The Secret Fire (8 page)

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yrrha and I both bowed as two women walked past. They wore equally dazed expressions on their faces. Guess that's what happens when you've had your brain erased. “The one purpose,” we all said. As soon as they'd turned a corner, Pyrrha opened a door and we stepped outside.

Morning had arrived. The temperature was already warming. We were standing between two long buildings—more spokes on the wheel that was the design of this weird place. There was some noise in the distance. Some of the followers were
carrying flowers and balloons. “What's going on?” I asked.

“It's for the reopening ceremony.”

“Oh, right. Wait, why would he reopen this museum? Why would he want tourists walking around?”

“He is not going to reopen it,” she said. “But the guests do not know that. They believe they have been invited to attend a grand ceremony of significant importance. They are influential people—wealthy museum donors, foreign dignitaries, even the mayor and chief of police are coming. My father will use this event to increase his power.”

Of course. The guests would gather in one room, Ricardo would open the urn and voilà—instant minions. With a mayor and chief of police under his influence, he'd quickly take over Philadelphia. Then move on to the next city, and the next. He'd amass wealth, destroy all traces of Zeus, and set up his New Mount Olympus.

Pyrrha took my hand. “If you still want to escape, I will take you to the entry gate and set you free.”

That was a tempting offer. To be free. To catch a bus home to Chatham and hug my mom and sit
in my backyard and never think of Ricardo again. But for how long? I knew the truth. So did Tyler and Ethan. Ricardo would come after us.

“I'm not going anywhere.”

“Are you certain?”

“No,” I said. “I'm not certain. And don't ask me that again because if I think about it, I mean,
really
think about it, I'll probably change my mind. So, what is the plan?”

“Before you agree to help me, I need to tell you something.” She ducked into a shadowy alcove. No one was around. Pyrrha stood real close to me. She still smelled like peeled oranges and mint, just like the first time I met her. I could practically count the freckles on her nose. She was so pretty, with her long glittery red hair. And her perfectly tan skin that looked really nice against her blue tunic. I thought her eyes were brown, but now they seemed violet. Were they changing colors? “There is much you do not know.”

“What don't I know?” If I'd asked Ethan that question, he would have recited all sorts of facts to me. His long answers usually bored me. But I missed him so much, I even missed his factoids.

“After you disabled the security system in the
Museum of Fine Arts, Ethan found the urn of Love. He carried it out of the museum.”

“That's the best news I've heard in a long time.” I smiled. Great-Aunt Juniper would be proud. So would my dad. But Pyrrha wasn't smiling.

“When we left the museum, I was going to take the urn of Love back to my realm. But my father kidnapped you and that changed everything. So I told Tyler to deliver the urn. I gave him the key to the portal.”

“Whoa!” I said. “Are you kidding? Tyler's in the Realm of the Gods?”

“I cannot be certain, but I expect he followed my directions.”

“Of course he followed your directions,” I said. “You could tell Tyler to jump off a bridge and he would. Well, maybe that's going too far but he'd do mostly anything for you. He has a huge crush on you.” Had I said too much? She didn't look surprised. She'd have to be blind not to have noticed the way he looked at her.

This latest news was almost unbelievable. My geeky cousin who'd been creating a game based on the world of the gods had gone into
their world
. “Then that means the urn of Hope
and
the urn of
Love have been destroyed,” I said. “That's even better news.” Except it meant the boys wouldn't be able to trade those urns for me, which kinda sucked.

Pyrrha's frown deepened. “They have not been destroyed.”

“What?” I didn't understand. “But you said—”

A small group of followers walked past. They were carrying more decorations for the fake ceremony. We all bowed and declared our commitment to the one purpose. I don't think any of them actually looked at my face. I was just another blue suit I guess. As soon as they'd entered the building, Pyrrha continued. “I told you the urn of Hope had been destroyed. But in truth, I took it home and left it with my mother. The urns cannot be destroyed individually. They were created together, and so they must be destroyed together.”

“Wait . . .” I shuffled in place. “You lied to us?”

“I did not want to burden you with the details.”

I'd have to remember that excuse the next time my mom caught me in a lie. Sorry, Mom, but I didn't want to
burden you
with the details.

“The urns will be destroyed, Jax, that is no lie. I took the urn of Hope to my home for safekeeping.
Once I have all three, I will ask Hephaestus to destroy them. And then I will beg Zeus, once again, to forgive my father.”

I couldn't remember who this Hephaestus guy was, but I didn't care. None of these Greek names were easy to pronounce and I was super worried about my situation. Ricardo would be pissed when he found out that my cousins had nothing to trade. And he would probably turn that anger on me. “Okay, so the urn of Hope and the urn of Love are at your mom's house. All we have to do is get the last urn.” It sounded easy but I knew it would be the most dangerous and difficult thing I'd ever done.

