Battle for the Blood (19 page)

I reached for the door, only to find it locked. At the sound of the handle being jiggled, the body on the other side of the door threw itself against it even harder. The door bucked in its frame but didn’t give. But behind that, there were more sounds, like attention had been drawn by the renewed effort.

“Let me,” Hera said, and I stepped back against the wall to give her access to the door.

She touched the handle and muttered something beneath her breath. I thought I caught the old word for
rot
or maybe
decay
, which struck me oddly, as in my mind they went along with things more organic. But she signaled me and Nick to be alert and reached for the handle. It turned as she twisted, and I raised my sword up, ready to burst into the hallway and take down whatever awaited.

Hera yanked the door open and a figure fell into the stairwell with us. It wasn’t Amanda, which was a good thing, as this woman had clearly seen better days.
Living days
where her dressy dress had probably been meant for a party and not her funeral shroud. One arm and shoulder hung limply, possibly from repeated pounding against the door, possibly from whatever had killed her. Her eyes were filmed over. Her paper-white skin had gone gray, one cheekbone was shattered.

I didn’t have time to catalog the rest of her damage before she was lurching for Nick and I had to cut her down, braining her with the flat of my blade. I didn’t know if it was kinder than the alternative, but she fell at Nick’s feet, completely out, at least for the moment.

But the commotion I’d heard behind her was that of others, an army of them, drawn by the new noise.

They didn’t all shuffle. Only those without two working legs. The others…they weren’t exactly speed demons. More like kids in a rush to get to the ice cream truck but knowing that it would wait. It was a bad analogy. These things were beyond reason. But I didn’t have the leisure to stand around thinking of something better.

I jumped into the hall, meeting them head on with my sword. I beat them off with the flat of the blade where I could and when I couldn’t, the sword bit and held, releasing only with effort and finishing with solid, stonelike thunks to the floor. Hera and Nick were a mere flurry out of the corner of my eye.

I was desperately trying to yank my blade from a behemoth of a man whose mouth frothed with red, something like the rabid dog, when another zombie rushed me, latching on to my half-turned back and sinking jagged teeth into my shoulder. Instinctively, I flung my head back to slam my thick cranium into his to make him release. The pain was terrible, but the zombie clung, despite my abuse, becoming dead weight. Heavy and overbalancing. The bite was to the shoulder of my good arm, and I felt my strength ebbing quickly away.

Before it could drain entirely, I forced myself to rip my blade free and turn, but the zombie, still locked on to my shoulder, turned as I turned, and I couldn’t get a decent angle to knock it loose. I realized then that it had become dead weight because that’s exactly what it was…dead. True dead. Petrified by my blood.

Others caught my moment of realization, using my distraction to leap for me en masse. Instinct kicked in, and I launched myself back into the fight, swinging madly with the sword, trying to take out as many as I could before they could bring me down or before the venom in the bite I’d sustained made me one of them. I didn’t know what my blood might do to the virus. Or what it would do to me. Only that I’d now been twice bitten—the rabid dog and the zombie guy. My future was not looking bright.

“Nick!” I cried, thinking that his name might be the last on my lips.

I caught sight of him in that moment, pinned down against a wall. Hera had put him behind her, it appeared, but she’d been drawn out, leaving him unprotected. He was holding the zombies off with the chair he’d brought with him from the third floor, but as I watched, it was ripped from his hands.

“Freeze!” I yelled at the top of my lungs.

The mass around me went still, but the others, bent on biting and paying me no attention whatsoever, were attacking.

I shook off those who’d latched on to me and grabbed for the petrified leech on my back, flapping frantically with my wings, trying to dislodge him. He came off with a ripping of flesh, taking some of my shoulder with him, but I didn’t have time even to feel it.

Hera was mumbling something else under her breath and the mob before her fell. I vaulted them to get to the group around Nick, some of whom were going down as well. The rest I lit into with the flat of my blade, sending them stumbling as they knocked into each other. When they turned on me, I yelled out another “Freeze!” feeling the power go out of me, leaving me shaky from blood loss or adrenaline overload or shock from all of my wounds.

They froze, and I hit the wall, literally, letting it hold me up as I turned painfully, my half-there shoulder smearing the once-white paint.

Nick caught me as the pain finally registered and I threatened to fall onto my face.

“Tori, you’ve been bit,” he said into my hair. I didn’t have the energy to raise my head.

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Sucks.”

He didn’t laugh. I hadn’t really expected him to.

“You okay to go on?” Hera asked. “Do you feel…um… Are we looking tasty to you?”

“In your dreams,” I told her.

She gave a humorless laugh. “So not a zombie yet. Unfortunately, we don’t know how long the incubation period is with this. We’ll have to watch you.”

