by Peter Nealen
“I'll explain later,” I told them. “For now, just know that most of us don't exactly get along with the Sisters of St. Peter the Exorcist.”
“Nobody gets along with them,” Charlie muttered. Oh, I could only imagine just how much the Sisters and Charlie would just love each other.
“Inter-order rivalries and clashes aside,” the Abbot said sternly, “you will need all the help you can get. The Walker is a Power. Our Friars can hold it once it is captured, but it will not be corralled without a fight. Both you and the Sisters will have to work together if you are to succeed. And remember, pride, after all, is a sin, and it will weaken you spiritually as much as it will weaken you tactically.” He rose shakily to leave. “I will have Brother Barnabas and two others ready to leave with you within the hour.”
At the door, he paused and turned back for a moment. “One other thing,” he said. “Though I am sure that Brother Barnabas will reiterate it, do try to draw The Walker as far from habitation as you can. Fewer people will get hurt that way.”
“Not to mention the fact that the townspeople probably won't enjoy having the middle of their town turned into a guarded mausoleum for ancient evil,” Father Ignacio commented.
“Indeed.” The Abbot gave us the ghost of a smile, then started down the steps.
Brother Barnabas was built like a tank. He must have needed to get all his habits custom-made, because he was nearly as wide as he was tall. He only came up to about my chin, but he probably weighed almost as much as Tall Bear, if not more, and it didn't look like much of it was fat, either. A thick spade of a brown beard covered his chest nearly to his silver crucifix. He was waiting for us by the gate, his arms folded over his tabard, with two more brothers standing beside him. One, a look of vague disappointment on his face, was the blond, scraggly-bearded porter. He looked more annoyed that our problem had indeed been of importance to his order than anything else. One would think he'd be a little bit apprehensive at going up against an ancient, evil Power of the Otherworld, but he just looked like he was mad that his routine had been disrupted. The third was a slight young man, clean-shaven and brown haired, who stepped out to greet us with a smile, introducing himself as Brother Ezekiel. He was fresh-faced and cheerful, without the worn, tired look of the other two. He must have been a new recruit.
Brother Barnabas simply waved a hand out the gate. “Lead on, brothers,” he said, in a surprisingly soft voice. “You know the way; I haven't been off this mountain in five years.” Father Ignacio simply nodded and led the way. The rest of us fell in behind him, with the Friars taking up their places in the middle of the file. We carefully began picking our way back down the mountain.
Toward the nightmare ahead.
Chapter 15
We could see the smoke rising from Lone Hill even before we saw the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles that were blocking the road.
“I guess that answers that question,” Tall Bear said grimly from the back seat. Eryn and I just nodded, tight-lipped. There were fire engines, sheriff's department vehicles, Highway Patrol vehicles, ambulances...you name it, it was on the road outside of Lone Hill. And what little we could see of the town spoke volumes as to why.
The place was a smoking ruin. The fight between The Walker and its unknown antagonist appeared to be escalating. The nearest buildings we could see were nothing but charred skeletons, their frames almost all that remained. Some flames still rose in the background, but most of the town just seemed to be smoldering. No trees, grass, or any other life appeared to have survived. It was all blackened, twisted, and dead. I thought I even saw a couple of blackened skeletons that might once have been human lying in the street, but there was so much wreckage that it was hard to tell from a distance.
We stopped well short of the roadblock. Father Ignacio pulled his Harley up next to my truck. I rolled the window down and looked down at him.
“Do we want to go in and see just what happened?” I asked, having to shout to be heard over the noise of both my truck and his bike.
He was studying the scene carefully, and didn't answer for a moment. Then he shook his head.
“I think we can be fairly certain what happened,” he said. “As much as I'd like to go in and try to help anyone who survived, there are a lot more people who are going to end up dead as long as this rampage keeps going. If we get involved with the authorities, the next town will be a wasteland to rival this one by the time we get moving again.”
