Rise of the Blood by Lucienne Diver

Author:Lucienne Diver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9781619216549
Publisher: Samhain
Published: 2013-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

I woke in a cell. The bars were a dead giveaway.

Those bars seemed to move as I watched them, and my stomach moved with them—warning: contents may have shifted during fight. I fought my guts back down where they belonged just in time to see a familiar face between the bars. Uncle Hector. I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. Well, maybe Nick on my doorstep with pizza, but aside from that… Uncle Hector stared down at me, studying my face.

“Tori, are you okay? They said you’d passed out.” I must have looked at him blankly. “Oh, yeah, I’m your lawyer,” he said with a wink. “No need to mention my background is in corporate law.”

I rose up and reached through the bars to hug him tight. He hugged me back, like I was a little girl again. That was when I became aware of all the other eyes on me from the next cell over. Apparently, I’d been put in some kind of isolation and had a cell to myself, but the one beside me held three women—one with a black eye, one looking scratched as though she’d taken my supposed tumble down the mountain, and the third smelling of vomit. The other women stood as far as they could from her in the cell. All three stared disconcertingly at me.

I wondered if Rhea had gone out like a light when I had and, if not, what she’d been doing with my body while I wasn’t using it to have garnered such attention from next door.

“Um, nothing to see here,” I told them forcefully.

None of them even blinked. It was eerie, like they were waiting for some signal they didn’t want to miss. If they weren’t behind bars, I’d have likened them to the birds from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic and controversial film, massing on the wire.

Uncle Hector looked over his shoulder at them and back to me.

“You know them?” he asked dubiously.

I shook my head.

“Well then, let’s get you out of here.”

“But the questioning…I don’t think I’m free to go.”

“I’ve convinced them it can wait. They know they can’t use anything they might get out of you in this condition. I’d never allow it. Anyway, they’d rather you be my problem at the moment.”

“Oh.” Score one for concussion, I thought. Or maybe it was the mini-quake and the thought of one less prisoner to evacuate if it happened again.

A uniformed officer opened the door for Uncle Hector, and motioned me out. Moving hurt, my head most of all.

“You okay?” he asked again, and I realized I’d never answered him the first time. “Do you need a doctor?”

I started to shake my head and quickly realized that was a bad idea.

“No,” I said instead, “exorcist.”

“We’ll talk outside,” he promised.

I thought that was a damned good idea. There was still paperwork to sign and the warning that I shouldn’t leave town and should keep myself available. Then we were free of the station.

Free. With a goddess possessing me at will, doing gods knew what to attract the unwavering attention of my fellow prisoners.

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