Tears of the Furies

CHAPTER FIVE

Ceridwen stood naked in the empty rooms that were to be her quarters, now that she had decided to stay. In recent days she had used one of the many guest rooms on the upper floors, but if she was going to live here, she desired a more permanent and more personal space. Conan Doyle had recommended this suite of rooms because of their location. There were half a dozen high windows along the rear wall of her bedroom, three each on either side of broad French doors that opened onto a small courtyard garden behind the house. The doors were wide open now, and a cool breeze swirled and eddied about the room, caressing her skin, bringing up gooseflesh and hardening the nubs of her breasts. It was a delicious sensation and she shivered in pleasure.

She swung out one long leg and did a spin on the smooth wooden floor, her bare feet rejoicing in the feel of the wood. There would be no carpet for Ceridwen. The smell and feel of wood was her preference.

The sun shone upon the cut edges of the many glass panes in French doors, and it glinted there, refracting, throwing a scattering of tiny rainbows across the natural maple floor. The rooms were bright with sunshine and had been cleaned recently. She wondered if Arthur had used magick to tidy up, or if he had had Squire clean the suite earlier, presuming she would stay.

No. He didn’t know I was going to choose to remain here, she thought. Though perhaps he hoped.

And it had been clear that he was glad Ceridwen was staying behind, and not solely because she was a staunch and valuable ally. That was all right, though, for she had not been forthcoming about the entirety of her reasons for that decision. The Faerie sorceress had not lied. She had simply not provided the whole truth.

Fighting at Arthur’s side made her feel complete, somehow. As though it was meant to be. Such attitudes toward destiny were common among her kin, but she had always eschewed such ideas as flights of fancy. Now she could not decide what to think. But, then, Conan Doyle had always had that effect on her.

A tiny smile played upon Ceridwen’s lips and she shivered again at the caress of the cool breeze upon her flesh. I think it must be his eyes, she thought. Yes. His eyes. There’s iron there.

She danced over to the open doors and stepped into the warmth of the sun. Her flesh absorbed it, the heat radiating down to her bones. Ceridwen went to her knees on the stone patio and glanced around the garden. It was a pitiful thing, with little variety and less vigor, but she would soon see to that. With a satisfied sigh she plunged her fingers into the soil and she felt the life there. The earth responded to her touch, quivering beneath her. There was so much she could do here. The garden needed color and wild scents. And water. She would want a fountain, built of stone and with the water summoned from deep within the earth, a spring she would create by simply asking the water to flow upward.

Elemental magick was her very pulse.

As Ceridwen smiled, sprouts burst from the soil, a trio of small buds that grew rapidly to full-fledged flowers, the same violet as her eyes. They smelled of vanilla and oranges and they grew only in Faerie, only within the walls of Finvarra’s kingdom.

Unless she willed it.

They were the merest fraction of the color and life she would bring to this garden. But now she had other duties to attend to. A different sort of summoning to answer. Ceridwen stood and stretched, enjoying the sun on her body. The walls around the garden courtyard were high. Anyone inside Conan Doyle’s house might see her, but she knew he had thrown up wards to keep away the attentions of prying neighbors. Not that she minded. Women of the Fey were never coy about their bodies. In its way, the flesh was the fifth element, after fire, air, water and earth. She only wished she could control her flesh as easily as she did the others.

With a sigh she slipped back into her bedroom, calling a small breeze to blow the French doors closed, just softly enough not to shatter the glass. The only things of hers she had already brought into her suite were some of the clothes she had kept in the guest room upstairs. Now she examined the closet and chose a light gown the color of the winter sea. Once she had slipped it on she also donned a hooded cloak of a blue deeper and richer than the gown.

Eve wanted to take her shopping for clothes more appropriate for the modern human world. Ceridwen felt that since she had decided to remain for a time, perhaps she would take the vampire up on this offer. At the very least, it ought to be an entertaining evening out. Beyond their fondness for Arthur, the two women had little in common.

Ceridwen retrieved her elemental staff from its place by the door, the wood cleaving to her grip and the fire within the icy sphere at its tip glowing brightly within. Another wind blew up and closed the door behind her as she went out into the corridor.

