by Nicole Thorn
I did.
I took a step forward, feeling like someone had carved the heart of out me.
“Another blow, to her stomach this time,” Callie said, her words coming out on a struggled breath. I could smell the blood from where I stood, and I could hear Juniper screaming again.
“Juniper rolls out of the way!” Callie says. “Minimizing the damage. She picks up a dagger, then slashes the demigod across his ankles. He goes down. And he’s dead.”
My breath only came mildly easier, but it didn’t help much as I could hear my family now. They didn’t say anything to me, too busy to reassure me. But they were all alive. They had to have been. I started picking out grunts and any sounds that I could use to identify them. As I did, I kept walking in the endless cave. Callie said they kept up with me, tearing down the monsters around them. More came though, and I didn’t know when it would end. Or if it would.
I started gasping, hearing every single sound of pain from every single wound behind me. Callie screamed when someone slashed Aster across the stomach, and my mind flashed with all the things I’d done wrong in his life. All the things I could have fixed if only I had been there like I should have been. But I’d failed at that. I’d missed my chance to make his life easier, and now, he could die thanks to me.
I heard Jasmine as she fought. It didn’t matter that she was a goddess because I would always see her as that damaged, fragile girl in the parking lot. It wasn’t fair, but I knew her to be breakable. She was a mountain now. I’d been there for that. I wished it touched me.
Callie’s voice started fading away as she told me all the ways my family had been hurt. All the close calls, the stabs, the slashes of throats. I didn’t almost lose it until she told me a demigod stabbed Kizzy in the throat. I heard Jasper scream. A scream like I’d never heard before, so filled with rage that the world flashed white for a moment. I pictured my sister hitting her knees, hands on her bleeding throat as she hoped she healed fast enough.
I stopped dead in my tracks.
I could end it. I could have said fuck it and started running toward the danger. One more person would help them cut down this threat faster, and we could face whatever came, together. Weapon or not. Verin said we could do it, so what would the harm have been if I turned…
I shut my eyes, breathing in as I listened to more people die. If I died, the world would keep turning. I knew it. Small worlds would stop, they would hurt, but they wouldn’t end. They would all move on. I was not the end all be all of anything, and I knew in my gut that everyone behind me was stronger than I could fathom. It wasn’t… it wasn’t all on me. It didn’t have to be.
It does. They’ll die without you. You didn’t notice. You didn’t notice Kizzy. You let her suffer. It’s on you. Jasmine is on you. The seers are on you. They wouldn’t have died if you were there.
Maybe not. Maybe they wouldn’t have died. Maybe if I had paid better attention, Kizzy would have suffered less. I had been young, and that wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my responsibility to save her. To save the world. I couldn’t have known. I took action when I could. I always took action when I could. Right now, I could not.
And that had to be okay.
It wasn’t on me.
My family was so much more than me.
I am so much more than failure.
I stabbed my sword into the ground, dropping my shield before I started running toward the light. The light got no bigger, but I didn’t stop running. I didn’t stop pushing. My eyes stayed fixed on that little point, and I prayed for it. I took it in, accepting the world I lived in. Accepting my role in it.
I tripped, barely catching myself as my knees slammed into earth. Something burned my eyes before I could look up, seeing the sun. The sun. My hands burned as gravel cut my palms open, pressed hard into ground that didn’t belong to the underworld. I was… out. The trial had ended
Almost.
I stayed so still. So, so still that I wouldn’t be tempted to look back. I didn’t know if it was over yet. He said that they had to pass me, so I waited. I waited, trying to breathe.
Juniper came out first with Verin right behind her. He had her hand in his, both of them soaked in blood with torn clothes. They panted, holding each other in the sunlight.
Micha and Aster emerged next, and I heard Callie crying from speakers I couldn’t see. I waited for the others, taking a breath when Kizzy and Jasper appeared, as wrecked as the others. Kizzy held her arm to her side, collapsing to the ground as she caught her breath. Jasper sat for about two seconds before he went backward, lying next to her and staring up at the sky.
Then she appeared in front of me. Jasmine bolted out, turned and fell to the ground in front of me. Her clothes were destroyed, ripped and bloody and covered in mud. But she breathed. She was here. They were all there.
I whispered as I clutched Jasmine tight to my body. I didn’t worry about breaking her, knowing that Jasmine could take it. She held me back, her face buried against my neck. I listened to her breathing, in love with the sound of it. Her heart pounded against mine, and I was unwilling to let go. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.
Over the speaker, I heard Callie. Her words still sounded strained and impossible, but I knew exactly what she said. “And the twelfth trial is complete. To our victors!”
Victors…
“We won?” I breathed.
Jasmine looked at me, her eyes glassy as she smiled, her fingertips touching my cheek as she whispered. “We won.”
Jasmine
T hey forced us to give interviews before letting us shower. Basically, all of us said that we were glad the trials had ended, but we hadn’t commented on how we felt about completing them successfully. It felt like too big of a thing for me to think about. We had gone into this insanity, the horror of having so much on our shoulders, and we had gotten through it. There had been times in the last couple of weeks where I felt like we would never get past it.
