Snake Eyes

by Hillary Monahan

  “Men in white,” one said. “Everywhere.”

  “What do you mean, men in white? Pig flesh? Tear them apart. Asunder. Asunder.”

  She slithered down the pipe after her daughters, abandoning Tanis in a heap. Tanis didn’t move at first, too pained to do anything other than lie prone, but listening to the chaos just beyond Lamia’s den, to the shouts and crashes and cacophony of invasion, she pulled her knees under her body, her chin perched on the ground to help keep her balance. It wasn’t easy to gain her feet without her arms, but she managed it, and just in time, too. A terrified yell echoed into Lamia’s chamber, telling Tanis to get out of the way or risk being run over. Her mother raced back into her room, eyes wide, face screwed up in terror as she whipped around, looking up at the thick slabs of rock forming her roof.

  “Help me,” she hissed at Tanis, climbing onto her stacked mattresses and straining to move the slabs that had taken a dozen daughters to place. “ATTEND ME, TANIS! The Gorgons come for us. We’ll go... we’ll make a new den. Together. Rebuild the lamias.”

  It wasn’t funny. There was nothing funny about the situation at all. Except... well, there was, wasn’t there? Lamia was in a total dither, terrified by the coming Gorgons, and—after nearly tearing Tanis’s arms off—she needed help lifting something.

  Tanis started to laugh. In some part, out of crazed acceptance that the end was very fucking nigh and there was nothing she could do about it. The other part, though, was utter astonishment at the suggestion that she could, should, or would help Lamia do anything after she’d threatened to sew her good remaining eye open and rape her.

  “I wouldn’t give you the steam off my shit, Ma,” Tanis quipped. The blood on her face had dried, and she felt it tug at her skin when she grinned. “What am I supposed to do, anyway? Headbutt the rocks to death? You crippled me, you stupid bitch.”

  “Call for them. Your sisters. Make them help me. Save us. They’re coming. Don’t you understand, THEY’RE COMING FOR US ALL!” It was impressive that Lamia made as much progress with the stone slabs as she did, shoving them up enough to allow a foot-wide sliver of sunlight to shine down into her birthing chamber. She poked her face up at it, blinking against the brightness of the light and clawing at the stone, trying to get a better grip to shove it aside.

  Tanis watched with morbid fascination.

  Footsteps neared.

  She would have smelled newcomers had she been breathing through her nose. She craned her head in time to see Euryale and Stheno marching up, side by side, a gaggle of their priests behind them in a wide arc, all wearing formal robes and belts. Muriel was among them, her walking stick striking the sides of the tunnel as she trudged along, Karl-the-makeshift-doctor clasping the priestess’s elbow to guide her.

  “Hey, ladies!’ Tanis said cheerfully. She might have felt like shit, but at least this part of things was going as planned.

  The Gorgons cast her a shared glance, but there was no smile to be found, only grim determination as they closed in on the frantic Lamia trying to cram her truck-sized body through a hole the size of a breadbox.

  Stheno stepped forward, porcine face twisting into what must have been a smile, but it was hard to tell with the tusks and stubby teeth. “No escaping again, Lamia. Justice is here.”

  “Justice,” her loyalists echoed, fanning out behind the Gorgon.

  Stheno advanced. Lamia screeched in terror, whipping her tail around and sending the smaller god sailing into the den wall, sprawling out among the broken eggs. Euryale rushed forward with an enraged shriek, lunging for the back of Lamia’s neck, her fangs sinking into the jiggling meat of Lamia’s shoulder. The priests followed her lead, ants on a picnic lunch, save for blind Muriel, who stood back and waited, patiently, listening to the chaos. The priests’ white robes billowed as they climbed the thrashing Lamia, weapons thrusting down over and over into her soft, blue flesh. Tanis watched dispassionately as Lamia’s shoulder, breast, side, and flank all split wide, spilling blood over her sagging flesh, over her scales and onto the floor. It stained her mattresses and splashed the wall behind her. It wound around her arms in sanguine rivers that drizzled to her armpits and breasts.

