I turned in time to see Hades leap into the air, slashing his sword for his opponent’s throat. The titan’s hand lashed out, and I could see that Hades was going to get knocked on his ass. I swooped in to save him, but Hypnos came out of nowhere and grabbed him up first, taking him to safety with Hades hollering the whole way. I’d have been tempted to drop the ungrateful bastard, but that was me. Anyway, I needed him—needed them both.
I flew to their side and landed as Hypnos did.
“Just the gods I needed to talk to,” I said. “Hades, I don’t suppose you can access the River Lethe from up here.”
“You suppose wrong,” he said, with a glare that was more, I thought, about the fact that I’d seen him rescued than that I’d questioned his powers.
“Good. And Hypnos, you’ve still got the power to send people to sleep? You haven’t used it up or anything?” Riling them up just like Hades had riled his troops. Now they’d both have something to prove. Anyway, it was a valid question. I had no idea how these things worked.
“No, I haven’t ‘used it up’,” he answered. His look asked me why on Earth I was wasting their time with stupid questions.
“Good. Here’s the plan.”
When I finished, both eyed me dubiously, but it was Hades who voiced it. “Why should we take orders from you, who have so far been nothing but trouble.”
“Because this time I’m on your side, sending my trouble her way. Don’t you want to see how it turns out?”
They considered. I didn’t have time for them to make up their minds.
“Anyway, this is all Hermes’s idea,” I lied.
Their looks cleared right away. “Ah, the trickster god,” Hypnos said. “This might just work.”
“Good, get with Zeus and Poseidon.” The three brothers, together again. Mythologically speaking, there was power in threes—the Muses, the Gray sisters, the gorgons, the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, Larry, Moe and Curly.
I prayed it would work, but I still didn’t know who I was praying to.
“Ready?” I asked Hypnos.
He nodded grimly, and we both stretched our wings, primed for takeoff. It was still strange, but I didn’t have time to dwell on that now. I had a goddess to face down.
I flapped my wings and rose up into the air, Hypnos right beside me, and we headed straight for Rhea.
Castor and Pollux had gotten her to drop her sons, but they were all now running for their lives as she bellowed, trying to stomp them out. Very godlike.
I flew up into her face, startling her, but she was too smart to hit herself trying to be rid of me. Instead, she flapped her hand in front of her face, as if brushing off a fly. It was all I could do to stay airborne when she missed me by a hair, the displaced air nearly enough to send me pinwheeling through the sky.
“Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up,” I muttered under my breath. I didn’t have the capacity for actual words. Flight was winding, and I wasn’t used to it.
Hypnos held back, as he was supposed to, waiting for his cue.
Pest blown away, Rhea ignored me to continue after Zeus and Poseidon, but I couldn’t let that happen. I dashed in again, flying just outside Rhea’s peripheral vision until she suddenly howled and clamped a hand to her nose as an arrow pierced it for her.
“Ha, gotcha, you old bat!” Cupid said, already nocking another arrow.
The first one didn’t look like much more than a splinter given Rhea’s huge size, but it seemed to enrage her all the same. Rhea went for him, and I grabbed for her ear, hoping to pull her up short, but I had nowhere near the power. She swatted at me, and this time caught me in a full body slap. For an instant of mind-bending pain, I swore the front of my ribs met the back, and then I was falling, still chanting hurryhurryhurry in my head.
There was no air left inside of me when I hit the ground, and for a moment the pain seemed stunted, twisted up somehow and unable to get from my back to anywhere else. I stared up at Rhea’s rampaging form, wondering if Apollo was still alive in all this, wondering if my plan would come together, when the sky started to blacken.
Yes, I thought. Finally.
I shifted my gaze, the only thing I could move, to track along the ground, looking for the brothers—Zeus, Poseidon and Hades.
There. Being defended by Castor and Pollux, Hermes and…was that? Apollo!
Apparently, my eyes weren’t the only things I could move. My heart could leap. And did…very quickly meeting the cage of my compressed ribs and nearly shattering against them.
