“Like hell you do,” Bernie said. “I’m not sending you in there alone. Why don’t we go ba—”
“Because she’s going to be furious either way. Panicked and furious that the Gorgons are near, and she never got the memo about not killing the messenger,” Tanis interrupted. “I’m not giving her an excuse to rip me in half, and not knowing what happened to Ariadne? That’s an excuse. So I’ll find out what happened to her and Daphne, hopefully not die in the process, and then I’ll check in. That’s my plan. It’s not a good one, but it’s the best I got right now. We’re hip-deep in shit and sinking fast.”
Bernie took off her white hat and fanned her face, gaze skipping between discarded body parts littering the ground like candy from a piñata and the black clouds of flies forming above. “You’re right. I know you’re right. Just hate that you are.”
Tanis pulled out another cigarette and trudged into the hip-tall grasses.
“So do I.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT TOOK ANOTHER half-hour of awful terrain to find the first statue. Bernie led the way, following the scents so Tanis didn’t have to fight a perpetual pants problem while she was, quite likely, walking toward her death.
Getting petrified with hard-ons was an indignity she’d rather spare herself.
The statue was a human male, a hunter by the looks of the tattered camo gear rustling over his stone form. He cowered, crouched low, his hands raised above his head like he was warding off a blow, his face screwed up in terror. Bernie and Tanis circled him, examined him, touched the rock of his skin. Where the sun grazed it, it was warm, and where there was shadow, it was cool.
“That’s messed up,” Bernie whispered. “You realize that could be us in a little while?”
“Not if I can help it. I have a woman to get home to.”
Bernie puffed on her cigarette. “Don’t let the girls at home know you’re a romantic or they’ll ride you for it.”
“Fuck them.”
She meant it, too. Outside of Bernie, Fi, Gaia in Percy’s Pass, and maybe Barbara, Tanis didn’t give much of a shit about any of them. She had sympathy for them, even for the True Daughters who seemingly had everything but were prisoners in their own right, but when it came down to it, all her affection was reserved for Naree.
Who will either have to come with me or be left behind, if we uproot.
No, fuck that. She’s mine and I’m hers.
We’ll figure it out.
Tanis set her jaw.
The second statue was found not too far from the first, the third even closer than that. Soon it was a veritable garden, all humans, all looking like they’d encountered Satan himself moments before their deaths. Tanis’s eyes skipped over them, not wanting to see their expressions, knowing that she could end up with her fear forever captured in stone, too. She gripped the gun harder despite its uselessness. The two remaining Gorgons were immortal. Medusa hadn’t been, thus Perseus slaying her, but her sisters? Bullets would do nothing other than annoy them a whole hell of a lot.
But I still want it near. Just in case.
“Look,” Bernie said, pointing to the left. Nestled behind a line of sycamores, black eaves taller than the trees, was the manor house Lamia described. White paint, the shutters intact but faded gray, it was a jewel of a place, with tall white columns and wraparound porch, hanging fuschia plants and blooming window boxes. Two stories, an attached garage, a water feature of a carved fish squirting water into a stone pool—a house like that didn’t belong in the wild with no sign of manicured lawns and domesticity, and yet Tanis couldn’t think of a single place that would have suited it better.
It was glorious.
The statue on the front steps, not so much.
It was in mid-step, one leg hiked up, one planted on the ground. An arm reached forward, thick and corded with muscle, fingers extended as if grasping for something. The head was tilted back, an angry, panicked expression preserved on the gray face. No ears, shorn hair, it wasn’t hard to identify Daphne. A tank top, tan cargo pants, combat boots. She’d succumbed to her petrification in a less-than-convenient place, and Tanis wondered if they’d bother to move her out with the rest of the bodies or if she’d be left there like a gruesome welcoming mat.
“I’ll be damned,” Bernie said, her hand going to her heart. “She was alright. Not much of a talker, but she always had a joke when you needed it. Good at puns.” She murmured beneath her breath, a prayer or a curse, or maybe a little of both. “She loved that girl, you know. Was sick about her, like you and Naree, but Ma was always down their throats. She’s so territorial about the breeders. I used to think they had it all when I was a kid, but now? I know better.”
