Rise of the Blood (25 page)

As soon as we hit the hospital, I was sidelined again, shoved off on someone with a computer and a no-nonsense attitude to answer questions, many of them the same as I’d already been asked, and to fill out paperwork that seemed endless. I asked every time I could catch a break whether I could see him, but I kept getting, “Just one or two more things,” until I wondered how the data entry lady had ever passed kindergarten math.

Finally I was allowed into the emergency area waiting room. No further. When I tried to ask the nurse who’d occasionally call someone in what was going on, she insisted that someone would be out to talk to me.

I tried to wait. Really I did. But it didn’t take. I’d told Apollo I’d be back in an hour. After twenty minutes had passed, I glanced around at my fellow waiters—reading magazines, playing on their smart phones, worriedly pacing the floor. All wrapped up in their own stuff. No one was concerned with me. I got up out of my seat and without rushing or doing the “casual saunter” that never looked anything but suspicious, I approached the door that would take me into the treatment area, turned the knob and simply walked through. No one was there to stop me. I dodged doctors and nurses, desperately willing them not to see me…or at least not to care if they did. Whether it worked or whether the craziness of the ER was on my side, I didn’t know. I peeked behind curtains and dodged into and out of treatment areas with impunity. But no Nick. No sign of him. At a guess, he’d had to go straight into surgery or some super-sterile area because of his burns and exposed flesh.

Tears welled up in my eyes, and I would have let that last curtain fall, seeing only the barrel chest and gray mane of hair, knowing it wasn’t Nick, but a voice lashed out with venom, “Gorgon-spawn.”

I froze, torn between ignoring it to continue searching for Nick and stepping inside. I recognized that voice.
Poseidon
. He’d spoken to me once—threatened me, really—through the mouth of a singing fish I had mounted on my office wall…just before he attempted to drown me and succeeded in flooding my office. And that had been
before
he’d tried to explode a charge in an offshoot of the San Andreas fault to set off the quake to end all quakes, dropping L.A. into the ocean to announce his (and Zeus’s) second coming. Oh yeah, and he’d tried to kill me then as well when I got in the way.

Talk to them
, Apollo had said. Yeah, right.

I stepped inside and let the curtain drop behind me. “Poseidon,” I said, as neutrally as possible. “You’re looking…well.”

Part of his silvery mane had burned away, and that lovely smell of burnt hair clung to him. Oxygen hissed softly as it fed through a tube up into his nose. His face was blackened, but miraculously not too burned. Possibly there was some protection against fire in being a water god. But a dry, wracking cough overtook him as I approached his bedside. It continued for the better part of a minute, which wasn’t such a long time in the grand scheme of things, but when you’re listening to someone cough up a lung, it seemed like forever.

“What have you done?” he asked when he could talk again.

Why was everybody always asking me that?

“Me, nothing. Why don’t you ask Zeus what
his priests
set in motion at Delphi? No, wait, I’ll tell you. Their attempt at human sacrifice woke Rhea, your loving mother. Apparently, she’s not happy to see you.”

Poseidon glared. It hadn’t been
him
she’d saved from Chronos, after all. She’d let him be devoured, along with the rest of her children. It had been Zeus alone she’d saved. Talk about mommy issues.

“I should kill you,” he growled, which set off another, longer coughing fit, which ended on a wheeze and a rattle in his chest.

“You tried that,” I answered when it died down enough that he could hear. “You’re welcome to try again, of course, but I don’t recommend it. Right now I’d say you have two options. You can keep threatening me and I can raise holy hell, bring people running and alert them that they’ve got an international fugitive on their hands. A
terrorist
, no less.”

He snarled.

“
Or
you can agree to join forces with us to put Rhea back in her place. She’s already come after you once. If she and the titans make a triumphant return, I’m going to be the very least of your problems.”

Poseidon was silent but for the rattle in his chest.

“Think about it,” I said.

“Have you talked to Zeus?” he asked gruffly.

“Does he speak for you?”

He started to growl again and had to stifle another bout of coughing. “Up this high,” cough, “he’s the one with the power.”

