The Gathering Dark (4 page)

Now the smile was gone from Kyle’s face. He stared at her as though he thought she was a lunatic, and Nikki had to allow that maybe she was. Kyle cocked his head to one side and studied her a moment. She cared for him. He was a good man and a talented drummer. But he had never been that bright. When understanding dawned upon him, she could see it in his eyes and that sudden realization made her look away, staring at the floor, at the flowers, at her guitar. At anything but that moment when he
got it
.

“I’m an idiot,” Kyle whispered. Then she heard him chuckle softly. “You’ve never played your new songs in public.”

Without meeting his gaze, she nodded. “Actually, I’ve pretty much never played an original song in public. Not ever.”

“Not ever?”

A knock at the door interrupted them. The club’s manager, Rich something, stuck his head in. “Everything all right?”

“Fine,” Nikki said, too harshly, too quickly. “We’ll be right there.”

“Great,” Rich replied, choosing to ignore the tone in her voice, the tension in the room. He pulled the door shut behind him.

While it was open, however, Nikki had heard them. The audience. They weren’t chanting her name or stomping their feet or any of that crap that happened at major venues, but there was a buzz out there, a hum of conversation and anticipation that made the place tremble.

Or maybe it was just her trembling.

“Nikki?’ Kyle ventured.

Swiftly she crossed to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of spring water. She spun the top off and took a long drink before at last looking him in the face again.

“I’ve always played covers. I know those songs inside and out, they’re a part of me. I understand how they’re gonna make the audience feel because I know how they make me feel. If I grind out something sexy, I know it’s going to go over because I’ve got every note inside me.”

Kyle shook his head. “But these new songs, they came from inside you. The CD is really great, Nik, and I’m not just saying that because I’m part of the band or because I’m head over heels for you. It’s music that gets under your skin in the best possible way. The single is tearing up radio. Trust me, this is no different. People will feel what you feel when you sing the new stuff, just like when we do covers. Don’t be so terrified.”

The words made her wince. Her eyes narrowed and Nikki glanced sharply at him. ‘I’m not terrified. Not of this. If you’d seen half the shit I’ve seen, you’d know what a joke it is to use that word about something like this. I mean, there’s fear and then there’s
terror
.”

“So what are we still doing in here when the audience is out there?” Kyle hooked a thumb toward the door and raised one eyebrow.

Nikki took another long draught of water, then put the cover back on and set the bottle down next to the flowers. They were fresh and the scent filled the room, mixing rather unpleasantly with the cat piss odor from the stained sofa. But they were pretty, at least.

“You’re head over heels, huh?” she asked idly.

“Pretty much.”

“Good.”

With a deep breath she shook back her hair and walked to her guitar. It was a beautifully crafted instrument with mother-of-pearl inlaid on the neck, and she picked it up and slid the strap over her head. The same strap she had been using for six years, since long before the horrors she had seen in New Orleans, when she had learned the difference between fear and terror.

Without another glance at Kyle, Nikki strode to the door and flung it open. The buzz of the crowd washed over her, embracing her and lifting her up the way nothing else ever could. Rich was waiting in the corridor and gave her a look of utter relief.

“So we still opening with ‘Son of a Preacher Man’?” Kyle asked as he followed her down the corridor that led through the back of the club and into the wings behind the stage curtains.

Nikki cast him a quick glance over her shoulder. “Fuck that. We start with ‘Shock My World.’ We’re gonna show Philly how to groove.”

The rest of the band stood up quickly as she swept into the wings. The curtains were open on a darkened stage, all their equipment and instruments up there already except for Nikki’s guitar. She did not wait for them, did not hesitate a moment longer.

Nikki Wydra marched onto her hometown stage with her guitar strapped across her back and the crowd began to roar. Her nausea and her hesitation were forgotten. The band rocked right into “Shock My World” and the audience thundered their approval. When Nikki began to sing, she felt the ache in every word. It was more of herself than she had ever given to anyone, only she was giving it to hundreds of people at once. Her song. Her music. Her heart.

