by Simon Archer
“Damn,” Hailey whispered in my ear. “That’s a good looking helmet if I do say so myself.”
“Thanks,” I said as I tipped my head this way and that to look at our creation from all angles. “I had a good apprentice.”
Hailey leaned her head up to look at me. “I had a good teacher. Say, do you think that it’s wrong for a student to sleep with her teacher?”
“Hailey,” I moaned in protest. “We have, like, two minutes until dinner.”
“We’ll be late,” Hailey said as I wrapped my arms around her and slid them up the inside of her shirt, fingertips roaming up her belly. My mouth kissed the soft space between her jawbone and her ear.
I let myself fall into her. She arched against me, pushing her breast forward as my hands cupped around the outside of her bra. Her shirt was just getting in the way at this point, so she took the second away from me in order to rip it off over her head.
I quickly followed suit. Her back pressed into my sculpted chest, and she reached her hands so she could grab something of mine. As much as I loved this position because it gave me full access to her breasts, which I played with masterfully, I didn’t have access to any of her delicious parts. I wanted to spin her around and kiss down her torso, unhook her pants, and keep going down, but she kept herself pinned against me, preventing me from going anywhere.
I pushed the cups of my girlfriend’s bra down so that it raised up her exposed breasts, making them appear plumper and fuller than they actually were. I rolled the tip of her nipple with my thumb while I pinched the other. She squirmed in my grip, to which I snickered gleefully.
She noticed that if she rose up on her toes, her ass pressed right against my thick bulge. That gave her some bit of power over the situation, allowing her to excite me more. So I rubbed myself against her, in time with my teasing rolls along her nipple.
It was Hailey’s turn to moan, and a smile appeared on my lips as a result. Suddenly, my hands left her breasts, leaving them cold and sore. Before she could protest, however, I spun her around so that we were face to face, my hands rising up her back to unhook her bra while my mouth found her nipple.
Her head flew back, and she arched under the delightful feeling of my tongue on her, my teeth biting at her, and my lips sucking her. Her bra fell to the floor. She went to work on my pants, giving me a couple of quick, gentle squeezes before she yanked them down. I had to stop my assault of her breasts at her touch.
“You’re distracting me, Hailey,” I groaned. “I’m enjoying pleasuring you right now.”
A stubbornness seemed to take over her as her fingers flew around my button and pulled my zipper down. I reached down and grabbed her wrist in a firm grip. Her intense, glowing green eyes caught mine, and my fire brightened at the wanting I found blazing within her.
“I said, it was your turn,” I growled, and I saw her breath hitch at the desire in my voice.
Before she knew what was happening, I lifted her up on the workbench with my strong hands, as though she were nothing more than a rag doll. I worked so fast I would have thought my father blessed me with the gift of speed as I undressed her, boots, pants, and underwear until she sat completely naked in the soft glow of the forge fire and the torches.
“Well, this isn’t fair,” She teased, crossing her arms over her breasts. “How come I’m naked, and you’re not?”
“I think I can make up for it,” I snickered as I grabbed both of her ankles and spread them apart.
My tongue reached out and licked her folds, making her shiver in anticipation. She leaned her head against the rock wall and enjoyed the fiery sensations rocketing up and down her limbs with each lick. I focused on her clit, slapping it with my tongue while my fingers teased her opening.
“Gods Cameron!” She moaned, her voice echoing back to me in the smithy.
Warmth spread through me, from the fires of the forge and the fire within. Hailey reached up and grabbed one of her breasts, adding to the pleasure as she played with herself.
When I slammed my fingers into her, she bucked against me. I moved my hand to match her hips as she bordered on an explosion. It took a single flick from my tongue, and she came. She convulsed around my fingers and yanked at her nipple in order to prolong the orgasm that consumed her.
“Cameron!” She cried, and a thousand Hailey’s responded in tandem as she came, singing my praises.
Her body didn’t even have a moment to fall slack and enjoy the aftermath before there was a thunderous boom from somewhere above us that shook the entire cavern.
