The Cult of Kronos (5 page)

Hades returned to Celene,
tearing off a scrap of his long robe and wrapping the dagger in the
cloth. He gave it to Celene. “When the time comes,” he said. “His
death will be eternal.”

The pair began to walk,
following the path of the Styx to the delta where it met another
river. The journey took hours. The water of the Styx gradually merged
with the water of the Mnemosyne, which shone like moonstone, before
both streams flowed clear and disappeared into a tunnel to the
outside world. Beyond this river was the tunnel that they would
follow for days to reach the surface; the North American portal to
Hades came out in the middle of New Orleans.

A few ghosts hovered around
the mnemosyne, the river of memory. Peter and Celene were walking
quickly, eager to make it back to the surface, when one of the ghosts
reached out and tried to grab her arm. She shouted and staggered
back, but his hand passed through her.

“
Dr. Davis,” the boy said.
Celene tried to calm herself as she looked at the boy. He was a tall,
handsome teenager with dark skin and large, almond-shaped eyes. He
was dressed in a suit. She knew him from one of her biology classes.
This was Ryan Bear, Diana Hill's boyfriend. He had died from an
allergy attack last summer.

“
Ryan,” she said, her hand
placed over her heart. It did not beat. “What are you doing out
here?”

“
They wanted me to drink
from the Lethe,” he said. “But I didn't want to forget.”

“
I'm sorry for what
happened, Ryan.”

Ryan tried to touch her again,
but all he did was give her a chill. “Diana needs to remember,”
he said. “Tell her to drink from the Mnemosyne. She will remember.”

Celene turned to Peter, who
was still in the form of Hades. He nodded. “Of course. Of course!
The water of memory—I didn't think of it because we discourage the
dead from drinking from the mnemosyne, but it does wake them up. It's
like turning a light on. When you die, everything is hazy and you
shuffle through. You drink from the Lethe without thought. But the
guards, we gave them Mnemosyne so they remembered their lives and
they did their duty. If the other Olympians were to drink it…”

He turned and took off towards
the onyx gates. “Wait there,” he shouted.

Celene stood next to Ryan's
ghost, waiting. She didn't know what to say to him. He was dead, and
she hadn't known him very well in life. She couldn't exactly ask how
life was treating him. Did he know that his death was more than an
accident? Ryan did not seem to mind the quiet. He was dead, after
all. Celene figured that eternity granted patience.

After a few minutes, Hades ran
back with a water skin in hand. “One of the guards had it,” he
explained. He tipped the bag and poured out the wine. It smelled
wonderful, though Celene wondered how ancient ghost wine would taste.
Hades knelt at the edge of the river and filled the skin. When it was
full, he slung it over his shoulder and wiped his hands on his robes.

“
You'll want to change,”
Celene said. “You can't go to the surface in a chiton. And leave
the bident, too. It'll attract too much attention.”

He nodded and shifted, his
face staying the same, but his robes turning to a canvas jacket and
faded jeans. He passed the bident to Ryan and asked him to carry it
back to the throne room. “I should say the same for you,” Peter
said. “You were just murdered, and you were a pretty school
teacher. Your face is undoubtedly all over the news.”

“
I don't know—”

“
Just remember,” Hades
said. He handed the water skin to Celene. “This may help.”

Celene held the bag to her
mouth and tipped it back. The water, bitter and sweet at the same
time, trickled over her lips. She saw herself standing in a field as
men, their backs bare, worked to harvest grain; she saw herself
kneeling in the Athenian cemetery, watching and weeping as Persephone
descended below; and she blushed as she saw herself laying in a field
with a handsome mortal. The memories and all of their attached
emotions came flooding back, as if a gate in her mind had opened up
and a wave of images had burst out. Tears brimmed at her eyelashes
and she shivered.

When Demeter lowered the drink
from her lips, she was no longer in the form of Dr. Celene Davis,
middle-aged school teacher. Instead, she had black hair, olive skin,
and a face that would forever look thirty-three years old. Only her
green eyes were the same. She wore a gown of draped green fabric and
a gold band around her arm.

“
There you are,” Hades
said.

Celene turned to look on her
reflection in the surface of the Mnemosyne. She gasped, unable to
believe how beautiful she was. “This is who I really am?”

“
It is,” Hades said.
“We'll work on the clothes as we go. Come on. There's no time to
lose.”

“
A beard signifies lice, not
brains. ”

-Greek Proverb

vi.

Apollo and Poseidon took on
the task

of building mighty walls
for Laomedon

to protect the sovereign's
city of Troy

from outside attack.

When it came time for the
King to pay his bills,

he refused to give the gods
what they were due.

For the high, impenetrable
walls of Troy,

the King paid nothing.

Poseidon would not allow
himself to be

cheated by an arrogant
mortal monarch,

and he summoned a sea
monster to attack

those same walls he built.

So perhaps Laomedon saw his
folly

when his daughter was
strapped to the sea's cliff face

and the monster was bearing
down upon her

to devour her whole.

“
Beware lest you lose the
substance by grasping at the shadow.”

-Aesop

VI.

Nick Morrisey swam like a
bullet between the orange and green lanes of the university swimming
pool. Every minute or so he would remind himself to pretend to
breathe like a human being, picking his head up, opening his mouth,
but not really taking in air. Nick had the unique ability to breathe
water—or at least it was unique to creatures that walked upright on
two legs.

