#i'm in a deadlock with chapter 47

[jflashandclash]

Traitors of Olympus IV: The Fall of the Sun

Twenty-One: Sadie

 I Go to Press Big Red Button

             For looking as unimposing as Leo did, the bloke was due more credit than I’d originally given him. He threw me over his shoulder and bolted towards Mount Camel Dung faster than a shabti would try to kill its master if it had all its appendages. Maybe those demigod genes gave him a natural, muscular edge. Maybe it was lugging all the metal to build homicidal, giant lizards.

           Either way, I owed the son of Hephaestus an apology for assuming he wasn’t as strong as his friends.

           Lightning exploded behind us. Harsh gusts of wind tore pieces of the iron fence down and threw sand into the air. The path forward was rapidly becoming a cross between a battlefield of inanimate objects and an obstacle course. Sunlight dimmed as clouds quickly spiraled into a net across the sky.

           Set’s gleeful laughter boomed through the cyclone of stuff.

           The rock formation was further away than it originally appeared. That was the problem with deserts: a lack of kilometer posts.

           At the first batch of red rocks jutting out of the ground, Leo took cover. He dropped me rather ungracefully on the sand.

           “Hey!” I protested, shouting over the wind.

           “Sorry, Lady Sadie,” he said. He lifted up one finger and a burst of flames hissed out like a mini blowtorch. “We’re keeping up the tradition of ungraceful landings.”

           If he was about to do what I thought he was about to do, I was about to tell him to shove that finger somewhere not very nice. Sure enough, he tilted that mini-blowtorch toward my bindings.

           “Are you mad?!” I demanded, not quite in the mood to be set ablaze.

           I’m sure there was some irony in my asking that question, as I rather enjoyed doing mad things, but all I could think about was coming out as a toasted Sadie marshmallow.

           “Trust me, I’m an expert in pyromania,” he said, giving me that crazy elf grin. “Now, inhale deep and exhale when I tell you. The Flaming Valdez is gonna set you free.”

           As he had me inhale, then exhale, he squirmed his other hand between the bindings and my skin, so he could use his own hand as a heat shield for my skin. I couldn’t help but feel like he looked nervous. Normally, it took a bit of magical work to undo a binding spell. I remembered the time my wand turned into a Celestial bronze dagger when Annabeth touched it and wondered if Leo’s magical flames acted like the Egyptian words of power for Bollix Your Binding Spell.

           Once he freed my hands, I withdrew my wand to help dispel the rest of the binding.

           In the last moment, the weather went from partially overcast to pitch black.

           My skin shivered. The temperature dropped at least five degrees Celsius.

           You know how you’re not supposed to look directly at the sun? Both Leo and I abandoned that notion to glance up.

           There was no dispersed glow behind the clouds or circular silhouette off in the distance. It was like Apophis had swallowed the sun all over again.

           “Is that a normal power of your Superman?” I asked, feeling a bit queasy.

           “Uh, no. I’m going to put that solidly in the list of NOT-Jason powers,” Leo said comfortingly.

           We peered over the rocks to see how Jason was doing against Set. Probably a good idea before leaving him on his own to fight a god. I knew we had to find Hemera and we were wasting valuable moments, but my mind kept flashing to how far he’d flown when Set first blasted him.

           All we could see was darkness at first. Leo kept a tiny flame alight in his palm so we could dodge debris caught up in the wind. Some tourist must have discarded an empty can of suntan lotion in the desert; the now-projectile almost took Leo’s head off.

           Off in the distance, there was the soft glow of a city—Phoenix.  

           Closer, lightning gave eerie bursts of illumination to the massive dust storm outside of Governor Hunt’s tomb. Each red streak would make the fog look like a dispersing firework before dimming back to the roaring nothingness.

           In the last burst, we could see the outline of a muscular boy on flying horseback. The horse itself seemed to spark and flare with static. The rest of the horse blended into the mass of debris. Jason must have found his gladius—more sparks exploded outward as the golden blade parried a strike from a flaming battle axe that spun around him. The red sand of the desert swirled higher and higher, as though reaching to drag the stallion down. A mass of it—Set’s avatar I presumed—loomed in front of the Roman horseman, cackling with thunder and laughter.

