Then the ghosts swept in, wispy as the fog itself, but tangible enough to grab him and hold him. There were too many of them, and they dragged him down into the misty depths of limbo.
Oz choked on the thick spirit mist that surrounded him and managed one word before his voice was taken from him. He said, “Willow.”
Buffy saw Oz just as the ghosts dragged him down. Though the air, or what passed for air here, was thick and filmy, and distance could not be judged accurately, Oz seemed to be only a short way off the path.
Next to her, Angel asked, “Did you see?” The tension in his voice was almost too much for her. Angel was overwhelmed, Buffy knew, by the ghost roads and what they represented. Here were the spirits of the dead—some on their way to their final rest, some so restless that they would walk these roads forever. Buffy knew that he had to have wondered— just as she had wondered—how many of his victims walked here, so abruptly torn from their lives that they might never be able to move on.
Buffy turned and gazed into his eyes. She reached out and grabbed his hands with both of hers. “We’re going to be all right,” she promised. “Watch my back. I’m going after him.”
“No!” Angel snapped.
Buffy stared at him. “We don’t have any choice. If we lose Oz now, we might never get him back.”
And Willow would never forgive me, she thought, without a trace of humor. She didn’t give voice to that fear, however.
Angel cursed aloud, his vampiric features contorting even further into a snarl of frustration and fear. His eyes seemed to glow, even in the colorless world of the ghost roads. With a grunt, he shrugged out of his heavy duster and grabbed Buffy’s wrist.
“Don’t untie this,” he said, as he knotted one sleeve around her wrist. “And don’t let it get untied.”
With spirits whipping around, lunging in for an attack, only to be rebuffed, Angel wrapped the bottom edge of his coat around his own wrist and held on to it with both hands. He sat on the path and gazed up at Buffy.
She shivered as he looked at her, for he looked like little more than a wraith himself. When he’d sat down on the path, the limbo mists had moved in, and now they wreathed Angel’s head as though he himself were a ghost. Only those blazing yellow eyes gave him away.
“If you have to go any farther than the length of this coat,” Angel said, staring into her eyes, “then we leave. The world is hanging in the balance, Buffy. I don’t want to leave Oz behind either, but if we don’t find the heir, it’ll just mean he was the first one to go, and the rest of us won’t last much longer.”
Buffy looked at Angel, turning away only to crush the spiderweb skull of another ghost. When she glanced back at him again, his eyes were narrowed and he was urging her on.
“Hurry,” he said, and then he grunted as a dark, hulking ghost swung something that struck Angel in the head.
His gaze never wavered.
Stop! the multitude whispered. He is ours, now. We will give him back to you once you have aided in our release. Stop now, or we will kill him. The boy is ours by right. We only want to be free!
Oz felt as though he were falling. The spirits held him aloft, but how high he truly could not have guessed. Altitude might not even be a concept this place was ready for, he considered. His coat now hung loosely in his right hand. Since he had no leverage, no purchase beneath his feet, Oz could barely swing a punch. Still, he tried. He flailed one way and then the other, trying to keep the angry spirits of the lost and lonely dead away from him.
Enough! screamed the multitude. If the Slayer will not aid us . . .
Even as the chorus of voices boomed in Oz’s head, a ghostly man who looked enormous, as though he might once have been a circus strongman, wrapped frozen fingers of icy mist around his throat—wisps, but wisps of steel. Oz could not breathe. The gray light of limbo began to dim even further as his eyes went wide. He struggled, striking out once more but now losing focus so that the ghosts became immaterial to him again. Nothing but shadows.
Something gripped his wrist. It took him a moment to realize that these fingers were not ice, but warm, human flesh. Then he was yanked roughly away from the ghost who had been choking off his air. Oz gasped, wheezing in whatever was passing for oxygen on the way to the Otherworld.
“Trust me, you wouldn’t have wanted him anyway,” Buffy said, her voice coming to Oz from out of the gray nothing. “He isn’t housebroken.”
