The Immortals (7 page)

He’d smiled impulsively, and something in the quirk of her mouth made him glance toward Andersen and roll his eyes. A
mean gesture perhaps—Martin was a harmless old coot—but Helen’s ensuing grin made the sin worthwhile.

He doodled through the rest of the meeting, and when it finally ended, he handed her the product of his labors. A detailed cartoon of the professors in the conference room, each dressed as an Olympian. His best caricatures: Chairman Bill Webb as a stooped, peevish Zeus and Andersen in drag as a dour, bespectacled Demeter, Goddess of Agriculture, holding aloft a sheaf of wheat and saying “A
grain
of truth!” while the other gods snoozed around her. He’d cast himself as a caduceus-wielding Hermes: floppy fair hair, wire-rimmed glasses, pointed chin, and a mischievous smile. Not a bad representation. Helen, of course, was Aphrodite, perched on an overlarge scallop shell, sea foam spattering her long blond hair. As she took the paper, he was surprised to notice that her head barely reached his shoulders—something about her confidence had made her seem taller when she was sitting across the table. She took a long look at the drawing, then stood on her tiptoes to whisper in his ear, “Not bad. But I’m a better Persephone. Because I’m going to bring this department back to life.” She walked away with a wink. He watched her go, noting the way her hair swayed in time to her light step.

Helen’s prophecy proved true, at least for a time. She certainly gave Theo a whole new reason to attend faculty functions. But eventually, after she and Theo broke up, she grew so consumed by her research that she nearly disappeared. She’d stopped teaching undergrad classes entirely, confining her professorial duties to a single graduate seminar meeting once a week and spending most of her time either with Everett or in the library. She’d become something of a recluse, all the passionate intensity she’d once showered on Theo now transferred to her fiancé and to her pursuit of knowledge.

But what, exactly, had she discovered? Theo plowed back into his research, searching for information on human sacrifice
within Aesculapian cult practices, but growing more disheartened by the minute. The connection with Helen’s murder just didn’t make sense. Most other gods in the Greek pantheon contained both benign and maleficent aspects. Asclepius’s father, Apollo, for example, was known as both the Plague-Bringer and the Savior. His twin Artemis was the Stormy One and the Good Maiden. Even Athena—Goddess of Wisdom, Civilization, and Crafts—was also a Goddess of War. Asclepius, however, was an entirely benevolent deity. He was the Healer. Associating him with the murder of an innocent woman was simply nonsensical. On top of everything, no Greek cults were known to even involve human sacrifice in the first place. Bulls, goats, birds, sure. But people?

Theo’s adrenaline leaked away. He found himself staring, glassy-eyed, at his computer screen, wondering if Gabriela was right and his research was merely an obsession to be used up and thrown away after a week or two, a distraction to stave off the grief that crouched just out of sight, ready to strike. How likely was it that the theft of a snake from the Natural History Museum correlated with a murder in Riverside Park? Had Helen really worn a chiton and a wreath? Maybe Selene DiSilva was just some delusional voyeur.

Theo rose from his battered desk chair and stretched.
Tea,
he thought.
I need very strong, very sweet tea if I’m going to keep this up.
As he moved toward the door, he knocked over the pile of papers from his in-box, sending them into a long fan across the floor. There, buried amid the memos, lay a small envelope addressed to “
Theodore
” in a minuscule, flowery script that only his long months of practice allowed him to easily decipher.

Theo picked up the envelope and sat back in his chair, his hands gone cold. How long ago had Helen left it? For half a second, he considered that he might be tampering with police evidence. Then he tore the envelope open.

Her usual stationery, with its gilt Greek
meandros
along the border.

In the bottom of the envelope lay four irregularly shaped paper scraps, each no more than two centimeters across. He dumped them on his desk. Ancient Greek covered each shred.
Xeroxes of papyri fragments from the Oxyrhynchus horde.

There was no date on the letter, but from the memos surrounding it in the pile, he interpolated that Helen had probably left it for him five or six days ago. It was just like her not to send an e-mail or leave him a voice mail. For someone who’d made her reputation using new technology to piece together papyri, she had a surprisingly old-fashioned affinity for handwritten notes and fine stationery. “A thousand years from now, it only seems fair that some fool will have to piece together
my
thoughts from charred fragments of paper,” she’d said once.

