The Gathering Dark (51 page)

“I will be free!”
a voice boomed within the sphere.

Peter felt his ears begin to bleed.

“Like hell,” he muttered.

The sphere hovered inches above the ground. The others called to Peter. Allison began to run to him.

“Keep them alive!” he called to her.

Then he expanded the sphere again, feeling as though he were about to be swallowed by the darkness of the storm, as though his very spirit were unraveling. He caught Keomany up in tendrils of his magick and then she was there with him. Peter Octavian stared into those golden, glowing eyes and he felt refreshed by the sunlight that tore through the storm above, following her.

Yet there was doubt and fear on her face. She was the vessel of Gaea, and yet she was also just Keomany Shaw, a shopkeeper from Wickham, Vermont. This was the evil that had destroyed her town and slaughtered her parents, here with her in this magickal enclosure.

“What are you doing?” Keomany asked, her voice pleading. “Peter, what are we supposed to—”

He reached out and touched her face, feeling the smooth skin, smelling the scents of flowers and grass. “You’re tied to Gaea now. You feel her and she feels you. Right?”

Keomany nodded, frightened, the golden light in her eyes faltering.

“Hold on to that connection.”

The remnants of the Tatterdemalion whipped at him. Thunder shook all of Ronda. A building up above the gorge burst into flames and a piece of the cliff wall calved off and crashed down into the nearly dry riverbed. It had fallen silent, however. The Hellgod was also afraid.

Already exhausted and in pain, Peter’s body trembled as he summoned all the sorcerous power he had accumulated in his time in Hell and in all of his studies. With his right hand he held on to Keomany and once more he could feel the umbilical that led back to Gaea through her. More importantly, he could feel yet again the cord that tied the Tatterdemalion to its own reality. Focusing upon that, he reached out his left hand, fingers splayed wide, and he spoke a single syllable in the language of Hell.

He tore a hole in the air, a shimmering vertical pool of mercury, a portal between dimensions. With Keomany beside him, he stepped through.

All the strength went out of Peter, drained from him, and he fell to his knees. His stomach lurched and he bent over vomiting on the floor, which was as smooth and perfect as glass. Disoriented, he swayed, and then he felt Keomany’s hand on his shoulder. He reached for her, and when he glanced up at her face and saw the golden light misting from her eyes, the light bathed his face and he did not feel quite so weak and lost.

On his knees the mage looked around.

They were in an enormous chamber, seemingly without any exit. It was formed of a smooth, reflective surface the blue of a robin’s egg, and though he could not find its source, there was light pulsing softly within that cavernous cell.

For cell it was.

“Is that it?” Keomany asked, voice low and tinged with wonder.

Peter only nodded. On the other side of the massive chamber was a single creature, an abomination easily a dozen feet high. Its body was armored with a carapace not unlike the Whispers, an indigo shell. Its upper half reminded him of nothing so much as the four-armed, hideous goddess Kali, and its lower half was not unlike that of a scorpion, massive spiked tail wavering up in back of it.

The horror’s eyes glowed a rotten orange that seemed all too familiar. It glared at them, took several cautious steps backward, and its massive stinger went rigid, aimed directly at Peter.

The mage had seen the face of the Hellgod only behind a cotton mask and outlined in ash and dust, but there was no mistaking it. The Tatterdemalion spoke then, its impossibly wide mouth opening, protruding lower jaw grinding against the upper. Its words were in a demon-tongue Peter could not even begin to decipher. But one word was familiar.

His own name. “Octavian.”

It was horrible, this thing. But Peter was confused by its surroundings. What was this world, this doorless, windowless chamber? This was the Hellgod’s home dimension, he was certain of it. But there had to be far more to this reality, more creatures, more demons, even hellish cities . . . an entire universe. Yet the Tatterdemalion was confined here.

And then he understood.

“It’s a prison,” he said, the words echoing off the glassy walls.

“Yes,” Keomany whispered in response. “In a world of dark magick and evil, it’s so monstrous that they have to keep it caged here.”

