“Okay, now stand,” she ordered.
Christie’d been all apologetic that she didn’t have shoes to match the dress, but the silver stilettos she’d offered instead were both stunning and deadly. I was likely to kill myself in them before anyone could “Kiss Me Quick”.
I wobbled to my feet, walked two steps, twisted my ankle and said, “This is ridiculous,” just as a knock sounded at the door.
“I’ll get it!” Christie said cheerfully, now totally on board with the dinner after her portrayal of Glamfairy godmother.
“No, Christie, don’t leave me—”
I stood in the center of the room, afraid to take another step without her support, lest I fall on my face.
“This is stupid.” I tried to kick the shoes off, but was foiled by the ankle straps. I dropped onto the nearest bed, making the dress ride halfway up my thighs so that I wondered how Christie ever hoped to sit in it without exposing her hoo-ha. That was, of course, when Apollo walked in.
He whistled at the sight. “All this for me?” he asked.
I glared. “No, all this for Christie. It was the only way she’d let me out tonight.”
Apollo looked at my friend, who beamed at her handiwork. “Impressive,” he said.
“I know, right?”
They shared a moment, and I wanted to throw a heel at him, but the buckles were defeating me.
“Don’t you dare,” Christie said when she saw what I was up to.
“I’ll kill myself trying to walk in these.”
“That’s why you have an escort.”
She drew Apollo forward, and then almost forgot to let him go, looking slightly stunned at the contact. I knew the feeling.
“M’lady?” Apollo said, offering an arm.
“What if something happens?” I said weakly. “What if I have to chase a mugger or something?”
Apollo and Christie exchanged a look.
“Stop that!” I said, cranky.
“Oh, fine.” Exasperated, Christie rooted around in one of her many bags and offered me a little black purse.
“How’s this going to help?”
She rolled her eyes. “Look inside.”
I unzipped the zipper, and inside were sparkly black ballet flats, folded in half.
“Brilliant,” I said.
“Aren’t I?” she answered. “Now, you two have fun. But not too much,” she said, fixing Apollo with the evil eye.
He smiled, but not in a way that was reassuring, and Christie momentarily forgot to breathe.
“She means that,” I said for her.
“I know,” he answered. “Shall we?”
I refused to agree or disagree until I heard the rest of that sentence, but I did precede him out of the room. I looked back and caught Christie checking out Apollo’s butt as he followed me. I shot her a grin, but I didn’t think she even noticed.
Sometime between when Apollo and I had parted and now he’d picked up a rental car several tiers up from my sliding-toward-antique Camaro. The car that beeped at us when he pressed the key fob was sleek and silver with lines like the bunched haunches of some jungle cat ready to spring.
“Nice,” I said.
His lips quirked up in a smile. “I figured you here meant trouble, and for that I might want to have some autonomy…like my own set of wheels.”
“I hope you got the extra insurance.”
“Oh, I did.”
He held my door open for me and checked out my legs as I slid into the passenger seat.
“Nice,” he echoed me.
I stuck my tongue out at him. Because maturity was so my co-pilot.
By the time he popped his door open, I’d given up on the buckle of the first strappy shoe and had instead risked stretching out the strap by pulling it down over my heel to release myself from my fashion bondage.
“You’re undressing already?” he asked. “Not that I don’t approve, but usually I have to buy a woman dinner first.”
“I bet you don’t,” I muttered.
“Well, okay…”
“Anyway, don’t get your hopes up. I’m just working on my own autonomy. There’s no way I’m going to be slave to these shoes.”
“That’s too bad. I was having visions of all sorts of things I could do to you in those shoes.”
My mouth was suddenly way too dry as I caught some of those same images—me still in the shoes with the little red dress pushed up over my hips and Apollo pushing into me from behind, my hair tangled in his fist, being used to bow my neck so that he could graze it with his teeth.
I gasped as my body struggled for the air I’d been denying it, unconsciously holding my breath.
“Stop,” I said when I could.
“Tori?” he asked. His confusion seemed genuine. “What’s wrong?”
He leaned in toward me, hand outstretched as if to touch me, and I cried, “Don’t!”
He froze, uncertain, which was a new look for him. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t know,” I grated out.
The car was way too hot and enclosed, the dress too tight. I wanted to shed it like I had the shoes…one of them anyway.
“Did you have ambrosia today?” he asked. “Are you going through withdrawal?”
If anything, this felt like an overdose. Everything was far too intense.
“Had…ambrosia,” I gasped out, then swallowed, trying to get my heart rate and sudden hot flash under control. “Must have been something I ate.” Or drank. Maybe there’d been something in Dionysus’s wine…something other than the ambrosia I should have been used to. “Just drive,” I ordered. “Give me a minute. I’ll be fine.”
Was this how Dionysus whipped his followers into a frenzy? It seemed a long way from wanting to tear my clothes off to wanting to tear into another human being, but then the thing stimulating me was an oversexed god. There was no telling what Dionysus’s presence would inspire.
