It soured Squire’s outlook considerably, knowing he was holding them back.
The road curved northward and soon they lost their view of the Aegean. Only then did Squire realize how much he had appreciated it. The sea was the only thing worth looking at from the road. Sure, they had seen little villages sprawled on either side of the highway, but there was not much chance to appreciate them while whipping past them at eighty miles per hour. The isthmus that connected Athens and its surroundings with the Peloponnese was a part of Greece that deserved a more casual approach. Squire would much rather have been meandering through seaside villages, sampling the local cuisine at each stop. At that moment a piece of spinach pie would have gone down very nicely.
But from the highway, and without the gleaming Aegean to remind them of their location, the landscape could have been a hundred other places.
Squire glanced at Clay. He was intent on the road, hands at ten o’clock and two o’clock like the poster boy for auto school. But the shapeshifter’s eyes kept moving, checking the rearview mirror. Every couple of minutes he would lean to one side and try to get a view of the sky out of his window. He wasn’t looking for the ghost of Dr. Graves.
"He can’t fly," Squire told him.
"Who?" Clay asked.
"Who? The guy who’s got you so antsy. The reason none of us had been that talkative. Got you spooked, didn’t he, with his dirt from the Doc’s grave and whatever that thing was he did to you. Not only is he watching out for Medusa, protecting her, but he was expecting us."
For a long moment, Clay said nothing. Squire realized that he must really be a little spooked. That didn’t sit well with the hobgoblin after all. Clay was… he didn’t like to think about what and who Clay was. And if he was nervous -
"Hey, I killed the idiot once," Squire added. "We can do it again."
A car whipped by them on the highway doing nearly a hundred miles an hour, judging by how quickly it passed them. Neither of them bothered to comment. Clay gave Squire a sidelong glance.
"Over time I’ve learned that anybody who comes back to life after you kill them is usually much harder to finish off the second time around."
Squire rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah. You’re a font of wisdom. I’m just saying he’s maybe hard to kill, but that doesn’t make him special."
"All right, then tell me about him. Tassarian. How did you kill him the first time?"
The hobgoblin grinned. He leaned back in his seat and put his boots up on the dashboard. "Now that’s a memory I cherish."
They passed a small town to the north of the highway but he could see nothing more than the sides of buildings and cars going by on the roads. It had been twenty years — more — but his recollections were crystal clear.
"Used to be, every couple of years Conan Doyle would send me on a little acquisition trip to buy — or, ah, otherwise get my mitts on — some ancient weapon or other. Some of ‘em he wanted because they had special attributes, enchanted swords, an ensorcelled quiver of arrows, that kind of thing. Others he just had his eye on. Of course the ones he just wanted he wouldn’t have me steal if they were in a museum. But the lion’s share of these beauties are owned by private collectors who didn’t come by them any more honestly than I did."
The car jittered over a section of cracked pavement, hitting a pothole that Clay did not even try to avoid. The shapeshifter glanced at Squire.
"That thing you’re doing right now? It’s called a tangent."
The hobgoblin shot him a gnarled middle finger. "Anyway, Tassarian worked for Nigel Gull. I’d met him a couple of times before that. Gull and Conan Doyle have history, obviously. Can’t stand the sight of each other, but they keep tabs. Run in the same circles, too. So it was inevitable they’d bump into each other now and again. Especially with Conan Doyle looking for Sweetblood.
"Gull and Conan Doyle, they have a lot in common. Gull likes pretty, shiny, sharp things too.
"So I’d been in Europe for about three weeks on what was probably the most successful acquisitions trip I’d made. I had some sweet stuff. Rostini’s Axe. The Helm of Kyth. Hunyadi’s Daggers. This perfect longbow from Germany, inlaid with gold, with a bowstring made of ectoplasm. A blind man with no arms could hit a gnat’s asshole with this thing.
"I’m in Prague in this little flat Conan Doyle rented for me for a month. I’ve got a whole room just laid out with these babies. I’d had a feeling a few times during my running around that somebody’d been keeping an eye on me. But Tassarian knows all that ninja bullshit and I really didn’t twig to him until I walked in on the guy trying to sneak off with an entire armory."
Squire shook his head. "Idiot."
Clay kept his foot on the accelerator. If anything he gave the car a little extra speed as he checked the rearview mirror again. "Okay," he said. "But how did you kill him?"
The hobgoblin laughed, thinking back on it. "Well, death and resurrection must have smartened him up some, ‘cause that time he sure hadn’t done his homework. I’m ugly, but I’m not stupid, and I’m pretty good with weapons. The moron came to steal my cache in the late afternoon. Maybe he got the whole shadow thing wrong, thinking he shouldn’t try it at night. Or maybe he figured I was out for a walk, or asleep. I don’t know.
"What I do know is, that time of day the shadows are nice and long. The sun coming in the windows threw huge distorted shadows off of every chair, bedpost and friggin’ doorknob. I had a couple seconds’ surprise on Tassarian and that was all I needed. I moved in and out of the shadows, kept out of his range, snuck up on him a dozen times. I must have hit him with every goddamn weapon in that room. Even broke the blade off one of Hunyadi’s daggers in the base of his skull. I killed the guy enough to snuff ten other guys. Just kept killing him until he actually laid down and didn’t get up again."
Another mile of road went by in silence before Clay glanced over at him.
"But Tassarian did get up again."
Squire shrugged. His gaze had drifted past Clay and out the driver’s side window, where the Aegean had come back into view. It was distant, but there. He smiled.
"Yep. Guess I’m going to have to kill him some more."
The hobgoblin glanced over to see Clay smile broadly… then the smile disappeared. Clay’s eyes went wide and his arms locked into place on the steering wheel.
"What the hell?" the shapeshifter snarled, even as he jerked the wheel to one side.
Squire turned his eyes back to the road. The ghost of Dr. Graves stood in the center of the highway, one hand on the butt of a phantom gun and the other raised to wave them to a halt.
The tires squealed as Clay cut the wheel too far.
Squire shot a hand out and grabbed the wheel, straightening it out. "Run him down. He’s already a ghost!"
Clay slammed the brakes on and the car slewed to one side as it shuddered to a halt on the shoulder of the highway. A car barreled past them, the driver laying on the horn.
Squire popped his door open and clambered out, scanning the road for Graves. "Where are you, Spooky? I’ll wring your neck! What’re you trying to do, give me a friggin’ coronary?"
The ghost was nowhere in sight. Cursing under his breath, Squire turned and stared expectantly through the windshield at Clay, but the shapeshifter did not get out of the car. After a moment, the hobgoblin went to get back inside, only to find the transparent wisp of Graves’s ghost in his seat. In the interplay of sunlight and the shadowed interior of the car, the specter was nearly invisible.
"I’m sorry if I startled you," Dr. Graves said.
"Sorry!" Squire sputtered. "You couldn’t just have ghosted yourself back into the car like you did before?"