Chapter 10 I Am Not Loving This Ring
I Am Not Loving This Ring
The Ares cabin smelled delicious when I walked in.
Like woodsmoke mixed with caramelized sugar from melted marshmallows.
Apparently, they’d had s’mores while watching Icarus Two: The Wax Is Back!
Now they were all on a sugar/bad-music high.
Everyone was talking and laughing or doing air splits and windmills off furniture while rock music blared.
I actually found myself smiling at the ridiculousness of it all.
But then I saw my bunk.
Or rather the scroll peeking out from under the pillow on my bunk.
A concealed note couldn’t be good. Not in a place where people had no problem saying things to my face.
I glanced at my cabinmates to make sure they weren’t paying attention. Then I did my most casual stroll to my bunk and plucked the scroll out from under my pillow.
My skin prickled.
Stamped on the outside was a sigil I’d seen before.
My first thought was How?
But there was no denying that symbol. With a trembling hand, I tucked the note into my pocket and hurried out the cabin door.
Thankfully, nobody but the little girl who tended the fire was in the courtyard, so I unfurled the scroll and read it in the shadow of the cabin.
Go back. You’ve only scratched the surface.
Goose bumps broke out on my arms. I tightened my fist around the note, crumpling it into a ball. There was only one thing to do with a message like that.
I marched to the courtyard’s central hearth and smiled tightly at the little girl as I tossed the note in. Fortunately, the girl asked no questions. Maybe she thought she was hallucinating me.
The note burned quickly with a green flame—nothing eerie about that at all—but its words lingered in my mind.
Go back. You’ve only scratched the surface.
I fiddled with the ring on my finger, no doubt the subject of the message.
Somehow, the note-writer knew that Grant and I had found the ring’s hiding spot. That meant we’d been watched. And this note meant I was still being watched. If what I’d been through so far was just “scratching the surface”…
My stomach turned loops. The ring suddenly felt too tight on my finger. I marched away from the hearth, tugging at the silver band to remove it. My panic and jerky motions made my knuckle start to swell. I couldn’t work the ring past it.
“Come on!” I grunted, stopping at a tree just beyond my cabin. “Come off!”
I twisted the ring from side to side, trying to wriggle it off my finger.
And then…my finger disappeared.
And my hand.
And my arm.
A wave of nothingness washed over me until my entire body was simply gone.
“Ohhh, no,” I whispered.
Harper had been right. I was invisible like Frodo Baguette!
I lost my equilibrium. I tried to steady myself against the tree, but I couldn’t judge where my hand was. I ended up crashing into the trunk with my shoulder. You don’t realize how much you depend on being able to see your own body until you can’t do it anymore.
The dizziness got worse. A force slammed into my skull, pushing its way into my brain.
Grainy images flashed before my eyes. Memories I’d worked so hard to bury.
First, I was standing on a soccer field as the opposing team cheered and my team shouted at me for scoring an own goal. But I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy watching Dad ride off on his motorcycle. Done with me.
Then I was using my ink-stained fingers to hold up a messy paper I’d finger-painted with Korean letters. Ones that spelled out Katie. Mom tsk-tsked and scolded me for getting so messy. My Korean wasn’t enough to overcome that.
Next, I was opening a drawer to shove in a package addressed to Dad and decorated with heart doodles.
Across my doodles, someone had written Refused in permanent marker, and the post office had slapped a return to sender—refused stamp on it for extra insult.
I could barely fit the package inside the drawer alongside all the other rejected ones.
Then the graininess cleared as I was plunged into a more vivid memory.
Olivia and I were in the backyard in our fencing gear, sparring with foils. She thrusted; I parried. She advanced aggressively, and I stumbled back.
With that break in my defense, Olivia lunged and touched me cleanly in the chest with the tip of her foil.
“Halt!” she announced proudly.
“You don’t call halt!” I complained. “The referee calls halt!”
I pointed at Mom, who was watching us from the porch swing.
Olivia rolled her eyes and gestured to Mom.
Mom, in turn, smiled like they were sharing some inside joke. “Halt.”
