A scream of purest agony pounded down the length of the heavily-draped corridor, and Bethany Snow, despite her resolve, flinched at the sound. She stole a glance at the man she was walking with, and the thin, knowing smile that sliced across the lower half of his pasty white face.

"What was that?" she asked, trying to keep her voice level.

"The screams of the damned." The man known in most circles as Brother Blood examined the back of his exquisitely manicured left hand, then let it fall back into the folds of his priestly robes. "It is not a sound I am ever likely to forget."

"No, I mean... who was it? Shouldn't we go see--"

"A Russian agent named Kovar attempted to assassinate me in my crypt three days ago, Miss Snow. He is presently being interrogated, and when we have what we want from him, he will be very publicly and very painfully executed." Blood frowned. "I'm afraid all we've gotten so far is his codename. Red Star. Very Hollywood, no? And you people think I have a flair for the melodramatic."

The tidbit about this Kovar was tantalizing, and Bethany promised herself she'd come back to it. But she couldn't help but fixate on one word.

"Crypt," she mused. "Brother Blood...you understand that no one outside of this country truly believes you're a vampire."

"They don't need to. It is enough that my people know the truth. The truth...and the fear that should rightly accompany it. Besides, the Vatican believes my claims. At least, they believe enough to denounce my priesthood."

"The Vatican denounces you because of the atrocities you commit here in Zandia. Drinking the blood of your people, violent police actions to keep order. Officials in America say you are what would happen if Adolf Hitler and Anne Rice had children together, you know this."

That last obviously displeased him, as the slash of a smile turned down at the corners and the pencil-thin black eyebrows drew down over his eyes. "I did not invite you here so that you could insult me, Miss Snow. I invited you here so that the world may hear my story, and perhaps so that you may help them understand the terrible judgment that will be visited upon sinners in the next life."

"And yet you claim to be a vampire, a creature of the Devil..."

"Why do you think my crusade is so important to me?" Blood hissed. "With the coin of blood and righteous penance, I hope to buy for the world the salvation I shall never know! Your small-minded 'American officials' should be raising statues to me, not mocking my efforts!"

Bethany Snow could only nod. She wondered if coming here hadn't been a mistake after all. Even now, it seemed like a Pulitzer in the making: exclusive interview with the eccentric ruler of a reclusive-yet-notorious island nation in the North Baltic. But after spending barely half an hour with this guy... "eccentric" didn't even begin to describe him. He was a full-throttle lunatic, one that was doing his best to relive the Spanish Inquisition by way of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

"My office is this way," Brother Blood said, gesturing with one slender hand. "Come. We will conclude this interview and you may leave...before I forget you are my guest and simply drain you dry."

A cold wind seemed to pass over Bethany, and despite her journalistic incredulity, she shivered. No one in their right mind believed the vampire schtick, of course. Even in a world with a "Blue Beetle" and a "Superman", it was patently ridiculous. But the defrocked priest and undisputed ruler of this nation had the act down remarkably well.

He cut across her path and pushed through a heavy wooden door. It groaned as it swung open, and Bethany took the opportunity while his back was turned to check her purse for the pepper spray she had stashed there -- wondering all the while if she should have brought some garlic instead -- before stepping forward to follow him into the room.

She almost plowed right into him. He had stopped dead on the threshold, and she saw why as she craned her neck to see over his thin shoulders.

On the other side of the dark, richly-appointed office, there was an ancient, oaken desk nestled against the opposite wall. Seated behind it was a young Caucasian male, with hair as black as an oil spill. His feet were propped up carelessly on the varnished desktop, and surrounding him were eight other young people, all of them stunningly beautiful.

Bethany guessed, by the way Brother Blood's shoulders were trembling with barely-contained rage, that these kids were not supposed to be here.

"Who are you?" Blood hissed, and Bethany Snow felt that same shiver pass over her spine again, like someone had sent a cold ribbon of air straight down the back of her blouse.

"We...are all," the teenager at the desk said simply, with a disarming smile. He kicked his legs off the desktop and leaned forward, replacing them with his elbows. "We are the ones who have come to blow down your little house of cards. Brother."

"Your names," Brother Blood insisted, tugging at his white collar and showing the wickedly pointed canines hiding beneath his slash of a mouth. "I must know who these children are that I'm about to have burned at the stake for this insult."

The ringleader's eyes narrowed, and all friendliness left his voice. "I am Cronos, mortal. Once I was lord of the universe entire. And if you must call us anything in your last moments, I suppose you may call us Titans."

