Eastover is mostly trees. An occasional house or store interrupted the forest, but it is still mostly trees. I knew the James River was somewhere to my right, but I didn’t know exactly how far away. I had no sense of it. The forest felt wrong as if something wicked lurked just out of sight. The Headless Horseman could have ridden past us and I wouldn’t have been surprised. Or a sign that said “Enchanted Forest. I’d turn back if I were you.” The place felt like something malevolent. It seemed to permeate the dirt, the tall trees, the and air we were breathing. Aaron didn’t say anything, but I know he felt it, too. In my peripheral vision, I could see his eyes darting back and forth like he was watching for something to crawl toward us from between the trees. Or maybe this was his predator mode, ever watchful for dangers.

Finally, Eli eased his Corvette onto the shoulder of the road just before a turn-off and got out of his car. He motioned to Bill, walked toward my Blazer, then waited for Bill to get out of his car before he spoke. “Alright, this is the road that leads to the plantation house. We passed a couple of small stores back that way. Bill and I will start there. Athena, you and Aaron keep going to see what’s up the road.” Eli had put in his contacts, likely while he was waiting for Aaron and me to finish talking to Julie, and his golden shining eyes were now brown and ordinary. Bill nodded toward him, accepting Eli’s leadership and walked back to his car.

In my rearview mirror, I watched Bill’s three-point turn around, then waited for Eli to do the same thing with his Corvette. I pulled away from the shoulder and drove down the road, again, trying to dispel the feeling of fiendishness in the trees.

“You feel it, too, don’t you?” Aaron asked me.

“Yes. Like there is something behind any one of those trees that’s going to jump out and grab us. It’s like that feeling you get when watching a very scary movie. You know something is about to happen, but you don’t know what.”

“But in a movie, you only have to listen to the music to know something evil is lurking.” He hummed the Jaws theme to prove his point. I laughed and the air in the car seemed less oppressive.

A convenience store that sold gas appeared on the right and I pulled in. A single car waited in the parking lot. I don’t remember what kind of car, only that it was white and nondescript. The store itself was in need of a coat of paint on the outside and the array of signs hung in the glass windows hid the inside from our view. Aaron and I got out of the Blazer. There were things strewn all over the parking lot—papers, trash, leaves, broken bottles. Near the door, someone recently threw up. We stepped around the mess and Aaron pulled open the dirty, hand-print-smeared glass door.

Inside was nearly as bad as outside. There were booths for lingering, but no one sat there. One booth had an empty Styrofoam cup and some discarded food wrappers and another had ketchup smeared across it. At least I thought it was ketchup. The floor was filthy from endless dirty and wet feet, and the shelves were disarrayed and only half full.

Behind the counter, a man with a scruffy chin and a dirty, white t-shirt leaned on the display behind him. The cigarette display seemed the only part of the store that was fully stocked. In fact, the man had a lit cigarette hanging from his lips. The smoke curled up into his left eye and he didn’t seem to notice or care that his eye watered constantly.

“You got coffee?” I asked him.

“Make some, if you want it,” the man replied and made no effort to move from behind the counter. I glanced toward the coffee bar and it was littered with discarded creamer packages, sugar wrappers, and stir sticks. Someone had spilled coffee, more than once, and it had been left to dry. The coffee pot had scorched coffee in the bottom, no liquid remaining.

A glance was all it took to convince me that I was not in the mood for this man’s coffee. “What I really want is some information. We belong to the Hampton Roads Historical Society and we heard there was an old plantation house near here. You know, a big old mansion with several columns across the front.”

“Don’t know it.” The man’s voice was gruff and scruffy as his chin as if he regularly chewed and swallowed gravel. He coughed without removing the cigarette.

“You see,” Aaron said, “We are looking for a place to have a Halloween party and a friend of mine told me about this house. It seems perfect.”

“No, they didn’t,” the man said.

“Who, didn’t?” Aaron asked.

“No one told you about the house. No one who lives around here would do that. What do you really want?”

“But, you just said you didn’t know about the house,” I countered.

He finally pulled the cigarette from his lips and blew a large cloud of smoke across the room. “You look like a nice lady, all clean and smelling sweet, so you don't need to be messing around that place. People from that house don’t like visitors, especially visitors from a historical society, which you ain’t. Go back to where you came from and leave those people alone. Not a nice one in the whole bunch. What do you really want?” he asked, again.

