Together, they watched as a pair of wraiths grabbed Norm Dunne and flew him upward. He ascended toward his goddess and she imagined him in ecstasy. He held the iron chest in front of him. The chanting rose to even greater volume and the rain tapered slightly, as if Navalica’s focus on the chest had slowed it.
Dunne held the chest toward her, this thing that she needed so that she could never be harmed again, never be thwarted, never be caged.
Navalica took the iron box from him, and then gestured toward the wraiths, who backed up several steps and let Norman Dunne plummet to an abrupt death in the town square below.
Amber flinched in horror, remembering the man’s amiable nature, his pride in his work, and his gruff love for his son. I’m sorry, Tommy, she thought.
As Navalica opened the chest . . .
THE goddess would destroy the traitors’ magic—their little binding spells and ritual oils. Navalica smiled, suffused with a power that she had only dreamed about in her long imprisonment, sometimes remembering while she slept what she really was, only to have the dream flit away upon waking. She hated them all for what they had made her.
Weak.
But the sigils for the ritual tattoos would be lost to history once the scrolls where they had written down the ritual were destroyed. The ingredients for the dyes, the measurements of the oils needed to brew the draught that had protected them from her . . . they would never be used again.
She would be worshipped. She would be fed. Forever.
Navalica laughed, full of such joy as she had never known. She opened the iron box, and her joy faltered. Her eyes narrowed. What was this? Where were the elements of the ritual? Where were the scrolls? Inside the chest was only darkness.
No. The air inside that box moved. Navalica turned it so that it would catch the light of her burning hair, and she saw the mist swirling inside. She did not understand.
And then the mist rushed out at her, taking shape . . . taking flesh . . . and she saw it had a face. Red hair, a beautiful girl, glittering fangs . . . a vampire. She stank of old blood and bitter oils and dead flowers. Her face and arms were a labyrinth of sigils, tattooed into her skin with ancient dyes made from Chaldean earth. Navalica knew those sigils; they spoke of a magic long forgotten, a sorcery that had been old when she had first set foot upon the soil of this plane.
Navalica screamed with a terrible fury. She reached for the vampire but her hands could not touch the bitch; the sigils and oils had seen to that. The chaos storm was her heart, the mad churning of her mind, and a dozen bolts of lightning lanced down and struck the vampire girl, who did not flinch away, but grabbed hold of Navalica’s head, her fiery hair burning the bitch’s hand.
Eye to eye, Navalica stared at her, full of hate and rage.
She grunted, and looked down just in time to see the vampire’s fist dragging her bright blue heart out through the ruin of her chest.
No! she thought. Not again!
The goddess fell to her knees as the vampire flew away. The flesh of her chest knitted itself quickly, but already she felt the storm begin to wane, so much of her strength lost to her. But she was still strong enough to kill the vampire, she thought. To destroy her.
With a gesture, she had the attention of her Reapers. She pointed, and they swarmed, filling the sky, blotting out the storm for a moment, and then flying in pursuit of the vampire.
Weakened, but drawing strength from her rage and the chaos she herself had created, she tried to stand and failed. The Reapers would bring her more of the bright, sweet human sustenance that had sped her awakening, but without her heart, the storm would slowly die. The chaos would fade.
She could not allow it. The vampire could not be allowed to complete the ritual.
Again she struggled to stand, staggering to her feet, her heel bumping something. Metal scraped against the stone of the clock tower’s ledge. Navalica looked down and saw the iron box still there, left behind in the vampire’s haste, and she began to laugh.
Fool. The vampire had weakened her, had taken her heart, but she could not complete the ritual without something within which to trap it. To cage Navalica’s essence.
The goddess laughed, glancing around, and then she saw them, just outside the town square—the vampire and three others, one of them the sorcerer she thought she had already killed. These were the forces arrayed against her?
She stepped off the clock tower, riding the wind, mind awhirl with murder.
These four were nothing.
