Amid the rubble of that massive bridge, they tumbled down into the Cleft of Ronda. As they fell, Father Jack felt a kind of peace envelop him that he had never known, a certainty of faith that he had always longed for but never found.
His time had come.
He did not flail as he fell, but gave himself up to God’s will.
With the ground rushing up toward him, the bridge collapsing all around him, Father Jack closed his eyes.
And he stopped falling. The sensation of plummeting ceased and he felt his hair standing up with static electricity. His eyes snapped open again and everything around him was a bright, glowing green for he was seeing it through the magickal field of energy with which Peter Octavian had caught him and Kuromaku and Sophie.
“Oh, Jesus, thank you,” Jack whispered, glancing up at the sky, where he saw the tear in the heavens where the light of the Spanish morning poured through, a hole in this Hell.
A moment later the descent began again, but more slowly this time. Peter brought them down to the rocky riverbank. The falcon flew down to join them and Allison took human form once more. Jack’s chest ached where he had been struck and a sharp pain confirmed for him that he had cracked a couple of ribs, but he was alive.
Relief washed through him, but along with it came awe. He stared at Peter and Keomany and marveled at the changes in them. The slim, delicately beautiful Asian woman had become a kind of goddess in her own right, at least at first glance. Golden light spilled and misted from her eyes, and in the midst of the sunshine that burned through into this Hell from another world, her hair blew in a breeze that was not part of this storm. Keomany was rooted to the place she stood, branches wound around her legs, moving slowly with a lover’s caress.
Then there was Peter. If Keomany had taken on the aspect of a goddess, Father Jack saw in Octavian another face, the grim visage of a dark god of war or some terrible archangel. Hair and clothing drenched, still he burned with a purplish glow that sent sparks snaking along his body, and in his hands he held a long, massive sword crafted from color and fire and light, from pure magick. Blood dripped from his hands.
“Jack,” Peter said, his voice somehow carrying through the storm. He smiled, but there was something unsettling in the expression. “Good to see you again.”
Then, holding his sorcerous blade in one hand, Peter stepped into the darkness, away from the gash Keomany had torn between worlds. The woman, Sophie, had been helping Kuromaku to stand but now the vampire stepped away from his human companion and despite his wounds he stood tall. Peter went to him and took Kuromaku into his arms and the two embraced as though they were brothers long apart.
“Peter,” Allison said, gaze darting around, on guard as the thunder boomed and rolled across the sky. Lightning still danced above but the storm seemed to have calmed some. “Your plan isn’t working. Can you get us out of here, back to our own world? Maybe from there we can—”
Octavian whirled on her, deep furrows in his brow. To Father Jack the mage looked somehow younger, his face thinner, his eyes brighter.
“Stop, Allison,” Peter growled. “If we can’t stop it here, there won’t be a home to return to.”
The vampire woman nodded. “All right. We stay and fight in Hell.”
Peter shook his head. “This isn’t Hell. Trust me.”
Father Jack turned his back on them and stared up at the storm, at the hideous tower of orange-black thunderclouds, and he was certain he saw a face there, a terrible visage gazing down at them and silently laughing.
“You’re right,” the priest told him. “We make our own Hells. This is just another demon with a fucking attitude problem.”
Peter could no longer feel the slashes in his hands. His skin burned with the power that coursed through him. Every bone and muscle seemed to ache and yet he felt as though he could have leveled the city with the magick that was in him.
Fury and despair warred in his heart, but he would not give in to either. He glanced at the others—at courageous Jack Devlin and fiercely loyal Allison, at his brother Kuromaku, who was much missed and now had been crippled, and at the beautiful yet ordinary human woman who stood by him.
Peter turned his back on them and stared at Keomany. The earthwitch raised her chin, feeling his attention upon her. Gold light seeped from her eyes and danced in her black silken hair. She smiled at him.
