The Gathering Dark Part 29

"Where the h.e.l.l are those V-rounds?" the Commander snapped, one hand clapped to his ear. Sophie realized the man was speaking into some sort of communications rig but couldn't see it.

"Commander!" Father Jack shouted, his words stripped away by the wind. "Commander Henning!"

The Bishop reached out and snagged him by the jacket. "Where are you going, Father Devlin?"

The priest tried to shake himself loose but his superior now had both hands on him and was attempting to pull him away from the Jeep. To Sophie's astonishment, Father Jack whirled around and punched the old man, connecting with a solid crack of knuckle on cheekbone. The Bishop staggered backward but Father Jack wasn't done. He followed after the old man and struck him again, and the Bishop went down onto the slick pavement.

Father Jack stood over him, fuming, eyes obscured behind his rain-spattered gla.s.ses. "You are not a man of G.o.d!" he spat, veins standing out on his neck. "You are a f.u.c.king lunatic."

When the priest raised his hand to point at the Bishop, his fingers glowed a dim, fiery blue.

"Stay there."

Father Jack reached for Sophie's hand and she took it. Together they jumped up into the Jeep. A pair of soldiers moved to stop them, one of them grabbing Sophie's leg, but she shook him off and froze him in place with a furious glare.

"Back off!" she barked.

"Commander!" Jack called.

When at last Commander Henning turned toward them, Sophie saw in his eyes that he had been completely aware of what was transpiring around him. The conflict among them had not escaped his notice, as she had a.s.sumed.

"Go away, Father Devlin," the Commander said, his eyes slitted against the storm, his commando uniform plastered to his body.

Another soldier in helmet and mask-just as eerily faceless as the demons, she thought now-ran up beside the Jeep with an automatic rifle.

"Commander!" the soldier shouted. And when Henning glanced down, the soldier pa.s.sed the weapon up to him, along with a pair of ammunition clips. Commander Henning popped the clip out of the weapon and inserted one of the new ones.

"Commander!" Father Jack shouted again.

The man ignored him. He climbed out onto the hood of the Jeep. Sophie began to shake her head as she jumped onto the rear seat of the vehicle. Past Father Jack and Commander Henning, over the heads of the soldiers in the street, she could see the anarchy in the midst of the intersection. Whispers capered, dodging gunfire, moving swiftly toward the soldiers, their thin, armored forms elusive in the rain and the driving storm. Bullets cracked their sh.e.l.ls, and their corpses littered the road. But there were so many. So many.

And among them, a thing unlike any Sophie had ever seen. A lone figure, a dervish, shifting and changing. Swordsman, tiger, mist, wolf, raven, samurai . . . Kuromaku. Stray bullets struck him but wounded him not at all.

Commander Henning raised the automatic rifle and took aim.

"He's on our side!" Father Jack roared, and he lunged forward.

Henning cracked the b.u.t.t of the weapon across the priest's face and Father Jack fell backward, out of the Jeep. He struck his head on the pavement and was still. It was insane. The Commander was diverting his attention from the creatures that threatened to overwhelm his men to focus on Kuromaku. He barely looked at Sophie as he raised the weapon again.

There was no thought in what she did next.

Sophie leaped down from the Jeep and raced toward the line of soldiers from behind. They were firing indiscriminately now, and as she approached them, it felt as though her eardrums would burst. Then she had reached them and she shoved through a narrow s.p.a.ce between two dark-clad soldiers and ran past them.

Out into the street.

The Whispers were all hissing, their tendril-tongues darting in front of their blank skull-sh.e.l.ls as bullets tore them apart. But not all of them were dying. Some of them were close by and they started for her instantly, sensing her, tendrils pointing toward her as though to a magnet.

They swarmed. Thick mucous rain pelted her. The wind buffeted her. Sophie raced toward the demons, peering through the storm and the Whispers for Kuromaku. In the midst of the intersection she stopped, threw back her head, and screamed.

"Kuromaku! They're going to kill you! Find cover!"

Much of the gunfire had silenced. Staccato bursts echoed across buildings off to her right and out over the gorge to her left. Behind her there were only short ripples of fire.

The Whispers closed in around her. They slowed, as if to savor her. She could hear the clack of their carapaces; there were so many of them around her that they blocked out that putrid orange light.

Then Kuromaku was there. His sword whickered through the air and he hacked two of the demons to pieces, spattering her with ichor thick as the h.e.l.lish rain. The others turned to defend themselves and he lashed into them.