This part of the old house was silent… what Arthur and his former associate, the disquieting Mr. Gull, were doing on the roof had no echo down here. Ceridwen liked it this way. In Faerie, everything was alive and vibrant. There was a beauty and sublime rightness to the dwellings of the Fey, particularly the homes constructed in the boughs of trees, but something about mortal houses brought her an inner peace. There was an elegance and a sense of artistry in a dwelling such as this one that she could appreciate in quiet moments.

Now, though, was no time for reflection.

Ceridwen swept along the corridor, a blue mist swirling around the ice atop her staff, her cloak nearly brushing the floor. They would all have gathered upon the roof by now and might already be awaiting her. Yet even as she thought this, Ceridwen passed a pair of large doors that had been thrown open and saw within the vast spectacle of Conan Doyle’s library. Nostalgia bloomed within her, a feeling rare for one of her race. Yet it was powerful enough to pause her in her purpose and divert her into that massive hall. For calling it a room would not do it justice.

The library was a glorious place, fully four stories high with nothing but bookshelves along the walls, save for the large skylights far above. The center was open and filled with comfortable chairs in which to cozy up and read. Stairs led up to the second floor, which was little more than a balcony that ran around the perimeter, looking down upon the first. The third floor balcony was slightly narrower, and the fourth the narrowest of all, so that the vast open air of the library grew wider the higher one climbed.

"Wonderful," Ceridwen whispered to herself. She could recall long hours spent here on the occasions when she had come back to the mortal world — what her people called the Blight — with Arthur.

Yet the immediacy of their situation beckoned. She turned to leave, but even as she did so, she caught sight of another figure moving across the balcony on the second story. It was only a glimpse, as he moved into one of the many alcoves of bookshelves, but there was no mistaking the leathery skin and small, sharp horns.

Ceridwen went softly up the stairs to the second floor and moved around the circumference of the room, along the balustrade, to the alcove where he had disappeared. Danny Ferrick had his back to her and wore small silver headphones. She knew that music somehow came from such things but she could not see its source. The demon boy nodded along in time with the rhythm and had not noticed Ceridwen’s arrival. For several moments she watched him curiously as he withdrew certain volumes from the shelves and perused them. Conan Doyle had one of the most extraordinary libraries in the world, replete not only with the summary accumulation of human wisdom, but with the secrets of the occult as well. The true histories of the world. Revelations of ancient societies. Lost worlds. Other dimensions. Many of the books in the library were unique and thought to have been lost at the time of the burning of the library of Alexandria.

A young man with an interest in the supernatural could learn a great deal in this hall.

She tapped him on the shoulder. "Danny."

"Fuck!" he snarled, spinning to face her and backing away at the same time. Fright and aggression warred in his eyes, and then he saw who had disturbed him, and he let out a long breath, relaxing into his sagging, teenager posture.

"You wear the face of his enemy and yet still call upon the man-god of your parents’ religion?" Ceridwen asked.

The demon boy leaned back and gazed up at the sunlight streaming in through the windows in the ceiling high above. He waved a clawed hand. "Well, He hasn’t struck me with lightning yet, so either He isn’t listening or I’m getting the benefit of the doubt. My guess is, you don’t get judged on your gene pool, but how you swim in it."

"I am amazed at how often I have no idea what you’re talking about."

Danny looked at her and shook his head. "Damn. You and everyone else around here. Squire’s the only one who doesn’t give me that confused look, and that’s because he’s more of a kid than I am. If he’s got a mom somewhere, I got a feeling she’s pretty horrified. Maybe that’s why we get along."

"You do yourself a disservice, Daniel. You have earned the respect and fondness of every resident of this house. Dr. Graves in particular."

The teenager shrugged. "He’s cool. You’ve all been pretty much all right by me. Except maybe Mr. Doyle. I don’t think he likes me very much."

He gazed over the edge of the balustrade, down at the first floor, and he said it carelessly. But Ceridwen could see in his eyes that he did care, quite a bit.

