The Immortals (14 page)

Selene sat back, looking grim. “Well, if that’s the case, now I know where they got this.” She pulled an enormous blackened tooth from her backpack. Theo felt his jaw drop. It could have been a dinosaur fang—if dinosaurs had fangs. Selene flipped the tooth casually in her hand.

“
Now
who’s withholding information? I thought you
saw
a tusk in the hospital, not
stole
it.” Breaking into the crime scene was one thing… but theft? What was he getting himself into?

“It was under a shelf in the storeroom. Did you really want me to just leave it there? The cops missed it in their search and I couldn’t very well tell them I’d broken in and done a better investigation than they had.”

“That’s too big to be some random sacrificial offering. It must be one of the
hiera
. You’ve got to give it to the police.”

“Right. Because they’ve done such a good job so far?”

“Then give it back to the museum,” he insisted.

“Not until I figure out exactly what it is,” she shot back.

Theo found himself transfixed, watching her nostrils flare with every seething breath.

Then he started to laugh, suddenly elated. All the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. He’d found the perfect partner. Sure, he could do the research himself, but he didn’t have a lot of practice with the more illegal aspects of their quest. For Selene DiSilva, on the other hand, it seemed all in a day’s work.

“Now you’re stuck with me—I’ve got a friend at Natural History. We can return the tooth, get it identified,
and
check out the crime scene from Thursday night.” He downed the last of his tea, grabbed his coat, and waved at the waitress for the check. “But first, we should look at the photos from the Met before I get fired and locked out of my office. We’ll zip up to Columbia, then head back down to the museum before it closes.”

Selene stood up, reaching into her back pocket for her wallet.
“I’ll get it,” Theo began, but she glowered him into silence and carefully counted out her share of the check. Then they stood without speaking, staring across the table at each other. He still didn’t know what to make of her. Despite her attempts to hide herself behind her baseball cap and loose clothes, only a eunuch or a blind man wouldn’t find her attractive.
No, scratch that,
he amended,
a blind man would still smell the cypress forest she seems to carry around in that huge backpack of hers.
Theo stayed still, sure she’d disappear if he moved, just as she had that morning by the hospital. So he waited for her to make the first move.

Finally, she picked up her backpack and slung it over one shoulder, then took a step toward him. “Before these assholes kill another woman, I’m going to find them—with or without you. Nobody hired me. Nobody’s paying me. I don’t talk to the press or the cops. I’m just going to track them down and catch them and—” Theo could have sworn she was about to say “kill.” “If your museum contacts can help me do that, then I’ll come with you.” She put on her baseball cap and pulled it low, so he could barely see her eyes glaring at him from beneath the brim. “But don’t think we’re partners, because we’re not.”

Theo grinned and snagged the sole leftover pork dumpling off her plate, chewing with relish. “Good. I think I’m going to like working with you.”

On the walk north, Selene tried hard to ignore her self-appointed sidekick. He didn’t seem to mind, rattling on about the details of Mystery Cults through the ages. She found his enthusiasm unnerving. Solving crimes had usually been serious, solitary work for Selene. Occasionally over the years she’d had a female partner. But never a man. For the Virgin Goddess, mortal men had always fallen into two categories: those to be punished and those to be ignored. Slowly, she was coming to realize that Theodore Schultz didn’t fall neatly into either camp. In fact, she had to admit that working with him might even be useful. Mankind had invented writing and painting to compensate for their inability to perceive multiple realities at once. As a result, Theo’s books taught him more about the Mysteries than Selene’s own hazy memories of godhood could offer. The Eleusinian goddesses themselves, Persephone and Demeter, might not even remember their own rites in as much detail as the books provided. Their memories would be as cloudy and confused as Selene’s.

The one thing Theo’s books could never teach him, of course,
was the true purpose of the cult. He could spend years trying to justify each ritual in its broader social context, but he’d never understand the fundamental truth—the ancients worshiped the gods because the gods were real. The gods demanded it. And the gods would torture you for eternity in the pit of Tartarus if you refused, just as they’d sentenced Sisyphus, who stole their sacred food, to push a boulder up a hill in the Underworld, only to have it eternally roll back down. When Theo had grabbed her last dumpling, he didn’t know how lucky he was that Selene was Artemis no longer.

