Divine Night

by Melanie Jackson

  He hissed through his teeth, watching his breath turn white and whirl away. Perhaps there was no direct, outside threat to her. He might be making up excuses to keep her here. Maybe he should send her away. Now. Anywhere. While he still had the strength to resist his own feelings. Before she decided that he was being timid and stupid and just seduced him.

  She could very well do it. He knew himself, knew that the reawakened yearning for companionship she had stirred would eventually overwhelm him. Dissatisfaction and loneliness had been a growing stain on his spirit these last sixty years. It had shadowed his soul as surely as the blackest of the deadly sins he had indulged in. Alex wasn’t given to envy. Sloth and gluttony were more his failings, he thought, recalling the dinner he’d just shared with Harmony. But though he did not lust after others’ possessions or talents, he did hunger with the appetite of a starving man for the companionship that others had. He thirsted for a chance to be with someone—to rest his heart in someone’s care—who truly understood who and what he was.

  In spite of what he’d said to her, he wanted to give his heart again—against the advice of his experience and every horrible tragic lesson he had learned. And she would figure this out eventually because of their mental connection. And she would try to give him what he needed.

  But could he do this to Harmony, knowing that it would likely end in disaster? And it would—it always did. He knew he could pick up the pieces of a shattered life and move on, but could she?

  From the moment of his change, he had held back from people—from his lovers especially. Always he was wary. Always he held back his heart. And the secret of his identity, and his unnaturally long life, was as safe as the day he had received it from Dippel and his dark gods. Even Thomasina had not known the truth.

  But Harmony knew. And she was here, with him, because she was psychic like he was and understood the danger Saint Germain posed, and because she was brave enough to face both impossibilities and not flinch from a truth that was wildly different from any reality she had known before.

  And she wanted him—right this moment. He could feel her desire and her fear. It lingered in the air even after she left the room. He could smell it even out here in the cold with a sea wind stirring. Fear wasn’t enough to end it, though. She might not know it, but she wouldn’t be the one to walk away from their relationship, not as long as she had any hope that he would relent.

  Alex! It was the voice again, more urgent this time.

  He gasped as his eyes finally managed to flash the visual distress call to his brain. Something moved in the water below—something white and shaped like an arm. Alex leaned over for a closer look.

  It was an arm—a woman’s. And was that a boat? If so, it was little more than a floating corpse, a ghost ship whose sail had become a shroud.

  So this was the danger he sensed—someone was drowning! It was almost a relief that this was so. This was something he could fix. Anyone caught in the currents this rough night was going to need superhuman help. Fortunately, he was here to save her. No one need die tonight after all.

  Without thinking, Alex rolled from the balcony and dove ninety feet straight down into the boiling sea.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.

  —Alexandre Dumas

  True love always makes a man better, no matter what woman inspires it.

  —Alexandre Dumas

  The Spider

  Chapter Three

  Morning dawned bright and cheerful with the smell of fall fires sailing on the breeze that slid through the inch-wide opening at the base of the casement window she’d left ajar while bathing. Gillian shivered as she pulled open the doors of her armoire and hunted for something warm to wear. After a quick review of her wardrobe of mostly lightweight clothing, she decided that a trip to London was in order.

  As added incentive to head to the capital rather than to nearby York, Ned had given a standing invitation to take her to some environmental fundraiser on a private yacht that would sail up and down the Thames while the privileged class went about enjoying its privilege to eat, drink, and show off its designer clothes to others of its kind.

  Suddenly the idea of socializing was overwhelmingly attractive. She hadn’t slept particularly well the night before, which suggested that she wasn’t entirely prepared to be alone in Dunnstone with only her thoughts and a portable PC for company. It wouldn’t hurt to sow an oat or two before the weather got bad and she gave herself over to her muse…

  The flashlight, which had worked fine upstairs, was failing by the time Harmony reached the dining room. It barely nudged the darkness back, less effective against the growing dark than a candle would have been. As she watched, the already tiny light stuttered twice, grew small, then flickered out like a spent wick finally drowned in its own wax. Something that glowed like moonlight but moved like fog crept into the hall and stained her skin a cowardly shade of pale. She stood in the near-dark and unwillingly thought of Alex and what he did to things with batteries.

