by S W Clarke
Boy, were they.
Chapter 21
Justin couldn’t control the heads properly, and as he started toward the World Army, one head shot fire at the men in the tree line, and the other gazed right at Serena and me, its mouth opening to reveal a sphere of flame.
Serena threw us out of the way, and the heat blew past us so close I thought my skin might be melting off.
As I lay on the ground, I lifted my head to see the real Ladon swoop forward and half-land, half-crash into the trees amongst the World Army. A man shrieked, and World Army soldiers tumbled out of the trees like debris. Ladon thrashed in amongst the soldiers, every head fighting, every fanged maw lifting men and tossing them through the air.
Serena grabbed my wrist, started to her feet. She yanked me after her, and we tore across the opening in parallel to Ladon. She meant to escape with me. And I knew if we reached that tree line, I would not escape.
I tried to pull away, but she had such immense strength I wondered if she, too, had been spliced. Or maybe she bore the strength of fury and fear and need. That was its own power, after all.
“Serena,” I yelled.
An arrow cleaved past my cheek and clipped her hair before it sailed into the forest. As it passed, I spotted the white feathering, the signature hearts on the shaft.
“Let go of her, you bitch!” Cupid called. When I looked back, he was racing toward us on his cloud, nocking a second arrow.
But Serena didn’t let go. She flinched and kept running, and I knew she carried a mother’s determination with her. Not just here, but everywhere. Everywhere she went, she thought of him. Her son—him and home alone. The only human in the world who mattered. She needed the knowledge I carried in my head, and even if someone cleaved her hand from her arm, that hand would cling on. Because she had her own love story.
I understood her. And I finally understood what Pythia had meant when she’d told me to face Serena. She hadn’t meant standing before her. She hadn’t meant that at all.
“Collin,” I whispered. Then, in a yell: “Collin!”
We were three feet from the trees when fourteen years of instinct forced her to turn her head. Someone was calling her son’s name.
She could never ignore her son’s name.
Her face came around, those blue eyes widening, and the next arrow took her right in the shoulder—the same shoulder that was connected to the hand holding onto me.
I leaned back as she fell, and her nails dug in to keep her grip. They ripped into the skin of my wrist, but Cupid’s arrow was too powerful.
When she let go, I fell back, rolled onto my hands and knees as I scrabbled for purchase toward the tree. I started running; I ran harder than I had in decades. When I glanced behind me, Serena had risen, the arrow still protruding from her shoulder. We met eyes for a beat before hers filled with ethereal desire—the arrow taking effect—and she turned and disappeared into the trees.
A reprieve, but she wasn’t done with me. She wouldn’t be done until she had taken back what I stole. That was what her love story dictated.
Ahead, Justin and Ladon were wrecking the soldiers, who had begun to flee. But I didn’t run toward them—I ran toward the two prone figures surrounded by new-fallen apples.
When I arrived, I lowered to my knees between Pythia and Hercules. He lay on his back, his hand stemming the blood from his side. She lay in the fetal position, her hair over her face.
“The oracle,” Hercules said, gaze upward, “go to her.”
I pressed Pythia’s hair away, found her eyes open. I couldn’t tell whether her chest moved under her robes for how frail she was. Then she blinked, a slow movement.
“Pythia,” I whispered. “You’re alive.”
Her mouth opened, and only air came out. Then, that thread of voice. “Only just, and not for long, I fear.” Her voice wasn’t so much a voice as an exhalation, words formed on the wind through her throat. One meatless, veined hand went up toward me. “You asked why I joined the resistance.”
I stared at her hand. “What matters now is …”
“One moment,” she breathed. “Just give me one moment. Take my hand. You will never experience a story in this way again, encantado.”
So I placed my hand in hers, and we took one last trip into the past. The very, very ancient past.
↔
We stood in an open-air temple, pillars rising around us to a Grecian dome. And at the center, a young woman of maybe fifteen in ivory robes, seated cross-legged before a grown man.
