Waking Nightmares (46 page)

Read Waking Nightmares Online

Authors: Christopher Golden

 
OCTAVIAN
burned with embarrassment and regret. He could still feel Keomany’s mouth and hands on his skin, and he hated Navalica for the chaos that had undone them both and forever stained their friendship.
He wiped the searing chaos rain out of his eyes and stared, trying to make sense of the figure flying toward him through the storm. The wind screamed in his ears, merging with the shriek of Navalica’s rage that filled the square, but Octavian ignored it all. What flew toward him might have been an angel, if he thought such things still existed in this world. Enormous eagle wings spread and caught the air, dipped and sliced the current, and she soared directly toward him.
“That’s new!” Keomany called, as she and Amber ran up beside him.
Octavian stared at the red-haired angel that dove toward them, and he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “It’s very, very old.”
In his time as a vampire, with the ability to alter his shape on a molecular level, he had never taken this form. He had seen it only a handful of times, a shadow not changing its fundamental flesh, but adding to it. It took more than imagination; it took irreverence, and righteousness and a supreme effort of will to tap into the structure of the universe and steal some of its substance.
Charlotte alighted beside him, wings furling toward her back and diminishing to nothing, like the claws of a cat returning to their sheaths. With the tattoos all over her flesh, she had a fierce glory about her, like some ancient barbarian queen. In her hands she held the dripping, pulsing, pustulent indigo heart of the goddess of chaos.
“How did you do that?” Octavian demanded.
“I did what you wanted!” Charlotte roared over the storm.
“Not that!” he snapped.
Amber darted into the air in front of them, hanging there five feet off the pavement, though the rain still touched her skin, still beaded on her new flesh.
“Where’s the chest?” she demanded, glaring at Charlotte. “You left it there!”
Charlotte snarled at her. “I got her fucking heart and I’m back here alive. I didn’t see you up there!”
Keomany shouted, pointing, and Octavian looked up at the clock tower in time to see Navalica step off the edge, descending toward the square. Charlotte had bought them precious seconds, and they were squandering them. How a rogue vampire girl with little experience shapeshifting beyond the sinister forms—bat, rat, wolf—could manifest angel wings . . . that would have to wait.
“Give me the heart,” Octavian snapped.
Charlotte hesitated, and he saw a flicker of something dark in her eyes, as though she might have some other plan for the goddess’s heart, but then she handed it over.
Were you going to try to eat it?
he thought, but did not say. More questions for another day.
Rage bristled inside him. He opened his arms wide, summoning a fierce magic from within him. His chest had begun to heal from the wounds Amber had slashed there, but not completely, and he smeared his palms with his own blood, flicked his fingers so that droplets flew into the air, and then spoke a single word that froze the blood and the air around it. Muttering a short enchantment, a spell of the ancient Hittites, lost to time but not to him, he reached out to grab the frozen droplets of blood and a silver light burst from both of his palms and blossomed into a cage of light around those blood drops.
“Now,” he said, thrusting the cage-sphere toward Charlotte. “Put it inside.”
Fearless, she did not hesitate, thrusting both of her hands into the silver light and placing the heart within. She pulled her hands out and turned to face the first wave of Navalica’s wraiths, which dropped down out of the sky to attack them.
“Bring it, bitches!” Charlotte screamed, and a fresh set of wings burst from her back. These were not angel wings, however. Webbed, leathery things, they belonged on a dragon, or a demon.
She launched herself into the air, slashing at two of the wraiths, and the battle was joined.
Octavian looked toward the square and saw people scurrying out of the way as Navalica stalked toward them. Blue lightning arced from the sky, striking her again and again. Wraiths dipped down to her out of the storm, bringing squirming blobs of color, bits of human joy, the stolen chaos of human hearts, to replenish her.
“Here!” he shouted, turning to Keomany and Amber.
He thrust the Hittite soul cage out to Keomany, who flinched away.
“I don’t do that kind of magic!” she insisted.
“You’re a witch, elemental or not,” Octavian shouted, wiping the rain again from his face. “All you have to do is hold on to it until we get the high priests’ damn box back. You know the feel of magic. You can do it!”
Hands shaking, Keomany took it.
Octavian turned to Amber. “Prep her for the spell, like we planned. Keep the Reapers off her.”
Then he looked up at the savage air war taking place above him, Charlotte and the wraiths clawing each other to shreds.
“Charlotte!”
The vampire spun in midair, red hair spilling wetly across her face, slick with rain.
“Go back and get that chest!” he roared.
She sneered and shot him the finger, but she beat those demon wings and flew off, speeding toward the clock tower again. Some of the wraiths gave chase, but others dove toward Octavian, Keomany, and Amber.
Teeth gritted, Octavian summoned arcane fire and burned them out of the sky.
Amber let out a cry. He turned toward her and saw the confusion and regret in her eyes.
“They’re not your family anymore,” he told her. “Now get Keomany ready. And keep her alive.”
Amber nodded, and Octavian turned to see Navalica striding toward him, arrogant in her rage. Without her heart, her magic had weakened. Her control of the storm would falter. She would lose control. But she was a goddess of chaos and darkness and she had waited thousands of years to taste freedom and human pain again. She would never surrender.
Octavian ran toward her, summoning magic learned in Hell, sorcery that had no place in this world. His hair whipped around him as that sorcerous energy crackled, burning away the chaos rain before it could touch him, raw power with which he could have slain angels. He willed it to take shape, holding his hands in front of him, and forged the blazing golden aura around him into a single blade, a sword of Hell’s fire.
Navalica paused, cocked her head, and laughed, the blue fire of her hair falling around her face. Lightning struck the pavement around her, cracking the street open. Steam shot up from the sewers below.
“Little magician, you inconvenience me,” the goddess said.
“No,” Octavian replied. “I bring you order.”
Navalica narrowed her eyes with hatred, and in that moment, he saw her uncertainty. Without her heart, she weakened. He knew, then, that he could defeat her.
If she didn’t kill him first.
 