The cough that burst out this time went on for so long I thought he’d break a rib. Poseidon was left gasping like a fish out of water, his barrel chest working like a bellows, trying to make up for the deprivation of air.

“Think about it,” I said again, turning to go. “You’re with us or you’re on your own.”

A man in scrubs with some kind of breathing machine on a wheeled cart nearly crashed into me as I exited, and I moved quickly away to let him do his job. Poseidon was right—this far from the oceans and his base of power, he was probably pretty near human in his abilities, but the titans weren’t just land creatures. If this thing got out of hand, if Rhea got down off the mountain or if she was able to move through followers who could we’d have a worldwide awakening on our hands. We’d need an army. And even that might not be enough.

I stood there trying to figure out how I’d missed Zeus and where to find him. A pair of hands clamped down on my shoulders and yanked me into one of the treatment alcoves. The hold shifted, and I stomped down on an instep, threw an elbow back and then pivoted out of reach—or out of reach in a perfect world. In a cramped treatment room I pivoted into the bed and rolled myself up over it instead, coming down on the other side. The bed between us, I now faced my grabber, staring into the crazed and hate-filled eyes of the king of the Olympians, Zeus Earthshaker.

“
You called my mother
?” he asked.

I was so stunned that it took me a second even to laugh. But as soon as I did, I realized it was the wrong move.

Zeus, enraged, shoved the bed at me. Luckily, the casters were old and clunky and the bed didn’t go far.

“Maybe you didn’t notice, because you were so far over your head, but we saved your ass back at the hotel,” I spat back. “I’m not sure why. But to answer your question, no, we didn’t ‘call your mother’. Your priests did that.”

He was breathing hard, looking from the hospital bed to me, as if he might give up trying to shove it and just lift and launch it instead, but that caught his attention.

“What?” he asked sharply.

“When your priests tried to gut Apollo in that stupid ceremony, the power unleashed with his blood woke her up. And I think she got up on the wrong side of the bed.”

He fell back a step, like I’d slapped him, and man did I want to.

Anger bubbled up at that thought, but it wasn’t his…wasn’t mine. Inside I was like a boiling pot with the top about to blow off.

No, no, no.

I gasped, trying to release some of the pressure, trying to fight Rhea down.

“What’s wrong with you?” Zeus asked.

I tried to answer him, but it wasn’t my voice that came out. “
My son
,” Rhea spat. I listened helplessly, mentally clawing at my own throat. “Your days are over. Typhoeus was a warning. The titans are rising. You couldn’t even hold your world against the humans. How will you hold it against us? Your time is through.”

I braced for another quake or explosion, but none was forthcoming. Rhea’s serpentine minions were off licking their wounds or whatever giant mythological beasts did when they’d been beaten. At a guess, she didn’t have any more tricks currently up her sleeves. I imagined it would take time to gather more monsters. There couldn’t be too many in the immediate vicinity. Which meant we had time. But how much when a titan could probably chew up the landscape like a
2 Fast 2 Furious
car in a no-holds-barred race?

Zeus stared into my eyes, but I wasn’t the one glaring back.

“I defeated you once,” he said. “I’ll do it again.”

“You and what army?” Rhea asked. “The giants have largely faded from the world. The cyclopses haven’t been heard from in ages untold. Your allies are no more. Your strength is no more. If you’d been alone tonight, Typhoeus would have destroyed you. You can’t stay surrounded forever.”

Zeus’s eyes blazed like one of his infamous bolts. “If you’re so sure you can defeat me, why waste time talking about it? Do you expect me to concede?”

“No,” she responded calmly, my mouth forming the words. “If you did, I could hardly use you as a rallying point. I expect the promise of vengeance will overcome anyone’s reluctance to awake. I’ve only come to say good-bye, my son.”

He lunged for me, straight across the bed between us and I fell right into his hands as Rhea suddenly withdrew from me and Zeus latched onto my throat, thumbs digging into my windpipe, cutting off my air. I stared, terrified, up into his bloodshot eyes, struggling to tell him that she’d gone. I wasn’t sure it would matter, and anyway, I didn’t have the breath. I dug deep for the energy to throw my head forward, crashing my forehead into his. His grip loosened, and I forced my hands in under his forearms and thrust, freeing myself from his grip.