“Agreed,” I said, though my conscience pricked at me a little. Yeah, I know you can't save everybody. That's a fact that I've been confronted with too many times to count, especially since joining the Order. Some people you can't get to fast enough, some people just don't want to be saved, and some people you've got to let go in order to stop something worse from happening. It never feels right, but this life is a hard one.
Unfortunately, there weren't many side roads in that part of the country. We'd have to turn around and head back north to get to another route to Bartram that didn't involve going through Lone Hill. It was going to give The Walker and its quarry a bit more of a head start, but there wasn't any choice in the matter. It would still be less of a delay than Lone Hill would present.
The detour to go around Lone Hill wasn't the only delay. We ran into the Sisters on their way south.
They were driving a fifteen-pack van, painted white with their emblem, a three-foot red and gold cross with a sword behind it, emblazoned on the doors. They were subtle, the Sisters.
Of course, they didn't notice us, and kept moving down the road toward Lone Hill. Father waved at the rest of us to keep going, pulled his bike around in a U-turn, and roared after them. I kept driving toward the nearest turnoff, confident that Father would run them down and get them pointed in the right direction.
I didn't particularly want to have to deal with them any more than I absolutely had to, anyway. Any delay in that meeting was welcome. The urgency of our mission aside, I found myself hoping that Father took his time.
The turnoff was just a stretch of gravel on the side of the road, several miles from anything but a single private road that led off into the hills and disappeared. There was nothing else around us but sagebrush and bunchgrass. Doors slammed loudly in the quiet, and we gathered around my truck to wait.
“Why does everybody look like they're either mad as hell, or bracing themselves for a visit from their mother-in-law?” Eryn asked.
“You'll see in a minute,” Charlie said. “Let me put it this way. Take the meanest, most bitter, 'smack your hand with a yardstick for being left-handed' nuns you ever heard of. Then imagine the ones who got kicked out of that convent for being too hardcore.”
Eryn raised her eyebrows and looked at me. I just glowered down the road. This was not going to be fun.
The van came into view about five minutes later, following Father's bike. It crunched to a stop right at the end of the turnout, and the engine was switched off. For several moments, we just watched the vehicle, waiting.
Then the side door slid open and the Sisters got out.
They were all dressed identically, though their habit was a bit more utilitarian than most orders'. They all wore riding skirts and lace-up work boots, dark vests and long-sleeved blouses. They wore short veils and each one was carrying a pistol on her hip as well as the red-and-gold cross and sword medallion on a chain around her neck.
The one who led them, at the head of a neat wedge as if they were advancing on the enemy, was a Sister I'd met before. Sister Margritte was in her late forties, looked sixty, and looked at everyone and everything around her with the same pinched, bitter look of disapproval. The women behind her were instantly more likable by virtue of their expressions being merely blank, if a bit arch.
Sister Margritte halted about six paces away from us and stood there for a moment, her arms crossed in front of her, eyeing us like a principal staring down a bunch of young ruffians caught fighting on the playground.
Now, I can
imagine how it would have looked to an outsider seeing this little meeting. On the one side, you had ten neat, prim, armed nuns, in clean, well-turned out habits, in front of a van that was evidently well cared for and clean. On the other side, you had us. None of us were dressed alike, we all looked scruffy and dangerous...Father Ignacio looked like a Mexican outlaw biker with a Roman collar, for crying out loud. Charlie was his usual hairy, outlandish self, having donned mirrored aviator sunglasses. Ian wasn't even looking at them, doing his usual thousand-yard stare out over the sagebrush. Tyrese was leaning against the trunk of his car, studying his boots. Tall Bear just looked confused, and the Ramirez twins were having a muttered conversation in Spanish. Blake hadn't even gotten out of the truck. I usually only shave every week or so, and I was overdue. I didn't remember at that point when my last haircut had been. We were all filthy from fighting, hiking, and traveling.