They formed a human shield around the brothers as they pulled together a massive storm, fueled by the River Lethe, accessed by Hades, whipped into a frenzy by Poseidon and molded by Zeus into a funnel aimed like a spear point right for Rhea.
She laughed as she saw it. After all, she’d already turned Zeus’s tornado against him. But this was another beast entirely. Again, she inhaled deeply, lungs stretched to capacity, swallowing the storm into herself, only to sputter and choke as it went down. A coughing fit seized her, blowing the brothers down, but the funnel was now a force all its own and was still raging, still on-rushing and—the River Lethe, invading, stealing her memory, her anger, her thirst for vengeance.
Hypnos was up next. He got up right into her face, wings flapping and flapping. That strange distortion where the night seemed to grow darker and deeper emanated outward from him, rolling over Rhea like waves.
She started to sway, shook her head hard trying to clear it and instead grew more disoriented with the motion. I had an instant of fear that she would shake it off, but the head shaking only seemed to make her dizzy. Between Hypnos and the waters of forgetfulness washing away her agitation, she seemed to shrink in on herself, eyes watering from her coughing fit and still trying to rediscover her breath.
“Get back!” I tried to yell as her swaying became frightening. It was either that or “Timber!” but neither actually made it out of my mouth, which wasn’t obeying me at the moment, though already I thought I could breathe a little easier—without ambrosia or Apollo’s intervention. Like the wings, I didn’t know what it meant, but apparently what didn’t kill me made me stronger.
And then Rhea teetered my way.
I had just time to think, “Oh, shit!” because my last words would be that classy, when someone swooped in out of nowhere and swept me out of the way.
Behind me, the concussion of Rhea striking the earth blew out eardrums and shook stones free of the ruins.
Hermes held me aloft until the earth stopped shaking. When it did, he looked into my eyes and grinned a wicked grin. “Now who owes who?”
I half heard and half read his lips, my ears still ringing from Rhea’s impact.
I was too relieved to rise to the bait.
“Put me down.” My lips formed the words, but I wasn’t sure they were understandable.
Hermes flew me jerkily toward Apollo and let me slide down his body toward the ground. Apollo caught me as I started to fall forward.
“You did it!” he said.
Then Rhea started to snore like a buzz saw.
Chapter Fifteen
The wings stayed.
I was able to furl them, bring them in close to my body, but there was no way to vanish them. Unlike Rhea. Together, the three brothers worked to sink her back into the earth where everybody prayed she’d sleep for another few millennia or more.
Some of the titans had disappeared themselves, escaping into the night. But Hades, Hypnos and the heroes herded or carried the rest back to the Underworld…just as the sound of police sirens carried up the mountain. Someone or ones had to have noticed the freak storm atop Mount Parnassus and no one within range could have missed the quake of Rhea rising or the concussion of her hitting the earth.
There was no time to clean up the battlefield. Zeus raised a mist that gave us cover as we all slipped off into the night, returning to the hotel in twos and threes, slinking in through side entrances, back up to the bridal suite. I was torn between the hotel an
d the hospital, where I knew they’d take Christie and the other girls who’d fallen on the field. I felt responsible for them…and besides, there was Nick. Even if we were through, there was history there. He deserved to know that it was all over.
Well, over except for tracking down the escaped titans.
But first I needed to see everybody safe and sound—Mom, Dad, Yiayia, Spiro… Oh, and I had a certain promise to keep to two heroes who stuck to me like glue. An introduction to a siren. Sure, she was a bit of a psycho and had tried to petrify Apollo. For that, introducing her to the twins seemed a fitting punishment. And if they hit it off, well, she had fought for our side in the end. Maybe the two would keep her too busy to cause any more immediate mischief.
So with a raggedy cloak borrowed from one of the downed titans wrapped around my body to hide my wings, we approached the bridal suite.
