Rise of the Blood

“One-way ticket?” I asked.

“There is no way back. At least, not on my skiff.”

We’d have to find our own way home.

“Come, come,” he insisted. “I have souls waiting.”

Apollo and I shared one last look before approaching the boat. It looked like if you stepped wrong you’d put a foot right through it. Fine for disembodied spirits. Not so for the living.

“You sure this will hold us?” I asked.

Charon stared at me from the depths of his cloak, and even though his face was still locked in impenetrable shadow I could feel his lack of give-a-damn.

Whatever. Maybe my buoyant personality would keep me afloat. Tentatively, I stepped into the boat. It canted crazily beneath me, but didn’t scuttle or dump me through, so staying low as I’d been taught once upon a time I pulled my other foot in behind me. The floorboards creaked ominously. If I were that kind of woman, it would have given me a complex about my weight. But I wasn’t, and it didn’t. I sat quickly and watched Apollo board. The boat lurched as his weight hit, and I grabbed instinctively for the sides to hang on for dear life. Beneath us, the water flowed in a slow, viscous way, as if it was more oil than water. It even had rainbow swirls like spilled gasoline floating on top. Or…not floating, but shifting, like a kaleidoscope, the picture ever-changing. For a second, I thought I caught a memory, and then it was gone, whipped like a rug out from under me. I almost wanted to dive after it.

“Don’t do it,” Apollo said, putting a hand on my arm. “The River Styx. You go in, you don’t come out again. It’s like the tar pits.”

I looked at him, and then Charon, who laughed, a sound like bullfrogs croaking, as he worked his pole, pushing us across the River before we could change our minds. The River wasn’t wide, but now I knew why it took a ferryman to cross.

We bumped up moments later on the opposite shore, rocks scraping the bottom of the bow. I braced for the water to seep up and into the skiff, but nothing happened. Charon used the pole to rock the boat and get my attention. “Out,” he commanded.

I considered flipping him off, but I couldn’t see what good it would do, so instead I let Apollo disembark first and hold out a hand to me. I accepted it, proud but not stupid. I’d take the steadying influence.

As soon as I was on solid ground, I turned to Charon. “Where to now?” I asked.

But he was already poling the skiff back across the way and didn’t even acknowledge me. I was already dead to him.

“Great.” I muttered, facing Apollo again. I was about to ask him the same question when my gut clenched with warning, and I saw the three sets of shining red eyes coming at us out of the darkness beyond the glowing moss. Emerging from side tunnels? I wondered, as if it mattered where they came from so much as their intentions.

I knew those eyes. Hellhounds. Quite literally.

Apollo and I moved a little apart from each other—not quite shoulder to shoulder—so that we’d have room to fight and yet be able to protect each others’ flanks. Like we’d done this before. Which we had. But as the hellhounds emerged, they didn’t seem ready to attack. Their lips stayed down over their teeth, and while they were wary and their hackles raised, they didn’t pick up speed as they approached or bunch up like they were ready to lunge…not unless we made a wrong move.

“Our emissaries?” Apollo ventured.

“If he’s got an uprising in Tartarus, they may be all Hades can spare,” I said, watching warily as the three started to circle behind us and close in, almost as if…

“They’re herding us,” I said.

“Well, then we let them. For now. But keep watch, just in case we’re headed into a trap. This all seems too easy.”

It was…until it wasn’t.

The hounds kept crowding us, cutting off exits they didn’t want us to take, herding us along the paths they intended. I kept vigilant for tripwires and stepped tentatively, worried about anything from another abyss to pressure grenades. But in a place of souls it was hard to prepare for everything—like the shriek of a thousand voices that greeted us up ahead.

