The Gatekeeper's Challenge (21 page)

When Therese was left alone with Clifford, she wiped more of the blood away from Clifford’s body. He’d stopped bleeding. His head was a clotted mess, and she could see the fractured skull and maybe even some of his brain behind his left ear. At least his eyes hadn’t been crushed. She wiped each paw, rinsing one of the towels at the sink and wiping again—wetting, wiping, the whole time praying to Artemis, until, after about three or four minutes, Dr. Chenault entered the room.

The doctor, a thin, petite woman with curly brown hair and glasses, bent over the examining table and looked over Clifford, pressed her stethoscope to his chest, lifted the lids of his eyes and closed them again. “Poor guy didn’t have a chance.”

“I don’t think he’s dead. Can you try to revive him?”

The doctor narrowed her eyes at Therese and called her to the other side of the table. “Look here. See how his skull is collapsed? This kind of brain damage means he didn’t suffer long. As soon as the hoof hit, this little guy was gone.”

Therese wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. “Can you fix him up? I don’t care how much it costs. I’ve got a lot of money. Can you stitch up his head and make him look nice?”

“Do you mean like a taxidermist?”

Therese’s mouth dropped open. “No. No, not like that at all.” Her shoulders shook as a new wave of sobs constricted her throat and made it impossible to speak.

The doctor put a hand on Therese’s arm. “I’m sorry.”

One of Clifford’s legs twitched. Therese covered her mouth with her hands and held her breath.

The vet saw it, too. “That’s normal dear, especially with head injuries. That doesn’t mean…”

Clifford blinked open his eyes and began to whine.

“What the…” The vet rushed to Clifford’s side and looked at him closely. “He’s breathing again. This is unusual. There’s a pulse. His heart’s beating.”

Clifford started writhing and whining, obviously in great pain. Dr. Chenault had to hold him to keep him from falling off the table.

Therese gasped, not sure whether to laugh with glee or to scream in terror at his suffering.

“Call my tech back in here. Her name’s Katie.”

Therese ran to the door. “Katie! The doctor needs you!”

“You’ll need to step out of the room, Therese. I’ll update you when I’m done here. This is very unusual.”

Therese met the others in the waiting room with a smile on her face. “He’s moving around. I think he’s coming to.”

Jen jumped from her seat. “What?”

Pete crossed to her side and put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you serious?”

“What did the vet say?” Carol asked.

“It’s very unusual.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine
: The Hydra

Dr. Chenault kept Clifford overnight on Thursday and Friday, but Saturday, after a disappointing swim meet, Therese rode with Carol and Richard to pick him up. He wore a hard cast on his head, covering all but his eyes and snout and would have to be fed a liquid diet with a turkey baster for a while. Therese suspected his skull would heal faster than most patients. After waiting a few more days for Clifford to get settled at home, she decided it was time to bake a cake for the Hydra.

She perused the pantry for a cake mix. Let’s see, she thought.
Chocolate, white, and yellow. Which would a monster like best? Chocolate was poisonous to dogs, but could it hurt a dragon-headed sea snake? She decided on her favorite—white cake with white icing—so if things went wrong, she could die eating it.

“What’s the special occasion?” Carol asked when Therese slid the two round cake pans full of batter into the oven.

Therese had already prepared her answer: “I never properly thanked the Holts for Stormy.” She realized then that she
should
bake a cake for the Holts, and she promised herself she would, if she succeeded in her fourth challenge.

Later that evening after dinner, she carried the cake up to her room, under the pretense of wanting to decorate it privately (which sounded weird and got her a funny look from her aunt), donned her sneakers, jeans, and traveling robe, along with her sword, shield, and visor with headlight, and god traveled to the foot of Larissa Hill near Argos, Greece. It was three in the morning there and dark, for the city was far below, like strands of white Christmas tree lights spread across an enormous field, and though the stars and waning moon shone brightly, the hill was in shadows.

“I can do this,” she said to the wind. She shivered in the cold. It was warmer when she came with Than at dawn several days ago. The night air chilled her to the bone. She should have worn a coat over the traveling robe. She could pop back and get one, but she decided to move on. “Let’s get this over with,” she said to no one in particular, or to any gods who might be watching.

She drew the sword, balancing the two-layers of cake in her left hand. Then, keeping her eyes open as she had practiced, she imagined the decoy zone located on the opposite side of the hill from the heart-shaped pool.

The invisible plastic wrapped around her, and the bright light shined from all directions. She recognized the fork in the tunnel with its peculiar anvil-shaped dividing wall. Since the Hydra was nowhere in sight, Therese landed at the fork, flipped on her headlight, set the cake on a rock near the ground, and then took several steps away from it to wait.

Her heart thudded in her ears as she ferociously bit the inside of her lips. The Hydra could come from any one of three directions—from either of the two tunnels that forked from the anvil-shaped wall, or from the main tunnel feeding into them, currently at her back. She sloshed around in the three-inches of ice-cold water, constantly turning to shine her light down each of the three ducts, both wanting and not wanting the monster to come.

She wondered if any of the gods were watching her crouched and shivering in the dark tunnel, her teeth now chattering uncontrollably as she held her breath, her limbs stiff, frozen with both cold and fear. She felt small beneath the massive hill and the ancient ruins, a tiny dot in the larger scheme of things. Realizing the gods would see her as nothing but a little frightened girl, she pulled her shoulders back, jutted out her chin, gritted her teeth, and narrowed her eyes. She was a warrior, and she would fight.                

That is, if the Hydra would ever come.

