Tears of the Furies

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The drape of night still hung heavy across the sky when Clay rode into Sparta, but the eastern horizon was tinted to indigo, just the barest hint that dawn would soon arrive. Squire sat behind him on the battered motorcycle they had taken from an alley near the docks where they made landfall. Dr. Graves had wanted to leave compensation, or a note for the owner. Clay had dismissed the suggestion as impractical. They had no way of knowing if the owner would ever find the money.

"Besides," Squire had snorted. "We’re hunting a monster. It’s not like we’re the friggin’ Justice League."

Now Graves flew overhead, a silhouette barely visible against the night sky, and only to those who were looking. Clay maneuvered the motorcycle through the streets of Sparta with Squire clinging to the bike behind him and the forbidding shapes of the mountains looming in the distance. The nearer they had come to Sparta, the quieter they became. Even Squire had fallen silent now, with the dawn approaching. Clay wondered if he was simply tired or if he somehow sensed that they were at last gaining ground on their prey.

Medusa had stopped running. He assumed she needed to rest, because he doubted that this was her final destination. Clay clutched the handlebars of the motorcycle and focused on the tendril of ectoplasmic energy that stretched out ahead of him, the soul trail left by the passing of the monster and the spectral remnant of the last human she had slain. He had hunted many killers in his long existence and when he drew near to them he was always aware.

He could feel the murder in her heart.

The motorcycle’s roar shattered the predawn quiet, grinding the air even as its tires bit the road. It was as though Sparta itself slumbered and the engine startled it awake.

They passed a decrepit hotel and a cafe, then came to a crossroads where Clay brought the bike to a halt, engine grumbling, struggling to spring forward once more. Squire continued his recent silence and Clay wondered if the hobgoblin had somehow fallen asleep while straddling the motorcycle.

"What is it?" whispered the voice of Dr. Graves.

Clay glanced to his left and saw the ghost hovering there, a golden tint to his spectral form, as though the sunrise tinted not only the eastern sky but the adventurer’s wandering soul.

"We’re going to have to get off and walk soon. I don’t want the engine to give us away."

Graves nodded once. "At your discretion."

Clay revved the engine and turned right. The road took them up into the hills, toward Sparta’s own acropolis. In the bustle of the day, Clay thought there must have been a great deal of traffic on these streets, but at this hour the only vehicles they passed were trucks he assumed were on their way to make early deliveries. Otherwise the city seemed abandoned.

For long minutes he navigated the motorcycle in pursuit of that ectoplasmic thread, moving farther and farther from the populated center of the city. At the base of the hill upon which was the Spartan acropolis, Clay pulled the motorcycle off the road and into a small gulley that ran along beside the pavement.

"Thank Christ," Squire grunted as he dismounted the bike with some difficulty. "My balls couldn’t have survived another mile."

Clay couldn’t help it. He laughed. They had ridden fast and hard, daring disaster on every curve, and he had felt the tension of their hunt. Now they must be more cautious than ever, stealthy yet savage. The moment was not without trepidation. For perhaps the first time since he had known the hobgoblin, Clay found that Squire’s humor was precisely what he needed. All the time Squire had been silent he must have been gritting his teeth in pain.

"Oh, sure, laugh it up. I don’t see you walking like John Wayne."

Squire staggered stiffly away, walking off his discomfort.

Dr. Graves alighted upon the ground several feet away. The ghost seemed barely an echo, almost entirely insubstantial. If Clay looked away, or tried to see the specter in his peripheral vision, he thought he might not be able to see Graves at all.

"You seem… less, somehow," Clay said. "Why is that?"

The pinpoint lights in the ghost’s bottomless eyes glowed more brightly and he narrowed his gaze. There was a tightness to his expression that belied the camaraderie that was usually between them.

"The night is ending. Dawn is near. Spirits are… thinnest then. I could manifest completely, but it takes more effort. I thought I ought to save that effort for Medusa."

Clay nodded. "I meant no offense."

