All I had to do was wait it out in here, sneak back out when Typhon and his men were all dead and then lift the sundial pendant from Typhon’s pocket. With any luck, Maximus would take a nap after his conquest and I could tiptoe on by. But until then …
Standing at the amphitheater’s rim, I tipped my eyes down at the first stone step of the central aisle.
“Oh no, she just has to touch it!” Simon groaned.
“Curious as a cat,” Garfunkel chuckled, donning his shades with a grin.
“And curiosity killed the cat!”
Orion must have seen the awe on my face. “Go on, take a closer look if you want. I’ll stay and watch the door.”
I hopped down from the top of the amphitheater to the steps descending to the Titan’s feet, breaking into a wild, childlike sprint.
A bit winded once I reached the dais, I peered once again up at the perfectly encapsulated form of a real-life (real-dead) Titan. The high strong forehead, serene eyes and curly flecks of hair on his scalp seemed so far away.
It was certainly worth writing home about. My dad, if he was here, would love it. A real-life Titan—he’d probably have a heart attack …
I recalled the flatlining of my mother’s heartrate monitor and her request for me to amend my relationship with my father. Which meant I had to somehow survive this ordeal and steal Typhon’s sundial pendant. At least it looked like Typhon would finally be stopped. Being scorpion bait, I didn’t have to worry about him coming after me anymore.
What had Typhon intended on doing with Atlas’s heart anyways?
It was encapsulated in stone and I didn’t recall anything about gaining immortality from eating a Titan’s heart. Would there even still be a heart after all these years?
“Guys, I thought Typhon was looking for creation crystals—not a heart.”
Simon nibbled at his fingernails. “Um, well, you know how crude oil comes from dinosaurs? Creation crystals come from the blood of gods and Titans.”
I sighed. “Well that’s good to know. A little late but—”
A sudden clamor against the silver door shook me from my daydreaming. Followed by a loud curse, the noise sounded like the Minotaur’s hoof.
Orion cupped his hands around his mouth. “Some of Typhon’s crew. I don’t think they’ll be getting in anytime soon though. They don’t have a magic tattoo conferring Zeus’s blessing. Not like you do.”
“Yeah,” I said, my mind on Gan’s possible Zeus tattoo, my eyes on Atlas’s scarred chest. Like a magnet, my eyes had been drawn to the stitched-up incision over Atlas’s heart. Unless the crystalline lighting in this place was playing tricks on me, it seemed to pulse with a slow cadence.
“Uh, guys. Atlas is dead, right?”
“Most definitely,” Simon said.
“I should probably go check out that heart, dontcha think? In case Typhon does somehow get in here? Maybe I can, I don’t know, destroy it?”
“Go ahead,” Orion called down to me. “I’m watching the door, just in case.”
I glanced up in awe, trying to discern the easiest way up.
“Most definitely not!” Simon said.
“You could just climb his junk,” Garfunkel suggested. “Lots of handholds there …”
“How about we just don’t climb?”
I bounded up a staircase carved into the side of the stone dais. The most efficient way up Atlas’s chest appeared to be climbing over his thigh and working my way upward and diagonally and across the chiseled abs to his pecs. I tested the grip of my shoe against the sandpapery surface and smirked. With my climbing experience, I’d have no problem shimmying up to the heart.
“Hang on,” I said to my shoulders as I slid my fingers over a ripple of muscle, almost expecting it to be warm like human skin.
“Why do I even bother opening my mouth?” Simon said and closed his eyes.
I had just completed the ab portion and was positioning myself on the underside of one pec when a sound like Thor’s hammer again beat upon the silver door.
Now that was the Minotaur; the first noise must have been made by a satyr.
“Beat it, bull-man!” Garfunkel jeered. “Ain’t getting in without a Zeus tattoo.”
“Rainbows. Butterflies. Rainbows. Butterflies,” Simon recited with closed eyes as my feet dropped away momentarily.
I hauled myself up onto the flat of Atlas’s pec, suddenly aware of a blazing warmth against my side. Peeking down the front of my open jacket, I saw the lava axe blazing red-hot. That same moment, I realized with a start that the granite chest beneath my fingers was … yep, beating!
