Refusing the Call

Apollo, god of the sun, medicine, music, and, like, just a ridiculous amount of other shit besides, stood in Sibyl Delphi’s kitchen. He glowed softly with a subcutaneous radiance as he towered over her, heedless of his nudity as the curls of his hair nearly touched the ceiling overhead. “Did you get all that?” he asked.

Sibyl stood in the same position she had been in when the Greek god had first appeared in her apartment with a burst of sunlight, the stirring spoon in her hand half-submerged in a boiling pot of pasta that was rapidly becoming overdone. “Uh,” she stammered. “Could you go over all that again?”

“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” Apollo said, brushing aside her bewilderment with a wave of his luminous hand. “Here, look, I’ll drop you a map pin to get started.” At his words, Sibyl’s phone pinged from its spot atop the microwave.

“Do I have time to finish making dinner?”

“Not if you want to save the world, you don’t,” Apollo said, his voice stern. That was apparently the end of the conversation as far as he was concerned, because, like a total dick, he vanished just as suddenly as he had appeared without another word.

“Well, shit,” Sibyl said, turning off the stove burner and setting the pot aside. Picking up her phone, she saw that there was indeed a map location shared with her from one ΑΠΟΛΛΩΝ. There wasn’t much to go on, only a location with a label of “Kelly.”

Sibyl swallowed an uncomfortable lump in her throat. The visitation on its own she might have been able to chalk up to some sort of hallucinatory episode, but she was stone-cold sober and this did appear to be a legitimate map pin on her phone; no amount of closing and reopening the app or navigating away from it would make it disappear.

“Let me just grab my coat, then,” she said to no one in particular.

---

The address turned out to be a club called The Piledriver, and it had the sort of cutting-edge hip aesthetic and vibe that immediately made Sibyl feel uncomfortable. The world may never know how close it came to a cataclysmic end because she couldn’t bear to approach the front door of this place, find whoever this Kelly person was, and deliver Apollo’s message. Maybe it wasn’t her place to make such observations, but it seemed to Sibyl that the whole process could maybe be streamlined a bit if Apollo would just appear before whomever he wanted to rope into this rather than sending her to do it. But he apparently spent his time with his glowing dick just swinging around, so who knew where his mind was at.

Screwing up her courage, Sibyl walked to the front door, readying her best arguments about why the bouncer should let her in to see whoever Kelly was rather than make her wait in the rather considerable line that wrapped around the building. Her best arguments were honestly pretty shit, though, which is why it was such a profound relief that she was able to just slip past the bouncer without a second glance. Indeed, no one seemed to pay her any mind as she wound her way past the bar and onto the dance floor. People just parted for her as she passed, her eyes on the phone screen as she tried to zero in on this Kelly person.

She found them tucked away in a booth at the very far reaches of the club. Sibyl knew she had found her target because Kelly was the first person to actually acknowledge her presence. Their eyes, ringed with thick eyeliner, went wide as Sibyl entered their presence. They brushed their blue and purple hair aside with a hand gloved in fishnets as they said, “You look like you’re here on a mission.”

“Uh . . . Apollo sent me, I guess? Told me I needed to assemble the demigods to stop the emergence of Typhon, Usurper of Zeus, from his prison beneath Mount Etna?”

Kelly put a cigarette to their mouth and lit it. The smoke smelled of cloves. “Hard pass,” they said.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to smoke in here.”

“Listen—what did you say your name was?”

“Sibyl. Sibyl Delphi.”

The cigarette nearly fell from Kelly’s coal-black lips. “You gotta be shitting me.”

“What? What’s wrong with my name?”

“‘Sibyl’ is another word for ‘oracle.’ That makes you the Oracle of Delphi, speaker of Apollo’s prophecy. He’s always trying to be cute like that.”

“Oh. That would certainly explain some things about tonight.”

“Was he naked?” Kelly asked, sucking on their cigarette.

“Oh yeah.”

“Yeah, that tracks. They’re always naked, every one of them. Pack of sexual assailants.”

Kelly scootched over in the booth and patted the black vinyl seat next to them. “Have a seat.” When Sibyl had sat down next to them, they continued, “How much do you know about demigods?”

