Enemies(18)

Chapter 8




“Hades?” I asked Janus after we were done in the Greek restaurant. “She thinks death is coming for us all, the literal one, the guy himself.”

“I assure you he is not,” Janus said stiffly as we walked down the sidewalk, not in the direction of my hotel but the opposite way. He kept himself upright, not deigning to look back, and I was left to follow along.

“Is he still alive?” I asked, trying to match his speedier pace.

“No,” Janus said simply as I came alongside him, our reflections catching my eye as we passed by glass shop fronts. “He is long dead.”

“Was he an incubus?” I watched for his reaction, and he semi-cringed.

“No,” Janus said finally. “He was not.”

“But there’s more to the story than that?”

“There always is,” Janus said, eyeing me with something approaching annoyance. “The important thing is that we have convinced Athena to come in from the cold, to get her under Omega’s protection.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said, “I didn’t convince her of anything. I’m still not sure that being under Omega protection is any better than being left to die under the gentle auspices of Century.”

He gave me a wary eye. “You think death is preferable?”

“Death is preferable to a great many fates I can think of,” I said with only a hint of bitterness.

He didn’t speak for a moment, but his pace slowed. He kept his eyes focused straight ahead, then placed his wrinkled hands in the pockets of his suit coat as the wind whipped between us. “I suppose I would see that way as well, if I had experienced what you have of late.”

“Yeah, well,” I said feelingly, “you haven’t, so—”

“You think I have not experienced great tragedy in my life?” He gave me an almost amused look, one eyebrow raised. “You think I have not been horribly betrayed before?”

I narrowed my gaze and looked at him. “I doubt you’ve ever had the people you trust most force you to kill the person you love.”

He stopped dead on the sidewalk. “I watched my parents killed before my very eyes by Zeus himself, in a fit of pique. I was ten. You see, Artemis, my mother, dared to resist his charms, his advances,” he took a step closer to me, “and when my father, Apollo, intervened to save her, he too was killed by Zeus’s rage. I watched him, powerless to do anything to stop it, until there was nothing left but ashes when the fire from the electricity subsided. I have lived in the presence of monsters my entire life and tried to never become one myself. Years later, I got to see a human mob kill a god. Of course, they did not know she was a god. She was only six, after all.” His expression grew darker. “Still, they killed her—witchcraft, devilry, something of that sort—before I could intervene. This was after I left Zeus’s court and tried to live among the humans to avoid the games of power and politics. The girl was my daughter, and to see them kill her with a sword before I could cross the hundred feet between us …” The air went out of him. “Well. It was the last regret they ever had, their hasty action, because I was not hasty in my revenge at all. Thorough, but not hasty.

“There are monsters everywhere, and that was my lesson that day. Human, meta-human, it matters little. The entire race is compromised, shot through with weakness of emotion, of the heart. To glorify people in spite of their flaws is the trick I had to learn.” He looked jaded. “Most of the time it works. So, yes, I have seen people I trust, admire and respect butcher those whom I loved, and I have also seen it done by total strangers. Neither one feels much worse than the other.” He turned back down the street, looking, as though he could see a destination in the far distance. “But I suspect you know that. All the rest is merely something that you are clinging to in time of great sorrow.”

I followed his gaze but didn’t see anything in particular he could be looking at. “Some days … lately … I don’t feel like I know anything at all.”

A wan smile spread across Janus’s face as he looked back at me. “I think that also is a uniquely human—both meta and standard—feeling.”

“So Hades is dead?” I asked, staring at Janus.

“He is,” came the reply. “He died before the Roman Empire even fell from the height of its glory. And he was no incubus, as I said.”

“Why do I get the feeling there’s more to this story than you’re telling me?”

“Because,” he said, and he sounded weary, “there always is.” He gave me a look. “Do you know why we want you—you, specifically? Why we’ve been after you since day one?”