Chapter 1

She Who Loves the Chase

Just outside the city walls of ancient Ostia, on the banks of the River Tiber, the Huntress stalked her prey down the street of the dead with only the moon to light her way.

She walked with silent tread on wide basalt paving stones still warm from the unrelenting summer heat. Her stealth was superfluous: Even if her boots scuffed the street, the piercing drone of cicadas would drown out any sound, and the man she hunted seemed oblivious to everything but the mausoleums around him.

Yet she studied him with a hawk’s keen gaze. He was young, clean-shaven, his weak chin and protruding nose accented by blond hair shorn mercilessly close to the scalp. His haircut and muscled physique proclaimed him a soldier. Another foolish mortal recruit in an ancient battle between gods.

The Huntress felt no sympathy. He might be a mere foot soldier, but his army had destroyed her life. They had ripped her from the world she knew, and now they threatened what little family she had left. Somewhere, they held her father captive. Somewhere, they tortured him and prepared him for sacrifice.

Perhaps right here in Ostia.

Either this young man would lead her to her father or he would die. Simple as that.

She followed his gaze to the necropolis’s older buildings, each pockmarked with niches just big enough to hold an urn brimming with ashes. The more recent mausoleums, she saw, housed grand sarcophagi instead. Even the passage of centuries wouldn’t erase the scenes of myth and history so deeply carved into their marble sides.

The young man paused before one of the stone coffins that flanked the mausoleum’s entrance. With a reverent finger, he traced its sculpted depictions of Sun and Moon, Birth and Death.

Then he quickly crossed himself.

The Huntress shuddered: In this pagan city, a mere twenty miles from the Empire’s seat in Rome, the Christian gesture seemed a harbinger of things to come.

Once, she’d watched with pleasure as pious Romans sent their loved ones skyward on the plumes of funeral pyres. The smoke would reach the very summit of Mount Olympus and swirl about the feet of the gods themselves. But more and more, the Romans chose to bury their dead within these marble tombs, where the corpses could await bodily resurrection. A sign, she knew, that soon the Empire’s citizens would abandon the Olympians entirely, praying only for their promised reunion with the Christ.

The Huntress imagined the richly bedecked corpses in their cold tombs. Meat turned to rot turned to dust, she thought with disgust. The Christians waited in vain for a resurrection that would never occur and a god who did not exist. A bitter smirk lifted the corner of her mouth. It serves them right.

At least for now, the Olympian Goddess of War and Wisdom still guarded Ostia’s main gate with her stern gaze: Minerva, whom the Greeks called Athena, carved in stone with upswept wings and a regal helmet. The sight gave the Huntress a measure of comfort. We’re not completely forgotten. Not yet.

She hid in Minerva’s moonshadow and watched her prey leave the necropolis behind as he ventured into the city itself. He strode down the wide avenue of the Decumanus Maximus, past empty taverns and shops, guildhalls and warehouses. The man wore all black as camouflage in the darkened town, but he took few other precautions, walking boldly down the middle of the deserted thoroughfare.

He clearly hadn’t counted on Minerva’s vengeful half sister following in his wake.

He passed the public baths, bedecked with mosaics of Neptune, and the amphitheater, adorned with grotesque marble masks, before finally turning off the avenue to wander deeper into the sleeping city. Only then did the Huntress emerge from behind her marble sibling like a statue come to life—as tall and imperious as Minerva herself, moving with such grace and speed she seemed to float on wings of her own.

She darted silently from shadow to shadow. With her black hair and clothes, the Huntress melted into the night. Only her silver eyes gave her away, reflecting the moonlight like deep forest pools.

