Battle for the Blood (5 page)

She looked at Apollo beneath her lashes. “I mean, how many women did
you
marry over the years?”

Apollo looked steadily back at her. “At least
I
don’t have commitment issues.”

“Oh, I am wounded,” Hecate said, miming plunging her fork into her heart.

“Children,” I cut in. “Am I going to have to separate you two?”

“No,” Hecate said, at the same time Apollo came out with, “Yes, please.”

“Anything you can tell us about her or about Namtar?” I asked to get us back on track.

“She was a beautiful woman, back in the day. Beautiful like a snake with the bright colors and gleaming venom. Namtar was…Namtar. Dark like the color of dried blood, fever hot, eyes a miasma that would draw you in and with a cutting, biting, poisonous wit. And that tail…” She sounded wistful.

“Weaknesses?”

“Lack of faith, the same malaise that affects us all.”

“But he’s back. Any guesses why?”

“Could be that Rhea woke him when she rose. Could be the modern zeitgeist—dystopian fiction, the zombie craze. Hell, just think about that one for a minute. You have zombie runs, zombie pub crawls, television shows, movies, comics…even the CDC with their zombie-preparedness guidelines to educate people about what to do to prevent an infectious outbreak. Then you have those people on the news we heard about, the ones eating each other’s faces… Hell, we could have woken him ourselves with all the insanity. People might not know Namtar by name, but they believe in what he does. They have
faith
.”

“Holy crap.”

“You have such a flare for language,” Hecate said.

Our food arrived, and we dug into it. I was glad I’d opted for the vegetarian dish. Even with that, it was hard to eat past the lump in my throat. What was it Hades had said?
Belief forms reality?
If so, we might have done this, mankind as a whole. America alone had become a nation of germaphobes—hand sanitizer on every desk and every key chain, whole tubs of it at the grocery store to wipe down carts. How on earth did we pacify an entire populace and calm people’s worst fears even as they were coming true?

First thing in the early, early morning, we had a grave and a legendary sword to dig up.

Mycenae was…epic, even in the dark of night with only the moon and a few security lights shining on it. No, epic was too small a word, a four-letter word even. Mycenae was—grandiose, splendiferous. To quote
Pinky and the Brain
, “fantastically amazing”. It was the textbook example of Cyclopean construction, meaning that the stones used were so monstrous and massive that latecomers could only conceive that they were placed there by the Cyclopes, legendary one-eyed giants. For all I knew, they had been. Looking at the incredible Lion Gate, with the huge stone monoliths several times my height standing to either side of the entrance and the multi-ton lintel above them holding up the slab of rearing lions carved into it, all I could say was “wow”—even with the lions currently missing their heads.

“You’ve never seen Mycenae before?” Apollo asked.

“Wow,” I said again. It seemed all I was capable of. It was on a loop in my brain. “Wow.”

“You said that,” Hecate pointed out helpfully.

“It bears repeating,” I answered with a glare, but it was a short one, because it took my gaze away from the majesty all around me. Like all other ancient sites in Greece, Mycenae had been built on a mountaintop. The scenery was amazing, and normally I found it hard to believe that man (or Cyclops) could create anything as beautiful as nature, but Mycenae was enough to shift my whole world view.

“Where to now?” Apollo asked. “Did Jesus’s research give any indication of where Perseus’s grave might be?”

“Well, if it
is
here, the earliest graves found were to the west of the acropolis near the cistern.”

“In or outside of the walls?”

“Both, the walls were built overtop of them.”

“But if Perseus founded the city…” Apollo began.

“Then
his
grave is likely inside the walls,” Hecate finished.

Which complicated things about twofold, since there’d likely be security measures to prevent people vandalizing the site.

“Can you get us inside?” I asked her.

It would be great if the witch was good for more than finishing Apollo’s sentences. I knew the thought wasn’t fair. I’d seen her heal. Him in particular. But I was surprised to find myself a little bit jealous of Hecate. She was striking and gorgeous in a way I’d never be, and clearly she and Apollo had history. They knew all the same gods, had probably even been to some of the same orgies.
Yes, and they’d had thousands of years to get together and hadn’t. What does that tell you?
my saner, more sensible side asked.

“Piece of cake,” Hecate said.

