Chapter 4* Death by Daisy
For a split second, there is the sickening feeling of my stomach being pulled from my body, and then another split second when I’m dropping and my heart is flinging itself around in my chest, and then I land-
In a soft bed of flowers?
No kidding. My face is pressing into mushy dirt, while the rest of my body is being tickled by flowers swaying in the breeze. Groaning, I push myself off the ground, hiking my backpack over my shoulder.
“Sam?” I croak out.
“Right here,” a voice answers, equally hoarse. Turning in the direction of the voice, I see Sam lying on the ground face up, eyes shut.
“Sam!” I exclaim, racing over to him, my feet rustling through the tall grass and crushing some unfortunate daisies. “Are you hurt?”
“I feel like puking,” he complains, and I roll my eyes. What a baby.
“Stand up,” I order. “We’ve got to find a way out of here.” Running a hand through his tousled bronze hair, he stands up stretches his muscles.
My heart suddenly grows cold. “Sam, where is the teleporter?”
He freezes too. “Um…” Whipping around in unison, we start frantically searching. My eyes scan through the thick bed of flowers and grass, hoping desperately that it was in there, somewhere.
I knew it. I should never have trusted him. If the teleporter was gone, we’d have no way out of here, and we’d be stuck here forever until our supplies eventually ran out and we died. I wouldn’t even get to die in Nashville like I’d hoped.
I am just about to go hysterical when Sam speaks. “I’ve found it!”
Without hesitation I sprint over to him and snatch it from his dirt streaked hands. Turning the little black plastic device in my hands, I check that it is unscathed. Thankfully, it is.
“Relax, Kayla, it’s working,” Sam says gently, coming up behind me. I turn, pinching the bridge of my nose like I always do when I’m close to tears or really angry. Right now it’s the latter.
“Don’t you ever let go of it like that again!” I shout at him. Instead of backing off like I thought he would, he nods seriously.
“I’m sorry.”
The anger drains out of me all of a sudden, like I’m too weak to stay angry for long at anyone. Extracting a bottle of water from my backpack, I take a swig from it and toss it to Sam. He drinks deeply and hands it back to me.
“Where are we?” he voices out finally.
I take a proper look at my surroundings, at the same time brushing dirt off my face with my sleeve. We are in what seems like a clearing, of course laid thick with flowers, surrounded by pine trees that give off a nice, earthy smell. Inhaling deeply, I let the tension in my shoulders ease a bit.
“It smells nice,” comments Sam, sniffing the air.
“It does,” I agree. “Now we wait for the teleporter to recharge again?”
“Yes,” he says, taking it out of his pocket and showing me the blue strips lacing the sides. “Solar panels, extremely powerful. We’ll have it recharged in no time.”
Apparently a lot of things can happen in ‘no time’. Because as I speak, a figure is rising out of the flowers a few yards away in a whirlwind of wheat. It clicks in my mind a few seconds later.
We are facing Demeter, Goddess of Wheat or Plants or something like that. I’d never really considered her as a threat, but now I am seriously rethinking it. She looks a hell lot mean.
“What is it, asshole day?” I grumble to Sam. He swallows.
“Hey, this is serious… we could die like, any second now.”
“Oh no, believe me,” I say dryly. “They’ll want to play with us. Soon enough, you’ll be wishing for death.”
“Can you feel the necessary panic now?” he hisses under his breath.
“Oh yeah. Run.”
My cockiness dries up when a long arm of grass whips towards us and tosses me up into the air. It snakes around my waist, cutting through my thin shirt and drawing blood. Hissing in pain, I try to tear the grass with my hands, but despite its weak and flimsy exterior, it is strong as a steel cable. Turning my head, I see Sam in the same predicament as me, wriggling desperately and trying to get out.
Demeter drifts silently towards us. It is so creepy because I can see her bare feet and they barely touch the ground. As she moves, so do the long arms of grass, until we are pressed against tree trunks. Rough bark scrapes my skin.
“How did you humans get here?” she demands. Her voice is queenly, hypnotizing, but I refuse to be lulled into a false sense of security. This god can kill me in a second and I know it. Instead, I turn my head to the side, not meeting her amber eyes.
“If you want to kill us, kill us now.” Sam’s voice rings high and clear into the clearing, and I feel a surge of pride. Here we are, inches from death, yet still refusing to be played.
“Oh, eventually,” Demeter says, amused. “But first you’ll have to go through minutes, hours, days of suffering before I let you die.”
“What gives you the right to take our planet from us?” I find myself shouting. “What gave you the right to kill all the innocent people out there just because it gives you a kick?”
Demeter’s amber eyes spark dangerously, and her red lips turn up at the corners. “Foolish little human, you should know by now that you cannot argue with a god.”
Looking back and forth between me and Sam, she summons up a daisy chain in her hands. It looks delicate, fragile and strangely beautiful, but it is an instrument of death.
“Since you annoy me so much,” she says to me, “you’ll be tortured first.” She points to Sam. “You can watch her.”
