The Gathering Dark (42 page)

“Drive!” Kuromaku roared, slapping the roof of the car.

“It’s . . . they have a child!” she shouted out the window, unaware that he had already seen the demons and their prize. “Hold on!”

Sophie hit the brakes. The Volkswagen shuddered to a halt. Kuromaku hissed a curse in Japanese and leaped down from the car. They were in the midst of the place where the three roads merged into one, out in the open. All of the activity around them, the Whispers shattering glass, slaughtering people . . . all of it stopped. Only the screams and cries of the wounded and terrified reached him now, and the barking of dogs. Henri Lamontagne stared out at him from the back seat of the car, having ceased his own crying. His mother lay curled into a fetal position against one of the doors as if she had been trying to push herself into that corner, make herself disappear.

Teeth gritted tightly together, Kuromaku threw open Sophie’s door and slid in behind the wheel, roughly forcing her into the passenger’s seat. Silently, he put the car in gear and hit the accelerator. The tires kicked up dust from the road. He did not have to look at Sophie to know that she was staring at him in horror.

“Do something,” Sophie whispered, so low that her words were barely audible over the engine. There was a crack in her voice. But then she said the words again and her voice was louder, angrier.

“Do something, damn you! You can save them, Kuromaku. What good is it, being what you are, if you don’t try to save them?”

He seethed, his nostrils flaring. Nausea churned in his gut and he forced himself not to look at either side of the road, not to bear witness to whatever atrocities they were leaving behind with every rotation of the tires.

“Kuromaku!” Sophie shouted in despair.

“Stop!” he snapped back, glancing momentarily at her before returning his attention to the road. Up ahead there were two buildings that had begun to burn.

“Think a moment,” he instructed her. “This is a war, Sophie, I am sorry,
chérie
, but it is true. We are behind enemy lines. That’s what this has all been about . . . getting back to our allies, our comrades, so that we can launch a counterattack.”

“But
you
can—”

“Yes, yes, I’m a vampire. All the things I can do,” he said, jerking the wheel to the right, ignoring the steeples of houses of worship higher on the hill to his left. They offered no sanctuary; he knew that now. They would be defiled just like the rest of this city.

“But I can’t save anyone in this damned place and still protect you. I couldn’t keep Henri’s father from a savage death and it’s only through luck that the boy and his mother are still alive.”

Henri sobbed even louder in the back seat. Antoinette said nothing, but she reached out from her huddled terror and pulled her son closer to her, both of them swaying with the rocking of the car as Kuromaku weaved around a few vehicles that had been abandoned.

“The object is to get the three of you out of here alive, and then to return with enough force to wipe out the demons and destroy whatever evil is responsible for this. Every death we leave behind will haunt me, Sophie,” he said, glancing at her, trying to make her understand the pain in his heart, “but how many more will die if this is not stopped? I cannot stop it alone. For now, the Whispers are ignoring us. They’re caught up in their bloodlust, taking the easier targets. But—”

From the back seat came the voice of Antoinette Lamontagne; every word seemed as though it had been scarred into existence.

“They are not ignoring us anymore,” the woman said. Then, in French, she added, “When Sophie stopped the car . . .”

No more words were necessary. Kuromaku shot a look over his shoulder just in time to see the sharp edges of a demon’s carapace running from the sidewalk toward the car. One of them landed on the roof and its tendril-tongue punched a hole through the metal, shattering the dome of the interior light. Kuromaku turned in silence, his foot pressing more heavily upon the accelerator. Through the windshield he saw Whispers coming out of buildings and two of them leaping off the roof of a three-story structure on the left.

“If we die now,” Kuromaku told Sophie, without turning toward her, “it’s for nothing.”

Sophie whispered something to him in French, words of quiet endearment that seemed wildly inappropriate at that moment. And yet Kuromaku found that they gave him strength and determination and he hunched over the steering wheel further.

The Volkswagen crested the hill and started down. Through the mass of Whispers that now swarmed the car, he could see that the road curved slightly and then there was a broad gorge with a bridge across it.

