How to Court a Gorgon

About This Novel

How to Court a Gorgon is a romantasy novel, following Here are the detailed character profiles for How to Court a Gorgon, ordered by importance:, .

Opening Line

"The Ministry of Mythological Affairs sent its summonses in envelopes the color of dried blood, sealed with a stamp that looked like a screaming laurel wreath."

The Ministry of Mythological Affairs sent its summonses in envelopes the color of dried blood, sealed with a stamp that looked like a screaming laurel wreath. Evelyn found it waiting for her on the doormat at 5:47 in the morning, wedged between a takeout menu for a place that had closed three years ago and a flyer for a dryad's yoga retreat in the hills.

She stood in the doorway of Thorns & Vines in her bare feet, the marble cold against her soles, and stared at the envelope like it might bite. The shop was quiet behind her—the soft drip of the watering can she'd left on the counter, the whisper of the hanging ferns in the morning breeze. The air smelled of crushed stems and wet earth and the faint, sweet rot of compost. It smelled like her grandmother, who had taught her that roses were liars: they promised beauty and delivered thorns, and that was the most honest thing about them.

The envelope hummed. Not audibly, but Evelyn could feel it—a low vibration against her fingertips, like a tuning fork pressed to her sternum. Official Ministry correspondence was spelled to announce itself. It wanted to be opened. It wanted to be *read*.

"Patience," she told it, and set it on the counter while she made coffee.

The shop was still asleep. Morning light came through the front window in long, golden slabs, illuminating the dust motes that drifted through the air like tiny, suspended stars. Evelyn moved through her routine with the ease of long practice: water the orchids, check the ferns, rotate the pots on the eastern shelf so they caught the sun. Her hands knew the work better than her mind did. They'd been doing it since she was tall enough to reach the workbench, since her grandmother had lifted her onto a stool and placed a seedling in her palm and said, *"This one's yours, little thorn. You'll know what it needs."*

She hadn't known, not then. But the seedling had known her. It had grown toward her voice, its leaves turning to follow her as she moved around the shop. That was the gift—the Thorne gift, passed down through generations of women who could coax life from stone and bloom from despair. Evelyn's mother had had it too, before she died. Evelyn didn't like to think about that. She liked to think about the flowers.

The coffee was ready. She poured it into her grandmother's favorite mug—chipped at the rim, painted with fading daisies—and carried it to the counter. The envelope sat there, patient and malevolent, its red wax seal catching the light.

"Fine," she said, and tore it open.

The letter inside was written in the Ministry's distinctive bureaucratic script: cramped, precise, and designed to obscure rather than reveal. It informed her, in language so convoluted it practically required a translator, that her services had been requisitioned for a delivery of high-priority floral materials. The recipient was specified in a separate paragraph, as if the Ministry itself couldn't bear to write the name in the same sentence as the word *delivery*.

*Medusa*, the letter said. *Former priestess of Athena. Current resident of the Kerameikos district. Threat level: EXTREME. Do not make eye contact. Do not engage in conversation. Do not deviate from the approved delivery procedure.*

Evelyn read the letter three times. She read it a fourth time, slowly, to make sure she wasn't hallucinating.

Then she laughed.

It wasn't a happy laugh. It was the kind of laugh that comes out when you've just realized the universe has a sense of humor and you're not sure whether to be delighted or terrified. Evelyn set the letter down, picked up her coffee, took a long sip, and laughed again.

"Medusa," she said to the empty shop. "Right. Of course. Why not."

The ferns rustled, as if they were laughing too.

---

The morning passed in a blur of preparation. Evelyn told herself she wasn't nervous. She told herself this was just another delivery, no different from the thousand others she'd made over the years—the wedding bouquets, the funeral wreaths, the apologies and declarations and quiet, desperate pleas that people couldn't put into words. She'd delivered flowers to a harpy's nest on the roof of the National Library. She'd delivered a corsage to a cyclops's date (he'd popped it like a grape, but he'd been so pleased). She'd delivered a funeral arrangement to a vampire's crypt and had to fight off a flock of bats for the privilege.

Medusa was just another client.

Except she wasn't. Medusa was the only client in Evelyn's career who could turn her to stone with a glance. The only client whose very name made the Ministry issue warnings in triplicate. The only client who had never, in two thousand years of existence, received a bouquet from anyone.

Evelyn's hands were shaking as she gathered the roses.

She'd grown them herself, of course. She grew everything herself. The greenhouse in the back of the shop was her sanctuary, a glass-and-iron cathedral where she could coax life from seed and cutting, where she could talk to her plants and they talked back in the only language they knew—growth, bloom, wither, thrive. The roses she'd chosen for this delivery were a deep, dark crimson, almost black at the edges. She'd bred them over the course of three years, crossing a hardy damask with a wild mountain rose she'd found growing in a crack in the Acropolis wall. She called them "Midnight Blood," though she'd never told anyone that name. She'd never had a reason to.

