Rise of the Blood

Chapter Two

An hour later I hesitated in the entrance to Chi Chi’s, the upscale spa Christie insisted on taking me to for wedding prep. I gave it one last try. “You do realize that the last time I set foot in one of these places, someone got killed.”

Christie, my BFF and absolute polar opposite, gave me a look. “Your point being?”

“I’m just saying, there’s precedent.”

“So you want me to believe you’re superstitious about spas?”

I shrugged. “It could happen again, you don’t know. Might even be me who snaps.”

I wasn’t a mani-pedi sort of girl. I wasn’t any sort of girl. Somehow I’d managed to achieve total womanhood without any of the L.A. rites of passage—no wax on or wax off, no shellacking, seaweed wrapping or other creative forms of torture in the name of beauty. I believed firmly in “don’t file what ain’t broke”.

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” she said wryly. “Tori, you’re going to be a bridesmaid in a destination wedding in one of the most romantic places on Earth. What kind of friend would I be if I let you go with raggedy-ass nails and pores the size of champagne bubbles?”

“Champagne bubbles, really?” I asked, pleased.

“Honey, that’s not a good thing.”

My smile fell. “I did mention there’ve been death threats, right? Armani wants to put me into protective custody. I probably shouldn’t be out in public at all.”

“I thought it was Nick these days. Anyway, the man just wants you in his custody, probably with handcuffs and other restraints. Safest place for you is in public with lots of witnesses. And before you start in on the expense, don’t. Just don’t. It’s my treat.”

“But—”

“No buts.” She put her hand to my back and virtually propelled me through the doors, knowing I wouldn’t dare hip check her after she’d helped me take down a killer cult and rescue Uncle Christos just last month.

A woman with the longest, straightest, whitest-blonde hair I’ve ever seen rushed out from behind a counter at the sight of Christie, gripped her by the shoulders and gave her an air kiss to each cheek, which Christie returned. Me, I was too busy watching to be sure she wouldn’t accidentally puncture Christie’s flesh with her dagger-like nails—gold swirled with black.

“Chi Chi,” Christie said, stepping back and turning talon-lady toward me. “This is my dear friend Tori. She’s a blank slate. I want to give her the works.”

Chi Chi eyed me, her brown eyes as dark as her hair was light. It was a striking combination, but her diamond-studded nose ring distracted from it all, focusing attention on the wrong part of her facial landscape. Apparently, I had my own pause button—Chi Chi’s gaze hadn’t dropped any lower than my brows.

“We have a lot of work ahead of us,” she said to Christie. “I think we start with the threading.”

“Threading?” I asked, but not with actual fear. Absolutely not.

“Of the brows,” Christie explained. “They’re a little…untamed.”

I imagined whips, Chi Chi in full lion tamer regalia. I suspected she could take me in a cage match.

“Um, okay.” Show no fear, I reminded myself.

“We’d better get started.”

As she led me away, I looked over my shoulder at Christie for reassurance. She gave me a double thumbs-up and turned toward another…stylist? masochist? glamscaper?…who was coming to take her away, ha, ha. I wondered what Christie was having done, then decided I didn’t really want to know. She was due for some kind of swimsuit shoot in the French Riviera around the time I’d be in Greece enduring Bridezilla and my crazy clan. I assumed scary words like Brazilian were in order. The fact that I even knew a Brazilian wasn’t just someone from Brazil meant I’d been associating with Christie for far too long.

I survived the eyebrow threading, but the facial… I wondered why the guys at Guantanamo Bay bothered with water-boarding when extractions seemed so much easier and, apparently, less controversial. Having a young thing with too much bosom leaning over me with a telescopic lens that made molehills into mountains on the level of Vesuvius was not my idea of a good time. Then she squeezed. I nearly erupted right out of my chair.

“Ow! What did you do, file your nails to points?” I asked, batting her hand away when she came back for another round.

“Some of your pores are impacted. When was the last time you had a facial? Do you exfoliate?”

“Exfoliate? Do I look like a tree? Wait, don’t answer that.” With my hair, I definitely tended toward bushy.

Brittany, as she’d introduced herself when I entered her lair, pushed me back into the rack…er, chair…with a strength that said she could probably bench press me and the horse I rode in on. I’d fought gods and goddesses, but Brittany…clearly she was a force to be reckoned with.

“It will go faster if you stay still.”

