His voice trailed off, but she had the information she needed. Eve raced to grab the branch, then ran at the monstrosity that still towered over the boy. Whatever magic they had used, it only affected those who were in the vicinity when it was cast. But the Hydra and Danny would not be slowed like this for long.
"This is going to hurt you a lot more than it does me," Eve said as she placed her hand against the charred scales of the monster’s breast, feeling for the pulse of its heart.
Eve found what she was looking for. With all the unnatural strength she could muster, the vampire plunged the jagged end of the makeshift spear through the creature’s chest and into its heart.
She found the act strangely liberating.
The Hydra shrieked in agony out of all of its mouths, a chorus of anguish so profound that Eve was almost moved to pity.
Almost.
When it crashed to the ground, throwing up volcanic ash in clouds that spread in concentric circles around it, she strode over to the monster and kicked it. "It wasn’t ever gonna be me in the dust, ugly. Not today."
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ash clouded the sun above the petrified forest. The breeze blowing across the island of Lesbos would soon clear away what had not already clung to the skeletal trees or blanketed the ground. In the moments following the death of the Hydra, Conan Doyle concerned himself with the well-being of his associates. All of them were injured, yet Danny and Eve healed quickly.
"Let me have a look," he said to Ceridwen.
She had sustained several long gashes on her right side. But even as he tried to see to her wounds he could feel a wave of cold emanating from her hands where she touched her scored flesh. Ice formed on her skin.
"I’ll be fine," she said, curtly at first, and then she caught herself and her features became gentler. "Truly. I will be fine. See to the others. Or better yet, see to Gull. He and his friends weren’t very much help, were they?"
Conan Doyle smiled bitterly. "Did you expect them to be?"
"Son of a bitch!" Danny snarled.
Through the drifting, settling ash, Conan Doyle saw the demon boy striding toward him with Eve at his side. Sunlight shone down in patches but the bit of magick Gull had taught Eve to protect herself was holding up for the moment. At least that had not been false.
"What is it?" Ceridwen asked, moving toward them in concern, wincing at the pain in her side.
Conan Doyle did not have to ask, but he awaited the answer to the question in any case. Eve spun around, her arms wide, taking in the entire dead, petrified landscape around them.
"They’re gone!" she said.
"Bastards!" Danny added for punctuation.
Eve laughed humorlessly. "Can you believe these guys? Drag us all the way out here to get answers and instead we get to fight the Hydra! And now they’re gone! Took off while we were trying to stay alive. We have been so completely punked."
Conan Doyle did not know the term, but its meaning was clear. He only nodded. Rather than respond he set off toward the place he had last seen Gull, Hawkins, and Jezebel.
"Arthur?" Ceridwen called.
Lost in concentration, he barely heard her. He had an idea but wanted confirmation. The ash continued to settle, drifting, and he wiped it from his eyes as he circumnavigated the corpse of the Hydra. He would have to see to it before they left, some spell to disintegrate it, perhaps, so that it was only more ash in the petrified forest. Certainly he had no intention of reburying it.
Beyond the monster’s corpse he strode a hundred yards farther to a place where the dead trees formed a kind of natural circle. Or, rather, it appeared natural. Conan Doyle knew better. In the rough center of that circle was a hole in the ground. Ash coated the earth but Conan Doyle fell to his knees there and plunged his hands into the hole, sifting ash and digging a bit deeper.
He drew out a human skull.
Ceridwen, Eve, and Danny had followed him at a distance, observing. Now the demon boy swore aloud once more.
"So this is the grave of that dude? Forceps, or whatever?"
Conan Doyle held the skull up. "This is human. Ancient, but human. The father of the Gorgons was not human."
"Then whose grave is this?" Eve asked. "What the hell was Gull up to here?"
He raised his eyebrows and stood, tossing the skull back into the ash. "I should think that much would be obvious, my dear. Some time in the past… perhaps as early as the very beginning of the Third Age of Man… the Hydra was buried here to guard this grave, to destroy anyone who came in search of it. My old friend Mr. Gull availed himself of our services as bodyguards. He simply did so without informing us."
