Apollo dropped the lyre he was playing as she manifested before his chaise inside his private temple. “Has the equator frozen over?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “I’m here to issue you a challenge.”
He scoffed. “I’m tired of these challenges from you and your boy-toy. Not to mention, I already have a fight tomorrow.”
Shrugging with a nonchalance she didn’t feel, Bathymaas arched a brow. “I’m impressed. I had no idea that you craved humiliation so much.”
“How do you mean?”
“We both know you can’t beat Aricles. He’s the best fighter who ever picked up a hoplon and sword. And as of tomorrow, everyone else will know it, too. I merely came to try and save some of your dignity. But since you’re so desperate for public degradation, who am I to deprive you?” She started to leave, but he stopped her.
“What did you have in mind?”
“A contest between gods. You and I. That way, if you lose, no one will mock you for it.”
“And if I win?”
As if that could ever happen. But she needed to give him some kind of hope, otherwise he’d never agree to this. “What do you want, Apollo?”
“You to stand down and allow my mother to be the supreme goddess of justice.”
She was aghast at his request. “Truly? That’s what you want?”
He nodded.
Leto would never be a decent goddess of justice. The bitch had no understanding of it. But that didn’t matter. Apollo would never defeat her.
“Fine then… I challenge you to a contest of bowmanship. We are both gods of archery. Grab your bow and meet me outside my temple.”
“Now?” he asked in shock.
She glanced about his empty temple. “You have something better to do?”
He narrowed his gaze on her. “I want witnesses to this.”
Gaping, Bathymaas was astonished by his request. “What? You think I would cheat you?”
“Who knows what you might do? You have emotions now. I wouldn’t put anything above you.”
She lifted her chin as anger ripped through her. “Never have I been more offended, but since I know you’re far more likely to cheat than I am, I, too, will bring a witness. I’ll see you there in an hour.”
He inclined his head to her. “One hour.”
“Are you sure about this, daughter?”
Bathymaas reached up to touch her father’s cheek. “I am. I can’t take a chance on Apollo harming my husband. Ari is everything to me.”
Set held the bow he’d given to her when she was a child. Only Bathymaas could draw the string to it, and she never missed whatever she was aiming for. With the exception of Ari and her father, it was the one thing she treasured most in the universe.
The air behind her stirred.
Turning, she found Apollo and his twin sister, Artemis. With long, curly red hair, Artemis was one of the more beautiful goddesses.
Even so, a chill of foreboding went down Bathymaas’s spine at Apollo’s chosen second. “You asked your sister?” It was known by all that the god had little use or love for his twin.
“You didn’t give me much time to prepare.” Apollo eyed her father as if Set made him extremely nervous.
And well he should. A primal god, her father was known to rip the fun body parts off men he didn’t like. Which was why she’d asked him to come. With her father present, she was hoping Apollo would be on his best behavior.
Bathymaas took her bow and jerked her chin toward their targets at the end of the field. “Three shots.”
Apollo made no move to conjure his weapon. Instead, he pursed his lips. “Perhaps we should make this more interesting.”
She narrowed her eyes on him suspiciously. “How so?”
“As you said, we’re both gods of archery. How about we shoot at my sister’s golden hinds?”
Artemis gasped. “Apollo, you can’t! They were gifts to me and I need them to pull my chariot.”
Apollo gave her a withering glare. “You only need four of them and you have five. I say we take one and release it in a herd of other deer and let them run. Whoever shoots the golden hind in the heart wins.”
Artemis curled her lip. “I vote I challenge Bathymaas and we shoot at you, brother dearest.”
Set and Bathymaas laughed.
Apollo not so much.
Turning his back to his sister, he faced Bathymaas. “Are you up to the challenge?”
“Where are these hinds?”
“In Artemis’s meadow.”
Bathymaas frowned at the obvious trick. Should her father step one foot on Olympus, the other Greek gods would call out for a supreme war. “You’d allow us to venture to Olympus?”
“I can have one of the hinds put here if you’d rather.”
“Of course, I’d rather.”Without reacting to her tone, he glanced over to Artemis. “Go fetch the first hind you see and mix it with a herd here. Then let us know when you release them.”
“I hate you,” Artemis snarled under her breath before she went to comply.
