The Immortal Fire

by Anne Ursu

  Then, from below him, there was a great movement—he felt it as much as he heard it. The Chimera was shifting, stretching, moving. Zee inhaled sharply, and he could see the Mr. Metos-shape flinch and draw upward.

  There was no time. Charlotte was surely on the lower level, and he had to get down there without attracting attention, and quickly. Off to the side of the loft, a foot or so in front of the rail, was a large chain that hung down from a pulley on the ceiling, and without taking the time to decide whether or not it was a good idea, Zee climbed up the rail and lunged for the chain.

  His plan had been to shimmy down and drop quietly just out of the beast’s line of vision. It was a good plan—or it would have been if the big iron pulley was not attached to a rotted old beam and if it was not just waiting for some large weight to be added to the chain so it could all come tumbling down. Which is exactly what happened—Zee made it about halfway down when there was a creak, then a snap, and then a clanging and a screeching, accompanied by Zee falling, chain, pulley, and all, to the ground.

  It was only a few feet, but it seemed to Zee as if it took several hours for him to fall—enough time to contemplate not only what a terrific mistake he had just made and where this mistake fit on his all-time top ten list (pretty high), but what might await him as soon as he landed on the concrete floor, and exactly how much it would hurt if the pulley fell on him, and how much better it might be if it did. He also had time to take in the scene in front of him—Mr. Metos creeping toward the Chimera, spear poised—and to think that that was the sort of situation where one really prefers absolute quiet.

  BAM! Zee landed on the concrete floor, pain pounding up his back. The chain clanged down next to him, followed quickly by the large iron pulley, which made the loudest noise in the history of the universe as it hit the concrete.

  A roar shook the building, and the Chimera—which was sitting half a length of the building away—whipped its heads toward Zee, just as Mr. Metos, with a mighty grunt, hurled the spear at its chest. It landed just off center, and the Chimera screamed and reared back, crashing through the loft above it.

  Zee narrowly avoided getting hit by one of the creature’s wings as it writhed. He rolled out of the way as it indiscriminately shot white-hot breath into the air, catching a group of crates, which burst into flame.

  “Zachary,” Mr. Metos shouted. “Get out of here!”

  The Chimera lunged toward the sound of Mr. Metos’s voice, and Zee picked up a brick and hurled it at its goat head. Roaring, it turned around, whipping its tail at Mr. Metos and knocking him to the ground.

  Zee was face-to-face with the beast now, as flames began to spread in the vast room. The lion head snarled at him, revealing a jet-black mouth and gleaming sharp teeth. Behind it, the goat head still writhed.

  Ignoring the pain in his back, Zee took off at a run toward the back of the vast room, away from the flickering flames. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Mr. Metos lunging for the spear still stuck in the Chimera’s chest. Zee stopped and picked up another brick and hurled it at the Chimera, hitting it right between the eyes.

  The Chimera let out a low growl, swiveling its heads back and forth from Zee to Mr. Metos. And then something very strange happened. The beast narrowed all four of its eyes, let out a small puff of blazing breath, and then drew itself up to its full height, unfurled its wings majestically, and, knocking the spear out of its chest, took off, bursting through the top of the warehouse and off into the clouds.

  Zee and Mr. Metos stared, panting, at the large hole in the roof, waiting for the creature to come crashing back down.

  But it didn’t.

  “I don’t understand,” said Mr. Metos to himself.

  Fire flickered along the south wall of the warehouse, and smoke began to tickle Zee’s lungs. “Did you find Charlotte?” he shouted.

  Mr. Metos shook his head. “You try those rooms, I’ll try the crates,” he called back. Zee half registered that he was clutching at his chest and working hard to breathe.

  Zee ran over to the tall doors along the north wall of the building, pounding on each one and yelling his cousin’s name. Then he remembered the flash of movement he’d seen and raced toward the room with the crate blocking the doorway.

  “Char,” he yelled through the wall.

  “Zee!” his cousin yelled back.

