Chapter Thirty-Four
The Deacon was aware that something had changed behind him, but he ignored it. He sensed Colleen and the child at his side. They’d entered from the rear earlier. He closed his eyes, breathing in the heady rush of sound and scent permeating the tent. He opened his eyes, turned, and smiled at Colleen. The serpents twined in and around her legs and slithered off into the crowd. They’d been released in the tent some time earlier by Longman, but had remained dormant. All of this fit the pattern nicely. Then something changed. It was as simple and absolute as that. Something rippled through the steady rhythms and sent rings of energy running against the grain of his will.
It wasn’t enough to stop what he’d set in motion – he was sure of that. The ritual was too far along. The disturbance, though, was sufficient for him to be aware of, and enough to change the way things felt. After the initial surprise, he welcomed it. He felt the inevitability of the power he controlled. It flowed through his veins. He was connected to it in ways that went beyond flesh, blood and bone. He was part of something bigger, something ancient. Whatever else happened in the tent, or in the world surrounding it – didn’t matter at all.
In fact, it made him smile.
‡‡‡
Behind the Deacon, Creed danced to the side, barely avoiding the first striking serpent. He looked down at his feet. The floor was alive with diamondbacks. Not one or two or even a dozen. The floor was a writhing mass of them. Most slithered away from him toward the pews at the far side of the tent, but a couple, as though aware of his presence among them came together determined to prevent his advance.
Creed didn’t hesitate. . The head of the first viper disappeared in a spray of blood and scales, and a second later the other joined it, bone splattering across the ground. Creed's six-guns spit fire. He saw the snakes blown to bits, but impossibly, he heard nothing. There was no sound. The bullets took chips out of the wooden floor, but the impact was silent. The only sound in the entire place was the swell of the Deacon’s voice. It soaked into Creed’s thoughts and confused him.
He stood there for a long moment, the snakes coiling around his feet then found himself taking a step backward.
The locket at his chest flashed hot tearing a cry from him.
The pain cleared his mind for a moment, and in that heartbeat of clarity he did the only thing he could think of. He holstered his guns with quick flips of his wrists, drew two bullets from the loops on his belt, and jammed them into his ears. It didn’t silence the chanting, but it muffled it. He glanced down at the floor. The serpents seemed to have lost interest in him.
Colleen stood behind and to one side of the Deacon, and Creed saw she held something in her arms. She swayed from side to side, and despite the rapt stares of everyone in the tent, she wasn’t watching the Deacon. She was intent on the bundle clutched tightly to her chest, and in a moment of ghastly realization, Creed knew it had to be the child he’d seen ripped from its mother the last time he’d been in this accursed camp.
He drew his guns again and moved slowly up behind the Deacon. He thumbed back the hammer, knowing it would be a second’s work to silence the preacher but he wasn’t quite ready to shoot a holy man in the midst of a sermon. It wasn’t that he was afraid of going to hell. Far from it. Come the time, he’d happily put a slug between the Deacon’s eyes. No, it was all about the numbers. He needed to know the stakes. He needed to know what was going on with Brady and the others. They appeared to have slipped into some sort of trance, lulled by the Deacon’s weird chant. That was enough for the preacher to earn a bullet as far as Creed was concerned, but not until he was certain the shot would set the others free.
He was only a few paces away from Colleen, so Creed targeted her and started forward. The closer he came to the ex-whore – to the child – and to the Deacon, the more difficult it became to take that next step forward. Each was harder than the last. Despite the bullets in his ears, the words of the chanted sermon were working their mind-numbing magic. He wasn’t sure how long he could hold them off. With a quick snap of his jaw, he bit his lip, drawing blood and bringing enough pain for another short moment of clarity.
Creed didn’t hesitate. He stepped up beside Colleen, brushed her shoulder with the back of his hand, and leaned in close.
"Colleen!" he rasped.
His words died soundless.
Like the gunshot, they failed to find life in air thickened by the Deacon’s voice.
He leaned closer and spoke again, louder this time.
Colleen didn’t react.
Creed saw his breath lift the hair from her neck, but she stared blissfully at the Deacon’s back as he spoke. She rocked very slowly back and forth. The child squirmed now and then; apparently oblivious to whatever held the rest of those gathered in thrall. It didn’t scream – or if it did, Creed had no way of knowing.
There was no time. Creed reached up, tucked the barrel of one gun under her chin, and pulled up and back hard. At first it seemed as though she’d resist him and let the metal tear her throat out, but after a moment she spun. Her eyes were glazed and unfocused, and he felt her pull against the tentative hold of the gun barrel on her chin.
"Colleen!" he screamed.
She blinked. She stared back at him, her features shifting from the distant, empty void to some semblance of the girl he’d known. She blinked, and then glanced stupidly down at the child in her arms. Creed followed her gaze.
The thing glared back at him through the face of an infant but it was no child. The eyes blazed with intelligence and hunger. The tiny hands groped impotently at the air, fueling the creature's rage. Colleen mouthed his name, and then she turned back toward the Deacon, and that fragment of clarity was lost.
