This is the fifth and final chapter of Stheno, a five-part urban fantasy novella.
The previous chapters may be read here: (I) (II) (III) (IV)
The header image is by EliseEnchanted on DeviantArt.
Stheno inhaled sharply. She withdrew her lips reluctantly from Kylie’s, and turned in annoyance to the door.
“Closed,” she called hoarsely.
Kylie’s whole being quivered in dreadful, erotic anticipation. She hated it. Hated the pleasure building within her with no chance of release. Hated that she was enjoying Stheno’s touch. No- not her. Her traitorous body.
Stheno turned back to continue kissing Kylie’s stone lips, to toy with the marble globes of her breasts. But the knocking resumed, more forcefully this time. She withdrew again and rolled her eyes, then dismounted Kylie’s pedestal and strode boisterously over to the door.
“I said we’re closed!” she yelled sharply.
“Sorry. I- I forgot my wallet,” came the muffled, contrite reply, “Pretty sure it’s by the ballerina statue. If you could just…”
Stheno snorted indignantly. She glanced down the long hallway. There was no wallet on Stephanie’s plinth, but there were a lot of statues that looked like ballerinas. She readjusted her sunglasses and carefully patted down her hijab to make certain it was secure.
“My sincere apologies,” she said, unbolting the door’s many locks, “I’m more used to knocks from-”
The door was thrown open forcefully. Stheno fell on her back with a surprised yelp, and out of the corner of her eye, Kylie saw someone barge through the doorway. A tall man. Wearing riot gear. He was holding something long and black and she had just enough time to recognize it as a shotgun before the man disappeared behind a jet of flame.
Stheno shrieked, was hurled back by the blast just as she was clambering to her feet. The thunderous boom rang painfully in Kylie’s ears like the pealing of churchbells and she wished she could cover them. All lingering pleasure from Stheno’s kisses dissipated in one frightful instant, and if her heart still beat it would have pounded out of her chest and taken flight. As it was, she stood motionless, her entire body electrified by an urgent, unanswerable impulse to flee, and she could only watch in terror as the man cast aside the shotgun. It clattered onto the marble floor of the gallery, and for a moment all was quiet save for the ringing echoes of the gunshot.
Stheno was dead. She had to be. Nothing that breathed could survive such a point-blank assault of raw, hateful lead. But in her left peripheral, Kylie saw something moving; a black, hissing heap of rags that slowly rose back to its feet.
“Did you think that would kill me?” Stheno hissed venomously.
“No,” the man replied. “That was just to piss you off.”
Kylie’s stone stomach fluttered at the sound of his voice. She recognized it. It was him. Him. Cedric. From the bar. But how… ?
He strode forward, chest puffed out confidently. Entering Kylie’s full field of view, she could see that he was dressed for war. Plates of glossy black composite armor fitted snugly over his chest, his arms and legs. Beneath them, a polypropylene shirt and balaclava like a knight’s mail. He wore a steel helmet with a transparent visor, and fitted over his eyes was the strangest pair of goggles Kylie had ever seen. They seemed to be cast from bronze or brass, but the lenses were a shifting kaleidoscope of colors- one moment they were ruby and emerald, the next amber and sapphire, the next amethyst and turquoise. As she noted this, Cedric reached down to his waist, and his gloved hand gripped the hilt of a sheathed sword.
Like lightning, he drew the sword from its scabbard. A gorgeous, straight blade of wan silver. Made to sunder steel and bone. Its quillons inlaid with gold-leaf patterans that Kylie couldn’t make out from her limited perspective. Once the sword was fully drawn, Kylie was temporarily blinded as it suddenly burst into white hot flame before her eyes. To her left, she could hear the unmistakable sound of snakes hissing.
“Dyrnwyn…” Stheno rasped lowly.
Cedric didn’t bother replying. He raised his sword up to his shoulder, and advanced towards Stheno.
Quicker than Kylie would have thought possible, Stheno shrugged off her hijab and the black abaya with it, leaving her stark naked in the middle of the gallery. Her sunglasses clattered onto the tile floor with the rumpled clothes, and Kylie saw for the first time the monster’s true form.
Stheno’s skin was a mottled shade of greenish brown, like dying moss. Her arms and legs were coated in drab, warty scales, studded irregularly with shiny black osteoderms, while her stomach and chest were lined with wide crocodilian plates the color of curdled milk. Now rid of the leather gloves, Kylie saw that each of Stheno’s knobby fingers was tipped with a long, jet-black talon.
Her face was even more awful to behold unveiled. Kylie had seen some of it earlier- her swarthy skin and too-large nose, the scowl-lines and sausage lips, all still presently caked over with makeup like a harlequin’s mask. But she hadn’t received the full brunt of her eyes, those searing nightblack eyes with their eerie blue irises, framed by a dense unibrow. Her stone skin felt colder still at the dread sight of them, and she thought she might even turn to stone again, metamorphosizing into some harder substance, tungsten or diamond.
But all of this was a mere footnote to Stheno’s hair. It was not as the gorgon hair imagined by generations of artists, a writhing thicket of dozens of serpents whose lengths amounted to an ophidian bob-cut. She had only ten. Atop her forehead, like a pharaoh’s uraeus, grew a pair of black, hooded cobras. Each side of her head anchored three vipers, their hides covered in reticulated patterns of black, brown, and tan triangles, and their snouts tipped with stubby horns. The last two snakes were by far the largest; a pair of mottled brown pythons, their thick bodies splitting right out of the back of her head. Ten serpent heads, and accompanying them were three rattlesnake tails growing like cornrows from the midline of Stheno’s scalp, along with thin, scraggly wires of jet black hair growing out between the various snakes. The rattletails and cobras were short, but the vipers and pythons were not and they grew thrice as long as Stheno was tall. In the brief moment after the gorgon shed her garments, Kylie saw how she’d hidden them- the snakes’ long bodies were wrapped in snug coils around her arms and torso, perfectly concealed beneath the loose abaya cloak.
Cedric faced Stheno squarely, and if he was at all surprised by her appearance, the balaclava and brass goggles hid it entirely. Kylie wanted to scream at him to run, to look away before he suffered the same fate as she and all the other stone people in the gallery. But he stared right back at Stheno, and nothing happened. No graying skin, no crackling of stone. He kept walking calmly towards her as if her appearance were totally unremarkable. The goggles, Kylie thought, The goggles are keeping him safe… somehow…
Stheno frowned when Cedric didn’t immediately turn into a statue before her. The almost pouty expression a small amusement to Kylie, in her otherwise intolerable situation. But Stheno didn’t need to rely solely on her eyes to defend herself. When Cedric failed to petrify as he was supposed to, her seething mass of serpents arrayed themselves in a protective halo around her, such that she almost seemed as one super-serpent, poised to deal out a swift death of venom and fang.
Cedric continued his advance with the slow but sure tread of a big cat. Kylie watched as the serpents leaned in closer to him, putting their fangs, their ominous white mouths between him and their mother. Forked tongues flicking the air. Their eyes like inkdrops. She watched breathlessly as they closed on each other, and then the combatants halted about six feet apart, right in the center of Kylie’s field of view. The serpents suspended in the air on her left, Cedric and his sword to her right.
