American Quest (45 page)

Her dress lay in a shimmering sea around her feet. He took her hand, and she stepped out of her satin shoes.

The elevator car rose higher and higher and it seemed with each passing floor Bruce’s stomach constricted in acid-churning spasms. He clenched the posts and closed his eyes, thinking of everything that had transpired since Gloria went missing. And a strange sort of calm settled over him. He still felt amped and battle-ready, but at his core he felt an implacable stillness.

The elevator came to a stop and opened. He stepped out into a grand foyer, but there seemed to be no door. He looked left and right. Inside the elevator, he’d pressed the button labeled PH, but this seemed only an empty chamber. He was about to return to the elevator when he saw something in one of the spear-posts.

When he moved it in front of the wall, the post seemed translucent, the way a glass-bottom boat allowed for underwater viewing when the water’s surface looks otherwise opaque. And through this spyglass effect, Bruce saw a door.

He tried it, and it opened.

Inside, a vast marble floor spread to an ornate room. A spill of light came from an open door to the left, and down the hall to the right, a shuffling noise. His heart hammered, but that calm still pervaded. He had striven so long and far. He would save Gloria now. Save them all.

He chose to follow the door to the left, and when he entered, he saw Gloria.

Standing naked. Her hand in another man’s hand.

The man stood tall, bare-chested, and wearing black dress slacks. He raised his dark gaze to settle on Bruce.

And then Bruce realized that this other man, nothing like what he’d imagined, was Enervata. That regal, handsome face, with dark hair and eyes, was only a distant likeness of the mummified, beastly skin in the vision he’d witnessed in the hospital room. And yet the features, if Bruce imagined them in the burled face of the vision, were similar.

Gloria turned her head toward him and, before her eyes registered recognition, he saw an air of anguish and resignation about her. No straightness to the spine, no easiness to it, either.

And then her eyes widened, and for a moment she looked like she might lose her balance. But she steadied herself, eyes watering to a diamond shimmer, and she spoke with a trembling voice.

“You did come.”

Bruce shook his head, his own eyes threatening to fill. “Of course I came. Our love is forever.”

Enervata stepped toward Bruce. “Your love for her is meaningless. She loves me now.”

Bruce turned toward the demon and saw the murderous intensity in
his stare. He forced himself to look away and reach toward his fiancée. “Come on, let’s go home.”

Gloria stepped forward and reached out to him. And then her eyes flew wide. “Sileny, no!”

The room suddenly went dark. Someone had thrown something over Bruce’s head—some kind of sack made of black fabric—and yanked him backward. He fell to the ground and kicked out his feet. He was being dragged backward. Gloria was screaming.

“Bring it to me,” he heard Enervata say.

Bruce felt a release in the tension around the sack and he tore it from his head.

“Sileny, no! Please don’t!”

Bruce saw Gloria struggling with the woman she’d called Sileny, a woman with long, straight brown hair who looked like she had no mouth. She struck Gloria in the head, knocking her to the ground. Then Sileny stretched her hand toward Enervata. In it she held a jewel-encrusted dagger. The dagger cast a mosaic of reflections, strange reflections, and Bruce even saw himself.

Sileny offered the hilt to Enervata. He extended his hand toward it.

There came a hissing shriek, a stream of silver, and the canteshrike appeared, leaping between Sileny and Enervata. She grabbed Sileny by the scalp and spirited her up off her feet and into the air. Sileny flailed, grasping at the tapestry that hung at the wall. It tore free and slid to the floor over Bruce and Gloria. Gloria clutched it to her chest as if to protect herself. The canteshrike landed on the other side of the room and hurled Sileny against the wall.

“Come on!” Bruce said, grabbing Gloria’s hand once again.

“Gloria!” Enervata roared. “You must never leave me!”

Gloria’s head jerked toward Enervata. She trembled against Bruce, hugging the fabric of the tapestry tight to her body. They ran for the door.

