Battle for the Blood (11 page)

“You need a diversion,” Hermes said, more quietly at least.

“You have some kind of trick up your sleeve?” Hecate asked sourly.

The look he gave her would have withered a mere mortal. “Think who you’re asking.”

“More importantly, what will it cost us?” I asked.

He turned his look on me. “
Agape
, I’m hurt.”

“You will be,” I said. “Cost?”

“Fine, I may be in a bit of trouble. I thought we could arrange tit for tat.” His gaze fell to my chest and Apollo glared and took a step forward. Hermes raised his gaze again, the dimple back full force. “Relax, big guy. I meant metaphorical tits. Well, maybe not entirely metaphorical.”

He held up a finger to signal that we should give him a minute and walked off toward Eu-meh’s far side, like her body could shelter the sound of his voice from our searchers. He spoke into his phone and waited for the result.

A second later, someone must have picked up, and he said as quietly as he could and still be heard, “Mel? Yeah, it’s on. They’re at Belvedere Castle. I think if I can get them to the Central Park stables, we’ll be in the clear. Think you can handle it?” He grinned a salacious grin at whatever he…she?…said next and responded, “How could I forget?”

Then he hung up the phone and turned to all of us, who were watching him expectantly. “Give her five minutes,” he said, cutting off as voices came closer, orders given to go left and right, two by two, and to move out. The voices were far too close for comfort, and I said a prayer to whatever gods still had the power to answer pleas that the corresponding people would trust their eyes and not get any closer. Most had no idea about magic and wouldn’t have any reason to doubt their senses…as long as we didn’t give them one.

We waited in anxious silence. Lau went back to Eu-meh, stroking her neck and keeping her calm. Apollo held Perseus’s sword at the ready. My prayers became more fervent. I didn’t want to see blood shed, especially not that of someone who was only doing his or her job, just protecting and defending…exactly what we were trying to do.

Hecate’s illusion was like a one-way mirror. They couldn’t see in, but we could see out, though it was like looking through a film. We saw one soldier jog past, then another… Something told me he was higher up on the chain of command. I didn’t know anything about insignia, and anyway he was in field dress, but he had an air of authority. He didn’t walk, he stalked, and right now he was headed straight toward us, his brow furrowed like he sensed something. He stopped just before the wall, staring as if he could almost see through it, as if he knew someone was there. His gaze practically locked with Hecate’s and I could see her lips moving, even though no sound came out. Performing a spell? Getting one ready?

My precog kicked me with the force of a bucking bronco, and I knew that whatever she had in mind, it wouldn’t go well for him should he pierce her veil. I readied myself to jump between them and take whatever she was preparing to throw, all while stunning him with the gorgon glare.

He took a step forward, reaching out a hand toward the illusion. My muscles tensed, my wings wanted to flare out and I held them to me only with an effort of will.

Lyssa gasped and I flinched toward her for a split second, ready to shut her up, but Apollo already had a hand over her mouth and another wrapped around her body, holding her still. Her eyes blazed red, the color of madness and blood.

The soldier lunged—

And a scream tore across the night. High-pitched, throat-tearing…the sound of someone who knows that if help doesn’t come in that next second, there will be no tomorrow to worry about vocal cords or eardrums or anything else ever again.

He whirled toward the sound and was off like a shot. My wings flapped, ready to take off after him, thinking zombie or demon attack, thinking that Lyssa’s bleeding insanity had reached out and touched someone, but Hermes grabbed my wrist and held me there.

“Distraction,” he said, “let’s go.”

“But—”

“Wait, could Mel be…Melpomene?” Apollo asked incredulously.

“One and the same. Now, let’s go!” He looked to Lau. “Can you get your dragon up?”

“She’s not
my
dragon.”

“Fine, she’s her own dragon. Can you get her up? Can she walk?”

Lau glared at him, but not even for half a second before turning back to Eu-meh. “Baby, can you stand?”

