need for vengeance in him. Life was a gift. Clay had taken lives, but he had spent far more time punishing those who had stolen that gift from others, making up for what he had done, and attempting to bring some justice to the world.
No, not for the world. Just for people. For the dead.
He thought about the children and spouses of the dead, the parents who would not even have a corpse to bury but instead a statue. Stone. And never an explanation for how such an atrocity could occur.
'She’s trying to free herself!' Dr. Graves shouted.
The ghost darted through the air, morning light shining through him, and fired his phantom guns at the Gorgon as she struggled against the net Squire had thrown over her. The bullets made her jerk and twitch and bleed black, but they would not kill her.
Squire kicked her again.
But they weren’t here to torture her. They were here to end her. And end the threat she represented.
With the lumbering gait of the mountain gorilla, Clay moved in. His form was so enormous that it cast a massive shadow across the ground, the darkness sweeping over Squire as he passed the hobgoblin. The shapeshifter reached down with his enormous hands and grabbed up fistfuls of net, drawing the sides together.
Medusa thrashed, attempting to tear herself free. One of her arms slipped loose and Clay grabbed it, snapping the bones in her forearm. He drew her into an embrace. She whipped her head around, eyes scarlet and gleaming with hatred as she tried to turn him to stone. Clay had solved that problem before by constantly shifting his flesh and bone, never holding the same shape so she could not work her curse upon him again. Now he closed his eyes even as his body began to stiffen, and his every molecule fought the effects of her influence.
He squeezed her tightly. The snakes on her head poked through the holes in the net and darted out to bite him, snapping at his face, sinking fangs into his flesh and sending venom shooting through him.
Clay tightened his hold on her and felt some of the bones in her chest give way. He drew in a breath and prepared to crush her, to snap her spine, to rip her in two if that was what it took to destroy the evil inside her.
'Hey!' Squire shouted.
The hobgoblin struck him on the arm. Clay was so entrenched in the gravity of his task that he did not respond. There was no levity in this. No pleasure in it.
Squire punched him in the leg. 'Hey, dumbass!'
Clay turned his face away from Medusa, the serpents biting his right cheek and his neck in several places, through the fur of the gorilla. He opened his eyes and stared down at Squire, then at Graves behind him. The ghost wore a confused expression that was entirely unlike him.
'Cut the crap,' the hobgoblin snapped. 'Wrap the bitch up with a bow. Just caught a whisper from the boss. Apparently we’re supposed to deliver her alive.'
Clay had convinced himself that Medusa’s death was necessary. Had felt her bones break in his grasp. The urge to finish her, to shatter them all, was powerful.
Now he growled, the words rumbling in his chest. 'Deliver her where?'
The island of Kithira was just south of the Peloponnese, a beautiful place with enormous Venetian influence mixed with the Aegean. Eve had been there once upon a time, before the Venetians, when the Barbary pirates still held sway over the place. But it wasn’t Kithira she had suggested for their rendezvous. It was Andikithira, the tiny isle she still knew as Aigila, though no one had called it that in many an age. It lay twenty-eight miles south of Kithira, a dot in the Mediterranean, and though it was not unknown to world travelers, it was no tourist haven. For centuries the only tourists had been pirates, and even now the only ferry came but once a week.
It was there, beside a whitewashed church overlooking the glistening blue sea, that they waited that long afternoon.
She sipped from a glass of wine that had been homemade by the Koines family, who had been on Andikithira as long as the island had been above water, or so it seemed. The spell that Gull had placed on her to protect her from the sunlight would wear off. The ugly son of a bitch had told her as much. But she was going to take advantage of it while she could. If it hadn’t been for the presence of Danny Ferrick — still a teenager despite his demonic nature — she would probably have stripped nude and lain in the sun, giving herself over to its rays and its warmth. Instead she made do with her wine and the white wall that ran along the edge of the steep hill that overlooked the small village below.
The church was at the peak, the village below, and beyond that, the blue-green sea, so soothing to her now. She would never forget the sight of the Mediterranean in that moment when the gates of the Underworld had blown open and they were free. If she’d had breath in her lungs, the sight would have stolen it away.
Her skin was almost entirely healed, save for some mottling on her face that would take some time to go away. That was where she had been burned the worst. A quick stop on Kithira and she had purchased new clothes, including attire for traveling, as well as an outfit for an afternoon in the sun: black linen shorts and a shirt that she had tied just below her breasts, and sandals. It had been millennia since she’d had occasion to bother with sandals.
There was a picturesque bit of architecture, at the edge of the cliff. A sextet of arches, three on the bottom, two in the middle, and one at the top. Inside of the top two tiers there were bells. Church bells, to let the villagers know the time for mass had come. But other than a low, singing whistle produced by the wind up inside them, the bells were silent this afternoon.
The others were all inside the church. Eve had no desire to enter, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have dared it. There was no way to know what would become of her. Conan Doyle, Ceridwen and Danny had each come out to join her briefly, but now all three of them were back inside with Gull, making certain he did nothing to endanger them.
Never turn your back on a scorpion, she’d warned Conan Doyle. She knew from experience, from years in the desert. And Gull was a scorpion if she’d ever seen one.
So Eve lay on the wall and drank her wine alone and waited for the afternoon sun to burn down into the ocean as evening approached. She saw the dust rising from the passage of a truck through the village long before she could make out the distinguishing features of the truck itself. Not that it mattered. The island was small. There was only one reason for anyone to drive a truck up the hill to the church this afternoon. Only one.
Reluctantly she rose and padded across the bleached pebbles and scrub grass that surrounded the church. She knocked twice, hard, on the massive wooden doors and then stood back. Even as she waited for someone to answer she heard the noise of the truck’s engine.
With a clank, the doors were pulled open. Conan Doyle gazed back at her from the shadows within. The cool darkness seemed to beckon to her, to promise her comfort and safety, but she would return to the nighttime world soon enough.
'They’re coming,' she told him.
Conan Doyle nodded, then pulled the doors open wider and stood aside, glancing in at Nigel Gull. Ceridwen and Danny sat together near the front of the church, conspiratorially near, though they’d left off their conversation to look up and see what was transpiring. Gull sat in the rear, hands folded on his lap as though he were the most penitent soul who’d ever entered a place of worship. Even his eyes had changed, for when he looked up at the interruption they were filled with hope and love and expectation.
For a moment the malformed mage seemed fixed to his chair. Then the sound of the engine grew louder — loud enough to be heard inside the church — and he rose and strode stiffly toward the doors. Eve stepped aside to let him pass. There would be no subterfuge from him now. His focus was on his heart’s desire, nothing more and nothing less.
Just as Eve had seen Conan Doyle do so many times, Gull smoothed his jacket and shook out his cuffs, trying to make himself presentable. He reached into his pocket and she knew he would be clutching the vial in his hand, hidden away. The tears of the Furies.
The truck came around the corner, a rough old thing, the sort of vehicle that might be used on a local farm or to go to market. There was a man driving — or at least, Clay, with the face of a man. The face he wore most often, when he gave his name as Clay Smith. Beside him the air shimmered and she could almost make out another figure. Someone else might have thought it a trick of the light, but she knew it was Dr. Graves.
