The Immortals Read online

  Usually, Selene found the park a welcome relief from the travails of her half-mortal life. But today it failed to cheer her. She couldn’t shake the memory of Mario’s knife above her face. She’d grown so weak that a mere mortal could threaten her. What sort of existence was that?

  Hippo, oblivious to her mistress’s distress, pulled against her collar, her tongue lolling with exertion. Selene gave up telling her to heel and unclipped the leash. After all, they had the park to themselves. It was officially closed before dawn, but that had never stopped them.

  The dog bounded ahead with unrestrained joy, chasing an errant squirrel. She’d been a shelter rescue puppy, starved and brindled, sporting huge paws and elephantine ears, growling and snapping at everything in sight. A kindred spirit, Selene had known from the first time she saw her. The fierce Amazonian queen Hippolyta made a fitting namesake; although, after overindulging in Selene’s carnivorous diet for the past five years, the nickname “Hippo” seemed far more appropriate.

  With a shift in the wind, some of the warm humidity dropped away, leaving only the bracing chill of approaching autumn. “Hello, Boreas,” she greeted the god of the North Wind, knowing full well he’d never hear her—if he even still existed. Selene pulled off her leather jacket and sweatshirt, letting the cold air rush against her bare arms and through her tank top, and jogged down the stairs leading to the boardwalk.

  Having lost the squirrel to an arboreal escape, Hippo waited for her mistress at the river’s edge, her tail pounding the asphalt. Together, they headed north along the shoreline. A single barge floated far out in the Hudson, but Selene had no interest in the boat. She scanned the water closer in, squinting in the dark, until a low woof from Hippo drew her attention farther upriver. She hadn’t bothered hunting any prey besides men in a very long time, but her dog sensed her desire.

  “Good girl.” Selene scratched briefly beneath Hippo’s chin. The dog stood, tail high and quivering—when she wanted to, she could be an exemplary hunting companion. Selene opened her backpack and pulled out two graceful lengths of curving gold—pieces of a bow almost as old as she. Quickly, she screwed the upper limb into the handgrip, then braced the bow between her legs so she could slip the string on more easily. She plucked the string once; it gave a satisfying thrum. Even after so long, it still felt like an extension of her arm.

  Before she and the other gods had left Greece during the Olympian Diaspora, Hephaestus the Smith had made the bow detachable. “So you can hide it more easily,” her stepbrother had said. “You carry around a bow and arrows in plain sight and the mortals are liable to think you’re a witch, or something worse.” He’d been right. Even with her bow hidden away, she’d never fit easily into the patriarchal constraints of the Middle Ages. Or of the Renaissance, or really of any time in the last fifteen hundred years. She’d been accused of witchcraft on three different occasions, burned at the stake one and a half times, and exiled from more towns and villages than she cared to remember. Even in the live-and-let-live tumult of twenty-first-century Manhattan, flaunting her status as the erstwhile Bearer of the Bow would be ill-advised. Accusations of witchcraft would pale in comparison to suspicions of terrorism.

  Selene nocked an arrow to her bowstring and aimed at the large Canada goose blithely paddling by. Without a second’s hesitation, she loosed the arrow toward the bird.

  The shaft flew right past, two feet off target, and disappeared beneath the river water.

  “Styx,” Selene cursed under her breath. She tried again. This time, as the arrow passed harmlessly by, the goose squawked and flapped into the air for a few moments before settling down once more.

  She lowered her bow, suddenly very weary. “What?” she demanded of her panting dog. “I know I shouldn’t be wasting the arrows. I’m just still not used to missing.” The arrows were only wood, after all. She’d used up her gold ones centuries before. Not that it mattered. Only divine prey required divine weapons—and this goose was anything but godly.

  With a loud splash and a spray of dirty water, Hippo jumped into the river. The goose took to the air, honking angrily, and flew off toward Jersey. Hippo, the tips of her long ears floating on the water, paddled happily, a look of pure innocence on her face.

  “There goes dinner. Thanks,” Selene grumbled. She whistled for the dog to get out of the water, but Hippo didn’t respond.

  Despite Selene’s increasingly frustrated commands, the dog started paddling away. A hundred yards upriver, where the boardwalk ended, she clambered out onto the rocks with a whimper. The dog looked back toward her mistress and gave a sharp bark of alarm, then began to sniff the ground.

