. I never much liked him, myself. How long have you been dating my daughter?”
Leif swallowed uncomfortably. “We’re not exactly dating.”
More traditional fatherly values battered through Zeus’s amusement like a giant through tinfoil. He drilled scrutiny into the mortal, who was apparently just diddling his precious child on the side. For a long time, Zeus silently let him stew in his own discomfort. To his credit, Leif did not break.
“Excuse me?” Zeus asked finally.
“Er, well—I mean, she doesn’t really . . . feel the same. She’s made that clear. I keep hoping, but I can’t seem to change her mind. So far. I don’t get it; I’m not the sort of guy who can’t get a little action when he wants to—Er, not, not that your daughter is—” Zeus deepened his scowl, and Leif gave a desperate chuckle. “I’d do anything for her. Sir. Which is why I came along on Operation Resurrect Zeus in the first place. Not that I didn’t think bringing you back was a good thing either, of course, but . . .” He trailed off.
Zeus let the half-truth of the final statement slide past without a direct challenge. “So you mean to say that you’re stalking my daughter.”
“No! . . . At least I don’t see it that way.”
“Few stalkers do.”
“I can’t help it! I don’t even really get why. She annoyed the heck out of me when I first met her, but—”
“So my daughter is annoying? She is unworthy of your adoration?” Now he was just messing with the kid. Counterproductive, yes, but a welcome diversion. Zeus did his best to mask his returning amusement.
“Don’t I get any points for keeping her safe? So she could bring you back? Or for climbing up the freaking Eiffel Tower? That’s not easy, you know! I hate wrought iron!”
“Come closer,” Zeus ordered. “I command it.”
The mortal’s compliance was not immediate, nor even existent. “Why?”
Zeus answered with only a stern gaze. Having ordered around gods for millennia, he was quite good at it, and Leif, finally, complied. Zeus took the mortal’s head in both hands to study his features in clinical fashion. He peered into Leif’s ears, scrutinized his eyeballs, and checked his pulse before letting him go with a nod.
“Please don’t say, ‘turn your head and cough.’”
“The love you feel is Aphrodite’s work,” Zeus said.
“Isn’t all love supposed to be Aphrodite’s work?” Leif smirked. “She claims to be the ‘goddess’ of love, no?”
“Can the air-quotes, boy. And yes, all love is her domain. Your particular case, however, is more directly induced. I expect she’s indulged herself by flinging around quite a number of love-barbs in the general population after the Return. Or perhaps she did it with purpose; a clandestine way of providing Tracy an ally on her quest.”
Yet, Zeus realized, would Aphrodite not have picked a more classically heroic figure than this mortal? The question brought up another possibility. “It may also be the work of Eros. Difficult to tell, as he derives his power from hers, of course.”
“Oh, of course. Who’s Eros?”
“Better known as Cupid, her Olympian son. Minor god. Did you receive any word or aid from either during your quest?”
“Not that anyone told me about, anyway. I thought Apollo might have done it somehow,” Leif answered, annoyed. “So this is fake? I didn’t care so much when I wasn’t sure, but now I know I’ve been drugged or whatever . . . Can you fix it?”
Zeus couldn’t hide a smirk. “And now my daughter is unworthy of your love. Is that it?”
“I—Are you just screwing with me or what?”
“Perhaps. To answer your question, your love is no more a faked emotion than the lightning bolts I hurl are fake electricity. Nor can I fix it. Divine gifts, once bestowed, cannot be revoked. It must run its course like any love.”
“Great. Swell. I can’t get enough of unrequited love; it’s a real hoot. What good is being king of the gods if you can’t fix things like this?”
“Even if I could, this love makes you an ally of mine. Why should I wish to fix it?” Zeus frowned, turning away. “And I am no longer king of the gods. My power is not what it used to be.”
Leif snorted, earning a glare from Zeus demanding an explanation. “It’s just that there’s a lot of that going around,” Leif told him. “Apollo diminished himself to stay off the radar after he was forced to attack Ares.”
“Truly? I shall greatly reward the sun god’s devotion when this is over,” he vowed. “But make no mistake, I am not diminished in the way Apollo has chosen. I remain a full god.”
“Then I don’t understand. And, ‘make no mistake’? Who talks like that?”
“You’re dangerously insolent, mortal.” Zeus couldn’t help but admire the quality but kept that to himself. Insolence had a time and place, neither of which involved addressing the rightful king of the gods, as far as Zeus was concerned.
“Yeah, surviving four-hundred-foot falls tends to do that to a person. Though I guess I was like that before too. So what’s with the less-powerful thing if you’re not diminished?”
“Though I am still a full god, make no mistake, I am simply less than I used to be, as I am not holding the throne and my place as the king of the gods. My rightful place, I might add.”
“You’re talking about being able to delegate?”
“Certainly not. I speak of my own personal power, which while still mightier than most, is less than it was when I was on the throne. One of the first things I did upon returning to life was to seek a prophecy of the future. I learned nothing.”
