The Gatekeeper's Challenge (16 page)

“Ares had no right!” Than spat the words out as he crossed the room. “You said no gods could intervene.”

“I said help,” Hades corrected. “I said no god may help her.”

“And I thought you were the god of justice!”

“These are challenges, Thanatos. The more challenging, the better the victory.”

“Hah! Admit it. You want her to fail!”

Hades didn’t hide the smile creeping across his face as he stood and met Than’s eyes, their noses inches apart. “I want her to pay! She was an embarrassment to me last summer. If she’s to join us here in my palace, I want her to suffer first.”

“The punishment should fit the crime!” Than said.

“Agreed!” Hades bellowed. “I said those very words to your sisters before you arrived. They want to drag on too long the punishment of a murderer in Paris before they bring him here. I think they are motivated by something other than justice.”

The Furies stood up, their eyes changing from blue in one and brown in the other to dark red. Blood dripped to their cheeks.

“Who doesn’t love Paris?” Tizzie hissed.

“We’ll leave you now,” Meg snarled.

The Furies vanished.

Hades crossed his arms at his chest. “And you are, too,
Thanatos.”

“She had compassion for a man who was no longer a threat to her. She refused to kill him in cold blood. How is that a failure?”

“He deserved death. Her parents deserved vengeance. You deserved her to keep her word! She’s the one who let you down, son. Not me. She chose to have mercy on that killer over becoming your wife. Doesn’t that bother you even a little?”

Than’s
throat tightened and no words came. He could think of nothing to say. Yes, it had bothered him. It had bothered him a lot. Only her prayers in the aftermath of the battle convinced him of her love. Her prayers, not her actions.

The challenges gave her the opportunity to remedy that. His father was right.

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Golden Apple

Back in her room in Colorado, relieved she succeeded in her first challenge, Therese searched the internet for more information about Hera’s golden apple orchard. She sat on her bed with her laptop across her legs and Clifford curled up beside her. Most websites placed the orchard in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco in Northwest Africa. One website described a fabled orchard in Marrakesh on the edge of the Majorelle Garden.

Therese wondered why it was called a
fabled
garden. If Hades wanted her to pluck an apple and bring it to Mount Olympus, the garden must exist, but wouldn’t at least one website verify that? The only logical explanation for the lack of information about the orchard was that it must be invisible to mortals, and if it was invisible, how would Therese be able to find it?

Gods weren’t supposed to help her face the challenges, but they could advise her, as Hephaestus pointed out. Therese closed her laptop, knelt on the floor, and pulled her flute case and music stand from beneath her bed. She played a new ballad she learned her sophomore year as a tribute to Hermes, and as her fingers slipped over the cool metal keys of the instrument, she prayed for his advice.

Not long into the ballad, Hermes appeared in the chair beneath her window, playing his pipe in harmony with her flute. The effect was so beautiful that tears welled in her eyes. She couldn’t believe she was contributing to such a perfect sound, the smooth notes reaching high in a trill, only to go low, slow, and long. Her fingers trembled; she didn’t want to ruin the beautiful song with a wrong note. When the song finally ended unmarred by her, Therese smiled with both relief and gratitude across the room at the messenger god. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” Hermes said, without getting up. “To answer your question: To see Hera’s apple orchard, wear the crown from Artemis. Only when you’re invisible to mortal eyes will you be able to see what mortals cannot see.”

Before Therese could ask another question, or thank him for his advice, Hermes disappeared.

Hermes’s advice reminded Therese of a fact she’d forgotten: Artemis’s crown made her invisible to
mortal
eyes. The immortal beings could still see her. The crown might help her find the orchard, but it wouldn’t protect her from being seen by the Hesperides or the one-hundred-headed dragon, not to mention the Minotaur and the Hydra. She’d been counting on the advantage of invisibility. Even if she were successful in the second challenge, what chance did she have against the two monsters if they could see her?

Therese slumped on her bed, twisting her bedcovers in her hands. This was crazy. She would die. Last summer at Mount Olympus, she was ready to die. She longed for her parents and knew her aunt would be protected by Ares, as part of their deal in her accepting the choice to fight McAdams. But now that she better understood what a life at
Than’s side would mean, she wanted to live. She didn’t want to be like her parents in the Underworld, without free will, without personality, and without much knowledge of the existence of others. She wanted to live.

Though after what happened with Vicki, she would rather die than face her friends when it was time to go back to school. If she could live with
Than, she could escape those judging eyes. Poor Vicki. Maybe she could do something for her once she was a god.

But making it through the challenges seemed impossible to her now. Than was right when he said the challenges were designed to punish
her. Maybe she shouldn’t have accepted them so hastily. Maybe she should have allowed Than to take her directly to Demeter’s winter cottage and turn her himself, even though it meant torture forever for him. At least they’d be together.

No. She couldn’t stand the thought of him being ripped to pieces every year. Her death was better than his torture. She had to try.

And it was too late to turn back now. She’d already accepted the challenges, and she’d completed the first of them. There was nothing to do but to keep going.

Monday morning, Therese went, for the first time since Vicki’s funeral, to swim practice with Jen at the city natatorium, their high school pool still under repair from the earthquake damage. As Jen drove them home afterward, Therese brought up the crown.

“I’ll have it back to you tonight,” Therese promised, though she worried she might not be able to keep it.

Jen looked at her like a wilted flower, quavering in the wind. She nodded and returned her eyes to the road. Before dropping off Therese, she drove to her own house and got the crown.

“I’ll come by later.” Therese climbed from the pickup with the crown hidden beneath her towel.

