Rise of the Blood

Chapter Ten

Somehow I battled back the dark clouds obscuring my vision, only the first thing I saw was even darker…Nick down. And not in the way that someone falls who has any control over it. He was lying pretty much on the left side of his face. The right side was so swollen and blackened that I could only tell it was him from his suit.

I crawled to him, but when I got to his side I hesitated to touch, afraid to hurt him. Distantly, I was aware of sirens and commotion, but all I could see was Nick. My hands quaked as I held one in front of his nose to see if I could feel him breathing. My heart was in my throat, choking me. I couldn’t tell. Dammit, I should be able to tell.

In that instant, I understood Apollo entirely. I’d have dosed Nick right then with ambrosia if I had any on me, to spare him pain, to bring him back to me and heal him up. I’d slit open my own wrists and let him drink if I had vampiric blood or if I thought there was enough ambrosia still running through me to help. I’d pay any price to save him.

Could it be? Did I have enough ambrosia running through my veins to heal him? Was it even safe to give a person human blood? I didn’t know his blood type or how important that might be. I didn’t know anything.

The EMTs arrived and pushed me out of the way before I could give in to temptation. I moved back, still squatting there, though, as closely as I could. Part of me was furious that they’d pushed me away when I could have helped him, but the other half knew they’d come just in time. If I’d helped Nick with ambrosia, I’d be making him an addict. I was almost certain he’d rather die.

Still, my heart broke at the missed opportunity, and I let out a sob that had been building.

I forced myself to turn away, to see if there was anywhere I was needed. Off to the side, Tina cried uncontrollably, a puddle in Jason’s arms, both collapsed together on the floor. Wedding guests were coming out of hiding. Paramedics were helping others who’d gone down—one figure with a prodigious beard among them. Fear filled me that it was Yiayia, and I felt terrible about being relieved when I looked beyond and saw her wringing her hands, watching Fergus with the EMT much the same way I’d watched Nick. She seemed to sense my gaze and met it from across the room. She looked desolate. Neither of us mouthed a word.

The EMT working on Nick got my attention and asked if I was his wife. I nodded, lying in silence, willing to admit to anything if it kept me by his side.

“Want to ride along? He’s alive, but badly burned. It may be touch and go. Decisions may have to be made.”

Hope and dread warred. Alive, but badly burned. Decisions? I wasn’t actually authorized to make any medical decisions on his behalf. What if it came down to—? I ruthlessly clamped down on that thought and nodded again.

Our EMT signaled another to help him get Nick onto a gurney. I felt a hand on my arm as they started to count in order to synchronize the lift, but I didn’t turn.

“I’m sorry,” Apollo said. He sounded sincere, but I didn’t know if he was sorry for Nick or for taking me down earlier when I was possessed. I nodded again. It didn’t matter.

“We have to plan,” he continued. “Let them care for the wounded.”

I turned now to stare at him, shocked that he’d even suggest it. “I can’t leave him.”

He tried to pull me aside and I dug in my heels, but he was stronger, and I owed him, even if I was only just realizing how much. I moved off with him, but only far enough for the EMTs not to overhear. Then I repeated. “I can’t leave him.”

“You can’t do anything else,” he countered, eyes soft with understanding. “You can’t do anything for him, and if Rhea comes back—” I won’t be able to control myself. He didn’t need to finish the thought. He seemed to sense it and moved on. “If Rhea really is raising the titans it’s a world-ender. Truly. No one will be safe. The best thing you can do for him and everyone else is to help us stop it.”

“How?” I asked. “So far I’ve been part of the problem, not the solution.”

“Even more reason for you to be with us. It’s safer for Nick, and I keep thinking there must be some way I can use our mind link to get through to you when Rhea’s in residence, or at least piggyback on her thoughts so that we can learn her plans.”

“What if there isn’t?”

“Then we’re no worse off than we are now.”

I knew in my head that he made sense, but my heart—the pieces that remained—didn’t agree.

