Apollo looked at me for another moment and then threw himself down on top of me, careful of the arrow.
He muttered something against my lips. It tickled. I wanted to breathe in his warmth, but that was getting harder and harder.
Then he kissed me, lips on mine, but softly, no more than a touch. For a second, he seemed to be breathing for me and something passed between us. Something profound. If he was opening up another damned gateway in my mind or another unwanted link, I was going to be pissed…though I didn’t see how that would matter for much longer.
When he pulled away, the numbness had spread, and I couldn’t even blink. If my eyes closed, fine. Otherwise, I was going to see the battle through to the bloody end…mine.
He gave a quick caress to my face, grabbed my bow off the ground as a backup for his own and ran off, Cupid flying beside him, firing as he flew.
I was left behind, staring wide-eyed at the battle, helpless.
On the field was chaos. Arrows and crossbow bolts struck the titans but not with the same success they’d had against me. Meanwhile, hellhounds were being hurled yelping through the air or being crunched between monstrous teeth. Hypnos and the eagle-woman had fallen to the ground, but he was rising again, though with tears in the membrane of his wings. Still, he was able to take to the air, if nowhere near as gracefully as before. Thanatos, Hades and the heroes slashed again and again, but didn’t look like they were gaining ground, except what the titans gave in their push forward to overrun the Olympians on the other end of the field.
From that far end, lightning flashed, but it was more electric shock than branch or ball lighting, as though Zeus was up too high to gather the full force of his storms. Rhea had chosen her battleground well.
And then my heart went cold. Figures came running toward my high ground. Human figures. Female human figures. I immediately recognized one of them.
Christie…still in the dress she’d worn to the wedding, but now with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. The women with her…I squinted, it was as much as I could do…my fellow inmates from Delphi prison. Rhea’s recruits.
My fault.
All my fault.
They lined up along the spectator section of the stadium opposite the Amazons. I tried to get up, to distract them or fight as they started to take aim at Althea, Junessa and the others and…nothing…I couldn’t move.
I felt pinned to the ground by the arrow in my chest, staked like a modern-day vampire. I knew it was stupid. I knew it was probably the loss of blood making me so weak, but the feeling wouldn’t leave me. I had to pull the arrow. It was the right thing to do. Precognition or delusion? What did it matter when I couldn’t even move?
No. I was not going to let everyone I loved down like this.
My fault.
With a monumental effort, I made my hand move. Just the one farthest from the arrow and just a flop, but I was amazed even at that. It was a start. I focused, pouring every ounce of strength I had into that one arm, praying that my last dose of ambrosia wasn’t all used up and out of my system.
Heal, dammit, I thought. Heal now.
I’d never been patient. Imminent death certainly wasn’t going to change that.
The hand moved. Slowly, painfully. It felt like I’d been petrified. No, not just petrified—stoned. Stone weighed more. A ton or so, it felt like. Eventually, the hand bumped up against the arrow, causing an explosion of pain to shoot straight down the shaft and all through my chest.
I coughed hard, and there was a gurgle to it that I knew to be a bad sign. Punctured lung? Drowning in my own blood?
Didn’t matter now. Diagnosis wouldn’t change a thing.
I labored against the aftermath of the cough, gasping for breath too painful to take. But I forced my hand up again for another try at the arrow, focusing on fine motor skills and actually grasping it this time. The hand moved torturously slowly and when it bumped against the arrow it was too weak to knock it hard. But it did make contact, and I forced it to turn and grasp.
Drawing my next breath took all my concentration for the moment, and it was another after that before I could refocus on the arrow and on pulling it out.
Meanwhile, Christie and her cadre were unleashing arrow after arrow, but with more regularity than skill. They were being controlled, but Rhea didn’t yet have the power, the precision to make it count.
She couldn’t have Christie and she couldn’t have me.
I gave my last ounce of strength to pulling the shaft from my chest. I almost passed out as it started to slide, ripping through already abused muscle and tissue. Pain blinded me, and I wanted to arch up, my body following the path of the arrow as if I could control the pace, but I didn’t have time for slow and easy.
