And then he’d become the savior of his people, revealing the plot to destroy them, in time for a real defense, releasing them from mental restraints they had endured unaware for centuries. All that in five-and-a-half centuries of life and now he’d spent nearly twice that time in constant agony, completely alone, but aware. She knew that her own mind would not have been able to withstand such trauma. Was that the problem with Peter, the reason he did not respond to her attempts to communicate using their psychic rapport?
Was he insane?
“Meaghan!” Lazarus barked, stepping back from the glass. She looked at him, her own efforts to chip the glass given up for the moment. Lazarus’s expression was one of complete disbelief, as he stared at Peter, inside the glass. Octavian’s eyes moved from one of them to the other, and back again. He was naked, or apparently so under what looked to be a cloak of some kind over his shoulders and hanging down to cover his lap, where his arms lay crossed at the wrists.
She didn’t see it.
“What?” she asked, ready to get back to work. They were so close to finishing, she just wanted it over, needed to hnow whether she would ever return to her home. Although, without Alexandra there, she didn’t know if she could call it that anymore.
“What?” she said again, because Lazarus hadn’t answered. Instead, he had moved toward, and then past, her peering in through the glass, trying to get a better look at something.
“Under the cloak, do you see it?” he said finally.
What, that he’s naked?” she asked, exasperated, but that was the wrong answer, and for the first time, Meaghan saw Lazarus get angry.
He snapped his neck to glare at her for just a moment, then growled, “Look!”
She moved to his side, her mind not really on what Lazarus was looking at. Instead, it was on everything else. Since begun their effort to free Peter, she could barely go ten minutes without wincing at the thought of the suffering that surrounded them, the burning beings on the mountainside above, the frozen agony all around them, the city of pain and glass. She wasn’t paying much attention . . . but she saw it anyway.
“Oh, my sweet Lord,” she whispered to herself, unaware of the rare prayer. For now she saw what had excited Lazarus so, and what had bewildered him as well. It had the same effect on her. Meaghan could not believe it, though she saw it with her own eyes. Resting on Peter’s right thigh, nearly covered by his forearm where it lay across his leg, and hidden by the shrouded darkness of the cloak, was a book. The Gospel of Shadows. It could be no other. She asked the obvious question.
“How?”
“I don’t know,” Lazarus said, smiling, happy, hopeful. “Perhaps time is uncertain in traveling between worlds? Or, it could be that Octavian was put here only recently.”
“If so, where was he before?” she asked, not giving that theory much credence.
“Does it matter?” Lazarus asked, and his smile was infectious.
“Okay,” Meaghan said. “Let’s get him out of there.”
They redoubled their efforts, working at the glass, in silence more complete than before, if that were possible, and it wasn’t more than an hour later that Meaghan’s efforts had torn the ice away from Octavian’s left shoulder nearly to the flesh.
“Lazarus,” she said. “Over here. If we can get through to him, maybe we can pull from the inside rather than just chipping it away.”
In seconds, it was done. Lazarus slowed as he got down to Peter’s skin, but in no time they had a hole half an inch wide. Meaghan’s hands returned to their human form—in truth the shape seemed almost unfamiliar to her—and she put her index finger to the hole and touched hot skin. It was something, but she despaired. At this rate it was still going to take them days to finish carving Peter out.
If they had to.
Meaghan stepped around Lazarus to be within Peter’s line of vision. The frightening thing about looking at him was that despite the movement of his eyes, the rest of his face was frozen in place, a terrible mask of sadness and pain. He looked at her now, and she smiled, motioning to let him know that they’d broken through, in case he hadn’t been able to feel her touch.
She knew he couldn’t smile in return, so she went ahead.
“Peter,” she said aloud, emphasizing the words with her lips. “Change. You’ve got to change form. Now that you’ve got an opening, you can escape!”
Nothing, Octavian didn’t even blink.
Peter, Meaghan said in her mind. Come on. Help us. We’ve got to get back and help the others. You’ve got the book but we’ve already been here too long. If you can change, you’ve got to try.
Still nothing. Octavian just kept looking at her as if he hadn’t heard a word. And maybe he hadn’t.
“Shit.”
“Maybe you’re going about this the wrong way,” Lazarus suggested.
And that was all it took. Making sure Peter was looking at her, Meaghan changed to mist, floated much closer to the glass prison that housed him, and changed back into her human form. If that didn’t work, she thought, they’d have to assume that his mind was gone.
Nothing.
And then something. Slowly, beginning with his feet, which were tucked under him where he knelt, and working eventually up to his torso and finally his head, Peter followed Meaghan’s lead. He turned to mist and, slowly, simply, seeped, like smoke from a lazy fire, through the hole they had scraped. Once outside, his change back to human form was even slower, and the agony of it was clear on his reappearing face.
Peter Octavian lay there, barely conscious, naked but for his cloak and wracked with pain. His body quivered and shook with convulsions, muscle contractions and a terrible healing. But he was free.
Meaghan knelt by her former lover, turning him over and cradling his head in her lap. Lazarus tore the hole in the crystal a bit larger, reached inside to retrieve The Gospel of Shadows, and began quickly flipping through it, attempting to find the spell to get them home.
