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.
揥hat the棓
揝hhh!?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.
揥hat the hell is this??Marie looked around frantically. 揂 pig??
揂 boar, and they are aggressive,?Persephone said. 揤ery, 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梠ne for me and one for Marie梐nd left the rest on the beach. We backed away to the tree line as the giant boar continued to sniff around.
揑 knew we were going to come across some strange stuff, but hairy pigs wasn抰 on my bingo card of weird things we might run into,?I said. Mermaids and living gods hadn抰 been on that list either, but there we were. Suddenly, giant wild pigs didn抰 seem so strange.
揟he original Circe turned Odysseus抯 men into boars,?Persephone said. 揝he supposedly changed them back, but now I wonder 厰 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抰 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梬hy should this last piece be any different? If it wasn抰 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.
揥e抣l keep a steady heading,?she said. 揥e don抰 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抮e 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抎 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抰 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抎 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抰 as easy for me to identify.
Ivy, Dutchman抯-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.
揟his cannot be happening,?she said angrily. She stomped ahead, and as the trees thinned, we found ourselves on the beach again, this time on the opposite side of the island.
Marie let out a string of choice words while Persephone simply looked up at the sky and closed her eyes.
揥ell, obviously this isn抰 it,?I said. 揕et抯 turn around and go back in at another angle.?
I clenched my jaw and tried to quiet the voice in my head that reminded me this was yet another setback, another waste of our precious time.