  “TANIS! ATTEND ME!” she howled, plucking a priest from her back and thrusting her hand into his stomach to tear out his guts. The hot, squishing mess spilled over her ham fist like ropes of sausage before he was thrown aside, insides leaking and staining his robe. Only when he lifted his head to scream did Tanis realize that it was Karl slapping at his ruined stomach, attempting to tuck his parts back into their fleshy cavern.

  Cassandra’s voice plucked at the strings of her memory:

  “I see your death, with guts and gore. Your insides spilled across the floor. Goodbye, Karl. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!”

  Stheno picked herself up, her dress covered in the gooey vestiges of Lamia and Luke’s decimated clutch. Her eyes glowed an unearthly green as she approached Tanis’s thrashing mother, her hands spreading wide, voice booming through the chamber.

  “Enough of you! Enough running. Enough escaping. Enough. For our sister. For MEDUSA!”

  Tanis stood behind the Gorgon, which is likely how she avoided the petrification stare. She felt the power, though; there was a drop in air pressure, like the calm just before a storm, followed by a coldness that blasted out in an arc from the front of Stheno’s body. The magic conjured silence, silencing Lamia’s shrieks, casting her in gray from her hair to her arms and breasts and all the way to the thick snake coils below. But it wasn’t a complete freeze—there were hints of color at the tips of her extremities, in particular her fingers and the very tip of her tail.

  Perhaps a god can’t be petrified, or at least not for long.

  Such was not the case for the priests who’d been climbing her, though. They were forever frozen, arms raised, faces contorted with zealous rage. They’d knowingly put themselves in harm’s way without hesitation, doing the Gorgons’ savage bidding with bloodthirsty glee.

  The true power of the Gorgons was, perhaps, not in their magic, but in the control they held over their devotees.

  Euryale slid down Lamia’s stone back to find the floor. She went to her sister and took her hand, the two gazing upon their macabre work. Karl groaned behind them, but they paid him no mind. Petrification would have been a mercy in the wake of vivisection, but they did not spare him a thought.

  “Call the others,” Stheno said to Muriel. “Disassemble her into pieces and spread the pieces far. As far as we can take them. She will live, and eventually, she will purge the poison from her flesh, but with no legs to walk, no arms to hold, no tongue to speak, she will be a prisoner in her immortal flesh. Tell them I wish to keep her eyes, so she can look upon me and know her oppressor. Suffer long, and suffer well, Lamia. I’ve waited for this day.”

  Well. That’s efficient.

  Horrible, but efficient.

  Good.

  Tanis didn’t say as much, though. The less attention she called to herself, the better.

  Muriel turned and tapped her stick upon the floor, slowly making her way back to the main tunnel and out beyond. Her voice traveled through the Den, calling to the other priests, which explained the eerie quiet outside. Very soon a dozen priests appeared, all looking bruised, battered, or bloody.

  Lamias aren’t easy to kill.

  “How many fled?” Euryale asked the frontmost priest, a lithe, Nordic-looking woman with a jagged cut in her cheek.

  “Many. They are fast, but we killed the breeders, as you said.”

  “Good. The rest will die out without their queen. They are no matter.”

  The True Daughters are gone, but most of the others survived? That’s better than I could have hoped.

  Fuck you, Mariam.

  Tanis slunk back into the shadows of the chamber, squatting to make herself as small as possible. It was, as it happened, the best seat in the house. The deconstruction started. Sledges, hammers, chainsaws—the priests came equipped. Most of the
body parts snapped off clean, like stone, though some had already started to turn back to flesh, the innermost cores bleeding true. The lumps of Lamia were handed off chain gang style, down a line of worshippers that extended out through the tunnel door.

  The breakdown took minutes—twenty, tops, if Tanis had to guess. Lamia’s eyes were taken last, carved from her head with chisels and handed over to Stheno, who rolled them around in her palm like dice. Tanis could hear them clicking against one another despite the distance between them.

  The Gorgon sisters stood shoulder to shoulder, fingers entwined, the snakes atop their heads calm for once. Euryale hummed a song Tanis had never heard before, and Stheno joined in with a harmony. It was a funeral dirge, best Tanis could tell, the melody haunting and full of despair, and they sung it through to completion, bowing their heads at the end as if they offered prayer to the dust and debris before them.

