From nowhere, drums pounded in her ears. Complex rhythms. Three or four patterns piled on top of each other. Shrill double-reed horns played a quick discordant melody that made her ears hurt. The louder the crowd cheered, the louder the music became. There were no musicians or amplifiers in sight. The music seemed to just materialize out of the air. Zoe didn’t want to cheer. She wanted to run, but she stood her ground.
“Look!” someone shouted. “Children. Her children!”
The crowd surged back onto the sidewalk as black cobras came roiling their way down the middle of the damp street. They were the biggest snakes Zoe had ever seen. Each one was easily the size of the crocodiles Mr. Danvers had shown her class, twelve feet long or more. Their skin shone like obsidian in the moonlight, and their eyes were green-gold, like tarnished coins. Their enormous fangs were bone-white daggers set in up-curved mouths that made it look as if the cobras were always smiling.
Behind the snakes came dozens of the queen’s hulking dogs, led by tall men with snouts and heads like wolves. Dressed in rough leather breeches and chain mail over dark jerkins, they held the snarling dogs with heavy silver chains, yanking them hard when one of the hounds would rear up on its hind legs as if it might lunge into the crowd. The spectators along the boardwalk cheered and screamed with delight as the dogs went by. The more the dogs snarled and charged them, the more they whooped and laughed.
The music stopped and the crowd grew quiet. The change was immediate and dramatic, as if it was something that had happened before. A kind of play or ritual in which everyone knew their part but Zoe. For a second, all she could hear was the endless pounding of the waves on the beach. She was still giddy enough with adrenaline that the abrupt change didn’t scare her. It heightened her excitement. She knew what she was feeling wasn’t exactly right, but she couldn’t help herself. The rational part of her brain told her to sneak out the back of the crowd, but something else kept her rooted to the spot. It was like being a little high or what she imagined being under a spell would be like. She had to know what was going to happen next.
A murmur rose up through the crowd and all heads turned toward the palace. The cheering started again, harder, wilder, and louder than ever. Zoe stood on her tiptoes, trying to see over the crowd. When she couldn’t, she crouched down and saw the legs of a horse moving down the boulevard. A protective circle of the wolf men surrounded the rider. When they were almost abreast of her, Zoe stood back up. She knew instantly that the woman who towered over the crowd on horseback was Queen Hecate. She reminded her of the shadow woman she’d seen in her dreams.
Her horse was black, but not like any black Zoe had ever seen before. It wasn’t black like the snakes, who were shiny and whose scales shone like dark jewels. Queen Hecate’s horse was black in the same way that darkness is black. The horse was the color of no light, as if the horse itself wasn’t there and what the queen was riding was merely its shadow.
The queen herself was the most beautiful woman Zoe had ever seen. She was tall and wore a sleeveless tunic and leather breeches of silver and midnight blue dark enough that it was almost black. Her long braided hair and skin were as pale as moonlight, and her arms and shoulders were sculpted and strong. Her silver crown didn’t encircle her head like an ordinary crown. It curved up and back from the center of her skull like a serrated shark fin. She wore knee-length leather boots with flat soles and sharp metal tips. Not the boots of a pampered princess, Zoe thought. Those were the boots of a warrior queen.
When Hecate reached Zoe, the girl looked up at her with awe. Every movement, every angle of Hecate’s body presented a being of strength and power. The screams from the crowd grew louder and more demented by the minute. As Hecate drew abreast of Zoe, a wispy cloud passed in front of the moon. The light in the street shifted almost imperceptibly. As the cloud covered the moon’s face, Queen Hecate’s face disappeared. Gone was the gorgeous snow-queen profile, and in its place was the snarling head of a great, black she-wolf. The wolf’s dark eyes scanned the crowd with a predatory gleam. Zoe stepped back, pushing to the rear of the crowd, not caring who she bumped into or which toes she stepped on.
A second later, the cloud moved beyond the moon, and Zoe chanced another look at the queen. She was a beautiful woman again, nodding and waving to her subjects.