“Pretty glasses,” Stheno remarked. Her voice frayed and hard. She drummed her talons against the smooth green scales of her hip. “Whose tomb did your Order desecrate to acquire them?”
Cedric huffed. Gruffly, he replied, “Kulkera.”
“Aaaaah,” Stheno cooed, “I suspected so. That was the last time I saw them- when she and her army left their deplorable oasis and scaled my mountains. Those goggles did not save her from joining my collection then; nor will they avail you now.”
She reached up a clawed hand to stroke the smooth belly of one of her vipers, as if it were a tree branch and she were lackadaisically strolling through an orchard. She glanced back at Cedric and once again Kylie wondered how the glasses were protecting him. That they were, there could be no doubt, but what was the mechanism? She wished with all her heart she’d had them back at the Home Depot.
“It is such a shame,” Stheno continued, “Such a shame, that your American army had to destroy the caves. My collection was so vast. Just south of the Silk Road. The work of centuries, knight. Gone in an instant, because of one bomb.” She sighed heavily. “No matter. Now that I have been invited so cordially to live among the very people who invaded my home, I have their interstates to bring me new prey.”
“I didn’t come here to chat,” Cedric said coldly. His posture was taut as a bowstring, leading with his left leg, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.
“Yes- I know how it goes, knight,” Stheno spat. “This only ends with either my head in your hands, or your body on one of my plinths. So please allow an old woman one last oration, for-”
The cobras struck first. Jets of milky white liquid spraying from their fangs, right at Cedric’s eyes. Despite the visor and goggles he raised his free arm to shield his face from the venom. Immediately one of the vipers snapped out at Cedric’s unprotected belly. Its white fangs pulled free of their pallid gum-sheaths right in front of Kylie’s stone eyes and struck home on Cedric’s stomach, only for the snake to find itself mouthing the stab-resistant vest like a sock puppet.
Recovered from the initial surprise of the cobras- spitting cobras!- Cedric stabbed down at the viper, but it had already withdrawn and one of its brethren caught the flaming blade in its mouth. Stheno’s laughter was like scraping metal, a thousand devils dancing in her beady blue-ring eyes. The blade glew red hot where the viper held it and its next tortured hiss was barely heard over the sizzling of its own flesh. It spat out the sword like it were acid and recoiled, the roof of its mouth cauterized.
Everything happened too quickly for Kylie to follow, even with her front-row seat and unblinking gaze. Stheno’s serpents struck out at Cedric. Fangs gnashing on air. Parried by the flat end of the sword or deflected by his armor. Recoil. Strike again. Quicker than bullets. Quicker than lightning. Six pairs of fangs against one blazing blade. If the lone knight was not as swift as the serpents he made up for it with lionhearted courage. Sword whirring, burning the air in its wake. As soon as one viper dared a strike against him he slashed down righteous fury upon it, and slowly he gained ground on Stheno.
One viper moved in like a rolling wave, going for Cedric’s briefly exposed side as his sword arm was held aloft, busy parrying one of its brethren. His polypropylene shirt a tender target between a gap in the plating. The viper dodged and weaved as it drove in for the strike, fangs out, ready to kill…
But Cedric was no longer there. He whirled to the right and brought his sword suddenly down. The viper hissed but once as it was bisected by the blade, gutted like a fish from its head back in a long, sweeping arc. Stheno shrieked in agony, and before the viper limply hit the ground Cedric was already swinging back up at one of its vengeful brothers.
The viper caught Cedric’s hand in its mouth. Grappling uselessly at his glove, a wet mess of venom dripping from its fangs and onto the floor. Another serpent dashed to the aid of its comrade and bit down upon the midsection of the sword, unmindful of its own crozzling despite Stheno’s sibilant shrieking. For a long moment, the pair of serpents pressed unyieldingly against Cedric’s strength.
Roaring like a tiger, Cedric was finally able to heave the snakes away. In a backslash so quick and violent Kylie would have missed it had she still been able to blink, Cedric removed the heads of the offending vipers.
Stheno shrieked in earsplitting agony. The instant Cedric relieved the vipers of their heads she fell to her knees and clawed at the writhing, blood-spraying tubes left behind, trying to gather them up in her arms. The snakes convulsed furiously in their death throes, writhing like live wires, short-circuiting synapses expending all at once the last of their lifeforce. When they finally went limp, the dead snakes detached completely from Stheno’s scalp, leaving her with only two vipers on her right side, and one on her left. Where the snakes had once sprouted from were now raw circles of pink flesh.
Stheno cradled the limp tubes and sobbed over them, screeching “My babies! My babies!” while her head bled profusely all the while, and a surge of exhilaration coursed through Kylie’s stone body. Had she been able to move at all she would have trembled in uncontainable excitement. She would have shouted and punched the air and cheered Cedric on. As it was, she stood as an inanimate witness to the deadly duel playing out before her unmoving eyes, just like all the other statues in the gallery.
And in that moment, she could imagine all her fellow statues silently cheering along with her, their minds mutely exulting their champion, this latterday knight in composite armor. The most attentive yet introverted audience in all of history.
He’s winning! she cheered from behind her passive stone eyes, Three! He got three! Come on Cedric! Come on!
The remaining three vipers arrowed in at Cedric, while the spitting cobras resumed their venomous fusillades. They were either natural-born sharpshooters or Stheno had trained them well, for the cobras loosed their venom only in the precise moments when no viper heads were in their paths, and they struck Cedric’s visor without fail. Not to damage his eyes, but to blind him nonetheless behind the wet visor. To try to clean it in the midst of the assault would be to invite instant death, so he simply fought on through the poisonous rain.
Behind her dainty marble eyes, Kylie’s soul was aflame in equal parts joy and terror. Joy at the possibility of rescue from this waking nightmare, or at the very least joy at the revenge being so violently inflicted upon Stheno. Terror, because she was helpless as she’d never been before. Each serpent’s strike, each blinding blow of Cedric’s sword, drew perilously near her fragile stone body. Even a glancing hit would be enough to knock her nose off, or reduce her dainty marble fingers to dust. Her whole body radiated with the potential energy locked within her rigid muscles. Straining under a burning surge of adrenaline that screamed at her to move, commanded her to run, but to which she was agonizingly incapable of responding. Every time the sword slashed down inches from her face, each viper’s bite so dreadfully close to her neck, she tried to gasp in spite of herself, to blink, to cringe away from her seemingly imminent destruction.
Up to this point, Stheno had stood well back from Cedric, allowing her serpents to fight on her behalf. But the deaths of three of them in short order roused such black hatred in her heart that, with a deafening shriek, she dropped the vipers she had been cradling and rushed recklessly forward through the thicket of her remaining snakes to battle Cedric herself.
He was too preoccupied to notice her charge. Two of the vipers were on his flanks, harrying his arms, while the third tried to sneak around behind him to snap at his heel and hopefully pull a leg out from under him. Cedric knew their game, and parried the flankers whilst yielding to the ankle-biter, intending to whirl in the motion to bring down a blow upon its head, but Stheno herself threw off his plan. She leaped through the air to meet him, arms up and claws out like a bird of prey, cursing him in tongues unspoken for a thousand years.
Stheno had the natural weaponry, her claws and snakes, but Cedric had strength and skill far beyond hers. When she impacted his armored body they rolled over each other and Cedric wound up on top. Stheno kicked out hard, catching him in the stomach and throwing him into one of the statues with a tremendous crash.
