The Gathering Dark

by Christopher Golden

  Kuromaku bounded off the altar, racing for the Lamontagnes, knowing even as he did so that he was too late. The bare instant that had ticked by as he looked into Sophie’s eyes had cost him a vital moment. Even as he raised his katana, he saw one of the Whispers strike, its right arm scything down, long talons sharp as blades slitting Alain Lamontagne open from throat to pelvis.

  The other lunged at Antoinette, who curled herself around her son as though her flesh and bone could act as armor for the child. The demon’s talons punctured her back like daggers and Antoinette screamed in soul-deep agony, knowing that they would tear through her to reach her son.

  Rigid with bitter anger that made bile rise in the back of his throat, Kuromaku cut the last two Whispers down, then hacked at the pieces where they lay on the floor, the katana cutting through wood and carpeting. The clack, clack of the blade on wood was the only sound in the church then, echoing back from those same rafters.

  The rafters.

  The ronin ignored the wounded woman and her son, turned his back on Sophie as she ran to see to them. He gazed up into the rafters, eyes peering into the depths of every shadow, ears attuned to the slightest creak of the wind. The quill-covered behemoth outside had stopped pounding on the door and the winged, carrion creatures that circled above had not even attempted to enter the church, but these things had.

  “Watch the shadows,” Kuromaku instructed Sophie, who nodded mutely, her expression revealing a kind of surprise, not at the events that had just unfolded here, but that she had survived them at all.

  With that caution, and moving more swiftly than any human could have conceived, Kuromaku raced through the church, searched every darkened nook, and assured himself that each door and window was tightly shut. He investigated the sacristy and the basement and each armoire and closet that he came to.

  Only minutes after he had departed, he returned to Sophie’s side. She was sitting with the boy, Henri, who seemed to have fallen again into that strange catatonia. His mother barely acknowledged his presence. Instead, Antoinette Lamontagne knelt by her husband’s corpse, blood spattered on her clothing, whispering to him in angry French. From time to time her voice would rise higher, become shrill, and she would strike the dead body as though it might elicit some response. All her recriminations were for nothing, however. Alain was dead.

  Sophie stared at the woman and her dead husband while she stroked the boy’s hair. Kuromaku did not like the hollowness of her eyes. Antoinette was already mad; he could not afford to have Sophie become unhinged now.

  “I wish she would stop,” Sophie whispered.

  “I wish it also,” Kuromaku replied gently.

  He reached out to touch her shoulder. The connection seemed to spark something in her eyes and she glanced at him, blinking, as though her vision had been blurred but was now clearing.

  “Now what do we do?” Sophie asked, searching his eyes for answers, for some truths that she must have feared his lips would not reveal.

  “We find another sanctuary.”

  She shook her head, glanced up into the shadowy rafters, and shivered. “If we aren’t safe here—”

  “Somewhere without windows, with a single door. A bank vault, perhaps. Somewhere I can keep the three of you safe while I explore this place and find a way out, a way back.”

  Sophie’s eyes widened. “You’re going to leave us alone?”

  Kuromaku gazed grimly at her. “There is no other choice. To do what must be done, to be free to fight and move, I must be unhindered by the need to protect you. Only for a short while. And not until I have moved you somewhere safe.”

  She looked for a moment as though she might argue, then she only sighed and nodded, her eyes downcast. Antoinette Lamontagne was still muttering to her dead husband, the boy lay motionless, eyelids fluttering as though he was disturbed by his dreams—though Kuromaku was certain his nightmares could not be more terrifying than the reality he refused to wake to. Sophie did not want to be left alone with a raving madwoman and a mentally paralyzed child, but she had made the choice to protect them on her own behalf and on Kuromaku’s. At the beginning, Kuromaku would simply have left them behind. But when the train was attacked, that was war. Now, they were all survivors, and he intended to see that no more of those under his protection lost their lives in this infernal place.

  “I don’t understand,” Sophie said, glancing up. “How could they come inside? All the things you said before about the magick of the church—”

  Kuromaku nodded, his brow furrowed. “I have been thinking about that,” he revealed, feeling his suspicions coalescing into grim certainty. He let his gaze drift a moment before returning his focus to Sophie.

  “There are many Hells,” Kuromaku began, voice just above a whisper. Even so it seemed to slink furtively through the pews and up into the rafters. “Thousands of years ago it was . . . common is such a strange word to use, but yes . . . it was common to find creatures from these Hells in this world. Reality is layer upon layer. Or perhaps all is one vast universe and what we think of as portals between dimensions are merely folds in space, spanning galaxies and diminishing them so that they are separated by inches rather than eternities.”

  He reached up to massage his temples and took a breath he did not need.

  “I am complicating things,” he said grimly. “Where did I begin? Oh, yes. There are many Hells. That is what we have always called them. Whatever they are, many of these places have monstrous creatures, savage things, some of which are merely animals, but others are sentient. Aware.” He paused and studied Sophie closely.

  “As demons from these many Hells found or forced their way into this world, sorcerers and mages wove new magicks to combat them. Eventually all of that knowledge was collected in a volume called The Gospel of Shadows. The book is lost to us now but a new effort is under way to gather that knowledge again. Meanwhile only one man in the world knows all of the magick that book once contained.”

