Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) (47 page)

Shielding Sophie, both of them coughing, he stumbled away from the fire until they were at a safe distance. “Are you okay? Are you okay?” he asked her, realizing he was nearly shouting.

She nodded. They both stared at the flames engulfing a patch of forest. Kiri sprinted toward them from the side, and Adrian knelt and hugged her. “Thank goodness. Where’s Niko, girl?”

Kiri whined, looking at the fire. A fresh wave of panic hit Adrian. Yeah, he could sense Niko—straight ahead, in the flames. Adrian scrambled forward. “Niko!”

No answer. A few seconds later, Freya’s voice called the same. “Niko!”

Adrian and Sophie turned.

Freya was bent over in pain, her hand braced on a tree. Blood drenched her jeans; a bullet hole loomed black on her thigh. But she’d be all right. Sophie ran to her and got her arm beneath Freya’s, letting her lean on Sophie. The two women gazed at each other a moment, with shaky smiles; a reunion between long-parted friends. But then Freya looked at the flames, and at Adrian, her face shifting to horror. “They detonated one of the grenades?” she said.

He nodded. “Kiri, stay,” he said again, his voice uneven. Then he turned and dived into the fire.

The smoke choked him, and the grenade’s chemical fire began devouring his clothing and searing his skin. But he stuck to his one reliable sense, the one pointing him toward Nikolaos, and rushed forward. He tripped over branches and rocks, and what he thought was a log but felt…fleshlike. He glanced down. Between ripples of fire and gusts of hot wind, he saw a blackened, bloody mess—what was left of the assassin. Squeezing his eyes shut against the horror and the heat, he plunged to his right, where he sensed Niko’s soul.

What if it
was
only his soul? That was what you sensed, when you could track someone. Ordinarily souls departed straight for the Underworld, but Niko would know enough to stick around a few minutes and wait to tell his friends what had happened if he had died…

But then Adrian’s feet crashed into someone’s legs, and he fell, and his hands landed on hot flesh, and clothes that had been mostly burned away, and he knew he had Nikolaos, there in one piece, soul within body even if unconscious.

Adrian threw him over his shoulder, and darted out of the fire. He burst into the coolness of the forest and gasped a breath of air. He dropped to the ground to smother all the flames on both Niko and himself with armfuls of wet dirt.

Freya and Sophie limped over too, Freya wincing as she landed on her knees beside Niko.

The burning bushes sent bright orange light flickering across them, showing that only a few scraps of Niko’s clothes remained, and all his hair had been burnt away. Wounds and burns studded his body, probably not only from the flames and the burning chemicals, but from the grenade’s shrapnel.

Freya stroked his head, tears running down her cheeks. “Oh, my poor dear. You scared me. But you’re going to be fine, you know.”

Nikolaos drew in a rasping breath, and his eyelids fluttered, but he didn’t regain consciousness yet.

Adrian sat back against a log, trembling. Sophie moved over next to him, embracing him, shaking even worse than he was. Kiri circled the group, then sat by Adrian and devoted herself to licking the burns on his arms and neck.

Sophie and Adrian sat hugging each other until Adrian recovered his composure, and looked at her. “We’d best get you back so you can give the police your report.”

“Yet again,” she sighed.

“Will you guys be all right?” Adrian asked Freya.

She nodded, cradling Niko’s head on her lap.

“I’ll be right back,” Adrian promised. He helped Sophie to her feet. “Guess we better walk a good distance out of the way first. Who knows what Wilkes’ grenade did to the area.”

“So.” Sophie took a long, shaky breath as they waded through the damp forest undergrowth. “It was Melissa.”

“What was Melissa?”

“Spying on my texts. It must have been. She led me straight between those buildings tonight. They must have recruited her somehow.”

Anger surged up in Adrian. “That explains how Quentin got in, then. Copy of the roommate’s key.”

“Yep.”

They walked in bitter silence a few paces. “Bitch,” Adrian finally said.

“
Stupid
bitch,” Sophie agreed.

