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Something paced restlessly in the back of Marc and Steven's mind as they stared at the empty doorway, their mouth dry and their thoughts a tangled mess. Despair threatened both men, intensifying the longer they stood there, frozen by the god's threat.
"Was...was he saying what I thought he was saying?" Marc asked, his reflection somewhere off to Steven's left.
"A psychopomp is a soul guide to the afterlife, more or less," Steven murmured, numbness seeping into his voice. "So, yeah, he was saying what you think he was saying."
"What?"
Steven jumped. Turning apologetically to the professor, he groped for something calming and appropriate to say. Instead, he asked, "What can you tell me about Hermes?"
The professor's gaze shifted from Steven to the doorframe and back again, mouth working as though trying to speak and finding his voice failing.
"I know it's a lot to take in-believe me, I do, yeah?-but right now, I need your expertise, Professor."
Clearing his throat, Simmons regained a fraction of his composure, his attention turning introspective as he plumbed the depths of his knowledge for information about the Greek god. "It's as...Hermes said. He serves many functions, but he is a trickster, most notably in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and primarily a messenger between the gods and the underworld and humans."
"What's the hymn, then?"
The professor swiveled in his chair, hunted among his bookshelves for a reference text. "It chronicles Hermes's birth and his proclivity for stealing. He meddles with Apollo, the Greek god of...well, a little bit of everything, I suppose. He's attributed with poetry, archery, prophecy, music, arts, healing, and the sun, among other things."
Pulling a book off the shelf, Simmons flipped through the text until he found the page he was looking for. He handed the book to Steven and tapped the title printed on the page: The Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Steven scanned it quickly. "He's a cheat."
"A trickster," the professor corrected. "It's part and parcel with the title."
"It says he deceives mankind."
"Yes."
"So he's probably lying," Marc stated, folding his arms over his chest, hands clenched into fists. "Probably about all of it: letting her go, threatening to kill her."
Steven nodded, skimmed the poem again. "He said he wasn't finished with her yet. We have to discover what she stole, yeah? And who she stole it from."
"That's assuming he told us the truth about that."
"It's a start, yeah?"
Simmons frowned. "Who are you talking to?"
"Me," Steven answered. "Do you have a photocopier?"
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Steven read and reread the Homeric hymn until he had it memorized. He searched online for different translations, checking to see if any changes in wording significantly altered meaning. He googled Hermes, his mother Maia, and Apollo.
By the time the plane landed, his eyes were bloodshot and grainy, his body running on fumes.
"We don't even know if she left the country," Marc told him. "She could still be in America."
"The men were here."
"That doesn't mean she stole from here."
"We don't have any other leads." Rubbing a hand over his face, Steven pleaded, "Please, Marc, follow me on this, okay? It feels like the right direction."
"You're ready to collapse, Steven."
"We can't sleep until we find her."
"Then let me take over for a while."
Steven conceded almost immediately. Marc fronted, immediately felt the exhaustion weighing down the body. Pushing through it, he hailed a taxi and directed the driver to your address.
He expected the apartment to be cordoned off with police tape. Instead, the door was shut but unsealed. The beginnings of a noxious odor had begun to extend past the obstruction, though not quite strong enough to merit attention from the neighbors. Marc let himself in with practiced hands and swiftly closed the door, breathing shallowly through his mouth as the decaying smell of decomposing bodies assaulted his nose.
The bodies lay where...the third one had left them. The men had been brutalized, put down with enough force to ensure they never moved again. Marc realized with horror that the men had been killed with bare hands. He glanced down at his own, wondering at how much blood had covered them. He couldn't say whether he had ever killed with his bare hands during his military service.
Unease sliding up and down his spine, Marc stepped over the men and glanced around your apartment, searching for clues. It didn't look like you had returned.
Curiously enough, no one had come after the men, either.
If you had been telling the truth, you had been compelled to dump the stolen item at some point after stealing it. If you were telling the truth, you hadn't even known what the item was, merely that you had needed to steal it and get rid of it shortly afterward.
If you were telling the truth, that meant the flat was a dead end.
Cursing, Marc turned to the bodies. Grimacing, he frisked the first one, searching through the man's pockets for anything that would give him a lead. The man gave up nothing; the second followed suit.
The third man, his face unrecognizable from the beating, yielded some fruit. Marc pulled a thin wallet from the man's back pocket. The ID therein was fake, the credit cards bearing the same name, but a white business card almost went unnoticed in the inner pocket.
It bore only one symbol: a lyre pressed in gold leaf.