"You might be surprised. I think Arthur fears for you, Danny. That is the concern you see in him."

The demon boy did not respond to that. He appeared to think it over a moment and then only nodded, keeping his own counsel. At length he walked past her and started perusing the shelves again, but halfheartedly, including her in his observations.

"This is a pretty amazing place, isn’t it? I mean, it’s so giant I have a hard time figuring out how it fits inside the house. From the inside it seems big enough that there shouldn’t be room for anything else. No bedrooms, no parlors, no dining room. It’s weird. Maybe it’s an optical illusion or something."

Ceridwen smiled. "Something like that."

Danny had begun to run his fingers along a line of books, reading the titles silently to himself, but at her response he paused and regarded her.

"No. Uh uh. Don’t do that. I know that tone of voice. Okay, so there’s stuff I don’t know. I’m a moron. Well, un-idiot me. Fill me in. What’s the secret of this place?"

She lost her smile. "You’re right, of course. You are young, but you’ve earned the right not to be treated as a child. My apologies."

Danny grinned. "Well, you don’t have to be so fucking serious about it."

The mischief in the boy’s eyes was contagious. Ceridwen found herself laughing softly along with him. As they spoke their voices echoed in the vast chamber. She gestured upward.

"You are correct. It is much too large to fit inside Arthur’s house. The truth is that it isn’t inside the house at all. It’s… elsewhere. And the door is just a door that leads to that elsewhere. If you were to go up through that skylight, it wouldn’t be Boston unfolding around you."

"Where are we, then?" Danny asked, sounding more than a little concerned.

Ceridwen considered a moment before replying. "I don’t know. I also don’t know how the library is summoned. Sometimes it is here, and sometimes it isn’t. The doors appear wherever they like in the house. The library is only available when it is needed, even if your need is only for pleasant distraction, for there are storybooks in here as well."

As she spoke, the two of them strolled along the second floor balcony. Ceridwen held her staff in one hand and ran her fingers over the smooth mahogany of the balustrade with the other. She could not help admiring the simple luxury of the great library. Danny kept moving along the shelves. They momentarily came to another, far larger alcove, set into the wall. There was an identical alcove on each floor of the library. The books here had a certain scent to them… a kind of wild, musty odor. Some of them were bound in leather as ancient as Eve herself, others in materials that could only be found in Faerie, or in other worlds.

Danny slid one of the books from the shelf, a heavy, dusty tome with a weathered cover and a lock that fell away at his touch. He began to lift the cover.

"Stop!" Ceridwen shouted, lunging for him and swatting the book from his hands with a swing of her staff. She watched breathlessly for a moment as it tumbled to the floor and slammed closed upon impact.

"What the hell?" Danny demanded.

"This section," she said, gesturing with her staff toward that wide alcove, fingers of blue fire shooting from the ice sphere atop it to touch the rest of this particular collection on the first, third, and fourth floors. "This is the bestiary. And it is off-limits to you."

"Why?" The boy was clearly angry. He crossed his arms. "Is the old man afraid I’ll do something stupid? Or something evil?"

Ceridwen flinched. So that was what the boy thought? That Arthur believed he would cleave eventually unto his father’s demonic nature. Well, and perhaps it was so, but only time would tell.

"Neither, Daniel," she said. "Do you know what those books contain?"

He rolled his eyes. "Hello? You wouldn’t let me open one to find out. But from the titles, I’m guessing Monster 101. Bestiary, right? So pictures of giants, vampires, goblins, trolls, all that kind of stuff. Big deal. Why are they off limits?"?Ceridwen frowned. "They are indeed full of monsters."

"They’re pictures!"

"Yes," she agreed. "But sometimes they get loose."

The boy stared at her with wide eyes. Ceridwen only nodded in confirmation and took him by the arm to lead him down the stairs to the first floor. As she escorted him out into the hallway and then toward the front of the house, she lowered her voice.

"We must move along, now. Arthur will be expecting us. Off to Greece, he said?"

"Yeah," Danny agreed. "Some island of lesbians."

Ceridwen arched one thin eyebrow. "I believe it is called Lesbos."