The Hellgod hissed, a hydraulic sound not unlike the voice of the Whispers, and it began to move slowly in at them, stinger twitching as it drew closer. This thing had been unable to exert its power over its own reality, unable to torment this world with its magick, and so it had turned its attention elsewhere, explored other dimensions, and found one that it saw as easy prey.

“No,” Peter said, the one word bouncing all around the cavern. “The fighting’s over. You’re done.”

He felt drained already, as though he had burned up the magick within him like fuel. But it was still there, traces of it, echoes of it. The mage reached out one final time and grabbed Keomany’s wrist. He held up his free hand and tendrils of magickal energy exploded from his fingers once more, weaving a new sphere, a new cage for the demon. The magick was blood red now and it felt to Peter as though it were his own blood, leeching out of him as he grabbed the Hellgod, paralyzed it there in that sphere. Its stinger was the only thing still moving, and it struck at its new, smaller prison again and again, and with each blow Peter winced in pain.

Scarlet light gleamed off the smooth glass cavern.

Peter closed his eyes. With Keomany to guide him he felt backward along the same umbilical they had used to arrive here. His sorcery twined with it, caressed the spirit of Gaea.

The mage stepped back into Ronda with Keomany at his side. The storm had begun to subside but the sky was still orange, the rain still thick and oily. He heard a voice call “Holy shit!” as he dragged the Hellgod through into the realm it had created.

But Peter did not stop there. The shaft of sunlight from their dimension, that Spanish morning light, bathed him and Keomany both. But that was not enough.

The next portal was easy to form. It was as though he slipped his fingers into a space between that sunlight and the darkness of the storm and opened up a door. He led Keomany through. He heard the rushing of the Guadalevin River. The earthwitch gasped and she shuddered as she moved into the full presence of her goddess again at last.

The slit in reality remained open behind them and Peter could smell the stink of that Hell blowing through it on the wind from another dimension. They stood at the bottom of the Cleft of Ronda. The river rushed nearby. Above them, however, there was no city. No bridge. And no sign that there had ever been a settlement on that plateau.

The mage glanced around and could see the shimmering barrier that surrounded Ronda and all of the other cities the Tatterdemalion had stolen, but this time they were on the
inside
of the dimensional rift. The Spanish morning light—probably verging on toward afternoon now—still shone above and the breeze still blew in from the mountains carrying the scent of the countryside upon it, but anyone outside the barrier would have seen it as a blank spot upon the world. It was as though where the city ought to have been, reality was out of focus.

Peter had no idea how the Hellgod had accomplished it. It came from a dimension unknown to this world’s sorcerers and its magick was a total mystery.

But the thing he thought of as the Tatterdemalion was
here
, now. The place it had wanted to destroy, and yet had wanted to avoid entering at all costs. If it had the power to take cities away upon a whim, it could have left its prison and come to Earth at any time. With its magicks and its ferociousness it might have conquered.

So why had it not?

There was only one reason that made any sense to Peter. That it could not. It could not wield the storm here, could not send its demon spawn Whispers out in the sun; its magicks had limited power here.

With a grunt of final effort, Peter dragged the blood red sphere through the tear in reality and into that null field in the Cleft of Ronda, a geography that had been reconstructed in that alternate dimension by the magicks of the Hellgod.

Octavian fell to his knees, too weak to stand a moment longer. Barely able to kneel. The Hellgod was freed as the sphere dissipated, his magick exhausted.

Keomany looked radiant in the sunshine. Her silken hair blew across her face, her expression one of grief, of mourning for her lost parents, and yet of resolution as well.

The Hellgod hissed once more, its carapace steaming in the sunlight but not burning. It raised its stinger and charged at Peter, muttering in its demon-tongue.

A fresh wind kicked up across the rocks and the rushing river, and it seemed to emanate from Keomany herself. She raised her hands and the ground shook, knocking the Hellgod off its many feet. Before it could right itself, branches shot from among the rocks, impaling it.

At the top of the gorge, the ravaged city of Ronda began to fade back into reality. Peter and Keomany found themselves in the midst of another battle, as their friends materialized around them. Allison was protecting Sophie and Nikki from the Whispers, which were incinerated almost instantly by the warm sunshine of that spring day.

