I hit the floor on my stomach with little grace. My chin thumped on the mat, teeth clamping down on my tongue. The taste and smell of blood flooded my senses. A moan burst from my lips, followed by a grunt and an attempt to stand.
Okay badass Fury within me, now would be a good time to show yourself.
"Stay down, Fury, you're not match for the two of us. Hades," he emphasized the word, correcting me, "sent you to us for a reason. The less you try to prove yourself now, the sooner we can actually get started." Gregory spoke, reaching a hand towards Alex to help her to her feet. No hand was offered to me this time.
"This is ridiculous. He said I was in training for war, not for getting my ass kicked," I reminded them.
Battling Alex and Greg in the mirrored room wasn't anything I had prepared for, mentally or physically. A few kickboxing classes had given Sarah and I sore muscles and a few techniques but this was a different ballgame. Two on one just didn't seem fair.
Alex sneered; her wings flapped gently and she floated upwards, feet completely off the floor. "You need to learn basics first. You know next to nothingâshut up for five minutes and we'll change that. We start at the beginning and work our way up. We're not here for physical training, anyway. It's just fun to watch you try."
"Oh, you should see me when I try."
Finally on my feet, my abdominals ached, and I struggled to carefully breathe around the pain. Gregory's knee was sharp and I would probably bruise. Good thing I wasn't trying to impress anyone with my astonishing good looks; dirty, tired, and bruised, the opposite of cute.
"I'll do my best not to hit you; you could try looking a little less confrontational, Alex." I breathed evenly against the pain. Instinct told me not to show weakness in front of these two, perhaps because one of them had wings and the other could have broken me in half with his bare hands. Both were less terrifying than the child-eater in my apartment but there was always time to be proved wrong.
Alex smirked from the air, literally hovering over me, ever ready to strike.
"How much do you know about Greek mythology?" Gregory asked.
"Let's see. I've read about a quarter of the Iliad and that's about it, Greg. Public school education at its finest. I know about Zeus and Hera and Hercules thanks to Disney and that's about where the knowledge stops. Tell me what I need to know," I answered.
"Don't call me 'Greg'. Cartoon Hercules isn't exactly factual. Unfortunately you'll never learn all of it, as we live in a proverbial time crunch with our unknown deadline looming closer every minute. But before you meet the Fury, there are a few crucial things you need to know."
Meet the Fury? I thought I was the Fury.
Alex chimed in, "Cliff notes version: the Titans, who were awful and scary powerful beings, gave birth to the Olympians, who were then the downfall of the Titans; the Olympians are more or less led by Zeus, brother of Poseidon and Hades. For centuries, they've been dormant in the lives of manâuntil the Nectar was stolen and they started to die. Among the dead so far are Hermes, Demeter, Eros, Artemis, the Muses, and Hades, to name a few. Enter Hector, new and improved Lord of the Underworld. The history of Greek mythology in a hundred words or less, there you go."
"Okay, sounds legitimate. But what does that make you?" I gestured to her wings.
She smiled at me. Could it be a genuine smile, like we'd simply gotten off on the wrong foot and she no longer wanted to tear me apart?
With one long finger Alex pointed to herself. "Harpy. It makes usâ" she gestured between herself and me, "âcousins. Not the kind of cousins that do Thanksgiving dinners together, more like the kind that gossip about each other at family reunions."
"Furies and Harpies are distant cousins, similar in appearance and attitude. Once upon a time, the two species worked harmoniously together. They also work well with Gorgons, but so far as I know, Hades keeps them at the gate," Gregory said. He kept throwing names of creatures at me as if I would have any idea what he was talking about. I didn't; I was hardly even sure what I was supposed to be. "'Fury' is actually the Roman term for Eumenides, beings born from the blood of Uranus and the earth, the judge, jury, and executioner in ancient times. The Harpies would deliver malefactors to the Furies for torture."
Maybe I didn't want to know about her wings. Was she born with them? What if it was a right of passage thing? And how did she wear shirts?
