The Gathering Dark (44 page)

Sophie stared at the Bishop. It was her turn to smile. “Kuromaku’s a vampire. You can’t kill him. Almost nothing can kill him.”

The Bishop’s nostrils flared. Thick beads of greasy water slid down his face. “Yes.
Almost
nothing.”

Sophie shook her head in abrupt denial. “You can’t. You . . . what are you going to do?”

“Me? I’m a man of God, girl. I’m not going to do anything.”

His meaning was clear. He might not be doing anything, but the man up in the Jeep—whom he had called “the Commander”—obviously was. Her gaze ticked upward and she saw the intense man raise a pair of high-tech field goggles to his eyes and scan the street to the east and the Cleft to the south. It made no sense, none at all. The Whispers were everywhere. No matter how many of them the soldiers killed there seemed to be more. And yet these men were intent upon killing Kuromaku.

Why? I don’t understand
, Sophie thought.

But before she could speak those words, Father Jack moved past her toward the Jeep. His face was no longer pale, but pink with anger. He reached for the door and began to climb up, glaring at the Commander, who did not notice Father Jack’s approach.

“Where the hell are those V-rounds?” the Commander snapped, one hand clapped to his ear. Sophie realized the man was speaking into some sort of communications rig but couldn’t see it.

“Commander!” Father Jack shouted, his words stripped away by the wind. “Commander Henning!”

The Bishop reached out and snagged him by the jacket. “Where are you going, Father Devlin?”

The priest tried to shake himself loose but his superior now had both hands on him and was attempting to pull him away from the Jeep. To Sophie’s astonishment, Father Jack whirled around and punched the old man, connecting with a solid crack of knuckle on cheekbone. The Bishop staggered backward but Father Jack wasn’t done. He followed after the old man and struck him again, and the Bishop went down onto the slick pavement.

Father Jack stood over him, fuming, eyes obscured behind his rain-spattered glasses. “You are not a man of God!” he spat, veins standing out on his neck. “You are a fucking lunatic.”

When the priest raised his hand to point at the Bishop, his fingers glowed a dim, fiery blue.

“Stay there.”

Father Jack reached for Sophie’s hand and she took it. Together they jumped up into the Jeep. A pair of soldiers moved to stop them, one of them grabbing Sophie’s leg, but she shook him off and froze him in place with a furious glare.

“Back off!” she barked.

“Commander!” Jack called.

When at last Commander Henning turned toward them, Sophie saw in his eyes that he had been completely aware of what was transpiring around him. The conflict among them had not escaped his notice, as she had assumed.

“Go away, Father Devlin,” the Commander said, his eyes slitted against the storm, his commando uniform plastered to his body.

Another soldier in helmet and mask—just as eerily faceless as the demons, she thought now—ran up beside the Jeep with an automatic rifle.

“Commander!” the soldier shouted. And when Henning glanced down, the soldier passed the weapon up to him, along with a pair of ammunition clips. Commander Henning popped the clip out of the weapon and inserted one of the new ones.

“Commander!” Father Jack shouted again.

The man ignored him. He climbed out onto the hood of the Jeep. Sophie began to shake her head as she jumped onto the rear seat of the vehicle. Past Father Jack and Commander Henning, over the heads of the soldiers in the street, she could see the anarchy in the midst of the intersection. Whispers capered, dodging gunfire, moving swiftly toward the soldiers, their thin, armored forms elusive in the rain and the driving storm. Bullets cracked their shells, and their corpses littered the road. But there were so many. So many.

And among them, a thing unlike any Sophie had ever seen. A lone figure, a dervish, shifting and changing. Swordsman, tiger, mist, wolf, raven, samurai . . . Kuromaku. Stray bullets struck him but wounded him not at all.

Commander Henning raised the automatic rifle and took aim.

“He’s on our side!” Father Jack roared, and he lunged forward.

Henning cracked the butt of the weapon across the priest’s face and Father Jack fell backward, out of the Jeep. He struck his head on the pavement and was still. It was insane. The Commander was diverting his attention from the creatures that threatened to overwhelm his men to focus on Kuromaku. He barely looked at Sophie as he raised the weapon again.

There was no thought in what she did next.

Sophie leaped down from the Jeep and raced toward the line of soldiers from behind. They were firing indiscriminately now, and as she approached them, it felt as though her eardrums would burst. Then she had reached them and she shoved through a narrow space between two dark-clad soldiers and ran past them.

Out into the street.

The Whispers were all hissing, their tendril-tongues darting in front of their blank skull-shells as bullets tore them apart. But not all of them were dying. Some of them were close by and they started for her instantly, sensing her, tendrils pointing toward her as though to a magnet.

They swarmed. Thick mucous rain pelted her. The wind buffeted her. Sophie raced toward the demons, peering through the storm and the Whispers for Kuromaku. In the midst of the intersection she stopped, threw back her head, and screamed.

“Kuromaku! They’re going to kill you! Find cover!”

Much of the gunfire had silenced. Staccato bursts echoed across buildings off to her right and out over the gorge to her left. Behind her there were only short ripples of fire.

The Whispers closed in around her. They slowed, as if to savor her. She could hear the clack of their carapaces; there were so many of them around her that they blocked out that putrid orange light.

Then Kuromaku was there. His sword whickered through the air and he hacked two of the demons to pieces, spattering her with ichor thick as the hellish rain. The others turned to defend themselves and he lashed into them.

“No!” she cried. “Find cover! Find cover!”

But Kuromaku did not listen. She ought to have known he would not. He had vowed to protect her and he was going to do precisely that. In trying to save Kuromaku, she had slowed him down, made him a better target.

Sophie spun and stared back at the Jeep, saw Commander Henning take aim. Fresh gunfire ripped through the air, echoes dancing around the intersection. Bullets tore the ground. Kuromaku was hit in the shoulder, blood splashing from the wound, and he staggered.