I growled and returned to an en garde position. As soon as Olivia did the same, I advanced several steps and thrust. Olivia dipped her wrist and whipped her arm to one side, using her foil to knock mine out of my hand.
“Halt!” Mom said this time.
Olivia pulled off her mask. “Come on, Katie. Are you even trying?”
“Seriously?” I gawked and turned to Mom.
She tilted her head. “You are not anticipating your opponent’s attacks. Is your mind elsewhere?”
Olivia snorted. “Space cadet.”
“Olivia!” Mom frowned at her, and my sister dropped her cocky smile. Mom turned her attention back to me. “You need to focus, Katie. Stop thinking about boys and bubble gum.”
I stared at her. “Right. Because those two things are all I talk about.”
I never talked about them.
“You should be more like your sister.” Mom pointed at Olivia.
I scowled. Olivia suddenly looked uncomfortable.
“I’m going to get a soda,” she said, and disappeared into the house.
“Don’t drink the last Sunkist!” I shouted after her. “That’s mine!”
As she walked off, Mom leaned toward me.
In her denim romper and sandals, with her black hair pulled back in a scrunchie bun, she could’ve been Any Mom, USA, but her eyes were so intense I always found it hard to meet her gaze.
She looked at me the same way she looked at targets on the shooting range.
“Katie, by the time I was your age, I was attending Olympic training camps. I won my first official medal at nineteen. Will you be able to say the same?”
I shrugged. “It depends. I can eat a whole pickle in a minute. Is there a medal for that?”
Mom pounded her fist against her thigh. “Aigo, Katie! Be serious! Olivia is already exceeding expectations in fencing, sharpshooting, equestrianism….” She ticked them off on her fingers.
“So then why do you need me to be perfect?” I asked.
Mom’s face softened. She grabbed my hand. “Because I know you are capable of greatness. No mistakes, Katie. Only successes.”
I snorted. “Everything I’ve ever done says otherwise.”
Mom squeezed my hand. “You want further proof? You were born of a god.”
My mom had never kept Ares a secret from me. I’d grown up hearing about him, as if my godly parentage had been just another of my mom’s many personal triumphs, another impossible standard I was supposed to live up to.
“A god who wants nothing to do with me,” I reminded her.
Mom tsked again. “Do you know how I won your father over? By being a champion among champions and always besting my opponents. That is what the god of war loves.”
I pressed my lips together. “So you’re saying Dad won’t love me unless I’m a winner?”
Mom’s expression hardened and she let go of me. “No, Katie. He will love you no matter what.”
“Is that why he keeps refusing every letter and package I send him?”
“Aigo,” Mom said again, clapping a hand to her forehead. “I should never have shared that address with you.”
“It’s the Empire State Building, Mom. Everyone knows where it is.”
She folded her hands in front of her. “Seeking your father’s attention with gifts and sentiments is a lost cause. You should put your effort toward excelling at something you are passionate about. Then he will really see you. If not sports, hangug-eoneun eottaeyo?”
I blinked rapidly at her sudden switch to Korean. I was pretty sure the word Korean was somewhere in there, and the implication was that I should learn it, but the language always gave me trouble—unlike ancient Greek, which came naturally.
“Patír toúto protimísei,” I said.
Mom narrowed her eyes. “Ancient Greek will not help you in the modern world. Korean will.” She nodded firmly, as if she’d made up her mind about something. “Olivia will help you with your Korean.” My eye twitched at the mention of my sister. “She can fix—”
“What?” I snapped. “Fix what, Mom? Me? Because I’m broken?”
I threw down my foil and mask and stormed into the house.
“Katie!” Mom called after me, but I ignored her.
Olivia emerged from the kitchen, holding out a glass of fizzing orange liquid. “Hey, K. You want—”
“No!” I knocked the glass out of her hand, relishing the crash and splatter as it smashed against the wall. “Leave me alone.”
She grabbed my arm. “Katie, Mom just wants what’s best for us.”
I yanked free of her grasp, and she stumbled forward from the force.
