by Diana Tyler
He motioned for Chloe to move closer, then stepped around her and extended the oar into the water. She watched as the second of Cerberus’s three heads gently took the oar blade in its teeth and with a guttural growl began dragging the boat backwards toward the shore.
Each head of the beast was surrounded by a lion’s mane, but in between black locks of hair there were clusters of red-bellied snakes, all writhing and hissing as they darted and struck at one another. Cerberus’s long gray tail was sinuous and thin, itself like an enormous snake as it slithered in and out of the water. He snarled and bared his teeth when she looked at his eyes, six yellow, vacuous orbs with white-hot pupils that dilated each time he growled.
Chloe placed her shaking hands on the sides of the boat, closed her eyes, and squeezed as she took in three full breaths, just as her counselor had taught her. It had always proven a futile exercise, but now, its uselessness was almost laughable. How could one’s nerves be calmed or stress quelled in a literal hell?
Chloe opened her eyes and tried to take comfort in Charon’s assurance that she couldn’t be killed.
Cerberus picked up his pace, grunting as he pulled the boat out of the river and slung it across the sand.
“Stupid dog,” Charon huffed, as he yanked the oar from Cerberus’s mouth and slid it into the oarlock.
Chloe was struck by how starkly different the shore was from the black, volcanic river. She stepped out of the boat and looked out into the labyrinthine void she had traveled through, the convex walls foaming with magma, the soupy, sulfuric air nearly suffocating. The climate here, just a stone’s throw from the other, was tolerable, even balmy, and though there was no sun, she was glad for the additional light.
Up ahead lay gentle slopes of vibrant, green grass, and a gray mountain range in the distance carved from a crystal-blue slate of sky. She could even detect the faint chirping of birds and a mellifluent lyre like Orpheus’s playing along to their melody.
Just another trick, she told herself. And then she thought of the old man Acacius and his Coronation, which she and her classmates had witnessed a decade ago: the rolling, emerald hills bursting with yellow and lilac flowers, the majestic herd of horses, and the golden palomino on which he’d loped away. That might as well have happened here, thousands of miles beneath Petros’s surface, if she really was in Hades.
Chloe watched Cerberus slink away toward a wall of solid marble, at the center of which were iron gates as tall as the Folóï oak trees that grew outside of Limén. The creature turned clockwise, then counterclockwise, and collapsed into a formidable heap of muscle and teeth, all three sets of jaws gleaming like brand-new knife sets as he panted and yawned, his eyes fighting to stay open.
“Can you tell me what I’m doing here now?” Chloe asked as she turned back toward Charon.
But the ferryman was already inside his boat, rowing away and waving until he rounded a bend and disappeared, unwelcoming whirlpools eddying in his wake. She wouldn’t try to follow him anyway, not with that monster swimming around.
“I will oblige, dear Chloe.”
Chloe spun around to see a young redheaded man floating four feet up in the air. He was wearing an indigo, knee-length tunic secured with a rope around his waist and was holding a short gold staff by his side. On his head was a furry brown hat, and on each of his sandaled feet fluttered a golden pair of wings.
He grinned and crossed his arms, dimples deepening the longer he looked at her. “Have a nice journey?” he said.
Chloe hated him already. “Who are you? Why am I here? Where’s Orpheus, and who was the woman that brought me here?”
She heard Cerberus bark and saw his heads shoot up, alerted by the commotion. But Chloe didn’t care. If she was going to die—or if, as Charon said, she couldn’t die—she at least wanted to know the reason.
“I am Hermes, humble messenger of lords Hades and Apollo. Come, and I will answer all of your useless questions,” he said, smiling amiably despite his insult.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” Chloe sat down cross-legged and folded her arms like an obstinate child.
The man sighed and scratched his head with his staff. “I swear, there is never a deviation from mortals’ insistence on being complete imbeciles.”
