Rise of the Blood

“Vittoria?” the chauffer asked, turning toward me.

“Tori,” I answered. “And you are?”

“I am Viggo. Your Uncle Hector has sent a car.”

My shoulders dropped about half a foot in relief. We weren’t about to be spirited off to some evil lair. (“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”)

But my Uncle Hector. He was nearly a myth, a barely remembered figure tossing me in the air and giving me pony rides until my sides hurt from laughing. But then there’d been some scandal with some princess or contessa or something, and he’d dropped off the face of the earth. I’d been too young to remember the details, and no one was going to share such secrets with me then. By the time I was old enough to ask the right questions, I was busy getting into trouble of my own. But rumor had it that he was richer than Midas and at least twenty thousand times cooler. I felt a childish glee about seeing him again…even if he was the one financing Apollo’s return to the big screen and, at least temporarily, my life.

“He’s here?” I asked stupidly.

“He sent a car and waits for you at the hotel, where he’s throwing a special reception.”

“A reception?”

I hadn’t gotten the memo. In fact, my plan had been to rent a car, drive to the hotel and fall facedown onto a bed to sleep the night away before making the two hour trek up to Mount Parnassus the next day for some sightseeing before the wedding festivities got under way. At the moment, I was most excited about the facedown, quickly unconscious part of that whole equation. I was hot, I was tired, and I probably still had slobber tracks on my face. I was not ready to face the family in my current condition.

Nick took in my shell-shocked look. “Yes on the car, pass on the reception,” he said for me.

“I’m afraid it’s a package deal,” he said with a smile.

“Now wait—” I was jet-lagged, and the heavy-handed tactics were making me cranky on top of it. Jesus held a restraining hand to my arm to keep me from unleashing a can of verbal whoop-ass.

“Did I mention that your uncle is picking up all accommodations and has arranged a limo to take you all to your destination on the morrow?” Viggo asked, sweetening the pot.

On the morrow… Who talked like that?

Before I could speak, Jesus jumped in to accept on our behalf. I gave him a completely ineffective death glare. “What?” he asked. “We go, we sip champagne, we vanish into the night. Quelle horreur.” He was Spanish…speaking French…in Greece. Well, why not.

I sighed. “Fine, I’m too tired to argue.”

“I didn’t even know that was possible,” Nick said. “But I’m noting it for future reference.”

I smiled tiredly at him and led the way to our baggage carousel, where for once I let someone else wrestle my baggage from the belt. Viggo was built for it, after all. In fact, in his huge hands, my big, hard-sided bag looked like a mere briefcase.

The car, when we got to it, was a sleek white thing with what looked like a boomerang mounted on the front. I knew that meant something about the make or model, but I was too fuzzy headed to think what. But the long and short of it was that it was fancy-schmancy, and where it swooped inward at the sides it was accented with silver-gray paint. It almost looked like one of the clouds that had practically smothered us on the trip over. I shivered.

“Cold?” Nick asked, already shrugging out of his shirt.

I shook my head, but I didn’t explain. I should be thankful about Uncle Hector’s generosity. I didn’t have any rational reason to distrust it, except that in Greece we knew the expression wasn’t, “Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” but always. After all, we’d taken Troy that way.

Just to be on the safe side, I called Yiayia as soon as we got into the car.

“Anipsi, you are here!” she said in lieu of “hello.”

“I am,” I admitted. “I’m, uh, on my way to the reception.”

“Wonderful! I should be up momentarily as well. We’re just putting the finishing touches on our couture.” We? “I understand that your friends have put in an appearance. You didn’t tell me —”

The phone seemed to move away from her mouth, and I heard a bit of a scuffle in the background. Or maybe not a scuffle, because…was that giggling? At her age?

“Yiayia,” I shouted, “What friends? What are you talking about?”

But then there was a thwump, as if the phone fell to the floor, and then… nothing.

Stunned, I hung up and tried again, but the phone just rang and rang and went to voicemail.

“Step on it,” I told Viggo. “Please hurry.”

My internal alarms weren’t blaring, but I still didn’t know the rules. Did they only go off when I was in danger? Was there some kind of range? Even without them, I had a bad feeling about things.

What friends could Yiayia be talking about? Zeus? Poseidon? Both were known to be able to change their forms…or at least had done so frequently when they were at full power to seduce a woman in the guise of her husband or by trickling in as a golden mist through a locked door. Could they be crashing the party? But how would they have gotten out of the States so quickly given their fugitive status? And why pose as friends at all?

“Something’s wrong,” I told Nick.

“What?”

“I don’t know, but Yiayia sounded…strange. And her phone went dead.”

“Maybe she lost reception?”

“Maybe. I’ll just feel a lot better when we’re there. How far are we?” I asked Viggo.

“Ten minutes,” he answered, holding up all ten fingers to show, leaving none on the wheel.

I gulped as another car barreled past, nearly smashing us against a white-washed concrete wall that was too close for comfort. I nodded quickly to show that I got it, the better to return his hands to the wheel as quickly as possible. He recovered his mastery of the road, and overtook the car that had overtaken us, as though they were in some kind of street race he was bent on winning. Just as he pulled past, he swung quickly right, off onto an exit that took us onto a much quieter street that led to another, and then past Hadrian’s Gate and the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Oh, I’d missed Athens, where antiquity and the everyday sat side by side and there was beauty everywhere you looked.

“Is that—?” Nick started to ask, pointing up a hill overlooking the city that was capped by stunning near- ruins.

“The Parthenon,” I answered with a smile, suddenly feeling a lot less weary. “Yeah.”

His look of awe made me so proud of my country…well, my other country. I’d been born in America, but this was the culture I’d been born to and this was what ran in my blood. This. Beauty. Antiquity. Home.

But I was still worried as hell about Yiayia.

Viggo pulled into the miniscule drive before a big, white-pillared hotel that overlooked the Temple and Hadrian’s Gate. I jumped out before he even had the engine turned off, trusting that the guys could handle the luggage. I ran to the front desk, but was too jet-lagged to remember to speak Greek until I’d already started in English. “The Karacis/Galanos reception? Where is it?” I knew they’d never give me Yiayia’s room number, but even if she hadn’t made it up to the party, someone there would know where to find her, and these friends of mine…

“Garden Terrace, top floor,” the woman behind the counter answered back, also in English.

I thanked her and hit the button for the elevator, but lost patience with it when it didn’t arrive instantly and instead dashed for the staircase just beside it. I reached the top sweatier than I’d intended, but there’d been very little air in the staircase, and even less in my lungs by the time I reached my goal. The stairwell let out on a small alcove, and I followed the noise—and the signs—through a beautiful restaurant enclosed on three sides by glass to take advantage of the views, and out onto a devastatingly beautiful terrace. The outer door was on the Parthenon