“Not a lot. I took a course on Greek mythology in college, I know there was Theseus, Bellerophon, Hercules—”

“Heracles,” Kelly interjected. “Hercules was the Roman name, and the Romans were douches.”

“Anyway, yeah, a lot of demigods in Greek myth were great heroes.”

Kelly chuckled and took another drag of the cigarette. “Well, the current generation isn’t so heroic,” they said. “Gods run on worship, and there’s not a lot of belief in the family going around these days. They’re still off fucking mortals, but there’s not a lot of heroic power to imbue in the offspring. My dad’s Eros, want to know what I inherited?”

“What?”

“I am the most amazing lay anyone will ever have. I know what gets ‘em hard. I know what makes ‘em wet. Everyone wants to fuck me and be fucked by me. I mean, look at you. I bet you want to fuck me.”

“I mean . . . yeah, kinda.”

“Well, too bad,” Kelly said, taking a long drag on their cigarette for emphasis. “I’m ace.”

“Oh,” Sibyl replied, her words weighted with that particular species of disappointment born of being denied something that one hadn’t even realized until that moment one had wanted in the first place. “Well, if you can’t help me, do you know someone who can?”

“Can help? Yeah, I can introduce you to a couple of my relatives. Will help? That’s a completely separate question. I’m telling you, you need to moderate your expectations. We are not a cohort of heroes, we are just a little rabble with big daddy issues.”

“I appreciate it nonetheless.”

Kelly nodded and gestured at Sibyl to pass them her phone. A moment later, they passed the phone back, their contact information added to Sibyl’s list. “Meet me on the corner of 36^th and State tomorrow morning around nine,” they said. “I’d say wear something nice, but I don’t think that’s actually going to matter for you.”

---

The corner of 36^th and State turned out to be a Chase bank. Sibyl was there at the duly appointed hour and waited in the lobby for Kelly to arrive. At first, she was afraid that one of the tellers would call her to the counter when she did not actually have an account and had no idea what it was that she was supposed to be doing there with Kelly, but she breathed a sigh of relief that she was being ignored just as she had been at the club. It seemed that the supreme importance of Apollo’s prophecy granted some aegis of anonymity so that no one could interfere with her mission.

At just about a quarter after the hour, Kelly strolled in, wearing the outfit with the fishnets they had been wearing the previous night, though their eye makeup was now a bit mussed and their lipstick faded. They took a moment to scan the milling customers before zeroing in on Sibyl with a smile on their face.

“Did you not go home last night?” Sibyl asked, taking in Kelly’s appearance.

“I never go home. Come with me, you’ll never get service on your own.”

Taking Sibyl’s arm in their own, Kelly marched straight up to the counter with a big-ass, shit-eating grin. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii,” they said, drawing out the syllable and smothering it with honey. “I have an appointment with Erin this morning to talk about, like . . . fuck, I don’t know, a mortgage? Can you just tell her that Kelly is here?”

“Um . . . sure,” the teller said, clearly somewhat confused by the exchange. He left his post at the counter to go flag down a woman with pin-straight raven hair and an aquiline nose dressed in a sky-blue blouse. Upon receiving the message, her eyes snapped upward in Kelly’s direction, and, while Sibyl could not hear it from this distance, the woman visibly sighed. Like, a whole-body sigh. It was super rude, actually.

Erin ushered Kelly and Sibyl over to her desk and slumped into her office chair as the two petitioners sat in the considerably less comfortable client chairs opposite. “What the blessed blue fuck is this, Kelly?” Erin asked quietly.

“Erin, daughter of Hades,” Kelly said by way of introduction, “this is Sibyl Delphi.”

“Ah, fuck,” Erin said, closing her eyes and tossing her head back. “Not oracle shit.”

“Yeah, she’s got a prophecy from your cousin.”

“Well?” Erin said, fixing Sibyl with an unblinking stare. “What is it?”

“I, ah, need to assemble the demigods to stop the emergence of Typhon, Usurper of Zeus, from his prison beneath Mount Etna? I’m sorry, I don’t even know where that is.”

“Sicily,” said Kelly.

“Usurper of Zeus,” Erin said, her eyes looking toward the ceiling as she played with a Chase-branded pen between the tips of her index fingers. “You know, not a lot of us are very big fans of ol’ Zeusy. Guy is just a ridiculously huge dickbag.”

