Guilt swept through me. “I’m sorry, Leandro.”
“Sorry? For what?” He looked up at me, astonished.
“I killed you.”
“You saved me in doing so. Destiny.” He smiled. “I’m the one who’s ashamed. You were doing what a hero should do. You must never feel guilt over that. One for the many, right?”
“One for the many,” the Wild Childs chanted.
“Oak told me that a long time ago.” Leandro glanced at Oak, who nodded. “You were right to try and stop me, Joshua. I see now that Hekate hypnotized me soon after she released you into the Wild Lands. I told her everything about me and you. Then she planted her brother’s memories in me.” He shivered. “I can never erase those.”
“Not your fault.”
Leandro bowed his head. “You are growing into your prophesied role, Joshua, as the Oracle. Destiny—again.”
I understood now that being a leader—and a hero—meant having to make tough decisions.
I pulled out his journal. “When you were under the spell, this helped me remember how you were so I wouldn’t forget … I didn’t want to forget.”
“You helped me find my way back.”
“Tough triumphs,” I recited back his words.
He smiled. “Neither sword nor arrow stopped my faith.”
“Stronger than steel,” I said, returning his smile.
He pushed the journal back in my hands. “You keep it. Add your own adventures. Then we’ll have them together even if we’re apart.”
I liked this idea so I slid it back in my pocket.
Leandro said no more but let me help him up, and Oak rushed to offer a hand. Silence hung thick in the air as the rest of the audience, my friends—and enemies—stared at me with new awe confirming the truth in my heart.
Apollo knelt to me. To my surprise, Ash, Oak, and Charlie did the same. “Joshua, you have the ancient power to heal like Apollo. The power to transform like Artemis. The power to command water like Poseidon. The Oracle has come!”
The Wild Childs banged their bows and arrows on the trees. Power filled me inside. I was the Oracle. My destiny. No questioning. No turning back.
Leandro swept a great bow before me and clapped a hand to my shoulder, surveying the scene. “What now … Oracle?”
I pulled the lightning orb from my pocket. “We send Hekate’s spirit away for good.”
Artemis struggled in her ropes, cursing me. Her soldiers hung helplessly. The freed kid slaves huddled and watched the show, unsure where to go now.
I held up the orb. It crackled with electric power in the blue sun. Artemis stopped struggling and fixated on it, as did her men. Even the hydriads slowed their pace.
“Like brother, like sister.”
The Wild Childs chanted in a steady beat. “Stick her good!”
“No, that’s too good for her,” I said.
A great wail rose from Artemis. Her legs kicked and her head flopped from side to side. Her head fell forward and was still. The soldiers flopped in their vine nooses, then froze as well.
“My queen!” Leandro drew his sword in one hand and his dagger in the other and dashed into the bog toward Artemis, slashing hydriads on either side. He scaled a rock under her and cut her vine down. She clung to him with a smile, then grabbed his dagger and stabbed him. She aimed for his heart but he jerked away. The knife sank into his shoulder. He shouted in pain and fell back into the bog, pulling the knife out with a great groan.
“Leandro!” Rage fired the animal in me and I roared through the water toward him, this time willed as a cadmean beast. The wild animals leaped in behind me, and the bog surged forward with us. I reached Leandro, who clung to a rock as Artemis stood nearby on hers, laughing.
“Get on!” I growled to him.
He clambered up my back to grab my fur tight as I breathed fire on the hydriads and dodged Artemis’s vape fire. Cretans and agrius beasts bound away. Some didn’t make it and vanished into the air. Her lightning bullets hit her own soldiers dangling helplessly in the firing zone, and many exploded in a swirl of dust, their broken vines left swinging empty.
I lunged through the muck around her rock as she fired at me. The Wild Childs filled the branches above, their arrows aimed at her. The queen was trapped!
Leandro whispered in my ear, “Artemis is still in there. We must save her like you saved me!”
“You can’t stop me!” Artemis continued to smile at us. “If you do, you kill the queen. I’ll make sure she can never be brought back.”
