Greek Revival: Chapter 10

X.

The rest of the book yielded two more interesting discoveries. One was another sticky note on a page that consisted of words like ‘stop’ and ‘restrain’ and ‘hold.’

27/04/2016CE. This magic works in the way it is described. The foolish husband is held securely and cannot flee. He needs neither food nor sleep. I will keep him in this way until he is needed.

“The foolish husband,” Damian repeated as Ari translated. “That’s Nico.”

“And keeping him sounds good,” Ari said. “Or, I mean, not good. Objectively that sounds awful. But if he’s under the effects of this, like, magical no-food-no-sleep freezing spell, and Dr. Pryor is keeping him that way, it means he’s probably not dead. Which means we just need to find him. And a way to break the spell. Which isn’t much better off than we were before, I guess.”

“No, you’re right. That does sound good. As long as he’s alive.”

“I don’t know that he is.”

“But it sounds like he is.”

Ari looked at the note again, making sure they’d gotten all the tenses correct. Is held. Cannot flee. Needs. Will keep until.

“Yeah,” Ari said. “It does.”

The other discovery fluttered out of the back of the book as they flipped through the last few pages. It was a sealed envelope addressed to Gilbert Applewhite. It had a return address – Dr. Pryor’s house – but no stamp.

“Should we?” Ari asked, but by the time the second syllable was exiting their mouth Damian was already tearing the envelope open and unfolding its contents.

Inside were two sheets of paper. The first was a typewritten letter dated yesterday and addressed to ‘my dear Mr. Applewhite.’ Evidently Dr. Pryor’s antique typewriter hadn’t been refurbished recently – the ‘e’ key stuck and produced blots of ink whenever it hit the paper, and the ‘j’ was worn down so completely that it was hard to distinguish it from a space. Ari and Damian bent over the letter, heads together, but after a moment, Damian grunted.

“Read it to me?” he said. “It’s fuckin’ hard to see these tiny-ass letters with just the one eye.”

“Yeah, sure.” Ari cleared their throat. “My dear Mr. Applewhite. I’m writing to inform you that I intend to call a special session of the Men to be held this coming September, at the hour of sunset on Thursday the twenty-second of the month, which of course is the fall equinox. You are receiving this notice ahead of time because, as our most junior member, a certain number of special duties fall to you, much as they did on the occasions of your induction and your ring-making ceremony.”

“Isn’t that what you dreamt about?” Damian asked.

“I’m pretty sure, yeah. I hope they don’t have to drown another lizard for this one.”

“Keep going.”

“Um, okay. Ring-making ceremony… here we go. You will, of course, be provided with a more complete description of your duties as the equinox approaches, but being as one of them is to receive notice about who will and will not be attending, I thought it best to alert you first. Attached is a copy of the letter I will be posting (albeit perhaps with a few linguistic tweaks designed to appeal to particular recipients) at the end of the week. Please review it thoroughly so that you may answer the Men’s questions, as I will be informing them to direct their ‘répondez, s’il vous plaît’ to you.”

“Their what?”

Ari squinted at the French on the page. “I’m pretty sure that’s what RSVP stands for.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, this guy is so pretentious.”

“Then he just signs off. I think the other page must be the copy of the letter.”

Ari rearranged the pages in their hands and looked over the second. Indeed, it wasn’t addressed to anybody, and it was handwritten instead of typed. The whole thing was in Greek.

“This is kind of a lot,” Ari said. “I could sight-translate some of it, but if you want something really accurate it’s gonna take me a couple minutes with a lexicon.”

“Go for it,” Damian said. “I’ll finish up with the photos.”

Ari set up at the kitchen table with their laptop, the letter, and a fresh sheet of notebook paper. The ibises flocked around them again, although they kept slightly more distance than they had when Ari was throwing up, and watched their work with what might have, on a human face, been keen interest.

“Are you guys gonna help, or just stare at me?” Ari asked as the big white ibis leaned in closer over their shoulder.

It fixed them with a long, beady stare, then prodded their hand with its beak.

“Okay, okay. Back to work.”

Although the Greek was full of complicated and unnecessary rhetorical flourishes – particles everywhere, genitive absolutes when simple preterite or even present tense clauses would have worked just fine, even one or two uses of the archaic locative case – Ari had little trouble with the letter. They’d grown used to Dr. Pryor’s particular style, tone, and fondness for certain synonyms over others over the course of many, many translation exams. Despite sitting at Nico Cappelletti’s kitchen table surrounded by birds, and being allowed to use their laptop, Ari could almost pretend this was another exam. Another twenty minutes and they’d turn it in and go out for bubble tea or pastries or a walk through the sunny parts of the town cemetery with their classmates to celebrate the end of another semester. Even the rustling of the ibises’ feathers could have been Tristan shifting in his seat or Clara chewing on the end of her pencil.

