A Beautiful Evil (15 page)

“But there’s no way of knowing what awaits us in her old temple either,” Sebastian pointed out.

“I know, but it’s our only alternative. Athena closed the gate we found in the ruins, so even if we wanted to use that one, we couldn’t. She won’t be expecting us to come back. She thinks we’re on her time, at her mercy. And if her old temple is in the same realm and abandoned, like the history books say, then we might have a shot.” I rubbed a hand down my face. “I get that there are a ton of things I don’t know about the doorways, or gates, or whatever the hell they’re called. But I still have to try.”

Sebastian and I stared at one another for a long moment before he turned his attention to Crank and Dub. “We’ll make the symbols away from the house, in the cemetery. We’ll pack food and water and weapons.”

Dub started to complain.

“Dub. It’s too dangerous,” I interrupted. “End of story.”

“You know me and Crank can take care of ourselves.”

“I know that. Taking care of yourselves is one thing, but entering the realm of a goddess is another. I can’t worry about Athena getting ahold of you. I can’t be constantly checking on you, looking over my shoulder . . . those things could get us killed. And it’s not because I think you need babysitting—it’s because I care. A lot. So just, please, don’t give me a hard time about this. Please stay so I know at least you two are safe. Let me worry about Violet, okay?”

I hadn’t meant to go on like that or get into my feelings. For a moment no one responded.

“I have an extra sheath you can borrow,” Dub offered, finally giving up.

I relaxed. The fight was over. Thank God.

“And I found a box of ammo a while back. Not sure if they’re the right kind of bullets for your gun, but you can have them if you want,” Crank said.

“Sneaking in, just the three of us, without an army or a bunch of Novem heads,” Henri contemplated. “I like it. We can move faster and not worry about egos and everyone fighting about who’s in charge.”

“Oh, I almost forgot!” Crank got off her chair and yelled behind her as she jogged from the room. “Stay there! I have a surprise!”

She banged around the kitchen and then returned with . . . a cake? She set it down on the coffee table and handed us forks. I pretended not to notice her shaking hands. “You know what a king cake is, right, Ari?”

“I know there’s a plastic baby in it, but that’s about it,” I answered, hoping that Crank wasn’t losing it. She was extremely worried. We were leaving and our chances were one in a million. If Crank wanted to have cake, we’d have cake.

“It’s twisted deep-fried dough with cream cheese filling. Trust me, you’ll like it.”

There was icing poured and hardened on the top, and sections were colored purple, green, and gold.

“Where’d you get it?” I asked, taking a slice and shoving a bite into my mouth.

“Perks of running the mail,” Crank said. “I smell cake and the box mysteriously never gets delivered.”

I laughed. “You stole it.”

“Hell yeah, I did. It was addressed to the Pontalba apartments.”

Which for us was enough said. Everyone knew that Novem families lived in those swanky apartments. And they sure as hell wouldn’t miss a king cake.

“Right on,” Dub said, clinking forks with Crank like a toast, his cheeks filled like a chipmunk’s.

Henri found the baby, so it was his responsibility, they all said, to find a cake next year. And I damn sure would do everything in my power to make sure there would
be
a next year.

Crank drove us the four blocks to Lafayette Cemetery. We could’ve walked, but she insisted, saying we shouldn’t tire ourselves out. She parked on the curb. We slid the rear door up and jumped out.

We headed down the first row of tombs, then the second. “How about that one there?” Dub pointed to an intact tomb at the far end of the row. It had roughened marble sides and was big enough to make the doorway.

“Perfect. Let’s use the other side, though, since it’s hidden from the main gate,” I said.

Once we were there, I let my heavy backpack slide off my shoulders and placed the small plastic container I carried on a flat bit of stone nearby. While the boys had packed the bags and weapons, Crank and I had used as little water as possible to wet the stiff blood from my shirt and squeeze it into the container. It was Athena’s blood for sure, but watered down.

