The Immortal Fire Read online

  THE

  IMMORTAL FIRE

  ALSO BY ANNE URSU:

  THE SHADOW THIEVES

  THE CRONUS CHRONICLES

  BOOK ONE

  THE SIREN SONG

  THE CRONUS CHRONICLES

  BOOK TWO

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ursu, Anne.

  The immortal fire / Anne Ursu.—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(The Cronus chronicles; bk. 3)

  Summary: As Philonecron plots to destroy the gods, transform the Underworld, destroy humanity, and remodel Olympus, Mr. Metos takes thirteen-year-old cousins Charlotte and Zee to join the Prometheans, who have an age-old weapon that may help protect them.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-9503-6

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-9503-X

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Mythology, Greek—Fiction. 3. Animals, Mythical—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.U692Imm 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009008917

  Visit us on the Web:

  http://www.SimonandSchuster.com

  For Dziwe Ntaba,

  my cousin

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Under the Sea, Again

  PART ONE: Water

  1: Holes

  2: Say What?

  3: Missing Persons

  4: Epic

  5: Breaking and Entering The Charlotte Mielswetski Way

  6: A Rather Alarming Development

  PART TWO: Fire

  7: Wild Kingdom

  8: And Now Presenting Zeus on High, Father of Gods and Men, and Lots of Other Stuff Too

  9: Smoke and Mirrors

  10: Maps and Legends

  11: Frenemies

  12: Anger Management

  PART THREE: Earth

  13: Good-bye to All That

  14: The Lair of the Prometheans

  15: The Writing on the Wall

  16: Behind Closed Doors

  17: Steve

  18: The Great Escape

  19: Friends in High Places

  20: The Kindness of Strangers

  PART FOUR: Air

  21: Greece Is the Word

  22: Seek the Belly Button

  23: Heart-to-Heart

  24: Old School

  25: Bread Crumbs

  26: Sacrifice

  27: Dream Come True

  28: Zeus on High

  29: Consequences

  30: Forced Entry

  31: An Unexpected Assist

  32: The Ballad of Philonecron and Steve

  33: The End, the Beginning

  EPILOGUE A Suitable Finish

  Bestiary

  PROLOGUE

  Under the Sea, Again

  AT THE CRADLE OF CIVILIZATION, CLOSE TO THE belly button of the world, there is a sea like no other on Earth. This sea is unique for many reasons—the particular wine-dark color of its water, the fact that it is at the nexus of three continents, and of course because of the vast population of Immortals who call it home. Up until about an hour ago, it was also unique because on it there sailed a yacht like no other—but there is not much of that yacht left anymore, thanks to the ministrations of a rather vengeful, extremely giant, giant squid.

  At this moment it is not the wreckage of this yacht like no other that currently makes this sea unique, nor the number of Immortals in formal wear speeding away from that wreckage, nor even the body of the gargantuan Ketos that lies at the bottom of this sea a few miles away—no, what makes this sea so very, very special is the man (or something very like a man) currently inside that Ketos’s belly.

  And him, surely, you recognize. The black pointy hair, pale skin, red eyes, and unmistakable air of megalomania? That is Philonecron, former Underworld Assistant Manager of Sanitation, grandson to Poseidon, would-be usurper of Hades’s throne, brilliant schemer, beautiful dreamer, impeccably clothed, paragon of good taste, victim of vile villainy, endlessly persecuted, but always resilient, able to rise from the ashes of ignominy better and more diabolical than ever. And something very special has just happened to him.

  For, what is that object in his hands? Mighty, mystical, and decidedly misplaced? That couldn’t be the trident of Poseidon, one of the artifacts fashioned for the three sons of Cronus in their epic war against their father for control of the Universe? Its magic—great and terrible—is dependent on the presence of Poseidon himself. Or, it turns out, someone who shares his blood—if that someone happens to be an evil genius.

  And isn’t it fortunate that Philonecron is?

  Philonecron certainly thinks so. It is quite something to have your destiny made manifest to you in an instant. To the uncultivated mind, his presence in the belly of the Ketos at the very moment his grandfather’s trident happened to come sailing inside might seem to be the greatest of luck. But Philonecron’s mind is nothing if not cultivated, and he recognized in the incident the white-gloved hand of Fate. Fate—so judicious, so clever—who truly understood the Universe’s greatest problem: that he, Philonecron, was not in charge of it.

  Now, perhaps there have been times in your life that you have been presented with the object of your heart’s most fervent desire, and perhaps in those times excitement overtook you to such an extent that you may have behaved in a way that one might, in retrospect, call rash. And if so, you will understand all the things that happened next.

