The Petros Chronicles Boxset

by Diana Tyler

  “You want to help us?” Leto asked.

  The surprise on her face made Damian wonder if anyone besides Hermes had ever shown her kindness.

  “This is a thank-you to you, Hermes,” he said, “for what you did for us in the future.” As Damian reached out to take their hands, a numbing wind swept through them, so strong it nearly knocked them to the ground.

  “What was that?” Damian looked around. Sitting three feet in front of him was a round block of ice the size of his floor mirror back home. Around it pulsated a silvery orb from which tinkling music emanated.

  “The pýli,” rasped Hermes, his voice hoarse from the cold, dry air. “What in Zeus’ name is it doing out here?”

  “In Duna’s name, it’s here because he deemed it be.”

  Damian’s wind-stung eyes darted in all directions in search of the female speaker until, finally, he noticed not a person, but an iridescent sphere floating near the ice. “Look.” He pointed to it. “How many goddesses live out here?”

  The sphere expanded to twice its size then turned to sapphire blue. “I am not a goddess,” it declared. “Chione is my name. I am a messenger, as Hermes is, except that I serve the true god. The only god.” The sphere glimmered as it grew once again, stretching to the length of a human.

  “Your father Poseidon has surely missed you all these years,” said Hermes, a wry smile on his face. “No doubt he dreams each night of his daughter and the endless snow that follows her.”

  “Yes, as Maia above misses you,” Chione said. “The chasm between heaven and Hades is no greater than the one in her heart, Hermes.”

  Hermes’ smile vanished. “What have you to do with the Cyclopes’ machine?”

  Chione floated to the ice and, resting upon it, thawed it to reveal a bronze, clock-like device surrounded by dark wood. It was sleek and streamlined, as modern-looking as anything Damian had ever seen.

  “Mnemosyne entrusted it to me ages ago.” The dial in the center of the pýli shimmered as Chione spoke. “She was wise enough to know that her proximity to Hades’ void was no coincidence. It was only a matter of time before some curious soul came hunting for it.”

  The fire roared behind them as though desperate to pulverize the snow and everything on it. Chione rose higher into the air and extended a sinewy arm of blue light toward the cave. With a flick of her finger, the fire went out, the flames replaced by opaque layers of ice. This only angered Apollo further. The mountain quaked as the volcano beyond them expelled black smoke like a factory chimney.

  “Um, maybe we should take this conversation elsewhere,” said Damian.

  “Peace, Damian,” Chione said, her voice like the metallic chime of a harp. “You mustn’t bow before Apollo’s tantrums. He can kick and he can scream, but he cannot bring peril to Petros’s land.”

  Damian waited for Hermes to refute her claim, but he kept silent, eyes fixed upon the machine as though hypnotized.

  “Would you like to see what you came for?” Chione said, her glowing arm now stroking the top of the pýli.

  Leto linked her arm with Hermes’ and whispered into his ear. Damian didn’t dare tell her it was useless to try and keep secrets from the All-Powerful’s messenger.

  “I am weary of running,” Hermes said, making no effort to conceal his response. “Running to and fro through Petros. Running through the portals to do my brothers’ bidding. Running from the omnipotent eye of the All-Powerful, who created those who endeavor in vain to destroy him.”

  He removed his cap and tapped it twice with his wand, transforming it into a gold tiara. Leto’s gray eyes turned the same color as the tiara elevated past her face and rested atop her head.

  “Sometimes, my flower,” Hermes said, “I pray to him.”

  Leto’s head tilted left, her expression a resounding question mark.

  “I ask that you would love me not for the power you think I possess but for my heart,” Hermes said. “That is to say, what’s left of it.”

  Leto’s eyebrows arched as she felt the tiara shrinking. She unhooked her arm from Hermes’ and slid off the crown, tears springing to her eyes as it shriveled and tarnished, turning into a tangled knot of common weeds.

  “Why are you so cruel, Hermes?” She glanced at Damian. “Damian was right about you, I’m just a pawn.” She flung the tiara into Hermes’ chest. “From the night you appeared to me at Ēlektōr, your mission has been to win my loyalty through grandiloquent speeches and intoxicating promises of power.”