He glanced back at the dwindling fire, and stopped. “Here’s probably good.” She nestled up to him, and he embraced her and switched them into the living world.

They almost fell off a curb—they were standing right at the edge of the sidewalk, in a group of onlookers gaping at the grenade-fueled fire engulfing a tree between the buildings. In the confusion, no one noticed or remarked upon Sophie and Adrian’s sudden appearance. The noise and flashing lights of fire engines, ambulances, and police cars surrounded them; hoses sprayed water and extinguishing foam upon the fire.

Adrian spotted Melissa, looking terrified, talking to a group of police officers. He nodded toward them, and told Sophie, “Suppose you better go. Say you ran off and just now crept back, or something.”

“All right. I’ll call you as soon as they let me go.”

They paused to look in the direction of the fire. “Suppose that’s the end of Wilkes, then,” Adrian said.

Sophie shuddered. “Yeah.”

“We’ll be sure to visit him in the Underworld.”

Sophie sent him a troubled glance, and he realized that not since her Persephone days had she seen Tartaros—the caves of punishment. He softened his gaze, and smoothed her disarrayed hair. “Don’t worry about it. Go on.”

Sophie nodded, straightened her shoulders, and walked toward the police.

Just before he slipped into the other realm, Adrian caught Melissa’s eye. He was almost certain she was watching him as he disappeared.

Chapter Forty-Two

S
OPHIE LEANED BACK ON THE
crackling paper covering the hospital examination table, closing her eyes. When the police learned she’d been bashed on the head in addition to being awfully near a grenade detonation, they’d insisted on sending her to the emergency room.

After examining her skin, looking into her pupils, and asking a lot of questions, the medical team had decided there was nothing wrong with her aside from a few minor burns, a mean bump, and some soreness that would last a few days. She could leave as soon as she felt rested enough to do so. She was now waiting for Adrian so she could go to the Airstream and sleep. The dorm room was not an option, not anymore.

Her phone had been incinerated along with Bill Wilkes. So she had borrowed the hospital’s land line to call home and tell her parents that someone tried to mug Melissa and her.
Yes, Dad, I did what he said and didn’t endanger myself. No, Mom, he didn’t get my credit cards; just my phone. Yes, Dad, he got killed. No, I don’t know why he was carrying a grenade. Yes, guys, I’m fine. Really. You be careful too, all right?

Only with great diplomacy did she manage to convince them not to come driving down here tonight like lunatics. Life would proceed normally, she assured them.

She’d wait till tomorrow or the next day to tell them she was moving out of that dorm room and finding a new place to stay.

She had given the police her report. Someone had tried to mug her and her roommate, she said. No, she had no idea who they were, except they were probably connected with the people who broke into her dorm room and also grabbed her recently. Yes, there’d been two guys, but one took off in pursuit of some other people who tried to step in and help, and he never came back. No, she didn’t know who the people were, or where they’d gone. She’d never seen them before.

But perhaps, she told them, they ought to ask her roommate who the assailants were. Because it seemed like Melissa recognized them.

It would be terrible to be thrown in jail at Melissa’s age. But that’s what you asked for, Sophie reasoned, when you joined up with a murderous cult.

A middle-aged female nurse stepped in. “Your friend’s here.”

Sophie got up, picked up her mud-stained jacket (nice match for her mud-stained jeans and sneakers), and checked out at the E.R. desk.

Adrian, in blond-streaked wig, hipster glasses, and long black raincoat, leaned by the door in a secluded corner of the waiting room. Sophie walked to him and caught him up in a long hug.

“I’ve missed you,” she said, then wrinkled her nose. “Though you smell like burned leaves.”

“And that’s
after
a shower.” He sighed. “Missed you too. Huge amounts. Come on, let’s go.”

As they walked outside into a new rainstorm, a girl called, “Sophie!”

Melissa came running up, evidently from her parked car where she’d been waiting.

Sophie stared her down coldly.

“I need to talk to you,” said Melissa.

