The Blood of the Hydra (17 page)

The water swirled beneath us, whooshing and roaring like an oncoming train. A large tree branch floated below, and the tendrils of the churning water rippled and reached out, trapping it and pulling it inward. It cracked into two, and was sucked into the watery tornado.

If that tree branch had been our boat, we would have been crushed and drowned by now. Instead, we soared over Charybdis, untouched by the raging water. Confident that Chris was holding the boat steady, I leaned over the railing to get a better look, my mouth dropping open at what I saw below.

In the center of the whirlpool was a giant pink gullet, wide enough to consume an entire ship. Its fleshy throat dipped in crags and valleys, the seawater sloshing down into its bottomless depths. Along the top rim sprung giant yellow fangs—teeth.

I was staring straight into Charybdis’s mouth.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Blake rested his elbows next to mine on the rail, yelling over the noise. I’d been so entranced by the monster below that I hadn’t heard him approach.

“I’m just glad we’re up here and not down there,” I said.

He nodded in agreement, and we both continued to stare down at Charybdis, watching her consume everything in her reach.

Then something shot down from the yacht, hitting one of Charybdis’s teeth and ricocheting into the water. An arrow.

One of
my
arrows.

“Hey!” My head shot up, and I saw Rachael standing on the other side of the yacht, the wind blowing her golden hair all around her as she prepared to shoot again. I recognized the weapon she was using—it was the backup bow I’d brought in case something happened to mine. And I definitely hadn’t given her permission to use it. So I hurried over to her, yanking the arrow out of the weapon before she had a chance to realize I was there. “What are you
doing
?” I asked, screaming to be heard over Charybdis’s roar. “This is mine.”

“It was in the extra room that my brother and I are staying in,” she said. “I figured that with no one else using it, I might as well try to get a shot or two at Charybdis.”

“As if she could actually feel this?” I laughed and waved the arrow in the air. “Do you
see
how big she is? This arrow would barely scratch her.”

“Obviously I see how big she is.” Rachael rolled her eyes and reached for the arrow, but I swiftly pulled it out of her grasp. “I thought that if I hit her in the right spot, I could find a weakness somewhere.”

“And you thought that spot would be… her tooth?” I asked. Maybe all that lotus fruit had gone to Rachael’s brain more than I’d realized.

“Of course not,” she said. “I was aiming for her eye.”

I’d been so focused on Charybdis’s gaping mouth that I hadn’t looked for an eye. Now that I did, I saw one of the huge, rock-like chunks smashed into the side of her face. I swear at that same moment she stared back at me, and she let out a low rumble, deep enough that I could feel the vibration resonate through the air. But I couldn’t help chuckling—because her eyes were nowhere
near
her teeth.

“What’s so funny?” Rachael asked.

“Your aim was a bit off,” I said, suppressing another laugh.

She narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying that you could do better?”

“I’m a daughter of Apollo.” I reached for my bow, held it up in position, and strung the arrow through it. “Of
course
I can do better.”

But before I had a chance to center in on my target, a long growl echoed from the other side of the strait, followed by an ear-splitting crack. Something rumbled high up in the peak, and a few rocks rolled down the mountain, splashing into the sea.

“Is that an earthquake?” Rachael asked, blocking the sun with her hand as she stared up at the peak.

“No.” I shook my head, ice-cold dread running through my veins. “I don’t think so.”

The whimpering puppy sounds returned, loud enough to rival the churning of Charybdis, as if there were an entire pack of them. There was more crashing up ahead—like footsteps. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought they were the footsteps of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

More rocks tumbled down into the sea as they grew closer. Then, out of a pitch dark cave buried in the side of the mountain, slithered one humongous reptilian head, and then another, and then another, until there were six of them in all. Each one yelped, whimpered, or barked—with the occasional hiss thrown in between. They were each identical, with green eyes, and were connected to long, snakelike necks that went on forever. Three lines of teeth glinted in the sunlight whenever one of them opened its mouth, and they chomped their teeth wildly, looking at us and salivating as if we were dinner on a platter.

