OF WAR Anthology Novels 1-3

by Lisa Beth Darling

  “Is that right?” Raven asked snottily.

  “It is, you were magnificent today.” Apollo raised the chalice and clinked against the one in Raven’s hand before taking a long drink. “You were strong, courageous, intelligent, and absolutely ruthless. One day you will sit on the Throne of Olympus, I’m sure of it.” Apollo crossed the large open room to sit on his sofa with its gold cashmere pillows stuffed with goose down. “For now this will have to do, come sit, tell me what’s on your mind. I assure you, Raven, no matter how it may appear in front of them I am always on your side.” Settling on the plush sofa, Apollo watched Raven continue to drink. The boy was delightful, he as exuberant and so willing to please. Apollo reached out to put his hand on the boy’s lower thigh and gave it a reassuring squeeze as his golden eyes gleamed with unfulfilled delight. He was outstandingly gorgeous as he stood in the Council Chamber bare-chested and barefooted in these wonderfully fitting blue jeans with their double-ring belt nestled snugly over that enticing youthful bulge. With that long hair kissing his shoulders and his supple olive skin, Raven was a very attractive boy indeed; Apollo just wanted to eat him up. He’d been very disappointed, and a little insulted, when Raven refused him at the Bacchanalia, preferring to stay with the women.

  “I know.” Raven finished his chalice, refilled it, and then sat next to Apollo on the sofa. ” Just tired, I guess.”

  “So I hear, and see, these Trials are quite exhausting. But you’re doing splendidly, Raven, really beyond anyone’s expectations, even your Father’s I would think. You’re certainly pissing Zeus off nicely.” Apollo clinked the chalices together again with a smile.

  “Well, there’s a plus. ” Raven took another drink. “Anything to piss off that old bastard.”

  Apollo laughed heartily. “I expect that when you’re King of Olympus you’ll throw your old Uncle a few bones for helping you get there.”

  “When I rule this shithole, you can have whatever you want, Uncle.”

  “You already know what I want.”

  “My Mother?”

  “Among a few…very small other things.” Apollo fought to hold back the grin bursting out on his handsome clean-shaven face. “I don’t care if she’s awake or not.”

  “What other ‘small things’?” A cold shiver went through Raven’s body making it ripple and break out in goose bumps that caught Apollo’s unbridled attention and made his golden eyes light up. Raven already knew Apollo didn’t care if Alena was awake or not, several times he’d asked Raven to sneak him into the Fortress to ‘visit’ with her. So far, Raven had kept his Uncle out, telling him Ares had the place locked so tightly Raven was lucky he could come and go at will.

  “Oh, nothing you’ll ever miss,” Apollo led deftly and then just let his words hang in the air as he kept a keen gold eye on Raven’s face.

  “Whatever,” Raven grumbled as Rose’s sweet image scampered through his head, “S’long as I get what I want it’s fine by me.” Raven raised the chalice as if in salute before finishing it off for the second time and filling it for the third.

  “I’m sure you’ll get everything that’s coming to you,” Apollo assured as he crossed his long golden legs under their white linen trousers and turned toward Raven. “But, out of curiosity, any chance of our dear Maggie waking in the near future? We’ve all heard the rumor of her talking through the little retard, is it true?” Apollo didn’t miss it when Raven flinched at the ugly word but remained cool and quiet.

  “What’s wrong? You think Hunter’s lying?”

  “Is he?” Apollo shot more angrily than he’d anticipated. Ares wasn’t the only who was waiting for the willow Fae to wake from her coma. He’d been most intrigued when Ares brought Jilios back to the island and she began spinning tales of fiery tornados. Of how she found the half-wit in the bed with Ares and Maggie naked as jaybirds with Ares wielding a vicious hard-on. Although the Nymph was genuinely afraid for the little girl, Apollo was hard-pressed to believe his Brother suddenly turned into an incestuous pedophile. Still, there was something going on in the Fortress. Some Dark Fae Magick was afoot and when Apollo told Zeus, it only stiffened his resolve to have the helpless woman cast from the mountain.

