Battle for the Blood (7 page)

Chapter Seven

Houses dotted the landscape on the approach to the summit we were aiming for. Not a town so much as isolated houses popping up here or there. It was near twilight as we approached the top, still light enough to see the abandoned construction there. The boxy white building shone pink in the setting sun. The first floor was only three-fourths the size of the second with the last quarter taken up with columns supporting the rest of the structure, creating an open carport area beneath.

The second floor looked like it was meant to support a floor-to-ceiling bank of windows, but instead of glass, tattered black tarps flapped in the breeze. There was something ominous about it, like the tarps were really shrouds, billowing out to reveal glimpses of the dead.

My imagination was in overdrive. There was nothing to suggest there
were
any dead or ever had been. It was common enough, unfortunately, for builders to go bankrupt or halt construction in the face of cash flow issues. There was no reason to think this had been anything else…

Except for my inner alarm system, which stood up and took notice, not going off, which meant nothing was going to lurch out at us, but aware, it seemed, that something
could
at any moment. The hairs on my neck and arms stood up. I couldn’t tear my gaze away, and was glad not to be the one driving so that I didn’t have to.

That was how I came to see the hand reach out from inside and grab the edge of one tarp to hold it down, keep it from flapping in the breeze and exposing secrets.

“Did you see that?” I asked Apollo, who
was
driving.

“See what?” Hecate asked.

I knew it wasn’t a hallucination. I hadn’t so much as craved ambrosia since the battlefield transformation that had given me wings and let me withstand things that would have killed a mere mortal. There hadn’t been any withdrawal symptoms. No cramps, sweats, shakes, weakness, hallucinations or death. Even so, I was comforted when Apollo verified my vision. Or not so much when I considered what it might mean.

“There’s someone in there,” Apollo said.

“A squatter, maybe?” Hecate ventured.

“But what kind of squatter?” I wondered.

The road petered out not far beyond the house since there was nothing else on the mountaintop. No other construction. No ruins…or at least none significant enough to be known. The place was, as the winds had said, deserted…except for whatever hidden horror we were leaving at our backs as we continued on up.

I knew Apollo’s and my precognition would warn us of danger, but it wasn’t exactly very instructional. It didn’t, for instance, give us anything like “vampires on the rise, bring garlic”—not that I’d ever met an actual vampire or even knew that they truly existed. With belief fueling reality, it was entirely possible they now sparkled in the sunlight and I’d see them coming a mile away.

Still, I didn’t like it.

“We’d better watch our backs,” I said, just in case they’d missed my message.

The hilltop was hyperalive with growth. Huge weeds and determined clumps of grass grew between the rocks that hadn’t yet eroded to the point of soil. Some grew up to our knees. A hearty few struck at chest and even shoulder level. There were only a handful of trees, not much higher than some of the weeds. I hoped Lau would be able to find us.

I checked my phone. I had one bar with which to find out.

“How close?” I asked when she answered.

“Do you know how hard it is to talk while traveling by dragon?” Lau asked. I assumed it was rhetorical. “I kind of need my hands for other things. We’ll be coming in around full dark. You setting off flares?”

“We’re going to have to clear a little ground cover first, but, yes, you won’t be able to miss us.”

“Good. Then I’ll see you when I see you.”

She hung up on me.

We didn’t have too long to wait until full dark. Already, the sun was dropping in the sky. Flares on the deserted hillside risked calling unwanted attention, but except for Lau and our creepy squatter, there shouldn’t be anyone around to take notice.

Still, I felt weird…like we were already being watched.

And there could have been anything in the high weeds. Anything. Spiders, snakes, scorpions… I didn’t know that any of those actually got up this high. But I didn’t know they
didn’t
.

Suddenly, every brush of every leaf was the creep of furry spider legs. I whirled the first time, swiping at it frantically, only to catch Hecate doing the same. She gave me a rueful smile when our eyes met.

“Would you two stop being so girly and help me out here?” Apollo asked, his hand squeezing the tall weeds in his hand so tightly it looked like he had them by the throat.

For a second he was menacing. His broad shoulders massive, his hands meat hooks. I took a step back, and the look on his face changed from cantankerous to…I couldn’t tell, and that scared me.

