The Gathering Dark (20 page)

“Thank you. Really.” Allison felt warmed by this simple companionship, by the idea that for the first time in a long time, she was not alone. “I remember what it was like to want the story. To want to be the one to tell it. You report whatever you want to. It’s your job.”

“You won’t get in dutch with your bosses at the U.N.?”

“Fuck ’em. What’re they going to do, send Task Force Victor after me? I’d love to see them try.”

*

The morning after the meeting with Father Jack, Peter sat on the bed in the hotel room Nikki and Keomany were sharing and listened to the sound of the shower running. He tried to fight the image that surged into his mind of Nikki under the steaming spray of water, rivulets of it running down over her perfect breasts and the pale expanse of her belly.

How many times had they showered together? Ten? Twenty? It pained him that something like that, the very thought of which made his heart skip a beat, could have registered so little that he could not remember how many times.

He rose from the bed and walked to the television, tempted to turn it on but not wanting to seem presumptuous. Instead he strode to the window and opened the curtains. The hotel looked down upon Forty-Fourth Street and he watched the gleaming yellow roofs of cabs as they wove in among the rest of the traffic. The taxis were so numerous and so insistent they seemed almost to be the only things moving down there, the only things alive.

Peter pressed his fingers on the window. There was dust on the glass.

From the bathroom came the squeak of pipes as Nikki shut the water off. He had to fight the urge to flee the room, to go downstairs where Father Jack and Keomany were having coffee, waiting for them. The rented Lincoln Navigator was already packed up, with the exception of Nikki’s things. Keomany had come downstairs right on time to tell Peter and Father Jack that Nikki wasn’t ready, and that she had asked if Peter would come up. He could feel the plastic keycard in the back pocket of his jeans.

The bathroom door swung open and in a cloud of steam Nikki emerged, wrapped in a towel, her hair very wet. “Peter?” It took a moment for her to spot him by the window.

Something in his chest felt broken. He could not help but smile as he looked at her. Even from here he could smell that familiar aroma she had, the hot water on her, the shampoo in her hair.

“You summoned me?” he offered, his grin broadening.

Nikki laughed and nodded. “Hey, there he is,” she said. “I know that guy, that smile.”

He stared at her for a long moment. “You know, I don’t think there’s anything in your wardrobe that you look better in than a white cotton bath towel.”

One of her eyebrows shot up suggestively. “There’s a face cloth.”

Peter laughed. His feelings about Nikki had grown so complicated in the time they had been apart. He loved her but he had been a different person entirely when they had met and she had fallen in love with him. When she had needed to go out and pursue her music career, he had been in the midst of figuring out what he wanted to do with his own life, now that he wasn’t immortal anymore.

And now . . .

“Aren’t you supposed to be rehearsing for your tour?” he asked.

Nikki gave him a wistful look. “Actually the tour’s already started. Officially, at least. I did a gig in Philly that was supposed to kick it off. But I have a few weeks before the real tour starts. Another couple of days won’t make a difference.”

Peter gestured around the room. “Sort of surprised you’re not at the Drake or the Waldorf. What with the hit single and all.”

“Not yet. But hitch your wagon to this star, my friend, and we’ll all be staying at the Waldorf in no time.”

He gazed at her a long moment before speaking again. “Why did you want me to come up, anyway? Just so I could give you a hard time for taking so long to get ready?”

Her smile was strangely shy; her head tilted to one side and she hid behind the cascade of damp hair that spilled in front of her eyes. “Maybe I just wanted to find out if you’d come.”

The tone of her voice as she spoke those words felt like an electric charge surging through him. Peter stared at Nikki for several seconds, then he strode over to her and put two fingers under her chin. He raised her face up to him so their eyes met.

“Any time. Any place,” he said. “You know that.”

“Except Los Angeles,” she replied, a tiny frown knitting her brows together.

Peter brushed locks of wet hair away from her face. “That was then. This is now. I spent a lot of time reminding myself what it meant to be alive. Now I’m just living for all I’m worth.”

She opened her mouth to reply but he silenced her with his lips. He was through being hesitant, through worrying what would happen when she had to go back to Los Angeles. Their kiss deepened and a small moan escaped Nikki’s lips and she let her body mold itself to his. Her towel came undone and began to slip, but was trapped between them.

When their kiss ended, both of them breathless, Peter laid his forehead against Nikki’s and she chuckled softly to herself. “I feel like I never left.” Then she pushed him back, one hand clutching her towel in place. “Can we pretend that, do you think? That I never left.”

Peter shook his head. “No. We can’t. What we can do is not talk about this for a couple of days. When we come back from Vermont, when it’s all done, then we can decide where to go from there. For the moment, I’ve only got two things to say to you.”

Nikki blinked, her expression a combination of hurt and curiosity. “And they are?”

“The first is, hurry up and get ready. I don’t have a spell to help you, and you’re already going to miss breakfast. Every hour that passes is another in which Keomany doesn’t know what happened to her parents and her town.”

Her expression became grim and she nodded. It was the truth, and she knew it. They were being greedy, stealing time for themselves.

“What’s the second thing?”

Peter smiled, ran a hand through the graying hair at his left temple. “I can paint anywhere.”

Only days after she had fled her hometown, Keomany sat in the back seat of the rented Lincoln Navigator and stared out the tinted window at the green hills and valleys that rose and fell on either side of the highway. With every mile they drew closer to Wickham, and with every mile her throat became dryer, her heart sped faster, and the images in her mind became more and more inescapable.

The rotten pumpkin sky. The black, skeletal demons. The unnatural silence on the street, the emptiness of it, as if the whole town had been hollowed.