“Why aren’t the people there nice?” I asked him.

“You best not ask any more questions.”

“If you don’t tell me what I want to know, someone else will,” I said.

“Don’t count on it. People around here don’t talk about that house much.”

Aaron jumped in, “Listen, dude. My sister may be involved with those people.”

When I felt the man’s thoughts, I knew why Aaron said what he said. The smoking man’s sister was taken in by the group at the house. “Then, your sister is already dead. Forget her. Forget the house. Go home. Stay away from that house. It’s evil and so is everyone in it.” He stabbed his cigarette out in an ashtray that was already full of butts. He pulled another one from a pack on the counter and lit it with a blue disposable lighter.

“She’s my sister, man. I can’t forget her,” I almost believed Aaron, myself.

“Then, you’ll be joining her. Joining them.”

“Them?” I asked.

“I already said too much.” He violently shook his head back and forth. In his agitation, he dropped his new cigarette on the counter and sparks flew. He picked it up and poked it back in his mouth. “No, I won’t tell you anything. Now, get the hell outta my store. Get the hell out.” The man started to move from behind the counter and I sensed that we wouldn’t get anything else from him. I walked toward the door and Aaron followed. Behind us the man shouted, “And you stay away from that house. You hear me? You stay away.”

We got back into the Blazer and I started the engine before Aaron had his door closed. I pulled out of the parking lot and drove around a bend in the road before I pulled the SUV off the road.

“What did you see?” Aaron asked me. This power that we shared meant that Aaron’s ability was augmented, but not as great as mine. I was beginning to learn our limitations already and it had only been a couple of hours since we forged our quadrumvirate.

Maybe his powers were growing, but for now, my telepathic abilities were far greater than Aaron’s. “You heard part of it,” I told him. “You know his sister joined that group. The man thinks she volunteered to go to the house. A boyfriend from there lured her in. But, Aaron, that was fifteen years ago.”

“It felt newer than that,” Aaron said. Then, “So, what did we learn that we didn’t know before we started this?”

“The neighbors are spooked by the place, too. The man was genuinely worried about us.”

“Yeah, but nothing else, useful.”

“I know, let’s keep going,” I said and Aaron nodded his head in agreement. I eased back onto the road and we continued. Next, we stopped at a small shopping center that boasted a small grocery store, a nail salon, a sub shop, a payday loan store, and other unremarkable places. I stopped in front of the nail salon and told Aaron, “I’m going for a manicure and scintillating conversation. Why don’t you try some other shops.”

He nodded and walked toward the video store. The sign on the nail salon said, “Walk-ins welcome,” so I did. No other customers waited, and after a moment I said, “I would like a manicure.” Three ladies that looked like they worked there lounged around a workstation in the back of the shop. The oldest of the three said, “We’re closed.”

“The sign on the door says you’re open.”

“I own the place and I say we are closed.”

“I want to ask a couple of questions...”

“Did you hear me, lady? I said we are closed.” She stood to her full height of just barely five feet, but she still managed to look menacing. “Go back where you came from. No one will talk to you. It is better if you leave everyone alone. Don’t make trouble for us.” So, they knew we were asking questions. Did the smoking man call her? Or did they find out via another method?

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

That’s when I knew what worried the woman to the point she was rude to a potential customer. The people at the house liked their privacy, for obvious reasons, and had scared the locals into protecting them. I saw the image in the woman’s mind of something huge and dark that lurked outside her house. I heard the eerie noises it made and felt her terror when it rattled her door. It was a threat. It wanted her scared so she would keep its secrets. The creature was Phobos.

It didn’t seem to matter where we went that early evening, we were warned off. Phobos knew we were close. Whether he was actually guilty of the crimes or if he simply wanted privacy, I didn’t know. I only know we were told time and time again to go away.

We four met at a McDonald’s and ate hamburgers and fries while we compared notes. Bill and Eli had the same tale as Aaron and me. Old fashioned police methods weren’t working. The next question was, what did we do next?

“I don’t know about you guys, but these locals only tell me that we are getting close to the killer,” Bill said around a mouthful of burger and special sauce. “I mean, if everyone around here is telling us to get out of here—and my guess is that we aren’t the first people to come looking for folks up at that house—your pal Phobos has been terrorizing the neighborhood for a long time.”

“But, why would people stay here if they are terrified?” I asked. “The woman in the nail salon was quaking down to her shoes. I would think they would leave.”

