The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross (13 page)

“Once it is burned to the ground, the ashes should be scattered so no one can ever find the book again,” I said to Will.

“I have already given the orders,” he said, watching the flames start to rise above the theatre’s roof.

I got back on the horse and rode off into the night. I had no idea where to look for the demon, but I had to look for it. The sort of thing that would slaughter a theatre full of people wasn’t what you left to wander the city alone at night. I had no idea what to do when I found it. Demons are all different. When hunting them, I find it best to take one step at a time.

I rode aimlessly through the streets, until the flames of the theatre lit up the night sky behind me. I stopped and turned the horse around so I could watch the place burn for a moment. That fire would be but a taste of things to come if we didn’t find the demon.

And then I cursed and dug my boots into the horse’s side as I realized where the demon was hiding.

I rode at full speed and dismounted in front of the theatre without even coming to a complete stop. Marlowe and Will stood outside with a handful of guards, watching the building burn.

“Come with me!” I said and ran for the theatre entrance.

“Cross! What do you seek inside?” Marlowe cried after me. “I left the book there as you commanded.”

“The demon!” I yelled. “It hides in the flames!”

And with that I charged into the burning theatre.

The inside of the theatre was completely ablaze now. It wasn’t the sort of place any mortal could survive for long. But as you well know, I’m not a mortal. As for Will and Marlowe, they had their own tricks they’d picked up over the years.

We ran into the middle of the audience and looked around. The stage hadn’t quite caught yet—only a few parts of it here and there were on fire. The book sat untouched. As if waiting for someone to pick it up.

I looked around at the bodies. Where would the demon be . . . ? Ah. There.

I looked up at the box containing the dead Royal. It was engulfed in flames, the bodies burning like torches. Nothing could possibly live there. Nothing but a demon.

“I know you’re in there,” I said, coughing from all the smoke. “Why don’t you come out and get this over with?”

For several seconds, nothing happened. Then a low, rasping chuckle rose above the sound of the flames and the dead Royal sat up in his seat, still blazing.

“I was beginning to think nobody would find me,” the demon said. “And what a shame that would have been.”

“I should have known,” Marlowe said, shaking his head. Maybe he should have, but I was willing to give him a pass given the circumstances and all.

“Come out of that body if you know what’s good for you,” I said to the demon. That was actually more advice than a threat. The Royals wouldn’t approve of one of their own being possessed, alive or dead.

“I don’t think so,” the demon said. “I rather like this body. It has many secrets and I haven’t finished uncovering them all yet.”

“It’s been my experience that you won’t want to learn all the secrets of a Royal,” Will said. He opened his folio and poised the Black Quill above it, ready for action.

“Silence, scribe, or I will make your soul scream for all eternity,” the demon said. He must have been in The Nameless Book a long time if he didn’t know of Will or recognize the Black Quill.

It could have been worse, I reflected. It was only a demon and not one of the truly unspeakable horrors of The Nameless Book. It was the equivalent of a footnote in that tome. Still, if it was bound in the book, that meant it was trouble. It could be more than enough for the three of us to handle.

It was like the demon read my mind.

“I think I’ll be going now,” it said. “And I’ll be taking that book with me.”

“I don’t think so,” I said and showed it my blades. Marlowe stepped up to my side with his own blade and a grim expression on his face. Will just licked the end of his quill.

The demon laughed—not exactly the sort of response you want when you menace something with a weapon.

“Steel can’t hurt me any more than tooth and claw can,” the demon said. “And you will never know the secret of what can harm me.”

“I’ll warn you now then that we have our own secrets,” I said. I hoped the demon didn’t know me. And if it did, and it proved too much for the three of us to handle, well, I’d just shove one of the others at it and make my escape. Better to live to fight another day than get torn to shreds by a demon and resurrect who knows where, I always say.

The demon smiled at that. “There is nothing I love better than secrets,” it said. It drew the Royal’s sword, and fresh flames ran down the length of the blade, only these flames were as black as Will’s quill. Then it threw itself off the balcony at us, still burning, and brought that blade down over its head in a sweeping strike.

