The Gatekeeper's Sons (The Gatekeeper's Trilogy) (42 page)

She stood there, thinking. “Is McAdams still up there?” she prayed to Than.

“Yes!” he shouted. “But hurry! Don’t waste time!”

He wanted her to set traps, but she didn’t know how to do that. Think, Therese! Okay, McAdams would eventually need food if she managed to stay away from him long enough, so he would come here, to this part of the woods. This would be a good place to try and trap him, or at least weaken him with an injury. But how?

She shuddered. She was not cut out for this. Strategically planning how to hurt and kill someone went against her grain. Remember your parents, she told herself. Remember the last time you saw them!

She forced herself to visualize her father writhing in frenzy as the water washed over him, suffocating him. She forced herself to see her mother, bleeding at the neck, blood pouring from her mouth as she yielded to her death. She clutched the golden locket around her neck. I can do this!

Than
said not to waste time, so maybe she should start sharpening the sticks until another idea came to her mind. She followed the stream out of the thicket where the undergrowth thinned out and looked for a place to sit and work. She saw a fallen log up ahead that would serve as a bench. On her way to the log, the ground dropped below her and she fell flat on her chest, dropping her bundle, apples flying everywhere. She had landed in a hole about two feet deep and four feet wide.

“
Ow! She scrambled to her feet. “Oh, damn!” Leaves stuck to her skin and fell in her bra as she gathered the apples, leaving the nuts and most of the grapes, which had fallen beneath the rotting leaves. She heaped the apples back onto her shirt, bundling it back up. Luckily they still looked good, no bruises. Her knee, on the other hand, would definitely have a bruise. It had been stabbed by a sharp rock. At least her jeans had protected her skin.

A flash of inspiration.

She could use this hole to set a trap, and she could look for similar places in the ground. She would sharpen sticks at both ends, drive them into the bottom of these holes, and cover them with dead leaves.

“Than!” she said in her mind. “I’ve got it!” She told him her plan.

“Yes!” he shouted. “But hurry!”

“Is McAdams still there?”

“Not for long!” Than yelled.

“What is he doing? Oh, wait, you can’t answer that. Is he watching me?”

“No!”

“Is he making plans?”

“Yes! Yes, hurry!”

Now Therese was filled with worry over what McAdams might be doing up on the platform. She took her collection of sticks to the large fallen log, sat down, and unsheathed her sword. The sword was too long to whittle the wood, so she drove the blade into the ground and used it like a cheese grater, rubbing first one end and then the other of each stick against the blade. The sword was so sharp that it didn’t take her long to produce a large mound o
f sticks sharpened at both ends. Now she needed to find a big rock so she could drive each stick into the ground.

She ran around the fallen log looking for a rock. There has to be a rock in these woods! Panic threatened to overtake her as she dug through
the layers of leaves and came up with nothing, over and over. Then she remembered where she had hurt her knee in the bottom of the hole and looked there. Yes, sharp on top but smooth on the bottom where it was wedged into the ground, it was the size of a large brick. She dug it from the earth and went back for her sticks. She had made the sticks a little more than a foot long and now she hammered them into the ground, a foot apart, so that they stuck up about eight inches from the bottom of the hole. Once she had impaled the bottom of the hole with the sharp, jutting weapons, she grabbed armfuls of dead leaves and hid the trap.

Then she picked her way back to the fruit trees to gather a few oranges, this time looking more closely at the ground for small dips where she could set more traps.

“Therese!” Than cried.

“Is McAdams climbing down?”

“Yes!”

“Is he coming after me?”

“No!”

“Where’s he going? Is he headed for the rocks behind Zeus?” That’s where she would have gone, for the lookout.

“Yes!”

“He hopes he’ll see me better from there,” she muttered.

“Exactly!”

“He’s waiting for me to wear myself out, and then he plans to come for me!”

“Exactly!” Than’s voice sounded desperate.

Therese trembled wildly. “I’ll set more traps. Shout if he heads this way.”

“I will!”

A movement in the wood caught her eye, and she froze, waited. She took a slow step and looked beyond the tree where she had seen the
flash of something brownish. Now she saw it was a wild horse there with her in the wood. At first, she smiled, comforted by the vision. Then she thought of the traps. The animals!

Again in her mind, she asked, “Than! Artemis! The animals! What if they hurt themselves on my traps? Can you warn them somehow?”

“No!” Artemis called out.

“Ares!” Than shouted.

Ares? “Ares will understand where the traps are.”

“Yes.”

“But how can we warn the animals?”

“Your scent!” Artemis cried.

“They’ll avoid the traps because of my scent?” She found herself whispering rather than praying in her head.

“That will be our message! To avoid your scent!” Artemis shouted.

Therese looked at the horse. It made her feel less alone. She took an apple from her bundle and held it out. The horse’s nostrils flared, but it didn’t move toward her or away. Therese tossed the apple toward the tree. The horse trotted away.

Of course. The apple carried her scent. He had already been warned.

She spent at least two hours sharpening sticks, driving them into holes, and covering the holes with leaves, but she began to fear she might be wasting her time. What if McAdams never came this way? What if he killed her before he got hungry? She was wearing herself out. Was this worth it?

Then she slapped her forehead. Maybe she should have tried to mount the horse. She might have had a better chance against McAdams if she came at him from above on horseback.

Too late now.

She should set more traps, but she should seek a path he was sure to cross.

She gathered more fruit—oranges and pomegranates, and stuffed them in her shirt, but they wouldn’t all fit. Then she had the idea of tying the hem of the shirt in a knot and stuffing the fruit
inside
the shirt rather than gathering the edges all around. More fruit would fit this way. She wanted to collect as much food as she could because with all her traps out here, she didn’t want to have to come back this way and risk injuring herself in one of them. That would be ironic, she thought.

