“And what?” he asked.
“Nothing. Forget I mentioned it.” I started to stand, and Hermes grabbed my arm, stopping me. I was afraid he’d feel me shaking and tried to pull back.
“Wait,” he insisted. “You came here for a reason. Here, I’ll buy you a drink more to your liking.” He snapped his fingers, and the bartender appeared like magic from a narrow doorway in the back wall, practically hidden behind a wood-latticed area with wine bottles filling every slot.
“What’ll you have?” Hermes asked. I was surprised he’d bothered to solicit my opinion, he’d been so high-handed so far.
“Diet Coke,” I ordered.
“Come,” he said, “you can do better than that.”
“You asked. I answered,” I said, waiting to see if it took before retaking my seat.
The bartender waited, looking for Hermes’s approval before making a move. Either he was a male chauvinist by nature or that’d been a helluva tip Hermes had given him. Hermes gave the bartender a wink and a nod, and I watched carefully to make sure there were no special additives. Even then, I took only a small sip before committing. Seemed fine. Tasted like swamp water. I sighed and looked longingly at the nectar.
“So, you came for more than my scintillating company?” Hermes asked.
“What did you know about the Back to Earth movement, and when did you know it?” I snapped.
“Is that the question you really want to ask?” he said, downing the last of the nectar in his glass and pushing it aside, just like my question. “What’s done is done. No longer relevant.”
“It’s relevant to
me
.”
“What’s relevant to
me
is that you sit here in a bar discussing a case that is closed instead of looking into what ails my friend Apollo.”
“Fine, what do you know about that?”
“Nothing. If I’d wished him harm, I would have taken a backseat when Dionysus and his bacchae were out for his blood. Or when Hades and his brood…”
“You didn’t exactly help.”
“No, but I warned. As far as the fight, what would have been in it for me?”
I wanted to hit something. Him, by preference. But I had the feeling that wouldn’t go well. Not in my current, shaky, under-oxygenated state.
Hermes was playing some kind of game. He was always in the thick of things—warning, needling, riddling. Never quite helping or hindering. But he’d just given something away I don’t think he’d intended. Whatever he
had
done, there’d been something in it for him. I just had to figure out what.
“You tell me,” I said, echoing his earlier words. “What’s in it for you now?”
“No,” he said simply. Cheerfully. “That’s for me to know and for you to figure out. So much more fun that way. Here, we’ll play twenty questions. By my count, you’ve already used, hmm, let’s say ten, so choose the rest wisely, Grasshopper. And for every question I answer, I get to ask another.”
Gah! More games.
“Fine. First question: did Dionysus get his ambrosia supply from you?”
“Yes. My turn.”
“Wait, yes? Just like that. Did you know what he was planning to
do
with all that ambrosia?”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk, you’re really not very good at this, are you? That was two more questions already. You are down to seven and I haven’t even asked my first.”
I was afraid my teeth would crack from me grinding them.
“
Fine
,” I said again. “Shoot.”
“How many gifts has Apollo given you?”
It took me a minute to process. I’d expected Hermes to go for something crazy personal, like my bra size, or grill me about Christie and how best to get into her bikini briefs. I’d never expected a serious question. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why he wanted to know, but thank goodness I wasn’t oxygen-deprived enough to let it out and waste yet another of my questions. Which meant the strategy of answering a question with a question was right out. No playing dumb for me. And I didn’t know Hermes well, but it didn’t take a genius to realize that if I didn’t answer his query, he’d be finished answering mine.
“Just the one,” I said. He hadn’t asked me
what
the gifts were. Just how many. Two could play at his game of minimalist responses.
“Very good,” he said, eyes glittering.
“Now, about that ambrosia,” I prompted.
“I never asked Dionysus what he intended with it,” Hermes said.
Ah ha. “That wasn’t my question,” I told him, pinning him with my no-nonsense gaze. “I asked what you
knew
, not what you inquired or what you were told.”
The glittering in his eyes took on a more sinister glint, like snake venom.
“I knew that it was too much ambrosia for personal use. Beyond that, I could only speculate.”
