The Unclaimed (University of the Gods Trilogy Book 1) (26 page)

“I still don’t understand half of what happened down there”, Cassandra said and reached for his hand to make sure that she wouldn’t lose her connection to the here and now again.

Cassandra remembered the beautiful frozen lake, how Alexander had ignored her and that she had been on skates for the first time. She skipped the part where Ben had almost kissed her in that strange parallel world he could create – that was a memory for another day – and went straight to where they had entered the tunnels. She remembered being blindfolded and going downhill for most of the time. That had continued until they had finally reached the Minotaur’s lair. She shuddered and fought the urge to open her eyes to escape the rising panic. She made herself go back to the point where she had found River’s body and where her sister had turned into something else entirely. A human dragon with no connection to her former self.

“Blood of my blood”, that’s what Medusa had said when a drop of Pandora’s blood had turned her human again. Maybe it had also been the other way around, that Medusa’s blood had turned Pandora into a raging dragon creature.

“Gorgon”, a faint metallic voice at the back of her head said. “She is a Gorgon.”

“My sister is a Gorgon”, Cassandra said aloud and Ben pressed her hand in affirmation.

There were three original Gorgons and Medusa was one of them. They all had metal claws for hands and hair made of living, venomous snakes and their stare turned any living thing into stone. Pandora didn’t seem to have inherited the last trait but her sister hadn’t recognized her any more either. The only thing holding Pandora back from killing anything and everything around her had been Medusa.

“She’ll be ok”, Ben murmured. “My brother is taking care of her and so is Madame Margot. They’ll do their best. Hector has been with your sister the whole time. He has come here twice too but you’ve always been asleep so he went back to your sister.”

She opened her eyes and saw that Ben was sweating heavily again.

“You look drained”, Cassandra said and Ben shrugged, patting her hand and then bringing some distance between them.

Cassandra saw the silver glow on his wrist and guessed that being bound to Arissa meant that he shouldn’t be here, not with another girl, and yet he had stayed over several days. No wonder he looked terrible.

“How is your brother?” she asked gently, trying not to feel hurt that he had let go of her hand.

Cassandra remembered the teeth, the hunger in Sam’s eyes and shuddered.

“He is not that bad”, Ben said and she tried to read his expression when he said it but found it was impossible.

“He isn’t all that good either, is he”, Cassandra said and saw Ben tense. “He is a vampire and he saved my life and I’ll be forever grateful to him for that.”

Something changed in the room when she said that.

“And now I can thank him in person”, she said to the empty chair for good measure.

This time Ben was visibly startled.

“What are you talking about?” he said, pressing his lips together and trying very hard not to look in the same direction.

“She knows I am here”, Sam said and appeared beside his brother out of thin air.

“You were off by a fraction”, he said and slumped down on the chair, lifting something that looked like a hat of some sort. “Our father’s Cap of Invisibility. And in case you were wondering, my brother doesn’t need it. He can do this neat trick of disappearing into thin air without the help of a magical object.”

Ben grimaced at his brother.

“No need to go into further detail”, Ben said sharply but Sam wasn’t impressed.

“How did you know I was here?” he asked, curious.

Cassandra thought for a moment, then shrugged, immediately regretting it because her sides started to hurt again.

“There was too much
nothing
in here”, she said and tried not to blink when Sam extended his sharp, ugly metal teeth. “The presence of an absence so to say.”

“Very philosophic”, he said and then added towards Ben.

“Will Medusa be punished?” she asked and Ben shook his head.

“They all seem to agree that River’s death was an accident”, Ben said and this time it was Sam who laid a hand on his brother’s arm. “She saved your life and that of the others by calling the Nereids, that should count for something, shouldn’t it.”

“You don’t believe that’s true?” Cassandra asked.

Ben blinked hard before he continued speaking.

“It doesn’t matter what happened”, he said and turned away to hide his emotions. “It won’t bring him back.”

Cassandra wished she could say something that would make it better but there was nothing.

“We still aren’t sure why she was here”, Sam said in an attempt to distract his brother. “She told Heracles that she was called here somehow by something she simply couldn’t resist. And then she heard Pandora down in the caves and came looking for her.”

“She was probably called by the same thing that called the hydra and Scylla”, Ben said and turned around again.

“What do you mean?” Cassandra asked, sensing that there was something they weren’t telling her.

“There is a theory”, Ben said, hesitantly at first. “We think that someone is in possession of an object called the Pipe.”

