Bad Blood: Latter-Day Olympians (21 page)

“Don’t ask.”
’Cause I don’t know
, I thought. I was guessing Apollo had a lot to answer for, though in this case I couldn’t get all worked up over it.

“Okay, how about this one: why the tar pits? How do you know?”

“Hermes.” Had I told him about Hermes? In all the insanity, I couldn’t remember. “I tracked him down. All he gave me was, ‘I hope you don’t unearth the plot too late.’”

“Based on that—”

“Hey, give me some credit, okay? I grew up with the tales. I know how these things work. It took me a while to figure it out. At first I thought he was talking about a cemetery plot, but that didn’t make sense with the whole earthquake/explosives plan we’d figured on. Graves just don’t go deep enough. But the tar pits make all kinds of sense—deep, open fissures the tar still bubbles up through to the surface, excavations all over the place and, if you think of it the right way, a graveyard. Animals, even a woman, went in but they never came out, except as fossils.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“So do I.”

“Are you going to call Apollo?” he asked.

I crawled through the space between seats so that I could sit up front. He looked over quickly, but I noticed his eyes made a quick stop at my chest before moving up to my face.

“Do you want me to?” I asked.

“It wouldn’t hurt to have a—uh—god on our side.”

The car hydroplaned and Armani fought for control. I grabbed the handrest, as if that would save me. Armani cursed fluently as the car spun a one-eighty, making geysers of the water on either side of us. He steered into the turn until we were facing the way we’d come.

While he righted us, I pried my fingers off the handrest to reach for my seat belt.

“I don’t think his powers are really, um, warlike,” I said feebly.

Armani risked another glance away from the road. “Oh, really? Never mind. I don’t want to know. Maybe he’s got friends.”

Yeah, but which side would they be on? If it came down to gods bent on recovering their power against humans who’d really rather they didn’t, which side would Apollo choose? What in the world did we have to offer?

On the flip side,
not
calling Apollo had never kept him out of the loop before.

“The storm seems to be moving off in the direction we’re headed, like it’s got something else on the agenda.”

“Good. If it has to give up battering us to focus elsewhere, maybe the gods only have enough power for one small concentrated storm. Maybe we can wear them out.” I wondered how long they could keep it going fueled only by the belief of Yiayia and a few other eccentrics. “The bad news is that with lightning et. al., we may be facing Zeus as well as Poseidon and Hephaestus.”

“Fantastic. Can’t wait. Call Apollo.”

Right…but with Apollo’s ability to scry me and all—“Um, Armani, you got something I can wear?”

His lips tugged upward in a lascivious grin. “You’re a better distraction as you are now.”

“
Please.
”

“In the back, I think maybe there’s a jacket.”

I reached behind the seats and found the jacket on the floor behind Armani, where I’d probably pushed it in my graceful belly slide into the backseat. Or, I thought when I held it closer and caught a whiff, it had been there for a really, really long time. Still, it probably wouldn’t bite and I was in no position to be choosy. I put it on, zipped it up and rolled the sleeves thrice.

Then I dialed Apollo, but with no idea what to say that wouldn’t make me sound like a whack job if anyone else checked his messages—like the police in the event he’d already become a casualty. My heart clenched. I hung up when his voice mail kicked in. If he was interested, my number would come up as a missed call.

“No luck,” I reported.

“Plan?” he asked.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“Great.”

I couldn’t say for sure, with the raindrops still committing hari-kari on our windshield, but I thought I spotted the entrance to Hancock Park, the tar pit complex, just ahead. Yup, no mistaking the stylized saber-tooth tiger guarding the gate, even with our headlights the park’s only illumination. It was eerily dark. No security lights. No street lamps lit in the vicinity. Nada. Armani pulled into one of the empty spaces all around the business district this time of night.

“What do you want to bet this freak storm has cut power to annoying little things like alarm systems?” Armani asked.

“And backup generators. Don’t suppose you have any night-vision goggles.”

Armani snorted. “Flashlight in the glove compartment and some flares in the trunk, that’s about it.”

“Gun?” I asked, reaching into the glove box to grab said light and trying to ignore Armani’s stare.

