“Right,” I said. “And I have no reason to think otherwise myself. I just feel so helpless right now. Who knows where the killers are going to strike again, and when?”
Apollo’s eyes focused on the distance so intently that I almost turned to look at what he was seeing. He seemed deep in thought, which wasn’t something I would have expected from the god of the sun. No offense meant. He wasn’t the worst person I knew, but the guy came with me to a supermarket once and all he could talk about was nut milk. “Who milks the almonds?” he asked me. The god of the sun was not the brightest bulb in the drawer.
“So maybe it’s too difficult for us to track this crime spree,” Apollo said, his voice as distant as his gaze. “And we don’t know what to expect, what’s going to happen. But what if we make it happen ourselves?”
Artemis rolled her eyes. “It’s his process,” she said, explaining to the rest of us. “It takes a while, but he’ll get there.”
“Shush,” Apollo said, waving at her dismissively. “Shush. My point is, there are too many nephilim around to keep track of. Too many to supervise, even with all the scrying power at our disposal. Which, let’s be honest, I have plenty of. The sun is my eye, after all.”
“Get to the point,” Artemis hissed.
“What I’m saying is that we change tacks.” Apollo’s gaze switched to me. I felt hot under the sudden scrutiny, noticing, for the first time, that there really was a tiny golden speck in one of his eyes. “It’s too taxing on our resources if we watch the other nephilim for trouble. What I’m proposing is for us to bring the trouble to the nephilim we’re already watching.”
Everyone went silent. Artemis shook her head. “Bait. He’s saying to use Mason as bait.”
Apollo snapped his fingers. “Bingo.”
“That’s totally bananas,” Florian said, his fingers digging into my shoulder protectively.
Samyaza shook his head. “Absolutely not. I’m not risking my son’s life in all this. I don’t even know how many of my offspring we’ve already lost.”
“I’ll do it.” They all turned to me, Samyaza, especially, gazing at me with stunned sadness. I smiled at him, nodding. “I’ll do it. It’s fine. I have all of you guys to protect me. I promise, we’re going to be okay. Anything that tries to come for me is dead on arrival. You all know that.”
“Fine,” Samyaza said softly, hesitantly.
I fished out my phone again and called Dionysus, happy to hear him pick up so quickly. “My nephilim friend,” he said. “A plan of action?”
“Something like that. Dionysus? I need you to spread a rumor.”
10
Valero was oddly quiet by night, at least in the part of town we’d picked to test our little theory. The Gridiron was not somewhere you wanted to be caught after dark. Normally I wouldn’t be quite so concerned myself. Even the most insistent of muggers go running when you brandish a giant golden sword right in their faces. But this time was different. We had an agenda, and it was hard to focus on looking vulnerable and innocent when what you really had on your mind was violence.
“It’ll be worth it,” I mumbled to myself. Punishing whoever it was that had killed all those innocents? It’d be absolutely worth it. I just had to play my part.
I rubbed my hands vigorously up and down my forearms, trying to stave off the evening chill. My eyes landed glumly on the spot near my wrist where my very expensive and very secret investment stayed pressed against my skin at all times. So secret, in fact, that sometimes I forgot it was even there. It was invisible, after all.
The enchanted leather bracer I’d commissioned was meant to keep me hidden from magical detection, but apparently not hidden enough. Lucifer Morningstar was powerful enough to still see me – across dimensions, possibly – and there was the horrible letdown of being told that someone could always track me through one of my friends instead anyway. What the hell did I pay all that money for?
And so we had to hope that Dionysus had successfully transmitted our tempting little morsel of a rumor through his beloved grapevine. One of these days I would have to check in with him and figure out if it really was just a figure of speech or an actual enchanted plant that somehow siphoned gossip and information for him. Basically, we wanted the seedier side of the arcane underground to be alerted to the fact that there was a live, active nephilim right here in Valero. I hated that we had to do it at all, given how I’d worked so very, very hard at concealing my presence in general, but this was our best course of action. Lead out the little fish with some bait, then beat them repeatedly until they told us the names and locations of the bigger fish.
I cupped my elbows, my breath coming out in a stuttering shudder. I’d worn a tank top, the better to show off the glyphs on my chest and shoulders. The cold would be worth it. To any casual observer, a nephilim’s glyphs would just look like tattoos, though ones with oddly vivid colors that tended to glow or shimmer depending on emotions, like a mood ring you can’t ever take off. It was part of why I had to be better at controlling my temper since I awakened to my talents, especially in public.
But to someone in the know, and to someone who was watching, my sigils were a dead giveaway. Samyaza said that no two nephilim or Grigori would have the exact same pattern on their skin. There would always be variations in the strange symbols that were placed on our bodies to seal in our power, these colorful shackles.
And you know what? Even someone as dumb as a
