Blood Hunt (22 page)

“We don't want to spread ourselves too thin,” I protested. “Wouldn't it be best to let them take whatever bait we dangle and then follow them back to their bolt hole?”

“And if they escape us? If we lose their trail or they decide to slice and dice their captive along the way? Then all we've done is throw someone to the wolves. Remember what you said back at the movie set—divide and conquer. There's a reason it's a classic.”

I hated her throwing my own words back at me, but I wasn't prepared to argue. She was the goddess of strategy. She had ages of experience on me. But…I was usually the one to come up with the plans, even if they generally amounted to “find trouble, smash it to bits, try not to die”.

Okay, so I was no master strategist, but I'd always gotten the job done…and I guess I'd gotten used to leading the charge. I never thought my ego had gotten wrapped up in it. Maybe P.I. to the pantheon had gone to my head. Maybe I was more competitive than I realized. Maybe even I was never really who I'd thought I was.

If Neith played my role better than I did, where did that leave me? Had I been an understudy all along, poised to be pushed aside when the diva arrived for her starring role?

Apollo reached out and took my hand, sensing my emotions, even if he couldn't know the reasons behind them. Hell, I barely understood myself.

“Okay, fine. I can do the tracking,” I said.
This
was something I was designed for. With my bizarre directional precog and my strange blood call, this was a team I could lead. I'd let Neith handle the take-down, even if I wanted to be there as well. “I just need to figure out where to start.”

We all looked at the map. It was clear the chaos had swept through the center of the city and out toward the freeway. I was willing to bet the insanity hadn't stopped there, but accidents and road rage were so common around L.A., I wasn't sure any uptick would be immediately evident. And once on the highway, the brothers could have gone anywhere or even circled back.

“I can help you there,” Sigyn said, stepping forward. At some point, probably while everyone else was fighting to keep Set down, she'd found time to change out of her red carpet clothes. She now stood there in designer jeans and stylish half-boots in a sheer, flowy shirt with a camisole underneath. She looked like she should be strolling down Rodeo Drive with an armful of shopping bags, not attending a counsel of war, but I knew how looks could be deceiving. The first time I'd met her she'd been in a girly blue dress and she'd kicked my sensibly dressed behind. Or, anyway, had minions to do the dirty work. I still didn't like counting on anything she might come up with, but I didn't see that I had much choice.

She reached into her little black-and-leopard-print purse and came out with something that looked like a small sundial, only instead of numbers, it was inscribed in runes.

“Here,” she said, handing it forward. “It just needs a bit of your blood to link to your desires. Then you hold what or who you're looking for in your mind and it will point you there.”

“So if one day I'm in the mood for a real Philly cheese steak…” Hermes asked, reaching out for it.

She slapped his hand. “Down, boy. They've got Yelp for that.”

I took the tiny sundial, not at all tempted to admit that my mind had gone momentarily to the mother of all margaritas. It had been a rough night.

Nick's phone buzzed loudly, and we all looked to him. He pulled the phone from the holder on his belt and checked the read-out.

Then he looked up to us gravely. “Turn on the television.”

No one asked why. Apollo stepped up to the cabinet under his large wall-mounted flat screen and turned it on. “What channel?” he asked.

“Just about any channel, I'd think.”

He was right. The first one that came up was a ten-year-old sitcom that had long since gone into syndication, but even there a bar ran across the bottom of the screen, warning of riots and listing areas to avoid… It might have been shorter to list what streets were still safe.

Apollo flipped to a local news station, and what we saw… They could have been replaying footage of the infamous 1992 L.A. riots if only the fashions hadn't changed.

Nick swore under his breath. “I have to get back to the station,” he said.

“No,” Neith responded, twice as adamantly. “They sent you home for a reason. At some point, they're going to need you fresh…or we will. You cannot afford to fail when they need you most.”

“And, as you said, tired cops make mistakes,” I added.

“I doubt I could get home through this anyway.”

“Then you can stay here. I have a guest room,” Apollo offered.

