The Gathering Dark (48 page)

But the sword still burned in his hands. His palms still dripped blood where the blade had sliced them. The brood mother had been a monster, had given birth to uncountable demons, but he had no sense that it was any more than a breeder, a mindless beast, no better than an animal. Its spawn were evil, he had seen that in them, felt it. But killing this creature brought him no sense of victory. None at all.

Hundreds were likely already dead in Ronda, maybe thousands. Dozens of buildings were already destroyed. And it was only beginning. If Wickham was any indication, other cities had already suffered worse . . . the fires and the slaughter and the torture . . . and the Tatterdemalion was only going to spread his influence farther, dragging city after city into this tiny Hell dimension, this place the Hellgod might well have created solely for this purpose.

Peter did not know why the Tatterdemalion had not simply swarmed across the earth with his Whispers, following nightfall around the world, bringing this storm to each new time zone and blotting out the sun. Why take it piece by piece instead of taking it all?

Unless he couldn’t take it all
, Peter thought. His mind flooded all at once with a barrage of questions and suppositions, all of which revolved around the idea that the Tatterdemalion had to do things slowly because it was not as powerful as it appeared to be.
What if it’s only a god in this little pocket universe?
he wondered.

With the storm screaming and the rain pouring down and the death and destruction the Hellgod had wrought, its power was all around him. Yet he had already reasoned that it had given up Wickham too easily, that they had
taken
it from him. And had the Tatterdemalion been unable or unwilling to cross into the portion of Wickham that Peter and Keomany had returned to its rightful place?

All of these thoughts churned in his mind. Peter knew the answer was here, knew that the key to stopping the Hellgod was not in snatching back sections of the earth that it had stolen, but somewhere in the morass of questions he had about its limitations.

In the midst of the chaos storm he and Keomany stood in the dimensional rip and Peter glanced over at her once more. The rocks around her feet had been pushed aside by new plant growth that erupted from the ground. Olive branches grew and twisted around her legs like vines.

“What now?” she asked, and her voice had changed. It seemed almost to ring in his ears.

Peter took a quick look around. There were still Whispers climbing the walls of the Cleft—the last that would ever be born of their mother, though he was not foolish enough to think it was impossible there was another brood mother somewhere. But killing the Whispers would avail them nothing at the moment.

Nothing.

He stared up into the storm in fury and frustration. His fingers clenched the magickal blade more tightly, and fresh blood flowed on his palms and dripped to the ground. He had expected some kind of reaction, thought that the death of the brood mother would draw the Tatterdemalion down where it might be more vulnerable.

“Damn you!” Peter screamed, stepping once more from the sweet-smelling shaft of earthlight that surrounded Keomany. “You’re so damned all-powerful? What are you afraid of, then?”

Behind him, Peter heard Keomany gasp and call his name. He turned and saw that she was pointing up at the bridge, at the extraordinary architecture that had gone into constructing its arches.

Atop the bridge, four figures stood looking over the edge. Allison was one of them and he knew Kuromaku must be among the others, for that had been her goal, rescuing him. But he could not make out their faces from this distance and did not know who the other two were.

Peter glanced at Keomany again, about to suggest that they ascend the gorge and meet the others to determine how to proceed. But before he could speak, there was a sudden lull in the storm, a quiet, ironically, that silenced him. The wind died and the rain was falling straight down. The thunderheads had grown darker all across Ronda and they hung heavier, lower, as though the storm might fall upon the city and swallow it whole. It roiled and pulsed as though it was alive.

Which, of course, it was.

Looks like I got your attention after all
, Peter thought.

Then green lightning began to arc up from the ground piercing those pustulent clouds, and thunder like the world was exploding began to roll across the sky, so loud Peter felt it inside, thumping against his heart.

Lightning hit the bridge.

Jack Devlin had studied sorcery for most of his adult life. In his magickal arsenal were a handful of summoning spells, wards and bindings, exorcisms, and a total of three deadly attacks that were specific to some of the demon species he had dealt with in the past. Nowhere in his studies did it say anything about defense against lightning.