Graves waved him off. "I took none. It just saddens me." The ghost rippled in the darkness as though in the breeze and turned to look up the hill. "She’s up there, is she? On the acropolis?"

"No." Clay pointed to the west. "The soul-tether leads this way, around the base. My guess is our destination is on the other side."

The ghost drifted for several yards in the direction Clay had pointed and then seemed to realize what he was doing. With obvious purpose, Graves began to walk rather than float.

"Shall we?" he asked, glancing back.

Squire had gone the wrong way, but he had not strayed far. The hobgoblin had been watching them and now came strolling back, his gait no longer awkward.

"Game time, huh?"

Clay laid the motorcycle down in the gulley, hoping to come back for it. "Yeah. And I don’t know if we’re going to get another shot at this, so — "

Squire bristled. "You think I’m some amateur?"

"Not at all." Clay shook his head for emphasis. "Not at all. You’re Hell in a skirmish. But you get carried away sometimes, get loud. You like to talk."

The hobgoblin took a deep breath and let it out. "Not a sound. We’ll get her. Greece is nice, but I’m through with the scenic tour. We end it here."

Clay looked at him a moment longer and then the two of them set off after Dr. Graves, the ghost visible only in silhouette against the indigo of the horizon. A glimmer of gold had appeared in the east, now, as though the edge of the night had begun to kindle into flame.

The corpse of Hades had become its own Hell, a city of damnation within the vaster Underworld. The Furies had tortured souls for an eternity in their lair, and the suffering screamed through the vast hollow caverns of Hades’ chest. The anguish in the very texture of the air was tangible and oppressive, and now it seemed to close in around Ceridwen so that she felt the weight of this darkest of realms fully for the first time.

A warrior sorceress of Faerie, a Princess of the Fey, she was tainted by this place.

She had to escape.

"Come," she said, grabbing Eve’s arm.

Still nearly feral, the blood of gods staining her fangs and chin, the vampire spun on her, snarling. Then her face softened.

"Eve, we must go now."

They had made their way back along the path that had taken them to Hades’ heart and now stood within sight of one of the dead god’s ribs, the massive bones that arced up the sides of the flesh city, columns that supported the dark heavens of this Hell. Even here the upper reaches of the cadaver’s roof were not visible, the sky too dark to see.

A wind of ancient screams blew past them and out through the gaping wound in side of the suicidal god’s corpse. Eve had slain one of the Erinyes, murdered part of the fabric of the mythology that had sifted down from the earliest age of the world. The myths and legends, the soul debris of that primeval time, had not so much woken as twitched in the midst of its death throes. The ghosts of gods and the lingering specter of a thousand years of worship had felt the slaughter of one of the Kindly Ones, and had lashed back. Like a tornado of retribution, the grandeur of a bygone age had risen against them. It might subside, but Ceridwen did not believe it would do so before they were all dead, before blood had been spilled in exchange for the blood of Tisiphone of the Erinyes.

Once more she urged Eve toward the way out of Hades’ corpse. It would take ages to return to the surface world — to Conan Doyle’s world of Blight — but Ceridwen did not want to think about how they would manage the journey. She only wanted to be moving.

"We can’t. We have to wait for Doyle," Eve said, eyes narrowed in anger and doubt.

Ceridwen bared her own teeth, aware that her ire could be just as terrible as Eve’s if pushed. "Arthur left us to face some task he felt he had to confront alone. If his life were ebbing, I would know. If his heart were breaking, I would know. I feel him, woman, every moment of my life. How can you think I would leave him here? He will follow, and the best we can do to aid him is get ourselves to the exit from this blasted place so that he does not have to concern himself with our escape."

Eve stared at her, eyes gleaming yellow in the strange darklight of the Furies’ Hell.

In the midst of Hades’ heart there was a battle raging. Gigantic figures of metal and leather armor, supported only by bones and spirit-wraiths, the mad ghosts of the Greek gods, were battling with an army of swift, brutal soldiers grown from the ivory teeth of the Hydra.

