DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

and the two of them slid down the small embankment at the edge of the road. They heard the car engine start, heard the car drive away.

They looked at each other.

And started up the hill.

19

The other maenads were waiting for her when she arrived back at the meadow.

April staggered toward them across the littered ground, acting drunker than she felt. They knew. They’d somehow discovered her plan and were waiting to kill her. She wished she’d brought some type of weapon. The power was within her, coiled and ready to be unleashed, but it was in them as well, and they outnumbered her.

Where was Margeaux? Janine and Sheila and Margaret were in front of her, standing together, but Margeaux was nowhere in sight. She glanced surreptitiously to her left, to her right. No Margeaux. Sneaking up on her probably, planning to grab her from behind.

She looked warily from Janine’s face to Sheila’s to Margaret’s.

Margaret smiled as she approached. “You did it,” she said. “You brought her to Olympus.”

April blinked.

They didn’t know!

“Yes,” she said, keeping her voice slow, slurred, calm.

“You’re the only one who could’ve done it,” Sheila said. “She doesn’t trust us anymore.”

Janine grinned lasciviously, rubbed her lactating breasts. “You deserve to be rewarded.” She dropped to her knees, motioned April forward.

April took a deep breath, sidled next to her, felt the other woman’s soft hands caress her thighs.

It was now or never.

She looked down at Janine, ran her hands through the kneeling woman’s hair.

And twisted off her head.

The others were too stunned to react, and before Janine’s spurting body had hit the ground, April was already clawing at Sheila’s breasts, ripping through skin, ripping through flesh, ripping through muscle. Margaret attacked her from behind, but she was already turning to meet the onslaught, and the three of them went down in a wailing, slashing frenzy of tooth and nail.

“How could you?” a voice screamed at her. “We’re your sisters!”

“He’s my son!” she cried.

She’d thought it was Margaret screaming at her, but as she rolled away from the body on top of her, spitting blood, she realized that Margaret was dead. It was her own voice she’d heard. She’d been screaming at herself.

She was growing weaker by the second, and she used all of the strength within her to sit up on her elbows.

There was a hole ripped through her abdomen.

In front of her, Sheila was coughing, still alive, but the coughs were weak, and one of them caught in her throat and then she was silent.

April fell back onto the grass, looking upward at the sky.

She closed her eyes, feeling the last of her strength ebb out of her.

“Dion,” she whispered.

20

The hike was tougher than she’d expected, the distance farther, and as the midday sun shone down on them and her head started to ache, she wished she’d saved the wine until after they’d reached their destination.

An hour later, as they began following a winding footpath up a fairly steep slope, the vegetation started to change. The trees thinned out, the underbrush grew scarce, and ordinary flora was replaced by wildly colored plants with strangely designed forms: magenta cacti with round umbrella-shaped leaves; Day-Glo yellow ground cover grown into intricate doily patterns; bright orange shrubs with arrowhead-tipped leaves.

“I guess we’re on the right track,” Kevin said.

Penelope nodded. She did not feel like talking. Whatever sense of humor she possessed had fled, and she thought of nothing but the grim task before them.

And Mother Felice.

More than anything, she was doing this for her mother.

Halfway up the hill, they heard screaming. Loud, short bursts of what sounded like unbearable agony. A few minutes later, they saw the source of the cries: Father Ibarra, the Catholic priest, was chained to a rock on the hillside. An oversize eagle was perched on the boulder next to him, pecking at his exposed abdomen in even intervals as the priest screamed in agony.

Kevin picked up a rock, threw it at the bird. It hit the boulder just below the eagle’s talons. The bird did not flinch. Kevin glanced toward Penelope. “Should we try to help him?”

Penelope shook her head. “We can’t help. It’s the god’s punishment. There’s nothing we can do.”

They ignored the screams, continued on.

Twenty minutes later, they reached the top.

They emerged from between two mutated pink palm trees. Penelope walked slowly forward, wiping the sweat from her face. This was Olympus? She had expect Greek buildings, green fields, flowers. Instead, there we bodies floating on the lake and, several yards down, cluster of rude huts made from plywood and dead branches.

Dionysus was nowhere in sight.

“What do we do now?” Kevin asked. “Wait for him to show up?”

“We find him,” Penelope said.

They started walking along the shore of the lake toward the huts. The water was dirty, brown, polluted not only with bodies but with the wreckage of boats. The mi smelled of sewage.

Kevin gagged, plugged his nose.

The plants were no longer as brightly spectacular they had been on the climb up. They were still strange but the colors seemed off, the bold designs closer to mutations than miracles. It was as if the closer they came the center of the wheel, the closer they got to the god, more things seemed as though they were beginning to unravel.

They trudged silently through the sludge until they reached the small assemblage of makeshift structures! Here, bodies were not only floating in the water, they were buried in the mud, stiffened arms acting as post supporting the bottoms of plywood walls. The stagnant air seemed unusually heavy, the atmosphere forbidding.

What had happened? It had not been like this when she’d seen Dionysus before. Then the atmosphere had been festive, seductively hedonistic, the opposite of dour oppressiveness. Was he spreading himself too? Was he losing his power because of some inner struggle? Was he simply too drunk and dissipated to function properly?

Or had he intended his new Olympus to look like this? No, she didn’t think so. She walked forward slowly. The huts