Blood Hunt

by Lucienne Diver

  I took a deep breath, hoping to find the lemongrass-scented zen needed not to knock her into next week.

  “Look, her—” How was Hermes representing himself these days? Her husband? Boyfriend? Lover? Best just to use his street name. “Um, Herman Molyvos called ahead. Sigourney is expecting me. I believe we’re scheduled for mani-pedis together.”

  I displayed my pitiful excuse for nails, which hadn’t been done since my cousin’s destination disaster wedding and had since survived two near apocalypses. Well, survived might be overstating things. They’d cracked, split and been righteously ripped, but the polish on the remaining portions was still glossy as all hell. I figured any self-respecting spa girl would rush me back into the salon stat.

  “Doubtful,” she said, unimpressed. “We book up weeks in advance.”

  “Well, then, it wouldn’t hurt to check,” I answered smugly.

  She sighed heavily, rolled her eyes and typed away at her computer, all with the air of doing me a vast, unrepayable favor.

  I wasn’t worried. Hermes and I had discussed this. If the trickster god couldn’t wrangle a little scheduling glitch, then it really was time to give up the title.

  “Your name?” she asked, looking up as though to assure herself I wasn’t leaning over the counter reading over her shoulder.

  I gave it to her.

  She froze as if zapped. She hit a key on her computer two or three times as though it might alter the view.

  “Um, here you are, Ms. Karacis. I’m so sorry. I was sure…” She looked up at me with pleading eyes, willing me to understand. “Anyway, the changing room is right through that door.” She took a key from her desk and held it out to me. “You have locker number forty-eight. You can leave your things inside and put on the robe. Someone will be right in to escort you.”

  “Oh, there’s no need for a robe. It’s just a pedicure and…”

  “I’m afraid that’s how we do things here. No clothes beyond this point…except for our therapists, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said wryly.

  Out in the real world, people were losing their lives. I supposed I could lose my skivvies for the cause.

  “When you’re ready, Adriana will escort you into the spa.”

  Well, I certainly couldn’t be left to wander willy nilly among the filthy rich and nearly naked of Beverly Hills.

  I nodded and went through the door she’d indicated into a fairly typical if upscale locker room. The paint was the color of sandstone. Supplementing the recessed lighting were antiqued bronze wall sconces molded like vines and laurel leaves, holding up fan-shaped travertine light covers. The locker doors had frescoes on them that looked like they’d come straight from ancient Roman bathhouses. It was a nice affectation that made me wonder whether Sigyn had chosen the spa for nostalgia’s sake or whether there was something more to it. Given all the gods, titans, demons, nymphs, djinn, giants and others that had existed over the course of history, it seemed impossible to swing a dead cat without hitting one of them. Of course, swinging a dead cat—sacred in ancient Egypt—might rile up some musty spirit that would haunt you until the end of days. Not to mention, it called up a pretty strange visual.

  Anyway, I shed my clothes and thoughts of dead cats, hung the clothes up in the locker I was assigned, frisked the robe in case of anything odd, frisked it again because it felt like a cloud and it was worth another feel, then wrapped it around myself and belted it tightly. I slipped the Set coin into my robe pocket.

  No sooner had I done so than a woman appeared out of nowhere. I supposed that in such a fancy spa they’d have calculated to the millisecond the exact amount of time it would take to strip down and belt up.

  The woman had mounds of flaxen curls pulled up on top of her head from whence they came tumbling down again. Her spa uniform was stunningly white, the blouse a wrap-around that tied at the side so that it would be an exact fit, the pants wide-legged and free like resort wear. Her face looked naturally bronze, almost the color of her wall sconces, and if she wore any makeup, I couldn’t tell…unless it was what gave her those impossible lashes. I could slave all day and still not look like she managed to look effortlessly.

  “I’m Sulis,” she said, her voice deeper than I expected it to be.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I answered. I debated offering a hand when she hadn’t done so. Sulis…surely they wouldn’t have sent the owner herself to deal with me, unless I’d already been marked as trouble.

