The Immortal Fire Read online

  “Good-bye, Mr. Metos,” Charlotte said as flatly as possible. And then, before her parents could talk to her, she turned and stalked up the stairs, with as much dignity as her body allowed her to muster. Which, in truth, was not much.

  As Charlotte opened the door to her bedroom, she was hit by a strange rotting smell coming from the room. It seemed to match her mood perfectly. She plopped facedown on the bed. A few minutes later there was a soft knock on her bedroom door. Charlotte turned her head and mumbled, “Come in, Zee.”

  Zee opened the door quietly and entered, followed closely on his heels by Mew, who promptly jumped up onto the bed and hopped on Charlotte’s back.

  “Ow,” moaned Charlotte.

  Picking up the cat, Zee sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall, then gave the wall a good bang with his head.

  “Ow,” he muttered. His face crinkled up. “What’s that smell?”

  “Dunno. The decay of my dreams, I think.” She groaned again. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Yeah,” Zee said.

  “We should have known,” said Charlotte.

  “Yeah,” Zee said.

  “Of course he wasn’t going to take us to the Prometheans. We can’t do anything. We’re just”—she spat the word out—“children.”

  “Yeah,” Zee said.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Zee said.

  Charlotte shook her head and glared off into the long shadow in the corner of her room. It seemed to flicker as she looked, take shape, a demon stalking her. She blinked and the illusion was gone.

  “Well, we’ll just have to convince him,” she said. “Tell him we want to join the Prometheans. Tell him we can help, that he has to let us help!”

  Zee nodded slowly. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”

  Charlotte shut her eyes. The whole Mediterranean could explode by tomorrow.

  “It’s not going to work. He’s not going to let us go.”

  “I know,” said Zee, setting his jaw in a manner that would be best called Charlotte-esque. “But we have to try.”

  That night Charlotte dreamt that she was running as fast as she could, clutching Mew in her arms. A great cartoon wave was chasing her, gliding along the ground. An endless line of half-glowing shadows stood off in the distance, passive and unmoving.

  Shades. The Dead. They were always there in her dreams, lingering listlessly in the background, a constant reminder of her great failure. Sure, Charlotte and Zee had saved them from Philonecron and an eternity of torture. But they were left with an eternity of dreariness. Hades ignored the Dead, let them wander the plains of the Underworld aimlessly, let them fade into near oblivion. Everyone Charlotte had known who’d died—her third-grade teacher who was always giving Charlotte books, her grandfather who did magic tricks, her grandmother who burned every batch of cookies she had ever made but never stopped making them—had gotten lost in the endless void of eternity. They were only shadows now. After they’d gotten back from the Underworld, Mr. Metos had gone off with the Prometheans; he said they would try to find a way to help the Dead. That didn’t seem to have happened, and they were still down there, suffering.

  They were ever-present in her dreams, a constant reminder that they were waiting for her. As she ran from the terrible wave, she could not help herself; she turned to the great line of them and called for help, but they did not move. They could not move. The wave was catching up, she could not outrun it, it was right behind her—

  Darkness. Complete and total. Everything had changed, as if someone had changed the channel. Charlotte felt around and discovered she was in some kind of cage. The air around her was dank and cold, and it reminded her of the long passageway to the Underworld. She was in a cave, that was it, a cage in a cave and she had to get out, because she had something important to do.

  Charlotte ran her hands up and down the bars of the cage, trying to understand her surroundings. The cage was small; she could touch both walls if she reached out in either direction. And the bars were thick and close together, much too close for her to slip through. And as she felt around she realized there was no door to the cage. It was impossible—there had to be a door somewhere. A feeling of horror crept over Charlotte suddenly—where was she? How did she get in here? And how was she ever going to get out?

  “Hello? Is someone there?” she yelled.

  Silence. Silence like eternity, silence like death.

  Then a form appeared, one of the Dead, its soft glow seeming like the brightest light in the whole universe.

