“Call Uncle Hector,” I told Tina, figuring that if anyone here had access to decent lawyers, it would be him. Then I followed the cops out, trying to ignore the fact that Tina had been more worried about filling my spot than about my fate. I was sure that on any other day she’d have been a lot more sensitive about the whole thing. Well, fairly sure.
“Right, Uncle Hector, he’ll know what to do,” she said as the door closed behind me. It sounded pretty final, but I didn’t know whether it was my precognition or just my own fears.
“This way,” badge guy said, leading me with a hand just barely touching my arm.
This way was toward the elevator, and I noticed that while they didn’t actually cuff me, hotel security walked in front and the two cops walked behind, ready to grab me should I try to bolt. I had a hard time not trying it. I had a very, very bad feeling about all of this.
“Murder?” I asked, making conversation to avoid making a run for it.
I glanced at the cops as I asked.
Both nodded silently.
“You’re not going to tell me who? Or when? We could clear this all up right now if I wasn’t in town when it happened. I only got in yesterday.”
“You were here,” badge guy said.
“Then it’s only just happened? Wait, it’s no one I know, is it? Please tell me it’s no one in the family or any of the wedding guests!”
Fear was fear. Hopefully they’d misconstrue the cause of mine. I hated the misdirection, but last night I’d been in no condition to call the deaths in and now that the cover-up had begun it felt like there was no going back. There was nothing I could do to stop Rhea from behind bars. No way I could make any part of this right. It wouldn’t be justice, it would be stupidity to assuage my guilt.
The officers exchanged a look, but didn’t say a word.
“Tell me,” I insisted.
“Down at the station,” the other cop insisted.
I worried all the way there about what they might have on me. I’d been kidnapped, for gods’ sake. If anyone had seen anything it would be that, wouldn’t it? But that hardly helped. If the police thought Apollo and I had fought our way free of our captors, then my little performance had just killed any self-defense plea before it even began.
I wasn’t prepared to walk into the small bustling station and see the shopkeeper who’d covered for the man in black sitting in a chair talking to yet another plainclothesman. She looked like she’d been watching the entry, because as soon as she saw me, she knocked her chair over in her haste to rise and point an accusing finger at me.
“That’s her,” she said, loudly enough to carry. “She’s the one who was following that man.”
Something welled up in me, strong enough to knock me to my knees, but I locked them and tried to ride it out. This was alien yet familiar—like Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers or any other horror villain…because that’s what filled me, horror. That part was all mine. But the rising tide of power and righteousness…
HOW DARE SHE accuse us? How dare they try to question me and hold my avatar. Those men were NOTHING.
The last thought roared out of me, and the ground beneath all of our feet started to shake. Pencil holders, phones and folders started to topple from desks. The shopkeeper tried to catch herself on her chair back, but since it had already fallen, she overbalanced herself and ended up going down hard. She cried out, and inside me, Rhea exalted.
“Stop!” I yelled, not realizing that I’d said it out loud until the ground momentarily stilled and everyone, including the goddess within, momentarily focused on me in surprise. “I want a lawyer.”
I didn’t really. Waiting for a lawyer would only delay things, and I had a wedding to get to. But I knew they’d set me to wait in some kind of holding cell or interrogation room, hopefully away from any temptation Rhea might have to do harm.
A holding cell might be the safest place for me. With a vengeful goddess, newly awakened, cranky after her millennia-long nap doing a ride-along in my body, I wasn’t safe to be around.
But Rhea didn’t agree. At all. Apparently, she had places to be, and as the vehicle she’d chosen from the motor pool, I was going along for the ride. Suddenly, I was under attack from within. Something wrenched inside my brain hard, and it felt like an aneurism or a flash migraine or…something monumentally painful and potentially mind-blowing in the permanent sense of the word. My vision went purple-black. My stomach rebelled, my brain shattered. I fought for consciousness.
