Hallowed Ground (36 page)

Creed didn't hesitate.
 
.
 
The head of the first viper disappeared in a spray of blood and scales, and a second later the other joined it, bone splattering across the ground.
 
Creed's six-guns spit fire.
 
He saw the snakes blown to bits, but impossibly, he heard nothing.
 
There was no sound.
 
The bullets took chips out of the wooden floor, but the impact was silent.
 
The only sound in the entire place was the swell of the Deacon's voice.
 
It soaked into Creed's thoughts and confused him.

He stood there for a long moment, the snakes coiling around his feet then found himself taking a step backward.

The locket at his chest flashed hot tearing a cry from him.

The pain cleared his mind for a moment, and in that heartbeat of clarity he did the only thing he could think of.
 
He holstered his guns with quick flips of his wrists, drew two bullets from the loops on his belt, and jammed them into his ears.
 
It didn't silence the chanting, but it muffled it.
 
He glanced down at the floor.
 
The serpents seemed to have lost interest in him.

Colleen stood behind and to one side of the Deacon, and Creed saw she held something in her arms.
 
She swayed from side to side, and despite the rapt stares of everyone in the tent, she wasn't watching the Deacon.
 
She was intent on the bundle clutched tightly to her chest, and in a moment of ghastly realization, Creed knew it had to be the child he'd seen ripped from its mother the last time he'd been in this accursed camp.

He drew his guns again and moved slowly up behind the Deacon.
 
He thumbed back the hammer, knowing it would be a second's work to silence the preacher but he wasn't quite ready to shoot a holy man in the midst of a sermon.
 
It wasn't that he was afraid of going to hell.
 
Far from it.
 
Come the time, he'd happily put a slug between the Deacon's eyes.
 
No, it was all about the numbers.
 
He needed to know the stakes.
 
He needed to know what was going on with Brady and the others.
 
They appeared to have slipped into some sort of trance, lulled by the Deacon's weird chant.
 
That was enough for the preacher to earn a bullet as far as Creed was concerned, but not until he was certain the shot would set the others free.

He was only a few paces away from Colleen, so Creed targeted her and started forward.
 
The closer he came to the ex-whore – to the child – and to the Deacon, the more difficult it became to take that next step forward.
 
Each was harder than the last.
 
Despite the bullets in his ears, the words of the chanted sermon were working their mind-numbing magic.
 
He wasn't sure how long he could hold them off.
 
With a quick snap of his jaw, he bit his lip, drawing blood and bringing enough pain for another short moment of clarity.

Creed didn't hesitate.
 
He stepped up beside Colleen, brushed her shoulder with the back of his hand, and leaned in close.

"Colleen!" he rasped.

His words died soundless.

Like the gunshot, they failed to find life in air thickened by the Deacon's voice.
 

He leaned closer and spoke again, louder this time.
 

Colleen didn't react.
 

Creed saw his breath lift the hair from her neck, but she stared blissfully at the Deacon's back as he spoke.
 
She rocked very slowly back and forth.
 
The child squirmed now and then; apparently oblivious to whatever held the rest of those gathered in thrall.
 
It didn't scream – or if it did, Creed had no way of knowing.

There was no time.
 
Creed reached up, tucked the barrel of one gun under her chin, and pulled up and back hard.
 
At first it seemed as though she'd resist him and let the metal tear her throat out, but after a moment she spun.
 
Her eyes were glazed and unfocused, and he felt her pull against the tentative hold of the gun barrel on her chin.

"Colleen!" he screamed.

She blinked.
 
She stared back at him, her features shifting from the distant, empty void to some semblance of the girl he'd known.
 
She blinked, and then glanced stupidly down at the child in her arms.
 
Creed followed her gaze.

The thing glared back at him through the face of an infant but it was no child.
 
The eyes blazed with intelligence and hunger.
 
The tiny hands groped impotently at the air, fueling the creature's rage.
 
Colleen mouthed his name, and then she turned back toward the Deacon, and that fragment of clarity was lost.

Creed stared past her into the sea of faces, each set of eyes locked on the Deacon as his voice roared like a storm, raged like each of the named winds, tolling out the words and sounds and spells in some lost, ancient tongue.
 
Each of them held either a tin cup or beaker in their hands.
 
As Creed watched, they raised them.
 
Creed saw Brady standing at the end of the aisle, swaying as though mesmerized.
 
He raised his cup to his lips.

"That's it," Creed said.

He stepped up behind the Deacon, just as the Holy Man dropped his arms in a motion of completion.
 
The congregation drank their communion and the Deacon mouthed a single, final word.

"Remliel."

Creed stepped forward, drew both guns, and fired.
 
He was so close he expected to jam the barrels of both guns into the Deacon's back, but he met resistance.
 
It was like walking into a wall of clear mud.
 
It didn't stop him, not exactly, but it slowed him.
 
Light flashed from above, a huge burst of brilliant white light that should have blinded him – but didn't.

The Deacon turned and smiled.
 
Serpents struck, latching onto Creed's ankles and calves.
 
He fired again, and again.
 
The Deacon glanced down and smiled.
 
Blood oozed from the front of Creed's shirt where the bullets had failed to penetrate
 
their target and the agitated air had turned them back on him.
 
Colleen stepped up beside them, and the Deacon took the child from her arms.

