Medusa

by Nataly Gruender

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Coming of Age; Siblings; Ancient

Synopsis

An intimate look into the life of a legendary mythical villain who has so often been stripped of her voice and humanity in this debut novel, perfect for fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe and the works of Jennifer Saint.

You know how Medusa’s story ends, but you’ve never heard her tell her own story… until now.
 
The only mortal daughter of two sea gods, and a priestess of Athena, Medusa was a woman who thought she had found her place in the world. But when Medusa suffers a horrific violation at the hands of Poseidon, Athena is outraged over the desecration of her name and sends a message by transforming Medusa into the snake-haired monster of legend. With one look, any who meet her gaze is turned to stone. Word of her monstrosity travels fast, igniting a king’s fear so greatly that he commands the boy-hero Perseus to bring him her head. With a power that will spare no one, Medusa begins to wonder if this is a blessing or a curse. Medusa only knows that she must leave the city she has come to call home before she harms another soul. 

Searching for a haven free from mortals, anger buoying her every step, Medusa journeys across ancient Greece. Her eyes are hidden beneath a blindfold, with nothing but the snakes for company. Through her travels, Medusa discovers solace and understanding in the mythical figures she stumbles upon: A debaucherous wine god, an alluring nymph, and a three-headed dog. But one cannot escape fate forever. As Perseus closes in, Medusa faces a choice: become the monster everyone expects her to be, or cling to the last piece of her humanity.
 

Release date: August 13, 2024

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 432

Sample

I WAS BORN THE only mortal daughter of a god of the sea and a goddess of sea dangers. My two sisters reveled in their immortality, holding their arms up to mine to compare the sheens of our skin, claiming their limbs glowed with the gentle golden light of those unburdened by an eventual death. I thought our forearms looked the same. If anything, mine were closer to golden from the days I spent walking the shoreline in the bright rays of Helios’s sun.

My sisters did not like it when I tried to point this out.

“It’s because you’re mortal,” Stheno said, drawing near me before dancing away again as if my mortality was contagious. “Your skin is aging.”

“Ew,” Euryale added.

They giggled and pranced away, their dark hair curling in long, handmade ringlets down their backs. There were tiny shells woven in between the strands, and they winked at me as my sisters left me behind, their bare feet making no noise on the stone floor worn smooth by age-old currents.

Our home was balanced on the precipice of space near the sea where the sturdy ground gave way to shifting sands. The ocean was only a few seconds’ sprint from the back door. The walls were formed in the shapes of the waves from the sea, gentle curves and sloping ceilings all bleached white by the sun. Against the pale background of our house, Stheno and Euryale stood out like dark, fluttering birds in a clear sky.

They both took after our parents in appearance. I did not. I had been overlooked not only in immortality, but in my looks as well, and my tawny hair announced my displacement amongst my sisters far before word of my mortality could. There were few things my sisters loved to hold over me more than this.

My mother told me that when we had been born, Stheno and Euryale had begun to cry immediately, their eyes squeezed shut in opposition to the bright light of our new world.

But you, Medusa, she had said, you were quiet. And you had your eyes wide open.

I was strange, right from the beginning. While some worried that a quiet newborn prefaced a dull child, and an even duller adult, I liked when my mother told me the story of our birth. I liked that while my sisters had cried for the darkness of the womb, I had immediately begun to take in the world around me. Perhaps I had already known I would not live long enough to see it all.

When my mother told this story to my sisters, Stheno asked our mother if she ever thought of tossing me in the ocean.

After a long pause, Mother had replied, She does not belong there.

We did not see our parents very often, since they preferred the wide expanse of the seas over the seashell-colored house on the shore, but when they returned to see three of their children, we were meant to appear in our triplicate. Late in my fourteenth year, our parents came to visit us. One of the quiet, elusive servants who kept the house in order, preparing our meals, and washing our clothes, had laid out the long, white sleeveless dresses my sisters and I wore to be presented as a group. My skin was still damp from the bath and I leaned against my bed, fingering the smooth fabric. A seagull screeched outside my window, the thin linen curtains that hung over the shallow alcove billowing in a faint, salty breeze.

Left on our own, Stheno and Euryale avoided me around our home, barring the times they sought me out to tease and torment me. This was fine with me. I had taken to walking the shoreline when I found that the sound of my sisters scampering up and down the halls of our house, accompanied by their cruel laughter, was soon to drive me insane.

