by Irene Ferris
She made as if to argue but something on his face made her do his bidding even as her posture spoke of rebellious thoughts. Mathieu would have laughed were he not struggling to keep the darkness from killing them all. She turned around and said over her shoulder, “we’re not done yet. You owe me. I don’t know for what, but you owe me and I intend to collect. I won’t forget that and I’ll hold you to it.”
“Perhaps,” Mathieu answered. “And perhaps I would be pleased if you did. I’m not certain.”
Marcus watched her walk out of the circle of light then said firmly, “I think you should leave now. We won’t stop you,” Marcus could sense what the others couldn’t, Mathieu knew. He could feel the dark power writhing, could sense the foulness and see the filth on Mathieu’s soul. He wanted Mathieu gone and away.
“Yes, I should,” Mathieu answered. He turned to contemplate the stairs that led to the world above.
“Wait,” the golden skinned man—Eddie--said. “Wait. Marcus, don’t let him go yet. Don’t go.” He lurched to his feet and staggered across the room to grab Mathieu’s arm.
It took Mathieu everything he had to hold the power inside and not kill the man that instant. Maybe because the touch was merely warm—not of fire and ice mixed together in such a way as to peel the flesh from one’s bones, the touch of Gadreel and his ilk—he was able to hold the darkness inside.
He reeled away from the touch and wrapped his arms around his chest to keep his terror—and the death—from leaking out and killing everyone in the room. He sobbed as he spoke, “Don’t touch me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you; I don’t want to hurt anyone. Please don’t touch me. I’m sorry.”
Eddie lifted his hands, and Mathieu saw blisters were forming on his palms. Through gritted teeth, Eddie said, “I wasn’t going to hurt you; I just wanted to talk.”
Marcus yanked Eddie back by the shoulder and hissed at Mathieu, “no one is going to touch you or hurt you or make you do anything. Get out.”
No one wants to be touched by my corruption, Mathieu thought as he drew a shuddering breath and pieced together his shattered bits into a façade of calm. He glanced back toward where Yve—no, her name was Jenn now—Jenn was tending to her wounded and then climbed the stairs and threw open the door.
The weak sunlight blinded him and he blinked as he breathed in the free air. It was only then that he felt the pressure of all humanity around him, their fears and hatred and base emotions calling to the darkness inside, only then did he realize the enormity of his struggle.
God, why did you not let me die? He thought of the most remote place he knew,—the scent of the air, the feel of the earth under his feet, the silence--traced a sigil in the air and vanished from sight.
Chapter Four
“Can this thing go any faster?” Jennifer Leigh Bartlett-Hascomb leaned her forehead against the window and stared at the mountain below.
Her voice was tinny in her ears, but she could still hear her stress bleeding through despite the heavy headphones. She could also hear the helicopter pilot answer her in patient tones for what had to be the tenth time, “No, Ma’am. Too many updrafts, too many air currents here. If we go to fast or get to close, they’ll be sending a rescue party up for us instead of your friend.”
“He’s not our friend,” both Jenn and Marcus said at the same time. She raised her forehead from the glass to look at her husband of two years. He was still the all-American corn-fed quarterback who had slid a gold band on her finger two weeks after they’d almost died in a dank basement. If anything, marriage was making him even more handsome.
“Did you take your pill? I don’t want you getting altitude sickness,” Marcus said. She knew he was worried because he was twisting the ring on his finger. He had never taken it off, but he did worry at it at times like this. Not that there had ever really been a time like this before.
“I took it before we left. I already told you that. Did you take yours yet?” She didn’t want to tell him that her head was already pounding from the thin air. She’d always preferred the beach to the mountains, even if she burned to a crisp within the first thirty seconds of putting her feet on the sand. The snow covered peaks that loomed over everything in this part of the French Alps just made her feel cold. She didn’t like being cold. She hated being cold.
“I took mine. Remember to keep taking them as you go. And drink your water.” If she didn’t know better, she might think she’d married her mother. Except her mother didn’t care about her even half as much as he did.
“I will. You know how much I hate being sick. I hate being sick more than I hate being cold.” She pressed her head against the glass again. “Are you sure we can’t go faster?”
The pilot chuckled in their ears and Marcus put a hand on her knee to hold her back. She shook in fury. The pilot didn’t know why they were here or why they were in such a hurry to reach their “friend” who was stuck on some inaccessible cliff somewhere in the Parc National. He just knew he had some Americans with too much money and too little sense to shuttle up the mountain.
“We’re almost there. I can see the clearing from here, Ma’am. We’ll have you down in less than five minutes.”
Jenn pushed her forehead harder against the glass, trying to lean out and see their destination, and then she leaned forward to peer over the pilot’s shoulder.
Marcus focused on his wife’s face as he held the tablet in his hands close to his chest.
He didn’t like tablets or laptops or anything like computers for that matter. He was a man who preferred paper and ink to screens and pixels. There was something magical about the way words would unspool from the point of a pen that electronics could not even come close to duplicating.
