by Kate O'Hearn
“I’m Emily Jacobs and I care for you more than you’ll ever know. You just don’t remember because it happened a long time ago. Now shut up and get on Pegasus!”
“Emily Jacobs!” Agent B cried. “That’s impossible. I’ve seen photos of Emily. You look nothing like her.”
“Yeah, I hear that a lot these days,” Emily said. She didn’t give him time to question her further as she hoisted him up onto Pegasus’s back. “Hold on to Stella, but be careful. She’s paralyzed below the waist and has no leg control. You must help keep her stable.”
Agent B slipped his arms around Stella’s waist. “This is insane!”
“It’s about to get much worse,” Emily said. “Just hold on tight and, please, trust me like you used to.”
“Come. It’s this way!” Arious Minor called as the dot flashed down the hall. “The elevator is over here. I can override the control.”
Earl and Frankie held their guard’s weapons high as they ran down the corridor. Seconds ticked by like hours as they waited for the elevator to arrive. When the doors whooshed open, Emily raised her hands to defend against anyone who came out. But the elevator was strangely empty.
“Where are the guards?” she asked suspiciously
“I don’t care,” Earl said. “Let’s just get the heck outta Dodge!”
They piled in and pressed the uppermost button to take them up into Charing Cross Station. It was only when the doors started to close that Agent B shouted, “Wait! Stop. Don’t let the doors close. This is a trap!”
Emily’s hand flashed out to stop the doors, but they kept closing. She had to snatch her hand back to keep from being caught. She tried her powers and commanded the doors to open, but they wouldn’t.
“Cupid, grab the other side. Help me pry them open!”
Emily and Cupid each held one of the doors, but despite their Olympian strength, they would not open even a fraction.
“It feels like someone is holding them,” Cupid panted.
Moments later the elevator hummed to life. Instead of taking them up toward the exit, it started to descend.
“We’re going down,” Cupid cried.
Pegasus whinnied and pawed the floor.
Arious Minor vanished into the control panel. A moment later he reappeared. “I can’t override it. Emily, try your powers again. We must not go down there.”
Emily held up her hands and focused on changing the direction of the elevator. She could feel the powers flowing from her core, yet despite her best efforts, other powers, greater than hers, were drawing them down. “I can’t stop it,” she cried, “no matter what I do. There’s something fighting against me.”
“Keep trying,” Arious Minor commanded.
Everyone looked up to the number panel high above the door and watched the numbers descend like a deadly countdown to the bottom floor, sublevel thirty. But when they expected the elevator to stop, it didn’t.
Agent B looked around. “This isn’t possible. This facility doesn’t go down below thirty levels.”
“Yes, it does,” Arious Minor said. “And what is in the bottom pit is more horrible than anything I’ve ever seen before. Emily, try again. We must not go down to them.”
“Flame, get us out of here. I can feel the evil,” Cupid cried. “We are getting closer.”
Emily felt it too. The deeper they descended, the worse the sense of malevolence became. She held out her hands again and put everything into stopping their descent. Sweat broke out on her brow, and her head was pounding from concentration. But still the elevator descended. “It’s not working. I can’t stop the elevator!”
“This is bad,” Arious Minor said. “Very, very bad.”
“What’s down there?” Earl asked.
“Living evil,” Arious Minor said.
Agent B held out his hand to Frankie. “Give me a weapon.”
“You? No way,” Earl said. “Emily may trust you, but I don’t.”
“Give me a bloody weapon!” Agent B spat. “Look what they’ve done to me. They’ll kill me, too, if they get the chance.”
Emily looked at Frankie. “He’s right. Give him one of the guns. Whether he likes it or not, he’s with us now.”
Earl nodded to Frankie, who reluctantly handed over one of the weapons. “You try anything funny and you’re a dead man.”
“I’m already a dead man, thanks to you,” Agent B said darkly.
The elevator started to slow and then stopped completely. The doors didn’t open right away, and Arious Minor said, “Emily, prepare your laser flame. You’re going to need it.”
