Tears of the Furies

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ash clouded the sun above the petrified forest. The breeze blowing across the island of Lesbos would soon clear away what had not already clung to the skeletal trees or blanketed the ground. In the moments following the death of the Hydra, Conan Doyle concerned himself with the well-being of his associates. All of them were injured, yet Danny and Eve healed quickly.

"Let me have a look," he said to Ceridwen.

She had sustained several long gashes on her right side. But even as he tried to see to her wounds he could feel a wave of cold emanating from her hands where she touched her scored flesh. Ice formed on her skin.

"I’ll be fine," she said, curtly at first, and then she caught herself and her features became gentler. "Truly. I will be fine. See to the others. Or better yet, see to Gull. He and his friends weren’t very much help, were they?"

Conan Doyle smiled bitterly. "Did you expect them to be?"

"Son of a bitch!" Danny snarled.

Through the drifting, settling ash, Conan Doyle saw the demon boy striding toward him with Eve at his side. Sunlight shone down in patches but the bit of magick Gull had taught Eve to protect herself was holding up for the moment. At least that had not been false.

"What is it?" Ceridwen asked, moving toward them in concern, wincing at the pain in her side.

Conan Doyle did not have to ask, but he awaited the answer to the question in any case. Eve spun around, her arms wide, taking in the entire dead, petrified landscape around them.

"They’re gone!" she said.

"Bastards!" Danny added for punctuation.

Eve laughed humorlessly. "Can you believe these guys? Drag us all the way out here to get answers and instead we get to fight the Hydra! And now they’re gone! Took off while we were trying to stay alive. We have been so completely punked."

Conan Doyle did not know the term, but its meaning was clear. He only nodded. Rather than respond he set off toward the place he had last seen Gull, Hawkins, and Jezebel.

"Arthur?" Ceridwen called.

Lost in concentration, he barely heard her. He had an idea but wanted confirmation. The ash continued to settle, drifting, and he wiped it from his eyes as he circumnavigated the corpse of the Hydra. He would have to see to it before they left, some spell to disintegrate it, perhaps, so that it was only more ash in the petrified forest. Certainly he had no intention of reburying it.

Beyond the monster’s corpse he strode a hundred yards farther to a place where the dead trees formed a kind of natural circle. Or, rather, it appeared natural. Conan Doyle knew better. In the rough center of that circle was a hole in the ground. Ash coated the earth but Conan Doyle fell to his knees there and plunged his hands into the hole, sifting ash and digging a bit deeper.

He drew out a human skull.

Ceridwen, Eve, and Danny had followed him at a distance, observing. Now the demon boy swore aloud once more.

"So this is the grave of that dude? Forceps, or whatever?"

Conan Doyle held the skull up. "This is human. Ancient, but human. The father of the Gorgons was not human."

"Then whose grave is this?" Eve asked. "What the hell was Gull up to here?"

He raised his eyebrows and stood, tossing the skull back into the ash. "I should think that much would be obvious, my dear. Some time in the past… perhaps as early as the very beginning of the Third Age of Man… the Hydra was buried here to guard this grave, to destroy anyone who came in search of it. My old friend Mr. Gull availed himself of our services as bodyguards. He simply did so without informing us."

"Bodyguards?" Eve snarled. "More like bait."

"As you wish," Conan Doyle acknowledged. His attention was still not fully on the conversation. He scanned the ground, eyeing the fresh ash as he began to walk away from the grave. Silently he counted paces in his mind, paused to glance deeper into the petrified forest, then crouched and plucked from the ground an object that at first appeared to be just a stone beneath the ash.

"No offense, Mr. Doyle, but you don’t seem nearly as pissed off about this as I’d like you to be," Danny said. "I mean, what now?"

Ceridwen sketched a symbol in the air, and a gust of wind scoured the stone in Doyle’s hand clean of ash. Beneath it was a familiar box whose sides were etched with sigils as old as human civilization.

Conan Doyle turned his face up to the sky. Now that the ash had cleared he enjoyed the warmth of the sun. The back of his neck was sticky with sweat, however, and that he could not abide. He longed for a luxury hotel room with a decent shower.