  “Hello?” Charlotte asked. “Can you hear me?”

  The Shade stared at her. It wanted her to do something, to know something. And then—

  Light, there was light—somewhere off in the distance. It was uncertain, inconsistent, dimming and brightening like—like fire. Somewhere in the caves someone had lit a fire.

  The Shade was gone. In the distance, though, a voice:

  Charlotte. Charlotte Ruth Mielswetzski. Over here.

  “Who’s that?” Charlotte asked. It didn’t sound like anyone she knew.

  Over here, said the voice. It seemed to be female, and possibly young. I have to show you something.

  And that’s when her alarm went off.

  Charlotte blinked herself awake, then rolled over and hit the button. “Well, I guess I’ll never know what she wanted to show me,” she mumbled to Mew, blinking back the image of the oncoming wave.

  “Meow,” said the cat, raising her head sleepily.

  Charlotte lay back on the bed as the pain in her body began to announce its presence. Part of her wanted to go right to her computer to see what had happened overnight; the other part just didn’t want to know.

  She cast a glance at her clock and sighed. “Do I really have to get up?”

  “Meow,” said the cat. She climbed on Charlotte’s chest and began kneading it with her paws.

  “Ow,” said Charlotte.

  “Meow,” said Mew.

  And Mr. Metos. They were going to go in today, to try to convince him to take them to the Prometheans. It was going to be an utter failure, but they had to try.

  “We should have just left him in the Underworld,” grumbled Charlotte. Mew gazed at her reproachfully. “Okay, okay, maybe not. But we should have at least thought about it.”

  Mew exhaled through her nose, turned around twice, and settled down on Charlotte’s chest pointedly, as if to keep her there.

  CHAPTER 3

  Missing Persons

  CHARLOTTE FINALLY WILLED HERSELF OUT OF BED, got ready, and went downstairs to find the rest of her family gathered in the kitchen, watching the news. She glanced at Zee, who gazed significantly back at her.

  On the TV, a coastal town was being assailed by wind. A line of cypress trees bowed to one direction, their branches reaching out to the side as if trying to flee. The dark sky roiled overhead. Houses shuddered and gave up pieces of themselves to the wind’s might. The air was thick with cloud and sand and debris. Not a soul was in sight; it was like not a soul existed on Earth—they had all abandoned it to the wind.

  And then, just like that, the wind stopped. The trees snapped back in relief. All was calm. And then, suddenly, the debris began to stir, the wind started up again, the trees bowed exhaustedly—in the other direction.

  “Whaaaa—,” breathed Charlotte.

  “Because of the unpredictability of the squalls,” said the voice-over, “the Sicilians cannot bring in ships or planes to evacuate the island, so the people of Mozia must simply take cover and wait this strange storm out.”

  “The wind’s been doing that all morning,” Mrs. Mielswetzski said in a low voice. “It hits, stops, and then changes direction. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “The people…?” Charlotte asked.

  “In underground shelters. Sometimes it stops for an hour and then starts again, in a completely new direction. It’s like…it’s like the wind is…toying with them….” There was an
odd expression on Charlotte’s mom’s face—wonder and disbelief, as if she was realizing the world was not quite the place she thought it was. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

  “What about the town where the tsunami hit?”

  Her parents exchanged a look. “Well, they were able to evacuate,” said Mr. Mielswetzski slowly. “But another one hit last night, even bigger, at the same place. There was no warning…. The town’s just gone. They’re watching for more and evacuating the nearby towns just to be safe. But it’s not just there; there’s a big storm brewing off Istanbul. That’s the Black Sea.”

  “It’s like it’s spreading,” Mrs. Mielswetzski said quietly.

  Charlotte and Zee exchanged a heavy look. She was right. From the Mediterranean to the Black Sea to…?

  “Hey, look,” said Mr. Mielswetzski, pointing to the TV screen.