Danny Ferrick had saved them all, forcing Nigel Gull to sing in the voice of Orpheus. Even now the demon boy was by Gull’s side and he no longer looked so much like a boy. It pained Ceridwen to see his transformation, but Danny was all demon now. The hatred in his eyes and the way his black-red skin glistened made him monstrous and terrifying, even more so than his horns or claws. He seemed to have grown during their time in the Underworld, his chest broader, his arms thicker and more powerful. It occurred to her that perhaps he had been tainted by this place just as she had been, and she hoped that both of them could somehow be cleansed.

But Ceridwen had little faith that either of them would ever be the same.

The changeling was clearly ready to kill Gull if he stopped singing. The voice of Orpheus rang sweetly through the Underworld, cutting through even the ancient cries of the damned. But Gull could not sing forever. The towering, shambling gods had ceased their battle. Even the Hydra’s children had stopped attacking the dead things, the shades of gods.

Ceridwen gestured for Eve to look at Gull. The sorcerer’s twisted face — as misshapen as his soul — showed the strain of his effort, and his eyes revealed his fear of Danny. Somehow, once controlled by Orpheus’s song, the demon boy had become immune to it, and Gull had not bothered to try it on Eve and Ceridwen.

The girl, Jezebel, was dead, leaving Gull with only Hawkins as an ally, and the cold man with his colder eyes seemed only to want to survive, now that things had gone so terribly wrong.

"We’ve got to go," Ceridwen insisted.

Eve stared a moment longer at Danny, Gull, and Hawkins, and then she nodded.

"All right. But we don’t go back out through the gates of this place without Arthur."

Ceridwen moved so swiftly that Eve could not stop her. Her fingers tangled in the vampire’s hair and she gripped it painfully tight, even as she sent tendrils of ice racing down over Eve’s face.

"We are allies, sometimes friends," Ceridwen said. "But question my loyalty once more and one of us will die."

Eve slapped her hand away, fangs lengthening again. She hissed softly, held Ceridwen’s gaze, then turned away.

"Danny! We’re going!" Eve snapped.

The demon boy looked as though he wanted to argue, but then his gaze shifted from Eve to Ceridwen and back again, and instead he nodded once. He grabbed Nigel Gull and propelled the mage toward the wound in Hades’ side. The skin around that gaping wound was ossified, insects and strange creatures fossilized in the dead god’s flesh.

Ceridwen led the way, leaping from the dizzying height of the exit toward the black ashen earth below. She drew a wind beneath her as she fell, and landed easily. Before she could even turn, Eve dropped to the ground beside her, striking hard and rolling, kicking up ebony dust on impact.

Both of them turned to watch Danny climbing down the exterior of the unimaginably huge body, plunging his claws into the dead flesh and scrambling downward as though he was a spider. For a moment Ceridwen was surprised he had left Gull and Hawkins to find their own way down, but then she realized that the mage and his operative needed to flee this place just as quickly as she and her allies did. Emerging through the wound, Gull grabbed Hawkins by the hand, his mouth still open, the voice of Orpheus still flowing sweetly from his throat. Tentacles of blue-black fire wrapped around them, then shot toward the ground like lightning, carrying them down to stand only a few feet from Ceridwen and Eve.

Hawkins’s expression had changed. He pulled away from Gull with a rictus of horror contorting his face.

"You right bastard!" he snarled. "You fucking killed her!"

Gull had no chance to argue. He had chosen Hawkins not only for his various psychic skills, but also for his murderous talents. When the man had touched Gull, he had learned who was responsible for Jezebel’s fate. Now Hawkins backhanded Gull, driving him to the ground with a pair of quick jabs to the throat and gut. The mage had no time even to summon a spell to defend himself before Hawkins launched a kick at his head.

"Son of a bitch! All Jez wanted was someone to be loyal to, someone to make her feel like there was such a thing as family. She would do anything for you, and you threw her away like some gutter whore!"

Hawkins kicked Gull twice more in the head, then in the arms as the mage tried to block the attack.