I dodged to one side and Marlowe the other. I threw up my blade to parry and Marlowe went for the kill, thrusting his blade up and into the demon’s chin. The point of his blade ripped through the top of the Royal’s skull, and the body collapsed down upon Marlowe, making him stagger back under its weight.

It all happened in the blink of an eye, but not so quickly that I didn’t notice the Royal’s body sagging lifelessly before Marlowe had even struck. The demon had already left the body by the time Marlowe’s blade kissed flesh.

I threw my blade out in a blind parry behind Marlowe’s back. I’d encountered a demon or two before in my life, and I had an idea how they thought. It turned out to be the right idea, as one of the corpses littering the ground suddenly threw itself up at Marlowe as the demon possessed it, striking at Marlowe’s back with a knife. My blade caught the knife before it could catch Marlowe, and then that body was falling, too, slumping to Marlowe’s feet.

“Ware!” Marlowe cried, shoving the body of the flaming Royal off his blade and at me. I sidestepped it and the dead Royal fell into another corpse rising from the ground, also armed with a knife. Everyone carried a knife or something longer in those days.

The newest corpse to rise stumbled over the Royal and fell to the ground, and then a ring of the dead rose around us, one body after the other. A man missing one of his arms stood, then started to slump back down almost immediately as I batted his punch away. At the same time, a headless man sprang to his feet, and Marlowe barely deflected his rapier. Then the headless man fell, too, at the same time as a man who had been disembowelled jumped up and lashed us with a strand of entrails. I kicked him away, and a man who’d been flayed threw himself at Marlowe, who sank a knife into his face with his spare hand. And on it went, one corpse after another rising and striking at us, then falling back down a second later. The demon was flying between the dead as fast as the blink of an eye, possessing each one for only a second or two before it moved on to the next.

This went on for several seconds, bodies rising and falling all around us, and then it started anew as the demon came full circle, animating the blazing Royal for a wild punch that grazed my head, then jumping back into the one-armed corpse for another punch that actually caught Marlowe a glancing blow, then back into the headless man for a rapier thrust that I narrowly managed to deflect away from my stomach. The demon moved so quickly between the bodies that when it left them they didn’t even have time to fall to the ground before the demon was back, possessing them for another attack. We were surrounded by a dozen or so corpses dancing like deadly marionettes on strings, striking at us over and over.

“It’s only a matter of time until he catches us,” I said, sliding away from an eyeless man’s knife thrust and then ducking under another punch to my head from the disembowelled man.

“You must think like a demon!” Will said from the edge of the scene, outside our macabre little circle.

And then the body of a man with gaping holes where his organs should have been leapt from the ground in front of Will, hands reaching for Will’s throat.

“I don’t think so,” Will said, scribbling quickly in the folio with the Black Quill. The corpse tripped over someone’s head and fell at Will’s feet. Will took a step back, out of arm’s reach.

“You do not know who you are crossing,” he said.

“No, but I would know,” the demon snarled, pushing the body up to its feet. And then the body fell back to its knees as the demon left it.

It did not return to the circle, though, as the corpses around us continued to fall and none rose up to attack again. It took me a second to figure out where the demon had gone. That is, where it had attempted to go.

Will kept on scratching in that folio with his damned quill, and then the body before him that the demon had last left suddenly flew backward, as if something had smashed into it. Or been smashed into it. It rose once more, shaking its head like it was trying to clear it.

“The Black Quill has already written my end,” Will said to the demon, his face expressionless. “You cannot possess me because you do not figure anywhere in that tale.”

Marlowe strode past me, toward the demon. “Do not hesitate to kill me if you must,” he said, and I knew what he meant. This demon was stronger and faster than any I had seen. Marlowe had enough experience to fend off a lesser creature, but perhaps not this one.

But this demon suddenly vanished, disappearing back into the dead. The corpse it was inhabiting fell back to the ground, empty of any animating force, but no others rose around us. I turned in a slow circle, as Marlowe stepped back to me, scanning the theatre himself.

