Cassandra’s eyes tracked over the floating heads, the preserved digestive tracts in sealed plastic. But the noise wasn’t coming from them. The flickering candlelight only made them appear to move. She walked through the rows of shelves, heat flowing to her fingertips. Fear lent itself to anger with comforting ease.
Whatever it was whispered again. A meatier sound this time, and closer. Not paper rubbing together, but leather. She should have brought a candle. But Thanatos was beside her, and his preternatural eyes could see where hers couldn’t. She looked deep into the far corner, toward the preserved, shriveled corpse of the woman.
It wasn’t there.
Cassandra grabbed Thanatos’ arm.
“What?” he asked.
“There was—” She paused. How could she explain it? She’d barely looked at it before, out of sheer aversion. Part of her thought she’d imagined it, or gotten the placement wrong. “There was something there before.” She pointed into the dark. “A body. It isn’t there now.” Thanatos came close and she leaned into his chest, not caring whether it was something she should do. “Why would Hades move it?”
The leathery whisper issued from somewhere to their left, in the shelves.
“He didn’t.” Thanatos dragged her back toward Calypso and the candlelight. He held her tightly. “It’s not Hades.”
They retreated fast into the circle of candles and stumbled against the side of the bed. Calypso had drawn her knife. Thanatos held Cassandra by the wrist and kept her carefully behind him.
The corpse of the woman ran. It ran, letting them glimpse it through jars of formaldehyde. Then it disappeared. All was silent for a span of minutes. When it moved again, it was much, much closer.
“Can I kill that?” she asked Thanatos. “It looks like it’s already dead, so can I kill it?”
“No,” the corpse laughed. “You can’t kill it.” She stepped out from between the glass cases, a beautiful, dark-haired girl in a black dress and high boots. A Fury.
“Alecto,” Thanatos said.
The girl smiled, and Cassandra flinched. Alecto of the Unceasing Anger. The Fury they’d taken such care to avoid.
Or no care at all, considering we drank her sister like a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Thanatos lunged, and knocked up against the shelves of dead and diseased things. Cassandra held her breath while they rattled and rocked. If anything fell and shattered, she wasn’t sure if she could control her panic.
Alecto laughed and danced easily out of his grasp. She moved too fast to be seen. Even Hermes might have had trouble getting his hands on her.
But he would have eventually, and Cassandra wished he was there.
The Fury stepped into the light again. Her face was sharper than her sisters’ and her eyes smaller, the dark irises so large Cassandra could barely make out any white.
“What? Just one charge?” She clucked her tongue. “I would very much like to see you bull your way through this china shop.”
Alecto traced her fingers along the row of petri dishes. Surely most of the specimens were dead, but Cassandra had heard stories of mass plague graves that authorities were afraid to disturb even sixty or a hundred years later.
“Hades would be displeased,” Calypso said. “If you damaged his collection.”
“More displeased than if I left you here to try and murder him?”
“It’s not murder. It’s an assassination,” Cassandra said.
“Semantics,” Alecto hissed, and gave them a view of her blackening teeth, so mismatched with her beautiful face. But that was her true form. The girl was an illusion stretched over the top of decaying wings.
“What are you doing here?” Thanatos asked, and Alecto slipped behind them, fast as a light going out. She stayed just long enough for them to spin and stumble against the bed before flashing back to hide behind the stacks. She was too fast. Trying to follow her movements felt like a case of whiplash.
“I’m here to do what Furies do.”
“Your sister’s dead,” Cassandra said. “Let it go.”
“Let it go?” Alecto screeched. “Like you have let Apollo go?”
“Your sister was a monster.”