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Mortal Gods
The Goodess War: Book Two
By Kendare Blake Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2014 Kendare Blake
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-1222-2
CHAPTER 1
SAND THROUGH HER FINGERS
The desert never changed. The same sun-dried sand, hard packed beneath Athena's feet, and the same herds of saguaros strung out across the horizon, were programmed on repeat. And maybe that's really how it was. Maybe it was the same five tumbleweeds, rolling through on the wind to fall off the edge and show up again back at the start.
Athena swallowed. Nothing in her throat today besides smooth working muscles. No quills, no itchy edges of feathers cutting into her windpipe to make her cough blood. Not today. Maybe tomorrow.
She wiped sweat from her brow. It was high noon in the desert. She'd timed the trip badly; she should've left when she could meet Demeter in the fading light of evening. But there was nothing to be done about it now. Her boots already tread lightly on Demeter's skin, stretched out for miles, half-sunk into the sand. At any minute, Demeter's wrinkled, blinking eye could show up between her feet. If she wasn't careful, she might step on it.
It was the first time Athena had gone back to her aunt since finding her in the desert and learning about Cassandra. The girl was the key to everything, Demeter had said. And she had been. Three months had passed since they'd fought Hera, since Cassandra had laid hands on her and killed her. Since she'd turned Hera to stone. Three months since Hermes and Apollo had torn Poseidon apart in Seneca Lake. Since they'd laid Apollo to rest beneath the dirt.
Athena's dark hair hung hot on her shoulders. Walking the desert the night before had practically turned her into an icicle, but under the sun she felt like a stick of softening butter. The plan had been to cover up the swirling tattoos on her wrists, to dress decently and avoid any of Demeter's harlot jibes. But that wasn't going to happen. She'd dropped her jacket shortly after hitting her aunt's skin and hadn't bothered to drag it along behind her.
"Back so soon?"
Athena spun at the sound of Demeter's oddly disembodied voice, carried on the wind from all directions at once.
"What do you want this time?"
Athena didn't answer. She scanned the wrinkled skin for the eye, broad and bleary. When she found it, she stood over the top and peered down. It swiveled over her body, blinking lashes longer than a camel's.
"The goddess of battle returns," Demeter said. "In torn jeans and barely a shirt." The eye squinted. "The jewel in your nose is gone."
"I took it out. You're welcome." Under her feet, the skin pulled and plumped: a set of pursed lips.
"If you've come to tell me your news, I've heard it. You found the girl."
"The girl who kills gods," said Athena.
The eye narrowed. "Does she? Does she really?"
"Don't get excited," Athena muttered. "I'm not going to drag her out to the middle of nowhere so she can take care of you. She's a god killer, not a god euthanizer."
"Careful, Gray Eyes. Don't insult me. You at least die with some semblance of self. I'm a bare-skin rug. Vultures loose their bowels on my face, and I'm forced to snack on passing lizards." Demeter took a breath. "Why'd you come all this way? Perhaps to gloat? To recount your victory? Tell me how my seaward brother died."
Athena crossed her arms. Victory, Demeter called it. When they'd lost Apollo. He died a mortal, and they buried him under a mortal's name in a Kincade cemetery when he should've had a temple. But yes. It felt like a victory.
"I was sent to ask whether you know what became of Aphrodite," Athena said.
"Sent? Who could send you?"
"Cassandra sent me."
Demeter sighed, and the skin dropped Athena four inches. She wondered how the lungs were laid out over the acres. It would make for an interesting dissection, if any ballsy scientists ever happened across the corpse.
"The girl wants revenge," Demeter said.
"Wouldn't you?" Athena asked. Cassandra swallowed rage and tears like candy. Her guts would soon burst with it. "The pain burns her like fire. Aphrodite's blood will put it out."
"Will it? I think you know better."
Maybe she did. But it was what Cassandra wanted, and Athena owed her that.
"What about your fight?" Demeter asked. "Your battle?"
"What of it? We found the weapon. We won the day. But we're no closer to answers. We're still dying."