And he didn’t have a fucking thing that would hold an eighteenth-century bridge together when it was dead set on falling apart.

As the first bolts of lightning struck the bridge, he was thrown to his knees. Sophie Duvic—the French woman who was companion to the vampire Kuromaku—screamed and swore loudly. For his part, Kuromaku said nothing. He was badly injured, barely able to stand on his own two feet but making a go of it. The grimly handsome Asian vampire would not die of his wounds—a vampire could not bleed to death—but there were other ways for him to die if he could not fight to stay alive.

Several bolts of lightning struck the bridge simultaneously. Enormous chunks of masonry blew out of the chest-high walls on either side, and in the center of the bridge a sinkhole appeared in the stone. It had begun to collapse.

Kuromaku staggered to the edge of the bridge and his head struck on the stone wall. He went down hard and Sophie was right behind him, crawling, shouting at him that now was not the time, that she was not going to let him die now after all they had been through. Father Jack could hear the hysteria creeping into her voice and was just amazed it had taken her this time.

The lightning came again, the thunder right on top of them now, and when it bellowed across the sky, Jack clawed his hands to his ears and cried out in pain. Beneath his feet the bridge began to sway.

Allison Vigeant ran past him, struggling to keep her feet, and went to Sophie and Kuromaku. He knew he ought to go to them, that as a man of God he should stay and help them get off the bridge. And he
was
praying to his God, that was for sure.

But Father Jack hesitated. He didn’t know these people.
Get your ass off the bridge right now!
his mind screamed. But he couldn’t do that. It would have made him no better than Bishop Gagnon, and Jack would not have been able to stomach that.

“Damn it,” he muttered, and he ran toward the other three, knowing that he had made an irrevocable choice, that he had thrown his fate together with theirs. And then he realized how foolish a thought that was, that his fate had been entwined with theirs from the moment this hellish place had swallowed him.

With inhuman strength Allison hefted Kuromaku off the ground. Father Jack reached for one of his arms to help him walk but the vampire pulled away, indicating that he was all right. Sophie gave the priest a grateful look and they all started toward the north side of the bridge. The collapsed portion was ahead, but south would lead back to the Whispers and none of them wanted to risk that.

The wind buffeted them. Father Jack pressed himself together with the others, a wall of flesh—mortal and immortal—marching across the bridge as it trembled with each lightning strike, each rumble of thunder. The oily, mucous rain made their feet slide on the stone but they did not slow.

The storm fell upon them. A tornado finger dipped down out of the clouds like the blood red hand of the devil himself and touched the bridge just in front of them. The winds tore the stone away in massive chunks, ripped a wound in the granite structure of the bridge, and it gave way, falling apart beneath their feet.

Once more Father Jack screamed to God for salvation. But there was no answer. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Allison transform into a falcon again, and out of reflex he began to formulate in his mind the spell that would allow him to levitate. But then a piece of masonry struck him in the chest, cracking ribs and knocking the air out of him, and Father Jack was falling. He slammed into Kuromaku and their limbs tangled as they fell. He heard Sophie calling out to God in her native tongue but her pleas garnered no more response than his own.

Amid the rubble of that massive bridge, they tumbled down into the Cleft of Ronda. As they fell, Father Jack felt a kind of peace envelop him that he had never known, a certainty of faith that he had always longed for but never found.

His time had come.

He did not flail as he fell, but gave himself up to God’s will.

With the ground rushing up toward him, the bridge collapsing all around him, Father Jack closed his eyes.

And he stopped falling. The sensation of plummeting ceased and he felt his hair standing up with static electricity. His eyes snapped open again and everything around him was a bright, glowing green for he was seeing it through the magickal field of energy with which Peter Octavian had caught him and Kuromaku and Sophie.

“Oh, Jesus, thank you,” Jack whispered, glancing up at the sky, where he saw the tear in the heavens where the light of the Spanish morning poured through, a hole in this Hell.

A moment later the descent began again, but more slowly this time. Peter brought them down to the rocky riverbank. The falcon flew down to join them and Allison took human form once more. Jack’s chest ached where he had been struck and a sharp pain confirmed for him that he had cracked a couple of ribs, but he was alive.

