Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (44 page)

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

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

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

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

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

The ghosts of the gods were marching once more.

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

The voice of Orpheus had been silenced.

Eve grabbed Ceridwen by the wrist.

"Run."

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

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

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

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

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

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

The snakes fell silent.

They had sensed something, or their mistress had.

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

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

Time to find out if the opposite was also true.

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

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

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

But she had.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medusa thrashed against the net, trying to break free.

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

She had to die.

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

But there were more.

On the wind.

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

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

"Shit," she snarled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She turned again.

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

Sad, dead, murderous things.