“Uh guys, what the hel—heck is going on? This is a statue, right? I mean, Atlas is dead …?”
Simon cleared his throat and with a scholarly spin, said, “It is possible that the lava axe’s handle contains fragments of a creation crystal. That would explain its being ‘called’ to a larger source of creation crystals, contained within Atlas’s chest.”
“Wait a minute. So the Heart of Atlas is actually a bunch of creation crystals?”
Simon nibbled at a fingernail. “Hidden buried power … Creation crystals are the most powerful items in the world left behind by the gods.”
“Cool,” Garfunkel said.
“I can’t let Typhon get his hands—er claws on it—”
The Minotaur’s banging hooves upon the doors clanged through the amphitheater, the sound ominous and clear with the place’s acoustics.
Damnit, Gan probably did have a magic tattoo. He was a Zeus man after all. But why hadn’t he used it already? Had Maximus um, killed him? An important question to ask as I was clinging to the front of Atlas completely exposed.
I glanced down at Orion.
“Sure is a long way to fall,” Garfunkel remarked.
“Just don’t look down.”
Simon looked down. “Ahh! I looked down!”
Garfunkel facepalmed.
Simon held on for dear life while nibbling the rest of his fingernails down to the quick. “What? You can’t hear ‘don’t look down’ and not look down. It’s like someone saying ‘look down.’ ”
I shook my head and focused on the task at hand—figuring out how to prevent Typhon from getting Atlas’s Heart.
The stone chest which had been cool to the touch—like a giant stone statue ought to be—now emanated the warmth of a cozy fireplace.
I felt comforted.
I felt I could cling here for all eternity and that all would be fine.
Silence filled the chamber. I held my breath.
From the other side of the door came a sudden crisp, chop. It sounded like a mini-guillotine. A moment later, a man howled like he’d just had his wrist lopped off.
Ouch. Should have had a Zeus tattoo, I thought, glad I hadn’t inserted my non-tattooed arm into the hole in the wall. Maybe Gan was dead. I turned my attention back to Atlas’s chest. I reached up and pulled myself onto the lowest suture. As if reacting to the tattoo on my forearm, an inscription appeared above the stitched-up chest over Atlas’s heart. I climbed the rest of the horizontal sutures like rungs of a concrete ladder.
With Atlas’s heart beating and throbbing through my palms, it was an experience like no other.
Luckily, when I reached the top suture, I found that the inscription just above the breast was etched in ancient Greek, a language I knew well.
Here beats the Heart of Atlas, a fount of creation for the time that we gods flee this mortal realm.
A source of pure energy for the mortals to save themselves … or destroy themselves.
Let it not be said that I was not kind to my people, for they were blind and pitiful without the gods’ help.
Atlas, punished to hold up the skies for his part in the war with the Titans, served his penance well, without complaint.
I now grant him rest.
Clouds shall cover the sky where his handprints did lie, for his was a fool’s errand. Unnecessary. Perhaps we gods are too harsh in our punishments.
>
Sometimes, when I am in my cups, I wonder if this world might not be better off without us. Have we not tired of watching civilization after civilization fail?
Of course, their struggles and flaws are not so different from ours, as they were created in our image.
Oh how I sometimes envy the mortals and their naivety and fleeting lives and lack of responsibility.
… But alas, it is just the Ambrosia talking and I must go now.
Whoa.
Sooo … yeah I definitely had to make sure Typhon never got his hands on Atlas’s Heart.
I turned back to face the entrance. It was a good thing Typhon was never getting through that door.
There was a click, and then the door slid open.
“Things Can Always Be Worse, Right?”
Kameno tost!
What was I to do? I couldn’t run—this was a dead-end chamber. But I couldn’t exactly fight either—I was stuck a thousand feet off the ground, helpless like that boy with his thumb stuck in the dike … actually, maybe I wasn’t that boy. But I felt like there was a dam just beneath my palms and with just the slightest of wrong moves, the water AKA Heart of Atlas would burst forth and end the world or whatever.
So I did something that often comes in handy in my occupation.
