Underworlds #2: When Monsters Escape Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Map of The Underworlds

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Glossary

  Preview

  Other Books

  About The Author

  Copyright

  MY NAME IS OWEN BROWN, AND MY FOREHEAD FEELS like an anvil that someone keeps pounding with a red-hot hammer.

  Also my teeth hurt, my eyes sting, and my fingers ache.

  But ever since my friends and I rescued Dana Runson from the Greek Underworld three days ago, pain has been the new normal —

  “Owen, move it!”

  Dana raced toward me across the wet school parking lot. Jon Doyle and Sydney Lamberti were right on her heels.

  “Out of the way, O —” Jon yelled.

  All three of them tackled me and rolled me to the side as — whoom! — a small car plummeted down from above, smashed onto the sidewalk, and skittered past us, sparking like fireworks, even in the rain.

  Just beyond it was a giant, taller than a house, all muscles, shaggy hair … and one huge eye. He was a Cyclops, one of two Greek monsters who escaped from the Underworld into our town. He was ugly, he was huge, and he was mad.

  Crash! An uprooted flagpole slammed down on the car and bent in half. The second giant emerged from behind the school. He was just as huge, just as mad, and just as one-eyed. But he had no hair at all.

  “Run. Now!” Dana screamed, yanking me to my feet and pulling me around the side of the school, with Jon and Sydney close behind. We crouched in a puddle behind a couple of oversize trash bins, just in time to see a bike rack crumple to the ground next to the smashed car.

  “What a mess from only two giants!” Sydney said, breathing hard.

  “‘Only two giants.’ Love that,” said Jon. He pulled a crooked umbrella out of the trash. The umbrella part was gone, so all that remained were the spokes. “Maybe I can use this,” he said, jabbing the umbrella shaft into the air as if it were a sword.

  Crash! The basketball poles from the playground bounced onto the asphalt court. Then the hairy giant started stuffing all the junk into a large sack hanging over his back.

  Three days ago, Dana had been kidnapped by the Norse god Loki and trapped in the Greek Underworld. Why? We weren’t exactly sure. It might have had something to do with her parents, who were in Iceland studying Norse mythology. But who knew?

  Loki was one truly scary guy, with a face of smoke, and horns of frost, and a body that looked like a skeleton. Only he was alive — which he shouldn’t be, as a mythological being. And he wasn’t the only one. Because when Loki stashed Dana in the Greek Underworld, we had to bargain with Hades, its frightening ruler, to let her go.

  The big red guy said that Dana could stay free — on one condition. Since Loki masterminded the escape of two Cyclopes from Hades’ domain, Hades gave us one week to capture and return them to the Underworld. Impossible? Sure it was. Except that impossible was also the new normal.

  BLAM! Another small car rolled past the trash bin and into the pile.

  “What are they doing? Recycling?” I asked.

  “Funny,” said Jon. His eyes were wide. “Or it would be, if they weren’t so big and mad.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s funny,” said Sydney, looking cautiously over the top of the bin. “How did two giants escape the Underworld through our school without busting down the walls?”

  Sydney was right. An entrance to the Underworld was behind the boiler room door in the basement of the school. How did they escape?

  “And how did they stay hidden for three days?” Dana put in.

  She had a point, too. We’d been on patrol for the last three days, scouring Pinewood Bluffs for the monsters. But we’d seen nothing — until tonight.

  “We’re not safe here,” said Jon, crouching low behind the bin. “Or anywhere, really. Owen, can you put a spell on them with the lyre? Make them fall asleep or something?”

  I pulled the lyre of Orpheus from the holster Sydney had made. According to what we’d read since we “borrowed” it from a museum, the lyre was made four thousand years ago by the musician Orpheus. It had seven strings and was shaped like a big horseshoe. Even though I had never played a lyre before, I found that if I plucked the right strings in the right order, I could charm people and objects to do pretty much whatever I wanted them to do.

