Antigoddess (3 page)

Athena smiled and said nothing. It was nice to imagine. But the truth was probably far uglier.

Hermes reached into his pack for some beef jerky. He wanted to ask a million questions; Athena could see that. But they’d been over most of them before, and she didn’t have new answers.

But Demeter might. She’s always given me wise counsel. She has to have heard something that we haven’t.

“Have you thought about what comes next?” he asked.

“One thing at a time, brother.” It was a stupid question anyway. She thought about it every minute. Where they were going, and what must be done. The thousand what-ifs and maybes, and finally what might be at the end. The ultimate end. Dying was a strange, almost invigorating feeling. She couldn’t remember ever feeling quite so desperate before.

*   *   *

The owl returned in the dark. Its yellow reflector eyes floated toward them, sinking slowly, and disappearing when it blinked. Hours had passed while the sun sank below the sand, and she and Hermes talked of idle things that had nothing to do with the task that literally lay before them.

As the bird dipped lower, she could feel the whisper of its exhausted wings. She gave it permission with a tilt of her head, and it landed on her shoulder in a soft, grateful clump. Hermes jerked. Cold came on quickly in the nighttime desert, and the two had taken to resting back to back, staving off the chill. He turned and regarded the drowsy owl.

There was no moon. The scene in the sand, two gods speaking to a bird at the edge of an expanse of stretched skin, was invisible to anyone else. But Athena could see into the owl’s eyes clearly.

“Where is she?” Hermes asked. “Er, where is her … mouth?” He didn’t ask whether the owl had found it or not. It wouldn’t have returned if it hadn’t.

“A few hours’ walk,” Athena replied. “That way.” She stretched her arm out and pointed southeast.

Hermes sighed. “A few hours. Everything used to be so much easier. Do you remember when I could fly?”

She laughed. “Of course I remember. It isn’t easy to forget someone running all over the place like the damned Flash. It was pretty geeky, frankly.”

He snorted. “Even when you’re dying, you’re still a bitch.”

“What are you complaining about anyway? You can still catch a bullet.”

Athena heaved to her feet; the owl on her shoulder gave a shudder. She glanced sidelong at it and whispered, “Rest now, little one. And be well.” It blinked and ruffled itself, then flew off into the black to disappear into its cactus. She held her hand out. Hermes took it, and she pulled him up.

We should be at the mouth by morning
. The strangeness of the idea made her pause, but after a few seconds, her boot found its way back onto the skin. It sank down like the surface of a trampoline. She couldn’t feel the dirt or gravel beneath it, but couldn’t help imagining the grinding that had to be going on beneath her heel. Maybe Hermes’ idea of flying wasn’t so ridiculous after all.

She looked back. He lingered on the edge, looking guilty or anxious, she couldn’t tell which. Then he shrugged and carefully put his feet down until he was by her side.

“At least she’ll know we’re coming,” he said.

*   *   *

“We should be getting there soon. The sun’s coming up. What do you think she’ll say? Do you think she can hear us? Where are her ears?”

Athena walked on in silence. After six hours of traveling on the skin, it didn’t feel any less unnatural beneath her boot heels. She wished Hermes would shut up. But he was nervous, and when he was nervous, his tongue moved as quickly as his wings used to.

“You’re lucky I’m stretched flat.” Demeter’s voice was a rasp, thin as the wind that raced across her leathered body. “If I had any decent lung left, I would’ve sucked in your bird and you’d never have found me.”

Athena scanned the skin beneath them. Hermes had zipped to her side and was doing the same.

“We’d have found you eventually, Mother of the Earth,” she said. “We would have just had to put more boot prints into your hide first.”

Demeter laughed, and when she did there was more air to it, more force. Athena wondered briefly if the goddess wasn’t sandbagging, and the pun almost made her snort. But the idea that Demeter was stronger than she seemed, that the skin could snap over the top of them at any moment, trapping them like a great bat’s wing, kept her quiet. She and Hermes both carried small pocketknives, but she didn’t want to think about what it would take to slice their way out should Demeter decide to try and keep them.

“Sit, children,” Demeter said.

Hermes did so immediately. The walk had been long, and his gray t-shirt was black with sweat. But after only a few seconds, he stood back up and looked at Athena with an odd expression.