“Here, let me help,” Hecate said, dropping her illusion. The rocky illusion fell like a sarong at the beach, and she swiftly laid hands on the dragon. A blue light, much like that from a breath mint commercial denoting magically fresh breath, flowed over Eu-meh. Immediately, her muscles seemed to relax, giving up the tension of pain. “That’ll help, but I can’t do any in-depth healing until we’re out of here.”

Eu-meh struggled to her feet, as if she understood it all.

There was a second scream, so full of panic and fear that all the hair on my body and my precog stood up and took notice at the same time.

“She’s not faking!” I said.

Apollo cursed, feeling it too. “Hecate, you get Lau and the dragon to safety.”

He didn’t have to tell the rest of us what to do; we were already off in an instant. Even Hermes, who was not usually a headfirst into danger sort, was chewing up the ground. His winged sandals would have come in handy. I wondered if they’d been confiscated by Interpol. But I didn’t spend a lot of brainpower on it. I was airborne already and racing toward the danger, leaving the other two in my dust.

I saw the gunfire before anything else, and a soldier going down in a hail of it, his final burst going wild, cutting one of his fellow soldiers down under the burst of friendly fire. He was immediately swarmed by the human-shaped horrors he’d been trying to fight. They fell on him, tearing, ripping… His clothes, my mind tried to supply, but I knew from the wet gleam of their hands as they raised them dripping toward their mouths that that wasn’t the case. They were after flesh and blood.

“Sword!” I yelled to Apollo, circling back for it. I was going to get there first. It made sense for me to have it and to cut a swath through the horrors.

“They’re people!” Apollo said, trying to impress it on me with his look, afraid, I thought, of the bloodlust that had come upon me before.

“What do you want me to do? Let them kill and infect others?”

“No…” He said it reluctantly. Right, Apollo, god of medicine, among all those other things. He’d think about a cure. He’d want to preserve life.

“I’ll aim to brain and not behead. That’s my best offer,” I said, wanting to mean it, willing to say anything to gain the weapon and join the fight. “Now give me the damned sword!”

I looked back momentarily and saw the second soldier struggle to his knees. He made it to one knee, the other leg bloody and useless. I prayed his brother-in-arms hadn’t struck an artery with his wild shooting. I had to hurry.

The sword hilt hit my hand, which instinctively closed around it, and I was off, flying furiously for the scene of the carnage. As I closed in, the soldier took out one of the horrors chowing down on his friend with a headshot, but I didn’t think he was going to get them all.

“Hold your fire!” I yelled as I flew between him and the body, swinging the sword with all my strength, blade first. I wanted to see the stolen blood fly. I wanted to stop any chance of another man going down to be rent to death.

Apollo shouted my name, seeing my intent. I howled in frustration as I let his voice be my conscience, turning my swing at the last possible second so that it hit with the flat of the blade. The head of the zombie thing caved beneath it. I could feel it like an unripe melon…hard, but not hard enough. It fell away, but others grabbed at my legs, pulling me down. I slashed the sword around me, unable with multiple targets to keep to the flat of the blade. It sliced through flesh like some kind of Ginsu commercial.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Apollo and Hermes come up on the scene and grab the downed soldier from under the melee that had forgotten him in the wake of my attack. I couldn’t tell if we’d been in time to save him, whether it was any kind of rescue at all or whether he’d become one of the zombie things in short order.

My attention snapped back to my own situation as something latched on to my leg, and I looked down to see a head.
Teeth…
Teeth were latched on to my leg. In the adrenaline rush of battle, I couldn’t feel any pain. I could only hope that they hadn’t broken the skin or penetrated my pant leg or… I swung the sword once again, using the flat of the blade. It was a bad angle, but I was highly motivated. On impact, the head jerked to the side, tearing my pants and bringing a piece of them along with it. I struck again, now at a better angle, and the zombie fell to the ground, still twitching.

Nothing new reached for me, and I flew up to survey the scene. Nothing but twitching bodies directly below. Apollo, Hermes and the two soldiers off to one side. To another, a body lay as still as death. Female, if the flared hair and the gown were any indication.