The very thought of him was like a bucket of cold water thrown in my face. My breathing slowed, and after a moment I felt like I could relax the too-tight hold I had on myself. I uncurled my hands from the fists I hadn’t realized I’d formed, nails biting into my palms to give me pain instead of pleasure to focus on. It hadn’t even registered.
“You’re bleeding,” Apollo observed.
“Just a bit.”
I wouldn’t meet his gaze, but instead focused on releasing the second strappy sandal without ruining it. Apollo watched me a second longer, then turned the car on. It purred like the jungle cat it resembled and leapt forward out of the parking space, which, luckily, he’d backed into earlier.
I felt better when my feet were tucked into Christie’s ballet flats.
“Are we going to talk about what just happened?” Apollo asked.
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
Because to expose myself like that I’d have to trust him. Trust led to intimacy, and intimacy would bring us full circle right back to the problem at hand. I had two very good reasons for avoiding that.
Nick Armani.
And my sanity.
“Hades attacked me last night,” I said, tossing out the first conversational monkey wrench I could think of.
Apollo looked at me, blowing straight through a red light he should have been paying attention to instead. “The Hades?”
His eyes were about as wide as Charon’s coins and dark in the dim interior of the car.
“As if there’s more than one.”
“And you survived?” he asked, stunned.
Since that was self-evident, I didn’t feel the need to answer.
“Why?” he asked.
“To make a point.”
“Tori, what’s going on?” His voice was soft rather than demanding, and I couldn’t help but confide…part of it anyway.
“Persephone has left him. He blames me.”
I told him about the explosion—or, more accurately, the dragon’s awakening—opening a path to Hell.
“An
d you’re investigating Dionysus because…? Wait a minute, his new spokesmodel?”
“You didn’t recognize her?” I asked. I’d wondered. I figured all Olympians knew each other.
“I met her once, maybe twice, like a few millennia ago. She was a mere girl.”
“Well, she’s all grown up now,” I said. As if you didn’t notice.
“I’d have to be dead not to.”
I snapped my gaze to his face. I knew I hadn’t said that out loud.
“Did you just read my mind?” I asked.
Apollo took on an oh shit expression and focused on the turn he was taking like his life depended on it. Half a second later, he took another turn into a drive where white-jacketed valets waited to take the car off his hands. He put up one finger to hold them off and turned toward me.
“You have to believe it wasn’t intentional.”
“Reading my mind?”
“Creating a link.” As hot as I’d been earlier, suddenly I was ice cold.
“I think you’d better explain.”
“When I gave you the gift of foreseeing, it opened up dormant pathways in your brain. For the rare person who is already predisposed to certain things, sometimes it has unforeseen effects.”
“Very poetic. Except that you’re the god of foreseeing. What ‘unforeseen’ effects are we talking about?”
“I swear, I didn’t know. It’s only happened once before.”
“What has?” I asked, teeth grinding.
“Forging a link.”
“Between us,” I asked, just to be clear.
He didn’t look away. “Yes. It’s faint. I only feel it in times of extreme emotion, like—”
“Take me home.”
“I could have lied,” he answered, the look in his eyes begging me to understand.
But I was putting things together now, understanding far too well. “That’s how you knew…” I couldn’t even complete the sentence. When Nick and I had first…gotten together…I’d received an ominous, two-word note from Apollo.
I know.
Now that I knew how he knew, I felt violated. Apparently, the intimacy I’d feared had already been forced upon me.
Flames engulfed me again, but this time there was nothing sexual about them. In fact, if I could shoot lasers out of my eyes or fire out of my fingers, Apollo would be a crispy critter.
“That’s your defense?” I asked. “I could have lied. Oh yes, so virtuous. You freakin’ changed me against my will. Or, at least, without my permission. There’s a word for that, and it’s not pretty. And that connection let you spy on something that was intensely private.” I felt sick.
“Do you think that was fun for me? I didn’t know what was happening at first. Then when I felt…what I felt and knew what was going on… Trust me, if I could have shut you out, I would have. I. Didn’t. Know. I gave you that precognition for your own good, because your job is dangerous and you needed protection.”
“I’m not yours to save or protect.”
“Yes,” he said, “you are.”
I was so upset I nearly swung for the valet when he startled me by opening my door, apparently deciding that our time was up. He must have seen something in my eyes, because he hesitated before leaning in to take my hand and help me from the car. It looked like a strain to keep that smile stretching from one of his retro sideburns to the other, but he managed.
Apollo handed his keys to a second valet on his side and came around the car to escort me into the restaurant. I backed away, fumbling open the clutch Christie’d leant me to find my cell phone.
“I’m calling a cab,” I told him.
The look in Apollo’s eyes was infinitely sad. I almost—almost—felt sorry for him. If he really hadn’t intended the connection, then I couldn’t really blame him. He would have been punished enough, I thought, knowing what Nick and I were doing—what he wanted to be doing. But the invasion… My anger needed an outlet. Someone to blame. And who else was there?
