by S W Clarke
I swept it aside. I couldn’t think about it; I wouldn’t let myself be distracted right now. “Let’s go slay a dragon, then.”
If I’d been given five hundred more years to live, I never would have guessed that the oracle of Delphi drove. Which means I definitely wouldn’t have guessed she owned a forest-green Volkswagen Jetta.
We came out the back of Nymphos and all of us stopped—except for Pythia, who pulled her keychain from her robes and manually unlocked the driver’s side door. She opened it with a creak, looked back at us. “Well?”
My eyes strayed to Hercules. “No offense, but I don’t know if we’ll all fit.”
“We shall make it fit,” Hercules declared.
“That’s what she said,” Cupid murmured.
Hercules looked perplexed. “No, she said she didn’t know if we’d all fit.”
Cupid looked at me. “Unintegrated Others are the worst.”
I nodded knowingly, though I hadn’t gotten the reference myself. Thanks to two years in college, I considered myself pretty savvy as Others went, but my roommate Aimee still groaned all the time about my poor pop culture education.
Instead of outing myself, I jogged around to the passenger side. “We’ll make it fit.”
Cupid flew after. “Shotgun!”
I opened the passenger-side door. “There’s no way I’ll fit back there with Hercules. Sorry.”
Cupid grumbled, looked back at Hercules, who was attempting to jigsaw himself into the Jetta’s back seat.
In the driver’s seat, Pythia slapped back the sunroof and pointed at Cupid. “You ride up top.”
“Got it, Chief.” Cupid floated to the roof, his bare feet hanging into the car.
With Cupid on top and Hercules pressed into the back seat like a can of Pillsbury dough, we set off toward Central Park and, according to Pythia, our destiny. We passed endless tall buildings, and I gaped. I had never seen New York City at night. It was different from Montreal. Taller. More glittery. But one difference really stood out.
“So,” I said, “how long until we get to Central Park?”
Pythia stopped us at a light, and as we idled, she looked over at me the way one looks at a hopelessly naive girl. “Oh, child.”
“Just forget that you’ll ever see Central Park,” Cupid said through the sunroof, “and then you’ll never be disappointed.”
I blinked. “So like, half an hour? An hour? A timeframe would be good.”
No one answered me.
“You see,” I said, “Justin and I have to be in Times Square tonight at a certain time.”
“You seek the resistance,” Pythia said. When the light changed, she hit the gas. “Well, you found us.”
My breath caught, and I braced myself on the door. “What did you say?”
Pythia sighed. “I should say you found one of us. Consider me a link in the chain.”
The Oracle of Delphi, a member of the resistance?
“Bad-ass,” Cupid said from above us.
“The trove,” I said slowly. “All those weapons in there were stockpiled for the resistance.”
Pythia gave a curt nod.
Hercules’s face appeared in the gap between our seats. “What’s the resistance?”
“We are an underground network of Others,” Pythia said. “We are present around the world, city to city, town to town.”
“And why are you called the resistance?” Hercules asked.
I could swear I saw a tiny smirk touch Pythia’s face. “Because we will not be put down.”
“Why have you joined the resistance?” I asked.
“Why not?” Pythia hardly glanced at me. I sensed she was evading.
“Because you’re mortal now,” I began. “Because life is short, and precious, and joining the resistance promises hardship. It promises hiding and secrecy and fighting, and very likely an early death. You are, after all, taking us to fight a one-hundred-headed dragon.”
“It is a long story,” she said in a whisper.
“According to you,” I shot back, “I shouldn’t ever expect to get out of this car, anyway.”
She exhaled a soft laugh. “Perhaps someday I will tell you. Trust must be built, encantado.”
“Did Egya tell you to meet me in Times Square?” I asked.
She raised an eyebrow. “Egya? I do not know this person. There are many of us in the resistance, encantado. But I knew one would come who would bring our immortality back.”
“But you didn’t know I was me until you touched me.”
