16
“Nightmares are what happen when the gods open up your skull, scramble your deepest darkest fears and play them back to you in a Quentin Tarantino-inspired montage.”
Tori Karacis
Now would be a good time for those flares,” I said, reaching out for Armani’s hand, not because I was suddenly scared that all my worst fears were about to come true, but to assure that we wouldn’t get separated.
“You want to go back for them, be my guest.”
Even amidst the chaos I spared a millisecond to appreciate that he didn’t coddle me, even as on some level it pissed me off.
“Well then?” I asked.
“Hey, this is your show.”
I thought quickly. Thick dark clouds still blocked light from the stars, moon, and distant glow of the unaffected part of the city. I wondered if there’d be enough light from the readout on Hephaestus’s remote for me to give him the Gorgon glare and put him out of commission. First, though, I’d have to get close.
“Nick, count to ten, then start a distraction. Fire at Hephaestus, whatever you have to do, but keep his attention on you. I’m going to try to get close.”
He grabbed my hand as I tried to lift it away.
“What?” I asked in irritation, wondering if he was belatedly about to go all he-man chivalrous on me.
“You called me Nick.”
“So?” The name had slipped out like some deathbed confession. I didn’t want to analyze it or the analogy I’d just made.
“Nothing,” he said, voice hard. “Go.”
I did, hoping there’d be time to make it up to Nick—Armani—later.
Running as fast as I could on the wet ground, I had to trust my memory of the layout. I circled well away from the tar pit to sneak up behind Hephaestus. The only point of reference I had was the faint glow of the remote. Once he eclipsed it, I was set.
Armani started his hue and cry, but in the midst of the whipping wind, it was a pretty pitiful display. Hephaestus didn’t even twitch as he micro-focused on the remote—a guidance system for sending the explosives down into the faults? I hadn’t considered the environmental handicap of my slap-dash plan.
A siren wailed across the night and blue fought red for the spotlight. Over the downed gate I could see a patrol car fishtail down the road and felt the wind shift, as if the storm had just turned its attention that way. The sky split open above me and another flashbulb fried the air, ripping toward the car. Two things happened instantaneously—the car spun out and the bolt hit home, shattered the headlights, which cracked, popped and died, and lifted the car off the ground. Figures hurled themselves out of either side of the vehicle, one Lau’s compressed aggression and the other a blur of uniform. My first thought was to run to them, but my second was that the Fates had finally leered in my direction.
In Hephaestus’s appreciation of the moment, he wasn’t paying attention to much else. I closed the distance in ground-eating strides and launched myself at him in a flying tackle. My arms latched onto his neck and shoulders. He gave a roar that could shake mountains and a great heave, as though he could just shrug me off. Surprised at my own strength, I held on even when he shook like a mastiff fending off a beagle pup too big for its britches. I was squeezing so hard my chest ached at the effort of expanding while squashed flat against his back.
Finally, finally, he did as I’d hoped, dropped the remote to deal with me. He reached huge hands to pry me off, but I folded like a cheap suit, all the way to the ground, and landed in a crouch. With my outstretched leg, I swept the remote into the pit in a move resembling the coffee grinder it was named for, glad my circus training hadn’t been completely for naught. The remote’s glow cut off abruptly and the world went black.
Hephaestus growled. I tried to steel myself for the blow that was sure to come. Those glasses, I suspected, were for night vision, and Hephaestus was the one goggled man in the country of the blind. The blow didn’t fall, and that worried me more. Was it possible the remote was not the only way to control the charges? I nearly smacked my head against the ground in frustration. Of course there’d be redundancies. They’d had ages to plan. I just had to hope that Hephaestus and the others wouldn’t set the charges off while the god was still in range. We’d been running on a wing and a prayer the gods were disinclined to answer.
Well, bumbling around in the dark had gotten me this far; I couldn’t stop now for fear of a little thing like becoming part of the fossil record.
I rose like a whirling dervish, just in case Hephaestus was in range. The odd calm of the storm suddenly broke again, and I screamed as it lashed me across the face with a stinging backhanded blow. My eyes burned, tears poured ineffectually down my face, and my throat closed off.
I flung my arms up to protect against a second onslaught, but that was the end. Hope bloomed that it had just been the recoil of the gods letting go of the storm, but the hope was short-lived.
Flares fired up, casting a red glow over the field of battle.