“Something’s going on,” he said. “You’re afraid of me.”

I shook my head too hard in denial, not wanting to provoke him. With the weeds so high—high enough to trip and choke, like strangler vines—and the stones ready to slide from beneath my feet—sending me shooting down the mountainside—I wasn’t sure I could get away from him in time if he came for me. I shot a look at Hecate, to see if she was thinking of flight as well. I wondered if I could outrun a goddess.

I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell anything. Her eyes were darker than the night, and she was looking from me to Apollo and muttering something beneath her breath. I didn’t understand a word of it, but my inner alarms were blaring.

“Duck!” a voice called out, sharp and unknown in the onrushing dark.

I dropped to the ground without thought, just as Hecate let loose a hellfire blast straight from her fingertips. It caught the high grass behind me on fire in an instant, and I rolled away instinctively, trying to put distance between me and the goddess, me and the fire, but my wings got in the way.

Apollo’s voice, raised in shock and awe, stopped me. “Lyssa? Is that really you?”

Lyssa?
Who the hell was Lyssa? It was Hecate he had to be worried about…

I opened my mouth to tell him so when it occurred to me that he might be talking about the person behind the warning to duck. My ire rose. Who was she? Some blast from his past? A nymph or demigoddess or prophetess or any of the hundreds of thousands who must have shared his bed over the eons?

I flipped to my feet, wings flashing out in agitation, and whirled toward the person behind the voice. A woman stood there, cloaked in red, her hair crackling at the edges, her eyes all madness, swirling like a maelstrom that made you feel that if you stared long enough, you could catch sight of your doom. From them leaked blood tears.

My blood ran cold.

“You weren’t supposed to come,” she said, her voice quiet now, pained. “No one was supposed to come.”

“What is this?” Hecate asked sharply, her eyes reflecting the crazy, hellfire forming once more between her hands. “An ambush?”

“You came to
me
,” the…woman Apollo had named Lyssa said sadly. “You can’t stay. The madness…it burns.”

Madness. Yes, I felt mad. Paranoid and panicked and more. More than I’d felt before, even in the midst of ambrosia withdrawal. I felt like the world was out to get me. Like Hecate and Apollo and this whole setup had been to lure me to the top of a mountain. To kill me where I’d always known I’d die.

“What do you mean?” Hecate snapped. “Who are you?”

“Maniai,” Apollo said softly. “The demon who drove Hercules to his doom…or to Megara’s doom anyway and…”

“Stop!” Lyssa said, the blood tears flowing faster now, thicker, like in a killer-virus movie when the heroine bleeds out. My wings flared again, desperate to fly me out of there, out of danger.

I didn’t know how much longer reason would hold sway.

“That’s why the place is deserted. You drove everyone out,” Apollo said.

“No,” she said, but not as if she was certain herself. “I’ve slept. Slept for so long, but the call…don’t you hear it? The call to arms. The call to act. It pulls me. It… I can’t hold on. You have to go too. Now, before—”

A cry split the night, sharp and chilling. Something deep inside me recognized it, wanted me to react like a mouse in the shadow of a hawk. I wanted to dive into the tall grass, regardless of what might be there, knowing it was still safer than what flew overhead.

Dragon.

How had that ever seemed like a good idea?

“Run!” Lyssa said. “Run or die.”

My legs were already moving, but I crashed into a wall of sheer muscle. Arms like steel bands came around me to hold me in place. “Tori, no. This is what we came for.”

“This is madness.”

Hecate was regrowing her hellfire orb. The air crackled and burned between her hands, the heat reaching me even at a distance. I didn’t know how she didn’t burn. I didn’t know how to feel. The dragon was death. I knew it deep in my bones. But it was also life…somehow. I couldn’t remember why. And I didn’t know that it mattered. If the dragon caught Lyssa’s insanity… I knew the story Apollo was talking about—Hercules driven crazy, crazy enough to kill his wife and children, his whole family in a murderous rage. It had destroyed him. I’d thought the Maniai were a myth, a personification mankind used to make sense of murder, but if Lyssa was one of them…and if they were being called… But called by whom?

No time for that now.

