The Gathering Dark (34 page)

“Turn her over!” Peter snapped.

Heads turned, eyes glared at him. Three of the women in the circle began to rise as if to protect Cat from this stranger in their midst, and the men across the room started to move toward him.

“Who the hell is he?” hissed a Latina girl who looked barely old enough to drive.

Nikki instinctively moved closer to Peter and Keomany stepped between him and the circle.

“Tori,” Peter said firmly.

The woman looked up, her carved ebony features hard with fear.

“I might be able to help her, at least for a little while,” he told her, raising his hands so they all could see the glow of blue fire that crackled from his palms. “And together we might all be able to fight this. But it has to be together.”

Tori sneered at him, lips curling back from strangely sharp teeth. “With your dirty magick, you’re going to heal Gaea?”

Keomany held up a hand in front of a woman who tried to move closer to Peter, stopping her there.

“No,” Peter said. “But I will find the power that’s causing this. I’ll find it, and I’ll stand, and I’ll fight. The healing will be up to all of you. I’m not your enemy.”

His words echoed in the otherwise silent room, the only motion that of the flickering candle-shadows on the walls.

“Turn her over,” he instructed again.

A fresh tear slipped down Tori’s face as she stroked her unconscious lover. At length she turned and slid her hands delicately beneath Cat, careful to avoid the carved map of her flesh. Keomany slipped through the circle to help her and together they gently turned Cat onto her belly, her hair covering her face. Her left breast, partially crushed beneath her body, bulged out from beneath her splayed arm. On that soft whiteness, the shores of Iceland had been delineated in slit skin. As her body was turned, Peter saw more wounds, deep and numerous. Some of them were places the news had already reported as afflicted, others were a surprise to him.

Only one mark upon Cat Hein’s body interested him, however.

On her back was a bright red welt smaller than a dime. Peter studied the macabre map of her skin and knew it was somewhere in Europe. He snapped his gaze up to glare at the men watching him cautiously from across the room.

“One of you get me a world map, right now!”

“What are you doing?” Tori demanded. “I thought you said you could help her.”

This last was a grief-stricken plea. Peter ignored her, glaring at the men until one of them moved to a bookcase and began to scan through titles, looking for an atlas or an encyclopedia, anything that would have what Peter required.

“That’s a new one,” Keomany told Tori softly, pointing at the welt on Cat’s back.

Nikki was speaking to all of them, however. She glanced around defiantly. “Wherever that is, it’s where the darkness is going to fall next. Your friend is in terrible pain and we want to help her. But don’t you think Gaea’s touched her like this for a reason? Your goddess is in agony and she’s connected to Cat the only way she knows how right now. She’s showing us where she hurts, showing us where she’s been blooded, so we can help her.”

Tori softly sobbed and lay down beside Cat, brushing the hair from the unconscious woman’s face, whispering soft intimacies to her that everyone tried not to hear.

“Got it,” said one of the men, a bearded man who looked more like a biker than some earth magician. He strode over to Peter with a thick book and handed it over. “It’s a history book, but it’s got world maps. Maybe not exactly up to date, but—”

“Fine,” Peter said quickly, snatching the book up and leafing it open. He could have told the man that he had spent centuries walking this world and had no problem at all comparing age-old geography with that of the present day. He remembered. But what would be the point? The man would not have understood.

In the back of the book was a foldout map of Europe, circa 1881. With the book open, Peter stepped through the circle. The women parted reluctantly for him. Whatever chanting or praying they had been doing around Cat before he and his friends had arrived, it was long forgotten now. Several candles guttered out, disturbed by his passing.

Peter held the book out and compared it to the grotesque topography on Cat Hein’s bare flesh.

“Spain,” he said aloud. He had thought it was Spain but now confirmed it. Carefully he held his finger above the map, then tapped the name of a city written there in boldface black.

“There,” he said, his voice a rasp. “The Tatterdemalion’s creatures are going there next.”