  Damian noticed that the phantasmal bobbing ball called Chione was fading. If she had eyes beneath that blue facade, they were probably rolling. How many thousands of lovers’ arguments had she been privy to since the dawn of man, or the dawn of immortals, for that matter? Damian was willing to bet she could predict their words verbatim before they spoke them.

  “We made pawns of each other,” Hermes said, lifting a hand to Leto’s cheek.

  Leto recoiled. “You are the most pathetic creature.” Her words dripped out slowly behind gritted teeth, each one more vindictive than the last. “You are lower than a creature. You are scum.” She stepped toward him, pressing a finger into his chest. “You are excrement. If I were Apollo, I’d have buried you in the vilest dump of hell the second I had the chance.”

  Hermes blinked rapidly and staggered back, absorbing her verbal blows as if they were delivered on the ends of spears.

  Damian looked away, considering whether he should create some distance between himself and the bickering couple. He knew that if he’d been behaving rationally, he would take advantage of their squabble by escaping while he had the chance. But for reasons he couldn’t explain to himself, he wanted to stay. And something, perhaps his conscience or a benevolent inner voice, was telling him that he should.

  “I cannot deny that I deserve such vitriol,” said Hermes when he recovered his breath. “The anguish it causes me, like a javelin through the heart, testifies to my love for you. There was a time, I admit, when your words touched me like a feather. They were immaterial, forgettable…” He paused, and with caution, took her hands. “But I do love you, Leto. As sure as the snow falls in this blighted hinterland, I love you.”

  Leto shook her hands free and jerked her chin at Damian. “Where am I in the future, Damian? In your interactions with this silver-tongued cretin, did he ever make mention of his desert flower?”

  Damian glanced at Hermes. He didn’t want to tell her the truth: that he’d never heard of Leto before he traveled back here, not from Hermes and not from his teachers.

  “Your silence answers plainly.” Leto rested her cold eyes back on Hermes. “Once you used me for your own clandestine purposes, you discarded me like scraps for the hellhound.”

  Chione rushed between them, blocking their view of one another should Leto’s doma rise up against Hermes’ wand. “Stop this nonsense,” she said.

  Leto and Hermes turned away, the former pouting and the latter sulking like a chided child.

  “The future is yours to see. That’s why I have been sent.” Chione pointed at the machine still nestled in the snow. Damian, for one, wanted to see what it could do.

  “We came here,” Leto said, in a low, composed tone that belied her temper, “to put Hermes’ nerves at ease.” She dug the toe of her boot into the ground and kicked snow into the air. “But you always knew what the future held, Hermes, because you knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that your heart will be as black and villainous in two thousand years as it was the day you were cast from heaven.”

  Leto swept her arms up and over her head, summoning the winter winds to her side. Chione leapt in front of the pýli, another arm appearing as she stretched herself in front of it.

  “I won’t touch your precious pýli,” Leto shouted to Hermes as the winds propelled her above the plain. “Nor shall I touch a hair on your head, my darling, as long as you stay out of my way.”

  Then, increasing the winds with a spin of her finger, she flew down and wrapped her arms arou
nd Damian’s chest. “Tell the gods you serve to mind their own affairs,” she barked at Hermes over her shoulder.

  Damian wriggled and squirmed, he even bit the side of Leto’s arm, but she continued to fly. Behind them, blue veins of lightning cut through the sky, rendering any pursuit impossible.

  “I’ve had enough of gods and Ashers,” she whispered.

  “So this is the part where you make me suffer until I ‘pine for the Styx,’ right?” Damian squeezed his eyes shut as the thunder boomed beside him.

  “This is the part where you help me.”

  “Help you do what?”

  “Become mightier than the gods.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  REFLECTION

  May I come in?”

  Chloe finished securing her chiton to her shoulders. She’d started to pick off all the dog hair Artemis had left behind while napping on it, but stopped when her tears blurred her vision. She wiped her face and turned toward the door of the tent. “Sure.”

