Chapter Eighteen Hermes
Chapter Eighteen
Hermes
“Hermes?” There was a relentless thudding noise. A hammer, Hermes thought, groaning and shutting his eyes tighter.
“Hermes!” The voice was louder now, more insistent. Through the fog that clouded his mind, Hermes registered who had spoken.
The queen of the gods was here? At his studio apartment in Bushwick?
In his sudden effort to sit up, Hermes flung out an arm, which came into contact with a body.
He squinted, disoriented, at the young mortal in bed next to him. Tanned brown skin, shaggy dark hair, and was that a six-pack—no, an eight-pack? Curious, Hermes lifted the sheet to peer underneath. The stranger had on a pair of Hermes’s shorts, but Hermes himself was naked. Hmm.
He drew in a breath and glanced around the room. He’d forgotten to close a window last night, and the city air drifted in, fragrant with that distinctly New York smell of sunshine and concrete and a hint of overwarmed trash.
Ah, how he adored it here. New York, the city of grifters and hustlers and liars, of people from other places. This was a city constantly in motion, always reinventing itself.
Hermes glanced back at the stranger in his bed. They had met late last night at a club whose name Hermes had forgotten, the kind where everything was shrouded in dim lighting and loud music. He sighed regretfully and shook the young man’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry, but you need to go,” he said gently.
The stranger woke and blearily registered Hera’s insistent knocking.
“This way, please,” Hermes said calmly, like an airline attendant guiding a passenger down the aisle, except he was bundling the young man’s clothes into a ball and handing them to him, then leading him out the tiny door off the kitchen to the fire escape.
“I—um, sure. I had fun, by the way,” the mortal called out, bewildered.
“I had fun, too,” Hermes assured him, and shut the door.
It felt like a rather asshole move, kicking him out this way.
If he’d had more energy Hermes would have just turned the guy into a spider while he was still asleep, then tucked him into a kitchen drawer until Hera left.
But transfiguration was such a draining branch of magic, especially when you were transforming a living thing. Athena had always been best at it.
Hermes hurried into a pair of khakis and a golf polo. Then, smoothing his unruly hair with one hand, he opened the door to his apartment.
There was something discordant about seeing Hera here, standing in the fluorescent lights of the hallway.
Usually, Hermes was quite proud of his building, one of the latest luxury apartment complexes popping up in Brooklyn for trust-fund millennials who played at being hipsters.
Hermes’s neighbors were the director of an off-Broadway play and a Peloton instructor who threw very loud, very fun parties.
But now, seeing Hera here, Hermes felt slightly embarrassed by how cookie-cutter it all was.
And how painfully small, compared to Hera’s vast penthouse.
“Thanks for letting me drop by unannounced.” She smiled and followed him inside.
Hermes watched her take in the studio apartment.
In the corner stood his king-size bed, the fluffy Matouk bedding rumpled in a distinctly incriminating way.
Stray shoes and wrinkled sweaters spilled out of Hermes’s closet.
The walls were covered in an eclectic mix of art, everything from an abstract image he’d bought at a night market in Thailand—he’d thought it was a cloud, only to realize later that the cloud was actually quite phallic—to the Manet he’d stolen from the Louvre.
He quickly recalled his manners. “Can I offer you something? Coffee, tea?”
Hera sighed. “Hermes, you’re the one who needs coffee. I’ll make it.”
He slumped gratefully at the table while Hera bustled around his kitchenette, turning on his coffee machine, scooping in fresh beans. Moments later came the heavenly sound of coffee pouring into a mug.
“You do know it’s a weekday,” Hera said reprovingly.
“It’s a Friday in the summer! Everyone knows summer Thursday nights are the start of the weekend.” Hermes would have protested more, but Hera had come over with his coffee, and he took a grateful sip.
When he set down his mug, Hera placed her hand on his brow like a mother taking the temperature of a sick child.
Her palm felt delightfully cool on his skin.
Hermes felt the refreshing sensation spreading its tendrils through his body, soothing his overheated brain, lowering his pulse, sending a jolt of relief to his liver—which, while not in as bad a shape as Prometheus’s, had been decidedly abused last night.
Hera was not Apollo, who could fuse broken bones, or Asclepius, the true healer among the gods, but Hermes would never underestimate her healing gift.
Mending, she had always called it, the sort of healing that mothers all over the world do every day.
