"She hides among the dead, those who were ancient before the first stone of the temple was laid."
Clay was behind the wheel of the car. Squire had to set up a rig to reach the pedals, and they didn’t have time for such foolishness. The goblin sat in the passenger seat, still wearing his silly cap. Clay gripped the steering wheel and drove down Ermou Street, careful at each intersection. The Greek way of handling such things was to honk the horn as one approached a cross-street. Whoever beeped first had the right of way. But if two cars blared their horns simultaneously, an accident was almost inevitable.
They had followed a small map Yannis had given them. It had been simple enough to find the Monastiraki train station, despite the torn up roads. The city seemed dotted with dozens of places where the streets were being improved, and others where they were in terrible disrepair.
"Not far now," Graves said.
Clay glanced in the rearview mirror. The ghost was visible there, manifesting in the backseat. In the darkness of the night, with only the glow from the dashboard and what light came in from the buildings that lined the street, Graves seemed almost solid.
"You can feel it?" Clay asked.
Dr. Graves nodded. "Like a winter storm coming on."
"Yeah, good for you, Casper," Squire muttered, shaking the map in his hand. "That’s great and all but, hello, map?"
The hobgoblin had his booted feet up on the dashboard. Clay shot him a sidelong glare. Squire had his uses, but often the annoyance outweighed them.
"Focus on the task at hand," Clay told him. "We’re going to have to be very quiet. It may go badly for us if we cannot take her by stealth."
"What, I’m not quiet? I’m the fuckin’ soul of quiet."
Clay sighed.
"I doubt the Gorgon’s stare will affect you, Clay. You are infinitely malleable," Dr. Graves said, his voice like a cold breeze in the car.
Clay shuddered.
"I don’t like guessing," the shapeshifter replied. "You’re dead. And Conan Doyle made it clear hobgoblins were immune to certain curses. But I’m not sure in my case, so let’s just take it slowly. And — " he glanced again at Squire "- be quiet."
The hobgoblin grinned. "My middle name."
The cemetery loomed up on their right, and above it a church whose domed roof seemed the color of rust in the moonlight. The Kerameikos was closed, of course, the gates locked. And somewhere inside, among ancient ruins of Greece that few tourists and fewer Athenians ever bothered to visit, among graves and aboveground crypts and crumbling markers, Medusa was supposed to have made her lair.
"Are you certain of this?" Clay asked as he pulled the car to the curb. Dr. Graves’s eyes seemed yellow in the dark. Clay parked and killed the engine, turning around to face the ghost.
"She hides among the dead," the phantom adventurer said. "Those who were ancient before the first stone of the temple was laid. That’s how they told it to me. The corpses of Athenians were buried here for more than a thousand years, as far back as the twelfth century B.C. Nowhere else in the city fills that bill. It’s an ancient place with far less human traffic than anywhere else in Athens."
"A good hiding spot," Squire said, peering through his window. "Nice and homey. Let’s go."
He started to open his door, and Clay grabbed his wrist. Squire twisted around to face him. Clay smiled and pulled the foolish cap from the goblin’s head.
"Quietly," he said. "Graves makes no noise. I’m going in on cat feet. If Medusa hears us coming, it’ll be you who gives us away. Please don’t."
Squire put one hand over his heart. "You wound me, buddy. To the core. And I heard you the first fifty friggin’ times."
The hobgoblin popped his door and stepped out, closing it gently behind him. Clay glanced back at the ghost in the rear seat.
"What do you think?" the shapeshifter asked.
Dr. Graves raised an eyebrow. "I think there’s a reason we’re not all going in together," he said, and then he rose up through the roof of the car, passing right through fabric and metal as though it weren’t there at all.
Clay climbed out, pocketed the keys, took one look around and then he changed. The feeling was not precisely painful, but it was often unpleasant. When he transformed into a creature smaller than himself, it was not as though he was being physically compacted, crushed down to size, but rather as though a part of him was draining away to some other place.
Fur pushed through his skin. His bones popped and reshaped and shrunk. His ears perked up. His rough tongue darted out, and he twitched his whiskers, tail waving behind him. On cat feet, fur the color of copper with a white streak along one ear, Clay darted to the gate of the cemetery and right through grating meant to keep humans out.
Graves was likely already inside, and Squire was nowhere to be seen. Clay assumed he had simply melded with the shadows outside the cemetery and emerged from some dark place within. The cat trotted across the brittle grass among the tombs.
The hunt had begun.
Kerameikos hardly looked like a cemetery at all. The tombs were mostly ancient stone arranged in long, low walls and many of the markers were simple columns. If not for the dead, it might have been an intriguing collection of ancient ruins, something that had crumbled away to nothing but those walls and the patches of grass and bare earth around them. But the names on the markers gave the place away.
Clay twitched his tail and paused on the edge of a low wall, lifting his cat-nose to the night breeze, whiskers twitching. A scent had caught his attention, yet he was certain it was not Medusa’s. Something else was here as well. Watchful, he leaped down from the wall and trotted behind a tree. In addition to ancient stones, the boneyard was filled with trees. Yet they were sparse, nowhere growing close enough to be considered a wood. And though their branches were not bare, there was something about the way they twisted at odd angles, stretching upward, that gave them a skeletal aspect.
The cat darted silently across a scrubby stretch of grass and then paused once more, crouching behind a short stone wall. He sniffed the air, purring in quiet curiosity. His rough tongue tasted the wind. Beyond that low wall was an enormous whitewashed stone monument topped with a marble statue of a bull. In the moonshadow beneath that bull’s heavy belly, Squire appeared, sliding from the deepest dark into the gray night, like a newborn from its mother’s womb.
The hobgoblin clutched the marble legs of the bull and poked his head out from beneath it, surveying as much of the cemetery as he could see from that vantage point. He saw the cat and nodded solemnly toward Clay, then slipped into the moonshadow again and was gone. The entire thing had taken only seconds and been executed with more stealth than Clay would ever have given the hobgoblin credit for. It was not that he had never worked with Squire before, but that the ‘goblin behaved like such a buffoon so often that it was easy to forget how competent he was in the worst situations.
The shapeshifter did not bother searching the sky or the treetops for Dr. Graves. The ghost would have made himself invisible on all spectrums. There was no telling how sensitive Medusa’s senses were.
Beyond the marble bull was a small hill, and Clay discovered a narrow path among shrubs and trees. Claws scratching hardscrabble earth, the cat slipped between two shrubs and made an alternate trail for himself, moving up the hill parallel to the footpath. His ears twitched, and he arched his back, barely able to keep from hissing. Wings fluttered, and several birds burst from a nearby tree. Clay could not be sure if they had become skittish because of his presence, or if something else had spooked them.
A shudder passed through his feline form, and his hackles went up. Something wasn’t right here. Some presence was fouling this place.
The Gorgon. It has to be. If anything else was here, she would have killed it.