Apollo and I gave each other a look and started running full out. We stopped short at the sight that greeted us when the passage opened up. In front of us stood a monstrous pack of hellhounds, Cerberus in all his three- headed glory and a mere handful of gods. I recognized Hades. He’d traded in the pastels of the Miami Vice look he wore above ground for red and black—a loose-fitting black suit with the sleeves rolled up, red T-shirt underneath, Italian leather shoes…or Greek, who could tell? I also knew his two sons—Thanatos, who looked like the stereotypical Grim Reaper, only wielding a sword instead of the iconic sickle, and Hypnos, all punked and pierced. The woman was a mystery, but her black leather catsuit was rockin’ and her hair was wild with some kind of storm that seemed to rage only around her. Hecate, at a guess. She was the only other Underworld god/dess I knew off the top of my head, though from the other figures gathered, I assumed there were more. Or that Hades’s dubious charm had garnered him allies.

But it was what was beyond them that captured my attention. Beyond them was…it looked like a barrier, a bubble stretched to its limit with arms and limbs and tentacles pushing through. The hellhounds growled, as if they could warn the titans back. Cerberus snarled and snapped at the air. The gods arrayed themselves against the imminent outbreak, arms out, a miasma or mist coming from their outstretched palms. It flowed toward the near- to-bursting barrier and formed a layer that momentarily pushed back the uprising.

“You going to help?” Hades called over his shoulder, apparently aware of our presence.

Apollo ran forward. I had no choice but to follow, though I didn’t know what good I’d do. I had one trick in my arsenal. One. I could freeze people and creatures…temporarily. But it had never worked on the Olympians, and the titans were older and more fearsome still, children of the original power couple, Oceanus and Gaea, the progenitors of Kronos and Rhea. They were the oldest of the old. Against them I was a single ant trying to take down a giant anteater.

Apollo took position beside Thanatos, and I stood next to him, my heart trying to pound its way straight out of my chest. As I stared there seemed to be a coordinated attack on the barrier and all at once it burst with the power of a sonic boom. The gods were blown back. I landed hard, right beneath Thanatos, whose elbow caught me on the chin as he fell, making me see stars. I blinked hard, desperate to clear them so that I could at least meet doom head-on. My brain almost went on strike refusing to process what was before me. Some of the titans were nearly human looking but for their vast size and the fact that they could have been carved out of mountains. Some had extra limbs or predator’s teeth or tusks. Others had tentacles or stingers or far, far too many eyes.

And they were coming straight for us. I pushed Thanatos aside as a tentacle slammed his way and he hadn’t recovered fast enough to dodge. As I pushed him, I used the counter pressure to roll the other way, toward the sword he’d dropped. I grabbed the hilt just as something grabbed me—another tentacle from the way it wrapped my ankle. I kicked and bucked to turn myself over onto my back where I could get the leverage and the space to swing the sword. I flopped like a landed fish—inelegant, but effective—and brought the sword down hard on the tentacle holding me. It didn’t release, though it did flinch, tightening its muscles painfully, like a constrictor squeezing me so hard I thought the foot would pop right off the end of my leg. Frantically, I swung again, and this time when ink-like blood spattered me, the tentacle loosened, and I realized it was because I’d cut it clean off and yet it was still attached to my ankle. There was no time for a girly gross-out. Another three tentacles were coming for me.

I rolled and scuttled out of the way of them, looking for some distance from which I could strategize a better angle on the battle than one tentacle at a time. I saw that Thanatos had pulled a second sword from somewhere and was swinging about like a madman, severing tentacles and claws, slimy with blood and ichor. Hellhounds were darting in—or being hurled out, yelps cut off in a horrifyingly final manner. Apollo was using a claw from something that could have been the great grandpappy of all velociraptors to wedge open a gryphon-like mouth that was trying to get at him.

I jumped the latest tentacle lashing out and went in with Thanatos’s lost sword, aiming for the soft skin under the titan’s neck. As the sword pierced the skin, the gryphon bugled and thrashed, knocking me to the side. The sword whipped free with me and together we went sliding across the ground in a puddle of something I didn’t