“Give me an hour,” I said. “Let me get him to the hospital. Let me be there in case he wakes. After that, they’ll probably have him on sedatives and in surgery. But for now—”

Apollo’s eyes were indescribably sad. “Go. I’ll get everyone together.”

I looked around suddenly. “Where are Zeus and Poseidon?”

We both looked to their last known position, but we couldn’t see them with the EMTs in the way. At least one was alive enough to refuse treatment and have the EMT argue with him over the extent of his burns. I didn’t hear any more after that and could only assume that the belligerent one had either passed out or been knocked out by some kind of painkiller.

“Seems they’ll be going to the hospital as well,” Apollo said. “Maybe you can talk to them.”

“Talk to them?”

He gave me a very serious look. “If the titans are rising, we can’t do it alone. I’m not even sure we can do it together. When Zeus beat the titans before he had help—the cyclopses and hecatoncheires. It wasn’t a battle, it was a war.”

This kept getting better and better.

“Fine, I’ll talk to them, but I have to go.”

The EMTs hadn’t waited for me, but were wheeling Nick out on their cart. I ran to catch up with them.

He didn’t moan or shift as they hoisted him into the ambulance and bumped him into place. He barely looked alive.

And I’d done this. Or at least I’d been too weak to stop it from happening, to stop Rhea from taking me over, using me to commit human sacrifice and awaken her fully into her power. This was the second time Nick would be in the hospital because of me. There wouldn’t be a third.

I had to quickly get out of the way as another EMT came through with another stretcher and they loaded that into the ambulance as well. I couldn’t tell who it was with his face as blackened as Nick’s, but from the suit it looked like another wedding guest. Poor man.

The medic got up into the ambulance; his partner motioned me in as well, then slammed the doors behind us. There was barely room for me and the medic between the two stretchers, and he had to shift back and forth between patients, starting IVs, checking heart rates. I tried to stay out of the way and prayed to anyone and everyone—Christ Pantocrator straight through to Rhea herself—with everything I had for Nick to be okay. For everyone to miraculously be okay. And for them to send Nick home where he’d be safe. He had no part in this war, but I couldn’t see him accepting that. If people were in danger he’d fight until his last breath to save them. That’s exactly what I was afraid of.

The medic fired questions at me as he worked on Nick, and I did my best to answer, remembering that I was supposed to be his wife. It was amazing how woefully ignorant I was. Finally, I patted him down for his wallet and pulled out his blood donor and insurance cards, which answered some of the questions I couldn’t.

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.

His eye kept closing, and it looked like it took more effort each time to reopen it, like the medicine was dragging him down into sleep. I wanted that for him, the freedom from pain, but he squeezed my hand to hold me there as he sensed me start to pull back to leave him in peace.

“Come with me,” he said, finally letting his eye shut and stay that way. “Not your fight either. I’m not sure…” He trailed off, and for a second I thought he was finished. Then his lips moved again, though his eyes stayed shut. “Not sure you’re helping the situation. Not sure things aren’t worse.” My heart stopped beating. I wondered if it was the medicine talking. Or confusion from the pain. But deep down I knew. He meant every word. I knew it, because he was voicing my very own doubts. Only, he was my touchstone. He was supposed to believe. And he’d cracked under the pressure.

I was so torn up and tangled up in my own pain that it took me a second to realize he wasn’t quite finished. “If this is…your path…can’t walk it with you.”

His hand went slack in mine, and I checked to see that he was still breathing. He was, and I struggled to feel something at that, but I’d gone numb with the stopping of my heart. I didn’t know what to process first—that he blamed me as I blamed myself or that it sounded like he was cutting me free.

Because that’s what he was saying. I couldn’t turn my back on the fight that had begun. I couldn’t. My responsibility was here. Now. With my friends and family and this mess I hadn’t started but had been sucked into nonetheless. His responsibility, his job, his identity was back in L.A. with the people he’d vowed to protect and serve. And because of me—I’d said it myself—because of me right now he couldn’t even do that. All he could do was hurt and heal. He couldn’t stay and I couldn’t go. After all I’d put him through, that felt like a betrayal. Yet I couldn’t see any other path.