A breathless beat of silence filled the room, during which Brother Blood's trembling abruptly stopped. Bethany took one step back from the man, hoping to be clear of the impending explosion, but she kept craning her neck, and yanked a notepad out of her purse to take notes.

She expected Blood to call for his guards--he had the entire Zandian army at his beck and call after all--but it was a well-documented fact that he hadn't gained his position by hiding behind his soldiers. With a rush of blackish wind and the flap of his priestly robes, he rocketed into the room almost faster than the eye could follow, fangs bared, and hands reaching for the ringleader's throat.

He never made it. One of the other teenagers--a broad-shouldered blonde with a quarterback's build and stunning sky-blue eyes--grabbed the monarch by the throat and slammed him face-first onto the desktop.

Blood squirmed and hissed and spat, but he couldn't break the giant's grip. Cronos was still sitting directly in front of him with his elbows on the desktop. He hadn't moved an inch.

"My thanks, Hyperion," he said, and the blonde nodded.

"Call...my...holy guard..." Brother Blood screeched, waving with one hand towards Bethany's position in the hallway.

"That won't be necessary, Miss Grant," Cronos said. "Rhea. If you would."

One of the girls who had been standing around the desk appeared suddenly in the doorway, directly in front of the reporter. Bethany started to cry out, but the girl put a hand on her arm, and all panic drained out of her like warm water down a sink.

"Come in," the girl said. "Please." She was black, though very light-skinned, and the curls falling about her shoulders were highlighted with red. Her brown eyes were so dark they were almost black. Under the influence of those eyes, her request sounded completely reasonable. Bethany stepped in and shut the door behind her.

"Whore!" Brother Blood cried. "You're in this with them, aren't you! You knew all along, you pale American bi--!"

Hyperion lifted Blood's face from the surface of the desk and slammed it down again. The brother shut up.

"Perhaps you aren't familiar with us," Cronos said, leaning over so he could be closer to Blood's pinned head. "Though how that's possible, even in this day and age, is beyond me. Hyperion, the one whose grip you're having so little success breaking, is Lord of the Sun. If you were truly what you claimed to be, his touch would be like fire to you. Selene? What say you?"

This last was directed at an Asian girl in black leather, her already-pale skin dusted with something to make it look even paler. She had short black hair, combed over severely to one side, and a ring through her lip and her nose. Not a one in her ear, though. She was standing next to another boy -- practically crawling over him, actually, though they both looked supremely bored by all this.

"He lies," she sighed, and went back to stroking the boy's chest, which was covered with an Ocean World logo tank top.

"Someone else who would know," Cronos said, obviously enjoying himself. "So what does that tell us?"

"That he's a petty mortal who, discontent with the power he possesses, must pretend to have even more." This came from the girl who had ushered Bethany into the room. She had taken the reporter's notebook from her and was idly flipping through it. Bethany had not protested this.

"Who are you?" Blood insisted. "Why are you doing this?"

"I've already told you who we are, priest, and I'm not given to repeating myself. Especially to a remorseless tyrant who doesn't have the brains to listen properly when his betters are speaking. As for why we're doing this..." Cronos pushed back the chair and rose to his feet. He was tall for his apparent age, nearly six feet. "That is no longer your concern."

He turned and walked toward the heavy black drapes on the other side of the room. Pinned as he was, facing that direction, Blood saw exactly what the teenager was going for.

"No! Don't! You can't do this to me! Please! I can make you rich beyond--"

His jabbering was replaced by a high-pitched, wailing scream as Cronos tore the drapes down. Light roared into the room, and Hyperion smiled contentedly into it while Brother Blood screeched and scrabbled beneath his hand. The skin of his exposed face went scarlet, and boils immediately began to erupt from his neck and face.

"What is this?" Cronos demanded. "I thought he wasn't a vampire! Mnemosyne!"

"It's called solar urticaria, Lord," one of the girls who hadn't yet spoken said. She had long, straight blonde hair and almond-shaped eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses; and wore a midriff-exposing tank top over bell-bottom jeans. "It's a rare condition among mortals. He is allergic to sunlight. Severely allergic, it seems."

"What a pitiable existence," Hyperion boomed, looking with distaste at the pus erupting all over Blood's skin and onto the Titan's hand.

"Kill you!" Blood squeeled. "I'll kill you all! Drink your blood!"

Feeling strangely detached from all this ever since the girl Rhea had touched her, Bethany Snow suppressed a giggle. The Brother sounded just like the Wicked Witch of the West.

"He has had certain surgeries," the bell-bottom girl, Mnemosyne, went on, "to give him the features and some of the abilities of this storybook creature. The allergy is completely natural, though."

