The Gathering Dark (49 page)

Peter whispered ancient words and Keomany glanced over at him and nodded as though she understood. He thought perhaps she had. Gaea, after all, was far older than the beings that had first wielded the sorcery Peter had at his disposal.

“Let’s take the son of a bitch down,” Keomany said.

The mage smiled at the incongruity of her coarse words coming from the lips of a goddess of purity. Then he nodded again.

“By all means.”

Keomany bent toward him and kissed him gently on the lips. A spasm went through Peter and he threw his head back. Something had passed from her to him, a small piece of the spirit that filled her. He not only could taste and smell the air around him, but could feel what was beyond this small patch of sunlight, could sense the world. Through the connection they had made, he
felt
Gaea, felt the earth.

“What are you doing, my brother?” Kuromaku asked, his low voice soothing as always.

Peter glanced at him, there in the storm. “Taking it back,” he replied.

His eyes fluttered closed. He could feel the branches that had wrapped around Keomany’s legs and could hear the splash of water that had erupted out of the ground ten feet away, a kind of fountain that flowed down into the dry riverbed and off away out of the gorge. In his mind’s eye he could see the exact size and shape of the tear Keomany had ripped between dimensions.

From the two of them, earthwitch and mage, power emanated. They reached out together with the power that raged through the circuit they created and they
pushed
.

Peter felt it give way even before he heard the astonished gasp of Kuromaku’s friend and the appreciative mutterings of Father Jack and Allison. He opened his eyes and saw that they were all bathed in sunlight now, that shoots of green plant life had spurted up from between the rocks at their feet. Above, the swath of blue sky had opened wider, pushing the storm back.

Keomany’s fingers tightened around his hands and the pain in the gashes in his palms barely registered. He gave her his magick, helped to connect her to Gaea, and he relished the way it felt to touch the earth spirit. Keomany laughed happily and golden mist poured from her eyes. Another wave of power pulsed from the two of them and the rocks and trees trembled. The entire Cleft of Ronda was returned to the world in which it belonged. The ruins of the bridge were painted with morning light, showing the way portions of the arches still stood, jagged remnants of brilliant architecture. The breach stretched to include the ramparts to the south of the gorge and the state-owned hotel that sat upon the north wall of the Cleft.

With a roar, the river flowed again. Allison and Father Jack had to move farther up the banks to avoid being washed away as the water raced down to fill the bed of the river, splashing and rolling and at last returning to the course it had followed forever.

“You’re doing it!” Father Jack told them. “Thank the Lord, you’re doing it!”

Peter had known it was an almost impossible feat; that it was not merely Ronda, but Derby and Hidalgo and who knew how many other cities that had been gathered here in this Hell, stacked one beside the other. But he allowed himself the tiniest spark of hope.

His heart soared.

Together, he and Keomany pushed farther.

But this time, something pushed back. A crack of thunder so loud it shook the walls of the gorge and resounded across the sky. Keomany cried out in anguish and Peter felt a spike of pain that raced up his spine and seemed to stab into his brain. Blackness swam at the edges of his vision and he fell to his knees. Even as his hopes were dashed, though, something tugged at the back of his mind, a niggling little bit of observation that he could not avoid. When the Hellgod had pushed back, he had felt something, a connection not unlike the one Keomany had to Gaea, to her own world.

But this was a connection to somewhere else. The power of the Tatterdemalion was not of this dimension. Peter had suspected that the Hellgod was not of this tiny universe, but now he
felt
it, and it made a new kind of sense to him. The demon was a visitor here, just as they were.

We make our own Hells
, Father Jack had said. And Peter now felt certain that the Tatterdemalion had made this one, created this pocket dimension in order to have a place to torment his conquests, to drag the cities of Earth and perpetrate his horrors upon its people.

Peter shook his head, clearing his vision, and realized that he was no longer holding Keomany’s hands.

“No, oh no please!” Sophie cried.

Peter saw Keomany, then. She had collapsed on the rocks at the riverside. She was moving, alive, and her eyes still glimmered with a faint golden glow. But all around them the storm raged in again, the blue patch torn in the sky above began to narrow and the sunlight to disappear, eaten by the wind and the rain and the power of a Hellgod that had at last deigned to pay attention to them.

The light contracted, the dimensional rip closed until all that remained was a shaft of light perhaps six feet around, just enough to outline Keomany there on the rocks. It was a spotlight upon the earthwitch as she sat up, buried her face in her hands, and began to weep.

“No,” Peter whispered to himself as the wind struck him again and the greasy rain struck his face, ran down his cheeks like oily tears.

“Whispers!” Allison shouted.

The mage glanced around to see that she was right. The southern wall of the gorge was dotted with the skeletal demons as they clambered down the sheer rock face. Whatever their instructions had been before, the Tatterdemalion must have changed his mind.

Father Jack came up beside Peter, standing tall, his hands held up, ready to cast a spell. “I guess you finally got its attention.”

Then, amid the wailing of the wind, he heard another sound, a scream carried to him on the storm, just the hint of it reaching his ears before being whipped away again. Peter glanced around, wondering where it had come from. The others were all preparing to fight off the Whispers that came quickly down the gorge like a hundred giant spiders. But that scream . . . Peter heard it again. A voice, crying out in terror . . . crying his name.

He looked up at the ruins of the bridge, and there he saw her, hanging above the jagged remains of the arches that had supported the structure, no more than two hundred feet in the air. She was nude, her body streaked with gashes Peter presumed had been made by the talons of Whispers. The wind swirled around her and she hung there, dangling in the breeze like a rag doll.

