Midnight's Angels - 03 (29 page)

By the time we’d gotten everyone together, the sun was on the verge of coming up. I didn’t know about anyone else, but I was really glad to see that. It felt like I’d been plunged in darkness half my natural life, a black grime pressing up against my entire body, working its way through my pores and back behind my eyeballs.

When the eastern horizon began growing brighter, I started to breathe a lot more comfortably.

I looked at the ragged little army that we’d gathered. There was Vernon. Not Willets -- I’d asked him to stay behind, in case there was more trouble. The rest -- and I’d insisted on this -- were townsfolk who had come back from the darkness, since those people were less vulnerable.

The large majority of them were Tyburners again. And in the daylight, they looked an even more curious crew than they had done at night.

The men were mostly pallid-faced and skinny. That had to be partly genetic, but was down to lifestyle too. They didn’t look as if they’d ever pumped a set of weights, nor allowed the sun to touch their skin for very long. They were not particularly talkative, and their eyes had a rather haunted look.

The women were pale and slight as well, although they carried it far better. Long, dark hair was in abundance. Their eyes flashed with liveliness and fire. They wore curiously shaped jewelry, had tattoos on their arms and necks. And like Emaline -- who was still leading them -- they favored long dresses that clung to their bodies. Most of them were wearing sandals.

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay with this bunch?” Willets whispered to me. He was staying close, in case I changed my mind.

“Best people for the job,” I told him. “Only people, in fact. Hell, I’d love to have you along for the ride, doc. But …”

There was another reason that I’d asked him to stay here, and there was no need to complete the sentence. If the hominids managed to get hold of him, we’d seen what could happen when a powerful adept was transformed.

The Tyburn folk had been issued with riot guns, courtesy of the police department. Most of them did not look happy about that. They relied on sorcery to get things done, not hardware. But we were heading deep into enemy territory, and we might need more than spells to see us through. I had told them that, Emaline backing me up.

She kept stroking the barrel of her shotgun.

“Have you ever noticed,” she asked, “how almost everything violent and destructive is masculine in shape?”

“If you keep on talking like that,” I answered, “you can go ride in another car.”

The top edge of the sun appeared. Light washed across the town’s center, altering everything in a few seconds. Rooftops no longer bled away into the gloom. The globe-shaped lights around the square all glinted. And the details on the statue sharpened, as if Theodore had come awake.

I stood in that yellow light for a few more seconds, letting its warmth seep across my face. But told myself that we had to get going. Back into the dark. Which was a fact I hated. I was aware how stiff my movements had become.

“Time to roll!” I shouted out.

We’d gotten hold of two large pickups and filled them with lanterns the same way as my Caddy. I got into the cab of the leading one, Emaline clambering in on the passenger side. And then watched in my rearview mirror as half of our people climbed on out back.

Then I noticed something else was happening around us. The townsfolk who’d been glowing … their luster was fading. They were going back to normal as the sun came up. I looked at my own hands and saw the same was happening in my case.

Spells just didn’t last forever. Curses might, but not mere spells. Which meant that we’d be back at risk as soon as the dusk came back around. And Quinn was in no condition to help us.

If this journey turned out to be another wild goose chase, we were in a very serious mess.

* * *

“You’re wound up like a spring,” Emaline said to me, her voice gentle and sympathetic.

I gazed out into the murk, refusing to look at her.

“What do you expect?” I muttered back.

“No, it’s more than that. I get an intuition that you’ve been this way a good long while.”

A hand brushed against my upper arm.

“I feel loss and loneliness in you. I see a man who has bad dreams most nights. There’s tragedy in your past, Ross.”

“It’s none of your business,” I said, my frame stiffening.

“That’s exactly what I thought you’d say.”

Her warm breath caressed my ear.

“There are ways to ease the pain, you know. Not spells. I’d be more than happy to oblige.”

She was coming onto me -- here,
now
?

“For Christ’s sake!” I snapped. “We’re heading into serious danger. Doesn’t that bother you even a little bit?”

But when I finally glanced over, she was smiling mildly.

“My fate is not mine to decide,” she explained. “It is in the hands of the Goddess, and I accept her judgment gladly.”

I pulled a face. “If that’s what makes you happy, fine. But anymore suggestive talk and you can walk back to the square. You get it?”

