Battle for the Blood (10 page)

“Don’ expect a ticker-tape parade,” Lau said, waking up a little more. “It’s your fault I’m in this mess.”

I stared at her dumbfounded.

“You were on your way to see Nick yourself,” I reminded her. “You were headed for the epicenter of the trouble, and you’re blaming
me
? It’s not like I put out an APB—
Calling all demons. Be on the lookout for an ungrateful ex-cop wearing her cranky pants and riding a dragon. Tasty blood, all you can eat.
”

Hecate snarfed at that.

“Uh-huh, and why is Nick in New York to start with?” Lau asked.

Recovering…from burns he’d gotten while with me. I’d never asked for that either. I’d never have put out
that
call—
Wanted, multiheaded dragon-lizard. Fire breathing a plus.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s all my fault then. Death, taxes, Donald Trump’s hair, the Kennedy assassination. Cellulite,
Star Wars Episode 3
—”

“Airline baggage fees?” Hecate asked.

“Those too. All my fault. We good now? Can we move along?”

“I’m all for moving on,” Lau said. She swiveled her head to look up at Apollo. “And you can put me down now. I think I can stand on my own two feet.”

She swayed as he set her down, but looked like he’d pull back a bloody stump if he touched her with the hand he reached out to help steady her. He checked himself and after a second, she seemed steadier.

“Can you hold on?” I asked. “Eu-meh, can you fly?” I didn’t want to be rude by talking around her as if she weren’t there. I suspected that she understood quite a bit.

Eu-meh hopped and extended her wings, as if to show that she was ready to go. Rocks skittered away down the mountainside as she landed, making me very aware of how easy it would be for us to do the same. With everything we’d been through in the past week or so, my fear of heights had gotten some pretty intensive exposure therapy, but even so I wanted to drop to the ground and hug the earth.

Apollo looked at me in sympathy.

“Okay then, let’s go,” Lau said, which I guessed was all the answer we were going to get about whether she could hold on. “But I think you might want to let someone else hold that sword. I heard something about demon blood.”

Hecate snapped a look at me, her eyes narrowing. “Demon blood?”

I refused to look away. “Maybe. We don’t know. I might have gotten a little carried away back there.”

“Damn, girl, I like you better all the time…except for that whole thing about the airline baggage fees. Not your finest moment.”

“Yeah, well, wings…grow a pair.”

I flapped mine in emphasis and Hecate’s laugh split the night.

“
I’ll
hold the sword,” Apollo cut in, before anyone else could suggest it.

Eu-meh squatted on her six legs, like a lizard hunkered belly to ground to suck up the last of the heat on a desert night. We all climbed on, adjusted, readjusted. I held Lyssa this time, way too intimately close to the demoness who, according to Apollo, had driven Hercules out of his head. Had driven him to murder. It was a comforting thought in the midst of all my other comforting thoughts. Luckily, they were too busy crowding each other and fighting for ascendance for me to focus on any one freak-out.

The trip passed in a haze of near insanity. Not exactly a new experience for me.

I remembered reading Tolkien when I was a kid and thought now that a special kind of madness must have possessed him to take forty-some pages to describe a trip in which nothing major happened. All I could say about our trip was that it was long. It was dark; it was night. There were stars. For a little while there were city lights, but for the most part we were soaring over the Atlantic with the ocean below darker than the sky above. It was windy; it was cold; it was fairly miserable. And to top it all off, Lyssa snored like a camel with sinus issues.

But we knew when we were getting close long before we actually reached the outskirts of the city. The lights themselves were bright enough to be seen from far off, but on top of that, boats and floodlights in the harbor practically made night into day, and powerful lights swept the city from the skies—air support. Helicopters. We’d heard that the city was shut down, cut off from the outside world. Seeing it was a completely different matter.

We were facing martial law.

Somehow we had to land a dragon in a city on lockdown without getting shot out of the sky.

Chapter Nine

Hecate cursed fluently—or so I assumed from the tone. The wind whipped away her words, reducing them to angry energy.

“What do we do now?” she shouted. That much I got.

