by Diana Tyler
Ethan bowed.
The high priestess chanted with the deep, unctuous voice of a god: “Lykaios Apollo! Lykaios Apollo!”
The rest of the cult followed suit, repeating the mantra over and over as the clouds began to rumble and churn.
This was it, the small window Chloe needed.
Aison was looking up at her, his hazel eyes moist with tears, his body quaking. “Please don’t kill me,” he pleaded.
Chloe closed her eyes and took a breath, inhaling his debilitating fear, the Centaur’s stupor, and the mushrooms that had induced it.
Ourania. Iris. Tycho. Charis. Chloe repeated their names in her head, envisioning their faces and the camp as clearly as she could. Darkness spun around them like a cyclone, enveloping them in the weightless cocoon that would soon shuttle them to safety.
“They’re disappearing!” cried a woman nearby.
But the high priestess didn’t stop chanting. Who was she to question the mysterious ways of Lykaios Apollo?
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
PARADOX
For what felt like eternity, no one said a word. The world around Chloe looked like a dream she was seeing only in her mind’s eye. The trees appeared as an imposing wall of incubi, the wind blowing through them the rush of their steel-tipped wings. The starlings’ song was strident, like Stymphalian birds. Even the tranquil stream trickling behind her was reminiscent of the pitch-dark Styx over which Charon had ferried her.
Her body, which she perceived was human again and fully clothed, felt dazed and disconnected, as though it were trapped back on that mountain, or bound beside the bronze wolf. She dipped her hand in the stream, hoping to be refreshed by its coolness, but the water might as well have been mud. Her tongue was dry, but she couldn’t bring herself to drink.
“Thank Duna!”
Chloe squinted at two forms as they passed through the shadowy wall of demons. Trees, Chloe told herself. You’re back in Ourania. You’re in a forest.
“Chloe?” It was Iris’s voice. “Chloe, can you hear me?”
As Iris came closer, Chloe’s vision sharpened around her auburn hair. Her face faded into focus. Chloe smiled. “It’s good to see you.”
“And you.” Iris took her hands in hers and kissed them, then pulled a wineskin from her sack. “Drink up. You’ll feel better soon.”
On Chloe’s right, the Centaur lay sprawled on his back, staring at the sky like an idiot high on nirvána, a psychoactive powder prescribed for overanxious adults. Next to him was Aison, who was sitting in a ball, his knees pulled into his chest, his spindly arms trembling atop them. He glanced at Chloe a few times, but still looked too traumatized to speak. They all looked too traumatized to speak.
“Is that…” began Tycho, looking at Aison.
Chloe nodded. “We went back to the Lycaea Festival. The first Lycaea Festival.”
“You did what?”
“Please don’t be angry, Tycho.” Chloe turned to Aison. An abandoned puppy couldn’t have looked more pitiful. “We got back here just before they were going to kill him as a sacrifice to Apollo.”
“You could’ve been killed,” Tycho shouted. “You all could’ve been killed.”
Iris watched her husband as he paced back and forth, settling down a little more with every step. “Now’s not the time, Tycho. They’re alive. Aison is alive. Let’s praise Duna for that.”
Tycho stopped, sighing loudly. “Anyone care to tell me why the Centaur looks as drunk as blazes?”
“It’s a long story,” said Ethan. “They made him go into the temple and swear some kind of oath. They must’ve drugged him while he was in there.”
“Mushrooms,” Chloe added. “I smelled them on him while I was the wolf. Aren’t they hallucinogenic?”
“Some kinds are,” replied Ethan.
They both looked down at the Centaur. His glassy gaze bounced from one part of the sky to another, following some unknowable hallucination.
“Please tell me you have a second doma and you weren’t turned into a Lycaean,” Iris said to Chloe.
“I ate a pomegranate seed,” she answered flatly. It had been one of the more normal parts of her day.
Tycho crouched next to the stream and splashed water onto his face, shaking his head in disbelief as it ran down his neck, darkening his light-blue tunic. “And where exactly did you get a seed that turns one into a wolf?”