"He’s not as upset as you are, Danny," Ceridwen said in her lilting Fey voice, "because he knew this was going to happen."

Eve snickered darkly. "Of course you did. Of course you did! Fuck!"

Danny shook his head. "I don’t get it. If you knew, why did we even come?"

Conan Doyle frowned and spun on his heel to stare at the boy in consternation. "Daniel, I’m disappointed. How else was I to discover what Gull had in mind? Now, at least, we know where to begin."

"We do?" Danny replied, throwing up his hands. "Maybe you do, but I’m totally lost."

Eve put a hand on his shoulder, smiling now, her own anger and the last of her bloodlust leaving her. "Doyle’s never lost."

"Well," Conan Doyle said, allowing himself a small swell of pride. "Never is awfully strong. Rarely, then. I’ll accept that much." He cradled the Divination Box in one hand, and with the other he reached out and let his fingers brush Ceridwen’s hand. When she allowed his touch to linger he felt a wave of satisfaction. Though his concentration had been elsewhere, part of his mind had been with her. He glanced at her, and she nodded, her eyes gentle.

"Go on," she urged. "I’m curious."

Conan Doyle glanced deeper into the petrified forest. "Well, to begin, they had another vehicle waiting for them not far from here, well aware that they would be leaving us behind and that they would unlikely be able to reach the Range Rover."

"Okay, but what about the grave?" Danny urged.

"Do you know the story of Orpheus?"

The demon boy nodded. "I think so. Something about saving his girlfriend from Hell- Mom used to watch Xena."

"Hades," Eve said quietly. She kept glancing at the open grave as though its nearness disturbed her.

"Hades. Whatever. Greek Hell," Danny muttered. "Okay, go on."

Conan Doyle turned to Ceridwen. She was unlikely to know any of what he was about to explain, and it seemed most important to him that she understand what was happening.

"Orpheus was the son of Calliope and Oeagrus. Some of the myths say his father was Apollo, but no matter. He was the greatest musician written about in the Greek mythology. His voice could soothe wild animals and lure the trees to dance. He appears in the story of Jason and the Argonauts, but that is not the greatest myth of Orpheus. For his story is intrinsically tied to love.

"His wife, Eurydice, died of a serpent’s bite, and Orpheus was so stricken with grief that he would not accept her death. He descended into the underworld and sang to Hades himself, his songs so beautiful that the lord of that terrible realm agreed to allow Eurydice her freedom. But not without condition. Hades instructed Orpheus that Eurydice must follow him to the surface and that he must not look back. But the agony of being unable to see her, to know for certain that Hades had kept his word, was too much for Orpheus, and at the last moment he did turn, and Eurydice was drawn down into Hades’ realm once more.

"Orpheus grieved for the rest of his days, and his songs of mourning made the heavens weep. Yet his luck did not improve. The Maenads were female followers of Dionysus, women who would dance in praise of their god and become so frenzied that they would lose control of themselves. When Orpheus refused to admire them, to lust for them, because grief still clouded his heart, they attacked him and tore him to pieces."

Danny visibly flinched. "Damn, I don’t remember that part being on Xena."

"Nice," Eve whispered.

Ceridwen only frowned, troubled, and said nothing.

Conan Doyle took a breath, glancing at them each in turn. "The Olympians were so furious with the Maenads that they turned them into trees." His gaze surveyed the petrified forest. "And as for Orpheus.. they threw his head into a river, and the river fed the ocean, and in time his head came to rest on the shore of the island of Lesbos."

Only the wind broke the silence. They stared at him. Danny shook his head.

"No way."

"You’re saying — "

Conan Doyle waved them to quiet. "Indeed. I believe the skull in that grave to be that of Orpheus. Gull had need of it, and used us as a diversion to appropriate it."

"But he left it behind," Ceridwen said.

"Because he found out what he wanted." Conan Doyle explained. "The ash all around the grave, even beneath our feet now, is wet." He plucked at the knees of his pants, which were damp. "The girl, Jezebel, is a weather witch. We have seen her work this magick already. She made it rain here, just in this place."

