Rise of the Blood

I shot a sudden glance at Nick and caught him looking back over his shoulder, even though Apollo and Serena were now well out of sight. He jerked guiltily when he noticed me watching.

“What?” he asked.

“You tell me.”

“Just wanted to be sure none of the paparazzi had caught sight of you and that we were in the clear.”

“Uh huh.”

“Really.”

I let it go. After all, I’d ogled Apollo a time or two, so I had no moral high ground here. Our airline rep escorted us straight to the gate, where we got to board with the first wave, passing cushy first class seats where Serena and Apollo would probably be sharing champagne and caviar. Served them right, being faced with fish eggs.

“You okay?” Nick asked me as we got seated…back in coach.

“Sure, why wouldn’t I be?”

“You tell me.”

I gave him my very most level look. “I’m fine.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

And with that, I snapped open the Sky Mall magazine and prepared to mentally spend money I didn’t have on things I didn’t need. Mental retail therapy.

Nick sighed and pulled the airline magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him. I glanced sidelong as he did it and came face to face with green cat’s-eyes staring at me from the cover. Serena Banks. Of course. She had the feature story.

I buried myself in Sky Mall, trying not to care as Nick, I was certain, turned straight to the article.

I did care when the rumbling started.

Despite the fear of heights that kept me out of the Karacrobats, my family’s acrobatic troupe, I wasn’t generally phobic about flying. Oh sure, my heart raced and I white-knuckled the armrests on takeoffs and landings, but I had a really advanced case of denial for the intervening air travel. My best guess was that it was a control thing. When I was close to the ground, I had the illusion of some sort of control. Sitting still while the plane jittered and banked and got underway took monumental amounts of willpower. Once we hit cruising altitude, I figured my only options were live, if things went well, or kiss my ass good-bye if they didn’t. But I had a bad, bad feeling about this flight. I hoped it was just nerves and not my Apollo-granted foresight, because we’d already taken off, and the control I’d never actually had was well out of my reach. But the feeling grew and grew as the sky darkened around us and seemed to charge with some ominous energy. I stopped paying attention to the Sky Mall and took to staring out the window.

Rumbling rattled the windows and a flash fork of lightning chased itself from one bank of clouds to another. The plane veered sharply away, trying to escape the storm, but gale-force winds pushed at our tail in hot pursuit.

An announcement came on about turbulence and returning to our seats. It was getting harder and harder to stay in mine. My internal alarms were now blaring full force, and I wanted to shout for the crew that the plane needed to be brought down now, now, NOW for an emergency landing while there was still a chance to control our descent. This was no natural storm. There’d been no warning before takeoff about rough weather ahead, and a storm like this would have been hard to miss on the radar.

Paranoia? Maybe, if not for my internal alarms and the fact that Poseidon Stormbringer and Zeus of the fateful lightning were on the loose and that the people most responsible for their incarceration were all on this flight. Coincidence? Didn’t seem likely, but there was no time to think about that right now.

To our left came a sudden crash like two monstrous hands clapping together and then bursting apart. The resultant shockwaves buffeted the airliner like a kite. Panic had me reaching for the armrest, but since Nick’s hand was already there, I nearly shredded him with my newly manicured nails. He hissed with pain, but didn’t draw back his hand. Instead, he turned it over to take mine. He looked into my eyes. I stared into his, and thought well, if the world ends, at least we’ll go out together. It was a shockingly romantic thought for me, and that, more than anything, snapped me to. We were not going to die. My cousin Tina would kill me. It would make her wedding party lopsided.

I unbuckled my seatbelt and started to rise, to demand that we make an emergency landing or something, not caring how crazy I’d sound, when the lightning flashed again, cracking across the sky like a whip. The plane flinched as it struck, bucking like a thing alive desperate to escape the pain. I was flung forward, bashing myself on the overhead bin and falling into Nick’s lap. He gripped me close and held on tight.

“Stay put,” he ordered. “There’s nowhere to go. We’ll get through this. It’ll be okay.”

But I knew he was wrong. I struggled against him as the plane banked sharply. No, not banked. Sheared off, beginning to fall, as if something was off on one side…like an engine.

“We have to land,” I yelled. “Now!” As if this was a newsflash.

There was so much screaming going on—babies crying, grown men and women praying or wailing or whatever—that no one heard.

Another crash of thunder came from the side of the plane, and punched into us like a fist, knocking us even farther off-kilter. The metal of the plane groaned in defiance, but it wasn’t a victorious sound. It was more like, “You’ll never take me alive.” And that’s exactly what I was afraid of.

“We have to do something!” I shouted at Armani. Nick, dammit, Nick. Even as we rushed toward death, I couldn’t get it right. But that’s how I’d thought of him when I’d first met him, a defense mechanism against my attraction, one I’d never gotten over.

“Like what?” he shouted back.

I didn’t want questions, I wanted action, but I didn’t have any to suggest.

Oxygen masks fell from the ceiling as the plane continued to drop altitude and the pilot was too busy, I supposed, trying to stop it to comfort his panicking passengers…as if an announcement would have made any difference. As if they, like me, couldn’t feel the ground rushing up to meet us.

Armani lifted me off him to grab two masks before pushing me down into a seat and manhandling me to get my mask into place. I didn’t fight him, only because the sooner he knew I was okay, the sooner he’d see to himself and I could lunge past him.

The second he was distracted, I did just that, avoiding his grabbing hands to lunge down the aisle. Down was the operative word. We were now at a forty-five degree angle, nose to the ground—falling, falling.

I canted left and then right as the plane lurched, the pilot battling to level off. I apologized as I went, gripping a man in a very personal place when a really bad thunderclap threw me off balance and I had to catch myself.

I hit the curtain between us and first class to the curses and cries of my fellow passengers. A flight attendant strapped down into her jump seat and counting off frantic prayers on a rosary tried reflexively to stop me from crossing the sacred threshold, but I stopped her with a look. The look. I froze her in place. She’d space right through at least a few minutes of panic, long enough for me to invade first class.

Apollo was already out of his seat and met me halfway down the aisle.

“You okay?” he asked. It was a silly question, so I ignored it.

“What do we do?” Scratch the we. If there was anything I could do, I’d have done it. “Don’t you have some power to stop all this?”

But I knew the answer before I heard it from his lips. I could see it in his eyes.

“I’m the god of the sun, and they’ve cut me off from it. Even if I could harness it still, I have no control over storms. There’s nothing—”

“Screw nothing!” I said. I looked around frantically for something, anything. But there was nothing physical to fight or fight with.

A male flight attendant risked life and limb to close in on us, coming from the front alcove.

“Sir, ma’am, you’re going to have to return to your seats!” he yelled over the noise of the screaming plane and howling passengers.