The ghost of Dr. Graves whispered past Clay, floating down beside the corpse as if he were kneeling. In the combination of the church’s shadows and the light from the doorway, Graves seemed only partly there, a mirage. He shook his head, studying the body, then glanced up. Through him, Clay could still see the candles up on the altar.
"I don’t understand," Dr. Graves said. "Why isn’t he stone?"
Clay lumbered deeper into the church, his flesh flowing and bones popping as he walked. Wearing the face of the dead priest, he knelt by the corpse. He traced his fingers along the corpse’s face, then reached up to his own eyes.
Once again he shifted his form, taking on the appearance of the man known back in New Orleans, and in Boston, and in other places around the world, as Clay Smith. Clay Smith, with a unique skill at solving murder. Not a detective, but often of help to police departments in whatever city he called home.
"He was blind," Clay said simply. "He could not see her, therefore her curse did not affect him. So she killed him, probably infuriated. The marks on his face — "
"Snakebites," Graves interrupted.
"Yeah," Clay said.
Squire strode across the small church, producing a stubby cigar from his pocket. He lit it from a candle and turned to face them.
"All right. But explain it to me. How come this means we don’t have to go looking for her?"
Graves studied Clay a moment, then looked at the dead priest, and finally gave his attention to Squire. "Our friend Mr. Clay has more than one talent, remember?"
Squire’s face lit up and he puffed on the cigar. The hobgoblin gave a short cough and nodded eagerly. "Right, right. The thing. The… the ectoplasm trail, or whatever. But you couldn’t see it before, because Medusa’s victims were all stone. It wasn’t working."
"No," Clay agreed. "It wasn’t." He looked upon the dead priest with sorrow, but also with grave determination. The souls of murder victims haunted their killers for a time, perhaps with intent but more likely simply because their lives have ended so abruptly that they cling to whatever’s nearest them when they die, afraid to go anywhere. To move on.
But the ghosts leave a trail, a kind of thin phantom line, a tendril that connected their ravaged bodies to their souls, no matter how far the souls traveled away from their husks. If he discovered the victim soon enough after death and he followed that link, that tendril, he could find the killer.
A faded pink mist clung to the dead priest, stretched like a rope out the front of the church and through the square, then farther up into the village. Into the hills.
Into the west.
"I’ve got her trail," Clay said. "It’s only a matter of time, now."
Her bones ached.
Eve drifted slowly up into awareness and though her eyes were still closed, her brow knitted in discomfort. She lay on her side already, her body rocking with some unknown rhythm, but now she pulled her legs up tight beneath her and shuddered with the cold. Her lips drew taut, pressed together and then she shifted uncomfortably.
Her eyes fluttered lazily open and she saw her hands, crossed at the wrists over her breasts. A thin sheen of crystal frost had formed on her flesh and a chill mist swirled around her. The rocking motion continued but only now did Eve have the presence of mind to recognize that she was in a boat.
Memories stirred and she remembered her circumstances. Rage washed over her, warming her icy blood, and her upper lip curled to bare her fangs even as she sat up. They were in a small boat, Eve at the prow. Nick Hawkins was nearest to her, smoking a cigarette, and the moment she was in motion he began to shift toward her, hands coming up in a defensive posture.
Eve was thousands of years faster.
She sprang at him, lunging through the mist and ignoring the sway of the craft or the rush of the water beneath it. Hawkins snarled, clenching his cigarette between his teeth, but he had neither the strength nor the swiftness to fight back. Eve clutched his throat with her left hand, the right gathering up the fabric of his jacket, and she drove him down beneath her. The back of his head struck the wooden floor of the boat with a solid thump. A guttural curse issued from his lips even as the impact knocked the wind from his lungs. Eve held him down as he bucked, attempting to throw her off, but she was too strong.
Her vision was far more than human. Her eyes saw through gloom and mist with utter clarity, and when she looked up she saw every line in Nigel Gull’s hideous features. He had been sitting behind Hawkins — beyond him the girl, Jezebel, had her hands in the water, somehow using her weather magic to propel the craft — and now Gull shifted forward, raising his hands. The old mage did not dare to stand in the small boat for fear they would all spill over into the frigid, rushing river.
"Not a fucking spark of magick on those fingers, asshole," Eve snarled, purposely flashing her fangs as she choked the man beneath her. "Or Hawkins loses his head."
Jezebel twisted around at the sound of Eve’s voice and her eyes went wide with alarm. "Nick," she said, her lips forming the name almost soundlessly.
The mist rolled across the water’s surface and the boat knifed through it. Gull was half-crouched, hands still contorted as if frozen in the act of casting a spell. His ugliness was made worse when he smiled, as he did now.
"Let’s not be hasty, pet," Gull said, lowering one hand to the bench below him in order to keep his balance.
Eve punctured Hawkins’s skin with her fingernails. "Call me that again, you pompous prick, and I’ll kill him just for fun, and to hell with what comes of it."
The smile disappeared from Gull’s face. His nostrils flared and the mist that swept past his face seemed also to swirl behind his eyes. The mage began to hum, the sound low and guttural.
"I don’t think you want to do that, Eve," he sang in a voice that was not his own, the sweet tones of Orpheus. "You don’t want to move at all, in fact."
She tried to fight the influence of that voice, her every muscle strained and burning with the struggle, but there was nothing she could do. The power of Orpheus’s voice was too much. She felt her heart surrendering, her rage pacified, though in the dark depths of her mind her hatred still churned. A spark of panic ignited in her.
Once, long ago, she had been overpowered by a demon with the sweetest of voices. The memory seared her and she did not want to allow it to take root, yet she seemed as helpless in her mind as in her flesh. Eve collapsed in the prow once more, on her back this time, forced to stare at the distended face of Nigel Gull and to see the mad light of triumph in his eyes.
"Mother of two races, hunter of two races, ancient as evil’s kiss. Do you think I’d have you here with me without preparing to deal with you?" he sang to her.
The river rocked the craft, water sprayed over the side and dampened her face and hair, and Eve could only lie there with her eyes open as Gull sneered at her. In the rear of the boat, Jezebel smiled at her and then plunged her hands into the water again. The girl had paused in her propulsion of the vessel and it had begun to be swept along with the current, but now the boat rushed forward across the water once more.
Hawkins sat up, his gunmetal eyes hard as he glared at her. He reached up to touch his neck and his fingers came away bloody. With an unsettling laugh he licked his fingers clean and then crabwalked forward so that he was looking down upon Eve, prone and helpless.
"Just to be clear, I don’t care what you are. Just another sodding relic to me." He wrapped both hands around her throat and began to squeeze. "You don’t need to breathe, I know that. But I’ll wager you need your head attached to your body, yeah? If Mr. Gull didn’t need you… ah, but he does." Now Hawkins grinned. "Might sample a taste of your blood, next time, though. Play your little vampire game. So mind your manners, leech."