“I’m off Task Force Victor. I’ll still scout for the U.N. I’ll find the nests, track the shadows who’ve gone underground, but I answer directly to you. Not just for this, but from now on.”
Commander Henning had grown wiser in the past few seconds, for though his face reddened even further, he remained silent, teeth clenched. The Secretary General studied her.
“Can I trust you, Allison?” he asked.
“For as long as I can trust you, Mister Secretary.”
“Good enough.”
Nieto thrust out his hand and Allison shook it. Then she turned to Ray Henning, her eyes narrowed to slits, her nostrils flaring. When she opened her mouth to speak, her teeth elongated into razor-sharp fangs. Allison stood eye to eye with him, their faces five inches apart.
“If you ever try to draw a weapon on me again, Commander,” she said, not attempting to hide her words in a whisper, “I’ll slit your throat and let you bleed where you fall.”
Before either man could respond, she turned to mist, slid swirling beneath the office door, and was gone.
The restaurant was just called Ellie’s, no “Tavern” or “Grill” or “Pub” after the name. It was situated in a ramshackle sprawl of a building that was too large for what was presumably a very low volume of business, and so one entire side of the place had been transformed into an antique shop whose display window was punctuated by a pair of beautiful carousel horses. A huge carved wooden bull, the tip of one horn snapped off, stood by the door.
Father Jack Devlin stood in front of the antique shop, which had not yet opened for the day. Ellie’s was serving breakfast already, but apparently the proprietor of the Golden Age did not think people out and about for their early morning meal were likely to want to buy antiques at that hour.
The priest leaned against the Lincoln Navigator, the rented vehicle much the worse for wear, and hit the first speed dial programmed into his cell phone. He had left Peter, Keomany, and Nikki in the restaurant because it was unconscionably rude to speak on the phone in the midst of people having breakfast—or any other meal—but more importantly because he simply did not wish to be overheard.
He laid the phone against his ear and listened to the electric buzz that substituted for a ring. A police car went by and he kept his head down, casting only a surreptitious glance in that direction. He wore charcoal gray pants and a dark green shirt. Nothing to catch anyone’s attention. That was good.
A pickup truck rolled into Ellie’s parking lot, kicking up dust from the ground. On the other end of the phone line, just as Jack became convinced he was going to get voice mail again, there was an answer. “Hello?”
“It’s Jack Devlin.”
“Where in God’s name are you, Jack?” Bishop Michel Gagnon asked, his voice an officious snarl. “I’ve been calling you since I got word yesterday about Wickham.”
Father Jack knew that the Bishop’s voice on the phone could not be heard by a couple stepping out of the pickup, but he held the phone a little closer to his ear regardless.
“If you got word, then you know where I am,” he said.
Bishop Gagnon paused, the line hissing with static. Despite advances in mobile technology, the system was not perfect.
“You’re not still there. I had a call from Tivosti in Homeland Security and he said you and Octavian had disappeared from Wickham after . . .”
“Not in Wickham,” Jack replied. He glanced around the parking lot, stared at the sprawl of Ellie’s and the carousel horses in the window of the Golden Age. “No idea what town we’re in at the moment. We are still in Vermont, though. We found a motel yesterday and now we’re just trying to figure out what to do next.”
“We?” the Bishop asked, disapproval apparent in that single syllable. “You and Octavian? You are partners now, are you? Father Jack Devlin and his pet monster.”
He isn’t a monster, Jack wanted to say. But he knew the argument would be ignored. The Bishop was deaf to any opinion but his own.
“Octavian’s magick is the only reason I’m still alive,” he said instead. “He saved Wickham.”
The Bishop actually laughed. “Saved Wickham? Wickham is not saved, Father. The town is destroyed, its people slaughtered.”
Jack sighed. He leaned back against the Navigator and ran his free hand through his spiky orange hair.