           Jason looked like he was fighting the desert itself.

           “Em, is he going to be alright?” I asked, withdrawing my wand. I had fought Set on more than one occasion and Lapis seemed quite the powerful host for the god.

           “Yea, this is a normal party for our Golden Boy.” Despite his confidence, Leo looked worried. “What I wouldn’t give for a bulldozer or a wrecking ball though. Can you magic those out of your little Do-a locker?”

           I could envision Leo singing that old Miley Cyrus song, “I came in like a wrecking ball,” while actually riding atop a wrecking ball. I’m not sure how it would help us, but the thought was quite entertaining.

           I was about to inform Leo that I didn’t store demolition equipment in my locker, other than some fireworks that Carter doesn’t need to know about, when I saw a blue burst of light from up Camel Dung Mountain.

           My brilliant reflexes saved us. “Drowah!” I shouted into the wind. The hieroglyph for boundary shimmered into a wall of golden light behind us. The blue wave slammed into it before dissipating.

           For that instance, I could see the silhouette of a man in linen robes with a staff and a small shack behind him.

           “Hemera’s shack!” I cried.

           “Hey! No fair—Set can’t add another creepy dude to the mix,” Leo said.

           The image of the shack and man shimmered under some kind of cover.

           “Creepy magician with powers,” Leo corrected.

           Another flare of blue light shot toward us.

           This time, Leo deflected it with a small blast of fire. We dived to the next closest rock, realizing we couldn’t take shelter from both he and Set at the same time. We needed to get up there.

           “He has the higher ground,” I said. “Can you lob a fireball up there?” I didn’t want to kill the other magician; I didn’t know what Nome he was from, if he was possessed by an evil god, or if Set had threatened him with cheese magic, something that inspires great terror in the Egyptian world. Still, I figured a ball of flames would keep him occupied.

           “I might burn the shack. I doubt it would kill Hemera, but we’d have one pissed off goddess on our hands. I guess you can’t toss over some Egyptian voodoo, Lady Sadie?”

           I deflected another wave of blue. I could fly up as a kite, the bird, not the children’s toy, but I would be a sitting duck—well, kite—for any attacks. “I was hoping for a bit more of a distraction so we could make it up the Mount Dung without being under fire.”

           Leo reached into his tool belt. His eyes blazed like those of a maniac, and I couldn’t help but think that I could get used to seeing that expression of pure madness. “Oh, I’ve got an idea that will leave you spinning.”

           A minute later and Leo fashioned a tiny fleet of rubber band-and-paperclip helicopters to drop nails, tacks, balloons filled with motor oil, miniature failed-shabtis, and anything else we could quickly rig from my Duat locker and Leo’s tool belt.  I gave them some honing magic. [Leo later said we’d have to call Coach Gleeson to eat up the mess. I have a different respect for Camp Half-Blood, knowing one of their counselors is loony enough to eat metal.]

           Despite the heavy wind, his tiny contraptions flew brilliantly.

           Our cue to run up Camel Dung Mountain came about ten seconds later, when the enemy magician started screaming.

           The bursts of light and tremble of thunder continued at the base of the rock formation as we climbed. I hoped this Jason fellow was as accomplished as Leo claimed he was. I hadn’t heard Set gleefully giggling about ripping someone’s limbs off or turning Jason’s skeleton into a puppet, so that was a good sign.

           Climbing the mountain wasn’t easy. All we had was my wand and Leo’s flame for light, and the rock formation didn’t seem to like being compared to a camel toilet, as it kept trying to trip us, though from Set’s magic or our clumsiness, I wasn’t certain.

           Once we got close to the top, I shouted, “Sun-ah!”

           The hieroglyph for reveal appeared in the sky, and the shack and magician came back into view.

           “Wow,” Leo said.

           I seconded the notion.

           Leo’s fleet had worked marvelously.

           Two tiny helicopters still sputtered in the air. One dive-bombed the magician, dropping a wad of chewed gum into his eyes. [And Carter says I need to keep my locker cleaner. Imagine if I hadn’t.]