She paid him no mind. She was still looking for the mouth, an eye, anything. Had all of Demeter’s features been spread out as she was stretched?

“How did you come to be this way?” Athena asked, stepping slowly toward the sound of shallow breathing.

“I am used as the earth is used,” Demeter replied. “Pulled thin across the land and consumed. Sucked dry, bleached white. And so I have been laid thin for decades. For centuries.”

“Why didn’t you seek us out for help?” Athena asked. She saw what looked like a ragged wrinkle in the skin, like an elephant’s kneecap. And then it opened, revealing a glassy, dark eye, which swiveled sickly toward her and fixed her with a sharpened pupil.

“We are not all like you, Gray Eyes,” Demeter whispered. “Goddess of battle, fighting through the millennium. Unable even now to lie down and accept your fate.”

Hermes walked to the eye and peered down at it. “We’re
immortals
,” he said loudly. “Why should we have to accept this?”

“Immortal doesn’t mean forever, Messenger.”

Hermes scoffed. “We shouldn’t have even come here. She’s as useless as that old turtle from
The Neverending Story
. Nothing but riddles and double-talk.”

Beneath their feet the skin quickened, tightening like the muscles of a snake before a strike. They were lifted three inches, and Athena cast him a sharp look. He was always impatient, always twitchy. Someday it would get them into trouble they couldn’t get out of.

“You say I am the goddess of battle, and so I am,” Athena said, careful, unlike Hermes, to keep the modernity out of her voice. “But wisdom was also my charge. And I can’t understand this. That is why I come to you. To learn what you know.”

“I know many things with my ears pinned to the dirt. They walk across me and spill their secrets into the sand. But you cannot escape this. You shouldn’t.” Demeter’s voice was low, spoken through tense lips and teeth. Her eye swiveled up and down the length of Athena’s body. “Look at you. Ink marks your skin. You bear a whore’s jewelry in your nose. Why should you escape when my daughter is already gone?”

“Persephone,” Athena whispered. The queen of the underworld and Demeter’s daughter, stolen from the summer lands and dragged below to be the bride of Hades. It made sense that she had died faster than the rest. She was half-dead already, one side of her an ageless, golden-haired maiden, and the other a rotted, sagging corpse. When Athena closed her eyes, she could see Persephone’s demise: the black skin slowly consuming the peach, the blue eye becoming cloudy, then milky, and finally falling into her skull. She swallowed and frowned, unsure whether the vision was true or just the product of her imagination.

“I’m sorry,” Athena whispered. “I was sorry the first time she was taken from you. You know that. I wanted to get her back.”

Demeter sighed, and the skin moved them with an uneven rattle. “What do you want, Athena? Why have you come, dressed like a harlot, asking stupid questions?”

“It’s high noon in the desert,” Hermes snapped, blowing sweat off of his upper lip. “Was she supposed to come wearing a high-collared robe?”

Athena placed a hand on his arm. Demeter’s words didn’t bother her. They didn’t feel insulting so much as grandmotherly, and she regretted not covering her tattoos and taking out her nose ring. It was lucky that the purple streaks in her mahogany hair had mostly grown out.

“If you seek to stop this, then leave me out of it,” Demeter said. “I want to lie here until I tear. I want to rip into leathery ribbons and be carried away by birds.” She laughed another low, papery laugh. “If you want answers, go to the Oracle. She will guide you.”

“The oracle? The oracle at Delphi?” Hermes scoffed. He looked at Athena. “There’s nothing there but a half-ruined temple and mushroom-induced hallucinations. There never has been.”

“She didn’t say anything about Delphi,” Athena muttered. Of course she’d never considered going to the oracle. There was nothing mystical about that temple in Greece. The only thing that had once made it wise was the fact that Apollo had deigned to imbue it with knowledge. But he hadn’t hung around there for centuries. He hadn’t hung around anywhere that she knew of. They had all scattered across the globe, becoming hermits and nomads, and maybe it was that as much as anything that had spelled their doom. They had lost one another. She hadn’t seen any of them, save Hermes, for over a hundred years, unless you counted the dreams and flashes. And now she was looking for them all, scrambling around to save them, when she hadn’t really cared for most of a millennium.

“Please,” she said. “Just tell me what you know.”

