A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [39]
“Can’t blame me for that last one,” Leis said. “If you don’t like it, go back to the dorm room.”
“I am not sitting alone in my dorm room on today of all days,” Helen said, “and I’m sure as hell not going to any of the NYU mixers. I’m not that hardcore of a loser quite yet.”
“Give it until senior year,” Leis said.
“You’re so jaded,” Helen said. “That’s what you get for studying both cultural and social anthropology at the same time.”
“No,” Leis said, stopping and spinning around. “That’s what I get for giving my heart out wholly and getting it diced up and handed back to me time after time.”
“So . . . what?” Helen asked. “Because you had a few bad relationships, you’re going to take out Love?”
“Not just a few bad relationships,” Leis asked. “Try thirty-six of them in three years. That’s messed up.”
“Okay, fine, but gunning for Cupid? I think that’s going to piss a lot of people off.”
Leis eyes were dark and she gave Helen a dark, bitter smile, shaking her head. “Gotta love a cultist,” she said.
“Huh?” Helen asked. “How is Cupid a cultist?”
Leis wrinkled her nose. “Well, he had a cult, anyway. Back then, he was considered one of the most powerful gods because he held sway over everything—animals, the dead, even the gods of Olympus. A god who could control the other gods? That’s pretty powerful, if you ask me.”
Helen’s face went white as the gravity of it all hit her. “And you still think this is a good idea, trying to take him down?”
Leis nodded. “I’m not interested in humiliating my exes or arguing with any of them all over again,” she said. “They’re really just middlemen in all this. I’m cutting to the root of the problem. And for your information, it’s not Cupid that we’re after.”
“So . . . who then?” Helen asked. “Saint Valentine?”
“Not exactly,” Leis said. “Hell, they’re not even sure who Saint Valentine really was.”
“Really?” Helen asked.
“Really.” Leis nodded. “There were at least three possibilities. One was a bishop in what the Italians now call Terni, another was a Roman priest . . . hell, the last one wasn’t even in Italy. He lived somewhere in Africa. This creature that I’m looking for isn’t any of them. We’re dealing with something completely different. Something older.”
“Is this from one of your classes?” Helen asked. “I didn’t know NYU dug so deep.”
Leis shrugged. “Some of it,” she said. “The rest came from a lot of research time spent in the older parts of the main library. I spent hours looking through it all, trying to find out what I could.”
“Yeah, well, maybe that’s why you have so much trouble with dating. You ever think of that?”
Leis turned and glared at Helen, who threw her hands up in the air. “Just saying.”
Leis turned and started walking off again. Helen hurried after her. “Go on,” she said. “Please.”
“I was studying up on my target,” Leis said, continuing to get her nerd on. “Call him Cupid, call him Eros, but call him the god of love either way. The Greeks and the Romans have similar stories about him despite their cultural differences, but he predates those pantheons. Even the Christians sucked him into the Valentine Day’s mythos, but that’s a sham too.”
“Wait,” Helen said, confused. “Now you’re saying Valentine’s Day isn’t Valentine’s Day?”
“Far from it,” Leis said, stopping again. “The whole saint construct of the holiday was just a whitewash by the church they concocted when they wanted to convert others to their beliefs. They took the dates that were important to a culture and superimposed new traditions over them, hoping that their ways would be adopted in place of older pagan rituals. For instance, ever hear of Lupercalia?”
Helen shook her head.
Leis grabbed her face and squeezed her cheeks. “See what a good job your Catholic upbringing did at overwriting it!”
Helen brushed her hand away. “Knock it off,” she said. “What’s Lupercalia?”
“According to legend, it was an ancient pagan ritual that focused both on purification and fertility. Its roots were in honor of the she-wolf that cared for the tossed-aside infants Romulus and Remus.