“Please note: the temple is currently experiencing technical difficulties in contacting the gods. We are doing our best to fix the problem. For your convenience, please leave any valuables you wish to sacrifice with the high priest. Sacrifices will be completed in the order received once the problem is resolved, and a receipt will be mailed to you. We (and the gods) appreciate your patience.”
—sign outside an Olympian temple following the Second Withdrawal
ZEUS KEPT HIS WORD in the end, rethinking his banishment of the entire pantheon and settling instead for reducing the Olympians to mere vanilla immortals with no powers beyond living indefinitely and having spectacular skin. (Their egos, of course, they could keep as well.) The punishment wasn’t irrevocable, but as he told them, they’d have to kiss his bum profoundly for a while before he’d consider reversing it. After all, Zeus reminded them, even those who didn’t kill him had accepted his death without protest. Anyone swearing to his terms was free to escape banishment.
Anyone, that is, except the remaining conspirators. Offering them no such deal, he launched them into exile once the others were freed. The world would simply have to do without Aphrodite, Ares, Hades, and Hermes. The fountain flung them into the void between the stars, never to return without Zeus’s explicit permission—or at the very least some other contrivance of plot should it become necessary.
Apollo retained full godhood, joined by Jerry and Baskin once Zeus, who resumed his place as king, gathered the power to make their elevation permanent. Though the gods withdrew once more, as Zeus had agreed, there were still tasks to be tended to and fewer Olympians to tend to them. Apollo didn’t mind; he no longer needed to respond to e-mail and evaluate the talent of bands such as Twig (or Stick, one of Twig’s many tribute bands that sprang up after their first recording went double-platinum). He still found time to go shooting with Artemis on weekends and did his best to nudge Zeus toward forgiving her enough to return her godhood.
The Muses were similarly pleased, even if Thalia did have to put up with the occasional severed head left on her doorstep, which she attributed to vindictive Erinyes. The Idiot Ball, swiftly recovered after the whole exiling debacle, was safely returned to the Hall of Creative Abstract Concepts. In time, the pace of sitcom production recovered.
Roaming monsters, both old and new, began to disappear nearly instantly. Regarding this, too, Zeus kept his word. A cloud of razorwings over Albuquerque vanished without a trace just as the Albuquerquean Civil Defense was loading the world’s largest ball of yarn onto the world’s third-largest catapult. (They fired it anyway because, frankly, who could possibly resist?) Sightings of unnatural creatures within urban areas dropped to nearly zero within the span of a single week.
Nevertheless there would be numerous reports in the weeks and months that followed of monsters still lurking out on the fringe, deep in the wilderness. None could be verified. (A vigilant hiker in the Canadian Rockies did record a twenty-second video of what appeared to be a giant ice cream sundae screaming at a walking oak tree, but general Internet consensus was that anything so ludicrous had to be faked. Curiously, all copies of the video vanished a week later.)
Thaddeus Archibald Winslow, who did manage to recover from the blow to the head he received at Zeus’s temple, wasn’t sorry at all to find the Olympians gone. (It was some time before he realized the Second Withdrawal had happened at all, of course. Keeping up with current events was for losers.) Fellow models who’d claimed Olympian heritage fell out of vogue, and his “pure mortal” blood became more popular than ever. In fact, he received absolutely zero comeuppance in the end, which is disappointing, but life is like that sometimes.
By strange coincidence, “life is like that sometimes” is also how one Brittany Simons (formerly Wynter Nightsorrow, formerly the young woman from Chapters Four, Seven, Twenty, and briefly alluded to in Chapters Thirty and Thirty-three) explained to her furious parents why they were still paying tuition after she’d flunked out. Her goth urges sated and her goddess gone, Brittany got herself readmitted the following year using a few secrets she’d picked up about the Dean of Admissions.
She refused to tell anyone her major.
As for humanity itself, the gods’ sudden disappearance after the Titan debacle was interpreted in as many ways as mankind could imagine (which is to say, four). Some insisted the gods were lying low for the moment, recovering strength, soon to return. Some assumed the Titans and Olympians had destroyed each other, never to be seen again. Others declared the entire nine-month Olympian ordeal to be a mass hallucination perpetrated by the Illuminati, the Liberal Media, and the Li’l Camper-Scouts of America in order to draw attention away from the fact that alien mind control had at last broken the tinfoil-hat barrier. (“Humanity is doomed! Evidence culled from the Mayan calendar supports this! We have a website!”)