The High Witch’s only response was to drop back lazily against her seat, staring out through the windshield and rubbing at the barrel of her riot gun again.

I concentrated on the job in hand. We were leaving the central part of town by this stage, crossing the Adderneck by means of a narrow wooden bridge. And continuing east until we entered Pilgrim’s Plot.

It’s older than my neighborhood, filled with smaller, rather picturesque two-story wooden houses. I’d seen pictures of towns in Cape Cod, and they looked quite a lot like this place. Quaint, cute, and tidily preserved. The kind of place folk go to when they want to relax and feel good about their lives. When Alicia had still been around, she’d talked occasionally about moving here. These days, I wished I’d gone along with that, making her as happy as I could while I still had the chance.

She’s not dead
, I kept telling myself, the same way I always do. But I had no way of proving that assertion, so I did my best to put the memories aside.

Besides which, the Plot wasn’t quite so cutesy this morning, sunken in unnatural darkness as it was. There were figures out there in the distant shadows. Masses of the things, following our progress the same way as before. I could almost feel their gazes on us. Like they’d sensed that we were up to something genuinely important. And if that was the case, then were the angels far behind?

One thing gave me hope. This district was not nearly in the same state of ruin as the ones we’d left behind. The hominids had not begun to search through here in earnest yet. Which meant we might still beat them.

We finally turned onto Alcott Avenue. The outline of another building swung into my field of vision.

It’s because we cannot cross our boundaries -- we cannot reach the outside world, and so we have to make our own world here. Because of that, the Landing has a lot of things that most provincial towns do not. And that includes a load more galleries and museums than you’d normally expect to find. This one was a case in point.

“Museum of Natural History,” read the sign out front when my headlamps brushed across it. And I already knew, from the computer records, Erin Luce had been one of its earliest patrons.

I pulled up to the curb and killed the engine, and the truck behind me did the same. Emaline had stopped being so languorous. She was sitting upright with a stiff, determined look on her smooth face. Which was a lot more like the kind of attitude I needed from her.

All the same, I started wishing Cassie was here. When I stepped out of the cab, there wasn’t just that mass of huddled figures that had been following us. More were on the roof of this place, their twisted faces staring down.

And more inside? The people that I’d brought along here noticed them, and grouped tightly around their leader.

“That’s it, stick together,” I told them. “Nobody gets separated from the rest.”

The dark shapes around us were all adults. Where were the children? I wondered again. But this wasn’t the time to go getting obsessed by details.

I led the whole crowd in through the front doorway, waiting to be sprung upon. But nothing like that happened, in the first moments at least. The lamps and flashlights we’d brought made our surroundings lurch and shudder.

The place appeared deserted. And was not lying in ruin, like the library had been. So the creatures hadn’t searched it yet. They’d only come to this place because we had led them here. And that made me curse inwardly, but I couldn’t see how else we could have played it.

Besides, it was too late for concerns like that. We reached the central hallway and then headed down it, running our beams across the brass signs off to either side. I hadn’t been here since I’d been a little kid. Knew which exhibit I was looking for, but could not remember where it was located.

“Here!” Gaspar blurted, holding up his lantern next to a big plaque with an arrow.

“Prehistoric Department,” it informed us.

There was a heavy scuttling from back in the lobby. So we’d better get moving, really fast.

* * *

It was a family that we wound up in front of. Five of them. Mom and Pop, two youngsters, and a baby. They were naked, and they badly needed haircuts. Pop, the largest of them, stood three and a half feet tall if that.

They were on an open patch of ground, a few boulders scattered around. A backdrop had been painted on the wall behind them -- a copse of trees, a cloud-topped mountain in the distance. And a pterodactyl in the air, which wasn’t in the least bit accurate. This was a pretty old museum.

The family was contained behind red velvet ropes and another brass plaque, this one reading “Stone Age Man.”

Did I forget to mention? They were made of wax.

Nothing had changed about this exhibit since I had been ten years old. The two kids were tussling with each other the way kids would still do millenia later. And Ma was seated on the dirt, cradling her smallest child.

Pop, of course, was hard at work. He was fashioning a flint spearhead, and was using the simplest of tools to shape it.

His right arm was flung back.

His fist was clutching a smooth rock, a bit smaller than a baseball.

There was more scuttling back the way we’d come. I pulled the barrier away.

Stepping across, I yanked the rock from between the little man’s cool fingers and then handed it to Gaspar.

