Goddess in Time Read online

  Kicking my way back down to the doors, I suck in a breath of water, tighten up my courage, and raise my hand to grab one of the bull-shaped silver door knockers—why the god of the sea would choose a land mammal as one of his sacred symbols is beyond me. I only hesitate half a second before banging the knocker against the door. All in.

  “No going back now.”

  I wait, listening for any sounds from the other side of the doors. Not that I could hear an explosion through them. The water would muffle everything anyway.

  I start counting in my head. When I get to fifty, I start thinking maybe no one is home. Maybe the palace is closed for the summer or something.

  By seventy I’m pretty sure this is a lost cause.

  At one hundred, my shoulders slump. What am I going to do? Between the fortress-like doors and the magic force field, getting into this palace is impossible. If no one answers I don’t know what else to try. I start to turn away, defeated. As I do, a swirl of current whips past me and spins me back around.

  I find myself face-to-face with what looks like a palace guard. It’s not an impressive guess since he’s wearing a navy-blue uniform jacket that matches his navy-blue tail fin and is decorated with almost as much silver as the palace itself.

  “State your purpose,” he says.

  “What?” I ask before I can stop myself.

  “Your purpose,” he repeats. “Why do you visit the sea god’s home?”

  I’m so overwhelmed by the fact that someone is actually here and the door is open, that at first I can only stare.

  He clears his throat. Loudly.

  “Oh,” I say, coming back to my senses. Shoot, I hadn’t thought this far ahead. What should I say? I can’t simply ask for a seashell. What would any other hematheos come to this palace for? Why would they make this risky journey?

  Without waiting to think up something tactical, I blurt, “I would like an audience with the sea god.” The guard’s eyes widen, but I nod. “I would like to speak with Poseidon.”

  I expect him to slam the door in my face. Or maybe set the sea dogs after me. Who am I to ask for an audience with a god-king?

  But the guard bows his head and says, “Please wait here.”

  He closes the door and I can only guess he’s going to see if he has to let me in or if he can send me away. I don’t bother counting this time. The palace is huge—it could take him an hour to swim to the back. Instead, I amuse myself by studying the weird sculptures covering the palace. There are a lot of bulls and horses—another one of Poseidon’s sacred symbols—and plenty of half-naked mermaids. Typical.

  But there are also lots of serpents and sea monsters, creatures with mixed-up features like the front half of a horse and the tail of a fish. There are about a million actual seashells inlaid into the palace walls. Not one of them is silver.

  I float over to the statue of a beautiful woman, her mouth open like she’s singing an opera. A siren, one of the evil women who uses song to lure sailors to their deaths.

  The sculpture is so realistic I can almost hear the—

  “Be careful.”

  Heart pounding, I spin around at the sound of the guard’s voice.

  “You do not wish to wake the sleeping siren.”

  I glance back at the sculpture—lifelike for a reason, apparently—and kick myself slowly away. I’m not a sailor and at the moment I can’t drown, but I’m not about to tempt fate.

  “Sorry,” I mutter as I swim back over to the guard.

  “The sea god will see you now,” the guard says, as if I hadn’t almost roused a murderous creature.

  “Good,” I say, trying to act like I knew he would.

  Inside, my heart and my mind are racing. Great, I’ve got an audience with Poseidon. Now what?

  “I need a silver seashell.”

  Did that just come out of my mouth? Seriously?

  As the guard led me to the throne room, I tried to think of some reasonable way to ask for the seashell without having to explain why. I could pretend I was a jeweler who wanted to make a necklace in his honor. Or that I was trying to win a merman’s love. But never once did I think to blurt out my request without preamble until, well, it blurted out of me without preamble.

  I feel my eyes widen as Poseidon studies me from the other side of his massive desk. It’s at least as big as Zeus’s and covered with as much clutter.

  Sometimes I really need to think twice before speaking. Or at least once. I should try it someday. I’m going to get myself smoted.

