A Beautiful Evil
Page 20

Seventeen
I TOOK TWO STEPS THROUGH THE DOORWAY AND STUMBLED, falling forward. My forehead cracked against something hard. A grunt broke from my lips as I dropped to my knees. Shit. That hurt.
It was pitch-black. The smell of earth and water was strong, but cleaner than the musty scent of swamp I was used to. I heard shuffling and breathing to my right. A curse to my left. The guys were through.
“Who the hell put a wall in the way?” Henri groaned.
I slipped my gun back into my waistband and ran my hand over the obstacle in front of me. Grooves, evenly spaced and smooth. “We must be in the ruined temple,” I said in a low voice. “This feels like part of a column.”
“I think we should keep the flashlights off until we know what’s in here,” Sebastian said.
“Let’s feel our way out of here,” I said.
It was slow going, squeezing through spaces, climbing over columns. I’d never been there before, but it sure as hell felt like we were somewhere deep inside the temple. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I could make out shapes that told the story—the temple had partly collapsed; several of the interior columns had fallen and broken apart.
Eventually dim light appeared, illuminating the marble around what I hoped was an exit.
“Thank God,” Henri whispered as we approached a small slanted space as wide as a closet door. It had once been a massive doorway, but a large slab of marble had fallen, wedging itself into the space.
The opening was overgrown with vines and roots. It looked like heaven to me, a bright, wonderful, welcoming light.
From darkness to light, I thought, stepping out. From one world to another. My eyes adjusted to the soft gray light.
The columns that had collapsed were colossal. I turned and stepped backward to the very edge of a wide landing and craned my neck. The temple still stood, but had buckled, one side slightly collapsed inward, with giant cracks in the marble. Athena’s temple. Well, hers before she stole her father’s. And even ruined, it was awe-inspiring.
“Do you guys have any idea how insane this is?” Henri asked, amazed. “This is . . . we’re standing in fucking Olympus.”
Sebastian let out a low, disbelieving laugh.
I turned away from the temple to see them side by side at the top of the steps, staring out over the landscape. I joined them and the three of us stood, shoulder to shoulder, completely slack-jawed.
Thick woods flanked the temple grounds. To the right was an eerie-looking stone garden, and in front of us, down the steps and beyond the overgrown lawn, was the smooth dark water of a lake.
My gaze traveled over the large expanse of water to the far side of the lake, and past a marble gazebo and a manicured lawn to an enormous white-columned temple that would’ve given any Ancient Wonder of the World a run for its money.
No doubt in my mind we were gawking at Zeus’s temple.
The lake, the land . . . it looked as though it had been plopped down on the side of a jagged mountain. Fires burned from giant bowls around the perimeter of Zeus’s temple, and from this distance, I knew they must be the size of swimming pools. Beautiful trees dotted the lawn. A pair of cranes took flight. The faint thrum of a string instrument wafted over the lake.
Heaven. A Maxfield Parrish heaven.
Athena, the goddess of war, destroyer of entire pantheons, and sick narcissistic bitch, lived in a fucking paradise.
For some reason, I’d expected her to live in the hell she seemed to spread in her wake, that she sat on some skulled-out throne and tossed bones to hellhounds. But no. She lived over there. In that beautiful place of horrors.
After the shock wore off, we went down the wide steps. This place was so different from the one across the lake. Vines crawled over everything, snaking up the temple as though trying to pull it down into the earth. It was a dark, lost, and abandoned place, reminding me of the GD.
“Ari, check this out,” Henri called from somewhere on the grounds.
I went down the stairs and to my right. The land sloped gently toward a field littered with marble and debris and what looked like hundreds of standing stones. A high wall surrounded the place on three sides.
Lichen, vines, and moss grew over small columns and marble. Stone slabs jutted up at odd angles from the ground. Trees grew around random stones, their roots encasing the hard rock. I saw Henri ahead of me, weaving between the stones.
The fine hairs on my body rose, and a very disturbing sense formed in my gut. Sebastian came to a stop beside me. “What is this place?” I asked in a near whisper.
“You hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“The silence. No birds. No insects. No squirrels climbing up trees. No wildlife here at all.”
Maybe that was why I felt so spooked.
Sebastian started off toward Henri. I followed, and once I got a closer look at the stones, an “Oh my God” breezed through my lips and hung there in shock.
They were statues. Hundreds of them. They were old. Random. Eerie. Of warriors, children, women. Some broken forever. Some covered in lichen or swamped in vines, like chains holding them in place.