The ferocious growls of the wild beasts rumbled around the bog as Artemis rose taller to face off with me. I urged them to stand down and they moved back. From the shore, Charlie, Oak, and Apollo watched with wide eyes.
“I don’t intend to let the queen die,” I said, snapping my jaws at her.
“Oracle! Oracle!” The chants of the Wild Childs echoed around the bog. In the second I glanced at them, Artemis flung her blue bullets at me. I catapulted over a rock and barely missed getting vaped. The wild beasts thumped the water in a thunderous beat. Leandro slipped off my back with a shout. “Get to shore!” I nudged him to a cretan that tossed him on his back and got him safe to land.
Now it was me and Artemis in a fight to the death.
Chapter Forty-One
Artemis and I paced around the rock step by step. She tossed her hand in the air, and her braided bracelet gleamed with polished wood.
The bracelet! It must hold Hekate’s spirit still!
Her fingers flashed blue and I leaped high, aiming for her hand. With one flick of a claw, I scraped her bracelet off, tossed it in the air, and torched the braided band with my fire breath. It exploded in ash. Artemis sucked in the gray cloud then fell into the water. A black funnel rose from her gasping mouth. It spewed into the air as a monstrous cloud, buzzing like a drone of angry wasps, and shot out of her, fleeing into the woods with a shriek. I snatched her cloak in my teeth, hauling her body from the water, and raced through the bog.
Leandro waited at the water’s edge. He slipped off his cloak, and I placed Artemis gently down on it and became a boy again.
“Leandro?” She turned her head to him.
“I am here, my queen … Temi. You’ve returned!” He thrust my bow and quiver into my hands and knelt to his queen. He placed a hand to her cheek and kissed her forehead while placing her crown back on that had fallen on the ground. In his softness, Leandro revealed how my mother must’ve seen him.
“As have you,” Artemis said. He tugged off her glasses. Her eyes were as bright blue as his. Their sharp, angled faces next to one another revealed that they looked like brother and sister.
She grazed the wound she’d given him, and I quickly placed my hand on it to heal it. A tear ran down her cheek. “I’ve hurt you. So much hurt I’ve caused.”
“It wasn’t you, Temi.”
“The Black Heart Tree wooed me. Hekate’s evil spirit was in it. It’s how she made it back. When Apollo took her down, her ash blew from the Lost Realm to here and settled in that tree, forging it in new evil.” She turned away from him. “I told her my secrets. Told her about you being like a brother. About wanting to end slavery and change our Nostos ways. About standing up to Zeus and bringing the boy that you believed to be … the one. And he is. And I made you do all those terrible things … such evil.”
“It’s not your fault, Temi. Hekate took the good things in your heart and twisted them into her own sick need.”
“I loved you as a brother, my lionhearted one.”
He bowed to her. “As did I, my sister.”
“A long time ago,” she whispered.
“Never forgotten.” He clasped her hand, revealing the royal tattoo on the inside of her wrist, the same spot as Apollo’s. Hers flared like the flag over her castle, an arrow of fire with a fancy “A” on it. Slave or queen. Everyone on Nostos was marked.
“I thought I was destined to be alone. Everyone leaves me. My mother, my love, my daughter … all dead. You left m
e too.”
“I’m here now.”
She nodded. “I’m truly sorry about your wife.”
Leandro touched his forehead to hers and we both helped her stand. She looked around in a daze at her soldiers who’d been awakened from their spell and peered at us from their vine traps, then she gained command. “Release them, Wild Childs. They’ll cause you no harm.”
The Wild Childs didn’t move but turned to me for confirmation. I raised my bow to them. “Hekate scram and crammed for good. It’s okay.”
One by one the soldiers were hauled up into the trees, untied, and left to climb across the trees and bog to safe ground.
Artemis held my hand with her trembling one and gazed about with wide eyes. “So bright. Like a whole new world.”
“It can be,” Leandro said solemnly.
Artemis fell to her knees, her head down, clawing at moss and leaves.
“Your terror of the woods, m’lady,” Leandro said, putting a hand to her shoulder. “It’s come back with the spell gone.”
