Coils

by Barbara Ann Wright

  “And where do you come from?” the nymph asked. The flowers didn’t seem woven through her hair but were part of it, green strands among the gold. She leaned forward invitingly.

  Cressida blushed and told her eyes to stay on the nymph’s face and away from the impressive décolletage now pointing her way. “Um. Nowhere special.”

  The nymph laughed and licked her full lips. “Have you come to play?”

  And boy, that sounded like a fine idea. Cressida watched the nymph’s tongue cross her lips a second time and turned away from temptation. She didn’t know how strict the food and drink rules were. If the nymph had just drank ambrosia, and then they happened to kiss…

  She told herself to shut up. “It sounded like a fun party, so I wandered over.”

  The ewer came back around; Cressida snagged it and filled the nymph’s cup. The nymph laughed but took a long drink and let herself be drawn into conversation with the person on her other side.

  Cressida held on to the ewer and scooted back a bit. When another ewer came around, she snagged it, too, all she could hope to carry. Adonis hadn’t told her how much she needed. Bastard hadn’t told her anything! Ambrosia had to be worth a lot; he wouldn’t go through all this trouble just for a good drink, right? Of course, she’d met people who’d flown hundreds of miles for the same thing in the living world.

  She scooted farther back. Around the circle, a few people began to frown, no doubt catching on to the fact that the ambrosia had disappeared. Before the frowns could deepen, winged creatures zipped through the trees bearing more ewers, and a hurrah went up from the company.

  Well, all she had to do now was walk away. The nymph turned her way, and when their eyes met again, the nymph’s head tilted. “There’s something different about you.”

  “Nope, not me.” Cressida stood, trying for nonchalant, but when the nymph squinted at her, she ran, heading for the border. Someone called out, but she didn’t stop to answer. She headed straight for the stream and gate, wondering if it would fade away like the fence had or if she’d need to open it. No matter what, she’d have to keep moving when she reached the other side, or the zombies would be on her.

  When she got to the stream, the trees beside it reached for her with their branches. She tripped to a halt. “What the shit?”

  Something tugged on her shoulder, and she wrenched away, trying to keep the trees and whatever had grabbed her in sight.

  The nymph’s impossibly green eyes opened wide. “You’re alive!”

  Cressida gulped in a few deep breaths. “I have to go.”

  The nymph eyed the ewers. “You’re alive, and you’re an ambrosia runner?”

  “Please, someone over there has my aunt, and if I give him this…” What? He would help her out of the kindness of his heart? She knew then that she should hold on to the ewers, maybe stash them somewhere until she saw June again.

  The nymph’s eyes narrowed. “Which gang do you work for? The next shipment’s not due until next week.” When Cressida shook her head, the nymph stalked forward, her perfect features settling into a disconcerting frown. “Someone thinks he can undercut us, does he? Kick us out of our own business?”

  “Gang? What? I…thought people in the Elysian Fields didn’t want to think of the people over…there.”

  “That’s just for silly humans telling their silly stories.” She reached out, and Cressida backed away. When the tree grabbed for her, Cressida ducked under its branches and ran. She hugged the ewers close, but the liquid didn’t slosh out. Maybe in the Elysian Fields, no one ever spilled a drop. She pounded across the ivory bridge and ran full tilt for the gate, hoping she wasn’t going to bounce off of it.

  “We’ll find your contact,” the nymph called. “Tell them that no one crosses the Flowers and lives!”

  The gate gave way as the fence had, and Cressida’s foot came down on hard pavement. The moans of the zombies echoed around her, but she held the ewers close and put her head down, plowing ahead. She shouldered someone over and kept running. Someone else seemed to pass through her, and she shuddered, but she could only think to run as the city came into sharper focus with its boarded up warehouses and slick streets.

  “Cressida!” Adonis waved. He’d lost his pack of zombies, and she streaked for him like a bullet, wondering if the nymph was just a step behind.

  The zombies clawed at her, some of them dissolving like smoke into the shades they’d been. They pawed for the ewers, but she kept running, and Adonis waved her on, though he hadn’t dived in to help. He even started running just as she got to him, gesturing for her to keep pace.