“He really is,” Kelly agreed.

“Might not be such a bad thing to see him usurped,” Erin continued.

“Isn’t Typhon’s whole thing that he’s fell and cruel and hates humans as much as he hates the gods?” asked Sibyl. “That seems like a definite trade down.”

Erin sighed and jabbed the pen back into the holder full of identical pens. “She kind of knows her shit,” she confided to Kelly.

“She had a class in college.”

“Okay,” Erin admitted, turning to Sibyl once again, “you’re not exactly wrong. But I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about it. Typhon was this whole thing with Uncle Zeus, and it took the combined might of the Olympians and Zeus’s thunderbolt to defeat him. What are we supposed to do about it? Kelly just knows what gets people off. My father is the god of wealth, so of course I work in a bank.”

“So you’re, what, good at being rich?” asked Sibyl.

Erin shrugged in response. “Good at being rich isn’t the same thing as good at becoming rich.”

“That was more Zeke’s thing,” Kelly said, with only one foot in the conversation as they tapped furiously with their thumbs across the surface of their phone.

Sibyl looked to Erin. “Who’s Zeke?”

Erin sank into her chair and nudged the cup of pens around with her index finger. “Son of Hermes,” she said. “Fucker just keeps founding startups to create messenger apps and then bails with a huge payout when they get acquired by larger companies. Should have been me. He should have been one of those sad sacks whose life peaked when he won a track meet in high school or something.”

“I hear he’s settled down and is, like, the product owner of iMessage at Apple or something,” Kelly said, nose still glued to the screen of their phone.

“Of course he is,” Erin grumbled.

“Look, this might be a weird time to mention this,” Sibyl said, “but I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist. If you want, I can give you guys a referral or something. Because I have to be honest, it sounds like your whole family has some deep-seated emotional trauma that you desperately need to work through.”

“I was thinking of taking her to see Art,” said Kelly.

“Who’s Art?” asked Sibyl.

“My nephew,” said Erin.

“My uncle,” said Kelly.

A moment of silence hung between the three of them. “Should . . . should I be taking notes?” asked Sibyl.

Ignoring her, Erin nodded slowly in Kelly’s direction. “Art might be marginally more useful than either of us, sure.”

“Would you be able to give us a lift to his house? I don’t have any money—”

“No surprise.”

“—and she’s not going to be able to call an Uber so long as she’s all covered in Apollo’s ‘Ignore Me’ glamour.”

Erin heaved a sigh and did a slow spin in her Aeron chair by Herman Miller. “Fine,” she acquiesced. “I’m off at four.”

---

Erin drove a navy-blue Honda CR-V hailing from a model year sometime after the inclusion of USB ports, but before everything was a fucking touchscreen. Exactly the sort of vehicle you’d expect from the scion of the god of death who only cleared $62K gross per year.

“It’s so convenient that you all live in the same town,” Sibyl said as she and Kelly piled into the bench backseat. “I thought I was going to have to travel the world and max out all my credit cards or something.”

“It’s not that remarkable,” Erin said, her voice distracted as she waited for her moment to pull into traffic. “There was a ‘gentleman’s club’ in town where Dionysus used to hold an annual fuck party, and eeeeeeeeveryone was invited. Every few years, there’d be an addition to the family, and then we don’t tend to drift too far away because this is where the support network is. Who else is going to know what it’s like to have an absentee father that just happens to be a god other than this family, you know?”

“Except Zeke,” chimed in Kelly. “Zeke left.”

“Yeah, well, Zeke’s a fucking tool,” Erin said through gritted teeth.

“And it’s always your fathers?” asked Sibyl.

“Mostly, yeah,” confirmed Erin.

Kelly raised a hand. “Um, excuse me,” they said. “My grandma fucked around a lot.”

“Yeah, but she’s the goddess of love, it’d be weird if she weren’t horny on main. But she didn’t fuck a lot of mortals and birth any demigods, right?”

Kelly scratched their brightly colored hair. “I think there were a couple dudes a few thousand years ago, but that might have been it.”

“So yeah. Mostly our fathers.”

“Who’s Art’s dad, then?” asked Sibyl.

“Art? Art’s dad is Ares,” replied Erin.

“What, the god of war?”