Damn, and double damn. Hypothesizing didn’t count as
knowing
. I was going to have to start thinking like a lawyer. Or a snake-in-the-grass trickster god.
“Now,” he said, “what exactly has Apollo given you and what have you given in return?”
He cupped his hands together under his chin and stared steadily at me, awaiting my response.
“That’s two questions,” I said, “linked together by an ‘and’.”
He gave me a crocodile smile. “Why, so it is. Which brings us neck and neck at seven questions remaining.”
“Fine. He’s given me precognition and I haven’t given him a thing.” Except grief, but I was pretty sure that didn’t count.
I had to think carefully about my next questions. “So let me be really clear,” I said after a moment. “The Back to Earth plans to addict people to ambrosia are no more.” I made it a statement. “Do you have plans to pick up where they left off?”
“You’re getting better at this,” he commented. “There is far too much regulation in the food industry. No, I have no intention of picking up their mantle. Now, back to Apollo. You haven’t yet given him anything in return. But what do you owe?”
The question chilled me, because the answer was more complicated than it should have been. Overtly, I didn’t owe anything. I hadn’t asked for my precognition, and Apollo had never mentioned any strings attached, but I knew the story of Cassandra, the prophetess of Troy. Apollo had given her the power to see the future, only to curse her never to be believed when she spurned his advances. Hermes had centuries more knowledge of Apollo than I had. Could it be that my bill had not yet come due? Or could Apollo have learned from his mistakes and outlived his past? I knew what I
wanted
to believe. But wanting didn’t make it so.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“Ah,” he said, unhelpfully. “Ah.”
Now I was torn. As much as I wanted to ask him about the consequences of doing the little dance Apollo and I were doing, I only had six questions left. I suspected that Hermes was
trying
to sidetrack me, which meant I couldn’t let it happen. Plus, the wedding rehearsal beckoned and I still had to change. I needed to start asking essay questions. Yes and no answers were getting me nowhere.
“What’s your present scheme?” I asked him.
“Scheme? Singular? Oh ho, girl, I’m hurt. You underestimate me.”
“You haven’t answered the question.”
“I’m trying to play fair. Do I tell you about my very explicit plans for your charming friend or do I share with you…no, no, I think I’ll keep that one to myself. Let’s just say that Back to Earth, in addition to showing poor judgment, thought too small. Health food, bah. Some will want it, yes, but not enough. Ask yourself, what is it that everyone wants? Where’s the real money?”
My heart clenched. People were dead because of the Back to Earth cult. If Hermes was thinking even bigger we were in trouble. Was he still trafficking in ambrosia? Nectar? Either one was more addictive than crack and twice as deadly to kick, at least for mere mortals. Even granted that the gods weren’t known for keeping it in their pants, so traces of their bloodline would be flowing through a whole lot of veins, it still left tons of people in danger. Even those with a smidgen of divine blood weren’t guaranteed to survive the kind of changes ambrosia would make to their system. And should access to the drug suddenly stop for any reason, death was the likely end game.
“You can’t,” I gasped.
“My dear, I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, but I surely can. Also, you still have no idea what exactly we’re talking about.”
“So enlighten me.”
Hermes clicked a finger against his teeth thoughtfully, annoyingly. “Have you not heard all the doomsday prophecies?” he asked. “They’re not really about the end of the world. They’re about the end of
this
incarnation. Out with the old, in with the new. The system’s broken. Rapture or zombie apocalypse, either way things aren’t intended to stay the same. I’m just planning to—” he pretended to pluck the right phrase out of mid air “—guide the course of future events.”
He was a maniac. Unconsciously, I’d distanced myself, leaning away.
“You’re insane,” I told him.
He looked me dead in the eyes. “Am I? If you saw a train wreck coming, wouldn’t you wrest control of the train to avert the crisis? I know you. You’d do it in a heartbeat. We’re the same.”
“We’re not.”
“I assure you, we are. And you don’t want to be a thorn in my side on this. Thorns get removed. With prejudice.”
