Holloway rejoined me in the hallway and held the door open for me to enter. I thanked him and waited for the door to close behind me before heading to the first stall. I was mid-step when I heard the lock on that outer door click home. I whirled back toward it, and had only time to register…nothing…an empty room…before Holloway threw himself against the door to bust his way back in, and I was suddenly pinned against the wall by an invisible pressure. Panicked, I kicked and struggled, but it was no use at all.
“She’s there, isn’t she?” a voice hissed out, a millimeter from my face. The pressure released enough for me to fall a few inches forward so that he could slam me back into the wall. “You ran out of the police station before I could talk to you, but you’re not running out on me now. Just answer the question—you found her, didn’t you?”
My eyes were bruised from being rattled in their sockets by the last impact of my head against the wall, but they weren’t doing me any good just then anyway. I was frozen with indecision. There was no telling what Hades would do to Persephone once he found her or what he’d do to those he’d see as aiding her. I couldn’t be responsible for that, even if she had maybe used the water of the forgetfulness on Uncle Christos. But—
He pulled me away from the wall and shoved me back against it again, brain-jarringly hard. It was not helping me think.
“Tell. Me,” he ordered. “Where do they have her?”
I started to shake my head in denial, but when that hurt too much, I croaked, “No.”
“Tori!” Holloway called. “Mizz Karacis, who is it? Who’s in there with you?”
I opened my mouth, though I didn’t know what would come out. I never saw the blow that knocked me to the ground, my vision and head exploding as I hit, the world going all Dali-esque and then dim.
“Never mind,” Hades was saying, ignoring the agent entirely. “I know she’s there. I will raze the whole place to the ground. I will tear it apart stone by stone to find her.”
I couldn’t form an objection. My world winked out.
And then I was being shaken awake and crying out in pain. My eyes, when I opened them, weren’t working right. Neither was my mind. I was afraid, and I couldn’t remember why. There was something… Something…urgent.
“Stop!” I begged.
The shaking stopped, but it didn’t help. The pain was such that I wanted to bash my own head against the tiles to open it up and relieve the pressure, but there was something I had to do…
“The Back to Earth complex,” I told the three agent Holloways before me. “Danger. You’ve got to get out there NOW. No time for a warrant. Danger.”
I didn’t know if I made any sense. It hurt even to talk, to think. I wanted to lie right down and pass out again to escape the pain.
A doctor pushed Holloway aside, and I flinched as he shined a light in my eyes. “She has a concussion,” he announced, as if that wasn’t obvious. “What happened here?” he asked.
Holloway ignored him. “I might be coming around to your way of thinking,” he said to someone outside the bathroom. Rosen? “Whatever blew past me, it was…unseen.”
Like he couldn’t bring himself to say “invisible”.
“Ouch!” Whatever the doctor was doing hurt. Putting my head in a vise, it felt like.
“We’ve got to get to the Back to Earth compound. She says there’s danger, and I heard a voice threaten to raze it to the ground. Call for back-up,” Holloway ordered.
“On it,” Rosen said.
Nick poked his head in. Three of him. In triplicate. The mind boggled. I tried to rise. The doctor held me down. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“Have to,” I told him, trying harder.
“No, you really don’t,” both he and Rosen said, almost in stereo.
“Nick, you’ve got wheels?” I asked.
Rosen and Holloway both gave him the evil eye, but he responded, “Yes.”
“Good. Help me up.”
The doctor tried to hold on to me while Nick tried to pull me up. I now knew what it felt like to be the rope in a tug of war. The agents took advantage of the tussle to leave us behind, getting a head start, no doubt hoping the action would be all over by the time we got things sorted out.
“I’m declining medical attention,” I said, to make it official. If there was one thing the medical profession feared more than contagion, it was legal action. If I declined the doctor’s help, he couldn’t touch me, which he made immediately clear by leggoing Nick’s Eggo.
I practically snapped to my feet, wobbling the whole way. The room spun around me and then stabilized. Like a 3D film without the glasses, everything had echo images, and they redoubled every time I refocused. I felt seasick.
“Let’s go!” I said.
Nick kept hold of my arm, which was all that was holding me upright. Running hurt. My vision kept blacking out, swimming back into focus and then collapsing again. I felt more than saw the exit doors whoosh open ahead of us and hot air hit. Nick all but shoved me into the passenger’s seat when we got to his rental car.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe through the nausea, nearly losing it when something shook me hard. “Tori, stay with me. Don’t go to sleep.”
I opened my eyes, but the sun was right in them, stabbing jagged sunspears of pain up into my brain. I closed them again immediately. “Won’t sleep, but can’t see right now. Migraine.”
“More like concussion,” he answered. “I hope I’m doing the right thing.”
“You are,” I said. I tried to make it convincing. I didn’t know what I thought I could do in my condition, but Hades going after the compound was all my fault, and I had to help any way I could.
“Do you think they called ahead?” I asked, trying to remember the conversation that had gone on around me at the hospital.
“What?”
“To warn them. Do you think the Feds called the compound?”
“Do they have a phone?”
“The Feds?”
