The Gathering Dark

by Christopher Golden

  Screaming, Sophie pulled backward, letting her legs fall out from under her, letting her weight carry her down. The Whisper lost its grip on her arm but it hissed, cocked its head to one side, and then descended upon her.

  Weapons fire echoed across the Cleft of Ronda and off the buildings and the demon was torn apart. One arm up to shield herself from the falling pieces of its body and shards of its carapace, she saw bullets shatter the other two as well. Broken glass scraping her back, Antoinette Lamontagne fell from the shattered car window to the street. After a moment in which everything seemed to freeze except for the storm, her little boy popped his face up from inside the car and peered out the window in terror.

  Above the gunfire and the sound of soldiers shouting, she heard a voice close by, gentle tones asking if she was all right. Sophie glanced up and saw the redheaded priest above her, reaching down to help her up. She took his hand, glanced over his shoulder, and saw two other clergymen. They raised their hands as though about to praise her and the air around them shimmered slightly. The tiny hairs on her arms stood up, static electricity sheathing her.

  “What . . . what are you doing?” she asked in French.

  The priest glanced worriedly around. “Protecting you as best we can,” he replied in English.

  That same static seemed to flow from him, and Sophie glanced behind her to see that it surrounded Antoinette as well. The other two clergymen rushed out and retrieved Henri from the car and in moments all six of them were hustling back among the soldiers, behind the battle line. The feeling of static went away, that kind of electric hum on her skin, and Sophie found that she missed it.

  They were behind the gunfire now, away from the bullets and the Whispers. Sophie’s body was racked with sudden spasms and she nearly fell to her knees. The priest supported her until she recovered her balance. It was all she could do not to break down, to scream out all the horror and terror she had been holding in since this had all begun.

  “What’s your name?” the priest asked, pulling her even farther away from the fighting, between a tank and the empty troop carrier.

  With a crack of ear-splitting thunder, the tank fired into the street. Sophie glanced up and saw a building on the edge of the Cleft—a building that must have been there five hundred years—begin to collapse in upon itself, sending up a cloud of dust.

  “Bonjour? Hello?” the priest said. “Your name?”

  “Sophie,” she said, as though only just remembering. “Sophie Duvic.”

  He held out his hand, an odd bit of formality in the middle of chaos. “Father Jack Devlin.”

  Sophie took his hand, but already the priest had glanced away from her. His eyes were on the massive thunderheads that were rolling in from the south, the hideous storm that roiled and churned, lightning sparking from cloud to cloud.

  “We should get cover,” he said.

  Kuromaku, Sophie thought. She tugged at the priest’s hand. “I cannot. My friend is still back there.”

  “The woman and the boy,” Father Jack said, gesturing past her. “The other priests have them.”

  Sophie turned and saw the two clergymen who had been with Father Jack helping Antoinette and her son into the back of the troop carrier. A medic was with them, already looking at Antoinette’s wounds.

  “Not them,” Sophie said.

  The priest put a hand on her arm but she pulled away. She glanced around for a vantage point that would allow her to see the melee without putting herself between the soldiers and the demons again, but the only point she could see was the tank in front of her. Without hesitation, Sophie started for it.

  “Wait!” Father Jack called, grabbing at her. “You can’t go up there!”

  Sophie spun and glared at him. “I have to make sure he’s all right. I . . . I need him here with me, safe. He wouldn’t leave me behind. I won’t leave him.”

  For a moment the pale man only gazed at her from behind his spectacles. Then he nodded. “All right, but not up there. Come this way.”

  He led her around behind the tank and on the other side of it was an open Jeep and a second tank, both vehicles surrounded by soldiers who were strafing the bridge and the rim of the Cleft with gunfire to keep new Whispers from joining the others. The demons were swarming though and some of them slipped through the hail of bullets. A chill ran through Sophie. There were buildings all around. The broad intersection was flanked on either side by military vehicles and soldiers, with Whispers in the middle of the street and on the bridge and coming up from the Cleft, but she knew from seeing them before that these weren’t the only ones. Her gaze ticked to the windows of the buildings around them.