The content of the letter, however, bore little resemblance to any translation exercise Ari had ever aced.

“I’ve got something readable,” they said to Damian after a while. “But it doesn’t bode super well.”

“Hit me. I’m done with the photos. Took ‘em on your phone and on the camera.”

“In this way, I call you, man of Pi Gamma Mu, to come to the riverside in the place we have gathered before on the twenty-second day of the ninth month. With the world spinning faster each day – that’s a genitive absolute, it’s more elegant in Greek – there are people who threaten us. They threaten to destroy our unity, our glory, our timei. That one’s, like, honor? Kind of? It’s a really hard concept to translate directly into English so I kinda just skipped it.”

Damian waved his hand. “Whatever. This sounds like some white supremacist bullshit.”

“It does. At least they don’t call out any specific group of people for threatening their glory, I guess, not that that’s a high bar. It does get worse though.”

“How so?”

“Um, okay. Here. On the one hand, one who is not among our troops already learns our magic and steals from us. On the other hand, the brother of that man already attempts to uncover us to the world. With there being a growing voice among the people – hoi polloi, although that’s not nearly as derogatory in Greek as it is in English – a growing voice among the people speaking against our ways, let us no longer aim at small magic. We must undertake the Liturgy to Mithras. We must aim at eternal life. We must hold our power and timei so those who do not deserve it will not snatch it from us. I have the sacrifice already. Uh, that actually could be ‘sacrifice’ or ‘victim,’ they’re basically the same word in this case.”

“Yeah, you’re right, that is worse.”

“He says a couple more things about, uh, keeping their timei for the full length of time in the universe and Mithras protecting their lives forever, but that’s basically the gist of it. And then there’s a couple letters – a phi and a lambda, if that means anything to you – and a bunch of numbers at the bottom, but I can’t tell if they mean anything. Maybe they’re people’s addresses or something? I can read them to you if you want.”

“Maybe later,” Damian said, staring into space. “Creepy riverside sacrifice for immortality. Fuck that.”

Ari nodded. “Agreed.”

“D’you think Nico’s the sacrifice? Victim. Whatever.”

“I don’t know,” Ari said slowly, although the sinking in their stomach told a different story. I will keep him in this way until he is needed. “He might be. Or it might be an animal. Most live sacrifices in Greece were animals. Either way, if we get him back before the equinox, we won’t have to find out.”

Damian’s eye was trained on Ari’s face, and his lips curled upward in a soft smile. “Can’t fuckin’ believe you thought your eye was gonna pop and you still stole this book for me. I mean – for Nico and Penny. For us.”

Ari tried and failed to hold his gaze. They ducked their head, rubbed the back of their neck. “Yeah, well, you let me throw up in your trash can, so I’m okay with calling it even.”

It was late then, well into what might be called the wee hours, and Damian insisted on being the one to sneak the book, and the letters, back into Dr. Pryor’s desk. “You’ve done more than enough today, and besides, I hate this fucker and I don’t want him coming after us,” he said, and no amount of protest – albeit weak protest – from Ari could convince him otherwise.

Ari explained the layout of the house to him in detail, even sketching a little map on the back of his hand in ballpoint pen so he’d know how to get in and out efficiently. They went over the workings of the desk and its secret drawer twice on the drive back to the house.

“This whole thing should take like two minutes,” Ari said as they pulled their car into a small clearing by the man-made pond across the street from Dr. Pryor’s house. “I’m gonna assume you’re dead if it takes longer.”

“It’ll be fine,” Damian said, patting his pocket, which contained a piece of Snake Protection tinfoil that Ari had drawn and folded up for him to carry. They weren’t sure the charm worked unless it was stuck to something, but the Papyri didn’t specify that it wouldn’t, so Ari figured it couldn’t hurt. “In and out.”

“In and out,” Ari agreed.

Damian climbed out of the car, leaving the door open so it wouldn’t make any noticeable sound, and Ari shut off the engine. He crept across the street and tried the front door. Ari watched as he carefully worked the handle. Locked. He felt around in the dark, under the doormat, around the front steps, until his hand found something. He picked it up, and Ari squinted across the street through the darkness to see what it was. A misshapen object the size of his palm, which he slid open and reached inside. He pulled out something that flashed in what little light the moon and stars provided, then slid it into the lock and opened the door. Once he slipped into the house, Ari’s eyes had adjusted enough to understand what he’d left on the doorstep. One of those hide-a-key rocks. Ari fought a laugh. Maybe there was no spell in the Papyri for concealing the key to your home, but still. It felt hilariously mundane in the face of everything.