“Hold on!” Lau shouted back. She was pressed low over Eu-meh’s neck, riding her like a jockey, and suddenly the dragon dipped, headed at about a forty-five degree angle straight for the choppy waters of the Atlantic. I squawked and squeezed Lyssa tightly in the effort to get a better grip on Apollo in front of us. I suddenly wished my arms were long enough to wrap around him and back on themselves like Velcro straps. But there was a demon between us. My legs were trembling with how hard I’d been holding on already and for how long. I was terrified they’d give out at some strategic moment, like when we suddenly banked to avoid unfriendly fire.

“What the hell!” Hecate yelled.

“Going in low,” Lau shouted, the wind shearing off her words, “beneath the radar.”

“So we get shot down from the ground rather than the air?” I asked. My heart was pounding hard enough to break ribs.

But either no one heard me or they didn’t find it worth a response.

The wind chill was ridiculous now, and my muscles were trembling from more than exertion. We leveled out as we neared the water, growing ever closer to the city lights. I wondered where on earth one landed a dragon in the Big Apple and how long it would take panic to set in. Oh right, we were already there. Zombie plagues tended to have that effect. Maybe it would even help us if everyone obeyed the warnings and stayed inside, away from possible contagions.

“There,” Lau shouted into the wind, daringly lifting a hand to point.

I tried to follow her gaze, squinting into the stinging air, but she clearly saw some kind of pattern or lack thereof in the lights that I didn’t.

As we got closer, I thought I might be seeing what she was seeing, A big rectangular area of blackout in the sea of lights…or near blackout. There was a smaller illuminated spot in the center and paler areas of light here and there, but a definite break in the pattern nonetheless. Central Park? I could think of nothing else beyond maybe the Chrysler and Empire State buildings that would make such an impression from far off. But as we got closer, I saw something that made no sense, something I couldn’t reconcile with the concrete and neon of the city that never sleeps. It looked like…it couldn’t be—a castle atop a rocky hill. Did they even
have
hills in Manhattan? Or castles?

“Where are we?” I yelled to Apollo, hoping he could hear over the rushing wind.

My precog kicked in right then, sending voltage through my heart and whipping my head around to locate the danger. Apollo was doing the same, and I knew he felt it too. Beneath us, Victorian-looking streetlamps provided pools of illumination. Everything looked okay on the ground, as far as we could see from our height, but…

I registered the thwapping of helicopter blades a split second before a blinding light hit me full in the face. A searchlight, sweeping us from Eu-meh’s tip to tail. I hadn’t heard the beating of the blades over the wind whipping past my ears, but now that I was aware, I wondered how we could have missed it. The light passed for just a second, but I blinked after it, knowing it would be back.

“Dive!” I shouted.

“Dive? Are you nuts?” Lau responded. “You can’t just drop a two-ton dragon. We need a runway, space to slow and land.”

The sound of the helicopter was getting closer. Eu-meh rolled to the right as the light swept us a second time. The sudden movement knocked me half-loose from my seat and Lyssa started to slip from my grip. My legs tightened on Eu-meh’s sides and I grabbed for Lyssa, my hands closing on her like clamps, feeling the adrenaline rush of panic give me superhuman strength. But I didn’t have the leverage to compensate for the overbalancing of bodies, and her weight whipped me out of my seat.

Fear kicked me like a mule in my chest. I was already kissing my ass good-bye, my life passing before my eyes—Mom, Yiayia, Spiro, Nick and Apollo—my life measured in people, when I remembered my wings. Or rather, they remembered themselves, beating furiously, trying to slow our descent, but I was at such an awkward angle, Lyssa pulling us down, already plummeting.

Some kind of warning issued from a loudspeaker on the helicopter, nearly drowning out my name as someone, probably Apollo, called it out. I couldn’t respond anyway. Every breath, every ounce of strength I had I put into my wings, into beating back the ground before it could flatten us like pancakes.

Lyssa jerked suddenly in my grasp, choosing that moment to come awake. I had an instant to hope she was just twitching in her sleep before the screaming began, amplified by madness and fear.