Relief washed through him, but along with it came awe. He stared at Peter and Keomany and marveled at the changes in them. The slim, delicately beautiful Asian woman had become a kind of goddess in her own right, at least at first glance. Golden light spilled and misted from her eyes, and in the midst of the sunshine that burned through into this Hell from another world, her hair blew in a breeze that was not part of this storm. Keomany was rooted to the place she stood, branches wound around her legs, moving slowly with a lover’s caress.

Then there was Peter. If Keomany had taken on the aspect of a goddess, Father Jack saw in Octavian another face, the grim visage of a dark god of war or some terrible archangel. Hair and clothing drenched, still he burned with a purplish glow that sent sparks snaking along his body, and in his hands he held a long, massive sword crafted from color and fire and light, from pure magick. Blood dripped from his hands.

“Jack,” Peter said, his voice somehow carrying through the storm. He smiled, but there was something unsettling in the expression. “Good to see you again.”

Then, holding his sorcerous blade in one hand, Peter stepped into the darkness, away from the gash Keomany had torn between worlds. The woman, Sophie, had been helping Kuromaku to stand but now the vampire stepped away from his human companion and despite his wounds he stood tall. Peter went to him and took Kuromaku into his arms and the two embraced as though they were brothers long apart.

“Peter,” Allison said, gaze darting around, on guard as the thunder boomed and rolled across the sky. Lightning still danced above but the storm seemed to have calmed some. “Your plan isn’t working. Can you get us out of here, back to our own world? Maybe from there we can—”

Octavian whirled on her, deep furrows in his brow. To Father Jack the mage looked somehow younger, his face thinner, his eyes brighter.

“Stop, Allison,” Peter growled. “If we can’t stop it here, there won’t be a home to return to.”

The vampire woman nodded. “All right. We stay and fight in Hell.”

Peter shook his head. “This isn’t Hell. Trust me.”

Father Jack turned his back on them and stared up at the storm, at the hideous tower of orange-black thunderclouds, and he was certain he saw a face there, a terrible visage gazing down at them and silently laughing.

“You’re right,” the priest told him. “We make our own Hells. This is just another demon with a fucking attitude problem.”

Peter could no longer feel the slashes in his hands. His skin burned with the power that coursed through him. Every bone and muscle seemed to ache and yet he felt as though he could have leveled the city with the magick that was in him.

Fury and despair warred in his heart, but he would not give in to either. He glanced at the others—at courageous Jack Devlin and fiercely loyal Allison, at his brother Kuromaku, who was much missed and now had been crippled, and at the beautiful yet ordinary human woman who stood by him.

Peter turned his back on them and stared at Keomany. The earthwitch raised her chin, feeling his attention upon her. Gold light seeped from her eyes and danced in her black silken hair. She smiled at him.

“No time like the present, Peter,” Keomany said. “You got its attention but it still isn’t coming. It’s
afraid
of you. I want to hurt the bastard. My parents’ ghosts won’t rest until I do.”

Peter nodded. “Let’s do it, then.” He turned to the others but his focus was mainly on Allison and Kuromaku, undead warriors, trusted friends. “Be ready for anything.”

He raised his hands and then opened them. Drops of blood hit the stones at his feet and a burst of light splashed from his palms; the sword he had conjured was gone. The mage stepped into the shaft of sunlight that still burned through the storm above, giving them a glimpse of the beautiful blue sky that ought to have hung above Ronda on this morning. He inhaled the scents of flowers carried on the breeze.

Keomany reached her hands out to him. The branches that curled around her legs seemed to grow higher up her thighs, holding on to her more tightly. She smiled and in that moment Peter felt he was gazing into the face of Gaea herself.

He took her hands, felt sharp pain as the cuts in his hands brushed her palms, his blood smearing her skin. This time when he began to summon the magick within him, he did not feel the resistance he had felt before. His sorcery might have been woven from chaos, and her earthcraft tapping the natural soul of the world, the order of things, but chaos and order had met before. They danced eternally, knew each other intimately.