Tears of the Furies (A Novel of the Menagerie) (32 page)

"We don’t have to search anymore," he said.

"What’re you talking about?" Squire asked.

Clay gestured for them to come forward, to see what he’d
seen. Sprawled just inside the entryway of the church was the corpse of an
Orthodox priest, his robes spattered with blood, his limbs jutting out at odd,
impossible angles. Broken. His face was black and swollen and there were dozens
of small puncture wounds on his cheeks, forehead and throat. One of his eyes
had been punctured as well and had dripped vitreous fluid like thick tears.

The ghost of Dr. Graves whispered past Clay, floating down
beside the corpse as if he were kneeling. In the combination of the church’s
shadows and the light from the doorway, Graves seemed only partly there, a
mirage. He shook his head, studying the body, then glanced up. Through him,
Clay could still see the candles up on the altar.

"I don’t understand," Dr. Graves said. "Why
isn’t he stone?"

Clay lumbered deeper into the church, his flesh flowing and
bones popping as he walked. Wearing the face of the dead priest, he knelt by
the corpse. He traced his fingers along the corpse’s face, then reached up to
his own eyes.

Once again he shifted his form, taking on the appearance of
the man known back in New Orleans, and in Boston, and in other places around
the world, as Clay Smith. Clay Smith, with a unique skill at solving murder. Not
a detective, but often of help to police departments in whatever city he called
home.

"He was blind," Clay said simply. "He could
not see her, therefore her curse did not affect him. So she killed him,
probably infuriated. The marks on his face —"

"Snakebites," Graves interrupted.

"Yeah," Clay said.

Squire strode across the small church, producing a stubby
cigar from his pocket. He lit it from a candle and turned to face them.

"All right. But explain it to me. How come this means
we don’t have to go looking for her?"

Graves studied Clay a moment, then looked at the dead
priest, and finally gave his attention to Squire. "Our friend Mr. Clay has
more than one talent, remember?"

Squire’s face lit up and he puffed on the cigar. The
hobgoblin gave a short cough and nodded eagerly. "Right, right. The thing.
The … the ectoplasm trail, or whatever. But you couldn’t see it before, because
Medusa’s victims were all stone. It wasn’t working."

"No," Clay agreed. "It wasn’t." He
looked upon the dead priest with sorrow, but also with grave determination. The
souls of murder victims haunted their killers for a time, perhaps with intent
but more likely simply because their lives have ended so abruptly that they
cling to whatever’s nearest them when they die, afraid to go anywhere. To move
on.

But the ghosts leave a trail, a kind of thin phantom line, a
tendril that connected their ravaged bodies to their souls, no matter how far
the souls traveled away from their husks. If he discovered the victim soon
enough after death and he followed that link, that tendril, he could find the
killer.

A faded pink mist clung to the dead priest, stretched like a
rope out the front of the church and through the square, then farther up into
the village. Into the hills.

Into the west.

"I’ve got her trail," Clay said. "It’s only a
matter of time, now."

Her bones ached.

Eve drifted slowly up into awareness and though her eyes
were still closed, her brow knitted in discomfort. She lay on her side already,
her body rocking with some unknown rhythm, but now she pulled her legs up tight
beneath her and shuddered with the cold. Her lips drew taut, pressed together
and then she shifted uncomfortably.

Her eyes fluttered lazily open and she saw her hands,
crossed at the wrists over her breasts. A thin sheen of crystal frost had
formed on her flesh and a chill mist swirled around her. The rocking motion
continued but only now did Eve have the presence of mind to recognize that she
was in a boat.

Memories stirred and she remembered her circumstances. Rage
washed over her, warming her icy blood, and her upper lip curled to bare her
fangs even as she sat up. They were in a small boat, Eve at the prow. Nick
Hawkins was nearest to her, smoking a cigarette, and the moment she was in
motion he began to shift toward her, hands coming up in a defensive posture.

Eve was thousands of years faster.