  Slinging her bow over her shoulder, Selene jogged toward her dog. “If you’re sniffing someone’s picnic leftovers, I’m going to shoot you next. And this time, I promise not to miss.” But she stopped scolding when a sudden gust of wind carried the scent to her. Death. Human flesh in the first stages of decomposition.

  Hippo disappeared for a moment behind the rocks, only to reappear dragging a corpse by its long, pale blue leg.

  Instincts honed by a long-ago career on the police force took over as Selene rushed forward. She ran along the asphalt path, avoiding the soft ground. In her youth, they’d called her She Who Leaves No Trace; her powers of stealth might be sadly diminished, but she still knew better than to add her footprints to a crime scene. As she sprinted, she scanned both sides of the walkway, the surrounding trees, the boulders crowding the river’s edge—it wasn’t unusual for criminals to remain near the murder scene to watch the police. But the only observers this morning were a red-tailed hawk circling above and a cloud of flies already swarming over Hippo’s head.

  The wake of the passing barge sloshed rhythmically upon the shore as Selene leaped across the grass and landed next to her dog on the boulders.

  With a curt gesture, she commanded Hippo to drop the leg. The dog looked up quizzically, wagging her tail. “I said drop it,” Selene insisted, staring her straight in the eye and pitching her body forward. For once, Hippo obeyed. The dog took a few steps backward to shake a fine mist of water across the body. It lay half out of the river, with its legs and pelvis on land and its torso floating in the shallows. With each wave, the dead woman’s head thudded against the rocks with the hollow clunk of a rotten pumpkin. She lay facedown, her torso wrapped in a sodden yellow bed sheet, her outstretched arms the delicate blue of a robin’s egg, not yet marbled green and black.

  Long blond hair floated around the woman’s head in a nest of matted braids, catching between the rocks as another swell of water washed the body farther ashore. As Hippo lunged forward to retrieve the corpse, Selene grabbed the dog’s collar to stop her.

  Looking at the dead woman, Selene forced herself to set aside her rising anger and to summon the detachment of a detective instead. Never her strong suit. Pulling on the black leather gloves stowed in her backpack, she crouched beside the body. The woman couldn’t have been dead long. Less than twelve hours judging by the tautness and color of her skin and by the limberness of her leg. Four or five days later, her waterlogged skin would tear or slough off at the merest touch. Lucky for Selene, the body was still in good enough shape to withstand a little rough handling. Carefully, she lifted the corpse’s shoulder, checking for the purple-red stain of pooled blood in the woman’s breasts or face. An old policeman’s trick. If she turned the corpse and the lividity moved with it, then she’d been dead for less than eight hours. But the woman had no lividity at all; the flesh on her chest was as perfectly blue as that on her back. Impossible—unless all the blood had been drained from her body before she’d been tossed into the river.

  Gingerly, Selene pulled the body out of the water. It was lighter than she’d expected—the woman’s lungs must still be largely full of air. No wonder she’d floated so quickly. Drowning victims inhaled so much water that they wouldn’t float until their own digestive acids began to decompose the body, filling it with buoyant gas. Someone killed this woman before
putting her in the river, Selene decided, turning the body over for a better look. She raised a hand instinctively to her mouth.

  Sea lice had already eaten away the woman’s eyelids. The bare orbs stared upward at the starless sky. Hazel once. Now filmy. Perfect, straight teeth winked through the swarm of tiny crustaceans devouring her lips. She must have been quite pretty once.

  Other insects appeared. Already, the flies smelled the feast. Selene wanted desperately to swat them away, but she needed them to guide her. The flies landed on the woman’s pelvis, a dark, pulsating girdle.

  Selene moved the sheet aside, knowing what she might find. A woman’s flesh was delicate, and a man’s instrument blunt. But she hadn’t seen anything like this since the sacked city of Troy. This was a mutilation. Where the woman’s genitals should be, only a gaping hole remained. The sea lice had done their work and were doing it still, feasting on her womb. But no crustacean could’ve formed such perfect slices in her flesh. Someone had cut her apart with a blade. Four incisions, a perfect diamond of meat.

  She faltered. For a long moment, she stayed crouched, catching her breath, before she found the strength to continue searching the body.

