“Elder Gods”

By Ryan Kunz

I.

The dead man lay on his back, the knife rising from his chest like a single, crooked tree on a hill. Ichor seeped from the wound in golden rivulets. Hands that had once wielded the mightiest weapons in the cosmos now law crumpled and limp.

Long ago, he had been a warrior. A sage. A king.

Not to mention a god.

Now he was just a corpse bleeding all over the freshly waxed tile of a retirement home. 

***

Let’s start at the beginning, please. State your name and godhood for the record.

Uh, Janus. God of beginnings and endings.

Roman?

That’s right.

Thank you.

So—have you found anything? Cardea said you took the prints from the murder scene—the first one, I mean. So who did it? What did you find?

I’m sorry, Mr. Janus, but the investigation is still ongoing. You can help by telling us what you know.

Right. Sorry. I read a lot of mystery novels. Well, that—and the fact that this is the most excitement this place has seen in a thousand years.

I see. How long have you lived at Olympus Heights Retirement Community?

Maybe fifteen hundred years? You get shipped off here as soon as you’re no longer widely worshipped on the mortal plane.

Do you enjoy it here?

Nice place to be, as far as places go where you’re here to be forgotten. With dryads tending its manicured grounds, ambrosia meals prepared by the finest chefs, and attendants for every immortal need, it’s the place to be if you’re a few thousand years past your prime…. That’s what the brochure says, anyway.

And when did you last see Odin alive?

Oh. Straight to business, then. Well, it was right after we played bingo.

Bingo? Start there.

***

Only a single open space stood between Janus and the sort of triumph the bards would sing of. With the promise of victory shining before him, he cast a surreptitious glance at his neighbors to check their progress. On his left, doddering old Hephaestus, Greek god of smiths, was muttering something under his breath. If Hephaestus had been mortal, it might have been a prayer for luck, but for the divine residents of Olympus Heights, the only appeals to the gods were the ones barked across to room to whoever held the TV remote.

On Janus’s right was Cardea, Roman goddess of door hinges. They hadn’t known one another, back when Janus commanded legions of worshippers and Cardea had commanded legions of hinges, but Olympus Heights was full of unlikely bonds. Cardea, too, was one space away from the bingo, and she gave Janus a sidelong glance.

“Don’t think you’re going to beat me this time,” she muttered, her tokens clutched in one liver-spotted hand.

“What was that, O goddess of people who are about to lose miserably?” Janus shot back.

In front of the room, the presenter pulled another ball from the machine and inspected it. “77,” he announced gravely.

36, thought Janus. Say 36 next...

The presenter held up another ball. “16,” he said.

Hephaestus shot up as quickly as his old knees would allow, screeching a cry of victory and holding up his bingo card. A few of his cronies, mostly smithing gods from other mythologies, swarmed around him to congratulate him.

“Freaking knobby knees of Zeus,” Janus swore, invoking a divinity at random to express his annoyance. He shot an apologetic look at the object of his blasphemy. Zeus, however, was far too busy flirting with the nurses to notice his name had just been taken in vain.

Cardea echoed Janus’s dismay.

Janus shrugged, feeling his frustration ebb. Let Hephaestus win today. There was always next week. And the week after that. There would be bingo at Olympus Heights until Ragnarök drenched the universe in blood and long-forgotten horrors rose from the sea—or at least until the air conditioning went out again and they had to cancel bingo that week.

He turned to face Cardea, who was handing in her bingo card and tokens. He checked the clock on the wall. “Almost lunch time,” he observed. “Should we make it to the cafeteria?” Sometimes the latecomers missed out on sweet rolls, baked by Hestia herself with real nectar of the gods, and the taste of those delicious confections was one reason Janus hadn’t yet submitted himself to the siren call of senility just yet.

“Ooh, yes,” said Cardea. Together they rose from the table and walked across the common room—past Quetzalcoatl and Mennomet playing backgammon, Artemis reading a gossip magazine, and Odin watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island. Others milled around in the familiar pursuits of immortality’s twilight.

But no sooner had Cardea and Janus made it halfway across the room than there was a telltale sighing sound. They froze and exchanged glances, then turned to see Mennomet, her hand outstretched to place another backgammon piece, going pale. Her eyes glazed over, and before anyone could do anything, her flesh had gone a stony gray.

Seconds later, Mennomet was entirely stone, as cold and dead as any sculpture.

Not more than half a minute had passed before an old security guard appeared to extricate Mennomet from the table where she’d been playing. The guard was a short, copper-skinned fellow who always wore a stud of jade in his nose and an amiable smile—even in the midst of his unenviable task. The guard—Janus knew him as Mick—rolled up his sleeves and heaved his stone burden onto a dolly, where he secured her with straps.

Whistling, Mick hauled Mennomet away.

***

Pardon the interruption, but does this occur often? A god turning to stone?

Unfortunately, yes. Mennomet’s passing was the second this month. No—third. Back on Earth, her name had just passed out of memory. There was nothing to tie her to the mortal world anymore, so she just...turned to stone.

That’s tragic.

It happens.

***

Janus watched Mick depart with Mennomet and then turned back to Cardea. “Shall we get those sweet rolls now?”

“Not even a moment of silence for poor Mennomet?”

Janus frowned. “I’ll remember her in my own way. I spend more time in the memorial garden than anyone. But dwelling on—well, on the ones like Mennomet—just takes me down a dark path I’d rather not go.”

Cardea nodded, frowning “I suppose you’re right. And yet…”

Janus waited, trying not to glance at the clock again while he thought of the sweet rolls that were surely vanishing even as they spoke. He followed Cardea’s disapproving gaze to Zeus, who had just slapped one of the pretty attendants on the rump, earning him a strict scolding.

“Just thinking how poor Mennomet had to be the one who turned to stone,” said Cardea. “She was kind to me—she was lactose intolerant, so she always gave me her ambrosia from the cafeteria. And yet no kindness could prevent her from turning to stone, totally forgotten on Earth. Doesn’t exactly fill me with hope for myself, you know? Every day I don’t turn to stone is a miracle.”

“And that,” said Janus, “is exactly the path I try to avoid going down.”

Cardea didn’t seem to hear him. She regarded the lord of the Greek gods with distaste as he lounged on the couch with a stupid leer on his face. “And then there’re idiots like Zeus. Didn’t he seduce a swan once?”

“No, he turned into a swan to seduce someone.”

“Gross. Is that better?”

Janus considered. “Definitely not.”

“It’s just—” Cardea’s voice betrayed a bitter note. “Seems so unjust, you know? That idiots like him are the ones who are most likely to be remembered. Even if you forget about the handful of people who still worship him these days, people remember Zeus. Books are written about him. Video games—you know what those are, right?—they’re written about him. Same with Ra, Isis, Odin, Thor, all the big ones—they’re more than gods on Earth. They’ve ascended into pop culture now. Did you know they made Thor into a superhero? Good luck forgetting about him when he’s played on screen by some brawny Australian who might well be part god himself. And that’s not even touching on the gods who aren’t even here yet—Jesus and Allah and the rest...” She sighed. “You’re right. Dark path. Let’s grab those sweet rolls. If I’m going to turn to stone, I might as well do it loaded up on sugar.”

“Gods aren’t affected by carbs,” Janus reminded her.

“All the more reason to cram as many of them down my throat as I can,” said Cardea. She stepped up the pace, a faint smile returning. “What’s wrong, slowpoke? You’re not getting old, are you? Keep up.”

***

So you had lunch with Cardea in the cafeteria. What did you do afterward?

I went to the library, like I typically do in the afternoons. I wanted to tell the librarian I’d liked his last recommendation. It was—

Olympus Heights has a librarian?

Not an official one. But as an Egyptian god of wisdom and knowledge, Thoth just liked the idea of guiding geriatric gods like me through centuries’ worth of literature.

