The Gathering Dark (14 page)

Nikki raised her right hand, and when she brought it down, the band slammed into the opening chords of “Shock My World.” She loved the song, but would never have started with it if the label hadn’t insisted.

By the first chorus she realized it had been the right choice. The fans in attendance erupted with joy and sang along, obviously surprised that she would play the song at the beginning of the set. Surprised, and thrilled. And the critics would see that, would have to feel at least a little of that enthusiasm.

Nikki smiled, and for the first time, she let her gaze drift deeper into the club, feeling relief wash over her. This was going to be fine. It really was. The second tune was her favorite cut off her disc, “Been Down This Road Before,” and she followed it with the first of her covers, “Love Me Like a Man.” It wasn’t her song and they all knew it. Bonnie Raitt had recorded (the best-known version) years ago, but nobody in the audience seemed to mind as Nikki ground against the guitar and put her heart into the suggestive lyrics.

It made her feel good, let her relax into the groove. With a laugh she glanced around at Kyle, who grinned as he hammered the drums. When she turned back to the audience, she looked down at the guys and girls who were right up in front, swaying back and forth with their arms in the air.

All but one.

In the midst of the crowd gathered right in front of the stage there was a woman who looked frozen. She stood completely still, watching Nikki on stage with an expression that seemed somehow both sad and patient, as though someone had dragged her along and she would rather be anywhere else. Nikki sang a few more lines, but she was distracted and her eyes wandered back to the motionless woman, a pretty Asian with black, silken hair, dressed in a baggy, unflattering sweatshirt. There were cuts on her face, healing, but there. She looked as though she had been attacked by a cat.

A shiver went through Nikki. The woman’s expression was unnerving.

She started to turn again, looking around to Trey and Sara off to her right to get some moral support, so that she could shake the weird vibe she’d gotten off the woman.

Then a spark of recognition hit her. Nikki had been playing guitar so long, performing since she was a child, that she didn’t miss a note with her hands or her voice. But her thoughts were spinning as she looked at the audience again, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible, never forgetting how vital this performance was to her career.

Her gaze locked with the haunted eyes of the unmoving woman in the audience. Nikki knew her now.

Keomany Shaw. Nikki hadn’t seen her in years, and if someone had asked her the day before, she’d have said a reunion with her old friend would have thrilled her. But Keomany was just standing there, gazing up at the stage with a face etched with sadness, as though they were the only two in the room and the music did not even exist.

Nikki forced herself to look away, to find a way to settle back into the groove again. Whatever had brought Keomany here, whatever had made her look so forlorn, it would have to wait until she had done the job she had come to do. The music had to come first. The music, and the critics who were scrutinizing her every move.

All through the rest of the set she avoided looking at Keomany as best she could. Nikki had no idea what had drawn the other woman here, but there was one thing of which she was quite certain.

It wasn’t going to be a happy reunion.

As much as the city of New York had changed in the early years of the twenty-first century, there were things about it that remained remarkably the same. Technology ran rampant, particularly in Times Square and the surrounding blocks, as well as in the subway stations, and yet some of the neighborhoods seemed almost to move backward in time.

Perhaps it was a response to the tech evolution going on elsewhere, but though the Village had remained as eccentric and eclectic as ever, it had also regressed to a more genteel age. Trees were cultivated along the sidewalks more than ever before and a kind of neighborliness had begun to blossom that was almost alien. The businesses in the area also reflected these subtle changes.

Once upon a time The Hovel had been a counterculture restaurant, but more and more over the years counterculture had become simply culture. Vegetarian dishes and world cuisine were the order of the day and no one gave waiters with green hair and multiple piercings a second glance. Ritual scarring and drastic body modification were still common enough, but growing less so, given that the shock value of it had worn off.

Peter Octavian sat at a small table on the sidewalk patio in front of The Hovel with Carter and Kymberly Strom, enjoying the warm spring day and the view up and down St. Marks Place, watching the world go by.

“So what do you think of the place, Peter?” Kymberly asked as she snapped her chopsticks at the Ocean Stir Fry Plate on the table before her. Kymberly was an attractive, dark-skinned woman with truly regal African features and an easy grin that had charmed Peter the first day he met her.

“It’s . . . interesting,” Peter replied with a wary glance at the souvlaki that had been set in front of him.

Carter laughed loud enough to draw the attention of others who were having lunch on the patio, but he either did not notice or did not care. Peter’s agent was a big, heavyset bald man with enormous hands and an accent from his native Austria. People at gallery shows were often astonished to learn that this was Carter Strom, a respected figure in the art world. But Carter liked that: challenging people’s expectations.

“Kym, haven’t you realized yet that Peter doesn’t like things to change?” Carter asked his wife with a broad wink at Octavian. “He’s upset we didn’t go to the White Horse. You should have said something, Peter.”

He pronounced “something” as
zumzing
.

Peter gave them a lopsided smile. “If it bothered me, I
would
have said ‘zumzing.’”

Kymberly laughed at his teasing, but Carter shot him a stern look.

“You make fun uff the man paying for lunch? Not very wise, I think.”

The conversation deteriorated further and then they were all occupied with eating their lunch. Peter was surprised to find that his souvlaki—which he would usually only buy from a sidewalk vendor; they always seemed to have the best—was quite tasty. Throughout their lunch he hid quite well the fact that Carter was right. He was not pleased with the change of plans. Kymberly had been ill when he had finished the last painting for the upcoming show and so they had put off their celebratory lunch until today, when Carter had insisted that Peter try someplace new. The Hovel wasn’t very far from his apartment, but ever since he had become mortal again—ever since he had begun to age once more—Peter had found comfort in things that were routine.