“No time like the present, Peter,” Keomany said. “You got its attention but it still isn’t coming. It’s afraid of you. I want to hurt the bastard. My parents’ ghosts won’t rest until I do.”
Peter nodded. “Let’s do it, then.” He turned to the others but his focus was mainly on Allison and Kuromaku, undead warriors, trusted friends. “Be ready for anything.”
He raised his hands and then opened them. Drops of blood hit the stones at his feet and a burst of light splashed from his palms; the sword he had conjured was gone. The mage stepped into the shaft of sunlight that still burned through the storm above, giving them a glimpse of the beautiful blue sky that ought to have hung above Ronda on this morning. He inhaled the scents of flowers carried on the breeze.
Keomany reached her hands out to him. The branches that curled around her legs seemed to grow higher up her thighs, holding on to her more tightly. She smiled and in that moment Peter felt he was gazing into the face of Gaea herself.
He took her hands, felt sharp pain as the cuts in his hands brushed her palms, his blood smearing her skin. This time when he began to summon the magick within him, he did not feel the resistance he had felt before. His sorcery might have been woven from chaos, and her earthcraft tapping the natural soul of the world, the order of things, but chaos and order had met before. They danced eternally, knew each other intimately.
Peter whispered ancient words and Keomany glanced over at him and nodded as though she understood. He thought perhaps she had. Gaea, after all, was far older than the beings that had first wielded the sorcery Peter had at his disposal.
“Let’s take the son of a bitch down,” Keomany said.
The mage smiled at the incongruity of her coarse words coming from the lips of a goddess of purity. Then he nodded again.
“By all means.”
Keomany bent toward him and kissed him gently on the lips. A spasm went through Peter and he threw his head back. Something had passed from her to him, a small piece of the spirit that filled her. He not only could taste and smell the air around him, but could feel what was beyond this small patch of sunlight, could sense the world. Through the connection they had made, he felt Gaea, felt the earth.
“What are you doing, my brother?” Kuromaku asked, his low voice soothing as always.
Peter glanced at him, there in the storm. “Taking it back,” he replied.
His eyes fluttered closed. He could feel the branches that had wrapped around Keomany’s legs and could hear the splash of water that had erupted out of the ground ten feet away, a kind of fountain that flowed down into the dry riverbed and off away out of the gorge. In his mind’s eye he could see the exact size and shape of the tear Keomany had ripped between dimensions.
From the two of them, earthwitch and mage, power emanated. They reached out together with the power that raged through the circuit they created and they pushed.
Peter felt it give way even before he heard the astonished gasp of Kuromaku’s friend and the appreciative mutterings of Father Jack and Allison. He opened his eyes and saw that they were all bathed in sunlight now, that shoots of green plant life had spurted up from between the rocks at their feet. Above, the swath of blue sky had opened wider, pushing the storm back.
Keomany’s fingers tightened around his hands and the pain in the gashes in his palms barely registered. He gave her his magick, helped to connect her to Gaea, and he relished the way it felt to touch the earth spirit. Keomany laughed happily and golden mist poured from her eyes. Another wave of power pulsed from the two of them and the rocks and trees trembled. The entire Cleft of Ronda was returned t
o the world in which it belonged. The ruins of the bridge were painted with morning light, showing the way portions of the arches still stood, jagged remnants of brilliant architecture. The breach stretched to include the ramparts to the south of the gorge and the state-owned hotel that sat upon the north wall of the Cleft.
With a roar, the river flowed again. Allison and Father Jack had to move farther up the banks to avoid being washed away as the water raced down to fill the bed of the river, splashing and rolling and at last returning to the course it had followed forever.
“You’re doing it!” Father Jack told them. “Thank the Lord, you’re doing it!”
Peter had known it was an almost impossible feat; that it was not merely Ronda, but Derby and Hidalgo and who knew how many other cities that had been gathered here in this Hell, stacked one beside the other. But he allowed himself the tiniest spark of hope.
