Page 14 of Blood of Hercules
I didn’t lower my weapon.
Charlie sobbed quietly.
The excruciating sensation in my sternum slowly drained away, and everything blurred.
Noises, sounds, movements—it was all a jumbled haze.
Time warped.
Charlie nuzzled sleepily against my side. I blinked into awareness.
Dim green lights flickered above, and a familiar ratty couch was beneath me. Night had fallen in the trailer, and snow fell softly outside in the darkness.
The storm had passed.
Charlie was asleep under my arm, and Nyx was wrapped tightlyaround my torso, invisible beneath my sweatshirt. The trailer was full of strangers buzzing with energy. One of them said something about the neighbors calling it in.
Two of the strangers turned to me.
I flinched and tried to scoot back on the couch, to put distance between us.
The male and female medic didn’t care. They leaned closer and invaded my personal space, the gold lion of the House of Zeus flashing on their ID badges.
If I’d had any energy, I would have screamed.
I barely mustered a grunt.
They dabbed something along the largest cuts on my face, hands, and feet, and I shivered.
“Stay still,” the female medic snapped. “This is extremely expensiveSpartan healing gel. There’s only a small amount left. Once it’s gone—you’re out of luck.” Her lips pursed with disgust.
The problem isn’t the medicine; it’s that you’re touching me.
“You should be grateful we’re using it at all,” the male medic scoffed. “This bottle is expired. Otherwise, we’d never waste it on you. Olympian Spartan laboratories takeyearsexperimenting and designing to create these miracle drugs.”
I wished it hadn’t expired.
With a deep breath, I hummed a classical tune and focused on the positives—a few feet away, Mother was being zipped into a body bag by people in white hazmat suits, and Father was outside in the snow arguing as he was questioned.
Good times.
The trailer door slammed.
“Stay still,” the male medic snapped as he squeezed my cheeks and dabbed at my left eye.
He’s probably never taken math above calculus. Carl Gauss would never speak to me like this.
A tall policeman—dressed in black with fancy Spartan guns onboth hips—knelt in front of me, and the wild horse of the House of Artemis flashed on his ID. It had feral bloodred eyes.
The policeman clicked on a recorder and spoke in a low voice like he was talking to a skittish animal. “We just need you to tell us what happened. Did you get these wounds from your father? Did he hit you?” he asked softly, like it mattered.
We both knew it didn’t.
Battery and assault weren’t prosecuted anymore—there was onlyonecrime the Spartan system expended resources to combat.
“Not my father,” I corrected, and my voice sounded strange. “Foster father, and yes. He hurt m-me.”
The policeman’s eyes narrowed with interest. “And who hurt your mother? Who killed her, do you rem?—”