He started making circling motions with the staff, but before Chloe could ask what he was doing, she, too, was hovering in the air. “I thought perhaps you would be an anomaly, but I see you’re just the same.” Chloe was being pulled toward him, though every muscle in her body strained with resistance. She slammed into the man’s chest and he took her wrist, swinging her out to his side. “I don’t recommend letting go,” he grunted, squeezing her hand so hard she was sure it would break.
In three seconds, they were a quarter-mile above the wall, speeding toward the jagged mountains, into the lands of the dead.
Ethan thanked his mother as she poured his new friends and him a cup of coffee. They’d been up all night and were still talking, still processing all that Katsaros had told them.
If it didn’t make such perfect sense, Ethan would’ve mistaken the past twenty-four hours for a stress-induced dream, something he could take a pill for and forget all about. And if Katsaros hadn’t been able to answer every single one of their questions without fault, Ethan would have dismissed him as a lunatic or a liar and reported him to the police. Certainly, if his path hadn’t crossed Mr. Zacharias’s all those years ago he wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
He looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was a quarter to eight, time to go to school and act normal, but there was still something he needed to do before courage abandoned him.
“Damian,” he said, in a voice so serious his mother stopped washing dishes and leaned against the sink to listen. “Your father gave the jasper stone to me, just before he died.”
“Oh, honey.” Lydia Ross put a hand to her heart. It was clear she wanted to say more, but she pressed her lips together and waited for him to continue.
He wondered what secrets she could be keeping, what secrets anyone could be keeping but were too scared to reveal. For the first time in his life, Ethan realized that every statute, law, and stringent regimen, while they gave the illusion of facilitating a safe, well-oiled utopia, were nothing so honorable. Everything the Fantásmata had established, from the curfews to the Coronations and every edict in between, was meant to foment fear, to keep every Petrodian silent, submissive, and utterly controllable.
But why? Why didn’t the government condone people talking about “strange sightings?” Why didn’t they allow his mother to continue excavating just as she was making progress? Why did they find it necessary to search a little boy’s room for clues about a perfectly good man? And why did that good man have to die?
They had to be afraid of something themselves. But what?
Damian took the jasper stone from the table and set it in his hand, regarding it as something different now. Something dearer. Then he shook his head, questions replacing sentiment. “Why did he give it to you? You’re not related to us…are you?”
Both Ethan and Lydia shook their heads.
Lydia pushed the dishwasher closed, turned it on and took a seat at the table. She turned to Damian and laid a hand on his arm. “You can trust me, Damian.” She turned and nodded lovingly to her son. “So can you.”
“You know about all of this?” Damian asked.
Lydia shook her head. “I’ve had my suspicions that something alerted the Fantásmata, ruffled their feathers, shall we say. It started eight years ago, right before your parents were killed.”
She cracked her thumbs and placed a long strand of brown hair behind her ear. “I’d seen your father walking along the beach where we were digging. He never told me how he was allowed to be in Ourania, and I didn’t ask. He was always curious about what we found, but usually I had nothing interesting to show him. Until one day…” She closed her eyes and lowered her chin toward her shoulder, her mouth tugging dow
nward, her chin quivering.
Ethan’s breath caught in his chest as the wolf, the blood, and the closed-up gashes flashed across his brain. Did she know what Mr. Zacharias could do, that he could heal people with his touch, even bring himself back to life?
“Take your time, Mrs. Ross,” Katsaros said. He folded his hands on the table and closed his eyes, then whispered softly to himself.
Lydia pressed her lips together and squeezed her eyes a moment as she drew a deep breath through her nose. “One day your father approached the team and seemed a little bit flustered. He asked for me. He said he wanted to show me something.” She swallowed hard and eyed the stone in Damian’s palm. “He led me about half a mile inland, to the limestone hills we’d excavated years before and found nothing in except some ceramics.”
“He’d found something else?” Damian asked.
