The Gathering Dark Part 2

"You're head over heels, huh?" she asked idly.

"Pretty much."

"Good."

With a deep breath she shook back her hair and walked to her guitar. It was a beautifully crafted instrument with mother-of-pearl inlaid on the neck, and she picked it up and slid the strap over her head. The same strap she had been using for six years, since long before the horrors she had seen in New Orleans, when she had learned the difference between fear and terror.

Without another glance at Kyle, Nikki strode to the door and flung it open. The buzz of the crowd washed over her, embracing her and lifting her up the way nothing else ever could. Rich was waiting in the corridor and gave her a look of utter relief.

"So we still opening with 'Son of a Preacher Man'?" Kyle asked as he followed her down the corridor that led through the back of the club and into the wings behind the stage curtains.

Nikki cast him a quick glance over her shoulder. "f.u.c.k that. We start with 'Shock My World.' We're gonna show Philly how to groove."

The rest of the band stood up quickly as she swept into the wings. The curtains were open on a darkened stage, all their equipment and instruments up there already except for Nikki's guitar. She did not wait for them, did not hesitate a moment longer.

Nikki Wydra marched onto her hometown stage with her guitar strapped across her back and the crowd began to roar. Her nausea and her hesitation were forgotten. The band rocked right into "Shock My World" and the audience thundered their approval. When Nikki began to sing, she felt the ache in every word. It was more of herself than she had ever given to anyone, only she was giving it to hundreds of people at once. Her song. Her music. Her heart.

This right here was what she lived for. This was home. Not this club. Not Philadelphia. Just the stage.

This was home.

On a shelf above the desk of Father Jack Devlin was a little jar with a perforated lid, the kind of thing a child might have kept a captive spider in. There was a tiny demon in the jar and it had been there so long that Father Jack hardly even noticed it anymore.

It noticed him, however.

In fact, during all the long hours Father Jack spent poring over dusty, decrepit, leather-bound books and tapping at his computer keyboard as he searched the Net, the demon never took its burning orange eyes off the priest. Father Jack knew this, of course. The little f.u.c.ker stared hateful daggers at him day and night and had done so for nearly two years. He just couldn't bring himself to care.

The demon in the jar on the shelf above his desk was a problem Father Jack had solved a long time ago. There were so many others to be dealt with . . . and most of those, unsettlingly enough, were a h.e.l.l of a lot bigger than the hideous, contorted, glaring thing in the jar.

Currently the priest was bent over a sheaf of loose, yellowed pages that had come from a thirteenth-century French ma.n.u.script that some fool had tried to burn once upon a time. The other volumes used in his research had been set aside, and though the computer screen threw its dim glow upon the desk, it also sat dormant and ignored. The scorched lower corners of the pages had left certain phrases forever obliterated, and some only partially blackened and obscured. But without those words . . .

"s.h.i.t!" Father Jack snapped.

He sighed and sat back in his chair with a heartfelt sigh sliding down so as to almost disappear beneath his desk. His eyes itched and he reached up to remove his wire-rimmed gla.s.ses, rubbed at the corners of his eyes, and ma.s.saged the bridge of his nose. There was a two-day growth of reddish-gold stubble on his chin that matched the color of his hair. He needed a shower, and a shave, and some rest. But first he needed to solve the problem that was before him.

So much for intuition. Had he actually thought he was going to be able to figure out what those missing phrases would have been just by context? Arrogant jacka.s.s Arrogant jacka.s.s, he thought miserably.

Father Jack slid his gla.s.ses back on, and when he glanced up, he was eye to eye with the little Cythraul. Its hideous, desiccated face was pressed up against the gla.s.s of the jar, three-fingered hands planted on either side of it, grinning at him, relishing his frustration. He had never seen it so active, so aware.

An involuntary shudder went through him, and Father Jack cursed inwardly that he had allowed the thing to get to him. Abruptly he stood, the legs of his chair squeaking on the wood floor, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed the jar from the shelf and slapped his palm over the top, covering the air holes.

"Don't mess with me today," Father Jack muttered.

The Cythraul snarled, thin lips peeling impossibly far back to reveal tiny little needle teeth that filled its mouth. Its orange eyes went wide and it hurled itself upward at the lid of the jar, gnashing its fangs at the metal, hoping to get just a taste of his flesh. It would slow in a moment and then fall into a kind of coma. But it would not suffocate; it would not die.

As the little demon began to falter, all the anger went out of the priest and he shook his head and put the jar back on the shelf, sighing once more, knowing it was overly dramatic but not caring. A little drama always made him feel better.