"What did you think would happen, Gray Eyes? That you'd destroy Hera and the feathers would dissolve in your blood? That Hermes would plump like a fattened cow? That I would spring up out of this dirt, soft and supple and woman-shaped?" Demeter's eye closed, wearily or sadly or both. "Everyone wishes for answers, Athena. But sometimes the answer is that things just end."
"Is that the answer here?"
"I don't know. But I know you don't think so. If you did, you would wander off and let yourself be torn apart by wolves. You'd dye more harlot colors into your hair."
Athena snorted. She could be killed. They'd proven the impossible possible. But it wasn't as easy as Demeter made it sound. Her bones would break those poor wolves' teeth. A death like that would take months.
And she wasn't ready. Who would have thought, after so much time, that she wouldn't be ready.
"The point is," said Demeter, "that you stay. Why?"
Odysseus flashed behind Athena's eyes. His voice whispered in her ears. And Hermes, too. Her beautiful brother. Thinner and thinner.
"There are things, I guess, that I still need to take care of."
Demeter drew in a rippling breath. "You are tired. Sit, child. Rest."
Athena cleared her throat. "No, thank you."
"Why not?"
"Hermes says ..." She hesitated and rolled her eyes. "Hermes said that when he sat on you he could feel your pulse through his butt."
Demeter laughed, hard enough to knock Athena off-balance. Her feet skidded apart, and she put her arms out to steady herself. Startled birds flew from wherever they'd been hiding moments before, squawking their worry at the shifting dirt.
"I wish you'd brought him," Demeter said, quieting. "I miss his impudence."
Athena smiled. Having finally reached her aunt she was no longer all that tired. Wind cooled the sweat on her shoulders and neck. The quest neared its end. Soon she could go home.
"Aphrodite," she said. "What do you know?"
"Nothing." Demeter recoiled innocently, stretching herself so thin that Athena could feel desert pebbles beneath her toes. "Without Hera to direct her path, Aphrodite will hide. So fast and so well that you'll never find her."
"We will find her."
"Why do you ask if you aren't going to listen?" Demeter snapped. "Why are you talking about a mortal girl's revenge? Why are you fighting her fight, instead of yours?"
Athena looked away, across the sand. At first it was grief. The loss of a loved brother. And then it was guilt, too many days spent staring at Cassandra, at the shell of a girl Apollo left behind. She'd made a promise to look after them all. Cassandra, Andie, and Henry. Apollo had made her promise.
"I don't know what it is," she said softly. "I never ... understood time before. It didn't mean anything. I could never make a mistake. I don't know how mortals do this. How they only live once."
"You doubt your instincts."
"Why shouldn't I? Things just end. Isn't that what you said?"
Demeter wriggled in the dirt. "I might be wrong. You beat Hera, but it wasn't Hera who caused this. Whatever really did, you may be able to fight." The eye bulged, scrutinizing. "Tell me. What you're thinking."
Images flickered in Athena's mind: she saw Demeter rise up from the earth and shake herself off, no longer a flat expanse of skin but a woman, with brown hair waving to her waist and deep dark eyes. She saw Hermes with muscle returned to his arms, a beautiful curve in his cheek when he smiled. She saw Apollo, Aidan, bright and perfect as ever, with Cassandra by his side.
She thought and she dreamed. Of wrongs put right. Things restored that would never be. Impossibility hovered like a light in her chest and made her want. To be a hero. To feel alive. As alive as she'd felt that day on the road above Seneca Lake, when she'd charged Hera with iron in her fist.
"We won," she said quietly. "Hera and I both sought the oracle, but I found her first. The other side was stronger, and everything went wrong. Our side was scattered and made terrible choices, but we won anyway. We left Hera and Poseidon dead, and Aphrodite running for cover. And now I have the girl who kills gods. And I have Odysseus, who can lead me to the other weapon."
She had Hermes, and capable soldiers in Henry and Andie. And she had herself. Goddess of battle.