  “No,” Raven huffed casually and reached for the gold box on the crystal table. From it he plucked a fat joint. “Rose talked for her that day,” Raven muttered as he bit off the end of the doobie then stuck it between his lips. Raven snapped his fingers to produce a small flame and light the paper. Puffing away, he told an abbreviated tale of that day just enough to appease his Uncle while he drew in deeply, letting the piney smoke fill his lungs. “But I’ve been kinda busy lately, ya know. S’far as I know, nothin’ else has changed.” He took another hit, which he coughed out of those strong lungs, reddening his handsome face. “You always do get the best shit.”

  Apollo knew the boy was holding something back from him, saw it in dancing behind his eyes but couldn’t hear it in his voice or detect it in Raven’s posture. It seemed to him that Raven was following nicely in his Father’s footsteps and, as such, Apollo didn’t push the issue. It was clear Raven was beginning to distrust him so Apollo took the long slow road to getting that trust back. “You’ll let me know if it does, you know how I like to be kept up-to-date on your Mother’s condition.” The Golden God plucked the thick joint from between Raven’s fingers, took a deep hit, and then handed it back. “I have to tell you, we all saw the warships pass by you today, Zeus has commanded Ares to go down there and find out what’s going on. Hades said there’s a steady increase in business and Poseidon expressed suspicion over how many warships have been sailing on his oceans lately. You can’t keep this secret much longer.” Apollo was amazed they had been able to keep it this long.

  Raven had been very busy with his Trials and hadn’t the time to go down and stir the brewing pot of anger the Mortals were cooking up in nearly three weeks. The news that Ares was going down there at this precarious point was disturbing. With Trinity’s warning echoing in his head bringing with it a pang of guilt, Raven didn’t think any of them could halt the inevitable. “It’s all gonna blow, any day now…boom!”

  “Just to make sure, while you were sleeping, I took a quick trip down there, there isn’t one place on the entire planet that isn’t riddled with unrest. Good job.” Apollo clinked the chalices together again, drank, laughed, smoked, and then motioned for Raven to light up another. “The plague is a very nice touch. It’s quite fun to play with them, isn’t it Raven?”

  Holding the skunky smoke tinged with pine, Raven looked at his Uncle with an inquisitive eye. “Plague?”

  “You didn’t know?” Apollo let out a belly laugh and slapped his linen covered golden knee. “Oh, that’s rich, they’ve done it to themselves. What else could you expect?” Seeing the humor in the matter did nothing to quell Raven’s want to know, and Apollo told him of how a government lab in the State of Nevada had been overrun by the militant group that Raven named ARES in honor of his Father. In the fuss and the fight, secret government laboratories were overrun, invaded, glasses, tubes, and vials shattered in the scuffle. Unfortunately for the Human Race, one of those vials contained a highly lethal weaponized version of rabies. The government called it Experimental Virus TK009; nickname Major Falls, because after being exposed to it, in a very short while, the victim’s health took a rapid and major fall followed by death. Though the scientists tried to explain the danger, ARES didn’t listen. They trampled through the lab taking whatever they wanted, shooting whomever they wanted, then they left taking the virus with them. After that, it was just a matter of time before it spread over North and South America. “It has an eighty-eight percent kill rate!” Apollo was beaming by the time he wound his way to the end of his tale. “Can you imagine that? Eighty-eight percent. Ares couldn’t do better if he tried. They’re dropping like flies down there.” The Golden God didn’t laugh but cackled as his glittering face flushed with crimson and tears of laughter filled his gold eyes. “Those that don’t get
it easily become carriers; they spread it wherever they go by touch or even by breathing on each other.”

  Raven was dumbfounded. Speechless. This unexpected turn of events wasn’t what he had in mind, he just wanted to bring the world to its knees, not cut off its head. “What about a cure? Antidote? If the military made it then they must have a countermeasure.”

  Apollo stared at his young Nephew, shook his head as he tried to stop laughing. “It doesn’t seem so. Though it does appear to have made its way to Europe, they’re getting sick now and that’s quelling their riots. Soon Europe, Asia, Africa, maybe even Australia, will be wiped out.” Other than the Nymphs on Cerci’s island, who would be arriving on Olympus to live in his Temple any day now, the Mortal World could burn to cinders and fall to ash. Besides, in his vast experience, every few thousand years or so the entire planet fell to rack and ruin, there was nothing to be done about it. So long as the Mortals kept forgetting History, they would keep building great societies only to burn them to ground in haste and hatred.

