I was still a bit dizzy from the blow to the head—bitch gave me a concussion, no doubt—so rather than getting up I just stayed where I was for the next part of the plan.
All of us were present save one. It was my job to get him here.
I grabbed my harmonica and brought it to my lips to play a summoning of my own.
The music was sharp, discordant, full of strange key changes and unusual riffs, but it was perfect for what it was designed to do.
The music from my harmonica warred with the chant coming from Fuentes’s mouth. He cast a withering glance in Rivera’s direction that didn’t need much translating; “Get rid of him,” it said.
Rivera smiled.
He brought his hands up in front of him and began a series of complicated gestures. Still playing, I watched as a ball of green fire began to form between his palms, growing with each sequence of his hands. It started about the size of a golf ball and then began to grow, hissing and spitting sparks and magick in every direction, until it was about the size of a basketball.
He paused, as if savoring the moment, and then flung the ball of fire directly at me!
I didn’t move.
Didn’t flinch.
Didn’t stop playing.
Fuck you, Rivera, I thought.
The fireball sailed through the air, perfectly on target, and I had to force myself to remain stock still and not move, no matter how much my instincts were screaming at me to get the hell out of the way.
My playing got a little louder, but that was the only external sign that I was at all concerned about the crackling ball of energy that appeared about to incinerate me.
I hit the last, strident note of my summoning call and held it, letting the sound blare in defiance as the fireball came thundering in with point-blank precision … only to splash harmlessly about a foot away from me on the dome of blue gray energy hanging there in the air and surrounding me in a dome of protective magick.
“Gaia bless you, Denise,” I muttered as I climbed to my feet and faced Rivera.
He was not a happy camper. He glared across the space separating us, his fury readily apparent, and I couldn’t resist giving him the finger.
Childish, I know, but ultimately very satisfying.
Rivera’s response was to fling four more fireballs in my direction.
Simultaneously.
I had a few seconds to wonder if Denise’s shielding was going to hold as they came sailing toward me, and then the flames were crashing against the barrier, hitting it and splashing outward like some kind of arcane napalm, trying to overwhelm the magick that held the shielding in place.
After a few seconds, when I realized I hadn’t been burned to a crisp, I opened one eye and looked about. I was still whole, still protected behind a shimmering blue gray dome of mystical energy, and still in this fight.
Rivera, however, was no longer paying attention to me, but was staring out across the Plain of Bones with a queer expression on his face. Fuentes, too, had seen something out there, and as a result his chant stuttered and then fell silent. I strained to see what it was they were starting at.
At first I saw nothing, just that flat, seemingly endless expanse of dusty plain, but then a figure gradually emerged from against the background, coming toward us.
As the figure drew closer two details became readily apparently.
The figure was human.
And, above his hand-sewn white shirt, dark trousers, and black frock coat, he wore an old-fashioned wide-brimmed hat.
A preacher’s hat.
41
The Preacher walked up until he stood just a few feet away from the gate and casually examined those of us on the other side. He let his gaze pass over Fuentes and Rivera rather quickly, let it linger a bit longer on Ilyana, and then turned to face me directly.
“Where’s the Key you promised me, Hunt?”
Even though those were the very words I’d been hoping to hear from him, I was kind of surprised that he even bothered to ask. Couldn’t he see the Key was right there in front of him, in the center of the gate?
I pointed to the spot where the Key now hung in its strange, home-grown lattice setting.
“It’s right there in front of you, Preacher. All you need to do is take it.”
Fuentes was standing there, staring at the Preacher with his mouth wide open, trying to process this new chain of events. I think it was solely the fact that something that just walked out of the Plain of Bones, seemingly out of hell itself, not only knew my name but was talking with me as if we were old friends, that kept Fuentes from trying to blast the Preacher where he stood.
His hesitation didn’t last for long, though. Fuentes controlled the gate by virtue of controlling the Key, and he wasn’t about to let either one go easily. He gestured with one hand and the gate swung inward, allowing him to see the Preacher more clearly. He stepped in the other man’s path.
“I don’t know who you are or where you came from, but the Key is mine. It is not Hunt’s to give.”
The Preacher fixed those eyeless sockets directly on Fuentes and slowly looked him up and down. The dismissive expression that crossed his face clearly showed what he thought of Fuentes’s opposition.
“Then I suppose I will have to take the Key from you, instead,” the Preacher informed him.
Fuentes grinned. “You can try.”
The two stepped forward, like Old West gunfighters about to have a showdown in the middle of the street.
Until that moment Rivera had been standing as idly by as the rest of us, watching, waiting to see what Fuentes would do. The minute Fuentes went on the offensive, Rivera did too.
He waved his hands again, just as he’d done earlier, and another ball of mystical plasma began to form between his palms.
The man sure does like his fireballs, I thought, and was opening my mouth to call for help from my two hidden companions when a couple of things happened simultaneously.
Ilyana rolled over, snatched the dagger from the table where it had been discarded by Rivera earlier, and plunged it directly into the latter’s leg about midthigh.