She squatted to the ground, a centimeter or two shy of kneeling and scraped together with her fingers a pile of dry dirt and rocky soil. Once it was nearly to sandcastle size, she began to swirl her right index finger around and around in the dirt, muttering something darkly beneath her breath. As her volume rose, so did the pile of dirt, becoming a tiny tornado. Hecate rose along with it, her hands coming up to her sides and then rising to shoulder level and above. The cloud of dust, dirt and pebbles rose with her, drawing more debris to itself until it was a cyclonic sandstorm. I had to avert my eyes as the grit and winds grew more severe, and clench my lips against asking what she was up to lest I get a mouthful of dirt.

The cyclone moved toward us, enveloping but not flaying us somehow, and as Hecate’s hands reached their pinnacle above her head, the cone rose up off the ground, taking us all with it. I made a sound I was sure Hecate would taunt me for later and clutched to my side one of the shovels we’d bought along. With my other hand, I reached out instinctively for Apollo. He was reaching for me as well, and we met in the middle, holding each other as the cloud lifted, taking us over the closed gates and releasing us inches above the ground inside so that we had to stumble to keep our feet. Hecate kept chanting and lowered her hands slowly, letting the cyclone lose force and materials at a steady rate until it was no more.

I wondered what she would do for an encore.

“Cool,” I had to admit. It occurred to me then that the mother of witches was probably one deity who’d never had to worry about losing her worship or her power.

“Thank you,” she said, turning an almost-feral smile on me. Her eyes had gone darker than ever, black holes with the brown of the cyclone still swirling like an afterimage. She had to blink a few times before they got back to somewhat normal.

That
was when I remembered that I could fly and could probably have brought the others in one by one, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as flashy. Damn, I had to get used to these wings and start thinking in terms of probabilities rather than liabilities.

“This way,” I said, retaking if not leadership then at least an active role. I knew from the map Jesus had sent that the cistern was on the far side of the complex from the Lion Gate, and so I started off in the right direction, figuring that when paths diverged, I could consult the file to orient myself again.

It was cool up here at the top of the mountain without any buildings to block the wind—at least, none still standing in near totality—and no modern conveniences to blow hot air. In fact, it was as though the modern world had dropped away entirely, leaving us in another time.

We had to be careful with our footing once we got beyond the pressed-earth walkway at the entrance. Everywhere we looked there were roped-off excavation pits with oversized stones, some still stacked on top of each other, forming the foundation of what would have been buildings at some point in the past, and some laying by themselves with grass growing all around. In the near dark, it was tricky to navigate. My wings wanted to flap every time my balance got iffy, until I was half tempted to rip out the back of my shirt and let them loose. Apollo’s shirt. Whatever. It was too bad there wasn’t any ancient god of tailoring I could go to for a custom wardrobe. Wait, was there? I’d ask, not that it would matter ultimately. Either I’d save the world and the Grey Sisters would keep their end of the bargain, or I wouldn’t and wings would be the least of my problems.

There were stones to the left of us, stones to the right…the demented little deejay in my head sing-songed in a parody of Steve Miller Band’s “Stuck in the Middle with You”. Just to be certain of our bearings I took out my phone to study the map, but the complex wasn’t as big as I’d have expected, given how huge it looked in myth and legend, and it wasn’t very long before we hit the steps down to the “secret cistern”, according to my map.

“You know, in Mayan times, cisterns were a place of sacrifice,” Hecate said casually. “People would be cast into the very same cisterns from which people drew their water.”

I turned to stare at her, “Are you trying to tell us something about
these
cisterns…”

“I’m just making conversation. Sheesh, chill. She always like this?” Hecate asked Apollo.

“She hasn’t had caffeine in hours,” he said, in poor defense of my honor.

It was true, I hadn’t. Come to think of it, I also hadn’t had any ambrosia since the great battle where I’d gotten my wings and nearly lost my life. And yet I’d healed anyway. It would be cause for celebration, if it meant what I thought it did—that my addiction was gone, but with my metamorphosis and my supernatural healing, I knew there was something more to it. I was becoming…something other. I just hoped I still matched the picture on my passport when all was said and done. Otherwise, I was going to have a helluva time getting home.

The water in the cistern was blacker than the tail end of night. Those same chunky stones that were all around the site formed a wall surrounding the well. They were bleached nearly white—or so it looked in the moonlight—like bones scoured clean by scavengers. The conservators of the site had roped off the approach to the cistern, both to keep people from falling in and from defacing the site. While we could easily access the pool by stepping over the rope “barrier”, the moonlight couldn’t penetrate the pool so easily. All this talk of watery sacrifices had me imagining stinking, waterlogged bodies pulling themselves up out of the cistern and coming for us, skin sloughing off, bellies bloated… I’d had nightmares like that.

