The Immortals (23 page)

A last water lily, striated pink and purple, floated in the fountain pool of the Conservatory Garden in Central Park. It lay with its petals unfurled, each a tapered ladle to scoop up the last rays of the setting sun. When darkness fell, the petals would close, only to open again with the dawn. A symbol of rebirth and renewal, of secrets concealed and revealed, of color too bright and form too beautiful for the mortal world. A lotus.

Soon after exiting the Underworld, Selene severed the flower’s stem with a single slice of her pocketknife and lifted it from the water.

At New York-Presbyterian, Selene woke the frail woman in the hospital bed with a gentle kiss.

“Mother,” whispered Leticia, staring at her daughter with cloudy eyes.

Selene could barely remember her grandmother Phoibe, Titan goddess of the moon, but she knew of her black hair and pale skin.

“No, I’m your daughter,” she said gently.

“Phoebe?”

When she’d inherited dominion over the moon from her grandmother, the Huntress had taken the name “Phoebe,” meaning “Bright One,” just as her twin was called Phoebus for his association with the sun. But she hadn’t gone by the name since a brief stint as Phoebe Hautman in New Amsterdam nearly four hundred years before.

“I’m not Phoebe or Phoibe, Mother.”

“But I thought, for a second, you brought the moonlight in with you.”

“I’m Selene now. Not Selene the Moon. Just Selene DiSilva.” She wasn’t surprised her mother could see a glimpse of her divine aura, just as the child at the movie theater had, but it saddened her. It meant Leto was approaching the border between worlds.

Her brow furrowed in confusion. “Artemis?”

Selene swallowed. “Yes, it’s me.” When they approached the end, the gods relinquished the mortal monikers they’d assumed and reverted to their true selves. For Leto, Selene had ceased to exist. Only her divine daughter remained.

“See what I’ve brought you,” said Selene, pulling a length of dark purple linen from her bag. “I know it’s not perfect, but it’s the best I could do on short notice.” Carefully, she helped her mother sit up and draped the fabric around her face so it covered her short gray hair.

Leto’s eyes seemed a little less cloudy next to the jewel-toned cloth, and Selene could almost imagine that she still had long, chestnut hair underneath. “You see, Mother, it’s a veil for Leto, Goddess of Modesty. And here…” Selene drew forth a small palm frond and wrapped Leto’s hands around it. “For the Mother of Twins, who stood beneath the Sacred Palm on Delos in her travail and birthed the Bright Ones into the world.” Next she pulled a box of dates from her bag. She ate half of one, gluey and oversweet, and fed the other half to her mother. “The date sustained you then, let it sustain you now.”

Leto chewed slowly, painfully. “Why, Artemis? Why do you remind me of a past I cannot have again?” she asked.

“Because you can. I think I’ve figured it out, Mother,” Selene explained, unable to keep the excitement from her voice. “There’s a cult. A new one. It’s using my attributes in its rituals, and it’s bringing me power. I’m growing stronger, not weaker. I feel almost like myself again.”

“Like yourself?” her mother asked wearily. “You’ve had so many names over the centuries… do you even know who you are anymore?”

“I know I’m your daughter,” Selene said, her throat tight.

Leto stroked Selene’s cheek, her fingers dry and cracked. “They called you She Who Helps One Climb Out. Do you remember?”

“Of course. Not my most melodic epithet.”

“You’ve always lifted me from hardship. Just by your presence. Just by your love. You don’t have to rescue me from death.”

“But I will, Mother,” Selene insisted. “If it can be done. I swear it by Gaia below and Ouranos above and by the dropping water of the River Styx. I swear it with the strongest and most awful oath of the blessed gods.”

Leto gave a resigned sigh. “I’ve never stopped you from doing what you wanted.”

“Then don’t start now. You can see my radiance; you know it’s working. Tonight, we’re going to create our own rite, using your attributes. Then maybe I can bring you back to health, as well.”

“I’m long past saving, Deer Heart.”

Selene refused to listen. She took the last sacred object from her bag. The lotus flower. She laid it carefully on her mother’s torso, where it dwarfed Leto’s narrow rib cage with its outspread petals.

Leto touched a velvet petal hesitantly. “So beautiful,” she whispered. “But not mine. Hera holds the lotus staff.”

“But there were some vase paintings that showed you with it, remember? The lotus is the royal symbol, and in my eyes, you are always a queen.” She kissed her mother on the forehead. “Now come, there’s one more step in the ritual.”

