Christopher Golden - Tears of the Furies

"Seriously," he said. "How stupid do you think we are?"

Even as he spoke, he turned, knowing he was swifter than any opponent would guess a creature so truncated might be. His right hand thrust inside his jacket and he pulled, snaps tearing fabric, brandishing the flail he had retrieved from Conan Doyle’s armory. Nineteenth-century Indian, the weapon was little more than an iron bar with two long chains attached to one end, a heavy metal ball dangling from each chain.

Squire had the flail swinging even before he was certain of his opponent’s location. But his eyes were used to shadow and he saw Tassarian immediately. The resurrected assassin was all in black and a veil was drawn across his face beneath his sunken eyes. Tassarian moved with such swiftness and precision that Squire could not have evaded him.

It mattered little.

The walking corpse was a master of weapons, but so was Squire. Tassarian’s great advantage had been surprise.

Tonight, he had lost that advantage.

Squire swung the flail, darting toward the killer. Tassarian tried to block the attack — it would have been impossible for even him to dodge — but the iron balls struck his face, cracking his cheek as the chains wrapped around his arm. The dead man grunted and started to reach his free hand up to try to free himself.

"No chance, dumbass," Squire barked, cigar still clenched between his teeth.

He cracked the flail like a whip, snapping the bones in Tassarian’s arm with a loud pop. From the thin scabbard clipped to the back of his pants the hobgoblin drew an ornate, seventeenth-century Italian stiletto. He tugged Tassarian toward him. The assassin used the momentum to attack. Leather rustled as Tassarian shot a kick at Squire’s head. The dead man underestimated him again. Squire stepped in closer, hauled on the flail’s handle to use Tassarian’s own broken arm to block the kick. The dead assassin hissed in pain even as he stumbled, off balance from the conflicting momentum of the kick and the twist of his arm.

Squire jammed the stiletto into Tassarian’s left eye. The blade plunged through the orbit and into the skull with a wet, sucking sound, spiking into the dead man’s brain.

But the killer was already dead. He shot his hand out, fist striking Squire’s chest hard enough to have killed a human. The hobgoblin staggered backward, losing his grip on the handle of the flail. Tassarian took two steps nearer to him, silently glaring with his remaining eye. The dead man plucked the antique stiletto from the ruined eye, blood and white fluid dribbling out of the socket. With the black mask covering his face, his expression was unreadable. He snatched the end of the flail with his good hand and began to unravel it, ready to use it.

"I wish we had time to really make a night of this," Squire said, smiling, twisted lips pulling up into a sneer. He’d kept the cigar between his teeth through all of this, and now he took a long puff on it, stoking the embers at its tip. "You got the drop on us last time. Hurt us. It’d be nice to take our time. But we’ve got places to go. People to see."

Tassarian barely reacted at first. Then the dead man dropped into a defensive stance, head tilted to listen to the night around him. Squire did not even bother attacking him, but watched as Tassarian spun around to see the ghost of Dr. Graves shimmering into existence just behind him, phantom guns drawn. The assassin swung the flail but it passed right through the specter, and Graves pulled his triggers. Ghost bullets punched through Tassarian’s dead flesh and he jerked several times, staggering, forced backward.

Clay was waiting. He darted forward, a small, sleek Persian cat, but the air rippled above him as he ran and by the time he reached Tassarian, he had transformed into a massive Bengal tiger. It shed the night like water as it grew, and then Clay leaped at Tassarian. Dr. Graves shot the killer again and the dead man danced as the tiger fell on him, tearing his left arm from its socket with a single swipe from its massive paws.

The hobgoblin and the ghost watched as Clay tore Tassarian to pieces and scattered them throughout the shipyard and the docks. Squire would have liked to linger over the killing, but they had no time. Even the twenty minutes the task consumed was too long.

When they had stolen the boat Squire had been eyeing, Graves took the helm and Clay stared southward, still following the ectoplasmic trail Medusa’s last victim had left behind.

Squire stood at the back of the boat, Tassarian’s crushed skull in his hands. He waited until they were several miles farther down the coast before tossing it into the Mediterranean. It bobbed on their wake several times before slipping beneath the surface.

"This time stay dead, you prick."

Eve had walked the Earth a thousand times, had witnessed the birth of religions and the death of empires. She had studied the worship of civilization and tracked her vampiric offspring through the mythology of every region of the world. She knew precisely what these women were.

Women. The word itself was entirely insufficient.

The Kindly Ones. The Madnesses. Potniae. Praxidikae. They were the Furies, the Erinyes, and though she herself was ancient and cruel in her fashion, Eve could only stare at them in terrible wonder. The sisters had emerged from the gaping hole in the corpse of suicidal Hades, the armored remains of a god the size of a small town. They had crawled headfirst toward the ground, talons hooked into the rotting flesh of the lord of the Underworld, and then dropped the rest of the way, landing with uncanny lightness and ease.

Megaera, Tisiphone, and Alekto. But though they did not look precisely alike, Eve could not tell them apart. The myths had not described them in detail, of course, for who might have gotten close enough to tell such tales and returned from this place to do so? Which had made her wonder, in that moment, if this was to be the end for her as well.

The Erinyes were far taller than any ordinary women, thin and elegant, their features regal and beautiful. They were cloaked in strange garments, sheer and torn, that barely hid the pale flesh beneath. They had no armor, yet there was nothing vulnerable about them. They moved with a grace and power that was intimidating, yet they seemed cautious as well, not coming directly at their prey.

Each held a whip in her hand, barbed all along its length, and the whips seemed to twist of their own accord with the menace of deadly serpents. When Eve heard the hissing sound she assumed that it issued from the whips and only as the sisters drew nearer did she see the tiny snakes nesting in the dark hair of the Furies.

Blood streaked their faces in vertical stripes like macabre war paint. It took Eve several moments to realize the sisters were actually weeping blood. Their eyes were red orbs too large for their thin features and another part of their myth came to her, then. Gaea had been enraged at Ouranos, the Earth furious with the Sky, and she enlisted the aid of her son Cronos. Cronos attacked Ouranos, wounding him, and from the blood that was spilled, the Erinyes were born.

Born of blood.

"Erinyes!" Nigel Gull called as the women strode across the black, dead soil of the Underworld toward them. "Eumenides, please accept our obeisance and lend me your ears."

The mage turned his misshapen face toward Hawkins, who nodded quickly and knelt, his weight puffing black dust around him. Jezebel gazed at the sisters as though she were a foundling at last discovering her true family. Her eyes were bright with hope and she ran her tongue over her lips, a tentative smile on her face. The Erinyes trailed their whips in the black dust, barbs dragging on the ground, and the things moved and darted with their own life. Jezebel followed the movement of the whips.