The Gathering Dark (50 page)

“There will not be a third opportunity.”

As Peter turned, lightning flashed, casting shadows of Nikki’s fragile nakedness, illuminating the face within the cloak of the Tatterdemalion at last. Peter winced at the demon’s visage, but not merely from its hideousness. The face was constructed of gravel and dust and embers from a fire. As he had always thought, there was nothing within those rags to animate them. Nothing within.

Only power from outside. Only the storm.

He hesitated.

A dust devil swept up from the ruins of the bridge, a slender finger of tornado that brought sharp-edged bits of crumbled masonry swirling up toward them. Stone struck Nikki’s right leg and Peter heard the sickening crunch of bone shattering, saw fresh blood spilling from the wound. A sliver glanced off her arm and slashed her shoulder and her left breast.

“But you won’t just give her to me and let me leave.” Peter glared into the Tatterdemalion’s nothing face, dread filling him just as surely as did the magick that coursed through him.

When he had looked down, Kuromaku had raised his sword in a gesture that the two had used many centuries before in another war on Spanish soil. The gesture translated into one word.
Stall.

“Of course not,”
the Tatterdemalion said.
“You and the others depart. When you have gone, your lover will be returned to you there. Go now.”

Peter nodded. “All right. We’ll go. But I want you to answer one question first.”

Lightning flashed across the orange-black sky. The Tatterdemalion hesitated and Peter saw that it pulled Nikki closer against itself as though suspicious of his capitulation.

“Ask.”

Peter narrowed his eyes and his nostrils flared. He asked the question, though he already knew the answer.

“What are you so afraid of?”

Kuromaku had seen his old comrade-in-arms, his friend and brother, only rarely since Peter had become human again. Never had he been so grateful for the presence of another. His honor as a warrior, his skill as a ronin, would not allow him to confess, even in his private thoughts, that there was no hope of victory. But it was clear to him that this had been the case only minutes before.

He was crippled.

It was not the gunshot wounds that had done this, but the effect of those first two bullets, the chemical they carried. Still he thirsted for blood, perhaps more now than at any time in the past sixty or seventy years—since the terrible events one night in Hong Kong—and still he was very difficult to kill. But he could not change his form, could not shapeshift at all. He had seen Allison fly, transform herself into a falcon and spread her wings, and already it broke his heart.

Kuromaku was hollow. Miraculously, through all of this, the warrior still held his katana, but his truest weapon was gone.

Still, crippled and bleeding and hollow, he had been trained a samurai. If he died, it would be with honor. This Hellgod the others talked about, this Tatterdemalion, it would not have presented Nikki, would not be parleying with Peter right now, if it weren’t afraid of him. That meant that Peter could hurt the demon. But Kuromaku knew the mage well enough to know he would not sacrifice Nikki to do that.

So Nikki had to be taken out of the equation.

The pain of his wounds was terrible. The thirst was upon him. He did not need the blood to survive, but every drop that seeped from the bullet holes in his flesh made him crave it all the more. There were no fangs in his mouth but his lips were pulled back in a rictus as though he might bare them.

The Whispers paid the price for his pain and thirst. Kuromaku had fought with injuries before, long ago when he was still human, still merely a samurai instead of a vampire ronin. Now the Whispers scrambled across the rocks, their scythelike limbs clacking on the ground, and they waded across the water that remained in the Guadalevin which was going dry once more now that the earthwitch had been stopped.

Kuromaku stood ankle deep in the water and met them as they came. He spun and hacked and thrust and that katana did not fail him, nor did his injured body. The trickling water seeped with filthy demon blood and became thick with the viscous rain. Demon corpses, shattered carapaces, severed limbs and heads began to build up around him and he had to step back.

To his left the priest, Jack, had barely managed to stay alive. There seemed only two magickal attacks he had mastered that were effective against the Whispers, one of which caused them to burst into flame from within and the other of which only seemed to paralyze them. The priest was a slender, bony man with cracked eyeglasses who prayed loudly to his God. And perhaps, Kuromaku thought, his God was with him, for somehow despite his pitiful magick and the exhaustion evident in the priest’s features, he had managed to hold his own.