“Well?”

He frowned so hard his whole face puckered. Held the stone at eye level, turning it over in his fingers.

“I get no sense of anything.”

Perhaps that was down to another Spell of Shielding. But I’d never heard of one so powerful it worked this close.

“It’s not the Clavis?” I asked, hearing my voice break.

“You misunderstand me, Ross. Even an ordinary stone has a slight energy. Whereas this … has nothing, like it doesn’t even belong on this plane of being. I suspect it’s what we’re looking for.”

He slipped it carefully into the pocket of his shirt.

And not a moment too soon. There was a huge rumbling from the main corridor. It sounded like a whole regiment of those things from outside was headed this way.

And a lot of them had started shrieking.

They -- or the things in control of them -- had to have sensed that we’d found the object they were looking for. I could hear it in their voices -- they were yelling out with rage. It still came out as high-pitched creaking noises, but a good deal louder than I’d ever heard before.

The old, worn parquet flooring underneath us started to vibrate. And the lamps on the walls around us began rattling in their fittings. My God, how many of them were there? My own gun was out again. I had switched the flashlight to my other hand. But by the sound of the approaching horde, I doubted either batteries or lead would hold them off for too long.

The Tyburn people seemed to get that. The men looked uncertain, hanging back. But the women reacted by stepping to the fore, Emaline at the center of them. They were still holding their riot guns, but slackly, in a casual right-handed grasp. Like they didn’t really need them.

Each woman raised her left hand. The fingers were spread and the palm facing forward, at about midriff height. They took a quick glance at their leader, then described a circle in the air.

And nothing in the slightest happened. So I wasn’t sure what they were doing.

The front rank of hominids came into view at the far end of the passageway. The rest of us immediately turned our lights on them. And there were shrieks and yelps, exactly like there’d been before. But they were not backing off this time. We were causing them intense discomfort, making them slow down, but they kept on coming at us.

I was reminded of the way they’d thrown themselves into that power station. They were being controlled by something that had no regard for their own safety.

When I glanced across at Emaline’s women, they were moving their hands in circles for a second time. They were holding themselves perfectly straight, their shoulders thrown back and their faces placid. I thought I could detect the strangest opalescent luster in their eyes, like they were not even seeing what was going on in front of them. Their thoughts seemed to have been turned inward, their attention fixed elsewhere.

I would have tested that, but didn’t have the time. Hundreds more creatures were piling up behind the ones up front, driving them steadily forward. I took careful aim and put slugs into a couple of exposed legs. They might still bleed to death from their wounds, but at least I was giving them a chance. Or so I thought.

The others didn’t take the slightest notice. They trampled right over the ones who had been wounded.

Vaguely, from the corner of my eye, I was aware of the Tyburn women’s hands describing a third circle.

And then Emaline spread her arms and tipped her face toward the ceiling, those long, golden curls tumbling down her back.

She began shouting so rapidly I couldn’t make any sense of it. It didn’t seem to be in English. Of the hundreds of words that came pouring out of her, I could pick out only two. ‘Hecate.’ ‘Lux.’

Then -- with her head tipped so far back she couldn’t possibly see where she was going -- the High Witch started to advance. Not slowly, but at a steady rate. Her legs, beneath that dress, were long, and so she closed the distance quickly.

A wave of shock ran through me. And I lurched in her direction, trying to grab her arm. But she was out of reach before I could do anything to stop her. I could only watch as she closed in on the sea of bobbing heads.

Then my alarm turned to amazement. Several extraordinary things started happening at once.

She seemed to take the hominids completely by surprise. They’d not been expecting any of us to behave like this. So the front rank shuddered to a halt. And the ones directly in her path started shrinking away, creating an opening.

She was in amongst them in the next second. And they were still trying to keep clear of her. But how much longer would that last? I stared, horrified. They might not be able to transform her back, but they could still tear her to shreds. How long would it be before they figured out that they had her surrounded and then pounced?

The men around me had, by this time, raised their weapons.

The women had done something too, but only with their heads. They had turned them purposefully. Each of the subordinate witches was staring at the nape of their leader’s neck.

Thin twin beams leapt out, shining the same kind of soft gold that I had seen when Maycott had illuminated us. They were coming from the women’s eyes. Each beam lasted a few seconds, striking the back of Emaline’s skull. Then vanished. It was like they were pouring something into her.