Creed stared past her into the sea of faces, each set of eyes locked on the Deacon as his voice roared like a storm, raged like each of the named winds, tolling out the words and sounds and spells in some lost, ancient tongue. Each of them held either a tin cup or beaker in their hands. As Creed watched, they raised them. Creed saw Brady standing at the end of the aisle, swaying as though mesmerized. He raised his cup to his lips.
"That’s it," Creed said.
He stepped up behind the Deacon, just as the Holy Man dropped his arms in a motion of completion. The congregation drank their communion and the Deacon mouthed a single, final word.
"Remliel."
Creed stepped forward, drew both guns, and fired. He was so close he expected to jam the barrels of both guns into the Deacon’s back, but he met resistance. It was like walking into a wall of clear mud. It didn’t stop him, not exactly, but it slowed him. Light flashed from above, a huge burst of brilliant white light that should have blinded him – but didn’t.
The Deacon turned and smiled. Serpents struck, latching onto Creed’s ankles and calves. He fired again, and again. The Deacon glanced down and smiled. Blood oozed from the front of Creed’s shirt where the bullets had failed to penetrate their target and the agitated air had turned them back on him. Colleen stepped up beside them, and the Deacon took the child from her arms.
A second flare of light exploded from somewhere near the Deacon’s chest. It pierced the child. In that moment, whatever force protected the Deacon wavered, and Creed lunged forward, clutching the preacher tight.
A great cry rose, and the canvas roof was wrenched aside by huge talons. Dark winged shapes swooped in low, and a rain of something – dirt? Sand? Something that glittered like diamonds and seemed to adhere to the Deacon like feathers to tar. They clung to Creed as well, and the child.
Finally the light grew too bright, too intense, and the sound too loud. Creed felt his lifeblood pulsing way, staining his shirt and pooling on the floor at his feet. The snakes lapped at it.
"Damn you," he choked, spraying more blood with each syllable. "Damn you to hell."
And everything grew dark.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The angel Remliel felt a shift in the essence that bound him to the Heavens.
He reached out, as he had reached out countless times, for the silver thread that tied him to his Lord. It was the conduit of purpose, the beginning and end of thought.
He carried light to the world below. His was the task of bringing the divine to the corporeal, the essence of God to the flesh of man. He awoke the spark inside them that helped them divine their true nature…that was his purpose.
The flow of energy to the divine was a cool wash of strength, the thread that bound him to those below was tenuous, a glittering shimmer of light so weak - so frail - that it took all of his concentration and all of his will to maintain it. His was a sacred duty.
Now something had changed. He stretched out toward the shift with his will, intending to close the growing rift and set things right. The change was not subtle. It tore at the fabric separating the Heavens and the Earth - a veil protecting one from the other. The veil was so vital to the essence of creation that Remliel would gladly have divided his essence and healed the rift through eternity if his immortal flesh could protect it.
He reached back for the strength he needed, but again, something had changed. Instead of growing wider and flooding him with energy and power, the conduit to his Lord shriveled. Beneath him, a bright funnel of light descended. He clutched at its walls. He drew back and spread his spirit, blending it with his surroundings and weaving it into the fabric of heaven, but each time he made contact, that contact was ripped free, and the pressure from below - the remorseless drag where there had been no more than the most tenuous leak of light - yanked him downward into a soaring, diving spiral. Behind him, the thread that bound him to his maker thinned and stretched and thinned some more. It did not break, but it felt as though a blade of black ice had pierced his heart.
And then…it was dark.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The Deacon feared his heart would burst. The heat and the pain of the talisman seared his flesh and threatened to erase coherent thought. He dug his teeth into his lip to buy himself a different pain, a distraction to give him strength as he fought to hold on. Colleen held the child out to him, and the ridiculous cowboy, already a dead man with the poison of vipers flowing through his veins and the lead of his own bullets buried in his flesh, reached out to him as well. It was pitiful. Comical.
The intensity of the light washing over and through him felt as though it ought to have burned, but it burst through his skin and made contact with the earth beneath his feet. It bathed him, and it bathed the child, it bathed Colleen, whose face had first gone slack with surprise and now glowed with shock and wonder.
The cowboy’s head dropped, and his grip loosened. The light bathed him as well, but it would be a final experience before death. The Deacon grinned fiercely and whispered the name again - the single word of power he’d changed in a ritual so ancient and powerful it transcended the boundaries between worlds.
"Remliel."
The cowboy lifted his head, despite the blood draining from his wounds and the venom coursing through his veins. Something important shifted, and if he could have, in that instant, the Deacon would have pulled back and away. The talisman burst its bonds. A beam of light pierced the Deacon’s flesh and joined him to the child. It shot through the young flesh with the ancient eyes and found the cowboy as well.
The Deacon gasped, dragged air into tortured lungs, threw his head back…and screamed.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Creed felt the life seep out of him by slow degrees. The snake bites burned like fire, and his grip on reality slipped. He knew what it meant. He was as good as dead. He had pierced the barrier, whatever it might be, but his bullets had fallen short, and then – like traitorous partners, had rebounded on him with lethal accuracy. He thought back to the dark woman and the crow men. He felt the locket burning like a shard of ice into the flesh of his chest.
