Crazy in the Blood (Latter-Day Olympians) (24 page)

I doubted any drug test or tox screen in the world was going to turn that up. I’d always thought the River Lethe was imaginary, a myth like Mount Olympus, gorgons, the Fates and all that jazz. I’d been wrong on everything else thus far, so why not this too?

Agents Rosen and Holloway turned at some kind of commotion in the hallway, the latter motioning me to stay back and presumably safe while the former slipped out to see what was going on, closing the door behind him.

A second later, he opened it again, and I couldn’t even believe my eyes.
 

Nick stood there, looking about two cups of coffee down for the day, but nonetheless gorgeous with his dark hair ruffled, one wave, as always, half over his eyes, which were emphasized by the blue denim, button-up shirt he was wearing over jeans. I’d never seen him look quite so casual before except when he was wearing nothing at all.

“You’re here!” I said, ever ready to display my brilliant grasp of the obvious.

“I took the red eye.”

Then I was in his arms, my face buried in his shoulder as his arms went around me and held me fiercely. “Christie called,” he said.

“She told me.”

Nurse Nancy was goggling at us, and I remembered she’d seen that news footage of me with Apollo. She’d probably assumed he and I had been an item. If I had half the fun everyone suspected me of having…well, I wouldn’t have time to get into nearly as much trouble.

Rosen cleared his throat from the doorway. “Can we take this into the hall or to the visitor’s lounge? Nurse Nancy says that we’ve exceeded the visitor room limit…again. She was trying to explain that to Mr. Armani when he flashed his badge and went around her.”

I looked up at Nick, who shrugged, totally unrepentant. I wanted to kiss him, but not with an audience. I supposed it could wait.

Agent Holloway led the way to a visitor’s lounge, which was either naturally deserted or had been pre-cleared by the agents. It sported dirt-brown couches and chairs, seventies green plastic tables and two-year-old magazines, largely winners like
Field and Stream
. Nick and I took the couch, leaving the chairs for the agents. We promptly sank toward each other as the couch sagged in the center.

“So, you’ve been inside the complex?” Agent Rosen began.

“I never said that,” I answered immediately, not about to admit to B&E.

“Earlier in the day,” he prompted, “with a Mr. Apollo Demas.” Agent Rosen held up his smart phone to show me a screen of words too small to actually read. “It’s his statement. Plus, your car was logged by the side of the road around midmorning. A police officer approached to offer assistance and couldn’t locate the driver of the vehicle. It came back clean when he ran the plates, except for a host of unpaid parking tickets.”

Armani looked amused over that, but Rosen looked like a disappointed papa. Was he the one with kids? I couldn’t recall.

I let out a breath. “Oh, okay, I was there. It’s not a crime, is it?”

“We want you to get with our people and give them the layout of the place—structures, vehicles, population estimate.”

I leaned forward, studying his face. “You found something? The lab results on the food?”

“Results were…inconclusive. There’s definitely an additive, but it couldn’t be identified. The chemical structure…it’s not something we’ve seen before. It’s definitely not on any black list.”

“What about Alonzo’s sister?”

“We have her samples en route to our lab, but results are not instantaneous, whatever you see on TV. Do you expect anything different?”

Damn, I didn’t.

“We have no cause for a warrant. Nothing on which to go in.”

“But you
suspect
,” I said. “You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“We have several similar and very brutal crime scenes, one of which happened close to the site of a terrorist attack on domestic soil at the top of Mount Lee.
Six
deaths now, including the eviscerated man in the morgue and the tourists who were killed in the parking lot of your hotel. We have
one
common denominator—
you
.”

Armani took my hand and squeezed it as I said, “But you told the officer at the station I wasn’t a suspect,” I protested.

“Honestly, that’s up to you. Suspect or informant…your call. Whatever else is up, you know more than you’re telling.”

“If only I knew as much as everybody thinks I do, I’d have this solved by now. But—wait—what if I could get you that informant?” I thought of the questioning girl who’d come to check on the alarm bells with Casey Olivieri.
She
didn’t seem to have drunk the cultish Kool-Aid. I wondered if she’d be as good at answering questions as asking them.

“You know someone?” he asked, leaning forward himself and studying me as if to determine whether I was putting him off or finally, truly, cooperating.

“I might. Look, I’ll meet with your people. I’ll give them all the info I have and you can put a sketch artist with me on the girl I think might be your weak link. If you can get her outside the compound, away from the others…but first, I really need to use the facilities.” Because that double espresso had finally run through me. I supposed that up until now I’d been scared literally shitless.

Holloway rose to go with me. I guess he’d drawn the short straw for the day. I squeezed Nick’s hand as I rose and told him I’d be right back. Famous last words.

Holloway preceded me out into the hall so that he could check it out first, and it must have been clear, because he motioned me to follow him. The restrooms were in an alcove directly across the way, so we didn’t have far to go. Within a few paces, Holloway was at the ladies’ room door. He knocked loudly, and when no one responded, he turned the knob and pushed the door open hard. It was a small, cotton candy pink space with two stalls—one a large handicapped stall—and one small sink. There were no windows through which I could escape, even if I were so inclined. The doors to both stalls were closed, and Holloway motioned me to stay back while he stepped inside and shoved them both open to check that they were truly empty. I felt a tingle of warning, but nothing happened. Both doors swung in, completely unobstructed, and bounced back into place, closed apparently being their default.
 

Holloway rejoined me in the hallway and held the door open for me to enter. I thanked him and waited for the door to close behind me before heading to the first stall. I was mid-step when I heard the lock on that outer door click home. I whirled back toward it, and had only time to register…nothing…an empty room…before Holloway threw himself against the door to bust his way back in, and I was suddenly pinned against the wall by an invisible pressure. Panicked, I kicked and struggled, but it was no use at all.