She saw the confusion in his eyes even as he slashed the katana out again, decapitating another Whisper. Sophie shouted again for him to take cover, beckoning him toward her. Blinking in surprise, shaking his head as if disoriented, Kuromaku staggered toward her. Another bullet grazed his left leg and he spun in toward her, spinning the blade, clearing a circle around them.

Sophie grabbed him and pulled herself close so that her own body was a shield between Kuromaku and Commander Henning’s bullets. If the soldiers were willing to kill her to get to him . . .
oh, Lord, please help us
, she thought.

“Those bullets,” she said, “can they kill you? The Commander thinks they can.”

Kuromaku’s features were grim, his eyes narrow and dark. “He’s right.”

“Get us out of here, then! Without Antoinette and her boy, we can fly! Carry me. Please, Kuromaku, let’s go!”

“I cannot,” he replied as the wind howled around them. “That is what the bullets do. The chemical in them, it takes away my power to change.”

Sophie stared at him, lips parted in horror. Fresh tears slid down her face, and the Whispers began to close in.

The storm raged, churning the sky above the southern half of the city of Ronda. The wind was hot, and seeded with pure malice. Peter could feel the malevolence of the Tatterdemalion in the air as it whipped against him, but he would not let it slow him down. He needed more time—time to think and to plan, to study the Tatterdemalion and formulate a strategy—but he wasn’t going to get it.

The time was now.

Despite the magick that blazed around his hands, crackling between his fingers, he had never felt so frail, so human.

After they had left the bullring behind, he and Keomany had seen very few of the Whispers, mostly lurking in the shadows inside the buildings they passed—restaurants and apartments and hotels. Peter tried not to think of the people inside those buildings, the human beings fighting for their lives with every passing second. Cries had issued from the upper floor of one building and Keomany had started off in that direction, but Peter had stopped her.

There was no time. The storm had arrived. Heavy, oily rain had begun to fall and it was as though the clouds were the eyes of the Tatterdemalion, and it was watching them. It was far too late for them to try to save a single life; such a delay might cost thousands, even millions more. It might cost the world.

Peter squinted his eyes against the wind and the rain. There was a terrible stench in the air and it assaulted his nostrils, causing his eyes to water. His clothes whipped against his body but he set himself against the gale and kept on. The distant report of gunfire thudded dully in the air, a nearly constant sound, as if the bullets were the grinding of some giant engine. Peter had at first thought that perhaps the people of Ronda were fighting back, but the sounds he heard weren’t from the sort of weaponry people had in their homes. He would see soon enough, he supposed, where the shots were coming from.

Up ahead there was a broad plaza with a monument at its center and beyond that he could see part of the bridge Keomany had told him about, and the rest of the city rising up on the horizon beneath the terrible face of the storm.

Around the monument was a ring of demons, skeletal Whispers crouched at the base of the stone memorial like gargoyles. He cursed silently the momentary delay they would cost. It would have been so much easier to wait for the Tatterdemalion to come to him, for he was certain the sinister presence had noted him. But he remembered too well what had happened in Wickham and knew that it was possible that the Tatterdemalion might not attack him at all, might simply ignore him and go about its work. They had to bring it to them, force it to pay attention.

That was where Keomany came in.

Keomany
, he thought, frowning. She had been beside him a moment ago. Now, when he turned around, he saw that she had fallen behind. She was strikingly beautiful, her black hair like curtains of silk around her face, and her eyes glowed a bright gold. Keomany Shaw walked in a cascade of warm, soft earth light that touched her as though Gaea herself had reached down into this hellish dimension and touched her servant with a finger, a shaft of her divine spirit.

It was the dawn. In Spain, the sun was coming up, and where Keomany walked, she was slitting open a narrow window to the world to which this city belonged. Lit up like that, it was as though Keomany had become a goddess. Behind her she had left a swath of that warm morning light. It was still dim, still early back in the world, but day was breaking. Where she walked, sprigs of green grass grew up from the pavement without any help from Peter’s magick. He had helped Keomany to break through, to connect with the spirit of Gaea, but now that the two were entwined, the power coursing through Keomany had nothing to do with the kind of sorcery Peter wielded.

Where that filthy rain fell, the light of the other world’s dawn evaporated it. Peter’s clothes and hair were becoming sodden and the slick rain streaked his face, but Keomany was untouched by it. Ever since they had left the bullring, she had kept up with him, but now she had slowed and was staring at the street in front of her. After a moment, Keomany crouched and touched the pavement with outstretched fingers.

Peter glanced over at the blank face-shells of the Whispers around the monument at the center of the plaza. They were completely still as though they thought he might not notice them. Only the sharp tendrils that hung beneath their skull carapaces were in motion, sensing his presence, perhaps waiting to see what he would do. Or perhaps it was Keomany they were afraid of.

“What are you up to?” he whispered.

Beneath his feet the ground began to tremble. Startled, he spun back to look at Keomany, his hands crackling with magickal energy. Even as he turned, he saw the pavement beneath her fingers shatter and fall aside as branches and leaves thrust up from the ground. The sky above split open and light shone down in a widening circle as the tree grew and its branches spread wide.

An olive tree, fully grown, stood in the midst of the plaza in a pool of Spanish morning light. Keomany stood beneath its branches, so slim and petite in its shadow. She reached up and plucked an olive from its branches and then glanced over at Peter, smiling. Her eyes gleamed even more brightly as she laughed.

“I found a flaw,” she said. “There are places where the walls between here and home are very thin.”

With a flip of her silken hair she glanced southward at the towering thunderheads, the roiling, unnatural storm clouds. “It isn’t as all-powerful as it thinks it is.”