I walked out of there like I was walking the Green Mile, already dead inside.

The tears didn’t start until I was in the limo Uncle Hector had sent to collect me, and then they wouldn’t stop.

Viggo looked at me in the rearview mirror and asked, “The man, he’s going to be okay?”

I wiped the tears out of my eyes. “Eventually. Nothing skin grafts and time away from me can’t cure.”

He looked sad, like he could read between the lines. “Back to the hotel?”

I thought about asking him to go by way of a liquor store, but I needed my wits about me.

“Yes,” I said finally. “Thank you.”

“It’ll be okay,” he told me.

I wished he had the power of prophecy.

I was too emotionally exhausted to fear the hairpin turns on the way back up to the hotel…or maybe I was getting used to them. Exposure therapy.

Like before, we had to stop short of the actual parking lot that looked like an explosion site. I thanked Viggo and raced out, ready to find the others and plot away my sorrows. Nick had pulled away from me. I didn’t think it was just his painkiller talking. My touchstone was gone. That voice that told me not to do the crazy things I usually did anyway had given up on me. But more than that…I hadn’t said as much, not even to myself, but the truth was that when Nick and I finally got through the bantering and dancing our way around our relationship, I thought we’d…settle down sounded too tame. Be together forever sounded too romancy. But somewhere in there lay the truth about what was slipping away from me.

The lobby of the hotel was all but deserted when I entered. One lone receptionist was holding down the check-in desk. I realized I didn’t know where to go. The banquet hall would be a crime scene, although what crime the police could prosecute I could only imagine. I headed for the elevators while I pulled my phone out to call Apollo, feeling stupidly guilty as I did it, even though this was hardly a social call. Anyway, I wasn’t sure I had a relationship anymore to worry about. The thought didn’t cause me anything but pain.

I was not going to cry again. Big girls don’t cry. I’d heard it in a song once. The wisdom of Fergie.

I heard a phone play out the first few bars of “Black Magic Woman” in the elevator coming into the lobby and knew I didn’t have to look any further for Apollo. I’d found him. He accepted the call just as the doors opened, and then dropped his hand to his side at the sight of me.

“What happened?” he asked immediately, stepping toward me. I took a step back. “Are you okay?”

I looked at the hand reaching out toward me, the phoneless one, and he stopped. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not the one hurt.”

“Then what was all that I sensed?”

Damn and double damn, I’d forgotten our weird, unwanted bond that meant he’d had a front-row seat for the breakup. But he could sense emotions, not read minds. He might guess, but he couldn’t know anything I didn’t tell him for certain. And I wasn’t about to tell him. He’d been wanting me to break up with Nick since we’d met. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing it was done or appearing pathetic because Nick had been the one to end it.

“Zeus is a douchebag, so what else is new? But I think I talked some sense into him and Poseidon both. I don’t think they can fight Rhea without us.”

“Without Zeus and his idiot priests, we wouldn’t have to fight her at all.”

“Where is everybody?” I asked, before he could whip out any more questions of his own.

“Strategizing,” he said, “in the bridal suite.”

“Oh, Tina must love that.”

“She volunteered it. She’s pissed that ‘that bitch goddess’ ruined her wedding. We had to fill her in. Pretty hard to keep her in the dark after everything.”

I felt oddly pleased. If she knew the full story, she’d have to know that none of this was my fault. Oh sure, Rhea would never have awakened if Zeus and Poseidon hadn’t come after me and Apollo and bolloxed up the whole thing, but I hadn’t put them up to the vengeance. As far as incurring their wrath to begin with…what was I supposed to have done? Let them drop L.A. into the ocean? Maybe some day she and I could sit down over a pint and I could tell her about my heroic adventures where I wasn’t possessed by a mother goddess.