  “Hermes called to say that you’re to get the star treatment. I’m so pleased. Any friend of his…”

  “Hermes?” I asked. Surprised she hadn’t called him by one of his aliases.

  “Oh!” She looked suddenly disconcerted. “You probably know him as Herman.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t. Well, I do, but… How do you know him?”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  I shook my head.

  She laughed, and it was like water bubbling through a brook. “Sulis,” she said. When I didn’t register a reaction, she added, “Goddess of the healing waters. Well, at Bath, anyway. I was fairly localized.”

  “Oh.” Since that didn’t seem to be a suitable reaction to meeting a goddess, at least based on the expectation on Sulis’s face, I added a huge smile and asked, “What brought you here?”

  “No one believes in the healing waters of Bath anymore—especially not since mankind discovered the dangers of the lead piping! I understand, though, that they still charge a pound or two for people to drink the dreadful stuff.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. How could waters through lead pipes ever have been healing? Unless that was all part of the goddess’s special magic.

  “Do you have healing waters here?” I asked.

  “Of course. Mud baths that drain a body’s impurities. Herbal baths that do the same. Both leave the skin feeling fresh and rejuvenated. In fact, I’m taking you to the mud room right now. Sigyn is already there.”

  “Uh, mud room?” I’d thought paws and claws were bad enough.

  She laughed again. “Hermes really didn’t tell you. Classic.”

  She led the way, and I followed her swishing, pristine pants through the locker room door to the rest of the spa, which followed through on the appearance of an old Roman bathhouse. She used a keycard on a lanyard she’d tucked away inside her top to buzz us into a room that was all frescoed plaster, except for the mosaic tiled floor. A kelpie or something like that—front part horse, back part fish—frolicked beneath my feet. There were three bubbling mud baths set into the floor, looking like freshly turned graves or the La Brea Tar Pits. The fourth was occupied by a figure with cucumbers for eyes…or over her eyes anyway. Her raven hair escaped in moist curls from under a tuque that twisted her hair out of the way of the mud.

  I looked at Sulis. “Uh, I’m good. I like my impurities. Or, as I like to call them, preservatives. They may be all that’s holding me together at this point. Maybe I can just…keep Sigyn company.”

  “And disturb the peace of this place? No, I can’t allow it. If you’re here, you soak.”

  Her eyes glowed for a second, like amber suddenly superheated.

  “All due respect—”

  “Soaking will show me all due respect.”

  “But—”

  “No buts.”

  “It’s my butt, actually, and I don’t want it getting grit where the sun don’t shine.”

  A muddy hand rose out of the one occupied bath, and a cucumber flipped up. “Tori, you’re such a hardass. I promise you’ll love it.”

  “I promise I won’t.”

  “Well then you’ll get to be right.”

  Sulis was watching me expectantly, and I realized that I was essentially in her temple, expected to comply with the tenets of her religion. I supposed the damage to Hermes’s credit card wasn’t tr
ibute enough.

  I sighed. “Okay, but there’s something I need you to look at first. Sulis, can you give us a moment?”

  She looked from me to Sigyn, and at the latter’s nod, she gave one of her own. “A moment. I’ll send Adriana back to care for you.”

  And with that, she left through a door I hadn’t even noticed at the other end of the room. It blended so nicely with the frescoes.

  As soon as she was gone, I pulled the sleeve of the robe down around my hand, but it was too thick to fit into my pocket and still grasp the coin. Considering the problem, I squatted down and dipped the thumb and forefinger of my right hand into the closest mud bath to coat them and provide some layer of protection between me and the coin. Only then did I reach into the pocket and bring forth the Set disk, leaving mud smears on the pristine white robe.

  As it cleared the pocket, Sigyn’s eye widened, as though she could feel the power. Her hands and all the rest of her was so coated in mud that she couldn’t take the coin from me, so I set it on the mosaic tile between us and brushed away the mud I’d left behind with the belt of my robe. We both stared at the face revealed, the mud in the cracks bringing it into better relief than it had been before.