Cassandra, who had never heard of it, asked what it was. Sam, baring his ugly teeth, looked at Cassandra like he didn’t quite believe her.

“It is something that can call to any creature and guide it to the place from which it was blown”, Sam said, checking for her reaction. “It is also said that whoever is in possession of the Pipe is able to control the creature that was called.”

Cassandra thought about this for a moment.

“Why has no one tried to find it yet?” she asked, confused. “It shouldn’t be too hard to detect, right?”

Sam smiled but it wasn’t a happy smile.

“We have been looking everywhere”, he said and let his long fingers play along the handle of his chair. “Actually, that is part of the reason why I was told to come here, to look for the Pipe. Usually, I am very good at finding things but even I couldn’t find a trace of the object.”

Cassandra frowned.

“What about magic?” she said and saw Sam frown. “Would you be able to detect it if it was hidden by magic?”

“That is an interesting question”, Sam said and Cassandra wished she could read his expression better. He always showed emotions a millisecond too late, as if he had to think about what the living would do first.

“Why is that a more interesting question than who is in possession of the Pipe?” Cassandra asked and Sam extended his fangs.

“I didn’t say that”, Sam retorted and withdrew the fangs when he saw Ben looking at him. “When you are as old as I am, you see that everything has a tint of magic to it. Actually, everything does have magic in it. Humans, animals, objects, me, you, my dear brother here. Or how would you explain that you can see the future or that Ben here disappears into thin air at will. That is, if not exactly magic, at least magical.”

“Who is being philosophic now”, Cassandra murmured but thought that there was truth in what he had said. Their very existence was nothing short of mysterious.

“I’ll keep looking for it but someone is doing a very good job at hiding it”, Sam said.

“Do you think it is the same person who flooded the tunnels?” Cassandra said and had to blink hard at the horrifying image of the rising water that came back to her unbidden.

“What makes you think that this is what happened?” Sam said and this time it was for Cassandra to scowl.

“Come on, like you didn’t think that, too”, she said towards Ben. “There is no way that all of this is a coincidence.”

Ben still didn’t react to that.

“There is a mechanism to flood the caves”, Sam said, rubbing his nose. “It seems like the Minotaur’s lair can get pretty messy and it needs to be cleaned from time to time but no one would have done it that day, not with people still in there.”

“Or with the Minotaur in his nest”, Cassandra said, remembering the panic in the creature’s eyes. “He was as scared as we were. Did he survive?”

Ben nodded, his frown growing deeper.

“Only a few people know how to operate the flooding mechanism”, he said, finally seeming to have his voice back again. “But there are still too many to start pointing fingers. Everyone was in the hall and it seems almost impossible that any of them might have done it, so Heracles is about to rule this as an accident as well.”

Cassandra didn’t think that this was very probable. There seemed to be no evidence to indicate that someone had entered the room where the mechanism was operated from by force. The lock hadn’t been tampered with and even though the mechanism itself had been set loose, that didn’t seem to have been forced either.

“And we are back to magic”, Cassandra said and Sam frowned.

“I couldn’t detect any more magic in the room than anywhere else”, Sam said. “I am with Heracles here. This seems like an accident. Granted a rather freaky one, but an accident nevertheless.”

Cassandra wasn’t convinced, not by a long shot, but she would let it rest. For now.

“One last question”, she said, yawning and feeling the strain of the last hour. “What happened to the Golden Fleece?”

Cassandra remembered the glow of magic that had come from the Minotaur’s nest and the dirty old sheepskin that should have been anywhere but in the Minotaur’s lair. It seemed like mythological objects were popping up everywhere these days.

“It’s somewhere safe”, Ben said and bared his teeth. “It should never have come here. It is a dangerous thing to have, just like the Pipe and there is a reason both things aren’t used anymore. We think that the Minotaur didn’t understand what he had in his possession or that he didn’t want to know what it was. He said that he liked the softness and that’s why he kept it but he wouldn’t tell us where he found it.”

Cassandra was hit by a sudden wave of nausea.

“How did you know it was the Fleece?” Ben asked and Cassandra, pressing her lips together, tried to breathe away the sick feeling in her stomach.

“Are you ok?” Ben asked gently and Cassandra nodded and shook her head at the same time. Finally it got a little better and she was able to answer him that she had known the sheepskin was something special the same way she had known that the Necklace of Harmonia she had found in Pandora’s room had been a magical object.