  But I wasn’t sure about this time.

  “The Cyclopes are so huge,” I said. “They might not hear the strings correctly. Maybe I can just distract them?”

  “They’re turning toward downtown,” Sydney said. “This could get a whole lot worse.”

  “Let’s draw them into the woods,” said Dana, glancing toward the forest behind the school. It was only suppertime, but the woods were already dark. “Owen, give the lyre a try.”

  “Earplugs for everyone,” whispered Sydney, always practical. She pulled a plastic bag from her pocket. She, Dana, and Jon twisted the plugs into their ears as the lyre’s strings jangled loudly under my fingers.

  As soon as the melody blossomed into the air, time seemed to slow down for a moment. I felt dizzy. This had been happening more and more when I played the lyre. I didn’t like the feeling, but the magic worked. The two giants paused in mid-mayhem and turned toward the trash bin we were hiding behind.

  “Oh, I love being live bait!” Jon screeched, and we bolted to our feet. As we raced toward the forest, the wind lashed us with cold, heavy rain. The Cyclopes gathered up the wreckage in their massive sack — the bike racks, the basketball poles, even the compact cars — and stomped after us.

  I kept slamming the strings as we entered the woods, and the melody coiled up through the rain like fingers, drawing the giants across the school yard. The Cyclopes were huge and lumbering, but they were charging like a couple of mad elephants.

  Dana was a fast runner and she sprinted between the trees. I tried to keep up, but no sooner did I hit the woods than branches crashed behind us. Jon and Sydney scrambled quickly up a rock ledge and hurled stones at the bald Cyclops, when the ground thundered suddenly at my heels.

  Dana turned. “Owen, behind you!”

  The hairy Cyclops lunged at me.

  Luckily, he caught his foot on a tree trunk and went down.

  Unluckily, he fell right at me.

  I threw myself down on the ground, cradling the lyre beneath me as the giant fell on top of me, his huge jaw inches from my face.

  I couldn’t bear to stare into his gross, milky eyeball. When I glanced away, I saw a round stone the size of a cheeseburger dangling from a chain around his neck. The stone was marked with strange intersecting lines.

  “De-stroy!” The Cyclops raised his great fist over my head, then suddenly bellowed, “AHHHHH!” and rolled away, clutching his giant foot — which had the point of Jon’s umbrella sticking out of it.

  Meanwhile, the bald giant was nursing a big bruise on his nose from where Sydney had beaned him with a rock.

  “And now — we get out of here!” said Dana, pulling me to my feet.

  We’d only made it a few steps when the giants grunted some strange words. A freezing wind sliced through the trees, nearly knocking us to the ground. Then the wind was gone. When it left and the trees settled, the two Cyclopes were gone, too.

  We all stared at the empty space in front of us.

  “Where did they go?” asked Dana. “How could they just … vanish? W
e can’t lose track of them —”

  “I wouldn’t mind if they lost track of us,” said Jon, staring all around.

  “So what just happened?” asked Sydney. “Do the Cyclopes have magical powers or something?”

  “No,” said Dana. “Not in the usual myths, anyway.”

  “Monsters don’t usually escape from the Underworld, either,” Sydney groaned.

  “Maybe this is a new myth,” I said. “Either way, we have to know where they went. We need to be someplace where we can see the whole town.” I stared through the trees to the coast.

  Dana turned to see what I was looking at. “You don’t mean …?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Jon. “All the way up there? That’s … dangerous!”

  But my friends followed me anyway, because dangerous was also the new normal.

  We dashed back across the school yard. We were going to climb the Pinewood Bluffs water tower. In a thundering rainstorm. One slippery ladder rung at a time.

  THE WATER TOWER WAS A HUNDRED FEET TALL AND ringed with a narrow walkway. To get to the top, we had to climb straight up an iron ladder that was dripping with cold rainwater.