Theo spread the four paper fragments out so that the letters on each faced upward.
She hasn’t called me Grasshopper since we broke up,
he thought, pushing together two fragments with matching shapes.
Why now?
Theo pushed away such questions—it was too easy to get pulled back into futile hypotheticals.

With only four small fragments to work with, it didn’t take him long to string them together into the semblance of a sentence. Small holes scattered across the papyri made translation more challenging, and many of the letters were blurred beyond
recognition. But that had never stopped him before. A few minutes later, he’d written down his best approximation:

ΟΡΩ T__ΕΛΕΥΣ__ΚΑΙΤΩΝΙΕΡΩ____ΟΝΑΜΥΣ__ΗΣ

He stared at the second group of letters for a moment. “Eleus…” he said aloud. Then he glanced at the end. “Mus—es.” After a moment, a slow smile spread across his face.

If he was right about the cultic connection with her murder, the words could only be
Eleusina mustes.
From there, he easily determined the full sentence:

Horō tēn Eleusina kai tōn hierōn gegona mustēs.

I see Eleusis. I have become a
mystes
of the sacred things.

He spun to his bookshelves, pulling down his copy of Burkert’s
The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth
and flipped to the chapter on the Eleusinian Mysteries. Like any classicist, Theo knew about the famous ritual, but he remembered it as a cult dedicated to Demeter, the Goddess of Grain, and her daughter Persephone, the Goddess of Spring—not to Asclepius. Still, it wasn’t unusual for the larger cults to incorporate the worship of other, tangentially related deities. The gods were syncretic, after all; their numerous epithets and titles were reminders of the foreign deities they’d absorbed and the many, often contradictory, aspects they embodied. He skimmed ahead. Sure enough, one day of the rite had been devoted to Asclepius. And that wasn’t the only correlation. The book said that the Mysteries at Eleusis had taken place in the early autumn: The timing matched up perfectly with Helen’s murder. And Helen did have a thing about Persephone…

Theo flipped back to the beginning of the chapter. It explained that on the first day of the ritual, Demeter’s priests processed to Athens, carrying with them two holy vessels—a
kiste
and a
kalathos
. Theo couldn’t help a muttered, “Holy shit-buckets.” The two stolen pots from the Met.

He called the front desk from his office phone. “Violet?”

“Just leaving, Professor.”

“Hold up a sec. Did Helen leave a manuscript for me sometime this week?”

“Nope.”

He cursed himself for his disorganization. “You sure?”

“Sure as sugar, hon.”

“Do you know if she gave anyone a preview of the abstract she was working up for the conference?”

“I didn’t hear anything about it. You know how she was about her research.”

“I know. Like a miserly dragon defending her horde. You don’t have keys to her office, do you?” Last year, as her work on Hellenistic sources grew more intense, she’d moved her office out of the Art History and Archeology Department and into Hamilton Hall to be closer to the classicists.

“Wouldn’t do you any good if I did. The police were here, took a few boxes of stuff, and sealed it up already.”

Theo dove back into his research, searching the Oxyrhynchus site for anything on Eleusis and coming up empty. Next, he tried to reconstruct the structure of the Eleusinian ritual from the available primary and secondary sources, many of which were overlapping and contradictory. Thankfully, piecing things together was one of Theo’s many specialties. By four in the afternoon, scribbled outlines shrouded his desk and index cards plastered his walls.

Reaching into his pocket, he fingered the scrap of take-out menu with Selene DiSilva’s number on it. He imagined her voice, calm and cold, then warming as he told her what he’d discovered. She’d been right about the Greek connection. Maybe they could work together to figure out who killed Helen, track him across the city, and bring him to justice. He felt a slight, anticipatory flutter.
Her with her silver eyes and fearsome hound, me with my glasses and teetering piles of books.
The image was ridiculous.

Who am I kidding? This whole situation is horrible enough without getting mixed up with some disturbed private investigator.
The last time he’d felt such instant attraction to a woman had been with Helen. And now he knew how that had turned out.

He reached for a fresh index card and penned:

Selene DiSilva. Moon Goddess.

Probably deranged. Definitely dangerous.

Contact only if desperate.

