Page 43 of Apollo

“Ito-san? Oje?”

Holy shit.

The exact monster to whom Lois Lance now shouted, emerging onto the concourse in his tailored yakuza boss finery, with a dozen of his wakagashira lieutenants keeping step right behind.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Hercules was the warrior, not him. Expressions like showdown, faceoff, throwing it all in . . . Apollo gladly left those blood and guts to his brother. Direct approach without careful planning always turned messy. Worse, unruly.

A very small step existed between unruly and deadly.

The tiny space into which this whole scene shifted, once Lois Lance uttered those incredulous words.

At her Uncle Ito.

Yeah, that version of an Ito Oje. Perhaps the only person who could walk onto this concourse and make Irowen look ready to escape from it. The mob boss with the manicured complexion who changed hers to a horrified pallor. Apollo almost caved to a visible startle from just one hurried glance at her, spared as she backed away to press against the tall planter.

But he had a bigger mission now. To lurch the other direction. To calculate his best course for intercepting the yakuza procession in as few seconds as possible.

Too late.

Lois bested him to the deed, totally unknowingly, with her prominent hail.

As soon as the man responded by sweeping the little writer into an affectionate hug, Apollo threw a what-the-hell look toward his brother. He nearly doubled the intensity when Hercules decided it was fine to react like a goddamned salt pillar, motionless except for the back off wave he brandished in return.

Apollo fumed and bared his teeth. “Herc? What the h—”

“Give her a second, for fuck’s sake,” his brother snarled. “He’s actually her uncle. Maybe we’ll all just be able to walk away with what we want.”

Sometimes the I’m-a-god thing was an advantage. Only by borrowing that preternatural strength did he restrain the urge to laugh aloud. Who was this guy, and what had he done with his brother?

Herc was the one who always negotiated with his fists first, especially with criminals known for the same tactics, before remembering the walking-away part of the deal. As for everyone getting what they wanted . . . well, shit. Was the guy too far-gone over Lois that he hadn’t heard Apollo’s explanation about Irowen’s prize for this risk? Ito had kidnapped her sister, damn it. So unless Kaw’s recon team had missed the yakuza henchmen coming back to the airport with Genny, Herc’s pipe dream was still grossly clogged.

Never more than when Natasha Korra appeared.

Who, from the moment she stepped out after clearing Customs, blinked with more amazement at seeing Lois out here, instead of the oyabun and his dozen gang officers.

“Holy shit,” Apollo spat, in perfect tandem with his brother’s growl. Only after that recognition did they jerk their heads around, realizing Lois had muffled them—before turning into a lunging wildcat right at Natasha.

“Eeeeaaagh!”

That was when some invisible giant put his cosmic meaty fist on the time crank—and every second tripled its speed. Quadrupled.

To all the mortals in the room, it was just some trick of their heightened nerves and racing adrenalin. But he and Herc knew better. The chronological crack was entirely possible because the lyre string had walked into the room along with the smug little starlet who greeted Lois as if she hadn’t just double-crossed her lover and now planned to control a huge swath of the human race.

Who picked at a hangnail as a pair of Ito’s men restrained Lois, only to be beaten back by Hercules.

Who gave Lois a doe-eyed stare while her friend frantically tried to explain about the dangers of the string. Who even kept up with the bubble machine eyes and the full-pout mouth when exposing that she knew allll about the string—because she was the one who now controlled it.

Except she didn’t.

Not how she thought she did.

Not even during the moments it took all of Apollo’s self-control to wait out the little grifter, knowing she’d swiftly expose her ignorance as well as her arrogance. That less than sixty of those speedy seconds later, she’d draw out the strand as if it were some diamond fairy thing retrieved from the den of a dragon then borne across eight mystical kingdoms, instead of a forty-centimeter line of stretched cow gut.

If only that damn beef rope wasn’t so ready to support her fantasy.

It was helped, of course, by its sensitivity to Apollo’s new nearness, manifested by its new vibrations. But the string’s soft, mesmeric melody wouldn’t last for long. He already knew that much, just from the few times he’d invoked the power of the lyre himself.