Christopher Golden - Tears of the Furies

The hunt had begun.

Kerameikos hardly looked like a cemetery at all. The tombs were mostly ancient stone arranged in long, low walls and many of the markers were simple columns. If not for the dead, it might have been an intriguing collection of ancient ruins, something that had crumbled away to nothing but those walls and the patches of grass and bare earth around them. But the names on the markers gave the place away.

Clay twitched his tail and paused on the edge of a low wall, lifting his cat-nose to the night breeze, whiskers twitching. A scent had caught his attention, yet he was certain it was not Medusa’s. Something else was here as well. Watchful, he leaped down from the wall and trotted behind a tree. In addition to ancient stones, the boneyard was filled with trees. Yet they were sparse, nowhere growing close enough to be considered a wood. And though their branches were not bare, there was something about the way they twisted at odd angles, stretching upward, that gave them a skeletal aspect.

The cat darted silently across a scrubby stretch of grass and then paused once more, crouching behind a short stone wall. He sniffed the air, purring in quiet curiosity. His rough tongue tasted the wind. Beyond that low wall was an enormous whitewashed stone monument topped with a marble statue of a bull. In the moonshadow beneath that bull’s heavy belly, Squire appeared, sliding from the deepest dark into the gray night, like a newborn from its mother’s womb.

The hobgoblin clutched the marble legs of the bull and poked his head out from beneath it, surveying as much of the cemetery as he could see from that vantage point. He saw the cat and nodded solemnly toward Clay, then slipped into the moonshadow again and was gone. The entire thing had taken only seconds and been executed with more stealth than Clay would ever have given the hobgoblin credit for. It was not that he had never worked with Squire before, but that the ‘goblin behaved like such a buffoon so often that it was easy to forget how competent he was in the worst situations.

The shapeshifter did not bother searching the sky or the treetops for Dr. Graves. The ghost would have made himself invisible on all spectrums. There was no telling how sensitive Medusa’s senses were.

Beyond the marble bull was a small hill, and Clay discovered a narrow path among shrubs and trees. Claws scratching hardscrabble earth, the cat slipped between two shrubs and made an alternate trail for himself, moving up the hill parallel to the footpath. His ears twitched, and he arched his back, barely able to keep from hissing. Wings fluttered, and several birds burst from a nearby tree. Clay could not be sure if they had become skittish because of his presence, or if something else had spooked them.

A shudder passed through his feline form, and his hackles went up. Something wasn’t right here. Some presence was fouling this place.

The Gorgon. It has to be. If anything else was here, she would have killed it.

At the top of the hill Clay moved beneath the shrubs back onto the main path and paused there. The wind died in that very same moment. No sound reached him save the distant noises of the city around the cemetery. On a broad stretched of hard-baked ground from which more of those skeletal-finger trees reached for the night sky, there were perhaps two dozen stone crypts spread across the hilltop. They were small, barely larger than an ordinary coffin, and at first glance, it seemed they had been arrayed there with no thought to symmetry, as if a random wind had scattered them across the hill. Clay paused, staring at them, and after a moment realized he had missed the organization of the stone coffins. They formed a rough circle, not unlike the standing stones found all over the United Kingdom.

The lid was off the largest of the crypts. Beside it was a pair of dead rabbits. Clay stepped out of hiding at the top of the path and started to creep toward the circle of stone coffins. As he reached the nearest of them, his ears twitched again and he heard a sound. A wet, slick, sucking sound. And then a crack of bone.

The cat peered around the corner, fur brushing stone, and spied the open crypt with its lid slid off and propped on the ground. The copper scent of blood was in the air, and he saw the red that stained the rabbits’ pelts. As he watched, a handful of tiny bones flew up out of the coffin into the moonlight and landed in the dirt. A low hiss came from within, and something shifted and gleamed in the dark. A serpent slid its head over the stone rim, as though saddened at the discarding of the bones. A second and third followed. Clay froze, unsure if he could be seen but unwilling to make a single motion that might give him away.

The serpents receded, and the sounds of sucking and gnawing began again.

Clay hesitated for a moment. As a shapeshifter he could read living things, could replicate any human, any animal, any creature who ever lived. Almost. He focused for a moment on the horror that lay in hideous repose within that stone coffin gnawing on the bones of rabbits, and he knew with certainty that he could not take that shape. It was a mystery for another day, but he suspected it had to do with her appearance being the result of a curse and not something crafted by the Maker.

The cat slipped from one stone coffin to the next. If he tried to rush across the circle, he might well give himself away. Instead he moved on to the next, and then the next, swift but silent. Within two coffins’ distance, he paused again. There was the crunch of small bones snapping, followed by the most intoxicatingly female sigh he had ever heard. Clay froze. There came the sound of shifting limbs from within that large stone coffin. Still the cat stayed out of sight.

The moonlight threw a shadow past the coffin behind which he was hiding. It was tall and full-breasted, and atop its head a nest of shadow vipers coiled. The cat’s hackles went up again, and Clay forced himself not to hiss at the shadow on the ground, so close. There came a wet crack, and in his mind he could practically see the remains of a rabbit shattering against the very crypt he hid behind. The shadow ducked down, perhaps snatching up one of the other dead rabbits, and then retreated. He listened to the sound of Medusa settling once more into the coffin.

Ears pricked forward, the cat prowled to the next crypt. The next one along the circle was his destination. Something shifted in the darkness now, and it did not come from ahead of him, but behind.

Clay turned, tail twitching, and scanned the cemetery and the branches of the strange grove of trees that surrounded this circle of the dead. All was still. The leaves hung seemingly lifeless, no wind at all to disturb them. Still the cat let its gaze linger a moment. Then, out of his peripheral vision, he saw something else move. Twisting to the right, he saw a patch of moonshadow beneath a distant monument give birth to Squire. The hobgoblin crawled carefully, silently onto the ground. His eyes gleamed in the dark. When he spotted the cat, the gnarled little man stood into a crouch and nodded slowly. He tapped the side of his nose, indicating that it had led him to this spot. The cat curled its tail around and used it to point at the open crypt. Squire took a step forward, and Clay shook his feline head. For once the hobgoblin did as he was told and remained still.

As he crept across the ten-foot expanse that separated his hiding place from Medusa’s lair, the cat darted a glance all around, on guard. Something else was here. He was certain of it. A ripple in the air at the center of the circle of crypts caught his eye, and he saw the ghost of Dr. Graves taking shape. Excellent. If he could grab Medusa from behind to avoid her stare, he ought to be able to choke or beat her unconscious. If not, Graves and Squire were there to help him immobilize her.