  Relief crashed into Zee with such force it almost knocked him over. “Are you all right?”

  “Get me out of here!” she yelled.

  Coughing from the roiling smoke, Zee called over to Mr. Metos, then braced himself against the tall crate and pushed with all of his might. Nothing. When Mr. Metos got there, he joined Zee, but they could not get it to move.

  “Hold on,” said Mr. Metos, and went over to the iron spear. With a grunt, he hoisted it up and brought it over. “Might you…?” he asked Zee, motioning to the crate. His face was racked with pain, and it looked as if it was all he could do to hold the spear.

  Zee took the spear, grunting a little under its weight, and wiggled it in between the wall and the crate. Using all his strength, he pulled back on it, using it as a lever, and finally the crate began to move.

  “At least that spear was good for something,” Mr. Metos grumbled, as an opening appeared between the crate and the wall. Within moments, Charlotte had slipped out and was staring at her cousin, wide-eyed, panting, and disheveled.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Mr. Metos said, looking back through the smoke at the flames that had now engulfed the entire south wall.

  When they were outside, Zee studied his cousin, who looked as if she’d been picked up in the claws of a dragon-like beast and flown several miles. Her voice was hoarse and her fists were raw, probably from pounding on the walls of her prison.

  “Are you all right?” Zee repeated through a fit of coughing.

  “No!” Charlotte yelled, sounding rather furious. “I’m covered in slime!”

  A grin spread across Zee’s face, and he felt tears prick his eyes. “Yeah,” he said, eyeing the sticky substance that had attached itself to her clothes in roughly the shape of a dragon claw. “You are.”

  Mr. Metos, still clutching his side, motioned to them both. “Let’s get in the car, children. Zachary, that was extremely—”

  Zee whirled around. “Would you stop it?” he spat.

  Mr. Metos blinked. “Pardon me?”

  “Mr. Metos, we are not children. We are thirteen years old. In the past year we’ve gone to the Underworld and back, we’ve dealt with Hades and a whole army made of enchanted shadows, we’ve fought Philonecron and Poseidon and a gigantic carnivorous sea monster. And all the while you’ve been telling us how much we need to be protected.”

  Something was buzzing in Zee’s head. The sound grew louder and louder as the words poured out of his mouth, until he could barely hear what he was saying anymore.

  “You speak of these great dangers to us, but you won’t tell us what’s going on, so the next thing I know I’m watching Charlotte be carried off by fluffy-the-Dragon Kitty while you’re skipping around trying to find its nest!” Next to him, Charlotte sucked in air. “So there will be no more locking us in cars, and there will be no more drugging people. We’re involved, like it or not—this is our fight just as much as it is yours. You complain about the gods not taking responsibility, but you won’t let us take any. And you can’t just manipulate people and lock them in places because they’re in your way—it’s arrogant…and…pigheaded and…cruel. And,” he finished, “it isn’t nice!”

  There was a moment’s silence then, while Charlotte watched him in awe, and the buzzing in Zee’s ears died down. Mr. Metos blinked at him several times, then looked down at the ground and cleared his throat.

  “Come on, ch—Charlotte, Zachary. Let’s go.”

  In silence, the three of them climbed back into Mr. Metos’s hatchback and collapsed against the seats, Charlotte in the front barely registering the body of her friend in back. They drove word
lessly back along the river and through downtown, Charlotte and Zee each staring out their windows, contemplating what had passed.

  Everyone was so lost in their own thoughts that no one noticed Maddy when she stirred, until her foggy voice broke through the silence.

  “What’s going on?” she asked sleepily.

  CHAPTER 10

  Maps and Legends

  BY THE TIME MR. METOS’S SMALL HATCHBACK HAD arrived at the upper school campus, all the other students had been picked up and taken to the safety of their homes, where they would be treated extremely well by their parents, who had always operated under the assumption that if you dropped your children off at a school in the morning, that school was likely to still be intact when you picked them up in the afternoon.