“Where’s yours?”

“Lockbox at home,” I answered defensively. “I didn’t exactly have time to grab it.”

No need for him to know I hadn’t used it since—

An immense gust actually lifted the car up on two wheels and dropped us down again.
Damn
, we had regained the storm’s attention.

“No safer in than out,” I said, mostly to psych myself up. “Let’s do it.”

Armani nodded and we threw open the doors—or tried to. The wind hurled the door back in my face, but my shoulder took the brunt of the impact. Hard rain picked up the slack, stinging like ice—or acid. I could see only the narrowest sliver of world through my eyes, squinting to near blindness in defense against the burn. A thunderclap clashed with enough force to crack my chattering teeth together. “Get away from the car,” Armani yelled.

“Trying!”

I took a deep breath and channeled my inner strongman, er, woman. “Eee-yah!” With a sudden burst of power, I flung the door back at the wind and pounded pavement. My feet nearly went out from under me on the slick street, but I managed to right myself and make it to Armani’s side. I held the flashlight and he the gun as we advanced on the gate, blinking against the rain that threatened to eat us alive.

A bolt had melted the gate to slag. The flashlight beam didn’t extend beyond, so it was impossible to see what lay in wait. We’d ditched the car so quickly that the flares still sat uselessly in the trunk. We’d be blind to anything more than a few steps away. We took those steps, over the twisted lump that had once guarded the complex from trespassers like us. Then we crept a few more paces across the grass, toward the slowly bubbling morass of tar and groundwater that I knew from past visits held plaster representations of mammoths soon to become one with the earth.

Those few steps had brought us to the eye of the storm, the eerie oasis of calm around which everything swirled. As I panned the flashlight beam before us, I knew why. A chill skittered up my spine as the beam hit upon the figure in profile to us a quarter of the way around the lake—powerful build, high-tech goggles and a faintly glowing remote. Hiero—no, call him what he was at that moment—Hephaestus, deranged god of the forge. The beam of my light tore his focus away from the black water. He thrust one arm out at me and the bulb in the flashlight blew. Darkness swallowed us.

Chapter Sixteen

“Nightmares are what happen when the gods open up your skull, scramble your deepest darkest fears and play them back to you in a Quentin Tarantino-inspired montage.”

—Tori Karacis

“Now would be a good time for those flares,” I said, reaching out for Armani’s hand, not because I was suddenly scared that all my worst fears were about to come true, but to assure that we wouldn’t get separated.

“You want to go back for them, be my guest.”

Even amidst the chaos I spared a millisecond to appreciate that he didn’t coddle me, even as on some level it pissed me off.

“Well then?” I asked.

“Hey, this is your show.”

I thought quickly. Thick dark clouds still blocked light from the stars, moon, and distant glow of the unaffected part of the city. I wondered if there’d be enough light from the readout on Hephaestus’s remote for me to give him the gorgon glare and put him out of commission. First, though, I’d have to get close.

“Nick, count to ten, then start a distraction. Fire at Hephaestus, whatever you have to do, but keep his attention on you. I’m going to try to get close.”

He grabbed my hand as I tried to lift it away.

“What?” I asked in irritation, wondering if he was belatedly about to go all he-man chivalrous on me.

“You called me Nick.”

“So?” The name had slipped out like some deathbed confession. I didn’t want to analyze it or the analogy I’d just made.

“Nothing,” he said, voice hard. “Go.”

I did, hoping there’d be time to make it up to Nick—
Armani
—later.

Running as fast as I could on the wet ground, I had to trust my memory of the layout. I circled well away from the tar pit to sneak up behind Hephaestus. The only point of reference I had was the faint glow of the remote. Once he eclipsed it, I was set.

Armani started his hue and cry, but in the midst of the whipping wind, it was a pretty pitiful display. Hephaestus didn’t even twitch as he micro-focused on the remote—a guidance system for sending the explosives down into the faults? I hadn’t considered the environmental handicap of my slap-dash plan.