"I almost admire him," the well-tanned boy with the goth girl crawling all over him said, still sounding bored. "To accomplish what he has with those handicaps..."

Cronos grunted, neither in acknowledgement nor disagreement. Then he nodded to Hyperion.

The surprisingly loud report of Brother Blood's snapping neck was a brutal punctuation to the man's screams. He slumped onto the desk, and then, when Hyperion released him, slid bonelessly to the floor. The Titan looked with distaste at his pus-covered hand, leaned over, and wiped it clean on the fine leather chair behind the desk.

"Now for you, Miss Snow."

"You...you say you're Titans?" Bethany asked. She realized she was probably very, very close to death at just that moment, but that strange detachment still held her in its sway.

Cronos sighed. "I think I preferred humans back when they were capable of believing the evidence of their own eyes."

"Don't hold it against her entire race, dear," Rhea said, still flipping idly through Bethany's notebook. "If this tablet is any indication, this woman is nothing but questions, questions, questions. Wondering about this and that, all queries and no answers. A veritable 'Wonder Girl'."

Hyperion thought this uproariously funny, judging by his booming laughter. Cronos, however, still wore a serious expression.

"Miss Snow, you are a reporter, yes? A truth teller?"

She nodded.

"Then you will tell your world the truth about us. Tell them the Titans walk among them again. Tell them we will keep them safe as a shepherd tends its sheep. They will want nothing, they will fear nothing."

He cast a meaningful look at Brother Blood's corpse.

"All will be safe under our absolute rule."

Rhea slapped the notebook shut and handed it back to Bethany. There had been a...shift in authority. Somehow, without discussing it or signaling in any way Cat could see, Cronos had stepped back and left Rhea in charge. The beautiful black girl nodded to Hyperion.

"Bring the despot's body."

From the opening chapters of the Titanography, by Titanographer the first, Bethany Louise Snow.

Brother Blood had been revered as very nearly a god in Zandia. Or, if not a god, at least close enough that it made no practical difference to his followers.

So, to say that the sight of nine teenagers strolling out of Blood's house of state, one of them holding the Brother's motionless body high above his head, caused a stir, is kind of like saying Attila the Hun wasn't a nice guy.

In the days since the Titans enlisted me into their service, I've seen things that I find hard to describe, both in their magnitude and their implications. But nothing -- nothing -- has come close to what I saw that first day.

In ancient Greece, the Titan Astraea was the progenitor of justice, so it's fitting that she was the one to announce to the stunned soldiers and civilians lining the streets of Zandia's capital city that divine judgment had been passed against Brother Blood, and that he had been made to pay for his crimes. When she'd finished talking, there was a long, long silence. I half-expected the people to start cheering, and maybe they would have if the truth had been given a few more moments to sink in.

But that was when Hyperion, always the cheerful one, laughed and pumped the arm holding Brother Blood aloft, catapulting the body out over the gathering crowd and into Zandia's cobblestone streets. The Zandians stared at the broken pile of charred flesh in stunned silence for a beat, and then they turned and surged up the steps of the palace toward us.

Hyperion was caught completely off-guard as they plowed into him. At first he was amused, but the Zandians' refusal to be happy about their leader's death began to anger him in pretty short order. He began shoving people, sending dozens of bodies careening backward into each other with every push. And that's when the palace guards began firing at us.

The male Titans moved forward as the women drew back. I was pulled behind Rhea. The bullets couldn't hurt the Titans, male or female, but dozens of Zandians were being cut down by hurried shots and ricochets. I heard Cronos yelling at Oceanus, the only male who hadn't moved to help, ordering him forward. Oceanus sighed and rolled his eyes. Then he peeled Selene off of his chest and looked to the east. Toward the ocean.

The tidal wave hit moments later, water sweeping through streets suddenly made into canals. The wave didn't hit with enough force to knock the buildings down, but it was more than enough to lift cars and carry away those unfortunates who didn't find high ground in time.

When the water had calmed, Cronos and the others walked out onto it -- you read that right, they walked on the water. They left me on the steps of the palace, as close to the street as I could get with ten feet of water covering it.

Then Rhea raised her arms and spoke in a voice that wasn't booming, but could still be heard all over the island. She said,

"This island of Zandia is the new seat of our power. The new Olympos. Rejoice, mortals, for the new golden age has arrived." Then she turned to Prometheus -- a quiet, brooding teen with fire red hair -- and said, "Let it be."

Facing the palace, Prometheus clapped his hands together, whispered something that I found out later was a prayer to Gaia, the Earth Mother, and then threw both arms up into the air.