But the door disappeared before their eyes. And the furniture, and walls, and everything wavered. Melted away into a wide, stainless steel chamber. At first, Bruce thought they were in the jaws of the lizard that had taken Bedelia. But then he saw four cell-like metal walls. No ceiling above, only a sky full of scarlet clouds.

Enervata lunged. Bruce pulled out one of the spears, the one with Forte’s treble clef, and thrust it at Enervata.

The Macul knocked it to the ground, casting his dark gaze toward it, and it burst into flames.

In the corner, the canteshrike’s wings and arm moved in a frenzy of violence. Sileny’s hands flailed and they were streaked with blood.

Enervata closed on Bruce. Bruce withdrew another spear, Shannon’s spear, and slashed at the demon. The cut dug deep into his skin.

Enervata pulled back, but grabbed at the spear at the same time. The spear burst into flames in his hand.

He grabbed Bruce by the shirt and threw him backward. Bruce felt his back strike the cold metal of the wall, and he slid to the ground.

Enervata came after him again. His bare chest heaved with exertion, black gaze burning.

“Aaron!” Gloria cried. “Please don’t hurt him!”

Enervata turned to her, his anger fogging briefly. “Do you love me? Will you give yourself to me willingly and forever?”

Gloria’s eyes flashed with confusion. Then her gaze narrowed. “Not even for a moment,” she said.

Enervata seemed anguished by Gloria’s declaration.
Did he really think Gloria would fall for someone like him?
Then the darkness returned to his expression and he said, “Then I will very definitely hurt him.”

Bruce reached inside of himself, calling on the spirit that drove him to defeat Ichabod Sparks in the Texas desert—the spirit of those who’d joined him on this journey. Then he lunged at Enervata with Emily’s spear.

The post dove deep into Enervata’s flesh. The Macul roared with fury and pain. He shot out his arm and sideswiped Bruce, sending him sprawling and causing him to drop the last spear, Jamie’s spear. It spun away across the slick metal floor.

Enervata pulled Emily’s spear from his side. It left behind a hole, weeping freely. He cast down the post, turning it to ash. He threw back his head and let fly another furious roar. As he did so, his body changed. His skin turned to leather, like the mummified creature in the vision, and a sharp whip of a tail emerged. Gloria gasped.

In the corner, the canteshrike stood with her talon cupped around Sileny’s neck. Sileny lay still, lifeless eyes staring into the roiling red sky. A crimson rose petal of blood formed just above her chin, and Bruce could not tell whether the canteshrike had cut a mouth into her, or whether Sileny’s mouth had just materialized in death.

The canteshrike reached down and withdrew the bejeweled dagger from Sileny’s fingers. She leaped into the air, arcing, hissing, and bearing down on Enervata. Enervata whipped his tail and slashed the canteshrike as she flew, and she tumbled sideways in a ball of silver feathers. The dagger dropped from her grasp.

Enervata and Bruce both lunged for it. Bruce knew that he and Gloria both would die if he failed. Enervata’s mission had already failed, but the Macul would continue until he found another man and woman. Again and again, until he succeeded and the world became a place of such desolation that no living creature would exist outside of intense suffering.

But Enervata found the dagger first. Bruce scrabbled, desperate, looking for something else, anything to use as a weapon. Jamie’s spear was nowhere nearby.

The canteshrike coughed, ruby blood staining her lips and feathers. She cried with whispering fury to Enervata.

“You stupid fool! Diseased soul! You sneaking, stinking prairie wolf! You think yourself high, but all can see—you’re naught but a hound with a hide of fleas!”

Her venom flew with such heat that it seemed a calculated taunt. As though she would prefer to feel the bite of Enervata’s dagger than for him to turn it toward Bruce.

But Enervata seemed beyond awareness of her. He was ruled by something else, something that kept stealing looks of longing toward Gloria and murder toward Bruce.

“No!” Gloria screamed.

Enervata lifted the dagger, taking aim. And in a suspended, unreal moment, he hurled it toward Bruce.

Gloria lunged, facing Enervata and throwing herself in front of Bruce.