  But Alex wasn’t there—mentally or physically. For the first time in days, she couldn’t feel him at all. Therefore, he wasn’t responsible for the flashlight’s sudden death.

  A terrible and familiar odor impregnated the fog that slipped into the room through the ill-fitting windows where the feral ivy grew. It felt sticky as a spiderweb as it climbed up her body and caressed her face. She fell back a step and did her best to keep her breaths shallow so that it didn’t get into her lungs. The fog followed. She backed away from the door but felt her muscles weakening with every step.

  Ha-a-armo-o-ony. I’ll se-e-e you so-oo-on. The-e-ere’s someone here who wants to pla-ay wi-i-ith you-uu-u.

  “Oh, God!”

  Harmony dropped to her knees, suddenly weak with terror. There was someone else here. Like Alex…only someone older, more powerful, whose presence could kill her electric light even without touching it. Someone who could whisper in her brain with a voice as real as anything issued by a human throat. The name wouldn’t come, but she didn’t need to think it, to say it. There was only one being who could do that.

  Her mind shrank into a ball of panic, collapsed so tight on itself that she could not reason or even recall how to breathe. She had to keep him out of her head—had to, or it was all over!

  Harmony gripped the carpet runner that ran the length of the hall and stared into the dining room, watching in transfixed horror as something large and not entirely human filled up the dark glass overlooking the terrace with a shadow even blacker than the night beyond. It leaned in. The window frames shivered for an instant and then burst inward. Rain was blown through the open window with a horizontal gust, rousing her to panic with cold kisses on her naked skin.

  How long she might have stayed crouched on the floor she did not know, but a trespassing gnat blown in on the evil wind flew into her mouth and buzzed her tonsils as it tried to escape. Gagging silently, she was finally forced to breathe. She couldn’t command her muscles to rise, but her brain resumed functioning and she was able to scramble into the deeper shadow behind the heavy drapes in the alcove across the hall, allowing only one eye to watch the dining room. Feeling the place where Alex had been inside her head, she visualized building a brick wall, a strong, tall wall that would keep the monsters out.

  She gagged. Evil—evil everywhere. It was like a veil over her mind, doing its best to separate her from even the most basic survival thoughts. But it wasn’t the evil. For some reason Saint Germain had passed her by and moved on to someone else. The list of possible targets was small.

  The knowledge lent her strength. There was a monster in the dining room, but she had killed monsters before. They could be stopped. The gun room—she had to get back upstairs and arm herself. Preferably with a big-bore six-gun like the Nitro, or a Magnum. Or an over-under shotgun. They only carried two shells, but those shots could be fired very quickly because you didn’t have to eje
ct the cartridge between shots, and you could blow a man’s head clean off and still have a spare for smashing the heart. And they were mechanical, not electrical. They wouldn’t fail even if she ran into…him.

  This thought of weapons steadied her. Maybe Alex hadn’t been able to kill off Saint Germain by tearing his heart out, but no one did much constructive attacking when they were missing a head. She and Alex would be fine. She’d kill the ghoul and then go to help Alex. She just had to force her muscles to unclench one by one and then to run as if the Devil himself were after her. It was maybe sixty feet, then up a flight of stairs, then maybe twenty feet more—that was nothing.

  Something swung into the dining room through the windows. It was not human but possessed powerful arms that dangled low like a gorilla’s. This wasn’t the King of Evil, but it was bad enough. Her will might be stronger, but it was no match for those hideous arms. Waiting no longer, she burst out from behind the tapestry and bolted for the stairs.

  Behind her, the monster yowled. It didn’t seem possible, but Harmony was sure she felt its weight when it landed in the hall behind her.