  At the middle school campus, officials searched and searched for the cause of the fire, but could not come up with the answer. One said that it looked very much as if the fire had come from outside the school, but that, of course, was impossible, and he was ignored.

  As for the school building, it was, frankly, toast. There would be no more classes at Hartnett Middle School for some time, and when the media pressed the principal on where, exactly, he planned to educate his students, he could only stare at the hollowed-out shell of his former dominion and request that they ask him a little later.

  It had taken some doing for the passengers in Mr. Metos’s car to explain to Maddy exactly where they were (why, on their way to the upper school!), why Charlotte had suddenly appeared in the car (they’d worried about her walking home and had gone to find her), and why everyone looked as if they’d been attacked by a horde of flaming monkeys (Fire! Fire at the middle school! You remember…)—not to mention where she’d been the whole time (fallen asleep, must have been so tired…), but she seemed satisfied. She was too glad to see Charlotte alive to ask too many questions.

  When they pulled into the upper school parking lot, they found Mr. Mielswetzski and Maddy’s mother standing there, looking rather frantic. Mr. Metos explained that they had gone to find Charlotte, and Mr. Mielswetzski looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to be grateful or to punch Mr. Metos in the face. Zee understood the feeling.

  As Charlotte’s father shepherded them into his car, Zee could see Mr. Metos standing in the parking lot, watching them go. If you did not know him, you might describe his expression as entirely blank, but there was a small tightening of his eyebrows, a twitching of his mouth, a flickering in his eye, and it made Zee all the more nervous.

  As exhausted as he was, Zee felt every muscle on alert, and he kept looking out the window to see what was coming for his cousin now. This is how it had always been, he thought grimly—Charlotte and Zee passive, waiting, reacting, leaving the great front door of their lives wide open and waiting to see what might waltz in. Zee was tired of it. He was tired of them being manipulated, used, followed, bruised, battered, kidnapped. If something was coming for them, this time he wanted to be there to meet it.

  When they finally got home, after a thorough debriefing with Mrs. Mielswetzski, Charlotte and Zee headed upstairs.

  “I need a shower,” Charlotte grumbled as they got to the second floor.

  “All right,” said Zee. He supposed no monsters could get her in the shower, but you never knew.

  While his cousin washed the Chimera-claw slime off herself, Zee paced around the room and Mew made agitated circles around the bed.

  “You would have fought off the Chimera, wouldn’t you?” Zee whispered to the cat, who gave him a look like she would very much like to try.

  He felt like he had been stomped on by a troll. His body ached from his encounter with the Chimera tail and the fall, and his lungs still felt as if they were filled with hair balls. He smelled, too—of smoke and fire and mildew and some other things he’d prefer not to think too carefully about.

  Finally Charlotte appeared in his room, looking much less slimy. She sat on the floor very gingerly, as if she were settling down on a bed of nails, and Zee winced in sympathy.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she huffed.

  She did not seem all right. Her jaw was set so firmly it looked as if it might lock that way, and her eyes were narrow and looked like lasers might shoot out of them at any minute. Which, really, might come in handy next time they were attacked. The whole thing had the effect of almost covering up all the pain he knew she was in. Almost.

  “I can tell.”

  “That thing,” she said, her voice quite loud suddenly, “that thing took me. It dumped me in a room and shut me in. And I tried and tried to find a way out. I pounded on the door and tried to break the windows, and…” Charlotte’s voice broke, and she shook her head. Zee’s heart burned. He could not imagine how scared she must have been, locked in that room, not knowing what was coming next, not being able to do anything. He felt another surge of anger.

  “Did you kill it?” she asked.

  “Um, no,” Zee said, wincing inwardly. “It got away.”

  “Oh,” said Charlotte. “Did you at least hurt it?”

  Zee’s fists balled up. “Yeah,” he said. “Mr. Metos put a spear in its chest.” Suddenly he slammed his hand down on the bed. “We should just go. Go to Greece, try to find the Prometheans on our own.”

