Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (19 page)

"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.