  Perhaps it’s a prayer for their fallen sister.

  Perhaps it’s a prayer to Tartarus.

  They turned to walk out, together. Tanis had the fleeting hope that she’d be forgotten after Lamia’s destruction, but then Karl wriggled on the floor, his bloodied hand reaching for Euryale’s skirt and tugging.

  “Please, my ladies. Grant me a final mercy,” he gurgled, a crimson bubble spilling past his lips to soil his chin and the robe below. He was an island in a lake of blood, desperately trying to hold his intestines together. “Send me to the Elysian Fields.”

  Euryale smiled down at him, gently shaking him off like he was a pesky, wayward child wheedling for a snack. “Soon. Tartarus calls,” she said. “Have faith.”

  “Finish me, please,” he pleaded.

  “No.”

  Another plea, another deflection, Euryale walking away from him. That was almost the end of it, except as Euryale went to take her sister’s hand, her eye skipped over Tanis huddling in the corner. The Gorgon stared, and Tanis had the distinct impression that it was not pity for Tanis’s condition, so much as curiosity and surprise that she’d lingered to see things through.

  “Stheno. The betrayer is here still,” Euryale said. “In the corner.”

  Stheno followed her sister’s gaze. Tanis struggled to her feet and walked into the dim light of the ceiling lamps, her arms limp at her sides. “My mother injured me,” she explained. “I didn’t want to go into the fray outside useless. Guns aren’t so good when you can’t lift them.”

  Also, I wanted to see what you’d do to my mother.

  Not worth dying for, but still satisfying.

  The Gorgons approached. Tanis took a step back, but where would she go? Stheno could simply do to her what had been done to Lamia. And so she braced, even as the sisters drew near enough that their longest snakes could snap at her. One of Euryale’s tried, looming before the Gorgon’s face, but she batted it aside and it slithered back to rejoin its brethren.

  “What to do with you?” Stheno said, circling around behind Tanis’s back, and the hairs on Tanis’s neck stood on end. A hand dipped down into Tanis’s waistband and pulled out first the Glock and then the Colt. The guns were assessed and promptly dismissed. Stheno next pulled the black feather from her jeans pocket, and after a thorough examination, handed it over Tanis’s shoulder to her sister. One of Stheno’s snakes glided over Tanis’s other shoulder at the same time, not snarling, but lazing there like Tanis had become a perch.

  Euryale plucked the feather from Stheno’s grasp, twisting it between her green-tinged fingers. “What is this?”

  “A rooster feather,” Tanis managed, but the fear was so thick in her throat, it strangled the words. She didn’t know if the Gorgons’ snakes afflicted the same poison as their mistresses, but with a second snake winding around her upper arm, things were not looking good.

  “Why?” Euryale demanded. “Why carry it?”

  “For luck.”

  “Ah, ah. Lesser gods again, lamia? What did I tell you about such foolishness?”

  “Figured I could use every bit of luck I could get, all things considered.”

  Please. Please just go.

  “...you would have made a good supplicant, I think. Given other circumstances.”

  Would have?

  Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  Euryale leaned in, pressing her snake face to Tanis’s own, their cheeks aligned, heat to heat. “You will live on with our eternal gratitude,” she whispered with her soft, sibilant voice. “You brought us justice. We honor you.” The feather coursed over Tanis’s neck and along her jaw. Down the column of her throat and over her upper chest to dance over the tops of her tattoos.

  “If that’s the case, why don’t you let m—”

  Euryale’s claws pricked Tanis’s flesh, and then they dug deep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  UNLIKE BERNIE, WHO’D gotten a diluted, minimal dose of poison, Tanis got a full hit direct from the source, which meant no lingering decay. It wasn’t instant like Stheno’s stare, but it didn’t tarry either. First came the cold numbness settling into her feet. It coursed up to her knees. It deadened her waist and abdominal muscles and breasts and—almost mercifully—her shoulders and head. Next came the fire, the burning of fire ants biting the inside of her veins. It stung all over, needling, the sensation tearing through Tanis’s body from one nerve to the next and making her twitch. Last came the drowsiness, a sleepy, leaden fog that drooped her eyelids, slowed her pulse, and made her muscles go slack.

