Rise of the Blood

I glanced at the cops as I asked.

Both nodded silently.

“You’re not going to tell me who? Or when? We could clear this all up right now if I wasn’t in town when it happened. I only got in yesterday.”

“You were here,” badge guy said.

“Then it’s only just happened? Wait, it’s no one I know, is it? Please tell me it’s no one in the family or any of the wedding guests!”

Fear was fear. Hopefully they’d misconstrue the cause of mine. I hated the misdirection, but last night I’d been in no condition to call the deaths in and now that the cover-up had begun it felt like there was no going back. There was nothing I could do to stop Rhea from behind bars. No way I could make any part of this right. It wouldn’t be justice, it would be stupidity to assuage my guilt.

The officers exchanged a look, but didn’t say a word.

“Tell me,” I insisted.

“Down at the station,” the other cop insisted.

I worried all the way there about what they might have on me. I’d been kidnapped, for gods’ sake. If anyone had seen anything it would be that, wouldn’t it? But that hardly helped. If the police thought Apollo and I had fought our way free of our captors, then my little performance had just killed any self-defense plea before it even began.

I wasn’t prepared to walk into the small bustling station and see the shopkeeper who’d covered for the man in black sitting in a chair talking to yet another plainclothesman. She looked like she’d been watching the entry, because as soon as she saw me, she knocked her chair over in her haste to rise and point an accusing finger at me.

“That’s her,” she said, loudly enough to carry. “She’s the one who was following that man.”

Something welled up in me, strong enough to knock me to my knees, but I locked them and tried to ride it out. This was alien yet familiar—like Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers or any other horror villain…because that’s what filled me, horror. That part was all mine. But the rising tide of power and righteousness…

HOW DARE SHE accuse us? How dare they try to question me and hold my avatar. Those men were NOTHING.

The last thought roared out of me, and the ground beneath all of our feet started to shake. Pencil holders, phones and folders started to topple from desks. The shopkeeper tried to catch herself on her chair back, but since it had already fallen, she overbalanced herself and ended up going down hard. She cried out, and inside me, Rhea exalted.

“Stop!” I yelled, not realizing that I’d said it out loud until the ground momentarily stilled and everyone, including the goddess within, momentarily focused on me in surprise. “I want a lawyer.”

I didn’t really. Waiting for a lawyer would only delay things, and I had a wedding to get to. But I knew they’d set me to wait in some kind of holding cell or interrogation room, hopefully away from any temptation Rhea might have to do harm.

A holding cell might be the safest place for me. With a vengeful goddess, newly awakened, cranky after her millennia-long nap doing a ride-along in my body, I wasn’t safe to be around.

But Rhea didn’t agree. At all. Apparently, she had places to be, and as the vehicle she’d chosen from the motor pool, I was going along for the ride. Suddenly, I was under attack from within. Something wrenched inside my brain hard, and it felt like an aneurism or a flash migraine or…something monumentally painful and potentially mind-blowing in the permanent sense of the word. My vision went purple-black. My stomach rebelled, my brain shattered. I fought for consciousness.

“What’s going on?” one of the cops, detectives, asked, like this might all be part of some scheme.

There was a hand under my arms now, holding me up, gripping too hard. I hadn’t noticed its arrival, but from the placement it went with the voice demanding answers.

“Concussion,” I managed “Hit…head…last night.”

“Damn it,” said the other cop. “We need to get her looked at. If she really did hit her head last night, that quake might have set something off.”

Yes! I thought.

Then…

No! An ambulance ride or whatever would only delay me getting help for my goddess issues or getting to the wedding. My brain was so scrambled, I didn’t know what I was thinking.

“No,” I said out loud, but not too loud, because my head seemed in danger of shattering. I couldn’t hold Rhea down much longer. She didn’t like the feel of the cop’s hand gripping my—our— arm. She was trembling on the verge of doing something about it, even if it meant bringing the station down around us. “No,” I said again, more quietly. “I just need to lie down.” My words were slurred as my control over my body faltered.

“Fine,” said one of the cops. “You can lie down in a holding cell while you wait for a lawyer.”

“And a doctor,” said the other. “Because there’s no way in hell you’re going down with an aneurism on my watch. I’m not doing that paperwork.”

And then…and then nothing. I lost control, even to the point of awareness.

I woke in a cell. The bars were a dead giveaway.

Those bars seemed to move as I watched them, and my stomach moved with them—warning: contents may have shifted during fight. I fought my guts back down where they belonged just in time to see a familiar face between the bars. Uncle Hector. I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. Well, maybe Nick on my doorstep with pizza, but aside from that… Uncle Hector stared down at me, studying my face.

“Tori, are you okay? They said you’d passed out.” I must have looked at him blankly. “Oh, yeah, I’m your lawyer,” he said with a wink. “No need to mention my background is in corporate law.”

I rose up and reached through the bars to hug him tight. He hugged me back, like I was a little girl again. That was when I became aware of all the other eyes on me from the next cell over. Apparently, I’d been put in some kind of isolation and had a cell to myself, but the one beside me held three women—one with a black eye, one looking scratched as though she’d taken my supposed tumble down the mountain, and the third smelling of vomit. The other women stood as far as they could from her in the cell. All three stared disconcertingly at me.

I wondered if Rhea had gone out like a light when I had and, if not, what she’d been doing with my body while I wasn’t using it to have garnered such attention from next door.

“Um, nothing to see here,” I told them forcefully.

None of them even blinked. It was eerie, like they were waiting for some signal they didn’t want to miss. If they weren’t behind bars, I’d have likened them to the birds from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic and controversial film, massing on the wire.

Uncle Hector looked over his shoulder at them and back to me.

“You know them?” he asked dubiously.

I shook my head.

“Well then, let’s get you out of here.”

“But the questioning…I don’t think I’m free to go.”

“I’ve convinced them it can wait. They know they can’t use anything they might get out of you in this condition. I’d never allow it. Anyway, they’d rather you be my problem at the moment.”

“Oh.” Score one for concussion, I thought. Or maybe it was the mini-quake and the thought of one less prisoner to evacuate if it happened again.

A uniformed officer opened the door for Uncle Hector, and motioned me out. Moving hurt, my head most of all.

“You okay?” he asked again, and I realized I’d never answered him the first time. “Do you need a doctor?”

I started to shake my head and quickly realized that was a bad idea.