I didn't have to be linked to Nick to see what he thought of that. It was written all over his face. And then a complete shift of scene and a new but familiar voice arrested our attention. I whipped my head around to see Susie Tallios, my reporter friend from back at the Roland mansion, this time in a royal blue power suit with black piping, her hair pulled severely back into a no-nonsense ponytail. With her was a man in a thousand-dollar suit with a pricy haircut, unnaturally white teeth and a zealot's smile. Everyone in L.A. knew him. He seemed to attach himself to every controversy and tragedy…as long as they were newsworthy. Why his fifteen minutes of fame weren't up yet, I had no idea. Sheer force of narcissistic will.

I'd missed the beginning of what Susie had to say, but tuned in at, “…here with Reverend John Moses Smith of the First Church of the Holy Believer, who has an interesting take,” I thought I caught a twist of her lips, like maybe she wanted to say
angle
but wasn't allowed, “on the spate of troubles that have hit Los Angeles.”

The reverend thanked Susie and then looked straight into the camera, dismissing her and talking as if to his congregation. “I have not wanted to believe it myself, but I have studied and I have prayed over it, and I can come only to the conclusion that we are in the End Times.” The way he said it, End Times was very clearly in caps and if he'd been on a sound stage, probably would have had its own reverb.

“They call this news?” Neith spat.

“Shhh!” I insisted. My precog was kicking me in the gut. Susie…the reverend…there was something here.

“Revelation 6: 7-8 ‘Then the Lamb broke open the fourth seal. I looked, and there was a pale colored horse. Its rider was named Death, and Hades followed close behind. They were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with war, famine, and disease, and with the wild animals of the earth.'”

I startled at Hades's name. In a Bible verse? It couldn't be real, could it?

“I think he's paraphrasing,” Osiris said. I thought it was Osiris, anyway. I didn't turn to look. My eyes were glued to the screen. I shushed the room again.

“Does this not sound like what happened in New York? No doubt a modern-day Sodom. Plague and pestilence affected the city. Animals turned on their human hosts. Brother struck at brother.” Which was true if one of those brothers was a freakin' zombie. “Have we not already seen the signs? Dragons and strange beasts appearing in the sky.”

He gestured, and the studio must already have had footage cued up from New York. A window opened beside him much like one of Hermes's creations, but this one showed rain-slashed footage from the huge storm conjured up by Poseidon's queen, Amphitrite, armed with his powerful trident. Through the rain pelting the cameras—police cam? traffic?—there was the impression of wings and a huge golden shape moving through the skies. Much like the “evidence” enthusiasts put forth for the existence of Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster, it was grainy, but…maybe not quite
as
grainy. Not quite as easy to dispute. And I knew for a fact that it was Eu-meh, the huge, gold-bronze dragon ridden by Nick's former partner who'd helped us defeat the plague demons and Amphitrite as well. And that
this
dragon was absolutely no satanic symbol.

The next clip showed one of the videos I knew had been taken of me in New York. I was practically falling out of the sky, my wings shredded after getting in the middle of a fight between two gods—Hecate and Janus. It had been played and replayed. Through most of it, my crazy, unruly hair covered my face, but for one brief moment, it blew away, leaving me exposed. That had been the image all the stills had been drawn from…for the tabloids, in particular. The mainstream press had been mostly about the real news—tragedies, body counts, destruction, and where people could go to find help. If my picture or any others were picked up, the articles were carefully non-committal and most likely to be in back pages, as if they didn't want to get egg on their faces when the pics were revealed to be a hoax. Even the Daily News, which could always be counted on for the absolute worst headlines, chose a flesh-eating zombie over me. It was still fully human in form, though worse for wear than your average man-on-the-street. It was something they could grasp, write off as a particularly nasty virus, and one that had since been cured. I think it had said something like, “Man…the other white meat.” Boy, had that raised a stink…but it had sold papers.

But this was mainstream news…on a major network. Millions would see and maybe believe. Sure, the network was allowing the reverend to intro the footage and its possible implications and could easily disclaim, “Views expressed by our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of this station” or some such, but…

He was continuing, “And now war has come to our very streets and a strange winged woman has been spotted in
our
skies.”

