Gorgon

by Chloe Garner

“You’ve got one of those?” Sam asked. Jenny gave David a sharp look then sighed.

  “Of course. How are we going to learn if we don’t keep good records?”

  “Who?” Isobel asked, and Samantha glanced over at her.

  “The Rangers. People who hunt mythological creatures, thinking they’re actually mythological creatures.

  “My mom didn’t have it,” Sam said, trying to move on again quickly.

  “It wasn’t something they all had, back then,” David said.

  “Yes she did,” Samantha said. “I read it. In two pieces.”

  “Just the notables,” David said, nodding at Sam before Sam could explain. “We have a list of every kill any Ranger has made since the internet turned into a tool we could use to store it.”

  “Can I see it?” Samantha asked.

  “No,” Jenny said sharply, sending David a look that defied him to argue with her, and David shrugged.

  “You heard her. Sorry. I get it.”

  “So what did you find?” Sam asked. David nodded at him.

  “Right. So, we were looking for mass infestations and for stories about charred-looking creatures. Chupacabra, giant bats, zombies, anything we could think of.”

  “Zombies?” Ash asked. “Those are real?”

  “No,” Samantha said quickly. “They’re just people who made some really bad decisions.”

  “I wouldn’t associate them with char,” Sam said. David nodded at him again, looking up from a page of scrawled notes, lines and circles and scratches. They’d spent time on this.

  “We wouldn’t send you after them until we sorted things out, but we record what the locals used to describe them, as well as what we ultimately decided they were. We were looking at stuff the Seekers ultimately decided not to send the Rangers after, too, because everyone knows that goblins don’t come in big packs.”

  “Everyone knows,” Samantha echoed.

  “Goblins?” Ash asked.

  “Demons,” Samantha said. “You shouldn’t believe anything they say; it’s a different language.”

  “Demons,” Isobel muttered.

  “Goblins…” Ash said.

  “There are a lot of things out there,” Jenny said, and Samantha shook her head.

  “You and I can argue it another time. I’m very firm on this.”

  Jenny glanced at Ash, then nodded.

  “I’ll hold you to that.”

  Samantha grinned.

  “Looking forward to it.”

  “Okay,” David said. “So we’ve got this list. The ones that we think were most likely structured the way the one in New Orleans was, a large number of low-power creatures all in one place, missing people, underground somewhere.” He turned it around on the table for Samantha to look at it.

  “What am I looking at?” she asked. He pointed.

  “This is you guys, out west. Oklahoma and Colorado. Best we can tell, they were still trying to figure out how to control the gremlins in Oklahoma. By Colorado, they had figured out the gremlins and were organizing their underground structure.”

  “Those make sense to me,” Samantha said. “Dry, hot, hostile to life.”

  David nodded.

  “I think I understand that. After that, we had one up in Maine and one in Minnesota. When we started looking, though, we found a few more. Ones we didn’t do anything about.”

  Sam remembered the hellfactory in Colorado. The first one he’d seen, one through vision no less, that unstable feeling of being out of control of his mind, not sure if he believed what he was seeing, the feel of Samantha’s thumbs on his eyes trying to help keep him stable, the headache from after. Throwing up behind a tree and not knowing if it was because of what he’d seen or because of the effort of controlling a vision. Any more, he just put on the obsidian glasses Samantha had gotten him and just glided around like he was on caster wheels.

  “There was another,” Samantha said. “In Flagstaff. They were using medical professionals, that time, but I think it has to go on this list.”

  Sam nodded. He remembered that one, too.

  Another vision, so much later.

  The things he’d seen. Helpless to change them. Things that had already happened, things that were presently happening.

  He gripped Wrath and Samantha sent him confusion and then sympathy. It took her a minute to figure out why it bothered him, to talk about these places.

  For her they were just flags, victories.

  She understood how bad they were. She’d seen things he would never imagine, hellside. She could torture a demon. Effectively. Proud of it or not, that was a skill that few humans had.

  But she had action. A war to fight. She could move on.

  He had images.

  She pulled him back into the conversation. David was adding Flagstaff to the list, asking her about where the cavern had been where she’d ultimately found the doctor named Ashley that Sam had keyed on. Isobel was leaning over the table with interest.

  “So…” David said, flipping the list back over for Samantha to read again. “That’s as far as we got. What do they all have in common?”

  Samantha shook her head.

  “Not much. The ones I got were mostly dry, but then you add New Orleans, Minnesota, and Maine, and that goes out the window…” She frowned. “Do you have a map?”

  “Sure,” David said, getting out his phone. She shook her head. “No, a really big one.”

  David and Jenny looked at her. Samantha was frowning, trying to visualize something.

  “Drawing on maps,” Sam said. “It’s something demons do.”

  Her hands were up, forming shapes in her mind that her fingers touched, like conducting an imaginary orchestra. Sam waited, holding up a hand when David started to speak.

  Then she cursed in hellspeak.

  Loudly.

  Sam knew what it was from experience, but the other three had never heard a human use hellspeak before, and there was a shocked silence. Samantha didn’t seem to notice as she went over her discovery more carefully, her hands making sharp motions. She cursed again.

