We rushed to the white fence and looked over the side.
My stomach lurched. The griffin was perched at the bottom level, its lion legs coiled. Beyond it, the cliff dropped off to the sea.
With a thrust of its wings, the beast surged toward the stairs and closed its talons on the shoulders of a black-haired monk. He screamed, his arms and legs flailing, as the griffin lifted him into the air.
We watched in horror as it flew northward along the cliffs. For the first time, I noticed that the cliff face was pocked with holes as far as the eye could see. The griffin with its prey flew directly toward one of them and disappeared inside. Aly gasped and turned away.
“I guess that’s its dining room,” Marco said.
Aly’s eyes were like saucers. I knew what she was thinking.
Cass might be in one of those caves, too.
Marco spun around, running directly into the swarm of fleeing monks. “Did you see our friend?” he asked the crowd. “A kid! Thirteen years old! Does anybody speak English here? Did you see where that thing took our friend?”
“Careful, Marco!” I shouted.
“Don’t worry, I’m immortal, remember?” Most of the monks were bouncing off Marco, not paying his words any attention. “Doesn’t somebody speak English here?”
Aly grabbed my arm and began pulling me through the crowd, toward the greenhouse. “Jack, look at this,” she said. “Look what’s in there.”
As we approached the glass-walled building, I could see enormous piles of stone rubble inside. They rose into jagged peaks high overhead.
“Look closely at those stones,” she said. “They’re sculpted. Pieces of statues. Like these guys have been scouring the world for every ruined relic they could get their hands on.”
She was right. Each piece had a carved side, as if it had been broken off a larger statue. There were piles of arms, legs, feet, heads…
A hand.
Aly and I both saw it at the same moment—the unmistakable shape of a giant broken hand, reaching upward as if it was supposed to be holding something. Like a torch.
“Jack, what if this is the—” Before Aly could finish, two fleeing monks barreled into her. She spun and fell, her head hitting the dirt, and the men landed smack on top of her.
The three of them scuffled. I grabbed on to one of the monks, who must have weighed two hundred pounds. He had stringy, shoulder-length hair, and his eyes were circles of panic. He yanked me downward, yelling in Greek. We fell to the ground, rolling to a stop near Aly. He grabbed me by the neck and started to squeeze. Hard. I gasped for air. My eyesight started to fade.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Aly knee the other monk in the groin. As he howled and curled up, she sprang to her feet, racing around behind my attacker. “Get your hands off him!”
She yanked the monk backward by the hair. He screamed and loosened his grip. Scrambling away, I swung my legs around to clip his ankle.
He fell with a thud as his head hit the hard-packed dirt. He was out for the count.
It took a moment for me to regain my breath. I stood carefully, still wary of the monk stampede. From their midst, Marco emerged, running toward us.
“Are you okay, Aly?” he asked.
She stood, staring down at her own palm. Her mouth hung open in shock. “Guys, look,” she said, turning her hand toward us.
Her palm was streaked with white, like she’d grabbed on to a freshly painted picket fence. “It’s from him,” she said. Her eyes traveled to the ground, to where my attacker now lay unconscious on his stomach.
The white lambda on the back of his head was smudged.
It had been painted on.
“These guys are fakes,” she said. “They’re not really Selects.”
Marco nodded. “Shoulda known. They’re not cool enough.”
A massive shadow swept over us. I glanced up to see the griffin soaring overhead.
A rifle crack rang out, and the tip of the griffin’s wing shattered into a spray of feathers. As I spun to look, a man in a black, embroidered robe was descending the stairs. At the top, ranged along the lip of the first ledge, three other monks knelt, their rifles pointing outward.
“Stop that!” Marco cried out, running across the plateau toward the stairs.
Aly and I followed. The man barked an order to his henchman. Then he turned to Marco and asked something in Greek.
“Do you speak English?” Marco said. “That thing has one of my friends. We think it took him into a cave. If you shoot it, we’ll never find him!”
