Rise of the Blood

Chapter Thirteen

We met up with Hypnos and the others at the Archeron…or at least a riverbed with not much more than a trickle of water left at the bottom. The remains of what looked to recently have been a mighty river were splashed about the banks, wetting the barren rocks all around and slowly slinking back into the earth. Whether there had been a massive battle, the titans had drunk it dry or we were seeing the result of hundreds of feet, claws, tentacles and hooves crossing in a frenzied rush, I couldn’t tell. One way or another, the titans had bypassed the barrier and were headed into trouble.

Hades stared in horror at the destruction of the Archeron, and when he looked to his son and the reinforcements he’d been able to gather, there was a fire in his eyes. Literally hellfire, and he gave off the stench of brimstone like he bathed in the stuff. Hypnos had managed a dozen or so hellhounds and a few unassuming gods in house black who I presumed to be relations based on the family resemblance. Now that I thought about it, myths had Hypnos breeding at least once—his son Morpheus, the Shaper of Dreams. But beyond that, my knowledge failed me.

“They will pay for this,” Hades growled.

He whirled, giving us the back of his hydra armor, and led the way through the nearly nonexistent river to the other side.

The ground started to climb and the walls narrowed in as we passed by it, until we were moving only about four across. Part of the ceiling had come down where the larger titans had knocked their heads, so that smaller stones turned ankles and made the way somewhat treacherous, but no one went down. No one complained.

The tension in my stomach ratcheted up with every step. I didn’t like this setup at all. A huge rockfall ahead or behind…or both…and we’d be cut off. Surely the titans would expect pursuit and leave us with a nasty surprise somewhere along the way.

Apollo had slung his bow over his back in favor of another, more modern weapon. He had his cell phone out and was fussing with it.

“I thought you said there were no cell towers in Hell,” I said, nudging him to get his attention.

“There aren’t, but the way we’ve been climbing, I keep hoping we’re close enough to the surface to get messages in and out. We need to know what’s happening up there, and they need to know the situation down here and that help is on the way.”

“Anything yet?” I asked.

“No, dammit. I’ll keep trying.”

Someone tapped my shoulder, and I turned to see the twins. “How ’bout now?” the green-eyed one asked. He seemed to be the ringleader.

“Might be your last chance,” said the other. “We might not survive the battle.”

Wow, were they the princes of romance or what?

“I thought you were already dead,” I said wryly.

“Do we look dead?”

I really didn’t know how to answer that.

A huge rumble up ahead saved me the trouble. The ceiling seemed to jump, like an ancient elevator finally hitting its floor, and then it buckled right overtop of us. I screamed like a girl and from the choral effect, I wasn’t the only one.

A man lunged forward to catch the center of the dipping ceiling, his muscles bulging where his lion pelt exposed them—Hercules, once again taking up the mantle of the earth as he had from Atlas. I hoped he hadn’t gone soft in the intervening millennia.

“Go!” he grunted at the rest of us. “I’ll hold it up. Just go!”

“You heard him,” Hades said. “Go!”

The army moved around Hercules. Sweat was breaking out across his brow, and I could make out not only every muscle, but every vein and artery.

“Can you hold out?” I asked with no clue what I’d do if the answer was, “No.”

He must have gotten the gist of what I was saying, “Don’t worry about me,” he answered. “Just get out of here. The sooner you go, the sooner all I have to worry about is me.”

“We’ll be back for you,” I promised. I hoped I lived long enough to follow through.

He nodded, as though another word would break him, and jutted his chin toward where the others had disappeared, signaling us to go.

Apollo grabbed me, and I ran after the others, trying to ignore the creaks and groans of the stone ceiling above, the jagged shards of rock still falling here and there like icicles to shatter on the ground.

I almost jumped out of my skin at the sound of a phone ringing. Apollo grabbed it out of his pocket and answered on the run. “Yes?” He listened for a second. “We’re on the way. We should come up behind them. And for Olympus’s sake, tell Zeus to stop shaking the earth—at least until we’re above it.”

He hung up. I guess whoever was on the other end already knew the titans had broken free.

“Who was that?”

“Hermes. He says get there as fast as you can and that it’s not Zeus doing the shaking.”

“Great.”

A rock pinged off my head, but I hardly registered the pain with all the adrenaline flooding my system. Ahead of us, people were calling out warnings and slinging boulders, pulling them away from the cave-in at the exit. We were already one hero down, but the others had it covered. All Apollo and I could do from the back of the field was stay out of the way of flying rocks.