Thoth, you say? Tell me about him.

***

Janus stood on the threshold of the library, a paperback book tucked under his arm. “Thoth?” he asked. “You in there?”

Olympus Heights’ resident librarian didn’t reply. It was entirely possible Thoth hadn’t heard Janus, however, given his advanced age, even among the millennia-old immortals in Olympus Heights.

“Thoth?” Janus asked again.

“Back already?” Thoth poked his head from one of the small anterooms off the main library. His back was stooped and his hair so white it was translucent, which contrasted sharply with his ebony skin. He looked like the sort of old man who roamed the desert, ready to offer cryptic riddles to travelers, though the look was spoiled somewhat by his faded gray T-shirt, which bore the logo of some Arabic death metal band.

“Finished it, have you?” Thoth asked.

Janus thumped a battered paperback on the coffee table in front of Thoth, who had taken up his customary post in an old leather armchair by the fireplace. “Agatha Christie was a good choice,” Janus said. “Thanks for the recommendation.”

“Careful with that,” said Thoth, a bit of madness flashing in his eyes as he picked up the book as though it were one of the lost scrolls from the library of Alexandria. Despite knowing very well it was a paperback someone had picked up at a mortal thrift store for a dollar, Janus checked to make sure the book wasn’t one of the lost scrolls of Alexandria—but those were on the far wall, next to a set of original Tom Clancy hardcovers. “The binding’s coming undone,” Thoth muttered, examining the book. “And did you…” He looked up, sudden betrayal burning in his eyes. “Did you dog-ear page 73?”

“Sorry—”

Thoth made a broad gesture to indicate the library—with books stacked eight or nine shelves high along walls twenty feet long, not including the dark anterooms full of books Janus had never seen. “Every volume here is more valuable than any shiny trinket dug up out of the earth. I won’t see them mistreated.”

“I won’t do it again,” said Janus. “The dog-ear was an accident. I swear.”

Thoth regarded him, the fury ebbing from his features. “Good.” He took a deep breath. “Anyhow. You liked it, then?”

Janus nodded, relieved to have evaded the librarian’s wrath. “Loved it. The twist at the end—good stuff.”

“Well, there’s plenty more where that came from.” Thoth, his regular good humor returning, gestured at the shelves. “Would you like more of the same, or do you want to try one of my other recommendations?”

Janus considered. “Well, if I weren’t up for trying new things, I’d still be reading poetry from the third century BC. What else have you got?”

Thoth sprang from his chair with an agility that belied his aged form. He darted to one particular shelf and grabbed another paperback, handing it to Janus. “Try this one. And when you’re finished with that…” He scooped up a notebook from the coffee table and scribbled down a few titles. “Try these.”

“As always, your thoughts are much appreciated,” said Janus. He nodded, turning the list around. “Hey, what’s this?”

“What’s what?”

“There’s writing on the back.” Janus held it up for Thoth to see. “Looks like poetry—pretty dark poetry, to be honest. It says… ‘My soul is borne to the underworld on wings of blackness’. What the... ?” He gave the librarian a bemused look.

“Give me that,” said Thoth, flushing red and snatching back the paper. “Just something I was—never you mind—”

“You’re a poet?” asked Janus. “It’s okay, you know. You’re surrounded by all this—” He gestured around the room with the hand not holding the book. “Seems natural that you would want to try your hand at writing eventually.”

Thoth shrugged, still looking sheepish. “I’m a scribe god. I write down others’ wisdom, prophecies, and achievements. I’m not meant to write my own—that is to say, the poetry’s rubbish, really. But something’s got to last after I’m gone, don’t you think? Even gods have to work for their immortality.”

Janus felt an uncomfortable pang in his stomach. First Cardea, now Thoth. Did everyone  have to dwell on the limits of divine immortality? “Gone?”

“I heard about Mennomet. I suppose that’s the way we all go in the end, isn’t it? Might as well leave something behind for people to remember me by.”

“A noble pursuit,” said Janus. “But I’m sure you’ve still got decades. Centuries, even.”

“I’m sure poor Mennomet thought that, too.”

An awkward silence expanded between them like a cloud of noxious fumes, choking any further conversation. When he could bear it no longer, Janus said, “I’d love that list of recommendations again, if it’s all right.”

“Oh, right.” Thoth pulled out another scrap of notepaper, inspected it for errant poetry, and scribbled a few titles. “Here you go. I’ll see you soon, I suppose.”

***

You did not revisit the library until later?

No. I told you that. I went straight to the memorial garden.

So you said. Tell me about the memorial garden, then.

Well, it’s one of my favorite places in the entire retirement community. It’s where we keep the gods who turn to stone, so most people tend to give it a wide berth. Cardea always makes fun of me, because sure, it’s a bit macabre, but you can’t beat the solitude.

Why not find solitude in your room?

The air is nicer in the garden.

And what did you do there?

What do you think? I read.

And that’s what you were doing…

Yes. When the murder happened. The first one.

II.

The memorial garden was a rectangular courtyard open to the sky, wreathed in climbing vines and kaleidoscopic ranks of flowers. Janus sat in one of the lawn chairs next to the artificial brook, regarding Mennomet’s stone form where it had just been installed near the southwest corner. Near her, other forgotten gods huddled, sat, or hobbled on stone canes, all frozen in the moment they had faded from earthly consciousness. One poor god, some ancient deity of sewers, had fittingly gone out on the crapper.

He cracked open the latest book Thoth had recommended. It was another mystery, starting off with the discovery of a corpse on a cold night, and Janus felt himself drawn in immediately. He impatiently brushed aside a bookmark from the previous reader—even more dark poetry from Thoth, he realized upon a half second’s inspection—and tried to lose himself in the tale. 

Fragments of his conversations with Cardea and Thoth came returned unbidden. Try as he might, he couldn’t keep his thoughts from wandering down that forbidden path. In his peripheral vision, the stone figures seem to leer at him, daring him to ask questions of himself he had always avoided.

When the mortal world forgets me, will I be gone here, too? What will I leave behind?

After a while, however, the serenity of the memorial garden overpowered both the troubling thoughts and the momentum of the story, and he felt his eyelids drooping, and he surrendered to the call of sleep. He dozed, the book draped across his lap.

He was yanked from the depths of his slumber by a scream.

Janus jerked awake and stood, ignoring the creaking of his bones, and let the book fall to the ground. He made his way to the exit, listening to the soft padding of other footsteps around the corner. He stepped from the open air of the garden onto the hallway and followed the excited murmurs, his heart sinking with every step.

There in the hallway, a kitchen knife rammed through his chest, was a corpse.

Liquid the color of sunshine, the ichor that ran through the veins of every god, radiated across the tile from where he lay. His skin still gleamed with a god’s faint luminosity, but one look at the dead man’s single eye told Janus he was gone. It took Janus a moment more to recognize the withered face, even though he had seen the victim several hours ago, watching reruns on TV: Odin, Allfather of the Norse gods.

Odin’s eye was still bulging in terror. His ancient walker lay on its side next to him. The Allfather had often boasted that the walker was forged by dwarven smiths, inlaid with wood from the World Tree Yggdrasil, and capped with the finest tennis balls Midgard could offer. In matters of protection from assailants, it seemed, the walker was still just a walker.

A few others had already arrived and were uttering small cries of distress and dismay. Mick the security guard was staring at the body with a mixture of sadness and surprise. Cardea shouldered her way past Quetzalcoatl and Brighid, her eyes going wide at the sight of the dead Odin. She looked up and caught Janus’s eye, her mouth a grim line.

The attendants were streaming in now, motioning for everyone to step back as they draped a sheet over the corpse. Janus retreated back into the garden, his stomach twisting. He wanted to blame the attendants, assigning to them some sort of dark motive for the crime, but that was impossible. The attendants were mostly elves, naiads, dryads, and another lesser beings—not a god among them. 

