The Immortals (20 page)

But why invoke me? Who would care enough to help me? And perhaps most important,
Selene thought,
can I convince them to save my mother as well?
In half an hour, Hermes would lead her to the Underworld, and she might find some answers. Persephone and Hades, as central figures in the original Eleusis cult, topped the list of possible suspects to be leading this new one. If they were involved, she’d know soon enough.

“You look so familiar,” the mother was saying to Theo. “Have I seen you on TV?”

Theo shook his head, all innocence, but Selene could see the sweat beading his brow.

“I have to go,” Selene said abruptly.

Theo shot her a grateful glance and followed her and Hippo back onto the street.

Selene looked up and down the block. “No cops in sight.”

“Great. Good thing we’re going to the cemeteries next. At least dead people won’t recognize me.”

“I’m not going to the cemeteries, not yet. The sun won’t be down for another half hour. Nothing’s going to happen before then. Probably not until the dead of night, like the other crimes.” She couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. What would he say if he knew she was
benefiting
from the cult? Would he trust her to punish the killer? Did she trust herself? She headed toward the nearest subway. “Right now, I’ve got another lead to pursue.”

“Where to?”

“I have to go alone.”

“You keep saying that, but I—”

“Not this time.” Her tone brooked no argument. This was about Athanatoi now. No mortals allowed. While Theo continued pondering Helen’s research into the Eleusinian Mysteries, Selene would talk to the Goddess of Eleusis herself. Theo couldn’t know that. Now or ever. “I’ll call you later and we’ll make a plan for tonight,” she said, forestalling any further protest.

Selene left Theo at the uptown subway entrance, acutely conscious of her lie. Returning from the Underworld was rarely easy. She might never see Theodore Schultz again.

In Union Square, Selene’s half brother Hermes waved exuberantly as he spotted her across the plaza.

Before she could stop him, the man currently known as Dash Mercer threw his arms around her and pressed a kiss on each cheek.

“Selene, darling. You look spectacular.” The platitudes sprang forth as easily as always. “No one pulls off bulky and baggy quite like you.”

“I don’t like to attract attention.”

Dash had no such compunction. Linen suit, open-necked pink shirt, suede loafers. Large black eyeglasses, of course.

“Nice touch,” she said, pointing at the delicately patterned silk handkerchief peeking from a breast pocket.

He winked. “
Hermès.
Cost a fortune. But worth every penny.”

“You’ve stooped to branding?”

“Every little bit of name recognition counts, you know,” he said reproachfully. “Our little cousin Victory looks great for her age, even though she’s not one of the Twelve, because a track coach decided to name his sneaker line ‘Nike’ back in the
seventies. You look stupendous at the moment, but you know the fading comes for everyone eventually. You should think about it.” He pressed a finger to his lips as he led the way through the square. “Artemis Athletics. A chain of workout clothes ‘for the goddess in every woman.’ Hah! I should go back into advertising.”

Rolling her eyes, Selene followed Dash down into the subway station. At the entrance, she turned to offer him a MetroCard, but he passed effortlessly through the turnstile. She raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t lost
all
my powers,” he grinned.

Inside the station, Dash led the way to the end of the downtown Number 6 platform. He leaned against a pillar, his cheerful nonchalance contrasting sharply with the heaviness permeating the station. The two recent grisly murders had worried even the most jaded New Yorkers. Lone women stood with their backs to columns, their headphones hanging from only one ear so they could hear their surroundings, their eyes scanning the crowd for suspicious young men.

A train clattered and squealed into the station, blowing Selene’s hair against her cheeks. Dash airily waved her aboard the last car. Crowds jammed the train as if it were rush hour—a time she always avoided. Dash maneuvered his way through with the ease and grace only Olympian gods or seasoned New Yorkers could muster. He leaned against the back wall, and Selene wedged in beside him, his curly hair in her nostrils. Two stops later, a short Latina woman jammed in beneath her arm, and a businessman’s briefcase slammed against her bruised kidney. Selene found the smell of so many bodies, pungent to any human, noxiously fetid. She looked out the window, trying not to breathe. An uptown train flashed by on the adjacent track, and windows passed like frames of film: a dreadlocked white guy with enormous headphones, grooving in his seat; a little girl swinging on a metal pole while her father looked on warily; a woman in pearls, her palm pressed to the glass, as if in entreaty.
This was
her
city.
Her
people. They might not kneel at her statue as her acolytes had of old, but they worshiped at the same altar she did.
We’re all
mystai
in the same cult,
she realized.
Bowing to a city that can be as harsh and as compassionate, as fickle and as stalwart, as any Olympian.

