The Immortals Read online

  Groaning, Theo pulled the photo back off the wall. For the first time in nearly a year, he allowed himself to feel angry with her. Not for leaving him, not for tempting him back again, but for abandoning him now. Barely aware of his actions, he tore the picture in half. Then he ripped it again, and again, until Helen’s image lay in mangled fragments in his palm. Ashamed, he thrust the shreds into his desk drawer.

  Theo turned his attention back to his research. Helen had focused much of her energy on deciphering and translating fragments of papyrus from the Oxyrhynchus horde. It was as good a place to start as any. There was no obvious correlation between the papyri and Greek cults, but with the Oxyrhynchus Project, anything was possible.

  In 1896, two British Egyptologists had discovered a massive trove of over four hundred thousand papyri fragments buried in a rubbish heap at the site of the ancient Hellenistic city. Egypt’s dry climate had allowed for the preservation of documents that would have moldered away two thousand years earlier in Greece or Italy. At first, elated archeologists were sure they’d uncovered the lost plays of Sophocles or the final works of Pythagoras. But before long, it became clear that most of the fragments, some no bigger than an inch across, were unreadable, blackened by exposure to minerals or damp. In a century of work, archeologists had succeeded in translating a mere four percent of the total horde.

  But in 2005, new multispectral imaging technology revolutionized the field of papyrology, allowing for the decipherment of previously illegible texts. The researchers at Oxford had put the entire trove online so scholars all over the world could participate. Theo’d joined the project for a year, gaining instant acclaim for his uncanny ability to piece together the fragments with the same speed he’d shown reconstructing vases. For a while, at least, he’d enjoyed the mind-boggling game of ancient Tetris. But depressingly, most of the documents he translated were household accounts, tax receipts, and marriage contracts. The most interesting thing he’d ever translated: a deed for the purchase of a parcel of uncultivated land for twelve drachmae. A far cry from the earth-shattering discoveries he’d hoped for. The scholars at Oxford were loath to let his talents go, but Theo, who preferred to study myth and epic, had moved on. Helen, however, had never lost the conviction that the papyri held secrets worth learning. When she joined the faculty at Columbia, she’d already been working with the Oxyrhynchus Project for years. Theo had happily shared his own techniques with her and wished her luck on her search.

  Theo pored over the project’s recent publications. Perhaps the last year had uncovered new information on Aesculapian worship—the city of Oxyrhynchus had been a Greco-Roman society, and even as Christianity spread through Egypt in the fourth century AD, the inhabitants would have known about pagan cult ritual. But after reading for hours, Theo concluded that no such discovery had been made—at least not by the official project at Oxford. That doesn’t mean Helen didn’t find something, he reminded himself. She’d always been very secretive about her research, but she hinted often enough that she was keeping some revolutionary discoveries for inclusion in her first book.

  Still, his reading wasn’t a total waste. One thing caught his eye: a newly discovered version of the myth of Narcissus. In the familiar Roman tale as told by Ovid, the beautiful young man fell in love with his own reflection while resting beside a pool. Unable to tear his gaze from his own beauty, Narcissus eventually wasted away, disappearing mysteriously and leaving in his place only the bright narcissus flower that bore his name. Theo had never been able to walk by a daffodil without remembering the story. As he told his students, it symbolized the numbing death that occurs when an individual or a society embraces materialism rather than altruism. But in the recently discovered Greek version found in the papyri, Narcissus wailed and wept, violently stabbing himself; his blood seeped into the ground, where it transformed into the eponymous flower. Violence hides behind the gentlest of myths, and there are always untold stories within stories, hidden meanings, and lost symbolism, Theo reflected. The early Greeks were far more bloodthirsty than their later Roman translators admitted. The thought made his stomach twist. What sinister findings did Helen uncover?

  Unfortunately, without access to her closely guarded research, he might never know. She’d always seen the ancient world a little differently than other archeologists. In her disregard for academic orthodoxy, Theo found a kindred spirit—he’d known they had a connection from the very first time they met, at a Classics faculty meeting two years earlier. As an archeologist specializing in the ancient world, Helen had attended, even though she wasn’t technically a member of the department. Theo and Helen sat across the conference table from each other, listening as Martin Andersen launched into a typically soporific diatribe against the department’s tolerance for substandard Latin grammar.

  “To those who say our scholarship is slipping, well, there’s a grain of truth there,” Andersen intoned. “Exempli gratia: the use of Salve as the greeting on our web page. Even our freshmen know to use Salvete when addressing plural readers.” He placed his hand over his heart, repeating somberly, “A grain of truth, I tell you”—and Helen’s eyes met Theo’s for the first time.

  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.

  Grasshopper—

  I’ve been working up an abstract of my book to present at the conference next month and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. I’ll send over the manuscript, but in the meantime I’ve enclosed a little preview. Enjoy the challenge.

  Syn philoteti,

  H

  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.

  Chapter 9

  DEER HEART

  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 whe
n 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.