Ironic how the queen of the hunt was terrified of trees and a memory of facing my past fears came to me. “Find the calm,” I told Artemis.
Her face was stricken. “How do I do this? Hekate never needed the glasses. She kept them on to instill fear in my people. Now I need them … need something … ”
I knelt beside her and put a hand on her arm. “You have it already. It’s the place inside you no one can touch.”
She balled leaves in her hand. “Not my mother?”
“Not anyone.”
“And not Hekate.”
“Right.”
“How do you know this, mortal boy?”
“Lightning used to scare me. I didn’t know why until I found out a Child Collector had killed my mother with lightning. Then I got the chance to stop him and my fears.”
She shook all over. “But I don’t know why the woods terrify me. My mother forced me to sleep in them at night under the Black Heart Tree—alone—to get over it. It was before Hekate’s spirit controlled it.” She spat the words out. “I hated my mother for that. Hated her for making me like all of our ancestors.”
Leandro stepped closer. “Perhaps your fear of the woods was your mind’s way of resisting your ancestor’s dark legacy to hunt mortal children. You told me once as younglings you wanted to free them all, remember?”
“I did,” she whispered, her chin touching her chest. “I do.”
“Perhaps if you change your legacy, you’ll lose your anxiety.”
She looked up with teary eyes. “Do you believe so, Leandro?”
“I want to, my queen.”
“I fought off my fear of lightning,” I said.
“It’s the fight inside that’s the hardest battle, isn’t it?” she said.
“Sometimes we must keep fighting to find our true legacy,” Leandro said, handing her sunglasses back. “And sometimes we need a little help.”
She put the glasses on with a trembling hand and stood taller, breathing deeply.
“It’s okay to be different,” I said.
“It’s hard to find your way when you’re different,” Leandro said looking at me.
How right he was.
Artemis took Apollo’s hand and put it to her chest. “Please forgive me for the terrible things I’ve done, my kin.”
“All is forgiven when it comes to family.”
Artemis directed a group of men to take the dead back and another group to send the slaves home through the Lightning Gate. Leandro broke through the calm. “How can we know we truly vanquished Hekate? We thought we had once before.”
Artemis put a hand on his arm. “Hekate put her spirit in me with that bracelet. The Black-Heart Tree placed it on my wrist. Some terrible things I remember but much is a blur.” She darted an apology to me with her eyes. “If Hekate’s spirit possessed the Black Heart Tree, her black cloud could have returned there. We must burn it, sink its ash in the sea, and hope her spirit cannot revive from a watery grave.”
“Allons! Let’s go burn down the evil tree and send the witch away for good,” Charlie said, punching the air.
“To the Black Heart Tree,” I said.
We darted between the trees on the backs of beasts as the Wild Childs raced above. On and on we ran, over patches of melting snow when cramps struck my every limb. I lurched over the back of Agri, not wanting to fail now with so much on the line. But my body was failing me and I had no idea why. Exhaustion, hunger … or something else. It all spun in my head as pain spiraled through me.
I braced myself to sit up straight and hide my condition from my friends. Suddenly, Artemis caught the reins of the agrius beast from Apollo’s hands and skidded to a stop, horror on her face. “The Black Heart Tree is gone.”
She pointed to a dark hole in the earth that looked like a monster had clawed its way out of hell. Roots and clumps of dirt were thrown about as if mighty hands flung them away in fury. A wide path of destruction spread ahead. Trees were violently uprooted, cast aside. Between them, a road cut into the ground with big holes stomped in it from giant feet.
The Wild Childs above us hollered a mighty chant. “One for the many!” They launched themselves from tree to tree ahead of us.
The ear-splitting crash of wood struck me with fear of what waited for us through the thick of the trees, but we had to follow these children of the woods to the next fight of our lives.
Chapter Forty-Two
In the middle of a clearing, the Black Heart Tree and the Grand Tree battled.
The two ancient ones lashed at each other in a frenzied fury. Massive limbs swung about in the ultimate face-off. The clash of wood smashed the air and arrows rained down from the Wild Childs who targeted the Black Heart Tree. Their arrows stabbed the enemy, but it pulled them out with gnarled fingers and flung them back. The Wild Childs dodged the wooden bullets. Not all made it. The cries of the fallen pierced the air.
