Read Online The Blood of the Hydra by Michelle Madow - Free Book Online Page B

sure that the creatures who escape from Kerberos are sent away and unable to return to Earth before the portal is sealed.”
    “Can you all back up a bit?” I said, and everyone looked at me, waiting for what I had to say. “I know that you’ve all been studying Greek mythology for your entire lives, but I’ve only been in the class since January. And I don’t remember much from when I read The Odyssey last year. So can you please tell me—what are the seeds of the lotus fruit, what are Helios’s immortal cattle, and what’s a hydra?”
    For a few seconds, everyone looked at me like I was crazy for not knowing this. Then Chris jumped in.
    “The Land of the Lotus Eaters was my favorite part of The Odyssey ,” he said. “It’s an island where people live off the lotus fruit, which is basically a drug that makes them lazy. When Odysseus’s men ate it, it they decided they wanted to stay on the island forever, so they blew off their mission to return home.”
    “So it sounds like getting the lotus fruit should be easy?” I asked. “A bunch of drugged up locals shouldn’t give us trouble. We’ll just need to gather the fruit and get out of there.”
    “The scent of the fruit is rumored to be quite tempting, so it might not be as easy as you think,” Darius said. “But yes, if you bring water infused with yellow energy onto the island, you should be able to stay focused on your mission and not get distracted by the scent of the fruit.”
    “The milk of Helios’s cattle shouldn’t be hard, either,” Kate said. “The only reason the island was a problem in The Odyssey was because Odysseus’s men slaughtered the cattle for meat, despite knowing that harming them would mean angering Helios.”
    “Odysseus’s men sure messed up a lot,” Chris said.
    “Yeah.” Kate laughed. “They did. So as long as we don’t kill any of Helios’s cattle, we should be fine there.”
    “What about the hydra?” I asked. “That’s the real challenge, isn’t it?”
    “The hydra is a monster with five heads.” Blake pressed his fingers together, his gaze locked on mine. “The myths say that it has poison breath, but really, it’s just its bite that’s poisonous. The only way to kill it is to cut off its heads. But if you cut off a hydra head, two grow back in its place.”
    “Then we can’t kill it by chopping off its heads,” I said. “There has to be another way.”
    “Hercules figured out that if he immediately burned the open stumps, the heads couldn’t grow back,” Blake said. “With my power over fire, that shouldn’t be a problem.”
    “Except there’s the immortal head,” Kate added. “It breathes fire, and it can’t be killed.”
    “But Hercules killed the hydra, didn’t he?” I asked. “Immortal head and all?”
    “With a special golden sword gifted to him by Athena,” she said. “We don’t have one of those.”
    “Hm.” I balanced my chin in my hands. “That does sound like a problem.”
    “Why don’t you ask the Book?” Chris suggested.
    “Ask it what? If we can have a golden sword from Athena, too?”
    “Sure.” He shrugged. “It can’t hurt to ask.”
    Even though it felt silly, I placed my hand on the book and asked, “May we please have a weapon that will help us slay the hydra?”
    Instead of another entry appearing in the Table of Contents, writing began to form on the previously blank page on the left, as if someone were writing in the Book at that very moment.
    You already have all of the weapons you need.
    I read the words out loud. Right afterward, they disappeared. We all watched the Book closely, as if more writing might appear, but it didn’t.
    “Well, that was vague,” Kate finally said.
    “Maybe not,” Blake said. “I did use my power to forge our weapons, using the instructions in the book I received in my clue. Those weapons must be strong enough to defeat the hydra. It would make sense with what the Book just told us.”
    “It would,” Chris