Page 38 of What Sleeps Within the Cove

What would it be like when we’d had decades,centuries, to exist within one another’s head?

The Gorgon woman smiled, revealing straight, perfectly white teeth. Only the fangs peeking out from the corners of her mouth were enough to remind me that she was far from human. Her smile reached her eyes, genuine glee consuming her features in a way that made any retort I might have continued with vanish. She took a step toward me, her hand outstretched cautiously as if it might placate me.

“Fenrir was bonded to my hussband, once upon a time,” she said, making everything in me go still. Fenrir was silent. The sound of the rushing fire and the slithering of the serpents in her hair was all that reached me through the haze in my mind.

It meant nothing. Caldris’s father was married to a woman that was not his mother.

The woman smiled softly, showing the gleam of those fangs as her eyes softened.

“Who are you?” I asked, feeling incredibly alone. The Morrigan made no move to interfere as she took another step toward me, and the Cwn Annwn remained with the other Gorgons as they were reunited.

“You already know the answer to that question, Little Ssserpent,” she said, her voice soft as she stopped so close to me that I could reach out to touch her. I raised my sword, holding the point to her throat in warning. She grinned, the low hiss of her snakes echoing as they shifted to stare down at me. “Just as you know why you have not turned to stone.”

“Fenrir believed I might,” I said, glancing down at the wolf at my side. I didn’t want to consider the implications in her words, didn’t want to face the reality staring me in the face.

Her connection to Fenrir. Her affinity for snakes.

No.

“You can never be certain with mixed bloodlinesss such as yours, but you are jusst as much mine as you are hisss. Perhaps more, looking at you now,” she said.

The Gorgon wrapped her hand around the blade, the clink of stone touching the sword. She shoved it away, her skin unblemished as I thrust my other toward her in defiance. It touched the skin of her arm, bouncing off as pain radiated through my hand and up my wrist as if I’d struck it against a boulder.

“Ssay it,” she said, blocking each of my blows as I attempted to strike her and put distance between us. “Sssay my name, Essstrella.”

I winced, tossing my sword into the dirt at her feet. She didn’t so much as flinch away from it as I reached up with my other hand, attempting to grab a snake from her hair. It bit me, sinking its teeth into the fleshy part between my thumb and forefinger.

Jerking back, I stared down at the two puncture holes and the blood that welled from them.

Turning my gaze up to the woman staring down at me, her face a mask of patience, I realized how impossible my task would be.

I realized why so many others had failed.

“Medusa,” I said, the word coming out half a hiss. I’d never felt more serpentine than in the moments after the venom of her snake slithered through my veins. It burned a path through me, turning everything within me cold and hard.

Turning my insides to what felt like stone.

“If you want ssomething from me, all you need to do isassk,” she said, reaching out to cup my cheek in her hand. Her touch was somehow soft in spite of the way my blades had bounced off her body, her thumb brushing over my cheekbone as I fought through the burn within me. “Claim your birthright, Esstrella.”

I shoved aside the pain, blinking through it as I tried to focus onher speckled green eyes. “I need a snake from your crown. Will you give me that willingly?” I asked, understanding what Mab hadn’t.

No one would ever be able to take from this woman by force. Never again would she allow something to be stolen from her, not after how she’d been wronged when she was cursed to this form in the first place.

The legend of Medusa had been passed through countless books, countless stories that the village of Mistfell had thought to burn. I’d seen mention of them, only learning the full truth of the horror she’d endured during my time in the caves with the Resistance.

Medusa reached up with her free hand, allowing one of the snakes from her hair to coil itself around her hand and wrist. She lowered it to mine, threading her fingers through my own as the snake passed from her forearm to mine.

She wound her way up over my wrist, slithering over the armor covering my forearm and sliding into the tiny slit in the scales at my elbow. She squirmed her way underneath it, slithering along bare skin and tickling the inside of my elbow as Medusa held me still with her iron grip. The snake was small, thinner than my wrist and the deepest purple as she turned her body and situated herself. Her tail wrapped around my shoulder, settling against my breast as it curled around my arm twice. The head rested just below my elbow, those eerie golden eyes staring up at me through the slit in my armor. She unhinged her jaw, spreading her mouth around my forearm and burying her fangs into my skin once again.

Fire burned through me, but she made no move to separate. Settling in for the long haul, she stared up at me as she pumped her venom into my flesh.

The skin around her teeth cracked, graying as it turned to stone just like the Gorgon woman in front of me.

It didn’t spread, leaving me to wonder what the fire in my veins would do.

Medusa ran her finger over the snake’s head, watching as the creature’s eyes closed happily. She turned her stare back to mine, those freckled green eyes boring into mine as she spoke. “I would give you anything, my daughter.”

TWENTY-FOUR

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