Waking Nightmares (49 page)

Read Waking Nightmares Online

Authors: Christopher Golden

“My student, Amber Morrissey—”
“The purple girl.”
He nodded. “She’s not . . .” He almost said
human
. “She’s also been changed. But she’s alive. Octavian—the sorcerer? He’s helping her.”
“Aren’t her parents ill?” his mother asked.
Miles thought about that. They had been in the process of being transformed into Reapers before Octavian had frozen time around them. Last night he had woven spells around them that seemed to be slowly restoring their humanity.
“It looks like they’re getting better,” he said. “Amber has offered to let us live with her.”
His mother stared at him. “She’s got that demon in her house. The thing that killed us. That caused all of this.”
Navalica was not a demon, but Miles knew better than to correct her.
“She’s there, yes. But she’s barely alive. She will never wake up again. Octavian has seen to that. She might as well be dead.”
“But she isn’t dead. We are.”
Miles flinched at her bitterness. They fell into silence again, until at last her fingers strayed to the piano yet again. She couldn’t help it.
“Mom . . .” he began.
She played through an old Charles Trenet song, singing softly in French. It had always been one of her favorites, one that she played to cheer herself up when she was feeling blue. He watched her translucent fingers moving across the keys and wondered what the new owners of the house might think when the piano began to play by itself in the middle of the night.
When she had played the final notes of the song, she turned to him.
“Do they have a piano?” she asked.
“We could ask Amber to take this one. I’m sure she would move it over there. Maybe even tonight.”
She considered for a moment and then gave him a nod. Then she nudged him and began to play. Miles joined in, accompanying her, though he would never play as well as she did.
Not even if he practiced forever.
 
