Cursefell (10 page)

     The woman who had journeyed so far emerged from behind a rock outcropping.  Fleshy and hardened scales gleamed in a thick covering across her body.  She had lost her legs to the form of a thick, coiling tail.  She hissed again, tongue darting out to taste the air, snakes growing from her head in snapping and lunging hunger.  She had finally revealed herself.  The face held all the humanity and beauty of the youngest sibling from the clearing.  Medusa.
     The woman's emerald eyes sought out what had disturbed her.  They glowed vibrant green then dimmed to normal as she slithered around edged boulders.  The man stayed silent as she moved closer, the veins in his neck strained in anticipation.  Medusa had her back to the column he hid behind, shaking her head from left to right, tossing the snakes wildly from side to side, searching.  Her shoulders relaxed after a moment and her lower body pushed her slowly back the way she had come.  The man rose up out of his crouch, sword held above his head, ready to attack from behind.  But he had misjudged the gorgon.
     Medusa shot her tail coiling around the back of the column, grabbing hold of the man's ankle, yanking his foot out from under him.  She dragged him to her, knocked down and tumbling as he struggled.  The vipers atop her head were in a frenzy when she wrapped the man in her tail.  He was lifted up in a vice of smooth snakeskin to look into her blazing green eyes.  But he knew what he faced apparently, holding shut his eyes even as she squeezed his body in a crushing hold.  His face turned away lest his lids open involuntarily.  The emerald glow from her gaze blazed brightly, casting illumination over his face and the dark stain on his chest.  Of course he had looked familiar, even at a dark distance.
     "Dad!" I screamed.
     My father's eyes snapped open as Medusa jerked her head towards me.  The monster let go my father, dropping him in a heap where the woman I had followed had coiled.  Her body slithered at speed in my direction, stopping inches from my face.  We looked into the souls of each other then, past the obstruction of the eyes.  The sharp glow she threw up to block my sight did not turn me into a statue, but it did rob me of seeing beyond it.  She raised herself up on her tail, deeming to make me crane my neck, helping her to look down on me.
     "Run Thera!  This is not a dream!" my father warned.  I could hear his heavy feet running in our direction.
     A bit of fear ran down my body.  If this was not a dream, if this was something between as I believed the last time I saw my father was, then I might well be in peril.  Body or spirit or both.  I suppose that explained the toothy cold smile Medusa gave me.
     Without turning, Medusa whipped the end of her thick tail out.  It caught my father under the arm, knocking him into the statue of the Greek holding something above his head.  His sword had been jarred from his grasp, falling and snapping near the hilt when it struck the slate.  Medusa hissed, she left me to cut off his escape.  Holding onto the statue to stop himself from falling over the lip of the island, my father shut his eyes again.  The gorgon hissed in his face, allowed her snakes to snap at him without biting, trying to terrorize him into inevitable surrender.
     "Thera!" he yelled.  "Remember our last time together!  For your life, remember!"
     That heavy vicious tail slammed down next to his feet, jarring him, encouraging him to look upon her face.  The rim his anchoring statue perched on rocked as the stones beneath them shifted unsteadily.  I begged for the woman to stop.  She turned her head and hissed a chuckle.  The sound was deep and pitiless.  Her trunk raised and fell again.
     "Medusa," my father spoke calmly, opening up his eyes to her.  In the shadows I could not see the effect of her gaze.  The face I knew so well, the look I had thought lost and so newly found, turned from her to me.  "I love you, Thera."
     His last words were nearly lost in the rumbling crash of collapsing stones, though I heard them clearly, and my own broken hearted scream as the rim gave way beneath his feet.  My father, still holding onto the carved form beside him, fell from the cusp, both plunging from sight under the ashes and a cloud of soot.
     The creature, she with the lower half of a snake and torso of the woman she had once been, moved slowly in my direction.  Her scales slid over the stones without friction, with barely a whispered hollow scrape accompanying the rhythmic movements her tail made.  Medusa rose up once more before me.  This time I did back away, stopping only when the heel of my foot slipped halfway over the edge behind me.  She leaned her torso uncomfortably close as she studied me.
     "Ah yes, ah yes," she hissed.  I was sure it was more hiss than was natural, meant to intimidate me.  If the tears streaming down my cheeks for my father were not enough to tell her I was beyond fear, then I doubted she had ever had a human heart.
     "You will do.  You will do indeed."
     I didn't wait to find out what she meant, but flung myself backwards.  It was what my father had meant when he told me to remember our last time together.  I hoped.  A second or two flying through the air, maybe even falling into the ashes, and I would wake up.  Only it did not happen as I thought it would.
