We didn’t have to go to the fighting, it came to us. It seemed most of the immortals chose ancient weapons while the humans fought a different kind of combat—one with guns. Shots rang out, but a simple ward was enough to deflect a bullet. All around us, bullets ricocheted off of personal barriers and the humans didn’t seem to notice they were doing no damage to us. The personal barrier was like the ward that was around the house. It was a shield made of magic. The humans were losing badly, and those they followed fared only marginally better.

Eli, the former god of the sun, threw a metaphysical ball into the air, and suddenly, an area the size of a football field was brilliantly lit. The ball of light hung over us and would be there until Eli willed it away. Fighting something I can see is far better and far safer than fighting something I can’t see. I made a mental note to thank him later.

The hovering light also gave our opponents a clearer vision of the status of the war. My sister charged me, screaming in rage. Enyo clothed herself in blood. Something that looked like intestines coiled around her red leather bikini and seemed to wiggle like a serpent every time she moved. I understood what Ares meant when he told me she bathed in blood before a battle. Looking at her, it was easy to think she wore a bodysuit instead of only a bikini. Another human died if the intestines were any indication.

She stood before me, sword poised. “Why are you here?” she screamed. Her blood-coated face terrified many armies before our small one. I knew her well and her gory aspect only served to reinforce my determination to defeat them.

“Why are you killing humans?” I screamed back at her.

“Humans are nothing to me. They are fodder. They are inferior beings that were created for us to play with. Why do you care about them?”

“We had a job to do. We were to teach them. Not play with them,” I answered.

All around me the sounds of the conflagration pounded in my ear and jarred my body. Swords clashing, guns firing, people screaming, shouting, scuffling. I focused on Enyo, again. I slashed at her with my sword.

She countered with a blow of her own.

“I don’t want to kill you,” I said to her as I parried a thrust.

“Then, why fight me? It is my intention to kill you, if possible. You face me with a sword and you are the enemy. I kill my enemies.”

“You simply don’t understand, Enyo. I cannot allow you to continue to kill people. I saw what you did in the dining room. You bled a man to death. You then used the blood to decorate your murder scenes.” I swung the sword rhythmically. She easily countered each blow.

“You are totally wrong, Athena. I didn’t decorate those murder scenes with blood. I used the blood to bathe in. I took a bath in the blood. That is the key to true immortality, you foolish woman.” Our race was naturally long-lived and very tough, but we could be killed. We are not immortal as she said.

I grabbed her wrist in a move that was so fast, it surprised me as much as it did her. I twisted her wrist until her sword fell to the grass, pointing down. The blade gently swayed back and forth, as if blown by a summer wind. “What do you mean, you didn’t decorate the murder scenes with blood? If not you, then who?”

“One with a far darker spirit than mine, dear sister,” Enyo replied. She dropped to her knees because I continued to twist her arm into an unnatural position. I sheathed my own weapon, reached for her sword, and threw it as far as I could, toward the forest. Disarming her would only slow her down, I knew, but I did it anyway. I didn’t want any surprises.

While still holding her wrist at an unnatural angle, I showed her my sword, allowing her to see it an inch at a time. I thrust it into her chest with a single jab and she collapsed in front of me. Enyo wouldn’t die from her wound, but it would take her a while to re-grow a lung. She gasped for air and clutched at her chest as if holding on would heal her wound faster.

I returned my attention to the battle. The stench of war filled my nostrils. The odor of intestinal gases was cloying in the night air. Lesser Olympians and humans lay side by side on the blood-slick grass. Too many of Phobos’s followers simply didn’t know how to fight. The use of weapons wasn’t a skill many needed in the twenty-first century.

The action wasn’t finished, even though the bad guys had half their ranks down. As the conflagration progressed, my companions had arranged themselves in a loose circle around me to keep us from being attacked from behind. I spun around until I saw the one I had to speak with. Phobos and Ares strove together.

In a move born out of the newly found power, I stepped between Ares and Phobos to grab Phobos’s weapon arm. His long sword dropped to the ground. Ares yelled at me. “Why did you do that?”

I didn’t answer Ares. I confronted Phobos and asked him amid the sound of the bones breaking in his arm, “Did you kill those people? Did you kill the boys in the mall?”

“No,” he growled. “It was a fabulous idea that I wish I had thought of. Is that what this is all about? You think I am responsible for killing those people.” He struggled against me, but I held on. The sound of crunching bones was pleasant to my ears. At that moment, I wouldn't have cared if I tore his arm completely off.