Selene lifted her mother out of the bed and set her on her feet. Leto stood on trembling legs, one clawlike hand clutching her daughter’s arm, the other holding on to her IV pole. Selene was shocked to see how short her mother had become. Her head barely reached Selene’s shoulder. Selene placed the lotus flower atop the pole, and draped the hospital blanket over Leto’s thin frame like a cloak. Together, they left the room, taking one excruciating step at a time.

It took nearly twenty minutes to walk down the hall, into the elevator, and out onto the floor above. Long before they arrived at their destination, Selene regretted what she’d done. Leto could barely stand, and each step only weakened her further. “Almost there,” she murmured encouragingly, taking more and more of her mother’s weight until she was nearly carrying her.

They came to a large window that overlooked an interior room. “Do you see?” said Selene. “I’ve brought you to your temple.”

Leto rested a hand upon the glass, staring fixedly at the infants within.

Selene looked over her mother’s shoulder at the nursery, waiting for the babies to show some recognition that the Goddess of Motherhood stood before them. Surely, they would turn toward her, or cry with joy, or at least wriggle a little more. But they merely lay there, fast asleep, their pruney faces scrunched with annoyance at being thrust into the world. Selene found them completely unappealing. Yet when she looked at Leto, a new glow illuminated her mother’s features.

“It’s working,” Selene whispered. “You look stronger already.”

Leto turned to her daughter, her eyes clear. “Not stronger, my child. But content. Thank you for bringing me here. I can go happily now, remembering that mothers still labor and children still arrive without me.”

“Happily? Knowing you’re not needed?”

“Is that not what all mothers want?” Leto asked softly. “For their children to grow up and live their own lives?”

Selene couldn’t respond to that, only clutch her mother’s arm a little tighter.

Leto gazed at her daughter, a silent entreaty in her eyes. “Your brother was here earlier,” she said finally.

“Oh?” Selene tried not to sound suspicious.

“He brought some other boys with him. They played a song for me.”

“That’s nice,” Selene said carefully. “Did he mention anything about… trying to make you stronger?”

“I think he finally understands that he can’t. But he hoped the music would bring me peace. And it did.”

That sounded innocuous. But then again, would Paul really tell his mother if he were killing innocent women? Leto would never condone such barbarity.

“He also said he missed you,” Leto went on.

“I’m sure.”

“He’s only ever tried to protect you. You know he would do anything to keep you safe.”

That’s what I’m afraid of,
Selene thought with a shudder.

“When I’m gone, you’re going to have to let him back into your heart.”

Selene said nothing. She wouldn’t make promises she couldn’t keep.

“Now take me back,” Leto commanded, her voice stern even as she slumped weakly against her daughter. “I’ve heard of those two women who were killed. One a child—a sick child. The
nurses talk of nothing else. I know what you carry in that pack of yours, Huntress, and I know you have work to do tonight.”

“But Mother—”

“Now, Artemis,” she whispered. “I can barely stand.”

Her eyes brimming, the Protector swept the Gentle Goddess into her arms and carried her back to the hospital bed.

Lying beneath the writhing snakes, the hierophant had dreamed.

Twin stags stand with heads lowered and antlers crossed. One spear pierces them both, and from the wound pours the blood of four women. One stag falls and the other remains, stronger and more glorious than before.

A gift from Asclepius—a dream to heal his tortured soul.

When he’d awoken, with the snakes’ whispers still echoing in his brain, the girl still hung from the ceiling, long dead at the hands of his
mystai
—but he felt her life force trickling through his own veins. She’d been weak, sickly, but not without power. Sammi Mehra possessed a tenacity unmatched by the other children in her ward. She wanted desperately to live. The hierophant doubted her tests had shown it yet, but she’d finally started winning her long battle with the disease. In a few months, she would’ve been well.

Suddenly, he remembered another dream from that night—flying through the air at a gymnastics event, spinning once, twice, then landing lightly on the mat to a thunder of applause. Such a simple dream, a girl’s dream, loosened from her mind as
she slipped into unconsciousness. He would not feel pity. Her life had served a far higher purpose than anything her mortal mind could imagine. What was the too-short future of a single girl compared to the eternal glory of an immortal?

