Seduction (43 page)

My heart sank. Even though blood was pouring from his mouth and hands, Peter had come back for more punishment.

Belmondo dropped me then. His eyes snapping, he strode toward my friend—
my foolish, reckless love!
—prepared to finish him. And Peter stood there, teetering on his wounded legs, his jaw set, ready to die.

I ran over to stand next to him, ready to fight alongside him to the end. But to my surprise, Azrael stepped between us and the madman who was planning to kill us both.

“My son, this must stop,” the old man said quietly. The cut on his head had congealed, but he still looked battered and pitiful as he begged Belmondo to allow Peter and me to live.

“Get out of my way,” Belmondo said.

Azrael reached out with his open arms. “No, you must listen. Hold my hands, Drago. Please.” Belmondo made an impatient gesture, but allowed the old man to grip his hands. “Now be still, my child,” Azrael said. “Be still.”

For a moment the two of them stood facing each other, their hands clasped between them. “Yes,” Azrael said somberly. “Yes, like this.”

“Like this?” Belmondo repeated gleefully. Azrael gasped. Belmondo’s hands had turned into claws—the claws I remembered from what I’d believed to be some sort of dream—and their five-inch-long talons had impaled Azrael’s palms. “Is this what you meant?”

Blood was dripping from the old man’s wounded hands. “Yes,” he said, speaking with the same calm, clear voice despite the pain he must have been suffering. “We shall remain like this. Together.”

Belmondo rolled his eyes in disdain. “Hardly,” he said. “Senile fool.” He tried to shake off the old man, but Azrael refused to let go.

“Get away,” Belmondo spat, but his voice no longer conveyed the confidence it once had. As he tried to pull away, his shoulders twitched. His eyes opened wide. The talons retracted. “Let me go!” he demanded, sounding frightened.

But the old man only stood there, holding his son’s hands with his own.

Peter glanced over at me. He hadn’t noticed Belmondo’s elegant white cuffs. They were taking on an unearthly golden sheen that spread upward, crackling like fire as it moved steadily up his arms.

“What . . . what are you doing?” Belmondo demanded, twisting violently, his belly heaving while his limbs, heavy as the metal they were becoming, remained rooted to the spot where he stood.

“What I must,” the alchemist said. He was creating gold.

“No. No, don’t do this,” Belmondo urged as the sound of flesh becoming metal grew louder. “You won’t be able to live with yourself.”

“I don’t plan to,” Azrael said.

Belmondo’s golden fingers were splayed, curved as if he were about to strangle someone. But they would never move again.

“Help me!” Belmondo screamed. He tried to turn toward me, but his neck was stiffening with the metal that was engorging it. “My darling, please!” His voice sounded strangled as his throat slowly turned to gold. “Please,” he whimpered, all pretense of control gone. “Help me . . .”

The crackling continued as inch by inch Belmondo’s living flesh was replaced by gold. His eyes darted wildly toward Azrael as he screamed at last, high and terrified: “Father!”

Tears coursed down Azrael’s face as he watched his son die, but he never let go.

He had honed this magic for a thousand years. It would not be reversed.

Soon, whatever other words Belmondo might have spoken were lost, reduced to a harsh rattle before the profound silence. The expanse of gold creeping up his chest seized his heart and stopped it. His brain fell into frenzied activity which showed only in his wildly rolling eyes, the last part of his body to succumb, the eyes of a steer at the moment of slaughter.

And then nothing. The man was gone. The monster was gone. Only a golden statue remained, its expression almost innocent in its surprise, its lips still forming the last word Belmondo had spoken:
Father.

Finally, Azrael released his son’s hands.

I covered my face. During the long life of Jean-Loup de Villeneuve, the only thing he had ever needed his great gift for was to kill his own child.

In the dim light of the cave’s few remaining lit candles, I saw something like a wisp of smoke leave Belmondo’s golden mouth and float lazily into Azrael’s.

“His last breath,” I said.

