Havoc Rising Read online

  The fish were cooperating when the guys could actually get the fly beyond the engines, but the damned sea lions were playing havoc with the fish once they were hooked, plucking them off my anglers’ lines as if they were freakin’ raspberries at a U-pick farm. Mercifully—for the fish, anyway—they weren’t getting hooked often.

  Holy crap. I hate these days. Thank Zeus it’s almost over. “We got about twenty minutes left before we need to head in,” I said, ever hopeful that the guys would have some sympathy for their seasick friend and just call it off early.

  “I sure would like to have caught one of those yellowtail while we were here,” replied the bulkiest of the trio of clients, with an attitude. He had a belly that his very expensive and scientifically developed fishing shirt—fresh from a catalog—strained to contain, and his cigar breath made me a little queasy. His pudgy face was the color of a cooked lobster, and every time he took his hat off to wipe back his thinning hair, the stark tan line nearly made me laugh. I could deal with that crap, but the guy hadn’t managed a cast longer than fifteen feet all day, and now he wanted one of the most demanding fish you could catch in Southern California. Yeah, right.

  Of course, it was always a guy like that who set a world record—no concept, no clue, and no skill, but all the luck in the world. That was fishing, and that was why I usually loved it: anything could happen. But today, it was just irritating.

  When we finally got back to the charter dock at the landing on Mission Bay where I kept my boat, the sick guy stumbled away even before I’d finished tying her off. His fancy fishing shirt was stained colors never seen on anyone healthy, and the odor that wafted off him as he staggered up the dock was indescribable.

  The other two gathered their rods, cooler, and camera gear, and the beefy guy handed me a ten-dollar bill, giving me a half smile. “It sure would have been nice to land a few more fish, Steve.” His tone suggested I hadn’t done enough—a sentiment backed up by the measly tip. “But I guess that’s why they call it ‘fishing’ and not ‘catching.’”

  That was the statement of someone ticked off about not catching any fish but wanting to seem like an experienced angler—I knew that from my many years of fishing all over the world. Being stiffed on the tip didn’t bother me because I didn’t do that job for the money, but I freakin’ hated that saying. “Well, maybe next time we won’t have so many dogs to contend with,” I said as I began to stow loose gear and collect the day’s trash in preparation for cleaning the boat. “If you’d have hooked that yellowtail you wanted today, you never would have landed it.”

  “You may be right, but it still would have been fun. See you next time.” He waved dismissively as he walked down the dock.

  If there were any justice in the world, he would jam that seven-hundred-dollar four-piece fly rod into the railing on the way to his rental car and turn it into a ten-piece toothpick. That didn’t happen. I spent the next few hours cleaning out the custom twenty-six-foot center console boat I chartered, trying to figure out how the guy had gotten vomit underneath the cap rail. I mean, jeez, I had to contort myself just to get at it with a brush.

  As I scrubbed, a familiar voice came from behind me.

  “Rough day out there, Cap’n Dore?”

  The boat rocked a bit, but I chose to continue scrubbing rather than turn and face him. “Now, how the hell would you know that, you squid’s dick?” I scrubbed just a bit harder. “Why on Earth were we the only ones harangued by sea lions all day? There had to have been three dozen boats off La Jolla, and I got to host the Pinniped Fest, you fishy-smelling jackass. And get your slimy hands off my clean boat.”

  “Aw, come on, dude,” my visitor said in a conciliatory tone. “Those guys would have killed anything you landed today, and you know it. Clymene was just making sure they didn’t get any spawners.”

  “Well, how come you didn’t at least warn me about the wind? I mean, I expect NOAA to get the weather wrong, but for cripes’ sake, don’t you control it or something, being an all-powerful Sea Titan and all?”

  I finally turned around to see my weathered old friend straddling the cap rail of my boat with one foot on the dock and the other dangling inside it. As usual, he was wearing a hideous shirt, unbuttoned to his navel. The shirt was some bizarre combination of yellows, reds, and greens, like something out of Picasso’s acid trip, but at least it fit him. A massive, bushy, dingy-white beard covered his chest.

