“Vicky!” I screamed as she vanished from my line of sight. “Stay strong kid, we’re here!” None of us hesitated as we reached the railing. Mike and I hurdled it, breaking the tiles as we landed twenty feet below, me with a sparking shield and Mike with the Smith’s Hammer. Foster went into a straight nosedive, sweeping past us and drawing his sword in one smooth motion.
The fairy came down behind Vicky. Belphegor was hunched over in front of the dark-tinted glass doors, shattered crystal and dinnerware strewn all around him. A halo of fire lit Vicky’s entire body and every step burned the floor, melting the stone beneath her.
Belphegor looked the child up and down, cradling the charred stump of his left arm. “Destroyer,” he hissed.
“No, demon. I am one of the Ghost Pack,” she said, her voice low and dangerous, entirely wrong emanating from a kid. “I am a Harrower!” She snapped her wrist forward, pointing with the middle and index fingers on her right hand. It looked like one of Zola’s spells. A roaring spiral of flame erupted from her forearm and blasted Belphegor through the doors. Glass and steel and the demon screamed as one.
Vicky stalked forward, paying the burning metal as much mind as I would a mosquito. Belphegor was still moving. More of his body was gone and a trail of ash followed him as he dragged himself closer to the edge of the garage.
“Vicky, left!” I shouted as the demon picked up a car with its remaining tentacles. I was only a few steps behind her, but I couldn’t do a thing. I saw her eyes widen as she turned left and the car smacked her across the garage in a barrel roll of vehicular carnage. The demon started laughing, only to retreat as Mike started to run him down. And then I saw where Vicky had landed.
She was frozen on her hands and knees, staring at the place Foster had eviscerated the vampire that had killed her. Killed her in so many ways.
“Kid, come on,” I said. “Move!”
She started to turn to me, and then Ezekiel was suddenly there, materializing in a haze of black beside Vicky as he moved to strike. “Little lamb,” he said as he struck her so hard and so fast I’d barely even registered he’d joined the fight.
Vicky’s head rebounded off the ground from the force of the blow. She rolled to the side in a vain effort to escape Ezekiel. She groaned and put her hands over her face, blood pouring from her forehead.
“What the fuck, she’s bleeding?” I said.
Ezekiel raised his foot to strike Vicky again. I raised my gun at the same time.
“No!” Foster screamed as he swooped in on Ezekiel. The necromancer unleashed a black beam of I can only imagine what. Foster dodged left and scored a hit on the bastard’s arm with a fully extended sword. Foster slid to a stop beside Vicky.
Ezekiel glanced at the gash on his arm and then summoned a shield. Only it wasn’t just a shield. It flashed out and smashed Vicky and Foster against the far wall with the force of a tsunami. The pair fell limply to the ground as Ezekiel turned back to the rest of us.
“Damian,” said a muffled voice. Vicky’s voice. “Damian!” The terrified little girl cried out to me as she bled in the corner.
“You son of a bitch!” I pulled the second trigger, six bullets sparked against another shield as Ezekiel took stock of his resistance.
“I am untouchable,” he said in that dead, papery voice.
“Tyranno Eversiotto!”
The lightning burned as it left my hand, channeling so much power from the ley lines the hair on my arm began to smoke. Ezekiel’s shield began to crack as bolt after bolt crashed into the translucent surface. His eyes widened slightly as the blue sparks began to dim and the shield gave way in a puff of static. He looked irritated as the last bit of the spell got through and hit him in the right leg.
“I’ll kill you last,” he said as he brushed out the small fire on his cloak. “For that insult.”
Happy made himself known then, phasing through the wall beside Vicky and closing his jaws on Ezekiel’s shoulder. The bastard just grunted as Happy flung him out of the garage into a rolling heap. Belphegor was outside with Mike, each looking beat down and exhausted. Mike’s shoulders were slumped, but he still shifted to block Belphegor as Happy bounded after Ezekiel. Ezekiel rolled and flung out his left arm, smashing Happy across the parking lot with a fierce backhand.