As she passed the darkened buildings, she could imagine how they’d appear when full of life. Vendors and merchants would clamor for attention, the perfume of their leeks and lemons fighting the stench of the human urine that produced such brilliant blues and reds in the nearby dye vats. The warehouses would bulge with foreign grain and local salt. Shopkeepers would hawk elephant ivory from the colonies in Africa, fish from the nearby Mare Nostrum, and purple-veined marble from Phrygia in the east, all destined to sate the appetites of the wealthy Romans a day’s journey up the river. Great crowds of toga-clad men and modestly veiled women would bustle down the Decumanus Maximus, pushing their way past ragged children begging for scraps. While some headed for the amphitheater’s worldly pleasures, others processed to the grand temples to offer sacrifices to Vulcan or Venus—or even to the Huntress herself.

But as she followed her prey down an alley bordered by tall brick tenements, she knew this man sought a very different sanctuary. Of the dozens of temples in Ostia, a full fifteen housed a cult dedicated to a single god: a deity not numbered among the Olympians, one who would never claim as many followers as the Christ. Yet one who held the power to destroy her.

Mithras.

Her heart picked up speed. This could be the end of her search. The most famous of Mithras’s sanctuaries lay at the end of the alley: the Mithraeum of the Seven Spheres. Unlike the Olympians’ temples, graceful public edifices with open colonnades and wide entrances, Mithras’s shrines lay tucked into caves or small buildings, where his rites were kept secret from all but the cult’s initiates. Harmless rites honoring a harmless god—or so the Olympians had once thought. Now the Huntress knew better.

Fire scorching my flesh. Water flooding my lungs. Torture of both body and soul. The memories cracked across her brain like a whip. She forced them aside, turning her attention to the temple before her.

From the outside, the mithraeum seemed no more than an unadorned shed of layered brick. Locked iron grates sealed off the single small window and narrow doorway. The Huntress had searched the mithraeum before and found no evidence of her father’s prison. Then again, the cult’s leader—the Pater Patrum—was notoriously wily. The entrance to their lair might be here after all, she hoped, taking a careful step closer to her quarry.

The young man in black fished a pair of lock picks out of his pack. The gate squealed open. He strode forward slowly with a gasp of reverence.

The Huntress repressed a disappointed groan. He didn’t look like a man returning to his cult’s headquarters: He looked like a worshiper entering the Holy of Holies for the first time. This is a pilgrimage. A holy errand. The rest of his army waits elsewhere with their Pater Patrum. And that means my father is elsewhere, too.

She’d hoped to simply follow her prey to his cult’s base, reconnoiter, then devise a plan to rescue her father. Now she’d need to force the correct location out of him instead. Unfortunately, initiates into this cult never broke, even under torture.

At least so far.

She slipped to the side of the barred window and peered inside the cramped shrine. Low platforms bordered a central aisle so the cult’s members could recline during their ceremonial feasts. Black-and-white mosaics covered the platforms and floor, their designs faded and chipped; though her night vision rivaled a wolf ’s, she couldn’t decipher the images in the dark. But when the man pulled a small lamp from his bag, she saw the signs of the zodiac adorning the feasting platforms: a fish for Pisces, balanced scales for Libra, two men for Gemini.

Along the length of the aisle, seven black mosaic arcs on the floor symbolized the seven celestial spheres that gave the mithraeum its name. On the platforms’ sides, the tiles formed crude representations of the Olympians—or rather, of the heavenly bodies named for them. A woman holding an arching veil above her head for the planet Venus, a man with a spear and helmet for Mars. The Huntress saw herself there, too: a woman bearing an arrow and a crescent. Fitting symbols for the one called Diana, Goddess of the Moon, by the men who usually worshiped in this sanctuary. Across the Aegean, the Greeks named her Huntress, Mistress of Beasts, Goddess of the Wild, and above all—Artemis.

What name would this man use if he turned around and saw me? she wondered. Pretender? Pagan? Likely, he’d dispense with such niceties and just slice out my heart.

At the far end of the aisle hung an oval relief that encompassed the cult’s entire religion in a single carven image: the “tauroctony”—the bull killing. Mithras, handsome in his pointed Phrygian cap, perched on the bull’s back, one knee bent and his other foot resting on a rear hoof. He plunged his knife into the beast’s neck, completing the sacrifice. A dog, a snake, a scorpion, and a crow encircled the bull. Like everything else in Mithraism, the image contained several layers of meaning. To a woman like the Huntress, who preferred a world of starkly defined categories—night and day, female and male, immortal and mortal—such complexities provided yet another reason to despise the cult.