  Sigyn removed the cucumbers from both her eyes and shifted for a better look. Then she glanced from the coin to me.

  “Set,” she said in a hushed voice.

  “Hermes talked to you about it, yes?”

  “Yes, but… I hoped he was wrong. Tawaret was certain she and her sister-wives had cut him off from his power.”

  “You feel it then? What does it do?”

  She started to raise a muddy hand out of the bath and then thought better of it. “It’s not my work. It would take me time to unravel, but it is dark magic. Not that I would expect any other kind. If I could have time with it…”

  I wasn’t so sure that would be a good idea. “Would you be able to track this coin back to those who’d carried it?”

  “Set’s taint overpowers any other. I could trace it back to him, but that’s not what you asked.”

  “No.” If Set was locked away, it was his acolytes we had to stop. And his influence. “Could you…neutralize it?”

  She looked back to the disk. “Have you tried a sacred salt circle? Or, better yet, a salt bath?”

  “Um…no.” I didn’t know the first thing about sacred circles, and my only use for salt involved steak and eggs.

  “Leave it with me,” she said. “I’ll decipher the magic and then you can tell me what you want to do with it.”

  I studied Sigyn. First Hermes and now she had tried to get me to leave the disk behind. I wasn’t equipped to deal with it. I knew that, but still…

  “I’ll get back to you on that. I’ve got feelers out on Ichnaea. I don’t want to do anything right now to the disk that might keep her from tracking it back to the last guys who used it.”

  She eyed me back, aware of my distrust.

  “I would not use it for ill,” she said.

  “Maybe not intentionally.” But what if she succumbed to Set’s influence? With Sigyn on his side… Sigyn, like Hecate and Isis and others, was a powerful sorceress, a mistress of runes and other magic. She could control others, paralyze them, send them to sleep, possibly for good and all… It was a risk I couldn’t take.

  The door on the far wall opened again, and a new woman appeared—petite and unassuming. She carried a tray of what looked like jars of oils and a plate of cucumber slices.

  I quickly pocketed the coin without first coating my fingers. I felt a flash of power, something dark and almost greasy, and immediately pulled back my fingers, wiping them on my robe, rubbing until the tingling gave way. Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to enter the bath and soak out any impurities.

  The new woman—Adriana—twisted my wild hair up into a rose-colored tuque, helped me off with my robe and let me sink down into the mud bath.

  To my surprise, it wasn’t nearly as icky as I expected it to be. The temperature was perfect, and the mud oddly silky. It still smelled like mud, but…not the kind mucked up from the earth. More…aromatic.

  I’d come about murder, mayhem and the patron god of both. I didn’t see how relaxation was possible, and yet as I sank into the mud, I actually heard an “Ahhh,” escape my lips. I even felt a muscle unkink.

  Ariana moved my head like I was a ragdoll and put a pillow under it, heedless of how muddy it was likely to get. Then she gave Sigyn a new set of cucumber slices and rubbed something that felt like cold cream and smelled like lemons into my face before placing cucumbers over my own eyes. Cutting off my sight. My eyes were already closed by that point, or I might have been upset over the curtailing of my vision.

  And then she was gone, leaving me alone with Sigyn and a weird new mud fixation.

  “So, tell me about Tawaret,” I said, before the sleep-inducing heat of the bath dragged me under.

  “Set’s first wife,” Sigyn said, her voice quiet, soothing, “but you know that. It’s very sad, really. She’s the soul of devotion. Faithful through all of Set’s many affairs… I know all about that. She’s the goddess of childbirth and yet married to a man not only faithless but infertile.”

  “That’s horrible,” I mumbled.

  “Worse, have you seen representations of her? Her people gave her the head and back of a crocodile, and the body of a pregnant hippo. Don’t even get me started on the use of a hippo to represent a pregnant woman.”

  “Horrible,” I said again.

  “She’s really a very lovely person.”

  “She’s not bitter?” I forced myself to ask. My body seemed to have become one with the mud, and even my lips, which were above board, wanted to go slack with relaxation.