“With all due respect, Your Eminence, there wouldn’t be a town or any survivors at all without Octavian’s involvement. You have not seen what I have seen, what was inside that village. Evil of such magnitude—”
“That’s enough, Jack,” Bishop Gagnon interrupted. “You’re not going to give me your report over a mobile phone. I will expect you back in Manhattan by nightfall. You can tell me about it then. In the morning, we leave for England.”
The priest had been about to argue that he had no car of his own but he knew that he could rent one. It was the last bit of the Bishop’s instructions that threw him.
“What’s in England?” he asked.
“That is what we shall discover.”
There was a click and the line went dead, only a hollow sound in his ear now, like the infinite nothing inside a conch shell. Jack had always contended that it was not the ocean children heard when their parents had them put a shell to their ear, but some other world, some vast, dark nothing. He had been a morbid child with a wild imagination, but it was unsettling to him now as an adult that what his odd thoughts had conjured as a boy had turned out to be possible. With all he had learned about magick and parallel worlds, his theory was not as fantastic as it had once seemed.
He shut the phone off completely just as he had done the night before, not wanting to hear the Bishop’s voice again until he had to. Sliding it into his pocket, he strode across the lot and through the front door of Ellie’s, wondering if his breakfast had arrived yet. Inside, he was disappointed to discover it had not, but he slid into his chair beside Keomany, the two of them sitting opposite Peter and Nikki, and sipped at his black coffee. It was still hot enough to drink.
His return had interrupted a conversation about Peter’s work as an artist and a gallery showing of his paintings that was apparently imminent. In the midst of asking Keomany a question, Peter paused and looked at Jack. Peter had not shaved that morning, and the stubble was dark on his face. It only made him look more handsome, which Jack envied, since he himself looked like a twelve-year-old with a bit of peach fuzz if he did not shave.
“Did you get through?” Peter asked.
Father Jack glanced at Keomany beside him, his heart breaking for the woman, those haunted eyes gazing out from her delicate features. He felt inexplicably as though he was letting her down.
“I have to go back to New York. Immediately.” The priest looked at Peter. “The Bishop and I are apparently off to England tomorrow, but he didn’t tell me anything more about it.”
The truth was that the Bishop had not had to tell him why they were going. The previous night in the hotel they had turned on the news and been horrified by what they had seen. Despite what must have been a huge effort, the United Nations and world governments had not really had a chance of keeping something so massive quiet for very long.
Wickham had been only one village among many afflicted cities and towns.
“He’s taking you to Derby,” Nikki said quietly.
Father Jack nodded. “That’s my guess.”
She nodded, her blond hair slipping across her face. “They’ll try to break through like Peter did.”
Beside the priest Keomany shuddered. He felt her tremble.
“I don’t think it will be that easy again. I think we have to find out what the next city will be, and get there before it’s completely cut off from the world.”
Father Jack frowned. “How do we do that?”
“Keomany knows a whole community of earthwitches ninety minutes from here on the highway. She thinks they can help.”
The priest nodded slowly and sipped his coffee. “I wish I coul
d come with you.”
Octavian smiled. “I guess the Bishop’s not very happy with you at the moment. You or me, for that matter. Is he trying to find a way to blame me for all this?”
Father Jack started to deny it, but there was a glint in Peter’s eye that told him there was no benefit in lying. The mage had a long and nasty history with the church. No matter how much Jack himself knew things had changed—the Church of the Resurrection was hardly the secretive, self-serving institution that the Roman Catholic original had been—men like Bishop Gagnon made it hard to convince anyone of the difference. Particularly someone like Peter.
“It’s all right, Jack,” the mage said, dragging a hand across his stubbled chin, then reaching for his glass of orange juice. “You do what you have to do. It could be that you’ll learn what’s really going on, what that thing was in Wickham. I don’t think I have the power to take these places back one by one, but maybe with the earthwitches’ help, we can find the source. Let’s keep in touch.”
“Bishop Gagnon won’t like that,” Father Jack muttered.
