Apollo sighed. “Just as well. I lied. Some of the papers are important, but I didn’t think it would be terribly sexy for me to move them off in nice orderly stacks. Might kill the moment.”
“I think I’ve already done that.”
He grinned, and it was wolfish. “Nah, eating can be sexy. Haven’t you ever seen Nine 1/2 Weeks?”
“I think crystal noodles might be a little too messy to eat out of a belly button.”
“What about Lady and the Tramp?”
“You think Lady and the Tramp is sexy?”
“Romance is always sexy.”
Gods, when he said things like that…suddenly, my hunger could wait. I stalked toward him and he stood his ground, waiting. He realized he still held the remote and tossed it into a drawer. When I got close, he slid his arms around me and I stood on my tiptoes to reach him, fitting my mouth to his and forgetting to breathe again as he devoured it. My heart did all sorts of complicated dance moves. I pressed my body into his and felt more than heat rising between us. Just to be absolutely certain, I swept one of my hands down his sides, across his washboard abs and then let it dip a little lower.
There was a firm knock at the door before I vaguely heard a click and a much less vague gasp. “Oh, uh, sorry. I should have waited… Your food is here.”
Apollo had turned toward the door, but didn’t let me go. “Thank you, Victoria,” he said, and I was pleased to hear that he sounded every bit as breathless as I felt. “Just, leave it by the door.”
She did and retreated, her face aflame.
My stomach growled again. “Rain check?” I asked.
Apollo smiled at me, and the effect was devastating. I fought it.
“Rain check,” he said, voice full of promise, as though there would be interest attached. I shivered at the thought.
He could sense it, even though I managed to keep the shiver inside rather than out, and I felt the full force of his arousal echoed back at me. It hadn’t bothered him at all that Victoria had walked in. And why should it? I reminded myself, as always, how different we were. Apollo dated back to the time of orgies and offerings. Before he’d made the move to more mainstream theatre and then dipped into management, rumor had it (and I’d since confirmed) that he’d been a star in the adult film world. If I lived ten lifetimes, he’d still have more experience. It was shocking I hadn’t bored him already.
“Stop,” he said.
I wished the Gray Sisters had taught me to hide my thoughts as I could my wings.
“You know it’s true,” I said out loud, since it really wasn’t my thoughts he could read so much as my feelings. Everything else was context.
“I know no such thing. First off, you are anything but boring, and if ever there was someone less predictable and more faceted, I’m not sure I’d like to meet her. I don’t think I could keep up.”
I didn’t answer.
“Do I have to do you right here on this desk to prove my feelings? It’s a sacrifice, but one I’m willing to make…for you. Though your stomach rumblings may be a bit distracting.”
I balled up a piece of paper from his desk, hoping it wasn’t one of the important ones, and threw it at him.
He caught it and lobbed it back at me.
“I’ll get the food,” I said as though it were an answer.
Really, it was. These very same thoughts had chased around in my head ever since I’d met Apollo and yet I’d fallen into bed with him anyway. I’d resisted him long enough to prove I could. And now… Now it was too late. I’d been hooked ever since, just as I’d been with my first taste of ambrosia.
Anyway, the food smelled heavenly. I wasn’t sure I could resist that. Not for much longer. Hunger was an even bossier than my hormones.
While I carried it to the desk, Apollo was shifting piles of paper away and off to a side area with a small buffet—coffee maker, sugar, creamer, minibar—under which was a mini-fridge containing, I knew, various kinds of water, sparkling and otherwise.
I set the delivery containers out on his desk, making sure the shrimp and crystal noodles were closest to me, although the Khao Phat smelled mouthwatering as well. I took some of each, leaving enough for Apollo. There was also some kind of soup, which I ignored entirely.
I was half way through my plate with barely a word spoken. I was hungry, dammit, when Apollo said, “So, you promised me show and tell?”
I would have smacked myself in the head if I wasn’t afraid of stabbing myself through the eye with a chopstick.
“Right!” I answered. I’d pulled off my jacket at some point when the heat of the meal had started sweat beading on my forehead. Now I reached for the pocket, forgetting my aversion to touching the coin with my bare hands. My precog kicked hard, though, and I yanked my hand back, going for a napkin and using that to grasp the disk and hand it to Apollo.
He put his chopsticks down and took it, setting the napkin in the palm of one hand and opening it up gingerly like the corners were delicate flower pedals.
All the color drained from his face. No mean feat when he was so California tan.
“What is it?” I asked. “Apollo, are you okay?”
He looked up at me without really seeing and back down at the disk.
Alarm was coming through our connection and…something else. Shame? Horror? Immediately, I felt him crash down on those feelings, trying to lock them away, but it was too late. Like closing the cage door after the lion had escaped, as Pappous would have said. Circus folk, go figure.
“Apollo?”
He swallowed something down, possibly bile, and looked at me again. This time there was a little more awareness there.
“How did you get this?” he asked.
“You recognize it?”
“Not the piece itself, but the symbol. It’s Set.”
“That’s what Neith said.”
“Neith? She’s here?” He looked around as if she might actually be there in the office and he’d somehow missed her.