Rivera screamed in surprised pain and the fireball he’d been working with shot free of his hands, narrowly missing me by scant inches. I ducked as it shot overhead and smashed into the wall behind me. When I looked up, Ilyana had managed to pull the blade free of Rivera’s leg, but he had hold of her now and flung her across the room to slam into a pile of packing crates even as I looked on.
So much for that diversion.
He snarled something at me in Spanish, then paused to pass a hand over the wound in his leg. It stopped bleeding and sealed itself in a matter of seconds.
With abilities like that he was going to be damned hard to take down. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do it on my own.
A roar filled the confines of the warehouse and I knew Dmitri had entered the fray. Dmitri was a berserker, one of the few who could take on the form of their totem spirits and reap all the benefits of being in that form while still retaining their ability to think clearly. Dmitri’s totem spirit was a polar bear; I don’t care who you are or what powers are at your disposal, when a polar bear roars at you in rage it puts a bit of a quiver in your boots.
Rivera wasn’t any different than the next guy down the line. He quaked at the sight of Dmitri charging toward him and quickly whipped up some magick to try to deal with the annoyed beast now bearing down on him, but what he hadn’t counted on was the short, red-haired woman who rode astride Dmitri’s back, her legs clamped tightly around his sides.
Stealing a page out of Rivera’s own playbook, Denise began to fling bolts of power in his direction, brilliant red flashes that slammed into the floor and walls around him, but never seemed to touch his body directly.
Normally I’m pretty useless in a fight; it’s hard to take action when you can’t see much of anything, but as long as Durante was inside my head I should have been able to contribute something valuable.
Except when I tried to go to Denise’s position and offer some aid, my body moved in exactly the opposite direction.
Not now, Durante. Not now.
But he wasn’t listening, not anymore. He would be denied his vengeance no longer.
He headed straight for Fuentes, who was still involved in an arcane battle with the Preacher. Mystical energies were flashing about with no thought at all as to what they might hit if they missed their target, and I knew that if I got into the middle of that I was going to be in serious trouble.
I thrashed about inside my head, metaphorically throwing myself around in an effort to break free of Durante’s control. I planted my feet against his efforts to move me forward. I pushed when he pulled, pulled when he pushed, and let my general stubbornness out to play in his sandbox. I had almost reached the gate itself when he must have decided the fight to stay inside my body wasn’t worth it anymore.
He abandoned it, bursting free without warning, leaving me to stumble and crash to the floor as he released control of my limbs. He took his sight with him as he left, so as I picked myself up off the floor I realized that all I could see around me was an endless sea of white.
With no other choice available to me, I activated my ghostsight.
I was just in time to see Durante’s spectral form plunge inside Fuentes’s human one.
There was a moment when everyone around me seemed to freeze, when the world went past my eyes in ultraslow motion, and then in the next instant Fuentes literally exploded right before my eyes. Flesh, blood, and brains were flung outward in a hundred different directions, leaving me staring through the space where Fuentes had been into the surprised face of the Preacher.
Remembering what had happened the last time I’d viewed him with my ghostsight, I quickly turned away.
Across the room, Ilyana had hauled herself to her feet and she, Dmitri, and Denise were fighting it out with Rivera. The trio seemed to be gaining the upper hand; all of them had injuries of one kind of another but Rivera seemed to be slowing down, his energy fading. It didn’t look like it would last much longer …
“Hunt!” Denise cried. “Behind you, on the plain!”
I turned to look, expecting to see the Preacher, but found he too was staring off into the distance.
One look was all I needed and even that was too much, for there was now no way of wiping what I saw out of my memory, and memories live a long time in our hearts and souls.
Far across the plain, out on the edge of that horizon, what looked like an army was moving in our direction. I couldn’t see them clearly yet, they were too far away, but what I could see was that there were literally hundreds, if not thousands of them, and that they all carried the taint of the dead and the damned about them. If they got loose on this side of the gate, the world as we knew it would come to an end, I was certain of it.
I had to shut that gate.
Not only shut it, but send it back to wherever the hell it came from too, before those things got here.
The Preacher apparently put two and two together as quickly as I did. He looked at the gate, then at me.
“Don’t you dare…” he said, fury building on his face.
I dared.
I ran across the cement floor of the warehouse as quickly as my legs could carry me, skidding to a halt in front of the gate while the Preacher still had at least half the distance to go. He tried to intimidate me one final time …
“Hunt! I’m warning you!”
I didn’t care what he would do to me when this was over. Right now the literal fate of the world hung in the balance and I wasn’t going to be found wanting. Not this time.
My ghostsight lets me see things as they really are and so it was a rather simple matter for me to see that if I were to turn the Key like so and then again like so …
The massive gate began sliding slowly, ponderously shut.
I watched the Preacher begin to close the distance.
Twenty-five feet.
Twenty.
Ten.
He was going to reach me before the gate was shut; even someone as math challenged as I was could see that. He was going to reach me and take control of the Key and then those things out there were going to wreak havoc …
Five.
I stepped up, ready to do what I could to try to stop him …
With less than a foot to go before the gate closed, locking the Preacher on the other side, he reached the entrance’s edge and started through it.