When he looked up, Bishop Gagnon was standing in the open doorway of the office with his arms crossed, face as pale as always, one pure white eyebrow raised in inquiry.

"Roommate problems?" the aged Bishop asked.

Father Jack chuckled and it occurred to him that there was an edge of madness to it. He looked up sharply, wanting to make sure the Bishop did not think so as well. He was far from insane, though a little more of this might well turn him into a lunatic eventually.

"I couldn't kill him if I wanted to," Father Jack said. He leaned against his desk and slid his hands into the pockets of his black pants. Black everything, after all. It was the uniform. "And I want to. That's the thing, Michel. I want to."

"As well you should," the old man said, his words still accented with his native French. "But that is the difficulty of the job we have set out for us, Jack. With all of the shadows loosed upon the world, all the darkness returning, we must attempt to recreate the knowledge that once kept them under our control."

"Not our our control. Theirs. Careful the way you phrase things, Michel." control. Theirs. Careful the way you phrase things, Michel."

"Of course," said the Bishop, one hand fluttering upward in dismissal. "Of course."

It was a constant struggle between them. Fully a decade had pa.s.sed since the Roman Catholic Church had splintered and collapsed. Revelations of sorcery and a sect of dark magicians in her ranks had brought the church down. While it had been only in the last few years that Rome had begun to reorganize with new leaders and a new focus, things had happened much more quickly in America. The Church of the Resurrection-the Americans had very quickly abandoned the use of the word Catholic Catholic-had branched off almost immediately when Rome collapsed.

It had suffered its own tribulations in the meantime, perhaps the greatest of which had been the witch hunt for pedophiles among the priesthood. But without the archaic secrecy Rome had always insisted upon, the Church of the Resurrection had flushed that element from its ranks in a style nearly as brutal and unrelenting as the notorious Inquisition had been. The net result, however, was that the United States now had a far larger and more organized Catholic Church than anywhere else in the world.

Yet here they were, this very moment, repeating the sins of their fathers. For nearly two thousand years the Roman Church had held the reins on demons and other supernatural creatures-or most of them at least-with the sorcery found in a book called The Gospel of Shadows The Gospel of Shadows. A sect within the church had been trained in the book's secrets. But now every member of the sect was dead, and the book had disappeared during the horrific vampire jihad that had exposed the truth to the world ten years earlier. They had been tainted by power and dark magick, the men and women of that sect. They had been evil.

But without them, without the secrets of that book, the shadows were rising again. The demons and the beasts of the darkness, the shades of the dead, all were returning to the world, testing the boundaries and finding them shattered.

In order to stop them, the Church of the Resurrection was now forced to attempt to recreate The Gospel of Shadows The Gospel of Shadows, or at least to build a new one, spell by spell, secret by secret, curse by curse.

But Father Jack couldn't figure out a spell to kill vermin like the Cythraul. How was he supposed to recreate the acc.u.mulated occult knowledge of thousands of years of infernal combat? And meanwhile he had to worry about the politics of present-day religion, and a former Roman Catholic priest who had become a Bishop in the Church of the Resurrection sometimes forgot that it was dangerous to forget the difference between the two.

"Jack?" the Bishop prodded.

The priest looked up at him and for a moment he saw himself as he knew Bishop Gagnon must see him: rumpled clothes, white collar hanging loose, in need of a shave, eyes red behind his gla.s.ses from poring over the scorched ma.n.u.script pages.

"I guess I just need a break," Father Jack said. "Maybe I'll take a walk."

The reed-thin old man glared at him suddenly, a glint in his eyes that felt to Father Jack like the wrath of G.o.d.

"You'll do no such thing," Bishop Gagnon commanded sharply. "You can stroll around Greenwich Village another night, Father. Right now, every hour that pa.s.ses costs us more souls in Hidalgo."

Father Jack stared at him, mouth open slightly in astonishment. The Bishop had never spoken to him like this before. Granted, they were both under incredible stress. Hidalgo was a tiny town in Texas a stone's throw from the Mexican border. In the previous seventy-two hours it had been the site of a demonic manifestation, creatures called Okulam that had blown in with a particularly fierce spring thunderstorm. The church just called them soul-leeches, for the disgusting things fastened themselves to the backs of their victims' necks and infiltrated the minds and spirits of human beings. They took control, these vicious demons, and left only when they had cored the soul right out of their host.