Of course, we probably had more to fear from some kind of site security than from supernatural forces.

Famous last words.

“Where do we even start?” I asked, looking at Hecate. “Any chance you have some kind of grave sense?”

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Some kind of locator spell? But it doesn’t work like that. Once the soul is gone from a thing, the connection is severed. I couldn’t trace Perseus back to his body, and if he ever knew where he was buried, he’s forgotten in the thousands of years since. It’s amazing how much memories can fade over time.”

Hell, witnesses had trouble remembering what they saw on the same day they saw it, I could well imagine spiritual senility.

My precog kicked me in the gut, whipping my head around just as Apollo said, “Um, girls, maybe we can start there.”

It didn’t seem like the time to take him to task over calling us “girls”—not when the stuff of nightmares was ripping itself out of the ground farther west of the cistern.

Chapter Five

By nightmares, I meant a live Halloween set with the skeletons clawing their way out of the earth. Already, bones—sheer bones that should no way, no how have been able to animate—were scrabbling and arm bones were straining to use muscles no longer attached to pull the rest of the body up out of the ground.

We weren’t exactly loaded down with weaponry, prepared to dig but not take on whatever the hell we were about to face. But Apollo gave a war cry and heaved his shovel up over his shoulder. He ran forward, poised to cut the arms off at the elbows before they could raise the rest of the creature, but another pair of hands suddenly erupted out of the earth, wrapping around his ankles with preternatural accuracy, and he started to go down.

My wings flapped and I tore at the back of my shirt, ripping it in half so that it clung together just at the yolk and my wings burst free, lifting me off the ground. I swooped toward Apollo, hands out to grab him up out of the fray, but the skeletal hands were unnaturally strong, and they weren’t letting go so easily. There were more now, gripping and binding him to the earth, and I feared my tug of war would tear him in half. Hecate launched herself at the ground, hacking at brittle bones with the trowel she’d brought for excavation, but it was torn almost immediately from her hands.

She began to mutter a spell. Something rose up behind her, a full skeleton, wearing a sagging clay necklace with more than half the beads missing and the flapping remains of what might once have been a dress…or a sack. Dried patches of hair still clung to the scalp, dark like rot. I opened my mouth to call out a warning as the thing reached for her, but the cry was knocked out of me as arms suddenly banded around my chest, squeezing me from behind like an anaconda and rooting me to the ground.

Desperately, I fought the grip, kicking and thrashing, clawing at the arms, but with no flesh to rip into, all I hit was bone and the only blood spilled was mine when my nails tore away. My wings flared futilely, panicked at the constriction, but the grip on me only tightened, and my vision started to blacken with every breath I failed to draw.

This was
not
going to happen. We weren’t going out like this, at the top of the world, at the hands of mindless monsters.

The one that held me in its iron grip hissed in my ear. Speech, I knew it even if I couldn’t understand. There was a cadence to it…and a scent. The breath was fetid with long-ago death, the kind that had fertilized new and poisonous life, like whatever motes had sickened archaeologists who’d opened ancient tombs without proper care, giving rise to lingering death and legends of mummy’s curses.

As I struggled for breath, Apollo began to sink into the ground, pulled by the innumerable hands clawing at him. I fought all the harder. I had to get free before I blacked out. I had to get to him.

I launched back with my heel, hammering away at the brittle shinbone of my captor. I heard a crack, but the arms around me didn’t even loosen, and so I didn’t stop, battering at the same spot again and again until the entire leg buckled and the skeleton canted to the side. I took swift advantage, hurling my weight in the same direction. I began to slip, and my wings flapped outward, throwing off the grasping arms trying for a new hold. Grabbing and missing threw the thing even farther off-balance, and the skeleton staggered forward…right into the roundhouse kick I launched at chest level. The sternum was right there, a relatively fragile bone for protecting such important infrastructure, all of which was long gone. But something moved behind those dark eye sockets, a flash of intelligence or at least cunning, and it grabbed at my foot as it would have connected, twisting hard. I had to flip fast, knowing I’d go down but lashing out with my other foot for the head, hoping to take the thing with me. It connected, and the skull jerked to the side, but didn’t go flying off or anything wonderfully cinematic.

