"Let's start with a bit of sparring," suggested Alexei.
I was pretty well up on my unarmed combat, I'd taken every self-defense class there was at my local gym - it was an unfortunate necessity in my line of work. People always think they can work over the pretty girl, and I've shown more than a couple of men how wrong that is. I had sparred with Alexei before, but this was different. That had been more about stress release than anything else, this was deadly serious, preparing me for a very real danger to my life.
I warmed up with Alexei while Nico and Christoph sparred together, then we switched partners, keeping things quick and easy for the present. After a quick breather and a chance to rehydrate, we started in earnest and I faced off with Christoph. He was quick and athletic, dodging any move I made then grabbing me and taking me down before rolling back to start over. Eventually, I began to read his style of combat and finally managed to fake him out before ducking to take out his legs.
"Nice," said Alexei. "Remember that. Nico, you're up."
Fighting Nico was a whole different ball game. Christoph was physically stronger than me but if I got in close I could use a judo hold to throw him. Nico was slower than his friend, but compensated for that vulnerability by being massive - I could get ahold of him but he was going nowhere. After a few disastrous attempts that ended with me flat on my back, I decided to use my brain. Up to now, I had been using my advantage of speed and agility to go on the attack, this time, I feinted as if to attack and when Nico moved to counter, I went the other way, catching him off balance and using his weight against him. Down he went with me on top of him, pinning him to the ground.
"Alright then," said Alexei, smiling.
He didn't give me much time to recover - I was straight back in it, this time against him. I knew Alexei was potentially the most dangerous of the three, he wasn't as strong as Nico but he was quicker; he wasn't as agile as Christoph but he was stronger. He was the best of both, lacking the extreme strengths of either but lacking their weaknesses, as well. On the bright side, I had sparred with him before and although that had been more in fun than this, it had still given me some idea of how he fought. We circled each other cautiously, neither keen to make the first move, then both making it at once, locking briefly and springing apart. He tried to throw me but I squirmed free. I took out his legs but he rolled as he landed, coming in under my guard. On we went until Christoph raised a hand.
"I'm calling this a draw. We're trying to train Cat, not tire her out."
Over lunch we chatted, almost as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening and this was just another gym session. Curiously, the oddest thing that struck me about this meal was who I was having it with. Not so long ago, I had not even known these three men with whom I now chatted so easily, to whom I felt closer than anyone in the world save my brother, and into the care of whom I would safely entrust my own life. It was less than a month ago that these three strangers had turned up on my doorstep to tell me that it was up to me to save the world, and the oddest part about what had happened since was that I could now not imagine my life without them in it in some capacity. Finding out I was a demi-god, discovering the truth of what had happened to my mom, learning the identity of my father, swimming with an orca, being hunted by wolves - all of it - it all paled to insignificance when I set it against the seismic shifts in my emotions that Alexei, Christoph and Nico had wrought in me. For all that had happened and might still happen, I could not regret any of it, because it had brought them into my life, making me a more complete person in the process.
After lunch, we switched from sparring to more standard training. We went for a run, which Christoph turned into an assault course by creating a route that took us over walls, up trees, and across rivers. I fell into bed that night exhausted but elated. The following day training resumed.
"I know it looks dumb," Nico began.
"Oh, you are aware of that?" I replied, gently mocking.
"But it will help," stressed Nico. He looked to Christoph and Alexei for support.
"Saying nothing," said Christoph, evenly.
"I think it will help," said Alexei, supportively. "It's a good idea. But; yes, you do look dumb."
Nico pointed to the large cardboard horns attached to his head with a loop of string around his chin. "These are the lengths to which I am willing to go so Cat is safe. I am sacrificing my dignity for her. No greater love has any man."
"And I appreciate it," I said, now feeling a little guilty for making fun.
"Thank you."
The truth was, Alexei was right and Christoph and I knew it. Nico had had a good idea. But the mocking was helpful in its own way, too. The closer we got to the day itself, the greater the need to keep things light, and the harder it became to do so. The sight of Nico with a pair of large cardboard cones on his head - constructed from several toilet roll tubes - was a gift for getting a smile on a difficult day.
"Okay," Nico went on, "here's the game; it's basically Capture the Flag." He had stuffed five torn rags into the waistband of his pants. "You have to get all five of these and put them in the bucket in the corner, which will be protected by Christoph. If I touch you with one of my horns, then you are considered dead and we start again. Alexei will referee and decide what constitutes a touch. Any questions?"
We all shook our heads.
"Let's get going."
Two against one is hard at the best of times, even if those two are in different areas and not working together - when you're trying to get by one the other is recovering their strength, something you never get the chance to do. That said, the main problem I had when we started playing Nico's game was the horns that I had been laughing at not so long ago. When you do self-defense, you train your body to respond in a certain way - honing your instincts to act faster than thought to take you out of danger. The problem I was facing was that those automatic instincts kept me away from hands and feet, I had never trained myself to see a swinging head as a big issue. It was a whole new kind of fighting. Suddenly, the part of the body that had previously been a target was the most dangerous.