G.o.d help him, Father Jack didn't know what to do about it. The ma.n.u.script he was studying had been written by early French settlers in North America, what would become the American Colonies, and it referred very specifically to a past manifestation of the Okulam. Without The Gospel of Shadows The Gospel of Shadows, it was all they had to go on.

Bishop Gagnon crossed the room and laid a hand on Father Jack's shoulder. There was no strength in the old man's grasp and barely any weight to his touch. It was as though the Bishop were little more than a ghost, haunting Father Jack.

"Not to put any pressure on you, my friend," the old man said, and now the wrathful glare was replaced by a kind, tired smile.

"Of course not," Father Jack replied with a nervous chuckle. Then he collected himself, took a deep breath, and met the Bishop's gaze again. "All right, Michel. Time to get back to work, I suppose."

"I trust your intuition, Jack. Your mind. You'll work it out."

"What if I don't?"

"Then the President will have to firebomb the whole town to keep the Okulam from spreading."

"But no pressure," Father Jack whispered.

Bishop Gagnon gazed at him a moment longer and then turned to walk from the office. Father Jack slid into his chair, eyes going once more to the charred ma.n.u.script, but abruptly he turned and called after the Bishop.

The old man paused at the door and turned to face him.

"I'll get to the bottom of this, Michel. I will will work it out. But I want you to think very carefully about your stance on my request to speak to the mage. If you'd let me speak to him before . . ." work it out. But I want you to think very carefully about your stance on my request to speak to the mage. If you'd let me speak to him before . . ."

Bishop Gagnon scowled. Father Jack had not finished his last sentence, but the old man knew what he had been about to say.

"My policy regarding the man you call the mage is costing lives, is that what you're telling me, Father?"

The priest stared at him. "Yes. It is."

The Bishop faltered, dropped his gaze, and Father Jack could see the old man's throat moving as he swallowed. At length the Bishop glanced up at him again.

"You know who he is, this man? What he is? What he's responsible for?"

Father Jack would not look away. "I know he may well be the only reason the darkness has not already swallowed the world."

A kind of bark issued from the old man's throat that might have been laughter. "If the darkness does 'swallow the world,' as you put it, he'll be the man to blame."

The priest took off his gla.s.ses once more and rubbed at his tired eyes. "With all due respect-"

"To h.e.l.l with your respect," the Bishop snapped, hatred and revulsion in his voice. Not for the priest, Father Jack knew that, but for the mage, and for the truth the old man was being forced to face. His stubbornness had already cost so many lives.

"Fine," Bishop Gagnon said. "You make sense of those pages, Jack. When the situation in Hidalgo is dealt with, you have my permission to approach the mage. For all the good it will do you. Perhaps meeting him in person will help you realize that this 'man' is not the n.o.ble warrior you think him to be.

"Peter Octavian is a monster."

2.

Blood red roses.

Peter Octavian took a step back from his canvas and narrowed his eyes as he studied the painting upon which he had toiled for the past three days; a single tree in the gardens of Constantinople, nightingales roosting in its branches. And beneath it, a tangle of wild rose bushes that seemed set to strangle the trunk of that lone tree.

He frowned deeply as he stared at those roses. Blood red, yes, but that was wrong. The color was all wrong but at first he could not decide how to fix it. Peter closed his eyes, his mind skipping back across centuries to another springtime, to a city under siege, and he could still see those roses as clearly as if he had walked among them yesterday. He could hear the nightingales sing and feel the breeze, and beneath the overriding odor of ox dung, he could still catch the lingering scent of those roses.

His eyes opened and Octavian stared at the painting again. With a slow nod, he moved toward the easel, palette in his left hand. He dipped his brush into a small glob of black paint. The roses had bloomed early that spring of 1453 in the weeks before Constantinople fell to the Turks, but they had been dark roses whose petals were a lush crimson. Blood red roses, yes, but blood that had begun to dry; blood that stained.

Peter daubed black paint onto the red, mixing the two, and then used the very tip of the brush to detail the edges of each petal, as though every one of the roses was slowly opening to reveal a darker heart within.

"Yes," he whispered to himself as he stepped back to regard the painting once more.

At last satisfied, he set down the palette and brush and stretched, muscles in his neck and shoulders and back popping loudly in the silence of his apartment. It was the second day of May, and though he could still taste the memory of winter in the air, it was warm enough today that the windows all along the front of the apartment were wide open.

Peter lived on the bas.e.m.e.nt floor of a row house on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, half a block from a lesbian bar called The Fat Cat and just around the corner from the legendary White Horse Tavern. It was not much to speak of-a single bedroom, a living room, a narrow galley kitchen, and a bathroom-but it was perfect for his needs, particularly since the living room was rather large and doubled as his studio.

