Battle for the Blood Read Free

about Nick in a hospital in New York recovering from extensive burns? Needing skin grafts? What did you do to him?”
    My heart clenched, and all my self-recriminations came back to tackle me to the ground. “Nick stepped between me and trouble and got burned for it. I’m so sorry. If I could go back…” I’d still have been possessed by a psychotic mother goddess and unable to change the outcome.
    “You make this right. You know people. Gods and…whatever. You heal him.”
    “He doesn’t want my kind of help, Helen. He flew off without even a good-bye.”
    “So your feelings are hurt. Boo hoo. You’ll heal. He won’t. Not without your help. I’m on my way back. When I get there, you’d better have come up with something or I swear I will hunt you down.”
    She’d do it too. Detective Lau was nothing if not serious.
    “You’re flying back?” I asked.
    “Not a commercial flight. No one stamps your passport when you fly off on the back of a dragon. With food and rest stops, it’ll take me probably a day and a half, but I’ll be there and then we’ll have a reckoning.”
    “Helen, I’m not in New York.”
    “I don’t care where you are. You get help to him. Pronto.”
    She hung up, and I was still staring at the phone when a very naked Apollo stepped out of the bathroom moments later.
    “Who was that?” he asked at the look on my face.
    “Detective Lau.”
    “The Dragon Lady?”
    Accurate on so many levels. “The same. She’s ordered us to fix Nick. Or else.”
    “Or else what?”
    “I didn’t get specifics.”
    “First we fix you. Then we worry about Nick.”
    “So you think I need fixing?” I asked, wings fanning out as my hands went to my hips, as if my feathers were ruffled, but I didn’t have feathers. I had black, membranous wings like those of a bat…or like some images of gorgons on ancient shields and pottery shards.
    Apollo came over and kissed me. It was weird how normal it seemed, and how quickly. I stepped back and gave him a dirty look, letting him know he still had to answer. “No,” he said with a slow smile. “I think you’re perfect just the way you are.”
    “You have a ‘but’ face.”
    He looked like he was about to ask, and then I could see him get it. “ But ,” he added, “you might be a little hard to explain to the paparazzi.”
    A jolt hit my heart. Despite facing killer gods and goddesses, gargantuan titans and multiheaded serpents, it was the thought of featuring in the tabloids that sent me running for the hills. “No paparazzi,” I told him, like he had control of such things. “None.”
    Crap, how were we ever going to get out of the hotel without being swarmed? The press had arrived in force. With all the recent insanity, the police had their hands full with crime scenes and damage control. No one had time to body guard or babysit a Hollywood heartthrob. Apollo could have hired his own bodyguard, of course, but that would only have cramped his style and potentially exposed secrets he’d guarded thus far, like his godhood.
    “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve got it all worked out.”
    Telling me not to worry or obsess was like telling water not to be wet, but I did my best. “What am I going to wear?”
    Apollo took care of that with a phone call and an excessive tip to the maid when she appeared with a bundle of clothes from my room, tucked into a pile of towels she’d brought in case anyone was watching. My pants fit. My shoes from yesterday were badly abused but still wearable, but shirts were out, and bra bands chafed my wings. Luckily, I was not of the size where a bra was an absolute necessity. Certainly not at the level of the stunning starlets Apollo was used to…
    I shut that down. I was not an insecure person or one who obsessed about my appearance, and Apollo wasn’t going to make me that way. He wanted me or he didn’t. After last night, I couldn’t doubt that he wanted me, but for how long?
    I whooped my mental ass, stole