Bathymaas lowered her bow as Artemis vanished. While they waited for Artemis’s return, she couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling in her stomach.
Something awful was going to happen. She could feel it.
But before she had time to fully examine that sensation, Artemis returned. “I have a buck mixed in with the others. Say the word and they’re released.”
Apollo finally manifested his bow. He glanced to Bathymaas. “Ready?”
“Whenever you are.”
“Release the deer!” Apollo called out.
Bathymaas nocked her arrow and waited.
After a few seconds, the deer herd ran through the trees in front of them.
Apollo shot a heartbeat before she did. His arrow went into the flanks of the hind. Hers went straight to its heart.
Relieved it was over and she’d won, Bathymaas started to smirk, until the hind began to change form. Her breath caught in her throat.
No!
Dropping her bow, she teleported to Aricles. Naked, he lay on the grass with Apollo’s arrow embedded in his thigh.
And hers in his heart.
“Ari,” she sobbed, sinking to her knees. She pulled him into her arms. “How?”
Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. His breathing came in short, ragged breaths. “I was… with Galen…”
Bathymaas screamed out for her aunt to come help her.
Ma’at appeared instantly then froze. “What is this?”
“Apollo… he transformed Ari into a hind and I shot him.”
Her eyes filled with tears, Ma’at knelt by her side. “Child, you know I can’t heal your arrow wounds. No one can.”
Utter despair claimed her as she stared into the pain-filled eyes of her husband. “Ari… I didn’t know it was you.”
“Shh,” he breathed, reaching up to cup her cheek. “Don’t cry, Bathia. You are my heart and I will always be with you. If it takes me ten thousand lifetimes, I will find my way back to you, I promise.” As he went to smile, he expelled a single breath and his hand fell from her face.
The light faded from his eyes and as it did so her amulet that he wore around his neck broke into two halves.
Screaming in utter anguish, she cradled him to her chest and rocked his body as grief tore her apart. Someone, she assumed Ma’at, placed a comforting hand to her shoulder.
“Rezar! Stop it!”
She looked up at Ma’at’s cry to realize that it was Artemis by her side, and her aunt was trying to keep her father from killing Apollo and Leto.
Tears glittered in the Greek goddess’s green eyes. “I didn’t know, Bathymaas. I’m so sorry. He was grazing outside my temple. I just assumed he was one of mine. I had no idea my mother had done this to him and to you. I swear it.” The agony in her voice attested to the truth of her words.
But it changed nothing.
Aricles was dead.
By her own hand, and by Apollo’s and Leto’s treachery. And as she sat there with his body in her arms, a frightening cold filled her. It chilled every part of her being and stilled her beating heart.
She’d been conceived as a goddess of justice. But this wasn’t just.
It wasn’t right.
And her husband’s wrongful death would not go unavenged.
Kissing his cold lips, Bathymaas laid him on the ground and covered his body with her cloak.
Artemis gasped and shrank away from her as she rose to her feet and turned toward Apollo and his mother.
For this, there would be hell to pay.
And hers would be the hand that gathered the payment.
Epilogue
January 3, 12,247 BC
Set held his infant daughter in his hands as his heart broke all over again. With tears streaming down his cheeks, he met Ma’at’s gaze and saw his own sorrow mirrored in her eyes. After the death of her husband, Bathymaas had gone on a bloodthirsty rampage that had almost cost the Olympian pantheon all their lives. But since Apollo’s life was tied to the sun, they couldn’t allow her to kill him, or else the entire world would have ended. But her rage had been such that no amount of logic could keep her from her vengeance.
Uniting for the first time in history, the gods and Chthonians had all gathered to lay a death sentence on her. Something Set couldn’t allow. Desperate, he’d gone to his sister, who’d conceived the plan to have Bathymaas reborn with half a heart and with no memory of her precious Aricles.
Now she slept again in his arms, tiny and defenseless.
“Will you ever let me hold my daughter?”
He glanced up at Symfora’s request. She lay on the bed where she’d delivered his daughter to him just a few minutes ago. The Atlantean goddess of sorrow and woe, she’d been the perfect mother for his child. If anyone would understand his daughter’s pain, it was Symfora.
Kissing his daughter on the brow, he carried her back to Symfora and placed her in her mother’s arms. “She is beauty incarnate.”