It was the detective. Cedric hit him in his midsection, and his marble body cracked in two. Kylie watched helplessly as he collapsed to the floor and out of her field of view. He fell, it seemed, in slow motion. Like a skyscraper, or a sinking ocean liner. She didn’t see him impact. Just heard the rending crash. The unmistakable cacophony of stone shattering. Then a cloud of pumice rose from where he had fallen.
The fighting ceased. The room silent save for the ringing echoes of shattering stone. Stheno and Cedric each stared at the rubble which had once been a living, breathing man. Each of their faces a panting mask of rage.
Then their eyes narrowed upon each other once more. A low, throaty growl rippled up from Cedric’s throat. Stheno’s rattletail locks riffled menacingly in reply. Her entire face contorted into a nightmare scowl of fang and paunch, so dreadful it made Kylie wish to gouge out the riversmooth pebbles of her eyes.
Far from intimidating him, the gorgon’s visage served only to reinforce Cedric’s rage. He raised up his sword again, leaned back on his right foot, and prepared to renew his attack with equal fury.
Then Stheno’s face softened. She looked quickly around the gallery, at all the dozens of statues, as if noticing them for the very first time. She ran a hand back along her head, through bloodmatted scraggles of hair. The wounds where her late serpents had detached itched madly, but she dared not stop to scratch them. She turned back to Cedric, her mind now made.
“You wish to kill me, knight? To take my head and free my prisoners? Well, you shall find that they are my loyal servants yet!”
And, so saying, her remaining vipers lashed out to either side of her, fangs out, and wrapped their sinuous bodies around the arms of two stone women- Excess, Rebecca, on the one side, and an unknown girl on the other. Effortlessly, they yanked the statues from their plinths and dashed them to pieces on the gallery floor.
The two huge pythons at the back of Stheno’s head, held in reserve until now, joined the vipers in their murderous task, their massive mouths wrapping around the heads of two other statues, decapitating them and hurling the stone blocks at Cedric. The first exploded on the ground just in front of Cedric’s feet, forcing him to leap back a pace, while the second head smashed into the statue beside Kylie, Kristina. It struck with such force, such a horrendous, thundering din, that Kylie knew Kristina must have shattered on impact.
Indeed, the stone head hit Kristina so violently that Kylie was pelted with shards of her disintegrating stone body, hard enough that she felt a sizzle of pain as a chip was taken out of her left shoulder. She couldn’t see it but it felt as if a knife had been stuck into her and she prayed through the agony, Please God, please please please let it only be a scratch, oh my God it hurts, Jesus and Mary and all the saints in Heaven please don’t let my arm fall off, don’t let me shatter, oh Jesus FUCK it HURTS.
Cedric raised his free arm to shield his face from the shrapnel, in spite of the helmet. When he looked up again Stheno was gone, falling back into the maelstrom of dust and shattering stone she was so eagerly creating. As she retreated, she gave each statue a brief sendoff before either she or one of her snakes pushed it from its pedestal.
“It was nice knowing you, Abigail! Goodbye, Wendy! And farewell to you, Charlotte!”
Hearing the iconoclastic slaughter continuing up the hall, Cedric gritted his teeth and charged into the cloud of dust after her.
Kylie could hear the fight long after it moved out of her field of view. Cedric roaring in fury. Stheno shrieking back. Sword whirring. Serpents hissing and rattling. The cacophony of stone bodies shattering, living bodies being thrown into the wall and bouncing heavily off.
All Kylie could do was stand perfectly still and wait for them to return. As if by means of echolocation, her ears told her of the battle moving further and further away. Desperately she wanted to turn her head to see the rest of the fight. To at least see the foul serpents coming her way before they shattered her. The sharp pain in her left shoulder had faded to a dull, throbbing ache. She could still see her stone fingers, could feel the dust settling in her palm, so she at least felt sure that her arm wasn’t going to break off.
She was certain Cedric would prevail, but since the detective fell and the destruction of the other statues began, she wasn’t at all certain she would survive it. That’s what this was now. A battle for survival. No longer was she a mere spectator to this clash of serpent and sword. She had been selected for destruction, and all that stood against her becoming a pile of gravel was pure, random chance.
Presently she heard the fight moving back her way again, and she redoubled her futile attempt to run or even flinch away from the annihilation she knew was barreling towards her. Her stone heart could not beat its way out of her chest. She had no pulse to pound. But her entire being was plunged into an icy, electric vise of frantic terror, building relentlessly within her until she felt crushed by thousands of pounds of pressure as the din of battle approached. It was a worse helplessness than any caged animal had ever known.
More rubble pelted her. She couldn’t see the statues to her left. Could only hear them falling. Breaking. She heard Cedric yell inarticulately. Then suddenly he was thrown back into her field of view. Thrown. Through the air. He crashed into the only plinth to Kylie’s right, swordless. He grunted on impact and as he tried to scrabble back to his feet, one of his errant legs kicked into Kylie’s pedestal. Whatever glue had been applied to her soles was no match for an impact of this magnitude, and for a gut-wrenching moment she teetered helplessly on the plinth. Her sense of balance tortured her and she writhed within herself, trying to catch her fall.
Please Jesus God don’t let me fall please please please please oh God oh God…
She wobbled for what felt like an eternity. Then the tottering of her stone feet slowed, until finally, blessedly, she came to a stable stop. A wave of cool relief washed over her like a spring zephyr. Unable to sigh it out, she simply relished it, glad to be alive, there still being a slender possibility of rescue.
She now faced a few inches to the left of where she had been before, granting her a better view of the gallery. What was left of it. Every single statue behind her had been demolished. All that remained on most of the plinths were the stumps of stone legs jutting up like Roman pillars. A few had their whole lower bodies intact, but above that there was nothing. Three had simply been decapitated, their heads crushed somewhere in the heap of quarry tailings that now littered the floor.
But not me! Kylie thought exuberantly, high on surviving her near-fall. Then she became grimly aware that nothing had changed at all, and she was still a statue, totally incapable of defending herself. Not yet, anyway…
The statue to her right wasn’t as lucky. When Cedric hit its plinth, it too wobbled like a spinning top, and fell onto him. He grunted at the impact, the three-hundred pound torso cleaving in two on his back. Kylie could only just barely see him out of the corner of her unblinking eye. He didn’t move for a long time. Then with a pained groan he rolled over onto his side, panting. Might have broken something. Or several things. He started to rise, shakily, then collapsed.
Come on, get up. Please get up, Kylie thought torturously, Please don’t give up.
He did not get up. He groped at his waist and from his belt he withdrew a small, silvery, egg-shaped object in one hand, and another device shaped like a tiny dumbbell, with Swiss cheese holes scattered around it. In the same instant he threw them Kylie realized they were grenades.
Her whole field of view exploded into a sheer curtain of light. Like she were inches away from the surface of the sun. Her ears rang and rang and rang. Were she still flesh she would have fallen to the ground, clutching her head, trying to hide from the unbearable assault on her senses.
Something hit her. Big, but not hard. Not another chunk of stone. It slapped into her face wetly and bounced off her shoulder. Wet? She couldn’t see what it was but the warm stickiness of it, dripping down her cheek, her curled hand and her arm, suggested blood. She hoped it was Stheno’s, but since the monster had survived a point-blank shotgun blast Kylie had little hope that an explosion would kill her either.