"You have much," Demeter agreed.
"I don't want to put them through any more," Athena said, and that was true. Hermes, Odysseus, and Cassandra had been through enough. But she couldn't deny the urge that grew daily in her gut. She couldn't deny the exhilaration she'd felt when Hera had fallen on the road.
"Going through is the only way to the other side," Demeter said.
"The people I've endangered ... I would see them safe. I dragged them with me before," she said, and paused thoughtfully. "But always in the right direction."
"Stop trying to make me say it for you," Demeter said. "Spit it out."
"I'm going to wage one more war."
"Why?"
"Because we're supposed to fight, and we're supposed to win."
"Ah," said Demeter. "There it is."
"Yes. There it is. I'm going to hunt down every rogue god and monster. I'll tear their heads from their shoulders. Cassandra will turn them to dust. One last rush of heroes on the battlefield. It'll be glorious. Something for the books."
"And if you win, you'll regain your immortality?"
"Even if we don't, at least we'll be the last to die."
"You're so sure," said Demeter.
"I am, Aunt," said Athena. She looked up at Aidan's sun, blazing high and hot in the sky. "I well and truly believe the Fates favor us."
"The Fates favor you," Demeter said quietly. "And so. What is your first step?"
"The first step," Athena said. She'd begun pacing back and forth across her aunt without realizing it. "Try to find Artemis. Save her from the beasts in the jungle and gain another soldier."
"That's not the true first step," said Demeter. "When Hera came after you, she sought two things. Two weapons. You only control one."
"The other can't be controlled."
"Then he must be eliminated."
"Yes," Athena said. "I need Achilles kept out of the other side's hands permanently. The trick will be convincing Odysseus to give him up. And once Achilles is gone ... there'll be nothing they can do against me."
The eye blinked slowly. For something so sickly and close to death, it was clear as a mirror.
"Go, then, and try your tricks," Demeter said. "None of this will really be over, anyway. Not until you are dead."
CHAPTER 2
SUN AND STONE
Snow never gathered on Aidan's headstone. Other grave markers stood half-buried, with ridges of ice packed across the tops even after family members brushed them off. But Aidan's sat bare. Snow and ice shrank from it. Out of respect? Or out of horror, maybe, at something buried beneath the ground that had no business there.
A god. A god lay dead at the feet of that granite slab. Apollo. Aidan Baxter. God of the sun.
Cassandra Weaver stood off to the side, as she had on every Tuesday and Friday afternoon since they'd buried him. Sundays were too crowded, and she hated the sound of other mourners, the ones who knew how to mourn and what to say. How to cry softly into a handkerchief instead of screaming until their noses bled.
Her fingers reached out and traced the air in front of his name. Aidan Baxter, Beloved Son and Friend. Every day in the cemetery she thought she'd say something that needed to be said, but she never spoke.
High on Aidan's grave marker, above his name, was a carving of an enflamed sun. No one had told his parents to put it there. They just had. One more strange thing, working its will on the world, placing symbols for dead gods and keeping the snow at bay.
Odysseus stepped up beside Cassandra and laced his fingers through her hair, drawing it over her shoulder like a brown curtain.
"It's been an hour. Should we go?" His neck was tucked into his shoulders. Londoner. Unused to the cold.
She'd asked him to be her alarm clock. Time in the cemetery tended to stretch out, and she didn't have hours to lose. Normally, the job fell to Athena. The goddess accompanied Cassandra practically everywhere she went. A faithful, and hated, hound dog. Looking past Odysseus, Cassandra could almost see her, standing quietly near the edge of the cemetery in the copse of bare winter trees. She'd used to lean against a monument of a weeping angel, looking bored, until Cassandra snapped at her and said she was being disrespectful. But Athena was hundreds of miles away, somewhere between New York and Utah, seeking another dying goddess, stretched out across the desert. Seeking word of Aphrodite.
Cassandra's hands tingled and burned even at the thought of Aphrodite's name. They'd spent two months looking, Athena and Hermes both. They threw lines out in all directions, and still Aphrodite was nowhere to be found.