The Deacon said something - something unexpected. It shifted the ring of power and shot threads of light out into the tent, illuminating the faces of the crowd. An arrow-slim shaft of light slammed into Creed’s chest. It drove the locket back into him so hard it felt as though the circle of metal was embedded in his chest. He raised his head, saw the look of exultation and triumph on the Deacon’s face, and felt a surge of power – bright, intense power – flood his being.
Something grappled with his thoughts, fighting for control, or to break free, but Creed seized the moment. He lifted both guns with reflexes like trapped lightning, snapped both triggers at the same time, and this time he drove his hands forward, drawing on the new strength that filled him. The barrels pressed into the Deacon’s belly and when the hammers fell, there was sound.
Creed couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d last heard sound of any sort. The twin reports brought a grin to curl the corners of his mouth. The Deacon stared at him in shock. Colleen gasped and staggered back with the child. Creed felt another flash of light sear his soul. It went beyond the flesh. The locket and the bright golden light combined and in that instant Creed felt something snatched from the child -- something dark and squirming and vital. It drove into him, sucked from the tiny form and pounded through the bright silver and the graven images.
Memories he’d never lived cascaded through his mind. He saw the girl, Elizabeth. He saw a town he’d never known, and a mountainside. He saw a crossroads, and the dark woman, the woman who seemed to become an owl on a whim and whose servants were sometimes crows, sometimes men, sometimes neither. He fought to control his mind, but another voice - a third consciousness - screamed and screamed and screamed and Creed staggered back beneath the onslaught of it.
Behind him, breaking the sudden silence like the sound of a thousand shards of shattered glass striking the earth, a voice spoke into the void.
"Well, well, well, what have we here? Oh my, this is new."
Creed turned.
He saw a tall man in a dark suit. There was a watch chain dangling from his pocket, and his eyes were as dark as night. Beside him, a woman stood. She was dressed in leather, very much alive, and her eyes blazed with the manic intensity of a soul that had seen too much. Creed felt the power in that gaze, the weight of her hatred. He raised a hand to ward it off - forgetting he held the guns.
She drew and fired, and Creed closed his eyes in resignation.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Creed heard the duel roar of the woman's guns. He felt the whisper of air across his cheeks, so wrong after the thunder of the shots, but it wasn't until he heard a pair of unearthly screeching screams that he finally shook free of the moment and moved.
He whirled around. The crow men had crept up directly behind him and had been reaching out to grab him with their jet-black talons when her bullets struck – now they stood very still, stupid emotionless expressions on their predatory avian faces. As Creed watched, the two staggered back, almost as one, their balance awkward as their knees buckled beneath them.
Creed didn't trust the reprieve. He'd personally plugged at least one of the creatures full of enough lead to sink a boat, and they'd walked away – not to mention falling two stories to the street before taking wing. This was different. The girl fired again, and part of the nearest crow men's head exploded. It screeched, turned, and tried to leap into flight but only managed to rise a few yards, before it veered crazily first one way and then the other, caught on the torn fabric of the tent's roof, and swung back toward the ground. It hit with such force the ground shivered. It did not so much as twitch.
The second crow man made it into the air, but the girl was unnervingly quick. She dropped one gun into her holster with a slick spin around her palm and gripped the hilt of one of a series of wicked knives sheathed on her belt. She whipped her arm forward and released the knife in one smooth motion. The blade flashed end over end after its target. It drove through the side of the thing's head, slamming into the bone with enough force to send it veering to the side, and ended its short flight in a desperate dive into the camp.
"Christ," Creed said.
&
nbsp; He spun back. The Deacon still stood, lurching back and forth. He clutched something at his chest, but somehow Creed knew instinctively it wasn’t his heart. Without thinking Creed holstered his gun, unconsciously mirroring the girl’s motions, and lashed out. He struck the Deacon hard in the chest, and at the same time he drove his hand down, parting the man’s hands, and snatched the thing he held from his grasp. As he yanked his arm back he felt resistance, so he pulled all the harder. The thong around the Deacon's neck snapped, and the pouch tore free.
Creed's hand snapped back, moving of its own volition. His hand moved of its own volition and slammed the pouch into the spot where the icy cold locket still rested. The sudden surge of energy that came with the contact rattled his teeth and sent him staggering back.
The pouch, suddenly limp and empty, fell through his fingers and hit the ground. Out of the corner of his eye Creed saw the Deacon fall. He felt his own balance begin to slip away from him, and he tried to turn, thinking that he could roll with it and break at least part of the fall. A strong hand fastened onto the neck of his shirt and hauled him back up straight.
Creed turned to see the dark-haired woman looking back at him.
More than half the candles in the tent had gone out. The moon shone down bright and silver. Its light played along the length of her hair and glittered in her eyes. In that instant, Creed thought she might have been the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen. He didn’t think woman, he thought creature. That difference sent a shiver down the ladder of his spine.
He turned back to the tall man who'd last spoken. He knew it had been only seconds since those words had rung out, but it seemed like years. The woman, Elizabeth, spun on the darker woman and raised her gun, but the man beside her – moving with incredible speed, and yet managing to make the motion appear casual – pressed the barrel down and shook his head.
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