I should worry about the short amount of time allotted to us, but the only thing that matters to me right now is the loved one Heracles mentioned. I think of my mother first, but what would she be doing here? Except if she’s—no. Even as cold as they are, the gods wouldn’t go so far as to kill…
Voices emanate from a low structure beneath Minos’s throne. It looks like a cage with its metal bars, but the voices are human. It is a prison.
Hades tugs on Cerberus’s chain to keep it away from us as we all rush to the gate. We try to look inside but it’s no use—the view is obstructed by magic.
“Marcus? Are you there, son?” a male voice whispers.
Marcus falls to his knees and cries for the chance to hear his father who was taken away from him so brutally.
I try to focus so I can hear who’s waiting for me. “Hope? Where are you, baby? What am I doing here?”
My mother’s anguish slams into me like a slap in the face. “Mom! I’m here!” I scream over the voices of the other challengers.
Gabriel apologizes to his mother while Amy weeps. The sight of her crying is as destabilizing as my mother’s presence in the underworld. A kind, feminine voice whispers to her.
“My darling daughter. I’ve missed you so much.”
While I wait for my mother to talk again, I bend over Amy. “Is that your mother?”
“I don’t know.” She shakes her head forlornly and wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I have no memories of her.”
I strain to hear my mother again, but a trumpet sounds the beginning of the competition. Hades throws ropes of black smoke from his fingers that lasso my chest, suffocating me until I faint.
When I come to, I’m locked in darkness. I feel for the walls of the cage I’m trapped in with my hands, but all I encounter is an oppressing obscurity. There is no floor beneath my feet. I don’t know what this is, but it feels a lot like my nightmares of death.
The wait is interminable—seconds turn into minutes, up to probably an hour—in this strange non-place. At last the darkness disperses and I find myself in a gray street, under a gray sky, sprinkled in glum mist—I’m in the Lower World.
My mother yelps behind my back. She sounds so scared. I start to turn around but stop myself before the harm is done. If I want to free her, I need to resist the urge to embrace her. She’s so close, and yet unreachable. This is the worst torture imaginable.
I cast my eyes down to my feet, looking for the rope. It is dark as the smoke that entrapped me earlier. I pick it up, circle the rope three times around my waist, and tie a strong knot over my belly button.
“Hope! Look at me!” my mother begs. “I’m scared.”
I clench my teeth as I search for the outskirts of the shantytown. She sounds so much like she did the last time I saw her, hunched over her hateful brochures, lost and scared, that I gasp for breath. But that’s why I want to win this competition—so she never has to be afraid anymore.
I start running, despite her pleas for me to stop and look at her. The shacks that serve as housing are crammed together into narrow alleys, all of them identical. I keep my eyes affixed to Minos’s tribunal, a black mass on the horizon. The ground is a sloshy mess of dirt turned into mud by the constant haze.
I skate on the slippery ground as I veer from one alley into the next, my mother pulling on the rope, fighting me with each step.
“Hope! What is going on? Where are you dragging me?” My mother’s questions never cease. “Let’s go home, baby. Just look at me and we can return.”
If I look at her, she’ll never go home, but I can’t tell her without adding to her panic. My neck muscles scream in agony as I force my eyes to look ahead. My hands fly to the rope to keep my mother steady on the other end. I can feel her weakening, ready to give up.
“We’re almost there. Just a couple more minutes,” I lie to pacify her.
The ground shakes with the sound of a gallop from somewhere nearby. Cerberus runs at us, his massive paws sending mud flying like a menacing cloud.
The snakes hiss on his back, sticking their forked tongues out, ready to strike. I dodge into the first open door to my left, dragging my mother in my wake. A shriveled gray thing, vaguely human-looking, startles as I barge in. It scrambles from its cot on the floor and huddles in a corner, its hands draped over its face like a shield.
I mutter apologies for the disturbance I caused and exit through the opposite side door.
“What was that?” my mother shrieks.
