The Black God (#2, Damian Eternal Series) (39 page)

“
And they’ll free him?” I
asked.

“
Possibly.”

It wasn’t a ringing reassurance. If action
movies were remotely based on reality, Herakles was probably in
danger of being killed if he wasn’t useful to his captors. I was
starting to worry this all was real. “All this just because I
stepped outside the boundaries.” It seemed too crazy to be
true.

“
It was inevitable,” Father
Ellis replied. “It was foolish of us to think we could cage you
forever. What’s important is we find a safe place for you
now.”

“
And rescue Herakles,” I
pressed.

“
Herakles is the strongest
man in the world. Chances are he will buy us time and won’t need
our help to escape,” Father Cristopolos said.

For once, he made sense. I didn’t see
Herakles staying anywhere involuntarily. “Can I ask where he went
at least?”

“
Washington DC,” Father
Ellis answered.

I was born and lived just out side of DC
until I turned six. If everyone in the world was looking for me, I
doubted I could walk into the nation’s capitol and find Herakles
unnoticed. Not that I was buying this nonsense …

Except that I kind of was. I was scared
enough to believe what they said without understanding exactly what
it meant to be someone of importance. To be hunted.

To be an Oracle, the most cherished and
highly regarded human in existence. It made little sense after my
humble upbringing here.

“
Where do I go?” I asked
quietly, unable to dispel the urge to find Herakles, no matter what
the priests said.

“
We have a backup plan.
We’re waiting for someone who will take you elsewhere.”

“
Who?”

Fathers Cristopolos and Ellis looked at one
another briefly in silent communication I didn’t particularly care
for. “You needn’t worry,” Father Ellis said. “I’ll be going with
you. In the meantime, I need you to keep this on no matter what.”
He stepped forward and took my arm, wrapping a piece of red cord
around my wrist.

I felt no different but assumed it was like
the boundaries of my home, capable of blocking me and the world
from one another.

“
Do you have any belongings
you need to collect?” Father Cristopolos asked.

I shook my head. I owned nothing of
value.

“
Very well. Remain here
with Father Ellis.”

The four of them turned and left. I watched
them. This didn’t feel any more real than watching the strange
grotesque-creature at the lake. It had to be a dream. A joke. An
epic mistake.

“
Things are about to
change,” Father Ellis said. “It’s only right I give you this.” He
held out a small pouch. “Herakles left it with me for safekeeping
in case something happened. I think this qualifies. It belongs to
you.”

I accepted the small velvet pouch and opened
it. Something glimmered inside. I dumped it into my hand and stared
at it. A teal gem set in a plain chain with a bronze finish nestled
into my palm. It was huge, clear and so bright, it almost seemed to
glow. Its multifaceted surface reflected sunlight and caused faint
rainbows to appear in the air around it.

“
This is … wow,” I
breathed. “It’s mine?” Even as I asked the question, I knew the
answer. It
felt
like it belonged to me. The strange sense wasn’t something I’d
ever experienced before.

“
Yes. It was all you
brought with you when you arrived. You don’t remember how you came
to have such an incredible piece of jewelry?”

I shook my head. “I don’t remember anything
from before the day we arrived here,” I murmured. I closed my hand
around the gem and considered replacing it in the pouch. It didn’t
seem natural or right for me not to wear what was mine. I tugged it
over my head and tucked it into my t-shirt. The gem settled against
my chest.

“
It’s special, whatever it
is,” he said.

I know.
Uncertain how it was possible for me to understand
a gem I’d only now laid eyes on, I stepped away, too wired to be
still.

Father Ellis sat down and closed his eyes to
meditate.

“
How can you pray at a time
like this?” I asked in agitation.

“
What better time is there
to pray than when you’re in trouble?”

To each his own.
I rolled my eyes.

There is nothing permanent
except change.

–
Heraclitus

How fast could reality, a world, life in
general, transform into something I never knew existed?

I was waiting for Father Ellis to laugh and
tell me he was joking about everything. But as the next two hours
passed in silence, he didn’t change his story. He was quiet and
calm, choosing to meditate in the peaceful meadow. I initially
paced then sat and stared at the sky, lost.

Everything they’d said began to sink in.
When I realized this was real or at least, the priests believed it
to be real, I also knew I had to do something. I stood. The monk
was seated cross legged in meditation, his eyes closed.

“
I’m going to get my
emergency pack,” I told him. I waited for him to tell me not to
bother, because they were messing with me.

He opened his eyes. “Is it far?”

“
Half hour.”

“
I’ll wait
here.”

My insides were shaking when I turned away
and started into the forest. Yesterday, I was desperate to leave
the forest. Today, I was scared of the same thing. It was stupid of
me to be so worked up! I didn’t buy the idea of me having power,
but I did know we couldn’t stay here when the place we all lived
was destroyed.

And there’s
Herakles.
He was the strongest man alive
and had been for fifteen years. But I worried about him. If there
was something else going on here, like maybe the priests were lying
to me for some reason or hiding something worse, then I wanted him
with me. I trusted him. I loved him.

I couldn’t leave him trapped in someone’s
basement or prison or wherever he was. Even refusing to believe
that I was the Oracle, I found myself looking closely at the red
cord around my wrist and wondering if it really did what the
priests said it did – hid me from the world.

I moved through the forest to the place
where we kept emergency packs and stopped at the base of the large,
old tree in whose trunk we’d stuffed supplies. Pulling on the pack,
I tightened the straps and rifled through the other supplies to
make sure I wouldn’t need them.

The crack of a branch made me tense, and I
straightened, listening.