Peter’s features narrowed, brows knitting together, and his nostrils flared. “I don’t think I care what he likes. Tell him he can take all the credit if I stop this thing, whatever it is, from spreading. And if it eats the world, well, he can just blame it on me. Not that there’ll be anyone left alive to listen.”
The priest smiled. He would have to rent a second car but that was simple enough. He held out a hand and Peter shook it.
“We’ll save the world in spite of itself,” he said, half in jest.
But only half.
14
Nikki lay sprawled sideways on the passenger seat of the Navigator. The big SUV’s engine rumbled and she could feel it all through her. Behind the wheel, Peter seemed to have retreated inward, lost in contemplation, but she had seen him like this before. The weight of the world. No one could expect him to bear the burden, to be responsible for stopping the cataclysm that was facing the Earth now, and yet Peter willingly took it onto himself.
She wanted to reach out to him, but she knew it was best to let him alone until he surfaced from wherever his mind had taken him.
Music played low on the radio and the sun was warm on her face. Her window was open partway, and despite the sun a light rain fell, a spring shower that sprinkled the windshield and sprayed a few drops in through the window. Nikki kept it down. The shower would be over in a moment and she never minded a little rain.
Keomany sat in the back, her fine features very drawn, her perfect black hair a curtain veiling her face. Nikki had seen horrors before, but she had never had to witness the ravaged corpses of her own parents. With what Keomany had seen and experienced, what had happened to her hometown, Nikki thought it was a wonder she was still speaking in complete sentences.
I’d be a basket case, she thought as she peered over the back of her seat at her friend. What a strange turn of events, that this woman she had not seen in years would turn up at one of her performances to draw her back into the terrible, secret shadows of the world.
Only they aren’t shadows anymore, are they? Everyone can see them. Just turn on fucking CNN.
And that was the truth. Anyone in the world could turn on the television and watch the apocalypse in progress. The thought made Nikki shiver, but neither her lover nor her friend noticed.
“Not too far now,” Keomany said, craning forward slightly to peer at a sign above the highway. “It’s north of Brattleboro, this exit or the next. I’ll know it when I see it.”
“You’re sure we shouldn’t have called first?” Nikki asked.
Keomany shook her head. “Cat and Tori will be there. In a situation like this, I can’t imagine them being anywhere else.”
Nikki sat up a little and looked at her, feeling a sadness sweep through her. This ought to have been a blissful moment, with Peter and Keomany around her and the sun and the breeze and the sprinkle of spring rain. Much as she wished, she could not sink down into the moment and pretend that beyond the confines of that vehicle, beyond the reaches of that highway, the world was not falling apart.
It was.
But at least she was facing the unknown with people she cared for, and who cared for her.
“So, Kem,” she began, peering into the back at her friend, “tell me about this whole earthwitch thing. I remember you had an interest in wicca way back when, but how did you get into this?”
Keomany sat back against the seat, pushing her hair away from her face. Her eyes were wide, as though she had just woken from a dream, and yet Nikki felt that what she had been pulled away from was the echo of the previous day’s horrors. She had not begun the conversation as some honorable effort to distract Keomany from sinking deeper into her grief, but if that was the result, so much the better.
“Wicca wasn’t for me,” Keomany said, glancing out the window at the forest to the east of the highway. “There’s a purity to it, sure, but there are also people who are just in it for the magick. Magick for magick’s sake is just bullshit.”
She blinked and glanced at the rearview mirror. “No offense, Peter.”
“None taken,” he said, surprising Nikki, who had thought he would have tuned them out. Peter glanced once into the rearview mirror. “The desire to know magick without a purpose—a benevolent purpose— always leads to dark places.”
“Exactly,” Keomany agreed, focusing on Nikki again. A sad smile teased the edges of her lips. “Wicca is benevolent, no doubt. But it had become popular, almost faddish, and that meant it drew too many people who weren’t benevolent. It was never about magick for me. It was about respecting this world that supports us, gives us life. We take it so for granted, and I didn’t want to live like that. The real power is in the earth and in the air. Nature is the soul of the earth. Gaea’s the mother of us all.”
