by Jaye Wells
“It’s quite a shock, isn’t it?” Dionysus said. “To find out that people you admire are nothing more than carefully constructed shells.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off Morales. “Is it true?”
“Of course it is,” Dionysus said impatiently. Both he and Shayla were watching me, because that’s where the drama was. “If he were lying he’d be dead.”
Morales nodded slowly. I noticed his hands were busy plucking at his bindings. Then his eyebrows rose and his gaze darted toward our captor. Toward the gun in Dionysus’s hand.
I knew instantly what he was planning. “Goddamn it, Morales! How could you cover up something like that?” I leaned over, as if trying to find comfort. The move allowed me access to the corkscrew and its dull knife.
“Don’t you fucking judge me,” he shouted. The outburst captured the rapt attention of both Dionysus and Shayla. I furiously sawed at my bindings. “I did what had to be done, Prospero.” His voice had a convincing defensiveness to it. So convincing I worried I’d misread his intention. “But who are you to judge? I’m not the only one here who’s rationalized shitty decisions.”
“I cooked to save Danny’s life. You covered up a murder to save your job!”
“And you haven’t kept your secret to save your job?” he challenged.
Dionysus crossed his arms and watched me closely, like he was anticipating a complete meltdown.
Part of me wasn’t sure if we were acting anymore. The anger his comeback caused certainly didn’t feel fake. I palmed the corkscrew and sat up, careful to hold my wrists together. Looking into my partner’s eyes, I played out the charade. “Fuck you, Morales,” I said in a low, mean voice.
“No, fuck”—in a burst of motion, Morales launched himself up from the bench—“you!” He slammed into Dionysus like a wrecking ball. The weight of both men slammed into the boat’s bow.
Shayla screamed and started dancing around, as if she were confronted with a mouse instead of two grown men pummeling each other as they grappled for a gun. Launching myself out of my seat, I tackled her. We slid across the slick floor until her head slammed into the gunwale.
But instead of subduing her, the impact turned her into a rabid polecat. For a few adrenaline-soaked moments the world was a sea of scratching nails, vicious hair pulling, and the palpable heat of rage. Somewhere in the tussle I lost my grip on the corkscrew. By the time I realized this, Shayla had managed to get a grip on her gun and raise it.
I froze instantly.
She let out a calming breath and smiled. “Stand up.”
With my hands raised, I stood as slowly as possible. She moved to put a little distance between us. Behind me, the men had gone silent, but I didn’t have time to worry about who’d won when my own skirmish was far from over.
“Do not fucking move”—Shayla’s voice rose with panic—“or I’ll shoot you.”
“No, you won’t,” I said. “You may be a whore, but you’re no killer.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I’ve known a lot of killers, Shayla.” I jerked my chin toward her partner. “That asshole is one. Uncle Abe, too. And Aphrodite for damned sure. But you?” I shot her a pitying frown. “You don’t have the hardness in your eyes or the steel in your gut.”
I braced myself. My hands clasping into fists. Trying to focus through the pain and the disorienting surge of magic’s energy through my cells.
“Actually, I lied,” I went on, bending my knees slightly. “According to my mom, you weren’t so hot at whoring, either. It’s sad, really.”
Time slowed to a crawl. The warped echo of a screech. That red fingernail pulling on the trigger. A flash of fire from the muzzle. My leg muscles screaming. Commotion behind me. Each frame of motion flashing like a slideshow. Shayla’s body flying backward. The gun flying loose. Hands, feet scrambling. Fingers yearning for and finding hot metal.
Fast forward. My bleeding fists slammed the bitch’s body against the wall. A smile bloomed on my lips even as the gun pointed at her face made her smile dissolve.
Her lower lip and jaw trembled, like she was too cold. My forearm dug into her sternum, allowing me to feel the rapid pulse of her breath.
Over my shoulder I called, “How we doing, Morales?”
“Peachy keen.”
I didn’t look to confirm. He’d tell me if there was something to worry about. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at the confirmation he’d managed to subdue Dionysus, but part of me was pretty impressed.