  “I mean, I was wondering if there’s any way I could—”

  He holds up his hand and I stop midsentence. He looks so much like Zeus right now it’s easy to see that they’re brothers. Same square face, flowing gray hair, and intense stare. Except where Zeus’s eyes are stormy gray, Poseidon’s are deep sea blue.

  “If you seek such a gift,” he finally says, “you must give a gift in return.”

  A gift? I didn’t think to bring anything with me. I’m lucky I even thought enough ahead to leave my phone in my room. I tend to act first and figure it out later—shocking, I know.

  “I’m sorry,” I admit. “I don’t have anything.”

  He smiles. “But of course you do.”

  Now why is the hair on the back of my neck standing up again?

  He waves me closer to his desk. I inch forward, more than a little nervous to find out what he has in mind. I’ve heard plenty of stories from the old days—the really old days—when the gods were pretty much full-time hound dogs. How do you think we got so many hematheos in the first place? If he tries something, I’ll have to break out some long-lost martial arts moves.

  But when I approach, he does nothing more than pull a silver seashell from his drawer and set it on his desk. I stare at the shell, seriously calculating the odds of grabbing it and getting out of the palace before he can stop me.

  Very, very low.

  “I have a daughter,” he begins, then laughs. “I have many daughters, but there is one.”

  His eyes get this far-off, dreamy look, and I can tell that he loves this daughter more than all the others combined. Kinda sucks for the rest of the family, but she must be one special girl.

  “She is an angel,” he continues. “Sees no evil in men.”

  And by men he means one man in particular.

  I get it. Naive daughter of one of the most powerful gods who ever lived. Less-than-naive guy who wants her for less-than-honorable reasons.

  “You think she’s being conned?” I suggest.

  “I—” Poseidon smiles and shakes his head. “Yes, that is it precisely.”

  I watch him, waiting for him to explain what this has to do with me getting the seashell. What this has to do with my forgetting a gift.

  He doesn’t speak, just sits there staring at the shell like he expects it to start talking to him.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally say, “but I don’t get what that has to do with me. How can I possibly help?”

  I have a sudden image of being asked to play cheat-catcher, acting as bait to lure the suspected con artist into hitting on me. So not my area of expertise. I’m better at scaring boys away.

  “I would like you to tell me her future,” he says.

  I twist my head sideways. Tell him her future? What am I, a fortune-teller?

  “You’ve made a mistake,” I explain, backing away a step. “I can’t see the future.”

  No, I’m trying to go back and fix the past.

  “You have powers you do not yet realize.”

  Poseidon reaches out and takes my hand, stopping my retreat. The moment his fingers touch me, my brain explodes with an intense image. I see a girl—a breathtakingly beautiful girl who could only be the daughter of a god—walking on a beach. As the image focuses in my mind, I see that she is walking hand in hand with a boy.

  “What do you see?” Poseidon asks softly.

  I don’t stop to ask how he knows I’m seeing something.

  “A girl w
ith pale blond hair and pretty green eyes,” I describe.

  “My daughter,” Poseidon confirms. “What else?”

  “She’s walking on the beach with a boy.” I squint my eyes, as if that will make the mental picture clearer. “He has dark blond hair and”—the image zooms in on his face—“a tattoo on the back of his neck.”

  “That is the boy.” Poseidon releases my hand. “The con artist.”

  The modern term sounds awkward in his accented voice.

  The image fades and I open my eyes. “I—” I shake my head, not sure how I could possibly know this, but I feel it like a certainty in my gut. “He isn’t a con artist.”

  “No?”

  I shrug. “They seem . . .” I study the picture of the girl and the blissful smile on her beautiful face. “Happy.”

  “Happy,” Poseidon echoes.

  I can’t tell if he’s relieved or disappointed. Personally, I’m confused. What the heck just happened? One touch from a god and suddenly I’m seeing things I shouldn’t be able to know?

  “Thank you,” he says, picking up the silver seashell and offering it to me. “It was not the answer I sought, but it is . . . acceptable.”

