Rise of the Blood

by Lucienne Diver

  “Don’t do it,” Apollo said, putting a hand on my arm. “The River Styx. You go in, you don’t come out again. It’s like the tar pits.”

  I looked at him, and then Charon, who laughed, a sound like bullfrogs croaking, as he worked his pole, pushing us across the River before we could change our minds. The River wasn’t wide, but now I knew why it took a ferryman to cross.

  We bumped up moments later on the opposite shore, rocks scraping the bottom of the bow. I braced for the water to seep up and into the skiff, but nothing happened. Charon used the pole to rock the boat and get my attention. “Out,” he commanded.

  I considered flipping him off, but I couldn’t see what good it would do, so instead I let Apollo disembark first and hold out a hand to me. I accepted it, proud but not stupid. I’d take the steadying influence.

  As soon as I was on solid ground, I turned to Charon. “Where to now?” I asked.

  But he was already poling the skiff back across the way and didn’t even acknowledge me. I was already dead to him.

  “Great.” I muttered, facing Apollo again. I was about to ask him the same question when my gut clenched with warning, and I saw the three sets of shining red eyes coming at us out of the darkness beyond the glowing moss. Emerging from side tunnels? I wondered, as if it mattered where they came from so much as their intentions.

  I knew those eyes. Hellhounds. Quite literally.

  Apollo and I moved a little apart from each other—not quite shoulder to shoulder—so that we’d have room to fight and yet be able to protect each others’ flanks. Like we’d done this before. Which we had. But as the hellhounds emerged, they didn’t seem ready to attack. Their lips stayed down over their teeth, and while they were wary and their hackles raised, they didn’t pick up speed as they approached or bunch up like they were ready to lunge…not unless we made a wrong move.

  “Our emissaries?” Apollo ventured.

  “If he’s got an uprising in Tartarus, they may be all Hades can spare,” I said, watching warily as the three started to circle behind us and close in, almost as if…

  “They’re herding us,” I said.

  “Well, then we let them. For now. But keep watch, just in case we’re headed into a trap. This all seems too easy.”

  It was…until it wasn’t.

  The hounds kept crowding us, cutting off exits they didn’t want us to take, herding us along the paths they intended. I kept vigilant for tripwires and stepped tentatively, worried about anything from another abyss to pressure grenades. But in a place of souls it was hard to prepare for everything—like the shriek of a thousand voices that greeted us up ahead.

  Apollo and I gave each other a look and started running full out. We stopped short at the sight that greeted us when the passage opened up. In front of us stood a monstrous pack of hellhounds, Cerberus in all his three-headed glory and a mere handful of gods. I recognized Hades. He’d traded in the pastels of the Miami Vice look he wore above ground for red and black—a loose-fitting black suit with the sleeves rolled up, red T-shirt underneath, Italian leather shoes…or Greek, who could tell? I also knew his two sons—Thanatos, who looked like the stereotypical Grim Reaper, only wielding a sword instead of the iconic sickle, and Hypnos, all punked and pierced. The woman was a mystery, but her black leather catsuit was rockin’ and her hair was wild with some kind of storm that seemed to rage only around her. Hecate, at a guess. She was the only other Underworld god/dess I knew off the top of my head, though from the other figures gathered, I assumed there were more. Or that Hades’s dubious charm had garnered him allies.

  But it was what was beyond them that captured my attention. Beyond them was…it looked like a barrier, a bubble stretched to its limit with arms and limbs and tentacles pushing through. The hellhounds growled, as if they could warn the titans back. Cerberus snarled and snapped at the air. The gods arrayed themselves against the imminent outbreak, arms out, a miasma or mist coming from their outstretched palms. It flowed toward the near-to-bursting barrier and formed a layer that momentarily pushed back the uprising.

  “You going to help?” Hades called over his shoulder, apparently aware of our presence.

