The Gathering Dark Part 16

Kuromaku swore under his breath. He kept his chin high, but his nostrils flared in annoyance. "Did you tell them that we cannot be certain it is safe here?"

"They don't agree. It is the house of G.o.d, they say. Christ Himself looks down upon us here. They believe we are safest here."

"Then we leave without them," Kuromaku said gravely, his eyes narrowing. In j.a.panese, he swore again, cursing the Lamontagnes.

Sophie blinked and stared at him. She took several steps closer to Antoinette so that now the two women were facing him together.

"You can't leave without them," she said. "We cannot leave them here to die."

"If they are right," Kuromaku declared, "they will be perfectly safe and we will be the ones at risk." He narrowed his gaze further so that he was staring at Sophie through slitted eyes. "Do not do this. If they will not come, that is their choice. But I will not leave here without you, Sophie. I . . . will not let anything happen to you."

Sophie let her gaze drift toward the ground. "We can't leave them here."

Frustration boiled up inside him and Kuromaku stormed past the women to glare down upon Alain and his sleeping son.

"Fool," he hissed. Kuromaku raised the wine bottle and continued in his imperfect French. "We do not know what has happened. How bad it is. There is no way to know if it will end, or when. We must find the world again," he said, gesturing at the windows.

Alain snapped at him, something unintelligible that Kuromaku interpreted as meaning that G.o.d would protect them, given the man's gestures toward the cross.

Kuromaku whipped around to look at Sophie, who shrank back from him as though in fear. He softened, sighed, and shook his head. "G.o.d cannot keep you all from starving. There will be no manna from heaven in this place."

Antoinette and Alain were silent. Kuromaku stared at them and then at Sophie, who seemed implacable. He would not leave here without her, but she would not leave without the d.a.m.nably stubborn parents of a catatonic child. The idea of simply sitting here and waiting drove him wild and he considered forcing Sophie to accompany him. But only for a moment. It was impractical. She would struggle, make them more of a target, and they would never survive it.

And afterward she would hate him for abandoning these people.

"d.a.m.n it!" Kuromaku cried, and he hurled the bottle of communion wine at the altar, where it shattered and spilled the blessed blood of grapes across white marble.

At the sound of the breaking gla.s.s, little Henri Lamontagne opened his eyes and began to scream. The boy shrieked as though he had woken from the most terrifying of nightmares, rather than into into one. It was a piercing wail that rose in pitch and volume, so that his father, who was closest to him, clapped his hands over his ears and shouted at the boy to be silent. one. It was a piercing wail that rose in pitch and volume, so that his father, who was closest to him, clapped his hands over his ears and shouted at the boy to be silent.

Henri kept screaming. Two words, over and over.

"Les Chuchotements!"

The Whispers.

In his bizarre catatonia, the boy must have heard their voices, Kuromaku reasoned. He glanced at Antoinette, who stared at her son, eyes wide with despair. Sophie reached for her, but Antoinette was already rushing past her, going to Henri. Kuromaku expected her to hold the boy, to comfort him. Instead she slapped his face with an impact that echoed all through the vast interior of the church.

Silence fell upon them, save that ringing echo.

A flutter of wings came from the shadowed rafters above them, pigeons or other birds that had roosted in among the high beams of the church and had been roused by the boy's screaming. Kuromaku glanced up and saw a pigeon fly down out of the rafters and across the church, to come to rest atop a pew near the main doors.

But something else caught Kuromaku's eye.

Something else lurked in the shadows among the rafters, dark and furtive. Les Chuchotements Les Chuchotements, he thought, and he realized that the boy was not screaming about things he had heard, but rather what he had seen, up in those rafters. Something that he had somehow found a name for.

The Whispers.

Henri was trapped inside his own mind, but for the first time Kuromaku wondered if he was alone in there, or if something had made its way inside with him.

There was more motion in the shadows above.

"Sophie," Kuromaku whispered. "Tell them to take the boy, now. We must go."

Sophie blinked in confusion. "What? They've already said-"

Any words she spoke thereafter were drowned out as Henri Lamontagne began to scream again. This time, however, his eyes were not bleary and unfocused as they had been upon his waking. No, now he was staring directly up into the rafters of the church at the faceless, skeletal demons that emerged from the darkness, p.r.o.nglike tongues tasting the air before them.

The first of them dropped from the rafters to the pews below.

The boy continued to scream.

"Les Chuchotements!"

11.

Nikki froze with astonishment as she watched Peter rise up off the ground, completely enveloped in a sphere of magickal energy. Her skin p.r.i.c.kled with the static electricity in the air and her face felt warm as if she were sitting too close to a fire. She had seen him use magick before, seen him orchestrate the sorcery that had become a part of him, but nothing like this. In the years since he had become human again, Peter had developed a far greater control over magick. Or it had grown in him, matured somehow.