           As the magician was blinded, he shouted a spell to explode the other airborne helicopter. This released Tabasco sauce shrapnel everywhere, something Leo claimed was vital for any dragon workshop.

           The magician had just withdrawn the gum from his eyes when the spicy condiment struck his face.

           He screamed again. I almost felt bad for him.

           Now that we were up close and I had dissolved his invisibility spell, I could see he was roughly in his thirties. (As far as magicians go, that means nothing. The bloke could be 564 for all I cared or knew.) He was tall, with a traditional forked beard, and caramel skin. His white linen robes were edged with blue.

           This magician must have been a bit confused about the colors of Ma’at and chaos.

           One of my failed shabti creations had landed on his shoulder. It was a blobby humanoid shape without legs, something I imagined would crawl up from under my bed one night to take revenge for its creepy existence. It kept bludgeoning the magician with its deformed, flobby arms, shrieking, “die, bipedal swine!”

           As the poor magician frantically conjured milk to wash out his eyes and blast the shabti off his shoulder, something about him seemed familiar. I hoped this wasn’t someone else’s displaced, distant son or nephew of someone Carter and I had once fought.

           Either way, he had to go. He was standing between us and the ten by ten, rickety shack that shuddered violently in Jason and Set’s storm. Quite charming as godly penthouses go.

           “Sadie Kane!” the magician roared.

           Not sure how he detected us, but Leo and I exchanged a glance to claim KO rights. I won, of course.

           “My name is Mel!” the man said.

           “There’s a magician named Mel?” Leo asked, sounding amused.

           Mel continued, ignoring the mockery. “I’m from the First Nome and guarded it for centuries before the Kanes caused the death of Chief Lector Iskandar and Desjardins, put a minion of Set as the new Chief Lector, and turned Zia Rashid traitor. You escaped me once, but this time—“

           “That’s lovely and all. Goodbye, now,” I said.

           I blasted him with a spray of green light. He was so disgruntled, having been both sprayed with Tabasco sauce and milk, he didn’t have the awareness to counter.

           I envisioned Mel as something much more containable: a tiny, green lizard. Within seconds, I had asserted my will over him. The magician shrank in size until he was a cute, confused-looking gecko that slithered out from the linen robes.

           “Dude!” Leo said. Within seconds, he’d created a cage from scattered paperclips and quick finger-welding. He snatched up our transformed friend. He leveled the cage with the trapped lizard to his eyes. “I know you’re saying, ‘I-guana go now,” he said to the trapped lizard. “But we can’t have you escaping. Hey, Lady Sadie, what was that stuff he was talking about?”

           Leo attached the tiny cage to his tool belt and stepped towards the shack.

           We’d have to clear up all those lies later. I was still rather upset about the deaths of the previous Chief Lectors, especially since Iskandar had been nothing but kind to me and Desjardins died to save Carter and me. What he was referencing were lies that Sarah Jacobi had spread to make my family look like rubbish. It was amazing how much damage someone could cause after death, though, after stopping a poorly-dressed ghost from taking over the cosmos, I shouldn’t have been surprised.  

           “Oh, just some gossip our enemies spread to make us look like Big Bad Guys. You know how it goes.”

           Leo nodded sympathetically. “I was possessed by an eidolon once and it made me attack our friends’ camp with a warship. One ballista fire led to another, and then all the Romans are saying Greeks stink. So, uh, yea. I know a thing or two about bad press.”

           Although it sounded like that had happened awhile ago, Leo’s smile lost its brilliance.

           “We should have a chat about that over some ice cream,” I suggested, knowing some solid camaraderie over possession might lift his spirits. My Uncle Amos was an expert in such matters.

           Leo stopped walking towards the shack. He glanced over his shoulder in confusion and disbelief, like he thought I had chatted up one of the tumble weeds, which—with Set and Jason’s storm—were twirling in the air like startled goldfish.