“You can’t stop it, Athena,” Demeter said. “I see the feathers blooming under your skin. You’ll be weak. You’ll be too late.”

“But there is a way to stop it.”

“I don’t know. Not without great cost. There are tools that might help.”

“What kind of tools?” Hermes interjected, impatient as usual.

“Those that you have known before,” Demeter said. “Some of them walking are nearly as old as you are. They are threads that were cut, and then rewoven.”

Hermes turned to Athena. “What is she blathering on about?”

“Reincarnation,” Athena said thoughtfully.

“Oh,” Hermes snorted. “So we’re Buddhists now, are we?”

“What would they be good for?” Athena asked, ignoring him.

“What they were always good for,” Demeter answered. “They still are, fundamentally, what they
were
.”

Hermes stepped closer to the eye. He seemed to hesitate to speak to it, but in the absence of a mouth, there were few other options. “I still don’t understand,” he said awkwardly. “How will humans, even reincarnated ones, help us to stop … whatever this is?”

“You still don’t know
what
this is,” Demeter said.

“This is the twilight of the gods.”

The skin shook as the goddess laughed. Pebbles bounced on her surface at the vibrations. Athena and Hermes shifted their weight uncomfortably. It was like standing on a drum.

“The twilight of the gods,” Demeter said when the rumbling had stopped. “But not all of the gods. Some of us are the bitches of fate and will persevere.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re not fighting our deaths. You’re fighting a war. A war against your own. And you will lose.”

“A war against our own?” Hermes asked. “Why would we fight each other? We’re dying.”

Athena swallowed. Some of them would fight for exactly that reason. Dying wasn’t something gods understood. It certainly wasn’t something many would do well.

“You’ll kill each other now, because you can. What was impossible is now possible. And if that wasn’t reason enough to try, you are the Titan’s children. You’ll kill each other. Consume each other, to survive.”

The skin shifted softly from side to side. It took Athena a moment to realize that it was Demeter settling into the dirt, ruffling her skin like she was pleased with herself and ready to drift back to whatever sleep she had, stretched across the desert.

“Go and find the Oracle,” the tired voice of Demeter said, drifting off. “If you can, and if she’ll help you, after what you did to her. You three. But maybe you’ll be lucky, and she’ll hate the others more than she still hates you.”

“Enough riddles. Who is the Oracle? What can she do?” Hermes stomped his foot and Demeter gave an “Oof!” Athena gave Hermes a stern look. It was rude to stomp your aunt, no matter how dire the situation.

“The Oracle is a prophetess. Find her. Make her remember, and she’ll be much more than that.” The eye fluttered shut.

“You won’t help,” Athena whispered.

“Do I look like I’m in any position to help?” Demeter snapped, and the skin coiled back to attention. “And you, with your whore’s jewelry and pathetic knife. Are you in any position to fight?”

Athena walked to the eye and knelt. Gently, she placed her palm above the lid, and the tired eye drifted shut. “Perhaps not yet. But I will be soon.”

3

THE CALM BREAKS

Abbott Park sat in the middle of the Spirit River Nature Preserve, an oblong strip of green land slowly yellowing its way to autumn brown. It was mid-October, and Kincade, New York, had already had a few hard freezes, just enough to make everything feel brittle and solid. Cassandra, Aidan, and Andie huddled on the outer edge of the fire circle, atop the remains of the low stone wall that seemed to begin and end at random, dotting the border of the park like an uneven stitch.

“You spread the word well,” Cassandra said, watching forty to fifty of their classmates mill around the three fire pits in the park. “Almost as well as if the word was ‘legs’.” She blinked and laughed, breath leaving her throat in a thin cloud. After a surprised pause, Andie and Aidan laughed back.

“Are you drunk?” Andie asked.

“No.” She looked down into her half-empty red plastic cup. The beer inside had gone sad and flat a half hour ago. “Sorry. I’m just tired.” Tired, and working on a headache. Some people had managed to get a few cars down the Jeep trail the DNR used and were blaring music out the windows. Not everyone agreed on the choice, and Muse competed with Florence + the Machine. The result was just a whole lot of shrill.

“It’s probably all the studying.” Andie bent her knee up and dug her boot into the edge of the wall, her arms folded over it. There was more than a little disdain in her voice. “I don’t know what your effing hurry is. College is two years away, and all it means is the end of us.”