Elementals 2: The Blood of the Hydra

by Michelle Madow

  “And you thought that spot would be… her tooth?” I asked. Maybe all that lotus fruit had gone to Rachael’s brain more than I’d realized.

  “Of course not,” she said. “I was aiming for her eye.”

  I’d been so focused on Charybdis’s gaping mouth that I hadn’t looked for an eye. Now that I did, I saw one of the huge, rock-like chunks smashed into the side of her face. I swear at that same moment she stared back at me, and she let out a low rumble, deep enough that I could feel the vibration resonate through the air. But I couldn’t help chuckling—because her eyes were nowhere near her teeth.

  “What’s so funny?” Rachael asked.

  “Your aim was a bit off,” I said, suppressing another laugh.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying that you could do better?”

  “I’m a daughter of Apollo.” I reached for my bow, held it up in position, and strung the arrow through it. “Of course I can do better.”

  But before I had a chance to center in on my target, a long growl echoed from the other side of the strait, followed by an ear-splitting crack. Something rumbled high up in the peak, and a few rocks rolled down the mountain, splashing into the sea.

  “Is that an earthquake?” Rachael asked, blocking the sun with her hand as she stared up at the peak.

  “No.” I shook my head, ice-cold dread running through my veins. “I don’t think so.”

  The whimpering puppy sounds returned, loud enough to rival the churning of Charybdis, as if there were an entire pack of them. There was more crashing up ahead—like footsteps. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought they were the footsteps of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

  More rocks tumbled down into the sea as they grew closer. Then, out of a pitch dark cave buried in the side of the mountain, slithered one humongous reptilian head, and then another, and then another, until there were six of them in all. Each one yelped, whimpered, or barked—with the occasional hiss thrown in between. They were each identical, with green eyes, and were connected to long, snakelike necks that went on forever. Three lines of teeth glinted in the sunlight whenever one of them opened its mouth, and they chomped their teeth wildly, looking at us and salivating as if we were dinner on a platter.

  The creature was out of reach of my arrows, so I dropped my bow to my side, transfixed as I stared up at the huge monstrosity. Rachael did the same.

  “Um, you guys?” Kate said, her voice shaking as she gazed up at the terrifying creature. “I think Scylla’s mad.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “Why’s Scylla showing her ugly faces?!” Chris yelled, still controlling the wind that was keeping our yacht afloat.

  “Don’t speak,” Hypatia said, shooting him a look so stern that he stopped talking. “You can’t risk that mint falling out of your mouth.”

  “Chris is right,” Blake said, his eyes determined as he stared Scylla down. “We chose Charybdis’s side of the strait. Scylla was supposed to stay in her cave and leave us alone.”

  “Except we broke the rules by flying over Charybdis,” Kate pointed out. “And I don’t think Scylla’s happy about it.”

  Danielle sneered at Scylla, as if that would be enough to scare her. “Is she even allowed to do this?” she asked.

  “She’s a monster,” Ethan answered. “She’s ‘allowed’ to do whatever she wants.”

  Kate held her hands up, her palms facing the side of the mountain, her brows furrowed in concentration. I don’t know what she was trying to do, but her expression grew more and more frustrated, and I could tell it wasn’t working. Finally she let out a long breath and dropped her hands to her sides.

  “I was trying to make Scylla’s cave collapse around her,” she explained. “But we’re too far away from the land for me to use my power.”

  “And Charybdis’s hold on the water is so strong that it overpowers anything I try to do,” Danielle said.

  I leaned over the railing again to check our progress—the back of the boat had just passed over the center of Charybdis’s mouth. At this pace, we still had a few more minutes until we would be out of the strait. And with the way that a few of Scylla’s mouths were licking their lips, I doubted we had that much time. Scylla must have realized it, too—or else she would have already attacked.

  “Hey, Chris?” I called to him. “Is there any way you can make us move faster?”

  He shook his head, his lips pressed tightly together.

