The Gathering Dark (40 page)

Nothing at all.

Like whatever had been there really was gone, the way the news anchors were all saying.

Agamemnon frowned as new images appeared on screen, video clips of other slushwalls and other cities. They showed the Kremlin in Moscow. A minute later, he saw the Eiffel Tower again. The reporters and analysts and U.N. spokespeople were yammering on about various efforts being made to figure out what was going on, but none of them seemed to really be talking about what the latest news was, what these images were.

A shiver went through him. Agamemnon hated contacts, hated glasses, and wasn’t about to have some fucking doctor take lasers to his eyes. The net result of this was that he had to squint to read the words scrolling across the bottom of the screen on the news ticker. That’s where he saw it.

Paris and Moscow latest cities to go missing.

Agamemnon took a step backward and ran his huge hand over the smoothness of his bald head. He felt warm, clammy, though it was cool outside.

How can that be? Paris and Moscow?
His mind was reeling. Most of the other places that had been taken so far were pretty small potatoes. Salzburg, Austria, had been the biggest city to disappear, the others mainly out-of-the-way cities or small villages.

“Jesus,” Agamemnon whispered. He glanced around for Bradenton and spotted the harsh-looking man with his arm around Maggie Gross, a fortyish barfly who spent most of her nights in the Lounge looking for love and only getting lost. Bradenton had Maggie pulled tight to his side and the woman leaned on him as though without him she would fall forever.

“Cole?” Agamemnon began.

Bradenton glanced over his shoulder.

“Did you try calling Octavian? I know what he said, but—”

“I left a couple of messages,” Bradenton replied. “He’s . . . there’s no answer.”

Agamemnon put his hand on the back of his neck as though that might cool him down. Every fiber of his being screamed for him to do something, to take some kind of action, but what the hell could he do that other people couldn’t? It frustrated him, knowing he had to wait it out just like the whisky-and-beer-stinking patrons who were crowded around the bar.

He and Bradenton had seen crazy shit before. Octavian had helped them out of a couple of jams. Terrified the hell out of him, but now it looked like those incidents had been small potatoes.

A lull had come between songs on the sound system. He knew the rotation by heart at this point. The Robert Johnson song that had been playing would be followed in a couple of seconds by classic ZZ Top. It was that kind of bar. But this time, in the pause between tunes, in that breath-holding moment, Agamemnon heard the crack of wood behind him. He turned, frowning, looking toward the booths at the back of the bar. Nobody was back there. The place was empty.

For a moment his eyes lingered on the shadowed booths and he remembered the last time Peter Octavian had been in. Agamemnon and Bradenton hadn’t had any idea that the Mister Nowhere freak was a demon, but they knew something freaky was going on. Octavian had saved some lives, killed the demon, made a hell of a mess of the floor. Not for the first time, Agamemnon wondered how that demon had managed to keep all those people inside of it. Now he realized that maybe they had not been inside it all along.

Maybe the demon’s gullet had been a kind of door.

By killing the thing, Octavian had shut the door, but everything that was going on in the world made Agamemnon wonder now what was on the other side.

A chill went up his back and Agamemnon looked back at the front of the bar, where something moved past the windows in the dark. The door was closed, but unlocked. Without him standing guard, anybody could walk right in.

Suddenly overcome with alarm, a tremor of instinct in the back of his mind, Agamemnon went to the door and pushed it open. He stood for a long moment on the sidewalk. There was nothing at all out there, the city was still quiet, silent as the dead. But there was a kind of buzzing in the back of his head, a sense of peril that he had learned to trust over the years. This wasn’t the first time Agamemnon had had an instinct about something. That demon, Mister Nowhere . . . he’d made the huge man’s head buzz like this too.

Somewhere far off a dog began to bark. The night wind blew cool across Agamemnon’s face, but now there was a stink on it, a stench that was not wafting up from the subway tunnels but coming across the city from somewhere else. More dogs began to bark, a whole chorus of them joining in with the first, and then it was like every dog in the city had gotten pissed off all at once.