When Nick's body was spent, he
climbed out of the pool and started towards the locker room. He had
already been to swim practice this morning (it started up weeks
before classes), but he still craved the water. It was a comfort to
him. Since arriving back at school after the funeral, Nick had spent
every possible minute in the pool. He had even skipped a kegger last
night for an evening swim.

Nick
sat down on the bench in front of his locker, still dripping wet. He
watched the beads of water drip off of his curly black hair and land
on his feet. The first week of college was supposed to be glorious;
he had planned to go to parties, pick up women, and bask in all the
attention that came with his new role as the UM swim team's secret
weapon. He credited his mood to paranoia: Kronos was coming to get
them. Clearly
that
was
the reason for his funk. Besides, why should he grieve Dr. Davis? She
had never liked him. None of them had ever liked Nick. They just
tolerated him because they had to. Because thousands of years ago
they were family.

But what kind of family were
they? Nick stood up and slammed the locker door open. It knocked into
the next locker and set the whole row rattling. June Herald had asked
Minnie, right on the front steps of the church, to call when she got
to Cambridge. Evan had even remembered to offer Valerie his services
in rigging a security system for her car, as she was living with her
parents and commuting to school. The ones who weren't going off to
college yet—Penny, Astin, Diana, Evan, Lewis, Teddy—had agreed to
meet regularly and continue their Sunday Pantheon meetings without
their older peers. Had anyone asked where Nick was going? No.

It had been that way since
kindergarten. Nick remembered the first day on the playground at his
new school. He was five; his mother had kept him home until then. All
of the other kids knew each other from their fancy private preschool.
Nick had been dragged from a summer of cookouts and swimming pools,
stuffed into an itchy collared shirt, and sent away from his parents.
He had cried when his mother left him at school. It was only a day,
but to a boy who had never been without his parents or grandparents,
it was a century. When recess came, Nick had made a solid effort to
join in an unstructured game of soccer, but one of the boys had
pushed him down. “Crybaby needs his mommy.” The other kids
laughed. Nick had never forgotten that day, and he made his
reputation on pushing that boy down, calling him “lard-ass”, and
looking completely innocent when the teachers came around. Now Nick
was at a new school again, and picking on the fat kid wouldn't
guarantee him success. He had to impress his team mates. He had to be
number one so that everyone would want to be part of his entourage.

The coach's office door opened
and he stepped out. Coach Cruz was a tall man with sandy brown hair
and skin that was wrinkled not from age, but from sun. He had a
strong swimmer's body, with the unfortunate addition of a few extra
pounds right above the belt.

Nick grabbed a towel out of
his locker and vigorously rubbed his hair. When he hung the towel
back on the hook, the coach was standing right next to him. Nick
jumped.

“
Oh, hey…I uh, just wanted
to get a little more practice on the breast stroke,” he said,
feeling like he had to explain why he was here so long after practice
had ended.

Nick turned and looked into
his coach's eyes. Something was wrong. The locker room, lined with
neat rows of orange and green lockers, was brightly lit, yet the
coach's pupils were wide and dark like the new moon. Was he high?

“
Dude…” Nick started to
say, but the coach clapped his hand around Nick's shoulder.

“
Poseidon,” he said.

Nick scrambled backward and
fell into the lockers. The clasp on one of the lockers dug into his
bare back, and Nick cursed quietly. His coach was a Titan? What were
the odds?

The coach just smiled and then
continued to speak.

“
It's good to see you, my
son.”

“
Are you here to kill me?”

The coach laughed. “No. No,
that would be wasteful. I'm here to make you an offer.”

He held out his hand and Nick
took it, letting Cruz pull him to his feet. Coach Cruz looked around
the locker room and nodded before looking back at Nick. “How are
the others treating you?”

“
The Pantheon?”

“
Yes, The Pantheon.”

“
Like…like Valerie. Like
I'm invisible.”

“
You know who I am?”

“
Kronos,” Nick said. “You
killed Dr. Davis.”

“
I killed Demeter,” he
nodded. “because I knew that getting to her would shake the
mountain. Was I right? How is your brother, Zeus?”

“
He's devastated.”

“
Good.” Coach Cruz put his
hand on Nick's shoulder again. “My son—”

“
You ate us.”

Cruz laughed. “But I didn't
kill you.”

“
There's a difference?”

“
You came back up whole,
didn’t you?”

Nick just glared.

“
I was rash, it's true. I
believed a prophecy and in trying to stop it, I made it true. I've
learned my lesson.”

“
And that lesson is?”

“
Don't try to thwart
prophecies. Keep up, boy. It was obvious enough.” He took his hand
off of Nick's shoulder and bridged his fingers in front of his chest.
“You were brothers and you drew lots. Hades drew the underworld,
Zeus drew the sky, and you drew the sea. Isn't it funny how the
brother who orchestrated this whole drawing of straws managed to get
the heavens? The best domain? By right, being the youngest, shouldn't
he have gotten the least domain?”

“
What do you want from me?”

“
Ah, yes. Listen, Poseidon,
I know you're tired of following orders.”

Nick's shoulders tensed. “I
mean, who isn't.”

“
And it's not necessarily
because you don't like rules and authority. After all, you have no
problem taking orders from an Olympic Bronze Medalist,” he said,
placing his hand on his chest.

“
Well, I figure someone
who's been to the Olympics deserves the authority.”

“
But Zeus…”

“
But Zach,” Nick said.
“Who died and made him boss?”

Cruz chuckled again. “Exactly.
Why does winning one fight against an old man make him king? Who
decided that it had to be a monarchy? Here you are, gods, and your
mortal pets have invented a more progressive government than you.”