Ghosts of War (13 page)

T
he eyes had continued to haunt him.

All throughout the war, all throughout those long months of bloodshed, mortar shells, engine oil, and death. Every time he'd gone up in his aircraft, every time he'd looked to the skies, the eyes had been there, watching him, judging him.

Gabriel had retreated into himself. He had prosecuted his missions with an increasing sense of dislocation. He felt as if his mind was disengaging. What was real? What was not? Had reality somehow fractured? Or was it simply his mind creating figments, ethereal ghosts, unable to cope with the atrocities he had seen, with the knowledge of what he was doing every time he depressed the trigger to set loose another shell. Was it simply the war, doing this to him? He didn't know, and soon enough even that question was lost as he drifted through the fog of those months, unable, in truth, to engage with anything or anyone other than what was strictly necessary for him to get through the ordeal as quickly as possible.

Life became a series of stuttering moments, repeating over and over: eating, sleeping, shitting, flying, eating, shitting…The borders of his universe had shrunk, and he was hemmed in. Only the war in France existed. Nothing more. He felt as if he were being eroded by it, as if soon, that shrinking universe would close in on him completely and he would simply blink out of existence, forgotten, like all the others left for dead on the fields of battle.

Throughout it all, the eyes had remained a constant, unwavering companion. They reminded him of his duty. Not his duty to his captain, or his country, but his duty to himself. His duty to protect the core of what he was, of
who
he was. He knew this conflict would change him, and everyone around him, utterly. Yet somehow the eyes reminded him to preserve what he could of Gabriel Cross, to bury it, to leave it untouched by the madness, and the violence, and the horror.

So Gabriel had done just that. He had taken that small kernel, what was left of
him
, and he had buried it somewhere over France. It wasn't until years later, in New York City, that he had even been able to conceive of unearthing it again. By then he had changed beyond all comprehension.

Of course, the horrors had continued. While Gabriel had become desensitized to the loss of human life—a notion he still found horrific to this day—the things he had seen during his crash, in those few lucid moments before delirium and his injuries had overwhelmed him, had perhaps done more to alter his perception of the world than anything that human beings could do to one another.

He barely remembered the moments leading up to the crash. Just the sensation of hurtling through the sky, out of control, of thinking,
Finally, this is it. This is where I die.

Silence and motion. The blur of speed, of the world sliding past the toughened glass of the cockpit. Black smoke smudging the sky, peacefulness. These were the impressions he was left with. And then…nothing.

When he'd come to, he had been on his side. The noise and the pain had returned with a startling ferocity, assaulting his every sense, filling his head with confusion. It had taken him a few minutes to realize what had actually occurred, to catch his breath and calm his nerves enough that he could think. He remembered pinching himself, disbelieving that he could truly be still alive. Then the world had resolved around him, suddenly snapping back into sharp focus. He'd glanced around, trying to get his bearings.

His plane had saved his life—a metal cocoon that had protected him from the worst of the impact. He'd lost a wing in the crash, and the other, damaged beyond repair, had been pointing up at the sky like an accusatory finger, jutting proudly from the wreckage. The plane had clearly rotated onto its side as it struck the ground.

Still strapped into his seat and hanging limply out of the shattered cockpit, Gabriel had been able to tell from the churned earth that surrounded him that the fuselage had gouged a long rent in the muddy loam, like a crazed plow, turning over the landscape as it came to rest.

In the distance dark smoke rose in long spirals, and he'd heard the sharp whine of engines overhead: his brothers-in-arms, still intent on smiting the enemy, on avenging him, their dead, fallen comrade who had been blasted out of the sky by enemy fire. He'd known they would not come looking for him. No one survived a crash such as the one he had experienced. No one. To his friends and fellow pilots, he was already dead. Dead the minute the enemy weapon had burst open his engine housing and sent him careening toward the ground.

