A smoke, a stop at the golden arches for some black tar in a cup, and off she went. Twenty minutes out of the Pass, Bernie called again. Tanis shifted her freshest cigarette over to the left side of her mouth so she could take it.
“Yeah?”
“Good news, bad news. Good news is, Ariadne’s in season, so she’s easy to scent track. Bad news is, she left the Den altogether. I don’t want to follow too far into the swamp without you, plus Ma wants to see us before we leave.”
“Greaaat. I’m close.”
Tanis pushed the Caddy up to eighty. It was early still; the leather jacket wasn’t too hot yet, the sun cresting the treetops on the eastern horizon. She finished the cigarette and the coffee in that order before turning the car onto the dirt road maze leading to the Den. Bernie awaited her outside, leaning against the flagpole with its weather-beaten pants flag. She had on the same fluorescent running shoes from the night before, black leggings, and an oversized white T-shirt. Her hair was up in a bun on top of her head, loose wisps of gray escapee tendrils floating by her face. She squinted against the sunlight, her myriad of wrinkles making her look even more like a gargoyle than usual.
“Morning, doll. Bring enough for the whole class?”
“Eh?” Tanis fell into step beside her as they approached the shed.
“The smokes.”
“When we get out. Hedging some bets we’ll both need one.”
Bernie smirked at her as they passed the newest shift guards, one reading a book in the corner near the open door, the other picking muck from beneath her fingernails with a twig. Tanis muttered a hello and promptly dropped below ground to escape any uncomfortable chatter; they both knew her name, but she hadn’t the faintest clue about theirs.
“Where’s Fi?” Tanis asked as they trudged through the water, sidestepping a writhing ball of juvenile snakes tumbling their way down the pipeline.
“She’s on door duty while Daphne’s missing. Volunteered for it before I could. smart bitch.” A minute later, Fi came into view, her ass planted on an upended milk crate, playing cards once again clasped in hand. The other guard was likewise positioned. It was something of a known fact that if you spent any time with Fi at all, you’d probably end up playing gin rummy. And losing.
“I’m old. You could have let me take guard duty,” Bernie said in greeting, rustling Fi’s hair with obvious fondness. Fi swatted her away.
“You’re too slow, old woman,” Fi replied, deep and low.
“Yeah, yeah. Enjoy sitting on your ass.” Bernie looped her arm through Tanis’s and walked her toward Lamia’s den. The pheromone sex stench tickled at Tanis’s nostrils, and she forced herself to breathe through her mouth as they passed a muted Kallie. Kallie was, in general, a smug pain in the ass, so her expression—she looked like she’d just gotten hit with a shovel—boded ill.
So did the echoing, enraged screams.
“GET DOWN HEEERE!” Lamia’s voice exploded through the pipe and the next pipe and the pipe beyond that, the queen snake’s voice big enough to fill every nook and cranny of the Den. Bernie and Tanis pulled away from one another to jog, and then run, their feet splashing in the shallow water below. Upon cresting the lip, they were besieged by a frantic Lamia, holding one eye in each of her puffy, pale hands, fingers delicate around the red-veined orbs, her slitted pupils darting this way and that as she scried. Her empty eye sockets sagged, the puckered orifices thankfully shadowed by the dimness of the birthing chamber.
Tanis looked down, unwilling—perhaps incapable—of peering into those empty voids for too long. It put her mother’s swollen, distended middle into focus. Lamia’s milky udders rested on a stomach fatter than it had been the day before, bulging more obscenely from the sides, lumps of wrongness disrupting the otherwise gentle swell of her rolls of blue flesh.
Half clutch of eggs. Half undigested Luke Des Moines.
“Ariadne is gone. She’s gone. Taken by that loathsome dyke guard. Pig-flesh daughter. I’ll rip her apart, feast on her, use her bones as toothpicks. Find her. Find them. Bring them to me.” Lamia waved her flickering eyeballs under Tanis and Bernie’s noses. “To the west, I see trees, tall trees, and grass.”
