The Gathering Dark (38 page)

“Jesus,” Father Jack said, lowering his head and closing his eyes. It was not a prayer. “You’re both madmen.”

But he remained where he was, head down, not wanting to look as the wave rolled toward him. The static grew louder, the smell and sound like the buzz of the bug zapper his aunt Judy’d had in her back yard in Scarsdale when he was growing up. It grew louder still, so loud Father Jack wanted to scream. He could barely contain the urge and at last he threw his head back to bellow his fear.

When Hell swallowed him, he barely felt a thing.

The airport was jammed with people and Keomany was stunned. She had never imagined so many would have been willing to risk flying with all that was happening. They had talked about it on the drive to LaGuardia, though, and Peter had predicted exactly this kind of madhouse. The modern world had never seen a crisis of this magnitude. People were going to want to be with their loved ones.

The big problem was that airspace over certain cities was restricted, flight plans had to be redrawn, routes changed, and some pilots were likely to have refused to fly at all.

Their flight had been rescheduled for 11:45 P.M.

“Shit,” Allison muttered, staring up at the screen amid the crush of people pushing, trying to get to their gates, dragging their wheeled luggage behind them for others to trip over.

Keomany was sweating. It might have been the crush of bodies around her, but she knew it was not that because she wasn’t hot, or even warm. She was freezing. So cold that she could barely keep her teeth from chattering. Peter and Allison were so wrapped up in the delay of their flight, trying to figure out what to do, that neither of them had noticed yet. And that was all right. If they knew she was sick, she was afraid they might make her stay behind the way they had done with Nikki.

Damn it, Nikki
, Keomany thought. A pain shot through her side and she clutched at it, teeth pressed together in a rictus grin, a poor attempt to hide her discomfort.

The last thing she had wanted to do was leave Nikki behind, but neither could she really argue. As detached as she felt from what had been happening to her, from the deaths of her parents and the extraordinary new connection she felt with Gaea—a connection she believed was providing her with the spirit to go on—she felt it filling her up and knew that she had to go. Earth magick was driving her on. She had touched the soul of the world and it required her as its instrument.

Keomany had power. Nikki did not. She had wanted to argue that her friend should come along but in her heart she agreed. Gaea was not going to touch Nikki, to keep her safe, and Keomany knew that the being Peter called the Tatterdemalion would look at an ordinary human as little more than an insect.

Another spike of pain went through her. This one in her back. Peter glanced over at her with a raised eyebrow, breaking off his conversation. Keomany forced her smile back on, letting herself be buffeted by the crowd around her, the labyrinth of lines that wound about the airport terminal. Announcements were made on the speaker system but it crackled so badly and the drone of the crowd was so loud that no words could be made out.

She was fooling herself. The Tatterdemalion was not commanding the storm they had seen in that hellish dimension. It was the storm. It was the power. Likely it would think of all of them, even Peter, as insects. But Gaea had touched Keomany’s soul and she would not turn away from the purpose that had been given to her.

Listen to me
, she thought.
I’m on a crusade. Keomany Shaw, earthwitch, savior of the universe.
The words sounded obnoxiously foolish in her mind, and yet the essence of them felt true and real.

Peter and Allison were still talking heatedly, almost arguing, and Keomany studied them. It was easy to see how Nikki had fallen so quickly for Peter, even back when he had been one of
them
, a vampire. Even now, with all the lines of tension creasing his face, he had an amazing presence, a charm that emanated from him. It didn’t hurt that he was handsome. Allison was not beautiful in the supermodel sense, and there was a hardness to her features that ought to have been off-putting. Instead she had the bearing and beauty of a marble sculpture of a Greek goddess. Her auburn hair framed her features and her intense eyes.

It was hard to imagine that she was a monster, that she was a shape-changing, demonic blood-drinker. Keomany shuddered. Not evil, she knew that. Allison was one among the shadows who did not drink blood from humans without invitation. She was not a savage. Not a predator.

Her presence was still chilling.

