Rise of the Blood

causing an explosion of pain to shoot straight down the shaft and all through my chest.

I coughed hard, and there was a gurgle to it that I knew to be a bad sign. Punctured lung? Drowning in my own blood?

Didn’t matter now. Diagnosis wouldn’t change a thing.

I labored against the aftermath of the cough, gasping for breath too painful to take. But I forced my hand up again for another try at the arrow, focusing on fine motor skills and actually grasping it this time. The hand moved torturously slowly and when it bumped against the arrow it was too weak to knock it hard. But it did make contact, and I forced it to turn and grasp.

Drawing my next breath took all my concentration for the moment, and it was another after that before I could refocus on the arrow and on pulling it out.

Meanwhile, Christie and her cadre were unleashing arrow after arrow, but with more regularity than skill. They were being controlled, but Rhea didn’t yet have the power, the precision to make it count.

She couldn’t have Christie and she couldn’t have me.

I gave my last ounce of strength to pulling the shaft from my chest. I almost passed out as it started to slide, ripping through already abused muscle and tissue. Pain blinded me, and I wanted to arch up, my body following the path of the arrow as if I could control the pace, but I didn’t have time for slow and easy.

When the tip came free, I collapsed. My hand fell to my side, along with the gored arrow. Blood began to bubble and gurgle up from the wound. Bubbles in the blood—bad sign, I thought, battling back the darkness that wanted to swamp me.

It felt like removing that arrow had removed some kind of blockage. Now the full measure of pain became heart-stoppingly clear—razor-sharp, stabbing shards of crystal being pushed through veins and arteries too narrow to handle them, tearing, ripping and scraping me raw. But behind it…what had Apollo breathed into me? The crystal shards of pain felt like unmaking—tearing apart my stitching, doing demolition. But behind that, the feeling that I was being re-stitched, putty poked into old scars that were then spackled over, base coated, repainted and remodeled. Like I was being remade.

What the hell.

It was unbearable, like my whole insides were crawling with army ants rebuilding me one cell at a time. It was the creepiest, most awful feeling in the world. Worse than ambrosia withdrawal. Worse than being possessed. Worse than the makeover at Christie’s upscale spa. I lay in a pool of my own sweat and blood, unable to stop it. Unsure if I’d survive.

And then, just like that, it was over. I thought I died. For a minute I couldn’t feel anything at all. Couldn’t hear. Couldn’t see. And then I gasped in a breath—a full breath with no rasping or bubbling or blood, and it was the sweetest thing in the world. I gulped in more air until I felt my lungs would explode with the fullness, and then they seemed to adapt. The sights and sounds and smell of the battle came rushing at me like a flash mob, coming from everywhere at once. Too vivid. Too much, as if I’d been experiencing the world through a bubble all my life and it had suddenly popped. And I felt…unbelievable. I tested out my arms and legs; they lifted as though gravity no longer had such a pull on me.

The twang of bowstrings snapped me out of my wonder and whipped my head around. The first person I saw was the woman who’d signaled me outside the jail, who I now knew Rhea had touched. I went for her, and my legs seemed to push off the ground with double their power. When I was close enough to spring for her, I sailed through the air, knocking her to the ground before she could get off her next shot. She writhed under me, trying to throw me off. I grabbed for her bow, yanked it from her hands and broke it in half, throwing the pieces and myself to the side in order to roll to my feet and go for the next girl. I rushed her just as she released an arrow. With no time to stop it, I leapt in the way and caught the bolt in my bare hand.

Her eyes widened, but she couldn’t have been more shocked than I was. She backed away as I started toward her, but then straightened and held her ground as if she’d received a new directive from Rhea. She reached for another arrow, but I was on her before she could nock it, driving the one in my hand into her leg. She dropped the bow in pain. I picked it up and ran for the next archer…only to come face to face with Christie.

She saw me coming and turned her loaded bow my way. I’d been shot once today. It wasn’t going to happen again.

“Christie,” I called, giving her the chance to snap out of it. “It’s me.”

She didn’t even blink, but let fly the arrow she was holding back.

I used the bow in my hand like a bat to swat the arrow out of the air, shocked when it worked, and leapt for Christie, even as she reached for another. I landed on top of her, knees to her stomach, hands on her shoulders, riding her to the ground. She hit with an “ooph” and for a second I saw my friend Christie flash in her eyes. Then they were cold again—dry ice cold, the kind that burned.

“You dare?” Rhea asked.

She reached Christie’s hands up, not for my neck, as I expected, but toward my face. Her icy eyes went wide as she touched me. “But…that’s not possible…I can’t reach you.”

I didn’t know what Apollo had breathed into me or what the long-term effects of the ambrosia or nectar had made me, but if it included being impervious to mesmerism, I’d take it.

Still, now that I had Christie down, I didn’t know what to do with her. She was my best friend. I couldn’t leave her behind to hurt me or anyone else on the battlefield, but I couldn’t hurt her. Rhea stiffened Christie’s hands like claws and I had less than a second to decide what to do as they came for my eyes.

“Sorry,” I whispered, sucker-punching Christie on the temple, just hard enough, I hoped, to send her to sleep. Her head fell to the side, eyes closed. I felt for her pulse, found it and moved on, stealing the bow and arrow from her unconscious body. I immediately nocked one arrow and sent it flying for the last archer on my side of the field—the final woman from the prison. I went for her bow hand, hoping to hurt her as little as possible.

With my crazy bolstered vision, it was no problem at all to hit my target, and she dropped her weapon, going down clutching at her hand.

I turned my stolen bow toward the battlefield, but it was too much of a melee, everyone engaged together. Even with my new acuity, I couldn’t trust that no one would shift and my arrows wouldn’t strike friend instead of foe.

Cursing, I threw down the bow and ran toward the field. The mother of all earthquakes hit between one step and the next. I went down watching the fighters on the field fall like bowling pins, barely catching myself on my hands, smacking my nose on the ground as the earth continued to convulse.

Mother of all quakes was right. From the center of the field, a figure started to rise, massive and female. I didn’t wait for her to fully emerge before pushing myself to my feet and starting to run again. I knew who it would be—Rhea—and I knew that if she was rising it was because she’d become strong enough to take us all on.

I don’t know what I thought I could do about that. I wasn’t thinking. I was only feeling—the need for vengeance against her for hurting Nick and Christie, for controlling me. She was going down.

Cupid and Hypnos circled her in the air, like the helicopters around King Kong on top of the Empire State Building. Only Rhea was a lot bigger and only slightly less hairy. She had a fountain of black hair spilling all around her head and eyes the color of hard earth. If I’d thought the titans were big, Rhea was humongous.

Just the thing you wanted to say to an angry mother goddess… “Hey, lady, your bazongas are the size of my laundry room.” Yeah, that would go over well. Clearly, however I’d been remade, my snark had survived.

As I ran toward her, something started to burn at my back. I felt tearing, and it was more than my shirt. I stumbled as I tried to twist and run at the same time, to see if someone had stuck a knife between my shoulder blades, and then almost fell on my face as I saw wings rising out of my back instead of the knife hilt I expected. The wings—gargoyle wings, black and leathery and attached to my freakin’ back—flapped as I started to fall, righting me and then raising me up to hover just above the ground.

Had Apollo somehow activated some dormant gorgon genes? I thought about Perseus’s gorgon shield—the crouching gorgon with her monstrous tusked face, wings half furled. This was not the time for