DO NOT BE AN IDIOT.

He push-pinned it to the wall with a single angry jab, then sat there staring at it, still unable to banish the image of her glowing eyes.

In all her millennia of existence, Selene had never been to a hospital. She found the mortal struggle against death unbearable—the lingering, fruitless agony of medicines and surgeries and prayers. Even if they escaped this time, they would still die. Why bother fighting so hard? Selene had never been known as merciful, but she usually granted her victims a quick death. She’d never understood why mortals so often chose a slow, painful end. Yet now, here she was, walking into the lobby of New York-Presbyterian Hospital and asking the woman behind the reception desk, “Where can I find a patient named Leticia Delos?”

The receptionist glanced up briefly before returning her attention to her computer screen. “Are you a relation?”

Selene swallowed hard. “I’m her daughter.”

The remark elicited no pity. The receptionist gestured curtly toward the correct elevator bank. “Room E 304.”

The Huntress hadn’t seen her mother in nearly two decades, even though she lived only a few hours away on Shelter Island, a small dollop of land floating between the two forks of Long
Island. Time passes strangely when you’re immortal. What’s twenty years among thousands? Like most children, Selene always meant to be better about visiting and somehow never got around to it as often as she’d have liked. And now it was too late.

“Mother,” Selene whispered at the doorway of the hospital room. The woman now known as Leticia turned her head; Selene had to hold her breath to keep from crying. The smile that had stolen the heart of Zeus himself remained the same. But everything else had changed. Without her customary veil or scarf, her hair was visible—brittle and gray, cut short around her face in a fashion last stylish in about 1984. Her eyes, once as turquoise as the Aegean, were cloudy, her figure so shrunken and frail that it nearly disappeared within the hospital bed.

“Deer Heart,” murmured the Mother of Twins. She held out a shaking hand.

Selene’s legs felt like ice. She walked forward slowly and took her mother’s hand in her own, aware of each fragile bone beneath the papery flesh.

“Hey, Moonshine,” her twin brother said softly from the other side of the bed, where he sat limply in a plastic chair.

Selene flicked her eyes toward him. She hadn’t seen Paul Solson—that was what Apollo called himself these days—in years, not since they’d inadvertently run into each other on the subway one evening. He’d been as radiant as usual—she’d watched the eyes of every woman, and many of the men, turn toward him. Even standing silently, the Bright One was powerfully charismatic. If he’d actually opened his guitar case and begun to play, he would’ve had to fend off the adoring masses with his silver bow. Instead, the Delian Twins had merely stared at each other across the subway car. They had never needed words. Silently, he asked for forgiveness. Silently, she refused. Their old rift remained unhealed. She got off at the next stop and had avoided the Lexington Avenue line ever since.

But today, no one would’ve looked twice at the God of Light and Music. His golden hair, usually so bright, fell in dim, defeated curls across his forehead. Without his usual air of cavalier arrogance, he looked vulnerable, small. His shoulders slumped beneath his designer blazer and tastefully shabby T-shirt.

“What are you doing here, Mother?” Selene asked. There was no point in bringing a deity to a hospital. No mortal medicine would have any effect on her ailment.

The Gentle Goddess squeezed her hand—the touch as light as that of a bird’s wing. “My neighbor got worried when he hadn’t seen me in a few days, so he called the police.” She spoke as if every word were an effort. “You will make sure my patients are taken care of, won’t you? I hate to abandon them like this.”

“I already did it, Mother,” Paul interjected. “I called another midwife and made sure she’d take your clients. You need to worry about yourself now.” He turned to his sister. “The idiots in that hospital out on Long Island couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. They were getting all these crazy readings on the lab results so they had her transferred here. The morons are totally stymied.”

“Mother, why didn’t you call before now? I would’ve come and stayed with you so you wouldn’t have to come to this horrible place.”

“I couldn’t bear the thought of my children sitting by my deathbed and waiting for something which could happen in a matter of days, or years, or centuries. Then this morning…”

She left the rest unsaid. Selene realized that Leticia wouldn’t have called her children to her side if she weren’t sure that the end was very near. They had little time left together in this world. But what does one say to the mother who has loved you for over three thousand years? Paul was the poet, the musician. Perhaps he knew the right words. Selene felt only anger.