“Yes.” She furrowed her brow, as if she had a headache. “Jax, there is something else. I am afraid I made a terrible mistake.”

“I'm listening,” I said, dreading whatever was about to come out of her mouth.

“I gave Tyler the key to the portal but I was in such a hurry I forgot to warn him.” She began chewing on her lower lip.

“Warn him about what?”

“Mortals are not allowed in my world. If Zeus finds out . . .” Tears filled her eyes. “Oh, Jax, my
father hurt your family by sending your father to prison. And now I have sent your cousin into a dangerous situation. I am so very ashamed.” She began to cry.

I didn't know what to say. I felt real hot all of a sudden. Anger filled my entire body. Those stupid gods and their stupid magic! If Zeus hurt my cousin, I'd volunteer to help Ricardo destroy all the Zeus statues! I'd be the first in line to help wipe Zeus off our planet! But then I took a deep breath and listened to Pyrrha as she tried to explain.

“My . . .” She choked on the word. “My father was changed by the urns but once they are destroyed, the power they have over him will also be destroyed. He will be my father again. And I will have my family back. We will be together. It's what I've wanted for such a long time. But in wanting this, I may have gone too far.”

It was an honest explanation. She wanted her fairy-tale ending. What would I do to have my family back? How far would I go to have my mother and father still married, living happily ever after? It was a nice image, even though I'd never lived it. “Look, here's what I think,” I said. “Tyler is super smart. He can take care of himself. Even if you'd
warned him about Zeus's laws, I think he still would have gone through that portal. He takes the whole hero-on-a-quest thing very seriously.” Was Tyler okay? We didn't know, so it was best to focus on what we did know. I was in deep trouble. Without Hope and Love, Ricardo would not be setting me free. He had
other plans
for me. And whether I ran away, at that moment, back to Chatham, he'd still find me. This had to end! “We need to find the last urn. Where is it?”

She wiped away her tears. “It is nearby,” she said. “I can sense it.” Then she hugged me. “I was so scared when I saw you dressed like the others. I am so glad you are not changed. I will make this right, Jax. I will. I promise.”

“
We
will make this right,” I told her. “Together.”

        
FACT:
In our world, there is a genus of copepods (small crustaceans) that live and function with one eye. This creature had been aptly named Cyclops. However, we humans are designed with two eyes. This is mostly a function of symmetry, which tends to be a default setting in our DNA. A person with one eye can see distance as well as a person with two. But the slight advantage to having two eyes is that they expand close-up vision, allowing us to see both to the right and to the left. This makes us better at judging depth.

Which probably explains why the mythological Cyclopses seemed so clumsy.

T
here were eight of them. They were big guys, at least ten feet tall. I didn't notice any females in the group, but I'm not familiar with Cyclopsean biology so I could have been mistaken. They were gray-skinned, as if they'd never stepped out into sunlight. I guess that's what happens if you live in a cave. The texture of the skin was rough, like stone. I thought that they might benefit from a good loofah, to help shed some layers. Their heads were hairless, and their foreheads broad, the single eye placed in the center. Like Hephaestus, the Cyclopses wore leather aprons. Two of them held enormous pickaxes and were cleaving boulders from a section of cave wall. The other six were carrying the boulders to a large pool of bubbling liquid. It looked like molten metal.

The clumsiness came in their inability to walk back and forth from the pool without bumping into each other. That led to lots of hollering in a language that was mostly grunts and growls. One Cyclops swung his massive arm and smacked another Cyclops in the ear. That led to the other Cyclops dropping his
boulder on the first Cyclops's foot. If this had been a movie, the scene might have been comical. But my entire body was trembling!

Tyler stared with his mouth wide open. He'd been doing that a lot since our arrival. I might have done the same thing but I didn't want to inhale any weird stuff that could set off my allergies.

We stood on a ledge above the cave, looking down at the working Cyclopses. There was no safety railing and I was struck by a wave of vertigo. One wrong move could send us falling into the pool. I stepped back and bumped into a wall.

“OMG,” Tyler whispered. “They have yellow blood. That's awesome. I'm gonna change that in the game.”

Tyler's observation appeared to be true because a yellowish goo was oozing out of the Cyclops's foot, right where the boulder had landed. The injured Cyclops roared with anger, then picked up the same boulder and tossed it at his coworker. His aim was horrid, however, because the boulder soared right over his intended victim's head, toward the ledge. Our ledge.

“Duck!” Tyler cried, pulling me down. The boulder whizzed overhead and broke to pieces on the cave wall behind us. Luckily, we were untouched. Physically
untouched. But emotionally, I was a wreck. My heart pounded and my nose started to tingle. Crud! I yanked one of my ever-present tissues from my pocket and held it to my right nostril as blood began to trickle.

“Let's get out of here,” I insisted, my voice somewhat muffled by the tissue.