"I am so not following this," Danny sighed, reaching up to scratch the flaking leathery skin around his horns. "Wake me up when we get to the ass-kicking part."

Eve thumped him on the arm. For once, Conan Doyle approved.

"Why would she need to make it rain?" Eve asked. "Come on, seriously. Every second you take enlightening the terminally dense here is another second between us and them. Assuming we do want to catch up to them?"

"Oh, we do," Conan Doyle assured her. "But I’ll attempt to be brief."

"Far too late for that," Ceridwen noted, violet eyes flashing in the sun.

"I’ve told you of Gull’s work with ancient magicks. Dark magicks that no one in their right mind would ever work for fear of how it might taint them. He sacrificed his face for that power, and other things as well, I should think. One of the rituals he practices allows him to… borrow the voices of the dead. If he drinks rainwater from the mouth of a corpse, he can speak in its voice."

"That is hideous," Ceridwen whispered. "Desecrating the dead in such a way."

"But useful at times, I’m sure," Conan Doyle conceded. "For instance, if you wanted to open the gates to the ancient underworld, to the home of whatever might remain in that realm from before the dawn of the Third Age of Man, and you knew that — "

"The voice of Orpheus," Eve said. "This is just too much. You’re saying this guy can speak in the voice of Orpheus now, and that’s somehow the key to some ancient netherworld."

Conan Doyle sighed."Precisely. But more than that, Gull will be able to sing in Orpheus’s voice. And few will be able to resist him."

"What the hell does he want in the netherworld?" Danny asked.

The four of them stood there in the midst of the petrified forest, the sun beating down on them, and Conan Doyle raised the Divination Box in his hand.

"That, I do not know. But I have no doubt we will soon discover the answer, and to our misfortune. Gull might have left this behind because he expected me to follow. Or he might simply have flung it away now that he needed it no longer, so arrogant that he could not conceive of my being able to use it."

Ceridwen reached for the box and raised it up, studying it in the sunlight. "But won’t you need some piece of Gull? Something of his flesh?"

"Not necessarily flesh. And not Gull, either." He withdrew from his pocket a lock of hair bound with red string. Red hair. "From Jezebel. With this, we can locate her. And when we find her, we find Gull."

"And when did you collect that little sample?" Eve asked, arching an eyebrow.

"Last night, while she slept, I gathered it from her hairbrush." Conan Doyle turned from them and started toward the Range Rover. "Come. I’ve got to prepare the Divination Box, and then we’ll see where we are headed next."

They followed, but as they did, Danny spoke up. Though he had the face of a demon, the hideous visage of some hellish thing, there was still somehow something of a human teenager in his expression. At time’s this phenomenon was comical. At others, it was chilling.

"Hold up. So Mr. Doyle had this all figured from the start, right? All of it."

"Not all," Eve said, striding along, and plucking at the tears in her clothing, clearly more displeased with the damage to her outfit than anything else. "He took the girl’s hair as a contingency. Probably one of a hundred backup plans he’s got in his head. And as for Orpheus, he only just figured that out since all of this happened, and even now he’s not completely sure."

Conan Doyle paused at the Range Rover with his hand on the door. He turned and regarded his three companions. Ceridwen came to him, standing intimately close. It made his heart light to have her near, but he refused to let it affect him now. His love for her had almost cost them dearly in this fight, and he would not allow it again.

"Is that true, Arthur? Are you unsure?"

"On the contrary. I’m entirely certain for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that there’s nothing else in that grave. Only the head. And when I held it… it seemed to hum."

Conan Doyle climbed into the Range Rover but paused before he shut the door. He leaned out again.

"Eve. Danny. A small favor, if you will?"

They had been about to get into the vehicle but now waited, eyeing him curiously.

"I’m going to deal with what’s left of the Hydra. Before I do, could I trouble you to go back and remove its teeth and bring them to me?"

Eve frowned. "Do I even ask?"

Danny seemed thoughtful for a moment, searching his mind for something familiar, for the story. Conan Doyle saw the process, saw the moment when the demon boy’s eyes lit up with realization. He had remembered. He grinned at Conan Doyle.

"The Hydra’s teeth. That just rocks." The boy bumped Eve affectionately. "Come on. You’re going to love this. I’ll tell you the story while we work."