When they’d cleared enough room to crawl out, Thanatos insisted on leading the charge, his sword raised before him to skewer anyone in his way. With a great cry, he pelted up out of the ground, the heroes echoing him as they followed.

Apollo and I climbed over the rocks in our way and blinked into the sudden sunlight, our sight clearing onto chaos. We were on the field of the Pythian Games that capped the sacred sight of Delphi at the very top of Mount Parnassus. My natural fear at the height clashed with my precog alarm klaxons for a sickening, blinding panic attack that threatened to take me down, but I didn’t have time for any of that. The battle was already in progress, the titans towering above our force of Hellenic heroes who’d rushed into the action, weapons drawn.

I couldn’t see our allies—gods and goddesses, my friends and family—all the way across the field, opposite our titanic foes, but I could feel the electricity in the air. I desperately hoped that meant Zeus and Poseidon had joined our team. I wondered who else had been recruited.

Something at the edge of my vision caught my attention, and my head swiveled as a figure rose into the air, great black wings unfurling, batlike in construct, but feathered along the struts where on a bat there might be fur. But at its core was something very familiar…

Hypnos? It looked like him, all punked out with spikes and piercings, but the wings…they were new. Or maybe there just hadn’t been cause to reveal them in the cavelike Underworld. But now…he was magnificent. He flapped the wings just enough to hover above the battleground, and as he did, he began to sing, something atonal and…not flat, but bottomless. I blinked again as the air began to ripple, like a Hollywood intro to a dream scene or mirage. His wings beat the rippling air toward the titans. Those closest began to sway, as if he were sending them to sleep. Then there was a raptor-cry from within the melee and a second winged figure rose up, this one from among the ranks of titans—a flying female, half woman, half bird of prey.

She flew at Hypnos, and as they grappled in the air, his waves ceased. The titans shook off their strange affect, and renewed their attacks with double their ferocity. We couldn’t stay on the sidelines. I just had to figure out where we’d do the most good.

There!” Apollo said, as if he’d read my mind. He pointed to a spot of high ground that would have been a spectator section during the Pythian Games where the Amazons were already spreading out for a good clear shot at our enemies.

I nodded, took two steps in that direction, and seized up as something took control of my body. No, not something…

Rhea.

I cried out a warning to Apollo, but it came out just a strangled sound. He whirled, though, in time to catch me as I fell forward, fighting Rhea for control. Losing.

And then suddenly I was pushing Apollo away with a strength not my own and swinging for him in a way that would snap his head around…and maybe a few vertebrae. He caught my fist before it could connect, but in that instant my other hand lashed out, aiming for something a lot more vulnerable. My hand like a talon, I caught and gripped Apollo’s bait and tackle, twisting mercilessly. His eyes got big and betrayed, and he started to buckle to the ground. I let go and used the fist he’d been holding to knock him aside. Even as he rolled, my leg shot up, ready to stomp down on him, but he did the unexpected. He rolled back toward me, grabbed the stomping leg and twisted. I went down on top of him, but kicked hard as I fell, managing to land a blow on his thigh, very close to those bits I’d already manhandled. His eyes filled with pained tears and I—Rhea—rolled away and shot to my feet, reaching for the bow and arrows strapped to my back.

Rhea loaded a crossbow bolt and pointed it down at Apollo, straight at his heart. Weapon cocked and ready, my gaze zeroed in on the sight, preparing to pierce him through.

Frantically, I fought to regain control of my body, flinging myself against invisible barriers, trying to get through to myself or even just mess up the signals, to save Apollo as he’d saved me so many times. I might as well have been a firefly beating at a glass jar.

Something flew up into Rhea’s peripheral vision, but she didn’t blow her aim by looking. I started to release the bolt, knowing that this was it—that Apollo’s death would break his hold on Delphi, the naval of the world. Rhea would capture the lashing rein, Delphi’s power once again hers to command.

My panic meter went to eleven.

The pain struck from out of the blue—a bolt to the chest. So stunning it took a second to register anything but that I had missed the shot, which had gone wide. Rhea looked down in disbelief to see an arrow sticking out of our chest, just inches shy of my heart.

She bellowed in more anger than pain, and immediately wrapped a hand around the shaft to pull it out.

I smashed through with everything I had, knocking her hand away. The shock was all that allowed it, I was sure.

Apollo kicked my legs out from under me as I stood there wavering, my body ready to topple as Rhea and I fought for control.

