“Excuse me?” Lou said angrily, pushing back from his desk and standing up. Karter took a step forward. Lou was tall and lanky, and Karter was uncoordinated as hell. I couldn’t imagine the two of them fighting.

I grabbed the back of Karter’s shirt and pulled him toward me. I had more questions, but I couldn’t let Karter beat up this wraith of a man in the basement of his funeral parlor. “Thank you for your help. We’re gonna go.”

Lou shifted his gaze to me and his posture relaxed. He retook his seat. “It has been my pleasure. Will you give Marie a message for me if you happen to see her?”

“Uh, sure,” I said.

He smiled and his thin lips stretched across his yellowing teeth. “Tell her I don’t appreciate having to clean up after her. She’s sloppy. Please remind her that she has had plenty of time to get her act together.”

“Right.” I assumed he was talking about the men in the woods. I took Karter by the arm and led him upstairs.

We left Lou’s and went to the truck. I felt better after leaning my head against the dash and taking a few deep breaths. Karter sat in the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel.

“Saying those things to you like that? What the hell is wrong with him?” He reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Briseis.”

I sat back in the seat. “I don’t understand how this has been happening in this town for generations and everyone is trying to keep a lid on it. What for?”

“I don’t know,” Karter said. “I can’t get over fuckin’ Lucifer in there. That guy was creepy as hell. He didn’t give off a creep vibe?”

“He did, but he works with dead bodies all day.”

“He looked like a dead body.”

Karter wanted to get as far away from Lou’s as he could, but I was the one who’d just discovered that a bunch of my relatives had died horrific deaths and that a lot of them, my birth mother included, had been murdered. Lou was clearly involved in a cover-up but his insistence that there was a good reason for it unnerved me.

Karter drove me home, and I texted Marie to tell her I’d seen Lou and that we needed to talk face-to-face. She hit me back right away to let me know Nyx would pick me up in a few hours.

CHAPTER 24

Karter dropped me off at the house and I went straight to my room. I sat on the bed and tried to let my mind settle enough to piece together what Lou had shared with me. I wasn’t any closer to finding out what I was supposed to do with the Heart and who might have been trying to get to it through me. The plants on the hearth turned toward me, acknowledging in their own little way that they understood my frustration. It made me feel better.

I went down to the apothecary and collected a few perfectly cultivated rosary peas to replace the broken ones on Marie’s necklace. I folded a square of scrap paper into a makeshift envelope and slipped them inside.

My phone dinged. An email notification hung at the top of the screen with Dr. Kent’s name in the subject line. I stuck the envelope with Marie’s gift in my pocket and opened the email.

Hello Briseis,

Angie told me you are thinking of majoring in botany when you get to college, but if you change your mind and want to venture into classical studies, please let me know. You seem to have a passion for it. As for your questions, I’ll try to address them in order.

1)Yes, I charge a consulting fee, but not for this conversation. I cannot express how touched I was that you understand the value of picking another person’s brain. You are a gem. Truly.

2)Oftentimes, the stories we think of as purely legend are based, at least in part, on real-world events. There are stories, for example, of the Priestesses of Apollo and the Oracle at Delphi. Many believed these were tall tales, but we’ve found the actual temple where the Pythia sat to give her predictions. We’ve uncovered the palace at Knossos where King Minos ruled. His wife, Pasiphae, was the mother of the Minotaur in Greek mythology. We now know the location of Troy, where the Trojans sent their famed horse full of invaders. Alexander the Great made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Achilles so that he could pay his respects. This is a fact. These people, these stories, are grounded in truths that have been exaggerated and distorted over time.

3)As for Medea specifically, there is less known about her beyond what the classic stories tell, but in my own research I have found evidence that she was a real person and that her origin story may have predated the Greek mythology by hundreds of years. She was indeed described as a witch or sorceress, but not like the witches we think of today. Think of her more as a priestess, someone initiated into the mysteries of a certain set of beliefs. Most priestesses were thought to be chosen by the gods or goddesses they served. In Medea’s case, she was a devotee of the goddess Hecate, but Hecate only arrives in Greek mythology in the fifth century BCE, which means that, like so many other Greek myths, she originated somewhere else much, much earlier. Long before the Olympians i.e., Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades come on to the scene. Hecate was shoehorned into Greek storytelling when people became aware of her later on, but one of her earliest mentions is alongside Medea. They are always linked, implying some deeper connection that has yet to be discovered.

Medea is said to have killed her own brother in an attempt to avoid being married off by her tyrannical father, who happened to be the son of the god Helios. She was said to have been cursed in some way because of this. What I know for certain is that her legend has been twisted, retold, and reimagined so many times that original elements have been obscured. I don’t believe she killed her own children, as only in Euripides’s play does she do this. There is some evidence to support my theory.

There is a folio in the Vatican Archives that a colleague of mine had access to about twenty years ago. It’s an assortment of documents that he believed were saved from the Library of Alexandria. These ancient, priceless relics were in pretty rough shape. One of them was the Medea story, and that version predated the stories we know now by centuries. There was even some talk about it being composed by someone who knew her. My colleague had planned to decipher the ancient Greek and try to mend the document, but his access to the archives was unexpectedly and without explanation revoked. There were rumors that the document had been “misplaced,” which is doublespeak for stolen or destroyed. I lean toward destroyed, because it is nearly impossible to remove anything from the Vatican Archives without being caught.