As the minutes wore on, and the cold crept deeper into her bones, and the shivering made her feel like a victim of Parkinson’s disease, she pondered the idea of calling out to the monster. She had tried and failed to study the petroglyphs carved into the rock throughout the tunnels. She had tried and failed to observe the tiny fish swimming near her feet. She had tried and failed to appreciate the stalactites, hanging like icicles from the ceiling. When she thought she could no longer take the cold, that she’d have to either pop back home for a coat or give up for another day, in a moment of insanity or delirium or both, she muttered, “Here Hydra, Hydra. Here Hydra, Hydra.”

In less than a second, the water moved like the tide coming in across her calves, and a scream, like a train screeching to a halt, echoed throughout the tunnels. Therese couldn’t tell from which direction the monster was coming. She spun around and around, dizzy and panting, telling herself to go, to leave,
to get the hell out of there. But she couldn’t focus. She couldn’t imagine her destination, and this made god travel impossible.

Think, Therese! Focus!

In her spot of light, Therese saw the scaly beast, its huge dragon head bobbing up and down on the end of its long, serpentine neck. She also saw claws and legs and realized it wasn’t a sea snake after all as it half slithered and half tromped through the water toward her. Eight other necks, four on each side of the base of the center one, hung seared and lifeless, flopping like wings. Therese stood with leaden feet, watching in terror wherever her light fell, her mouth agape and her mind blank and stunned. The great mouth opened, exposing rows and rows of sharply pointed teeth, and lunged toward her, its head now within inches of her. Therese closed her eyes and thought of her room and Clifford nestled on her bed, but she didn’t leave as the monster’s snapping jaw grazed her
nose before rearing back to strike again. Stupefied, Therese looked around in all directions, in full panic, swinging her sword madly, blindly, and hitting nothing. She leapt away from the path of the Hydra and fell on her hands and knees, her traveling robe ripped from her in shreds, hooked on the claws of the beast.

Therese sprang to her feet and retrieved her fallen sword as the monster discovered the cake and devoured it, making a noise sounding something like glee. Without stopping to look, Therese ran in the direction from which the Hydra had come, with only the circle of light to guide her. She stumbled once and fell, but scrambled to her feet, her eyes locked on the path before her. All she could do was run for her life. Even if she prayed, the gods couldn’t help her.

At a fork in the tunnel, she went to the right, because the water seemed to get deeper the other way, and she knew the tunnel leading to the heart-shaped pool was shallow. The Hydra must have finished licking the icing from her mouth, for Therese heard the ground shaking again. She ran on, at full speed, but could hear the monster closing in on her, getting closer and closer to the shield on her back.

Another fork made her pause, and that was her undoing. If she’d flung herself one way or the other, she might have avoided being plucked up by the shield and lifted into the air. Therese threw her sword at the Hydra’s head, slipped her arms from the shield, and jumped toward the rock wall. Scraping her hands and knees and elbows, she scuttled into a small cavity in the upper side of the wall, barely able to maneuver herself because it was a tight squeeze. She wriggled as far in as she could, flat on her stomach and elbows, until she hit up against solid rock. The Hydra screamed in frustration, chipping at the rock with her sharp teeth. Therese had nowhere to go and nothing to do but lie there.

“I will not freak out,” she said aloud. “I will not freak out.” She lay there, panting, trying to catch her breath, stuck like an insect in a spider’s web, the walls closing in on her, like a cocoon, weaving tighter and tighter around her. The Hydra continued to scream and chip as Therese shouted, “Think!”

Using her hands and elbows, she rolled over onto her back to inspect her nook more fully, wincing with the realization that
her back had been scratched by the claw of the Hydra. It stung and throbbed with pain now that she was aware of it. Up above her was another hole. She propped herself up, sticking her head into it, shaking so badly that her head repeatedly bumped into the rock. The light on her visor revealed another tunnel, so, like a termite, Therese pulled herself up till she was standing on her feet, cringing at the loud wails of the Hydra and the pounding against the rock near her. She unbelted her scabbard, useless now that her sword was lost, and let it drop to her feet. Then she grasped on to the rocks above her and found lodgments for her feet as she inched her way further up.

Therese rejoiced when she noticed the tunnel widening, allowing her to breathe and hold her arms out to each side. Eventually, she had to choose one side to scale, no longer able to stand astride the opening. She chose the side which was furthest from the wailing beast.

The wall became easier to scale, no longer upright, but slanting now into the steep slope of a hill, and the air became fresher, crisper. A few more strides, and Therese found herself safely out of the hill, staring up at the star-filled sky over Greece!

She emerged from the caverns and lifted her arms toward the moon, happy to be alive. She had been face to face with the monster and had lived!

Her elation quickly turned to dread as the pain throbbed in her back and she had this realization: if she left the hill now, she’d never have another chance to complete the fifth challenge. She had no traveling robe, and she had no way of getting another. She wasn’t allowed to ask the gods for help, and they weren’t allowed to help her, except to give advice. If she was going to make it through the entrance to the Underworld, she’d have to do it tonight. Besides, how would she get home without the robe? She might make it down to the city of Argos and ask for help, inventing some story about being abducted and taken to Greece. Then she wouldn’t have to climb back into the cold and narrow lair and risk her life again. But that would mean no life with Than. He might insist on changing her anyway, but how could she live with herself knowing that her cowardice was the cause of his eternal torment?

She must succeed or die trying.

She took in another breath of the crisp, chilly air and then turned back to the hill, descending down the steep slope of the tunnel toward the Hydra.