  All eyes turned. The image was still of the wind-battered coast, but in the distance an enormous rainbow had appeared, spanning half the horizon.

  “That’s…beautiful,” said Mr. Mielswetzski.

  He was right. It was beautiful. Inhumanly so. The rainbow shimmered beguilingly in the dark sky, and even the clouds seemed to hang back to admire it. The colors were so vivid that they were difficult to look at, as if human eyes were not built to take them in. It was immense, awe-inspiring, ostentatious…

  It looked like it was showing off.

  And then another appeared, a little closer to shore, its bands of color thick and discrete. And then another, pouring down from the clouds to the awaiting sea.

  “What the—,” exclaimed Mrs. Mielswetzski.

  Even the reporter was stunned into silence. The scene suddenly flashed back to the shore, where the trees were now bent completely to the side. The sand was so thick in the air you could barely see. And then the wind shifted abruptly, like a car thrown into reverse, and the trees all lurched to the other side. A few snapped and fell to the ground, pieces flying off into the wind. Then a rainbow burst forth from the sky, right in front of the camera, spilling out onto the ravaged beach, grander than all that had come before. The wind swirled and then the trees were pulled upward, reaching to the heavens.

  “I don’t understand,” said Mr. Mielswetzski under his breath. “It doesn’t seem possible.”

  Zee had sidled up next to Charlotte and muttered in her ear, “They’re trying to show each other up.”

  She nodded slightly. That’s what she thought too. In The Odyssey, there was some god who kept the dangerous sea winds captive on an island in the Mediterranean. Well, it seemed he’d let them out. And the rainbows—the goddess Iris was is charge of them. They were doing something—playing, battling, some kind of godly power-off. It was either spite or recreation, but either way the consequences would be disastrous. The world could not survive if enough gods decided to show off.

  “We’d better go,” Charlotte said, her voice flat.

  “You didn’t eat anything,” protested Mr. Mielswetzski.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Her parents just nodded. There were no comments today about how breakfast was the most important meal of the day, no mention of a healthy breakfast building a healthy mind, nothing about how studies showed that kids who ate a good breakfast did better in school. Not today.

  “All right,” said Mrs. Mielswetzski, with a glance toward the TV. “Let’s go.”

  It was a quiet car ride that morning, everyone pensive and tense. Charlotte could not imagine what her mother was thinking. She must be scared. She had caught on somehow—not the truth, of course, but she knew something was horribly wrong. The things that were happening should not be happening—they were impossible. Any one of them would be frightening enough on its own, but together…

  Was it scarier, Charlotte wondered, to see all this happen and know the cause, or to wonder at the dark? She was terrified for very real reasons; Mrs. Mielswetzski and everyone else watching were scared of the terrors that lurked in the vast unknown. Would it be better, in a way, if they knew?

  Mrs. Mielswetzski pulled up in front of the school and turned to her daughter.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, honey?”

  Charlotte looked up the stairs toward the big double doors of Hartnett Middle School and exhaled. No. “Yeah.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  Bad. “All right.” She gazed up the stairs again. “Mom? Keep watch on the news, okay?”

  Mrs. Mielswetzski rested her hand gently on her daughter’s head. “I promise.”

  Charlotte expected to find a grim school when she walked in the doors: wide-eyed students talking in low voices, half-empty hallways as frightened parents kept their children home. But no. People around her moved by, talking and laughing, going about their day as if everything was perfectly normal. Who cared that half a world away everything was falling apart, that people were huddled in basement shelters while their homes blew away?

  “You all right?” Zee muttered, standing next to her.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “Um, Char,” said Zee, his voice suddenly tight. “I have to go.”

  She turned toward her cousin, but he was disappearing behind the doors of the school auditorium, where he had no reason on earth to be.

  And then, from across the hall, a surprised voice called her name. Maddy.

