The Cult of Kronos (15 page)

“
He has a point,” Lewis
said from his vantage point floating high above them.

“
Let's get to the truck
before he whips up a new angry mob,” Jason said. “I had to see it
to believe it, and now it terrifies me.”

A slow clap began across the
street. Diana heard it first, but the others weren't long after.
Atticus Speal, Kronos, was sitting on the bench across the street,
dressed in a fine suit, and clapping. He was a tall man with a wild
beard and neatly trimmed hair. He smiled, and that smile was oddly
unsettling. “Nice work, Apollo. The light of truth. That set back
my plans just a smidge,” he said, holding up his fingers to
indicate just how small a “smidge” was. “But hey, you know what
they say. If you want something done right, you have to do it
yourself.”

“
Are you always so corny?”
Lewis asked.

The crowd quieted. Its members
turned to watch the exchange between Kronos and the Olympians.

“
Perhaps,” Kronos said. He
reached beside the bench and held up a sickle, a shining curved blade
with a handle fixed to one end. It caught the moonlight and glinted,
and Peter instinctually knew that this was the blade Kronos had
dipped in the Styx. Kronos rose to his feet and pointed the sickle at
Zach. Kronos tilted his head from side to side and put one hand under
his jaw, pushing upward as if trying to crack his neck. He rolled his
shoulders and shook them out. When he relaxed, when he dropped his
shoulders back and lifted his head, he stood before them ready to
fight. “You'll find I'm just as deadly.”

“
Man, supposing you and I,
escaping this battle, would be able to live on forever, ageless,
immortal, so neither would I myself go on fighting in the foremost,
nor would I urge you into the fighting where men win glory. But now,
seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us in their
thousands, no man can turn aside or escape them, let us go on and win
glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.”

-Homer

XV.

The crowd around them began to
scream and run in every direction. People shoved and trampled over
each other in their urgency to get away. Valerie closed her eyes and
held up her hands, casting a calming wave, but Teddy swatted down her
hands and shook his head. “Let them panic. Their fear will keep
them alive.”

“
I ain't afraid of you,” a
man in a Dolphins hat said, holding out a hand gun and pointing it at
Kronos. “You got a big knife? I got a big gun, and I feel
sufficiently endangered enough to use it.”

“
Don't be stupid,” Zach
said, reaching to grab the man by the arm. The man shook Zach off.

“
I got a right. Stand my
ground,” he said.

“
Go ahead,” Kronos said,
approaching the man. “Shoot me.”

“
Stay back!” he shouted.

“
Shoot me!” Kronos
replied.

The man pulled the trigger.
The bullet tore through Kronos's chest, barely rattling him. Kronos
looked down at the hole and touched his finger to the wound. He
licked the blood off his fingertip and laughed. “Mortals.” And
then he swung his sickle and took off the man's head.

More screams erupted as the
last of the crowd made a dash as far away from Kronos as they could.

“
Guys,” Minnie said from
the back of the group. “I think we're done worrying about
anonymity.”

“
So go all out?” Nick
asked.

“
Precisely.”

Nick held out his hands and
the road fractured. The ground heaved up in front of them, stopping
when there was a concrete wall between the fleeing crowd and Kronos.
Some of The Pantheon with less combat experience used the opportunity
to jump behind a line of cars: Teddy, Devon, and June, lead by
Celene, found a blue florist's van to crouch behind.

Minnie started calling the
shots, using her quick mind to strategize. “Zach and Astin, take
the right and left flanks. Be ready with projectiles. Lewis—high
ground. Jason, you got any real fire power?”

Zach tossed his backpack to
Jason. Jason looked inside at the weapon Zach had sneaked out of the
cabinet without telling him. “I thought you didn't want to hurt
anyone?”

“
Well, Kronos isn't anyone,”
Zach said.

Jason
pulled the sub machine gun Zach had found at the cabin out of the bag
and held it up. “Oh, I know
that's
illegal.”

“
Take cover and don't shoot
friendlies,” she said.