“So you can report back whatever I say to the evil cult people? I don’t think so.” Sophie pulled on Adrian’s arm, moving them forward a few steps.

Melissa leaped in front of them again. “I didn’t tell them everything. They
are
evil. You’re right.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in jail right now?”

“I’m not in the cult. I told the police everything, and they’re going to…see if charges need to be brought against me.” Melissa’s voice wavered in fright. “I’m not supposed to leave town until the investigation’s done. But I swear, I didn’t realize how far these people would go till they broke into the dorm room. I don’t want anything more to do with them.”

“Then tell them that, and call the police if they come near you again. But I’m moving out of the room, and I’m done with you.” Sophie tried again to pass by, and Melissa seized her arm.

“I want in on the immortality thing.”

Sophie and Adrian both paused, looking at her.

“I didn’t tell the police about that,” Melissa continued. “But I know about it from reading your texts, right? Plus I knew that very first day, when you disappeared into thin air with that other guy, something weird was going on. Something huge. So when that old woman came to me and said she wanted my help keeping an eye on you, I made her tell me why.”

“The old woman told you an immortality story?” Sophie hoped they might still keep it secret—lie, play dumb, all that—and possibly Adrian agreed, since he hadn’t said anything yet.

“Yes. So I started getting looks at your texts,” Melissa said, “when you were in the shower or asleep or whatever. And the messages were about Hades and Persephone and another realm, and immortals, and it sounded like something you could join. So I want to join too.”

“People pointing guns at you? Setting off bombs? Getting you killed?” Adrian finally spoke, not even trying to disguise his accent. “That’s what you want in on?”

“If I could be immortal? Of course. Who would say no to that?”

Sophie stayed silent, largely in shame. She’d said no all these weeks, and look what danger it had put everyone in.

Adrian answered after a moment, “You’d be surprised. People like that old woman, they’re really not keen on the idea.”

“I don’t care about them,” said Melissa. “Listen, like I said, I didn’t tell them everything. I wanted to know more about it—about you guys. I gave the cult a few messages so they’d tell me things too, but I didn’t give them much that would help them.” She looked at Sophie. “But she did get a copy of my key. She said it was just to look at your stuff when neither of us was there—that no one would be hurt. I didn’t like doing it, but she was really persuasive. Then she broke in, and I started getting scared and didn’t want to talk to them anymore. But they pressured me into luring you out tonight. One last ‘favor.’ They were going to ‘show’ me how dangerous Adrian was. I was going to turn them in as soon as they did anything stupid, I swear. I wanted them off my back. I didn’t know they’d bring
guns
.”

Sophie sighed, wiping rain off her forehead. “No, I have to move out. This isn’t something I can get past.”

“But I want in on it! Please. I’m on your side, really. What I saw tonight—” Melissa’s desperate gaze latched onto Adrian. “The way you guys can appear and disappear, how strong you are—I know it’s all real. Please, tell me how I can do it.”

Adrian slipped his arm around Sophie. “You mistake me for someone who’s recruiting. Sorry. We need to get going.”

They set off across the parking lot. Behind them Melissa called, bitterly, “But you’re recruiting Sophie.”

Sophie and Adrian kept walking through the rain, and didn’t look back.

T
HE MORNING FOUND
Freya and Niko sitting opposite Sophie and Adrian at the Airstream’s table, devouring bacon sandwiches. Niko and Freya had spent the night in Adrian’s bed in the caravan, since they were the ones most in need of recovery. Sophie and Adrian had slept wrapped up together in sleeping bags and blankets in the back of the bus—not at all a bad arrangement. Adrian let himself think back to some of it, his blood warming at the memory. He twined his leg around Sophie’s beneath the table. She nudged it affectionately.

This morning Niko looked whole and healthy again, and fully normal. Normal, that is, aside from the fact that he’d had to throw away his burned clothes and borrow some of Adrian’s (which were a bit too short for his limbs), and that his head was shaved to get rid of the patchy burned hair.