  Charlotte’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

  “Who cares about Mr. Metos? What do we need to know about the Chimera—it came after you, that’s enough. Anyway, what if this is happening all over? Chimera carrying people off, people who don’t have anyone to save them? Char, the monsters are on the loose. Isn’t that our fault?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “What are we supposed to do? Hang out here while you get nicked by flying mutant lions?”

  “No, but—Greece is a big country. How are we supposed to get there, anyway? Walk?”

  “We’ll ask Sir Laurence. He’ll give us money.” Sir Laurence was the English gentleman turned giant squid who’d helped Charlotte escape Poseidon. With the aid of Poseidon’s trident, she’d turned him back into an English gentleman. His family fortune had grown quite substantially in the century he spent as a cephalopod, and he’d helped pay to smuggle Zee back to the States after Charlotte had rescued him from Philonecron.

  “And then how are we supposed to find them?” Charlotte asked. “Just walk around Greece asking everyone if they know the secret lair of the descendants of Prometheus?”

  “We’ll find them!” Zee could hear his voice getting loud and tight. “Or we’ll go to Olympus. We’ll find something to use on Zeus. We can’t just sit here!”

  “But that doesn’t mean we should go running off stupidly, either,” Charlotte retorted, sounding suddenly very dangerous.

  “Running off stupidly is what you do, Char! That’s, like, your whole reason for living!”

  Narrowing her eyes, Charlotte stood up. “I think I’ll go to my room now,” she said coldly. And with a toss of her wet hair, she hobbled out the door, while Mew gave him a look that clearly said, You, sir, are a stupid git. Groaning, Zee punched his pillow.

  It was a chilly Charlotte that Zee met when he came down for dinner that night. He did not understand why she’d resisted his idea—she was the one who had been taken, she was as angry as he’d ever seen her as a result, and she was the one who always wanted to go running off half-cocked anyway.

  The Mielswetzskis, too, were grave and shaken as they ate their plates of spaghetti and turkey meatballs.

  “I still don’t understand where you were,” said Mrs. Mielswetzski. “Why on earth didn’t you go with everyone else?”

  “Oh,” said Charlotte. “Well, we had to go out a window, and—”

  “You what?”

  “It was the only thing we could do,” Charlotte mumbled.

  “Didn’t you evacuate with everyone else? Why didn’t you join everyone in the parking lot? Do you know what your father thought when you didn’t get off the bus?”

  Charl
otte looked down. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. We just…couldn’t.”

  “I don’t understand you two,” she said. “Why can’t you just be more careful?” Her mother looked at the table, her eyes filling with tears.

  Charlotte flushed, and Zee eyed her. Where she usually seemed defiant when her parents talked like this, now she just looked cowed.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Charlotte repeated, stabbing at a stray piece of spaghetti.

  Dinner proceeded silently from there, interrupted only by Mr. Mielswetzski’s attempts to force more turkey meatballs on everyone, and after it was over, Zee began to trudge up to his room to beat on his pillow some more.

  “Wait, Zee.” Mrs. Mielswetzski stopped him. “I forgot. You got a package today.” She handed Zee a small tube wrapped in brown paper. “Must be from England. Different mailing system they have there, huh?”

  Zee studied the parcel. No, the postal system worked the same in England as it did in the States, but whoever put together this mailing didn’t seem to know that. Everything was just slightly off: The stamps (which certainly were not British stamps) were on the wrong side, and the address was written in one long line and seemed to have been scripted by someone who had a rather creative understanding of how to form letters. He tried to catch Charlotte’s eye as she went upstairs, but she didn’t seem very interested in looking at him.

  Zee headed upstairs, and with a fast-beating heart began to unwrap the brown paper. Inside was a small cylinder made of dark wood with a wooden cap on it. He unscrewed the cap and found inside a small silver object and a rolled-up piece of delicate-looking paper with a wax seal.

  For some reason, Zee found himself looking around, as if invisible spies might be peering over his shoulder. Sometimes that’s just how getting wax-sealed scrolls in the mail makes you feel. But his room was empty save for Mew, so he examined the objects before him.