  Let us just say, hypothetically, that you’d been trapped inside the stomach of a Ketos, tossed around in its stomach acid a few times, and that stomach acid was currently disintegrating your lovely silk cape. You’d also been anticipating an escape through the creature’s digestive process that was sure to be the most unpleasant thing you had experienced in a life that had recently been quite full of unpleasantness—and then, suddenly, the creature died on you and suddenly digestion did not look so bad compared to spending an eternity where you were—and then you were presented an object that was capable of granting your every wish? What would you do?

  Well, you explode the Ketos from the inside.

  Afterward you find yourself standing on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, and you recall how very much you do not like being wet. You are also now covered in Ketos-goo, and technically you have no one to blame for that but yourself. Nonetheless, you are quite uncomfortable. And so you do the natural thing.

  You get rid of the sea.

  Afterward you find yourself standing in a vast cylinder surrounded on all sides by a wall of swirling sea, and you are so happy to be dry again and breathing air—which, while not as good as the dank darkness of the Underworld, is a great improvement on water—though there are still bits of Ketos on your tuxedo.

  It is at this point that you notice that you are not alone in this cavern in the sea. For some distance from you is a tangled mess of chariot and some very cranky-looking horses, and emerging from that tangled mess is the owner of the trident.

  He looks confused at first—perhaps wondering where the sea went—but his expression changes when he sees you.

  “Grandson,” he breathes. “My trident, you found it. Give it to me!”

  Now, you are nothing if not methodical. That is the point of being an evil genius—o
ne doesn’t just follow one’s impulses wherever they might lead. One considers. This is what you do, you consider. You ponder your goal, meditate on all the options, deliberate on the ramifications and/or permutations. This is why your plans are always so very, very brilliant.

  Sometimes, though, sometimes there is not time to meditate, ponder, or even deliberate. Sometimes you are standing in the muck covered in Ketos-goo while the second most powerful god in the whole Universe is staring at you, and he wants his trident back. And so you do the only thing that is really possible at that moment.

  You aim the trident at him.

  “What, this?” you say, purring slightly. “You want this?”

  And this seems, suddenly, a very good time to get a few things off your chest. Because when you don’t let these things out, they build up inside you, and that’s simply not healthy for anyone.

  You take a step forward. “Do you know, Grandfather, that you are really quite tacky?” you say, your voice like silk. “You think your taste is so very well developed, but really you are the most vulgar creature in the Universe. Truly, I don’t think you deserve this trident. I think it belongs to someone who can use it to make a better world.” A slow smile spreads across your face. “Don’t you?”

  Silence then, while you watch the dawn of comprehension on your grandfather’s face. It takes some time, as he is really quite stupid.

  And then he roars and charges toward you. “You can’t use that,” he yells. “It’s worthless to you.”

  And you say, “And that is just another failure of imagination on your part. Would you like to see?”

  And then it seems there is nothing to it but to act. And in a few moments, Poseidon, Lord of the Seas, second most powerful god in the whole universe, has vanished, and in his place is a small blue sea cucumber. A shiver of great portent passes through you as you stare at the creature’s small body as it flaps tackily in outrage. Then you look down at your trident—your beautiful, brilliant trident—and you cannot help yourself. You give it a hug. Finally, after all your searching, you’ve found love.

  “That,” you coo, “went rather well, don’t you think?”

  PART ONE

  Water

  CHAPTER 1

  Holes

  A FEW DAYS LATER, HALF A WORLD AWAY, ONE ordinary eighth-grade girl was lying on the couch in her den, stroking her cat and feeling sick. There was nothing too extraordinary about this situation; this girl stayed home from school, and if you looked at her you would not be surprised. For Charlotte Mielswetzski (you know how to pronounce that by now, right? Meals-wet-ski?) was covered in gross yellow bruises and small cuts and wore her wrist in a splint and generally looked as if she had had an unfortunate encounter with a very large falling piano.

  But Charlotte’s sick feeling had nothing to do with her injuries, at least at the moment. It was caused instead by the most extraordinary images on the television screen in front of her.

  Her mother entered the room and looked from her daughter to the television. She watched silently for a few moments, and then shook her head.

  “Have they figured out what caused it yet?” she asked Charlotte in a grave voice.

  “Uh-uh,” Charlotte muttered. On the screen in front of her, helicopters circled around the all-too-familiar wine-dark waves. Water swirled angrily around the great hole that had appeared suddenly in the middle, as if someone had carved out a piece of the sea. The gaping blackness at the center looked like it might suck the world into it at any moment. It was so wrong, it would have made Charlotte ill to look at even if she did not suspect the cause.

  “They say all the sea life in a mile radius has just disappeared,” Mrs. Mielswetzski said. “Poof! Look!” She pointed at the TV screen. The image had changed to another part of the sea, near the coastline. An entire village worth of people huddled on the beach, staring at the sea in front of them. And it was no wonder why, for the waters in front of them were thick with dolphins. There must have been thousands, leaping frenetically in and out of the waters as if trying to escape. Charlotte’s stomach turned, and a low, wary rumble came from her cat Mew.

