Omega (35 page)

“
Another great victory that
will be spoken about for years to come,” said the priest beside
me.

“
Had you any doubt?” I
replied.

“
Never, your grace. The
Oracle of Delphi foretold your victory.”

I smiled. My kingdom was enjoying a golden
era of wealth, military conquest and glory.

“
You have doubled the size
of your kingdom. You will conquer all peoples by the time you are
twenty five.”

“
I will leave the world to
my heirs.”

“
The first of which I bring
you news. The child is a boy,” the priest added. “Healthy and
strong like his father.”

“
The gods bless us.” I
smiled. An empire, a son, an army unlike any that had ever been
created. I would be the one to realize the dreams of my
forefathers.

“
They do. He is likely the
first of many of the servants and slaves you’ve taken to your
bed.”

“
You wanted heirs,” I said
with a wink.

“
One will suffice.” His
grave features were even more serious than before. “The Oracle
believes he will be as mighty as his father.”

“
Good.”

“
Which leaves us to the
final message I wish to impart to you.”

I glanced at him. Final? He was elderly but
not yet near the age when men died naturally in their sleep. At
seventeen, I was a feared warrior not about to die in my sleep
either.

“
Artemis has seen your
battle and requested your service.”

“
Artemis?” I echoed. “The
goddess of women? Not a mighty warrior like Ares?” After each
battle, I was summoned by a god and usually given the location for
the next battle and advice for defeating my enemies. We worked
together, the Gods and the Bloodline, for the glory and power of my
kingdom.

Artemis was not known to favor battles,
though, unlike some of the other gods who were constant
benefactors. I was curious what peoples the goddess of women and
hunting would have my army conquer next.

“
She offers you this.” He
handed me a small pouch. I accepted it and dumped the glowing teal
gem into my palm. Holding it up to the dying sun, I admired the
sparkle and facets.

“
Flawless. Fit for a king,”
I said in approval. “Tell her I will go where she
wishes.”

The priest bowed his head. “We thank you,
your grace.” He left me in peace to ponder my next great battle. I
listened to the ocean in case Poseidon sent word through the waves
of enemies trapped in the bay in need of slaying.

The sun sank beneath the horizon, and an
immediate chill seized me, tickling my toes and traveling upward
through my body. I felt … stiff despite the battle lust still in my
system and glanced down at the toes that suddenly didn’t move.

They were gray, and the strange color and
stiffness was climbing up my body.

“
Priest!” I
bellowed.

My thighs, hips, lower back and torso were
soon too stiff to move. My fingers went next and it raced up my
arms and shoulders, finally swallowing my neck and head.

I fell from the horse, helpless. I couldn’t
even blink.

“
The curse of the
Bloodline,” came the priest’s sad voice. “The price for the
blessing of the gods.”

My eyes opened. The memories flooded my
mind. Scenes of previous victories, of battle, war, blood-edged
politics and strategy that explained my ability to see what others
didn’t in the manipulative maneuvering of the
Triumvirate. 

And then there were the four thousands years
frozen in stone where my mind and senses were alert in my role as a
temple guardian even though my body never moved for four
millennia.

I looked anew at the others around me,
understanding why I resembled them, why I was comfortable visiting
them. Why we were connected. Horror spread through me and I crossed
to the nearest grotesque. It told me the answer without me
asking.

Two thousand years.

The one next to it had been frozen for only
a few hundred.

I was surrounded by my family, Bloodline,
forefathers and heirs. My heart twisted inside me to recall what it
was like to be among them and then the ecstasy of the first breath
I took after Alessandra awoke me.

Phoibe.
I froze in place. I had been seventeen when I sired a child.
The Silent Queen, a descendent of mine, was eighteen, but the image
in my head was of her as a child close to Alessandra’s age when she
woke me.

“
Do you remember why the
queen is silent?” Artemis asked through the priestess.

“
Because I told her never
to speak so the priests couldn’t trick her into the curse. She was
supposed to remain mute until I returned for her.” I was struggling
not to feel, not to let the emotions inside me take over. “I never
returned. That was twelve years ago.”

“
She’s never spoken
since.”

I said nothing, overwhelmed by the idea I’d
let a little girl suffer for twelve years. I’d dealt with Phoibe as
the queen, neither of us knowing who the other was. As a child, she
knew only my Mismatch form and I had been forced to forget
everything about her.

The protective instinct surging inside me
was the same I felt for Alessandra. It had first emerged in the
responsibility of a ruler charged with the welfare of his people
and was later tempered by my duty as a stone guardian of a temple.
Ingrained into me, I didn’t understand its source and strength
until this moment.

“
You were hurt. Lantos
saved you. Your memories were likely deemed … dangerous,” Artemis
said, pulling me from my thoughts.

Lantos wiped my
memories.
I saw these images, too, of him
erasing my mind as I lay helpless and dying beneath him.

“
You swore once to serve
me.”

“
An oath that turned me to
stone.” I faced her.

“
The oath to me did not do
this. Your word was given to fight a battle on my
behalf.”

I was struggling to contain the beast side
of me that wanted to fly, to lose itself in physical sensation.

“
Lantos is your friend.
Your master. But he’s not your ally when it comes to a particular
issue.”

“
What exactly would you
have me do to fulfill my oath? Kill him?”

“
No. I’d have you protect
Alessandra.”

“
Alessandra.” Another
thought occurred simultaneously. “She can save them!” I motioned to
the members of my Bloodline trapped forever in stone.

“
Not yet.”

I paced. “Then our purposes are aligned.
Protect her so she saves my kind.”