And if Janus had learned anything from more than two thousand years of divinity, it was that only a god could kill a god. 

***

Tell me about the scream. Did it sound like Odin?

Who else would it be?

Just answer the question, please.

Yes, I suppose. Male, but high-pitched and hoarse. Full of terror.

I see. So after you all found the body, that’s when the attendants sent everyone away?

Yes. They were waiting for the police to show up.

Our records show the first uniforms on the scene fifteen minutes after the body was discovered.

That sounds about right.

We apologize for the delay. Response time isn’t great this far down the River Styx. So after the police asked everyone to stay in your rooms, what did you do?

While I was waiting?

Yes.

I talked to my reflection.

***

Janus sat with his book in his comfy armchair in his room, trying in vain to focus on the book in his hands.

“Some gods are afraid,” said a voice. “But not you.”

“No,” said Janus.

“Some gods will go back to backgammon and bingo tomorrow, writing off Odin’s death as a curiosity,” said a voice. “But again...not you.”

Janus turned slightly to see his own face in the mirror over his dresser. His reflection was moving of its own accord.

“No,” Janus said again.

“You desperately want to know who did it,” said his reflection.

Janus said nothing, looking down at the mystery novel in his hands. His reflection waited for him to reply, but the rapport the two had built over the millennia didn’t necessarily require a response.

Finally Janus said, “Why does it matter? Thoth was right. I suppose we’ll all die someday, whether we get a kitchen knife stuck in our hearts or people just forget about us.”

“Are you certain?”

Janus raised an eyebrow. His reflection did not echo the expression. “And what do you mean by that?” Janus asked with a longsuffering snort. “Please. There’s no need to be cryptic, you know.”

“I’m just not so sure that waiting like a mummified corpse for someone to open your burial chamber is your only choice,” said his reflection.

Before Janus could ask what his reflection meant, there came a soft rapping at his door.

“Come in,” Janus said. His reflection blurred and fell back into mimicking Janus’s motion.

Cardea stroke in, furtively looking back over her shoulder.

“You’re supposed to be in your r—” Janus started to say.

“I know,” Cardea snapped. “But how can I stay in my room when a god is dead. Dead. Not just forgotten. Really dead.”

***

Before we go on, tell me about your reflection. It’s self-aware, then?

As much as I am.

And it talks to you?

Looks like I need to back up. I’m the two-faced god of beginnings and endings, right? Traditionally depicted with two faces, and for good reason. Some people draw me with a face coming out of the back of my head, like the villain in that British children’s book Thoth told me to read. Have you read that one?

No.

You should; it’s pretty good. The later books get even better. But the whole face-on-the-back-of-my-head image, that’s not really accurate. We’re not two physical faces. More accurately, we’re two facets of the same being, two distinct personas within one form. I tend to look backward, and he tends to look forward—but metaphorically, not literally.

You switch who has control of the body, then?

No need. We’re more like—what’s the word?—co-pilots.

Always in harmony with each other?

Of course not. You have impulses within you that compete, don’t you? Even conflict, sometimes? Sure you do. Same with me. Except I get the added benefit of being able to have a civil debate with myself. Or give myself some much-needed advice.

And did you get that advice?

In this case, it was more of a nudge in the right direction.

***

Janus nodded expectantly at Cardea. “Right. What’s happening out there?”

Cardea nodded back. “Police everywhere. Flashing lights, caution tape, the whole thing. Plus, they brought in three dark elves from one of the Norse realms. Detectives, they said.”

“Dark elves? What for?”

“Well, since the victim was Norse, I guess the death fell under the dark elves’ jurisdiction. They left after a while. Took fingerprints and ichor samples. Said they’d run through all the facts back at the station, but the regular police are still here.”

“Did they ask you anything?”

“Not really,” said Cardea, squirming a little. “I was in my room when it happened. Cross-stitching a miniature Golden Fleece. Then, a minute later, I heard a commotion outside in the hall.”

“You didn’t hear the scream?”

“What scream?”

“The scream. It woke me from my nap. There was definitely a scream.”

Cardea cocked her head at him. “No—I don’t think so. But I heard people crying out when they saw him dead in the hall.”

“Have a seat,” said Janus, frowning. He had certainly remembered a scream. “Who found the body first?”

Cardea gingerly took a seat next to him, wincing as her old knees protested the motion. “The detectives said Hodr stumbled upon him in the hallway. The body was right there in the open, though—another few seconds, and someone else would have been the one to find him.”

“So Hodr found the body. Norse god of—something or other?”

“Yeah, I can’t remember either. Disagreeable fellow, though. Why?”

“I want to talk to him.”

“And why would you…” Cardea trailed off.

Janus nodded, looking at his feet. But as he looked at his reflection again, he thought maybe he knew what his reflection had meant earlier. Perhaps he had more choices than merely fading or being murdered someday. Perhaps...he could make something of his time here.

His eyes fell once again on the discarded mystery novel, and he felt a faint smile playing on his lips.

He studied his reflection, who regarded him back, sharing the smile. A silent understanding passed between them.

He had looked backward for long enough. Maybe it was time to look forward for a change. And with that, he knew what he had to do.

“It’s a start,” said Janus. “Enough of a trail to go on.”

Cardea raised an eyebrow. “You mean—try to find out who did it? But the detectives…”

“Won’t be back for hours,” said Janus. “You know how low this place is on this list of cosmic priorities.” He could feel his heart racing for the first time in years. “Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll catch the killer.” His grin unfurled wide across his face. “You want in?”

Cardea hesitated. “Yes. That would be…interesting.”

“You have something better to do?”

Cardea said nothing, so Janus went on. “Once I had a respectable cult of my own across the Empire,” he said. “I was the essence of beginnings and endings. Now… I read about others’ exploits and wait to be forgotten. This is my chance to do something, something real, for the first time in… I don’t know how long. After everything you said earlier, don’t you want to be part of that? Or do you want to sit around playing shuffleboard and making another Ark of the Covenant out of macaroni during craft night?”

Cardea looked up at him, her expression shifting from reluctance to gradual determination. “You’re right,” she said. “Let’s catch a killer. Where do we start?”

“You said you saw someone in the hallway before the murder, didn’t you?” said Janus. “Let’s pay Hodr a visit.”

When Janus and Cardea ventured out of Janus’s room, they found most of the corridors deserted. A pair of police officers—from their size and smell, likely Scandinavian trolls stuffed into blue uniforms—were talking in low voices at the reception desk, but it wasn’t hard to avoid their notice. Trolls were tough and persistent, but their observational skills left much to be desired. It was good that the real detectives had left for now—Cardea had said they were dark elves, whose notice would have been harder to escape.

Janus and Cardea slipped into the next hall, out of sight of the troll officers.

“Where do you two think you’re up to, huh?”

They froze as a short figure stepped into the hall, a mild look of interest on his copper features. Janus relaxed slightly as he recognized Mick, the old security guard.

“Hello there, Mick,” said Janus.

“Janus,” said Mick with a gentle smile. “Cardea. What are you two doing out? I may be hard of hearing, but I did hear the police make a few specific requests about people being in their rooms.”

“Mick…” said Cardea. “We were just—well—”

“Investigating,” said Janus. No use lying. “We were headed over to Hodr’s room. The one who found the body.”

“I see,” said Mick. “You know that my job would require me to tell you to turn around, right?”

“You have a job to do, of course—” Janus said, feeling the momentary surge of purpose burning out. So much for looking forward for a change.

“I’ve got a mind to do it, too,” said Mick. “Folks aren’t supposed to be out. It’s for your own safety, you know.” His sleeves were rolled up, and Janus noticed the faded skulls tattooed on his folded arms. Had those always been there?