“Hands up!” Lau yelled, as soon as she could see well enough to get a bead on Hephaestus.
He ripped the goggles off his face before complying with a smile worthy of Charles or maybe Marilyn Manson.
I waited for him to fire off some pithy catchphrase of villainy, but his statement was a little more physical.
A sharp-edged crash split the night, coming from the Page Museum. I turned instinctively toward the sound and was grabbed roughly from behind in a full nelson. It almost didn’t matter. Standing amidst the razor shards of shattered museum glass were two beasts of another age: a saber-toothed cat and a giant ground sloth. My brain stuttered over the vision, unable to process until my eyes fixed on those places where the glass had shorn away fake fur to expose the animatronic innards. The display models that battled it out day after day in the tar pit museum had come to life.
“The girl and I will be leaving,” Hephaestus yelled. “My toys will make sure the rest of you don’t get any ideas.”
Girl? Girl!
I stomped down on his insole, popped my elbow into his solar plexus and bent, ready to throw him over my shoulder, only he never buckled. That was it. I went all alley cat, scratching, shrieking, clawing, kicking, anything to gain enough slack to stone the bastard. He was ready for me this time, lifting me off my feet and shaking me until my brain rattled around in my skull.
“Stop,” he commanded.
“We’re dead anyway!” I yelled to the others.
“As you wish,” he snarled.
In a blur of speed, the prehistoric beasts were upon Armani and the others. Gunshots cracked. Still I saw the smilodon’s huge jaws unhinge and snap down around the defensive arm Armani had lifted. He screamed, and I yelled with him. The sloth battled Lau and the patrolman as easily as a bear swatting flies, batting them to the ground. I didn’t see the officer rise again. Lau laid where she’d fallen, still firing off shots.
“No!” I shouted, but Hephaestus just laughed and moved us past the slaughter, out toward the street and escape.
Apollo! I shouted mentally, knowing it wouldn’t work, that even if in the crazy new world order he heard me, he’d never reach us in time.
But I was wrong. He was already there. Right in front of us, menacing and deadly serious with an arrow aimed at Hephaestus’s head, which I was too short to shield. Oddly, Apollo didn’t look at all out of place with the archaic weapon. He looked more—just more—than he’d ever been before. Larger. More present. I’d forgotten that the hunter was one of his aspects.
“Call them off,” he said.
Hephaestus didn’t jump to. “Do you really want to set yourself against us?” he asked.
“I said call them off.” He bit off each word.
I felt Hephaestus’s shrug and the sudden susurrus of sound behind us. “You’ve signed your own death warrant,” Hephaestus snarled.
Ah, finally, the villainous one-liner. Sadly not witty enough to appreciate, especially without knowing the fate of those on the ground.
“This is not the way,” Apollo answered, arrow unwavering. “There are far more of them than there are of us. Make them fear you and they will hunt you down.”
“Hah! Teach them to fear and the smart ones will ally themselves with us. Our worship will be restored. We will have the power to crush the others.”
“We’ll just have to agree to disagree. Let her go.”
“You always did have the low-brow taste for human flesh.”
Apollo refused to be baited. “Let her go. This is the last time I will repeat myself for you.”
“Yes,” Hephaestus answered, “it is.”
I couldn’t tell what happened next. Apollo released a shaft. A jagged bolt of lightning streaked from the sky. No forks, no dramatically beautiful strike, just a single focused pulse headed right for Apollo. Hephaestus jerked me skyward as a shield against the hunter’s arrow, but too slowly. The indescribable sound of the shaft embedding in flesh, Hephaestus’s roar of pain, the awful spurting of blood, my bone-jarring impact with the ground as Hephaestus’s grip went slack all seemed to happen at once. Skewers of pain shot through my legs.
From the heap I’d fallen into I looked up to meet two sets of inhuman eyes nearly glowing with life. Hephaestus fell behind me, but I could hear him flailing around, grunting and panting with pain. Not dead yet. I only hoped the same could be said for my friends.
Apollo lay still as death a few yards away. The smell of charred flesh met the coppery smell of blood and the asphalt/sour-pickle scent of the bubbling tar from the pits. A cry caught in my throat and my knees shrieked as I tried to get them to bear my weight, carry me toward him.