"Okay. That’s not nearly as much fun, but okay."

They started up the main staircase toward the roof. She let her senses become attuned to the air, moved it around, felt for the presence of others, just in case Gull’s associates were lingering nearby. Though there was no sign they were not alone, still she lowered her voice.

"From the moment we set off on our journey with Mr. Gull, you will have an assignment of your own."

Danny paused on the stairs and gave her a secretive glance. "Yeah?" he asked in a whisper.

"You must do something for Arthur and me. You must keep watch over the girl, Jezebel, to see if there is any sign of duplicity among Gull and his companions."

"Jezebel?"

"It shouldn’t be difficult, Daniel. You can barely keep your eyes off of her," Ceridwen said, smiling sweetly.

He grinned. "It’ll be pretty painless. But why Jezebel and not that Hawkins guy? She’s pretty wacko, but he seems way more slimy."

Ceridwen nodded. "Eve will be looking after Mr. Hawkins for precisely that reason. He is too dangerous for you to make an enemy of him. Should he take a dislike to you, Hawkins could kill you out of sheer boredom."

She started up the stairs once more, but Danny did not move. Ceridwen looked back down at him. "What is it?"

He shrugged. "Just trying to decide if I’m insulted by that or not." After a moment he seemed to determine that he was not, for he started up after her.

They made their way to the roof with no further incident. There was a small stairwell that went up from the east end of the fourth floor corridor, and at the top was a door. It stood open, and a cool breeze swept in from outside. Sunshine splashed onto the threshold, and when Ceridwen and Danny stepped out onto the roof, they found a glorious blue-sky day. Jezebel’s weather manipulation had been only the beginning, creating a chain reaction that altered the weather pattern for the entire city.

"Her magick is sort of like a minor league version of yours, huh?" Danny muttered to her as they joined the others.

Ceridwen shot him a hard look. Jezebel was nothing like her. The girl bent the weather to her will, instead of cajoling it, nurturing and loving it. And Ceridwen was bonded to the elements, not the weather. Yet the comparison grated on her.

"I was beginning to worry about you," Conan Doyle called as he started toward them. He was neatly attired and his clothing was extremely old fashioned, but he did not look as proper as he often did.

Gull was with him, and beyond the misshapen man were Hawkins and Jezebel, watching like carrion birds awaiting the demise of their feast. But the show really belonged to Gull and Conan Doyle. Each of the two men held an object in his hand, a heavy stone carved into the shape of a pyramid and engraved with strange sigils unfamiliar to Ceridwen.

"All right," Eve said, "how does this thing work, exactly?"

Ceridwen stared at her in surprise. She was sitting on the far edge of the roof with her skin-tight natural denim-clad legs over the side, propped back on her arms with her face upturned toward the sun.

The mother of all vampires, basking in the light of day.

"Eve?" Ceridwen said. "What are you… how?"

The wind swept Eve’s hair across her eyes and the vampire tossed her head like some Hollywood starlet and gave them all a Cheshire cat grin. She stretched backward, obviously relishing the sunlight. The dark green sweater she wore rode up, exposing the smooth flesh of her midsection.

"How, what how?" she asked coyly.

"How come you’re not crispy fried?" Danny put in.

Conan Doyle cleared his throat, and when Ceridwen looked at him he gave her a meaningful glance. "Mr. Gull has come to us armed with one of the things Eve most desired. A spell that cloaks her in hidden shadows all day long. The sunlight never reaches her skin."

Ceridwen frowned and left Danny to watch the mages at work, while she walked over to join Eve. She did not sit on the roof’s edge, however. Instead, she stood and stared down at the vampire.

"That was rash, don’t you think? Accepting his help? You owe him, now. You’ve made a deal with the devil."

Eve snorted derisively. "I’ve made deals with lots of devils in my time. I’m already damned."

For a long moment Ceridwen only stood there. "All right. Just watch him. And watch yourself. You never know what you’ve agreed to without realizing it."

"Eve?" Gull said.

