Page 59 of Painless
I recalled Noelle telling me her dream, supposedly from Daren, that Mari would love four men. So aside from me, Jandro, and Gunner, she would bring in one more. I couldn’t even speculate as to who that was—there were no other men I trusted enough to be with her. It wasn’t even the mysterious fourth person I was concerned about—but the other part Noelle told me.
That if I killed one of Mari’s lovers, she’d never forgive me. So typical of Daren’s uncanny ability, to give me a warning with no context whatsoever. Not that I believed my dead little brother was actually communicating with Noelle. Hades’ amused smile and head tilt seemed to disagree with me, though. Like this vessel of an ancient god, or whatever the fuck, could actually hear what I was thinking.
“Anything else?” I rose from the floor, turning my back to the dog as I meandered back to the stack of books.
“She’s the goddess of erm, love, lust, beauty, sex, and fertility.” Shadow appeared deeply uncomfortable with all of those words. “She takes half of those slain in battle to her heavenly field.”
“What happens to the other half?”
“They go to Valhalla, Odin’s hall.”
“And what pantheon is this?”
“Norse mythology.”
“Gods from three different pantheons, all right here,” I muttered under my breath. “How the fuck does that make any sense?”
“I’m not sure.” Shadow held his chin, eyes darting over the open books spread out in front of us. “I wonder if it even matters.”
My eyes narrowed at him. “What do you mean?”
“Death, the underworld,” his finger tapped down on the section about Hades, “The sky and sun above,” the finger moved to Horus’s book, “and between the two, life and love.” His fingertip made a small caress over Freyja’s depiction. “What do they all have in common?”
“I don’t fuckin’ know,” I groaned, rubbing my forehead.
“All these…human experiences were personified by ancient cultures. Deified, you could say. They were given a name, an image, and were worshipped.”
“So?”
“Every ancient culture had a deity associated with death, the sky, and with fertility and beauty. Their names are different and they may be depicted slightly differently, but they’re all the same ideas.” Shadow approached another bookshelf, scanning the titles before pulling out one particularly ancient-looking volume. “I read about something called a collective unconscious by this psychologist in the early nineteen-hundreds.”
“Give me the watered down version, if you will.” My head was already spinning.
“Okay, so,” Shadow paused in his rapid page-flipping. “The collective unconscious is thissomethingthat connects all humans. It’s what unites us, in a sense. We’re fascinated with death, we get, er, anxious about being accepted, we seek out, uh, love and partners—all of that is part of the human experience. The theory is that it’s the collective unconscious that drives those desires.”
“Okay,” I sighed, rubbing my temples. “What does that have to do with gods?”
Shadow closed the book and put it back on the shelf. “Well, one theory is the collective unconscious is the divine part of humanity.”
“I’m not following,” I admitted.
He cocked his head toward the table where the open mythology books laid. “Did those ancient cultures create their gods, or were the gods inside them all along?”
“Fuck me. You really expect me to answer that?”
“It’s just something to ponder. We can’t prove whether the collective unconscious is real or not. But if they just made gods up, they would be more unique to that culture. We wouldn’t have divine beings associated with love, death, and whatever else acrossallcultures.”
“So say, the god of death,” I turned toward my dog, who cocked his head at me, “he exists across all of humanity, all cultures. He’s just given different names.”
“That is the basic theory, yes.”
Glancing back at Shadow, I tossed him a smirk. “You’re a lot smarter than you put off, dude. I had no idea you knew half of this history-psychology shit.”
“Ah—um, thank you, President.”
“It’s Reaper,” I reminded him. “You earned the respect of calling me by name a long time ago.” Crossing my arms, I turned in a slow circle to take in his library again. “Mari would get a kick out of this, I bet. She likes research, pursuing knowledge and all that.”
“She’s welcome here anytime,” Shadow said, his dark eye brightening.
