by S W Clarke
“Now!” Pythia yelled from where she stood by the tree. “End this, encantado.”
I pushed myself upright and sprinted toward the tree, where Ladon’s body had wrapped so tightly the bark was flaking away.
How simple a thing it was, to stop a dragon: a single cut with El Lobizon’s claw, no bigger than a paper cut. I stooped as the battle raged on the other side, the tree’s immense trunk shuddering all the way up to the leaves, where the enormous apples swayed, and I waited for the moment when Ladon’s serpentine scales shifted to reveal their soft interior.
I knew what that moment would be.
The dragon prepared to roar, his body easing before he did, and the scales lifted like petals. I drove the claw in amongst the scales, yanked it out in the same instant.
At once, Ladon flinched, shuddered from his tail straight up the length of his body, all the way around and around the tree’s trunk until it reached his heads. Together they ceased, and the dragon released another roar from his fifty-something remaining heads—this one pitiful, heartbreaking. The mouths opened, but the fire did not come.
And so a great and terrible dragon, older than any of us, was stripped of his power.
As I rose, my vision blurred with tears.
Beside me, Pythia sighed. I felt the sorrow in that exhale. “Retrieve the apples, Hercules,” she called, “and let it be done.”
Hercules lowered his club to the ground and stepped forward. Ladon’s remaining heads hovered in the air, hissing as he reached for one of the low-hanging apples.
Beside me, Pythia tensed. She took two steps, set her hand on the dragon’s body. “He whispers of something. I cannot hear him properly.”
Hercules’s fingers touched a low-hanging apple. As they did, a low, foreign sound echoed through the clearing. A rapport. Gunpowder. My mind returned to the present era, and the word entered my head like a shot.
Gun.
The apple Hercules had touched fell from the tree at his feet, a perfect hole in the meaty center of it.
Then three things happened at once:
“Killers,” Pythia cried first. “Ladon speaks of killers.”
A second rapport. This time a hole appeared in Hercules’s side, and blood streamed from it like a cracked jug. He stared down at the wound, found the strength to turn in the direction he’d been shot, then he dropped to one knee.
Across the clearing, the World Army emerged from the trees.
Chapter 20
Run. Run, Isabella. Run.
Hinata. It was Hinata who had told me that. Hinata whose face I now wore.
In 1915, she had been fascinated by me. Most young Brazilian women had heard stories, feared and distrusted encantados with equal fervor. But Hinata was not of Brazil. She was an immigrant, the teenage daughter of a Britishman—long disappeared—and a woman who had brought her daughter from Japan to work on a coffee farm.
A difficult, withering life. One which had not diminished her. She had a rare brightness, a sight which, the first moment she saw me walking down the road, brought her to her feet. Her mother, whose face had shriveled from a lifetime under the sun, remained seated.
“Kiseki,” Hinata had said in Japanese. Which, I would later learn, didn’t mean what I’d thought. In Brazil, we encantados were seductresses, thieves, monsters who stole men away. Even worse, you could not tell us apart from humans, because we wore the illusion of them. I assumed kiseki meant monster or demon. I assumed it meant I should walk faster, turn my eyes away.
I did. Her footsteps sounded behind me, and her fingers fell on my arm. “Kiseki,” she repeated, softer this time. Her mother was beckoning her back, but Hinata persisted. “Anata wa nanimonodesu ka?”
I spoke Portuguese and English. She spoke only Japanese. We only had one common language, and that was kinship. You feel your kin when you meet them. I did not understand, but I did. I understood her softness, her brightness, her sweet cadence. I felt it in the eyes, the lips, the tone.
And so, over years, I visited her at nights. We walked the road by the plantation, our hands clasped, our conversations becoming richer as she learned Portuguese—as one does when enveloped by a new language—and I learned what kiseki meant.
Miracle. She considered me a miracle.