“We do know, but—”

“I’m supposed to keep this place safe, and—well, not doing so good a job, am I?”

“Well, it wasn’t your fault,” Cardea said quickly.

“Maybe not,” said Mick. “I was doing my rounds when it happened. Not sure how I missed it all going down. Pretty shoddy work. You folks think you can do better?”

“Well,” said Janus awkwardly. “Not exactly—”

“I asked a serious question,” said Mick, his smile gone. “You folks think you can find out who did it?”

There was a moment of silence, filled only by the steady humming of the air conditioner overhead.

“I think so,” said Janus.

“Good,” said Mick. “So here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m pretty sure I heard a suspicious sound coming from the exact opposite direction of Hodr’s room. I’m gonna go check it out. When I get back, neither of you better be here.” One eye twitched in a motion that could have been a wink. “You understand?”

Janus and Cardea both gave short, quick nods. “We won’t be here,” said Janus.

“Good man,” said Mick. Without another word, he turned and strode away, whistling.

“That was close,” said Cardea when he’d gone. “Always liked him, you know?”

They stopped as they found the door with Hodr’s name written on a small placard on the front. They knocked.

“Who’s out there?” came a voice from within.

“Janus and Cardea,” Janus replied. “We just want to ask a few questions.”

“You’re not supposed to be wandering the halls.”

“You’d best let us in, then,” said Janus.

When Hodr admitted Janus and Cardea inside, the first thing that struck Janus was the lack of decor—no woodcuts of relatives, no ancient runes of unspeakable power, no shelf of battered old Louis L’Amour paperbacks, nothing. Hodr himself sat in a squashy chair near the foot of the bed. He was a wrinkled old creature without a single hair to call his own. His eyes were closed as though he wasn’t quite ready to wake up from a nap.  

“What is it?” he asked curtly, waving a bony hand. “Janus and Cardea, is it?”

“Yes, that’s us.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“Well, we heard you found the body,” Janus said, sensing it might be wise to skip formalities. “We were just wondering what you knew.”

“First time investigating a murder, huh?”

“Well, I don’t imagine—”

Hodr let out a sharp, raspy laugh. “You mean you want to know if it was me.”

“We never—” Cardea began.

“Admit it. I’m a suspect. What are you doing, investigating? Aren’t there real detectives out there somewhere?”

“They’re not here right now,” said Janus, trying not to sound defensive. “We’re just—well, we’re just curious. Did you see anything?”

“Like I said, you just want to know if it was me.”

“No,” said Cardea. “Why would you—”

“I kill one brother back on Asgard and everyone thinks I’m a cold-ichored murderer.” Hodr slammed his hands down onto the arms of his chair. “Baldur’s death was an accident, I swear by the fires of Surtur!”

Janus exchanged a glance with Cardea. He vaguely remembered something about Hodr being tricked by one brother, Loki, into murdering his other brother, Baldur. But that sort of thing happened all the time in mythologies with trickster gods, which was pretty much all of them.

 “Not that my father believed me!” Hodr went on. “Odin never really cared about poor Hodr. He never shut up about how handsome Baldur was growing up to be! And Thor—Father gave him that fancy hammer, not that Thor ever knew the difference between a hammer and a power drill. And don’t get me started on Loki—Sure, his school therapist says he has sociopathic tendencies, my parents said, but look at those dimples! And all the time never a word about me!”

“We don’t—” Cardea started to say.

“Of course you think it was me,” snapped Hodr. “You think I murdered old Odin out of some sort of spiteful daddy issues. Fat lot of good that would have done. All I ever wanted was for my father to recognize me, to remember he had another son. I didn’t kill him.”

“Can you prove it?” Cardea asked.

Hodr let out a wheezing cackle. “Prove it? You fools. You fools.” He turned his head toward Janus and Cardea and opened his eyes.

His milky white eyes.

“I’m blind, you idiots,” he said. “Guess you didn’t read the myths well enough. I heard old Odin was stabbed right through the heart. Bit difficult for a blind man, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well…” Janus had to admit he had a point. He was about to turn to Cardea and admit they had a dead end when Hodr held up a finger.

“But if you really want to know who did it, talk to Suhep-Yoggoroth,” said the blind god. “She was out in the hall, too. I could smell her a league away—very distinctive stench. Ever met her?”

“I have,” said Janus. Nobody quite knew how old Suhep-Yoggoroth and her fellow Great Old Ones were, but they certainly predated any mortal religion. On Earth, she’d been worshipped by a handful of deranged nutjobs rather than a proper religion. For an ancient chaos god from another dimension, she had always seemed nice enough, though Janus rarely saw her out and about.

“If anyone’s going to have murder in their heart,” said Hodr, “it’s someone with her own death cult.”

***

And the two of you thought you could simply—what, solve the murder? On your own?

Yes.

I’m curious, then. Do you have a suspect in mind?

So you do want to hear what I think?

I simply want to know if you think you know who did it. Indulge my curiosity.

…

You do, don’t you?

I have a...suspicion. As we left Hodr’s room, some things Thoth had said earlier were working their way through my mind. It didn’t mean anything to me then, but the riddle was there, trying to solve itself.

And what riddle was that?

Why one god would kill another.

III.

When they knocked on Suhep-Yoggoroth’s door a few moments later, the door swung inward without a word. Beyond was nothing but darkness. The room swirled with tendrils of mist. That happened sometimes—maybe the humidifier was possessed by a Japanese water demon again—but it still gave Janus a bad feeling. The air seemed to crawl around him, as though someone were pouring oil all over his skin. And the smell—that must have been what Hodr was talking about. It was a sickly-sweet odor, like rotting flowers.

Cardea nudged Janus forward.

He stepped over the threshold. “Suhep-Yoggoroth?” he asked.

“In here!” came the voice again. “Come in, I can’t see you very well.”

They crept through the darkness, conscious of the stench in the air.

“I can’t see you, either,” Janus said.

“Oh, sorry!” At once, the mist dispelled, revealing Suhep-Yoggoroth herself—the Black Behemoth of the Forbidden Realms, the Mother of Madness, one of the last of the Great Old Ones—sitting in a rocking chair, watching Law and Order. Janus’s head hurt looking at her; she was unspeakably vast, and yet she fit neatly in the chair in a way his brain didn’t quite understand, as though Janus gazed upon only a part of her, the rest hidden from view. The part he did see, however, was a mass of grasping tentacles in a vaguely human shape. A pair of stunted goat legs stuck out from under the tentacles. And around the chair was a puddle of pulsing ooze.

“Janus!” Suhep-Yoggoroth called. “And you, Cardea! Good to see you both! Sorry about the mist—I don’t like regular air. Bad for my complexion, you see. My tentacles get all dry, too. Nasty.” She hit the remote with several of said tentacles, shutting off the TV. “So what can I do for you?”

“You were out in the halls when the murder happened, weren’t you?” Cardea asked. “Hodr—uh, Hodr smelled you there.”

The mass of tentacles shifted in what Janus assumed was an uneasy manner; his experience as a god didn’t include a lot of tentacular body language. “I was there, yes.”

“Did you see who did it?”

“The detectives will be back soon with the fingerprints, I hear—”

Janus strode forward and gently took one of her tentacles in his hand. It felt just as he expected—a bit squishy. “Suhep-Yoggoroth—”

“Oh, call me Sue, dear. Only cannibalistic, human-sacrificing cultists call me Suhep-Yoggoroth. Oh, dear—I forgot, my grandkids made me cookies. Would you like some?” Before they could answer, she slithered over to a low table, where a plate of cookies waited. As she moved, she left a trail of that strange, pulsing ooze.

“I have thirty thousand grandchildren,” Suhep-Yoggoroth—Sue—said proudly. “They drop by now and then.” She noticed Janus’s and Cardea’s eyes on the trail of ooze. “Oh, don’t mind that. It goes away after an hour. That’s just protoplasm. It won’t kill you or drive you to gibbering madness—provided you’re not mortal, of course.”