Now, deep underground, he held a green glass flask to the firelight and watched Sammi’s blood swirl with Helen’s. From Sammi, he gained determination and courage. From Helen, brilliant intelligence and unquestioning faith—a rare combination. Tonight, another woman, young and pure, would add her life’s essence to his. Her blood would hold special magic:
kharisma.
Modern mortals defined charisma as mere personal magnetism. But the ancients derived the word from
karis
, “grace,” meaning a talent divinely conferred. A hint of the godly ran through the veins of those with such talents, giving their blood extraordinary power.

The thought sent a shiver of impatience down the hierophant’s spine. He could almost taste the blood of tonight’s sacrifice upon his lips. But the steps of the ritual must be obeyed in order—the
Pompe
must begin here, in a long-forgotten chamber where the dead lay nearby, guarding the secrets of mortality.

The first offerings waited in cages nearby. Their brains could not comprehend their place in the ancient ritual—but they could feel fear. The hierophant breathed in the odor of their anxiety, reveling in the power it gave him.

“Remove the sacrifices,” he said to his gathered
mystai
. While the cage doors clanged open, he turned to his most trusted acolyte and placed the glass flask in his hands. “One cannot achieve everlasting life without knowledge of death,” he explained, his voice resonating with the tone of command. “The blood we have harvested carries within it the power of the living and the dreams of the dead. Tonight we add more. Tonight we grow closer to the end. And to the beginning.”

In a few hours, he would finally show himself to the city. Fear would course down its filthy streets and through its crowded
tenements. Terror would hurtle along the fetid underground tunnels and up the counterfeit majesty of skyscrapers, invading every corner of the city. One by one, the mortals would realize the extent of their vulnerability. And as they did, he would grow ever more invulnerable.

He stoked the fire before him and made a silent promise.
Before rosy-fingered Dawn lightens the sky, I will turn this soulless city into a god-fearing realm.

By the time Selene left her mother’s hospital room, night cloaked the city. She glanced at the crescent moon where it hung between buildings, its horns yellowed by smog.
Hear me, Grandmother Phoibe, Bright Goddess,
she prayed.
If you still exist somewhere among the heavens, then answer my plea. Tonight I go to save a mortal life, but tell me it’s not too late to save your daughter Leto as well.

The moon was still and silent. No voice bright as starlight pierced her mind. Phoibe was long gone. Only a rocky sphere remained, orbiting the earth without the aid of any goddess.
If I could still guide it across the heavens,
Selene thought, jogging down Fifth Avenue,
I might be able to look down and see the hierophant at work. But something tells me that particular power is never coming back.
From what she’d learned of astronomy, she wasn’t sure how she’d ever done it in the first place. She’d lived too long among mortals to understand the consciousness of a god anymore.

She’d have to find the killer the old-fashioned way: lots of legwork and a little bit of luck. And if she found him—
when
she found him—she’d force him to save her mother. She’d stop the
murders, seize his power, and turn his cult of destruction into a cult of salvation.

The chatter on her police scanner indicated that, despite their skepticism, the NYPD couldn’t risk rejecting Theo’s tip out of hand: Officers watched every graveyard in Manhattan and even some in the boroughs. Still, she heard no mention of any suspicious activity. For an hour, she willed herself to stay patient, flipping between the precincts’ different frequencies as she paced a rough circuit between the old Sephardic graveyards in the West Twenties and the Marble Cemeteries on Second Street.

Selene fiddled with the scanner. Still nothing. She spotted the unmarked cop cars parked near the various graveyards and the suspiciously sedentary “homeless” people near the cemetery gates. But nothing else. Over the course of the night, her relief at not running into Theo had evolved. At first, she blamed him for suggesting she patrol the graveyards at all. Now she secretly wished he were there to keep her company. Finally, she gave up and called his cell.

“Where are you?” she demanded.

“Where are
you
?”

“I’m watching the graveyards, where do you think?”

“I gave up waiting for you to call and came down to Trinity Cemetery. I’m unemployed, remember, so I’ve got plenty of time for stakeouts.”

“Where are the assholes we’re trying to catch? Are you
sure
they’re going to be at a cemetery?”

“As I explained, the pattern of evidence—”

“Right, right. The NYPD are surveilling all over the—hold on.” She turned her attention to the scanner.
“Respond to Duane and Elk 10-75 P.”
At first, Selene assumed the additional units were being summoned to an unrelated patrol. Then she recognized the address and swore softly.

“What is it?” asked Theo.