“She wants what makes her look best.” I gestured to the hallway ahead of us—Mom’s unofficial Hall of Glory, lined with her trophies and Olivia’s awards and my…
“What. The heck?!” I stormed down the hall to a framed cover photo of Olivia from Fencer’s World. “Where’s my soccer participation ribbon?”
Olivia flinched. “I needed…I moved it….” She pointed to a bronze medal farther down the wall. “Hey, your tae kwon do medal’s still here!” She laughed nervously. “Third place! Yay!”
I glared at it. Then at her. “Are you making fun of me? Because I got third place out of three kids?” Before Olivia could respond, I clenched my fists, called her a heartless harpy, and then screamed two lungfuls of rage at her. “AUGHHH!!!”
I snatched Olivia’s cover photo off the wall and stormed to my room, slamming the door so hard the walls shook.
I meant to simply keep Olivia’s photo until I could replace it later with my participation ribbon, but as I prowled my room searching for the award, I came across my box of darts.
Mom had given Olivia and me each a set, along with a dartboard so we could work on our accuracy and precision.
Olivia’s photo fit perfectly on the board.
Next, I grabbed a dart and hurled it at the board, nailing the bull’s-eye dead center, right on Olivia’s nose.
I flung another and another, each one hitting its mark—Liv’s ears, her mouth, the middle of her forehead.
Each dart sank into the board deeper than the last. My final dart disappeared into the board with just the tail peeking out like a brooch on Olivia’s throat.
Mom would have been proud of my aim. But knowing that only made me angrier.
I picked up the baseball bat Dad had given Mom when I was born—an Easton Titanium Typhoon. The bat had been banned for being dangerous and helping batters hit too well—a perfect gift for a daughter he knew would fail.
I clenched my jaw, gripped both ends of the bat, and unintentionally snapped it in two. The metal broke clean and sharp.
“AUGHHH!” I roared again, tossing the bat halves to the floor. I grabbed for something else—the dagger Dad had given me.
I stabbed Olivia’s face hard with it.
Then I thought how satisfying it would be to use the dagger to slash the walls of the Hall of Glory, slice up Olivia’s ribbons and photos.
I could smash Mom’s glass plaques, denting her trophies.
I gripped the handle and tried to pull it out of the dartboard, but it didn’t budge.
In my rage, I’d used all my strength—my god-given strength—to bury it deep.
Then I looked at Olivia’s mangled photo, and I gasped.
Her face was unrecognizable.
I hugged myself, glancing from the broken bat to the dartboard, which had started to crack in two.
What was I doing? Did I really want to unleash this kind of violence on my family?
I scooped up the bat pieces and the dartboard, darts and dagger still wedged in it, and shoved everything in my closet.
I shuddered and hugged myself again. I didn’t want this Ares-level anger and power that seemed to possess me at my most vulnerable moments. I didn’t want to be his daughter.
“Katie?” Mom’s voice carried down the hall.
With shaking hands, I locked my door, and then I sat on my bed with my face pressed against my knees.
I could not be this person. I couldn’t let anybody know what I was capable of.
My hand throbbed. Why did my fingers hurt? Then I remembered where I was. In the present. Wearing the ring.
I finally managed to claw it off my index finger, and the flashback evaporated, leaving me shaking and weak.
I was kneeling in the dirt, the ring clenched in my left hand. My right hand was a bloody mess of scrapes and cuts, bristling with wood splinters. I looked at the tree I’d been leaning against.
I’d literally punched a hole right through the trunk.
Oh, gods…I hoped the tree wasn’t the home of some dryad.
I stared at the ring. The sapphires gleamed cheerfully on the silver band like it was just a pretty bauble. Maybe the ring could turn me invisible, but those images, those emotions it had dredged from the darkest parts of my soul…This was definitely the kind of ring you’d throw into a volcano.
And yet…
Go back. You’ve only scratched the surface.
There was more to discover in the woods. There was Grant to find. The ring would be useful for both, if I could learn to master it.
A champion among champions, I recalled Mom saying. Always besting my opponents.
I had no more room for mistakes. I had to succeed.
I shoved the ring in my pocket and staggered back to my cabin. I was going to need as much sleep as possible for the day ahead.