“Maybe I should save you for Aphrodite to deal with,” I said to Shayla. Her lipstick had smeared like a wound across her face and her hair stood on end, as if the violence had shocked her system.
Her chin rose despite the fear glinting in her eyes. “I outsmarted the Hierophant once. I could do it again.”
“Tough talk from a dirty mouth.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t admit your other secret,” Shayla taunted, clearly changing tactics. “Why didn’t you reveal how you cooked the potion that killed your mama?”
My left eye twitched.
“Kate,” Morales said.
Shayla’s laugh was low in her chest. Her chin didn’t tremble anymore. Now it was my hands that shook.
“I bet you still cry about it,” she taunted. “But the saddest part is, it’s not even true.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“You’ll have to ask your uncle about that.” She pursed her lips. “Knowing Abe, though, I bet he’d let you go on believing it was your fault.”
The dark place in my mind where the demons lived lit up like a volcano about to erupt. Their seductive voices urged me to remove that lying mouth from her face with a bullet. Hell, to even consider what she was saying as truth made me feel capable of leveling the city myself.
“Step away, Prospero.” Morales used his cop voice now. Somehow I’d gone from partner to perp. “She’s not worth you ending up in a cell next to your uncle.”
I didn’t know how Morales knew exactly what to say. But those words managed to break the spell of rage. Panting, I pulled back, lowering the gun.
I started to turn toward Morales. A blur from the corner of my eye. The flash of red nails. A scream of rage. Her weight landed on my back and I started to fall. Swiveling midair, I turned to face her. Hands grappling for the gun.
I don’t know whose hand pulled the trigger. I don’t know if she believed she could actually get the gun from me. But I did know her body went lax and that the breath on my face was her last.
The sound of two hands clapping cleared the foggy haze of shock. Turning my head, I saw Dionysus lounging on the low bench set into the bow, clapping as if he’d just watched dinner theater. Morales, stoic expression firmly in place, stood with a gun pointed at the asshole.
“It—it was an accident,” I said.
“Sometimes accidents are merely manifestations of wishes long denied,” the fake god concluded.
“Shut the fuck up.” Morales grabbed the false god by his arm and jerked him to a standing position. To me, my partner said, “What now?”
In death, the priestess was a lot heavier than she had been alive. It took a couple of shoves to roll her body off me, and when it hit the deck, it did so with a hollow thump. I pushed myself to standing as gracefully as possible, which wasn’t very. Once I was upright, I had to steady myself against the wall of the boat. My hand left a red smear on the gleaming white hull.
As I stood, I realized the pain from the potion had dissipated a great deal. I was smarting from all the wounds I’d earned in my catfight with Shayla, but the sickening tingle of magic in my veins was almost gone. Volos’s truth potion had been strong, but it hadn’t been long lasting. Guess I’d have to mention that little defect to John if we survived the night. Right after I punched him for making the fucking thing in the first place.
The promise of being able to have that conversation gave me enough perverse pleasure to ignore the exhaustion rolling in my gut l
ike an ocean tide.
“Now,” I said, “we deal with the goddamned bomb.”
Dionysus snorted. “You’ll never figure out how to disarm it before the moon reaches its apex.”
I punched him in the throat. He doubled over, wheezing and choking. Morales smiled at me like I was a genius. “Then I guess we’ll just have to torture you until you share your own secrets.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Dionysus’s secret bomb location turned out to be a wooden platform that was anchored to a mooring buoy about half a mile away from the boat. To reach it, we had to row over in a rubber raft that had been tied to the cabin cruiser where we’d been held.
From the buoy, I could see the silhouette of the old Babylon lighthouse about a mile away. The full moon overhead illuminated the steel cage around the darkened light. The lighthouse had fallen into disuse years ago after the GPS technology that most of the freighters and fishing boats were now equipped with made it obsolete.
The water patrol cop I’d shadowed as a rookie was named Lieutenant Fred Harris, but he’d insisted I call him Cap’n. Anyway, the old coot had spent most of our time patrolling the Steel River telling me about the history of many of the fourteen hundred shipwrecks littering the bottom of Lake Erie.