A siren wailed across the night and blue fought red for the spotlight. Over the downed gate I could see a patrol car fishtail down the road and felt the wind shift, as if the storm had just turned its attention that way. The sky split open above me and another flashbulb fried the air, ripping toward the car. Two things happened instantaneously—the car spun out and the bolt hit home, shattered the headlights, which cracked, popped and died, and lifted the car off the ground. Figures hurled themselves out of either side of the vehicle, one Lau’s compressed aggression and the other a blur of uniform. My first thought was to run to them, but my second was that the Fates had finally leered in my direction.

In Hephaestus’s appreciation of the moment, he wasn’t paying attention to much else. I closed the distance in ground-eating strides and launched myself at him in a flying tackle. My arms latched onto his neck and shoulders. He gave a roar that could shake mountains and a great heave, as though he could just shrug me off. Surprised at my own strength, I held on even when he shook like a mastiff fending off a beagle pup too big for its britches. I was squeezing so hard my chest ached at the effort of expanding while squashed flat against his back.

Finally,
finally
, he did as I’d hoped, dropped the remote to deal with me. He reached huge hands to pry me off, but I folded like a cheap suit, all the way to the ground, and landed in a crouch. With my outstretched leg, I swept the remote into the pit in a move resembling the coffee grinder it was named for, glad my circus training hadn’t been completely for naught. The remote’s glow cut off abruptly and the world went black.

Hephaestus growled. I tried to steel myself for the blow that was sure to come. Those glasses, I suspected, were for night vision, and Hephaestus was the one goggled man in the country of the blind. The blow didn’t fall, and that worried me more. Was it possible the remote was not the only way to control the charges? I nearly smacked my head against the ground in frustration. Of course there’d be redundancies. They’d had ages to plan. I just had to hope that Hephaestus and the others wouldn’t set the charges off while the god was still in range. We’d been running on a wing and a prayer the gods were disinclined to answer.

Well, bumbling around in the dark had gotten me this far; I couldn’t stop now for fear of a little thing like becoming part of the fossil record.

I rose like a whirling dervish, just in case Hephaestus was in range. The odd calm of the storm suddenly broke again, and I screamed as it lashed me across the face with a stinging backhanded blow. My eyes burned, tears poured ineffectually down my face, and my throat closed off.

I flung my arms up to protect against a second onslaught, but that was the end. Hope bloomed that it had just been the recoil of the gods letting go of the storm, but the hope was short-lived.

Flares fired up, casting a red glow over the field of battle.

“Hands up!” Lau yelled, as soon as she could see well enough to get a bead on Hephaestus.

He ripped the goggles off his face before complying with a smile worthy of Charles or maybe Marilyn Manson.

I waited for him to fire off some pithy catchphrase of villainy, but his statement was a little more physical.

A sharp-edged crash split the night, coming from the Page Museum. I turned instinctively toward the sound and was grabbed roughly from behind in a full nelson. It almost didn’t matter. Standing amidst the razor shards of shattered museum glass were two beasts of another age: a saber-toothed cat and a giant ground sloth. My brain stuttered over the vision, unable to process until my eyes fixed on those places where the glass had shorn away fake fur to expose the animatronic innards. The display models that battled it out day after day in the tar pit museum had come to life.

“The girl and I will be leaving,” Hephaestus yelled. “My toys will make sure the rest of you don’t get any ideas.”

Girl? Girl!

I stomped down on his insole, popped my elbow into his solar plexus and bent, ready to throw him over my shoulder, only he never buckled. That was
it
. I went all alley cat, scratching, shrieking, clawing, kicking, anything to gain enough slack to stone the bastard. He was ready for me this time, lifting me off my feet and shaking me until my brain rattled around in my skull.

“Stop,” he commanded.

“We’re dead anyway!” I yelled to the others.

“As you wish,” he snarled.

In a blur of speed, the prehistoric beasts were upon Armani and the others. Gunshots cracked. Still I saw the smilodon’s huge jaws unhinge and snap down around the defensive arm Armani had lifted. He screamed, and I yelled with him. The sloth battled Lau and the patrolman as easily as a bear swatting flies, batting them to the ground. I didn’t see the officer rise again. Lau laid where she’d fallen, still firing off shots.