“I thought prophecies were Apollo’s thing?”
“Again, you interrupt,” Zeus warned.
“I do that. It’s a valid question.”
“Apollo has the most aptitude, but all gods have at least some ability. Most are so poor at it that whatever they learn only leads to confusion, so they have long abandoned the art—but I used to have some skill, when I was king. I shall not have it again until I am king once more. Being king shines power upon a god, like standing in the focus of many spotlights.”
“Spotlights of power.”
“So to speak.”
“So Poseidon could do it now? The prophetic vision thing, I mean.”
Zeus shrugged. He disliked shrugging, but it was appropriate. “Possible. But the power gained through ruling is cumulative, and nine months is not enough time to accumulate much. This will work in my favor.”
“Got it. Glad we got that established.”
“Thus do I wish to find Apollo. What became of him after the ritual?”
“You mean what’d I see from my lofty perch in the waves far below?” Leif asked. “No idea. You don’t happen to know where Tracy is either, do you?”
“No. Under normal circumstances, the location of any mortal child of mine should be known to me at any instant I wish to find them, but I cannot see her. She must be somewhere hidden from my sight, intentionally or otherwise.”
Leif faltered a moment. “Does that mean she might be dead?”
Zeus considered his response. The day before, Zeus had tried making that determination himself, though he couldn’t be sure without asking Hades directly. Instead he had disguised himself as Hermes and risked a quick side trip to the Acheron crossing, with the intent of asking Charon if he’d seen her spirit board the ferry. The discovery that some guy named Marcus was running things forced him to shelve the matter until he knew more about what was going on. While it was possible that Tracy died resurrecting him, his gut told him otherwise. In any case, Zeus wasn’t about to tell that to a mortal whose loyalty was tied more to Tracy than to him.
“I have no evidence to think so,” Zeus answered. “It might be helpful to describe what happened when you did see her last.”
“Like I said, I was outside the temple with Thalia trying to buy Tracy some time and keep the Erinyes from getting inside. Oh, they killed that guardian-tree you made, by the way.”
“Fiends!” Zeus declared. “I liked that tree.”
“Sorry. They didn’t find the key to that barrier thing, though, so I ran out and grabbed it. Then they cornered me in a place I could see her down below in the temple, still doing the ritual. I figured the only way I’d get out of there and keep the key out of their hands was by hurling myself off the cliff, and that’s pretty much all I know.”
Zeus gave the mortal a shoulder slap. “You truly meant to sacrifice yourself to buy Tracy the time she needed, yet your valor and mettle still fail to move her heart? Unbelievable.” Women!
“I don’t think she saw that part, and I haven’t seen her since, obviously.” Leif frowned. “And, ah, I didn’t really think I was sacrificing myself. It looked like a fall no one could possibly survive, so . . . I went for it.”
“You speak of an unsurvivable fall, yet deny intending sacrifice? Your meaning is muddled, mortal.” Zeus frowned. “Perhaps you struck the waves harder than you are aware.”
The mortal, again, had the temerity to roll his eyes. “You don’t see many movies, do you? If it’s a fall ‘no one can possibly survive,’ it’s pretty much guaranteed that a person’ll survive it. That’s just how it works.”
“That is ludicrous.”
“No, it’s called being genre-savvy.”
“It sounds like hubris to me. However, we will pretend for a moment that you have such a power. What would you do were you in my position, Mr. Karlson of the Genre-Savvy?” While dubious, Zeus could ill-afford to dismiss possible assets at this stage.
“Hard to say without knowing a few things.”
“For instance?”
“Why’d you order that whole god-withdrawal in the first place? Apollo said you never explained it.”
Zeus laughed at the mortal’s audacity. “And you believe I shall tell you, a mere mortal, simply for the asking?”
“A mere mortal who risked his life to help you,” Leif corrected. “Who still wants to help your daughter, and who seems to be one of your few allies at the moment. Hey, you asked.”
Again, Zeus could not hide his amusement, though Leif mistook it for refusal.
“Worth a shot,” Leif muttered after a time.
“Hiding the reason no longer matters,” Zeus answered finally. “There was a prophecy.”
“Great. More prophecies.”
Zeus blasted Leif with a tiny manifest of power that knocked the wind out of the mortal with a gasp. After allowing him a moment to recover, Zeus continued.
“My own prophecy, that there would come a time when Olympian lust for mortal worship would swell to disastrous levels. According to the prophecy, such a thing would come hand in hand with an end to my reign. At the time, I took this to mean that the others would somehow devise a way to gain enough power from mortal worship to overthrow me. This led to the natural conclusion that by hiding ourselves from mortals, the others would never reach such a state.
“I now believe that it was denying them access to any mortal worship at all that drove them to murder me.”
“Probably would’ve worked the way you thought it would, if you hadn’t made them withdraw. One of those ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ sort of things.”
