Crazy in the Blood (Latter-Day Olympians) (27 page)

Apollo didn’t dignify that with a response.

“Guys, as much as I appreciate the dick waving—and I do—we’ve got bigger things to think about here.” They both grinned at that.

On the phone, Yiayia snorted, reminding me that she could overhear everything.

“Yiayia, save me,” I said. “Tell me where around here I can find an entry to the underworld.”

“W-e-l-l, I don’t know specifically. It’s never been a regular interest of mine, but the conspiracy boards have been abuzz lately about a few things.”

“
Conspiracy boards
?”

“A woman needs a hobby. Besides, often there’s some method to the madness. You’d be amazed how many leads…”

So if the conspiracy boards were a hobby, what was her Olympian obsession? A life’s calling? Scary.

“Yiayia,
what
leads?”

She huffed. “Since I knew you were out there, I’ve been paying special attention to the San Francisco area. There’ve been a few rumors. For one, that Alcatraz is haunted.”

“Old news,” I cut in.

“Hush or I won’t tell you more. A three-headed monster menacing the streets.”

“Cerberus,” Apollo said unnecessarily.

“And the Wave Organ picking up what sounds like a domestic dispute from the center of the earth. Very Jules Verne.”

“What?” I asked, suddenly interested.

“Wave Organ?” asked Armani.

Apollo just nodded, like it all made perfect sense.

“I Googled it,” she said, clearly proud of her accomplishment. “According to Alcaspaz2000, it’s this amazing sculpture park on a jetty in the San Francisco bay, where the artist engineered tubes that lead into the underground caverns or straight into the bay and act like giant sea shells, where you can hear the sounds of the deep.”

“Why don’t I know about this place?” I asked.

“Because it’s neither a mystery nor a man,” she said matter-of-factly.

My face flamed. Both men smirked at me in the rearview mirror, and I vowed to buy Yiayia a muzzle for her next birthday. Not that she’d wear it.

“Wanna start a conspiracy theory?” I asked, trying to deflect, but also inspired. “Tell everyone to stay away from Back to Earth products and The Rustic Potato. They have dangerous additives. People have gotten ill…or addicted.”

“Is this true?” she asked in horror.

“One hundred percent.”

“I’ll need specifics to make it convincing.”

“I’ll put someone in touch.” And I would, if Alonzo and his sister were up for another interview. “Thank you, Yiayia. I’ll let you know how it all works out.”

“Stay safe,” she ordered. “And you two—” She raised her voice until it bounced around the car like an echo chamber. “You see that she comes home safe
or else
.”

The look the men exchanged was still more glare than glance, but they said in stereo, “Yes, Yiayia.”

She disconnected.

I tried to hide my amusement.

Armani wrecked the moment by asking suddenly, “Is it getting really dark outside or is it just me?”

The question had to be rhetorical, because there was no way he needed confirmation of what was perfectly clear. Or rather, perfectly
un
clear. The sky
had
darkened, thick steel-wool clouds moving in to blot out the sun. I’d been so focused on talking to Yiayia I’d never even noticed. A flashbulb of light went off out the left side window, just caught in my peripheral vision. I turned too late to catch the freaky fork of lightning, but only a few heartbeats later thunder rocked the car.

“Demeter mourning her daughter’s abduction,” Apollo said, at the same time Nick kicked in. “Ten Mississippi. It’s about two miles away.”

“I thought lightning was Zeus’s bailiwick.”

“She can make sure the conditions are right for it,” Apollo said grimly.
 

“She said she’d give us time,” I protested.

“Did she say how much?”

We were all silent at that, which made the shock of a sheet of water hitting our windshield that much more deafening. There were no warning droplets. It was more like someone had simply thrown several buckets full of water straight at our car. The heavens had opened like a sluice gate.

We fishtailed down the street. Apollo cursed and struggled for control of the car as the fishtail threatened to morph into a full on spin out. The back of the car seemed to want to overtake the front.

“You want us to get your daughter back, you have to
stop
trying to kill us,” I yelled at the heavens.

Both men winced at the volume in the small car, but miraculously—or maybe just coincidentally—the rain slacked off from deluge to downpour.

“Thank you,” I said, just in case Demeter was actually listening.

“It’s like déjà vu all over again,” Nick said. He was thinking, like I was, about the night we’d gone up against Poseidon and Zeus. We’d survived that. Demeter’s hissy fit probably wasn’t going to destroy us, but I didn’t want to take the risk.

“Underground caves, possibly with under
water
entrances are going to be pretty treacherous if this continues,” Apollo said.

“Maybe it’s localized,” I answered hopefully.

“We can hope.”

“We’re going to need supplies,” Nick cut in. “Unless you can make like Aquaman and call fish to our aid or whatever. We’re going to need special equipment, a map of the caverns as accurate as possible. We can’t just rush in.”

“Give me my phone,” Apollo said, reaching a hand back for it.

“You’re
driving
,” I pointed out. And given the slick streets, I didn’t really want him dividing his attention.

“Fine. Call Hermes. He delivers everything to everybody all over the world. He’ll be able to put us in touch with someone who can get us what we need.”

Hermes being helpful? I’d never even considered the possibility.

“You sure he’ll help?”

“A potential war brewing between Hades and Demeter, possibly pulling in Dionysus, you, me, your boyfriend…” Petty emphasis on the
boy
, although Nick was hardly that, though if we were comparing our lives to the centuries Apollo’d lived, I guessed I was a mere child as well. “He’d probably pay for front row seats. Chaos is kind of his thing,” he reminded me.

“But he runs a worldwide business. That’s got to take organization.”

“Even Hitler made the trains run on time,” Apollo said, “and he was about the most destructive force I’ve ever seen.”

