Rise of the Blood

I couldn’t process. “Find? Shouldn’t we report them?”

Apollo looked at me pityingly and continued trying to pull me to my feet. I wasn’t being any help. Escape felt…pointless. Three men were dead. I’d killed them. Sure, they were trying to kill us, but…it hadn’t been self-defense. Not for me—or Rhea. I remembered it all now. There’d been anger, hunger, righteousness, but no fear. I hadn’t—she hadn’t felt threatened. She’d felt vengeful.

I started to shake. Hard. So hard my teeth clacked together and I almost shook loose of Apollo’s hand.

“You’re in shock,” he said. “And no wonder, but you can break down later. For now, I have to get you out of here. No arguments. We can’t report this when you’re the one covered in their blood.”

It seemed pointless—to protest, escape, report, breathe. All equally hopeless. What could the authorities do, after all? Arresting me wouldn’t stop a disembodied mother goddess. I wasn’t even sure she wouldn’t take possession again to prevent that from happening, and I was afraid of what that would mean for any authorities.

My shaking grew more violent, but Apollo held on and dragged me from the site.

It was dark. There was no constant glare of city lights and pollution like in L.A. Just darkness barely lightened by the moon and stars, even with no clouds to blot them out. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other and not thinking about the dead priests. Someone’s sons, certainly. Brothers? Lovers? Who was left behind to mourn and how could they without knowing…

I stumbled, and Apollo kept me upright.

“No guard?” I asked, surprised, looking around the ruins.

“No money for them. There’s only one way in, and it would have been closed hours ago.”

So the bodies wouldn’t be found until morning. Were there predators up this high? Scavengers who would… The bile rose up again, but not with enough force to spill over.

Right, not thinking about them. Not my fault. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. My body, my rules. My parents had taught me that before we’d even had the first sex talk. It was like a mantra, and it had been totally blown to smithereens. If I wasn’t safe inside my own mind and body, where was I safe? And who was safe from me?

Right, fleeing the scene of a crime now, complete mental break later. After my murder indictment. Maybe I could claim insanity. I already had the family history.

Apollo was moving slower than normal, I noticed after a minute. “Are you okay?” I asked.

He didn’t answer right away. “Healing,” he said finally, “and talking to the winds. Getting help.”

I craned my aching neck to stare at him. “You couldn’t have done that earlier?”

“No winds where they had us locked away, and then I was distracted taking a knife to the chest.”

“Oh, that. And between times?”

He looked away. Between incarceration and attempted sacrifice, I’d been knocked out. Had all his focus been on me?

“I tried. He wasn’t taking calls,” Apollo said.

“Who wasn’t? Hermes?”

Apollo snorted. “I wouldn’t trust Hermes to help me cross the street.”

“Who then?”

“Pan.”

I stopped short, and Apollo, still holding my arm, propelling me along, nearly fell on his face with the sudden loss of momentum.

“Pan,” I said, confirming. “As in my possible progenitor Pan?”

“You don’t know?” he asked.

“Know what?” I snapped back. I’d killed tonight. I really wasn’t in the mood for guessing games.

“Your Uncle Hector.”

My brain refused even to process that thought, still fried from earlier or just unable to accept any more impossible things before breakfast…or rehearsal dinner. Oh gods, that rehearsal dinner. Tina was going to kill me. And right now I could only think that it would solve all my problems.

“Uncle Hector,” I repeated stupidly.

“Ask your yiayia. She knows. Or ask him yourself. He’s on his way.”

My brain had truly blown a fuse. Suddenly, my divine heritage had gone from theoretical to actual. Oh sure, I’d come to terms with the gorgon glare; there was no denying that. But divinity… Although, actual relation to the god Pan, the earthy divinity best known for his sexual appetite, explained so much about Spiro.

Uncle Hector. Now I understood why I’d never known quite where he fit into the family tree. It seemed to be kind of an emeritus title. I wondered…did everybody know? Or was everyone but Yiayia as ignorant as I was?

“Tori, stay with me. We have to get past the road block so that Hector can pick us up.”

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” I snapped.

“Not physically. But mentally you’re so far away your feet have stopped moving.”

I cursed, colorfully and bilingually. It didn’t help anything, but it felt good. I had so much pent up…stuff— horror, shock, panic, horror, stunned disbelief, horror—that it was a release valve of sorts, letting off just enough steam to get my feet moving again.

We made it past the gated-off portion of road and down a little ways from the bloodshed and ruins when a car, running dark with no lights, pulled up to us. The passenger side window rolled down, and Uncle Hector ordered, “Get in.”

Apollo opened the back door for me and gently lowered me in, then he took shotgun.

“That your blood?” Uncle Hector asked as he got in.

“Mostly.”

Uncle Hector only nodded, like he picked up bloody men on dark mountain roads on a regular basis. He was completely unfazed. “Tori-girl, how are you?”

There was no way to answer that.

“In shock,” Apollo said for me.

Hector nodded, popped the car into gear and somehow managed a three-point turn on the narrow road. We drove for a mile or so before he felt it safe to turn on the headlights.

“I didn’t make any excuses,” Uncle Hector said as he drove. “Would lead to too many questions, and I wanted to get out of there in a hurry. Plus, I didn’t know what kind of injuries we were gonna have to account for. But you two disappearing together, that’s caused quite a stir.” He took his gaze off the road to look back over his shoulder at me. “Your young man is fit to be tied. Caused quite a ruckus saying you’d gone missing. Nearly derailed the rehearsal. Stayed behind to search for you. Had hotel security all up in arms.”

Nick.

My heart broke. How was I going to tell Nick that I’d killed, even if I hadn’t been the one in control of my body? That I’d left the scene. That I could feel Apollo’s pain…

Even without a psychic connection, I could sense Nick’s pain, because I knew what I’d be feeling if situations were reversed and he’d gone missing after threats to his life. I’d fear the worst. He was a Los Angeles police officer, a detective. He’d seen a lot more of the worst than he had of best case scenarios.

“Cell phone?” I asked.

Uncle Hector reached into the console cup holder and handed me the phone that sat there. “Wait a minute or two though. We want it to ping off the right cell towers.” If I’d had my head on straight, I’d have thought of that.

When Uncle Hector—I still couldn’t think of him as Pan—gave me the nod, I dialed the hotel. But Nick wasn’t in our room. Of course not, he was out looking for me. I hung up before the voicemail came on and then called again. This time I asked the front desk to give him a message, just that I was okay and on my way back.

“We need a cover story,” I said the second I hung up.

“Ahead of you there,” Uncle Hector said, far too cheerfully, especially under the circumstances. “You went