“Yes, exactly!” declared Zeus. This mortal understood. There were no such things as self-fulfilling prophecies; sometimes the cosmos was simply out to get you no matter what you did. The mighty Zeus was not at fault! “And my daughter doesn’t like you at all, you say? Unbelievable.”
“Yeah, you know, I think you ought to maybe mention that to her when we see her.”
If she still lives, Zeus thought. “You’ve yet to give your ‘genre-savvy’ suggestion.”
Leif nodded and leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. “Well, you can’t confront everyone immediately. Do that and you’ll just wind up locked in a hole somewhere or killed again. You need to gather allies first. Unless . . .” He trailed off, drumming his fingertips. “Unless you show up at some dramatic point, surprise the crap out of everyone, and immediately take out one of the conspirators in one shot. Say, Ares or something. The sheer awesomeness of that moment ought to help you do what you need to do. But for that you’d need to find somewhere in the shadows to hide and wait for the opportune moment. Or some sort of costume to disguise yourself.”
“So your advice is either to gather allies and go in force, or to not gather allies and go it alone.”
“And wait for a dramatic moment.”
Zeus frowned. “You could have simply said you have no idea.”
“I have an idea! I have lots of ideas!” The mortal shifted uncomfortably under Zeus’s expectant watch. “I just don’t know which one’s right. I’ll tell you this for sure, though: there’s got to be some sort of twist coming. Or some final last-minute betrayal.”
“Really.”
“Definitely. Like, I don’t know, someone’s actually someone’s father, or Hades is really Apollo, or maybe Ares is actually on your side. Stuff like that always happens. Just watch for it, even if it’s some minor point from earlier that turns out to play a major part in everything. Or maybe Buddha shows up in a super-powered divine attack helicopter with a clone army in tow. That would kick ass.”
There were so many things wrong with that last statement that Zeus chose to ignore it completely. As for the rest . . .
“Vague warnings and lists of things that may or may not happen are what put me here in the first place,” Zeus grumbled. Perhaps it was too much to hope that this mortal could be so grand an asset. Though he was right about needing allies, even a blinded man could see that.
The problem was that all the major Olympians deserved his wrath, even those not actively involved in his death. Every single one swore an oath of loyalty to Zeus, an oath broken when they ignored the crime of his murder and raced over his still-cooling corpse to throw down his decree of withdrawal. If there was one thing Zeus could not abide, it was an oath-breaker. (As it happens, there were many things Zeus could not abide, those things numbering among them chastity belts, nosy wives, and those weird hairless cats. Yet oath-breakers topped the list, so the statement stood.) Every single Olympian knew this. Who, then, would join him, knowing their eventual reward would be punishment?
Apollo would; through his previous efforts, Apollo already numbered among Zeus’s allies and would, therefore, be spared for his loyalty. Yet Apollo alone was not enough, especially diminished. Furthermore, the other Olympians had betrayed him once. What guaranteed that they would not betray him again, perhaps—just as Leif theorized—even before this business was finished? Though Zeus loathed admitting it, he was fallible. He might inadvertently recruit one of those who’d killed him, only to be betrayed anew at a key moment and cast into Tartarus while he was weak, so the usurper could raise themselves up as the new ruler. In the time since his resurrection, Zeus had considered the possibility that only one option may remain, given the stakes.
He might have to flush the whole blasted pantheon.
Apollo could stay, of course. And perhaps Aphrodite, about whom Zeus was still uncertain. The others would have to go.
Zeus returned his attention to Leif. “While your advice lacks a kernel of usefulness, mortal, you may continue to earn my gratitude— and a good word with my daughter—via other means.”
“What other means?”
“I require a loyal liaison between myself and another group of mortals who are working on something that may help me. We were in contact prior to my death—something of a long-shot contingency, you might say. As the grant funding ought to still be valid, I can only assume they continue their efforts. Swear an oath to serve me, and I shall make you my priest so that you may contact me telepathically.”
“I’m not arm-wrestling immortals or slaying dragons or anything like that, am I?”
“For the time being, I simply require someone who won’t attract attention, unlike myself.” Zeus also figured that Poseidon may have remembered Zeus’s passing mention of this particular project and could be keeping an eye on it. Were that the case, Poseidon would either not notice Leif at all or spring a trap on Leif in Zeus’s stead. Zeus obviously preferred the former, but the latter would at least give him valuable information.
The mortal considered Zeus’s offer. “Meals are covered in this deal, right? I’m a little low on funds and that climb took a lot out of me.”
Zeus nodded and fabricated a steak gyro.
“All right, fine, I’ll do it.” Leif took a bite and asked before he’d even swallowed, “Where am I going?”
“Switzerland. Have you heard of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, mortal?”
“You know, I’m getting a little tired of all you guys calling me ‘mortal.’”
“Yes, mortal, I can see how that could get annoying.” Zeus smirked. “Should you succeed, I shall call you that no more.”