Blood Hunt (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

Apollo must have called the doorman at his luxury apartment building and let him know to let people up, because his living room was nearly full when we arrived after calling a cab to take us home from the salon.

I was nearly recovered by the time we got there, but the sight that greeted us when we stepped into the fray nearly set me back in shock. I hadn't really understood why we couldn't meet in Neith's hotel room. We'd all fit before, if barely, but now…it was like a godly multiplication dance, as though everyone had grabbed a friend or two.

My gaze caught and held on a green man with the usual squared off beard of a pharaoh. Not slightly green, like a blond who'd spent too much time in chlorinated water, but the true green that came in every box of crayons. I tried not to stare, even as he caught my eyes and blinked slowly, as though time moved differently for him.

“Who?” I asked.

“Osiris,” Apollo said, following my gaze. “I haven't seen him topside in ages.”

“He's not, like, a counterpart for Hades or anything like that?”

Apollo looked at me like I'd asked something odd. I'd thought it was a perfectly valid question. “Hades mentioned to you about the various underworlds, right? All those different beliefs…no one could govern them all.”

Plus, as far as I knew,
Hades
had never been cut up into a million parts, scattered all over the world and resurrected, though there'd been days when I'd gladly have performed the first two parts of that myself.

“Wait,” I said, “aren't you associated with—”

“Horus, his son,” Apollo finished for me. As I watched, he changed. I'd never seen Apollo shift before. He'd always told me that it wasn't really his area. At least, not as a sun god. The sun was constant. Unchanging, if one didn't consider solar flares and sun spots.

But Horus had come before Apollo, and in that other aspect, in his association with the moon, he'd been changeable. He'd been… It was all I could do not to take a step back when he turned a hawklike head toward me. Not because I didn't still sense him inside, but because being that close to a raptor's beak and his piercing predatory eyes was slightly unnerving.

Reassurance radiated out to me, but still I stood speechless as he stepped forward to greet his…father? I'd never understood the Horus myth. I'd always heard that when Isis put Osiris back together she'd managed to find every part of him but the one essential to procreation. Myths were full of births that didn't seem to have anything to do with the natural order of things—Athena springing fully formed from the head of her father, women being impregnated by gods who weren't in human form at the time and bearing unlikely offspring like the Minotaur, immaculate conceptions…

I made myself move on. Osiris was not the only newcomer. Hanging on Eros were a gaggle of girls…
women
…who looked like the Real Housewives of Hugh Heffner. No, that wasn't quite fair. One looked like a FemBot out of
Austin Powers
in a pale pink negligee, complete with sheer overcoat. The others were in varying shades of black and in one case a whiskey-colored cowl-necked sweater where the cowl dipped so low between her breasts I wondered how she got it to stay up on her shoulders. Maybe she and Aphrodite shared boob tape…or possibly defiance of gravity was her superpower. Then there was the girl with the beautiful brown skin and the darker hair flowing into full on green in an ombre effect that I first thought was salon created…until I noted the pointy ears that jutted slightly from the cascade of hair and fingernails that looked more like bark than keratin. A dryad then? I'd never seen one before. I stared in fascination.

I'd known that Yiayia's blog wasn't the only godly grapevine out there, since word had somehow spread labeling me “P.I. to the Pantheon”. But I'd never expected word about Set and the trouble we faced to get out this fast or to achieve such a response. Apparently, renewed attempts to unleash chaos into the world warranted an all-hands-on-deck approach.

There came a knock at the condo door, and I went to answer it, needing a moment to process in any case.

I hit the button first on Apollo's video monitor to see who stood outside and received another jolt. I recognized the woman peering back, looking straight at the camera with a determined stare.

It was Demeter…Ceres…the mother of Persephone, Hades's previously pilfered bride. She'd liberated herself at long last, but I'd made sure it took. The god of the Greek underworld did not take well to having his will thwarted. I thought that was just too damned bad.

I opened the door, pleased to see another familiar face…not to mention a goddess I knew to still have quite a lot of power.