  No blood smeared the sheet. Either the woman had been wrapped after the mutilation, or her attacker had protected the sheet from staining. A scrupulous killer. The kind seeking not just bloodlust but ritual. No defensive wounds marked the woman’s palms, but thin red welts snaked across her wrists and ankles, perhaps from a narrow rope. On the ring finger of her left hand, a narrow indentation, as if from a too-tight band. Selene bent close. The ring’s shadow still remained, pale against tanned flesh, wrapping the finger in the familiar geometric pattern of the meandros—the Greek key. She sucked in a breath. Such rings weren’t unusual. Still, Selene couldn’t help looking at the ravaged corpse with new eyes.

  That nest of leaves in her matted blond hair might be more than just river detritus. Laurel sprigs—she recognized the leaves that had so often graced her twin brother’s brow—twined together in a crude crown. She examined the sheet more carefully. A safety pin still held it closed at one shoulder, and a tiny hole showed where a second pin had secured the other side. She sat back on her heels, struck by a realization: The sheet was no makeshift shroud. It was a chiton. A draped garment not unlike those worn by ancient Greek women. This woman had been wreathed and draped like a priestess. Or, Selene realized with a shock, like a sacrifice.

  She looked again at the braids in her hair. She turned the head gently from side to side, counting. Six braids. A sex crines. The hairstyle worn by Roman virgins.

  “You’re one of mine,” she murmured. Instinctively, she pulled the leather glove off her right hand and laid a fingertip upon the woman’s brow. In that moment, a vision swam before her.

  River water sloshes lazily against the shore while my heart drums with terror. His footsteps, swift on the pavement, draw closer and closer no matter how fast I run. I glance behind—but shadows cloak his face even as he passes beneath the lampposts. Then a knife glints red in the darkness.

  He catches me, binds me. “I wish there were another way,” he says, slipping the ring from my finger and holding it to his lips. “But you know there isn’t.” He puts aside the knife, and for a moment I clutch at hope. Then he pulls forth something else—small and silver and curved like a fishhook. He pushes aside the folds of my yellow robe; my bare thighs tremble on the cold ground. There is pain beyond imagining. I look toward the heavens, searching for help. Searching in vain.

  Feeling as if she’d awoken from someone else’s dream, Selene grasped at the swiftly receding images. A needle, she saw in the final flash. He had a suture needle and black thread. She reeled, sitting down hard on the rock, clutching her hand to her chest with a gasped curse.

  Selene hadn’t received a vision of a woman’s last moments since the Diaspora. Why now? Why this? Her heart still raced with the woman’s fear. Selene could picture her, braids streaming as she ran from her attacker, a modern simulacrum of the innocents who’d once prayed at the altar of Artemis.

  The image brought swift rage to blot away her terror. She rose to her feet, frantically scanning the riverside once more. The names she’d rejected only hours before now sprang to her lips. “I am the Goddess of Virgins,” she seethed under her breath. “I am the Protector of the Innocent.” For millennia, she’d guarded her own virginity, the most sacred of her divine attributes. Much of the time, such abstinence felt like an anachronism: Few of the women she helped were virgins anymore. Yet she had never forgotten the duty she owed her ancient worshipers.

  She reached for her bow.

  Then she froze, uncertain.

  In ancient days, she would’ve already known the perpetrator’s identity. As Artemis guided the moon across the sky, she heard the pleas of women and witnessed the crimes of men. No one could hide from her swift vengeance. But she’d lost such supernatural abilities more than a thousand years before. Selene raised a finger to the swollen bruise on her chin, feeling the silky texture of the powder, a tangible reminder of how far she’d fallen.

  In recent decades, she’d preferred to work in the shadows, defending only women who asked directly for her help—those like Jackie Ortiz, whom the cops usually ignored. Now, if even a bully like Mario Velasquez could overpower her, what use would she be tracking a murderer? Then again, how could she not try?

  She looked down at the woman. You were killed steps from my home, she realized. Sacrificed as a sick invocation, a perversion of rituals I once held sacred. And I did nothing to stop it. Disgusted, she thrust aside her self-pity, her hopelessness, her despair. I may be only a shadow of what I once was, but that doesn’t mean I’m powerless. Not yet. “I promise,” she said aloud, “this will not go unpunished.”

