Allison watched as Cody fought the possessed ones off, then turned to mist as they overwhelmed him. One of the few armored attackers still intact rushed toward her, sword raised. She brought the Beretta up to meet him, trying her best to stay calm, her breathing steady. She fired, and the bullet struck the ghost-man in the shoulder, just under the armor plate. The soldier’s arm spasmed, dropping the sword as he held the arm close to his body. Allison squeezed the trigger again, and nothing happened.
The gun was empty, useless. She dropped it.
With no time for hesitation, Allison ran toward the once human thing, rather than away. She had been trained to fight, to protect herself, in the years since the Venice Jihad. Now she used those newly honed skills. Four steps brought her left foot down on the sword before the possessed one could use his right hand to raise it. She grabbed his helmet as her knee came up and smashed, crunching bones, into his face. The spirit within this man obviously felt his pain, for it shrieked a hellish noise, then fell to its side on the street.
Allison picked up the sword. She kicked away an arm raised to protect the fallen man, and lifted the blade above her head. As it whickered through the air toward the man’s bare neck, she saw in his upturned face, in his dark eyes, a trace of the humanity that had once resided there. Then the sword fell. It was not a clean cut, but it would do, for the neck had broken.
She knew it was an act of mercy.
Allison turned to face the mob again, but Cody had destroyed most of them. She could see the spirits leaving the corpses piled around him, and out of the corner of her eye for she did not want to look close, the ghostly form rising from the body of the man she had killed. She knew the soldiers themselves had not been evil, but what was left of them was easily manipulated by Mulkerrin’s sorcery. The floating forms were gone from the street in an instant, and the way was nearly clear.
Behind her, in his own form, John Courage struggled with the charred and smoldering demon, who had only a handful of eyes left on his body. Courage was sinking his hand into the demon’s flesh and tearing, searching for something vital. Allison turned to watch just in time to see him raise his hand to strike, but when the blow fell, it was not his hand at all. John Courage’s entire arm had changed, but not in shape. It had changed its substance.
John’s arm was made of stone.
Blows rained down on the demon, until it was almost whimpering in its defiance. It struggled and clawed at Courage, but could not shake him off. It had proven unusually resistant to fire, and now Courage raised his stone arm, and it changed again, to fresh wood, its bark slightly green. The wooden fist was lengthening, sharpening, until it resembled nothing so much as a newly carved stake.
“Cody,” Courage heard Allison call behind him. He knew that he had their unwanted attention, but it could not be helped. He thrust his arm into the creature’s belly, the sharp wood passing nearly through the thing, then wrenched around inside before pulling out and thrusting again. On the third thrust, he found something, his hand piercing it. The wood had the desired reaction, as the beast screamed.
The creature shuddered and expelled a fetid breath, and John Courage looked up. From inside the hotel came another demon, this one snake-like of a kind he had seen only once before. It slithered in a lumbering fashion. It had no eyes but a sense of smell that led it slowly toward Allison, the human. Far down the street, other things moved and people ran in the streets. In the darkened corners, even smaller things scuttled, the size of human children. They were the scavengers, dark jackals, waiting for their larger counterparts to do the serious damage first. But in packs, they were just as dangerous.
It was getting worse; they had to get out. Courage turned toward Allison and Cody, and saw Cody finishing off the last of the soldiers as Allison stared at him. Cody, apparently, had not heard her shout, had not seen Courage’s latest transformations. All the better for now.
John Courage walked toward her, and Allison turned to shout to Cody that it was time to go, while the getting was good. Then she saw them: more soldiers, former human beings who had been overcome by Mulkerrin’s ghostly slaves, pushed from their bodies to make way for new tenants. Allison realized what had happened. For every human host Cody killed, the spirits simply found a new one.
They were fighting a losing battle, no matter what.
“Will, come on. We’ve got to get out of here.” He ignored her, finishing off what he thought was the last of them. “Look behind you!”