Whatever its explanation, it was breathtaking to see.

Peter raised his hands as though conducting a symphony and a scythe of energy arced outward from his fingers. The ground that separated him from the demons shook and the pavement cracked and then his magick struck the first wave of the onslaught. Seven of the darkly hideous creatures were blown apart, limbs and burning sh.e.l.ls raining down upon the others that bounded in behind them.

"Nikki!"

For an instant she had no idea who was calling to her, so entranced was she by watching her former lover, the sorcerer, at work. Then it was as though a switch had been thrown in her head.

The voice belonged to Father Jack.

"Watch out!" the priest shouted.

A gunshot punched the air too close to her head and the impact on her right eardrum made her cry out. Even as she did, she spun in that direction and saw what Father Jack was shooting at. Not the Slogute . . . the enormous beast seemed to have disappeared into the ground once more. No, the priest had shot one of these swift, cruel-looking demons, the bullet punching through the blue-black sh.e.l.l that covered its chest.

The demon let out a piercing shriek that Nikki thought would have shattered gla.s.s.

It went down.

And the others swarmed right over it.

Peter was on the other side of the Navigator, dealing with the huge crowd of the hideous things that had come up out of the ground after the Slogute. Nikki had no idea what Keomany was up to and didn't dare look. For on her side of the SUV, the things were rushing from the rubble of the devastated house on the corner.

Against the filthy orange sky they seemed little more than savage silhouettes, almost surreal.

But real enough.

"Shoot them!" Father Jack snapped at her, even as he fired his own weapon twice more, stepping farther away from the SUV and balancing his aim with both hands.

Nikki did not need to be told twice. She had faced the impossible before, horrors that could not exist in a sane world. But that was back when she had been under the false a.s.sumption that the world was sane. She knew better now. She did not even flinch as she brought the weapon to bear. Two of the thin demons rushed from the gra.s.s, crossing the pavement as they scrabbled spiderlike toward her. Nikki felt her finger twitch upon the trigger. The gun had a kick and the first bullet went wide.

The demons hissed, a sound like the static between radio stations. Her heart thundered in her chest and she bit her lip, her throat going dry. Too close. They were too close. Faster than she had thought. The first bullet had been her last.

Her finger pulled the trigger and this time she kept the barrel of the gun straight and kept the trigger down. Bullets tore from the weapon and shards of demon sh.e.l.l and stinking black blood shot out the backs of the creatures closest to her.

"Good!" Father Jack yelled as he fired again. Once. Twice. Slowly. "But save your ammunition if you can!"

Save your ammunition, my a.s.s! she thought. The first time she had fired she had not remembered that the gun had the capacity for rapid fire. The weapon felt warm in her hand now as she took aim again at several more of the demons as they rushed at her. Bullets tore them apart. she thought. The first time she had fired she had not remembered that the gun had the capacity for rapid fire. The weapon felt warm in her hand now as she took aim again at several more of the demons as they rushed at her. Bullets tore them apart.

Others were coming from behind houses and from the new hole the Slogute had made in the rubble, but they were more cautious now, creeping slowly toward them, looking for an opening.

"We have no idea how many there are!" Nikki told the priest. "We need to clear a path, not play 'Remember the Alamo.'"

Father Jack nodded. "Agreed."

He glanced over his shoulder and Nikki watched the demons a moment, checking to be sure they were keeping their distance, before she did the same.

Within that sphere of magick Peter now floated above the hole in the middle of the road. The pavement was strewn with the remains of the creatures and now the sorcerer drifted to the ground. The sphere dissolved around him with a crackle and Peter knelt and touched his hands to the ground.

The hole caved in upon itself, the ravaged area of the street growing larger as pavement and earth gave way and filled in the pa.s.sage below.

There would be no more demons from that avenue.

Nikki frowned, panic surging through her. She glanced back into the SUV, raced to the back of the vehicle and around the other side.

"Where's Keomany?" she shouted at Peter.

He frowned. There was such power in him that she had expected his face to be somehow inhuman but she saw the emotion in his eyes and his expression and in that moment she remembered the first time she had met him, the way he had gazed at her from the audience in a little club she was playing in New Orleans. The way he had looked that very night when he had saved her from having her throat torn out.

Gunfire echoed off the houses on either side of the street. Father Jack was firing at the demons that had grown courageous enough to approach anew. Nikki glanced at the priest. Beyond him, she saw Keomany. Her friend had left the Navigator and was walking onto Little Tree Lane. Her parents' house was the third on the left and from here it looked intact, unblemished, but there was no way to tell.

Not that it mattered. Keomany would never reach the house. The demons were flooding toward her. They might be afraid of the guns and of Peter's sorcery, but Keomany was unprotected, alone, walking among them.

"Peter!" Nikki cried, chills running through her.