The moment the doors opened, Stella started to scream. Pegasus whinnied, and Cupid’s mouth hung open in terror.
Emily charged forward and fired at the creatures closest to her. Gunfire echoed behind her, and she felt more than saw Earl, Frankie, and Agent B shooting at the creatures.
“What are they?” Cupid cried as more of the terrifying creatures came at them. Some looked like large walking turtles; others looked almost like the Minotaur, while another type were black with wings and looked almost like armored ravens.
“Shadow Titans!” Emily shouted.
9
THE SHADOW TITANS SWARMED DOWN on the group in numbers too high to count. The futile blasting of gunfire filled the air until all the bullets were expended, but not one Shadow Titan had fallen as a result. After guns, the others used hand-to-hand combat, but they didn’t stand a chance.
As had happened long ago, only Emily’s flames could destroy the hollow, leatherlike warriors. But no sooner would she blast one into oblivion than more would descend. Despite her best efforts, Earl was captured by the creatures, followed by Frankie, and finally, Cupid. Pegasus was subdued, but Stella and Agent B were allowed to remain on his back.
What was different from the past was the Shadow Titans did not kill her friends. Instead, they held them captive, binding their arms but doing no harm.
“Emily, you cannot win against us,” a bodiless male voice boomed. “Surrender now or we will kill the others. . . .”
“Don’t do it!” Earl cried.
“We mean it, Emily. Surrender now, or your friends will die.”
Emily had no choice. She knew the horrors of the Shadow Titans. The others didn’t. She held up her hands. “All right. You win. I won’t fight you.”
“Flame, no!” Cupid shouted. “Leave us. Get out of here!”
The moment her hands went up, two large Shadow Titans grabbed her. Their grip was firm but not painful.
“Bring them in,” the voice said. “We have waited long enough.”
“Yes, yes, bring them to us . . . ,” another voice called.
The presence of evil was smothering like a blanket on a hot summer night. Emily and her friends were completely surrounded by Shadow Titans as they were led forward. They moved down a long corridor. At the end, they descended a ramp into an area that opened up into a massive room much larger than the train station high above them.
Many cages lined the walls of the room, and Emily was horrified to see that the occupants of some of the cages were beings she’d never imagined possible.
“Those ain’t Olympians, are they?” Earl asked softly as the passed before the pitiful-looking gray-skinned creatures.
Cupid shook his head. “No. I have never seen their likes before.”
“I think they’re aliens,” Frankie offered. “Look at their big black eyes. They’re just like in the reported sightings.”
Other occupants of the cages were all too familiar to Emily—winged horses, Dianas, Cupids, and Paelens reached out to her. Just like at Area 51, they seemed to know that she was important and that they needed her.
Pegasus reacted to the clones and whinnied loudly. At his call, the two winged horses also responded and kicked the doors of their stalls. Pegasus started to quiver, and his tail flashed out.
Several more Shadow Titans moved closer to the stallion and caught hold of his mane to keep him down on the ground.
“Don’t fight them, Pegs,” Emily warned. “They are too dangerous for you.”
“Ah, so you remember our Shadow Titans,” the voice called.
“I’ll never forget them,” Emily said. “How can this be? We destroyed them thousands of years ago. And the clones? We rescued all of them from Area 51.”
“You didn’t destroy all the Shadow Titans. Some remained on Earth. As for the clones, these are not the Area 51 clones,” the voice said. “You cost us dearly there, Emily. But luckily, we were doing the same thing here.”
“Why?”
“Come forward and see for yourself.”
“Yes,” a female voice offered. “Come and see what you have created.”
There was something in the way she said it that sent a chill down Emily’s spine. They moved past the room with the captives and into another corridor. At the end they saw two tall, sealed steel doors.
“Come forward, Flame of Olympus. Come to us. . . .”