“What’s going on?” one of the cops, detectives, asked, like this might all be part of some scheme.
There was a hand under my arms now, holding me up, gripping too hard. I hadn’t noticed its arrival, but from the placement it went with the voice demanding answers.
“Concussion,” I managed “Hit…head…last night.”
“Damn it,” said the other cop. “We need to get her looked at. If she really did hit her head last night, that quake might have set something off.”
Yes! I thought.
Then…
No! An ambulance ride or whatever would only delay me getting help for my goddess issues or getting to the wedding. My brain was so scrambled, I didn’t know what I was thinking.
“No,” I said out loud, but not too loud, because my head seemed in danger of shattering. I couldn’t hold Rhea down much longer. She didn’t like the feel of the cop’s hand gripping my—our—arm. She was trembling on the verge of doing something about it, even if it meant bringing the station down around us. “No,” I said again, more quietly. “I just need to lie down.” My words were slurred as my control over my body faltered.
“Fine,” said one of the cops. “You can lie down in a holding cell while you wait for a lawyer.”
“And a doctor,” said the other. “Because there’s no way in hell you’re going down with an aneurism on my watch. I’m not doing that paperwork.”
And then…and then nothing. I lost control, even to the point of awareness.
I woke in a cell. The bars were a dead giveaway.
Those bars seemed to move as I watched them, and my stomach moved with them—warning: contents may have shifted during fight. I fought my guts back down where they belonged just in time to see a familiar face between the bars. Uncle Hector. I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. Well, maybe Nick on my doorstep with pizza, but aside from that… Uncle Hector stared down at me, studying my face.
“Tori, are you okay? They said you’d passed out.” I must have looked at him blankly. “Oh, yeah, I’m your lawyer,” he said with a wink. “No need to mention my background is in corporate law.”
I rose up and reached through the bars to hug him tight. He hugged me back, like I was a little girl again. That was when I became aware of all the other eyes on me from the next cell over. Apparently, I’d been put in some kind of isolation and had a cell to myself, but the one beside me held three women—one with a black eye, one looking scratched as though she’d taken my supposed tumble down the mountain, and the third smelling of vomit. The other women stood as far as they could from her in the cell. All three stared disconcertingly at me.
I wondered if Rhea had gone out like a light when I had and, if not, what she’d been doing with my body while I wasn’t using it to have garnered such attention from next door.
“Um, nothing to see here,” I told them forcefully.
None of them even blinked. It was eerie, like they were waiting for some signal they didn’t want to miss. If they weren’t behind bars, I’d have likened them to the birds from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic and controversial film, massing on the wire.
Uncle Hector looked over his shoulder at them and back to me.
“You know them?” he asked dubiously.
I shook my head.
“Well then, let’s get you out of here.”
“But the questioning…I don’t think I’m free to go.”
“I’ve convinced them it can wait. They know they can’t use anything th
ey might get out of you in this condition. I’d never allow it. Anyway, they’d rather you be my problem at the moment.”
“Oh.” Score one for concussion, I thought. Or maybe it was the mini-quake and the thought of one less prisoner to evacuate if it happened again.
A uniformed officer opened the door for Uncle Hector, and motioned me out. Moving hurt, my head most of all.
“You okay?” he asked again, and I realized I’d never answered him the first time. “Do you need a doctor?”
I started to shake my head and quickly realized that was a bad idea.
“No,” I said instead, “exorcist.”
“We’ll talk outside,” he promised.
I thought that was a damned good idea. There was still paperwork to sign and the warning that I shouldn’t leave town and should keep myself available. Then we were free of the station.
Free. With a goddess possessing me at will, doing gods knew what to attract the unwavering attention of my fellow prisoners. I didn’t like it.