  Raven closed his eyes against the welling sting of tears even as his heart plummeted to his feet. In the Under World Tisiphone told him that he’d go down in history as the Greatest Mass Murderer the Mortal World Ever Knew. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.” Apollo leaned in close to Raven to take in the fresh salty smell of the boy as he refilled his empty glass. “Soon, Zeus and the others won’t have any choice but to recognize you for the Olympian that you are. Your mother’s blood won’t matter to them anymore. You’ve set this up quite nicely, very well indeed.” Running his fingertips over Raven’s bare shoulder and breathing that wonderful scent once more, licking his lips Apollo whispered, “Now that we’re alone, tell me, what did you make of the vision with my Sister, Artemis?”

  Raven was still trying to get his head around just how many people must be dying by the minute down there if he was to believe Apollo. Ares was bound to notice that and Raven didn’t think his Father was going feel very benevolent towards him when he returned to Olympus. Who cared about the vision of Artemis in the moon? They were in some heavy-duty shit here. Apollo was crazy if he thought the Olympians were just going to consider what they’d done another game, they would just have a good laugh and let it slide. Total Destruction of the Mortal World wasn’t on their agenda, Trinity warned him about it, and again he didn’t listen. Wanting to start ranting and raving, Raven fought to keep his cool in order to answer Apollo. “I don’t know, it was weird, it was like Artemis wanted my Mother to go to him. That’s what I got out of it anyway but I don’t know why she’d want that. What do you think?”

  Apollo frowned and sighed, “No idea. What about Trinity? What did she have to say to you?”

  Raven shook his head. “Nothing that made any sense, she just babbled.” He took down the last of the drink in the chalice and refilled it once more. “I dunno, she lost her mind in the fall or something.”

  “So I take it, only you and I still know the truth of what happened there?”

  “Yeah,” Raven mumbled.

  “Good, you know if they find out, Raven, they’ll kill you without any hesitation. Neither Ares nor I will be able to save you.”

  “I know,” he grumbled, thinking of his time in the cave that shook when lies were told and how it quaked when he talked. “The punishment for killing an Olympian is death, unequivocally.”

  “So we must make sure they never find out, especially Aphrodite, she’ll turn you in faster than you can drop a hot potato.” His eyebrow raised in a knowing arch.

  “Yeah,” Raven mumbled again, took a heavy hit off the burning joint and then a large swallow of Nectar in a classic stoner’s ‘cannon ball’. He drained the chalice then filled it again as he exhaled the smoke. “Ya know what, I gotta get goin’. I better be there when my Father gets back, got a long night ahead of me.” He ashed the remains of the joint and stood up catching sight of the disappointment in his Uncle’s eyes. Usually when Raven visited the two of them helped themselves to finer pleasures and indulgences of Apollo’s servant, Terpsichore. Maybe Jilios wasn’t the only spy he let in through the front door, maybe Ares was right all these years and Apollo was only using him for some plan Raven couldn’t see.

  “So soon?”

  “I’ll catch ya ‘round, Uncle, later. Give Terpsichore my very best regards, will you?”

  “Of course.” Apollo rose from the couch in a snit that equaled his earlier cackle. He had plans for Raven for the next few hours. “Are you sure you won’t stay? Promises to be a most delightful night.”

  “My Father’s gonna kick my ass in a few hours, I gotta go,” Raven said sternly, hoping to give his cunning Uncle a good dose of reality.

  Although he was hoping the boy would change his mind, Apollo walked Raven to the front door of the Temple and opened it for him. “I’m sure you know how to handle your Father.”

  Raven walked through, his bare feet sunk deep into the frozen snow, bringing him back to full wakefulness as it temporarily pushed away the pot and Nectar from his mind. “I guess we’ll find out,” he called back before sprinting the distance between the Temple and the outer doors of the Fortress.

  Chapter Seventeen

  By the Light of the Silvery Moon

  The sound of Rose shrieking made Raven’s sprint turn into an all-out run. He burst through the heavy doors to see her in Onya’s arms standing in the snow looking up at the full moon.