“Can you really know anyone until you are intimate with them? By any definition of that word.”
“Well put,” Cupid said.
“So you can see what will happen when we fight the dragon.”
She shook her head. “Not as yet. You still don’t seem to grasp how my powers work. I see many fates, and they are determined by choices.”
I considered what she’d said. “So … when we arrived at Nymphos, our choices determined our fates?”
“Correct. And you, my dear, made a choice that set you on an unlikely branch.”
“When I set the claw to your throat,” I said.
“And you allowed me to show you the past. To show you Serena Russo.”
“Why did that matter so much?”
“Because I understood you, Isabella. Only in touching you could I truly see you—where you have been, where you are, where you will go.”
“But I thought my fate could go in many directions.”
“Yes,” Pythia said, “and right now, I’m trying to ensure you stay on the right branch. It is thin, wavering, but if you make the right choices, you will serve the resistance in a greater way than anyone ever anticipated.”
“She gets it,” Cupid said, leaning down and pointing through the sunroof at Pythia.
I looked up at him. “My love story?”
His dimples appeared.
“What if I make the wrong choices?” I asked both of them. “If the branch is so delicate, how can I possibly stay on it? I mean, we’re about to fight a GoneGodDamn dragon.”
A warm hand fell over my arm, and I met eyes with Hercules. “Because it matters this much to you. That’s how you make the right choices.” He struggled to get his other arm unpinned, finally managed to press his thumb to his chest. “And you have me. I never make the wrong choice.”
Pythia groaned, and Cupid made a gagging motion. I couldn’t help snorting, despite—or maybe because of—what was to come.
Chapter 19
By the time we arrived at Central Park, the moon sat round and white in the sky, the treetops lined in silver and otherwise ominous beneath.
Pythia parallel parked us, and I stared into the park. “Why is it so dark?”
“Why should it be otherwise?”
“How can people walk through it at night?”
“Trust me,” Cupid said, “no one wants to walk in Central Park at night.”
“Is the dragon in there all the time?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” Pythia said. “A dragon will not leave his hoard, if he can help it.”
Hercules’s face appeared between us. “And how do you hide a hundred-headed dragon in the middle of such a city?”
“If you were to pass through the park, you could not see Ladon or the apples,” Pythia said. “Not without knowing where you were going.”
I turned to her. “And you do?”
“Why yes. I arranged with the nymphs to have him put there.”
“Will he be awake?”
“He wouldn’t be a very good dragon if he wasn’t, would he?” Pythia said. “Thieves come most often at night. Anyway, this dragon never sleeps.”
“And he flies?” Cupid said.
“Not willingly,” she said. “His treasure remains on the ground, after all.”
“How many of his heads must I remove to slay him?” Hercules asked.
Pythia turned to him. “How many heads do regular dragons survive with?”
&n
bsp; Hercules’s eyes glazed as he considered the question.
One, I thought. The answer is one.
“Well,” I said before I lost my nerve. I grabbed the door handle. “Let’s go find him, then.”
The three of us got out and worked to extract Hercules from the Jetta. By the time we’d gotten his upper body out, a homeless man watched us from the bench he was sleeping on. With a last tug on both his arms, we pulled Hercules onto the sidewalk, and the car rose a foot on its suspension.
So much for being inconspicuous.
With the four of us on our feet, Pythia touched her staff to the sidewalk. “This way. Follow on my heels, or else you will lose me. If you lose me, you may never escape the park.” She winked. Was the oracle of Delphi making a spooky joke? Either way, I shivered, my eyes flitting upward to the trees and down to the beer cans and needles littering the path.
Pythia started into the park, Cupid and I close on her, and Hercules at the back. We walked deep and deeper, passing the very occasional lamppost, bright enough in this blackness to be its own moon. Sometimes I heard snoring, caught glimpses of a sleeping bag on a bench. Once, a laugh echoed down the path, and I stopped so hard that I felt Hercules’s warmth behind me.