I stared, stunned, unable to form a response. Suddenly everything—Apollo’s petrification problem, my ambrosia withdrawal and overcomplicated love life—seemed petty. What was Hermes up to? What was his end game? Was there—
My brain stuttered to a stop, and it took everything I had to force it to go on.
Was there a chance that I’d somehow been a pawn in Hermes’s game, whatever it was? Had he helped me before so that I would remove the greater gods from the playing field—Zeus, Poseidon, Dionysus, Hephaestus, even Hades to the extent that he was still sulking? Who was left to stop him? Little old me? My gorgon glare didn’t work on the older gods. What else did I have? My precognition was no good without the
power
to stop my visions.
“Are
you
responsible for what’s happening to Apollo?” I asked suddenly.
“You’re getting colder. As I’ve said, I don’t have anything against Apollo. Even if I did, I’d hardly need to waste my time on him with Zeus and Poseidon on the loose and happy to run him down.”
Hermes reached in front of me and grabbed my glass of nectar, tossing back the remainder. Then he returned the glass to the bar and rose from his stool.
“By my count, there are still questions to be asked and answered. However, I believe you have a rehearsal to get to, and I have a…thing. So, we’ll have to pick up again another time.”
He threw money down on to the bar to cover my soda—too much—and strode out as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Meanwhile, he’d just rocked mine, and not in the good way. I tossed back my soda like it was something a helluva lot stronger and sat there stunned as it bubbled its way down.
But not for long. I didn’t have the luxury of time to process what I’d just heard. I had notes to compare with Nick and a wedding rehearsal to get to. If Hermes was in business with Uncle Hector, maybe I could even manage to squeeze some information out of him between learning where to stand and how to adjust the bride’s train just so for pictures.
I pulled out my phone to call the room, to see if Nick had escaped Serena’s clutches so I’d know where to meet him—changing seemed a no-go given how much time the interview with Hermes had set me back. But the phone just rang until the hotel voicemail picked up. I left a message telling him I was on my way, in case he got back to the room before I did, then hung up and dialed Christie. I was going to have to warn her off Hermes and find a way to make sure the warning took. I didn’t know what he was up to besides “no good”, but I didn’t want her stuck in the middle of it.
I decided to take the stairs rather than the elevator up to my room, afraid I’d lose cell service. I took the steps two at a time while I waited for Christie to answer…and waited. She was probably off at her shoot. I hit my floor and stepped out of the stairwell, about to leave Christie a message, when something lashed out from nowhere to knock the phone from my hand. It was so close to my ear that the blow caught that too, and my head whipped around with the force of the impact. I caught a glimpse of black robes, and then that black seemed to fly at my head and was suddenly smothering me. Fabric choked off my vision and my air as something was yanked over my head. Frenzied, I lashed out every which way. I made impact with something that oofed, but then I got lightheaded. The hood over my head smelled sickly sweet and…
My body fell like a disarticulated skeleton. I lost consciousness before I ever hit the floor.
Chapter Eight
My eyes snapped open as my body rocked roughly into something that grunted in pain. But opening them didn’t help; something was blocking my view. I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. I remembered then being grabbed and reflexively jerked my hands toward my face to remove whatever kept me in the dark, but they wouldn’t move, lashed as they were to the sides of my body by some sort of restraint.
“Tori?” a voice came from beside me, the same direction as the grunt. It was muffled, but still identifiable.
“Apollo?”
He let out a breath. “Thank gods it’s you and you’re okay,” he said softly.
With every breath I took, I felt more lightheaded rather than less, and I knew the hood over my head must have been treated with something like chloroform. I didn’t think I was meant to wake, at least not so soon. Ambrosia gave me almost godlike powers of healing, but with so much time passed since my last fix, I didn’t know how long that would last.
I had to focus on keeping awake.
An engine coughed and then roared to life, and I could feel the rumble of the machine all around us. Wherever we were, we’d soon be on the move with no one knowing where to find us or even that we were missing yet. And the only person who could sense my alarm, through our unwanted mind link, forged when he granted my precognition, was right here with me.
“Can you move?” I asked in a whisper.