The Forest Gods' Reign

by Alexandria Hook

  When we stopped a few feet inside the tree line, I quickly pulled out my armor and a sword from a hollow log and started to strap on my bronze and silver breastplate, pausing to run my finger over the familiar picture of a gold owl carrying Medusa’s head carved on the front. Not bothering to grab my helmet, I looked up and was surprised to see Alec pull out his own armor, sword, and round shield out of a different tree. These pieces were also bronze and very well made, although they did not look quite as fancy or intricate as mine.

  “Where did you get those?” I asked in Greek, remembering that he had come here with only a sword. I had just assumed he would borrow Ares’s stuff.

  “Hephaestus made them for me,” Alec explained with a shrug, his voice strangely tight. “You were with your cousin.”

  I nodded silently, feeling a bit out of the loop, and Alec followed me toward the meadow, which was a nice open place to train. As we trudged through the undergrowth, we could still hear the thunderous booms from the fireworks high in the sky above our heads. They blocked out all the other noises that we usually heard in the forest, such as the birds and the wind whistling through the trees. However, we could not see the bright bursts of light anymore because we were under the thick cover of the tall treetops, traveling through murky darkness.

  We then stepped out under the fiery sky into the empty field of long grass that brushed up against our shins as we walked to the center of the meadow. Without saying a single word, I turned around to face Alec, pointing my sword directly at his chest. He did the same to me, and for a second it was like the world was frozen in time, our eyes locked and our silver swords shone in the surprisingly bright moonlight.

  “The second lesson,” I began in a serious whisper, “is that if you’re going to fight a monster, you fight to kill, or you don’t fight at all. Commit to your plan. Your whole head and your whole heart have to be in it together, if you want to keep from going crazy with post-traumatic stress.”

  Alec nodded, eagerly absorbing the tips, and from the way his stance kept shifting slightly, I could tell he was ready to start practicing. “Now, show me everything you’ve learned. Pretend I’m a monster,” I ordered firmly, knowing it wouldn’t be too hard for him to imagine; during the days I spent with Katie, I was sure he had observed the rest of the Monster Watch acting less than noble on multiple occasions. Humans and gods can be monsters too, after all.

  And then Alec lunged at me, his cool blue eyes suddenly seeming angry. I quickly blocked the thrust of his sword, and it hit my shield with a loud clang. I swung my own sword down to the left, just barely missing the skin on his side, and I heard his sword slice through the air by my ear. Thus, my theory that Alec had been properly trained, contrary to what he had told the rest of the gods and me earlier, was confirmed. And he was good, really good—about a million times better than I thought he would be. To be honest, I began to think that he was almost as good as Ares in some aspects. But unfortunately for Alec, I was better than Ares in all aspects.

  Without stopping to think about his training anymore, I let my instincts take over and slammed my shield into his body, throwing him way off balance, even though I hadn’t hit him too hard. However, the blows and the falls from the sky that the rest of the gods and I took during battle practices would certainly injure or kill any normal human, so I had to admit that Alec was doing pretty well.

  But he could have been doing even better. Every time he met my gaze, he would let down his guard just a little bit, a very slight hesitation that only the most experienced fighters would notice. I couldn’t tell if he was worried about hurting me or simply distracted by the overwhelming beauty of a goddess.

  “The third lesson is about focus, Alec,” I muttered to him under my breath as we kept fighting. “Don’t fight your instincts, and don’t let yourself get distracted by your opponent or anything else. If you’re trying to guess my next move, watch my body, not my face.” He smirked at that last part and eagerly obeyed, and I vowed to myself that that would be the last time I ever asked him to purposely avoid my eye contact.

