Angel Souls and Devil Hearts (9 page)

“Unless you want to leave Allison here, just how do you propose doing that?” Cody answered, acid in his voice.

“Only one way,” Allison said, answering both their questions as she squared her feet the way Cody had taught her, aimed the Beretta, and shot the nearest soldier in the eye.

“Allison, they’re tourists,” Cody reminded her, right hand nervously tugging his beard.

“Get with it, Will. We’ve got no clue what’s really happened to them. What Mulkerrin’s done. Besides, it’s them or us. That’s a no-brainer.”

She squeezed off another round, then pawed Cody’s jacket for backup clips. There weren’t any. And there were a lot of soldiers, moving in slowly, but inexorable as the tide.

“John,” Cody said. “Can you burn?”

“Of course I can, but—” He wasn’t allowed to finish.

“Take the demon.” He flashed a look at Allison. “I’ll take these guys; you cover me. We’ve got to get an escape route.”

Behind the demon was a side street from which some civilians still appeared, screaming and shouting but afraid to turn back, fleeing instead to the east, away from them. That side street led to
Franz-Joseph-Kai, and the Salzach River beyond. At least from there, Cody figured, they’d have space to figure out their next move. He transformed, in a heartbeat, from William F. Cody into a
tiger, a form he’d first seen taken by Meaghan Gallagher. Then he sprang, launching himself into the armored, possessed creatures that hunted him. Shots rang out, as Allison fired her weapon.
Bullets glanced off armor near him, one lodging in his flesh, stinging for a moment.

He tore into them, their armor no match for strength that could smash their ribs, tear the limbs from their bodies. Claws raked skulls and fangs bit deep. Allison would run out of bullets
quickly, and then she’d be defenseless. Cody was not going to let anything happen to her. Swords bit deep into his flesh, and he knew he was lucky they were only steel. The sheer numbers of
the soldiers, many with no protection—there were only so many suits of armor—began to overwhelm him, and he turned to mist to escape the press of their flesh.

John Courage lived up to his name, his flesh flowing like liquid, forming itself into the body of a huge hawk. His wings spread wide, and he dove to avoid the scrabbling arms of the many-eyed
demon as it rushed toward them. Talons raked the thing’s groin and thighs, eyes popped, spurting an acid ejaculate which soaked John’s wings, and his scream was that of the bird. He
changed fast, fire enveloping the demon, immolating it. Flames licked at the creature’s body, and it let out another roar, using its hands to smash at the flames, slapping its burning,
charring flesh in a feeble attempt to douse the flames. Eyes burst all over its form, the sound like popcorn popping, and the thing threw itself to the street, rolling around to kill the fire.

Allison watched as Cody fought the possessed ones off, then turned to mist as they overwhelmed him. One of the few armored attackers still intact rushed toward her, sword raised. She brought the
Beretta up to meet him, trying her best to stay calm, her breathing steady. She fired, and the bullet struck the ghost-man in the shoulder, just under the armor plate. The soldier’s arm
spasmed, dropping the sword as he held the arm close to his body. Allison squeezed the trigger again, and nothing happened.

The gun was empty, useless. She dropped it.

With no time for hesitation, Allison ran toward the once human thing, rather than away. She had been trained to fight, to protect herself, in the years since the Venice Jihad. Now she used those
newly honed skills. Four steps brought her left foot down on the sword before the possessed one could use his right hand to raise it. She grabbed his helmet as her knee came up and smashed,
crunching bones, into his face. The spirit within this man obviously felt his pain, for it shrieked a hellish noise, then fell to its side on the street.

Allison picked up the sword. She kicked away an arm raised to protect the fallen man, and lifted the blade above her head. As it whickered through the air toward the man’s bare neck, she
saw in his upturned face, in his dark eyes, a trace of the humanity that had once resided there. Then the sword fell. It was not a clean cut, but it would do, for the neck had broken.

She knew it was an act of mercy.

