Mythos (The Descendants, #1)

by Vrinda Pendred

  * * *

  Aidan had spent most of the day at the edge of a river, as far as he could get from the headache of civilisation. Sometimes he fantasised about having his own island, completely devoid of other people, and just doing what he wanted, day in and day out. No one to tell him what to do. No one to trick him into thinking he needed them. No one to say he had to love them when he didn’t. He would just live out the rest of his days on Earth sleeping under the stars, bathing in the sea, fishing and pulling berries off the trees.

  Now he imagined Itzy was with him on that island. In his mind, he saw her long black hair draped over her shoulders as she rose from the sea, blotting out the sun so its rays seemed to emanate from her. She looked like a mermaid crossed with a vampire. It wasn’t an unattractive image.

  She walked toward him, smiling at him. What was it she held? What did she want to show him? What story did she have for him? All he could hope was it would have a happy ending.

  She came closer, and he could see something beating in her hands. For a moment, he thought it might be his own heart. Wouldn’t that have been poetic? Then she dipped her hands to show him, and he saw. It was black, and it pulsed, throbbing like the emotions inside him, calling him and drawing him to it.

  Then a goose honked and shattered the illusion, reminding him he was sitting at the edge of a river in the middle of England, hundreds of miles from the place he’d been taught to think of as home. The riverside was coated in smooth grey stones. He picked one up and tossed it across the water, watching it skip three times before sinking.

  The air was clearer out here. There were no telephone masts or electrical pylons blotting the landscape, though there were a few wind turbines dotted around like futuristic windmills. He wondered what Don Quixote would have made of them.

  Time to go back. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t stay out there forever. He had to face the realities of life and figure out what he was going to do with himself. Last night, with her…he wanted more of that. But he was scared to give in to it too soon. He had thought he was in love with Melody, and look where that had landed him.

  He walked barefoot back to the Jag, carrying his shoes in his hand. The car was parked half a mile up the desolate road - the boreen, as he thought of it - but the journey was mostly grass. It felt soft and cool under his feet, creeping up and tickling his toes.

  When he reached the car, he slipped inside and shut the door. He sat there, staring through the windscreen at the scenery outside. Maybe he didn’t need an island. Maybe he could make do with a few acres of land. Live off the interest accumulating in his trust fund. How long could he make that last?

  He glanced at his phone, sitting on the passenger seat. He’d switched it off in the morning, after receiving an onslaught of furious threatening messages from Melody that he just didn’t need.

  Are you with her right now? was one of the more frequent texts.

  He didn’t know how to make her understand that Itzy had only been the catalyst to make him see what he’d been trying to ignore ever since he’d come to London.

  Itzy. He longed to speak to her. He missed her in a way that surprised him. When he drove away from her in the early hours of the morning, it had felt like something inside him had been tethered to her, and the further down the road he drove, the harder that tether pulled and stretched. How oh how had he managed to fall so hard, so quickly?

  Except it hadn’t felt quick at all. In fact, he wondered why it had taken him so long to find her.

  He grabbed his mobile and switched it on, waiting for it to find a bar of signal. Then it beeped endlessly as the messages and missed calls pulled through. The first few were inevitably from Melody. He breezed through them, deleting each one before he had a chance to read more than the first few words.

  But one stopped him. It was the last one she sent, which simply said:

  I know how to find the Wisdom. At the British Museum, if you care to join us.

  Us?

  The other messages were from Itzy. There was even a voicemail from her.

  He listened to it with growing concern. Something had happened, but he couldn’t think what.

  He pressed a button to ring her back. She answered almost immediately, as though she’d been gripping her phone and staring at its screen all that time, willing it to ring. The sound of her voice was like salve for his soul.

  ‘Thank God!’ she exclaimed in greeting. ‘Where have you been? Are you alright?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, confused.

  ‘I was so worried about you,’ she gushed. ‘Now I just need to find Oz and we should all sit down and have a long talk.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘I can’t get into it over the phone,’ she said. ‘But it’s important. Ugh, I wish Oz would return my calls. I mean, who goes out to the British Museum at night, anyway?’

  ‘Hang on,’ Aidan stopped her. ‘What did ye say?’

