“Our time draws near,” he said, and Diana saw that he was not Theo. His face was pale as wax, his teeth yellowed points wet with blood. He wore a battered black helm, crowned by the face of a Gorgon.
Diana growled and shoved him from the car, tumbling with him to the ground.
“Get out of here, Alia!” Jason bellowed.
Diana heard the car door open and Alia’s footsteps as she ran.
“Phobos,” Diana said, looking down into the face beneath her. God of panic. A god beneath her.
He was beautiful until he smiled, the points of his teeth like spikes of sharpened bone. “We see you, Amazon. You will never reach the spring. War is coming. We are coming for you all.”
She could feel his power coursing through her, flooding her mind with terror. Her heart pounded a frantic rhythm; cold sweat bloomed on her brow. She had failed. Failed her mother, her sisters, herself. She had doomed them all. A wild, gibbering panic slashed at her chest. She couldn’t breathe. Run, her mind commanded. Hide. All she wanted was to obey, to let her legs carry her as fast and as far as they could, to find somewhere she could bow her head and weep. She wanted to cry out for her mother. Her mother. Through the horror, she held to the image of Hippolyta, warrior and queen, subject to no one.
“We are stronger,” Diana gasped. “Peace is stronger.”
“If only you believed that.” His grin widened. “Can you imagine the pleasures that await? I can already taste your suffering on my tongue….And it is sweet.” He drew the last word out, his tongue waggling obscenely from his mouth.
It isn’t real, she told herself. Nothing terrible has happened. There’s still time to reach the spring. This fear is an illusion.
She needed something real, something indestructible and true, the opposite of the false fear Phobos created. Diana seized the lasso at her hip and pressed its golden coils against Phobos’s throat. He screamed, a sound that seemed to pierce her skull, high and rattling.
“Get out,” she snarled.
“Out of what?” Theo said desperately, batting at her arms. “Just tell me and I’m gone.”
Diana rocked back on her heels. He sat up, looking dazed, his face as sweet and ordinary as it had ever been. She shook her head, eyes blinking furiously, body still trembling from the terror that had washed through her.
She shoved to her feet and rounded the other side of the Fiat. Nim was sobbing, but she was Nim again. The skin of Jason’s hands and forearms looked badly blistered, though she could see they were already starting to heal. Apparently, the blood of kings was powerful stuff. Alia stood a few feet away, arms tight around herself, chest heaving.
Diana could feel the fragility of these mortals, and for the first time, something inside her felt breakable, too.
“We need to go,” said Alia. She kept her arms wrapped around herself, as if trying to keep from flying apart, but her voice was steady, resolute. “Nim, can you drive?” Nim nodded, shakily. “Diana, can you and Theo switch the license plates?”
“Alia—” Jason began.
“We’re getting to that spring. If they didn’t think we were going to make it, they wouldn’t be trying to frighten us.”
Gods don’t work that way, Diana thought but didn’t say. Amazons were immortal. They didn’t think in minutes or hours or even in years, but in centuries. And the gods? They were eternal. Alia’s power had called to them, and like hibernating beasts they’d come awake with empty bellies. She could still hear Phobos crooning, Can you imagine the pleasures that await? The mirth in Eris’s teasing voice when she’d said, You and your sisters have evaded our grasp far too long.
Diana retrieved Theo from where he was lying on his back, panting in the dirt, and set about making herself useful, afraid that if she faced Alia now, Alia would see the truth in her face. Because Diana knew that Phobos and Eris weren’t worried. They’d been sure of themselves, smug. And they’d been hungry. What Alia had sensed in them was not anxiety but anticipation.
Now Diana understood what this war would really mean, and the terrible truth of the vow she’d made settled over her. If they did not reach the spring, she would have to face the horror of killing Alia, or live with the knowledge that she had helped set the gods’ terrible appetite loose upon the world—and offered her own people up for the feast.
They drove on, all of them weary and shaken. They’d faced bullets, missiles, a plane crash. Still, thought Alia, it was different to know that the forces allied against you weren’t just humans who happened to be better trained and armed, but that actual gods were trying to take you down.
For a while, Diana and Jason passed the map back and forth, debating the best route to take to Therapne. They could save hours by cutting east across one of the major highways, but those roads would also probably be the most closely watched. Instead, they agreed to keep heading south to a twisting mountain road that would take them directly through the Taygetus. It was steep, empty of people, and rarely used by anyone but tourists eager for scenery. The sharp cliffs and rock overhangs also meant they’d be hard to get eyes on from the air.
The sun sank low over the horizon, and Nim’s pace slowed. They used their brights when they could, but sometimes they had to double back when they missed road signs, and they were all getting sleepy. Nim’s yawns grew more frequent. They rolled down the windows, turned the radio up loud. Jason kept offering her swigs of sugary soda from their supplies. But it was no good.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “If I don’t stop, I’m going to fall asleep at the wheel.”
“It’s okay,” Alia said gently. She could sense Diana’s frustration with their progress, but she also knew Nim had pushed as hard as she could. They all had. If the gods had meant to scare them off, they’d failed.
They’d been wending their way down the eastern side of a steep series of hills, and when they reached a flat-enough area, Nim steered the car carefully off the road behind a stand of lush poplars and brush that would hide the car from anyone on the road.
“We’ll camp tonight,” said Jason. “If we get an early start tomorrow, we’ll be in Therapne long before sunset.”
“We have to be,” said Diana. “At dawn, the new moon rises and Hekatombaion begins.”
Nim punched a button and the car’s engine went silent. She turned off the headlights.
“We have the blankets Diana took from the farmhouse,” said Jason. “Two people can sleep in the car.”
“Or we could all sleep in the car,” said Theo. “Not that I’m afraid of the dark. Which I am not.”
Nim’s hands gripped the steering wheel. “I’m not sure that’s a great idea. Not if our…friends come back.”
They opened the Fiat’s doors and stepped outside into the balmy air. The stars glimmered brightly, gilding the trees around them in silver. Diana dropped into a lunge, stretching her long legs, and Alia felt a pang of sympathy. If she felt this stiff after being crammed in that car, Diana must really have been hurting.
“Do you hear that?” said Theo. “It sounds like running water.”
They picked their way through the trees and brush toward the sound and emerged at the top of a wide outcropping of rock. Alia took a deep breath, something in her heart eased by the beauty of what she saw.
A waterfall. Two waterfalls, really. One that fed the small pool beside them, and another that cascaded over the rocks in a misty white veil, emptying into a wide, dark pond below.
Theo picked up a rock and tossed it over the cliff. It hit the surface with a resonant plunk, sending silver ripples marching toward shore. “Seems pretty deep.”
“Look,” said Nim. “A bell.”
She was right. An old iron bell hung from a metal bar that had been driven between the rocks. “I think there’s a cave back there,” said Alia. “But why a bell?”
“It might be a hermit cave,” said Diana. “Mystics—”