  There were other Whispers, she was sure. She wondered what they were waiting for.

  The storm was coming on, the wind blowing so hard that her hair whipped at her face and her clothes flapped against her body and she had to work to keep her balance. Her hair was drenched with that viscous rain and she reached up to wipe it out of her eyes as Father Jack hurried her over to the Jeep. The soldiers ignored them, smearing the rain across their faceguards between firing off rounds of bullets. The staccato gunfire ripped the air and pounded her eardrums.

  Sophie squinted through the storm and the chaos and in the orange-black light she saw two men standing in the back of the Jeep. One of them was a formidable-looking military man in commando garb but without the helmet and mask the others wore. The second man was a slim, elderly, white-haired priest. The old man’s face was lit up as though he were in the midst of the rapture.

  “Destroy them!” the priest was shouting, the words cutting through the rain and the report of weapons fire. “Kill the devils!”

  Father Jack dragged Sophie up beside the Jeep and he reached up and tugged at the sleeve of the older priest. The man glanced down and a different kind of light gleamed in his eyes now, not the fervor of religion but the arrogance of superiority.

  “Bishop Gagnon!” Father Jack shouted to be heard over the gunfire, spitting out some of the vile rain that had gotten into his mouth. “Michel, this woman needs help! Her friend is still out there! Tell the Commander that—”

  “Her friend?” the Bishop cried, a kind of hysteria in his voice and his eyes now. “Her friend, you say?” And then a terrible, sneering rage transformed his features and the old man stepped down from the Jeep. In one swift motion he cracked the back of his bony hand against Father Jack’s face, knocking off his glasses. The priest fell to his knees in shock and in pursuit of his spectacles.

  Startled, Sophie took a step back and stared at the Bishop, whose name and accent were French.

  “What is wrong with you?” she shouted through the storm in her native tongue, not caring at all that it was a clergyman she was talking to.

  The old man turned on her. “Get out of here, girl!” he snapped. Then he, too, lapsed into French. “Let the soldiers protect you. All the souls in Hell should be so fortunate. Demons surround us, and your friend is only a demon with another face.”

  Sophie stared at him, her mind reeling. She had thought them unaware that Kuromaku was out there among the Whispers. Now she realized that wasn’t the case at all. They had seen him, all right, and they knew what he was. In the midst of all the chaos they had seen him transforming as he did battle with the Whispers.

  “No,” she whispered. Then she shouted it. “No! He is not like them! Not a monster! You cannot just leave him out there!”

  The smile that spread across the Bishop’s face then unnerved her more than staring straight into the cruelly blank countenance of a Whisper demon.

  “Leave him? We’re not going to leave him there. Trust me on that, my dear.”

  A phalanx of soldiers rushed around them, hurrying to provide support to their comrades. The eruption of gunfire seemed even closer and Sophie winced. Someone nearby screamed and she glanced over and saw that two Whispers had somehow made it past the soldiers and climbed atop the tank. They were ravaging one of the men who stood atop it, slashing at him
as two other soldiers on top of the tank shouted in panic, trying to get a clean shot at the demons.

  Talons slashed down and the soldier’s left arm was severed, his throat was torn out, and then his head was ripped violently from his body, leaving only ragged flesh and muscle and a stump of the man’s spine. Blood splashed toward Sophie and the Bishop and spattered Father Jack as he stood, at last having recovered his glasses.

  Sophie screamed and seemed to sink into herself. Her entire body seemed to curl inward and she wanted nothing more than to disappear. She flinched away from every gunshot, and from the presence of the Bishop and Father Jack. Pressure built up inside of her until at last she screamed again, letting it out, letting it all go. Fresh tears streamed down her face, but for the first time, a terrible truth had lodged itself in her brain.

  If she wanted to survive all of this, it was up to her. Not Kuromaku, and not any soldiers. Her.