I flew to her and landed at her side. Her neck…her neck was gone, nothing but some stringy, bloody goop holding it together on one side. And her stomach had been ripped open, turning her once white dress to scarlet. Her eyes and mouth were still open, staring, the terror still in the set of them, even if there was no glimmer of life left. Her skin was pale and perfect, almost porcelain. Her eyes and lashes as dark as her hair, not needing any enhancement. The blood had drained from her cheeks and lips, like it had from the rest of her. She didn’t look real, but like someone staged for film. So beautiful and yet so dead.

“Is she alive?” Hermes called.

I looked toward him, but we were too far away for my eyes to tell the tale. “No. Yours?”

He glanced at the soldier at his feet, the one they’d pulled from the melee. “He’s unconscious but hanging in there. I’m not sure if he’ll consider that a win, given…” He stopped, because the soldier with the shot-up leg had leveled his gun at Hermes and Apollo, trying to keep his eyes on both.

“Don’t anyone move. I’ve called for backup. It should be here anytime. You’re going to have to explain…everything.” His gaze flicked toward my wings, and Hermes lashed out with lightning, trickster-god reflexes to snag the gun during the millisecond of distraction, turning it back on the solider.

“I don’t want to use this,” he said. “But you need to be quiet and let the grown-ups talk.” He looked to me. “We can’t leave her here. And we can’t stay.”

“I can take her, but we can’t leave the others alone and defenseless,” I said, nodding toward the soldiers on the ground.

“That
is
a dilemma,” Hermes agreed. He shifted his grip on the gun and removed the magazine, holding it in one hand and the gun in the other and fixing the conscious soldier with a blood-chilling gaze.

“If I give this back to you, you can probably fire on us before we can get away. But that would be a grave mistake. For one, we might be the only ones who can stop this whole mess. For another, you might want to conserve your ammunition in case more of these things arrive before your backup. You’ve got to consider one question:
Do you feel lucky, punk?
” Hermes’s grin ruined the moment. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”

The soldier looked at him like he was crazy. “What do I tell my superiors?”

“Tell them you were bested by a winged woman wielding a sword and two unarmed guys. I bet that will go over real well.”

“I think I’m delirious,” he said, swaying on his knees.

“Yeah, best to go with that.”

I lifted Melpomene in my arms, her hair and tattered ends of her dress falling dramatically toward the ground so that she looked every bit the tragic heroine she inspired as one of the Muses. A broken doll, barely articulated. I hadn’t even known her and I could feel the sadness pulling at me, stronger than gravity. My wings seemed to beat more slowly with the weight of it, but I got us airborne. Hermes and Apollo backed away from the soldiers. Hermes still held the gun until he decided he was far enough from the soldier to toss it and run…which he did.

The three of us raced off the way we’d come, with Hermes calling directions to the stables as we went. No gunfire followed us. No more zombies stumbled out from behind trees or lampposts. Everything was as silent as a city under siege.

Chapter Ten

Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

—an old proverb, often spouted by Pappous to predict travel conditions

We were almost there when Melpomene spasmed in my arms. I almost dropped her in shock and primal fear. She was dead. I
knew
she was dead. Which meant…

I glanced down at her and met eyes staring up into mine. They were still filmed over, but somehow no longer sightless. Her head wobbled, like she was trying to get the few strands of muscle still attaching it to her neck to work. If that happened, she’d attack. I knew it by the intensity of her glazed eyes and the sudden tension in her body.

Hecate ran out to meet us as we came upon the stables, appearing seemingly out of nowhere. I landed beside her, Hermes and Apollo, on foot, trailing behind. As I started to set Melpomene on her feet, she lunged toward Hecate. It was more a falling forward than a targeted strike, but still she hit home.

Hecate yelled in shock and reached defensively for the falling Muse, grabbing her by the upper arms and holding her gnashing teeth away from any sensitive spots. Melpomene’s head lolled forward, her neck unable to support it, but still straining with the rest of her body toward Hecate.

