“What do you think you are doing?” Cassandra said angrily and tried to take the bottle from Jim who smiled at her with teeth and lips stained blue from the wine.
“I am old enough to drrrink”, Jim protested, his speech slurring so much he was barely understandable.
Cassandra threw Charlie a “What the hell?” look which Charlie acknowledged with a shrug.
“He is old enough”, Charlie said, burping.
“And I have grown, I know I have”, Jim said and indicated the general direction of his pants. “They are too tight. They pinch me in the whatnots, you know.”
He started giggling uncontrollably and Charlie joined him, a belly-deep, ugly laugh that sounded all wrong. He bared his rotten teeth at Cassandra in a way that made her want to slap him.
“I know he is old enough”, Cassandra hissed, trying to ignore that Jim was starting to hump a chair, making whooping noises and crying that he would show the ladiiiiies a good time. “He is just not big enough. He weighs 70 pounds, how is he supposed to digest that much alcohol?”
Cassandra went face to face with Charlie, the full force of the smell hitting her but she knew she couldn’t back down now.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked and felt Chaos reaching for her mind, asking her to join in on the fun, to just let herself go once in her life. No regrets. A voice in her head that she vaguely recognized as her own told her to fight it, that it wasn’t fun, but a vicious, self-destructive madness that was trying to suck her in.
Cassandra, trying to fight those two different emotions, felt her vision blur. In one last desperate attempt to stop the Chaos from taking over, she let herself fall to the side and hit her shin. The pain helped her think clearer for a moment.
Jim, who had stopped torturing the chair, was now swaying to the sound of music only he could hear, all the while laughing his head off.
“Stop that. Now”, Cassandra said but could barely hear her own voice over the blood raging in her ears.
Jim didn’t react at all. Charlie was sprawling on the chair provocatively.
“Damn it Charlie, what are you doing?” Cassandra murmured. “I’ll make coffee and you will help Jim get out of whatever place he’s locked in at the moment.”
Charlie slowly got up and approached her. Cassandra, bending over, tried to get away from him but hit the kitchen countertop instead.
“He is happy”, Charlie said, now very close to her, his voice slow and seductive.
Cassandra shook her head, trying to clear her vision but couldn’t.
“Why do you always have to be so uptight?” Charlie said and she felt Chaos reach for her again, this time for real. “Relax, have a little fun. Don’t worry so much.”
Cassandra turned away from him, reaching for something, anything that would stop her from doing what she was about to do. Suddenly Charlie was behind her, hugging her, pressing his hips against her. Cassandra gripped the corners of the countertop. She was in the throes of a whirlwind of emotions that told her to let go, forget everything, to be free. She felt sudden utter exhilaration, hilarity, heard laughter and most of all she felt a sudden longing, a fire burning so hot that it could only be extinguished… by Charlie.
“That’s better”, he said, his breath suddenly sweet and enticing. Cassandra breathed hard when she felt his mouth at her neck, felt him move against her. “Number three on your list? I didn’t think so.”
She had no idea what made her stop at that point. Maybe it was the thought of Ben and Alexander that got her sober up for a millisecond, maybe it was something in the way Charlie had grabbed her from behind that triggered her alarms, in any case she was suddenly able to detach herself from this madness.
She felt that Charlie needed this to stop as much as she did but somehow it seemed like he couldn’t. Once she was a little more herself, she did the only thing she could think of at such short notice – she tried to stomp on his foot and would have then turned around to kick him as hard as possible but he had already stepped to the side. And then he was all over her, fighting and hitting her with all he had.
For a moment, she saw the dark madness that possessed him in his eyes when he almost knocked her unconscious with a head butt. She reeled back and hit her back hard on the shelf behind her. Then he was on her again and Cassandra, instead of trying to escape him at such close quarters, moved in on him so that he wouldn’t be able to use his height and, it turned out, greater strength on her. They exchanged hits in fast, short movements, blocking and attacking, engaging and releasing all the while knocking over furniture and destroying plates and throwing down pots and pans. They were cheered on by Jim who had regained access to the wine bottle and was now drinking directly from it.
