The Gathering Dark (24 page)

“Oh, shit,” Nancy whispered.

Paula stepped up beside her and together they watched it tumble, pages ruffling, end over end, down and down until at last the tiny speck it had become landed soundlessly in the brush beside the river. The fall had seemed to last an eternity.

“Great,” Paula sighed. “We’re fucked now.”

Kuromaku had no idea how many hours had passed since he had led Sophie and the others to the church. The journey through the ravaged city of Mont de Moreau had taken them through abandoned streets, entire blocks on fire, and they had been set upon several times by demons.

The black-armored, scythe-limbed creatures had kept their distance, but their path had led them into skirmishes with two more of the lumbering, poison-quilled monsters they had seen at the site of the train derailment, as well as a small clutch of
J’ai-Pushti
, a race of tiny yet savage demons referred to in the oral histories of Central Africa.
J’ai-Pushti
were much like vicious goblins, no more than nine inches high, yet despite their size they were formidable when traveling in packs. Sophie and the family she had saved from the train were covered with scratches, but Kuromaku had made certain none of them were fatally injured.

In the church they had washed their wounds and made introductions. The couple were Alain and Antoinette Lamontagne. They had been traveling on holiday with their son Henri, planning to visit friends in Nice. Now their son seemed almost catatonic, sleeping for hours and only gazing around wide-eyed while awake, as though trying to convince himself it was only a bad dream.

Kuromaku could not blame him.

The Lamontagnes were handling the situation far better than he would have expected, however. Perhaps it was simply that they could not deny what they had seen and felt; perhaps it was nothing more than instinct and not wanting to die. The five of them, Alain carrying his son, had made it to the church alive.

But where to go from here?

Kuromaku had expected to find the church full of people fleeing the demons and the hellish vista their town had become. Where else would they run? Yet the church had been empty when they arrived, not even a priest here to pray with them, and it troubled Kuromaku deeply. There had been no blood, no evidence of violence, no broken windows—but the front doors of the church had been hanging wide open when they reached it. In the long hours since they had taken sanctuary within that holy edifice, no human had appeared. The only things that had tried to gain admittance were the
J’ai-Pushti
, but the magick inherent in the building’s architecture had kept them out, just as it kept out the huge, razor-quilled thing that hammered on the door even now.

It could not enter, but with each thunderous blow on the door, Kuromaku winced. He could hear the thing all the way back in the sacristy, where the priests who presided over this church prepared for each mass and where they kept their holy vestments.

The others remained in the front of the church, among the pews, in the shadow of the cross. Kuromaku retreated twice an hour to the sacristy to peer out the windows—the only panes in the church that were not part of a stained-glass biblical scene—yet the view of Mont de Moreau spread out before him never changed. New fires burned and others dimmed, but the heavy, dark orange sky remained and nothing human moved on the streets. Above the church he saw several of the winged carrion demons they had seen feasting on the dead upon their arrival. The things circled expectantly above, as though certain the death of those in the church was inevitable.

And it is, Kuromaku thought grimly as he gazed out the window. His brow furrowed as he turned their dilemma over in his mind. There was a small refrigerator in the sacristy and there had been a little food inside. They had finished the last of it more than two hours before, forcing the boy, Henri, to eat a bar of chocolate Kuromaku had found on a desk in the sacristy.

A creature of the shadows himself, Kuromaku would survive. But if they did not leave here, Sophie and the others would die of starvation in time.

The vampire swore under his breath and turned from the window. He pushed through a door and strode out onto the altar, a place where once upon a time his kind would never have dared to set foot. The light that glowed outside the stained-glass windows cast an eerie, disturbing illumination upon the church. At the bottom of the two steps that led down from the altar, Antoinette Lamontagne had created a bed for her son out of the priestly vestments she had gathered from the sacristy. Her husband sat in the first pew, speaking quietly with Sophie, expression intense.

“What is it?” Kuromaku asked.

Sophie looked up. She had slept very little and her features were drawn and pale. Kuromaku resolved for the hundredth time to find a way to get her free of this.