Cody did, and they rushed him from all sides, all corners, and toward Allison as well. Courage was next to her, knocking several of her attackers away, one with enough force to snap its neck. She saw Cody buried beneath a mound of the creatures, who had jumped him all at once bringing him down. Then fire blossomed at the bottom of the pile, kindling under dry logs, and the whole group was in flames, their clothing burning out of control and their skin beginning to give off a greasy smell and a crackling noise.
“Allison, pay attention!” Courage said, then yanked her aside.
She looked up to see that the ghost had fled the body of the man whose neck he had broken, and was moving toward her. It would not approach Courage directly, and his arm burst into flame as he tried to wave it off.
“Why does it want me?” she asked.
“It doesn’t care, it needs a host to stay alive, to stay here, in our world. You’ll do as well as any human.”
Finally, the thing apparently decided there would be easier targets, and fled the scene, even as Courage was lifting another of the soldiers and tossing him away.
In our world. Allison heard the words again. Not on, in. Not even on Earth, but in our world.
“What do you mean by . . . ?” she started, but there wasn’t time.
“We’ve got to get you out of here, or you’ll be one of them,” he said, and then he was dragging her away, north toward the side street the demon had blocked.
She turned to see the huge snake-like thing, at least thirty feet long and three feet thick, sliding to block their way, and screamed.
“Will!”
She realized he was in trouble too. She looked at Courage out of the corner of her eye.
“What about Will?” she demanded.
“He’ll have to fend for himself! He should be fine, but we’ve got to get you out of here! Once we’re gone, he won’t have to fight, he can run.”
“I’m not going anywhere without him,” Allison said, trying to stand her ground.
“I’m sorry, but you are,” Courage answered, then threw her over his shoulder and shot into the side street just in time to escape the serpent, which even now coiled back to slither toward the overwhelmed Will Cody.
Will was fighting hard, but he was getting very tired. Changing from flame to mist to a tiger to himself and then back to flame again, the battle a constant, combined with the serpent he saw sliding toward him now, had begun to take a toll on his body, and his psyche. He was glad that Allison and Courage had gone. He knew of the danger to her, and he stood a better chance of getting out if he didn’t have to worry about her. All he had to do now was change to something with wings, or to mist, and fly out of there.
A sword entered through his back and out his stomach, and he vomited blood, hunching over. He turned fast, his movement pulling the sword from its owner’s grasp, then reached around behind him to pull the blade from his body.
“That . . . fucking . . . hurt!” he said, swinging the blade down into the shoulder of his attacker, a woman. The sword sank deep into the body, cracking through the collarbone and splintering ribs. He turned to face the rest, his wounds healing, but not as quickly as they should. Human hands driven by ghostly minds grabbed him from all around, and he felt a burning, searing pain that made him scream.
He clamped his mouth shut, willing the scream, the pain, away, even as he felt his arms yanked to his sides by the mob that surrounded him. He wanted to strike out, to burn them, to fly away, but he could not gather his thoughts, his concentration,
enough for the change. The pain overwhelmed him, covering his entire body now, and despite his greatest efforts, he did scream again.
“Yeeaaarggghhhh!”
Then the hands were gone, the mob was gone, though the pain remained. His mind aflame, he fell to the pavement with a clank. Opening his eyes, he saw the chains. Silver chains, wrapped around his entire body. And then he heard the voice.
“Well.” The voice floated on the breeze. “If it isn’t our old friend, Buffalo Bill.”
Cody recognized the voice.
It belonged to Liam Mulkerrin.
Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
Tuesday, June 6, 2000, 1:31 P.M.:
Meaghan was pretty ambivalent about being the boss. Here she was, one of the youngest shadows on Earth, certainly with less experience in their culture than the creatures she surrounded herself with. She didn’t really rate, at a surface glance, the kind of attention she received. She was nervous and frightened sometimes, when Alex was sleeping and couldn’t comfort her. She was insecure because not long ago she’d been human, a young woman with a so-so job and no steady relationship, who had no family and whose only real friend had been murdered. Not much of a résumé.
