Battle for the Blood (25 page)

Frantic, I dove for the window, launching myself and Hecate into the air before I even hit the ledge. There was an explosion behind me that threw me forward, blasting us away from the building, all uncontrolled. I beat my wings desperately to compensate, but they weren’t working properly. Gravity, however, was working just fine, sucking at me and trying to pull me down.

Hecate and I hung momentarily in the air, like Wile E. Coyote when he didn’t realize the cliff had dropped out from under him, and then we started to plummet, the wind whistling through the rents in my wings. I beat harder and faster, and when that didn’t work, I tried to bell my wings like a parachute to slow our fall. It worked, but not well enough. The ground was rushing up to meet us far too fast. My heart was beating harder than my wings ever had, and I was sure we were going to dent the pavement and break every bone in our bodies when we hit.

In my panic, it took Hermes’s call two or three times to get through to me. I only realized he was there when he swooped past me, close enough to add temporary wind to my sails. He made another run at us and flapped in front of me, doing his best to match my descent without precipitating his own.

“You’re going to have to let her go,” he said.

I was too panicked even to glare. I’d thought a million times about dropping Hecate on her head—Hermes too, for that matter—but I didn’t think I could actually do it.

“Can’t!” I called.

“Do it!” he insisted.

The ground was right there. So close. Two stories? One.

A blast from above hit me then and took the decision—and Hecate—out of my hands. Lightning or a blast from Janus’s weapon had struck me, and I was on fire. Every muscle locked up—hands, back, neck, shoulders, wings—and I plummeted to the ground on fire.

Hecate broke my fall, and not at all willingly. We rolled together in a way that under other circumstances would have made Hermes grab a video camera and consider selling the footage on pay-per-view. A crash stopped our tumble, and we smacked up against the back of a white panel van.

My brains were still scrambled when the impact woke Hecate. Her head bobbled like a dashboard Elvis, still disoriented from the blast, but she froze momentarily as though something had caught her attention. I willed my head to stop spinning so that I could follow her gaze, but it hadn’t complied before she suddenly lunged for something and came up with a sword and held it aloft.

The Sword of Perseus. The very one I’d dropped. Back in enemy hands.

That
got me moving. I lunged for her, my vision still unfocused, but I was too slow. She sidestepped easily and swung the sword for my head like a baseball bat, aiming with the flat of the blade.

“You saved me. Now we’re even,” she said, as the blade hit me like a ton of bricks. I blacked out with her words still ringing in my ears.

I came to fighting, only there was nothing left to fight. Hecate was gone, and the sword with her.

A growl from between two nearby buildings got me moving. Rabid or hungry street animal, I didn’t care. At this point, a pissed-off kitten could probably do me in. Woozy, I rose to my feet, using my good hand pressed to the van’s side to keep myself from falling over. I tried my wings, but they were a no-go. Singed, torn, battered and possibly broken. I was going to have to walk…or, better yet, drive, assuming I could teach myself to hot-wire a van. I’d done it once with a car, back in my wild youth when I’d borrowed Pappous’s boatlike Crown Vic to run off and see the outsider boyfriend my family disapproved of. But that had been long ago and far away.

I staggered around to the driver’s side of the van as the body behind the growl slunk out toward me. It was wild, all right, but no animal. A girl, early teen years, it looked like. At first glance, one might assume she’d been eating cherry Popsicles and gotten the goop all over her face and clothes. At a second glance, it was nothing so innocent.

I ripped at the driver’s side door as she began running at me, barely favoring the leg turning brokenly beneath her, throwing off her gait. Mercifully the door was unlocked. I swung the door open and myself up into the seat, slamming the door shut between me and the zombie girl before I had to fight her. I…I couldn’t. Not unless it became life or death. Frantically, I looked around for keys, checking visors, cubbies, glove compartments. But regardless of the movies, it was never that easy. I
did
find a screwdriver in the glove box and used it to get loose the wires I’d need.

The girl slammed into the van as I tried to finagle the wires, clawing at my door. When the van roared to life, it was more dumb luck than skill. I jammed the van into Reverse, wincing as the girl’s nails screamed painfully along the siding. The second I was clear of her, I shifted gears and roared away, leaving her in the dust, racing toward Cori’s apartment, using sidewalks where the streets were blocked by abandoned vehicles or, worse yet, bodies.