Charlie almost took her down but Cassandra again moved to the side at the very last moment and then snatched the bottle from Jim, smashing it against the side of Charlie’s head and would have followed up with a huge frying pan but just then Charlie started to sprout wiry branches from his hands that wrapped themselves around her throat. The deep, dark madness in him had now completely taken over and all that was left was pure, utter, uncontrollable Rage.
“Who are you?” Cassandra thought before she lost consciousness.
She was rescued by Hector who threw Charlie off of her. Cassandra, who thought it was still Charlie attacking her, struggled against Hector’s grip, raging and roaring and kicking at her brother. Summer screamed at her to stop but Cassandra couldn’t. Summer finally took a jug of water and threw its contents on Cassandra. As if wakened from a dream, Cassandra finally saw clearly again and although her blood was still seething and she desperately wanted to hit something, the Rage was gone and all that was left was emptiness. She tried to apologize to her brother who seemed to be ready to fight her if she went crazy again, tried to tell Summer, who was looking at her as if she were a dangerous animal, that she wasn’t going to do anything, that she was sorry, that she hadn’t meant to frighten her but the words wouldn’t come.
Instead she saw how Hector kept his huge bulk between her and Summer as if he was afraid she would hurt his girlfriend. He also kept an eye on Charlie who had retreated to the sofa with a look of shock written on his face, stretching out his hands as if he wanted to get rid of them but there were no more feelings of Chaos or Rage coming off of him. Instead he looked the picture of misery. No wonder her brother thought she was the dangerous one.
“Look what you did”, Summer shouted at them, sounding like an angry mother. “You made a complete mess of the kitchen and your managed to rip open Cassandra’s wounds again. You are irresponsible, crazy and utterly stupid!”
When Cassandra looked down, the left side of her T-shirt was soaked in blood and with the rush of adrenaline gone, her body told her in no uncertain terms that it didn’t appreciate what she had just done to it. Summer was beyond livid.
“Cassandra, if you keep wrecking your body like that, there won’t be enough Ambrosia or stitches to put you back together again”, she hissed, dragging Cassandra to a chair to look at the wounds. “And Charlie, if you keep poisoning everyone around you and dragging others into your misery you might not live to regret it. And wouldn’t that be for the best.”
Summer was about to go on when Jim, who had been watching them in wide-eyed wonder, threw up the wine all over himself. Hector groaned, grasped Jim by the collar and dragged him out of the kitchen.
“And look what you have done to Jim”, Summer cried. “Do you have you no feeling of responsibility? He is just a boy!”
She stomped her foot and pointed an accusing finger at Cassandra.
“You, upstairs, in your room, now”, Summer said. “Go change. It’s not blood on your shirt, it is wine. Lots of it. You are lucky nothing worse happened.”
Cassandra, all fight gone out of her, lifted her shirt and saw that it was true. It wasn’t blood on her shirt and her wounds hadn’t ripped open, even though it certainly felt like they had. Once again, she dragged herself upstairs to her room, he
aring Summer chide Charlie and wishing she knew what had just happened.
“And you, Charlie, you are going to clean up this mess. I don’t care how deep your weltschmerz is, you did this to Jim and you’ll make up for it. Do you understand?”
If Charlie replied to that, Cassandra didn’t hear it. She fell on her bed, her head still spinning, everything aching like she had just been cut open by the metal claws again. She curled herself into a ball and waited for the pain to subside.
When Cassandra woke up the next morning, she felt she was about to die of thirst. She went to the sink and drank greedily, then she splashed water in her face, dried it with a towel and sat down on her bed again. She knew she couldn’t simply go down for breakfast, not after what had happened the night before. Why had Charlie acted so strangely last night and why had he dragged Jim into it? Why hadn’t he just told her what was bothering him?