Then his butt slammed down onto a hard surface and he sprawled sideways. He glanced up and saw Angel sitting next to him, his face bleeding, his hair nearly standing on end. Ghosts swirled around him in the gray mist. The vampire held onto the end of his duster, and the other end was in Buffy’s hand—the one that wasn’t wrapped around Oz’s wrist.
“Thanks.” Oz nodded, eyes still wide with amazement. “Part of me would like to respond to that housebroken crack, but do you think maybe we should go now?”
Buffy hauled Oz to his feet. Angel jumped up next to them. All of them were badly scratched and bruised. Angel pointed and shouted something Oz could not hear over the moaning of the angry ghosts, and Oz looked up to see the breach not far away. Through it, they could see a small British village across a green hill. He thought he could hear a train whistle, but then thought it might just be the despair of the wandering ghosts.
“Back off!” Buffy barked at the ghosts. She turned to Angel and Oz and snapped, “What I wouldn’t give for a cattle prod right now!”
Without a word, she got them both moving toward the breach. Granted, it didn’t take much. The ghosts began to gather at the breach to block their path. There were so many of them, Oz didn’t think they would have any chance at all of breaking free. Even through the spectral forms, he could see the world through that breach, the darkened hillside out there, and he wanted so badly to smell the night breeze that blew the scents of earth across the land.
You’ll go no farther unless you agree to hold the breach open for the rest of us, cried the multitude.
“Look,” Buffy snapped, angrily, “maybe you’ve got a raw deal. I don’t know. But if you’re trapped here, the way to get out is to move on to where you’re supposed to be. Out there? That’s not it. Now back off, or you may never rest in peace!”
Angel snarled, fangs bared, eyes blazing color in the land of limbo and nothing.
A ripple seemed to pass through the cloud of lost souls, and the wispy shades of the dead seemed to become even less substantial. They began to fade, like shadows as the sun emerges from the clouds. Oz thought he saw a look of shame on some of their faces, but most of them only seemed very, very sad.
In seconds, all that remained was the enormous spirit he’d thought was a circus strongman, a ghost who was angry enough to dare anything to escape the sameness of the ghost roads. The thing opened its mouth and tried to scream, but without the support of the multitude, it had no voice. In silent fury, it lunged toward them.
“Go!” Buffy snapped.
Oz and Angel, spurred on by the Slayer, ran directly at the specter. The three of them passed through the ghost as though it were nothing but a shadow. There wasn’t even the slightest bit of resistance. But the freezing cold was there, and Oz felt numb and slow as he stumbled the final distance to the breach, practically fell through it, and then dropped nearly ten feet from the split in the night sky to land none too gently on a hill in the English countryside.
A moment later, Angel slammed down next to him. Buffy landed hard on top of both of them, and Oz got a boot in the back of the head.
“Ow!” he grunted, then just lay there shivering as the cold finally began to pass from his body.
“Well,” Buffy said with a sigh. “That completely sucked.”
Oz was about to respond when Angel stood and started to put his duster back on. As he did so, Angel looked at his hands, reached up to touch his face, and quite obviously realized what Oz had just noticed. Angel looked at him, and Oz shrugged.
“What happened to all the blood
?” Angel asked.
For it was gone. All the wounds. The blood and bruises.
“Ghost blood?” Oz suggested.
“They didn’t feel like ghost wounds,” Buffy said. “But I suppose we should be grateful. What ever happened to Casper? That’s the kind of ghost I want in my life.”
Oz stood and brushed dirt from his jeans. “I don’t know,” he said offhandedly, “I always thought Casper was a little too goody-two-shoes. I’d prefer a ghost who could tell the difference between a Gibson and a Stratocaster.”
That earned him a baffled look and raised eyebrow from Buffy. Angel didn’t even respond. He was staring at the sky and sniffing the air.
“Angel?” Buffy asked. Her concern was obvious.
When he turned to face them, his face was smooth and human. Oz was glad. When Angel got all vampy, it freaked him something fierce. But he wasn’t entirely comforted. Not with the grave, brooding look on Angel’s face now.
