CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THERE WERE NO tears for Bernie because Tanis had none left to give; Naree and Bee had claimed them all at the airport. But her heart was heavy as she drove from the beach. It was dark, it was quiet—perfect feeding ground for sadness—and it mounted as the miles passed, a snowball rolling silently downhill and becoming a boulder. She was alone. She was vulnerable. In the face of Lamia and the Gorgons, she was a speck of dust on their shoes, powerless. And where once she’d had nothing to lose, now she had everything.
Which is why I’m going to them, to the monsters.
I might fail, but at least I tried.
She drove until her eyes wouldn’t let her anymore, landing at a cheap motel just outside of Tallahassee. She slept poorly, the Colt on the bed beside her, her hand resting on its grip. She would have preferred Naree’s warm curves and the softness of a well-loved T-shirt, but that was behind her for the time being.
Forever, if she couldn’t get herself out of the mess she was about to make.
Breakfast at nine, Tanis reading a wall of Naree’s texts while she stuffed herself with an omelet so big it had to be served on a platter. Naree and Bee had landed in New York at five in the morning. Their bus had arrived in Connecticut at six-thirty. Naree’s father picked them up, nearly throwing up on himself seeing Bee for the first time, but the shock gave way to delight, and both of Naree’s parents were already fawning over their first and possibly only grandchild.
Naree attached a picture of Bee against her grandmother’s chest. Bee looked annoyed with her circumstance, and despite the sick feeling pervading her guts, Tanis actually managed a chuckle.
So much like her mother already.
Naree’s questions started thereafter—what Tanis had planned, why, when she thought she’d be done. Tanis didn’t know how to answer any of them so she changed the subject to Bernie, filling Naree in on what happened at the beach. Naree replied with a line of sad faces and a single Damn, which pretty much covered Tanis’ feelings on it, too. She didn’t feel good losing her friend, but in the face of a grueling, painful death, Bernie had chosen to let go, her way, on her timetable. Tanis might have done the same in her position.
Tanis fueled the Honda and hit the road south. She’d veer east to catch the seventy-five and follow it all the way down to the Everglades. She didn’t want to go straight to Adder’s Den, but somewhere nearish, maybe thirty minutes out, where she could park until the Gorgon priests came sniffing around. Hopefully they were still looking; she hadn’t encountered them since the gas station a couple days ago, but that may have been because Tanis and company had kept moving. Scrying wasn’t a perfect science, and they didn’t have the lamias’ sensitive noses to round it out if they lost the trail. Tanis had been able to avoid detection by being smart and just a little bit lucky.
She didn’t want to avoid it anymore, though; she wanted to be found. But that wasn’t for hours and half a state yet, and so she scrolled through her missed calls from the other day, finding Fi’s number and dialing. Fi’d been kind enough to warn her about her pursuers. Tanis could, at the very least, return the favor, and maybe in the process have Fi get Zoe and the other kids away from the Den. The kid didn’t deserve to suffer—hell, none of the kids did—and Tanis would have to figure out a way to pull off what she wanted without creaming the innocents, too.
Two rings in, Fi’s line connected. But it wasn’t Fi that answered.
“Is this you, traitor child? Deserter. DISLOYAL STAIN!”
There was a time that Lamia’s anger would have turned Tanis’s insides out. She would have done anything to appease her so life could go back to the atrocious reality of being abhorred and ignored until she was needed again. But so much had happened in the last few days, so many new feelings, so many new experiences, so many hurts, that Lamia didn’t seem as scary anymore. She was the same horrific piece of shit she’d been before Tanis left, yes, but the notion of dying beneath her hands didn’t scare Tanis as much, not with Naree and Bee away and safe.
“Knowing what you want from me, I’d be careful dropping insults, Mom.”
There was a sharp inhale of breath on the other end of the line. Lamia was taken aback at Tanis’ gall; or else formulating her next onslaught.
Possibly both.
Seconds ticked by.