The priest had dignity and courage. Kuromaku was honored to fight beside him.

Like Peter, Allison had been a welcome sight upon her first appearance. According to the priest and Sophie, she had saved Kuromaku’s life. He was grateful, but also simply pleased to be in her presence, despite his envy that she still had the ability to change herself and he did not. She was beautiful and yet full of despair, a tragic heart, but she was fierce. In the first few moments when the Whispers attacked, she had killed more than a dozen of them.

But now Kuromaku and Father Jack were on their own.

Back a ways from the bank of the river, Sophie hewed close to the earthwitch, Keomany. The witch was not powerful enough to defeat the Hellgod’s sorcery, but she still retained a link to their world, to their dimension. Sunlight bathed the two women and prevented the Whispers from getting near to them, though fifteen or twenty of the demons stalked the perimeter of that shaft of sunlight as if searching for a way in. Sophie was safe, as long as Keomany was with her.

Several times Sophie called to Kuromaku to warn him of demons slipping stealthily up on his flank, and he managed to defend himself in time. Now when he glanced back at Sophie, he saw that Keomany had begun again. Her eyes glowed with golden light that cascaded like a river of tears down her face and her hair had begun to blow again in a wind that did not come from the storm. Fresh shoots erupted from the rocks around her, flowers blossomed on the ground.

The rift between dimensions widened once more, just slightly, and sunlight washed over the Whispers that had been stalking around Keomany and Sophie. The demons raised their darting tongues and hissed as their carapaces steamed and blistered, and then they disintegrated in a flash of embers.

Kuromaku glanced over at Father Jack. “Now!” he called.

The priest nodded, finishing a spell in Latin that knocked a trio of Whispers back away from him. The demons fell into the shallow water and twitched in pain from the impact, but they survived.

Then, side by side, Kuromaku and Jack Devlin ran along the bank of the river toward the rubble and ruin of the devastated bridge. In the air above what remained of the arches that had been the foundation of the bridge, Kuromaku saw Peter levitating in a sphere of magickal energy that burned around him as it shifted from green to crimson. A wind tore down from the Tatterdemalion where the rag-creature hung, holding on to Nikki, and a twist of churning air brought debris up to batter her, the sharp rocks gashing fresh wounds in her bare flesh.

“We need a clear view of it,” Father Jack called to Kuromaku as he stumbled, picking his way across the rubble.

Kuromaku glanced back at the Whispers giving chase but paid them no mind. They had seconds to spare in which to act out their plan. Still, he did not bother to tell the priest that a clear view was not going to help them.

Father Jack stopped and planted his feet. Kuromaku heard the clack of Whispers’ talons on the rocks behind him. He raised his katana and the priest grabbed hold of the hilt as well, his own hands laid over Kuromaku’s. Father Jack rattled off a brief stream of Latin—the same spell he had been using against the Whispers, the one that had caused them to immolate from within.

“Lord, deliver us,” the priest said.

Kuromaku heard the words only because of a momentary lull in the storm. The wounded vampire felt the magick pass into his hands and into his sword. The hilt thrummed with sorcerous power and then, unseen, the spell was cast from the tip of the blade.

In the air, in the midst of confrontation with Peter, the Tatterdemalion burst into flames, rags and clothing igniting in an instant. Blazing with fire, it stretched an arm out toward them, cloth finger indicating its attackers with sinister portent.

With a crack of thunder, lightning flashed out of the sky and struck them both. Father Jack went rigid, screaming, and his eyes burst, his hair catching on fire. Kuromaku felt his own hair begin to burn, felt the lightning shooting through him, every muscle taut and shrieking with pain. He jittered where he stood for several seconds after the lightning had struck and receded, and then Kuromaku fell to the rocks beside the corpse of Father Jack Devlin, his nostrils filled with the stench of charred flesh.

Peter had not known what Kuromaku had planned but he had been certain of its intent—to get Nikki away from the Tatterdemalion and provide him an opening to act. He had risked driving the Hellgod over the edge of reason in order to distract it, gambling that Kuromaku would make his move in the meantime.

Kuromaku had come through.

