The Gathering Dark Part 10

Sophie looked up at him and locked her gaze with his. "Do you drink blood?"

Kuromaku raised an eyebrow. For a long moment he simply looked at her and then he leaned back against his seat. "The simple answer is yes."

Her lips must have been dry, for Sophie ran her tongue along them to moisten them. She looked very nervous, and Kuromaku could not blame her. The woman had agreed to accompany him even after discovering that all the rumors about what he was were true, all her suspicions had become reality. If she had indeed been attracted to him since she had been a girl, that helped him to understand her decision. But now she needed to know more about what he was.

"And the complex answer?" Sophie prodded.

Kuromaku regarded her carefully. "I'm surprised you didn't ask this question before we left."

She glanced away. "Maybe I was afraid that I wouldn't have the courage to come with you if I knew the answer."

Kuromaku let his gaze drift for a moment out the window to the French countryside the train sped through. Sophie had been nothing but honest with him and it was only fair that he do the same. Honor demanded it. He turned to face her again.

"Very little of what is thought to be true of those you would consider my kind is accurate. Fundamentally true are two things: silver can be poisonous to us, and we require blood to survive. Perhaps what you're asking is do I kill for blood, or take it forcibly. The answer to that is no. I am not a predator."

Sophie blushed as she glanced down, the silken flesh of her neck gleaming in the sun. "Do you want to drink mine?"

From her tone it was clearly a question, not an invitation. Still, it gave Kuromaku pause. How to answer this honestly without frightening her? At length he nodded once.

"Yes. But not as much as I want to kiss you."

He could hear her sharp intake of breath from across the cabin. Sophie looked up at him, smiling open-mouthed in a way that was incredibly erotic. A stray lock of her hair had hung loose from where the ribbon tied it back and now she reached up and tucked it behind her ear.

"Well, why don't you then?" she asked.

A shiver went through Kuromaku. He was unused to such boldness in himself or in his lovers. Certainly he had enjoyed the attentions of a great variety of women in his long life, but with those he had truly cared for there had always been a bit of ritual and courtship involved, and never such a frank revelation of attraction. Yet there was a vitality to this electric connection he felt with Sophie that could not be denied.

He rose to cross the compartment. There could be no mistaking his intention here, nothing subtle about the process of kissing her. His only purpose in moving those few feet from one side of the compartment to the other was to kiss this beautiful young woman whose blue eyes drew him so magnetically toward her.

Something rocked the train hard and he stumbled, reached out to plant a hand flat upon the broad window to keep his balance. The entire compartment was thrown into a filthy gray gloom. From a perfect, clear day, the sun had abruptly been blotted from the sky.

Sophie swore under her breath.

Kuromaku saw the sudden fear etched upon her face and he turned to look out the window. The landscape had changed. They were pa.s.sing through the village of Mont de Moreau and he could see buildings on fire. A forest of enormous posts, perhaps torn from a fence, jutted from the lawn of a home they sped past. Humans had been impaled upon those posts.

Winged demons circled like vultures in a sky filled with a thick soot that had cast everything but the fire in a drab gray, as if they had pa.s.sed from their world into a realm of demons. And perhaps they had.

The train rumbled as if the tracks were no longer smooth. Sophie lurched over to grasp Kuromaku by the waist, and she stood with him, staring out the window. With a scream of brakes and a terrible, stunted shuddering, the train slowed to a halt in the midst of that infernal landscape.

"What's happened?" Sophie whispered. "My G.o.d, what is it?"

"I'm not sure," he confessed. "But I fear we will be forced to find out."

7.

Kuromaku had fought in many wars, had slain enemies both human and otherwise. Yet never had he seen a vision so h.e.l.lish as that which unfolded beyond the broad window of his train compartment now. The village of Mont de Moreau had been transformed into a tableau of d.a.m.nation that was positively Boschian. But this was no painting, no portrait dredged up from the fevered imagination of a troubled artist.

"Armageddon," Sophie whispered beside him.

They stood together and stared out at the ravaged village, at the dark, heavy sky, clouds hung low and stained with a hideous orange light. Kuromaku shook his head, mind awhirl as he tried to make sense of it.

"Impossible," he said. "The rest of the world was unaffected."

"As far as we know," Sophie replied, her voice very small.

"True. But look out there. This has not only just happened. Recently, perhaps. Hours ago, no more than a day. But nowhere else that we know of. If this is Armageddon, it is Armageddon writ small."

