The Gathering Dark (35 page)

“You and Octavian proved that some of these cities taken by the Tatterdemalion may not be gone forever. You, Father Devlin, are going to work with the rest of us to be sure the U.N. forces assigned to this are able to cross over into the Tatterdemalion’s dimension, its stolen empire. There we will determine if the other cities can be recalled into this world. If they cannot, then the breaches the demon has made into this reality will be resealed, this time with magicks of far greater power. Sealed forever.”

For a moment Jack felt as though the plane had hit an air pocket and begun to drop, like the world was falling out from under him. But the flight was smooth, the engines still humming nicely. It wasn’t the jet.

It was him.

The priest stared at his superior, his chest aching, breath catching in his throat. “You’re . . . you’re not serious. You can’t just leave those cities in there. Even in Wickham there were thousands still alive. You’d be leaving millions behind . . . if it was even possible to seal them off completely.”

At last Bishop Gagnon smiled, his pleasure at Jack’s dismay obvious and harrowing. “Oh, we believe we can. We may well be able to seal this dimension off from others totally and eternally.”

“You can’t do this,” Jack hissed, beginning to stand up from his seat to look around for support from the other priests on board. “People won’t stand for it. Every single person in those cities has loved ones somewhere else, family and friends who will burn you at the stake if you just abandon them, if you—”

Faster than could be expected of a man his age, the Bishop shot out a hand and grabbed Jack by the shoulder. His grip was painful and he shoved Jack down into his seat, holding him there. When he spoke, he leaned in close and Jack could smell garlic and wine from lunch on the Bishop’s breath.

“You should keep your seat belt on, Father Devlin,” the Bishop suggested.

Jack made no move to comply but the man’s hand lifted from his shoulder.

“You are right, of course. I cannot do any of those things. But we, my son, we can. We are the Holy Church, you little shit. We are the shepherds of this world and we will tend to our flock whether they like it or not. If the wolf snatches away some of our sheep during the night, we do not stake the others out as a sacrifice to its predations. We protect them, and we learn never to let the wolf near again.

“If it weren’t for your heroics in Wickham with that damned monster, we wouldn’t even be going in there in the first place. But now that every news channel has reported that Wickham was rescued—and you could hardly call it a rescue, could you?—the U.N. is insisting that an effort be made. So we’re going to go in, Father. We’re going to do our duty to the faithful, and even to the Philistines. And then we’re going to put a fence around the rest of our flock and forget all about the ones lost to the wolves.

“You, Father Devlin, will cooperate because it’s the only possibility that some of these cities could be resurrected, and that some of the survivors might be returned to their loved ones. And if you breathe a word of this conversation to anyone who is not on this plane, when this is over you may find yourself locked on the other side of the fence, in the territory of the wolf. Do I make myself clear?”

For several minutes Bishop Gagnon stared at him but Jack did not answer. The question was not posed again and eventually Jack turned away and stared out the window at the blackening sky. Flying east, over the Atlantic, they were chasing the night, hurrying into a darkness that might never lift.

For the remaining duration of the flight, there was utter silence.

Sophie Duvic wanted nothing more than to be able to close her eyes. Everywhere she looked, the streets of Mont de Moreau were alive with menace. Whispers moved inside shattered shop windows and clung to the front of apartment houses. Smoke from distant fires clogged the orange sky and winged carrion demons flew in vulture-circles above as she struggled to propel Antoinette Lamontagne forward.

“Move, damn you,” she whispered in French, afraid to raise her voice. Afraid to draw attention.

Antoinette carried her son Henri, deathly still once more, over her shoulder as though he were a rolled carpet or a length of rope. Her eyes were nearly as glazed and her features as gaunt as those of her nearly catatonic son. Antoinette had watched the Whispers slaughter her husband before her eyes and it had leeched all the energy from her.

“Please, please hurry,” Sophie urged, reaching out to take the woman by the hand.

Antoinette snatched back her hand as if Sophie’s fingers had burned her. Her dull eyes were suddenly alive with madness.