But other times, she knew all the reasons why she was the leader, and agreed with them. Other times she was confident in her strength and ability, and the rightness of her position. She had been strong enough as a human to walk among the walking dead, to befriend them, to take Peter Octavian as her lover. She had chosen to become one of them, to help them fight a centuries-old battle to the death. She had helped ease the pain of the reconciliation between Peter and his blood-brothers and -sisters. She had shown them the way out of their self-imposed limits, shown them that their shape-shifting abilities could be used for far more than even Peter had imagined, that they didn’t have to limit themselves to bats, wolves and mist, forms imposed by Rome’s brainwashing.
She was young, but she was strong. And good. And for those among them that had a difficult time remembering what it was like to believe in one’s own, innate goodness, she was an example to be emulated. Her innocence was a beacon to them. To others, for the moment in the minority, that beacon became a target, and Meaghan knew she would be defending herself very soon. She also knew that chief among her detractors was Hannibal, and that keeping him in line would require more effort than she had believed.
That threat, she knew, would have to be eliminated. And if that required that Hannibal be eliminated, so be it.
Though voices screamed in the back of her mind at such a thought, Meaghan Gallagher resisted their input, their logic, which wondered if what she was doing were so much different from the culling of the herd practiced by the Church for centuries. She insisted to herself that it was different, that she was doing it, not for her own good, or any evil purpose, but for the good of her own kind, for humanity, and for the world, which could not stand a war between humans and shadows. The smoldering remains of Venice, the hundreds of bodies, proved that.
But still, Meaghan was a woman full of doubts and insecurities, and so she was glad to have the distraction of a common enemy. Though Mulkerrin’s return frightened her almost more than anything else, it also gave her one problem upon which to concentrate her thoughts, and a time in which she did not have to concern herself with long-term questions. Only immediate solutions mattered. She was also glad to be returning home to Alexandra Nueva, whom she loved more than life, more than what little was left of her humanity, more than the goodness in that elusive thing she persisted in thinking of as her soul.
And Alexandra’s kiss, her touch, her voice, served to soothe Meaghan’s doubts, to quiet the storm in her soul. Alex gave her the first part of an answer to their forever question: the nature of their kind. Meaghan knew they had the capacity for atrocity, horror and great evil, but Alexandra, who had lived such terrible acts, been a hunter of humans and reveled in it, was now a constant reminder that the shadows also had the capacity for love, for kindness, for great good. Like humanity’s, the shadow soul contained an extraordinary duality of spirit, but magnified a thousandfold.
But the question remained.
Meaghan shook such thoughts from her head as she rushed along the sidewalk toward her Back Bay home. Alex would be waiting, she knew, packed and ready to scramble off to Otis Air Force Base. They’d be in Germany in less than seven hours. By then it would be nearly 3 A.M. in Salzburg, and hell would be in full swing.
She rounded the corner by their brownstone, and there was Alexandra, sitting on the steps with their bags packed, like a child with whom no one will play. The image didn’t last long, though, as she looked up at Meaghan and smiled that beautiful smile of hers. Whatever they faced, they would do it together. Always.
“Hello, sweetie,” Meaghan called to her as she approached.
Alex stood up and handed Meaghan her bag, then gave her a firm kiss, nuzzling for a moment. When she pulled back, she sighed, knowing there was work to be done.
“Time to go, sugar,” Alex said, and shouldered the strap of her own bag.
They locked hands, and Alexandra raised her free one to call over the inconspicuous government sedan that waited at the corner to rush them to Otis. The car was there in a moment, and the clean-cut, quiet type who stepped out of it was wearing sunglasses and did not smile. These two factors had always seemed to Meaghan a prerequisite for working in government security. CIA, FBI, OSP, NSA—the letters didn’t matter. They all looked the same, as if they were all grown in the same laboratory somewhere.
