1
Zeus
The moment Brigit’s hand drops away from my face, I know I’m fucked.
We’re both fucked.
She is especially fucked and the hot blood on my hands and sleeves underscores the point. My eyes burn. Tiny shards of glass? I have no idea and I don’t care. I don’t care about anything anymore. I was wrong to ever care.
Up ahead, in the dark of the street, a shadow runs away from me dressed like Reya. For a moment I feel a wild, pulsing hope, but it’s gone in a flash. I know what I saw. She’s dead, and Brigit saw it too. If dead Reya had only been a hallucination then Brigit wouldn’t have tried to save her.
Brigit tried to save her, and then I walked her back to her death.
My ears ring, a flat tone that won’t go away no matter how much I shake my head. It won’t go away until it does and then the air around us is a riot of noise. Wind kicking up through the city blocks. Sparks flying on the air. Ash, painting the sky. Something explodes behind us and I know it’s the building. Whatever took out the back half will be lighting the rest ablaze. More fire catches with every step I take.
The sirens begin at the end of the block.
What happened to the rest of them?
My body tries to turn. To find out. There are so many women at Olympus and I only saw three, three in the ballroom. Three and my dead secretary. I don’t know where they are and my bloodied, thrashing heart has ceased to function in a way that will let me think. Think.
How long is the walk to the hospital? Twenty minutes, if I hurry, but the horrifying truth is that Brigit is getting heavier.
She was helping before, in the way that a person will help you carry them if they’re conscious. I saw her eyes. Her face was left untouched by the apocalypse we lived through. But now her head has dropped back.
I steal a look at her eyes and all of me jolts in an embarrassing involuntary startle because it’s not her, it’s Katie, it’s Katie, bleeding out all over my shirt in her red dress. A blink transforms her back into Brigit but my gut twists, my heart stops. Cold grief digs its nails into my spine. I would give anything for Brigit to hold on that tightly. But she doesn’t move.
She doesn’t move.
I’m crossing intersection after intersection, hardly looking, and no one is looking for me. Three fire trucks speed by, sirens screaming, lights painting us in red and white.
I don’t have a plan, other than to get to the hospital.
And then what?
What, if she’s dead? I make a vague decision to throw myself off the roof, if that’s the case. It’s a mindset issue, really. I will never be in the mindset to live past this, if Brigit is dead.
A familiar black SUV jumps over the sidewalk curb in front of me. It misses the brick facade of the store we’re in front of by inches. The door opens, kicked out by James, who sprints toward me with both hands up. I don’t stop walking. If I stop, I’ll crumple to the ground and none of us will get where we need to be.
He puts himself between me and the road. “You’ve got to stop.” He’s breathing hard and scared, the whites of his eyes showing. “You’ve got to get her there faster. Get in the car.” He points, a slow gesture meant for an idiot. Is it possible I’ve gone into shock? I doubt it. I’m not capable of shock. But I am finding it difficult to perform the unique calculus of walking from the curb to the SUV.
James puts a hand on my shoulder. “Get in the car.” His voice cracks. “Please.”
“Hurry, then.” I sound so casually irritated, as if I’ve been asking him to appear all along and now he’s done it, a few minutes off schedule. He pushes in front of me and throws open the back door. We get in.
I get in. Brigit flops lifelessly into my lap and the red of her blood in the lights of the SUV is so bright that it pulls me headfirst into somewhere else. My knees on the carpet. Katie’s red dress.
“We found the charges in the back,” James says. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
“Charges?”
“The explosives.” He stomps on the gas and reverses into the street, the SUV rocking. Brigit rolls against me and a fresh gush of blood soaks my shirt. I hold her closer to try and mitigate the bump from the curb but I don’t want to push the glass farther into her back. It’s an enormous shard for her small body. It’s going to kill her. “We found the explosives and I cleared out as many people as I could, but—”
“The tower always falls,” I tell him sagely, some bullshit I heard from one of the women who works at The Fates. “I’m not giving you a glowing reference.”
James’s face is pale in the rearview mirror. “I won’t blame you if you kill me.”
“Kill you?” I laugh, automatic and heartless. “You’re my head of security. Why would I start with you?”
“I’m the closest.”
The way James is driving, it’s only a few minutes to the hospital. He guns it into the emergency entrance, throwing me shoulder-first into the door. Fine, it’s fine. I stop Brigit’s head from making contact and pull the handle, spilling us onto the sidewalk. James tries to get out but I kick his door shut. “You go to my place. You have the address?”
He does. He’s the only one at the whorehouse who knows the place I’m talking about, and he confirms it with a nod.
“Go there and wait for me. If I don’t come back, you know what to do.”
His hands are on the wheel. “You have to come back.”
I ignore this and go toward the lights.
The hospital is blinding at this hour. Its glass and metal front is an ocular assault. Maybe my retinas were burned by the explosion. Don’t look down. I look down regardless and the red threatens me a second time. Red on red. An ambulance howls its way along the side of the building and this sharpens my resolve. Not a single fucking person is going to get help before Brigit. I’ll get them to help her if it’s the last thing I do, and it might be the last thing I do.
The first thing I see when I get into the lobby is a woman, running.
Her hair is another red flash. Blue scrubs, sprinting in the opposite direction. Is she running from my father?
She’s running from me.
The waiting room is a collection of statutes, people frozen in chairs. They’re faceless, unimportant things, expressions frozen in shock.
Say something. No words come to mind. Or—the words that come to mind won’t mean anything to these people. My building exploded. Someone tried to kill me but Brigit was in the way. There’s glass—
A voice over a speaker is a muddled mess of codes. For her? For me? I don’t care if they clear the whole building, as long as someone comes to help.
Someone is coming.
A flock of blue scrubs and white coats, running, running. I discover I’m standing in some liminal space between the waiting area and a wide hallway, big enough for crash carts and stretchers. The redhead from before reaches me first.
Then she reaches for Brigit.
And—
I can’t.
I wrench her away from them, from the grasping vultures. They’re all talking at once, too many of them, and the rush of blood in my ears shreds the words into an unrecognizable mess. Panic body-checks me with enough force to crack several ribs, and fuck these people. I brought her here but it was a mistake, a terrible mistake—