Gabriel had fought to free himself from his webbing, and had cried out at the lancing pain the movement stirred in his leg. He hadn't been entirely unscathed, after all. Nevertheless, he'd known the danger of staying too close to the wreckage. The engine could have gone up at any moment if a stray spark found an exposed fuel line or spillage from a split tank. He'd seen it happen to other downed planes, even discussed it with the other pilots, explained how he saw it as a fitting end for a dead pilot, to be cremated along with his vehicle. Better that, surely, than being left to be picked over by scavenging animals? At least this way there was some dignity left for the dead man, something to be claimed from the horror of what had become of him.

He'd never even considered before that some of those pilots might still have been alive.

Taking all of the strain in his upper arms, Gabriel had heaved himself out of the cockpit and slumped onto the wet, clinging mud below. He'd lain there on his back for a while, watching the sky. And surely enough, up there, in the distance, that pair of eyes had stared back at him, unblinking.

It had been after this, after he had freed himself from the carcass of his downed plane and stumbled, near delirious, toward a farmhouse in a neighboring field, that he had first encountered the creature that would change his life.

The farmhouse had been long-abandoned, its occupants most likely fleeing in the face of the oncoming conflict, the tide of violence and death that was sweeping across their country. But something else had taken up residence in the dilapidated building.

Gabriel had practically fallen in through the door, desperately in search of help. His leg had been mangled in the crash, and he'd been barely able to support himself as he'd stumbled toward the building in the hope of salvation. It had taken every ounce of his remaining strength. With hindsight, he'd been able to see how foolish he'd been to expect to find any help in that crumbling old wreck of a home. Of course there would be no one there, in the middle of a war zone. They would have been evacuated months earlier, their home given over to the soldiers or left abandoned, target practice for the enemy bombers. Nevertheless, he had pressed on, fixated on the idea that if he could only get to safety, to the haven of that farmhouse, everything would be all right.

Instead of the hoped-for assistance, however, instead of the kindly French farmer he'd imagined in his half-hallucinatory state, he'd found something else there, lurking in the dark. Something that should never have existed. Something that shifted and stirred in the shadows, that unfurled itself as he'd crept into that blackened shell of a building, readying itself to feast on his broken, exhausted body.

It was an alien thing, a monster, a creature derived from his very worst nightmares, spawned from the depths of hell itself. It had reached out for him with its thick, ropy tentacles, its pink flesh glistening in the half-light, dripping with syrupy mucus.

He'd thought then that he was probably insane, that this thing, this figment, had been born out of his waking dreams, just like the eyes that haunted him from above. He'd tried to convince himself it was a hallucination, a creation of his damaged mind. Others had said the same, too, when—a day later—they had picked him up, stumbling across the fields, still fleeing the unbelievable creature he claimed to have encountered near the wreckage of his plane.

Of course, the crash site had been located and the farmhouse had been explored, and nothing had been found to corroborate his story. It had been dismissed as the ravings of an injured man, driven temporarily mad by the shock.

He'd held on to that notion after he'd recovered, after he'd been invalided home back to Long Island to have his leg treated. The dreams had continued to torment him, of course, but those strange, all-seeing eyes had remained in France, as had the beast. And so he came to accept that theory as the truth—that of course such things could never exist, that the creature he had seen had been nothing but the product of his unconscious mind, the means by which his mind had coped with the horror of his ordeal, an externalization of the pain. He'd listened to the doctors and had come to believe what they told him. He had followed their advice, and he had slipped back into his mundane, ordinary existence. The eternal party had once again come to define him.

Yet somewhere, deep inside that kernel of himself that he had buried so long ago, he knew that in his complicity, in his readiness to believe in the mind-fever, he was deceiving not only the doctors, but also himself. A part of him recognized the truth, but he kept it hidden, terrified to admit it even to himself. Because in acknowledging the truth—that everything he had seen had been real—he would be admitting that either he had, truly, been driven insane, or else that there were such horrors in the universe that knowledge of them might amount to exactly the same thing.

He had kept such thoughts buried for years, even when he had first donned the black suit of the Ghost. And then, just scant weeks earlier, he had seen another of the creatures, here in New York City, in the basement of the Roman's mansion, thrashing about as it hauled itself through the gateway from its own world into his.