The creature was out of reach of my arrows, so I dropped my bow to my side, transfixed as I stared up at the huge monstrosity. Rachael did the same.

“Um, you guys?” Kate said, her voice shaking as she gazed up at the terrifying creature. “I think Scylla’s mad.”

“Why’s Scylla showing her ugly faces?!” Chris yelled, still controlling the wind that was keeping our yacht afloat.

“Don’t speak,” Hypatia said, shooting him a look so stern that he stopped talking. “You can’t risk that mint falling out of your mouth.”

“Chris is right,” Blake said, his eyes determined as he stared Scylla down. “We chose Charybdis’s side of the strait. Scylla was supposed to stay in her cave and leave us alone.”

“Except we broke the rules by flying over Charybdis,” Kate pointed out. “And I don’t think Scylla’s happy about it.”

Danielle sneered at Scylla, as if that would be enough to scare her. “Is she even allowed to do this?” she asked.

“She’s a monster,” Ethan answered. “She’s ‘allowed’ to do whatever she wants.”

Kate held her hands up, her palms facing the side of the mountain, her brows furrowed in concentration. I don’t know what she was trying to do, but her expression grew more and more frustrated, and I could tell it wasn’t working. Finally she let out a long breath and dropped her hands to her sides.

“I was trying to make Scylla’s cave collapse around her,” she explained. “But we’re too far away from the land for me to use my power.”

“And Charybdis’s hold on the water is so strong that it overpowers anything I try to do,” Danielle said.

I leaned over the railing again to check our progress—the back of the boat had just passed over the center of Charybdis’s mouth. At this pace, we still had a few more minutes until we would be out of the strait. And with the way that a few of Scylla’s mouths were licking their lips, I doubted we had that much time. Scylla must have realized it, too—or else she would have already attacked.

“Hey, Chris?” I called to him. “Is there any way you can make us move faster?”

He shook his head, his lips pressed tightly together.

“The mint increased his power ten-fold,” Hypatia reminded us. “It doesn’t make his abilities endless. If he pushes himself and loses control of the yacht, we’ll be crushed in the mouth of Charybdis. We can’t risk it.”

Blake drew his gun and held it in front of him, focused in on Scylla. “Then it’s a good thing we brought our weapons,” he said. “Because it looks like we’ll need to fight.”

“Yes.” Hypatia nodded, her expression grim. “It appears so.”

“I thought we couldn’t fight Scylla?” I asked, although I still held tightly onto my bow. “That it was impossible and we shouldn’t even try?”

“I did say that,” she said. “But Chris needs to be out in the wind for his powers to work, and we can’t risk losing him to Scylla. Then the yacht will fall into Charybdis’s mouth, and we’ll all be dead. We need you and the others here to protect him. So… I suppose it’s time for you to prove me wrong, isn’t it?”

Kate’s face was pale, like she’d just seen a ghost. “We wouldn’t just be proving
you
wrong,” she said. “We would be proving thousands of years of
history
wrong. We can’t do it. It’s impossible.” She backed up and gripped the handrail, terror in her eyes as she stared up at Scylla. We weren’t moving fast enough to escape, and the expression on Kate’s face said it all—she didn’t think we were going to make it.

My stomach rose into my throat, fear weighing down my body. I knew this mission was dangerous, and that our lives would be at risk. But the real danger wasn’t supposed to happen until we reached the hydra. It wasn’t supposed to happen this soon. Not here. Not
now
.

“You also must remember that in thousands of years of history, there’s been no record of anyone like the five of you, with powers over the elements,” Hypatia said, the confidence in her voice forcing me to focus. “And we have demigods with us as well. If there was ever a team to fight Scylla, it’s the one we have right here.”

I readied my bow, but Blake reached for me, pulling me to stand behind him.

“What are you doing?” I tried to step forward, but he held his arm out to hold me back. “We need to be ready to fight.”