"That's a touch," pronounced Alexei, forty-five seconds into my first attempt, and those were words that I got sick of hearing pretty quickly. Try as I might, I couldn't get my body to adapt - which was why this training was so important. After an hour, Nico had “gored” me so many times that he needed to stop to rebuild his cardboard horns. Thus far, two rags were the most I had managed to win away. I was sweating buckets, my clothes sticking to me, my hair plastered to my face. And yet I still felt strangely good. This was progress - I was doing something to actively increase my chances of success. There was nothing worse than just sitting and waiting, knowing you could do nothing about it. I hoped that from his divine vantage point on Mount Olympus, Zeus was watching and seeing the work I was putting in. I hoped that he was close to crapping his toga with worry. I also hoped that Dolos was watching. That's right “Dad” - that's the kid you gave up; look how well she turned out without any help from you.
These thoughts set a new determination in me. Yes, I was already fighting for the survival of the human race and to avoid being maimed by a bull-headed monster, but the thought of rubbing my success in the faces of Zeus, Dolos and anyone else in the pantheon who looked down their noses at me was a greater motivator than any of that. I was going to show them what humans could do!
When we restarted the game, I felt like a different woman.
"Boy, the break did you good," said Alexei, clearly impressed as I dumped my third flag into the bucket and jogged back towards my makeshift Minotaur with barely a bead of sweat on my forehead.
I didn't tell him that the break had had nothing to do with it. Now, I had found my own secret advantage, I was determined to keep it to myself. Perhaps doing it to spite my father was a weird way to save the world, but I doubted the world would mind, and I would take anything I could get.
I rolled under Nico's down-swinging head as he tried to clip me w
ith his freshly restored horns, then ripped off a backward somersault as he came back the other way.
"Serious wow," I heard Alexei say as I plucked the next rag from Nico's pants and bounced back towards Christoph, still feeling energized: Are you watching Zeus? Dolos? Check out what I can do.
I feinted left, then right, then rolled under Christoph's grasping hand to drop rag number four in the bucket. You had to be pretty good to outmaneuver Christoph, and I was that good. I was also feeling pretty smug, but managed to refocus as I set out to get one more rag and win the game.
Nico definitely wasn't messing around this time. I was learning to avoid his horns but his hands were as dangerous as ever, and once I was caught by one, then his strength was more than I could contend with. I ducked and dodged, trying to keep out of his reach and get in close at the same time, but he wasn't letting me in. A sort of exhausting stalemate emerged, where I could keep out of his way but couldn't get hold of the rag, while he couldn't gore me but could stop me from winning the game. It was developing into a game of stamina and I had a hunch that was a game I wouldn't win. I had to make my move. As he lowered his head to charge me again, I made no attempt to go left or right, but waited, as if I had given up. Then, at the last moment, I sprang forward, using Nico's broad shoulders as a pivot from which to leapfrog him, grabbing the fifth rag from his waistband as I passed. I hit the ground running and, taking advantage of Christoph's astonishment at what he had just seen, dived past him to deliver the final rag to the bucket.
"Winner!" yelled Alexei.
"Yes! I did it! I finally did it!" By rights, I ought to have been collapsed in the corner in an exhausted puddle of sweat, but instead I bounced excitedly about on my toes, punching the air. "How do you like those apples?"
"What apples?" asked Nico, puzzled.
"Well done," said Alexei. "Let's have some lunch, and then we can find out if that was a fluke."
We played again in the afternoon and established that it was not mere luck - I had gotten the measure of fighting a man with horns. My instincts were starting to adjust, my reactions picking up, my muscles remembering how this was done. I was as ready as I was ever going to be.
Although dinner was chatty and convivial, there was, too, a slight tension to proceedings as anxiety took its toll. We didn't talk about it - what would have been the point? - but the knowledge that tomorrow was the day for which we had been preparing hung like a cloud over the four of us. We had an early night and a late morning. Further training would have just served to tire me so I contented myself with a light warm up and a massage that Nico administered. It said something about the tension of the situation and my own deepening concern, that having Nico's large, strong hands molding my muscles, touching my bare skin, did nothing but relax me. I was too focused to think about what else he could do with those hands.
The day passed slowly, but as evening descended, we walked to the ancient Palace of Knossos, picked out by the moonlight that illuminated its decayed majesty.
"The maze is beneath the palace," said Alexei, and I could hear a catch in his voice as he spoke.
"Thanks," I said.
"Don't go." Nico looked down at me through red-rimmed eyes. "You don't have to. No one's making you."
I expected Christoph and, certainly, Alexei to tell him what a fool he was being but neither of them said a word, as if their friend was voicing thoughts that all three of them shared.
"I have to," I said. "If I stayed then I'd only have two weeks left with you anyway."
"I'd sooner two weeks with you than a lifetime with any other woman."
I shrugged. "If I don't go in now then there won't be any other women, either. There'll be no one. I can't run away from this."