The dagger struck. But it did not find its intended home. Gloria’s back arched, her spine growing rigid, and she sank to her knees. The
jeweled eyes of a serpent leered from the hilt protruding at Gloria’s breast.

Bruce caught her, his hands at her waist. He wanted to scream, but he found that he couldn’t.

She went limp, draping backward in his arms, her eyes glazed.

Enervata balled his claws and bellowed. And then his cry patterned toward the howling keen of a desert coyote and the sound echoed through the chamber and beyond, repeating in the distance as if some canine pack were answering his hollow call.

Bruce rocked with disbelief. “Gloria.”

Her breath came in rasps. “I love you. Bruce, I love you.”

She gasped, and from her mouth came a trickle of red. “The canteshrike . . . She stopped me. Tonight I was going to tell Aaron that I would rather die than spend a lifetime as his prisoner.”

She hitched.

“Don’t talk.” Bruce buried his face in her hair and found it cool and damp.

“I couldn’t live as his pet. She told me to wait. That he had fallen for me and if I . . . that you . . . get here . . .”

Her voice trailed off and her lids sank over her eyes.

She opened her lips in one last reach for oxygen. And then she was gone.

Bruce felt everything in his core begin to crumble.

“Take this weapon, let it fly.”

The songlike words, whispered in a Siren’s melody, came as if from a great distance.

Bruce registered little beyond the throbbing pressure of blood that ached in his ears. He saw the look of mortal anguish on the Macul’s face.

Something was moving in a whisper like the turning blades of a fan. And he could see it spinning toward him. White, substantial. He lay Gloria gently down.

He recognized the intonations that floated to his ears: ragged, and yet still pearled with music. The canteshrike was speaking.

“And let us watch this Macul die!”

He reached for the spinning object and it came to a halt in his hand. Jamie’s spear, the spear of love.

Enervata tore the dagger from Gloria’s breast, touching her wound and bowing his head. From deep within his throat there came a deep, almost inaudible wail, and it disappeared amid thunder that shuddered from the far horizon.

Bruce stared. Enervata had no right to grieve for Gloria. Whatever unclean emotion this Macul felt, it was an abomination.

Enervata raised his eyes to Bruce, his lips peeling backward into a snarl of hatred. His claw curling tight around the dagger. But Bruce was quick. For Gloria’s sake, he couldn’t let this demon continue to spread his sickness into humanity.

He lunged forward and sank the spear into Enervata’s heart.

The pure white heft of it slid through bone and tissue.

Enervata wailed. He swung the dagger drunkenly and Bruce ducked from him. He gathered Gloria up again into his arms, and she hung limp. Arms and hair spilling backward, eyes closed.

Enervata let out a thundering cry, a cry of a thousand years’ hunger that would go unsated. His skin began to blister and roil.

Bruce inclined his head over his lover’s shoulder. He rocked her, wept into her hair. Cried out against the tearing of spirit as it cleaved within him. No longer whole. Never again whole.

He raised his gaze to the Macul. The leathered body now coursed with sizzling boils. Their eyes met for a fraction of a second, and then Enervata slowly, methodically, disintegrated. He came apart slowly at first, and then the particles of the demon swept into a cone, like an infernal tornado. Bruce felt the wind whipping through him and watched, awestruck, as the cone swept upward, leaving nothing of the Macul but a fine trail of dust on the floor.

Bruce bent his head over Gloria once again. He knew no sense of time. He felt only Gloria in his arms, Gloria in his heart, Gloria in her death. Two vines intertwined, where to pull one from the ground is to rip out the other.

Bruce tried to imagine the coming days without Gloria. He found that he couldn’t. Maybe he was going crazy with grief, but his thoughts refused to take him in that direction. Instead, they drove him to see her as they kissed on the sidewalk before she went to work on the day she disappeared. To see her in her mid-forties accepting the accolades of a cheering group at a charity dinner. To see her blabbing nonsense words
at their infant grandchild. The images bathed him, swaddled him, radiated from his soul.