I struggled to take back some portion of my brain for planning rather than panic, but it was hard to think when my lungs were collapsing. I had to have some resource or her some vulnerability that I could exploit. My useless hands accidentally brushed the fine fins all along her tails wrapped around my legs. The spines burned me like coral, carving up my flesh and releasing fresh blood into the water. But it gave me an idea. Fins were thin and membranous between the spines. If I could do enough damage… I forced my shredded hands into claws to rip and rend those sail-like fins. The serpent woman let out a cry that was eerie and otherworldly. If my hearing weren’t fading along with my vision, I’d guess it would have deafened me.
There was a splash to my right. Something else coming in fast, maybe attracted by my blood. I’d never survive a second attack. I didn’t let it distract me, but got one leg free in serpent-woman’s distraction and struggled to free the other.
Only then did I turn to the new danger and see Nick yanking on that skanky green hair. Her other tail loosened, and I kicked free of it, barely able to propel myself to the surface, which didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I despaired of ever reaching it, my vision and movements getting fainter and fainter, and suddenly there it was. My autonomic system took over, gasping in the breath I’d been starving for. Nick appeared beside me and took me under his arm, pulling me against his chest to swim me to shore. There was no way I would have made it on my own.
The sight of the entire family that had been playing so peacefully now watching my rescue made me feel especially vulnerable as Apollo and Persephone helped Nick get me onto the jetty. I ignored them, ignored everything and closed my eyes. It had been a helluva day.
Chapter Fifteen
“Now what?” Armani asked.
Everyone looked at me, but I hadn’t gotten so far as a plan that would avert Hell on earth. And I realized at that moment, when I was thinking about everyone I cared about getting caught in the middle of a godly grudge match, that I’d forgotten something.
“Crap!” I said, earning a disapproving look from the happy family. “Hades knows about the hotel. It’s the first place he’ll look for us. Christie and Jesus are there, defenseless.”
“Not for long,” Nick said. “Apollo, you get word to Demeter to meet us at the hotel. We’ll grab our people, hand over Persephone to her mother and be done with it.”
Persephone started sobbing. “It’s not going to be that easy. Hades will punish you for helping me. This is all my fault.”
“No, it’s his,” Nick said, putting an arm around her. “We can take care of ourselves.”
A flash of jealousy warred with my sympathy for her, but I was distracted by Apollo’s muttering.
“I’ve told it to the West Wind,” he said at my look. “Demeter will get the message. Let’s go.”
I didn’t need to be told twice, but I did need to be helped to standing. Since Nick had his arms full with Persephone, it fell to Apollo. I swatted him when I realized he was reaching down to carry me, but realized it was sheer bravado when he pulled me to my feet and my legs nearly went out from under me. I’d call them jelly, only they didn’t seem even that firm. Apollo seemed to feel it and didn’t let me go, supporting me as my legs tried with every step to let me down.
We reached the car, and this time Apollo growled as Nick approached the shotgun seat. Nick gave him a dark look, but backed away to leave it for me. I went boneless as Apollo poured me into the car, and waited until he got into the driver’s side and was pulling out to ask, “You got any ambrosia?”
I was beyond caring that Nick might overhear. This was survival. If any more craziness came our way right now, I’d be defenseless.
Apollo shook his head, tight-lipped and driving like a fiend. I had some ambrosia back at the hotel, and very shortly Nick was going to know it. It took effort, but I forced my hand up to flip down the vanity mirror and angle it so that I could see his face.
“Ambrosia?” he mouthed.
I nodded but refused to look away in shame, defensive that I even felt the urge.
“We’ll talk.” His lips barely moved.
I didn’t answer. I could already imagine how the conversation would go. Nick would see me as a junkie. He’d want to get me clean and…I knew that should be what I wanted as well. But now…with everything going on…I wasn’t so sure that kicking the habit was the way to go. I couldn’t have beaten Hades or Hypnos or even survived them without the extra punch it gave me. I couldn’t have rescued Persephone. But were those reasons or excuses? Was I an addict, rationalizing my continued dependence?