The only time we willingly stood side by side as sisters was when our parents were home. So, on that early morning of their arrival, I stood between my sisters with Stheno on my right and Euryale on my left, our bare shoulders not quite touching. Our hair had been styled similarly, my sisters’ straight dark hair twisted into curls and crowned with a delicate wreath of shells and iridescent stones. My own hair needed no aid to curl, but the pale greens, blues, and whites of the wreath did not stand out as sharply against my tawny head as it did with my sisters.

Our mother arrived first, rising elegantly out of the frothy waves in a chariot made of fiery coral, pulled by a sharp-toothed shark and a steely fish with a nose like a serrated sword that thrashed in the shallow water. She dropped the reins and stepped out of the carriage, the pale gray hem of her dress swirling with the tide. The chariot disappeared back into the waves, unmanned.

As my mother strode up the sand, my sisters bowed their heads in turn, first Euryale, then Stheno, and finally I dipped my chin to my chest, tilting my head down just far enough to be respectful. I had no issue with my mother, but she had not tried to harbor any feeling of empathy or motherly affection toward me or my sisters. Child-rearing came as an afterthought for a god.

“Gorgons,” my mother greeted us with our shared name. She glided to a stop a few paces away and turned around to face the ocean, crossing her arms and leaning on one leg so that her hip was angled out. The sharp bone of her hip was hidden under the fabric of her skirt, but the attitude in her stance came across all the same. She struck a very un-goddess-like figure when she stood like that, allowing her emotions to project outward through the shape of her body. This was something I had been told only mortals did. I made sure to stand very straight and kept my shoulders back.

Father arrived a few moments later with much more fanfare. The surface of the ocean rippled and bubbled before bursting open as no less than four creatures battled with the waves, their front half made up of a horselike head and legs, the longer tufts of hair around their chin and hooves plastered wetly to their skin, while their flanks transitioned into tightly packed gray and purple scales leading to heavily muscled fish tails. The creatures pulled a dark stone chariot studded with pearls. Father stood straight-backed in the carriage, his bright red, clawed hand resting on the crossbar and his mortal hand holding his spear. The creatures were moving without the guidance of reins. They splashed their way to the edge of the surf and skidded to a halt, spraying frothy white sea-foam and sand.

With far less elegance than Mother, our father leaped out of the carriage and trudged up the slope toward us. The sea creatures whirled away and dove back into the water the moment his feet touched the sand, and the ocean seemed to pull away from them, creating a temporary path for the creatures and the chariot to dive into and disappear.

Unlike my mother, who had emerged from the ocean as dry as desert stone, my father reveled in the drops of water that clung to his reddened skin. He would remain this way, as if he had only just been drenched by a tumbling wave, even when he was on land and away from the water for long periods of time. I thought he began to smell a bit like a washed-up piece of rotting seaweed after a few days.

Father paused next to Mother where she stood with one hip cocked out, high on the beach. I could see a faint smile tempt his mouth at her stance, and he dipped his head to kiss the back of the hand that she had proffered to him to fulfill the expectations of a respectful greeting between husband and wife.

I did not think my parents loved each other. Love was a human fault, a mortal emotion the gods did not have the patience nor the desperation to entertain. My mother and father had probably been paired together for their shared affinity for the dangers that lurked below the ocean’s surface. If anything, they had similar tastes in pets.

“Hello, my urchin,” my father said. My mother turned her nose up and away from him.

“Phorcys,” she greeted tersely.

Turning away from his wife, he brought his gaze to my sisters and me, which commenced another round of the synchronized, delicate bows. I put even less effort to be polite into this one, my chin barely dipping down a finger’s length. He did not seem to find this half-assed display of respect as amusing as our mother’s thinly veiled irritation.

“And hello, Gorgons. You are well?”

“Yes, Father,” Stheno replied, speaking for all three of us. Nothing would come of me saying otherwise, or telling my parents of Stheno and Euryale’s treatment of me when we’re left on our own. This was a truth I had learned long ago, so I stayed silent.

“We will go to the banquet hall,” our father declared, and he swept around us toward the whitewashed house. My sisters and I parted to allow our mother to follow him, and when she stepped between us, she placed her hand on Euryale’s cheek and tilted her head up, smiling faintly. I noticed Stheno’s jaw tick with annoyance at our mother’s obvious favoritism, but she was smart enough to keep her mouth shut. When Mother dropped her hand and continued up the sandy hill, Stheno and Euryale were drawn together once again and they followed our parents toward the house, leaving me to bring up the rear.

