The Immortal Fire

by Anne Ursu

  Charlotte felt a lump rise in her throat. Her father knew. Oh, he didn’t know know, but he sensed something. It was true: She had been marked for trouble—mostly by accident, but nonetheless, marked she was. And as worried as they might be now, her mom and dad would probably go crazy if they knew the truth. Charlotte had been so busy trying to keep things from them, as if they were her adversaries, that she’d forgotten she needed to protect them too.

  “Thanks, Dad,” she said quietly. What had she been thinking? What were they going to do, run off with Mr. Metos and leave a note? Went to Greece, off fighting gods, see you when I see you? How was she going to do what she needed to do and keep her parents from losing their minds? And who was going to protect them when she did?

  “All right,” said her father. “You’d better go meet Mr. Metos.” He reached over and rubbed her hair. Charlotte smiled weakly and started to get out of the car.

  “Lottie?” Mr. Mielswetzski added as she was about the close the door. “I’m proud of you.”

  Focusing on a spot in front of her, Charlotte went up to the school. She found Zee waiting for her in the front lobby, and the cousins headed wordlessly to Mr. Metos’s office. Maybe, Charlotte thought fleetingly, it was nothing, maybe Mr. Metos had just decided to tell them more about Poseidon. Or maybe he’d just baked some brownies and wanted to give them some….

  But when Zee knocked on Mr. Metos’s door, there was no answer. The cousins looked at each other and knocked again. Nothing.

  “Maybe we’re early,” Charlotte said.

  “Hmmm,” said Zee, shifting.

  Trying to ignore the metaphorical hot breath on her neck, Charlotte leaned against the gray wall, while Zee paced up and down the long, quiet hallway. Every once in a while he would wander over to the stairs to see if anyone was coming, but no one ever was. 7:30 became 7:35 became 7:40, and by 7:45 Charlotte was officially worried.

  “I’m officially worried,” she said.

  “Perhaps he just got held up,” said Zee, sounding unconvinced.

  “Perhaps he got eaten.”

  “Don’t say that,” grumbled Zee. He knocked one more time, then placed his hand on the knob. A puzzled expression crossed his face, and he turned the doorknob, and the door opened.

  It was unlocked.

  Charlotte closed her eyes, afraid of what she might see.

  But to her immense relief, there was nothing horrible in the office, and no sign of anything horrible either. On first glance it looked just as it had, though there were some strange things. His office chair was pushed back from the desk, as if someone had sprung up from it quickly, and his phone hadn’t been placed back in its carriage well. Charlotte wondered if that was from the call to her house, or if there’d been another call later, one that had caused him to jump up in his chair and burst out of his office.

  “Looks like he left in a hurry,” Charlotte mumbled.

  “Looks like.”

  It was better, at least, than the alternatives. At least Mr. Metos hadn’t been taken; he had gone somewhere, urgently, maybe something to do with them—or maybe there was something even more important. (Like something to do with his maybe-son?)

  Charlotte sighed. “What do we do?”

  Zee shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe he’ll come back.”

  After every period, one of them ran downstairs to check for Mr. Metos, but he was never there, and Charlotte spent her classes staring out the window, wondering what was going to befall them now.

  It was a strange day. It had been sunny and beautiful since they’d gotten back, and it was no different when they’d gotten to school in the morning. But as the day went on, the sky darkened—as if too eagerly anticipating sundown. Thick, black-looking clouds rolled in and hung ominously in the air. Something was not right.

  Then, when Charlotte was sitting in history, paying no attention at all to the origins of the Cold War, there was a moment when the whole building seemed suddenly enveloped in shadow. A very cold feeling passed through Charlotte. She turned her head to look out the window, and that was when the street in front of the school exploded in flame.

  Somebody screamed. Fire alarms began to wail in the school hallways, and the whole building seemed to shift. The students—who had practiced lining up in an orderly fashion once every month since they’d been dropped off wide-eyed at kindergarten nine years earlier—stampeded to the door and into the hallway, Ms. Bristol-Lee shouting commands at them as they fled.