Andie said it didn't matter. That Aphrodite would die eventually anyway. But it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be enough, if it wasn't at Cassandra's own hands.
Odysseus sank deeper into his coat. His shaggy brown hair made for poor earmuffs. Cassandra flexed her fingers to drive the burn away, and to drive Aphrodite from her thoughts.
"Cold?" she asked.
"Of course I am. It's beastly cold." He stuffed his hands under his armpits. "But take your time. We've got a while before we need to nab Andie from practice."
"We can go. Thanks for coming with me."
"Anytime. But if we don't go soon, I'm going to warm my feet on his gravestone. Think he'd mind?"
Cassandra looked at the marker. Aidan Baxter. She'd loved him from the minute she saw him, without ever knowing what he really was. Who was she to say what he'd do, or what he'd feel?
I knew him in two lives, and not at all.
She remembered what he'd done to her in Troy — driving her insane, cursing her to never be believed — and she hated him. But she also remembered the sound of his voice and the last look in his eyes. He was there, underneath the dirt, and she'd give anything to reach down and pull him out of it.
Even if it was only to scream into his face.
Damn you, Aidan. You were never this infuriating when you were alive.
Come back, so I can tell you so.
"'Beloved son and friend,'" she read. "If they only knew. That it isn't the half of it. That they'd have needed a gravestone a mile long to tell the whole story." She shook her head. "Four words. It's not enough."
Odysseus put his arm around her and tugged her close. He took a deep breath, and kissed her head.
"I think he'd say it's everything."
* * *
Cassandra and Odysseus walked into the ice arena and found Andie waiting on the steps leading up from the locker room. Her hair stuck to her head, steaming with sweat from practice. It wasn't that much warmer inside the arena than out, but Andie stretched her t-shirt-clad arms happily.
"First one done?" Cassandra asked, descending the stairs.
"As usual." Andie cocked her head toward the locker room. Inside, the shouts and laughter of her teammates mingled with the noises of packing skates and pulling Velcro. She snorted. "I don't know what they're laughing about. They suck. We suck."
"Still time to turn it around."
But there wasn't. February was upon them, and the hockey season neared its end. Andie waved at Odysseus as he talked to the girls running the concession stand. "Hey, heartbreaker! Get me a hot dog!"
The sheer booming volume of Andie's shout made Cassandra squint. "You're in a decent mood, considering how bad you suck."
"Yeah. It's funny, but I don't really care that much. Did you know?" she asked Cassandra. "That the season was going to blow?"
Cassandra shrugged. Of course she had. The usual, run-of-the-mill visions were still around.
"Well, anyway. What's going on in the world of weird?" Andie asked. "Does Athena still want to look for Artemis?"
"So Odysseus says."
"But you saw Artemis running to her death months ago." Andie craned her neck and gestured for Odysseus to hurry up.
Had it really been so long? Standing in the hockey arena, it felt like minutes, not months. Cassandra's eyes clouded with memories of overgrown jungle leaves streaked with blood. The slim girl with brown and silver hair, chased down by a pack of ravenous who knew what. She could almost smell the blood and the rich black dirt. "Yeah," Cassandra said, taking a breath. "But it's the only vision we have to go on. And you know Athena. Any chance for another soldier is a chance too good to pass up."
"Don't be unfair," Odysseus said, sneaking up behind them. "It's about saving her sister as much as it is finding a soldier. And Artemis was Aidan's sister, too, you know. His twin." He handed Andie a hot dog in a cardboard shell.
"Finally. What took so long?"
"Sorry. Got caught chatting up Mary and Allie." He nodded to the girls in concession, who leaned so far over the counter they were about to fall out of it.
Andie batted her eyes. "Odysseus is so witty. Odysseus is so charming! Don't you just love Odysseus' accent!" She took a huge bite of hot dog and talked through it. "Barf."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mortal Gods by Kendare Blake. Copyright © 2014 Kendare Blake. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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