A massive hand smashed through
the concrete, spraying broken chunks of blacktop at the Olympians and
cracking the glass siding of the building behind them. Kronos was
growing. He grew as tall Zach had, reaching twenty feet in height,
and then he kept going. His growth only stopped when he was four
stories high. The sickle grew with him.

“
That explains how he ate
y'all,” Lewis said, launching into the air and dodging back as
Kronos took a swipe at him.

“
The backpack,” Jason said
to Peter as he loaded his gun. “I brought your souvenir.”

Peter understood. Next to
Minnie, he vanished from sight. Jason looked around for him as Frank
caught Kronos's giant blade mid-swing, catching the end of the handle
with both hands, and stopped him from slicing through Evan. Frank
gritted his teeth and pushed back. Evan ran with a shout, launching
off of the hood of a parked sedan, and landed on Kronos's massive
wrist. His hands were white-hot and Kronos screamed as his flesh was
seared. He swung his arm around and Evan held on tight as if he were
riding a bull at a rodeo. His leg strained in protest, but his
fingers kept on burning.

In the chaos, nobody saw Jason
vanish. Peter had wrapped his arms around Jason and extended his aura
of invisibility around the mortal. Peter pulled Jason back behind a
car, and when they were safely out of site, dropped the veil and
unzipped the backpack. The knife was waiting, wrapped in a scrap of
inky black cloth. “Thanks for packing this,” Peter said.

“
This ends today,” Jason
replied.

Peter nodded.

Frank fell back, keeping guard
over Devon and the others. “Get the baby out of here,” he shouted
as he swung a lamp post to parry a blow from the massive Titan.
Celene lead the way as the group of cowering Olympians ducked and
crawled around the corner. They only stopped briefly so that June
could scoop up an abandoned child and carry him away with them. Jason
aimed his gun to provide cover fire as they slipped away, but Kronos
was too preoccupied to stop their escape.

Valerie stood up from her
hiding place behind a car and thrust out her palm. Her eyes flashed
as fire blossomed from her fingertips and rocketed towards Kronos.

“
Holy shit,” Nick shouted.
“When did you get good powers?”

Zach had grown to half of
Kronos's size and was beginning to fire bolts of lightning. They
weren't very effective on the Titan—just painful little zaps to his
massive frame. Kronos finally shook Evan off. Evan crashed into the
ground, landing on his wrists with a terrible crack. Astin dropped
his hands, letting the blinding sunlight he had been aiming at Kronos
fade away, and rushed to play the role of medic.

“
Weapons,” Minnie leapt
over an overturned trash can and stopped next to Evan. Astin cast
white light to heal Evan's broken wrists. “I need a weapon,”
Minnie said.

Diana was running about on the
ledge of fractured concrete, hopping up and down and dodging blows.
She was drawing Kronos's attention, using her agility to duck out of
the way as his sickle came swooping down. Soon the wall of blacktop
was leveled. Diana's face was red and sweaty, but she kept moving.

Penny, crouching low to avoid
drawing attention, edged over behind the car where Jason and Peter
were hiding. “Peter,” she said.

“
Go with your mom, get out
of here.”

“
No,” she said. “I need
you to take me across the street.”

“
Why?”

She put her hand over Peter's
and looked into his pitch-black eyes. “Trust me.”

Peter looked back at Jason.
Jason nodded. Peter put the cloth-wrapped knife in Jason's hand and
turned back to Penny. Peter and Penny vanished.

Kronos's shoulders were on
fire now, the result of Valerie's assault. He swatted at the flames,
stamping them out with his massive hands. The Olympians were darting
about in front of him, taking advantage of this momentary
distraction. He began to swing his arms in front of him, causing his
attackers to duck and weave. His open hand struck Frank with a
backhand swing and sent him flying over Jason's head and crashing
through the glass wall of the building. Astin left Evan's side and
followed Frank through the Frank-shaped hole, hoping to patch his
wounds.