“Brooklyn Bridge. End of the line!”
blared the announcement as the train squealed to a stop.
“Last stop on this train! Everybody please exit the train!”
The doors opened and the crowd poured forth like air released from a balloon. Selene could finally exhale. She started toward the exit, but Dash put a hand on her arm and shook his head.

The motorman’s door swung open and a short black woman in an MTA vest and goggles emerged, shouting, “Clear the train! This train is going out of service then heading back uptown!” In a moment, she’d realize Dash and Selene weren’t moving.

“Oh my God!”
Dash suddenly cried, pointing to the front end of the car, where a crowd made its way out the door. “What’s that guy doing? Is that a
live monkey
?” Like marionettes, every head in the car, including the motorwoman’s, turned toward a perfectly innocent Sikh in a yellow turban standing in the doorway, looking as bewildered as everyone else.

As swiftly as only a god once known as Hermes could manage, he’d opened the rear emergency exit, jumped up to grab the top of the doorframe, and swung himself out of the car, his feet disappearing over Selene’s head. She sighed, but hitched her backpack more firmly onto her shoulders, and, before the motorwoman could turn around, seized the lintel in both hands. Using the rubber safety ropes as a ladder, she clambered to the train roof and kicked the door shut behind her.

Dash lay flat, his head pointing toward the front of the train, his curls a mere foot from the tunnel ceiling. Selene pulled off her backpack so it wouldn’t get ripped from her body when the train began to move and settled herself beside him, one hand
holding her bag and the other gripping the side of the car. “This is a terrible idea,” she whispered to him. “Train hopping gets people killed.”

He just grinned. “What’s the fun of being immortal if you can’t cheat death every now and again?”

“I try not to push the limits,” she grumbled as the train headed toward the turnaround loop farther downtown. “You know we’re not completely invulnerable anymore.” Dash just giggled. Stony-faced, Selene shifted her weight to hug the train’s roof more securely.
I may be getting stronger,
she thought,
but this is just foolhardy.

“Ready?” Dash shouted above the rattle a minute later.

“For what?”

“Jump!” He let go. His body flew backward, sliding off the top of the car and disappearing into the darkened tunnel behind them.
Dash has grown as mad as the rest of us,
she thought with a groan.

Zip lining out of the museum was one thing. This was entirely more stupid. She swung her body around carefully to face the back of the train. Glancing at the electrified tracks rushing beneath her nose, she shook her head and then rolled off the end of the car.

It would’ve been history’s most graceful exit from a moving subway—if it hadn’t been for the rat.

As she flew off the roof, Selene turned a midair somersault, almost floating to the gravel rail bed and hitting the ground feet-first—landing on a scurrying, squealing, subterranean rodent. Then falling on her ass. Dash spluttered from somewhere nearby.

“I can see you laughing, you know,” she snarled. “My night vision’s pretty good.”

“You have to learn to laugh at yourself.”

“And you have to learn to take some things more seriously,” she returned, trying to regain some dignity as she rose to her
feet. “You’re telling me this is the only way to get to the Underworld? We couldn’t just get off at the last stop like everyone else?”

“Our stop’s
beyond
the last stop.”

“And we couldn’t walk down the tunnel from the last station like the MTA employees do?”

“But this was
so
much more fun! You were always the best sister for adventures, you know, and I haven’t had an adventure like this in decades!”

“You’re ridicu—” She stopped mid-word as another rat ran over her feet. Swift as the wind, she pulled an arrow from her bag and thrust the shaft through the rodent’s pulsing side. “—lous.”

Dash whistled in appreciation. “Not bad. But where’re your gold arrows?”

“Used up.”

“I could get in touch with the Smith for you.”

Selene wasn’t used to offers of help. She was even less used to accepting them. But since divine enemies required divine weapons, Dash’s suggestion couldn’t have come at a better time. “Thanks. That might be a good idea. I haven’t talked to the Smith in a long time.”

Selene remembered Hephaestus as a child, a strapping boy with a wide grin that softened the coarseness of his features, always investigating and inventing. Puttering around in his forge, playing with fire and iron the way a mortal child might with blocks and string. Hera, Queen of the Gods, who’d defied Zeus himself to birth Hephaestus without the aid of a man’s seed, watched her son with pride. But when the Smith took his mother’s side in one of her many arguments with her husband, Zeus flung him from the heights of Mount Olympus. His body careered from boulder to boulder, landing in a broken heap on the island of Lemnos. The Smith could fashion a gold bow for Artemis, a feast hall for his family, or winged sandals for Hermes, but he could not rebuild his own legs. That day, the
Huntress had learned her first lesson about the limitations of the gods: No mortal could defeat them, but the Olympians could damage one another irreparably.

Dash’s smile flashed white in the darkened tunnel as he walked beside her. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear from you. The Smith always liked you best, you know.”

“Did he?”