A shade of the Lower World. But I can’t explain this without increasing her frenzy.
We’ve lost Cerberus but we’re running out of time. Bracing myself against the foul weather and my mother’s wails, I sprint through the maze of the shantytown until we reach Minos’s tribunal. My heart swells with hope—just a couple more minutes and I’ll see her face. I’ll hold her in my arms and everything will be set right.
The challengers who went before me stand erect next to the Olympian gods’ thrones. I wonder why they are alone and not rejoicing with their parents, but the thought fades away when I near the bridge, last obstacle to safety.
“Hope… Please stop. I can’t. I’m exhausted.”
“Hold on, Mom.”
My palms are slippery against the rope, but my grip never falters as we cross the bridge. My mom goes quiet behind me, as if sensing the conclusion to our race is close. I beam at the gods, thankful for this chance to see my mother before the end of the competition. I thought they were cruel, but this is the most generous gift they bestowed upon me.
A trumpet sounds to mark my victory. I don’t bother unknotting the rope as I wheel around and dart into my mother’s embrace, my eyes closed to fight off grateful tears. She can’t see me cry, or it will ruin our reunion.
As I hug her, I’m struck with a feeling of foreboding. Something’s wrong. There’s no warmth in her embrace, no scent of jasmine and chamomile, no love. Instead, she’s shrinking beneath me, as if she couldn’t wait to get away from me.
I open one eye and shove the gray shade away from me. It flinches as if expecting a blow, but I’m transfixed by pure horror. I can’t move. I can’t scream. I can’t even cry.
My heart has been crushed, my hopes quashed to dust—I was tricked.
I stomp toward the gods, my fist brandished in the air, my anger building as I yearn to tear them apart for the pain they just caused me.
“Why look for a hero when you don’t uphold their values!” I scream. “You have no heart… No sense of honor. You can’t be trusted! I’m done with you and your stupid competition!”
They look bored with my outburst. I suspect I’m not the first challenger to react violently today. On the other bank of the Styx, Hades unfurls from his throne.
“That’s enough!” he roars.
The underworld’s ruler lashes at me with darkness, the inky ropes shackling my ankles and wrists so I can’t move, muzzling my mouth so I can’t speak.
“You are all weak. You dishonor the title you fight for. Do you really believe we care for your heartache? Your inconsequential feelings? You should be grateful for the chance to dwell among us. To worship us.”
The quest hasn’t stopped while I was arguing. Another challenger rushes away from the shantytown, Cerberus at his heels.
Hades speaks some inaudible command to the darkness and it drags me to the row of contenders, who I now realize are petrified in place. The ropes slither deep inside my muscles, like a paralytic drug that keeps me captive in my own body.
Gabriel is immobile as a statue next to Heath and Jared. But his clear eyes, the only part of us untouched by Hades’s powers, seek me. Tears bristle in them as he shares my heartache.
The gods stare ahead unenthusiastically, my outburst already forgotten. What are we to them but pawns to move around their chessboard? Their apparent kindness, their generosity, it is all an act to lure us into complacency. Kieron was right—they only care about themselves.
Aphrodite a
dmires herself in a bedazzled pocket mirror. Hephaestus bends over her, his eyes shining with love for the woman who doesn’t deserve his affection.
“You are magnificent, wife.”
She clucks her tongue in aggravation. “How can I be? Zeus is selfish, speeding time in Mount Olympus so the challengers don’t worry about their beloved parents… Look at this wrinkle! That makes three of them since the beginning of the competition!”
Hephaestus is about to argue some more, but the new challenger is near. I stop listening to Aphrodite’s selfish concerns as a girl, my friend, races past the tribunal toward the bridge.
I would never have recognized Amy from her hunched shoulders and unsteady footing. What have they done to her usual swagger? Violent tears stream down her face, as if now that she’s opened the dam she doesn’t know how to close it.