  She would let the cops do most of the legwork, but she didn’t intend to let them arrest the murderer. This heretic would die. Not in some cell, after a drawn-out trial and years of appeals, but at the swift and deadly point of a goddess’s arrow.

  Chapter 3

  THE CLASSICIST

  Seventy eager young students stared at Professor Theodore Schultz, their hands poised above laptops or clutching pens, ready to absorb his wisdom. Make that sixty-nine, Theo amended, noticing Anant Paravastu’s eyes slowing rolling back into his head.

  “We have to ask ourselves, what are the myths that shape our own lives, our own society?” Theo paused, as if waiting for an answer. No hands rose, unsurprisingly. Students these days preferred to be told what to think. But he didn’t believe in letting them off that easy.

  “Mr. Paravastu, what about you? What are the myths that shape you?” he asked cheerfully. All eyes swung toward the dozing boy in the back row. Theo’s unusual insistence on learning all of his students’ names, even in large lecture classes, had made him the object of both their adoration and their greatest fear.

  Anant sprung upright in his chair and chuckled weakly. “Umm… that you can get two hours of sleep and still be functional for your nine a.m. class. Turns out to be a complete myth. No truth to it at all.”

  As the students laughed, Theo threw Anant a formal salute. “Nice save. I won’t ask why you only got two hours of sleep. Wouldn’t want you to tell another myth.” The laughter built to a crescendo as Anant turned beet red beneath his sheepish smile.

  “I’ve got my own myth,” Theo went on. “I often tell the story of how, when I was eleven years old, my mother handed me D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. I read it cover to cover in one day, memorized the Twelve Olympians, and constructed my own papier-mâché replica of Athena’s helmet and spear, which I proceeded to wear to school all week. And how did that go over in my very bland suburban middle school, you ask? About as well as can be expected. I got my ass kicked all over the playground, called all sorts of names we would now deem hopelessly homophobic, and was eventually asked by the principal to stop acting like such a, I believe his term was ‘anomalous child.’ But did I back down? Did I hang up my h
elmet?” He raised his fist defiantly and shouted, “Of course not! Because I knew the Goddess of Just War was on my side. I was the epitome of self-righteous heroism—at least until the rain turned my helm into a yeastily odiferous paste, and I was forced to relinquish my warrior’s raiment.” More laughter.

  “Or at least, that’s the story I tell everyone. Why? Because it follows an archetype. I’m given a magical talisman—the book of myths—by an older mentor, I follow my heart into danger, I’m given a powerful weapon that only I can wield, and I come out a hero on the other end. Just like in so many Greek epics. But is my story true?” He paused for dramatic effect.

  “Trick question. I’ll never tell.” A few groans, rueful smiles. “Because it doesn’t matter.” He waited a moment for that to sink in, then launched into the conclusion of his lecture.

  “Our definition of ‘myth’ in common parlance: a widely believed, but false story. That’s the definition Anant so helpfully illustrated. But that’s not how the Greeks defined it.” Theo turned to the whiteboard behind him and scrawled “μῦθος: muthos” in large blue letters.

  “Muthos just means ‘story.’ No connotation of fictitiousness. The Greeks didn’t question whether Persephone had actually been abducted by Hades, or whether Artemis truly turned the hunter Acteon into a stag. On one level, they understood that these stories certainly weren’t meant to be taken literally, but on another level they believed that the stories held ultimate truth. Ways to understand their society, their own behavior, their relationship and duties to the gods. That’s something that fundamentalists in our own day have trouble grasping. That the words in the Bible could be both true and false at the same time. It’s natural to be literal-minded with holy texts, because written words are essentially static. But the Greeks had oral traditions, constantly adapted by different storytellers, coming from the mouths of men—no one ever conceived of them as the direct, immutable, literal word of the gods. So. Here’s the hypothesis I propose. Drumroll, please.” He pointed to Anant, who obliged with a quick thrumming on his desk. “The very nature of their myths, even more than their politics, their economics, or their geography, advanced the Greeks to unparalleled heights. Perhaps, I submit, creating a society even more adaptable, more flexible, more creative than the monotheistic, literal-minded Judeo-Christian civilization that followed.”