The kind of mending that fixes bruises or fevers or skinned knees—or in Hermes’s case, a god-awful hangover that was already evaporating like smoke.
When she’d finished, Hera took the other seat at the table. “Thank you,” Hermes croaked, and took another sip of coffee.
Hera waved away his thanks. “I must admit, I had an ulterior motive in stopping by.”
Of course she did. Hera’s moves were always calculated, her plans meticulous and often inscrutable.
“I’m afraid I can’t attend the upcoming Curator’s Circle dinner. Would you manage it on my behalf?”
Hermes blinked in surprise. The Curator’s Circle was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s most exclusive donor group, consisting of only a dozen families: those whose annual donations numbered in the seven figures, whose names graced entire wings of the museum.
Hera adored these events, as much for the socializing among “our sort of people” as for the art.
“I’d love to. I’ll pick up Aphrodite on the way?” Hermes offered.
“Actually, I’d like you to bring Julia. Help her meet some people in the art world.”
Hermes took another thoughtful sip of coffee.
Everyone knew that there was no love lost between Hera and Aphrodite, but still, the two goddesses tended to set aside their animosity for the sake of a Curator’s Circle event.
Zeus never had any patience for museum functions, whereas Aphrodite shone at them.
She was beauty personified, after all. Hera had tried, a few times, to invite the muse Polymnia, only to complain afterward that Polymnia was as bad as Athena, cornering the artists and trapping them in long-winded conversations about artistic technique or symbolism.
At least Aphrodite understood the value of networking and could be trusted to either flatter or ignore the other guests as they deserved.
Aphrodite looked forward to these events as much as Hera did. She would consider it a deliberate snub that a nobody mortal was attending in her place. And Hermes could guess why Hera had done it.
As grateful as he felt for the mending, and the coffee, Hera’s clucking mother-hen routine hadn’t fooled him. He was not her son, like Hephaestus and Ares. She would always think of Hermes as an employee. Someone to do her bidding.
“You’re asking me to spy on Julia.”
“Spy is such a strong word! I want you to spend time with her,” Hera said innocently.
“And report back to you?” Hermes was being impertinent, but when someone asked him a favor, he wanted the request spelled out in English.
Or French, or Mandarin, or whatever language these particular dealings happened to be in.
He knew from experience that if he wasn’t clear up front, trouble inevitably followed.
Actually, even when he was clear, trouble usually followed. Probably because Hermes so loved stirring it up.
“Well, yes,” Hera admitted. “If you find anything out about the mortal, particularly anything suspicious, I hope you would share it with me.”
As usual, Hermes was tangling himself ever further in a knot of promises.
He’d already told Hades that he would bring him intel like this.
There was no easy way to deny Hera, but if she thought Hermes was double-crossing her—worse, if she learned that he was also working for Hades—he didn’t like to think of the consequences.
Well, it would hardly be the first time Hermes had walked a narrow tightrope between opposing factions among the gods. What was the point of it all, if he couldn’t stir the pot a little?
“I’ll keep an eye on Julia.” Hermes felt emboldened enough to ask a question. “Am I looking for anything in particular?”
In other words, what had Julia done to earn Hera’s suspicions?
“Oh, nothing. I’m just doing my due diligence as a mother. You know, watching over her for Ares’s sake.” Hera stood, giving Hermes’s shoulder one last pat. “Thank you, darling.”
Poor Julia, Hermes thought as he pulled out his phone to text the mortal woman. Hera was not someone you wanted as an enemy.
· · ·
Several weeks later, Hermes led Julia onto the roof of the Met, gratified when the elevator doors opened and she gasped.
“It’s beautiful!” she exclaimed, hurrying forward. “I have to admit, I was skeptical about seeing Eliasson’s industrial sculptures on a roof, but this is just perfect.”
It did feel like they were stepping into an enchanted world.
Bars with white tablecloths flanked either end of the roof, which was scattered with Olafur Eliasson’s famous sculptures.
As Julia had pointed out, they were all industrial in feel, made of fiberglass or metal tubing or sheets of aluminum.
Yet they had a poignant beauty that Hermes couldn’t explain.
At the center of the roof stood eight dining tables, each adorned with a miniature version of an Eliasson sculpture—an unusual centerpiece, but then, no one at this dinner was impressed by flowers anymore.