She remembered the vines growing out of Charlie’s hands and the power with which Chaos had been reaching for her and shuddered. She reached for her neck which felt stiff and felt a dull headache rise just behind her temples. She tried to move her body but it wouldn’t obey her commands, not as usual, and suddenly Cassandra realized that it would take much longer to get back to her former shape than she had initially hoped. Much, much longer.
She felt like she wanted to cry but instead she went down into the kitchen and made herself some breakfast amidst the chaos. She chewed in silence, still wondering where it had all gone so terribly wrong before she finally took out the broom and started cleaning up the mess.
About a week later, she was called to the Dean’s office. Heracles wrote her a short note saying that he wanted to talk to her about the incident in the tunnels, but Cassandra guessed that it would also have to do with her future at the university. She hadn’t been able to attend classes for more than two weeks now and she was afraid that he would set her a deadline for when she had to return.
The teachers lived in the right-hand wing of the palace and when Cassandra came there, note in hand, she was already expected. She was admitted by a grumpy looking servant who asked her to follow him quietly. The servant led her through living quarters that were at least as opulent as those of the demigods, the only difference being that there weren’t as many guards present. There were delicate engravings etched into the wooden doors on the first floor to which she had been led that showed Heracles’ famous twelve labors in elaborate detail.
The second one showed him slaying the nine-headed hydra, the fifth showed him cleaning the Augean stables. In the end, he had been given immortality and had earned a place among the gods on Mount Olympus which he had never taken. When they passed a door that was only half closed, Cassandra had an idea why he might have chosen to stay on earth instead: there was a pool table and ashtrays filled with cigar stubs and in the background she could see a tray filled with the finest alcohol. There was the smell of perfume and Cassandra thought she saw the naked leg of a girl passed out on a sofa but they were past the door too fast to be sure. Wine, game and women. As far as she knew, Hera wasn’t having any of that on Mount Olympus, at least not anymore.
They finally arrived at Heracles’ office and the servant, after making sure that she was really welcome, opened the door for Cassandra who was immediately drawn into a tight embrace by her teacher Hippolyta who looked at her with a mixture of concern and reproach.
“It’s been two weeks”, she said. “You should have let me know how you were doing.”
Then she held Cassandra at arm’s length for a more thorough inspection.
“You look tired, child”, she said. “Medusa must have hurt you more than we thought. You should have healed by now. Still, you need to get back in the saddle soon, otherwise you’ll fall too far behind.”
The dean, who hadn’t looked up when Cassandra had entered, nodded and frowned when he saw Cassandra’s pale face.
“Icarus, stop pacing”, he bellowed, but the skinny vice dean didn’t seem to hear him and kept going restlessly back and forth, doing some sort of complicated calculation only he seemed to be able to understand. When Heracles saw that Icarus wasn’t listening, he directed his attention to Cassandra who felt uncomfortable under his stern stare. Cassandra took a place across from the man that was her father, wondering whether there was anything they had in common. She waited until Hippolyta had taken the place next to her before she asked why she was here.
“I wanted to go over what happened in the tunnels once again”, Heracles said and there was more than a hint of hostility in his voice.
She felt Hippolyta tense up beside her and Cassandra quickly pressed her hand to show that she was ok with it.
“I am prepared to answer any questions you might have”, Cassandra replied calmly, wondering where all of this was going.
Ben had told her that Heracles had ruled all of this an accident so why was she here answering questions again? Maybe something new had come up that she wasn’t aware of yet but she knew that she had to tread very carefully from now on.
Heracles asked how she had prepared for the challenge, why she had decided on taking Pandora and then he wanted to know everything about their encounter with Medusa. He seemed to be especially interested in the relationship between Medusa and Pandora and kept insisting that they must have known each other from before. Cassandra told him again and again that this was impossible until he finally seemed satisfied that she was telling the truth.
Suddenly Icarus was right beside her.
