Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (29 page)

Squire sighed and crossed his arms. "Yeah, well, I
don’t see you jumping in with the funny anecdotes, Doc. I need to get one of
them Game Boys. Or, hey, either of you guys know Mad-Libs? What I wouldn’t give
for a Mad-Libs right now. I’m a riot with those things."

There was silence from the back seat. After a moment Squire
frowned and twisted around to glance behind him, expecting to see the familiar
features of Dr. Graves. Squire had to hand it to the guy, the 1940s adventurer
look really worked for him. Tall, dark, and handsome, all that shit. Only
problem was, he was too serious.

He was also gone.

"Son of a bitch," Squire muttered, shooting a
glance at Clay behind the wheel. "Now that’s just downright rude. Here I
am talking and he just . . . poof!"

Clay nodded. "Ghosts do that."

"Fucking ghosts."

"Sometimes Leonard just needs to be on his own,"
Clay added. He reached up a hand and brushed back his brown hair, fingers
pushing through the single, odd patch of white. It wasn’t his real hair, or his
real face for that matter, just the one he used the most often. Squire was not
completely sure Clay had a
real
face, unless it was the formidable shape
he often took in battle, the hairless, dried-earth creature that seemed made of
actual clay.

"Still, he could have said something," Squire
replied.

Graves had gone to check on the progress of the train eight
or ten times already. They had agreed at the outset that he would not try to
locate Medusa on the train, or to engage her. Clay could have shapeshifted into
a falcon or something even faster on the wing and caught up with the train as
well. If Squire knew where he was going along the shadow paths he probably
could have found the train — saving them all the trouble of traveling in
this crappy car and the uncertainty of their pursuit of the Gorgon — but
he’d never been aboard the train, and it was in motion, and it might have taken
him ages to find the right shadow. Never mind that he’d have to carry along all
of the nets and weapons he’d gathered to catch Medusa. And they had agreed it
was wiser if they were together when they located her again.

It soured Squire’s outlook considerably, knowing he was
holding them back.

The road curved northward and soon they lost their view of
the Aegean. Only then did Squire realize how much he had appreciated it. The
sea was the only thing worth looking at from the road. Sure, they had seen
little villages sprawled on either side of the highway, but there was not much
chance to appreciate them while whipping past them at eighty miles per hour. The
isthmus that connected Athens and its surroundings with the Peloponnese was a
part of Greece that deserved a more casual approach. Squire would much rather
have been meandering through seaside villages, sampling the local cuisine at
each stop. At that moment a piece of spinach pie would have gone down very
nicely.

But from the highway, and without the gleaming Aegean to
remind them of their location, the landscape could have been a hundred other
places.

Squire glanced at Clay. He was intent on the road, hands at
ten o’clock and two o’clock like the poster boy for auto school. But the
shapeshifter’s eyes kept moving, checking the rearview mirror. Every couple of
minutes he would lean to one side and try to get a view of the sky out of his
window. He wasn’t looking for the ghost of Dr. Graves.

"He can’t fly," Squire told him.

"Who?" Clay asked.

"Who? The guy who’s got you so antsy. The reason none
of us had been that talkative. Got you spooked, didn’t he, with his dirt from
the Doc’s grave and whatever that thing was he did to you. Not only is he
watching out for Medusa, protecting her, but he was expecting us."

For a long moment, Clay said nothing. Squire realized that
he must really be a little spooked. That didn’t sit well with the hobgoblin
after all. Clay was . . . he didn’t like to think about what and who Clay was. And
if he was nervous —

"Hey, I killed the idiot once," Squire added. "We
can do it again."

A car whipped by them on the highway doing nearly a hundred
miles an hour, judging by how quickly it passed them. Neither of them bothered
to comment. Clay gave Squire a sidelong glance.

"Over time I’ve learned that anybody who comes back to
life after you kill them is usually much harder to finish off the second time
around."

Squire rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah. You’re a font of
wisdom. I’m just saying he’s maybe hard to kill, but that doesn’t make him
special."

"All right, then tell me about him. Tassarian. How did
you kill him the first time?"

The hobgoblin grinned. He leaned back in his seat and put
his boots up on the dashboard. "Now that’s a memory I cherish."