Eve and Ceridwen ran at them, but Danny reached them first. He had been spider-walking down from the wound when it began. Now he leaped from the side of Hades’ corpse and somersaulted through the air, snapping his feet out at the last moment so that he crashed into Hawkins with a sort of dropkick that sent the silver-haired man tumbling across the black, blasted earth.

"What the hell are you doing, you moron?" Danny thundered, his voice no longer his own, but coming from some darker realm. "You’ve killed us all, assclown. You’ve goddamn killed us all."

For a moment, Ceridwen did not really understand. Then she heard the screams of angry gods from inside the corpse of Hades, and the ground beneath them began to rumble, and the entire wall behind them — the wall that was body of the king of the Underworld — began to tear in places, new wounds being ripped open in a handful of places along its length.

The ghosts of the gods were marching once more.

Hawkins had crushed Nigel Gull’s throat with one of his blows.

The voice of Orpheus had been silenced.

Eve grabbed Ceridwen by the wrist.

"Run."

On the southern slope of the Spartan acropolis the land leveled out and rough, grassy terrain gave way to forest. Between hill and forest was a pit bordered by stone. For just a moment, as Dr. Graves came round the side of the hill and first caught sight of the place, he saw its ghost. Once upon a time the ruin had been a theatre, and imprinted upon the very air itself was the ancient shape of the thing. Though he himself was a specter, they were different sorts of ghosts, and so he saw it only fleetingly before the image gave way to the modern reality. Granite walls were crumbled, the marble stage was only partially revealed, the rest buried beneath the earth as though the theatre was growing up organically from the ground. The rows and rows of seating — where thousands of people had once sat enraptured — were eroded by time, but echoed silently with the laughter and cheers of audiences who had been dead two thousand years or more.

In the deeper darkness of an alcove — almost a bunker — that had been created long ago by the collapse of a section of the wall, something shifted, moving swiftly and fluidly. If Medusa had come to this place to rest, she had managed little of it.

Graves moved away from the ruins, backtracking around the hill.

Clay and Squire were moving swiftly but quietly toward him, their mismatched sizes almost absurd, and yet their approach was formidable. Dr. Graves caught the shapeshifter’s eye and held an insubstantial finger to his lips, shushing them both.

The ghost reached down to the holsters he wore and drew phantom guns with nary a whisper. There was no leather and no metal, after all. Only the hush of the afterlife.

He moved swiftly, then, no longer bothering to pretend at walking. He sped around the base of the hill, floating several inches above the ground. He willed himself to fade so that he was nothing more than a ripple in the air and did not even hesitate as the ruins of the theatre came into sight. He rushed past the tumbled down outer walls, past the colonnade, and then down into the pit, passing over the remains of the rows and staircases. Nearly as quick as thought, he swept down into the theater, hovering above the cracked marble stage, and from the lair Medusa had chosen, he heard the hissing of the snakes upon her head.

The snakes fell silent.

They had sensed something, or their mistress had.

But Dr. Graves was swift and Medusa had no time to prepare. She had found herself a cave of sorts, but what she thought was a hideaway had proven not a place to hide, but a trap.

She lunged from it, snakes erupting into a chorus of hisses, and her fingers curled into claws as she glared around the ruin searching for her attacker. The monster relied upon her curse, upon her gaze. Had Graves been flesh and blood he doubted even invisibility would have saved him from her power. But he had been tested already. Medusa could do nothing to him.

Time to find out if the opposite was also true.

Leonard Graves was dead. That did not mean he felt no fear. Trepidation passed through him in that moment the way that a breeze moved the trees of a willow. It swayed him, but he would not let it stop him.

Medusa was hideous, her flesh somehow reptilian green and corpse gray at the same time. Her mouth was stretched open as though in some silent scream and long, needle, serpent fangs jutted from within. Her eyes were black, recessed into her face as though they hid in the cave of her skull, yet there was a liquid darkness to them, as though they did not so much see as flow within. She moved in tiny bursts and flinches, a predatory thing, aware of her surroundings. She darted halfway across the stretch of marble, paused, head tilted to one side, and then she turned and looked right at him.