Belphegor lashed out at Mike, knocking the Smith’s Hammer out of his grip as I moved to help him. Mike gave a shaky hop backwards to dodge the next strike and I cut in front of him, a soulsword forged without a thought. Belphegor’s legs came off with one sweep of that blazing sword and I screamed bloody murder as visions of the demon’s circle of hell seared my brain. Women and children, skinned and hung and beaten to death atop their own fathers and husbands. The terror of war paled compared to the sight of families killing their own, not knowing it until their “enemy” died by their own hand, and then being struck senseless by the knowledge, only to be killed and resurrected by a demon so it could start all over again. I retched as the visions of torture and war etched themselves into my brain. I tried to stand—having fallen to my knees without realizing it—wanting to move in for a kill and then take down Ezekiel, but the Old Man beat me to it.
He came down on Ezekiel from the sky. It took me a second to realize the Old Man must have jumped from the top of the building. Something flashed over his right arm, a jagged bark-like darkness. It only took a split second to know where I’d seen it before: the skin of a gravemaker. Only it was the Old Man’s skin.
Claws erupted from that darkness, striking Ezekiel across the back. Ezekiel grimaced and spun away, revealing four slashes through the back of his cloak. He gestured with his right hand, a simple flip of the wrist, much like Boonville, and a thousand dead things sprang into the air at his whim, shattering the pavement they rose through and forming a smoky cloud of death above us.
“No,” the Old Man said, both his arms covered in rough tree bark. He clapped his clawed arms together and it felt like a bomb went off. My vision shook as the shockwave of power reached me. Ezekiel’s flood of necromancy simply cut off. Everything under his control dropped to the broken asphalt. Animal corpses and skeletons and even ancient human bones clattered unceremoniously back to earth.
“This is done!” I barely recognized my Dad’s voice. The rage and emotion boiling out of him turned it into a war cry. My eyes found him in time to see his finger pull the trigger. Mom and Zola and Sam stood behind him, and I wondered what the hell they were doing out there. The bomb lance shot forward like a rocket.
A smoking rocket that screamed and cried and groaned in a thousand maniacal voices. Belphegor’s mouth opened but whatever the demon was about to say or do was lost as the bomb lance punched into his blackened and burned chest.
His red eyes widened as his teeth fractured and shattered and he screamed. A scream never meant for the ears of the living. I fell back to my knees, hands over my head trying to shield myself from that shrill cry. The cry I’d heard when I’d touched him with a soulsword. The shock hit me a moment later. I’d used the focus, I shouldn’t have had any visions, any knowing, when I struck Belphegor. The explosion was almost quiet. A little pop and Belphegor was thrown to the four winds in streamers of fire.
Ezekiel stared at the fading fires of Belphegor’s impromptu pyre before he turned back to the Old Man. “I’d like to know how you did that. I think I’ll rip it from your mind.” His left hand curled up and the Old Man started sliding forward, propelled by an unseen force. As I raised my Sight I could just barely make out that force. Wisps of black and red power swirled around the Old Man’s aura. The Old Man crossed his arms and laughed. Laughed from his gut as he threw back his head in what seemed like an unending, inevitable procession.
“You want me closer, Ezekiel?” he said. “You only had to ask.” His right arm thickened in my vision, claws growing and sparking with a dim yellow glow.
“A soulart?” I muttered to myself.
The Old Man cut the black power around him with a simple arc drawn through the air. Ezekiel stumbled backwards, staring at his hands. His face bore no expression. He was still dead inside, for all I could tell. He almost missed the Old Man’s attack.
Claws slashed out, sending explosions of lightning toward Ezekiel as the Old Man closed the gap. Ezekiel threw up a shield to parry a golden beam of power. His lips slowly curled into a grin.
“You mean to kill me.” That dead, papery voice crawled its way into my head.
“I
will
kill you,” the Old Man snarled. The canyons and shadows of his skin flared up to cover his neck. He paused then, taking a deep breath and the bark-like texture receded to his arms.
“You don’t have the power. You’ve never had the power to kill me. I was worshipped. You are a maggot unfit to grace a beggar’s corpse.” Ezekiel bowed his head a fraction of an inch and pushed forward with both hands. His cloak blew backwards as a wall of fire, bristling with red and orange and blue flames, enveloped the Old Man. The ley lines in the area bent, drawn into the maelstrom.
I watched it happen or I wouldn’t have believed it. The Old Man opened his mouth and
consumed
the fire as though he was a demon himself. The Old Man took a step forward. An explosion of necromancy followed. All the dead things Ezekiel had called rose into the air, crying for blood, screaming their allegiance to the man. The man who freed them from the monster. It was a power I’d felt. It whispered and called to me. It was a power I knew.