She sprang at him, lunging through the mist and ignoring the
sway of the craft or the rush of the water beneath it. Hawkins snarled,
clenching his cigarette between his teeth, but he had neither the strength nor
the swiftness to fight back. Eve clutched his throat with her left hand, the
right gathering up the fabric of his jacket, and she drove him down beneath
her. The back of his head struck the wooden floor of the boat with a solid
thump. A guttural curse issued from his lips even as the impact knocked the
wind from his lungs. Eve held him down as he bucked, attempting to throw her
off, but she was too strong.

Her vision was far more than human. Her eyes saw through
gloom and mist with utter clarity, and when she looked up she saw every line in
Nigel Gull’s hideous features. He had been sitting behind Hawkins — beyond
him the girl, Jezebel, had her hands in the water, somehow using her weather
magic to propel the craft — and now Gull shifted forward, raising his
hands. The old mage did not dare to stand in the small boat for fear they would
all spill over into the frigid, rushing river.

"Not a fucking spark of magick on those fingers,
asshole," Eve snarled, purposely flashing her fangs as she choked the man
beneath her. "Or Hawkins loses his head."

Jezebel twisted around at the sound of Eve’s voice and her
eyes went wide with alarm. "Nick," she said, her lips forming the
name almost soundlessly.

The mist rolled across the water’s surface and the boat
knifed through it. Gull was half-crouched, hands still contorted as if frozen
in the act of casting a spell. His ugliness was made worse when he smiled, as
he did now.

"Let’s not be hasty, pet," Gull said, lowering one
hand to the bench below him in order to keep his balance.

Eve punctured Hawkins’s skin with her fingernails. "Call
me that again, you pompous prick, and I’ll kill him just for fun, and to hell
with what comes of it."

The smile disappeared from Gull’s face. His nostrils flared
and the mist that swept past his face seemed also to swirl behind his eyes. The
mage began to hum, the sound low and guttural.

"I don’t think you want to do that, Eve," he sang
in a voice that was not his own, the sweet tones of Orpheus. "You don’t
want to move at all, in fact."

She tried to fight the influence of that voice, her every
muscle strained and burning with the struggle, but there was nothing she could
do. The power of Orpheus’s voice was too much. She felt her heart surrendering,
her rage pacified, though in the dark depths of her mind her hatred still
churned. A spark of panic ignited in her.

Once, long ago, she had been overpowered by a demon with the
sweetest of voices. The memory seared her and she did not want to allow it to
take root, yet she seemed as helpless in her mind as in her flesh. Eve
collapsed in the prow once more, on her back this time, forced to stare at the
distended face of Nigel Gull and to see the mad light of triumph in his eyes.

"Mother of two races, hunter of two races, ancient as
evil’s kiss. Do you think I’d have you here with me without preparing to deal
with you?" he sang to her.

The river rocked the craft, water sprayed over the side and
dampened her face and hair, and Eve could only lie there with her eyes open as
Gull sneered at her. In the rear of the boat, Jezebel smiled at her and then
plunged her hands into the water again. The girl had paused in her propulsion
of the vessel and it had begun to be swept along with the current, but now the
boat rushed forward across the water once more.

Hawkins sat up, his gunmetal eyes hard as he glared at her. He
reached up to touch his neck and his fingers came away bloody. With an
unsettling laugh he licked his fingers clean and then crabwalked forward so
that he was looking down upon Eve, prone and helpless.

"Just to be clear, I don’t care what you are. Just
another sodding relic to me." He wrapped both hands around her throat and
began to squeeze. "You don’t need to breathe, I know that. But I’ll wager
you need your head attached to your body, yeah? If Mr. Gull didn’t need you . .
. ah, but he does." Now Hawkins grinned. "Might sample a taste of
your
blood, next time, though. Play your little vampire game. So mind your manners,
leech."

The wood was rough beneath her. Eve smelled blood but could
not be certain if it was Hawkins’s or her own. Beneath that smell was another,
one she was noticing for the very first time. The stink of the dead. Not the
rotting odor of fresh death, but the dusty, brittle smell of the tomb. It lived
in the wood of the boat and drifted with the mist. This place was a realm of
the dead and so it did not surprise her, but it served to calm her. Though she
had no desire to rest in the grave, Eve had to remind herself from time to time
that she was, in essence, one of the dead. Creatures far more wretched than
Nick Hawkins had done far worse to her than he would ever be able to conjure in
his most depraved imagination.

