It Happened One Doomsday (19 page)

They wandered past lines of half-burnt candles, battered cauldrons, a desk stacked high with books and loose papers.

Dru had already walked by a pinned-up drawing of the stone archway before she realized what it was. She hurried back and looked it over. A St. Louis–style archway with a stone ramp leading up to it and magical notes scribbled all around it. “That's the archway out back!”

“Guess so,” Rane said, sounding unimpressed.

Dru studied the symbols scrawled around the edge of the paper. The first looked like football uprights turned upside down. The second symbol was a circle with a diagonal line drawn across it. “
Sekura koridoro
,” she translated. “‘Secure passageway.' The symbol below that says that this is a safe road to follow.”

“Road?” Rane said.

“Not literally a road. Could mean some kind of escape route.” She pointed to a flattened hexagon symbol, just like the one Salem had spray-painted on her door, and the column of symbols below it. “
Kristalo
. ‘Crystal magic unlocks the road.' Whatever that means.”

“Hey!” Rane excitedly punched her shoulder. “Maybe these nutjobs managed to build a portal to the causeways.”

Dru shook her head. “Don't you think if the causeways ever existed, somebody would have found a portal by now?”

“Maybe there
aren't
any portals anymore,” Rane retorted. “That's why they built one.”

Dru fought the urge to roll her eyes.

“Their generator is dead,” Greyson said, emerging from the darkness into the torchlight. “We're stuck with the torch. Did you find anything?”

“Just this, whatever it is.” Dru waved a hand at the diagram of the archway. Turning to Rane, she said, “I highly doubt it's a portal to the causeways.”

“The what?” Greyson said.

Dru sighed. “According to the stories, way long ago, ancient sorcerers built portals and tunnels through the netherworld. Shortcuts from one place to another. You enter in Rome and come out in Cairo, that sort of thing. And, if you believe everything you read, some pretty scary sorcerers supposedly used the netherworld as their personal domain. Building fortresses there. Safeguarding their greatest treasures. Carrying out unspeakable experiments. Creating an empire of magic in the netherworld. And all of their bridges and roads, those are the causeways.” Dru shook her head. “But they're a myth. No one's ever found the causeways.”

“Whatever.” Rane yanked down the drawing and folded it up. “We're taking this with us.”

A photo slipped off the table and fluttered to the floor. Dru picked it up, and a jolt of recognition went through her when she saw the black-and-white snapshot.

Four women and three men alternately stood or sat somewhere in the desert. The men all had long sideburns and shaggy hair, two of them with mustaches, one with a cowboy hat. The women wore bell-bottoms, crazy-patterned dresses, and hairstyles that Dru hadn't seen outside of old family photos from the sixties.

No one smiled. They all made the same cryptic sign: one hand held palm-out, joined by two fingers from the other hand.

A seven-fingered hand. Just like the one drawn on the front of that journal.

Seven Harbingers, they'd called themselves.

“Oh, God,” she realized out loud. “I bought that journal from an online auction.” Doubtless the same auction where Greyson had bought Hellbringer.

In the photo, now brittle and tan with age, the Harbingers' wide eyes all had the same crazed look. It made goose bumps rise on the back of her neck. Maybe the whole thing was staged, a bit of post-hippie drama captured for the ages. Or maybe it was a gleam of true madness. She had no way to know.

She flipped the picture over. Sprawling handwriting in faded ballpoint ink read, “Severin, Alistair, Marlo . . .” She couldn't make out the rest of the names. But those three were legendary sorcerers from the twentieth century.

Severin, Alistair, Marlo
. She'd heard terrible things about them. Dark incantations, horrifying age-old secrets unleashed, rumors of murder and worse.

“Dude,” Rane said to Greyson. “Gimme your hand.”

When Greyson held out his hand, looking puzzled, Rane smacked the fist-sized lump of brown coprolite into his palm.

“No joke,” she said slowly. “That shit is a hundred million years old.”

Greyson wasn't paying attention. He turned and stared into the darkness, his face going blank. “Do you hear . . . ?” He didn't finish.

Rane rolled her eyes. “Hear what?”

He dropped the rock. With a lurch, he set off into the gloom, as if called away.

