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.”
“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.
“Great,” I said. “I’ll track, you trap. Now, who do we use as bait?”