This right here was what she lived for. This was home. Not this club. Not Philadelphia. Just the stage.

This was home.

On a shelf above the desk of Father Jack Devlin was a little jar with a perforated lid, the kind of thing a child might have kept a captive spider in. There was a tiny demon in the jar and it had been there so long that Father Jack hardly even noticed it anymore.

It noticed him, however.

In fact, during all the long hours Father Jack spent poring over dusty, decrepit, leather-bound books and tapping at his computer keyboard as he searched the Net, the demon never took its burning orange eyes off the priest. Father Jack knew this, of course. The little fucker stared hateful daggers at him day and night and had done so for nearly two years. He just couldn’t bring himself to care.

The demon in the jar on the shelf above his desk was a problem Father Jack had solved a long time ago. There were so many others to be dealt with . . . and most of those, unsettlingly enough, were a hell of a lot bigger than the hideous, contorted, glaring thing in the jar.

Currently the priest was bent over a sheaf of loose, yellowed pages that had come from a thirteenth-century French manuscript that some fool had tried to burn once upon a time. The other volumes used in his research had been set aside, and though the computer screen threw its dim glow upon the desk, it also sat dormant and ignored. The scorched lower corners of the pages had left certain phrases forever obliterated, and some only partially blackened and obscured. But without those words . . .

“Shit!” Father Jack snapped.

He sighed and sat back in his chair with a heartfelt sigh sliding down so as to almost disappear beneath his desk. His eyes itched and he reached up to remove his wire-rimmed glasses, rubbed at the corners of his eyes, and massaged the bridge of his nose. There was a two-day growth of reddish-gold stubble on his chin that matched the color of his hair. He needed a shower, and a shave, and some rest. But first he needed to solve the problem that was before him.

So much for intuition. Had he actually thought he was going to be able to figure out what those missing phrases would have been just by context?
Arrogant jackass
, he thought miserably.

Father Jack slid his glasses back on, and when he glanced up, he was eye to eye with the little Cythraul. Its hideous, desiccated face was pressed up against the glass of the jar, three-fingered hands planted on either side of it, grinning at him, relishing his frustration. He had never seen it so active, so aware.

An involuntary shudder went through him, and Father Jack cursed inwardly that he had allowed the thing to get to him. Abruptly he stood, the legs of his chair squeaking on the wood floor, and he snatched the jar from the shelf and slapped his palm over the top, covering the air holes.

“Don’t mess with me today,” Father Jack muttered.

The Cythraul snarled, thin lips peeling impossibly far back to reveal tiny little needle teeth that filled its mouth. Its orange eyes went wide and it hurled itself upward at the lid of the jar, gnashing its fangs at the metal, hoping to get just a taste of his flesh. It would slow in a moment and then fall into a kind of coma. But it would not suffocate; it would not die.

As the little demon began to falter, all the anger went out of the priest and he shook his head and put the jar back on the shelf, sighing once more, knowing it was overly dramatic but not caring. A little drama always made him feel better.

When he looked up, Bishop Gagnon was standing in the open doorway of the office with his arms crossed, face as pale as always, one pure white eyebrow raised in inquiry.

“Roommate problems?” the aged Bishop asked.

Father Jack chuckled and it occurred to him that there was an edge of madness to it. He looked up sharply, wanting to make sure the Bishop did not think so as well. He was far from insane, though a little more of this might well turn him into a lunatic eventually.

“I couldn’t kill him if I wanted to,” Father Jack said. He leaned against his desk and slid his hands into the pockets of his black pants. Black everything, after all. It was the uniform. “And I want to. That’s the thing, Michel. I want to.”

“As well you should,” the old man said, his words still accented with his native French. “But that is the difficulty of the job we have set out for us, Jack. With all of the shadows loosed upon the world, all the darkness returning, we must attempt to recreate the knowledge that once kept them under our control.”

“Not
our
control. Theirs. Careful the way you phrase things, Michel.”

“Of course,” said the Bishop, one hand fluttering upward in dismissal. “Of course.”

