by Lizzy Ford
“Niko?” Theodocia rasped. “Where’s Tommy?”
“Shut up, Dosy.”
I hurried past the door leading to the main break room and then slid through the kitchens. Three of the cooks were present. One glanced towards me and paused in his task of unloading the industrial dishwasher.
I pointed at the dishes with a hard glare. He took the hint and returned to his job without alerting the others.
Reaching the staff entrance, I exited into the humid day.
Sticking to the back lots of the compound, I kept to my planned route, weapon drawn and eyes roving my surroundings. No sooner had I reached the corner of the parking lot than the alarms blared. I quickened my pace and ducked behind the protection of one of the maintenance sheds.
“Niko.” Dosy squirmed.
“Tommy begged me to save you, but I can still drop you here and tell him you were already dead,” I snapped. “Be still and quiet.” I lowered her to the ground then went to the front of the maintenance shed and snapped the lock open with a sturdy kick. The chances of anyone looking for me here first were slim, now that those I’d bribed were scrambling the emergency response teams in every direction but mine. Still, I wasn’t about to lower my guard, sit down and discuss the plan with my ex over afternoon tea. We had to keep moving, no matter what.
I started one of the golf carts used by the elite to navigate the sprawling compound and exited the shed.
I drove around the side – and hit my brakes fast.
Theodocia wasn’t alone.
“What in Hades are you doing?” I snapped and launched out of the cart.
The stunning blonde servant with an attitude who had worked for Alessandra backed away quickly and raised her hands. “I stopped the bleeding,” she said.
I glanced at Theodocia. A leaf was on her cheek. “With that?” I demanded.
“I’m a nymph, remember? I can do things with nature. A grunt like you wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re right.” Ignoring her, I went to Dosy’s side and lifted.
“Take me with you, Niko,” the teen girl said.
“Um, no.”
“I can help you.”
“By … nymphing?” I snapped and lowered Dosy into the back of the cart. “Covering me with leaves?”
“Or by telling you the fastest way to reach the city beneath, so we aren’t murdered by your own men,” she said.
I straightened, eyeing her. She appeared as I’d last seen her, in her servant’s robes, though they were smeared with dirt, and her hair was lumpy. Dark circles lined her eyes, and she carried a backpack. “You’ve been here the whole time?” I asked.
“I had to stay.” She averted her eyes.
The last thing I needed was someone claiming to be a mythical creature that was clearly hiding a lot. Mentally calculating response times and how long it would take for someone to spot me, I climbed into the driver’s seat. “Good luck!” I placed the cart in gear and started to drive off.
“Niko! I can help you!” she cried. “Dosy’s unconscious, and she will be until I wake her. I used magic to knock her out!”
What I would give for a world without magic. Hissing a sigh, I slowed then stopped the cart. Twisting, I glanced at Dosy, who was out, then up at Leandra. She didn’t appear to be bluffing, and if I made it off the compound, and Dosy didn’t awaken …
A shout came from the direction of the House.
I waved at Leandra reluctantly, suspecting any friend of Alessandra’s possessing magical abilities was going to be more trouble than she was worth. Leandra climbed in beside me.
“There are rules to this,” I said and shifted into gear again. “If you lie to me, I’ll kill you. Don’t talk to strangers, and don’t make a move I haven’t approved. If I suspect you of anything, you’re dead. Do you understand?”
She nodded. “Don’t take the southern exit,” she said.
“Why not?” It was my planned route of escape.
“I asked the trees to help hide us. If we go the southeastern –”
“Trees?” I echoed. “You want me to go a different route because … trees?”
“If I’m wrong, and I can’t get us to the city before we’re caught, you can murder me!”
“When we’re free, you’re going to tell me what a nymph is,” I directed her.
Gripping the steering wheel tightly, I waited until the last minute to change our course. I skipped the eastern entrance and headed towards a stretch of trees near the southeastern staff entrance.
