Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven (6 page)

“Is that because you were a Roman god?”

He gave a slight shrug of the shoulders. “It is true, I did miss the Hellenistic days, having not been born yet when so many of my contemporaries were milking the lands of Greece for all they were worth. It is possible that I did not learn to acquire a taste for some of the foods that were so popular to them, having grown up on more traditional Roman fare.” He gave a short chuckle. “Which is nothing like that which you would consider Roman today. Food is one area where I am thankful for the advancements that technology has brought us. Others of our kind who lived in those days, and even those who didn’t, they act as though it was some glorious time, halcyon days where wine was poured directly into our mouths by beautiful women, where every need, whim and desire was granted without thought or concern for those involved.” He got a far-off look in his eyes. “I don’t see it, though, the romanticism of it all. I lived in those times, and yes, we exercised the vital powers in ways that we no longer do, held sway in the courts of the world in a way that has faded, receded, but the way we lived …” He let his voice trail off.

“I bet it was a real bitch living without flush toilets,” I said, my voice hoarse from my morning’s activities.

Janus gave me a slight smile. “You have no idea. The hygiene … Humans had it easier than us, of course, with our superior sense of smell and taste. When we lived in palaces, I took baths every day, sometimes multiple times per day when it was hot, and the ones who didn’t …” He shuddered. “Bacchus was the worst. He would drink himself into a stupor, soil himself, then never bother to clean up, going back to the alcohol and letting the smell offend the rest of our nostrils, as though he weren’t covered in his own feces.” He gave a small noise of disgust. “I was not sorry the day that Zeus dashed his brains out, though there was more to it than that, of course—”

“What was his power?” I asked, half-listening to Janus and half-studying the menu. The food was beginning to appeal to me a little, the nausea receding. I read the description of the British breakfast, eggs, bacon, tomatoes and baked beans, and wondered a little about the inclusion of the beans. There was a blissful quiet in my mind, a kind of peace that I couldn’t remember feeling in a long while. The peace of no one talking.

“Hm?” Janus looked up at me. “Oh, Bacchus? He was a Persephone-type, but he never wasted his talents for influencing life on mere humans, preferring instead to treat with vineyards, speeding the growth of their vines in exchange for wine. Quite the sot, as they say.”

I squinted at the menu. “Persephones can grow plants?”

“Oh, yes,” Janus said, “quite well. A Persephone can cultivate a field of thriving plants in the middle of a snowstorm.” He frowned and turned to me. “Have you not seen Klementina do that before?”

“You mean Kat,” I said, almost grinding my teeth. “I’ve seen plants respond to her touch, but I didn’t know she was growing them.”

“Indeed,” he said. “A Persephone has a bond with life, influences it with the touch, can augment it, make it grow, guide it in the directions she so desires. I suppose if the Kat … personality, as it were,” he said, almost sheepishly, “did not have much experience with the power, it would probably be somewhat limited. A Persephone with full command of her abilities,” he clucked his tongue and shook his head slowly, “well, it is different from what you’ve seen, I suppose.”

“Marvelous,” I said, uncaring. “Are you going to eat?”

“Ah, yes,” Janus said, “just one minute more.” We waited, and I looked at him until the door opened to his right and a girl a little taller than myself stepped out. She looked just a hint younger too, dressed in black shirt and pants, with an apron tied across her waist. She wore a broad, feigned smile as she stepped out to greet us.

Her hands were neatly clasped in front of her. “Good morning,” she said with an accent. “Can I help you?”

“We were considering breakfast, my dear,” Janus said with a condescending sort of sweetness.

“We have the best Greek breakfast in town,” she said, her accent only faintly noticeable; she showed no sign of knowing Janus, and I wondered what his game was.

“Of that I have little doubt,” Janus said, pouring it on thick with his own brand of sweetness. It reminded me of seeing an old man flirt with a waitress. I thought about Kat and Janus and realized that I might in fact be witnessing just that. I started to feel nauseous again and wondered if I was about to be involved in a thousand-year-old man making an effort at picking up a teenager.

“Why don’t we go inside and take a seat?” he said to me, jarring me out of my reverie. Personally, at that moment I wanted to be about a thousand miles away or, barring that, at least in a different restaurant with the man, preferably someplace with guys as waiters. That might be more palatable.

“Come right in,” the girl said and held the door open for us. Janus made a great show of stepping inside, gesturing for me to follow. I passed the waitress with a little reluctance; part of me wanted to tell her to get out while she could. “My name is Athena,” she said, and that part came out sharply accented, “and I’ll be your server.”

“Excellent,” Janus said as she led us to the table. “Do you know where your name comes from, Athena?” I realized somewhat belatedly that Athena was in fact, Greek, and working at a Greek restaurant. Coincidence? Doubtful.

“I was named after the Greek goddess,” Athena said, a little off balance, “of wisdom, inspiration, law, justice, strength—”

“Let us call her what she truly was,” Janus said somewhat broadly, “a woman who encompassed the ability to speak to the betterangels of our nature, to borrow a fitting phrase.”

Athena cocked her head at him. “Ah … all right. What can I get you to drink?” she stepped aside at the table she had led us to while Janus and I took our seats. We were near the front window, and behind us was a long counter. To either side of us were unoccupied tables set up with seats for twos and fours but no larger groups. They were all unoccupied, and I wondered what time of day it actually was. I was guessing I had missed traditional breakfast hours and we were about to shift to lunchtime.

