Page 131 of The Games Gods Play
Only when I open my eyes, I’m still lying on the bed.
Um…did it work?
I don’t think it worked.
Aphrodite isn’t here. Hypnos isn’t here. I turn my head to find all the other champions still lying in their beds, eyes closed and sleeping.
A swirl of emotions drops into my gut—disappointment, embarrassment, and a few others I don’t want to put names to.
See. I was right. No one is waiting for me.
I expected this. I knew it was coming. And yet it still feels like someone just speared me through the chest.
I’m broken.
I get to just lie here and wallow in humiliation until the others return.
“Come with me, mortal.” A bronzed man, and I mean all bronze—his skin, his hair, his eyes—with wisps of a sparkling bronze…smoke, I guess?…swirling off of him is standing beside my bed.
I had heard the myth of the sandman was based on Morpheus. Now I see why.
He holds out a palm to me, and despite the fact that I’m still strapped down, I lift a hand to take his anyway. Mine is…translucent. He helps me stand from the bed, and I look down to find my mortal body still strapped there. My soul is leaving it behind to travel wherever Aphrodite and her helpers have me going.
“Each of the champions will get to their loved one in a different way,” he tells me. “For you, my mistress chose something fun.”
Morpheus walks me through a small doorway and down a hall of black-and-white-checkered marble floors and pristine white walls decorated along the top with a simple black molding. At the end of that hallway, double doors lead out onto a balcony, and there, a pegasus waits. The pink one I admired. She nods her head at me a couple of times in what I think is a horsey greeting.
I’m so entranced by the thought of getting to ride a pegasus that I almost forget I need to focus on the challenge.
Think of the person I love most, and the dream will take me to them.
Start with the easier part. Get on the horse, Lyra.
I’ve never ridden a horse before, so let’s just say that I’m the source of great amusement for a lot of immortals watching me struggle to get on right now. And then the pegasus takes off, and I clench my thighs against her waist as I wrap my arms around her soft neck. And squeal.
Riding the pegasus involves a lot of hanging on for dear life as I try not to slide off one side or the other. This has to be harder than riding a regular horse, right? Because she’s surging forward like she’s running, which jostles me forward and back, but her whole body is propelled by her wings, which bounces me up and down.
Thankfully, once she gains altitude—not too high—she levels out, and it’s easier to sit up and hold on with my hands now wrapped in her mane, thighs still gripping tight.
The pegasus tosses her head, eyeing me.
Think of who I love the most.
I know who it’s not. Not my parents. Not Felix. Not… Well, that was a short list. But I remind myself there are all different kinds of love. And three faces immediately flip in my head.
I close my eyes and focus.
One possibility is busy right now, and another is not mortal, which only leaves…
My pegasus surges under me, and I have to open my eyes again to hold on. She flies us up and over a mountain and then spirals down into the clouds that surround the base of Olympus. They remind me of the fog that rolls into the bay in San Francisco, damp and chilly and hard to see through, and I’m used to that. When we emerge from the clouds, that’s exactly where we are. San Francisco. Impossible to miss the soaring columns of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Instead of turning to the city, though, my pegasus flies me away, across the bridge, over the Minos Headlands, past the city of Sausalito, and on to the massive redwoods of Muir Woods.
I’ve never been here.
Maybe I was wrong?
Now with every flap, I’m second-guessing who it could be…or that it’s no one and this is all a terrible joke.
