The Immortals (27 page)

They walked in silence up Broadway to the southern border of Central Park. Selene showed no signs of stopping. “So where to?” Theo asked finally.

“There’s a place in the park that I go sometimes when something like this happens. Up around 100th Street.”

Forty blocks.
All thoughts of a romantic tryst flew out of his mind. He wasn’t going to make it. His feet hurt. He’d been up for twenty-four hours. His glasses had pressed two indelible commas into the bridge of his nose. He smelled like old sweatpants. He put his hands on his hips and cracked his back. “I’d love to come, but I—”

“Let’s take a cab.”

Theo knew she preferred to walk. “Really?”

“This time of night, the cabbies might be desperate enough to ignore a little blood.”

“Well, here—” Theo pulled a rumpled tissue from his pocket and dabbed at the blood and grease on her forehead. Her eyes followed his hand, but she didn’t move away. “Sorry, I’m about to act like my grandmother, but…” He dabbed the tissue with
his tongue, placed one finger on her chin to steady her head and wiped a bit more firmly, careful not to press too hard near her bruises. “Tell me if I hurt you.” She smiled, as if at a secret joke. Her eyes were very close to his. The piney smell of her filled his nostrils.

They entered the park at its northern tip, next to a large pond surrounded by weeping willows and spreading sweetgums. After the chaos in Midtown, it felt like stepping into another world. A raccoon froze at the pond’s edge, a fish clutched in one hand-like paw. Theo tried to move as silently and gracefully as Selene so he wouldn’t disturb it. He’d been to this pond many times—it wasn’t too far from Columbia—but he’d never dreamed of this secret, predawn idyll. Selene veered off the path to follow a narrow, rushing stream into the unlit North Woods. Theo fell a few steps behind, unsure of his footing.

Finally, deep in the woods, Selene stopped on an outcropping of boulders beside the stream and waited for him. He peered down at the seven-foot-high waterfall below them. It cascaded between granite shoulders into a small, shallow pool of frothing white. He’d never known such a place existed in the heart of the city.
Perhaps it didn’t until this moment. Maybe she conjured it from thin air, and if I were to return tomorrow, there’d be no trace of it,
he mused, glancing at Selene.

Now that they’d stopped moving, he missed his coat. He clasped his arms around his chest. Selene jumped down the surrounding boulders and crouched at the foot of the pool, staring into the shallow water as if looking for answers.

Theo squatted beside her, elbows resting on his knees. “I’ve been tracking this cult, thinking I understand it,” he said after a moment. “And then tonight… when Jenny Thomason… God, when they put that knife in her… I realized I still can’t answer the most fundamental question of all. Why? Why murder these women?”

A tremor slid across Selene’s face, and for a moment, Theo
was afraid she might cry. Instead, she took a shuddering breath and said, “Because the hierophant believes it will make the rite more powerful.”

“Just because it’s more gruesome? More dramatic?”

She shook her head wearily. “You claim all ritual is metaphor. But this cult is different—they’re translating symbolic action into something real. At Eleusis, the clay vulva was just a
symbol
of fertility, right?”

Theo nodded. “Yes. And the burnt offerings, the ‘sacrifices,’ were also symbolic: The ancients gave the fat and the bones to the gods but kept the rest of the meat for themselves—they never relinquished food necessary for their survival.”

“So using actual flesh goes beyond metaphor, beyond ritual—it’s a
true
sacrifice—the greatest offering you can make to the gods.”

“I remind my students that the Greeks didn’t take their religion so literally. But I guess our hierophant doesn’t know that. You’re right—he probably thinks he can do it better than the ancients did.” Theo rubbed the point of his chin, intensely thoughtful. “But why ‘empower’ the rite in the first place? They really believe they can tap into some sort of ancient juju? Helen was a scholar, not a fanatic.”

Selene raised an eyebrow. “A scholar with a hidden
lararium
.”

He winced. “I can’t help feeling somewhat responsible. I’ve always claimed Greek religion has some advantages over monotheism. But I never dreamed she’d take it so far. To think Helen would actually embrace paganism… it’s so absurd, so sad.”

“The ancients created a civilization unparalleled for its time—maybe unparalleled for
all
time—and they did it while believing that immortals walked among them. Maybe Helen wasn’t so crazy after all.”