“What?” Tyler looked at me as if I belonged in a psychiatric hospital. “Why would I leave? Dude, we're looking at Cyclopses!” While I was trying to keep from totally freaking out, Tyler stood up, took out his phone, and held it up for a photo. I think it was too dark in there for an adequate shot, but I didn't say anything. A flash of light went off, illuminating the cave. The Cyclopses stopped working. They blinked, as if dazed. Then they turned. The camera had sensed the lowlight conditions and had automatically employed the flash. “Uh-oh,” Tyler said.

For a moment, the cave fell into silence.

Then the Cyclopses dropped their pickaxes and boulders and lumbered across the cave, pushing, shoving, and tripping over each other as they headed toward our ledge.

Toward us!

Tyler turned. “Okay, now's a good time to leave. RUN!” he screamed. But there was nowhere to run,
what with the wall behind us and a steep drop on either side. Tyler and I pushed our backs against the wall, then he flung his arm across my chest, the way my mom always did when she had to stop suddenly while driving. When the Cyclopses reached the ledge, we could only see them from the neck up. Eight huge gray heads. Eight curious eyes. One of them began to drool. Another licked his crusty lips. Why were they making unmistakable “yum yum” sounds?

“Do not eat the mortals!” a voice bellowed.

Hephaestus, son of Zeus, was somewhere in the cave, though we could not see him. A bell chimed. The Cyclopses blinked a few more times, then turned and began to lumber away. They disappeared down a tunnel.

As soon as they were gone, Tyler exhaled. “That happened, right? That actually happened!” He was talking so fast, spit flew out of his mouth. “Up close and personal. Wow! I can't believe it. They were looking right at us! They don't have eyelashes. Did you notice that? And their nostrils quivered when they smelled us. Like rabbit noses.” He seemed delighted.

“They were going to eat us,” I told him, just in case he'd missed that fact.

“I can't believe it,” he said again. “That was the best moment of my life!”

“A thank-you would suffice!” the voice said, followed by a grunt.

Tyler and I took a few steps and peered over the ledge. Hephaestus stood beside the molten pool, the urn of Hope in one hand. “You two were almost Cyclops fodder.”

I gulped. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Tyler shoved his phone into his pocket. “Where's Pandora?”

“She is not needed here. I only brought you two.”

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Welcome to my palace,” Hephaestus said, his gruff voice dripping with sarcasm.

I didn't see any furniture. Or personal items of any sort. Perhaps that stuff was in a different section of that cave. “Why did the Cyclopses leave when the bell rang?” I asked.

“Break time,” Hephaestus explained. “They need to be fed thirty times a day or they won't work. They barely work as it is. You would think the son of Zeus could get a better class of laborers, but the only creatures who work down here do so because they are shunned aboveground.” I guessed he was
referring to his own grotesque appearance, as well as the Cyclopses'. He put his hands on his hips. “Why are you still on that ledge?”

I pressed the tissue harder against my nostril. “Is there a way down?” I asked.

Hephaestus glared up at us. “I forget. You are mortals.” He waved an arm and suddenly we found ourselves standing next to him.

Heat radiated from the pool. Bubbles rose to the surface, then popped and splattered. Up close it looked like metallic silver paint. Tyler was about to dip his finger in. “If you cherish the use of your hand, I would not do that,” Hephaestus said calmly.

Tyler yanked his hand away. As a gamer, his hands were everything. “What is it?” he asked.

“The source of all I create.” Hephaestus grabbed one of the boulders, then tossed it into the pool. The rock began to melt. “This is the metal of the gods.”

“Whoa,” Tyler said. “Awesome. So this is where you made Eros's arrows? And Hermes's winged sandals?” Hephaestus nodded.

“And the urns?” I asked.

Hephaestus nodded again, then pointed at my face. “What ails you?”

I could feel my cheeks go red. “Uh, you mean my
nose?” He grunted. “It's a stress reaction. When I get nervous, my nose starts to bleed. Not all the time, but some of the time. It's . . . embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing?” He scratched his tangled beard. “Am I correct to assume that mortal females do not like bleeding noses?”

“Not so much,” I said.

“Do they find your bleeding nose abhorrent?”

“Yeah, some of them do,” I admitted, remembering all those times in school when the sudden spray of blood had caused a commotion. I didn't mention that the real reason I had only one female friend, and she was my cousin, was because of my social anxiety.

“Girls aren't super crazy about gaming geeks, either,” Tyler said with a shrug.

Hephaestus nodded. “Females also find me abhorrent.”

Though I appreciated this sort of bonding, I thought “abhorrent” was a bit of an exaggeration, at least as far as Tyler and I were concerned. While we weren't princes of eloquence or social butterflies, we weren't
ugly
. Tyler could use some basic lessons in hygiene, but so could most of his friends.