The light lasted but a few seconds and then faded, leaving splotchy smears of bruised purple across her peripheral vision. She saw Cedric reaching feebly at his belt again. Another of the queer, silvery eggs. It didn’t look like any sort of grenade Kylie had seen in movies, but she knew nothing of military equipment.
He threw it. Feebly. Not hard enough to even come close to Stheno.
Slap.
The silver egg hit Kylie square in the chest, spattering a yolky yellow fluid over her stone breasts which promptly dripped down onto her right hand. Acid? If it was a weapon to be used against Stheno it was the only thing she could think of. But the liquid did not melt through her stone body, nor make her marble skin sizzle or corrode. Indeed, it felt pleasantly warm.
She heard cold, brittle laughter to her left. Stheno. An ophidian silhouette in the dust, heralded by a flourish of hisses and rattletails.
“Look at you. Is that really all?” she rasped contemptuously, “A few cheap parlor tricks? I expected far better from a Knight of Andromeda. What would your Grand Master think? What would Hudson think?”
She slouched into Kylie’s field of view and the stone girl realized whatever had hit her in the explosion might well have been a chunk of Stheno. The gorgon was drenched in blood. Only one of her vipers remained, along with the cobras and pythons. One of the fallen vipers still hung on at the root like it had been split by a hatchet. Her makeup had all run down like melted wax. Her lip bled freely, and she now had a pronounced limp, but still she carried herself with the confidence of an Olympian as she strode over to Cedric’s prostrate figure. When he reached at his belt again and drew a pistol, she kicked it out of his hand and stomped on his fingers before he could fire.
“You know I can still see the look on his face, before I turned him to stone. Poor, poor Hudson. I think you should see him, Cedric,” she hissed malevolently, “One more time. I’ll turn you to stone in front of him, and let him watch as I crumble you into dust. Slowly. I’ll start with your legs, and leave your head for last. So you will know, for at least a few hours, or days, the same fear I have lived in for years. I won’t kill you. I’ll pluck out your eyes and grind down your ears. I’ll leave you as a deaf, sightless husk, just a mind trapped forever in a broken chunk of stone. For my sister.” She grinned, licking her bloodied lip hungrily, “I think I’ll call you- ARROGANCE.”
She squatted down to him. Her last viper coiled tensely, fangs out and ready to strike. Cedric looked up at her and one of the pythons shot out like a river of mercury. Quicker than Kylie could make out, it coiled itself around his waist, pinning his left arm to his side. The other python slithered in just as fast and engulfed Cedric’s right hand in its mouth. Cedric screamed raggedly. His arm leaking crimson onto the floor as the python chewed its way up to his elbow. Reaching it, the python must have thought its victim secure, for its razor-fangs sank deep into his flesh and it went no further.
With her prey sufficiently restrained, Stheno reached out one clawed hand to Cedric’s visor. “Now, let’s get rid of those silly glasses…”
Kylie once again tried to move. Out of the way. She expected one last, desperate lunge from Cedric, trying to heave the serpents off of him, and she knew if any such scuffle occurred she would be toppled and that would be it. She tried to step back, to cringe away from the fight.
Her fingers twitched.
The sight like liquid nitrogen. Unbelievable, but. She tried it again. Yes. Real. The fingers of her right hand wriggled slightly at her command. As she tried the third time, they flexed almost fully. Her left hand was working too, the knuckles brushing feebly against her neck. The joints crunching like gravel underfoot.
Looking down from her fixed gaze, she could plainly see the color returning to her chest, her breasts resuming their life-warm pinkish hue, the gray pebbles of her nipples reverting back to a rich brown.
Her heart- did she hear it beat? Not yet. But she felt pure euphoria nonetheless. The stone nightmare was ending and she knew that no matter what else happened, if she was given but five minutes to let whatever formula she had been doused with do its job, she would leave this dreadful place alive.
But her fear did not vanish, despite this joyful certainty. Rather, her joy at the possibility of release only intensified the terror. The thought of the fight resuming before she was able to move away. Her being shattered against the ground into a red slurry of half-flesh, half-stone. She wriggled her fingers frantically, trying to speed up the process, but they moved as feebly as a hatching bird and she knew there was absolutely nothing she could do to relieve herself except wait.
Stheno was taking her time with Cedric, still taunting him. She had just wrapped one claw around the edge of Cedric’s visor, nudging the plexiglass up slowly, when a switchblade sprouted from the python’s neck like a horn. It didn’t even hiss, so suddenly was death upon it. Its mouth too full of Cedric’s arm to make a sound. With the python still attached to his leaking arm, Cedric swung at Stheno in a wide semicircle, aiming his knife for her eyes. She stumbled back and he missed, and caught her last viper through the roof of its skull instead.
It was too late to pull out of the sledgehammer swing and Cedric wound up arcing back down and stabbed himself in the shoulder. The blade driving completely through the other python, pinning both it and the viper against him like an entomologist’s specimen board. Then Cedric ripped the blade sidelong, grating against the python’s spine. It went slack as a knot coming suddenly undone, and he wriggled his left arm out of the slick brown coils, grabbing the thick body with his free left hand and yanking hard.
Stheno wailed shrilly. Rage and sorrow combined into a dread banshee’s howl. When Cedric began to reel her back towards him, pulling the dead python like a lasso, she met his efforts willingly and leaped upon him with all the fury of a jaguar.
They tussled on the ground, rolling over top of each other, grunting and snarling. Cedric still had the dead python attached to his right arm and relied on his southpaw to grapple with Stheno, to fend off her wild claws and the close-range snaps of her twin cobras. He still swung with his right nonetheless, trying to stab her with the protruding switchblade. Stheno clawed frantically at his visor, trying to rip the helmet away, to get at the protective goggles and end the fight in one instant of crackling stone.
They wrestled in and out of Kylie’s view, but she paid little attention to them, so laser-focused was she on escape. Her breasts had fully reverted to flesh, and her cheeks twitched at her command, though her lips remained sealed in stone and her gaze was still fixed ahead. The most dramatic recovery was to her arms. She could flex her fingers completely now, though her right arm was still partially gray below the elbow. Her left, held against her neck, was in better shape- here the formula had dripped from her cheek onto her curled fingers and down her entire forearm, before the egg bounced off her shoulder, so she was able to move her entire forearm as if she were doing dumbbell curls. But slowly, slowly. Her muscles and tendons groaning as they thawed from their stone slumber. Now that salvation seemed imminent, she was of one mind- Oh you bitch, you absolute fucking bitch I’m coming for you I am going to fucking get you.
The fight moved. Back on their feet now. Both of them obviously weakening. Exhaustion from several sustained minutes of ferocious combat starting to take its toll. For a moment they grappled with each other’s hands as if engaged in a deadly waltz. The claws on Stheno’s left hand digging into the flesh of her own dead python where it had sunk into Cedric’s arm. Cedric’s helmet had been knocked off, and all that saved him from the gorgon’s gaze now were the brass goggles. The cobras sprayed jets of venom right at them, and at his mouth, trying to poison him through the balaclava.