Now she cut them from their stems with her grandmother's shears, and the blades hummed.

It was a subtle vibration, barely perceptible—the kind of hum you feel in your teeth rather than hear. Evelyn paused, the shears halfway through a stem, and frowned. The shears had been her grandmother's, and her grandmother's mother's before that, and so on back through generations of Thorne women. They were old, older than the shop, older than the city itself, maybe. The handles were worn smooth with use, the blades sharpened so many times they were thin as whispers. They had never hummed before.

"What?" Evelyn asked them.

The shears hummed again, more insistently. A warning, maybe. Or a reminder. Her grandmother had always said the shears knew when something important was being cut.

Evelyn finished the cut and laid the rose on the workbench. The hum faded, but it didn't disappear entirely. It lingered in the air like a struck bell.

"Noted," she said, and reached for the next stem.

The bouquet came together slowly, deliberately. Evelyn worked with the focus of a surgeon, her hands steady now that she had a task to perform. She trimmed each stem at an angle, stripped the lower leaves, arranged the roses in a loose spiral that would open as it traveled. She added sprigs of rosemary for remembrance, a few stems of lavender for calm, and a single white anemone at the center—protection against evil, according to her grandmother's old notes. She didn't know if it would work against a gorgon, but it couldn't hurt.

The final touch was the hardest.

Evelyn set down the bouquet and went to the back room, where she kept her supplies. She returned with a small glass vial and a sterilized needle. Her hands were shaking again as she pricked her finger, squeezed a few drops of blood into the vial, and mixed it with the rose water she'd prepared earlier.

The Ministry's letter had been explicit: the bouquet had to be stabilized. Roses grown by a Thorne were powerful, but they were also volatile—they responded to the emotions of their creator as much as their recipient. If Evelyn delivered a bouquet that was too full of her own fear, it would wilt before Medusa ever saw it. The blood was a stabilizer, a way of grounding the magic in something physical. It was also, Evelyn suspected, a way of binding her to the delivery. If something went wrong, the Ministry would know.

She added the blood-and-rosewater mixture to the vase, watching as it swirled and settled. The roses seemed to sigh, their petals deepening to a richer shade of crimson. The anemone at the center trembled, then stilled.

"There," Evelyn said, wiping her hands on her smock. "That's done."

She looked at the bouquet for a long moment. It was beautiful, she thought. The most beautiful thing she'd ever made. It was also, very possibly, the most dangerous thing she'd ever made.

The shears hummed again, a low, warning note.

"I know," she told them. "I know."

---

The Ministry of Mythological Affairs was located in a brutalist building near Syntagma Square, a monument to bureaucratic despair that looked like it had been designed by someone who hated windows. It loomed like a concrete sarcophagus, its angles defying the pastel facades of the neoclassical buildings around it. Evelyn had been there twice before—once to renew her florist's license, and once to contest a fine for "unauthorized magical plant cultivation" (she'd been growing nightshade for a client, which the Ministry had deemed a public safety hazard). Both visits had been exercises in patience, requiring her to navigate a labyrinth of desks, forms, and clerks who seemed to have been trained in the art of looking supremely unhelpful.

This visit was different. There was no line, no queue, no waiting. A clerk in a gray suit met her at the door and escorted her through the building with the brisk efficiency of someone who had been told to treat this as an emergency.

"You're the florist?" the clerk asked, not looking at her.

"I'm Evelyn Thorne, yes."

"Right. The bouquet?"

"In the vase."

"Good. The shield will be provided at the gate. You'll need to sign for it."

"The shield?"

The clerk glanced at her, finally, with something that might have been pity. "You'll see."

They led her to a small office on the third floor, where a woman with sharp cheekbones and a sharper suit was waiting. The nameplate on her desk read *A. Papadakis, Deputy Director of Mythological Affairs*. She didn't stand when Evelyn entered, but she did gesture at a chair.

"Ms. Thorne," she said. "Thank you for coming."

"I didn't have a choice," Evelyn said, sitting. "Your letter was very… thorough."

Papadakis's mouth twitched, almost a smile. "The Ministry is thorough about everything. Especially when it comes to Medusa."

"Right. About that." Evelyn leaned forward. "I've delivered flowers to a lot of people. Nymphs, harpies, the occasional minotaur. But I've never delivered flowers to a gorgon. I didn't even know gorgons received flowers."

"They don't," Papadakis said. "That's the point."

She slid a folder across the desk. Evelyn opened it. Inside was a dossier on Medusa—photographs of a walled garden, notes on her habits and movements, a risk assessment that ran to several pages and used words like *lethal* and *unpredictable* and *do not approach*. There was also a summary of the delivery request, which was brief and unsigned.

