Dionysus: A Short Story

“I wanna play with some mortals. Female mortals.”

Eryx, son of Aphrodite, looked up from the neat stack of papers on his Chippendale desk. He frowned at the intruder, his cousin Dionysus. “Don’t you ever knock?”

Dionysus, beautiful in his smugness, merely shrugged. “You’re the only god I know who keeps an office. No one else has a door.” He plunked his big frame down in the Herman Miller chair in front of Eryx’s desk. “I’m bored.”

“You’re always bored.” Eryx’s blond brows met in a frown as he returned his gaze to his papers. “So why are you here?”

“Because I want you to come with me.”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Eryx. I hear there’s a new club open on the Vegas strip. Topless waitresses.”

Eryx spared him a glance. “Seriously? You’ve seen and done it all before. You can’t tell me you’re intrigued by the idea of topless waitresses.”

Should he even tell Dionysus? His cousin lived to get him into trouble. Still, each new project filled him with excitement, and he really had no one to share it with. The other gods couldn’t care less. His mother, the goddess of love, was too busy being, well, herself, to get involved in her son’s projects. As for his father… He was too busy playing soldier.

And it’s wasn’t as if he had friends the way mortals did.

Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to just give Dionysus a high-level overview. Of all his cousins, he was closest to Dionysus. Even if his influence could be described as debauched on the best of days.

Eryx concentrated on the papers on his desk. He then passed his hand over them. Immediately, a mist formed a few inches above the papers. Within seconds, the mist separated and a tiny 3-D image appeared from it. The image of a museum. “This is the Toronto Museum. They’re in the midst of renovating. They have an extensive, important Greek collection. I thought they could use some help.”

“Toronto, eh? Sounds cold.” An involuntary shiver passed through Dionysus.

“It’s summer,