  “Where in Maine?” she asked.

  “Kittery,” David said quietly after checking.

  “Is that right on the state line with New Hampshire?” she asked.

  “Right across the river from Portsmouth,” David said. It sounded like a yes.

  “And what about in Minnesota?” Samantha asked.

  “Grand Portage,” David said. “Walking distance to Canada.”

  More hellspeak. It was hard to listen to, even when you were used to it.

  “They’re all on boundaries,” Samantha said.

  “Flagstaff is the middle of the state,” Jenny said.

  “Not your boundaries,” Samantha said. “Ours.”

  She paused.

  “Sorry,” she said after a moment. “That was sharper than I meant it. Somehow a demoness that no one knows is picking spots right along our boundaries.”

  “Why does that matter?” David asked. Samantha shook her head, trying to focus.

  “Because we’re weak at the boundaries. We’re always fighting over who controls them. They get pushed back and forth all the time, depending on who’s stronger and who’s not interested. The territory I took used to be quite a lot larger. Lindsay ceded territory in huge swaths to Spake and Bane.”

  David raised an eyebrow and Samantha shook her head again. Sam bent time, grabbing hold of her mentally and slowing her down. She bent time as well, giving herself space to think it through. She was angry, and it was making it hard for her to see exactly what she needed to do next. A minute later, though, she had calmed. She sat back down in her chair and Sam let go of his grip on time.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Okay. North America.” She traced a very rough shape on the table with her fingertip. “We divide it up among us by workload, mostly along power lines. The Rockies, the Mississippi, the Great Lakes, the Ohio River. Like that. It isn’t coincidence that the points where three territ
ories intersect tend to be large cities. The geography and the power dynamics have characteristics that are also conducive to trade, and that’s where big cities go. New York, Denver, Chicago, Kansas City, New Orleans, and New York are all on boundaries. A lot of the things that divide states and countries are also things that contribute to power lines, so our boundaries often lay along state lines. Not a coincidence, and not convenience. Right?”

  “I’m aware of these structures, though much more informally,” Isobel agreed.

  “I want to go print a map so you can draw them for me,” David said.

  “No,” Samantha said. “I’m happy to explain the concept, but these are our politics. They don’t actually concern you.”

  “We can talk about power lines in the ground another time?” David asked.

  “Of course,” Samantha said. “It would be possible that she’s just finding spots by instinct that are along power boundaries, except that she’s exploiting points where the claims gap, rather than points where they overlap. No one is claiming that tiny region, rather than two of us claiming it. She’s actually hitting holes, and to do it that many times in a row…”

  “You have gaps along your territory?” Sam asked, surprised. She gave him a withering response mentally that was only just enough in fun to keep it from being personal.

  “I’ve only had this job a couple of weeks.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “We need your boundaries,” Jenny said.

  “I’m sorry,” Samantha said. “I can’t do that.”

  “It’s the only way we can help you,” Jenny said. “If you can point us at the gaps in your boundaries, we can find her.”

  Sam felt Samantha soften. She liked Jenny. Jenny didn’t get along with anyone, when it came to conflicts of interest with being a Seeker, but Samantha really did like the woman.

  “I don’t have a good way to say this that isn’t patronizing,” Samantha said. “This is the second time that you guys have shown us up this badly, and I’m grateful that you’re staying, because I intend to use your skills to make my people look bad again in the future, but…” she drew a breath, feeling guilty, “we’re going to take it from here.”

  She looked at the ceiling.

  “You got what you need, Abby?”

  Sam jumped to Abby’s room, where her eyes were still distant.

  “I can see you,” he said.

  “I’m looking,” she said to the empty room. “Sam’s going to have to help me find the gaps. I don’t know all of them.”

  “She needs help with the map,” he said. He felt Samantha’s confirmation.

  “I’m on my way,” she said.

  “I can find them,” Ash said abruptly, and Sam jerked back to watching the room, albeit while remaining in vision.

  Samantha was staring at the young man.

  “Say that again?” she said.

  “I can find them,” Ash said.

  “How?” Samantha asked. Ash shrugged, pushing both hands through his hair and dropping them on the table again.

  “I don’t know. I just know I can. I just have to…”

  “No,” Samantha said. Ash’s eyebrows shot up, and Sam signaled the same confusion at the intensity of her reaction. She shook her head quickly.

  “No, information is one thing,” she said. “And I’m not sure even how much of that I want you to have. You are never, ever to go looking for demons on purpose. Is that clear?”

  She and Ash looked at each other for a long time.

  A very long time.

  The boy wasn’t rebellious, but he was curious and he was intense.

  “I can find them, can’t I?” he asked. Samantha licked her lips.

  “I believe you can,” she said. “But I don’t want you to.”

  “If I can help and I don’t, I’m as bad as the people doing the bad things,” Ash said.

  “I tend to agree,” Isobel murmured.

  “That’s mom,” David said softly. “I recognize that sentiment anywhere.”