Now I did look away, afraid my own uncertainty would show and fuel Nick’s arguments when the time came for us to have it out. First, we would save the world. Then we could worry about me…if I even needed saving.
Before us, the storm clouds seemed to melt away, and the sun came shining through, but it didn’t do anything for my mood. All I could see in my mind’s eye was Jesus and Christie being ripped apart like the couple in the hotel parking lot.
“Faster,” I told Apollo.
He shot me a look. “Prophecy?” he asked.
I closed my eyes, thought about it and shook my head. “No, just worry.”
“Then I’d like to get us there in one piece.”
I nodded, but the lack of danger warnings did not unclench my gut. I didn’t know whether there was some kind of range on my precognition. If so, the hotel might be outside of it. Not knowing was making me crazy…er.
“Phone,” I said urgently.
Nick handed his up from the back seat, and I quickly dialed Christie.
Her laugh caught me by surprise. She had to choke it off to say, “Hello?”
“Christie, are you okay?” It seemed like a silly question in the face of her laughter, but my gut would not unclench.
“I’m fine. A friend of yours stopped by.” Panic fluttered my heart. “He says his name is Thom Foolery.”
Hermes? Here?
Apollo and I shared a look.
“He said something about grabbing ‘front row seats’. That mean anything to you?”
“Shitshitshit,” I said under my breath.
“Christie, make sure you and Jesus are packed and ready to go. And…if anything happens, you can’t trust Thom to protect you.”
She laughed again, and I had a feeling she wasn’t listening to me at all.
“Christie, this is serious, okay? You can’t trust him.”
But the voice that answered me wasn’t hers. “Agape mou, what an unkind thing to say. I’ve never been anything but helpful to you, and the chance to see you in a wetsuit…I couldn’t pass that up.”
“I am not your love. We’ll be there in ten,” I told him. “No hanky panky.”
“Neither hanky nor panky? You ask a lot of a man.”
And he promised nothing, I noticed, but he was already gone before I could say as much.
Now my early warning system was starting to blare.
“What I wouldn’t give right now for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” I said under my breath.
“What?” Apollo asked.
“A flying car,” I snapped, even though none of this was his fault. “I don’t suppose you still have your sun chariot stashed away somewhere?”
“That belonged to Helios,” he answered, “and Phaeton smashed it all to bits. No more chariot.”
“Too bad.”
But we were almost there. I recognized the turn. The parking lot, when we pulled into the inn, was eerily quiet. The crime scene tape from days ago fluttered in the breeze where people, probably impatient for the parking spaces blocked off behind it, had blown through. My Spidey senses were tingling.
“Quickly,” I told the others.
We were barely out of the car when the shadows all around us took on form, at first just vague shapes rearing up out of nowhere, then becoming more sharply edged.
Persephone cried out and shrank back, but I didn’t spare her a glance. My gaze was r
iveted on the closest of the horrors, a man so gaunt there was barely enough flesh to cover his bones. Every rib stood out above his caved-in stomach. His lips had peeled back from his over-large teeth. I could make out the individual arm bones. The radius and the ulna, my brain supplied in a sanity saving non-sequitor. The apparition licked its lips when it saw me, and the moisture it left behind convinced me that this thing had substance. It was no mere shade.
Others closed in, looking like extras in an old zombie film. One had its chest torn open just where the heart should be. Another had been flayed, his skin hanging from him in strips, some held on by mere threads of tissue. All of him was red and bloody, except for white greasy gobs of fat poking out here and there…or maybe it was bone. Yet another was bloated, washed out, fish-belly white, eyes bulging, hair a ghastly sludge slick molded to her head. Drowning victim? I wondered. Murder? Suicide?
Had Hades made good on his threat and opened up the gates of his realm, starting with Tartarus and all those poor souls the gods saw fit to torment for all eternity?
All the dead eyes were on us. Hungry…ravenous…not the least bit sane.
“Apollo?” I said, not really sure what I thought he could do.
