And then I remembered the sound of the car door closing, and I knew we were in deep shit.
“Everyone get down!” I suddenly shouted, taking a couple of running steps toward Rose and grabbing her hand. I dragged her to the ground, but not before a boom nearly deafened me.
There was a sickening, smashing-melons sound, and Rose’s hand went entirely limp in mine as we both hit the ground. I turned to ask if she was okay, my brain not quite ready to register the shower of hot liquid that splashed all over me.
Rose’s head was gone, as was a large portion of her upper chest and shoulder, scattered in little bits and pieces of blood and flesh and bone, forming a garish red splash over Jasmine’s pretty green lawn. It was too dark to really see the colors, but my imagination had no trouble filling in the gaps.
I’d seen more blood and gore in the last few months than I’d ever seen in my life, and I wasn’t as squeamish as I used to be. But nothing could have prepared me for this level of horror, and my entire body just froze up on me. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. Hell, I could hardly even breathe, and I certainly couldn’t think.
Everyone around me dove for cover, but I just sat there and dripped, staring at what was left of Rose’s body, unable to process anything. I was vaguely aware of Jamaal yelling at me. I knew I had to move, that I was a sitting duck, but I couldn’t seem to force my limbs to do anything.
I had forgotten about Sita, who must have heard the shot and come running. She barreled into my back with the force of a freight train, knocking me flat on my face. The lawn made a disturbing squooshing sound under me that I hoped was just because of the rain soaking the grass. A streak of blinding light came shooting from somewhere near the head of the driveway, electricity crackling the air around it. The lightning passed right through where I’d been sitting a moment ago. It hit the pavement with a crack so loud it left my ears ringing, and was quickly followed by a burst of automatic-weapons fire.
And then, because the situation wasn’t bad enough already, everything went dark.
I don’t mean natural dark, like the night. I mean inky, solid, absolute dark, the kind where you literally can’t see your hand in front of your face. I knew this particular brand of darkness, having experienced it before. Emma, Anderson’s most recent ex, had been a descendant of Nyx, the Greek goddess of night, and she’d had the power to create impenetrable blackness.
With the wreckage of Rose’s body now hidden from my view, I was able to get my brain back online. It was still raining pretty hard, but no way had that bolt of lightning come from the sky. That meant the enemy included at least two Liberi, one descendant of Nyx and one of Zeus. Based on the sheer volume of gunfire, I estimated they had at least two or three others with them, whether Liberi or mortal I had no idea.
The good news was that in the unnatural darkness, the bad guys couldn’t possibly see what they were shooting at. The bad news was that none of us could see, either. I had dropped my gun when Sita knocked me flat, but I found it again with a little groping. The artificial darkness was so dense I couldn’t even see the muzzle flashes as the enemy kept shooting at us in short, intense bursts.
I aimed toward the sound of one of those bursts, and my finger tightened on the trigger. My supernatural skills allowed me to target accurately based on sound, but at the last moment, I changed my mind and slipped my finger off the trigger. I might well hit whoever was shooting, but I had no idea where Jack or Jamaal or Logan were, and I didn’t know if my power would prevent me from accidentally shooting one of them if they were in the way.
I started crawling forward on my belly, looking for an end to the swath of darkness the Nyx descendant had created. Emma’s had always been pretty small, so maybe I could crawl clear of it and get a visual on the shooters.
I hadn’t gotten very far when I followed the logic of my own thoughts and realized something was off. If the patch of darkness was that small, then surely two or three guys raking it with automatic-weapons fire ought to have hit someone by now. Maybe they had—my friends weren’t shooting back or making any noise to help the enemy find targets—but I’d had no sense of bullets whizzing past or making impact with the ground near me.
Either they were the worst shots in history, or they weren’t really trying to shoot us. So why would they form this pool of blackness around us and then not shoot into it?
Rose!
In the heat and the horror of the moment, I’d allowed myself to forget that Rose was a goddess. That bullet might have made a wreckage of her body, but unless it was fired by Niobe herself, Rose would not be dead for long. Which meant that our enemies had to get their hands on that body to exact a more permanent solution to their problem.
My conviction that they weren’t shooting into the darkness wasn’t so strong that I was willing to stand up straight, but I rose into a crouch and tried to orient myself. My sense of direction had always been good, and it was pretty close to flawless now that I was Liberi. I took a couple steps toward where I knew Rose’s body was lying, meaning to stand over it and guard it with my life.
Unfortunately, my understanding of the enemy’s tactics had come too late. The darkness suddenly lifted, and I heard the gunning of an engine followed by the screech of tires.
Rose’s body was gone.
Logan and Jack were both crouched near the bushes, unhurt. Jamaal was lying facedown on the lawn. Sita was parked on top of him, shielding him with her body and holding him down with one massive paw on his back as he tried to get out from under her. The sight might have been comical in another context.
I entertained the brief notion of diving into our car and taking off in pursuit, but one look at our sorry rental showed that was not an option. The car was riddled with bullets, glass shot out of every window and all the tires thoroughly flattened.
We weren’t going anywhere.