Brrr. A chilling thought.
Their bags were in the trunk, and Alex had already climbed in. Meaghan had one foot in the door when a hand landed on her shoulder, strong enough to stop her.
“Wait,” a cold, familiar voice said.
In the space between heartbeats, Meaghan turned, pulling the hand from her shoulder and toward her, prepared to strike its owner with a ferocity born when she died. Then she saw the face of the being who had accosted her, and could not have been more surprised. She knew she’d recognized that voice.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Alexandra spat the words as she got out of the car behind Meaghan, just as their driver finally freed his sidearm from its holster. For a distracted moment, Meaghan pitied humans their loss of superiority. They would never again be the strongest or the fastest, the best at anything. But the thought was passing. There were far more important issues at hand.
“Yes,” Meaghan said with barely suppressed anger and frustration. “Where exactly have you been, Lazarus?”
The smile of greeting had left the ancient shadow’s lined face as soon as Alex spoke. Only grim resolution remained.
“I would like to say I expected a more, shall we say, cordial reunion. But I did not, and so, shall not. Why don’t we go inside?”
Meaghan and Alex looked at each other, both still quite angry. Meaghan spoke only because Alexandra had even less control of her temper.
“You may not realize this, but we have far more important things to worry about right now than you. If you’d wanted to talk to us, you should have shown up when we still wanted to talk to you.”
With that, she turned and began to usher Alex back into the sedan. The driver still stood at attention, wary and stupidly unafraid, his ego denying his own uselessness.
But Lazarus was not through.
“Cody is Mulkerrin’s prisoner,” he said.
And now they were prepared to listen.
Meaghan and Alexandra had first met the vampire known only as Lazarus the night before the Venice Jihad. He had fought at their sides, in the sunlight. Octavian had just revealed Rome’s treachery to them, revealed that they could exist in the sun without fear of death. But it was new to them, and painful, and many were afraid even to try. Lazarus, on the other hand, did not seem at all pained by daytime battle, or surprised by their newly expanded shapeshifting abilities. In fact, they were forced to surmise that he’d been aware of them from the star
t. Lazarus had participated in the battle only until the tide had turned irrevocably in their favor, and then he had departed.
Peter Octavian had known Lazarus was different, had suspected something of the truth, and Lazarus had hinted that he was on the right track. But then Peter was gone. Meaghan and Alexandra had made the same connections, but later, as Will Cody searched the world for Lazarus and found nothing.
Centuries upon centuries earlier, when the church realized it would be impossible to destroy all of the so-called Defiant Ones, the shadows who refused to bow to Roman Catholic rule, sorcerous clergymen trapped as many as they could. Using dark and hurtful magic, those sorcerers tampered with the minds of the vampires they captured, ingraining within them certain . . . weaknesses. These shadow creatures had complete control over their own molecules. With the church’s influence, they now believed that they could not enter holy ground, could not bear the touch of silver or blessed water, could not change their shape into any but supposedly “unclean” animals or mist, and most importantly, could not bear the touch of the light of day. Of these all, only silver’s poison had a grain of truth.
Lies all, but so effectively woven into the minds of these Defiant Ones that they infected those others with whom they came in contact after their release, as well as each successive generation. Lies that would cause the vampires own minds, own powers, to destroy them.
Psychosomatic suicide.
The Church believed that these controls would enable them to control the shadows from afar. And for a time, it had worked. And then came Peter Octavian. He had overcome the pain of sunlight, though other such triumphs eluded him. Peter had abandoned the life of hunter, and instead spent his time in the service of humans, investigating their losses and broken hearts and crimes. It was a subject of great fascination for him. Eventually, this vocation led him in pursuit of a book, a book stolen from the bowels of the Vatican: The Gospel of Shadows. It detailed all of the atrocities perpetrated by the Church on their kind, as well as the many magical spells used to control other creatures of darkness, from beyond what they referred to as “the veil.”
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