“Will you shut . . . the fuck . . . up?” came the same annoyed voice as before.
“For Her to have done this, you must be very important. Who are you?” the guy near me asked as though he hadn’t even heard the commotion down the corridor.
“You first. Who’s ‘The Bitch’?”
Whispers. Sad, fragile whispers began, carrying down the corridor. Whispers of one word, one word that finally became something.
Athena.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight. The bird voice mixed with the others in a whisper that sounded like awe. “Athena.”
Ten
I LAUGHED IN DISBELIEF, THE SHARP SOUND REBOUNDING DOWN the corridor, the echo eventually replaced by the flat, continuous drip of water against stone. First vampires, witches, and shape-shifters. And now this.
This is what Alice must have felt like when she tumbled down the rabbit hole.
No one moved or spoke, and I got the feeling that my newbie response had brought a sadness to the underground prison, as though everyone here was, for a moment, remembering their own first night, their own horror and disbelief.
“How long have you been in here?” I asked the figure across from me.
“Nothing brings the madness back faster than thinking about time,” he said softly. “Best to not ask that question. No one likes to dwell on it.”
Oh. Right. “And Athena . . . you’re talking the Athena, Greek goddess, hung out on Olympus?”
“She is, unfortunately for us all, very real.”
My back slumped and my eyelids fluttered closed as a dumbfounded cackle bubbled to my throat and lodged there. What the hell was happening? Why the hell couldn’t I get out of this freaking nightmare? The gods were real. I didn’t know how to react, so I just sat there feeling blank and squeezing the bars as tightly as I could. And even more bizarre, I’d somehow pissed off one of the gods.
It figures.
I pulled my knees into my chest and hugged them, resting my head on my forearm and sighing on the words: “I can’t believe this.” The man across from me chuckled softly; his hearing had to be incredibly acute. I lifted my head. “They’re all real, then, the gods?”
“Some are, yes. The myths we all know, the gods you learn about in school, some are mere fiction, but many of them are or were once real. And there are some never mentioned in the chronicles of mankind, who even now roam the earth. The pantheons are not what they used to be. The Age of the Gods has long passed, and now they struggle for survival just like the rest of us. Entire families wiped out, gods overthrown, imprisoned . . . There are only two pantheons left, made up of those who survived the wars and rivalries. And Athena would like nothing better than to wipe her enemies off the face of the planet. In the meantime, she amuses herself with plots and vindictive pleasures.”
“So, what did you do to piss her off?”
He laughed. “I was born to power.”
Another whisper drifted from down the hall. “I’m born too.”
“Me too.”
“And me.”
“And me.”
My heart thudded harder. These people, their only crime was being born. Was that my crime as well?
The bird voice came next. “Born or Made. Born or Made. We are all Born or Made.”
“Which are you?” I asked louder, pressing my face to the bars so my voice would carry down the hall.
“Made. Made. Made me, she did.” It screeched, a contained, very birdlike squawk, and chills spread up my arm.
Another voice, female, came from the darkness. “Made.”I counted seven. Seven people were down here. And I was number eight. I could understand being born to power, but “Made”? “What does it mean to be Made, exactly?”
“Made from human into something . . . else. Made into τερας.. As punishment. To fight for her. Sometimes on a simple whim. Athena is harsh, judgmental, and will not be overshadowed. Sometimes all it takes is being beautiful,” the man across from me said.
The bird voice spoke again amid a ruffling of movement. “Not all of us are here because we are Born or Made. There is one here for another reason. …”
“Go fuck yourself,” came that irritated, deep voice from before. Male. The same accent as the two hunters who had come after me. An accent I now understood to be Greek. The bird screeched in an angry response, the sound making me cover my ears as it bounced off the stone walls.
No one spoke afterward.
I rested my head back against my forearm and closed my eyes, letting my body rest. My mind, however, raced, going over the events of the last two days that had led up to this. I couldn’t be too far from New 2. This place was probably one of the many plantations that existed, or had existed, along the River Road. All I had to do was get out of this cell and back to the dock. Or to a path. I couldn’t stay here, not in this darkness, not surrounded by swamp and sludge, which could implode the walls and drown me in mud—inescapable, suffocating mud.
My blood pressure rose with the thought. My fingers flexed with the desire to cause some serious damage. Damage to myself. Damage to the cell. Didn’t matter. My foot bounced my leg with the speed of a locomotive. Small way to release the adrenaline compounding in my body. Bounce your leg or slam your fist against the bars and break your hand. Seemed an easy choice, but I was thinking the pain might feel pretty good right about now.