When the tip came free, I collapsed. My hand fell to my side, along with the gored arrow. Blood began to bubble and gurgle up from the wound. Bubbles in the blood—bad sign, I thought, battling back the darkness that wanted to swamp me.
It felt like removing that arrow had removed some kind of blockage. Now the full measure of pain became heart-stoppingly clear—razor-sharp, stabbing shards of crystal being pushed through veins and arteries too narrow to handle them, tearing, ripping and scraping me raw. But behind it…what had Apollo breathed into me? The crystal shards of pain felt like unmaking—tearing apart my stitching, doing demolition. But behind that, the feeling that I was being re-stitched, putty poked into old scars that were then spackled over, base coated, repainted and remodeled. Like I was being remade.
What the hell.
It was unbearable, like my whole insides were crawling with army ants rebuilding me one cell at a time. It was the creepiest, most awful feeling in the world. Worse than ambrosia withdrawal. Worse than being possessed. Worse than the makeover at Christie’s upscale spa. I lay in a pool of my own sweat and blood, unable to stop it. Unsure if I’d survive.
And then, just like that, it was over. I thought I died. For a minute I couldn’t feel anything at all. Couldn’t hear. Couldn’t see. And then I gasped in a breath—a full breath with no rasping or bubbling or blood, and it was the sweetest thing in the world. I gulped in more air until I felt my lungs would explode with the fullness, and then they seemed to adapt. The sights and sounds and smell of the battle came rushing at me like a flash mob, coming from everywhere at once. Too vivid. Too much, as if I’d been experiencing the world through a bubble all my life and it had suddenly popped. And I felt…unbelievable. I tested out my arms and legs; they lifted as though gravity no longer had such a pull on me.
The twang of bowstrings snapped me out of my wonder and whipped my head around. The first person I saw was the woman who’d signaled me outside the jail, who I now knew Rhea had touched. I went for her, and my legs seemed to push off the ground with double their power. When I was close enough to spring for her, I sailed through the air, knocking her to the ground before she could get off her next shot. She writhed under me, trying to throw me off. I grabbed for her bow, yanked it from her hands and broke it in half, throwing the pieces and myself to the side in order to roll to my feet and go for the next girl. I rushed her just as she released an arrow. With no time to stop it, I leapt in the way and caught the bolt in my bare hand.
Her eyes widened, but she couldn’t have been more shocked than I was. She backed away as I started toward her, but then straightened and held her ground as if she’d received a new directive from Rhea. She reached for another arrow, but I was on her before she could nock it, driving the one in my hand into her leg. She dropped the bow in pain. I picked it up and ran for the next archer…only to come face to face with Christie.
She saw me coming and turned her loaded bow my way. I’d been shot once today. It wasn’t going to happen again.
“Christie,” I called, giving her the chance to snap out of it. “It’s me.”
She didn’t even blink, but let fly the arrow she was holding back.
I used the bow in my hand like a bat to swat the arrow out of the air, shocked whe
n it worked, and leapt for Christie, even as she reached for another. I landed on top of her, knees to her stomach, hands on her shoulders, riding her to the ground. She hit with an “ooph” and for a second I saw my friend Christie flash in her eyes. Then they were cold again—dry ice cold, the kind that burned.
“You dare?” Rhea asked.
She reached Christie’s hands up, not for my neck, as I expected, but toward my face. Her icy eyes went wide as she touched me. “But…that’s not possible…I can’t reach you.”
I didn’t know what Apollo had breathed into me or what the long-term effects of the ambrosia or nectar had made me, but if it included being impervious to mesmerism, I’d take it.
Still, now that I had Christie down, I didn’t know what to do with her. She was my best friend. I couldn’t leave her behind to hurt me or anyone else on the battlefield, but I couldn’t hurt her. Rhea stiffened Christie’s hands like claws and I had less than a second to decide what to do as they came for my eyes.
