by Diana Tyler
“Aison, we had a deal, right?”
“Yeah, and I kept it.” He looked at Ethan. “The boy’s reached manhood, hasn’t he?”
“How do you know he’s the same person?” Chloe asked.
Aison tapped the tip of his nose. “Same scent.”
Ethan’s hands flew up. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Would one of you please tell me what you’re talking about? How did you know me when I was a kid?” he asked Aison. “And how in Hades’ name do you know my scent?”
“Later, Ethan,” said Chloe, “please.” She looked back at Aison. “I’d appreciate it if you could extend our terms and not hurt anyone here.”
Aison nodded. “I didn’t come here to harm anyone. I’ll go with your friend to retrieve your brother, and I swear not to touch a hair on the pretty boy’s head.”
“Thank you.”
Then Aison took off, running far faster than the best sprinters at her school, including Damian and Ethan.
Ethan shot Chloe a look out of the corner of his eye. “I hope you’re not leaving me in the dark.”
“Only when I time travel,” Chloe said.
Ethan laughed and followed after Aison, who was already halfway to the shed.
“Back so soon?”
At the sound of the familiar voice, Chloe turned to see the Centaur looming over her shoulder with a leather bowcase strapped to his back.
“I didn’t go after Damian,” she said. “Turns out he was here all along.”
“Good news then, eh? Simplifies things a bit.” He took a swig from his wineskin.
“Not really. Damian just followed me into the past—my past—and I’m pretty sure I know why.”
“And why’s that?”
“He wants to rewrite history so our parents were never killed. He doesn’t understand the damage that would do.”
The Centaur sighed and looked around the camp, at the dozens of men and women building new lives for themselves, literally from the ground up. Their old lives had been burned to ashes, yet not a one of them seemed aware of it, or, if they were aware, they simply didn’t mind. They worked and laughed and ate and sang as if they were the most fortunate people on the planet. They had each other and they had security. They didn’t seem to need anything else to be happy.
“Who wouldn’t want to rewrite history if they had the chance?” he asked.
It was a rhetorical question, but Chloe felt compelled to answer anyway. “If there wasn’t so much at stake, you can bet your life I’d go back and try to prevent a lot of things, starting with my parents’ deaths. But that would be the cowardly thing to do, and my family is through being cowardly.”
“A noble sentiment, as long as your family’s not through being a family. Take it from someone who knows, Miss Chloe.” The Centaur turned to her. She tried not to stare at the triangular serpent head tattooed on the bridge of his nose. “If you haven’t got your family, you haven’t got anything.”
Chloe wondered what secrets lay hidden behind his gruff exterior and tattooed face. He obviously wasn’t a part of Iris and Tycho’s family, nor did she see any other centaurs walking around. But before she could ask him what his story was, she saw Damian, Ethan and Aison trudging toward her. Much to her relief, no one appeared to be bruised or bleeding.
“Can we talk about this in private?” Damian asked Chloe, staring at the ground the way he used to when their parents scolded him for something.
Chloe looked past his shoulder at the carpenters by the shed. They were shaking their heads and mumbling to each other, pointing at them with their tools. She didn’t want to know what they thought of the three strangers Iris had brought to their new colony. Did they suspect she was another Mania? She couldn’t blame them if they did. So far she’d done nothing to ingratiate herself with them, much less give them reason to trust her.
“We can talk farther away from them,” she said to Damian, indicating the men and boys behind him, “but I think the rest of us deserve to know where you’ve been and why you’re betraying us.”
“Strong words to speak to one of your own kith and kin,” said the Centaur.
Chloe held her gaze on Damian until he finally lifted his eyes to hers. “It’s the truth, and he knows it,” she said. “Warning Mom and Dad or whatever it is you’re intending to do by following me to our past would undo everything we’ve accomplished up to now.”
“What have we accomplished?”
Damian didn’t sound angry, the way he had in the tent. Instead, sadness, verging on apathy, shaded his words. She could feel the weight of them pulling on her heart like an anchor.