MILES opened his eyes. He felt strangely at ease, cradled in a warm softness that gently rocked him. Someone played piano in a room nearby, and he realized that he knew the song, but only when the voice began to sing in lovely, melodic French, did he recognize the voice as his mother’s. He went completely still, not even breathing, listening with a melancholy heart that brought the sting of tears to his eyes.
In the quiet between notes, the rest between one line and the next, he heard the silence inside his chest. It occurred to him that he had not yet started to breathe again, and that he felt no particular yearning to do so.
Sitting up, he found himself in bed—his own bed, in his home, where he had grown up, where his mother had taken care of him and where he, eventually, had taken care of her. A golden glow suffused the room, a persuasive light that might have been twilight or the last moment before dawn. The music made him ache with longing, but he felt it only the way he had felt the keenest emotions all his life.
“Mother,” he said, testing his voice in the room. He could hear it inside his head, but it made no echo, did nothing to fill the empty corners.
He slid off the bed and frowned, for he did not hear the shush of his skin against the sheets. A trickle of icy dread ran down his spine and made him shiver. He swallowed hard, but thought the feeling might only be the memory of swallowing. The weight of dread upon his shoulders was terrible, but he forced himself to reach out and touch the sheets. He smiled, for he could feel their softness, but when he tried to press down on the fabric, to muss the sheets, to grab a snatch of the fabric in his fist, his fingers passed through as if the bed were an illusion.
Miles bit his lip, took a long, shuddering breath, and stared at his hand. He closed his eyes and hung his head and let himself relax into utter stillness. A stillness only possible for the dead.
He remembered now. The red-haired vampire. Her black eyes with the tiny red pinpricks for irises. Her teeth like razors in his throat. Pain and sorrow, as he felt life leave him. And hope, as he gazed at Keomany as she tried to use her elemental magic to remove the taint of chaos upon his soul, so that he could go to his natural rest.
The singing in the other room ceased abruptly, the last piano notes lingering in the air. He opened his eyes and his breath caught in his chest. No breath, he thought. No chest. But he could still feel. His body no longer had the weight it once had, but the memory of its uses stayed with him like that last note of music hanging in the air.
The house moaned, buffeted by the storm. His surroundings had changed. Whatever ethereal place he’d been in when he first awoke to his new awareness, he had moved from there and back into the world of the living. The rain still beat on the windows, blue lightning arcing outside, lighting up the room, turning his outstretched hand into even more of a phantom limb. Transparent blue light washed right through him.
It isn’t over, he thought. The evil is still here.
“Miles?” a voice said, from the doorway.
Hope fluttering in his ghost heart, he turned to see his mother standing in the hall outside his room. For a moment he thought Tim McConville might be with her, but whatever message Tim’s ghost had been trying to send him earlier, it must have been delivered. Or perhaps it no longer mattered, now that Miles himself was dead.
“Ma,” he said.
He hurried to her, and if his feet did not exactly touch the floor, they certainly felt like they had. His mother’s ghost embraced him, and he felt her arms around him, and he to
ok solace from the knowledge that they were together.
After several long minutes, he asked the only question that seemed to mean anything to him.
“What now?”
His mother stepped back and looked up at him. He had been taller than her since the year he turned twelve, and she had joked about him being able to eat beans off her head, whatever that meant. It had always made him laugh.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think . . . I think we wait here until we’re not scared anymore.”
Scared. Miles felt a painful hollow in his gut. Yes, he was scared. Frightened of what came next. He wondered if that was why Tim McConville had come to see him all those times, searching for someone to tell him not to be afraid . . . or that it was all right to be afraid. He wondered if the little boy who had never gotten to grow up was still afraid, or if he’d been able to finally put his fear to rest.
“We’ll be all right,” he told his mother.
She smiled. “I know, sweetheart. We have a piano.”