I guess I needed to send Cap’n a thank-you note because some of what he’d told me stuck. That’s how I knew the buoy we tied the raft to had been installed by an organization that tracked Lake Erie’s shipwreck sites. They’d installed the moored buoys so that dive groups didn’t have to drop anchor and risk harming the wreck sites far below. From our position, I guessed that the site we were above was the Cuyahoga, a barge that went down during a storm in the 1920s.
The wooden platform on the water’s surface was dominated by two large metal brackets, a mechanical catapult, and a big glass sphere containing two chambers, one filled with iridescent red liquid and the other with shimmering blue. Beyond the bomb, the bastard moon mocked us from its perch high above the Babylon skyline. Judging from its position in the sky by the time we reached the bomb, I knew we were reaching that deadly hour when the orb achieved its apex and became an officially full Blue Moon.
Once we’d all disembarked from the raft, Morales handed the gun over without a word. The GSW on his leg was bleeding freely. His complexion was pale, and he’d had trouble climbing out of the raft without my help. Considering the concussion, the hangover from the potion, and the bullet wound, I was amazed the guy was even upright.
“How much time until it goes off?” I asked Dionysus.
He glanced at the moon. “The bomb is set to deploy once the moon hits its apex.”
“What time will that be?”
“Four twenty-seven a.m.”
Morales glanced at his watch. “It’s four ten right now.” We exchanged a heavy look.
The thing was, the bomb didn’t look all that complicated. It wasn’t like the movies where there were different-colored wires sticking out of the damned thing. Near as I could tell, once the timer counted down, a charge would activate the catapult. Then it would fling the orb toward the city.
“It’s too far,” I said. “The catapult can’t project the bomb that distance.”
“Even if it doesn’t reach all the way when it explodes, it will be high enough for the wind to carry the potion cloud over the city.”
Eyeing the water, I cursed its lack of salt. If I’d been on an ocean, I could have tossed the entire damned thing into the water and interrupted the magic’s ability to activate. But Lake Erie was infuriatingly free of salt, which meant we were fucked. In addition, the catapult was bolted to the platform, which meant throwing it overboard to sink to the bottom of the lake was also impossible.
“What happens once it’s deployed?” I asked the asshole.
“Once the catapult flings the orb, the potions will mix, creating a chain reaction that will end in an explosion.” He smiled a cocky smirk. “A trick and a treat just in time for Halloween.” He raised his arms and looked up at the moon. “Between the fucking and the fighting, the entire city should be on fire before sundown.”
My pulse had had so many shocks that night that it jumped for a couple of beats before settling back into its normal rhythm. “I’m going to give you one chance to tell us how to disarm it. If you fail, I will make you bleed. Do you understand me?”
“Why would I build the perfect weapon with the option of disarming it?”
I tilted my head. “You’re lying.” What I wouldn’t have given for an extra dose of Volos’s truth serum right then.
His eyes danced with manic glee. “Once it’s set in motion, there is no stopping chaos.”
My gun crashed into his jaw with a satisfying crunch. Blood splattered from his mouth. A few cool drops hit my own skin, but I didn’t care.
“Tell me how to stop this,” I yelled.
His head swiveled slowly back toward me. His pink tongue jutted from his lips to lick away the blood. “You can’t stop it.” That smile again. Those red teeth, like a demon. “Surrender, Kate.”
The moon mocked me over the wizard’s shoulder. My right hand clenched into a fist. My teeth clenched.
“Surrender isn’t an option.”
“It’s the only option,” he countered.
In an instant the rage boiling in my chest parted to reveal a calm spot in the middle. And in the eye of that storm, a deadly calm cut through me like ceremonial athame.
I didn’t hear the laugh escape Dionysus as he realized my intent. I didn’t hear the gun discharge. But I saw his left hand explode and felt grim satisfaction.
His laughter turned into a scream.