The banquet hall was built on the east end of the house, open to the beach and the ocean on one side. The remaining walls had wide windows carved into the sides, flooding the room with light that turned golden and flushed when the sun set over the horizon. In the growing light of the morning the hall looked washed out and dim, tinted a faint blue. Usually the polished stone floor was empty, since my sisters and I had little use for this room on our own, but now there were a few low couches piled high with cream-colored pillows arranged in a semicircle facing the altar at the far end of the hall. The quiet servants in the house always seemed to be aware of my parents’ imminent arrival before I was.

My father waved his claw at the couches as he passed them and told us, “Have a seat, girls.”

Stheno and Euryale spread out over one of the two middle couches, lounging so that their limbs took up as much room as possible and there would be no room left for me. I sat on the edge of the remaining middle couch. Our mother had followed Father to the base of the altar where two more couches were waiting, and each of my parents took one for their own.

As soon as they sat down, servants carrying trays laden with food filed into the hall. The low tables set in front of our seats became crowded with plates of all kinds of fish and crustaceans, as well as small bowls of the tough fruit that grew on scraggly trees at the edge of the sand. There was also a loaf of bread on each table with some hard cheese and a small knife. A carafe of wine was placed in the middle with small, foggy green glass cups, and my mother immediately reached for a cup when the servant placed the wine in front of her.

My sisters picked at a few of the dishes the moment they were set down, but I kept my hands folded in my lap.

“Father,” I said, as he clamped down on the tail of a whole cooked fish with his claw and dug out the meat with his other hand.

“What?” he said around his mouthful of fish. He was peering at me with narrowed eyes, which may have been because I had called him Father. I don’t think he liked being reminded that he had sired a mortal daughter.

Well, tough for him, I thought, but I’m the one who must live like this.

“Why have you and Mother come here?” I asked.

“Ah,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his human hand. “Right, well—Ceto, would you like to tell them?”

He looked imploringly at our mother, who was idly picking a scallop out of its shell and did not look up at her name. After another beat of silence with our mother refusing to even look up and acknowledge Father, Euryale let out a poorly suppressed giggle.

Father sighed.

“Your siblings will be coming to join us here,” he said finally, “to celebrate your sister Echidna’s wedding to Typhon. Expect for them to arrive tomorrow afternoon.”

I was already sitting precariously on the edge of my couch, my back straight, but as Father spoke, my sisters quit eating and scrambled into an upright position. I looked over at them and, after first sharing a look between each other, they looked over at me.

There were only a few situations in which my sisters and I allowed ourselves to be willingly grouped together; one of those instances was when our parents returned home, and another was in defense against our parents’ other children. While we all shared the same parents, the moments of our birth were so widely spaced that we had little in common with our siblings and treated them more like distant cousins when we were forced together. We were far from the most powerful offspring of Phorcys and Ceto, and we had discovered we stood a better chance against our elder relatives as a united front of triplets.

I studied my sisters’ faces carefully. Stheno and Euryale would remain connected at the hip with or without me, but I could see they were weighing the benefit of three over two against all our siblings. The last time the entire family had been gathered—when our older brother Ladon and his hundred heads had been assigned by our father to protect the golden apples in the Hesperides’ pompous little garden—we’d managed to fend off our relatives long enough to wedge ourselves into the corner of the banquet hall with a plate of oysters. Stheno seemed to be remembering this same moment, as she pressed her lips into a distasteful line and jerked her chin in acquiescence to my unspoken question.

A weight like a heavy cloak seemed to lift off my shoulders. Leaning back on my couch in an ungraceful slump, I realized I had been bracing for my sisters to close ranks against me, and so their decision to let me join them was a stark relief. I turned back toward my parents, who had either not seen our silent truce or not cared enough about our reaction toward the news of our siblings’ imminent arrival to show concern.

I pulled the loaf of bread from my table toward me and ripped off a chunk, since the tension I had been holding in my shoulders had transformed into a sharp pinch in my belly. There was a small dish of rosemary and olive oil next to the bread tray, and I dipped a corner of the bread into it before bringing it to my lips.