Conan Doyle nodded and slid back into the Range Rover’s seat. Ceridwen climbed in beside him. Together they began to work with the Divination Box, and all the while his curiosity ate at him.

What are you after, Nigel? What could be so vital to you that you would dare disturb the tomb of an entire age?

The blue sky over Athens had deepened to a rich indigo, and a hint of the moon was visible above the Acropolis. Tourists walked the long path down the hill from the Parthenon, surrendering at last to exhaustion after a long day exploring the city. On their way down, none of them glanced up into the darkening sky, but even if they had they would not have been able to see the ghost of Dr. Graves as he floated back the way they had come, an errant cloud in the shape of a man.

As night crept across the city, Dr. Graves looked up at the outline of the Parthenon silhouetted in the dark and was humbled by its beauty. This is a ghost, he thought. You, Leonard, are merely an afterthought. An echo.

Graves had first visited Athens in 1927. His memories of the Acropolis were what brought him there tonight. In those days he had been a living, breathing man, a thing of flesh and blood. Now he was a wisp of smoke, nothing more. Yet even then he had sensed the ancient soul of this place, all the lives and cultures that had thrived and died there, all the souls that had cried out to their gods for succor. The destruction the Venetians had wrought. The blood that had been spilled upon the stone and earth of that hill. If there was a better place for him to go and try to commune with the phantoms of Athens, he could not imagine it.

The strange part was that in those days of flesh and blood and adventure he had not believed in such things. He had told himself that what he felt was merely awe and respect for the achievements of that ancient society. But that had been foolish. The specters of ancient Greece still lingered atop the Acropolis.

Now Graves cursed himself for waiting so long to come here. It had seemed sensible to begin with the Gorgon’s victims, those fragile humans whose lives had been snuffed when she had turned them to stone. He had spent hours trying to follow the paths of the Gorgon’s victims into the afterlife. The passing of their souls had left a kind of ethereal residue, but it had grown fainter as he followed it, and Graves had found himself lost in the swirling gray white nothing of the spirit world that existed just beyond the reach of human senses. Athens had many ghosts, contentious spirits whose awareness had crumbled over the ages so that they were little more than imprints, repeating the same arguments with long dead relatives or raving about the injustice of their death. There were those who had died far more recently, but they were disoriented by the cacophony and chaos and were little help to him.

There would be no help from that quarter. He needed a place that was a locus for the city’s most ancient spirits, those powerful enough to maintain their hold on Athens and on their minds. Ghosts that had been here long before the population had exploded, during a simpler time.

The ghosts of antiquity, he thought, propelling his ectoplasmic, weightless form through the air, rising up the hillside toward the Parthenon. Their presence had been strong even when he was just a man. He hoped that now, three-quarters of a century later, they were still cogent and aware.

Olive trees lined either side of the path beneath him. The last of the tourists straggled down from the hill even as the phantom came in sight of the Propylaea, the ancient gateway with its colonnades of Doric columns to the east and west and the rows of thick, proud Ionic columns on either side of the central stair and corridor, holding up nothing but the sky. Spirits were propelled through the tangible world by force of will alone. This was one of the facts of the new science he had studied ever since he had become a part of it. And yet Dr. Graves slipped more rapidly through the veil of night without even realizing he had quickened. He moved above the Propylaea and then paused abruptly, hanging in the air, staring at the majesty of the Parthenon, the temple built to honor the virgin goddess Athena upon her defeat of Poseidon, with whom she had warred for the patronage of the city.

Perikles himself had initiated the construction of the temple in the fifth century B.C. It had been a Byzantine church, a Latin church, and a Muslim mosque in the centuries that had passed since then. When Graves had last been on the broken, bleached ground atop the Acropolis, the Parthenon had been a terrible sight, never having recovered from an explosion that had destroyed part of the temple when the Venetians laid siege, attempting to wrest control of the city from the Turks. Then that thieving bastard Lord Elgin had stolen so much of the sculptural decoration of the place and shipped it back to London to the British Museum. Leonard Graves had spent time on archaeological digs in Greece, and though it had been more than one hundred years since Elgin’s crime, the mistrust he had found among the Greeks had saddened him. But he could not blame them. That was what happened when an ignorant fool stole national treasures. He ruined it for everyone else.

