by Jeff Gunhus
I appreciated its beauty. I just expected something more than a pile of rocks roped off from the public.
As we got closer, I could make out the layout of the old temple from the ruins. It looked like the temple had two distinct layers, an outer wall of pillars and a much smaller circle of pillars in the center. I imagined that either walls or cloth had closed off access to the inner circle for everyone except the priests and whoever wanted advice from the Oracle. Sounds impressive except that the whole thing was about the size of one of my classrooms back at Sunnyvale Middle School.
“It’s kinda tiny,” T-Rex said as if reading my thoughts.
“But it was built over two thousand years ago,” Will said. “Think about it. This was built before Julius Caesar. Before the Coliseum in Rome. I think it’s pretty cool.”
“I’ll give you that it’s cool; I’m just not sure what we’re supposed to find here,” I said.
“The dragon legend might be something,” Daniel said. “Since there’s a Creach lair around here, maybe we have to prove ourselves in battle?”
I shuddered at the thought of having to face dragons again. Two of them had attacked the Monster Hunter Academy, and I’d gotten up close and personal with them before it was over.
“Come on, let’s get closer,” I said.
We made our way through the crowd of tourists toward the temple ruins. As we approached, the Templar Ring on my finger turned warm and began to quiver slightly. I clutched my hand in a fist and glanced around, expecting to see some kind of imminent attack.
Nothing.
“What’s wrong?” Will whispered, picking up on my anxiety.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I just feel like something big is nearby.”
“I don’t see anything,” Will said.
“Something wrong?” Daniel asked, doubling back from in front of us.
“Jack senses something,” Will said.
Daniel nodded. Given our history, that was enough for him to go on high alert without asking any more questions. “Do you have a direction?” he asked.
I focused, feeling the ring turn even warmer in my hand. But I couldn’t lock in on anything. The presence seemed to exist everywhere at once. Its intention wasn’t clear either. It wasn’t good or evil. But not neutral either. It seemed both good and evil at the same time, able and willing to be both depending on… depending on what? My weird senses couldn’t answer that part of the puzzle.
A cry came from our left. In our heightened state of readiness, all four of us spun toward the sound, hands on our weapons.
A few of the German tourists were yelling, but one man in particular was raising a fuss. Barrel-chested and square-jawed, the big man looked like he belonged on a poster for the German Olympic wrestling team. He waved one hand in the air wildly to get someone’s attention while the other hand wrapped around a little girl’s wrist.
I recognized her. It was the same girl we’d seen begging from the tourists when they first got off the bus on the village below. I didn’t need to understand German to guess that she’d gone a little farther than asking for money. My guess was that the big German had caught her trying to pick his pocket.
“He’s calling for the police,” Daniel said, confirming my hunch. “Says the girl stole his wallet. Heads up, guys. This might just be a diversion from the real attack.”
The way the girl struggled against the big man, trying desperately to free her arm from his massive hand, I didn’t think she’d staged it. Suddenly, the big German howled in pain as the girl kicked him hard in the shin. He flung her aside as if she’d bitten him.
She was so light that she flew through the air, hit the ground, and rolled onto the rocks. But with the grace of a hunter, she sprang to her feet in one smooth motion and broke into a run. Right toward us.
The big German, his face so red with anger that it was almost purple, got his wits about him and chased after her. He bellowed German words that would probably have made me blush if they were in English.
I spotted four security guards closing in from either side, coordinating with their walkie-talkies.
The little girl ran right past us without giving us even a look. She ducked under the ropes keeping the tourists from climbing directly on the ruins of the temple and made a beeline for the temple itself.
The security guards and the German converged on the spot from different directions, surrounding her. She climbed the rocks and stood in the center of the circular temple. The guards yelled at her in Greek, waving her to come out. The German shouted the same way, injecting some broken English into the mix.
“Come… girl… out…,” he shouted.
The security guards ducked under the ropes and approached the girl in a tightening circle, their arms out as if cornering a wild beast. By the look in the young girl’s eyes, they pretty much were doing just that.
I wondered what could have happened to the girl to put her in this position. Where were her parents? Why was she begging on the street?
I suddenly had a powerful image of Eva as a kid, one hand missing and wrapped in bandages, begging for money, relying on the kindness of strangers to survive. Without the Black Guard, she might have spent her entire life that way.
In a coordinated move, the security guards closed in on the girl at once. I half-expected her to squirt out from the huddle of guards like in the cartoons and run away, laughing. But she didn’t. Despite her kicking and scratching, the guards had her firmly in control.
The German cheered, and his friends who had gathered around him cheered along with him.
The guards walked the girl over to the German and held her in front of him. We pushed our way closer so we could hear. The guards spoke first in Greek, but the German just looked at them blankly.
“Speak English?” the guard asked.
“A little English,” the German said. “I want my money back.”
The girl spit at the German. “I didn’t take your money,” she said.
The guards gripped her roughly, speaking harshly in Greek. She replied back, venom in her voice.