  Apollo ran forward. I had no choice but to follow, though I didn’t know what good I’d do. I had one trick in my arsenal. One. I could freeze people and creatures…temporarily. But it had never worked on the Olympians, and the titans were older and more fearsome still, children of the original power couple, Oceanus and Gaea, the progenitors of Kronos and Rhea. They were the oldest of the old. Against them I was a single ant trying to take down a giant anteater.

  Apollo took position beside Thanatos, and I stood next to him, my heart trying to pound its way straight out of my chest. As I stared there seemed to be a coordinated attack on the barrier and all at once it burst with the power of a sonic boom. The gods were blown back. I landed hard, right beneath Thanatos, whose elbow caught me on the chin as he fell, making me see stars. I blinked hard, desperate to clear them so that I could at least meet doom head-on. My brain almost went on strike refusing to process what was before me. Some of the titans were nearly human looking but for their vast size and the fact that they could have been carved out of mountains. Some had extra limbs or predator’s teeth or tusks. Others had tentacles or stingers or far, far too many eyes.

  And they were coming straight for us. I pushed Thanatos aside as a tentacle slammed his way and he hadn’t recovered fast enough to dodge. As I pushed him, I used the counter pressure to roll the other way, toward the sword he’d dropped. I grabbed the hilt just as something grabbed me—another tentacle from the way it wrapped my ankle. I kicked and bucked to turn myself over onto my back where I could get the leverage and the space to swing the sword. I flopped like a landed fish—inelegant, but effective—and brought the sword down hard on the tentacle holding me. It didn’t release, though it did flinch, tightening its muscles painfully, like a constrictor squeezing me so hard I thought the foot would pop right off the end of my leg. Frantically, I swung again, and this time when ink-like blood spattered me, the tentacle loosened, and I realized it was because I’d cut it clean off and yet it was still attached to my ankle. There was no time for a girly gross-out. Another three tentacles were coming for me.

  I rolled and scuttled out of the way of them, looking for some distance from which I could strategize a better angle on the battle than one tentacle at a time. I saw that Thanatos had pulled a second sword from somewhere and was swinging about like a madman, severing tentacles and claws, slimy with blood and ichor. Hellhounds were darting in—or being hurled out, yelps cut off in a horrifyingly final manner. Apollo was using a claw from something that could have been the great grandpappy of all velociraptors to wedge open a gryphon-like mouth that was trying to get at him.

  I jumped the latest tentacle lashing out and went in with Thanatos’s lost sword, aiming for the soft skin under the titan’s neck. As the sword pierced the skin, the gryphon bugled and thrashed, knocking me to the side. The sword whipped free with me and together we went sliding across the ground in a puddle of something I didn’t want to identify.

  From my ant’s-eye view I saw Cerberus facing off with a mega mountain of a man—a titan, looking almost human but for a second head. It was a death match. The titan had one of Cerberus’s heads locked within his massive arms, trying to choke the life out of it, while the next closest head had its fangs buried in the back of the titan’s neck. Both struggled, both locked on, it seemed, until their power ran out. I couldn’t worry about them.

  I rolled back to my feet, sword still miraculously in hand. Half my body aching and the other half unable to be heard over those complaints.

  Apollo’s gryphon was down, and he’d rushed to Hades’s aid, now standing shoulder to shoulder with Hecate as she defended Hades, who was chanting with ever-increasing furor, something dark and sinister growing between his cupped hands.

  A massive club swung by one of the other titans knocked Apollo aside, sending him flying
. I raced to intercept—to cushion his impact, flinging my sword arm out to my side so that I wouldn’t catch him with it. Apollo struck me just as Hades let loose with his spell. It crashed into the chest of the club-wielding titan and exploded outward. The titan howled as the impact from the darkness seemed to open some kind of miasma in its chest. Not so much a wound as a void, a black hole. Its knees buckled, and the ground jumped, as it fell hard. The darkness expanded, catching another titan, who looked part crab, claws whipping out toward Hypnos, who dodged them like Jack-be-Nimble jumping over the candlestick. Hypnos kicked off the claw, doing a flip in mid-air, which would have been completely impressive if an involuntary spasm of pain hadn’t sent the claw flailing out and catching him just wrong, striking the back of his legs and unbalancing him in the air. He went crashing into the side of the monstrous, two-headed titan and slid to the ground.