Dub handed me my notebook with the symbols. “We can each do one,” he said.

“No. It has to be me. The tablet said it has to be done by a woman in order to work.” My cheeks turned hot and I kept the whole virginity thing to myself. “Once it’s made, though, anyone should be able to go through.”

Sebastian and Henri brushed off the spots where I’d make the drawings.

After they were done, I took the container and dipped my finger in the blood. I drew each symbol slowly and perfectly, referencing my sketches from the notebook. The watered-down blood was so light, I wasn’t sure it’d work, so I waited for the symbols to dry and then did another coat.

Four coats later I stood back. The wall looked like the wall in Entergy Tower, though not exactly. The symbols were slightly different.

I set the container down, used a bottle of water to rinse my hands, and took a deep breath as the guys stood in front of the wall trying to note any energy disturbance or increase, any sign that the symbols held the power to open a doorway.

“Uh, guys. Check this out. I’m thinking Ari’s doorway works.” Crank stood next to the wall with her hand inside. Gone.

Relief washed over me, making my knees weak. We were really doing this. Going into Athena’s realm. I sat down and rubbed a shaky hand down my face.

After the shock and reality dimmed, Henri, Sebastian, and I secured our backpacks over our shoulders. I pulled out my
blade with one hand and drew my 9mm with the other. Henri swung a shotgun off his back, which he had strapped there like a bow, and Sebastian went empty-handed. His hands were—as I’d seen—pretty destructive things.

“See you guys soon.” I hugged Crank and Dub, and then waited for the others to say good-bye.

Deep breath. Game face on. “Last one in’s a rotten egg,” I said, and walked through the gate.

I
TOOK TWO STEPS THROUGH THE DOORWAY AND STUMBLED
, falling forward. My forehead cracked against something hard. A grunt broke from my lips as I dropped to my knees. Shit. That hurt.

It was pitch-black. The smell of earth and water was strong, but cleaner than the musty scent of swamp I was used to. I heard shuffling and breathing to my right. A curse to my left. The guys were through.

“Who the hell put a wall in the way?” Henri groaned.

I slipped my gun back into my waistband and ran my hand over the obstacle in front of me. Grooves, evenly spaced and smooth. “We must be in the ruined temple,” I said in a low voice. “This feels like part of a column.”

“I think we should keep the flashlights off until we know what’s in here,” Sebastian said.

“Let’s feel our way out of here,” I said.

It was slow going, squeezing through spaces, climbing over columns. I’d never been there before, but it sure as hell felt like we were somewhere deep inside the temple. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I could make out shapes that told the story—the temple had partly collapsed; several of the interior columns had fallen and broken apart.

Eventually dim light appeared, illuminating the marble around what I hoped was an exit.

“Thank God,” Henri whispered as we approached a small slanted space as wide as a closet door. It had once been a massive doorway, but a large slab of marble had fallen, wedging itself into the space.

The opening was overgrown with vines and roots. It looked like heaven to me, a bright, wonderful, welcoming light.

From darkness to light
, I thought, stepping out.
From one world to another.
My eyes adjusted to the soft gray light.

The columns that had collapsed were colossal. I turned and stepped backward to the very edge of a wide landing and craned my neck. The temple still stood, but had buckled, one side slightly collapsed inward, with giant cracks in the marble. Athena’s temple. Well, hers before she stole her father’s. And even ruined, it was awe-inspiring.

“Do you guys have any idea how insane this is?” Henri asked, amazed. “This is . . . we’re standing in fucking Olympus.”

Sebastian let out a low, disbelieving laugh.

I turned away from the temple to see them side by side at the top of the steps, staring out over the landscape. I joined them and the three of us stood, shoulder to shoulder, completely slack-jawed.

Thick woods flanked the temple grounds. To the right was an eerie-looking stone garden, and in front of us, down the steps and beyond the overgrown lawn, was the smooth dark water of a lake.