The worst horror faced us. The Black Heart Tree.
Its trunk convulsed in a serpentine mass that slithered through it with each smack of its gargantuan limbs at the Grand Tree. The molded faces of children screamed along its hardened skin in a nightmare, their bones broken and crushed in the bark: a foot poised to kick, a hand fisted, fingers begging to live. With each punch the monster tree wielded, the dead writhed and moaned in its thrashing wood. A ghoulish vision that would haunt me forever.
The Black Heart Tree grabbed a Wild Child nearby. I rushed forward with the other kids but we couldn’t save her. A great creaking threatened to split my skull open. The branches at the top of the evil tree curled outward, and the trunk spread open like a carnivorous mouth. Gray leaves tinged with blood red lapped the air hungrily. With a flick of its branches, the monster threw its captive in the air and swallowed her whole. The girl’s screams echoed as she fell down the death tunnel. Her face and hands bulged from the tree’s innards, cast in its wood, her mouth petrified in a wide O.
The beasts rushed the Black Heart Tree, gnawing at its branches, slashing the trunk with their claws, and cracking limbs in pieces, but they couldn’t take it down. The tree’s great arms tossed the animals away. The Grand Tree battled bravely but stumbled back after one sweeping blow. It bent its boughs, clutching itself in agony.
“No!” I threw my lightning orb with every ounce of strength left. Anger pumped thick inside me while my body throbbed with deepening pain. The orb exploded on the coiled snake bark of the Black Heart Tree, leaving a scorched hole. The tree broke off a branch and thrust it at me. I dodged left and just missed getting speared.
Charlie, Leandro, Oak, and Ash joined the Wild Childs in the Grand Tree’s branches to help the oaken elder fight. Apollo and Artemis rode their agrius beast around the two timber giants, firing arrows at our enemy. I was all out of arrows but I had the orb. I blasted the Black Heart Tree with it, wounding it but nothing more, when something pinched me. Wooden fingers scratched at me, digging in. The Black Heart Tree’s branches caged me w
ith Hekate’s evil spirit. I shook wildly.
“Joshua!” Charlie tried to pull me free but splinters dug into me. Blood oozed.
Using my feet, I kicked at the arms trapping me. “Let me go!”
The limbs relaxed and I busted free, crawling backward. Hollow moans of laughter heckled us as the tree shook its arms in a mocking dance. It rose, a black witch of darkness, blacker than any tree in these woods and twice as tall.
The ground shook like an earthquake as the two trees smashed in combat, and the splitting shriek of wood ripped the air as they tore limbs from one another. The Grand Tree’s boughs sank lower and lower, its tired body growing weary from the attack. It staggered back and fell.
A familiar voice cut through the chaos.
“Joshua.” It floated down from the sky.
A trick of the Black Heart Tree?
It called again, this time clear and strong. “Joshua!”
Bo Chez!
Chapter Forty-Three
I flattened myself against the craggy bark of a nearby tree, searching desperately for my grandfather amongst the leaves above me. There! His face appeared through the canopy shadows. The branches spread apart more, revealing his location, and horror streaked through me. He hung from a vine high over the heart of the Black Heart Tree. His arms and legs were bound tight to his body, leaving him helpless to use his hands to fight with his Storm Master power. But he’d come for me!
I grabbed the Black Heart Tree’s trunk and pulled myself up on knotty footholds, trying to avoid stepping on the bones and faces of the dead.
“Joshua, no!” Charlie tried to pull me down. Branches snagged at us and I kicked them away.
“Charlie, it’s Bo Chez!”
He fell back with wide eyes, scrambling out of the hooks of the Black Heart Tree.
I pulled myself up higher. Splintered fingers scratched at me. I broke them off and kept climbing. I had to free Bo Chez.
A final glance down showed the terrified faces of my friends on the ground.
Joshua, oh, Joshua.
The words sing-songed in my head, vibrating through the trunk I climbed. Hekate!
Joshua and the Arrow Realm Page 19
