Orion's Kiss Read online

  “Ready?” Ryan asks.

  “Does it matter?”

  Ryan takes my hand, threading his fingers through mine, and it gives me all the certainty I need. We step through.

  The room is still and quiet. My footsteps stir a thick layer of dust on the marble beneath our feet, and I sneeze.

  Ryan retrieves the key and puts it in his pocket, closing the door behind us. We didn’t encounter anything in the Byway, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything out there.

  “Think the key will show us where the scythe is?” I joke. I don’t like how quiet or still it is here. It feels like the moment in a horror movie before something horrible jumps out at you.

  “I don’t think we’ll be so lucky.”

  “Zeus used to keep the scythe in his throne room. I guess we should try there first?”

  “As good a theory as any,” Ryan agrees. He drops my hand, but it doesn’t feel as hostile as last time. He unshoulders his bow, getting it into position. “Any idea which direction that is?”

  “None at all.” I take out my knife, feeling like it’s going to be seriously inferior to whatever task it encounters in here. I thought about asking Brandon for the other bow, but who are we kidding? I’d be better off thwacking a monster with it than actually trying to draw it again in the heat of battle.

  “Let’s head that way,” Ryan says, nodding straight ahead of us. “I have some memories of the palace at Olympus. If I can figure out where we are, I should be able to navigate us there.”

  We soldier forwards, our hiking boots leaving trails in the undisturbed dust. How many centuries has it been since someone visited here? The sibyl’s warning rings in my mind. Olympus will be guarded. But if there’ve been any monsters prowling here lately, they’re the incorporeal kind. At the door into a hallway, I spot a darkened torch in a sconce on the wall.

  “Lighter?” I ask.

  Ryan turns his back to me so I can fish it out of his pack. I light the torch and the cheerful blaze comforts me. It’s easier to see by the light of the torch so I turn my headlamp off, leaving it hanging around my neck.

  “Lead the way.”

  Our slow sojourn down the hallway brings memories bubbling up. The hallway is lined with ornate alcoves sporting tall marble statues of mythical creatures. A centaur, the three-headed dog Cerberus, who guards the underworld. A strange gryphon with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. The Greek gods sure loved to mix and match; they treated the whole animal kingdom like a bestial Mr. Potato Head. The arched ceiling above us is painted with clouds and blue sky, not that anyone would be fooled to think they’re outside. “I think I remember this corridor,” I say as we near the end. “Go right. If I’m right, there should be a—

  “Fountain of Poseidon,” Ryan finishes as we enter the room. The carved fountain looms before us, its leaping dolphins dark and silent. The fountain is dry, but I’m not surprised. Water means life, and there’s no life here. Not anymore.

  Now that Ryan and I know where we are, we walk more quickly. We pass through the long room that was once filled with diners both mortal and immortal, and all the delicacies Olympus had to offer. The long, polished wood tables stand empty and quiet, flanked by rows of chairs facing off like soldiers. We leave them behind, walking through the octagonal antechamber into Zeus’s throne room.

  My heart is in my throat as I hold the torch aloft, my eyes searching the inlaid walls of the cavernous space for the item we seek. The scythe of Chronos.

  “Holy hell, it’s here!” A disbelieving laugh escapes Ryan’s lips.

  I want to weep with relief. For there—hanging on its hooks behind the marble hulk of Zeus’s empty throne—is the scythe. Just where my sister once retrieved it.

  The blood of my sisters is gone from the polished floor, but I can’t help but feel the poignancy of the moment. “This is where it all started,” I say, my eyes affixed to the scythe.

  “It’s fitting that this is where it ends,” Ryan agrees.

  “I have to admit, after what Sibyll said, I thought it’d be harder to find,” I muse.

  Ryan huffs. “Find some wood to knock on, why don’t you? We haven’t broken the curse yet. Do you have any idea how to wield that thing? To end the curse?”

  “None whatsoever,” I admit.

  Great, he mouths with a shake of his head.

  “How are we going to get it down?” I ask. It’s nestled atop two hooks on the wall.

  Ryan draws his bow, aims, and looses an arrow. It buries itself into the wall, busting off one of the hooks. The scythe tips out of the other hook and tumbles to the floor with a clatter.