  “The mint increased his power ten-fold,” Hypatia reminded us. “It doesn’t make his abilities endless. If he pushes himself and loses control of the yacht, we’ll be crushed in the mouth of Charybdis. We can’t risk it.”

  Blake drew his gun and held it in front of him, focused in on Scylla. “Then it’s a good thing we brought our weapons,” he said. “Because it looks like we’ll need to fight.”

  “Yes.” Hypatia nodded, her expression grim. “It appears so.”

  “I thought we couldn’t fight Scylla?” I asked, although I still held tightly onto my bow. “That it was impossible and we shouldn’t even try?”

  “I did say that,” she said. “But Chris needs to be out in the wind for his powers to work, and we can’t risk losing him to Scylla. Then the yacht will fall into Charybdis’s mouth, and we’ll all be dead. We need you and the others here to protect him. So… I suppose it’s time for you to prove me wrong, isn’t it?”

  Kate’s face was pale, like she’d just seen a ghost. “We wouldn’t just be proving you wrong,” she said. “We would be proving thousands of years of history wrong. We can’t do it. It’s impossible.” She backed up and gripped the handrail, terror in her eyes as she stared up at Scylla. We weren’t moving fast enough to escape, and the expression on Kate’s face said it all—she didn’t think we were going to make it.

  My stomach rose into my throat, fear weighing down my body. I knew this mission was dangerous, and that our lives would be at risk. But the real danger wasn’t supposed to happen until we reached the hydra. It wasn’t supposed to happen this soon. Not here. Not now.

  “You also must remember that in thousands of years of history, there’s been no record of anyone like the five of you, with powers over the elements,” Hypatia said, the confidence in her voice forcing me to focus. “And we have demigods with us as well. If there was ever a team to fight Scylla, it’s the one we have right here.”

  I readied my bow, but Blake reached for me, pulling me to stand behind him.

  “What are you doing?” I tried to step forward, but he held his arm out to hold me back. “We need to be ready to fight.”

  “But you don’t need to be on our front lines,” he said. “I—we—need you. And Rachael seems more than ready to race to the front, and she has a bow and arrow, too.”

  “Obviously you haven’t seen her shoot.” I rolled my eyes, but didn’t run forward again. I knew from training that I wasn’t supposed to rush ahead of everyone. I needed to keep myself in one piece so I could heal the others. And if Blake didn’t want me ahead of him, then I would fight right beside him.

  “What’s the plan?” Kate asked, still gripping onto the rail.

  Before anyone could answer, one of Scylla’s heads darted forward, as quick as a rattlesnake, and wrapped its mouth around Chef’s arm. His screams drowned out my thoughts, and I shot an arrow straight into one of Scylla’s eyes. That was enough to make her open her mouth in a scream and release Chef, who toppled to the floor, blood spurting all around him.

  Scylla prepared to take another bite of him, but Danielle dashed forward, a shield of ice in one hand to protect herself. She stabbed Scylla’s other eye with her katana. The head whimpered and pulled back, blindly crashing into the side of the mountain a few times on its way there.

  The other heads made a similar sound to the one I heard earlier—what had reminded me of lost puppies. Could blinding one of her heads have been enough to scare the other ones away from attacking?

  I wanted to hope so, but then the center head hissed and
reared back, its eyes locked on mine as it prepared to strike.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Give me fire!” I yelled to Blake, my gaze leveled with Scylla’s.

  The tip of my arrow erupted in flames, just as we’d practiced in training, and I released it straight into Scylla’s open mouth. I did it again, and again, and again, moving so quickly that it felt like one big blur. Blake and I worked together seamlessly—he always had the fire ready when I was ready to shoot. So much energy buzzed between us that we didn’t need to speak to communicate. It was like we’d been fighting in tandem for years.

  Once my quiver was emptied, Blake held up both of his hands, beads of sweat collecting on his forehead as he focused on the flames coming out of Scylla’s mouth. She looked like a fire-breathing dragon. Her neck flailed around, her eyes wide in pain—and in what also looked like confusion.