“I ate her, you know,” she said finally, her voice quiet and laced with an ugly purr. “I found out she’d warned you so I gouged out her eyes and then I ate her. Feet first. She was a big girl and it took some work, especially with how she flailed, but I snapped her arms and legs like twigs. She screamed all the way down, bellowing like a cow. Hnnn. Hnnngh. Hnngeee.”
Fi. Oh, Fi. Fuck. I’m sorry.
Lamia kept up the horrible honking moos. Tanis wanted to pound the phone against the dashboard until it stopped, or reach through the line to pull her mother’s tongue clean out of her fat skull, but neither was possible, and so she breathed deep, letting her mother put on her little show.
“I’m coming home,” she said, finally, when Lamia’s brays died out to a raspy chuckle. “I’m on my way.”
“Good. Make it fast. We’re leaving soon. Kallie has made arrangements for my shipping.” There was a pause. “I’ve been dreaming about punishing you, you know. I’ve thought about it—thought about tearing off your arms and legs and feeding them to our first clutch. Thought about taking out your teeth and your tongue, leaving you a husk with just your cocks to keep you company. If I were you, I’d think long and hard about how you’d like to curry my favor. I am displeased, consort. Most displeased.”
Consort? No. No, never, you loathsome twat.
Tanis ended the call without another word and focused on the road ahead. She pushed the Honda up to eighty, ninety. She’d had enough of Lamia’s bullshit. For herself, for Naree and Bee. For Bernie and Fi. For Ariadne and Daphne who’d had to run because they loved one another. For Priska with a hole in her chest and Rhea who had to care for her.
Tanis Was Done.
And Being Done made what came next infinitely easier.
SHE STOPPED BY the apartment in Percy’s Pass. The door had been jimmied open, and the inside was a disaster; the TV was toppled over, the kitchen cabinets all opened, the bureau drawers rifled through. Hell, even the sex toy bucket had been found and upended, raining Naree’s rainbow of sparkle dildos across the bed. Whoever it was had been most thorough, going so far as to take their desktop computers and any receipts, probably looking for evidence of their plans. Tanis picked through the litter on the floor of her former life to find her now-dry alligator boots, her most broken-in jeans, and a Budweiser T-shirt. She didn’t let her gaze linger too long on any one thing. There were too many feelings trapped between those four thin walls. Too many laughs and loves and ghosts of good times past.
She drove to the Value Mart and waited, the statue of Dumballah tied around her neck and resting between her breasts. It was everything a mom-and-pop quick stop in Florida ought to be: six packs, cigarettes, junk food, Coke, jars of home-brewed moonshine next to a live-bait cooler. Tanis parked outside and off to the left, sitting on the trunk of her car watching the store’s neon Open sign in the front window flicker. There were two gas pumps ahead of her beneath a rusted carport, the front one covered by a tied-off garbage bag with a handwritten Closed sign attached to it, the back one still in service and charging a buck more a gallon than anywhere else nearby. Two lightbulbs dangling on strings lit the whole place, dragging moths in to singe themselves and plummet to the cracked tarmac below.
Tanis was on her ninth cigarette, a full carton beside her and ready for smoking. She’d sit there all night waiting for the Gorgon priests if she had to. The only snag she could think of was if the lamias came for her first, but she’d told her mother she was on her way. Her sisters had no reason to retrieve a willing tribute.
A mosquito buzzed by her ear and she swiped it from the air, killing it before it got any of her blood. They’d been dive bombing
her awhile, and she considered heading into the store for some repellent, but then a black BMW pulled up, not alongside the gas pump, but on the opposite side of the store. Tanis smoked her cigarettes and eyed them. The two people in the front seat didn’t get out immediately. She watched them through the haze of smoke by her face and had the distinct impression they watched her right back.
“HEY!”
Her voice echoed across the empty parking lot, bigger thanks to the carport. Still the strangers didn’t climb from their car.
“I NEED TO TALK TO STHENO AND EURYALE. WE GOT BUSINESS TO DEAL.”
If they weren’t Gorgon priests, no harm, no foul. They’d assume she spoke in tongues, might shout some random shit at her and drive off, and that’d be the end of it. But if they were...
She waited.