“The necklace, it glowed with magic just like your father’s Cap of Invisibility”, she said, indicating the little hat Sam was playing with. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Sam frowned.

“Magic doesn’t glow”, he said dismissively. “Magic is a shift in the structure of things, it is the slightest distortion of an object, the movement of something unmoving.”

Cassandra shrugged.

“Maybe for you”, she said, too exhausted to start a discussion. “I am done for today. Thanks for visiting, Sam and Ben, please tell Alexander that I will see him as soon as I am out of here.”

She closed her eyes, waiting for them to leave even though she wished Ben could have stayed with her. But she knew that it was no good. Sooner or later he would have to go and she wanted it to be her decision and not his. Or someone else’s.

And then the water came rushing back at her, suffocating her. She ripped her eyes open, trying hard to breathe but it was everywhere, choking her. She tried to shut it out, tried to find a place to hide but couldn’t. She started to shake. Wide-eyed with fear, she bit her fist until it bled and still the shaking wouldn’t stop. Tears were rolling down her face and she wanted to scream but no sound came out.

That was how Ms. Nightingale found her and immediately called for a nurse to help her. Then she gently took Cassandra’s arm and gave her something that would calm her down. For a while, Ms. Nightingale stroked the girl’s cheek until the trembling finally subsided and Cassandra relaxed and closed her eyes.

She was a strange one, that girl, Ms. Nightingale thought. Strong and yet so vulnerable. She had seen the girl fight a hydra and live to see the next day but she knew that what Cassandra was going through now was much worse than an actual physical enemy. She had seen it many times and not everyone had the strength to overcome the fear. She guided Cassandra back into bed and turned off the light.

“Let’s just hope you’ll be tough enough, girl”, she whispered and left Cassandra to a dreamless sleep.

Cassandra asked her brother to take her home the day after her talk with Ben and Sam. She didn’t want any more of the medication Ms. Nightingale gave her but she also knew that she would go crazy if she stayed in the infirmary all by herself. At home, Summer reluctantly agreed to take care of her and Cassandra spent a whole week in bed before she was able to even think of getting up again.

Ben came over to visit once but when he saw Charlie sitting at Cassandra’s bedside, testing her for an upcoming exam in tactics, he excused himself and left again. Charlie made fun of her because she was too distracted afterwards to answer his questions.

When Charlie wasn’t drunk or recovering from a hangover he was quite good company and Cassandra was glad that he was willing to spend so much time with her. He told her endless stories about his past conquests that were so outrageous that Cassandra sometimes didn’t know whether to laugh or blush. He regularly hit on her, professing his deepest, undying love and his constant urge to throw himself at her. Cassandra repeatedly invited him to try but he always said that even he had certain standards and that he would wait until she had recovered from her current most unattractive state.

“Stop teasing me”, Charlie said one evening after they had been bantering back and forth for a while.

He looked good, clean, and there was a playful twinkle in his eye when he was looking at her.

“Yes, Charlie”, Cassandra said, yawning. “You are my hero. Please: Go ahead. Ravish me.”

Charlie, sliding deeper into his chair, grinned at her.

“That is for another day, love”, he said, winking. “You know as well as I do that I am your heart’s true choice.”

“What?” she said, rubbing her eyes. “You just called me heartless a minute ago.”

“I did, didn’t I”, he said. “I am afraid your presence makes me confused at times.”

Cassandra tried to get up to escape this silly business but the pain of the sudden movement made her gasp. Charlie was beside her in a moment, providing her with a sip of Ambrosia from the little silver flask she had given him for New Year’s.

“Where do you get it from anyway?” Cassandra murmured and waited until the pain had subsided before she opened her eyes again.

Charlie, a little too close for comfort, murmured that he had his sources.

“I bet you do”, she said and was momentarily distracted by his green eyes so close to her and the smell of grapes and green grass.

Go ahead, she thought, and stretched out her hand to touch his face. His pupils dilated in surprise and he bent a little further down but suddenly he withdrew, spilling some of the Ambrosia and hastily retreating to a spot far away from her, careful not to meet her eye.

“Thought so”, she murmured with a grim smile.

Despite his verbal bravado his heart wasn’t in it, not really. That didn’t mean he didn’t like her, but the part about wanting to be with her was just for show. There was something else that made him stay with her, some deeper concern that she hadn’t been able to figure out yet. Normally Cassandra wasn’t easy to distract but Charlie had a way of bringing chaos to her thoughts that was not easy to counteract.