“No, thank you on the cookies,” Janus said. “Now, you said you were out in the hall—”

“I didn’t see what happened, no,” said Sue. “I can’t go very far out in the halls.” She waved a tentacle. “I can only step outside my door for a few moments. I need the air to be right, or I’ll shrivel up and die.”

“I see.”

Sue shrugged sadly, a slithering motion in the general vicinity of where her shoulders should be. “It’s my curse, I suppose—I’m not of this world. Or any world close to this one. They just don’t have decent retirement homes in the realms of madness, you know?”

Janus nodded, glancing at Cardea. “Thank you for your time, Sue. We’ll be going now.”

“You’ll take a cookie on your way out, won’t you? They’re made with the souls of the damned, but I had my grandchildren add some extra brown sugar this time, so they’re actually quite good.”

Janus’s hand hovered over the cookies. “No thanks. My doctor’s telling me to cut down on… uh, damned souls. Have a good day, Sue.”

As they turned to leave, Sue called out, “Wait! Maybe I can help you.”

Janus and Cardea faced the Great Old One again. “Yes?” asked Janus.

“Two things. First, I did see someone else out in the halls. That security guard Mick, first of all. And two more: Hodr and Fenrir. Both Norse gods, I believe—just like the poor, deceased Odin.”

“We’ve spoken to Hodr and Mick,” said Janus. “But we’ll look into Fenrir. Thank you.”

“And the other thing: I can sense madness and anger. It’s sort of my thing. I got a pleasant whiff of it when I was out in the halls. If you’re looking for something interesting, you might want to check out the garbage can in the memorial garden.”

“What’s there?” asked Janus, wondering if he had missed something when he’d been there earlier.

“No idea,” said Sue. “But if you’re looking for a murderer, you’d best start there.”

“Goodbye, Sue,” said Janus.

“Goodbye, dears,” said the cosmic nightmare in the chair.

“Well, she couldn’t have done it,” said Cardea a few minutes later as they strode toward the memorial garden. “Not with that weird ooze she exuded. That wasn’t anywhere close to the body. If she tried to murder anyone, she’d literally leave a trail pointing right to her.”

“No,” Janus agreed, keeping his voice at a whisper. The troll police officers still had their backs to Janus and Cardea, oblivious as the two gods snuck past at the end of the hall. “She was helpful, though. So—she said she saw Mick out in the halls. No surprise there. Could he have done it?”

“Maybe. I don’t know what motive he would have. I’m not entirely sure he’s even a god—‘Mick’ certainly isn’t the name of any god I’ve ever heard of. Maybe he’s an elf or a dryad or something. I’ve never heard him talk about what he was back on the mortal plane, if anything.”

“All right, we’ll come back to him. Sue saw Fenrir, too. What do we know about him?”

“Not much,” said Cardea. “Not particularly social. Never seen him at craft night or Bingo, but he likes to wander the halls.” Her mouth curled into a smile. “He does have connections to Odin, beyond both being Norse.”

“Oh, yeah?” Janus tried to remember his Norse mythology.

“Fenrir was foretold to kill Odin during Ragnarök. You know—the Norse apocalypse.”

“Foretold? By who?”

“I don’t know. Whoever it is that foretells things for the Norse. Probably some creepy raven or something. But I’d say it’s as reliable as any other prophecies in other myths—I’d be remiss if I said I didn’t believe it.”

Janus cursed. “Well, crap. It’s not Ragnarök already, is it?”

“I don’t think so. I would have noticed fire giants, sea serpents, earthquakes, walking trees, and general mayhem. You seen any of that?”

Janus thought back. “I think the janitor slew a sea serpent in one of the second floor toilets last week, but it was just a stray.”

“Then no. It’s not Ragnarök. Could still have been Fenrir, though. Maybe he just wanted to get a jump on things and killed Odin early.”

“You’re right,” Janus said, his voice rising with excitement.

“Ssh! Don’t want those trolls to hear us—”

“Sorry. Yes, that’s got to be it—how does the prophecy go?”

“Fenrir’s going to burst forth from his captivity and usher forth Ragnarök by slaying Odin.”

“Maybe this is how it all starts,” Janus reasoned. It all fit, didn’t it? “Fenrir kills Odin, hoping the murder will set off a chain of events that will free him from Olympus Heights and set him loose on the world, free to wreak havoc as he wills it.”

“That’s—” Cardea stopped and frowned.

“What is it?” Janus didn’t like the look on her face.

“Fenrir is a giant wolf.”

“Yeah?”

Cardea wiggled her hands illustratively. “No opposable thumbs.”

Janus looked down at his hands, sheepish. He remembered the kitchen knife slammed into Odin’s chest. “Oh.”

“You need hands to use a knife.”

“Yeah, I got it,” said Janus, annoyed at his own failure to see the obvious more than he was at Cardea. “All right, then. So maybe not Fenrir.”

They looked at each other for a moment.

“Maybe we’re not cut out for this detective thing,” said Cardea.

“Don’t say that,” said Janus, holding up a hand to forestall and further lack of confidence in their new calling. “There it is. The memorial garden. Suhep—Sue said there was a clue somewhere.”

“She didn’t say the word clue.”

Janus ignored her, striding through the door into the memorial garden. The stone gods watched in silence as he passed his regular chair and walked over to a small metal garbage can tucked into the corner. It was so unobtrusive that he had hardly noticed it on his many previous visits to the garden.

He leaned over the can, scanning its contents. He saw some unidentified detritus—tissue paper, candy wrappers, and the like. Nothing that suggested any particular connection to madness and anger, certainly nothing that would help him ascertain the identity of the murderer.

“Anything good?” asked Cardea, coming up beside him with a doubtful look on her face.

“Not that I can see,” Janus admitted, reaching out to tentatively rummage through the trash.

“We’re wasting our time,” Cardea murmured, half to herself. “There’s nothing useful in there. Those cosmic horror-type gods are all nuts. I don’t see how—wait, what about that?”

She reached past Janus and pulled out a sheaf of paper covered in minute scribbles.

“Oh, that,” said Janus. “I think I pulled that out of a book earlier. It’s from Thoth. Some of his poetry. Pretty dark stuff, if you ask—” He stopped. “Wait. Let me see that.” He snatched it from Cardea’s hands. “I only read the first few lines. I was in the middle of a book. But…” He whistled. “There’s some… intense… stuff here. Here, take a look.”

Cardea accepted the paper back with a longsuffering look. “ ‘By death we die, and by death we live forever’? What is this nonsense?”

“I told you, it’s Thoth’s terrible poetry,” said Janus. “I read some of it earlier.” His eyes widened as he read to the bottom of the sheaf over Cardea’s shoulder. “Look at this. He’s writing about how life is fleeting, even for gods. About what he has to do to live on. And here’s something you can relate to—how much he hates the gods whom everyone remembers and immortalizes on Earth.” He grinned. “And here—the piece de resistance. Read the line at the end.”

“DIE ODIN DIE,” Cardea read. “Not subtle, is it? It’s like Sue said—madness. Anger. It’s all here. Really could have used a comma there, though.”

“We just found strong proof Thoth did it, and you’re concerned about punctuation?”

Cardea shrugged. “I’m the goddess of door hinges. Would have been nice to be the goddess of proper grammar, though. But why would Thoth do it? What did he have against Odin?”

“For the notoriety. He’s surrounded every day by books that grant their writers a form of immortality, but he was never much of a writer himself—despite his best efforts. So it was the only way he could think of to be remembered. By killing another god.” It made a twisted sort of sense, Janus realized with a start. He shivered, uncomfortable with the idea of sympathizing with a murderer.

“No, I mean—why Odin? Thoth isn’t Norse. He never had any beef with Odin in mythology. So why choose the Allfather?”