“We’re freaks, Chloe. Exiled from our own world and this one, too.” He gestured toward the rows of tents beyond him. “We don’t belong here.”
Iris, Tycho and Charis emerged from the woods and rounded the corner near the shed, each with a wicker basket on their arm. Chloe’s thoughts shot back to the Fields of Asphodel and the flower-filled baskets every soul there was obsessed with. Like Sisyphus, who rolled and rolled his boulder upwards without ever reaching the summit, the spirits of Asphodel labored in vain. But, Chloe thought, at least Sisyphus was aware that his monotonous lot was the gods’ retribution. To those in the Fields, picking flowers was their life’s purpose. It would be everyone’s purpose if they died without knowing the All-Powerful.
It was that thought alone that restored Chloe’s reason whenever she found herself fantasizing about meddling with her parents’ murder. Even their deaths, which were senseless and devastating, were being used for the greater good—the good of all Petrodians, both present and future.
She couldn’t trade their eternal damnation for her temporal happiness.
She wouldn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MERCENARY
Iris waved at Chloe, but Chloe could only manage a superficial smile in return. As her own smile faded, Iris hastened toward her.
“And you think we belong back in the past with our parents,” Chloe said. “You want to just erase your mind of all we know about the Fantásmata and the fact that they want our family dead.” Chloe fixed her eyes on an early evening star crowning a distant peak. If only Damian could see the Fields himself. If it weren’t such a risk, she’d take him there right now.
“What’s going on here?” Iris turned to Damian and rested a hand on his arm. “It’s good to see you, Damian.”
“Just a little sibling spat,” said Ethan.
Chloe wished this were just a spat and not a quarrel concerning the fate of humanity.
“Did you go outside the wall?” Charis asked. Her strawberry-blond hair danced in the breeze as her eyes widened with curiosity.
“Maybe,” said Damian, thinking this was a convenient change of subject. He would have loved to talk about anything other than his and Chloe’s “spat.”
“Don’t beat around the bush, kid,” said the Centaur. “If you saw something worth telling, you’d better open your yap and have out with it. I didn’t save your skin for nothing.”
Damian glared up at the Centaur, whose massive hand rested on the strap of his bowcase. Damian had always been the braver twin. “You know,” he said, “I liked you a whole lot better when you were Katsaros.”
Charis and Ethan laughed, despite the Centaur’s disgruntled sneer.
“Come now, Damian,” Charis said sweetly. “What have we done to so upset you that you won’t tell us what you’ve seen?”
“No one’s done anything to upset me,” Damian assured her. “I just wish my sister would see that there’s nothing we can do here. Mania isn’t our problem.” He sighed and stared down into Charis’s basket as a gust of wind rushed by them. “I met Mania today. She wanted me to go with her. She wasn’t scary at all, actually.”
“Then why didn’t you go?” Ethan asked. “You could’ve gotten some intel and then used your doma to leave without being noticed.”
“Because,” began Damian, his apathy giving in to heated conviction, “this is what I’m tryin
g to tell you—she isn’t our problem.” He pointed to Iris and Charis. “These Ashers are the ones who should have stopped Mania, not us. I wanted to go with Chloe to the future because that’s where we can make a difference. We could save our parents, and Ethan’s, too.”
“No,” said Aison, “you couldn’t.”
All eyes swung to the shapeshifter, whose true identity only Chloe knew.
“Who are you?” Charis asked, as if only now noticing Aison’s presence in their circle.
“The proper question is what are you,” Chloe said, glad that two of the three men around her were armed and that one of the two women had fire in her hands.
But Aison didn’t seem to mind her remark. He pointed to the back of his right hand, just below the space between his thumb and forefinger. “You see that?”
Everyone but the Centaur bent down to get a closer look. Chloe had to squint to make out a small, flesh-colored rectangle the size of a stamp imprinted on Aison’s skin.
“A tattoo,” said Tycho. “Pythonian. Look, there’s a serpent running through the middle.”