“They’re watching the old eighteenth-century African slave burial ground downtown.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” Theo sounded distraught. “There must be others like that—graveyards covered up for centuries without visible tombstones.”

“Dozens. They’re under our feet, under the subway, under all the buildings.”

“Shit. You’re right. But how many people know enough New York City history to find them?”

“I wouldn’t put it past this hierophant.” Many of the city’s immortals had called the city home since at least the nineteenth century. They’d remember graveyards long past. “They could be
anywhere
.” She felt suddenly overwhelmed. Even with her preternatural speed, she’d never be able to search every part of the city.
Another woman will die, and I’ll be no closer to helping my mother.

“Let’s look at this piece by piece,” Theo said, his voice steady. “It can’t actually be
any
defunct cemetery. It has to be one that’s somehow still accessible. Maybe one that’s connected to the subway or some other underground access so they could get close to the graves.”

“New York City has over four hundred subway stations,” she snapped. “And those are just the ones currently in use. You’ve got to give me something more, Theo. Tell me again—which cemetery did they use in Athens?”

“Kerameikos. It stood right outside the main entrance through the city walls—the Dipylon Gate.”

Selene remembered it now. Many a time, the Huntress had watched in dismay as the mortal masses passed through the gate’s two soaring portals, leaving the wilderness behind for the pleasures of civilization. If Manhattan had a Dipylon Gate…

“Grand Central.” Sixty-seven tracks carried seven hundred fifty thousand people a day into and out of the city through the train station. “I remember there’s an old burial ground—a potter’s
field for the poor—somewhere near Grand Central, but I don’t know exactly where.”

“The entrance to the city. Brilliant, Selene,” Theo crowed. “Let me check on my phone…”

She’d attended a burial at the potter’s field in 1849, but the city had looked completely different. She had no idea exactly where the field would lie on today’s grid of city streets. The burial bore no relationship to Hamilton’s stately Trinity Church funeral; it had been for a servant girl, Taryn O’Clare, one of her few friends over the centuries. Usually, the Huntress abandoned her companions before they could abandon her, but Taryn had died young, taken by the cholera epidemic. The Huntress had stood in the rain at the funeral, whispering her own rites as the Catholic priest chanted his. She could still see the white linen shroud sliding into a ditch of unwanted dead. She might have bought Taryn O’Clare a better resting place, but it wasn’t in the Punisher’s makeup to care about what happened to mortals after they died. Before her own fading had accelerated, death wasn’t something she spent a lot of time thinking about.

“Are you thinking about the pauper’s graveyard at Forty-ninth and Park?” Theo asked. “Wikipedia says the Astors bought up the land in the late 1800s and put the Grand Central train tunnels through it and the Waldorf-Astoria hotel on top.”

“That’s the one. It’s perfect.”

“But it doesn’t have any underground access,” Theo protested.

“Yes it does.” Selene had personal experience with the tunnels beneath the hotel.

“Then I’m on my way,” said Theo.

“Don’t even think about it,” she snapped, hanging up on him. The last thing she needed was a clumsy mortal getting in the way of a confrontation between gods. He would only get himself—or her—hurt.

Selene had only been in the Waldorf-Astoria once, in 1944. She remembered the year clearly because it had been one of
Franklin Roosevelt’s visits to New York during World War II. Like the other Olympians, she’d stayed far away from the conflict. It was the first time mortals had truly acted like gods, ravaging earth and sea, massacring men and women by the millions, harnessing the power of flight and farseeing. The gods had stood in the shadows, realizing once again that they’d been permanently replaced. Not by the Church, this time—but by the Machine.

One of Roosevelt’s bodyguards had gotten a little overzealous with a young woman he’d picked up at the Waldorf’s bar. The girl left the hotel bruised and weeping, nearly bumping into a tall, black-haired woman in a pencil skirt and sensible shoes.

Now that same woman sprinted up Park Avenue to the Waldorf. The freight elevator was still there on the Forty-ninth Street side of the building, right beside the entrance to the hotel’s underground parking garage. She ran her hands along the seam between the doors. Welded shut. Probably forgotten for decades. But Selene remembered where the elevator led. Deep beneath the hotel, a little-known private “presidential” railroad siding known as Track 61 had once served VIPs. Trains could pass through Grand Central terminal without stopping and discharge their passengers under the Waldorf so they wouldn’t have to contend with the unwashed masses. For Roosevelt, the secret siding provided a way of leaving the city without the public witnessing his crippled body being lifted onto the train. The platform sat directly on top of the old potter’s field.

