The Forest Gods' Reign

by Alexandria Hook

  Zach was about to add something in Luke’s defense, but then he saw Cole, who still didn’t know about the truth of the Greek myths, making his way toward us. So Zach quickly changed the topic to the first thing that came to his mind. “I love clouds, don’t you? Today, I saw one that looked like a bunny.”

  Of course, Luke and Connor cracked up involuntarily, but I just shook my head in defeat as Cole gave Zach a dubious look. I knew I probably should have changed the topic myself.

  In slight confusion, Cole ruffled his brown hair, which was about two shades lighter than my long, dark hair. As he began to make me feel even more awkward, I thought of my own hair and nervously adjusted my ponytail before pushing the bangs out of my eyes. Luke snickered.

  “So,” Cole started as I settled down again, looking specifically at me with his soft eyes. I frowned and bit my lip, not quite sure yet of what to think about the provocative way he had stared at me, while he continued, “Have any of you seen Josh lately? I haven’t heard from him today.”

  Without thinking, Connor answered promptly, “He went to talk to Shane and Haley.”

  Cole frowned and ruffled his hair again, then wondered aloud, “Why would he need to do that?”

  Although his statement may have sounded slightly rude, Cole did have a good point. Outside of the forest, Josh didn’t really know Shane or Haley very well. I had to admit that although our town was small, people still acted quite cliquish, specifically the Monster Watch, but I liked to tell myself that this was just an inevitable result of how the newspapers had portrayed us nine years earlier. I didn’t see much sense in completely changing the status quo so many years later, when it would only cause more issues to arise.

  “He found a … hairband! In the street, yeah, and he thought it was one of theirs,” Connor said as he caught sight of my ponytail from the corner of his eye.

  Note to self: When possible, don’t let Connor/Apollo or Zach/Zeus lie or change the subject.

  Luke, Zach, and I simply shook our heads, wondering why in the world he had said “hairband.” Obviously just as bewildered as the rest of us, Cole gave Connor a strange look of disbelief, knowing full well that Shane’s short, cropped hair was nowhere near long enough to need a ponytail, and so Connor continued sheepishly, “Yeah … it’s probably not Shane’s.” Then he put his head down nervously and started quietly sipping his lemonade again, which was probably for the best.

  “Well, do you mind if I join you?” Cole asked. We all reluctantly said it was fine, and then he sat down next to me, with a tall glass of lemonade in his hand. Once he had made himself comfortable, we started a new conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with clouds or hairbands. Thankfully.

  Chapter 6:

  THE KNOWING

  A few weeks later, everyone in the entire county was getting restless, especially all of the kids who were stuck in school for a few more hours. The next day was the start of summer vacation, after all. So when the last bell finally rang, students immediately poured out of the double doors at the front of the large, brick school building and raced to the buses as quickly as possible. After the ride home, the rest of the Monster Watch and I hung back and waited for the other students to disperse and the school bus to drive away, leaving us alone in the dust. Obviously, this didn’t bother us one bit.

  As soon as the four of us were completely alone, we exchanged excited grins with each other. “Race to Pan’s hideout?” Zeus suggested in Greek, raising one eyebrow. He took off without even bothering to wait for an answer, and Poseidon and Apollo let out loud whoops from behind me as we sprinted across the empty street and into the woods. We didn’t stop running until we had reached the hideout by the waterfall.

  For the rest of the afternoon, we played a few rounds of reverse hide-and-seek and then happily chatted with Pan, Persephone, and a few nymphs as we munched on some delicious juicy berries. Needless to say, the rest of the Monster Watch and I headed back to our houses late that night with huge smiles on our faces. When we reached Maple Street, I bid them farewell and walked up my porch steps, opening the screen door with a creak. I didn’t see either of my parents, so I heated up some leftover pasta from the night before and ran up the stairs to my room. I then sat on my bed and began eating as I pulled out my laptop.