I went down in a heap and my sight caught on what had moved in my peripheral vision—a winged boy, teenager anyway, all tussled hair and shining eyes, wearing little more than a bow and arrows. Cupid? I’d been downed by Cupid?

My vision started to swim as Apollo kicked the bow out of my hand.

“Tori?” he asked.

He looked strange from this angle—him up, me down, the rising sun behind him lighting up his hair like a halo around his head. Put him together with Cupid’s wings and he’d look like an angel.

Was I delirious with pain?

“She’s not my only one,” Rhea’s voice issued from my lips, and then she was gone.

I was left cold. So cold. Numb. I could barely feel the pain anymore, and I wasn’t sure that was a good thing with no Hecate available to heal me.

“Go,” I said, faintly. Breath was hard, and I thought I felt fluid in it, like maybe the arrow had pierced something never meant to be pierced. “Fight. Win.”

Apollo looked at me for another moment and then threw himself down on top of me, careful of the arrow.

He muttered something against my lips. It tickled. I wanted to breathe in his warmth, but that was getting harder and harder.

Then he kissed me, lips on mine, but softly, no more than a touch. For a second, he seemed to be breathing for me and something passed between us. Something profound. If he was opening up another damned gateway in my mind or another unwanted link, I was going to be pissed…though I didn’t see how that would matter for much longer.

When he pulled away, the numbness had spread, and I couldn’t even blink. If my eyes closed, fine. Otherwise, I was going to see the battle through to the bloody end…mine.

He gave a quick caress to my face, grabbed my bow off the ground as a backup for his own and ran off, Cupid flying beside him, firing as he flew.

I was left behind, staring wide-eyed at the battle, helpless.

On the field was chaos. Arrows and crossbow bolts struck the titans but not with the same success they’d had against me. Meanwhile, hellhounds were being hurled yelping through the air or being crunched between monstrous teeth. Hypnos and the eagle-woman had fallen to the ground, but he was rising again, though with tears in the membrane of his wings. Still, he was able to take to the air, if nowhere near as gracefully as before. Thanatos, Hades and the heroes slashed again and again, but didn’t look like they were gaining ground, except what the titans gave in their push forward to overrun the Olympians on the other end of the field.

From that far end, lightning flashed, but it was more electric shock than branch or ball lighting, as though Zeus was up too high to gather the full force of his storms. Rhea had chosen her battleground well.

And then my heart went cold. Figures came running toward my high ground. Human figures. Female human figures. I immediately recognized one of them.

Christie…still in the dress she’d worn to the wedding, but now with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. The women with her…I squinted, it was as much as I could do…my fellow inmates from Delphi prison. Rhea’s recruits.

My fault.

All my fault.

They lined up along the spectator section of the stadium opposite the Amazons. I tried to get up, to distract them or fight as they started to take aim at Althea, Junessa and the others and…nothing…I couldn’t move.

I felt pinned to the ground by the arrow in my chest, staked like a modern-day vampire. I knew it was stupid. I knew it was probably the loss of blood making me so weak, but the feeling wouldn’t leave me. I had to pull the arrow. It was the right thing to do. Precognition or delusion? What did it matter when I couldn’t even move?

No. I was not going to let everyone I loved down like this.

My fault.

With a monumental effort, I made my hand move. Just the one farthest from the arrow and just a flop, but I was amazed even at that. It was a start. I focused, pouring every ounce of strength I had into that one arm, praying that my last dose of ambrosia wasn’t all used up and out of my system.

Heal, dammit, I thought. Heal now.

I’d never been patient. Imminent death certainly wasn’t going to change that.

The hand moved. Slowly, painfully. It felt like I’d been petrified. No, not just petrified—stoned. Stone weighed more. A ton or so, it felt like. Eventually, the hand bumped up against the arrow, causing an explosion of pain to shoot straight down the shaft and all through my chest.

I coughed hard, and there was a gurgle to it that I knew to be a bad sign. Punctured lung? Drowning in my own blood?

Didn’t matter now. Diagnosis wouldn’t change a thing.

I labored against the aftermath of the cough, gasping for breath too painful to take. But I forced my hand up again for another try at the arrow, focusing on fine motor skills and actually grasping it this time. The hand moved torturously slowly and when it bumped against the arrow it was too weak to knock it hard. But it did make contact, and I forced it to turn and grasp.

Drawing my next breath took all my concentration for the moment, and it was another after that before I could refocus on the arrow and on pulling it out.

