Tears of the Furies m-2

by Christopher Golden

  Eve smiled, the expression cracking the still burned flesh, and she sat down in the water herself. Some of the charred skin was flaking off to reveal new, pink skin beneath, already healing.

  Strands of seaweed had begun to wrap themselves around Ceridwen’s arms and legs, but they were not attacking her. The sea was caressing her. Nature was welcoming her back. This was not her home, not the way that Faerie was, but this place her people called the Blight was far more natural to her, its elements far more familiar. She could speak to them, rely on them, and they on her.

  When he looked once more upon Ceridwen’s face, she was smiling.

  "Uh, Mr. Doyle?" Danny called from the rocky shore.

  Conan Doyle turned and looked at him. The demon boy stood with Nigel Gull, who seemed to have almost recovered from his injuries. Recovered his dignity at least. He stood with his arms crossed, as though he were impatient for them to conclude their business. It took Conan Doyle a moment to realize why it seemed as though something was missing from the scene.

  The cliff behind them was just a cliff, now. Stone. Nothing more. The ground had ceased all shaking.

  But Sweetblood was gone.

  "I didn’t even see him go," Danny offered, shrugging in apology.

  Conan Doyle threw his arms up. "Gone. Of course he is. Slip in, use the lot of us as his bloody chessmen, and then disappear before the dust can clear, no regrets, no recriminations. Bastard."

  He was stoking the fire of his rage, preparing for a proper rant, when Ceridwen reached up from the water and took his hand. Conan Doyle glanced down at her and saw that she was smiling fondly at him. His brow creased in a frown and he turned to Eve, who had waded out a short way into the sea so that now only her head was above water. Charred flesh drifted around her, washed away by the surf.

  Eve cocked her head to one side. "We survived. He played us, yeah. But we made it out of there. Shit like this, well, let’s just say whenever the ennui of being immortal starts to get to me, it’s good therapy to have to fight for your life."

  Conan Doyle pushed his fingers through his hair and then flattened his mustache. He smoothed his jacket, trying to bring some order back to his immediate surroundings. When he spoke, he let his gaze drift to Nigel Gull, who was wiping drying blood from his face with his untucked shirttail. Gull had seemed defeated, deflated, before they escaped. Now he stood as tall as ever, a dark gleam in his eyes and a sneer set into that ugly face.

  "We survived, yes," Conan Doyle confirmed, glaring at Gull. "But I wonder if we would have been so fortunate if Sweetblood did not think there might come a day when we might be useful to him again."

  Gull snorted laughter, a fresh trickle of blood spilling from his left nostril. "Come on, old boy, do you really believe Lorenzo ever actually needs anyone."

  Danny spun and marched toward Gull, then poked him in the chest. "I’m so sick of you, dude. Talk to Mr. Doyle like that again and — "

  Black light crackled in Gull’s eyes and that bruise-purple energy began to coalesce around his fingers as he made a fist. "Don’t press your luck, boy. You caught me unaware before. I’m quite alert at the moment, I promise you."

  The changeling laughed. "What are you going to do to me? Burn me? Kill me? I’m not afraid to die, I’m afraid to — "

  He left off there, quite abruptly, and Conan Doyle frowned as he finished the sentence in his own mind. I’m not afraid to die, I’m afraid to live. It would be good to get Danny home, and soon. The boy had been through a great deal. He needed his mother’s comfort, and the counsel of a soul more tender than Conan Doyle. Dr. Graves had formed a bond with Danny. After this adventure, that would surely be put to the test.

  Ceridwen rose from the water. She still looked a bit wan, but a certain peace had returned to her countenance. The way her cloak and tunic clung to her made Arthur’s breath catch in his throat. All of his righteous ire evaporated in that instant and suddenly he was as grateful to be alive as Eve was. They had survived.

  He reached for her and, despite the presence of the others, held her close. Ceridwen smiled as their lips brushed together and then he pressed his cheek against hers, knowing his stubble was rough on her skin, remembering that she had always liked that.

  Survived.

  "Well, it’s been lovely, but I’m afraid I must be going," Gull announced.