“The Back to Earth people.”
“They must. Do you—” I hated to ask but, “—have Apollo on your phone?”
He didn’t ask questions. “Yes,” he said cautiously. “From the last time you were in trouble.”
“Would you dial him for me?” Because right now I couldn’t see clearly enough to tell which end of the phone was up. I wondered when my super healing was supposed to kick in. Had it been too long ago that I’d had the ambrosia? Had I taken too little?
I presumed from the small thing he’d pressed into my hand which was now ringing in my ear that his answer had been “yes”.
“Tori?” Apollo answered instantly. “Where are you? What’s going on?”
Like he’d known it was me. Probably our damned mental connection.
“Hades?” he asked, after I told him. “Skata. That’s bad news. How big a head start does he have?”
“How long since I was knocked out?” I asked Nick.
“Knocked out?” Apollo roared in my ear.
“Twenty minutes,” Nick replied, “give or take.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Apollo said, overhearing.
“Wait! That’s not why I called. Do you have a number for Dionysus? He’s got to get his people away to safety. If Hades comes with back-up it’s going to be a bloodbath.”
“Dionysus is perfectly capable of using his followers for cannon fodder. You forget that we were in power during the time of sacrifices and tribute. Calling will only ensure an all-out war.”
“Then what do we do?”
“I’ll come up with something on the way.”
“Great,” I said unconvincingly. The phone rang in my hand as I hung up.
“How is she?” the voice asked. “Where is she? We went to meet you at the hospital, like you said, and you were gone. The staff will only tell us that she left against medical advice. I thought she was fine,” Jesus said, putting his special emphasis on it.
“Jesus, it’s me.”
&nb
sp; “Dios gracias. Wait a minute—you don’t sound so good. Where are you? Are you…drunk?”
I guessed I could add slurring words to my blurred vision and crashing headache.
“Don’t worry. Nick’s got me. That’s how I come to be answering his phone.”
“Protective custody, that’s what you need,” Jesus sniffed.
I shot Nick a look. “Oh…right. Listen, we’re a little busy right now.” Trying to figure out how to stop an Olympian civil war. “Can we call you later?”
“Wait, boss lady—” I was already pulling the phone away from my ear when I thought I heard him say something about tying a cowbell around my neck. Yeah, like that would help.
“So, do we have a plan?” Armani asked as I hung up.
“Apollo says he’s working on it.”
“Great.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“I’m working on it too.”
“As long as we’re all on the same page.”
I ran over about a gazillion potential scenarios in my mind as we drove, but nothing prepared me for seeing the gates of the fenced-off complex crushed to the ground as though a Mack truck—or a three-headed dog the same size—had barreled right over them. Several feet of fence on the right-hand side had gone down with the gate. And there were bodies strewn across the yard. We could see them from just outside.
Armani stopped the car before we hit the fence, afraid he’d drive over people along with the mesh if he continued. The Feds had apparently feared the same. Not one, but two dark, unmarked sedans also sat abandoned outside the gates. We jumped out, and I overran the fence on foot. I didn’t see any bodies where I stepped, but just beyond lay a blonde woman whose hair had half escaped her ponytail to catch in the blood matting her face. I bent down to take her pulse and shook my head at Nick.
From the buildings to the left came a sound like gunfire, but my brain quickly processed with more clarity—something had cracked, all right, but it sounded more like wood, like something being put to use as a battering ram. There were screams and snarls.
I took off running in that direction, Nick hot on my heels. Any extra speed or prowess the ambrosia might have given me had been worn away by everything I’d already been through, most recently the concussion. My head felt like it would split every time a foot hit the ground. Any impact could crack me open like the San Andreas Fault. My vision was cutting in and out. I was running on instinct and adrenaline.
A body came flying out of the door of the guard shack or whatever I’d been trapped in last night and crashed to the ground in front of me with the fearful bonelessness of a rag doll. I vaulted it to get to the source of the trouble, suspecting the girl was already beyond help. But as if I had a third eye at the back of my head, I sensed Armani stop to offer aid. I hoped he didn’t judge me and that there’d be a later when I could explain.
I was barely through the door when I was blown back by a gut-busting whack straight to the chest. It sent me flying. My healing ribs cracked. Pain exploded so that the impact of my butt with the ground barely registered. I was struggling to breathe, every inhale torture. A gurgle sounded with each exhale…not good. So not good.
I tried to blink my vision back into being, as if I was in any condition to avoid a threat even if I could see it coming. But the world had gone dark, like a stage when the show’s over. I’d never been so afraid in my life.
Someone was calling my name. Or maybe it was “Toro!” and not “Tori”—someone wanting to play raging bull with whatever had smacked me around. I hadn’t gotten a good look, but I suspected Cerberus’s tail had delivered the whack that had sent me flying, which meant I hadn’t even met the really dangerous end and already I was no match.
Someone grabbed for my jaw, and I gurgled something at him—probably blood. Then something was being shoved into my mouth, and I was choking. Or so I thought. There were definitely hands at my throat, but my breathing wasn’t any worse than it had been…as if there was any room at all on the scale between “No breath” and “oblivion.”