  It’s my turn to huff. “Hope it’s not breakable.”

  I step forwards to retrieve the weapon. And the ground starts to shake.

  Chapter 30

  The scythe is heavy in my hand, but I fear it won’t be substantial enough to face whatever’s coming. Because the shaking has transformed into the thunder of pounding feet. “What should we do?” I ask, my brain refusing to cooperate with our current predicament.

  “Get the hell out of here.” Ryan nods his head towards the exit to the throne room.

  “We haven’t broken the curse yet,” I protest.

  “We don’t know how to break the curse,” he says. “And I’m not inclined to just hand myself over on a silver platter while you sit around trying to figure it out.”

  Oh gods, the vision. Ryan’s boots peeking out from behind the column. The thick blood congealed around him. His vacant eyes…

  “Let’s go,” I agree. We break into a run, our boots pounding against the polished floor. We skid into the hallway, and my heart leaps into my throat. They’ve found us. The defenders of this place. And they’re coming right at us.

  “Retreat!” Ryan screams and we scramble back into the throne room, dashing for a doorway behind the raised dais. My mind still struggles to make sense of what it’s seen. Statues come to life. The stone menagerie we passed has come alive and is now set upon our destruction. The stone leopard bursts through the doorway at the far end of the throne room with a snarl.

  I risk a glance over my shoulder. Its passage has ripped chunks of stone from beside the opening, spraying them in a deadly hail of rock projectiles. The other creatures are hot on its heels—I see the three-headed dog, a gryphon, and a centaur. The centaur aims its bow at us and I screech and duck. The stone arrow buries itself in the wall just inches from my head.

  But there’s no time for marveling or wondering or even thinking. There’s only time for running. We barrel through an antechamber into a circular room with an arched ceiling that must have been Zeus’s treasure trove. All around us objects glitter—the vast wealth of Olympus. I’d give my left arm for a few moments to linger over the items—priceless statues, delicate gem-encrusted jewelry, intricately painted pottery.

  “My bow,” Ryan breathes, skidding to a stop as we reach the far end of the room.

  I can hear the creatures’ hooves and claws scratching and sliding on the slick floor of the antechamber. They’re close.

  Ryan drops his compound bow and grabs his ancient one—shouldering the brightly-painted quiver. I spot a glittering shield hanging on the wall and grab it, threading my forearm through the leather straps.

  The bow looks right in his hands, transforming him into the hunter I remember from Merope’s memories. “Think they can be killed?” he asks, notching an arrow.

  “I sure as hell hope so,” I say as the leopard appears in the doorway, snarling and baring its wicked stone teeth. It’s fixated upon us, its tail swishing. “’Cause we sure can.”

  Ryan looses an arrow. The shaft flies straight and true, burying itself in the leopard’s eye.

  The big cat screeches with pain and charges at us.

  “Run!” I’m not sure if it’s me or Ryan who says it.

  We’re on the move again, pounding down a long, dark hallway. I try not to think about how many arrows it will take to bring that thing
down. At least it didn’t just ricochet off the creature’s stone skin. That’s something.

  The leopard is fast, and from the racket behind us, it’s utterly decimating the treasure room as it passes through. Guilt flashes through me—a museum would kill for just one of those priceless artifacts. Oh, well. It’s the least of our concerns.

  The cat appears behind us and Ryan sends another arrow into it.

  I make the mistake of looking back to watch its flight. My toe snags a loose tile and I go down hard, the scythe clattering out of my grip.

  Ryan skids to a stop, his bow up, but the leopard is upon me.

  I just manage to get the shield up in time, hiding my torso and head behind it.

  The leopard scrabbles at the shield with its raking claws, its snarling maw filling my vision. Its weight on top of me is suffocating; I think my ribs might break from the pressure. One of its stone hind legs steps on my ankle and I scream as the creature’s sharp claws pierce my skin. A horrible though occurs to me. Do seers see their own deaths? Maybe the magic doesn’t work that way. Maybe Ryan and I both die here, but I just didn’t realize…

  Two more arrows bury themselves in the leopard’s face as it claws at me, and I see in my darkening vision the scythe swinging towards the leopard’s head. Warning rings in my mind. What if the scythe breaks on the stone, and we’ll never be free of the curse? But something else happens. The weight upon me disappears and a cloud of sand rains down upon me.

