Rise of the Blood

want to identify.

From my ant’s-eye view I saw Cerberus facing off with a mega mountain of a man—a titan, looking almost human but for a second head. It was a death match. The titan had one of Cerberus’s heads locked within his massive arms, trying to choke the life out of it, while the next closest head had its fangs buried in the back of the titan’s neck. Both struggled, both locked on, it seemed, until their power ran out. I couldn’t worry about them.

I rolled back to my feet, sword still miraculously in hand. Half my body aching and the other half unable to be heard over those complaints.

Apollo’s gryphon was down, and he’d rushed to Hades’s aid, now standing shoulder to shoulder with Hecate as she defended Hades, who was chanting with ever-increasing furor, something dark and sinister growing between his cupped hands.

A massive club swung by one of the other titans knocked Apollo aside, sending him flying. I raced to intercept—to cushion his impact, flinging my sword arm out to my side so that I wouldn’t catch him with it. Apollo struck me just as Hades let loose with his spell. It crashed into the chest of the club-wielding titan and exploded outward. The titan howled as the impact from the darkness seemed to open some kind of miasma in its chest. Not so much a wound as a void, a black hole. Its knees buckled, and the ground jumped, as it fell hard. The darkness expanded, catching another titan, who looked part crab, claws whipping out toward Hypnos, who dodged them like Jack-be-Nimble jumping over the candlestick. Hypnos kicked off the claw, doing a flip in mid-air, which would have been completely impressive if an involuntary spasm of pain hadn’t sent the claw flailing out and catching him just wrong, striking the back of his legs and unbalancing him in the air. He went crashing into the side of the monstrous, two-headed titan and slid to the ground.

Catching Apollo had knocked the wind out of me, but that was nothing to the sight of the coming stampede. The sounds of terror—raptor, serpentine, leonine, human—erupted as the darkness spread, and all thoughts of battle evaporated. A single-minded, instinctive flight response took its place. Anything to avoid the miasma. And we, all of us, Team Underworld, were between the titans and escape. I saw it coming on, but there was nowhere to go. Nowhere to escape. Apollo had recovered himself, and faster than thought pivoted us out of the way of the first massive body blasting past us, taking chunks out of the tunnel wall as it went, but then the next hit us like a freight train. We ricocheted off into the next and went down under a set of knife- sharp hooves.

After that, I lost track and, very quickly, consciousness. We’d failed. The titans were unleashed.

Chapter Twelve

My body was on fire, surrounded by it, like I was sinking into a pool of molten lava. I burned, mouth open to scream, but nothing escaped. My eyes were closed, but the lids seemed almost translucent with red light, as if I could see right through them if only I could focus. The agony was worse than anything I’d ever experienced. I desperately hoped to black out again, but the pain stopped and a voice commanded unsympathetically, “Get up.”

He had to be kidding. But Hades, Lord of the Underworld, was not known for his sense of humor. I blinked my eyes open, surprised when they actually focused and I wasn’t surrounded by a pit of fire. Beside Hades, Hecate stared down at me, her face all angles, like a top model on a diet of air. It wasn’t just the catsuit that made her striking. Sure, you could cut glass on her cheekbones, but her eyes were sheer obsidian—shiny black, the same shade as her wild hair. Wilder than mine and snapping with electricity, as though it were made of live wires.

“If hairs be wires

Black wires grow on her head”

What a time to remember my Shakespeare. I wondered if he’d met our darling ’Cate.

“I healed you,” she said, her voice deep and rough, a la Kathleen Turner if she’d gargled razor blades.

Oh, was that what “get up” had been all about—healing. It had felt more like torture. Eyeing her dubiously, I tried my arms and legs. She was right. They worked, and the burning sensation had faded away. They still felt…singed…but maybe that was from massive regrowth of tissue or reknitting of bones. I didn’t know how bad off I’d been. And everything itched like a sonofabitch.

“Which way did they go?” I asked.

“It’s too late,” Hades snapped, even as Hecate pointed…not the way we’d come, but in the opposite direction. It made sense; the titans couldn’t cross the River Styx, even if Charon would allow it. There was no way the skiff could carry their weight and no way across on their own.

“They’re gone, “ he continued. “But you will help us get them back.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “Yeah, because I was so much help this time.”

“You brought this trouble on. You will help us end it.”

It seemed fair enough in theory. In practice…

“How?” I asked.

“You know where they’re going?”

I bolted upright. “We have to warn them. Everyone at Delphi—”

There was a masculine moan, and Hecate and I looked to see Apollo, still unconscious, his head…I couldn’t look. It was misshapen, as if a tremendous weight had squashed it, stepped on it in the escape. Hades nodded to Hecate—permission to heal him, I could only hope, and the mother of witches knelt beside him, her hands aglow in that red fire as she lifted them to his head. I watched his eyelids flutter and saw only white beneath them as his eyes rolled up into his head and he curled into a fetal position, trying subconsciously to shield himself from the pain I knew all too well.

“Delphi?” Hades prompted me.

I told him the whole story, from Zeus’s priests through Rhea’s rising and her threats to return the titans to their former glory.

He cursed long and floridly in Greek, but an older form, it seemed, because I only understood one in five words and they were enough to blister my ears.

“Then those at Delphi already know they’re coming,” he concluded, boring into me with his crazy Manson- eyes.

I swallowed a ball of acid that had burned up my throat and nodded.

“And once again I get to clean up my brothers’ messes.” He sighed dramatically, even for him. “Let’s go see which way they’ve gone. Perhaps we can cut them off or perhaps they’ve already dead-ended themselves. Many exits. Most of them are illusions.” He showed his teeth in a psychotic smile, something like the Cheshire Cat might give after picking his teeth with White Rabbit bones. I wondered what kind of horrors those illusions hid.

“How do we find out?”

Hades approached a wall and put his palm to one of the stones. I was shocked to see a smart board light up in front of him. I’d expected magic, some kind of all-seeing eye. Not a high tech screen he could tap and wave his hands at—almost like magic—to reveal different sections of his domain. I rose to follow him, expecting it to be painful, still shocked when it wasn’t. But before I went, I looked toward Hecate and Apollo. His head had rounded out again, and his color was good. Much better than it had been. He was still in the fetal position, but was now snoring gently. It was almost…cute.

“Head injury,” Hades said. “He’s going to need to sleep for a while. That kind of thing will take a lot out of you.”

I considered planting a kiss on Apollo’s head, but decided against it. There were witnesses, and anyway it would be just my luck that he’d wake up and make something of it.

Thanatos and Hypnos were rousing the wounded and Hecate went off to help others.

I went to see what Hades had in mind.

When I stepped up beside him, he was studying a schematic on his smart board, all lit up with red dots in one area. “Ah,” he said, not bothering to expand on that for my benefit. He tapped the screen, made an opening motion with his hand, brought in a second image and suddenly we were watching the escapees from two different camera angles. Security cameras…in Hell…who’d’ve thought?