Then he started to laugh. It made my skin crawl as if I’d been overrun by a swarm of fire ants. His very laugh was chaos—somewhere between that of the creepy bad guy from Who Framed Roger Rabbit and…I couldn’t think of a suitable comparison… As if the bad guy had laughed down into the abyss and the abyss had laughed back.
“I suppose we are at an impasse,” he said. “I am not currently in a position to kill you. You cannot kill me, for without chaos there is only order and, ultimately, atrophy.” He shuddered, and, oddly, I felt an answering shudder in the depths of my soul. “I am already imprisoned. You can do nothing to me that has not already been done.”
“We can petrify your ass,” I said, glaring through my pain.
That laugh again. “You tried that, little gorgon girl. Only it was not quite my ass you stung. And so, we have all tested my chains. We have found that I cannot break free.” Yet, I supplied mentally. But he’d sure as hell tried. Hermes had sounded nearly panicked when he’d called us in, and Set had been more than a match for all of us combined. The moment he gathered enough power…
“Will you stay?” Set continued. “Are you to be my new jailors? I get so tired of seeing the same old faces day in and day out, and you really have been quite amusing. Something different to while away my days.”
“Where’s Tawaret?” Neith asked, challenge in her voice, as though she’d jump him again in a New York minute with or without her weapon.
“Merely sleeping,” he said, waving vaguely into the cloud cover, “after a vigorous night. You see, I am not totally without my charms.” He adjusted his skirt in a way that left no doubt about what he considered his charms. I wondered if Tawaret felt the same way. I didn’t plan to take his word for it that she was “merely sleeping,” especially through the noise of our battle.
“Can someone check on her?” I asked…anybody in a better position than I was. The burning sensation had moved up my arms, leaving my hands behind feeling merely numb…disconnected…useless, as though the strength to move on had been drawn straight out of my own muscles and sinew.
Neith started in the direction Set had indicated and called Hermes over almost instantly. “You’re going to have to hold her down while I realign this break.”
“Field medicine,” Apollo said to me. “Neith’s well-versed. Don’t worry, Tawaret’s in good hands.” To them, he called, “You two good here? Can you handle things until Artemis and her huntresses arrive for reinforcements?”
Hermes nodded distractedly, and a second later, I heard the snap of bone and a cry of pain I felt in my soul. And then I had my own pain to distract me as Apollo scooped me up. I mumbled the spell to draw my wings back, and he cradled me to his chest, my burned hands bumping against him, sending agony screaming up my arms. I blacked out for a second, the world gone purple with pain.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked when I was able to form the words.
We didn’t know any healers. Panacea was off battling a new and virulent outbreak of the flu. Hecate was no more than a living statue.
“To Sulis,” he said.
It didn’t make any sense to me. She mentioned she’d been a localized deity and that her healing waters were back in Bath…hadn’t she. I couldn’t remember anymore. Everything was pain.
Chapter Twenty
I was only dimly aware of things after that. Together, Hermes and Apollo must have opened a portal to the spa, because the next thing I knew I heard voices—someone shrieking in surprise, demanding to know what we were doing there. Apollo asked for Sulis, and the response came that she’d gone out mid-afternoon and never returned. None of it made any sense. It was still night, wasn’t it? I couldn’t understand why anyone should be at the spa at all.
There was more discussion, and jostling and pain like my arms were all funny bones that someone kept striking with a firestick. And then I was lowered into something warm and enveloping like a hug. It didn’t make me hurt any less, but it relaxed my muscles enough to drive me into something like sleep so that the pain seemed part of a nightmare rather than my reality.
“Poison,” I heard Apollo say distantly to whoever was listening. “This should draw the impurities out, right? Give her the chance to heal.”
“If she’s been poisoned, she needs a hospital, not a mudbath,” the voice protested. Female. Kind of stick-up-her-butt-y. Like an accountant. Or a librarian. Maybe that was it, someone burning the midnight oil working on the spa’s books.
“Trust me, I know what she needs,” Apollo said.
“Of course,” she said with derision, “being a man and all. Maybe we should ask her. Anyway, the spa is closed, and I can’t be responsible—”
“I’ll be responsible,” Apollo answered, power in his voice. I’d heard him use that voice before with the slight godly resonance. “Sulis is an old friend. She’ll understand. Get her on the phone.”
There was a pause. “I told you, she went out and never came back. We’ve been trying to reach her all day.”
That didn’t sound good. Not at all. Not with one of Aphrodite’s nymphs missing and Thalia kidnapped.
What if, I wondered…and then my thoughts wandered away. I’d been going somewhere with that, but the pain… I worked harder to focus. This was stupid. I was made of sterner stuff. Definitely not sugar and spice and everything nice, but maybe salt and spice and a cockatrice…it seemed to fit given that we both had a paralyzing affect. But I was digressing. What was I thinking about?
Nice…cockatrice…ah, mythologicals, that was it. What if the brothers had decided that killing more powerful beings gave greater glory to Set? It seemed logical that the longer-lived might leave behind a greater gap in the world…or the weave, as the Fates would have it…with their passing. Or that they’d have more power to be channeled for Set’s use.
