by Lizzy Ford
Herakles waved over one of the soldiers following us and issued quick instructions. I continued onward, inspecting the vehicles visually.
“Something’s wrong.” Kyros’ soft warning came from a short distance away.
I glanced at him then back. What do you sense? I asked.
“Someone’s at the front gate.”
As much as I hated to admit it, I knew to trust his instincts. I waved him forward.
Speak to Herakles for me, I directed him. Tell him to go to the front gate himself.
Kyros obeyed, and Herakles ran to the vehicle stationed on the road and used to run new guard shifts to the compound gate.
“Thank you for trusting me,” Kyros said.
I ignored him.
“Don’t you want to know who it is?”
He was the first person to show up unwelcome to my compound, followed by Adonis, then Niko. I was starting to grow concerned about the secrecy of a place my enemies had no trouble finding.
“Okay. I’ll let him tell you,” Kyros said, amused.
I walked a short distance until I reached the end of this row. Tilting my head back, I glanced towards the eastern horizon, which was beginning to grow dark. Whoever my guest was, he had better hurry, or I was going to have to meet him in the morning.
Kyros trailed me as I started down the final row of vehicles. Not ten minutes passed before the sound of Herakles’ truck drew my gaze. He drove right up to me, instead of halting at the truck’s assigned place, then stopped fast enough for the vehicle to kick up dirt. He leapt out, and my eyes settled on the old man with dark, olive skin and white hair in the car with him.
“Your Majesty,” Herakles was breathless. “You need to hear this.” His features were pale.
“Your Majesty.” The elderly man exited the truck more slowly and limped towards us, supported by a cane. His eyes were the shade of whiskey. “It is an absolute honor to meet you at last.”
What could this man possibly have to say that alarmed Herakles so much?
“Only that your camp is being targeted. They will strike at dusk,” the old man answered.
I blinked, not expecting him to hear me. Who will attack?
“The military. And we have …” He peered up a the sky. “… maybe half an hour.”
My heart felt like it flipped over in my chest before it began to race.
Who in Hades was this man?
“Menelaus.” He offered a stiff bow. “I am a friend of Adonis.” When my eyebrows rose, he chuckled. “Or … if you do not care for Adonis, I am not a friend of his,” Menelaus said. “We must go, either way.”
“How do you know someone is going to attack us?” Herakles demanded.
“Apollo,” Kyros answered quietly.
“The god?” Herakles asked.
Menelaus laughed. “Yes. Because I am Menelaus and I am also Apollo.”
I glared at him then at Kyros, who took a step back and cleared his voice, avoiding my direct look.
How do you know this information? I asked Menelaus-Apollo.
“Zeus revealed it to me.”
So he speaks to everyone but me?
“You are killing our kind. We will not let our king address you directly, until we are certain of your motives.”
So the gods had learned a thing or two about my opinion of them. I didn’t know if Kyros told them of my intense hatred of Zeus, or if the slaughtering of their kin had cemented the truth.
Apollo was the brother of Artemis, who had tried to safeguard and guide me throughout my life. If there were a god I didn’t despise, it was Artemis. But I had no direct dealings with her brother before this evening, and no insight into what his ulterior motives could be. If Menelaus were possessed, in the same way Kyros was, then Apollo was immediately my enemy. Unfortunately, Apollo had one advantage that was probably going to prevent me from taking his life or leaving him behind.
Apollo is the patron god of Oracles, is he not? I asked Menelaus.
“Yes.”
Anyone with potential access to Alessandra was of interest to me. Hence the reason Herakles was so easily accepted into my organization. Apollo was a major deity, not one of the smaller gods and goddesses I’d hunted and murdered. It was possible this god could help me, not as much as Ares or Zeus, but in ways I didn’t yet know.
Having two possessed humans around me was enough to spur my anger. I set my hatred aside and looked to Herakles. He didn’t need to hear or read my words to understand my meaning.
Herakles spun and bolted towards the main building.
A trickle of fire went through me, and I glanced at the sky again. A sliver of the sun remained above the horizon. The timing of my transformation was terrible.
“You are ready to change?” Menelaus asked me.
I shot Kyros a look.
“I didn’t say a word,” he said.
How do you know about this? I demanded of Menelaus.
He lifted his gnarled hand and twisted his wrist to me. Like Adonis, he bore the faint sign of the omega, the birthmark of the Bloodline.
I snatched his hand, barely believing my eyes. How is this possible? Menelaus was a member of the Bloodline? My second thought was far darker. After cursing us to suffer, one of the deities had the nerve to possess a Bloodline member?
The sirens blared, alerting the compound. At Herakles’ insistence, we had staged many drills and educated all soldiers and civilians about which protocol should be followed with each kind of alarm. There was no mistaking the one sound my people had never heard: that calling for a full and immediate evacuation.
“I’ll explain later,” Menelaus said.
At once, the motor pool exploded into activity. Soldiers in different stages of dress, carrying fly bags, poured into the vehicle staging area and raced to their assigned vehicles. We didn’t have enough vehicles to transport everyone, and those members of the infantry lined up in small formations of twenty. As soon as one formation hit twenty, their leader signaled to one of the commanders and bolted out of the compound. The commanders were tracking numbers to ensure everyone made it off. The orderly evacuation was as efficient and fast as Herakles had trained those executing it to be.