Lydia nodded as she rubbed the diamond in the center of her wedding ring. “There was a fissure in the northernmost cave, cave one, we called it. It was barely wide enough for a person to walk through sideways. None of my team had noticed it before.” She pushed her chair from the table and stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
Ethan leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Katsaros, we have to go to school in a few minutes. What will they do when they find out Chloe’s missing?”
“They’ll search, of course,” said Katsaros. “But they won’t find her. It’s impossible.”
“Because she’s in Hades.” Damian almost laughed as he said it. It was, without a doubt, a ridiculous-sounding notion.
But Ethan had seen too much to laugh off anything anymore. “If—when—we get her back,” he said, “what will the Fantásmata do?”
“You’re asking the wrong question,” said Katsaros. “The question is: what will she do?” The boys exchanged glances, then waited for the sage to stop philosophizing and start expounding. “You two mustn’t get ahead of yourselves. One step at a time.”
Lydia reentered the kitchen, rolling a nondescript suitcase behind her. She hoisted it onto the table and tapped it on the side closest to Damian. “Open it,” she said to him.
Damian hesitated a moment, pushing his tongue into his cheek. Ethan was tempted to open it for him, but finally Damian reached forward and slowly unzipped the luggage from end to end. Inside were seven small, ordinary amphoras lined up in a row; they were all alike save for a faint arc of color painted onto the bottom of each one. The jar farthest left was marked red, followed next by orange, yellow, green, blue, deep purple, and violet.
Ethan and Damian both moved closer, warily eyeing the jars. As they reached out their hands to pick one up, the sound of a rushing wind filled the suitcase, scaring them so badly they nearly tumbled out of their seats.
“What is that?” Damian shouted.
“This has never happened before,” Lydia shouted back, her hands muffling her ears.
Ethan’s eyes shot to Katsaros, but he sat calmly, staring at the jars as they rumbled and shook, louder and louder, harder and harder, until even the table legs rocked off the floor and crashed back down again.
Ethan hopped up and helped his mother take the coffee cups and saucers to the counter. When he turned around, Damian was leaning over the table, gripping the suitcase on either end, his entire body shaking furiously as the Vessels roared and rattled against each other.
“Damian…” Ethan started. But before he could finish his question, the wind went silent, and the jars stilled. Damian’s eyes widened as he stared into the suitcase. “What is it?” Ethan asked.
Damian’s hands relaxed as a thin red bolt of lightning shot out of the suitcase, disappearing just inches from the ceiling. “Whoa!” He yanked his hands away and backpedaled toward the wall.
A rosy cloud of smoke drifted down to the table. Next, six more flashes of light erupted out of the suitcase, following the color sequence of the jars, orange all the way through to violet.
After they’d waited for the onset of any further surprises, Katsaros walked over to Damian and watched with him as the last misty swirls of blue and purple dissipated. “It seems your sister isn’t the only Vessel.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
IDENTITY
That’s what he meant,” Ethan said, his hands pressed against his cheeks as he leaned against the counter and stared at the suitcase, dumbfounded. “He had a doma, like Iris.”
“Who? My dad?” asked Damian. Ethan nodded. “What did he say? Who’s Iris?”
Ethan turned on the faucet and splashed his face in the sink. All of this was fitting together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, and his brain felt hot, firing on all cylinders just to keep up.
“Your dad saved my life, Damian.” Ethan looked to his mother, but her expression was placid, as if this was the most normal conversation in the world.
Anticipating Damian’s next question, Ethan continued. He might as well reveal everything he knew; it was too late to turn back now. “It was on vocation day in grade three. I was with my mom at the ocean and had wandered off to the north shore to take a nap.”
For the next few minutes, Ethan recounted the entire episode with the wolf and Mr. Zacharias. When he finished, he rolled up his shirtsleeve and showed Damian the chalk-white scars below his elbow.
Damian turned to Katsaros. “Is this possible?”
Katsaros pointed to the jasper stone gleaming on the kitchen table. “I told you it was passed down, generation to generation. You should know that the generations you come from are unlike any others in history.”