Was I going to get a pair? I certainly didn't emerge from the womb with wings, what with the whole "human" factor and all.
Maybe Hector had made a mistake. "So wings are part of the bargain?" I asked. I breathed the question, less in awe of Alex and more out of fear. The quiver in my voice betrayed me.
What was I going to have to do to bring the Fury out in me?
"You don't know anything at all, do you?" Alex shook her head and sighed. "If the other Harpies could see me now. Yes, all Furies have wings; you just don't know how to use them. Any other questions?" Alex answered.
She glowered at me when I so quickly opened my mouth but it was too late at that point. "Where are they gonna come from? It's not like I have extra space to hide a set of wings."
Gregory moved to answer but Alex beat him to it. "It's magic, Autumnâthey'll just sort of pop out of your back." She demonstrated: her wings folded together behind her and sort of shimmered away as it someone had covered the space behind her with a green screen. "You'll get them when you can bring out the Fury."
I couldn't stop myself: "So you look like that all the time?"
"Rude much?"
Backpedaling, I shook my head and tried again. "I meant with the wings. You always have them, but sometimes they are hidden?"
"Yes. I hope you have questions about more important things than my wings."
Of course I did. "What 's this business with the nectar stuff? Who stole it?"
Gregory opened one of the walls. A hidden closet, not quite the length of the wall but close, had blended in with its mirrored door. He reached in and rummaged around. Metal clinked against metal, something heavy-sounding thumped against the wall. The weapons inside were lifted and freed from the confinement of the wall with ease; Greg might as well have been picking up toothpicks, not handling swords the length of my leg.
This time Gregory beat Alex to the explanation. "The Nectar, capital N, was stolen in the dead of night, and if we knew who ran off with it," he threw a sharp look in Alex's direction as he spoke, "the gods wouldn't be going to war, we wouldn't be making alliances with all manner of indecent creature, and you wouldn't be here. The Nectar is the thing that grants immortality to the Olympians and thus is very important to their continued existence. It's the thing that has kept them alive even though the humans stopped believing in the gods eons ago. You can imagine why Zeus is so deadly determined to get it back and why Hades needs it." Gregory swung a weapon with a spiked ball on the end before adding it to the pile of weapons that had amassed at his feet.
"No, actually; well, Zeus, I understand. But why does Hector need it so badly?" The question was for Gregory but Alex answered.
"Hades needs it because he's not a full god yetâhe's not immortal," Alex sneered at me.
Which made so much sense to me, an outsider who knew none of this existed twenty-four hors prior to the current conversation. Not. Yesterday I was falling asleep in study hall to the monotonous sound of shuffling papers and the scratch of pencils, suffocating on the aroma of teenage angst. Today was a little out of the ordinary for me; high school hadn't exactly prepared me for this.
I steered the conversation away from my idiocy and back to the Nectar. "Who do the gods think stole it?" I asked between clangs and thumps and thuds.
"Hades, naturally. They think the old Hades stole it and now his replacement has it," Alex said over her shoulder, less condescendingly.
"Does he?"
Alex held a scythe, long, curved and glitteringly sharp, but otherwise didn't participate in the gathering of weapons.
"No."
And that was that, no more explanation offered. I moved on.
"Why would the old Hades have stolen it? And if Hector had it and needed it to become a big, bad god, why would they think he hasn't taken it already?" I rambled.
"I understand that, having been raised in the world of humans, you are naturally curious. While I applaud you for your attempts at gleaning knowledge, I would suggest that you refrain from ending every sentence with a question mark," Gregory offered.
Alex clarified, "He means you ask a lot of questions and it's annoying."
I pretended not to hear them. "That doesn't make any sense; the gods are immortal, they don't need a cocktail to make them live forever." When Gregory thrust a spear in my direction, perpendicular to the floor, I took it gingerly. It remained at arm's length.