Police sirens started to wail, assaulting the darkness. Close by there was a shattering of glass and a woman screamed, and then an alarm began to peal. A clang of metal came from off to Agamemnon’s right and he looked over to see one of the iron gratings in the sidewalk jump in its frame as though it had been struck from below.

Back in The Voodoo Lounge, Cole Bradenton swore loudly and people started to mutter in fright. It took Agamemnon only a second to realize what had upset them. He could not hear the droning of the television news anchors anymore. The TV signal was dead.

The sirens came closer. The dogs barked louder. Across the street, Agamemnon was sure he saw things moving in the darkness.

Above, the sky had begun to turn orange.

All of his fear disappeared. Agamemnon rose up to his full height, muscles rippling in his arms and back. He withdrew into The Voodoo Lounge, shut and locked the door.

Then he waited. This was his job, after all.

Nobody and nothing got through this door unless it was through him.

Nobody and nothing.

In the middle of the bullring in Ronda, Peter shouted a curse in Greek and stared upward. The moment of their arrival here there had still been a glimmer of pinprick stars, a layer of the real world beyond the filthy orange sky in this twisted dimension. Now that was gone and only the hideous, rotten light remained. The air tasted differently and there was a rank odor that he had not scented in Wickham. Whatever dimension the Tatterdemalion had dragged these cities to, it was becoming more hellish with each passing moment.

“Peter!” Allison snapped. “In the stands!”

Octavian spun, studying the shifting shadows of the seating galleries that circled the bullring. Almost as though sparked by his scrutiny, the hidden corners became suddenly alive with motion. Like swarming insects, Whispers began to scramble down over the seats to leap over the low walls and into the bullring. Many of them crouched on the walls, tendril-tongues jutting out from beneath their eerily featureless faces, their indigo carapaces gleaming a hideous bruise-purple in the deep orange light.

“Enough of this,” Peter muttered to himself. He had had his fill of these hard-shelled, vicious demons in Wickham.

Allison stood ready to fight. Keomany’s eyelids fluttered as she reached out, trying to touch the spirit of the world from which they had just been removed.

“Buy us a minute!” he instructed Allison.

He raced to Keomany and put a hand on her shoulder. She hissed a breath in through her teeth and her lids opened, brown eyes the color of pennies in the tainted light.

“I can feel her,” Keomany said.

Peter did not have to ask who she meant. Keomany was talking about Gaea, the goddess spirit of nature, whom the earthwitches worshipped. He nodded.

“Let’s do this. Just like in Wickham.”

Allison grunted, drawing his attention. Peter glanced over and saw that the Whispers had reached her. But then it was not Allison anymore. She had morphed in a single eyeblink into an enormous Bengal tiger. The tiger’s huge paws lashed out and she began to tear the Whispers apart.

But she could not stop them all.

Magick like rage blossomed in Peter’s left hand, a crackling sphere of green fire. It shot from his palm and enveloped five of the Whispers in a moment, incinerating them where they stood. The others hesitated, and Allison launched herself at them, ripping with claws and jagged teeth.

“Now,” Keomany rasped.

Peter turned to find that she had thrown her head back, her hair flying out behind her as if blown by some unseen wind. The earthwitch was beautiful, stunning in her power. The ground beneath their feet trembled and fissures split the earth. Tree roots pushed from the soil, shooting upward to impale Whispers, twining in the air and reaching out to crush other demons in their grasp.

“Gaea!” Keomany cried, the word tearing from her throat as though she were speaking to a lover in the throes of passion.

Whispering words he had learned in Hell, Peter held out his hands to either side and a web of pure golden light burst into being between his palms, stretching from one to the other. The earth beneath Keomany’s feet blossomed with greenery and bright flowers that had not been there a moment ago. Without breaking the circuit of magick between his hands, Peter reached down and touched a finger to the petals of a gentle lily.

The Whispers hissed loudly and all of them froze as that golden light shot straight into the sky from the open petals of that lily. Keomany and Peter stood on either side of the flower and both of them gazed upward, where a hole had been torn in the sky, revealing black night and starlit heavens beyond.

“Allison!” Peter shouted. “Come closer.”