Dru traded worried glances with Rane, then followed him. “Greyson? Where are you going?” She caught up to him and tugged on his arm, but he pulled free without even breaking stride.

As she chased after him, he led her past the last of the workbenches into the open center of the chamber, a dirt-and-gravel clearing that extended beyond the torchlight into endless gloom. He marched onward without any hesitation, each stride purposeful and yet somehow vacant, as if sleepwalking.

“Greyson?” Dru's voice shook. She stopped at the border of the clearing.

Rane touched her shoulder. “Something's wrong. I'll go first. Stay tight.”

Dru stayed close behind her, following Greyson, until he stopped in front of one of the four long trenches she'd seen from the top of the stairs. They were laid out like a plus sign. In the center lay the charred remnants of a long-dead bonfire, filled with the blackened remains of bones.

At the outside end of each pit lay a bleached-white horse skull, facing out. The one at Greyson's feet had something painted on the wide arch of bone between its hollow eye sockets.

Dru crept closer until she could get a clear look.

A pair of scales. Just like the one painted under Hellbringer's hood. Just like the one that had glowed on Greyson's hands, after he had become the demon.

He stood motionless and vacant, as if mesmerized. Dru backed away from him.

Rane's metal feet rang softly on the gravel as she circled the ceremony site, looking at the other horse skulls. “This one has a symbol of a bow and arrow on it,” she said, pointing, then went to the next one. “A sword.” When she reached the last one, she cocked her head. “Looks like . . . fangs? I dunno. Mean anything to you?”

Scales. Bow. Sword. Fangs.
Dru shook her head.

Rane pointed to the gravel pit in front of the horse skull with the sword symbol. “The gravel there looks darker. Like maybe it's been dug up recently.”

“Don't touch it,” Dru warned her. “Not yet. Give me a sec.”

“We don't
have
a sec.” Rane shot a worried look at Greyson. “Something seriously bad is about to happen.”

“Just let me think.”
Scales. Bow. Sword. Fangs.
The symbols whirled around in her head. She couldn't put it together. What were they? She burned with frustration.

Scales. Bow. Sword. Fangs.
Dru pressed her fingertips into her forehead, thinking.

Four horse skulls.

Four horses.

“Dru?”

“Still thinking!”

Rane bent down, one hand hovering over the disturbed gravel pit. “What if I dig this up? Will it break Greyson's curse?”

It hit Dru then, like being dropped into icy water. The cold realization washed over her, as impossible as it was, stealing her breath away.

“Oh, Greyson.” She studied his blank face, suddenly wishing she didn't know. When she reached up and laid a hand on the scratchy stubble of his jaw, he blinked, startled.

“What?” He looked all around, at the pits, at Rane, and finally at Dru. An impenetrable worry haunted his eyes. “What's wrong?”

In a flash, the words came back to Dru from her childhood.

“‘When he opened the third seal, I looked, and there was a black horse,'” Dru whispered. Her head felt suddenly, nauseatingly light. The vast cave seemed to spin around her.

Greyson caught her arm and steadied her. “Dru? What's going on?”

Gently, she took Greyson's hand and turned it over. The skin was rough and thick from too many hours in the garage, but there was no trace of the demon's burning glyph. “The rider had a pair of scales in his hand,” she whispered.

Greyson frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“The book of Revelation.” Tears blurred her vision. “It's not just any curse afflicting you, Greyson. That's why this has been so hard to beat. I'm not sure we
can
beat it.”

His eyebrows drew together, an unspoken question.

“Greyson, I don't know how to save you. You're . . .” She swallowed down the hard lump in her throat and looked straight into his red eyes. “You're becoming one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

He stared at her, the disbelief in his face gradually transforming to confusion, then horror. Despite his tough exterior, she could tell her words had shaken him to the core. “What happens next?”

“Doomsday. The end of the world.”

The muscles in his jaw rippled, and then he quickly shook his head. “Tell me you know how to stop it.”

“If I'm right, that means there are
four
Horsemen. Maybe if we find the others, maybe we can cure all of them at once. That could conceivably break the curse.”

“
Other
Horsemen?” Rane straightened up, her steely gaze boring into Greyson. “How are we supposed to find the rest of them?”