But that assumed the brothers even could kill them. The gods had condemned Prometheus to have his liver eaten out again and again by a giant eagle for the sin of bringing fire and innovation to mankind. Atlas supposedly held the weight of the world on his shoulder, which I knew to be as true as the myth of the world tree or the earth growing on a turtle’s back, but the point being that he could lift things that would crush a mortal man. I myself should have been dead at least ten times over.
But…what if Thalia and Genie and possibly even Sulis were being sacrificed over and over? I tried desperately not to remember the crime scene photos Neith had shown me of the poor woman back in the museum in Egypt, but… What if they were being sacrificed and worse. I couldn’t forget that Set wasn’t the only psycho in the mix here. There were those two sarcophagi and Neith’s theory that they’d been bound with restless, evil spirits denied the afterlife who may have found new homes in the Roland brothers. They’d undoubtedly spread chaos and destruction in life and now, it seemed, were driving it in death.
The mud no longer felt warm or soothing. It felt restrictive. I had to do something. Before I even remembered about my hands, I tried to use them to pull myself out. The pain that shot through me blacked my sight for more than a second this time, and I felt Apollo’s alarm like a zap from an electric fence.
“M’okay,” I mumbled when I could speak again. “Do whatya gotta do.”
At least, that’s how it sounded in my head. In the real world it might have been sheer gibberish.
I sank back into the mud and prayed that Apollo was right, that it would leach out the impurities and help my body heal that much faster.
In my semi-conscious state, I heard him making calls—to his sister Artemis, to Hermes, to Nick.
And then he was waking me. “Tori, how do you feel. Are you ready for the baths?”
I blinked my eyes open. A bath sounded pretty good, especially if Apollo was volunteering to wash my back or any number of other areas, but then I remembered about my hands. I tried to move them, and to my surprise, they clenched and unclenched. It h
urt, but in a way I could live through.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thank you.”
“No problem.” He reached down, and I reached up with my muddy arms, looking like some kind of swamp monster.
“Sexy,” he said.
“Thank you, I try,” I answered wryly.
This time when he grabbed my arms—going for the upper arms where the venom hadn’t quite reached—I didn’t black out. My quick intake of breath was more about the pain I expected rather than the reality. Between us, we got me to standing.
“Let’s get you cleaned off.”
I stepped out of the mud bath onto the tile. My brain started to click, as though now that the pain signals weren’t jamming the switchboard, other things were coming back on line.
I let him towel me off, but let was about all I was doing. I wasn’t helping, because something was nagging at me. Something else needed to be done. I flipped mentally through the calls he’d made.
“We need to call Yiayia,” I said suddenly. “Right away. The other gods and godlets, godlings, whatever, need to be warned. If the Roland brothers are finding them through her site…or even if they aren’t. I think they’re hunting more-than-human prey now.”
The towel froze in Apollo’s hand.
“If we post a warning, the brothers will know we’re on to them. We lose any advantage of knowing something they don’t know we know.”
Apparently, I wasn’t yet together enough to process that.
“What?”
Apollo started up again with the towel. Faster, and more vigorously, catching my urgency. “I mean, we need to warn them, yes. But what if we can use the site and the fact that they’re watching it to set a trap.”
“I like the way you think,” I said. “Go on.”
“Let’s get you to the baths.”
“Fine,” I said, “if it will move things along, but keep talking.”
He steered me through a quick shower and into a room I hadn’t gotten to before—one with several round pools, more like hot tubs than the original waters at Bath. But I wasn’t complaining. I groaned in relief as he lowered me in. The spa might not quite have the healing waters of the famed Roman bathhouse, but something was definitely at work to finish drawing out impurities and to renew and invigorate. Herbs? Oils? I had no idea, but if they had a shop where I could get a consumerized version for my bath at home, I was going to treat myself when all this was over.
“So,” he continued, “if we know they’re looking for gods, that’s what we have to give them. Plant a new story that gives them a target they can’t refuse.”
“You mean use someone as bait? They already know about me. And you. And Neith, through Jessica. If we make it any of us, they’ll see it coming and know it’s a trap.”
“I was thinking about Eros.” He gave me an evil grin.
“Might work,” I admitted. “If he’ll agree, but…I think they prefer more feminine targets.” I was not going to say softer, because I knew plenty of women who could rip a man’s head off—and would at any suggestion that they might be the softer sex. Some might even eat their innards. The Gray Sisters came to mind.
“What about Sigyn?”
That question, those three words hung there for a minute.
“Maybe.”
I knew from painful experience that Sigyn could take care of herself. Her runes were powerful. If we could draw the brothers out…or get them to capture Sigyn while she was armed with some kind of tracker, magical or otherwise, like a signal rune that could be triggered that we could trace back to her and the other kidnap victims…
“We need to talk to Sigyn. Also, I need to call Yiayia. We need to warn the others in the L.A. area. Not overtly,” I said, before he could protest again, “but maybe she’s got some kind of code she could use or maybe even a phone tree.”
