Angel Souls and Devil Hearts (34 page)

And all Joe said was “Yeah.”

“God help us all,” George said softly. Perhaps too softly, because Joe Boudreau didn’t say a word in reply.

Salzburg, Austria, European Union.
Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 9:03
A.M.
:

Mulkerrin had power enough to destroy them all, despite the confusion he’d begun to experience as the shadows infiltrated the fortress and slowly overwhelmed his hellish
forces, his ghostly soldiers. He’d been preparing to do just that, drawing close much of his power, weaving his magic around him as a stronger protection, as well as a battering force with
which to strike. This was all new to him, a new kind of power, and he was still growing comfortable with its uses, testing its limits. It seemed only to be limited by his own ability to concentrate
on several things at once.

He’d been preparing to destroy the Defiant Ones when the magic itself contracted around him, a familiar voice screaming his own name, in his head, tearing at his brain from inside like
something struggling to be born. And then he’d known. Will Cody was alive and had access to the magic! His magic, the power God had given him to purify the world! It was impossible, not only
that Cody was capable of such a feat, but that he was alive at all. Mulkerrin had torn his heart out!

The former priest looked up, the action itself his first signal that things had gone drastically wrong. Rather than standing triumphant as his power swept over the vampires, he was on his knees,
hands clamped vise-like to the sides of his head. In a moment, along the tendrils of sensation he felt through his magical influence, he knew that all of the portals were closed. The sky above was
free from his control, communications would have returned, and the sun was shining down.

And his own protective aura was rapidly deteriorating as vampires slashed and raked at it, coming ever nearer to him in their many forms.

No! He had the power!

“
Away
!” Mulkerrin shouted, and the aura surrounding him nearly exploded with the force of his magic, obliterating several of the vampires that had come nearest to him and
throwing others across the courtyard, to slam into the stone walls around them.

Even as he reached out with his mind to find Cody, to retaliate, he was on the attack once again, more ferocious than before. And yet he was startled once again, for now he could not find Will
Cody anywhere. Only moments before the vampire had been as attuned to the flow of magic around the fortress as Mulkerrin himself, and now he was nowhere to be found.

What then? Had the death of the vampire’s spirit created some backlash which struck while Mulkerrin was vulnerable? No, he could not accept it; Cody was truly still alive and yet Liam was
blind to him. He felt very strongly that Cody lived, yet he could not sense his location.
But enough foolishness
, he thought. It was a mystery, but if Cody no longer had access to the magic,
he could not truly harm Mulkerrin no matter where he was, and the battle was far from over. He was toying with them now, really. He could destroy them all, though he might have to drop his shields
to do so, to summon the concentration. That would be foolish, when taking his time was so much more . . . gratifying.

The time for play was finished. No more portals were necessary, for the moment. Later, demons would be useful to frighten the human race, to make them see exactly what their rotting lives had
wrought upon the eternal scales of justice. But for now, Mulkerrin was concerned only with this shadow race of beings without any true place. Their insolence and interference, their
defiance
, was at an end.

“Attack!” shouted the shadow he knew was called Martha. “Kill him now! He is weakening!”

And the fool led the new charge against him. The scene had changed, but it was still familiar. Mulkerrin, all in black, white hair disheveled as the air around him, tinged green by magic,
protected him from harm. But it was more that the reality around him was altered by the magic, than It was that the air itself had changed. The portals were gone, the demons all dead. Many of the
spirits of dead soldiers he had raised had already found new human hosts and were making their way back to the fortress even now. But once they were killed again, they would return to their rest.
He had given up sustaining them.

It was now just Mulkerrin and the vampires, and his magic could protect him as long as he desired it to. But protection was not what he wished.

“Fool,” Mulkerrin snarled at Martha as she rushed toward him, and she changed the course of her attack slightly as he held his hand out to her, palm up, as if he
meant to hold hands with her, to walk, quietly, joined in that way like lovers. Even as Martha’s hands became talons, with which she planned to tear at Mulkerrin’s weird force shield,
she watched a tiny cloud of smoky darkness whirl into life above the palm of his outstretched hand. The darkness sprang into being; half a second later it was as large, or larger, than she. Dozens
of red embers burned within, and Martha knew they were the eyes of a sentient being, a creature from Hell, yes, but another Hell than the one from which Mulkerrin drew most of his slaves.

