The image horrified her. She felt like running down the silent corridor and screaming at the top of her lungs for help, but she checked the impulse. Nobody would want to assist her, and they wouldn’t like it if she made trouble. Her mind flitted back to the compound where she had been raised. There was an older woman there who fell into fits. Some said she was possessed. The elders sent her away to a place where she was given medicine to make her quiet. She never came back. There were other wives too who became discontented, but they weren’t sent away. They were given medicine at the compound. Whenever Hannah talked to one of these women, she always got the feeling that some part of them had left anyway. Maybe they had turned into birds too.
Her eyes welled up with tears of despair. She was sure they would freeze as they streamed down the sides of her face, so she made no move to brush them away. Her arms remained pressed against her sides. Hannah imagined she was lying in her coffin instead of a bed. It must be a coffin because she felt a deathlike numbness creeping over her limbs. She expected that in time the numbness would spread to her heart and extinguish the spark there. She could still feel it flickering now, but she wondered how long before the light would go out completely.
Could hell be any worse than this? She remembered Annabeth’s terrified warning that she mustn’t think such things. A new notion struck her. Could the Fallen Lands be any worse than this? She almost gasped at the boldness of the question and what it implied. If she tried to run, she would be entirely alone in the world. But wasn’t she alone already? If she tried to run, she would surely be damned. Didn’t she feel damned already? The numbness crept upward toward her heart urging her to choose the kind of hell that suited her best. She would have to decide soon before there was nothing of herself left to save.
Chapter 27 – Quartz Calendar Watch
“This is ridiculous,” Cassie muttered, hopping on one leg as she tried to jam her other foot into a boot. It was still dark. More than an hour before dawn. She knew she was the last one up. Racing down the stairs, she caught up with the rest of the Arkana team, minus Stefan, in the courtyard. They were preparing to make the journey back to the calendar stones.
The pythia did a double-take when she looked at Erik and Fred. “Did you guys call each other up to decide what to wear today?”
The two men were both wearing blue jeans, yellow shirts, and white jogging shoes. Even though Fred was several inches taller than Erik, they were both blond. The effect was disconcerting.
Fred laughed self-consciously, but Erik chose to ignore the remark. The security coordinator addressed Griffin instead. “Now are you gonna tell us what this is about?”
“All will be revealed in time,” the scrivener replied evenly as he climbed into the back of the Jeep.
For the past twenty-four hours, the Brit had been in constant communication with his staff at the Central Catalog. Most of what his teammates could glean from his telephone conversations consisted of gibberish. Numbers and dates flew back and forth in some sort of coded language. Whenever the trio asked for an explanation, their questions were met by a brusque, “No time now. I’ll tell you later.”
With nothing better to do, Fred, Cassie, and Erik loitered around the hotel grounds until it was time to bid Stefan farewell. The trove keeper packed his artifact and departed almost as abruptly as he had arrived. During this interval, Griffin emerged from his teleconference only long enough to tell the team they would be driving back to the calendar stones before dawn.
Now that they were actually in motion, Cassie felt as if she was riding a roller coaster inside a tunnel. Her queasiness after reading the dagger hadn’t entirely subsided and bouncing along in the Jeep brought it rushing back. She fought off repeated attacks of dizziness and nausea as the vehicle trundled over rutted dirt trails in utter darkness. The headlights barely illuminated the road directly ahead of them much less the surrounding landscape. It was a good thing Fred knew where they were going. With no way to gauge their progress, Cassie lost track of time though they must have been traveling through the forest for over an hour. Just when her stomach was about to erupt in earnest, the vehicle came to a halt. Cassie breathed a shaky sigh of relief. They’d made it.
The pythia slid out of the truck and waited for the world to stop spinning. By the time it did, the others were already climbing the trail that led back to the megaliths. She scurried to catch up with the three flashlights bobbing ahead of her.
The team paused briefly at the top of the rise above the tree line. Now that they were out of the pines, Cassie could see a huge swath of stars twinkling overhead. A sliver of moon hung low in the sky, but its light was too weak to afford much help. Off to their right lay the plateau where the giant stones waited. Griffin trained his lantern on the megaliths and descended. The others followed in silence until he came to an abrupt stop in the center of the stone ring.
“Now what?” Cassie asked, bringing up the rear.
“Now we wait for the sun,” the scrivener replied.
Orienting himself toward the mountain peaks that ran off in a straight line to the east, Griffin chose a grassy patch of earth and sat down. The others followed his lead. They