“I saw you allow people to die in your house,” I accused.

“Any who died in my house were willing victims. And many we bled didn’t die. They enjoyed the bloodletting. You are both so stupid. You, dear Aunt Athena, and you, dearest Dad. You are like the worse soldiers that ever lived. You keep attacking the wrong people.”

I began to get a heavy feeling in my own chest as if I was the one who was stabbed in the chest instead of Enyo. Could it be true? Phobos may be capricious toward human life, but he had no reason to lie.

“Stop this fighting and we will talk,” I said to him.

I released Phobos’s arm and he stared at me for a long minute. Finally, he shouted to his followers. “Desist!”

He waited until the noise settled down and then he addressed his father and me. “What happened in this house was simple. We gathered people who thought of us as some kind of hero. They were followers. Worshipers. Regardless of your opinion of that act, that is my worse crime. Yes, people died, but they wanted to die. They volunteered to die. They thought in death, they would become as we are.”

Phobos reached out and pulled a small blonde human female to his side. “What do you want from me?” Phobos asked her.

She gazed up at him, her eyes filled with admiration and something more. “I want your love,” she said.

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“And how do you get my love?” he asked her.

“You just have to be yourself. I love you, Phobos. I want to be like you. I want to love you forever.” The speech sounded rote as if it were memorized. Phobos had created a cult. He callously shoved the girl to the ground but she still stared up at him in adoration.

Phobos continued speaking, explaining himself. The bad guys always like to explain what they were doing and why. “You came to my house, Athena, and you had the nerve to be upset when we played with you. You were the intruder. Then, you and Hermes came back to my house and all you did was succeed in pissing off Circe and Perseis with that action. You should have left us alone. We have been here for thirty years and no one was the wiser about our life style here. Now, look at my house. Look! It is rubble. You destroyed my house!”

“I didn’t destroy the house,” I said. “I barely got out of there with my life.” I saw the look of confusion cross his face. “I had only a second to get me and mine out.”

His frown deepened even more than I thought possible. “Circe did it. She has only been among us a few weeks. She enjoyed our games, did little Circe.”

“Circe couldn’t have destroyed the house, Phobos. I took off her head in the basement of your house.”

“She was dead?”

“I think so,” I said, thinking back to those moments in Phobos’s basement.

Ares spoke. “She vanished before we could check to see if she was really dead.”

Phobos shook his head. “As I said, you are both fools. Circe isn’t dead. If she could vanish from sight after her head was chopped off, she isn’t dead. Don’t you understand? She has a greater, darker power than me or mine.”

Something inside me broke and I felt my anger flare, white-hot. “Just because there is someone who is worse than you doesn’t mean you are off the hook, Phobos. You, Deimos, Eris, and Enyo have killed more than your share of humans outside the field of battle. You are not an innocent victim here, just because someone who is worse than you showed up.”

Phobos was not, by any stretch of the imagination, exonerated for the crimes committed. He allowed himself to be worshiped, he killed untold thousands of humans in his lifetime, and he was a sadistic monster, a serial killer. But, maybe he was correct. Maybe we were looking at the wrong person as far as the recent murders. When I was a captive in the house, he never admitted to killing the people. I saw the people hanging from the ceiling and then drained of their blood and I made assumptions. We all had made assumptions from the beginning. Bill wasn’t going to like it when I told him this.

Deimos and Eris flanked Phobos in a show of solidarity. Gradually, lesser deities joined them and we were outnumbered three to one, but no one fought us. They waited.

“So tell me, Phobos, who killed those eleven people,” I said, making it an order. “You know the answer. Was it Circe? Tell me.”

“Find your own answers.” I felt him reinforce the resolve for his followers.

“Tell me,” I said, adding what should have been irresistible magic to my words. I hoped to overcome his magic with my own.

Phobos shook his head violently and said, “No. I will not tell you. Find your own answers.” He yelled the last sentence. His personal barrier became exponentially stronger as he pulled power from his flock. This was a waste of my time.

“I’m trying to find answers,” I said to him.

“Don’t look at the gods of terror and strife to get your answers. We are not friends, Athena and I will not help you.”

I did something I had only heard about, but there was nothing that would stop me from performing the next action. I bound Phobos, Deimos, Eris, the recumbent Enyo, and any of the lesser deities in a metaphysical net that prevented them from transporting away. Phobos responded to his incarceration by calling me a bitch. Well, I had been called worse things in my considerable life.