And now they had ended. We had gotten through them in one piece, more or less. And yeah, that felt nice, but I had gotten thoroughly sick of the cameras being shoved in my face, of the people asking me questions, of Callie being forced to play hostess, of the stage, of the lights, of the cruel crowd. I wanted a break from all of them so that I could just fucking breathe.
And the others felt the same way.
So, yeah, the second we could get away with it, we shuffled off to the showers, where no one could find us. We had two rooms where we could get cleaned up, so we split, boys and girls.
The second we were alone, I grabbed Juniper and hugged her until she croaked out a plea for help.
Kizzy gently extracted me. “We’re all okay,” she said, but I couldn’t tell if she spoke to me or herself at that moment.
“I know,” I said, sucking in a relieved breath. Then I grabbed Kizzy and hugged her just as hard as I had my sister. “Are you guys okay? I couldn’t really see what was happening during the fight. I was kind of trying not to die at the time, but I heard everything that Callie said. You got stabbed!” I flailed so hard that my sister and Kizzy both backed up a step.
“I’m all right,” Juniper promised me, lifting up her rainbow shirt to reveal her healed side. “Nothing too bad. I liked this shirt, though…”
“I’ll get you a new one,” I promised. “I’ll buy you so many colorful shirts and dresses that you’ll get that overwhelmed look on your face and Verin will have to talk you down.”
“Or not,” Juniper offered.
Kizzy picked at the front of her dress, watching as it peeled off her skin. She wrinkled her nose. “Jasper loved this…”
None of us had walked away with our clothes intact. They were bloody, dusty, dirty, and torn. We split up to the three separate shower stalls and allowed the water to erase the memory of the battle. When I stepped out of my stall, I found that someone, probably a godly someone, had given me a new set of clothing. An orange dress that faded to blue toward the hem, with frills on the bottom. I wrinkled
my nose when I saw it, wondering what god I had pissed off so much that they would force this on me.
I still put the horrible outfit on, then stepped into the main bathroom to find that Juniper and Kizzy hadn’t gotten lucky in the clothing department either. Kizzy had on a bloodred shirt and lime green shorts that made her look like a sad, washed out Christmas, while Juniper had on a black dress. Black did not look great on my sister, because of her fair skin and still too-thin body.
She pulled on the dress, frowning. “I hate it.”
“You don’t think that they’re trying to like… make us look a certain way for the cameras, do you?”
“Ugh,” Kizzy said and marched toward the door with a determined gleam to her eye. She slammed through it, and I heard people shouting her name instantly. Juniper’s eyes widened.
I hooked my arm through hers, hauling her in against my side. “This is one of the last times we’ll have to deal with it. Chin up, attitude on. Let’s give them hell.”
I marched out of the bathroom with Juniper, into a crowd of people and lights that blinded me. The screaming turned from people chanting Kizzy’s name, to all of our names. Kizzy had her hands on her hips, glaring at everyone in the crowd. They hurled questions at us like bullets, as if they expected us to answer any of them.
“When will you get married?”
“How does it feel to have beaten your trials?”
“Are you embarrassed that you’re the only one that lost a trial?”
“Do you think the boys are proud of you?”
“Who are you wearing?”
“How does it feel to be dating a hero?” a woman shouted this last to me, which felt weird.
The onslaught didn’t stop. I could see my sister starting to buckle under the pressure, and Kizzy didn’t look much better. I cleared my throat and shouted, “Unless you want the wrath of a god to fall on your heads, move!”
Something tugged inside my chest, and the lights started to flicker. One even blew out, raining glass down on the people with cameras. They all backed away rapidly, tripping over one another to make room for the angry goddess. I took Kizzy and Juniper and shuffled them along, glaring at everyone as I did so. We found the boys in a similar state, though none of them had issues with crowds the way that Juniper and Kizzy did, so they handled their situation… differently.
A man hung from the ceiling by the back of his shirt, while another sat in the corner with his head covered, and a third seemed to be in the middle of a panic attack while Verin talked to him. Of course, Verin had his arm around the guy’s shoulders while also flicking his garotte around.
I flitted up to Zander and wrapped my arms around him. He must not have seen me, since he looked surprised, then delighted when I slammed my mouth against his. When I pulled back, I grinned at him. “Hey there, hero.”
He scowled. “Please, don’t let that be a thing…”
“Oh, it’s a thing.”
We eventually made our way back to the green room, where we could sit in peace without people bothering us. A veritable feast had been delivered, and we all tucked in. Apparently, fighting monsters got our appetites going. We hardly said a word while we ate. Even Callie, Aster, and Micha didn’t seem interested in talking. I thought that we all just wanted to go home.
When I finished my meal, I sat back, rubbing my tummy. “Zander, I can’t move anymore. Are you ready to spend the rest of your life as my personal taxi?”
“Ready and willing,” he said, grinning. “I’ll carry you wherever you want to go.”
“The candy store?”
“Fuck yeah.”
“Clothes shopping for Juniper?”
“Yes.”
“Oh gods,” Juniper muttered.
“What about when I have to feed Nemo his muck?”
“That’s where I draw the line,” Zander said, shuddering at the thought.