Once upon a time he had faced in battle a sorcerer named Liam Mulkerrin. The man had used magick to prolong his human life, so that as he neared the century mark, he still looked barely sixty. Peter knew that he could similarly extend the time remaining to him, but in his heart of hearts he was afraid of what would come after.

It was strange to him, because he also relished his mortality. After all the years he had spent knowing he could not die, to be human again made him appreciate every second that ticked past on the clock, for he knew he would never get it back again. Anytime he wished, he could ask for the gift of immortality from Kuromaku or Allison; either of them would be pleased to give it to him. But he would not.

Peter feared what was after death, but he found a pleasure in the smallest things in life that he knew he would not have felt if the specter of his own eventual demise did not loom ahead of him. He wanted to live a simple, mundane life as part of the flow and rhythm of humanity, after so many centuries existing outside of it.

But Carter and Kymberly had reminded him today that he had taken such desires to the extreme.

The Hovel was a fine restaurant, the world that churned along St. Marks Place vibrantly alive. And the souvlaki was tasty.

“Thanks for suggesting this place,” he said as he finished his meal.

Carter looked up with one eyebrow raised. Then he smiled. “You are very welcome, my friend.”

“Kymberly, I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Peter added. “Now just stay healthy. The show’s only a few weeks away and I won’t get through it if you aren’t there.”

Her expression was soft and kind and Peter reflected that she did, indeed, remind him of a queen. He had met royalty several times in his life . . . his father had been an emperor . . . and Kymberly Strom had the bearing of a monarch.

“I wouldn’t miss it, Peter. And it will be wonderful, of that I’m quite certain.”

“I wish I shared your confidence,” he told her.

A busboy came and began to clear some of the plates from the table. Carter began to go over some of the details of the upcoming gallery show again, but Peter was never very concerned with such things, preferring to leave them in his agent’s hands. He nodded solicitously, but then let his gaze drift across the patio.

A trio of girls whose ankles all bore identical rose tattoos sat chattering happily to one another several tables over. Further along there was a fiftyish couple toasting one another with fluted wineglasses and sharing a glance the intimacy of which was both inspirational and intimidating. On the other side of the table where Peter and the Stroms sat were two young men who spoke softly to one another, ignoring their lunch, their hands clasped across the table. A first or second date, Peter thought. And beyond them, three couples arrayed around two tables that had been pushed together.

And from the street a scream.

Peter snapped his gaze up to find the source of that horrid, guttural, animal sound. When he spotted the woman crossing the street toward the open patio of The Hovel, he stiffened immediately. She looked forty, but given the filth and grime that covered her and the snarled nest of her hair, she might have been considerably younger or even older and he would not have been able to tell. Her clothes were torn but she hugged herself in a way that kept them clinging together.

As she crossed the street, a car locked on its brakes and the driver sounded the horn. The filthy woman’s head moved with fits and starts like a nervous bird, and she walked with the same jerky motion. Her eyes were wide, and when the driver of the car shouted out the window at her, she seemed not to notice.

Abruptly, as if at some unseen horror that had appeared in the middle of the street, the woman let loose another ferocious scream. Then this strange creature rushed the rest of the way across the street, paused on the sidewalk just beyond the shrubs that lined the patio, and began to jabber to the large party at the two shoved-together tables, all of whom were studiously avoiding looking at her. One of the men rose and strode purposefully toward the entrance to the restaurant, likely to bring a hostess or manager to shoo the homeless lunatic away.

“Poor thing,” Kymberly said, the sadness in her voice palpable.

“Someone like that, it’s terrible,” Carter added. “Probably she was a patient at a hospital somewhere, and her insurance ran out. They do that, you know? Put the crazies out on the street when they can’t pay.”

But Peter was not paying any attention to his friends. Instead, he was
listening
to the woman. This horrid vision of madness who was speaking to the people on the patio, insulting them in a language not spoken on Earth in tens of thousands of years . . . a language Peter had only ever heard spoken in Hell.

“Excuse me,” he said, standing up so quickly that the legs of his chair scraped loudly upon the patio stones.

“What? Oh, Peter, no. Don’t get involved. There’s nothing you can do.”

He paused and glanced at them, a frown creasing his forehead. These were his friends, certainly. But how well did they really know him? Not well at all, in fact, for he had only given them a little of himself. They had seen the artist, the soft-spoken man who kept his hair too short, did not shave often enough, and who had begun to go gray at the temples.

Then he smiled. “Let’s see.”

Peter moved past the young men on their date, who had stopped holding hands, their time together now soured by the madwoman’s approach. He strode toward the large group at the joined tables, some of whom glanced at him curiously as he approached. At the edge of the patio he simply stepped over the shrubs.

The nattering, grime-covered woman turned on him, spittle flying from her mouth as she threatened him in that ancient tongue. Then she blinked, as though a bit of awareness had crept into her mind, and an agonizing scream erupted from her throat.

“I can help,” Peter told her.

But then her eyes narrowed again as the thing inside her regained control. It spat at him, and where it flecked his cheek, the saliva burned. Peter quickly wiped it on the leg of his jeans and the denim began to smolder there until he slapped at it a couple of times.

The thing inside the woman was grinning madly.

Peter raised both hands and contorted his fingers as though he were a puppeteer controlling some invisible marionette. Under his breath he muttered several words, and then he whipped his arms back, tugging hard. The woman’s mouth opened and she screamed again, only this time, those who heard that scream would have noticed that there were two voices screaming—one the woman’s and one a low, guttural, savage snarl that had not been there before.