A mountain of solid rock exploded from the center of the palace, decimating the structure and rising nearly a mile into the air. I was flung from the steps by the tremors, and thrown into the ice-cold water at the Titans' feet. By the time Hyperion fished me out, chuckling at my foolish mortal antics, the pillar of earth and stone was completed.

"It is good," Rhea decided, looking towards the mountain's peak with a wide smile that would have looked more at home on the sidelines of a high school football game than in the presence of a miracle. She looked toward Prometheus. "What will you call it?"

"Olympos is already taken," Prometheus shrugged. "How about... Titans Tower?"

Fort Meade, Maryland. 1130, GMT.

Adrian Chase was not having a good day.

It had started out well enough -- a call from Margie to confirm their dinner date for tonight, enough work on his desk when he walked in to keep him busy without overwhelming him. He'd even chopped a minute off of the time for his daily 5-mile jog.

And then he'd received the ROOK alert.

As a Special Operations Officer for the NSA, Chase was one of maybe two hundred people who knew about CHECKMATE, a string of satellites placed in geosynch orbit all over the globe, utilizing the latest in cloaking tech. The system was probably the single most valuable intelligence-gathering tool the US had, but that value would be negated if those governments they were spying on knew about it. For that reason, very few alerts were sent directly from the system, since even encrypted, internal communications could potentially compromise it.

But the ROOK had come straight from CHECKMATE Command, and Chase saw why a moment later. Brother Blood, the maniac ruler of Zandia, had been assassinated. No one knew why or how or by whom yet, but since Chase had been organizing a covert mission to bump the despot off, the word had been sent before all the facts could be gathered.

That was bad enough. Then the BISHOP-level alert hit.

A mountain had just sprung out of the Earth right in the middle of the Zandian palace. A mountain.

The first thing Chase had done was call Margie to cancel their dinner date. She didn't take it well, especially since he couldn't explain why he couldn't make it. Just another sacrifice to the American Dream, Chase thought bitterly as he hung up.

Then he'd called the US Embassy in the Netherlands. America didn't have an embassy in Zandia, but since the Netherlands were right across the water from the island nation, Chase had gotten to know the ambassador there during his preparations for his own planned assassination of Brother Blood. He secured a promise that the ambassador would call Chase with any new developments right after calling his own superiors.

Then Chase snatched up his TV remote and switched on the second most valuable intelligence tool he had at his disposal: CNN.

It was all over the news, of course. No one had video of it happening yet, but they had all sorts of pictures of the new mountain. They were also reporting something about ten people standing around the mountain's base, people who had entered a cave at the base of the mountain shortly after it had been formed. There were no pictures, but the CNN personality was confirming that there had indeed been ten, and that Daily Planet reporter Catherine Grant had likely been one of them.

"Grant?" Chase muttered. He'd had a few run-ins with Grant and that environmentalist/extreme left rag she worked for. He didn't like the woman -- truth to tell, he didn't like reporters, period -- and he had absolutely no idea what she could have to do with all this.

"What is going on?" he said aloud.

"Nothing good, Adrian Chase."

Chase whirled, hand going to the desk drawer that held the gun he was absolutely not supposed to have in the building.

"Oh, stop that," his visitor insisted. "You know it wouldn't do any good anyway."

Chase's hand fell away from the desk. "You. What the hell are you doing here?"

Leaning against a bookcase that held all the binders with Agency policies and guidelines, was a tremendously fat man wearing an orange Hawaiian shirt, blue swimming trunks, and leather sandals. Sandals with wings on the sides. He was picking apart a large turkey leg and dropping the pieces into his grease-slathered maw.

"Is that any way," the fat man paused to stifle a belch, "to greet a god, Adrian Chase?"

"Hermes. You haven't shown your face since that business with Slade Wilson in Qurac. Fifteen years. Since you're here, I take it you've got something to do with what's going on in Zandia."

"Only indirectly." Hermes licked his fingers, then set the cleaned leg bone gingerly on the top of the bookcase. "Are you familiar with the story of the Titans, Chase?"

"Sure. They made a movie. Denzel Washington was in it, I think."

"Not the football team!" Hermes rolled his eyes. "The fathers of the gods!"

Chase nodded. He'd known exactly what Hermes was talking about, of course, but he was still reeling from all this. First a mountain sprouts out of Zandia, and then a Greek god shows up in his office. The last time Hermes had made himself known to him, an archaeologist had accidentally set free a mythological monster called Echidna. Chase truly hoped this situation wasn't going to be that bad.

"The Titans are the generation of deities that preceded the gods. They are the fathers of Zeus, Apollo, Hera, and the others. Infinitely powerful."

"And that has what to do with Zandia?"