The final theory was that God himself had had enough of the entire lot of Olympians and had booted them from His creation. (He Himself seemed silent on the matter, save for a single postcard of a burning bush received at the Vatican that simply read, No comment.) The NCMA assumed that the group sent to Greece had something to do with the gods’ disappearance, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that they’d never been heard from again. They erected a statue in Richard Kindgood’s honor, flanked by Ninjas Templar. The statue bore more of a resemblance to Gabriel Stout due to a photo mixup, but the name spelling on the statue’s plaque was more than 90 percent accurate.
“I just couldn’t take it anymore, you know?” Tracy told Leif over lunch a few weeks after it was all over. “A lot of the things you said when you had him in the fountain made sense, and there were other things too.”
Leif shuddered. “I still can’t believe I did that.”
“It’s fine. You had the Idiot Ball. I saw it.”
“That just makes it more embarrassing,” he answered. “What other things?”
“Being fed up with manipulation on all sides, for one. Zeus, Hermes, even Thalia and Apollo, though I don’t really blame them as much. That anti-betrayal safeguard Zeus threw in, like he couldn’t even trust us—”
“Well, he couldn’t,” Leif pointed out. “Frankly it wasn’t a bad idea.”
“Doesn’t mean it didn’t get on my nerves. Plus, Jason’s last request was that I try to get rid of the monsters.”
“I’d have figured it’d be, ‘Bury me at Make-Out Creek’ or something. So that part was just for him?”
“No, not just for him. Did I ever tell you what I learned on the way to Hades? That the gods themselves sent the monsters into the world just for the fun of it?”
“Um, no, I think I missed you mentioning that one. You know you made a living off of that, right?” he asked meekly. “Er, not to judge or anything.”
She smirked at the addition. “I always thought it was a side effect. You get gods, you get monsters. Tornado-chasers aren’t happy about the tornado’s damage, but they’re a force of nature; no one’s responsible for them.”
Leif considered pointing out that it depended on who you asked lately but, to his credit, actually kept his mouth shut.
“I didn’t think I cared that much when I first heard they created the monsters—too much on my plate, maybe. But I think it bothered me more than I realized at first. Dionysus tossing minotaurs at people, hydras loosed to wander around probably just to see how long it takes us to deal with them . . .” She shrugged. “I just saw the opportunity to really do something good for the world, and it seemed like that demanding that things go back to the way they were was the way to do it. The new Olympian world order was interesting, but I’d had enough. Oh, plus I think Zeus killed my grandparents.”
Leif nearly choked. “What?”
Tracy blinked thoughtfully back at him. “It tracks. I never knew them, but they disowned my mom after she got pregnant from a one- night stand. Up and booted her out of the house. A few weeks later, they died in a lightning storm.”
“Dick move on Zeus’s part.”
“On everyone’s part, I figure, but yeah. If he did it. I should probably call my mom and tell her about everything. Ten-to-one she’ll complain about me giving up his genes before she gets mad at him, though.”
“I still can’t believe you did that—or figure out how ‘giving up genes’ even works. And anyway, no one says basketball players are any less talented for being naturally tall.”
“I thought you didn’t watch basketball?”
Leif shrugged.
“Billions of people get by with regular human genes. I can too.”
“Not going to try to take even an ounce of advantage of it.” Leif shook his head. “You at least ought to use your career connections, star in your own reality series. ‘Zeus’s Daughter Does . . . Stuff.’”
“Nope. I stay behind the camera. Why don’t you do it?”
“A reality show?” Leif laughed. “No way. Though we should at least sell the story.”
“How about this: you sell yours; I’ll manage you.”
Leif grinned. “A partnership?”
“Of a sort. We’ll have to figure out a strategy.”
“Deal.” Leif grinned wider. “We’ll go out tonight to celebrate.”
She chuckled. “I told you: no dating.”
Leif pouted. In his defense, he was only half-serious. “Oh, come on, you’re supposed to finally fall for my charms at the end.”
“The end of what?”
“The end of the thing! You know, the whole . . .” Leif waved his glass about, searching for the word. “Adventure!”
“But this isn’t the end. We’re going to do this project together, right? Heck, we haven’t even finished lunch.” Tracy smirked. “Or do you mean the end of our association? I fall for these charms of yours and never see you again? Want me to leave right now?” she teased.
“You need to watch more movies.”
“Don’t try to change me, Karlson.”
“Hey, that’s another thing people do at the end of things,” Leif added. “They change somehow so . . .”
“I told you this wasn’t an end,” she said.
“Yeah, well.”
“Ooh, good comeback.”
Searching for a better one, Leif glanced out the window at someone busily painting over a mural of the Olympians with an ad for the latest smartphone. Poseidon’s face, half covered already, stared blankly out at them with his single remaining eye.
“Hey, whatever happened to Dave and the doctor, anyway?” Leif asked suddenly.
“Geez!” Tracy smacked her forehead. “I have to call them back!”
They’re still fine, by the way.
The End