           “Trapped goddess, “I reminded Leo, “Your friend fighting for our lives so Set doesn’t make us into finger puppets?” I dispelled a booby trap around the shack: sloppy and simple ones with easy-to-find hieroglyphs. Really, they don’t make clever, monomaniacal villains like they used to.

           The poor boy’s cheeks roughened. I do have that effect on people sometimes, though usually it’s because I’ve utterly humiliated them with my verbal wit. Although the scene of chaos around us was terrifying—what with the crashing debris, the flashes of lighting, and the dim glow of fire on Leo’s face from his lit hand—Leo looked quite cute.

           [What, Carter? Yes. I said it. Yes, I know Walt and Anubis can listen to this recording. Give me more credit than that.]

           As he ran to catch up, he said, “Careful. I’ve melted the heart of an Ice Goddess once. I’m dangerous around ice cream.”

           “We’ll have ourselves a double date, shall we? We can invite our godly boyfriend and girlfriend,” I suggested. I was going to say “to keep things from getting too hot,” but caught myself before those horrid words came out of my mouth. I really didn’t mean anything by that.

           I blame my embarrassment for almost doing something incorrigibly stupid.

           Leo and I busted our way into the shack door, which, really, we didn’t need to do. The shack almost fell over when we came through the entrance. Inside, the rattle of the ceiling as it strained against the storm was more alarming than the storm itself. Refer back to “don’t make monomaniacal villains like they used to” and add, “don’t make godly traps like they used to.”

           The wall and ceiling boards looked just as rickety and dilapidated inside as they did out. Talk about horror cinema center. There was a rusty, metal control board, like something out an old radio station, with levers and a giant red button that said Release and a giant green one that said Capture.

           A woman lay in the center of the red sand floor. Her dusty blonde hair rippled dimly, like sunlight filtering through a dirty window. The remains of a tattered sundress clung to her body, the color indiscernible in the glow of Leo’s fire. Heavy chains linked her hands and feet to the floor. Red wires ran from the chains to the control board.

           I’ll admit it: I walked right up to the control board to hit the giant red button.

           Obviously a trap? Highly likely.

           Did I care? I might have been a bit too flustered and distracted. Besides, I’d rather press first and handle consequences later.

           Leo grabbed my wrist before I could make contact. “Woah, Ladie Sadie, seriously? The Big Red Release button set up by two gods of chaos?”

           “What’s your plan instead?” I asked.

           The goddess drearily lifted her head at our voices. This Hemera looked downright knackered and I had the queer feeling Set had already started to picnic on her powers. She was lovely, as most goddesses tended to be. (If you can make yourself look like anything, why look any less than gorgeous, like my stupid boyfriend Anubis.) Her eyes appeared black in the darkness.

           “Who goes there?” she asked weakly and quite delayed.

           “Professional heroes. Saving the day and whatnot,” I said.

           “Just make sure you give us a Five Star Rating on RateMyHero, Madam Daylight,” Leo said. He sounded distracted as he looked over her chains. “Huh,” he said and snapped off a piece of the wire connecting the chains to the control panel.

           “What are you doing?!” I demanded. That, supposedly, was the way to unlock those chains.

           He grinned and popped the wire into his mouth and began to chew.

           Any previous attraction I felt for this demigod zapped away. Had he been switched out with a monster without me noticing? Or were all Greeks secretly this loony? Or was magical wiring secretly delicious?

           “It’s pieces of Twizzlers, the kind you can peel apart,” he said. “These chains aren’t actually hooked up.”

           Leo examined the control panel. He withdrew a screwdriver from his belt. With a few quick flicks of the wrist, he’d removed the front, metal covering to reveal a stack of dynamite underneath the Release button. He pointed to the wires connecting the button to the dynamite. “Those,” he said, “are real wires.”

           I blinked at the dynamite. The sight was so foreign, it almost looked cartoony. Despite being around so many ancient weapons and dangerous spells, it suddenly hit me how rarely I had seen modern-day weapons. We didn’t really do the gun thing in Britain and we didn’t have any modern weapons at Brooklyn House.

           “Ah, explosives,” I finally managed, “Well, that’s not very… magical or demigodly.”

