Gull was with him, and beyond the misshapen man were Hawkins and Jezebel, watching like carrion birds awaiting the demise of their feast. But the show really belonged to Gull and Conan Doyle. Each of the two men held an object in his hand, a heavy stone carved into the shape of a pyramid and engraved with strange sigils unfamiliar to Ceridwen.
"All right," Eve said, "how does this thing work, exactly?"
Ceridwen stared at her in surprise. She was sitting on the far edge of the roof with her skin-tight natural denim-clad legs over the side, propped back on her arms with her face upturned toward the sun.
The mother of all vampires, basking in the light of day.
"Eve?" Ceridwen said. "What are you… how?"
The wind swept Eve’s hair across her eyes and the vampire tossed her head like some Hollywood starlet and gave them all a Cheshire cat grin. She stretched backward, obviously relishing the sunlight. The dark green sweater she wore rode up, exposing the smooth flesh of her midsection.
"How, what how?" she asked coyly.
"How come you’re not crispy fried?" Danny put in.
Conan Doyle cleared his throat, and when Ceridwen looked at him he gave her a meaningful glance. "Mr. Gull has come to us armed with one of the things Eve most desired. A spell that cloaks her in hidden shadows all day long. The sunlight never reaches her skin."
Ceridwen frowned and left Danny to watch the mages at work, while she walked over to join Eve. She did not sit on the roof’s edge, however. Instead, she stood and stared down at the vampire.
"That was rash, don’t you think? Accepting his help? You owe him, now. You’ve made a deal with the devil."
Eve snorted derisively. "I’ve made deals with lots of devils in my time. I’m already damned."
For a long moment Ceridwen only stood there. "All right. Just watch him. And watch yourself. You never know what you’ve agreed to without realizing it."
"Eve?" Gull said.
Ceridwen eyed him cautiously. He was malformed, and she most clearly found him hideous, but she saw something tragically noble in his features and bearing. That and his charm combined to make him far more dangerous than any mere mage.
"Yeah?" Eve replied. She did not turn toward him.
"You asked how it worked. Quite simple, really. Or relatively so." He gestured at an oval ring of shimmering energy that opened like an iris on the rooftop. "Scattered across the world are loci that Sweetblood and his acolytes — Doyle and I — placed there well over a century ago. The one nearest the isle of Lesbos is in Istanbul. There must be three loci for a Blackgate to function. One to open it on this side, like a key. The second, at our chosen destination. In this case, Istanbul. The third to follow after, closing the Blackgate. Leaving such portals open is bad magick to begin with, but leave enough of them open, and the entire time-space weave could come undone and collapse."
"Don’t cross the streams," Eve muttered, eyes closed, head still thrown back. "Thanks, Egon."
Ceridwen ignored her. Gull seemed puzzled but said nothing.
"Blackgate?" Danny asked.
"As you see," Conan Doyle replied, and he gestured to Gull. The two mages had used a spell to create the foundation for the portal, but now they separated, one moving to the left of the shimmering oval and the other to the right. Then, simultaneously they raised their loci and touched the tips of those runic pyramids together. At the moment of contact, the portal ceased its shimmering and became a sheer, vertical oval of solid blackness. Like an oil spill painted on air.
"Right. Blackgate," Danny repeated.
"Mr. Gull will go first," Conan Doyle said, glancing warily at Gull. There was clearly a part of him that saw this as a trap, and Ceridwen could not blame him. "Then the rest of you, one at a time. And I will follow behind, closing the gate."
"Let’s saddle up and get a move on, then," Eve said, climbing to her feet picking up her long, dark brown leather jacket, and striding toward the Blackgate. "I could use a shot of ouzo."
Ceridwen exchanged a glance with Arthur, a look rife with meaning. She would go second, right after Nigel Gull. And if anything should go wrong, if somehow Arthur was killed in transition or magickally rerouted or something equally unpleasant happened, she would slit Gull’s throat and stay by his corpse to make sure it remained dead.
"As you say, Eve," Conan Doyle agreed. "As you say."
As night fell over Athens, she lingered in the darkness between two of the columns of the Thesseion, the temple dedicated to Hephaestus. The progeny of man wandered in and around the temple as though the whole of the city were some hideous beehive. Yet there was no veneration in their visits, not an ounce of worship. The Doric columns of that proud temple stood as a faded testament to an ancient way and all that remained of the mystical power that once had held sway here was the brittle residue that sifted down from the ceilings and columns.
Time had moved on and left a void within her, an ache in her heart. Once upon a time there had been great deeds performed in this city, by both gods and men. Now there was merely aimless meandering. What little she understood of the modern age told her that mortals aspired to very little beyond their own mortality.
Fools. She wished she could erase them from the land, or at least instill within them the sense of awe that their ancestors had once had for the gods and monsters of old.
She did not want to die. Yet if she were to live, she wanted at least not to be so alone. Somewhere in this ancient seat of power, she reasoned, there must be pieces of the Old World lingering, some tangible connection to the past. If she could touch that bygone age, taste it, she knew it would sustain her. For here in the modern city with pollution in the air and cars roaring on the roads, she felt like a wisp. Like a memory. Like a myth. As though at any moment she might simply disappear into the mortals’ collection of legends, becoming nothing more than a story.
Yet she was not a story. She was flesh and blood.
And venom.
There in the darkness between the columns of Hephaestus’s temple, she stared out across the Agora, a massive open area ringed with buildings and thronged with mortals. Yet they did not thrive there. They only survived and observed. They entered the buildings as though the city was a living museum.
Once the Agora had been the center of life in Athens, the seat of its lawkeepers and administrators, with its temples and arcades and shops, and the mint where the coin of the ancient city had been struck. There had been a library there, and houses of education. But if all of those structures that lined the edges of the Agora were the mind of Athens, its broad open expanse was the city’s beating heart.
The memory was fresh. So much so that if she narrowed her eyes just a bit she could still see the carts and the vendors shouting at passersby, the hagglers at the booths and the children running in among the crowds. A shudder of nostalgia passed through her. The Agora of Athens had once been the crossroads of the Aegean. In her mind’s eye she could see Socrates orating in the street. She could smell the honey and spices permeating the sweltering air, hear the voices of slave traders as they boasted about their chattel. She could taste an olive upon her tongue, its perfect flesh crushed in her mouth, flavor spreading over her palate.
What mortals did not understand was that the ancient world faded but it never disappeared. If she could peel back the layers of time that had transpired since then, she could touch that world. Just for comfort. Her mind roiled with confusion. Immortal life was wasted if she could not decide how to spend it. Certainly not like so many others from her age. She had convinced herself that a taste of the past was all that was required. Then she would know what to do. How to live.
And none of these mongrel offspring of the once-proud human race were going to stand in her way.