Free Battle for the Blood by Lucienne Diver Page A

in the same direction. I began to slip, and my wings flapped outward, throwing off the grasping arms trying for a new hold. Grabbing and missing threw the thing even farther off-balance, and the skeleton staggered forward…right into the roundhouse kick I launched at chest level. The sternum was right there, a relatively fragile bone for protecting such important infrastructure, all of which was long gone. But something moved behind those dark eye sockets, a flash of intelligence or at least cunning, and it grabbed at my foot as it would have connected, twisting hard. I had to flip fast, knowing I’d go down but lashing out with my other foot for the head, hoping to take the thing with me. It connected, and the skull jerked to the side, but didn’t go flying off or anything wonderfully cinematic.
    I fell to the ground and the thing fell on top of me, mandible gnashing, going for my throat, even though the human mouth was so not meant for ripping out jugulars. It also wasn’t made to animate without muscle or brain or nerves to send messages back and forth between the two. I struck out at those eerily alive eyes, carving fingers into the sockets and fighting down bile as they met something wet and suctiony deep inside. Whatever they struck seemed to pull at my fingers like tentacles, as if they’d yank me in and make me part of them. Horrified, I pulled back, but the skull came with me, mandibles still chomping together. I shook my hands so hard I nearly dislocated my wrists and finally the skull came free, sailing through the air. My fingers were still gunked and starting to lose feeling, as if necrosis was setting in. But I couldn’t think about that now. I had to get to the others. I kicked the rest of the skeleton out of my way and rose to find Hecate stabbing her trowel up through the nose and into the cranial cavity of a skeleton that had her similarly pinned.
    Apollo’s shovel lay abandoned a foot from the god-shaped indentation in the ground where I’d last seen him. I was afraid to stab the blade into the ground to dig for him for fear that I’d hit him somewhere vital, so I knelt beside the disturbed earth and thrust in with my arms. They didn’t go far. Whatever I was becoming, it was clearly not the X-Men ’s Wolverine. No adamantium for me. Just flesh and blood.
    “Hecate!” I called. “A little help here?”
    She snarled, but came to kneel as well. She held out a hand to the dirt, muttering a spell that whipped out of her in a gust of power as she made contact. The dirt suddenly seemed to shift more like sand than hard-packed dirt. We both reached in, arms buried up to our chests, searching for Apollo, but to no avail.
    “Cover your eyes,” Hecate warned, and without waiting to make sure I obeyed, she started to swirl her finger around in the sand as she had the grit at the front gate, and another cyclone started, ready to raise sand out of the pit.
    I yanked my arms from the grave and covered my face with them as the first of the sand lashed out, scouring me as though it would whip the skin from my body and leave me like the skeletons we’d fought. The wind continued to whip, gaining force, and then there was a great sound, like a gasping breath, and I had to risk my eyesight to look.
    I peeked over my concealing arms to see Apollo rise up out of the pit, gasping and filthy and grasping a sword. He flailed it around him like he was blind—which maybe he was from the sand—and still expected to be fighting enemies. Hecate let the wind die and called out to him, telling him to stand down. The tension drained out of Apollo and the sword fell to his side as he let her help him out, coughing up dirt and wheezing with the haste to take in the air he’d been lacking.
    My precog kicked up again, louder this time, flooding me with adrenaline.
    “We have to get out of here,” I told them. I didn’t know if it was site security or more skeletons, but something was coming. Something…
    I tried to