As she tore her way through the woods back toward the deeper canyon, she stopped whenever she found a good dip in the ground to set up another trap. She’d set down her bundle and the big rock she used for hammering, sharpen a dozen more sticks at both ends on her blade, and then stake the sticks firmly in the ground before hiding them with fallen leaves. The further she got from the thickest part of the woods, however, the fewer dead leaves were there on the ground. She realized as she followed the stream back down to the rocky canyon behind Hades that she would have to think of a different way to set traps on this side of the battlefield.

“Therese!” Than shouted.

She prayed, “Is he following me?”

“Hide!”

She looked up and realized she had now come into view of those on the side of the platform closest to her. She could see Than, Hades, and Aphrodite directly overhead. She had to remember to stay out of Ares’s view. She clambered against the canyon wall and hid beneath the cliff edge above her.

“Is McAdams following me?” she asked Than.

“Just now!”

“He’s just now leaving the rocks behind Zeus?”

“Yes!”

“Is he headed toward the woods or the lake?”

When he didn’t answer, she said, “I mean, is he headed toward the woods?”

“Yes!”

“Good. Maybe he’ll come across at least one of my traps. I think I have twelve or thirteen all around the fruit trees. But I need to think of something else down here in the canyon. There’s nothing here but rocks.”

“Yes!”

“What? I didn’t ask anything.” She thought back on what she had said. “Rocks? I should make traps with rocks?”

“Yes!”

But how? She thought. How could she use rocks to make a trap? The sticks went into hidden holes waiting for McAdams to happen by. They probably wouldn’t kill him, but he could get cut up really bad. But falling on rocks? What could she do with the rocks? Could she sharpen them? Chip them into sharp wedges? No. The rocks could fall on him. How could she make it so the rocks could fall on him? She could throw them at him. She could gather a stockpile and keep them near her hideout so that when he came for her she could launch…

Wait! Launch?

She had to work without being seen by Ares, and she had to work fast. She crept along the base of the cliff edge scanning for possibilities. She looked down into the deeper canyon below where her shield lay useless to her and out across to the other side about a fifty yards away. Think, Therese! Think!

Then, like a bullet, it hit her.

The waterfall!

Chapter Forty-Two
: The Battle

Therese filled with hope and enthusiasm when it dawned on her that she could scuttle along this canyon wall beneath the cliff edge and make her way to the roaring fall behind Hephaestus without being seen. She prayed to Than to let him know her plan.

She would find a place behind the falls to stash her food and store her rocks, which she started collecting in her arms now. She would find a lower place, visible to Ares, to set up a decoy camp. Then, when McAdams came to the decoy, she would launch her rocks at him. The rocks probably wouldn’t kill him, but as with the traps in the thick part of the woods by the fruit trees, they would injure him and slow him down, hopefully enough for her to defeat him with her sword.

“Good!” Than shouted.

A blood-curdling wail rang out across the canyon and caused Therese to freeze. “Was that McAdams?”

“Yes!”

“Did he find one of my traps?”

“I think so! I can’t see him!” Than called out.

Whether McAdams injured himself in one of her traps or in some other way, he was nevertheless injured, and this added to Therese’s overall optimism as she scrambled beneath the cliff edge with her arms full of rocks the size of softballs. The noise of the falls thundered as she neared them and the spray hit her bare
skin and chilled her, a relief after the sweat she had worked up from building her traps in Demeter’s woods.

“How long till nightfall?” she asked Than in her mind. It seemed like hours had passed, and yet the sun still bore down on them high in the sky. “Wait a minute. We never left Olympus, did we? The sun always shines, right?”

If Than answered her, she could no longer hear him this close to the crashing falls. She hadn’t thought of that! How would she make it without him?

Unlike Than and the other gods, she had no powers of telepathy and could not be sure if voices in her head were inspirations or delusions. She almost turned back. In fact, she changed her mind five or six times and nearly wore herself out beneath the cliff edge with indecision. At last she decided it was her best chance of survival to go on with her plan. “I can’t hear you anymore,” she prayed. “But I’ve decided to go on anyway.”

She reached the falls and found a hidden grotto behind the roaring water, but if McAdams came this way to her decoy camp, she would have no advantage for attack. Although there were many little nooks and crevices back here that she could climb onto, she would be open, visible, and vulnerable to his retaliation. She dropped her rocks in a heap, set down her fruit, and looked around.

At the furthest lip of the grotto on the outer edge of the falls, she found a nook way up high that just might work. If McAdams came through the grotto, she would see him, and she would be above him, with gravity on her side. She wou
ld also be hidden until he reached the point where she stood now. It also seemed, from down here, anyway, that she might have a view of the deeper canyon in case he came that route. The trick would be hauling the rocks and fruit up the steep wall nearly twenty feet to the nook. First she would try it empty-handed to see if it was possible.

Now that she couldn’t hear Than, she felt really anxious that McAdams could be coming around the corner for her at any moment, and this anxiety caused her to tremble more profoundly than she had before. The trembling made climbing up the nearly vertical wall very difficult. She used her fingers to find places in the wall to grip, and she fished
around with her feet for footholds to support her weight. One false step meant falling to her death at the bottom of the canyon.

Dirt from the canyon wall got into her mouth and crunched in her teeth when she clenched them. She ran her tongue around her teeth, trying to wash it out, and she spit and gagged. She reached for another rock, keeping her mouth closed this time, breathing through her nose. A fingernail broke at the tip as she clung to another ledge, but that was the least of her worries.