Rise of the Blood

gloved hands. I watched him go, but with the sun now set, it wasn’t long before he disappeared.

Yes, I missed him. But more because I was squatting on the edge of a big black hole, waiting for my own journey to the center of the earth.

When he yelled, I learned over the abyss, got vertigo and stopped.

“What,” I yelled back.

“Slide down. I’ve got you.” It seemed to come from a long, long way away. If I hadn’t been straining, I’d never have heard him.

The shakes set in. My pits grew damp. It was like ambrosia withdrawal, only without the fun hallucinations. The horror before me was real.

I took a deep breath, counted to ten, let it go. I’d seen people do that on television too, or maybe in infomercials to calm stress. They were full of shit.

“Tori?” he called.

“Coming,” I yelled down impatiently. Geez, give a girl a chance. “Okay,” I said for my own sake. “Here goes.”

I sat down on my butt and scooted myself toward the edge, shaking the whole way. Terror rose up, choking me, making me feel like I couldn’t catch a breath or let one out. My heart was pounding so hard I expected my chest to explode. But I didn’t stop…until I hit the very edge and small rocks started to skitter out from under me, raining down into the abyss. Probably coming down on Apollo’s head. He’d flinch. I’d fall.

“Are you sure you’ve got me?” I yelled.

Suddenly, something started to fill me, like a humming in my head. Soothing, calming. My heart rate started to slow again. I wanted to panic at the invasion, afraid Rhea might be taking over again, that she might use me to close the tunnel behind Apollo—bring it down on his head. But—

“Better?” Apollo called up.

“Are you messing with my head?” I called back.

“I’m inspiring peace.”

“Well—keep it up.” Cut it out, the fiercely independent part of me wanted to say, but she was vetoed by sanity. Not a frequent visitor to my world, so we tended to listen when she spoke. Yes, we. Me, myself and Rhea. One more personality and we’d make a blockbuster film…or at least a made-for-TV movie. Ah, there, I knew the sanity wouldn’t last long.

I took a deep breath, swallowed hard and let myself go. I didn’t drop far. A body length, maybe, and then the rope pulled taut.

“Good girl,” Apollo called, making me wonder if there were cookies in this for me at the end, or a good ear scratch. “Now, I’m going to let you down easy.”

Easier than Armani. No, no, I wasn’t going to think of that. Now was no time for distractions.

Hand over hand, Apollo lowered me down into the darkness while I tried not to think of Nick, creepy crawlies or falling to a deadly death. Yes, I knew it was redundant. But any scenario where I didn’t just go quietly into that good night at a ripe old age struck me like that.

When the hands reached me, I shrieked.

“Tori, it’s me. I’ve got you.”

Apollo. I wanted to hug him and squeeze him…and call him a bastard for scaring me like that.

“Your hands are cold,” I lied.

“Uh huh.”

I heard his clothing rustle and then realized that I still held the flashlight, so illuminating our surroundings was up to me.

Apollo gently angled my hand to shine the light on the climbing ropes so that he could release me. “If they weren’t so awkward to move in, I’d suggest we stay in the harnesses for a quick getaway, but—”

He found the release. When the harness fell away, it felt like a weight had been lifted off me. Finally, I could breathe.

Apollo took the flashlight back from me and moved the beam slowly around the space. The snake’s tunnel continued downward at a slope, the floor of the tunnel smooth and almost polished, as if countless scales had slithered over it during the course of ages. It was creepy, and the way was going to be slippery, especially if we came across any wet areas.

“You got another of those for me?” I asked, nodding toward the flashlight.

“I have a cell phone with a flashlight app,” he answered.

“Never mind.”

Apollo kept the light and led the way, figuring, not wrongly, that if he slid from behind me with his greater bulk, he’d take me down with him, but if I slipped and he was in my way he had some chance of stopping the slide.

We moved slowly, and at the first branching stopped to consult our precog. It seemed counter-intuitive to head toward the danger, but the right path was clearly more ominous, based on the mule kick my precog landed on my solar plexus.

“Right?” Apollo confirmed. I nodded.

The tunnel leveled out almost entirely and the walls grew as smooth as the floors. Water dripped from the ceilings, though, and when I shone the light up toward them, it became clear that the drips were coming from the end of dark stalactites that looked like petrified icicles.

There were other branches leading off, though not many. Still, our guts kept telling us to move straight ahead and after a while—monotony tended to mess with my concept of time—there seemed to be a glow from up ahead, as if we were getting somewhere. I got the sense, too, that things opened up ahead, and the phantom mule gave me another kick to the gut, as if in affirmation.

Apollo felt it too. He put a hand back to slow me, silently, and together we crept toward the end of the tunnel…the light at the end of the tunnel. Hadn’t I heard somewhere not to go into the light? Unfortunately, I didn’t see that we had a choice.

When Apollo stopped, I nudged him aside, unable to let him discover anything before me. The light was coming from some kind of florescent moss covering the stalactites. Spiro would have loved it, but my attention was caught by what the light revealed. The smooth floor of the tunnel led down to a shore of equally smooth rocks, and beyond that, a slow-moving river on which sat a weathered skiff and a skeletal ferryman. Or, at least, as thin as he was there couldn’t have been much more than bones beneath his tattered cloak.

Charon. Ferryman for the dead.

If he knew we were here, then Hades…

And yet my precog hadn’t kicked up full force—bells and whistles and migraine-inducing klaxons.

Charon turned as he sensed our approach. I couldn’t see his face inside the hood and cowl of his cloak, but the boney finger he pointed our way, which I was glad to see was covered in a minimum of flesh anyway (fish belly white) was unmistakable. He crooked it at us in the universal sign for “Come hither.” To your doom, my brain wanted to add, but I beat it into submission.

I pointed to my own chest to make sure he was really talking to us and that there weren’t some other lost souls, maybe spirits we couldn’t actually see, who he might be signaling.

“Come here,” he demanded, his voice as threadbare as his cloak. It sounded like the wind howling mournfully through thick marsh grasses—thin and rank with decay.

Apollo and I looked at each other. “But we’re not dead,” he said, just to be clear.

Charon sighed like a bubble of swamp gas releasing. “Hades sent me to fetch you. There is trouble afoot.”

Well, no shit, Sherlock.

I looked to Apollo for some sign. He knew the old gods better than I did. Was Hades for real? There was no way he could have missed the earth quaking. And if the titans were rising, he’d no doubt need help. I just couldn’t see him asking for it. On the other hand, Charon hadn’t exactly been asking.

“We don’t have the fare,” Apollo said, still testing.

“Your fare has been paid.”