23
“I didn’t do that,” Hailey said as she leaped back from me, still naked and looking gorgeous.
I managed to piece a sentence together. “It sounded like an explosion.”
As if it were confirming my hypothesis, another cacophony of sounds blasted through the air, accompanied by another rattle of the ground beneath our feet. I spread my legs wide and crouched low to try to keep steady while everything shook around us. Flecks of rock fell from the ceiling, and red dust burst out from the walls.
Hailey scrambled off the workbench and gathered up her clothes. As I was bent over my pants, I heard a panicked voice from behind me.
“Cameron!” Katlynn called as she floated into the cavern. “You’ve got to get up there. The villa is under attack and-- Whoa!” The ghost held up a hand to shield her eyes as she walked in on Hailey’s bare behind sticking up in the air. “When Arges said you were down here, I didn’t think you were down here doing that.”
“Shut up, Katlynn,” I snapped as I yanked on my clothes. “You said the villa was under attack?”
“That’s what I said, yeah,” Katlynn said as she still held her hand over her eyes.
“We’re dressed,” I declared as I slammed my shirt over my head.
Katlynn let out a relieved sigh and removed her hand from her eyes. Like me, Hailey had redressed. My brain had to transition from sexy mode to crisis mode, and admittedly, it was not an easy shift to make.
“I liked you better with your shirt off,” Katlynn said as she eyed Hailey up and down.
“Katlynn!” I shouted, snapping my finger in my sister’s direction. “Focus!”
“Yes, right, sorry,” Katlynn replied as she turned her head back to me, but she still stole a final glance over at Hailey, eye level with her ass.
“Who’s attacking the villa?” I asked. I felt the adrenaline rush through my body in anticipation of the battle ahead. I equipped myself with whatever tools I could grab within reach. I tucked a hammer in one of my belt loops while I stuck a short bowie knife in my boot. I took a sickle off the wall as well. It was the closest thing to a scythe which I had gotten rather adept at wielding after making so many of them. The daughter of Apollo had the same idea and snatched a great sword from the wall along with a shield that fit snugly on her left forearm.
“I don’t know,” Katlynn admitted with a shrug. “It’s a bunch of monsters, but they don’t look right.”
My heart sank at Katlynn’s description. “Don’t look right how?”
As I asked the question, a third explosion rattled the air. While Katlynn didn’t need to, she still crouched down against the falling rocks while Hailey and I covered our faces respectively.
Instinctively, Hailey and I decided that we didn’t have any more time to waste. We dashed past Katlynn, one on each side of her, and exited out of the cave. But before I left completely, I had a thought. So I rushed back, Katlynn watching me the whole time, and snagged the helm of invisibility. I put it on my head and joined Hailey back near the front.
“Katlynn, are you coming?” I called back to my half-sister.
She didn’t respond right away but instead looked at me with a raised blue eyebrow. “Isn’t that thing supposed to make you invisible?”
“We haven’t had time to enchant it, okay?” I clapped back at her. “And is now really the time?”
“You’re right, you’re right,” Katlynn relented as she floated for
ward to join Hailey and me.
The three of us dashed up the stairs on the side of the cliff, me leading the way. Unfortunately, I had to stop when I reached the top because the sight before me was too surreal to believe.
The beautiful villa house was on fire. It was an ordinary fire, with no multicolored features, but just as deadly all the same. It flew out the windows from the second story and crackled loudly. Smoke whirled into the air, the clouds expanding like balloons. Specks of wood popped off the sides of the house and flew into the pool, sizzling as it landed. Another explosion resounded, blasting out through the glass sliding doors like a dragon breathing a stream of fire. The three of us all flinched at the sound and the violence of the scene.
After the blast, there was a sickening moan. I looked in the direction of the noise and saw Arges on his knees, shouting towards the wreckage that was his house. His hands were tied behind his back, and he was held by two massive minotaurs. But these minotaurs weren’t regular beasts. Instead, they were monochromatic, all different shades of brown, looking like a moving sculpture rather than the real beast.
