"What happened?"
"Did you get the poison out of his system?"
"Is Nickamedes going to be okay?"
One after another, the questions tumbled out of our lips. Metis held up her hands, and we slowly quieted down.
"Finding out which poison the Reaper used was an enormous aid," she said. "It's helped me figure out the best course of treatment for Nickamedes, including a way to slow the progression of the poison."
"Slow, but not stop?" Daphne asked, picking up on what she hadn't said.
Metis sighed. "Yes, slow, not stop. Poison is a tricky thing, especially a magic-based poison like this one. Basically, poisons like these eat up all of the magic you use to try to get rid of them. All my healing magic is doing right now is keeping the Serket sap from causing any more damage to Nickamedes. But eventually, the poison will build up a resistance to my magic and start to overcome it. When that happens, the poison will once again follow its normal progression and will start doing further damage to him - until he finally dies from it."
I closed my eyes. I wasn't touching any of my friends, but I could feel the agonizing grief rolling off them - it mirrored my own emotions perfectly. After a moment, I forced myself to open my eyes and look at Metis again.
"So there's no . . . cure?" I barely got the words out through the hard lump in my throat. "No way to save him?"
Metis sighed, a little deeper and sadder than before. "There is an antidote."
"So what's the problem? Go mix it up or get it or whatever and give it to him."
She shook her head. "It's not that easy. The only known antidote to Serket sap is Chloris ambrosia, named after the Greek goddess of flowers."
Chloris ambrosia? I'd never heard of it, and neither had anyone else, judging from the blank looks on my friends' faces.
"Oh sure," Carson piped up. "It's sort of like the honeysuckle that grows around here."
We all looked at Carson, who blushed.
"My dad owns wineries in California," he said. "He's always talking about grapes and plants and things like that."
Metis nodded. "That's right. Chloris ambrosia is a flowering vine that is similar to honeysuckle. The only problem is that it's very rare. In fact, there's only one place in the United States where it's supposed to grow - in the Rocky Mountains."
"So what's the problem?" I repeated. "We go there, pick this flower, and bring it back so you can cure Nickamedes with it. No sweat."
Metis stared at me. "The problem is that the only place the flower is known to grow is in some ruins on the top of a mountain above the Denver branch of Mythos Academy."
Alexei narrowed his hazel eyes. "You mean the Eir Ruins?"
Metis nodded again, her mouth flattening out into a grim line. Oliver crossed his arms over his chest. Daphne started muttering, while Grandma Frost sighed, as if she'd known that was what the professor would say all along. Maybe she had, with her ability to see the future.
"Okay, so what's the deal with the ruins?" I asked. "And why do you all look like it would be the worst idea ever to go there?"
Carson peered at me through his glasses. "The Eir Ruins are supposed to be a place of great power, of great magic."
"So?"
"So . . . tons of people have gone up to the ruins, but some of the folks have come back . . . different," he said.
Daphne snorted. "You mean, most of them were so scared that all they did was babble on about ghosts and spirits and how they barely survived."
"The ruins have a reputation," Oliver added. "You don't go up there unless you absolutely have to."
"Okay, so basically the ruins are some Mythos version of a haunted house," I said. "So what? We've been through worse."
"It's not the ruins I'm concerned about," Metis said. "It's the Reapers' trap."
We all froze for a moment.
Finally, Alexei spoke. "What do you mean? How could it be a trap?"
The professor took off her silver glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Because the poison is working too slowly on Nickamedes. Serket sap is usually fatal within a few minutes, but it was longer than that before Nickamedes even showed any symptoms. And now, my magic is keeping the poison at bay, even though that's not usually possible. I think . . . I think the Reaper gave Nickamedes a small, diluted dose of the poison - on purpose."
"But why would the Reapers do that?" Oliver asked. "It doesn't make sense."
I thought back to when I'd seen the Reaper poison the water bottles, and I remembered something I hadn't thought too much about before. Jason had used white pouches on the bottles, but outside on the quad, he'd had a red paper pouch. And after he'd swallowed the poison inside, he'd been dead in a few minutes, just like Metis had said. Even when Vivian had called, she'd asked him if it was done, if I'd been poisoned - not if I was actually dead yet.
I looked at the professor, and I started to pick up on her train of thought. "Jason wanted to poison me, but he didn't want to kill me, did he? Not right away. Instead, he wanted to give you guys enough time to figure out what kind of poison he'd used. Maybe that's even why he kept looking at the book so much in the library - so I could flash on it and see him reading it when you guys finally found it back in the stacks. Once you did, he knew that you'd go rushing out to the ruins to find the antidote, and when you got there, the Reapers would be waiting."
Metis nodded. "That's what I think. That the Reapers want to lure us out to the ruins so they can attack us."
I frowned. "But why? Why go to all that trouble when they could attack us here? They've done it before."
When they could just kill me, and be done with it. That was the other dark thought that filled my mind, but I didn't share it with the others.
"That, I don't have an answer to." Metis sighed again. "But even if it's not a trap, you can't just go find the flower. Chloris ambrosia has powerful healing properties, but there's a catch - it has to be picked under a midnight moon. That's the only time the flowers on the vine bloom, and the flowers are what I need to make the antidote."
"So let me get this straight," I said. "Not only do we have to get to the ruins, figure out how to survive whatever creepy magic mumbo jumbo may or may not be there, and thwart a likely Reaper attack, but we also have to pick this mythological flower at precisely the right moment or Nickamedes will die anyway. Does that about sum it up?"
Metis nodded. "Unfortunately."