  I gag and cough, brushing the sand out of my eyes, my mouth.

  “What—?” I begin to ask.

  “Get up,” Ryan’s voice is insistent.

  I scramble to my feet, my ankle screaming in protest, and register our predicament. The scythe somehow dispatched the leopard, but the other creatures have caught up. Dog, centaur, gryphon. It’s three against two. Or, I reassess, with the dog’s three heads, maybe more like five. The centaur looses an arrow towards Ryan and I heave the shield in front of him, acting on instinct.

  The bolt twangs into the metal, vibrating.

  I take the scythe from Ryan, freeing his arms for his bow. He has an arrow nocked and flying at the centaur before I even swing the scythe at the creatures. The stone animals shy back. Clearly, the scythe can hurt them. Turn them back into the dust from whence they came. Good to know it still has some juice—not that it gets us any closer to figuring out how the hell to break the curse.

  Ryan lets an arrow fly and it knocks the centaur’s bow from its hand. “Run,” he growls, and we launch into action.

  My lungs feel compressed, each heaving breath sending shooting pain through me. Wet blood drips into my boot, and pain radiates through my ankle. I think the leopard might have crushed some of the bones. Stark reality slams into place. I can’t outrun them. Not like this.

  “In here,” Ryan says, ducking through a side door. There’s an actual door here attached to this opening—thick timber vanished to a shine. We heave it shut, and blessed gods, there’s a sturdy piece of wood to bar it closed. Ryan throws the crossbar down just as one of the stone creatures hurls itself against the door.

  We both step back from the thudding on the other side of the door. Tears prick my eyes from the pain of every step—every breath.

  “That’s not going to buy us much time,” Ryan says. “We have to get the hell out of here.” He only has three more arrows in his quiver.

  I turn to survey our surroundings, and my mouth goes dry. It’s a long, rectangular room flanked by columns. I recognize this room. This is the room where Ryan dies.

  Chapter 31

  “We have to get the hell out of here,” I say, my voice twisting and shrill.

  “That’s what I just sai—” Ryan cuts himself off when he sees my face. He pales as he comprehends what I realized. “Oh.”

  A ferocious thud against the door startles me free of the suffocating pull of the vision, and I shake my head. “The scythe can kill them. We can do this.”

  “So you want to make a stand?” he asks. I can tell he thinks this is a terrible idea. That this is how he dies. He’s probably right. One scythe, three monsters. Not great odds.

  “Maybe there’s something else here,” I say, feeling panic and pain curl the edges of my mind, tinting everything red. I limp across the room, examining the dark recesses between the columns. There’s nothing. Nothing except… “Oh my god.”

  Sitting quietly in the corner of the room, hidden behind the row of columns, is the largest loom I have ever seen.

  “Ryan, come here.” I motion him over, and he jogs to my side, looking over his shoulder warily at the shuddering door. Dust rains down from the frame each time a beast throws itself against the wood. There’s no way the door will hold for long. They’ll break through the wall itself at this rate.

  “Is that…” His blue eyes go wide.

  “The loom of the Three Fates.”

  “I hate those bitches.” Ryan shakes his head darkly.

  “Me too!” I say, amazed that we’ve only just discovered this kinship. “The Fates weave the tapestry of all life on Earth. Each thread is a life.” The pattern is magnificent, the cloth as long as Ryan’s truck is lengthwise. But it’s the colors that really astound me. There must be thousands of hues—rainbows of color, swirls and starbursts of interconnected lives.

  “But the Fates aren’t even here anymore? How is it still working?” Ryan asks.

  Ryan is right. Even as we stand there, the shuttle moves ever so slightly, a line of threads creeping infinitesimally forwards.

  “How is any of this still here?” I shrug helplessly.

  “I guess physical objects were more permanent than the gods themselves. Sibyll was right.”