“Bless you for not thinking it was Kratos,” sighed Kelly.

“Well, this is good, right?” asked Sibyl. “This is directly applicable to the situation, isn’t it?”

“He is legitimately a brilliant tactician and military mind,” Erin admitted.

Sibyl smiled. “Sounds like things might finally be going our way!”

“Again,” Kelly cautioned, “you need to be managing your expectations.”

---

Art sat at the workbench in his garage, the rippling of his muscles visible across the broad expanse of his shoulders beneath his T-shirt as he hunched over his work. The implements of war were arrayed before him as he meticulously assembled his military might. “Blood for the blood god,” he muttered under his breath as he held a fine detail brush that looked like a toothpick between his massive fingers. “Skulls for the skull throne.”

With a trembling hand, he brought the fine tip of the brush dipped in metallic gold paint closer to the miniature figurine held beneath the magnifying lens. The soft bristles just barely caressed the surface, laying down a gilded trail along the trim of a crimson-colored greave as Art gently, ever so gently, just completely fucked the whole thing up.

“Hell damn farts,” he sighed, examining the wayward streak of gold paint cutting across the shin of his tiny armor-clad warrior fashioned in the finest space gothic grimdark aesthetics. With a sigh, he set the figurine aside on the workbench where it joined a motley crew of motley-painted space marines.

“Man, I’ll never understand why you put yourself through this,” Kelly said, having to stand on their tiptoes to even peek over Art’s hulking shoulders.

“Tournament play requires that your whole army be battle ready,” Art grumbled, carefully tweezing the head of the next figure between his unreasonably large fingers so that he could maneuver it into position beneath the magnifying lens. “That means each figure must be fully painted with at least three colors, and it has to be done in a good-faith effort. So, no painting three dots on a pauldron and calling it good.”

Erin grinned at Sibyl. “Ask him how many tournaments he’s won.”

“Do not ask me how many tournaments I’ve won,” said Art.

“How many tournaments have you won?” asked Sibyl.

Art buried his face in his meaty palms. “None,” he said quietly.

“I thought you were a brilliant tactician?”

“I am. I am completely undefeated in unranked friendly play. Any army, any faction, I will pull out the win. But all the local tourneys around here are organized by Tobey.”

Kelly smirked. “Ask him about Tobey.”

“Do not ask me about Tobey,” said Art.

“Okay,” said Sibyl, “I won’t ask about—”

“Tobey is a giant jerked turkey,” Art lamented unprompted. “He used to be the dungeon master of our D&D group in high school, but he rage quit because no matter how hard he made an encounter, the party would come out on top so long as I was playing. Now here he is, a grown adult, and he’s still holding that against me as he finds every possible reason to disqualify me from play. He always kicks me because my paint job isn’t good enough, or does something weird like make the dress code for the event business casual because he knows I can’t find khakis my size.”

Sibyl picked up one of the sorry plastic warriors and turned it over gingerly in her hands. She didn’t know much about whatever game this was, but she could definitely see how people might want to not let Art’s creations see the light of day. “Couldn’t you just pay someone to paint them for you?” she asked.

“For a whole army? Do you have any idea how expensive that would be?” Art sighed. “I don’t have the money for that. I spent it all on these figures.”

Standing up from his stool to his full enormous height, Art stretched his arms and then arched his back with an audible cracking noise accompanied by a pained grunt of relief. “Not that I don’t love to talk shop with you all,” he said, “but is there a reason we’re holding an impromptu family reunion in my garage?”

“Guess who this is,” Erin said, nudging Sibyl so hard with her elbow that Sibyl nearly fell over.

“I have no idea who that is,” Art said, removing his glasses and cleaning the lenses with the front of his T-shirt. “What, are you getting married or something?”

“What? Dude, Art, I’m straight.”

“Well, you know, this entire family is . . .” Art punctuated the sentence by extending his hand palm down and rotating it back and forth at the wrist.

“She’s the Oracle of Delphi,” Kelly said. “Got a genuine fucking prophecy and everything. Lay it on him, Sibyl.”

“Yeah, uh, hi,” Sibyl stammered. “Sorry, I should have introduced myself earlier, I’m Sibyl. Like Kelly said. Right, anyway, Apollo told me I needed to assemble the demigods to stop the emergence of Typhon, Usurper of Zeus, from his prison beneath Mount Etna.”