Ceridwen eyed him cautiously. He was malformed, and she most clearly found him hideous, but she saw something tragically noble in his features and bearing. That and his charm combined to make him far more dangerous than any mere mage.

"Yeah?" Eve replied. She did not turn toward him.

"You asked how it worked. Quite simple, really. Or relatively so." He gestured at an oval ring of shimmering energy that opened like an iris on the rooftop. "Scattered across the world are loci that Sweetblood and his acolytes — Doyle and I — placed there well over a century ago. The one nearest the isle of Lesbos is in Istanbul. There must be three loci for a Blackgate to function. One to open it on this side, like a key. The second, at our chosen destination. In this case, Istanbul. The third to follow after, closing the Blackgate. Leaving such portals open is bad magick to begin with, but leave enough of them open, and the entire time-space weave could come undone and collapse."

"Don’t cross the streams," Eve muttered, eyes closed, head still thrown back. "Thanks, Egon."

Ceridwen ignored her. Gull seemed puzzled but said nothing.

"Blackgate?" Danny asked.

"As you see," Conan Doyle replied, and he gestured to Gull. The two mages had used a spell to create the foundation for the portal, but now they separated, one moving to the left of the shimmering oval and the other to the right. Then, simultaneously they raised their loci and touched the tips of those runic pyramids together. At the moment of contact, the portal ceased its shimmering and became a sheer, vertical oval of solid blackness. Like an oil spill painted on air.

"Right. Blackgate," Danny repeated.

"Mr. Gull will go first," Conan Doyle said, glancing warily at Gull. There was clearly a part of him that saw this as a trap, and Ceridwen could not blame him. "Then the rest of you, one at a time. And I will follow behind, closing the gate."

"Let’s saddle up and get a move on, then," Eve said, climbing to her feet picking up her long, dark brown leather jacket, and striding toward the Blackgate. "I could use a shot of ouzo."

Ceridwen exchanged a glance with Arthur, a look rife with meaning. She would go second, right after Nigel Gull. And if anything should go wrong, if somehow Arthur was killed in transition or magickally rerouted or something equally unpleasant happened, she would slit Gull’s throat and stay by his corpse to make sure it remained dead.

"As you say, Eve," Conan Doyle agreed. "As you say."

As night fell over Athens, she lingered in the darkness between two of the columns of the Thesseion, the temple dedicated to Hephaestus. The progeny of man wandered in and around the temple as though the whole of the city were some hideous beehive. Yet there was no veneration in their visits, not an ounce of worship. The Doric columns of that proud temple stood as a faded testament to an ancient way and all that remained of the mystical power that once had held sway here was the brittle residue that sifted down from the ceilings and columns.

Time had moved on and left a void within her, an ache in her heart. Once upon a time there had been great deeds performed in this city, by both gods and men. Now there was merely aimless meandering. What little she understood of the modern age told her that mortals aspired to very little beyond their own mortality.

Fools. She wished she could erase them from the land, or at least instill within them the sense of awe that their ancestors had once had for the gods and monsters of old.

She did not want to die. Yet if she were to live, she wanted at least not to be so alone. Somewhere in this ancient seat of power, she reasoned, there must be pieces of the Old World lingering, some tangible connection to the past. If she could touch that bygone age, taste it, she knew it would sustain her. For here in the modern city with pollution in the air and cars roaring on the roads, she felt like a wisp. Like a memory. Like a myth. As though at any moment she might simply disappear into the mortals’ collection of legends, becoming nothing more than a story.

Yet she was not a story. She was flesh and blood.

And venom.

There in the darkness between the columns of Hephaestus’s temple, she stared out across the Agora, a massive open area ringed with buildings and thronged with mortals. Yet they did not thrive there. They only survived and observed. They entered the buildings as though the city was a living museum.

Once the Agora had been the center of life in Athens, the seat of its lawkeepers and administrators, with its temples and arcades and shops, and the mint where the coin of the ancient city had been struck. There had been a library there, and houses of education. But if all of those structures that lined the edges of the Agora were the mind of Athens, its broad open expanse was the city’s beating heart.