"Bodyguards?" Eve snarled. "More like bait."
"As you wish," Conan Doyle acknowledged. His attention was still not fully on the conversation. He scanned the ground, eyeing the fresh ash as he began to walk away from the grave. Silently he counted paces in his mind, paused to glance deeper into the petrified forest, then crouched and plucked from the ground an object that at first appeared to be just a stone beneath the ash.
"No offense, Mr. Doyle, but you don’t seem nearly as pissed off about this as I’d like you to be," Danny said. "I mean, what now?"
Ceridwen sketched a symbol in the air, and a gust of wind scoured the stone in Doyle’s hand clean of ash. Beneath it was a familiar box whose sides were etched with sigils as old as human civilization.
Conan Doyle turned his face up to the sky. Now that the ash had cleared he enjoyed the warmth of the sun. The back of his neck was sticky with sweat, however, and that he could not abide. He longed for a luxury hotel room with a decent shower.
"He’s not as upset as you are, Danny," Ceridwen said in her lilting Fey voice, "because he knew this was going to happen."
Eve snickered darkly. "Of course you did. Of course you did! Fuck!"
Danny shook his head. "I don’t get it. If you knew, why did we even come?"
Conan Doyle frowned and spun on his heel to stare at the boy in consternation. "Daniel, I’m disappointed. How else was I to discover what Gull had in mind? Now, at least, we know where to begin."
"We do?" Danny replied, throwing up his hands. "Maybe you do, but I’m totally lost."
Eve put a hand on his shoulder, smiling now, her own anger and the last of her bloodlust leaving her. "Doyle’s never lost."
"Well," Conan Doyle said, allowing himself a small swell of pride. "Never is awfully strong. Rarely, then. I’ll accept that much." He cradled the Divination Box in one hand, and with the other he reached out and let his fingers brush Ceridwen’s hand. When she allowed his touch to linger he felt a wave of satisfaction. Though his concentration had been elsewhere, part of his mind had been with her. He glanced at her, and she nodded, her eyes gentle.
"Go on," she urged. "I’m curious."
Conan Doyle glanced deeper into the petrified forest. "Well, to begin, they had another vehicle waiting for them not far from here, well aware that they would be leaving us behind and that they would unlikely be able to reach the Range Rover."
"Okay, but what about the grave?" Danny urged.
"Do you know the story of Orpheus?"
The demon boy nodded. "I think so. Something about saving his girlfriend from Hell- Mom used to watch Xena."
"Hades," Eve said quietly. She kept glancing at the open grave as though its nearness disturbed her.
"Hades. Whatever. Greek Hell," Danny muttered. "Okay, go on."
Conan Doyle turned to Ceridwen. She was unlikely to know any of what he was about to explain, and it seemed most important to him that she understand what was happening.
"Orpheus was the son of Calliope and Oeagrus. Some of the myths say his father was Apollo, but no matter. He was the greatest musician written about in the Greek mythology. His voice could soothe wild animals and lure the trees to dance. He appears in the story of Jason and the Argonauts, but that is not the greatest myth of Orpheus. For his story is intrinsically tied to love.
"His wife, Eurydice, die
d of a serpent’s bite, and Orpheus was so stricken with grief that he would not accept her death. He descended into the underworld and sang to Hades himself, his songs so beautiful that the lord of that terrible realm agreed to allow Eurydice her freedom. But not without condition. Hades instructed Orpheus that Eurydice must follow him to the surface and that he must not look back. But the agony of being unable to see her, to know for certain that Hades had kept his word, was too much for Orpheus, and at the last moment he did turn, and Eurydice was drawn down into Hades’ realm once more.
"Orpheus grieved for the rest of his days, and his songs of mourning made the heavens weep. Yet his luck did not improve. The Maenads were female followers of Dionysus, women who would dance in praise of their god and become so frenzied that they would lose control of themselves. When Orpheus refused to admire them, to lust for them, because grief still clouded his heart, they attacked him and tore him to pieces."
