The Cult of Kronos (18 page)

“
Keep it subtle. Keep it
anonymous,” Zeus said. “We don't want them looking too closely at
who paid their college tuition. They must have suspected that Jason
didn't save enough for all three to go to Ivy League schools on
school nurse salary.”

Dionysus got up from the table
and fetched another bottle of champagne from the cart. He came around
and topped-off their glasses while Athena took minutes. Each member
took their turn updating the rest of the council on the goals and
developments in their domain. Hephaestus was working on technology to
improve cerebral-linked prosthetics. Zeus was planning to make Athena
his Secretary of Education in his next term as President. Hermes
thought he had identified a new demigod awakening in Fresno.

When the talk came around to
Hades, he stood up from his seat.

“
Always dramatic,” Hermes
muttered.

“
I have had a request from
the jails of Tartarus,” Hades said, his black cape flowing around
him. “Prometheus requests a parole hearing.”

The group was silent, then
whispers rose up and filled the room like a hive of angry bees.

“
He tried to kill us!”
Artemis said. “I was stabbed.”

“
He put us in that
terrifying jar,” Persephone said. “With those creepy statues.”

“
How about the whole
usurpation before that?” Hermes reminded them. “I mean, we
wouldn't have had to fight Kronos if he didn't pull all that.”

“
You forgave me,” Hestia
said, and the room fell quiet again. Her words, when she chose to
speak, had a way of cutting through the room.

“
I mean…you opened a door
thousands of years ago,” Dionysus said. “He locked us in
Tartarus, and then he attacked us again not even twenty-five years
ago. We were defenseless kids.”

“
Speak for yourself,” Ares
said.

“
Alright,” Hermes
corrected, “We were defenseless kids and you were The Incredible
Hulk. Dionysus is right. Twenty-five years is nothing to him.”

“
He says that Zeus wasn't
worthy of his fealty then,” Hades added, “but he is now.”

Zeus sipped his champagne and
sat back in his chair, thinking about what everyone was saying.
“Worthy now? What happens if I again become unworthy of the great
Prometheus' approval?”

“
We have changed,” Demeter
said.

“
Tell him I'll consider it,”
Zeus said.

Hades hesitated, “So
delaying the decision, that's the decision?”

Zeus slammed his fist on the
table. “He was my friend and he betrayed me. Did I deserve it?
Maybe, but it doesn't change that he threw me in Tartarus with
prisoners who hated me. It doesn't change that he tried to lock us, a
bunch of kids who had no idea what we were, in a vase for the rest of
eternity. It doesn't change that his actions almost lead to Kronos
taking over the entire planet and sucking away human free will. I
will think about it, and he should be glad I've committed to even
that.”

The room was silent again.

“
So…” Hermes started,
tapping his fingers on the table. “Dessert? Did we order dessert?”

A thirty minute taxi drive
from the hotel brought Demeter, donning a human-safe form that was
not Madam Secretary, to a tiny shop in downtown New Orleans. When the
store opened, Demeter walked past the shelves of books and statues of
gods from different pantheons and pretended to observe some jewelry.
When the shopkeeper turned her back to answer a question from a
patron who had just entered the store, Demeter slipped into the back
room.

The walls were built with
bricks and had been painted to stop mold from growing between the
mortar. A hole that was only visible to the gods was carved into the
wall on the far end of the room. No matter who built what on this
ground, the hole would always appear to those worthy of entering.
Demeter crossed through it and into a dark and winding tunnel that
lead to the land of the dead.

She traveled for a day to get
into The Underworld, and then along the banks of the Styx, the
Phlegethon, and around the edge of the pit of Tartarus to the tunnel
that lead back out. For another night she journeyed up the dark,
winding path. Moisture and mildew clung to the walls, making them
slick. Rats scurried past as she walked, but she did not mind them.
There were dozens of entrances to the realm of Hades from the surface
of the Earth. This one came out in Namibia, one half mile from a
place where a group of British philanthropists had built a temporary
hospital.

As she walked out under the
blazing sun, Demeter changed. Many of the women moving around the
village wore their hair in long braids coated in thick, red clay.
Ndali, a form of Demeter with dark skin and a round, smiling face,
wore her hair cropped very short with a scarf tied around her head.
She assisted in the hospital, translating for the patients that only
knew their indigenous languages and the doctors who only spoke
English. Ndali was known as a wanderer, a strange woman who sometimes
lived in a clay hut with a straw roof, but more often was nowhere to
be seen. When she was around, she helped with the harvest and acted
as a bridge between the native people and the missionaries, but
little was known about her origin.

She was expecting him tonight,
the young doctor who worshipped her not just as a lover, but as
something more. He was twenty-three, young for a licensed physician,
but his life had been serendipitous like that. He had always known
what he wanted to be and through homeschooling he had earned his
diploma and entered medical school at sixteen. He had found his way
to Africa six months ago, wanting to earn valuable experience. He was
a handsome young man with eyes that crinkled when he smiled. He came
when he told her to meet, under the light of the full moon, and
stayed the night. He did not know where she came from or where she
went, but he did not ask for fear that she would go away and never
return.

The council had decided that
they must leave him in peace. They had ruined his previous life,
taken him away from his children. Yet she could not let this mortal
go. He was different. He was not Jason in so many ways, but in many
other ways he was. As she lay next to him in the night, sweat beaded
on her skin, listening to the mosquito buzzing outside the gauze that
hung around her bed, she thought that some day she would tell him.
Some day he deserved to know that he was loved by the gods. Or
perhaps it was easier to not know. She would decide. Some day. Not
tonight.