“Tell me why you didn’t escape,” I said, not trusting her, despite her connection to Alessandra.
“Someone told me to stay.”
“Who?”
Leandra was hugging her backpack. She didn’t answer.
“A tree?” I asked with a snort.
“A ghost.”
I rolled my eyes. Allowing her to accompany me was probably a mistake. If this escape route backfired, she was dead where she sat.
We reached the forest.
“You need to send another email to the trees or something?” I joked darkly.
“They’re moving, aren’t they?”
“What? They’re not …” I stopped, eyes on the flora that was shifting around us. Rather than step out of the ground and walk to a new spot, the trees glided from one spot to another, through the earth, as if they were floating through water.
“Over there.” Leandra pointed to a spot where the trees were creating room.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen magic used, but I would never be comfortable with something I didn’t understand and could never control. Uneasy with the display, I slowed instinctively and drew my weapon. Halting a short distance from where she indicated, I climbed out of the golf cart and stared at the trees that appeared to be alive.
“What’re you going to do? Shoot one?” Leandra snapped, seeing my gun clenched in my hand. “Hurry up! The entrance is here.”
“What entrance?” I faced her.
“Do you really think we didn’t install a secondary entrance to the city on the compound?” she retorted. “How else do you think I was able to slip by your guards all the time?” She dropped to her knees and placed her palms on the ground. Blue sparks lit up the space around her palms, and the grass and soil peeled away from the spot, revealing a metal door. “Hurry!”
The alarms all over the compound wailed. The trees had formed a wall between us and anyone who might pursue. Beginning to suspect I’d never be free of weird, magical beings, I snatched Theodocia’s unconscious form from the golf cart and strode to Leandra. She climbed down a ladder whose top rungs were all I could distinguish in the dark hole. With misgivings heavy in my gut, I put my gun away and followed her.
Reaching the abandoned sewer tunnel beneath, I stepped back while she darted up to seal the entrance once more. She leapt down and started down the tunnel, in the direction of the city outside the compound. I jogged after her.
“The trees aren’t coming?” I called after her.
“I don’t know how Lyssa tolerated you,” Leandra said with a frustrated sigh.
“Where are we going?”
“To our headquarters.”
“I thought we destroyed the underground city,” I said as we walked.
“You destroyed a couple of sections. Mama’s army just moved to the part you missed.”
I hadn’t missed them on purpose. I had an idea of where Dosy was located for much of the time, thanks to Tommy and his unnatural connection to a god. More than once I’d walked in on him mid-conversation with Thanatos. I purposely didn’t target the strongholds or the way stations where Dosy spent much of her time. But I also didn’t know the full layout of the mysterious underworld, so it was beyond me to understand how large Mama’s operating area was.
Leandra led me through the dark tunnels with minimal light. Her step was sure and quick. I followed closely, not about to be left or lost in the dark. Whether she knew this path because she was constantly travel
ing it, or her unusual nymph – whatever that was – ability helped her see in the dark, she didn’t hesitate once to enter new tunnels I didn’t sense until we turned down them. I was blindly following her and becoming tenser the more lost I became in the underground maze.
Dosy didn’t stir, and Leandra didn’t stop. We walked for close to an hour, until even my sense of direction was clueless as to how far we’d gone from the compound or which direction we were headed or where we might be relative to the city above. No sounds of pursuit reached me. It was our destination, rather than who might pursue us, that left me leery.
As I walked, I listened to the chatter of those soldiers coordinating search parties. None of them mentioned the walking trees or the entrance to the underground. Their focus was on the eastern and southern exits, with the response teams scrambling between the two. With some reluctance, I admitted Leandra’s instincts had been right. If I had fled through that gate, I’d be caught by now, and Theodocia and I would both be in cells in the dungeon under the House.
“All hands return to base.”
The command caused silence to replace the flurry of chaotic messages. I listened hard, as confused by the directive as everyone else on this channel.