“Hecate, no!” Apollo shouted, releasing me to tackle her to the ground.

She whipped out of his way and aimed the full force of her hellfire straight for his chest, seeing him as a threat.

“No!” I cried. I ran to get between them, but there was no time. He was too close, and the orb struck him right at the heart. His eyes went wide and he flew back with the force of it, his shirt catching on fire and his skin seeming to go translucent with the glow of the hellfire burning its way inside. And then, to my shock, it burrowed inside. For an instant, he looked like a jack-o-lantern, all lit up, his ribs showing like sharpened teeth, and then the fire seemed to race through his veins and he roared, his whole body crackling with energy. The sun god, absorbing a fireball.

I was still trying to process this when a powerful wind blasted us and I rocked on my feet. Wing beats blew cool mountain air over us, and Lau yelled from the back of the dragon.

“Get back, she’s out of control!”

Her voice was lost over another primal cry from the dragon that turned my blood to ice.

Lau!
If the dragon went berserk, what could we do? Fighting the dragon put Lau in danger. Yet everything inside me screamed that it was kill or be killed. The madness pounded at me, stronger than the winds now whipping us like a hurricane.

“The sword,” I yelled to Apollo. It was carefully wrapped and tucked away in an army duffle we’d found in a secondhand store. But if he could get to it in time…

Something was pinging away at the back of my mind, beating at the madness like a dragonfly trying desperately to get at the heat of a lamp. I tried to focus on it, to tune out the ice in my veins and the deafening sound of my internal alarms going off. Then I caught it by the wing and stopped the fluttering long enough to get a glimpse of the thought… There was more to the Hercules story… How had his rampage been stopped? A blow to the head, wasn’t it? From a stone? Like David and Goliath.

I wasn’t willing to brain Apollo or Hecate, and I certainly had no chance at the dragon. Lau, well, she was another matter. But I thought I had a better idea.

I crouched down while all eyes were on the sky. We could see the dragon now, too close. Time was running out. It circled like it was about to dive, talons the size of steak knives out and aimed. I felt around frantically for a stone of sufficient size, almost sobbing in relief when I found one. I grasped it tightly in my right hand, rose and aimed in a single motion, letting it fly with all my strength straight for Lyssa’s head.

It struck her right between the eyes, which rolled back in their bloody sockets, sending her crashing to the ground.

Immediately, the constriction around my heart and the fog around my brain started to recede. The dragon cut off in the middle of another blood-chilling cry, sounding confused and not happy about it.

Apollo stared down at the stunned demon, who now looked like a girl to be pitied rather than someone to be feared. “This isn’t good,” he said, apparently trying to take my title as Master of the Obvious.

“Well, that’s new,” Hecate added.

“What?” I was totally lost.

“Lyssa…in the past, she’s had some control over her powers. She’s been more like a targeted missile, not a nuclear weapon. The fact that she affected us all, even reaching out to Lau’s beast, and that she clearly didn’t want to… It goes beyond disturbing.”

The winds whipped her words away. My hair lashed my face, slashing across my eyes, flying into my mouth. The very air seemed to displace, and then with a few more great flaps, the air stilled, and there was a dragon before us and a severely pissed off former detective Lau. I didn’t know which was scarier.

I
did
know which held my attention. I’d only gotten a glimpse of the dragon when he’d busted out of Mount Lee. He’d been a whirl of motion then and I’d been too far away for a good look, in any case. Now…he—she?—was massive. I couldn’t tell in the moonlight whether it was gold or bronze, but it was something in that family, with lighter, almost luminescent scales beneath the wings where a cockatiel might have bright yellow. In fact, cockatiel was a pretty good comparison, with the dragon’s massive crest and ridges down its back like ruffled feathers. Its maw was somewhat beaklike as well, but instead of cracking nuts, it seemed designed to crack bones…big ones. It had six legs rather than the four of the classic European dragon, and its tail was a whipcord, lashing in agitation. I jumped back as it smashed to the ground a foot from me. Too close for comfort.

“What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?” Lau asked, sliding down off her perch near the dragon’s neck. If she could have breathed fire, I imagined she’d have been doing so. “What did you do to get her so riled?”