“Interesting thought...” Aaron said. “Maybe he has some kind of hold on these people, too.”

“That’s not it,” Bill said. “Don’t you guys know anything about people? They stay because this is their home. While they may be frightened, they also know if they don’t call attention to themselves, they will be safe. They can go to work, take care of their families, and live. Ask yourself why people stay in ghettos where there are gunfights in the street every night. Most people aren’t shooting up the neighborhood. They are watching reruns of Mythbusters on the TV.”

I found myself nodding in agreement. I couldn’t argue with him. “You stay inside and you don’t bother anybody and you are safe.” I repeated. Once Bill said it, I knew it to be true, but Bill knew it all along. Maybe this new power base we have established doesn’t mean being able to read each other’s minds all the time. Or maybe even our Olympian brains are limited in that we cannot learn everything all at once.

We cleaned up the debris from our quick dinner and walked toward the door. “Let’s meet back at the apartment,” Eli said to all of us and headed toward his Corvette.

Aaron trotted up to him and said something in Eli’s ear. Eli nodded and then said to me, “Athena, Aaron is going to ride with me.”

“All right,” I said. I didn’t really wonder what Aaron wanted to say to Eli because I knew Eli would let me know later.

I lingered for a few minutes in the parking lot after the guys pulled away. I could sense that Bill was deep in his own thoughts regarding this strange case and that Eli and Aaron were engaged in a deep conversation about Aphrodite and Hephaestus. For my part, I wondered about Bill’s original suggestion that we simply knock on the front door. It could be that simple, just knocking and asking to talk to Phobos. Once near him, I would know what he knows.

I turned down the narrow road that led to the plantation house.

Twilight. Trees converged overhead, creating a living tunnel and deepening the already dark shadows. The road was not maintained very well and not very well traveled as far as I could tell. Weeds grew over the edges and in between cracks in the asphalt. I switched on the headlights.

Abruptly, the asphalt ended and I was on a sandy road that was little more than a path between the trees. I engaged the automatic four-wheel drive on the Blazer and pressed on, deeper and deeper into the woods. I bounced around inside the Blazer every time the tires fell into a hole. I hung onto the steering wheel with both hands so tightly that my knuckles glistened white in the light from the dashboard.

The trees seemed to creep closer to the Blazer and I slowed to a near crawl. I wasn’t worried about getting stuck in the sandy road because of the 4WD and I should have been extremely worried. The Blazer’s rear tire slid into a trench alongside the path and was buried up to the axle. “This was a brilliant idea, Athena,” I said aloud to ease my suddenly trembling nerves. I opened the door to the Blazer to investigate the damage before I dug myself into a deeper hole. “My guess is Triple A won’t come out here,” I said, aloud. I was more nervous than I wanted to admit, even to myself.

The sky was totally black and a few stars winked at me. The forest was completely silent. No crickets chirped. No frogs called. No night birds sang. On the right, fog reached its tenuous fingers toward my truck. So, the James River must be close, after all. I tried to get a sense of the house, but there was nothing. I could have been anywhere from Miami to Maine. I reached a little farther with my senses and could not feel Eli or Aaron or Bill. I knew that something was blocking me. Probably the forest, itself. Or perhaps the wards around the house extended this far. I had to be close to it.

I was nervous, but not frightened by my situation. Lingering at the front of my brain was the knowledge that I could simply transport away if anything happened.

The next step was freeing my tire from the rut I was stuck in. I found a large flashlight in the back of the truck and I shone it on the tire that was nearly buried in loose sand. A quick sweep of the immediate area revealed a lot of fallen branches that I could use to put in front of the tire for traction. I ventured a few steps away and began gathering wood. I maintained my grip on the flashlight, so my efforts were hampered. I pushed several small branches into the sand near the tire and was ready to get the truck moving, again.

I paused to admire my handiwork.

Finally, the forest made a noise. Some leaves rustled and I assumed the wind was increasing. Then, I heard a twig snap and I froze in place. I tried to transport away, but I couldn’t penetrate the shroud that surrounded me. The house was about a hundred yards in front of me and I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. Apparently, Phobos could use a kind of glamor to hide what he didn’t want to be seen.

Everything moved slowly as if in slow motion. The trees swayed slowly in the ever-increasing breeze. I took a step backward that seemed to take minutes instead of seconds. My own breathing slowed to a near-death-like state. I was in the grip of something sinister and I didn’t know how to get out.