  Alex let go of the corpse and watched the sea reclaim it. If this woman had ever been swimming for her life, it had been weeks ago. She was rotten now, an abode for creatures of the tide pools. He had been lured here by a trick—the kind of corpse animation only Saint Germain could do.

  Turning in the wild water, he looked up the sharp gradient of his island, rising as a white mass in the black night. It was nearly vertical, a seemingly impossible climb back up to the dark house. He swam quickly.

  The climb would have been deemed impossible by most people, but Alex made it anyway, jamming his fingers into the tiny fissures in the rocks, forcing the island to give him handholds as he hauled himself up the crumbling stone wall. He had to get back to Harmony. Saint Germain was coming. He might already be there. The thought made him sick with worry, and for the first time since Thomasina’s death, Alex knew real fear.

  This wouldn’t happen again! He swore it. No one else was going to die for his mistakes.

  He tried to reach psychically for Harmony but ran into a brick wall. In time he could batter it down, but didn’t attack it at that moment. Whatever was happening to her, she didn’t need to be distracted. And as long as the wall held, Saint Germain wasn’t in her mind.

  The storm broke as he climbed, and, against his better judgment, Alex looked back at the sea and then out at the horizon. Strange lightning left bloody trails on the undersides of the swaying clouds that whirled above him like a tornado that hadn’t touched ground. He’d never seen wind affect clouds this way. As he watched, the bottom sides of the clouds bulged back and forth as though being sucked in and out of a giant’s lungs. The sky began to shrink, compressing the clouds around the island. Much closer and they would become blinding fog. If he wasn’t careful, the wind would whip him away from the cliff.

  Alex climbed faster, leaving his own flesh and blood behind on the rocks.

  Her fear tried to burrow deeper inside as she ran, but when it couldn’t find anyplace to hide in her stomach, heart, or bowels, it began to claw its way out of her throat in a keening wail. Harmony clamped her lips tight, refusing to let the sound out.

  Behind her, something bulged into the hallway and screamed, expressing as much triumph and gloating as she felt fear. Earlier, the sound might have paralyzed her, but she was almost to the gun room. And now she was angry as well as frightened. She wanted to kill this thing—kill it and kill it and kill it.

  The bellowing grew closer, as did the sound of pounding hooves. It was coming, and coming fast. The endless roar pierced her eardrums and then shot through her skull, where it burrowed under the scalp, leaving her feeling that her flesh was being shorn from the bone. Long after the oxygen in the creature’s lungs should have worn out, the noise went on, ululating up and down, shredding Harmony’s nerves, goading her to turn and move in for the attack. She wanted to smash it, kill it. She wanted to do anything that would make the noise stop. But to attack the thing unarmed would be suicide. She didn’t waste time looking back.

  Regular vision was of no help in the unnatural dark, but Alex didn’t need it. He could see the slimy psychic trail left by the ghoul where it had scrambled up the ivy and in through a dining-room window.

  The wind howled around him on the terrace, but above it Alex could hear racing footsteps—Harmony’s and the ghoul’s. They were headed for the gun room. Harmony had a lead, but not more than a few yards.

  Alex was about to launch himself at the wall and follow them when he saw a second oily trail heading up the corner of the building and ending at the attic window. As dangerous as the ghoul was, this second trail frightened him more. He knew it of old. It belonged to Saint Germain.

  After only an instant of hesitation, he ran for Saint Germain and the attic. Harmony was a good shot, and there was plenty of weaponry in the gun room. She could take on a ghoul. Probably. Even if it bit and infected her, Alex knew what to do to save her. He could resurrect her. And there was every chance that the ghoul had been ordered to take her alive.

  But she would not survive a run-in with a powerful psychic like Saint Germain. He’d simply move in and blank out her brain and order her to follow him. She wasn’t strong enough to keep him out. Harmony didn’t know it yet, but there actually were worse things than death by ghoul attack.

  If God was with them and Alex’s strength held—s’il Vouz plaît, bien Dieu—she would never know this.