The Shadow Titans led them onward. At their approach, the doors slowly opened. The room ahead was dimly lit, and it took a moment for the humans’ eyes to adjust. But for Emily, Pegasus, and Cupid, their eyes saw the horror that lay before them immediately.
Pegasus whinnied, Cupid cried out, and Emily’s hands ripped free of the Shadow Titans and rose to her mouth as she tried to stifle her scream.
This was followed by Earl’s, Frankie’s, and Stella’s outbursts of complete terror. Even Agent B cried out at the creatures that lay before them.
“Closer,” the heaving masses commanded as one.
There were three of them. They were either lying side by side or they were connected. Emily couldn’t tell. Her mind was incapable of grasping the horror of their existence. They were like giant jellyfish, the kind that sometimes washed up on shore, or clear balloons filled with a thick, slimy liquid.
Grotesque faces lay in the center of each of their undulating masses. They each had large, unblinking, bulbous gray eyes, nostrils with no nose, and thin lips on tiny mouths. Each creature stood almost twenty feet high and the same in width.
If they were even alive, they were living pools of gelatinous goo.
“My God,” Earl cried. “It’s ‘The Blob!’ ”
Words could not come to Emily’s mouth as she beheld the horrors before her.
“What’s the matter, Emily?” the female voice said out of the tiny, moving mouth of the middle creature. “Don’t you like what you see? You created us, Mother. Behold, we, your special children!”
Only one other time in her life had Emily felt such blood-chilling terror. Back when she first met the Gorgons. The two sisters of Medusa had caused a similar reaction in her. But now she realized these three monsters were infinitely worse.
“Cat got your tongue, Emily?” the third new voice teased. It was lighter than the others, but certainly male. “And yes, Emily, we did know it was you from the very start. Your change of body could not fool us like it did our gullible agents.”
“What do you mean your agents?” Agent B demanded.
“Ah, yes, the wonderful Agent B,” the female voice said. “Hero of the Titan War. You, Stella, and Pegasus are almost as responsible for our existence as Emily is.”
“What are you talking about?” Agent B spat.
“Why, sister, he doesn’t remember us,” the first voice said. “Perhaps we should remind them of their crimes.”
The grotesque creatures pulsated, and colors flashed through their clear, liquid bodies like lightning.
Emily felt their powerful minds enter her brain. She started to scream as they accessed the memories of the other time line. Further and further back, leading all the way to the Titan War and their place in it. Once they had her memories, the monsters shared them with everyone in the room.
Emily also saw the war from other perspectives. She learned that while she, Pegasus, Joel, and Agent B had fought in one part of the battle, Stella and elderly Paelen had worked with Vulcan at the mobile forge in another. She saw things she’d never known had happened. How much Stella had cared for Paelen and Brue, and suffered when she’d witnessed their fiery deaths. Nothing was held back.
Beside her, Pegasus’s head flew back, and he whinnied as his mind filled with visions of the past—including seeing his own death as a frail old stallion. His anguished, pain-filled cries mixed with the others as they all received the memories. When the pain finally stopped, Emily collapsed to her knees.
Pegasus was breathing heavily and nickered softly. He pawed the ground and shook his head. When his eyes found hers, they were filled with compassion.
“You saw all that?” Emily asked.
When Pegasus nodded, Emily looked over to Cupid. “Did you see it too?”
He was panting and rubbing his temples. “I never realized it was so bad. . . .”
Stella had passed out from the sudden dump of information. Agent B caught hold of her before she fell off of Pegasus. He laid her gently forward on the stallion’s neck. Like everyone else, his breathing was heavy and his brows furrowed with pain. Agent B looked at Emily with absolute recognition in his face. “I remember it all now,” he said softly. “I remember you. You came back for me.”
“I promised I would.”
“How sentimental,” the female voice said. “Feel the love. . . .” But then her voice became hard. “But it won’t last. We have waited millennia for this moment, Emily. The time has come for you to pay for your crimes against us.”
“What crimes? Who are you?” Emily demanded.
