Themis disappeared before Cairn had a chance to ask more, so she chased her outside. She winced as she passed from the dim dojo into the bright morning light.
The backyard was as opulent as the mansion, a sprawling parterre of landscaped hedges and flowerbeds that smelled of freshly mowed grass and the ocean beyond. Across the lawn, she saw Vulcan sheering a topiary with a pair of electric trimmers—apparently, he completed many odd jobs for the doctor. “What the hell do you mean my mom worked for you?” Cairn asked. “She was a marine biologist. She played with fish and whales.”
“None of us are only one thing, Cairn,” Themis replied as she walked toward the giant windmill that stood atop the sea cliffs. The breeze blowing off the water effortlessly rotated the thirty-foot blades.
Cairn struggled to keep up with the doctor’s swift gait, her body still sore from getting her ass kicked. “That’s adorably philosophical, but what could my fish doctor of a mother possibly do for an unhinged psychiatrist like you? Stock your koi pond?”
“Do you want me to keep explaining or would you rather see?” After a beat, the doctor chuckled. “You have to appreciate the irony of me asking that.” She opened the windmill’s latticed door and gestured for Cairn to enter.
On a rational level, Cairn wanted to resist, to turn and flee the premises, but she was caught in this woman’s gravitational pull, clinging to whatever she might know about her mother.
As Cairn stepped inside the windmill, the interior walls flickered with light. At first, she worried that Themis was about to torture her with another home movie. When her eyes adjusted, however, she found herself surrounded by a series of ornamentally illustrated trees of various species, illuminated on LED panels that lined the walls.
Cairn wandered over to the first projection, an olive tree against the backdrop of a Mediterranean coastline. Its many branches were punctuated with pictures of different faces—some of them professional portraits of smiling men and women, some candids taken with their subjects unaware. A few were criminal mug shots. Some were simply question marks over a faceless silhouette.
They were all Greek gods.
A man and woman identified as Chaos and Gaea topped the tree, and in a subsection labeled “Titans,” Cairn spotted a photo of Themis. When she reached up and touched the doctor’s picture, additional details expanded beneath it.
“Themis, titan of justice,” Cairn read. “Rebirthplace: Thessaloniki, Greece, 1958.” Below that was another incarnation born in 1844, then a third in 1732.
The earliest date listed was 2500 B.C.E. “You’ve traced your incarnations back to Ancient Greece?” Cairn asked incredulously.
“I like to think I don’t look a day over four millennia,” Themis replied. “It’s fascinating how drastically reincarnations of yourself can vary. In one version, you might grow up to be a saint. The next, a ruthless warlord.”
Wordlessly, Cairn wandered from tree to tree, taking in all the faces. A goat willow overlooking a deep fjord that detailed the identities of the Norse gods. A palm on the banks of the Nile for the Egyptian pantheon. Shinto deities on a cherry blossom in the shadow of a pagoda. There must have been forty trees, each decorated with countless faces and names.
“We call it the Arboretum,” Themis explained. “It was your mother’s brainchild, but Vulcan built it. Exactly how much did she tell you about the gods and goddesses?”
“That all the deities from every world mythology are reincarnated every century or so with no memories of their previous lives. That they bleed and die just like us—it’s just less permanent.” Cairn suddenly felt foolish for not asking her mother more questions while she was still alive. “I guess I don’t know much more than the average Jane.”
Themis traced her fingers over one of the Braille readouts beneath a Norse fire giant, who Cairn recognized as a tight end for the New England Patriots football team. “For thousands of years, our kind lived in obscurity. Sure, a god would make a mess now and then, but as the old polytheistic religions died out, no one truly believed that powerful, supernatural beings walked the earth among them. Several years ago, all that changed. A violent clash between the gods landed on the public stage, and in an era where photos and streaming video spreads like wildfire, humanity as a whole was forced to swallow a difficult truth: that the gods they’d only read about in history textbooks were real. Ever since, more and more gods have decided to publicly identify themselves.”
“Not my mother.” Cairn paused in front of a white spruce, solitary against the Arctic tundra. The other faces on the tree blurred when she spotted Ahna, who smiled as digital snow fell silently around her.
“Sedna walked the seam between both those worlds, between the light and the shadows.” Themis appeared behind Cairn, placing a hand on her shoulder. “She was the very best of us.”
“Then why is she dead?” Cairn asked bluntly. “And why did she build a secret lair in my house?”
“Wasn’t the suit a dead giveaway? Sedna was a vigilante.”
Cairn tried to laugh at the preposterousness of those four words, but it sounded hollow. “A vigilante fighting whom? Dolphin poachers?”
“Rogue gods, mostly. Every pantheon has its own troublemakers. With awesome power unfortunately comes an escalated potential for corruption.” Themis led Cairn over to a tall Saguaro cactus growing in a desert. She touched the picture of a handsome young man with tan, chiseled features. “Kokopelli, Hopi trickster,” the label read. A series of photographs and videos appeared depicting chaos and destruction. A street in Miami decimated by explosions. What looked like the bloody aftermath of a grisly attack in a redwood forest. Cairn recoiled when she saw a bloody corpse that had been torn to shreds by a wild animal.
She pursed her lips disapprovingly. “Why is it always the sexiest ones who have the longest rap sheets?”
“For better or worse,” Themis continued, “our abilities come with an enhanced sense of purpose—of importance. I tried to channel mine into stopping atrocities like this before they could happen. To that end, I assembled a group of gods two decades ago while I was teaching at the university. Your mother was the first to enlist. We called ourselves ‘the Pantheon’ and made it our mission to seek out others like us, to let them know they were not alone, that they didn’t have to live in isolation.” Themis produced a picture from her pocket, a creased 5x7 faded with age. “When I learned you were coming, I had Vulcan dig this out of the archives.”
Cairn immediately recognized the younger version of her mother. In college, Sedna could have passed for Cairn’s twin, albeit with bangs and regrettably 90s fashion. Themis was in the picture, too, beaming proudly at her recruits in front of the college gates.
There were several other students in the picture, but one in particular stood out: a debonair Egyptian man whose charm was undeniable even in a still photograph.
“Holy shit,” Cairn said. “Is that Senator Ra?”
Themis nodded, her face emotionless.
Ra was one of the deities who had publicly embraced his mythological origins. It had been a risky gamble for a politician, but one that paid off: the Massachusetts public had elected the Egyptian sun god to the United States Senate. His approval ratings had soared ever since with liberals and conservatives alike.