  Conan Doyle turned toward him, still holding Ceridwen. Eve was floating blissfully in the water and barely acknowledged him, but Danny gaped in astonishment and looked to Conan Doyle for support.

  "Come on!" the boy said. "This guy totally played us. You’re not going to just let him walk away?"

  Gull raised an eyebrow. "Isn’t he? We go back a ways, boy. And Sir Arthur was never the sort to slay a man in cold blood. It’s one of the obvious distinctions between the two of us."

  For just a moment longer, Conan Doyle held on to Ceridwen, gaining strength from her touch and her nearness. Then he pulled away from her and strode out of the surf up onto the narrow, rocky shore. Gull cocked his head and watched him curiously. There was no sign of fear in the man’s countenance, but Conan Doyle had known him long enough to see a bit of trepidation in his eyes. Only once before had they tested their skills against each other in dire combat. The truth was, rested and ready, Gull might have had more raw power. He certainly had dark sorcery at his disposal that Conan Doyle did not. But like any other conflict, a magickal duel was equal parts strength and cunning, and despite his conniving ways, Arthur felt sure that he could best Gull if it came to that.

  But he had no intention of dueling.

  Still…

  Conan Doyle stepped into the swing, slamming his fist into Gull’s face with enough force that the other man staggered backward. One of his knuckles popped. He kept after Gull, driving a left into his abdomen, then a right, and even as the twisted mage tried to block, magick crackling around him, Conan Doyle struck him one, final time with a blow to the chin that knocked him off of his feet. Gull fell onto a ridge of rocks and rolled over once, crying out with the impact.

  Fuming, magick roiling around his hands and steaming from his eyes, his mouth pulled into a sneer that distorted his misshapen head even further, Gull pulled himself painfully from the ground, climbing to his feet.

  Conan Doyle stepped up onto the rocks to glare down at Gull. "I am not the man you once knew. I could kill you, Nigel. Don’t imagine I’d feel any compunction about that. I have the will, and the capacity. But I have been considering your sins ever since I discovered your intent. Others have done far worse for love. No matter how misguided, no matter what you nearly cost my friends, and me… I am inclined to accept that we have all been equally manipulated. You were as much a pawn as the rest of us were. For that alone, I will not prevent you from leaving. But after what you’ve done, what you risked, and the callous way in which you threw away the lives of your own associates.. I could not allow you to depart without expressing my displeasure."

  Gull strode several yards nearer to the cliff face, his back to Conan Doyle. He reached into his jacket and withdrew the vial of blood he had received from the Erinyes, the tears of the Furies. After examining it to make sure it was still intact, he glanced back at Conan Doyle, nostrils flaring.

  "I shall not forget that indignity."

  "Nor should you," Conan Doyle warned. "Nor should you."

  Eve at last surfaced and emerged from the sea, water spilling off of her ruined clothes. Whatever designer had fashioned them would have wept to see the way she wore them now. She strode up beside Conan Doyle and Ceridwen joined him on the other side. Danny crouched on a nearby rock, more at rest in that position now, it seemed, than standing upright.

  All four of them stared at Gull silently for a moment.

  "Are you going to tell him now?" Eve asked.

  Gull bristled. "Tell me what?"

  Conan Doyle nodded once and let out a long breath. The magick Gull had been mustering had begun to dissipate. The time for war was over, for now.
<
br />   "When the first of Medusa’s victims turned up in Athens, I sent agents to investigate."

  The realization of what that might mean was instantaneous. Gull’s eyes widened and he glanced about as though he might find some solution upon the rocks. Then his gaze hardened again and he glared at Conan Doyle and his companions.

  "If she has been harmed — "

  Conan Doyle raised an eyebrow. "She’s killed who knows how many by now. I can almost assure you that if they’ve caught up to her, she has been harmed. You may have put us all through this for nothing, in the end. A bid to cure a monster. Yet you if anyone should know that it is not the face that makes a monster, but the heart.

  "Still, we shall see."