“English?” The man narrowed his eyes. He had a deep voice, his Greek accent inflected with British. “I am Brother Dimitrios. Who are you?”
“Brother Marco,” Marco shot back.
The man cocked his head curiously. “From the New York or the Los Angeles Massarene?”
I shot Aly a look. Massarene?
Marco blinked. “Uh—the Akron, Ohio?” he said.
Brother Dimitrios eyed us warily. Then one of the henchmen began yelling, pointing south along the cliff wall. The griffin’s wound had been only a graze, and it was coming back for another pass.
The men aimed their rifles. But the griffin never came in range. It soared below us and disappeared into another of the cliffside caves.
“By the Great Qalani,” Brother Dimitrios said under his breath. “How many prisoners has it taken?”
I shot Aly a glance. She’d heard him say it, too.
Brother Dimitrios began shouting instructions in Greek to his henchmen. Two of them ran toward the cliff, disappearing through the door leading inside. The other man came down the steps, urging all the monks to follow him.
“What are they saying, Brother Dimitrios?” I demanded.
He ignored me, his eyes focused on something over my shoulder. I turned to see the griffin rising into the air once more.
This time, it flew straight toward us.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
TWEETY RETURNS
WE WERE TOAST. Aly, Marco, and I dove for the ground. We hit the dirt where the greenhouselike building met the cliff wall.
But the griffin passed right over us. It flew at the side of the cliff, digging its talons into the wall above our heads. A clod of dirt and rock shook loose.
Letting out a ferocious cry, it sprang away and attacked the wall a second time.
“It’s trying to get inside!” I shouted. “It wants something in there.”
“Something that starts with L and ends in oculus,” Marco said.
The cliff wall shook again. We had to roll away to avoid being crushed by an avalanche of rocks and dirt.
My mind was racing. Cass was unreachable. The Loculus was ungettable. For a split second I thought about Dad. About how he always said a problem was an answer waiting to be opened.
Help me, Dad, I thought.
As the griffin attacked the wall for a third time, I heard another rifle shot from above us. One of Brother Dimitrios’s men was on his knees by an olive oil urn, pointing the rifle down at the griffin.
The griffin landed just a few yards from us, roaring angrily. The man quickly descended the steps. He planted his feet at the base of the staircase and shot a third time. We all flinched. As the bullet penetrated the griffin’s skin, the beast cocked its head at the shooter. It took two quick steps toward him and lashed out with its wing. The rifleman tried to scramble away, but he wasn’t fast enough.
He tumbled forward and disappeared over the edge. His scream made my stomach churn.
The griffin didn’t seem concerned about either the monk or its own bullet wound. It paused a moment, looking toward the caves to the north. I didn’t have to be an expert on griffin facial expressions to know that it was hungry. It had its own problem. It needed the Loculus, but it also needed to eat.
In that moment, I knew exactly what to do.
“If the Loculus is in there,” I said, “we have to help the griffin get it.”
“What?” Aly said at the same tim
e.
“It’s programmed to get the Loculus,” I said. “It’s going to do that first—and I say we let it. But look. It’s starving. My bet is that once it has the Loculus it will head off for a meal.”
“Yeah, fillet of Cass!” Marco added.
“Exactly,” I said. “We just have to get to him before it does.”
“Awesome, dude!” Marco said. “We can scale the cliff!”
Aly whirled on him. “And how do you suggest we do that, Mr. Immortal? Rappel down with our shoestrings? There are dozens of caves. We’d need a week to find him!”
“I know it’s risky,” I said, “but it’s the only chance we have.”
“Uh-oh,” Marco murmured. “Heads up.”
The griffin was turning slowly, as if noticing us for the first time. It blinked, then bared a set of sharp teeth, glistening with saliva. It let out a guttural hiss that whipped up the stones from the ground.
Aly’s hand found mine and gripped it tight.