     My feet landed in a hole, my body upright like sticking the landing as I had done many times before when dismounting the balance beam.  Only it wasn't a cushioned mat or ash or dirt beneath me.  I stood on a mountain of writhing, scaly bodies.  The twisting motions pulled me deeper into the hole formed of living serpents sliding over and around each other.  The snakes, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, crawled over me, through my hair, across my arms and face.  I called out for my father, panic induced terror ringing into the nothingness.  Brown, black, coppery, albino, all colors and types slithered over me in all their suffocating weight until even my head was submerged beneath their undulating mountain.

CURSEFELL

CHAPTER TEN

     Slapping the bottom of my flashlight to stop the bulb from flickering, I wondered if this was the best idea regardless of the sleeplessness my dream that wasn't a dream had inspired.  Walking down the spiraling staircase to the dark cells below during the day with Galead beside me was creepy enough.  Venturing down there in the dead of night, alone and with a flashlight powered by dying batteries was downright terrifying.
     The light was dim as I continued, but at least it stayed constant now.  Forcing myself not to rush down the slippery steps was a problem that I sought to manage by controlling my breathing.  I tried deep, slow breaths to keep my feet from hurrying.  And from hyperventilating.  Amazingly it was working, at least until I rounded a curve to find a figure suddenly looming up before me.
     Holding back a scream when I nearly ran right into Isabel half way down the staircase came with her hand pressed firmly over my mouth.  She shoved me against the wall, shushing me with a look and a violent shake of her head.  Tilting her head to the side, she listened for something in the stagnant air.
     "Sorry.  I thought you might be someone else," she whispered, releasing me from her grasp.
     My mouth felt flat from the pressure she had applied to it.  I had to shake my shoulders to relax them and release the ache the stone had pressed into them.  Maybe this had been a mistake.  Maybe I should have talked with Galead first.  Or my mother.  But they had both held back the truth from me before and were still keeping things held in secret.  So far Isabel had been the only one willing to fill me in.  Enemy or not, I needed to speak with her.
     "Just who did you think was coming?"
     "Oh I don't know.  A member of the Circle maybe.  A yardarm escort to see me home with a noose of hemp.  Your gallant friends perhaps." She smiled that crooked, toothy grin.  "I feared it was harpies actually.  They would have been bad for us all."
     I would take her word for it.  We had more important things to discuss and little enough time to do it.
     "I want to talk with you," I told her.
     "What, no blue eyes with you?  That is disappointing.  He is easy to look at though, isn't he?" he was, I could admit to myself, but not to Isabel.  "He doesn't know you are down here talking to me, does he?"
     "No." I felt badly about not talking to him, not trusting him, all over again.
     "Trouble with the happy couple?  Need some guyvise?  Now don't worry, I won't tell him anything." She gave me a critical look before sliding down on a step, patting its twin below her.  I sat, but two steps above her.  "Hmm.  You might make a good gorgon yet."
     "That is what we are going to talk about, and you are going to give me the truth." The light illuminated her enough so I could see her face.  She would not have the opportunity to hide a lie with the help of darkness and shadows.
     "Okay.  Nothing but the truth.  Pinky swear?" she teased.
     I ignored that.
     "You are a mermaid and a gorgon?"
     "I'm a siren, technically speaking.  Think of it as a mermaid that is a gorgon."
     "What does that mean?"
     "A gorgon is any one of three cursed sisters and their bloodline.  Sirens are the magical aberration created when that curse fell.  The spell cast on our ancestors has passed to us.  But mermaids, they are a natural race from a time when magic and the mundane blended together.  They were not created by some wicked spell like a genetic experiment.  Like us.  It's why I can shift from a tail to legs and mermaids can't."
     "Among other things," I mumbled to myself.
     "Yes.  A gaze that turns people to stone for instance," she said.
     "What happens if the curse is broken?"
     "The magic is unraveled and we will be what we were always meant to be.  We will become normal human beings, mortal and free to live our own lives."
     Isabel wasn't lying as far as I could tell.  There had to be something I didn't know, a question that I should be asking.  I did not believe breaking the curse would be as simple as she had made it seem before.  There had to be a reason another one of my ancestors had not done what she wanted of me.
     "Why would you want to give up your life as a siren?  I can't even imagine all the amazing things you have seen in the ocean," I asked Isabel.
     "Why?  Didn't you hear what I said?  We can live our own lives.  No more curse guiding our course.  No spying Circle.  We can create a life free from the compulsion of our ancestors in our heads."
     "Our ancestors in our heads?"
     "Yes.  Don't you hear Medusa in your mind?  Doesn't she whisper to you through that big bright brain of yours?" she prodded.
     "No," I lied, though if I reasoned it out it was not really a lie.  I did not know if what I had dreamed was, in fact, reality.  I suspected, yes, but I did not know for a fact.  As long as I hid my suspicions I also would hide the mirthless grin that wanted to break out.  Considering that I had been worried Isabel would try to lie to me and instead it was I who was withholding information from her, it all seemed like an unfunny joke.
