The Immortals (6 page)

You said we shouldn’t have let last night happen. Now, in the light of day, I know you’re right.

The letter ended there, but the image still lingered in Selene’s mind—for an instant, she recalled how it felt to run her palms over the hard muscles of a man’s chest. She’d had a lover of her own once. Schultz’s books told their own versions of the tale, but this was the one memory from her pre-Diaspora godhood that she’d managed to preserve in its true, unaltered form. It had taken a great act of will, but from the moment she’d realized her memories had begun to shift and fade, she’d started reciting the story of her love, in all its passion and heartbreak, over and over to herself through the millennia, so the poets’ versions might not eclipse her own. So, while the rest of her history had slipped away, this story remained clear.

Hesitantly, she traced the sharp contour of her collarbones, the square lines of her own jaw, trying to imagine her lover’s caress.

“Orion.”
She whispered his name aloud, the shape of it like a kiss upon her lips. She closed her eyes, falling into the memory of the only man she had ever loved—
would
ever love.

Stag and boar flee before us, but we chase them down. All through the night we hunt, my silver moon lighting our path. Even my hounds cannot keep pace, and dryads and naiads fall panting behind us. Only Orion and I remain, leaping over rivers and across hills, then crouching down to hide behind the sheltering trees, ready to spring forth once more when prey crosses our path, I with my golden bow and the Hunter with his bronze sword.

I marvel at my own unfettered joy, so unlike the wrathful vengeance of my hunts with Apollo. My twin and I chase those who insult us, those who do not pay proper homage. But with Orion, I am only the Huntress of Beasts, the Goddess of Wild Places, Mistress of the Moon. To be with him is freedom. It is ecstasy.

I kneel with my Hunter behind a fallen tree, watching a stag and its doe pace silently into a moonbeam’s path. I start to raise my bow, but Orion takes my hand in his instead. I might protest, but for the look in his eyes, both gentle and hungry. “I would do anything to be with you,” he whispers. His words are a flame, heating my skin. There, in the shadow of the trees where even my father the Sky God might not see, he takes my face in his hands and kisses me.

I taste a man’s lips for the first time. I run my hands through his dark curls. I feel his heart beat strong against my breast, and I suffer both heat and chill when his hand slips beneath my tunic to rest against the small of my back.

Heart pounding, Selene pulled herself from the memory. She replaced the love letters in their box. As Helen’s ex-boyfriend and sometimes secret lover, Schultz looked even more suspicious. But no visible fingerprints marked the dust covering the lid. The professor hadn’t opened it in months. If Helen had indeed been his prey, he likely would’ve sought the photos and letters often, reliving his humiliation and heartache, stoking the fires of vengeance. Shaking her head resignedly, she stowed the box back under the bed. She’d had thousands of years of experience with hunts like these, and she prided herself on knowing when a man was guilty. But now she just wasn’t sure.

As she stood up, her skin prickled as if sensing something just beneath the range of human hearing. She stayed still for a moment, listening closely. Her hearing hadn’t been supernatural in centuries, and yet—yes, a quick step on the stairs, the jingling of keys. She snatched up her backpack and dashed toward the window, hoping for a fire escape. No such luck. Still, there was a narrow stone ledge overlooking the alley. Once she would’ve hopped onto the ledge without a thought, but that was before she’d lost her uncanny balance and agility—not to mention her ability to quickly heal from a fifth-story fall. Still, hiding in the closet seemed even stupider.

She opened the sash and swung onto the sill. Balancing on the six inches of granite with one booted foot, she slid shut the window with the other, then sidled out of view along the ledge, her back pressed against the brick wall of the building. Gingerly, she pulled off her left glove with her teeth: Her bare fingers could better grip the masonry. When she took the glove out of her mouth to shove it into her pocket, it slipped from her grip. Instinctively, she reached after it, bending down as it fluttered past her fingertips.

Then she froze. With a gasp, she realized she hung suspended fifty feet in the air, her feet on the narrow ledge and all her weight hanging over the abyss, with only the fingers of one hand to hold her steady. Yet somehow, she didn’t fall. Slowly, she stood upright, willing her heart to stop its panicked gallop.

From the apartment behind her, she heard the sound of an opening door. Curious, she glanced down at the window. Double-paned, as she thought. She shouldn’t be able to hear through it so easily.
So I can hear through walls again,
she mused.
If only I could see through them, too.
She’d give anything to see what Schultz was up to.
Don’t do it, don’t even think about it,
she chided herself.
Just because you’re feeling particularly agile doesn’t mean you’re suddenly Artemis again.
But she couldn’t help it—she raised herself onto the toes of her boots, then bent into a precarious squat so
she could lean toward the window. She twisted her head over her shoulder and peeked inside.

Schultz was on his hands and knees beneath his desk, shuffling through more papers. He finally emerged, dusty-haired, with a thick book. Selene could just make out the title:
Asclepius
by Trismegistus. An ancient Arabic text translated first into Greek, then from Greek to Latin, then Dutch, and finally into English in the seventeenth century. She doubted such an oft-translated text would hold any reliable clues. Reading it would be like playing an ancient game of telephone, with words, stories, entire chapters corrupted by time.

