Sweet Legacy (Sweet Venom) (19 page)

“The bond to Apollo has been severed.”

“It has?” Grace looks hopeful.

“How can you be sure?” Gretchen asks.

“I . . .”

I don’t know how to describe the feeling. It’s not as if anything has changed—I still feel like myself—but there is an underlying sense of . . . emptiness. Of loneliness. I may not have been consciously aware of Apollo’s presence, but I can certainly feel his absence.

It’s like the difference between wearing a pair of genuine Louboutins and an extremely well-done knock-off. They might look identical, but there are subtle differences to the feel. You just
know
.

Good girl
, the woman says.
Your powers are indeed great.

Thank you
, I answer.

I’m shocked when she replies,
You will soon have the opportunity to do so.

I shake off the imaginary conversation. My brain might be Apollo free, but that clearly hasn’t affected my schizophrenia.

“Trust me,” I say. “He’s gone.”

I keep my voice neutral, not betraying my sense of loss.

“Life will be easier now.” I try to sound cheerful. “No more running through the city streets and hiding in bookshops.”

Although some parts of running weren’t so bad. The parts with Thane, for example, were quite nice—especially the parts where he kissed me. I could do with more of those.

I scan the group around me, suddenly realizing that Thane hasn’t spoken since my return. Probably because he’s no longer here.

“Where’s Thane?” I ask.

I thought it was a simple question. But when I see the look of fury on Gretchen’s face and the pain on Grace’s, I worry.

“Oh, Greer,” Grace says. “There is something we have to tell you.”

CHAPTER 22
G
RETCHEN

G
reer surprises me. The look on her face is not what I expected. As Grace tells her about Thane’s confession, the truth about him and his involvement in this big ugly war, about why he is a part of our lives in the first place, I expect to see confusion, doubt, betrayal even.

Instead, she looks thoughtful.

I’ll never understand her.

I can hear the emotion in Grace’s voice. A whole rainbow of feelings is running through her, I’m sure. She just found out her brother was sent to kill her. That’ll mess up a girl’s mind.

But Greer . . . she just tilts her head to the side and says, “He is not responsible for this.”

“I know,” Grace says, swiping at her tears. “But he lied. His whole life has been a lie. He’s a liar.”

Greer gives her a half smile, a gentle and peaceful look on her face. “Aren’t we all?”

She looks so serene, relaxing back on the bed with a handful of pillows propping her up and Sillus curled at her side.

Normally, I would call her out for being stupid and naïve—something I didn’t think her capable of—but after everything she’s been through, I’ll cut her some slack. She just came back from the dead to find out the boy she’s getting involved with is an assassin sent to kill her sister. She might still be in shock.

Besides, I know all about boys who walk that fine line between devotion and betrayal.

“Do you have any Hestian serum?” Cassandra calls out from the bathroom.

“If we do,” I reply, “it’s in that tin of vials.”

Where is that boy of mine, anyway? Between everything that’s happened since we came back from the abyss—the nonstop running and worrying—I haven’t had time to think about anything but survival and keeping my sisters safe. I didn’t notice until now that Nick is nowhere to be seen. He should have been at Grace’s side. The hair on the back of my neck stands up.

“Found it,” Cassandra shouts.

“Hey, Grace,” I ask. “Where’s Nick?”

The air in the room stills. She turns to me, and her jaw drops. My stomach tightens into a knot.

“Oh, Gretchen, I didn’t even think— I should have told you sooner,” Grace says hesitantly. “But with everything that happened . . .”

She waves her hands around.

“Tell me now,” I say through clenched teeth.

“When Nick and I autoported back to my apartment,” she begins, “we found it overrun with bad guys.”

Cassandra returns to the bed with a vial in one hand and a cotton ball in the other. She sits down next to Greer and starts dabbing the wet cotton ball on her forehead. “This should help you relax.”

My heart pounds. Old fears and doubts seep up into my brain. Once again, our enemies show up where Nick goes. Another coincidence? What if she tells me he betrayed us? Again. I trusted him with the thing I value most: Grace’s safety, her life. At least she’s unharmed. He had better not have turned against us if he knows what’s best for him.

“He saved my life, Gretchen,” she says quickly, as if she can sense the direction of my thoughts. “But he sacrificed himself.”

My stomach plummets to my feet. “What do you mean
sacrificed
?” He can’t be dead. He just . . . can’t be.

Every moment of our rocky relationship flashes through my mind: The first time I ran into him in that dim sum place. When he showed up in my biology class at school. Fighting the griffin and the skorpios hybrid. That kiss before the monsters dragged him into the abyss. Going in after him. Him letting me beat him to a pulp when I found out he knew more than he’d let on—before I knew everything about his involvement.

We’ve been through a lot together in a short amount of time. He can’t be gone. We have a lot more to go through before I’m done with him.

“Oh, no, that sounded bad! I’m sorry. He’s not dead,” Grace says. “I just meant he stayed behind to delay them so I could get away.”

“Stayed behind?”

“He threw me into the elevator and told me to autoport away. Then he attacked the bad guys to keep them from coming after me.” She shakes her head. “I think he was taken prisoner.”

That sounds like Nick.

If he’s been taken prisoner, then the odds are in our favor. The boy is a genius at talking himself out of situations—he’s done it with me at least three times. He’ll be fine until I can rescue him. I hope.

“Who were the bad guys?” I ask. “Did you recognize them?”

“No, but I think he did,” she explains. “One—the lead guy—had a dog’s head and flippers for hands.”

