“Did you say yes?”
“I said no.”
“You said no to my father?”
“I did. I told him that a storm could power you or tear you apart and I didn’t want to be ripped to pieces.”
That took some serious balls.
“He said he understood. I told him that d’Ambray would make a better candidate. We all worshipped your father, but he had Hugh the longest, since Hugh was a child. He would do anything Nimrod asked of him.”
And what a wonderful reward Hugh got for his devotion.
“He said the process wouldn’t work on Hugh. His healing power was too strong and would reject the alien magic. We mused about it. We finished the dinner. I don’t remember getting up but when I woke up, we were in Mishmar and he had already started. I remember pain. Excruciating pain. It didn’t stop for an eternity. I decided then that if I lived, Nimrod would never benefit from what he had done to me, so when I absorbed Deimos, I turned all of my power inward. There is only so much terror a human psyche can handle.”
The willpower required to do that to yourself had to be staggering.
“I don’t know what to say. ‘Sorry’ doesn’t seem adequate. My father really hates hearing ‘no.’”
“He doesn’t hear it often.” Ruby light rolled over his irises.
“Did he try to put you back together?”
“Yes. But he failed. The damage was too massive and I wanted to stay broken. After months of treatment and torture he sent me with Hugh to the Caucasus as a last-ditch effort. He didn’t want me in Greece—too many native powers and too risky—but the Black Sea coast was close enough for Deimos to feel the pull of the land. He hoped that proximity to Greece would draw me out, so he told Hugh to put me in a cage, so I could see the sky and feel the wind, and starve me. But I was too far gone. I would’ve died in that cage, and then you took me out, and you and Barabas took care of me ever since.”
The memory of him in the cage triggered an instant rage. No human being should’ve been treated like that, starved, dying of thirst, sitting in his own waste.
“What will you do now?” I asked.
He smiled, baring vampire fangs. “When you fight your father, I will soar above you. I want to be the last thing he sees before he dies.”
So far I had the god of evil and the god of terror on my side. My good-guy image was taking a serious beating. Maybe I should recruit some unicorns or kittens with rainbow powers to even us out.
Teddy Jo walked out onto the porch. “Here you . . . damn it.”
Christopher gave him a small wave.
“Can’t feel him with the tech up?” I asked.
Teddy Jo ignored me. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to come,” Christopher said. “In case something goes wrong. I won’t be any trouble.”
Teddy Jo opened his mouth.
“Don’t be mean,” I said.
“Mean? Me? To him?”
“Yes.”
Teddy Jo’s face turned dark. He sat in the chair next to me. “Answer me this, how do you exist?”
“Forced theosis,” Christopher said.
“How?” Teddy Jo asked.
“Ask her father. I remember only pain. It probably began as implantation, a forced possession, but how exactly he went about it is beyond my recollection.”
“Did you . . . ?” Teddy Jo let it trail off.
“Absorb the essence of Deimos? Yes.”
Teddy Jo shook his head. “It’s not apotheosis. Apotheosis implies reaching the state of rapture and divinity through faith. It’s not an appearance avatar.”
“No,” I said. “That would imply the deliberate voluntary descent of a deity to be reborn in a human body, and from what I understand there was nothing voluntary about the process. Deimos wasn’t reincarnated.”
“There is no word for it,” Christopher said.
Teddy Jo rocked forward, his hands in a single fist against his mouth. “That’s because it goes against the primary principle of all religion—the acknowledgment of forces beyond our control possessing superhuman agency.”
“With the exception of Buddhism,” Christopher said.
“Yes. The key here is ‘superhuman.’ A deity may consume a human or another deity, but a human can never consume a deity, because that implies human power is greater than divine.”
Just another night in Atlanta. Sitting on my porch between a Greek god who was really a human and an angel of death who was having an existential crisis.
“This shouldn’t be. You can’t be Deimos.”
“But I am,” Christopher said.
“I know.”
“It’s the Shift,” I said. “The power balance between a neglected deity such as Deimos and a very powerful human is skewed toward the human, especially if there are no worshippers.”
“It would have to be a really powerful human,” Teddy Jo said.
“I was,” Christopher said. “I suppose I should say I am.”
“Do you retain any of your prior navigator powers?” I asked.
“No.”
We sat together on the porch, watching the universe strip herself bare above us.
“Theophage,” I said.
“What?” Teddy Jo said.
“You wanted a word for Christopher. Theophage.”
“The eater of gods?” Christopher smiled.
“That word is for the sacramental eating of God, in the form of grains and meat,” Teddy Jo said.