"The client is anonymous," Papadakis explained. "They've paid a substantial fee for a bouquet to be delivered to Medusa's residence. The Ministry has approved the delivery, with conditions."

"What conditions?"

"You'll be given a mirror-shield. It will allow you to see Medusa without meeting her gaze directly. You will not look at her without the shield. You will not remove the shield under any circumstances. You will not engage in conversation beyond the minimum required to complete the delivery. And you will leave the bouquet at the gate, not enter the garden."

Evelyn stared at her. "You want me to leave a bouquet of roses at a gorgon's gate and run?"

"We want you to complete the delivery safely. Medusa is not… she's not like other clients. She's been isolated for centuries. She doesn't respond well to unexpected visitors."

"Then why is someone sending her flowers?"

Papadakis's expression flickered—a crack in the bureaucratic mask. For a moment, she looked almost human. "Because someone, apparently, cares about her. The Ministry doesn't question the motives of its clients. We only facilitate the logistics."

Evelyn looked back at the dossier. The photographs of the garden showed high stone walls, overgrown with ivy. A gate, iron and rusted. Beyond it, a glimpse of green—dark, tangled, wild. It looked like a place that had been forgotten by the world. It looked like a place that had forgotten the world.

"I'll do it," she said.

Papadakis nodded, as if she'd expected nothing less. "The shield will be waiting for you at the gate. You have until sunset."

---

The garden was in the shadow of the Acropolis, hidden in a tangle of narrow streets that the tourists never found. Evelyn had to park her van three blocks away and walk, carrying the bouquet in a ceramic vase wrapped in wet cloth to keep the roses fresh. The sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows across the cobblestones, and the air smelled of jasmine and dust and something else—something ancient, like stone that had been baking in the sun for a thousand years.

She found the gate at the end of a dead-end street, half-hidden behind a tangle of bougainvillea. It was exactly as the photographs had shown: iron, rusted, overgrown with ivy. A small plaque was bolted to the wall beside it, worn almost smooth with age. Evelyn squinted at it, reading the faded letters: *Beware the Gorgon's Gaze.*

"Comforting," she muttered.

The mirror-shield was waiting for her, propped against the wall like someone had left it there for the trash. It was a rectangle of polished bronze, about the size of a serving tray, with a handle on the back and a small inscription along the edge: *Property of the Ministry of Mythological Affairs. Do Not Remove.*

Evelyn picked it up. It was heavier than it looked, and cold against her palm. She raised it to her face, checking her reflection—copper hair escaping its bun, a smudge of dirt on her cheek, eyes too wide and too bright. Green eyes, with the faintest rim of gold. A nymph's eyes. Her mother's eyes, before the sea took her.

She looked like someone about to do something very stupid.

"Right," she said, and lowered the shield. "Here goes nothing."

She knocked on the gate.

The sound echoed in the narrow street, loud and final. Evelyn held her breath. The bouquet was heavy in her other arm, the roses swaying slightly in the evening breeze. She could feel them pulsing with her heartbeat, their petals darkening as her anxiety spiked.

*Calm down*, she told herself. *You're a professional. This is just another delivery.*

The gate creaked.

Evelyn's heart hammered. She raised the shield, positioning it so she could see the gate's reflection without looking directly at it. The bronze was polished enough to show her a distorted image—the gate swinging open, the darkness beyond, the hint of green.

And then a voice.

"You're late."

It was low and wary and beautiful, like honey mixed with gravel. It was the kind of voice that could read poetry and make you weep. It was the kind of voice that could also, Evelyn suspected, make you turn to stone.

She swallowed. "I'm sorry. Traffic."

There was a pause. Then the voice said, "Traffic."

"In Athens. It's terrible this time of day. You wouldn't believe it."

Another pause, longer this time. Evelyn could see a figure in the reflection—tall, slender, draped in something dark. The figure moved closer to the gate, and Evelyn's grip on the shield tightened.

"You're not afraid," the voice said. It wasn't a question.

"I'm terrified," Evelyn said honestly. "But I'm also a professional. And I have this shield thing." She gestured with the bronze rectangle. "So I'm probably fine."

The figure stopped. In the reflection, Evelyn could see the outline of a face—pale, sharp, framed by something that moved. Something that writhed. The snakes, she realized. Medusa's hair was snakes.

Her heart did something complicated in her chest.

"You're the florist," Medusa said.

"Evelyn Thorne. I own Thorns & Vines, in the Plaka. We specialize in—" She almost said *love bouquets*, but stopped herself. "—custom arrangements. I have a delivery for you."

"I didn't order anything."

"I know. It's from an anonymous client. The Ministry approved it." Evelyn set the bouquet down on the ground in front of the gate, careful to keep her eyes on the shield. "I'm just supposed to leave it here and go."

