New Title 1 (21 page)

“It came through your tunnel.”

“Yes. Which means we won’t be safe walking the betweens anymore.”

“They came from hell.”

“The doorway those spheres came through wasn’t coming from hell. Penemue dismissed my hellwall so easily that I called a barrier from heaven.”

“I heard Penemue call you Hellbender.”

“And we called Penemue a Watcher. The signifier can never adequately encompass the signified.”

“What are you?”

“Just a man, like you.” Todd plucked at one of the unraveling threads of his sweater. “More or less. Traveling the limis
can change a person. I’ve been traveling through it for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Several hundred years.”

“Impossible.” The former priest’s voice was flat. “I would have heard of you before this.”

Todd lifted a shoulder. His sweater was probably irreparable. Too bad. He’d bought it in a small, upscale shop in Knightsbridge, and he’d been fond of its soft lambswool.

“The kind of people I reveal myself to are the kind who can keep secrets.”

Markham studied him a long moment, frowning, then looked back down at Jack.

“We still don’t know what’s going on.”

“The Gudruns summoned something very old and very alien. At the last moment, something stopped them. Whoever laid down the goetic seal, I presume; their nephew, the pastor’s grandfather, or some wandering occultist like you. Now the seal has been removed and the energies of their summoning have started to flow again.”

“The dragons of the abyss.” Markham closed his eyes. “Tell me the truth, Edward. Did you send that email to me, about the angel hunt?”

“Amon told me about the hunt. I thought you might be interested. The angel’s name was Melech.”

“Why did you think it would be important?”

Todd hesitated, then decided there was no harm in answering honestly.  “I knew something was going to happen here. The probabilities all pointed toward it. I wanted to learn more about you. Sending you to face a pack of nephilim seemed like a good way to find out if you were a fraud or not.” He paused. “And the odds were high that you’d learn something useful from it. Does the angel’s vision make any more sense now?”

“The field of blood, I think we can interpret easily enough, by now. Worms seething through meat—that could be a metaphor for those serpents, especially given the way they like to crush bodies. A bone staircase going down into darkness, and doors closing. You said you knew a bone staircase.”

“There is a passage of bone through the limis. We could travel through it to the nearest staircase—but it would be dangerous.”

“And the doorways could be real or metaphorical.” Markham looked down at his friend. “What do you think, Jack?”

The lanky man nodded. Todd wasn’t convinced he understood what was going on around him, but he seemed to be breathing more easily.

“When he’s well again,” Todd said, “we can have him try to capture one of those dragons. I’d like to see what it is we’re dealing with.”

“The orb shape is an illusion?”

“I think the orbs are cross-sections.”

“What do you mean?”

Todd shrugged off his shredded sweater. His white Oxford shirt was torn and pinpricked with blood. 

“If I’m right, the dragons come from a hyperspace. What we’re seeing is the part of the creature that pierces our three dimensions.” He ran a finger through the unraveling weave of his sweater. “Your friend’s invocations might be strong enough to translate the dragons entirely into our axes of reference, however.”

“Hyperspace? We’re not talking space aliens again, I hope.”

“Dimensional aliens, perhaps. You do know that there are many more dimensions than our three?”

“I’m aware that time is the fourth dimension.”

“
A
fourth dimension. There are others. And they have nothing to do with spaceships traveling from galaxy to galaxy.”

“What makes you think those creatures are from another dimension?”

“They’re too alien to come from our own.” Todd paused. “Flesh, strange organ-like shapes, spheres of hair or scales, a flash of claws—all we’re seeing are our own sensory interpretations of the creatures’ cross-sections; the rest of the creatures extend into dimensions we can’t perceive.”

“You’re sure?”

“No,” Todd admitted. “But there’s a very high probability that I’m correct.”

“If you are, I don’t think Jack’s invocations will do us any good.” Markham squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “If those creatures come from another dimension, couldn’t they just—warp-drive—back into their own space again, to escape us?”

“If we tried to trap them physically, yes. But magick reverberates through more dimensions than our three. I hope that if his conjurations are strong enough to trap nephilim and b'nei elohim, they will be strong enough to affect these dragons.”

“Which you don’t think belong to either God or Satan.”

Todd let the sweater fall to the carpeted floor.

“After what Penemue said, I think they’re the original enemy of both.”