  I went easy on Alec to start with, letting him hit me a couple of times. But when he realized I wasn’t really trying at all, we began exchanging more blows, harder and harder each time. Eventually, I noticed him getting tired. Taking advantage of his sudden fatigue and the hole in his defense, I slammed my shield into him once again, this time even harder than before, so he almost fell. That was when I swung my sword right, and the sharp blade seared through his blue shirt and the skin on his left side, making a clean and shallow gash. But he was not going to give in easily. Staggering and gasping for breath, he raised his shield just in time to block my next swing, though I used one of my legs to knock his feet out from under him and he fell back into the long grass, clutching his bleeding side.

  “Lesson four: always remember where your armor is.”

  I pointed my sword down at him, the tip of the blade just barely touching his Adam’s apple as I looked into his shining blue eyes. Yes, even though he was breathing hard, sweating a lot, and bleeding from several shallow cuts, he still managed to keep smiling, and so I simply shook my head in bewilderment, impressed by his attitude. I, on the other hand, wasn’t even starting to breathe harder, but because I was a goddess, this wasn’t really a fair fight to begin with.

  He pushed himself up off the ground and said breathlessly, “Good practice.” Those were probably the only two words he could muster at the moment. I didn’t answer him, but led him over to a hollow tree on the edge of the meadow, where Apollo kept hidden emergency medical supplies. Even gods get hurt every once in a while, after all, and one can never be too careful with injuries.

  As Alec and I sat down on a log and took off our armor, I started to wipe off my arm, where Alec had managed to make a single shallow cut. He was in the middle of pulling off his bloody shirt when he started squinting at my arm. “Is your blood gold?” he asked, looking shocked. I nodded, forcing myself to tear my eyes away from his six-pack abs as I flashed back to when the other gods and I had first discovered the unusual color of our blood.

  ___________________

  It was in the middle of our very first battle practice after finding the rest of the gods, and I had been battling with Ares in the meadow. I had just made a cut on his triceps when I noticed that his blood was an odd color. I stopped fighting in midstep and called out to the others immediately. “I think your blood is … gold,” I said, pointing to Ares’s wound. We all stood staring at the blood in silence, too shocked and confused to speak.

  “It’s never done that before,” Ares told us, obviously mystified.

  Poseidon and the other gods walked over to join Ares and me. “I think you’ve finally lost your marbles, Ares.”

  Ares threatened to punch the god of the sea, but Aphrodite intervened and got Ares to calm down and cooperate. He slowly turned his arm to the right and to the left, and we discovered that his blood wasn’t totally golden yet. The color just depended on the way the light hit the wound.

  The rest of the gods and I soon realized that all of our blood was beginning to change from red to gold, which we assumed was because we had found out our true identities as gods, and we didn’t worry about it anymore. It was just a side effect. However, ever since the day of our first battle practice, our blood had slowly turned more golden and less red. Six years later, our blood really was the color of pure gold, and so we all had to live in fear of blood tests whenever we visited the doctor’s office. The doctor’s office had become like prison to us; no one wanted to end up in there for fear of becoming a human lab rat.

  ___________________

  Facing Alec again, I helped him bandage the slice I had made in his side, and he grimaced as the medicine stung his open wound. Luckily, the cut was shallow, but it was still very long. “I bet this scar will be permanent,” Alec mused in Greek, more to himself than to me, as I wrapped the bandage around his shirtless chest.

  “That’s okay,” I told him with a s
mirk, avoiding eye contact as I somewhat nervously tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “Scars are hot. Ask any normal girl.”

  “You really think so? I mean, I didn’t realize you were a normal girl,” Alec responded just as playfully, and I paused in the middle of dressing his wound to look up at him and raise my eyebrows.

  I shook my head and argued, “I never said that. I’m just saying I did you a favor. You’ll have plenty of girls fighting for your attention now, though I’m sure there were some before you came here too.”

  At this, Alec laughed out loud, which just brought a smile to my own face. He had one of those good, contagious laughs. “Oh yes, you obviously did me a favor by almost killing me. Forgive me if I forget to thank you,” he said sarcastically, ignoring my other statement about girls, and I smirked again.