“Sooo, you see the Glades. The Glades are big, Mother,” Bernie said, her voice flat. Lamia roared and whipped around, her trunk-thick tail lashing out to strike Bernie in the side. The older lamia crumpled to the floor, on her knees, gripping her middle, and Lamia struck her in the face with her tail tip. Bernie’s mouth exploded crimson, her lips mashing into her teeth and shredding open on the inside. She wheezed at the pain, a long tendril of bloody spittle dripping down to soil her white T-shirt, her left arm pressed to her mouth as if to hold her teeth inside
Tanis wanted to help, but Lamia was there, looming, and a show of sisterly solidarity was a show of rebellion against the Bitchbeast. Two of them bleeding did no one any good. Plus she still sported a tender spot on her shoulder from last night’s impromptu cave flight. A matched set didn’t appeal.
She dropped a hand onto Bernie’s shoulder and squeezed—the only comfort she dared risk.
Bernie grunted.
“Do you think your mother so stupid, Berenike? She that has persevered, has saved our people for thousands of years? Idiot child.” Lamia lifted the eyes, hovering both before their respective empty sockets. “There is a house. White with black shutters gone gray beneath sun. A stone fountain before, the basin cracked, with a water bearer who bears no water. Follow the treeline to the south and west; you’ll find the scent. Ariadne is ripe for breeding. This one”—Lamia’s tail rose from the floor, the delicate, tapered point at odds with the sheer girth of the coils stroking over the crotch of Tanis’s jeans, up and down, back and forth—“with her worthless cocks will know best. She’ll hunt her sex. She is a slave to it, in her own right.” Lamia leaned forward, the black, spidery veins in her cheeks and temples pulsing against the sheaf-like, translucent skin. Her mouth gaped open, unleashing her fetid breath on Tanis’s face. Tanis wouldn’t breathe it in—refused the chamber’s base, reptilian draw—but she was all too familiar with the rankness roiling forth from Mother’s maw. It tormented her memory enough that she flinched.
“You are so disappointing to me, but perhaps, this time, you will be less so. Don’t fail me, Tanis Barlas, daughter mine, or I will eat your secret.”
CHAPTER SIX
“THE FUCK DOES that even mean? ‘I’ll eat your secret’?” Bernie demanded. She was sour and understandably so; her chin was crusted with dried blood, one of her teeth was loose and probably fated to fall out, and her sneakers had gotten wet in the tunnels, and would never, ever dry in Florida’s jockstrap humidity.
Tanis had abandoned the leather jacket in the Caddy before the two of them set off into the unknown with nothing more than a gun, a pack of smokes, and a pair of baseball hats to keep the sun from their eyes. Bernie’s was white with red, script lettering that read Fred’s Diner. Tanis’s was a blue Romney for President hat she’d gotten for a nickel at a yard sale.
“My girlfriend,” she replied flatly. “It’s not much of a secret, but she wants me to know she knows about her. She generally doesn’t give fuck-all what we do until it suits her purposes, and her purposes this time are to let me know my girlfriend’s fucked if I don’t find Ariadne.”
“How’d we get so lucky, eh? How’d we get so lucky?”
Tanis hoped Bernie meant it to be a rhetorical question, because she was in no mood to answer.
Naree. I’m sorry.
She spit out her cigarette and trudged on, Bernie so close that their hands brushed every few steps. Ariadne’s scent was getting stronger further into the Glades. Sour, sweet, enticing. Lamia wasn’t wrong about the effect on Tanis. She’d had soft wood for fifteen minutes, and didn’t that make an already excruciating walk all the more unpleasant.
Dick chafe. Good times.
A half-hour in, Ariadne’s signature was twice as pungent as when they’d first set out and Tanis wanted
to dive into any number of the waterways they passed. Sadly, it wasn’t one of those things she could will away, or attempt to counter, with unsexy thoughts. She was biologically wired to respond, and respond she did, no matter how much she’d like not to. Her erections had become fucking dowsing rods for Lamia’s missing daughter.
“Daphne,” Bernie said, tilting her head back and sniffing. Tanis struggled to get past the Ariadne clouding her brain, inhaling deeply. Yes, there were traces of Daphne, though it wasn’t a pheromone so much that anything she’d touched or swept past held traces of her. She was on the grass and shrubs; she was an overlay on the vast, verdant green.
“Close,” Tanis said.