ARE
you hungry?
Miles had asked his mother.
Her mystified expression was all the answer he required. That, and the way his hunger had begun to focus on his mother, on the pale expanse of her throat. No blood ran beneath that ethereal skin. Like him, she had no substance except for spirit. And yet as the hunger gnawed at him, he knew that she wasn’t like him at all.
“This can’t be,” he said, backing away, ghost tears sliding from his phantom eyes.
Were his teeth sharper now? He ran his tongue over them, all of it only a manifestation of his spirit, nothing but a ghost, nothing that should be able to be altered on such a level. What were ghosts? Spirits? Ectoplasm? Energy?
This is impossible,
he thought.
But wasn’t that the true terror of chaos magic, that it made the impossible possible? His body had been tainted by Navalica’s chaos, and then savaged by a vampire. He had been impaled on the table, and those wooden shafts had thrust up through her body as well, and her blood had run down into his wounds, inside him . . . and then Keomany had touched him with her magic, made certain that his soul maintained contact with the earthly plane.
All those different strains of magic working on him at once, even as death took his flesh and his spirit slipped away, contaminated.
“Miles, please, you’re scaring me,” his mother said, reaching for him.
“Don’t touch me!” he snapped, jerking away from her, though all he wanted was to embrace her again. It was what the hunger in him demanded.
“Miles?”
“I’m hungry, Mother,” he said, running his tongue over the spectral fangs in his mouth.
Anguish clutched at his heart. He looked at the window and saw the rain running like thick syrup down the glass. Blue lightning flashed, and hate filled him so completely that for a moment his hunger faded.
“Chaos,” he whispered.
Charlotte had been driven mad with bloodlust she could not control. Keomany had only tried to save his soul. Miles understood that he had become a monster, a pit of ravenous gnawing where a soul ought to be, and he knew who was responsible.
If Octavian and his friends were out there now, trying to kill Navalica, he wanted to see it happen.
“I’ll be back,” he told his mother.
“Sweetheart, please,” she begged, reaching for him.
Miles skittered away from her. “No. Not now. I’m hungry now. But I’ll come back.”
“When?”
He shot her a look that he knew would haunt her, but he could not stop himself.
“When I’ve eaten.”
As he walked toward the door his thoughts were focused entirely on Keomany. She had tried to help him. Whatever Octavian had in mind to fight Navalica, Keomany would be a part of it. Miles had to find her.
He went through the door, and for a moment the house shimmered around him, becoming once again that soft gray twilight realm in which he had awoken.
No,
he thought.
I need to be with Keomany. I need to go to her.
For a second or two, all became gauzy mist around him, and then he blinked in surprise as the world resolved again. He stood in the town square in the midst of the storm, rain passing through him, wind not touching him at all. Wraiths darted overheard, diving in and out of the churning clouds. People fought and fornicated in the street.
A shout of rage came to him, and he turned.
Keomany Shaw stood only a few feet away under the awning of the Black Rose Grille, her hands on either side of a sphere of gleaming silver light. She looked as if she were in pain, struggling with intense concentration. Beside her stood a wraith unlike all of the others, the ones Amber had called Reapers. This creature had a sensual female body, nothing like the withered skeletal piping of the others. Its skin was a dark, bruised purple. The wraith had some kind of needle in her hand and was hastily tattooing arcane symbols on Keomany’s face.
Miles darted toward them. Keomany saw him first. The wraith noticed the way she stiffened and turned, and he realized he knew her.
Hunger clawed at him, but he forced himself to be calm.
“Professor?” the wraith said. “Miles?”
Anger filled him. “Amber,” he said. “God help us, what have we become?”
CHAPTER 18
 
AMBER
didn’t have an answer for him. In truth, she felt good. Better than she had ever felt when she was flesh and blood. She would miss her friends—because how could they accept her like this?—but she would not miss the weakness and the worry that came with fragile humanity. Octavian had told her she was beautiful, and now that the shock of metamorphosis had begun to wear off, she felt a constant stirring inside her that had nothing to do with the carnal desires prompted by chaos. She felt as though her life had been a dream and now she was at last awake.
Alive.
But Miles . . . Miles was dead.
“Are you a ghost?” she asked.
The rain fell through him. The wind did not rustle his clothing. When the blue lightning cracked the sky, she could see through him. But even as some grave specter, he seemed gaunt and hollow and she took a step back from him.

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