Theta (18 page)

“
Perhaps.” He smiled. “Many
of the names I have recorded have not been spoken of in thousands
of years. Do you really wish to know?”

“
I do.”

“
Is it not enough to learn
you are not human at all?” Menelaus pressed, his eyes flashing from
dark brown to light and back to dark. “Is there not freedom in
being able to choose the name you wish, and to become the man you
want to be, instead of being confined by the past?”

“
Do you know my name and
bait me, or is this a philosophical question only?” I asked,
growing agitated with his stalling.

“
Neither. I wish only to
prepare you in case I don’t have the information you
seek.”

“
I will deal with this
possibility if it should arrive,” I replied.

“
My records are in the
trunk in my room.” He glanced towards the doorway to his bedroom
and lifted his eyebrows.

I shot up and crossed the living area,
entering his room. “Did you and Artemis plot this meeting between
us?” I called as I moved.

“
Plot? No. She said she was
sending someone to visit me, and that I should not help you, unless
you seemed worthy.”

“
She did not tell me this
was a test.”

“
It would be less like a
test, if you knew,” he pointed out.

“
Has she forgiven you then
for Troy, since you helped sack the city of her brother?” I
snapped.

“
No. And neither has
Apollo.” Menelaus’ laugh was deep and loud and hard enough to shake
his frail body.

Spotting the trunk, I knelt and opened it.
It contained computer equipment and a box containing several thumb
drives.

“
Bring all the drives,” he
called.

“
How do you have a laptop
when you have no electricity?” I asked.

“
There’s a generator in my
closet. Turn it on, after you bring me my computer.”

I placed his laptop beside him, along with
the thumb drives, then went to the closet. The generator whirred to
life with the touch of a button, and I returned to the living room.
Restless, I couldn’t sit still when I was this close to knowing the
truth about who I was. I paced behind the couch as his slow laptop
came to life. Menelaus plugged in one thumb drive, searched its
contents, ejected it and inserted another.

He went through five while I paced.

“
If you cannot be still,
fetch the pouch from the trunk,” he said.

I returned to his room and pulled a heavy
pouch made of leather the size of a large notebook out of the
trunk. I sat across from him.

“
What is this?” I asked and
placed it on the cushion beside him.

“
It’s a plaque. Not yours,”
he added quickly. “I took it from my brother’s tomb.”

“
Where is your
brother?”

“
He was placed on Apollo’s
temple in Attica for a thousand years before Apollo moved his
primary temple to Rome, then Paris then London. Last I heard,
Agamemnon was on his temple in New York.”

My thoughts went to the temple guardians who
had been decimated when the gods declared war on the human world,
five years before. I hoped to free those stone grotesques that were
left in DC and couldn’t help wondering how many of my fellow
Bloodline members had been killed by those they protected.

“
You were born exactly four
thousand years ago, or within a centuries or two of that number?”
Menelaus asked, peering at me over the top of his
laptop.

“
I would say at least four
thousand,” I replied.

He shook his head. “My records end thirty
eight hundred years ago.” He twisted his laptop to show me the
chart he had created listing the names and dates of Bloodline
members.

My heart toppled to my feet. Until that
moment, I didn’t realize how much I wanted him to have the
answer.

“
Artemis might remember,”
he said. “Have you not asked her?”

“
To ask a favor of a god or
goddess is to incur a debt I do not want.”

“
For every one they give,
they take ten back.”

“
Exactly.”

“
You’re a free
man.”

I glanced up.

“
Choose your own name,”
Menelaus said with a smile. “Who do you want to be?”

I didn’t know. “Maybe it shouldn’t
matter.”

“
A name is just a name. I
would have liked to replace mine with another after the Trojan
Wars.” He stretched for the plaque.

I handed it to him.

Menelaus removed it from its protective
covering with old, gnarled hands and held it up. I had not seen
this ancient writing in four millennia.

Agamemnon, who sacked the city of Troy and
died a protector of Apollo

“
When my brother turned to
stone, Apollo made him sit before this plaque for a hundred years
before moving him to a temple. Our Bloodline has been sworn to
Apollo since that time,” Menelaus said. His features softened as he
gazed at the chiseled, stone plaque. His eyes had changed again to
light brown. “We stood watch over Pythia, Attica and every other
sacred city of Apollo. We guarded his temples, his bastards, his
cities and treasures. For a thousand years, our Bloodline married
his Oracles at his direction. He sought the successor to his first
Oracle of Pythia, the strongest Oracle in history, who opened the
gate that allowed the gods and goddesses to enter our
world.”

I tilted my head, my instincts tingling.

“
He probably thought he
could outsmart the Fates and breed an Oracle sworn only to him, as
a member of the Bloodline. The gods are mad with their need for
power,” Menelaus said. “It never happened in all the time I
watched.”

“
The Bloodline protected
Oracles.”

“
Oracles are the domain of
Apollo, and we are their protectors. We protected everything in his
domain, until Greece united and wars among gods and clans no longer
existed. The Oracles became revered and treasured four centuries
ago. At that point, our protection wasn’t needed.”

I sat back, dwelling on this news. The
Bloodline was born to rule and to protect. The more I thought, the
less it seemed like a coincidence that Alessandra had chosen me,
twelve years ago. Did some part of her know I was destined to
protect her?

The weight of my confusion was starting to
lift. I was bound by the blood of my being to protect her. I was
her guardian, not a butcher.

Of all I’d been told, the one fact I
couldn’t quite move past was the idea I was a true monster. Never,
during the time I had known what I was, did I believe it possible I
had never been fully human to start off with.

