The Immortals (16 page)

“You certainly come prepared,” he said. “What else do you have in there?”

“You don’t want to know,” she said, zipping it closed before he could catch the glimmer of her disassembled bow. She hopped lightly back up onto the rolling chair. “Who’s in the offices between here and Helen’s?”

“It’s all associates and adjuncts, but none on of them are here on a Saturday.”

“Good.” She handed him the flashlight. “But you’ll still have to be quiet. Any sound will carry into every office with a vent on the same shaft.”

Selene grabbed hold of the vent’s edge, flipped upside down, then launched herself, feet first, into the airshaft. A moment later, Theo’s head appeared. She wriggled backward out of the way as he attempted to lever himself inside with his elbows. He managed to get his torso in, then turned to look at her with a mixture of humiliation and hilarity. “I’m stuck,” he mouthed. Selene rolled her eyes, but grabbed his elbow and hauled. An unfortunate clanking ensued, but eventually the professor lay securely inside the duct.

Theo’s face was too close again, his pupils huge in the dim light. For a moment, she studied him with her newly improved night vision, knowing that he couldn’t return the scrutiny. His narrow lips were parted slightly. A lock of fair hair stuck behind his glasses, poking at his eyes. He brushed it aside, looking surprisingly vulnerable. Then he turned on the flashlight, blinding her. She winced and spun around, more comfortable with her
feet in his face. With a whispered “Follow me,” she began shimmying down the shaft.

Astoundingly, they made it to Helen’s office without mishap. Selene’s multi-tool easily opened the vent cover. She lowered herself through the hole and dropped the few feet to the ground, landing soundlessly. The professor followed, his legs swaying as his feet searched for purchase. She rolled a chair underneath him, but his shoe caught on the back, wrenching the chair from her hands, then spinning it toward her and knocking her backward. Before she could rise, the professor tumbled on top of her, his flashlight rolling free.

They lay tangled together for a moment in the dark, his chest smothering her face, his knee between her legs. Selene bit her lip to keep from loudly demanding that he immediately remove his hand from her ribs. Her shirt had ridden up in the fall, and his gloved fingertips were warm against her skin.

With her nose pressed to his sternum, the smell of his sweat overwhelmed her. A mix of exertion and excitement, with just a hint of fear. She expected to be repulsed. Strangely, she wasn’t. Then he was rolling off her with a whispered apology.

“Next time I’m trying to help you, just let me,” she hissed.

“Only if you let me do the same.” He held out a hand to help her up. She ignored the gesture and got to her feet unaided.

Theo retrieved the flashlight and panned it across the shelves lining the walls of the small office. “Looks like the cops already took a lot,” he whispered, opening the drawers of Helen’s desk. Selene nodded absently, standing in the middle of the room. Turning in a slow circle, she scanned the photos adorning the walls in tastefully asymmetrical arrangements. A fresco painting of the Minoan snake goddess. The Egyptian temple of Isis at Philae. Another of the ruined temples of the Vestal Virgins in the Roman Forum.

“Interesting collection.” She pointed at the walls.

He glanced up and frowned. “Those are new. Last time I was in here—months ago, probably—she had the usual archeologist’s collection of maps and museum prints.” He opened a file cabinet. “No sign of her laptop.” He gestured to the empty drawer. “And I don’t see any of her research related to the Mysteries either.”

Selene turned to another tall file cabinet near the door, sure it, too, would be empty. To her surprise, it was sealed with a combination padlock. The cops probably planned on coming back with a bolt cutter. But in the meantime…

Selene tugged at the lock, feeling the metal cabinet bend a little in her hands, but even with her increased strength, the lock itself didn’t give. Theo moved to stand beside her.

“Helen liked to do everything the hard way. Handwritten notes, hidden compartments, secret ciphers—I sometimes think maybe she was a CIA agent posing as an archeologist. But, you know, that would imply the government gave a crap about Greco-Roman society, so unlikely.” He shone his flashlight onto the padlock.

“The combination’s only three digits,” Selene said. “We should be able to figure it out.”

Theo shook his head. “Three digits means a thousand possibilities.”

“Well, try
something
.”

He attempted Helen’s birthday. Then the first three digits of her phone number. Then the last three. Then he stepped back from the cabinet and folded his arms, staring at it.