Then, I addressed the mortals who remained on the battlefield. They looked collectively stunned by the turn of events. “All of you humans need to go home now.”

“This is my home,” a woman shouted to me. “It is a pile of rubble, but it is my home.”

Most of the others nodded their agreement.

“You cannot stay here,” I said to them, compelling them with my voice. Humans were much easier than Olympians or Titans to control. “You have to find another place to stay. These you have been following are not gods. They are criminals and will be treated as such. Leave now and you will leave unbruised. Stay and you will suffer the same fate as those you follow.”

I watched as each person looked from one to the other in confusion. Each one was hoping a leader would rise up among them to tell them what to do. No one said anything and the humans gradually eased away from us a few steps.

The humans were no longer my concern. People can be forgiven for being deceived and that is what Phobos and Company had done. They were the guilty parties.

I was left with the problem of what to do with Phobos. When Zeus led the war against the Titans, he imprisoned them in Tartarus, which is simply a system of caves. He sealed the cave after binding it heavily with magic. The rebellious Titans are still alive, but unable to escape the prison created for them. After thousands of years of living in total darkness, they would be very unlikely to survive with their sanity intact. Releasing them now would have disastrous results.

A cave wasn’t necessary to imprison Phobos and his friends, at least not on a temporary basis. Just sufficiently strong bonds to keep them from transporting to another place. Where they were standing was good enough for my purposes, so I reinforced the spell that already held my prisoners.

Hercules stood close to me, so I asked him, “Can you keep these here until I return? You will have Dion, Jason, Ariadne, and Nike to help you. Ares, Eli, and I have business elsewhere.”

“They won’t move an inch, I promise,” Hercules said in his deep rumbling voice.

“We’ll be back soon,” I told him.

“Wait a minute,” Phobos shouted. “You aren’t just going to leave us here, are you?”

“Yes. For now. I am not done with you, Phobos,” I told him.

I transported Ares, Eli, and myself to Bill’s house. Typical of my abilities, a lamp fell off a side table in the living room and the large, overstuffed chair flipped over backward. Eli grabbed onto me to keep me from stumbling over the chair and I heard Ares chuckle at me. “Let someone else do that, your majesty,” Ares said. “If any of your POWs had seen that clumsy attempt to transport, your credibility would have plummeted.”

I shot him an irritated look. “Well, they didn’t see it, so I am all right.”

Hebe stepped into the living room and said, quietly, “Hermes and Bill are upstairs.” Then, “Is my husband all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “He is guarding our prisoners.” She nodded and walked away from us.

“Allow me,” Eli said, and a breath later, we appeared in my bedroom.

Bill reclined on the bed and Hermes the pig sat in a chair, watching his every move. In his pig’s voice, Hermes said, “Bill’s shoulder is still dislocated. Helios has my caduceus.” Hermes’s voice sounded guttural with the words slurred and squeaking. A difficult-to-understand voice, for a certainty. A pig’s mouth was not designed for speaking. The pig in the chair had the same mass as Hermes, although not as tall as Hermes, nor as long. Still, a pretty pig, for all that. The pink skin was covered in hair that was the same color as Hermes’s own—white blonde. The eyes belonged to Hermes, making it disconcerting to look at him.

“Hermes, can you use the caduceus in that form?” I asked him.

The piggy head nodded. Eli held it out and Hermes took it in his mouth. The caduceus resembled a short staff, nearly forty inches long with intricately carved wings a couple of inches from the top. Although statuary, myths, and even the modern day symbol for the medical profession depict the caduceus with snakes intertwined around it, the actual caduceus has two ribbons, white cotton with gold woof threads, hanging from the ball at the top of the staff. Hermes pointed the ball toward Bill to perform his healing magic. The air filled the metaphysical stuff Hermes pulled in from energy that could be found in every living thing. The hair on my arms upended when the magical effect began.

It was a gentle magic, loving magic that touched Bill’s dislocated shoulder. No wrenching pain, no long-term healing process. Bill was simply whole, again.

Hermes dropped the caduceus from his mouth and it hit the floor with a metallic clang. He asked Bill, “How do you feel?”

He moved his arm, experimentally, several times then said, “Holy Hannah! It worked.” Then, he said to Hermes, “Thanks. It’s not every day a guy gets healed by a pig with a magic wand.”