The Heir of Olympus and the Forest Realm (44 page)

In life she looked exactly like the statue that depicted her in Apollo’s realm, yet it was completely wrong. Stone, no matter how it had been magically manipulated, could not replicate her grace and strength, poise and fury. These qualities shone out of her like the moon itself. It was breathtaking. But Gordie was growing weary and impatient.

After she had shot three more arrows, he could see no way to get near her. As she broke into the clearing on her second pass he shouted, “Enough!”

She froze in the clearing and glowered at him. He sheathed his bat and absorbed his shield, put his arms at his sides and glared back. Slowly, deliberately, she raised her bow. She was tall—a few feet taller than him, and the bow was nearly her height. She stared down the shaft of her nocked arrow and Gordie stared right back into her unblinking eye. A ghost of a smile touched her lips and she loosed.

He spun to his right as the arrow whistled past his cheek, close enough to feel its tailwind ruffle his hair. He sprang forward as she reloaded. Gordie dove over the next arrow as he charged, and slid on his knees beneath the next like a high stakes game of limbo. Her arm was a blur as it reached back for the next arrow in her quiver over and over. He dodged and flipped and rolled and dodged again.

When he had halved the distance, her frustrated snarl turned into a triumphant grin as she nocked three arrows at once. Fortunately, Gordie had seen this trick depicted on Apollo’s mural and was expecting it. What he was not expecting was for the arrows to change course. The three missiles danced and spun around each other as they approached their target. He panicked, but at the last second realized their gambit, and continued to run straight ahead. One arrow flew an inch above his head, its tail feather tickling his hair. Another flew passed his right side at elbow height, and the other to his left at knee height. She had expected him to dodge, but he hadn’t taken the bait.

Then she shouted in anger, a battle cry that chilled Gordie, before she loosed one more projectile. From ten yards away he stopped and caught the quivering arrow in his fist—its point continued twisting in his grip two inches away from the smooth skin between his eyes. He smiled as he tossed the arrow aside, and she lowered her bow. The hatred on her face was alarming, making his smile falter.

“Look, I just want to—”

“DIE!” She slung her bow over her back and pulled two curved, glinting daggers out of her belt as she sprang forward, all in one movement.

“Not quite,” he said, but his light mood melted as he started evading the slashing knives. Again he was rolling, flipping, diving, twisting, as the thin blades hacked at him in a blur of silver.

“Stop!” A blade slashed open the front of his sweatshirt as he sucked in his stomach.

“Stop!” A few hairs were shaved off the top of his head.

“STOP!” he screamed as he grabbed her wrists.

As he caught her, they froze in a dead-lock. Her face was inches from his as she mirrored his lunge—Gordie recoiled from the ferocity of her glare.

“Release me,” Artemis growled through clenched teeth.

“No. Look, I just want to talk.”

“Release me!”

“I’m not going to hurt you!”

“No, but I will hurt you,” she said, her eyes narrowing with each word she spoke.

He felt her trying to break his grip. Sweat broke out on his face. It took all his prodigious strength to keep her subdued. Meanwhile, he couldn’t help but notice how smooth her skin was in his hands despite the sinuous muscles he felt roiling beneath. Her skin was silver and shone brightly, as if it were its own light source. She wore a leather vest and matching leather skirt, but they were not the dull tan of normal hides. These skins were the pure white of fresh snow, their brilliance only outdone by her luminescent complexion. He pushed these thoughts aside and searched for a way to mollify her. And an answer came to him, but he only wished to use it as a last resort.

“Will you please listen to me?” he said. “I can stop you, but I want you to stop of your own free will. Please don’t make me. Will you listen?”

“You cannot command me!” she screamed. Gordie’s heart sank. There was one way to stop her then, despite his uncertainty of the consequences—since the last task remained incomplete—he saw no alternative.

“Artemis!” Gordie bellowed—her eyes widened with surprise, “I, Gordon Leonhart!”—she had been trying to bull-rush him before, but now Gordie felt her muscles change direction as she tried to pull away—“demand the opportunity to prove—”

“NO!” she cried.

“My worth!” The last words echoed through the trees. Artemis’s body went slack and her eyes glazed over and shone silvery like two tiny moons. Gordie released her, but they remained bound together. The floating gossamer strands shot out of Gordie’s chest and wound their way around Artemis. She floated inches above the ground, arms outstretched, body immobilized. The silvery strands circled around her and made their way back to Gordie, wrapping him in their gentle warmth. But then something different happened.

A spray of golden strands—like the silver ones, but more substantial—shot out of Artemis’s chest. Gordie’s eyes widened with alarm, but he had no time to react. The golden ropes bound him, snapping his arms and legs to his sides. “Wait. What?” he spluttered, before his head snapped back and his eyes clouded as well.

Images flooded his brain.

A horde of angry Titan soldiers were charging him at his spot on the high ground. He looked down the shaft of a nocked arrow held steady in his bow by his slender, silvery hand. He released, sending the missile spinning through the nearest assailant’s forehead. To his right a lycanthrope was slashing and snarling at a group of enemies. The scene dissolved.

He looked down at a small blue bonfire on the sand of a gray desert. He sat cross-legged with his hands poised on his knees. On the other side of the fire, also sitting cross-legged, a beautiful young woman looked into his eyes. Her lips were moving, but he could not hear her words. Her hair floated in the air behind her. Over her shoulder, very distant in the star-filled blackness, he could make out a hemisphere, mostly blue with large green splotches—ethereal whites roving over it. The scene dissolved.

He was wading through a forest pool in the moonlight, the surface rippling away from him as he went. In the water ahead of him, a bare-chested, muscular man stood in the waist deep fount, his arms outstretched, awaiting him with a smile on his face. Then an arrow pierced the man’s head and Gordie’s point of view spun. Standing atop a rock wall next to the small waterfall that fed the pool, Apollo was lowering his bow with triumph etched on his features. The scene dissolved again and his sight went black.