           He withdrew the panel beside it to reveal some kind of net-system under the Capture button, something that looked primed to latch around a mammoth.

           “At least they’re honest about their advertising,” Leo said about the names of the buttons. “Eris doesn’t really seem to play on the normal demigod or magical level.”

           “So, if we’re not going to use the Big Red Button to open the chains, how do we open the chains? I don’t see a keyhole or even a break in the metal,” I asked, running through a list of spell words. Without a seam in the metal, the word “open” wouldn’t do anything. I had a few ideas, but, judging from how sturdy the shack was and the dynamite a few feet away, I feared I might blow us all up. I was good at that.

           “You can’t!” Hemera said. Her voice was weak. I had the distinct feeling she would put the back of her hand to her forehead if she had the strength. “The Spartans made these to trap Ares.” When she tried to lift a hand, the chains shimmered with red Greek writing. “He never found a way out. Sparta had to be destroyed to release him!”

           “Yea, well, I have something Ares didn’t,” Leo said. He tapped the work goggles out of his hair and over his eyes.

           Hemera looked Leo up and down skeptically. “The strength of Hercules?” She sounded hopeful.

           I choked on a laugh. As much as I liked the Latino Elf, he definitely didn’t have that.

           Leo reached into his magical tool belt and withdrew a circular saw with a glittering black blade and what appeared to be a massive battery packet. He grinned, snapping the battery packet into the saw, looking like a crazed serial killer. “Power tools.”

           Ah, the grand words of greatness from Admiral Leo. Some people make speeches about freedom. Some about justice. Leo about garage implements.

           [Carter thinks Leo was mental for thinking power tools could work on magical chains, but has Carter given real thought to magical power tools? Besides, Leo said he’d done this before on a different goddess’ cage. Carter just thinks Leo said that to chat me up.]

           As Leo’s saw whined to life, I fished through my supplies to withdraw a minor healing potion that Jazz, our healer, had made me. I popped off the top and offered it to Hemera, partially because she looked like she’d been through three of my brother’s lectures on the importance of dairy in Egyptian mythology, and partially because it kept her from staring in horror at the maniac demigod sawing so close to her skin.

           She was too weak to reach out. I propped her up in my lap to give her the potion and so Leo wouldn’t accidentally decapitate the poor woman in his power tool mania.

           I wasn’t sure how a magician’s potion would heal a goddess, but she seemed to perk up.

           “So, when we’re done releasing you,” I shouted over the whine of the saw and the scream when it touched the metal, “You can god your way over to Nyx and sort this kidnapping nonsense out? And maybe tell your godly mates to help Camp Half-Blood?”

           One of the shackles fell away from Hemera’s wrist. Apparently Ares’ chains were no match for the Valdezinator. Take that as a point towards brains over brawn.

           Hemera’s skin seemed to glow a bit brighter, though her head stayed lolled off to one side. She mouthed something, but her voice was too weak to be heard over the sawing.

           When the second chain fell and Leo went to shove his saw back into his tool belt, I could hear her say, “I can’t, young heroine. I don’t have the energy. Set has been feeding off me for too long. Alas, since I am no longer worshipped, I can’t recover my powers in a timely manner.”

           The last part sounded more like an apology for bollixing a dinner party invitation. I thought about the gods that I had seen at Sunny Acres Assisted Living Community, how their memories would fade with the memories of their worshipers, falling into senility as they were forgotten. I envisioned this pretty goddess in a smock with a walker and I felt a bit nauseous. Watching something immortal dying is nasty business.

           “Let’s get you out of here,” I suggested. I could give her a pep-talk later.

           For now, I slipped one hand under her arm to pull her up. Leo got her other side so we could drag her out of the shack. Not the most efficient way, having two tiny godlings lugging a goddess around, but we managed.

           Just in time too.

           As we exited the sad excuse for a building, a boy-and-horse-wrecking-ball catapulted into the roof of the shack. Instead of stopping there, like a good ball of destruction, it continued through, taking the roof and walls with it. The dynamite-rigged control box and chains were shockingly still intact, sitting out in the open as the rest of the building smashed into the side of Camel Dung Mountain. It exploded up in a poof of dust that got swept away by the storm. Hopefully that puff didn’t also contain scattered Jason particles.