“Yeah,” Tanis said, because what else was there to say? Looking at the worry on Daphne’s forever-frozen brow, at the desperation in her expression, she saw only Naree. Would she get on alright without Tanis? Would she go back to Connecticut and that clutch of bigoted assholes she called family? Would she head out west and take that tech job she should have taken in the first place? Or would Lamia send someone to clean up Tanis’s ‘mess’ first? Humans weren’t supposed to know about lamia. When Tanis took a human lover, she’d promised her mother she accepted responsibility for her discretion, but with her gone...
Don’t think like that. Naree knows the plan. Get out fast and go somewhere cold. Snakes hate cold.
Focus.
A slam inside the house, followed by shouting. Tanis and Bernie ducked behind a tree and peeked out around the trunk. A half-dozen people in white robes, all wearing the green sashes with the Gorgon beading, filed from the front door like ants, lining up on the brick path before the steps. Tanis had the poorly-timed thought that they were like the kids in The Sound of Music, lining up after Captain von Trapp’s boatswain call, to meet their new nanny for the first time, except here, there was no Julie Andrews to sing away their troubles.
One robed individual held back from the rest. She remained in the doorway, a white woman with short blond hair, who wore a red sash over her eyes and carried a folding walking stick in her left hand. She stepped forward, the stick gliding over the deck and tapping against the porch railing. It swung out in a wide arc and struck the statue, tapping along its side from chest to thigh and, at one point, tangling in the pocket of Daphne’s cargo pants.
“Move it to the side yard. Stheno won’t want to look at it,” she snapped, her tone brooking no argument. The group of six moved forward, trying to lift Daphne, but failing that, they pushed her over instead so she plummeted to the ground. The collision of statue and brick walkway resulted in Daphne’s head falling off and rolling a few feet from the rest of the body.
Tanis could see her spine. Unlike a statue that would be smooth stone throughout, each of Daphne’s body parts had turned to stone; crack the casing, you got a perfect anatomical dummy cast in stone.
The servants rolled the body away from the house and abandoned it on its side in a patch of dense, tall grass beside the driveway. They never said a word. Task accomplished, they followed the blind woman back into the house, the screen door clattering shut behind them. Tanis wouldn’t let herself look at her sister, instead surveying the property for good entry points. The windows all had drawn shades, which prevented a quick peek to determine Ariadne’s status. There were no patrols walking around, which was good, but with no way to determine how many people were inside or which parts of the house they occupied, the front and back door weren’t options. The bulkhead to the basement, however...
Tanis pointed. “We’ll go from the bottom up.”
“Lucky us,” Bernie murmured.
This is insane.
But what choice is there?
None. There is no choice. See what you can see and run. And hope it’s enough.
Before she could give into her roiling unease, Tanis sprinted toward the house, a blur of woman, faster than a cheetah with a hundred times the endurance. The bulkhead door wasn’t latched—bonus—and it was dark
inside the basement—bigger bonus. She snuck down the stairs, gun at the ready, if not for a Gorgon, then for the humans attending them. Priests, maybe, in a cult, if the robes were any indication, but who knew? Lamia was rarely conversational, especially about topics that upset her, and the Gorgons were her biggest upset.
The few snippets she had shared became Tanis’s beacons. The Gorgons’ strength was predominantly in their magic, physical strength, and resilience. They weren’t as fast as lamias. They couldn’t smell what lamias could smell, nor could they see as well, especially at night. Gorgons were superior predators, but lamias were the ultimate survivors if the terrain played nice, and for the time being, the terrain was playing nice. It was a big basement with plenty of places to hide, if push came to shove; three closet doors off the main chamber, a big boiler, stacked rubber bins and shelving units for storage. The stairs were at the far end of the room with a nook beneath that could provide cover if circumstances turned dire.
More dire.
Balls.
