Greek God Zeus 2 |10,769 PCS|

notice things: a faint itch at the edge of his attention, as if somebody were talking about him behind his back. He looked down from Olympus and there it was, sprawled across the side of a laundrette in the old town. A Zeus thirty feet tall, splattered in gold and violet and electric blue, beard flying, scowling furiously at the morning traffic.

It was not flattering. The nose was enormous. The eyebrows were absurd. The muscles looked as though they had been inflated with a bicycle pump.

Zeus came down in a crack of thunder that set off every car alarm in the street. A thin young man was standing on a stepladder in front of the mural, a spray can in each hand, wearing headphones and a paint-spattered vest. He did not even turn round.

"Mortal," boomed Zeus. "You will remove this insult."

"It's not finished," said the young man, whose name was Niko. "Can you stand a bit more to the left? You're in my light."

Nobody had spoken to Zeus like that in three thousand years. The sky darkened. Pigeons fled. Zeus raised his hand, and a thunderbolt crackled into being between his fingers, hissing and spitting.

He drew back his arm to blast the wall to dust. And Niko, without a word, stepped down off the ladder and stood right in front of it.