“Let’s ask him.”

Cardea blinked. “What?”

“You have something better to do? Let’s go talk to a murderer.”

***

Didn’t you say you threw that scrap of paper aside while you were reading?

Yes.

And no one entered the garden after you left it the first time to follow Odin’s scream?

No. Not that I know of.

So you don’t know who threw the paper away? The janitorial staff wouldn’t have been out and about—not after the murder.

I guess I didn’t really think about that. No, I don’t.

Interesting.

IV.

The library was dark when Janus and Cardea arrived. The blinds were drawn, the lights extinguished, and everything was still.

“Thoth?” Janus asked the darkness. “I read the book already. I had a question for you, though.”

No answer. Long strips of light filtered through the blinds like claws trying and failing to gain purchase in the darkness.

“I don’t like this,” Cardea whispered. “If he killed Odin, what’s stopping him from killing the two of us?”

“Because he likes me,” Janus whispered back. “And he respects my taste in books. We’ll just have a chat.”

“Speaking of books,” said Cardea, “was he always such a slob?”

“What do you—” Janus’s feet trod on a pile of upended books. “No, he wasn’t.” He groped around for the light switch and flicked it on.

The sudden deluge of light shone on a scene utterly unlike the one Janus had left a few hours ago. One of the shelves was tipped onto it side, spilling volumes like a broken dam. More books were strewn around the floor in reckless defiance of Thoth’s careful organization. Loose pages lay torn and scattered about.

But Janus had only half a second to register the mess before his attention was demanded by the corpse lying in the chair by the fireplace. Thoth’s throat was a sticky-looking golden ruin, his neck and chest wet with ichor. His eyes were still open, his face frozen in uninterrupted terror.

“Oh, great Jupiter,” Cardea swore, her eyes going as wide as Thoth’s. “We gotta get out of here.”

“You’re right,” said Janus. “We’re definitely not cut out for this.”

A low, rumbling growl issued from behind them. They both spun to see a pair of glowing red eyes set into a bristling mass of matted black fur. A wolf the size of a small European car stood on the threshold of the room, blocking their exit. His paws clawed the ground, digging furrows into the carpet.

“Fenrir,” Janus said, summoning all the courage required to speak in a voice that didn’t sound strained and small.

The wolf stepped forward, kicking the main door to the library closed behind it.

“Run!” Cardea shouted.

With the exit blocked, they darted deeper into the library, into one of the many adjoining rooms crammed with books, as fast as their aged knees would take them. This wasn’t particularly fast, but Janus grabbed a shelf of books as he went and threw it in the wolf’s path. He was rewarded with a brief snort of annoyance as Fenrir ran into the overturned shelf, but it delayed the wolf only a moment.

Cardea reached a door to one of the still-dark anterooms and shot through the opening like one of Apollo’s arrows, arthritis be damned. Janus followed and slammed the door shut behind them. The act cut off the wolf, but it also plunged them back into darkness. Janus stumbled over another armchair in the dark as he groped for the light switch, but he couldn’t find it.

There came the sound of frantic claws on the door. Then the sound of something large slamming itself against the wood.

“What’s your plan?” Janus demanded of Cardea.

“Plan?”

“After we ran—”

“Don’t look at me. Fenrir had the exit blocked off. Didn’t see any other way.”

The door buckled inward with a mighty splintering sound, spears of light stabbing the darkness through the hole the wolf had made in the door. Janus caught a glimpse of slavering fangs as Fenrir’s head emerged through the splintered opening.

“I smell you,” the wolf snarled. Its voice was a deep, feral thing that Janus could feel through the floor. “I smell death on you.”

“Probably the dead guy in the other room, don’t you think?” Janus managed, his voice going embarrassingly high. “Why did you do it?”

The wolf only howled in response.

Janus and Cardea fell back into a corner of the darkened anteroom, willing themselves to melt into the shadows.

“You cannot run,” the wolf said, sniffing the air. “You cannot escape. I will rend you limb from limb as I did Thoth. As I was meant to do to Odin.”

Even hiding and about to wet himself as he was—or maybe he already had, given old age’s tenuous bladder control, from which even gods weren’t spared—Janus couldn’t help but feel his excitement rise as puzzle pieces fit themselves together.

“You never wanted Odin dead. At least not yet. You wanted him alive for Ragnarök, right? To fulfill prophecy—so you could kill him later?”

The giant wolf growled again. It rammed the door again; more wood splintered.

“Janus?” asked Cardea, her voice rising in pitch. “Janus, what do we—”

“I was foretold to kill Odin at Ragnarök,” the wolf said, pausing from its demolition of the door to glare at Janus with eyes that glowed like the pits of Tartarus. “The end of days. It would be the beginning of the end of my imprisonment here. I was to go forth and wreak my wrath upon the cosmos. So that fool Thoth thought I would aid him in his foul deed, thinking I wanted to see Odin dead.”

“Thoth asked you to help him kill Odin?” asked Cardea, her voice shaking.

Fenrir let out a growl that was slightly different from its previous growls, though it had the ring of an affirmative.

“But why Odin?” Cardea asked. “Thoth isn’t Norse. There’s no connection.”

The wolf barked out a snort of disdain. “Odin returned one of Thoth’s precious books with pages torn out. Odin merely laughed and confessed to using them to wipe his—”

“Yeah, that’d do it.” Janus let out an irrational chuckle, forgetting his peril for a moment. He was hit with a sudden flash of insight that momentarily pushed his fear back further. “So Thoth needed a target, and he chose Odin out of spite. He killed Odin, and you killed Thoth out of retribution for screwing up your prophecy.”

The floorboards echoed with the wolf’s answering growl.

“Thoth killed no one!” Fenrir pawed the floor and rammed the door again. There was a great cracking sound as some huge chunk of the wood gave way. “I ripped out his throat three hours ago. The deed was already done when I made my way back through the corridors and heard the uproar over Odin’s death.”

“Wait,” said Cardea. “That doesn’t make sense. If Thoth didn’t kill anyone—”

“Yes,” rumbled the wolf.

“Then help us find the killer!” Cardea exclaimed, sounding pleading. “We need your help, honestly.” She didn’t seem entirely at ease with the idea of having the wolf as a partner, but she was clearly more comfortable with it than she was with the notion of being his next victim.

“I will have my vengeance for the future that was stolen from me,” said the wolf. With one final lunge, it smashed aside what was left of the door and shouldered its way through the breach.

It leaped into the darkness—

—and rammed blindly into a wall as three staccato gunshots cracked through the anteroom.

Janus prepared to run through the breach, back into the main room of the library, but a shaft of light fell across the wolf’s body… and the fresh bullet wounds in its side.

Three figures stepped through the door. “You can come out now,” said a voice Janus didn’t recognize.

Janus and Cardea tentatively stepped from the shadows. “Who—who are you?” Cardea asked.

But as the light played over their tall, slim forms, he knew what they were. They were dark elves of Svartalfheim, with skin like night and eyes like fire, each wearing a trench coat and carrying a smoking .45 revolver that shone with a peculiar silver light. Janus had seen weapons like that before—they had to be pure adamantine, and of dwarven make.

The detectives had returned.

“It’s all right now,” said one of the detectives. He had a voice as calm as a frozen sea. “You’re safe.”

“Fenrir…” asked Janus, looking over at the dead wolf.

“Had to put it down,” said the detective, shrugging. “Would have killed the both of you otherwise.”

“Thanks,” said Janus weakly.

“Thank the security guard,” said the detective, pointing to a fourth figure that hung behind the other three. In the dim light, Mick was barely visible, carrying a telescoping baton in one hand. Janus could make out enough of his expression to guess the guard was happy he hadn’t had to try and face off against the wolf with just his baton. “He heard the noises and came running for us,” the detective went on. “Thank you, Mr. Mictlantecutli.”

