I glanced at her sidelong as we passed a gorgeous sculpture of one of the goddesses of ancient Greece crouched. It seemed well preserved, the white marble still looking clean and bright after what had to have been thousands of years of existence. “To do what? To fight a battle to kill tens of thousands?”
“No,” she said, and stopped in the middle of the gallery. There were only sporadic groups around now, the museum drawing close to closing time. “Well, yes, in Ares’s case. But Hades,” she said with a shake of her head, “he was something else entirely.”
“You keep mentioning him,” I said. “And others, that Athena I met—she came from a cloister in Greece—she said that the old metas, the ones that had lived as long as you,” I caught the twitch of her eye at my mention of her age, but she said nothing, “thought it was like Death had returned. Death with a capital D.”
Hera seemed to consider this for a moment. “Death with a capital D. That’s as good a way to describe him as any.”
I thought of the village that had been destroyed, the bodies all piled in the church basement, and I stared down Hera, who was now pensive. “What was Hades’s power?”
She blinked, not really in surprise, but looked at me almost as though she were amazed I was asking the question. “He could rip the souls from mortals to imprison them within himself.”
I felt myself flush with heat, as though it was an embarrassment that he was like me. “He was an incubus.”
She shook her head, dismissing that idea. “No. Your kind has to touch to drain a soul. By necessity, even if we threw you naked into a pit of other naked bodies—which has been done, rather cruelly, I might add,” she said, “you could only drain a few at a time. Hades could rip the life out of every person standing within a hundred meters of him.” She seemed to grimace. “If he focused hard enough on someone miles away, thought really hard about him, he could rip the soul right out of them at that distance. Touch had nothing to do with it. You could touch the man all day—not that I did, other than once—and nothing would happen.” She shook her head again. “No, he wasn’t an incubus. Close, though.”
Very close, Wolfe whispered.
I kept my gaze on Hera. “There’s more, isn’t there? Something you’re not telling me?”
She smiled slyly. “Something I’m not telling you yet. Give me just a minute.” She turned and we began to walk again, this time toward a far wall. Two sculptures sat posed next to each other in thrones, the marble weathered with time and age, pieces flecked off it from ill care. The man’s face was utterly missing, but his muscled body was still present, one hand gripping the arm of his squared throne, the other broken off at the wrist. It was sculpted in such a way that it could have been holding a staff, or a piece of fruit—anything, really.
To his left was his queen in a smaller chair. Her face, too, was missing, but her body was more complete. Her robes were flowing, but the curves were exquisite, and one breast was displayed. Her feet were lost in the furls of her dress, but there was a simplicity and elegance to her that caught my notice.
“A fine piece of art, here,” Breandan said casually as we ambled up to it. “I wonder how much that would fetch on the open market?”
“I think you mean the black market,” Reed said, “since you’d have to steal it in order to sell it, and I doubt that Ebay would be very excited to have you place it with them.”
I looked at the inscription on the placard in front of them. It read, Hades and Persephone.
“The King and Queen of the Underworld,” Hera said dryly. “I felt bad for her, you know. Demeter didn’t deserve to lose her daughter because Hades was a depraved maniac who was utterly insatiable and unwanted by any reasonable woman.” Her eyes narrowed as she regarded the sculpture. “Still and all, Persephone was quite a shrewd lady. Rather than be dominated by that beast of a man, she managed to wring some concessions out of him, got him to curb his bloodthirsty ways—at least for a time. And when the moment came that she realized what he meant to do, she killed him herself.” Hera’s smile went broader, and I could see the measured respect in it. “I would have done the same.” Her face darkened for a moment. “Hell, many’s the time I wish I had. Then again, Zeus was a bastard and a murderer but nothing on the scale of Hades.”
“What did he do?” I asked quietly, taking in the lines of the sculptures, the king and queen sitting in their places and looking down on me. The statues were taller than I was, even without the plinth they rested on. Where I stood, I could almost imagine being in some shadowy cave, in the darkness, being stared down at by the two of them. Now faceless. I wondered if the sculptor had been in their presence when he had made the statue, or if it had been simply inspired by them.