  When she glanced up, she saw several Whispers leaping out from the top of a building to land on the tank. But the soldiers were taking no more chances. Bullets strafed the air, ripped apart the demons, with little regard as to whether or not one of their own might get hit. On the street beyond the line of soldiers, however, she knew that other men must be dying. There were simply too many of the Whispers. Too many of them.

  Sophie stared at the Bishop. It was her turn to smile. “Kuromaku’s a vampire. You can’t kill him. Almost nothing can kill him.”

  The Bishop’s nostrils flared. Thick beads of greasy water slid down his face. “Yes. Almost nothing.”

  Sophie shook her head in abrupt denial. “You can’t. You . . . what are you going to do?”

  “Me? I’m a man of God, girl. I’m not going to do anything.”

  His meaning was clear. He might not be doing anything, but the man up in the Jeep—whom he had called “the Commander”—obviously was. Her gaze ticked upward and she saw the intense man raise a pair of high-tech field goggles to his eyes and scan the street to the east and the Cleft to the south. It made no sense, none at all. The Whispers were everywhere. No matter how many of them the soldiers killed there seemed to be more. And yet these men were intent upon killing Kuromaku.

  Why? I don’t understand, Sophie thought.

  But before she could speak those words, Father Jack moved past her toward the Jeep. His face was no longer pale, but pink with anger. He reached for the door and began to climb up, glaring at the Commander, who did not notice Father Jack’s approach.

  “Where the hell are those V-rounds?” the Commander snapped, one hand clapped to his ear. Sophie realized the man was speaking into some sort of communications rig but couldn’t see it.

  “Commander!” Father Jack shouted, his words stripped away by the wind. “Commander Henning!”

  The Bishop reached out and snagged him by the jacket. “Where are you going, Father Devlin?”

  The priest tried to shake himself loose but his superior now had both hands on him and was attempting to pull him away from the Jeep. To Sophie’s astonishment, Father Jack whirled around and punched the old man, connecting with a solid crack of knuckle on cheekbone. The Bishop staggered backward but Father Jack wasn’t done. He followed after the old man and struck him again, and the Bishop went down onto the slick pavement.

  Father Jack stood over him, fuming, eyes obscured behind his rain-spattered glasses. “You are not a man of God!” he spat, veins standing out on his neck. “You are a fucking lunatic.”

  When the priest raised his hand to point at the Bishop, his fingers glowed a dim, fiery blue.

  “Stay there.”

  Father Jack reached for Sophie’s hand and she took it. Together they jumped up into the Jeep. A pair of soldiers moved to stop them, one of them grabbing Sophie’s leg, but she shook him off and froze him in place with a furious glare.

  “Back off!” she barked.

  “Commander!” Jack called.

  When at last Commander Henning turned toward them, Sophie saw in his eyes that he had been completely aware of what was transpiring around him. The conflict among them had not escaped his notice, as she had assumed.

  “Go away, Father Devlin,” the Commander said, his eyes slitted against the storm, his commando uniform plastered to his body.

  Another soldier in helmet and mask—just as eerily faceless as the demons, she thought now—ran up beside the Jeep with an automatic rifle.

  “Commander!” the soldier shouted. And when Henning glanced down, the soldier passed the weapon up to him, along with a pair of ammunition clips. Commander Henning popped the clip out of the weapon and inserted one of the new ones.

  “Commander!” Father Jack shouted again.

  The man ignored him. He climbed out onto the hood of the Jeep. Sophie began to shake her head as she jumped onto the rear seat of the vehicle. Past Father Jack and Commander Henning, over the heads of the soldiers in the street, she could see the anarchy in the midst of the intersection. Whispers capered, dodging gunfire, moving swiftly toward the soldiers, their thin, armored forms elusive in the rain and the driving storm. Bullets cracked their shells, and their corpses littered the road. But there were so many. So many.

  And among them, a thing unlike any Sophie had ever seen. A lone figure, a dervish, shifting and changing. Swordsman, tiger, mist, wolf, raven, samurai . . . Kuromaku. Stray bullets struck him but wounded him not at all.

  Commander Henning raised the automatic rifle and took aim.