As for Theo’s theories about the supposedly hallucinogenic properties of
kykeon
, however, he might have a point. In their prime, the Olympians could send dreams and prophecies to anyone at any time—no assistance necessary. But as their power had faded, and their threats of punishment grew empty, the gods had turned desperate. Selene wouldn’t put it past her kin to consider drugging their followers.

Still thinking wistfully of Sisyphean torture, she followed the professor through the tall gates of Columbia’s main quad. For every student who noticed him and looked askance, whispering in a friend’s ear, another trotted up to Theo and offered to help.

“What the hell, Dr. Schultz?” asked one young Indian man with a surfer’s accent. “It’s bullshit, what they’re saying. The cops have their heads up their asses. We’ll have another sit-in. Like we did to protest the expansion. We won’t move until they clear your name.”

“Slow down, Anant. There’s no need to go all
Lysistrata
,” Theo assured him.

Selene gave a little snort of amusement, grateful for a reference she could finally understand, but the student just looked at him blankly.

Theo looked at the kid over his glasses. “The Aristophanes play where the women of Greece withhold sex from their husbands until they agree to end the Peloponnesian War? I reminded
you to read it at our last class?” Nothing. Theo sighed. “I appreciate the effort, Anant, but let’s hold off on the sit-in until you finish the homework. I’ll be fine, I promise.”

When they reached Hamilton Hall, Selene and Hippo followed Theo up the steps of the stately Greek Revival building. A bronze statue of the building’s namesake stood guard on a pedestal at the top of the stairs. “Asshole,” Selene couldn’t help muttering as they passed. Theo shot her a startled glance.

“Not you. Him.” She jerked her thumb at the statue, then immediately regretted it. She forgot sometimes how strange she seemed to mortals.

“Alexander Hamilton? What do you have against
him
?”

“Long story,” she mumbled, following Theo through the massive wooden door. She couldn’t very well explain that on a particularly humid July Fourth in 1804, Hamilton had run into Dianne Delia, a strikingly tall, black-haired beauty, on the streets of Greenwich Village as he stumbled toward his carriage, drunk and reeling from a night of celebrating the republic he’d helped create. He tried to lure the young woman to a nearby inn and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Dianne finally resorted to kicking Hamilton soundly in the groin and pushing him into the horseshit-strewn street. He’d had her arrested for disorderly conduct. She spent a week in a fetid jail cell next to a mildly insane Irishwoman who sang rude Gaelic ditties from dawn to dusk. History remembers that Hamilton was fatally shot in a duel with Aaron Burr on the shores of New Jersey soon after Dianne was released. Those who knew Burr were surprised—he was supposed to fire into the ground. Those who knew the Huntress were not—she’d been hiding in the woods with a pistol beyond the dueling ground, and when Burr fired, so did she.

Theo led the way to an empty lobby area on the top floor of the building. He walked behind the reception desk to his in-box. “Ah-hah!” He waved a slim envelope with the Met’s logo in the corner. “Got it.”

He led her down a long, musty corridor lined with offices. One bore a conspicuous red sticker pressed between the door and its frame, reading “EVIDENCE” in large block print.

“I see the cops have already been here,” said Selene.

“Yeah. Took the good stuff from Helen’s office and sealed it up.”

Selene blew out a frustrated breath.

“I know,” he concurred. “I’m desperate to get my hands on the manuscript she was working on, and no one knows where it is. I’m sure she must have kept some research notes in her office—she always preferred to handwrite things anyway. It’s possible the cops may have left something useful behind, since I doubt they even knew what they were looking for.”

“You think her notes would be helpful?”

“Definitely. They’d tell us her sources, which might lead us to whoever got her mixed up in this cult in the first place. And we might find more of the papyri fragments she translated. Then we’d know what she uncovered about the Mystery itself. My own predictions about the cult’s next move are guesswork. But Helen must have spent at least two years on this. I bet she had all the answers.”