The young woman’s lush, dark hair swept over her shoulders, her porcelain skin unlined. She was striking. And the man … was not. Scars littered his body, and the tip of his nose had at some point been cleft away. But he was clearly powerful—a warrior, clad in armor, a sword at his waist.
In the night, a storm raged. Lightning skewered the sky by intervals, overpowering the flames burning in cauldrons around them.
Beside me, Pythia sighed. “It has been two thousand years since I saw her. Tell me, encantado, can you remember anyone’s face from the first hundred years of your life?”
That was five hundred years ago. I thought hard. “No,” I whispered. A strange shame swept through me. “I can’t even remember beyond the last century.”
“Nor can I.”
“But before the gods left, couldn’t you just revisit the past any time you liked?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes on the young woman before us. “But I could not bear to revisit this past.”
As I gazed with her, I recognized the resemblance between her and Pythia. “Is she you?”
“Oh, no.” Pythia swept a dismissive hand through the air. “I was far less attractive in my youth.”
But I could see it in the way she stared at the young woman, the longing on her face …
“She was your daughter,” I said.
Pythia’s eyes welled. She turned away before I could see the tears touch her cheeks. “Pray you never have a daughter, encantado.”
Before us, the seated girl offered her palms to the soldier—an oracle doing her reading. “Why is that?”
Pythia wiped at her eyes, straightened. Ahead of us, the warrior reached out and grabbed the girl’s small wrist. She shrieked—the same sound through human history, unchanged: a girl in pain, a girl in need. A girl alone.
“Because losing her will be a worse pain than any mortal wound,” the oracle whispered.
Pythia did not move as the man pulled the girl toward him, knocking over bowls, spilling a red herb and a forest-green dust across the stone. As he pressed his lips to her face, lightning lit the sky, and the two of them were illuminated in a pose I knew well.
A man taking what he wanted. Nature’s vilest maxim: the strong will dominate the weak.
In the temple, under the rain, we watched a horror of the past. The girl’s robe torn off to expose her not-yet-developed chest before she was hoisted over the man’s shoulder like so many potatoes in a sack. The man rising as she beat his back. The man carrying her from the temple as she screamed for her mother.
Pythia was the name she called. And the words, “Mother,” and “please.”
The rain enveloped them as he left, and we two specters were left standing amongst the spilled herbs and the firelight.
“She was half-human, half-demigod,” Pythia said. Her tone had gone flat. “She was the most precious creature I have ever beheld, and I have seen many, encantado. Yet with all my power, I could not see her fate to save her.”
“What happened to her?” I whispered.
“That I saw, too,” Pythia murmured. “But I will not show it to you.” She raised her eyes to me. “Suffice it to say, she became like the other virgins lost to time.” Her hands raised, indicating the temple all around us.
I lifted my eyes, spotted their faces carved into the pillars. Young women. The oracles of the ancient world, commemorated in stone.
“That is why young women could no longer be oracles,” Pythia spat
. “Because they offered men the future, and those men could not resist present desires. Humans have always been short-sighted.”
Thunder boomed, and a few seconds later the pillars lit up in blue-white light. When Pythia lowered her hands, I enfolded hers in mine. “You joined the resistance because of her.”
“I led many men to their worst fates because of her. Because I could not bear her death.” Her voice was streaked through with regret. “But I joined the resistance because I saw you. I saw that you would come to me, and fate told me that you were the only one capable of returning immortality to Others.”
My eyes widened. “Immortality? Pythia, no. The gods are gone. And I’m …”
She raised a hand. “You’re only a scientist. You’re only an encantado. You’re only Isabella. All these things I have heard.”
I closed my mouth.
“You finally understood what I meant about facing Serena Russo.”
I nodded.
“And you will understand this, too, when the time comes.” She stepped closer, leaned toward my ear. With a boom of thunder, she whispered, “You will understand when you complete your labor.”
I blinked, leaned back. “My labor?”
