Christopher Golden - Tears of the Furies

Ceridwen gestured for Eve to look at Gull. The sorcerer’s twisted face — as misshapen as his soul — showed the strain of his effort, and his eyes revealed his fear of Danny. Somehow, once controlled by Orpheus’s song, the demon boy had become immune to it, and Gull had not bothered to try it on Eve and Ceridwen.

The girl, Jezebel, was dead, leaving Gull with only Hawkins as an ally, and the cold man with his colder eyes seemed only to want to survive, now that things had gone so terribly wrong.

"We’ve got to go," Ceridwen insisted.

Eve stared a moment longer at Danny, Gull, and Hawkins, and then she nodded.

"All right. But we don’t go back out through the gates of this place without Arthur."

Ceridwen moved so swiftly that Eve could not stop her. Her fingers tangled in the vampire’s hair and she gripped it painfully tight, even as she sent tendrils of ice racing down over Eve’s face.

"We are allies, sometimes friends," Ceridwen said. "But question my loyalty once more and one of us will die."

Eve slapped her hand away, fangs lengthening again. She hissed softly, held Ceridwen’s gaze, then turned away.

"Danny! We’re going!" Eve snapped.

The demon boy looked as though he wanted to argue, but then his gaze shifted from Eve to Ceridwen and back again, and instead he nodded once. He grabbed Nigel Gull and propelled the mage toward the wound in Hades’ side. The skin around that gaping wound was ossified, insects and strange creatures fossilized in the dead god’s flesh.

Ceridwen led the way, leaping from the dizzying height of the exit toward the black ashen earth below. She drew a wind beneath her as she fell, and landed easily. Before she could even turn, Eve dropped to the ground beside her, striking hard and rolling, kicking up ebony dust on impact.

Both of them turned to watch Danny climbing down the exterior of the unimaginably huge body, plunging his claws into the dead flesh and scrambling downward as though he was a spider. For a moment Ceridwen was surprised he had left Gull and Hawkins to find their own way down, but then she realized that the mage and his operative needed to flee this place just as quickly as she and her allies did. Emerging through the wound, Gull grabbed Hawkins by the hand, his mouth still open, the voice of Orpheus still flowing sweetly from his throat. Tentacles of blue-black fire wrapped around them, then shot toward the ground like lightning, carrying them down to stand only a few feet from Ceridwen and Eve.

Hawkins’s expression had changed. He pulled away from Gull with a rictus of horror contorting his face.

"You right bastard!" he snarled. "You fucking killed her!"

Gull had no chance to argue. He had chosen Hawkins not only for his various psychic skills, but also for his murderous talents. When the man had touched Gull, he had learned who was responsible for Jezebel’s fate. Now Hawkins backhanded Gull, driving him to the ground with a pair of quick jabs to the throat and gut. The mage had no time even to summon a spell to defend himself before Hawkins launched a kick at his head.

"Son of a bitch! All Jez wanted was someone to be loyal to, someone to make her feel like there was such a thing as family. She would do anything for you, and you threw her away like some gutter whore!"

Hawkins kicked Gull twice more in the head, then in the arms as the mage tried to block the attack.

Eve and Ceridwen ran at them, but Danny reached them first. He had been spider-walking down from the wound when it began. Now he leaped from the side of Hades’ corpse and somersaulted through the air, snapping his feet out at the last moment so that he crashed into Hawkins with a sort of dropkick that sent the silver-haired man tumbling across the black, blasted earth.

"What the hell are you doing, you moron?" Danny thundered, his voice no longer his own, but coming from some darker realm. "You’ve killed us all, assclown. You’ve goddamn killed us all."

For a moment, Ceridwen did not really understand. Then she heard the screams of angry gods from inside the corpse of Hades, and the ground beneath them began to rumble, and the entire wall behind them — the wall that was body of the king of the Underworld — began to tear in places, new wounds being ripped open in a handful of places along its length.

The ghosts of the gods were marching once more.

Hawkins had crushed Nigel Gull’s throat with one of his blows.

The voice of Orpheus had been silenced.

Eve grabbed Ceridwen by the wrist.

"Run."

On the southern slope of the Spartan acropolis the land leveled out and rough, grassy terrain gave way to forest. Between hill and forest was a pit bordered by stone. For just a moment, as Dr. Graves came round the side of the hill and first caught sight of the place, he saw its ghost. Once upon a time the ruin had been a theatre, and imprinted upon the very air itself was the ancient shape of the thing. Though he himself was a specter, they were different sorts of ghosts, and so he saw it only fleetingly before the image gave way to the modern reality. Granite walls were crumbled, the marble stage was only partially revealed, the rest buried beneath the earth as though the theatre was growing up organically from the ground. The rows and rows of seating — where thousands of people had once sat enraptured — were eroded by time, but echoed silently with the laughter and cheers of audiences who had been dead two thousand years or more.

In the deeper darkness of an alcove — almost a bunker — that had been created long ago by the collapse of a section of the wall, something shifted, moving swiftly and fluidly. If Medusa had come to this place to rest, she had managed little of it.

Graves moved away from the ruins, backtracking around the hill.

Clay and Squire were moving swiftly but quietly toward him, their mismatched sizes almost absurd, and yet their approach was formidable. Dr. Graves caught the shapeshifter’s eye and held an insubstantial finger to his lips, shushing them both.

The ghost reached down to the holsters he wore and drew phantom guns with nary a whisper. There was no leather and no metal, after all. Only the hush of the afterlife.

He moved swiftly, then, no longer bothering to pretend at walking. He sped around the base of the hill, floating several inches above the ground. He willed himself to fade so that he was nothing more than a ripple in the air and did not even hesitate as the ruins of the theatre came into sight. He rushed past the tumbled down outer walls, past the colonnade, and then down into the pit, passing over the remains of the rows and staircases. Nearly as quick as thought, he swept down into the theater, hovering above the cracked marble stage, and from the lair Medusa had chosen, he heard the hissing of the snakes upon her head.

The snakes fell silent.

They had sensed something, or their mistress had.

But Dr. Graves was swift and Medusa had no time to prepare. She had found herself a cave of sorts, but what she thought was a hideaway had proven not a place to hide, but a trap.

She lunged from it, snakes erupting into a chorus of hisses, and her fingers curled into claws as she glared around the ruin searching for her attacker. The monster relied upon her curse, upon her gaze. Had Graves been flesh and blood he doubted even invisibility would have saved him from her power. But he had been tested already. Medusa could do nothing to him.

Time to find out if the opposite was also true.

Leonard Graves was dead. That did not mean he felt no fear. Trepidation passed through him in that moment the way that a breeze moved the trees of a willow. It swayed him, but he would not let it stop him.

Medusa was hideous, her flesh somehow reptilian green and corpse gray at the same time. Her mouth was stretched open as though in some silent scream and long, needle, serpent fangs jutted from within. Her eyes were black, recessed into her face as though they hid in the cave of her skull, yet there was a liquid darkness to them, as though they did not so much see as flow within. She moved in tiny bursts and flinches, a predatory thing, aware of her surroundings. She darted halfway across the stretch of marble, paused, head tilted to one side, and then she turned and looked right at him.