Breathe, Ari. You’ve been in worse spots than this. Seven years old. Locked in a dirty dog crate for three days straight and fed dry dog food thrown through the front grate. My punishment. Foster Mom Number Two had served chicken breast for supper, completely raw in the middle. On purpose. I refused to eat it, got pinned to the floor, raw chicken shoved down my throat. Puked it right back up onto Number Two’s hand as she tried to duct tape my mouth, and the rest became just another chapter in my history. Whatever. I’d handled that small space. And I sure as hell could handle this one.
I sniffed hard and wiped at my nose, eyeing the dim light down the hall, remembering other events in my past. …
Don’t think about it.
Instead I thought of Bruce and Casey, their easygoing nature and frequent smiles; both no-nonsense and tough, but kind and loving in their own way. I thought of Crank and Violet, and the gifts that were still in my backpack, wherever that was. And Sebastian. How my stomach went weightless whenever his image popped into my head. How much I’d liked holding his hand on the way to Café Du Monde. How kissing him had erased every single thought from my mind and, for once, just allowed me to be in the moment, completely swept away.
A cough echoed from the darkness.
I lifted my head from the bars, my knee finally done bouncing. I knew I was experiencing what everyone else here had already gone through. The panic. The disbelief. The fear.
My teeth bit down gently on my lip. And they’d all probably thought of escape too.
My fingers felt along the bars, looking for the lock. It was square with a large keyhole big enough for my pinkie, which fit to the first knuckle and then could go no more. I wiggled it, feeling for the jagged ridges.
“It won’t open,” Diagonal Guy said. “Our powers don’t work down here.”
My hand stilled. “Powers?”
One syllable came out of his mouth before the door from above opened, sending a shaft of welcome light racing down the hall. It wasn’t all that bright, but when you’ve been in darkness for several hours, it seemed like the sun had come out. I shielded my eyes as footsteps proceeded down the steps.
“Good luck, girlie,” the bird voice said.
I tensed, standing and grabbing the bars, looking hard to the guy near me, for comfort, for help, for anything.
“He’ll take you to Athena,” the man said quickly. “She won’t come here. It will be over before you know it.”
The lanterns along the walls flickered to life, one by one, as the footsteps drew closer. The large black silhouette stopped in front of my cell. It was the same man who had put me here. A τερας hunter. A monster hunter. And he had my backpack slung over his shoulder. He slid the key into the lock, opened the door, and reached in.
I reacted without thinking, relying on years of instinct and a seriously strong need to get the hell out of there. I grabbed his wrist, jerking him inside with all my might, knowing he wouldn’t expect that. If anything, he’d assume I’d try to run, to get out, not get him in.
Caught off guard, he barked his surprise and stumbled inside, slipping on the grimy floor and sliding into the blackness as I snagged the bag off his shoulder.
The bird voice shrieked. Shuffling sounded. The hunter cursed loudly.
Quickly I unzipped the bag and felt for the dagger, pulling it out blade first and then flipping it so that the hilt slapped into my palm. Then I waited, heart pounding and limbs tingling with adrenaline.
My eyes were a bit more accustomed to the dark than his, so I had the advantage. My fingers flexed. Movement. I got only a one-second glimpse of him as he surged out of the blackness. I dropped to both knees, calves and feet tucked under me, as his arms reached for where I’d once been. His feet hit my knees and he fell forward as I leaned back, so far back that my head touched the grimy floor, and at the same time, thrust up with the dagger. His hands hit the bars. He groaned.
Warm drips hit my face. The scent of iron was thick and nauseating.
His blood slid down the hilt of the dagger and onto my hands, trailing over my forearms. I stayed still, breathing heavily. Not moving. The cells went quiet. My back and stomach muscles strained as he slumped his weight onto the dagger. My arms burned, but still I didn’t move. And then suddenly he twitched. Three seconds later his body transformed to smoke and disappeared into that invisible updraft. The weight was relieved from my body, and I collapsed back onto the floor.
I rolled to my side, disbelief flooding me. Quickly I wiped my bloody hands on my jeans and then shook them hard, trying to relieve myself of the trembles. It didn’t help. I shoved the dagger back into the backpack, wiggled the key out of the lock, and then eased out of the cell.