The Cult of Kronos Read online

  “Basically.” Zach shook his head. “Your car.”

  “What about my car?”

  “Too obvious. Pull over at that Uhaul over there,” Zach said.

  Jason pulled into the rental place and went inside. He decided that the slovenly teenager working the desk probably hadn't rushed out to buy Becoming Your Golden Self and took the risk of renting a moving van from him.

  Jason removed anything he thought they'd need—the emergency blanket, his roadside kit, the baseball hat in the backseat, Jason's sunglasses, the backpack Peter left at his house—and then left his car. They left the Electra in the parking lot and took off in the rental van, heading away from the city as fast as they could. When they finally stopped for gas, Jason grabbed the baseball cap and sunglasses to hide his face and went in to buy snacks.

  “Alright,” he said, passing a soda and protein bar to Zach. “I went by the apartment after you called. Signs of a struggle. No sign of Peter, Celene, or Penny. I double-checked everyone's phones. Nobody picked up. So we have to assume they've all been taken.”

  “Even Frank?”

  “How do you take down someone as strong as twenty men? Get fifty men.”

  Zach slumped in his seat. “So it's me and you.”

  “Sounds like it. Me and you and Celene's phone.” Jason pulled the phone out of his pocket. “Celene left it on my dresser…anyway, it might help?”

  Zach took the phone and flipped through the apps. “She has find my phone on here. It's synced to Penny's phone.”

  “What's that do?”

  “It tracks Penny's phone!” Zach said, his voice lifting. “This is perfect. Look! They're in Orlando.”

  Zach passed the phone to Jason. “So we know where they are?”

  Zach rubbed his hands together, smiling. “We do. And Kronos has been on an island for a couple thousand years, so I bet he hasn't even thought of that possibility. We can get the jump on him.”

  “We can get the jump with ten percent of Orlando playing eyes and ears for him?” Jason asked.

  It was clear they needed a plan. Jason told Zach about his father's old hunting cabin. When Jason was a child, they had gone there a few times a summer to camp. Now it was collecting dust, but Paul Livingstone drove out there once in a while to leave survival supplies in case the government collapsed and society dissolved into anarchy. It was twenty minutes away, and Paul Livingstone hadn't used the place in nearly two years. It would be a perfect hideout until they could figure out what to do.

  As night fell, Zach and Jason pulled up to the cabin. A little dirt access road lead right up to the cabin. From its front porch, no sign of civilization could be seen. It was the perfect horror movie cabin: a quaint little place in the middle of nowhere. It had one advantage that Jason had not mentioned until they were pulling up. It was full of guns.

  “These are real people,” Zach said. “Real people being puppeted.”

  Jason looked back at Zach as he unlocked the door, feeling a sense of pride. The Zach he knew of two years ago might have considered shooting everyone to save himself. Now Zach was worried about hurting innocents.

  The old cabin smelled musty and dusty. Most of the cabin was one room. There was a fireplace on the right-hand wall and a large table in the middle of the room. Couches and chairs, coated in dust and mildew, were arranged on the left side of the room. A kitchen and a bathroom were just beyond the fireplace wall, and a staircase lead up to a bedroom. It was quaint. Jason crossed to the opposite wall where a large armoire loomed over the room. He slipped yet another key into the padlock on the door. The armoire was packed with crossbows, rifles, snares, and bright orange vests.

  “Well,” Jason said, pulling out a plastic box of darts labeled Horse Tranquilizers. “There must be a tranquilizer gun in here somewhere, because he has these darts.”

  “Why the hell does your father have an arsenal?”

  “He's a bit paranoid that the Democrats are coming for his guns.”

  “Maybe they should,” Zach said, nervously picking up a submachine gun. “Is this an MP5? I've only ever seen one of these in Call of Duty.”

  “Put that down,” Jason said nervously. “Help me find something that's a bit less lethal.”

  “Well, it's not a perfect plan, but it sure beats shooting or electrocuting them,” Zach said.