  Once we had finally stopped chuckling, I returned to being more serious in nature and started to dab at the bloody flesh wound in Alec’s side again. Part of it cut all the way around to his back, and as I carefully turned his body around, my eyes grew wide when I caught sight of a tattoo at the base of his neck. It was a small sword in a black circle, which was about two inches wide. “What is it?” I whispered to him in Greek as I slowly traced the circle imprinted on his skin.

  He let me continue to trace his tattoo as he spoke, his voice suddenly seeming frigid. “It’s the symbol of the Warriors, the protectors of the Knowing camp. Every occupation has a symbol, which each person is required to wear as a tattoo. We get it when we start training. I just got it a little early.”

  I frowned, not sure I liked the idea of tattooing an identification on somebody. Too permanent, I supposed. Even if he really wanted to, Alec (or any other Knowing member, for that matter) could never truly leave that part of his life behind.

  I stopped studying his tattoo and faced him once again, meeting his icy blue gaze. “Aren’t you finished training? You’re the best person I’ve ever fought using swords, besides Ares, of course,” I pointed out to him.

  “I trained myself,” he stated dryly, dropping his head to stare at the ground. “Technically, you’re not supposed to start training until you turn sixteen. Even when I had the vision that led me here, the leaders wouldn’t prepare me for anything.”

  His voice was angry now, and I could understand why. The Knowing had basically thrown him to the monsters and left him for dead, not even bothering to help prepare him for his mission to find us. The more I heard about the Knowing, the less I liked them, though I was also impressed by Alec even more. Training yourself was hard—all the gods knew that—but Alec was really, really good, and I couldn’t help but think that the rest of the Knowing had seriously underestimated him.

  “What are the Knowing people like?” I asked him, wanting to learn more about the people I would probably meet someday in the future.

  Alec frowned. “To be honest, they’re all cowards,” he informed me bluntly, and I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

  “What do you mean?” I questioned, chewing on my lower lip in thought.

  “I’m the first person in ages to have left the base camp. The Knowing people complain that the gods have turned their backs on them, but the Knowing haven’t even made themselves known to any of you. Even the Warriors hardly ever venture out of the camp because they’re too afraid of monsters and the fact that the gods might be mad at them for some of the things they’ve done. To put it simply, the Knowing are pretty much untouchable inside the camp, so no one wants to leave it,” Alec explained to me, an anxious edge to his voice. “I think almost all of the Knowing camps have lost contact with each other as a result. The base camp in Kentucky used to keep in contact with the smaller camps around the United States, but I can’t remember the last time we even spoke with one of the other leaders. Even my leader, who was originally from the New York camp, has given up.”

  “Then we’ll have to change that, create a new era of cooperation or something,” I said lightly, meeting Alec’s gaze with raised eyebrows, and he quietly nodded in agreement. I couldn’t help but notice how his expressions became darker when he was talking about the Knowing than when he was talking about anything else, which made me infer that there was a lot more to the story. I didn’t have the heart to press him, however.

  “We can call it the Golden Age of the Forest Gods,” Alec whispered with a small, somewhat hopeless chuckle, but I smirked at his suggestion anyway. I thought it suited my generation of gods quite well.

  In silence, we stared out at the beautiful meadow. At the moment, the moon was illuminating a thick, silver mist that was settling right above the lush green grass, covering the soft ground like a blanket. The fireworks show was over, but we still stared up at the twinkling sky and stars anyway. Alec put his hand over mine for a split second, and I felt my heart flutter again. I hated him for being brave enough to touch me like that. I hated it more than anything.

  No, I told myself. What are you doing? Don’t let this happen! It’s only been a few days, for gods’ sakes!

  Which also meant the fulfillment of the prophecy was growing nearer and nearer. The rest of the gods and I seemed to be careening toward our destinies at top speed, and I didn’t know how to slow this train down.

  “Thanks for helping me,” he whispered, looking deeply into my eyes. My mind whirling, I just smiled weakly at him before moving my hand away from his, and he sighed.