  “He’s on our side!” Father Jack roared, and he lunged forward.

  Henning cracked the butt of the weapon across the priest’s face and Father Jack fell backward, out of the Jeep. He struck his head on the pavement and was still. It was insane. The Commander was diverting his attention from the creatures that threatened to overwhelm his men to focus on Kuromaku. He barely looked at Sophie as he raised the weapon again.

  There was no thought in what she did next.

  Sophie leaped down from the Jeep and raced toward the line of soldiers from behind. They were firing indiscriminately now, and as she approached them, it felt as though her eardrums would burst. Then she had reached them and she shoved through a narrow space between two dark-clad soldiers and ran past them.

  Out into the street.

  The Whispers were all hissing, their tendril-tongues darting in front of their blank skull-shells as bullets tore them apart. But not all of them were dying. Some of them were close by and they started for her instantly, sensing her, tendrils pointing toward her as though to a magnet.

  They swarmed. Thick mucous rain pelted her. The wind buffeted her. Sophie raced toward the demons, peering through the storm and the Whispers for Kuromaku. In the midst of the intersection she stopped, threw back her head, and screamed.

  “Kuromaku! They’re going to kill you! Find cover!”

  Much of the gunfire had silenced. Staccato bursts echoed across buildings off to her right and out over the gorge to her left. Behind her there were only short ripples of fire.

  The Whispers closed in around her. They slowed, as if to savor her. She could hear the clack of their carapaces; there were so many of them around her that they blocked out that putrid orange light.

  Then Kuromaku was there. His sword whickered through the air and he hacked two of the demons to pieces, spattering her with ichor thick as the hellish rain. The others turned to defend themselves and he lashed into them.

  “No!” she cried. “Find cover! Find cover!”

  But Kuromaku did not listen. She ought to have known he would not. He had vowed to protect her and he was going to do precisely that. In trying to save Kuromaku, she had slowed him down, made him a better target.

  Sophie spun and stared back at the Jeep, saw Commander Henning take aim. Fresh gunfire ripped through the air, echoes dancing around the intersection. Bullets tore the ground. Kuromaku was hit in the shoulder, blood splashing from the wound, and he staggered.

  She saw the confusion in his eyes even as he slashed the katana out again, decapitating
another Whisper. Sophie shouted again for him to take cover, beckoning him toward her. Blinking in surprise, shaking his head as if disoriented, Kuromaku staggered toward her. Another bullet grazed his left leg and he spun in toward her, spinning the blade, clearing a circle around them.

  Sophie grabbed him and pulled herself close so that her own body was a shield between Kuromaku and Commander Henning’s bullets. If the soldiers were willing to kill her to get to him . . . oh, Lord, please help us, she thought.

  “Those bullets,” she said, “can they kill you? The Commander thinks they can.”

  Kuromaku’s features were grim, his eyes narrow and dark. “He’s right.”

  “Get us out of here, then! Without Antoinette and her boy, we can fly! Carry me. Please, Kuromaku, let’s go!”

  “I cannot,” he replied as the wind howled around them. “That is what the bullets do. The chemical in them, it takes away my power to change.”

  Sophie stared at him, lips parted in horror. Fresh tears slid down her face, and the Whispers began to close in.

  19

  The storm raged, churning the sky above the southern half of the city of Ronda. The wind was hot, and seeded with pure malice. Peter could feel the malevolence of the Tatterdemalion in the air as it whipped against him, but he would not let it slow him down. He needed more time—time to think and to plan, to study the Tatterdemalion and formulate a strategy—but he wasn’t going to get it.

  The time was now.

  Despite the magick that blazed around his hands, crackling between his fingers, he had never felt so frail, so human.

  After they had left the bullring behind, he and Keomany had seen very few of the Whispers, mostly lurking in the shadows inside the buildings they passed—restaurants and apartments and hotels. Peter tried not to think of the people inside those buildings, the human beings fighting for their lives with every passing second. Cries had issued from the upper floor of one building and Keomany had started off in that direction, but Peter had stopped her.