In this moment of tension Kylie saw that somehow a coil of dead python had gotten wrapped loosely around Stheno’s neck. If only there were a gallows to hang her by…
The pythons’ bodies didn’t detach from her head like the vipers. Too well-anchored to her skull to simply fall off, though she surely would have been able to grow new ones in time. Presently, though, the deceased serpent was choking the life out of her. Her cheeks and forehead swelling purple as Cedric pulled hard on the python. Its teeth cutting so deep into his arm was now a source of strength, and he wound back like he were tugging an anchor chain, gripping the dead snake’s thick body with his left hand as well. Stheno yielded to him, trying to relieve the pressure on her throat, and as she lunged she took a wild swipe at his face.
The goggles’ right lens went flying off. Kylie saw it go, passing right in front of her, and she tracked its path, now finally able to move her eyes again. It shattered against a chunk of marble that must have been part of Rebecca.
Cedric snapped his eyes shut. Held his left palm flat over the empty frame to prevent him from meeting Stheno’s gaze, but she was already in his face, trying to pry it off. Her claws dug into his wrist and he winced in pain as beads of blood welled up from the punctures. The cobras on her forehead hissed in gleeful anticipation, finally about to use their venom for its intended purpose.
“Give up, knight!” Stheno growled, her voice still choked by the coil of serpent looped around her neck. “Look into my eyes. Don’t be rude. Let’s finish this once and for all.”
Cedric gritted his teeth. His hand was being pulled inexorably away from his eye. If he didn’t open it Stheno would simply pluck it out, or one of her cobras would blind him. Winking his right eye shut as tight as he could, he looked over with his still-protected left at the plinth where Kylie stood. She was facing him, Stheno’s back to her as she slowly returned to life. Her eyes wide and blue, staring at him beseechingly.
With a jagged scream of pain and fury, Cedric ripped his right arm free of the dead python’s mouth. His blood jetted crimson from a dozen arm-length lacerations, and with the last of his strength he threw the python’s head in Kylie’s direction, into her open arms.
She caught it in both hands and gripped the python’s smooth body as tightly as she could. Then, she pulled back hard.
Stheno yelped, a strangled sound as Kylie reeled her in. Just like tug of war, Kylie thought. She didn’t dare loosen her grip and her fingernails dug deep into the serpent’s scales. Stheno clawed at her neck and scrabbled about on the floor, trying to free herself, to dismember the python, to pull Kylie from her plinth to end the assault, but it was too late. Kylie’s was the strength of stone, and though she teetered perilously on her heels against Stheno’s efforts, she held against the exhausted gorgon long enough for Cedric to come back around, bloody switchblade in hand.
Kylie watched- how could she not?- as Cedric stabbed out at Stheno. His eyes must have still been shut tight, for the blade missed its mark and sunk deep into her cheek, scraping on bone. But that first probing effort was enough, and his next try did not miss. Stheno’s splitting shriek was cut short when the blade found first her right eye, and then an instant later her left.
She fell dead to the ground, and Kylie finally released the python and wobbled back once more to a stable position, looking down at the slumped, ragged body of her tormentor.
Cedric fell to the ground beside Stheno, rolling onto his back and panting heavily. Then he started laughing. Just a chuff at first, then great guffaws of joyful uproar that quickly devolved into a pained fit of coughing.
Kylie didn’t begrudge him his joy but she had her own, far more immediate problems to contend with. Her skin was rapidly restoring to flesh- her arms and chest fully healed now, her head and hips partly so. But though her lungs begged for air, her throat wasn’t yet loose enough to draw breath. Blind panic shot through her as black curtains began to dance at the edges of her vision, threatening to shutter closed at any moment. No, no like this- please not like this! The thought of asphyxiating so close to salvation paralyzed her, and she tried with all her might to inhale.
Then, finally, she felt life-bringing moisture in her mouth, her throat. She gasped; a dry, ragged sound like she had just awoken from a long, thirsty slumber, and she tumbled from the plinth.
Sitting up, Cedric caught her in his arms, but he was too weak to hold her; she rolled out of his grasp and onto the cold tile floor. Panting. She couldn’t move. Well, she could, but. Her muscles were all gone to jello, having strained so hard to exert themselves all during the fight. It felt so good to breathe. Her mouth was dry as a bone and she was incredibly thirsty but she didn’t care. She rolled onto her back and just breathed, watching her bare breasts rise and fall with each exhalation. She didn’t know how long she laid there, didn’t count the seconds or the minutes. She lived by the breath. The blessed inhale. Rich oxygen filling her lungs, her chest rising, falling. The sacred exhale.
She didn’t care that she was naked. Didn’t even try to cover herself. She cried. Laying on her back the tears pooled in her eyes until finally they spilled over and ran hotly down her cheeks. She pressed her palm to her heart and listened to it beating. Cherishing each precious bu-dum, bu-dum, bu-dum, as if she thought it might stop again at any moment.
Finally she rolled onto her side and was aware again of the pain in her left arm. A little triangular divot taken out just under her shoulder. It bled freely, bright scarlet rivulets running down her arm. She held her hand over it, applying pressure until the blood welled between her fingers and continued dripping down her arm.
“Here,” Cedric said.
She stiffened. Surprised. Suddenly aware of her condition. Naked, in front of a stranger. A man. She cringed, curled into a fetal position against the pedestal. Haphazardly attempting to lower her right arm to shield her breasts while still holding her shoulder, while her left hand shot down to conceal her mound. She looked over to where Cedric was now sitting up and saw him holding out a roll of white cloth. He’d pulled his balaclava down, though he still wore the broken goggles. She watched his emerald eye track quickly up to hers, away from the direction of her chest, the curve of her hips. His cheeks flushed when he realized she’d caught him looking. He cleared his throat and looked down again, at the cloth, at the floor, at anything but the nude beauty in front of him.
“For your arm,” he explained, gesturing with the cloth.
His own arm still bled freely. The python’s fangs had ripped through the stab-resistant fibers of his sleeve when it engulfed him, and when he tore his arm free of its grasp it shredded the sleeve to ribbons. The wounds undressed, as of yet. Just a bled-through rag wrapped around his hand, so as not to mar the white cloth he was now offering to her.
“I think you need it more than me,” Kylie said, her voice dry and cracking. Almost laughed, at the absurdity of it all. In a more primitive era such a victor would simply have hefted her naked body over his shoulder and carried her home with him, but now he was sheepish about looking at his prize. Is that what she was? His prize? He’d saved her from a fate worse than any death, and despite her naked shame, if now he wanted to drink in the sight of her, she would not blame him one iota.
“Let’s do yours first,” he said, “Then you can help me with mine.”
He’d certainly need help. Aside from his arm, he had multiple abrasions on his face. Probably from being pelted with stone fragments. Very well, she thought, I can play Nightingale in the nude.
She sat up and held out her left arm gingerly. Tensing just a bit as he took her hand. Still holding her right arm over her breasts. He wrapped the tourniquet tightly until the pressure gave the wound a pulse. It felt good, in an odd way. Just as searingly alive as her heartbeat.
Cedric looked at her. Her eyes, this time. Right into them. He cleared his throat and started to say something, then shook his head. He fumbled for words. As soon as he thought of something he seemed to think better of it and went mute once more.
“Are you alright?” he asked finally.
She nodded.