Allison turned to face the mob again, but Cody had destroyed most of them. She could see the spirits leaving the corpses piled around him, and out of the corner of her eye for she did not want
to look close, the ghostly form rising from the body of the man she had killed. She knew the soldiers themselves had not been evil, but what was left of them was easily manipulated by
Mulkerrin’s sorcery. The floating forms were gone from the street in an instant, and the way was nearly clear.

Behind her, in his own form, John Courage struggled with the charred and smoldering demon, who had only a handful of eyes left on his body. Courage was sinking his hand into the demon’s
flesh and tearing, searching for something vital. Allison turned to watch just in time to see him raise his hand to strike, but when the blow fell, it was not his hand at all. John Courage’s
entire arm had changed, but not in shape. It had changed its substance.

John’s arm was made of stone.

Blows rained down on the demon, until it was almost whimpering in its defiance. It struggled and clawed at Courage, but could not shake him off. It had proven unusually resistant to fire, and
now Courage raised his stone arm, and it changed again, to fresh wood, its bark slightly green. The wooden fist was lengthening, sharpening, until it resembled nothing so much as a newly carved
stake.

“Cody,” Courage heard Allison call behind him. He knew that he had their unwanted attention, but it could not be helped. He thrust his arm into the creature’s belly, the sharp
wood passing nearly through the thing, then wrenched around inside before pulling out and thrusting again. On the third thrust, he found something, his hand piercing it. The wood had the desired
reaction, as the beast screamed.

The creature shuddered and expelled a fetid breath, and John Courage looked up. From inside the hotel came another demon, this one snake-like of a kind he had seen only once before. It slithered
in a lumbering fashion. It had no eyes but a sense of smell that led it slowly toward Allison, the human. Far down the street, other things moved and people ran in the streets. In the darkened
corners, even smaller things scuttled, the size of human children. They were the scavengers, dark jackals, waiting for their larger counterparts to do the serious damage first. But in packs, they
were just as dangerous.

It was getting worse; they had to get out. Courage turned toward Allison and Cody, and saw Cody finishing off the last of the soldiers as Allison stared at him. Cody, apparently, had not heard
her shout, had not seen Courage’s latest transformations. All the better for now.

John Courage walked toward her, and Allison turned to shout to Cody that it was time to go, while the getting was good. Then she saw them: more soldiers, former human beings who had been
overcome by Mulkerrin’s ghostly slaves, pushed from their bodies to make way for new tenants. Allison realized what had happened. For every human host Cody killed, the spirits simply found a
new one.

They were fighting a losing battle, no matter what.

“Will, come on. We’ve got to get out of here.” He ignored her, finishing off what he thought was the last of them. “Look behind you!”

Cody did, and they rushed him from all sides, all corners, and toward Allison as well. Courage was next to her, knocking several of her attackers away, one with enough force to snap its neck.
She saw Cody buried beneath a mound of the creatures, who had jumped him all at once bringing him down. Then fire blossomed at the bottom of the pile, kindling under dry logs, and the whole group
was in flames, their clothing burning out of control and their skin beginning to give off a greasy smell and a crackling noise.

“Allison, pay attention!” Courage said, then yanked her aside.

She looked up to see that the ghost had fled the body of the man whose neck he had broken, and was moving toward her. It would not approach Courage directly, and his arm burst into flame as he
tried to wave it off.

“Why does it want me?” she asked.

“It doesn’t care, it needs a host to stay alive, to stay here, in our world. You’ll do as well as any human.”

Finally, the thing apparently decided there would be easier targets, and fled the scene, even as Courage was lifting another of the soldiers and tossing him away.

In our world
. Allison heard the words again. Not
on
,
in
. Not even on Earth, but
in our world
.

“What do you mean by . . . ?” she started, but there wasn’t time.

“We’ve got to get you out of here, or you’ll be one of them,” he said, and then he was dragging her away, north toward the side street the demon had blocked.

She turned to see the huge snake-like thing, at least thirty feet long and three feet thick, sliding to block their way, and screamed.

“Will!”

She realized he was in trouble too. She looked at Courage out of the corner of her eye.

“What about Will?” she demanded.

“He’ll have to fend for himself! He should be fine, but we’ve got to get you out of here! Once we’re gone, he won’t have to fight, he can run.”