“I knew it,” I said, shaking my head. “You only love me so long as I can take you to fancy places.”
“Well, yeah. Didn’t I make that obvious?” he asked.
We busted out laughing at the same time. It felt so good to be done with everything, while also so surreal and nerve-wracking. The fact that we had gotten through this meant that we moved one step closer to an actual war. One with fucking gods. Real gods, too. Not just the minor ones, like my siblings and me. I couldn’t even imagine what that would mean for us in the long run. Could we survive it? What happened if we failed or stumbled at the wrong second?
What happened if the gods decided not to trust us like they had for so long now, and we ended up dying because of it? What happened if…
I shut the line of thought down because I could have gone through a thousand different scenarios, and it wouldn’t have changed the most important fact.
It didn’t matter. We would be getting knee deep into this war no matter what, whether we wanted to or not.
I shifted around so that I could rest my shoulder against Zander. Across the table, Kizzy sat in Jasper’s lap, sideways. She kept forcing him to eat, though I felt certain my brother had already stuffed himself. She’d take bites only after he had ingested something. She smiled at him every time he spoke, no matter what he said.
Juniper and Verin sat next to each other to my right. They didn’t say much, but they didn’t need to. When he did speak, Verin usually just reassured Juniper that she could change into something more comfortable the second they got back to the room. She really, really hated the black dress.
Then Callie, Aster, and Micha all sat to my left, talking about all the goodies they would bake the second they got back home. Callie said something about calling her parents, who probably didn’t even know that she had been taken away. Unless Medusa told them, which would create a whole slew of problems that I didn’t want to deal with right then.
We had all relaxed so much that when the lights flickered, everyone froze. I had a cookie halfway to my mouth but stopped to stare up at the ceiling. “They can’t be calling us on stage, can they?”
Callie glared at the ceiling. “They are.” She took a deep, deep breath, and let out it slowly. “Okay, this is fine. They must be handing the weapon over. That makes sense. They’d want to do it with flair and pomp, right?”
“They’re gods, so yeah,” Aster grumbled. He didn’t even immediately correct himself, so I could tell that he was thoroughly done with their shit.
We all stood up and made our way to the stage. The bright lights seemed even brighter, weighing us down with their illuminance. Callie took her spot on-stage, while some producer told us to wait off-stage. Aster and Micha took their custom seats in the crowd, though neither of them looked happy about it.
“And three, two, one…” The producer pointed at Callie.
She didn’t even bother to smile as she brought the microphone up to her lips. “Hello everyone, and welcome to the finale of the Trials. It’s been one hell of a show so far, what with the ups and downs.” She rolled her eyes. “But we have just one more thing that needs to be done before we can call it quits. First, let us welcome back our champions, our heroes!”
She gestured to us, letting us know that we could enter the stage.
My family and I trooped out amidst insane cheers and applause. Some people stood up from their seats, pumping their fists in the air, screaming our names. It felt surreal, and it made me wonder how the gods put up with it when they had been more widely worshipped. When thousands of people had believed in them, how did they handle pressure like that?
I couldn’t stand being in front of this crowd.
Callie let them whoop it up for a few seconds before putting her microphone back up. “Now, now, guys, I know you’re happy and excited,” she said. “But we have to let the show go on.”
Did I imagine the bitter twist to her mouth right then?
The crowd quieted down as Callie turned back to look at us. She had a smile on her face as she stepped forward. “Now, to give you your reward, we have a very special gues
t! Heracles!”
Doors to the stage opened, and Heracles walked out. He looked about as happy to be there as the rest of us did. And the crowd went fucking wild when they heard his name. They screamed, they whooped, they reached out to touch him. Heracles seemed immune to this attention as he walked out onto the stage to stand in front of us. The cameras moved around so that they could zoom in on our faces, making it harder for us to escape the glaring lights and the insane crowd.
Heracles smiled at us. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” I said, immediately, eying him. “But, um… are you supposed to have a weapon on you?”
He inclined his head slightly. “Actually, you already have your reward. Or, the means of getting it, that is.”
For a beat, none of us reacted. Then Kizzy gasped and pulled the coin from her pocket. The one she had fished out of the fountain during her trial. The one that would call Hermes and allow us into the underworld. “Are you talking about this?” she asked, holding the coin out.
“Yes,” Heracles said.
“I don’t get it,” Jasper grumbled.
Heracles turned so that he could look at the camera and us at the same time. “You must retrieve your weapon, not just from the underworld, but from Tartarus itself.”
Dead silence.
I opened my mouth. “Are you fucking kidding me? We go through all that hell, and now you expect us to go into Tartarus to get this weapon that the gods said they would give us if we survived said hell?”
“That’s not okay,” Callie said, stepping forward.
“I agree,” Heracles said. “But the weapon has never been in the gods’ possession because it is that volatile. You would be liberating it from Tartarus, and bringing it into the world, and I think that you’ll want to do that.”
“Why?” I demanded, still miffed. “Why the hell do you think we would risk our lives going into Tartarus for some weapon that the enemy can’t even get ahold of either? What makes you think it’s worth that?”