“But you don’t need to be on our front lines,” he said. “I—
we
—need you. And Rachael seems more than ready to race to the front, and she has a bow and arrow, too.”

“Obviously you haven’t seen her shoot.” I rolled my eyes, but didn’t run forward again. I knew from training that I wasn’t supposed to rush ahead of everyone. I needed to keep myself in one piece so I could heal the others. And if Blake didn’t want me ahead of him, then I would fight right beside him.

“What’s the plan?” Kate asked, still gripping onto the rail.

Before anyone could answer, one of Scylla’s heads darted forward, as quick as a rattlesnake, and wrapped its mouth around Chef’s arm. His screams drowned out my thoughts, and I shot an arrow straight into one of Scylla’s eyes. That was enough to make her open her mouth in a scream and release Chef, who toppled to the floor, blood spurting all around him.

Scylla prepared to take another bite of him, but Danielle dashed forward, a shield of ice in one hand to protect herself. She stabbed Scylla’s other eye with her katana. The head whimpered and pulled back, blindly crashing into the side of the mountain a few times on its way there.

The other heads made a similar sound to the one I heard earlier—what had reminded me of lost puppies. Could blinding one of her heads have been enough to scare the other ones away from attacking?

I wanted to hope so, but then the center head hissed and reared back, its eyes locked on mine as it prepared to strike.

“Give me fire!” I yelled to Blake, my gaze leveled with Scylla’s.

The tip of my arrow erupted in flames, just as we’d practiced in training, and I released it straight into Scylla’s open mouth. I did it again, and again, and again, moving so quickly that it felt like one big blur. Blake and I worked together seamlessly—he always had the fire ready when I was ready to shoot. So much energy buzzed between us that we didn’t need to speak to communicate. It was like we’d been fighting in tandem for years.

Once my quiver was emptied, Blake held up both of his hands, beads of sweat collecting on his forehead as he focused on the flames coming out of Scylla’s mouth. She looked like a fire-breathing dragon. Her neck flailed around, her eyes wide in pain—and in what also looked like confusion.

Then the fire exploded, and Scylla’s head burst into thousands of scaly pieces, raining blood and guts and squishy green goop all over the deck.

Blake pulled me close and held his arm above our heads, shielding us both from the fallout of Scylla’s guts. Some of the pieces were still on fire, so Danielle pulled water from the air to create an isolated rainstorm, extinguishing the flames.

The destroyed neck crashed lifelessly into the swirling sea, splashing water up at us on impact. The four uninjured heads reached forward and clamped their mouths around different sections of the neck, pulling it away from Charybdis’s deadly whirlpool. They poked and prodded at it, whimpering as they tried to urge it back to life. But it remained still.

The time Scylla spent tending to the limp neck was the time we needed for Chris to fly the yacht safely out of the strait. We landed with ease, and I looked behind us, surprised at how calm it all looked now. Scylla had disappeared back into her cave, and Charybdis had closed her mouth, the sea flat and calm. The sun had emerged from behind the clouds, rays of light sparkling over the water. It was as if the past ten chaotic minutes hadn’t happened at all.

At least, until I stepped back and my heel squished into the green goop that had come out of Scylla’s head in the explosion. I didn’t want to think about what it could be—because I highly suspected that it might be a booger.

“Nicole!” Kate called my name from the other side of the deck. “We need your help over here!”

I looked to see what she meant, and saw her kneeling on the floor next to Chef. He was slumped up against the rail, and Kate had removed her jacket, using it to tie a tourniquet around what was left of his arm.

His arm that now ended at his elbow, the skin above it torn and shredded to his shoulder.

I rushed over to them, and Chef’s eyes lit up when he saw me. “You can fix it, right?” he said. “Kate promised me that you could fix it.”

I looked at the stump again, swallowing down a wave of nausea. Because of what I could see, yes, I could heal. But as for the rest of it—how could I heal something that wasn’t even there? I didn’t think I could do it, but I took a few deep breaths, trying not to panic.