Theta (42 page)

Herakles waved over one of the soldiers
following us and issued quick instructions. I continued onward,
inspecting the vehicles visually.

“
Something’s wrong.” Kyros’
soft warning came from a short distance away.

I glanced at him then
back.
What do you sense?
I asked.

“
Someone’s at the front
gate.”

As much as I hated to admit it, I knew to
trust his instincts. I waved him forward.

Speak to Herakles for
me,
I directed him.
Tell him to go to the front gate himself.

Kyros obeyed, and Herakles ran to the
vehicle stationed on the road and used to run new guard shifts to
the compound gate.

“
Thank you for trusting
me,” Kyros said.

I ignored him.

“
Don’t you want to know who
it is?”

He was the first person to show up unwelcome
to my compound, followed by Adonis, then Niko. I was starting to
grow concerned about the secrecy of a place my enemies had no
trouble finding.

“
Okay. I’ll let him tell
you,” Kyros said, amused.

I walked a short distance until I reached
the end of this row. Tilting my head back, I glanced towards the
eastern horizon, which was beginning to grow dark. Whoever my guest
was, he had better hurry, or I was going to have to meet him in the
morning.

Kyros trailed me as I started down the final
row of vehicles. Not ten minutes passed before the sound of
Herakles’ truck drew my gaze. He drove right up to me, instead of
halting at the truck’s assigned place, then stopped fast enough for
the vehicle to kick up dirt. He leapt out, and my eyes settled on
the old man with dark, olive skin and white hair in the car with
him.

“
Your Majesty,” Herakles
was breathless. “You need to hear this.” His features were
pale.

“
Your Majesty.” The elderly
man exited the truck more slowly and limped towards us, supported
by a cane. His eyes were the shade of whiskey. “It is an absolute
honor to meet you at last.”

What could this man possibly have to say
that alarmed Herakles so much?

“
Only that your camp is
being targeted. They will strike at dusk,” the old man
answered.

I blinked, not expecting
him to hear me.
Who will attack?

“
The military. And we have
…” He peered up a the sky. “… maybe half an hour.”

My heart felt like it flipped over in my
chest before it began to race.

Who in Hades was this man?

“
Menelaus.” He offered a
stiff bow. “I am a friend of Adonis.” When my eyebrows rose, he
chuckled. “Or … if you do not care for Adonis, I am not a friend of
his,” Menelaus said. “We must go, either way.”

“
How do you know someone is
going to attack us?” Herakles demanded.

“
Apollo,” Kyros answered
quietly.

“
The god?” Herakles
asked.

Menelaus laughed. “Yes. Because I am
Menelaus and I am also Apollo.”

I glared at him then at Kyros, who took a
step back and cleared his voice, avoiding my direct look.

How do you know this
information?
I asked
Menelaus-Apollo.

“
Zeus revealed it to
me.”

So he speaks to everyone but me?

“
You are killing our kind.
We will not let our king address you directly, until we are certain
of your motives.”

So the gods had learned a thing or two about
my opinion of them. I didn’t know if Kyros told them of my intense
hatred of Zeus, or if the slaughtering of their kin had cemented
the truth.

Apollo was the brother of Artemis, who had
tried to safeguard and guide me throughout my life. If there were a
god I didn’t despise, it was Artemis. But I had no direct dealings
with her brother before this evening, and no insight into what his
ulterior motives could be. If Menelaus were possessed, in the same
way Kyros was, then Apollo was immediately my enemy. Unfortunately,
Apollo had one advantage that was probably going to prevent me from
taking his life or leaving him behind.

Apollo is the patron god of
Oracles, is he not?
I asked
Menelaus.

“
Yes.”

Anyone with potential access to Alessandra
was of interest to me. Hence the reason Herakles was so easily
accepted into my organization. Apollo was a major deity, not one of
the smaller gods and goddesses I’d hunted and murdered. It was
possible this god could help me, not as much as Ares or Zeus, but
in ways I didn’t yet know.

Having two possessed humans around me was
enough to spur my anger. I set my hatred aside and looked to
Herakles. He didn’t need to hear or read my words to understand my
meaning.

Herakles spun and bolted towards the main
building.

A trickle of fire went through me, and I
glanced at the sky again. A sliver of the sun remained above the
horizon. The timing of my transformation was terrible.

“
You are ready to change?”
Menelaus asked me.

I shot Kyros a look.

“
I didn’t say a word,” he
said.

How do you know about
this?
I demanded of Menelaus.

He lifted his gnarled hand and twisted his
wrist to me. Like Adonis, he bore the faint sign of the omega, the
birthmark of the Bloodline.

I snatched his hand, barely
believing my eyes.
How is this
possible?
Menelaus was a member of the
Bloodline? My second thought was far darker. After cursing us to
suffer, one of the deities had the nerve to possess a Bloodline
member?

The sirens blared, alerting the compound. At
Herakles’ insistence, we had staged many drills and educated all
soldiers and civilians about which protocol should be followed with
each kind of alarm. There was no mistaking the one sound my people
had never heard: that calling for a full and immediate
evacuation.

“
I’ll explain later,”
Menelaus said.

At once, the motor pool exploded into
activity. Soldiers in different stages of dress, carrying fly bags,
poured into the vehicle staging area and raced to their assigned
vehicles. We didn’t have enough vehicles to transport everyone, and
those members of the infantry lined up in small formations of
twenty. As soon as one formation hit twenty, their leader signaled
to one of the commanders and bolted out of the compound. The
commanders were tracking numbers to ensure everyone made it off.
The orderly evacuation was as efficient and fast as Herakles had
trained those executing it to be.

A strange wail overhead drew my gaze to the
sky. Something streaked above us. Seconds later, it smashed into
the main body of the mall and exploded.