  ‘I said: who goes to the British Museum at night? It’s closed, isn’t it? What do you think he could be doing there, even?’

  Aidan didn’t like the sound of this. ‘What makes ye think he’s there?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, Seth got a text from him saying he’d discovered something big there and was researching it. Crazy, right?’

  No, no, no, he didn’t like this at all. He thrust the car key into the ignition.

  ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ he ordered her. ‘I’m coming to pick ye up.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Seth sat awkwardly in the backseat of the Jag while Itzy rode shotgun. Aidan tapped impatiently on the window frame of his car door and swore under his breath at the London traffic they had found themselves in. It had gone eight o’clock, but it was a Saturday, so it might as well have been rush hour.

  ‘So what are you saying?’ Itzy asked. ‘Melody has somehow kidnapped my brother?’

  Aidan cursed a cyclist who had just overtaken them. ‘Well, I don’t know for certain,’ he said, ‘but…that’s my theory, aye.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, his eyes concentrating on the road ahead of him. ‘All I know is: we need to think up a plan.’

  ‘I second that,’ Seth piped up from the back, glad to have something to focus on, other than fantasies of making Aidan disappear. It had been bad enough seeing the look on Itzy’s face when she talked about him, but seeing Aidan return that look…. ‘I don’t want a repeat of what happened in the crop circle.’

  Aidan nodded. ‘If I’m right, Melody will have lulled Oz with her music. And she probably roped Verdi into helping her.’

  ‘No pun intended, eh?’ Seth joked weakly, but in fact the image of Itzy being dragged across the field by living vines had become a recurring nightmare of his, and he didn’t wish it on his best friend.

  ‘Aye,’ said Aidan. ‘And something yis need to understand is if she makes her cat-melodeon racket when we’re there, I’ll probably be the only one unaffected.’

  ‘Why?’ Seth wondered. He did a bad job of disguising his suspicion. He still wasn’t convinced Aidan didn’t know more than he let on.

  ‘I wish I knew the answer to that,’ Aidan said quietly. ‘Powers -’ he glanced briefly at Itzy and amended ‘- most powers don’t touch me.’

  Seth slumped back in his seat. ‘How convenient,’ he mumbled.

  Aidan gave Seth a curious look in the rear-view mirror, but said nothing.

  Itzy twisted in her seat to meet Seth’s eyes. ‘Why don’t you do that thing you did?’ she suggested, clearly eager to change the subject.

  ‘Oh right.’ Seth gave her an exaggerated nod. ‘That thing, yeah.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘You know. The Egypt thing.’

  He shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t help. It’s the equivalent of hiding in a wardrobe. Sooner or later, we’d have to come back out, and who knows how bad the situation would’ve got in the meantime?�
�

  He noted how stricken Itzy seemed at the words hiding in a wardrobe. What did that mean?

  ‘Why don’t you just write us all a happy ending?’ Seth suggested in return.

  Aidan glanced once again at Itzy before refocusing on the road. They crossed a bridge over the Thames. The river glistened on either side of them in the fading light.

  ‘I don’t know if I can do that,’ Itzy almost whispered.

  ‘Why not?’ Seth pressed.

  ‘Well, I mean…I could try,’ she said. ‘It’s just…I’ve never done that before.’

  Seth stared at her. ‘Never done what? Written a happy ending?’

  ‘Well, I have, but not until after lots of horrible stuff happened first. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be interesting, right?’ She turned back around so she was facing forward and fidgeted with her fingers as she stared out the car window.

  Aidan reached over and put his hand on her shoulder, drawing her attention. He gave her an encouraging smile and Seth looked away, feeling uncomfortably like a third wheel in this operation.

  ‘So maybe we’ll have to face some challenges, first,’ Aidan told her. ‘We just need it all to work out in the end.’

  ‘It’s more than that,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I’m not sure how quickly I can make things happen. Little things, yeah, I guess sometimes they happen right away. But a whole scene? Who knows when that would play out?’

  Seth looked up briefly and saw Aidan pull his hand back, replacing it on the steering wheel.

  ‘Don’t waste time, then,’ Aidan told her. ‘Start writing.’