Afterwards

I wanted to take a moment to
thank everyone who has read Olympia Heights from the beginning. I
started writing this series back in the spring of 2007. Seven years
later, I have reached the end of the novels’ arch, but I am not
done telling this story. A few months ago, I made a proposition to my
brother, Sam Albro: let’s work on an Olympia Heights comic
together. He accepted, and since that day we’ve been putting our
heads together on story ideas and designs.

What we are creating is an
alternate universe story that is both accessible to new readers and
fresh enough to draw old readers back again for one more trip. The
gods you know and love from this series will be essentially the same,
but certain aspects of them will change. They will go on new
adventures with a wider variety of Titans and monsters, and each
volume will focus on a smaller cast (but of course with cameo’s
from other gods.) Flashbacks will be drawn in a modified black figure
style. Timelines and stories will overlap. It’s going to be a lot
of fun.

I plan to launch a Kickstarter
to pay Sam for his art. The campaign will give readers the
opportunity to get Kickstarter exclusive covers, posters, shirts,
buttons, and more. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be launching
the project in early October and I would like you to help me spread
the word.

You can head over now to
www.olympia-heights.com and check out the character designs. While
you’re there, I’d appreciate if you’d take a moment to sign up
for the email list so I can let you know when the Kickstarter
launches.

Thanks
for reading.

Amy
Leigh Strickland

www.olympia-heights.com

The
following excerpt is from Rescue OR, Royer Goldhawk’s Remarkable
Journal by Amy Leigh Strickland. You can get Rescue now on Kindle,
Nook, Kobo, iBooks, and in paperback.

“
The
crowd's too thick to pass here,” Benjy said. I marveled at the
thousands of people marching, wondering how many were risking their
jobs to be there. Benjy pointed back towards the theater. “Let’s
go wait for America with Mercy,” he suggested. I was pleased for
any excuse to spend more time near Miss Winmer and nodded my head.

Benjy
and I entered the alley next to the theater. Up ahead, Mercy waited
at the back door, fighting to keep her extravagant hat from blowing
off in the breeze that swept through the alley. Benjy called out and
she turned to wave. A great shadow fell over the alley and I became
acutely aware of a rumble overhead.

I
placed my hand on the rim of my hat to keep it from falling off as I
looked up at the sky. Overhead, a great dirigible loomed. The rigid
airship was being steered directly over the alley and had slowed to
linger above us. “Brooker & Bedloe Steam Industries” was
painted on the side in a text style that resembled a circus poster. I
marveled at the great airship, wondering if it was part of the
parade. Surely a great company like Brooker & Bedloe did not want
to encourage their workers to organize, but there was no other reason
for the great ship to fly so low over the city.

As
I watched, something dropped from the back of the gondola. It landed
in the alley before I could identify it and exploded in a cloud of
grey smoke. I fell back, my body automatically throwing me away from
the source of danger.

There
was a zipping noise, metal quickly grinding against steel cable. A
cluster of figures appeared in the smoke, and I could see bodies
moving through the cloud in the direction of Mercy Winmer. Her scream
was cut off by a fit of choking coughs. One of the figures in the
smoke turned and looked at me and I could see that his face was
covered by a long, black mask with great glass eyes. I had seen
drawings of similar apparatuses in the journals my father subscribed
to; it was a gas mask.

I
sprang to my feet as fast as I could and ran back into the cloud,
untucking my ascot from the front of my vest and holding it over my
nose to filter some of the smoke. A ladder had dropped down from the
dirigible and one of the men was pulling Mercy Winmer, now
unconscious, towards it. I grabbed for her, but a third figure
stepped out of the thick smoke and struck me with something hard. The
object hit me just above my eyebrow and the sharp blow stunned me.

The
ladder began to rise up evenly, as if pulled by a mechanical crank.
It was out of reach by the time I recovered from the blow, so I
grabbed the ladder from the theater's fire-escape and began to climb
frantically. I could hear Benjy behind me, calling my name, but his
voice had receded to the background. Quickly, I scaled the
fire-escape and made my way to the top of the roof. I rose above the
cloud of slowly dissipating smoke. From the roof of the theater, I
was almost level with the gondola. The door was open and someone was
reaching out to help the kidnappers haul Miss Winmer inside.

The
man in charge-- I assume this because he was dressed in a finely
embroidered tailcoat that indicated that he likely had too much money
to answer to anyone-- took Mercy Winmer by the arm. He was a handsome
older man with thick, pepper-gray hair and a small, neatly-kept
mustache. His features were long and his black eyes were sharp. He
looked like a wolf in rich clothing. He wore a white silk opera scarf
and a red fez. A machine-rolled cigarette hung out of the corner of
his mouth, its smoke mixing with the fog rising up from the alley
below. He looked at me, his cold eyes locking with my own, and I was
stricken by a sense of familiarity. I had met this man before. He
smiled and turned back to his business, as if I was a mere observer
and clearly no threat to his plot.

I
ran. I ran straight up to the edge of the roof and jumped, reaching
for the ladder. They would have to knock me off or kill me to stop
me. My jump fell short and I grasped desperately, trying to grab
something to hold on to. The richly attired man had a leather tube
hanging from a strap around his shoulder, and I managed to grab it. I
swung from the strap and held on tight. He desperately grabbed the
ladder so that I would not pull him down with me. I hung there for a
moment, an almost immeasurable instant, before the leather strap
stretched and snapped.

Still
gripping the tube, I plummeted towards the ground. My fall was broken
by the awning over the theater door. It, too, broke and in seconds I
was on the ground. I strained to breathe. My side burned. A striped
piece of canvas covered my face. It was a moment before I could think
to move, to free myself from the broken awning. When I uncovered my
own face, Benjy was standing over me in a thin fog and the airship
was rising up into the sky. They had gotten away.