Then a powerful female voice rang loud and clear in his mind.
I, Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt, command you to best the mighty gryphon in combat. Bring me its body as a trophy and sacrifice
. The voice echoed in his sub-conscience, then disappeared. The blackness remained. Then another voice broke the silence, a male voice, which Gordie knew.
I, Apollo, God of the Sun, command you to find my sister, Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt, and convince her to forgive me
. The echo of the voice died and sensation rushed back to Gordie like the instant of a star’s death.

Gordie fell to his hands and knees in the crisp grass. He panted. The air stung his lungs with each inhalation and clouded before his face with each exhalation. The sound of reality returned to him in an instant: the trees rustling in the gentle breeze, the call of night birds (some he recognized and some he did not), and the slow, steady breath of another nearby. He raised his head and saw Artemis sitting on her knees just feet in front of him, her head tucked to her chest.

“Are you okay?” he breathed, his words labored and pained.

She did not respond for a few moments. Then she whispered, “You fool.”

She raised her head and a tear stained her cheek, glimmering brighter than a diamond. Although her words were hostile, Gordie sensed her aggression towards him had gone. He thought he even recognized a look of pity on her face.

“What? What did I do?”

“You have doomed us both,” she said, looking at him with mild interest, as if she were seeing him for the first time.

“How so?” he asked, rocking back on his knees. They stared at each other, knees in the grass, just feet apart. Gordie shivered as the night air pulled at his damp clothes.

“You demanded a task of me before completing your last. You have made me complicit. We are bound now.” Her eyes narrowed on him—they were the shiny gray of the moon, but deeper than the silvery sheen of her skin. Then she adopted an even tone and said, “You will never complete his task because I will never forgive him. And when you die—as all men do—you will have died without completing the task. Penalty for failure of completing such a task is death, and so, I will die too.”

Her eyes never left his as she spoke. Gordie just stared back in awe. He knew he would be having a panic attack if the tables were turned. Her detached resignation broke his heart.

“I-I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know. I-I didn’t mean to.”

“It does not matter. It is done.”

“But you could forgive him,” Gordie said, pushing himself up with one hand and rising to his feet. “You could just forgive him, and then we’re both set!”

“Forgiveness is not a choice.” She rose to her feet with one fluid movement and looked down at him.

“Of course it is—”

“NO!” she said. Gordie recoiled. “It is not so simple.” Her voice reverted to its even keel. “What is done is done.” She turned and walked toward the mountain in which she was silhouetted. Gordie stepped briskly to catch up.

“Well, I can at least complete your task,” he said from beside her, looking up reverently and taking two steps for each one of hers.

“You can certainly try, but none can kill a gryphon. Even Heracles nearly fell to the Nemean Lion, and that beast had not the cunning of the Eagle. You will likely die and I with you. So be it.” She walked on. Gordie looked down at his shuffling feet with his eyebrows knit together.

“Yeah, well, I’m starting to think Hercules was kind of a moron,” he said. He took four more steps before he realized that Artemis had stopped, and he turned to look at her. She was looking at him with a half-smile.

“Maybe there is hope for you after all, young Leonhart.”

“Thanks,” he smiled with pride. “Hey, how did you know I was coming here anyways?”

“I lured you here. Have you forgotten your dream?” She looked at him as if doubting the intelligence for which she had just praised him.

“You made me dream that?” he asked. He looked down and shuddered, remembering the fury of the storm pounding him against the rock.

“Indeed. After your meeting with
him,
” she snarled the last word, and Gordie knew she was referring to Apollo, “I knew you would be itching to seek me out . . . I gave you a push.”

“Did you know about the task that Apollo gave me?” Gordie asked, ignoring her scowl at the mention of her brother’s name.

“Of course—we are twins. I know of all of his dealings.” She walked past Gordie in the direction of the mountain again.

“Then why did he ask me to find you? Shouldn’t he know where you are if you have some kind of telepathic connection?” Gordie trotted alongside her. A nearby bush rustled and he glanced at it, but saw nothing. He turned back to Artemis and awaited her response.

“I have closed myself off to him,” she said. “Of course he has not done the same, desperate as he is to win me back. He thinks he can lure me with his internal turmoil. Pathetic!”

“He really is sorry, you know.”

“Good. He shall remain so for eternity.”

She stopped in the middle of the glade and knelt down. Her back was turned to Gordie so he could not see what she was doing as she hunched over the grass, but when she moved aside, a small bonfire was crackling over kindling that hadn’t been there moments earlier. She crossed her legs in front of the fire and stared into the flames. He watched her for a second, feeling uncomfortable in the silence, then joined her at the fireside.

“It may not be wise to dawdle,” she said without taking her eyes off the embers. “You have a long journey ahead of you.” She inclined her head in the direction of the dark mountain. Gordie looked up at it.

“I have to go
there?
” He pointed up at the mountain.

“Indeed. That is where the gryphon roosts.” She gazed into the flames.

“That sucks,” he said, feeling very discouraged as he looked at the towering peak.

“Indeed,” she repeated. “It may behoove you to remove your clothing and dry them by the fire first. It would not do for you to freeze to death. That would be an unfitting end to my existence.”

“I wouldn’t be too crazy about it either,” said Gordie, blushing at the prospect of disrobing in front of this enchanting goddess. He unslung the bat-sheath from his shoulder and took off his hoodie, laying it by the fire. Although his skin prickled, he was warmer without the sopping sweatshirt trapping the cold against his body. He scooted up to the fire and rubbed his chest, feeling the warmth spread. If only he were brazen enough to remove his trousers too: his legs felt like ice cubes.