Only the wind broke the silence. They stared at him. Danny shook his head.
"No way."
"You’re saying — "
Conan Doyle waved them to quiet. "Indeed. I believe the skull in that grave to be that of Orpheus. Gull had need of it, and used us as a diversion to appropriate it."
"But he left it behind," Ceridwen said.
"Because he found out what he wanted." Conan Doyle explained. "The ash all around the grave, even beneath our feet now, is wet." He plucked at the knees of his pants, which were damp. "The girl, Jezebel, is a weather witch. We have seen her work this magick already. She made it rain here, just in this place."
"I am so not following this," Danny sighed, reaching up to scratch the flaking leathery skin around his horns. "Wake me up when we get to the ass-kicking part."
Eve thumped him on the arm. For once, Conan Doyle approved.
"Why would she need to make it rain?" Eve asked. "Come on, seriously. Every second you take enlightening the terminally dense here is another second between us and them. Assuming we do want to catch up to them?"
"Oh, we do," Conan Doyle assured her. "But I’ll attempt to be brief."
"Far too late for that," Ceridwen noted, violet eyes flashing in the sun.
"I’ve told you of Gull’s work with ancient magicks. Dark magicks that no one in their right mind would ever work for fear of how it might taint them. He sacrificed his face for that power, and other things as well, I should think. One of the rituals he practices allows him to… borrow the voices of the dead. If he drinks rainwater from the mouth of a corpse, he can speak in its voice."
"That is hideous," Ceridwen whispered. "Desecrating the dead in such a way."
"But useful at times, I’m sure," Conan Doyle conceded. "For instance, if you wanted to open the gates to the ancient underworld, to the home of whatever might remain in that realm from before the dawn of the Third Age of Man, and you knew that — "
"The voice of Orpheus," Eve said. "This is just too much. You’re saying this guy can speak in the voice of Orpheus now, and that’s somehow the key to some ancient netherworld."
Conan Doyle sighed."Precisely. But more than that, Gull will be able to sing in Orpheus’s voice. And few will be able to resist him."
"What the hell does he want in the netherworld?" Danny asked.
The four of them stood there in the midst of the petrified forest, the sun beating down on them, and Conan Doyle raised the Divination Box in his hand.
"That, I do not know. But I have no doubt we will soon discover the answer, and to our misfortune. Gull might have left this behind because he expected me to follow. Or he might simply have flung it away now that he needed it no longer, so arrogant that he could not conceive of my being able to use it."
Ceridwen reached for the box and raised it up, studying it in the sunlight. "But won’t you need some piece of Gull? Something of his flesh?"
"Not necessarily flesh. And not Gull, either." He withdrew from his pocket a lock of hair bound with red string. Red hair. "From Jezebel. With this, we can locate her. And when we find her, we find Gull."
"And when did you collect that little sample?" Eve asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Last night, while she slept, I gathered it from her hairbrush." Conan Doyle turned from them and started toward the Range Rover. "Come. I’ve got to prepare the Divination Box, and then we’ll see where we are headed next."
They followed, but as they did, Danny spoke up. Though he had the face of a demon, the hideous visage of some hellish thing, there was still somehow something of a human teenager in his expression. At time’s this phenomenon was comical. At others, it was chilling.
"Hold up. So Mr. Doyle had this all figured from the start, right? All of it."
"Not all," Eve said, striding along, and plucking at the tears in her clothing, clearly more displeased with the damage to her outfit than anything else. "He took the girl’s hair as a contingency. Probably one of a hundred backup plans he’s got in his head. And as for Orpheus, he only just figured that out since all of this happened, and even now he’s not completely sure."
Conan Doyle paused at the Range Rover with his hand on the door. He turned and regarded his three companions. Ceridwen came to him, standing intimately close. It made his heart light to have her near, but he refused to let it affect him now. His love for her had almost cost them dearly in this fight, and he would not allow it again.
"Is that true, Arthur? Are you unsure?"
"On the contrary. I’m entirely certain for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that there’s nothing else in that grave. Only the head. And when I held it… it seemed to hum."
Conan Doyle climbed into the Range Rover but paused before he shut the door. He leaned out again.
"Eve. Danny. A small favor, if you will?"
They had been about to get into the vehicle but now waited, eyeing him curiously.
"I’m going to deal with what’s left of the Hydra. Before I do, could I trouble you to go back and remove its teeth and bring them to me?"
Eve frowned. "Do I even ask?"
Danny seemed thoughtful for a moment, searching his mind for something familiar, for the story. Conan Doyle saw the process, saw the moment when the demon boy’s eyes lit up with realization. He had remembered. He grinned at Conan Doyle.
"The Hydra’s teeth. That just rocks." The boy bumped Eve affectionately. "Come on. You’re going to love this. I’ll tell you the story while we work."
Conan Doyle nodded and slid back into the Range Rover’s seat. Ceridwen climbed in beside him. Together they began to work with the Divination Box, and all the while his curiosity ate at him.
What are you after, Nigel? What could be so vital to you that you would dare disturb the tomb of an entire age?
The blue sky over Athens had deepened to a rich indigo, and a hint of the moon was visible above the Acropolis. Tourists walked the long path down the hill from the Parthenon, surrendering at last to exhaustion after a long day exploring the city. On their way down, none of them glanced up into the darkening sky, but even if they had they would not have been able to see the ghost of Dr. Graves as he floated back the way they had come, an errant cloud in the shape of a man.
As night crept across the city, Dr. Graves looked up at the outline of the Parthenon silhouetted in the dark and was humbled by its beauty. This is a ghost, he thought. You, Leonard, are merely an afterthought. An echo.
Graves had first visited Athens in 1927. His memories of the Acropolis were what brought him there tonight. In those days he had been a living, breathing man, a thing of flesh and blood. Now he was a wisp of smoke, nothing more. Yet even then he had sensed the ancient soul of this place, all the lives and cultures that had thrived and died there, all the souls that had cried out to their gods for succor. The destruction the Venetians had wrought. The blood that had been spilled upon the stone and earth of that hill. If there was a better place for him to go and try to commune with the phantoms of Athens, he could not imagine it.
The strange part was that in those days of flesh and blood and adventure he had not believed in such things. He had told himself that what he felt was merely awe and respect for the achievements of that ancient society. But that had been foolish. The specters of ancient Greece still lingered atop the Acropolis.
Now Graves cursed himself for waiting so long to come here. It had seemed sensible to begin with the Gorgon’s victims, those fragile humans whose lives had been snuffed when she had turned them to stone. He had spent hours trying to follow the paths of the Gorgon’s victims into the afterlife. The passing of their souls had left a kind of ethereal residue, but it had grown fainter as he followed it, and Graves had found himself lost in the swirling gray white nothing of the spirit world that existed just beyond the reach of human senses. Athens had many ghosts, contentious spirits whose awareness had crumbled over the ages so that they were little more than imprints, repeating the same arguments with long dead relatives or raving about the injustice of their death. There were those who had died far more recently, but they were disoriented by the cacophony and chaos and were little help to him.