“Right,” Cedric said. He cleared his throat again and held out his arm. “Well, uh. Can you help me out with this?”
She nodded again. “Yes.”
He sat up and took off his goggles, then began unstrapping his armor. There was more of it than Kylie thought possible.
“You look like Robocop,” Kylie said as he started taking off the anti-stab vest, the chest and back plates.
“Always come prepared,” Cedric smiled, wincing as he reached to unclip his shoulder pads and arm protectors. It all went into a big pile on the floor- the Kevlar collar, the kneepads and leg protectors. He peeled off the balaclava and then shrugged out of two separate long-sleeved shirts- the outer Cordura, the inner Kevlar. Underneath all of that was just a sweaty white T-shirt. He wore a silver rosary around his neck and she looked at the crucifix intently, merely thinking- Thank you.
She started inspecting him. No nursing skills but she didn’t need any expertise to identify a cut. There were only a few. Some abrasions on his face, probably from being thrown into shards of broken stone. Most of his torso was welted with black and blue bruises, but there were no scrapes that she could see. Or bitemarks, besides his right arm.
“Where did you get the bandage?” she asked.
“That was all I had on me,” he said. “I left a backpack out in the hall. Can you do stitches?”
She shook her head.
“Alright,” he replied, “We’ll just have to tourniquet it really well for now. Go get the bag.”
She did as he asked. Groaned to her feet. She rose wobbly, fawnlike, as if she needed to learn how to walk all over again. As she limped away, she felt his eyes on her backside. Well, let him look.
Kylie poked her head cautiously out of the doorway, but when she looked around there was no one there. Just the empty, red-walled lobby she’d been carted through earlier. She supposed no one else was allowed on this floor besides Stheno and her guests. Nevertheless, in her nakedness she felt compelled to be furtive and her steps were quick. The backpack was sitting right beside the door. She tugged tentatively at the handle. Heavy. There was a canteen in the side-pouch and she chugged it greedily. While she drank she tugged her hair forward so it fell over her breasts, at least partly covering them. Her thirst slaked, she returned the bottle to its pouch and fussed over her hair a moment longer. Then she hefted the backpack up and waddled back into the penthouse. She shut the door quietly behind her and trotted over to Cedric. The medical kit was at the very top of the bag, a white plastic latchbox with a red cross on it.
“Hand me the disinfectant,” Cedric said. He opened the bottle and poured it all over his arm, wincing and gritting his teeth. “Alright, gauze me.”
She took a handful of gauze, dabbed it in more disinfectant, and started cleaning the wounds, starting at the elbow and working her way down. Fresh blood still flowed even as she dabbed, replacing the gauze as it soaked red, but the arm looked a bit better with the old, caked blood removed. Cleaner, anyway. The lacerations stretched from his elbow all the way to the base of his fingers, like he’d jammed his arm through a broken window. He winced once when she dabbed the gauze into one of the deeper cuts but other than that he did not complain.
“I didn’t see any other bites when I checked, but you’d know better- did any of them get you, besides the python?” Kylie asked.
Cedric chuffed, “If they had, you’d be calling an undertaker right now. Those were Gaboon vipers.”
By the time she was finished dabbing the wound, fresh blood had covered up most of her work, but Cedric told her that was okay. “The important thing is getting any bacteria from the snake’s mouth out. It’ll heal on its own but an infection would be nasty.”
“Okay,” Kylie said. She pulled out a roll of the same white dressing Cedric had used on her, and began wrapping his arm. Up and down and back up again as the wound bled through, until finally she had it to almost cast-thickness.
“That should do,” Cedric said. He held up his arm and flexed his fingers against where the bandage wrapped around his palm. “Good. Good work.”
“Thanks.” Kylie replied. “Does it hurt?”
He laughed. Stupid question, but. “Yes. Yes it hurts. Here, hand me the med kit.”
He reached into the latchbox and pulled out a little orange vial of blue pills.
“What are those?” Kylie asked.
He took one tablet and then reached into the bag for the canteen. He held it up and was surprised at how little was left. He eyed Kylie suspiciously, then shrugged. “Fentanyl.”
“Fentanyl?” she exclaimed. “Are you fucking crazy?”
“I got mauled by a python,” he replied. “It’s a prescribed dose, don’t worry about it.”
He took a deep, contented breath as the painkiller kicked in, and when he looked back at Kylie his pupils seemed slightly constricted, the green forests of his irises encroaching upon them.
“Right,” Cedric said. He groaned as he clambered back to his feet. “Well, let’s get moving. We’ve got a lot to do.”
He reached out a hand to Kylie. She looked down at her chest with lingering reserve.
“I won’t look,” he said solemnly.
She nodded, then reached out and took his hand. He pulled her up effortlessly, still strong as a workhorse despite the punishment he’d taken. Once on her feet, she looked around the ruined gallery, all the shattered statues, the mangled corpse of Stheno, and finally her emotions caught up with her and she let herself fall into Cedric’s arms and clung to him desperately, weeping into his shoulder.
“Thank you,” she whispered between sobs, “Thank you.”
“It’s alright,” Cedric consoled. He clasped his hand over hers and Kylie wished dearly that he would never, ever let her go. “It’s alright. You’re safe now. Come with me. We don’t have much time.”
She nodded through her tears and only let him go reluctantly. Cedric walked back over to the doorway and picked up the shotgun he’d discarded at the beginning of the battle. “Can you walk alright?” he asked.
“Yes,” Kylie replied. She looked down at herself again. “I need clothes.”
“We’ll find you some,” Cedric said. “Come on.”
He began walking back down the gallery, deeper into the penthouse. Kylie turned to follow him but first there was something she needed to do. She turned back to the pedestal. Her pedestal. Stheno’s bloated carcass was slumped down in front of it. Her mouth hung open, forever gasping for air. The terrible eyes were reduced to bloody holes, unable to hurt anyone ever again, but the sight of her still sent a shiver racing down Kylie’s spine and she quickly looked away. The gorgon wasn’t what interested her, anyway. Finally she was able to see the title chiseled into the plinth she’d been imprisoned on- would have been imprisoned on forever, had Cedric not arrived. It simply read Privileged.
She scoffed and followed after Cedric.
“Where are we going?” she stammered. She had to mind her bare feet on the rubble-strewn floor. Jagged shards of marble worrying her soles. Now that she was restored to flesh and blood, she had to consider such things again. The chip taken out of her left arm throbbed and had already bled through the tourniquet, but it was beautiful and she relished it as she never thought she’d enjoy the sensation of pain before. Oh, to be able to bleed…
Cedric didn’t answer her. He kept marching down the corridor, possessed by a mad drive to find something. The path of destruction went on and on. Kylie couldn’t believe the fight had covered such a distance. She counted the plinths as they passed- twenty, thirty-five, forty-seven…
Sixty-four. She counted sixty-four pedestals. All scalped of the souls which had been imprisoned upon them. She would have made sixty-five.
She tread gingerly over marble fragments of hands, fingers. The gray crescent of some doomed soul’s face. It was not like walking through a ruined museum gallery. This was a mortuary, and if Cedric remained quiet, Kylie understood why. And she had even more reason to keep her sepulchral silence. For every shattered stone face she passed, each fractured hand whose stone palms still faced supplicatingly towards the heavens, might just as easily have been her.