My heart pounded hard as I picked my way through the stone garden.
I stopped, coming around a statue of a hooded woman in a fall of fabric. Gray marble fabric. Her face was turned to the side, staring as though she’d heard a sound. Vines grew over her sandaled feet and crept up her gown.
Blood rushed past my eardrums. I gulped, reaching out to touch the marble hand that held the cloak closed at her neck. Movement behind me made me stop. I stepped back, away from the statue.
Sebastian threaded his way through Athena’s garden of stone. I didn’t want to call to him. My voice would be too loud here, too . . . wrong. I crawled over a broken marble bench and hurried to his side. He turned as I approached. His eyes were solemn, his entire being quiet.
This place was like being in church.
Church of the Damned, maybe.
“This is . . . bizarre,” he said, looking around.
My chest tightened until it burned. There was no question what this was. “This is more than bizarre. This is a cemetery, Sebastian. Don’t ask me how I know it, but these people were turned to stone.”
The handiwork of one or maybe hundreds of my ancestors.
“Athena collected these, you think?” Henri approached us. “Pretty morbid, if you ask me.”
Tell me about it. “I wonder if she brought the statues here. . . . Or maybe a gorgon actually lived here.”
“How can you be sure this is the work of a gorgon?” Henri asked.
We started back toward the temple, passing a marble warrior. A Roman. Young. Handsome. Sword raised. I shivered. “Because I know. . . . It’s a feeling. I can’t explain it.”
I went around a fallen warhorse and found a mother on the other side clutching a toddler to her chest, the child’s chubby arm stuck out over a blanket. The mother’s face was frozen in fear as though looking in the eyes of Death itself. And the child, the child had its head turned too, looking at me. No fear. It had no idea what it was seeing when it died.
My throat thickened until it was hard to swallow. This was what awaited me. This was what would happen if I refused to end my own life. I’d turn into something that did . . . this, to innocent people.
“Come on. Let’s scout a path around the lake. It shouldn’t take us long to get to the temple. Twenty, thirty minutes, maybe,” Sebastian said, and I was glad for the change in direction.
With the lake butting up to the mountain on one side, our path was chosen for us. We went to the right instead, forging through the woods. The deeper we went, the more thick the vines. They covered the treetops, their long, thin roots hanging down like streamers. If the place had a name, it’d be the Forest of a Thousand Ropes.
After the forest of ropes, the woods became thick and eventually so dense and crowded with undergrowth that I fell behind. Thorns grabbed at my clothes and hands. Branches smacked my face and arms and tangled in my hair. I lost count of how many times I was poked, scratched, or stuck. Or how many curses went through my head or hissed out my mouth.
It was either distract myself or completely lose it. I caught up with Sebastian and tossed out a question that had been brewing ever since my face-to-face meeting with Gabriel and his friends in study hall. “So what’s with you and Anne Hawthorne?”
Not one of my smoother moments. More of a jarring, bumbling blurt. I was looking down, watching my step, when Sebastian stopped. I ran straight into his back.
He tossed a curious gaze over his shoulder and kept moving. “Where’d that come from?”
“Uh, from the way she was looking at you. I am a girl. I can tell history when I see it.” I shoved a loose wisp of hair from my face with an annoyed swipe.
“We went out a few times.”
I waited for more, walking several feet before finally realizing he wasn’t going to elaborate. I rolled my eyes and then glared at his back.
“What’s your idea of a few times?” I pressed.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It was last year. Didn’t work out.”
“Why di—” I tripped, recovering before I fell. I groaned in frustration. The urge to pull out my blade and start hacking at the forest was so strong, but I didn’t want to dull the blade.
“Look,” Henri said in front of us. Random patches of dim firelight from the temple slashed through the thinning woods. “We’re getting close. We should go silent from here.”
The path began to narrow the closer we got, and I saw sky through the trees to my right where the woods dropped off into nothing. Who knew how far up on the mountain we were—pretty high, if I had to guess.
Finally the woods gave way to a narrow stretch of jagged rocks that curved around to the lawn. The rocks were tall enough that we found cover easily. “Let’s stop and rest here,” Sebastian suggested.
I slumped to the ground behind a gray rock and dug in my pack for a drink.
“I’m gonna do some aerial recon,” Henri announced after a few minutes. “Be back soon.”
“Be careful,” Sebastian told him. “We don’t know what things fly in these skies.”