I remembered.
It was the power that had flooded me before I killed Prosperine.
It was the Old Man.
The realization staggered me. I watched, partially aware of the soulsword in the Old Man’s grasp, the union of the dead, the auras, the souls. But the rest of my mind was back at Stone’s River. Back in the vision: the dying man, his family tied down and slaughtered on his back so he’d feel the blood of his own children running into the ground.
That hadn’t been Belphegor’s circle of hell. That had been the Old Man’s memories.
Ezekiel, he had been there. He stood by and watched. He gave the order. What wouldn’t a man do to take revenge on an atrocity like that? “Gods, no.”
The Old Man lunged and laid open a huge section of Ezekiel’s leg. Ezekiel cauterized his own wound in an instant as he spun and countered.
Something flung me to the ground as lightning cracked over my head. I rolled my head to the side to find Zola.
“What?” I said slowly, seeing her lips move, but not fully comprehending her words.
“Ah said, get the fuck down, boy!”
“It was Ezekiel,” I said. “Ezekiel killed his family. He raped his … his … while they were … oh my god.”
“What?” Zola said. “What are you talking …” and then her face twisted into an expression of utter horror. “Christ, that’s what he never told me. He’s going to lose control. This fight has to stop.” She was up on her feet and running at the fight full speed. I could have sworn she shouted a name, but he paid no mind. “Old Man! You have to stop!”
He may not have looked, but Ezekiel did. The strike that followed laid his chest open, the wet white glint of bone exposed to the night air. The Old Man followed with a quick stab to the bastard’s chest.
Ezekiel raised his arm and an explosion of wind sent the Old Man and Zola into the air. I was fast enough to get beneath Zola, breaking her fall, but the Old Man hit hard several yards away. He was laughing.
Ezekiel vomited blood, hands sealed over his chest as he stared at the Old Man. Something between disbelief and absolute rage crawled over his face. He never saw the panda bear storming in behind him.
Happy wrapped his jaws around Ezekiel’s waist, shook his head like a rabid dog, and flung Ezekiel further into the parking lot. Ezekiel rolled to a stop with a shout of surprise. I stared as he slowly rose to one knee, holding a hand over the worst of his wounds and the blood staining his dark cloak.
“We are not done,” he said, a small spark lighting in his voice.
“Not until you’re dead,” the Old Man said.
For the second time, I watched the chaff of a gravemaker rise up and then vanish with Ezekiel, leaving no traces behind.
“No!”
the Old Man shouted. “No.” He stared at the vacant patch in the dirt and debris where Ezekiel stood a moment before. He kicked at a smear of blood and sighed as the ley lines around him gradually resumed their natural flow.
Mike picked his hammer up and slid the innocuous-looking tool into the loop of leather on his belt.
“Where’s Dell?” Mike asked. “I thought you were travelling together.”
“I sent Dell to your shop, Damian,” the Old Man said as he looked my way. The rough, dark carapace slowly slid back into his skin, leaving nothing behind but a mosaic of blood to trace the lines of his scars.
“Thank you,” I said as I ran back into the garage. Foster was there, his wing bent at an odd angle, but he was up. Vicky was cradled against his chest, showing no signs of the power she’d been wielding.
“You okay, Vicky?”
She glanced up and forced a little smile before immediately breaking down into tears. She pushed off Foster and ran over to me, bawling. I picked her up. She was heavy and she felt as real as Nixie or Sam or any one of us. Vicky buried her face in my neck.
“It’s okay. We’ll get you out of here.”
Edgar was waiting in the destroyed doorway, Vik just behind him. “The Watchers are on their way. We need to move.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I
glanced back at the burning ruin of Chesterfield Mall in the rearview. Black smoke rose against the fading light, lit from below by the fires that birthed it.
“Edgar, can you really cover this up?” I asked.
He rubbed his hand over his forehead. “I don’t know. All the employees are dead. The few Cleaners we could send found them in one of the theaters. I’ll spare you the details.”
“How many?” I asked.
“It wasn’t just employees,” Edgar said.
“How many?” Foster said from his perch on Vicky’s shoulder.