OCTAVIAN
and Charlotte had both spent the night at Amber’s. He had done all he could for her parents and hoped that time would do the rest, but it remained to be seen if they would ever be completely cleansed of Navalica’s influence. In addition to the ritual they had done to hide the goddess behind the guise of a withered old woman, Octavian had cast further enchantments on the creature Amber would have to pretend was her great-grandmother—spells that would keep Navalica essentially comatose.
The Morrissey family, as descendants of her ancient Chaldean high priests, had been her caretakers for thousands of years, and Amber vowed to continue to fulfill that duty. Abandoned, the old woman would not die. They could bury her in a hole in the ground and she would continue just as she was, perhaps for eternity, as long as the iron chest remained hidden in the dead, lifeless parallel dimension where Octavian had placed it. But Amber did not like the idea of burying Navalica where she might be forgotten. Someone had to keep watch, to make certain, and she was determined to be that person.
Octavian had tried to reverse the effects of long-term exposure to Navalica’s anarchic magic on Amber, to make her human again, but whatever she had become, there would be no returning from it. Instead, he had cast a glamour upon her. She would be able to walk among ordinary humans and they would see her as they always had . . . as a pretty college girl, a good daughter, a hard-working student. Only other supernaturals would be able to see through the glamour. But Octavian had no illusions about Amber being able to return to her old life—that time for her was over.
Amber and Charlotte walked him to his car, the Morrissey house looming quietly behind them. It looked empty, but it would never be empty again. Chaos slept there. Soon ghosts would haunt its halls. Octavian wondered if people passing on the street would quicken their pace without knowing why. Such houses always gave passersby the shivers.
Amber carried a wine bottle that held what they had managed to collect of Keomany’s ashes. Octavian had wanted something he could seal, and the Santa’s Workshop cookie tin had seemed too disrespectful, though he thought it would have amused Keomany.
Thoughts of her weighed on him. Her life had been full of lightness and contentment before her home in Vermont had been destroyed by a demon called the Tatterdemalion. A demon that never would have been able to come into this world if the Vatican sorcerers were still alive to continually restore the magic keeping the forces of darkness out. Octavian had helped to destroy them in order to save himself and his kind, but the cost had been so much higher than he could ever have known.
He had liked Keomany very much, and perhaps he had felt something more for her. But he refused to allow himself to dwell on what might have been, and what should never have been, though he still burned with guilt and embarrassment about what Navalica’s influence had caused them to do.
Charlotte squirmed as they walked the front path to the street, where his car was parked. She wore a thin, hooded sweatshirt with the hood up, hiding as much of herself from the sun as she could manage. Objectively, she knew it would not burn her, but Cortez—the vampire who had made her—had instilled the vampire traditions in her so deeply that the sun made her profoundly uneasy.
Octavian set his bags down behind the car.
“I want to thank you,” Amber said.
“Nothing to thank me for,” he replied.
She laughed. “Other than my life, you mean? And my parents’ lives?”
Such as they are,
Octavian thought, but he did not want to cast a pall over the bright spark of her hope.
He opened the trunk and loaded Keomany’s suitcase and then his own.
“Just remember you can call me any time,” he said. “And practice that glamour. You’ll need to refresh it at least once a month to keep it from slipping.”
“It seems weird,” she said. “I’m no magician.”
Octavian smiled. “I’ve done the hard part. The rest is small magic. You’ll do fine.”
Amber hesitated a moment, sadness touching her eyes, and then she handed him the wine bottle. The depth of her regret made her new features even more lovely, and Octavian thought he understood for the first time what it meant to say one was tragically beautiful.
“I prayed for her,” Amber said.
Octavian took the wine bottle. “She would have liked that.”
Charlotte shifted, anxious to be out of the sun. “What are you going to do with her? With the ashes, I mean?”
“I’m taking her back to the orchard where she lived. There are other witches there, her friends. I thought they’d want to scatter her ashes into the soil there, around the roots of the trees. She would have liked that.”
An awkward moment passed among them as they all realized this was farewell.
“I want to thank you, too,” Charlotte said. “For giving me a chance.”
Octavian nodded, but he studied her closely. She wore sunglasses, but he couldn’t escape the feeling that she didn’t want to meet his gaze. Was it really just the sun that made her squirm?
“When are you leaving?” he asked.
“Tonight,” Charlotte said. “When it’s full dark. Until I get used to it, I’d rather travel at night.”
“You’ve got enough money to get you to New York?” he asked.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, perking up as though she sensed his doubts. “I’ll go straight to the shadow registration office, like I promised. I don’t want to be a rogue, Peter. I don’t want anyone hunting me.”
Octavian narrowed his eyes. “Cortez is going to be hunting you,” he said. “You know that. But we’ll help you. I’ve got to take care of Keomany’s ashes and then reconnect with Nikki, but give me a week and I’ll meet you in New York. The UN Security Council and Task Force Victor are going to want to know everything you can tell them about Cortez. We can’t afford to have him building some kind of secret vampire underground. We’ve worked too hard to establish peace.”
Charlotte nodded. “Cortez killed me. I didn’t want this life. I’ll help in any way I can.”
“Good. I’ll see you there,” Octavian replied.
He thought he should say something more, tell them that he hoped they did not end up like Keomany, but he knew it would serve no purpose. They were no longer human, but they did not have to share the earthwitch’s fate. If they worked at it, they could both have some semblance of ordinary lives. It would be a pretense, but many people lived their lives behind masks. It could be done.
For a while, at least.
The wave of chaos that had spread out from Hawthorne would draw even more attentions from the demons and monsters and forgotten gods that had been banished into other realms, the forces of darkness that had been kept out of this plane for over a thousand years. There had been a number of incursions in the time since the Tatterdemalion, with Navalica only the latest. More would be coming, and he knew now that he had to be in the thick of the fight against them. If they were lucky, Amber and Charlotte would not be a part of that fight. But he feared that one day the whole world would have to take up arms against the darkness. It was a war he prayed would never come.
“Take care of yourselves,” he said.
He climbed into his car and set the bottle of Keomany’s ashes on the seat beside him, plumping a faded Sorbonne sweatshirt around it to keep it from rolling onto the floor. Then he started up the car, gave Amber and Charlotte a wave, and drove away.
Octavian thought that his spirits would lift when he crossed the town line and left Hawthorne behind him, but instead, his mood darkened. He had talked to Nikki twice yesterday and once this morning. She had taken the news of Keomany’s death even harder than he would have expected. They had been good friends in college but off and on since. This morning, her tone had been different, as though she sensed something in his voice, suspected that there were things he was not telling her.
For an ordinary woman, she had always had excellent intuition.
He needed to see her. To spend time in her arms and try to sort out what he really felt. He wondered about what he had felt for Keomany—if there had been anything real there at all—and what it might mean for him and Nikki. Of late he had begun to question more and more if it was possible for him to sustain a real relationship with an ordinary woman, with all of the threats lurking in the shadowed corners of the world.
It was a question they would have to answer together.
 
EXHAUSTED
and worried about Peter, Nikki rode the elevator to the twelfth floor of the Loews Hotel. She hadn’t slept well the night before, woken too early, and then fallen back to sleep after her wake-up call, which had made her late for her sound check at the World Café. She always enjoyed playing Philadelphia and seeing the hope and enthusiasm in the faces of the college kids who came out to hear her. She wanted to give them a good show tonight, which meant getting something to eat, taking a nap, and trying not to think about Keomany’s death, or the tension between her and Peter before he had gone off to save the world again.
Listen to you,
she thought.
“Save the world.” What a bitch.
She knew she was being a bitch. Peter had obligations that were much greater than whatever he owed her and their relationship. But knowing that and fully accepting it were two different things. Some days it was all right, but right now she just wanted him with her . . . wanted him to put his arms around her and tell her that he loved her, and that everything would be all right.

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