  The morning sun had long since stretched across the water and the shore. Conan Doyle left all of them standing on the rocks and walked up toward the cliff. An outcropping of rock jutted from the craggy face of the peninsula, and he stepped into the cool shadow it cast.

  "Squire," he whispered into the shade. "Hear me."

  On the marble stage of the ancient theatre in the shadow of Sparta’s acropolis, Clay let out a bellow that frightened birds from the trees of the nearby woods. The shapeshifter had taken the form of a mountain gorilla, and he felt the weight and the grim menace of the animal in his heart and soul. If he had a soul. Somehow he doubted that in the midst of fashioning his creations out of the Clay of Life, the Lord had seen fit to provide one for him. He was a tool, after all, not a being.

  Yet if he had no soul, how else to explain the horror he felt so deeply within him at the horrors Medusa had perpetrated. He thought of the hundreds who had been murdered just in the last twenty-four hours, and it kindled a need for vengeance in him. Life was a gift. Clay had taken lives, but he had spent far more time punishing those who had stolen that gift from others, making up for what he had done, and attempting to bring some justice to the world.

  No, not for the world. Just for people. For the dead.

  He thought about the children and spouses of the dead, the parents who would not even have a corpse to bury but instead a statue. Stone. And never an explanation for how such an atrocity could occur.

  "She’s trying to free herself!" Dr. Graves shouted.

  The ghost darted through the air, morning light shining through him, and fired his phantom guns at the Gorgon as she struggled against the net Squire had thrown over her. The bullets made her jerk and twitch and bleed black, but they would not kill her.

  Squire kicked her again.

  But they weren’t here to torture her. They were here to end her. And end the threat she represented.

  With the lumbering gait of the mountain gorilla, Clay moved in. His form was so enormous that it cast a massive shadow across the ground, the darkness sweeping over Squire as he passed the hobgoblin. The shapeshifter reached down with his enormous hands and grabbed up fistfuls of net, drawing the sides together.

  Medusa thrashed, attempting to tear herself free. One of her arms slipped loose and Clay grabbed it, snapping the bones in her forearm. He drew her into an embrace. She whipped her head around, eyes scarlet and gleaming with hatred as she tried to turn him to stone. Clay had solved that problem before by constantly shifting his flesh and bone, never holding the same shape so she could not work her curse upon him again. Now he closed his eyes even as his body began to stiffen, and his every molecule fought the effects of her influence.

  He squeezed her tightly. The snakes on her head poked through the holes in the net and darted out to bite him, snapping at his face, sinking fangs into his flesh and sending venom shooting through him.

  Clay tightened his hold on her and felt some of the bones in her chest give way. He drew in a breath and prepared to crush her, to snap her spine, to rip her in two if that was what it took to destroy the evil inside her.

  "Hey!" Squire shouted.

  The hobgoblin struck him on the arm. Clay was so entrenched in the gravity of his task that he did not respond. There was no levity in this. No pleasure in it.

  Squire punched him in the leg. "Hey, dumbass!"

  Clay turned his face away from Medusa, the serpents biting his right cheek and his neck in several places, through the fur of the gorilla. He opened his eyes and stared down at Squire, then at Graves behind him. The ghost wore a confused expression that was entirely unlike him.

  "Cut the crap," the hobgoblin snapped. "Wrap the bitch up with a bow. Just caught a whisper from the boss. Apparently we’re supposed to deliver her alive."

  Clay had convinced himself that Medusa’s death was necessary. Had felt her bones break in his grasp. The urge to finish her, to shatter them all, was powerful.

  Now he growled, the words rumbling in his chest. "Deliver her where?"

  The island of Kithira was just south of the Peloponnese, a beautiful place with enormous Venetian influence mixed with the Aegean. Eve had been there once upon a time, before the Venetians, when the Barbary pirates still held sway over the place. But it wasn’t Kithira she had suggested for their rendezvous. It was Andikithira, the tiny isle she still knew as Aigila, though no one had called it that in many an age. It lay twenty-eight miles south of Kithira, a dot in the Mediterranean, and though it was not unknown to world travelers, it was no tourist haven. For centuries the only tourists had been pirates, and even now the only ferry came but once a week.