  I was video chatting with Zach and Luke, trying to decide when to have our next battle practice, when my dad suddenly walked into the room. He leaned against the door for a moment, and I quickly signed off the chat. Whenever my father came to tell me something, I knew it was important, since he almost never stopped by my room for a visit and I certainly never stopped by his. I didn’t appreciate him poking his nose into my business anyhow.

  I slowly turned to face him, and he took a deep breath before he said, “Your cousin Katie and her parents are coming to visit tomorrow.”

  I cursed. But not out loud, of course, not in front of my dad. You see, I despised Katie. She got to travel the world with her parents year-round, and she always acted like she was so much better than me, even though we were the same age. Not many people would describe her life as normal, but it was far more normal than mine. Most of the time we were together, Katie was constantly annoying me by trying to give me a makeover, but contrary to her belief, even Becca admitted that I dressed perfectly fine, except for the fact that I didn’t own any fancy skirts or dresses. Anyway, I seriously doubted that Katie had the guts to kill a monster, and I knew for a fact that I was way smarter than she was, so I didn’t believe she had the right to give me any lectures at all.

  Naturally, I didn’t tell my father any of this. Instead, I just gritted my teeth and tried to hide the annoyance in my voice as I asked, “How long are they staying?”

  “Just three days,” he answered, and I groaned. That meant three days of being banned from the forest. Three days too many, in my opinion.

  My dad ran his fingers through his thinning, light brown hair and mumbled, more to himself than to me, “I just don’t get why you think your cousin is such a problem. She’s a very nice girl.”

  Yeah, nice to you, but not to me, I thought to myself bitterly, but again, I didn’t answer him out loud. Instead, I turned to face the glass doors that opened to my tiny balcony. Across the lawn next door, I could see a light on in Zach and Luke’s room. I wished I could go over there for a while, if only to get out of my house and finish our conversation, but I couldn’t exactly do that with my father looming there in front of me.

  I held my breath as the awkward silence lasted a couple more seconds, and then my dad left the room without saying anything more. He was probably going to get drunk, as usual. The only mystery was if he was going to go out to the Fire Pit, or if he was planning on staying home. But I knew the answer when I heard the screen door slam shut a few seconds later. Sighing to myself, I turned off the light and went to bed a few minutes later, ready to get the next three days over with.

  ___________________

  I heard an arrow whiz by my head as I stabbed Ares’s chest plate, but he still yelled in agony. Like him, I was breathing heavier and getting even more tired as each minute passed by. We had already been fighting for two hours, nonstop. PE class definitely did not get us in shape for this kind of exercise, if you could even call battle practice an exercise. It was way more than exercise. That was like comparing an ant to a blue whale—not even close.

  To my left, Artemis shot an arrow at Poseidon, but the earth suddenly shook under her feet, and her body crumpled to the ground. Meanwhile, Dionysus was trying to whip and trap Demeter with his grapevine, but she turned it against him, and so Dionysus was flung backward into Hera, who had been fighting with Zeus and Apollo. At that particular moment, Apollo was trying to shoot arrows at Hermes, who was running faster than a rocket. Literally. And Aphrodite … well, she was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she was chatting in the woods with Hestia, who had actually decided to come to practice this time. Hephaestus, however, was in his basement workshop making us some new weapons.

>   “Okay, fine! We’re done!” Zeus shouted at us in Greek as we finished our battle practice, and I checked my watch to see that it was eleven o’clock, which meant only half an hour until my cousin and her parents were scheduled to arrive in the Woods. I took a deep breath, wishing I could stay in the forest forever, but I knew I couldn’t. I figured I would just have to walk back home as slowly as possible.

  So Dionysus, Ares, Hermes, Hera, Demeter, Aphrodite, Hestia, and Artemis headed east toward Main Street, and Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo and I decided to follow them for the time being, just to avoid going home for as long as possible. Hera was giving me dirty looks because my left arm kept brushing up against Zeus’s right arm, but I just chose to ignore her because I was talking with Zeus about going to see Pan soon and the trail was so narrow that our accidental touching of arms was inevitable. And, to be honest, I didn’t really mind the comforting, tingling warmth of his skin on mine anyway.

