Crazy in the Blood (Latter-Day Olympians) (31 page)

“No,” Persephone said, stepping in front of me. “I didn’t escape one horror to give anyone over to another. This has all gone far enough.”

A deadly smile spread across Demeter’s face as she moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with her daughter. “You heard her. This is over. The Feds have invaded the compound.
Hades
has invaded the compound. It is no longer safe. Your ‘paradise’ is no more
.”

Dionysus snarled but didn’t answer with words. Instead, he gave a sharp gesture that unleashed the bacchae on us. They dove for the closest targets—Apollo, Armani,
me
. Dionysus himself turned on his former allies.

“Get back,” I heard Hermes call to Christie and Jesus before he snapped his fingers and was instantly out of the fray. The smell of popcorn suddenly filled the room, and I swore that if he’d just materialized himself a snack, I’d kill him…if I lived that long.

Claws flashed at my eyes, and I threw my hands up just in time to deflect one of the bacchae. The nails diverted to rake across my scalp. Teeth snapped at me, and I reared back. My flinch gave her the chance to raise a knee…fast, striking in a spot no less painful for women than men, even with our plumbing on the inside. My eyes instantly watered, and my knees buckled, but I locked them and refused to fall. I’d beaten Olympians. I was
not
letting some crazy cultist take me down. I swiped the tears from my eyes so that I could see straight, and met her crazy with my own.

“Freeze!” I thundered. I felt it flow out of me with all the force of my determination. The bacchae before me stiffened. To my right I felt another figure falter, and looked to see that it was Demeter, staggering from a blow Dionysus had dealt her. In the close quarters of our room, she couldn’t summon the perfect storm. Persephone caught her as she reeled, and Dionysus raised an arm to strike again while they were vulnerable. I dashed the frozen bacchae aside and caught Dionysus’s hand as the blow started to fall. The power behind it pulled me off balance, but Dionysus grabbed me with his free hand and pulled me against him. He looked straight into my eyes, and I wished with every fiber of my being that my gorgon glare worked on the elder gods. And then the alarm bells chased that thought away along with any other I might have had. It was so hard to concentrate…and then the blare of the alarms became muffled, as if someone had slammed a door on them. One line of a song, just one, played through instead.
The girl with kaleidoscope eyes
. It didn’t make any sense, and I didn’t have time to ponder as someone tried to tear me away from Dionysus, but I was held fast.

…kaleidoscope eyes…

The eyes staring into mine spun and telescoped, as if all the secrets worth knowing lurked there, hidden in the shadows, and if I just concentrated they would reveal themselves. I couldn’t break contact. Any second now…any second, I would know…

A huge rumble shook the room, and the earth moved under our feet.

No!
my mind cried. The shift lost me a secret I’d been stalking, a mystery about to be revealed. Gone forever. Then those knees that had been threatening to buckle gave out on me. My feet were torn in different directions, as the floor burst wide open.

The big one
, my mind jabbered, the panic of every La La Landian. The steel bands that held me in place, Dionysus’s hands, released as he flailed to keep from going down with me. Stars exploded across my vision when one of my knees struck the floor. The pain cleared away the last shred of wonder and awe. The for-real fall had kept me from falling under Dionysus’s spell, but if this
was
the big one, I could hardly be thankful.

I looked around frantically at the world jumping around us. Nick’s gaze met mine, and he reached out for me, heedless of the bacchae riding him to the ground, but the earth jumped again, and our fingers missed by inches. My legs split farther as the fissure beneath me grew, until I felt like a wishbone, and when the air escaped, hot as Hades, I feared that one way or the other, it was the end. Either we’d gotten so unlucky as to choose a hotel on a previously uncharted fault line or all hell was about to break loose.

I pulled my legs back together and twisted around to face whoever was coming, just in time to see Thanatos rising from the depths of…whatever lay beneath. He was dressed like the traditional grim reaper—black cowled cape and sickle that danced with the reflected flames from down below.