“Ahhh!” Keomany moaned in pain, clutching at her chest. The world seemed to swim around her and her legs fell out from under her. She was tumbling to the ground then, crashing into a woman strolling by with a huge piece of luggage. Keomany fell over the suitcase and struck the floor, her head thunking hard on the ground. Her vision blurred and her breath caught in her throat. It felt as though someone had slipped the thinnest and sharpest of blades into her breastbone and punched a hole in her.

She cried out.

Blurry figures appeared above her from a nightmarish swirl of activity. Out-of-focus faces swam in and out of her field of vision and then she felt a strong, comforting hand on her left arm. Keomany blinked and her vision cleared slightly.

The ground beneath her back trembled and the airport shook, dust raining down from the ceiling.

Someone shouted about an earthquake and people panicked and began to run. Peter’s voice tore through the miasma around her as he ordered people away from her.

Keomany smiled. “Sorry. I . . . I fell, didn’t I?” Her tongue felt thick and the words sounded slurred in her ears.

“What’s wrong?” Allison asked, stroking her hair gently.

“Keomany?” Peter began, kneeling by her. She could see his features perfectly now. “What is it? Where are you hurt?”

She tasted salt and felt warm tears slip down her cheeks, so hot against her cold skin. Keomany whispered up to him. “We shouldn’t have left Nikki behind.”

Allison and Peter exchanged confused, grave glances.

“It’s okay,” Keomany said. “I understand. I just wish . . . I wish she was here.”

“What is it?” Peter asked again.

Keomany laughed softly. “It’s Gaea. I can feel her inside me. You cut her off from Cat up in Vermont. Now I’m feeling her pain.”

Peter’s eyes roved across her body—over bare skin and clothed flesh—and it was exactly the way she had seen many men look at her in her life, wishing they could see what she looked like naked. This was the same, and yet so very different.

“I don’t think I’m cut,” Keomany rasped. She grabbed hold of Peter’s hand and pulled herself into a sitting position. The world spun dizzily around her for a moment, but then her head started to clear. “I’m . . . I’m feeling a little better, actually. I think . . . Gaea was just . . . just screaming. She’s been hurt even worse, and I felt it.”

Peter swore. He glanced up at the departures screen in the midst of the airport chaos, as if by sheer force of will he could make their flight leave on time instead of more than two hours late.

“We’re not going to make it,” he said grimly, his silver-gray eyes narrowing.

A shrill ringing sounded close by. They both glanced over to see Allison frown as she reached into the pocket of her leather jacket and withdrew a cell phone. She flipped it open.

“Vigeant,” she announced to the caller.

Then she listened. And she swore. And she hung her head just slightly before thanking the caller and snapping the phone shut, then returning it to her pocket.

“What was that?” Peter asked.

Allison raised her chin and stared at him defiantly. “That was an old friend of mine. Carl Melnick. He’s a news producer, one of the best-informed guys in the world. We’ve been keeping in touch on this thing. There’s been a development that the U.N. is trying to keep the world media from reporting . . . at least until someone finally leaks it.”

Keomany felt an ache deep in her bones, a dull, throbbing pain that she knew was part of her connection to Gaea. This was where her pain had come from . . . something new had happened. It was getting worse.

“What happened?” Peter asked.

Allison glanced at the two of them, then looked around to make certain no one was paying attention to them now that Keomany’s fainting episode was over. Allison moved in nearer to them.

“No new cities have been taken,” she said, her voice low. “But from every location, everyplace that’s been affected, the void is
spreading
. And fast.”

Then Allison crouched down beside them and reached out to put a comforting hand on Keomany’s arm. She stared at Peter.

“Ronda may not be accessible much longer. But either way, we’ve run out of time. There’s only one way to get there fast enough now.”

A flash of something much like anger went across Peter’s face then and Keomany thought that she had seen for the first time the warrior he had once been . . . and the monster he had later become. He shook his head slowly, falling to his knees and letting his hands rest on the travel bag he had been carrying over his shoulder.

“Damn it, Allison,” he began.

“You know I’m right.”