  I let out a huge—water-filled—sigh of relief. Seems like I passed the test.

  I reach out to take the seashell. Before I can grab it, Poseidon moves his hand back a few inches. When I look up, ready to call him out for pulling a dirty trick, he is giving me a serious look.

  “You of all people, Nicole Matios,” he says, shocking the ever-loving crap out of me by knowing my name, “of all hematheos, should know that some things happen for reasons beyond our control.”

  “I, um . . .”

  Crazy guy says what? What kind of cryptic nonsense is that? Sure, the old guy gets points for knowing my name, but that ominous threat is filed under none of his business. He must be totally off the rails. If this all goes wrong at the last moment, I’m going to be seriously annoyed.

  But Poseidon doesn’t spout any more of his crazy talk. He holds the seashell back within my reach.

  I snatch it before he can yank it away again.

  “Thanks,” I say, clutching the seashell in my fist.

  I turn and swim for the door as fast as my mediocre swimming skills will take me. It’s not until I’m out of the palace, through the canyon, and kicking to the surface that I let out a sigh of relief. I did it. I actually got the silver seashell.

  As I break through into the salty air, I don’t hesitate. I autoport back to Serfopoula, back to my friends, with the edges of the shell digging into my palm.

  7

  It’s late when I get back and the beach is deserted, so I go ahead and autoport back to my room. After placing the seashell in the desk drawer next to the feather, I grab my phone and send the gang a quick text to let them know I’m back safe.

  A phone beeps from the vicinity of my always-messy bed.

  Scowling, I cross the room and yank the comforter away. There’s Troy, sprawled across my sheets, sleeping like a little baby.

  “Hey,” he says, rolling over and squinting into the light. “You’re back.”

  I don’t bother confirming the obvious. “How did you get in here?”

  I swear I reset my protections after last time.

  He sits up, rubs his eyes with one hand, and waves at the window with the other.

  “I’m on the third floor,” I argue while he stifles a yawn.

  “I know.” He gives me a lopsided grin. “I neofactured a ladder.”

  I give up. With a resigned shake of my head, I drop into the chair at my desk. “Clearly I need to up my security.”

  Troy ignores my grumble. “Did you get it?”

  I yank the drawer back open and hold up the seashell.

  “How?” he asks. “Was it hard?”

  “Not really,” I answer.

  All it took was a bizarro mental movie of Poseidon’s daughter. I have no idea what that was all about, and part of me wants to share that with Troy. Not that he would understand any more than I do, but it’s making me a little crazy to keep it inside.

  What would I say? Poseidon touched me and I saw—what? The future? The past? I don’t even know.

  It had to be something supernatural. I’ve never seen this daughter of Poseidon before, but according to him I described her—and her boyfriend—perfectly. And whatever I saw, it was enough to appease the sea god.

  Still, it’s . . . weird. To say the least.

  Instead of telling Troy something I can’t explain, I tell him the rest of the story—from the moment I left the beach until I autoported home.

  “All I did was ask for it,” I say. “He was pretty reasonable, as far as Olympians go.”

  “Wow, that’s—” Troy shakes his head. “Wow.”

  I nod my head. “I know.”

  He reaches for the seashell and I let him take it. It doesn’t look like anything special. Just an ordinary seashell that happens to be silver. I get the feeling the offerings are more about the effort than the objects themselves. While Troy turns the shell over in his hand, my mind drifts to the next step.

  Apparently, so does his.

  “So . . .” he says, holding the seashell up for a closer look. “Hades?”

  I draw in a full breath. “Hades.”

  “That’s going to be—”

  “Impossible,” I interrupt. “I’ll add it to the list.”

  I grab the seashell back, drop it in the drawer with the feather, and slam the thing shut.

  “This isn’t the same as Poseidon’s palace,” Troy says, reclining back on my bed. “The underworld is a whole different ball game.”

  I sigh. “I’m trying not to think about that.”

  Hades. The underworld. The land of the dead.