I felt something flood through me, like adrenaline on speed, like…a crazy cocktail of energy, anger and denial.
This was not happening.
If I had to bitch-slap reality to get it to fall in line, I was not going out like this. Power pushed out to my wings. I flapped harder, gripped Lyssa more tightly to contain her struggles.

The ground was only a few man heights below us when our descent stopped and I was able to hold us aloft. The searchlight hit me full in the face as I searched the sky for the others, but it passed quickly by, leaving me momentarily blind. Before it could find us again, I brought us to the ground at the base of the castle’s promontory. Lyssa’s feet hit first, of course, and I had to let her go rather than unbalance. She immediately scrambled to keep her feet and backed away from me, her eyes black holes of madness.

I landed close by and without thinking swung openhanded to slap her face. Maybe I’d seen too many movies, but it always worked there to bring the hysterical woman around…and it was almost always a woman. (Damned sexist filmmakers.) She hauled back on contact, staring at me in shock, but the madness pulled back from her eyes like the tar pits letting go of a sunken prize—still clinging to the outskirts, ready to suck it back in. Anger boiled in the depths of those eyes.

“You nearly killed us!” she shrieked. “You crazy…whatever you are.”

“Saved you, you mean. And you’re welcome,” I countered.

Eu-meh’s cry pulled my gaze back to the sky, where she banked and wheeled, clearly headed to hide behind the castle. With a flash, something shot out of the copter, and Eu-meh suddenly arched, her wings faltering. Her cry changed to one of pain rather than defiance. I ran toward where it looked like she’d go down, hoping that the copter would hold fire, those inside tasked to capture and question rather than annihilate.

My wings created drag, wanting to act like parachutes behind me. I was awkward on my feet, something I hated, especially now when it counted. I launched myself into the air again—not high, but high enough that I could clear the ground and eat up the distance between me and my friends. I hoped Lyssa would follow. I didn’t want to think of unleashing her on an unsuspecting city or working her madness on those already on the attack, but I couldn’t babysit her while my friends fell to their deaths.

Eu-meh was flapping frantically now, panicked instead of purposeful. One wing wasn’t working the way it should, and while she was slowing their descent, she was still going down hard and at an angle. The way she was canted now, she was going to land on her shoulder, tearing up her damaged wing, if not the bone and muscle that went with it.

I flew around to her other side, yelling, “This way. Everyone lean this way. She needs the ballast!”

For once, not even Lau argued with me. Hecate, Apollo and Lau all leaned their weight over the side of the good wing, but it wasn’t enough and there was no time for anything else. They’d strike in a flash.

“Bail!” I shouted. “You’re going to have to bail. I’ll catch you.”

“All at once?” Lau yelled back.

“I’ll do my best.”

It wasn’t possible. I knew that. She did too, clearly. There was no time to explain that what I couldn’t prevent, Hecate could heal. There’d still be the pain and the danger of something they couldn’t come back from.

With faith that humbled me, Apollo made the leap first, falling into me and knocking me back. I caught him in a way that would have made my family of trapeze artists proud. If only they could see me now… The thought flashed even though I didn’t have time for it.

I pounded my wings hard to keep us aloft. The loss of Apollo’s weight had barely registered on Eu-meh, pain or panic making her flap with greater urgency and less effect.

“Next!” I yelled.

Hecate glanced at Lau, who shook her head adamantly. Hecate didn’t waste breath convincing her, but slid off, reaching for my neck and hanging on for dear life. That was all the weight I could take. We sank to the ground, and Hecate slid down my body as soon as she could touch. Apollo right after.

Eu-meh struck as he did, the whole area quaking from the impact. Hecate, Apollo and I ran for the stone cliffs of the castle that had stopped Eu-meh’s flight. She was crumpled against the base of it now, a tangle of legs, wings and neck. There was no sign of Lau.

The helicopter was looking for them as well, the searchlight sweeping the ground. It would find us at any second. Panic squeezed my heart in my chest.

“Can’t you do anything?” I yelled at Hecate.

“Do you want me to hide us or do you want me to heal?” she snapped back, looking poisonous at the idea that she was asking rather than telling me what to do. I knew there was a reckoning ahead.

“Hide now, heal later.”