“It’s all right,” he whispered.
At some point, it felt as though we’d exited the city and entered a forest. Pythia departed from the original path we’d started on, cutting up a little incline, across grass, stepping over small rocks. Past a point, her staff stopped tapping on the carved stone of a walkway, and we never encountered a real path again.
Finally the moon went out of sight, and I had begun to wonder if I should resign myself to walking for the rest of my mortal life. That was when Pythia stopped hard, one palm raising for us. When she stepped forward, it appeared as though she’d passed through a shimmering cobweb. She turned to us, and I didn’t so much see as sense her set a finger to her lips.
The rest of us followed, and as soon as I had passed through the web, the air changed—became cleaner, more fragrant. I scented flowers, fruit, and … dung. Hundred-headed dragons probably made a lot of dung.
Pythia’s arm came around my shoulders, and we all leaned in to hear her whisper what I’d already sensed. “We are here,” she said, and from somewhere behind her emanated a deep, gargantuan breathing.
Before we continued, Hercules squeezed us closer. “I will lead,” he whispered. “This is my labor. I must slay Ladon.”
Pythia nodded. “Fight well, son of Zeus.”
Hercules paused, and I sensed him looking at me in the dark. When I raised my face to where I thought his should be, he surprised me with a soft kiss on the cheek. And, like the oblivious encantado I was, I hadn’t recognized I felt something more than lust for Hercules until that moment.
I loved Justin, but love wasn’t so narrow that it couldn’t encompass more than one person. And what I felt for Hercules wasn’t love, precisely—not yet—but the promise of it, if both of us were to survive this fight.
And then I would be in a real pickle.
But I would have to take that as it came. For now I needed to follow the demigod, and Cupid behind him, and Pythia behind Cupid, through the thicket into a clearing illuminated nearly to daylight by the moon.
In the rainforests of Brazil, we encantado lived amongst large trees. Very, very large—so big, that some we couldn’t see the whole of. And the one that rose in the center of this clearing, its roots extending from a trunk the width of a building, was bigger than the biggest tree I’d seen in the rainforest.
That was when I knew we weren’t in Central Park any longer.
“Hera’s garden,” I breathed. “The garden isn’t part of the park.”
Pythia nodded. “A magical place, not bound to one spot.”
This was how the Daughters of the Evening protected the tree.
“I never thought I would stand here again,” Hercules whispered.
Amongst the tree’s boughs hung red apples the size of my head. Not just a few, but countless apples, brilliant and heavy for the picking. Except for the serpentine body wound around and around the trunk beneath those apples, the clubbed tail at the end of that body, and at the other end …
One hundred necks, one hundred heads, one hundred sets of enormous teeth, and two hundred eyes. All of which opened to gaze at us.
Hercules eased his club from his lion’s skin, stepped forward into the clearing. As he did, he seemed to grow in the moonlight. His powerful limbs shone silver, the muscles enormous beneath his skin. It gave me courage to see him so healthy, so powerful. If he was alive, it meant Justin was alive, too.
“Ladon,” he boomed, “I have come to challenge you. Bring forth your anger, your fire, your fury. If you do not, I will end you with a single blow.”
“Oh boy,” Cupid whispered to me as we creeped through the trees around the clearing, pulling his bow over his head and preparing his first arrow. “He’s doing his thing again.”
I glanced at Cupid. “His thing?”
At that moment, all one hundred heads rose, their eyes focused on Hercules. Together, their mouths opened, and they let out a roar that blew my hair back and left my ears ringing.
Cupid flew back up to my side, and Pythia and I continued through the trees at a jog. “He really likes to piss off his opponent. Really likes it.”
Well, this kind of fury hadn’t been part of the plan. But of course, male bravado didn’t follow plans. So with that, I pulled El Lobizon’s claw from my boot, and Cupid, Pythia and I charged in toward Ladon.
