Gorgon

by Chloe Garner

  “How long have you had her?” Samantha asked.

  “Since before we left Macedonia,” Isobel answered. Samantha shook her head. The depth of magic bond between the two of them was unprecedented. Inconceivable. Samantha couldn’t even guess at what the two of them would be capable of.

  “Just stay close,” Samantha said.

  Spake was cresting the hill. He picked up a rock and tossed it in the air once, then threw it.

  Samantha wasn’t certain, but she was guessing that that was where the hive was. She looked around quickly, then nodded.

  “This way.”

  Isobel had already changed directions.

  Samantha nodded, keeping her eyes open. She didn’t hear dogs, but she wasn’t sure they had made much noise, last time, anyway. “There were four dogs,” Samantha said. “Five, but I killed one of them. I’m almost certain. Watch out for them. They’re demons, and she can heal them.”

  She wished Sam was here.

  “Dogs can be demons?” Isobel asked.

  “More accurate to say demons can be dogs,” Samantha answered. Isobel hummed a response, somewhere between simple acknowledgment and outright skepticism.

  They got around the side of the hill and Samantha spotted the hole that Spake had noted, but there was no sign of activity at all.

  Spake whistled, a single, high-pitched tweet, and Samantha looked as he wound up and threw another rock.

  He could have just pointed.

  There was a boat on the shore on the other side of the island.

  No one in sight.

  “Keep your eyes open,” Samantha said.

  “Missing people, got it,” Isobel said.

  “No, the scrub up there could have demons hiding in it,” Samantha said.

  They were moving past a section of dry grass and into low, leafless shrubs, and while Samantha hadn’t seen any signs of motion yet, she didn’t trust the underbrush there to not harbor the scaly, burnt-looking creatures.

  “Not much for cover,” Isobel observed.

  “You ever heard of chupacabra?” Samantha asked.

  “Yes,” Isobel answered.

  “They look like that,” Samantha told her, swishing Lahn through the pessimistic grass.

  “Like mangy dogs?”

  “Like crispy sticks with claws and half a head,” Samantha said.

  “Ah,” Isobel said. “I thought they all looked like humans.”

  “The powerful ones mostly do,” Samantha told her. “The little ones look like demons.”

  “That’s very clear,” Isobel said wryly.

  Samantha smiled to herself. It was the best she was going to do.

  She looked across the hillside where Lange and Kelly were working their way forward, and then back at Spake, who was hanging back to let them come further around. He was still the closest to the hole.

  And there was still no sign of activity.

  And then Samantha heard the scream.

  Sam had always been the one to see what was going on in the hellfactories, but Samantha didn’t have to see this one to have an idea. She’d worked a hellfactory, one of those times that she had let intellectual curiosity carry her away from her common sense and, in that particular case, her humanity. She was ashamed she’d gone that far astray from what made her human, but she’d learned a lot. And she knew what demons would do to humans, if they had real, live ones to work with.

  Blood, fear, and pain.

  Lifeblood was something you couldn’t get, cheap, hellside. Souls didn’t come across with it, nor did simple crossers. You had to get it from people who did a fully-manifest cross, like she’d done with Jason to get Anadidd’na. To have such an ample supply of lifeblood would drive a lot of the lower demons batty. People tended not to live very long, like that.

  Without consulting among themselves, everyone sped up. There was another cry, and Samantha was running, time bent to keep her feet clear of the tangle, hoping that Isobel didn’t impale herself on that pretty angel blade after all these centuries. Spake appeared to be hopping, two-footed. She didn’t pause to wonder.

  There was barking, and the ground exploded. Samantha landed on her back with two hellhounds bearing down on her, and the world was in chaos.

  There were more hellhounds than she’d seen the last time. Six, maybe seven. Kelly was fighting one, Lange had one. Spake was whistling at them and snapping a bullwhip she hadn’t known he’d been carrying, but they didn’t seem to be able to get close to him.

