CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY
Standoff
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“I’m okay,” Sam said as he pulled himself up from the ground where he’d been lying only a second ago. “I, uh, just had a weird dream.”
He reassured Thunder with a toothy smile Apollo promised would get him out of any predicament. Thunder’s rising eyebrow told Sam Apollo was mistaken though, leading Sam to the conclusion that the sun god didn’t have a clue about mortal women. Guy probably doesn’t stick around long enough for them to get mad at him.
“You were unconscious for almost a minute,” Thunder said in a tone that sounded both worried and annoyed to Sam’s ears. “Unconscious, Sam… And we didn’t know why.”
“Only a minute?” Sam confirmed. Huh, I guess Apollo wasn’t lying about time in the white-hot room being different from the mortal world.
The others were huddled around Sam, and they all had worried expressions on their faces as Thunder had. Everyone except for Farsight that is.
“I told you he was fine,” she said before leaning in to whisper in Sam’s ear, “What did Apollo want?”
Sam wasn’t surprised that Farsight knew about the sun god’s visit because Apollo was also her patron. She might have noticed his divine aura surrounding Sam while he dreamt. Probably. “He wanted to give my mind time to absorb the, um, truth bomb that’s been dropped on my head,” Sam admitted.
Farsight’s gaze drifted past Sam’s shoulder, and he guessed that she understood. That was the thing about having a seer for a friend. There were rarely any secrets you could keep from them.
“Are you alright now, mate?” Jackboot asked.
“Yeah, sorry about that…” Sam placed a hand on Thunder’s shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. “I’ll explain everything later, but now I’ve got to say hello to my family.”
“Your…family?” Thunder frowned. “What—”
“Just be ready,” Sam said.
After a reassuring nod to his other friends, Sam turned around and faced the villains who seemed to have been content waiting for him to regain consciousness. It was a courtesy he hoped to return by offering them a chance to surrender before the eventual throwdown began.
“I see you’ve finished chatting with your little helper.” An impish smile played on Medea’s lips. “You must be rather special for a god to descend into the mortal plane and protect your sanity from such mind-boggling revelations.”
“God?” Jackboot repeated from behind Sam. “There was a god here?”
“Shush,” Farsight chided.
Sam wasn’t surprised to learn that Medea knew Apollo had visited him either. She was no seer but power radiated off this ancient sorceress like she could burn everything around her if she wanted to. Apollo had said as much.
“She’s gone crazy over millennia-long grudges, and you can’t trust a thing that comes out of her mouth, but beware, Sammy. Medea trained under Hecate herself. She’s the real deal,” Apollo had warned.
Despite this warning, Sam chose to ignore Medea’s taunts as his gaze had already drifted past the sorceress to settle on the teenage girl standing on Medea’s right. Pandora the 8th’s face, so much like their mother’s, caused Sam’s heart to tighten just by looking at her.
What do I say? He wondered. Hi — nice to see you again — it’s been a while — they don’t feel appropriate…
He’d dreamed of this moment so many times that he couldn’t believe it was actually happening. This was more than just a simple reunion though. It was a chance for him to save his sister like Sam couldn’t do when he was younger.
Should I just rush over and hug her? he considered. No, Medea would start casting her spells if I came close… and I don’t even know if Serena remembers me…
“It is you, isn’t it, Serena?” the words spilling out of Sam weren’t planned, but they carried with them all the emotions currently churning inside of him. Love, hope, fear, sadness, and even guilt—they were all bundled up in the tremor of his voice. “If I’d known you were alive, I—”
Sam had taken a step forward, but he quickly stopped himself after he noticed that there wasn’t even a hint of recognition in Pandora the 8th’s face. Not even after Sam had called Serena by her true name.
“Serena, it’s me… It’s Sam, your big brother,” he insisted.