  “You’re ancient-looking again,” Ethan said with a smile.

  “I’m going to assume you’re talking about my outfit.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He laughed, realizing his mistake. “You don’t look ancient. You look fine.”

  Chloe bit her lip to keep from looking disappointed. What if violet wasn’t her color? What if her hair looked awful in a bun? There were no mirrors around to show what she looked like, and for once in her life she actually wanted to know.

  “It’s late. Why aren’t you in bed?” she asked, before the silence became even more awkward.

  “Same reason no one else is.” Ethan looked outside, to where one campfire was still burning bright. “We want to know what you’re planning.”

  “I would’ve thought that was obvious.” Chloe crossed the tent, picked up the hidesack, which was now only half full, and slung it over her shoulder. “I’m going to find my brother. Did they send you in here to talk me out of it?”

  “Iris and Tycho did, yes.” Ethan drew the tent flaps together. “But I’m not going to try.”

  Chloe took a breath. She’d been preparing to give him an impassioned spiel about blood being thicker than water. After that, she was going to tell him she was willing to take the risk because she’d never be able to live with herself if she didn’t. But instead, Ethan was looking at her somberly, as if he already knew all of that.

  “I know it won’t do any good,” he continued. “I’m sure Mania will be a breeze after dealing with Hades.”

  Chloe couldn’t help but burst out laughing at his unintended joke.

  “What? What’d I say?” he asked.

  Chloe leaned against the back of the settle. “Mania will be a breeze. And thunder, and lightning, and maybe some hail and a snow flurry or two.”

  “And you’re not intimidated by any of that?” he asked, too preoccupied to be amused.

  “I would rather Mania’s doma be sheep shearing, but like you said, I’ve lived through worse.”

  Ethan sighed and stepped into the center of the tent. Maybe it was just shadows from the oil lamps falling across his face, but Chloe thought he looked tired, like he hadn’t slept in days. She remembered the first few nights after her parents had died, and how she’d counted the stars to try and lull herself to sleep. The one time it had worked, she’d been so overcome with renewed grief when she woke that she avoided sleep for nearly a week until the doctor made her take a pill. Sleeping had made their deaths feel like a bad dream; it was a terrible trick of her unconscious, one that took months to escape.

  “Try to rest, Ethan. I’ll be fine.” She gave her most convincing close-lipped smile, but she could see it did nothing to reassure him. “Really. Don’t worry about me.”

  “We both know that’s not going to happen.”

  “What, the-me-being-fine part, or the you-not-worrying-about-me part?”

  “The me-not-worrying part.”

  Chloe felt her face grow warm as he came closer.

  “I just lost my parents,” he said. “I’m not going to sit on my hands while you go out there and face the weather monster.”

  Chloe laughed. “She doesn’t sound so scary when you call her that.”

  Ethan cracked a smile, then reached out and placed his hand on hers, brushing the top of it with his thumb. “I’m serious. I walked away when I saw you with Orpheus that day at the café because I had no clue who he was. But I know everything now. Well, almost everything. And I’m not walking away.”

  Chloe relived the moments she had stood on the sandbar at Lake Thyra, watching the portal to Hades appear as a silver mist on its surface. She’d been too enthralled by Orpheus’s lyre-playing to realize what she was stepping into.

  An idea hit her. “Orpheus…” she whispered.

  Ethan pulled his hand away. “Orpheus? What about him?”

  “His power. I watched him hypnotize a witch who was seconds away from turning me into an animal. For life. I know it could work against Mania.”

  Ethan sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “It’s a good theory, but there’s a slight problem: you can’t travel forward in time. And even if you could, there’s no guarantee Orpheus would believe you or want to help you.”

  “I don’t have to travel to our time. I can go to his time and bring him here.”

  “But there’s still the other part of the problem. He’ll have no reason to believe you.”

  A breeze blew through the door and the air suddenly got colder, sending chills up Chloe’s arms. Either a cold front had just rolled in, or an immortal was in their midst. She had a hunch she knew which it was. She looked at Ethan. “Hermes?”