“Well,” Sister Margritte finally said, her voice as high-pitched and grating as I remembered it, “is there actually anyone in charge of this rabble so that we can get down to business?”
Eryn's mouth dropped open a little. I don't think she had quite processed what we'd told her yet. Or she had, but had underestimated just how snooty the Sisters could be. Just wait, I thought. Things are going to get so much better.
“It's good to see you, too, Sister,” Father growled. “Have you got that out of your system?”
Her lip curled a little bit more, but she nodded curtly. “What sort of mess have you gotten into now?” she asked, managing to give the impression that she thought the current situation was entirely our fault, which I was sure she did. “Give me all the details, and be quick, so we can get to work cleaning this up.”
Father gave her the rundown, while the rest of us just kind of watched, listened, and tried not to glare too much. The rest of the Sisters were listening attentively, with expressions ranging from studied disapproval—probably trying to emulate Sister Margritte as much as possible—to poorly disguised nervousness. We'd all lived through it, so we kind of tuned it out, while trying to suppress the wrath that her comments had awakened.
When Father finished, Sister Margritte just looked at him with a single raised eyebrow. “The Walker on the Hills?” she said, the same note of disbelief in her voice. “That old fairy-tale again? I'm rather surprised at you all.” So now she was going to lecture us like a bunch of truant schoolboys. “It's bad enough that you botched a job so badly you had to call for help, but to make up such an outlandish story...”
Eryn's face had gone white, her lips compressed into a thin line, and if she could have shot fire from her eyes and incinerated Sister Margritte at that moment, I'm sure she would have. Gentle she might be most of the time, but my wife is still a redhead, and it is never wise to get a redhead mad.
Before she could say anything, though, Tall Bear loudly asked, “Do we really need these harpies' help?”
“I was about to ask the same question,” the porter, whose name was Brother Milo, suddenly said. “I know the Abbot said that we would need them, but could we possibly put that down to fatigue and some human frailty?” As much as he had irritated me up on the mountain, I suddenly felt a certain liking for Brother Milo. Still, I couldn't, if I was being rational, deny that the Abbot had been right. The Walker was too big for us to take on our own. But this little alliance of necessity was about to fall apart before we had even gotten started.
“You know,” Eryn said, her voice cutting across any response Sister Margritte might have been about to make, “I initially thought that maybe my husband and his fellow Hunters were being a bit harsh when they talked about the Sisters. They can be that way, you know. But now I can see that they were understating the case, if anything.” She folded her arms and eyed Sister Margritte with an expression that dared her to interrupt. “Are you really that arrogant? Are you really so full of yourselves that you'd pass judgment on a situation you don't know the first thing about, just because you don't particularly like us? When my husband and the rest of these guys objected to bringing you on board, the Abbot pointed out that pride is a great sin. But maybe their objection wasn't informed by their own pride, but rather by what they knew about yours.” She glared around at the sisters. I noticed that Sister Margritte was the only one who was meeting her gaze anymore. The rest were pointedly trying to find somewhere else to look. I guess sometimes having the mirror held up in front of your face isn't terribly pleasant. “People are dead,” she continued. “A lot of people are dead. Others will never be the same. I watched people try to end their own lives by any means they could after what they had been through in Ophir. I...” she faltered for a second, horror briefly making her face a mask, tears glittering in her eyes. “I had to kill people who didn't know what they were doing, people who didn't have the strength or the defenses to keep them from being used by something that threw them at us like zombie kamikazes.” Her gaze sharpened again, as she glared at Sister Margritte. “And you have the gall to come here and call us liars because you think you're so much more righteous than we are. Why? Because you've got pretty habits and more money? So what if we're scruffy? We've been through more in the last week than I expect you've seen in the last year. So either get off your high horse, listen to what we've got to say, and help, or get out of here and leave us alone. As it is, you'd just be a liability.”
I couldn't help but feel proud. This was the woman who had deigned to marry me. And she'd just put the Sisters in their place in a way that I couldn't have hoped to do. My version would have been a lot louder, cruder, and angrier, and really wouldn't have gotten us anywhere.