“Sunrise is maybe two hours away. We have no shelter at the moment, and no idea where we are, as of yet,” Angel said, and slipped into his duster, almost as though it could protect him from the coming dawn.
“Then we’d better go,” Buffy said.
But Oz wasn’t listening. He was staring up at the space, ten feet above, where they had appeared out of mid-air.
“Oz?” Buffy prodded.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking that there are so many ghost stories around, it must be pretty common for them to escape. They probably wander around the earth looking for something to hold on to, someone to talk to. It can’t be easy to pass over. The ones who do must work really hard at it.”
He turned to regard Buffy. “Kind of sad, actually.”
When the three of them moved off across the hillside toward the town in the distance, and the train tracks that ran toward it, they walked in silence, broken only by the whistling of a cold, disdainful wind.
Boston, January 27, 1882
The city of Boston was covered with snow. It had been falling for nearly two days and showed no sign of lessening in intensity. Jean-Marc Regnier trudged through the cold, wet whiteness that came nearly to his knees. He squinted into the storm, but the fat, heavy flakes fell in a curtain all around him. He could barely see the house he now passed on his left, never mind the manse his grandfather had built atop Beacon Hill those many years ago.
But he was determined.
With an anger that had not subsided throughout this long trek across the city, Jean-Marc forged on, sweating a bit now beneath the wool. Snowflakes struck his face and melted there, and he wiped them away from his skin and hair.
At long last, he saw the turrets of the Gatehouse looming ahead, crested with white, like some kind of mad confection. The thought prompted a bitter smile from Jean-Marc. There would be nothing sweet about this visit. Not in the least.
With legs as cold and unfeeling as iron, Jean-Marc dragged himself the last few yards to the doorstep of the home in which he had been raised. The madhouse where he had lived his entire life until only a few months earlier. He’d spent his years as apprentice to his father, learning the ways of magick and the paths of shadows. His mother had stood quietly by, tacitly agreeing with her husband’s effort to train his son as a sorcerer. She believed that he was meant for great things. Now a man of twenty-one, Jean-Marc realized that this was a belief held by nearly all mothers about their offspring.
The day he’d left them both standing just inside the doorway of the massive house, Jean-Marc had felt the fetters of what he now perceived almost as indentured servitude fall away.
The role of apprentice magician had not been enough for him. Jean-Marc Regnier wanted to live a life that was all his own. He was a learned man, of course. His father had seen to that. In the months since his departure from the Gatehouse, he had found meager living quarters far from the spying eye of his father’s home, met several young ladies, each of whom had instantly stolen his heart, and had obtained a position as an instructor at a prominent boys’ school.
He’d been happy.
Until scant hours ago, when he had received a missive carried to him from his father by messenger. Heaven forbid that the old man might actually step down from his perch above the city and sully himself among the people he had sworn to protect from the unseen horrors of another age.
My son, the note had read, the time has come for you to accept the responsibility that falls to you as scion of him who guards the gate. The years gather about me like shadows now, and the duty falls to you. Return to the house by this evening. If you stay away, the world will suffer for your selfishness.
Jean-Marc mounted the steps. At the door, he did not bother to reach for the knocker. Instead, he merely lifted his hands, palms together, and then moved them swiftly apart. As a burst of rosy light emanated from his hands, the locks shattered and the doors slammed open with such force that the hinges screamed and the wood slammed against the walls inside with a bang that shook the foyer.
Trailing tumbled piles of snow behind him, Jean-Marc stomped into the foyer of his father’s home. The wind whipped snowflakes in behind him, and blew the already substantial drifts over the threshold. Jean-Marc didn’t bother to close the door. With melting snow dripping from his already sodden clothes, he tromped up the wide stairwell at the front of the house, calling for his parents to show themselves. Removing his woolen jacket and scarf, he left them on the steps and continued on.
He found his father in a study on the second floor, among arcane volumes and an eclectic collection of talismans and wards. Though Henri Regnier was more than two hundred years old, he looked no more than sixty. When Jean-Marc stepped into the study, his father smiled softly, painfully, and nodded.