My gaze traveled over the large expanse of water to the far side of the lake, and past a marble gazebo and a manicured lawn to an enormous white-columned temple that would’ve given any Ancient Wonder of the World a run for its money.

No doubt in my mind we were gawking at Zeus’s temple.

The lake, the land . . . it looked as though it had been plopped down on the side of a jagged mountain. Fires burned from giant bowls around the perimeter of Zeus’s temple, and from this distance, I knew they must be the size of swimming pools. Beautiful trees dotted the lawn. A pair of cranes took flight. The faint thrum of a string instrument wafted over the lake.

Heaven. A Maxfield Parrish heaven.

Athena, the goddess of war, destroyer of entire pantheons, and sick narcissistic bitch, lived in a fucking paradise.

For some reason, I’d expected her to live in the hell she seemed to spread in her wake, that she sat on some skulled-out throne and tossed bones to hellhounds. But no. She lived over there. In that beautiful place of horrors.

After the shock wore off, we went down the wide steps. This place was so different from the one across the lake. Vines crawled over everything, snaking up the temple as though trying to pull it down into the earth. It was a dark, lost, and abandoned place, reminding me of the GD.

“Ari, check this out,” Henri called from somewhere on the grounds.

I went down the stairs and to my right. The land sloped gently toward a field littered with marble and debris and what looked like hundreds of standing stones. A high wall surrounded the place on three sides.

Lichen, vines, and moss grew over small columns and marble. Stone slabs jutted up at odd angles from the ground. Trees grew around random stones, their roots encasing the hard rock. I saw Henri ahead of me, weaving between the stones.

The fine hairs on my body rose, and a very disturbing sense formed in my gut. Sebastian came to a stop beside me. “What is this place?” I asked in a near whisper.

“You hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“The silence. No birds. No insects. No squirrels climbing up trees. No wildlife here at all.”

Maybe that was why I felt so spooked.

Sebastian started off toward Henri. I followed, and once I got a closer look at the stones, an “Oh my God” breezed through my lips and hung there in shock.

They were statues. Hundreds of them. They were old. Random. Eerie. Of warriors, children, women. Some broken forever. Some covered in lichen or swamped in vines, like chains holding them in place.

My heart pounded hard as I picked my way through the stone garden.

I stopped, coming around a statue of a hooded woman in a fall of fabric. Gray marble fabric. Her face was turned to the side, staring as though she’d heard a sound. Vines grew over her sandaled feet and crept up her gown.

Blood rushed past my eardrums. I gulped, reaching out to touch the marble hand that held the cloak closed at her neck. Movement behind me made me stop. I stepped back, away from the statue.

Sebastian threaded his way through Athena’s garden of stone. I didn’t want to call to him. My voice would be too loud here, too . . . wrong. I crawled over a broken marble bench and hurried to his side. He turned as I approached. His eyes were solemn, his entire being quiet.

This place was like being in church.

Church of the Damned, maybe.

“This is . . . bizarre,” he said, looking around.

My chest tightened until it burned. There was no question what this was. “This is more than bizarre. This is a cemetery, Sebastian. Don’t ask me how I know it, but these people were turned to stone.”

The handiwork of one or maybe hundreds of my ancestors.

“Athena collected these, you think?” Henri approached us. “Pretty morbid, if you ask me.”

Tell me about it. “I wonder if she brought the statues here. . . . Or maybe a gorgon actually lived here.”

“How can you be sure this is the work of a gorgon?” Henri asked.

We started back toward the temple, passing a marble warrior. A Roman. Young. Handsome. Sword raised. I shivered. “Because I know. . . . It’s a feeling. I can’t explain it.”

I went around a fallen warhorse and found a mother on the other side clutching a toddler to her chest, the child’s chubby arm stuck out over a blanket. The mother’s face was frozen in fear as though looking in the eyes of Death itself. And the child, the child had its head turned too, looking at me. No fear. It had no idea what it was seeing when it died.