Sister Margritte was staring at Eryn with a sort of shock. I doubt anyone had dared to talk to her that way in a long, long time. She started to open her mouth to speak, but the sister behind her, an actually rather attractive young woman, stepped forward quickly. “I'm sorry, dear,” she said to Eryn, “we can all sometimes jump to certain conclusions.” Tyrese snorted from behind me. “We got started off wrong.” She held out her hand. “I'm Sister Emilia.” She glanced at Sister Margritte, who was now keeping her face studiously neutral, though her lips were still compressed into a thin line. “Can we start over? Let's start at the beginning, and then we can plan from there.”
Eryn smiled suddenly and took Sister Emilia's hand. “Of course,” she said, her anger fading away. She's very good at not holding grudges. It's something I still need to work at. She turned back toward the truck. “Can we get Blake to come out here and tell his story again?”
In fits and starts, with the rest of us filling in parts that the others hadn't seen, the whole mess got laid out. Sister Margritte maintained her expression of arch skepticism, but apparently knew better than to express it further after the first time she raised her eyebrow in disbelief, only to be challenged to go back and talk to the emergency personnel who were still handling the aftermath in Ophir, Bowesmont, and Coldwell, never mind Lone Hill. Tall Bear throwing his star on the hood of the truck to demonstrate that he was an outsider, and had seen everything we'd described, had a certain chilling effect on her self-important all-knowingness, too.
Quite a few of the women turned pale when Tyrese laid out the case for the creature we'd encountered in Bowesmont being The Huntsman, and that whatever we were dealing with was big, bad medicine enough to order that ancient, eldritch creature around. I could tell that most of them were still desperately hoping that Sister Margritte's prejudices would turn out to be legit, and that we were just a bunch of nutcases or incompetents making excuses, but their self-regard was slipping.
But when the whole picture was laid out, Sister Margritte said, “So, we've got two problems to deal with. We have to deal with the creature that was set loose—and I'm still not convinced it's The Walker—but we also have to neutralize this sorcerer.”
I shook my head. “One thing at a time. The Walker's going to be enough of a handful as it is,” I said. She frowned at my insistence on using the name, but I just sneered at her. Petty, y
es. I'm not terribly proud of it. But we were all pretty strung out, and she was pushing my buttons in a big way. “I'll agree that the sorcerer's a problem that will have to be dealt with, but The Walker's going to take all of our concentration. We get it locked down, then we can worry about the bald guy.”
She looked down her nose at me. “I'm starting to question your depth of faith and commitment, Mr. Horn,” she said. “We are the servants of God. 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' Do you remember that? We cannot pick and choose which parts of our duty to fulfill.”
“That's enough,” Father Ignacio snapped. “You're out of line, Sister. Aside from the fact that you're wrong, it's not your call. You're not in charge here. We called you in to assist. Can you do that, or do we need to look elsewhere?”
She looked like she'd just bitten into a lemon, but she nodded, though it looked as if it hurt. “You have the lead on this,” she acknowledged. But she didn't look happy about it, and I watched her with narrowed eyes. I suspected we hadn't heard the last of trouble from Sister Margritte.
Kolya joined us just before we pulled out to head for Bartram.
“Alistair's stable,” he reported. “He's mad that he's still stuck in the hospital, but there was no way the docs were going to let him go with those puncture wounds in his side.” He looked at the Friars and the Sisters. “Who are the monks, and why are they here?” He didn't have to elaborate as to who he meant by “they.”
I filled him in quickly. We were pretty well packed up, and there was a sense of urgency in the air. We'd been too late for Lone Hill. Were we going to be too late for Bartram, too? I hit the high points without going into too much detail. I knew Kolya well enough that I knew I wouldn't have to. He'd seen some pretty horrific stuff over the years; he was a more experienced Hunter than I, and he could fill in the details by himself easily enough.