They counted the seconds as Damian moved through the house. No lights flickered on. They heard no screams, at least none loud enough to carry across the street.

I hope he gets out of there okay. I hope he’s okay. I hope –

Ari’s shoulder and back still felt warm from earlier. The hug he’d crushed them in still radiated across their nerves whenever they thought about it like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

We don’t have time to unpack however I feel about him, Ari thought. Not until we get Nico back.

A minute and a half. A minute fifty seconds. A minute fifty-eight.

When two minutes had passed, Ari opened the driver’s side door of the car and unbuckled their seatbelt.

When two minutes and eight seconds had passed, Damian emerged from the front door, easing it shut behind him. He gave Ari a little wave, slipped the key back into the fake rock, replaced the rock by the front steps, and crept back across the road and into the car.

“You okay?” Ari asked as they started the car and pulled out of the clearing, taking a random series of back roads through the neighborhood in the general direction of campus in case anyone was following them. It was a silly question. Damian seemed calmer and more centered than he had in weeks. Maybe spy work is good for him.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “Pretty sure Pryor and Penny were both asleep. It was easy – in and out, just put the book back in the drawer with the fabric. Nothing really happened.”

“Fabric?”

“Yeah, in the secret drawer. Had some shit written on it. You didn’t notice when you were stealing it?”

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there earlier.”

“Huh, weird. Well, it can’t have been anti-theft magic. Or if it was, I guess anti-theft magic doesn’t work when someone’s returning your book. Or when someone’s stealing it, apparently.”

“Hey! I borrowed it.”

Damian chuckled. “We’ve got those photos though.”

“We do. Do you want me to get started on translating them tonight? As soon as I have one spell figured out, you can test it and in the meantime I can be working on the next one.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again and shook his head. “No. No way. Don’t you have work in the morning, kid? We’ve got more than a month to figure this shit out.”

“That’s not a lot of time.”

“It’s enough for you to get some sleep.”

Ari drove the car around the bend that took them away from campus and towards their edge of Poole. “You don’t have to do that, y’know. I can take care of myself.” I’m used to pulling all-nighters, anyway, they didn’t add.

“Which is why you saw a crazy guy with a knife in an alleyway and decided to help him out, right?”

“Shut up. Where would you be if I hadn’t?”

“Exactly. That’s why I’m trying my best to take care of you, kid. Because I’d be completely fucked without you. And because you’ve been doing the same thing for me.”

“Uh. Thank you. I’m –”

“Would you pull over up here for a second?”

Ari’s eyebrows furrowed, but they did as Damian asked, guiding the car into a gravel pull-off that was obscured by the dark and by thick stands of oaks on three sides. “Is everything okay?” they asked. “Did you see someone following us?”

“No – no. It’s fine. I just wanted…” Damian grimaced, unbuckled his seatbelt. “Jesus, I haven’t done this since college. Stop me if this isn’t cool, okay?”

“If what isn’t –”

Damian reached a hand towards Ari, slowly, as if he were inviting a stray cat to sniff him. His fingers curled, and he made as if to cup Ari’s cheek.

He missed. His palm glanced off their ear and the rest of his fingers flailed uselessly in the hair at their temples before he pulled his hand back like he’d been scalded.

“Shit! I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have even –”

“What were you even trying to –”

“It’s this goddamn eye, I’ve got no depth perception anymore –”

“No, it’s fine, I’m just confused –”

“I was gonna kiss you, kid, and it was gonna be all fuckin’ smooth and dramatic and – Jesus. I’m so sorry. Bad idea.”

“Oh. Oh! Uh.” Ari swallowed. Their mouth was dry and sticky. I wasn’t gonna deal with this until we got Nico back safely, they thought, trying to aim their desperate thoughts at Damian so they wouldn’t have to say them aloud. Why are you making me deal with it now?

“Dammit. Look, let’s just go home. Sorry I made you pull over.”

He buckled his seatbelt again, and Ari, feeling like a deer caught in their own headlights, shifted the car into drive and pulled back out onto the darkened stretch of curving roads that led back to their neighborhood. They put the windows down a crack so the silence inside the car wouldn’t feel quite so suffocating. The whistle of the warm summer breeze kept them company as they snuck glances at Damian out of the corner of their eye. He stared out the window, avoiding looking at Ari, and his ponytail whipped at his face in the cross-breeze.

Instead of dropping Damian off outside the front door of the little white house and driving home, Ari parked their car in the driveway and got out.