“God, look at this,” Cedric said, his voice low as a churchgoer’s.
Kylie trotted over to where he stood in front of a plinth that held the lower half of a woman with her hips swayed as if she had been petrified mid-dance. The title read Decadence. The statue’s date, in smaller print below, read- December 2003.
“She’d been standing there for over twenty years,” Cedric gritted. His voice flushed with rage and remorse at the slaughter he had witnessed, had participated in, if only by self-preservative necessity.
Kylie wasn’t sure what to say. She just stared at the plinth silently, while her hand felt for Cedric’s. She found it and held it tightly, reassuringly. It jolted him, her touch. He looked over at her, his eyes wide and damp. She smiled sadly.
“You freed her,” she said. “You freed all of them.”
He pursed his lips. Nodded. Holding back tears, she knew.
“Yeah,” he said. He wiped his sleeve against his nose. Nodded again and sighed raggedly. Then he pulled himself back up and continued leading Kylie through the gallery.
Eventually the path of destruction ended at a locked door. Here the tile floor was slick with blood, the long coils of two dead vipers strewn like discarded halyards. Cedric walked over them and picked up his sword where it lay flat on the ground. It glew like captured moonlight in his hand, before he returned it to its scabbard. Then he smashed the doorknob with the butt of his shotgun. Kylie hesitated at the smears of blood, her bare toes scrinching away from them, but when Cedric entered the next wing of the penthouse without waiting for her she tip-toed across and tried to ignore how warm and sticky it felt.
The door led into a narrow corridor, and at the end of it, they found themselves staring up a dark, spiraling metal staircase. Without hesitation, Cedric began climbing the stairs, Kylie following after. She wondered when the police would arrive. There was no way the tenants below hadn’t heard the thunder of battle raging over their heads, the wholesale destruction of the gallery. There was a timer on whatever Cedric was doing, but he scanned over every nook and cranny in the place with the keen eye of a thief. It was driving Kylie nuts.
“Cedric, what are you looking for? Maybe I can help you.”
“Her bedroom,” Cedric replied ambiguously. “Need to get something.”
“How did you find her, anyway?” Kylie asked as they began their ascent up the stairs. Now that they had left behind the dreadful hall of death, the silence was unbearable, and she was brimming with questions for her rescuer.
“It was a long op,” Cedric replied, “Stheno covered her tracks well; only a handful of people even knew this gallery existed. We knew she was in the Northeast, somewhere, but beyond that the trail went cold. Took a few years to put together enough information to nab her.”
“No, wait, go back further,” Kylie insisted, “How did you know she even existed?”
Cedric was quiet for a moment. As if deciding how much to tell her- what he was allowed to tell her. “I served four tours in Afghanistan. Navy SEALs. Found her cave by accident on an op back in 2020, right before shit hit the fan. The Taliban conspicuously weren’t using it and we wanted to find out why.”
“Was anyone there?” Kylie asked. “Anyone… stone, I mean?”
“No,” Cedric replied. “Whole place had been blown out, probably back in ‘03 when we carpet bombed the valley. She immigrated shortly after that, and didn’t wait long to start claiming victims.”
“So how did this all wind up back here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you were a Navy SEAL, and then you come in here with a glowing sword fighting a gorgon…”
Cedric sighed. Again debating how much to tell her. Finally he spilled. “I’m a Knight of the Order of Andromeda. It’s a sovereign Order, not a government agency or part of the military. What we do is hunt down the things that shouldn’t be. Things that aren’t supposed to exist outside of myth and legend. Fairy tale monsters. The things that go bump in the night. They’re real, most of them. We hunt them and kill them, hopefully before they kill anyone else. Sometimes we recover special artifacts, like Dyrnwyn here,” he tapped the burnished hilt of the sword in its scabbard, “or those goggles. I clashed with Stheno once before, but she got away. Tonight was a rematch.”
The staircase terminated at another locked door, which Cedric again smashed in with the butt of his shotgun. Then came another short corridor, which they walked down swiftly. It was less spartan than the stairwell- an array of paintings hung on the walls, certainly Stheno’s own work. Mostly scenes of mountains and villages, memories of her native Afghanistan. Kylie looked them over and wondered how Stheno could have chosen to be so spiteful, so envious, to inflict such suffering on people, when she clearly had the power to create great works of beauty on her own. It was an alien mindset, one which she found herself grateful to have nothing in common with.
“Does any of that surprise you?” Cedric asked.
“What?”
“Everything I told you.”
“I was turned into a statue,” Kylie replied. “I’m ready to believe just about anything right now.” She shook her head. “That’s not the full story though.”
“It isn’t?”
“What were you doing at the bar?”
“Oh. Waiting for my second,” Cedric replied, “I wasn’t supposed to come here alone. But when I saw you come out of the bathroom, I knew she was active in the area and couldn’t wait. I left right after you and tailed your bus. Was hoping to get to Stheno before she found you.”
“You used me as bait?” Kylie demanded.
“Not bait. More like a homing beacon. You were already turning to stone; we had nothing to do with that.”
“You could have saved me right at the bar with one of those… whatever you threw at me!”
“Rooster eggs. Anyway, how would you have reacted if I’d come over and told you ‘Hey, stranger, you’re turning into a statue, why don’t you come outside with me so I can break an egg over your head?’”
Kylie huffed, but he had a point. That was the worst part of it, that he was completely right. She remembered how he’d gasped at the sight of her, how she’d thought he was just shocked at how sickly she looked. He knew all the time.
“I’m sorry things turned out the way they did, Kylie. I really am. I meant to head Stheno off before she even got to your apartment, but she was one step ahead of me. And I did save you in the end.”
“Barely,” Kylie sulked.
Cedric started to say something back, then just shook his head. They were at the next door. This one wasn’t locked, and it opened out into a sprawling, luxuriously furnished apartment. To the left, the parlor had a ceiling-height fountain, a curtain waterfall dripping down the fieldstone wall into a koi-filled basin on the floor. A long, sunken leather couch faced parallel to the basin, and Kylie saw behind the waterfall the black screen of an enormous television. Wrapping around the other two walls of the parlor were floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out upon the crystalline Philadelphia skyline. To the right was a fully automated kitchen, while an elegant, modernist staircase coiled itself around the division between the two rooms, right beside the door they had entered by.
“Two story penthouse,” Kylie spat, “Private gallery. A waterfall curtain for her jumbotron. She told me she’d sold everything to immigrate here.”
“It’s not your fault,” Cedric said. He glanced around the rooms and then, failing to find whatever he was seeking, began ascending the stairs.
“She told me she was just looking for a better life.”
“Aren’t we all? She was a predator, and she preyed on your good nature.”
“Do you think that’s how she got the others?”
“Probably,” Cedric replied gravely. “Good nature. Vanity, some. Love of art.” He paused. Stopped on the stairs and looked back at her. “We can never know why they were taken.”