Marco’s eyes drifted upward, above the griffin’s head. He swallowed hard. “Um, Angry Bird? You can’t understand what I’m saying, but you’re some in serious trouble….”
I looked up. The two olive oil delivery guys stood at the top of the cliff, nearly a hundred feet above the griffin, balancing an enormous boulder between them.
Behind the beast, a metal door cracked open against a wall. The griffin turned its head sharply—just as the men released the boulder.
It hurtled downward, glancing against the raptor’s shoulder. Its foreleg buckled. Letting out a roar of confusion and pain, it launched itself straight upward. The olive oil men took off at a run.
As the griffin leaped, Brother Dimitrios emerged from the monastery. He began struggling up the wooden stairs toward the first level. In his arms was a huge object, covered by a gold-embroidered cloth.
Hovering in midair, the griffin turned to look.
Then it dove, shrieking, at the monk’s head. Brother Dimitrios stumbled. The object fell out of his hands and bounced downstairs with a strange, ringing sound. It rolled to a stop near the fence on the far side of the ledge.
The cloth had slid off to reveal a bronze sculpture of an enormous flame, about five feet high.
“No!” Brother Dimitrios bellowed. Wrenching free of the griffin, he threw himself down the wooden steps after the flame.
And I ran toward it, trying to get there first.
I didn’t know what a Loculus looked like. But I knew the Colossus had held a flaming torch in its hand, like the Statue of Liberty. And the griffin had been focused on Brother Dimitrios and his sculpture.
All of which meant to me that maybe the Loculus was in the sculpted flame.
Marco and Aly were right behind me. “Give it to the griffin, Brother Dimitrios!” I shouted. “Let him have it!”
“Over my dead body!” Brother Dimitrios replied. He shoved me aside, scooped up the flame, and began running, dodging the griffin as he rushed up the steps. Marco, Aly, and I dashed after him. But he stumbled as he started up the next set of stairs—and the griffin swooped down again.
The monk screamed as the griffin dug its talons into his shoulder. It shook him like a chew toy, slamming him against the wooden railing that ran along the side of the stairs. With a crack, the banister broke.
Brother Dimitrios’s robe tore and he tumbled down the stairs, landing at our feet with the flame still clutched firmly in his arms. The griffin perched above us and prepared to pounce.
“Hey, Rotten Breath!” Marco called out, leaping over the monk and running right for the griffin. “Ever play Whac-a-Griffin?”
He yanked off a section of the broken banister. Holding it over his head, he raced up the steps and brought the rail down hard on the griffin’s beak.
The beast let out a roar of pain. It fluttered its wings. It had endured bullets and a flying boulder. A bat to its schnozz was the last straw.
As Marco slipped past it and raced to the top of the cliff, it flew upward. They both disappeared out of sight on the top level where we’d first arrived.
Aly and I ran. We could hear Marco taunting the beast. It screeched back at him. I heard the crash of glass, the crunch of metal. “Marco-o-o-o!” I called out.
We emerged at the top and stopped in our tracks.
The griffin was hunched over, facing away from us, bent forward. All we could see was its massive wings and haunches. It looked like it was feeding.
There was only one thing it could be feeding on.
Marco.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THE FLAME
I COULD HEAR Marco’s voice. Shouting. He was still alive.
The creature’s back was rising and falling. I had to get him. I had to do something.
I dove for the beast’s legs. Fishing a pen out of my pocket, I jammed it into its thick foot. Green fluid spewed out, and the griffin let out a strange sound.
I backed off, scrabbling to my feet. I nearly knocked over Aly, who was standing still, staring.
She pulled me aside, farther to the left, and gestured toward the griffin. My jaw nearly clunked to the ground.
The griffin’s head was stuck in the driver-side door of the olive oil truck.
“What the—?” Aly murmured.
Marco sauntered around from the other side of the truck. “Looks like Red Rooster’s doing some window shopping.” He shrugged, grinning at our astonished faces. “Hey, all I did was dive through the driver’s side window and out the other door. Then I razzed this doofus through the window. It fell for the trick. Came straight for me. Got its head in, and now it can’t get its head out.”