I fell to the ground and the thing fell on top of me, mandible gnashing, going for my throat, even though the human mouth was so not meant for ripping out jugulars. It also wasn’t made to animate without muscle or brain or nerves to send messages back and forth between the two. I struck out at those eerily alive eyes, carving fingers into the sockets and fighting down bile as they met something wet and suctiony deep inside. Whatever they struck seemed to pull at my fingers like tentacles, as if they’d yank me in and make me part of them. Horrified, I pulled back, but the skull came with me, mandibles still chomping together. I shook my hands so hard I nearly dislocated my wrists and finally the skull came free, sailing through the air. My fingers were still gunked and starting to lose feeling, as if necrosis was setting in. But I couldn’t think about that now. I had to get to the others. I kicked the rest of the skeleton out of my way and rose to find Hecate stabbing her trowel up through the nose and into the cranial cavity of a skeleton that had her similarly pinned.

Apollo’s shovel lay abandoned a foot from the god-shaped indentation in the ground where I’d last seen him. I was afraid to stab the blade into the ground to dig for him for fear that I’d hit him somewhere vital, so I knelt beside the disturbed earth and thrust in with my arms. They didn’t go far. Whatever I was becoming, it was clearly not the
X-Men
’s Wolverine. No adamantium for me. Just flesh and blood.

“Hecate!” I called. “A little help here?”

She snarled, but came to kneel as well. She held out a hand to the dirt, muttering a spell that whipped out of her in a gust of power as she made contact. The dirt suddenly seemed to shift more like sand than hard-packed dirt. We both reached in, arms buried up to our chests, searching for Apollo, but to no avail.

“Cover your eyes,” Hecate warned, and without waiting to make sure I obeyed, she started to swirl her finger around in the sand as she had the grit at the front gate, and another cyclone started, ready to raise sand out of the pit.

I yanked my arms from the grave and covered my face with them as the first of the sand lashed out, scouring me as though it would whip the skin from my body and leave me like the skeletons we’d fought. The wind continued to whip, gaining force, and then there was a great sound, like a gasping breath, and I had to risk my eyesight to look.

I peeked over my concealing arms to see Apollo rise up out of the pit, gasping and filthy and grasping a sword. He flailed it around him like he was blind—which maybe he was from the sand—and still expected to be fighting enemies. Hecate let the wind die and called out to him, telling him to stand down. The tension drained out of Apollo and the sword fell to his side as he let her help him out, coughing up dirt and wheezing with the haste to take in the air he’d been lacking.

My precog kicked up again, louder this time, flooding me with adrenaline.

“We have to get out of here,” I told them. I didn’t know if it was site security or more skeletons, but
something
was coming. Something…

I tried to reach for Apollo to help him up, but while I saw my hands connect with his arm, I couldn’t feel it, and they didn’t have the strength to grasp. Whatever had reached for me from the eye sockets of that skull still had hold of me, and once again my body wasn’t my own. Not all if it. I was damn sick of the arrangement.

He didn’t seem to notice, still sand-blind. Hecate helped him to his feet and reached a hand for his eyes, theoretically to quick-heal them, when a voice stopped her, as rough and cracked as a desert grave.

“Good, you have found it. I knew you would with the proper motivation… Now, hand it over.”

Hecate whirled, my wings flared and I turned, half levitating as I did so and instinctively moving closer to Apollo, standing between him and the threat, because there was no mistaking that’s what it was. For his part, he grabbed the fallen sword and held it at the ready.

The figure we faced looked like something out of a sci-fi flick. Not
The Mummy
, because we were in the wrong place geographically for that, but close enough. Her clothes—a tunic or chiton or something—hung off of her like a sack, in contrast to the skin that seemed to be baked onto her bones without the meat or fat or muscle to separate them. Her elaborate jewelry sat hard on her deflated chest. She looked like well-tanned leather. Her eyes weren’t dark pools like the others, but glittered in the darkness like the moonlight striking black water. Whether her nose would have been hawklike before her cheeks and all had sunken was a moot point, because it certainly was now. In one clawlike hand, she held a sinew-wrapped spear—obsidian tipped, it appeared. She was, in a word, intimidating, all seven plus feet of her.

“Hušbišag,” Hecate said, sounding as though she were choking on the name. “You’re looking…well.”

Hušbišag made a dry-coughing sound I took to be a laugh. “I am flattered that you bother to lie, however I won’t be distracted. Hand over the sword.”

“What do you want with it?” I asked.