“We all have our labors, encantado. But most of us don’t have oracles to make us aware of them.” She gripped my shoulder. “When you return, place a piece of apple in Hercules’s mouth. You must do that at once. You will need him for what is to come.”
“I will.”
“And then you must go straight to 91 Bainbridge. I’ve told them to expect you there.”
“91 Bainbridge?” I repeated. “Where is—”
“Cupid of Eros will know.”
“But who …”
She cupped my face with her hand. “You will be safe. For a time.”
My chin crumpled. “Will you come?”
“You remind me of her, encantado. Maybe it’s just that: we are always in search of those we’ve loved.” Pythia’s eyes had already passed beyond me. She crossed to the temple’s edge, one hand reaching out into the storm, the droplets coating her fingers. “I will miss this.” A little laugh escaped her as the world melted away. “You never know what you’ll feel sentimental about until the end.”
That was the last view I had of the Oracle of Delphi. Just a woman in the rain, waiting for her daughter to return.
When I opened my eyes, my hand was still set in Pythia’s. Beneath me, her eyes had shut, every ounce of her spirit burnt into the ether. I raised the bare-boned fingers, set my lips to them.
“Isa?”
Justin stood still some ten feet away—only a moment had passed, as the oracle had promised—with a hand pressed to his bloody side. My first instinct: get him to the hospital, to the emergency room. I was about to start toward him when he fell to his knees.
“I’ve got him.” Cupid flitted over to Justin, catching him before he knocked his head on the ground as he dropped.
Everyone was falling around me. Pythia, Justin, Hercules ...
Hercules. The apple.
I fell to my hands, crawling over to the demigod’s prone form. Like Justin, he had slipped into unconsciousness, both hands still pressed to the bullet hole in his side. Blood pooled in the grass beneath him.
And beside him lay one of Hera’s perfect, untouched apples.
I rose, searching the ground. There, glinting some twenty feet off: my dagger. When I retrieved it, I grabbed the apple—which was as big as a basketball—and set it in my lap. I cut off a tiny sliver, and the fragrance hit me at once, more potent and alluring than any fruit I had tasted in my life. My mouth watered as I opened Hercules’s mouth and inserted the piece of apple.
My heart thundered in my chest. Nothing happened.
Cupid flitted over. “What are you doing?”
“Pythia told me I had to give Hercules a bite of the apples.”
Cupid scoffed, fished the piece out of Hercules’s mouth. “He can’t swallow it while he’s unconscious.”
“What am I supposed to do—juice it?”
He passed it to me. “Eat it.”
I stared at the piece of apple, looked back at Cupid. “Pass it to him like a bird?”
“That’s gross. Just swallow a bite and then kiss him.”
He was right, of course—the juice would still be in my saliva. I had already inserted the apple into my mouth, began chewing almost at once. Not because of the urgency of the situation as much as, well … it tasted better than Ambrosia.
If I wasn’t careful, I’d eat the whole apple right here.
The most powerful feeling of well-being I’d ever experienced came over me as I swallowed, and I understood why King Eurystheus had charged Hercules with stealing this fruit—and why Pythia had instructed me to feed it to him.
When I swallowed, every ache and pain left my body. And after that battle, I had many. They all evaporated, and for the first time since the gods had left, I felt immortal again. I felt timeless.
My eyes flicked to Justin, prone on the grass. This is for both of you, I thought. I leaned over Hercules’s body, parted his lips with my thumb and kissed him. I kissed him as deeply as I had ever kissed a man, my hands cupping his face. I tried to imagine he was Justin, but Hercules’s lips were fuller, more sensual. His scent was different. It was like trying to imagine the color green was red.
I couldn’t do it. So, after a moment, I acknowledged the truth: I was kissing Hercules. And GoneGodDamn was it nice.
Soon, I wasn’t the only one doing the kissing. One hand touched my hair, and when I tried to lean back, he pulled me in closer. And I knew it wasn’t just the apple or saving Justin any longer.