“Sorry,” I whispered, sucker-punching Christie on the temple, just hard enough, I hoped, to send her to sleep. Her head fell to the side, eyes closed. I felt for her pulse, found it and moved on, stealing the bow and arrow from her unconscious body. I immediately nocked one arrow and sent it flying for the last archer on my side of the field—the final woman from the prison. I went for her bow hand, hoping to hurt her as little as possible.
With my crazy bolstered vision, it was no problem at all to hit my target, and she dropped her weapon, going down clutching at her hand.
I turned my stolen bow toward the battlefield, but it was too much of a melee, everyone engaged together. Even with my new acuity, I couldn’t trust that no one would shift and my arrows wouldn’t strike friend instead of foe.
Cursing, I threw down the bow and ran toward the field. The mother of all earthquakes hit between one step and the next. I went down watching the fighters on the field fall like bowling pins, barely catching myself on my hands, smacking my nose on the ground as the earth continued to convulse.
Mother of all quakes was right. From the center of the field, a figure started to rise, massive and female. I didn’t wait for her to fully emerge before pushing myself to my feet and starting to run again. I knew who it would be—Rhea—and I knew that if she was rising it was because she’d become strong enough to take us all on.
I don’t know what I thought I could do about that. I wasn’t thinking. I was only feeling—the need for vengeance against her for hurting Nick and Christie, for controlling me. She was going down.
Cupid and Hypnos circled her in the air, like the helicopters around King Kong on top of the Empire State Building. Only Rhea was a lot bigger and only slightly less hairy. She had a fountain of black hair spilling all around her head and eyes the color of hard earth. If I’d thought the titans were big, Rhea was humongous.
Just the thing you wanted to say to an angry mother goddess… “Hey, lady, your bazongas are the size of my laundry room.” Yeah, that would go over well. Clearly, however I’d been remade, my snark had survived.
As I ran toward her, something started to burn at my back. I felt tearing, and it was more than my shirt. I stumbled as I tried to twist and run at the same time, to see if someone had stuck a knife between my shoulder blades, and then almost fell on my face as I saw wings rising out of my back instead of the knife hilt I expected. The wings—gargoyle wings, black and leathery and attached to my freakin’ back—flapped as I started to fall, righting me and then raising me up to hover just above the ground.
Had Apollo somehow activated some dormant gorgon genes? I thought about Perseus’s gorgon shield—the crouching gorgon with her monstrous tusked face, wings half furled. This was not the time for vanity, but still I had to touch my face and hair to make sure there were no tusks or snakes rising out of it. Although, right now they’d really come in handy.
As far as I could tell, my face and hair were as they’d always been, which was a good thing, because I didn’t have time for a breakdown over any sort of ereptile dysfunction. Rhea already had her upper body entirely free and was pushing off the ground to get her hips loose as well. If we had any shot at her, it was going to have to be now.
I darted in, still with no plan. With all the static electricity Zeus’s pyrotechnics had unleashed in the air, Rhea’s hair was rising alarmingly, and it gave me ideas. I knew I couldn’t see a thing when my crazy hair flew in my face. It was a start, and I had to do something quickly, because the arrows being sent her way via Althea, Junessa and Apollo were only pissing her off.
I willed myself to fly toward her, hoping my wings would obey, having no idea how to work them. I jerked back and forth as they flapped, trying to work out how not to do that and realized pretty quickly that I just had to relax and go with it. It was like I had some ancestral muscle memory. The wings knew what to do, even if I didn’t.
Rhea tried to bat me out of the sky as I flew in, but I dodged instinctively, flitting like Tinkerbell in the face of Captain Hook. Proportionately, the description was apt. I dashed in closer, rather than dancing out of reach and grabbed hard for a handful of her hair. It was too thick, though, and too heavy for me to grab enough to make any difference, and I realized it as soon as she shook her head hard and all that hair whipped around, lashing me a thousand times and sending me flying.
From across the battlefield Zeus saw what I was trying to do and yelled, “Stay back!”