Some of the sculptures remained, but the place truly was a ghost of its original glory. Even so, he was pleased to discover upon closer inspection, drifting on air currents toward the eight-columned face of the temple, that restoration was under way and appeared to have been going on for decades. Barriers were in place that would keep tourists out. And as he alighted upon the marble stairs and then passed between two of those columns and into the massive central chamber he was surrounded by scaffolding.

He felt he could almost hear the chants of the cult of Athena, could almost see them gathered there around her statue. The dust of history coated everything, both in the physical world and the ethereal one.

"Hello?" he called, standing in the center of the chamber, looking up through the collapsed ceiling at the night sky as the stars began to appear.

The ghosts came like the stars, materializing one by one in the darkness of the temple, between columns and beneath scaffolding. Some floated above him, others crouched on the marble beams around the edges of the chamber. Graves said nothing as they scrutinized him, most of them faceless shades, so long dead that they had forgotten their own images and could no longer form the details of their fleshly appearances. Some were in the helmets and garb of Grecian warriors, others in the robes of priestesses of Athena.

Yet for all of the cultures that had lived and died upon the Acropolis, the ghosts of the Parthenon seemed to number only the most ancient. Only the Greeks. Graves wondered if all of the other ghosts, the Turks and Venetians and the rest, had all been driven out.

At length one of the ghosts drifted toward him. Dr. Graves could not see if it was male or female, for this specter was little more than an upper torso clad in a robe and the rough shape of a human head. It had no face. Neither eyes nor mouth. When it spoke the words seemed to manifest upon the air much like the spirits themselves. Leonard Graves had been dead more than half a century. The ancient dead could not harm him — as far as he knew — and yet he felt a rippling chill pass through him as he heard this voice out of the ancient world.

"You are not welcome here."

The words were in another language, an ancient form of Greek, but such barriers meant little to the dead. Like other ghosts, Dr. Graves could draw the meaning of the words from the ether itself. From the substance of the spiritual realm, a tapestry woven from the souls of humanity throughout the ages.

"I apologize for the intrusion," Graves said quickly, for he had been schooled in many things during his life, diplomacy among them. "I will stay only a moment and then leave you to your peace."

The faceless dead laughed at him. Their spokesman tilted his head to one side, and the words came again, yet now Graves wondered if it was he speaking or if this was the voice of the collective.

"There is no peace here while the world treads upon this ground and admires the temple of Athena as nothing more than a relic. It would be better if it were nothing more than dust. Perhaps then we could move on."

Graves nodded, hoping he projected sympathy. He began to speak again, but was interrupted.

"And you will leave when you are instructed to do so. Or you will never leave. We shall see to that."

Fear rippled through his spectral form again, and Graves bowed his head and began to withdraw. "My apologies again. I merely thought that if the Gorgon had desecrated this temple with her presence, you might tell me."

" Wait."

Dr. Graves forced himself not to smile as he paused and glanced around. The gathered dead drifted closer, some of them emerging from among the columns and forming a tighter circle around him. There was a flicker of identity across the face of the spokesman ghost, but then it was gone.

"What do you intend for Medusa?"

"Medusa?" Graves repeated, mouth dry. So it was true. Not just a Gorgon, but the hideous monster of legend. "Only to stop her from killing anyone else."

There was a susurrus of whispers on the ethereal plane, the voices of dozens, perhaps hundreds of ghosts speaking all at once. He heard them as a single sound, the hushed noise of the wind through a cornfield. Then all at once it ceased.

The faceless spokesman slid closer to him, staring at him with no eyes, speaking to him with no lips.

"She has been here. We sent her away."

Graves nodded. "There are too many people who might see her."

" Fool!" the voice in the ether snapped. The faceless ghosts swirled closer, and Graves shivered with the cold of tombs millennia old. "We would never allow Phorcys’s tainted spawn within these walls. It would be the gravest insult to the goddess."