The shade behind her is grotesque. I try to warn her, but my vocal chords are paralyzed. I seethe with fury, throwing my powers against the darkness, hoping to heal myself from their hold. My first attempts are clumsy and Hades’s power is incredibly strong, yet I sense weakness after a while. I wind my light around the ropes of darkness, crushing them so they weaken. At last I manage to free one hand before moving onto my throat to free my speech.
The awful shade screams as it reaches the bridge, making a show of falling. It yells to Amy. “I’m slipping. I’m going to drown.”
Amy’s resolution breaks from the fear of losing the mother she’s never met. I focus all my powers on my vocal chords but I’m not fast enough. Amy swings her ravaged face toward the shade.
“No!” I yell—I’m too late.
Chapter 34
Hades throws his hands toward Amy. She’s so broken she doesn’t fight the ropes as they wrap themselves around her petite frame and conjure her away.
I watch the empty bridge where she stood moments ago, my fury rising like a cresting wave. I can’t let myself grieve just yet—my wrath is more powerful than sadness. The red-hot indignation, fusing with my luminescent powers, becomes a flame that scorches Hades’s binds of darkness to cinders.
I run across the bridge toward Hades, ready to battle the God of Death himself to avenge Amy. I hope he fights back. I’d welcome physical pain over the storm raging in my chest, the agony that singes my heart. Someone must pay for the deception that cost me my friend.
The gods stare dumbfounded at me. I’d have been surprised I overcame their powers, too, if I were not so damn furious. Through my tunnel vision, I watch Hades stir from his daze, the dark pits of his eyes hardening, his lips tightening into a vicious smirk.
He strikes me with his powers before I make it to the other side of the Styx. A black cloud of smoke hurtles toward me, infiltrating my nostrils and mouth until I’m choking on the miasma. I fall to the ground, writhing as my air pipes shut off and black spots dance behind my closed eyelids.
My subconscious registers the sound of footsteps, then a dark shape hovers over me. I recognize Hades’s stench of sulfur and death.
“A night in Tartarus should teach you to obey. I expect you to be much more docile come morning.”
I won’t make it until morning if he keeps strangling me.
The pressure on my lungs withdraws. I inhale as much air as I can to make up for the previous deprivation.
I scramble to my knees, expecting to face the tribunal, but find myself inside my living room, back home. My mother sits on the couch where I left her days ago, gazing into nothingness. Tears sting my eyes as I gorge on her beautiful face—the light grooves, like open parentheses, on each side of her mouth from a life of smiling, the high cheekbones, and the crow’s feet framing her eyes.
But the amber of her eyes doesn’t sparkle like it usually does. They look dull, lifeless like those of the Pythia. I rush to her side, kneeling before her as I enfold her cold hands between mine.
“Mom, look at me. I’ve missed you so much!”
She tilts her face to look at me. “Who are you?”
A silent scream locks in my throat. Over the past couple of years, she’s forgotten my age, our apartment, many other details of her life—our life—but never me. She never could forget me.
The living room walls waver and dissolve like an oasis in the desert before turning a cheerless white. The couch where my mother was sitting morphs into a single bed. I watch her tucked under the blankets, her face drained of color, her eyes sunk into their orbits. A heart monitor beeps depressingly while another machine breathes for her.
I look away from her, glaring at the hateful rainbow sticker adorning the white wall in a pitiful attempt to cheer up the room. She did it. She checked herself into one of those horrid homes with sunshine names.
I punch the rainbow with all my might, wildly relishing the pain that zings from my fist all the way to my shoulder. The walls expand and explode, the ceiling writhes, and the room spins until I’m left standing under a gray sky, my feet planted in decaying grass. My mother has disappeared.
I look down at a white tombstone.
Teresa Diaz,
Beloved Mother,
Forgetful…Never Forgotten.
I release the scream that’s been building up inside of me as I sink down on my knees, yanking at the grass desperately. The cemetery vanishes and I’m kneeling next to my mother again in our living room.
“Who are you?”