A strange tingle went through me, and my entire body arced up off the ground as the pain that hit doubled…quadrupled. I had a flash of vision. Two faces staring worriedly down at me. Two fallen angels. Eyes two impossible and entirely different shades of blue—midnight and Mediterranean. Then it was gone again, ripped away by pain. Every available nerve stolen away so that my body could scream with everything it had that Things Were Not All Right.
It went on forever…my forever…because I was sure at the end of it would come death. I even welcomed it. But when my round on the rack ended, I was left panting and spent. Distantly, I heard screams and forced my eyes open; those faces were still there. One looked anxious but relieved, the other relieved and furious all at once.
“What did you give her?” the furious face asked the other.
They had names. I knew they did. And they meant something to me, but right then it was as if my whole brain needed to reboot, like I had the files and the operating system, but couldn’t remember how to make them work together.
“It’s enough for you to know that she will be fine.”
“It’s that stuff, isn’t it? The stuff I found in her fridge?”
“Do you think now is the time for this discussion?”
I gave up trying to think and decided just to act. I gritted my teeth, expecting pain, and found none as I sat up. There was a body beneath me, badly broken from what I could see, and in front of me—beyond the arguing men—was a doorway completely taken up with…a gigantic dog’s behind? Could it be?
I shook my head and it rattled my brains, but I was starting to remember—Apollo, Armani, Cerberus…
The latter’s back end was thrashing around like he was striking at something with his front, and I said, “Someone give me a gun.”
That ended the argument. Both men stared down at me dumbfounded.
“No gun?” I asked them.
Both shook their heads. “I don’t even have my arrows,” Apollo lamented. “Couldn’t get them through airport security.”
“There’s always UPS,” I said.
But it was too late for that now.
“Ideas?” I asked.
Both looked at me blankly.
“Right. Super.”
I started to rise to my feet, but Armani jumped me…and not in the good way.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going? You nearly died.”
I shoved his hands off and pointed to the downed girl beside me. “There was no ‘nearly’ for her.”
I rose to my feet, tested their steadiness, so glad to have them under me again and my head and eyes in working order. Later I’d deal with the fact that Apollo had saved me—again—and that it was him I looked to, knowing without asking that we were on the same page. “Ready?”
He nodded.
I darted for that door, ready this time for the tail. I paused, watching the swing so that I could time it just right, and then I leapt, letting it catch me under the arms and hanging on for all I was worth. As it swung toward the body, I leapt, grabbing hanks of that thick, matted fur to use as handholds to pull myself up onto the beast’s broad back. The hound shook like a dog after a bath, but I clung tightly and managed to hang on, even when the eau de pooch threatened to choke me all over again. But that was the least of my worries. I was most afraid one of the heads would snap back for me at any second, but now that I had the high “ground” I could see why they weren’t.
Men and women lay scattered about the floor in front of Cerberus like discarded dolls, but a woman I’d never seen before still stood facing off with him. Her hair was wild and white, lighter in color even than her wheat-toned cult clothes. Her eyes were equally wild, but contrastingly dark and not the least sane-looking. One of Cerberus’s heads was lashed to the floor by some kind of thick green rope, but the others still snapped at her as she faced him fearlessly. I yelled at the woman to run, but she ignored me, raising empty arms toward the beas
t and chanting furiously. She had to be crazy to choose prayer over retreat, I thought, but suddenly Cerberus shook again, more violently. Terrified, I hunkered down, holding on for dear life. It was then I realized that it wasn’t him shaking, but the ground. Something erupted through the floorboards… A vine. Thick and shiny, growing as it erupted like Jack’s beanstalk.
Cerberus snapped at it, snarling and lunging suddenly, so that I almost lost my seat. I clamped down with my legs and held tight to keep from falling. The left head noticed me then and looked back, baring its fangs, but the middle head gave a yelp of startled pain and its partner whipped back around to bite at the vine that had wrapped itself around the central mouth. As it got close, a tendril from the vine snaked out and drove itself right up into one exposed nostril. The head reared back, howling pain, nearly deafening me.
I looked at the crazy woman with new respect. No mere mortal then. Demeter?
“Where’s Persephone?” I asked. “Hades is here for her.”
“He has her already,” Demeter shouted so that she could be heard over Cerberus’s increasingly panicked noises. Her mad eyes met mine. “Karacis girl?” she asked, as if confirming something she already knew. “Your grandfather was a good man. You find Persephone and bring her back for me and I won’t have to take your world apart to do it myself.”
“My world?” I asked, voice strangled.
“All the current entrances and exits to Hades’s realm are protected against us gods. I’d have to make my own. It would be…messy.”
One of Cerberus’s heads got free and he lunged forward to snap at her again. I used their mutual distraction to slide down off Cerberus’s back. Strong hands caught me as I landed, and I looked up into Armani’s killer blue eyes, shaded by his dark brows and overhanging thatch of hair.
Neither man had been able to get past Cerberus’s bug ol’ butt.
Crazy in the Blood (Latter-Day Olympians) Page 18