“You aren’t clapping,” said a tall man to Zoe’s right. She stared up at him, trying not to look too scared or shocked. Whatever spell or adrenaline high had kept her rooted to this spot was wearing off. She was tired and overwhelmed enough that her mind froze and she couldn’t come up with a good lie for why she wasn’t clapping. Then the man smiled down at her.
“It’s all right. I’m not clapping either.” He turned and looked back over the heads of the crowd, toward Hecate. He spoke quietly. “It’s strange, isn’t it? Seeing everyone here like this. The smiling, the cheering, their faces beaming up at our queen. Every soul here tonight hates her, and would like to see her ripped to pieces by her own hounds. Yet here they all are, screaming for her as if she were the answer to all the riddles that have ever plagued or terrified the human race.” The tall man shook his head. “Why do you think they do it?”
Zoe’s head was swimming with fear and confusion, but the man didn’t do anything threatening, although it would have been easy to point her out to one of the queen’s wolf bodyguards. The stranger had a sharp, birdlike face and heavy, unruly eyebrows. His skin was gray and sagged on his cheeks and under his chin, as if he’d been heavy once or, like her dad’s aunt Irene, had spent most of the last twenty years drunk.
“Maybe they’re afraid not to cheer,” Zoe said.
The man shook his head again. “Silly girl, we’re all afraid of her. But that’s not why these people are screaming with such glee.”
“Maybe they do it because they mean it.”
The man looked at her, his expression open and curious. “Ah,” he said.
“I guess, if someone was really kicking your ass, you’d want them to be special. I mean, I’d rather have Batman kick my ass than Mickey Mouse any day.”
The man nodded. “A friend of mine once put that same thought a little more elegantly: does the smart sheep make friends with the wolf or with the other sheep?”
“The wolf, definitely,” Zoe said.
The man smiled down at her warmly, patting her on the shoulder. “Good girl,” he said. “Have a lovely evening.” He turned and walked away, disappearing into the noisy crowd.
At the end of the street, Hecate stepped down from her horse and stepped onto a sort of stage. Zoe couldn’t take her eyes off the woman as she strode to the front of the platform and raised her long arms for quiet. The crowd went silent in an instant.
“Welcome, my subjects, my friends, my children,” Hecate began, her voice amplified magically so that it seemed as if she was speaking directly to Zoe, and to her alone. “Welcome especially to those newly arrived members of our family, new souls whose experiences and insights will, no doubt, reward and enrich us all.”
The queen looked down on the crowd, nodding occasionally to someone near the front of the stage.
“To our new brothers and sisters still confused by your journey, you have come to Iphigene, the city at the end of the line. Your new home. I am Hecate, your queen and your protector, your sister and your mother. Iphigene, you will find, is both terrible and sublime.” She bowed her head slightly, then looked up. “As am I.” Zoe could tell that the head bob was a practiced motion.
“Tonight all you need take with you are these few thoughts: Iphigene, like all cities, is made more beautiful or more ugly by its citizens, and by my love for each of you. Never forget that we are in the most awful of places, a city forgotten, broken, and bleeding. And who has abandoned us here in this limbo? A repository for their trash, cast away, cast down, like so much filth.” Hecate was at the very edge of the stage, pointing down into the crowd as if demanding an answer from every one of the tens of thousands spread out at her feet. The feeling of being high was coming on again. Despite herself, Zoe wanted to call out, so Hecate would be pleased and maybe smile at her. She was horrified at the thought, but couldn’t help herself.
Hecate stepped back from the edge of the stage and opened her hands, palms out. Quietly, she said, “The living.”
An anxious muttering started up from the crowd. Hecate’s wolf men eyed the nearby crowd members restlessly from the sides of the stage.
“We are what they despise,” Hecate continued. “We are the shadow they only see when they’re alone. We are their nightmares and the secret fears they want to forget. So, they have condemned us to this dark and baleful place with nothing but our memories and the garbage that washes down to us.” She shook her head slowly, in mock sorrow. “The living abandon everything when they’re done with it. Even us.”
The low sound of the muttering crowd kicked up a notch, rising into an animal rumble from thousands of
