Rise of the Blood

force of nature.

“Safer,” I insisted.

He winked and was gone, making no promises.

Nick stood holding his plate, looking between me and their retreating backs. “Why didn’t you warn her off if you didn’t approve?” he asked.

“Tried that. Didn’t work.”

“She has a thing for bad boys, huh?”

I nodded, biting the head off a croissant that had never done a thing to me but dare to be light and flaky.

“Seen a lot of that,” Nick said. “Rarely ends well.”

I swallowed the bite of croissant that had turned to ashes in my mouth and glared. “That your idea of comfort?”

“You want comfort, you don’t come to a cop. Hey,” he added, grabbing my hand before I could decapitate a second pastry, “does Christie seem the typical type to you?”

I eyed him. “No,” I admitted.

“Then there’s a good chance her results will vary.”

It was exactly the right thing to say, and he must have read that on my face.

“I made it all better?” he asked.

“Mostly.”

“Good.” Then he mumbled, “If only Apollo’s petrification was as easily solved.”

I went a lot easier on my second croissant and gulped coffee to wash it down. “We’d better get going before our transportation leaves without us,” I said once I’d consumed enough caffeine to care.

We retrieved our bags from the room and met up with the others in the lobby.

In front of the hotel, two gleaming white stretch limos waited and Odd Job…er, Viggo…stood, directing people toward one or the other based on the list he held. It turned out the film people were going in the first limo, family in the second. There’d be no chance for me to interview any of the suspects, Serena top of the list, regardless of what Apollo thought. But the two-hour ride was the perfect opportunity for me to catch up on my missed sleep.

For the second time in as many days, I drooled on Nick’s shoulder…until we hit the switchbacks and I was catapulted upright and knocked awake by my head hitting the window. From there on up the mountain it was an unending thrill ride. And by thrill ride, I mean sheer heart-stopping terror as each time it looked like there was no possible way the limo could make the turn in the space provided and we’d go shooting off a cliff, cinematically falling end over end down the mountain, ending in a fiery wreck at the bottom.

By the time we reached the top and pulled into the almost forty-five-degree angle of the parking lot of our mountain-view hotel I had nearly shredded the leather interior with my fingernails and was seriously in need of a drink. Or ambrosia. Or all of the above. And then a way down off this deathtrap. Times like this, I doubted my ancestry. We Greeks had a habit of building on the very tippy top of impossible places. They were the holiest, the most strategic…at least, that was supposed to be the reasoning. Heights were certainly religious experiences for me. Nothing made me pray so much—ohgods, ohgods, ohgods—as being perilously close to cliffs, summits, high wires and other insanity.

I felt a prayer coming on now.

No one was happier than I was to come to a complete stop, but Nick had to be a close second. I noticed as he helped me out of the limo that his hand had gone nearly white from my squeezing of it and that he was flexing and tightening his fist in the hope of getting blood to circulate back through.

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly.

“You going to be okay?” he asked.

I sampled the air outside the limo, trying to breathe deeply and failing. It felt thin, frail, too cool, as if it could barely sustain itself, let alone actual life. I remembered Apollo speaking to the West Wind back in San Francisco. I wondered which wind spirit might rule the roost on Mount Parnassus and whether it might be prevailed upon to pump up the volume. I’d have to ask Apollo when he wasn’t too busy turning into a tree.

The thought was like a slap in the face. I had to get it together. People were counting on me—my cousin to fill out her wedding party, Apollo to solve a mystery. Apollo—now there was someone with problems.

Breathing…yeah, I had this. No problem.

I tried again and managed to breathe a little deeper this time, taking in maybe enough oxygen to get to my next breath.

“Totally,” I lied to Nick.

Fake it ’til you make it, Pappous had always said.

I grabbed my luggage from the back of the limo like the others, and Viggo held us back until the important people in the other limo were swept in ahead of us.

We were met inside by two women in hot pink suits and even brighter smiles. Their skirts stopped right above the knees. Their smiles stretched from ear to ear. Tina’s friend Junessa, and her other boss, besides Lenny Rialto, Althea Fielding. The three had become thick as thieves after Junie had recruited Tina to sell Eterne, sort of like Avon or Mary Kay but focused on eternal youth and beauty, just like the name implied. Both women were wearing Eterne’s signature color—fuschia—and were bedecked with sample bags they handed out to the wedding guests as we arrived.

Junie squealed when she saw me and swallowed me up in a backbreaking Amazonian hug. Actual Amazons were mythical, so far as I knew. So, no, the female warriors hadn’t had breasts removed to better aim their bows. But if they had existed, Junie would have fit right in. She was wearing ballet flats right now, but even so she was nearly six feet tall, all of it lean muscle. Her gorgeous cherry-wood skin glowed with health and her dark hair shone under the overhead lobby lights. I thwapped her on the back and coughed to signal my surrender, and she let me go.

“Sorry. I forget you’re not a hugger. You look fantastic!” she said, pulling back to study me more critically. “Except—” She wet her finger and scrubbed at the drool stains at the corner of my mouth. I jerked away, and Armani laughed.

“I’ve been wanting to do that myself.”

“Why didn’t you?” Junie asked.

“I didn’t want to lose a hand.”

Junie grinned at him. “Oh, she’s more bark than bite.”

“Really?” Althea cut in, handing her last bag to Yiayia as she sailed by. “Don’t you remember the time in that bar where the good ol’ boy wouldn’t take no for an answer and Tori almost made him eat his arm?”

“You brute,” Nick said, proudly.

“Oh, we have some stories to tell,” Althea promised mischievously. “Catch us later.”

“It’s a date,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” I said sourly, waving good-bye to them as I pushed Nick toward check-in.

“Jealous?” he teased.

I snorted, only because I couldn’t honestly tell him he was wrong. Junie and Althea got more than their share of attention—not the least of which from my brother, who’d tried to score with them ever since Tina had brought them around. As far as I knew, it was still girls two, Spiro zip.

Where Junie was tall and muscular, Althea was smaller and coltish with one of those natural size-zero bodies…maybe size two, tops. She could wear spaghetti straps without worrying about completely unnecessary bra straps. In other words, she was sleek like a model. She had big brown doe eyes, wheat-gold hair pulled back into a complicated braid and perfect sun-bronzed skin. No freckles, no wrinkles. It was enough to make me an eensy bit interested in what was in the little pink sample bags they’d handed out.

“So, what’s the story there?” Nick asked as we waited our turn, jerking his head to indicate our fuschia- wrapped friends.

“Beauty cult.”

“Huh?”

“You know, like the Back to Earth movement, only not. Less digging in the dirt and more miracle