  Catching Apollo had knocked the wind out of me, but that was nothing to the sight of the coming stampede. The sounds of terror—raptor, serpentine, leonine, human—erupted as the darkness spread, and all thoughts of battle evaporated. A single-minded, instinctive flight response took its place. Anything to avoid the miasma. And we, all of us, Team Underworld, were between the titans and escape. I saw it coming on, but there was nowhere to go. Nowhere to escape. Apollo had recovered himself, and faster than thought pivoted us out of the way of the first massive body blasting past us, taking chunks out of the tunnel wall as it went, but then the next hit us like a freight train. We ricocheted off into the next and went down under a set of knife-sharp hooves.

  After that, I lost track and, very quickly, consciousness. We’d failed. The titans were unleashed.

  Chapter Twelve

  My body was on fire, surrounded by it, like I was sinking into a pool of molten lava. I burned, mouth open to scream, but nothing escaped. My eyes were closed, but the lids seemed almost translucent with red light, as if I could see right through them if only I could focus. The agony was worse than anything I’d ever experienced. I desperately hoped to black out again, but the pain stopped and a voice commanded unsympathetically, “Get up.”

  He had to be kidding. But Hades, Lord of the Underworld, was not known for his sense of humor. I blinked my eyes open, surprised when they actually focused and I wasn’t surrounded by a pit of fire. Beside Hades, Hecate stared down at me, her face all angles, like a top model on a diet of air. It wasn’t just the catsuit that made her striking. Sure, you could cut glass on her cheekbones, but her eyes were sheer obsidian—shiny black, the same shade as her wild hair. Wilder than mine and snapping with electricity, as though it were made of live wires.

  “If hairs be wires

  Black wires grow on her head”

  What a time to remember my Shakespeare. I wondered if he’d met our darling ’Cate.

  “I healed you,” she said, her voice deep and rough, a la Kathleen Turner if she’d gargled razor blades.

  Oh, was that what “get up” had been all about—healing. It had felt more like torture. Eyeing her dubiously, I tried my arms and legs. She was right. They worked, and the burning sensation had faded away. They still felt…singed…but maybe that was from massive regrowth of tissue or reknitting of bones. I didn’t know how bad off I’d been. And everything itched like a sonofabitch.

  “Which way did they go?” I asked.

  “It’s too late,” Hades snapped, even as Hecate pointed…not the way we’d come, but in the opposite direction. It made sense; the titans couldn’t cross the River Styx, even if Charon would allow it. There was no way the skiff could carry their weight and no way across on their own.

  “They’re gone, “ he continued. “But you will help us get them back.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “Yeah, because I was so much help this time.”

  “You brought this trouble on. You will help us end it.”

  It seemed fair enough in theory. In practice…

  “How?” I asked.

  “You know where they’re going?”

  I bolted upright. “We have to warn them. Everyone at Delphi—”

  There was a masculine moan, and Hecate and I looked to see Apollo, still unconscious, his head…I couldn’t look. It was misshapen, as if a tremendous weight had squashed it, stepped on it in the escape. Hades nodded to Hecate—permission to heal him, I could only hope, and the mother of witches knelt beside him, her hands aglow in that red fire as she lifted them to his head. I watched his eyelids flutter and saw only white beneath them as his eyes rolled up into his head and he curled into a fetal position, trying subconsciously to shield himself from the pain I knew all too well.

  “Delphi?” Hades prompted me.

  I told him the whole story, from Zeus’s priests through Rhea’s rising and her threats to return the titans to their former glory.

  He cursed long and floridly in Greek, but an older form, it seemed, because I only understood one in five words and they were enough to blister my ears.

  “Then those at Delphi already know they’re coming,” he concluded, boring into me with his crazy Manson-eyes.

  I swallowed a ball of acid that had burned up my throat and nodded.

