Bad Blood: Latter-Day Olympians (16 page)

And still naked. As far as I could tell, my clothes had vanished.

It killed any chance of a dramatic exit—or even of slinking out unseen—but I had to go back to Apollo to ask the whereabouts of my clothing.

Apollo didn’t react as I reentered the bedroom. He was too busy watching the flat-screen television mounted on the wall. I groaned. Someone had gotten video of the rescue. The news footage exposed Apollo, half-naked, his impressive chest exposed and my flaccid, waterlogged body clutched to it. Apollo looked cinematically heroic. I looked like crap. If the contrast didn’t dampen his libido, I didn’t know what would.
 

“Hot damn,” he said under his breath.

“Um, my clothes?” I asked uncomfortably from just within the doorway—far enough in that I could see the screen but close enough to a speedy retreat.

“I sent them out,” he answered without pulling his eyes away from the screen. “
That
ought to convince the damned studios I’m still leading-man material.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, look at Connery. How old was he when he played opposite Zeta-Jones?”

“Right. Before you go staging your comeback, do you think you can find me something to wear so I can get out of your hair?”

“I need to call my publicist back. Damn, you can’t
pay
for publicity like this. Can’t believe she’s teed off I didn’t tell her first— What did you say?”

My fuse was lit. “Are you saying you rescued me as some freakin’ publicity stunt? That’s why you wouldn’t answer my questions. You probably didn’t even know it was me in trouble, just some random damsel in distress.”

His face twitched in irritation. “I
did
know it was you, and before you go concocting some crazy conspiracy theory, it’s called
scrying
, okay? Damn, you’re suspicious. As far as the camera goes, that was just luck—paparazzi, maybe, or some tourist with a handycam.”

He rose in all his nekkid glory and headed for a door I’d missed in my avoidance of the bedroom. I tried not to ogle, but really, wow. And I mean
wow
. The big screen did not do him justice. He needed intimate spaces and natural lighting. Oh hell, my hormones were getting all supercharged again.
 

The sheer vastness of his walk-in closet momentarily distracted me, and I had to fight down the ugly green-eyed monster—jealously, not lust. The blasted thing was the size of my kitchen.

Apollo’s phone was ringing again, but he ignored it from the depths of his closet.

“Do you want me to get that?” I called.
 

“No. I don’t have a damned thing here to give you to wear. I’m going to have to call someone. There are going to be a million questions, and I’ll need to coordinate with the police. They’ll probably want a press conference.”

Phantasmagorical.

“Just give me a T-shirt and some sweats. I’m sure if I roll them they’ll stay up long enough to get me home.”

Apollo emerged to stare me down. He looked like he was taking calming breaths. “Do you not realize that there are going to be paparazzi everywhere? You can’t just walk out the front door. We’ve got to have a plan, a story. If they recognize you, you’ll be shark bait. The fact that I brought you here rather than a hospital will raise questions.”

“And heavens forbid you be linked to me.”

Tension was rolling off Apollo in waves. “Is that what you want—your fifteen minutes of fame?”

It was too bad Christie and I had such different coloring and I couldn’t get her in to be my stunt double. She would eat this up.

“No,” I answered.

I knew he was baiting me. He hadn’t forgotten my earlier slight or his anger, but for right now he needed me for his impromptu publicity campaign. I wondered if I went along whether I would escape retribution.

“Fine, then I will call Maria.
You
can call Armani. And, by the way, it is quite interesting to me that you use his last name and my first. So, perhaps you think more of me than you realize.”

I hated myself for the thrill that sent up my spine. It didn’t sound as if Apollo had given up the chase. One would think the first-hand demonstration of what it meant to run with not just a god but an
actor
would have knocked some sense into me. But common sense and my family, if they’d ever been acquainted, had fallen out ages ago.

Still, I was not so far gone I’d agree to perform for a media circus.

Several phone calls, one reaming out from Armani and a
Mission Impossible
-style escape later, I was locked in a car with a repressively silent plainclothes officer in an unmarked sedan heading toward my apartment. Armani and Lau had wanted to be nowhere near Apollo’s dog-and-pony show lest the media make the logical leap between the kidnapping and rescue and Circe Holland’s high-profile murder case. Some LAPD spokesman had been delegated deflection duty.