Keomany closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose.

A gentle hand touched her shoulder. “Are you not feeling all right?”

She opened her eyes again. Father Jack was studying her with genuine concern and she forced herself to smile. “As well as can be expected, I suppose.”

The priest nodded as though he understood precisely what she felt.
It must be something they’re trained for
, Keomany thought. For though she was sure Father Jack had seen his share of chaos, somehow she doubted he had any idea what she was feeling. The terrible certainty that she would arrive back home and the place would be barren, deserted, nothing but a ghost town. The idea that the hellish possession of the town would have ceased and left only the bones of the town where her life had been. She would go to her parents’ home and find that they, too, were now only bones.

The night before, she had dreamed precisely that.

“Keomany, when we get there, you don’t have to come into the town,” Peter said.

He was behind the wheel, and Nikki in the passenger seat. Keomany had watched him a lot during the hours they had been on the road—watched both of them, in fact. Peter was an enigma to her. Despite what she knew of his past, what she knew he had once been, he seemed on the surface to be a normal, average, thirtysomething guy. But Keomany had always been able to sense the true nature of things. Perhaps that was part of being an earthwitch, or perhaps it was simply that she was a good judge of character. Either way, she saw beneath the surface when it came to Peter.

Underneath the chamois shirt and the blue jeans, under that almost mundanely handsome exterior, Peter Octavian
burned
. It was not just magick that coursed through him, but fierce passion and honor. Keomany found it strange that Octavian kept these things almost hidden, as though the face he wore were a disguise, like Superman receding beneath the persona of an earnest reporter.

Keomany saw him, though, for what he really was and it helped her to understand why they all automatically deferred to him, why Father Jack had handed him the keys to the Navigator, why Nikki so obviously still loved him.

Nikki glanced into the back seat at her and Keomany blinked, realizing she had not responded to what Peter had said.

“You sure you’re all right?” Nikki asked.

“No,” Keomany admitted. Her gaze ticked toward Peter. She saw him looking at her in the rearview mirror. “But I’m not staying behind, either. That’s my family in there. My friends. It’s my town.”

Peter nodded and said nothing more on the subject. Unlike Father Jack, she had a feeling that his apparent understanding had a depth and truth to it. It helped.

Keomany let her gaze drift out the window again. She saw a little town in a valley off to her right, homes sprawling out from the center of town, where a picturesque white church marked the heart of the community. Another quaint and peaceful New England village, where every day seemed just like the last. And where—as she had learned— anything could happen.

When they passed the sign that announced that Wickham was five miles away, she flinched. As those last few miles rolled past, Keomany fished into her pocket book and took out a rubber band, then tied her raven hair back in a tight ponytail.

“Take a right here,” she told Peter.

He followed her directions as she guided them toward Wickham. Since she had left, Keomany had felt only a glimmer of the connection to nature that had been hers the last time she was here. It was still there—a new awareness of the world around her, of the order of things and the health of the land—but not so much that she could wield it. Not so much that she felt able to reach out and touch the soul of the earth itself, the way she had on that day.

Now, though, as she drew closer to home, Keomany felt it growing in her again. She was an earthwitch, and what had happened in Wickham was like a huge wound in the flesh of the world, a scar upon nature. It was as though the wound was hers, and yet at the same time, she felt the earth trying to heal itself, felt that she could tap into that.

It was the most incredible feeling she had ever had, being a part of something.
No, of everything
.

Half a mile outside of town Peter drove the Navigator down a gentle slope from the top of which the village ought to have been visible. There was nothing there but a kind of haze, as though a cloud had dropped to earth and made everything past that point in the road out of focus.

A hundred yards from the barren land that had replaced Wickham—from the bubble of air that shimmered and blurred her vision—Keomany saw a phalanx of police cars and two military Jeeps. The road was blocked. The men and women posted at that roadblock were armed. When the Navigator rumbled toward them, they raised their weapons and trained them on the huge black Lincoln SUV.

“Thank God it’s a rental,” Father Jack said.

Nobody laughed.

Peter parked the Navigator in the middle of the road and killed the engine. He glanced at Nikki first, then into the back seat.

“Sit tight. I’m going to have a little talk with them.”

He opened the door and stepped down from the driver’s seat. Keomany leaned forward to get a better view and she noticed that Father Jack had done the same.

Peter had his hands up as he approached the police and the MPs, but there was something different about him now, as if the warrior that he had hidden away was now revealed. It was in everything about him, the way he walked, the way he held his head, the sheer energy that radiated from him. This was what he had come here for.

This was who he was.

When he reached the first police officer, Peter spread his arms wider and his fingers sketched at the air as though he were conducting an orchestra. One of the MPs shouted in alarm, demanding to know what he was up to. The man barely finished his sentence.

A bright flash of green light burst from Peter’s hands, rolling like a wave over those who had been guarding the road. As it struck them, they fell one by one to the ground, unconscious.

“Jesus!” Father Jack hissed.

Nikki glanced back at him, smiling. “Was that a prayer, Father, or were you taking the Lord’s name in vain?”

The priest did not respond. He only stared, just as Keomany did, as Peter turned his back on the men and women he had just rendered inert with a gesture and walked back toward the Navigator. Tapped into nature, Keomany felt as though she could sense the power of the earth itself, even access it a little. But she could not imagine the kind of magick that Octavian had at his disposal. A thousand years in Hell, and he had brought this back with him.

Peter opened the door and smiled in at them. “It was just going to take too long to explain,” he said. “And we’re kind of in a rush.”