“Demeter!” I said, not holding my arms out to her. She was
not
the huggy type. “Thank you so much for coming.”

Last I'd seen her and Persephone they'd been up in the Napa region of California, but after all that had happened there, I had no idea where they'd finally settled.

“I had to come,” she said, stepping inside.

I closed the door behind her, and by the time I turned, she'd changed completely. Her hair was no longer wild and white. She no longer wore a natural-tone hemp skirt and oversized top like an aging hippy/earth mother, but was in a sleek white gown that stopped just above her knees. Her hair had darkened and now lay straight and glossy down her back, hanging all the way to her backside. Her features too had smoothed out. She was still nearly the same earth-brown, but now it seemed more her natural skin-tone than from years and years spent out in the elements. Wrinkles and decades had fallen away, and she now looked as perfect and polished as though she'd walked off a Hollywood set…one where she'd been playing a modern-day Cleopatra.

I watched her with wide eyes as she strode toward Horus/Apollo and Osiris, holding her arms out to them and enfolding them in her embrace when she got within range. I…my brain stuttered. Demeter was Isis was…
Apollo's mother
? She hadn't exactly been warm and fuzzy the last time we'd met. But then, she'd been a little focused on her domestically abused daughter. And Apollo had never mentioned other siblings beyond his twin sister Artemis. I was…stunned didn't even begin to cover it. Where did the myths stop and the reality begin? How did I know who was who from one minute to the next when it could all change at the drop of a hat?

For a moment it didn't seem as though the three of them—father, mother, child… Osiris, Isis and Horus—were aware of anyone else in the room. They were complete in and of themselves. And then, slowly, Horus and Isis opened their arms to me. I didn't know what on Earth to do with that.

I approached, but stopped short of the hug fest until they came out of it and looked at me askance.

“Demeter is Isis?” I said, just to be absolutely certain I understood it all.

Apollo must have sensed my minor freak-out through our link, and seeped back into…I couldn't actually say “himself”. He was Horus, apparently, as much as he was Apollo…or any of his other incarnations. Geez, you think you know a guy…

“Is, was, will be,” he said. “Mother and fertility goddess under whatever name she's known.”

Neith stepped up to our little group and drew my attention. “As those most affected by Set in the past, I thought they had a right to know. I thought they'd want to help.”

“You did the right thing,” Demeter-Isis said. No, that was going to get complicated. She appeared now as Isis, and that was what I'd call her. Just like Neith-Athena (or vice versa) was simply Neith. “We'll do all we can. What is the plan.”

Neith and I looked at each other. “You're the goddess of strategy,” I said. “Now you have troops. I defer to you.”

Apollo looked at me in utter amazement. “You've never deferred to
me,
” he said quietly enough so that it might not have been heard in a room any less filled to the brim.

Everyone seemed prepared to ignore it…except Eros, apparently. “Well, I guess
that
answers the question of who's on top,” he said at full volume.

Two of the nymphs…or whoever they were…tittered.

Apollo looked like he was prepared to take Eros's head clean off.

I fixed Eros with
a look
, “Top, bottom, upside down, right-side up…don't you worry, Apollo's got
all
the moves.”

“Oooohhh,” chorused the girls surrounding him. I noticed half of them edging closer to Apollo.

“Don't even think about it,” I snapped.

It stopped them in their tracks, all but the Fembot, who said, “Surely he's god enough to go around.”

I looked up at Apollo, wondering if he was going to chime in and found his gaze riveted to her more obvious attributes. Power flowed out of her in waves, even I caught the edges of it as it lapped against Apollo and flooded our link with desire.

My breath quickened, and I felt…heat and readiness swept through me like a wildfire. I wanted.
He
wanted—

Apollo tore his gaze away from the nymph and looked to me. He wanted to act on the impulses she'd inspired, but with me in her place. I could read it in his eyes, feel it through our link. He wanted to order everybody out and take me in every room and in every position I'd mentioned and then some. Possibly invent some new.