Bones rattled behind us, and I took my gaze off her long enough to see the skeletons rearticulating. One had a half-bashed-in skull, glaring at us from its one good eye; another’s leg was bent at a ludicrous angle; yet another was missing arms. None that I could see were whole, but I didn’t have time for a full study.

“To foil you, of course,” said the seven-foot skeleton, snapping her fingers together with a crack like a wishbone breaking.

The skeletons fell on us, grabbing for the sword, reaching for shoulders, heads, necks… I beat my wings hard, knocking them away from me before they could latch on. Apollo lashed about him with the sword as I rose up into the air. If Airbag or whatever her name was went down, so would they all, I was sure of it. I launched myself straight at her, and she braced the spear she held, ready to impale me. She was staring right at me, her target, and I glared back into those eerie eyes and yelled, “Freeze!”

She thrust forward with the spear, and I was so shocked at her movement that I faltered in flight, but wasn’t able to dart out of the way. The spear tip pierced the membrane of one of my wings, and she ripped downward with it, tearing a gaping hole all the way through. I plummeted to the ground. My feet hit hard and off-balance. I lunged forward, straight into her. She couldn’t get the spear in place again quickly enough to pierce me, but improvised by whipping the shaft against my back, cracking across my shoulder blades. I arched in pain and reached for the haft of the spear to wrestle her for it, but I couldn’t even feel it when my hands hit. They were still dead, numb, unable to grasp. For the first time since I’d seen Apollo disappear into the ground, I had a spike of fear, and my precog amped it up tenfold, not that I needed it to know that things were going horribly wrong.

She had me trapped between her spear and her desiccated chest. My heart was beating hard enough to hurt, but not cartoonishly hard enough to pound right out of my chest, knocking her away.

Hecate cried out something behind me, but I couldn’t understand a word of it.

I thrashed in Hubashag’s grip, trying to fight my way out, but she started to constrict her embrace, crushing the life and the air out of me. I stomped desperately down on the fragile bones of her feet, protected only by flimsy sandals that looked as dried out as she was, but while I heard bones crack, her only response was to squeeze tighter.

I didn’t know how much longer I had. For the second time, black spots crept into my vision, which was flickering out. I craned my head to look into the goddess’s wild eyes and saw a sudden shadow flash across the moonlit depths. I didn’t know what it was, whether it was something for us or against, until I heard the growl, eerie and awful…the kind that made every hair on your body stand up and made your heart go cold as, well I’d say a witch’s tit, but I was sure Hecate would take exception to that. I knew what I’d see next would be glowing eyes, sleek, powerful bodies with jaws dripping death.

Hellhounds. Hecate had called for backup.

The ghastly goddess let me go suddenly to fling her arms up as one of the hounds launched himself right over me to get to her. I dropped, gasping for breath, and the beast’s hind claws scratched at my back and wings, trying to find purchase to keep up its attack as she tried to bat it away. I pivoted, still on the ground, but with my vision clearing now that I was able to breathe. I thrust my hands up to knock away her spear. My hands still weren’t clasping, but I struck with enough force that, distracted as she was, it fell to the ground.

I kicked it away and rolled in the opposite direction before rising up to get a better look at the battlefield. A second hound launched itself at Hubistank or whatever the hell her name was. Then a third. She howled and fought like the wind, like a dervish, but there were so many claws and teeth going for her. Now the black spots in my vision resolved into hellhounds, all as excited as any dog with a bone.

Apollo was swinging about with the Sword of Perseus, cutting down skeletons left and right, slashing through bone like it was butter. Hecate was doing her whirlwind trick again, but instead of swirling dirt, the sun-whitened stone all around was flying, mostly at skulls, which came tumbling off and rolling on the ground.

“Enough!” Hubistank yelled. “We fight another day!”

She got her fingers free of the hellhounds and snapped them hard, again the sound of bones breaking, and then suddenly all was silence. The ghastly goddess and her posse were gone as though they’d never been. Even the bones some of the hellhounds had been chewing disappeared straight out of their jaws, and they made an almost comical sound of doggy disappointment, somewhere between a yelp and a whine. Hecate took pity on them and materialized a few bones, possibly even from the Grey Sisters’ stash, and sent them away happy.

“Wow, she’s really let herself go,” Hecate said when the hellhounds had dashed off back to Hades.

I stared at her like she was crazy…the same way people often looked at me.

“Seriously, we were almost wiped out and
that’s
all you have to say?” I asked.

“Well, maybe not
all
,” she admitted.