As we got into Uncle Hector’s limo, the prisoner with the black eye was just leaving the station, apparently having made bail or whatever herself. Her head turned a third of the way around, almost like an owl’s, to stare at me through the tinted windows she couldn’t possibly see through. When her gaze locked on to mine, she gave me a very definite nod, as though I should know what she was agreeing to. Uncle Hector’s driver pulled away.
“Wait,” I said, brain racing and getting nowhere. “Maybe we should stop and question her.”
Uncle Hector turned around to see what I was seeing. “Right here in the police station parking lot?” he asked. “Better not. I know that look. She won’t tell you anything. She thinks you already know.”
“Know what?”
“Whatever it is. She’s been mesmerized. It’s all over her face. Apollo said that Rhea rose last night, using you as her vessel?”
“Yeah.”
“Rhea has many powers, not the least of which is mesmerism. How do you think she convinced Kronos that the stone she fed him was the child Zeus? I don’t know what she’s planning, but she’s had millennia to think on her revenge. I’d say she’s just tagged her first recruits.”
“How do we stop her? Stop me? I’m not safe to be around people.”
“For now, we ward you as best we can. We get through the wedding. Rhea should still be getting her feet under her. She shouldn’t be strong enough yet to summon power in someone else’s sacred space. The church should be safe enough.”
“Should be?”
“It’s not exactly a science.”
“Can you do wardings? Lay down protections?”
“I don’t know that I’m strong enough alone, but I’m sure that if we explain the situation, we may be able to find some recruits of our own.”
We had a little over an hour to go before the wedding. Our appearance back at the staging suite caused quite the kerfluffle. Althea opened the door to Uncle Hector’s knock. She looked like a Greek goddess—hair half up and half spilling down in ringlets over her neck and shoulders. The green gown draped over one shoulder and hung almost like a chiton. Her eyes got manga-huge at the sight of me, and she yelled back over her shoulder at top volume, “You can stop panicking, she’s back!”
“I don’t know that I’d call off the panic just yet,” Uncle Hector said helpfully. “We need to talk. Get Junie.”
Her eyes went from soup bowls to slits. “I don’t answer to you.”
“What about Rhea?” he asked. “Because she’s back and she’s pissed. Look, I know you don’t like me.” Because Pan the promiscuous and Artemis’s adherents were pretty much diametrically opposed. “But I think it’s time for us to come together lest we come apart.”
From the look of fury on her face, she was not unaware of the double entendre.
“Rhea?” she gasped. “But how—”
“Call your compatriot. I promise to fill you both in.”
“Junessa,” Althea called over her shoulder.
She appeared, looking like a Nubian goddess, her hair done in the same style as Althea’s. Runway fierce.
As Uncle Hector opened his mouth to speak a third person pushed them out of the way and grabbed my arm, yanking me into the suite. I expected Tina, but it turned out to be one of the makeup militia.
“Come on,” she said, “there’s no time to waste.”
I dug my feet in and held my ground. “One minute,” I told her. “Give me that and I promise I’ll be as good as gold.”
“I’ll vouch for her,” Althea said with a smile.
I bristled over needing a voucher, but I didn’t have the time to make an issue of it. “One minute,” she said significantly.
I held my fingers up in what I thought was the sign for scout’s honor, and she huffed, but moved off to prep…whatever she had to prep to make me presentable.
“Serena?” I asked Althea quickly, hoping she’d neutralized that threat while the police had held me in custody.
She was shaking her head before the name even left my lips. “Couldn’t get to her. She was already with the production people.”
“Damn.”
“Time’s up,” the makeup lady said, tapping the spot a watch would be if she was wearing one.
“Tell him,” I said to Althea. “I’ll—”
“You’ll come with me,” my new nemesis said, taking me by the arm. I let her lead me away, hoping I’d left our fate in good hands. A petrifying Apollo, me, Pan and a couple of huntresses against a rising mother goddess who could mesmerize and possess at will…to say that I was worried would have been a massive understatement.