“She says she didn’t take anything from you,” the guard said. “That she only asks; she doesn’t take.”
“Forty euros missing. My pocket. Gone,” the German said. “She little thief.”
The guards talked among themselves. One brought out a pair of handcuffs and readied them. The girl’s eyes went wide at seeing them, and she struggled to get away.
I dug into my pocket and brought out my wallet. Opening it, I counted out the rest of our money. It only came to fifty euros.
“We need that,” Daniel hissed.
“Not as much as she does,” I said. I stepped forward. “Here,” I called. “I’ll pay the forty euros. Just let her go.”
The crowd spun my direction, and I regretted making a scene. After all, we were supposed to be lying low. I should have waited until they led the girl away from the other tourists before making my offer. But the look of fear in the girl’s eyes was too much to bear. They reminded me too much of Eva’s.
The guards looked confused, so I stepped up and pushed the money in the big German’s hands. “Here, there’s your money. Now there’s no harm done.”
The German looked embarrassed. He held the money at first like it was dirty, but he got over that quickly. He folded the bills and stuffed them into his pocket.
“Now tell them to let her go,” I said.
The German hesitated and then nodded at the guards. “It’s okay. No problem.”
The guards let the girl go. The second they did, she sprinted away like a rabbit being chased by a hawk without once looking back.
“So much for thank you,” Daniel muttered.
I watched the girl dart through the ruins until she disappeared. Something told me I would see her again. It turned out my feeling was right – I just didn’t know how soon.
Chapter 9
The ruins at Delphi were a bust. We did everything we could to get close to the tem
ple, but after the whole episode with the girl, the guards watched us too close. None of us thought we were missing much though. The ropes allowed us to get right up the edge of the stones outlining the old exterior wall. From there, we could see into the inner chamber, if you could call it that. It was just an open area with five worn down pillars. There were no inscriptions. No magical hole in the ground. If something was supposed to happen here, it was taking its time.
We decided to go back to the town, have a bite to eat, and wait until dark to sneak back onto the site to get a better look around without the guards. The town was set for the tourists with menus in English and ridiculously high prices for everything. We walked a couple of blocks away from the town center and found a local place where the food smelled twice as good and the prices were half of the tourist traps’. Since we were considerably poorer than we’d been this morning, I was happy we’d found something cheap.
“What do you think?” Daniel asked after the waiter put plates of fresh grilled fish in front of us.
“I think it looks great,” T-Rex said excitedly. “The lemon garnish is perfect. Smells like it was grilled over a real charcoal fire. Ummm… tastes great too.”
“That’s not what I was talking about,” Daniel said, shooting me a look. “What’s the plan?”
“I thought we agreed to head back up there tonight,” Will said.
“Based on what we saw today, anyone here think those ruins are going to suddenly reveal something magical to us tonight?” Daniel said.
Will took up my defense. “Maybe. We don’t know, do we?”
“That place has been totally picked over by tourists,” Daniel argued. “I don’t know how anything could be hidden up there.”
“I felt something when we first went up there.” I said, lifting up the Templar ring. “This got warm and started to vibrate.”
This quieted them down a little. None of us, including myself, knew how the Templar ring worked, but we respected and feared its power. The silence was broken only by the sounds of T-Rex scarfing down his food.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Daniel asked.
“Because it disappeared when we got there,” I explained. “We walked around the entire site like three times, and it never came back.”
“But it sensed something,” Will added.
Daniel looked unimpressed. “Could have been a Creach nearby. Or something that happened miles from here that set it off.”
I couldn’t really argue either way. I had no more idea how the ring worked than the other guys did. It had come alive only a few times, and that had been in life and death moments. This was the first time it had vibrated. I didn’t know how to interpret what that meant.
“You guys have to try this fish. It’s awesome,” T-Rex said with a mouth full of food. He pointed to my plate. “Are you gonna finish that?”
I pushed my half-eaten plate toward him. “Go ahead, buddy. I’m going to the bathroom.”
I left them behind and heard Will and Daniel get into a heated discussion of whether we were wasting our time in Delphi. I couldn’t help but feel like Daniel might be right.
The bathroom was in the far back of the restaurant, opening to the alley behind the building. As I walked back out of the room, drying my hands with a paper towel, I saw the little girl from the ruins run by at a full sprint. Two teenage boys chased her, calling out to her in Greek, laughing and taunting her. I could tell by their tone that this wasn’t a game. Going back to Dirk Riggle at Sunnyvale Middle School, I really hated bullies. I ran after them into the ally.
The backside of the buildings weren’t nearly as nice as the fronts the tourists saw. Paint peeled from the walls. Telephone and power lines crisscrossed between rooftops like cobwebs. There was trash on the ground from overflowing dumpsters, and stray cats hissed at me as I hurried past them.
I heard the sounds of a fight around the bend in the alley. As I made the turn, I was surprised to see the two teenage boys sprawled on the ground, knocked out. There was a flash of movement to my left. The girl darted down another side alley.