  “Could that shirt get any more obnoxious, Ned?”

  My beach-bum friend—Nereus the Titan, Protector of the Sea, in self-imposed exile in Southern California—always made me think of Santa Claus at the beach after a two-day tequila bender. And it figured that Clymene, one of his many sea-nymph daughters, was encouraging the fish-stealing pains in the ass we’d encountered that day.

  “Did the dudes leave any beer behind?” Nereus asked, ever hopeful.

  I’d never been much of a drinker because, frankly, I just never liked the taste, so any spare beers would have gone to Nereus. However, he was out of luck. I shook my head, and he sighed.

  Despite being a Protogenoi, or Old One, one of the many powerful otherworldly beings that came to our world from time to time, I considered him a friend and always gave him the stuff that got left behind.

  “You got any cheese puffs left in your bag, then?”

  “No beer and no cheese puffs, Ned, but I think I have some corn chips if you want them. And I’ve got water if you want it,” I added, trying to sound generous.

  Ned had laid himself back to bask in the sun on the wide cap rail along my boat’s starboard bow and closed his eyes. “Water? Ugh. No way, man. You know what fish do in that stuff?” He made a face as he got comfortable. “But I’ll take them corn chips. Oh, you hear about the bombing earlier today?” he asked as I tossed the bag at him.

  I expected it to smack him and then bounce onto the dock beyond, but instead, he caught it as if he’d been watching me the whole time, though he never even opened his eyes. His action made me smile, and I shook my head, impressed, as I resumed cleaning.

  “No, you know I don’t have a regular radio onboard. Middle East somewhere?” I just assumed he was making conversation, but I probably should have known better, given who he was.

  “Nah, man. New York City.” He opened the bag of chips. “Metropolitan freakin’ Museum of Art. Suicide bomber. Kablooie. Took out seventeen people, injured another thirty-three. They can’t find any remains of the bomber or the bomb. Not even residue, man. Nada.” He was munching loudly as he spoke. “Happened right at the entrance. I guess none of the art got damaged, but some kinda cool old cup was stolen while they were sortin’ stuff out. Thief totally ransacked some sheik’s private collection that was on loan to the museum. Curators said it was the least valuable item in the collection and just a simple bronze cup, but I’m hearin’ different, dude.”

  I climbed off the boat with my gear and began to spray the two rods I’d brought and break them down. I loved days when people brought their own gear because the cleanup was fast. The only problem was today it gave me time to wonder about the bombing. I’d seen a lifetime of bombings, many lifetimes in fact, but Ned wouldn’t have brought up a mere suicide bombing if it didn’t relate more directly to him and, by extension, to me.

  “So?” I asked. “What are you hearing? And I assume you don’t mean on the news.” I finished the rods, zipped up my gear bag, and walked off the dock.

  Ned flip-flopped along behind me, talking through a mouthful of corn chips and getting crumbs in his long beard. I could smell them upwind. Ugh.

  “Cup was special,” he managed to spit out with a spray of crumbs. “And, dude, you know I don’t watch TV or nothing. You humans sensationalize everything, man. I just got a vibe that somethin’s happenin’.”

  I had been involved with seemingly benign situations turning out to be omi
nous—and vice versa—for millennia, so I knew better than to jump to conclusions just because Ned had a hunch. Heck, for all I knew his hunch was a reaction to too much skunky beer, sun, and stale cheese puffs.

  “Well, if you’re right, I’m sure I’ll hear about it soon enough from Athena.” I put the gear in my truck. “I’m heading home and getting some rest. And, hey, find out where I can get a couple of nice white sea bass for my guys on Friday, would ya? They’re good guys, and I know they’ll release them.”

  “I dunno, dude. I’ll see what I can do. Take ’em easy.” He strolled off toward the seawall at the end of the marina, munching as he went.