“I’m not going anywhere without him,” Allison said, trying to stand her ground.

“I’m sorry, but you are,” Courage answered, then threw her over his shoulder and shot into the side street just in time to escape the serpent, which even now coiled back to
slither toward the overwhelmed Will Cody.

Will was fighting hard, but he was getting very tired. Changing from flame to mist to a tiger to himself and then back to flame again, the battle a constant, combined with the serpent he saw
sliding toward him now, had begun to take a toll on his body, and his psyche. He was glad that Allison and Courage had gone. He knew of the danger to her, and he stood a better chance of getting
out if he didn’t have to worry about her. All he had to do now was change to something with wings, or to mist, and fly out of there.

A sword entered through his back and out his stomach, and he vomited blood, hunching over. He turned fast, his movement pulling the sword from its owner’s grasp, then reached around behind
him to pull the blade from his body.

“That . . . fucking . . .
hurt
!” he said, swinging the blade down into the shoulder of his attacker, a woman. The sword sank deep into the body, cracking through the
collarbone and splintering ribs. He turned to face the rest, his wounds healing, but not as quickly as they should. Human hands driven by ghostly minds grabbed him from all around, and he felt a
burning, searing pain that made him scream.

He clamped his mouth shut, willing the scream, the pain, away, even as he felt his arms yanked to his sides by the mob that surrounded him. He wanted to strike out, to burn them, to fly away,
but he could not gather his thoughts, his concentration, enough for the change. The pain overwhelmed him, covering his entire body now, and despite his greatest efforts, he did scream again.

“Yeeaaarggghhhh!”

Then the hands were gone, the mob was gone, though the pain remained. His mind aflame, he fell to the pavement with a clank. Opening his eyes, he saw the chains. Silver chains, wrapped around
his entire body. And then he heard the voice.

“
Well
.” The voice floated on the breeze. “
If it isn’t our old friend, Buffalo Bill
.”

Cody recognized the voice.

It belonged to Liam Mulkerrin.

Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.
Tuesday, June 6, 2000, 1:31
P.M.
:

Meaghan was pretty ambivalent about being the boss. Here she was, one of the youngest shadows on Earth, certainly with less experience in their culture than the creatures she
surrounded herself with. She didn’t really rate, at a surface glance, the kind of attention she received. She was nervous and frightened sometimes, when Alex was sleeping and couldn’t
comfort her. She was insecure because not long ago she’d been human, a young woman with a so-so job and no steady relationship, who had no family and whose only real friend had been murdered.
Not much of a résumé.

But other times, she knew all the reasons why she was the leader, and agreed with them. Other times she was confident in her strength and ability, and the rightness of her position. She had been
strong enough as a human to walk among the walking dead, to befriend them, to take Peter Octavian as her lover. She had chosen to become one of them, to help them fight a centuries-old battle to
the death. She had helped ease the pain of the reconciliation between Peter and his blood-brothers and -sisters. She had shown them the way out of their self-imposed limits, shown them that their
shape-shifting abilities could be used for far more than even Peter had imagined, that they didn’t have to limit themselves to bats, wolves and mist, forms imposed by Rome’s
brainwashing.

She was young, but she was strong. And good. And for those among them that had a difficult time remembering what it was like to believe in one’s own, innate goodness, she was an example to
be emulated. Her innocence was a beacon to them. To others, for the moment in the minority, that beacon became a target, and Meaghan knew she would be defending herself very soon. She also knew
that chief among her detractors was Hannibal, and that keeping him in line would require more effort than she had believed.

That threat, she knew, would have to be eliminated. And if that required that Hannibal be eliminated, so be it.

Though voices screamed in the back of her mind at such a thought, Meaghan Gallagher resisted their input, their logic, which wondered if what she was doing were so much different from the
culling of the herd practiced by the Church for centuries. She insisted to herself that it was different, that she was doing it, not for her own good, or any evil purpose, but for the good of her
own kind, for humanity, and for the world, which could not stand a war between humans and shadows. The smoldering remains of Venice, the hundreds of bodies, proved that.