When I didn’t hear him respond, I looked over to see him shaking his head. “Can’t sing them to sleep. They’re not given any such peace. And they’ve no souls left to soothe.”
“Any suggestions?”
“Don’t let them get you.”
“Great.”
Behind those horrors were more like them. Just as hungry, just as grotesque, coming on as inevitably as death and taxes. An undead army. We were surrounded.
“Persephone!” someone yelled from beyond the horde.
“Mom!” Persephone cried. “Mom, help!”
“Oh my baby.”
Baby? She was how many years old? Someone seriously had to learn to cut the cord. If we weren’t careful, the Tartarus terrors would do it permanently.
“Take cover!” Demeter ordered.
Apollo and Armani were on the far side of the car from Persephone and me. They instantly ducked back against it. I had to grab Persephone as she would have ignored Demeter and rushed to her side. I pushed her up against the car and shielded her with my own body. The wind began to whip up, blowing my hair into my face and chilling me to the bone. I fought my way free of the blinding hair to see a funnel cloud beginning to form. Distracted as I was by it, I completely missed the closest terror lunging for me until it was too late. Sharp, ragged nails raked my arm, and I cried out. Instinctively, I lashed out and hit…something. My brain didn’t even want to process the wet, meaty sound of impact. Eyes that had been hollowed out and refilled with crazy bored into mine as the remnant of a man wearing his insides out grabbed me and ripped me away from Persephone. She screamed…or maybe it was me. The horror swung me around, bashing me against the hood of the car. My chest took the impact, which was a nice break for my head, but it crushed all the air straight out of me.
Wind was whipping all around, so fast I couldn’t catch it for breath. That cone of churning chaos came for us, and I had just time to grab on to the car for dear life before my attacker was ripped away from me with a howl of denial. The wind lessened almost immediately, as the tornado seemed to skirt around me then, collecting the debris of a thousand tourists—fallen wrappers, receipts, maps, fast food leavings. They swirled on the air, fuel for the funnel. More snarls split the air as other ghouls were swept up in it, and Demeter yelled, “Run for shelter.”
I spat out hair that had whipped into my mouth and blinked grit out of my eyes. Demeter had cleared a path between us and the hotel.
“Come on,” I urged the others, like they needed it.
We ran full out for the hotel room. The door opened before we even reached it, the impish face of Hermes appearing in its place. I knew it was him, even if this wasn’t a form I’d seen before. The glint in his eyes was unmistakable.
We all flew past him into the room, and he slammed the door behind us.
“Mom!” Persephone cried, when she noticed Demeter wasn’t with us.
“She’s in control,” Apollo assured her. “Just finishing up.”
Christie pushed Hermes aside and threw herself into my arms. “You’re okay!”
I hugged her back, so glad the same could be said for her. I searched out Jesus, who stood on the other side of one of the beds in our now overcrowded room, arms crossed.
“Boss lady, you need a keeper.”
I would have laughed, but my inner alarm system was still tugging at me like a boy who’d spotted the ice cream truck disappearing around the bend. All urgency.
When the knock sounded at the door, I jumped, even though I knew it was Demeter.
Persephone leapt to open the door, but confusion chased the joy off her face, and I pushed her aside to see what was wrong. Dionysus stood in the entryway, backed up by three female acolytes in the wheat wardrobe from my nightmares. They crowded into the room, Demeter trailing behind them, leaving barely enough room for the door to close behind them.
“Take Persephone and go,” Dionysus said to Demeter. But he was staring at me, practically radiating menace.
Apparently, she sensed it too. Demeter swept him a startled glance. “What are you going to do? They saved my daughter from Hades—”
“After leading him right to her,” he cut in sharply. “Go. If you get in my way on this, I’ll destroy you too.”
Beside him, the bacchae hissed, bristling like guard dogs eager to jump the leash. They watched us with a fanatic hunger that was both disturbing and almost completely inhuman. I was startled to realize that one was Casey Olivieri. She no longer looked like a nature cultist so much as a wild woman with her hair a rat’s nest from the earlier fight at the compound and blood caking the front of her clothes as if…as if she’d been a sloppy eater. My stomach lurched at the thought.