I clutch my mother’s gaunt fingers between mine, as if I could stop the infernal merry-go-round by holding onto her. Next is the cemetery. I can feel it coming as the rainbow wobbles on the wall, but I’ll die if I have to stare at the tombstone and its depressing epitaph one more time.
How many times have I circled in my misery? Ten? Twenty? Living room, deathbed, cemetery. My mother’s dead eyes as she looks at me. The machines that keep her alive. And then her death, final and utterly terrifying. My own soul dying along with hers and then forced to suffer through it all over again.
Next time, I hope they add a tombstone for me as well—I need the torture to end.
The rainbow explodes and falls like multicolored rain on my head. I gawk at the myriad of colors, focusing on their beauty to steel myself against the dreadful gray that will follow. But the cemetery never comes.
Instead, I’m standing under a merciless sun that hurts my eyes and scalds my skin. Tortured screams linger in the air. My knees chafe against the scorched earth.
Kieron stands before me, a tempting shadow in the desert. His glorious mouth twists with worry as he drops his sketchpad on the ground and rushes to my side, picking up my shivering body and pressing me against the hard planes of his chest.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to find you. My father used his darkness to conceal you.”
I peek over the cocoon of his arms, taking in our surroundings. We are in Tartarus. My mother—that was Hades’s punishment for my outburst.
Knowing it was an illusion doesn’t dispel the fear. Hades didn’t fabricate everything I just saw. He simply gave life to my fears, gave me a glimpse of the future if I can’t save my mother.
Kieron cradles me as he starts walking away from Tartarus, toward the Elysian Fields. His grasp is too tight around me, hurting me as he tries to keep me together so I don’t fall apart. After what happened in my room, I never expected to feel his arms around me again.
“Why did you come for me? After what you said…”
“I didn’t say anything, Hope. You vilified me and I didn’t contradict you. I thought hating me would help you focus. Obviously I was wrong.”
“So then why did you push me away?”
“Exactly for the reasons I gave you. The world needs you more than I do. What I want, my feelings for you, they are inconsequential in the grand scale of things.”
I should ask him to put me down, but I snuggle closer to him instead until we reach the shade of a tree and he lays me down softly on the grass. He sits down as well and helps me sit up, my head resting against his chest. His arms circle my trembling shoulders as he sha
res his strength with me until my heart remembers how to beat on its own.
His lips press the crown of my head. “I’m sorry I was stupid. I never thought I could be so afraid when I didn’t know where you were. I should have been there to stop my father. I still believe we need to prevent the gods’ plan, but you matter more. Besides, we’re stronger together.”
I don’t dare to look at him, I’m too afraid of getting my hopes crushed again, but I need to ask, “So you do have feelings for me?”
“I do, as inconceivable as it may seem. You reminded me what it was to feel.”
I sink deeper into his embrace. This wonderful god just saved me from a nightmare and led me into a dream. I can’t believe I begged for death mere minutes ago.
“I’m sorry about your friend. I know you two were close.”
The nightmare returns as I remember Amy’s haunted eyes when she gave up on the bridge. Where is she now? Still waiting in Erebus, or sent back to Earth to a life of solitude, deprived of her memories?
My eyes well up again but I strain to keep them bottled up. Her loss has also released my fury against the gods. Amy would want me to use it so I can win, so I can find a way to avenge her.
I crane my neck to look into Kieron’s eyes. “Your father needs to pay for what he’s done.”
He grins. “My thought exactly. It is high time the gods start answering for their sins.”
“How can we do it?”
“We’ll figure it out. But you need to be the next Olympian heroine first. You won’t be swayed by greed or a thirst for power. You alone are strong enough to stand up to them.”
“I don’t feel strong at all.” In only one night, Hades almost broke me. So did Kieron when he left me behind yesterday. “I’m weak. And I rely far too much on you.”
“You got where you are in the competition all on your own. That took inner strength. And I swear I’m not going anywhere. Not anymore.” He caresses my cheek with the tip of his fingers.
Olympian Challenger Page 24