“A small argument,” she told him, her voice echoing in the vast church. “Alain thinks it would be sinful of us to drink the wine of the mass unless it is administered by a priest. He’s not sure about the holy water.”

Kuromaku stared at Alain grimly. He pointed to the man’s unconscious son. “God would deny water to this boy?” he asked in French.

The man’s mouth hung open slightly and he turned to stare at his son. His wife gazed up at him and then turned away. Alain covered his eyes as though afraid he might weep in front of them. Then he rose and went to Antoinette and Henri, and he lay down with his son, curling his body behind the boy’s, shielding his son with his own flesh.

Sophie slipped out of the pew and walked up to Kuromaku on the altar. She sat down on the top step and patted the place beside her. Troubled, his mind working at the puzzle of their predicament, he sat.

“We can’t stay here,” Sophie said, voice low, her words heavy with her Parisian accent.

“No,” he agreed.

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this. I wish you would share those thoughts.”

Kuromaku turned to face her, aware suddenly of her nearness, of the spare inches that separated them. She seemed so delicate, fragile, though he knew she was hardly that. In that moment he remembered her father, and what a fine man and loyal friend he had been. If Kuromaku could not keep Sophie alive, he would never learn if there might be something more between them, but more than that, his honor would be forever tainted.

She gazed at him and he knew that though she knew what he was, she saw him as a man. Sophie saw his heart. In the time since they had arrived—fifteen hours, perhaps eighteen—he had walked back and forth between altar and sacristy over and over, trying to determine the best course of action. Yet he had shut her out, and he realized now that had been unfair. He owed her honesty, at least.

Kuromaku gazed a moment at one of the stained-glass windows, an image of the Nazarene at Golgotha, bearing upon his back the very burden upon which he would soon be crucified. The agony depicted there was plain enough, but with the dark glow behind it, the scene was like something out of Hell itself.

He tore his eyes from it, focusing on Sophie again.

“Do you believe in evil? True evil?”

Her blue eyes shone as she gazed at him, seemingly untouched by the hideous light that filtered through the stained glass, and Kuromaku felt strengthened by them.

Sophie nodded.

“I do not think that I believe,” Kuromaku told her. Her eyes widened in surprise and he forged ahead. “I believe in cruelty, in lack of conscience, in pettiness and lust and tyranny. I believe in savagery and the predatory nature of beasts, human and otherwise. But I cannot say that I have ever been convinced of the existence of the sort of epic, operatic evil so many religions have put forward to motivate their subjects to behave.

“If you look into the eyes of a demon, of a monster, and you can see that it wants to kill you, wants to feel your hot blood gushing into its throat, then it is evil, is it not?” Kuromaku asked. He nodded but more to himself than to Sophie. “By that definition, I do not think I have ever seen anything as evil as the things that swarmed our train.”

He fell silent for several seconds then. Sophie reached out and took his hands in her own but kept her gaze steady, waiting for him to continue.

“You saw what happened in Paris,” he said at length. “The demon that made an incursion there was unable to enter Sacré-Coeur. We should be safe here, but even if we are, we cannot stay. We will starve to death. Our only choice is to escape the Hell that has swallowed this city. Otherwise we will die. The sooner we move, the better.”

Sophie took a deep breath and blew it out. “Do you think . . . what I mean is, you do not think that the whole world has become”—she gestured around them—“like this?”

“No. It may be simply that I cannot imagine it, but I do not believe it. Rather than making an incursion into our world, some Hell or another has absorbed Mont de Moreau. If we can reach the limit of the area that has been affected, we might escape this.”

Sophie leaned back in the pew, turned to gaze up at the carved figure of the crucified Christ. “Then we go,” she said quietly, her eyes ticking toward the Lamontagnes. “But perhaps a few more hours’ sleep first? To rest before we have to endure that again?”

“I do not think that’s wise,” Kuromaku admitted.

Something in his tone made her flinch. Sophie looked at him with suspicion. “What are you not telling me?”

Kuromaku ran his hand along the smooth wood of the pew. It gleamed as though it had been recently dusted, by cloth or by the palms of hundreds of the faithful, and he had no doubt that it had indeed.