After their little encounter, Charlie quickly excused himself and disappeared from her room. Cassandra, getting fed up with having to lie down and calling for help all the time, made herself get up and go to the bathroom to wash her face. Then she went back to bed, exhausted. She fell asleep almost immediately and when she woke up next, Charlie was still nowhere to be seen.

The next morning, she decided it was time to get up and moving. To her immense relief, her body didn’t protest too much. She started with slow work in her room, then she ventured further out and after another three days she was finally able to move almost normally again, and even felt that she might be ready to go back to training again. She also knew that she would have to go see Pandora eventually but every time she thought she was ready she found another excuse why she couldn’t go there, not just yet.

On her sixth night alone, she went downstairs into the kitchen to see whether Charlie, or anyone else for that matter, was still awake. She found both Charlie and Jim sitting in the kitchen, sharing a bottle of wine. By the look of Charlie it wasn’t their first one either. The smell of sour grapes and decay coming off of him was so pungent Cassandra wrinkled her nose in disgust. Charlie had trouble sitting on his chair and Jim was happily toasting himself and chattering away.

“What do you think you are doing?” Cassandra said angrily and tried to take the bottle from Jim who smiled at her with teeth and lips stained blue from the wine.

“I am old enough to drrrink”, Jim protested, his speech slurring so much he was barely understandable.

Cassandra threw Charlie a “What the hell?” look which Charlie acknowledged with a shrug.

“He is old enough”, Charlie said, burping.

“And I have grown, I know I have”, Jim said and indicated the general direction of his pants. “They are too tight. They pinch me in the whatnots, you know.”

He started giggling uncontrollably and Charlie joined him, a belly-deep, ugly laugh that sounded all wrong. He bared his rotten teeth at Cassandra in a way that made her want to slap him.

“I know he is old enough”, Cassandra hissed, trying to ignore that Jim was starting to hump a chair, making whooping noises and crying that he would show the ladiiiiies a good time. “He is just not
big
enough. He weighs 70 pounds, how is he supposed to digest that much alcohol?”

Cassandra went face to face with Charlie, the full force of the smell hitting her but she knew she couldn’t back down now.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked and felt Chaos reaching for her mind, asking her to join in on the fun, to just let herself go once in her life. No regrets. A voice in her head that she vaguely recognized as her own told her to fight it, that it wasn’t fun, but a vicious, self-destructive madness that was trying to suck her in.

Cassandra, trying to fight those two different emotions, felt her vision blur. In one last desperate attempt to stop the Chaos from taking over, she let herself fall to the side and hit her shin. The pain helped her think clearer for a moment.

Jim, who had stopped torturing the chair, was now swaying to the sound of music only he could hear, all the while laughing his head off.

“Stop that. Now”, Cassandra said but could barely hear her own voice over the blood raging in her ears.

Jim didn’t react at all. Charlie was sprawling on the chair provocatively.

“Damn it Charlie, what are you doing?” Cassandra murmured. “I’ll make coffee and you will help Jim get out of whatever place he’s locked in at the moment.”

Charlie slowly got up and approached her. Cassandra, bending over, tried to get away from him but hit the kitchen countertop instead.

“He is happy”, Charlie said, now very close to her, his voice slow and seductive.

Cassandra shook her head, trying to clear her vision but couldn’t.

“Why do you always have to be so uptight?” Charlie said and she felt Chaos reach for her again, this time for real. “Relax, have a little fun. Don’t worry so much.”

Cassandra turned away from him, reaching for something, anything that would stop her from doing what she was about to do. Suddenly Charlie was behind her, hugging her, pressing his hips against her. Cassandra gripped the corners of the countertop. She was in the throes of a whirlwind of emotions that told her to let go, forget everything, to be free. She felt sudden utter exhilaration, hilarity, heard laughter and most of all she felt a sudden longing, a fire burning so hot that it could only be extinguished… by Charlie.

“That’s better”, he said, his breath suddenly sweet and enticing. Cassandra breathed hard when she felt his mouth at her neck, felt him move against her. “Number three on your list? I didn’t think so.”

She had no idea what made her stop at that point. Maybe it was the thought of Ben and Alexander that got her sober up for a millisecond, maybe it was something in the way Charlie had grabbed her from behind that triggered her alarms, in any case she was suddenly able to detach herself from this madness.

She felt that Charlie needed this to stop as much as she did but somehow it seemed like he couldn’t. Once she was a little more herself, she did the only thing she could think of at such short notice – she tried to stomp on his foot and would have then turned around to kick him as hard as possible but he had already stepped to the side. And then he was all over her, fighting and hitting her with all he had.