“Thank God. My face is killing me and my underwear’s so far up my ass it’s twisted around my tonsils.”
Tanis didn’t want to smile, but... well. Bernie.
Her lips twitched.
The terrain was terrible, mushy in some parts, covered with brambles in others. Near the Den there’d been hundreds of snakes drizzled over the flora, haphazard and limp like scaly tinsel tossed at Christmas trees, but further out was gator territory. Every once in a while you’d see the lumps in the water that, at first glance, looked like logs, but on second, had eyes, or moved faster than the current. None of them approached the lamia, though some drifted to the edges of their wading pools in case lunch had conveniently presented itself.
It hadn’t. In one notable week, Tanis had killed two gators with her bare hands. In her defense, they’d been assholes.
Trying to eat a person was assholish, anyway.
Deeper into the Glades, stepping over and around fallen trees, moldering underbrush, long abandoned hunting camps, and bird nests along the banks. Ariadne and Daphne’s scents intensified, which was good. What wasn’t as good were the new scents carried in by the wind, equally as present as the lamia, and distinctly... human? Four scents total, beyond Daphne and Ariadne’s own. Tanis stopped in her tracks, her eyes narrowing against the blazing sun.
“What’s that?” she demanded.
Bernie hunkered down low, her nostrils flaring as she swung her head back and forth. “Wish I could get past the stink of my own blood,” she muttered, knees dropping to the damp ground, her hands splaying out before her so she could get right up to the earth and sniff. She crawled forward, veering away from simpler, less-hazardous lakeside terrain and into waist-tall grasses. Tanis followed, honing in on Ariadne’s chemical invitation because how could she not?
Fuck you, dicks.
“Blood,” Bernie rasped. “Forty-five degrees ahead.”
Tanis cut in front of her and pulled out the gun; it was a Colt 1911, a big gun, a status gun, typical of a man like Luke Des Moines. Bernie scrambled to her feet. The two of them crept along, silent hunters, and it wasn’t long before Tanis recognized something that made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle: decay. Coppery, dank, sour rot. She smelled death. On any day that she wasn’t bathing in breeding-season lamia secretions, she would have picked up on it much sooner, but better late than never, she supposed, and really, death wasn’t something one ever wanted to find.
She advanced.
Blood on the tips of the grass.
Blood splashing the bark of a broken sapling.
Blood pooling on the ground like a sanguine offering.
Tanis spotted the hand first, the foot second. Meaty tendrils dangled from both, the exposed bones slicked red and wrapped in flesh that had, to all appearances, been ripped apart. Someone hadn’t taken the time to clean up after themselves. Tanis tiptoed into meatier terrain, viscera painting the Glades wrong. She spotted the torso in a small clearing between two trees, the human man’s head twisted so far it’d begun to tear away from his neck. One arm was still intact, but the other lacked a hand, the wrist stub poking out from the remains of a white robe that had been cinched with a forest-green belt beaded with gold.
She only noticed the belt when she spotted the legs. They were fifteen feet away from the torso, the bloodied cloth tangled around his knees, the unsoiled beads glittering.
“Daphne,” Bernie said. “She’s all over this. I can smell her.”
Tanis squatted to survey the damage. The corpse—a pale, bald male with sightless brown eyes that pointed at the sky, who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds—had been torn asunder. The why wasn’t evident, at least, not from the clues left. All they knew was that Ariadne and Daphne had started off alone from Adder’s Den, perhaps sneaking away for a tryst. Or perhaps they were sneaking away for good? And then they’d met these people and it turned violent.
Only finding the scent markers leading out would tell how the story ended.
If Daphne ripped one of them apart, it ain’t gonna be good.
“This is bad,” Bernie said.
“Yep. But we can’t go back without an answer.”
And if the answer is a body, maybe we shouldn’t go back at all.
It wasn’t an option, not with Naree out there, not with Lamia’s spying eyes, so Tanis forced herself up and away from the messy scene, continuing into the Glades, her nostrils flaring with Ariadne’s scent. She kept the gun in her right hand, her left adjusting her crotch. The rot had quelled most of the ardor, but it’d be back soon enough if she didn’t do something to stop it.