  In a flash, Zee was next to Charlotte and the two stared out the window at the flaming ground, then up into the sky. There was nothing, nothing at all, and then a shadow passed over the school again.

  There was a loud roaring noise, so loud it shook the foundation of the school, and Ms. Bristol-Lee screamed, “Charlotte, Zachary, come on!”

  The next thing Charlotte knew, Zee was pulling on her arm, and the cousins were running through the hallways, following the chaos of a school’s worth of students pushing toward the exits. Another roar shook the school, and smoke poured under the door from the gymnasium behind them. A crash echoed from somewhere.

  Smoke billowed down the hallways, pursuing them as they fled. In the distance was the crackling of fire and the echoing yells of their schoolmates. Into the stairwell leading to the basement fire doors they went, down one flight, then another, as shell-shocked teachers manned posts on the landings, trying to manage the chaos. Then they could go no farther. At the bottom of the stairwell, in front of the basement double doors, was a bottleneck of students trying to push their way outside to safety. Zee tugged Charlotte back into the smoke-filled hallway, into the open door of one of the classrooms.

  “Out the window,” he yelled, and Charlotte, her body screaming in protest, climbed up onto the ledge and hit the lock, then tried to open the window.

  “It won’t go!” she shouted back.

  Zee swore loudly and ran toward the door, just as another impossibly loud animal roar burst through the air, shaking Charlotte’s bones. There was the sound of shattering glass, a blast of skin-singeing hot air, and suddenly flame erupted in a room across the hall. The door hung limp on one hinge.

  Fire lapped out into the hallway, toward them, and, swearing again, Zee slammed their door closed while Charlotte hit at the stuck window.

  A coughing Zee joined her efforts and as smoke filled the room, some deeply buried school fire safety video replayed in Charlotte’s head and she grabbed a jacket from the nearest desk and rolled it under the door to slow the smoke.

  Then a loud grunt emanated from Zee. Charlotte whirled around and he was picking up one of the desks and hurling it at the window. The window shattered and in a flash Zee was at her side, urging her toward it. Charlotte climbed up on the ledge and stumbled through, cutting her hands on shards of glass. As her legs landed on the ground, pain shot up through her body, reverberating through her chest and back, but she didn’t have time for that. She whirled around toward the window just as her cousin came bursting out, landing next to her with a thump.

  “You all right?” Zee yelled.

  Charlotte nodded and shook her head at the same time. Zee helped her up, and they hurried up the hill that lay behind the school.

  “What’s happening?”

  “I think there’s something up there,” said Charlotte, pointing to the dark clouds overhead.

  The sky seemed perfectly still. All the activity was coming from the school below. For a moment Charlotte thought she was wrong, the fire came from inside the building, there was nothing up there—and then, within the clouds, she saw movement.

  In the parking lot off to the side of the school, the Hartnett students milled around noisily. The teachers came running out of the building, leading the last stragglers with them, as fire trucks squealed to a stop just in front of the school.

  From their perch on the hill, Charlotte and Zee stared up at the sky, trying to discern what lurked there. There was another unworldly sound, and, with their necks craning upward
, they began to back away hurriedly. A shape punctured the cloud above. Dark, impossibly large, dragon-like, it flickered in the air and then disappeared behind the clouds again.

  The cousins gasped, and chills racked Charlotte’s body.

  “What is it?” she breathed.

  Below them, the students and teachers of Hartnett Middle stood in awe, watching their school burn. Charlotte looked from them back to the sky and to her cousin.

  “We have to go,” she said, her voice cracking a little as she gestured toward the people below. Whatever that was, it wanted them. While there had been times that siccing a fire-breathing creature on her school might have sounded appealing to Charlotte, it was one of those concepts that was much better in theory.

  Zee nodded and pointed to the fields above the steep hill behind them. “There,” he said. “Can you run?”

  No. “Sure.” Charlotte nodded lamely.