At the motion, the animatronic monsters sprang. The smilodon hit first. Pain ripped through my knees as I dodged, not entirely successful. Steel claws tore through muscles and tendons, shredding my shoulder, exposing nerves left raw and screaming. I managed to keep my feet, but just barely. The beasts circled, squeezing me between them and the tar pits. An idea formed through the haze of pain, to use my body as the red flag in a game of matador. If I could stay alive long enough, maybe the tar pit would finish them off just as it had their extinct forebearers.
The sloth nearly blindsided me. Only that precognitive tingle of danger let me pivot in time to avoid the crushing blow. It brought me dangerously close to the pit; not so the sloth that veered at the last moment, faster than it looked. I was going to have to time everything just right or one flying tackle would put me over the edge. The smilodon didn’t wait for his partner to get into position before launching his attack, but the sloth was only microseconds behind, closing from a converging angle. My head swiveled from the smilodon’s blade-like teeth gleaming wet and red to the sloth’s massive claws.
I waited until every instinct I had screamed at me to run, then ducked and rolled beneath their lunging claws, but I’d overestimated the aerodynamics of robotic ground sloths. The beast’s hind feet came down on my back. Something snapped. Pain bloomed like a mushroom cloud. The world went supernova.
Then the earth itself exploded. Hot tar shot into the sky, the turf bucked like a goosed bull. I curled into a fetal ball to present the least surface area to the heated debris. Through the haze of pain and misery, I registered distantly that the quake hadn’t been as bad as it could have been, that maybe we’d stopped Hephaestus from setting the charges deeply enough. Then I felt something grab hold of all that force and heave.
Suddenly my teeth cracked together with enough force to splinter, and I felt like I was being shaken apart. The whole earth was coming apart at the seams.
A crack started off to my side. Whatever damage the sloth had done to my back, I couldn’t wait for it to heal, even assuming that earlier incident with the glass hadn’t been a freak thing. My breath stalled as I bit back the pain, but I got to one knee before I had to stop and steady myself. The world doubled, tripled, divided into a myriad blurring images. Beneath me the earth continued to heave, and I tacked like a ship at sea trying to get to my feet.
Two other forms rose—Hephaestus and Apollo. The sight kicked me in the chest. Apollo alive. “Run!” I yelled, as if they couldn’t figure that out, but they were too focused on each other.
And also, the least of my worries. They could survive electrocution and arrows through the neck—for all I knew everything short of having their hearts ripped out like Circe. I left them to it. Jagged blades of pain ripped through me at every step, but I rode the tremors, letting them propel me toward Armani and Lau.
In the distance, a second quake seemed to overlay the first, and an animal cry of anguish cut across the night, even over the rumble of the quake, striking dread into my heart. Some primal part of me recognized it, though I’d never heard its like before. The dragon. He was awake and he was Pissed.
Lau’s head snapped up, and she wavered to hands and knees. Armani and the young patrolman still hadn’t moved, and now I knew why. The patrolman didn’t have a throat left. His head and shoulders were only connected by the thinnest bloody filaments of flesh. Bile rose up in my throat and threatened to spill over.
I turned fearfully toward Armani, who looked little better. There was so much blood coating his chest, I was afraid he was dead. I couldn’t see where the wounds were; there was just too much gore. But Atropos hadn’t yet cut the cord of his life. His chest still rose and fell.
“All right, you bastards,” I yelled at the sky. “Show your cowardly asses so I can kick them back to Olympus.”
“What are you doing?” Lau hissed.
I was too angry to consider the wisdom of taunting gods with firebolts.
“Come on, you malakas, come out from behind your damned storm—or don’t you think you can take me? Look,” I took off the jacket I’d borrowed from Armani and hurled it at the sky. “I’m unarmed. You want me, you’d better damn well get down here and finish the job. If I live, the world will know you weren’t man enough to take me.”
“Tori!” Apollo’s voice was muffled by Hephaestus’s hand on his face as they grappled like boys on the ground, more schoolyard brawl now that they’d both lost their weapons than Hollywood god on god action.
A cloud burst above and hard rain fell impressively, building figures from the ground up. “Now what?” Lau asked, disgusted.
“Take Armani and go. Get him to the hospital. I’ll keep them focused on me.”
“Throw yourself to the wolves—good plan. You are crazy.”
“It helps. Now go!”
I stood fast, watching Lau strain to lift Armani’s greater weight and flexing my back to be sure it wouldn’t give me any nasty surprises when the time came to move. Whatever super-healing thing Apollo had done was kick-ass. I wasn’t one hundred percent, but I could breathe through the pain.