The memory was fresh. So much so that if she narrowed her eyes just a bit she could still see the carts and the vendors shouting at passersby, the hagglers at the booths and the children running in among the crowds. A shudder of nostalgia passed through her. The Agora of Athens had once been the crossroads of the Aegean. In her mind’s eye she could see Socrates orating in the street. She could smell the honey and spices permeating the sweltering air, hear the voices of slave traders as they boasted about their chattel. She could taste an olive upon her tongue, its perfect flesh crushed in her mouth, flavor spreading over her palate.

What mortals did not understand was that the ancient world faded but it never disappeared. If she could peel back the layers of time that had transpired since then, she could touch that world. Just for comfort. Her mind roiled with confusion. Immortal life was wasted if she could not decide how to spend it. Certainly not like so many others from her age. She had convinced herself that a taste of the past was all that was required. Then she would know what to do. How to live.

And none of these mongrel offspring of the once-proud human race were going to stand in her way.

In the darkness, her hands caressing the perfect beauty of the Doric column beside her, its marble cool against her skin, she hissed softly. It was only her voice for a moment, and then her hissing was joined by a chorus of angry whispers from the nest of snakes atop her head.

"Excuse me?" asked a voice from behind her. The language was Greek, but so mangled that she knew he had not been born here.

A curious tourist who’d lost his way, perhaps, and heard the hissing in the shadows. With an expression half smile and half sneer she turned to face him. He recoiled in horror and his eyes froze, his features a mask of revulsion and terror that would remain for all eternity, etched in petrified stone.

The passengers of the Range Rover had traveled in silence ever since setting out from Mitilini, where two of the vehicles had been awaiting their arrival. Eve was behind the wheel, with Conan Doyle in the passenger seat, and Danny and Ceridwen in the back. The kid still had his headphones on, but when she glanced in the rearview mirror, Eve could see he was alert and anxious, his eyes darting around, watching the sides of the road… not to mention the road in front of them. He was guarded and suspicious.

That was good. Healthy.

The other Range Rover was ahead of them. Hawkins was driving with Gull riding shotgun and the wild-eyed Jezebel in the backseat. Eve had taken a liking to Jezebel, perhaps because of the madness in the girl’s eyes. She knew what it was like to feel that unchained and how dangerous it could be. Eve figured the girl’s instability was a liability, but she was Gull’s problem, for now.

Conan Doyle had a map spread on his lap and the interior light on. Eve had enjoyed the sunshine, thanks to Gull’s spell, but she was relieved that night had fallen. She was comfortable in the dark. At home.

"We’re nearing Sigri, now," Conan Doyle reported.

Eve shot him a sidelong glance. "Let me guess. Cute little fishing village, like we stepped back in time, full of hardy Greek men and sensuous full-bodied women?"

Despite the tension Gull’s presence was causing, Conan Doyle had not apparently lost his sense of humor. Most people would not believe he had one, but Eve knew it well. Even now, the mage pretended to be surprised.

"However did you know that?" he asked.

"I’m psychic. Didn’t you know?"

In the back, Danny laughed softly. A quick glance in the mirror confirmed he had pulled the headphones off. Eve realized that, just as she had, the kid sensed they were approaching their destination. That there was something supernatural nearby. Something big.

Even Ceridwen smiled at her words. Eve was far from psychic, of course. But they had been driving the coast of the island of Lesbos for a while now, and every place they came to was just a more rustic version of the last quaint fishing village.

"I wish we coulda spent some more time in Istanbul," Danny said. Now that the silence had been broken, he seemed to want to engage the rest of them. "It was beautiful. Dirty, yeah. But still… squint your eyes just right and it feels like you’re walking through history. Those were maybe the only lectures I ever stayed awake for in my history classes… about the Byzantine Empire and the Turks and all of that."

"Perhaps we can return one day," Conan Doyle offered. "When other matters are not so demanding of our attention."

Danny seemed surprised. "Do you think?"

Ceridwen replied instead of Conan Doyle. In the mirror, Eve could see the Fey sorceress turn to the boy. "I don’t see why not. You have the resources now to explore not only this world but others as well. You’d do well to take advantage of the opportunity to enrich yourself."