Graves was a ghost. A wandering soul. If he chose not to be seen there ought to have been no way for her to notice him.

But she had.

When he fired those phantom guns it was not to keep her from escaping him, but to keep her coming any nearer. Gunshots echoed out over the ancient ruins of the theater as a new drama began to unfold. The spectral weapons jumped in his hands, ghost bullets seared the world of the living, intruding upon it. Medusa attempted to dodge but the first bullet caught her through the shoulder. The Gorgon screamed and black blood spattered white marble. The second struck her beneath the left breast. The third shot missed but the fourth grazed Medusa’s head, shearing off one of the serpents that grew from her scalp.

Faced with an enemy capable not only of resisting her cursed gaze but of hurting her, making her bleed, Medusa fled. She darted across the stage and leaped into the crumbling stone seating area. Graves felt almost sorry for this creature, so exposed now that she had discovered herself vulnerable. But then he remembered the dead, the vast forests of human statues, of those stone effigies of her murderous progress across Greece. He swept across the theater in pursuit, phantom guns clutched tightly in his hands.

Medusa scrambled across several rows to a grand stone staircase that would take her out toward the forest behind the theater. Once in the trees, she might easily elude him.

Clay came down from the sky with the screech of a night bird. He was an enormous white owl. Medusa turned to defend herself, claws slashing skyward, snakes snapping at the air. Her own scream tore across the sky and Graves though that if the ghosts of ancients lingered here, she would have woken them. The last time they had clashed, the Gorgon had turned Clay to stone. Now he took no chances. Even as he dropped down toward her, he changed shape. Medusa lashed out at the owl, but the owl was no longer there. Instead, he was a hummingbird, darting past her face. Then, in the space between heartbeats, he became a Bengal tiger, massive paws crushing ancient stone to powder beneath his tread. Clay sprang at her. Medusa reached for the tiger, prepared to fight it. One of her hands closed on its forepaw…

An octopus sprawled across gray stone, suffocating even as its tentacles wrapped around the Gorgon, crushing her. One of those tentacles wrapped around her throat, but Clay could not retain that form for long without endangering his own life.

Warping the air and light around him, he changed again, to the biggest mountain gorilla Graves had ever seen. Medusa had been taken entirely off guard. Now she at last got her claws into him, slashing his face and chest. Clay let out the thundering cry of the gorilla and grabbed her by the throat. Serpent hair darted down and bit his hands, even as he raised her above his head and then hurled her with all of his strength at the stone stairs. There came the crunch of breaking bone.

Medusa flipped onto her belly, managed to reach her hands and knees, preparing to stand in spite of her injuries.

Now that Clay was out of the line of fire, Graves shot her again. Two bullets struck her, one in the leg and another in the pelvis. She crumbled to her knees.

From the massive shadow cast by the lumbering gorilla, Squire emerged. The hobgoblin had retrieved the net they had planned to use for Medusa, and now he hopped forward, agile and brutal, and cast it over her. Squire swore loudly as he kicked the Gorgon, trapping her in the net. The snakes on her head hissed at him and the goblin hissed back.

Medusa thrashed against the net, trying to break free.

Clay, Squire, and Graves rushed to encircle her so that she could not escape. What she had become was not entirely her fault, but Medusa was a true monster.

She had to die.

A shrieking filled the Underworld, whipping around Eve and her companions on a tornado wind. The anguish of dead Olympus, the bitter sorrow and resentment of dead gods, echoed through the vastness of that death realm. Ghost-warriors, the armored remains of ancient gods, tore free of their mass grave within the massive corpse of Hades. Others forced themselves up from the black soot underfoot, rising from the ground where they had once fallen and been forgotten.

But there were more.

On the wind.

Those without bones, without armor or any other remains, simply soared through the air, many of them not attacking so much as taking the opportunity to give voice to their pain, and their madness. They screamed, those spirits, and where they flew and twisted around Eve, their touch scoured her flesh like rough stone. These were no ordinary spirits.