  Isobel was fighting one off, without much apparent hope of killing it, but with such beautiful, classically trained forms that Samantha found herself reassured that maybe the woman could hold her ground long enough for Samantha to work out what to do next.

  There were more of them, around, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. They were the ones that were going to tip the fight.

  Or she was.

  Samantha put a hole in one of the dogs and looked up to find the wispy, dark demon slipping up out of the hole in the earth, gray face turned directly at Samantha. With a word in hellspeak that Samantha didn’t recognize, the two dogs split, one headed for Spake and the other for Kelly.

  Samantha found new footing and held her space, waiting.

  “You killed my friend,” the woman said, her voice like the sound of the sea.

  “You chose to kill humans for sport,” Samantha said. “Everyone knows that we don’t let that pass.”

  “You’ve let it pass for centuries,” the woman said. “And you will again. They say you’re the one who cares. If I kill you, they’ll let me slide by, as I always have.”

  Centuries.

  Samantha gritted her jaw, angry that the woman had gotten away with it for as long as she had, and angry that she was going to be fighting a demon with that much time to accumulate power.

  Power steeped in lifeblood.

  She was completely unprepared for that. Everything in the little bag at her hip, the things strapped against her skin under her shirt, her sleeves, the long, slender weapons tied to her thigh and down at her shins, these were things that might only be mere nuisances to this woman.

  She’d known Cassie.

  She’d even known who she was, hellside, a novelty she’d never come across before.

  “You weren’t very good at it, out west,” Samantha said.

  “Who says?” the woman asked, mouth stretching to the side in what might have been mistaken for a smile in the wrong light. Lange yelped and Samantha forced herself not to turn. She couldn’t help him.

  She wished Sam were here.

  “The pit lords you had working were basically roast goats,” Samantha said. “I beat them with a gun.”

  “That was you?” the demon asked passively. “There were rumors there was angelspeak involved. I might have guessed.”

  She breathed another word Samantha didn’t know, and a hellhound that had been limping just into Samantha’s peripheral vision went sprinting back away.

  A hydra.

  That’s what she was.

  A hydra versus a gorgon.

  It was an absurd observation, one out of nowhere, but Samantha couldn’t shake it.

  Two snake-headed creatures. Who won that?

  “You got a name?” Samantha asked. “I like to write them down in my diary.”

  The woman laughed, drifting forward, her toes just dragging on the dirt, catching here and there on a shrub.

  “Evita,” she said. “And you are Renouch. The one who always comes back.”

  Samantha shrugged, feeling Lahn, feeling the ground under the balls of her feet, feeling in a more abstract way the fights going on around her.

  “I don’t see him,” Evita said after a moment.

  “Who’s that?” Samantha asked, taking a single step back to buy herself space, physically and mentally. She needed a plan.

  “Either of them,” Evita said. Samantha stole a quick glance, finding that her side of the battle seemed to be retreating from behind her, spreading fu
rther as they went. Lange and Kelly would turn soon enough, forming a ring with Spake that Samantha could probably get to if she needed to, but she worried about Isobel.

  “Still don’t know who you’re talking about,” Samantha said.

  “Shah’nicht or Kha’shing,” Evita said. “I’d hoped to get all three.”

  “Shah’nicht,” Samantha said. The black seer. The one who sees in darkness. Depending on how you translated it. Sam.

  “It’s what they call him,” Evita said, her face drifting to the side, then completing the turn, slowly looking behind her, to the other side, and back at Samantha, her body stationary through the motion.

  “That’s a neat trick,” Samantha said. “How do you know that?”

  Evita sighed, the fringes of her clothing drifting as if in a breeze Samantha couldn’t feel, and the intensity of the attacks going on behind Samantha went up audibly. The bullwhip cracked faster and she heard Spake shout something in his own language that seemed to indicate anger.

  Samantha took another step back.

  “You killed my friend,” Evita said. “Without you, they won’t live very long. I regret that they won’t die at my hand.”

  “Have you got hands?” Samantha asked. One more step back.

