“So you can see,” she snapped. “What I want to know is if you can hear.”
Her words had the desired effect. The demon had expected her to be silenced by the opening of its eyes, and was sorely disappointed and quite angry. It rose to its feet and took a step toward them, and Meaghan thought she saw the suckers inside its mouth elongate just slightly, and when it spoke now, in anger, it had something of a lisp.
“I am Pa-Bil-Ssssag!” it yelled. “How dare you ssspeak to me in sssuch a manner?”
Before it could continue, Meaghan interrupted again.
“How dare I?” she shouted back. “Simple. I dare because I am an agent of the Stranger. We come here on the Stranger’s mission, not our own, and we have been played for fools for far too long!
“Now, Pa-Bil-Sag, if your name is as you claim, then I know you, I know your power, I know your name and I know the spell of binding, taught to me by the Stranger,” she lied. “I can think of several places to relocate you that you would not enjoy!”
Pa-Bil-Sag merely stared at her then, and Meaghan found it disconcerting to be looking down at its testicles when the danger of its gaping jaws was much higher and doser to her. But she would not be the first to look away. This was a staring contest, like the ones she had had with her childhood friends, but this one was for much higher stakes.
Pa-Bil-Sag’s eyes closed, and it sat down. Meaghan heard an audible sigh from Lazarus behind her, but she resisted an urge to step back, to uncross her arms, to look away.
“You are strong, female,” it said. “Though perhaps not as strong as you would like me to believe. We owe the Stranger no allegiance, only courtesy, and my courtesy is hard-pressed with you. Still, I have no wish to confront your master again, and this charade was purely for the amusement of my brother, not myself. As such, I see no reason to perpetuate it.”
Meaghan saw Lazarus move closer, stunned to realize that they were about to receive answers, but she listened carefully, searching for the deception she had found in all demon-lords’ speech.
“This Mulkerrin and the one you seek are and have been the playthings of my brother, who found them when they first arrived here,” he said. “I am certain they have endured extraordinary suffering. I am also certain that my brother will be very pleased to add to his collection.”
“What is your brother’s name?” Lazarus asked.
“Not that it will help you any,” Pa-Bil-Sag said and grinned, tentacles reaching out from inside its mouth, sucking at air, latching on to each other and to the demon’s face. “My brother isss Beelzebub, but he will not be concerned with your sssmall magicksss. Beelzebub is sssecond in power only to the First Fallen and will never allow an alleviation of sssuffering for one of his toysss.”
“And where is the lair of this brother of yours?” Meaghan asked, still arrogant on the surface, but filled with sadness and dread.
“Outssside.”
“And how do we get there?”
And now the demon laughed, a huge, bellowing roar. On its crown, though apparently not connected to it in any way, the penises seemed to grow erect, and Meaghan finally had to look away. A mistake, she knew, but it couldn’t be helped.
“A bargain,” the demon-lord said, stifling its laughter. “I will transssport you there, to the outssside, and you mussst only walk toward the fire to find my brother’sss land. For this ssservice, you will do one thing for me.”
“And what might that be?” Lazarus asked, waiting for the catch.
“Tell him I sssent you,” Pa-Bil-Sag said and chuckled down in some phlegm-filled throat. “Tell him I sssent you . . . as a gift.”
Salzburg, Austria, European Union.
Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 7:19 A.M.:
It was madness.
Gloria Rodriguez floated out of the sky, H-K blazing. As they approached, her paratroopers unhitched, dropping the last fifteen or twenty feet to the ground, rolling over and blasting Mulkerrin’s possessed “warriors” into as many pieces as they could. It was clear to them that the sorcerer was somehow controlling these people, but they would have to be listed as “casualties” in the destruction of the city. The repercussions of those civilian deaths couldn’t be taken into consideration here. A war was on.