  It was there, beside a whitewashed church overlooking the glistening blue sea, that they waited that long afternoon.

  She sipped from a glass of wine that had been homemade by the Koines family, who had been on Andikithira as long as the island had been above water, or so it seemed. The spell that Gull had placed on her to protect her from the sunlight would wear off. The ugly son of a bitch had told her as much. But she was going to take advantage of it while she could. If it hadn’t been for the presence of Danny Ferrick — still a teenager despite his demonic nature — she would probably have stripped nude and lain in the sun, giving herself over to its rays and its warmth. Instead she made do with her wine and the white wall that ran along the edge of the steep hill that overlooked the small village below.

  The church was at the peak, the village below, and beyond that, the blue-green sea, so soothing to her now. She would never forget the sight of the Mediterranean in that moment when the gates of the Underworld had blown open and they were free. If she’d had breath in her lungs, the sight would have stolen it away.

  Her skin was almost entirely healed, save for some mottling on her face that would take some time to go away. That was where she had been burned the worst. A quick stop on Kithira and she had purchased new clothes, including attire for traveling, as well as an outfit for an afternoon in the sun: black linen shorts and a shirt that she had tied just below her breasts, and sandals. It had been millennia since she’d had occasion to bother with sandals.

  There was a picturesque bit of architecture, at the edge of the cliff. A sextet of arches, three on the bottom, two in the middle, and one at the top. Inside of the top two tiers there were bells. Church bells, to let the villagers know the time for mass had come. But other than a low, singing whistle produced by the wind up inside them, the bells were silent this afternoon.

  The others were all inside the church. Eve had no desire to enter, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have dared it. There was no way to know what would become of her. Conan Doyle, Ceridwen and Danny had each come out to join her briefly, but now all three of them were back inside with Gull, making certain he did nothing to endanger them.

  Never turn your back on a scorpion, she’d warned Conan Doyle. She knew from experience, from years in the desert. And Gull was a scorpion if she’d ever seen one.

  So Eve lay on the wall and drank her wine alone and waited for the afternoon sun to burn down into the ocean as evening approached. She saw the dust rising from the passage of a truck through the village long before she could make out the distinguishing features of the truck itself. Not that it mattered. The island was small. There was on
ly one reason for anyone to drive a truck up the hill to the church this afternoon. Only one.

  Reluctantly she rose and padded across the bleached pebbles and scrub grass that surrounded the church. She knocked twice, hard, on the massive wooden doors and then stood back. Even as she waited for someone to answer she heard the noise of the truck’s engine.

  With a clank, the doors were pulled open. Conan Doyle gazed back at her from the shadows within. The cool darkness seemed to beckon to her, to promise her comfort and safety, but she would return to the nighttime world soon enough.

  "They’re coming," she told him.

  Conan Doyle nodded, then pulled the doors open wider and stood aside, glancing in at Nigel Gull. Ceridwen and Danny sat together near the front of the church, conspiratorially near, though they’d left off their conversation to look up and see what was transpiring. Gull sat in the rear, hands folded on his lap as though he were the most penitent soul who’d ever entered a place of worship. Even his eyes had changed, for when he looked up at the interruption they were filled with hope and love and expectation.

  For a moment the malformed mage seemed fixed to his chair. Then the sound of the engine grew louder — loud enough to be heard inside the church — and he rose and strode stiffly toward the doors. Eve stepped aside to let him pass. There would be no subterfuge from him now. His focus was on his heart’s desire, nothing more and nothing less.

  Just as Eve had seen Conan Doyle do so many times, Gull smoothed his jacket and shook out his cuffs, trying to make himself presentable. He reached into his pocket and she knew he would be clutching the vial in his hand, hidden away. The tears of the Furies.

  The truck came around the corner, a rough old thing, the sort of vehicle that might be used on a local farm or to go to market. There was a man driving — or at least, Clay, with the face of a man. The face he wore most often, when he gave his name as Clay Smith. Beside him the air shimmered and she could almost make out another figure. Someone else might have thought it a trick of the light, but she knew it was Dr. Graves.