The Tatterdemalion thrashed and cried out as more and more shoots of green and wood punched through its carapace from below and then shot out through cracks in its armor above. It was a demon, a monster, but its fear of this place had always been that here its magicks could not protect it. Here, it was only flesh.

A small grove of olive trees grew up to maturity within the space of seconds, and tore the Hellgod apart.

It was the last thing Peter Octavian saw before surrendering at last to the shadows of unconsciousness.

“So the priest, Devlin, he was dead, right?”

The late afternoon sunshine cast long shadows out across the North Platte River. It was the last day of May and the spring air still held a hint of the past winter, a bit of a chill that slipped across the Nebraska countryside when evening was coming on.

Allison Vigeant sat on the grassy bank of the river with her knees pulled up under her chin, remembering another river. She shivered, but it was not from the chill.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “That part of the report was true, at least. I didn’t . . . I mean, I only knew him for a little while, and it was in the middle of all that, the shit hitting the fan, everything. He had a lot of courage. Peter says he was a nice guy, as well. Quiet. Funny.”

Carl Melnick sat beside her on the grass. He looked very out of place there, uncomfortable in his khaki pants and brown suede shoes and a button-down shirt. The aging newsman’s salt-and-pepper hair seemed to have thinned somewhat in the weeks since she had last seen him. But she suspected that the whole world felt a little older these days. The official death toll was just shy of eight hundred thousand and it would have been much higher if they had not reclaimed the lost cities when they had. Paris and New York had been brought back only hours after they had disappeared. Another day and . . . Allison did not like to think about that. It was a catastrophe of previously unimaginable proportions.

She shook her head, a bitter chuckle issuing from her lips.

“What?” Carl asked.

“Nothing. Just sad, really. Seems like Devlin was a good guy. A hero, if you go in for the word. We could use a lot more like him. Dealing with what happened.”

Melnick cleared his throat and narrowed his gaze, studying her though she averted her eyes. “Dealing with what else might happen. Bad enough when you told the world there really were such things as demons and vampires among us. Now they’ve gotta get used to the idea that there are things as powerful as this somewhere out there, on the other side of some black hole or something. Stephen fucking Hawking meets
The Exorcist
. Just what the world needed to know.”

“At least this time I wasn’t the one to have to tell them.” Allison glanced up at Melnick and smiled before returning her attention to the gentle rush of the river. It soothed her. “The world will get by. Humans are a pretty resilient species. And I have it on good authority that the earth itself is healthier than ever.”

Her old friend raised an eyebrow. “You said something like that before. What’s that mean, exactly?”

She had not told him about Keomany Shaw. Now Allison just returned the upraised eyebrow. “Let’s just say there’s more than one kind of magick, Carl.”

Melnick raised both his hands; the skin on them was wrinkled and dry. “All right. Be mysterious. Just don’t expect me to trust you again. You promised me you’d give me the story.”

Allison did not turn her focus away from the river. “I did. I told you what happened.”

“You told me
part
of what happened.”

With a long sigh she nodded and turned to him. “What more do you want to know?”

“Kuromaku. The other one like . . . the other vampire,” Melnick said tentatively. “What happened to him. Reports from the site didn’t say anything about you, but they didn’t mention him either. It’s like the U.N. wants to pretend vampires don’t exist anymore.”

“We still exist. We’re just not public enemy number one anymore.”

Melnick nodded in understanding.

Allison brushed the hair away from her face and went on. “Kuromaku should’ve died. Even a shadow can’t sustain that kind of damage and survive. Without being able to heal himself . . .”

“Should’ve died. But he didn’t. How did you save him? You said Henning shot him with the coagulant.”

She flinched and shot him a dark look. “You know I hate that word. It doesn’t do anything to the blood.”

“Sorry. But it’s not supposed to exist, so there’s no name for it. The online vampire fanatics call it that.”

Allison waved his apology away. “Never mind. You’re right, though. Kuromaku’d been shot. He couldn’t shift anymore.” She pressed her lips together in hesitation and then at last forged on. “There’s a cure. A way to reverse it. Pretty simple, actually. He was lying there on the rocks near the priest. Both of them were badly burned but Kuromaku isn’t human. He was still alive but he wouldn’t have lasted long.”