“
Hey asshole!” Lewis
shouted from sixty feet in the air. He threw a rock as Kronos looked
up and it struck the Titan in the eye. Kronos shouted and swung his
sickle, but Lewis zipped out of the way.

The beating blades of a
helicopter approached. Someone was stupid enough to try and film the
fight from the sky. Kronos ripped a blue mailbox off of the ground in
front of him and threw it at Lewis. Lewis dodged it, but the mailbox
struck the helicopter. It spiraled in the air and started to go down.
Lewis stopped his assault of the Titan to yank the cameraman out of
the crashing wreckage and safely lower him to the ground. He didn't
have enough time to grab the pilot, who went down with the smoking
vehicle.

Both Astin and Frank jumped
out of the hole smashed open by Frank's body just as the helicopter
crashed into the building. A fireball erupted, the force and heat
sending Minnie and Evan ducking for cover. Evan held a spear in his
hand, something he had shaped out of a broke stop sign. He handed it
to Minnie and she charged, dodging around Kronos's fists and stabbing
the spear into his leg. He screamed and kicked her, sending her back
across the street in a crumpled heap.

“
The pilot!” Lewis shouted
as he lowered the cameraman to the ground and told him to run for his
life. “Apollo, the pilot!”

Astin ran back in the building
and dragged the pilot of the helicopter, bleeding and burning, from
the wreckage. Frank scooped him up in one arm and ran down the street
to get the innocent civilian away from the fray.

“
Minnie,” Jason shouted,
afraid to leave his cover to check on her. She lay face down on the
pavement, but her hand moved and then the rest of her body stirred.
She placed her palm flat on the black top and pushed herself up.
Minnie sat up, coughing and clutching her ribs. Astin came to her
side. He looked paler than usual, worn from giving his own energy to
heal others. “We need a plan,” she said.

Jason scooted out from behind
the car and fired the submachine gun. A stream of bullets sank into
Kronos's shoulder, but the Titan reacted as if it were a bee sting,
swatting at his arm and continuing his assault on Diana and Lewis.
Evan had given another street-sign javelin to each of them, and
together they were doing a good job drawing Kronos's attention away
from the cluster of plotting Olympians across the street. He dodged
and swatted, barely avoiding the points of their weapons. Lewis was
growing tired and slowing down, but even still, he was too fast for
Kronos to hit.

“
The knife,” Jason said,
tossing the black cloth bundle across the ground to Zach. Zack had
shrunk down to six and a half feet, his face was split and bleeding,
and his left arm was turning purple with bruises. “It'll kill him
for good. Peter's across the street with Penny. Not sure what their
plan is,” he said.

Minnie looked at Kronos's
feet. “That's her plan,” she said. Vines were creeping up around
his ankles as he stood his ground, trying to strike one of the
Olympians pestering him. These were not your garden variety of vines,
the kind that crept along latticework and flowered in the spring.
These vines were more Evil Dead, thick and glossy black with thorns
jutting out at every angle. Diana narrowly dodged away from his
blade. She dodged behind a lamp post and the sickle caught the metal
post with a deafening clunk. The pole ripped out of the ground and
the light burned out. Diana crawled away in the dark, her night
vision helping her to see. Now the battle ground was only lit by the
moon and the red and green glow of traffic lights. Sirens sounded
down the block. Police were coming.

“
We need to move now,”
Minnie said. “Lewis can't hold up much longer.”

“
Someone needs to direct
Kronos’s attention while I run in,” Zach said.

Kronos was noticing the vines
around his ankles and started flailing, trying to rip his feet from
the chords of plant that held him to the ground. The vines, once
slack, contracted suddenly, the thorns biting into the Titan's legs.
Jason stood up and ran out from behind his cover. He ran far to the
left, rushing out into the open street before raising his gun and
firing. The bullet caught Kronos in the same eye that Lewis had
thrown the rock at. He shouted and covered his face with his elbow.
Blood poured out. Kronos spotted Jason with his one good eye and
swung his open hand.