This Wicked Fate (This Poison Heart #2)(68)
We ate until we were stuffed and sleepy. The terrible events of the journey to the island began to fade. Persephone took first watch, and I curled up next to Marie as I waited for sleep to find me.
CHAPTER 18
We don’t have a dog.
That was my first thought when I heard the noise, before my eyes fluttered open, before I remembered that we weren’t at home, and that of course we didn’t have a dog because Mom was deathly allergic. Mom wasn’t there at all because …
I opened my eyes.
A furry, snorting snout, wet and wriggling, was just inches from my face. The musty smell of dirt invaded my nose, and I yelped as I scrambled to my feet. Persephone caught me by the arm and slipped her hand over my mouth.
“Be quiet,” she whispered. “Do not make any sudden moves.”
The boar rooting around our camp was the size of a small car. Its stubby legs sat atop jagged hooves, and a pair of razor-sharp tusks curled out of its upper lip. Its beady black eyes focused on the ground in front of it where it was turning up the dirt.
Marie still slept soundly on the blanket. Circe stirred, and Persephone slowly reached for her ankle. As her eyes opened she rolled to a sitting position and looked around.
“What the—”
“Shhh!” Persephone chided. She roughly pressed her index finger to her lips in a plea for silence.
Circe reached over and shook Marie, who woke up, saw the creature, and got up so quickly all I saw was her terrified face, and then she was standing behind me.
“What the hell is this?” Marie looked around frantically. “A pig?”
“A boar, and they are aggressive,” Persephone said. “Very, very aggressive. We need to get moving anyway.”
Circe slowly moved to her case of poisons and pocketed several vials. She picked up the two cages and handed one to Persephone. We slowly packed up everything that could fit in two backpacks—one for me and one for Marie—and left the rest on the beach. We backed away to the tree line as the giant boar continued to sniff around.
“I knew we were going to come across some strange stuff, but hairy pigs wasn’t on my bingo card of weird things we might run into,” I said. Mermaids and living gods hadn’t been on that list either, but there we were. Suddenly, giant wild pigs didn’t seem so strange.
“The original Circe turned Odysseus’s men into boars,” Persephone said. “She supposedly changed them back, but now I wonder …” She trailed off, lost in her thoughts.
I took out the moon clock from the side pocket of my bag. The waxing gibbous phase was almost over, and the full moon was set to rise. We only had a day and a half left.
I took the vial of Living Elixir and the invisibility potion from my bag and put them in my pocket for safekeeping. Doubt crept in and seeded itself in my gut once more. We weren’t even a 100 percent sure the last piece of the Heart was on the island. Everything had led to this, but the other pieces had made their way to the ends of the earth—why should this last piece be any different? If it wasn’t there, we had no time to make other plans. It was all or nothing.
Persephone looked at the sky through the canopy of leaves high above us, then back at the shoreline before it disappeared from view.
“We’ll keep a steady heading,” she said. “We don’t have a map, so we might have to come back across the island in a kind of grid. Just pay attention to the trees. If they start to thin we’re probably heading to the coast, not the center of the island.”
We all nodded in silent agreement and started our trek into the forest in search of the last piece of the Absyrtus Heart.
The forest on Aeaea was unlike anything I’d ever seen. The tightly packed trees at the Ravine back in Brooklyn, even the vast forest behind the house in Rhinebeck, were nothing compared to this place. It was full of foliage that didn’t belong on the same continent much less crowded together on an island in the middle of the Black Sea.
Ancient olive trees stood like sentries, their twisted, gnarled trunks a testament to their age. They’d almost certainly been there when Circe and Medea roamed these woods, and now they were watching us follow paths that no mortal had seen in thousands of years. Alongside the olive groves were massive Antarctic beech trees draped in damp moss, towering cannonball trunks with fruited bark, and haunting skeletal cypress. I knew them all, but the island sheltered species of trees and flowers that weren’t as easy for me to identify.
Ivy, Dutchman’s-Pipe, towering willow trees shrouded in curtains of Spanish moss, grew intertwined with short flowering bushes dotted with apricot-colored leaves, magenta blossoms, and long quill-like darts grouped at the center. There were trees running with sapphire-blue sap that smelled faintly of mint but that stung my nose and back of my throat so bad I almost coughed up a lung. A fallen tree trunk was festooned with something that looked almost identical to the Dioscorea dodecaneura, a rare plant with heart-shaped leaves, only these had clusters of cerulean florets protruding from their stems. They yawned open to reveal tiny gatherings of garnet-colored spines.
The sun was still slanting through the canopy as we made a slow march toward what we thought would be the center of the island, but the light was slowly dying. After what felt like hours, a familiar sound filtered through the trees. Circe heard it, too, and stopped abruptly, shoving her hand down on her hip.