He dropped the book, let it thump to the floor, and held out his hands above Cat’s body. Blue fire spread from his fingers and expanded. Two of the men swore and threw themselves backward. The other raced toward Peter with a cry of alarm but Nikki grabbed the man and pushed him backward. He tried to fight her, but Nikki could hold her own. She tripped him and sent him sprawling to the ground.

Most of the earthwitches scattered. Several began to call upon Gaea and a frigid wind lashed at Peter, coming up from nowhere, impossibly, and creating an icy bluster around him.

“Please!” Tori cried, but Peter did not know if she was appealing to him to stop, or to continue.

The spell he had cast was a ward of sorts, and his sorcery lifted Cat from the ground, her arms and hair dangling beneath her. A cocoon of blue light swirled around her, holding her there aloft.

Her wounds began to disappear.

“What’d you do to her?” Nikki asked.

But it was Tori to whom Peter explained. “I’ve cut her off for now. Put a barrier between Cat and her goddess. Gaea can’t touch her and Cat won’t have any access to earthcraft for now. Just for a while. Just until this is over.”

“It’s going to kill her, to be cut off from nature,” Tori said sadly. “When she wakes up—”

Peter stared at her. “Cutting her off was the only way to keep her alive. When this is done, I can restore her. But for now we have to take the gift that Gaea gave her and stop this before there’s nothing left of this world to save.”

Tori nodded. She glanced once more at the strange spectacle of her lover bathed in blue light, hovering above the ground, and then she rose. Slowly, she embraced Keomany and then walked over to Peter and Nikki.

“Where is it?” she asked. “That new wound. Where the darkness is attacking now. Where are you going?”

“It’s in Spain,” Peter said. “A small town there called Ronda. I only wish I knew how quickly the darkness claims these places, how fast the Whispers take over.”

The prone, levitating form of Catherine Hein shuddered. Cat moaned, there in that blue, sorcerous light. She spoke three words that, though muttered softly, as though talking in her sleep, everyone in the room heard with utter clarity.

“Whispers travel fast.”

Only the gleam of the moon illuminated the interior of the Mondragon Palace. Night had fallen in Ronda and the building was closed now to tourists, who would be left to wander the streets or return to their hotels to await the traditional late Spanish dinner hour. The courtyards and gardens were empty, though the fountains still burbled and the wind swept up off the valley floor to rustle the leaves in the trees. Pears bobbed at the ends of branches on the lone fruit tree in the garden.

Just inside, in the moon-glazed dark, a droplet of light appeared seven feet above the ground. It glistened and grew heavy and then it slipped slowly toward the tile floor, a tear drop on the face of reality. As it slid downward, it left a streak of silver behind, a gleaming slit that began to pout open and quickly blossomed until it grew to the shape of an enormous rose petal. Its surface was like a liquid mirror, absorbing and reflecting back the moonlight within the palace.

The tear drop touched the tiles.

A black, razor-taloned hand emerged from within the silver portal, sending ripples to its edges. It was a tentative hand, reaching and searching, as though cautious of what it might find.

Then the first of the Whispers slipped through into Ronda. Others followed. Safe in the moonlight, they skittered through the city in the night black shadows, investigating each cellar and enclosure so that they might wreak dark havoc upon Ronda and still be able to secrete themselves before dawn’s light, hiding until the second night, when their master would come to claim them, and this new city, for his own.

Jack Devlin hated to fly under normal circumstances. Today’s flight was anything but. Most of the world’s major airlines had severely curtailed departures as the news had broken of the crisis that had now affected much of the globe. Flights that went anywhere near affected areas had to be rerouted due to fear of what might happen if a plane flew into affected airspace. Then the cancellations had begun. Pilots called in sick, passengers gave up their travel plans and went home. Bad enough to wonder what might happen to your own hometown, but on board a plane flying overhead, one had to think about the consequences if a city below suddenly went the way of Salzburg or Mont de Moreau.