Peter whispered her name. And then he shouted it.

“Nikki!”

With a snarl Peter spread his arms wide and there was an audible pop as the air crackled with energy and a sphere of verdant light blossomed into existence around him. He felt the magick all through him now and his bones no longer hurt. It was as though his physical form had been transmuted into pure magick, as though the energy that swirled around him was just as much his flesh as the fingers that directed it.

An afterthought, he glanced at Allison. The vampire looked almost feral, crouched and ready for battle, her red hair slicked back on her scalp by the rain.

“Keep them safe,” he told her.

Then he rose up off the ground, energy sphere lifting him upward with dizzying speed. He shot toward the ruins of the bridge, aware of his surroundings—of the Whispers clambering down the cliffs into the gorge and the lightning and the storm that was ripping at the city—but focused now only on the fragile, pale, nude body of his lover hanging there above the jagged ruins.

In his mind’s eye he saw the face of Meaghan Gallagher, a woman he had loved who had sacrificed her life to save others. And he saw Allison, saw her as she had looked the first time they had met, and remembered the way she had gazed at Cody with love before he had been killed and her innocence had been ripped from her.

Not Nikki
, he thought, teeth clenched so tightly his jaw hurt.
Not Nikki.

He would rush to her, envelop her in the protective circle of his magick, and lower her gently to the ground. He would cover her nudity with his shirt and investigate the slashes in her skin, and he would hold her. Peter saw all of this in his mind and he knew that it had to be.

Once upon a time he had been immortal . . . fate had altered him, given him a second chance at humanity. At first he had embraced the opportunity, relished the idea that time would one day run out for him. But it had been centuries since he had walked among his fellow humans as just an ordinary man, since he had had to really
live
in the world. And so he had retreated to old patterns, keeping mostly to himself. He might have claimed immortality again at any time—had Allison or Kuromaku bring him into the Shadows once more—but instead he found himself trapped by his desire to be human, and his terror of what that meant.

No second chances. That was the truth of humanity. As an immortal he could live as he pleased and watch the world go by around him, years passing with the speed of a single dawn to dusk. But mortality meant he only had one chance, one journey. And this hard truth had wrought in him a fear of living that left him very much alone.

All of this went through his mind in the seconds it took for him to levitate himself to where Nikki hung naked and bleeding above the ruins. But as adrenaline rushed through him, he knew she would be all right, that she had to be, for despite his power he was just a man now, mortal, and he could not bear the thought of going on without her.

The wind raged around the sphere, battering against it, slowing Peter down. He was perhaps twenty feet from her when he saw the first rags whipping around in the storm. Strips of cloth, dishrags, clean laundry plucked from a clothesline somewhere.

Ice formed along his spine.

In the time it took him to travel ten feet, rags and laundry flew together, layered upon one another, to create the shape of a man. In an eyeblink the Tatterdemalion had arrived, his arms outlined beneath bath towels and a clutch of grease-stained mechanics’ rags, burning eyes cloaked in a hood fashioned from a pretty, floral-patterned sundress.

The Tatterdemalion held Nikki from behind, the two of them borne aloft on the winds. Its fingers were made of women’s panties, twisted into knots by the storm, and it clutched her throat.

“You were warned,”
the Tatterdemalion said, its voice the whisper of the storm in Peter’s ears.

“Nikki,” he called to her. Through that sphere and the roar of the wind he could not have expected her to hear him. It took him a moment to dredge up from within him a spell that would have let his voice carry to her as though he were right beside her. A flash of irony went through him that such simple magick should be a challenge to him when sorcery of a more brutal nature was simplicity itself, but he ignored the thought.

This was not a time for subtle magicks.

He had no doubt that the Tatterdemalion would hear his voice, regardless of the storm. After all, it
was
the storm.

“Give her to me,” Peter demanded. Magickal flames licked up from his fingers and the sphere around him took on a reddish hue.

The wind blew the sundress-cloak across its face and Peter saw the outline of the Tatterdemalion’s features, ridged and gruesome, with a protruding lower jaw and a mouth that stretched Jack-o’-lantern wide. With the cotton over its face, he could see it grin.

“You have become quite a nuisance. And I did warn you. Foolish mage. I am still adding more of your world to this one, but I don’t have room for all of it. There will be cities left, entire nations, in fact. But someone will have to help rebuild; someone will have to hunt the demons that all of these breaches into your world have unleashed. Every hole I have made was torn through several other places as well
. . .
it will be years before you have catalogued all of the things that now run free in your world.

“They need you at home, Octavian.

“I give you a second opportunity. Take your friends,”
it said, the voice of the wind now joined by a rumble of nearby thunder. The wind whipped the cloak away from its face again and there was only darkness beneath that hood now, not even those glowing eyes. Cloth fingers raised Nikki’s unconscious face up so that Peter could see her clearly. Her eyelids fluttered and she seemed about to wake.

“Take your lover and return to your world. Pick up the pieces. And be glad I don’t have enough room for all of Earth in here.”

The Tatterdemalion seemed to offer Nikki up to Peter and yet it proffered her only tentatively, prepared at any moment to destroy her. It had brought her here like it had brought everything here. It had somehow captured her and yet kept her alive.

Puzzle pieces clicked into place in his mind. Peter hesitated, let the Tatterdemalion assume that he was considering its demands. He glanced back down into the gorge, where Father Jack and Kuromaku fought with blade and spell against the Whispers returning to the site of their mother’s murder. Keomany kept Sophie safe inside the single shaft of sunlight that still streamed from the breach in the Tatterdemalion’s world, that umbilical back to the Earth dimension.