I grew scared. Instinctively, I reached toward Eli, but I couldn’t feel him, at all. The shroud around the house not only kept me from transporting away, it blocked me from sending an urgent message out.

I was in serious trouble.

I heard his voice, whispering in the slight breeze. “Welcome to my home.” Phobos didn’t speak aloud. It was in my head and he was not truly welcoming me, at all.

Then, he was there. Phobos loomed in front of me, larger than his father, but looking very similar to Ares, the god of war. Their facial features were the same, the eyes were identical. Phobos wore his black hair pulled back in a severe ponytail that didn’t relieve the angles of his face, at all.

“Why did they send you? A woman?” Phobos asked. “Has the god of war gotten soft so that he has women to battle for him?” Deimos stepped from behind a tree, looking very much like his brother. His dark hair touched his shoulders and his black eyes smoldered with an inner fire that could never be quenched. Eris and Enyo were there, too. My sisters in that we shared the same father, but there was no further resemblance between us. They both had dark hair that hung like silk down their backs and dark eyes, while my hair was pale red—strawberry blonde—and my eyes pale gray. I stood inches taller than either of my sisters, but that didn’t cause them to fear me in the least.

“Why do you seek us?” Phobos asked me with his raspy voice that I remembered from past ages. I had heard rumors that his throat was cut with a magical weapon and had never healed properly. If that were the case, however, chances are he would not have survived at all, so the rumors may have been just that—rumors.

“I want to know about the murders,” I told him. I tried to sense his thoughts, but he blocked me. All of them blocked me. Or the glue that held me captive blocked me. I could only move very slowly.

“You want us to stop what we are doing,” Deimos said. He edged his way around Phobos until he stood beside me. “And you never cared before. Why now?”

“I am helping a friend to investigate the murders.” My voice sounded like an echo from a faraway mountain.

“A human friend?” Enyo asked me. She moved close to my other side and I knew without looking that Eris planted herself directly behind me. They created a cage with their bodies. “Why do you care about these mortals?” Shakespearean quote? I somehow doubted it.

“Why do you not?” I countered.

I received no answer from any of the four. I tried a different approach. “Are you responsible for the murders of nine people who were killed by exploding them from the inside?”

“Responsible? No one attributes the word responsible to me,” Enyo said as she slid her hand across my shoulder. It felt like a serpent slithering its way over my flesh. I shivered in spite of myself. “She will be fun to play with.” I didn’t know who she addressed, but Phobos answered.

“She is one of Zeus’s favorites. Harming her will mean harming ourselves,” Phobos said. So, he still possessed a shred of rational thought. “But, we can use her. She will bring him here.”

“She is not in Zeus’s close company any longer, dearest,” Enyo said. “She is with Helios. But she is stronger now. I sense others with her.”

“She can’t harm us,” Deimos said. “She isn’t strong enough.” Enyo shot him a look and Deimos fell silent.

Phobos responded, “I wasn’t worried about her harming us. You see, my dear aunt, we have grown in power, too.” Phobos stood even closer to me and I was unaware of his approach. It felt like I was losing precious seconds, like I fell asleep and was startled awake, suddenly. “We are strong enough to challenge Zeus. We are going to challenge him. That is our plan.”

Only then did I realize I was in serious, serious trouble. Phobos was telling me his plan which could only mean he planned to kill me. Panic rose in my chest and threatened to choke me. I couldn’t catch my breath. Wait, the voice inside my head told me. He is Fear. He wants you to fear him.

Eris laughed. “She knows and she fears. The great Athena, the goddess of war, knows and fears us.”

“It is your nature to create fear,” I countered, with far more bluster than I felt. “Phobos is Fear. Deimos is Terror. And you, sister-ling, you are Strife. All things men, Titans, and Olympians seek to avoid.”

“Then, you do not fear us?” Phobos asked, his face a mask of mirth. He thoroughly enjoyed himself.

“I fear what you can do to men. I fear your influence will have a bad effect on them.”

“She still cares about these mortals,” Deimos said.

“Mortals have a single purpose, dear aunt,” Phobos said as he traced a finger around my face. I shivered as if a spider crawled across my skin. “Mortals exist to worship us.”

“You are a fool,” I said.

Phobos laughed, then, his voice booming around the forest and sounding more like Ares than I cared to admit. “Fool is it?” Then, to Enyo he said, “Bring her.”