“Mic—what?” asked Janus.

“Mictlantecutli,” said the detective. “You didn’t know?”

“I was an Aztec god of the dead,” said Mick, shrugging. “For whatever that’s worth here.”

“Sorry, Mick. I always thought—” Janus shook his head dismissively, trying to process the new information among everything else he had learned. “Thank you, Mick.”

Mick shrugged, his usual smile looking a bit shy. 

“Did you hear what Fenrir said?” asked Cardea to the detectives. “He killed Thoth.”

“The dead fellow out there?” asked another detective, poking a thumb out toward where Thoth lay dead on his armchair.

Cardea nodded.

“No, we didn’t hear a thing he said,” the first detective said. “Didn’t get here in time. But we’re hoping you can tell us. Would you folks mind coming with us? We have a few questions.”

V.

So let me get this straight. Fenrir said Thoth wanted to kill Odin out of some sort of crazed desire to make a name for himself. And because Odin—what, mistreated one of his books?

That’s right. Thoth had already made up his mind that he was going to kill a god. He just needed a target. When Odin did that to one of his precious books, it just made Thoth’s choice for him.

And then Fenrir, who wanted to kill Odin some time in the future to set off Ragnarök, tried to stop Thoth from killing him today. Only he was too late—by the time he knocked off Thoth, someone else had already gotten to Odin. Did I get that right?

That’s what Fenrir told us, yes.

Odin’s beard… This is—Oh. Seems a little, I don’t know, callous to take the deceased’s name in vain, doesn’t it? Never thought I’d see something like this in a retirement home, though. Too bad all that Fenrir business seems like a dead end. He didn’t kill Odin, so where does that leave us? Unless there’s anything else he told you that might be useful.

No, not that I can think of.

Nothing? No seemingly insignificant, throwaway comments from Fenrir? Even the slightest detail might help.

Sorry, that’s it.

I see.

***

The detectives led Janus, Cardea, and Mick from the room, passing attendants who were laying a sheet over Thoth’s body. They passed through the hallways, where residents’ doors were starting to open, curious faces looking out.

The detectives flanked them all the way to a room Janus recognized as one of the staff offices, currently vacated.

“This will do,” said the lead detective, gesturing to the office. “We’ll take you first, miss. Sir, please wait right here.” Janus settled himself onto a long couch in the foyer just outside the office. “Mr. Mictlantecutli, thank you for your assistance. You’re free to go about your business.”

“Can we get you anything while you wait?” another detective asked Janus. “I’m sure they’ve got something here you can have—coffee, tea, nectar?”

“No, thanks,” said Janus.

The detective nodded. He followed the lead detective into the office with Cardea, shutting it behind him. The third detective remained outside, giving Janus an affable smile before staring thoughtfully in the middle distance, apparently dismissing Janus and Mick from his attention.

Janus waited on a plush couch for Cardea’s interview to finish.

“Thanks for getting the detectives,” he said to Mick. “We owe you our lives.”

“First time I’ve really done my job right today,” said Mick, jabbing a short finger toward his security guard’s uniform. “Other than hauling off poor Mennomet, I guess. Feels good to have something meaningful, you know?”

“Oh, I do,” said Janus.

“Hey, is all that stuff about Thoth true?” asked Mick. “About how he wanted to kill Odin?”

“Fenrir said so. I have no reason to disbelieve him.”

Mick let out a low whistle. “That’s heavy stuff, man. It’s always the quiet ones, though. The ones that turn out to be crazy. The ones you never suspect. So—did you figure out who did it?”

“Not yet, no. You already told the detectives everything you know, right? I’m sure they interviewed you earlier, right after the first murder.”

“That’s right. Sat me down like they’re doing for you and Cardea.”

“Is there anything we’re missing?”

“That depends,” said Mick sagely, “on what you already have.”

Janus let out a little laugh. “I suppose that’s true. What did you see earlier? You said you weren’t there when the murder happened, but you were making the rounds. Anything suspicious?”

Mick considered the question, idly fiddling with the jade stud in his nose. “I saw a handful of folks out and about in the minutes before Hodr found Odin dead. Suhep-Yoggoroth was out for a breath of fresh air—well, if you can call what she breathes fresh or air. Fenrir was headed in the general direction of where Odin was found—now I realize Fenrir was heading back from the library, where he’d already killed Thoth. Then I passed Hodr too, which makes sense, given he was about to find the body, and of course Cardea was there, very politely telling me good afternoon—”

“Cardea was out in the halls too?” Janus said sharply.

“Yeah,” said Mick. “Nothing suspicious, though. Just going about her business. She didn’t tell you that?”

“No,” said Janus, glancing toward the door, behind which Cardea was relating her version of events to the detectives. “She said she was in her room.”

They lapsed into silence, each contemplating his own pressing questions. After a time, Mick rose. “Gotta get back to doing the rounds, I guess,” he said. “Best of luck to you.”

He left.

As Janus sat, he regarded his reflection in the large, gilded mirror across the narrow hall. After a time, Janus rose and walked over to the mirror.

His reflection pursed his lips.

“What are you thinking about?” asked the reflection.

“A lot,” said Janus in an undertone so the detective couldn’t hear.

“Good,” said his reflection. “You have a guess, don’t you?”

Janus didn’t answer.

“Fenrir said it smelled death,” said his reflection. “Why do you think it said that?”

Janus was still ruminating when the door opened and the lead detective poked his head out, ushering Cardea out.

“Mr. Janus?” said the detective. “We’re ready for you now.”

***

I believe that brings us to where we are now. Thank you for your account, Mr. Janus.

I’m happy to help, Detective. Will that be all?

I believe so. Would you stick around for a few minutes? We have to confer on a few things, and then we’ll make sure you get back to your rooms safely. We’ll have to lock this whole place down. There’s still a murderer on the loose, after all.

***

His interview concluded, Janus took a seat on the couch next to Cardea. Two of the detectives were still inside the office, while the third waited outside the door, smiling benignly at Janus and Cardea.

“You sure I can’t get you a drink or anything?” the detective outside asked. “They’ll be out in a moment.”

“No, thanks,” said Cardea. To Janus, she murmured, “Generous of him, offering us Olympus Heights’ own drinks.”

Janus nodded, but he didn’t say anything. A train of thought had begun with Thoth and continued—almost unbeknownst to Janus’s conscious mind—with Fenrir and Mick. Now Janus tried to halt it, but he couldn’t. That train blazed on to its conclusion, unstoppable as Charon’s ferry as it bore the souls of the dead to Hades.

They were both quiet for a few moments until Cardea spoke up, still in a whisper. “I think I know who did it.”

Janus looked up, surprised.

Cardea leaned in, whispering.

“There was someone today that we never really considered. Someone walking the halls, like he always does.”

“Cardea, I’m not sure…”

“Mick’s a god of death. There’s never any death around here—just stone statues. I’ll wager he missed the old days and... well... ”

“That’s all you have to go on?”

“Do you have someone better?” Cardea asked, the faintest tinge of scorn in her voice. “Sue said he was out in the halls during the murder, but we ruled Mick out at first because I didn’t know—”

“Don’t pretend you weren’t out there, too,” Janus said slowly, his train of thought finally pulling into its mental station. “Mick said he saw you right before it happened. You told me earlier you were in your room cross-stitching.” He gave Cardea a disappointed frown. “You lied to me.”

Cardea flushed. “I told the detectives the truth, at least. Just now. At the time—with you—it just seemed a bit suspicious, and I didn’t want you to think—”

At that moment, something buzzed in the nearby detective’s pocket. As Janus watched, he reached in and pulled out a small metal instrument covered in magic runes.

He held it up to his ear.

