Rise of the Blood (16 page)

My body lurched again, suddenly, and my feet hit something hard, like the ground. All at once the acid that had been burning its way up erupted. I doubled over, coughing and spewing it, causing a yell and a sudden movement outside myself. Someone—Apollo—braced me from behind and patted my back. I wanted to tell him it was torment, but my throat had been burnt out and I couldn’t speak.

I blinked away tears from my violent purging and only then realized I
could
blink again. I was as weak as a kitten, completely dependent on Apollo holding me upright, worried about keeping my feet under me.

Until my newly opened eyes lit on the carnage all around us, and I learned we had much, much bigger things to worry about.

I blinked up at Apollo, every muscle in my body protesting the simple turn of my head. “Did you do that?” I asked.

His eyes were a bottomless pit of pain. I fell back away from them—or would have fallen if I hadn’t caught myself on a still-standing column. “What?” I asked, filled with dread. There was no way that pain was caused by killing in self-defense. There was more to it, and the way he was looking at me…

I looked down at
myself
and saw my chest, matted in blood that was tacky and thick. It wasn’t just the “blood spatter” pattern on all the CSI shows with the blowback from a bullet wound or the cast off from a blunt force weapon. It was up close and personal lifeblood spilling out as I—

I hit a mental wall, and my knees buckled. My back scraped against the stone as I slid down it to the ground.

Had
I—

The wall hit
me
. With a vengeance. My vision, my world blinked out and swam back again, but when it did I was lying in a puddle of bile and blood with Apollo crouched over me, smoothing hair away from my face.

“You saved my life,” he said softly, as if that would make it all better. “Or, anyway, Rhea killing them kept them from killing me. This wasn’t really
you
, you know. None of this was your fault.”

They were just words. My hand had wielded the blade, had buried itself in some guy’s flesh. I knew that now. I
remembered
. I was the one covered in their blood. I searched inside myself for any sign of Rhea, to cast her out or rail at her or assure myself that yes, truly, this had happened and there was nothing I could have done to stop it. But if Rhea was still in possession, she was playing it cool.

“Come on,” Apollo continued, reaching for my arm when he saw that I was coming back to myself. “We have to get out of here before anyone finds the bodies.”

I couldn’t process. “
Find
? Shouldn’t we report them?”

Apollo looked at me pityingly and continued trying to pull me to my feet. I wasn’t being any help. Escape felt…pointless. Three men were dead.
I’d
killed them. Sure, they were trying to kill us, but…it hadn’t been self-defense. Not for me—or Rhea. I remembered it all now. There’d been anger, hunger, righteousness, but no fear. I hadn’t—
she
hadn’t felt threatened. She’d felt vengeful.

I started to shake. Hard. So hard my teeth clacked together and I almost shook loose of Apollo’s hand.

“You’re in shock,” he said. “And no wonder, but you can break down later. For now, I have to get you out of here. No arguments. We can’t report this when you’re the one covered in their blood.”

It seemed pointless—to protest, escape, report, breathe. All equally hopeless. What could the authorities do, after all? Arresting me wouldn’t stop a disembodied mother goddess. I wasn’t even sure she wouldn’t take possession again to prevent that from happening, and I was afraid of what that would mean for any authorities.

My shaking grew more violent, but Apollo held on and dragged me from the site.

It was dark. There was no constant glare of city lights and pollution like in L.A. Just darkness barely lightened by the moon and stars, even with no clouds to blot them out. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other and not thinking about the dead priests. Someone’s sons, certainly. Brothers? Lovers? Who was left behind to mourn and how could they without knowing…

I stumbled, and Apollo kept me upright.

“No guard?” I asked, surprised, looking around the ruins.

“No money for them. There’s only one way in, and it would have been closed hours ago.”

So the bodies wouldn’t be found until morning. Were there predators up this high? Scavengers who would… The bile rose up again, but not with enough force to spill over.

Right, not thinking about them. Not my fault
. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. My body, my rules. My parents had taught me that before we’d even had the first sex talk. It was like a mantra, and it had been totally blown to smithereens. If I wasn’t safe inside my own mind and body, where was I safe? And who was safe from me?