He also liked the neighborhood a great deal. West Fourth Street was comparatively quiet and the locals tended either to be friendly or to keep to themselves. The row house belonged to Jarrod and Suze Balent, both of whom were musicians who made their living playing in the orchestra for various Broadway shows, he the cello and she the violin. They were good for a cup of coffee and a chat now and again, but weren't around enough to become a nuisance. Best of all, they seemed to sense when he wanted company and when he did not.

Peter took a last look at his newly completed painting and he smiled again. His heart was light, as it always was when he finished a new canvas, when he had successfully prised from his mind a bit of the past that haunted him. Barefoot, he padded across the wooden floor in jeans that were slightly too long, the edge of the denim fraying in the back beneath his heel. Not that he was overly concerned, given that both the jeans and the b.u.t.ton-down shirt he wore were spattered and smeared with a dark rainbow of color.

Time for a little celebration, he thought as he went to the bathroom and began to wash up, scrubbing the paint from his fingers under hot water from the tap. He would phone Carter Strom and let him know that the final piece for the new show had been completed, and unless he had some other pressing plans, Carter would do as he always did- pick up his wife Kymberly and meet Peter at the White Horse. In the years since Peter had first begun to express himself with paint, discovering both a talent and an untapped source of income, that had become a ritual for the three of them: the artist, his agent, and the agent's wife.

Among Peter's few friends, fewer still were in New York City. Carter and Kymberly were primary among them.

Peter stepped back into the living room and glanced at the clock, pleased to discover that it was early yet, not even two o'clock in the afternoon. He had been so focused the past few days that he had barely seen the sky. Immersed as he was in the painting, he had stepped outside only to pick up the newspaper and breakfast at the deli on Twelfth Street, and even then he'd barely noticed the world around him. It was like that when he was working.

Now that he was through with the painting, the world was flooding back in, his awareness of things other than that canvas suddenly returning. Some time away from the apartment would do him good.

Peter had just begun to unb.u.t.ton his shirt when the doorbell rang. The Balents always knocked and Carter never would drop by without calling first. Aside from the rare messenger or courier, n.o.body rang his doorbell. One of the things he had liked the best about this apartment when he bought it was that it had its own entrance, not even a shared foyer with the house above it. A trio of brick steps led down from the street to his sunken residence. n.o.body came down those steps by accident, but at first there had been those who had come looking for him. He had used simple magick to install a ward around his door, to keep the curious away.

Now, though, he was curious himself. His bare feet made almost no noise on the floor as he crossed the room and opened the door.

Upon the landing at the bottom of those brick steps stood a lanky, thirtyish, redheaded man in wire-rimmed gla.s.ses whose only remarkable quality was that he wore the clothing of a Catholic priest. They might not call themselves Catholics anymore, but the uniform had not changed.

The priest seemed taken aback, almost surprised that the door had been answered at all.

"You look lost," Peter told the man.

His visitor actually took a step back when he spoke, and Peter was about to shut the door when the priest laughed softly, self-deprecatingly, and clapped one hand to his face in embarra.s.sment. It was such an unself-conscious gesture, and there was such warmth in that laugh, that Peter found himself lingering longer in the open door than he otherwise would have.

"I'm sorry," the priest said, still a bit embarra.s.sed, but smiling in spite of it. "I guess you're just not what I was expecting."

"I get that a lot. What can I do for you, Father?"

The priest raised an eyebrow. "Father? I'm surprised to hear you use the term."

Peter's good humor was fading. He could feel himself preparing to step back, to close the door on the man. "Don't they call you people that still?"

"The faithful do, yes."

"Then you shouldn't be surprised. I may not believe in you, sir, or your church, but there are a great many things I do believe in. Now is there something I can do for you, or did you just drop by to have a look?"

For a long moment the priest was speechless. He shifted awkwardly there on the doorstep, scratched at the back of his neck, and then that grin returned.

"Guess we're getting off on the wrong foot, here. That wasn't my intention. Mind if I take it from the top?"

Peter didn't know why, but there was something about the guy that made him nod his head. "Give it a shot."

The priest thrust out his hand. "Mr. Octavian, my name's Jack Devlin. Technically I'm not supposed to be here, but there are some things going on that . . . well, I could use your help."

"Why aren't you supposed to be here, Father Devlin?" He did not shake the priest's proffered hand.