“What the hell?” Hecate asked. “Is this—?”

“Melpomene. We didn’t get to her in time.” I stated the obvious for the record. “We have to get her inside. And keep her away from the others.”

“Duh,” Hecate responded.

Hecate risked taking a hand off one of Mel’s arms to tap her firmly on the head. “Sleep,” she commanded in ancient Greek.

Melpomene slumped forward into Hecate’s embrace, but Hecate pushed her back into my arms, brushing disgustedly at her clothes to swipe away any bodily fluids that had transferred. I wondered how well blood came out of leather and whether she had a decent dry cleaner in hell. My brain was once again going off on tangents to avoid what was right before it. Our side consisted of a zombified Muse, a witch goddess, a trickster, a sun god, a garden-variety human (former) detective, a not-so-human P.I., a wounded dragon, and a mistress of madness.
This
was our army. We’d barely begun to fight, hadn’t even come face-to-face with the actual enemy, and already we’d fallen back to lick our wounds.

Unacceptable.

But Hermes knew more than he’d said so far. I was sure of it, and as soon as we had a quiet moment, I was going to beat it out of him. Or maybe he’d volunteer the information, but the edge hadn’t yet come off my bloodlust, and I was sort of hoping to do things the hard way.

Then there he was—Hermes, with Apollo right on his heels. Hecate motioned for us to follow her, and we did, disappearing through a door that still looked to be gated and bolted but clearly wasn’t. Inside, the snoring was enough to rattle walls. Eu-meh, recovering. She was in a stall down on the far end of the building we were in, but it wasn’t a huge building, and the sound echoed through the place, reinforcing itself.

“Where’s Lyssa?” I asked.

“Sleeping. Stall across from the dragon,” Hecate said. “You can put your Muse next door.”

Melpomene couldn’t have weighed much over a hundred pounds, some of which had been lost to the zombie bloodlust, so it was easy to hoist her up with one arm and open the stall door Hecate had indicated with the other. I laid her down gently on the bare earth inside, even though I knew she was beyond feeling anything.

I closed and locked the stall behind me and looked in on the others. Lau had abandoned her stall and was spooned with Eu-meh, her back pressed up against the dragon’s chest between the first and second set of feet, one hand beneath her head and the other resting on one of Eu-meh’s huge front paws. It was kind of adorable. If I’d been in another kind of mood, I’d have snapped a picture. But that wasn’t what I wanted to snap. A neck, now that was a different matter. One neck in particular.

I turned back toward the gods and goddess still conscious and fixed my gaze on Hermes. “Talk. Whatever’s going on, you tell us now. No riddles. No cryptic crap. Just lay it out.”

Hermes looked sad. I’d seen mischievous, pissed, teasing, intense…so many other emotions from him in the past, but sadness was a new one. It looked sincere, but I didn’t trust it.

“Fine, but can we sit? This may take a while and I’ve had a rough few days. Even gods need a rest sometimes.”

To demonstrate, he collapsed where he was standing, falling cross-legged to the ground. It was the first sign of weakness I’d ever seen from him, and considering that he was one of our few allies, it was less than comforting. I sat with more purpose, as did Apollo. Hecate decided to stand. And pace.

“How much do you know about Javier Kontis?” he asked.

Holy non sequitur, Batman.

“Who?” I said.

“Exactly,” he answered, as if that made all the sense in the world. “Javier is an eccentric collector. Reclusive, yet controversial in certain circles for outbidding museums and cultural consortiums for artifacts that interest him, particularly with occult or end-times significance.”

A chill ran up my spine. “Okay, creepy, but he can hardly be alone in that, with all the false prophets, doomsday preppers, prognosticators and collectors out there.”

“Yes, but I wasn’t shipping for any of them when my cargo got hijacked or flew off on its own or whatever…”

“Come again?” Apollo asked.