  “I think we're covered,” Jason said, sliding out a drawer filled with boxes of all kinds of ammo.

  They finished rifling through the cabinet and found a pair of specially made tranquilizer rifles. They loaded up the pair of rifles with tranquilizer darts. There were hunting rifles and shotguns as well, but they left those on the rack, locked the cabinet up, and sat down at the rough wooden table to plan. Jason found some paper and crayons, stuff his father had stocked for when Haley came to visit, and they used it to draw a map.

  The map software gave them a top-down view of the street.

  “That's my Dad's building,” Zach said. “He's keeping them at the office tower.”

  “Downtown. That's going to be tricky.”

  “It's smart. It seemed like almost everyone in that office had read the book. My Dad even tried to get me to read it before Kronos jumped in.”

  “You sure Kronos wasn't there the whole time?”

  Zach shook his head and scratched his face. His beard was starting to come in. “Naw, his eyes were normal until then.”

  They mapped the best way to approach the building and then took a break to finish off the rest of the snacks from the gas station.

  “Do we wait until morning?” Jason asked. “Get some rest?”

  Zach shook his head. “No. We use cover of darkness. People will be out of the city; commuters will have gone home. We slip in at night. If we wait too long, he might move them.”

  “Where do you think he'd move them to?”

  Zach took a deep breath, “Tartarus.”

  Jason went out to the Uhaul and came back inside with a black backpack. He tossed it on the table. Something inside made a clanking noise.

  “What is it?” Zach asked, reaching for the bag.

  “Peter arrived with it. He brought this back from the underworld, along with the water from the Mnemosyne.”

  Zach reached inside and pulled out a dagger. It was old, really old, but it was in decent condition for its age. “A dagger?”

  “He dipped it in the Styx. It should kill Kronos permanently. No coming back. His soul would be tied to the underworld and not even Hades could set him free.”

  “And why didn't he tell us this at the meeting?” Zach asked, his voice rising with fury.

  “Because there was a traitor among us. You told us that.”

  Zach turned the knife around in his hand. He gripped the handle and made a few stabs in the air. “Kill Kronos. For good.”

  “That's the idea.”

  “That's a fate we never even resorted to before.”

  “Do you think it's necessary now?”

  Zach nodded. He slipped the dagger into the backpack and slung it over his shoulder. “Oh yeah. No more second chances.”

  Jason scooped up the rifles. “Good. That means I don't have to do it myself.”

  They loaded the van. “Ready?” Zach asked.

  Jason started the van. He looked back at the cabin, a place that he had spent a lot of time as a child. They had even come up here for Thanksgiving once. He nodded his head slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I'm ready. We can't hide forever, right?”

  Zach nodded in response. “We end this now.”

  “I have learned to hate all traitors, and there is no disease that I spit on more than treachery.”

  -Aeschylus

  XIII.

  With his eyes blindfolded, Evan Fuller had tried to track where they were going as he was dragged from a van and lead into the building. He was pretty sure they were on a basement level, one of the few basements in Florida. Judging by the length of the drive and the sounds of city traffic, they were most-likely in Orlando.
The room was large and grey with metal riveted to every wall. The heavy bay door they were brought in through shut behind them: a steel curtain. One other door was cut into the wall at the other end of the room, but it was solid steel and there was no handle on the inside. There were no tables and no chairs in the room. It was just empty space. Evan examined the metal tracks built into the floor and determined that the room must have been used for crash and blast tests.

  Every member of the Pantheon, save for Zach, was captured and trapped in this room. They sat on the floor, Devon and Frank huddled together around their sleeping infant, Astin moving around the room to heal people's injuries. It had been too risky to fix Penny's broken arm before; the police had documented the injury. Now that they were taken, they needed every able body they could get.

  “And that was yesterday,” Lewis said, finishing the recap of their latest Pantheon meeting for June and Minnie. Everyone was there except for Zach. “If Zach isn't here, that's good news, right?”

  “Okay, so you all have your memories?” Minnie asked. She and June had missed drinking the Mnemosyne. “What's that like?”

