tone modulated, more reasonable, as he stroked his mustache.
Eve glanced around the petrified forest. The place was impossibly quiet. In that moment it seemed the whole world had been fossilized. Something was not right. She had felt the supernatural force growing here and had told Conan Doyle as much. It was obvious that something was here. But despite the look of the place, it did not feel like a grave to her.
It felt hungry.
And no one knew what hunger felt like better than she did.
'I’ve been mapping the real-world locations of mythology for decades. You know that well enough. In my travels I located stone statues… victims of a Gorgon’s eyes. The Gorgons were Phorcys’s daughters. That in mind, it wasn’t difficult to find a spell that would use the stone remains of his daughters’ victims to create a Divination Box.'
He reached into the first Range Rover and withdrew a small wooden box with no cover. On its sides were markings similar to others Eve had seen once before, ages ago in Babylon. Gull held it low so that they could all see inside. There were bits of stone within that must have come from one of the Gorgon’s victims as well as the small bones of some kind of bird and several dark-shelled nuts.
Gull shook the box. The contents rattled and jumped a bit, and then all of them rolled of their own accord across the bottom of the box, clicking on the wood as they gathered in one corner.
'Good as any compass,' Danny noted, standing between Eve and Conan Doyle.
Gull’s misshapen face beamed at the kid. 'Precisely, my boy. Precisely.'
The bones and stones and nuts began to rattle again. At first Eve though nothing of it. Then she saw the alarm on Gull’s face. An instant later the contents of the Divination Box slid up the inside wall and jumped out, flying to the ground and bouncing and rolling across the barren earth, as if drawn by a magnet.
The ground began to buckle and quake. Eve was thrown against the Range Rover. Her companions began to shout, but she ignored them all, her eyes searching the darkness among the petrified trees for the place where those bones and stones had gone.
The earth heaved, shattered, and sprayed, and then collapsed in upon itself, a massive hole opening in the ground.
From it came a noise… hissing, as if of a thousand snakes.
Then the first hideous head began to rise, sickly yellow eyes glowing in the night as it sought them out.
CHAPTER SIX
A Hydra.
Danny Ferrick didn’t need one of Doyle’s musty old books to tell him what it was that had emerged from the dry, barren earth, its multiple heads snapping and hissing. He‘d seen enough movies and read enough Greek mythology to know exactly what now attacked them.
'Holy shit. A fucking real Hydra.' he whispered with awe, frozen where he stood. He could not take his eyes from the serpentine monstrosity, its nine heads swaying hypnotically, as if trying to decide which of their number it would strike at first.
Conan Doyle stood beside Danny, his hands held up, a spray of emerald light flashing from them and spreading in front of the two of them like some sort of shield. The old guy seemed way too proper most of the time, but the second the magic started to spark from his eyes and that weird nowhere wind buffeted his clothes and ruffled his hair, he was almost more frightening than any monster. Power simmered in him, flowing off of him in waves.
'Eve,' Conan Doyle called. 'If you would be so kind as to get off your behind and lend a hand…'
The vampire had been thrown back against the Range Rover when the Hydra erupted from the ground, and now she pulled herself to her feet. 'Right away, boss man,' she said, shooting him the middle finger. 'I live to serve.'
The ground shuddered again, a tremor that all of them rode out as though they were on board a ship. The earth collapsed around the Hydra, huge chunks of volcanic soil sinking inward, entire stretches of that dusty ground erupting upward as the Hydra bucked and hauled its body out of its den beneath the dead earth. Each head was as hideous as the first, jaws gaping over, slavering venom spilling out onto the ground to sizzle like acid as it touched earth. Beneath its scales moved thick, ropy muscles, and its nine tails thrashed on the dusty ground.
Danny started forward, despite Conan Doyle’s magickal defenses. The mage reached out a hand and grabbed his shoulder.
'Not yet, boy.'
Eve cautiously moved toward the monster that now swayed on its thick, muscular trunk. She drew its attention, and nine pair of eyes focused on her.
'What’s she going to do?' Danny asked.
Conan Doyle ignored him, muttering an incantation under his breath, even as Ceridwen entered the fray. The elemental sorceress pointed her staff toward the beast, the sphere of blue ice atop it crackling with growing power. Her violet eyes sparked, and she raised her arms
The Hydra struck. Despite Eve’s distraction, one massive head turned away from the vampire, and its jaws opened wide, vomiting a gray, noxious vapor. Ceridwen tried to ward off the billowing cloud, but it clung to her, coating her in a layer of ash.
Conan Doyle shouted her name, his face etched with fury as he unleashed a bolt of pure magickal force. But he had been distracted, and even as he ran to her side, the blast went wild, missing the monster and shattering a fossilized tree nearby.
Three of the Hydra’s heads twisted around to stare at the tree that the spell had destroyed. One set of jaws gaped open and hissed in the general direction of Conan Doyle and Ceridwen, but the others still focused on Eve. It had identified her early on as its main prey, and now it began to slither across the barren earth toward her.
This whole thing is going to shit, Danny thought. Deep shit. He started after the Hydra, but he remembered Conan Doyle’s caution, and turned to glance back at the man who led them. What the hell was he supposed to do?
Eve snapped a branch off of a petrified tree and as the Hydra twisted its body across the earth toward her, she prepared to use it as a club. 'Is she all right?' she yelled to Doyle, who knelt at Ceridwen’s side, trying to remove the solidified ash that was crusted on her body.
The vampire had no time to wait for an answer. The Hydra darted toward her, quickening its speed, and while two of its heads feinted, a third lunged toward her, jaws spreading, venom drooling out.
Eve danced aside and swung the thick tree limb at its head. 'Take that, you ugly prick.'
The Hydra screeched in pain and fury, but even as one head sagged, disoriented, another long neck shot forward, jaws snapping. Once more Eve evaded the Hydra, but this time she jabbed one of its eyes with the end of the branch. The eye punctured, and putrid, gray fluid squirted out. But the Hydra was not nine separate beasts. Its injured heads had distracted Eve, and perhaps they had been meant to, for now a third and fourth serpentine mouth belched clouds of that noxious clinging vapor rather than attacking outright. Danny held his breath, his heart pounding in his chest, and every muscle tensed to join the fray. But Eve amazed him with her speed as she dove to the ground, rolling beneath the vapor, right up to the belly of the beast. She swung her club, this time striking the monster’s body. All nine heads bellowed its rage as the creature swiveled around and lashed at her with a pair of whip-like tails.
Eve could not dodge the monster forever. One of the tails caught her in the chest with such forced that the pop of cracking bone echoed in the air. She was thrown forty feet, landing in a tumble of limbs. She grunted with the pain of broken bones as she spilled end over end and at last came to a sprawling stop.
The Hydra eagerly moved toward its fallen prey.
This was a whole new life for Danny, this world of magic and monsters, but new as it was, it was his world. He was part of it. No matter what Conan Doyle said, he had to help Eve. The mage was helping Ceridwen, and Eve’s battle with the Hydra was slipping by in heartbeats, so quickly that it might be over before Conan Doyle returned to the fight. Danny had to do something.