  Then the fire exploded, and Scylla’s head burst into thousands of scaly pieces, raining blood and guts and squishy green goop all over the deck.

  Blake pulled me close and held his arm above our heads, shielding us both from the fallout of Scylla’s guts. Some of the pieces were still on fire, so Danielle pulled water from the air to create an isolated rainstorm, extinguishing the flames.

  The destroyed neck crashed lifelessly into the swirling sea, splashing water up at us on impact. The four uninjured heads reached forward and clamped their mouths around different sections of the neck, pulling it away from Charybdis’s deadly whirlpool. They poked and prodded at it, whimpering as they tried to urge it back to life. But it remained still.

  The time Scylla spent tending to the limp neck was the time we needed for Chris to fly the yacht safely out of the strait. We landed with ease, and I looked behind us, surprised at how calm it all looked now. Scylla had disappeared back into her cave, and Charybdis had closed her mouth, the sea flat and calm. The sun had emerged from behind the clouds, rays of light sparkling over the water. It was as if the past ten chaotic minutes hadn’t happened at all.

  At least, until I stepped back and my heel squished into the green goop that had come out of Scylla’s head in the explosion. I didn’t want to think about what it could be—because I highly suspected that it might be a booger.

  “Nicole!” Kate called my name from the other side of the deck. “We need your help over here!”

  I looked to see what she meant, and saw her kneeling on the floor next to Chef. He was slumped up against the rail, and Kate had removed her jacket, using it to tie a tourniquet around what was left of his arm.

  His arm that now ended at his elbow, the skin above it torn and shredded to his shoulder.

  I rushed over to them, and Chef’s eyes lit up when he saw me. “You can fix it, right?” he said. “Kate promised me that you could fix it.”

  I looked at the stump again, swallowing down a wave of nausea. Because of what I could see, yes, I could heal. But as for the rest of it—how could I heal something that wasn’t even there? I didn’t think I could do it, but I took a few deep breaths, trying not to panic.

  “I need my arm,” Chef said, slower this time. “I can’t work without my arm.”

  “I’m going to do my best,” I told him. “Just lean back and close your eyes, okay?”

  He did as I said, but the reason I’d asked him to close his eyes wasn’t because he needed to for me to heal him. It was because I didn’t want him to see my expression when I unwrapped the tourniquet.

  It was a good thing he wasn’t watching me, because while I couldn’t see myself, I would bet that my expression was one of absolute horror. All that was left after his elbow was a bloody stump, with a jagged bone sticking out of the end. The surrounding skin was ravaged, mauled by Scylla’s teeth. Blood dripped out of the open hole of his arm and splatted onto the deck. My stomach swirled at the sight of it, and it took all my effort to swallow down the bitter nausea creeping up my throat. I couldn’t even reach forward to touch it. It was too gruesome.

  “You can do it,” Blake said from behind me. I turned around and looked up at him, grateful that he’d somehow known I needed support. My eyes must have conveyed my doubts, because he kneeled down next to me and leveled his gaze with mine. “It’s no different than the other times you’ve used your power,” he said, sounding absolutely sure of it. “You’ve got this, Nicole.”

  “What’s taking so long?” Chef asked. His voice shook from pain, and he was sweating so much that his hair was drenched and matted to his head. “Just do it already. Please.”

  Unable to let him live with this pain for a second longer, I reached forward and placed my hand on his arm. Then I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and called on the white energy, gathering it until it filled my body. I let it out of my palms, allowing it to flow into Chef’s arm and knit his injuries back together.

  Once finished, I opened my eyes, disappointment flooding my chest at what I saw. Chef’s injuries were healed—the skin was firm and smooth—but the piece of his arm that was missing hadn’t grown back. Instead, he looked like someone who had been an amputee for years.

  “I’m sorry.” I looked down at his stump of an arm and shook my head, unable to meet his eyes. “I tried. I really did.”

  “Try again,” he demanded. “Kate promised you could fix my arm.”

  “I said she could heal you, and that you wouldn’t die,” Kate said, her voice soft. “And that maybe she could fix your arm.”