It was perhaps one of the most terrifying, and yet liberating, experiences of his life. After all this time, all those years of repressing the truth, he had finally allowed himself to recognize that he had been right all along. In doing so, he had blurred the boundaries between the twin halves of his life.

Gabriel—or the Ghost—had fought the beast, and it had taken from him the woman he had loved. Only Celeste had been able to stop it. Celeste. Remarkable, beautiful Celeste. She had known the truth all along, had known of the existence of such things, and had known also that her blood was anathema to it. She had killed it by sacrificing her-self, and in doing so she had saved him, Donovan, and the city.

In doing so she had offered him hope—hope that those things could be stopped—but at a price he could barely stand to consider. Her loss was like a burning poker in his chest. When he thought of her, he found it difficult to breathe. The pain was still so acute, so pointed, so fresh.

But now he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the monsters in the darkness did exist. This was the burden he carried. One of the many.

Gabriel woke with a start, thrashing his way through layers of unconsciousness.

Had he called out to her? To Celeste? He thought perhaps he had.

He sensed movement, and turned to see Ginny stumbling through the doorway of his bedroom, blinking into the early-morning light like a vampire emerging into the dawn. He watched her for a moment, trying to remember where he was, what had happened, why she was there.

Yes, that was right. They were in Manhattan, in his apartment on Fifth Avenue. He'd spent the night in an armchair, giving his bed up for the girl. Judging by the light streaming in through the window, it was already well past dawn.

His body ached. He stretched wearily, feeling a sharp pull in his shoulder. That was where the raptor's claw had bitten into his flesh. He cycled through the events of the previous night—the party, the trip into town, the apartment and the dead agent, the fight with the raptors. Ginny and his two pistols. It came back to him in a cascade of stuttering images.

Ginny eyed him as she crossed toward the kitchenette. Had she heard him calling out? Is that what had roused her and brought her out, blinking into the morning light? Most probably. But then Ginny knew what it was to have bad dreams. She was broken, just like him. Only instead of donning a black suit and traversing the rooftops by night, searching for penitence, for someone to take it all out on, she handled her demons in a different way. She found solace at the bottom of a bottle. The thing was, he just didn't know why.

“God, I need a drink,” she said, rummaging in the cupboards for a glass. Her voice was still groggy with sleep.

“Isn't it a bit early for that?”

“Gabriel, my dear, that's precisely the point.” She smiled coquettishly and ran a hand through her mop of unruly hair. Her red, glossy lipstick was smeared across her cheek. She still looked pretty, Gabriel considered. Devastatingly so, perhaps more so because of her rumpled state, her lack of perfection, her humanity. Why, then, had he chosen to sleep in the armchair, alone?

He felt strangely reluctant to acknowledge his feelings for the woman, as confused as they were. What was it that was holding him back? Was it because she reminded him of a past he'd thought he'd left behind, a part of his life he'd sooner forget? Was it because he suspected her of something underhanded, for walking so brazenly back into his life without any sort of explanation as to why? Or perhaps it was loyalty to the memory of Celeste, who had died only a few weeks earlier? Even fear that it might happen again—that if he allowed himself to fall for this girl once more, she might disappear again, or worse, that he might lead her unwittingly to her demise?

He didn't know. But one thing was sure—he wanted to be around her. He wanted her close. And perhaps that was enough for him, for now.

Ginny sauntered over, drink in hand, ice cubes clicking in the glass. She folded herself smoothly into the armchair opposite him, crossing her knees. She was wearing his long, silk dressing gown, and it looked faintly ridiculous on her, billowing around her like some oversized kimono.

Gabriel, on the other hand, was still wearing the accoutrements of the previous night: the coat and jacket of the Ghost. He'd unclipped the long barrel of his fléchette gun and dropped it on the floor beside his chair. Likewise the canisters of his rocket propellers, which he had unstrapped from his ankles and cast across the room. His hat was resting on the coffee table. He'd need to bathe before facing the day.