There was a party going on behind the closed doors. I could hear it even from down the hall. Startled, I looked left and right at the twins, who looked back at me with identical grins. Apparently, where I was ready to mourn the dead and wounded, they were more than ready to celebrate the victory.
I knocked loudly at the door, which swung open after a second of loud, drunken debate about who would get it. I wasn’t surprised to see that Spiro had won that battle. The door opened to reveal his flushed face, sweat starting to curl his hair along his forehead and neck. His shirtfront was open a button or two beyond the norm, giving him a dissolute look, even before I spotted Jesus on his arm, tie askew as I’d never seen it before. Spiro raked a glance over me and my two companions and grinned from ear to ear.
“Leave with one man, come back with two. Way to go, sis!”
“Don’t be a pig,” I told him.
“And togas,” he continued. He opened the door wider to let us in and started chanting, “Toga, toga, toga!”
I glared at him as we passed, not bothering to point out that they wore chitons, not togas. It wouldn’t have mattered to him and anyway I was too happy to see him alive to argue.
Jesus, looking not the least bit sheepish, studied me in typical Jesus fashion. “Rough night?” he asked, eying my wardrobe choice.
“Oh, you’ve no idea. Way to go, keeping me out of trouble. Bang up job.”
His eyes widened at that, and I air-scored a point to myself, catching the cloak as it began to slip off my shoulders.
Tina came rushing up the second she saw me, talking a mile a minute even before she was in range. “Hope you don’t mind. I couldn’t sit around waiting, so I invited people up and pretty soon— What are you wearing?”
To her surprise, I grabbed her in for a hug instead of answering and held her tightly enough that she protested. When I let her pull back, she looked me over from head to foot. I was a mess, but all she said was, “I’m so glad you’re alive.” And then she pulled me in for a hug until two throats cleared behind us.
I grinned into the top of Tina’s head and disentangled myself to ask, “Where’s Serena?”
“Serena?” she said, shocked.
“Is she here?”
“She most certainly is,” Serena said from the hallway behind us. The twins and I turned to see her standing with a hand jauntily to her hip, looking none the worse for wear, but for a bruise on her cheek and a scrape along her neck. I was surprised she’d dared show her face again, but the emerald green gown she’d changed into showed a lot more than that, embracing her curves like Jesus embraced GQ or Cosmo. I supposed she had amends to make with Pan…Uncle Hector…if she wanted to stay with the film.
Castor and Pollux stepped forward even without my introduction, drawn by her striking green eyes that flashed as she spotted them.
“Well, well, well,” she said. “Who do we have here?”
I performed the introductions and quickly became extraneous, which was just how I wanted it. I left them behind and moved into the suite, spotting Jesus and Spiro. Beyond them Mom and Dad, Yiayia and Fergus, Uncle Christos…
Yiayia caught my eye and tugged on Fergus’s arm. I didn’t need my precognition to see the future. She’d corner me and make me tell her everything. Everything. In excruciating detail. I’d be stuck here all night.
But now that I knew everyone was safe, there was somewhere else I had to be—the hospital, checking on Christie and Nick and all the people I’d failed.
I quickly headed for the door, doing my best not to cause a ripple in the crowd that Yiayia could track.
Apollo was coming in the door as I was leaving. I tried to sidestep him with a muttered, “excuse me,” but that wasn’t going to work. He grabbed me by the shoulders. “You okay?”
I shrugged him off and looked up desperately. “Step aside or come with, but if we don’t get out of here now, we won’t be going anywhere.”
He looked over my shoulder, saw Yiayia coming our way and quickly put two and two together.
He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the door. As soon as we were out and the door closed behind us, he jogged me toward a dogleg in the corridor.
“Come on,” he said. “My room’s closest.”
“But the hospital—”
“You can’t go in like that,” he said. “Hospital’s the first place the police will look for injuries that could have come from tonight’s trouble. You can’t even ask about Christie. They’ll want to question how you knew she was there.”
“But—”
“No buts.”