  “Try again,” he repeated, staring straight at me. I finally looked up at him, and saw the desperation in his eyes. It was the same desperation and fear that I’d expect from anyone who was coming to terms with the possibility of losing a limb.

  This shouldn’t have happened to him. We were the ones who were supposed to be putting our lives at risk on this mission—not the crew. I owed it to him to try again.

  “Okay,” I said. “I will.”

  I placed my hands back on his arm, and called on the white energy again. But unlike the other times when I’d tried to heal someone, I couldn’t sense anything there to fix. Still, I sent the energy into his arm, hoping it would do something.

  I knew before opening my eyes that it hadn’t worked.

  “I tried,” I told him. “I’m sorry. I really did.”

  “You’re supposed to be a healer,” he said, yanking what was left of his arm back to his side. “What good are you if you can’t fix this?”

  “She saved your life.” Blake’s voice was calm and controlled, but he flexed his arm muscles, and I could tell that it was taking all of his effort to keep himself from lashing out. “If Nicole wasn’t here, you would have bled out and died.”

  “Death would have been better than this,” he muttered, glaring at his stump.

  “You don’t mean that…” Kate said.

  “Oh yeah?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Cooking is my life. I worked for years to get to where I am now. Now, just like that, it’s gone. I’ll lose my job. I’ll never be able to cook again.”

  Hypatia must have heard the commotion, because she walked over to us, her hands clasped in front of her. “Nicole did what she could, and you’re in much better shape now than you would have been if she wasn’t here,” she said. “You knew this would be a dangerous mission coming in, yet you volunteered anyway. You will be rewarded for your bravery. So while I know it can’t make up for what you’ve lost, as the Head Elder of Greece, I promise that you will be taken care of for the rest of your life.”

  “All I want is my arm back,” he said. “Who am I if I can’t cook?”

  Hypatia shot me a sympathetic look, and she reached forward to escort Chef below deck. He went with her, in a daze, not looking behind him.

  All I could think as I watched him disappear down the steps was that I wished I could have done better.

  I should have been able to give him his arm back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Once we were through the strait of Scylla and Charybdis, it wasn’t far to Helios’s island. During that
time, we took turns showering—none of us wanted Scylla’s guts on us for any longer than necessary. And I didn’t want Chef’s blood on me, either. It just reminded me of my failure.

  Unlike the Land of the Lotus Eaters, Helios’s island had a modern dock on it, so it was easy for us to pull up. According to Hypatia, this was because the island was now the home to a beautiful witches-only resort, popular for newlyweds on their honeymoons. From looking at it out of my window, I could see why. With huge overwater bungalows extending out into the sea, it reminded me of those exclusive resorts where only celebrities and socialites vacationed.

  To avoid Scylla and Charybdis, most people portaled in. But the magic around the island prevented unapproved portals, and there was a long waiting list for a room at the resort. Which was why we’d had to travel there the old-fashioned way.

  Once done freshening up, I gathered some of my extra arrows from the storage room and ventured onto the deck. Everyone was there—except for Chris.

  “Where’s Chris?” I asked.

  “He’s quite worn out after flying the yacht across the strait,” Hypatia said, as if what he’d done was a normal occurrence. “This will be your easiest task in this mission, so he’ll be staying back and resting, since he’ll need his full energy when you all fight the hydra.”

  “Is he okay?” Kate asked, her eyes wide with worry. “Does he need someone to stay back with him?”

  “He’ll be fine,” Hypatia said. “We need the rest of you on Helios’s island to collect the milk from the immortal cattle.”

  “Maybe I could stay back to keep him company?” Rachael volunteered. “Since from what you said, collecting the milk shouldn’t be hard, right?”

  “I don’t imagine it will be,” Hypatia said. “As long as you all stick to the rules and don’t slaughter any of the cattle, you shouldn’t run into any difficulties. And as I’ve said before, while we appreciate you and your brother joining us, this mission was given to the Elementals, not to either of you. So, you’re free to do as you please.”