My inner alarm jingled until I yelled, “Enough!” out loud, drawing Thanatos’s extremely pissed off gaze right to me.

I kicked out for his knee a fraction of a second before I noted the fall of his sickle and that I’d have been better to roll out of the way, but he had gravity going for him, and the sickle beat my foot to impact. My shoulder exploded in pain. Someone leapt for Thanatos’s back, or so I assumed based on his sudden oomph and lurch forward, and the sickle jerked with him, slicing straight down through my collarbone.

The pain overwhelmed my alarms, which fell silent as the world went black. Everything receded—the flames, the fear, the pain…all a distant star, meaningless to me in the void of space.

I silently cried out as the star raced toward me, denying it and what it represented. If life was pain and death was the absence of it, then maybe I was ready for the end. But as the light hurtled toward me and resolved into three separate stars, I had a funny feeling…

“Again?” Lachesis said dramatically. “But it’s so unsatisfying. Where’s the climax? The character arc? The denouement?”

“This is life,” Clotho said.

“No, it’s
death
,” Atropos argued, “and I agree, wholly unsatisfying.” She raised the scissors to a multicolored string. It wasn’t smooth like silk. No, my strand had burls and kinks, crazy combinations of color along its length, coming to a very dark end.
 

“Wait!” Lachesis cried, putting a long-fingered hand to Atropos’s wrist to stop her as the shears started to close around my cord. “Look.”

As the three sisters peered at my strand, the end seemed to lengthen and the color to return—the red of blood or roses or hellfire, and I felt the sisters’ light pulling away again.

“Damn,” said Atropos.

“So unsatisfying,” grumped Lachesis.

They swirled away from me and winked out just like that. Suddenly, pain convulsed me, arcing me up off the floor, stealing my breath and nearly my sanity. Apollo loomed over me, hand pulled back as if he were about to slap sense back into me.
Again?
I wondered, but the pain of my cheek was such a small ache in the grand scheme of things that I couldn’t be really certain I’d felt it at all.

Thanatos was turned away from us, having moved on to another target, but I must have gasped at my sudden return to consciousness, and he whirled back around on me, sickle dripping with my blood…or maybe others’ at this point. I didn’t know how long I’d been gone, and I couldn’t see around him to check on anyone. His sickle was already crashing down, and I used the renewed fire of my weave to buck hard, rolling Apollo off of me, out of the path of the blow meant for me. I caught the blade between my forearms like some kind of gorgon ninja. The tip pierced my chest, but not far. Blade trapped, I rolled with it, twisting it out of Thanatos’s grip. He came down with it, landing hard on top of me, purposely or not leading with an elbow as hard and bony as a hilt. I felt something crack and realized for a wonder it wasn’t my rib but the haft of the sickle, unequal to handling our combined weight working against it. I quickly adjusted my grip on it to thrust a broken end back at him like a stake, but it vanished right out of my hands like it had never been. Nice trick, that, only I was now defenseless, prey to a god with a grudge whose hands were tangled in my hair, ready to bash my head into what was left of the floor.

Thanatos rocked with a blow as someone—Apollo?—attacked him from the side and it knocked us closer to the fissure in the floor.

“Stop right there!” a voice rained down on us with sudden authority…and nearly its own reverb. Certainly, the walls rattled, just a bit.

Thanatos rolled off of me to stare up in shock at Persephone, who stood above him holding the now-mended sickle, pointed straight for him. I looked quickly around to see the few battles still feebly being waged cease at the power of her voice.

“
I
am your mistress,” she thundered. “I am your queen—by the marriage Hades refuses to dissolve. You will heed
me
.”

Apparently, there was something to that, because Thanatos stared as if he had no other choice…until he bowed his head and lowered his gaze in silent acceptance.

“You tell Hades that as long as we are bound, his power is
mine
. I am claiming my share. I am through with the fear, with the obedience and with
him
.”