“Look,” they said, circling around the front of the car to meet Damian by the passenger side. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. And I told myself I wasn’t gonna deal with this yet. Maybe it’s still a bad idea to deal with this now, I don’t know. A lot of stuff that I care about has gone on the back burner for the rescue mission. I don’t want to put the rescue mission on the back burner, too. Mostly for Nico and Penny’s sake, obviously, and also because I don’t want to have given up the rest of my life for no reason.”

Damian’s eyebrows, which were just visible in the dim moonlight, arched. “Is there a but coming?”

“But. Now that you’ve brought it up I think it’s probably better to let it happen now and just agree we won’t let it get in the way. So… yeah. Um, it’s okay. I won’t stop you.”

He reached out a hand, just as he had in the car. This time, Ari found themself raising a hand of their own, guiding his fingers to their cheek and jaw. The blunt tips of his fingers, his broad square palm, the permanent calluses that peppered his skin after years of farm work at Moonwild Acres – everything was warm and electric against Ari’s cheek.

“I’m gonna kiss you now,” Damian said. “If that’s cool.”

Ari nodded, and the hand on their cheek guided them forward, and their lips brushed his, just barely, just enough to send a blizzard of butterflies from Ari’s stomach up into their lungs, just enough to make them lean in for more. Crickets buzzed somewhere in the grass. Ari felt the buzzing in their bones. They smiled. Damian pulled them in closer, kissed them again.

And then something soft and cold wrapped itself around Ari’s neck, and they began to choke.

“What –” they croaked, and the thing pulled tighter, cutting their voice off altogether.

Thief, the air seemed to whisper. Secret-stealer. Ring-robber.

“Ari,” Damian cried, although his voice sounded far away, “what the fuck is going on? What is that thing?”

He didn’t call me ‘kid,’ Ari thought unhelpfully. That’s a new one.

Their body felt slow and heavy, but they managed to raise their hands to their throat and claw at whatever was choking them. It felt rippling and insubstantial, like a cloud or a silk scarf, even as it tightened around them. Ari’s fingers met little resistance as they passed through it. Remembering some long-buried Self Defense For Girls assembly in high school, Ari tried to slip their hands underneath the thing around their throat, pressing their fingers tightly against their neck to make more space and gasp in a breath, but almost as soon as they felt the warmth of their own hands and swallowed a gulp of air, the thing rippled between their fingers and pressed itself, soft and cold, against their neck again.

Damian was no longer in their field of vision. Ari didn’t know where he had gone. They were starting to see black starbursts spotting in front of their eyes, and a fizzy lightheadedness filled them up. They felt as if someone was filling their brain with soda. The cold trickled down their arms, into the front pocket of their shorts, and they tried and failed to swat it away. Something else reached into their back pocket – a hand? It was warm, and there, and gone again. They flailed their arms, trying to feel behind them for their attacker, but there was nothing there. Only more soft cold something, practically indistinguishable from the summer night.

Suddenly, there was a bright flash of light, and the thing slackened its grip on Ari’s neck, just enough for them to breathe in another huge gasp of air and spin around to face their attacker.

There was nothing there. Damian was holding Ari’s phone, shining its flashlight at a patch of darkened driveway between Ari and the passenger door of the car.

“What the fuck just happened,” Damian said flatly, eye wide. Ari panted, getting their breath back, and reached into their front pocket to confirm their half-formed suspicions.

“The ring’s gone,” they said. “Whatever that thing was came to take the ring back.”

“Dammit.” There was less conviction than exhaustion in his voice. Ari shrugged.

“I… I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” they said. “Other than that it means Gilbert probably knows exactly who I am now. Which I guess is kind of a huge deal, now that I’ve said it aloud. Yeah, that’s really concerning. But we have the book now, which means we could make our own ring, provided we’re willing to kill a lizard to do it, which I don’t think I am, but if we really need it I guess I’ll manage. Point being, we don’t really need his anymore. I’m more worried about what the heck that thing even was.”

“It looked like…”

“What?”

Damian shook his head. “It’s gonna sound stupid.”

“It’s magic.”

“It looked like… like the darkness just kind of… melted. Into the shape of a person. And when I turned the light on to see who the hell it was, it disappeared.”

“A shadow,” Ari said. “I got choked out by a shadow.”

“That’s what it looked like.”

They breathed in and out again, a deep sigh that hurt their overworked lungs. “Seems like I’m not gonna get much sleep tonight after all. Let’s get inside and figure out which spell makes shadows attack people.”