Theo led her down a long, musty corridor to his office and gave a relieved sigh when the door clicked open. “At least they haven’t changed the locks on me yet.”

He ushered Selene inside the cramped room. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases jammed the walls, stuffed two rows deep with volumes in Ancient Greek, Latin, English, and Acadian. Masks, vases, and miniature plinths competed for space on the shelves, many of which looked ready to give way with the addition of one more pamphlet. Above his desk—a desk piled a foot high with notes—hung maps of ancient Greece alongside a photo of the Parthenon, a reproduction of the Minoan
Phaistos
Disc, and dozens of scribbled index cards tacked to the wall. Memos and lecture outlines littered the floor. With a frustrated huff,
Hippo wedged herself into the only space big enough for her—underneath the desk. Papers crunched under her weight as she curled into a surprisingly small ball.

“Who’s that?” Selene asked, pointing to a color photograph of a man with shaggy blond hair and a draped white tunic, who could’ve been a younger version of Theo. “He looks familiar.”

“Because he’s Luke Skywalker,” he said, looking at her as if she were mentally disabled.

“Oh. Right.”

“You’ve never heard of
Star Wars
?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it,” she said brusquely. Even the Huntress couldn’t avoid imbibing a certain amount of pop culture. “I’ve just never… you know… seen it.”

“Wow. It doesn’t get much more like a Greek hero archetype than
Star Wars
. The ancient myths tell about classical civilization; our own myths do the same for us. And some stories are so good that they’re as relevant today as they were three thousand years ago, and they’ll be just as relevant in a galaxy far, far away. Young man from the sticks—not unlike Perseus or Achilles—goes off to battle evil, finding an inner strength he didn’t know he had, wielding a magical weapon, overcoming some challenging father-son issues, and finally fulfilling his destiny to save the world.” Seeing the utter delight on his face, Selene felt the stirrings of a smile. But only the stirrings. “I’ll show you sometime,” he said. Then his smile faded, and he looked away. Selene wasn’t sure what expression he’d seen on her face, but she assumed it hadn’t been encouraging.

“Let’s just look at the photos from the Met,” she said.

“Right, right.” He turned to his desk. Then he paused. He moved a few stacks of papers. “Wait. I put it down right here… I can’t have possibly…”

“Is this a joke? We don’t have time for this.” She didn’t want to smile anymore. She wanted to growl.

“Did you see where the envelope went?” He was on his knees
now, sifting through the drifts of documents on the floor. “Maybe it slid off one of the piles.”

“You may be the most—”

“Amazing classicist you’ve ever met? That’s what I thought you were going to say. The good news is, I have a background in archeology and my office is always a midden, so I’m an expert at this sort of dig.”

Sometime between when he donned a floppy safari hat from his desk drawer and when he started referring to Hippo as “Cerberus the Hell Hound, guarding the entrance to the UnderDesk,” Selene found herself more entertained than annoyed.

“Or are you a Sphinx?” he asked the dog, who cocked a baleful brow at him. “Must I answer a riddle before you will allow me access to the treasures on which you sit? What’s that?” He squatted down, his face hovering close to Hippo’s. “What tastes better than it smells, you ask? Hmm… good one…” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

The dog lifted her head and licked his face.

“That’s it!” he spluttered though the cascading drool. “A tongue!” Theo looked up and met Selene’s eyes from beneath the brim of his ridiculous hat.

Only then did she realize she was actually grinning.

“Ah!” He shook a victorious fist in the air. “I’ve done it! You’re laughing, I dare you not to.” She spluttered a bit, failing to control the chuckle burbling inside. Theo looked at the ceiling, raising both hands as if to an unseen deity. “You see, she
is
human after all!”

With that, Selene threw back her head and let loose. Not her usual dry snort, but her true laugh—a very silly, very loud, honking guffaw. She’d once complained to her father that if he was going to give her such a preposterous laugh, he should’ve at least spared her the ability to feel shame. Zeus had only smiled and winked.
Your mother sometimes says I can’t feel shame, but she’s wrong. And good thing, too. Because if she thinks I’m incorrigible now, only think how I’d be if I didn’t feel at least a little guilt!