“Don’t you recognize us?” the first male voice said. “You should. After all, you created us.”
“Stop saying that!” Emily cried. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Of course you did,” the female accused. “Cast your mind back. Saturn had you trapped in his energy void, but somehow you escaped. You and your dog made it to the cell block to free Joel and Prometheus. When we came in to stop you, you used the powers of the Xan against us. . . .”
Emily remembered the fight on Tartarus. She’d wounded Saturn, his brothers, and several of his top leadership. But her powers had also vaporized three others. She instantly remembered Riza’s sad voice saying, “Oh, Emily, what have you done . . . ?”
“I believe she’s starting to recognize us now,” the female said. “Yes, Emily, we are the three Titans you vaporized but couldn’t destroy.”
The thoughts were too terrible to consider. “It’s not possible,” Emily said.
“After that blast, we were all but destroyed, but still conscious. We witnessed everything—Stella creating the flame-swords that defeated the Shadow Titans and the end of the battle, with Agent B’s valiant sacrifice. We saw you destroying Saturn’s weapon and changing the time line. We witnessed it all, alive but not living.”
Emily was shaking her head at the horror of it all. Back on Xanadu, Riza’s father had spoken to her of the damage she had done that hadn’t been realized yet. Was this it?
“Yes, Emily, Riza’s father meant us. He knew what you did on Tartarus and what you created with the power of his people,” the female said, reading her thoughts. “Now do you understand?”
“B—but how did you survive?”
“How?” the first voice said. “By sheer willpower. You left us wounded and bodiless. After the war we combined what was left of our powers and fled to Earth. We buried ourselves deep under the ground of this small, cool island, where our wounds could heal. But no matter what we tried, we could not restore our bodies. Instead, we fed on anything we could catch.”
Emily didn’t want to hear any more. It was all too terrible.
“But you will listen to us,” the first voice said. “We fed and we grew. But humans weren’t enough to restore us. So as humanity developed technology, we controlled some weak-willed men and created the agency that you now know as the Central Research Unit.”
The female took over speaking. “Our agency has been hunting extraterrestrials and anything with
power for a very, very long time. Each and every life form we absorbed added to our power, but as you can see, it changed us.” She started to laugh with mirthless humor. “Can you imagine their surprise if the agents of the CRU ever discovered that they had been serving the very things they have hunted and despised?”
“That’s not possible,” Agent B said. “The CRU was set up to find aliens and study their technology to serve the world and keep the peace.”
“You blind fool!” the female said. “All those aliens and people of power did was feed us! And very soon, thanks to Emily, we shall soon rise from this pit and get back to Olympus. Imagine the power we’ll amass when we have consumed genuine Olympians and not just their clones. Finally, we will move on to Titus and devour those who betrayed us.”
The third voice laughed. “The great Saturn will kneel before us and beg for mercy as we absorb his people. Then, when those worlds are gone, we will make our way to Xanadu. Riza, the last Xan, will sustain us for a very, very long time.”
Emily was sickened to realize that the clones and aliens in the cages they’d seen in the other room were nothing more than food to these terrible monsters. “You’ve completely lost your minds,” she cried. “Whether you’ve been down here too long, or absorbed too many innocent species, you’re all insane and filled with evil.”
“We are what you made us!” the female said. “And now, after all this time of watching and waiting for you to be born and meet Pegasus, after all the adventures you’ve had, it is time for you, Emily Jacobs, to feed us!”
The third voice cackled. “The power of the Xan within you will finally free us from this pit. You, Emily, will grant us the power to devour your beloved Olympus!”
“Emily, kill them!” Cupid cried, struggling against the Shadow Titans. “Use your powers and destroy them!”
“Yes, Emily,” the male voice teased. “Kill us before we absorb you.”
Emily screamed as invisible hands wrapped around her and lifted her off the floor. She struggled in their grip as she was slowly dragged toward the hideous creatures. But no matter what she tried, she couldn’t break free.