Ari skimmed through the photos for familiar words, but nothing to do with shadows made itself clear to them right away. The handwriting was too difficult to read, and the backwards writing and lack of punctuation made the text too dense for proper skimming. The ibises kept a disinterested vigil over Ari, clacking their beaks at each other and making grunting noises whenever Ari flipped between photos. Damian, meanwhile, paced back and forth between the windows of the little white house, armed with a flashlight, shining it through the window at anything suspicious. No other shadows attacked while they were inside, but whether that was a function of Damian’s patrol or the Snake Protection spells all over the walls, Ari couldn’t have said. As the windows reflected the beam of Damian’s flashlight back into their eyes for the sixth or seventh time, Ari let out a groan of exasperation.

“This is gonna take forever,” they said. “I’m just gonna make us a bunch more Snake Protections and hope they hold until tomorrow. I think we’re gonna have to start from the beginning and translate the whole book and hope we run into something useful along the way.”

“Doesn’t sound any faster than what you’re doing now.”

“You have a better plan?”

Damian shook his head.

“Alright, then.”

The space between them was tense, but Ari was too tired to parse what kind of tension they were feeling. They made several more ouroboros drawings on several more pieces of Nico’s rapidly dwindling tinfoil supply, writing their name on half and Damian’s on the others. They carefully stuck one to the inside panel of their bag, put several others in their pockets, and left the rest on the floor. Then they gathered their things and headed for the door, promising to come over directly after work the next day.

“Hey,” Damian said, catching their wrist as they reached for the knob. “You can stay. If you want.”

“Not tonight,” Ari said. “I… tomorrow, maybe? If you still want.”

“I will,” Damian said. He leaned forward and brushed his lips against Ari’s cheek. “G’night. Get home safe.”

“I will,” Ari echoed.

***

The days stretched into weeks, each hour bringing some new revelation about magic yet each night the same, on some essential level, as the first. Nobody – nothing – ever attacked Full English, although Ari wasn’t sure whether that was due to the public setting, the Snake Protection charms that filled overlooked corners of the fridge and freezer, the coworkers ignorant of magic, or the sheer innocent charm of Sammy, the red-cheeked, cow-eyed med school dropout who had taken over for Virgil. Regardless of why they felt safe at Full English, they did, and they relished having a place to work hard and think about anything other than magic. Their productivity skyrocketed. They peeled faster, chopped more, washed more thoroughly, and found time at the end of every day to pitch Teddy suggestions for new baked goods. It was better than cleaning, although they did that too – the few hours they spent at home were bathed in the smell of lemon disinfecting wipes. But in terms of pretending magic didn’t exist, nothing could top Full English. They even worked on their grad school applications during their lunch breaks. Just like old times, they’d think to themself fondly as they submitted application after application to programs they figured they might not live to see.

Greg and Teddy teased them for the thousand-yard stare they got when they were browning butter and their mind was blissfully free of fear and magic, but Teddy also gave them a dollar-per-hour raise.

“What’s this for?” Ari had asked when Teddy presented them with their first paycheck at the new rate.

“Because you’re killing it lately, Roger Ebert. Or because you’ve got to afford all those application fees when you leave us to go get a fancy degree. Or, more frankly, because we can afford it,” he said with his rumbling laugh. “Sammy doesn’t have even half of Virgil’s experience, so her base pay’s a little lower.”

“She’s good, though,” Ari said.

“Very good,” Teddy agreed. “I swear, people would dump their life savings into the tip jar if she gave them baby-doll eyes for long enough.”

After work, Ari went straight to the little white house and worked with Damian on translations and spell testing well into the night. The two of them discovered after the first few spells that, while the more straightforward ones that involved chanting nonsense words and drawing complicated figures on paper or wood or tin worked on the first or second try, anything that required physical ingredients was almost impossible without a lengthy testing process. On their days off, Ari would make grocery lists and stay home translating while Damian searched specialty stores up and down the Connecticut River for the eight or nine different plants to which Ari thought a particular word might refer. When they took breaks, they were either filled with hasty meals of anything that could be microwaved in under two minutes or with less-hasty sex, sweet and rough and warm in the guest bed Damian had been occupying for the past several months, followed by a few hours of blissfully heavy sleep. Then Ari would run home to shower and change clothes and, if they were lucky, tidy something up, before they did it all again.