“Oh, Peter,” Meaghan said, the love she had once felt for him, the loss she had felt when he sacrificed himself for the world, and the loss of her one true love, Alexandra Nueva, who’d died searching for him, all coming back to her in a rush of emotion like nothing she’d felt before, as human or vampire.
“It’s okay,” she told him as his body twitched, his eyes fluttering open. “The pain is over now. We’ll take you home now. We need you, Peter. All the shadows do.”
He stared at her a moment, and then his body tensed, a growl rising from his throat, becoming a roar as he jumped up, tossing Meaghan aside.
“Peter,” she pleaded, reaching out for him. And his right hand, curved and extended into a terrible weapon, lashed out and tore the flesh of her left cheek to the bone.
“Keep the fuck away from me, you bitch,” he said, slowly, coldly.
Sanely.
17
U.S. Interstate 81, Glasgow,
Virginia, United States of America.
Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 4:04 A.M.:
“The secretary general of the United Nations has recalled the Japanese unit of the UN security force that was on its way to Salzburg. Meanwhile, local troops are evacuating civilians from what is apparently a twenty- to thirty-mile radius around the city. The Fortress Hohensalzburg, which the media and military had been unable to photograph, was apparently the scene of much of the battle. Once communications in the area had returned, a German cameraman was able to get this footage . . . As you can see, the fortress has been nearly destroyed, and the battle has moved out into the city proper. The number of combatants has dropped drastically, but Liam Mulkerrin, the man the UNSF came here to stop, is still on a rampage. The question now is, are the recent moves by the UN secretary general in preparation for a last-ditch nuclear attack?”
The CNN anchor droned on and on from the dashscreen of Joe Boudreau’s car, and his chest felt cold and hollow If the UN persuaded the Americans to nuke Salzburg, which wouldn’t take much after the President’s assassination—c
ome to think of it, the UN might be the only thing holding the new President back—if that happened, nobody in the city would survive, human or vampire.
“I’d love to wake up from this nightmare,” George Marcopoulos said next to him, and Joe knew just what he meant. He’d led a simple life in Boston before he met Peter Octavian and Meaghan Gallagher. Joe had run a bookstore in Cambridge, last in a long series of occupations he had quit. But he couldn’t ever quit being a vampire. In fact, if he didn’t lose his cool, there was a good chance he would live as close to forever as any creature would ever get. But nukes. Uh-uh.
No, he couldn’t quit anymore. Meaghan needed him. All the shadows did, and certainly George Marcopoulos, a human, would be dead without him. Joe felt good. For the first time in his life, he belonged somewhere, somebody wanted him around. His family had never given him any kind of encouragement, and he’d felt out of place with everyone he’d ever called a “friend.” That was why he’d fallen so easily into the world of books, for the escape they offered, the endless new worlds in which to belong.
He didn’t need books anymore. His life had a purpose, and he would not betray it. He’d driven quietly for the last hour, but George had come awake at the beginning of the current newscast and was even now listening intently to its discussion of the ascension of the new President and the battle in Salzburg. The media was trying its best to stay away from supernatural references to Mulkerrin and his power, was, in fact, concentrating on the villainous acts of the shadows who had gone to fight alongside the humans and then betrayed them. Or at least that’s how it was made to seem.
“Joe,” George said, “find someplace to pull off, will you?”
The old Greek doctor-turned-ambassador rubbed sleep out of his eyes, then stretched, never taking his eyes off the dash-screen.
“I’ve got to use the toilet, and make a phone call,” George elaborated.
“Whatever you say,” Joe replied, and began scanning the highway for a pit stop. They were still traveling along Route 81, and they’d been making excellent time. With mountains and forest rising up on either side of them, it would have been a beautiful trip during the day. Unfortunately, that hadn’t been an option.
Joe saw a sign for the next town—”Buchanan, 5 mi.”—and was surprised again at the time that they had made. Then again, the highway was completely deserted. Anyone awake at this hour was more than likely still at home, glued to CNN. By 7 A.M., they ought to have crossed into Tennessee. By 11:30, noon at the latest, they’d be passing through Georgia for about twenty minutes, and then it was across Alabama and a tiny corner of Mississippi. A long way to go, but they’d be spending the night in New Orleans, come hell or high water. After all, they only had to stop for gas, and for the old doc to pee.
Joe saw the flickering sign for a Mobil station up ahead, and slowed to pull off the highway. Slouched in the passenger seat, Marcopoulos grumbled something and punched a button, and the dash-screen went off. The car rolled to a stop in front of the pumps, and Joe pulled the keys from the ignition.
“Let’s keep an eye on each other, shall we?” George said, and Joe nodded. As they were getting out of the car, a Viginia State Police cruiser slid into the station and parked. Joe and George shut their doors and watched as the trooper hopped out and went into the tiny convenience store portion of the station. The bell atop the glass door jingled as it shut.
“Be careful” was all George said as they walked up to the store, following the trooper in. George went directly down the hall to the left and disappeared into the men’s room. The trooper held what looked to Joe like an enormous cup of coffee, and was shooting the breeze with the clerk who’d just handed it to him. The trooper didn’t appear to have any plans to pay for his coffee, but what surprised Joe was that he didn’t appear to get free doughnuts to go with it.