  It used to be that her cousin and her best friend got along really well—which was always a relief, since Zee mostly turned and ran when confronted with anything resembling a girl. But then Zee and Maddy started going out, and Zee dumped Maddy for one of the Ashleys. Maddy was devastated, and Charlotte was furious.

  Except it hadn’t been Zee at all—he’d been kidnapped by Philonecron, and Proteus, a shape-shifting sea god, had taken his place and apparently decided to relive his youth through Zee. Which was sort of ironic, because Zee wasn’t really living his own youth.

  So Charlotte was forced to tell Maddy things like, “You have to understand, Zee just wasn’t himself,” but of course Maddy didn’t buy it, and Charlotte couldn’t exactly tell her the truth, because (a) Maddy would never believe her, and (b) Proteus in real life looked like he was about a thousand years old, and some things it was just better to go through your life not knowing.

  “I didn’t think you were coming back all week!” Maddy exclaimed, running up to her.

  “I felt better this morning,” said Charlotte. “So I decided to come.”

  “Oh, I’m so glad you feel better. I was so worried!”

  The official lie was that Charlotte had been in an accident over spring break—which was technically true, if you consider being bounced around the deck of a cruise ship by Poseidon an accident. It was a lie that her parents were only too happy to participate in, as falling unconscious while your cruise ship was mysteriously transported half a world away and your daughter suffered serious, unexplained injuries seemed careless, to say the least. So Maddy had come over on the weekend, bringing magazines and cookies and movies and all kinds of sympathy. Because Maddy was a good person, she didn’t ask for the gory details about the accident, which was fortunate, since it never happened.

  As they walked slowly through the hallways, Charlotte felt people’s eyes on her. It was like they’d never seen anyone beaten up by Poseidon before. She could feel how ridiculous she looked—black and blue with little cuts, and walking like she was made of sand. It grew worse with every step. She had already moved more that day than any since she’d gotten home, and it was not going very well.

  “Did you see the news this morning?” Maddy asked. “The Mediterranean’s gone crazy.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Charlotte.

  “It’s got to be global warming. It’s the only explanation. Jack Liao thinks it’s aliens, but he thinks everything’s aliens. Oh,” she said, her face turning stony as they turned the corner to where Charlotte’s homeroom was. “I’d better go.”

  A hurt expression crossed Maddy’s face, and Charlotte’s heart sank. It was very awkward
having your cousin break your best friend’s heart, and even more awkward when it wasn’t your cousin at all but a geriatric shape-shifting sea god in disguise. The two people in the world she could count on weren’t speaking to each other. The purgatory of the rest of her life was already proving to be something very like hell.

  When Charlotte entered her homeroom, she saw Zee huddled in the back, looking ashen. She made her way toward him, ignoring the eyes on her as she passed. Someone let out a low whistle, and she heard a whisper, “That was some accident.”

  Charlotte slipped into the desk next to Zee and gave him a look. This Maddy thing was going to be horrid. “I’ve seen you braver,” she muttered.

  “I think I’m going to go back to London,” he grumbled.

  “That’s probably for the best.”

  “Ashley’s not speaking to me either,” Zee added mournfully. “Neither’s the other one.”

  “On the bright side,” Charlotte said, “the Ashleys aren’t speaking to you.”

  Zee shot her a look, then lowered his voice. “This was on the message board for me,” he said, handing her a folded-up note.

  On the outside, Zee’s name was written in Mr. Metos’s scrawl. Charlotte’s heart sped up, and she unfolded it.

  You are excused from lunch, the note read simply.

  She looked at Zee and nodded. They would meet Mr. Metos then. Now all they had to do was wait.

  It was not easy. The day passed horribly slowly. It was already too much that Charlotte had to be here while the world was falling apart; it didn’t seem fair that she had to go to math, too. She spent the whole time staring at her blank notebook. Every once in a while she would glance up at the board where Mr. Crapf was solving equations, but finding nothing comprehensible there, she just looked back at her paper and waited for time to move.