Worse than the laborious testing process for the spells were some of the things the Papyri advertised as spells at all. Some of the simplest pieces of magic were, in fact, less magic than they were sound housekeeping advice or less sound medical advice. The Papyri instructed Ari on how to keep away ants (apply vinegar to the doorways and windows of your home) or cure a dog bite (slather it in crushed garlic and recite a daily incantation until the wound has healed). Occasionally, a functional spell would astound them with its effectiveness, and Ari would perk up and Damian would laugh and the birds would chatter in excitement, and they would all enjoy their newfound ability to reliably find unlikely amounts of loose change on the ground each time they went outside, or to pick a plant and watch an identical green shoot sprout in its place, while whatever they picked stayed green for weeks at a time. The money went back into purchasing more magical ingredients, and soon every available surface in the little white house was covered with Ari’s notes, vases of flowers and herbs, or both. But the functional and useful spells were few and far between, and for some – like a charm for seeing the future that required the eye of an ape, or a divine revelation spell that required the blood of a virginal young man – Ari and Damian couldn’t procure the necessary ingredients at all. Damian kept a running list of everything they had tried, what worked, and what hadn’t, and by the time August drew to a close, the list of failures far outstripped the list of successes.

“This sucks,” Damian complained aloud one evening, addressing it to nobody in particular, although the ibises clacked their beaks at him in response. He was laying spread-eagled on the floor beside Ari while they worked.

“You’re not even doing anything,” Ari replied absently, absorbed in a line of text that refused to yield. It seemed to be discussing chariots and winning races, but nowhere could Ari find a description of it as a victory or sporting spell.

“That’s what sucks,” he said, although there was no anger behind his words. Ari glanced up, realizing that they’d just insulted him. They closed their eyes and ground their palms into them, trying to rub away some of the ache.

“Sorry,” Ari said as they worked out the tension in their head. “I didn’t actually mean that.”

“I know,” Damian murmured. “We’re both stressed. We’ve been at this shit for weeks and nothing’s happening.”

“Not nothing,” Ari offered, gesturing around at the dozens of fragrant bouquets in vases, mason jars, empty wine bottles. “But you’re right. Nothing useful.”

“There’s gotta be something in here that’s worthwhile.” Damian pushed himself up into a sitting position. “I mean, we know there is, or how the fuck else would they be sending shadows after us and summoning gods and shit like that?”

“Oh my gosh, wait, that might actually be a good idea. Okay, definitely don’t say yes to this if you’re not okay with it, but what if we call Hermes again? And ask him what to do?”

Damian’s lips twisted into a thoughtful grimace. “I was freezing for hours after that. What about Asclepius?”

“We’d have to make a new ring first, or steal one, which I don’t really want to do. And making one would require finding the spell to make one, which kind of brings us back to square one. We don’t even know where the shadow guy came from yet.”

He scratched his head and, after a moment, nodded sharply. “Yeah. Sure. Fuck it. We’re running out of time and we need some more useful magic if we’re just gonna storm in and rescue Nico. Or figure out where the hell Pryor’s even keeping Nico. Just don’t piss him off, okay? I don’t wanna wake up with no memories and find out that he smited you. Smote? Smitten? What’s the past tense?”

“Smote, I think.”

“Find out that he smote you, then. Be careful, okay, Ari?”

Ari nodded. “Yeah, of course. I’ll have blankets and some kind of hot drink ready for you when you wake up. But we should figure out what kind of offering to give him so he doesn’t, y’know, smite me.”

After so many days of eye-straining work on the Papyri, researching something else felt like a refreshing dip in the river. Ari felt themself smiling as they showed Damian all their favorite journals on Greek religion and sacrifice and quoted passages from the eleventh book of the Odyssey for him, spinning the story – first in Greek, then in English – of Odysseus pouring wine into a grave-sized hole to summon the dead. The speed with which they found their answers was also novel. Within an hour of skimming archived articles and primary sources they knew by heart, Ari felt comfortable rummaging around the kitchen for a half-empty bottle of wine and a pork shoulder that Damian had bought for a spell that ultimately failed.

Ari uncorked the wine and sniffed it. “How long has this been open?” they called, waving the bottle at the doorway between the kitchen and the living room so that Damian could see.

Damian narrowed his eye. “A couple weeks, I think. I haven’t had any since I brought the book back.”

“For real?” Weird.

“Yeah. I know you were freaked out about whether I was really focusing on research and whatever. Besides, I’ve been driving all over this godforsaken state getting materials anyway.”

“Oh! Um, well. Thanks?”

Damian rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Don’t mention it. Does it smell alright?”

“I can’t really tell, honestly. I like pretending I know anything about wine but it all just tastes like grapes to me.”

“Me too,” Damian said with a chortle. “I’m always giving Nico and Penny shit for it. You know most of the tasting notes that wine snobs say they’re tasting are all made up?”

Ari, deciding the wine smelled enough like any other wine to be acceptable for an offering, poured some into a shallow dish and said, “No way. For real?”

“Yup. Eliana – from Moonwild – told me about an article she read about it once. Apparently the only things you can actually taste are the kind of grape they made it with and the barrel they aged it in, or some shit like that.”