Many of the paratroopers didn’t make it to the ground alive, savaged in the air by flying things, chutes destroyed, bellies torn open. But most of them did make it, and some of those who did had flamethrowers. Fire was their most effective weapon, and getting it inside the fortress was key. As demons and weird, mind-controlled soldiers burned, the intensity of the green glow surrounding the sorcerer at the center of the fortress’s courtyard seemed to dim just for a moment. One of Gloria’s men fired on Mulkerrin, but the bullets seemed to pass right through, appearing on the other side to scatter among the others, wounding one shadow, who shook it off and kept going.
“Shadows!” she shouted. “The door! Let’s go!”
And then they were around her, in arrow formation, as they headed for the huge door to the fortress. Here she was, in the middle of the battle, surrounded by vampires, and all Gloria could think of was the giant gate in the original King Kong. She forced the thought back and spun to fire at a figure rushing her from behind. A torrent of bullets cut across the body, but even before it hit the ground she knew she’d made a mistake.
Gloria Rodriguez had killed one of her own men.
“Carlos!” she shouted, but even as she considered kneeling at his side, she sensed something different about the battle in the courtyard.
Looking up, Gloria was stunned to see that, even though most of Mulkerrin’s civilian warriors had been destroyed, and the main portal in the courtyard was being continuously blanketed with fire, torching everything that came through, they were not winning. In fact, they were losing.
Losing, because her troops were killing one another. She watched as Maria Santos turned and blasted her blowtorch in the faces of two of her fellow soldiers, her friends. Gloria’s unit began firing at one another, bodies falling rapidly.
“What the hell?” she began to say, and then saw the movement out of the corner of her eye, where the body of Carlos, the man she’d killed, lay. From his still form, a sickly yellow cloud rose and floated toward her. A quick glance showed her that others of these clouds flitted among the soldiers in the courtyard, and she watched one disappear into one of her paratroopers, who pulled out a knife and leapt on his nearest comrade.
“God, no,” she whispered to herself, and then heard a ghastly, sickening chuckle.
Mulkerrin, whose eyes had been closed as he wove his spells, protected from the fighting around him, had finally opened them, and was looking right at her. Rodriguez turned to run, and then realized she couldn’t. Mulkerrin had to be stopped or all human troops would be useless.
“Go!” she shouted at the contingent of shadows around her. “Help your people get those doors open, now!”
Gloria turned back toward the sorcerer, and the ghost, or whatever it was, had come much nearer. She moved as fast as she could, and faster, obviously, than that yellow, evil mist. She dodged right past the thing, firing at Maria as she went. Thirty-five feet separated her from Mulkerrin, and she closed that gap in seconds. Gloria slung her H-K over her shoulder, knowing bullets would do no good, and pulled her knife from its hip sheath. Steel flashed in sunlight even as she passed through, into the green glow surrounding the former priest.
Reflexively she had taken a breath, and without reason she held it, though it tasted of death, the burning of stinking monsters and a bitter poison she imagined came from those tainted, ghostly things. None of that worried Gloria, but something inside her warned against inhaling whatever was causing the glow around the sorcerer. And Mulkerrin just stood there, arms wide, head hanging as if in supplication. He looked up at her, his eyelids drooping, his stare either tired or seductive. The smile remained on his lips as he spoke to her.
“Welcome, little girl,” he said, and even as Gloria thrust the k
nife toward his belly . . .
. . . she stopped. Or something stopped her, still, paralyzed where she stood. The mad being who had once been Liam Mulkerrin reached out and passed a hand through her black hair, and Gloria opened her mouth and breathed in. The smell was awful, rotten, dying, and she wanted to throw up but could not command the muscles in her stomach to do so.
“Kneel before me,” Mulkerrin said, his smile turning into a leer even as the weight of his words forced her to her knees, “and I will give you your communion.”
All around the fortress, the United Nations security force was fighting on two fronts. While they tried to get over the walls of the fortress, past the demons that continued to emerge from the portals, only to be destroyed but often at the cost of lives, they also had to guard their own backs against those demons that had come up into the city and were now rampaging there, hunting down the many humans still left cowering in basements and hiding under beds. Many of the demons also attacked the troops from behind and prevented a good portion of the forces from reaching the fortress at all.