“I don’t like you being here—these doctors treating you like
a lab rat,” she said sternly, her eyes on her mother’s wan face. Leticia merely smiled gently as if to say she didn’t mind. Selene turned to her twin. “Didn’t you try to get her out of here?”

“Don’t give me that look. I’m not some nymph who cowers under your glare. I tried, okay? The hospital won’t release her without a whole lot more testing and paperwork.”

Selene sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, careful not to tug on any of the IV tubes and electric wires running from her mother’s flesh to a bank of computers. “I want to pull these out,” she said, her voice low and dangerous as she watched the oscillating green line of her mother’s heartbeat—too slow and too weak—on a nearby monitor. “They’re not doing you any good.”

“I already tried it,” Paul said. “The doctors will come running, put them all back in, and then threaten to call the cops.”

“I’ll put an arrow through them before they can stop me.”

“Do us all a favor and don’t go crazy, okay? All this time and you still don’t know how to act around mortals. You can’t just kill anyone you want to. It doesn’t work that way anymore.”

“Well, then, I miss the good old days,” Selene shot back. “When we could kill with impunity.”

“You killed. I healed,” Paul sniffed.

“And how’s that going?” she snarled. “Do something, Apollo!”

Her twin flinched at the use of his real name. It was a terrible breach of etiquette—it not only put him in danger of exposure, but also still carried some power of compulsion. An immortal did not use it lightly.

“Medicine now is nothing like the craft I practiced.” He gestured angrily to the monitors and tubes. “I can no more heal a person by laying hands on them than you can control the phases of the moon. We’ve all lost our powers,
Artemis
.”

Selene would’ve struck him but for the sudden tightening of Leticia’s hand on her own. Her mother gave her a pleading look. “Please, it brings me such comfort to have you both here.” She
didn’t say that it also brought her great pain to see them still at odds, but Selene knew it did.

Leticia slowly raised her bony arm and laid her hand upon her daughter’s smooth black hair, tucking a stray strand behind her ear. “Your hair…” she said. “You haven’t had to cut it again, have you?”

Selene shook her head. In one of the strange side effects of immortality, her cells died so rarely that her hair hardly grew. She’d cut the long tresses into a bob in the 1920s, and it had remained short ever since.

“Good,” Leticia said. “It may be my time, but not you, not yet.”

“Don’t say that. I know you’ll get better.”

“Don’t wish for the past. I’ve lived as a mortal for many years now. It’s fitting that I should die as one.”

“What do you mean?” Selene asked.

“The fading started centuries ago. First a gray hair. Then a few wrinkles.” She paused to catch her breath. “Then sometimes years would go by and I would feel no change.”

“I, too, have aged over the years.”

“Not like I have. I’m no Olympian. Merely a Titan. A minor deity. For a while now, life has sped up. I live it now at the pace of a thanatos, growing older each time I look in the mirror. My time is over.”

“No, Mother,” Selene said, her voice thick. “I won’t accept that.”

Leticia chuckled faintly. “I don’t think you have the power to stop time anymore. I doubt you ever did. There’s nothing you can do.”

Selene wanted to tell her mother about her experience at Schultz’s apartment. Her balance, her hearing—if those powers were back, why not her other attributes? Yet she couldn’t give her mother false hope. The morning’s adventure must have been
a fluke. The fading might progress at a different pace for each deity, but Selene had never heard of it actually
reversing
. Once a goddess lost her abilities, they were gone for good.

A nurse came into the room carrying a paper cup of pills. Selene started to protest, but Leticia dutifully swallowed the medicine with a small smile for her daughter.

“Your mother has very restricted visiting hours,” the nurse said, not unkindly, as Leticia’s eyes fluttered closed. “She needs her rest. You can come back tomorrow.”

Selene met her brother’s eyes. She felt his frustration mirroring her own. Who was this mortal to tell them to leave Leticia’s bedside? And yet, who were they any longer to protest? As one, they kissed their mother on each cheek and left the room.

In the hallway, Paul walked ahead of her for a few steps, his shoulders thrown back and chin high. Then he teetered to a stop and slumped against the wall, his face buried in his arm. When he turned to her, his golden-brown eyes were full of tears. “She’s dying. Just like Pan and Eos and Asclepius. And the nymphs. No one left to worship them. All their power gone. Back into the Khaos from which we all sprang.”