After eating a burger Richard had picked up in town, Therese sat on the living room sofa beside Carol, who had her laptop resting on the coffee table where she worked her pharmaceutical sales. Sometimes Carol had to travel out of town, but she was never gone for more than a few days at a time.

“Everything okay?” Carol asked.

Therese shrugged. She couldn’t say how wrong it seemed that she had lived and Vicki had died. She also couldn’t tell how she was about to
put herself in danger and wanted to sit with Carol awhile in case it was the last time. She wanted to say, “I’m scared,” but instead she said, “Yeah.”

Carol put an arm around Therese’s shoulders and they leaned back on the sofa. Therese crossed her ankles on the coffee table, something her parents allowed and used to do themselves. Carol closed her laptop and did the same.

“Maybe we should do something fun together this week,” Carol said. “We could go rafting, or we could take the Silverton train. What sounds good to you?”

Therese shrugged again. “It doesn’t matter to me.
Whatever you want to do.”

“I can take a break now if you want to watch a movie together.”

Therese wanted to watch a movie. She wanted to sit quietly beside her aunt, her last remaining blood relative, and feel her close beside her once more before facing the immortal monsters. But if she wanted to start the first challenge today, she didn’t have much time before it would be dark in Marrakesh. According to the web, there was a seven hour time difference between Colorado and Morocco. “How about tonight, after supper?” Hopefully, she’d be alive and back by then.

“Okay, sweetheart.”

“I’m going to take a nap.” Therese got up from the sofa and went upstairs, Clifford on her heels. She was ready to put on the traveling robe from Aphrodite.

The Majorelle Garden in Marrakesh, Morocco bustled with tourists weaving up and down floral-lined stone paths and over bridges across ponds of lily pads and through antique stone buildings full of paintings. Cobalt blue fountains, railings, and trim unified the otherwise multi-colored flowers and foliage. Therese sifted through the crowd and found her way just outside the garden near the trails leading up the Atlas Mountains. A dozen tents and donkeys peppered the valley with the aromas of freshly cooked dinners wafting toward the sky. Picnic tables, scattered across the valley, held tourists eating the food these makeshift restaurants prepared beneath their tents. Therese’s belly rumbled at the delicious smells even though back in Durango, she’d just eaten a burger and was full. It was lunchtime back home; here, it was seven in the evening.

She wondered what these people thought of her wearing the silk robe, the golden scabbard at her
waist, and the golden shield on her back, carrying a flute in one hand and a crown in the other. Maybe they thought she was an entertainer. It occurred to Therese that, indeed, she was, for Hades.

She wore her purse strapped around her neck and hanging at one hip. It carried a cinnamon roll leftover from breakfast and stuffed with
SleepAid caplets and the Prozac she never finished taking. Scouring the landscape for the perfect place to disappear, she trekked past the tents and picnic tables into a copse of pines leading up a mountain. Once she was in the thick of them, she placed the crown on her head as her heart sped up and her fingers twitched.

Immediately, the landscape changed. The pines disappeared, and in their place were fruit trees. She stood between a row of pear and another of orange. Taking a few hesitant steps, she saw no sign of the three nymphs or their dragon. With trembling hands, she put the flute to her bottom lip and played, telling herself that it would be okay if she died. She wouldn’t know any better. The Lethe would wipe away her memories and infuse her with a pleasant feeling of contentment for all eternity.

When she reached the end of the rows, she froze. Her fingers would no longer move and all the air rushed out of her body, leaving her nothing to blow across the flute. Three beautiful ladies lounging on the thick, gnarly roots of a giant apple tree looked up at her with their mouths open in surprise and delight, but wrapped around the trunk of the tree was the body of the biggest snake Therese had ever seen, its many green heads looking at her from the branches, blending with the green leaves except for their yellow eyes and flicking tongues. Round, golden apples hung from the branches, but none were within arm’s reach from the ground. The ladies all had long black braids and skin the same color of the ashy brown tree trunk. If it weren’t for their soft cotton gowns of different colors billowing in the gentle breeze, they would have blended in with the trunk and roots of the tree. Their dark eyes narrowed at Therese suspiciously, so she took in air—though it burned—and blew. The ladies smiled at her again.

One of the three hopped to her feet and took the hand of her sister. Soon all three danced to Therese’s melody. She was afraid to stop, playing and playing for hours until the sun began to set and her fingers felt raw and her throat tight.  Worried she’d be too weak to fight if
necessary, she stopped playing and decided to speak.

“Hello,
Hesperides. My name is Therese. Hera gave me permission to pick an apple from her tree and take it to Mount Olympus.”

The three ladies laughed, looking over their shoulder at
Ladon’s many heads glaring at Therese from the branches.

Therese opened her purse and took out the cinnamon roll. “Hera gave me a gift to give to
Ladon.” It wasn’t exactly true. Technically, Hera hadn’t given it to her. But it had been her idea. Too frightened to approach the tree and the nymphs, Therese tossed the roll through the air where it was caught and eaten by one of Ladon’s hundred heads.

The middle and tallest nymph stepped toward Therese. “Why would Hera allow you to pick an apple and not one of us, who have been her servants for centuries?”

“She told me I wasn’t to eat it, but to bring it to her.”

This information made the nymph nod and
reconsider Therese, but the other two dashed forward and took Therese by the arms.

“I want to keep her,” one of them said.

“Me too,” the other said.

Therese tried to pull free but couldn’t loosen their hold on her.

“We’re so bored,” said one.

“We want you to stay and play for us.”