The professor moved toward the door, knocking a mug of tea off a shelf as he went. The mug didn’t break, but the tea spilled all over his chest. With a huff, he dropped his satchel and tore off his overcoat and T-shirt. A sunbeam from the window illuminated a blond tracery of hair across the taut planes of his chest. It seemed scholarship was better exercise than she imagined. His body was slimmer, less heavily muscled than Orion’s had been—surely it was only her recent reminiscing that brought a flush of heat to her cheeks. Her eyes traveled the path of Helen’s fingers: across the curve of his lower rib, up the shallow declivity of his sternum, resting for a moment in the hollow between his collarbones before skimming the sharp point of his chin and coming to rest on the thin line of his lower lip.

When Selene’s phone rang, she nearly fell off the window ledge.

She cursed and stuck her hand in her pocket, silencing the ringer as she pulled it out. She glanced back through the window, but Schultz was busy yanking a new T-shirt over his head. He hadn’t heard. She waited until he left the apartment again, then answered the call.

“Moonshine?” asked a familiar voice. “Hello… are you there? Moonshine, it’s me.”

“I know who it is.” Only one man ever used that nickname.
The cold shiver down her spine had nothing to do with her hazardous perch.

“Mother gave me your number—”

“I asked her not to do that. Look, this isn’t a good time.” She bent back toward the window, but realized she wouldn’t have enough leverage to open it again from the outside.

“I don’t care. This is an emergency.”

“Oh, yeah?” Awkwardly, Selene swung her backpack around her body and fished inside with her free hand until she found the length of rope she’d packed—just in case. “Another girl get out of your grasp? Now that they don’t turn into trees anymore, I thought you’d have an easier time of it.” Selene balanced the phone against her shoulder and made a quick loop in the rope. Above her, an exhaust pipe stuck through the brick. She slung the rope over and tightened the knot, praying the pipe would hold. “Why are you calling?”

“It’s Mother. She’s at New York-Presbyterian.”

“The hospital?” Selene swayed a little, and only reflexes she’d thought she’d lost centuries before kept her from toppling off the ledge. She gripped the rope harder to steady herself.

“Yes. I’m here with her. You need to come soon. She’s… she’s fading.”

Numbly, Selene pushed off from the wall and slid down the rope. At the bottom, she stood frozen, clutching the rope in one hand and her phone in the other.

When her twin brother spoke again, his voice, usually smooth and velvety, shook and cracked. “It has begun.”

Researching the cult ritual that might have inspired Helen’s murder—and could provide the key to preventing others—was the best proof yet that myth and story mattered. Despite the sadness still shadowing him, Theo felt reborn. He was always searching for battles to fight, causes to champion. Now, for the first time, his knowledge could actually save lives. With a feeling of growing urgency, he jogged up the stairwell and into the Classics offices in Hamilton Hall.

“Theo!” He came to a resigned halt when an all-too-familiar voice called his name.

Nathan Balinski, short and broad, with a smattering of red freckles that kept him looking younger than his forty-odd years, called to him from down the hall. “Heard you were with Everett when he got the news. Rough, man. I guess I should call him or something, but you know I’m not the best shoulder to cry on.” He took a swig of something from a tumbler. It looked suspiciously like scotch.

Theo suppressed a disgusted grimace.
That’s an understatement—how could Nate, a man without morals, provide moral support to anyone?
Theo and Nate had known—and disliked—each other since
grad school, where Nate, although nearly a decade older than his classmates, had spent most of his time stoned and drunk at Theo’s roommate’s orgiastic parties. When Theo inevitably slipped away from the revels, Nate had coined the nickname “Theo-bore,” which he still let slip whenever he was feeling particularly dickish.

Theo felt the nearly unbearable urge to slug Nate in the face. Thankfully, Violet Macon, the office administrator, saved him from himself by waddling toward them, waving a copy of the
New York Post
.

“This is so horrible,” she choked, passing the newspaper to Theo.

MURDER MOST FOUL!
it blared, in an atypically literary headline over a front-page photo of Helen. Theo knew the shot—he’d taken it. She stood on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her blond hair streaming, her smile so bright it outshone the sunlit marble around her. They’d gone together to the Greek and Roman galleries and laughed over the erotic vases like two undergrads. That afternoon, they’d made love for the first time.

“Yes,” Theo said. “It’s terrible.” How many other ways were there to describe it? Dreadful. Shocking.
Nefarius. Horribilis.
No words of dismay would bring her back.

“You must be so upset.” Violet’s penciled brows drew together as she patted him on the shoulder. “I know how you felt about her.”

“We
all
liked Helen,” interjected Nate, unwilling to let Theo best him even in grief.

“Yes, but Theo
loved
her.” Violet ignored Theo’s wince. “Don’t you remember, they dated for a year before Everett showed up? Now Theo, have you spoken to Bill yet? He’s been calling everyone to see if they’re all right.”

