Page 45 of Wildfire

They rushed in from all sides, some with weapons, some with frost-covered skin, and a few with flames dancing around their fingertips. Some with nothing more than their bare hands.

Typhon rolled over, shoving Hermes off him and wiping at his face, lips pursed and face scrunched up in disgust.

For a moment, Wilder couldn’t take his eyes off Hermes. The man was breathing, though, and grinning, and... giggling? Trust Hermes to find it amusing, being poisoned. Wilder only hoped that meant that the poison wasn’t going to kill him.

Typhon glanced around, from one student to the next, each armed, and each focused on him, face calculating.

“We know what you are,” Wilder called out to him. “Maybe we didn’t at first, but we do now.”

The monster spun to face him, sneer back in place. “You could not possibly know the power of—”

“Mate to Echidna, father of monsters, last andleastof Gaia’s children,” a voice called from the student line—Ward, pushing his way through to stand in front of the kids. “Most histories don’t even call you a titan, like her other children. You’re just a monster.”

That was ballsy of Ward—and impressive—but Wilder wasn’t going to have the monster kill his friend for coming forward and speaking up. Maybe he could finally acknowledge, if only to himself, that Ward’s spiritus magic was impressive in its own way, but there was one thing it was not: offensive. Or hell, evendefensive. Ward could not hold his own in a fight against anyone, let alone a creature that was made of poison.

“A monster, covered in vomit,” Wilder taunted. “And surrounded by people who know what he is. And who know how to kill him.”

For a second, Wilder was worried Typhon would laugh it off and start killing students. Kill Ward. Go after Hermes, who was still lying prone behind him, breathing hard and not even trying to get up.

He needed Typhon to take them seriously. He needed the damned monster to leave, so that he could go help Hermes.

Then Typhon was running again, in that strange crouched position, like a beast and not a man. Wilder rushed to grab onto the fire, to build it inside himself, but the monster was so damned fast...

Typhon hit the ground four feet in front of him and leapt... right over his head. He spun, expecting attack to come from behind, but no. Typhon was still airborne, on the other side of the parking lot.

He was running. Well, jumping.

A cheer went up through the students, and Ward looked like he was about to collapse from sheer relief, but Wilder’s dread didn’t dissipate. A student had been attacked—maybe killed, Wilder had frozen in the face of the monster he had to fight, and Hermes was poisoned.

With that thought, he rushed over to Hermes. Before he could drop to his knees next to the wily little messenger, Hermes threw a hand up.

“Don’t touch me.” He started coughing, flecks of gold peppering his hand where he held it to his mouth, and it took him a moment to get it under control. When he finally stopped, his voice was raspy and thin. “I’m poisonous.”

Wilder wanted to say that was ridiculous, because touching something poisonous didn’t make youpoisonous, it made youpoisoned.

But then there she was, the student Wilder had watched Typhon touch—the one he’d worried was the latest victim. Alive. She was leaning on a fellow student, but completely alive. “I think he took the poison out of me,” she was explaining to Ward, her voice trembling. “I woke up and he was over me, sweating and shaking.”

A state of things that had not changed at all, Wilder noted. He dropped to his knees in the grass a few feet away from Hermes. “Who can we get for help?” he asked, and for some reason his voice was a squeaky whisper. “How do we fix it?”

“I should—” Hermes was once again cut off by a wracking cough, and he rolled over to be sick again. Finally, he managed to mutter “wash” before collapsing into the grass, unconscious.

Possible poison be damned, there was no way Wilder was going to leave him like that. He pushed forward, reaching out—but someone got there before him. Ward’s boyfriend. Clinically, he pressed his fingers to Hermes’s neck, then the back of his hand to his sweaty forehead.

Gods had pulses and a normal body temperature? Sure, why not.

For some reason, Wilder wanted to laugh.

Like Hermes had been laughing only a few moments before.

Lysandros turned his hand and looked at the back of it, shiny with the sweat from Hermes’s forehead, and his lips curled away from his teeth in a grimace. He turned to Ward. “He’s sweating it out. We need to wrap him up in something and get him to a place we can wash it off without touching any mortals. And this whole area needs to be cleaned before people touch anything.”

He wiped his hand on his trousers and looked down at where Wilder’s knees met the grass, brows furrowed and lips pressed into a thin line. “You need to be careful.”

“We can call the gardener,” one of the other adjunct staff said, pulling out her phone. “They can get hoses out here. And we’ll rope off the area anyway, just in case. Are people going to die when this gets washed into the water table?”

“I don’t believe so,” was all Lysandros offered, with an apologetic shrug. But it wasn’t as though they could stop it from happening. If they didn’t wash it away immediately, the next rain would. There was no feasible way to keep it all from human contact.

A student came running out of the building where the range was, carrying one of the fire retardant blankets they kept there, and held it out to Lysandros, who efficiently wrapped Hermes up in it, hefted the god into his arms, and turned to Wilder. “Coming?”

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