“I will take a glass of wine, whatever the house white is,” Janus said with a wave. He glanced at me. “My friend will take water.”

I blinked at him in confusion. “I will?”

“It might be best for your stomach,” he said. “And you, Athena?” he asked, turning his head to look at her. “What would you like?”

Athena blinked at him in confusion. “I … uh …” She seemed to strain the very boundaries of her English, looking for what to say. “I’ll get you your drinks—”

“Why don’t you sit with us for a few minutes?” Janus asked, and he said it gently. It was strange, but the way he did it compelled even me. I wanted her to sit even though a moment earlier I didn’t care what she did.

“All right,” Athena said hesitantly and pulled up a chair from a nearby table to sit between the two of us. I stared at her, and she stared at me from behind her thick-framed glasses. On a man, they would have been hipster glasses. Hers were older, I guessed, and probably all she could afford.

“Athena,” Janus said, “I want to tell you something. Something you already know, really. You are not a human being.” She blinked back at him and started to speak. “Now, now, let us not play games. You were raised in a cloister, I would guess, around other metas, yes?” He tilted his head to look at her with a piercing gaze, and I saw her burn beneath it like an ant under a magnifying glass. “You need not answer. I can tell that it is so. You ran away, yes? From home? To the big city of London?”

She nodded, hesitant. “I found … passage … a job … from a man in a nearby town, to work in his brother’s restaurant here in London.”

“Ah, so you came from Greece itself,” Janus said with a smile that was cool, a little distant, something beneath the surface. “And your family? They remained in the cloister?”

It was her turn to be cool; her eyes shifted downward. “Yes.”

There was a moment of quiet, and Janus seemed to take stock of the situation before speaking again. When he did, it was lower, wearier, and infused with candor. “You know, don’t you?” She looked up at him, and he looked back. “That something is coming?”

She gave a slow shake of her head. “I heard rumors. Before I left.” Her raven hair hung loose around her shoulders, straight and perfect, in a way that I only wished mine would. “That something was coming. Something bad. Cloisters were disappearing, ones where the village elders had known each other for hundreds or even thousands of years, just going quiet in eastern Asia, Turkey, eastern Europe.”

“Ah,” Janus said, and there was no mirth or light in his expression, only a sad understanding. “Yes, something is coming.”

“Death,” Athena whispered then seemed to catch herself. She looked for a moment as though she wanted to stuff her hands over her mouth, as though she could crowd the thought back into her, as if she’d never spoken.

Janus cocked his head. “It certainly brings death. But what do you know of what is coming? Have you seen—”

Athena began to shake and placed her palms flat on the table. After a minute of silence she removed them, and there were wet spots of moisture in the shape of handprints left on the table where she had rested them. Her eyes came up, and I realized they were a dark brown, the irises shadowed in the low light of the restaurant. “The village elders talk of a darkness that spreads from the lands of old, of enemies coming back from a bygone time.” She leaned forward and whispered. “They talk of whole villages being wiped out, villages of metas strong and powerful being erased from the land.” She looked left and right, as though someone might hear her. “I left so they wouldn’t find me.”

Janus leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs and adopting a thoughtful posture. “Have you heard more than rumors?”

She was quiet then, looking down. “My father was an elder. He traveled to Cappadocia, to a cloister there, one that had been there for thousands of years. The elder there was powerful, had been a local deity in his youth in the days of the Romans.” It took me only a moment to realize that she was speaking of the days of the Roman Empire. “The village was dead.”

Janus stirred, only a little. “Dead?”

Athena nodded, meek as a mouse. “As though he had come upon them himself.”

“He?” I interjected, looking to Janus, who shook his head subtly, as though trying to warn me off.

“Athena,” Janus said, causing her to look back to him before she could answer me. “What was the state of the village? What did your father say he saw?”

“Bodies,” Athena said quietly. “Bodies everywhere, in their homes, in their places, lying on the floors and in beds, as though
he
had come for them.”

Janus held out a hand to stay my questions, putting it up as though he could ward me off by a simple wave of his hand. “Athena, dear,” Janus said, “it is not him. It may, perhaps, be someone with powers like his, but I assure you that it is not him destroying villages. Indeed, I can assure you that it is not even the same meta every time—”

“No, it is him,” she said, swallowing, her throat making an unnatural motion. “My father was there for the last time he spread his fingers across the lands, and he said it was exactly the same, the same thing happening, the same darkness.” She shook her head in disbelief. “You can tell me a thousand times I am wrong, but a thousand times I will tell you I am right, that he has returned to cover the land in his darkness again.”

No hand was going to stop me this time. “Who?” I asked, and I said it loudly enough, insistently enough, that she broke out of her focus on him and looked to me, her dark eyes shining. “Who are you talking about?”

She looked at me with a hint of confusion, then let her gaze stray back to Janus, who seemed to shake his head in resignation. With that little permission given, Athena turned back to me. “Death, of course. Him. The one who would destroy the world and claim all the souls for his own.”

My mouth was dry, and the air had gone still in the restaurant. The sun shining in from outside felt like it had been captured behind a cloud, and I was left to stare at her, probably open-mouthed at the words she had used.

“You know,” she said to me, waiting for a reply that I couldn’t give. “Him. Death.

She gave a small shudder, and the name came out in a fearful whisper.

“Hades.”

“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?”