  Suddenly, a man’s bloodcurdling scream cut through the quiet forest like a knife. We knew this was not one of Pan’s games of trying to scare us; Pan’s voice was more high-pitched, and we knew it well. This was real. Someone—probably another satyr—was being attacked by a monster, although I thought it strange that I wasn’t hearing any prayers for help echoing through my mind, like what usually happened when a satyr or nymph was in need of my wisdom or guidance in battle. But then again, whoever was in trouble could have been praying to a different god just as easily.

  Without even looking at each other or confirming a plan, we all raced north, in the direction of the scream. We were gods, which meant we protected our people, of course. That had been our most important job for six years now.

  However, the trail that the Monster Watch and I had blazed long ago was very narrow, so most of the gods were not even bothering to use it. Like a herd of elephants, we trampled over bushes and fallen branches as we sprinted through the thick forest, just hoping we would get there in time to save whoever needed to be saved.

  Hyperventilating, we ran over the top of a small hill and found ourselves staring straight at the huge Minotaur, although his back was facing us. It’s black, furry, humanlike hands were completely covered in dark red blood, and in the long grass a few feet in front of it there lay a body, a human body, bloodied and unnaturally twisted. The older man’s dark eyes were still open, but they were glassed over. He was obviously dead. We were too late …

  Or maybe not.

  I saw movement from behind a tree a few yards past the Minotaur, and when a head nervously poked out, I found myself looking at a boy our age. He appeared just as surprised at seeing us as we were at seeing him. His frightened, bright blue eyes met mine for only an instant before he looked down with concern at the dead body.

  And that was when I noticed what he was looking at, what he was contemplating retrieving: a shiny sword, lying next to the dead man. There were only a few drops of red human blood on it, so the sword had obviously not helped the dead person at all, but it was a sword all the same. And it did prove one thing: this boy and the dead man had come prepared, sort of. Somehow, they knew. Knew that the Greek myths were true, and knew where they could find us, the gods.

  How the hell did they know? I asked myself, quickly deciding that I had to save this mysterious boy no matter what, even if I just wanted to find out his secrets.

  Obviously having heard us gods run up behind it, the Minotaur turned around to face us, its red eyes widening. It knew it had already been beat and was turning to run away, but I wanted to vanquish the threat, not just chase it away. With only a split second to think, I eagerly called out my plan, “This one’s mine!”

  I hurled my spear at the Minotaur with as much force as I could muster. The spear dug into his chest with a dull thud, and the Minotaur fell forward onto his bull face, turned over, and grasped the spear’s shaft in an effort to pull it out. I saw the greenish-gold blood slowly ooze out from the giant body, but the monster was still alive, breathing shakily through flaring nostrils that were the size of my fists. Not taking any chances, Artemis quickly shot an arrow at the beast, and when it pierced the Minotaur’s thick skull, we all sighed in relief. The Minotaur died immediately, and it crumbled to dust before the second wound could even start to bleed.

  For a moment, the only sounds one could hear were of us trying to catch our breaths after running so hard. Most of the gods were staring uneasily at the bruised corpse lying in front of them, although the only obvious wounds were a broken neck and slits on his arms and torso from when the Minotaur had pried the sword out of the man’s grasp. We had seen plenty of monsters die, as well as a couple of nymphs or satyrs, and we had seen our own blood gushing out of us too, but this was the first human death we had witnessed, the first body that didn’t crumble to ashes as soon as its life was destroyed. Not surprisingly, Aphrodite threw up and sank to her knees as she continued to forlornly eye the dead body, and many of the gods looked away from the scene in disgust, but then the sight of the discolored remnants of the love goddess’s lunch caused Hestia to vomit as well. As the boy with dark hair nervously stepped out behind the tree, however, I noticed that he seemed to have much better control over his stomach than a few of the gods, and so I wondered if he had seen someone die before in this fashion.

  The teenager gulped before he took another step forward and knelt down in front of us, bowing his head. His actions only confirmed my suspicions that he knew we were the infamous gods of Olympus. “Who are you?” Zeus demanded in English, still breathless.

