Midnight's Angels - 03

by Tony Richards

  There were no such things as adepts in Tyburn. It was a concept alien to the people of this place. An adept was a conjurer -- usually descended from the Salem refugees -- who stood head and shoulders above the rest of the population when it came to skillfulness in magic arts. Whereas, in this part of town, they were all fairly skillful. There were High Witches like Emaline, for sure. But they rose to such positions by means of charisma, their ability to lead a crowd.

  It had been this way for well in excess of two hundred years. Tyburn had remained a normal part of town for the first few decades after Regan Farrow had hexed the place. But gradually, the people here had started asking, why pretend that we are living normal lives?

  The power that the Salem witches had brought to this town … why not view it as a blessing? And they’d decided to make the very most of what they had been given, shaping their existences around it.

  They had broken away, embracing the magic arts completely, cutting themselves adrift from the rest of the community.

  They attended ceremonies like this one on a regular, sometimes nightly, basis. The tall houses around them were practically empty. Almost every other activity had stopped.

  The congregation watched as Emaline stepped forward, raising one of the goblets. Then the people swayed gently, began to chant.

  “Hecate, grant us your blessing!”

  Emaline dipped her forefinger into the blood and drew a symbol on her brow. She was a tall, striking woman with long curly hair the color of cornstalks and eyes of such a pale hazel that they were nearly yellow.

  “Hecate, show us a sign!”

  “A sign!” Emaline repeated, bellowing the words.

  She drew herself up to her full height, spread her arms out wide. And then she turned back to the altar.

  And stopped dead.

  The whole crowd gasped.

  * * *

  Emaline’s first thought was that some small child from the congregation had given its parents the slip, snuck around, and climbed onto the big dark block of marble while her back was turned. What sacrilege! She’d have the brat’s family ostracized for several months!

  Then she took in the fact that the shape in front of her was not that of a child at all. She squinted closer.

  No, it was in actual fact a fully-grown man in his thirties, but hunched over so tightly that it made him look much smaller than he should have been. He was thin and prematurely bald, his face colorless and twisted in the moonlight. And, in spite of the fact that she knew everyone around these parts, she didn’t recognize him.

  His knees were pressed up almost to his chin, and he was staring at her fixedly, his own gaze strangely glassy. Emaline took in the fact -- it seemed a bizarre additional detail -- that he was wearing the plain white collar of a heathen Christian priest.

  What kind of intrusion was this? He was obviously from some other part of town. She took a step back involuntarily, driven by surprise and shock. But righteous outrage cancelled that out.

  “What do you think you’re doing, heathen?” she yelled.

  She could hear the crowd start murmuring behind her, but did not let it divert her. Opened her right hand. The goblet dropped, splashing blood. Then she flexed her fingers, getting ready to work magic.

  But no. She was not inhumane. It would be better to give this disbeliever one final chance before unleashing anything on him.

  “This is a holy ritual. How dare you disturb it in this way?” she demanded. “Have you come here to preach to us about the son-god on his bed of sticks?”

  The hunched figure did not reply. It tipped its head a little to the side. The motion seemed more insect-like than human, and unnerved Emaline badly. What was wrong with this peculiar man … was he an escapee from some faraway madhouse?

  No matter. This could be fixed in an instant. If he was not prepared to talk, then she could wrench the answers out of him.

  She was about to use her powers when something new began moving through the dimness of the park in her direction. Her face swung toward it and her jaw dropped open wide.

  The congregation had seen it too. The next gasp they let out was even louder, higher pitched.

  This new shape … it was floating above the ground. Drifting along like a tiny white cloud, casting out a flickering pale light. And it had wings. She was amazed by it, fixated. It seemed more beautiful than anything she’d ever seen.

  She tried to understand what she was looking at. Obviously some form of supernatural entity. And finally, she got it.

  This was some form of messenger, sent to them this evening by the great Moon Goddess. Their prayers had at last been answered. Ordinary magic was already in their grasp. But tonight …

  They would be given the ability to transcend it. They would be granted almost supreme power. Emaline felt sure of that.

  There were more startled yells. She turned back to the crowd, and could see some of the congregation’s faces swiveling around blankly.

  When she glanced from side to side the way that they were doing, her amazement grew. Two more of these divine creatures were moving in from either end, coming across the wrought-iron gates and through the tangled branches. They were floating too. And both had equally gorgeous countenances. She felt more certain than ever that Hecate had decided to reward her.

  Except that some of her flock did not seem sure of that. Panicked cries went up, and a few parents started trying to hustle their children away. She turned to them quickly, stretching out her arms.

  “My people, my lambs!” she called out. “Stay where you are, please! Do not be afraid!”

  And she had always been extremely good at convincing them to follow her. Those who had been trying to retreat stopped in their tracks, although a lot of their faces were still tense with fright.

  “Can’t you see what’s happening this evening?” she explained to them in a gentler tone. “We are being blessed.”

  Her voice almost cracked, it was so full of joy.

  “These are emissaries of the Goddess. Let them pass among you freely.”

