Christopher Golden - Tears of the Furies

They started up the main staircase toward the roof. She let her senses become attuned to the air, moved it around, felt for the presence of others, just in case Gull’s associates were lingering nearby. Though there was no sign they were not alone, still she lowered her voice.

"From the moment we set off on our journey with Mr. Gull, you will have an assignment of your own."

Danny paused on the stairs and gave her a secretive glance. "Yeah?" he asked in a whisper.

"You must do something for Arthur and me. You must keep watch over the girl, Jezebel, to see if there is any sign of duplicity among Gull and his companions."

"Jezebel?"

"It shouldn’t be difficult, Daniel. You can barely keep your eyes off of her," Ceridwen said, smiling sweetly.

He grinned. "It’ll be pretty painless. But why Jezebel and not that Hawkins guy? She’s pretty wacko, but he seems way more slimy."

Ceridwen nodded. "Eve will be looking after Mr. Hawkins for precisely that reason. He is too dangerous for you to make an enemy of him. Should he take a dislike to you, Hawkins could kill you out of sheer boredom."

She started up the stairs once more, but Danny did not move. Ceridwen looked back down at him. "What is it?"

He shrugged. "Just trying to decide if I’m insulted by that or not." After a moment he seemed to determine that he was not, for he started up after her.

They made their way to the roof with no further incident. There was a small stairwell that went up from the east end of the fourth floor corridor, and at the top was a door. It stood open, and a cool breeze swept in from outside. Sunshine splashed onto the threshold, and when Ceridwen and Danny stepped out onto the roof, they found a glorious blue-sky day. Jezebel’s weather manipulation had been only the beginning, creating a chain reaction that altered the weather pattern for the entire city.

"Her magick is sort of like a minor league version of yours, huh?" Danny muttered to her as they joined the others.

Ceridwen shot him a hard look. Jezebel was nothing like her. The girl bent the weather to her will, instead of cajoling it, nurturing and loving it. And Ceridwen was bonded to the elements, not the weather. Yet the comparison grated on her.

"I was beginning to worry about you," Conan Doyle called as he started toward them. He was neatly attired and his clothing was extremely old fashioned, but he did not look as proper as he often did.

Gull was with him, and beyond the misshapen man were Hawkins and Jezebel, watching like carrion birds awaiting the demise of their feast. But the show really belonged to Gull and Conan Doyle. Each of the two men held an object in his hand, a heavy stone carved into the shape of a pyramid and engraved with strange sigils unfamiliar to Ceridwen.

"All right," Eve said, "how does this thing work, exactly?"

Ceridwen stared at her in surprise. She was sitting on the far edge of the roof with her skin-tight natural denim-clad legs over the side, propped back on her arms with her face upturned toward the sun.

The mother of all vampires, basking in the light of day.

"Eve?" Ceridwen said. "What are you… how?"

The wind swept Eve’s hair across her eyes and the vampire tossed her head like some Hollywood starlet and gave them all a Cheshire cat grin. She stretched backward, obviously relishing the sunlight. The dark green sweater she wore rode up, exposing the smooth flesh of her midsection.

"How, what how?" she asked coyly.

"How come you’re not crispy fried?" Danny put in.

Conan Doyle cleared his throat, and when Ceridwen looked at him he gave her a meaningful glance. "Mr. Gull has come to us armed with one of the things Eve most desired. A spell that cloaks her in hidden shadows all day long. The sunlight never reaches her skin."

Ceridwen frowned and left Danny to watch the mages at work, while she walked over to join Eve. She did not sit on the roof’s edge, however. Instead, she stood and stared down at the vampire.

"That was rash, don’t you think? Accepting his help? You owe him, now. You’ve made a deal with the devil."

Eve snorted derisively. "I’ve made deals with lots of devils in my time. I’m already damned."

For a long moment Ceridwen only stood there. "All right. Just watch him. And watch yourself. You never know what you’ve agreed to without realizing it."

"Eve?" Gull said.

Ceridwen eyed him cautiously. He was malformed, and she most clearly found him hideous, but she saw something tragically noble in his features and bearing. That and his charm combined to make him far more dangerous than any mere mage.

"Yeah?" Eve replied. She did not turn toward him.

"You asked how it worked. Quite simple, really. Or relatively so." He gestured at an oval ring of shimmering energy that opened like an iris on the rooftop. "Scattered across the world are loci that Sweetblood and his acolytes — Doyle and I — placed there well over a century ago. The one nearest the isle of Lesbos is in Istanbul. There must be three loci for a Blackgate to function. One to open it on this side, like a key. The second, at our chosen destination. In this case, Istanbul. The third to follow after, closing the Blackgate. Leaving such portals open is bad magick to begin with, but leave enough of them open, and the entire time-space weave could come undone and collapse."

"Don’t cross the streams," Eve muttered, eyes closed, head still thrown back. "Thanks, Egon."

Ceridwen ignored her. Gull seemed puzzled but said nothing.

"Blackgate?" Danny asked.

"As you see," Conan Doyle replied, and he gestured to Gull. The two mages had used a spell to create the foundation for the portal, but now they separated, one moving to the left of the shimmering oval and the other to the right. Then, simultaneously they raised their loci and touched the tips of those runic pyramids together. At the moment of contact, the portal ceased its shimmering and became a sheer, vertical oval of solid blackness. Like an oil spill painted on air.

"Right. Blackgate," Danny repeated.

"Mr. Gull will go first," Conan Doyle said, glancing warily at Gull. There was clearly a part of him that saw this as a trap, and Ceridwen could not blame him. "Then the rest of you, one at a time. And I will follow behind, closing the gate."

"Let’s saddle up and get a move on, then," Eve said, climbing to her feet picking up her long, dark brown leather jacket, and striding toward the Blackgate. "I could use a shot of ouzo."

Ceridwen exchanged a glance with Arthur, a look rife with meaning. She would go second, right after Nigel Gull. And if anything should go wrong, if somehow Arthur was killed in transition or magickally rerouted or something equally unpleasant happened, she would slit Gull’s throat and stay by his corpse to make sure it remained dead.

"As you say, Eve," Conan Doyle agreed. "As you say."

As night fell over Athens, she lingered in the darkness between two of the columns of the Thesseion, the temple dedicated to Hephaestus. The progeny of man wandered in and around the temple as though the whole of the city were some hideous beehive. Yet there was no veneration in their visits, not an ounce of worship. The Doric columns of that proud temple stood as a faded testament to an ancient way and all that remained of the mystical power that once had held sway here was the brittle residue that sifted down from the ceilings and columns.

Time had moved on and left a void within her, an ache in her heart. Once upon a time there had been great deeds performed in this city, by both gods and men. Now there was merely aimless meandering. What little she understood of the modern age told her that mortals aspired to very little beyond their own mortality.

Fools. She wished she could erase them from the land, or at least instill within them the sense of awe that their ancestors had once had for the gods and monsters of old.