There was the world, the universe, and then there was Hell, but her brother Lazarus had taught her that there was much in between those poles, many other worlds, other dimensions, and many races
darker and more evil than the denizens of Hell. This thing of the burning eyes and the countless mouths filled with infinite gleaming ebony teeth, this was one of those things, a
Nachzehrer
,
or at least fitting the description of one.

And it was upon her even as she exploded in flame, attempting to use her natural shapeshifting ability to drive it off. But it was no more corporeal than she, and though it could not surround
and douse the flames that Martha had become, it could unfortunately consume her, a bit at a time.

“
No
!” Martha heard Isaac shout, even as the thing’s attack gave her some kind of psychic pain, and then he screamed as the thing fell upon him in her place.

Martha changed back to her true form, lashing out immediately at the thing of darkness. Her talons passed through it, as did the hands and arms of those who had come to her aid. Even as dozens
of vampires rushed past them to attack Mulkerrin’s shield, she could hear the sorcerer’s laughter as her nephew, Isaac, the son of Lazarus continued to scream. His shouts of agony,
coupled with the slurping, bone-crunching sounds of the thing consuming him, emanated from within it, but he was not there. Martha could reach right through and touch Stefan, the SJS deputy, on the
other side of the
Nachzehrer
.

And then the screams stopped, but the gnawing sounds, and Mulkerrin’s laughter, continued.

Cody had pulled a light sweatshirt off the first corpse that looked to be about his size, a tourist who’d been possessed by one of Mulkerrin’s soldiers. And now he
was making his way up a long walkway toward the courtyard. The bestial sounds of attacking vampires echoed back to him, but no gunfire, no traditional sounds of war.

When the screams began, he ran toward them. At the top of the walkway, he found himself above the yard, a short stone staircase leading down into the thick of things. From up there, he saw it
all; the thing of darkness, not a shadow or anything he’d ever seen before, and the vampires swarming around Mulkerrin, who laughed and laughed. And he’d seen quite enough.

“Mulkerrin!” Cody shouted, and he could almost
feel
it as the sorcerer turned his attention away from his attackers and toward the new threat.

Not almost, he realized. Cody could feel it, the magic around Mulkerrin, pouring through the castle, surrounding them all, really, ready to be bent to the sorcerer’s will if he had the
strength to do it. Unlike before, when Cody’s spirit was in it, was a part of the magic, he could not sense anything through it, but he could feel its presence. He knew that it was there, and
that Mulkerrin wielded it with violence and hatred.

Even from forty yards away, as he descended the stairs, Cody could feel Mulkerrin’s power find its focus on him, could feel the anger seething, boiling into action. Cody knew an instant
before that a tentacle of magic, formed from the greenish aura that surrounded Mulkerrin, would lash out at him, slamming like a battering ram into the stairs where he’d stood but a moment
earlier. He knew when another of those fearsome night things was born in Mulkerrin’s hand and sent rocketing toward him.

Cody went to defend himself, but in a moment, he found he did not need to. He could feel the thing’s confusion and, in a flash of his own, realized that it couldn’t see him. He was
somehow invisible to it.

“You will die, Cody,” Mulkerrin screamed as Will came closer, though the former priest did not attempt any new attack, perhaps sensing the disturbance Cody created in the magic. The
aura around the sorcerer blossomed suddenly, growing in a flash from a ball surrounding his body to a dome which stretched ten feet above him and twenty feet all around. Vampires were thrown
backward and to the ground. Others were borne aloft by the growth of the thing, and changed to flying creatures so they did not have to slide down the side of the shield, so they didn’t have
to touch it more than necessary.

Cody reached the outer edge of the dome and helped Martha to her feet.

“You know me?” she asked, seeking confirmation.

“From Rolf’s mind,” he answered.

“It’s impossible to estimate Mulkerrin’s power,” she said even as the other vampires struggled around them. “Every time we think we’ve got it pinned down, it
changes and grows a little more.”