  Why? the worried faces asked.

  “They’ll give us the higher powers that we’ve always craved! I promise you! I promise!”

  Many of the folks in front of her relaxed and even brightened. And the few who still looked doubtful stayed put, obviously afraid of angering the rest. It was the children who appeared the most concerned. Their small gazes were wide. Hands went to mouths. But they’d soon find out that they were worrying about nothing, bless them.

  The bright celestial beings reached the outer edges of the crowd. And then started tipping lengthways, ducking down, their long necks stretching and their beautiful faces pressing up close to the people. Emaline strained to see what they were doing.

  They were … kissing all her congregation. One by one. The entire throng. Maybe they imparted power that way. Oh, how very wonderful!

  But what of the hunched man-thing that was still behind her on the altar? Emaline turned calmly around to face it once again.

  “And what of you, homunculus?” she murmured in a reverent tone. “What aspect of the Goddess do you serve?”

  When it jumped down and started getting closer, the High Witch did not allow herself to flinch. Not even when its mouth started coming open.

  CHAPTER 18

  The adepts were looking genuinely shocked. None of them had planned for this, but they’d had no say in the matter. Woodard Raine -- direct descendant of the Landing’s founder, and the last in his bloodline -- was more powerful than any of them. So powerful, in fact, that even the basic rules that governed magic arts did not apply to him. I’d seen that demonstrated a while back, without even realizing what I was looking at.

  But he was also totally and irredeemably nuts. As crazy as a fox at a hen convention. And so they normally avoided him, having practically no contact with the man. Pretending that the things he did were not even an issue. Which was easy enough most of the time, since Woody was agoraphobic, staying inside hi
s vast, sprawling home and showing little genuine interest in the doings of this town.

  That didn’t seem to be the case, on this occasion. It appeared that he was trying to play a part. It was his magic that had brought us here, I was in little doubt of that. It seemed that he’d done it intentionally. Although to what end, I had not a clue. I rarely do, when I’m around him.

  Looking at the other washed-out faces, I guessed everyone else shared that same opinion.

  Gaspar Vernon might have been visibly shaken, but he puffed his cheeks out. Samuel Levin held his ground, but seemed to draw in slightly on himself, his whole frame very tight. And the normal cocksure expression was gone from Kurt van Freisling’s face.

  As for Willets, he’d been here before. I’d brought him myself, almost at gunpoint. And the memory of that encounter was etched on his features in a scowl that was both apprehensive and full of distaste.

  For us normal human beings, Ritchie Vallencourt seemed unsure where he had wound up, but looked pretty certain that he didn’t like it. He proved that by pulling out his sidearm. And then his apprehension got a great deal worse. Because his Browning automatic vanished from his grasp as soon as he’d raised it. That had to be Woods again. The Master of the Manor disapproved of firearms being waved around on his property.

  I ignored all that. Shoved my hands into my pockets, gazing at the window he was standing behind. I was perfectly used to Raine, and was unimpressed by his conjuring tricks.

  His eyes were the only part of him that were remotely visible. They were larger than they ought to be -- he’d altered himself several times the past few years. And were shaped like a cat’s, although you couldn’t see the slitted pupils from this distance. The man behind them, I already knew, was medium sized and slight of build, a fairly unprepossessing figure. But a sensible man doesn’t judge books by their covers, nor adepts by their physical size. Raine’s sorcery was truly massive, and his madness made the way he used his power genuinely impossible to predict.

  “What’s up, Woods?” I asked.

  It only came out as a murmur, but I knew that he could hear me.

  “I was about to ask the same of you, sport.” His cut-glass tones came skirling out of the thin air around me. Several of the adepts jumped. “Everyone seems so busy this evening. And … why do the inhabitants of my town keep on disappearing?”

  “How’s that?”

  “A lot of them seem to have vanished. I can’t sense them any longer. A handful in the other suburbs, and now a whole big load in Tyburn. There seems to be almost no one left there anymore.”

  I exchanged glances with the rest. They looked alarmed. And then a couple of their faces became blanker. I knew that they were reaching outward with their powers, trying to confirm what we’d been told.

  He could simply be imagining it, couldn’t he? The thoughts that came out from his so-called mind were as tangled as a dozen balls of string all mashed together.

  “Those two angels we were after,” Judge Levin explained to me. “We chased them as far as Tyburn. And we were just about to catch up with them when Raine brought us here.”

  His bespectacled gaze burned furiously. He seemed convinced that, if Woody had not interfered, he and the rest might have stopped anything happening. Which was misplaced anger, to put it mildly. From what I’d seen last night, I doubted it would be anything like that easy to stop these intruders. And by his expression, Willets agreed.

  Martha Howard-Brett and Gaspar Vernon both came back. That is, their consciousness returned to their bodies. They jerked, then their expressions changed, looking appalled to the very core. We’d never had much time for the inhabitants of Tyburn, but Martha’s eyes were sparkling with dampness.

  “All gone to the Dweller’s side,” she told us. “Women. Children. Everyone.”

