The Sacred Thievery

Chapter XIX: Krasiads.

I listened to her.

I didn't know why, but I did. The voice flowed over me like oil but quicker, and my muscles moved like I was twitching. I began to inch forward like I was walking on eggshells.

Leroy had the same reaction. However, he began grinning widely and instead sped up towards her.

Jesse didn't move. She instead quickly assessed that something was going on and threw her arms forward, grabbing our arms.

"Guys, stop!" she said. "What are you doing?" Her accent sounded indignant, but it was similar enough to the "jogger" that it snapped me from her magic.

I stopped. Leroy did too, his smile fading. Jesse glared at the jogger. "What are you?"

The jogger took out a silver knife and began filing her long, sharp nails. I honestly didn't think it was necessary since her nails were jet-black, but I didn't question her. "I'm a friend." Her voice had changed now, and she sounded maternal. "Honestly. I want to help."

I blinked, and she was gone. She was now behind us, her hands on me and Leroy's shoulders, her head above Jesse's. Jesse froze, her face locked in fear, and her arms letting go of our hands. "Follow me."

That was kind of a difficult thing to do because I became incredibly dizzy before passing out.

I woke up with my back to the thick trunk of a tree. My nose still stung, like pepper was in my sinuses, and my vision was still blurred. I took in my surroundings.

We seemed to be in a wide clearing, though for all I knew, we were in Colorado. Grape trees, connected by spiked vines, surrounded the clearing, and I could see well across it. Thick bushes, rich with thorns, were dotted around the clearing, white, green, and purple grapes growing in bunches.

I looked around frantically for my friends, only to find that they were on different sides of the same tree. I shook them both awake, and almost threw Pan off of Leroy's shoulder. Somehow, the insect had gotten to the satyr's shoulder, and I decided not to change that.

As soon as I had woken them up, and before they could even figure out where they were, the "jogger" appeared. She didn't come out gracefully in a swirl of purple or float from the sky. Instead, she was just there. In the blink of an eye, she was there, seeming as if she'd been waiting for a long time.

Jesse pointed at her, not seeming taken aback, but angry. She coughed as she tried to speak, doubling over and throwing up.

The jogger looked genuinely concerned. "Yes, my magic can do that to people," she admitted. "As compensation, I will answer your question. I am a wine nymph. A krasiad."

I'd never heard of them before, and my face seemed to show it because she elaborated.

"We are dryads with the great blessings of Dionysus. He very much appreciated our sacrifices and how much we honored him along with our upbeat attitudes and party chill. So only our tribe, the third biggest, was bestowed the blessing of Dionysus. There weren't many tribes then, at least not as civilized as ours. Now we are no longer bound but strengthened by his circle of power. Our fellow tribes, in jealousy, tried to cover up our existence, though they couldn't ever do it perfectly."

Honestly, considering how no one at camp seemed to know about krasiads, I thought the dryads did a pretty neat job.

Jesse groaned again, now sounding annoyed instead of sick despite her recent vomiting. "What's your name? I want to know who to curse when I pass out."

The wine nymph laughed. "I am Chari." She bowed. "Solo wine nymph and savior of you three's sorry adolescent bottoms." I almost discerned passive-aggressiveness, but her tone was even kinder than before.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

She either didn't want to address her being a soloist or simply assumed I meant the second thing. "There are more nymphs than you realize in Inwood Hill. One guards this place. And if you'd found me, the others must have found you by now."

Leroy's face paled. "Who do you mean?"

"The animal nymphs, of course," she said, bringing up another kind of nymph I didn't know. "The plasmaiads used to be oreads, the nymphs of the mountains of the world, embodied by ourae. But unlike other nature spirits representing aspects of nature, the oreads represented the mountains and wilderness themselves. This led to them evolving into a new race, the plasmaiads, animal nymphs representing the creatures and animals of the mountains and wilderness. While you can find oreads if you look, the plasmaiad are like the Roman to the oread's Greek, the automobile to the oread's horse wagon."

"Why aren't we safe around them?" I asked.

Jesse snorted. "Timothy, we don't even know if she's telling the truth. Don't trust anything she says."

"Young girl, if I'd wanted to kill you, you'd be dead by now." Then she turned back to me. "They've changed. They'll kill you at first sight. Heaven's influenced them. It's too dangerous for kids like you to be here." She fixed us with a curious look. "Why are you here?"

I was starting to trust her, but I didn't want to tell us what we were doing. I was about to lie but realized that she must have known we were under the world of Greek myth, so we couldn't pretend we were regular mortals. So I spun something else up.

"A monster was said to be here," I started. "And we were sent to defeat it."

"What monster? I know everyone who steps into this forest. It'd have to be invisible to get pa-"

I thought fast. Jesse thought faster again. "It can turn invisible," she said, getting what I was doing. "It's half-lion and half-dragon, and when you can't see it it's invincible."

"What do you call this creature?" Chari asked, now intrigued.

Jesse lost her guard when she was asked this creature's name. However, at that moment, I knew that I'd made a mistake. I hadn't asked more of the plasmaiads. And I still didn't know where we were.

Because just then, the animal nymphs attacked us. Jesse had just said, "Its name is-" when they rudely interrupted.

I don't know how I recognized them. I just knew. A rustle was sent through the trees, and two people broke through two trees' leaves on one side of the clearing. One was a girl about me and Jesse's age. She looked like Squirrel Girl without any of the direct squirrel features. Her ears were slightly pointed, and her nose twitched. She had auburn hair which was short-cut, and she seemed amused by what she was doing. I instantly pegged her as a rodent kind of animal nymph, and then cursed myself for not learning more about them and how the animal thing worked.

The other was a boy, maybe two years older than us. He had slick black hair that curled slightly when it ended at his forehead, and he seemed annoyed. He wore black sweatpants and a hoodie and his eyes were sharp like an eagle through his round glasses. He held a curved dagger resembling a beak as he rolled through the air and landed on the ground behind me along with the other nymph.

Just as I was looking at them, they dashed forward, and they were at all our necks. Squirrel Girl put her arm around my neck, her elbow parallel to my nose, and Emo Kid put his dagger to Jesse's throat with his right hand, his arm around her neck still with a strong grip, and his other arm around Leroy's neck like Squirrel Girl's arm was to mine.

Squirrel Girl put her head up to face a shocked Chari. She cocked her head and said, "Make a single move, and we kill all three of them."