Someone was there. Not the priests, who
didn’t know how to walk with discipline, but someone who was trying
to navigate the forest without being discovered. The occasional
brush of cloth on wood, the careful placement of slow footsteps
…

Pulling free my knife, I faced the direction
of whoever was following me. “I can hear you,” I called.

There was a pause, as if the forest was
waiting, too. Finally someone spoke.

“
I seem to have gotten
lost,” the man said. He eased out from behind a thick tree
trunk.

The stranger was dressed in the type of
clothing indicating he wasn’t a lost camper but someone who wanted
to blend in with his environment. He carried several hunting knives
and was built like he knew how to use them. His exposed forearms
were scarred where there was no tattoo sleeve. A tattoo wound
around his neck and disappeared into the clothing covering his
chest. He was too handsome to be a priest by far, but it was the
gleam in his eyes – the spark of a predatory awareness Herakles had
taught me to be wary of – that disturbed me. He had the look of a
soldier, aside from his medium length hair.

“
Where are you trying to
go?” I asked and eased away from the stash of supplies.

“
You with the
orphanage?”

“
Where are you trying to
go?” I repeated.

He snorted. “My employers are located
somewhere in this forest. A priest named Cristopolos.” His gaze
went to our surroundings, and one of the tattoos on his neck stood
out. The mark of Hermes – a winged foot – was surrounded by other
ornate ink work. Herakles had taught me about the different guilds
of the underground society of criminals. I filtered through what
he’d forced me to learn to identify the marking.

“
You’re a mercenary,” I
said, surprised.

“
Not a mercenary. A
gladiator,” the stranger corrected. “But I do merc work on the side
during the off season.”

I didn’t think someone
could bear the tattoo of a mercenary and
not
be one. Mixed martial artists
belonging to the Gladiator Guild were street fighters paid
handsomely for beating the daylights out of another of their kind.
The line between the legal and illegal markets of being paid to
fight was blurry, and I didn’t fully understand it except that this
man wore a tattoo that designated him to be something other than
what he claimed he was.

“
So you fight and kill
people for money,” I said, recalling what the priests told us about
one of the occupations they favored least. They looked upon
gladiators with disdain and mercenaries with outright
horror.

“
Not exactly the godly
values they teach you, I know.”

“
I think it’s cool. I can
fight, too.”

“
Sure, kid.” He flashed an
insincere smile. “Which way is it?”

I bit back my response,
irritated he didn’t believe me. And to call me
kid
when I was eighteen, an adult by
most standards … though today, I felt like I was being treated like
a ten year old again. The mercenary was younger than Herakles’ age
of thirty five, younger than the priests and the age of all my
favorite Hollywood actors.

“
Whatever,” I muttered.
“What kind of gladiator gets lost in a tiny forest like
this?”

“
One hired to fight not to
track,” he returned.

I was tempted to mislead him to teach him a
lesson. A look at him, though, and I recalled what Herakles once
said about not deliberately pissing off someone who could pound me
into the ground. Priests were one thing. They adhered to strict
rules about non-violence. But a gladiator or mercenary was
another.

Turning away, I put my knife away and
started towards the meadow. “I’ll race you there.”

“
You
want to race me?” He fell into step behind me, amused. He was
over six feet tall and muscular in a way the teen boys at the
campground neighboring the property weren’t.

“
Why not?” I snapped. “You
think I can’t run?”

“
I think I don’t want to
explain to the priests what happened to the little girl in the
forest who fell and impaled herself on a tree trunk because she
tried to race me,” he replied with arrogance that made me want to
ditch him in the swampy part of the forest where I’d accidentally
discovered quicksand one summer.

Really?
This man couldn’t know I had been raised by the
strongest Olympian in the world. Satisfaction sank into me. I loved
the opportunity to prove someone wrong, probably because I rarely
had the chance.

“
See if you can keep up,” I
challenged and then bolted.

For the first fifty meters, he almost did. I
pushed myself harder. I had the advantage of knowing the forest and
led him through a route that included a few downed trees.

Larger and heavier than me, the gladiator
soon fell behind as he struggled to navigate spaces more suitable
to someone my size than his. I reached the meadow triumphant and
slowed to a trot as I broke free of the forest and headed back to
the priest.

Reaching him, I turned to wait for the
gladiator. He appeared a full two minutes later.

“
I found the mercenary you
hired,” I told Father Ellis. “What made you all want to hire
someone like that anyway? Don’t you hate them?”

Father Ellis climbed to his feet, facing the
gladiator striding across the field towards us. “We needed
discretion and loyalty. Money buys both,” Father Ellis said.
“Though we paid for a gladiator of some honor, not a
mercenary.”

“
Yeah, well, he has the
tattoo of a merc.” I observed the approaching gladiator. He was
grinning, as if pleased by the exercise, his sharp gaze on the
priest beside me. “Herakles said you should never pay someone like
that. Besides, I can take care of myself.”

“
Not against what comes.”
Ignoring my look, Father Ellis stepped away to greet the gladiator.
“I am Father Ellis. You must be Niko.”

“
I am.” The gladiator shook
his hand.

“
You’re late. We expected
you hours ago.”

“
The airport is locked
down. I had to find a creative route here,” came the easy
response.

I kind of liked that Niko wasn’t fazed by
the priest’s chiding. Niko wasn’t really what I expected of a
mercenary. I had the vision of a gold-obsessed pirate in my head
for some reason, and the clean-shaven, practically attired Niko was
nothing like that. The edge of wary arrogance definitely fit the
image I’d created.

“
You’ve met your charge, I
see,” Father Ellis said.

“
What? This little girl?”
Niko motioned to me. He looked me over critically.