They passed a small town to the north of the highway but he
could see nothing more than the sides of buildings and cars going by on the
roads. It had been twenty years — more — but his recollections were
crystal clear.

"Used to be, every couple of years Conan Doyle would
send me on a little acquisition trip to buy — or, ah, otherwise get my
mitts on — some ancient weapon or other. Some of ‘em he wanted because
they had special attributes, enchanted swords, an ensorcelled quiver of arrows,
that kind of thing. Others he just had his eye on. Of course the ones he just
wanted he wouldn’t have me steal if they were in a museum. But the lion’s share
of these beauties are owned by private collectors who didn’t come by them any
more honestly than I did."

The car jittered over a section of cracked pavement, hitting
a pothole that Clay did not even try to avoid. The shapeshifter glanced at
Squire.

"That thing you’re doing right now? It’s called a
tangent."

The hobgoblin shot him a gnarled middle finger. "Anyway,
Tassarian worked for Nigel Gull. I’d met him a couple of times before that. Gull
and Conan Doyle have history, obviously. Can’t stand the sight of each other,
but they keep tabs. Run in the same circles, too. So it was inevitable they’d
bump into each other now and again. Especially with Conan Doyle looking for
Sweetblood.

"Gull and Conan Doyle, they have a lot in common. Gull
likes pretty, shiny, sharp things too.

"So I’d been in Europe for about three weeks on what
was probably the most successful acquisitions trip I’d made. I had some sweet
stuff. Rostini’s Axe. The Helm of Kyth. Hunyadi’s Daggers. This perfect longbow
from Germany, inlaid with gold, with a bowstring made of ectoplasm. A blind man
with no arms could hit a gnat’s asshole with this thing.

"I’m in Prague in this little flat Conan Doyle rented
for me for a month. I’ve got a whole room just laid out with these babies. I’d
had a feeling a few times during my running around that somebody’d been keeping
an eye on me. But Tassarian knows all that ninja bullshit and I really didn’t
twig to him until I walked in on the guy trying to sneak off with an entire
armory."

Squire shook his head. "Idiot."

Clay kept his foot on the accelerator. If anything he gave
the car a little extra speed as he checked the rearview mirror again. "Okay,"
he said. "But how did you kill him?"

The hobgoblin laughed, thinking back on it. "Well,
death and resurrection must have smartened him up some, ‘cause that time he
sure hadn’t done his homework. I’m ugly, but I’m not stupid, and I’m pretty
good with weapons. The moron came to steal my cache in the late afternoon. Maybe
he got the whole shadow thing wrong, thinking he shouldn’t try it at night. Or
maybe he figured I was out for a walk, or asleep. I don’t know.

"What I do know is, that time of day the shadows are
nice and long. The sun coming in the windows threw huge distorted shadows off
of every chair, bedpost and friggin’ doorknob. I had a couple seconds’ surprise
on Tassarian and that was all I needed. I moved in and out of the shadows, kept
out of his range, snuck up on him a dozen times. I must have hit him with every
goddamn weapon in that room. Even broke the blade off one of Hunyadi’s daggers
in the base of his skull. I killed the guy enough to snuff ten other guys. Just
kept killing him until he actually laid down and didn’t get up again."

Another mile of road went by in silence before Clay glanced
over at him.

"But Tassarian
did
get up again."

Squire shrugged. His gaze had drifted past Clay and out the
driver’s side window, where the Aegean had come back into view. It was distant,
but there. He smiled.

"Yep. Guess I’m going to have to kill him some more."

The hobgoblin glanced over to see Clay smile broadly . . .
then the smile disappeared. Clay’s eyes went wide and his arms locked into
place on the steering wheel.

"What the hell?" the shapeshifter snarled, even as
he jerked the wheel to one side.

Squire turned his eyes back to the road. The ghost of Dr.
Graves stood in the center of the highway, one hand on the butt of a phantom
gun and the other raised to wave them to a halt.

The tires squealed as Clay cut the wheel too far.

Squire shot a hand out and grabbed the wheel, straightening
it out. "Run him down. He’s already a ghost!"

Clay slammed the brakes on and the car slewed to one side as
it shuddered to a halt on the shoulder of the highway. A car barreled past
them, the driver laying on the horn.