  Everyone paused to think. Penny was the first to speak. “Like a reading a Harry Potter book.”

  “What?” Nick asked.

  “Hear me out. So it's like you're reading Prisoner of Azkaban and you hear the name Sirius Black for the first time. Now big stuff you remember from book-to-book, but the details you have to actually go pick up the other books to refresh. I had to go back and pick up Sorcerer's Stone to remember that Sirius Black loaned the motorcycle to Hagrid.”

  “I didn't have to look that up,” Minnie said.

  “Well, pretend you're normal for a minute,” June snapped back.

  “So you have your memories, you just have to try a little to find the details?” Minnie asked.

  They all nodded.

  “So try to find a power that can get us out of here. Lewis said you can shape-shift. What else?”

  They all stared at each other. Evan was still walking around the walls, looking for a way out. “This camera,” he called. “Can we block it?” The camera he pointed to was mounted high above their heads in the corner of the room.

  “Ooh!” Lewis raised his hand as if he was still in English class. “I know!”

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before he started nodding. “I totally got this,” he said, opening his eyes and smiling. Lewis began to run across the room, but as he ran he ascended as if he was climbing on a staircase of air. Diana gasped. Teddy whispered, “Nice!”

  Lewis got to the camera and stood there, hovering in the air. It was clear from the way he floated that all of his lift came from his feet. “Do I try and break it?”

  “Cover it up,” Astin suggested.

  Lewis peeled his t-shirt off and hung it over the lens.

  “Ew, nobody wants to see your scrawny concave chest,” Astin said.

  Lewis looked down at his body and then took a deep breath. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and blew. Like a Loony Tunes character, his chest inflated when he blew. His shoulders, stomach, and chest puffed out into nicely formed muscles. He looked like a classical statue. “That better?”

  “Nice,” Teddy said. “I'm getting rid of my gym membership.”

  “Alright,” Minnie said. “Now we can work in private. What else have we got?”

  Frank had been sitting with Devon, keeping a protective arm around her as she cradled their sleeping infant. Now Frank stood up and walked to the door. He swung his fist and punched it. The room rang with the sound, but the door was hardly dented. Frank stepped back. Horns sprouted from his head and his body hunched over. In seconds he was gone and in his place stood an enormous black bull with white horns and shining fur. The bull Ares crashed into the door over and over, but aside from breaking a horn, he accomplished nothing. Frank shifted back to his human form and sat down hard. He looked dazed, and he shook his head. “The alloy's too strong.”

  “I might be able to melt through it if I had enough time,” Evan said.

  “Time is, apparently, all we have,” Astin noted.

  “Time is not on your side,” someone next to Peter said. Peter spun around, but the others didn't hear the words. A ghost had appeared in the room.

  “Ghost!” Penny shouted. Apparently now, she could see them too.

  “Where?” Nick asked.

  Peter recognized the ghost, though he had hardly known the guy. It was Ryan Bear, the same ghost that told them to drink the Mnemosyne. “What are you doing here?” he asked Ryan.

  “Whose ghost?” Astin asked.

  “Ryan,” Penny said, looking at Diana.

  “Kronos came back to the underworld,” Ryan said.

  “Did he try another jailbreak?” Peter asked.

  Ryan shook his head. “He stopped at the Styx. Charon saw him. He dipped his sickle in the waters.”

  “Oh crap.”

  “What is it?” Nick asked. “What's he saying?”

  Diana crossed to the spot where Peter was staring. “Is he here?”

  Ryan's ghost turned and looked at Diana. He tried to touch her shoulder, but his fingers passed through her. Peter nodded.

  “How long ago was this?” Peter asked.

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “Teddy said Kronos was at that fundraiser,” Penny said. “He must have gone before, right? Isn't the closest hellmouth in New Orleans?

  Peter nodded. “Thank you Ryan. Thank you for warning us.”

  Ryan looked back at Diana one last time before he vanished.