"No!" she cried. "Find cover! Find cover!"

But Kuromaku did not listen. She ought to have known he would not. He had vowed to protect her and he was going to do precisely that. In trying to save Kuromaku, she had slowed him down, made him a better target.

Sophie spun and stared back at the Jeep, saw Commander Henning take aim. Fresh gunfire ripped through the air, echoes dancing around the intersection. Bullets tore the ground. Kuromaku was. .h.i.t in the shoulder, blood splashing from the wound, and he staggered.

She saw the confusion in his eyes even as he slashed the katana out again, decapitating another Whisper. Sophie shouted again for him to take cover, beckoning him toward her. Blinking in surprise, shaking his head as if disoriented, Kuromaku staggered toward her. Another bullet grazed his left leg and he spun in toward her, spinning the blade, clearing a circle around them.

Sophie grabbed him and pulled herself close so that her own body was a shield between Kuromaku and Commander Henning's bullets. If the soldiers were willing to kill her to get to him . . . oh, Lord, please help us oh, Lord, please help us, she thought.

"Those bullets," she said, "can they kill you? The Commander thinks they can."

Kuromaku's features were grim, his eyes narrow and dark. "He's right."

"Get us out of here, then! Without Antoinette and her boy, we can fly! Carry me. Please, Kuromaku, let's go!"

"I cannot," he replied as the wind howled around them. "That is what the bullets do. The chemical in them, it takes away my power to change."

Sophie stared at him, lips parted in horror. Fresh tears slid down her face, and the Whispers began to close in.

19.

The storm raged, churning the sky above the southern half of the city of Ronda. The wind was hot, and seeded with pure malice. Peter could feel the malevolence of the Tatterdemalion in the air as it whipped against him, but he would not let it slow him down. He needed more time-time to think and to plan, to study the Tatterdemalion and formulate a strategy-but he wasn't going to get it.

The time was now.

Despite the magick that blazed around his hands, crackling between his fingers, he had never felt so frail, so human.

After they had left the bullring behind, he and Keomany had seen very few of the Whispers, mostly lurking in the shadows inside the buildings they pa.s.sed-restaurants and apartments and hotels. Peter tried not to think of the people inside those buildings, the human beings fighting for their lives with every pa.s.sing second. Cries had issued from the upper floor of one building and Keomany had started off in that direction, but Peter had stopped her.

There was no time. The storm had arrived. Heavy, oily rain had begun to fall and it was as though the clouds were the eyes of the Tatterdemalion, and it was watching them. It was far too late for them to try to save a single life; such a delay might cost thousands, even millions more. It might cost the world.

Peter squinted his eyes against the wind and the rain. There was a terrible stench in the air and it a.s.saulted his nostrils, causing his eyes to water. His clothes whipped against his body but he set himself against the gale and kept on. The distant report of gunfire thudded dully in the air, a nearly constant sound, as if the bullets were the grinding of some giant engine. Peter had at first thought that perhaps the people of Ronda were fighting back, but the sounds he heard weren't from the sort of weaponry people had in their homes. He would see soon enough, he supposed, where the shots were coming from.

Up ahead there was a broad plaza with a monument at its center and beyond that he could see part of the bridge Keomany had told him about, and the rest of the city rising up on the horizon beneath the terrible face of the storm.

Around the monument was a ring of demons, skeletal Whispers crouched at the base of the stone memorial like gargoyles. He cursed silently the momentary delay they would cost. It would have been so much easier to wait for the Tatterdemalion to come to him, for he was certain the sinister presence had noted him. But he remembered too well what had happened in Wickham and knew that it was possible that the Tatterdemalion might not attack him at all, might simply ignore him and go about its work. They had to bring it to them, force it to pay attention.

That was where Keomany came in.

Keomany, he thought, frowning. She had been beside him a moment ago. Now, when he turned around, he saw that she had fallen behind. She was strikingly beautiful, her black hair like curtains of silk around her face, and her eyes glowed a bright gold. Keomany Shaw walked in a cascade of warm, soft earth light that touched her as though Gaea herself had reached down into this h.e.l.lish dimension and touched her servant with a finger, a shaft of her divine spirit.