  “And once again I get to clean up my brothers’ messes.” He sighed dramatically, even for him. “Let’s go see which way they’ve gone. Perhaps we can cut them off or perhaps they’ve already dead-ended themselves. Many exits. Most of them are illusions.” He showed his teeth in a psychotic smile, something like the Cheshire Cat might give after picking his teeth with White Rabbit bones. I wondered what kind of horrors those illusions hid.

  “How do we find out?”

  Hades approached a wall and put his palm to one of the stones. I was shocked to see a smart board light up in front of him. I’d expected magic, some kind of all-seeing eye. Not a high tech screen he could tap and wave his hands at—almost like magic—to reveal different sections of his domain. I rose to follow him, expecting it to be painful, still shocked when it wasn’t. But before I went, I looked toward Hecate and Apollo. His head had rounded out again, and his color was good. Much better than it had been. He was still in the fetal position, but was now snoring gently. It was almost…cute.

  “Head injury,” Hades said. “He’s going to need to sleep for a while. That kind of thing will take a lot out of you.”

  I considered planting a kiss on Apollo’s head, but decided against it. There were witnesses, and anyway it would be just my luck that he’d wake up and make something of it.

  Thanatos and Hypnos were rousing the wounded and Hecate went off to help others.

  I went to see what Hades had in mind.

  When I stepped up beside him, he was studying a schematic on his smart board, all lit up with red dots in one area. “Ah,” he said, not bothering to expand on that for my benefit. He tapped the screen, made an opening motion with his hand, brought in a second image and suddenly we were watching the escapees from two different camera angles. Security cameras…in Hell…who’d’ve thought?

  Then I spotted something. “Right there,” I said. “Expand that.” He shot me a dark look at the order, but he gestured the screen to zoom in on the section to which I’d pointed. I thought I’d seen a person-sized figure running ahead of the crowd. On expansion, I saw that I’d been right. What’s more, I knew that figure.

  Christie. It occurred to me now that I hadn’t seen her at the meeting in the bridal suite. But…how had she gotten here? How had she paid the ferryman? However she’d gotten in, how would she ever get out alive? Hades, so far as I knew, had a one hundred percent success rate. Souls checked in but they never checked out. What would that mean for Christie? Or me? Something I’d carefully not thought about on my way down. But Hades had sent Charon for us. Apollo and I were invited guests now. That had to count for something.

  Beside me, Hades froze the screen on the image of Christie. “I recognize her,” he said ominously. “A split second seen in a certain hotel room in San Francisco.” He turned on me. “A friend of yours?�
��

  I met his gaze dead on. Oh, poor choice of words. There was no use in pretending. “Yes,” I admitted, “a friend. But not acting on her own. Rhea’s got to be controlling her.”

  “First you steal my bride Persephone away from me. Then your friend breaches my security and leads an escape.” He lashed out on the last word and grabbed me by the throat. I never even saw it coming before I was on my tiptoes trying to ease the pressure on my neck to breathe.

  I hated to think how the king of the Underworld would collect. My soul forfeit? Condemned to Tartarus in place of the titans? My innards pecked out every day like Prometheus or like Sisyphus forced ever to roll a boulder uphill only to have it slide back down again.

  “Let go of her,” Apollo demanded, rising from behind Hades. My distress must have reached him right through his unconsciousness.

  Hades swiveled his head, owl-like, to look at Apollo with a leer, and then pointedly turned back to me, dismissing Apollo as less than a threat, which, given the way he was swaying on his feet, still weak from his own destruction, wasn’t unreasonable.

  “The two of you owe me,” he said, his eyes burning like hot coals. He took a minute to savor the situation. “I have it. If I help you stop the titans and defeat Rhea, you will watch over my kingdom while I take an extended vacation. Oh, the things I could do.”

  I couldn’t have heard right. Oxygen deprivation had to have me hallucinating. He could not have just blackmailed us into housesitting. He shook me like a dog shakes its favorite chew toy before loosening his grip just enough for me to gasp the air to respond.