AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She’s in the room again, her hand soft in my hair. She turns into Brigit, and then Zeus, and then Ares, and then back into herself. She doesn’t have any bruises, and she’s smiling. If that’s what it’s like to be dead, then it can’t be that big of a deal. It can’t be Very Bad. It can only be different from what’s happening now. Maybe, if I was dead, I wouldn’t be boiling.
Ares pushes through her again, and she’s gone. He’s at the side of my bed, leaning over. What bed is this? It’s so white and hard. It’s ice, and then it’s fire.
Ares says something I don’t understand with tears running down his face.
My stomach hurts, and it fights, and when I look down at the front of me there’s a lot of red on the blue hospital gown. There’s a lot of blood. My stomach lurches again, and then there’s more. It tastes like pennies. I have a mouthful of pennies.
Ares says something else.
Still don’t understand.
The room changes behind Ares. White walls darken like they’re going to burn, but they don’t. They turn into something else instead.
Gates. Big and black and shiny, like they were carved out of marble. Looking at them is like being inside a ringing bell. It vibrates all my bones. My toes vibrate. My teeth.
I know what those gates are.
I’ve never seen them before, but I know.
“Don’t let Artemis see,” I tell him. “Cover her eyes. Don’t look.”
19
ARTEMIS
I’m not ready.
Sorry, but, like, I’m just not ready. I was ready to go hunting the first time, and I was ready to miss that deer and let my Uncle Hades kill it for me, and I was ready to be fine afterward. I was ready to go back the next time and do it right. I was ready to take deep breaths and remember all the things I learned and let him talk me through all the cuts and the resistance and having to push through.
But I’m not ready for this.
Nothing.
Is working.
Nothing.
Somehow, I thought the hardest part would be getting Apollo out of that clearing and to a hospital. Any hospital. But either Daisy or Delphi—or both of them working together, I don’t know—had that solved before I had to think about carrying him off the mountain myself.
And I would have.
But that helicopter landed in the clearing like a miracle, and maybe that’s when I wrecked it for us, because I thought he’s saved. I thought the worst is over. I thought everything gets easier from here.
I can’t stress how wrong I was.
That became apparent in the helicopter, while a physician and two paramedics from the German army tried to get Apollo’s fever under control.
And I just?—
I thought they’d be able to do it.
But there was never a break in their clipped information exchange. Their hands never stopped moving. It never stopped being the emergency that it was. I didn’t have to speak German to know that things weren’t getting better.
What was I going to do? Interrupt them to see if someone could explain the situation to me in English? They didn’t have to. Apollo was dying of a fever right in front of me.
He’s still dying of a fever, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
The helicopter flew for longer than I thought it would. It landed at a hospital in Germany—which one, I couldn’t tell you—and now the nightmare is happening in a German hospital instead of on a helicopter or in a clearing on a mountain.