Behind him, Sam could hear his friends surprised reactions to his confession, but none of them interfered while he continued to reach out to his sister. He was thankful for their trust. After all, admitting that he was related to a high-profile villain that had come to steal the Golden Fleece from their team would have been a hard pill to swallow for anyone.
“Don’t you remember me?” Sam asked.
Pandora the 8th gave no reply. Her face remained impassive.
Sam sighed, although he expected this. Apollo warned him that Serena might not know who he was.
“The Queen’s priestesses were pretty thorough in programming the latest model,” Apollo had admitted to Sam. “She won’t remember anything about her life before her time in the temple.”
Stolen story; please report.
Medea confirmed this too after she wrapped an arm over Pandora the 8th’s shoulder and revealed, “Pandora does not recognize you, Herculean, because she has no memories of you.”
She let out a peal of laughter that grated on Sam’s ears. That it reminded him so much of the Trickster’s mad cackle worried Sam some more. He’d had his fill of crazy, and he wasn’t looking forward to dancing with another villain of the chaotic-evil alignment.
“Your sister has undergone…” A strange look flashed across Medea’s face. As if the sorceress was remembering an unpleasant memory. “…unspeakable tortures meant to purify her body and mind so that she might become a fitting handmaiden to the Spirit of Hope.”
“How would you know what’s been done to her?” Sam asked.
“Because, to my great regret, I’ve helped prepare a Pandora to her purpose before,” Medea admitted, and for the first time since they met, she didn’t sound evil. She sounded honest. Remorseful even.
Medea spared a glance in Pandora the 8th’s direction, and Sam could almost swear that he’d seen actual pity in her gaze.
“Over a thousand years have passed since I performed the rituals myself, but it is clear that not much has changed since my time.” Medea leaned toward Pandora the 8th and lifted the teenager’s chin up with her finger. “This one’s a far more perfect doll than anything I’ve made… One can only imagine the sort of cruelties they’d visited upon her to make her so…compliant.”
“No,” Sam growled.
Feeling angry, not just at Medea’s words but with himself for allowing his sister to endure all those tortures while he thought her dead, Sam’s hand drifted to Onus. His fingers tightened on its handle to the point where he could feel pain in his hand.
“Some things you can’t forget,” he insisted, although in his mind he wondered if this was true. Styx, how do I get through to her?
“True enough,” Medea admitted, smiling wryly. “Why, if I could forget Jason’s betrayal, I might find myself enjoying a stroll at a café in Paris while fighting off the numerous suitors come to steal my mended heart away.”
She laughed a scornful, venomous laugh and then swatted at the air as if she was banishing an unwanted vision.
“But my hate makes me strong, scion of Apollo,” she hissed. “And that is true for Pandora as well, I believe.”
Medea’s fingers tightened on Pandora the 8th’s shoulder.
“Like me, your sister was betrayed and abandoned by those she thought loved her. She was broken. And like me, she has been reborn…” A purple glow flashed within the depths of Medea’s eyes, “…Reborn to burn this world in a cleansing fire so that it might be remade as well!”
Medea let go of Pandora the 8th. And, like an attack dog that had been unleashed, the teenage girl raised her jar high, and a roiling cloud of darkness began to drift out of the tiny bit of gap between the jar’s mouth and its cap.
“Don’t do it!” Sam begged.
But his plea fell on deaf ears for Pandora the 8th had begun to summon something from the depths of Pandora’s Box. It was malevolent energy that felt strangely familiar. Not just to Sam, but to Thunder as well.
“Oh, no,” she said. “It can’t be him…”
Sam wondered what Thunder meant, but then he saw the darkness take shape, and even without it fully materializing, he recognized it too.
“Correct me if I’m wrong”—Jackboot’s voice cut through the low-rumbling growl emitted by the forming shadow—“but that creature looks remarkably like the horror responsible for turning the Eisenhower Museum into a haunted zone.”