Screams and shouts of alarm and horror had erupted within the train and the cacophony continued as pa.s.sengers reacted to the infernal domain where their journey had come to an unforeseen end. In the filthy sky two large shapes circled the forest of impaled human corpses like vultures. A moment later one of them darted downward, growing larger and larger until it landed among the dead upon their stakes. Kuromaku cursed under his breath. The thing was an abomination, a red-scaled beast with black-feathered wings, a trio of prehensile tails each tipped with a vicious stinger, and a long, thin beak. It reached for the nearest stake, upon which a woman had been impaled through her back, so her arms and legs dangled toward the ground in a macabre, gymnastic bit of puppetry.

It tore her from the stake, and Kuromaku was glad that he could not hear the sound of it through the gla.s.s. The winged demon drove its sharp beak into the wound at the dead woman's back and tore free a chunk of flesh, which it gulped down. Then it spread its black wings and took off once more into that dreadful sky. The thing flew above the train, and both Kuromaku and Sophie craned their necks to watch its flight.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kuromaku spotted something else up there. Something moving in the thick, bilious clouds, like a man o' war jellyfish floating there, dyed an infected red, tendrils swaying beneath it like a storm of solid rain. He only caught a glimpse of it before the clouds swallowed it again, but that one glimpse made him think it was larger than any living thing he had ever seen or imagined.

Silently, he prayed that Sophie had not seen it. Already, what she had seen was enough to crush a human spirit.

Sophie gripped his arm at the bicep and Kuromaku glanced down at her crystal blue eyes. She seemed paler than he had ever seen her, her facial expression a mask of calm that must have taken extraordinary effort to maintain. Kuromaku thought that it was a mask brittle as a china teacup, and he feared what might happen to her mind if the mask were to crack.

"What do we do?" she asked in a whisper.

Kuromaku had no time to formulate an answer. And any answer he might have given would have been eclipsed by the impact that struck the car they were in at that moment. It rocked over to one side and they tumbled together in a tangle of limbs and slammed into the wall beside the compartment door. For a moment Kuromaku was certain they would tip over, he felt the train tipping, but then it slammed back to the ground, still upright.

The screech of rending metal and the shattering of gla.s.s filled the car along with the cries of the other pa.s.sengers. Kuromaku leaped to his feet and reached his hand to his side as his sword manifested there at the nearly unconscious summons of his mind. He drew the katana with the ring of steel upon steel and grabbed Sophie's hand, helping her to stand.

His own astonishment had dulled him for several moments, the horror that had enveloped them almost impossible to believe. But now they must believe or die. Adrenaline seethed in him now, and he sublimated all wonder, all fear, and gave himself over to the instinct of the warrior.

"We are not safe here," he told her. "Stay by me."

With a tiny, hollow laugh, Sophie swore in French. "Where else am I going to go?"

Kuromaku rammed open the compartment door and lunged into the pa.s.sageway, Sophie close behind him. To the left was a crowd of terrified pa.s.sengers, many of them bleeding or injured in the abrupt stop or the ma.s.sive impact upon the train. To the right there were others, but rather than crowding into the corridor to escape whatever was outside, this group were stumbling headlong toward Kuromaku and Sophie.

He pressed her back against the wall of the corridor and people streamed past. An enormous bear of a man reached out and grabbed Kuromaku's shoulder, tried to sweep him along.

"Weg rennen, du idiot!" the German man bellowed, eyes frenzied and wide. the German man bellowed, eyes frenzied and wide.

Kuromaku shook him off, knocked his arm away. Instead he stood as tall as he was able and tried to see what pursued these people. At the back of the fleeing pa.s.sengers he saw a man and woman together hustling a small boy along in front of them.

Then he saw what it was they ran from. It was a rich blue-black, the color of lividity bruises on a dead man. The thing loped after the pa.s.sengers, its plated body, limbs, and razor talons so thin it seemed like every inch of it was a blade slicing the air. Its head was sheathed in a hard black sh.e.l.l from beneath which a spiked proboscis extended, darting ahead of it, wagging like the sensitive antennae of some nightmarish insect.

The thing was nearly upon the family of three, and the woman screamed. Her husband grabbed at their son and the boy stumbled, began to fall.

"Kuromaku!" Sophie cried.

But he was already moving. He stepped away from the wall, pushing the husband and wife behind him, even as Sophie reached down and caught the falling boy, tugging him up and toward her.

The plated scythe of a creature froze and its head turned up toward Kuromaku, where he stood before it in the pa.s.sageway. The spike that protruded beneath its face-sh.e.l.l whickered toward him as if taking his measure.