  Sophie frowned. “Who is this man?”

  “His name is Peter Octavian and he is my brother,” Kuromaku said reverently. He saw the confusion in Sophie’s eyes and shook his head. “Not my brother by birth, nor even by the blood of Shadows, but my comrade in arms, my fellow warrior, a brother of my own choosing.”

  He paused, frowned. “Yet I wonder how even Peter would fare against these demons. If they can enter the church, it seems clear to me that these wraiths are from a dimension unknown to the ancient mages. All known demon races are magickally barred from holy ground. If we are not safe in this church, it is because whatever they are, these things are unknown, from a hellish dimension not even the greatest sorcerers of history ever knew existed.”

  Sophie stared at him, expression blank. After a moment her face changed, as though a wave of awareness seemed to come upon her and she was awaking, for the first time, to the reality of their situation. She reached out and touched Henri’s face but the little boy did not stir. With a glance at Antoinette madly mumbling over the corpse of her husband, Sophie stood and faced Kuromaku eye to eye.

  There was a fire in her gaze that he was heartened to see. Sophie Duvic had decided that she was going to make it out of this alive. It gave Kuromaku hope.

  “You really believe that Mont de Moreau has just been . . . captured somehow? That if we reach the edge of the city, we may be able to break back through into our world?”

  Kuromaku nodded solemnly. “I do.”

  Sophie glanced around the church again. “All right. I will get them to the basement and block the door. But the demons—the wraiths as you called them—will not be held off for long. There was no blood here. I believe that the priests and the faithful, if they made it here at all, were driven out and then killed outside. The ones you killed were here all along. Others may find this place, but I think it would be by accident, I do not think they know that we are here. Otherwise they would swarm the church as they did the train.”

  Kuromaku nodded at her logic. “All right. I
will go and find a safer place for you to hide. Once you have been moved there, I will go to the edge of the city and see if escape is possible.”

  He turned from her, intent upon his mission. Sophie grabbed his arm and pulled him back. When she kissed him, Kuromaku felt as though she were giving over to him a little bit of her spirit, her soul, and it nourished the vampire far more than stolen blood ever had. When the kiss ended, they gazed at one another for a moment.

  “Before you go,” she said, pointing upward. “Fly up there and make sure there are no more of them.”

  Kuromaku let his lips brush gently across hers again, committing to memory their softness and the smell of her. Sophie’s blue eyes caught and held him a moment.

  Without pause he transformed, his body flowing and twisting, much of his physical mass going to that same place where his katana stayed until he needed it. Kuromaku shifted from human to crow, black feathers gleaming in the church. Sophie gasped and stared in amazement.

  “I will never get used to that,” she said.

  He cawed and spread his wings, flew up into the rafters of the church, searched every shadow there and made certain there were no more demons lurking above the pews or the altar. Then he circled once above Sophie and what remained of the Lamontagne family, cawing vows of fealty and protection in the tongue of crows, until at last he flew toward a side door. Sophie ran to let him out, opening it just a crack for him to fly through and then barring it again behind him after he had passed.

  Then Kuromaku was out of the church, back into the hellish landscape of Mont de Moreau. The horror of the city’s fate struck him deeply once more but he steeled himself against the visions of fire and destruction that met his eyes. He was a warrior. He had seen such devastation before, and then at the hands of men.

  The crow soared high above the tall white steeple. Below he saw the wraith demons that had been hunting them, that had swarmed the train and hidden in the church. He saw more of the enormous quill-backed demons and other horror that slunk and crept through the smoldering streets beneath that hideous orange light. Winged carrion eaters flew above and Kuromaku was careful not to soar too high.

  But he was high enough.

  High enough to see something that made his mind spin, made even one who had learned so many of the world’s secrets gaze in incredulous awe. For as he looked to the northern edge of the city, he saw not the barrier he had expected to see, nor the French countryside that would have been there had this atrocity not taken place.

  At the northern perimeter of Mont de Moreau there was another city, a sprawling desert village of small, dusty homes and cantinas. This place was not in France, that much was certain. It might have been Mexico, or somewhere in the southwestern United States.

  The crow dipped one wing and glided eastward. On that side it could see another city, with sprawling green hills surrounding a busy shopping district downtown, the architecture and the signs upon the stores and pubs revealing it as an English town.

  To the south, Kuromaku saw Salzburg, Austria, recognizing it immediately by the view of the ramparts of the massive Hohensalzburg fortress, overlooking not only the streets of Salzburg, but of Mont de Moreau as well.

  Cities from all around the world, impossibly drawn together beneath that dreadful orange sky. All so different and yet all now identical in the horrors that had befallen them, the ravaged streets, the burning buildings, the monstrous beings that prowled in search of human survivors.

  A tear appeared at the corner of the eye of that crow, moistening its feathers. Kuromaku did not understand how this had happened but he knew that there had never been such an abomination, such a terrible slaughter, in the history of the modern world.