"Or you could just have fun," Eve added. "You know, learn about different countries by experiencing their pubs and whores."

Conan Doyle sighed but said nothing. Eve gave him a devilish smirk. She was glad that he and Ceridwen seemed to be healing the rift between them and maybe there was a future there. They certainly loved one another and that in itself was rare. Even with the resentment of the past still lingering the two of them would obviously have sacrificed anything for one another. But Eve was going to draw the line at their trying to parent Danny Ferrick. The kid needed friends and mentors, yes. But he had a mother. An ordinary, wonderfully human mother. Eve didn’t want any of them distracting the kid from how lucky he was to have her.

They followed the Range Rover in the lead as it veered away from the village they’d been approaching. The land around them quickly began to change. The ground was rutted. Hawkins was driving like he had a death wish or just didn’t care. Eve thought that was pretty sexy, actually, and had no problem doing the same. They bumped over ruts and cut corners too close, sending up swirls of dirt clouds that rose into the night as they passed.

Soon it was not only the terrain that had changed.

"Holy shit," Danny muttered in the back eat, voice so low he seemed unaware he had even spoken. "What is this?"

"Yes," Ceridwen agreed. She shuddered and drew her cloak more closely around her as she stared out her window. "It is like a tomb of trees."

Up ahead, Hawkins slowed. Eve did the same. She had to cut the wheel to swerve around a tree that had fallen across their path. But, then, it wasn’t really a tree, was it? All around them now was a gray, charcoaled landscape. The trees did not blow in the breeze. The plants did not give off the perfume of flowers. Each trunk that jutted up into the shadow of the night seemed like a withered husk, a corpse, and their branches were skeletal figures pointing accusingly at the sky.

"That’s exactly what it is," Eve told Ceridwen. "Exactly."

Hawkins turned off the main road now and Eve followed slowly, very careful not to knock down any of the trees. The smell of the ocean came on the breeze through the window, but there were no other scents. Nothing.

"The forest is petrified," Conan Doyle explained, glancing back at Danny and then leaning forward to see out the window. "Nature as cadaver, if you will. In prehistoric times there was a great deal of volcanic activity here. Eruptions produced lava and ash that filled the air so quickly that instead of burning the vegetation here, it was coated instead with a layer of ash and preserved, just as you see."

Even for Eve the trees were haunting to look at, and they were deep among them now.

"So, the original trees are still under that ash?" Danny asked.

"No. Actually, they were fossilized from the inside out during that same process. You’re in a sort of fossil diorama at the moment. It’s a remarkable place, actually. A window on the past."

"I’m more concerned about the future," Eve said grimly. Up ahead, Hawkins had stopped the lead vehicle. There appeared to be some kind of clearing beyond.

Eve pulled behind and killed the engine. She was the first one out of the Rover. Conan Doyle and Danny got out. Ceridwen was slow to follow. The destruction of this primeval forest seemed catastrophic to her, or so her expression implied. The Fey sorceress reached out to touch a nearby fossilized tree, but she drew back her hand quickly and lowered her gaze in sadness.

"And this is where we will find the grave of Phorcys? The Gorgons’ father?" she asked as she looked up.

Conan Doyle and Danny were already walking toward Gull and his associates, all of whom were out of their vehicle. Eve was the only one who had waited for Ceridwen. She did not dislike the Faerie woman. In fact, Ceridwen had earned her respect many times over, and she appreciated that Conan Doyle loved her, and that the feeling was mutual. But they just didn’t have a thing in common. Despite the horrors she had seen in her life, Ceridwen remained in some way innocent.

Eve was the furthest thing from innocent. She was tainted, forever and always, by her sins and by the touch of unclean hands.

Yet Ceridwen always treated her with deference and a quiet camaraderie. So Eve waited for her, and it was she who answered the elemental’s question.

"Maybe we’ll find it, and maybe we won’t," Eve told her. "Phorcys was a myth. A legend. Some of them are true and some of them are bullshit. But even if he was real, and the story of the Gorgons is true, that doesn’t mean this is his grave right here. If there’s one thing I know about Nigel Gull, it’s that the truth is open to interpretation when it’s coming from his mouth."