Don’t struggle, said the spider to the fly.

I crossed my arms over my own much-smaller chest and tried for stoicism. I failed miserably.

Afterward, I lay there with cucumbers on my eyes and some sort of soothing or detoxifying or gods-knew-what-kind of balm on my skin when Katy Perry’s “California Girls” suddenly blared right in my face. See, torture. I was pretty sure Chi Chi’s had cornered the market.

Then I realized that all the music I’d heard so far had been low key and new-agey. This was definitely not on the menu. It wasn’t coming from my phone, which would melt to slag if I’d ever made it ring out a Katy Perry song. Any self-respecting phone would.

I peeled a cucumber off one eye and squinted around me. An eye stared back—huge, golden brown, long lashed. I jumped out of my chair, and there was no Brittany to hold me back. The other slice of cucumber flopped to the floor.

The music squealed to a halt and a “Whoa!” issued from the magnifying lens that had been right above my head. The eye pulled back to reveal brows, hairline, cheek and, finally, a full face—Hermes, god of mischief.

“So not a good look for you, agape,” he said, eying me top to toenails. “Your pores are the size of—”

“Would everyone stop obsessing about my pores?” I nearly shouted.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize I’d hit a sore spot.”

I forced myself to breathe slowly and count to five. Bashing the magnifying glass would only hurt my hand. Hitting Hermes himself would be so much more satisfying. He’d scared me half to death.

“What do you want?” I asked. “And get to the point? I’m relaxing here.”

“Yeah, you look really relaxed. Maybe a nice massage?”

He waggled brows at me that not only hadn’t been threaded, but were threatening to merge and mate with his hairline.

“Pass.” For all I knew that was next on Christie’s menu of masochism. “The point?”

“Oh, you’re no fun. The point is, you owe me. I’m here to collect.”

“I owe you for what?”

“Keeping your friends safe during the last battle.”

“You mean locking them in the bathroom?”

“Did they escape unscathed?”

“Yes,” I answered reluctantly.

“Then I did my job.”

Crap. It was impossible to win an argument with the god of mischief. By the time I was born he’d already had thousands of years of talking his way into and out of trouble.

“Fine. What do you want?”

“Her number.”

“Whose number?”

“Your friend.”

“Tori,” Christie’s voice carried from outside the room Brittany had tucked me into, far enough back, I’d have thought no one could hear me scream, let alone converse with ancient pains in the butt. “You all right? I hear voices.”

Cerberus crap. A big steaming pile.

“I’m okay. Just…watching a video on my phone.”

“You’re supposed to be relaxing.”

“Let her in!” Hermes said gleefully. “Three’s a party.” Then he gave me that all-over look again. “Hmm, maybe not. Though you do clean up pretty well.”

“Gee, thanks,” I mumbled.

“What’s that?” Christie asked.

“Nothing. I’ll shut it down.”

“Uh, okay. It’s just…the girls thought you might be talking to yourself. They were worried.”

Great, I was a crazy talking, walking disaster with pores the size of volcanic craters. Could the day get any better?

“How about that number?” Hermes asked.

I glared at his face in the magnifying mirror. “I don’t pimp out my friends,” I said in a hush.

“So who’s asking you to?”

“You’re a god. You can’t get her number for yourself?”

“She’s unlisted.”

I wanted to smack my head on something—hard—but it would probably leave a mark Brittany would feel compelled to fix. I didn’t think I’d survive it.

I thought about Hermes’s request. If I denied it, would he turn up in Christie’s bathroom mirror as she stepped out of the shower? It was exactly the sort of thing he’d do. Maybe the fact that he wanted to start out a little more conventionally was a good sign, something to be encouraged? As if Hermes needed encouragement.

“Tell you what,” I said, “I’ll give her your number. If she calls, she calls.”

“That’s the kind of tit for tat I can expect? Honey, I credited you with much better tits.”

I looked down at myself. “Really?”

“Well, perhaps not. Anyway, this will barely touch your debt.”

“Fine, whatever. Are we done here?” Before the spa folk come at me with straightjackets.

“Unless you want to hear about—”

“I don’t,” I said quickly, slapping at the mirror to torque it away and break our connection.

“—the plot—” I heard as he spun away from me. I rushed to grab the mirror back into position again, but he was gone.

There was a knock at the door, followed almost immediately by it opening. “Everything okay in here?” Brittany asked, looking around like I was a babysitter who might have snuck my boyfriend in after hours.