  “Moon! Moon! Moon!” Rose screamed as she kicked and bucked in Onya’s failing grasp. “Ray-Ray! Moon!”

  “What is the racket?” Raven demanded to know as he ran up behind them.

  “Ray-Ray!” Rose cried out with relief and then wriggled free on of Onya’s hold to run as fast as she could through the deep snow on her uneven legs to her Brother. Her legs were not sturdy and she fell face first into the biting cold.

  Raven scooped her up, brushed the snow from her cheeks. “What’s going on?”

  “Ray-Ray! Moon! Moon!” Rose shouted excitedly as she bounced in his arms and pointed up. “Da-Da!” Rose grabbed the sides of his smooth face in her palms and forced him forward until they were nose-to-nose and she was staring him directly in the eye. “MOON!”

  “Ok, moon, I got it, Rosie.” Raven looked past the little girl in his tired arms to Onya with a quizzical expression, “What the fuh—?”

  Onya looked at him exasperated. “She’s been like this for hours, she keeps yelling about you, Lord Ares, and the Moon. She won’t stop. Nothing consoles her.”

  Raven looked at his little Sister. “Let’s go inside, Rosie, it’s fuckin’ freezin’ out here.”

  “NO! MOON!”

  “You can tell me all about the moon inside where it’s warm over cake and cocoa, ok?” Rose stopped bouncing, she looked up at the moon and pursed her lips before she pointed at it again. “It’s not goin’ anywhere, Rosie, it’ll still be here after that.”

  “‘K,” she mumbled, unable to resist of the sweet treats. “Da-Da!”

  “Oh, I’m sure our Father will be home any time now,” Raven said sarcastically, “I’m sure the moon isn’t the only thing you’ll be screaming about tonight,” he smiled for her. “Me either.”

  “What?” Onya asked from behind them, catching her breath now that the little girl stopped screaming.

  “Nothing, let’s get that cake and cocoa, you can tell me what’s up with the fuckin’ moon.”

  Inside the Fortress where it was safe and warm, Onya went off to fetch cake and cocoa for Rose while Raven took her into the Throne Room but Rose didn’t want to stay there. She was pretty adamant about it. “Ma-ma! Ma-ma! Moon!”

  “Ok, whatever you want, let’s go see Mom.” Raven carried her up the heavy marble staircase but slowed and then stopped halfway up. He felt cold, his skin was all prickly, and his mouth was salivating. “Stay here, Rosie.” He settled her on the step watching her look past his knees to the top of the stairs and then silently nod her understanding. “Right here.” Creeping
up the rest of the way of the steps, Raven called his spear to his hand, holding it looped through his right arm as he neared his Mother’s bedroom door. His skin grew colder, ice crystals started to form on the hairs. A quick glance back to see Rose still standing where he left her, Raven threw open the door knowing someone, an Olympian, not his Father, was on the other side. Charging over the threshold he took in the sight of Morpheus’ ghostly frame hovering over his Mother’s sleeping body a gleaming steel blade in his solidifying hand. “You. Get away from her!”

  “What are you doing here?” Morpheus hissed, unhappy to see the boy. The King of Dreams had been waiting four nights to get into the bedroom and kill the Fey. For the last several nights Morpheus did everything he could think of to drive Ares out of the bedroom but it did no good, no matter how wicked the dream or how vivid the nightmare, Ares stayed firm, kept his place at her side. The son of a bitch left her only long enough to pee, he even had his meals delivered to the room. Morpheus wasn’t about to challenge the God of War head-to-head. Morpheus thought about dousing Ares will the good dream dust, sending him to a deep blissful sleep in which time Morpheus would kill Alena. When Ares woke and found her dead body next to him he’d think he’d done it in his sleep. All of the Olympians would blame him. Not that they’d care she was dead, nothing would happen to Ares because of it. When he ran the plan through his angry mind on a second pass he realized although they hated him, most of the Olympians would not believe he killed her. Even though they’d love to they wouldn’t because they were fully aware of how much he loved her, how willing he was to lay down his own life for her. So he waited until tonight, when Ares was down in the Mortal World and Raven was supposed to be elsewhere. “I thought you were screwing Apollo’s little bitch tonight.”

  “Apollo knows you’ve got her? Don’t that fuckin’ figure.”