Chloe looked up at the Centaur, whose own snake tattoo was glaring at her. She turned back to Aison and said, “Why do you have the same mark as someone from this time?” But she already knew the answer: Aison wasn’t from her time. He probably had more in common with Iris and the Centaur than Chloe or anyone else back home.
“The Pythonians are what you know as the Fantásmata,” said Aison, flecks of orange flickering in his eyes. “They’re cut from the same blood-soaked cloth as Apollo. This”—he tapped the tattoo—“is not just the Pythonian mark. Beneath it is a tag called the Lycaean Seal, and that contains everything there is to know about me, as well as the others.” He looked at Damian. “And there are others, thousands of them.”
Charis’s pale cheeks flushed pink with impatience. “Others of what? What are you?”
“One of the young men chosen at the Lycaea Festival. I was the first.”
“The first what, Aison?” Ethan said.
“Asher hunter.” Aison grimaced, and his four incisors protruded from his mouth. Within seconds, his face and arms were covered with yellowish-brown fur.
Charis and Iris gasped and stepped close to Tycho, whose hand flew to his scabbard.
“Peace,’ Aison said. “I’m only showing you.”
Less than a minute later, Aison’s metamorphosis was complete. Artemis growled at him from her post outside Chloe’s tent, but at half the wolf’s size, she wasn’t dumb enough to provoke him.
“So that’s how you could see me,” Damian said to Aison. “You’re part animal.”
The Centaur cleared his throat. “Keep that in mind the next time you try to sneak by me, kid.”
“You’re the wolf that attacked Chloe’s dad and me,” Ethan said, more stupefied than upset.
“I…” Aison’s fiery gaze fell to the earth as he dug his claws into the earth. “I cannot say. It could’ve been me, or it could’ve been a dozen other Lycaeans assigned to that area.”
“You can’t stay here, Aison.” Chloe said, and Aison’s ears and tail went limp. “We can’t risk changing history if it was you who went after them. I don’t think it was a coincidence that Ethan showed up there on the beach with us.”
“Then what stopped him from coming after me?” Ethan asked. “Or going after you? If he’s our attacker, he would’ve attacked.” He stared at Aison a moment, examining him from head to tail. “He isn’t the same wolf.”
“It was hope that stopped me.” Aison released the word as if it had been pushing against his lips for hours. “The second I saw Chloe and Damian appear out of nothing, I knew they were Ashers with great power, Ashers who might be able to help us.”
“You mean help all the other wolf people?” Damian asked.
Aison nodded. “We’re not all assassins. We do what we must to survive, mercenaries compensated with another sunrise.”
“Tell us what happened to you,” said Charis. Then she ducked into the tent and returned with a bowl full of water. She set it before Aison and smiled as he lapped it up.
“Thank you.” Aison lifted his wet nose from the bowl. “My past is not a pleasant one, nor one I’m proud to share, but perhaps it will help redirect your perspective.” He was looking straight at Damian.
“Come,” said Iris. “Let’s get you into the woods and back to your human form before someone sees you.”
Iris led them behind the tents and up a steep narrow path lined by armies of beech, oak and eucalyptus trees whose foliage blocked the sun. The air was infused with the intoxicating scents of pine needles, mint, and honey, a virtual paradise for the moths and butterflies floating through the branches in search of the best place to feast.
It was easy for Chloe to believe that the mythical wood nymphs known as dryads dwelled here. Eurydice, Orpheus’s wife, was one such nymph. Her tragic death by a viper’s bite was one of the many reasons Chloe was here. Without it, Orpheus would not have been desperate enough to do the bidding of his beguiling uncle Hermes by luring Chloe to the gateway to hell; she knew him better than that. Had Eurydice lived and their marriage endured, who knew how the future would have unfolded, and what tack Apollo would have taken to stop the Vessel when the Moonbow appeared.
It was useless to speculate, but following the thread back to the moment Eurydice died only further persuaded Chloe that good really could be made of evil. Her time on Circe’s island and later in hell hadn’t exactly been a bed of roses, and nor had losing her old life and coming here been easy. But the fact was, Eurydice and Orpheus were together in heaven now. As were Chloe’s parents. All of it, from discovering Carya in her backseat that first day at the museum to being forced by Deimos to drink from the Lethe, had prepared her for this, her one and only chance to change history.
“Have none of you ever heard of or seen a Lycaean before?”
The sound of Aison’s voice interrupted Chloe’s thoughts and she looked up to see him, in his human form, standing beneath an oak tree. The others circled around him slowly, cautiously, eyeing him as though he were a feral animal. He seemed genuine enough to Chloe, but she acknowledged that her judgment wasn’t always spot on. She’d been naive enough to believe Orpheus, after all. She had learned the hard way that people aren’t always what they seem.
She noticed that the Centaur was also staying back, eating a handful of mulberries he’d no doubt picked from one of the others’ wicker baskets. Though he appeared nonchalant, Chloe had a hunch he was more interested in serving as bodyguard for the group than hearing Aison’s story. She watched him remove his bow from the bowcase and set it beside him, a clear warning to the shapeshifter.
Before Aison could continue speaking, he stumbled sideways, catching himself on the oak’s wide bole. Unable to support his weight, he slid down the tree, his neck and brow suddenly slick with sweat. His arms and legs began to shake. Charis tried to go to him, but Tycho held her back. He didn’t trust Aison either.
Chloe gasped. “Aison!” She ran to his side and crashed to her knees. “What’s happening to you?”
Aison’s lips parted and thin rivulets of blood spilled between them, trickling down his chin, staining his white shirt. He raised a hand to his mouth to cough, filling it with inky blood.
“The seal,” he rasped, holding up a bloody, trembling hand until, wracked with exhaustion, he let it drop onto his thigh. “Take the seal.” Then he wheezed a final breath as his head fell back against the oak.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
BLOOD
Chloe stared at Aison’s lifeless eyes, hoping that if she looked long enough she would see a glimmer of orange. She refused to feel for a heartbeat. He couldn’t be dead; he hadn’t been sick or wounded. On the contrary, he’d seemed in better spirits than he had been on the beach. One second he’d been healthy, and the next, fighting for breath.
Iris stepped between Chloe and the oak where Aison reposed and held out her hand. “Come, Chloe. Leave him i
n peace.”
“I’m going back.” Chloe whispered, unable to find the strength to shout. She wanted to scream, to let her voice ring out and echo through the woods—echo until every Petrodian and dryad heard her. She would make this right. Aison hadn’t deserved to die.
She reached around Iris and placed her hand on Aison’s, tears welling at the shock of his cold, stiff skin. “Please go,” she said to Iris. “I need space to do this.”
“You’ve used your doma twice already today,” said Ethan, standing just a few feet behind her. “Remember what Carya said?”
“Then I’ll wait and go back tomorrow,” Chloe said, finding her voice again. “I’ll go back to the beach, to the moment I saw him, and then…”
“Then you’ll try to convince him that he can’t come here with you.” Iris placed a maternal hand on Chloe’s head, stroking her hair. “There’s a reason he wanted to come with you, Chloe. You heard him yourself.”
Chloe looked down at Aison’s tattoo and the minuscule snake bisecting its middle. She thought of the stained-glass windows in the foyer of the Religious Council building that depicted a crescent moon and a serpent just like this one. And then she knew.
“The councilman killed him,” she said, releasing Aison’s hand and leaning back against Iris’s legs. “Just like he almost killed Ethan.” She turned to look at Ethan, recalling, with tears running down her cheeks, the moment the councilman had held the fob over Ethan’s head, one touch of which could have taken his life in an instant.
“The microchip was rigged, just like the suit was,” said Ethan. “It was probably programmed to kill its host if something ever seemed off.”
The Centaur cursed under his breath. “By the Twins, if I ever get my hands on a Petrodian…”
Tycho knelt beside Aison and gently closed his eyes with his palm.
“He said to take the chip, didn’t he?” Damian said to Chloe. “If you try to go back in time, we won’t know what he’s talking about.”