He whipped up the winds and sent them in a tornado cone toward Rhea. Her own hair whipped up around her, blinding, restraining. Maybe we could lash her up, net her in her own tresses.
Rhea raised her face to the sky and sucked in a breath. It was like the suction of a black hole; the winds roared down into her open maw. Her hair fell still about her head and shoulders. And yes, in front of her face, but it didn’t seem to even give her pause.
I saw her prodigious chest expand until I thought it might bust…no pun intended.
Then she blew out the breath again in a gale-force wind that knocked everyone to their knees. I went head over feet, windmilling through the sky until I crashed into something and crumpled to the ground.
Chapter Fourteen
My vision wasn’t just double, it was Ferris wheel—an image in every car, all circling around, making my stomach lurch along with the ride. Blinking just seemed to send the wheel spinning faster. I closed my eyes and focused on breathing.
Three calming breaths were all I could stand. I had to know what was going on. I had to get back in there.
My stomach gurgled as I opened my eyes once again and the images shifted, slowly coming together into focus. I was laying on top of a behemoth chest, very human except that the hair covering it was more like fur, bunny soft. It was…disconcerting. I sat up in a shot, anxious to make sure the titan wasn’t about to squash me flat, but it looked like he’d gone down badly. His head was at a funny angle and his eyes gazed up unseeingly at the sky. No one who’d seen death could ever question how you could tell. There wasn’t just a stillness. There was a light that went out of the eyes, almost a film or a shade drawn across them. They just looked dead. There was no poetic way to describe it. Not that I could think of.
I didn’t even know him. Likely, if he’d been alive he’d have been trying to kill me. But, oddly, he reminded me of Pappous—my grandfather, the strongman with the weak heart. Maybe it was that the titan was so massive and seemingly strong, yet the bunny fur and the bad fall made him seem so vulnerable. So dead.
Bile burned its way up my throat, and I quickly slid off the titan’s cooling chest toward the ground before I could lose it.
I knew what had to be done. Separately, we were vulnerable. Each part of this battle from Zeus on down was so used to being powerful in his or her own right that they weren’t thinking about working together. Not really. Zeus had seen what I’d been trying to do with Rhea’s hair and played off of that. It was a start, one we’d have to build on.
We were going to n
eed a strategy. A coordinated plan of attack.
I was still in shock over my wings, didn’t know what to feel about them or how I’d get them home on the plane, but they were good for getting a bird’s eye view on the battle. I rose, keeping a watch on Rhea, who had now completely risen out of the earth and faced off with two bearded figures—Zeus and Poseidon, who’d managed to pull themselves up off the ground. Serena, who’d clearly joined up with her lord of the deep, wasn’t so lucky. She lay beside them like a doll who’d been tossed aside. I could tell she still breathed, but she hadn’t yet regained consciousness. Hermes hovered beside the brothers in his winged sandals. My movement caught his eye as Rhea swept downward with an outstretched hand to swat them like flies. With no hope of stopping her, he zagged out the way and flew to my side, staring at my wings.
“Tori—what—when—how?”
I shook my head. “No idea. We need a plan.”
“You got one?” he asked.
“Maybe. How do I know I can trust you?”
“Tori,” he said, a hand to his heart. “How can you ask?”
I gave him my best gorgon glare. “I know, okay? I figured out about the thing you’ve got going with Eterné. ‘Where’s the real money?’ you asked. I’m going to say pyramid schemes and youth serums. What’s in your product? Nectar? Ambrosia?” I don’t know when I’d guessed, but suddenly it was all crystal clear. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, it ends. You promise me. If I save the day, no more trying to hook humans.”
Hermes’s eyes blazed, and for an instant, I could see his relationship to Hades. “And if I don’t agree?”
“Then I’ll do this without you and let the whole ancient world know what you could have helped and didn’t. If that’s not enough, I’ll come after you myself.”
He eyed me sourly, but we didn’t have the time for a battlefield sulk. “Yes or no?” I asked, staring straight into his eyes, looking for a lie.
“Yes,” he spat.
“Swear.”
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