Bad news. I know exactly who she means. “The boss.”

Last time I saw that creep was in his office in the abyss, with half of monsterkind bearing down on him. Too bad he got out of that alive.

“Yeah, that’s what they called him,” she agrees. “The boss.”

Maybe Nick won’t be fine. One run-in with that flippered freak was more than enough for a lifetime. He’s creepy with a capital everything. The boss learned Nick was a double-agent mole when I went in the abyss the first time. Nick said the guy would have killed him if I hadn’t shown up to save him. I don’t doubt that he would have.

I can’t imagine his opinion of Nick has improved in the meantime. And I’m not there to stop him.

I hope Nick can sweet-talk him enough to buy us some time again.

“Bad?” Grace asks, her face twisted in concern.

“Yeah,” I say with a nod. “Bad.”

“Well, then,” she says, pushing to her feet, “let’s go get him.”

I laugh. Just like that.
Let’s go get him.

Sometimes I envy her naïveté. Everything is so simple for her. “Go get him.” As if we’d even know where to look. They could be anywhere. It’s been how long since he and Grace came back? One day? Two? More than enough time to get well and truly lost.

The sad thing is, that naïve response is also my gut reaction.

Part of me—the girly part that was just getting used to having him around, to feeling that connection with another person, to the idea that maybe fulfilling my legacy doesn’t have to mean going it alone—wants to drop everything and go rescue him, if it’s not already too late.

But the rest of me knows that’s not possible.

“It’s not that easy,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Because we
can’t
,” I bark.

She jerks back, and I immediately regret the outburst. From the corner of my eye, I see Greer and Cassandra flinch on the bed. Even Sillus stirs in his sleep. I shouldn’t take my anger out on them—especially not on Grace. She didn’t take Nick away. She didn’t start this war. None of us did. But we can finish it. That’s our priority. “Because we have other priorities. We have responsibilities that are bigger than one boy. Bigger than one life.”

He of all people would understand.

As a servant of justice, he knows the cause is more important than rescuing him. He knows our first duty is to restore balance. It’s what he came here to do; it’s why he sacrificed himself to save Grace. The best thing we can do to help him, to save him—if it’s not too late already—is fulfill our destiny.

I turn to the group. “We have to find the door.”

“The gorgons think the oracle is the only way to find it,” I say, “but clearly they haven’t located her yet, or they’d be back already.”

I look around the table: Sillus, our mother, Greer—who is recovering quickly—and Grace. They are two girls who didn’t know until a few weeks ago that mythology wasn’t myth, a furry monkey creature, and the woman who brought us into this world but is herself powerless. Not much of a think tank, but it’s what we have to work with while the gorgons are out searching.

“They might never find her,” I continue. “We need to figure out how to find the door on our own.”

“I wish I could help more,” Cassandra says, “but the knowledge passed down to the Sisterhood through the generations did not include any information about the door, and human research only describes it as a cave.”

I smile at the term
human
research
.

“Well, we know it’s not a cave,” Grace replies. “The gorgons said it wasn’t a physical portal.”

I push to my feet and start pacing. The oracle sure picked a pretty inconvenient time to go missing, assuming the gorgons are right about her staging the scene at her place. Nick was pretty certain she left of her own accord, too. Our friends didn’t mention seeing her in the abyss or the dungeons of Olympus.

Maybe she did just take off.

“The least she could have done was leave a clue,” I snap, spinning on my heel in the kitchen before pacing back toward the table. “An X-marks-the-spot treasure map would have been nice.”

“Maybe she couldn’t,” Greer suggests. “Maybe she didn’t have time.”

Grace gasps. “Or maybe she
did
.”

“What?” I ask.

Her face beams with excitement. “What did you find in her shop?”

“No treasure map,” I reply. “The pendant of Apollo and—”

“The riddle,” Greer finishes.

“Sillus love riddle,” the little monkey chimes in.

“The riddle?” I parrot. “The one written in ancient Greek?”

Grace nods. “Greer and I got it translated.”

She pushes to her feet and pulls her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans. After a few clicks on the screen, she starts reading:

“In the space beneath the sky, between harbor and haunted ground,

Where graces and muses weep at gentle water’s shore,

Be three within three, join life with death in thee,

To find the lost and take up destiny.”

She looks up when she finishes, a hopeful look on her face.

That’s our big clue? I’ve got nothing. It does sound like directions for finding the door—for opening the door and accepting our legacy—but beyond that . . . it’s so vague. It could be a map to the moon, for all I can tell.

I stare back blankly. “What does it mean?”

Her face falls. “I thought you might know.”

We both look at Greer, who shrugs. Sillus and Cassandra are just as clueless.

“It certainly sounds like a clue to find a location,” Greer says, giving me a scolding look for being unsympathetic. “It’s quite likely it leads to the door.”

“That’s true. And if it’s a clue to find the door, then at least now we know what the riddle means,” I say, trying to make Grace feel better. “That’s something.”

She stuffs her phone back into her pocket. “Yeah. I guess.”

We fall silent.

This is not the kind of puzzle I excel at solving. If the problem involves breaking into a high-security office building to take down an ekhidna, I can totally do that. I can kick through doors and scale chain-link fences, but I can’t find someone who doesn’t want to be found, and I can’t solve a crazy old woman’s riddle.

Greer clears her throat. “Am I the only one who sees the obvious here?”

We all turn to look at her.

“Apparently,” I say. “What’s the obvious?”

She glances around the room. Then, as if it truly is the most obvious thing in the world, she says, “
I
can find the door.”