  Breathing grew laborious. Blinking was a chore.

  This isn’t as bad as I thought it’d be.

  I’m tired. So tired.

  Euryale’s hand stroked Tanis’s hair like she’d stroked Jefferson BMW’s hair back at the manor house.

  “Know your gods, little snake. Know who to fear, who to revere.”

  “No, you,” Tanis rasped, her throat so dusty a thousand lakes couldn’t wet it.

  Tanis breathed deep, welcoming the tonnage settling into her bones and willing it to take her away, Calgon, but she couldn’t go yet because a wretched smell rose from the floor, assaulting her nose and commanding attention. It wasn’t the Den itself, though that was beyond unpleasant with the rot of broken eggs and Lamia’s deplorable housekeeping. No, it was thousands of years of concentrated death; a bog of stench that hit her in the face, the likes of which she’d only encountered once before, so of course she laughed, which didn’t sound like a laugh at all as her lungs seized up but more like a backed-up garbage disposal.

  The Styx.

  It’s real. It was all real.

  Euryale’s face screwed up first in confusion and then in disbelief. It was difficult to follow her gaze—Tanis’s spine had gone to rock—but she managed it over the course of a few seconds, forcing her head to dip despite an unnerving cracking sound and the sensation of dust crumbling off her skin. Shadows slinked around her’s and Euryale’s ankles like cats, weaving in and out, back and forth in lazy, rhythmic curves.

  Stheno came to stand by her sister’s side, similarly gawking at the floor and the death magic undulating below her knees.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  “You promised,” Tanis whispered. “You vowed...”

  “Vowed to what? This is no Snake Father. What did you do, lamia?!”

  Stheno reached out to clasp Tanis around the neck, squeezing, but the flesh had mostly gone to stone, so the strangulation fell short. The Gorgon yelped as the shadows grew bolder and hands—dark hands, a thousand hands made of blackness and the cold of the grave—grabbed at her body and tore at her dress, scratching at her legs and shackling her arms. Euryale was similarly afflicted, a maelstrom of magic rising and washing her body in an oily cloak.

  “The Styx,” Tanis managed, her throat closing, hardening, no longer allowing for words.

  The Styx.

  Yes, that is the last of it, then. The last from me.

  “In the bottle. In her wretched bottle!” Euryale screamed just before a fat, black tendril broke from the shivering shadows to s
hove itself into her mouth and stifle her screams. More hands, all over, gripping her snakes and tugging at them, covering her eyes and nose in a shroud. Stheno’s tusks went from white to black as the Styx swallowed her, too, her boar snout disappearing beneath a rising tide of power that not once, despite churning all around, touched Tanis.

  The blackness on the floor looked like a whirlpool, like someone had filled a bathtub with ink and opened the drain. Faster it spiraled, round and round, the magic sucked into a vacuum that pulled everything in its grasp into its current, including the Gorgons. Stheno’s enraged shrieks were muffled first by the power encapsulating her and then by the floor itself as she was dragged down, down down, not beneath Lamia’s den but beneath the world, Tartarus seizing her and Euryale both.

  Gone. They’re gone.

  Tanis wanted to relish her victory—she wanted the joy of knowing that Naree and Bee would be safe—but there was no place left inside of her for feeling. She was, as Bernie had been and countless others before them had been, stone.

  And stone did not feel. It did not bleed. It did not breathe or think.

  It sank. Stone sank, as Bernie had sunk.

  Stillness crept over her mind. Her lungs filled but didn’t drain. Her heart beat one last time. There was a fleeting image of Naree holding Bee and then the blackness came, pouring over her and spiriting her away to her ever after.

  Just as a rooster crowed.

  “BAH, STUPID KOULÈV. Getting yourself killed. Such a waste.”

  No one told her that Maman Brigitte would be in the afterlife scolding her, but then, death was the greatest mystery of them all, so who was Tanis to say if it was strange or not? She floated in darkness, a buoy on a sea that wasn’t at all cold. There was no stench of death, no River Styx or rotting bodies. No mongooses or never-ending fields of dead grass. It was a cozy little nest, her body swaddled in softness, the air smelling strangely floral with a dash of...

  Tide?

  Death smells like Tide?