A few arms snaked up from the horde. Some of the hominids were regaining their nerve. A hand lashed out and grabbed her elbow. And she was finally forced to take notice, her gaze coming down.

I was about to try and put a shot into the creature’s wrist …

When I was dazzled so completely that I couldn’t even aim straight.

* * *

Between one heartbeat and the next, the corridor in front of me was filled with light so blinding that it hurt. The kind of searing white glow you get from a thermic lance. I was forced to put a hand across my eyes, then squint between my fingers.

Emaline had been reduced to a thin, wavering silhouette at the heart of all that brilliance. But when she turned her head a little, I could see the glow was coming from her pupils.

The snarling of the hominids turned to undulating screams. Awful sounds, like they were being burned alive. It was hard to make out clearly, but the entire heaving mob of them turned back the other way and began rapidly dispersing. And they didn’t just head off across the floor -- they used the walls as well, they were in that much of a hurry.

The corridor cleared out in seconds. Emaline started turning our way, but seeing the way we flinched back she thought better of it.

She swiveled toward the main corridor instead.

“With me!”

The rest of the women moved up behind her, forming a loose crocodile. The men closed protectively around me and Gaspar, -- they were intent on guarding the stone -- and we followed the High Witch too.

She was heading forward even faster than before, at a pace barely short of a jog. Her arms remained in the air at her sides. If it had been me, I would have started running. But I doubted that she could, in that dress.

We returned to the main corridor and pounded back down it, the museum’s lobby expanding ahead of us. But we weren’t completely in the clear.

There was an abrupt movement from a chandelier above us. Something ragged came tumbling down, wrapping its limbs around Gaspar’s shoulders and then clawing at his throat. He started to wobble, yelling startledly.

I turned my gun around in my hand and slammed the butt into the creature’s face. And it dropped away to the floor, then fled.

Several seconds later, three more hominids tried the same thing, coming from a doorway to our right. No shots were fired, I’m glad to say. The Tyburn men drove them off with the stocks of their shotguns, following my example.

It had been a mistake to bring along such weapons, and I made a mental note of that. Had our people used them, each creature that they shot would lose a limb at very least. If we were forced to venture out again, we’d bring more suitable firepower.

We finally got beyond the building’s entrance, to be greeted by a startling sight. Every remaining hominid in town seemed to have gathered here. Once again, they were keeping their distance. But I could see enormous groupings of them everywhere.

Every head was turned on us. The white light Emaline was casting was reflected dully in their eyes. They drifted back a little more when we emerged into the open. But there were masses of the creatures.

Both remaining angels had arrived as well. They were hovering above a darkened lamppost at the next block down the street. My breath hardened in my throat, wondering what new powers they might have. I was afraid they’d send those darkened tendrils snaking out again. But they simply hung there, watching us. So maybe Emaline’s witchcraft was too strong for that.

We split back into two groups, heading for the pickup trucks. This time, Gaspar was squeezed in between us as we got into the leading cab. He’d taken the stone out of his pocket, and was clutching it to his chest like his life depended on it. Which perhaps it did.

Our new friend’s eyes went back to normal. And I was grateful for that -- I needed to see to drive. I blinked heavily and swung the truck around. Then, satisfied the other headlamps were behind me, took us back the way we’d come.

“What exactly did you do?” I asked the High Witch, having to shout above the motor’s roar.

“Did
we
do!” she corrected me. “I couldn’t manage by myself, so my sisters lent me their power. They took the life force in their bodies and their souls, and gave it to me.”

I remembered how their palms had been circling level with their navels. And guessed this was a concept with which I’d become familiar.

“
We’ve
someone who knows about that life force stuff. He’s called Lawrence DuMarr, and he calls it ‘chi.’”

“Really? What a curious word. But this DuMarr sounds like a very wise man,” she added. “I had no idea you outties knew about such things.”

I went around another corner, almost leaving rubber on the curb. And didn’t look at the woman, but frowned.

“Is that what you guys call us? Outties?”

“Not anymore, perhaps.” And I could hear the warmth in her voice. “After all, we’re now comrades in arms.”

And wasn’t that a turn-up for the books? I concentrated on the road. The wooden bridge was rumbling beneath my tires before much longer.

And then the town center was coming up, and we were starting to see daylight again. And to my eyes, it looked even better than it had the last time.