Midnight's Angels - 03 (13 page)

I ended up, close to dawn, sitting propped against the statue’s plinth, the big bronze face of the town’s founder hovering over me. The fires had been allowed to drop a little, but they were still glowing the whole way across the square. And -- Paris, 1968, be damned -- it looked from my point of view like the early hours before a battle in some old-time conflict, an army keeping itself warm. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, and most people had huddled in closer to the flames. But the two remaining adepts didn’t seem to feel the chill. And neither did Cassie, who was strolling along the perimeter with her shotgun at her side.

She’d cleaned up and changed by this hour. It turned out one of the eateries on O’Connell had a washroom out back with a hand-held shower. And then someone had opened up his men’s store for her. So she was dressed in new, much stiffer-looking jeans, and a Red Sox T-shirt. She didn’t look especially happy about that, but promised she would pay him later.

It didn’t look like we were going to be attacked again. So maybe Willets had taken us in the right direction, suggesting what he had. When had he become so very smart and able? Most of the time I’d known him, he’d been rather screwy and detached.

All I
really
knew was that I was exhausted. It felt like pinches of fine sand had gotten up behind my eyelids. So I rubbed at them, which only made things worse. Then my hand fell back into my lap. My chin rocked down without my willing it to. And then I was dozing.

The whole town was lost to me. My mind went to another place. I had been there before, but it still made me uneasy.

A great dry open plain yawned around me, an outcrop of jagged rocks visible at the far horizon. The sun was on the point of setting directly above them, bathing their outlines in a deep blood red. And there were thicker shadows visible in there I believed might be the openings to caves.

I heard a noise and turned around. A sparsely realized face sprang into being in the air in front of me.

A female one, gaunt and withered and with straw-like hair. I’d met her in my earlier dreams. Her name was Amashta, and she was a very ancient shaman. What she wanted with me, I still couldn’t tell.

The carved scar on her neck was still there. And the dangling earrings made from animal bone. She peered at me evenly, her wizened lips twisting into a vague impression of a smile.

When she spoke, her voice didn’t seem to issue simply from her mouth. It was on the air around me, echoing.

“You choose fine times to sleep, Defender.”

“Got to grab a little while I can,” I answered, trying to sound nonchalant.

Although truthfully, inside, I was anything but that. What did she want this time?

“You are facing your greatest challenge yet.”

“And don’t I know it. Are you going to help?”

“I did that the first time, yes. But it is you who answers to the title of ‘Defender.’”

“I never asked for that,” I pointed out.

But she ignored me.

“You cannot expect me to intervene every time a threat comes down. Or do you suppose I am some sort of … what is the term your kind use?”

I thought I got it. “Fairy godmother?”

Her smile took on a slightly harder edge.

“I think that we both understand I am not that.”

A surge of anger ripped up through me. I was getting sick of her riddles. In fact, between her and the Little Girl, I’d all of them I could ever possibly use. What I genuinely required was straight answers.

“Why don’t you tell me what this is about? What exactly does ‘Defender’ mean? And what the hell’s this ‘prophecy’?”

The image of her face began to fade.

“That would be telling you too much, Ross Devries. As I have said, free will is the most important element in all of this. You must make your own decisions, without the luxury of knowing whether or not they might be the right ones.”

“But if this is already foretold …?”

“The prophecy relates to only one possible future. And there are thousands of those.”

Her face had turned into the palest outline on the air, like a scrap of mist that had been accidentally blown into a human shape. She was taunting me with little bits of information all over again. Which infuriated me almost beyond reason. And I wasn’t going to let her have the final word this time.

“You’re expecting a hell of a lot from one man, aren’t you?”

Any trace of hardness fled from her expression. Her smile became an open, genuine one, her eyes widening.

“Defender is not simply a title. It is what you are, Ross. It is in your nature.”

She blinked and pursed her lips together.

“Let it guide you. Seek your inner truth. That is your best chance to prevail.”

I jerked and woke up, squinting, blinded suddenly. And it took me a few more seconds to figure out why.

I was facing east. And the sun was rising, gold and glaring, on the far horizon.

* * *

The massed ridge of treetops in the distance seemed to phase through turquoise before turning green. A flock of birds span up from them and wheeled away. The details of the square around me began to solidify. The theatre. The offices of local governance. I had my own office close by, although I rarely use it these days. Even the people around me became more tangible a presence. Night turns human beings into partial phantoms. Only daylight makes them fully real again.

Folk were stretching and pacing around, and kicking the last embers of the fires out. Some had cups, and plates of food. The crowd had grown so large that it had stretched off from the square into O’Connell Street. And there were plenty of bars and eateries down there. The staff still had to be present, since there was no way they could go home.