Both of the gelling gods snarled at me as their forms solidified. It was the first time I’d seen either in the flesh, as it were. Zeus was Wolverine on a really bad hair day. Poseidon looked, well, like something out of Clash of the Titans or a really brawny midshipman who’d climbed the rigging to yell defiance at the storm. Once I pushed my overactive imagination down deep and forced myself to focus, I could tell they were tired. Bags under their eyes, a certain slump to their stance—as if that would give me a chance.
Freeze! I shouted mentally, putting everything I had behind it—pain, rage, fear. It wasn’t enough. Neither would meet my eyes. I muttered about damned useless talents and flew into action, squatting to pick up a clod of wet dirt to toss in their faces, then dropping again to avoid retaliation and sweep a leg outward to take them off their feet. The clod hit Zeus, who wheeled away, outside the range of my swipe, which did catch the mighty Poseidon. The earth shuddered again at his fall, and he gave a great woof of pain, but my eyes were on the god still standing.
Zeus recovered, turned on me with eyes blazing and hands flexing. “You dare?”
“I didn’t know truth was an option,” I retorted, just in case the question hadn’t been rhetorical.
He growled and flew at me like a linebacker going for a flying tackle. I dodged and he landed hard on one shoulder, rolling awkwardly to one side.
“Russian judge gives that one a 2.0,” I said.
Zeus forgot himself long enough to glare right at me, and I hit him again with my whammy. Freeze!
This time he did.
Then I was airborne, all the air knocked out of me by the force of a body hitting mine at Mach eight. The impact with the ground had barely registered on my pain-meter before Poseidon’s weight added to the splintering pain in my back and arms, which had done most of the catching. I wanted to elbow him in the face, throw him off, but I didn’t think I could move. Something had snapped, crackled and popped. My ears roared and my vision went hazy with whatever natural drug my body was pumping to combat the pain.
“Got you,” he breathed into my ear, the smell of brine and decomposing fish wafting with it.
I went limp, playing possum and praying he wouldn’t make me roadkill. He bought it, allowed himself to shift enough to wrap his arms around my head, the better to snap my neck. The movement had freed one of my legs. Just the opening I needed. Anchoring my hips into the ground, I flung the freed leg up toward my back—or rather, the one in the way of mine—with my hard heel aimed to maim. The heel landed a sharp blow to Poseidon’s coccyx just as his arms began to tighten. His body spasmed in reaction to the pain, knocking him off me, and bringing us nearly face-to-face.
“Poseidon!” I snapped. Pain-filled eyes instinctively met mine. “Freeze!”
He did.
I looked toward Apollo, who seemed to be locked in a permanent clinch with Hephaestus. They’d wrestled to a stalemate. Whoever passed out first lost.
I rose, spikes of pain shooting up my arms. Something was broken; fractured at the very least, but slowly and painfully my limbs obeyed my commands. I searched the patrolman for his zip-tie cuffs and tucked them and his weapon into my jeans. The ties were for the downed gods. The gun for Hephaestus.
I walked over to the struggling gods and pointed the gun toward Hephaestus’s head at point-blank range. That froze him even without my mojo.
“You twitch that finger, girlie, and all I have to do is roll your boyfriend into position.”
I shrugged. “Through him or around him, you’ll still be dead. Long as I miss his heart, I’m figuring he’ll recover. But you I won’t be aiming to miss. On target or not, you’ll pass out sooner or later and then I’ll have you.”
“Bitch.”
“Ooh, good comeback, but nobody said you could call me by my first name. Now, release Apollo.”
Apollo eyed me like he was ready to fight me next. He caught the zip-tie I tossed at him with a glare that let me know where he’d plant an arrow if only he hadn’t lost them all in the quake.
“Relax,” I said, as soon as Hephaestus was secured. “It was a bluff.”
“I’ll laugh later,” he answered stiffly.
“That’s all I ask.”
I felt my shoulders sag in relief. It was over. Really over. We’d defeated three of the most powerful gods of old. I’d pirouette if only I had the energy left. Okay, maybe not. A long soak and a good sleep seemed more the thing. But first there was the little problem of what to do with our captives.
“What the hell do we do with these three?” I asked Apollo. “Free they’ll be gunning for me, but I don’t think the police can hold them once their powers have recharged. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
He looked at me, still pissed, but one side of his mouth started to twitch with some secret amusement.
“Come on, share,” I said.