  And to the west . . . at last Kuromaku saw the barrier he had sought, a shimmering field of energy that stretched from the ground all the way up into the heavens. Whatever unimaginable demon or god had the power to drag cities from the real world into this dimension as though building a kingdom of the damned one puzzle piece at a time, the western edge of Mont de Moreau was still the outer perimeter of this hideous montage.

  There was no time to find a new sanctuary. If whatever power was behind this continued, they might never find the outer barrier again. Kuromaku had to get Sophie, Antoinette, and Henri out of this damnable place before they were trapped here forever.

  Once outside, he would have to discover what was doing this, how many cities had been taken, and what could be done to stop it. But first, they had to escape Mont de Moreau, had to reach the western perimeter before another city was dragged into Hell to block them in, and then another, and another, until the whole world burned and bled beneath that filthy orange sky.

  13

  The moon was high and bright and limned with a halo of shimmering gold that turned the night sky blue around it. The woods were dark, but moonlight illuminated the canopy of branches that sketched at the sky above Nikki’s head as she walked side by side with Peter along a path worn over years by other feet.

  It was the second time she had lived through something incredible with him, something terrible. Afterward there was a kind of high, an adrenaline rush that nothing in the world compared to, not even performing with her guitar on stage in front of hundreds of people, not even on those nights when she just knew that every heart in the audience was beating with hers and she had them, just had them, right with her.

  But that high did not last. In the aftermath, when the surreal tingle in her skin and the heat of her blood rushing through her and the almost sexual flush to her cheeks were over, there was only silence left in her. A quiet unlike anything else in the world.

  Images from that first time, in New Orleans, still lingered in her mind, still visited her dreams on long, difficult nights. The blood and death, the sheer cruelty of those who tried to kill her and Peter and all those who believed in what he stood for—it had left a scar upon her soul. Nikki had carried on, and always would, but to have seen that and felt it all was something that would stay with her forever. And when she sang, she knew that some of that dark knowledge was communicated to her audience with every note.

  Today had been worse.

  In New Orleans, Peter and his friends had been able to put a name to their enemies. The threat had been horrifying, but identifiable. Whatever that thing was—in the storm, she could still picture it in the storm, the winds tugging at the rags of the creature and simply carrying them away after it had delivered its warning—whatever it was, the sorcery Peter wielded was not powerful enough to destroy it.

  This was an enemy with no name, with power even Peter did not understand. After Wickham had been saved—if that was a word she could use to describe what had happened there—they had slipped away, avoiding the military and emergency crews that moved in as soon as the village had been restored to its rightful place.

  More than seventy miles west and higher in the mountains, they had found a small motel that would let them rest and figure out what their next move was going to be. But as soon as Nikki and Keomany checked into their room, Keomany had turned on the television, and they had discovered that Wickham had been just the beginning.

  Nikki shivered.

  “Hey,” Peter whispered as they strolled, hand in hand, along that mountain path, the lights of the motel behind and below them.

  She glanced up at him and forced a smile.

  “You’re cold,” he said. “Do you want to go back?”

  “Not just yet.” Nikki paused on the path and looked again back at the hotel. In her mind’s eye she saw those creatures again—Whispers, the demon had called them—and she saw the thing itself, the thing Peter had called “the Tatterdemalion” in the SUV on the way out of Wickham.

  But it wasn’t the cold that made her shiver.

  Didn’t Peter understand that she would never be warm again?

  “I wish we had been able to share a room,” she said as they picked up walking again, following the trail that would have been used for cross-country skiin
g in the winter.

  Peter laughed softly. “Somehow I think that would’ve been awkward for Keomany and Father Jack.”

  They had strolled another twenty feet but Nikki stopped again. She turned to him, reached up to touch his face, forcing him to meet her gaze, to see in her eyes all that was in her heart.

  “Tomorrow morning, we’re going to figure out our next move, right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he agreed, staring back at her curiously. “We all need some sleep. The news is terrible, I agree, but we’ve got to retrench a little bit, get some rest before we can try to stop this.”

  “Fine,” she agreed, brushing her hair out of her eyes. Nikki gazed at him intently. “I never want to spend another night away from you.”

  A smile played at the edges of his lips, but he also looked surprised. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to L.A.?”

  “Do you want me to go back?” Nikki’s chest hurt. She would not be able to breathe until he answered.

  Peter stared at her. The moonlight glinted in his eyes. “No,” he said, his voice a firm, quiet rasp.

  “You saw the news,” she said. “I don’t even know if L.A. would still be there when I got back. I’m not going on tour, not going anywhere, until this is over. I was starting to think, hey, maybe our days are numbered, maybe this is all the time we have. And then I realized that even if I live to be a hundred, there are still only so many days in a life, and I want to spend mine with you.”

  Peter reached out to touch her as if she might be a mirage, as if she might disappear at any moment. Nikki smiled as his fingers touched her arm and something passed between them, a silent covenant, a promise to each other. She stood on her toes and kissed him, and he held her close against him as though she would fall off the Earth if he let go.

  When the kiss ended, Nikki laid her head on his chest, and they just stood there on that mountain trail, warm against the chill night air. She could hear his heart beat.