Toronto was gone now too.

Now Jack found himself on a private plane high over the Atlantic Ocean with only a dozen other Church of the Resurrection clerics for company and not a glass of whiskey in sight. And damn it if he couldn’t have used that whiskey now.

He glanced out the window, doing his best to ignore the imposing presence of Bishop Gagnon beside him. Jack had been summoned to that seat beside His Eminence not as a place of honor, but as a kind of punishment, not unlike a student being called to the principal’s office.

“You’re awfully quiet, Father Devlin,” the Bishop said.

“Just tired, I guess,” Jack replied immediately, an automatic response.

Without looking, somehow he could still see in his mind’s eye the way the Bishop must have pursed his lips then, as though disdainfully tasting those words.

“At some point, Jack, you’re going to stop sulking and realize that Peter Octavian is not your friend. Once upon a time, he was one of
them
. Even those few that remain are still a blight on this world. An infection. If Octavian had not destroyed the Catholic sect of sorcerers that kept demon manifestations in check, it’s likely none of this would be happening at all. Perhaps he isn’t a vampire anymore, but whatever he is, it isn’t
human
.”

The engines of the small jet purred, making the seat hum beneath him. Jack felt it in his gritted teeth, in the taut muscles at the back of his neck and across his shoulders.
Sulking
, he thought.
Asshole
.

Slowly, Jack turned to face the Bishop. Solely to keep his hands too busy to wring the old man’s neck, he reached up and removed his glasses.

“If you studied your history, Michel,” he said, all traces of friendship gone from his voice, “you might discover that it was the mishandling of the species in the first place that led to the clusterfuck that brought the church down. The same ignorant bullshit you’re preaching now,
Your Eminence.
Octavian has already proven more capable of confronting this crisis than we are and it’s pissing you off. Why not admit it?

“You want to blame him? Why? Because he and others like him performed sorcery over the ages that perforated our reality with badly repaired breaches into other dimensions? Fine. Blame him. But if you do that, you’ll have to share the blame, Michel. Unlike you, I’ve done my research. I know for instance, that the original breach in Derby was caused in large part by a spell cast by a small group of Roman priests, and that you were among them. The sect you’re talking about probably punched more holes in the barrier between worlds than the fucking ancient Egyptians, and we know how experimental they were.

“So don’t go pointing fingers, Michel. You need all the help you can get.”

Fuming, he glared at the Bishop, challenging the man to contradict him. It might have been career suicide, but Jack found that he no longer cared. The moment he had left Octavian and the others behind in Vermont, he had known it was a mistake, and from the second he had boarded this private jet, he had regretted it, wishing to be back among the people who wanted to destroy this gathering darkness, this insidious threat, solely because it had to be done and not out of any self-aggrandizing motive.

“Are you through?” Bishop Gagnon asked. His voice was light but anyone who knew him well would have heard the threat in it, seen the danger glinting in his eyes.

“If only I were.” Father Jack casually slipped his glasses back on, as though whatever the Bishop said now would not matter in the least. He could feel the eyes of some of the other priests on the jet upon him but cared not at all. There were only a few of them he knew, and not one among them with whom he had developed any kind of kinship.

The Bishop paused a moment, lips pressed together in an expression of distaste, nostrils flaring. At length he narrowed his eyes, almost forcing Jack with his will alone to look up and meet his gaze.

“We have a sacred charge, Father Devlin,” the Bishop said. “Sacred. We hold in our hands the faith of millions, and we may use it as our greatest weapon even as we safeguard it with our lives. This thing, this great evil that Octavian called the Tatterdemalion, is far more powerful than such a dismissive description could ever imply. Whatever this cruel sentience is, its power seems barely affected by our own magicks. For some reason its attention was drawn to our world. Our seers believe that it sensed the many breaches of the past, found the scars they had left behind, and has been forcing them open again.