The animals in the tauroctony symbolized the constellations that rotated across the sky on the celestial spheres. Mithras, or so his followers believed, controlled those spheres. To some who feasted atop the sanctuary’s platforms and offered sacrifices upon its altar, Mithras was only that: a god of stars, one more deity among the dozens worshiped by Ostia’s citizens. But not to the young man gazing upon the tauroctony with a fanatic’s fervor. To him, Mithraism was no mere Roman mystery cult; it was the truest form of the one religion that terrified the usually fearless Huntress: Christianity.

According to the cult’s pseudo-Christian doctrine, the shifting of the celestial spheres would usher in the “Last Age,” a twisted version of the biblical End of Days. Mithras‑as‑Jesus would walk the earth once more, bestowing salvation and eternal life upon his followers. Only one thing stood in the way of that promised resurrection: the existence of the Olympians. Thus, to make way for their savior’s return, the Mithraists had sworn to destroy the gods.

And now, finally, the Huntress thought, imagining the pain she would inflict on the man before her, the gods are fighting back.

She watched him crouch before one of the black mosaic arcs; he pressed a finger against the tiles, tracing the seam as if he—not his god—could shift the celestial sphere it represented and move the world into the Last Age.

He reached inside his pack for a pouch of tools. A line of sweat trickled down his smooth jaw as he placed the blade of a chisel against the floor and raised a hammer.

The Huntress wasn’t about to let him steal the mosaic. She didn’t care about preserving some other god’s holy artifact, but she didn’t intend to let the thief get what he’d come for. As an authentic sacred symbol, the arc might hold some unknown power. More than one Olympian had died at the hands of a Mithraist wielding a divine weapon—she couldn’t let the cult acquire any additions to their arsenal.

Very slowly, the woman once known as Artemis, the Far Shooter, turned away from the window and slid her pack off her shoulders. Soundlessly, she withdrew two gleaming lengths of metal and screwed them together at the handgrip to construct a divine weapon of her own: a golden bow forged by Hephaestus the Smith.

She slipped two arrows between the knuckles of her right hand and aimed their razor-sharp tips at the back of the thief ’s neck. This would be much easier if I could just kill him right now, she thought. But that wasn’t part of the plan. She needed him to talk first. And she couldn’t simply shoot him in the leg and tie him up—she’d tried that with the last Mithraist she’d stalked. He’d been about to haul off an altar from a mithraeum in Rome. When she’d charged toward him, her arrow at the ready, he’d simply used his own dagger to stab himself in the heart before she could elicit more than a terrified moan. Clearly, the Mithraists were under strict instructions to avoid capture at all costs.

She spread her knuckles a little wider. With a nearly inaudible thrum, both arrows flew between the window bars and into the sanctuary. The young man grunted in astonished pain and dropped his tools as the shafts simultaneously pierced the backs of both his hands. He tried to rise, but she tore through the doorway, moving nearly as fast as the arrows, and smashed him to the ground; the back of his skull thwacked against the tiles. The lamp rocked, its beam spotlighting the impassive face of the carven Mithras watching the chaos below.

She grabbed the shafts in the thief ’s hands and stood above him, her feet braced on either side of his hips.

“Tell me where the rest of your friends are, mortal.”

He stared up at her, pale eyes narrowed with pain, but said nothing.

The Huntress shook her head with a frown. “Is that how you want to play this? Do you know who I am?”

His lips twisted. “Do you?”

She barked a laugh in his face. “Right now, I’m She Who Leads the Chase. And you’re my prey.” She levered the shafts wider, tearing at the holes in his hands. “Don’t forget—some predators like to play with their food. So start talking while you still have a few fingers left.”