They were made of clay.
“Kari,” I said, the word leaving my lips like a curse.
When Arges screamed, one of the minotaurs pulled out a whip and slapped the cyclops across his bare back with it. This time, a startled grunt pushed out through Arges’s gritted teeth, as though he were resisting the urge to show them his physical pain.
Anger burned as hot as the villa fire in my chest. I wanted to dash over to those minotaurs and slice them to pieces. But my half-sister’s words stopped me before I made a rash decision.
“Where is Phae?” Katlynn asked, her eyes darting around the property.
A different kind of panic seized my chest. I joined Katlynn in searching for the goddess when another explosion came from the burning house. We saw the flames lick up the sides of the house, eating up the veins like rivers of lava. In the midst of the explosion, I heard a fierce and painful scream over the top of it, like a failed attempt to harmonize.
“Oh gods,” Hailey said from over my shoulder. “She’s in the house.”
“Katlynn and Hailey, you two need to free Arges and get him to the chariot,” I commanded, an unfamiliar confidence and strength taking over my voice. “I’ll go in and get Phae.”
“But she’s a daughter of Helios,” Katlynn reasoned, “shouldn’t she be fine?”
“Her powers have to do with radiance,” I countered, my eyes fixed on the smoldering fire as it grew and grew. “Fire will still kill her.”
“She’s a goddess, Cam,” Hailey said back to me. “She’s immortal. She’ll survive.”
“That doesn’t mean that she can’t feel pain,” I snapped back. “Go get Arges. Use Katlynn’s fire form if you need to.”
I didn’t give the pair of them a chance to argue. My legs bolted across the gardens, and I raced directly for the house. Without thinking, I threw myself into the fire.
The smell hit me first. The scent of burning wood mixed with burnt plastic, and it stung so hard that my eyes watered. While I might not have felt the heat, I could still taste the smoke on my tongue and see the damage that spread across the whole house.
“Phae!” I shouted as loud as I could. But I wasn’t sure she could hear me over the roar of the crackling flames. I darted from room to room, but my path was soon blocked by the broken staircase. They were completely destroyed, and there was no way I could make it up them safely. I may have been immune to the flames that danced around my ankles, but I could still fall through that unstable wood.
Suddenly, there was a loud snap, and one of the ceiling beams tumbled towards the ground. I crouched low and rolled out of the way. When I twisted the helmet back into place so I could see, I made it a little big thinking that Hades most definitely had a bigger head than me, the beam that nearly squashed me ended up being a serendipitous accident. The wide, long piece of wood was the perfect ramp up to the second floor.
I took it one step at a time as I scaled the beam like a tightrope walker. As I tip-toed forward, there was a corner of the beam that crumpled beneath my foot, and I had to leap towards the top edge of the second floor. My momentum caused the beam to break beneath me, and it crashed with a loud bang into the tile floor.
I took a second to gather my breath, avoiding that close call. It was another scream from Phae that brought me back to my senses. I hollered out her name once more, to let her know that I was coming.
“Phae!” I shouted. “It’s Cameron. Where are you?”
“Bedroom!” came the reply. Although it was faint, I made out the words and got to my feet so I could head her way. I navigated through the blazing maze and twisted the sickle around in my wrist, prepared for a clay monster to jump out and get me. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew that the monsters would avoid the fire as much as possible since it was their one weakness. Hailey and I found out my first year that you had to attack them with a heated weapon in order to injure them properly.
During that train of thought, I stuck my right arm out, placing the sickle in the center of a nearby bonfire. The steel of the curved blade instantly heated up, pulsing a sinister yellow color. I yanked it back out and continued my quest to find Phae.
The goddess was indeed in the bedroom, but she was tied to the footboard of the bed. Her hands were behind her back, handcuffed to the iron rods. The rest of the room was a disaster, with the armor ablaze, while the carpet was charred and stiff.
Phae’s normally golden skin was reddish and covered in soot. Her bare legs peeled in places where the fire had gotten her. Her eyes were watery and puffy because of the smoke. Her hair tangled around her head like a ruined bird’s nest.