“No, Greek civilization benefited specifically because they
didn’t
take their own myths literally.”

“That’s your own bias talking,” Selene said sternly. “You like the Greeks. You don’t believe in the gods. So you think they didn’t either. That they were somehow too ‘advanced’ for something you consider superstition.”

For once, Theo was silent.

“Yet,” she said more gently, “when you prayed by the riverside the day we met, you spoke in Ancient Greek.”

He shot her a surprised look. “I wasn’t praying.”

“No?”

After a moment, he said, “I guess after spending so many years studying the Olympians, I do feel some spiritual connection to them. God—you know, the one with the capital ‘G’—has always been a bit unknowable for my taste. So abstract. Athena and Zeus and Hermes and Apollo… they’re just human enough to make us think we have some agency in the world, and just divine enough to remind us we can’t really control our fates. Maybe you’re right… maybe the world was a richer place when mankind believed they lived in the same realm as gods. So I guess, on some level, it was a little like a prayer.” He gave a rueful snort. “You realize you’re making me rethink everything I’ve been teaching and writing about for the last ten years.”

“You’re welcome.” She rose from her crouch. “Now let me show you something.”

He followed her to a low pile of rocks on the far side of the pool. There, a thin rivulet of water emerged between two stones.

“Montayne’s Fonteyn.” Then she gestured to the larger waterfall behind them. “The waterfall’s manmade, you know, in the 1870s. That and the stream, too. But this spring is older. It’s the last natural water source left in Central Park. It used to flow into a creek, Montayne’s Rivulet, but when they designed the park, they cut it off to create the waterfalls. All the lakes and ponds and streams in Central Park are full of New York City tap water now. There’s a pump house where they can just turn it on or off.
Except this one. A little bit of Montayne’s Fonteyn still finds its way into the stream up here. A last bit of the natural world.” She cupped a hand beneath the spurting water and took a long drink.

“You sure that’s safe?”

“You just attacked five armed men and you’re worried about a little spring water?”

“Death by knife wound is faster than death by
E. coli
.” But he knelt down anyway and took a quick sip. The water tasted faintly of iron and mold. “Tastes like New York.”

“It
is
New York. The very heart of it.” She stood and walked to the edge of the pool at the waterfall’s base. “Drinking from the spring cleanses your insides, but bathing in running water from a stream’s the only way to purify the body. So in you go.”

“You can’t be serious. That water would freeze the balls off a brass monkey. I’ll catch a cold and die.”

“You don’t catch colds from cold.”

“True, but it weakens the immune system—” He stopped himself before his pedantry got the better of him. She’d probably read the same
New York Times
column he had. Too many conversations among the city’s intelligentsia devolved into recitations of articles everyone had already read. His relationship with Selene should be different. He stumbled across the boulders to join her. Kneeling, he cupped his hands, still stained with the actress’s blood, in the freezing water.

“You have to get your whole body in. You read the classics. Don’t you understand ritual purification?”

“Selene—”

“You’ve been polluted by their filth,” she interrupted fiercely. “Wash it off, Schultz.”

He was about to protest further, but stopped himself.
I already followed her up here. Why would I turn down the chance to get wet?
The entire situation was completely absurd. Who ever heard of skinny-dipping in Central Park? But since when had Selene been anything but extraordinary?

“Christ,” he muttered, hopping precariously on one foot to pull off his shoes and socks. Standing on his tiptoes to avoid the chill rock beneath his feet, he pulled off his blazer. While unbuttoning his shirt, he realized belatedly that he’d misbuttoned it that morning, leaving one shirttail hanging drunkenly off-kilter. Then he yanked his undershirt over his head, catching the neckband on his glasses for one embarrassing moment and emerging static-charged and tousled. Throughout it all, Selene just stood, arms folded. Her gaze was no longer stern, but he could see the tension in her jaw. Finally, he stood shivering in only his corduroys; she looked away, a hint of disgust in the flaring of her nostrils. Theo glanced down at his own bare torso. He was no longer the gangly, acne-plagued teenager he’d once been—cords of muscle defined his flat stomach—but hunched over with cold, his chest seemed concave once more.
Might as well get this over with.
He fumbled with the zipper on his pants and tugged them off in another stunning display of imbalance. Perhaps he should be glad Selene had stopped watching. He’d forgotten until he looked down that he was wearing his yellow C-3PO briefs, an old birthday gift from Gabriela that made him look like a cross between a male stripper and a space robot. He didn’t hesitate to doff the offending garment and splash noisily into the pool. If only it were a little deeper, he might be able to regain a shred of modesty. As it was, the water only came to mid-thigh.