“Are you trying to glare it into submission?” Selene asked.

Theo pushed his glasses a little farther up his nose. “That’s more your style. I’m thinking.”

“Try doing it a little faster. We need to get the tusk identified at Natural History before it—”

“I’ve got it.” He grinned and gestured to the calendar on Helen’s wall. The dates were written not in Arabic numerals, but in Greek characters. “Helen hated math. She once told me that
one of her favorite things about studying Ancient Greek was spending a day without seeing modern numerals. She liked that the Greeks used letters for their numbers. Alpha is one, beta is two, and so on. Her lucky number was 98, the sum of the number values of the letters in the Greek translation of her name. So if we take her favorite Greek three-letter words, then turn the letters into their number equivalents, we’ll have a possible combination.”

“Sounds just absurd enough to work.”

“Worth a shot.” He grabbed the padlock. Then he just stood there.

“What are you waiting for?”

Theo cleared his throat. “There are actually very few Greek words with only three letters.”

“What about ‘Theo’?” Selene suggested impatiently. “That’s Greek, right? The ‘t-h’ is one letter, so that’s three letters total.”

“I know, awfully fitting for a classicist, right? ‘Theodoros,’ meaning ‘gift of the gods.’ I try not to let it go to my head. But I don’t think it’s our combination. The ‘o’ in Theo is an omicron, which corresponds to seventy. Too many digits, but if we add them together…” He did some quick mental math. “No good. It’s nine, five, seventy, so that’s only eighty-four. Not enough digits. It would be a little weird of her to use my name anyway. Maybe not Theo, but ‘theos,’ meaning ‘God.’ Add it up, you get… two hundred and seventy-nine.” He spun the combination lock. “Nope. Damn. We probably need a word that uses only alpha through theta, so it corresponds to our nine modern digits.”

Selene stared at the lock for a moment, then around the room, searching for inspiration. Theo just stared blankly at the ceiling, his lips moving silently. Then, at the same moment, they both turned to the photos of the temples.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked. “Not ‘Theos.’
Thea.
”

Selene nodded. “What better password than
Goddess
?”

“Theta, epsilon, alpha. Nine-five-one.” The lock sprang open in Theo’s hands. He gave a quiet whoop. “I’m not saying we
are
geniuses, but I am saying it’s damn possible.”

He opened the drawer and shone his flashlight inside. Selene peered over his shoulder.

“A
lararium
. A Roman shrine to the
lares
—their household gods,” he murmured, awestruck. Beneath a cardboard roof stood four small clay figurines, a shallow dish of wine, and a pile of burnt incense sticks. “Usually, the
lares
were unnamed protective spirits—local gods of the hearth or the crossroads—or sometimes personal ancestors. But that’s definitely Persephone,” he said, focusing the light on the statue holding a clay pomegranate. “Or I guess, since this a Roman shrine, I should say Proserpina.” He swung to the next figurine, this one bearing a wooden arrow made from a toothpick.

“Artemis. Diana,” Selene said, the names heavy on her tongue.

The third idol had no symbolic accoutrements and barely the suggestion of a face, just full, pendulous breasts and a round belly. “That one doesn’t look Greek or Roman at all,” Theo whispered. “More like a primitive Earth Mother goddess.” The last figure, clearly male, carried only an unadorned toothpick. “And that one could be anything. But probably Asclepius with his staff. Then again, it could be a sword.”

Selene glanced up at the photos on the wall once more. “This whole place is a shrine,” she said. “Your friend Helen didn’t just study the gods, she worshiped them.”

The night of her death, Helen must have invoked Artemis in her moment of need. The magnitude of her faith had awakened senses long dormant, allowing Selene to receive the vision of the woman’s last moments. That explained why touching Sammi Mehra’s corpse had no effect—whatever god or gods the girl had worshiped, they weren’t Greek.
But Helen prayed to
me
,
Selene realized with a heavy heart.
I felt a tingling, a summons, as I left Jackie Ortiz’s apartment the night Helen was killed—and I didn’t even realize what it was.
Now, when it was too late, she could almost hear the woman’s prayer, offered up as she lay bound and gagged at the river’s edge, a man poised above her with a needle glinting in the light of a single lamppost:

Artemis, Protector of Women, aim your arrow true.

Find him, Huntress, show no mercy.