  Angel flame was out. She couldn’t control it. It would consume the island, killing everyone, and then, depending on how fast she died, it could follow the arteries of life flowing up and down the river on boats, wiping out a serious fraction of Montreal.

  She summoned heat, confidence, faith. She was here because this was what she was trained to do, what she was built for.

  Righteous fury would do it. Nothing demonic had ever survived it, but it wasn’t something she could summon.

  Samantha drew a gold dart off of her hip and flipped it at the demon. By all appearances, it went straight through. The woman’s head twisted slowly to look at where it landed.

  “Just trying something,” Samantha said.

  “You are nothing, to me,” the demoness said.

  “How has no one ever heard of you?” Samantha asked.

  “I am mist,” the woman said. “I bear on the wind, everywhere and nowhere, intangible and invincible.”

  “Come tell that to Lahn,” Samantha said.

  The woman hissed. It was reflexive.

  So at least there was that.

  Another step back.

  She couldn’t see Lange or Kelly any longer. Spake was disappearing over the crest of the hill. She couldn’t find Isobel in a quick survey, nor could she hear her.

  She hoped she was still alive.

  The earth around Samantha rolled and she jumped back as rocks the size of car tires came jumping out of the soil, fleeing further as they rained down on her. The sound from Evita might have been laughter.

  How was she controlling the natural world? Demons could touch humans because of freewill. They weren’t a simple part of creation. A mix of light and dark, the spark of the immortal divinity buried in the dark of human nature. Demons could pick a human up and slam them into a wall at a thought, if the demon was powerful enough and the human involved in the fight between light and darkness in the right ways.

  That was how Samantha had died.

  The natural world, though, was neutral. It bore the power of creation, which was where the power of natural magic came from, but it was the domain of men. A demon, Samantha didn’t care how powerful, shouldn’t be able to manipulate it in any significant volume without actually touching it, or directly applying a magic of some kind.

  Evita shouldn’t be able to move it like she was, and yet, that was exactly what she was doing.

  Light magic was what she had, so Samantha began to invoke, pulling a vial from a slot in the belt under her shirt, smearing her hands with oil, feeling the hot power of it as the magic flowed out of her.

  Evita held her arms out in front of her, and the earth tore away. Samantha stumbled and fell, scrambling back to find solid ground again.

  The chain of magic fell away and she had to start over, wiping her hands on her jeans, leaving streaks of oily mud. Evita laughed again.

  Samantha reached the peak of the little hill, looking quickly back.

  Jason and Kara were on the bank, armed, and Spake was nearly to them, four dogs pestering him. Kelly and Lange were elbow to elbow not far away, fighting three of them. One of them took a hit and came limping away, and as Samantha watched, the earth swallowed him and he emerged, whole, to attack Kelly again.

  Samantha ran back another few steps, trying half a dozen more spells, splashing two potions onto Evita to no result, throwing a dagger and a titanium star at her, but they both just flew through her.

  And then they were on the shore, six of them, surrounded by a line of hellhounds backed by the drifting, wafting demoness. Isobel had to be dead, somewhere on the other side of the hill.

  Flame.

  It was something she’d never tried before, something she’d promised Carter and herself she would never try, not even for curiosity.

  Hellflame had no real effect on demons. Angelflame was too dangerous.

  That left soulflame.

  Almost all dark magics had a light mirror. Natural magic was complicated and oh so human, by comparison, but if you studied, most of the mirrored magics had an analogue in natural magic, and soulflame was the natural equivalent of the light and the dark.

  They had no more ground to give.

  Samantha slashed Lahn down the inside of her arm, loosing a splash of blood that she clung to, mentally, finding the source of her own self, deeper down underneath what fueled hellflame or angelflame. The blood lit, and Samantha flung it in an arc, the shape of the idea more important than where the blood actually went, and a red arc of flame sprung up out of the ground, sliding out onto the water like burning oil.

  Red.

  It would be red.

  Like molten sapphire, it let no light through from the other side, though Samantha could still hear the hellhounds pacing and whining.