“Emergency response as well?” someone finally asked the question on my mind.
“What part of ALL HANDS don’t you understand, soldier?” came the quick reply. “ERTs deploy immediately to Site Persus and assume defensive positions.”
I stopped walking.
“Countdown to Persus attack: T minus one hour, forty five minutes.”
I checked my watch. The heavily military jargon sent a streak of uneasiness through me. What was Cleon thinking?
The military maintained several clandestine sites outside the wall, one in each cardinal direction, to include a missile-launching site called Persus. Our Persus rockets were designated as surface-to-surface projectiles and had been placed within range of the Silent Queen’s camp as soon as we discovered where it was. It was a precaution only, to prevent her from making a move on Washington DC before Cleon had accomplished the first phase of his plan, whatever that was. He told me enough to do my job without revealing his true agenda. I suspected he understood killing the only surviving member of the Bloodline wasn’t smart.
The voice over the earpiece was ordering the emergency response teams to take up defensive positions around the site with an attack planned in less than two hours.
“Say again,” said the commander of the EST.
“Obey your order, soldier.” This voice was Cleon’s. “Operation Bloodline is in effect.”
And this was the codename given to the super secret mission to take out the Silent Queen.
“What’re you doing?” Leandra called. “You’ll get lost down here, if you don’t keep up!”
My boss is going to launch a shit load of missiles at your boss, I answered silently. What was Cleon thinking? He had told me multiple times this was a last resort operation. He wanted us to keep hazing the Silent Queen, to keep her boxed in and busy fending off our recon teams, so she didn’t have a chance to coordinate a large attack. If he wanted her dead, he would have destroyed her a few weeks ago. What had changed?
It had nothing to do with my escape. Something else had happened, if he were ignoring my betrayal and setting his targets on the Silent Queen. Nothing I’d heard today, before I maneuvered Adonis into freeing Theodocia, gave me any insight into what Cleon was doing or why he had suddenly changed his mind about the Silent Queen.
I began to smile.
What happened to the Silent Queen was irrelevant to my interests – with the exception that I knew one person who would trade me a ticket out of the city to hear this secret.
I started forward, listening intently to the exchanges as the EST dropped their current mission to find me and prepared to move out to the western site a few kilometers outside DC.
“I hope you don’t plan on sleeping too long, Dosy, or I can’t use this information for my benefit,” I whispered.
Chapter Seventeen: Alessandra
“Is that you?” Cleon asked.
I glanced up from my seat on top of the boulder in the middle of the forested area where I had met with Pythia twice. The glow of light, emanating from the compound’s floodlights, brightened the shadows of dusk.
“Is what me?” I replied.
“I’m experiencing mild vertigo.”
I tilted my head. “I don’t feel it,” I said. “Is it part of the illness you won’t admit exists?”
“No.” He stood again, and my attention turned from my thoughts to the relative location of my body. If he made a run for it, I’d hear it in his mind first and could then outrun him. Even reading his thoughts, I didn’t feel comfortable trusting him. He was able to keep his illness from me, and I didn’t know how. If there were a way for someone in our circumstances to deceive or trick me, he’d be the one to figure it out.
I paced and roamed a circle around the boulder, alert for any flickers of light indicating Pythia was here. As always, Cerberus was reflected in the black and white mirror opposite me, watching me curiously. I didn’t know how to assure him I wasn’t ever going to purposely trespass.
Although, one of my visions was of future-me in Hades, with Adonis.
“I am no closer to figuring out our visions,” Cleon said, sounding puzzled.
My cheeks grew warm. Whenever I thought of Adonis, I felt his lips pressed to mine again. I shook my head, embarrassed to know Cleon felt it, too. “They could be pieces of four different paths,” I said, equally frustrated. “Or … one path.”
“A warning.”
“Yeah. One that’s too disjointed to fully understand.”
“But we can understand it,” he insisted.