She raced toward the front of the SUV but Peter was already there. A tiny alarm bell sounded in Nikki's mind as she realized they were leaving the Navigator behind-being separated from their transportation-but it did not matter. The only thing that mattered in that moment was Keomany.

Her black hair gleamed red in the filthy orange light.

Peter raised his hands. Nikki saw that they were glittering with green sparks. The air in front of him seemed to shiver. Nikki knew she would never reach Keomany in time. She stopped, planted her feet, and took aim.

She never squeezed the trigger.

Keomany screamed something unintelligible at the things that swarmed in around her, these slender, vicious demons that seemed more like ants than anything else. The pavement was sundered as thick tree roots shot up through it, impaling three of the demons and snaring two more. The ground split beneath several others and they tumbled into the gaping trench beneath them.

As if nothing at all had happened, Keomany strode on toward her parents' home.

Nikki stared after her. "Wow," she whispered as she ran up beside Peter.

"Earthwitch," he said. "She wasn't kidding."

A loud hiss rose up behind them and Nikki and Peter turned, side by side, to find a new phalanx of the faceless demons rushing them, long tendril tongues darting about below the sh.e.l.ls that covered their heads.

"Oh, enough of this," Peter snarled.

Nikki leveled her weapon at them and fired, her bullets splintering the sh.e.l.ls of the two closest to her and grazing another.

Then a new sound filled the air, a sound like lightning striking a tree, splintering wood. Peter screamed as though he was in pain and she whipped around to find that his face was contorted in agony, his teeth bared, clenched tight. With a release of breath that seemed to explode from him, he cried out in that ancient tongue she had heard him use before.

A tear appeared in the world in front of them, running like a crack from ground to stratosphere and then peeling back on either side to reveal blue sky and golden sunlight beyond. The fissure between worlds widened and the demons screeched at the infusion of daylight, of this world that was not their own.

They began to retreat.

Nikki nodded in satisfaction. She turned to Father Jack. "Get in and drive!" she snapped. "Follow us."

Peter reached out and took her hand and his grip was strong and confident. Nikki ran with him, following Keomany. She saw another pair of demons attack her friend but Keomany would not be stopped. Tree roots tore at the demons and dragged them back into the earth. It occurred to Nikki then that what Peter had just done on a huge scale Keomany was somehow doing as well: tapping into the real world, the dimension they had come from.

"Why didn't you just do that at first?" Nikki asked him as they sprinted after Keomany.

A demon sprang at her from broken pavement. Nikki spun and shot it through the head, shattering the sh.e.l.l over its skull. They kept running.

"I wasn't sure I could. All I did was return that part of the town to our world, where it belongs."

They raced up Little Tree Lane. Keomany was already walking up her parents' front lawn toward the door. It should have made her breathe a sigh of relief but Nikki was even more unnerved as she went up the steps. With that sickly orange sky and the unnatural feel of the air, with demons lurking in every shadow, it only felt more wrong. This picture-perfect little town that had been Keomany's home had been twisted into something horrid and unrecognizable. A sudden urge to cry welled up in her but Nikki pushed it away.

"Can you do that to the whole village?" she asked Peter as they reached the front door.

"I'm not sure."

She wanted to tell him he had to try, even if the town would never be the same again. But then Keomany was pounding on the door and screaming for her parents. She tried the k.n.o.b several times and cried out for them again. Then she turned and gazed back at Nikki and Peter.

"The dogs," she said, eyes wide with shock and dawning horror. "I don't hear the dogs."

Peter took her gently by the arm and moved her aside. He waved at the door and it unlocked. As he stepped inside, Nikki heard the roar of an engine and he saw Father Jack pull into the driveway. The demons had begun to form a large circle, creating a perimeter around them at a distance, and their numbers were increasing.

In the sky, Nikki thought she saw something huge and dark on the horizon, wings outspread, but then it disappeared among the treetops in a vast wooded area to the east. With all these indigo monsters with their gleaming sh.e.l.ls, she had almost forgotten the Slogute. These demons weren't the only things here, and now she wondered what else was in Wickham, what other evils lingered in this otherworld.

Father Jack jumped out of the Navigator, glancing over his shoulder to make sure there was nothing rushing at him, and he ran up toward the front of the house.

Peter went inside and Keomany followed. Nikki glanced again at the priest and then went in after them. It was a split-level home and the door opened onto the landing between levels. The lower portion of the house was dark but upstairs it opened onto a large room with bay windows and the interior was illuminated by that grotesque orange light.

They went up.

At the top of the steps Peter glanced to his right, into what Nikki imagined was the living room. Keomany was right behind him, but Peter stopped and turned to her, held a hand up to stop her where she was, to keep her from going farther. He shook his head, grim compa.s.sion etched into his features. Nikki felt all the air go out of her lungs.

"Oh, Keomany," she whispered.