Silent, it leaped at him, fingers like daggers slashing down toward him.

Kuromaku lowered his head and lunged forward, the point of his katana cracked through the demon's armored chest, and he impaled it. The demon's only cry of protest was a bizarre, almost hydraulic hiss. Then it slid off his blade to the floor of the pa.s.sageway.

More screams came from the next car. Heavy thuds struck the outer skin of the train. Metal tore and more gla.s.s broke, and in that pa.s.sageway, no one spoke. All eyes were upon Kuromaku. He saw them staring at him, wide-eyed, as though quietly praying to him for deliverance.

Then someone at the other end of the car screamed and more of those scything monsters leaped into the corridor from the compartments on either side, apparently having crashed through the windows. Kuromaku hissed air through his teeth and let loose a guttural shout of fury and regret.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed Sophie's hand. "Come," he told her.

But she held back. He stared down at her. "We must find shelter."

Her head shook. "What . . . what about everyone else?"

Kuromaku glanced once more along the corridor to where the monsters had begun to drive human pa.s.sengers down onto the floor, tearing into them. The wet sound of their talons ripping flesh could be heard in among the screams.

He sensed the one behind him more than he heard it, and spun, decapitating it with a single swipe of his blade. Then he snapped around once more and shouted at Sophie to be heard over the cries of agony and anguish. The sounds were deafening, the horror overwhelming.

"If we stay, we die with them! You are my priority! We must survive to find a way out of this!"

Once more he tugged at her arm, and though she hesitated a moment, it was only a moment. Then they were running down through the train car. At their heels came the family Kuromaku had saved. He hoped that they could keep up.

At the end of the car came a thunderous noise and the door to the train crashed inward, two of the scything demons atop it. Others followed, swarming in after them.

"Here!" Sophie shouted.

Kuromaku turned, saw that she was leading the family into a side compartment, carrying their little boy herself, and he swore. Then he followed them inside and rushed past them to the window. With a single blow he shattered the window and shards of gla.s.s rained down around him and blew out onto the blasted, ruined landscape.

In the preternatural darkness outside the train Kuromaku could still see the town and the hideous forest of the dead, and darting silhouettes like night-black cutouts against the putrid orange sky. Screams came to them, there in the compartment, but most were from inside the train. The car rocked with each new impact.

Immediately beyond that window he spied only two of the scythe-limbed demons, as well as a plodding, mammoth creature covered in porcupine quills. It lumbered toward the train on two ma.s.sive feet like those of an elephant. The enormous creature had twin upturned tusks jutting from its mouth and a flat, bald, apelike pate. Where its eyes ought to have been were only long, wet vertical slits that seemed to pucker and breathe like the gills of a fish.

With one rapid glance over his shoulder to confirm that they were still alone in the compartment, Kuromaku leaped out through the shattered window, landing in a crouch on the ground below. In his right hand, he gripped his katana, but now in one fluid motion he reached down with his left and withdrew from that same impossible place the wakizashi that was its mate. The grip of the short sword felt good in the palm of his left hand. So often he sparred or did combat with only the katana that sometimes he forgot the beauty of fighting with both blades at once.

The lumbering, quilled behemoth opened its tusked mouth and let out a long bellow. As if in response, the two skeletal, razor-edged demons twitched and turned in Kuromaku's direction. The spikes from their mouths searched for him as though they could use those wavering needles to see with.

They sprang at him, streaking across the ground that separated them. Kuromaku braced to meet their attack, then sidestepped, leaping in with balletic grace into a pirouette in which both swords spun with him in a circle, the blades so swift they blurred almost to nothingness.

Jagged claws gored his back but Kuromaku did not flinch, merely completed the motion he had begun. His swords found plated flesh, one cracking and slicing through the abdomen of a scythe-limbed demon, severing it in two, and the other coming down to cleave the head of the second demon in twain. Skull and natural-sh.e.l.led helmet fell away like the twin halves of a walnut.

He glanced quickly in both directions along the ravaged, derailed train. There were others, many others, so many that he could never have counted, and they swarmed across the train, leaping through windows and capering up into doorways and tearing through the metal skin of the train.

Twenty feet away, the elephantine beast covered in quills bellowed at him again. The wet slits where its eyes ought to have been now spread open like twin v.a.g.i.n.as and Kuromaku saw that tiny, green-black, pinp.r.i.c.k flames guttered in their depths. It took one shambling step toward him, and Kuromaku knew then that it was too slow to catch them.

He spun toward the shattered window of the train, knowing any moment could bring more demons over the top of it, or through the interior door of the compartment.