The man was lean, young but not a child, and his close-cropped hair promised a seriousness that his laughter did not make good on. When Joe laid two twenties on the counter and said, “Fillin’ up the Buick,” the trooper barely glanced at him. And why should he do more? Joe was a regular-looking guy, some might even call him a dweeb, geek, dork, nerd. Whatever they were calling quiet outcast children these days, he thought.
He sure didn’t look like a vampire.
George Marcopoulos came out of the men’s room with an attitude. The place was a pigsty, and he’d nearly slipped in a small puddle on the floor. He hoped it was water, because he’d gotten some on his pants leg. A man his age ought to be able to relieve himself in a relatively clean, safe and smoke-free environment. This place was none of those things, and George was particularly incensed about the cigarette butts on the floor. Smoking was, after all, illegal in public places, including gas station rest rooms!
And now, approaching the counter, he was even more annoyed. It was the clerk who smoked, and he was lighting up at that very moment. The nerve of the man, with the police officer standing right there, doing nothing. Though he’d been a pipe smoker for years, George was content to do so only in his own home, and the smell of cigarettes had always nauseated him. Perhaps he was a hypocrite after all, but in his lifetime, he felt, he’d earned a little hypocrisy.
“Do you have a videophone?” George asked, and the clerk looked at him as if he were insane.
“Not just yet, fella. Telephone’s outside and to the right if you can handle that.”
George harrumphed and turned to go, but glanced back to tell the clerk, in no uncertain terms, what he thought of the conditions in the bathroom . . . and caught something strange on the police officer’s face. The man looked puzzled, as though his mind were reaching for something just out of range. The officer met his eyes, looking more closely at George now, getting a good, long look. The puzzled expression didn’t leave his face as the clerk said, “Something else, mister?”
George’s heart fluttered.
“You ought to clean that bathroom,” he said finally. “It’s disgusting.”
He hurried out, realizing that he’d procrastinated long enough, that he really ought to have done something sooner to change his appearance. There might not be a “posse” after him, but certainly there must be a warrant for his arrest. They ought to get out of there, he knew, but he had to make this phone call. If the cop did realize who he was, George only prayed it was after they’d left the station. By then, his call would have been traced anyway. Once they got closer to their destination, George couldn’t take that chance, but just this once . . .
He slipped his card through the slot, then punched in the number lodged in his head. Only one person would ever answer that phone. There was no answering service, no secretary or receptionist. It seemed to ring forever, and George was concerned that the man he was calling might not have the phone with him.
George heard a door open behind him, and Joe was going into the store to get his change. Good, now they had a full tank of gas. He continued to watch, and listen to the phone ringing on the other end of the line. The sky had been brightening for some time, but now he could see it start to burn, just at the horizon line. The sun would be up in no time. When Joe came out, the police officer was right behind him. Both men went and sat in their cars, and George looked from one to the other. Inside the police car, a blue light, like that from a dash-screen, came on, and wondering what the trooper was watching suddenly made George very nervous.
“Come on, you son of a bitch,” he said into the receiver, “pick up the phone.”
“What?” a startled voice said at the other end of the line.
“Oh, Rafe, thank God!”
“Who the hell is this?” Rafael Nieto, secretary general of the United Nations, barked over his private line.
“Who do you think?” George snapped back, annoyed. “We’ve got to talk.”
“I can’t believe you’re calling me,” Nieto said, recognizing George’s voice now. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Listen,” George said calmly, “I only have a minute, so pay attention
. The shadows aren’t what you think. Just like us, they have white hats and black hats, but mostly gray hats. I won’t argue that with you now, but I have two things you’ve got to know.”
Nieto was silent for a moment, then said, “Go on.”
“First, that these creatures have been hunted too long. If you start it all over again, you’re liable to drive the gray hats over the edge. Second, I don’t know if this nuclear thing was your idea, but watch Bill Galin, Rafe. I mean. watch him very closely.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nieto said, and suddenly George had the feeling that maybe the secretary general wasn’t having the call traced after all.
“What it means is that the man is dangerously unstable. Perhaps even insane. After the President was killed, and that Agent Williams saved both our lives, Galin tried to murder me himself.”
George couldn’t even hear Nieto breathing on the other end. It occurred to him that, for the moment, the man might not be. Across the parking lot, the trooper was getting out of his car. George hadn’t seen him on the police radio, and he hoped that was a good sign.
“I’m not going to try to convince you, Rafe,” George said into the silence. “I don’t have time. All I’ll say is, you know me. You know some of these people, these vampires. Don’t trust Galin, and please, for God’s sake, don’t use the nukes.”
The cop was approaching the Buick. George couldn’t see Joe’s face inside, but the engine was running.
“I’ve got to go,” George said.
“Be careful,” Nieto said quietly on the other end.
“No, my friend,” George replied. “It’s in your hands now. You be careful. And be watchful. Hannibal will certainly want you dead too, but he’s far from your only enemy.”
Angel Souls and Devil Hearts Page 28