Meanwhile, Christie and her cadre were unleashing arrow after arrow, but with more regularity than skill. They were being controlled, but Rhea didn’t yet have the power, the precision to make it count.

She couldn’t have Christie and she couldn’t have me.

I gave my last ounce of strength to pulling the shaft from my chest. I almost passed out as it started to slide, ripping through already abused muscle and tissue. Pain blinded me, and I wanted to arch up, my body following the path of the arrow as if I could control the pace, but I didn’t have time for slow and easy.

When the tip came free, I collapsed. My hand fell to my side, along with the gored arrow. Blood began to bubble and gurgle up from the wound. Bubbles in the blood—bad sign, I thought, battling back the darkness that wanted to swamp me.

It felt like removing that arrow had removed some kind of blockage. Now the full measure of pain became heart-stoppingly clear—razor-sharp, stabbing shards of crystal being pushed through veins and arteries too narrow to handle them, tearing, ripping and scraping me raw. But behind it…what had Apollo breathed into me? The crystal shards of pain felt like unmaking—tearing apart my stitching, doing demolition. But behind that, the feeling that I was being re-stitched, putty poked into old scars that were then spackled over, base coated, repainted and remodeled. Like I was being remade.

What the hell.

It was unbearable, like my whole insides were crawling with army ants rebuilding me one cell at a time. It was the creepiest, most awful feeling in the world. Worse than ambrosia withdrawal. Worse than being possessed. Worse than the makeover at Christie’s upscale spa. I lay in a pool of my own sweat and blood, unable to stop it. Unsure if I’d survive.

And then, just like that, it was over. I thought I died. For a minute I couldn’t feel anything at all. Couldn’t hear. Couldn’t see. And then I gasped in a breath—a full breath with no rasping or bubbling or blood, and it was the sweetest thing in the world. I gulped in more air until I felt my lungs would explode with the fullness, and then they seemed to adapt. The sights and sounds and smell of the battle came rushing at me like a flash mob, coming from everywhere at once. Too vivid. Too much, as if I’d been experiencing the world through a bubble all my life and it had suddenly popped. And I felt…unbelievable. I tested out my arms and legs; they lifted as though gravity no longer had such a pull on me.

The twang of bowstrings snapped me out of my wonder and whipped my head around. The first person I saw was the woman who’d signaled me outside the jail, who I now knew Rhea had touched. I went for her, and my legs seemed to push off the ground with double their power. When I was close enough to spring for her, I sailed through the air, knocking her to the ground before she could get off her next shot. She writhed under me, trying to throw me off. I grabbed for her bow, yanked it from her hands and broke it in half, throwing the pieces and myself to the side in order to roll to my feet and go for the next girl. I rushed her just as she released an arrow. With no time to stop it, I leapt in the way and caught the bolt in my bare hand.

Her eyes widened, but she couldn’t have been more shocked than I was. She backed away as I started toward her, but then straightened and held her ground as if she’d received a new directive from Rhea. She reached for another arrow, but I was on her before she could nock it, driving the one in my hand into her leg. She dropped the bow in pain. I picked it up and ran for the next archer…only to come face to face with Christie.

She saw me coming and turned her loaded bow my way. I’d been shot once today. It wasn’t going to happen again.

“Christie,” I called, giving her the chance to snap out of it. “It’s me.”

She didn’t even blink, but let fly the arrow she was holding back.

I used the bow in my hand like a bat to swat the arrow out of the air, shocked when it worked, and leapt for Christie, even as she reached for another. I landed on top of her, knees to her stomach, hands on her shoulders, riding her to the ground. She hit with an “ooph” and for a second I saw my friend Christie flash in her eyes. Then they were cold again—dry ice cold, the kind that burned.

“You dare?” Rhea asked.

She reached Christie’s hands up, not for my neck, as I expected, but toward my face. Her icy eyes went wide as she touched me. “But…that’s not possible…I can’t reach you.”

I didn’t know what Apollo had breathed into me or what the long-term effects of the ambrosia or nectar had made me, but if it included being impervious to mesmerism, I’d take it.

Still, now that I had Christie down, I didn’t know what to do with her. She was my best friend. I couldn’t leave her behind to hurt me or anyone else on the battlefield, but I couldn’t hurt her. Rhea stiffened Christie’s hands like claws and I had less than a second to decide what to do as they came for my eyes.