↔
Before tonight, I had never imagined a hundred-headed dragon. And I certainly hadn’t imagined how a hundred-headed dragon would shoot fire.
Breathing fire is one thing, but shooting it? Like a bullet out of a tooth-filled barrel.
Hercules jogged forward with his club at the ready, and Ladon opened one of his mouths to reveal a growing ball of flame. With a jerk forward, the head spewed a cannonball-sized sphere of flame straight at him. Hercules strafed left, his feet working so fast it looked as though he had teleported, and all the while, he didn’t stop his forward progress.
GoneGodDamn was Hercules a badass. Not because of his strength—which was, I knew, as immense as this dragon’s—but because the man was utterly fearless.
Ladon closed his mouth as another of his heads rose into the air. This one opened, spewed fire down on Hercules, who was lost in the brightness, and then inevitably reappeared, this time even closer to Ladon’s body.
The dragon opened another mouth, fire shooting out of it from a different angle. The flames pinged between each head in rapid succession, each of them preparing their attack before the fire even emerged from their mouths. One of the heads angled around on its long neck behind Hercules, who had gotten close enough to be in amongst the tangle of Ladon’s body around the tree, and I yelled out as the mouth opened and fire shot at him from behind.
Hercules stepped right, spun, and used the momentum to swing his club into Ladon’s fire-breathing head, sending it rocketing around on its neck and into the ground. When it hit, the earth rumbled beneath us, and it scorched the grass as it went down. The eyes closed, and the head didn’t move.
One down, ninety-nine to go.
As we approached, I only caught glimpses of Hercules in amongst Ladon’s tremendous bulk. The heads passed around him, shooting fire—and he rolled, dodged, passed through flames and swung his club. Heads flew, they rolled, they went quiet, and at every moment I expected Ladon to land the killing strike, but he did not.
Because he was fighting Hercules, and tonight, the demigod had more than strength. He had purpose.
The three of us came up behind Ladon in the darkness. Pythia nodded me forward.I stepped toward the tree. As I did, three heads swung around like risen snakes, six eyes flashing on me. One mouth opened, and I saw a growing ball of flame at the center of it.
Cupid rose into the air beside me, an arrow nocked. “Move!”
&n
bsp; I jumped to the side as flame spewed out, destroying the spot of earth where I had been standing. I landed on my hands and knees just as the second head raced toward me, preparing to snap me in half. Before it reached me, it jerked left with a roar as an arrow plunged into its eye.
“Add that one to your list of admirers,” Cupid called as he shot by me, preparing another arrow. A second later I heard it thwip through the air, followed by the cry of another of Ladon’s heads.
Admirer? I thought, but my question was answered by the head that had just tried to take a bite out of me. It swung around and attacked the first head—the one that had tried to incinerate me a moment earlier. The two of them flared on each other, now snapping and growling as their necks wrapped around each other in a strange ballet.
I got it: I had a dragon admirer. One head of one hundred, at least. Did that count as a full dragon? Either way, he would fight the other ninety-nine for me, it seemed.
Which left me with one looming head. And boy, was he pissed.
I got to my feet as the last head—the largest of the three—swept out toward me, his mouth opening as a mesmeric cauldron of flame grew in his throat. This one had a two-tier strategy: he would burn me to a crisp, and if that failed, ram me straight on. As soon as I recognized what he was doing, I didn’t have time to run.
I only had time to duck.
I gripped the claw hard as the ball of flame broke, the fire issuing out of his mouth. Now, I had time to think before I dropped to one knee and rolled, swiping the claw across the soft underside of his jaw as he passed above.
Tremendous heat washed over me—and not just from the flame. It just emanated off his head and neck like a furnace, and I kept rolling to avoid being scalded.
But I didn’t know if I’d gotten him with the claw until I rolled onto my belly and looked back. Behind me, the flame died away as the head lost its magic, and it rose high into the air with a terrified shriek.