“Mercury wasn’t…” I couldn’t even finish the thought.

“In character at the time? No, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d been somewhere behind the scenes. Manning the supply lines at the very least.”

“Great galloping gorgons.”

Apollo smirked. “I like that one, you should keep it.”

“Thanks.”

Nick cleared his throat to break up the moment. “Hate to intrude, but
rescue mission
. Special equipment, phone call to make, caves to spelunk.”

I blushed and looked down at the phone, because Nick was right. Apollo and I had been having a moment. There’d been too many of those lately, and that was dangerous. I felt like a shit over it, but I’d been right before. After this was over, no more contact. It was the only way. I didn’t trust my willpower.

Apollo called his people, who called other people, and inside a half hour we were in a dive shop being outfitted in wetsuits and warnings. According to the pros, we were either: A: crazy—the weather made visibility nearly nil and the churning waves would be doing their best to smack us up against the rocks, or B: suicidal—neither Nick nor I were scuba trained, so they refused to rent us
that
equipment…something about licenses being revoked. We’d be counting on whatever breath we could take on the way down and our senses of direction to find the way back up for more. It was easy to become confused with no visibility to light the way back to the surface.

Apollo couldn’t come with. As he explained in the car, Hades had his kingdom warded against other gods. Humans not so much. If a soul wandered in unannounced, well, it was just too bad for them. One more subject to add to his rolls. But a
god
, that was a clear threat and distinctly unwelcome. Whether an Olympian wanted to rescue a lost love—their loves were always falling prey to this misfortune or that wrongful death—or stage a hostile takeover, any infiltration was seen as an act of aggression and treated with extreme prejudice.

Apollo’s presence would only make ours completely conspicuous…and actionable. I didn’t realize until he said it how much I’d come to count on his back-up. Now was a good time to start tapering off my Apollo addiction. He promised to keep an eye on things topside so that we wouldn’t emerge into an ambush. It was something anyway.

We were quiet on the ride to the Wave Organ jetty. Even with the GPS on Apollo’s phone confidently spitting out directions in a voice that seemed specially chosen to give geek boys wet dreams, I wondered whether we were on the right track. I didn’t see a thing as we approached but a discreet sign and a parking area long before we hit the end of the jetty. From here it looked like any other—a spit of land jutting out into the San Francisco bay, the skyline of the city off in the distance on another, much larger, spit of land. I guess I’d expected to see, well, something like a pipe organ, now that I thought about it, rising from the earth like a churchly instrument and sounding like whale or dolphin song.

Apollo pulled off into the parking area where only three other cars sat.

“This is it?” Nick asked, as if we had the answers.

“I guess so. They probably have people park here to keep the car sounds from interfering with the ambience,” I said. I sounded half-convincing even to myself.

We got out. Armani and I hefted our dive packs onto our shoulders, even though Apollo tried to take mine from me, and started trudging down the jetty. Despite the lack of cars in the lot, the path was well trod. Not paved, exactly, but sand, shell and stone had been compressed almost to the point of concrete.

I kept waiting for some monumental construction to come into view, but we were almost to the end of the jetty when instead I saw cut stone stairs leading downward. We took them, and I caught my breath as we descended into ruins…or anyway, a sculpture park made to look like ruins. Artfully tumbled stones, terraced walls with wildflowers and weeds growing up between them. It looked like a cross between an old armory and a Greek temple. Doric columns here and there, half crumbled or carved into the stone walls should have contrasted with the rest of the feel, but strangely they seemed in harmony with the site. But more than that, they gave me the strong sense that we were in the right place. There was no point at all to those columns in this place unless they’d been inspired, consciously or unconsciously.

The breeze whipped my dark hair across my face, saturating it as well so that the strands bound together into a lash. I spat the hair out as it flew into my mouth before gathering it up and twisting it into a knot at the base of my neck that I knew wouldn’t hold. It never did. But it would give me a temporary reprieve so that I could listen.

The whole place was the organ. Among the ruins, pipes stuck out like gun muzzles or canon barrels, and I realized that was what had given me the impression of an armory. I tried to tune out the wind and listen for the sound of the sea, which was all around us. The pipes acted as speakers, amplifying the music of the deep, some sounding like, yes, whale or dolphin song, others as though the sea breathed into underground cave entrances like a flutist into his instrument. Only the sound was deeper than a flute. More melodic than a tuba. It was a sound all its own. I was entranced. Whoever had built the wave organ was a genius. There’d been a sign back toward the stairs that had probably said, and I vowed to pay more attention on the way out, assuming I was in any condition to do so.

“Everybody pick a pipe,” Nick directed, “and start listening.”

I gave him a saucy salute, even though I’d been about to suggest the same thing.

My first two tubes were a wash—like holding giant seashells up to my ears. Beautiful but completely unhelpful. I was about to move on to the third when Apollo announced, “I’ve got something.”

Nick was closest, and he got there first. The look of concentration on his face as he listened was nearly comical, only I didn’t laugh. I hadn’t been in water, beyond the daily shower, since I’d nearly been drowned by the twin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon just weeks ago. Oh sure, I visited the beach, but I stayed well away from the surf. When I needed to cool down, I went with a rum punch.

Creature—Glaucus—was no longer a threat, but he had friends. He was far from the only water divinity, none of whom were happy with me after my part in taking down Poseidon. If they came gunning for me…well, water wasn’t exactly my element. I preferred the much more breathable air.

“Let me listen,” I ordered, pushing Nick gently out of the way. He went, but not far, standing beside me with a dazed expression on his face. He’d been exposed to enough weirdness now that he
knew
. He believed, but every once in a while, the evidence still seemed to strike him dumb.

There were definite voices, raised, heated. But what they were saying wasn’t immediately clear. There was too much interference.