  Zee grabbed her, and the cousins turned on their heels and ran toward the fields that lay beyond the school, hoping the creature followed them, hoping the creature did not follow them. As the sirens and shouts of the students echoed behind her, Charlotte could not bring herself to stop and look up. And if she stopped, she didn’t think she could go anymore.

  Zee was pulling her along the best he could, but Charlotte’s ribs couldn’t seem to hold her lungs anymore, her back felt as if it would snap in two, and her eyes were beginning to see black.

  There was something following them, something large and heavy, something that made the air around it recoil. And then Charlotte’s legs gave out and, dropping Zee’s hand, she collapsed on the ground.

  A great creature exploded through the clouds, a creature with tremendous leathery wings and a long, serpentine tail that even the sky seemed to cower from. It was no dragon—its body was thick and mammalian, and its head was that of a gigantic lion, and on its torso was a snarling goat head. A Chimera.

  Charlotte screamed. The beast dove toward them with the agility of a sparrow. Zee dove for her, ready to grab her, ready to carry her on his shoulders if he had to, but suddenly the Chimera had landed on the ground next to them. The goat head, with its enormous circular black horns, focused its bloodred eyes on Zee while the lion head bared its teeth at Charlotte. Then, with one mighty flick, its great tail swept over and thrust Zee aside.

  “Zee!” Charlotte yelled, but before she could go after him, the Chimera had sprung toward her. She thought then that she was done for—after everything that had happened she was going to die in the field above the school; but the creature did not attack her. It leaped over her, and as it did it reached a scaly, slimy, car-size, dragon-clawed hand down and enfolded her in it, retracting its claws as nimbly as Mew. With a mighty flap of its wings, the Chimera sprung up into the air and carried her off.

  PART TWO

  Fire

  CHAPTER 7

  Wild Kingdom

  THE PREVIOUS EVENING, SLEEP HAD NOT COME EASILY to Zachary “Zee” Miller. Something seemed to linger in the darkness in the Mielswetzski family guest room, something large and threatening, something that was either the specter of his future or a giant Zee-eating lion. Zee was rather hoping it was the lion.

  Like Charlotte, Zee wanted nothing more than to devote himself to working against the gods. But that didn’t mean that he wasn’t a little apprehensive about the proposition. And he would have preferred, for once, to be the one in control of the fight, but it seemed once again that the fight was coming to them. The giant black bear of destiny had lumbered into his room, climbed on the bed, and crawled directly on top of Zee’s chest, where it curled its enormous body up and fell into a deep, lengthy slumber.

  And when he did find himself drifting off despite the metaphorical zoo around him, his sleep was not exactly restful. Not satisfied with the vagueness of the threat before them, his mind tried assiduously to divine its nature by enacting some of the possibilities. In the theater of his brain, Zee saw any number of mortal threats to himself and his cousin played out, from well-aimed bolts of lightning to vindictive Minotaurs to armies of rabid snaggletoothed Munchkins. Not that there was anything particularly Greek about snaggletoothed Munchkins, but Zee couldn’t be held responsible for the whims of his subconscious.

  There was one dream, though, that was not like the others. It began with Zee in total darkness, darkness so complete he felt it seeping into his mind. He knew nothing, he was nothing. Then suddenly there was light, just a flickering, but he was conscious suddenly of the force of his breath, the tightness of his skin, the persistence of his own heartbeat. The light grew brighter, and Zee looked around and knew.

  He had been here before. He knew this place.

  He was in a long tunnel in a cave, and up ahead in the distance burned a fire. And pretty soon he would hear—

  Hey, Zee, come over here!

  —the voice. He knew the voice. He was not surprised, then, to behold in front of him a girl. She was young, about six or seven, in a white dress and white ribbons that gleamed in the flickering firelight. She was pointing toward the light, and Zee dutifully took a step toward it, then suddenly found himself in a small room inside the cave, at the center of which burned a tiny fire. Out of the corner of his eye, Zee saw shapes on the cave walls, like primitive cave drawings. It took a moment for him to realize they were moving. Then the girl appeared in front of him, a line of Dead standing behind her.