I don’t know how she knew what I was. But some have that ability to see past the veil, see us for what we really are, and she must have been one. She asked me about where I lived, and I took her there one night. The rainforest, our home by the river where we slept under the canopy and hung our clothes from branches. And Hinata met my sisters, the first human in a hundred years to truly enter our world.
She met them with joy.
That night, we returned to her mother standing in the road, feet set apart, the metal in her hands silvered by the moonlight. I recognized the long barrel as she lifted it, aimed at me. I remember she called me a demon—because she, too, had the sight. She saw me for what I was, and what she saw she feared.
Other. A monster.
But I remember Hinata’s words better.
Run. Run, Isabella. Run.
Because by then, she spoke fluent Portuguese.
I did run as the two women wrestled, but Hinata’s mother had a mother’s love. She feared me, and what I would do to her daughter. So I, clapping down the road as hard as I could, heard the rapport and I knew. I knew it before the hole appeared in my side, and my blood ran out into the dirt like a cracked jug.
↔
In Central Park, I could not run. Even as the soldiers fanned past the trees. Even as they spread into a half-circle inside the center of Hera’s garden. Even as Serena Russo emerged at the center of that circle, her black slacks and suit jacket swapped out for tactical gear. That waterfall of ebony hair had been wound into a tight bun, the angles of her hard face shining harder under the moon.
She stared at me. Only at me.
Run. My best hope was to run.
Pythia’s hand gripped my wrist. She sensed my fear. “Remember what I said. Remember what I told you.”
My blood rushed so hard in my head, I couldn’t even remember ten seconds before, or my own name. I stepped back from Ladon.
“You must face her,” Pythia said. Behind her, Cupid swept toward Hercules, unleashing arrows into the night. The oracle’s grip slid to my hand. “You must.”
I stared, uncomprehending.
“Forget your instincts,” she said. “Forget what you have always done. If you do not face her, Hercules will die. Justin will die. Look at the son of Zeus.”
She turned my face with almost violent force, and through the blur of tears, I saw Hercules trying to rise. Trying, and failing.
“He is not of this world,” Pythia said. “He does not know a bullet, a gun.”
I looked back at her. “I’m not a fighter.”
She gripped my face harder, anger flaring in her eyes. “You want to be a coward? Then you are. You want to fight? Then you fight. But be decisive, encantado. For GoneGods’ sake, be decisive.”
And with that, Pythia dropped her hand and struck off toward Hercules and the World Army. She didn’t run like a young woman or a fighter. She ran with uneven steps, a stumbling gait. Because she was old and her balance was not what it had once been.
Of course, none of that mattered, because when she reached his side, she planted her staff in the ground and from her chest blossomed a thousand pasts and futures.
They swept out of her like ghosts, which I suppose is what they were: the ghosts of what has been, and what may come. White wisps, but so many of them that they nearly obscured my view of her, and even of Ladon’s remaining heads. They swept around her, Hercules and Cupid, enveloping the three Others in a vortex of time.
And the pasts and futures screamed. They screamed like wailing women, all of them … because they were being shot. Beneath their wails, I heard automatic rifle fire. Guns unloaded from the tree line, the World Army assailing the oracle’s vortex with hundreds of bullets. The bullets p
ierced everything: Ladon’s body, the tree’s trunk, the apples, which thumped to the ground.
I dropped to the earth. How had they found us? Justin had removed the tracer, but somehow they’d tracked me again, here into this magical place in Central Park. And they’d decided to destroy everything they saw.
Which was, after all, the World Army’s way: shoot first, sort through the wreckage afterward.
I knew they wanted me alive, to extract the information I’d stolen from my brain, but they wouldn’t mind if I ended up dead, either. After all, both outcomes kept me—and the research I’d stolen—from slipping into the resistance’s hands.
Through the gaps in the swirling vortex, I caught glimpses of Pythia. She was aging, dying, her body growing frail. What was left of her life she intended to use to protect the rest of us.