“Oh,” my father said suddenly, raising his attention off his plate, “the gods will be in attendance as well.”

Mother looked at him sharply. She must not have been informed of this beforehand. I knew how much our mother despised being the last to know about news and rumors that spread across land and sea.

“Which gods?” she asked.

“Who knows,” Father said, spitting out a fish bone. “None of those Olympians can keep a decision in their mind long enough to make it off their high-and-mighty mountain. I suspect that piddly excuse of a sea god will show his face just to spite me.”

“Not Zeus?”

Father waved his claw in the air, a move of dismissal that was encumbered by the size and weight of the red exoskeleton. I thought it might have been more imposing when he was underwater. “Zeus would sooner give up his throne than attend a primordial descendant’s wedding.”

“Is he still angry about the whole devouring thing?” Stheno asked, lazily pulling apart a shrimp.

“Wouldn’t you be?” I responded, before Father could. “All of Zeus’s brothers and sisters were eaten by Cronus, and he had to cut them out of the Titan’s stomach to free them. Would you not be angry, if you had to do the same?”

Stheno wrinkled her nose at me and sniffed, “Mother and Father would never eat us.”

“Ew,” Euryale added, once again perceptive of Stheno’s tone.

“Definitely not, since there are no prophecies that you will ever overtake them in legend, and that seems to be the main reason that parents eat their children,” I agreed, and took another bite of bread. “No prophecies yet, anyway.”

Father peered at me from over his plate again, and this time Mother turned her gaze on me as well, assessing for something, though I didn’t know what.

“Let us hope that none of you ever become worthy of legend, then,” she said eventually and lifted a glass of wine in our direction. Stheno and Euryale raised their cups tentatively, sharing a second-long glance, but I picked up my wine and tilted it toward my parents easily before taking a long drink. It was unlikely that I, a mortal, would ever overcome the legend of my godly parents and all the immortal siblings that came before me.

THE WEDDING WAS AT sunset the next day. Stheno, Euryale, and I were dressed to match once again, this time in long, flowing dresses of silver that resembled what our mother often wore. Our hair was pulled away from our faces and braided down our backs in one long plait, tiny shells woven in between the strands, the pale objects standing out starkly against my sisters’ hair but lost in the sandy tangle of mine.

Mother had overseen the ceremony. My sisters and I timed our arrival so that we were quickly ushered into our positions beside our parents’ other set of triplets, the Graeae, right as the wedding began. With one dingy eye and a single tooth between the three of them, the Graeae had turned toward us with eerie coordination and grinned toothlessly, except for Deino, who had possession of the tooth. Pemphredo had the eye. They whispered to one another as she looked us up and down, and even though Enyo was left sightless and toothless, she sneered at Euryale when my sister stuck out her tongue at them.

I scarcely paid attention to the wedding itself. The moment our mother finished speaking, we had led the way toward the banquet hall, which had been transformed overnight and was now crowded with tables and long benches. My sisters and I positioned ourselves at the back of the room.

“No, no, here,” I said as Stheno and Euryale moved to take seats closer to edge of the room. I sat in the middle of the table with the wall at my back. “This way they won’t be able to sneak up on us.”

“Easier to trap us, though,” Stheno said, but she slid into place on my right, and Euryale followed.

As the tables filled with our distant relations and the subjects of our mother and father’s oceanic jurisdiction, we kept a wary eye on the guests moving around us. I watched our brother Ladon take up an entire half of a table, his hundred heads and two hundred eyes blinking at every corner of the room. A few of the minor sea gods piled into the table closest to where our parents sat, like their proximity to the god and goddess would increase the odds of Mother or Father acknowledging them. Our parents sat at the front of the room at a long table positioned perpendicular to the others. Father was already digging into whatever fish had been placed in front of him, but Mother was watching the room as carefully as I was. When our gazes overlapped, she raised her eyebrows slightly as if to say What are you looking for? I raised my own eyebrows in response, What are you looking for? She waved me off and poured herself some wine.

Echidna and her new husband entered the hall to raucous cheers from the minor gods and sea folk, and I clapped as she passed our table. Echidna wove her way to the front of the room on her iridescent, serpentlike tail, the human half of her body almost completely bare save for the white fabric that was wrapped around her chest and crossed over her shoulders, the excess trailing behind her like two extra tails. She had broad shoulders and generous curves, which meant that a lot of dark skin was on display. A dusky green laurel wreath sat on her unbound hair.