Selene turned away from him, refusing to break beneath the emotions buffeting her, even as her own eyes welled. She would not show pity or weakness in front of her twin. So she clung to her ancient anger against him, letting it burn off some of her grief. “No one to worship her! How dare you say that! She has you and me, doesn’t she? Have we not always paid homage to the mother who bore us?”

“You never even visit her.” The Bright One’s anger leaped to meet her own, their flames feeding each other, as they always had. “She came all the way to America to be close to you, and you’ve spent the last four hundred years protecting mortal women who don’t even know your name, instead of looking out for Mother.”

“That’s my
job
.”

“If she dies, it will be your fault.”

Selene punched him, hard, on the corner of his jaw. A nurse at a nearby desk gaped and leaped to her feet. “You need to leave this hospital
immediately
, or I’m calling security!”

Selene ignored the nurse long enough to watch the red welt along Paul’s chin swiftly fade away, leaving his golden skin flawless once more. “I see you’re still healing just fine,” she sneered, thinking of the bruise on her jaw from her fight with Mario Velasquez. Without makeup, it would be a bright red reminder of her own continued vulnerability.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means our mother’s dying and you’ve somehow got the key to eternal youth. We’re twins and I look ten years older than you. Explain that.”

The nurse moved toward them. “I’m going to have to insist!”

Selene spun on her heel and headed toward the elevators, Paul hissing behind her, “The worship of sun and music are still strong, you know that. But death is coming for all of us. Even for me.”

“Don’t be absurd. They may not call me the Unwithering One anymore, but none of the
Twelve
has ever actually died.”
Wanted to, maybe,
she thought, remembering yesterday’s feeling of hopelessness by the river,
but never done it.
She jabbed the elevator call button.

“No? Look.” He pulled a piece of paper from the tight pocket of his jeans, unfolded it, and thrust it toward her. Selene grudgingly stepped closer. A single white hair, many yards long, lay on the paper in a tight loop.

She drew a deep breath. “Who?” she asked finally.

“The Eldest,” he said, using the ancient epithet for Zeus’s oldest sibling—Hestia, Goddess of the Hearth.

“No one’s seen her since the final Gathering. How did you get this?”

“The Smith. Kronos knows, I never had anything to say to the Eldest—she was always such a boring prude of a woman, but I guess the Smith bonded with her over their love of fire. I happened to be in Casablanca last week—”

“You were?”

“I was on tour to promote my new album,” Paul said, as if she should’ve known.

“I don’t read your
blog
, okay?”

“Do you even have a computer?”

“No. Get to the point, Paul.”

“I don’t like to travel abroad without arrows. Unlike you, I refuse to use those cheap wood pieces of crap, so I needed to find the Smith. You’d think a cripple would be easy to catch up with, but he’s a tricksy little gimp.”

“You know, for the God of Poetry, sometimes you’re remarkably crass.”

“Poetry died a slow death a long time ago.”

“But rock and roll is here to stay, right?”

“No, that’s what I’m trying to say,” he said, deadly serious. “
Nothing
is here to stay. Not even us.”

“If we fulfill our traditional roles and protect the realms assigned us, we should retain at least some measure of immortality—that’s how it’s always been, at least for the Twelve. You play music, I hunt predators. We live on.”

“You’re not listening. It may not be enough anymore. When I finally caught up with the Smith, he told me he was worried about our aunt, so he took me to the Eldest’s little hideaway. I think we were in Tunisia, who knows. Terrible place. The whole thing’s like a furnace, maybe that’s why she likes it there.”

“And?”

“There she was in this hut, sitting by the fire—of course—and just staring at it, like she always did. It was burning up outside. Over a hundred. The hut was sweltering, but she just kept
stirring the damn coals. Trying to be the Goddess of the Hearth, as always. But her hair. It was so long.”

“It’s always been long,” Selene interrupted.

“Not like this. It hung down her back, to the ground, and it never stopped. It coiled. Around the walls. Around her stool, around the fire. Yards and yards and yards of it, like it’d been growing for a century. And all of it was white. Every strand.”