“In L.A. I met her at the crime scene where I got this. Apollo, what’s going on? Your emotions are all over the map.”
“Are they?”
“You know they are.”
He put the coin down and covered it back over with one corner of the napkin. When it wouldn’t stay down, he grabbed a penholder from his desk and placed it overtop.
Finally, he looked up at me again, but his eyes were…shadowed was the only way I could put it, as if clouds had moved between me and the sun, dimming its brilliance, hiding its face.
“How much do you know about Horus?” he asked.
I blinked. “Horus?”
“You know that most of us have been many things in many cultures, sometimes doing double duty, since civilizations don’t rise and fall like dominos.”
“Yes.”
“In Egypt, I was Horus.”
“The falcon-headed god?”
“The sky god. He…I…was portrayed as a falcon. It was said my right eye was the sun and my left was the moon and that they traveled the sky when I took to the air. Poetic more than strictly accurate, but it worked just as well as a golden chariot or anything else. But…okay, Set…there’s history there.”
I waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, I jumped in tentatively. “I know some of that, I think. Set supposedly killed Osiris, right? He dismembered him and sprinkled his parts all over the earth. Isis, his wife, recovered them all. All but his penis.” Take that, Neith. “And she resurrected him. Or, wait, was Osiris the one who was tricked into lying down in a coffin, which was then locked up and thrown into the sea and then grew into some kind of tree that Isis, um…that somehow impregnated Isis to produce…uh, you?” Okay, it sounded crazy when I said it like that.
Apollo’s lips twitched. Not quite into a smile, but almost enough to chase away the shadows still hang
ing over him.
“There’s truth here and there,” he answered, which was completely unenlightening. “Anyway, Set did plot against Osiris. And kill him. And Isis, who was a powerful sorceress as well as a goddess, did resurrect him. But…Osiris wasn’t the only one he plotted against.”
“You?” I asked.
“And Isis too. He was equal opportunity.”
“I don’t know Isis,” I said. “I know you. Tell me what happened.”
He used the pencil holder to push the coin away to the very edge of his desk. I didn’t think we were going to be playing around on it any time soon.
“He attacked me. He tried to… Well, anyway, he didn’t succeed. Myth has it that he put out my left eye and that Thoth helped regenerate it, but that it was never the same, hence the fact that the moon waxes and wanes and sometimes is blood red. It recalls the trauma.”
I reached across the desk and put my hand over the one he’d drawn back from the covered-up coin. “Is that true?” I asked, looking into his eyes. He wouldn’t meet my gaze, and he was still bearing down on his swirling thoughts. I got torment and a mix of emotions so complex it would take a master to unravel.
“About the eye? That much is true.” He glanced up just briefly. “As you can see, I got better.”
I squeezed his hand. “But you’ve never forgotten.”
“You don’t just get over something like that. I mean, you move on, but something like that tends to leave a mark. Anyway, the long and short of it is that Set isn’t just petty or vengeful or any of those things the rest of us might be. He’s evil. Pure, unadulterated, no-holds-barred evil. If there’s a god of psychopaths and murderers, he’s it.”
“But the other gods locked him away, right? He’s imprisoned.”
His eyes locked on mine then, as if to drive his next words home. “He is, but… I’ve been worried for ages that with our power so weakened, he might break free. The only thing that lets me sleep at night is the knowledge that he’s likewise weakened. Probably even worse, since he hasn’t been around to draw new followers, which is a good thing, because mankind gets into enough trouble on its own.”
The wheels in my mind were turning, and I didn’t like any of the thoughts they were churning up.
“What is it?” Apollo asked.
Unlike him, I didn’t have the ability to quell my thoughts. I kind of lived out loud.
I looked to the coin he’d covered as though it might produce answers. “What if…” I wanted to voice the thoughts even less than I wanted to think them. “Look, you’ve read the Harry Potter books, right? Or at least seen the movies?”
He nodded and waited.
I sighed and plowed on, knowing that denial was best left as a river in Egypt. “What if Set left something of himself behind, like Voldemort did with the horcruxes?”
He stared. “Come again?”
“Look, Neith explained to me about sympathetic magic, like clay figurines standing in for the actual animals and food and stuff that were supposed to accompany a person into the afterlife. What if these coins hold a piece of Set’s ba…or is it ka? Anyway, a piece of his spirit? I’m sure the gods would have tried to erase images of Set like the Pharaohs tried to eliminate the names and all of their rivals, but some tokens always survive.”
Apollo froze like I’d hit him with the gorgon glare. But not just externally. His thoughts stopped entirely as though they’d just met an immovable barrier, one they couldn’t brush past.
“No,” he said, horror now starting to slip through.
“And what if…what if just like the grave goods and all, the bloodshed and violence somehow nourishes him?”
“It can’t happen.”
“It can’t happen or we can’t allow it to happen?”
“Both.” He pushed away the remains of his meal. “How can I help?”
My gaze shot to the coin again, and I considered for a minute whether I really wanted to put him through remembering everything he clearly wanted to forget. But people’s lives were at stake, and he was made of sterner stuff. He could handle it, and he wouldn’t thank me for babying him.