  “Keep going,” he said. “They’ll weaken the farther we get from the barrier.”

  He reached for the ewers, but she snarled at him. When they ran up the block and around a corner, he finally slowed.

  “I’ll hold on to these until we get my aunt back,” she said.

  He put his hands on his hips. “And I’ll refuse to help until I get my ambrosia.”

  She glared. “A nymph from the Flowers wanted me to tell you that they’ll find you, that no one crosses them and lives.”

  He took a step back, just as she hoped. “You met one of the Flowers? What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Well,” she said after a deep breath. “They had a sign that said, ‘Come meet us, and you can have a free slice of cake,’ and I thought why not? Free cake.”

  He stared at her, and she felt like kicking him.

  “They found me!” she said. “After your oh-so careful instructions and all the information you gave me about who to talk to and what to do, I had to improvise. I found some people. I grabbed this. I tried to sneak away, but a nymph caught me. All right?”

  “Do they know who sent you?”

  She shrugged, holding that information in reserve.

  He ran a hand down his face, lingering at his mouth.

  “Are you and Narcissus in a gang?” she asked. “And you all deal in this stuff?” She nodded at the ewers. “I’m guessing it’s not just a cool and refreshing beverage?” When he didn’t answer, she sighed. “How about I give you one and hold on to the other until I have my aunt back?” But she didn’t hand either of them over, not yet, not until he agreed.

  He rolled his eyes. “You’ll never be able to hold it on your own.”

  “Why, is it going to grow legs?”

  “No,” a new voice said from the closest alley. “The denizens of the Underworld will tear it from your grasp.”

  Chapter Four

  Cressida turned and then wobbled to a halt as if someone had yanked her around on a rug. Vaguely, she knew what she should be feeling: Alarm, fear, suspicion. Any of those would have been correct, even justified. But just like she knew her jaw was open and couldn’t close it, she couldn’t muster any thoughts besides, “Good God, look at her!”

  Even without shoes, the stranger stood nearly as tall as Adonis, and Cressida had never been able to resist the tall ones. Her skin had a dusky, Mediterranean tint, and her hair shone like thick black ink, so dark it reflected the colors of the closest neon sign, giving her electric green highlights. Her eyes were green, too, though with slits like a snake’s and streaks of yellow dancing through them.

  And that figure! Curves on curves, she was the epitome of hourglass as she glided toward them. Even with mud flaking off her skin, spotting her white robe and jeans, she was beyond breathtaking. Breath-stealing, maybe. She locked up every breath and threw away the key.

  Cressida tried to speak and ended up saying, “Who,” and “How,” more or less at the same time, leaving her with, “Whow?” Smooth, very smooth. She suddenly wished she was back in her undergrad classes, where any preface to asking someone out could start with innocuous questions like, “Excuse me, which chapter were we supposed to read?” or “Were we supposed to calculate just how big that stick up that prof’s ass is?” Of course, Cressida had never had a class with anyone who looked like the embodiment of the word gorgeous. If this wasn’t a
goddess, who was?

  Cressida licked her lips, tried to think of something that would cover her “whow,” and ended up with, “How…how are you?”

  The goddess lifted a thick black eyebrow. “I’m fine, thanks, and you can be, too, the sooner you get away from him.”

  “This isn’t any of your business, Medusa,” Adonis said.

  Cressida burst out laughing, and they both stared at her. “No,” she said, “you can’t be.” Though that would make her a demigoddess, half Titan, if the really old tales were to be believed, but Cressida had been ready to call her Persephone if not Aphrodite herself. Cressida tried to smooth her expression into something more suave and hoped like hell she succeeded. “I’m Cressida. Nice to meet.” You forgot a word! You forgot a word! “You. It’s nice to meet you. Nice that we’re, um, meeting.” She cleared her throat, and it came out far noisier than she intended.

  Medusa took a step, and unlike her former glide, this was more predatory, putting Cressida in mind of Medusa’s famous snake hair, which she currently wasn’t sporting, though Cressida didn’t think it would make her less beautiful, just more interesting. Snakes were very graceful, if she recalled correctly. And dangerous, at least for some.