  “So how do you like living with Pan and Persephone?” I asked, changing the subject.

  Alec frowned to himself, then confessed, “It’s great. It really is. They’re very accommodating. My only complaint is not getting any sleep, with the nymphs and satyrs coming and going from the hideout all through the night.”

  I smirked. “You’ll get used to it. The rest of the Monster Watch and I did. We still like to camp out there every once in a while. Then again, it usually just turns into a party.”

  A dark brown flash caught my eye, and I watched a deer run through the meadow, cutting right through the blanket of mist. Suddenly, an arrow pierced its skull, and the deer crumpled to the ground before it could even take another step. It was dead.

  Instead of feeling sorry for the deer, I just grinned and quickly pulled out my walkie-talkie from a belt loop. “Artemis, was that you?” I asked, knowing that the goddess of the hunt would have her walkie-talkie on and with her just in case anything bad happened while she was alone. From afar, I watched her step out into the meadow next to the deer, accompanied by two tree nymphs that served as a couple of her virgin huntresses. When she heard my voice call out to her, she looked wildly around her murky surroundings, trying to catch sight of me in the darkness. I waved, and then Alec and I walked toward her.

  “What happened to you two?” she asked in Greek, studying the bandage that covered Alec’s entire midsection.

  “Alec wanted me to train him,” I informed Artemis, placing my hands on my hips.

  The blonde only smirked as she yanked the arrow out of the deer’s forehead and pulled out a burlap sack from behind her. Alec and I helped her stuff the dead deer into the sack, and then we tied it tight. Next, Alec lifted the sack up onto his shoulders, but his wound started to gush even more blood, and I could see his fresh bandage already turning red. “I’ll do it,” I told him, shaking my head, and he nodded reluctantly.

  Together, the three of us made our way to Pan’s hideout, leaving the two green-skinned tree nymphs to go back to their own neck of the woods. When we finally reached the hideout, Pan was still swimming in the river with some water nymphs and Persephone sat on his throne, leaning forward and braiding the long hair of a young tree nymph. Meanwhile, Artemis and Alec took the deer out of the big brown sack and started to skin it and cut it in half using swords and pocketknives. Persephone only frowned and turned away, not wanting to look at the poor dead animal and all of its sticky blood, but I did not have any sympathy for her. After all, without Artemis hunting for them every once in a while, the nymphs and satyrs would be forced to consume nothi
ng but berries. Monsters tended to gravitate toward the deer as well, since tasty, unarmed humans no longer strutted foolishly through the forbidden woods. There were always smaller rodents running around the forest floor at night, of course, but natural predators like owls tended to pick those up.

  Leaving Alec and Artemis to finish slicing the deer, I walked over and sat down in the grass beside Persephone, who had been stealing glances at me suspiciously. “You’re hiding something, aren’t you?” she whispered, tucking a piece of light brown hair behind her ear, but not meeting my gaze. “Every time you look at Alec … it’s like you know something about him that no one else does.”

  “So what if I do?” I challenged with a shrug, pretending it wasn’t a big deal and glaring at Alec’s back as he helped Artemis hand out slices of deer meat.

  Persephone was looking at me now, raising her eyebrows expectantly. “Don’t you think you should tell the rest of us gods?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  “When?”

  I sighed irritably. In my mind, I flashed back to when I was nine, sprinting alone through the forest one day, a particularly frightening moment only two others knew about. My dignity had depended on me escaping that godforsaken arrow—and I had, in fact, escaped—but upon reflection, I was sure that arrow would have led to a better fate than what awaited me now. So, when an image of the Oracle placing a finger to her lips flashed through my brain, all I could say to Persephone was, “When the prophecy comes true.” I couldn’t even bring myself to specify the part of the prophecy to which I was referring, the part of the prophecy that no one really understood yet.

  “Why not now?” she questioned, shrugging. “Won’t you feel guilty keeping secrets from all of us? At least from Zeus, you must.”