Kylie swallowed. Looked down at the stairs. If she didn’t feel the exact kind of pain as Cedric, she felt her own to the same dreadful degree. But for the grace of God…
At the top of the stairwell was an equally luxurious bedroom. A tigerskin rug. Leopard fur blankets on a double-king bed whose mattress was sunk into a marble frame, facing an enormous firepit. The room was decorated with more statues, but not of people. Animals. Beside Stheno’s bed was a long plinth with a crouched, snarling panther. On the opposite side of it was a wolf, caught as if it had been in the middle of stalking, its head lowered, one paw held slightly off the ground. Other animal statues lined the walls in various alcoves- a seated lynx, a fox, a pronghorn, a whitetail buck, a bighorn sheep. An otter with fur so slick it could only have been petrified immediately after exiting the water.
To the left was a walk-in closet, and Cedric led Kylie towards it. “Let’s get you some clothes.”
“Oh Jesus,” Kylie breathed as she entered the room.
It was indeed a walk-in closet, but no clothes hung from the hangars. Instead, piled on the floor were heaps of unfolded garments of every kind. T-shirts and winter coats, blouses and suitjackets. Shorts and jeans, tights, slacks, trousers. One pile was just shoes- sneakers, heels, ballet slippers. The shelves on either side of the closet were the only things neatly organized- on each shelf were little rows of wallets and keys.
She stared at the heaps of clothes until finally Cedric said, “Well, find something to wear.”
“You don’t mean- ?”
“Yes,” Cedric replied. “Unless you feel like walking out of here in one of Stheno’s burqas.”
“But, this is-”
“I know what it is,” Cedric snapped. “I know it and you know it but there’s nothing we can do about it now.”
“But-”
“Kylie, I just did battle with a gorgon. Sixty-four people are dead because of me. I’ve got two broken ribs, probably my clavicle too, and the police are coming any minute. I’m all horrored out for tonight. Get dressed.”
He left her standing there naked and trudged away, still restlessly searching for something.
She tread gingerly among the heaps of hoarded clothes. The mere thought of wearing them seemed a desecration to the memory of their owners, but she knew she had to. There wasn’t another choice. She peeked at the wallets, still left as they were the day Stheno petrified their owners. Popping their buttons open to see the smiling ID photos. She thought she recognized a few of them but it was difficult to tell when she’d only “known” them as blank, gray statues, sharply contrasted against the vivid, living people in the pictures. Senseless. Senseless.
It reminded her of a museum trip with her nana, when she was a girl. They’d gone- she, her parents, grandmother, and nana- to the Titanic exhibit at the Franklin Institute. One of those traveling, two- or three-week events. A wall of rusted hull pulled from the seafloor like the door to a tomb. The shoes and shirts. Children’s toys. But what stuck with her, what haunted her dreams for years after, were the photos. The lovers. The children. The elderly couple who decided to die together on the decks. The photos in the wallets were like that. All gone now, to… wherever we go.
She sighed and knelt down to begin her search for something suitable to wear.
Heaven or Hell or a new life or something else… they are free now…
Cedric walked around the bedroom, looking at the stone animals. He’d only had four cock eggs on him, else he would have freed them all in that moment. Claws and fangs be damned, nothing that breathed deserved such hellish torment. But he only brought four eggs. Two he’d already used on Kylie. The other two, he was keeping in reserve. Nathan was supposed to have brought a couple cartons of them, enough to free a hundred petrified victims. Was bringing, currently, but no telling if he’d arrive before the police. Murphy’s Law in full effect tonight.
He looked around the room and then his heart leaped when he finally found what he was looking for. He raced over to one particular statue, positioned in one of the bay windows. A dog. It looked like a sleek Belgian Malinois, frozen mid-bark.
“Hud!” Cedric shouted, his voice strangled in relief, “Hud! Hud, I’m here buddy. I’m here. Just hold on, I’ll get you out.”
He knelt in front of the stone dog and reached back into his belt for the last two cock eggs, breaking them over the dog’s head and back. Then he lathed his fingers in the running yolks, rubbing it all over the dog’s stone fur.
“Come on, Hud. It’s okay, buddy. It’s okay. I’m here.”
Kylie stepped out of the closet. Wearing a pair of jeans and a loose, olive green top with long bishop sleeves. A good pair of sneakers. She felt safer now, more at ease. Her lingering shame over wearing the clothes of the dead vanishing with the comfort of simply being clothed. Everything fit, at least.
“Cedric, I’m-”
She stopped. Saw Cedric kneeling over the dog. Its snout was mostly thawed back to flesh and blood, and Cedric scratched the rapidly restoring fur behind the dog’s ears.
“It’s okay, buddy. It’s all okay now. Just another minute, okay?”
Kylie watched, tears welling, as the dog’s tongue started to flick out at Cedric’s face, even before it could move any other muscles in its face or neck. As the dog changed back, his fur was revealed to be a glossy black, his eyes ringed by a mask of tan. His belly white. And as his throat thawed, the dog began to whine in uncontrollable joy and excitement. Trying to move forward, to leap into Cedric’s arms despite his legs still being stone.
“Okay, okay, calm down!” Cedric implored. He hugged the dog tightly. Partly to prevent him from hurting himself as he unfroze. Mostly out of pure, truest love.
“I came back, buddy. I told you I would. I’m here now. I’m not leaving. I’m not going anywhere.”
And, as Kylie watched, the dog’s tail began to wag.
Tig ran far ahead of Kylie, down the gravel path. Taking turns chasing and being pursued by Hud. Hud was much faster, but Tig was thankful to finally have a playmate.
It was a brisk November morning, and Kylie was bundled up in a thick pair of jeans and a toad green tweed jacket. Her neck wrapped in an alpaca wool scarf she’d bought at a farm in Lancaster. But keeping her most warm was the bubbly feeling she got whenever Cedric brushed against her.
He was acting funny today, as opposed to all their other walks in Benjamin Rush State Park since he saved her life. Blurting out apologies whenever he accidentally brushed against her, like his mind was lost on another planet. And he was not very subtly fondling something in the pocket of his own grey tweed jacket, turning it round and round in his fingers. Kylie was pretty sure she knew what it was. And what her answer would be.
But until he was ready, she was quite content to simply meander through the park with him and their dogs.
It had been an eventful year. She’d finally been accepted to the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine, and was now wrapping up her first semester. The dusty old sketchbooks from her closet had been brought out of deep storage and she’d begun drawing again, and over the summer had taken up line and wash- turns out she had a natural knack for it. Inking and painting the trees, the birds, scenes of churches and farms and the many parks Cedric had driven her out to since they’d begun dating shortly after that night.
The winds whispered through the trees. The canopy painted shades of scarlet and burnished gold, elms and maples stubbornly clinging to their leaves even as winter loomed. They passed another couple with a stroller, and Kylie’s heart fluttered at the sight of it, the little onesied feet kicking up.
They smiled politely and exchanged hellos, and then Cedric suggested a rest on one of the park benches. Very unlike him. Usually he had the endurance of a wolf. Kylie obliged him, her tummy fluttering in anticipation. They sat and Cedric put his arm around her. So strong and warm. Kylie called Tig and Hud back, and they came bounding over happily to sit with their respective humans.
Cedric sighed heavily and they sat for awhile watching a hawk wheel over the wildflower meadow ahead, its coaldust feathers glinting back what little sun filtered through the cloudy sky. Kylie’s nerves bunched up until she thought maybe he wasn’t going to ask… but then he sucked in a deep breath and spoke-
“Kylie… I have something to ask you…”
Was not at all expecting this horror story to turn into pulp action in the final stretch. Loved every chapter.