“
We have to go!” Kyros said
and pushed me towards the command vehicle awaiting me.

I go last!
I replied.
When my people
are safe, I’ll leave!

Another missile crested the treetops and
smashed into the headquarters building. Debris sprayed twenty
meters into the air, and flames flashed.

Fire was trickling through me more
insistently, warning me I wasn’t going to have time to drive
anywhere before the transformation came. I tried to fight it,
determined to oversee the orderly evacuation of my army.

Herakles joined us. “We have to go!” he
shouted.

Tell him –
I started to direct Kyros.

As if knowing I wasn’t going to leave,
Herakles scooped me up in his arms and ran to our vehicle at the
center of the motor pool. Furious, I nonetheless waited until he
set me down to give him a stern look and shake of my head he
ignored.

“
Get in!”

Menelaus was hobbling quickly towards us
with the aid of Kyros. More missiles rained from the sky, followed
by deafening explosions and the ground shaking. Shouts between
commanders and among those being evacuated were joined by the
screams of the injured and dying. Debris sprinkled out of the sky,
along with chunks of cement when the parking lots were hit. Dust
clouds left thin films of gray everywhere.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was
supposed to lead this army to the walls and knock them down in four
months, and then rescue humanity from both men like Cleon and the
gods who abandoned us all. Frozen in horror and surprise, I could
only watch as chaos broke out. The orderly evacuation turned into a
free for all, as people fled the camp in vehicles and on foot,
desperate to be away from the missile fire.

I watched my army scatter and die, helpless
to protect anyone. I didn’t know what to think or do, and my
stomach twisted with nausea as I realized I was losing a war before
I had a chance to start it.

In that moment, I began to understand how
poor my chances of fighting had been. With ten times the people,
fifty-meter walls, and a corrupted Oracle, Cleon’s advantage was no
longer something I could ignore, not when I was experiencing
firsthand what a few missiles could do.

Kyros twisted to see over his shoulder,
hearing the sounds of people in pain. I started forward, determined
not to leave anyone behind, and then stopped as familiar fire
smashed through my system.

“
Phoibe … get in!” Herakles
shouted above the war zone around us.

My body began to morph. My clothing grew too
tight, and fire raged within me. Fighting the sensation, I closed
my eyes and willed myself not to change, at least, not yet.

The magic didn’t listen. Wings tore through
my clothing, and talons through my shoes. Within seconds, my skin
was gray, my hair gone, and my sensitive senses ringing from the
bombing. I stretched my wings and shook off the last of the
clothing clinging to my frame then threw my head back with a roar
of fury.

An eerie silence fell
between missile strikes, and I
felt
those around us back away. Any hope I’d had of not
revealing my other self to my army was gone. I was too angry, too
overwhelmed by the sounds of explosions and scents of war, to care.
Propelling myself upward, into the air, I hovered to see the damage
below and let out a second roar, this one of pain.

The destructive power of the missiles left
me stunned. We had taken gradual, slow losses over the past few
months, but this was something entirely different. The power of one
rocket could have decimated half my army, if we hadn’t had advanced
warning. What would an outright war do, when I had so few advanced
weaponry?

One of the missiles had hit the nursery
section of the strip mall. My mind filled with images and
sensations only my beast side was capable of seeing, and I stared,
unable to process what was happening.

Let us stop this.

The light gray wings of Menelaus swept by me
as he darted upward into the sky, twirled, and then made a beeline
in the direction from which the missiles had come. I hesitated only
a second before the beast side of me took over. Compelled by fury
and sorrow, I raced after Menelaus. For the first time since
transforming into a beast, I freed the primal side of me whose
intensity had previously scared me. I was a woman of great control,
meticulous thought and careful action. To release everything, to
give up my control, had never happened before in my adult life.

The queen would never do
what had to be done this night. But the beast would. I
felt
the depths of my
strength, fury and bloodlust when in my secondary form. So I freed
the monster from the careful control I exerted over every second of
my life and flew after Menelaus, towards a brightly lit area
outside the walls, where the military had set up camp to destroy
me.

Vengeance consumed me, along with the images
of the dead men and women I was supposed to protect.

What happened next was a blur of blood,
night, and uncontrolled emotion.

In which direction we went, and what exactly
we did, I didn’t know with certainty until the next morning when I
awoke with a cloudy mind and parched mouth. Moving caused me to
groan from muscle soreness, and I blinked away sleep to try to make
sense of my unfamiliar surroundings.

I launched away from where I lay before
alarm fully registered. Scampering back, I glanced down at myself
then at the pile of bodies I’d been lying on. My skin was stiff
from caked blood, and I was naked. No less than ten men were tossed
in the pile, all dead, all bearing horrific fang and claw marks, as
if they’d been mauled by a group of bears.

Oh, gods
! I thought and glanced down at my hands. Dried blood was
packed under my nails and had stained my blonde hair pink. I
swallowed hard. My heart thumped against my chest. I
stood.

Fifty men. There had to be at least that
many corpses strewn around the military’s camp. The
surface-to-surface missile launchers remained in their original
positions, and additional neat stacks of rockets sat beside each
one. Blood splattered everything from the soaked dirt to the sides
of the vehicles to the tents. No one else moved anywhere in
camp.

Numbed to the damage, and afraid to look too
long at the carnage for fear of vomiting, I picked my way through
the bodies and mess. I didn’t want to consider why I was full when
I knew I hadn’t hunted any animals last night. The violence
displayed around me soon drove me to my knees.

I retched even harder when I saw how much
blood I threw up. Tears stung my eyes, and my throat burned as I
emptied the contents of my stomach. This was not morning sickness.
This was disgust.