Ari found a pan, turned the stove onto its highest setting, sliced off what they estimated were the most delicious parts of the remaining pork shoulder, and sauteed those parts until the whole house was filled with the smell of rendering fat and browning meat. Then they placed the pork in another shallow dish and put both dishes on the kitchen table.

“C’mere, and grab one of those oil lamps,” they said, indicating one of the kitchen chairs. “Sit down. I’m gonna summon him in here.”

Damian did as he was asked, carrying the lamp in one hand and tugging his hair out of its ponytail with the other. The brown was beginning to overtake the blond in earnest now. The birds trailed after him, watching the proceedings with interest. Ari sat down opposite him, lit the lamp, repeated the words of the spell, and dropped one of Nico’s many Hermes Lamp slips into the flame. After a moment, Damian’s eye began to burn with the molten-gold light that Ari recognized and his hair floated up around his cheeks. They smiled and bowed their head.

“Lord Hermes,” they said, once again grateful that he seemed to understand English, “thank you for answering my call. I offer you these – wine and pork – and humbly ask for your help in return.”

Damian’s head tilted, and the burning eye stared at Ari. They quickly lowered their gaze and kept their head bowed, waiting for Hermes to do something. After a few long moments, Damian’s body stood up and picked up the dish of wine in both hands. Hermes bent Damian’s head towards the wine and inhaled deeply. As Ari watched, the wine seemed to evaporate from the dish, although Damian’s lips never once touched the liquid. When the wine was gone, he did the same with the pork, breathing deeply over it until the meat shimmered like a mirage and disappeared altogether.

“Xaritas,” Hermes said. He spread Damian’s hands expectantly, and Ari pulled their phone out of their pocket and showed him the photos they’d taken of the Papyri.

“We’re on a really tight schedule,” they said. “We’ve got to save Damian’s brother by the fall equinox, and going through the whole book translating every single spell and hoping we find useful ones is taking way too much time. Could you point us in the right direction? Help us find the spells that have been used against us – attacking someone with a shadow, making a magic ring, turning yourself invisible, that kind of stuff? And spells that will be useful to us if we’re going on a rescue mission?”

The burning eye flicked down to the empty dishes and back up to Ari. He reached out a hand, and Ari placed their phone in Damian’s palm. He closed his fist around it, and from between his fingers, the phone began to glow the same color as his eye. Ari felt a flash of panic and restrained themself from lunging for the phone, although heat had begun to radiate from Damian’s fist and the glow was so intense that Ari thought the phone must be melting.

As his fist glowed brighter, Damian’s other hand raised slowly and pointed at the white ibis, which was, as usual, surrounded by its entourage of glossy ibises and had its eyes trained on Hermes.

“Tis ornis ei?” he asked.

The ibis clicked its beak and grunted at him, and that seemed to satisfy Hermes, who turned back to Ari and opened Damian’s hand. The phone rested in his palm, unharmed, seemingly unaltered.

Ari hesitated, but he thrust the phone at them, so they took it. Their fingertips brushed Damian’s, and they drew back with a yelp. A bright welt was already forming on the tip of their middle finger, as if they’d touched a branding iron.

“Thank you, Lord Hermes,” Ari said and stuck their middle finger in their mouth to soothe the pain.

Damian’s face smiled. “Ouk esesthe eutukheis,” Hermes said, “alla mei phobei. Kai mei me kalei palin.”

“Wait, what? We’re gonna be unlucky? But why –”

But as soon as the words had left Ari’s mouth, Damian’s eye faded and his hair relaxed and he slumped over onto the table, face-first, leaving Ari to half-wrestle, half-drag him back into the kitchen chair and run for a blanket from the living room.

“H-how was it?” he stammered through chattering teeth when he’d regained some of his usual faculties.

“I’m not sure,” Ari said. “He took my phone. He asked the big white ibis why it’s a bird, which is a wild question but does reinforce my theory that they’re magic birds. He told me not to call him again. He said we’ll be unlucky but I shouldn’t be afraid, which is maybe the most unhelpful thing he could have said, because now I’m way more afraid than I would have been if I hadn’t known we were gonna be unlucky in the first place. But he didn’t smite me this time, and he seemed okay with the sacrifices, so that’s good, I guess?”

“Unlucky how?

“No idea. He didn’t say.”

“Jesus. What did he do with your phone?”

“I’m not actually sure. Hang on.”

Ari unlocked their phone, which was still warm but otherwise seemed to bear no traces of godhood or magic. They pulled up the photo of the page they’d most recently been translating, with the chariot races, and swiped through to the previous page.

It was gone.