And he had paid the price for his valor, struck by lightning, his body smoking even now where it lay on the rocks beside the corpse of Father Jack Devlin. Kuromaku might yet survive, but despite his dabbling in magick, Jack had been only human. He was surely dead.

“Damn you!” Peter screamed at the Tatterdemalion.

But it wasn’t listening. The rags and clothing that the Hellgod had brought to life, a cotton homunculus, where aflame. The viscous rain fell in a torrent now, dousing those flames, but there were seconds to spare when the Hellgod was distracted by the plight of the scarecrow face it had offered up to them in effigy.

Nikki’s eyes were fully open now. She was rigid, still trapped in the tempest that coalesced to keep her dangling there in the sky, but she met Peter’ s gaze. The flames on the Tatterdemalion scorched her skin and she cried out in pain.

Something just past Nikki and the burning Tatterdemalion caught Peter’ s eye and instantly he understood the rest of the plan Kuromaku had laid. Battered by the tumultuous winds, the falcon flew at the Tatterdemalion from behind.

Tendrils of magickal flame—his own lightning—snaked from Peter’s fingers, replenishing the crimson sphere of sorcery that held him aloft. Though it had been five years since he had become human again, he bared his teeth as though he were flashing needle fangs.

Just as it would have collided with the Tatterdemalion, the falcon dispersed into a cloud of mist, swept around the Hellgod even as the rains finally doused the last of the flames, and then Allison Vigeant coalesced in human form once more. Even as she took flesh, Allison reached out and wrapped her arms around Nikki.

Allison tore Nikki—naked, bleeding, and terrified—away from the Tatterdemalion and the two of them fell.

The Hellgod screamed in fury. Thunder rolled across the sky and lightning tore through the state hotel on the edge of the Cleft of Ronda. Arcs of electricity from the sky shot down into the gorge. Peter thrust out his left hand and with the same sorcery he was using to hold himself aloft he snatched Allison and Nikki when they were less than fifty feet from the ground. He slowed their descent but did not stop it.

His attention could stay with them only a moment, and he was forced to let them drop the last eight or ten feet, but he counted on Allison to take the brunt of the fall.

“A terrible mistake, Octavian!”
the Tatterdemalion screamed, the floral sundress pasted to its face again, its mouth wide as it roared its fury at him.
“This is my world!”

Peter sneered through the scrim of scarlet magick that separated them. “Yes, your world. Your plaything. But not the dimension you come from. You said it yourself. You brought Nikki here, just like you brought everything else!”

The Tatterdemalion faltered slightly, and Peter knew that he was right about all of it. The mage opened his arms wide and the sphere of magick around him burst outward and enveloped the Tatterdemalion, trapping it inside with him.

“Father Jack said it, before you killed him. He said we make our own Hells. And that’s what you did.”

“Fool! You cannot destroy me! I am not even truly here, only my essence, only my influence.”

The Tatterdemalion exploded in a burst of energy that singed Peter’s face and clothes. The rags and clothing whipped at him, flying around inside the sphere, beating on the crimson prison Peter had trapped it in, lashing at their captor.

Peter Octavian smiled grimly. “I know that. I
felt
it, the world you really come from. This place isn’t a parallel universe. It’s just some toy you created, a pocket you sewed into your own reality. You found my home dimension and saw it was vulnerable, so you built a place where you could be a god.

“Well, now it’s time for both of us to go home.”

There was a roar inside the sphere with him. The rags whipped at him, bruising and scratching him. Lightning struck that magickal energy but it could not break through. Peter let the sphere drop from the air above the ruins, saw through a veil of red magick the Whispers on the banks of the river. The demons had stopped and stared up with their blank faces at the mage and his captive as the sphere lowered.

The power of the Tatterdemalion strained against Peter’s magick and it felt to the mage as though he were being stretched on the rack, his bones and muscles tearing with the effort of keeping the monstrous Hellgod imprisoned.

Below him Peter saw Allison and Nikki, the latter draped in Allison’s jacket, running toward the place where Keomany and Sophie stood amid the rift between worlds, that sanctuary of sunlight. Keomany held on to Sophie, preventing her from running to the place where lightning had struck Kuromaku and Father Jack down.