“
Protect her so she saves
all peoples.”

Anger was crowding out my surprise. The gods
and their priests had cursed me and every ruler of Greece for ten
thousand years. What did I care for her cause? If I protected
Alessandra, it was because she had truly acted out of a desire to
help me and in doing so, had lifted the curse on one monster
otherwise doomed to an eternity in stone. If she did it once, she
could do it again and stop this nasty curse that imprisoned
feeling, thinking, sensing men and women in stone.

“
I don’t care about other
peoples,” I said at last. “I owe them nothing.”

“
And Lantos?”

Lantos wasn’t bad. He was driven and
desperate enough to use Alessandra in a way neither of us wanted
simply to reach his end goal. Without my ability to strategize, he
looked for the quickest method to succeed, no matter what the risk
and cost ultimately was. Erasing my memory … sending me after
Alessandra when he knew what she was to me … they were the means to
his end. I didn’t fault him for doing what he felt necessary, but I
did fault him for his insistence earlier this day that Phase Two
was the only option we had.

“
He’s a misguided friend,”
I replied. “One whose purpose no longer serves mine.”

“
I hear the voice of the
ruthless prince of Greece you once were.”

I touched my forehead. The familiar headache
was back. “That man is dead, his brashness tempered by four
thousand years trapped in stone. I have no desire to become him
again.”

“
But you may need to if
you are to take your place in this prophetic end of
times.”

I lifted my head, liking our discussion less
and less. “Alessandra is the Oracle. I’m nothing to the
Triumvirate, and Phoibe is the current heir to the Bloodline and
crown. What place does a rogue monster, awoken by the good humor of
Tyche, hold in prophecy?”

“
The place beside
her
. I don’t need to tell
you this. You’ve felt it since you became reacquainted.”

What I’d felt had been too unclear for me to
understand, except that I knew I couldn’t let anything happen to
Alessandra. How deep that dedication ran, whether or not it was
more than gratitude and fidelity for her rescuing me, I didn’t
know. But I suspected it was more than I was ready to handle at the
moment. “You’re wrong,” I said.

“
Then let me prove it to
you.” Artemis sat on the back of one of the stone creatures. “Do
you remember your real name?”

“
Of course. It’s …” I
stared at her. I recalled every moment of my life before being
stone, every military campaign, every slave I slept with, even the
names of politicians I’d ordered assassinated and my forefathers
for a hundred years before me. Adonis was a name given to me when
two police officers found me in an alley shortly after Alessandra
awoke me.

But it wasn’t
my
name. Not originally
at least.

“
Your name is written on a
plaque buried beneath the beach where you turned to stone, a
memorial of sorts to the great warrior prince,” Artemis said. “Go
there. Find it. Tell me what else is written. When you see it, you
will understand.”

Usually it was me who toyed with others, but
the goddess was having her day – or perhaps, more accurately, her
latest day the past four millennia – to play with me. I didn’t like
it one bit.

And I didn’t have a choice either. If I
wanted to know what secret she hid, I’d have to do as she said.
“What of Alessandra?” I asked uneasily. “She’s not safe here.”

“
No, she is not, and I
fear her fate will become much worse soon. Like you, she needs to
learn. Those lessons will be painful.”

“
Then I’ll
stay.”

“
You can never truly help
her if you don’t find the plaque.”

I clenched my jaw. A goddess was offering to
help me for reasons I didn’t understand. This same goddess was the
only one rumored to be trapped on Earth who hadn’t spoken to
Lantos. And she wanted me to help Alessandra, the person who could
awaken the other members of the Bloodline and perhaps prevent
Phoibe from being turned into a temple guardian.

My personal feelings held no place in this
discussion. I detested being manipulated or lied to. I hated being
sent away from the action knowing full well I left Alessandra in
danger.

“
I have guided you the
best I can the past few years,” she added. “Like Mnemosyne, I have
spoken to you as well.”

“
Through Mrs. Nettles?” I
asked. The double possession. The sense that Mrs. Nettles was two
people living inside her, one of which only responded to flashy
items. The other was wiser. Different. “I wish you all would leave
her alone.” I had no way of knowing if my long time companion
experienced pain when overtaken by a goddess, and I loathed the
knowledge I’d been spied on.

“
The faster you go, the
faster you return,” she baited.

“
I will do it for them,” I
motioned to the statues, “and for her. Not because I gave you an
oath.”

“
Very well.”

My head snapped in the direction of
Alessandra’s villa, and my body went rigid. It wasn’t yet
comfortable to feel what she did, despite teasing her about it.
Fear slid through me – her fear – followed by her pain.

Without saying another word to the goddess,
I leapt into the air.

I am not afraid of an army
of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a
lion.

–
Alexander the
Great

It happened too fast for me to react.

Hands yanked me out of slumber, bound and
gagged me and tied a hood over my head. Hushed voices were too soft
for me to understand, and I was slung roughly over the shoulder of
someone I didn’t need to see to know how big he was. His jarring
gait smashed into my ribs with each step, waking me further.
Immobilized, I did what Herakles had taught me and trained my
senses on anything I could identify: sounds, smells, touch.

And I tried not to panic.
It was one thing to be tossed into an arena with a monster and
provided weapons. It was something else to be blinded and helpless.
I
hated
the
feeling of being out of control of my own body.

I identified four people by the different
pitches of their voices. I was slung into the backseat of a car
that peeled out fast enough for me to be pinned to the backseat.
Struggling to make sense of what was happening, I heard two men in
the front seat. They had bound me with duct tape, and I almost
smiled.