“We still have to find Amanda,” I said, much more comfortable
not
thinking about becoming a mindless eating machine, especially given what was on the menu.

“Already found her,” Nick said, and the tone of his voice was…desolate.

I jerked my head up to catch the look on his face. And then to follow his gaze to one of the fallen. One of the group he’d been holding off with his chair. I couldn’t see her face—not well—but the woman he was watching wore blood-spattered jeans, an emerald-green sweater and blood-matted hair. Dark like Nick’s.

“Oh, Nick,” I said, reaching for him.

“Don’t,” he snapped. “Don’t. If you do, I’ll break down, and I don’t know if I’ll pull myself back together. She was here because of
me
.”

There was nothing I could say to that. I knew the feeling. I understood that blame game. He hadn’t let me off the hook for getting him into trouble back in Delphi. He wasn’t going to let himself off the hook any easier. It was a burden he’d have to bear.

“At least she’s only frozen. If we can find a cure for this—” I tried.

“Yeah,” he answered. But not like he believed it could happen.

“Sweep the rest of the hospital then?” Hera asked. “See about any other survivors, grab the kids and get out?”

I nodded. “A survivor might be able to tell us what happened here. We only talked to Nick a few hours ago and everything was fine then. Or…not fine, but seemingly stable, and all of the sudden…all this—overrun by zombies and rabid animals. Whatever swept through here, it happened fast.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Hera said. She’d definitely had experience reassuring people in the face of mad odds, because she almost sounded convincing.

I didn’t suggest that we split up. Neither did anyone else.

Chapter Seventeen

We started our search with the floor we were already on—quickly, before anyone could unfreeze or… It only then occurred to me to wonder if the turning-to-stone thing was permanent or if it was just temporary, like the results of my gorgon glare. Sure, the sword itself had done damage to those I’d petrified, and maybe that would be enough, but…damn this transformation. Why couldn’t it come with a handy-dandy set of rules, like the
Gremlins
. “Don’t feed after midnight” and all that jazz. But, oh no, I had to learn as I went. For all I knew, I was one bean burrito away from paralyzing an entire taco joint with a gas cloud.

My brain did its little digression dance as I tried not to see the bodies and parts the zombie army had left behind…a hand here, an ear or gristle or something absolutely unidentifiable there. Down the hall there was a zombie left behind, trying to pull enough of itself together to lunge at us. It was half in and half out of the elevator. That’s what had kept it from closing and coming when called. The zombie’s back had been crushed by an overhead light that had been pulled down on top of it. It was a pitiful sight—trapped, broken, bloody, but still trying to rise. One that made me wonder whether it was kinder to put the thing out of its misery. Not that it probably knew misery. Or much of anything else but its urges. Fight, bite, spread the disease.

There were no survivors, but neither were there as many dead as I expected to see. Some must have gotten away.

The frozen ones were starting to stir, but not those I’d petrified as we gave up on the second floor and retreated back to the stairwell. But Hera had rotted the lock; we couldn’t just seal it behind us and expect it to hold. Or so I thought, but she tapped the handle and muttered some kind of counterspell as voices and clanking rose from the first floor below us. Body armor, it sounded like. And orders.

Military orders. The cavalry had arrived.

The three of us looked at each other. My first thought was relief. Soldiers could do the sweep, take charge of the children… But thoughts and feelings were two different things. Inside, my stomach churned. If they caught us, no doubt we’d be frisked, decontaminated, debriefed. I only had wings for one passenger. And the kids…would they truly be better off with the soldiers? What if…

My gut cramped with the signal my precog was sending me, and then I heard the flap of wings not my own. My precog and my every instinct turned my gaze toward the tiny stairwell window, where I caught just the end of a whipcord tail edged with spikes. Immediately, I flashed on the images from the roof, and I knew why the children wouldn’t be better off. No one was making it out of here alive.

Not with that thing outside.

“Get to the children,” I told Nick and Hera. “Protect them. I’ll be back.”

Nick grabbed me with his good hand as I turned to bolt toward the roof, hoping to hone in on the thing from there. “Are you crazy?” he asked. “You’re not going alone.”

As to the crazy, I’d have thought that truth to be self-evident.

“Do you have wings?” I asked harshly, knowing that I had to get him gone. “Right now you’re more a hindrance than a help, and I’ve done enough to you already. The children trust you. Go to them. That’s where you’ll do the most good.”

“You haven’t done anything to me,” he said, good eye meeting mine, breaking my heart even as my precog was kicking at my innards, screaming at me to go, go, GO! “I made my own decisions.”