I gasped as a new video segment played. Crystal clear. No lashing wind and rain. No grainy traffic camera. It showed me, wings flared, sweeping low and then climbing higher into the sky. Luckily, it didn't show my face. Whoever had taken the video was above and behind me, but…from the vantage and from the fact that I wore my red carpet gown, I realized it had to be the nurse who'd seen me jump out of the hospital window who'd taken the video. She must have run to the window to try to stop me or to follow my fall and seen me take wing. I could hardly blame her for whipping out her cell phone camera. But to send the footage to Reverend Smith…

“From the wings, she is no angel,” the reverend continued. “A demon, perhaps, sent from Hell to fight for dominion over earth, her dress the color of blood. Or perhaps one of the locusts Revelation warns of, who wear the faces of man. ‘Their hair was like women's hair, their teeth were like lions' teeth',” he quoted.

Susie, I thought, had had enough. She tried to take the microphone back to ask a question or put an end to the segment, but the reverend wrapped his hand around hers and held it in place.

“‘They have tails and stings, like those of scorpion',” he continued, eyes burning into the camera. I expected froth to start forming at his mouth, “‘and it is with their tails that they have the power to hurt men for five months. They have a king ruling over them, who is the angel in charge of the abyss. His name in Hebrew is Abaddon; in Greek the name is Apollyon, meaning “The Destroyer”.'”

We all looked at Apollo.

“The Destroyer?” I asked, sotto voiced.

“Locust?” he responded, raising a brow.

“Touché.”

It would have been funny, except that it wasn't. It was far too easy to see signs and portents in what had been going on these past few months. I couldn't imagine the Reverend Smith was the only one. In fact, the description of these End Time locusts—and surely there was an alternate translation—sounded eerily like Namtar, the god of all plague demons. He'd been human-esque with bulging muscles, covered in leonine fur with backbent legs much like a lion rampant. He'd sported a scorpion's tail complete with deadly stinger. If I'd met him fully versed in two-thousand-year-old prophecies, I might have been half convinced myself that the End Times were upon us. Hell, I'd thrown around the word apocalypse at the time and… No, surely not.

“Oh, Hades's flaming phallus!” I said. “Now everyone and their brother will be watching the skies. I'll be lucky if some gun nut doesn't blow me out of the air, thinking I'm a demon or something.”

“Actually, I believe the locusts are sort of like the old Biblical plagues, sent to torment the unfaithful. So, in a way, you're like a hand of god,” Eros said helpfully.

“Great,” I answered wryly. “I'm absolutely certain everyone in L.A. will appreciate that distinction.”

Reverend Smith had gone on to talk about some kind of meeting to pray for our city's salvation. Susie just barely let him get the details out before reclaiming the microphone.

I shot a glance at Apollo, who nodded solemnly at me. He'd felt it too. There was something here. Some danger or…

My eyes shot wide open and my heart started pounding double-time. Damn and double-damn—the number of times I'd heard it, you'd think I'd get it instinctively by now. Belief fueled reality. If enough people
believed
, truly believed in the reverend's fear-mongering…believed we were in the Biblical End Times… It could affect how this all played out. At best, some would certainly prepare for the rapture. At worst…well, I wasn't sure Set could cause greater chaos than crashing some other god's homecoming bash. But would he come masquerading as the guest of honor or crashing the party like a jilted ex at a wedding?

Either way, my gut said clearly we'd come upon this for a reason. Maybe chaos, like every other force in the universe, had an equal but opposite reaction, like fate…or
The
Fates. Just in case, I closed my eyes and said a tiny prayer of thanks to Clotho.

“If Set escapes, Reverend Smith's prayer meeting is where he's going to go,” I said aloud. There was no room in my mind for doubt.

“Then we have to make sure he doesn't,” Neith said, kindly not pointing out that this was what she'd been trying to orchestrate before I shushed everyone.