Right, fleeing the scene of a crime now, complete mental break later. After my murder indictment. Maybe I could claim insanity. I already had the family history.

Apollo was moving slower than normal, I noticed after a minute. “Are you okay?” I asked.

He didn’t answer right away. “Healing,” he said finally, “and talking to the winds. Getting help.”

I craned my aching neck to stare at him. “You couldn’t have done that
earlier
?”

“No winds where they had us locked away, and then I was distracted taking a knife to the chest.”

“Oh, that. And between times?”

He looked away. Between incarceration and attempted sacrifice, I’d been knocked out. Had all his focus been on me?

“I tried. He wasn’t taking calls,” Apollo said.

“Who wasn’t? Hermes?”

Apollo snorted. “I wouldn’t trust Hermes to help me cross the street.”

“Who then?”

“Pan.”

I stopped short, and Apollo, still holding my arm, propelling me along, nearly fell on his face with the sudden loss of momentum.

“Pan,” I said, confirming. “As in my possible progenitor Pan?”

“You don’t know?” he asked.

“Know what?” I snapped back. I’d
killed
tonight. I really wasn’t in the mood for guessing games.

“Your Uncle Hector.”

My brain refused even to process that thought, still fried from earlier or just unable to accept any more impossible things before breakfast…or rehearsal dinner. Oh gods, that rehearsal dinner. Tina was going to kill me. And right now I could only think that it would solve all my problems.

“Uncle Hector,” I repeated stupidly.

“Ask your yiayia. She knows. Or ask him yourself. He’s on his way.”

My brain had truly blown a fuse. Suddenly, my divine heritage had gone from theoretical to actual. Oh sure, I’d come to terms with the gorgon glare; there was no denying
that
. But divinity… Although, actual relation to the god Pan, the earthy divinity best known for his sexual appetite, explained so much about Spiro.

Uncle Hector
. Now I understood why I’d never known quite where he fit into the family tree. It seemed to be kind of an emeritus title. I wondered…did everybody know? Or was everyone but Yiayia as ignorant as I was?

“Tori, stay with me. We have to get past the road block so that Hector can pick us up.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” I snapped.

“Not physically. But mentally you’re so far away your feet have stopped moving.”

I cursed, colorfully and bilingually. It didn’t help anything, but it felt good. I had so much pent up…stuff—horror, shock, panic, horror, stunned disbelief, horror—that it was a release valve of sorts, letting off just enough steam to get my feet moving again.

We made it past the gated-off portion of road and down a little ways from the bloodshed and ruins when a car, running dark with no lights, pulled up to us. The passenger side window rolled down, and Uncle Hector ordered, “Get in.”

Apollo opened the back door for me and gently lowered me in, then he took shotgun.

“That your blood?” Uncle Hector asked as he got in.

“Mostly.”

Uncle Hector only nodded, like he picked up bloody men on dark mountain roads on a regular basis. He was completely unfazed. “Tori-girl, how are you?”

There was no way to answer that.

“In shock,” Apollo said for me.

Hector nodded, popped the car into gear and somehow managed a three-point turn on the narrow road. We drove for a mile or so before he felt it safe to turn on the headlights.

“I didn’t make any excuses,” Uncle Hector said as he drove. “Would lead to too many questions, and I wanted to get out of there in a hurry. Plus, I didn’t know what kind of injuries we were gonna have to account for. But you two disappearing together, that’s caused quite a stir.” He took his gaze off the road to look back over his shoulder at me. “Your young man is fit to be tied. Caused quite a ruckus saying you’d gone missing. Nearly derailed the rehearsal. Stayed behind to search for you. Had hotel security all up in arms.”

Nick
.

My heart broke. How was I going to tell Nick that I’d killed, even if I hadn’t been the one in control of my body? That I’d left the scene. That I could feel Apollo’s pain…

Even without a psychic connection, I could sense
Nick’s
pain, because I knew what I’d be feeling if situations were reversed and he’d gone missing after threats to his life. I’d fear the worst. He was a Los Angeles police officer, a detective. He’d seen a lot more of the worst than he had of best case scenarios.

“Cell phone?” I asked.

Uncle Hector reached into the console cup holder and handed me the phone that sat there. “Wait a minute or two though. We want it to ping off the right cell towers.” If I’d had my head on straight, I’d have thought of that.

When Uncle Hector—I still couldn’t think of him as Pan—gave me the nod, I dialed the hotel. But Nick wasn’t in our room. Of course not, he was out looking for me. I hung up before the voicemail came on and then called again. This time I asked the front desk to give him a message, just that I was okay and on my way back.

“We need a cover story,” I said the second I hung up.

“Ahead of you there,” Uncle Hector said, far too cheerfully, especially under the circumstances. “You went for a walk together and ignored the signs about loose scree and falling rocks. Happens all the time. You got hurt, went bumping down the mountain, got stuck on a ledge. Apollo had to figure out how to get you up safely and didn’t dare leave you to go for help. I presume you don’t have your phone on you?” he asked Apollo, who shook his head. “So, he couldn’t leave you, and he didn’t have a phone to call for help.”

“You’ve done this before,” I said, not sure whether I was accusing or admiring.

“
Anipsi
, I’ve been sneaking into and out of bedrooms and coming up with alibis since long before you were born.”

“How do we explain all of this blood?” Apollo asked.

“Change of clothes,” Uncle Hector answered, “in the back.”

On the floor in front of me was a dark backpack. I tore open the zipper and out fell PowerBars, mini water bottles, a first-aid kit and a profusion of clothes. I looked from it to Uncle Hector.

“Just one question, why am
I
the one getting rescued in your scenario?”

I hadn’t meant to be funny, but his laughter fell about me as I ripped into a PowerBar, suddenly consumed with the munchies, maybe trying to fill the empty void that was my soul.

But once I’d consumed the calories, all I wanted to do was sleep. Playing host to a psychotic mother goddess after her millennia of slumber apparently took a lot out of a girl. Ambrosia or nectar would probably perk me right up, but now that the supplier was suspect, the cost was far too high. This wedding had already become more about death than a new life, and it wasn’t even over. None of it. Apollo’s blood and near sacrifice had awoken Rhea, and she didn’t seem inclined to slip quietly into that good night.

Sleep. It seemed to be the best thing. Already my body was shutting down. My eyes were closing. My head lolled back against the headrest, and my eyes shut with a satisfying finality. I had a blissful moment of escape, and then, “Tori!”

I was so sick of hearing it. My eyes stayed shut and my mind blank.

A slap rocked my head from one side to the other, and my eyes snapped open. “What?” I asked without the energy for the heat I felt at the rudeness.

“We’re almost there. You have to change.”

“Let ’em take me.” It came out “Et em ake ee,” and my eyes shut again.

There was cursing, and then someone was crawling into the backseat with me, and I was half aware that I was being undressed, but not awake enough to actually care. Then my arms were lifted, and I was slumped forward so my shirt could be pulled off of my back. The wet suctiony sound barely penetrated my cloud of exhaustion. I didn’t resist, but I didn’t help either. If I was caught bloody-handed, so be it, as long as they let me sleep. Deep down, I knew that wouldn’t happen. There’d be an interrogation, mugshots, fingerprinting—things for which I’d probably have to stay upright, but… Yeah, I wished them luck with that.

The car door opened. Presumably, the car had stopped first, but I hadn’t been aware of it. I stayed deadweight as I was lifted out of the backseat. I was vaguely aware of a sense of movement, of being taken from one place to another and being laid down on something, but whatever warned me of danger didn’t sound an alert, and so I didn’t bother to rouse myself. I wasn’t even sure it was possible. Not even for the insistent voices all around me. I did manage to shift into a more comfortable position and fall far, far away from it all.

At a certain point, I became aware of a loud argument, followed some time later by warm arms pulling me into a seated position and someone spooning something into my mouth with the command, “Eat this.” That same someone rubbed my throat to make sure that I swallowed, like a recalcitrant kitty with a heartworm pill. Then I was out again.

Blood, seeping, absorbing, awakening. Power rising.
Me
rising, seeking, laughing at the glory of it, then horrified at the degradation. Finding a new avatar. Strong, that one, but so pointless. Hardly aware of her potential. Wasteful. So much to be exploited, taken over, pathways seldom traveled. Unguarded.