Danny visibly flinched. "Damn, I don’t remember that part being on Xena."
"Nice," Eve whispered.
Ceridwen only frowned, troubled, and said nothing.
Conan Doyle took a breath, glancing at them each in turn. "The Olympians were so furious with the Maenads that they turned them into trees." His gaze surveyed the petrified forest. "And as for Orpheus.. they threw his head into a river, and the river fed the ocean, and in time his head came to rest on the shore of the island of Lesbos."
Only the wind broke the silence. They stared at him. Danny shook his head.
"No way."
"You’re saying — "
Conan Doyle waved them to quiet. "Indeed. I believe the skull in that grave to be that of Orpheus. Gull had need of it, and used us as a diversion to appropriate it."
"But he left it behind," Ceridwen said.
"Because he found out what he wanted." Conan Doyle explained. "The ash all around the grave, even beneath our feet now, is wet." He plucked at the knees of his pants, which were damp. "The girl, Jezebel, is a weather witch. We have seen her work this magick already. She made it rain here, just in this place."
"I am so not following this," Danny sighed, reaching up to scratch the flaking leathery skin around his horns. "Wake me up when we get to the ass-kicking part."
Eve thumped him on the arm. For once, Conan Doyle approved.
"Why would she need to make it rain?" Eve asked. "Come on, seriously. Every second you take enlightening the terminally dense here is another second between us and them. Assuming we do want to catch up to them?"
"Oh, we do," Conan Doyle assured her. "But I’ll attempt to be brief."
"Far too late for that," Ceridwen noted, violet eyes flashing in the sun.
"I’ve told you of Gull’s work with ancient magicks. Dark magicks that no one in their right mind would ever work for fear of how it might taint them. He sacrificed his face for that power, and other things as well, I should think. One of the rituals he practices allows him to… borrow the voices of the dead. If he drinks rainwater from the mouth of a corpse, he can speak in its voice."
"That is hideous," Ceridwen whispered. "Desecrating the dead in such a way."
"But useful at times, I’m sure," Conan Doyle conceded. "For instance, if you wanted to open the gates to the ancient underworld, to the home of whatever might remain in that realm from before the dawn of the Third Age of Man, and you knew that — "
"The voice of Orpheus," Eve said. "This is just too much. You’re saying this guy can speak in the voice of Orpheus now, and that’s somehow the key to some ancient netherworld."
Conan Doyle sighed."Precisely. But more than that, Gull will be able to sing in Orpheus’s voice. And few will be able to resist him."
"What the hell does he want in the netherworld?" Danny asked.
The four of them stood there in the midst of the petrified forest, the sun beating down on them, and Conan Doyle raised the Divination Box in his hand.
"That, I do not know. But I have no doubt we will soon discover the answer, and to our misfortune. Gull might have left this behind because he expected me to follow. Or he might simply have flung it away now that he needed it no longer, so arrogant that he could not conceive of my being able to use it."
Ceridwen reached for the box and raised it up, studying it in the sunlight. "But won’t you need some piece of Gull? Something of his flesh?"
"Not necessarily flesh. And not Gull, either." He withdrew from his pocket a lock of hair bound with red string. Red hair. "From Jezebel. With this, we can locate her. And when we find her, we find Gull."
"And when did you collect that little sample?" Eve asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Last night, while she slept, I gathered it from her hairbrush." Conan Doyle turned from them and started toward the Range Rover. "Come. I’ve got to prepare the Divination Box, and then we’ll see where we are headed next."
They followed, but as they did, Danny spoke up. Though he had the face of a demon, the hideous visage of some hellish thing, there was still somehow something of a human teenager in his expression. At time’s this phenomenon was comical. At others, it was chilling.
"Hold up. So Mr. Doyle had this all figured from the start, right? All of it."
"Not all," Eve said, striding along, and plucking at the tears in her clothing, clearly more displeased with the damage to her outfit than anything else. "He took the girl’s hair as a contingency. Probably one of a hundred backup plans he’s got in his head. And as for Orpheus, he only just figured that out since all of this happened, and even now he’s not completely sure."
