Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (13 page)

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.