Read Online The Blood of Athens by Amy Leigh Strickland - Free Book Online Page B

foreign caffeinated drink in a bright red can had
renewed their energy.
    The afternoon
tour was to the Kerameikos cemetery. The enormous ancient cemetery
featured low stone walls and crumbling columns that divided patches
of green grass. They had walked through the museum shortly after
lunch, looking at ancient pottery much like the pieces they had seen
in the National Museum that morning. Red clay pots were painted with
black bases and scenes of static figures enacting ancient myths.
After a walk through the museum, they made their way out into the
cemetery. To keep them on task, the art teacher had given them a
scavenger hunt of statues to photograph.
    Peter and
Penny had snapped the bull on her pink camera and the lion had been
directly next to it. They traveled with a group of students being
chaperoned by one of the history teachers. The group had stopped to
listen to Mr. McCracken read a tour pamphlet about a relief of Athena
when Peter saw something just beyond the palms behind them.
    “ What’s
that hole?” he asked, leaning to whisper to the closest ear.
    He had asked
one of the soccer players, and the other boy looked around before
saying, “What hole?”
    “ Uh, you
know, the gaping cave mouth right behind us.”
    The boy kept
looking before turning back to listen to Mr. McCracken. “Stop
messing around, Hadley.”
    “ I’m no--”
    “ Whatever.
Loser.” He shoved Peter’s shoulder, but not hard enough to make
him fall.
    Peter fell
back in the crowd and drifted to the left until he was standing next
to Penny. He nudged her with his elbow.
    “ What?”
she hissed, shooting him a glare. She was trying to listen.
    Peter tipped
his head back over his shoulder. “Look.”
    Penny turned
around and laid eyes on the mouth of the cave. She looked back at
Peter.
    “ Can you see
it?” he whispered.
    “ Of course.”
    “ Blockhead
over there can’t.”
    “ What?”
    Peter smirked.
“Let’s check it out.”
    The group was
allowed to wander for a few minutes. They had reached the meet-up
spot for the tour. “Don’t leave my sight,” Mr. McCracken said.
“But you can take pictures and talk until the other groups catch
up.
    Peter
approached the hole. To the others, it was just a patch of green
grass with a few slabs of stacked marble laying around. To Peter and
Penny, however, the ground sloped downward and dipped under the
marble, which framed a doorway to a black pit below. Peter looked
down into the hole. There was a path that winded inside and vanished
in the dark. “I wanna go in,” he said.
    Penny looked
down the same hole and shook her head. Just looking down it made her
feel claustrophobic. She wanted to get away, but she was dying to
know what was inside. “Not with everyone watching.”
    “ It’s
gotta be another portal, like the one at the Acropolis,” he said.
    “ And it goes
down? Three guesses where that leads to.”
    Celene’s
group was reaching the end of the tour. She was surprised to find
that Nick, the student who, last year, had been one of the
worst-behaved students in her chemistry class, was helping to keep
order and move things along. Her group stopped in front of the relief
of Athena, and Minnie, who Celene had surrendered the pamphlet to,
told her classmates about the carving.
    Celene’s
eyes fell on Penny and Peter. They were standing at the entrance to a
cave. Celene had seen that cave in her dreams. It was a hell-mouth.
It was the entrance to Hades that Demeter returned to every spring to
wait for her daughter. Celene abandoned her group and walked as
quickly as she could across the grass.
    “ Penny,”
she hissed. “Penny. Get away from there.”
    Penny was
staring down into the darkness and listening. She swore she could
hear something below calling to her. Her mother’s voice broke her
out of her focus and she whirled around.
    “ Dr. Davis,”
Peter said quietly. Some of the students were watching them. “They
can’t see this, so take it easy.”
    Celene