  She didn’t so much burst through the gun-room door as hydroplane over the inexplicably wet floor. Unable to stop herself, she smacked into the far wall, rattling the weapons that hung there on brass pegs. She reached out desperately. There was no light in the room, and the first gun her panicked hands encountered was, of all things, a flare gun. That wasn’t her first choice of weapons, but it was at hand and she desperately wanted some light. Praying that Alex’s paranoia would have put him in the habit of leaving guns loaded, she spun about and pulled the trigger.

  The simian nightmare rushing through the doorway was briefly illuminated as the flare exploded in its chest. Its rush stuttered to a brief halt as it staggered back a step, but Harmony didn’t wait to see it fall. She snatched up the next pistol, not bothering to see what kind it was, and unloaded it into the thing’s flaming head.

  Unfortunately, the gun was a small-caliber weapon and none of the bullets penetrated her attacker’s skull; they tore through the scaled flesh of its face, but the hard white bone beneath never cracked. Nor did the creature bleed.

  “Shit!” Harmony hurled the pistol as the thing again rushed her. It was fast—inhumanly fast!

  She spun out of reach of the swiping claws and grabbed at the next weapon. She cried out as something sliced into her fingers.

  Her assailant bellowed in pain, and she shot it a quick look. The living torch had impaled itself on some kind of lance near the door, and it was burning bright enough by now to show her that it was Alex’s African knife made from giraffe bone that had cut her fingers as she’d grabbed it.

  She wanted the Nitro, but it was within the ghoul’s striking distance. All the high-caliber weapons were.

  “Damndamndamn.”

  The thing pulled itself off its spike. There was no time to get at the rifles on the other wall and no way to get around those giant, reaching arms as the monster placed itself in the middle of the room and screamed at her again. It was the throwing club, the mace, or the knife. Snarling with frustration, Harmony snatched at the knife handle with her undamaged hand and then spun away from the fiery monster, which leapt forward and swiped at her again. Its hands and arms were on fire now, but it wasn’t slowed.

  She turned and ran at the room’s only window, praying that it was as poorly latched as all the others but willing to chance a fall through glass if that was what it would take to get away.

  Feeling heat on her back from the monster who was setting the room ablaze, she didn’t stop to
ask herself what she would do if there was no balcony outside this upstairs room.

  Alex saw a flare of light from the corner of his eye as he hauled himself up the last stretch of ivy-covered wall. The sight was followed quickly by several cracks from a handgun—a twenty-two. Not the best choice for taking on a ghoul, but it could do the job if the creature was close enough and not walled with muscle. It pleased him to hear the ghoul shriek and then Harmony curse in anger. As long as she was angry and not screaming in fear or pain, she was probably okay.

  Wishing he could also afford to scream in anger himself, Alex forced himself to remain quiet, hoping he could sneak up on his enemy. It wasn’t that he feared losing a physical fight with Saint Germain, but there was no knowing how much stronger psychically his nemesis might have grown. Alex was a strong psychic. He could do a metaphysical bench press with the best of them and he’d never met a psychic stronger than he was. But this wasn’t the moment to rush in blindly and get himself killed by being overconfident. Saint Germain was bound to have grown stronger over the decades, and there was no way to know how powerful he might now be, especially if he had managed to consume Smoking Mirror’s vampiric energy.

  He had to stay alive for Harmony. And for himself. For the first time in years, Alex realized how much he wanted to live.

  There was a balcony and a convenient ladder of ivy leading to the garden below. Harmony’s descent down the wet ivy was less a climb than a poorly controlled drop, but she made it to the ground without breaking an ankle.

  Impossibly, it was even colder and somehow raining hard, a solid, dark torrent that felt oily. The water also smelled foul and stung when it hit the skin, but it was definitely the lesser of two evils. The choice was a flaming ghoul or acid rain—she’d take rain. A typhoon even. Harmony had wondered if fire would eventually deter a ghoul, and now she had her answer. Fire alone was not enough—at least not enough to kill quickly. She’d have to do something else, and options were limited.