Hermes went on as if the agent hadn't spoken. "Millennia ago, Zeus and five other gods took Mount Olympos from the Titans, and threw them down into Tartarus.

"One week ago, nine of the Titans broke free and tried to take Olympos back.

"They failed, and Lord Zeus came up with a new and terrible punishment for them this time. Since they wouldn't stay bound in Tartarus, he would turn them into mortals. Young mortals, teenagers. And he would exile them to Earth."

Chase looked at the TV, where the same shot of the Zandian Mount was being shown again. Nine Titans, plus one reporter, equaled...

"Oh god."

"But even Zeus couldn't take away their power."

"Who are they? What are we up against?"

"Cronos, former lord of the universe. His wife, Rhea. Astraea, patron of justice. Hyperion, lord of the sun. Mnemosyne, patron of memory and mother of the muses. Oceanus, lord of the oceans. Prometheus, the maker. Selene, the mistress of the moon. Themis, the maker of laws."

"And you just unleashed them on us?" Chase pounded a fist on the desk. "They just built a mountain from scratch, you fat bastard! How the hell are we supposed to fight them?"

"That is not our concern, Adrian Chase. The gods care as little for man as man has cared for the gods these last 3,000 years. We have warned you, and you should be grateful for that kindness."

And then he was gone, leaving only the greasy chicken bone behind. Chase looked at it, fuming for almost a full sixty seconds. And then he turned back to his desk and picked up the phone.

"Get me Magnus," he said.

The facility was in a sub-basement of one of NSA's training annexes. While employees learned foreign languages and word processing programs on the first floor, the real work of the Agency took place far beneath their feet. Normally, Chase loved that kind of James Bond crap, but he couldn't take any pleasure in it today. Especially since the empty elevator descending to the facility gave him far too much time by himself to think about what was happening in Zandia at that moment.

Magnus was waiting for him when he stepped off the elevator. "Zandia?" he said, pushing his thick-rimmed glasses up on his nose.

"Zandia," Chase confirmed.

The two men began moving quickly down the polished tile and metal corridor, Chase in his slowly unraveling suit and tie, and Magnus in a green Polo shirt and stonewashed blue jeans. They were about the same height, but Chase had almost forty pounds of muscle and twenty years of age on the other man.

"Since you've come to see me, I can only assume America has decided on a tactical response."

"You could say that," Chase nodded. "Or you could say that I've chosen to interpret the dictates of Project: Deathstroke in a manner not entirely in line with the interpretations of my superiors."

Magnus gave him a look. "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that."

"That's probably for the best. Are the Terminators ready?"

"See for yourself," Magnus replied, pushing through a familiar door and waving him through.

The two men stepped out onto a catwalk overlooking an unfurnished concrete room nearly as large as an aircraft hangar. Arrayed beneath them in precise, military formation were nearly two hundred silver men. Recognizable as men only from their lack of breasts, the Terminators were featureless, naked, and utterly lacking in genitalia. They looked somewhat like life-sized Oscar statues without the plinths.

"Terminator" wasn't their official designation, of course. They didn't really have official designation outside of the name of the project that had created them. Project: Deathstroke. The staff had taken to calling them Terminators when, two years after the Secretary of Defense had signed the classified funding authorization for the project, the movie Terminator 2 had debuted. The resemblance between the killer machine in that movie -- a morphing, remorseless, liquid metal assassin -- and these killer machines -- morphing, remorseless, memory metal assassins -- had been uncanny. And so these nameless "metal men" had become "Terminators" to those who knew about them, though never on paper.

Developed as covert assassins, the Terminators had been successfully tested in Qurac six months ago. As far as NSA was concerned, they were a go. Their next scheduled mission had been to assassinate Brother Blood.

That was Chase's mission. And even though it was pretty much null and void at this point, he still intended to make use of these robots.

"I want them ready to roll in six hours," he said, knowing that Magnus would protest but also knowing that the boy genius could have them prepped in that time. The Terminators were going to Zandia, one way or the other.

And then they would see whether these Teen Titans were friend, foe, or something else entirely.

NEXT: Siege on Titans Tower! Plus, more on Cat Grant and Adrian Chase! Cronus and Oceanus have it out! And if that's not enough, we ask the question, "What is the Red Star?" Be here...

THE TITANS

Cronos - King of the Titans

Rhea - Queen of the Titans

Astraea - Patron of Justice

Hyperion - Lord of the Sun, father of Selene.

Mnemosyne - Patron of Memory, mother of the Muses

Oceanus - Lord of oceans

Prometheus - The maker; creator of mankind

Selene - Moon goddess; daughter of Hyperion

Themis - Creator of laws