“What?” Jason and the doctor said at once. Somewhere nearby a falcon cried out.
“What did you say?” Leif managed finally.
She waggled the amulet. “I put this thing on and . . . saw things. A vision. And I know it was a vision because there was this warning that told me—” She stopped short of adding details that wouldn’t help.
“Are you certain?” the doctor asked. “You may have just been dreaming. If you struck your head on the rock, there may be some hemorrhaging that I didn’t—”
“I didn’t talk that much!” she shot at him. Okay, that probably sounded just a tad insane, didn’t it? “Just listen, will you? I saw Zeus die, saw this—this metal bug thing crawl out of a gift box and jab a stinger in him. He fell out the window and . . . Well, that was mostly it, I guess.”
“Mostly?” Jason tried.
“Metal bug thing?” Leif asked.
“Zeus spoke to me,” she continued. “By name. Yeah, fine, maybe that’s not so telling since it’s—The point is he said I was his child, that I could reverse his fate. Or was ‘key’ to reversing it, anyway, and that this amulet was—well, that I should hold on to it. Guard it.” There didn’t seem to be all that much to it when she gave a recap, she realized. “I was out for two hours?”
“Er, not exactly,” Leif answered, appearing distracted. “Hour, fifty-five minutes or so, really, but . . .”
Tracy gave him what was fast becoming the usual look. “Okay, not helping. The point is I saw this stuff. But more than that, I just . . . know it. Like I know my own phone number or that my grandparents are dead.”
“One set anyway,” Jason pointed out. “If Zeus is your father, then your other grandparents would be . . .” He trailed off, perhaps trying to think of names.
“I’m serious, Jason. I’m Zeus’s daughter and I have to do something, probably something with this amulet, to bring him back!”
“Ah, and why is that, exactly?” asked the doctor. “The bringing him back, I mean.”
“Because it’s the right thing to do! Because he’s my father and . . .” She shook her head. “It sounds stupid, isn’t it? All this.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Leif reached out to touch her arm for a moment before she realized it and could pull it away.
Jason was trying to suppress a laugh. “Ah, yes, it does.”
She bristled. “Jason, I know what I saw!”
He held up his hands. “Fine! You’re Zeus’s daughter. I killed a giant, man-eating turtle-frog today, so I’ll accept that. But why do you have to bring him back? You said yourself you don’t even know what to do. Seems if the guy was half organized, he’d have left better instructions.”
Tracy scowled. He was right, of course, at least for the moment. Zeus’s daughter or not, she had no idea what she was supposed to do. She lifted the amulet again, looking through it experimentally. It was warm to the touch.
“Um, I should probably mention something . . .”
Tracy gave Leif a sidelong glance. “Since when have you hesitated to mention anything during the past twenty-four hours?”
“I met Apollo,” Leif blurted. “And I think he thinks . . . I’m you.”
Tracy just stared. So did Jason. So did the doctor. Hooray for solidarity.
“I don’t see the resemblance,” Jason said finally.
“Not that I’m—I mean he thought I was Zeus’s son. That he had some vision about how I’d bring him back somehow. I said he had the wrong guy. Looks like he wasn’t even looking for a guy.”
“Did he say anything about this?” Tracy held up the amulet.
“Er, well no.”
“I can’t believe I’m going to say this, Karlson, but . . . talk!”
Thalia sat upon a rock at the top of the canyon wall, some distance back from the mortals for privacy’s sake. Ankles crossed, she leaned back on one hand, sunset-kissed red hair blowing back in the wind as she tossed it to make room for her cell phone against her ear. She was visible—invisibility tended to hinder cell reception—and she was posing, though she didn’t realize it. It is a habit bordering on instinct of all Muses to pose when visible, regardless of whether or not they are seen. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, and it hit a Muse, that Muse will be posing.
“Come on. Pick up . . .”
The call connected. “Hello, you’ve reached Apollo’s private line. I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now. If this is Hera, I’m looking into the pomegranate thing, and I will get back to you. Anyone else, leave a message and I’ll be glad to get back to you too.” Here there was a pause for a barely audible sigh, “Eventually.”
Voice mail. Of course. She could just send him a text, but who knew when he’d get that?
“Apollo, it’s your favorite redhead. Get out to the Nevada desert. Now. That guy I’ve been following? Major breakthrough.” Figuring she shouldn’t say more, Thalia hung up, slipped off her arm bangle, and tucked it away.
Thalia considered that she probably should have called Apollo two hours ago, right when she saw the flash of Zeus’s aura as Tracy picked up the amulet. But she hadn’t wanted to take action until she got some confirmation of what was going on, especially since it was Tracy, not Leif, who’d picked it up. She was supposed to be following him, after all. And what if Tracy had woken when she was away making that call? She would’ve missed hearing the whole vision, then, wouldn’t she? Where would they all be then?
Though she could have texted Apollo rather discreetly without leaving their side . . . Crud. Thalia forced back a few tears of self- recrimination. She’d just leave that little detail out. So she’d hesitated. Big deal! Apollo didn’t need to know. She was a Muse, not a spy!
Plus, the roaming charges out here were monstrous. Probably. Who did pay those bills, anyway?
It was then that Thalia heard the fabric of the world shudder and tear before it swiftly sealed back up. But not before something came through. There was no mistaking the sound. It was how They traveled.
Thalia went cold. Here?
Now?
“Did anyone else hear that?” the doctor asked.
Intent on listening to Leif’s story, Tracy and the others ignored the question. Leif had just finished explaining his conversation with Apollo, the god’s entreaty for his help, and his own refusal to give it. She couldn’t really blame him. He’d been told even less about what he could possibly do than she had.
She yelled at him for it anyway.
“It wouldn’t have mattered!” Leif argued. “Obviously I was supposed to be here and help out somehow! You didn’t even want to have me along, so now who’s stupid?” He blinked. “I mean, you’re beautiful when you’re stupid, of course.”
She resisted the urge to smack him. “And Apollo didn’t say anything about what—?”
The grinding scrape of stone on stone cut her off. Their attention shot upward to where a small chunk of the canyon top was rapidly sliding away. All anyone could manage was a perfunctory, “Look out!” before the refrigerator-sized piece shattered on the canyon floor not fifteen feet from them. Chips of stone flew everywhere, clattering off the canyon wall as dust billowed up from the impact.
Too late to do much good, they shot to their feet regardless. Tracy belatedly felt the pain in her shin where a piece had scraped her. It hurt but wasn’t bad.
“Um, what just happened?” Leif asked.
The only answer was the crack of splitting rock in the overhang above them. At the same time, melon-sized stones began to tumble from the top of the canyon. Tracy had only a fraction of a moment to wonder if the rocks were falling of their own accord before Jason pulled them all out from underneath the overhang amid the scattered showers of rock.
“It’s still happening, whatever it is!”
A cascade of small but numerous stones rained down in the passage that led to the canyon’s exit. Momentarily trapped, they couldn’t do anything but stand close and try to avoid the larger stones plummeting down every f
ew seconds from all sides. At first Tracy had thought it an earthquake, but the dust devils dancing at the canyon edges and what sounded like vindictive screams from above put that idea out of her mind. It wasn’t an earthquake.
Or if it was, it wasn’t a natural one.
A chunk of rock the size of her head hurtled toward the doctor. She yanked him away and they both stumbled backward, landing in some sagebrush that immediately began to snake its branches around their wrists. A screaming cackle echoed through the dust from above as the others rushed to help her.
No, definitely not an earthquake.
“No, no, no, no, this isn’t my area, this isn’t what I do! I’m a Muse, for the sake of all that’s sacred!”
Thalia rushed back to the canyon, cursing her luck and hunting for anything to say that could possibly matter to the three beings who had just arrived. She could see them up ahead, bat wings spread, hovering near the canyon edge and focused on whatever havoc they were wreaking below. They had their game faces on: monstrous, sneering, and surrounded in manes of snakelike hair (actual writhing snake heads enhanced the effect). Thalia couldn’t begin to comprehend why they would go around like that when they didn’t even have to, but then there was a great deal about the Erinyes that she couldn’t comprehend.
Generally, Erinyes do not get along with Muses, and the “generally” part of that is redundant. More to the point, the “Muses” part is redundant as well. The Erinyes pretty much do not get along with anyone. Initially, one could hardly blame them. If you were born out of blood spilled from the castration of Zeus’s grandfather, you might be a little bit cranky about it too. Yet even such traumatic beginnings can be overcome, and after so many thousands of years, it has become apparent to even the most forgiving individuals that the Erinyes are, put simply, spectacular jerks.
Make no mistake: being jerks goes well with their job of wreaking vengeful justice (or just vengeance) upon those who deserve it. It is a job that needs to be done; crimes such as matricide, patricide, double- parking, and general hubris can hardly go unpunished. Yet no one on Olympus who’ve had any dealings with them can deny the screamingly obvious feeling that the Erinyes are in it for the vengeance.
It’s not even really the vengeance that draws them, but the violence with which they get to dispense it. Sure, justice is done, but to say the Erinyes care about that is to say that porn aficionados care about plot. The Erinyes also have an interest in safeguarding the Natural Order of Things—yet, again, this is primarily motivated by the knowledge that anyone caught violating it becomes fair game for their fury.
“I cannot even begin to tell you how much you shouldn’t be doing that!” Thalia called out when she got within earshot. It wasn’t a great opener, and it wouldn’t stop them, but it was the best she could come up with. It might at least get their attention. Once that was done, all she really needed to do was think of something clever enough to deter the Erinyes from their vengeance! Yes! And then she could teach an elephant to dance on the head of a pin or something equally preposterous!
“Is that a Muse?” said the one spinning dust about. Her name was Megaera.
“A Muse?” Tisiphone, the second, laughed. She ceased lobbing boulders into the canyon for a moment to spin one atop a single talon like a basketball. “Whatever is a precious little Musey doing way out here?”
The third, known to most as Alecto the Unceasing, didn’t even bother to look up from where she showered the smaller rocks into a barrier at the canyon’s exit. She had an appellation to live up to.
Thalia did her best to look authoritative and imposing—a difficult task when one was outnumbered and addressing figures unperturbed by the fact that blood freely gushed from their own eyes. (Copious eye-bleeding is a side effect of the Erinyes’ instantaneous mode of transport. Painful, yes, but worth it to pack more violence into a single day’s time. Plus, it is really, really disturbing, and anything that makes them more disturbing—with the notable exception of wedge-heeled shoes—is fine by them.) “What right do you have to attack these mortals? Is desert videography such a heinous crime?”
“Ooh, is it?” asked Tisiphone, practically salivating at the thought of having more offenses to punish.
“Since when does a Muse have anything to say about our affairs?” Megaera asked. “This isn’t some sissy play, Thalia. We don’t have to justify anything to the likes of you!”
Alecto gleefully maintained her rock curtain at the canyon tunnel. The mortals were clustered in the open, gazing up warily.
“Maybe not to me,” Thalia tried, “but to somebody!”
“To ‘somebody’?” Megaera asked. “For the god-commissioned killing of a mortal or two?” She gave a practiced cackle while Tisiphone simply took aim with her boulder and chucked it at the group. Thalia winced and started, thinking she might do something really foolish and interfere, until she saw the throw go wide—likely intentionally so. Tisiphone liked to play with her quarry. The mortals scattered regardless.
Thalia ignored the “god-commissioned” bit for the moment. Let them know she was curious, and they’d never reveal who sent them.
“A mortal or two?” She pointed down, feeling a performance coming on. “One of them—one of them isn’t just some mortal, you know, one of them is—an experimental nanocluster of festering, disease-causing motes!” She willed her voice to rise toward a dramatic crescendo, doing her best to enthrall the Erinyes. “Kill that one, and you set them free!” she cried. “They burst apart, infecting everyone within two hundred miles! Highly contagious, highly fatal! A mortal or two? How about an entire hemisphere? Do you really think the gods would be thrilled with losing so many worshippers?”
Yes, it was a little hokey, a little desperate, a little too sci-fi . . . but hey, in a crisis, she’d go with what she knew.
It seemed at least enough to give two of the three pause. Both Tisiphone and Megaera shifted into their more conversational forms, dropping to the ground as their wings folded up, their faces grew lovely, and their hair became . . . somewhat less objectionable. Meanwhile, Alecto sheared bits of the canyon sides away at the narrow exit point, still maintaining her curtain of falling rock. It was piled halfway up and already a major barricade the mortals would have to scramble over.
“You’re making that up!” Tisiphone said finally.
“Which one is it?”
Thalia smirked. It was going better than expected. “I don’t know, but there’s no sense in taking the risk, is there?”
“She’s making it up!” Tisiphone cried again. “She’s a Musey!” Her wings folded back out. Her face turned gaunt and haggish.
Okay, Thalia thought, not going quite as well.
“What if she’s not?”
“Oh for gods’ names!” Tisiphone’s hair writhed. “Do you even know what a nanocluster is?”
“You didn’t even know what a DVD was until last month!” shot Megaera.
Across the way Alecto was apparently getting bored, starting to fling the pile of stone shards up into the air to rain them down on the mortals. Their huddled conference broke apart once more as they rushed for what cover they could.
“Sisters!” Alecto hissed. “Work ethic? Vengeance!”
Megaera growled, her bleeding eyes rolling. “Well . . . I suppose we could just grab them all, shut them up somewhere, and leave them to starve!”
“Too much trouble, not enough fun!” Tisiphone snarled and hurled a rock. It smashed above Jason’s head and drew protests from Megaera and Thalia alike. “Oh, stop your bloody whining! Even if she’s not lying, we’ve got the paperwork! Ares gets the blame!”
Megaera’s face blossomed in a maw of snarling, cackling delight. “Why am I always forgetting those things?”
“’Cause you’re a simpering pus-bag!”
“And a hag to boot!” Alecto added.
Megaera hissed at the insults, smiling widely nonetheless. With a raise of her arms, she gathered heaps of sand and stone into the early evening air t
o launch them down into the canyon with renewed vindictiveness. “Go to Tartarus, Musey! The grown-ups are working!”
Megaera’s shriek as the crossbow quarrel pierced her chest a moment later completely blasted away whatever it was Thalia was about to yell in response, which was a shame because she was certain she had a really effective zinger on the tip of her tongue.
Leif gave a whoop as Jason’s crossbow shot found its mark. The weapon, small and hastily unfolded once he’d fished it from his bag, was more powerful than Leif expected. The hideous bat-snake-woman- thing tumbled backward out of view. The shower of rocks blocking their exit subsided. Tracy caught the whole thing on the headband camera she’d snatched from Jason. With Dave gone, it was the only one they had left, and visions or not, she’d said, she’d be damned if she’d let this go unfilmed.
“One down, two to—”
“Run!” The scream came from a redheaded woman now swooping toward them in gold-gilded robes of flowing white. The sight of her surprised them enough that most of them stood rooted and blinking as two of the bat-women flew down ahead of her. Leif ducked as talons raked the air nowhere near him, although the creatures appeared more concerned with Jason, but better safe than sorry, right?
Jason managed to dodge and knock one off course with a swing of his crossbow. The other seized him as he turned, lifting him up. Tracy grabbed his ankle before he got far and the doctor sprang up afterward, fighting alongside her to free Jason from the thing’s grip. They dangled there a moment like an oversized earring before the hag let Jason go and the three mortals landed in a heap. All Leif could do was blink.
The redhead landed, or more accurately stepped out of the sky. Also, she was yelling.
“Run! Run now!”
“Someone hand me another quarrel!” Jason tipped an imaginary hat to the redhead. “Ma’am.”
The bat-women had disappeared somewhere over the top of the canyon. Their screams echoed down over the edge, sounding like a banshee with its hand caught in a blender. Leif hoped at least some of those were screams of pain.
Zeus is Dead Page 15