With a rumbling growl the tiger leaped nearer to the golden light, which began to spread, the dimension rip around them growing wider. The Whispers were not put off, however. It was perhaps four in the morning in Spain and dawn still a ways off. The demons danced around them, tendrils darting from beneath their face-shells. With a loud hiss they began to attack again.

Allison tore them apart. Peter was in awe of her fury and her bloodlust. The rage that burned in her was unlike anything he had ever seen, and he knew that she must have made the perfect predator for the U.N.

A spasm of pain racked his body and he groaned. The magick that coursed through him began to falter.

“What is it?” Keomany asked, her legs now twined with vines that had grown up from the ground. “Are you hurt?”

Ebony talons clacking together, a Whisper leaped over lashing tree branches at her. Peter felt suddenly weak, barely able to keep the magick going that was ripping at the dimension tear, opening it wider, trying to drag Ronda back to the world where it belonged. He stretched out a hand and a spark of blue light leaped from his fingers ineffectually.

Keomany whipped toward the Whisper, screaming at it in defiance. From the broadening ring of earth-sky above came a bolt of lightning that struck the demon. It sizzled and charred, withering to little more than ash in an instant.

“Fuck off,” Keomany snarled at it. Then she turned to Peter. “What’s wrong? I can feel you faltering.”

Octavian gritted his teeth, angry with himself and filled with hatred for the Tatterdemalion, the creature responsible for all of this. Allison continued to shatter the body-shells of Whispers, to snap them in half, to tear them apart. The bullring was strewn with their remains. Only a handful of the things remained alive, but Peter knew there would be many more where these had come from.

“Opening the portal that got us here cost me a lot,” he reluctantly admitted, even as he reached deeper within himself, tapping into his darkest emotions. There was an undercurrent of cruelty in all of the magick he knew, which was what made it so unlike earthcraft. Now he touched it, and summoned it into his grasp in a way he had not done since his time in Hell. With a snarl that surprised him, Peter spat the words to a spell that he had learned, but never recited before.

Green light spilled out of his mouth and nostrils, filling him up so completely that he thought he would vomit magick. It emanated from his pores, causing his skin to glow green. His vision shifted and he could see the orange sky no longer—everything he saw now was a bright, vibrant green, and he knew that his eyes must be glowing with the dark sorcery he had woven into himself.

Keomany pointed across the bullring and vines shot from the earth to lash at a pair of Whispers that had foolishly thought to escape her. Now she turned, saw Peter, and her mouth gaped, her eyes widening.

“Peter . . . what . . .” She could not get the question out.

Nausea roiled in him. His skin felt as if it was on fire, his muscles taut as he began to rise off the ground. The few remaining Whispers let out a low, keening whistle he had not heard from the monsters before, and they turned and began to run. Peter let them go. The huge tiger did not bother to chase them either, turning now to stare at him even as Allison’s body shifted and contorted until she wore her human face again.

“I needed more power,” he said, his voice echoing strangely in his own ears. “Do you think sorcery comes from within the mage? Some does, I suppose, but not all. Not most.” His eyes shifted toward Keomany. “Like your earthcraft, Keomany, my magick comes from elsewhere. I use it only for the best purposes, but I summon it from dark places. From the shadows.”

The golden light that burned upward from the lily that had grown near Keomany remained untinged by the humming verdant power that now crackled around Peter, but the tear they had made in this dark dimension grew no larger. They had punctured it, returned a few square yards of this city back to the Spanish countryside it had been gouged from. No more.

“This thing . . . this Tatterdemalion, whatever power it is that wore those rags in Wickham . . . this place belongs to that entity. We can barely steal back this bullring, never mind an entire city . . . never mind all the cities it has stolen.”

“We have to find another way,” Keomany said. Her eyes had changed, the spirit of Gaea filling her so completely that they glowed pure white, with tiny golden pupils.

Allison noticed it a moment after Peter did, for she stared at Keomany now. “What’s happened to
you
?”

Keomany smiled. “She’s in me now. Not completely, not that. But not like before . . . I feel her pain, her hysteria, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. I also feel her power. I’m her tool. Gaea has put me here. I understand that now. I’m like a virus in this place.”