"We know," breathed Christoph. "We love you, is all."
"There might be a way." Alexei's voice was thick with uncertainty. "There might be a way you could still run away from this."
"What do you mean?"
"Technically - technically - you're not human. You're part god. An argument could be made that you shouldn't die with the rest of humanity."
Alexei's offer was one made by a desperate man, and while he may have been right, he knew that it was not a deal I would be able to take. He probably would have thought much less of me if I had agreed to it.
"I'm not leaving the world to the fate of your petty gods," I replied, adding in my head that I was not going to let Zeus win, either. "I don't know if it's my fate or destiny or any of that crap, but I'm the one it's fallen to, and I'm not going to let down the human race."
I stretched up on tiptoes to kiss Alexei on the mouth, hard and fast. Then Nico and Christoph. There were no words - what words could there be? - but their feelings were never hidden from me; every emotion was there for me to read in their eyes.
"See you on the other side," I said, knowing that nothing of the sort was guaranteed.
I turned from them and walked into the ruins of Knossos. Finding a staircase, I headed down, the darkness seeming to envelop me as I walked. But then, up ahead, I felt a light breeze on my face and silvery shades of moonlight alleviated the darkness. Was I coming back outside again? How was that possible if I was going down? The light increased, though thin skeins of fog now drifted about me as I came to the bottom of the staircase and gaped.
Ahead of me was a vast field of corn, far taller than corn had any right to be. An unearthly moonlight glowed above it, reflecting off the fog to contribute to the eerie atmosphere. A whispering sound issued from the field, as the stalks moved against each other, or perhaps of creatures lurking within. I had a hunch that when tourists and other visitors came to the Palace of Knossos, this was not what they found in the basement, this was just for me.
Cut into the wall of corn before me was a gap the size of a doorway. I peered through and saw it leading off into a maze cut through the field. This was my labyrinth, my final task.
If I got through this, humankind would be spared.
And just maybe you can have a life of love like you’d never dreamed of, a little voice whispered.
I nodded to myself and straightened my shoulders.
Game on.
Chapter 17
My hand was shaking like a leaf as I pressed it against the wall of the maze. As I had anticipated, this was no ordinary field of corn, through which I might have pushed. The stalks were grown densely together, tightly packed to an almost brick-like solidity. There was no way through this save the path itself. Well, at least I had come prepared for that.
From my pocket, I took out one of my balls of string and tied one end to a stalk near the entrance. This done, I began to walk into the maze, paying out the string behind me. On I walked, carefully leaving the trail behind me, walking slowly and nervously, trying to hear any approaching sounds above the thumping of my heart.
After about fifteen minutes, I rounded a corner and was brought up short. There was my string, laying on the ground, indicating that I had been here before. Which was the idea, but the string was disjointed and disappearing fast, courtesy of a pair of mice, one at each end, nibbling away at this length of string. A soft sound of rustling made me look around to see a family of the despicable rodents scurrying out of the corn to begin consuming the string immediately behind me. Looking at the speed at which they worked, I could assume that the trail I had left from the start was now gone. It seemed that the Greek gods had learned their lesson since the last time they had done this.
"Damn." I dropped the ball of string. Now what? Anything I tried to leave behind me marking my path would be subject to the same fate - the gods weren't taking any chances.
But did they keep abreast of advances in technology?
I got out my phone. There's an app for almost everything now, including a useful little feature that will track your steps so you don't get lost in a strange town. Would it work? I couldn't see any reason not.
"Score one to Cat," I muttered to myself as I set off again, penetrating deeper into the maze.
Whatever smugness I might have been feeling about overcoming this first difficulty was short lived as a creeping fear began to trespass through me. The further I went into the maze, the more I noticed the noises issuing from around me and from up ahead of me. The whispering and rustling sounds that stalked through the cornfield had initially struck me as being no more than the wind going through the stalks, making them weave against each other. Now, those noises were becoming clearer and I was starting to get the feeling that I was not alone in here. What had seemed at first like the breeze, now sounded like sniggering - someone concealed in the field laughing at me. Perhaps it was the mice. From time to time, I was sure I could hear footsteps and would spin around, confident that I would see someone there, only to find myself still alone in the shadows of the labyrinth. Perhaps it was all in my imagination; growing anxiety taking the perfectly natural sounds and turning them into something terrifying.
But one sound could not be so easily explained away. As the narrow pathways of the maze broadened – hopefully, indicating that I was on the right track - I heard a rumble from up ahead. At first, I thought it was thunder but it modulated, rising in tone and volume into a roar - angry and snarling. Something was up ahead of me. Something big. Something pissed. I knew that the Minotaur was part human, in theory, but there was nothing human in that sound. It was pure animal, and the hairs on the back of my neck raised in terror. It was followed, minutes later, by another roar - closer this time, though still a little way up ahead of me.
On the bright side, this presumably meant that I was approaching the maze's center, now all I had to do was make it there alive and then get back out again. How hard could it be?
Her Immortal Harem Book Two Page 12