Pierce him through the heart like a stag on the run.

Selene shuddered, thinking of how Helen’s last breath must have reached for Olympus and found it empty. The unanswered prayer would fall from heaven to earth. There, it would slide past the city’s spires, sigh along the canyon streets, and rush down the back alleys into dark and hidden places, to finally whisper in the ear of a goddess who could no longer hear.
The one supplicant I have left, and I came too late to save her,
she admitted.
Maybe it’s Helen’s faith, not my mother’s decline, that has brought back my powers.

As he looked from the figures in the
lararium
to the photos on the wall, Theo’s face paled. “I always talk about how we’ve lost something by embracing literal-minded monotheism, but I never dreamed she’d go this far. What did she get herself into? And who—”

The distant sound of Hippo’s urgent barking interrupted him.

“What’s she—” he began, but Selene cut him off by laying a finger on his lips. They were dry and soft to the touch. He looked astonished, but a second or two later, his eyes darted to the door as footsteps entered his hearing range. They stood, frozen, as the footsteps stopped. Hippo’s muffled barking continued from down the hall in Theo’s office. Selene could almost feel the presence of a man on the other side of the door. She sniffed the air, but smelled only Theo, scared and excited, beside her. Removing her finger from his lips, she padded silently to the door, leaning her cheek against the wood.

Is it the cops?
Theo mouthed.

She shook her head. Too quiet. Too still. Someone staring
at the tamper-proof seal on the door, wishing he could get in. Someone whose scent Hippo recognized.

The instant the footsteps moved away, she took a flying leap onto the desk chair, then launched herself into the ductwork with barely a clatter. Moments later, she’d come out the other end into Theo’s office and thrown open his door so Hippo could bound through. Selene followed the sprinting dog to one end of the hallway, where the hound stood, pacing uncertainly, her nose lifted. She sniffed the ground for a few seconds, then took off in the opposite direction. Selene ran back down the hallway after her dog, past Theo’s office, then Helen’s. Hippo took a sharp turn into another room, then started barking maniacally. Selene halted, made sure she could easily reach the bow in her pack, then treaded cautiously into the room. A skinny old man in a three-piece suit huddled in the corner of the office kitchen, clutching a ham sandwich to his chest.

“Stay back!” he shouted at the drooling dog crouching a foot away.

Selene groaned. “Sorry,” she said, pulling Hippo away. “She has a thing for pork.” She scolded the dog as she dragged her back down the hallway to Theo’s office and slammed the door behind them.

“What? What is it?” Theo panted as his head appeared above her in the vent.

“I thought Hippo’d caught our suspect’s scent, but she was more interested in some professor’s lunch. If it was the killer outside the door, he’s already gone. I was too slow.”

“Too slow? Are you kidding? I blinked and you were gone.” He swung his feet through the hole in the ceiling. “Are you some sort of gymnast?”

“I’m a lot of things.” She pushed the chair under Theo. This time, he dropped onto it without sending her sprawling.

“The way you ran, I was convinced something was about to attack us.”

“If something had been about to attack us,” she said dryly, “I wouldn’t have run.”

“That makes one of us.” He began gathering books and papers from his desk.

“Are you a coward?”

“Wow. Personal question. Only when facing a pile of midterms to grade. You should see the grammar these kids use. But if you’re talking about
violence
? I’ve never actually hit anyone. Wanted to, sure. But I don’t believe in putting myself or others in needless physical danger. I’ll leave that to stuntwomen like you.”

“We need to get going before Natural History closes. You have two minutes.” She hefted herself back into the airshaft and shimmied down the duct to Helen’s office to replace the grate in her ceiling. A minute later, she was back doing the same to Theo’s. He was still packing.

“I just need to grab a few things to take with me while I’m on… vacation,” he explained.

Selene maintained her patience for nearly a minute, then found herself clenching and unclenching her fists, trying not to snap at him as he attempted to shove an entire library’s worth of material into a satchel.

“I’m just going to go,” she said finally, grabbing Hippo’s leash and turning toward the door.

“You can’t go without me.”

Selene spun back to the professor and took a step toward him. She was surprised to notice he was actually an inch or so taller than she. “We are
not
partners, remember?” She narrowed her eyes, but unlike most people she encountered, he neither backed down nor grew defensive, but only looked at her calmly.