And still I wanted to run.
Except her words wouldn’t let me. “You must face her. You must face her to defeat her. They will die if you do not.”
Hercules and Cupid would die if I did not face Serena Russo. Justin would die if Hercules died. And I would die with them. If not in body, then in spirit—and certainly in body not long after.
The wailing was dying with Pythia, the vortex shrinking. “For GoneGods’ sake, be decisive, encantado.”
It was possible those words would remain with me for the rest of my mortal life.
I gripped El Lobizon’s claw hard enough to make my hand hurt, and when I heard a pause in the gunfire, I rose and emerged from behind the tree. My hands went up, waving through the air in the universal body language for truce, for a ceasefire.
Across the scorched earth, Serena Russo’s elegant hand went up, too. And just like that, only the sound of the Oracle of Delphi’s gasps remained, the pasts and futures dissolving into the air like smoke.
Beside me, Pythia dropped to her knees beside Hercules.
“Here I am,” I yelled, my voice echoing back at me. “It’s me, Serena.”
Beside her, Sergeant Johnson yelled in his barking style, “Tell the Others to drop their weapons. You too, encantado.”
I dropped the claw to the ground.
Cupid floated to my side, his bow still in his hand. “You can still run. I’d distract them.”
“Put your bow down,” I whispered. My eyes drifted to Hercules, whose hand pressed to his bloody side, and Pythia, who appeared impossibly frail to still be alive. “I’m not running. The oracle told me my fate.”
Whatever came—and I knew it wouldn’t be good for me—I wouldn’t run from her tonight.
He stared across the clearing. “Which is what?”
I followed his gaze, a shiver running up my body as I found her blue eyes. They were staring at me. “I have to face her.”
“What will you do?” he said.
What would I do? I had no clue, except the vague idea that I could save the rest of them by approaching her woman to woman. “I’m going to talk to her.”
Cupid’s eyebrow arched. “You do realize she just ordered a military contingent to kill us all with automatic weapons?”
I nodded, reaching up to touch his chubby hand. “Promise me you’ll do whatever you can to keep Hercules and Justin alive.”
“Immortality burns promises out of you,” Cupid said. “You’re more important than any of us, Isabella. More important than me or Hercules or Pythia or Justin. You can’t let them take you.”
“What if my love story isn’t possible without bravery?” I said. “What if I’m not capable of having the kind of love you see in me without protecting the four people who would give their lives for me?”
He opened his mouth, but when no response came, he closed it. His only answer was to drop his bow to the earth. He floated back to the other two, watching me with terrified eyes.
Above us, Ladon’s remaining heads hovered, a hundred eyes staring down at me. He had still been aggressive after I’d stabbed him with the claw, but now he just watched.
He watched me with the intensity of a dragon.
A thin voice—it might have been leaves rustling—threaded up to my ears. “Ladon knows. I have shown him who you are.”
Pythia. She hadn’t moved, but she spoke. She was still alive.
“Go, encantado,” she said in that threaded voice. “This is the way. Go now.”
I turned back to the World Army. Against every fiber of instinct, I started forward across the clearing.
↔
Serena understood at once. She came forward alone, and the two of us met in the middle of a patch that had been scorched and blackened by Ladon’s flames.
“You look different,” Serena observed. That low voice pooled into my ears, seductive and menacing at once.
I looked up at her, who appeared exactly as the last time I’d seen her in real life. That afternoon, she had just settled into her office chair after our daily meeting, completely unaware that I was about to steal everything she understood about Other DNA.
“You don’t,” I said. “How did you find me?”
“I can’t reveal all my secrets, Isabella.” She studied me. “You defied all your species’ instincts. Encantado are runners.”
“We are.”
Her eyes drifted behind me. “Three Others and a dragon.” She squinted. “Is that a Cupid?”
I said nothing.