It was us.
After some time, he released me. I stared down at Hercules, breathless, and cut off another slice of apple. When I handed it to him, a smile touched his lips before he bit into it.
“For the record,” Cupid said, “I didn’t shoot either of you with arrows. That was au naturale.”
Merda, I thought. This was both good and bad.
After he had swallowed, Hercules raised to his elbows. “Do you know,” he said, “after I completed this labor the first time, I wondered for the rest of my life why King Eurystheus wanted the apples from Hera’s garden.” He glanced down at the wound on his side, which was rapidly closing. “I thought maybe it was pride, or that he had a vendetta against Hera and the nymphs. But I never once thought to sample the prize.”
I sat back on my legs. “Now you know.”
“Now I know.” He reached for the apple I had taken a slice from, and I passed it to him. He accepted it with one hand, and it looked more like a softball than a basketball in his palm. “They’re not as big as I remembered,” he murmured.
“That’s what she said,” Cupid sang from where he sat with Justin.
“Isa said nothing,” Hercules began. “And how would she know? She was not there when—”
“Just stop,” Cupid said. “First thing we’re doing when we get in front of a TV is an Office marathon.”
I rose, crossed toward Justin and dropped down by his side. “Honey,” I said to him, setting a hand on the side of his face. Because, despite what had just happened between Hercules and me (or maybe because of it) it had become clear to me how much I cared for Justin. What he had just transformed into—a half-man, half-dragon—was terrifying, but I trusted the human in him. He had sacrificed for me more than once, and now he was here because of me. For me.
I was about to press a slice of apple between his lips when Cupid pointed. “Look.” The wound in his side was fading, smoke rising from it like mist. “The River Styx’s power.”
“It’s that strong?”
“It made Achilles immortal,” Cupid said with a shrug. “Well, except his heel.”
“But he’s not …”
“No,” Cupid said. “No one in this GoneGod World is immortal anymore. It’s a temporary effect.”
Justin’s eyes opened, and he gazed up at me. “You’r
e OK.”
“Me?” I said. “You—”
But before I could finish, he pulled me down to kiss him.
When our lips met, the thread of fear I felt at the creature he had become a few minutes ago dissipated. These were the lips I remembered, and the arms I knew. The scent I loved. The human I trusted.
Afterward, I leaned back. My hand slid down to his side. Beneath the blood, he bore no wound. “What have you become?” I whispered.
His mouth twitched, and he said nothing except, “What now?”
“Now?” It was hard to think of the next step, after everything. Then I remembered what Pythia had told me. I turned to Cupid. “Where is 91 Bainbridge?”
Cupid rubbed his chin. “That sounds familiar. Hold on—I need to think.”
“Pythia told me to go there,” I said. “She said they were expecting us.”
His eyebrows raised. “The oracle told you?”
“She said you would know where to go.”
He snapped his fingers, and his puff of cloud swept down from the sky. He hopped into it and proceeded thinking with his face in his chin. “91 Bainbridge. 91 … Bainbridge.”
“I once slew ninety-one—” Hercules began.
“Go eat some more apple, Herc.” Then Cupid’s eyes lit, and he rummaged in his loincloth. The rest of us averted his eyes until we heard paper crinkling. Somehow he had fit a map inside there, which he now unfolded in his cloud as he floated over to me. His finger traced, and he stabbed at the map. “Brooklyn.”
I squinted. “What?”
“91 Bainbridge Street.” A little grin spread over his face. “You’re going to love the subway at night.”
Hercules appeared above us, hands at his hips. “Well, what are we waiting for? I feel like I could slay the Nemean lion all over again.”
I rose. “Not yet,” I said. “We need to do something first.”
Chapter 22
Together, the four of us worked to bury Pythia beneath Hera’s apple tree. Hercules ate an entire apple, core and all, and afterward managed to dig up great swaths of dirt so that, soon after, we had a small grave.