Squire popped his door open and clambered out, scanning the
road for Graves. "Where are you, Spooky? I’ll wring your neck! What’re you
trying to do, give me a friggin’ coronary?"

The ghost was nowhere in sight. Cursing under his breath,
Squire turned and stared expectantly through the windshield at Clay, but the
shapeshifter did not get out of the car. After a moment, the hobgoblin went to
get back inside, only to find the transparent wisp of Graves’s ghost in his
seat. In the interplay of sunlight and the shadowed interior of the car, the
specter was nearly invisible.

"I’m sorry if I startled you," Dr. Graves said.

"Sorry!" Squire sputtered. "You couldn’t just
have ghosted yourself back into the car like you did before?"

"I needed you to stop," the specter said. "We
don’t have a great deal of time."

Clay narrowed his eyes so tightly that his flesh seemed to
alter with the expression. "Has Medusa left the train?"

"Oh, I’m almost certain she has. And we’d best hurry if
we want to search before the authorities arrive. It’s a matter of minutes, I
expect."

Squire’s head hurt. "Search what? You lost me, Doc."

The ghost seemed suddenly more solid, and the expression on
his spectral features was bitter. "The wreckage, Squire. The train has
derailed."

Dr. Graves pointed to the northeast, where several columns
of dark smoke were pluming into the sky. The crash sight was two or three miles
away from the highway, but he and Clay had been caught up in conversation and
had not even noticed the smoke.

"Damn," the goblin whispered.

Dr. Graves floated right up through the roof of the car and
hovered above it. "I think we ought to leave the car here for the moment. We’ll
reach the site faster by our own means."

"Agreed," Clay said. He put the car in drive and
pulled further onto the shoulder, then locked it up tight.

"Any survivors?" he asked, just before he
transformed, his flesh popping and rippling as it diminished. In a handful of
moments, Clay was gone and a hawk hopped about the ground in his place.

Dr. Graves floated toward the crash site. "We’ll find
out soon enough," said the ghost.

Squire went to the shoulder of the road. Beyond it were only
olive trees and open ground, with some power lines in the distance. Clay and
Graves flew toward the pluming smoke, just a bird and this blur against the sky
that looked more than a little like a jellyfish, distorting the light that
passed through it.

"Don’t wait up, guys," the hobgoblin muttered.

He went back to the car, glanced over his shoulder at the
power lines, and then dove into the long shadow the vehicle cast on the
shoulder of the road.

The darkness swallowed him. His senses spread out through
the shadow paths, fingers on Braille, and he began to run. A short time later
he emerged from the shadow beneath an electrical tower. He did not step into
the sun, but emerging from the darkness he still had to shield his eyes from
the brightness of the day. A quick scan of the sky showed him that he was
slightly ahead of the hawk and the ghost. Not far from him he saw the railroad
tracks. The crash had happened perhaps a mile east. The smoke was thinner, now,
wispy.

Like ghosts.

Squire gauged the distance to the crash and slipped back
into the shadows. The darkness caressed him as he slipped along the path,
feeling the various conduits all around him, touching the shadows intimately. He
knew them.

Even so, he almost missed the path he wanted. It was so dark
that he did not notice it at first. Then he moved along it and let his
instincts feel for the egress.

The hobgoblin slid from the shadows inside the wreckage of
the train. The car was turned on its side, windows shattered and metal walls
torn like paper. Seats had been ripped from their moorings. Squire breathed
through his mouth, prepared for the wretched stench of blood and death.

But all he could smell was smoke and dust.

Confused, he looked around the wreckage. It took a moment
for him to realize what he was seeing. There were no bodies. None of flesh and
blood, at least.

Medusa had turned the passengers to stone.

The crash had reduced them to rubble.

The River Styx did not crash and churn, no whitewater foamed
its banks, yet it ran deeper than imaginable, fast and steady and inexorable in
its strength. To attempt to swim its breadth would be foolhardy. Suicidal. And
though Nigel Gull knew his soul was likely damned — whatever that really
meant — he did not want to discover what would become of his spirit if
his body was destroyed here in Hades’ realm. There was the additional
complication of Eve. Hawkins carried the vampire over one shoulder. The man was
stronger than he looked, but no one was strong enough to swim the Styx carrying
one hundred and thirty odd pounds of dead weight.