I bluffed.
“Don’t come in or I’ll do it. I’ll destroy the Heart!”
All I did was turn my head toward the black open doorway and talk. The acoustics of the room took care of the rest. No echo, just clear crisp me.
While I waited for a reply, I realized I’d drawn the lava axe from under my jacket and now held it inches away from the heart. Part of me really, really wanted to split open the chest, to thrust my fist into this Titan’s life-blood, the motherlode of creation crystals, to become a god …
I licked my lips.
Yes. I could become a god.
The axe blade’s steaming molten tip disrupted my vision. It would be only too easy to slit open the first concrete suture and then the second and then the—
Something heavy and hard crunched upon the floor from somewhere behind me and I probably would’ve ignored it if not for two pairs of tiny hands slapping and pinching my cheeks.
“Ow, you twerps, that hurts …”
I glanced at the red, glowing axe in my hand, at the heatwaves shimmering off it and the pulsing cement chest before me, urging me to free it of its burden …
“Eee-yuck,” I said as I tried to rid my mouth of a bad taste. “This damned lava axe. It’s messing with my mind.”
“Well, look at the door,” Garfunkel said. “Something else that might mess with your mind.”
With no clue what could’ve made that heavy crunchy sound, I turned. And gaped.
Even from my vantage point, I could see the object that had been tossed through the wide-open door and onto the amphitheater’s entrance floor.
A giant, shiny pincer, fluid sputtering from the end that should’ve still been connected to Maximus’s arm.
Maximus. As in the enormous, unstoppable creature of nightmare with the tanklike shell that should have decimated Typhon’s entire entourage.
“Theo,” Typhon’s voice carried conversationally from the safety of the hallway beyond the open door. “I’m about to step inside. I hope you don’t mind.”
I watched in horror as Typhon’s leg and then shoulder entered the refracted blue crystalline light of the amphitheater.
He stood like a gladiator; scorpion blood spattered his face and the dark hair of his bare chest was likewise matted by blood and sweat.
His eyes gleamed a fluorescent yellow, the pupils slotted and catlike. His shirt dangled in tatters past his belt, his pants laced with cuts and gashes.
Typhon stood taller than his normal height, his exposed chest and arm muscles enlarged as if pumped up with air. His shoulders thrusted out like mini-mountains, his neck bulged with veins and fleshy muscle. His arms were as large as the Incredible Hulk’s and terminated with Godzilla claws that could eviscerate—or tear a giant scorpion’s poor arm claw off.
Typhon’s eyes locked in on mine as precise as lasers and the ugliest grin I’ve ever seen deformed the lower half of his face.
He laughed. “What’s wrong? Why so … pale?” His voice was deeper than usual but it was still his, except the politeness had been lifted so that only menace remained.
“Oh, geez, he’s right,” Garfunkel said. “You don’t look well.”
On my right shoulder, Simon fainted.
Still clinging helplessly to Atlas’s chest, I had only one play left.
“Orion!” I called down to where he’d been standing earlier. “Orion?”
I swiveled my eyes over the amphitheater. Where—
“Over here.”
It was Orion. Standing atop Atlas’s shoulder, his crossbow trained on me.
“It’s hopeless!” Simon shrieked, and then fainted again.
Orion sneered down at me. “You don’t look all that surprised.”
I shrugged, as lackadaisically as I could manage. Inside I was just trying to keep it together. Sure, I’d expected it, and it hurt like hell to be confirmed but I couldn’t allow myself to show the pain.
“What gave it away?” my partner asked in a tone that suggested his pride had clearly been slighted.
“Oh, a few things. You clammed up when Jack called you out for helping Typhon dig. Also, you had to have heard or seen Typhon’s commandos following us in through the Rock Forest—I mean, you expect me to believe a mythical hunter such as yourself would let an entire private army sneak up on you at the gate?” I laughed in an attempt to bolster my bravado. “Also, after you conveniently escaped and found me during Maximus’s attack in the crypt, you were pretty intent on reaching Atlas’s chamber instead of hiding. You were following a plan—Typhon’s plan. What I don’t understand is why you trust Typhon.”