“Go on without me if we are too slow for you,” she sneered. But in an instant her anger dissipated and fresh tears sprang to her face.

“Alain would want you to live,” Sophie told her. She could hear her own voice, cold and flat, so very matter of fact, and wondered how glassy her own eyes might be if she could see them in a mirror.

The truth was that it had crossed her mind that leaving Antoinette and her son behind might be the only chance for her own survival. She never would do such a thing, would die herself before she betrayed her heart and soul in such horrid fashion. But the thought was there, and it had tainted her so that she could barely stand to look at the Lamontagnes now.

“Let’s go,” she whispered. “Just . . . let’s go.”

This time when she reached out for Antoinette’s hand, the other woman let her take it. Together they crept along the orange-dark street, keeping close to the buildings. There was a corner ahead where a narrower side street forked off to the right, a centuries-old area of the city that had been restored, its architecture charming once upon a time, and now ravaged by passing beasts. For there were more things abroad here than the Whispers and the carrion fliers and the quilled monsters they had seen before.

The thought of the demons that had swept out of the sewer and nearly dragged Kuromaku down with them made her stomach convulse. Sophie pushed the images from her mind before she threw up again.

At the fork in the road ahead was a building that had once been a hotel. Empty cars were parked in the street in front of it, some abandoned, some merely forgotten. Corpses picked almost clean lay half-in, half-out of windows. The body of a man had shattered the windshield of a car and Sophie wondered if the man had jumped from the hotel’s roof or if his remains had been dropped from high above.

“We cannot make it,” Antoinette said aloud. “It’s too far. By the time we get there, another city will rise. And another and another. This is Hell, don’t you see? It’s Hell.”

Sophie could not argue. It was Hell, of a sort, but they would make it to the edge of town. They had to make it, before another city was brought into this hellish landscape. Kuromaku had been clear . . . there was only one escape route and it would not stay open forever. She was about to tell Antoinette once again to hurry, but the sound of breaking glass ahead made her pause and crouch low, close to the building. She indicated that Antoinette should do the same but the woman barely twitched, as though she wanted to be discovered.

They had nearly reached the fork, had prepared to round the turn and start up the narrower street that made up the oldest section of Mont de Moreau and cut through the town, directly toward the one area of its perimeter that might provide them a route of escape.

Inside what had been the hotel’s restaurant, Whispers moved in the dark. The grimy orange light filtered in only slightly but it glinted off their carapaces. Sophie held her breath as one of them leaped up onto a table inside that restaurant and peered out at the street.

It
saw
them. No eyes, but somehow, it saw them.

Sophie’s chest hurt and she found she could not breathe. Seconds ticked past. Antoinette felt Sophie’s grip tighten on her and stopped to stare at her, shifting the weight of her son in her arms. Then the other woman must have seen the stark terror on Sophie’s face, for she began to turn to see what Sophie was staring at.

The sharp tendril-tongue of the Whisper twitched and darted in the air as if pointing them out.

Antoinette screamed. The Whisper threw itself at the plate glass window of the restaurant, shattering it and landing in a rain of jagged shards upon the sidewalk. For a moment Sophie thought Antoinette was still screaming—that her terrified wail had grown to a strange roar—and then she realized that this was a different sound.

It was an engine.

The Whisper began to lope toward them. Antoinette clutched Henri more tightly. Sophie swore as she saw more of the dagger-thin, black-plated demons rushing out of the restaurant toward them. She started to turn, tugging on Antoinette, knowing they could not outrun the monsters.

The rumble of the engine grew louder. Headlights illuminated the Whisper that had first spotted them and it paused and turned to look up the hill. An aging red Volkswagen tore down the road, colliding with the Whisper, crushing it beneath its tires; the demon’s body was snagged on the undercarriage and dragged twenty yards, pieces of it torn off and strewn in the street before the Volkswagen went up onto the sidewalk to swerve around an abandoned truck and the corpse of the demon fell off.

The Whispers on the other side of the street hesitated.