“Thank you for coming,” Henri Regnier said, in French.
When Jean-Marc spoke to him, it was in English. “How dare you?” he snapped, sensing the presence of his mother, Antoinette, as she came into the room behind him. She remained silent, however. It only infuriated Jean-Marc further.
“I have a life now!” he shouted at his father. “Whatever mantle you want to pass on to your progeny, you’ll have to find someone else to give it to. I don’t want it. I don’t want to live forever. I’m a teacher, Father. It’s a glorious profession. Protecting the world from the horrors of another age is the job for someone who is from another age. Chaos will not shatter the world around us if I do not follow in your role as Gatekeeper.”
Henri chuckled sadly, but even that was enough to start him coughing harshly into a closed fist. When he looked back up at Jean-Marc, the young man winced and stared closer at his father. A trick of the light, perhaps, but he looked older than he had only moments ago.
“I’m afraid you’re wrong about chaos,” Henri said, capitulating and speaking English. “If you do not do your duty, it will reign supreme indeed. Sadly for you, Jean-Marc, but fortunately for the world, you have no real choice.”
Jean-Marc groaned in frustration, threw up his hands, and turned to leave the room. The only reason he stayed was that his mother blocked his way, and no matter how aggravated he might become, he would raise neither voice nor hand to his mother. Not ever.
“Of course I have a choice,” he said through gritted teeth, still looking at his mother, who would not meet his gaze. “I can walk away, Father. In fact, in case it has escaped your notice, I have already walked away.”
He turned on his father, anger seething within him, but what Jean-Marc saw made him stop short, his mouth open in astonishment. In what seemed to be the span of only seconds, his father had aged perhaps twenty years. He looked ninety years old, at the least.
Blood dripped from his nose down onto his lips. His eyes were yellow and filmy, and his hands were crooked and arthritic. What was worst, however, were the tears that rolled down his cheeks. In his twenty-one years—a trifle compared to his father’s magickally sustained life—Jean-Marc had seen many horrors. But he had never seen his father cry.
It gave h
im pause.
“Jean-Marc,” his mother whispered behind him. “I’ll be with you. I can help you, just as I have your father.”
For a moment, he considered it. Then he shook his head vehemently. “I will not!” he shouted. “I won’t give up my life for this. I can’t.”
The tears flowed more freely now, and the Gatekeeper had grown much, much older.
“I’m sorry, Jean-Marc. When it was my turn, I had no choice, either. My father told me that when I was just a boy, so perhaps it was easier for me. With you, there were so many dreams I had for you. I suppose I simply didn’t expect it to come around so soon.
“It’s part of the house. Part of being the Gatekeeper,” Henri explained. “It was a spell my father, Richard, placed on the house not long after he built it.”
Jean-Marc stared at his father. “What are you saying?” he demanded.
But Henri could no longer speak. His eyes had sunken in his head, and his face drooped as he stared at his son through eyes quickly losing the last of their light. He could not even respond.
“Your grandfather knew how vital this house was,” his mother explained. “Essential to the survival of everything you value in the world. Upon his death, his knowledge and vast power passed to Henri, your father. And when your father dies, as long as you are within these walls, those things will be transferred to you. No one else will have the power or the knowledge to be the Gatekeeper. Don’t you see? You must do it.”
Jean-Marc stared at his mother in horror. He looked at his father, or what was once his father. Only the gleam in his dark eyes and the rattle of his breathing indicated that he still lived.
“No,” Jean-Marc said, horrified. “No!” he screamed. “Give it to someone else.”
Then he bolted for the door. Down the hall he ran, then to the landing above the vast stairwell leading down to the foyer. Halfway down the steps, he felt as though he had heard his father’s last gasp, and he cried out to heaven for deliverance. Like a shaft of lightning, the magick struck him, worked through him, stood him up rigid and infiltrated his entire body. The knowledge. The power.
The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Two - GHOST ROADS Page 3