It was a constant struggle between them. Fully a decade had passed since the Roman Catholic Church had splintered and collapsed. Revelations of sorcery and a sect of dark magicians in her ranks had brought the church down. While it had been only in the last few years that Rome had begun to reorganize with new leaders and a new focus, things had happened much more quickly in America. The Church of the Resurrection—the Americans had very quickly abandoned the use of the word
Catholic
—had branched off almost immediately when Rome collapsed.

It had suffered its own tribulations in the meantime, perhaps the greatest of which had been the witch hunt for pedophiles among the priesthood. But without the archaic secrecy Rome had always insisted upon, the Church of the Resurrection had flushed that element from its ranks in a style nearly as brutal and unrelenting as the notorious Inquisition had been. The net result, however, was that the United States now had a far larger and more organized Catholic Church than anywhere else in the world.

Yet here they were, this very moment, repeating the sins of their fathers. For nearly two thousand years the Roman Church had held the reins on demons and other supernatural creatures—or most of them at least—with the sorcery found in a book called
The Gospel of Shadows
. A sect within the church had been trained in the book’s secrets. But now every member of the sect was dead, and the book had disappeared during the horrific vampire jihad that had exposed the truth to the world ten years earlier. They had been tainted by power and dark magick, the men and women of that sect. They had been evil.

But without them, without the secrets of that book, the shadows were rising again. The demons and the beasts of the darkness, the shades of the dead, all were returning to the world, testing the boundaries and finding them shattered.

In order to stop them, the Church of the Resurrection was now forced to attempt to recreate
The Gospel of Shadows
, or at least to build a new one, spell by spell, secret by secret, curse by curse.

But Father Jack couldn’t figure out a spell to kill vermin like the Cythraul. How was he supposed to recreate the accumulated occult knowledge of thousands of years of infernal combat? And meanwhile he had to worry about the politics of present-day religion, and a former Roman Catholic priest who had become a Bishop in the Church of the Resurrection sometimes forgot that it was dangerous to forget the difference between the two.

“Jack?” the Bishop prodded.

The priest looked up at him and for a moment he saw himself as he knew Bishop Gagnon must see him: rumpled clothes, white collar hanging loose, in need of a shave, eyes red behind his glasses from poring over the scorched manuscript pages.

“I guess I just need a break,” Father Jack said. “Maybe I’ll take a walk.”

The reed-thin old man glared at him suddenly, a glint in his eyes that felt to Father Jack like the wrath of God.

“You’ll do no such thing,” Bishop Gagnon commanded sharply. “You can stroll around Greenwich Village another night, Father. Right now, every hour that passes costs us more souls in Hidalgo.”

Father Jack stared at him, mouth open slightly in astonishment. The Bishop had never spoken to him like this before. Granted, they were both under incredible stress. Hidalgo was a tiny town in Texas a stone’s throw from the Mexican border. In the previous seventy-two hours it had been the site of a demonic manifestation, creatures called Okulam that had blown in with a particularly fierce spring thunderstorm. The church just called them soul-leeches, for the disgusting things fastened themselves to the backs of their victims’ necks and infiltrated the minds and spirits of human beings. They took control, these vicious demons, and left only when they had cored the soul right out of their host.

God help him, Father Jack didn’t know what to do about it. The manuscript he was studying had been written by early French settlers in North America, what would become the American Colonies, and it referred very specifically to a past manifestation of the Okulam. Without
The Gospel of Shadows
, it was all they had to go on.

Bishop Gagnon crossed the room and laid a hand on Father Jack’s shoulder. There was no strength in the old man’s grasp and barely any weight to his touch. It was as though the Bishop were little more than a ghost, haunting Father Jack.

“Not to put any pressure on you, my friend,” the old man said, and now the wrathful glare was replaced by a kind, tired smile.

“Of course not,” Father Jack replied with a nervous chuckle. Then he collected himself, took a deep breath, and met the Bishop’s gaze again. “All right, Michel. Time to get back to work, I suppose.”

“I trust your intuition, Jack. Your mind. You’ll work it out.”