“If you thought that Hell had come to Earth and you lived in the shadow of a church like this one, with its spire beckoning to you, would you not have run here? If you were the priest who had been given this flock to shepherd, would you not remain here to welcome them to a safe haven?”

Sophie frowned. “I might. Or I might wish to go out in order to minister to that flock. Perhaps to lead them here.”

Kuromaku nodded, but he was still troubled. He kissed Sophie on the forehead and rose from the pew. Leaving her to explain the terrible truth to the Lamontagnes, he returned to the sacristy only long enough to search for the communion wine. Uncorking the bottle he sniffed at its contents and wrinkled his nostrils. It was terrible stuff, and the last thing he wanted was for any of the humans with him to be even slightly intoxicated. Still, a small sip might give them a kind of strength water would not. Despite Alain’s hesitation, Kuromaku hoped that the man would look upon communion wine as a gift of grace.

He returned to the front of the church with the bottle. The moment he stepped out onto the altar, Antoinette Lamontagne rose and approached him, cursing him in French. Kuromaku understood the language but Antoinette’s words ran one upon the other with such speed that he could only grasp a fraction of what was said. With a frown he turned to Sophie, who ran both hands through her hair and froze a moment in frustration.

“They won’t leave,” Sophie told him. “They think it’s going to end. Eventually it has to end, they say, and why can’t we just wait here, where it is safe, until it is over or until someone else comes to help us? Antoinette refuses to take Henri out of here.”

Kuromaku swore under his breath. He kept his chin high, but his nostrils flared in annoyance. “Did you tell them that we cannot be certain it is safe here?”

“They don’t agree. It is the house of God, they say. Christ Himself looks down upon us here. They believe we are safest here.”

“Then we leave without them,” Kuromaku said gravely, his eyes narrowing. In Japanese, he swore again, cursing the Lamontagnes.

Sophie blinked and stared at him. She took several steps closer to Antoinette so that now the two women were facing him together.

“You can’t leave without them,” she said. “We cannot leave them here to die.”

“If they are right,” Kuromaku declared, “they will be perfectly safe and we will be the ones at risk.” He narrowed his gaze further so that he was staring at Sophie through slitted eyes. “Do not do this. If they will not come, that is their choice. But I will not leave here without you, Sophie. I . . . will not let anything happen to you.”

Sophie let her gaze drift toward the ground. “We can’t leave them here.”

Frustration boiled up inside him and Kuromaku stormed past the women to glare down upon Alain and his sleeping son.

“Fool,” he hissed. Kuromaku raised the wine bottle and continued in his imperfect French. “We do not know what has happened. How bad it is. There is no way to know if it will end, or when. We must find the world again,” he said, gesturing at the windows.

Alain snapped at him, something unintelligible that Kuromaku interpreted as meaning that God would protect them, given the man’s gestures toward the cross.

Kuromaku whipped around to look at Sophie, who shrank back from him as though in fear. He softened, sighed, and shook his head. “God cannot keep you all from starving. There will be no manna from heaven in this place.”

Antoinette and Alain were silent. Kuromaku stared at them and then at Sophie, who seemed implacable. He would not leave here without her, but she would not leave without the damnably stubborn parents of a catatonic child. The idea of simply sitting here and waiting drove him wild and he considered forcing Sophie to accompany him. But only for a moment. It was impractical. She would struggle, make them more of a target, and they would never survive it.

And afterward she would hate him for abandoning these people.

“Damn it!” Kuromaku cried, and he hurled the bottle of communion wine at the altar, where it shattered and spilled the blessed blood of grapes across white marble.

At the sound of the breaking glass, little Henri Lamontagne opened his eyes and began to scream. The boy shrieked as though he had woken from the most terrifying of nightmares, rather than
into
one. It was a piercing wail that rose in pitch and volume, so that his father, who was closest to him, clapped his hands over his ears and shouted at the boy to be silent.

Henri kept screaming. Two words, over and over.

“Les Chuchotements!”