The door to our overcrowded room blew open, and Hades stood in its place, face a mask of anger and pain. It was hard to look at and harder to know which emotion was coming out on top.

“Tell him yourself,” he said.

We all watched Persephone to see if she would waver, but she only shifted the aim on the sickle and looked him right in the eyes.
 

“It’s over,” she said. Firm. No explanation. No apologies. No room for argument.

“But I still love you,” Hades said, voice ragged with torment. But I remembered the sound of his slap in the tunnels and the sight of her reddened face, and I was unmoved. I hoped she’d stay the same.

“You’ve never understood the word,” she spat back. “Love takes into account what the other wants. I don’t know what you ever felt for me, but it was
never
love. And now, it’s over.”
 

No one moved. I wasn’t sure anyone even breathed.

Until Hades, like Thanatos before him, finally hung his head. “As you wish,” he answered.

Chapter Sixteen

“It’s not about the climax, it’s about the clean-up afterward.”

—Yiayia, in an OMG, she did not just say that moment

I called Agent Rosen, though I hardly needed to do it. Little things like localized earthquakes, tornados and battles to the death and back again tended to attract attention. The local police announced themselves with a no-nonsense knock on the door that Hades had slammed back into place when he left and the order that we open up. The agents were barely a step behind them.

“Quick,” I hissed to anyone who would listen. “Demeter and Persephone—” I paused, because I had no idea what names they were going by among us mortals.

“Demi and Sinestra,” Demeter supplied.
 

“Sinestra? Still? Okay, whatever. You two were trying to escape the cult. The others—“

But the door burst open before I could get any further.

Thanatos had disappeared from whence he’d come. There one second and gone the next. Hermes had done the same, which surprised me. If he liked trouble, he could have gotten a firsthand look at another round, but apparently he’d had his fun. Sticking around to answer questions probably didn’t seem a fitting encore. At least he’d gotten Jesus and Christie out of the way. They’d ridden things out locked in the small hotel bathroom. At least I could be thankful to him for that much.

They arrested us all until they could sort things out. This time, Rosen and Holloway didn’t rescue me from custody, but stood, I suspected, behind mirrored glass watching the interrogations. We were all, of course, separated. I had no idea what tales the others were spinning or how I was going to explain any of it to my assistant and BFF, who were certainly going to want explanations for what they’d seen.

It was long and grueling. I was left alone for vast periods of time with nothing but the burnt brown sludge they called coffee. I even fell asleep for a time, too exhausted to remember whether that was supposed to be a sign of guilt or innocence. I was very much afraid it was the former, but the needs of the body totally outweighed any concern.

Finally,
finally
, Agent Rosen entered. He didn’t look like he’d slept at all, probably not since before the raid on the Back to Earth compound. He gave me a tired smile as he sat down across from me.

“After the murders at the hotel earlier in the week, the inn decided to reactivate the parking lot cameras they’d shut down to cut costs. You’ll never believe what they showed. Oh wait, you were there. I don’t suppose any of those—things? people?—who attacked you will be available to answer for their crimes?”

I shook my head, completely at a loss. It had been caught
on camera
? What about Demeter’s tornado? How on earth did the authorities explain all this to themselves? How were they planning to keep it quiet? And why was I just hearing about it now? Had the Feds gotten to the footage before the regular police?

“Or course, Dionysus Bach and his followers are claiming they were invited to your room, where you jumped them.”

“Is anybody buying that?”

“Not with two former cultists willing to provide evidence against them, including regarding your claim of drugs. Although, it might be a little difficult given that one doesn’t seem to have much of a history before, say, right this minute. Still, we’ve offered them Witness Protection.”

“They’re taking you up on it?” I asked.

“Looks like. Marshals should be here within the hour.”

It was the best thing for Demeter and Persephone, in case Hades changed his mind about letting Persephone go or Dionysus got out and went looking for revenge. Unfortunately, the rest of us would be a lot easier to find.