I wasn’t surprised to see Armani waiting for me when I let myself into my apartment. I didn’t ask how he’d gotten in himself. My super was nothing if not mercenary. If the badge hadn’t worked, bribery certainly would have done the trick.

Armani sat in the same chair from which he’d interrogated me after my last attack, eyeing me like he was hungry and pissed off about it, which I could relate to. I noted he didn’t rush to enfold me in his arms and tell me how relieved he was to see me. Sheesh. When had I gone all girly?
Enfold me in his arms
—gods, I’d gone over to the melodramatic side of the force.

“Hey,” I said offhandedly.

The officer had left as soon as he’d seen his replacement. Armani and I now faced off. Or maybe it just seemed like that because I felt guilty, even though there certainly wasn’t any ring on my finger and it wasn’t like Armani had even declared himself in any way. I mean, I’d had to blackmail him for a date. Here I was with Apollo, powerful, seductive, terrifying, doing his damndest to get me into his bed if not his life and I was still pining over Armani. Maybe it was the
terrifying
part of the aforementioned. Maybe I’d just grown accustomed to Armani’s face, but I thought it was more than that. In many ways, Apollo was an amazing, exotic vacation I couldn’t really afford and Armani was like coming home.

“Karacis?”
Apollo calls me Tori
, I thought. “You okay? You seem distracted.”

Drop it, Tori, there be dragons
. I snapped to.

“Fine. Just…” To my horror, tears started leaking from my eyes.

Ridiculously hormonal, teary-eyed, self-reflective. Thank the gods—I wasn’t crazy, I was probably just pre-menstrual.

I cackled. Armani halted mid-rise, staring at me like I’d grown a second head.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to fall apart on you.” I swiped at the ridiculous tears. “It’s only—” my inner imp toyed with the truth, and if I ever wanted him to run screaming, maybe I’d share it. “Never mind. I’m fine now.”

He didn’t look like he believed me, but he couldn’t hover awkwardly over the chair forever, so he finally decided to stand. I took the next move out of his hands by walking right up and putting my arms around him. My head only came to his chest, but it was a really nice chest. He rested his chin on top of my head as he did that sappy enfolding thing. He was warm and comforting. I felt strangely at peace. After a minute, I also realized that we were breathing at the same pace and that his back where my hands gripped it beneath the jacket was just the least bit damp. For some reason, I wanted to explore that.

I drew away before confusion could rear its ugly head again.

“Sit. I’ll tell you everything.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Everything?” he asked.

I looked at him hard. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “You were off the radar for a long time.”

Chapter Thirteen

“Just because you have no dreams of glory doesn’t mean you get to ruin mine.”

“Glory? You’re a performer in a rinky-dink, two-bit circus. You can’t sacrifice your health for a— Rialto’s right behind me, isn’t he?”

—last words Tori and her brother shouted at each other before Lenny Rialto blew a gasket and very nearly her family’s contract

I laid in bed trying to ignore the figure watching over me like some latter-day gargoyle. Armani was planning to put me under surveillance whether I liked it or not and insisted on taking first shift. I didn’t like it, but then I wasn’t too fond of fighting for my life either, so a temporary guardian might be the lesser of two evils.

Since he wanted to remain watchful, I doubted Armani would accept an offer of a place to lay his head. He’d gone all quiet when I told him that I’d been unconscious for most of the missing time and even more so somehow when upon further questioning I accounted for Apollo’s whereabouts. I left out exactly what had transpired when I awoke, but I had the awful feeling that Armani was filling in his own blanks. I couldn’t very well stop him without confessing to what
had
happened, which was bad enough.

I finally fell off to sleep, only to dream of being chased by coyotes who turned into paparazzi and herded me into the center ring at the big top. To escape I climbed to the high-wire act, where my family tossed me from one to the other while I tried not to shriek like a banshee—until my brother’s shoulder gave out. Then I plummeted toward certain death.

I awoke sweaty, thrashing and alone. Second watch, I guessed, hadn’t been invited in, for which I was grateful. Even though I was sure the surveillance was completely unnecessary, I felt I had to know where my watcher was—just in case. Muscles protested, but only vaguely, as I got up to wash away the sweat with a cool cloth. The bathroom mirror reflected back at me a rumpled, sleepy-eyed image. If this was the vision that had greeted Apollo, it was a wonder we’d gotten to first base. Anyway, even with my nightshirt ending three-quarters of the way down my thigh, I reckoned it safe enough to peer out my doorway to see how close by my babysitter might be. I was unlikely to incite more than a grimace.

I’d wondered if the surveillance would be as far away as a squad car on the street, but no, Armani had opted for aid closer at hand—a baby-faced patrolman whose five a.m. shadow seemed incongruous. He looked up from his paper as my door opened, raked me with a glance and a nod and went back to his reading. Yup, I was definite siren material.

I drew my head back in, set the deadbolt, unset it again, figuring that with my enemies trouble might not come knocking at the front door; it might not be the best idea to lock out aid. With that happy thought, I resumed the supine position. It was a long, long time before I gave in once more to sleep.

Yiayia was on a roll.

“…clutched to his chest for gods’ sake and you don’t
call
…”

It had been a good ten minutes since she’d awakened me from a fitful sleep, and I had yet to get out a single word in my own defense.

I cut in finally, “Yiayia, I was a little busy being
passed out
, thank you very much, then being interrogated before passing out again. I promise that I would have called you if only you’d given me the chance to wake up at a decent hour.”

There was a weighty silence while Yiayia measured my sins against my suffering.

“Fine, you are forgiven, but only if you tell me everything. How did he feel? Was he sexy as hell?”

“Yiayia!” I gasped in astonishment. “For one thing, I was
unconscious
.”

She clucked her tongue at me. “
Then.
Do not try to tell me that you’ve had no private moment. It cannot be a coincidence that you start digging into the gods’ lives and then Apollo himself rescues you from the deep. You have been holding out on me.” She sniffed, “You will get no more from me until you come clean.”

Gods, she was getting as bad as me with the slang. Maybe we’d both seen one too many cop shows. Heavens knew I’d get no peace until I complied. Anyway, I needed someone to talk to.

I poured it all out, more or less. Apollo, Armani, my confusion, the case itself, the conclusions we’d come to, everything I knew of my attacker.

She hesitated only an instant once I wound down, as if to be certain that I was done.

“I will not tell you what to do, since you have never listened anyway. Whatever you decide with your men, go carefully. Apollo…I think you know the dangers already. He may burn you out or leave you still burning with no way for another to ever take his place. But if you should choose your detective, it will not be any safer, certainly not for him. You’ve heard the stories of scorned gods. Just know I am here for you, whatever you need.”

I tabled that, since my only choice was no choice at all. I would not be subsumed by some god, no matter how sexy, and Armani seemed to have taken himself out of the running. Anyway, my love life was the least of my concerns.

Yiayia beat me to a change of subject. “Regarding your attackers, I would say Glaucus, but in all the pictures I’ve seen of him, he has a tail like a serpent. Of course, it is possible that he has found some potion or spell to allow him to walk like a man once again. It sounds like his Mo—” she pronounced it like one of the Three Stooges, “—is falling in love with an inappropriate woman like that actress only to have something horrid happen. Just think of that poor Scylla, a monster for all eternity because Circe double-crossed him on that love potion.”

It made perfect sense. Glaucus, having been betrayed by Circe in the past, wouldn’t have had any trouble believing that she’d killed his new love. The question was, who’d suggested it to him? Who’d manipulated him into Circe’s murder? And was that the whole purpose of Sierra Talbot’s death or was there more?
 

While Glaucus now sported eternally in the surf, he’d once been a humble fisherman, transformed by some magical mystery herb he’d found on a deserted island. The herb hadn’t done a damned thing, though, to ease the transformation or extend his human lifespan. For that he was beholden to the water gods and goddesses, who’d made him a pet project, taken him under their wings and granted him divinity. Whether Glaucus’s initial metamorphosis was unstable or some new monkey wrench had been thrown into the works, it was not out of the realm of possibility that he could regrow legs. Neither was it inconceivable that beings with such long lifespans had memories to match and that someone like Glaucus could still feel such a debt of gratitude that he’d be prone to unquestioning faith in his saviors.