Of all the children of Ceto and Phorcys, I liked Echidna the most. This was partly because she had never spoken of my mortality like it was something to be ashamed of, and partly because her hair looked a little like mine. It curled freely over her shoulders in long golden strands, and I felt a little less like an outcast in this family when she was around.

Echidna reached the table where our parents sat and took her place in the middle. Her husband, dark and stormy Typhon who towered over the minor gods with his bulk, his skin covered in long, scraggly cracks flowing with the red-hot magma of his volcanoes, followed right behind her.

With the bride and groom settled, the crowd turned back to their plates. A few people were still wandering around the room, some stepping up to the altar behind the wedding table to make a sacrifice to the gods of marriage or present a gift to the married couple. Suddenly, the steady din of the hall was punctured by a rush of wind and a pressure that made my ears pop. Every head rose up and turned toward the entrance.

A god was standing in the fading light of the sunset, his dark hair tumbling boyishly out from under a crown of coral. He was bare chested and deeply tanned, with a linen wrap around his waist and a trident held loosely in one hand. He held it like a walking staff, as if it were not one of the most feared weapons in all the seas.

“It’s Poseidon,” Euryale whispered.

“I know,” Stheno whispered back.

“Everyone knows,” I snapped at them from the corner of my mouth. I didn’t take my eyes off the god. As he stepped into the path between two tables and began to walk to the front of the room, I saw his eyes pass over me before skipping back. He looked at me and I felt the weight of his gaze on my face, my shoulders, my chest. I held my breath. Poseidon smiled, a glint of pearly teeth, and looked away.

I wanted to ask my sisters if they had seen the god of the sea look at me, but then Euryale gasped and pointed.

“Look, another one!”

Standing where Poseidon had just stood was indeed another Olympian, a goddess in a cinched white dress with a sword strapped to her hip and a plumed silver helmet resting on her dark hair. She was scanning the room as if searching for an enemy, her steel-gray eyes sweeping over our table with practiced efficiency. When she spotted Poseidon’s broad back moving toward my parents and Echidna, she scowled.

“Athena,” Euryale whispered unnecessarily.

The goddess of wisdom strode after Poseidon and managed to arrive at the wedding table at the same time he did. They spoke lowly to our parents, but the crowd had begun whispering and murmuring as soon as the gods arrived and so I could not hear what was being said. Eventually, Poseidon and Athena took their seats at the far end of the head table. They seemed to do so a bit unwillingly, though I wasn’t sure if they were objecting to have to sit next to the descendants of primordial gods or having to sit next to each other.

Poseidon reached for the wine and a cooked crab as soon as he sat down, looking out across the room. When his gaze turned my way, I quickly averted my eyes, though I didn’t know why. A strange feeling beneath my ribs urged me to not check and see if the god was looking at me again, though I could feel that same heaviness from before.

“Why is Athena here?” Stheno asked.

I took a sip of wine to clear my throat, which had gone dry, and said, “She’s probably here to represent her father, if Phorcys’s suspicion about Zeus is correct and he refused to attend. Athena’s wisdom would make her wary of dismissing an affair like this and making our parents angry.”

“Oh,” Stheno said mildly. “Olympians make everything so complicated.”

“Don’t say that too loudly with two of them present,” I admonished, even though I couldn’t help but agree. Stheno rolled her eyes.

When the noise of the hall rose back up to its comfortable volume, I spared a darting look over the wedding table. Poseidon was not looking at me, and I felt both relieved and disappointed. As I glanced over the hall one more time, my gaze snagged on a set of three heads moving in our direction with unnerving coordination. I straightened my spine and set my shoulders back.

“Be ready,” I said out of the corner of my mouth, and Stheno and Euryale both dropped the bites of food they had been preparing to eat and copied my posture.

The Graeae glided to a stop in front of us. They’d traded the tooth sometime after the ceremony, and so now it was Enyo who looked sightlessly down at us with a single-toothed grin as she began to speak.

“Word of the Gorgons has yet to cross our path,” she said, her voice thin and terrible. “Are our triplet sisters fated to remain on this lonely beach, unheard and unseen, their entire lives?”