That day in 1944, Selene had followed the president’s bodyguard down the freight elevator, but lost him in the mass of Secret Service men readying to depart on the underground train. Even the Far Shooter wouldn’t take on so large a crowd. The abusive bodyguard escaped her bow that day. When she saw the same man three years later, smoking a cigarette on a lonely street corner in the West Village, he wasn’t so lucky.

The elevator might be defunct, but when Selene pushed on the adjacent fire-exit door, it swung open easily, as if someone had already picked the lock.

Cursing, she assembled her bow on the run and dashed down the narrow staircase to a dark, abandoned platform. She could feel, rather than hear, trains passing in the distance. The blur of far-off headlights provided just enough illumination for her night vision to function. Arrow nocked, she came to a halt, spinning this way and that, sniffing the air. No scent of man. Only stale air mingled with oil and grease. Then, suddenly, a faint whiff of blood from an old train car. Midnight blue. Just like all the Roosevelt-era Presidential coaches. Had one really been sitting on this siding for the past seventy years? She padded up to it. The smell of blood grew stronger, but she heard no movement inside the car. Bow in one hand, she hauled on the door with the other. It slid open with a rusty squeal.

She stepped inside. No light of any kind penetrated the boarded-up windows. Even with her newly keen vision, she couldn’t see in such darkness. She stepped forward cautiously into the silent black. Her foot slipped, pitching her forward onto her hands and knees into slick wetness and knocking her bow from her hand.

Styx,
she cursed silently, belatedly fumbling for the flashlight in her pack. She flicked it on. She was kneeling in a wide pool of blood. Not a woman’s blood, by the smell of it, not even a human’s.
Probably more pigs or boars,
she reasoned. She bent close to examine the puddle. In a violent attack, blood would splatter and smear the surroundings as it projected from the wound, even if the victim didn’t thrash or move. But the droplets around the pool formed near-perfect circles with barely a spatter, meaning they’d fallen from a distance of no more than eight inches, as if someone had opened an animal’s vein—or from the size of the pool, its throat—and let the blood pour onto the floor.

The animal sacrifice would only be the beginning. The men may not have captured another human victim yet, but Selene was willing to bet they were about to.

She sniffed again at the blood. Still fresh. They couldn’t have gotten far. Rising to her feet, she’d gathered her weapon and prepared to leave when two spots of glowing yellow a few feet away caught her eye. Instinctively, she raised her bow with one hand as she swung her flashlight toward the yellow glow with the other.

In the cold circle of light, a dog’s face stared up at her. For a second, she thought it was Hippo. It had the same square skull and floppy ears. She took a deep breath to calm herself—Hippo was safe at home. The large mutt lying before her clearly had no owner. Patches of mange covered its wide back; its tail was flea-bitten. And despite its shining eyes, Selene knew the dog was dead. The dog’s mouth was closed and its head lolled to one side as if it died peacefully, but the wide gash in its throat told a different story. She knelt and sniffed at its mouth. Anesthesia. They’d drugged the dog before they murdered it. She wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved that it had died without suffering or infuriated that the hierophant had used modern medicine to simulate a willing sacrifice.

She stepped back, widening the circle of light across the train’s floorboards, and fury overwhelmed all other emotions. A dozen dead dogs lay in front of open cages, making a rough semicircle around the perimeter of the train car. Their unseeing, unblinking eyes shone red and yellow and green in the dark. Most were smaller than the large mutt. Easier to carry, no doubt. The smallest was a puppy, only a few days old. When she lifted it from the pool of its own blood, it fit into the palm of her hand, its chin wobbling on the tip of her finger.

Theo had said tonight’s
Pompe
began with sacrifices to Demeter and Persephone. But the Goddess of Grain and the Goddess
of Spring would shun such an offering. This massacre of dogs could only be meant for the Lady of Hounds.

“Are you trying to worship me or punish me?” she begged in a rough whisper.

Selene put down the puppy and shone the flashlight on her own trembling hand. She clenched her fingers, pressing her nails into her palm, hoping the sudden pain would banish her fear. She could almost hear the voices of Sammi Mehra and Helen Emerson:
He’s killed all you’re sworn to protect. Now he’s coming for you. Beware, Huntress, lest you, too, become prey.

“Don’t worry about me,” Selene said aloud as her rage burst into flame. “He’s the one who should be afraid.”