"Yes," Ceridwen replied. "I had that sense."

She glanced once more at the tree she had touched and rubbed her fingers together as though some residue remained on her skin. Eve wore her jeans and boots and a long leather jacket over a green turtleneck. Her hair was perfect. Her dangling earrings, jade and amber set in gold, had come from a jeweler in Paris. Ceridwen wore a dress that was little more than a layered veil and a robe more suited to Medieval times. And yet there was no question that the sorceress seemed the more at home here, in this ancient place, despite what had befallen the forest.

"I think we’re going to have to work extra hard to keep your guy out of trouble this time," Eve told her.

Ceridwen’s violet eyes flashed defensively, but then she must have seen something in Eve’s own gaze, for she smiled instead. "Where would he be without us?"

Eve glanced around and laughed. "A fossil."

The two of them caught up to Conan Doyle and Danny, Eve noting with admiration that the kid was handling himself well. Hawkins and Jezebel were standing back from the others slightly, and so Eve also hung back to keep an eye on them.

"You are certain this is the place?" Conan Doyle asked, glancing around. Despite the heat, he wore one of his dapper, old-fashioned suits. Thus far his only concession to the weather had been to remove his tie. Any moment she expected him to doff the jacket and roll up his sleeves. But, then, he was locked in this battle of wills with Gull, and that might be construed as a sign of weakness.

It was all ridiculous as far as Eve was concerned. Gull was deformed because he played with magicks he should have left alone. She figured Conan Doyle ought to be satisfied with that as a victory.

"Am I certain?" Gull asked. His wide nostrils flared. "Would I have dragged all you lot out here if I wasn’t? You know me better than that, Sir Arthur."

Their mutual dislike and rivalry was buried beneath the chivalric code of another era, but it was there nevertheless.

"How did you determine this to be the site of Phorcys’s grave? What led you here?" Conan Doyle asked, his tone modulated, more reasonable, as he stroked his mustache.

Eve glanced around the petrified forest. The place was impossibly quiet. In that moment it seemed the whole world had been fossilized. Something was not right. She had felt the supernatural force growing here and had told Conan Doyle as much. It was obvious that something was here. But despite the look of the place, it did not feel like a grave to her.

It felt hungry.

And no one knew what hunger felt like better than she did.

"I’ve been mapping the real-world locations of mythology for decades. You know that well enough. In my travels I located stone statues… victims of a Gorgon’s eyes. The Gorgons were Phorcys’s daughters. That in mind, it wasn’t difficult to find a spell that would use the stone remains of his daughters’ victims to create a Divination Box."

He reached into the first Range Rover and withdrew a small wooden box with no cover. On its sides were markings similar to others Eve had seen once before, ages ago in Babylon. Gull held it low so that they could all see inside. There were bits of stone within that must have come from one of the Gorgon’s victims as well as the small bones of some kind of bird and several dark-shelled nuts.

Gull shook the box. The contents rattled and jumped a bit, and then all of them rolled of their own accord across the bottom of the box, clicking on the wood as they gathered in one corner.

"Good as any compass," Danny noted, standing between Eve and Conan Doyle.

Gull’s misshapen face beamed at the kid. "Precisely, my boy. Precisely."

The bones and stones and nuts began to rattle again. At first Eve though nothing of it. Then she saw the alarm on Gull’s face. An instant later the contents of the Divination Box slid up the inside wall and jumped out, flying to the ground and bouncing and rolling across the barren earth, as if drawn by a magnet.

The ground began to buckle and quake. Eve was thrown against the Range Rover. Her companions began to shout, but she ignored them all, her eyes searching the darkness among the petrified trees for the place where those bones and stones had gone.

The earth heaved, shattered, and sprayed, and then collapsed in upon itself, a massive hole opening in the ground.

From it came a noise… hissing, as if of a thousand snakes.

Then the first hideous head began to rise, sickly yellow eyes glowing in the night as it sought them out.