A strange wail overhead drew my gaze to the sky. Something streaked above us. Seconds later, it smashed into the main body of the mall and exploded.
“We have to go!” Kyros said and pushed me towards the command vehicle awaiting me.
I go last! I replied. When my people are safe, I’ll leave!
Another missile crested the treetops and smashed into the headquarters building. Debris sprayed twenty meters into the air, and flames flashed.
Fire was trickling through me more insistently, warning me I wasn’t going to have time to drive anywhere before the transformation came. I tried to fight it, determined to oversee the orderly evacuation of my army.
Herakles joined us. “We have to go!” he shouted.
Tell him – I started to direct Kyros.
As if knowing I wasn’t going to leave, Herakles scooped me up in his arms and ran to our vehicle at the center of the motor pool. Furious, I nonetheless waited until he set me down to give him a stern look and shake of my head he ignored.
“Get in!”
Menelaus was hobbling quickly towards us with the aid of Kyros. More missiles rained from the sky, followed by deafening explosions and the ground shaking. Shouts between commanders and among those being evacuated were joined by the screams of the injured and dying. Debris sprinkled out of the sky, along with chunks of cement when the parking lots were hit. Dust clouds left thin films of gray everywhere.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was supposed to lead this army to the walls and knock them down in four months, and then rescue humanity from both men like Cleon and the gods who abandoned us all. Frozen in horror and surprise, I could only watch as chaos broke out. The orderly evacuation turned into a free for all, as people fled the camp in vehicles and on foot, desperate to be away from the missile
fire.
I watched my army scatter and die, helpless to protect anyone. I didn’t know what to think or do, and my stomach twisted with nausea as I realized I was losing a war before I had a chance to start it.
In that moment, I began to understand how poor my chances of fighting had been. With ten times the people, fifty-meter walls, and a corrupted Oracle, Cleon’s advantage was no longer something I could ignore, not when I was experiencing firsthand what a few missiles could do.
Kyros twisted to see over his shoulder, hearing the sounds of people in pain. I started forward, determined not to leave anyone behind, and then stopped as familiar fire smashed through my system.
“Phoibe … get in!” Herakles shouted above the war zone around us.
My body began to morph. My clothing grew too tight, and fire raged within me. Fighting the sensation, I closed my eyes and willed myself not to change, at least, not yet.
The magic didn’t listen. Wings tore through my clothing, and talons through my shoes. Within seconds, my skin was gray, my hair gone, and my sensitive senses ringing from the bombing. I stretched my wings and shook off the last of the clothing clinging to my frame then threw my head back with a roar of fury.
An eerie silence fell between missile strikes, and I felt those around us back away. Any hope I’d had of not revealing my other self to my army was gone. I was too angry, too overwhelmed by the sounds of explosions and scents of war, to care. Propelling myself upward, into the air, I hovered to see the damage below and let out a second roar, this one of pain.
The destructive power of the missiles left me stunned. We had taken gradual, slow losses over the past few months, but this was something entirely different. The power of one rocket could have decimated half my army, if we hadn’t had advanced warning. What would an outright war do, when I had so few advanced weaponry?
One of the missiles had hit the nursery section of the strip mall. My mind filled with images and sensations only my beast side was capable of seeing, and I stared, unable to process what was happening.
Let us stop this.
The light gray wings of Menelaus swept by me as he darted upward into the sky, twirled, and then made a beeline in the direction from which the missiles had come. I hesitated only a second before the beast side of me took over. Compelled by fury and sorrow, I raced after Menelaus. For the first time since transforming into a beast, I freed the primal side of me whose intensity had previously scared me. I was a woman of great control, meticulous thought and careful action. To release everything, to give up my control, had never happened before in my adult life.
The queen would never do what had to be done this night. But the beast would. I felt the depths of my strength, fury and bloodlust when in my secondary form. So I freed the monster from the careful control I exerted over every second of my life and flew after Menelaus, towards a brightly lit area outside the walls, where the military had set up camp to destroy me.
Vengeance consumed me, along with the images of the dead men and women I was supposed to protect.
What happened next was a blur of blood, night, and uncontrolled emotion.
In which direction we went, and what exactly we did, I didn’t know with certainty until the next morning when I awoke with a cloudy mind and parched mouth. Moving caused me to groan from muscle soreness, and I blinked away sleep to try to make sense of my unfamiliar surroundings.
I launched away from where I lay before alarm fully registered. Scampering back, I glanced down at myself then at the pile of bodies I’d been lying on. My skin was stiff from caked blood, and I was naked. No less than ten men were tossed in the pile, all dead, all bearing horrific fang and claw marks, as if they’d been mauled by a group of bears.
Oh, gods! I thought and glanced down at my hands. Dried blood was packed under my nails and had stained my blonde hair pink. I swallowed hard. My heart thumped against my chest. I stood.