  Evita laughed.

  “If you think I’ll be disappointed to let my friends feast on you after you’re dead, rather than taking the deathblow myself, you’re wrong. We can wait.”

  Samantha clenched her fist, feeling the hot flow of power.

  “Sam, you’re bleeding,” Jason said.

  “Get in the boat,” Samantha said.

  “Hell no,” Kara said.

  “Hell no,” Jason echoed.

  “Now,” Samantha said. “I’ll hold them as long as I can, and then…”

  “If this statement doesn’t end with all of us leaving together, you need to revise,” Jason said.

  “I’ll try,” Samantha said. “But you need to get in the boat now.”

  “Lotta blood,” Spake said.

  “Sam,” Kelly said softly.

  “I’ll try,” she said again through gritted teeth, every piece of focus on holding the wall of flame.

  She didn’t know if she could put it out. It would burn until her blood was gone, and then it would die with her.

  The hellhounds bayed, and there was a flash of light over the flames.

  “What was that?” Lange asked. Samantha shook her head, jaw sore.

  Blood flowed down her arm, hot with flames that ran red, connecting her to her shield.

  She felt light-headed.

  “Anyone going to help me with these beasts?” Isobel called.

  “Say that again?” Jason called.

  “She’s dead,” Isobel yelled. “I’d love help killing the mutts.”

  “Shut it down,” Jason said to Samantha.

  She was breathless, tipping over her own feet. He caught her, pinning her shoulders against his chest.

  “Shut it down,” he said again.

  “I can’t,” she whispered.

  It was almost done.

  “Anyone in there?” Isobel called. “I’m outnumbered out here.”

  “Samantha,” Jason said, firm, calm. “Shut it down.�
��

  Lock in key, she breathed and the flames diminished, down, down, down, and Lange hopped them, going to fight hellhounds. Spake and Kelly were just behind him.

  “All the way out,” Jason said into Samantha’s ear. “You’ve got this.”

  They extinguished.

  “Jason, she’s still bleeding too much,” Kara said. Samantha put Lahn’s flat side to the inside of her arm, breathing slowly. She was glad Jason was holding her up.

  Lahn had healing powers all the time, but she was particularly effective on wounds she herself had inflicted. As Samantha slid the angel blade down the inside of her arm, the gash closed, and in another moment, she was just leaning against Jason, slick red blood smeared down her arm and staining her jeans next to black mud.

  “I’m going to go help them,” Jason said. “Kara’s going to stay with you.”

  Samantha felt rather than saw the glance that passed between the two of them, then she was sitting on the ground and Kara was chatting to her, words that didn’t have to say anything. It was just the sound of her voice that Samantha needed.

  The dogs scattered and Lange and Spake went off after them. Isobel, Kelly, and Jason stayed closer, guarding the boat. Samantha.

  “How… didit?” Samantha tried, swallowing and pushing herself against Kara to get up. “How did you do it?” she asked, trying to get Isobel’s attention.

  “You shouldn’t get up yet,” Kara said. Samantha took a vial out of her harness and downed it. Light energy, power, picked her up, and she stood on her own.

  “How did you do it?” she asked again. The magic would keep her upright for a little while, but she needed food, water, and sleep to get back to her own strength again.

  “She said she was mist,” Isobel said. “Sunlight burns that off every morning.”

  “Huh,” Samantha said, still numb.

  There was a scream, and a child came running over the hill, stumbling and scrambling, screaming again as two hellhounds crested behind her, full sprint.

  “Jason,” Samantha yelled, but he was already running.

  He wasn’t going to be fast enough.

  The hounds were closing way too fast, and they would tear her apart before Jason could get anywhere close.

  The girl fell again, and then Kelly was curled around her, unarmed. The hellhounds attacked him, biting and tearing at the angel, but he held himself where he was, shielding the girl as Jason got there and killed the two hounds in two sweeps of the dragon sword. They ashed quickly, this time, and Samantha was running.