Apollo snorted.
I stood and started to wade out of the pool, ignoring Apollo’s disapproving look. “We need a council of war. We need to call those boys out and put them down before they can do any more damage.”
My arms felt merely weak now. And tingly. And still numb, but no longer totally useless. I’d take it over the mind-sucking pain any day. I tried to raise them to grab a towel for myself from a shelf on the wall, but they’d only rise so far, and actually gripping and lifting a towel was still beyond me. It would come.
I missed the old days when I could down ambrosia and be miraculously healed. Oh sure, ambrosia had come with an addiction, complete with horrible withdrawal symptoms and the very real possibility of death, but… Well, I supposed I was an instant gratification junky. Now that I’d experienced healing at ludicrous speed, merely super felt like a come-down.
Apollo had to towel me off again. I barely even had time for a wistful thought of how we could defile the pools while we had the place to ourselves.
“Everyone’s meeting at my place for a council of war,” he said, handing me a fluffy white robe.
“Your place?” I asked.
“It’s the only one big enough.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Apollo must have called the doorman at his luxury apartment building and let him know to let people up, because his living room was nearly full when we arrived after calling a cab to take us home from the salon.
I was nearly recovered by the time we got there, but the sight that greeted us when we stepped into the fray nearly set me back in shock. I hadn’t really understood why we couldn’t meet in Neith’s hotel room. We’d all fit before, if barely, but now…it was like a godly multiplication dance, as though everyone had grabbed a friend or two.
My gaze caught and held on a green man with the usual squared off beard of a pharaoh. Not slightly green, like a blond who’d spent too much time in chlorinated water, but the true green that came in every box of crayons. I tried not to stare, even as he caught my eyes and blinked slowly, as though time moved differently for him.
“Who?” I asked.
“Osiris,” Apollo said, following my gaze. “I haven’t seen him topside in ages.”
“He’s not, like, a counterpart for Hades or anything like that?”
Apollo looked at me like I’d asked something odd. I’d thought it was a perfectly valid question. “Hades mentioned to you about the various underworlds, right? All those different beliefs…no one could govern them all.”
Plus, as far as I knew, Hades had never been cut up into a million parts, scattered all over the world and resurrected, though there’d been days when I’d gladly have performed the first two parts of that myself.
“Wait,” I said, “aren’t you associated with—”
“Horus, his son,” Apollo finished for me. As I watched, he changed. I’d never seen Apollo shift before. He’d always told me that it wasn’t really his area. At least, not as a sun god. The sun was constant. Unchanging, if one didn’t consider solar flares and sun spots.
But Horus had come before Apollo, and in that other aspect, in his association with the moon, he’d been changeable. He’d been… It was all I could do not to take a step back when he turned a hawklike head toward me. Not because I didn’t still sense him inside, but because being that close to a raptor’s beak and his piercing predatory eyes was slightly unnerving.
Reassurance radiated out to me, but still I stood speechless as he stepped forward to greet his…father? I’d never understood the Horus myth. I’d always heard that when Isis put Osiris back together she’d managed to find every part of him but the one essential to procreation. Myths were full of births that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the natural order of things—Athena springing fully formed from the head of her father, women being impregnated by gods who weren’t in human form at the time and bearing unlikely offspring like the Minotaur, immaculate conceptions…
I made myself move on. Osiris was not the only newcomer. Hanging on
Eros were a gaggle of girls…women…who looked like the Real Housewives of Hugh Heffner. No, that wasn’t quite fair. One looked like a FemBot out of Austin Powers in a pale pink negligee, complete with sheer overcoat. The others were in varying shades of black and in one case a whiskey-colored cowl-necked sweater where the cowl dipped so low between her breasts I wondered how she got it to stay up on her shoulders. Maybe she and Aphrodite shared boob tape…or possibly defiance of gravity was her superpower. Then there was the girl with the beautiful brown skin and the darker hair flowing into full on green in an ombre effect that I first thought was salon created…until I noted the pointy ears that jutted slightly from the cascade of hair and fingernails that looked more like bark than keratin. A dryad then? I’d never seen one before. I stared in fascination.
I’d known that Yiayia’s blog wasn’t the only godly grapevine out there, since word had somehow spread labeling me “P.I. to the Pantheon”. But I’d never expected word about Set and the trouble we faced to get out this fast or to achieve such a response. Apparently, renewed attempts to unleash chaos into the world warranted an all-hands-on-deck approach.
There came a knock at the condo door, and I went to answer it, needing a moment to process in any case.
I hit the button first on Apollo’s video monitor to see who stood outside and received another jolt. I recognized the woman peering back, looking straight at the camera with a determined stare.
It was Demeter…Ceres…the mother of Persephone, Hades’s previously pilfered bride. She’d liberated herself at long last, but I’d made sure it took. The god of the Greek underworld did not take well to having his will thwarted. I thought that was just too damned bad.
I opened the door, pleased to see another familiar face…not to mention a goddess I knew to still have quite a lot of power.
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