“That’s uncharacteristically sensitive of him.” In Theo’s eyes, Bill Webb never cared for anything except his own reputation. When the chairman was diagnosed with throat cancer a few
years back, Theo had instantly regretted all the horrible things he’d said—or at least thought—about his boss. But Webb’s illness had made him, if anything, even more of an asshole than ususal. “I haven’t heard from him, no.”
Unsurprising, since of everyone in the department, he likes me the least.

Nate started to say something, but Theo wasn’t in the mood to listen. He turned to go.

“I’ll see you at the vigil tonight, all right, hon?” Violet called after him. “And the university’s planning a memorial service for Sunday. Details are in the memo.”

“Memo?”

“In your in-box. You know, the one you never check,” she chided. Theo’s determined resistance to all memos, meetings, and functions he considered purely administrative was the bane of Violet’s existence.

He dutifully collected the unruly mountain of envelopes from his in-box, resting the
Post
on top of the pile. As he walked back to his office, Helen stared up at him from the newspaper. Memories of those first days with her came flooding back.

“Moments like this make me want to live forever,” she’d purred, curled in his arms. Theo felt cold and hot all at once, sweaty where she pressed against him, chilled where the air conditioner panted against his back, fighting off the humid July heat.

“If life is so extraordinary, how can we bear to die?” she asked, suddenly serious.

“I don’t think we have much of a choice,” he’d murmured, tracing the perfect shell of her ear.

“But if we did, I’d stretch this moment, here with you, until the end of time,” she went on.

“I’m not sure I’d want to live forever.”

“Then I’d be like the Dawn. I’d tell Zeus to make my lover immortal, whether he wanted to be or not.”

“So, like Tithonus, I’ll grow older and older, and never die,
until eventually I shrivel into a grasshopper? Then you can put me in a box and carry me around in your pocket.” Theo made a convincing cricket chirp in her ear.

Helen sat up, flipped her hair out of her face, and frowned at him.

“I’m serious. I never want this to end.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? I say I want you to be with me for eternity and that’s the best you can do?”

He laughed. “As a grasshopper? I doubt I’d live for eternity. If the lawnmower didn’t get me, some Japanese food cart would.”

“Okay, fine, what if I’m Selene instead, and I look down from the moon, and I see you lying here, my beautiful Endymion.” She traced the valley of his chest with a finger. “And I grant you eternal sleep so you’ll never age and never die.”

“Better. You know how I hate waking up in the morning.”

“You’re always joking,” she pouted. “You know it’s part of why I love you, but it’s a defense mechanism. You’re too scared to say how you really feel.”

“That’s not true.”

“Okay, then promise me we’ll always be brutally honest with each other. Starting tonight. Tell me what you’re thinking. Right now.”

He couldn’t stop himself from kissing the gentle curve of her breast. She pulled away.

“Don’t
show
me.
Tell
me. I know you don’t have a problem talking.” True, he’d spent much of their lovemaking quoting Catullus.

I’m thinking that you scare me,
he’d thought about saying.
You cling so tightly I feel sometimes like I’m a fig tree, and you’re the strangler vine, using me to reach ever higher toward the sun.
But at the moment, her embrace felt pretty damn good. So instead, he said, “I’m thinking that maybe talking’s overrated.” He’d kissed away the rest of her protests.

Theo closed the door to his office and summarily tossed the contents of his in-box onto the floor.
I’d be your grasshopper now,
he thought,
if only it would bring you back.
He tore the front page off the
Post
and threw the rest of the newspaper into the recycling bin. Then he push-pinned Helen’s picture above his desk, where it stared down at him like an icon at a shrine.

When she’d started dating Everett, Helen had been brutally honest, as promised. Theo had let her down, made her feel small, and she wanted someone else. Theo felt guilty about all of it—he should’ve just broken things off cleanly with Helen once he realized the relationship was doomed. Instead, he’d been too chicken to confront her. How could he tell her that she loved him
too
much? He hated sounding like a typical male—turned off by a “clingy” woman and afraid to commit. It was more than that—Helen’s single-minded devotion to their relationship made him wonder if she was incapable of standing on her own two feet. He’d interpreted her intelligence and determination as strength, but the more tightly she clung to him, the weaker she appeared. So he’d pulled away gradually, unwilling to hurt her feelings, until she got fed up and left on her own. He’d been unsurprised that she’d found Everett so soon—it only confirmed his suspicions about her dependencies. Still, he couldn’t help being a little hurt. It didn’t feel good to be so easily replaced. Perhaps that’s why he’d gone home with her that night. After barely seeing Helen for months, he’d run into her at Book Culture, one of the last independent bookstores left in a neighborhood once replete with them. She’d been picking up a fresh copy of the
Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary
(her copious annotations had made her original copy illegible), and he’d been browsing the science fiction section, looking for a new escapist adventure. A quick hug and a few self-deprecating jokes later, Theo found himself staring at her naked body while studiously avoiding looking at the ring on her finger. It’d been dumb and dishonorable—and they’d done it anyway. His stupid male ego
couldn’t help preening at the thought that she’d come back to his apartment because she wasn’t satisfied with Everett. And for all her faults, Helen was a brilliant scholar and a beautiful woman. She was hard to resist.

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.