“Go on, all the way in, or it doesn’t work,” Selene said quietly. He looked over his shoulder. She still wasn’t watching him. Instead, she sat hunched over a small pile of branches. He took a deep breath. “And don’t scream,” she warned just in time.

Theo stayed under the waterfall for about five seconds, his teeth clenched together the entire time to squelch the rising holler that would no doubt bring hordes of park police to their little hideaway and put him right back into custody—this time for indecent exposure. He splashed back out of the pool hissing,
“Shit shit shit shit it’s cold cold cold.”
Selene was laughing now—not her usual dry chuckle, but the splendidly absurd, unbridled honk he’d heard only once before. She held out his incriminating briefs. He pulled them on with even less grace than he’d yanked them off, then crouched down beside the low fire she’d made.

“We’re not going to burn down Central Park, are we?” he asked as he dried himself hurriedly with his shirt.

“Trust me. I’ve done this a thousand times.” She shrugged out of his overcoat and handed it back to him. He pulled it on gratefully, enjoying the faint scent of cypress that enveloped him.

“You’re like a homegrown Prometheus, huh?” he teased. “Bringing fire to man despite the gods’—or should I say the park commissioner’s—proscriptions.”

She chaffed her hands over the flame. “Prometheus did what he did for love of mankind,” she murmured, suddenly serious. “I’m not sure why I do what I do.”

“What do you mean by…” He wanted to understand. She was being cryptic, as usual.

She swung her head toward the trees. “Do you hear that?” she asked, her voice low.

“What?” he whispered back.

“There’s a rabbit in there.”

“You’re not going to kill it, are you?” he asked, alarmed and fascinated at the same time.

“I don’t have a bow anymore, remember?”

Theo thought it was grief that tightened her mouth this time, not anger. “But you can hear a rabbit?” No matter how he strained, he heard nothing but an indistinguishable rustle of leaves in the wind.

“I can hear the raccoon returning to its den in a log by the stream,” she said softly, her eyes fluttering shut. “I can hear a rat rustling in the undergrowth. I can hear a hawk winging its way
above our heads.” Theo looked upward. He saw only the dark outline of branches against the dim glow of the light-polluted sky. “I can hear the slow crawl of worms through the mulch. I can hear the small cry of leaves as they wither and die and glide gently to the earth. I can hear the pull of the moon on the water.”

Theo couldn’t decide if Selene was insane or inspired. He let his eyes fall shut and tried to listen as she did. Yes, there was the small sound of an animal in the brush. If he concentrated very hard, he could distinguish between the wind blowing through the branches and the wind blowing through the leaves upon the ground. There—a bird cheeped! And the waterfall, of course; he could hear the white rush of the water. And a softer sound, the burble of the stream that fed it. For an instant, he felt his awareness swing outward—he was beyond himself. At once as large as the universe and as small as the insect crawling across his bare ankle. Then the roar of an airplane overhead snapped him back to his own shivering form. He opened his eyes. Selene was staring at him. The sudden warmth of her gaze made him tremble all the more.

“Your turn,” he said, suddenly bold.

“Hm?”

“Ritual purification.” He nodded back at the waterfall. “Your idea.”

Her skin grew, if possible, even paler. Her silver eyes narrowed.

“Right now,” he said softly when she didn’t move, “you remind me of your namesake. Homer said the Moon Goddess was mild, but I’ve always thought she’d be fierce. Fierce and lonely.” He left the challenge hanging and forced himself to say nothing more. He stayed silent and calm, the way he imagined one might stalk a bird of prey who at any moment might lash out—or fly away.

“You can’t…” she began finally. “You can’t look.” He’d never
heard her stammer before tonight. Maybe he was rubbing off on her just as she was on him. He was pretty sure he came out ahead in that trade.