Theo was laughing, too, a convulsive, breathless hoot. “Don’t cover it up,” he insisted as Selene’s hand flew to her mouth in embarrassment. “That’s a fantastic laugh. Completely contagious.” Hippo finally scuttled out into the room, woofing her agreement. Theo grabbed the missing envelope from under the desk, rumpled and covered with dog hair, and held aloft his hard-won trophy, as triumphant as Jason with his Golden Fleece.

Selene felt a door inside her crack open despite herself. She couldn’t quite wipe the smile from her face.
It’s going to be okay
, she thought suddenly.
No one else needs to die.

Still chuckling, Theo ripped open the envelope and held a paper out toward Selene. “Check it out. Courtesy of my friend Steve over at the Met.”

She examined the first grainy photo. A terracotta vase with a wide, flaring lip. The faintest suggestion of wheat sheaves painted in darker brown around its base. Theo leaned forward.

“Damn, I love it when I’m right,” he said, beaming. “That’s a clay replica of a
kalathos
. Exactly like the basket they used at Eleusis to carry their sacred objects.” He did a quick search of the Met’s online database. “Accession number 74.51.1137 probably,” he mused. “No photo on the website, but the description matches up. It’s old. Really old—1200 BC, they think. Our cult’s reaching way back before the Athenian Golden Age—all the way to the beginning of Greek religion as we know it. To be perfectly authentic, they should’ve used a woven
kalathos
rather than a terracotta one, but the real wool-gathering baskets didn’t survive the way pottery did.”

Selene flipped to the next page.

“Hmm. Terracotta red-figure bell-krater,” Theo announced. “Those were usually used for mixing wine and water. Not a chest, like the
kiste
should be, but maybe all they could get their
hands on. That means they’ve got their two sacred containers. Thank God they lost their tusk in the hospital. If they’re missing one of the
hiera
, that may slow them down. Give us time to catch up.”

He leaned closer to the paper, his head bent. Selene found herself staring at the threads of silver that curled out from his sideburns. Oblivious to her scrutiny, Theo went on. “Interesting red figure. Three stags. Doesn’t seem relevant to the cult, does it? Strange. If they couldn’t find a real
kiste
, they should at least choose something with a meaningful design—wheat sheaves or pigs or something to do with the Underworld.”

“Don’t tell me you’re rethinking your Eleusinian theory.”

“Absolutely not.” He looked up at her, and for a moment, his face was only inches away. “I’m way too stubborn for that.” He swung to his computer, and Selene felt oddly relieved. “Besides,” he continued, “don’t you know the key to understanding Greek pottery is looking at the back? Two sides to every myth. Two sides to every vase.” He gave her a cocky grin as he checked the online database. “Fifth century BC bell-krater with three stags on the obverse. Voilà. And on the reverse… drumroll please… four unidentified figures.” Selene applauded sarcastically. “Okay, not helpful, I admit. But let’s just take a look, shall we?” He clicked open a photo of the vase’s reverse. “A young man and two women, one with a veil and a lotus staff, the other holding a child’s hand…”

But Selene wasn’t listening.

She had no photographs of her mother. Mortals amassed pictures and keepsakes as a dress rehearsal for the inevitably permanent parting of death. The Athanatoi, on the other hand, never feared forgetting each other’s faces—never needed to seize and remember some special moment. There would be countless such events in the future, and there had been countless such events in the past. But staring at the painting of her brother, her mother, and herself on the face of the pottery, Selene began,
for the first time, to understand why humans had been making representations of their loved ones for so long. The painting was an unusual one, since none of her family carried their traditional attributes—no bow for her, no lyre or wreath for Apollo—but she recognized the figures immediately by the telltale shiver that coursed over her arms. Her mother would’ve loved it. In it, Leto held the lotus staff, a symbol of royalty usually reserved for more important goddesses like Hera. Artemis stood with a child. Not her own, of course, but one that represented all the world’s youth. The Goddess of Girls had always been Leto’s favorite epithet for Artemis—the only aspect of her daughter that the Goddess of Motherhood truly understood.