“No,” Peter said, grabbing my arm. “It’s the Darkness, finding a new home.” He shoved me toward the cave opening. “Hurry,” he said.

“Yes, hurry,” Azrael rasped behind us. “Soon I will not be able to stop this thing inside me.”

“Azrael,” I cried.

“Go!” he shouted, and his voice was like the roar of the sea.

CHAPTER

•

FIFTY-ONE

As soon as we reached the tunnel, we heard screams coming from far away.

“The house,” Peter said.

Together we ran along the underground passageway to the basement of the Abbey of Lost Souls, where the rank odor of smoke hung like a pall.

“The place is on fire,” Peter said, bolting up the stairs. I followed, remembering the smashed oil lamp in the library. At the time I’d thought it could be contained, but evidently I’d been wrong.

The house was in flames. People were running everywhere, clutching precious treasures or slapping frantically at pieces of furniture in an attempt to keep them from being destroyed. Some simply ran around in aimless panic, screaming or vomiting, despite the open front door.

“Get out!” Peter called, trying to throw the residents out bodily. But none of them seemed to want to leave. They just
scurried around like squirrels, picking up picture books, china, paintings, jewelry, clothing. One of the women he tried to rescue was Annabelle, Sophie’s friend. She was bending over a glass étagère, picking over a collection of Fabergé eggs.

“For God’s sake,” Peter shouted, forcing the woman toward the exit. “Get outside! Save yourself!”

“But my things,” she wailed. “What shall we do without our beautiful things?”

He stooped to pick her up. She screamed as the priceless jeweled eggs fell from her arms.

I also tried to get the witches to evacuate the place, with equally disappointing results. Two women were trying vainly to move a harpsichord down a flight of stairs. Another was shrieking wildly, a pile of satin shoes clutched to her chest.

“I can’t believe it,” Peter said. “What’s wrong with these—”

“Oh, God,” I whispered.

The woman in Peter’s arms had shriveled almost to ash. He dropped her—or rather,
it
, a desiccated, long-dead body with the texture of a wasp’s nest—with a groan of revulsion.

“Are they all . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. I followed his gaze to the secret portal joining the main parlor to the ritual chamber below.

Azrael was standing there, his yellow eyes glowing, as around him flames leaped up like fiery ghosts. One by one he pointed to the witches of the Enclave, who, as if obeying his command, shriveled slowly into dust, just as if Drago had sucked the breath out of them.

“Did you believe this day would never come?” the
Darkness thundered. “You, who have done nothing to warrant your privileged, worthless lives?”

A woman screamed, then fell silent as her life streamed out of her and into Azrael’s open mouth.

At that moment I spotted Fabienne tugging on her mother’s arm. Sophie was standing in front of a mirror, studying her face with morbid fascination.

The Darkness had spotted her. Now Sophie’s trembling hands ran along the deep creases and sunken flesh of her face as if she hoped they could stop the terrible damage to her once-perfect features. As I watched, one of her eyes drooped suddenly and then fell out of its socket. She screamed in horror.

“Hurry, please,” Fabby begged, her own voice rising in panic. “The place is on
fire
, Mother. Please, I don’t want to burn!”

“What do I care if you burn?” Sophie shrieked, her lips cracking as she spoke so that blood coursed down her chin. She tugged at her hair, which fell out in clumps that stuck out between her bony fingers. “Look at me!” she screamed, holding out her hair for her daughter to see. “Look what’s been done to me!”

“Mother—”

“It doesn’t matter to you, though, does it! You’ll still be beautiful, while I—”

At that point, Peter grabbed Fabienne and threw her over his shoulder. “Talk later,” he said.

Fabby stretched out her arms toward Sophie. “Mother!” Tears ran down her face.

But Sophie had already forgotten her. Instead, she fixed her mad eyes on me. “You!” she spat. Her voice was calm now, dripping with disdain. “Everything was fine until you came along.”

