Confusion crinkled my brow. Callie must’ve missed this scroll in her haste. She had been overly anxious, and there were so many people crowded around watching; she must’ve plucked one scroll out and totally missed the other.
I reached in and took it out. The second I touched the paper my fingers tingled. I knew I should just put the scroll back inside and return the box to Callie, but something told me to open and read it. So, I did.
I pulled the ribbon off and unrolled the parchment.
Congratulations, recruit! You’ve been invited to the Gods’ Army.
My heart picked up, revving like a motorcycle in my chest. An electrical shock went through my fingers, and I dropped the scroll. The paper fluttered in the air for a few seconds then landed gracefully onto my blanket.
I couldn’t believe it. Callie missed this in her spoiled temper tantrum. The proper and moral thing to do was to roll the message back up, place it in the Shadowbox, and return it to Callie, so she could go to the demigods academy and train to be a righteous soldier for the Gods. But I didn’t want to.
Callie had everything: loving parents, a good home, lots of money and possessions, friends. And she didn’t appreciate any of it, not one morsel. She always complained to me about not having enough, or her parents not letting her run off to the Cayman Islands in the middle of a school term. She complained about not being pretty enough, or thin enough, gorging on caviar and macrons, while three neighborhoods over, people were homeless and starving.
A thought crossed my mind. What if I kept it for myself? No one would know. Callie already thought the Gods had rejected her, commanding me to destroy the beautiful Shadowbox. She’d never know. If the academy really existed, maybe it would give me true purpose—something I’d never been able to find.
For the last eighteen years, I’d felt lost, like a ship without an anchor, being tossed around in a storm. I’d been an outcast my entire life, not knowing my parents, wondering why they’d left me, always feeling like I was worthless. And now, I could finally become someone who had worth and direction.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime-chance, and it required a hard decision.
I stared down at the box, my heart and my head at war. I had done really bad things in my life but stealing Callie’s opportunity to attend the Gods’ Academy? It was going to be the worst.
I knew it was wrong, but my heart longed to find my place in the world. Was it at the academy? I couldn’t know… but I had to find out.
Chapter Two
MELANY
I picked up the parchment lying on my bed and flipped it around, looking for the rest. Rumor was that inside the box, along with the invitation to the academy, would be instructions on how to get to the famed but secret institution and the date and time. I didn’t see any of those things scrawled on the paper.
Lifting the box, I peered inside it again, paying particular attention to any clever hiding spot for another scroll. I ran my fingers along the smooth edges and planes to find nothing. But when I touched the velvet inlay on the bottom, a tiny bit of the corner curled up. Maybe there was something underneath.
I gripped the velvet between my fingers and tore it away. It didn’t come easily, and I had to remove it in strips. When it was gone, I squinted into the box and saw an inscription etched into the metal on the bottom. I held the box up to my lamp and read the words out loud.
“To reveal the secrets of the academy, you must use the thing that has no legs but dances, has no lungs but breathes, and has no life to live or die, but does all three.”
A riddle. Perfect. I groaned.
It couldn’t be too hard, or none of the recruits would make it to the designated time and place, but I supposed that was the point, as they’d only want the best of the best. I read it over again, trying to put the pieces together.
I rose from my bed and paced a little. I did all my best thinking while moving around. What could dance, breathe, and live or die? Humans, but that wasn’t it, as we had legs and lungs and had a life. It couldn’t be an animal because the same parameters existed. As I marched around my room, my gaze kept going back to the Shadowbox. Every now and then, it would flash from a direct beam of light reflecting off the metal as I moved around it. I thought about how it felt in my hands; the wave of heat that rushed over my skin. Halting, I picked up the box again and studied the symbols of the Gods etched on the exterior.
Zeus – lightning.
Hera – star.
Aphrodite – rose.
Ares – wolf.
Apollo – sun.
Artemis – moon.
I flipped it around and looked at the other six, something irritating my mind like a piece of a popcorn kernel stuck in my teeth.
Poseidon – trident.
Dionysus – chalice.
Hephaistos – fire.
Athena – owl.
Demeter – cornucopia.
Hermes – snake.
Frowning, I brushed my fingers over the box, feeling the metal. Again, heat enveloped my fingers. It was as if I’d set my hand over a burner on a stove. The craftsmanship of the metalwork was beyond anything earthly. It had to have been designed by one of the Gods. Heat, metal…
Fire.
That had to be it. Flames in a fire appeared like they were dancing, fire needed oxygen, like lungs did, to burn, and fire could be snuffed out, the flames dying. That had to be the answer. There was only one way to find out.
Since I didn’t have a fireplace to make a fire in, I gathered all the pillar candles I had in my room, set them in a cluster, and lit them. Then I held the Shadowbox up over the tiny individual flames, hoping I wasn’t making a fool out of myself in thinking how clever I was.
I held the box over the candles for ten minutes at least before I could feel a temperature difference in the metal. After another few minutes, it started to become difficult to hold, as my fingers burned. Wincing at the sharp pain, I didn’t know how much longer I could keep the box over the flames.
Reaching my threshold, I was about to drop it when thin curls of black smoke rippled out from inside the box. The vapors snaked around in the air, animated, as if blown by an unseen wind. I looked to my window to see if it was open; it wasn’t. It was closed tight. At first, I thought the smoke nothing more than a result of melting metal, but then the tendrils started to make words and numbers in the air.
Cala.
3 a.m.
Pier…
I leaned forward, my breath hitching in my throat, as a number formed. But I couldn’t decipher if it was a nine or a six. It looped around, set into a spin by either the unseen wind or my frantic breathing. It looked like a six, then a nine, then it stayed as a six. Then after it had all formed in front of me, as if someone had been writing it in the air with a quill and ink… it vanished.
The flames on the candles flared. I dropped the box, as my fingers couldn’t hold it any longer. I glanced down at my hands; the tips of my fingers were red, and a few tiny blisters had formed. It didn’t matter, as I had my information.
Cala was the small town near the bay. There was a large dock there; Sophia had taken me there once to watch the huge cruise ships come in. I didn’t know how many piers were there, but I only had to find the one—pier six. And it had to be at three a.m. I grabbed my cell phone and looked at the time. It was eleven. I had four hours to get to the right spot to find the academy.
It didn’t give me much time to reconsider my decision or to think about the consequences of it, either. If I was going to go, it had to be now.