  Not exactly a choice vacation spot. In fact, other than descendants of Hades and his too-stupid-to-live bride Persephone and participants in a ridiculous survival game held on the island every summer, no one but the dead ever enters Hades because no one can ever leave.

  “There has to be a way,” I insist. “Otherwise why would that be a required step?”

  “I don’t like it,” Troy says. Before I can tell him I don’t care if he doesn’t like it, he says, “But we’ll figure it out.”

  He pats the bed and I move to sit next to him. Our arms touch and I feel myself relax. I’ve never felt as comfortable with anyone as I do with Troy. Suddenly, the exhaustion of the day—of this whole quest—hits me and I find my eyes sagging.

  “We’ll get everyone together tomorrow,” he continues, his voice lulling me to sleep. “We will figure out how to get you to Hades.”

  “And back,” I murmur, letting my head fall onto his shoulder.

  “And back,” he repeats.

  As I drift to sleep, images of golden feathers and silver seashells dance in my mind. With my friends at my side—with Troy at my side—I have no doubt that ruby pomegranate seeds will be mine before long.

  Redemption, too.

  Just as the last of my consciousness succumbs to sleep, I feel Troy’s hand slide under mine. I smile and then I’m out.

  We decide to meet at Phoebe’s house the next morning. Mostly because the idea of having so many people in my room makes me itchy. Also because we are less likely to be overheard here than in the dorm or the library. Even on summer break, there are still some students on campus.

  At Phoebe’s, we only have to worry about her mom—not really a concern, because she doesn’t know enough about this world to freak out; her stepdad—a major problem, because Headmaster Petrolas knows everything about this world, but luckily he’s in Athens on business; and her stepsister—another major know-it-all problem, but Stella tends to make herself scarce when we’re around. Besides, she’s busy getting ready to leave for Oxford in a few weeks.

  Phoebe and I are counting the days.

  “I found a site that says the Romans believed the entrance to Hades was through Lake Avernus in Italy.” Phoebe look
s away from the computer screen and smiles at us. “Road trip?”

  I shake my head.

  “Can’t trust anything the Romans say,” Troy says without looking up from the atlas he’s reading.

  Griffin looks up from the prehistoric-looking book on mythology he found in the nonsecret collection at the library. “They got everything wrong.”

  I flip through another useless book, filled with all the standard mythological stories about Hades. Kidnapping Persephone, Odysseus’s odyssey, Orpheus trying to bring Eurydice back from the dead. Nothing helpful.

  “Here’s something,” Griffin says. He reads from his book. “Supposedly, there is an entrance to Hades in Abyssos, the realm of monsters.”

  “Realm of monsters?” I ask. That doesn’t sound fun.

  “I’ve heard of that,” Troy says. “It’s where all the gods banished monsterkind after Medusa’s murder.”

  “Murder?” Phoebe asks.

  “It’s a long story,” I explain. “But how would we get to Abyssos?”

  “It says there’s a door . . .” Griffin reads ahead, and then his face falls. “Oh. It says the door has been lost for millennia.”

  “Great,” I mutter.

  Square one.

  “You know,” Troy says, “Hades isn’t the only god with access to the underworld. You could always call—”

  “Shut it,” I growl before he says too much.

  He should know that what he’s suggesting is not an option. Not. An. Option.

  “Are you sure your girlfriend can’t help us out?” I ask, just to torment him.

  Phoebe sits up straighter. “Troy has a girlfriend?”

  “A secret one,” I tease.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” he says, turning his attention back to the atlas.

  I smirk. Score one for Nicole.

  Everyone returns to their searching. I’m about to read the story of how Hades kidnapped Persephone, how the biggest idiot in all of mythology cursed herself into spending three-quarters of eternity trapped in the underworld with her kidnapper—Stockholm syndrome much?—when Phoebe’s bedroom door swings open.

  “Phoebe, did you take my—”

  We all freeze at the intrusion of Phoebe’s stepsister into our lair.