“Like I said,” said Ethan, “it’s a long story.”
“Over dinner,” he said, “I want to hear it.”
Ethan nodded.
Tycho cupped his hands in the water and took a long drink.
Ethan walked over to Aison and sat beside him, making sure there was plenty of space between them so Aison wouldn’t be startled. “How’s your hand?” he said.
Aison looked down at the bandage.
“They put something in it, didn’t they?” Ethan said.
“How do you know that?” Aison’s eyes flashed to Chloe, then all around him as a fresh wave of fear washed over his face.
“Take it easy,” said Ethan. “You’re safe now. We’re not Pythonians.”
“Then who in Hades are you?” Aison winced as he gripped his hand.
“We’re Ashers,” said Iris. “At least, Chloe and I are.” She put her arm around Chloe’s shoulder. “As well as my daughter and Chloe’s brother.”
“Where are they?” Chloe asked, looking through the trees as the last nightmarish shadow fell away from them, revealing their benign green leaves. “Are they back at camp?”
Neither Tycho nor Iris spoke for several seconds. The Centaur hummed to the infernal rhythm of the Lycaean drums.
“Damian’s gone missing again,” said Iris. “Charis is out looking for him, but her doma won’t last much longer.” She squeezed Chloe’s shoulder.
Chloe chewed on her lip to keep from yelling. Why was Damian acting out like this, leaving the safety of the wall a second time without telling anyone? Did he have a death wish? Was he hiding somewhere close by, waiting for her to go back to Cave One again so he could stop their parents’ death? Or was he just trying to infuriate her? If so, he was definitely succeeding.
“Ashers,” Aison said, looking warily at Iris and Chloe. “My uncle says you’re Pythonian-bred menaces. He says you were created to destroy the memory of Duna by hoarding glory for yourselves.”
“I wouldn’t believe everything your uncle says,” said Tycho. “The high priest belongs in the temple the way a horse belongs in a chariot’s carriage.”
“How do you know my uncle is the high priest?”
“Because we’ve met you before,” said Chloe. “My Python-bred doma allows me to travel back in time. Long story short, if it weren’t for us you’d be an immortal shapeshifter living two thousand years from now, hunting down Ashers so they won’t rise up and restore the memory of Duna to our world. Despite what your uncle told you.”
“And for the record,” Ethan said, “in a different timeline the chip in your hand is the cause of your death.”
Aison shifted uncomfortably as he picked at the bandage. “That’s impossible. Becoming a Lycaean grants immortality.”
“Maybe if you stay loyal,” Chloe answered wryly.
Aison carefully unwrapped the linen, revealing a green goopy poultice covering the chip. “I suppose I should thank you for saving me, then.” He pushed the mass of herbs until the round wound was visible.
“If you wanted saving, sure,” said Chloe, finally feeling like herself as she took a swig from the wineskin.
“I never wanted to be a Pythonian. I hope my uncle doesn’t think so. They fooled me in Limén. A gang of centaurs said they had work for me in a quarry.” Grimacing, Aison scraped around inside the hole and pulled out the chip. “I guess you know what happened after that.”
“I don’t know,” Iris said, tears welling in her eyes.
“They kidnapped me and hauled me off to Mount Lykaion.” Aison jammed the heel of his left hand into his right, matt
ing down the poultice. “To be sacrificed.”
Iris’s tears broke like water through a dam. “I’m so terribly sorry.”
Aison shook his head and gave a nervous smile. “I was a fool to leave Eirene in the first place. I only wanted to see the world.”
Chloe knew just how he felt. Before her eighteenth birthday, before her doma had changed everything, she, too, had dreamed of an unbridled, unrestricted exploration of Petros. She wanted to escape her aunt and uncle who, while not strict or abusive, were so aloof that she and Damian could only interpret their indifference toward them as hatred. She had wanted to escape Damian, who outshone her in every way and always seemed resentful that they were related. She wanted to escape the colony of Eirene and see what the other three were like, and if any other lands lay beyond them.
