“Hello, what’s happening?”
The shopkeeper did not answer.
Clutching her bag, she broke into a run and turned a corner to find herself in a large square lined with eateries. Despite the tantalizing smell of roasted meat filling the air, there was not a soul to be seen. The establishments had closed in such a hurry, the tables outside were still strewn with half-eaten plates.
A laugh rippled across the square. Danae’s head snapped toward it.
Four people leaned against the wall of a modest kapeleion, hidden in the shade of its tattered green awning. They all had cups of wine in their hands and did not seem in the least bit concerned that everyone else appeared to have fled. The tallest of the group was a man with ivory skin peppered with freckles and hair the color of fire. To his left was an older man with sun-leathered cheeks and a slight build, and next to him was a youth who looked around Danae’s age, with a broad, rosy face and ears that stuck out beyond his mop of chestnut curls.
But it was the fourth member of the group that held Danae’s attention. A woman. The only females that frequented kapeleia on Naxos were women of the night, but this person looked more accustomed to providing pain than pleasure. Her ochre skin was laced with pearly scars, and she was dressed in battered silver armor that looked as though it had been beaten to follow the contours of her lean body. A bow and quiver of arrows were strapped across her chest, as well as at least three knives that Danae could see. Her companions were just as heavily armed.
Danae had barely taken two steps toward them, when a cry that sounded like the slaughter of a thousand lambs ruptured the air.
She backed away and flattened herself against the bricks of an eatery as something vast slithered out from a street on the far side of the square.
Danae’s mouth stretched in a silent scream.
An obsidian serpentine body wound across the stones. The creature had no legs, only long double-jointed arms ending in vicious talons that scraped along the ground as it dragged itself forward. Danae was violently reminded of the harpies at the sight of its bulbous head, which looked like a diabolical amalgam of a woman’s and a snake’s. Ropes of long matted hair hung past its undulating neck, and vertical eyelids blinked across yellow irises and black slitted pupils. Its flat nostrils flared, and a mouth cut from cheek to cheek, peeled open to reveal two rows of fangs. The creature’s sickly eyes roved across the square and settled on Danae.
It slid toward her with terrifying speed.
Then something leaped from the roof of a building to her right. All she could see was a mass of fur before the serpent-creature snarled in pain and twisted back on itself.
She gaped. A lion stood upon its tail.
No, not a lion, a man wearing the animal’s hide.
He looked like a god, his golden-brown skin gleaming like the fur upon his back. He knelt astride the beast, his sword buried deep in its thrashing tail. He was dressed in nothing but a kilt, his powerful torso bare save for the lion hide draped over his shoulders, the animal’s head crowning his own. Below it was a face Danae knew well, despite never having seen it in the flesh. An arrestingly handsome face that would have been a replica of his divine father’s, were it not for the scar that sliced his cheek from his eyebrow to the bone of his strong jaw.
Heracles’s ocean-blue eyes met hers, and Danae was sure her heart stopped beating. Then he wrenched his sword free of the monster’s scales and swung it to meet the talons swiping toward him. The creature shrieked as the hero cleaved its fingers straight through the bone. An arc of blood painted a dark rainbow across the sky, then splattered onto the square along with the severed digits.
Incensed, the creature bared its fangs and lunged at him, milky venom dripping from its teeth. He leaped to meet it, lowering his head so his impenetrable lion hide collided with its mouth, while thrusting forward and burying his sword in its throat.
Teeth shattered; wine-dark blood sluiced from the creature’s mouth as it thundered to the ground with a last rattling shriek.
Heracles jumped down from the trunk-thick body and wiped his sword against its scales as though he’d done little more than fell a tree for firewood.
Danae remained fused to the wall as he approached her, only moving when something prickled against her thigh. She glanced down. Heat was pulsing into her skin from something inside her bag.
The prophecy stone.
“Are you hurt?” The hero’s voice was honey and thunder all at once. He stood before her, his cerulean eyes scanning her for injuries.
“N-no.”
A slight crease formed between his brows. His lips parted as though he would speak again, just as the woman outside the kapeleion shouted, “What took you so long?”
Heracles’s attention snapped to her. He grinned, his blue eyes sparkling as he strode toward the group.
“Thanks for the assistance, you lazy bastards. You’d better have at least got me a drink.”
The woman tossed an empty cup to the side and shrugged. “I got thirsty waiting.”
The older man rolled his eyes.
The youngest held out his cup. “You can have mine.”
The hero took the wine, just as the kapeleion door cracked open and the barkeeper peered through the gap. He beheld the monster lying in the square and cried, “Heracles has slain the Lamia!”
