As I take Grace’s palm in one hand and Greer’s in the other, I smile and brace myself for whatever comes, knowing that together we can take it on.

Greer and Grace exchange a look. Then Grace takes Greer’s hand, closing the circle, and the world explodes around us.

I don’t know what I expected to follow the opening of the door, but the blinding light and hurricane-force wind seem reasonable. Those last for only a split second, just long enough for me to shut my eyes against the glare and get thrown back against one of the trees.

Quickly regaining my footing, I turn back to fight, ready to face Athena or the hippocampi or whatever other creature is coming after us.

But it’s like we hit the pause button. Now everything is rewinding. The beasts in the sky stop attacking. The serpent around the door slithers away. The epic battle raging beyond quits full stop. It’s as if everyone decided, right in the middle of battle, that they didn’t want to fight after all.

“What’s happening?” Grace asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

“The door is open,” a deep voice says.

I turn and look up to find Zeus standing next to us—over us—imposing, intimidating, and about the size of a garbage truck. He is the leader of the faction that has been trying to kill us. Instinctively, I step in front of my sisters and raise my dagger.

“Put that aside,” he says, brushing my arm away. “You have initiated the prophecy. We are no longer enemies.”

I blink several times. “What?”

“Now,” he says, gesturing at the swirling vortex that is the door, “we face the same foe.”

Almost as soon as he says that, monsters start climbing out of the abyss, two, four, even six at a time. If we don’t act fast, we’ll be outnumbered before we can get our first bites in. My sisters and I dive forward as the rest of our friends and supporters come to our aid. Fangs bared, we start venoming beasties, not bothering to care about pulse points or bite placement. We send them back as fast as we can, while our support army slashes venom-dipped weapons into the ones that get through our line of defense. Creatures are coming out in greater numbers than we can stop, even with the extra help.

This is a losing battle.

“Oh no,” Grace says. “Look!”

I turn to see where she’s pointing. Through the battlefield, between the clash of blades, teeth, and fur, I see a legion of hypnotized humans approaching from the other side. There must be hundreds of them.

All of this to defeat three teenage girls.

How will we ever fight them? How can we defeat them without killing them? We’re trapped between innocent humans and a sea of monsters flooding through the door.

For the first time, I have real doubts that we will succeed.

“Perhaps I can help.”

Spinning to my left, I find myself face-to-face with the oracle, here, now, after we’ve been looking for her for so long. My first instinct is to hug her. My second is to punch her. She has been missing for how long? And now is the time she decides to make her grand reappearance.

Better late than never.

“Please,” I say as a monster grabs me from behind. I pull its arm toward my mouth. “Do whatever you can.”

As I sink my fangs into to the beastie’s wrist, the oracle walks off into the crowd. Magically, no one touches her. It’s like she’s invisible—or wearing an invisible force field.

Then I’m too busy fighting monsters to watch her progress.

CHAPTER 33

GREER

When the woman in billowing robes shows up, Gretchen looks like she wants to throttle her—and I’m relieved that, for once, I’m not the one on the receiving end of that look. But then Gretchen goes back to fighting and the woman walks off into the crowd.

I’m busy trying to get my bite in on an onocentaur, but I keep my eye on the woman. There is something mystical about her, magical. I’m drawn to her, wanting to follow her when I know I should be fighting at my sisters’ sides.

We share a gift, the woman’s voice says in my mind, something we shall discuss when this battle is over and my pendant has been returned.

I gasp. The voice in my head—the woman gliding through the battle—is the oracle.

I should have guessed. Who else would be able to maintain that connection? Who else would know so much about the situation, about me and my sisters, and be able to help us figure out what we had to do?

Who else would have remained so mysteriously anonymous?

I watch as she reaches the edge, the line between our people and the hypnotized human army they are trying to hold back without causing any harm. Lifting her hands out to her sides, she shouts something at them, and then, in a flash, all the humans stop.

For a second, I’m afraid she killed them all, they’re so still—Gretchen will be furious. But then, gradually, they start moving, shaking their heads and looking around, confused.

Coming out of their hypnosis.

The ordinary humans breaking free of the monster-induced trance don’t see the beasts in their true form. They see them as other humans, fighting and clawing at each other like alley cats. They must think they’ve landed in the middle of the biggest brawl San Francisco’s ever seen. Suddenly realizing that there’s an epic fistfight going on around them—one they don’t know how they wound up trapped in the middle of—most of them turn and run. A few scream. The rest back slowly away.

Then the humans are gone, and it’s just us against gods and monsters.