“The door to the flood control has been tampered with”, he said and the sudden change of direction put Cassandra’s teeth on edge.
“I thought nothing was found that would indicate a break-in”, Cassandra said, remembering how Ben had said that they had found no trace of anyone tampering with the lock or flooding mechanism.
She looked at Hippolyta and then at Heracles who only shrugged.
“Someone very skilled opened the door and left little to no trace doing it”, Icarus continued, still breathing uncomfortably close to her ear. “To the naked eye it might have looked like someone had simply used a key but I saw traces of a sharp object being expertly used to open the door.”
Cassandra had a fleeting image of Pandora climbing up almost vertical walls to open windows behind which she thought something valuable might be hidden.
“It’s just a thought”, Icarus said and Cassandra felt the hair on her neck rise. “But considering the special skill set your sister has, we think that it is fair to say that it is not entirely improbable that she had something to do with it.”
“That’s ridiculous”, Cassandra said evenly, finally seeing where all of this was going. “My sister was down in the caves with me when the water came.”
“She could have opened the lock before that day”, Icarus said and Cassandra wondered how they knew about Pandora in the first place. Then she remembered the look their father had given them when they had left the orphanage.
“No one had been up there in over a month”, Icarus continued. “There was no need to flood the lair before the contest. We wanted it nice and dirty for you.”
“It doesn’t make sense”, Cassandra said. “Even if someone opened the door before the challenge, how would they have made sure that the door stayed open? Or that they wouldn’t be found out by accident?”
Icarus shrugged.
“That’s a chance they had to take”, he said.
“My sister has nothing to do with this”, Cassandra said with more confidence than she felt. “She would never do something like this.”
Icarus huffed.
“I am sure you believe that”, he said and finally stepped away from her. “Maybe she is not who you think she is.”
Cassandra didn’t know how to reply to that. The wild, uncontrollable creature her sister had become had nothing to do with the girl she had grown up with and the realization that she simply wasn’t sure anymore broke her heart.
“Yes, be that as it may”, Heracles said and
thereby effectively stopping any more questions Icarus might have in mind. “The question of what we are supposed to do with your sister remains wide open.”
Cassandra didn’t like the sound of that at all.
“She has until the end of the semester to learn to control herself”, he said and Cassandra suddenly felt afraid.
“Or else?” she said with more confidence than she actually felt.
Hippolyta reached for her hand again but Cassandra pushed her away, angry and lost at the same time.
“We’ll deal with it once we get there”, Heracles said. “I know it’s not her fault, Cassandra, believe me. But we don’t have a choice. It’s not safe to have her here, not until she learns to control her second nature, just like we all do.”
That sounded like he actually wanted Pandora to get better but all Cassandra wanted was to get out. She felt like she couldn’t breathe anymore and her eyes were burning with anger, shame and desperation.
“Can I go now?” Cassandra asked, biting her lips so that she wouldn’t start crying in front of them.
“Two more things”, Heracles said and Cassandra felt like screaming. “There will be no third challenge. And we’ll have a ceremony for River on the last day of the semester. We expect you all to be there.”
“Of course”, Cassandra said. “Is that all?”
Heracles nodded and Cassandra got up and left without looking back. Finally, she found it in her to go see Pandora. She needed to see her, talk to her but Madame Margot’s people wouldn’t even let her through the front door. Apparently Pandora had told them during a moment of clarity that she needed to do this by herself. Hector had been sent away, too. Apparently Hector’s presence made it impossible for her to do what was needed of her. She was too afraid of hurting him and that fear made her turn every time; so they had decided not to let anyone through.
Frustrated and feeling utterly helpless, Cassandra went back home to check with Hector that this was true. Then she went up to her bedroom, fell on the bed and starting crying. She was still sobbing when Hector came in and took her into his arms. They sat like this for a while, then Cassandra took her brother’s hand and pressed it tightly.
The Unclaimed (University of the Gods Trilogy Book 1) Page 26