“Sure, except I think my face might be starting to crack.”

She smiled at the thought. Great. “That just means you’re done! You lay back down and I’ll clean you up and turn you over to Valencia.”

“Oh goody.”

If there was more torture, I didn’t even notice. I was too busy thinking about Hermes’s last words. As soon as Torquemada here was finished with me, I was going for the cell phone I’d actually left in my spa locker along with my clothes. Then I was going to blackmail Hermes into telling me what I’d missed.

But Hermes wasn’t taking calls—at least not mine—and Valencia waited outside the locker room door to take me to some fresh hell, pacing and looking in impatiently while I tried my call again, as though her time was more precious than mine. Probably it was, if we were talking hourly rates.

I left a message and surrendered myself.

Christie was already sitting in what looked like a dental chair, her feet soaking in a solution tinted by the Tidy Bowl man.

“Polish,” Valencia said.

It was like she was speaking Greek, only that I’d have understood.

“Um, no, I’m good.”

She snapped a finger toward a wall rack of nail color. “Pick your polish,” she ordered.

“Oh.” I’d been afraid that after all of Brittany’s work, she’d been talking about some kind of buffer or something that would shine me up to a high gloss. “Uh, you pick.”

“What color is your bridesmaid’s gown?” Christie asked.

“Puke green.”

She lowered the magazine she was holding—the one with the star who cheated on the other star, making their new movie promo a study in awkward. “Seriously?”

“For reals. Only I’m sure they call it something a lot fancier.”

Christie canted her head like she was trying to envision me in puke green.

“Val, give her the crushed shell shellac.”

“Wait, shellac?” I asked. But clearly I had no power here; Val was already off to do Christie’s bidding.

“The way you live, yeah. It lasts for, like, ever, and I know you won’t just go home and take it all off with nail polish remover.”

“How do you know?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“How does it work?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“You know, lady, you have an evil streak. I have a friend who would be just perfect for you. And by perfect, I mean that you two together would be truly terrifying.”

“Sounds intriguing. Is he cute?”

“Why don’t you call him and find out for yourself?”

Then I proceeded to tell her all the reasons why it was a very bad idea. The warnings were barely out of my mouth before I realized they were like waving a red cape at a bull or a flame before a moth. Christie had terrible taste in men. Hermes was just her type.

I’d have felt a lot worse if Christie a) wasn’t a grown-up, and b) hadn’t just had me shellacked against my will.

We were followed when we left the salon. With plots afoot and escaped enemies on the loose, I didn’t think I was being paranoid at my concern when a black SUV with tinted windows followed us out of the parking lot.

“Christie, I’m going to pull over here,” I said, keeping an eye on the SUV in my rearview mirror.

She looked where I indicated. “This grease pit? Are you kidding me? You can have a heart attack just breathing the air.”

“They only gave us rabbit food back at the salon. I’m starving. And anyway, I’m testing a theory.”

“How much the seams of your bridesmaid’s gown are likely to hold? Do you hate it that much?”

I did, but that was beside the point. At the last possible second, I cut across two lanes of traffic to take the turn into a fast food drive-thru. I checked the rearview mirror as I switched to see the front of the SUV jerk suddenly into the nearer lane, leaving the back still sticking out. Next came a brake-squealing, metal-crunching impact as another car struck the back of the SUV, causing it to rock on its wheels. I was recalled to my own driving by my front wheel thumping over a concrete piling. I righted our trajectory, pulled into the drive-thru line and grabbed my phone out of the car’s cup holder to report the accident. It was still ringing when the SUV raced off, leaving the scene and the driver of the other car staring stunned after it, half out of her own vehicle. She looked around then, as if to see if anyone else planned to report the rear-ending, shrugged and got back into her car. Just another L.A. day.

I ended the call and relaxed back into my seat.

“What was that all about?” Christie asked.

But, crisis averted, the munchies had kicked in with a vengeance, and I was totally focused on the drive-thru menu board. “They serve sweet potato fries now? Awesome!”

“Tori.”

“Oh, sorry.” I turned a sheepish grin on her. “I don’t know. It might have been those enemies who escaped. Or someone they hired to follow me. Or…”

“Tori!”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered.”

“How?”

“Tomorrow, I leave for Greece.”

Where the old gods would have the home court advantage.