  “My name is Alec. I am honored to be in the presence of my gods,” he responded immediately, still kneeling. He sounded almost like a robot, like he had practiced saying this one line a thousand times.

  “Do you speak Greek?” Zeus asked. When the boy nodded, Zeus continued, this time in Greek, “I give you permission to stand.” Obediently, Alec stood up and looked Zeus in the eye. “Who is the dead man?”

  “That man is, I mean was, my father, Edmund,” Alec reluctantly answered him in Greek, his voice filled with pain.

  Before anyone could utter a word of sympathy, however, Zeus fired off questions at Alec without taking another pause. “Why are you here? Where did you come from? How did you find us?”

  I was about to tell Zeus to kindly slow the speed of his interrogation, but then Alec took a deep breath and said, “I came from a big camp in Kentucky, where my people live and train to be heroes—but of course, only you gods can actually label a person a hero. Anyway, we are a secret society of people who have the Sight and know that the Greek myths are true, and we are called the Knowing. Most of us are children and grandchildren of demigods or the real heroes who knew past generations of the gods.”

  All of our eyes were wide as we intently listened to Alec’s story, and I began racking my brain, trying to remember if I had ever read anything about Knowing camps like Alec’s. However, Dionysus suddenly interrupted, “Whoa! Did you walk here all the way from Kentucky?” I just rolled my eyes along with Artemis, thinking about how stupid it would have been if Alec had walked from Kentucky to the Woods, which was in the middle of Washington.

  Alec shook his head. “No, sir. My father and I rode a bus to the airport in Kentucky, and then we flew to Seattle, but we just hitchhiked and walked off and on for the rest of the way. We didn’t know what to expect at the end of our quest.”

  A few of the other gods’ jaws dropped in shock. The Woods was at least one hundred miles from Seattle.

  “Continue with your story,” Zeus said with a sigh of amazement, waving for all the gods to be silent once more.

  “Okay, sir,” Alec started again. “I had to find you because I had a vision, sent to me by the Oracle of Delphi. In the dream, I saw directions, leading me here into your forest. Her voice told me that I had to help you fulfill some prophecy, or else all would be lost.”

  I sighed. Hera narrowed her brown eyes at Alec as she mused, “Interesting. The Oracle never mentioned you in the prophecy.” She paused and shr
ugged before saying rudely, “But we don’t need you right now, so you can just go home and cry to your mommy.” Alec’s jaw dropped, too shocked to be offended.

  “Hera, what is your problem?” I asked her angrily. “Just because nothing has happened yet doesn’t mean something won’t start! Give the guy a chance, for crying out loud!” The rest of the gods nodded in unison, agreeing with me.

  “Yeah, he’s cute,” Aphrodite added, and Alec blushed bright red, glancing down at his worn-out shoes.

  Hera frowned and glared at me, pushing a stray piece of reddish-brown hair back behind her ear, trying to calm herself down. “Anyway,” Hestia started, clapping her hands together to try to get us all back on topic, “we can’t really let him go home now, if he’s only going to come back later. And if we let him wander around the forest on his own, he’ll surely die. That would be a total waste of resources, as I’m sure Athena was about to point out.”

  “But Athena should also know that if this so-called war is really going to erupt among the gods, this boy here doesn’t stand a chance against our powers. Ultimately, he’ll be killed in either case, even if he is a little more likely to live longer in one,” Hera responded hotly, glancing over at me to back her up for once.

  Frowning, I looked back at Alec, his wild blue eyes seeming to flicker with flames of uncertainty that mirrored the ones in my own eyes. I had a very bad feeling about him, but for some reason I found myself turning to face Zeus and announcing in a strangely calm voice, “He stays.” Hera groaned.

  “You sound awfully certain about this,” Zeus remarked.

  “Really?” I asked. “Then you must have misunderstood my tone. I’ve honestly never been so unsure of anything in my entire life. This kid could be dangerous, after all. Actually, I know he’s dangerous. But I certainly don’t want his premature death on my conscience, and you probably don’t either.”