The Volkswagen spun into a turn that made the tires squeal on the road and then shuddered to a halt perhaps fifteen feet from Sophie, Antoinette, and Henri. The driver’s door popped open and Kuromaku appeared. He shot a hard look at Sophie.

“Get in!” he snapped. “You drive.”

The demons, their scythe-fingers clacking as if in anticipation, rushed across the street toward the vehicle. The engine was still running, the headlights cutting the orange gloom. Kuromaku reached to his waist and from nothing but the air he drew his curved sword. The katana seemed to hiss in a voice not unlike that of the demons as it slashed through the air, slashing downward in a series of arcs and thrusts that cracked the carapaces of the Whispers, hacking their bony figures to pieces.

Sophie was transfixed in those first moments but then, while Kuromaku continued to fight and more Whispers began to appear from beneath abandoned cars and from the rooftops and shattered windows of nearby buildings, she was finally spurred into action. With Antoinette running hard behind her, weighed down by Henri, Sophie rushed to the Volkswagen and threw herself through the open door into the driver’s seat. Antoinette had hauled open a back door and now seemed to tumble into the rear of the car in a bundle with her son.

A Whisper scrabbled across the pavement after them. Antoinette just had time to pull the door closed before it reached the car and the demon struck the car with enough force to crack the window and buckle the metal door.

“Drive!” Antoinette shouted in French.

Sophie did not need the prodding. She screamed out the window to Kuromaku, not even certain anymore what language she was speaking. Whether it was French or English, the vampire warrior understood her. He lunged forward, driving the sword through the demon in front of him. A dark spatter of demon blood had splashed his face and she saw his profile in that moment—those handsome, grimly regal features, black hair wild, muscles on the back of his neck clearly visible—and she was terrified of him. In her mind’s eye she saw the gentle man upon whom she had placed her childhood affections, a crush that had not disappeared with maturity but only intensified.

Kuromaku turned toward her, wiping filthy ichor from his face, skin glistening with that hideous orange light and torn shirt whipping in the dread wind that had blown up just as they left the church, and she knew that despite—or perhaps because of—her terror, Sophie had never wanted Kuromaku so desperately. Her breath caught in her throat and her chest hurt, just as it had moments before, but now for an entirely different reason.

Survive
, she thought.
If you don’t live, you’ll never get to tell him.

She threw the Volkswagen into gear. In the back Antoinette cried out as the Whisper who had struck the door now shattered the cracked window and began to reach in after her. Kuromaku snarled something in his native tongue and then the ronin leaped atop the Volkswagen and decapitated the Whisper with a single swift stroke of his blade.

“Go!” he shouted.

Swarms of them were on the streets now, drawn by the fighting. Kuromaku dropped onto the hood of the Volkswagen, his sword at the ready. Sophie gripped the steering wheel in both hands and hit the accelerator. The car lurched and she drove directly at the front of the hotel where the Whispers had first emerged. The road forked and she cut the wheel to the right and the engine whined as she drove up the hill through what had once been a beautifully refurbished district.

At first the Whispers gave chase, capering and loping after them. Several caught up to the car but Kuromaku dispatched them quickly, scrambling over the roof with unnerving agility. One managed to grab hold of the rear bumper and was dragged a ways before it tore itself apart on the pavement.

Three of them leaped from rooftops along the sloping road but reached the street moments too late, as the car was roaring by. Sophie floored it and they gained speed as they surged up the hill. At the top of the grade where the road first flattened slightly and then began to descend, they came to an intersection. She slowed down not at all, mindful of the demons still giving chase.

On a street off to her right, Sophie saw several others, but these weren’t Whispers, nor were they the great quilled beasts they had seen earlier. These things were far larger than that, with bodies like that of a rhinoceros, long serpentine necks, and flat heads with massive fanged jaws that reminded her of nothing so much as enormous alligators.

The roar of the engine drew their attention and the demons glanced up, then those long, fanged maws snapped open and closed and they began to give chase.

Kuromaku clung to the hood, ignoring these new abominations. His gaze was intent upon the road ahead and Sophie knew what he was thinking. They had to reach the edge of Mont de Moreau.