Miles laughed, thinking of all of the songs she had taught him. Her students at the high school had called their French and music teacher Mrs. Varick, but in her heart she had never stopped being Toni Pelletier, whose parents had come to America from Saint Paul de Vence, in France. She had been a good mother.
“That’s all we need now, is it?” he asked. “Music?”
His mother smiled and hugged him again. “It’s all we ever needed.”
Miles smiled, still confused and afraid but a little less of both. He kissed his mother’s hair. He opened his mouth to make a joke about eating beans off the top of her head, but the joke never came out.
A sharp pain stabbed him in the gut. He grunted, clutching at his abdomen as he stepped back from her.
“Miles, what is it, darling?” His mother’s fear pervaded the room.
Another pain twisted inside him and he shook his head. Was this supposed to happen? He knew this pain, this pang.
“I don’t . . .” he began, but then he faltered and looked at her and a fresh pang stabbed at him. A chilling rush of horror swept through him.
“Are you . . . Mom, are you hungry?” he asked.
OCTAVIAN burned with embarrassment and regret. He could still feel Keomany’s mouth and hands on his skin, and he hated Navalica for the chaos that had undone them both and forever stained their friendship.
He wiped the searing chaos rain out of his eyes and stared, trying to make sense of the figure flying toward him through the storm. The wind screamed in his ears, merging with the shriek of Navalica’s rage that filled the square, but Octavian ignored it all. What flew toward him might have been an angel, if he thought such things still existed in this world. Enormous eagle wings spread and caught the air, dipped and sliced the current, and she soared directly toward him.
“That’s new!” Keomany called, as she and Amber ran up beside him.
Octavian stared at the red-haired angel that dove toward them, and he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “It’s very, very old.”
In his time as a vampire, with the ability to alter his shape on a molecular level, he had never taken this form. He had seen it only a handful of times, a shadow not changing its fundamental flesh, but adding to it. It took more than imagination; it took irreverence, and righteousness and a supreme effort of will to tap into the structure of the universe and steal some of its substance.
Charlotte alighted beside him, wings furling toward her back and diminishing to nothing, like the claws of a cat returning to their sheaths. With the tattoos all over her flesh, she had a fierce glory about her, like some ancient barbarian queen. In her hands she held the dripping, pulsing, pustulent indigo heart of the goddess of chaos.
“How did you do that?” Octavian demanded.
“I did what you wanted!” Charlotte roared over the storm.
“Not that!” he snapped.
Amber darted into the air in front of them, hanging there five feet off the pavement, though the rain still touched her skin, still beaded on her new flesh.
“Where’s the chest?” she demanded, glaring at Charlotte. “You left it there!”
Charlotte snarled at her. “I got her fucking heart and I’m back here alive. I didn’t see you up there!”
Keomany shouted, pointing, and Octavian looked up at the clock tower in time to see Navalica step off the edge, descending toward the square. Charlotte had bought them precious seconds, and they were squandering them. How a rogue vampire girl with little experience shapeshifting beyond the sinister forms—bat, rat, wolf—could manifest angel wings . . . that would have to wait.
“Give me the heart,” Octavian snapped.
Charlotte hesitated, and he saw a flicker of something dark in her eyes, as though she might have some other plan for the goddess’s heart, but then she handed it over. Were you going to try to eat it? he thought, but did not say. More questions for another day.
Rage bristled inside him. He opened his arms wide, summoning a fierce magic from within him. His chest had begun to heal from the wounds Amber had slashed there, but not completely, and he smeared his palms with his own blood, flicked his fingers so that droplets flew into the air, and then spoke a single word that froze the blood and the air around it. Muttering a short enchantment, a spell of the ancient Hittites, lost to time but not to him, he reached out to grab the frozen droplets of blood and a silver light burst from both of his palms and blossomed into a cage of light around those blood drops.
“Now,” he said, thrusting the cage-sphere toward Charlotte. “Put it inside.”
Fearless, she did not hesitate, thrusting both of her hands into the silver light and placing the heart within. She pulled her hands out and turned to face the first wave of Navalica’s wraiths, which dropped down out of the sky to attack them.
