behind.
It wouldn’t have been fatal. She was dying, that was true, but she still couldn’t be
She thought all of this in the fraction of a second it took to catch hold of the swung-open car door in the reflexive instant she felt her neck tense just enough to keep her skull from bouncing off of the pavement passing by below.
She hung suspended between the open door and the front seat, her knee wedged underneath the dashboard, and flexed. Her hands wrapped around the interior door handle, trying to pull it shut while the driver swerved. Something struck her hip and she yelped. Looking back she saw the end of some kind of steel or lead pipe, just before it raised and came down again, this time closer to her rib cage. The impact had the opposite effect of what was hoped for; it made Athena’s muscles contract sharply, and she managed to pull the door most of the way shut.
In the backseat, Odysseus woke. After a few startled seconds of coming to, he plunged forward and began to fight with the driver for control of the steel pipe. The Taurus careened sharply to the right. Athena winced. If they turned too far, or went off the shoulder, they would flip like a coin.
“The wheel!” she shouted at Odysseus, who stretched out and grabbed it. With the door mostly shut, she had just enough leverage to draw her leg up and piston her boot-clad foot into the driver’s ribs, snapping at least two. The impact drove him into Odysseus, and the car swerved again.
“If you want me to drive, you have to give me some room.” Odysseus tried to hang on to the wheel as the car accelerated in mad spurts. It revved and shot forward as the driver’s foot pushed the gas pedal unintentionally down to the floor.
Athena reached up and grabbed the driver by the throat. She yanked hard and for a moment he was on top of her, before she heaved herself up and shoved him toward the still slightly open door. The front seat was cramped, and Odysseus’ shoe heel scraped her cheek as he climbed over from the back and dropped down to drive.
“She’ll have him if she wants him,” the driver said, and Athena paused. She was holding him by the collar and the door had popped open again. He hung suspended over pavement passing by at ninety-five miles an hour.
“She can have anything she wants. Anything she wants,” he babbled. His eyes fixed on Odysseus, bloodshot and stark raving nuts. “I wanted to give him to her. I wanted to. He’s right there.” His arm stretched out toward Odysseus, trembling. “And then we drive away, we drive away and you’re gone. You’re gone, awful bitch—”
“Throw him out the bleeding door!” Odysseus growled. “Or I’ll put that pipe through his teeth.”
Athena ignored him. She stared at the driver, fascinated. Tears welled in his eyes. He was manic and sad, a special kind of sad that was reserved for when you failed someone you loved.
Athena snorted.
“That silly brat.”
“What?” Odysseus asked. “What are you talking about?”
“This is her attempt,” Athena said incredulously, and shook the driver by the collar. “She sends a lovesick lunatic to try to take me out? Her assassin is a mooning mental case?” Her eyes narrowed in disgust. “She must be the laughingstock of that little trio.”
Odysseus let the car slow. Athena wrested the pipe away from the driver and tossed it into the backseat. He cried, hard, with his eyes clenched shut.
What were they going to do with him? Aphrodite’s little assassin. They could tie him up, she supposed, and gag him so they wouldn’t have to listen to his ranting all the way to Kincade. Once they got there, she might be able to find a way to put him to use.
She cried out as pain pinched down on her hand. The bastard was biting her. Half of his teeth had disappeared into the skin between her thumb and forefinger. When she let go, he grinned an enormous blood- tinged grin and shoved himself backward out the open door before she could stop him. They heard the sharp crack of his bones striking the pavement and felt the car lurch as the back tires caught some part of him underneath.
Athena looked out the back window. He was a rumpled set of clothes tumbling and flapping down the middle of the road. The semitruck was only a mile or so behind. The body would be found, and they had better be nowhere near when it got called in. She yanked the door closed tightly and stared ahead. Odysseus breathed hard, and the car slowed. He’d been shocked into coasting, his foot off the gas.
“Don’t slow too much,” she said, and grasped his knee, guiding it down. “But don’t speed. We need to—” Exhaustion hit her in a strong tide. It felt like someone had cut her adrenaline line and it was leaking out of her in a rush.
“We need to what?” Odysseus asked gently.
Athena put her fists to her forehead. “We need to get out of Dodge,” she said, “and then we need to get out of Ford.”
Odysseus’ brows knit. “Is that a cutesy, Americanized way of saying we need to get out of here and then ditch the car?”
Athena smiled. “Sorry. I’m suddenly very, very tired.”
“I’ve got more salve and bandages.”
She jerked her hand away. “Forget it. I’m not walking around with both hands gauzed up.”
“Suit yourself. But that bloke’s mouth was like a toilet.”
A groan issued from her throat, made up of every frustration she’d had over the last day and a half. It filled the car almost to bursting. She wanted to slow down, to take stock, but her brain refused to obey. It raced ahead, thinking of good places to get off of the interstate, mapping out alternative routes and figuring where they might be able to score another car, because more hitchhiking sounded not appealing at all. All she really wanted to do was rest. To go back to sleep and wake up to the radio playing a good song and gold and red fall trees going by in the window. But there was no time for that.
“What I want,” she said, “is to know why the hell she was after you. Why are they after you? Why did you come halfway around the world to seek my protection?”
Odysseus looked grimly ahead when he answered. “They want me because I know what they’re after. They want me because without me, they won’t be able to get it. And I came to you because you’re the only god strong enough to stop them.”
11
MESSAGES FROM THE MESSENGER
The explosion in Chicago was on every channel. It didn’t matter whether she flipped from CNN to ABC, there was the same live image: smoke rising into the sky, and an enormous pile of wreckage on the corner of a block. It was a mess of crumbled rock and steel girders, dust and flashing red and yellow lights from fire trucks and rescue crews. Some of the neighboring buildings had been hit too, and wore dangerous-looking cracks snaking up their sides. Before the bomb it had been a small, restored warehouse, converted to house a consultancy of some kind. No one was sure yet how many had died. Estimates varied wildly from twenty to several dozen, depending on the network. There were other casualties too: people who had been walking on the sidewalk or driving past. There were surprisingly few injuries. It killed you, or it left you alone.
“It’s terrible,” Cassandra’s father said. He and her mother had been watching the coverage since he’d come home from work. The smoke reflected in his eyeglasses and was made tiny. “It’s going to cost the city a hell of a lot to rebuild.” He shook his head and sighed.