“I don’t think even he knows how much power he has, Cody muttered, turning to lock eyes with the madman, twenty feet away. “But I would like to know where he got it.”

Cody had known Mulkerrin was a madman, and he had not been disappointed.

“Where did my power come from?” Liam Mulkerrin asked, stunned that any should question such a thing. “From God, you vile, evil thing. The Lord Himself endowed me with these
abilities so that I could purge the Earth, beginning with you and your kind!”

Cody shook his head, still tired from everything he had been through, but energized by the situation, knowing that many others of his people would die if he were to fail.

“You tried that once already, didn’t you?” he asked, mocking, feeling Mulkerrin’s hatred of his kind, but more, of him personally. “That’s the only shot you
get.”

And then suddenly he knew he could do it, and just as quickly he
was
doing it. With Martha and the rest looking on in astonishment, Cody began to wade right through Mulkerrin’s
protective field, the greenish aura surrounding him, welcoming him.

“I’m coming for you, Liam,” he said with a low growl.

“No!” Mulkerrin snapped. “You cannot. My magic protects me.”

“Not from me, apparently,” Cody said grimly.

And he could feel it, the strain Mulkerrin put behind his efforts, the magic that stretched out, searching for Cody, hoping to hurt him, or at least to reject him. But it couldn’t find
him, and therefore could not affect him. Mulkerrin was vulnerable, and Cody had been taught the lesson early in life that in a true war, you must exploit the vulnerable. He was wading through
Mulkerrin’s shield when he saw the resolve appear in his old, mad eyes.

And then those eyes closed. Mulkerrin raised his hands muscles straining in his neck, and the ground shook, buckled, cracked beneath Cody’s feet. The stone floor of the fortress, which had
withstood the siege of many centuries opened wide and swallowed Will Cody and several others . . . Then, with a terrible shout from Mulkerrin, it slammed together again, tearing new cracks in the
foundation of the fortress.

But Cody was no fool, and neither were his comrades. All but one of the vampires who had fallen transformed to escape—into mist, into fire, one into a sharp-clawed owl. Cody knew now that
even if Mulkerrin could not attack him directly with magic, it did not mean the madman was powerless against him. On the contrary, as the fortress continued to shake, its battlements crumbling and
the stairs Cody had only just descended disappearing into a crevice, he realized that the sorcerer was creating another earthquake for the entire city, not merely the fortress.

It must stop. Cody made his way toward Mulkerrin again, the sorcerer apparently ignoring his approach. But only apparently. For as Cody neared, once again at the edge of the greenish aura that
surrounded the sorcerer, the entire floor beneath both of them collapsed. A hole forty feet in diameter opened up in the center of the courtyard falling into the rooms below, and thinking to
confront Mulkerrin there, Cody allowed himself to fall, did not change shape. Only when he lay there, bruised and bleeding but not feeling the quickly closing wounds, did he realize that, in fact,
Mulkerrin had not fallen at all.

Above him, Mulkerrin hung suspended at the center of the glow that was his strength, his access to magic. Dozens of vampires, in flying or floating forms, hovered around that bubble-like shield,
attacking it, testing its strength, but Mulkerrin ignored them. Instead, he stared down at Cody, who lay in the rubble, and his grin was a combination of hate, insanity and fear. Fear, yes, for
Cody was a threat to him, an unexpected one.

“The strength of Hell is inside you!” Mulkerrin shouted, or Cody thought that was what he heard over the noise of the subsiding quake. Then, more clearly: “Your purification
will set an example, the Lord Himself demands it.”

And Cody wondered yet again where Mulkerrin had gotten the power to control the flow of magic, of the ether, the way he now did. Certainly it was not from “the Lord.” But the maniac
believed it was, and perhaps Cody could use that against him. In any case, Cody was apparently now immune to direct attack by magic, invisible to demons and other such creatures. He recognized then
that he might be their only hope to destroy the sorcerer once and for all.

A new rumbling pulled Cody’s attention from Mulkerrin, and even as he stood among the rubble, he turned to look in the direction the sorcerer now pointed. Cody looked up, and the wall was
coming down on top of him.