“And that man—how he moved. Johnson saw him at the tunnel, and that was quite the show just now. He is … who? Achilles? Or perhaps the Hercules of legend?” My eyes must have fluttered, because Russo nodded in understanding. “So he is Hercules. How is it that he lives? Never mind that now. He’s bleeding out, but there’s still time—if we get him to a hospital.”
My lips pressed together; how had she known? The shimmer of greed had entered her eyes. I knew she was already imagining how she could splice her soldiers with his DNA, what kind of marvelous strength they would possess.
“You won’t have him,” I said. “You won’t have any of them.”
Her gaze returned to me. “Oh, I see. You think you can bargain.” She shook her head. “No, that’s not possible.”
“Then why meet with me like this?” I swept my hand around. “Here, the two of us alone, at the center of everything.”
As I said it, a voice bellowed through the clearing. “Step away from her, Serena.”
We both turned, but I already knew who I’d see. I knew that voice better than anyone’s.
Justin.
He stood by Hera’s tree, as hale as I’d ever seen him. He wore a bow over his chest, and had an automatic rifle pointed right at Serena’s head. A thrill shot through me—he had come for us, for me, and he was OK—before cold dread filled me. Something about the way he stood struck me as profoundly off. Hercules’s wound. He’s taken the same wound.
With a sharp inhale, I understood he would not be able to defeat her on his own. This would not turn out well for him.
“That’s why,” Serena said. And I understood: she had been waiting for her super soldier to appear. And she knew he would have to show himself if I was about to be captured by the World Army.
Serena raised her hand into the air, gestured at Justin. All at once, a hundred automatic rifles clicked, and she pulled me to her. Her arms gripped me like a vise; GoneGodDamn but she was strong for a scientist.
“Drop!” was all I had time to yell before the firing started.
Pythia and Hercules were already prostrate, but Cupid hit the ground hard. Ladon roared as the bullets peppered his heads and body, his blood spilling out of him with each new bullet hole.
And Justin?
Justin had disappeared.
I searched the clearing, but I couldn’t find him. The firing continued, and Ladon lashed out with his remaining heads, sweeping them up and around, his mouths opening to spew the fire he no longer had. The apples on the tree shook, sprouted holes, more of them thumping to the ground and rolling down.
On and on it went, until the dragon finally unwound himself from th
e tree and rose into the air, great wings flapping with such fury that my eyes couldn’t stay open from all the debris. He carried the dead weight of half his heads, but still managed to raise himself high above us.
The bullets followed. I suppose because Justin had disappeared, and because they had no other target but the dragon who now roared with the fury of some thirty heads over Hera’s garden.
It was an even sadder sight, watching the majestic creature die a slow death to bullets, without even his fire to protect himself. And I had done it to him. I had stuck the dagger in.
“This is what happens,” Serena said into my ear. “I don’t relish this. I don’t want it. But this is what happens when you endanger humanity. When you take the research we’ve spent decades procuring to protect humans—that I’ve spent decades gathering—and give it to those who threaten to destroy us.”
For a moment, I was transported back to Collin Russo’s bedroom, to Serena’s pained, tender face as she watched her son do his homework. This was her feeling, and always had been: humans were frail, delicate, powerless. Her son was powerless. She would give him safety, a future. Freedom from fear of those creatures who possessed magic, who possessed the power to destroy human beings the way Hercules had defeated Ladon.
“You mean your son,” I whispered. “Those who would threaten to destroy your son.”
I felt her breath catch, and she had just opened her mouth to speak when a plume of fire bore down on the soldiers behind us.
Ladon had gotten his magic back.
We both stared into the sky, where the dragon still raged, and I realized I was wrong. No fire emanated from those remaining mouths. My eyes followed the fire’s trajectory, and I realized it had come from the ground.
Out from behind the tree stepped Justin, two of Ladon’s heads squirming from the top half of his body, arching away from his own head. The dragon heads were so large I didn’t even know how his legs could hold them up. And both of them were spewing fire.