“Sorry,” I whispered, sucker-punching Christie on the temple, just hard enough, I hoped, to send her to sleep. Her head fell to the side, eyes closed. I felt for her pulse, found it and moved on, stealing the bow and arrow from her unconscious body. I immediately nocked one arrow and sent it flying for the last archer on my side of the field—the final woman from the prison. I went for her bow hand, hoping to hurt her as little as possible.

With my crazy bolstered vision, it was no problem at all to hit my target, and she dropped her weapon, going down clutching at her hand.

I turned my stolen bow toward the battlefield, but it was too much of a melee, everyone engaged together. Even with my new acuity, I couldn’t trust that no one would shift and my arrows wouldn’t strike friend instead of foe.

Cursing, I threw down the bow and ran toward the field. The mother of all earthquakes hit between one step and the next. I went down watching the fighters on the field fall like bowling pins, barely catching myself on my hands, smacking my nose on the ground as the earth continued to convulse.

Mother of all quakes was right. From the center of the field, a figure started to rise, massive and female. I didn’t wait for her to fully emerge before pushing myself to my feet and starting to run again. I knew who it would be—Rhea—and I knew that if she was rising it was because she’d become strong enough to take us all on.

I don’t know what I thought I could do about that. I wasn’t thinking. I was only feeling—the need for vengeance against her for hurting Nick and Christie, for controlling me. She was going down.

Cupid and Hypnos circled her in the air, like the helicopters around King Kong on top of the Empire State Building. Only Rhea was a lot bigger and only slightly less hairy. She had a fountain of black hair spilling all around her head and eyes the color of hard earth. If I’d thought the titans were big, Rhea was humongous.

Just the thing you wanted to say to an angry mother goddess… “Hey, lady, your bazongas are the size of my laundry room.” Yeah, that would go over well. Clearly, however I’d been remade, my snark had survived.

As I ran toward her, something started to burn at my back. I felt tearing, and it was more than my shirt. I stumbled as I tried to twist and run at the same time, to see if someone had stuck a knife between my shoulder blades, and then almost fell on my face as I saw wings rising out of my back instead of the knife hilt I expected. The wings—gargoyle wings, black and leathery and attached to my freakin’ back—flapped as I started to fall, righting me and then raising me up to hover just above the ground.

Had Apollo somehow activated some dormant gorgon genes? I thought about Perseus’s gorgon shield—the crouching gorgon with her monstrous tusked face, wings half furled. This was not the time for vanity, but still I had to touch my face and hair to make sure there were no tusks or snakes rising out of it. Although, right now they’d really come in handy.

As far as I could tell, my face and hair were as they’d always been, which was a good thing, because I didn’t have time for a breakdown over any sort of ereptile dysfunction. Rhea already had her upper body entirely free and was pushing off the ground to get her hips loose as well. If we had any shot at her, it was going to have to be now.

I darted in, still with no plan. With all the static electricity Zeus’s pyrotechnics had unleashed in the air, Rhea’s hair was rising alarmingly, and it gave me ideas. I knew I couldn’t see a thing when my crazy hair flew in my face. It was a start, and I had to do something quickly, because the arrows being sent her way via Althea, Junessa and Apollo were only pissing her off.

I willed myself to fly toward her, hoping my wings would obey, having no idea how to work them. I jerked back and forth as they flapped, trying to work out how not to do that and realized pretty quickly that I just had to relax and go with it. It was like I had some ancestral muscle memory. The wings knew what to do, even if I didn’t.

Rhea tried to bat me out of the sky as I flew in, but I dodged instinctively, flitting like Tinkerbell in the face of Captain Hook. Proportionately, the description was apt. I dashed in closer, rather than dancing out of reach and grabbed hard for a handful of her hair. It was too thick, though, and too heavy for me to grab enough to make any difference, and I realized it as soon as she shook her head hard and all that hair whipped around, lashing me a thousand times and sending me flying.

From across the battlefield Zeus saw what I was trying to do and yelled, “Stay back!”

He whipped up the winds and sent them in a tornado cone toward Rhea. Her own hair whipped up around her, blinding, restraining. Maybe we could lash her up, net her in her own tresses.

Rhea raised her face to the sky and sucked in a breath. It was like the suction of a black hole; the winds roared down into her open maw. Her hair fell still about her head and shoulders. And yes, in front of her face, but it didn’t seem to even give her pause.

I saw her prodigious chest expand until I thought it might bust…no pun intended.

Then she blew out the breath again in a gale-force wind that knocked everyone to their knees. I went head over feet, windmilling through the sky until I crashed into something and crumpled to the ground.