“Bring it, bitches!” Charlotte screamed, and a fresh set of wings burst from her back. These were not angel wings, however. Webbed, leathery things, they belonged on a dragon, or a demon.
She launched herself into the air, slashing at two of the wraiths, and the battle was joined.
Octavian looked toward the square and saw people scurrying out of the way as Navalica stalked toward them. Blue lightning arced from the sky, striking her again and again. Wraiths dipped down to her out of the storm, bringing squirming blobs of color, bits of human joy, the stolen chaos of human hearts, to replenish her.
“Here!” he shouted, turning to Keomany and Amber.
He thrust the Hittite soul cage out to Keomany, who flinched away.
“I don’t do that kind of magic!” she insisted.
“You’re a witch, elemental or not,” Octavian shouted, wiping the rain again from his face. “All you have to do is hold on to it until we get the high priests’ damn box back. You know the feel of magic. You can do it!”
Hands shaking, Keomany took it.
Octavian turned to Amber. “Prep her for the spell, like we planned. Keep the Reapers off her.”
Then he looked up at the savage air war taking place above him, Charlotte and the wraiths clawing each other to shreds.
“Charlotte!”
The vampire spun in midair, red hair spilling wetly across her face, slick with rain.
“Go back and get that chest!” he roared.
She sneered and shot him the finger, but she beat those demon wings and flew off, speeding toward the clock tower again. Some of the wraiths gave chase, but others dove toward Octavian, Keomany, and Amber.
Teeth gritted, Octavian summoned arcane fire and burned them out of the sky.
Amber let out a cry. He turned toward her and saw the confusion and regret in her eyes.
“They’re not your family anymore,” he told her. “Now get Keomany ready. And keep her alive.”
Amber nodded, and Octavian turned to see Navalica striding toward him, arrogant in her rage. Without her heart, her magic had weakened. Her control of the storm would falter. She would lose control. But she was a
goddess of chaos and darkness and she had waited thousands of years to taste freedom and human pain again. She would never surrender.
Octavian ran toward her, summoning magic learned in Hell, sorcery that had no place in this world. His hair whipped around him as that sorcerous energy crackled, burning away the chaos rain before it could touch him, raw power with which he could have slain angels. He willed it to take shape, holding his hands in front of him, and forged the blazing golden aura around him into a single blade, a sword of Hell’s fire.
Navalica paused, cocked her head, and laughed, the blue fire of her hair falling around her face. Lightning struck the pavement around her, cracking the street open. Steam shot up from the sewers below.
“Little magician, you inconvenience me,” the goddess said.
“No,” Octavian replied. “I bring you order.”
Navalica narrowed her eyes with hatred, and in that moment, he saw her uncertainty. Without her heart, she weakened. He knew, then, that he could defeat her.
If she didn’t kill him first.
ARE you hungry? Miles had asked his mother.
Her mystified expression was all the answer he required. That, and the way his hunger had begun to focus on his mother, on the pale expanse of her throat. No blood ran beneath that ethereal skin. Like him, she had no substance except for spirit. And yet as the hunger gnawed at him, he knew that she wasn’t like him at all.
“This can’t be,” he said, backing away, ghost tears sliding from his phantom eyes.
Were his teeth sharper now? He ran his tongue over them, all of it only a manifestation of his spirit, nothing but a ghost, nothing that should be able to be altered on such a level. What were ghosts? Spirits? Ectoplasm? Energy?
This is impossible, he thought.
But wasn’t that the true terror of chaos magic, that it made the impossible possible? His body had been tainted by Navalica’s chaos, and then savaged by a vampire. He had been impaled on the table, and those wooden shafts had thrust up through her body as well, and her blood had run down into his wounds, inside him . . . and then Keomany had touched him with her magic, made certain that his soul maintained contact with the earthly plane.
Waking Nightmares Page 31
