Battle for the Blood Read Online Free PDF Page A

delicacy. “And, thus, family.”
    I stared at him now. The gorgons and the Graeae were related? My family tree kept getting weirder and weirder. If I looked closely, their ropy hair, like long-neglected dreadlocks, might possibly resemble sluggish serpents.
    “Family,” the one with the tooth hissed. “They don’t call, they don’t write.”
    “Ah, but it seems they send care packages,” the eyeless, toothless one said slyly, coming closer to me.
    It was all I could do not to give ground and show weakness as she leaned in to sniff me like a bloodhound. I planted my feet instead, ready to fly into a frenzy if she tried anything more. My wings flared, wanting to stretch and prep for launch, and she fell back, searching the vicinity blindly. “What’s that? Wings? Who do you have with you? Not the trickster. He is forbidden.”
    The one with the eye had held back, taking it all in. When she started cackling, my head wanted to split open right down the center. It was as sharp as a hatchet to the skull. The other sisters joined in, cackling with her, sharing a joke they hadn’t even heard. Unless they had…unless they shared some kind of unspoken communication, which was creepy on a strategic level. Between Apollo and me, we could take them, no problem. Even at two against three, they were frankly outnumbered. But three who thought as one, forming an unholy trinity… It was a concept that occurred one way or another throughout mythology. Numbers didn’t have any meaning we didn’t assign them, but there were certain numbers—3, 12 and 666 just to name a few—that held untold eons of belief to reinforce their strength. I wouldn’t say I trembled, but my certainty fled.
    “This is the one!” the sighted sister crowed. “She will fight the Bringer of Plagues.”
    “Ah, but will she win?” queried one of her sisters. I didn’t look to see which one. I didn’t take my eyes away from the single opalescent eye staring at me with a mix of glee and avarice I didn’t understand.
    “I’ll do what?” I asked, feeling queasy. Bringer of Plagues didn’t sound at all promising. “Apollo, what do you know about this?”
    He was still next to me, but also not. His gaze had unfocused, and it was clear he was miles away, maybe entire continents. “Prophecy,” he said, largely to himself, caught up in suddenly inspired foreseeing.
    “Give me the eye,” the toothless sister insisted. “I want to see her. Does she look good enough to eat?”
    I stared at Apollo and debated slapping sense into him or just grabbing him and running, but settled for shaking him by the shoulder. I met no resistance. He wobbled but didn’t go down.
    The toothless one plucked the eye right from the forehead of the other, and a fight ensued. The third chomped on the arm of the one now holding the eye, blood gushing out as she shrieked and dropped the orb, which splatted on the ground and rolled in the blood, taking on a rose-red cast.
    My wings were desperate to unfurl, and this time I gave them free reign, tearing my shirt off so that they could reach their full extension and facing the sisters bare-chested as a harpy. I gathered my legs and leapt up into the air, making a beeline for the bouncing eye, the demented little deejay in my brain playing “On Top of Spaghetti”, imagining the eye as the lost meatball. That’s all it is, I told myself, diving for it and trying to ignore the gory, gooshy feel of it in my hand as I flew with it back to Apollo. Two of the sisters were scrabbling about on the floor, trying to find the eye by feel. The third was listening to the wing beats, sniffing the air, figuring it out.
    “She’s stolen the eye!” she wailed to her sisters. “Stop her.”
    She lurched my way blindly, driven by her other senses, and I knocked her aside with a wing as she came close, sending her nosediving into the bones of her previous meals. The second sister fell over her feet, and the third mystically veered around them,