“That’s because it is him,” Thunder said in a strained voice. She moved over to stand on Sam’s right, her hand drifting toward his so that their fingers intertwined. “It’s Rick…”
She’d probably done it so his touch could comfort her, but the effect went both ways. Relief and comfort flooded through Sam as he took in Thunder’s presence beside him.
“Really? You’re calling the giant red hound… Rick?” Jackboot asked.
Appearing before them now was a Hound more massive and lordlier than anything they’d encountered. It was even bigger than the solar dragon lounging behind Medea. Bristling red fur wrapped over muscles that would have made Sam’s old enemy, the Cannibal Boar, look tiny by comparison. Its mouth was filled with sword-sized fangs that could have swallowed Sam and his friends whole. Then there were the eyes—the only part of the horror that still carried a hint of the human it had once been—they blazed red with uncontained rage and malice.
“Yes, that was the name of the angry kid who’d brought a gun to my high school field trip and...”
Thunder couldn’t finish her sentence as the anger in her voice had won out. Instead, she let her gift do the talking. With a cock of her arm, a bolt of jagged lightning came to life in her right hand.
“Great, as if two villains and their dragon weren’t enough of a fight,” Farsight sighed.
She’d just finished notching three arrows to her bow. Each one had a different tip.
“What is it with you and villains wanting to kill you so badly they unleash the most horrific monsters on us,” Farsight asked Sam as she positioned herself to the right of Thunder.
“Wait a minute,” Jackboot moved over to Sam’s left, “you mean to say this has happened before?”
“Didn’t you hear about the fifty-foot giant shadow that wrecked a hospital in Queens?” Farsight asked.
“That was you people?” Jackboot asked. Now, Sam couldn’t see his face on account of Jackboot’s mask, but he could almost see that raised eyebrow on his friend’s face. “How have you never mentioned this before?”
“Would you have joined us if you knew how bad our luck with enemies was?” Sam asked.
Sam leaned into the banter to keep his spirits up—a tactic that’s been working for him ever since he met Chiron who usually filled his head with nonsense that helped to keep Sam’s mind off the monstrous things wanting to kill him.
“We’ll never know the answer to that now, will we,” Jackboot replied.
He elbowed Dr. Hearthstone who’d shown up on his left side with arms already lit with the hero’s inner fire. An armor made of rough-hewn stone dug out of the sacred ground now wrapped around his chest and shoulders too. It was an interesting application of the doc’s secondary gift which was a gamma-level control over the earth around him.
“Did you know what you were getting into when you joined this motley crew?” Jackboot asked.
Dr. hearthstone shrugged. “I was there when Herculean and Thunder destroyed the ‘Terror of the Bronx.’ It gave me an idea of what to expect from them.”
“Was I the only one who didn’t know we would be constantly waylaid by vicious monsters of all varieties ninety percent of the trip?” Jackboot asked.
“Yes,” the other heroes replied almost in sync.
“Well, I want my money back,” Jackboot sighed. “You bloody Americans and your archnemesis problems.”
“Suck it up, Jack,” Sam slapped his friend gingerly on the back, “You’re on the crew of the Argo VII… The danger comes with the job description.”
‘Danger’ was indeed the right word to choose at that moment for both sides looked to finally be ready to do battle. Only, as he was technically the protagonist of this adventure, it was Sam’s job to launch the opening salvo—and launch it he did.
Sam let go of Thunder’s hand, and with his other hand holding firmly to Onus the Load Bearer, he launched himself forward with the intent to blow Rick the Hound away to get to his sister. Sadly, his plan was torn apart by the dragon whose tail savagely tackled him from his right side almost as if it had read Sam’s intent before the attack began.
“Sam!” Thunder yelled, but she couldn’t go and help him as Rick the Hound chose that moment to leap at her with jaws wide open. “Godsdammit!”
Sam heard the “Krak-ka-boom!” of thunder, but everything else was a blur as he rolled around on the ground while Medea’s solar dragon flapped its wings high above him. Its mouth was wide open and dragon fire spilled forth from it.