Without wasting a second, I approached her and set my weapons down. I put my hands on both cheeks and adjusted her limp neck so she could look up at me.
“Phae, Phae, look at me,” I slapped her face slightly so that she would stay awake. “Phae, it’s Cam. You gotta get up, okay? I’m going to get you out of here.”
“It hurts,” she moaned. “It hurts so bad.”
“I know, I know,” I said, even though I never knew what a burn felt like. From the looks of it, though, it appeared as though her skin had been rubbed raw. “We’re going to get you out of here, okay?”
I wrapped my hands around the handcuffs and concentrated on the simple metal. The environment made it hard to concentrate, but the urgency of the situation helped me focus on the sensations the metal sent me. I asked it to open, and the handcuffs answered with two simultaneous clicks.
Phae was free, and I immediately wrapped her arm around my neck so I could help her get to her feet. I managed to carry the weight of the goddess, even though she was several inches taller than me, and picked up my sickle again. As we slowly moved forward, a wall came down nearby and blocked the door to the bedroom. I shield Phae with my body so she wouldn’t sustain any additional burns. Shards of wood attacked my back, and I grunted as they pelted me like hail.
There was no way that I could carry the goddess over the new pile of debris. So I whipped about the room in order to think of another way out. There was a huge hole in the wall where a pair of French doors used to reside, which led out to a balcony that overlooked the pool.
“I’m sorry, Phae, but we’re going to have to jump,” I said as the idea came to my mind.
“What?” she wheezed. The goddess broke into a fit of coughs, and that made my mind up for me. I didn’t hesitate to drag Phae forward and haul her out on the balcony, despite the broken glass that scraped along the floor.
The stone balcony still held true, though I knew that it would come down with the rest of the house which could be any minute by the looks of it. I rested Phae’s limp body against the railing and bent down to grab her feet.
“I’m so, so sorry, Phae,” I said more to myself than to her. Then I flipped the goddess over the side of the balcony and let her fall two stories into the pool below.
&n
bsp; As I watched her splash safely into the water, another explosion came. But this time, it was directly behind me. A rush of heat, air, and fire blasted right at me. I wasn’t ready for the force of this explosion and completely lost my balance. Then, I found myself tumbling down right after the goddess.
For a solid four seconds, I was in freefall. One of my worst nightmares came true as the ground, even if it was a pool filled with water, rushed up at me with the speed of a bullet. A scream escaped my lips, but it was soon swallowed by the chlorine infused water and a splash that echoed in my ears.
A rush of cold surrounded me, and goosebumps sprouted across my skin. My body dove into the water, the sound of the burning fire rushed away, as though someone had stuffed cotton in my ears. The impact rattled my bones and sent the helm prototype flying off my head. It took me a minute to regain control over my limbs and eye my surroundings amidst the bubbles.
My eyes stung against the water as I opened them, but I needed to see where Phae was. My lungs craved air, having been so unceremoniously dunked into the water. That took precedence over finding my friend, so I bolted up to the surface. My face broke through the water, and I heaved, gulping in a lungful of hot air. I swam in place but turned my head this way and that, trying to see if Phae had come up for air yet. Unfortunately, the goddess was nowhere in sight.
I inhaled deeply and dove back down into the pool. Under the water, the blaze from the fire above looked like a light show at a nightclub. It made it hard to focus beneath the surface. However, I managed to clear my vision just enough to see Phae’s body at the bottom of the pool.
She wasn’t moving.
I hauled myself forward, swimming as fast as I could to her limp form. When I reached her, I could tell immediately that she was unconscious. Wishing I had been a lifeguard during high school, I did what I could to swim both the goddess and myself back up to the surface.
The muscles in my legs burned with the effort as I kicked. My lungs strained against my ribs, begging for an ounce of air to keep going. I was completely out of my element, with my wet clothes dragging me down along with the heavy weapons at my hip and in my shoes. Still, I pushed on, desperate to get the goddess, immortal or no, to safety.