Rise of the Blood

for a walk together and ignored the signs about loose scree and falling rocks. Happens all the time. You got hurt, went bumping down the mountain, got stuck on a ledge. Apollo had to figure out how to get you up safely and didn’t dare leave you to go for help. I presume you don’t have your phone on you?” he asked Apollo, who shook his head. “So, he couldn’t leave you, and he didn’t have a phone to call for help.”

“You’ve done this before,” I said, not sure whether I was accusing or admiring.

“Anipsi, I’ve been sneaking into and out of bedrooms and coming up with alibis since long before you were born.”

“How do we explain all of this blood?” Apollo asked.

“Change of clothes,” Uncle Hector answered, “in the back.”

On the floor in front of me was a dark backpack. I tore open the zipper and out fell PowerBars, mini water bottles, a first-aid kit and a profusion of clothes. I looked from it to Uncle Hector.

“Just one question, why am I the one getting rescued in your scenario?”

I hadn’t meant to be funny, but his laughter fell about me as I ripped into a PowerBar, suddenly consumed with the munchies, maybe trying to fill the empty void that was my soul.

But once I’d consumed the calories, all I wanted to do was sleep. Playing host to a psychotic mother goddess after her millennia of slumber apparently took a lot out of a girl. Ambrosia or nectar would probably perk me right up, but now that the supplier was suspect, the cost was far too high. This wedding had already become more about death than a new life, and it wasn’t even over. None of it. Apollo’s blood and near sacrifice had awoken Rhea, and she didn’t seem inclined to slip quietly into that good night.

Sleep. It seemed to be the best thing. Already my body was shutting down. My eyes were closing. My head lolled back against the headrest, and my eyes shut with a satisfying finality. I had a blissful moment of escape, and then, “Tori!”

I was so sick of hearing it. My eyes stayed shut and my mind blank.

A slap rocked my head from one side to the other, and my eyes snapped open. “What?” I asked without the energy for the heat I felt at the rudeness.

“We’re almost there. You have to change.”

“Let ’em take me.” It came out “Et em ake ee,” and my eyes shut again.

There was cursing, and then someone was crawling into the backseat with me, and I was half aware that I was being undressed, but not awake enough to actually care. Then my arms were lifted, and I was slumped forward so my shirt could be pulled off of my back. The wet suctiony sound barely penetrated my cloud of exhaustion. I didn’t resist, but I didn’t help either. If I was caught bloody-handed, so be it, as long as they let me sleep. Deep down, I knew that wouldn’t happen. There’d be an interrogation, mugshots, fingerprinting—things for which I’d probably have to stay upright, but… Yeah, I wished them luck with that.

The car door opened. Presumably, the car had stopped first, but I hadn’t been aware of it. I stayed deadweight as I was lifted out of the backseat. I was vaguely aware of a sense of movement, of being taken from one place to another and being laid down on something, but whatever warned me of danger didn’t sound an alert, and so I didn’t bother to rouse myself. I wasn’t even sure it was possible. Not even for the insistent voices all around me. I did manage to shift into a more comfortable position and fall far, far away from it all.

At a certain point, I became aware of a loud argument, followed some time later by warm arms pulling me into a seated position and someone spooning something into my mouth with the command, “Eat this.” That same someone rubbed my throat to make sure that I swallowed, like a recalcitrant kitty with a heartworm pill. Then I was out again.

Blood, seeping, absorbing, awakening. Power rising. Me rising, seeking, laughing at the glory of it, then horrified at the degradation. Finding a new avatar. Strong, that one, but so pointless. Hardly aware of her potential. Wasteful. So much to be exploited, taken over, pathways seldom traveled. Unguarded.

I thrashed, trying to wake, trapped in the dream, wanting out.

A new avatar, linked to the blood sacrifice. Blood I knew. Blood relation. Oh, the flavor. The power, the hum and life of it. I’d nearly forgotten life and the immediacy of the sensations. Almost too much after all this time asleep.

And then those bladed men, thinking they could take it all from me. I saw it in their hearts.

All for my eldest son, Zeus, who’d ruined everything. I should never have fed his father that stone in his place.

Zeus. The name burned. He would not rise again to ascendency. His time had passed, but the titans. I could sense it in this new avatar, in the very earth…the old ways had been forgotten. The titans themselves had been forgotten, along with any remembrance of how they might be defeated. And unlike the upstart Olympians, their power had never been fueled by belief, but by the sheer primal power of creation.

I flailed, trying to throw Rhea out of my head, as I’d tried and failed to exorcise her from my body. I lashed out and struck something, but it might have been in the dream, because…

One of Zeus’s human dogs made a move, and as quickly as I willed it, the sacrificial blade was in my hand, slashing, cutting deep. More blood, more power. More elation, more bloodshed. Until I was bathed in it, as I’d been when I’d borne my misbegotten son.

I jerked out of the nightmare, terror blind. There was sound and stabbing light and something weighing me down. I tried to shake it, and panicked when I couldn’t move, couldn’t control my own body. Again. My own personal hell. And then the dark clouds across my vision started to clear but for pixilated pain throbbing around the edges. I looked up into Nick’s midnight blue eyes, almost black at the moment.

“Shh, shh, Tori, it’s just a night terror. Tori, it’s me. You’re safe.”

His cheek was swollen, and it was my fault. The lashing out had been real enough, not simply part of the dream, which wasn’t a dream in any case.

The fight leaked out of me, and when he felt me relax, Nick eased onto his side next to me, studying me with concern.

“Want to talk about it?” he asked quietly.

“No,” I answered. It hurt to talk. I wondered if I’d been screaming, and then whether it was in my own panic or Rhea’s triumph.

“You didn’t get hurt walking with Apollo, did you?” he asked, and I could hear something like fear beneath the careful gentleness in his tone. “The news—”

So the bodies had been found already.

I rolled over, away from his probing gaze. What did I tell him? That I’d committed triple homicide, but I hadn’t been myself at the time? Did possession qualify someone for the insanity defense or—

“Tori.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t be satisfied with that.

“Tori!” he said it sharply, and I rolled to face him so suddenly he almost looked afraid…of me.

“What?” I asked.

The pain in my throat and in my head were already receding, and I no longer ached all over like I had after… No, no tangents. The bodies had been found, Nick was asking questions, and I had to face this. If someone had spooned ambrosia into me earlier in the evening, it was the least of my worries. So the pain in my head was gone, but the one in my heart… “What do you want me to tell you? That I killed them? That I was possessed at the time? That I passed out in a dead faint afterward and relived it all in my nightmares? It’s all true.” Nick looked lightning stuck. “Apollo and I were kidnapped, and we were going to die, and the only reason I’m still alive is that a goddess more powerful than I am used me as her own personal puppet.”

I broke down. I could have counted on one hand with fingers left over the number of times I’d cried in my life. I wasn’t prepared for the sudden explosion of sobs that seemed to start from somewhere around my gut and wracked my whole body.

Nick didn’t touch me. Didn’t hold me, and that only made me cry harder, because I knew I was horrifying to him now. Repugnant, but no more than I was to myself. I’d had my hand buried in some guy’s solar plexus.

Too late, he finally reached for me, as if it was a duty and not one he was sure he should perform. I knew it