Waking Nightmares (48 page)
Authors: Christopher Golden
Navalica faced him, holding the rusting sword in front of her, and stalked toward him. She began to chant loudly, and a wave of sickly yellow energy flowed out from her, rolling like ocean surf along the ground. Octavian wondered what she would try to set against him now, but he did not have to wonder very long.
He heard the barking and glanced toward the base of the clock tower, where the dead dogs had been scattered. Now those dogs were up and moving again, but just as dead. They had torn each other apart in a frenzy of violence and now they came at him with their throats hanging open, fur matted with blood, skin hanging in flaps.
Reanimating dead dogs. It showed how little she had left to fight him with.
He spoke the words of the spell in ancient Chaldean, so she would hear him and know that such things were no more than parlor tricks. Then, with a gesture, he returned them to death. The dogs collapsed all at once, flopping to the wet pavement without so much as a whimper.
Navalica screamed. Sword held at her side, she thrust out a hand and chaos swirled around her fingers, exploding toward him. Octavian felt the magic coming at him, so fierce, so powerful that it took him off guard. It would turn him inside out, reversing his entire body, blood and organs bursting. Instinct, and the magic at his core, saved him. He let go of the flaming sword and it vanished as he dropped to one knee and splayed his fingers out in front of him, creating a shield of sizzling emerald light that deflected her attack.
Stupid,
he thought. He’d been arrogant, and such overconfidence could get him killed.
he thought. He’d been arrogant, and such overconfidence could get him killed.
He did not have to defeat her, only keep her occupied until the others finished the spell to entrap her. It had been his plan all along, take her heart, weaken her enough to confine her anew, then put the iron chest into some parallel dimension instead of at the bottom of the ocean, so that even if it were ever opened again, Navalica could never be reunited with her heart.
All he had to do was fight her, and stay alive.
And the best way to fight chaos was with order. Navalica came at him again, still wielding that entropic sword, edging her way around the hole she had created in the street. Broken sewer pipes gushed water below. Octavian did not bother forging a new blade of his own. Instead, he struck her with a blast of concussive magic that knocked her back several yards. She landed hard, but sprang up instantly, a new confidence glinting in her eyes. Brute force would not destroy her; they both knew that. And he knew she would think he had run out of ideas.
But even as he had attacked her, Octavian had been crafting another spell. He reached deep within himself for the strength, and into his memories of Hell for the words, for he had learned them from a fellow prisoner, a Chinese sorcerer who subscribed to philosophies of simplicity and synchronicity . . . of Order.
The air around Navalica shimmered. A round hole appeared in the fabric of the world, and sunlight shone through it. Navalica cried out and turned toward that purity in surprise, but she was no vampire. It would not kill her. Confusion made her blade falter, even as a second circle appeared opposite the first, this one a window into winter night, snow blowing in from another part of the world. A third window opened, and then a fourth, one revealing a spring morning and the other a windy autumn afternoon, leaves dancing on a gust of wind.
The four seasons of the natural world in perfect symmetry. Order.
Navalica tried to slip between these openings, but they moved with her. The clean air of a world of order, untouched by her chaos, surrounded her. The goddess screamed in rage and rushed at him, but again the spell kept her boxed by those windows, poisoning her with order. She was already weak; confusion and frustration made her falter anew.
In the sky above Hawthorne, the storm had diminished enough that the first gleam of sunshine and blue sky broke through the gray and the rain.
“I told you I didn’t have to kill you,” Octavian reminded her. “Submit now. Your time in this world is over.”
With a roar, Navalica swung her entropy blade. It struck the autumn window, cleaving the magic in half. The spell deteriorated instantly, unraveling so quickly that the backlash stunned Octavian, hitting him like the scorching blast of an explosion. He threw up his hands to protect himself and his flesh seared anew.
Weakened and unsteady, he looked up to see that the windows were gone. Navalica seemed withered now, aging, diminishing. The radiant power of a goddess had faded like the storm above.
“I will not be caged!” she shouted at him.
The goddess looked around, searching for something. He thought she hoped to find wraiths that would come to her aid, or worshippers still under her control. With the rain now nothing more than a light drizzle and the daylight glowing behind the clouds, filtering through and breaking up the storm, nothing could be hidden in darkness.
Navalica froze, gaze locked on something off to Octavian’s right. He turned and saw them, standing under the awning half a block away, where he’d left them. Keomany and Charlotte and Amber. A ghost stood with them, wavering in and out of existence.
Charlotte held the box. Amber and the ghost stood back as Keomany closed the latches, the soul cage no longer in her hands. Navalica’s heart had been returned to the chest where her high priests had trapped it millennia before. All that remained of the ritual was the enchantment that went along with it, the words of which he had implanted in their minds so they could not be forgotten. As he watched, Keomany raised her hands and began to speak.
Navalica shrieked. She leaped at Octavian. Weak and distracted, he avoided the killing blow of her blade only by throwing himself backward and deflecting her with a hasty defensive shield. But the goddess kept moving, rolling away from his shield and leaping through the air, magic carrying her forty feet or more.
She came down beside the awning. Amber attacked her, but Navalica threw her aside. The goddess might not be able to control the strange hybrid wraith that Amber had become, but Amber could not stop her.
Charlotte cried out a warning, tried to move the chest around, to hold it against her with one hand, but she was too late.
Keomany’s eyes went wide as the entropic blade plunged between her breasts.
Octavian screamed, running toward them, knowing he was too late.