"Of course," Graves agreed, moving backward toward the entrance. "If only I knew where to find her, I could be sure she would never be able insult the goddess again."

Once more the temple was filled with that ripple of whispers.

"She hides among the dead, those who were ancient before the first stone of the temple was laid."

Clay was behind the wheel of the car. Squire had to set up a rig to reach the pedals, and they didn’t have time for such foolishness. The goblin sat in the passenger seat, still wearing his silly cap. Clay gripped the steering wheel and drove down Ermou Street, careful at each intersection. The Greek way of handling such things was to honk the horn as one approached a cross-street. Whoever beeped first had the right of way. But if two cars blared their horns simultaneously, an accident was almost inevitable.

They had followed a small map Yannis had given them. It had been simple enough to find the Monastiraki train station, despite the torn up roads. The city seemed dotted with dozens of places where the streets were being improved, and others where they were in terrible disrepair.

"Not far now," Graves said.

Clay glanced in the rearview mirror. The ghost was visible there, manifesting in the backseat. In the darkness of the night, with only the glow from the dashboard and what light came in from the buildings that lined the street, Graves seemed almost solid.

"You can feel it?" Clay asked.

Dr. Graves nodded. "Like a winter storm coming on."

"Yeah, good for you, Casper," Squire muttered, shaking the map in his hand. "That’s great and all but, hello, map?"

The hobgoblin had his booted feet up on the dashboard. Clay shot him a sidelong glare. Squire had his uses, but often the annoyance outweighed them.

"Focus on the task at hand," Clay told him. "We’re going to have to be very quiet. It may go badly for us if we cannot take her by stealth."

"What, I’m not quiet? I’m the fuckin’ soul of quiet."

Clay sighed.

"I doubt the Gorgon’s stare will affect you, Clay. You are infinitely malleable," Dr. Graves said, his voice like a cold breeze in the car.

Clay shuddered.

"I don’t like guessing," the shapeshifter replied. "You’re dead. And Conan Doyle made it clear hobgoblins were immune to certain curses. But I’m not sure in my case, so let’s just take it slowly. And — " he glanced again at Squire "- be quiet."

The hobgoblin grinned. "My middle name."

The cemetery loomed up on their right, and above it a church whose domed roof seemed the color of rust in the moonlight. The Kerameikos was closed, of course, the gates locked. And somewhere inside, among ancient ruins of Greece that few tourists and fewer Athenians ever bothered to visit, among graves and aboveground crypts and crumbling markers, Medusa was supposed to have made her lair.

"Are you certain of this?" Clay asked as he pulled the car to the curb. Dr. Graves’s eyes seemed yellow in the dark. Clay parked and killed the engine, turning around to face the ghost.

"She hides among the dead," the phantom adventurer said. "Those who were ancient before the first stone of the temple was laid. That’s how they told it to me. The corpses of Athenians were buried here for more than a thousand years, as far back as the twelfth century B.C. Nowhere else in the city fills that bill. It’s an ancient place with far less human traffic than anywhere else in Athens."

"A good hiding spot," Squire said, peering through his window. "Nice and homey. Let’s go."

He started to open his door, and Clay grabbed his wrist. Squire twisted around to face him. Clay smiled and pulled the foolish cap from the goblin’s head.

"Quietly," he said. "Graves makes no noise. I’m going in on cat feet. If Medusa hears us coming, it’ll be you who gives us away. Please don’t."

Squire put one hand over his heart. "You wound me, buddy. To the core. And I heard you the first fifty friggin’ times."

The hobgoblin popped his door and stepped out, closing it gently behind him. Clay glanced back at the ghost in the rear seat.

"What do you think?" the shapeshifter asked.

Dr. Graves raised an eyebrow. "I think there’s a reason we’re not all going in together," he said, and then he rose up through the roof of the car, passing right through fabric and metal as though it weren’t there at all.

Clay climbed out, pocketed the keys, took one look around and then he changed. The feeling was not precisely painful, but it was often unpleasant. When he transformed into a creature smaller than himself, it was not as though he was being physically compacted, crushed down to size, but rather as though a part of him was draining away to some other place.