“Yeah?” the detective asked some unseen speaker. “All right, great. I’ll let them know.” The detective shoved the device back into his pocket. Addressing Janus and Cardea, he said, “You folks wait here for a minute, will you? Gotta tell my partners something. I’ll be right back.”

He disappeared into the office, leaving Janus and Cardea alone with the security guard.

“You know, Thoth was right about one thing,” said Janus. He gave Cardea a pitying look. “When it comes down to it, the mortals will forget us all eventually. But our names—those can live on among the other gods even after we’re stone.” He stood and began to pace. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” said Cardea, her voice taut with wariness.

“What would you do to assure you would be remembered? Don’t tell me Thoth is the only one who’s come up with the idea of doing something drastic.”

“Janus,” Cardea said sharply. “You’re scaring me a little. We all think like that—you just said that.”

“Especially if that drastic action involved getting back at one of the gods people tend to remember in the mortal world. Two birds, one jealous stone, right?”

Cardea said nothing.

“You know, when you get down to it, the things you said earlier aren’t that unlike Thoth’s crazed poetry,” Janus said.

“Janus.” Cardea’s voice turned pleading. “You don’t seriously think it was me, do you?”

“I don’t know,” said Janus. “Then there’s the murder weapon. A kitchen knife. The kind you’d use to cut sweet rolls with. I was there with you in the cafeteria—I wonder if I’d have seen you slip a knife into your pocket if I had been paying closer attention.”

“Janus, anyone could have gotten a knife. We weren’t the only ones to get sweet rolls today—or to go near the cafeteria.”

“No, we weren’t. But it all fits. Motive, means, opportunity—you have it all.” Janus found himself trembling. “And lastly, there was something Fenrir said, something I dismissed. Something I didn’t even tell the detectives. But the more I think about it…”

“Janus, don’t—”

“Fenrir said it smelled death, Cardea. I thought it was smelling Thoth’s corpse, but what if it wasn’t? It smelled Odin on you.”

Cardea’s mouth opened to protest, but the words were stillborn on her lips.

Bile rose in Janus’s throat, the physical manifestation of the shock of betrayal. Cardea was his friend—his only real friend here at Olympus Heights. But that bile was forced down by the cool knowledge that he didn’t fault her for her actions. Not exactly. No god wanted to go out like Mennomet. What would he do if it meant being remembered?

“The funny thing is, I don’t know if I blame you,” said Janus.

“Janus…” It was the only word Cardea seemed to manage. She shook her head, tears springing from the corners of her eyes. “Janus…”

“What now, I wonder,” Janus mused. “I guess I just hold you here until—”

The office door flew open as the three detectives burst out into the waiting area. Cardea let out a cry of alarm and jumped back.

“Detectives,” Janus called out, breathing a sigh of relief. He was glad this didn’t have to get difficult—more than it already was. “She’s here. I figured it out. I didn’t want it to be her, but it fits—it was her all along—”

The detectives walked straight past Cardea.

“We got a call just now,” said the detective who had been waiting outside until a moment ago. “The lab ID’d the fingerprints they found at the scene.”

“What do you…?” Janus trailed off.

The lead detective stepped forward. “Janus, god of beginnings and endings, you’re under arrest for the murder of Odin Allfather.”

For a moment, Janus was certain he had misheard. Why in all the Nine Realms would they be after him? “What?”

“Save the feigned innocence for the judge,” said another detective. “We’re here to take you to Erebus for trial.”

“I don’t—” Janus looked helplessly at Cardea, whose face was twisted with the pain of betrayal. “But I didn’t—”

“Oh, I’m afraid you did,” said a voice.

 As the detective affixed adamantine handcuffs to his wrists, Janus spun to see his reflection clapping softly in the hallway mirror. His reflection wore no handcuffs.

“What are you talking about?” Janus demanded.

“I told you there was another way,” his reflection said smugly. “You thought I meant for you to investigate the murder? We need to work on our communication, you and I.”

“You—”

“Always looking backward, dear Janus. Never willing to take a step forward. Willing to die in obscurity if not for me.”

“You killed Odin?”

“We’re two aspects of the same being, aren’t we? I did the dirty work while you were sleeping, but deep down you were right there with me. You remember it now, don’t you?”

“No, I—”

“You weren’t paying attention to that scrap of terrible poetry we found in the book,” said Janus’s reflection, “but I was. I’ve been considering this course of action for some time—and when I read Thoth’s scribblings, I realized we had to take action quickly. He had the same idea I did, and nobody cares about a copycat. If we wanted notoriety, we had to be the first.”

The memories came in sudden flashes, like a dark temple on a hill illuminated by streaks of lightning. He saw himself pocketing a knife in the cafeteria. He saw himself taking a nap in the statue garden—and then rising again. Like a sleepwalker, but part of him was fully aware—the part of him consumed by a singular, terrible purpose.

“No,” said Janus, trying to shut out the sudden onslaught of hidden memories. He saw himself crumpling up the scrap of paper, throwing it away, and striding from the garden, his steps steady with murderous intent. “Please stop. This is madness.”

“Madness is sitting here day after day, century after century, reading those insipid mysteries,” said his reflection.

“You getting all this?” one of the detectives asked the other, who nodded, scribbling away on a notepad.

“Yes, I do hope you’re writing it all down,” said Janus’s reflection with a smug smile at the detectives. “Let me know if I need to speak more slowly or repeat any key points.” Addressing Janus again, he went on. “We waited till Mick, Cardea and Hodr had each passed. Then we left the memorial garden. We ducked into the restroom when I heard Suhep-Yoggoroth and Fenrir coming around the corner. Then we confronted Odin.”

Janus saw it all in a blink of an eye—the knife was thrust into Odin’s heart before the Allfather could scream. And then Janus was back in the garden before anyone saw him leave.

“But—I heard a scream,” Janus whispered. “It woke me from my nap.”

“Just a dream,” said his reflection. “Your sleeping self was still, er, processing the murder we had just committed. Deep down, at some level, you knew what we had done.”

“Why?” asked Janus, numb with shock and horror.

“I think you know,” said his reflection.

“You got it all, Snari?” the lead detective asked the one with the notepad.

“Bit unorthodox,” said the notepad detective. “It checks out, but I’ve never had a reflection confess before.”

“It’ll hold up in court,” said the lead detective. “Boys, let’s get him out of here.”

Janus reached out to Cardea as the detectives led him into the hallway, but she recoiled and refused to meet his gaze.

As they walked through the hall, doors opened tentatively. Gods and goddesses peeked out.

Janus turned his head to see Cardea still standing outside the office. Were those tears running down her face?

By the time they reached the end of the hall, there wasn’t a closed door in sight. Janus wasn’t sure how word had gotten out, but the entire floor seemed to have turned out to watch the murderer go. Janus’s reflection jogged along the long hall mirror to keep up as the detectives led him through the gauntlet of onlookers. Though Janus felt as though he were struggling to stay afloat in a raging river of his own fear, his reflection wore a look of grim satisfaction.

The whispers followed in his wake.

“He killed…”

“...murdered a god!”

“...ever happened here before?”

The detectives pushed Janus through the outer doors of the retirement home. A blue-and-black police carriage drawn by four eight-legged horses waited there, one door open to receive him. Lights atop the carriage flashed. More troll policemen stood ready in case Janus made any trouble.

The detectives shoved the handcuffed Janus inside.

Through the carriage’s window, Janus watched his fellow Olympus Heights residents assembling in front of the doors to watch him go. Now none of them spoke; they simply stared after him. He knew what they were thinking—he was thinking it, too.

This couldn’t be real. In a moment he would awaken from his nap, perhaps in the memorial garden, and none of this would be real.

“What have you done?” he hissed to the reflection that now lurked in the carriage’s rearview mirror, though he knew the answer.

“You’ll thank me later,” said the reflection. “You were just a god before. Now you’re immortal.”