After another five minutes, a man climbed from the car and walked her way. He was polished—nice khaki slacks, nice pale blue button-down shirt, shiny shoes. His brown hair had streaks of gray along his hairline. His hands were in his pockets. If he was supposed to be their idea of non-intimidating, it didn’t work; Luke Des Moines came across much the same and he’d been a wife-beater and a rapist. Shiny exteriors all too often hid rotten cores.
“Stop right there.” Tanis aimed the Colt at his middle. “I pull the trigger, there’s two ways this’ll go. Worst case? A slow, painful bleed out. Best case, a lot of extra effort needed to eat and shit the rest of your life.”
He stopped fifteen feet away, his hands sliding from his pockets so he could show her his bare palms.
Tanis spit out her smoke. “Got poison on you?”
“Yes,” he said frankly, his Florida twang in full effect. “But I left it in the car. You sounded like you wanted to talk. We’re listening.”
She eyeballed him. He could have been a lawyer or a banker, or an insurance salesman. He had ‘fine, upstanding citizen’ written all over him, and if she had to venture a guess, that shiny black BMW parked across the way was absolutely his. She supposed they could have dressed up an average Joe and paraded him in front of her, but he walked the walk and talked the talk too well.
“What’s a guy like you doing with a couple of Gorgons anyway?”
He smiled, showing off blindingly white, capped teeth. “They’re magical, aren’t they? Strong. Beautiful.”
Buddy, your idea of beautiful and mine are way different. Rainbows are beautiful. Horses are beautiful. Women with snake hair and bronze hands and faces that look like they’d been vacuumed backward? Not so much.
“Look at what they can do,” he said, reverently. “I’ve never seen such power. Love them, fear them, that’s all they ask. They only harm those who mean them harm. They’re peaceful. Loving.”
“Unless you’re a lamia. Or the poor bastards whose house they want.”
He smiled, daring a step forward like he was going to evangelize her—or whatever the ‘love my snake-bitch’ equivalent was—and she shot the pavement beside his foot, sending him skittering back, gravel flying. The color drained from his face, but he tried to play cool despite the hammering pulse at the base of his throat.
“You stay right there,” she said. “You got a way to talk to Stheno and Euryale? I’m listening. Hell, I’m negotiating.” She hopped down off of the car and popped open the Honda’s trunk. The remaining half of the heart was right there, in the salt, and she lifted it up to shake the container at him. “Here.” She lobbed it his way. He barely had the wherewithal to catch it, but once he had it in hand, he lifted the lid and peered inside.
“What is it?”
“Ask your mommies. They’ll know.”
Sharp-Dressed Man pulled out a phone and dialed, his face screwed up in distaste at the body part in his possession. He backed away from Tanis, probably hoping to keep her out of his conversation, but she could hear most of it. Could hear him talking to someone with a shrill female voice who demanded to know why he dared to ask for his mistresses by name.
“The lamia wants to talk to them,” he whispered.
It took three different people on the other end of the line, the request filtering up the ranks, for him to get a Gorgon on the phone. Euryale, by the sounds of it; Tanis had only heard her through the floor in the basement, but the tone of her voice was unmistakable—high pitched, oddly nasal and soft at the same time.
He walked forward to offer Tanis the phone, but she waved the gun at him again.
“Throw it. You stay over there,” she said.
He did as he was told, and she snatched it midair and put it up to her ear.
“You give us back that which you stole? In half measure? And then wish to bargain with us,” Euryale said in greeting. She sounded amused more than anything, which was good, because Tanis didn’t have another round of crazy, bitchy, screaming snake woman in her.
“It’s good faith. I want to cut a deal.”
“Your life for the mother snake? Is that what you want?”
“Among other things.”
“Other things, she says.” Euryale’s laughter was a wisp of a thing: light, airy, almost pleasant to listen to. “I’ll hear you, Lamia’s child. I’ll hear your offer.”
