The Dogs of Athens (2 page)

“I saw a boy,” she says instead, and her eyes drift in the direction that he went. He's gone now, in some bar or restaurant with his friends.

“A boy,” says Daphne.

“He reminded me of someone.” Actaeon. He'd been a hunter, like her. He had spied on her while she was bathing, so she cursed him into a stag and set his own hunting dogs to tear him apart. So many hounds. Black and white and brown, with long legs and sharp teeth. They ripped out Actaeon's stomach and savagely bit his face. They hadn't known him, hadn't recognized their master in his stag disguise. Artemis doesn't remember now if that had been part of the experiment. She doesn't remember if it was an experiment at all.

“Someone,” Daphne says, and snaps her jaws. “Who, someone? I don't like your voice, the way it sounds, when you say that.”

“How does it sound?”

Daphne thinks. It has been a long time since she was human enough to decode the meaning behind every tone. She licks the backs of her fangs.

“Guilty,” she says, finally. “Regretful.”

Artemis frowns. It couldn't be regret. She hadn't thought of Actaeon in perhaps six hundred years. He was one small lesson amidst countless others.

“Every life bears regret,” says Daphne.

“Not mine,” Artemis says. “Not a life which isn't measured in time. I am no mortal, Daphne, to have only one chance before I disappear to an uncertain end. I am eternal; I can kill a thousand of them and save a thousand more, and none will matter to me more than the first.”

“Why did we come here then?” Daphne asks. “Searching for scattered family and looking back to the past? You can't lie to me, Goddess. I'm your dog.”

“I'm going back to the camp,” Artemis says. “Are you coming?”

“Soon.”

Daphne stands and wags her tail.

*   *   *

Phylonoe has been escorting tourists through the park near the Temple of Olympian Zeus in exchange for scraps of food. She's bloated on salty fries and bits of lamb. The ice cream gave her the trots; she keeps disappearing around corners to relieve herself.

“It serves you right,” Daphne scolds, and bares her fangs. “Swallowing so much city food.”

Phylonoe shakes out her pretty golden coat. Fattened up, she looks more like Erigone, except that the fur on Erigone's tail is longer, and Phylonoe has white markings on her snout and feet.

The pack had finally come together again. Artemis had woken to find them lying at the edge of the camp. Iphigenia was stretched out across the ground. Loxo kicked at her long brown ears with a hind foot.

She didn't know when they'd returned. Sometime after she'd gone to sleep, and she'd been awake almost to dawn, staring up at the fading stars and wishing it was winter so that she could see Orion. Wondering where the other gods were, or if she had somehow inexplicably become the last.

“You were right about this place,” she'd said to the dogs upon waking. She'd drawn her knees up and picked a dry twig from her hair. “We should go.”

The dogs hadn't paid much attention. They'd yawned and regarded each other with shifting brows until Daphne muttered with her snout in the dirt. “Soon,” she said. “Now we rest. And tonight we hunt.”

The dogs woke in the afternoon and slipped away in pairs until Artemis was alone again. Since they'd arrived in Athens, they'd been so scattered. It's a surprise to find them together in the Monastiraki market, near sundown.

Phylonoe returns from her latest bathroom break and stretches her hind legs. The pack stands out here, amongst the tourists. If they linger too long, someone will wander over to the beautiful girl and her handsome hounds, and want to pet them.

“We thought you'd never arrive,” Iphigenia says. “Where were you?”

“Wandering,” Artemis says.

“Wandering. Looking for lost gods? This place is full of lost gods. Fallen gods and old ghosts. The sand doesn't smell the same. Nothing is sacred.”

Artemis looks at them with pity. They are irritable, and—except for Phylonoe—poorly fed. There hasn't been much meat on whatever they've been catching, and they're stretched so thin that they almost look taller.

“You're right,” Artemis says. “This was futile. I can hardly remember why I wanted to come. Why I wanted to see them.”

“Haven't we always taken care of you, Goddess? Are we not your immortal companions?” Daphne asks, and flashes her teeth.

“There is a house,” whispers Loxo, “on a southern hill. It's filled with death. I passed it two days ago, looking for dogs to eat.”

“Dogs do not eat dogs,” Artemis says sharply.

Loxo's ear twitches. “The house belongs to Hades,” she says. “But he is not in it.”

Hades. King of the underworld.
How do you know it is his? For how long has he not been in it? Have you not scented any others?

Artemis wants to ask these things, but the hounds wouldn't answer. They don't like the change that they sense in her. She, who has been changeless since the beginning.

“You said we would hunt,” she says instead. “Where? In the hills?”

Something ripples through the pack. Something that not even Artemis can hear.

“Stay,” Daphne says. She goes around the corner of the building. The other dogs whine. But it is only a moment before she returns, a human.

Artemis holds her breath. It has been a long time since she's seen Daphne as the girl she once was, the white-armed, raven-haired beauty in a short tunic and sandals. Daphne spares the pack a glance, and then moves off into the crowds.

“What is she up to?” Artemis asks. But the moment she sees Daphne slide into the center of the group of boys, she knows. The boys are drunk and excitable. It will not take long for them to rise to the bait.

“We could go north,” Artemis says softly, “and fell bear. We could run them down and cling to their shoulders and dodge their claws.” In the center of the boys, Daphne has her hands everywhere, running along their jawlines and tracing their chests. There are five of them, and they are perhaps twenty or twenty-one, but they are still just boys, not men like they would have been once, at that age.