     "Maybe it is different for you since she lost her body.  For me, Euryale can speak to me in my dreams during my waking hours or at sleep.  Her will can impose itself sometimes.  If she commands me to do something or if she shows me what is expected, I am compelled to do it."
     Waking hours or at sleep.  Is that who helped me when Isabel attacked us?  Is that who released the power inside me?  Medusa might have guided my actions without my even knowing it.  It was a thought I could not ignore.  If she was anything like she was in my vision (her dream maybe?) and could compel me to do things, then my mother and my friends were in danger from what I would become.
     "How do you stop it?"
     Isabel shook her head.  I tried not to let on that it was more than curiosity, that Medusa may be reaching out to me.  I wasn't sure if she saw the truth of it however.
     "You can't.  It is the price for being born to a cursed one.  There are rules to being accursed I guess."
     "So it is like being a wolf.  Euryale is your alpha, the pack leader for each generation, and you are part of the pack." She gave a quizzical look, not following what I said.  "You follow the alpha, do what they want.  And she follows the laws of nature, the laws of the curse."
     "I'm not too familiar with the ways of land animals, but yes, I guess."
     Following my own example, to leave the pack would be to live hunted by other wolves and predators without protection.  And humans, if they saw a threat or gave into fear, would fall into the predator category.  To leave the pack was to die alone.
     Unless a new pack was gathered together.  Unless a strong pack was formed.  Then there would be a fighting chance to survive.
     "Even so, you want to just give up being a mermaid?  Sorry, I mean a siren."
     "Don't be.  Mermaid is good.  I prefer it actually.  The mer-folk are natural magical beings.  A siren is a creation, a cursed creature.  Legends are far kinder to mermaids, as they should be.  I would much rather be counted among them than a siren or a gorgon." Her words were filled with wistful musing.
     "Sure."
     "Do you know, Thera, what it is like to be trapped in a life you can not change?  A world with only the illusion of choice?  To reveal your true self is a condemnation, to invite hurt and fear to yourself.  Even worse, to your loved ones.  So you hide.  You lurk.  And you live in the grey fringes until hope drowns within the tides of time." Isabel looked at me with a desperate plea for understanding seated deep in her eyes.  "If we swam out of myth to reveal ourselves, we would die.  We would be hunted down as nothing more than a novel trophy.  For fear, for scientific study, because we were different.  If just one of my pod were careless, we would all suffer.  There are too few mermaids to escape if the entire world believed we were more than just a name in a story.  Because of that, I would choose to be human.  I want to always be able to feel the sand between my toes.  I want to live my life without the threat of secrets.  The curse that being a gorgon carries comes with darker consequences as well.  You will learn this, as I have, too."
     A solitary tear fermented in salt and sorrow ran down Isabel's downcast face.
     "I am so sorry, Isabel," was all I could think to say.  It was not very comforting I'm afraid.
     "I'm tired of being alone in a world so wide.  In waters that run too cold." The words were as hollowed as the future she foresaw.  My chest tightened painfully, hit by unwanted pity for this girl who had hurt my mother.
     A hand hesitantly reached out to stroke Isabel's hair before gently guiding her head to lie atop a comforting lap.  I was shocked as much as she was to realize it was my hand, my lap, that she found comfort in.  We were connected now no matter how slight it might be.  I still did not trust her fully and maybe I never would.  She was still a person, however, who deserved compassion.  No matter what had happened to me the past year and past few days, I refused to let it strip my humanity away.
     "Thera," she mumbled, my hand continuing to brush through her hair.  "Are you afraid?"
     "Of what?"
     "Change.  What you are becoming.  What you are."
     "I'm not afraid." It was half a truth.  The fear was tucked well away as long as I could distract myself with others.  So long as I did not admit it.
     "Then I will be afraid for you," she promised.
     "Why would you be afraid for me?" I asked her.
     "Your life is headed down a path to a world you are not prepared for.  All you have will be lost, all your human pod forgotten.  This curse will consume you.  It will become your life.  Unless you dare to defy it and stand with the shield raised against it."
     The shield with Medusa's head.  It all came circling back to her.  My mind was not made up yet.  As I sat there with a siren, no not a siren but a mermaid as she wished, on the damp stone steps sending chills deep into the marrow of my bones to make me shiver, the enormity of my choices began to sink in.
     I could abandon my mother, friends, town, and Galead to search for some mythical relic.  Hand it over to some sea witch I did not know.  Hope that she could break the curse.
     Or I could dig in here and stand my ground.  Learn about the curse.  Learn to control it.  Maybe find another way to reverse it in time.  But time sounded like it might be in short supply with several factions wanting their own endings to be the one that was written.
     One thing was certain.  Either way, as a girl or a snake-maid, I had choices to make.  And since I was not running or hiding right now I needed to get my mother's book.  I would need to go home.
     "I don't know what I'm going to do about the shield yet," I told Isabel.  "But whatever happens, just remember you are no longer alone."