But, like every other Petrodian confined to their colony of birth, exploring anything outside of school and study was out of the question. She had turned to her cartoons, to Rhoda and to Farley the dragon, and lived vicariously through their adventures, which were boundless and as free as the birds. Never in a million years could Chloe have imagined that one day she would indeed become an explorer, and that the people and things she saw would never be believed back home.
But now, if she were to be honest with herself, there was much she wished she couldn’t see.
“Just before you were killed,” Ethan said to Aison, “you told us that the microchip holds information about you.”
“Aye.” Aison turned the chip over and handed it to Ethan. “Believe it or not, the bloody thing’s cursed. My name, where I came from, the day I was sacrificed—or supposed to be—is all encoded by some godforsaken magic.”
“Or technology,” said Chloe. “It’s a tracking device, too. It has to be. That explains how the Pythonians knew you died here.”
“We’d be wise to get rid of it,” Iris said. “You heard what Archelaos said about it.”
Aison crossed his legs and leaned over them, his worried face gaunt with exhaustion. Chloe found it hard to believe this was the same person she had met on the beach. He was childlike now, fragile and innocent; still a naïve young man who’d only wished to see the world. It was as if the sacrifice, or perhaps the chip itself, had changed his demeanor entirely into the volatile shapeshifter she’d encountered.
“What did my uncle say?” Aison asked.
“That it might harm us if we stayed too close to it,” said Tycho, staring at the chip in Ethan’s hand.
“He feared you might have been disingenuous about your reason for coming here with Chloe,” said Ethan. “He said that you leaving the chip with us after you died was a trap. So, after all of us had voted on whether or not to keep it with us, he took it back with him to the temple.”
Aison shook his head in frustration. “That isn’t true. I was there when they implanted the seal in my hand. The incantation said nothing that could be even remotely construed as a death curse, not on myself or anybody else. Besides that, curses don’t exist.”
“So curses don’t exist, but men who can turn into immortal wolves do?” said Chloe.
Aison stood up and scanned his surroundings. “Where is my body buried?”
Ethan put the chip in his satchel. “Nowhere,” he said. “You didn’t really die, remember? It’s a paradox thing.”
“I still know it wasn’t the chip that killed me.” Aison looked to each one of them, as if seeking their affirmation.
“There’s no better explanation,” Iris said. “Your symptoms came on so suddenly—”
“A weapon is a perfectly reasonable explanation,” Aison interjected. “Did you check my body to see if perhaps an arrow had pierced me?”
“There was no weapon,” said Tycho, stirring the water with a stick. “Not one we could see, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Aison asked. “What sort of weapon is invisible?”
“Poison,” Tycho replied. He stood and flung the stick into the stream. “But that doesn’t make any sense either.”
Just then, the sound of a woman crying mingled with the wind and the starlings.
“Charis?” said Iris, eyes frantically searching the trees.
In an instant, Charis appeared among them, sniffling and dabbing her cheeks with the hem of her cloak.
“Charis, what’s wrong?” Tycho said, embracing her.
“Artemis,” she said softly. “She’s dead.” Her arms fell to her side as she sobbed into her father’s shoulder.
“How?” Ethan asked. “She was fine yesterday.”
Charis lifted her head and stood there silently, breathless for half a minute as she waited for her sobs to abate. “I found her in Chloe’s tent beside the sack of fruit you gave her, Mama. It must have poisoned her.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
POISON
Chloe’s heart beat like the Pythonian drums, pounding rapidly, furiously, louder and faster as the revelation hit her: she’d given Aison an orange back on the beach. She was the one responsible for killing him.
“I poisoned Aison.” She felt like she was reciting the words of an oral essay for school, perhaps a line from a letter or an ancient play. They couldn’t possibly belong to her.
“Chloe, that’s impossible,” said Ethan. “We were with you the whole time. You didn’t give him anything.”
“I gave him an orange.” She looked at Aison. His was the only face not stricken by surprise. “When I met him on the beach back in time. I threw it at him as a distraction.”
Aison lowered his head and looked away in shame.
“I thought he was going to attack me. I’m so sorry, Aison,” she said.