“She’s there, isn’t she?” a voice hissed out, a millimeter from my face. The pressure released enough for me to fall a few inches forward so that he could slam me back into the wall. “You ran out of the police station before I could talk to you, but you’re not running out on me now. Just answer the question—you found her, didn’t you?”

My eyes were bruised from being rattled in their sockets by the last impact of my head against the wall, but they weren’t doing me any good just then anyway. I was frozen with indecision. There was no telling what Hades would do to Persephone once he found her or what he’d do to those he’d see as aiding her. I couldn’t be responsible for that, even if she had maybe used the water of the forgetfulness on Uncle Christos. But—

He pulled me away from the wall and shoved me back against it again, brain-jarringly hard. It was not helping me think.

“Tell. Me,” he ordered. “Where do they have her?”

I started to shake my head in denial, but when that hurt too much, I croaked, “No.”

“Tori!” Holloway called. “Mizz Karacis, who is it? Who’s in there with you?”

I opened my mouth, though I didn’t know what would come out. I never saw the blow that knocked me to the ground, my vision and head exploding as I hit, the world going all Dali-esque and then dim.

“Never mind,” Hades was saying, ignoring the agent entirely. “I know she’s there. I will raze the whole place to the ground. I will tear it apart stone by stone to find her.”

I couldn’t form an objection. My world winked out.

And then I was being shaken awake and crying out in pain. My eyes, when I opened them, weren’t working right. Neither was my mind. I was afraid, and I couldn’t remember why. There was something… Something…urgent.

“Stop!” I begged.

The shaking stopped, but it didn’t help. The pain was such that I wanted to bash my own head against the tiles to open it up and relieve the pressure, but there was something I had to do…

“The Back to Earth complex,” I told the three agent Holloways before me. “Danger. You’ve got to get out there
NOW
. No time for a warrant.
Danger
.”

I didn’t know if I made any sense. It hurt even to talk, to think. I wanted to lie right down and pass out again to escape the pain.

A doctor pushed Holloway aside, and I flinched as he shined a light in my eyes. “She has a concussion,” he announced, as if
that
wasn’t obvious. “What happened here?” he asked.

Holloway ignored him. “I might be coming around to your way of thinking,” he said to someone outside the bathroom. Rosen? “Whatever blew past me, it was…unseen.”

Like he couldn’t bring himself to say “invisible”.

“Ouch!” Whatever the doctor was doing
hurt
. Putting my head in a vise, it felt like.

“We’ve got to get to the Back to Earth compound. She says there’s danger, and I heard a voice threaten to raze it to the ground. Call for back-up,” Holloway ordered.

“On it,” Rosen said.

Nick poked his head in. Three of him. In triplicate. The mind boggled. I tried to rise. The doctor held me down. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Have to,” I told him, trying harder.

“No, you really don’t,” both he and Rosen said, almost in stereo.

“Nick, you’ve got wheels?” I asked.
 

Rosen and Holloway both gave him the evil eye, but he responded, “Yes.”

“Good. Help me up.”

The doctor tried to hold on to me while Nick tried to pull me up. I now knew what it felt like to be the rope in a tug of war. The agents took advantage of the tussle to leave us behind, getting a head start, no doubt hoping the action would be all over by the time we got things sorted out.

“I’m declining medical attention,” I said, to make it official. If there was one thing the medical profession feared more than contagion, it was legal action. If I declined the doctor’s help, he couldn’t touch me, which he made immediately clear by leggoing Nick’s Eggo.

I practically snapped to my feet, wobbling the whole way. The room spun around me and then stabilized. Like a 3D film without the glasses, everything had echo images, and they redoubled every time I refocused. I felt seasick.

“Let’s go!” I said.

Nick kept hold of my arm, which was all that was holding me upright. Running
hurt
. My vision kept blacking out, swimming back into focus and then collapsing again. I felt more than saw the exit doors whoosh open ahead of us and hot air hit. Nick all but shoved me into the passenger’s seat when we got to his rental car.

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe through the nausea, nearly losing it when something shook me hard. “Tori, stay with me. Don’t go to sleep.”

I opened my eyes, but the sun was right in them, stabbing jagged sunspears of pain up into my brain. I closed them again immediately. “Won’t sleep, but can’t see right now. Migraine.”

“More like concussion,” he answered. “I hope I’m doing the right thing.”

“You are,” I said. I tried to make it convincing. I didn’t know what I thought I could do in my condition, but Hades going after the compound was all my fault, and I had to help any way I could.

“Do you think they called ahead?” I asked, trying to remember the conversation that had gone on around me at the hospital.

“What?”

“To warn them. Do you think the Feds called the compound?”

“Do they have a phone?”

“The Feds?”

“The
Back to Earth
people.”

“They must. Do you—” I hated to ask but, “—have Apollo on your phone?”

He didn’t ask questions. “Yes,” he said cautiously. “From the last time you were in trouble.”

“Would you dial him for me?” Because right now I couldn’t see clearly enough to tell which end of the phone was up. I wondered when my super healing was supposed to kick in. Had it been too long ago that I’d had the ambrosia? Had I taken too little?

I presumed from the small thing he’d pressed into my hand which was now ringing in my ear that his answer had been “yes”.

“Tori?” Apollo answered instantly. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

Like he’d known it was me. Probably our damned mental connection.
 

“Hades?” he asked, after I told him. “
Skata
. That’s bad news. How big a head start does he have?”

“How long since I was knocked out?” I asked Nick.

“Knocked out?” Apollo roared in my ear.