She was so focused on the healer’s face, she didn’t notice the knife Dolos slid from his belt. Didn’t have time to stop him as he plunged the blade into her gut.
Blood seeped into the snow, dark as ink against the dazzling whiteness.
Gasping, Danae staggered back and slumped against a tree, her lungs constricted in agony.
“I’m sorry,” Dolos whispered, his knife glistening. “You should never have followed me here.”
Pain blurred her vision. With each breath her stomach felt like it was being ripped apart.
Dolos stepped back, his knife still raised between them. “I will tell Heracles the truth. That you deceived him, that your powers are far from divine, that you would have been his destruction had I not stopped you.”
Moaning in agony, she tried to press down on her wound and hold her life-threads inside her, but they were slipping away like the blood spilling through her fingers. She was diminishing, her energy weaving back into the world, into the earth, the grass, the trees.
Thetrees.
She’d seen it in every vision, the tapestry of life that circulated through all living things. Not just mortals and animals, everything that lived.
Fighting each excruciating heave of her chest, she placed a bloody hand on the trunk behind her and felt for the tree’s life-threads. They did not come willingly as the panther’s and the harpy’s had done. They resisted as she reached out her will to grasp them. The tree was healthy, it was not the time for these strands to pass back into the tapestry of life. But she had to consume them, or she would die.
Danae ground her teeth against the pain as she strained, pouring every ounce of her strength, mental and physical, into sucking the tree’s life-threads into her palm. Finally, they answered her call, rising through the bark to pierce her skin. Once the connection was made, they flowed freely, like water bursting through a dam, and with as deep a breath as she could muster, she drew them into her.
“What are you doing?” Dolos’s face tightened with fear.
In her periphery she could see pine needles dropping as the branches withered. It was different, absorbing the life of a tree. A slow and steady glow of warmth rather than a heady rush. But just as before, her wounds knitted together and the pain in her gut faded away.
She leaped to her feet, a storm of rage erupting inside her as she imagined the twisted words spewing from Dolos’s mouth, the horror and hatred spreading across Heracles’s face.
Dolos stared, his jaw slack with terror, then he turned to run.
But he was not fast enough.
He must be silenced, the voice commanded.
She threw out her arms, whipping up a gust of wind so strong the healer was thrown across the clearing into the trees beyond. There was a sickening crack. She faltered, and the wind died.
“Dolos?”
There was no sound, save for the rustling of pine needles.
She ran toward him. The healer lay crumpled, face down at the base of a tree. Trembling, she rolled him over.
His skull was split down to his nose, blood trickling between his sightless eyes. She placed her hand on his chest and felt for his life-threads. They were already gone.
Her ears rang. What had she done?
She staggered back and almost tripped over the dead body of the shade. As she stared down at its mottled gray skin, realization sank into her bones.
Dolos had been working for Zeus, and the shade presumably had brought him Heracles’s medicine on the god’s command.
The shades were servants of the Twelve.
And that meant the Olympians were responsible for the Missing. Rage speared her heart as she thought of Arius, of her family ripped apart by the gods.
Run, said the voice.Run while you still can.
She picked up the healer’s bloody knife and the bag of strength elixir and sprinted back toward the camp.
By the time she reached the tents she knew what she must do.