Tanis’s eyes adjusted as Bernie slithered down the steps behind her, pulling the bulkhead closed, slowly, so it wouldn’t clang. Bernie tilted her head back and sniffed, pointing first directly above their heads and then at one of the closed doors to their right. People one floor up, people behind the door. A plan wasn’t immediately obvious until a loud thud sounded above, like something dropping to the floor, followed by a plaintive wail. Tanis looked up, swinging her head back and forth. There was a break in between the floorboards a few feet above her head. She couldn’t see through it from where she stood, and so she handed Bernie the gun and rummaged around the basement until she found an empty milk crate and upended it. Bernie’s hand went to support her back as she climbed onto the crate and peeked through the gap, blinking away the dust and debris that rained down into her eye.
Ariadne was above, but not trying to escape, although only two humans held her arms. She was much stronger than them, could have thrown them through the wall if she wanted to, but she stayed put. Tanis swung her head around to see why, but the visibility wasn’t good. She heard footsteps above her, a bare foot actually stepping right above her face for a moment before moving away, but still she couldn’t discern much.
“You have a choice,” a woman’s voice said, speaking English but with a thick Greek accent.
Ariadne whimpered and lunged forward, but her body wouldn’t go, like she was shackled to the floor by invisible bonds. Tanis swept her gaze down. No chains, no rope, but Ariadne’s once-brilliant scales looked dull. The iridescent sheen that had made her so lovely was gone, replaced by a sickly gray. She wasn’t stone, not like Daphne or any of the other statued people peppering the yard, but she looked... dusty. Antiquated.
She can’t break free because she’s too weighted down by magic. Her coils can’t move.
“I can’t. I c-can’t. You’ll kill me, she’ll kill me. I can’t,” Ariadne sobbed, mascara-stained tears coursing down her pretty face. The tip of her nose was red, her upper lip dewed not with her usual pink gloss but with snot.
A thin arm, the skin the color of brass and gleaming like metal, darted out, clasping Ariadne around the throat. Long, thick fingernails, brown until they tinged green at the pointed ends, dug into her skin, the tips biting hard enough to draw blood. Tanis’s eyes followed the arm up to a bare shoulder and a sundress, the fabric yellow with tiny blue flowers. On any other woman, it would have been sweet for the season. On a Gorgon, it looked wrong. She was wrong.
Tanis had never seen a Gorgon before, so she wasn’t entirely sure what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this. The Gorgon’s body was humanish, curved above and below with a narrow waist between, her skin the color of fresh peaches save for the brass hands. Normal feet, normal legs, no snake coils from the waist down or anything noteworthy beyond toenails as green as her fingernails. The neck up was another story; her face was heart-shaped on a slightly too-big head, her mouth a lipless slash with an overbite of fangs, the ends dripping yellow liquid that crusted her chin and neck in sugary crystals. Her eyes were black marbles in too-round sockets, no irises or pupils to be seen, no lashes fringing top or bottom. In place of a nose she had a flattened bump, like she was hit dead on with a shovel.
Slitted vents replaced nostrils. Ear holes took the place of ears.
Atop her head were snakes; writhing, clay-colored snakes with eyes as black as the Gorgon’s own. They weren’t nearly as orderly or as matched as the mythology books depicted. Some were thick and long, three or four feet, extending from the Gorgon’s scalp to snap at the air in the nearest priest’s direction. Some were short and thin and frail, especially the ones closest to her temples, one of them daring to laze across her brow as though napping, oblivious to its cohorts’ incessant rustling. It was impossible to say if the size of the snake reflected how long it had grown on the Gorgon’s head, or if the variance was perpetual and by design; by the large snake on the back of the head devouring its sister, its throat bulging like it was giving the world’s most obscene blowjob, Tanis had to believe that the snakes died off and were replaced with new snakes, much like human hair.
That’s fucked up.
Bernie poked Tanis’s side. Tanis waved her off, watching the Gorgon’s fingers digging further into Ariadne’s flesh. The weird grayness around Ariadne’s snake-half crept up over her human half, too, her veins blackening beneath the skin and pushing at her flesh, the squiggly, dark worms pulsing in time to the erratic beat of her heart.
