Christopher Golden - Tears of the Furies

The turbulent waters exploded and the monstrous Scylla reared up from beneath the Styx, shrieking like the damnable thing she was.

But there was something wrong. Scylla was not attacking. She was fending off an attack.

Bobbing upon the roiling waters, Conan Doyle looked on in astonishment as Daniel Ferrick clung to the body of the raging sea monster. The lunatic savagery of his demonic birthright had overcome him, and there was nothing human about him now. His yellow eyes gleamed as he tore away chunks of the monster’s flesh with his claws and needle-teeth in a bloody frenzy of violence.

The river churned as though attuned with Scylla’s pain. It took everything Conan Doyle had to keep himself and Ceridwen above the raging waters. Scylla dove repeatedly beneath the surface and exploded upward in an attempt to loosen the hold of her attacker, but to no avail. Danny held fast, rending her flesh with wanton abandon.

The last thing Conan Doyle saw before succumbing to the pull of the Styx was the monster Scylla beckoning to the heavens as the demon boy dug into her chest with his claws, hunting for her heart. Scylla screamed as if pleading to the gods that had cursed her for mercy.

The shipyard stank of fish. Squire wrinkled his nose as he ambled among the dry-docked fishing boats. Some of them were obviously being repaired or repainted and one or two seemed to be in the midst of a patchwork reconstruction using the remains of several others. The majority were rusting or rotting hulks that had been abandoned long ago, their paint flaked off so completely that they appeared ancient. From the awful odor, it seemed like one of those old wrecks — or perhaps one of the boats under repair — still had a hull filled with the catch of the day.

If the day was a week ago, he thought.

The smell was ferocious and he breathed through his mouth. It might have come from the boats themselves, from the sea seeping into the wood, or maybe it was just that stench that sometimes came off the sea at low tide. But something about it made Squire reasonably sure it was local. Either there was a trawler-net full of rotting fish nearby, or something had crawled up out of the ocean and died. Maybe a lot of somethings.

The night was humid and even the breeze off the Mediterranean was hot. They were farther south now, Medusa’s trail having led them to the coast and then southward, passing through several small villages and at last to this place. Marina would be far too rich a word for it and dock was not nearly descriptive enough. There was a dock where local fisherman brought in their catch, but that didn’t account for the ships under repair or the ones that had been abandoned. It was like some nautical junkyard occupied by dedicated fishermen who wouldn’t give up on a boat until it was beyond repair… but from the look of things, whoever these fishermen were, they had paid little attention to the upkeep of their vessels until things went horribly wrong.

Squire licked his lips, wishing he had a thick, sugary glass of ouzo to relax him. What he liked best about the Greek liqueur was that it was sort of like getting drunk on melted candy.

The evening sky was a blue-black and the darkness seemed to nestle within the shipyard in graded hues, an evening shadow in one place and an utter, inky black in others. It was almost as though the place had something to hide and the night was its conspirator. Squire paid it no mind. Natural or otherwise, he was intimately familiar with the dark. The shadows were his conspirators.

He whistled an old Frank Sinatra song, "Summer Wind," and turned seaward, passing through an opening between two skeletal boats, one of which appeared to have once been put to military use. As he moved nearer the Mediterranean there were fewer wrecks and more ships under repair, propped up on scaffolding or hoisted off the ground with ropes and pulleys. A pulley clanked against the side of a boat and Squire paused, frowning, but he did not turn to see the source of the sound.

The wind was strong, but enough to sway the heavy apparatus?

He continued on until he emerged from among the ships. A wide, rutted path separated the shipyard from the docks — wide enough for a car or truck to pass through — and beyond that was the Mediterranean. Whitecaps churned atop the waves, whipped by the wind and the night. Squire had always thought the sea was a nocturnal animal, only truly coming to life after dark. Scientists talked about the pull of the moon, but he felt it was more than that.

The masts of fishing boats swayed on the horizon. Smaller boats were tied up at the docks, silent but scarred with the wounds of their history, of hard work and rough seas. The smell of dead fish receded as he crossed the span of rutted earth between shipyard and dock, and he breathed more deeply of the moist, heated air. It had started to blunt even his prodigious appetite and he was pleased to be away from the stink.

Squire thought smoking was a filthy habit. Except, of course, on the rare occasions when he felt like having a stogie. He reached into the inner pocket of his coat, fingers pushing past the steel razor he kept there, and withdrew a fat Cuban cigar. Fidel. Hell of a guy, he thought.

"Gonna have to commandeer one of these," he muttered aloud, scanning the sea again, evaluating the fishing boats. He didn’t want a trawler. The speed on one of those old, choking things would have driven him apeshit. There was one that looked like it might actually be a charter boat, kept up nicely, outfitted for the sort of thing where businessmen paid to go out and have someone bait their hooks, and reel the fish in, and all they had to do was hold a rod for a few hours in between. But it probably had a decent engine.

Sails were okay for a backup plan, but the hobgoblin didn’t trust them. And he wasn’t all that enthused about the physical exertion they required.

It didn’t hurt that the charter-looking boat probably had a galley full of food.

He used his sharp thumbnail to pop the end off of the cigar and clenched it in his teeth. A quick check of his pockets produced a lighter. It was always extraordinary what a hobgoblin might find in his pockets that hadn’t been there moments before. It was a bit of magick luck, and Squire thought it was about the best quality a guy could be born with, even better than a startling endowment. Or close, at least.

The lighter flared in his hand and he puffed on the cigar. The tip glowed in the dark as he slipped the lighter back into his pocket. Impatience was part of his personality, so it was difficult to relax, there at the edge of the sea. He smoked the cigar, his exhalations pluming in the air, and he sighed. Squire had his heart set on that boat.

With his incredible gift, Clay had been following Medusa’s trail south from Corinth.

"What the hell does it look like?" Squire had asked him.

"Chewing gum," Clay had replied. Then, after the hobgoblin had shot him a hard look, he had shrugged. "It does, in a way. Like bubble gum that someone has chewed and started to stretch out to an impossible length."

Weird shit, Squire thought now. But it worked. He and Graves had followed Clay, and Clay had followed this invisible ghost-line that connected victim and killer. It had led them here, but unfortunately it didn’t stop here. The ectoplasmic trail that Clay was following stretched out across the water, which meant Medusa had left in a boat. She could probably swim, but even a creature of myth couldn’t stay afloat forever. Given her curse, the only way the ugly thing could have left the shore was with the help of someone else.

Squire chuckled under his breath and took another draw on the cigar that was almost a sigh. He snorted the smoke out through his nostrils and chewed on the end a bit, rolling it in his teeth. As he did so he walked a bit closer to the docks. There were nighttime shadows down there, the moonlight throwing the space beneath and beside the dock in a darker shadow than seemed natural.