Aison swallowed hard, then picked up a stone and sent it skipping across the stream. “It isn’t your fault,” he said. “You were defending yourself, for one thing. And you didn’t know an orange would kill me, for another.”
“He’s right,” said Tycho, “in more than one regard.” He walked over to Aison and held out his hand. “The seal isn’t cursed. And, praise Duna, neither are you.”
Aison smiled, the first real smile Chloe had seen him give, and shook Tycho’s hand. “Praise him, indeed.”
Iris stood and went to Charis, wrapping a consoling arm around her waist. “Don’t you worry about Aison,” she whispered. “He isn’t a wolf anymore.”
Charis looked over her shoulder at Aison. “If the seal doesn’t kill people, then why did you want Chloe to have it?”
Aison drew a deep breath, fingering the wolf-shaped brooch at his shoulder. “The only thing I know about my seal is what I’ve told you. It identifies who I am, or rather, what I was supposed to be.”
“You told us it identifies all the thousands of Lycaeans who came after you, too,” said Chloe.
“Thousands?” Aison shuddered.
“Aye,” Tycho said. “One every year at the Lycaea Festival. They celebrated the sixth last evening.”
Aison wrapped the bandage around his hand. “Because I was the first, perhaps the seal given to me is unique. Perhaps it has a dual purpose.”
“And I have a hunch Archelaos knows what that purpose is,” said Chloe.
With an agonizing groan, the Centaur rolled over and got to his hands and knees. His normally tanned skin took on a greenish tint as he started to perspire. “I feel like I’m going to…”
“Vomit?” said Tycho.
The Centaur shook his head. “No. The other end.” He jumped up and bolted into the trees as everyone struggled to hold in their laughter.
When he was out of sight, Chloe belly laughed for the first time in what felt like years. Her laughter spread to Charis and Ethan; theirs transferred to Iris and Tycho, and finally Aison was infected by it, chortling so hard he cried and was sent to his knees.
The Centaur reappeared a few minutes later, pressing a finger into his sweat-bedewed forehead. “I had the strangest, most terrifying dream,” he said. Then, startled by something unseen, he jerked and glanced around the woods, eyeing the foliage, stream,
and cloud-streaked sky above him with suspicion. “Where are they?”
“Where are what?” Iris asked. “Here, drink some water. It’ll help your headache.” She took the wineskin from Chloe and handed it to him.
“Where are Zeus and Cronus? I saw them a few minutes ago.” The Centaur searched their faces, each one still flushed from laughter. “Why do you all look at me as though I’m some grog-besotted sap? I saw them. Ferocious men as big as mountains.” He gestured toward the brook. “They’d drain this brook with a single gulp.”
“You were drugged,” said Tycho, “with ceremonial mushrooms at the Lycaea Festival. You went there with Chloe and Ethan. Do you remember?”
The Centaur twisted his mouth and took a swig from the wineskin. “So it wasn’t a dream.”
“Everything up until the point you got drugged was real,” said Chloe. She paused, envisioning the moment he’d spoken up at the ceremony, endangering not only him, but Ethan and herself as well. “Why did you do it?”
The Centaur hung his head. He knew exactly what she was talking about.
Tycho paced toward the Centaur. “Would you mind telling us what, precisely, you did?”
“Save your breath,” Chloe said to the Centaur. “Your throat’s probably sore from all the talking you did earlier.”
“Back your oars, Miss Chloe,” the Centaur said, his olive complexion returning.
“Why? I’m only going to tell them that you presented yourself to the high priestess—a lovely lady, might I add, full of hospitality—and would have slit Aison’s throat yourself had I not eaten the seed and saved all our hides.”
The Centaur stomped his hoof. “You’ve not been in our world one week and yet you still have such arrogance. You may be an Asher, my lady, but that doesn’t make you omniscient. You cannot rightly judge everything, least of all my motives.”
“Make your defense,” Tycho said to the Centaur. “You must see how rash your actions seem to the rest of us. We’re not accusing you of treachery, or even imprudence. Please enlighten us so we may understand your true intentions.”