“Lead the way,” I told him.

Inside the elevator I stood as far away from him as humanly possible—toward the front while he stood in the back—but I could feel his gaze on me. He hadn’t bought my explanation for the emotional turmoil for even a second.

I was out of the elevator the instant the doors opened, but then I had to wait for Apollo to catch up.

He led me to a room at the end of a long hallway. I could hear even before we reached the door that we were in the right place. There were a lot of voices talking over each other. I would have thought “party” if I didn’t know better.

Apollo knocked, and the voices hushed. It was Hermes who answered the knock, looking from me to Apollo with sharp eyes that seemed to catch everything and guess the rest.

“Come in,” he said soberly. I didn’t know he could do sober. It made the whole situation seem that much more dire.

Hermes stepped aside, and we entered. Everyone stared at me as if I might go on the offensive again. I couldn’t blame them.

“What’s the news about your young man,” Yiayia asked from across the room. Fergus, I was shocked to see, was still at her side, singed but whole. Christie was conspicuously absent.

“He’s burned and hurting, but he’s going to be okay.”

“Zeus and Poseidon?” Hermes asked.

“Healing. Not all fired up to join us, but I don’t see that they have much choice. I’d guess it’s a matter of time.” I looked around the room. “What have you come up with so far?”

Everyone stirred uncomfortably, swapping glances, meeting each others’ gazes, but not mine…until I got to Althea. She looked me right in the eyes and said, “We can’t tell you. It’s like talking to the enemy. Tori, I’m sorry.”

I felt it like a blow to the chest. Nick didn’t want me. Now neither did they. And I couldn’t convince them they were wrong when I was sure they were right. But I also couldn’t stay sidelined. There was a battle brewing of epic proportions, and I knew with that sixth sense I had that I was part of things. I had to be.

I swallowed down my first response and reconsidered my second. “Fine,” I said. It came out tight but strong. “I understand. A quick suggestion. Yiayia’s been keeping track of who’s been doing what with whom and where for at least a decade. If you’re looking to recruit allies, I’d start there.”

“Anipsi—” Yiayia began, stepping forward as if she’d embrace me and make it all better. I held up a hand to stop her. It was the only way I could stay strong.

“Let me just ask—who’s going to approach Hades? With or without Zeus and Poseidon, we’ll need him on our side.”

No one spoke.

“Fine,” I said again. “I’ll go. I’m expendable and he knows me.”

He didn’t like me. The last few times we’d met he’d actually tried to kill me. But he knew me. Maybe he’d marvel at my audacity in approaching him long enough to listen.

There was something wrong with my vision again, and I fumbled for the doorknob. A strong hand, warm like someone had been soaking up the sun, came down on top of mine and twisted the knob for me. I didn’t thank him. It felt too much like he was coming to the rescue of some kind of damsel in distress, and that wasn’t me.

He followed me out into the hall.

“You’re not going alone,” Apollo stated.

I whirled to confront him and found him way too close, but I refused to take a step back.

“You gonna stop me?”

“No, I’m going with you.”

“You’re needed here.”

“I will be when things heat up again. For now I need to be with you.”

“Why?”

“I sense it,” he said, his turquoise eyes burning like sunlight reflected off the Mediterranean.

“A vision?” I asked. “What do you see?”

“I see you coming into your own. I see you having a pivotal role to play, and I know you have to survive.”

Not I know you will survive, but you have to.

“What about you? You have to survive, to fight. At my side doesn’t seem a terribly safe place to be lately.”

“Well darn, because you know how I like things nice and safe. Crossword puzzles, warm milk, in bed by nine,” he smiled.

To my shock, I started to smile back.

“You realize that if I get you killed, your sister’s huntresses are going to have my hide.”

“At the very least,” he agreed. “So don’t get me killed.”

“Sir, yes, sir.” I clicked my heels together and saluted, and his smile got wider. “You think they’ll help us out with some weapons to aid us in not getting slaughtered?”