With a small chuckle, she stopped and shook her head. “I’m preaching.”
“No,” Nikki protested. “I’m interested. Notice the lack of mocking?”
Keomany nodded. “All right. Anyway, when I learned about earthcraft—”
“Earthcraft?”
“That’s what it’s called. Simple and to the point, I think. It’s based on a lot of old Celtic rituals, ancient druidry, that sort of thing, and it’s meant to allow people to tap into nature, to honor Gaea and celebrate all that she provides us. It isn’t exactly an original concept, but it is benevolent. And the truth is, it works.”
Nikki nodded. Obviously it worked. They had all seen the proof of that in Wickham. “What I don’t understand is where the power comes from. And is it accessible to everyone? I mean, could anyone tap into the forces of nature like that? Sort of scary to contemplate.”
For a long moment Keomany just stared out the window, frowning. “I guess I never thought of it like that,” she said at length. “One of the tenets of earthcraft is that anyone can commune with Gaea like that, honor her, celebrate the festivals and all. The impression it gives is that anyone can tap into the power, but in practice I don’t think that’s true. Maybe two or three out of every hundred at the Bealtienne festival showed any actual power. Mostly to influence the weather, actually, and that’s an easy one for skeptics to brush off. Though it’s real enough. I was convinced pretty much immediately.
“Cat can create an earth tremor. She can make plants and trees grow. Tori can bring rain or snow or disperse clouds. They’re the major practitioners of earthcraft in the northeastern U.S.”
Nikki tried to wrap her mind around that. This network of people— mostly women—across the country, across the world, who had developed a new way of looking at the world and discovered magick in the midst of it. If they got together, they might have the power to change weather patterns in certain areas, to help crops grow, to feed people who were starving. If earthcraft grew, it could change the world.
If there was a world left to change.
“That’s amazing,” Nikki said. “Really. Are they as strong as you are?”
Keomany shrugged. “Up until what happened in Wickham, the day I came back from the festival, I’d enjoyed the ritual of it, the joy it brought me, but I’d never so much as summoned a raindrop, never mind made anything grow. I don’t understand it. Really I don’t.
“You asked where the power comes from. Well, it doesn’t. It’s here. It’s all around us. Earthwitches believe that we live in symbiosis with Gaea and that we can influence nature, turn it to our own ends as long as they’re pure. Some people are more adept at it than others. Maybe some people are just born with a greater . . . I don’t know, affinity, or whatever. I was happy to be one of the majority, someone who just wanted to be there. It felt right to me. I guess I had more of Gaea’s spirit in me than I knew.”
Nikki reached into the back seat and took Keomany’s hand. The two women gazed at each other for a moment and Nikki found herself regretting that she had let this friendship slip away and never once tried to resurrect it. Despite all that had happened, she was grateful for this chance to know Keomany again.
“I guess you do,” she said. “We were always in turmoil, weren’t we? Back when we met. But you’ve got a kind of peace inside you now, and I have to wonder if that comes from having connected with Gaea, or if there’s something in nature that sensed that peace, and found you.”
Keomany smiled so sweetly it nearly broke Nikki’s heart. Catastrophic tragedy had torn through her life in recent days, but somehow Keomany could still summon that smile.
“Let’s just hope that the coven will be able to—” Keomany began, but then her eyes narrowed and she cocked her head slightly, listening carefully to something.
A small laugh escaped her lips.
“What’s funny?” Nikki asked.
Keomany raised an eyebrow. “The radio. Listen to the radio.”
It was turned down low, a static buzz in the background, and Nikki had not been paying any attention to the music while they were talking. Now that Keomany had drawn attention to it, she mentally tuned into the music. Even Peter smiled, roused from his contemplation by the rhythm, and he reached out to turn up the volume.
The Gathering Dark Page 24