  “You know”—Mrs. Mielswetzski turned to Charlotte—“I looked at a map, and I think the…incident…is very close to where our ship was. If we’d been there a little longer…”

  Charlotte didn’t respond. There was no doubt in her mind that the cavern in the Mediterranean Sea was just where their cruise ship had bobbed helplessly only a few days ago.

  “Honestly, Char,” her mother continued, “I know it sounds absolutely crazy, but sometimes I wonder if something really…strange is going on. After what happened to us…”

  Charlotte eyed her mother. Mr. and Mrs. Mielswetzski had recently had the very strange experience of falling unconscious on a cruise ship off the coast of Virginia and waking up to find themselves on the same ship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Everyone seemed to have accepted the cruise officials’ completely implausible explanations, because there was no plausible one. Only Charlotte and her cousin Zee knew the truth: The ship had been transported there by Poseidon, who was planning to punish Charlotte by feeding it, along with all its occupants, to a giant Ketos. Her parents, like most of the rest of the world, had no idea that there was any such thing as a Ketos, or that Poseidon and the rest of the Greek gods were anything more than half-forgotten myths.

  “I know what you mean,” she mumbled. Something very weird was going on. It wasn’t just the half-mile-wide hole that had suddenly appeared in the Mediterranean Sea, or the behavior of the dolphins. Strange reports were coming in from the whole region. A fleet of ships from the Croatian navy had disappeared. Sharks off the coast of Rome had gone psycho, swimming after fishing boats and patrolling the beaches. A whirlpool had suddenly appeared in a shipping lane. The waters of the Aegean Sea had turned so choppy that no ship could travel on it. A several-mile-long swath in the Mediterranean had turned pitch-black and cold, as if it had simply died.

  There was more, too, things that would never make it to the TV news. Someone had started a blog cataloging all the incidents, and Charlotte spent the morning pressing reload on it until she couldn’t stand it anymore. There was a tiny deserted island that had somehow become cloaked in eternal night. In Rome a fisherman showed up at a hospital covered in animal bites; he babbled some story about his boat being set upon by a monstrous woman with a pack of dogs for legs. On the small Greek island of Tilos, the mayor’s daughter had gone missing, and there were rumors she’d been seen chained to a cliff face above the sea. She wandered back into the town after a day with no memory, but a vague impression of being rescued by a tall, dark-haired man. The captain of a sailboat racing team was found swimming desperately for shore. He said his boat had been wrecked on a small island he’d never seen before. They were very surprised to find a young, beautiful woman living there, a woman whom the man could only describe as bewitching. When asked about his shipmates, he just shook his head and said they had decided to stay. On the isle of Rhodes, a twelve-person caving expedition had disappeared. In Croatia twenty people disappeared from a city street midday. Whoever had taken them had left, in their place, perfect stone statues of each person.

  As the scene of the TV shifted to a reporter standing on the beach interviewing people, Charlotte’s mother shook her head grimly. “I guess I’d better pick up your cousin. How are you feeling, sweetheart?”

  Horrible. Terrified. Furious.

  “All right,” Charlotte said with a half shrug. Anything more hurt too much.

  Her mother frowned at her, her face full of sympathy and concern. As far as she knew, Charlotte had woken up on the cruise ship with the rest of them, with no memory of how she’d suffered her injuries. There was no way for Charlotte to tell her they’d all been inflicted by Poseidon himself.

  “Do you need anything?”

  “No. Thanks, Mom.”

  “All right,” she said, glancing between Charlotte and the TV. “Listen, don’t worry about all
of that. I know it’s scary. But it will be okay. We’re safe.” She leaned in to kiss Charlotte gently on the forehead and then left.

  On the TV the reporter was interviewing a white-haired, rough-skinned woman from Cyprus who was babbling excitedly in a foreign language. All around her, fish were flopping on the sand while children scurried to pick them up and throw them back into the water. A voice-over translated the woman’s words:

  “It’s the end of the world.”

  A terrible shiver passed through Charlotte, and the woman turned to the camera and said something to it, her dark eyes a challenge to everyone who saw her. But whatever she said, they did not translate. The scene cut to the newsroom, where the reporter appeared on a big monitor next to the shiny-haired anchor. “As you can see,” the reporter said, “explanations for the mysteries in the Mediterranean are in short supply, but”—she smirked—“theories abound. Susan?”

  “Fascinating,” said the anchor. “What did she say at the end there, when she looked at the camera? Do you have it?”

  The reporter looked at her notes. “More superstitions, Susan. ‘Find the heir,’ she said. ‘It’s our only hope.’”

  “Huh. Another mystery in the Mediterranean!” exclaimed the anchor, as a banner appeared below her, echoing her words. “Thanks, Brittany. Coming up next, who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?”

  Charlotte glared at the TV and changed to another news channel, then lay back on the couch to wait for her cousin.