“We—we thought it was eating you,” I said.
“At this rate, it’s going to have to settle for some pretty skanky seat upholstery.” As the griffin roared, lifting the truck and slamming it back to the ground, Marco slapped its haunches. “Good exercise, Tweety. You need to lose that big butt. Now, come on, campers, let’s go check on Darth Vader.”
He ran ahead, down the stairs. Aly and I glanced at the trapped griffin and then followed behind Marco. Brother Dimitrios lay semiconscious at the bottom of the steps. His henchmen had surrounded him. As we approached, they reached for their rifles. “No,” Brother Dimitrios said to the men. “They saved my life.”
I crouched next to him. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t answer the question, instead leaning in close to Marco. “May I see the back of your head, young man?”
Marco looked warily at him. “Why?”
“Is it painted?” he asked. He grasped Marco’s chin and turned his head to one side. “No, it is real. The lambda. And you two—you have it also?”
Before I could reply, Aly said, “We have a question for you, Brother Dimitrios. What is that sculpture? And why are you trying to take it away?”
The monk’s eyes flickered, blood trickling from the side of his mouth. A faint smile creasing his lips. “Touch…the flame…”
His henchmen glanced uneasily at one another. Finally one of them picked up the sculpture and brought it to me with two hands. It was nearly as tall as I was. As he set it down in front of me, he groaned with its weight.
“Touch…” Brother Dimitrios repeated.
I reached to the flame, letting my fingers graze it. It had been dented in the fall.
For a long moment nothing happened. Aly and Marco stared, baffled. From above, I could hear the pickup truck thud onto the dirt again.
From below, I heard monks shouting.
Aly turned. “Marco, Jack—look.”
One level down, the greenhouse had started glowing. It was bright enough that I had to squint. And it was getting brighter.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
MASSARYM
I TRIED TO let go of the flame, but it wouldn’t let me.
It was warming to my touch. Brother Dimitrios’s monks backed away in fright. Without really thinking, I cupped both hands around the base of the flame and pulled it toward me. I wasn’t su
re why. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
The metal flame felt weightless, as if filled with helium. I could lift the whole massive thing without any effort at all. I stood, turned, and walked to the top of the stairs that led to the second level. A crowd of monks had gathered around the greenhouse, which was now pulsing with an eerie light. I saw a swirling from within, like an errant gale.
“Jack?” Aly said. “You’re scaring me.”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Marco glanced down toward the greenhouse. “The disco’s calling you, dude. Better go.”
As I descended, the torch in front of me, I couldn’t feel the stairs beneath my feet. It was as if I were floating. The monks backed away as I neared the greenhouse. It had no entrance from the outside. The only way in, I figured, was through the monastery itself. There must have been an inner door that led into the greenhouse.
Aly and Marco went inside with me. We walked to the right, a short way down a corridor. Three ancient-looking paintings hung on the wall. One was a grand image of the Colossus. Just as Aly had said, it stood at the side of the harbor like a lighthouse. It was all made of burnished bronze, like the flame I held in my hands.
The next image was of a young man dressed in a fancy tunic, sitting on a translucent white ball. He was handsome and buff, surrounded by adoring friends, mostly girls. I had to look twice to see that he was actually floating.
Next to that painting was one of an old man, his skin wrinkled and sagging. Although his eyes were deep with suffering and his hair a tangle of white wisps, he radiated a powerful dignity.
I noticed an identical bronze plaque beneath each of the two portraits: MASSARYM.
Marco’s hand was on the doorknob, but he backed away. His face was taut. “I’m not sure about this, brother Jack,” he said.
“I’m not either,” I said shakily.
His eyes darted toward the paintings. “This is, like, Team Massarym here. We’re in the belly of the enemy. Brother Dimitrios wants you to do this. Doesn’t that seem like a reason not to?”