Page 135 of Thief of Hearts

We would figure it out like we’d figured out the rest.

“How many more of these do you think we have to go?” he asked.

I shook my head and didn’t answer. I didn’t want to think that far ahead. I just wanted to get through the next challenge until we were done and had retrieved the caduceus. “What I keep thinking about is that, so far, we have needed to have at least two people trying to get the god-weapon. What if at some point we need more?”

How many people had died coming here because they tried it without enough help?

“You and me,” he said with a smile. “That’s all we need.”

His words lifted something inside my chest, and it felt like tiny butterfly wings flapping.

“And Dagger,” he added, and I’d actually forgotten he still carried his dog.

“Is he all right?” I asked.

Zain pulled the front of his tunic away. “He’s sleeping.”

I laughed again.

He drank from his waterskin and then handed it to me. I used it to rinse out my mouth three times before taking a drink. I didn’t want to accidentally ingest any of the accelerant.

“Should we go?” he asked as I handed it back.

“Yes, let’s go see what other types of almost-deaths wait for us.”

We stood up and he had the torch. I took my sword and knife out and followed.

I noticed that the hallway we were in seemed to be sloping down. The slope got worse the farther we walked. We turned a corner and a bright blue light emanated from something in front of us.

Zain used the torch to see the walls around us until he found a sconce. He left the torch there and we went quietly toward the blue light.

At the end of the hallway was a long ledge that looked down into a massive cavern. We crouched at the spot where the ledge began, close to the hallway we had just exited. I spotted stairs that we could use to get down into that area, and then wondered why the walls were making that blue light.

I surveyed the cavern. There was a massive pool on the left-hand side, and on the right, I saw large rocks spaced unevenly in rows that looked as if they’d been placed there deliberately. It reminded me of when my grandmother had set up mock battles for us to fight. She had used wooden walls, but they had been places for us to hide and recuperate before heading back out to face the enemy.

There was another metal door in the far wall. I assumed it was locked. How were we supposed to get it open?

“What do you—” I started to ask, but he put his finger over my lips, wanting me to be quiet. He picked up a small rock and threw it at the pool.

The moment it hit, something exploded out of the water and the room seemed to shake from the awful sound it emitted. A green-scaled monster with more heads than I could count climbed out of the pool to patrol the cavern. The heads moved like snakes, bobbing and testing the air with their tongues.

Zain grabbed me and dragged me back into the hallway where he’d left our torch.

“Is that a—”

“Hydra? Yes,” he said.

I let out a long groan. “I hope you know that this is your fault. You spoke this into existence by making jokes that there weren’t any hydras in the Wastelands.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You think I conjured this creature up?”

“There are so many other monsters you could have made fun of, and the one you chose is the one that’s almost impossible to kill.”

“As I recall, you were the one who made the last joke about the hydra,” he countered.

“Because I was mocking your jest that was so obviously wrong!”

“I hope you’ve learned not to make fun of jokes that are objectively funny at the time and later are not, only because they turn out to be disproven.”