Free Battle for the Blood by Lucienne Diver

locator spell? But it doesn’t work like that. Once the soul is gone from a thing, the connection is severed. I couldn’t trace Perseus back to his body, and if he ever knew where he was buried, he’s forgotten in the thousands of years since. It’s amazing how much memories can fade over time.”
    Hell, witnesses had trouble remembering what they saw on the same day they saw it, I could well imagine spiritual senility.
    My precog kicked me in the gut, whipping my head around just as Apollo said, “Um, girls, maybe we can start there.”
    It didn’t seem like the time to take him to task over calling us “girls”—not when the stuff of nightmares was ripping itself out of the ground farther west of the cistern.

Chapter Five
    By nightmares, I meant a live Halloween set with the skeletons clawing their way out of the earth. Already, bones—sheer bones that should no way, no how have been able to animate—were scrabbling and arm bones were straining to use muscles no longer attached to pull the rest of the body up out of the ground.
    We weren’t exactly loaded down with weaponry, prepared to dig but not take on whatever the hell we were about to face. But Apollo gave a war cry and heaved his shovel up over his shoulder. He ran forward, poised to cut the arms off at the elbows before they could raise the rest of the creature, but another pair of hands suddenly erupted out of the earth, wrapping around his ankles with preternatural accuracy, and he started to go down.
    My wings flapped and I tore at the back of my shirt, ripping it in half so that it clung together just at the yolk and my wings burst free, lifting me off the ground. I swooped toward Apollo, hands out to grab him up out of the fray, but the skeletal hands were unnaturally strong, and they weren’t letting go so easily. There were more now, gripping and binding him to the earth, and I feared my tug of war would tear him in half. Hecate launched herself at the ground, hacking at brittle bones with the trowel she’d brought for excavation, but it was torn almost immediately from her hands.
    She began to mutter a spell. Something rose up behind her, a full skeleton, wearing a sagging clay necklace with more than half the beads missing and the flapping remains of what might once have been a dress…or a sack. Dried patches of hair still clung to the scalp, dark like rot. I opened my mouth to call out a warning as the thing reached for her, but the cry was knocked out of me as arms suddenly banded around my chest, squeezing me from behind like an anaconda and rooting me to the ground.
    Desperately, I fought the grip, kicking and thrashing, clawing at the arms, but with no flesh to rip into, all I hit was bone and the only blood spilled was mine when my nails tore away. My wings flared futilely, panicked at the constriction, but the grip on me only tightened, and my vision started to blacken with every breath I failed to draw.
    This was not going to happen. We weren’t going out like this, at the top of the world, at the hands of mindless monsters.
    The one that held me in its iron grip hissed in my ear. Speech, I knew it even if I couldn’t understand. There was a cadence to it…and a scent. The breath was fetid with long-ago death, the kind that had fertilized new and poisonous life, like whatever motes had sickened archaeologists who’d opened ancient tombs without proper care, giving rise to lingering death and legends of mummy’s curses.
    As I struggled for breath, Apollo began to sink into the ground, pulled by the innumerable hands clawing at him. I fought all the harder. I had to get free before I blacked out. I had to get to him.
    I launched back with my heel, hammering away at the brittle shinbone of my captor. I heard a crack, but the arms around me didn’t even loosen, and so I didn’t stop, battering at the same spot again and again until the entire leg buckled and the skeleton canted to the side. I took swift advantage, hurling my weight