Christopher Golden - Tears of the Furies

They passed a small town to the north of the highway but he could see nothing more than the sides of buildings and cars going by on the roads. It had been twenty years — more — but his recollections were crystal clear.

"Used to be, every couple of years Conan Doyle would send me on a little acquisition trip to buy — or, ah, otherwise get my mitts on — some ancient weapon or other. Some of ‘em he wanted because they had special attributes, enchanted swords, an ensorcelled quiver of arrows, that kind of thing. Others he just had his eye on. Of course the ones he just wanted he wouldn’t have me steal if they were in a museum. But the lion’s share of these beauties are owned by private collectors who didn’t come by them any more honestly than I did."

The car jittered over a section of cracked pavement, hitting a pothole that Clay did not even try to avoid. The shapeshifter glanced at Squire.

"That thing you’re doing right now? It’s called a tangent."

The hobgoblin shot him a gnarled middle finger. "Anyway, Tassarian worked for Nigel Gull. I’d met him a couple of times before that. Gull and Conan Doyle have history, obviously. Can’t stand the sight of each other, but they keep tabs. Run in the same circles, too. So it was inevitable they’d bump into each other now and again. Especially with Conan Doyle looking for Sweetblood.

"Gull and Conan Doyle, they have a lot in common. Gull likes pretty, shiny, sharp things too.

"So I’d been in Europe for about three weeks on what was probably the most successful acquisitions trip I’d made. I had some sweet stuff. Rostini’s Axe. The Helm of Kyth. Hunyadi’s Daggers. This perfect longbow from Germany, inlaid with gold, with a bowstring made of ectoplasm. A blind man with no arms could hit a gnat’s asshole with this thing.

"I’m in Prague in this little flat Conan Doyle rented for me for a month. I’ve got a whole room just laid out with these babies. I’d had a feeling a few times during my running around that somebody’d been keeping an eye on me. But Tassarian knows all that ninja bullshit and I really didn’t twig to him until I walked in on the guy trying to sneak off with an entire armory."

Squire shook his head. "Idiot."

Clay kept his foot on the accelerator. If anything he gave the car a little extra speed as he checked the rearview mirror again. "Okay," he said. "But how did you kill him?"

The hobgoblin laughed, thinking back on it. "Well, death and resurrection must have smartened him up some, ‘cause that time he sure hadn’t done his homework. I’m ugly, but I’m not stupid, and I’m pretty good with weapons. The moron came to steal my cache in the late afternoon. Maybe he got the whole shadow thing wrong, thinking he shouldn’t try it at night. Or maybe he figured I was out for a walk, or asleep. I don’t know.

"What I do know is, that time of day the shadows are nice and long. The sun coming in the windows threw huge distorted shadows off of every chair, bedpost and friggin’ doorknob. I had a couple seconds’ surprise on Tassarian and that was all I needed. I moved in and out of the shadows, kept out of his range, snuck up on him a dozen times. I must have hit him with every goddamn weapon in that room. Even broke the blade off one of Hunyadi’s daggers in the base of his skull. I killed the guy enough to snuff ten other guys. Just kept killing him until he actually laid down and didn’t get up again."

Another mile of road went by in silence before Clay glanced over at him.

"But Tassarian did get up again."

Squire shrugged. His gaze had drifted past Clay and out the driver’s side window, where the Aegean had come back into view. It was distant, but there. He smiled.

"Yep. Guess I’m going to have to kill him some more."

The hobgoblin glanced over to see Clay smile broadly… then the smile disappeared. Clay’s eyes went wide and his arms locked into place on the steering wheel.

"What the hell?" the shapeshifter snarled, even as he jerked the wheel to one side.

Squire turned his eyes back to the road. The ghost of Dr. Graves stood in the center of the highway, one hand on the butt of a phantom gun and the other raised to wave them to a halt.

The tires squealed as Clay cut the wheel too far.

Squire shot a hand out and grabbed the wheel, straightening it out. "Run him down. He’s already a ghost!"

Clay slammed the brakes on and the car slewed to one side as it shuddered to a halt on the shoulder of the highway. A car barreled past them, the driver laying on the horn.

Squire popped his door open and clambered out, scanning the road for Graves. "Where are you, Spooky? I’ll wring your neck! What’re you trying to do, give me a friggin’ coronary?"

The ghost was nowhere in sight. Cursing under his breath, Squire turned and stared expectantly through the windshield at Clay, but the shapeshifter did not get out of the car. After a moment, the hobgoblin went to get back inside, only to find the transparent wisp of Graves’s ghost in his seat. In the interplay of sunlight and the shadowed interior of the car, the specter was nearly invisible.

"I’m sorry if I startled you," Dr. Graves said.

"Sorry!" Squire sputtered. "You couldn’t just have ghosted yourself back into the car like you did before?"

"I needed you to stop," the specter said. "We don’t have a great deal of time."

Clay narrowed his eyes so tightly that his flesh seemed to alter with the expression. "Has Medusa left the train?"

"Oh, I’m almost certain she has. And we’d best hurry if we want to search before the authorities arrive. It’s a matter of minutes, I expect."

Squire’s head hurt. "Search what? You lost me, Doc."

The ghost seemed suddenly more solid, and the expression on his spectral features was bitter. "The wreckage, Squire. The train has derailed."

Dr. Graves pointed to the northeast, where several columns of dark smoke were pluming into the sky. The crash sight was two or three miles away from the highway, but he and Clay had been caught up in conversation and had not even noticed the smoke.

"Damn," the goblin whispered.

Dr. Graves floated right up through the roof of the car and hovered above it. "I think we ought to leave the car here for the moment. We’ll reach the site faster by our own means."

"Agreed," Clay said. He put the car in drive and pulled further onto the shoulder, then locked it up tight.

"Any survivors?" he asked, just before he transformed, his flesh popping and rippling as it diminished. In a handful of moments, Clay was gone and a hawk hopped about the ground in his place.

Dr. Graves floated toward the crash site. "We’ll find out soon enough," said the ghost.

Squire went to the shoulder of the road. Beyond it were only olive trees and open ground, with some power lines in the distance. Clay and Graves flew toward the pluming smoke, just a bird and this blur against the sky that looked more than a little like a jellyfish, distorting the light that passed through it.

"Don’t wait up, guys," the hobgoblin muttered.

He went back to the car, glanced over his shoulder at the power lines, and then dove into the long shadow the vehicle cast on the shoulder of the road.

The darkness swallowed him. His senses spread out through the shadow paths, fingers on Braille, and he began to run. A short time later he emerged from the shadow beneath an electrical tower. He did not step into the sun, but emerging from the darkness he still had to shield his eyes from the brightness of the day. A quick scan of the sky showed him that he was slightly ahead of the hawk and the ghost. Not far from him he saw the railroad tracks. The crash had happened perhaps a mile east. The smoke was thinner, now, wispy.

Like ghosts.

Squire gauged the distance to the crash and slipped back into the shadows. The darkness caressed him as he slipped along the path, feeling the various conduits all around him, touching the shadows intimately. He knew them.