She took a step back. The roses were still pulsing, their petals dark and rich in the fading light. She could feel them reaching toward the garden, toward the figure behind the gate, as if they recognized something there. As if they were drawn to it.

"Wait," Medusa said.

Evelyn stopped. "Yes?"

"The flowers. What are they?"

"Roses. Midnight Blood, I call them. They're—" She hesitated. "They're special. They grow in difficult conditions. They thrive where other flowers would die."

The figure behind the gate was still. Evelyn could see the reflection of the snakes—dozens of them, writhing slowly, their scales catching the light. Some of them were watching her. Some of them were watching the roses.

"I haven't seen roses in centuries," Medusa said quietly. "They don't survive my breath. Nothing does."

"These will," Evelyn said. She didn't know why she said it. She didn't know why she believed it. But she did.

The gate creaked again, and Evelyn tensed. But the figure didn't move. It just stood there, a shadow in the reflection, watching her.

"You should go," Medusa said. "Before the sun sets."

"Right." Evelyn took another step back. "The delivery's complete. I'll—I'll let the Ministry know."

"Thank you," Medusa said. And there was something in her voice that made Evelyn's chest ache—something raw and uncertain, like a woman who had forgotten how to receive kindness.

Evelyn turned away. She walked back down the narrow street, past the tangle of bougainvillea, past the faded plaque, past the point where she could still see the garden gate in the bronze shield's reflection. She didn't look back. She didn't trust herself to.

It wasn't until she reached her van that she realized she was still holding the shield. She'd forgotten to return it. She'd forgotten to sign for it. She'd forgotten everything except the sound of Medusa's voice, low and wary and beautiful, saying *thank you* like it was a foreign language.

Evelyn climbed into the van, set the shield on the passenger seat, and sat there for a long moment, staring at the dashboard.

"What did I just do?" she whispered.

The shield didn't answer. But the roses, still pulsing faintly in the vase in the back, seemed to hum with a quiet, satisfied note—like they knew something she didn't.

---

That night, Evelyn dreamed of stone.

She dreamed of a garden overgrown with ivy, its walls crumbling with age. She dreamed of a woman standing at the center, her hair a crown of serpents, her eyes the gold of a setting sun. She dreamed of roses blooming at the woman's feet, crimson and dark, and she dreamed of reaching out to touch them.

She woke with her hand outstretched, reaching for nothing.

The shop was quiet. Moonlight filtered through the front window, casting silver shadows across the workbench. Evelyn lay in her bed above the shop, staring at the ceiling, and tried to convince herself that she'd imagined it—that the dream was just her subconscious processing the day's events, that the voice in her head was just her own voice, that the ache in her chest was just hunger or fatigue or something equally mundane.

But she could still feel it. The pull of the garden. The weight of Medusa's gaze, even in reflection. The way the roses had reached toward her, as if they recognized something in her that Evelyn herself couldn't name.

She rolled over and reached for her phone. The Ministry's summons was still on the counter downstairs, but she'd taken a photo of it earlier. She opened the photo and read the letter again, looking for something she might have missed.

*Do not engage in conversation*, the letter said. *Do not deviate from the approved delivery procedure.*

Evelyn had engaged in conversation. She'd deviated from the procedure. She'd told Medusa the roses would survive her breath, and she had no idea if that was true.

She set the phone down and stared at the ceiling again.

"You're a professional," she told herself. "You're a professional, and you're not going back there. The delivery is done. The client is satisfied. You're going to forget this ever happened and go back to your normal life."

The words felt hollow. They felt like lies.

Evelyn closed her eyes and tried to sleep. But the dream came back—the garden, the woman, the roses blooming in the dark—and this time, she didn't wake up.

She walked toward the garden gate, and she knocked.

And a voice, low and wary and beautiful, said: "You came back."

Evelyn opened her mouth to answer, but before she could speak, she woke up.

The morning light was streaming through the window, and the shop was quiet, and the roses in the back room were blooming—all of them, every single one, their petals dark and rich and pulsing with a life they hadn't had the night before.

Evelyn sat up in bed and stared at the wall.

"Oh no," she said.

The roses had never bloomed like this before. Not all at once. Not without her tending them. They were responding to something—something that had happened, something that had changed.

Something that had, Evelyn suspected, everything to do with the delivery she was supposed to have completed.

She got out of bed and walked to the greenhouse, her bare feet cold on the floor. The roses were waiting for her, their petals turned toward the window, toward the direction of the Kerameikos district, toward the garden where Medusa lived.

Evelyn stood among them, surrounded by crimson blooms, and she knew—with a certainty that settled in her bones like a stone—that she was going to go back.

She didn't know why. She didn't know what she would say. But she knew she couldn't stay away.

The shears hummed on the wall, a low, satisfied note.

"Shut up," Evelyn told them.

They hummed louder.

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