“We could go south, after antelope. We could tumble a dozen and carve up the best cuts. We could eat beside lions and jackals.”

The pack does not listen. Their eyes and ears are on Daphne, and their prey. Iphigenia growls.

“We should not have come here,” Artemis whispers.

*   *   *

The boys are loud; easy to track around the corners of the darkening Athens streets. Artemis doesn't know what Daphne has promised them; a party, perhaps, or some grand adventure; but they laugh and hoot innocently, casting pale, open-mouthed shadows on the walls.

These boys have done something,
she thinks.
Committed a crime, or a sin to be punished for.

Haven't they all? Haven't all mortals offended in some way? And isn't it always her pleasure, to dispatch them?

But there is something different about this hunt. It's in the hunch of her dogs' shoulders and the eager foam on their lips. They look savage. They tremble, and look mad.

The pack darts around the corner at some unknown signal from Daphne. There is a gentle, collective gasp. The boys are surprised, but not afraid. They've seen many packs of roving, friendly strays. They don't start to scream until they see the teeth. Some don't scream until they feel them.

Dog kills are noisy. They're full of movement: paw pads and claws scratching across the stone of the alley, the sound of snapping jaws growing wetter with blood. Clothing pulled until it tears. Flesh pulled until it rips. Shouts for help. Cries. A growl so deep that it is almost a purr.

When it grows quiet, Artemis rounds the corner. Whether the boys tried to stand together she can no longer tell. They've been dragged apart and lie shredded, faces slack and eyes already glazing. One boy for each dog, and perhaps that was the only reason they were chosen in the first place.

“Help me.”

Artemis glances at two dead faces before she sees him. He's still alive, facing her, and facing Daphne, who stands with fingers hooked into talons, unable to decide in which of her forms to kill him, maiden or dog.

“It's you,” Artemis says. “The boy who looks like Actaeon.”

His hands shake, useless, at his sides. Loxo stops tugging at his friend's intestines and growls at him with a red muzzle.

“This one is mine, Goddess,” Daphne says. She sinks back down onto all fours. Her fangs return with her shiny black fur. They are longer, and sharper, than Artemis has ever seen them.

“Oh,” the boy whimpers, and Artemis sighs. The boy is not Actaeon, but that doesn't matter. All Artemis knows is that she cannot stand in an alley of corpses and watch that face be torn again to pieces.

“Come, Daphne,” she says. “Leave him.”

She gives the command, and Daphne's hackles rise. The muscle of the big hound's haunches stretch beneath her skin.

“Daphne,” Artemis says, and the disbelief in her voice is plain.

Daphne snarls. She lunges, straight for the boy's throat.

Artemis has no bow, or arrows. Not even a knife. She's come unarmed into the city, except for her fists and her wits. She leaps and gets hold of Daphne around the ribs. The dog scratches and snaps. She twists in Artemis' arms, the two of them rolling and kicking up dust. Artemis hears her own breath. She hears the whines of the pack as they watch nervously. She was never as good at hand-to-hand as her older sister Athena, but she manages to kick out and send Daphne rolling.

Daphne strikes the wall of the building beside them and yips. She lies still in a dusty black heap. Artemis rises. The pack looks unsure. Iphigenia's wide, yellow eyes move back and forth between the goddess and the fallen dog.

The boy is gone. He cleverly used the commotion as a distraction to escape, and Artemis is thankful. If he'd been standing there shivering, she wouldn't have saved him twice. She walks to Daphne and kneels, stroking her soft black fur.

“Daphne. Are you hurt?”

The fur beneath her hands trembles. The black dog twists around and bites. Her fangs sink deep into Artemis' hand.

Artemis jumps back. Dark red blood wells in the holes and runs out onto the ground. Daphne licks it off of her teeth. The pack laps it out of the dirt. The wounds do not heal.

Phylonoe's tail is low, but wagging. One of the dogs growls but Artemis cannot tell which. They sniff at her blood as it continues to run.

“It's not healing,” Artemis says.

Daphne shoulders through the pack and lowers onto her belly. Her ears are tucked, and her tail thumps the ground, contrite.

“Forgive me, Goddess,” she says. “I don't know what came over me.”

The pack edges closer, their noses twitching. A voice in Artemis' head says,
Run.

It sounds like Apollo.

“You were overtaken by the hunt. It was my fault, for keeping you out of the wild.”

Daphne's tail thumps harder. Her brown eyes are soft. She licks her jaws, and her fangs are long.

The pack shoves red noses into her hand and licks the wounds. Their tails wag excitedly.

“We'll go after game again,” says Artemis. “We'll go to the jungle.”

Run, sister.

But she cannot run. She strokes their sweet heads, and scratches Erigone's lopsided ear. She could never run from them. They are her companions. They are her dogs.

In the back of her mind, the voice comes again, the one that sounds so very much like her long-lost brother.

They are not your dogs anymore, Artemis.

They are beasts.

About the Author

Kendare Blake
holds an MA in creative writing from Middlesex University in northern London. She is the critically acclaimed author of
Anna Dressed in Blood, Girl of Nightmares
, and
Antigoddess.
She lives and writes in Lynnwood, Washington. You can sign up for email updates
here
.