I choked and coughed, my eyes watering, and whirled for the counter, grasping for anything I could use as a weapon. But there were no handy scalpels laying around for just such emergencies. Only tissues, a box of sanitary gloves, a plastic container of tongue depressors…

I spun back around, ready to find him closing in on me, prepared to use my body as a weapon, but he seemed to have gotten ahold of himself. He hadn’t rounded the hospital bed, but
was
watching me like a hawk from the side of it.

“You see,” I said. It came out, well, strangled. “She’s dangerous. We didn’t call her, but we’re going to have to work together to put her back to rest.”

“Work together?” You would have thought
he’d
been strangled by the sound of his voice. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“You think you can stop her alone?”

His glare was answer enough.

“Talk to Poseidon and meet us back at the hotel. I promise you, we defeat her together or we go down separately.”

He didn’t say a word as I edged cautiously past him, but neither did he grab me again.

As I stepped out of the treatment room an intercom crackled and snapped, then a voice came over asking for Tori Karacis to report to the ER front desk.

My heart gave a
thump
. Fear and hope battled it out in a cage match in my chest to see which would win in regard to Nick. I’d lied and told them I was his wife. I prayed they weren’t calling to tell me I was a widow.

I rushed back the way I’d come, back toward the waiting area. As I burst out of the inner door to the treatment area, I nearly collided with an orderly, who turned just in time to catch me before I could overrun him.

“Mrs. Armani?” he asked.

Close enough. “Yes,” I answered.

“Your husband’s out of surgery if you’d like to see him.”

“He’s okay?” I asked, for the second time today, feeling like I wanted to collapse as the tension went out of me and relief flooded in. Relief was not nearly so rigid as fear.

“He’ll need skin grafts and reconstructive surgery, but as long as we can keep infection away…”

Skin grafts and reconstructive surgery
…and I’d brought this on him.

“I’ll follow you?” I asked.

He led me back the way I’d just come and used a keycard to get us beyond the general ER area and back to the trauma treatment rooms. Nick was in the first one on the left, and I had to keep from throwing myself on him as I spotted him laying there, looking so helpless. One side of his face was loosely bandaged in white gauze pink with blood. The eye on the bandage-free side rolled to look at me, so blue and perfect in contrast.

I gasped and approached the bed tentatively, as if even displacing the air might cause him pain. My vision went blurry, and I realized there were tears in my eyes.

“I’ll give you a minute,” the orderly said, “but he may not be awake long. He’s on some pretty serious pain meds.”

Nick raised a hand, again on the uninjured side. The left, I noticed, which meant it was his dominant side that had taken the hit. I reached gently for the hand and stood by his bed, afraid to perch on it and cause him to shift.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. My damaged throat and the tears made it a hoarse whisper.

He shook his head. “Not your fault,” he whispered, as soft as spider’s silk.

“It is,” I insisted, not allowing myself the relief of looking away from his pain.

“Tori—” Saying my name recalled my gaze to his one good eye, and I realized I was lying to myself. I had let my gaze wonder down to his chest where the skin was less angry.

“Yes,” I said, wiping tears away from my eyes with my free hand.

“I’m out.”

I blinked. “Well, of course. I’m so, so sorry. No one expects you to come back to the fight. I should never—” a sob stopped me, and I had to swallow it down before I could continue, “—I should never have drawn you into any of it.”

He started to shake his head and stopped as it sparked pain that flashed across his face and made his body nearly arc off the bed. He breathed shallowly through the pain for a minute before his muscles untensed and he relaxed back onto the mattress, looking smaller than before somehow.

“No, I mean I’m out of everything. I can’t be…part of this.” He sounded like he was drowning on his words, and I could see a single tear welling in his good eye. “I’m not…equipped for these battles, and now…can’t even fight for those I’m meant to fight for, back home.”

He wasn’t a god…or a gorgon. Hell,
I
wasn’t equipped for this and that was with ambrosia and my gods-given gifts. But I suspected he was saying something more…something I desperately didn’t want to hear.