“It won’t be quick,” the Gorgon rasped. “Unless you tell me.”
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” Ariadne sobbed.
The Gorgon’s other hand crept over Ariadne’s shoulder, stroking, her gnarled brass fingers plucking at the pink strap of her top. A talon curled around it, the edge as sharp as a razor, cutting the fabric away. A full breast with a pebbled pink nipple fell out.
“I am Euryale,” the Gorgon said, her voice low as if she talked to a lover. “I know your mother. I tangled her innards around my fist and pulled, ropes of sausage in my hand. And yet the bitch escaped me.”
“Please, no. I... Sh-she fears you,” Ariadne managed. “We are all taught to fear you.”
“You should. I loathe your kind.” Euryale traced the back of her hand over the soft flesh once more before turning the nails inward and spearing the meat. Sanguine stars bloomed where the fingers bit, red rivers drizzling down over Euryale’s hand and wrist, over the flat of Ariadne’s stomach and onto the gray-tinged scales at her waist. Ariadne shrieked, and then she caterwauled as Euryale’s grip tightened. A moment later, the breast came off in the Gorgon’s hand, not in a fleshy chunk, but in a single piece of stone, so perfect it could have been pulled from the Venus de Milo itself. Where it had been attached to the chest was a strange wound, a nearly perfect circle of stone, the flesh along the edges curling away like the corners of old paper.
“Piece by piece,” the Gorgon crooned, showing the breast to a hysterical Ariadne. “Piece. By. Piece. This is what the lamia deserve for their hand. This is for Medusa.”
The hell does Medusa have to do with anything?
“Tanis!” Bernie demanded in a loud whisper.
Tanis tore her gaze from the gap in the floor, queasy, angry, and confused. By the mention of the Gorgon’s dead sister, and by the violation she’d seen. Tanis had thought Gorgons did a stone-stare, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am thing and that was the end of it. Apparently, they’d refined petrification to an art form; something precise and selective. Maybe through a gaze as Tanis had been taught, but it was possible—likely, even, given what she’d witnessed—that it had something to do with the bronze hands or green nails.
Does it really matter, in the end? Euryale is going to break Ariadne down into little stone parts until there’s nothing left.
Tanis ran her hand over her face, and Bernie jabbed her in the side again, harder. A part of Tanis wanted to shove her away for being so goddamned insistent, but then she followed the direction
of Bernie’s gaze and she understood. A sliver of pale light, under the door where Bernie had sensed the other person, that hadn’t been there before.
Something stirred.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WE HAVE TO go.
There was nothing they could do for Ariadne. Even if Tanis and Bernie rushed upstairs like a couple of be-titted Rambos, that would just mean four dead lamia instead of two. Lamia would chastise them for not giving it a suicidal try anyway, but Tanis had other ideas that included living to see the next day. Maybe the warning that the Gorgons were close would distract the Mother Beast from doing what Mother Beasts did best when they were given bad news, which was destroy everything in their path, especially the humanoid daughters unfortunate enough to poison her vicinity.
More shrieking from Ariadne was followed by a loud crash as something heavy hit the floor.
Another body part.
Get me out of this basement.
Tanis tiptoed ahead, avoiding the dim light peeking out from beneath the closed door by hugging the opposite wall, her shoulder skimming a shelf of power tools. Bernie made to follow, but then she stopped and cocked her head to the side, a finger lifted to her lips. Tanis reached for the gun she normally would have tucked into her waistband, remembering too late Bernie still had it. The hand cannon’s barrel stretched the tight fabric of Bernie’s leggings into an obscene shape against her left ass cheek.
Bernie pointed at the door.
“Hear that?”
Tanis didn’t, on account of the screeching upstairs, but once Ariadne quieted for reasons she didn’t want to think about, the mad whisper spilled forth. It was raspy and frantic, the person behind the door talking so much they ran out of breath, paused only to gasp, and continued prattling despite too little oxygen. There was a tinny quality to it as well, a faint echo as in a warehouse where the voice bounced off the unyielding walls.
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