  “Yes, some. But the whole world is her family, in a sense. People may not call on her much anymore, but she still feels every birth, provides strength when she can. Unlike Set, she’s been called on in many incarnations in many different cultures. Procreation is universal. Her worship was once immense. All that doesn’t just go up in smoke.”

  “So she’s strong?”

  “I’d say that if anyone was made to endure, it is she. But you do know she’s not his only guard, yes? Anat and Astarte take their turns as well.”

  “Tell me about them,” I said, almost dreamily. The peace of the mud was taking its toll. I had to shake it off, but shaking seemed downright undesirable.

  “Sister wives,” she said.

  I raised a brow and a cucumber went with it. She’d used that expression before, but it hadn’t really penetrated. Did she mean it in the sense that they were actually sisters? And to Set or each other? Either way, it wasn’t the shock it might be. Many ancient cultures and the pantheons that represented them were polygamous…or at least polyamorous. Many kept the dynasties all in the family. Bad idea from an inbreeding perspective, good for the maintenance and consolidation of wealth and power…assuming assassination stayed out of the mix.

  Familial relationships aside, I couldn’t see it. A single relationship was hard enough to maintain, even over the course of a human lifetime. I couldn’t imagine the complications of a full house, especially for an eternity. The stresses that would build…

  “Lovely,” I said. “All above reproach? None of his wives want to see him freed?”

  Sigyn snorted. “See him dead, maybe. Freed? Not on your life.”

  “Even if it meant they wouldn’t have to play jailor any longer?”

  “I think they rather enjoy it. Certainly more than having Set free to claim conjugal rights. And Anat and Astarte are much less gentle than Taweret. I’m quite certain they yank his chain, perhaps even wrap it around his neck from time to time,” she seemed to take a certain glee in that, which made me hope Hermes slept with one eye open. “But either way, I’m sure they’re quite dedicated to keeping him bound.”

  “Maybe
you can arrange a visit for me? Just to see for myself.”

  I heard Sigyn move, the mud sucking at her, and I forced myself to move as well…only far enough to slide a cucumber off one eye so that I could see what she was about. She sat up in her mud bath, cucumbers fallen into the muck, staring at me as though I’d grown a second head.

  “Are you crazy?” she asked.

  “Popular opinion says yes,” I quipped.

  She didn’t smile. “Set is a natural born killer. No, worse, he’s an unnaturally born killer. He ripped his way out of his mother’s womb, and he never stopped tearing a path of destruction until the gods rose up against him and bound him in his chains. Taweret, Anat and Astarte, they are goddesses. You…you would be like Clarice in Silence of the Lambs, and you know how that ended.”

  Yeah, Hannibal Lector had escaped to kill and kill again.

  “Okay then…” My precog kicked me in the gut, doubling me over and making me lose both my cucumbers and my cool just as Sulis came running back into the room, shattering any lingering sense of peace.

  “Come quickly,” she said, thrusting a huge towel at me, regardless of the fact that I couldn’t catch it high enough to keep it from the mud. “There’s been a horrible accident at Dynastic Studios. The police are asking that you come right away.”

  My heart beat double-time, and I wrapped the towel around me, mud and all. “Who called?” I asked. “What accident?”

  “A Detective Reyes called,” she said. “Accident on a film set. Five dead or injured. Carly took down the information.”

  The hell with double-time. My heart stopped.

  I didn’t know what it meant that Reyes had called and not Armani. Was he hurt? Or…was it Apollo? He’d mentioned heading to a set to sign papers with Thalia Day. Could it be…

  I frantically wiped the mud off with the towel, doing the best I could in under a second. I still felt the slime between my toes and in other regions, but I couldn’t be bothered with them. I dropped the soiled towel to the ground, shrugged myself into the robe, wiped my face on its pristine white sleeve—pristine no more—and ran for the locker room, Sulis’s protests ringing in my ears. I didn’t care about her floors or her linens. I cared about my men. And murder.