“Enough,” snapped Neith. “Vega if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Step back.”

The Fembot, Vega, I presumed, pouted prettily and took a step back, though she didn't look the least bit chastened. In fact, she turned her gaze on Hermes.

“What about you, handsome?” she asked.

Sigyn hissed. “Over my dead body.”

“Oh, is that how he rolls?” the nymph asked.

“This was a mistake,” Eros said. “Vega, go back to Aphrodite. Explain to her how you couldn't control yourself.”

Vega rolled her eyes and blew out a breath. “Oh, you're no fun.”

“No fun at all,” Sigyn agreed. Hermes shot her a dirty look.

“Plan?” I asked Neith.

“We're waiting for one more.”

As if on cue, there was another knock at the door. This time Apollo went to answer it, possibly needing a modicum of space to cool down so that his pants might fit properly again.

He came back with Nick, looking…stormy. Haggard. I wondered if he'd been home at all between crime scenes. If he'd even slept since the Roland brothers had killed their parents.

He nodded quickly to everyone, eyes widening at the sight of Osiris, narrowing at the nymphs—clearly recognizing trouble when he saw it. Then his gaze came around again to Neith and settled there. Something passed between them.

“Any sign of the Roland boys?” she asked. “Or their sister?”

I could see the answer on his face. “No sign. Not of Thalia or Iphigenia either. And now you say another woman is missing? Sulis?”

“Yes,” I answered, “missing, though not a confirmed victim. Her assistant says she went out and never came back, never called and no one can reach her. It's not like her.”

“Noted. The chaos, by the way, has spread. You won't believe the reports we have coming in. Dispatch is swamped. HQ is authorizing all kinds of overtime. Don't know how they'll find money in the budget, but… Not my problem. I don't really have the time to be here at all, but I've been on shift from the beginning. Captain ordered me home for a shower and a few hours of sleep before reporting back.”

“What kind of reports have you received?” Apollo asked. “Anything we can use to pinpoint the trouble?”

“You have a map?” Nick asked.

Apollo looked blank. In the days of GPS and navigation apps, no one had maps anymore.

Hermes sighed, snapped his fingers and produced one out of thin air. It was a real map of L.A. and the surrounding areas, not one of the touristy kind with attractions or stars homes marked off.

Apollo went into the kitchen and came out with a Sharpie.

He and Hermes cleared the coffee table of the decorative bowl of balls that I'd virtuously never commented on and spread out the map.

“You know about Hollywood Boulevard and all that?” Nick said, getting nods. “That's where it seemed to start. It spread out from there. At the Page Museum, the mammoths have pulled themselves out of the muck and gone on a rampage. A five-year-old boy was nearly trampled to death. Trouble on a film set where one actor took his stalker character a little too far. And then there's the gangs…”

I hadn't even considered the gangs. Oh, hells bells, we were in trouble. Hollywood was insane at the best of times. With chaos leaking out, we could easily descend into madness. It had happened before even without Set's influence.

“Yet they sent you home?” Hermes asked.

“Tired officers make mistakes. We can't afford that right now. Not ever, really, but at the moment…L.A. is a powder keg. One misstep, one overzealous cop and it might well explode.”

Apollo handed Nick the Sharpie. “Here, show us on the map.”

Nick got down on his knees so that he could reach the map and circled a bunch of areas. By the time he was finished there wasn't a whole lot left untouched. The chaos field had headed away from the Boulevard, out past LACMA and the Page Museum, and on out of the city. I'd guessed that much—that they'd gone beyond the bounds of L.A. proper—from my earlier flying reconnaissance. Now, at least, we had a direction.

“Got it,” Neith said, sounding strong, decisive and not the least uncertain. “We need two teams. One to draw the brothers out, get them away from their victims so that we can rescue them. The boys aren't going to stop here. They'll want to capture and kill again. We need to control their next targets, the where and the when. We need to be ready. The second team will hunt down their lair while they're lured away, free those they've captured and get them medical help. We need to steal the source of strength they're sending Set right out from under them.”