“Wait!” I called. “It’s me. The one who got you out of trouble up at the ruins.” I ran after her. “I just want to talk to you.”
The alley she’d run down was narrow and dark with shadows even during the day. It was like the alleys in Marrakech where I’d tracked the djinn who kidnapped Eva and T-Rex.
There was a wall at the end, and for a second I thought it was a dead-end. Then I saw a door to the right. It swayed on its hinges, showing that someone had just passed through. I opened it cautiously.
“Hello?” I called. “I’m not trying to scare you.” I thought of the two teenagers I’d seen on the ground and considered that this girl probably wasn’t scared of me. She’d shown she could handle herself.
I peered inside and saw an unexpected sight.
A dark, high-ceiled room filled with men, wild animals, and monsters.
All staring at me.
Chapter 10
Muscular men held enormous swords over their heads. A lion, teeth bared, crouched ready to jump. A monster with a woman’s body, but a head covered with snakes, held her clawed hands up, ready to scratch out my eyes. Winged harpies stretched their talons out toward me.
I would have been in big trouble if they had all been real. Luckily, they weren’t. They were just marble statues.
Still, they were pretty creepy, an obvious warning to anyone dumb enough to break into this house that this was one place they really didn’t want to be.
Beyond the statues, I saw the glow of natural light. I drew my sword and slowly made my way through the maze of statues. I remembered how the gargoyles on Notre Dame had come alive, and I wasn’t taking any chances. Lucky for me, all the statues behaved themselves and remained frozen in place.
After I passed the last statue, a long, serpentine dragon with marble flames billowing from its mouth, I saw that the light came from a large, round courtyard garden, surrounded on all sides by windowless walls two-stories high.
Ornate columns lined its outside edges. In the center of the garden stood another circle of pillars. From this second circle, out stepped the little girl I’d been following.
“You said you possessed no intention to hurt me,” she said, her voice and word choice oddly formal.
Her eyes bore into me. They were an ice-cold blue, almost to a point of looking otherworldly. I could have sworn her eyes had been brown when I’d seen her at the temple.
“I won’t hurt you,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
The girl laughed, but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. It felt like she was making fun of me for some reason.
“Then why do you bring a weapon into my garden?” she said.
I realized I had a firm grip on my sword. I was about to lower it, put it away even, but something made me hesitate. Something was wrong here.
“This is your garden?” I said, lowering the tip of my sword just slightly. “Pretty nice for a pickpocket.”
The girl looked down her nose at me. “I only ask. I do not take what is not mine.”
“So you didn’t take that German guy’s money?”
The girl closed her eyes for a brief second and then opened them. “That idiot will find his money in his backpack tonight and feel only joy that he came out forty euros ahead. He’ll laugh with his friends about the idiot American who gave his money to save a street beggar.”
The Templar ring vibrated in my hand. The girl’s eyes darted to it, and I covered it with my other hand on reflex. She smiled, but again I felt the sense that there was no kindness in it.
“So the rumors are true. You have recovered the Templar ring, and you collect the Jerusalem Stones.”
“Who are you?” I whispered.
“I think you already know that, Jack Templar,” the girl said.
“You’re the one I came to find,” I said. “You’re the Oracle of Delphi.”
The girl grinned and raised her
arms over her head. Slowly, she transformed in front of me, growing from a child into a teenager, then a young woman. The baggy clothes of the girl became a well-cut dress, cinched at the waist by a red sash. The facial features bore a resemblance to the little girl but were now developed in real beauty. The eyes remained the same though. Ice-cold, calculating, pale-blue so they almost appeared clear.
“Yes, I am the Oracle. My name is Pythia. And your kindness to me today gained you this audience.”
My brain clicked into gear. “So that was the test?” I asked. “Just helping a homeless girl? I think most people would help.”
“Then you are a fool. Man is a cruel breed, able to overlook the plight of even the most helpless, even the needs of a child.”
“Not everyone is like that,” I argued.
Pythia shook her head, looking at me as if I was stupid. “Even your companions would not have given the money as you did. Admit it. You give your race too much credit, Templar. It will be your undoing.”
I bit my tongue. I wasn’t here to argue the nature of man. I was here to find the answer to only one question.
“Do you know where I can find Kaeden, Lord of the Werewolves?” I asked.
“I see everything,” Pythia hissed. “I see the thousand pathways each one of your movements obliterates. I see the birth of a thousand new ones stretching out into time eternal.”
“Sooo… is that a yes?”
Pythia snarled at me, the elegant beauty disappearing for a second to reveal a wrinkled, shrunken face of an old woman. “You dare to mock me, boy?”
The Templar ring grew warm once again on my finger. It filled me with foreboding. Danger was near. “I thought you can see the future,” I said. “It’s what all the history books say.”
“I can see all futures,” she replied, regaining her composure. “You were born with free will – I do not take that from you. I do not take what is not mine.”
I remembered her saying that minutes earlier and at the temple with the German. “You don’t take what’s not yours, but you ask for it.”
“Yes,” she said.