I glanced over at him.
“I have never met a riddle I couldn’t solve,” Cleon said. “I think the problem isn’t that we don’t know the answer, it’s that our minds have the potential to uncover it, if we both stop resisting the full integration.”
My heart began to beat harder. “By full integration, you mean we lose our separate identities and become some kind of joined Franken-brain.”
“I wouldn’t put it so inelegantly, but yes.” He was frowning. We shared identical distaste for the idea, for two completely separate reasons. I thought he was a psychopath and wanted nothing to do with his mind, and he viewed me as ignorant, backwards and uneducated. “But we each maintain a unique piece of the puzzle. We think differently, and our differences complement each other.”
“You mean you couldn’t survive a day without your butler, and I’m not going to win a chess championship,” I said icily.
“Yes.”
“What if we don’t have to merge our brains? What if we just … cooperate more?” I suggested.
“It’s preferred for certain.”
I rolled my eyes.
“This is awkward.” At Pythia’s husky voice, we both spun to face her. She was studying Cleon intently, if not a suspiciously. “This must be the parasite.”
Cleon’s look cooled.
“Yeah,” I said with a half smile. “We have a problem.”
“Aside from the fact your minds are inseparable?”
Until that moment, I held out some hope this was reversible or at least, I wasn’t going to be joined with Cleon forever. From the flicker of surprise in his thoughts, he hadn’t thought this as permanent as it was.
“The technology wasn’t intended for a long term –” he began.
“Even if the technology wasn’t intended for this, you won’t have a choice soon,” Pythia said. “Did I not warn you against leaving your body unprotected?” She addressed this to me.
“Yes, but that’s why I brought him with me. We have a truce. He knows we needed to talk to you.”
“He wasn’t the only threat to which I was referring.”
Cleon understood before I did, and his knowledge spread to me a fraction of a second later.
“Perhaps you can convince her. She’s on the ledge. She just needs that final push,” the Supreme Magistrate said.
I studied Pythia, wanting her to refute his confident claim of who my enemy was. When she did not speak, I did. “Is this true?” I asked. “Did … she start the Holy Wars? Did she nearly destroy humanity? Did Zeus save what he could of my kind?”
“The truth of matters like this is always complicated,” Pythia said softly. “I made a mistake when I opened the gateway to allow the gods onto Earth. I replaced the Old Ways, in which humanity ruled itself, with a group of selfish dictators of extraordinary supernatural power. It was one thing for them to exist and create from their place in the universe and another for them to live among us. That’s one bridge that should not have been crossed.”
“Then you accept responsibility for destroying humanity,” Cleon said.
Pythia and I both gave him looks.
“Before I could correct my error, I was struck down by none other than Zeus, over the protests of Apollo,” she continued. “There has never been a threat to their rule of the Earth, until one Oracle figured out how to block the bridge. She couldn’t undo what I had done, because she didn’t have the strength, but she could start an initiative that extended across a dozen Oracles. Each of them fed some of their power into building a wall between the world of the gods and ours. And finally, one had the strength to hammer the last nail into place.”
“Cecelia,” I said.
“Correct. Except, when the time came to act, she acted not out of the desire to help humanity, but to punish everyone. What her true motivations are, I don’t know. If not for the god who struck me down, humanity would be gone. My enemy is who kept you alive, knowing when you came of age, you could do what I had not, and what Cecelia won’t: put an end to this chapter of human history.”
I felt sick to my stomach. “Then why was she helping me?”
“Was she helping you?” Pythia challenged.
“She was teaching me control, so I didn’t destroy everyone by unleashing my power.”
“She was trying to clip your wings, and keep you under her thumb, until she had the ability to outmaneuver you. It’s similar to what I did,” Cleon said. “You look at her and you pity her. You don’t see her brilliant, manipulative mind. You related to her, and she used this. It’s why she wanted a power transfusion, and why she encouraged you not to learn or use your magic.”