If there was a later.

I expected her to stop dead in her tracks and begin muttering a spell, but instead she ran even faster for the castle cliff, dodging the downed dragon to put her hand flat against the stone wall, holding the other out toward the oncoming helicopter. Her eyes rolled up into her head and came back black as night, flashing as her chant grew in power and volume. I was torn between watching her and the air rippling in front of her, and crawling over Eu-meh in search of Lau.

The dragon let out a piteous sound, and I went to her head, looking to calm and quiet her. Her eyes were glazed with pain, but they were aware, alert. One of her wings moved and Lau pushed out from beneath it, looking shaky but alive.

“We have to get out of here,” she said, sliding down Eu-meh’s body toward her head, taking her muzzle between her hands to gaze into the dragon’s pain-filled eyes. “Are you okay, baby? Can you move?”

I looked away; it seemed like a private moment.

“We’re okay for now,” Hecate said. “I’ve cast an illusion to make the cliff appear to extend out farther than it does. We’re ‘behind’ it, so they can’t see us, but they’re bound to land and explore. If they hear us or if they spread out to search… I don’t know how much time I’ve bought us.”

Lyssa ran up then, possibly having decided she was better with us than with men shooting out of helicopters. The madness still licked at the corners of her eyes.

“What the hells was that?” she asked. “What have you dragged me into?”

“You ever see the movie
Escape from New York
?” Apollo asked. “In this case they’re trying to contain a contagion and not criminals, but it’s the same idea. They don’t want anyone getting in with the power to get anyone out.”

“But the news reports—the virus isn’t limited to the city anymore,” I protested.

“You want logic or you want reality? The reality is our dragon was just shot down. The city is quarantined. Maybe the plague has broken free, but it seems to have started here. Whether they’re thinking about containment and slowing the spread, or still trying to isolate patient zero, we’ve entered a no-fly zone. We might be wingless right now, but the guys—or girls,” he jumped in before I could protest, “—in that copter are not going to forget what they saw.”

“But they will rationalize,” I said.

Because there was no way they were going to report an unidentified dragon-shaped flying object.

“Focus, people,” Lau snapped, looking from Eu-meh to us. “Where are we? What do we do?”

“Belvedere Castle,” Apollo said. “I was here once for a shoot. It’s a weather station in the center of Central Park. Impressive as hell from the outside, but not much to it on the inside. No place to hide a dragon, even if it wouldn’t be the first place they’d look since we landed practically on top of it.”

“Great, any suggestions?” she said wryly.

My phone chose that moment to ring—“Chalk Outline” by Three Days Grace, a song that always made me think of Hermes…or possibly the way I’d like to see him. I reserved it just for him. Of course the trickster god
would
call at the worst possible moment. But the tingle that ran through me as my hand closed around the phone said that this was a call I should take.

“What,” I growled into the phone as low as I could. “Now is not a good time.”

“Is it ever? Where are you?”

“Where are
you
?” I countered, wondering if he was calling for bail money or a character witness. Last I knew, he was stuck with Interpol.

“Certainly not right behind you,” he said.

I whirled around, phone still pressed to my ear, to see Hermes in his Iemisch form—body of a fox, tail of a serpent. The fox face seemed to laugh at the look I wore, and the tail lashed happily, like a cat who’d gotten into the cream.

“What the—” The shaken look cleared from Lau’s face as she dropped into a warrior stance, ready to take him on.

Hermes barked out a laugh, and in the blink of an eye went from semi-serpent to man. I didn’t know how he ended up with clothes on. Maybe it was all illusion, but I was pretty happy for at least the appearance of those khakis and the open-necked white shirt.

Lau went from shaken to stunned. “But—how—”

“You ride a dragon and
that
impresses you?” Hermes said. “If you like that, I have some magic beans and a bridge you could buy. The latter has a troll under it, but he works for tips.” He was in full-on charm mode, even showing a dimple in his right cheek I didn’t remember seeing before.

“Keep it down,” I spat. Because in the distance, the sound of the copter blades was winding down and a drill-sergeant voice was issuing orders for the crew to fan out and search the grounds.