Eve managed to sneer. But she would not give Hawkins the
pleasure of a response. Instead her gaze shifted beyond him, to Gull. Focusing
the entirety of her will, she managed to force her lips to move.

"You . . . need me?" she rasped. "Why?"

The mage nodded slowly. "Indeed." He placed a hand
over his heart. "As to my purpose, I’m afraid you’d never understand. All
of this —" he gestured around him, taking in Hawkins and Jezebel,
the boat and the river, and the netherworld beyond. "It’s for love. I’ve
orchestrated all of it for the sake of a woman." His face stretched into
that horrid smile again.

"I’m a romantic, you see."

Another spray of water came over the side and Eve blinked it
away. On her lips, the droplets had the salt tang of tears.

"What woman would have you?" she asked. It was
becoming easier to speak, though she still could not move her limbs.

Gull gazed out across the river, all amusement gone from his
eyes, leaving only a melancholy emptiness behind. "The most beautiful
creature in all the ages."

"I hope she’s worth it," Eve said. "The pain,
I mean. Conan Doyle and the others — my friends — they’ll be coming
for you."

The ugly man raised an eyebrow and stared at her. "I’m
prepared for them, as well. I know what Arthur is capable of. Do you think I’d
underestimate him?"

Gull settled into the craft as though it were a throne. He
gestured for Hawkins to join Jezebel in the aft of the boat. The slender man
moved carefully past the mage, then Gull turned his attention to Eve again.

"Sit up," he commanded.

Jerking like a marionette, she complied. Somehow his
instruction had freed her upper body, at least enough that she was able to
glance around at the river.

"The Styx," Gull said. "And we come, momentarily,
to the far shore."

Eve turned to see that he spoke the truth. They approached
the bank of the river, where the ground seemed made not of soil but of cold,
gray ash. She shot Gull a withering glare.

"You don’t think Conan Doyle will find a way across?"

"Oh, I’m certain he will. I’d be terribly disappointed
otherwise."

Only then did Eve notice the activity in the rear of that
small, ancient craft. Jezebel still had her hands thrust into the water, surges
of white foam jetting out behind them as she forced the river to propel them. But
now Hawkins knelt beside her, one hand on her shoulder. Despite the chill of
the mist and the river, beads of sweat had formed on his forehead.

Gull saw that she had noticed them.

"Mr. Hawkins is a psychometrist," the mage said. "You
know that. But he is capable of more than simply reading images and emotions. With
enough motivation and focus, he can also communicate them. Jezebel is
one
with the river. Through her, Hawkins is pouring hatred for Conan Doyle into
every drop of water, tainting all of the Styx with the single, unrelenting
thought that Arthur is the enemy and must be destroyed."

A knot of fear twisted Eve’s gut. She had faith in Conan
Doyle, but Gull seemed so confident . . .

Still, she did her best to hide her alarm. "Water? You
expect the water to rise up and stop him?"

"Of course not," Gull replied. A sneer of
satisfaction split his face. He dropped one hand over the side of the boat and
let his fingers trail in the river. "Here there be monsters, my dear Eve. Here
there be monsters."

Though only in small measures, Ceridwen could indeed feel
that she was growing stronger. The deeper they progressed into the Underworld,
the more acclimated she became to the nightmarish place. The process was equal
parts relief and concern. Although glad to be regaining her strength, she had
to wonder the cost. Already she had begun to feel a certain, disturbing sense
of belonging, the simplest thought of returning to the land of the living
filling her with uneasiness. What that meant, she did not know. But it troubled
her deeply.

They had reached the shores of the swiftly flowing Styx and
were awaiting the ferryman to take them across. Danny and Conan Doyle stood at
the river’s edge.

"Where is he?" Danny asked, attempting
unsuccessfully to skip a stone across the river’s turbulent surface. "The
Cyclops dude said that Charon’d just show up after we got here." He threw
another stone, waiting for Conan Doyle’s reply.

Arthur remained silent, staring out over the Styx, trying to
see through the thick, undulating clouds of gray vapor. Ceridwen did not like
the expression on his face.