“If I recall correctly, you three had yet to step one foot out of whatever cave you called home, hiding your faces, at our age,” I shot back. Experience had taught me that remaining silent under the Graeae’s attention did not encourage them to leave any quicker, but perhaps if I gave them the satisfaction of a response, I had a better chance to control the conversation.

“Indeed,” Enyo hissed, “but time does not matter for those who are not weighed down by it, little mortal Medusa. How long can you afford to waste away on this beach before you realize that your sisters will live long past your death, and longer after your bones have mixed with the sands?”

Stheno and Euryale shifted uncomfortably on either side of me. I had figured part of the reason they had allowed me back into their fold was that I was always the easiest target amongst our other siblings, but their connection to me meant that they could never avoid these attacks completely. This had been terrible to bear at first, but after years of practice trading blows with the Graeae and our older siblings, I now had the sharpest wits between the three of us.

I tilted my chin up. “Perhaps you would allow me to borrow that eye, so that I may see just how much longer I have to waste.”

Pemphredo reflexively cupped a hand protectively over their dingy eye, as if I was going to reach forward and rip it out of the socket.

“We would not let you taint it with your grimy mortal hands,” Enyo spat.

I was surprised when Stheno leaned forward and asked, “Could I hold it, then?”

Euryale made a face, crinkling the smooth skin between her brows in disgust, though I couldn’t tell if it was exaggerated or genuine.

“You would touch that nasty thing?” She sounded as if she was going to retch from the thought of it.

Probably genuine, then, I thought.

The Graeae scowled down at us, their thin limbs trembling in divine anger that would have made any other mortal quake in fear.

“Maybe if I had a bit of cloth or something to hold it with, so that it wouldn’t touch my hand,” Stheno amended thoughtfully.

“Our eye is a divine blessing that was gifted to us to protect,” Enyo said hotly. “You are not worthy enough to bear it.”

“It’s a blessing to only be born with one eye between the three of you?” I asked. “Are you quite sure?”

Stheno grinned like one of our mother’s sharp-toothed sharks, a look which I knew prefaced something cruel coming from her mouth. “I guess you are blessed that with only one eye you cannot see how truly hideous you all are.”

“Foolish children,” Enyo wailed, drawing the attention of the nearby guests. The vile power in her voice made my sisters and I lean back and away from the Graeae, who seemed to have grown in size in the last few seconds, and now loomed over us. Enyo’s voice was different, shaking and layered as if each of the sisters were speaking through her mouth. Now the Graeae had the attention of the entire hall and I could see the two Olympian gods watching us from the wedding table. “Listen well, for we have indeed looked beyond your current years, Gorgons, and we have seen the terrifying future that awaits you. Beware your looks.” Pemphredo turned their yellowed eye on me as Enyo continued, “Especially you, Medusa, only mortal of divine lineage, for you have a truly horrifying monster that awaits you.”

Their prophecy hanging in the air, the Graeae shrank back to their normal size and turned away from our table, moving once again in their eerie coordination as they left the hall. A tense silence followed their departure, and I felt every eye in the room turn to me. At the front of the room, Athena tilted her head, a move greatly exaggerated by the plume of her helmet, which she had yet to remove, and the weight of her gaze blanketed me. I tried to breathe but found that the air was stuck in my throat.

“So,” Stheno said to Euryale quietly, “that went well.”

Euryale didn’t respond. She was staring at me with a look on her face I had never seen before. She leaned forward, as if to ask me something.

I stood, jerking to my feet in a move that surprised my sisters and they flinched away from me as I clambered over the bench and fled the room.

THE SUN HAD SET over the horizon a few hours ago and the sea was dark as the night sky. I sat just above the reach of the waves, each crashing tide rushing up the sand as if to seize hold of me and drag me back into the water. I let the sound of the waves breaking on the shore wash out the ringing in my ears.

The Graeae always knew what nerve to pinch on both immortals and mortals alike, though they always seemed particularly cruel with their siblings.

“Gray-skinned freaks,” I muttered. I wrapped my arms around my bent legs and rested my chin in the divot between my knees.

“You are not wrong about that.”

I lifted my head and looked over my shoulder, ready to snap at whoever was behind me, but closed my mouth when I saw Echidna making her slow, curving way toward me. She left a long, winding trail in the sand behind her.

“Why are you here?” I asked, and then grimaced at my harsh tone. I was not angry at Echidna. “Should you not be inside, celebrating with your new husband?”

Echidna scof