Sigyn’s shieldmaidens or whoever they were had confiscated my phone and I’d never gotten it back. I had no way to call ahead to Cori for the garage code or any way to reach anyone inside. When I got to her garage, I pressed the intercom button there, probably for people who’d forgotten their codes or clickers or whatever, but no one answered. Or at least, no one answered within the time I dared wait. From around the corner shambled a zombie with his face half-eaten away and an arm mangled beyond use. He wasn’t alone.

I gunned the engine and sped around the front of the building, blowing past the zombies gathered toward the front entrance. Pulling up before it, I saw two things immediately—that the zombie gang had already turned, tracking the sound of the engine and the possibility of fresh meat, and that the entrance was too narrow to drive through, even if that wouldn’t leave the whole building exposed to invasion. The entryway was a single glass door that would allow people in one at a time or possibly two by two if the pair was holding hands. And it was probably reinforced glass. Maybe even bulletproof given what the apartments within must cost. The only way in was to get buzzed in. I hoped the electricity was still working in the building. A brown- or blackout might be the end of me.

There was no time for indecision. The zombies were in bad shape, but they hadn’t been around long enough to decompose to the point of falling apart.

I pulled a three-point turn, caving in the side of a car unfortunate enough to be directly across from me on the other side of the street and aimed the van for the oncoming zombies. Then I put the car temporarily into Park, kicked off my shoes, positioned them so that one jammed up under part of the lower dashboard and down into the other shoe, which pressed down on the gas. Then I climbed out of the car and reached back in to put it into Drive. I withdrew with an impressive speed, spurred on by adrenaline, and still got smacked in my shoulder by the door to the car as it started to move forward.

Then I ran toward the entrance, listening for the impact of the car with the zombies…or the side of the building. It would either take out some zombies or drop some wall on top of them—or so I hoped. At the very least, it would provide an obstacle for them to climb around or over, buying me some time.

I hit the entrance without slowing, but with both hands out in front to catch me. The keypad was immediately to the right of the door. I didn’t know Cori’s number, so I pressed all of the buttons frantically, muttering,
“Comeon comeon comeon,”
under my breath.

A voice came over the intercom. “Jason. Ohmygod, is that you?”

“No, but I’m being chased by zombies. You’ve got to let me in!” I infused as much fear as I could into my voice, which wasn’t hard, because while the van had crashed sickeningly into one zombie, crushing him between it and the side of the building, the rest were now climbing up, over, under and around.

“How do I know you’re not infected?” the girl asked.

I didn’t have time to convince her.

Luckily, another voice came over the intercom as she waited for me to answer. “Who is it?”

The voice sounded familiar. “Cori, please tell me that’s you!”

“Tori?”

“Let me in!”

The closest zombie was still steps away when the buzzer sounded, but as if it understood the significance of the sound somewhere in the depths of its being, it sped up suddenly.

I grabbed the door, dashed in and tried to slam it behind me, but it was one of those spring doors that couldn’t be slammed, probably a liability thing, and the closest zombie managed to get a hand in the door. I was out of bladed weapons or even blunt objects to beat down inconvenient limbs.

“Freeze!” I yelled through the door, catching its gaze.

The zombie froze, arm still reaching through, but I slapped it down hard. As the arm started to clear the doorway, I jump-kicked, landing a blow to its stomach, sending it falling back into its fellow zombies. Then I yanked the door as hard as I could, managing to speed the latching by possibly a mere millisecond. But it was closed. And autolocked. The zombies left standing slammed into the glass as they tried to push in, to break in to get to me. The door bucked in its frame, but held…for now.

I ran toward the elevators, which thank the gods already had one car on the ground floor that opened the second I pressed the button. I dashed inside and hit the floor I remembered Cori had brought us to from the garage. As soon as the doors closed behind me, I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

There were only two apartments on Cori’s floor, and I turned in the direction I thought we’d taken. At my knock, I heard, “Who’s there?”

“Tori.”

“Tori who?”