Safe. That was the word they were clinging to. A word like a life raft on a huge, fathomless ocean. And we knew it couldn’t last forever. Time would pass until the twilight hours fell again. But we were grateful for the respite. Once the sun was fully up, people looked like they were breathing far more easily.

The only people who were not looking relieved were Martha and Willets. I couldn’t help but wonder what was still bothering our two remaining adepts. So I got to my feet and did a little stretching of my own, and then went over to them.

They were both gazing, all over again, at the high uneven bulk of Sycamore Hill. And I could understand Martha’s discomfort, since her own home was up there. She was a virtual outcast by this juncture, with no hope of reaching it.

Which still didn’t explain why Willets was looking so terribly unhappy.

“What’s up?” I asked them.

The doctor replied without so much as turning his head.

“Good God, man! Don’t you have eyes?”

I stared where they were. Could see nothing wrong, at first. The side of the hill facing us was still rather darker than the rest of town, the big houses dim. But there was nothing too unusual in that. Sections of the hill were densely forested. And the fact that so much witchcraft was practiced up there seemed to have had an effect as well. It always took a while longer than was natural for the shadows on the gradient to untangle.

But the more I kept on staring, then the more I figured out that simply wasn’t going to happen. The sun had risen high enough that its rays ought to be spilling down the slope, illuminating Levin’s home and Gaspar Vernon’s mansion. But no such thing was evident. The hill remained darkened.

A chill spread through me. And I shook my head, trying to understand what I was looking at.

I’d seen some genuinely weird stuff in my time, but not a lot to match this. It was hard to tell precisely where the sunlight gave up and the dark took over. The air above and around Sycamore Hill was filled with a smoke-like blur which gradually thickened, deepening, the closer to the hillside your gaze took you. As if day and night had blended with each other at the edges, like ink in the bottom of a tall glass full of water.

Others began to notice too. Shoulders were nudged, fingers pointed. And an alarmed murmur rose. Which was when Cass came hurrying across.

“What the hell is this?”

I shrugged. If it was like this on the hill, then how about Tyburn? Was the same happening there?

The pair of us headed for the tall house where my office was located. The door was hanging open, so we went through to the back and started climbing up the fire escape. Vivid memories came back as we went higher. I had fought and beaten Saruak up here, with a little help.

Gravel crunched below us as we made our way across the flat roof to the southwest edge. We stopped there, the shingles of the town spreading off around us like a brown-red forest flecked with strips of green and charcoal gray. There were no cars on the avenues today, and no pedestrians on the sidewalks. Normal life had been put on hold.

I heard Cassie murmur something when we turned our gazes to the southwest. I’m not sure what, because my pulse was bumping loudly in my head. If there were such things as frozen moments, this was one of them. A tiny little fragment of time, locked up in cold storage.

The same had happened this direction as on Sycamore Hill. But Tyburn was a much larger area, and far more densely populated. The entire southwestern section of our town was heavily buried beneath layers of dimness, despite the fact the neighborhoods around it were all brightly lit, their windows gleaming.

Two whole sections of the town were virtually lost to us. And -- since it’s the only home we’d ever known -- it’s hard putting into words precisely how that felt. Imagine how you’d feel if the eastern seaboard suddenly dropped off.

A pair of moving blurs told me that the adepts had come to join us. They materialized, and stared. And were immediately plunged into the same despair that I was feeling.

“I never thought I’d say this,” Martha managed to get out. “But even in a town like our one, this defies belief.”

“And I’m afraid it gets even worse,” Willets muttered, surprising us, but not in any pleasant way.

He raised his right hand, snapped his fingers. And a pair of field glasses appeared in his grasp.

Which he handed to me with the words, “Take a look.”

I was the one who needed them, since he was capable of seeing what the regular human eye could not.  I adjusted the focus carefully. It was hard to make out smaller objects in that lightless murk. But I began to notice there was movement. Not simply on the narrow avenues and lanes of Tyburn. It was in the yards and on the walls, and even on the rooftops.

The hominids again. It was becoming increasingly difficult to remember they had once been human beings. Some of them were in the trees, like those cops last night had been.

With no daylight to drive them back, they could go anywhere they wanted in that part of town. The angels were not in sight, but I guessed they had to be down there somewhere.

I handed the glasses to Cassie and she peered. And her face slackened with dismay.

“How do we even
start
to deal with this?” she asked.

But the only answer that she got was a soft breeze moaning round us. Otherwise, there was just silence.

“I say we start to kill ‘em,” argued Nick McLeish. “Doesn’t matter that they were once human beings, ‘cause they sure aren’t any more.”

Which had been Woodard Raine’s original argument. It was strange to hear the same thing coming from the mouth of a sane person. But several other people murmured in agreement. A lot of the townsfolk had joined in the discussion, clustering around the statue’s plinth.

