Chapter 54 Flaming Out
AS SOON AS I SAY his name, his blue eyes grow watchful and the fire dies out on his fingertips. “How’d you figure it out?”
“Um…” I gesture to the blood spot seeping through his shirt. “You kind of gave me a lot of clues.”
“I guess I did do that.” He grins.
“So what are you doing here?” I ask. “And don’t tell me trying to fix that ridiculous cauldron!”
“Well, somebody had to do it after you snuffed it out.” He smirks.
“What do you mean? It was already out before I ever set foot in the amphitheater.” I remember, because I was standing right next to it for a while.
“I’m not talking about the cauldron fire,” he answers, his eyes sparking with glee.
“Then what—” I freeze as I think back to the first morning I met him. The first morning at Anaximander’s. “You mean your lantern? That was—”
“The eternal flame of humanity?” He shrugs. “Kind of.”
“Oh my gods. Oh my gods. OH MY GODS! I blew out the…”
He grins. “Yep.”
“The same one you…”
“That’s the one.” He nods.
“And you didn’t say anything? All this time, you just let me go on like it was no big deal?”
“What was I supposed to say?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe, You shouldn’t have done that! Or We need to figure out how to fix this now.” I throw my hands up in exasperation. “You should have said something.”
“And miss out on you figuring all this out on your own?” He throws his head back and laughs. “Now where’s the fun in that?”
I don’t even know what to say to that, so I just sit here running things through in my mind again and again.
As I do, a million questions come to me.
But the most burning one is, “Well, why haven’t you been able to fix it then?
Surely this isn’t the first time in the history of humanity this has happened. ”
“Oh, no. It’s definitely the first time it’s happened,” he counters.
I can literally feel my face drain of color. “Ever?”
“Yes, ever.”
“But how? Why? I mean, it wasn’t even hard to do,” I tell him. “I just”—I purse my lips and blow air through them in a demonstration of what I did that day—“blew it out.”
He laughs again. “Yeah, I noticed.”
“So what does it mean that I could do that?” I whisper. “Does it mean I’m a bad person or…”
“You’re not a bad person, Penelope. Not at all.”
“Then what? I mean, I blew out humanity’s fire. That can’t be a good thing.” I swallow. “No wonder I didn’t make it into Athena Hall.”
“No. You didn’t make it into Athena Hall because it’s obviously not where you’re meant to be. And as for being a terrible person? I actually think it’s the opposite.” His blue eyes meet mine and a weird sense of calmness fills me despite all the thoughts ping-ponging around in my head.
“The opposite?” I whisper.
He shrugs. “It’s like I tried to tell you the last time we talked. You’re a very special person, Penelope.”
“No, I’m not. I’m just me.”
“And who are you?” He lifts a brow. “Besides the girl who blew out the eternal fire? And the girl who waltzed into the Underworld and came right back out? While bringing Hades’s Book of Death with her? I don’t know about you, but all that seems pretty special to me.”
His words send me reeling all over again. My heart pounds. My chest aches. And suddenly it’s really hard to take a breath. “But what does all that mean?”
“I think it’s up to you to find that out, don’t you?”
I give him my most winning smile. “I mean, it’d be cool if you’d just tell me.”
He cracks up, but when he stops laughing, he gives me a steady look. “I think you’re smart enough to figure out that some things you have to learn on your own.”
He’s right. I know he’s right, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. But it also means I can’t argue about it with him anymore either.
Silence stretches between us for several minutes, until it’s disturbed by a gust of wind whispering through the trees. The sound of it reminds me of all the other questions I had for him before he totally blew my mind.
“So, this means you knew Pandora.”
He shoots me a wary glance. “I did.”
“What was she like?”
He looks confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, everybody always makes it sound like she’s so awful, but I don’t think she was. Just because they created her to do one bad thing doesn’t mean she was actually bad, right?”
PT—no, Prometheus—takes so long to answer that I get nervous, start worrying that I overstepped.
But then he clears his throat several times and in a voice thick with emotion, he says, “She was fantastic.”
“I knew it!” I crow, proud that for once my instincts were right on. “Can you tell me about her? It doesn’t have to be anything big. Just what you remember.”
“I remember everything,” he says, and there’s so much pain in those three words that it breaks my heart. More, it makes me want to give him a hug, but I’m too afraid of hurting his side to do it.
“She smelled like honey and pomegranates. She had an amazing voice and liked to sing in the bath—and when she was doing laundry. Always soldier songs, never anything normal.” He blushes a little at the memory. “She could make friends with anyone. And I mean anyone.”
His voice grows softer, his eyes more faraway.
“I can’t tell you the number of times I’d lose her in the square because she got busy talking to someone or another and then decided to help them carry their goods or their bread or whatever it was.
She loved to eat but was a terrible cook.
She couldn’t keep her mind on it, so she ended up burning everything she tried to make.
So I did the cooking most of the time and she cleaned up.
Oh, and she would give you anything she had—everything she had—if she thought you needed it. ”
“You loved her.” The realization crashes through me and the words come out before I can think them through.
“Everyone loved her,” he tells me fiercely.
“It was you,” I whisper. “Not your brother, Epimetheus. You. That’s the sibling trouble you were talking about.”
“She was always meant to be mine. Even when I knew I couldn’t have her, she was mine.”
That might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, especially since I can practically hear his heart breaking beneath his stoic front. “This isn’t right,” I whisper. “Not what they did to Pandora. Not what they’re still doing to you.”
I look down at the cut on his side. “It’s been thousands of years and you’re still being eaten alive every night. It’s not right.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s right when it’s what the gods wish,” he says with a sad smile. “But speaking of night, I should probably get going. I have a date with a very impatient vulture.”
So it’s a vulture now that Agatha has retired. No wonder different stories claim different birds.
“What happens if you don’t go? What happens if you just stop doing what Zeus wants you to do?” Even as I say them, I know the words are revolutionary.
“It doesn’t work that—”
“Penelope!” Fifi’s voice floats through the darkness as she comes running up to me, Arjun right behind her. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
“Sorry, I’ve been out here with PT.”
Arjun nods at him. “Hi. How are you?”
“Doing all right, thanks.” He stands up. “Thanks for letting me borrow Penelope for a few minutes.”
“No problem,” Fifi says, eyes wide as she looks between us.
“I’m going to head out,” he tells me. “But you might want to look behind that bush.”
“What’s behind the bush?” Kyrian asks as he walks up.
Instead of answering, PT waggles his fingers at me before he disappears.
“Who was that?” Kyrian asks, baffled.
But I’m too busy checking out the bush Prometheus pointed to. I walk over to it, trying to see what’s up in the dark. The leaves rustle as I get closer, then a loud, high-pitched call erupts from the depths of the bush.
“Forget the guy,” Arjun says. “What was that?”
“I don’t know.” I move forward and start rattling the leaves a little. At least until a giant peacock comes running out of the bush and knocks me flat on my butt.
It squawks again, louder and more aggressively, before running toward the tree line as fast as it can.
“Is that what I think it is?” Arjun asks.
But Fifi’s eyes have already found mine, and it’s obvious she’s thinking about the same thing I am.
“The woman with the peacock feather!” we both shout at the same time.
“Uh, I hate to break it to you, Penelope,” Kyrian says. “But that definitely wasn’t a woman.”
“That’s not what we mean. She’s—”
I break off as the ground beneath us starts to rumble in a way that has becoming depressingly familiar to me. “Hang on!” I yell.
“Why?” Arjun asks.
I start to answer, but it’s too late. Because the ground is already shaking and we are already spinning.