A second flare of light exploded from somewhere near the Deacon's chest.
 
It pierced the child.
 
In that moment, whatever force protected the Deacon wavered, and Creed lunged forward, clutching the preacher tight.

A great cry rose, and the canvas roof was wrenched aside by huge talons.
 
Dark winged shapes swooped in low, and a rain of something – dirt?
 
Sand?
 
Something that glittered like diamonds and seemed to adhere to the Deacon like feathers to tar.
 
They clung to Creed as well, and the child.
 

Finally the light grew too bright, too intense, and the sound too loud.
 
Creed felt his lifeblood pulsing way, staining his shirt and pooling on the floor at his feet.
 
The snakes lapped at it.

"Damn you," he choked, spraying more blood with each syllable.
 
"Damn you to hell."

And everything grew dark.

The angel Remliel felt a shift in the essence that bound him to the Heavens.  He reached out, as he had reached out countless times, for the silver thread that tied him to his Lord.  It was the conduit of purpose, the beginning and end of thought.

He carried light to the world below.  His was the task of bringing the divine to the corporeal, the essence of God to the flesh of man.  He awoke the spark inside them that helped them divine their true nature…that was his purpose.

The flow of energy to the divine was a cool wash of strength, the thread that bound him to those below was tenuous, a glittering shimmer of light so weak - so frail - that it took all of his concentration and all of his will to maintain it.  His was a sacred duty.

Now something had changed.  He stretched out toward the shift with his will, intending to close the growing rift and set things right.  The change was not subtle.  It tore at the fabric separating the Heavens and the Earth - a veil protecting one from the other. The veil was so vital to the essence of creation that Remliel would gladly have divided his essence and healed the rift through eternity if his immortal flesh could protect it.

He reached back for the strength he needed, but again, something had changed.  Instead of growing wider and flooding him with energy and power, the conduit to his Lord shriveled.  Beneath him, a bright funnel of light descended.  He clutched at its walls.  He drew back and spread his spirit, blending it with his surroundings and weaving it into the fabric of heaven, but each time he made contact, that contact was ripped free, and the pressure from below - the remorseless drag where there had been no more than the most tenuous leak of light - yanked him downward into a soaring, diving spiral.  Behind him, the thread that bound him to his maker thinned and stretched and thinned some more.  It did not break, but it felt as though a blade of black ice had pierced his heart.

And then…it was dark.

The Deacon feared his heart would burst.  The heat and the pain of the talisman seared his flesh and threatened to erase coherent thought.  He dug his teeth into his lip to buy himself a different pain, a distraction to give him strength as he fought to hold on.  Colleen held the child out to him, and the ridiculous cowboy, already a dead man with the poison of vipers flowing through his veins and the lead of his own bullets buried in his flesh, reached out to him as well.
 
It was pitiful.
 
Comical.

The intensity of the light washing over and through him felt as though it ought to have burned, but it burst through his skin and made contact with the earth beneath his feet.  It bathed him, and it bathed the child, it bathed Colleen, whose face had first gone slack with surprise and now glowed with shock and wonder.

The cowboy's head dropped, and his grip loosened.  The light bathed him as well, but it would be a final experience before death.
 
The Deacon grinned fiercely and whispered the name again - the single word of power he'd changed in a ritual so ancient and powerful it transcended the boundaries between worlds.

"Remliel."

The cowboy lifted his head, despite the blood draining from his wounds and the venom coursing through his veins.  Something important shifted, and if he could have, in that instant, the Deacon would have pulled back and away.  The talisman burst its bonds.  A beam of light pierced the Deacon's flesh and joined him to the child.  It shot through the young flesh with the ancient eyes and found the cowboy as well.

The Deacon gasped, dragged air into tortured lungs, threw his head back…and screamed.

Creed felt the life seep out of him by slow degrees.  The snake bites burned like fire, and his grip on reality slipped.
 
He knew what it meant. He was as good as dead.  He had pierced the barrier, whatever it might be, but his bullets had fallen short, and then – like traitorous partners, had rebounded on him with lethal accuracy.  He thought back to the dark woman and the crow men.  He felt the locket burning like a shard of ice into the flesh of his chest.

The Deacon said something - something unexpected.  It shifted the ring of power and shot threads of light out into the tent, illuminating the faces of the crowd.  An arrow-slim shaft of light slammed into Creed's chest.  It drove the locket back into him so hard it felt as though the circle of metal was embedded in his chest.  He raised his head, saw the look of exultation and triumph on the Deacon's face, and felt a surge of power – bright, intense power – flood his being.

Something grappled with his thoughts, fighting for control, or to break free, but Creed seized the moment. He lifted both guns with reflexes like trapped lightning, snapped both triggers at the same time, and this time he drove his hands forward, drawing on the new strength that filled him.  The barrels pressed into the Deacon's belly and when the hammers fell, there
was
sound.

Creed couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd last heard sound of any sort.  The twin reports brought a grin to curl the corners of his mouth.  The Deacon stared at him in shock.  Colleen gasped and staggered back with the child.  Creed felt another flash of light sear his soul.
 
It went beyond the flesh.  The locket and the bright golden light combined and in that instant Creed felt something snatched from the child -- something dark and squirming and vital.  It drove into him, sucked from the tiny form and pounded through the bright silver and the graven images.