Rise of the Blood

count in order to synchronize the lift, but I didn’t turn.

“I’m sorry,” Apollo said. He sounded sincere, but I didn’t know if he was sorry for Nick or for taking me down earlier when I was possessed. I nodded again. It didn’t matter.

“We have to plan,” he continued. “Let them care for the wounded.”

I turned now to stare at him, shocked that he’d even suggest it. “I can’t leave him.”

He tried to pull me aside and I dug in my heels, but he was stronger, and I owed him, even if I was only just realizing how much. I moved off with him, but only far enough for the EMTs not to overhear. Then I repeated. “I can’t leave him.”

“You can’t do anything else,” he countered, eyes soft with understanding. “You can’t do anything for him, and if Rhea comes back—” I won’t be able to control myself. He didn’t need to finish the thought. He seemed to sense it and moved on. “If Rhea really is raising the titans it’s a world-ender. Truly. No one will be safe. The best thing you can do for him and everyone else is to help us stop it.”

“How?” I asked. “So far I’ve been part of the problem, not the solution.”

“Even more reason for you to be with us. It’s safer for Nick, and I keep thinking there must be some way I can use our mind link to get through to you when Rhea’s in residence, or at least piggyback on her thoughts so that we can learn her plans.”

“What if there isn’t?”

“Then we’re no worse off than we are now.”

I knew in my head that he made sense, but my heart—the pieces that remained—didn’t agree.

“Give me an hour,” I said. “Let me get him to the hospital. Let me be there in case he wakes. After that, they’ll probably have him on sedatives and in surgery. But for now—”

Apollo’s eyes were indescribably sad. “Go. I’ll get everyone together.”

I looked around suddenly. “Where are Zeus and Poseidon?”

We both looked to their last known position, but we couldn’t see them with the EMTs in the way. At least one was alive enough to refuse treatment and have the EMT argue with him over the extent of his burns. I didn’t hear any more after that and could only assume that the belligerent one had either passed out or been knocked out by some kind of painkiller.

“Seems they’ll be going to the hospital as well,” Apollo said. “Maybe you can talk to them.”

“Talk to them?”

He gave me a very serious look. “If the titans are rising, we can’t do it alone. I’m not even sure we can do it together. When Zeus beat the titans before he had help—the cyclopses and hecatoncheires. It wasn’t a battle, it was a war.”

This kept getting better and better.

“Fine, I’ll talk to them, but I have to go.”

The EMTs hadn’t waited for me, but were wheeling Nick out on their cart. I ran to catch up with them.

He didn’t moan or shift as they hoisted him into the ambulance and bumped him into place. He barely looked alive.

And I’d done this. Or at least I’d been too weak to stop it from happening, to stop Rhea from taking me over, using me to commit human sacrifice and awaken her fully into her power. This was the second time Nick would be in the hospital because of me. There wouldn’t be a third.

I had to quickly get out of the way as another EMT came through with another stretcher and they loaded that into the ambulance as well. I couldn’t tell who it was with his face as blackened as Nick’s, but from the suit it looked like another wedding guest. Poor man.

The medic got up into the ambulance; his partner motioned me in as well, then slammed the doors behind us. There was barely room for me and the medic between the two stretchers, and he had to shift back and forth between patients, starting IVs, checking heart rates. I tried to stay out of the way and prayed to anyone and everyone—Christ Pantocrator straight through to Rhea herself—with everything I had for Nick to be okay. For everyone to miraculously be okay. And for them to send Nick home where he’d be safe. He had no part in this war, but I couldn’t see him accepting that. If people were in danger he’d fight until his last breath to save them. That’s exactly what I was afraid of.

The medic fired questions at me as he worked on Nick, and I did my best to answer, remembering that I was supposed to be his wife. It was amazing how woefully ignorant I was. Finally, I patted him down for his wallet and pulled out his blood donor and insurance cards, which answered some of the questions I couldn’t.

As soon as we hit the hospital, I was sidelined again, shoved off on someone with a computer and a no- nonsense attitude to answer questions, many of them the same as I’d already been asked, and to fill out paperwork that seemed endless. I asked every time I could catch a break whether I could see him, but I kept getting, “Just one or two more things,” until I wondered how the data entry lady had ever passed kindergarten math.

Finally I was allowed into the emergency area waiting room. No further. When I tried to ask the nurse who’d occasionally call someone in what was going on, she insisted that someone would be out to talk to me.

I tried to wait. Really I did. But it didn’t take. I’d told Apollo I’d be back in an hour. After twenty minutes had passed, I glanced around at my fellow waiters—reading magazines, playing on their smart phones, worriedly pacing the floor. All wrapped up in their own stuff. No one was concerned with me. I got up out of my seat and without rushing or doing the “casual saunter” that never looked anything but suspicious, I approached the door that would take me into the treatment area, turned the knob and simply walked through. No one was there to stop me. I dodged doctors and nurses, desperately willing them not to see me…or at least not to care if they did. Whether it worked or whether the craziness of the ER was on my side, I didn’t know. I peeked behind curtains and dodged into and out of treatment areas with impunity. But no Nick. No sign of him. At a guess, he’d had to go straight into surgery or some super-sterile area because of his burns and exposed flesh.

Tears welled up in my eyes, and I would have let that last curtain fall, seeing only the barrel chest and gray mane of hair, knowing it wasn’t Nick, but a voice lashed out with venom, “Gorgon-spawn.”

I froze, torn between ignoring it to continue searching for Nick and stepping inside. I recognized that voice. Poseidon. He’d spoken to me once—threatened me, really—through the mouth of a singing fish I had mounted on my office wall…just before he attempted to drown me and succeeded in flooding my office. And that had been before he’d tried to explode a charge in an offshoot of the San Andreas fault to set off the quake to end all quakes, dropping L.A. into the ocean to announce his (and Zeus’s) second coming. Oh yeah, and he’d tried to kill me then as well when I got in the way.

Talk to them, Apollo had said. Yeah, right.

I stepped inside and let the curtain drop behind me. “Poseidon,” I said, as neutrally as possible. “You’re looking…well.”

Part of his silvery mane had burned away, and that lovely smell of burnt hair clung to him. Oxygen hissed softly as it fed through a tube up into his nose. His face was blackened, but miraculously not too burned. Possibly there was some protection against fire in being a water god. But a dry, wracking cough overtook him as I approached his bedside. It continued for the better part of a minute, which wasn’t such a long time in the grand scheme of things, but when you’re listening to someone cough up a lung, it seemed like forever.

“What have you done?” he asked when he could talk again.

Why was everybody always asking me that?

“Me, nothing. Why don’t you ask Zeus what his priests set in motion at Delphi? No, wait, I’ll tell you. Their attempt at human sacrifice woke Rhea, your loving mother. Apparently, she’s not happy to see you.”

Poseidon glared. It hadn’t been him she’d saved from Chronos, after all. She’d let him be devoured, along with the rest of her children. It had been Zeus alone she’d saved. Talk about mommy issues.

“I should kill you,” he growled, which set off another, longer coughing fit, which ended on a wheeze and a rattle in his chest.

“You tried that,” I answered when it died down enough that he could hear. “You’re welcome to try again, of course, but I don’t recommend it. Right now I’d say you have two options. You can keep threatening me and I can raise holy hell, bring people running and alert them that they’ve got an international fugitive on their hands. A terrorist, no less.”