They were not going to get there.

A Whisper leaped onto the hood of the car and its ebony talons slashed down and splintered the windshield. The glass spider-webbed but did not shatter.

“Take the wheel again!” Kuromaku shouted.

“Go!” Sophie snapped without hesitation.

The moment he saw that her hand was on the wheel, he transfigured himself, shifting his body mass to mist. He could feel the moisture of himself on her as she moved into the driver’s seat and then he slipped out the window. As mist Kuromaku enveloped the Whisper on the hood of the car and then with a thought he transformed again, bursting into a cloud of fire that engulfed the Whisper completely.

Once more he took human form, katana in hand, and the blade began to sing, hacking at the demons that crowded in around the car. A crush of Whispers pushed in, some of them being driven down beneath the car, broken by its weight. But there were too many for Kuromaku to slaughter himself, and as the car careened wildly, others leaped onto it, punching talons through the metal to hang on, shattering windows and grabbing hold of the frames, trying to reach inside to tear at Antoinette and her boy.

Sophie cried out as her arm was slashed, but she kept both hands on the wheel as they thundered toward the bridge. From what Kuromaku had seen, there were many of them on this side, but none of the Whispers on the other side of the gorge.

Then, in the midst of hacking a Whisper in two, shattering its carapace with his blade, he glanced back the way they had come. In the distance, the Spanish town silhouetted against it, there hung a massive storm front, dark, orange-tinted clouds rolling in, a hurricane spawned in Hell itself. For just a single instant it seemed to him that there was a face in the storm, slitted red eyes and a gaping, grinning mouth.

The wind whipped up even harder—enough so that it tore several Whispers away from the car and nearly knocked Kuromaku off as well—and an acid rain began to fall that burned his flesh where it touched him.

Up ahead a road intersected with the one they were on.

On either side of that road, Kuromaku saw something that stunned him even more than the cruel hint of a face in the oncoming storm. To the left and right there were tanks, and trucks, and soldiers in body armor and helmets. Human soldiers.

The Whispers saw them as well and must have sensed them as a new threat, for many of the demons turned away from the Volkswagen and began a new onslaught against the military vehicles.

The soldiers opened fire.

Allison soared, wings outstretched, but this time there was no joy in flight. Peter had told her about the Tatterdemalion, about the dark power that lurked within the oncoming storm, and she felt a cold dread deep within her. This hellish place was unlike anything in her experience. Despite the monstrous thing that she was and the horrors that she had seen, the way the sky bent at the far horizons frightened her. They had been displaced, pulled into a twisted landscape, away from the world she knew. Allison Vigeant was afraid.

It pissed her off.

The oncoming storm whipped against her as though it hoped to keep the falcon back, but Allison stretched out her wings and kept her talons pulled up beneath her and she flew directly toward the tower of thunderclouds that was marching across Ronda from the south. It felt to her as though it was not merely the wind and the heaviness of the air bearing down on her, but the gaze of some ancient and terrible god.

Across the Cleft of Ronda—on the other side of the bridge that connected the new city to the old—Allison saw something that made her lose a wingbeat. Tanks. And not merely tanks, but other military vehicles as well, some carrying British markings, others those of the United Nations.

No fucking way
, she thought.
Task Force Victor.

Most of the soldiers on the other side of the gorge had their faces covered and from this height and distance she could not make out the features of the few who did not, but she knew it was Task Force Victor. Allison had figured that without Octavian, they wouldn’t have been able to get through the barrier into this demon world, but somehow they had managed. It made her wonder if there was more here than mere chance, if the creature responsible for all of this was simply playing with them all. Task Force Victor might just be more victims brought into this particular Hell to play the role of the damned.

For a moment, the tiniest sliver of guilt went through her. She had been sent to collect Peter, after all, to bring him back so that he could work with Task Force Victor. But Octavian wanted to take a more direct approach, and Allison preferred it as well. Henning and his lackeys could rot here, for all she cared. She wasn’t here for them.

Welcome to the party, boys
, she thought.