Then I was in another room and plunked into a chair. My hair was sprayed down with some kind of gunk—probably conditioner to give the stylist a fighting chance to get a brush through it, and then I was combed, curled, twisted, twirled and teased until my head ached. The makeup was less painful only, I presumed, because I’d been pre-threaded and waxed. When the torment was over, all the girls stood round me gaping.
“Wow,” Tina said. “I didn’t even know you could look like that.”
I took in my reflection and…maybe took in was too strong. I saw, but I didn’t necessarily accept. The image looked like me, but as Disney might paint me, some idealized version that didn’t seem quite real. My hair fell in soft ringlets rather than tangled curls. My brows arched gracefully. My skin was smooth, even and youthful, like I was sixteen again…only without the acne. I looked…beautiful.
Except for the dumbfounded expression on my face. I’d been through a lot of crazy crap today, but this seemed downright impossible.
“Um…thanks?” I said to Tina.
I’d certainly steal Nick’s breath, but his heart? I had to hope it wasn’t already lost to me. I felt selfish beyond all reason even thinking about that in the midst of everything else.
I stood from the chair before I could get too crazy with the new look and start asking the mirror, mirror on the wall whether I was the fairest of us all. It wouldn’t last anyway—not past the first sign of humidity or the first course I spilled on myself.
“Let’s get you dressed,” Althea said, and dragged me off to the room where we’d all hung our gowns. Once she had the door shut behind us, she dropped my arm and said, “We’re still working on plans for Rhea, but Serena’s going down. Don’t sweat it.”
“How?” I asked.
“She’s a water divinity, right? Apollo said it happened when she walked in on him in the shower. That’s because she needed to catch him in her element.”
“Okay, how does that help us?”
“Apollo’s the sun god.”
“Yeah,” I said, not following.
“It’s not in his nature to change. He’s not fluid like water. He’s centered, steady, that around which things revolve.”
“Or so he’d like to think,” I muttered.
“That’s why he hasn’t petrified already. His own attributes fight against the transformation.
That means this is an ongoing spell and they’re still battling it out. Serena’s not strong enough to do this on her own, I wouldn’t think, which means she’s got some kind of help, a talisman to enhance her power or an effigy she’s constructed to work sympathetic magic. All we have to do is find it. Junie and I have already tossed her room and it’s not there.”
“Which means she has it on her.”
“Bingo. And we’re going to get it. If not us, then Hector or Apollo. We’ve got it covered.”
It was the first good news I’d heard since I’d seen the tabloid back in L.A. But it wasn’t a done deal yet, and there was still the matter of Rhea. I knew Hector had told her about the goddess rising. I wondered if he’d filled her in on the rest, like the fact that Rhea could ride me like the city bus. I made sure to tell her, figuring she and Junie would be close enough at the wedding to take me down if I started to act out of character.
“Hector told me about that. But he also says that you saved Apollo’s life. Junie and I will keep an eye out for trouble. If we have to, we’ll stop you, but we’ll do our best to use non-lethal means.”
She grabbed my gown and changed gears so quickly I got whiplash. “Okay then, let’s get you suited up.”
There was a knock at the door, followed immediately by Tina’s voice. “Hurry up in there. We’re taking a few quick pics, then we’re off to the church!”
Althea held out my dress, and I carefully unbuttoned my shirt and dropped trou to step into it and shimmy it up my body, careful not to disturb a single curl. Althea zipped it for me, and I searched for my shoes. Golden sandals with straps that crisscrossed my ankles and tied at the back. Thankfully, they were flats, so that Tina could almost level the field when she donned her four-inch heels.
When I caught sight of the full effect in the mirror, I had to admit that the dresses maybe hadn’t been such a bad choice. The green somehow set off the amber of my eyes and my dark curls contrasted nicely, tumbling over the draping. I felt weirdly powerful. Almost goddess-like, only a lot less bloodthirsty than those I’d met so far.
“Do I have time to make a quick call?” I asked Althea.
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