Angel Souls and Devil Hearts (37 page)

And there was another reason she and Lazarus kept at the glass, kept working to free Peter Octavian, but one the two vampires refused to discuss: their other options. What other alternative did
they have, wandering around Hell without the spells necessary to return to their own world? They had come to find Peter because the world needed him in its battle against Mulkerrin’s madness.
But now they needed him as well, if they were ever to escape.

The other question that had haunted them was why they had been allowed to continue to hack away at Peter’s prison without any demonic interference. Meaghan and Lazarus had both been at
Venice, been a part of the events for which the demon Beelzebub now punished Peter Octavian. Surely the demon-lord would enjoy their suffering as well. And yet, though the Suffering continued to
wail in agony on the mountain above them, where they were burnt to cinders again and again, and though a new, bloody crystal prison would sprout every day from the glass beneath their feet, filled
with damned souls, they never saw a demon-slave, much less a lord. Nothing.

They had first used their hands, formed into razor-sharp claws that were less easily burned by the heat of the glass, to shatter the edges of Peter’s prison. They pounded at it but it
wouldn’t crack, and Meaghan and Lazarus realized that they would be forced to chip away at the thing until they reached its occupant. Meaghan had been astounded when Lazarus transformed his
fingers into solid but completely functional steel. She had caused the same reaction among the shadows in Venice when she had shapeshifted into a hawk and then a tiger, but most of them had adapted
quickly to those hidden abilities.

It had taken Meaghan a week of Lazarus’s explanations before she could duplicate the trick. And during their times of rest, he helped her with other forms, like wood stone and water. It
was all the same, he had insisted, and was right. But she was still surprised by that development.

After that, the work had gotten easier, and they had continued their efforts unmolested by the denizens of this Hellish world. As they worked, Meaghan had become convinced that the theory she
had developed on their walk across the surface of Hell was correct—it was a planet—somewhere, somehow, perhaps not in any universe humans had ever imagined, but a planet nonetheless,
dedicated to the suffering of all manner of sentient beings.

And Peter was one of them. Meaghan didn’t like to think of him suffering, but she could not turn away. She consoled herself with the knowledge that if she and Lazarus had not come, Peter
would never have been freed. Of course, that was getting a bit ahead of herself, but she had a blind faith that they would escape from this world.

“We’re almost through,” Lazarus said, smiling through the exhausted expression on his face. Meaghan did not reply, her mind too busy with other things. She thought again about
time. Gauged by their need for blood, which was only now beginning to become a real problem, she and Lazarus had decided that the months which they had spent in Hell—though “on”
Hell might have been a more appropriate expression—had not been even a single day on their own world. They were confident that if they could return, they could make a real difference in the
battle against Mulkerrin. After all, surely the battle could not have been decided so quickly.

But what of Peter? If the months they had spent here were less than a day on their own world, how long had Peter been suffering inside his glass prison? He’d crossed over into Hell five
years before Meaghan and Lazarus, according to their own timetable. On Hell, that had to be . . . Meaghan paused a moment in her work, but Lazarus didn’t seem to notice. Peter had been the
illegitimate son of the last Byzantine emperor. He’d become a predator, part of Karl Von Reinman’s coven, but had renounced that path on the last night of the nineteenth century. Then
he’d lived a new life, helping humans in small ways, hiding in plain sight.

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, t
hey’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.

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—come 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.