The Immortals Read online

  “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 weakne
ss 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.”

  The elevator finally arrived. They got in beside a nurse and her charge. Selene was grateful for their presence—it meant she didn’t have to respond to Paul’s revelation—but she couldn’t bear to look at the patient, a wizened infant in a large wheelchair. Her flesh looked like paper that had been crumpled and smoothed out again, over and over until the slightest breeze would tear it to shreds.

  “I won’t do it. I won’t become that,” Paul said, trembling, as they moved through the lobby.

  “The Eldest wasn’t really one of the Twelve, you know,” Selene insisted. “She gave up her seat to the Wine Giver, remember?”

  “Of course I remember. But still, she was an Olympian once and now she’s dying. Man stopped worshipping her long ago, but at least they revered the hearth for another fifteen hundred years. Not anymore. Now it’s all central heating and LEDs. She might try to play out her old role, but it’s not enough anymore.”

  Selene kept walking. “Don’t worry, Brother.”

  “Don’t tell me what to feel. I am worried.”

  The door to a large black Suburban parked in front of the hospital swung open. A pretty young woman launched herself out of the car and into Paul’s arms. “Oh, honey, is everything okay?” she cooed, kissing his cheek.

  Paul kissed the girl back. “Sophie, this is my sister. Selene, this is my muse.”

  Selene took in the girl’s outfit—a torn crepe skirt that barely brushed the top of her thighs, tall motorcycle boots, an expensive cardigan—and rolled her eyes. Little rich girl trying to look edgy for the indie-rock musician. His muse, indeed. Had Paul so easily forgotten the real Muses? Their nine half sisters, goddesses of inspiration and art? They were probably long dead by now, but calling pallid Sophie by their name was the height of disrespect.

  Three young men emerged from the SUV, hipsters with unfortunate facial hair and conspicuously large glasses. Paul introduced them in turn: his bassist, drummer, and keyboardist. Each patted Paul on the arm or shoulder, as if unable to keep their hands off him, demonstrating an unmistakably slavish devotion to their frontman. Paul’s manager unfolded himself from the front seat, significantly better dressed in slim trousers and a button-down. He took a headset out of his ear and nodded dismissively to Selene. “Paul, we’re running late, buddy. You’ve got a sound check in twenty.”

  Selene shook her head at her brother. “I told you not to worry about a lack of worship anytime soon.”

  Paul gestured for his entourage to get back into the car. “It’s not the same thing, and you know it,” he said, turning his back on their adoring faces. “And it’s certainly not going to help Mother. But I’m not going to let her die. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “You’re saying I won’t?”

  “I’m just saying you may not have the strength. The worship of sun and music continues, but hunting…”

  “Leave it.” She turned to go.

  “You may despise me for what I did two and half thousand years ago, but you’re still my other half.”

  “Do you even remember?” she hissed, spinning toward him. “Or has the memory of your treachery faded, along with so much else? I wish it would fade for me. But it’s still here.” She jabbed a finger into her temple. “And here.” She struck her chest. “A bright, sharp blade honed by centuries of retelling. Every time I see you, it’s like I’ve been stabbed all over again. I came across an ocean to be rid of you, and you followed me here. I know
if I moved again, you’d just keep tracking me. You and all your damn groupies. So please. It’s the one thing I ask of you—leave me the fuck alone.”

  Chapter 10

  THE DETECTIVE

  “I know when and where Helen’s murderer will strike next,” Theo began after an officer had shown him to Detective Brandman’s desk in the precinct house.

  The cop turned away from his computer monitor and raised his eyebrows in a gesture halfway between curiosity and skepticism. He folded his hands on his desk beside the orderly stacks of files. “Whoa there. Who are you again?”

  “Theo Schultz. I was with Everett Halloran yesterday.”

  “Right. The other professor. And what’s your relationship to the victim exactly?”

  I should tell him, Theo thought. But it was none of the cops’ business, was it? His relationship with Helen was long over. And as for that one illicit night in her bed… better no one knew about that. The last thing Everett needed was more grief.

  “We were colleagues. Good friends.”

  “Um-hum. And you think you know about our killer? Interesting. I’m listening.”

  Theo placed his own bursting folder of notes on the desk and announced, “There’s a cult attempting to reenact the Eleusinian Mysteries, and their next ritual takes place tonight, so we better get moving.”

  The detective ran a hand across the gray stubble shadowing his chin and blinked his bloodshot eyes. Theo felt no pity: He, too, had spent the whole day researching the case. “You’re going to need to start from the beginning, Professor,” Brandman said wearily. “A cult? Like Hare Krishna or something?”

  “Neither so amusing nor so innocuous, I’m afraid. The Greeks took their cults extremely seriously. Nearly everyone belonged to at least one. There were cults devoted to each different god, each with its own rites that only initiates were allowed to know. That’s why we call them ‘Mystery Cults,’ from mysterion, meaning ‘secret ritual.’ The one in the Greek city of Eleusis was the most popular Mystery Cult in the ancient world, and I believe Helen got mixed up in a group trying to bring it back.”