           Dark laughter echoed around the desert.

           The flashes of lightning grew closer, brighter. A massive vortex of sand rose to our level on the mountain, making it look like the mountain itself was crumbling into the sandy floor. Because the light from Leo’s fire only extended a few meters, the storm look like it had encompassed the world.

           “Oh, that was fun, Pretty Boy!” Lapis and Set’s voices combined into one. They twirled the flaming battle axe in an arc around the dust storm. “Tossing you is almost as much fun as tossing Tuft-Ears!”

           Jason groaned out an answer. His horse had dissolved into a burst of lightning and was sparking back into horse shape further up the mountain. It didn’t look excited to be tossed again.

           Jason drearily dragged himself from the wreckage. He was bleeding from his mouth. His shirt sleeve and half his shirt had been burned away, and—in the dim lighting—it looked like the skin under had some nasty blisters. As he fished his gladius out of the debris, his left arm dangled uselessly behind him.

           Tenacious bloke, that one.

           Set’s host didn’t look like he was going to win a beauty pageant anytime soon either. Lapis’s eye was puffy from being hit. Blood soaked his right pant leg. His face had grown ashen and, despite the laugh, he grimaced in pain. Sand stuck to his face with the beaded sweat.

           This reminded me of when Uncle Amos tried to control Set: Lapis was struggling.

           “I’m ready to kill you now, if you don’t mind,” Set said, seeming not to notice his host’s pain.

           Last time I fought Set, I opened a portal to transport us out of the desert and plop us in Washington, D. C. And I had his secret name. However, last time, he hadn’t made an agreement at the start of the fight.

           I crossed my arms like an irritated mother—something I’d learned scarily well from Isis. “That would be a bit fussy, don’t you think?”

           “Killing you? I count on it!”

           “No, going back on a promise,” I said. “I’d say it’s been five minutes.”

           I had no proof, but clamoring up Mount Camel Dung in the dark felt like an eternity.

           A smirk slid onto Set’s face. “And how would you know, Little Sadie?”

           “We timed it,” Leo said.

           I thought he was reaching into his pocket for a watch and wanted to hug the demigod for his forethought. Instead, he withdrew two screws, a silver disk, a chain, some wires, and a small, flashing light from his tool belt, keeping his hands partially inside so only I could see the components. His fingers flashed overtop and, within seconds, he was presenting Set the most garage-style pocket watch ever invented.

           Fortunately, Set was not the god of super vision.

           Leo pointed to the blinking light. “See Ol’ Blinky here? It means the timer went off.”

           I wanted to hug Leo for a trait I valued much more than forethought: quick-thinking.

           “A deal is a deal,” I said.

           Set pouted. “Oh, come now, Sadie. At least let me rend the flesh from one of their bodies.”

           “Nope!” I put one finger up and waved it back and forth. “No flesh rending. Bad Set. Taking us back to our friends? Good Set.”

           He bellowed a laugh. “Assuming your friends are alive. Now, why do you think I picked five minutes?”

           The fire on his Egyptian axe poofed out. The dust storm started to die, lowering him several inches closer. Now that I was able to hear a little better, I could tell Lapis was panting.

           “You wanted enough time for a commercial break?” Leo guessed.

           “Because that’s exactly the amount of time it would take me to burn through Lapis’ life force if I didn’t give her enough extra power,” Set grinned. “Good luck getting to your friends in time.”

           Then his face went slack and his eyes closed.

           The dust storm collapsed.

           Lapis, and our chances of a quick ride out of here, fell out of the sky and plummeted to the bottom of Mount Camel Dung, unconscious.

Sorry for the missed chapters, guys. Admittedly, I’m trying to figure out the end of the series right now and none of my characters (or my own writing) is cooperating, so I lost some steam to get chapters out.

Regardless, i hope you enjoyed!!! I will try to be back to our normal output next week!

(As a quick hint-hint, one of the reasons I’m struggling with the end is because of a new project I started that i think you’ll all really enjoy! :D)