His heart soared.
Together, he and Keomany pushed farther.
But this time, something pushed back. A crack of thunder so loud it shook the walls of the gorge and resounded across the sky. Keomany cried out in anguish and Peter felt a spike of pain that raced up his spine and seemed to stab into his brain. Blackness swam at the edges of his vision and he fell to his knees. Even as his hopes were dashed, though, something tugged at the back of his mind, a niggling little bit of observation that he could not avoid. When the Hellgod had pushed back, he had felt something, a connection not unlike the one Keomany had to Gaea, to her own world.
But this was a connection to somewhere else. The power of the Tatterdemalion was not of this dimension. Peter had suspected that the Hellgod was not of this tiny universe, but now he felt it, and it made a new kind of sense to him. The demon was a visitor here, just as they were.
We make our own Hells, Father Jack had said. And Peter now felt certain that the Tatterdemalion had made this one, created this pocket dimension in order to have a place to torment his conquests, to drag the cities of Earth and perpetrate his horrors upon its people.
Peter shook his head, clearing his vision, and realized that he was no longer holding Keomany’s hands.
“No, oh no please!” Sophie cried.
Peter saw Keomany, then. She had collapsed on the rocks at the riverside. She was moving, alive, and her eyes still glimmered with a faint golden glow. But all around them the storm raged in again, the blue patch torn in the sky above began to narrow and the sunlight to disappear, eaten by the wind and the rain and the power of a Hellgod that had at last deigned to pay attention to them.
The light contracted, the dimensional rip closed until all that remained was a shaft of light perhaps six feet around, just enough to outline Keomany there on the rocks. It was a spotlight upon the earthwitch as she sat up, buried her face in her hands, and began to weep.
“No,” Peter whispered to himself as the wind struck him again and the greasy rain struck his face, ran down his cheeks like oily tears.
“Whispers!” Allison shouted.
The mage glanced around to see that she was right. The southern wall of the gorge was dotted with the skeletal demons as they clambered down the sheer rock face. Whatever their instructions had been before, the Tatterdemalion must have changed his mind.
Father Jack came up beside Peter, standing tall, his hands held up, ready to cast a spell. “I guess you finally got its attention.”
Then, amid the wailing of the wind, he heard another sound, a scream carried to him on the storm, just the hint of it reaching his ears before being whipped away again. Peter glanced around, wondering where it had come from. The others were all preparing to fight off the Whispers that came quickly down the gorge like a hundred giant spiders. But that scream . . . Peter heard it again. A voice, crying out in terror . . . crying his name.
He looked up at the ruins of the bridge, and there he saw her, hanging above the jagged remains of the arches that had supported the structure, no more than two hundred feet in the air. She was nude, her body streaked with gashes Peter presumed had been made by the talons of Whispers. The wind swirled around her and she hung there, dangling in the breeze like a rag doll.
Peter whispered her name. And then he shouted it.
“Nikki!”
21
With a snarl Peter spread his arms wide and there was an audible pop as the air crackled with energy and a sphere of verdant light blossomed into existence around him. He felt the magick all through him now and his bones no longer hurt. It was as though his physical form had been transmuted into pure magick, as though the energy that swirled around him was just as much his flesh as the fingers that directed it.
An afterthought, he glanced at Allison. The vampire looked almost feral, crouched and ready for battle, her red hair slicked back on her scalp by the rain.
“Keep them safe,” he told her.
Then he rose up off the ground, energy sphere lifting him upward with dizzying speed. He shot toward the ruins of the bridge, aware of his surroundings—of the Whispers clambering down the cliffs into the gorge and the lightning and the storm that was ripping at the city—but focused now only on the fragile, pale, nude body of his lover hanging there above the jagged ruins.
In his mind’s eye he saw the face of Meaghan Gallagher, a woman he had loved who had sacrificed her life to save others. And he saw Allison, saw her as she had looked the first time they had met, and remembered the way she had gazed at Cody with love before he had been killed and her innocence had been ripped from her.