  I’m drawn to a warp in the fabric, where a few threads are tangled. I step in closer and lean until my nose is almost touching the fabric, examining the threads. What happened here? My eyes widen in recognition as I see the threads. Two of them have been cut, but they’re held into the fabric by the tight hold of the neighboring threads—the knotted tangle.

  “Sweet baby Jesus, I know how to break the curse,” I say, breathless.

  “How?” Ryan’s face is before mine in an instant. “Don’t mess with me.”

  “This tangle. This is us! Look. There are eight threads. Seven Pleiades sisters, one for Orion. Two have been cut. Those are Electra and Alcyone, who’ve died in this lifetime. Look! If you trace the threads back…” I move farther up the loom until I’m standing on my tippy-toes pointing to another tangle. “Same threads. Six of them have been cut here. But because of the tangle, they’re stuck in the fabric.”

  “Gods, Mer, you’re right,” Ryan breathes.

  “If I use the scythe to cut and untangle the threads, it should break the curse, right?”

  “It’s as good a guess as any. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “I could cut all our threads and we’d all die and our souls would be lost forever,” I suggest.

  The wood splinters on the door across the room, and the sharp beak of the gryphon comes snapping through, a piercing cry escaping from its mouth.

  Crap. I take the scythe, frowning at its unwieldy bulk. The thing is made for harvesting grain, not cutting delicate threads as thin as spider silk. “I wish this thing were a pair of scissors,” I grumble, turning to the task at hand.

  The scythe transforms in my hand. Into a pair of scissors.

  “Hey, awesome!” I hold it up to Ryan, delighted.

  “How’d you do that?” Ryan asks.

  “I just told it I wished it were scissors.”

  At the far end of the room, the door explodes inwards off its hinges, and the gryphon skids across the floor, its wicked talons digging grooves into the stone floor.

  Ryan yanks the scissors out of my hand. “I wish you were an arrow!” In one lithe motion, he knocks the transformed scythe against his string and lets loose. It pierces the gryphon straight in the chest and the creature disintegrates into a cloud of sand.

 
“Well, I need it back now,” I say, panicked. The arrow is now lying on the ground all the way across the room.

  “I’ll get it.” Ryan groans, then runs straight at the approaching Cerberus statue.

  I turn to the knot, examining it. At least I can be ready and know what to do when he returns. I realize that the two loose threads of my sisters who’ve died are already free. Could I…tie them back together? I lean in, and ever so carefully, extract from the tangle one of the purple threads that I know is Electra. Then I pull the other one, and, thanking my Girl Scout days, tie them gently together in a knot. The thread vibrates, a golden charge running up and down its length. I release it in alarm and when I lean back in to examine what’s happened, I see. The thread is whole once more. Healed.

  I let out a gasp of relief and grab eagerly for other cut thread—the goldenrod. Ryan bellows in pain and I look over my shoulder to see the three-headed dog on top of him, Ryan’s forearm in one of its mouths.

  “Ryan!” I scream, horror filling me as another head snaps for Ryan’s throat. But the creature turns to dust and I spot the scythe-turned-dagger in Ryan’s fist.

  I sag in relief and turn back to the loom, pulling Alcyone’s threads and tying them quickly.

  Ryan limps to my side, his mangled arm cradled to his chest. I try not to think about how it looks just like the injury from my vision.

  “Where’s the centaur?” I ask.

  “Don’t know.” Ryan hands the scythe to me, and it transforms back into the shears. His face is sweaty and smeared with dust and blood, but in that moment, he’s never looked more devastatingly handsome.

  My heart squeezes painfully as I turn back to the loom. “Keep an eye out.”

  “I don’t know if I can pull the bow right now. If it comes, I’ll need the scythe,” he replies.

  “Okay.” I turn back to the task at hand, examining the threads before me. The remaining ones are in a tangle. I squint, trying to trace their paths, to see which one needs to be cut next. I recognize the forest green one as Ryan’s. It’s twined around a sky-blue thread that I see is mine. It’s farther outside the knot, threading only through Ryan’s. His is hopelessly tangled with the others. I squint, cocking my head. The green thread runs down, around the magenta and purple—but those would untwine if it were freed… My mind works on the pattern until my eyes widen in recognition. In horror.