  “Wherever the Cyclopes are hiding,” Dana said, clinging to the rungs below me, “the tower will give us the best view.”

  Sydney chuckled behind her. “Also the best view of where we’ll land when we fall.”

  “Please don’t say things like that,” Jon squeaked.

  Poor Jon. I felt bad dragging him up there, knowing he didn’t like heights. I also knew he wouldn’t let us go without him.

  With a final pull, I swung my arms up and around the support posts of the iron railing, crawled between them, and slumped down on the cold walkway at the top of the tower.

  “The lyre’s keeping dry?” asked Sydney, when she joined me.

  I checked it, then pulled my hoodie tight around my head. “It’s good. Dana, you have your book?”

  “Safe.” Dana patted the pocket of her sweatshirt.

  Dana’s battered copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology had been our major source of information about the Underworlds. Besides the text, she had scribbled hundreds of notes in it. It had just about everything we needed to know about mythological places, creatures, and stories.

  A lyre and a book. So far, these were our only weapons in this weird battle. Plus the sometimes-working cell phone Sydney had borrowed from her dad.

  Some arsenal.

  Dana squeezed up next to me. She was quiet for a few minutes, just looking out at our town. The giants were nowhere to be seen. The rain had let up a bit, but it was quickly turning into early evening, and streetlights and house lights were coming on.

  “We should be home, not chasing monsters,” said Dana softly.

  “I told my mom we had extra work at school,” I said. “Which is slightly true.”

  “And slightly insane,” Dana added.

  We all grinned at that, but Dana was serious. She had endured a lot. The unthinkable, really — being kidnapped by an evil god and held prisoner in the Underworld. I couldn’t imagine it. But she wasn’t wallowing. She was strong, and she was smart. Leafing through her book, she stopped at a page.

  “Loki is known as the Dark Master for a reason,” Dana said, referring to what the monster Argus had called Loki when we rescued her. “He was known as a trickster, too. I figure he’s using tricks to get the Cyclopes to join him.”

  “Not to mention that gross, giant wolf, Fenrir,” said Sydney.

  We’d met Fenrir a couple of times, and we weren’t on the best terms. He was an extra-large red-furred wolf who breathed fire and smelled like garbage.

  “Actually,” said Dana, “the wolf is one of Loki’s children.”

  Jon froze. “Uh … what?”

  Dana shook her head. “Don’t ask. Loki is the father of a bunch of monsters.”

  “That’s probably what makes him so good at getting monsters on his side. He’s like a dad to them,” I said, trying to make it sound funny. (Okay, so I didn’t do a very good job.)

  That made me think of my dad and my mom and my little sister, Mags. I hoped they would stay home and out of all this craziness.

  “Dana,” Sydney said, “what are the Cyclopes actually like?”

  Dana brushed the rainwater from her cheeks. “They’re not the sharpest crayons in the box. And they’re easily enraged, which we already found out. But they do one thing well. They make lightning bolts for Zeus.”

  “Do you think that’s what they’re doing here?” asked Sydney. “Making bolts for Loki? Was that why they were collecting metal junk?”

  Dana shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  None of us knew much, really. Only that the Underworlds were in turmoil. Loki was recruiting monsters for some big battle. But why he sent the Cyclopes here was a mystery. All I wanted was to get the giants back below and keep Dana safe.

  The sky rumbled and turned blacker by the minute. Thick clouds hovered low over the buildings, the pine forests, the bluffs zigzagging the rocky shore, everything. I looked down at our small town. Nothing much was happening. The rain was keeping people inside. Good.

  “It’s actually kind of peaceful up here,” I said.

  I spoke too soon.

  Out of nowhere came another fierce wind, and the two giants reappeared on the edge of the forest. They tore through the darkness outside of town, knocking down trees in their way. Then all at once, the hairy giant slowed and turned. A car was moving down the street toward the stoplight.

  “Oh, no,” I breathed.