Ari checked their photo album. Of the hundreds of photos they’d taken of the Papyri, just eight remained. One they recognized as Snake Protection, but the others were unfamiliar. Ari checked the folder of recently deleted photos, too – the others were still there.

“Hermes deleted most of the photos of the Papyri. There’s only a couple left. I guess those are the important ones.”

“That’s it?” Damian shivered, managing a half smile. “Not fuckin’ worth it, if you ask me.”

“Didn’t you say getting possessed by Hermes was better than sex?”

“I said it was different than sex. And when I said that I hadn’t slept with you yet.” He wiggled his eyebrows lasciviously, the effect of which was somewhat undercut by another violent shiver. He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders.

Ari’s phone beeped. An email notification.

“Apparently,” they said, pulling up their email, “he also took my phone off silent.”

There was nothing new in their usual inbox. There was, however, a second inbox that hadn’t been there before. Ari opened it. The first email, unread, had come in seconds earlier.

It was from Gilbert Applewhite, and it was addressed to Dr. Pryor.

“Holy crap,” Ari breathed, tilting their phone screen towards Damian. “I think Hermes somehow hacked me into Dr. Pryor’s email.”

The message from Gilbert opened with profuse apologies for using email when he knew Dr. Pryor preferred to communicate via snail mail, but the last of the RSVPs had just come in and Gilbert thought it was important that Dr. Pryor have the list as soon as possible. He had appended a list of dozens of names. All were men, as far as Ari could tell, and each received a Doctor or a Professor or occasionally a Reverend at the beginning of his name and an assortment of letters – PhD, D.D., J.S.D., S.T.D. – at the end. Several of the men held more than one doctorate, giving the impression that Gilbert had occasionally fallen asleep with his finger on the ‘D’ key.

“STD?” Damian said with a snort, peering at Ari’s phone. “They’re just advertising that to everyone?”

“Doctor of Sacred Theology,” Ari said. “The initialism is from the Latin, though, so the letters are rearranged in the worst possible way.”

“Yikes.” Damian scrolled to the bottom of the list. There were almost fifty men listed. “So we’ve just got their whole-ass membership list now. We know who these fuckers are.”

“We do.” Ari took a screenshot of the email, just in case. “We should probably write these down somewhere so we have a hard copy too. But yeah, we know who they are.”

“You think one of these guys has Nico?”

“Maybe. I mean, more likely Dr. Pryor still has him, so we should focus on that, but it’s not gonna hurt to do a little digging into these guys. Do you want to do that while I start trying to figure out the spells Hermes left us with?”

“Sure, yeah. Look into the assholes. My specialty.”

Ari raised an eyebrow. “That was almost as bad as ‘piece of ass.’”

“Shut up.”

Ari handed the phone to Damian to copy the names down, then closed out of Dr. Pryor’s inbox. When they opened their email again, theirs was the only inbox remaining.

“Thank you, lord Hermes,” they muttered.

The two worked steadily until Ari’s eyes began to blur and Damian was letting out almost as many sounds of exhausted annoyance as the ibises were. The spells, with persistence and what Ari considered a very reasonable amount of frustration on their part, unfolded themselves and bloomed into things that Ari could more or less understand. The list of names bloomed, too, with schools, positions, education histories, faculty photos. All forty-eight of them (fifty, counting Gilbert and Dr. Pryor) were, in fact, white men. All worked at some of the English-speaking world’s most prestigious institutions. One of them was the dean of languages at Oxford. Another chaired the Classics department at Princeton. Many were in charge of, or at least participants in teaching, the same PhD programs Ari had been applying to every day at lunch. A few were former educators who had retired after miraculously hitting it big in the stock market. All of them, Damian insisted with a laugh, were “the smuggest motherfuckers I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Finally, when the songbirds outside were beginning to awaken and chirp their warnings that dawn was on its way, Damian stood up from his spot on the floor and held out a hand to help Ari up.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s get you to bed.”

“I’m almost done with this one, though.” Ari interrupted themself with a massive yawn. “It’s supposed to turn us invisible.”

“That sounds useful as hell. You’ll finish it tomorrow.”

“Damian –”

He placed a hand on each of their shoulders. “How many times do we have to go through this? I love my brother. I miss him like hell. You’re no good to either of us if you work yourself to death. Besides, Hermes told you not to worry. So don’t fuckin’ worry. C’mon. Sleep.”

Ari didn’t protest. They felt like they should, felt like they should remind him that Hermes also said they’d be unlucky, but their legs felt like lead and their head was swimming. They hardly noticed Damian piloting them up the stairs and depositing them into the guest bed, hardly felt him wrapping his warm arms around them and pulling them tightly against his chest, hardly realized they were falling asleep until they were waking up the next morning.

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.