“Good. I’ll come to you, then. I want to meet in person, you and Stheno, and I come alone. Know this: if you fuck me over, the Den will run and you’ll spend another sixty years looking for them. Keep your priests away from me and I’ll give you everything. Everything.” She paused to let that sink in. She’d been full of shit on the Lamia and Den running thing—she’d made no such arrangements—but they didn’t need to know that. Lying on the phone was infinitely easier than doing it in person. Something she’d come to understand over time was that creatures who’d lived for thousands of years, like Lamia and the Gorgons, were exceptional at reading body language. Their bullshit meters were almost preternaturally good.
But over the phone? Not so much. And the humans would be too dumb to know any better.
Euryale clicked her tongue a few times, thoughtful, but then she burst into delighted laughter. “You make this easy. Too easy. Come to me and we’ll talk.”
“Keep the priests away from me or no deal,” Tanis warned.
“As you like, lamia. Now come.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
TANIS FOLLOWED THE BMW through the Glades, all the way to a tiny road that was impossible to find unless you knew exactly how and where to look for it among the cypress trees. Narrow, winding, two miles long—there was no hope of anyone stumbling across it, or the house at its end, unless you damn well knew where you wanted to get. Someone had built themselves a secluded little paradise in the wetlands. The Gorgons had promptly murdered them and claimed it for their own, but hey, at least someone got to benefit from the privacy.
The windows of the Honda were down, so she could smell for a rear ambush when she drove up to the house. No bodies near, but many ahead. All ahead, in fact. The Gorgons were centered on the porch steps, side by side, their sundresses rippling with the breeze. Their priests flanked them. Some were in street clothes, but most wore the white robes with the green sashes and billowy palazzo pants. There had to be a hundred of them altogether, all shapes and colors represented, all standing far back from the hissing snakes writhing atop their mistresses’ heads. Karl, the man who’d doctored Cassandra, was there, as was the blind woman from Daphne’s removal and the driver of the car at the gas station attack. Mr. Clean-Cut BMW and his never-before-seen partner, Mr. Obnoxious Combover and Pineapple Shorts, left the car to stand at the foot of the house steps with their brethren, Clean-Cut holding the Tupperware with the prophet’s heart in his hand.
Tanis eyeballed them all from the safety of the Honda, then peered past them, looking for more zealots. She found none, but in the distance, to the sides of the house, were the statues of the Gorgons’ victims. Standing among them was a half-snake girl with no breasts and no arms, her head lolling forward, her hair curls forever captured in stone.
At least she rests in the same garden
as Daphne. Even if Daphne’s statue is toppled and headless.
Tanis killed the engine and went to the trunk. Bernie’s shotguns were there, and she selected a pair, looping one over her shoulder with a sling and carrying another. The Gorgons and their priests could poison her all they wanted, but she’d make a few of them into sprinklers before she went down. A straight petrification and she’d be fucked, but at least her statue would look badass in the garden.
She was about to close the trunk and its mini-arsenal away, but then she spied Maman’s black feather resting atop one of the white, crinkly Walmart bags. She hadn’t put it there—in fact, she was pretty sure she’d left it in the visor of the Caddy—but somehow it’d made the trip anyway.
“For luck,” Maman had said.
Tanis slid it into her pocket. With what she was about to do? She needed all the luck in the goddamned world.
She shoved the trunk closed and circled around the car, nostrils flaring and searching for priests, but so far, the Gorgons were playing fair. The onslaught was ahead, not to the side or behind. Tanis held the shotgun to her chest, her teeth clenched around an unlit cigarette. Figuring that could be interpreted as rude, she tucked it behind her ear, standing thirty feet from the house with her legs braced apart.
Euryale was as unpleasant to look at as she’d been days ago: human body, bronze hands, green fingernails and toenails, black, lidless eyes. Poison-crusted chin and mass of self-cannibalizing snakes atop her head. Stheno was somehow worse. From the neck down, she was dark and lithe, taller than her sister by some inches, long legs and nice hips. The problem was the boar’s head attached to her neck, complete with tusks, a broad pig mouth, and a snout. She wasn’t furred like a boar; human skin stretched over a porcine skull with whiskers bristling the chin. Her eyes were the same black, lidless orbs as her sister’s, and atop her head, instead of brownish snakes, she had dark green and blue ones in an unruly tangle.
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