  “Most of the time, yes,” Samantha said. “There’s a caveat to that. If you don’t help when you could, simply because you’re afraid or lazy or too busy, and the worst thing that could happen to you is the thing that you would help prevent, you’d be right, I think. I’d want to make sure there aren’t any other exclusions, but it’s a good start. If, by helping, the worst thing that could happen to you is much, much worse than what you’d be preventing, sometimes you are right to let it happen.”

  “They’re dying,” Ash said.

  “I know,” Samantha said, deep meaning in her voice.

  “How do you know that?” David asked. “No one said that.”

  Ash’s eyes flicked to David, but only for a moment.

  “There’s nothing worse than death,” Ash said. “Let me find them.”

  “There is,” Samantha said. “Just not for most people.”

  They looked at each other.

  “He’s just a kid,” Jenny said.

  “No,” Samantha said. “He has a responsibility to take care of himself. The demons that wanted him are still going to be looking for him, looking for opportunities.”

  “Why?” Ash asked.

  “You know I can’t tell you that,” Samantha said. Ash nodded.

  “I know. I just have to keep asking.”

  “I know,” she answered.

  Like a secret language. Even being able to see inside her head, feel the meaning of the words as she said them, Sam felt like he would never understand the way Ash did.

  Another moment, and it was done, that silent exchange, and she turned to Sam.

  “I need to get all of us together. Do you want to come with me or do you want to stay and help Abby?”

  “Where are you going?” Sam asked. She grimaced.

  “New York.”

  <><><>

  The string of possessions in Delaware turned out to be a high school hazing ritual that had been significantly misunderstood by the locals. Jason and Kara had called it a day, informing the teenagers that they needed to at least tell their parents where they were going before wandering off into the woods and dancing around a fire until the small hours of the morning.

  Kara said she’d done it, herself, at that age. More than once. And she’d been naked at the time.

  Jason said it said something about the state of the world, that grown adults could possibly let a rumor grow to the point that the Seekers heard about it without anyone even going to see what was happening. Or asking the teenage boys. Because if there was any chance of the high school girls dancing around a fire naked, there were going to be high school boys hiding in the bushes. Guaranteed.

  Kelly said that dancing naked sounded like a good way to get scratches everywhere from the woods.

  “Oh, honey,” Kara had said.

  “Have you ever tried to walk through the woods?” Kelly asked. “They’re full of stuff that your clothes are always getting caught on.”

  Kara laughed. Jason shook his head, glancing at the kid in the rearview in bemusement.

  “Really,” Kelly said. “Why would you do that?”

  “If you don’t know, there’s nothing I can do to explain it,” Jason said.

  “Do angels even have an idea of fun?” Kara asked.

  There was silence.

  “We play games,” Kelly finally said.

  “Are they fun?” Jason asked.

  More silence.

  “It’s different,” Kelly finally said. “I can’t explain it.”

  He was working way too hard at this.

  “Y’all spend too much time tuning your harps,” Jason said. “Not interested.”

  “That’s blasphemous,” Kelly said.

  “That,” Jason said. “That’s what you’re going to pick out of everything and call me blasphemous?”

  “He doesn’t know about Ellen, does he?” Kara asked.

  “Who?” Kelly asked.

  “Didn’t until now,” Jason said.
Kara had made good on her bet. Jason had picked out the young woman at a club in Chicago a few nights after the fight with the vampire, and Kara had talked her back to the hotel. Jason wasn’t sure if he was getting old, or if the woman simply hadn’t been as interesting as some of the others, but he’d actually wished at one point that it had just been him and Kara.

  “Who?” Kelly asked again.

  “Still doesn’t,” Kara said.

  “You’re talking about sex, aren’t you?” Kelly asked.

  Jason glanced at the angel innocently and Kelly shook his head.

  “Deceit. Debauchery. Stupid. But not blasphemy.”

  Jason looked at Kara.

  “Nice for him to box them all up for us, isn’t it?”

  “Be nice,” Kara said.

  “He’s talking about you, too,” Jason said. She shrugged.

  “He isn’t wrong, is he? We do kind of lie for a living, and we both know what your favorite thing to do is when you’re off the clock.”

  Jason shook his head.

  “So? It all amounts to just a bunch of name-calling in the end, doesn’t it?”

  “It matters,” Kelly said. “You know it does.”

  “Do I?” Jason asked. Kelly sat back in his seat, looking out the window.

  “I can’t talk to you about this,” he said. Jason shook his head.

  “Afraid you might spoil my ignorance?” he asked.

  “No,” Kelly said. “I’m just not allowed to interfere in the affairs of humans when it comes to what they believe.”

  “And calling me a…” Jason paused, struggling to find the right word.

  “Debaucher,” Kara suggested. He pointed at her.

  “That. Calling me a debaucher isn’t interfering?”

  “It didn’t change anything, did it?” Kelly asked, still distant. Jason shook his head.

  “Nope. Where do you want to go for dinner?”

  “There was a bar off the highway along this way,” Kara said. Jason nodded.

  “Done.”

  <><><>

  Kara was dancing. Jason was drinking. Kelly was watching with open, undisguised interest.

  “I never will understand,” the kid said as Jason downed another shot and signaled the waitress again.

  “What’s that?” Jason asked.

  “How you waste so much of your existence eating and drinking,” Kelly said.