SIX
It wasn’t long before we heard the sound of emergency vehicles making their way toward us. Thanks to our shot-up car in the middle of the driveway, there was no way to cover up our presence at the crime scene.
“Can’t you hide it with one of your illusions?” I asked Jack, but he shook his head.
“I can cover it with an illusion, but it’ll still be there, and someone’s bound to run into it. That would get weird, don’t you think?”
I didn’t like it, but he was right. And a bunch of foreigners carrying illegal firearms and standing in the middle of a violent crime scene was going to be bad, bad news. I didn’t want to get an up-close-and-personal view of the Bermuda jail system.
“I can’t hide the car,” Jack said, “but I can hide the weapons.” He looked me over from head to toe. “And you.”
I shuddered, trying not to think about what I might look like, what might have soaked into and stained my clothing. I looked at the area where Rose’s body had lain and saw that our enemies had gathered up any significant chunks that the bullet had left. I wondered if it would have been possible for Rose’s life force to return to one of those chunks instead of her captured body. Maybe that was why there was so little left behind. The rain was doing a decent job of washing away the blood on the grass, or at least diluting it so much that you couldn’t really see it in the dark, but I didn’t think it was having a similar effect on me.
“We don’t have much time,” Jack said. “Hand over the guns and let’s find some secluded place where they’re not likely to trip over them—or us—while they process the scene.”
“What about Logan and Jamaal?”
But they were both handing their weapons to Jack and me and making shooing gestures. I hoped Jamaal’s temper was up to the challenge of dealing with the police, and that he wouldn’t collapse from exhaustion after having summoned Sita.
“We’ll deal with it,” Logan assured me, and since the sirens were getting uncomfortably close, there wasn’t time for an argument.
Jack and I crouched at the far edge of the property, well away from where all the shooting had h
appened, the weapons piled at our feet while he created some illusion I couldn’t see.
Pretty soon, a veritable army of police and emergency vehicles swarmed the place. Logan and Jamaal were immediately taken into custody, and crime scene techs started scouring the place, taking pictures and otherwise collecting evidence. The rain continued to fall, sometimes with more intensity, sometimes with less. Jack and I watched the process carefully, but we saw no evidence that the police noticed any of the blood or other . . . stuff left over from where Rose had been shot.
“If they had some reason to look,” Jack whispered to me, “like a body, or a witness saying someone was shot, they’d probably find something. Tonight, they just want to get out of the rain.”
I figured he was right on that score and wondered how they were explaining the bizarre scene to themselves. There were hundreds if not thousands of rounds fired, and yet apparently no one was hurt. Jamaal and Logan would no doubt claim they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, which wouldn’t do much to help the cops figure out what had happened.
The police towed our defunct rental and cordoned off the entire area with crime scene tape, leaving a few hapless souls to keep watch. My guess was that they decided to save the more thorough examination of the crime scene for daylight.
The cops left guarding the scene were at the head of the driveway facing out, which gave Jack and me the chance to creep back to the area where Rose had been shot and look for anything that might clue the cops in that someone had been hurt here and cause them to look closer. It was a good thing we did, because I found the bullet that killed Rose, buried in the trunk of a small tree by the porch. It was the size of four or five bullets put together, and if the crime scene techs had found it, it definitely would have stood out—and given them an idea where to focus their investigation.
As it was, I pried the bullet out of the tree and hoped no one would be interested in the hole that was left. Jack and I then made our way back to our cottages on foot with the weapons shielded from sight by another of his illusions.
Although it was clear to everyone involved that the police weren’t happy about it, they eventually had to let Logan and Jamaal go. There was no evidence that either of them had committed a crime, and ostensibly they were just a couple of American tourists who’d accidentally gotten in the middle of something that had nothing to do with them.
The police instructed Jamaal and Logan not to leave the country, but they had no grounds to insist. I hated to leave the altar dying, but without Rose there was nothing left we could do. Besides, we still had pressing problems waiting for us at home, seeing as Anderson hadn’t miraculously appeared while we’d been gone.
By the time Jamaal and Logan finally got back to the cottages, Jack and I had packed everything up so we could go straight to the airport and catch the next flight home.
“Tell me you didn’t let Jack near my stuff,” Jamaal said as he eyed the suitcases suspiciously.
“Of course not,” I assured him. I could only imagine what kinds of “hilarious” pranks the trickster would have played if I’d let him pack anyone’s belongings but his own. “I packed your bag myself.”
But things were bad. That altar was losing its juice, and we no longer had a helpful fertility goddess ready to lend us a hand. And even if we did, Niobe and her accomplices would still be keeping a careful eye on the altar to make the second attempt as disastrous as the first.
The best-case scenario would be for Anderson to emerge from wherever he was hiding and somehow fix the enormous mess he had created, but there was still no sign of him. Barring that, we had to find another one of Niobe’s sisters, convince her that renewing Jasmine’s altar was the right thing to do, and then actually get to the altar to perform the ceremony. We knew Niobe had at least two Liberi on her team as well as two or three others, one of whom was apparently a sniper. When I showed the bullet I’d dug out of the tree to Logan, he said it was a .50-caliber round fired from a sniper rifle, probably from a significant distance. The shooting, the lightning bolt, and the darkness had all been used to blind and distract us while they hauled Rose’s body away so Niobe could kill her more permanently.