She had Ceridwen by the wrist and the two had begun to run up the long, steep hill that led back the way they’d come. But Eve glanced over her shoulder and saw that Danny was hauling Nigel Gull off the ground.

"Shit," she snarled.

As Danny got Gull to his feet, Nick Hawkins stood gaping like a fool at the gods in the midst of their resurrection. The nearest had been female once, and carried a quiver of arrows across her back. She was nearly out of the ground and Hawkins seemed unable to tear his gaze from her.

Eve raced back down to them. "What the fuck are you doing? Just leave them."

Gull was bleeding from a broken nose and a gash in his cheek and his eyes were glazed and disoriented. The demon boy got one of the mage’s arms around him and started hustling him toward where Ceridwen stood up on the black-earth hill.

"He’s still got serious mojo, even without the voice. We might need him," Danny said.

Eve stared at him stupidly for a moment. Of course he was right. "Shit," she snarled.

Someone started screaming behind her, in a voice that sounded like a little girl’s. She spun, claws out, to see that in the moment she was focused on Danny, the resurrected archer had reached Hawkins and was driving him down to the ground, throwing up a low mist of black dust. The goddess of the hunt snatched an arrow from her quiver with skeletal fingers and plunged its sharpened tip through Hawkins’s left eye. He twitched twice, and then lay still.

"Just my fucking luck," Eve muttered. She had been wanting to kill Hawkins since a few seconds after they’d met, and she felt cheated.

A trio of screaming ghosts whipped around her, spinning her, scraping her arms and face. Eve swore and snarled, but could not harm them. The others — the ones solid enough to tear apart — were scrambling nearer, but there were too many of them. Far too many.

She raced to Danny and they held Gull between them, hurrying toward Ceridwen. As they half-dragged the mage up the hill, Eve saw Ceridwen’s eyes begin to glow blue. A weird kind of steam issued from them, and then Ceridwen raised both of her hands. Eve felt a wave of frigid air blast past her and the screams of the disembodied gods were silenced. She glanced behind her and saw several of the giant, armored corpses freeze, ice forming upon them. One tumbled and shattered in the black dust.

Nigel Gull, still staggering along with her and Danny’s aid, began to chuckle dryly. When he spoke, his voice was a tortured rasp.

"We’ll all buggered now," he said. "They’ll take us one by one. No way any of us are getting out of here. It’s too far."

Eve fought the urge to shatter his chest with her fist and rip his heart out. She glanced over at Danny past the burden they shared and saw in his eyes that the words had cut him deeply. They did not slow him down, however. The demon boy hurried Gull along more quickly.

They had almost reached Ceridwen when the Fey sorceress pointed down the hill past them. She shouted something, but the howl of dead voices had returned and Eve could not hear her. Spirits spun around her again. Danny lashed out at one but his claws passed right through it. Eve was less interested in these things than in whatever had drawn Ceridwen’s attention.

She turned again.

The dead gods were marching after them up the hill, gathering nearer together now, an army of brokenhearted myths out to take vengeance for the spilled blood of one of their own. They trod upon the shattered-ice bones of their fallen comrades and upon the skulls and helms of others still trying to drag themselves from the ground. Most of them were minor gods and demigods, certainly, but she suspected that among them were some of the children of Zeus, the royalty of Olympus, withered and deteriorated until they were impossible to tell from their lesser relations.

Sad, dead, murderous things.

But it was not the gods that had caught Ceridwen’s attention so completely. Beyond them, fire had burst up through the chest of Hades’ corpse. Broken bits of the god’s rib cage jutted from the hole the fire had made and flames danced around the bone, charring it, sending swirls of smoke skyward.

Rising up through that blazing wound in a sphere of crackling flame was Arthur Conan Doyle. And he was not alone.

"Sanguedolce," Eve snarled, and the name was a curse upon her lips.

The master sorcerer and his former pupil hovered in the air within that fiery sphere and between them was an enormous metal cauldron filled with gold-and-orange fire — the purest fire she had ever seen.