“But Nick.”
He blew out a breath, stopped in front of a door and used his key card to get us inside.
“Fine, Nick, but don’t get caught sniffing around the others.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” I said, saluting him. My cloak dropped and my wings unfurled, nearly knocking over the little decorative table in the room’s foyer.
We both froze.
“I thought I’d seen, but…I didn’t…are they permanent?”
My heart dropped. I didn’t realize how much I’d been wishing he could tell me.
“I don’t know.” I was surprised to hear a sob in my voice. After everything that had happened… The wings had been a godsend during the battle, but now…nothing would ever be the same again. “What did you do to me back in the fight?”
Apollo’s gaze slid away from mine, and I grabbed his face, pulling him back around to look at me. “Apollo?” I asked.
“It was the breath of life,” he said softly.
“The what?”
“I gave you some of my divinity. It was…it was just supposed to save you, but everything I do keeps having unexpected side effects with you. It’s like parts of you that have been dormant are starting to awake.”
“So today the wings, tomorrow the tusks?”
“I don’t know,” he said miserably. “This has never happened before. I’ve never—”
“Can it. Recriminations later. For now, I need to clean up and get to the hospital. Do you have a jacket I can use?” I didn’t have to say “oversized,” because with the width of his massive shoulders everything he had would hang on me.
Besides, whatever he gave me would do well enough. I had to get out of here and away from the look in his eyes that said there was nothing I could accuse him of that he didn’t already blame on himself. Another second and I might be trying to comfort him, let him off the hook. I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.
Apollo grabbed my chin, gently, and now made me look at him. “Tori, this doesn’t change anything about you, you know. You’re still you. Still beautiful and amazing and vital. You saved the day. Not the Olympians or the heroes—you.”
“Great, pin a big ole medal on me. Maybe it will distract people from my wings. I have to get out of here.”
I backed out of his grip and closed myself in the bathroom. I was a wreck. Apollo was right, the police would have converged on me the second I set foot in the hospital.
I started with the tear tracks on my face, staining his white washcloth with dirt, makeup and blood. Then another for my
clothes…and another. I rinsed grit from my mouth and brushed twigs, grass and dirt out of my hair, which still, miraculously, fell in waves rather than tangles, a testament to whatever industrial grade gunk they’d put in it.
In the end I looked halfway presentable. Pale and ragged, as one might expect from a woman whose fiancé…or had I called him husband?…was in serious condition. I hoped I’d pass.
I stepped out of the bathroom five minutes from when I’d gone in, wearing determination like a shield.
“Give me one minute,” Apollo said, stepping in as soon as I was out and closing the door behind him.
It was two, but I used the time to find a blazer of his and roll up the sleeves. I was slipping out the door when he emerged. He caught the door before I could close it and slid out behind me.
“We’ll go together,” he said, “in case of trouble.”
I turned and glared, crossing my arms over my chest, which made my wings want to flare, as if I had feathers to ruffle. “I don’t need your help for this.”
“You’re getting it regardless. Don’t worry, I’ll stay out in the waiting room.”
“Fine,” I said, though it wasn’t fine at all. I didn’t want him there, sensing my every emotion through our strange link. If I broke down…well, I didn’t need an audience. It gave me a tiny sense of the vulnerability people felt when I poked around in their lives. No wonder the Rialto Bros. had kicked me out and my family still had no idea what to do with me. I was a freak. Now I had the wings to prove it.
Apollo swooped in and kissed me hard, his hands going to my hips. The suddenness of it made me catch my breath and made a hot spike of desire start in my stomach and finish up somewhere significantly lower. The shock of it brought me back to myself and I heaved him away, ready to slap his face…before I saw the look on it—satisfaction.
“What?” I asked. “What did you do that for?”
“You were feeling sorry for yourself. I figured the kiss would either turn you on or piss you off. Either way, no more pity.”
“Screw you,” I said, giving him my back and starting for the stairs.
“Any time,” he said softly.
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