“You sound surprised!” A dim light from up ahead glinted off his glasses as he turned to her. “For someone with such keen senses, you can be pretty oblivious.”

“When you’re hunting, it only matters if you can find the animal and track it down, not whether it laughs at your jokes or wants to go out for dinner.”

Dash let out a burbling laugh. “Take note.
I
think you’re funny. That means I
like
you. As a sister, as a friend. Of course, our Smith actually
liked you
liked you. Hah! You’re blushing again.”

“You can’t possibly see that in this light,” she snapped.

“But I don’t have to. God of Communication, remember? I’m
great
at sensing people’s emotions.”

“Oh? Then why can’t you tell you’re pissing me off?”

Dash skipped a few steps down the tunnel then turned and gave her an elaborate bow, pulling his handkerchief from his pocket to wave a final flourish. “That’s exactly my goal, sweetheart. I want to crack some of that icy shell. You’re not the Moon anymore, you know. You don’t need to be so cold and stony.”

Selene didn’t feel cold and stony. She felt hot and irritated. “Can I help it if I’m not an extrovert like you?”

“Of course. That’s the great part about no longer being fully immortal. It’s true that we have to keep some link to our old identities now that we don’t have real worshipers. But we can define that connection for ourselves. That means we can be pretty much anything we want. This isn’t like the old days, when mankind cast us in the image they desired. They made
me a thief and a liar and a seducer of women, with fleet feet and a prodigious phallus. But I don’t
have
to be all those things anymore. Though before you can ask—yes, I still have the enormous penis.” He winked at Selene’s obvious discomfort and gave his handkerchief another twirl. “But I don’t lie or cheat half as often as I used to.”

“You still sow plenty of mischief. That train stunt was completely unnecessary. If you don’t watch out, you’ll wind up as unhinged as Father, living in a cave and dining on bats.”

“Me, mad? I’ll leave that to the rest of the family. Look, I got all the good stuff. I
like
most of the attributes they gave me. You, on the other hand, definitely got a bum deal. Virginity and hunting.” He made a loud retching sound. “Both things that were last in style in the mid-nineteenth century. I’m actually surprised you aren’t already fading away.”

“I
chose
to be the chaste Huntress,” she retorted, ignoring his last comment. Until she figured out who was causing her transformation, she didn’t want the other Athanatoi to know about her increasing power.

“Sure, maybe you sat on Father’s lap and asked for a bow and hounds, just like the stories say. But was that really your idea to begin with? Or did men just need a Goddess of the Hunt? And could they imagine her any other way than silent and celibate and deadly?”

Dash’s words reminded her of Theo’s theories—casting the gods as figments of society’s imagination rather than as autonomous beings. She knew there was some truth there, but she wasn’t yet willing to admit how much. “So you’re blaming my worshipers from millennia ago for my social ‘inadequacies’?”

“No! I’m blaming
you
. You could be anything, and you’re still a taciturn prude with no interpersonal skills.”
He’s right,
Selene thought, not bothering to protest. “They used to call you She Who Leads the Dance,” he said thoughtfully. “Whatever
happened to that epithet? Might be a little more fun than the Relentless One.”

“I led
nymphs
in dances after the hunt. I knew how to deal with them. Mortals are harder.”

“Please. Mortals just want to do whatever makes them feel rich and beautiful. It’s
im
mortals you have to worry about. We’ve had too many millennia of resentment and overweening pride. So think carefully about what you’re going to ask Cora. The Goddess of Spring is pretty touchy, you know, and you’re not known for your subtlety.”

“True. I find old habits hard to break, just like the rest of the Athanatoi. You, for example, are still a pain in my ass. And Cora—I think she’s resurrecting her old Eleusis cult.”

“Oh-ho! You think an Athanatos is involved in the murders?”

“I know it,” she said grimly.

“Then how come you don’t suspect me?”

“You said yourself, on the phone this morning, you had nothing to do with Eleusis. More important, you were in L.A. only a few hours after the last murder. Even with your private jet, that clears you of suspicion.” The tracks ahead of them began to curve. “This is where the line loops around to head back uptown again?” she asked.

“Yup. Check it out.” As they rounded the bend, an abandoned station came into view. The ceiling widened into a graceful barrel vault supported by fifteen tiled arches in patterns of green, white, and black, interspersed with leaded glass skylights. Brass chandeliers hung from the ceiling, their bulbs dark. Dash jumped up onto the stretch of platform beside the track. A green and orange mosaic sign on the terracotta wall read “City Hall.”

“I forgot all about this station,” Selene whispered. It seemed wrong to speak loudly in this perfectly preserved remnant of the past, a shrine to a city long since gone, where every public space was designed to impress visitors with its sheer ornate beauty.
“I haven’t been here since they stopped using it in the 1940s. It looks pretty good, considering.”