29

29

Dragon Teeth

I stare at a skeleton soldier, shield and sword and everything, all made of bleached-white bone, but instead of legs, it has a tail like a mermaid. Adapted for the environment it was born into? That’s a bonus.

By the time I manage to wriggle out of the sea monster’s coils, made extra difficult by all its leafy parts, my lungs are near to bursting. I shove off the rocks to try to get up to the surface as quickly as possible. My body screams, desperate for a breath, but I haven’t reached the surface. I can’t. I suck in salt water just as Samuel grabs my hand and drags me out.

I land on my stomach, coughing and spluttering. It takes way too long to rid my body of the water in my lungs. Every inhale is so painful I expect to start coughing blood.

“What are those?” someone at the other end shouts. I know exactly what they’re looking at. Three of them. That’s how many dragon teeth I used.

“Kill the sea monsters!” I order the soldiers made of bones.

The water erupts in a battle of creature against creature as we all watch in horror. “Isabel, Zai, swim!” Samuel yells.

They both jump off the post and make it to us, where Samuel hauls them out one at a time. Isabel lands on the rocks beside me.

“You’re bleeding.” I sit up for a closer look at her leg. Two rows of jagged cuts seeping blood line her calf. The sea monster must’ve gotten a bite in while she was on the post.

Isabel whips her shirt over her head, leaving her in a sports bra, and ties it around the wound.

“Zai thinks you risk too much,” she says to me, “and I’m inclined to agree.” Then she looks up and grins. “But I like risk takers.”

I want to grin back, but I’m too busy having a moment.

“We got it!”

One of the male champions is standing on the rocks above the carved words of warning along with Rima and Amir. Diego, I think his name is. Older, maybe in his forties, he’s not short but not tall and of a wiry build, with floppy, silvering hair and a genuine smile that lights him up like a beacon. He’s Demeter’s champion, and his tracksuit is burgundy in color, which means Heart is his virtue, not Mind. Interesting.

I can’t get a read on Rima, but Amir’s arrogance seems to have been stripped away as he grins in almost boyish pride as the Heart champion claps him on the shoulder. The two men have stripped off their soaking-wet shirts and pants and have draped them over the remaining unhatched eggs, covering them completely. Amir’s underclothes cling to his lanky, still-growing form, and Hera’s kid champion looks far too small for this fight. I can tell by the way Diego situates himself between the teenager and the once-deadly waters that he sees it, too. So paternal, I note, and wonder not for the first time about the families my fellow champions left behind.

“They must hatch when they hit air,” Zai says next to me. Clinically. As if this is a very interesting scientific fact he’s just discovered.

About that time, the water goes suddenly quiet. Only the natural roll of the ocean disturbs the surface as we all stare down into the depths. “Are they dead?” Meike asks.

“Gods, I hope so,” Jackie mutters.

With a clatter and a splash, one of my skeletons rises out of the water, supporting itself with its bony tail. It salutes me and then immediately falls apart, bones scattering and sinking to the bottom of the cave, no doubt with the two other skeletons.

“They’re all gone.” I collapse on the rocks and roll to my back, staring at the geometric shapes above my head. I grin on a rush of pure relief. “One Labor down.”

A laugh escapes me. I hear a few others make similar sounds, somewhere between relief, shock, and lingering terror—reality setting in.

We made it through one. With no one killed.

Beside me, Isabel suddenly screams, a sound that is a rending shriek of such agony I’m surprised she doesn’t bring the whole cave down on top of us. I jackknife up to see her frantically unwinding the bloody shirt from her leg.

Only instead of gashes where the teeth sank in, there are…holes. Holes in her leg turned black as ash and growing deeper and wider as we watch with revulsion, spreading like they are eating her alive.

“Help her!” someone yells.

Isabel writhes and screams, holding on to the top of her leg like she could make it stop, but the bite is consuming her flesh so fast, creeping up to her knee now. I whip a thin coiled rope out of one of my vest pockets and tie it around her thigh like a tourniquet to stop the burning, or whatever this is, from going higher, but the charred flesh passes the tie-off like it’s not even there.

Isabel arches off the rock, her terrible screeches echoing around the cave, and I think maybe my insides are bleeding with her, as if every scream is claws tearing at me. I’ve never heard a sound so awful. I scoot closer, taking her hand in mine. It’s all I can do.

She looks at me, and it’s not just agony in her eyes or fear…but knowledge. She knows she’s going to die and there’s nothing anyone can do to help her.

“I’m here.” What else can I say?

Then Isabel takes one long breath that is both a scream and a groan before her eyes roll back in her head and she passes out, no doubt from the pain. But her body is still in trauma, her chest rising and falling fast, her limbs twitching as she tries to fight it. By now, the charring is up to her waist. All we can do is watch, helpless and paralyzed, as it consumes the rest of her until, with a death rattle from coal-black lips, she goes terribly still, no longer breathing.

No longer in pain.

She looks like bodies pulled out of house fires in movies—a corpse of flesh burned beyond all recognition. What the movies can’t replicate is the putrid smell of it. I realize I’m still holding her hand and gently let go before rubbing her remains off on my clothes.

Samuel removes his shirt and covers as much of her as he can with it, then puts a hand on my shoulder, and I flinch at the touch. “She’s gone.”

It doesn’t seem possible. She was just here. She was just—

“Congratulations!” Zeus’ voice booms from the sky.

Zeus, not Poseidon. The ocean god is probably pissed at himself for devising a challenge that eliminated his own champion, and therefore himself, from the running. Good. I hope he chokes on failure.

“You have completed your first Labor, champions.” The god’s words echo around us. “Well done.”

Not all of us, dickhead. I can’t make myself look away from what’s left of Isabel.

“And the winner of today’s competition is…Demeter’s champion, Diego Perez, who determined the cause of the hatching and stopped it.”

The god pauses, probably giving us a chance to applaud or something. I feel sick.

“Diego—for your win today, you have earned a boon. The Ring of Gyges.”

Vaguely, I’m aware of a spark of light in the cave, but I don’t look over to see Diego accept the blood-prize.

Zeus’ tone is benevolent. “This magical artifact grants its wearer the power of invisibility at will.”

Much good invisibility did Dex.

“Go ahead, champion,” Zeus says.

I finally glance up to see Diego standing above the words of warning carved into the rocks. A gold ring as thick as my thumb hovers in the air before him. He doesn’t move but instead glances toward where Isabel lies, partially covered, beside me.

“Take it,” Zeus encourages him. “It’s yours.”