Fur pushed through his skin. His bones popped and reshaped and shrunk. His ears perked up. His rough tongue darted out, and he twitched his whiskers, tail waving behind him. On cat feet, fur the color of copper with a white streak along one ear, Clay darted to the gate of the cemetery and right through grating meant to keep humans out.

Graves was likely already inside, and Squire was nowhere to be seen. Clay assumed he had simply melded with the shadows outside the cemetery and emerged from some dark place within. The cat trotted across the brittle grass among the tombs.

The hunt had begun.

Kerameikos hardly looked like a cemetery at all. The tombs were mostly ancient stone arranged in long, low walls and many of the markers were simple columns. If not for the dead, it might have been an intriguing collection of ancient ruins, something that had crumbled away to nothing but those walls and the patches of grass and bare earth around them. But the names on the markers gave the place away.

Clay twitched his tail and paused on the edge of a low wall, lifting his cat-nose to the night breeze, whiskers twitching. A scent had caught his attention, yet he was certain it was not Medusa’s. Something else was here as well. Watchful, he leaped down from the wall and trotted behind a tree. In addition to ancient stones, the boneyard was filled with trees. Yet they were sparse, nowhere growing close enough to be considered a wood. And though their branches were not bare, there was something about the way they twisted at odd angles, stretching upward, that gave them a skeletal aspect.

The cat darted silently across a scrubby stretch of grass and then paused once more, crouching behind a short stone wall. He sniffed the air, purring in quiet curiosity. His rough tongue tasted the wind. Beyond that low wall was an enormous whitewashed stone monument topped with a marble statue of a bull. In the moonshadow beneath that bull’s heavy belly, Squire appeared, sliding from the deepest dark into the gray night, like a newborn from its mother’s womb.

The hobgoblin clutched the marble legs of the bull and poked his head out from beneath it, surveying as much of the cemetery as he could see from that vantage point. He saw the cat and nodded solemnly toward Clay, then slipped into the moonshadow again and was gone. The entire thing had taken only seconds and been executed with more stealth than Clay would ever have given the hobgoblin credit for. It was not that he had never worked with Squire before, but that the ‘goblin behaved like such a buffoon so often that it was easy to forget how competent he was in the worst situations.

The shapeshifter did not bother searching the sky or the treetops for Dr. Graves. The ghost would have made himself invisible on all spectrums. There was no telling how sensitive Medusa’s senses were.

Beyond the marble bull was a small hill, and Clay discovered a narrow path among shrubs and trees. Claws scratching hardscrabble earth, the cat slipped between two shrubs and made an alternate trail for himself, moving up the hill parallel to the footpath. His ears twitched, and he arched his back, barely able to keep from hissing. Wings fluttered, and several birds burst from a nearby tree. Clay could not be sure if they had become skittish because of his presence, or if something else had spooked them.

A shudder passed through his feline form, and his hackles went up. Something wasn’t right here. Some presence was fouling this place.

The Gorgon. It has to be. If anything else was here, she would have killed it.

At the top of the hill Clay moved beneath the shrubs back onto the main path and paused there. The wind died in that very same moment. No sound reached him save the distant noises of the city around the cemetery. On a broad stretched of hard-baked ground from which more of those skeletal-finger trees reached for the night sky, there were perhaps two dozen stone crypts spread across the hilltop. They were small, barely larger than an ordinary coffin, and at first glance, it seemed they had been arrayed there with no thought to symmetry, as if a random wind had scattered them across the hill. Clay paused, staring at them, and after a moment realized he had missed the organization of the stone coffins. They formed a rough circle, not unlike the standing stones found all over the United Kingdom.

The lid was off the largest of the crypts. Beside it was a pair of dead rabbits. Clay stepped out of hiding at the top of the path and started to creep toward the circle of stone coffins. As he reached the nearest of them, his ears twitched again and he heard a sound. A wet, slick, sucking sound. And then a crack of bone.

The cat peered around the corner, fur brushing stone, and spied the open crypt with its lid slid off and propped on the ground. The copper scent of blood was in the air, and he saw the red that stained the rabbits’ pelts. As he watched, a handful of tiny bones flew up out of the coffin into the moonlight and landed in the dirt. A low hiss came from within, and something shifted and gleamed in the dark. A serpent slid its head over the stone rim, as though saddened at the discarding of the bones. A second and third followed. Clay froze, unsure if he could be seen but unwilling to make a single motion that might give him away.