Of course, he wouldn’t be able to even lift the volumes of notes in this small tablet if they were on paper, so he supposed he should be glad of the convenience of the thing. Hopefully he wouldn’t drop and break it before he could finish reading everything. He was death to machines.
He already knew some of what was on there, of course. He and Jenn had written a good bit about the being they’d first encountered in the basement of an abandoned London church two years ago. They’d spent ages digging through half-rotten records in an ancient monastery in a small French village looking for the device they’d glimpsed on his torn and bloody surcoat. What little they found there led them to an even older monastery in an even smaller village. They hadn’t been able to find much, but at least they had a name, Mathieu, and a place, Bourguel, along with some dates and part of a family tree.
Others had added to the files, and he’d been reading those entries all night. The Foundation had sent their best teams to that dank basement and scoured every square inch of that room for any clue about what they’d encountered in there. Cells around the world started looking for Mathieu the moment they were aware of his existence. They’d even had a few encounters, some more memorable than others.
Rome had been interesting because the group there hadn’t been warned to not touch him. They’d thought the close quarters of the isolated ancient chapel they found him in would be perfect to capture what looked to be a frightened young man deep in prayer. The moment they laid hands on him, they’d discovered their mistake.
No one was killed, but several of the group ended up with severe burns. But the thing that intrigued the report writer the most was that the supernatural being that almost killed them pled tearfully for forgiveness, and warned them to leave him alone before disappearing.
The message was the same in all the other encounters: Leave me alone. The observations about Mathieu were the same as well, that he was young, afraid, alone and unstable.
Marcus looked at his wife’s face as he remembered the conclusion drawn in the reports: Extremely dangerous, but not malevolent. Not friendly, but not hostile. Avoid direct contact. And yet, here they were.
After Rome, there’d been no sign of him until some Foundation members on hiking trip through an isolated ar
ea of the French Alps came across incredibly strong wards that physically repelled them. Of course they’d reported it and of course a group was sent up to find out what was happening. It wasn’t long before they realized that their quarry had gone to ground somewhere up there and he wasn’t about to let any of them in, and he wasn’t coming out no matter how much they pushed and worked at the wards.
Marcus leaned to look over the pilot’s shoulder at their destination. A gently sloping clearing with a small prefab building now had a half-circle of dome tents going up with a fire pit in the middle. Whatever Marcus thought of Hugh DeValle, the man worked fast. There would be a full encampment before the sun set, complete with all the comforts of home and a gourmet dinner to boot. This was France, after all.
The tents faced the mountains towering above with a drop-off of a few hundred feet beyond the fire pit. Normally his flatlander self would have been awed by the sheer beauty of the mountains and their endless vistas. Instead he was scanning the areas above the clearing to see anything that might indicate their quarry’s hiding place. Of course, there was nothing. The wards were that strong.
He turned back to his wife who had turned to again press her face against the window. “Are you sure I can’t go with you? I’m really not comfortable with this at all.”
She lifted her head from the window and a small part of him noticed the red spot she’d pressed onto her forehead. He knew better than to laugh, though. She’d kill him with her bare hands, especially now. She shook her head and answered, “You know that I’m only one that has any chance of getting through to him. I really don’t even know if I can do that, but this is Amanda’s only chance so I’m taking it.”
Marcus sighed. “I still don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it. I’m going, and that’s that.” She turned and put her head back up against the window.
The helicopter dropped, getting ready to land on the clearing in front of the cliff.
He leaned forward and put his hand on her knee. She looked back up. “Be safe. Come back to me. I love you. You’re my life. We’re meant to be together forever, remember?”
She smiled tightly and nodded. “I love you too. Don’t worry so much. I’m just going to be walking up a really big hill. How hard can that be?”
Chapter Five
“Damn him,” Jenn rasped. The altitude was killing her. The climb was killing her too. She’d barely had time after getting off the helicopter to get her feet shoved into hiking boots and her ass up the side of this mountain, but she’d be damned if she was going to quit now. Too much was riding on this.
The two mountaineers who’d gotten her halfway up had been left behind—they couldn’t make it past the wards. It wasn’t as though they’d been hurt in any way—that wasn’t his style. The trail just disappeared in front of their eyes. Where she saw a rocky goat track, they saw sheer cliffs and an impassable rock fall. The beauty of a well-drawn ward was that no one knew that it was there unless they were specifically looking for it.
She took a few more steps up the rocky slope and cursed. “Damn him. Couldn’t hide out in the lowlands where he was born, could he? No, it had to be on top of a freaking mountain.” She was done with muttering under her breath. There were no humans around for miles, and she really didn’t care if he heard her at this point.
Her head throbbed almost as much as her feet did. The feet, she could handle. She could power through the physical pain of blisters and muscle fatigue. The headache was probably altitude sickness, though. If she wasn’t careful, she’d drop dead in her tracks and all this effort would be for naught. She brought the drinking straw from her camelback to her mouth and drank deeply, then took one of the pills that they’d shoved in her pocket. They wouldn’t keep her from getting sick, but they’d lessen the effects so that she could get back down the mountain safely. She hoped.