A roar sounded in my ear, horrifyingly close, and then a massive white paw slipped past my shoulder and slammed into the Preacher with stunning force. He was flung backward a good ten feet, landing on his butt in the dust and bone fragments of the plain.
Our gazes locked as the gate swung ponderously shut.
“Hunt!” he screamed.
I grabbed the Key and pulled it free of its mooring.
A great whooshing sound filled the structure, and reality did that shifting thing again. The world blinked …
When it was over, Denise, Dmitri, and I stood in an empty warehouse. The gate was gone and with it the Preacher as well as that army of creatures that had been headed in our direction.
I didn’t see Rivera anywhere and asked Dmitri what had happened.
“He hit me with a fireball,” he said, turning to show a spot on his shoulder where his shirt had been partially burned to his skin. “Bastard got away while I was trying to keep my fur from going up in flames.”
“And Ilyana?”
She too was gone, though neither Denise nor Dmitri had actually seen her go. She must have slipped out during the final few minutes of the battle with Fuentes, though whether she had done it on her own or had left with Rivera’s help, we didn’t know. I suspected we hadn’t seen the last of her.
Fuentes was dead; that much, at least, we’d achieved without too much difficulty.
Perhaps most importantly, I was free of the spectre of Michael Durante and could get back to normal. Or what passed for normal in the lives of three interstate fugitives, anyway.
“What are we going to do about this?” I asked, holding up the Key.
Denise smiled. “I know just the person to guard it for us,” she said.
42
The sun was still below the horizon by the time we reached our destination in the desert outside of Palm Springs. We’d left the L.A. area immediately following the confrontation with Fuentes and the Preacher in Long Beach and, aside from a short stop in a rest area for Denise to make a call, had driven straight through.
I wasn’t sure what the hurry was; no one had been living here for years. This place had clearly been deserted for a long time; the few buildings that were still standing were all in various states of disrepair, everything from broken windows and doors to sagging roofs. A chain-link fence surrounded the property, and there appeared to be a padlocked chain holding the gate closed, but when Dmitri pulled on it, the chain was revealed to be nothing more than window dressing, draped there to chase away unwanted visitors but not actually locked.
I drove the car forward and waited for Dmitri to close the gate again behind us. Denise was lying down in the backseat, asleep for these last four hours while the desert highway had rolled beneath our wheels, and I almost felt sorry for having to wake her up at this point.
Almost.
“Hey, wake up,” I told her, leaning over the back of the front seat and gently shaking her shoulder.
She came awake with a start, her hands out in a defensive posture, and it took a few seconds of soothing talk for her to calm down enough to recognize me. I wondered what she’d been dreaming about.
“We’re here,” I told her, when she was coherent enough to follow what I was saying.
While I’d been concentrating on getting Denise up, Dmitri had driven through the maze of half-ruined buildings and come out at the edge of a short runway. He parked in the shade of a nearby hangar and turned off the ignition.
“What is this place?” I a
sked, looking around into the darkness as the three of us got out of the car.
Dmitri sounded amused as he said, “Old smugglers’ strip. Used to provide a quick, easy way to take product across the border into Mexico.”
“What kind of product?”
He shrugged. “You name it. Drugs. Money. Talking Elmos. Whatever was in demand.”
Talking Elmos? I let that one go without asking any further. Something told me I really didn’t want to know.
“What happened to it?”
“DEA sold half a dozen armed surveillance drones to the Mexican government. Two of the Cessnas the smugglers used were shot down, all hands lost, and that pretty much took the heart out of the entire group.”
“And you know this how?”
Dmitri smiled. “Oh, you know, word gets around. A person hears things, if they know how to listen.”
Right.
Dmitri’s past was still a big mystery to me, at least the part before I’d met him as the owner-bartender of my favorite drinking hole in Boston, Murphy’s, and local fixer. If you needed something and couldn’t get it through normal channels, Dmitri could often get it for you, for the right price.
I was just about to deliver a scathing reply when Denise said, “Shhh,” and cocked her head as if she was listening to something.
It took me a minute, but eventually I heard it too: a faint sound breaking the stillness of the early morning. Gradually it grew louder as it grew closer, until the sound resolved itself into the whomp-whomp-whomp of a helicopter’s rotors.
The sun was just peeking over the horizon and soon I wouldn’t be able to see anything again, lost once more to the ocean of white that was my everyday existence; I just hoped we’d be able to conclude our business and be on our way before that happened. I slipped my shades on my face, hoping to buy a few extra minutes when the time came.
As the sound grew louder, we stepped out into the open and started looking around. It was Denise who saw it first, a dark splotch against an even darker near-morning sky, angling in our direction. Eventually we could see the shape of the helicopter, and I was surprised to see that it was a military, rather than civilian, model. A Blackhawk or Apache, one of those kinds of birds. The cargo bay door was open and even from where I stood I could see the soldier manning the mini-gun, keeping it trained off to one side of our little party but ready at a moment’s notice.
Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) Page 22