For a moment, she saw the dark madness that possessed him in his eyes when he almost knocked her unconscious with a head butt. She reeled back and hit her back hard on the shelf behind her. Then he was on her again and Cassandra, instead of trying to escape him at such close quarters, moved in on him so that he wouldn’t be able to use his height and, it turned out, greater strength on her. They exchanged hits in fast, short movements, blocking and attacking, engaging and releasing all the while knocking over furniture and destroying plates and throwing down pots and pans. They were cheered on by Jim who had regained access to the wine bottle and was now drinking directly from it.

Charlie almost took her down but Cassandra again moved to the side at the very last moment and then snatched the bottle from Jim, smashing it against the side of Charlie’s head and would have followed up with a huge frying pan but just then Charlie started to sprout wiry branches from his hands that wrapped themselves around her throat. The deep, dark madness in him had now completely taken over and all that was left was pure, utter, uncontrollable Rage.

“Who are you?” Cassandra thought before she lost consciousness.

She was rescued by Hector who threw Charlie off of her. Cassandra, who thought it was still Charlie attacking her, struggled against Hector’s grip, raging and roaring and kicking at her brother. Summer screamed at her to stop but Cassandra couldn’t. Summer finally took a jug of water and threw its contents on Cassandra. As if wakened from a dream, Cassandra finally saw clearly again and although her blood was still seething and she desperately wanted to hit something, the Rage was gone and all that was left was emptiness. She tried to apologize to her brother who seemed to be ready to fight her if she went crazy again, tried to tell Summer, who was looking at her as if she were a dangerous animal, that she wasn’t going to do anything, that she was sorry, that she hadn’t meant to frighten her but the words wouldn’t come.

Instead she saw how Hector kept his huge bulk between her and Summer as if he was afraid she would hurt his girlfriend. He also kept an eye on Charlie who had retreated to the sofa with a look of shock written on his face, stretching out his hands as if he wanted to get rid of them but there were no more feelings of Chaos or Rage coming off of him. Instead he looked the picture of misery. No wonder her brother thought she was the dangerous one.

“Look what you did”, Summer shouted at them, sounding like an angry mother. “You made a complete mess of the kitchen and your managed to rip open Cassandra’s wounds again. You are irresponsible, crazy and utterly
stupid
!”

When Cassandra looked down, the left side of her T-shirt was soaked in blood and with the rush of adrenaline gone, her body told her in no uncertain terms that it didn’t appreciate what she had just done to it. Summer was beyond livid.

“Cassandra, if you keep wrecking your body like that, there won’t be enough Ambrosia or stitches to put you back together again”, she hissed, dragging Cassandra to a chair to look at the wounds. “And Charlie, if you keep poisoning everyone around you and dragging others into your misery you might not live to regret it. And wouldn’t that be for the best.”

Summer was about to go on when Jim, who had been watching them in wide-eyed wonder, threw up the wine all over himself. Hector groaned, grasped Jim by the collar and dragged him out of the kitchen.

“And look what you have done to Jim”, Summer cried. “Do you have you no feeling of responsibility? He is just a boy!”

She stomped her foot and pointed an accusing finger at Cassandra.

“You, upstairs, in your room, now”, Summer said. “Go change. It’s not blood on your shirt, it is wine. Lots of it. You are lucky nothing worse happened.”

Cassandra, all fight gone out of her, lifted her shirt and saw that it was true. It wasn’t blood on her shirt and her wounds hadn’t ripped open, even though it certainly felt like they had. Once again, she dragged herself upstairs to her room, hearing Summer chide Charlie and wishing she knew what had just happened.

“And you, Charlie, you are going to clean up this mess. I don’t care how deep your
weltschmerz
is, you did this to Jim and you’ll make up for it. Do you understand?”

If Charlie replied to that, Cassandra didn’t hear it. She fell on her bed, her head still spinning, everything aching like she had just been cut open by the metal claws again. She curled herself into a ball and waited for the pain to subside.

When Cassandra woke up the next morning, she felt she was about to die of thirst. She went to the sink and drank greedily, then she splashed water in her face, dried it with a towel and sat down on her bed again. She knew she couldn’t simply go down for breakfast, not after what had happened the night before. Why had Charlie acted so strangely last night and why had he dragged Jim into it? Why hadn’t he just told her what was bothering him?