It was the dawn. In Spain, the sun was coming up, and where Keomany walked, she was slitting open a narrow window to the world to which this city belonged. Lit up like that, it was as though Keomany had become a G.o.ddess. Behind her she had left a swath of that warm morning light. It was still dim, still early back in the world, but day was breaking. Where she walked, sprigs of green gra.s.s grew up from the pavement without any help from Peter's magick. He had helped Keomany to break through, to connect with the spirit of Gaea, but now that the two were entwined, the power coursing through Keomany had nothing to do with the kind of sorcery Peter wielded.

Where that filthy rain fell, the light of the other world's dawn evaporated it. Peter's clothes and hair were becoming sodden and the slick rain streaked his face, but Keomany was untouched by it. Ever since they had left the bullring, she had kept up with him, but now she had slowed and was staring at the street in front of her. After a moment, Keomany crouched and touched the pavement with outstretched fingers.

Peter glanced over at the blank face-sh.e.l.ls of the Whispers around the monument at the center of the plaza. They were completely still as though they thought he might not notice them. Only the sharp tendrils that hung beneath their skull carapaces were in motion, sensing his presence, perhaps waiting to see what he would do. Or perhaps it was Keomany they were afraid of.

"What are you up to?" he whispered.

Beneath his feet the ground began to tremble. Startled, he spun back to look at Keomany, his hands crackling with magickal energy. Even as he turned, he saw the pavement beneath her fingers shatter and fall aside as branches and leaves thrust up from the ground. The sky above split open and light shone down in a widening circle as the tree grew and its branches spread wide.

An olive tree, fully grown, stood in the midst of the plaza in a pool of Spanish morning light. Keomany stood beneath its branches, so slim and pet.i.te in its shadow. She reached up and plucked an olive from its branches and then glanced over at Peter, smiling. Her eyes gleamed even more brightly as she laughed.

"I found a flaw," she said. "There are places where the walls between here and home are very thin."

With a flip of her silken hair she glanced southward at the towering thunderheads, the roiling, unnatural storm clouds. "It isn't as all-powerful as it thinks it is."

Keomany walked up beside Peter and he could smell the fresh air of home swirling around her, could feel the golden glow of the natural light that bathed her. It felt right and it gave him hope. Despite his exhaustion from transporting them here, he felt stronger now.

"What do you say we kick some a.s.s?" she asked.

Peter nodded once. The fingers of his left hand hooked downward, almost clawlike, and then he lashed out with a flick of his wrist and a scythe of green light sliced across the square. His attack cut three of the Whispers in half and threw the other two to the ground, ichor seeping from cracks in their armored forms. The stone monument shattered.

As if sensing the new strength in them, the power and resolve, the wind blew harder but they forged ahead through the storm. The bridge was ahead, the stones coated with a film of rain that puddled instead of running off the way it should have. An explosion echoed out across the bridge-across the gorge that spread out to either side, the gash that separated the halves of the city-and Peter peered through the filthy rain, wiping the viscous fluid from his eyes.

Amid the gunfire he had been hearing since they left the bullring, there had been occasional small explosions, like mortar sh.e.l.ls. Now he saw the source. On the other side of the bridge, in the intersection at the bottom of the hill that led up into the heights of Ronda, there were military vehicles, including at least two tanks that he could see. More gunfire echoed across the gorge.

"Peter, look," Keomany said, pointing.

Above the bridge they saw her. Allison had become a falcon to search the city from the sky, but now she was falling, plummeting toward the ground and changing as she fell. From bird she became woman. End over end she tumbled, too fast. The only thing he could think of was that she must somehow have been knocked unconscious. He thrust out his hands, palm up, and began to mutter to himself. This was simple magick, but delicate. He had not had much use for gentleness of late and so it took him a fraction of a second, a single inhalation of breath, to steady himself.

Midway through a spin that would have ended with her head splitting on the stone bridge, Allison turned to mist. Keomany let out a cry of relief and ran ahead, stepping away from the tear she had created in this reality as though leaving the spotlight upon a stage. She had detached from her connection to Gaea, it appeared, at least for the moment. Peter followed her, racing toward the edge of the new city, where they could look down upon the wide gorge and the ancient, arched stone bridge.

Several feet away, Allison coalesced once more into flesh. Instantly the rain began to plaster her red hair to her skull. Her eyes were wild.

"You're all right," Peter said.

Allison only nodded, moving quickly to the edge of the bridge to stare down into the Cleft of Ronda.

"What did you see?" he asked, forced to shout over the storm, which began to roar even louder around them, screaming through the gorge below.

"Have a look," she called back, a grim cast to her features.