Art’s eyes bulged as he started in shock. Looking between Erin and Kelly, he shouted, “And you both brought her to me? You dingleberries, we’ve just assembled the demigods!”

“Relax,” Kelly said, flipping their hand nonchalantly at the wrist as they scrolled their phone. “Zeke is hundreds of miles away in Cupertino or something. We wouldn’t actually assemble the demigods and fulfill the prophecy. Do you think we’re crazy?”

“Zeke? Zeke died two months ago! They found him face down in a pile of blow on his desk! Didn’t either of you get my letter?”

“Wait, like an actual, physical letter?” asked Erin, her question followed by an ominous peal of thunder. “Does Kelly even have a mailing address?”

“Art, you asshole!” Kelly shrieked as the ground began to rumble beneath their feet. “Who the fuck sends a letter in this day and age?!”

“Do you not have a fucking phone?!” shouted Erin as she clung onto a support beam to steady herself.

“It’s not really my place to pick a side,” Sibyl yelled as the trembling rattled the siding of the garage, sending storage totes and yard tools tumbling to the ground from their places on shelving units and wall hooks. “But seriously, what the actual fuck, Art?”

“Oh noooooooooooooooooo,” Art groaned, looking upward as the roof of the garage began to tear away and ascend a blood-red vortex overhead. Raging winds descended upon them as the garage and its contents were whipped away into the swirling clouds that rippled with bolts of black lightning. Blinded by the maelstrom, Sibyl felt Art’s arms wrap around her in a protective embrace as he hunkered down over her, soon to be joined by Kelly and Erin as the quartet were buffeted by the winds of the unearthly storm.

When the gale died down, Sibyl opened her eyes. The dome of the night sky overhead stretched from horizon to horizon over the bowl of black basalt rock where they now stood. “Mount Etna!” she gasped.

“Isn’t Mount Etna a volcano?” Art asked, releasing his hold and standing up straight.

In answer to Art’s question, the ground shuddered beneath their feet and the air filled with the sound of a deafening boom as a cleft in the earth cracked wide and sent a gout of magma arcing through the air. Sibyl and the demigods scrambled backward from the otherworldly heat as a taloned hand, dripping with molten stone, emerged from the fissure and clawed at the ground. Inch by torturous inch, the monstrous Typhon emerged from his prison, the lava falling from his form and condensing into shards of obsidian on the ground as they cooled. His face was a cruel mockery of human features, and the heads of a hundred serpents writhed about his shoulders. He stood to his full enormous stature on legs that were the coiling bodies of snakes and roared at the heavens in challenge, “Zeus! I am free at last! Face me, and meet your unmaking!”

He remained staring at the sky for what seemed to Sibyl like a very long time. It was super awkward, actually. Like, at what point should she say something? Fortunately, his gaze turned earthward once more as he asked, “Am I just early? I thought this was going to be a whole . . . thing.”

“Art!” Kelly whispered. “Art, what do we do?”

Art chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t know,” he confessed.

“Art!” Erin hissed. “It’s like your whole thing to win battles!”

“A level-one party going up against the BBEG is not a combat encounter!” Art hissed in return. “It’s a cutscene where we die!”

“Excuse me!” Sibyl said, stepping forward and shrugging off the attempts of the demigods to clutch at her and drag her back to their number. “Excuse me, Typhon?”

Eyes like smelted iron turned toward her. “Are you a goddess?” he asked. “Where are the Olympians?”

“No, actually I’m a licensed therapist,” Sibyl shouted upwards. “Look, I know you have been holding on to some preconceived notions of how this was going to go for a long time, but I’m afraid that things have changed quite a bit since Zeus imprisoned you beneath the mountain. I understand that you were destined to be the usurper of Zeus and wrest away his control of the cosmos, but the fact of the matter is that he doesn’t control the cosmos anymore. The biggest thing he’s got going on these days is that he was portrayed by Russell Crowe in a movie about Thor.”

“You talk like I know who either of those people are,” Typhon said, clearly peeved as he crossed his arms across his thickly muscled chest.