Through gritted teeth he snarled at her. “You’re always right. But with all that’s going on . . . the Tatterdemalion can feel every crack in our dimension, every breach that’s ever been. Or most of them, at least. That’s how it’s been slipping its creatures in and getting anchored to drag the cities away. What if it
knows
? What if it feels us go?”

“What choice do you have?” Allison asked quietly.

Her strength coming back, Keomany glanced back and forth between them. “One more question. What are you two talking about?”

But Peter just stared at Allison for several long seconds before standing straight up. He stared around the airport, his gaze lingering in one particular angle, a direction that might have been back toward Manhattan. Then he looked down at Allison one last time and he took a deep breath.

“Damn it!” he shouted in frustration.

The curse echoed through the airport, shushing the cacophony of the crowd for a single moment, forcing hundreds of heads to turn toward him. Then Peter Octavian held his hands out in front of him, palms together as though molding clay. Something grew there in his hands, bright and glowing, fluid as mercury and just as silver. It slipped over his fingers and the sphere grew larger and larger.

As though watching some street magician, people began to gather around them, mesmerized by the work of Peter’s hands.

“Back off,” Allison instructed them.

There was menace in her tone, and she was obeyed.

The silver, pulsing sphere in Peter’s hands was no larger than a melon but he raised it above his head as though he meant to shatter it on the floor. Instead his hands spread apart and the mercury seemed to sweep them up in a whirlpool of silver, blocking Keomany’s view of the terminal.

Her stomach lurched as Gaea screamed in her heart again.

Once more Keomany was falling. Impossible, of course, for she had never risen to her feet; yet still she was falling. Silver magick rained down around her, splashing the ground, silencing the world. She landed on her side, hip painfully striking the pavement.

The pavement.

Keomany blinked as she looked around. The airport was gone. The crowds and the lights and the noise, all gone. The silver sphere of magick had dissolved to nothing, leaving the three of them standing in the middle of what a dozen old movies had taught her could only be a bullring. It was empty. A breeze toyed with a few strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail, and even the wind smelled different here. In the night sky above, the constellations had moved, the stars shifting.

“Ronda? Is this Ronda?” she rasped, turning to stare at Peter in awe. He looked pale and exhausted
and no wonder
, she thought—but he nodded in return.

“Gaea,” Keomany whispered.

From the gallery circling the bullring came a rustling that was not roused by the wind. In the shadows, something stirred.

The stream that wound through the outskirts of Mont de Moreau ran red with the blood of its citizens and the offal of river demons. Kuromaku crouched on the roof of the aged red Volkswagen he had commandeered and clutched tightly to the frame of the open driver’s window beneath him. In his right hand, his katana seemed to glow darkly in the perpetual orange light of this hideous dimension.

“Kuromaku!” Sophie called out in alarm from behind the wheel of the car.

He knew what had upset her. All around the French village new cities had appeared, dragged into this realm by whatever terrible power had transported Mont de Moreau here. Only one edge of the village still shimmered with the dark magick that separated this community from the world where it belonged, the barrier between dimensions. They had to reach that one spot if they had any hope of breaking through, of forcing their way back to reality.

But to do that, they had to cross a bridge that spanned the stream. The water was filled with tiny figures the size of human infants, demons with translucent flesh and pointed, outsized heads that made Kuromaku think of squid. Like some freakish human mutation, they had limbs that seemed a nauseating combination of arms and seal flippers, covered in suckers like those on the tentacles of an octopus. They weren’t close enough yet to the bridge for Kuromaku to see such detail, but he had been attacked by similar creatures once long ago, on an island in Greece.

“What the hell are they?” Sophie called.

Nektum
, Kuromaku thought.
They’re called Nektum.

“Just drive!” he shouted back. “Don’t slow down!”

He wanted also to tell her not to look as she crossed the bridge, to avert her eyes from the grotesque panorama that would unfold on the banks of the stream as they passed. Even now Kuromaku tried to block from his memory the images of Nektum attached to the faces of dead village children, using those suckers to tear the skin—just the skin— from their bodies; of their translucent forms burrowing inside people who were not quite dead yet.