Conan Doyle paused at the Range Rover with his hand on the door. He turned and regarded his three companions. Ceridwen came to him, standing intimately close. It made his heart light to have her near, but he refused to let it affect him now. His love for her had almost cost them dearly in this fight, and he would not allow it again.
"Is that true, Arthur? Are you unsure?"
"On the contrary. I’m entirely certain for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that there’s nothing else in that grave. Only the head. And when I held it… it seemed to hum."
Conan Doyle climbed into the Range Rover but paused before he shut the door. He leaned out again.
"Eve. Danny. A small favor, if you will?"
They had been about to get into the vehicle but now waited, eyeing him curiously.
"I’m going to deal with what’s left of the Hydra. Before I do, could I trouble you to go back and remove its teeth and bring them to me?"
Eve frowned. "Do I even ask?"
Danny seemed thoughtful for a moment, searching his mind for something familiar, for the story. Conan Doyle saw the process, saw the moment when the demon boy’s eyes lit up with realization. He had remembered. He grinned at Conan Doyle.
"The Hydra’s teeth. That just rocks." The boy bumped Eve affectionately. "Come on. You’re going to love this. I’ll tell you the story while we work."
Conan Doyle nodded and slid back into the Range Rover’s seat. Ceridwen climbed in beside him. Together they began to work with the Divination Box, and all the while his curiosity ate at him.
What are you after, Nigel? What could be so vital to you that you would dare disturb the tomb of an entire age?
The blue sky over Athens had deepened to a rich indigo, and a hint of the moon was visible above the Acropolis. Tourists walked the long path down the hill from the Parthenon, surrendering at last to exhaustion after a long day exploring the city. On their way down, none of them glanced up into the darkening sky, but even if they had they would not have been able to see the ghost of Dr. Graves as he floated back the way they had come, an errant cloud in the shape of a man.
As night crept across the city, Dr. Graves looked up at the outline of the Parthenon silhouetted in the dark and was humbled by its beauty. This is a ghost, he thought. You, Leonard, are merely an afterthought. An echo.
Graves had first visited Athens in 1927. His memories of the Acropolis were what brought him there tonight. In
those days he had been a living, breathing man, a thing of flesh and blood. Now he was a wisp of smoke, nothing more. Yet even then he had sensed the ancient soul of this place, all the lives and cultures that had thrived and died there, all the souls that had cried out to their gods for succor. The destruction the Venetians had wrought. The blood that had been spilled upon the stone and earth of that hill. If there was a better place for him to go and try to commune with the phantoms of Athens, he could not imagine it.
The strange part was that in those days of flesh and blood and adventure he had not believed in such things. He had told himself that what he felt was merely awe and respect for the achievements of that ancient society. But that had been foolish. The specters of ancient Greece still lingered atop the Acropolis.
Now Graves cursed himself for waiting so long to come here. It had seemed sensible to begin with the Gorgon’s victims, those fragile humans whose lives had been snuffed when she had turned them to stone. He had spent hours trying to follow the paths of the Gorgon’s victims into the afterlife. The passing of their souls had left a kind of ethereal residue, but it had grown fainter as he followed it, and Graves had found himself lost in the swirling gray white nothing of the spirit world that existed just beyond the reach of human senses. Athens had many ghosts, contentious spirits whose awareness had crumbled over the ages so that they were little more than imprints, repeating the same arguments with long dead relatives or raving about the injustice of their death. There were those who had died far more recently, but they were disoriented by the cacophony and chaos and were little help to him.
There would be no help from that quarter. He needed a place that was a locus for the city’s most ancient spirits, those powerful enough to maintain their hold on Athens and on their minds. Ghosts that had been here long before the population had exploded, during a simpler time.
The ghosts of antiquity, he thought, propelling his ectoplasmic, weightless form through the air, rising up the hillside toward the Parthenon. Their presence had been strong even when he was just a man. He hoped that now, three-quarters of a century later, they were still cogent and aware.
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