“The point I’m trying to make is that there’s nothing to usurp anymore,” Sibyl continued. “The Olympians faded to myth long before humans summited Mount Olympus and found nothing there, and even that was a hundred years ago. This,” she said, gesturing to the demigods, “this is all that’s left of their legacy. Just . . . regular people, living their lives. Sure, their lives are a little fucked up, but isn’t everyone’s life fucked up? That’s the basis of my entire career: helping people unfuck their lives, at least just a little bit.”

The thick cords of snake flesh that were Typhon’s legs thrashed across the ground as he roared and shook his clawed fists at the heavens. The volcanic stone of the caldera was sundered beneath the blows of his titanic fists crashing against the earth, and the sky quaked as he howled his outrage to the legends of time writ in the constellations above. Sibyl and the demigods huddled together as far away from the rampage as they could manage until Typhon’s ire seemed to wane. At last, he only stood there, his chiseled pectoral muscles heaving with labored breath.

“I never even wanted to rule the cosmos,” he grumbled. “I just wanted to beat the shit out of Zeus. Guy is such a smug asshole.”

“No argument here, big guy,” Kelly shouted from a safe distance.

Typhon looked at his hands, clenching and unclenching his fists. “But now it wouldn’t even be worth it, would it? All those thousands of years of hatred sustaining me, keeping me alive, and meanwhile the object of all my fury has just wasted away to a footnote in history while I was gone. There’s nothing to be gained from besting him if he can’t truly fight back with all his might. That’d just be . . . sad.”

Wrapping the coils of snake beneath him, Typhon sat upon the stone ground, chin resting in his hand. “Well, shit,” he said. “What the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

Art raised his hand. “I do tabletop miniature wargaming, mostly,” he said.

“I pretty much do nothing but party and do molly 24/7,” said Kelly.

“I dox queerphobes on social media all night,” confessed Erin.

“Didn’t you just tell us you were straight?” asked Kelly.

Erin just shrugged. “What, I can’t be an ally?”

Typhon’s molten gaze fell upon Sibyl. “What about you?” he asked. “What do you do to bring meaning into your petty little mortal life?”

“Well, that’s more than a little belittling,” Sibyl began, “but since you asked, on OnlyFans I’m @MistressDelphi, and people pay me money to be submissive little piggies. That, and the therapy thing.”

Art blushed a shade of beet red while Erin let out a low whistle.

“I don’t think I quite know what that means,” said Typhon.

“It means that Sibyl is way more fun than I ever thought, holy shit!” Kelly said through a grin.

“Hold up for just a moment here,” Art said, making the customary timeout motion with his hands, “but just to confirm, the world is not in imminent danger of ending at present?”

Typhon unleashed a sigh that was the wind of ages. “No, not at present,” he muttered. “I think I just need to go somewhere and do some serious thinking and maybe find myself or something.”

Without a further word, he rose to his full height until it seemed as though his head would brush the stars before unfurling his ebon wings that were totally there the entire time, just not relevant or worth mentioning before. Sibyl and the demigods covered their faces and half crouched in the face of hurricane-force winds as Typhon beat his wings and ascended into the sky until he was lost among the countless stars in the heavens.

The moon bathed Sibyl and the others in its silver light as it crested the rim of the volcano and spilled its luminance into the basin of the caldera. “Huh,” Art said, pushing his glasses up his nose, “that actually went pretty well.”

“Motherfucking extinction-level event is really just gonna Eat Pray Love it out there, isn’t he?” Kelly said, their eyes still skyward.

“So,” Erin said, sidling up next to Sibyl as she fished out a cigarette and Zippo from her pocket. “Tell me about this OnlyFans thing you’ve got going on.”

“Oh, for fuck’s—you just said you were straight! Twice!” Kelly cried.

“Hey!” Erin said, jabbing her lit cigarette in accusation. “You don’t get to define who I am.”

“I know, I know,” Kelly groused, finding a suitable rock to sit down on and sulk. “I of all people know that.”

Sibyl and the others climbed to the top of the caldera rim, staring down upon the rustic Sicilian countryside spreading out before them until it abutted the twinkling lights of cities on the coastline. The Italian mainland lay beyond, separated by an ocean that shone like mercury in the light of the moon. It was truly some awe-inspiring, inspirational shit if not for one little thing.

“Hey, guys?” asked Art. “Any of you know how we’re supposed to get home?”