Fifty men. There had to be at least that many corpses strewn around the military’s camp. The surface-to-surface missile launchers remained in their original positions, and additional neat stacks of rockets sat beside each one. Blood splattered everything from the soaked dirt to the sides of the vehicles to the tents. No one else moved anywhere in camp.
Numbed to the damage, and afraid to look too long at the carnage for fear of vomiting, I picked my way through the bodies and mess. I didn’t want to consider why I was full when I knew I hadn’t hunted any animals last night. The violence displayed around me soon drove me to my knees.
I retched even harder when I saw how much blood I threw up. Tears stung my eyes, and my throat burned as I emptied the contents of my stomach. This was not morning sickness. This was disgust.
“Phoibe!” The shout came from the other side of camp.
I finished throwing up and stood carefully. My legs shook, and I had the urge to run as far from this place as possible. My anger was completely gone this morning. All I could think about was how I had not only murdered tens of people, but I’d eaten parts of several of them!
My thoughts shifted as I awoke fully and made my way towards those searching for me. Had I gotten here in time to stop the complete destruction of my army? To give my people a chance to escape?
Where was Menelaus? Did I dream him coming with me?
The night was too hazy for me to recall details with any sort of certainty. My stomach turned again, and I snapped my gaze up, beyond the piles of bodies.
“She’s here!” Unfazed by the massacre, Herakles spotted me long before I did him. He raced towards me, blanket in hand. With no consideration for my title or standing in the world, he draped the blanket around me and swept me up into his arms. His concerned gaze searched my face. “Are you okay?”
He was surrounded by dozens of dead, and he wanted to know if I was okay? I didn’t think I’d ever appreciated him as much as I did in that moment.
I started to squirm. The jolting sensation inside me made me suck in a breath and go still, lest I threw up all over him. When I’d conquered the urge to vomit again, I nodded.
Reaching two of our vehicles, he set me down on the ground and went to one truck to grab a pack.
“Kyros!” he belted loudly enough to be heard across camp. Kneeling, he pulled out a bottle of water and handed it to me. “I’m no doctor, but you look okay. No worse than Menelaus. He took a couple of bullets.”
I sat up straighter.
“He’s alive and recovered, thanks to Kyros,” Herakles added. “I brought you clothing and enough wet wipes to take off all the blood. I can make you breakfast quickly, too.” He pulled a portable stove out of the pack, along with sausage, eggs and bread.
How he was so calm and accepting of my transformation and massacre, I had no idea.
My thoughts went unexpectedly to the insistence of Kyros that I tell Herakles about Alessandra. Guilt fluttered through me. Herakles had never once let me down, never once questioned my orders, and never once failed to help or guide me. His actions and heart were pure, much more so than mine.
Notebook? I wrote into the dirt.
“I’ll find one in a minute,” he said and placed a small frying pan on the stove.
The army? I scrawled next.
“We’re estimating a twenty percent loss of personnel,” he replied quietly. “It would’ve been eighty percent, if you and the old man hadn’t stopped the missile fire.”
So we had succeeded at some level. Twenty percent loss was huge, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought when I hovered over the camp last night. I was relieved and a little surprised. My beast side had thought nothing of stopping the missiles but of seeking revenge against those attacking us. Was it possible the two sides of me were more integrated than I thought? That I didn’t need to be in control of my monster to remain … me?
“For the record, I was right.” Herakles gave a tight smile. “The army loves the idea of following a monster. Grotesque. Whatever.”
I pursed my lips in what he would recognize was mild disa
pproval. He retrieved a notebook and pen from the interior of the vehicle and handed them to me. I watched him make me breakfast amidst the corpses of our enemies.
I had to tell him about Alessandra. I didn’t want to, and a bad reaction from him would hurt my efforts, but he deserved to know. As breakfast cooked, I wrote him a note about the Oracle he considered to be his daughter. I made an effort to keep it short and to use small words, but the letter stretched for two pages. When I finished, I moved behind the truck, with the wet wipes and clothing. Torn about whether or not to reveal the truth, I cleaned myself up and pulled on clothing before deciding I had to do this, because a good leader would tell her most trusted advisor the truth.
Returning to the other side of the truck, I sat. When he handed me a plate, I handed him the notebook.
“You wrote me a book,” he said, glancing down at it. His eyes were glued to the two words at the top. About Alessandra
I stood and walked away, leaving him in peace. My hands trembled as I ate, and I watched his expression change in a way that caused me pain. I forced myself to face him, because I deserved to hurt after hiding the truth from him.
“You did the right thing,” Kyros said softly from behind me.
Did I? I replied bitterly. What if he walks?
“What if he stays?” he countered. “Your army still has the best chance of rescuing his daughter.”
Not after last night. We lost our supplies and home.
“Almost everyone survived. Not only that, but they know you saved them. ”
Hearing the truth, I was still inconsolable. I should have predicted the attack or ordered an evacuation after Adonis disappeared. I had saved most of my army, but I had also not been the one who prevented their danger in the first place.
“They’re soldiers. They understand,” Kyros said.
Not all of them are soldiers. They’re volunteers whose lives were destroyed by the gods. I owed them more than to let fire fall from the skies and finish them off.
“You did the best you could.”