In the back of the room, a beam fell with a deafening crash. Flames shot through the arched doorway toward us. “Come outside, Sophie,” I urged, extending my hand toward her.

She lunged forward and slapped my face. Her hand felt like dry bones. Then, with another brief, bitter glance in the mirror, she backed away from me, away from the exit.

“Sophie—” Whatever I was going to say was lost as the windows all imploded. I flattened myself on the floor as a whoosh of broken glass went flying through the room at the speed of a tornado. Ahead, I watched in horror as the razor-sharp glass shards shot into Sophie with so much force that her body twitched and bucked with their impact. Still, she never turned away. Her single remaining eye, staring now from the ruined face that had once been so beautiful, held no expression whatever. It was as if she knew—or believed—that without that beauty, she no longer existed. Like a wraith, she glided to the floor. With one final spasm, she lay still, her terrible staring eye open as her flesh grayed and sank into itself.

“Oh, Azrael,” I whispered. “Look what you’ve become.”

He was near me now, standing on a low step as if he were an orchestra conductor directing the music that obeyed the unspoken commands of his hands. Behind him was a wall of flames.

I wanted to ask him to stop, to beg him to spare the lives
of these helpless women, but the kindly old man I had known was no longer inside that body. He was purely the Darkness now, his flesh merely a container for the evil within. And more than that, I’d seen him—It—too many times to hope for anything resembling compassion.

The yellow eyes glowered at me. I expected It to point at me next, to signal that my turn to die had come. But oddly, what I felt wasn’t fear. I’d lived with the fear of meeting the Darkness again for so long that it was beginning to take over my life. Well, here It was. Again. It had been in Belmondo, and now It was in Azrael. And maybe this was going to be the day when my worst fear would come true and It would be in me.

But I was tired of running from It. That was what I felt. Not fear, but
impatience
. I’d had enough. If the Darkness was so determined to have my life, then okay, we’d have a showdown right here, in the flames that led to Hell.

“Am I next?” I asked. I stood up amid the rubble that had once been the palatial Abbaye des Âmes Perdues. “Because I don’t care what you do to me. I’m sick of running from you. If you want me so badly, then here I am.” I spread my arms. “You hear me, good buddy? Take your best shot.”

The ancient face clouded. Nearby, another beam crashed to the floor, sending up a fizzing display of sparks. The heat of the fire around me was suffocating.

The creature who had been Azrael struggled to speak. His mouth opened and closed. His hands stretched open, then curled into fists. Finally It managed to utter one tortured sentence:

“Life . . . is . . . precious,” he croaked, each word a monumental effort, “if you . . . make . . . it . . . so.”

That was Azrael speaking. He had somehow managed to fight his way through the Darkness that had taken over his body to give me his message.

I sank to my knees. “I see you,” I whispered.

His eyes met mine. They were not yellow. They were not glowing. They were my friend Azrael’s eyes, and they were filled with the heartache of a hundred lifetimes. Then he nodded once, in benediction, and walked backward into the flames.

The old man’s hair caught fire. He was destroying his body because he would rather be dead than a carrier of the Darkness. I understood. Some things are worth dying for.

He never spoke another word until his skin blistered and charred, and he staggered to stand upright.

“Oh, Azrael,” I said with a sigh, but he didn’t hear me. He was listening to some other music, beholding some other face beyond mine. His eyes lit up at the sight. I twisted around to see who it was, but there was no one.

“Veronique,” he whispered, and I knew.

Some things were forever.

Then he moved farther back into the flames.

• • •

I fell down and crawled like a crab over a lot of bodies and broken objects. I cut my hand on something, but I was aware of that only because I saw the blood; I didn’t feel anything. A blanket of smoke was descending over me, covering me with numbness and forgetting.

It doesn’t hurt,
I thought, remembering Azrael. Maybe he hadn’t hurt either. Had he sent the Darkness into me? I’d been the closest person to him. I should have been the chosen one. But I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything.