“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.
I thrashed, trying to wake, trapped in the dream, wanting out.
A new avatar, linked to the blood sacrifice. Blood I knew. Blood relation. Oh, the flavor. The power, the hum and life of it. I’d nearly forgotten life and the immediacy of the sensations. Almost too much after all this time asleep.
And then those bladed men, thinking they could take it all from me. I saw it in their hearts.
All for my eldest son, Zeus, who’d ruined everything. I should never have fed his father that stone in his place.
Zeus. The name burned. He would not rise again to ascendency. His time had passed, but the titans. I could sense it in this new avatar, in the very earth…the old ways had been forgotten. The titans themselves had been forgotten, along with any remembrance of how they might be defeated. And unlike the upstart Olympians, their power had never been fueled by belief, but by the sheer primal power of creation.
I flailed, trying to throw Rhea out of my head, as I’d tried and failed to exorcise
her from my body. I lashed out and struck something, but it might have been in the dream, because…
One of Zeus’s human dogs made a move, and as quickly as I willed it, the sacrificial blade was in my hand, slashing, cutting deep. More blood, more power. More elation, more bloodshed. Until I was bathed in it, as I’d been when I’d borne my misbegotten son.
I jerked out of the nightmare, terror blind. There was sound and stabbing light and something weighing me down. I tried to shake it, and panicked when I couldn’t move, couldn’t control my own body. Again. My own personal hell. And then the dark clouds across my vision started to clear but for pixilated pain throbbing around the edges. I looked up into Nick’s midnight blue eyes, almost black at the moment.
“Shh, shh, Tori, it’s just a night terror. Tori, it’s me. You’re safe.”
His cheek was swollen, and it was my fault. The lashing out had been real enough, not simply part of the dream, which wasn’t a dream in any case.
The fight leaked out of me, and when he felt me relax, Nick eased onto his side next to me, studying me with concern.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked quietly.
“No,” I answered. It hurt to talk. I wondered if I’d been screaming, and then whether it was in my own panic or Rhea’s triumph.
“You didn’t get hurt walking with Apollo, did you?” he asked, and I could hear something like fear beneath the careful gentleness in his tone. “The news—”
So the bodies had been found already.
I rolled over, away from his probing gaze. What did I tell him? That I’d committed triple homicide, but I hadn’t been myself at the time? Did possession qualify someone for the insanity defense or—
“Tori.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t be satisfied with that.
“Tori!” he said it sharply, and I rolled to face him so suddenly he almost looked afraid…of me.
“What?” I asked.
The pain in my throat and in my head were already receding, and I no longer ached all over like I had after… No, no tangents. The bodies had been found, Nick was asking questions, and I had to face this. If someone had spooned ambrosia into me earlier in the evening, it was the least of my worries. So the pain in my head was gone, but the one in my heart… “What do you want me to tell you? That I killed them? That I was possessed at the time? That I passed out in a dead faint afterward and relived it all in my nightmares? It’s all true.” Nick looked lightning stuck. “Apollo and I were kidnapped, and we were going to die, and the only reason I’m still alive is that a goddess more powerful than I am used me as her own personal puppet.”
I broke down. I could have counted on one hand with fingers left over the number of times I’d cried in my life. I wasn’t prepared for the sudden explosion of sobs that seemed to start from somewhere around my gut and wracked my whole body.
Nick didn’t touch me. Didn’t hold me, and that only made me cry harder, because I knew I was horrifying to him now. Repugnant, but no more than I was to myself. I’d had my hand buried in some guy’s solar plexus.
Too late, he finally reached for me, as if it was a duty and not one he was sure he should perform. I knew it as if I still had some fragment of Rhea’s all-knowing.
Maybe I did.
I pushed him away and ran for the bathroom, locking myself inside. It wasn’t the most mature response in the world, but we’d blown well past any concern about maturity on the way to post-traumatic stress.
I started the shower, just thinking I didn’t want him listening to me bawl, and then realized that beneath my borrowed top there was still caked blood from the attack that had seeped through the fabric of my discarded clothes. All I could think of was getting clean.
I didn’t even wait for the water to get warm, but stepped into the shower fully clothed. I didn’t adjust the temperature when it turned from frigid to scalding, but stood beneath the onslaught shivering. Burning and yet cold, all at the same time.
I grabbed up the bar of soap and scrubbed everywhere—over my clothes, under. And then I ripped the clothes off entirely and let them lay there on the floor of the bathtub as the water swirled all around, washing me clean.
I’d barely gotten a towel wrapped around me when there was a pounding at the outer door to the room.
I yelled out, “Go away,” but still I heard Nick open the door and let someone in. A second later, I knew who. Small person, big voice.
“Where is she?” Tina demanded.
“Shower,” Nick said.
“Oh my god, what happened to your eye?” Tina asked him, but she was already moving on before Nick had the chance to answer. “Tell her to get her butt out here. I need to see if she’s still fit for duty and to walk her through what she missed at rehearsal.”
“Tell her yourself,” I yelled from behind the bathroom door. “She can hear you.”
Somehow, talking about myself in the third person was easier. Like I could escape. I didn’t even blame Tina for her attitude. After all, we came from circus stock, where you downed the painkillers, put on your flesh-tone bandages, smiled to hide the wince and made sure the show would go on. If there was time later, you could ice it up and call in the medic.
The bathroom doorknob rattled, and I reluctantly reached to unlock it before she could tear it off the hinges. I wouldn’t put it past her.
Tina yanked the door open and we faced each other on either side of the doorway. “You look like crap,” she said, showing off her sensitive side. “What happened to you? They said a walk, but I couldn’t see you scaling the side of the mountain.”
No one could blow your cover like family.
I pulled her into the bathroom with me and shut the door.
“Ooh, secrets,” Tina said, belligerence giving way to elfin mischief. “Tell me all. But be quick about it.”
I rolled my eyes. The normality of Tina’s presence was starting to have a strange calming effect on me. I wasn’t sure I deserved calm, but my brain must have decided it couldn’t sustain a state of perpetual panic.
“Apollo and I had…things to discuss, okay? So we found someplace quiet where no one would be looking for us, and I slipped and hit my head, that was all.”
“Uh huh, someplace to talk. Important enough to make you miss my wedding rehearsal?”
“In my defense, I was unconscious.”
“Sure, sure, some excuse. Of course, if I’d been on a private walk with Mr. Hollywood hottie, I’d have swooned too…if I weren’t a soon-to-be-married woman and all.”
“I did not swoon,” I answered, indignant.
“There, now you look more like yourself.” Her eyes glittered. “You look like you want to take a swing at me. Come on, get dressed.”
“But—” After everything that had happened, the last thing I wanted to do was walk down the aisle at her side like nothing was wrong. I felt like I’d taint the whole ceremony just by being part of it. A wedding was supposed to be something sacred. The show must go on didn’t seem to apply. But there was no way I could explain all that to Tina, even if I was sure she’d see things my way. She’d just see that her wedding party was lopsided and that it was all my fault.
“Okay,” I said finally. “But can we stop for coffee and calories before whatever fresh hell you’re going to put me through?”
“Andre said ‘no caffeine’,” she protested. I guessed Andre was the clipboard guy from yesterday’s production meeting.
“No caffeine, no Tori,” I said, talking about myself in the third person again.
“Fine, fine,” she said. “I’ll just tell the makeup artist to give you the teabag treatment before she goes to work on you. Now get dressed.”
I didn’t get it—teabags were good, coffee was bad? There was no justice in the world.
I hoped the lack of justice would work in my favor for the next twenty-four hours at least. Having the police crash the wedding to arrest me would probably ruin Tina’s big day and Uncle H
ector’s production and put me back on the outs with my family…not to mention in prison.
I went to get dressed, avoiding Nick’s arms when he reached for me as I passed him on the way to my suitcase and avoiding his gaze when he tried to catch my eye. I’d just gotten myself together. I was afraid that I’d fall apart again at one hesitant touch.
If I were Christie, I’d probably focus on what I was going to wear, just in case I ended up on the morning news. What went well with handcuffs? Did I go with unobtrusive and demure, completely incapable of cutting down three grown men single-handedly? Since I didn’t exactly own pearls and Peter Pan collars, I went for the first thing I touched, but Tina took it out of my hands and reached for a plain white button-up with just enough darting for shape. Feminine but not girly. “A wardrobe staple,” Christie had called the shirt when she’d made me buy it.
“Button-up is better,” Tina said. “Then you can change later without messing up your hair and makeup.”
Couldn’t have that.
I shrugged and took the shirt, added black skinny jeans and went to the bathroom to change. I didn’t bother with makeup or anything else, since I knew it would all be redone, and I didn’t wear much anyway.
On the way out, Tina dragged me to the hotel’s breakfast buffet, flashed her room key, loaded croissants and fruit into a napkin and looked pointedly from me to the coffee keg. The carafe was keg-sized, anyway, with both ceramic and foam cups sitting beside it. Unfortunately, they only had one size to-go cup, which was not nearly big enough, but I didn’t think the hotel would take kindly to me grabbing the keg like a football and rushing it out of there, so I made myself two cups, doctored them both with cream and sugar, drank one still standing at the coffee bar and refilled the cup before applying lids.
“Okay, let’s go, I said.
She looked like she despaired of my behavior. Since I agreed with her, I didn’t say a word, but followed her out into the extra crisp morning air. It slapped me awake better than the cup of coffee I’d already downed.
The sun was shining, glistening off the dew that sparkled on every leaf. The world seemed newly made, pristine. Perfect. It was the kind of day that made you glad to be alive and death seem far, far away. I felt like crap about it, the kind that stunk and stuck to your shoes, clinging to the treads. The kind that stayed with you…like the memory of cutting down three men without missing a beat.
Rise of the Blood Page 13