Not Nikki, he thought, teeth clenched so tightly his jaw hurt. Not Nikki.
He would rush to her, envelop her in the protective circle of his magick, and lower her gently to the ground. He would cover her nudity with his shirt and investigate the slashes in her skin, and he would hold her. Peter saw all of this in his mind and he knew that it had to be.
Once upon a time he had been immortal . . . fate had altered him, given him a second chance at humanity. At first he had embraced the opportunity, relished the idea that time would one day run out for him. But it had been centuries since he had walked among his fellow humans as just an ordinary man, since he had had to really live in the world. And so he had retreated to old patterns, keeping mostly to himself. He might have claimed immortality again at any time—had Allison or Kuromaku bring him into the Shadows once more—but instead he found himself trapped by his desire to be human, and his terror of what that meant.
No second chances. That was the truth of humanity. As an immortal he could live as he pleased and watch the world go by around him, years passing with the speed of a single dawn to dusk. But mortality meant he only had one chance, one journey. And this hard truth had wrought in him a fear of living that left him very much alone.
All of this went through his mind in the seconds it took for him to levitate himself to where Nikki hung naked and bleeding above the ruins. But as adrenaline rushed through him, he knew she would be all right, that she had to be, for despite his power he was just a man now, mortal, and he could not bear the thought of going on without her.
The wind raged around the sphere, battering against it, slowing Peter down. He was perhaps twenty feet from her when he saw the first rags whipping around in the storm. Strips of cloth, dishrags, clean laundry plucked from a clothesline somewhere.
Ice formed along his spine.
In the time it took him to travel ten feet, rags and laundry flew together, layered upon one another, to create the shape of a man. In an eyeblink the Tatterdemalion had arrived, his arms outlined beneath bath towels and a clutch of grease-stained mechanics’ rags, burning eyes cloaked in a hood fashioned from a pretty, floral-patterned sundress.
The Tatterdemalion held Nikki from behind, the two of them borne aloft on the winds. Its fingers were made of women’s panties, twisted into knots by the storm, and it clutched her throat.
“You were warned,” the Tatterdemalion said, its voice the whisper of the storm in Peter’s ears.
“Nikki,” he called to her. Throu
gh that sphere and the roar of the wind he could not have expected her to hear him. It took him a moment to dredge up from within him a spell that would have let his voice carry to her as though he were right beside her. A flash of irony went through him that such simple magick should be a challenge to him when sorcery of a more brutal nature was simplicity itself, but he ignored the thought.
This was not a time for subtle magicks.
He had no doubt that the Tatterdemalion would hear his voice, regardless of the storm. After all, it was the storm.
“Give her to me,” Peter demanded. Magickal flames licked up from his fingers and the sphere around him took on a reddish hue.
The wind blew the sundress-cloak across its face and Peter saw the outline of the Tatterdemalion’s features, ridged and gruesome, with a protruding lower jaw and a mouth that stretched Jack-o’-lantern wide. With the cotton over its face, he could see it grin.
“You have become quite a nuisance. And I did warn you. Foolish mage. I am still adding more of your world to this one, but I don’t have room for all of it. There will be cities left, entire nations, in fact. But someone will have to help rebuild; someone will have to hunt the demons that all of these breaches into your world have unleashed. Every hole I have made was torn through several other places as well . . . it will be years before you have catalogued all of the things that now run free in your world.
“They need you at home, Octavian.
“I give you a second opportunity. Take your friends,” it said, the voice of the wind now joined by a rumble of nearby thunder. The wind whipped the cloak away from its face again and there was only darkness beneath that hood now, not even those glowing eyes. Cloth fingers raised Nikki’s unconscious face up so that Peter could see her clearly. Her eyelids fluttered and she seemed about to wake.
The Gathering Dark Page 37