Commander Gruber’s unit, having come down the river and into Mozartplatz, had been almost completely slaughtered, and even the commander himself had been killed. The majority of the shadows with Gruber had also died, though several had disappeared at the same time that Hannibal had abandoned Commander Jimenez’s strike team, a couple hours earlier. In fact, each unit lost a handful of shadows at that time, and there was no trace of Hannibal or the other AWOL shadows. They were, simply, gone.
The other commanders—Locke, Surro and Thomas—all continued their attacks, and the more than one hundred fifty shadows still in action had finally been moved close enough to diminish the danger from the portals, so that the troops could concentrate on the walls themselves.
Finally, it seemed to UNSF Commander Roberto Jimenez, they were getting somewhere.
Roberto and his team were outside the gate. Including Rolf, there were thirty-five shadows with Jimenez, and though they could easily have flown over, they had to open the gate if the rest of the forces were to enter. Jimenez had attempted to blow the gate to splinters using a pair of CAMELs, easy-launch, hand-held missiles with computer-aided targeting to find the weakest structural point. They exploded before ever reaching the door. In fact, any artillery used on the gate was rebuffed, and even the strength of as many shadows as could line up in front of the gate couldn’t budge it.
Though nervous, even frightened at first, Jimenez’s men had warmed to the shadows immediately. Handpicked by Rolf Sechs, for the most part they were top-notch soldiers and engendered an easy camaraderie with their human counterparts. All of them, that is, except for Jimenez himself. Though he had a grudging respect for Sechs, he was glad to have the cold, sharp silver of his dagger hidden safely away in his clothing.
“Rodriguez,” he snapped into his collarcomm, “what’s taking your guys? We need extra strength on the gate, I said. Get those shadows out here.”
Rodriguez didn’t reply, but a sudden squealing shrieked from Jimenez’s comm, forcing him to cover his ears, and the commander couldn’t be certain his message had been received. Satellite communications were out, so they’d had to rely on primitive broadcast methods in the field. Still, they seemed to be working for the moment.
“They’re here, Commander,” came the computer-generated voice of Rolf Sechs behind him, and Jimenez looked up to see a bat flying above the gate, signaling the arrival of Rodriguez’s shadow unit. Sechs put away his voice-pad then, and the assault on the gate began anew, joined by pulling from the other side. As Jimenez’s strike force, of which forty-six men still lived, stood and watched, roughly sixty gray-clad vampires tore and dug at both sides of a magically protected gate. On the hill to their left, soldiers shot grapples into the sheer stone wall and began to scale it. Shadows with no immediate chore changed form and flew to the top of the wall with ropes, anchored them, and let them down for the human soldiers to climb.
By God, Jimenez thought, they were going to do it.
And then the gate opened and swung wide, crushing a number of shadows behind it. It was clear that it had not been their diligence that opened the door, for even now it pushed tight against the wall, attempting to destroy the vampires it had trapped. Jimenez let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding as he saw the mist float from behind that door, signifying that the shadows were all right. He had no love for the creatures, but he needed them. And now the gate was open, though apparently by choice.
What to make of that?
“Move!” he shouted, though he needn’t have. The team had passed the point of waiting for his order. Under normal circumstances, he would have felt bound to reprimand them. But now . . .
“Get the son of a bitch!” he yelled as he led the pack, screaming, up the curving path toward the courtyard, the air around him turning suddenly cold, and the sky darker than ever. Rolf Sechs ran beside him, and Roberto was pleased to see that the shadow did not shapeshift, but remained in human form. Also, though his speed was greater, Sechs stayed with him, and Roberto had to wonder whether the creature thought he was protecting him.
“Rolf,” Roberto thought he heard somebody whisper, and then the vampire fell to the ground, writhing in pain, with his hands on his head. But Roberto Jimenez was commander and could not stop for one soldier.
He rounded the corner and came into the courtyard just behind several of his men and half a dozen shadows. The tableau that unfolded before him was grotesque. His forces had begun to come over the walls, firing into Mulkerrin’s soldiers and demons and at the sorcerer himself, though none of the bullets were able to reach him. Several dozen shadows had already come over the wall, and they engaged warriors and demons alike, shrugging off the friendly fire as Jimenez had known they would. And in the center of it all, sheathed in a greenish glow, was Mulkerrin.