"Come!" he snapped, his voice a low rumble that he prayed would not garner attention. He reached up toward Sophie, but she stepped aside to allow the other woman to jump out ahead of her. The woman's husband pa.s.sed their son down to her, and then Sophie came out.

The man was last, and he shot a nervous glance over his shoulder before leaping out onto the blasted terrain.

All throughout the horror that unfolded around them, the young boy had remained pale and wide-eyed, yet silent. Shock Shock, Kuromaku knew. The boy was too stunned to respond to their surroundings. He had shut down. Probably for the best Probably for the best.

A loud bellow came from behind them and Kuromaku spun to see that the enormous quilled demon had come closer, but only just.

"This way," he instructed them quietly, then he turned and led them off toward the village at an angle that would take them around the field of impaled corpses. It was the only thing to do. There was no telling what might lurk on the other side of the train, away from the village. At least in the village itself, there might be shelter of some kind.

Unconsciously he sheathed the wakizashi, the short blade disappearing beside him. He reached out for Sophie's hand. She clasped his, fingers twining. Together with the young couple, the father holding his son in his arms, they ran toward the village.

Another bellow came from behind them, but now when Kuromaku turned, he saw that the quilled beast had turned its back to them. A barrage of quills sprang from its back, fired like arrows from a bow. They sliced the air toward them and Kuromaku stepped in front of the others, let his flesh take those painful spines.

Instantly, a fire raged through him.

Poison, he thought.

It seeped into his blood and Kuromaku doubled over in pain, teeth gnashing.

"Run!" he commanded the others.

Sophie balked, reaching for him, calling his name.

"Get out of range!" he roared. "Go!"

She must have seen something in his eyes, for she did what he had ordered. Sophie ushered the others on and they kept on toward the village, running across an open expanse of land just beyond the field of corpses.

The poison was agony to him but it did not keep Kuromaku from changing. He willed his body to become mist, nothing but molecules of moisture in the air, and in that way he cleansed himself. He drifted after the others, propelling himself, and transformed once more into a hawk. His wings beat until he was behind them once more, then he glided to the ground and once more took the form of a man. The katana was a part of him and so he had taken it unconsciously into himself. Now it manifested once more in his hand and he surveyed the land around them.

Satisfied that there were no enemies near, he hurried up beside Sophie. They had reached a street. Ahead, on the edge of the village, what had once been a sizable chateau was engulfed in flames that seemed garishly bright in comparison to the sky. Tongues of fire leaped into the air and yet the air was already so hot and dank that there seemed little heat from the blaze.

"What do we do?" Sophie asked, staring at the burning chateau and then at the village beyond. "Where can we hide?"

For the first time Kuromaku really focused on the French family that accompanied them. The man was thin and darkly handsome, his wife also slender but taller than he. The boy had his father's complexion and his mother's hair. The husband and wife were whispering fearfully to one another, he stroking her hair. When the man looked up at Kuromaku, his gaze was defiant.

"What is happening here? How can this be?" the man asked in French.

"I wish I knew," Kuromaku replied. "But somewhere in Mont de Moreau there must be a locked bas.e.m.e.nt, or a windowless storage room in the back of a shop. We must find some refuge. Soon enough those things that attacked the train will tire of it."

"And then we die," the man replied. "Even if there are no windows, there are doors. You saw what they did to the train. Like bees in a hive."

But even as the man spoke, Kuromaku looked past him, through the curtain of flame that leapt from the burning chateau, and on a hill in the midst of the village he saw the spire of a church jutting into the h.e.l.l-stained sky. Even at this distance the steeple looked white, he could see stained-gla.s.s windows that were unbroken, and the church called to him like a beacon.

"There," he said, pointing. "Stay close to the faces of the buildings," he snapped off in rapid-fire French, reaching out for Sophie's hand and getting them all moving deeper into the village, toward the church. "Head for the church. Whatever happens, do not stop. I will keep them off us as best I can."

He shot a quick look back at the train. It had come off the tracks, the rails twisted and torn, the skeletal, scythe-limbed demons still tearing at it. Several of the three-tailed carrion beasts circled overhead. They had to move now while the demons were focused on the train. It pained Kuromaku to know it, but the deaths of those remaining on the train had bought them this time to escape. He could not have saved them all-not against those odds, not and still have saved Sophie. She had come at his invitation, and he cared for her. He would not trade her life for that of strangers.

The only wise choice now was to find safety, find time to determine what evil was afoot here, and do everything in his power to stop it from spreading beyond this little village.