“You got the scent?” Tanis asked. “Rather not walk into a bad situation packing wood.”
“Course I do, doll.” Bernie squeezed her shoulder. “You’re lucky, in a way. Mia does the tongue flicking thing. Imagine if you did, too?”
“No, thanks.”
Bernie smirked at her before taking point, leading them past the arm and foot and torso. They’d just stepped over the legs with the gaping waist and gut confetti when Tanis noticed something about the beading on the blood-saturated belt—it formed a shape. A distinctive shape.
“Bernie.” She snagged the back of the older woman’s T-shirt and reeled her in. “You seeing what I see?” Tanis stooped to pull on the belt, not tearing it away from the corpse but smoothing it out across the grass so the pattern became more distinct. Bernie tilted her head, sussing out the picture. With some beads stained red and some untouched, it was like trying to see the schooner in one of those optical illusion books, but once she picked up on it, her mouth flattened into a grimace.
“Gorgon.”
The beading was intricate and hand-done, the features on the face straightforward but elegant. Five snakes from the head, mouths open with forked tongues, the eyes picked out with red beads. Tanis traced a finger along the shape of the leftmost serpent, stopping short of actual contact with the sticky, bloody sash.
She’d never seen a Gorgon—nor had any living lamias save the queen herself—but she’d heard the stories from her mother. Gorgons had hunted lamia for thousands of years, finding them weak and pathetic as a race. Gorgons considered themselves the true snake gods, the lamia a fragile, mortal stain compared to their eternities, and so they chased Lamia and her flock to prove their sovereignty. Their last attack was in Argentina in the early nineteen-fifties, where they killed all but twenty-seven of the six-hundred-plus colony. The genocide forced the lamias to migrate to the States. An injured Lamia was crated and snuck aboard a shipping vessel, her daughters nursing her back to health during the journey across the Atlantic, which probably meant feeding unsuspecting sailors to the monster mama’s maw to restore her strength. Lamia was a demigod—hard to kill, but not impossible—and the Gorgons had damned near taken her down. How the few managed to escape wasn’t known; Lamia never spoke about it, but what happened to the dead had carried down through the generations, becoming the stuff of child Tanis’s nightmares.
All six hundred of them had been turned to stone beneath Stheno and Euryale’s deadly stares. Two Gorgons wreaked that much havoc on that many lamia.
There’d been a History’s Mysteries about the abandoned lamia village southeast of Buenos Aires. It was deemed a secret society, the people living in squalor amid
st hundreds of statues of snake women. They’d called it the Latin Roanoke, and Tanis had watched the episode with macabre fascination. Human scholars speculated on cult activity, and old gods, and what might have caused the people to flee and where they’d gone. They were particularly fascinated with the ‘sculptors’ responsible for the strange masterpieces, and reported that a Berlin museum had paid the Argentinian government exorbitant amounts of money for their treasure trove. And so the statues were packed up and shipped overseas in the early ’sixties. There they were displayed under green spotlights, the exhibit credited to ‘Unknown Artist, circa 1954.’
Thousands of people a year unknowingly visited a lamia graveyard.
“They’re here?” Bernie’s voice was strangled.
“Mother always said they’d come looking for her.”
Lamia had one defense against the Gorgons and that was her removable eyes. The scrying, the precognition allowed her to stay one step ahead of the Gorgons—it wasn’t foolproof, but it was reliable enough, and if the Gorgons had gotten this close without Lamia cluing in, that meant they hadn’t been around for very long. There was still a window of opportunity to escape.
And then what happens when you land wherever you’ll land? To you, to Naree?
Tanis cringed.
“We need to tell her,” Bernie said. “She’ll want to know as soon as possible.”
Tanis brushed past Bernie to walk, not back toward Adder’s Den, but away from it. “We can’t go home empty-handed.”
“One True Daughter versus an impending invasion? I think your priorities are a little off, doll.”
Tanis paused to glance at Bernie over her shoulder. Bernie had mud on her knees from kneeling, and splatters of blood on her pretty fluorescent shoes, and sweat rivulets streaming from her brow to settle into the deep grooves of her wrinkles. Her face was puckered with worry, her pulse jumping in her throat. “You can go. I got this.”
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