Few of them had gotten much sleep, and none in a lot of cases. Their faces were wan and drawn, their eyelids edged with red. But they were animated, nonetheless. Something needed to be done.

Willets and Martha looked as unhappy as I was. We understood what this was partially about. Would Nick even be suggesting such a course of action if the people who’d changed had come from Garnerstown?

The ordinary population of the Landing had never had much time for Tyburn folk. Hardly surprising, when you were talking about a community that kept itself completely isolated and stuck to its own weird ways. Its denizens were viewed as almost alien round here, their neighborhood no real part of the town. And that always makes a brutal attitude easier to consider. I knew enough about the history of the world beyond our borders to get that.

But there was the matter of the hill as well. There were not so many victims involved, but they included guys like Levin. And could we simply, coldly, gun them down?

“We’re talking about several thousand lives,” I pointed out.

Which was another thing about the Landing. It might have the
feel
of a small town; the inhabitants might think and mostly act that way. But Regan’s Curse -- the fact that none of us could ever leave -- meant that the population had expanded far more than it should have done.

A few staff from the Town Hall had shown up. They’d come forward to find out if there was anything they could do to help. But there was still no sign, as yet, of Mayor Aldernay. He had doubtless been transformed with the rest, and was grubbing around on his hands and knees right now. But we could get on well enough without him.

“There has to be another way,” Martha pleaded, a genuine sadness in her hazel gaze. “These are people who were like us only yesterday. So doesn’t killing them amount to murder?”

“Looking out for your rich buddies?” someone shouted from the crowd.

I couldn’t make out who had spoken, so I snapped out angrily at the whole load of them.

“We need to calm down. We’re in a bad way, for sure. But turning on each other isn’t going to help.”

And I was glad to see that Nick McLeish and those around him saw the sense in that. They quieted down a little.

“So what exactly are we going to do?” he asked me. “Sit around on our asses until nightfall?”

“Anything but. Most of the people here are from the southern suburbs, where the news first broke. But we’re not nearly the entire town.”

He listened carefully.

“Plenty of families are still holed up at home. We need to get in touch with them and bring them up to speed. Tell them how fire can keep these things off, especially.”

It wasn’t much, but was the best that we could manage presently. And it gave Nick something to keep him occupied, which he seemed pretty grateful for. He took charge and began to organize that, assigning small groups to different districts.

“If you run into any trouble,” he was saying, “don’t try to fight. Head back here immediately.”

Which was right.

When I turned back to the adepts, Martha’s slender eyebrows lifted. Intuitive as ever, she could see I had a question for her.

“Yes?”

“You said last night the adepts who had changed might have retained their magic powers?”

“It’s a possibility.”

One we hadn’t told the others about yet, since there was no doubt that it would create more panic. We’d have to tell them before night fell, though. We didn’t want another repeat of what had happened yesterday evening.

“So if they’ve still got their mojo, to what extent?”

“You don’t think we’ve already tried to find that out?” Willets asked me. “All we’re getting is another blank. If their sorcery’s still present, then it belongs to the Dweller.”

“You’ve another question,” Martha pointed out.

And she was quite correct.

“Can you still not tell if Raine’s been changed?” I asked her slowly. “It could really be an important factor.”

They could see what I could -- it was a factor that worked both ways. He’d have the potential to either help or harm us.

Willets’s lips moved gently, silently. I knew that he was turning options over. Then his temples unclenched and he shook his head.

“I’ll go take a look,” he told me.

“I’ll come with you,” Martha said.

Considering they’d only met a few hours ago, they were getting along extremely well. They were both smart and educated, so I supposed that made sense.

Both their bodies faded, becoming little more than murky blurs. And the next instant, they were gone from sight.

Except the process was reversed in barely a second. They reappeared in front of me, the pair of them looking astonished. I’d not been expecting them back so soon, and took an involuntary step away from them.

“What …?”

Neither adept answered right away. They were both struggling to arrange their thoughts and come to grips with what had happened. And it was Willets who managed it first.

“It seems that, where the darkness begins, our magic stops working.” He rubbed a hand across his face, wiping a trace of damp away. “We couldn’t get anywhere
near
Raine Manor. In fact, we were stopped dead at the bottom of the hill.”

I took that in, then turned my gaze back to the high, dark promontory. The mansion up top was still pitch black, the grounds spreading around it in their usual murky tangle. It was impossible to tell, from here, if the place had been affected or not.

But it was possible that Raine was still up there, untouched by last night’s events. He might be crazy, but his sorcery was of the highest caliber.

And if he could be persuaded to assist us …?

I had managed that before on a couple of occasions.

“I’ll have to go,” I told the others.

“No,” Cassie corrected me. She’d moved up to my shoulder. “
We
will.”

And she raised her shotgun, just to emphasize that point.