Back at the museum, Ethan had come so close to telling Chloe about Iris and the power—the so-called doma—she had, power he thought was purely mythical. He’d had the opportunity to tell her what her father had said hours before his death, but he’d waited too long. He wouldn’t miss his chance now.
“A few days after the incident with the wolf,” Ethan told Damian, “your dad came up to me during one of our track meets. I was benched because my elbow was still hurting, but I’m pretty sure it was all in my head. I was still a little shaken up.” Ethan caught himself rubbing his elbow even as he spoke. “He asked me how I was doing, how school was, all normal stuff. And then he told me I was the only one who knew his secret, and said he wanted to know if he could tell me one more.”
Lydia wrapped her arm around his waist and squeezed her encouragement into him.
“‘When my kids turn eighteen, tell them this,’” Ethan said robotically, concentrating on reciting the words verbatim. “‘The Moonbow is the warning and the way.’” He paused, then looked away from Damian to the stone. “Then he gave me that. Told me to give it to one of you after you turned eighteen. I’d planned on giving it to Chloe. I guess I thought she’d take it better.” He gave a little laugh as his mother patted his back.
Damian didn’t crack a smile, or react at all, for that matter. He just stared at the checkered linoleum floor, and Ethan couldn’t blame him. In a matter of hours, Damian’s whole world had been turned topsy-turvy. Before, his biggest problem had probably consisted of applying to various programs at the university. Now it was figuring out what it meant to have a supernatural gift, not to mention retrieving his sister from hell.
“Damian,” said Lydia in a soothing, maternal tone as her arm slipped from Ethan’s side. “Why don’t you take a look inside the first amphora, the larger one on the left.”
Damian gave her a distrustful sidelong glare, then stared down at the suitcase as if daring it to come alive again.
Katsaros fetched the amphora for him and set it upright on the table. “Come see,” he said, flicking its side with his finger. Then he bent over and peered into the opening. “Ah, yes,” he said, smiling at whatever was hidden inside.
“Look at it, Damian,” urged Ethan as he glanced at the clock. “We have to go to school.”
Damian frowned. He parted his lips to speak, but then closed them again and scratched his neck. Like Ethan, he seemed to be realizing that returning to the status qu
o wasn’t an option.
“Fine,” he said. Then he strode over, grabbed the amphora by its neck, flipped it over and shook it, sending a huge chunk of charcoal onto the table. “What is it?” he asked, carefully picking it up.
“A scroll,” said Lydia. “It was preserved in amber originally, or so we think, based on the ancillary fragments we found.”
“A scroll? It’s a rock,” argued Damian, holding it out for her to see.
“Take a look at the end,” she said.
Ethan walked over to Damian to examine the object himself. The ends did indeed look like rolled-up pages that had been petrified somehow. “How did it go from papyrus to this?”
“I suspect it has something to do with whatever catastrophe destroyed Ourania two thousand years ago,” said Lydia. “Fire would’ve been involved, that’s for sure.”
“Have you opened it?” asked Damian.
“It would fall apart,” Ethan answered before his mother had a chance.
“I have, actually,” she said.
Ethan took the scroll from Damian’s hand and studied it closely. It looked like a fireplace log, charred and dented, with deep grooves winding around it. It was incredibly dense. He was sure that prying it open would shatter it into thousands of useless pieces.
“In ordinary circumstances,” Lydia continued, “something that old would be too fragile to handle, much less to study with your bare hands. It would require X-ray imaging, a particle accelerator. But its integrity has been preserved. It’s quite remarkable.”
“You’ve never taken this to the lab, or recorded it?” Ethan asked her.
Lydia shook her head.
“Very wise,” Katsaros chimed. “The Fantásmata would love nothing more than to burn it to a crisp.”
“Why?” asked Damian, taking the scroll back from Ethan, his fingers circling the rigid, bark-like curl of the pages.
“It was written by Iris,” said Lydia, “who it seems was one of your ancestors.”