“There’s a god or goddess for everything,” I said. “I thought there might be someone for tracking who could help me trace the coin back to the killers…to the Roland boys.”
“Like a bloodhound?”
“Yeah, but more, you know, mystic.”
“Well, there’s Ichnaea, but… I haven’t seen her in a dog’s age. I don’t know where she might be.”
“One way to find out.”
“Yiayia?” he asked.
“Yiayia,” I sighed.
My grandmother ran the gossip rag of the gods. She knew all there was to know about everybody…at least, everybody interesting. I had no idea whether Ichnaea was interesting or not. This was the first I’d heard of her.
“What’s her story?” I asked, so I’d be prepared.
“Funny thing,” he said. “You know how Cinderella had those three fairy godmothers show up at her birth?”
“Hey, you made a pop culture reference!”
“Yeah, one that’s ages old. Anyway, I had three witnesses at my birth as well. Goddesses—Ichnaea, Nemesis and Theia. In a very real sense, they are god-mothers, even though they didn’t grant me beauty and grace.”
“Um, have you looked in the mirror lately? Any more beauty and I wouldn’t be able to stand you.”
“Thank you, I think.”
“You’re welcome. Anyway, I’ll see if she’s got contact info on Ichnaea.”
“Good. You call Yiayia; I’ll call Hermes,” he said.
“Hermes?”
“I hear he sometimes uses her to track lost packages. He might have a current whereabouts.”
Right, packages. For his worldwide messenger service.
“Don’t tell him more than you have to,” I said. We had enough chaos already without him deciding to add to it. I trusted Hermes about as far as I could throw him, but he’d just gotten back together with his wife Sigyn from his Loki incarnation, and I didn’t trust her even that far. Sure, under duress, she’d helped us save the city of New York, but she’d also put runes on me at one point to make me compliant, and I still bore a grudge.
Apollo fixed me with a look. “You know the less I say, the more curious he’ll be.”
Chapter Six
Something dropped from the ceiling at that instant, and I’m not ashamed to say I shrieked like a banshee, considering that it was the grandpappy of all spiders—about the size of my hand, black and brown furry legs, flashes of red. I rose from my seat so fast it fell over and I whirled away, ready to head for the door if the thing so much as moved. Spiders and heights were my kryptonite, though ever since I’d sprouted wings, the latter was fading, moving arachnids up to first place. Yay team.
It jumped to the desk and my heart nearly beat its way out of my chest. I backed up an extra few steps, not wanting to leave Apollo to fend for himself, but…
“Watch out!” I called, as though he might not have seen it for himself, but I couldn’t spare a glance away from the spider to see what he would do. Smash it, I hoped, even though I was primarily a live-and-let-live type. I knew in the rational part of my brain that spiders were good. They kept down the insect population and all that jazz, but the rational part of my brain had been chased away by the jumping spider and now crouched in some corner of my brain rocking and sucking its figurative thumb. I couldn’t look away, because if it moved again and vanished from sight I’d never be able to enter the office again, sure it hid in wait for me.
So when it started to grow…
When it started to grow, I froze, staring in horrified fascination.
“Freeze!” I yelled at it, but it laughed.
Laughed, I swore it. That or I was losing my mind.
In terror and desperat
ion, I tore my gaze away to look at Apollo, who knew my fear. I’d met Arachne. The Arachne. I’d nearly been killed by millions of her minions.
“Hermes, cut it out,” he snapped.
The spider clicked out something with its mandibles and began to change shape.
Anger started to replace fear. If this was Hermes and he was pulling some kind of prank…
I yanked off my shoe, ready to smash him flat, only to realize he was already too big for that. The laughter got bigger as he did, and I wished, probably for the first time ever, that I had my gun.
Half a second later there was a full-sized Hermes sitting on the edge of Apollo’s desk, legs crossed, grin splitting his face from ear to ear.
“How long have you been here?” I asked, thanking the universe at large that Apollo and I hadn’t used his desk as intended and given Hermes a show.
“Long enough,” he said. “Funny thing. People always say how they’d like to be a fly on the wall, but flies are so vulnerable, don’t you think? Spiders are much more fun. Just think of Little Miss Muffet sitting on her tuffet…whatever the hells a tuffet is. I’m thinking it’s not her badonkadonk, but…”
“Hermes!” I cut in, frustrated as always.
“Right, anyway, don’t worry, I haven’t been here long enough to know about that birthmark above your right buttock. It’s just a simple little spell Sigyn helped me with. Kind of a ‘speak of the devil and he appears’ sort of thing.”
“Hermes!” Apollo growled. Hermes’s head swiveled toward Apollo, turning far enough around that I’d swear Owl was one of his aspects, though I’d never heard of it.
“Apollo,” he growled back.
“You will remove the spell at once.”
I limped around the desk to stand beside Apollo, so I could see Hermes assume an expression of wounded innocence. It sat surprisingly well on his face, even knowing it was all an act. “But it’s come in so handy,” he said. “No sooner do you want me than I appear. Almost as though I am at your beck and call. Really, I think that thanks are in order.”
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