“Damn him. They make great wine down there, too. I like wine.” This time she said it without much heat. After all, who could blame him? If she’d been in his position, she probably would have hidden away from the world too.
She shifted her pack and followed the track around a bend, climbing through the rocks and shrubs and occasional patches of wildflowers, higher up until she finally came to the slightly flatter place he called home.
It wasn’t much. There was a low rock wall stacked near the edge of the trail—it barely reached the middle of her thigh. It damn near killed her to swing first one leg and then the other up and over it, though.
A low building made from stone joined seamlessly into the cliff that loomed above. If she hadn’t known what to look for, she might have missed it since it seemed to have grown out from the side of the mountain.
A carved wooden door hung on leather hinges in the middle of the building, a simple cross incised deep into the wood. There was also a chimney on one side, but no smoke rose out of it.
Jenn sighed. “Damn him. I really could use some of that fucking wine right about now.” She was so very cold and so very tired. It would have been nice to have a fire. She lowered herself to rest on the wall, putting her pack on the ground next to her. “Damn him.” Damn altitude. Damn him again for making her come all this way. Damn that creature for making in necessary for her to come to him and beg for help. Damn this mountain for being this cold in the middle of summer. Damn everything and everyone and the horse they rode in on could just go fuck off.
Before the cold could settle into her bones and stiffen her limbs, she struggled to her feet and hobbled to the door, dragging the now too heavy to lift pack behind her. She stood there and looked around before proceeding. The air sparkled. The sky was vividly blue, the stones were sharply grey. It was probably the lack of oxygen to her brain, but this might be the most beautiful place she’d ever seen.
The door opened easily, dragging across the floor in a groove that had been scraped down to rock.
She paused when she saw what was inside the small building. It certainly wasn’t what she’d expected.
It was a chapel. A small, bare, empty chapel but still a chapel. A simple wooden cross hung against the far wall, worked to seem as if it sprouted from the side of the mountain. The lines were clean and simple, but the wood shone in the shafts of sunlight that hit it from high slit windows that she’d not been able to see from outside.
The wood had been polished until it gleamed, she noted with a distant part of her brain. The rest of her noticed the two small benches that seemed to fill the rest of the small building. They were just as well made and cared for as the cross.
“I should have known that they’d send you when no one else could get through.” The voice was as she remembered, low and soft, with an accent that was almost French but not quite. He’d appeared somehow by her left elbow but she was too tired to jump or scream or even wonder how he’d done that. She just sighed as he closed the door behind her.
“Why do you say that?” It took what little energy she had left to ask that question as he gently took the pack by the strap furthest from her hands and put it in the corner.
“Because you’re the only one who I would ever allow past my wards and they’re smart enough to realize that.” He indicated a bench for her to sit and rest. She gladly limped over, noting how he moved away from her, keeping distance between them in the tiny room.
“Are you cold?” He asked solicitously from the far side of the room, which wasn’t so very far at all, maybe eight or ten feet at most.
“As a matter of fact, I’m freezing. I don’t think I’ll ever feel my toes again. Well, except for the blisters. Maybe.” She turned to look at him closely for the first time. He was unchanged from the basement in London: hair dark and straight with the slightest curl at the ends, his eyes brown with long lashes that grazed his cheeks. His skin was smooth and lightly olive. The mustache and goatee were small, neatly trimmed but also thin as if he were too young to grow anything more substantial. He’d dressed in baggy clothes of dark wool, somber colors in a fruitless a
ttempt to disguise the fact that he was slender but still well-muscled. The overall effect was as before: he was painfully beautiful to human eyes.
He simply nodded and hurried to a small hearth concealed in the corner of the room near her. As he struck flint onto kindling, he spoke quietly. “I apologize. I cannot feel the cold as you do.” He blew the sparks into a flame and then piled smaller pieces of wood to get a fire going. “I somehow think the monks at the Abbey would tell me that it was the fires of Hell keeping me warm. They always thought I was bound there anyway, what with all my...” He faded into an awkward silence while he fiddled with the fire.
The small room grew warm quickly and Jenn unlaced her boots, peeled off the socks and inspected her feet. She shook her head at the damage, sighed and stretched her legs in the direction of the hearth.
“Why are you here?” He asked from where he’d propped himself up against the wall in the farthest corner of the room.
“We--I need your help. Something horrible has happened and you’re the only one who can help.” She wriggled her toes and put her socks back on with some regret.
“And why would I want to help any of you? The last time we met you tried to enslave me. Your people have been poking and prodding at the edges of my wards for months. I’m amazed you would even think to come here and ask anything of me.”
“Things have changed. I admit that we got off on the wrong foot, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t work together.”
“Doesn’t it?” He crooked an eyebrow at her. “I still feel no overwhelming urge to do anything to help you or your people, no matter what has changed.”
“I think I can convince you.” She glanced around the empty church. “Or at least I can once I power down a Clif Bar and some water so my head will stop throbbing. I can do that in the corner. I wouldn’t want to eat where you pray.”
He smiled at her, but the smile was sad and bitter. She could see it clearly in the firelight. “I do not pray anymore. God does not listen to creatures like me.”