“Trust him?” Orion chuckled and glanced across the expanse to where Typhon stood with his bulging arms crossed, silently observing and hearing every word of our exchange. “No offense, Boss.”
Typhon shrugged and Orion turned back to me.
“I’m doing it for the money. Life is more expensive than in my first life. Used to be, you could enter a town with fresh deer meat for barter and the shopkeepers would be only too generous with their wares, inn keepers with their rooms, alluring women with their … charms.”
His eyes settled hungrily on me clinging to the rock face. “Oh, but were you clinging to me …”
My face soured. “You can look but you can’t touch, Star Boy.”
“Remember, you swore an oath,” Orion said.
“And you’re not upholding your side of the bargain,” I said.
Typhon laughed. “Escort her down, please?”
With a muttered curse, Orion reached down for me but I leaned out of his grasp and gripped onto the raised curving bump of a chest vein. I rode it most of the way down to Atlas’s lap like some bizarre playground ride. From there, I traversed a ripple of thigh muscle down to the amphitheater steps. At the top, on the rim of the amphitheater glaring down at me stood Typhon.
Orion slid down Atlas’s chest to his lap as I dashed up the center aisle toward Typhon who only smiled at me as the lava axe’s flames extinguished. Arrayed behind Typhon and still pouring in through the silver doors, commandos and thugs watched wide-eyed. There were so many of them and only one of me …
I reached the top and stood before Typhon as Orion closed the distance behind me. He raised his crossbow and edged up to me.
“If I can’t have you, I’ll kill you.”
I laughed. “That’s Wrath, and Lust you’re wrestling with.”
“Give me the lava axe,” Orion said.
I stood with a hand on one hip. “No ‘please?’ That would be Envy talking.”
Orion’s eye muscle twitched and bulged. “Give it to me.” He reached out slowly and I offered the axe handle to him before backstepping just out of his reach as
he lunged for it.
I grinned wickedly. “Now that I believe would be Sloth …”
“Uh, Theo,” Garfunkel warned. “I think he’ll actually shoot you …”
Orion let out a growl and approached too quickly; sidestepping and spinning, I slung the lava axe in an arc, hooking its curving blade under one of the crossbow’s limbs.
Orion grunted; I bent at the waist, and using leverage, slid my foot behind his ankle as I wrenched the crossbow from his hands, sent it soaring out of his reach.
“Why you—”
My foot connected hard with his face and instead of trying to deflect it, both his hands latched onto my leg. I punched him right in the goods. He released my leg and I hiked my knee back, delivered another kick to his jaw, staggering him sideways to the rim of the amphitheater. He clutched at his chin and rocked on his back.
I turned to Typhon.
“Ready to tango?” I asked, changing up my grip on the lava axe’s shaft.
Typhon studied me with a curious glint in his eye before belly laughing. “You wish to … dance?” And turning his head to the side in a strained position, he said, “Nay. I wish to kill you.”
I stared as the muscles in Typhon’s neck first began to bulge; then his entire body began to puff out as morphing ovalish shapes forced their way up and out, roving beneath and stretching the skin of Typhon’s chest and shoulders and neck.
Faces.
Wide-eyed, dragonoid with squashed noses and long maws sucked at the skin from beneath, straining to burst from between Typhon’s dermis like alien babies.
“Human. You are so outmatched,” Typhon said as his body expanded even more, and with synchronous tearing snaps, the sharp teeth-lined dragon heads exploded from his shoulders, their long necks swaying and writhing like tentacles, their reptilian eyes blinking off pieces of skin and fluid.
I swallowed and glanced down at the lava axe in my hand, at the cold metal against my palm.
Just an ordinary axe. No flame-y fire or simmering heat.
At some point, Typhon stopped growing—he was now nine or ten feet tall and I was still standing there with an uncooperating cursed lava axe which according to some ancient Greek prophesy of the Oracle of Delphi was supposedly the only thing that could kill him—the souls of the dead rejoicing afterward and all that.
Axes and Angels: A Snarky Urban Fantasy Novel (Better Demons Series Book 1) Page 53