  CHAPTER 2

  While I was driving the short distance home down Rosecrans, the news of the bombing was still all over the radio. I flipped through a couple of stations and got the gist of the story, which was basically what Ned had told me: suicide bomber in the entrance to the Met, fifty people either injured or dead.

  The odd part was that absolutely no remains of the bomber were recovered. They couldn’t tell what kind of device had caused the explosion, even though surveillance videos showed the guy bolting through the Great Hall and then whammo.

  The detail about the cup was a brief side note—clearly not considered significant beyond the fact that it made the story that much weirder. Every major tourist attraction, airport, train station, bus depot, and government building across the country was on lockdown, and all I could do was wonder if we were having a repeat of 9/11. As horrible as that had been, at least it was a purely human event. I only hoped that the attack in the Met was as well.

  By the time I pulled into my driveway in Roseville, on Point Loma just a few miles from my boat, I knew it was much worse than a terrorist attack. Unless some museum worker wanting to complete his cups-of-the-world collection had snagged it, it was too coincidental—odd bombing and odd theft. I didn’t believe in coincidences. I did, however, believe Ned’s assessment that the cup was more important than they knew or were admitting. It had to have been, or he just wouldn’t have cared. And that was all I needed to raise my hackles ever so slightly. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time an artifact of profound and frightening supernatural power had been judged as insignificant simply because mundane humans just couldn’t see or feel the object’s true nature. The fact that I hadn’t heard from Athena or her Metis Foundation only meant that things hadn’t quite reached catastrophic proportions for all mankind yet.

  That was when I noticed the lights were on inside the den of my small house. Crap. Apparently, I was wrong about the catastrophic thing.

  I hated when she showed up like that, and I was also still a bit grumpy from the tough day fishing. After I opened the two-car garage, I drew out the process of putting my stuff away, out of pure defiance. I dropped a garbage can lid and banged around a bit to emphasize the fact that I was home but not coming inside.

  After delaying the inevitable as long as I could, I closed the garage, kicked my boots off, and walked inside. The door from my garage opened up into my meager little outdated kitchen, which was separated from the den only by a counter and some cabinets.

  “Honey, I’m home,” I shouted. No response. I plodded toward the den—sweaty, fishy, and hungry—and there she was, sitting on the arm of my leather chair, picking at the stuff on my fly-tying desk. As usual, she was dressed to the nines in a formal gray lawyer-type high-powered business suit, her fiery-red hair pulled into a tight bun at the back of her head. Her flawless beauty combined with her inexorable manner would have been intimidating enough in a boardroom if she ever dared show it in a mundane setting. I could also see the raw power she embodied as a kind of intense blue-white aura around her, which beings like her specifically hid from humans because our minds normally couldn’t handle it.

  She was one of the most powerful of Ned’s fellow Protogenoi brethren still here in our world, and she was stunning to behold in every way. Even her voice was beautiful, and I was the only human she’d ever allowed to see her in her true form. I had seen men fold in total acquiescence to her disguised presence and instantly agree to whatever she might ask of them. Those poor fools unlucky enough to witness even a portion of her power and force of will would have gladly sacrificed themselves for her.

  I’d worked for her for over three thousand years, so I knew better, and thanks to one of her gifts to me, I was also immune. I stood behind her, hands on hips and a bit bone weary, staring at the various fly-tying head-cement stains on my carpet, trying to figure out the best way to address her, given that I knew why she was in my den. I always knew why she showed up, and it was never good. That was just my nature.

  “I will never understand your fascination with the remains of dead animals,” she said, dragging a fingernail through the feathers, fur, and flash material I use to tie flies. “There are far easier ways to catch a fish if you must do so.” She tossed a bright-blue bucktail back onto the desk, finally turning her head just enough to see me. Even in profile, her face was perfect, far too perfect to be human, and I could see the brilliant blue of her eyes flare with an intensity rivaled only by an electrical discharge. “I take it everything is now arranged to your satisfaction in the garage, Diomedes?”