Least fun knock-knock joke ever.

“Tori who’s going to huff and puff and blow your door down if you don’t let me in this instant.”

The door swung open and Hermes’s face appeared in the gap. “Sorry, I had to be sure it was you and that you hadn’t become a slavering beast.”

“Yet,” I said, “but you keep this up…”

He stepped aside and let me in. I looked around the apartment as he closed the door behind me and met Nick’s one good eye.

“See,” a childlike voice said, and I looked down to see Lacy on his lap, staring earnestly into his face. “I tol’ you she’d be okay. I had a vision.”

Wait, if Nick was back, that meant… I swept my gaze around the room and spotted Apollo in the back hallway, the one with the bathroom where Sigyn lay fighting for her life against the poison from the plague demon. A cool-blue glow emanated from that area as well.

I was drawn to it, and when I reached Apollo’s side, I stopped at the sight of a young woman bent over the tub, hand out, resting on Sigyn’s chest. Panacea, I presumed, somewhat awed. Neither Apollo nor I spoke a word as we watched.

After what seemed only moments, the glow dimmed and died. The woman rose from her crouched position, and I looked beyond her toward Sigyn, whose color looked a lot better. She was still swollen, but no longer several times her size.

“She’s going to be fine,” Panacea said, looking to Apollo, “but she’ll need rest. I’ve broken down the poisons, but she’ll need lots and lots of fluids to flush the remains out of her system.”

She looked so much like Apollo—a
female
version of Apollo, of course—that there was no mistaking that she was of his bloodline. While the hair escaping from under her colorful headcloth was as dark as night, her eyes were the same amazing turquoise. But where Apollo’s lit with life and the potential for trouble, hers were clouded with sadness from all the pain and suffering she’d seen. Her face was deeply tanned and weathered from time spent out in the sun.

But I didn’t have time to marvel and Sigyn didn’t have time to rest. “She’s going to have to sleep when she’s dead,” I said, deciding just to rip the Band-Aid off. We had no time for gentle. “Which is what we’re all going to be if she doesn’t get up and call off the hit.”

“The hit on who?” Apollo asked.

Lacy gasped loudly, and I started immediately back for the living room to find her standing like a statue, her eyes huge. Her gaze was far, far away, as if she could look through buildings, maybe even time and space. “The city,” she said, in a voice deeper than her own, hollow and somehow ancient.

“City swept away by sea

Buildings not for rent but rust

The ruins bones and beams and blood

The refuse washed away by flood.

The people ne’er mourned too long

Ocean casts a siren song

And some deny while others flee

But this world will no longer be.”

No one said a word as her pronouncement died away. Prophecy. There was no doubt about it. Lacy had to be an Oracle.

An Oracle
…proclaiming the end of the world.

No time. I couldn’t process. Process and I might accept.

“She’s right,” I said, “at least about part of it. Amphitrite is set to destroy the city on Hecate’s orders. Anytime now. We have to fight it. We have to stop this.”

Lacy fell forward into Nick’s arms, as if the foreseeing had taken everything out of her. I strode forward to shake her awake and demand to know what she meant by it all, though it seemed terrifyingly clear for an Oracle. Apollo got between us.

“Don’t,” he said. “She won’t be able to tell you what she means. But you, start talking.”

So I did. I told them everything I knew and concluded with, “So Sigyn doesn’t have the time to rest. Either we find a way to call this off or this whole city will be underwater.”

“I always thought it would be L.A.,” Nick said. “New York…it just doesn’t seem possible.”

“Well, it is,” I said. There was no time for mercy. No time for smelling salts or waking Sigyn with a gentle shake. I strode back to Sigyn and heard Panacea gasp as I slapped her face. Hard.

Sigyn rocked with the blow and her eyelids fluttered, but that was about all.

“Monster,” Panacea gasped. “She’s out. As she should be. Let me, if you must.”

She stepped forward and I tried to feel terrible about slapping Sigyn, but all I managed was a minor torment that I’d made a crappy impression on a goddess—demigoddess?—who amounted to the Mother Teresa of the ancient world. Sigyn had already mind-controlled me and left me for dead. A single witch-slap seemed the least I could do.