  “He's gone,” Peter said to Diana. “And for those of us who don't speak ghost, Kronos just made himself a god killing weapon.”

  “God killing?” Nick asked. “Like he killed Dr. Davis?”

  Celene shook her head. She remembered the dagger they had dipped in the Styx. If only they had it now. “If a blade dipped in the Styx kills you, your immortality is gone. You are bound to the Underworld. Not even Hades can bring you back.”

  “It's his sickle.”

  “Like the grim reaper?” Lewis asked.

  “That's a scythe,” Evan said. “A sickle has a short handle. It's got more of a curve to the blade.”

  Lewis was still flying around the perimeter of the room. “I'm not waiting around for him to get Zach so we can all be executed together.” Lewis' hand settled on a grate that pumped air into the room. “I can pass through locks, I bet I can pass through air ducts.”

  “You're just gonna leave us here like a coward?” Nick asked.

  “I'm gonna leave and find a way to bust you out of here. Man, you have trust issues.” Lewis looked back at the grate and focused. Slowly his hand turned into shining particles and slipped through the vent. The rest of his body followed. In seconds, Lewis was gone.

  Everyone sat in silence. Minnie paced the room.

  “None of this would have happened,” Astin finally said, “if someone hadn't stabbed us in the back.”

  “Well, we know it wasn't Zach,” Teddy said. “I mean, why would he? He was the big man at the top.”

  “But he's also the only one of us not here right now,” Diana pointed out.

  “It was probably someone who wanted more power,” Astin said, glancing at Peter.

  “Don't look at me,” he said, “I had my own kingdom.”

  “Yeah,” Teddy said, “With a bunch of dead people.”

  “Oh come on,” June said, “We all know that one person here has never been a team player.” She looked directly at Nick.

  “Hey! If he wants to accuse me of something, he should come here himself instead of sending his bitch.”

  June lunged at Nick. Minnie grabbed her and held her back. “He's not worth it.”

  “I wanna see them fight,” Teddy said. “Fifty bucks on June clawing Nick's eyes out.”

  “Stop it!” Celene shouted. Everyone had erupted into arguing, their voices blending together. Celene's words were lost among the noise.

  �
�Just so you know,” Nick said, “I passed up an opportunity to stab you all in the back just a few days ago. So don’t you pin that cowardly bullshit on me.”

  A pulse filled the room, radiating out from Valerie. It slowed their hearts and silenced their voices immediately. “Stop,” she said, hardly above a whisper. Everyone heard it. “It was me.”

  “I'm sorry, what was you?” Teddy asked.

  “I betrayed you.” Valerie closed her eyes. Her form shimmered away. Before them stood Hestia, the goddess of the hearth and home. She had long, dark brown hair and fair skin. Her deep set eyes were cool and gray, and her features soft. A shawl was wrapped around her head, and the rest of her figure was modestly covered in the same dusty purple cloth. “I saw no other choice.”

  “Explain yourself,” June said.

  “It was after I quit the council. You were hurting people. Zeus impregnated whomever he wanted, regardless of if she was a virgin or a married woman. You kept murdering these women and their children.”

  “You betrayed us because of Zeus and Hera's bickering?” Nick asked.

  “And your raping. And all of your smiting. You were supposed to bring out the best in people, to help them, to guide their society. Instead, every time someone excelled at anything, you massacred them as an example to not shine brighter than the gods.”

  “Only if they bragged about it,” Devon said.

  “Not one of you here is innocent of bringing selfish, needless harm to the mortals. It was all a game to you. You saw them as so much less. You treated them like insects.”

  “You sold us out,” Astin said, rising from his spot on the floor. “You turned us over to spend thousands of years in Tartarus with people who hate us.”

  “I did what I did,” she said, casting her eyes down at the floor. “And for my betrayal, I went with you. But can you not say that you are better people than you were then?”

  “All for nothing if Kronos kills us,” Peter said. “We may have been jerks to mortals, but Kronos is taking away their free will. That was how he reigned in his golden era. They have no free will.”