  “Well, sometimes you just gotta shift stuff around,” I said offhandedly. “Haven’t you ever looked at something and thought, ‘Wow, that’s really annoying there—I just gotta move it right now’?” I made my way back to my bedroom, mumbling, “I’ve got some stuff in my den I’d like to move right now,” as I took my shirt off.

  To be honest, I wasn’t really irritated at her, but rather at the situation. Part of me wanted to just go back to being a normal mortal man, but a significant part of me knew what was at stake and refused to let me back down. I longed for the days when the worst thing I had to think about was riding into battle with my men at Troy. But apparently, like my father before me, this entity sitting in my den favored me above all others, so she chose me to fight against those creatures and beings that normal men could not.

  My benefactor never cared about the emotional or physical wear and tear that I felt, because she wasn’t human. Far from it, in fact. While she’d been known by many names over the course of history, I first knew her back in ancient Greece as the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare. Immortal or not, I was still human. Given that she was from another plane of existence, I never fully understood her motives, but since she was always intent on protecting humankind, I never really cared why she did what she did.

  For the past half century or so, Athena had run the Metis Foundation, one of the most well-respected think tanks in the world. The foundation’s primary focus was finding peaceful solutions to human conflict, and they were pretty good at it. I knew her efforts included the Fourth Treaty of Paris, the Treaty of Versailles, the Treaty of San Francisco, and that whole NATO thing. In fact, I Googled “list of treaties” once, just for fun, and realized she’d had a hand in just about every one that came up. My work for her involved less civilized solutions to much less human issues.

  “Don’t be so brash, Diomedes,” Athena said, her steely voice reverberating in my head. “We have business to discuss.”

  “Can it wait until I’m clean, or is it something I can do smelling like dead fish?” I yelled. I started the shower and hopped in. When I finished a few minutes later, I put on some sweats and a T-shirt and came back out front to where I could hear her banging around in my kitchen cabinets.

  “Don’t you ever have anything to drink here?” Athena asked before I could make it down the hall.

  “Hell, if I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake. Now, what’s up this time, Athena?” I was pretty sure it was going to involve the New York thing, but I never quite knew with her. “And why can’t you at least bring food when you come over?”

  “Fine, if it will allow you to focus,” she said, her voice becoming more stern as the aura of her po
wer surged ever so slightly. “What would you like to eat?”

  Score one for me. I walked into the kitchen and leaned against the counter next to her as she stopped searching through my cabinets and glared at me, her blue eyes alternating between the color of the deep ocean in bright sunlight and its shade right after a storm.

  “How about Chinese? I know a good place. They have awesome wonton soup and an outstanding shrimp with lobster sauce. Ooh, maybe some pho. Do you like Vietnamese? I know a good place for that, too.” I liked to see how far I could push her before she got really mad.

  Her eyes began to glow an intense blue, and her aura flashed so brightly I squinted involuntarily.

  Time to stop. “Pho is good. There’s a place right down the street,” I said, lowering my voice while staring down at the counter to avoid eye contact.

  “It will be here as soon as they finish it.” She walked back into the den. “Can we get down to business now?”

  I had no idea if she’d really ordered or how she might have ordered. I also had no idea how she expected the food to get here. As far as I knew, the place didn’t even deliver. Even after three millennia, the limits of her abilities were beyond me.

  “I presume you’ve heard about the suicide bombing in New York.” Athena shifted her weight from one leg to both while placing her hands flat on my counter. She stared at the cracked Formica in front of her. “There’s more to it than the mortal authorities know. Are you familiar with this?”

  She produced a photograph from her jacket pocket and passed it down the counter to me. It was a mug shot of a funky hexagonal vase made out of a dull grayish metal. A museum tag in the lower left corner read “Beaker with etched decoration.” It couldn’t have been more than six inches tall, and it flared out at the top like the horn of an old-fashioned gramophone. It had a few designs etched into it, but altogether it was unremarkable. It was just an old bronze cup.