Her wings beat against the gale as the winds whipped even harder at her. The sky darkened, orange firmament charring black as though the embers of a fire hung above. The towering thunderclouds spread and seemed to breathe as they rolled on toward her and she dipped her beak and flew lower, over the Cleft of Ronda, headed for a better look at the military forces arrayed on the ground below.

Gunfire ripped the sky. The soldiers were in the midst of combat. Whispers had moved in from all around them, slipping along the streets and emerging from the shattered doors and windows of once-beautiful buildings half a millennium old or more. Then, amidst the chaos, Allison saw a single figure spinning like a dervish—changing, misting, taking flesh once more—and she was stunned. A shadow, a vampire, warring against the Whispers with a gleaming sword. And she knew him, recognized him by his blade and the body language of his combat style.

Ku romaku.

It felt to her in that moment as though some greater power were at work here. Not merely the evil of the demon in the storm, but something beyond the storm, beyond this world entirely. Kuromaku would be an invaluable ally.

If he survived the next several minutes.

Allison knew that she had to go to his aid, but not without first alerting Peter to his old friend’s presence. She also wanted a closer look at the Whispers. Where were they all coming from?

Rain had begun to fall from the sky, pelting the falcon. It beaded up on Allison’s wings, thick and greasy, her feathers sticking together. The rain drove her down. She would have to land. To change. The bridge over the Cleft was just below her.

And then she
saw
them. Below the ramparts, Whispers scuttled spiderlike up the cliff face, scaling the craggy wall of the gorge. Allison dipped her right wing and soared in a half-circle, coming back around even as her feathers became too heavy. Far, far below, at the base of the Cleft, the Guadalevin River was dry now, having been cut off from its source. There on the riverbed, partially obscured by the trees that grew on either side of the cleft, she saw something else.

The beast was gigantic, a huge black, pulsing monstrosity. It was on its side, dozens of small legs beneath it, and curled up like some horrid insectoid fetus. If it had not been folded in upon itself in such a way, Allison estimated it would have been as long as fifty feet. And from that place at its middle, which it seemed to have twisted round to protect, Whispers crawled.

They slid wetly from the demon’s midsection, climbed out of the pouch made by its position on the ground, and stood shakily. After a moment, each of the things would get its bearings and they would begin to scramble across the dry riverbed toward the cliff and to climb toward the top of the gorge.

Newborns
, Allison thought.

It’s their mother.

A moment later the greasy, heavy rain at last became too much for her and she tucked her wings against her falcon’s body and swooped toward the bridge below. Peter and Keomany would be waiting for her on the north side. The storm was rushing in, the Tatterdemalion was coming, but Allison could not think about that at the moment, nor about Kuromaku’s plight. Her mind was seared, branded with the image of that demonic matriarch giving birth to one monster after another, an endless supply.

Kuromaku was going to be overwhelmed. Task Force Victor and the other soldiers didn’t have a prayer.

Those thoughts were followed immediately by the realization that unless she, Peter, and Keomany could destroy the beast down inside the Cleft of Ronda, neither did they.

Only when Sophie tasted the copper tang of blood in her mouth did she realize that she had bitten her lip. She sucked on the wound, swallowed her blood, and blew out air in short breaths as though she could dispel her fear that way. Her hands gripped the steering wheel and unconsciously she began to brake.

“Stop!” Kuromaku shouted.

She could barely hear him over the howling wind and the sound of gunfire, but Sophie made the word out well enough to slow the car to a standstill. The engine rumbled. In the back seat, Henri Lamontagne began to sob loudly once again but Antoinette was silent save for the sound of her thumping her head over and over against the door. It was as though insanity was being carried to them on the storm or falling with the fat, hissing raindrops, and soon they would all be infected.

The Whispers had turned their attention to the soldiers now, and so the street around the car was clear when Kuromaku leaped down from the roof and bent to her window. His hair was slick with oily rain and the wind buffeted him. Silhouetted in the orange light he looked almost like a monster himself, save for those gentle eyes. He reached out to stroke the tips of his fingers across her cheeks and nodded once.