“No,” Persephone said, stepping in front of me. “I didn’t escape one horror to give anyone over to another. This has all gone far enough.”
A deadly smile spread across Demeter’s face as she moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with her daughter. “You heard her. This is over. The Feds have invaded the compound. Hades has invaded the compound. It is no longer safe. Your ‘paradise’ is no more.”
Dionysus snarled but didn’t answer with words. Instead, he gave a sharp gesture that unleashed the bacchae on us. They dove for the closest targets—Apollo, Armani, me. Dionysus himself turned on his former allies.
“Get back,” I heard Hermes call to Christie and Jesus before he snapped his fingers and was instantly out of the fray. The smell of popcorn suddenly filled the room, and I swore that if he’d just materialized himself a snack, I’d kill him…if I lived that long.
Claws flashed at my eyes, and I threw my hands up just in time to deflect one of the bacchae. The nails diverted to rake across my scalp. Teeth snapped at me, and I reared back. My flinch gave her the chance to raise a knee…fast, striking in a spot no less painful for women than men, even with our plumbing on the inside. My eyes instantly watered, and my knees buckled, but I locked them and refused to fall. I’d beaten Olympians. I was not letting some crazy cultist take me down. I swiped the tears from my eyes so that I could see straight, and met her crazy with my own.
“Freeze!” I thundered. I felt it flow out of me with all the force of my determination. The bacchae before me stiffened. To my right I felt another figure falter, and looked to see that it was Demeter, staggering from a blow Dionysus had dealt her. In the close quarters of our room, she couldn’t summon the perfect storm. Persephone caught her as she reeled, and Dionysus raised an arm to strike again while they were vulnerable. I dashed the frozen bacchae aside and caught Dionysus’s hand as the blow started to fall. The power behind it pulled me off balance, but Dionysus grabbed me with his free hand and pulled me against him. He looked straight into my eyes, and I wished with every fiber of my being that my gorgon glare worked on the elder god
s. And then the alarm bells chased that thought away along with any other I might have had. It was so hard to concentrate…and then the blare of the alarms became muffled, as if someone had slammed a door on them. One line of a song, just one, played through instead. The girl with kaleidoscope eyes. It didn’t make any sense, and I didn’t have time to ponder as someone tried to tear me away from Dionysus, but I was held fast.
…kaleidoscope eyes…
The eyes staring into mine spun and telescoped, as if all the secrets worth knowing lurked there, hidden in the shadows, and if I just concentrated they would reveal themselves. I couldn’t break contact. Any second now…any second, I would know…
A huge rumble shook the room, and the earth moved under our feet.
No! my mind cried. The shift lost me a secret I’d been stalking, a mystery about to be revealed. Gone forever. Then those knees that had been threatening to buckle gave out on me. My feet were torn in different directions, as the floor burst wide open.
The big one, my mind jabbered, the panic of every La La Landian. The steel bands that held me in place, Dionysus’s hands, released as he flailed to keep from going down with me. Stars exploded across my vision when one of my knees struck the floor. The pain cleared away the last shred of wonder and awe. The for-real fall had kept me from falling under Dionysus’s spell, but if this was the big one, I could hardly be thankful.
I looked around frantically at the world jumping around us. Nick’s gaze met mine, and he reached out for me, heedless of the bacchae riding him to the ground, but the earth jumped again, and our fingers missed by inches. My legs split farther as the fissure beneath me grew, until I felt like a wishbone, and when the air escaped, hot as Hades, I feared that one way or the other, it was the end. Either we’d gotten so unlucky as to choose a hotel on a previously uncharted fault line or all hell was about to break loose.
I pulled my legs back together and twisted around to face whoever was coming, just in time to see Thanatos rising from the depths of…whatever lay beneath. He was dressed like the traditional grim reaper—black cowled cape and sickle that danced with the reflected flames from down below.
Crazy in the Blood (Latter-Day Olympians) Page 22