“
Artemis knew I wouldn’t
find what she claimed I would,” I said, struggling with what to
think of my journey. My anger towards her softened. She had
answered the question I needed answered about who I was, and it had
nothing to do with my name. “She knew why I had to be
here.”

In fact, I no longer cared what anyone
called me.

“
To break the curses placed
upon us all by Apollo,” Menelaus said with a nod.

“
What?” I asked.

“
She sent you here to learn
what you have to do to free our Bloodline.”

“
I don’t
understand.”

“
Have you never asked
yourself why he is included in the oath you take, before you turn
to stone?” Menelaus asked.

“
I took no such oath. I
became stone the evening I was told I had a healthy son,” I
replied.

“
It’s a trick of the gods.
After the first curse of Apollo, no one in the Bloodline was
willing to volunteer, because no one wanted to be turned to stone
for all eternity. The original pact called for us to
choose
to serve the gods
as guardians, after we had born heirs. When no one would volunteer,
the gods changed the terms and created a secret invocation that
tricked the Bloodline members into fulfilling their oaths. They
worked through their priests and priestesses to ensure the members
of the Bloodline always spoke the invocation, even if it were
broken up over the course of a lifetime,” Menelaus said.

“
I know this. I warned the
current member of the Bloodline on the throne not to speak. But I
never knew the exact words.”

“
Until the debt to Apollo
is repaid, I pledge myself to stone,
” he
said.

In that moment, I felt more disgust and
loathing for the gods and goddesses than I ever had.

“
You are here, instead of
stone. Apollo chose
you
. Out of the thousands of members of the Bloodline, you were
selected to serve him and to repay the debt our kind owe
him.”

I had never considered the idea Alessandra
was able to animate me only because the patron god of Oracles – who
was also the patron god of my Bloodline – wished for it to be so.
We were destined to meet, destined to bond, destined to fight
beside one another in the war that was coming.

“
Tell me,” Menelaus said.
“What service could Apollo possibly need of
you
?”

“
Protecting Alessandra,” I
whispered. “The Oracle of Delphi who awoke me. She’s the strongest
Oracle since the first, ten thousand years ago. She bears the sign
of the double omega.”

Menelaus leaned forward, eyes keen. “From
the prophecy. The gods have long anticipated the fulfillment of
this prophecy.”

“
I have only heard pieces
of it. The second coming of a great Oracle, the double omega, and
the end of the worlds,” I said.

“
The prophecy foretells a
great war that will determine the fates of all worlds, not just
ours,” Menelaus explained. “It does not specify that this war
occurs between humanity and the gods. It does specify a great
battle the last of the Oracles must fight, and whether or not she
wins will determine what happens to all of existence.”

I shifted in my seat. The
hunch I’d been slowly cultivating over the course of the past week
with Menelaus was all but proven by this answer. He knew too many
details about the Bloodline, the forgotten past, and the prophecy
for him to be one of my successors. I wasn’t dealing solely with a
member of the Bloodline
.

“
Why do you hesitate to
protect her?” Menelaus asked, further solidifying my
instinct.

Whether it was a distant relative or an
earthbound god asking, I decided to answer truthfully. “I fear
myself around her. I fear what I am capable of and that I will hurt
her because of who and what I am.”

“
We are guardians and
kings. We are also beasts. Who better to protect her from yourself
than you?” he challenged.

“
Is it that
easy?”

“
It never is when a
beautiful woman is involved. I destroyed the greatest city in
antiquity over a beautiful woman.”

With a half-smile, I gazed at the plaque. It
contained nothing I expected to find and hinted at everything I
needed to know. My thoughts were on Alessandra and also on Phoibe.
“If I can’t repay this debt, what will happen if a member of the
Bloodline never says the invocation at all?”

“
I imagine he would never
turn to stone and never die.”

“
Would he become a
monster?’

“
It has never happened that
one of our kind was
not
turned into his natural form, or failed to speak the
invocation. Several hundred years ago, a member of the Bloodline
morphed into his beast form after a sea storm destroyed his ship
and left him wounded and stranded in the ocean. In one instance,
when the Bloodline bearer was a woman, she transformed when her
life and the life of her young child was in danger. It’s possible
trauma can cause the transformation for the first time. Our true
nature is dormant but instinctive, even if we transform once and
turn to stone the next moment.”

From what I knew of the Silent Queen, who
had not spoken since I warned her of the curse twelve years ago,
she had lived a fairly sheltered life, more so after Theodocia
became her guardian. I doubted Phoibe experienced the kind of
trauma that might trigger a sudden transformation into a beast, and
I hoped to talk to her before anything remotely traumatic had a
chance to happen to her.

With another glance at the plaque, I rose. I
had answers to questions I never thought I’d understand, and could
no longer fight the compulsion to return to DC. Fulfilling the debt
to Apollo would save Alessandra and free the Bloodline from stone.
Too many lives depended upon me for me not to find a way to mesh
the two sides of me, and I dared not spend any more time here than
I had already.

“
Are you well enough to
care for yourself?” I asked the ancient king starting to doze on
the couch.

His eyes opened. “I have been here for
thirty five hundred years. I’m not going anywhere,” Menelaus
responded. His eyes closed again, and he leaned his head back.

With a glance at his dogs, I hesitated. The
urge to return to DC was strong, but the insistent instinct not to
leave Menelaus remained. Was it because I suspected he had
channeled a god whose favor and knowledge I might need? Out of
loyalty to the only family member I had ever met?

Or … the shrewd side of me that cared
nothing for family and loyalty but understood how valuable Menelaus
could be on my side of the war that was coming.