“Beware now,” Will said. “Think not like a mortal, but think like a hellspawn instead.”

“If I was a hellspawn, I’d be trying to get away from us,” I muttered, eyeing the dead.

Then Marlowe sprang my way. “Behind you!” he cried, and I spun around.

It was the wrong move, I realized, even as I was doing it.

Think like a demon
, Will had said. And this demon was clearly dangerous and had been around much longer than any of us.

There was no demon behind me.

The demon was in Marlowe.

And then something gripped me and spun me about. Another force that took control of my body and turned me before I could turn myself. I thrust with my blade, and I caught Marlowe in the chest with it, even as his blade scored my side. Better that than my back, which he’d been targeting. The look on his face was a mingled expression of surprise and relief, as he fought the demon for control.

“There is no happy end,” Will said, scribbling away. “Not for any of us.”

Then the demon was back in the body of the Royal again, only this time it stayed there. It grinned a fiery grin at me as I caught Marlowe in my arms and slid my blade out of him as gently as I could.

“I don’t know what you lot are,” the demon said, “but you are closer to my kind than you are to mortals.”

“Words always did get me into trouble,” Marlowe said to me. He tried to laugh, but he choked on his own blood.

I didn’t have to look at the wound to know it was fatal. Will would have written nothing less with the quill when he had me turn and strike Marlowe. I’m not sure the Black Quill would have let him write something that didn’t end in death.

“I will raise you,” I said.

“Save your grace,” he said. “Dispatch the demon back to whence it came.”

The demon raised its hands as if receiving a blessing.

“The book is the only prison that can hold me,” it said. “But it would take the secret powers of a dozen angels to force me back into that particular hell.”

I didn’t have the power or secrets of a dozen angels. But I did have the grace of one angel, give or take. And I had my own secrets.

I lunged at the demon then and rammed my blade through the body it was possessing. I used a little of the grace to move fast enough it couldn’t leap into another body before I caught this one with my blade, but only a little. I was saving the rest.

The demon didn’t try to switch bodies again. Instead, it just grinned even wider at me. “Your grief has made you deaf with bloodlust,” it said. “I already told you your weapons cannot harm me.”

“I’m not trying to harm you,” I said. “I’m trying to do something far worse.”

And then I threw all my grace down that blade into the demon.

It would have been satisfying if it had shrieked or convulsed or exploded or something like that. Instead, it just looked confused.

“What have you done?” it asked.

“I have bound you,” I said, and the demon’s eyes widened as it understood.

The truth was I didn’t know how to bind a demon back then, although I’ve learned a few tricks since. Standing there in Marlowe’s burning theatre, I didn’t know how to force the demon back into The Nameless Book. But the grace. I understood grace and I knew what to do with it.

I kicked open the cover of The Nameless Book and looked away before I could read any of the words there. And then I took hold of that grace I’d put into the demon and forced it down into The Nameless Book.

The demon howled and lashed out with a burning hand suddenly turned into talons, but I dodged it. The demon’s realization of its fate was too late anyway, as the grace pulled it and the body it occupied into the book like I had thrown it into a void. Maybe I had in a way. I kicked the book shut again, and now there was no sign of the demon or the Royal’s body. They were gone, bound into The Nameless Book together along with the grace of the angel I’d killed so long ago. I kicked The Nameless Book again, this time into the flames, and then I turned back to Marlowe.

He lay on the ground, staring at The Nameless Book as it burned. His doublet was a bloodstained mess now, and his chin crimson with his own mortality.

“It was the only possible ending to this sorry tale,” Will said, but I ignored him. I lifted Marlowe in my arms and carried him from the burning theatre, as sections of the balcony began to collapse all around us.

I took him outside and laid him on the ground. I cradled his head on my lap and his lifeblood ran out over my hands as the royal guard looked on. Will came and stood at our side but said nothing. He slipped the folio and Black Quill back into his pockets.