“You think Homeland Security has a contingency plan for this?”
Hephaestus spat at that thought, but we both ignored him.
“Why don’t we find out? If you’ll do guard duty, I’ll find a nice anonymous pay phone and call it in. I don’t want HS to trace anything back to me and get all forgetful about my personal freedoms because they don’t like my answers to their questions.”
“Fair enough.”
I put a hand to his cheek, silently thanking him for his timely arrival, and realized that my back didn’t so much as twinge. Grateful as I was, it reminded me that I still had questions of my own.
“What did you do to me anyway? What’s with this superhero healing thing I’ve got going on?” Apollo grimaced, and his eyes skidded off to the side.
I tapped his cheek to bring his focus back to me. “Apollo.”
He met my gaze only reluctantly. “Ambrosia, food of the gods. The other day when you were kidnapped, you were in really bad shape. I wasn’t sure you were going to make it; it was the only way I knew to help.”
“And—”
“And what?”
“And you didn’t tell me because … Wait, ambrosia … tell me we’re not talking immortality here.”
Again, his eyes slid away from mine. Oh, this was bad.
“Not yet; not from one dose.”
“Then what’s the downside?”
“You’re going to want more.”
“Hell yes, you ought to bottle the stuff.”
He didn’t even crack a smile. The hand I’d stopped him with formed a claw.
“Wait, by ‘want,’ you mean ‘need,’ don’t you? Like an addict.”
He finally looked me in the eye. “Yes.”
I saw red, great glaring blood-washed crimson.
“I’m going to go now. I need to hit something and right now it’s you.”
“Tori—” He reached out to me.
“No!” I roared. My body shook with the effort to hold myself back.
Fists clenched at my side, I pivoted toward the gate and stalked off. He’d saved my life, a small part of me insisted. More than once, it said. But it wasn’t the part that was winning. Rationally, unemotionally, that was probably true, but I’d watched Pappous struggle with alcohol his whole life, falling off the wagon, clawing his way out, falling again. I’d vowed addiction would never rule my life. Nothing was ever going to control me. I felt like my freedom, my independence, had been stripped away, and I was now slave to a substance. For all I knew, to Apollo too, as my pusher. It wasn’t as if it was something I could obtain at any corner store. I had no idea if ambrosia withdrawal was survivable, but I intended to find out.
What really made me mad was that I’d known, known I couldn’t trust him and done it anyway. I’d thought I was still resisting, but I was wrong. That made me culpable as well.
Still seeing red, I barely registered picking my way over cracks and debris and using directory assistance to place the call to Homeland Security. I did retain enough presence of mind to use the jacket sleeves to hold the receiver and to dial. I knew they’d trace the phone and didn’t want my prints anywhere in evidence. The man I spoke with wasn’t nearly finished with me when I hung up. I felt a certain satisfaction that I was leaving Apollo to deal with them. Poetic justice, in a sense.
Drained now, it was all I could do to walk back to the cars so that I could vacate the area. It suddenly dawned on me that the one vehicle I had was Armani’s and I was keyless. Uncle Christos had taught me how to hot-wire a car. I could only hope I remembered.
I had to fight to stay awake on the drive back to my apartment. Going on autopilot was not going to get me around the downed trees and power lines that littered the roadway in the wake of the quake. I wanted to go right to the hospital to check on Armani, but in my state, covered in mud and blood, they’d likely mistake me for a patient. I’d had enough well-intentioned biological tinkering to last me a lifetime.
I saw the flashing red lights from two streets away and knew with a sick certainty exactly what I’d find when I turned my corner. A fireman with a light stick diverted traffic a few blocks from my building. Smoke rose thick into the air. Unable to process any more blows, I parked on a side street and walked zombie-like as far as the barricades would let me go. My building was up in flames, fully involved or however they put it. That second bolt of lightning we’d ducked out on must have started a fire. And with no one around to put it out …
My knees buckled and I fell to the sidewalk. Everything I had, gone. I’d lived too seat-of-my-pants for renter’s insurance. No, I’d trusted the Fates. I was about ready to pound my forehead on the concrete when I realized I wasn’t alone. One of the onlookers, radiating concern, asked if she could help.
I summoned a weak smile for her. “No, thanks.”
Once again I mustered the strength to move when I was well past the point of collapse and shuffled dejectedly toward Armani’s car, where silent tears streaked down my face until I fell asleep.