  Medusa’s gaze flicked to the ewers. “Do you know what you have?”

  “Ambrosia?” Cressida asked.

  “The most powerful drug in the Underworld. In the Elysian Fields, it’s just wine. Here, it’s mixed with a special ingredient that gives anyone who drinks it more awareness.”

  “Making everyone happy,” Adonis said.

  “Not everyone,” Medusa said, glancing at him. “Not the shades.” She pinned Cressida with her gaze again. “When word gets out that you have this much ambrosia, you won’t have a moment’s peace, not from the gangs, not from anyone. Not even from the shades.” She glanced up.

  Cressida looked and took a step back as the fog billowed closer. She bumped into Adonis, who put his hands on her shoulders as if to protect her. She wriggled out of his grasp and stood so she could run from both of them if she had to, though her pelvis kept telling her to lean closer to Medusa. She told it to keep its mind on the problem at hand.

  Cressida looked Medusa in the eye again and tried to keep her face serious; no longing allowed. “So, you want it instead?” She blushed at what could be the world’s sloppiest double entendre and tried to look tough, afraid that with all her effort, she was landing somewhere just shy of sassy.

  “I want you to dump it or throw it back where it came from.”

  “No!” Adonis took a threatening step, but Medusa didn’t back up an inch. She gave him a glare famous for turning people into stone, though he remained flesh and blood, or spirit, or whatever. Maybe Medusa wasn’t trying very hard. “Do you know how much that’s worth?”

  “Worth the destruction of souls who’ve never wronged you?”

  “Better than becoming one of them.” He jerked his chin toward the fence, the zombies.

  “As long as people remember who you are, you won’t end up like that,” Medusa said.

  “And how long can that be, really? Luck has to run out sometime.”

  Cressida shook her head. “Wait, if you drink the ambrosia, more people will remember you?”

  “You gain more awareness.” Medusa said. “Besides being remembered, drinking modified ambrosia is the only way to become more aware, but only after mixing the ambrosia with a shade.”

  Cressida frowned and tried to think through that. “With a shade?”

  “Oh, he didn’t tell you?” She glanced at Adonis, who sighed and crossed his arms. “The gangs in the Underworld mix the ambrosia with the souls of the weaker dead and consume them. It’s a complicated, painful process.”

  “No one knows that it’s painful,” Adonis said.

  “Undertaken by those desperate to remain aware, to remain powerful.”

  “This could save your sisters,” Adonis said. “Look, we can both come out of this happy. You take one ewer; we’ll take the other.”

  “I don’t deal in soul eating.”

  “Then just stay out of my business, and we won’t have a problem.”

  Cressida started edging away, wondering who was right, but they both agreed on one thing: what she was holding was dangerous. Maybe she should have never gotten involved with Adonis at all. Maybe she could find June on her own. She hugged the ewers tighter. She could trade them for help. Hell, that was what Adonis was offering, but if it was true that the drinker also had to eat the dead…

  She wondered what Adonis meant by mentioning Medusa’s sisters. Stheno and Euryale were part of Medusa’s legend, though they were missing from the tales most people knew. According to older legends, the three sisters were powerful, part-snake demigods, and Medusa was targeted by the hero Perseus because she was the only mortal of the three. Newer legends dropped the sisters and claimed Medusa had fornicated—some tales said willingly, others not so much—with Poseidon in Athena’s temple, so Athena turned her into a monster with a head of snakes whose gaze could turn someone to stone. In either tale, she’d been killed by Perseus, first to serve as a wedding present, then to help him petrify a horrific monster.

  He’d murdered her while she slept, so legend claimed. Cressida had always thought of it as a sad story, but one that happened over and over in myth, one that cemented the notion that everyone was a plaything of the gods. Women often couldn’t catch even the hint of a break, and Cressida’s heart suddenly went out to the muddy demigoddess. Even with Adonis there, staring Medusa down, Cressida wanted to hug her for more reasons than one.

  Medusa looked to Cressida again, and she blinked, seemingly surprised at the sympathy Cressida couldn’t hide. Her head tilted as if Cressida was an interesting puzzle worth the time to figure out. “I’ll help you find your aunt.”