It was a complete reversal of what he’d said in Delphi. Maybe he’d had time to think, to come to a kind of epiphany, but…everything was different now. Maybe. Possibly. Or not. Now was not the time.

I yanked my arm out of his grasp. “If we survive this, we’ll talk. For now, you’ve got to let me go.”

He did, and I was off in a shot, before I could see any potential pain on his face. He’d hurt me. I’d hurt him. Sometimes I thought that’s what caring was all about. People hurt each other until they couldn’t take it anymore and then moved on to the next, full of hope and the pretense that it wouldn’t happen again. Just look at the pattern of Apollo’s life. All those millennia and still alone. Did I really think it would be different with me? That he’d only been waiting all those lifetimes for some mythical concept of true love? Did it matter? Could I help myself? Or was it all part of the pattern woven by the Fates, who were way too fond of their daytime programming? Did anyone ever live happily ever after in the soaps?

Wrong time, wrong place. Maybe even wrong genre. This wasn’t a serial, this was an action flick, where the guy always got the girl in the end…right? The question was, which guy?

Gah! Battle now. Love, lust, confusion, whatever later.

My gorgon blood was boiling as I raced for the roof. I let it go, let the battle frenzy build.

By the time I crashed through the door onto the roof and slid in the blood congealing on the other side, I was ready to tear the plague demon I’d spotted limb from limb with my bare hands. The sword I held said I didn’t have to. I wiped the zombie blood off onto my pants and nicked my hand again before the horror of the comingling bodily fluids could stop me. I’d already been bitten. If I was going to go zombie, it was already too late for me.

My precog snapped my head around to the right, where a beast waited in what shadows there were on the roof. Realizing it had been sighted, it let out the growl that had no doubt been building silently, and every hair on my body stood up in primal fear.

It was the sound of every imagination-amplified beast hiding in every bush on every dark, lonely walk home. I couldn’t see its full shape. I knew that it was serpentine from the back, but from the front, it was somewhere between hyena and grizzly. Its back arched upward so that it appeared to be hulking. Its muzzle was long and powerful. I couldn’t get a look at its teeth through the blood-flecked froth of its mouth, but I knew them to be all predator. Its legs stuck out from its body, lizard-like.

The monster lunged before my brain could even latch on to any nonsensical digression about Puff the Magic Demon or anything like that. I leapt into the air, rising above the rush and angling my sword so that when I dropped to its neck I could stab straight downward. In sci-fi flicks, they always showed the blade being driven right through the skull, as if that weren’t the hardest, thickest bone in the body, as if remotely human strength could pull that off. I wasn’t remotely human—not anymore—but I hadn’t tested myself, and, anyway, severing the spine ought to do just as well.

But as I brought my wings in to drop, the whipcord tail knocked into me from the side. My wings belled out to catch myself, but only opened in time to take the brunt of the impact as I crashed onto the concrete of the roof. Pain and panic ripped through me simultaneously and my chest refused to rise, the wind knocked out of me and the muscles or whatever it took to gather new breath were stunned or paralyzed or…

The demon was on me before I could finish that thought. Its weight crushing, its clawed front paws digging into my shoulders and holding me flat to the ground, unable to lift my sword even if I could move.

It dripped stinking saliva onto my face, and it was all I could do to get my mouth to close so that at least I wouldn’t have to taste it. For some reason, that was my most primal terror. Death seemed inevitable, but demon drool was right out.

Gunfire broke out from the stairwell and the beast howled in shocked pain, whirling on top of me and using my body as a springboard to pounce at the soldiers. The pain, as much as the weight, was crushing.

“Don’t!” I tried to yell, thinking of the soldiers that had come before, but my chest wouldn’t rise. No air was getting anywhere. Not to my lungs, vocal cords or brain. I felt things getting hazy. That superhuman healing that’d come with my transformation wasn’t kicking in fast enough. Definitely not fast enough to save the soldiers. Maybe not fast enough to save me from whatever was broken inside.

I couldn’t move, but I could still think and feel and scream internally, reaching out for the connection I had with Apollo. I hoped and prayed that whatever interference Hermes had encountered searching for Nick didn’t extend to me, here on the roof. I tried to be loud and desperate. It wasn’t exactly a stretch. I hoped it wasn’t my imagination that I felt a frisson of fear come back at me.

A millisecond later I saw it, the air rippling practically right above me. And then Hermes and Apollo tearing through, stumbling over my legs, armed with Cori’s largest kitchen knives.

“Tori!” Apollo said, ready to drop to my side.

I couldn’t answer him. Couldn’t tell him about the danger, but Hermes grabbed his shoulder and spun Apollo around to face the back of the plague demon and the rapid fire from the soldiers.