Peter pushed through the rain and laid his hands on the stone wall of the bridge. Keomany did the same and together the three of them looked down into the Cleft at the abomination that lay on the dry riverbed, its flesh pulsing. Octavian felt bile burn the back of his throat at the sight of the grotesque thing and the demons that emerged wetly from its abdomen.

"Brood mother," he told Keomany.

Her eyes had lost that golden glow when she had run to Allison's aid, but now the light gleamed once more in Keomany's gaze. The rain had beaded upon her face and hair, sliding down her cheeks like syrup tears. Above, a new shaft of daylight burned down through the orange-black sky and christened her anew.

All of this happened in an eyeblink. Then Allison tore herself away from the sight of the hideous giant in the gorge and turned to Peter again.

"Here's the deal. Task Force Victor's over there with a bunch of British soldiers."

"They're not our priority," Peter replied gravely. "The Tatterdemalion is. The storm is here, it's all around us, but the b.a.s.t.a.r.d hasn't come for us yet. Maybe it's not planning to. We've got to get its . . ." He paused and went to look down into the gorge again. And then Peter Octavian smiled. "Attention. We've got to get its attention." "Agreed," Allison said. "But Kuromaku's over there too."

Peter blinked several times in surprise, trying to make sense of this new information. He frowned and pulled his gaze from the brood mother at the base of the cliffs and bridge and turned to stare at the tanks again.

Kuromaku. Where the h.e.l.l did he come from?

Not that it mattered. Kuromaku was his brother, or as near as any man had ever been. He was also the finest warrior Peter had ever known. Allison was staring at Peter expectantly and he nodded to her.

"Go get him. Meet us down in the gorge."

Keomany's head snapped around, sparks slipping from her eyes and turning to golden mist. "Down there? What are we going down there for?"

Peter's nostrils flared with anger and distaste and he glared up into the storm, the wind howling and the rain pelting his face.

"The Tatterdemalion's an arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He thinks we can't hurt him. We're going to prove him wrong."

Pain seared through Kuromaku's shoulder and leg where the bullets had struck. The viscous rain smeared his vision and all around him the Whispers moved in. He wiped at his eyes and could see that more and more of the demons were swarming up over the edge of the Cleft. There were too many of them; too many even for the soldiers. He could hear the screams of men and women tearing across the intersection as the Whispers began to slip through the crossfire. The staccato bursts of gunfire slowed. There were still stray bullets that tore the pavement nearby, but very few. The soldiers were too occupied with the swarm around them, or simply had not fallen so far that they would kill an innocent woman to take the life of a vampire.

Unlike those attacking the soldiers, the Whispers that surrounded Kuromaku and Sophie moved slowly, filled with dark purpose. The circle closed inexorably around them, stalking carefully, as though the demons sensed that Kuromaku had been wounded. They had no nostrils that he could see, but he suspected that somehow they smelled the blood.

Blood, Kuromaku thought. The irony was too much. I'm bleeding I'm bleeding. He could no longer shapeshift, that ability had been taken from him by the chemical carried in the bullets that had struck him. Sophie had made it clear that the commander of these military forces was trying to kill him. There was no sense to it, no logic, but he did not bother to question it. He was a vampire, and the United Nations had a special section of their military that hunted vampires.

The chemical stabilized his molecules, preventing him from changing. The cruelest irony was that it had been developed by a vampire, a creature named Hannibal, who had used it to slaughter those of his own kind who would not follow him. It had been the U.N. task force that had first put the chemical in ammunition.

Kuromaku's gaze ticked around the circle of Whispers that took a step closer, their tongues darting at him, tasting the air, perhaps even tasting his anxiety. They could tear him apart, if the bullets did not get him first.

But it was not for himself that he was anxious.

"Stay behind me," he told Sophie, not daring to sneak a glance at her porcelain features or those perfect blue eyes for fear they would distract him a second too long. She was holding on tightly to him and now he pulled her hands away from his body, ushering her back.

"I will be moving quickly. You must try to stay close but not interfere, not get in the way."

"They'll kill you," Sophie said, her voice little more than a rasp above the sound of the wind and rain.

"They'll kill us both," Kuromaku replied, wiping again at his eyes, letting his katana hang by his side as he studied the Whispers intently. "We need to get to cover."

"There isn't any!" she cried. "They're in all the buildings. They're . . . the bridge!"

Kuromaku frowned and glanced at her, then over at the bridge.

"I didn't see any demons on the other side," Sophie said. "Do you think we can-"