  The hairy Cyclops reached back and ripped a telephone pole out of the ground as if it were a weed. He threw it across the road in front of the car, which swerved up onto the sidewalk. Almost instantly, the power lines sparked, flamed, flashed brightly, and snapped, throwing the whole town — whooom! — into darkness. The driver leaped out of the car and ran back up the road, covering his head with a newspaper. I couldn’t tell whether he saw the Cyclopes or not.

  The bald giant gripped the car in one hand and dropped it into his friend’s sack. Then both Cyclopes headed toward the shore.

  “Where are they going?” said Jon.

  We watched as the Cyclopes reached the rocks and climbed down to the water. They waded into the waves, which came up to their chests.

  Then I saw it.

  “They’re going there,” I said, pointing to a rocky island several miles up the coast. “Power Island.”

  The little island was a collection of dark buildings, the remains of a power plant that had been abandoned five years ago.

  “It makes all the sense in the world,” said Sydney slowly.

  “Nothing about this makes sense!” said Jon, shaking his head. “What do the Cyclopes want out there?”

  “Electricity and lightning are essentially the same thing,” said Dana. “If I needed to make lightning bolts, that’s where I’d go. Plus, the power plant’s been empty so long, the Cyclopes can hide there without anyone seeing them.”

  The idea of two giants working in an old plant creeped me out.

  The dark town suddenly exploded in sound. Alarms jangled. Sirens wailed. Police cars screeched up Main Avenue, their lights spinning blue and red. Fire engines lumbered out of the town’s only fire station.

  “Should we call our parents?” asked Jon.

  “We don’t want our families involved in this,” I said, watching the two giants clamber up the rocky shore of the island. “We need to get over there —”

  Fire-red emergency lights flashed at the school. I suddenly remembered that, because of the emergency generators and the big gym and cafeteria, the school was a community shelter during storms.

  “Everyone will be going to the school,” Sydney said. “What happens when we bring the giants there?”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the Cyclopes dragging their sack of junk to the power plant. The idea that we would actually return them to Hades seemed so far-fetched. The
fact that we had to go through the school to do it just seemed crazy and impossible.

  “We’ll figure that part out when we get to it,” I said. “First, we follow them. Somehow.”

  “Our quickest way is by water,” said Jon matter-of-factly. “My ship is at the docks.”

  Sydney turned to him. “Wait. You have a ship? You mean a boat, right? With a motor?”

  “It’s actually a rowboat,” said Jon. “But it has oars and everything. One for each of us.”

  “And it’s really yours?” Dana asked.

  “Technically … no. It’s my dad’s,” Jon said. “But it’s no problem if we borrow it. When he’s not looking.”

  It was better than nothing.

  We carefully climbed down the water tower’s slippery ladder to the ground and made our way quickly to the coast. When we arrived at the inlet among the bluffs, the docks were deserted. Of course they were. Nobody in his right mind would be in a boat on a night like this.

  “Now … we take to the high seas,” said Jon. We followed him to the end of the pier, where he waved his arm at the tiniest boat I’d ever seen. “Ta-da!”

  “You expect us to fit into that?” Sydney said.

  “Not that one,” said Jon. “This one.” He pointed to one even smaller.

  A sudden flash of red light glowed from the distant power plant.

  “The Cyclopes have already started,” Dana said. “Let’s move it.”

  The minute we climbed into the boat and rowed out beyond the rocks, the sea really let loose. Waves slapped both sides of the tiny hull at once, spraying and soaking us even more. Jon was a good sailor and knew just how to turn the boat into and against the waves, but the farther from shore we rowed, the wilder the sea became.

  Sydney touched my arm. “Owen, maybe you should use the lyre to calm the sea?”

  I still had no idea what power the lyre really held. Or what my dizziness meant. But we needed to get to the power plant, which sort of meant not drowning. I slipped the lyre out of its holster and hunched over it to protect it from the rain, while everyone else put in their earplugs.