Blood everywhere. Dionysus collapsed on the platform and rolled to protect his destroyed hand.
Morales’s face was a mask of shock—mouth hanging open, face pale. “What the fuck, Kate?”
I licked my lips and tasted that bastard’s blood. “Trust me.”
“You shot an unarmed man.”
Anger flared in my gut, the fire fueled by desperation and fear. “Don’t judge me. You fucking covered up a cop’s murder!”
His face hardened. “And you protected your uncle.”
My stomach dropped to the bottom of the lake. “I never said—”
“You think I’m an idiot? Who else could it have been?”
I shoved the gun in the rear waistband of my jeans. “All right, look,” I snapped. “We’re both assholes, okay? But we’re also the only two assholes who can save the city.”
“You… won’t… succeed,” panted Dionysus.
“Shut the fuck up,” Morales snapped.
I grabbed the whimpering madman by the toga and dragged him toward the bomb. Reaching back for my cuffs, I remembered too late I didn’t have them anymore. I looked around, my eyes zeroing in on Morales’s waist. I snapped my fingers. “Bring me your belt.”
He frowned. “What, you’re going to beat him, too?”
“No, wise guy, I’m gonna strap him to his own bomb.”
Morales’s frown cracked into a crooked smile. “I like it.” He limped across the platform to bring me the strip of leather. Judging from the grimace on his face that deepened with each step, that leg of his was giving him a world of hurt.
I grabbed Dionysus’s right hand and strapped it tightly to one of the metal struts supporting the bomb. Then I stepped back and assessed the situation.
“Now what?” Morales asked.
I looked up at the moon, which winked mockingly from the ink-stained sky. It loomed so large and bright that I suddenly felt very small and full of shadows. The idea of me being able to stop this runaway locomotive of a clusterfuck was suddenly so inconceivable that I wanted to just jump in the water and let the currents pull me down to the wreckage below.
“Kate.”
“What?”
“What are you thinking?”
I laughed bitterly. “I was thinking I wished Uncle Abe was here to summon the Lake Erie Lizard to eat this fucking thing.” I kick
ed a metal brace.
“Actually,” Morales said slowly, “that’s not a horrible idea.”
My eyebrows slammed down, worried. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, Morales. Maybe you should sit down.”
He shook his head and stepped toward me. “Sometimes you have to fight magic with magic, right? Abe told you how he did it, didn’t he?”
I shook my head and stared at him like he’d sprouted horns. “That’s ridiculous. He was lying to a little kid, Morales. The monster doesn’t exist.”
He crossed his arms. “How can you be so sure? Every day we see all sorts of inconceivable things.”
Morales’s words came back to me from that day we’d gone to see Abe.
“This lake’s gotta be what—a hundred feet deep?”
“Two hundred in some places.”
“Right. Just saying, maybe there’s things down there we don’t want to believe in.”
I shook my head again, as if doing so might shake some sense into him. “You’re insane. I don’t do magic, remember?”
He raised an ironic brow. “You did it to save Danny? Why wouldn’t you do it to save the entire city?”
“Uncle Abe told me he summoned it using a potion he cooked using blood and water gathered under a full moon.”
“Shh—don’t spoil it,” Dionysus said in a pained voice. “She’s about to give up.”
I rounded on him. The impossibility of the situation mixed with taunting by that sick fuck lit a fire under me. “No, I’m not—” I backhanded Dionysus. The blow forced the side of his head into the metal bar. He slumped over to the side.
I turned back to Morales, who wisely kept his opinions about my abuse of the psycho to himself. “I don’t have any Gideon’s Dew, remember? Dickhead over there threw it over the side.”
“You said he used dew gathered under a full moon, right?”
I nodded sharply, ready to argue with anything he said.
“We’re in the middle of a freshwater lake under a Blue Moon, Kate.” He spread his arms wide. “Look, if you don’t try what will happen?” I remained stonily silent until he answered his own question. “They’ll die,” he said, pointing toward the skyline. “But first they’ll suffer. And it’s up to us to make sure that doesn’t happen.”