  Do you know where you are?

  No, Zee said.

  That’s too bad, she said.

  And then he woke up.

  Zee’s eyes popped open, the last image of the dream still lingering in his mind. The last time he’d seen the girl, it had been just before Charlotte had left on the cruise. She had shown him this cave, and then he had suddenly seen a flash of Charlotte in danger on the sea. (Now that he thought about it, it might have been nice of the girl to warn him about Philonecron, too, while she was at it…. Not that Zee was ungrateful or anything.)

  But there was no warning this time, nothing but the cave, the fire, and those strange drawings on the wall. Zee closed his eyes and tried to bring them forth in his mind—he had a feeling they weren’t done by cavemen.

  Still, as much as he struggled to clarify the pictures, he could remember no more detail. Zee sighed, and the great big bear groaned, turned around twice, and settled back in for a nice, long nap.

  That morning, like every morning since their return from Poseidon’s yacht, when Zee saw Charlotte he had a strong urge to order her back to bed.

  It was Zee’s fault that she’d been hurt. He’d been so preoccupied with getting revenge on Philonecron that he hadn’t stopped to think that she might be in danger. And when he’d had the dream of her on the seas, he was so busy thinking of his own problems that it didn’t occur to him to warn her until it was too late.

  It didn’t seem fair that Charlotte had to suffer when the whole thing was Zee’s battle. And, as much as he wanted to throw himself into the fight against the gods, he couldn’t stand the idea of risking further harm to Charlotte. Part of him wanted to lock her up somewhere and go off himself—but at the same time he knew he couldn’t do it without her. Plus, if he did, she’d destroy him emotionally with a stunning tapestry of insults, and then break his kneecaps.

  Still, that morning in the car on the way to school, as Zee’s eyes fell on the sickly yellow bruise peeking out from underneath Charlotte’s sleeve, he thought again about the white-dressed girl in the dream and the warning he had not heeded, and he vowed never to let anything bad happen to his cousin again.

  That vow lasted through lunch. When the Chimera burst through the dark clouds and dove toward them, Zee knew—he just knew—that it wasn’t coming for him. He lunged for the beast, with no idea what he would do when he reached it—and the next thing he knew something slammed into him with the force of a city bus.

  Everything went black. Zee slowly became conscious of the smell of grass around him, and he fancied himself lying in the soccer field a
t his old school after a long practice, waiting for the rain to come cool him off, existing, for one moment, in a world of perfect peace.

  Except rain clouds don’t roar. The Chimera’s voice rattled the ground, shaking Zee back to the terrible reality. He sat up, his head and back throbbing, just in time to see the creature envelop Charlotte and take off.

  Time stopped. Everything went perfectly quiet, the giant wings of the beast moving through the air in slow motion, like some monstrous ballet. Somewhere Zee was conscious that his hands were scurrying around on the ground, that he was springing to his feet, that his arm was hurling a stone at the Chimera.

  The rock bounced harmlessly off its stomach and fell to the ground. With the goat head eyeing him haughtily, the Chimera looked down, opened its mouth, and issued a torrent of hot air, and the spot where the rock had fallen burst into flames.

  And then, with a mighty beat of its wings, the creature pushed itself higher in the sky and flew off into the horizon, leaving Zee standing alone in the field. His head exploded in a sound that might have been his own yelling.

  The rain came then, steady and forceful, slowly quenching the fire that burned a few paces away. Zee stood, water beating down on his face, his mind refusing to reunite with his body, until a burst of thunder in the distance shook him back to himself. Sucking in air, he looked frantically at the clouds above, then turned on his heel and ran back toward the school.

  Zee would have liked very much to have known exactly how to proceed, to have a vast store of knowledge as to the habits of Chimera and Chimera-like creatures, to have an arsenal of weapons custom-designed for such monsters and their associates—in short, to have any idea at all what in the world to do now. But, despite his rather vast recent experience with mythological monsters great and small, he did not. He needed Mr. Metos.