A bullet pinged off a stone near my hip, but I couldn’t so much as flinch, still couldn’t speak. I could only watch in horror as Apollo jerked to the side suddenly, blood blooming from his shoulder where the bullet had grazed him.

Knives against guns and a rabid beast. What had I brought them into? If my mind hadn’t been numbed by pain, I’d have thought more clearly, kept them out of danger.

I focused on healing, as if I could speed it through sheer force of will. I strained with every ounce of my being to force words through my lips.

“Take…sword,” I managed. It wasn’t more than a whisper, but Hermes heard me.

He glanced quickly from Apollo to me. “Hell with that, we’re getting you out of here,” he said.

The portal had closed to a pinprick above me. It was so tempting. They could reopen it…we could be gone. But if people could get through, so could bullets. And there were still the children, Nick, Hera.

“No,” I croaked. “Children.”

He looked at me like I’d gone mental, but before he could say a word, the beast suddenly roared and leapt back, its spiked tail lashing and hitting Hermes upside the head, much as I’d wanted to do for ages now. I felt terrible for that thought as he landed hard beside me, bouncing on the concrete. He instantly rolled toward me, turning not-entirely focused eyes toward the sword. He reached for it twice before wrapping a hand around the hilt and rising unsteadily to his feet. He couldn’t even see straight after that blow to the head, but before I could protest, he was running toward the beast, sword upraised.

Apollo was there already, hanging on to the tail just above the spikes, climbing toward more sensitive spots and keeping his head low to avoid flying bullets. As I watched helplessly, the beast roared and shook its head violently, and a soldier went flying like spittle from its mouth. His body as limp as a rag doll. He slid toward the edge of the roof and then...over and gone.

I tested my arms, but they wouldn’t move yet. I thought I could feel my fingers twitch, but wasn’t sure it wasn’t phantom sensation. I was breathing easier, though. Which meant I’d probably heal. Given time.

Time I didn’t have.

Hermes leapt into the air and stabbed at the beast as high as he could on its flank, taking its attention away from a second soldier it had crushed beneath its front feet before it could take the bite it was contemplating. There was only one soldier still flailing that I could see, and that one was rolled on his side, reloading.

The demon howled and lashed out with the leg attached to his bleeding flank, sending Hermes flying…but then the leg stuck, freezing in that position like the mother of all charley horses had taken hold. The beast panicked, letting out horrified squeal-grunts as it spun on its good legs, trying to see why the one wasn’t working. But I knew what had happened. My blood, still on the sword, had begun its paralysis. The demon was much larger than the zombies I’d fought below—too big for my blood to petrify the whole monster with a single slice, but it was something.

The soldier’s reload clicked into place and there was another burst of fire, center of mass on the demon. It squealed again and went for the last soldier standing, lifting him in oversized claws and slamming him down again so that bones cracked sickeningly against the concrete and he went eerily limp.

I strained again to twitch my muscles and finally got some reaction out of them, enough to rock myself back and forth until I could roll onto my stomach. It hurt like hell, but I’d experienced the real thing and didn’t have time for the nostalgia.

I forced myself to move again. Painfully, like a free climber at the end of a monumental ascent, muscles shaking and weak, threatening to give out, I belly crawled toward Hermes, where he’d fallen with the sword. Blood was flowing from a head wound where he’d hit and he wasn’t moving. He was one of the Olympians. He’d heal. I had to believe that. But I didn’t know if he’d heal in time. Or whether I would, but one of us had to finish off the demon.

I fell on the sword and whirled with it in time to see Apollo, now riding the demon’s head, try the trick I’d discounted earlier on—jamming his giant butcher knife straight through the beast’s skull. To my shock, it sank in, buried to the handle, but it only seemed to piss the monster off. The creature swept its tail toward its head, aiming straight for Apollo.

I managed to push off the ground and go running for the beast. My legs felt as sturdy as paper and seemed to accordion on me as I ran, but as Apollo rolled off the beast’s back and down its side, I leapt for it. My wings extended just enough to raise me to above the lower spine. I dropped onto the beast’s back and thrust the sword into its nerve bundle at the base. Its back legs gave out as the stoning process began, paralyzing it from there on down. But it didn’t stop the head, which the beast swung around, looking for the problem and ready to end it with razor-sharp teeth. I twisted the sword as I yanked it out of the beast’s back, going for maximum damage, and braced myself, trying to keep from being thrown off and seeking leverage for my next strike. My strength wasn’t going to last much longer.

That massive maw came for me, dripping bloody foam. I quickly wiped the sword as clean as I could of the beast’s blood and cut myself with it to refresh my own blood on the blade, then I timed my last lift of the sword and…