We went over all these details when we got back to the house, still reeling from our dismal failure.
“How could we possibly have gotten around the trap they set?” I asked, shaking my head.
“If we’d known what was coming,” Logan said, “we could maybe have kept better track of Rose and made sure she was always surrounded.”
Jamaal dismissed the idea quickly. “We’d still have been totally blind, fighting someone we couldn’t see. And even if we hadn’t been, there were at least two gunmen and then whoever was in the distance with the sniper rifle. Nikki might have been able to take out the guys with the automatic weapons if it weren’t for the dark, but she couldn’t have done anything about the sniper. Not with a handgun.”
We’d been doomed since the moment we turned into that driveway, and there was no reason to think we wouldn’t be just as doomed if we tried a second time.
“The fact is,” Logan said, “there just aren’t enough of us to fight our way through to that altar. Not when they’re all set up and ready for us. We’re going to need more people.”
“Well, we’re all we have,” I countered. The moment the words left my mouth, I understood what he’d been getting at, and my jaw dropped. The moment Rose had shown up at the house, I’d pushed Cyrus and his ultimatum to the back burner of my mind, trying to focus on one problem at a time. I was still aware of his deadline, the clock ticking away, but I kept telling myself I’d deal with it later—all while clinging to the hope that Anderson would show up so I didn’t have to deal with it at all. Asking Cyrus to help with our current crisis would never have entered my mind.
“No way!” I said, glaring at Logan.
“As soon as you come up with a reasonable way to get us to that altar without any help, you can reject my suggestion out of hand,” Logan said. “So, what’s your suggestion?”
He had me there, and he knew it. There were probably ways individual members of our merry band could get safely into that house, thanks to our various powers, but the problem was we had to get someone else in, and not just for a couple of minutes. The ceremony would take time, so even if we miraculously snuck another goddess in there, she and Jack would be sitting ducks for however long it took. Assuming we could find another of Niobe’s sisters and convince her to cooperate.
“In case you need a reminder,” I said, “Cyrus and the Olympians are the enemy. He’s planning to start killing us off one by one if we can’t prove his daddy’s alive, which we can’t do.”
“Keep in mind his highest priority,” Blake said. “Cyrus wants what’s best for Cyrus, at all times.” Blake should know, considering the twisted friends-with-benefits relationship he and Cyrus had once had going—and that Cyrus would stop at nothing to resume. The whole reason Cyrus had turned me over to his father was that Konstantin had promised to “give” him Blake as a reward.
“All the more reason why he’d laugh us out of the room if we asked for help.”
“Not if you take the long view,” Blake argued. “He and the rest of the Olympians don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves, but that doesn’t mean they’d enjoy a world completely devoid of human beings. They need mortals to do all kinds of stuff for them, like provide food and housing and entertainment. In a world without mortals, the Olympians would have to provide for themselves, and I guarantee you that isn’t something they’re interested in doing.”
I chewed my lip as I considered Blake’s argument. I had never thought about it that way before, but he was right. Olympians might consider mortals on par with cattle, but that didn’t mean they didn’t want the cattle around for their convenience. And there were a hell of a lot more Olympians than there were of us. With greater numbers and a larger variety of powers at our disposal, we might actually stand a chance. Hell, Cyrus was a descendant of Helios,
the sun god, and I had seen him create something like a sunburst before. Maybe his light could counter the Nyx descendant’s dark.
I wasn’t happy about having to negotiate with Cyrus, especially not from a position of weakness. But if nothing else, getting him to lend us some of his people might buy me a little time before I had to deal with our inability to prove his father was alive.
SEVEN
I’m not sure how I ended up being Anderson’s stand-in while he was gone, but I was the one who called Cyrus and asked for a meeting, and none of Anderson’s Liberi seemed to object to the way I was taking charge. I did a little fancy verbal footwork on the phone and allowed Cyrus to believe that we were meeting so I could personally give him the proof of life he’d been demanding. I figured he’d be more willing to show up if he didn’t know he’d be facing a request for help.
We met in the same coffee shop where we’d met before, under very similar circumstances. I had Logan and Maggie with me, and every person in the shop was an Olympian. I suspected Cyrus had bought the place or he probably wouldn’t have been able to take it over so completely. They had more than enough firepower to mop the floor with us, and I reminded myself of the need to be at least marginally diplomatic despite my loathing for Cyrus.
As with last time, there were no preliminary pleasantries or offers of coffee. Cyrus merely gestured me into the seat across from him, his stare uncommonly cold and unfriendly.
“Three more of my Olympians have gone missing since we last spoke,” he growled. “I don’t think proof of my father’s life is going to be enough anymore.”
Ah. So I wasn’t the only one who’d shown up under false pretenses. I realized there was a good chance Cyrus was planning to kill me and my friends right on the spot in retaliation for what he was assuming was Anderson’s killing spree. I also realized that we now most likely had at least five Liberi working with Niobe, and I wasn’t happy to learn the odds were stacked even more heavily in her favor.