  “In exchange for?” Cressida asked, glad that part of her mind was reacting on autopilot because her body wanted nothing more than to drape around Medusa and not let go.

  Medusa smiled widely. “Nothing.”

  Cressida quirked an eyebrow and waited.

  “I’ll help you get your aunt, and then you decide whether or not you want to help me.”

  “To do…” Cressida said, getting pretty tired of everyone’s reluctance to just say what they were thinking. But when Medusa licked her lips, Cressida changed her mind. She could watch Medusa think all day.

  “Simple really. I need you to lure the hero Perseus over to this side of the fence so I can kill him, reduce him to a shade, and feed him to my weakened sisters with the small amount of ambrosia I have tucked away. One little murder for three lives? Not so bad, eh?”

  Yeah, pretty bad, but Cressida was too stunned to speak. Even if Perseus deserved to be punished, Cressida had only ever sworn at another person in anger. She’d told herself she’d been prepared to hit Nero with the bat, but she wasn’t certain she would have. “I thought you didn’t deal in soul eating?”

  “Don’t fall for any of her bull,” Adonis said. “You’re halfway to your goal with me already. Just give me the ambrosia, and you’ll have your aunt back in no time, and the two of you can be on your way.”

  Two people who were clearly in it for themselves, and she had no idea which might be the lesser of two evils. And whichever she chose, she’d wind up with at least one enemy. She looked to the ambrosia, trying to tell herself it didn’t matter if the people of the Underworld destroyed themselves. The shades weren’t her concern.

  Even more than that, she tried to tell herself she wasn’t swayed by the exquisite woman but by the offer to help before asking for a favor, rather than the other way around. She looked at the shades, at the way their formless eyes tried to focus on the ambrosia. They were hungry, too, for the power the ambrosia could give them even though they were the ones killed for it, the whole of the Underworld eating itself.

  “Do you know how to get my aunt away from Hecate?” Cressida whispered.

  Adonis started. “Well…” He wav
ed vaguely. “There’s, um…”

  Medusa stepped forward. “As someone who’s visited the goddess of magic many times, I know the ways in and out of her palace. All we need do is sneak in while she’s distracted, grab your aunt, and sneak out before she notices. Even if she finds out, chances are, she’ll be so taken with our moxie, she won’t care to pursue us.”

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was more than Adonis had.

  “One small condition.” Medusa nodded to the ewers. “Get rid of those.”

  Adonis squawked, but before Cressida could think better of it, she ran for the fence and chucked the ewers hard, sending them sailing over the head of the moaning zombies to disappear beyond the fence.

  “No!” Adonis cried, but Medusa held him back. “We had a deal!”

  Cressida shrugged, but she did feel a bit guilty. “And she has a plan.”

  He backed away, staring, and she knew she’d made an enemy, but she had to make a choice. He glared hard at Medusa, too, but if he had any parting words, he kept them to himself as he turned and strode toward the nearest elevator.

  Medusa smiled, and Cressida hoped she hadn’t been a fool by choosing the prettiest face.

  “Well,” Medusa said. “I’m honored you accepted my offer. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to stop by my apartment and change before we continue.” She held out the ends of her robe. “Believe it or not, this is not my usual style.”

  Cressida opened her mouth to say that Medusa would look fab dressed in a garbage bag, but she shut her teeth before the words could get out. “Sure.” She gestured at the robe and felt as if something was needed. “I didn’t know if you always wore…” Well, obviously not! “I mean…”

  Medusa’s lips quirked as if she wanted to laugh but was afraid of embarrassing Cressida further. “Well, a regular muddy robe is pretty much my go-to for hanging around the house, but I thought I might change into my more formal muddy robe for adventuring. I mean, it’s just more rescue ready.”

  Cressida sighed a laugh before clearing her throat. “I’m sure. Lead the way.” They walked together toward another elevator, and Cressida relaxed more than she had with Adonis, and she and Medusa had only met moments ago. It gave her bright hopes for the future. She’d found someone in the Underworld who seemed to have ethics, who’d offered to help June before asking for favors. Any way she approached it, things were looking up.