Discord's Apple

The man avoide

d the question like someone with a geis laid on him. “What if I asked very nicely?”

He didn’t say a word.

“He knows,” said the Wanderer.

Hera said, “At first, I believed that Zeus made the Storeroom. A last act before his martyrdom, to take up all our things of power and put them away. But the Marquis says no, it wasn’t him. So who? I don’t know how, my Greek, but you knew of Zeus’s plan. You were there.”

He didn’t answer, and she didn’t trust him, not a whit. If he meant to join with her, he would say what he knew. He was trying to distract her—wasting time. She glanced over her shoulder at the car, where Frank Walker sat. He was still in place.

Just as it was difficult to bribe an immortal, it was difficult to threaten one. So she didn’t threaten him.

“If I harmed them both, what would happen to the Storeroom then?”

The Wanderer moved ahead of the Greek, stopping him with a hand on his shoulder. They stood like that for a long moment, the Wanderer holding his gaze. The Greek’s eyes widened. His neck strained, like he was trying to look away but couldn’t.

Hera watched with interest.

“Prometheus,” the Greek said suddenly, his voice tight.

“Ah, of course,” Hera said. She should have guessed that herself. “Thank you.”

She would have to deal with the Greek later. She couldn’t trust him, and she wasn’t even sure anymore if she could use him. But she would keep him close until the moment she decided to dispose of him.

“We’ll wait for the Walker girl here. You wait by the car. See for yourself that we haven’t harmed her father,” she said, touching the Greek’s chest. “I wouldn’t want you to cry a warning to her.” He presented her a bow that might have been mocking, if she’d had the time to be insulted. To the Wanderer she said, “Go with him. Guard Mr. Walker.”

She gestured to Robin, who followed her to the edge of the cemetery.

Softly she said, “Wait. Hide. You are my reserve.”

Robin saluted and disappeared in a flash of magic.

Hera slipped behind the hulking tomb of one of the town’s founding fathers.

In the days of Olympus, they’d made a game of shape-shifting themselves and others. When he still had a sense of humor, Zeus placed bets about what outrageous forms he could take on to seduce his latest prize. She’d never had the patience for such games. She still didn’t understand the swan.

Zeus had been the King because of the ease with which he imposed his will on others. He didn’t command or threaten; rather, his personality expanded. His moods crept out like a fog bank to encompass all those around him, so that he saw his own mood reflected back at him, in the people around him. He was like that even in the oldest of days, before they were gods, when they were little more than confused and naïve children testing small powers and talents they collected like seashells in the sand. Their sibling rivalry turned deadly at times—the stories told about them by Egyptians, Sumerians, and others hardly exaggerated, recounting chopped-up bodies scattered in rivers, swallowed infants, journeys to the land of the dead. But they always managed to put each other back together again, using the tricks and spells of nature that they’d learned.

Zeus rightfully became their King when he killed their father, a bitter old man who wasted his time and power battling the clan of Titans. Instead, Zeus befriended them. Even Hera couldn’t argue, though she had been Queen of her own lands before. Zeus’s will absorbed them all.

And when he decided that he’d had enough, that he didn’t want to rule anymore and he didn’t want to hand over his place to a son who might kill him, he wiped them all out. There was too much magic in the world, he said. It was in danger of destroying all of human civilization, not just Troy. A civilization built through the worship of gods, Hera told him. But he couldn’t hear that he was wrong, and in his righteous arrogance, he worked a spell of magnificent destruction. He destroyed magic. He murdered those best schooled in its use, the gods and goddesses who had lived for millennia.

In his ennui and guilt, he used his own life as fuel for the spell and took the rest of them with him.

Hera was his sister and his wife. She’d healed his wounds and eased his pains, though he never liked to admit it. They were never associated with love—it wasn’t their dominion. But she knew him. She knew she could not stop him. So she defended herself. It took all her power, expended in a brilliant shielding flash, and it almost wasn’t enough. The spell left her old, weak, powerless. She almost had to start from scratch, relearning all the magic she’d spent centuries perfecting. But she persevered. She lived. She was almost what she had been.

She couldn’t yet transform herself into something magnificent, like a hawk, or large like a bear or a cow. But a little thing, a quiet thing, was all she needed now.

She became a cat, a small gray creature who would not be noticed. Moving four-legged and low to the ground required a shift in thinking, a level of defensive paranoia—danger might come from any direction. But she gained a litheness and ease of movement that made crossing the cemetery, dodging headstones, and leaping the odd flower arrangement a joy.

Sitting primly, she rested under the rear bumper of the sedan and waited.

______

Evie waited behind the auto garage with Arthur and Merlin, on the opposite side of the cemetery from the caretaker’s shack, where Alex said he’d meet them. Ten more minutes. She could see the car where her father was being held. One other person was inside. Alex walked along the parallel road, arm in arm with Hera, accompanied by two of her flunkies.

“He’s betraying us,” Merlin muttered.