Had he been there every time Nick and I had…? No, I couldn’t even think it. And that thing between us, Apollo and I, in the car—that overwhelming tsunami of feeling—was that some kind of feedback loop with our link? If so, he was more dangerous to me than ever. If it ever came up just after the rush of ambrosia or another life and death situation where I was vulnerable and on adrenaline overload…there was no telling what would happen.
“Tori,” he said, reaching out to me. “If you really want to leave, I’ll drive you.”
“Go!” I said sharply. “I’ll…be there in a bit.”
I still needed to pump him for information. I battled down the image that rose to mind of a different sort of pumping entirely. I had to fight this.
But first, I needed a minute or twenty.
Apollo put on his public face. I watched it transform right in front of me. If he was still hurting, there was no longer any sign.
I waited for him to disappear inside and voice-dialed Nick, who picked up on the first ring. “Tori,” he answered, in that voice that could melt me—deep, grumbly, a little rough around the edges. Only tonight it just made me ache.
“Tell me, is murder still illegal?” I asked.
He laughed, but cut off abruptly when I didn’t join in. “Wait, you’re not serious, right?”
Then I remembered Internal Affairs and potential phone taps and how that was probably the dumbest thing I could have said. “Of course not,” I lied. “It’s just…Apollo’s here.”
There was complete and utter silence on the other end of the line. Then, “In San Francisco. With you?”
“If you mean with me in the sense of being seconds away from having his head handed to him, then yes.”
“Tori, don’t joke like that.”
“Who’s joking? Anyway, yes, he’s in talks with the very group I’m investigating.”
“That’s it, Tori, I’m coming up.”
“Can you?” I asked.
“No,” he sighed. “Probably not.”
“Of course not. I couldn’t get that lucky.”
“Tell you what—you come home and you can get lucky any time you want.”
Home and Armani—Nick—in the same sentence. It was a lovely thought.
Marred only by the knowledge that we wouldn’t be truly alone.
“I’ll be back soon.”
“How soon?”
“Not soon enough.”
We both contemplated that.
“They discovered the identity of the body you drove up there to see,” Nick said after a moment.
“Oh?” That snapped my mind straight away from getting lucky. I wondered nastily if Apollo was getting whiplash at my changing emotions.
“Jeremy Clarkson, a string reporter from the Associated Press. He was undercover investigating… You’ll never guess.”
“Back to Earth,” we both said together.
“Bingo,” Nick finished.
“Thanks, Nick.”
We sat on the phone a second longer with nothing more to say, but wishing it was different.
“I’d better go,” I said finally. “Apollo’s waiting.”
“Tell him I said hi,” Nick told me, knowing how that would go over.
“I’ll give him your love.”
“Nope, that’s all for you.” My body ran hot and cold all at once. It was the closest Armani had ever come to a declaration, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
“Okay then,” I answered, going for breezy. “I’ll save it for myself. Good night, Nick.”
“Good night,” he answered, and I wished I could read his mind like Apollo could mine. Had Nick really meant that love part the way it sounded? How did I feel about that? No time to think about it. Apollo waited for me inside, and the anger he inspired was nice and pure and uncomplicated. I held on to it as I made my way inside.
Apollo waited beside the hostess stand of the lovely, elegant restaurant that I had no taste for. The amber-soaked lighting gave the place a warm, intimate g
low. Just right for an assignation…or an assassination. His, I thought hopefully.
The hostess, who’d been flirting with Apollo, sized me up as I approached and apparently found me wanting. I blamed the ballet flats, but I didn’t regret my choice. If she wanted the god, she could have him. Now would be good.
Apollo studied me intensely as I walked up, and I glared back but didn’t look away.
“Everything all right?” he asked when I arrived.
“What do you think?”
“That you’re still here.”
“We had a deal. You help me, I have dinner with you. I thought about it. I don’t want to end our relationship owing.”
“End?”
“Show us to our table,” I told the hostess. I’d had enough of audiences already.
She smiled professionally at me, more than professionally at Apollo, as if to tell him that if I was stupid enough to pass him up, she’d be glad to pick up my slack, and led the way.
While the front of her little black dress had been demure, the back dipped indecently low, revealing what on a man I’d have called plumber’s butt. I wondered how one wore a bra with a backless dress. Christie would undoubtedly know.
Apollo’s gaze didn’t follow the hostess as she retreated…as if I’d care. Instead, he was disconcertingly still focused on me.
“End?” he repeated.
I looked him in the eyes. I didn’t want him to think that I was in any way unsure about this. “After this case, I don’t want to see you again.” It was dangerous, cutting a god off cold-turkey, but I didn’t see what choice I had. “There’s nothing I can do about the fact that we’ve been thrown together again, and I can’t tell you what to do about Dionysus, but once this is over and I have my uncle back, I don’t want anything more to do with gods or goddesses.”
“What’s this about your uncle?” he asked, ignoring the rest of that rather important sentence.
“He’s missing,” I answered shortly, determined to get back on track. “He’s in trouble and his last known whereabouts involved the Back to Earth movement. Cult,” I added. “Dionysus either has him or knows where he is.”
Crazy in the Blood (Latter-Day Olympians) Page 14