Kneeling before him with her head buried in his crotch was Gloria Rodriguez.
“No!” Jimenez screamed, and started toward them.
Rolf lay on the cold ground, feeling every stone and pebble that pressed into his flesh, hands holding his head as the voice boomed his name again.
Rolf, it said, but softer this time, as if it knew it had hurt him.
And then it wasn’t an “it” anymore, for Rolf recognized the voice.
Cody, Rolf thought, sitting up and shaking his head.
Yes, it’s me.
You’re all right?
Strong enough to mind-link at least; otherwise I don’t know. But never mind that. They’ve got to go—the humans. They’ve all got to go.
And then the words stopped, and the rapport that they’d always shared, the mind-link which had allowed them, as children of Karl Von Reinman, to experience events as one, to know things the other knew, to hold actual, mental conversations, told Rolf the story, everything he needed to know. In seconds, he knew Cody’s pain, knew he was not yet healed, but knew that he had somehow joined his spirit to the magic flowing around the castle. And Rolf also knew why the humans had to go.
He moved more swiftly than ever before, knowing that Cody would be safe for now, knowing what he must do. In two heartbeats he had come in sight of the sorcerer, and Commander Jimenez racing toward him. Rolf had to prevent that meeting, for hovering about Mulkerrin, just outside of that vile green glow, was a spirit cloud, the ghost of a dead soldier, and it began to drift toward Jimenez.
Rolf caught up to the commander just as the ghostly mist started to waft around his head. Rather than simply knocking him out of the way, the mute shadow bent and threw the commander over his shoulder on his way to the other side of the courtyard, where there seemed to be relatively little going on.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jimenez yelled as Rolf put him down, then turned to look back at Mulkerrin. “Gloria!”
He went to run back there, but Rolf grabbed him by the arm, shaking his head in a firm no. But Jimenez’s eyes were wild; he wasn’t paying attention. He reached inside his shirt, and
in a second he brandished a silver dagger-crucifix in front of Rolf’s eyes, something Rolf had seen before. In Venice. He didn’t have time to wonder where the man might have got something like that. Jimenez lunged for Rolf, stabbing forward toward his belly, but when his knife and hand got there, they passed only through flame.
Jimenez cried out, briefly, in pain, then switched the knife to the other hand and, holding the burnt one gingerly away from his body, made to go after Rolf again.
“Damned thing!” he shouted, but Rolf grabbed his wrist, holding it nearly tight enough to crush it, then shoved him to the ground, the dagger clattering to the stone. By the time Jimenez had regained his feet, Rolf was searching frantically inside his jacket for his voice-pad.
Jimenez came after him again before he could pull the pad out of his jacket, but Rolf stopped the commander, with one hand this time, and then slapped him, hard, across the face. Their eyes locked, Jimenez’s burning with hatred and Rolf’s imploring, trying to send a message. He held up a hand and with incredible speed whipped out his voicepad and scrawled upon it with a suddenly elongated fingernail.
“Soldier spirits possess you. Humans must leave,” the electronic voice said, translating Rolf’s stunted scribble.
A woman screamed, and they turned. The two warriors, shadow and human, saw it at once. Mulkerrin had thrown Rodriguez out of his sphere of influence, onto the stone floor of the courtyard, and the vile cloud was hovering over her . . . and then it disappeared inside her.
In seconds she was on her feet, H-K in her hands, and firing up at the soldiers, her own troops, coming over the wall of the fortress. Rolf glanced at Jimenez, and knew that the commander understood, that he had seen the look on his lover’s face, in her eyes, and that it wasn’t her anymore.
“Dear God,” Jimenez said, then looked back at him. “But they can’t possess you?”
Rolf shook his head, pocketed his voice-pad, bent down and retrieved the commander’s dagger and returned it to him. Jimenez barely looked at the thing as he sheathed it. Rolf shooed him away, using both hands.
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