“No, wait!” Sam cries. “You- you torture me first. Don’t touch her!”
My heart lurches. Sam is willing to give up his life… for me?
“How moving,” Demeter says, pretending to consider it, I see the cruel spark in her eyes. “But why so eager? You’ll have your chance soon.” She turns back to me, malicious intent in her golden irises.
She stuffs the daises up my nose.
I scream, trashing in my binds, as I feel the daises working their way higher and higher up my nose. I hate this feeling- vulnerability. I try to kick Demeter but my leg passes through her like smoke and a delicious grin forms on her face.
“Yes, scream and trash little human,” she murmurs, inching the daises up. The flowers are not just going up my nose, they’re slashing the insides of it to ribbons too, and I can feel the blood, warm and sticky, running down my lip. It tastes like salt and copper.
“Don’t touch her you toad!” I hear Sam screaming.
There is a flash in the edges of my vision. Great, now I am seeing sparks. I squeeze my eyes shut and try not to focus on the pain. Not surprisingly, it is close to impossible.
I hear another scream. The pitch is higher by many octaves. Instantly, I know Sam cannot be the one making it. It is too… girly.
My eyes fling open, and I see Demeter screaming as flashes erupt all over her body. My eyes follow one of the flashes, and I see wings, a pale gold body-
“Curse you Atermis!” Demeter yells and vanishes. The flashes vanish with her. The long arms of grass prisoning us snake back and retreat beneath the flowers. I fall to the ground on my hands and knees, coughing out blood.
“Kayla!” I hear Sam stomping through the grass to get to me, feel his hands rubbing soothing circles into my back. Tears come to my eyes as the pain in my nose intensifies. I can’t breathe.
“I’m- fine-” I manage to gasp out, before being overwhelmed by another coughing fit. Blood stains the flowers in front of me.
“Breathe through your mouth,” Sam tells me, holding my shoulders to stop me shaking. I take his advice and breathe through my mouth. I can taste blood but the pain reduces significantly.
Suddenly I see a pale gold body in front of me. I go cross eyed trying to focus on it, but it places its tiny hands on my face. Its long lashed gold eyes close, and its red lips murmur an incantation. Warmth tingles through me and the pain in my nose reduces to a stinging, to a burning, and finally nothing at all. When I open my eyes, the ‘it’ is gone.
“Wow.” I let out a shaky breath and Sam helps me to my feet.
“Are you okay?” he demands, looking me up and down. I shrug off his hand.
“I’m fine,” I assure him. I see a little bruise on his arm. “Look, you’re hurt!”
He ignores this, pointing to my waist. “That thing healed your waist wounds too!” I look down, and see that this is indeed true. “Wow.” It seems like this is all I’m capable of saying.
A silver glint high up in a tree has me frowning. Why would there be silver in a tree? Squinting, I peer up into tree, and what I see has me shocked.
“Look! A bow!”
“A what?” Sam says, turning his gaze up to where I’m pointing. Eyes widening, he inhales sharply. “Oh my god.”
Without thinking, I run forward and dig my fingers into the bark. There are plenty of easy handholds and footholds for me, and I scale the tree in less than a minute. My fingers hook around the bow, and settling myself in a fork in the branches, I grin.
“Catch!” I shout, and throw it down. Sam catches it with an equally wide grin. “Here comes the quiver!” I say, and throw that down too. By the time I have climbed down the tree and have both feet firmly planted on the ground again, Sam has already notched an arrow and is aiming it at a pine tree across the clearing.
He lets it fly. It whistles through the air with unmatched precision, and buries itself in the target effortlessly.
“Nice,” I say appreciatively, whistling through my teeth. His cheeks go pink.
“I was in archery in my school,” he mutters, striding across the clearing to retrieve the arrow.
“How is the teleporter?” I shout to him, plopping down on the ground and toying with the flimsy stem of the daisy. Sam takes it out of his pocket, checks it. “Half way there!” he shouts to me. When he returns, he puts the arrow back in the quiver and sits down facing me.
“What do you think those things were?” he asks, brown eyes fixed somewhere off to my left. It seems like this is a common trait we have- An inability to look in another person’s eyes as we speak.
“Sprites,” I say, looking at the air beside his head. “I guess they have something to do with Atermis, since Demeter said “curse you Atermis” just now.”
Sam looks impressed, but he says nothing more. I take out a piece of bread from my pouch to sooth my rumbling tummy, and toss half of it to him too.
“Have I earned your trust?” he says suddenly, chewing thoughtfully. It brings me back to our conversation the first time we met in that warehouse, when he asked me if I trusted him and I replied with a negative. A smile playing on my lips, I shrug evasively.
“Oh, 3%, around there,” I say vaguely.
Grinning widely, he tips me an imaginary glass of wine. “Well, I’m looking forward to earning that 97%.”
I can’t resist a smile.
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I'M SO ADDICTED TO THE MEMORY BY MAYDAY PARADE RIGHT NOW
OOOOOHHHHHH
SORRY I'M CRAZY