  Ethan drew his sword and held it before him with both hands.

  “Sheathe your sword,” came Hermes’ voice, as mellow and deceptively suave as ever. “I come here peacefully with but one request: that you accept my aid in the matter of the poet Orpheus.”

  He appeared in the center of the tent, holding his golden staff at his side. With a snap of his fingers it morphed into an olive branch. He held it out to Chloe. “Take my wand if you suspect my intentions are foul.”

  Chloe snatched the branch from him and held it behind her back. “I don’t suspect. I know. The last time you and I met, you picked me up at the gates of Hades and dropped me off in the Fields of Asphodel.”

  Hermes didn’t laugh or grin or wink, as she’d known him to do in the past. On the contrary, he regarded her with eyes as tired as Ethan’s, and equally sincere. “And according to your brother, I betrayed Hades.”

  Chloe took a step toward him, half tempted to wield the wand and see what it would do. “Where is he? Where’s my brother?” she demanded, her anger brimming from deep inside her chest.

  “With Leto.” Hermes’ eye was on the branch as it slowly changed back to solid gold. “Or Mania, as she’s affectionately known. She took Damian during our excursion to acquire this.” He slipped a large leather sack from his shoulder and pulled out a bronze clock encased in a wooden box.

  “I don’t care about a dumb clock. Where did she take him?”

  Hermes shrugged. “To her home west of here, perhaps. But then, all of Petros is hers to hide in. And no one, not even I, can approach her without first confronting her fury.”

  Chloe and Ethan exchanged glances. Despite her efforts to see past what was surely a ruse, Chloe couldn’t help feeling that Hermes was going against his nature and being honest for once. There was just one more thing she wanted from him before she let him explain why he was there.

  “Take off your sandals,” she said, pointing the wand at him, “and toss them over there.”

  “You’ve leveled the playing field,” said Hermes, throwing them onto the mat. “A wise strategy. But I told you, I haven’t come here to play games.”

  “Does that thing have snow on it?” Ethan asked, pointing at the clock. It was covered in white powder.

  “Aye. It’s been kept safe at Mount Othrys since the dawn of time as you know it.”


  “What does it do?” Chloe asked. “What does it have to do with Orpheus?”

  Hermes beckoned her with his finger. “I’ll show you.” He turned the clock around, revealing a small black circle the size of a drachma. “Look and see.”

  “You must think I’m a special kind of stupid,” said Chloe.

  Hermes went to the table and set the clock on the edge. “Would it put you at ease if I showed you how the mechanism works?”

  “Maybe,” Chloe replied.

  “Very well.” Hermes knelt down, took off his cap and pressed his right eye against the circle. Nothing happened.

  “Maybe snow got inside the gears,” said Ethan, with his usual dry wit.

  A muted light spread against the wall behind the table. Small gray figures curled up from the bottom like shadow puppets stretching to life. There was the sound of faint voices as the figures, now grown and consuming two-thirds of the gossamer-like screen, began to move. And then, as if the light were a TV monitor that had just been switched on, the shadows became suffused with color and a full background bloomed into view behind them.

  A tall mountain loomed in the middle, overlooking scores of soldiers and horses. Three giant creatures five times the size of the Centaur, with dozens of heads sprouting out of their necks and twice as many hands, tore chunks of rock from the earth as if they were flowers and flung them at the opposing ranks; their targeted shields splintered and fell underfoot. The bodies, now exposed, became pincushions for falling arrows.

  Chloe lifted her eyes to the top of the screen, where a silver chariot led by two black steeds raced through the low-hanging clouds. The driver, his hair and panoply gleaming gold, was the ruthless archer. Though she’d never seen him before, she knew instinctively that this was Apollo.

  “What’s this?” she asked Hermes.

  He lifted his arm and pointed at the right side of the screen. Three Cyclopes were marching onto the field. Hermes, clad in armor, floated over their heads, a red guidon flapping at the end of his wand. Above him, dark clouds spun in circles, clashing against one another, creating thunder so loud it shook the mountain and made even the giants jump.