Hermes glared. “I don’t know how much clearer I can make it. I was over in Greece to check out my movie, yes. To crash your cousin’s wedding, yes. To sweep your friend Christie off her feet and maybe rub your face in it just a little,” he admitted, gaze flashing to mine, the mischief temporarily animating his face. “But also because I was asked to personally transport a precious cargo, a very ancient artifact. Babylonian, Sumerian, something like that. I’m no kind of scholar, but even I’ve been to a museum or two—mostly interested in portrayals of me, of course, but all so static and
boring
. My god, I think if I see one more statue with the tightly coiled hair, one leg out in front of the other and my arms raised holding something or other, I’ll scream.
Seriously?
They call that art?”

Hecate growled and paused in her pacing right behind Hermes, as if she might knock him upside the head to get the story moving again.

He looked up from his seated position and winked. “I can see straight up your nostrils from this angle, especially when they’re flaring like that. Sex-y.”

She raised a fist and Hermes caught it in both his hands, kissing her knuckles like a courtier. She wrenched her fist back out of his hand and would have beaten him with it if Apollo hadn’t cut in. “Children! Apocalypse now, grudge match later, okay? Hecate, if we live through this, I’ll arrange for the cage match myself. Hell, I’ll sell tickets. We’ll rent out the Coliseum.” He turned on Hermes. “For now, have we forgotten that Melpomene is dead? And probably that soldier as well. How many more? I think they’ve earned your undivided attention.”

The light went out of Hermes’s eyes and he looked almost as dead as the Muse we had locked away in a stall. Hermes’s face was not built for sorrow or seriousness.

“Fine,” he said, defeated. “Point is, we’ve all seen artifacts from that time. Fairly crude, badly eroded, culturally significant but hardly aesthetic.”

“Yeah,” I encouraged, before Hecate could threaten him again to get him to the point.

“This was a work of art. Truly. Not just sculptural, but like a being fossilized and frozen in time. I’d call it a gargoyle, but I’m fairly sure the Greeks invented them, if not the actual word. Plus, I’m talking a relief of tendons and muscle, struts in the wings, veining. It would have taken a master craftsman with tools a lot more modern than they had at the time. Either Javier was getting scammed—hard to believe for a collector of his caliber—or…this was something else.”

“And it was hijacked?”

Hermes shook his head. “No. I mean, that’s what the police think—some kind of air pirates, but there’s just no way. First of all, how on earth? Second, we’d have noticed we’d been boarded, unless you believe someone successfully tricked the trickster. Which I don’t.”

“So what do you think happened?” I asked.

“There was a horrendous noise, a cracking, a clanging from the cargo hold, and then a rending, a loss of air pressure, a great dip like something massive had pushed off, and then we leveled. When my steward ran back to check the window into the cargo hold, the crate had burst open and the side of the plane had been punched out. Not in, not cut open,
busted outward
.”

All of us stared, thinking over the implications.

“Where does Interpol come in?” I asked.

“I guess they’d been tipped off about the artifact, which maybe wasn’t technically supposed to leave the country. They were waiting for us when we landed, but the cargo was gone. Try as they might, they couldn’t prove we’d ever had it. Oh, clearly there’d been
something
in the crate, but without evidence…”

“And you think this has something to do with what’s going on?” I prompted.

“I don’t believe in coincidence, do you?” he asked, going on without waiting for an answer. “An end-times artifact comes alive and breaks out of captivity as we near the East Coast and then all hell breaks loose? I think it’s worth investigating. And Javier seems a likely place to start.”

“You mentioned he’s reclusive,” Apollo cut in. “Can you get to him?”

“Not so far. He’s had his people call my people. It’s all been through intermediaries. With the loss of the cargo, there’s, uh, even been the threat of a lawsuit. I can’t get close. But you, Apollo…that’s another matter, especially with that tasty trinket you all are lugging around.”

He looked to the sword in my lap I hadn’t even realized I was still holding. And stroking. Like a cat.

