Underworlds #2: When Monsters Escape Read Free Page A

rune?” asked Dana. “Runes are stones that hold power, if you know the symbols and how to use them. Loki was called a Rune Master. Maybe he gave the Cyclopes magic rune stones to get them outof the Underworld. That could be how they escaped from school and vanished in the woods.”
    “I’m pulling up a bunch of stuff about runes now,” said Sydney, tapping away on the screen of her cell. “Owen, if you can remember what the design of the rune was, we could use that same magic to get the giants back to Hades.”
    It seemed like a long shot, but I liked the idea of something working in our favor. “That’s a better plan than mine,” I said.
    “I didn’t know you had a plan,” said Jon.
    “I don’t,” I said. “Come on.”
    Carefully but quickly, we darted along the outside wall of the plant until we found a large steel door. I may not have known very much about the lyre’s different powers, but I knew how to make it open doors. My friends popped in their earplugs, and I brushed the strings of the lyre until the door quivered like heat off a hot stove and popped open.
    The main room of the plant was a giant open box made of coal-blackened bricks. It rose eight stories from the floor to the ceiling, where a narrow gallerywas accessible only by a rickety set of stairs on the far side of the room. Part of the ceiling had crumbled in, and rain was pouring down like a waterfall, flooding a sunken section of the floor.
    There was a narrow set of iron tracks around the perimeter of the room, leading deeper into the plant. The tracks had a small coal car sitting on them. Beside that, enormous machines made up of wheels and gears and pipes — generators, I guessed — seemed to have been ripped from their places and shoved to the sides of the room as if they were toys.
    Against one wall was a huge coal-burning furnace. Its big iron door stood open to the room, and a fire was blazing inside. Among the flames we saw street poles, a section of bleachers, the body of a car.
    “They threw all that stolen junk into the furnace,” whispered Jon.
    Not far away from the furnace sat a flat-topped pile of iron girders. They seemed welded together into a giant block.
    “I know what that is,” Sydney whispered. “Dad has one in shop class. An anvil. The Cyclopes wouldneed a furnace and an anvil to make lightning bolts. This is really not good.”
    No, it wasn’t.
    But not everything was bad. Even though the room was big and open, the piles of equipment pushed aside to make room for the anvil created tunnels and shadows where we could hide if we needed to.
    And we needed to — fast.
    Something heavy scraped across the floor deep inside the plant, and we took cover behind a mess of busted machines.
    Scrape. Pause. Scrape. And something the size of a mountain moved into the room.
    In the light from the blazing furnace, we saw one of the giants clearly for the first time.
    If he was huge when we saw him outside school, he seemed to have grown. To call him a giant hardly seemed big enough. The guy was gargantuan. He was almost as tall as the eight-story room itself. He lumbered in slowly, every muscle in his massive arms and legs clenched and menacing.
    His head was the size of a hot-air balloon. Shaggyhair hung in tangled clumps to his shoulders, which were as wide as a house. Under a brow as big as a hedge stood one large, round, wet eye.
    “Gross …” Jon said, swallowing behind his hand. “I think I’m going to —”
    I knew how he felt.
    The white of the monster’s one huge eye was the color of eggnog. The brown pupil at the center pulsed, causing the eye to drool yellow liquid down his cheeks.
    A wave of nausea moved from my stomach up to my throat. I breathed deep and swallowed hard.
    From his massive shoulders to his knees, the Cyclops wore a kind of blacksmith’s apron that looked patched together from a whole herd of cattle.
    Dana crept up beside me, nudging me to look at the giant’s massive hand. In it, he