The serpents receded, and the sounds of sucking and gnawing began again.

Clay hesitated for a moment. As a shapeshifter he could read living things, could replicate any human, any animal, any creature who ever lived. Almost. He focused for a moment on the horror that lay in hideous repose within that stone coffin gnawing on the bones of rabbits, and he knew with certainty that he could not take that shape. It was a mystery for another day, but he suspected it had to do with her appearance being the result of a curse and not something crafted by the Maker.

The cat slipped from one stone coffin to the next. If he tried to rush across the circle, he might well give himself away. Instead he moved on to the next, and then the next, swift but silent. Within two coffins’ distance, he paused again. There was the crunch of small bones snapping, followed by the most intoxicatingly female sigh he had ever heard. Clay froze. There came the sound of shifting limbs from within that large stone coffin. Still the cat stayed out of sight.

The moonlight threw a shadow past the coffin behind which he was hiding. It was tall and full-breasted, and atop its head a nest of shadow vipers coiled. The cat’s hackles went up again, and Clay forced himself not to hiss at the shadow on the ground, so close. There came a wet crack, and in his mind he could practically see the remains of a rabbit shattering against the very crypt he hid behind. The shadow ducked down, perhaps snatching up one of the other dead rabbits, and then retreated. He listened to the sound of Medusa settling once more into the coffin.

Ears pricked forward, the cat prowled to the next crypt. The next one along the circle was his destination. Something shifted in the darkness now, and it did not come from ahead of him, but behind.

Clay turned, tail twitching, and scanned the cemetery and the branches of the strange grove of trees that surrounded this circle of the dead. All was still. The leaves hung seemingly lifeless, no wind at all to disturb them. Still the cat let its gaze linger a moment. Then, out of his peripheral vision, he saw something else move. Twisting to the right, he saw a patch of moonshadow beneath a distant monument give birth to Squire. The hobgoblin crawled carefully, silently onto the ground. His eyes gleamed in the dark. When he spotted the cat, the gnarled little man stood into a crouch and nodded slowly. He tapped the side of his nose, indicating that it had led him to this spot. The cat curled its tail around and used it to point at the open crypt. Squire took a step forward, and Clay shook his feline head. For once the hobgoblin did as he was told and remained still.

As he crept across the ten-foot expanse that separated his hiding place from Medusa’s lair, the cat darted a glance all around, on guard. Something else was here. He was certain of it. A ripple in the air at the center of the circle of crypts caught his eye, and he saw the ghost of Dr. Graves taking shape. Excellent. If he could grab Medusa from behind to avoid her stare, he ought to be able to choke or beat her unconscious. If not, Graves and Squire were there to help him immobilize her.

Her. Not a monster anymore. Not after hearing that sigh. No matter how hideous she was, no matter how insane her curse had made her, there was still a part of her that was the sensuously beautiful creature she had once been.

This thought was still echoing in Clay’s mind as he willed himself to change once more. Not a human. Not a cat. Not a monster, this time. He transformed into his natural body — or the one with which he was most intimate — a seven-foot-tall, hairless, man whose flesh was his namesake. Clay. Lined with cracks, cool and dry. And strong.

With uncanny swiftness he crossed the last five feet to the stone coffin and reached for Medusa.

An earsplitting, almost musical whistle split the night.

The sound disturbed her, and even as Clay reached for the Gorgon, Medusa dropped the rabbit she had been gnawing on and erupted from the crypt. The nest of serpents on her head hissed in chorus and lunged at him, snapping, even as Medusa turned toward the sound of the whistle.. toward Clay.

He did not have a chance to avert his eyes.

Clay heard Squire shout in alarm and saw Dr. Graves’s spectral form flying down at the Gorgon, even as he felt paralysis take hold. Horror blossomed within him. He was malleable, ever-changing, ever in motion. But now he froze, solid, unable to move or change.

No longer clay, but stone.