"No, they drink of the Nectar during the designated seasonâin conjunction when the Olympic games were held. In ancient times, they celebrated immortality as an annual event, but adaptations to the festival have had them consuming less often. The timing is purely traditional; ingesting the Nectar every few years is sufficient to keeping the gods alive and well. As long as the Nectar was in Olympus, no one worried. The gods were protected simply by its presence."
He had finally addressed me directly, having pulled as many weapons from the closet as he seemed to desire. I looked back at him confused. "Well it's no wonder they've been all but erased from the human consciousness: they stopped regularly consuming this immortality cocktail." to use Jasper's term, "That's why they're dying, right? That's what this war is about?"
Alex rolled her eyes at me. "The gods have been huffing and puffing about war for fifty yearsâthat's fifty years without their ambrosia. The longer the Olympians are away from the Nectar the weaker they get." The proverbial duhhung in the air between us. "Going to war where some of them might actually die is a really good way to make sure that none of them die, but it's the only way they know to solve problems other than taking and cursing each other's children. Fifty years is a long time to be vulnerable when you've lived forever."
"Forever without consequences for your actions, fulfilling every whim you ever had, garnering the adoration of humans who knew you to be unkillable no matter who, or what, wanted you dead." Gregory continued to rifle around in the hidden closet, his voice muffled by the contents.
The only sound in the room was the clanging of metal and wood coming together during Gregory's search. When I could no longer take the silence, I broke it. "So it took them this long to realize that the Nectar was missing?"
"Gods don't require guards on all of their treasures, Autumn. Some things do slip by unnoticed."
"Which is why we are going to war," Alex chimed in unnecessarily. "That spear in your hand? The tip is poison but only to chimera. It won't pierce the hide of a minotaur or the scales of a dragon but it'll take down a patchwork beast. Pay attention, this will be on the test."
Because that explained so much, I now feel fully informed and well prepared and ready to face an army of gods. Of course I know what a chimera is, please don't waste your breath telling me about the patchwork beast.
Alex didn't offer any more information regarding the Nectar. She went on to explain the scythe in her hand and the spiked-ball, a mace, near my feet. Gregory held an axe in my direction, which I exchanged for the spear. Alex put a sword in my free hand and together they hoisted a club into view. It was tinged red-brown on one side.
I sincerely hoped it wasn't an old bloodstain. Luckily for me, they dropped the club and moved on. The mirrored walls shook a little with the impact.
"Not that I'm complaining, but no guns?"
"The Underworld makes gun barrels limp and turns bullets to sludge. Even if you could get one to fire, the weapons of man are useless here."
I shrugged, satisfied; we moved on.
Where Gregory was matter-of-fact, Alex was a firecracker, flashing back and forth between excited and peeved. How she and Gregory landed this job together was anyone's guess. The way they acted I would say that he was her handler; someone had to keep her in check.
Plus, Gregory seemed to have a good head on his shoulders. An extremely good-looking head of light hair that would be considered shaggy if it didn't lay so perfectly around his face.
Do they only let pretty people hang out here?
"Autumn, how do you wield this war hammer?" Gregory gestured to a pick axe-looking weapon still on the floor. The head of the wooden handle was topped like a sledgehammer, with one blunt side and one sharp side.
"What am I, Thor? You know I won't be able to throw that thing." I shrugged. My hands were full of Gregory's weapons whose lessons I hadn't paid attention. Alex snickered at me.
"Wrong mythology," Gregory sniffed.
"I told you she wasn't paying attention." She picked up the war hammer and held it out to me. I dropped the axe onto the pile and took the hammerâwhich immediately plummeted to the floor. If I had to guess, it weighed about as much as I did. "You don't throw a war hammer; you beat people with it. The pointy end can break through armor and the blunt end makes a great skull-crusher. But you don't throw it."
"I'm just going to try my chances with a gun, if that's all right with the two of you."
Alex's face dropped, a serious look in her eyes. "Guns won't kill gods, Autumn. No matter how big and bad, the weapons of humans won't faze an army of gods."
Well, of course, everyone knows that.