Ceridwen took several steps back down the hill, crackling with power, her eyes leaking that same frigid blue mist. As she passed them, Danny, Eve, and Gull all turned with her, staring at the sphere of fire as it rose up above the corpse of Hades as though it were the sun in this ever-night world. Even the shades of the dead gods down on that black field turned and looked up at them as the sphere began to move, burning the air around it. It hurtled toward the place where Eve and the others stood.

Beside her, she heard Gull mutter under her breath. "Ah, now I see, Lorenzo. I’ve been your fool."

"What’s that?" Danny Ferrick demanded.

Gull snickered. "Sweetblood told me what I needed to break Medusa’s curse, but he never worried if I would succeed. It didn’t matter. I used Conan Doyle and all of you as my distraction to slip past Cerberus into the Underworld. Lorenzo used us all to focus the gods’ attention so that he could claim the Forge of Hephaestus. Mad, brilliant bastard."

"So, basically, he fucked you over the way you fucked everyone else," Danny snarled. "Swell."

Eve was only half listening by then. She wanted to know more about the Forge of Hephaestus, about exactly what was going on here, but there wasn’t time. The dead of Olympus were distracted for the moment, but it would not last.

The shrieking ghosts tore through the air, converging on that flaming sphere. They darted at it, battering themselves against it with a crackle and pop like insects swarming around a light. Spectral hands tore at the fabric of the thing, tearing strips of flame away with a ravenous frenzy.

"That can’t be good," Eve whispered.

Beneath her feet the ground began to tremble, and then to shake. It buckled and heaved and Eve was thrown down, tumbling once end over end on the slope before stopping herself. The entire hill rocked and she looked around, finally overwhelmed by her frustration and fear. Rage overcame her once more, bloodlust taking her heart, fangs extruding sharply and hands hooking into claws. She glanced around and saw Danny had also fallen and was crouched on the hill like an animal. Ceridwen floated on air currents that she drew around her, cloak whipping around her.

Nigel Gull was unmoved. Purple-black light coiled around him like a nest of ebon serpents and held him aloft. His nose still bled and his hideous countenance was distorted by a look of such malice that Eve shuddered. How much of his disorientation had been an act she did not know, but he had recovered.

"What now?" Danny roared.

Sweetblood and Conan Doyle hit the ground nearby with such force that she felt sure they would be killed. The fiery sphere was like a meteor, burning right into the soil of this hellish landscape. But when the black dust settled and the glow of the fire dimmed, the two of them stood on either side of the Forge, unharmed. It was enormous, at least five feet high and six wide. There was no way to remove it from here without magic, and yet the two mages seemed prepared to lift it.

"Ceridwen!" Conan Doyle shouted. "Come here! Quickly!"

Under other circumstances, the Fey would have snapped his neck for speaking to her like that. But now Ceridwen raced across the still-trembling ground toward her lover and the Forge. The hill heaved again and this time Ceridwen did fall.

There came a thunderous crack unlike anything they had heard before and Eve whipped her head around to look down the hill once more. The dead gods were on the march again, most of them managing to stay on their feet despite the buckling and shaking of the ground. Then, in their midst, the black soil erupted with a giant, skeletal fist easily as large as the Forge of Hephaestus. Parts of that broad, hellish plain collapsed and minor gods disappeared into the yawning maw that appeared in the earth.

The gigantic, withered corpse that drew itself from the ground then still had some flesh attached to its face, and white whiskers on its chin. Its eye sockets were dark, empty holes out of which squirming white things tumbled as it rose, maggots the size of men. When its other arm burst up out of the earth, Eve saw that it had an axe in its hand whose double-edged blade was the length of an automobile.

Eve had felt true fear, terror for herself, only a handful of times since she had become immortal. After what she had suffered, few things could frighten her. Now a single bloody tear raced down her cheek and she shook her head, speechless. She wiped the tear from her face and stumbled across the shaking ground to grab Danny by the shoulder and propel him after Ceridwen.

"What now, Eve?" he shouted. "What do we do now?"