  Levin blinked with disbelief. “An area of that size? The whole population?”

  “It seems to have started with the biggest coven,” Gaspar Vernon explained huskily. “Once they were changed, they spread out and started taking down the rest like some contagious plague.”

  And what did that mean for the rest of us? A chill spread through the group. But Willets pulled himself together quickly, cleared his throat and turned back to the window in the distance. He proceeded to fill Raine in, explaining to him about the Dweller and its deadly agents. And that got a pretty typical response.

  “My word. That’s shocking.”

  But, by his tone of voice, he might have been talking about a problem with greenfly.

  “You can’t sense those people anymore because they’ve been drained of their humanity,” the doctor finished up. “They’re still there physically, but they belong to the creature out there now.”

  “And can we get them back?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “You have no ideas at all?”

  Raine paused for thought.

  “Then we’d best destroy them,” he decided, “before this gets out of hand.”

  Kill all those who’d been transformed? I had never heard him talk like that. It got shocked stares from several of the group, and a bristling response on my part.

  “We’re talking about hundreds of people, maybe thousands. We can’t massacre them out of hand.”

  I was relieved to see that several of the adepts nodded. Woody still took a little while absorbing that.

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  “We have to at least try,” I breathed, “to find some other solution.”

  “And if you can’t, old chum?” asked Raine.

  Even I had to admit, there was no simple answer to that. There would have been absolute silence around me, except that I could hear Lehman Willets cursing underneath his breath.

  And I sympathized.

  CHAPTER 19

  It turned out that none of the adepts accompanying me could use their powers while they were still on Woody’s property. When they tried to move themselves by sorcery they couldn’t. And so the whole load of us had to make our way on foot back to the gates. We lumbered through the twisted undergrowth until we had reached Plymouth Drive again. Descended to the first bend in the road.

  We could see Tyburn off in the distance from this section of the hill. And it had been turned into a pretty alarming spectacle.

  It’s normally the dimmest suburb in the Landing, come nightfall. There is less illumination at the windows of its houses than in any other part of town, and a lot of its streetlamps stopped working long ago. But by this hour, there was total darkness over the whole place. A scattering of faint yellow light was still visible on its outer edges, sure. But as we watched, even that started going out.

  We couldn’t see the flickering of the angels down there. So this had to be the things that they’d created, scurrying along from house to house, extinguishing what light remained.

  I wondered if the witches of Tyburn were accepting this readily, or if any of them were trying to fight back. But it seemed academic by this stage. The entire neighborhood was gone.

  The air seemed far colder around us than it should have done. And we were all silent. That is, until Gaspar Vernon finally managed to find a voice.

  “I compared this to a plague,” he said unsteadily. “And that’s exactly what it is. What do you say we contain it?”

  He stared around at his hushed comrades.

  “I think the time’s come for another Spell of Sealing.”

  Levin’s mouth dropped open.

  “What?”

  “The largest one this town has ever seen. Which will require the powers of all of us. Even you, sir.”

  And he reached out toward an astonished looking Willets.

  They were going to include him. I was rather pleased to see that. It was high time that the doctor put aside his past and started to rejoin the human race … or what passed for it around these parts.

  The stunned look left him and he nodded carefully. The adepts formed a circle and began to chant. This was no longer a plac
e for normal people. There was nothing more that Vallencourt and I could do here.

  We watched them for a few more seconds. Then we headed back on down the hill, to where our cars were parked.

  * * *

  The spell was fully in place by the time we’d headed down through Clayton to the Tyburn borderline. As before, the barrier they’d thrown up had the same shifting quality as the surface of a bubble. The difference was that this one stretched off as far as the eye could see in both directions. It magnified the rows of houses we were looking at, giving them an even more unreal quality than was usual.

  You see disrepair of that kind almost nowhere else in town. Mortar had dropped out of walls. Dandelions sprang up through the stonework of porches. And there was not a plant growing anywhere that looked like it had been introduced to a pair of clippers its whole natural life.

  It wasn’t a wreck, don’t get me wrong. But it was just plain scruffy. This was a community that focused on one aspect of its life to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

  They mostly had jobs, and I understood that. Local ones, of course. They raised families, did many of the regular things that people do. But it was like they did them at a slight remove, their hold on reality a tenuous thing. I’d noticed the same quality about the adepts sometimes. And it’s another reason that I never use witchcraft. It pulls you steadily further from the real world, until you’re only holding on by the ragged edges of your fingernails.

  Before he was promoted to sergeant, this had been Ritchie Vallencourt’s beat. God knew how a cop managed to function in a place like this. But this guy had. And he was staring at it now as if he barely recognized it.

  “It’s so damned empty,” he breathed.

  I looked where he was looking, knew exactly what he meant. Tyburn people were night folk. Their adherence to magic made them shun bright light, preferring the darkened hours. The sidewalks would have usually been bustling, people on their way to ceremonies mostly. We were staring down a main street. And it was completely quiet, with nothing moving.