With a blood-chilling roar, the gravel pit at Rane's feet erupted in a spray of dirt. Red scaly claws shot up from below and latched onto her ankles. Rane let out a startled cry as the claws dragged her feetfirst down into the gravel, like quicksand.

23

DEVIL IN THE DARK

As the scaly claws dragged Rane into the pit, her metal fingers clawed into the dirt, digging long, parallel troughs. But they did nothing to slow her down.

Dru stood transfixed with horror. She wanted to run and help, but a cold rush of fear froze her to the spot. She couldn't move. She could only stare in stunned terror as the pit of gravel swallowed Rane's feet, then her calves, and then her thighs.

Greyson didn't hesitate. He charged directly across the ceremonial site toward Rane. A fiery glow lit him up from below. His footsteps left burning imprints on the ground, ruddy glowing footprints crawling with yellow points of light. Waves of magic raced up his body, clinging to him. But he didn't seem to notice.

Greyson's presence released some kind of infernal energy from the unholy ground. But what would it do to him?

He grabbed both of Rane's arms. His face contorted with effort as he dug his heels deep into the dirt. The unholy energy slithered over his body, wrapping around him.

With a breathy grunt, Greyson heaved. Rane's metal body went taut, like a rope in a tug-of-war, suspended for a moment between the pit and Greyson's bulging arms.

Rane, wide-eyed, looked up at Greyson wreathed in flames, then glanced over her shoulder to Dru for help. “Dru!” she yelled. “Problem!”

“Hang on!” Dru jammed the torch upright into the dirt, set down her massively heavy purse, and dumped out the crystals she had just gathered from the cabinet. Green vivianite. Violet amethyst. Black tourmaline. Where was her galena?

Greyson let out a tortured groan, baring his teeth. With a final pull, he wrenched Rane free of the gravel. The two of them tumbled across the ground.

A spray of rocks erupted from the pit. With a screeching roar, a red scaly creature clawed its way out of the pit. Hunched, reptilian, bowlegged, it looked nothing like the human being that it had probably once been. A long, wickedly toothed snout jutted out from its wedge-shaped head. A line of spines ran down its back to a tail that twitched with a life of its own, ending in a viciously curved claw that gleamed like a newly sharpened blade.

With another roar, the demon charged, knocking Greyson to the ground again just as he got to his feet.

In a heartbeat, Rane vaulted onto the creature's saw-toothed spine and hooked her metal arms around its neck. She braced one foot and yanked its head back.

The thing's scaly back arched, and it reached behind to grab at Rane. Its claws raked across her metal skin, drawing sparks.

Dru tore apart the pile of crystals, frantic with frustration. Just as she was about to give up, she spotted the cube of galena gleaming happily up at her.

She plucked the shiny lead-colored cube from the dirt and sprinted around the outside of the ceremonial site, taking care to stay well clear of the other trenches and their painted horse skulls.

Before she could reach the creature, its tail snaked up and wrapped around Rane's neck.

With a vicious tug, it broke her grip. As Rane tried to recover, the creature raised one powerful leg and kicked her to the ground.

Then it turned its attention to Dru.

One cold look from those fiercely glowing green eyes made Dru pull up short. A wet, breathy growl boiled up from the thing's throat.

Suddenly, the cube of galena in her hand felt completely inadequate.

A long, forked tongue slipped out between the creature's grinning teeth and flicked the air, as if tasting it.

As it stalked toward her, it moved to step over Rane's body. But it didn't get far.

Rane stood up directly in the creature's path and slammed her metal forehead into its scaly snout, momentarily stunning it. Then she stepped back, widening her stance, and hauled back one titanium fist. With blinding speed, she twisted her body and drove her fist straight into the creature's body. The blow rang out with a sound like metal striking concrete.

The impact flung the demon back into a bookshelf, knocking it down in an explosion of pages and dust.

With one hand, Rane pulled Greyson to his feet. “Time to
go
!”

Dru ran back to her purse and scooped up the crystals, careful to leave the galena sitting on top, then plucked the torch out of the dirt. Its flame sputtered as they ran for the stairs, threatening to blow out and strand them in pitch black.