"I don’t know!" she snapped.

Danny stared for a moment at the gigantic corpse. Eve could not help doing the same. Beyond the first one, another head had begun to emerge, a cracked skull with one eye still intact, gleaming golden in the shadowed land. The dead gods that had attacked them thus far were only the foot soldiers. These others… they were the children of Titans.

Eve ran with Danny, the two of them rolling from side to side as though they were aboard a ship. Gull followed, whisking through the air, though now the blood flowed even more freely from his nose and she could see the strain even this minimal magic was placing upon him.

Ceridwen was already at the Forge, and she was shouting at Sanguedolce. "I can’t do it! Never with so many, and not here. My magick isn’t the same! This place isn’t the same."

Sweetblood only glared at her and then gestured to Conan Doyle to indicate that the problem was his to solve.

"We’ll help you, Ceri," he said as Eve, Danny, and Gull gathered with the others around the Forge. "We can feed the strength to you, give you whatever you need, but it’s a kind of magick none of us have. The spell must come from your fingers, your lips."

It was difficult to hear above the cracking of the ground and the screaming of the vengeful dead. Ceridwen did not bother to put her reply into words. She looked at Conan Doyle a moment and then reached out a hand to him. He took it, their fingers twining together. Eve had never seen Conan Doyle so pale, the circles beneath his eyes so dark. He looked drained. But when he touched Ceridwen, they both seemed to brighten with the contact, to come alive again.

Ceridwen nodded.

Conan Doyle turned to Gull. "Come, Nigel. You’re needed."

"Good thing we didn’t kill him, then," Eve snarled.

Danny was in a crouch, one hand on the ground to steady himself. He glared up at Eve. "Does this mean we’re getting out of here?"

She didn’t even dare look back down the hill. "Let’s hope."

Ceridwen raised her hands above her head. The air seemed to flow to her fingertips and then down her arms, caressing her, swirling around her, beginning a kind of whirlwind current. Her body shook with the effort and blue light sparked between her fingers. Eve shivered with the icy chill that gathered around her, the temperature dropping rapidly. The Fey sorceress moved her lips in silent supplication to the elements themselves.

Conan Doyle held her hand tightly. Gull took her other hand. Both had once been students of Lorenzo Sanguedolce and now Sweetblood himself stepped behind Ceridwen and — with one hand on the Forge of Hephaestus — placed the other on the sorceress’s back.

Only then did Eve understand what they were doing. She dropped into a crouch beside Danny and grabbed his hand, then reached out and clutched the back of Conan Doyle’s jacket.

Danny was staring past her at the dead gods, at the two ancient Titans that were emerging from the dust of history and myth. He barely acknowledged her touch, his yellow eyes gleaming.

Thunder boomed, shattering the air with such force that Eve winced at the pain in her ears. She glanced up at Ceridwen, but the Fey was deep into the summoning of her spell. The thunder had not been her doing.

Lightning lit up the Netherworld as though sunshine had broken through into the land of the dead. It flashed, accompanied by more thunder, and then came a series of bolts that burned the air and blinded her. Eve turned to search for the source and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust.

Beyond Hades a tower had exploded from the ground, a huge silhouette, a monument. The next bolt of lightning streaked upward from the top of that tower and she saw that it was not some structure at all, but a hand. With lightning searing the sky, erupting from its fingers.

Zeus.

"Doyle! Ceri! Get us out of here now!" Eve cried.

But even as she bellowed those words, they were stolen by the wind that had begun to embrace them all. The traveling wind. It whistled around her ears, grasping at her body, blinding her to her surroundings. It was a storm, summoned by Ceridwen and powered by Conan Doyle, Gull, and their former teacher.

A traveling wind unlike any ever summoned before.

It picked Eve up off of the ground. She tightened her grip on Danny’s hand and tried to see his face. In the midst of the whirlwind she saw only the cruel gleam of his demon’s eyes. Then she was hurtling through the air, propelled by the currents, moving with the storm, wondering where in this realm of death and suffering the traveling wind would take her.