“Females,” Hephaestus said with his trademark grunt. “Difficult to exist with them, difficult to exist
without them.” He cleared his throat, then spat into the pool. Then he scratched
other
parts of his body. He wasn't such a bad guy, I realized. Not half as scary as those Cyclopses. My nose had stopped tingling. I wadded up the tissue and stuck it into my pocket.

Hephaestus began to limp slowly around the pool and toward a fire that burned in a stone hearth. We followed. “This is where I formed the urns,” he explained, pointing to his forge. He set the urn of Hope on a workbench. “Zeus commanded me to build them. I did not know he would use them to torment Pandora's family. Had I known my father's intent, I would have refused him. But he does not forgive easily. If he is fond of you, your days will be blessed. But if you disappoint . . .” He stared at the fire with his good eye, as if lost in memory.

“Did he really throw you off a cliff when you were a baby?” Tyler asked. “That's what the stories claim.”

“When he saw my
deformities
, he cast me off the mountain.”

“That's terrible!” I blurted.

“Terrible?” Hephaestus snorted. “That is the way of the gods! I survived. The only permanent damage was to my foot. I manage to get around.”

The image of a baby being thrown off a mountain
was horrific. He'd obviously survived, physically, but what about the emotional damage? Did he have a counselor to talk to? A support group? That kind of trauma would leave deep scars.

Talk about a dysfunctional family of epic proportions.

An uncomfortable silence loomed. I remembered Jax and our mission. “So, if I understand this correctly, you made the three urns here, so this is where they need to be destroyed?”

“Correct,” he said. “But they must be destroyed together.”

I opened the leather bag and handed him the urn of Love. He set it beside the urn of Hope. They made a pretty set, something you might see on a grandmother's mantel. “We don't know how to get the third urn,” I told him. “Epimetheus still has it. He kidnapped Jax and told us that if we don't bring him Hope and Love by eight a.m. tomorrow morning, we will never see Jax again.” Each time I repeated Ricardo's threat, it was like a knife to my stomach.

“And Pyrrha?” Hephaestus asked. “What of her?”

“She's with her father right now,” Tyler said. “We think she's trying to convince him to come home.”

“She is risking her life to save her father,” Hephaestus said. “She must believe that if the urns are destroyed, they will no longer have power over him. And his soul will heal. He will love his family again.”

“Will he?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But even though I was once married to Aphrodite, goddess of love, I am no expert in matters of the heart.” He suddenly looked pained, as if he'd been struck by a migraine. While I'd never heard about him being tossed off a cliff, I remembered that marriage part of his story. His union with the most beautiful goddess on Olympus had not worked out. While he'd adored her, she hadn't returned the feelings.

But enough about theses gods. Jax was waiting for rescue. My thoughts spun round and round. The situation seemed hopeless. “What are we going to do?”

Tyler rubbed the back of his neck. Then his brow furrowed. “If we try to get the third urn from Epimetheus, chances are he'll open it and we won't know what hit us. We'll become his zombies.” His arms dropped to his sides. “OMG, what if he's already opened it in front of Jax and Pyrrha?” Had
this thought just occurred to him? Had he been so distracted by the Realm of the Gods that he hadn't considered this? I'd been worrying about it nonstop.

“It would appear you have only one choice,” Hephaestus said. “You must deliver the two urns to Epimetheus as he demanded.”

“Huh?” Tyler said. “But—”

Hephaestus shot Tyler a stern look. Tyler swallowed his objection. “As I was saying, in order to rescue your cousin and ensure Pyrrha's safety, you must deliver the urns. If you can get all three urns together, in one place, they can be destroyed before Epimetheus has the chance to use them.”

“How can we destroy them?” I asked.

“With fire,” he replied.

“But Great-Aunt Juniper tried to destroy them with fire and they wouldn't burn,” Tyler said.

“You must use a special flame. My flame.” He reached his hand into his forge. I winced, but the god showed no sign of pain. When he pulled his hand out, a small orange flame danced in the center of his palm.

“Wow,” I said.

“The fire that formed the urns is the only fire that can destroy them.” He stepped close to Tyler. Even
though Hephaestus was hunched over, he towered above my brother. “Hold out your hand.” Tyler obeyed. Hephaestus grabbed Tyler's left hand, which looked like a baby's hand compared to the god's. He pressed their palms together. “Tyler Hoche, elder brother of Ethan Hoche, I hereby bequeath you with the sacred fire born from the forge of Hephaestus, son of Zeus.” He lowered his hand. Tyler gasped. The thin orange flame was now dancing on Tyler's palm.

“Wow,” Tyler said. Even though fire was touching his skin, Tyler didn't appear to be in pain. He closed and opened his palm. The flame was gone. He closed and opened it again; the flame was back. It was a trick any magician might master, but this was no illusion. It was real, godly magic.