I stopped midstroke and glared back defensively. “We can’t sell him the sword!”

“We don’t have to. We only need it as bait to lure him into a meeting.”

“Great, so we have tea and play twenty questions. What about action?”

“Are you so anxious to act without intel? Who are you striking out against? Where do you even start?”

The adrenaline still rushing my system didn’t like his logic. Not one bit.

“Hecate,” I said, maybe snapped. “You’ve met Namtar. Does Hermes’s description sound like him?”

“Tail?” she asked him.

“Curved, wicked looking, like the tail of a manticore or a scorpion,” he responded.

“And wings, you said, but basically human looking?”

“In that overmuscled, bulges in funny places kind of way,” he agreed.

“Sounds like him,” she said. “I can’t be sure, of course, but how many can there be who match his description? But we already knew he was here. I don’t see that knowing how he got that way helps us a whole helluva a lot. We still have to find him, and we’re not going to do that hiding out in these stables.”

“I wasn’t expecting we would,” Hermes answered. “I transported Namtar. Unknowing as I was, I feel responsible. I know, not a word you generally associate with me, but there it is. I was planning to take you to Mel’s but, as it is… Let me make a call.” He didn’t sound happy about the idea. In fact, he sounded a lot like a messenger who fully expected to be shot for delivering his news.

Hermes was already dialing before we could ask any more questions. My senses were sharp enough to pick up a sleep-cranky voice on the other end of the phone. Feminine.

“Cori?” Hermes asked, voice as serious as a preacher’s. “It’s Herman. I…I have some news. You’re not going to like it. Are you sitting down?” He waited for a response. “Laying down? Good, good, listen…Mel…” he looked at Apollo and me, as though we could help him get the words out, “…Mel’s been bitten. She’s in bad shape. Really bad.”

There were a string of slurred words all run together and then Hermes cut in. “Worse than that. We had no idea. I thought… I only meant her to be a distraction, but… No, no, we’ll bring her to you. It’s not safe for you to come here or to go out at all. You just stay put.”

There was sobbing coming through the phone now with a few words mixed in, but I couldn’t listen. All I could hold in my head was the image of Melpomene with her throat gone, still trying to attack.

“Cori?” Apollo said as Hermes hung up. “Not Terpsichore, by any chance?”

Terpsichore…another of the Muses?

“The same,” Hermes answered, and I realized it was in response to Apollo’s out-loud question and not the one I’d left unspoken. “As you might expect, she’s really torn up about Mel and…well, I wouldn’t be surprised if she tries to take off my head when she sees me. She might even aim considerably lower, but we can’t hang around these stables indefinitely. For one thing, my cell battery isn’t going to last forever, and we need contact with the outside world. We need to know what’s going on.”

“You think she’s going to let us
stay
?” I asked. “After what we let happen to her roommate? What about Eu-meh? I doubt she’s going to fit into a New York apartment. Or any apartment, for that matter.”

“I’m saying we need provisions, electricity and weapons. None of that is going to just drop into our laps. I’m saying we split up. You and Hecate go for provisions—weapons, food, batteries, water. Think siege, just in case. Think long term. Apollo and I will get Mel back to Cori and make some phone calls, see what we can learn. See what she knows.”

“And leave Lau here with Lyssa? How is that a good idea?”

“We’ll have Hecate reset the sleep spell before she goes. It should be perfectly safe.”

Hecate made a hacking noise, something like a cat choking on a hairball. “Are you asking me or telling me, trickster? One will get you a lot farther.”

Hermes rose to one knee, like a knight at the behest of his lady. He tried to take Hecate’s hand, but it was crossed over her chest with the other as she stared sourly down at him. “My most gracious and beauteous lady,” he began, “I grovel at your feet, lowering myself to beg of you, oh Queen of Cats, oh Moonlit Lady, oh most amazing and fearsome of visage, who puts the bella in belladonna—please aid these poor
avó
η
toi
in their noble quest, without which we are sure to fail.”