Charlotte dropped the iron chest, which struck the pavement and tipped over, but remained latched. Shapeshifting, she grew in the space between heartbeats, becoming an enormous black bear. One paw on Navalica’s head; with the other she tore the goddess’s right arm off. The entropic sword hit the sidewalk, but its magic had vanished without connection to Navalica, and with an acidic hiss it bubbled away to nothing.
Shifting back to her human form, Charlotte fought the ruined goddess, tearing at her, refusing to let her rise from the ground.
When Octavian reached Keomany, Amber was already at her side. They knelt on either side of her, but Keomany looked only at him. The hole in her chest had begun to sink inward and her skin wrinkled and sagged. Her hair whitened as entropy took hold.
“Peter,” Keomany said, wearing a mask of sorrow and embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”
He knew what she meant. She burned with the same guilt and humiliation he felt for the way Navalica’s magic had made them behave.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” he said, and found that he meant it. He regretted succumbing to chaos, but not what they had done under that influence.
Keomany smiled, but it did not erase the sadness in her eyes. She died with that expression on her face, her flesh continuing to wither and flake so rapidly that only half a minute passed before her body crumbled to dust and yellowed bone.
“Oh, my God,” Amber whispered.
Octavian looked at her inhuman beauty, saw the ghost standing behind her and recognized Professor Varick, and thought about how much they had all lost to chaos.
“A little help here?” Charlotte snapped.
But a glance told him that she didn’t really need help. A fresh wind was blowing the storm away, revealing more of the blue sky. The goddess no longer had the strength to fight them.
Octavian rose and retrieved the chest. He sat on the sidewalk and held it in his lap and he spoke the words. He could feel the seal on the iron chest tighten, and heard a small shushing noise as it expelled what air had been inside.
As they watched, the blue faded from the skin of the goddess Navalica. Her burning indigo fire became ordinary hair, thin and gray. Charlotte held the one-armed old woman in her arms, and for the first time, Octavian saw the vampire girl’s eyes turn soft and kind.
“Gran,” Amber whispered.
Octavian held the chest tightly and they all watched as the last of the storm cleared away, sunlight glinting off the towers of the church and city hall, the bell and the clock. Against the bright blue sky, he saw sparrows flying in formation.
Order had been restored. But it felt nothing like victory.
EPILOGUE
MILES
knew he could not haunt his own house, or remain in his childhood home. As far as the rest of the world knew, he and his mother were both among the eighty-seven people who had died in the chaos storm that had cut Hawthorne off from the rest of the world.
knew he could not haunt his own house, or remain in his childhood home. As far as the rest of the world knew, he and his mother were both among the eighty-seven people who had died in the chaos storm that had cut Hawthorne off from the rest of the world.
As far as the world knows?
he thought.
You
are
among the dead.
he thought.
You
are
among the dead.
He had to remind himself of this constantly. It was strange to be aware and awake, to have a sense of reality, to be able—under certain circumstances—to touch the living, solid world, while being neither solid nor alive himself.
“Miles?”
He turned to see his mother standing in the entrance to the living room. Miles himself sat—as much as a phantom could be said to sit—on the piano bench where she had taught him how to play. They had shared real joy there, a contentment that parent and child rarely experienced together. In school, Miles had often been called a mama’s boy, but he had never seen any sin in loving his mother, she who had been kinder to him than anyone else in his life. His wife had broken his heart and then broken their marriage, and though he had returned to Hawthorne with deep regrets, he had never regretted being able to spend more time visiting with his mother.
Now, though, he had one last regret.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
His mother’s ghost drifted toward him, almost walking, though each stride covered more distance than it ought to have. She settled beside him on the piano bench and played a few notes of “Hit That Jive Jack,” which had always made him laugh.
“What are you sorry for?” she asked.
Miles turned to her, felt the vague stirring of hunger inside him and pushed it away. He had sated his hunger with Navalica’s wraiths, but already it had begun to return. When he looked at ghosts—and there were many new ones in Hawthorne, getting their bearings before they moved on to whatever came next—he felt that hunger. But he felt it when he looked at humans, too, and his spectral fangs were sharp indeed when he ran his tongue over them. He felt sure that he could drink blood to satisfy his hunger, just as easily as he could feed off a ghost, and if he had to choose, he would take from the living. The dead had suffered enough.
“You know we can’t stay here,” he said, running his fingers over the keys and then playing the opening run of “Devil May Care.”
His mother joined in, her fingers dancing over the keys, but she did not reply.
Miles stopped playing and turned to her. “The house will be sold. New people will move in. Our things will be removed. I don’t want to see all of that. I don’t want to haunt my own house.”
“This hasn’t been your house in years,” his mother said, but lightly. They both knew it had always been his home just as much as it had been hers, no matter where he lived.
“It might be fun,” she added, lifting her hands from the keys and making absurd spooky-ghost noises.
The joke fell flat and the two of them sat there, side by side at the piano, for what might have been a minute or an hour—Miles had found that it was sometimes difficult to gauge the passage of time now that he was dead.
“What do you have in mind?” she asked, at last, playing with the keys again, mischief turning into a snatch of Mozart.
“You don’t have to wait for me.”
She stopped playing and turned to look at him, anger flaring in her eyes. They had talked about this already. Whatever he was, Miles did not feel the lure of the other side the way other ghosts seemed to. His mother described it as a yearning, but he did not share that yearning. Only hunger. Whatever final rest awaited the soul, he feared that he would never find it. But she could go. She could have that peace.
“I’m not going anywhere until we know more about what’s happened to you. God will have to drag me screaming to Heaven if he wants me. At least until I can be sure that you’ll be able to follow someday.”
Miles smiled. It had been worth a try.
“Plan B, then, I guess,” he said.
“Which is?”
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