“I am Chronos,” the man answered. “The primordial deity of time itself.”
I blinked, taking in what he’d said. “You can control time?” I asked him, hope rising in my chest. “You can change the past?”
“I cannot ‘control time,’” he said with a kind smile. “Time is an essence that cannot be controlled—not even by the gods. I can, however, travel through the fourth dimension and access any point in the past. Once there, I can make changes as I see fit. Although I try not to change much, since messing with time can get quite complicated, even for a primordial deity like myself.”
“But since you came here so quickly, it means you see why we need to make changes, right?” Chris asked.
“We didn’t come here ‘quickly.’” Erebus chuckled, his eyes dark. “It took me weeks to convince Chronos to meet with me. By then, the spring equinox had passed, and Typhon had risen from Mount Etna. Despite all of the destruction, and despite my telling him that the rise of the Titans was inevitable, Chronos insisted that there was still a chance that the three of you would close the portal. He gave me no choice but to wait it out. Once the three of you failed, he gave in and brought us back here.”
“Back up a second.” Danielle held up a hand, her forehead crinkled. “You can travel through time. So why did you have to wait for those weeks to pass? Couldn’t you have just popped into the future, taken a look at what happened, and then come back?”
“The future is not written in stone,” Chronos said, watching her calmly. “There are many possible paths that the future can take at any given time, and those paths are constantly changing based on every decision made. Even deities like Nyx and Erebus, who can see where those paths might lead, are not always correct. The future is in constant flux, and it doesn’t exist yet. Therefore, I can only travel to the past. The moment I make myself known in the past and create changes, that moment becomes the present. It’s impossible to predict exactly which future those changes will create until the present plays out on its own.”
“So when Erebus found you, and both of you saw us fail to close the portal by the summer solstice, that was the present,” I said, doing my best to understand this. “But since you traveled back to this point in the past, this is now the present? And the future that you saw is erased?”
“Precisely.” Chronos smiled. “Do you see now why I avoid changing the past?”
“I guess,” I said, although it was definitely still confusing. “But you’re here now, so that must mean you want to help us. Right?”
“The point when Medusa’s head was destroyed seems to be the moment that the rise of the Titans became inevitable,” Chronos said. “So yes, I will allow the three of you to travel back in time to a moment when you can retrieve Medusa’s head while it was still in tact.”
“We can save Blake,” I whispered.
“And Kate,” Chris added. “Don’t forget about Kate.”
“You’re right,” I told him, smiling. “We can go back to before we beheaded Medusa, and we can save both of them. We’ll go back to the day before the fight in LA. Then we can do whatever we need to stop Ethan from going through with his crazy plan, and warn Kate about what will happen to her so she can take proper precautions. We’ll have both of them back. It’ll be like the past nightmarish week never even happened.”
“I’m afraid that I can’t allow you to go that far back,” Chronos told us, his eyes sad.
“Why not?” I dropped Blake’s hand and stood up, looking at Chronos straight on. “You’re the god of time. You just said you could send us back. So why can’t we go back to that moment?”
“I said I would send you back to retrieve Medusa’s head before it was destroyed,” he corrected me. “But I absolutely cannot send you back to before you beheaded her. If I do, there’s a chance that something else will happen during that fight that will result in an even worse situation—such as Medusa being victorious and turning you all to stone. It’s a risk we cannot take.”
“We defeated Medusa once,” Chris said, slashing his knife through the air. “We can do it again. Especially since this time, Ethan won’t be there to sabotage us.”
“I’m sorry.” Chronos shook his head. “Since you were already successful in beheading Medusa in this timeline, I will not send you back to before that moment. We can’t risk having any other possible outcome from that fight.”
“Then when will we go back to?” I asked.
“You will go back to the latest moment possible, as to cause the least number of changes in the timeline,” he said. “You will go back to Kerberos, right after Ethan steps through the portal with Blake. Ethan closed Medusa’s eyes before coming through the portal and he put her head back in his bag, so you won’t be in danger of catching her gaze and turning to stone. You can take care of Ethan, retrieve Medusa’s head, and bring it back to Kerberos.”
“And Blake will be okay,” I said, more than ready to erase these past few days forever.
“Yes.” Chronos nodded. “I’m doing this to help you acquire Medusa’s head, and one of the side effects will be that Blake will still be alive. But—” he said, looking seriously at the three of us. “When Helios allowed Ethan and his dragons to kill Blake, he considered that to be punishment for all of you after what you did to his cattle. A life for a life. Once you change the past, you will change that, too. Helios will still be looking to punish you. And while the group of you are powerful, you are not powerful enough to take down a god. Only another god is strong enough to do that.”
I reached for the sun pendant on my necklace, holding it between my fingers. “Luckily, we have some gods on our side,” I said, thinking back to those few minutes when Apollo had visited us in the cave. “Hopefully my father will be willing to help.”
“We have my ancestor , and Chris’s, too,” Danielle added. “Aphrodite and Zeus. And Blake’s ancestor…” She glanced at his body and quickly turned away, as if it pained her too much to see him this way. “Who is his godly ancestor? No one ever told us.”
“Ares,” Erebus answered, as if it should have been obvious. “The god of war.”
“Sounds like the kind of god we need on our side,” Chris said, and I nodded in agreement.
“And what about you?” Danielle asked Erebus, stepping toward him. She reached for his hands, but stopped herself, dropping her arms back to her side. “You’ve done so much for us already… and you have no idea how grateful I am… but you’re not just going to leave. Right?”
“If I don’t travel through the time portal with you, then I will forget ever having met you,” he said. Danielle’s lip quivered, as if she were about to cry, and he added, “That’s not what I want to happen, so I will be traveling back with you. Once we’re there, I will disappear into the shadows and distract Helios’s Solar Dragons to ensure that they don’t arrive to pick up Ethan and Blake while you’re still there. Once you’ve taken care of Ethan, retrieved Medusa’s head, and have returned to Earth, my role as your guide through Kerberos will be over.”
“Will we ever see you again?” Danielle asked.
“I can’t say for sure,” he said. “And I refuse to make you any promises that I cannot keep. I respect you too much to do that.”
They stared at each other for a few seconds, neither of them saying a word. The way they were looking at each other made me think of me and Blake, when we first met but didn’t think we could be together.
I didn’t doubt that Danielle could have developed feelings for Erebus. After all, he was a god. But did he return those feelings? I wouldn’t have thought it was possible—not because of anything Danielle had done—but because I couldn’t imagine a primordial deity having any interest in a mortal.
But the way he was looking at her right now, as if the thought of never seeing her again would be more torturous than an eternity spent in the underworld of Kerberos, made me wonder.
“I have a question,” Chris said, interrupting whatever moment was happening between Erebus
and Danielle. “After we travel back in time, what happens to the versions of ourselves that already exist there? We can’t co-exist with them, right? So will we have to kill our alternate selves or something crazy like that to make sure the timeline continues like it should?”
“No.” Chronos chuckled. “The moment you come face to face with the versions of yourselves from the past, they will cease to exist.”
“And Blake?” I asked, although I continued before Chronos could answer, already coming to my own conclusion. “We have to destroy his body. We can’t risk the chance of any creature from Kerberos bringing it back in time and showing it to the version of Blake from the past—the version of him that’s alive. If they do, Blake will be gone. Forever.”
“I can turn him to shadow,” Erebus offered. “Then no creature alive will be able to get their hands on him.”
I glanced at Danielle and Chris, who both nodded. “Yes,” I said to Erebus. “That would be helpful. Thank you.”
Chronos held his hands up, motioning for us to be quiet. “All of you are not thinking fourth dimensionally,” he said, and I focused on him, wondering what on Earth he was talking about. “Once you step through the time portal and land in the past, everything you just experienced from that point until now will be erased. Nothing from then until now will exist anymore—including the boy’s body.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. So we won’t have to worry about what to do with the Ethan from right now, either?” I glanced at the door, knowing he sat just outside, crippled from my arrows. “He’ll just be gone?”
“Precisely.” Chronos nodded. “Now you’re getting the hang of it.”
“So what are we waiting for?” Chris held his gaze with Chronos’s, still gripping his knife in his hand. “Let’s do this.”
“Not so fast,” Chronos said. “Before you go, you need to understand that mortals are not meant to travel through time. I am only agreeing to do this for you because we’re in dire circumstances, and I cannot think of any other solution that will give us this chance.”
“And we thank you for this opportunity,” I told him. “We won’t let you down. We promise.”
“That’s not all,” he continued, unfazed by my words. “I need to warn you that if you go through with this, there will be a cost.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“What kind of cost?” I asked.
He looked seriously at each of us, and said, “The stress of the journey will take away one year of each of your natural lives. Is that something you’re willing to risk?”
“Of course I’m willing to risk it.” I didn’t have to think twice. “One year of my life is worth saving Blake’s.”
“And it’s worth saving the world,” Chris added.
We both looked at Danielle, expecting her to agree, too. But she stared down at Blake’s body, her eyes far off and her forehead crinkled.
After a few seconds, she looked back up at Chronos. “What will happen if we don’t have a year of our lives left?” she asked him. “Will we drop dead the moment we step through the time portal?”
“The year is one year from your natural lives,” he clarified. “You will physically be one year older when you emerge from the portal than you were when you stepped through. You’re all young, so if you don’t die from unnatural causes, it’s reasonable to assume that this won’t affect you until far in the future.”
“Wait.” Chris reached for his shoulder, where a tiny bit of fresh blood was seeping through his shirt. “I was bitten by a fox on the mountain,” he told Chronos. “Its poison is in my system. And the poison takes weeks, or maybe months, to kill.” He turned to face Danielle and me, his eyes shining with regret. “I don’t have a year left,” he said. “I can’t go back with you. You’re going to have to do this on your own.”
“No,” I said. “We can’t just leave you here.”
“It won’t be like that,” he said. “Don’t you remember what Chronos told us? About thinking fourth dimensionally? You won’t be ‘leaving me here,’ because I’ll never have been here in the first place. You’ll get to Kerberos right when Ethan comes through the portal with Blake. At that point in time, the past version of me will still be in the cave with the past versions of you and Danielle, speaking to Apollo. After the two of you and Blake take care of Ethan, go back through the portal. When Apollo sees you come through and the past versions of yourselves disappear, you can tell him—and me and Blake—about everything that happened. You can try to get Apollo’s help.”
“Good idea,” Danielle said, walking across the room to pick up Ethan’s discarded knife. He must have been so confident that he could beat us with the dragons that he hadn’t bothered bringing it outside with him. It wasn’t as glamorous as the Golden Sword, but at least it would give her extra protection.
“It is,” I agreed. “Especially since it sounds like with everything we’ll be up against, we’ll need Apollo’s help against Helios.”
“So only three of you will be going through the time portal,” Chronos clarified. “Nicole, Danielle, and Erebus.”
“Yes.” I nodded, and Danielle and Erebus echoed their agreements. “That’s right.”
“Very well,” he said, and then a shimmering pink portal appeared in the center of the cabin. Looking through it, I could see the place where we’d first arrived in Kerberos, just as Ethan stepped through the portal with Blake.
Blake was there—alive. My eyes filled with tears at the sight of him, and I realized that until this moment, I hadn’t completely believed that changing the past would be possible.
Seeing him now, I knew that it was.
I glanced over my shoulder for a final look at his corpse that was here. No matter what, I would never allow this future to become reality. It was too painful to live through again. I would have to live with the memory of it forever, and I knew that everything I’d experienced here would haunt me for the rest of my life, but I was more than ready to leave this timeline behind—to erase it from existence.
I’d just looked into the past and seen Blake alive. I was going to make sure he stayed that way.
“Good luck,” Chris said, nodding at us and stepping back to stand next to Chronos. “Make sure to tell my past self how brave I was during our adventures here. Don’t leave any details out, all right?”
“I promise,” I told him. “We’ll see you on the other side.”
And then I turned back around and stepped through the portal.
* * *
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ELEMENTALS
THE HANDS OF TIME
Book five in the Elementals series
COMING NOVEMBER 2016
Turn the page for a sneak peak!
CHAPTER ONE
I stepped into the portal and screamed.
My soul felt like it was being torn from my body. It was like someone had reached inside of me, grabbed onto my soul, and was peeling it out of every inch of my skin. I was floating through nothingness, unable to see anything around me, unable to feel anything but the excruciating pain rip
ping through my body.
I’d traveled through many portals before—ones that had taken me to the cave, to Greece, to Antarctica, to LA, and even to the prison dimension of Kerberos.
None of them had felt like they were tearing me to shreds like this. Was this portal killing me? Chronos had told us that traveling through the time portal would take away one year of our natural lives. Did I not have one year left? Was this what death felt like?
Then, just as quickly as the pain began, it stopped. My feet were on solid ground, and I found myself back in Kerberos, staring at the back of Ethan and Blake’s heads as they waited next to the portal that had taken them to the prison world. Ethan’s grip was tight around Blake, his knife pressed to his neck.
But all I cared about was that Blake was here. Alive. Happiness flooded through me at the sight of him, making all the pain from the time portal disappear at once.
I still held onto Danielle’s hand. A shadow moved in front of us and floated off to the side—Erebus. As promised, he’d shifted into shadow form immediately after coming through the time portal, and was off to distract the dragons.
Then Ethan’s knife vanished from his hand.
“Hey!” He flexed his hand, as if that might make it appear again. “What happened to my knife?”
Taking advantage of the moment of surprise, Blake elbowed Ethan in the stomach, head-butted him in the chin, and escaped his grasp. He spun around, crashing his fist into Ethan’s face over and over again. They were so involved in fighting that they didn’t even see us.
I raised my bow, an arrow already strung through and ready to shoot. But I had no more magic arrows left, and the guys were so close to each other as they fought that I couldn’t risk aiming for Ethan and accidentally shooting Blake instead. Ethan spun around and aimed a punch at Blake, but he must have been dizzy from the blows to the head, because he missed. Blake ripped the bag with Medusa’s head in it off Ethan’s back, tossed it to the side, and got another punch in to his cheek. Danielle hurried to the bag and grabbed it. I followed behind her, my arrow still poised and ready to shoot.
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