XXXII

Jack was barely aware of the conversation above him. He was trying to cling to consciousness and keep an eye on Amon, which seemed much larger and more dangerous than it had before. Scraps of tunes kept running through his mind, all dark.

I looked to the East, I looked to the West, I saw his coffin coming.

Lay down, lay down his cold, clay corpse, And let me gaze upon him.

His head pounded, and his vision was blurry. He felt a modicum of hope, though. He didn’t feel the same sense of paralysis that he’d suffered in the bar outside Reno. The tingling in his arm was starting to fade, not into numbness, but into normality. Andy’s hand and voice were comforting presences, although Edward Todd’s deep, rumbling voice echoed strangely in his ears.

Amon turned and looked at him, its mirroreyes revealing his tattered reflection. Jack stared at himself in its gaze, counting his breaths. His warding spells were setting his nerves on end.

Andy was saying something about the angel-ash vision, and Jack heard his name. He managed to incline his head to show that he was still aware. He wondered what Todd’s vision had been, after he’d bitten down on the devil’s flesh. What visions would angels and devils see, if they were to eat a human’s flesh?

Maybe that was why Amon had bitten Todd. To establish communion.

Did b'nei elohim ever feed off humanity? If he offered an angel his flesh, would the angel finally see him the way he saw himself?

Had those spherical creatures—the things that Todd was calling dragons—eaten Penemue, and if so, what had the Watcher’s flesh shown them?

If he ate the flesh of a dragon, what would he see?

Andy squeezed his shoulder, and Todd’s ragged sweater dropped through the air like a black bat. Jack started, thinking for a moment that Amon had attacked. The devil snapped its beak at him, mockingly. Now that Jack’s vision was clearing, Amon didn’t look so large and fearsome, after all.

“Jack? Are you all right?” Andy asked.

“Yeah....” Jack lifted the hand that wasn’t tingling to his forehead. He closed his eyes.

“I can’t reach a hospital,” Andy said, sliding an arm around Jack's shoulders to support him. “All I get are busy signals. And nobody in Campus Security is answering.”

Todd said something. Jack counted his breaths again, his hand still over his face. The pain was receding.

Magick. People thought it was all-powerful, but in fact it was very limited. Jack had never run across a spell that could cure cancer, stop a heart attack, or even stave off a common cold. Devils promised good health, but all they did was numb pain so their victims thought they were in the prime of health until their bodies collapsed. Control over mortality was the Creator’s alone.

That fact had been driven home to him in a hospital bed in October, and now he recognized it anew.

He dropped his hand and opened his eyes.

“Andy....”

“I’m here.” Andy leaned forward.

“Angel...”

“What?”

“Need an angel.”

“Yeah. Penemue didn’t make it. I guess we’ll need to talk to one of the b'nei elohim.”

Todd walked back, holding a paper cup of water. He crouched and held it out. Surprised, Jack took it.

The theologian’s dark eyes held his.

“This would be a bad time to die.”

Jack smiled weakly at the ridiculous advice and drank. He was feeling stronger. Good. He still had work to do.

“How—” He paused and drew in another breath. “How do we summon a dragon?”

“I suggest,” Todd said, “that we find your bone staircase and see what happens then.”

“God save us,” Andy murmured.

Jack hoped so.

A few more minutes passed before he was able to stagger upright. The students remained clustered by the front door of the chapel foyer, staying well away from them. Todd frowned.

“They’ve seen too much,” he muttered. “It could cause problems tomorrow.”

“Let’s just hope we’ll all
be
here tomorrow.” Andy gave Jack a worried look. “Ready?”

“I could really use a drink and a cigarette,” Jack muttered.

“Not on your life. Literally.”

Todd took a deep breath, glancing at his devil. The creature was on all eights now, its wiry muscles tense and clearly defined beneath its dry, ashen skin. It whined shrilly to itself.

“Let’s hope the dragons aren’t waiting at the door,” Todd said, then he reached out and threw open a portal into the limis.

XXXIII

“Oh, man.” Alison ran her flashlight around the wreckage of the social science building. “This sucks.”

The steel girders were twisted and bent, and the reinforced concrete had cracked and broken away, revealing dark branches of rebar. The entire building looked like some kind of eerie sculpture reaching up toward the stars in ruined supplication.

Vibrations shuddered through the ground and made the girders tremble and creak.

“Damn.” Peter’s light played over the shaking floor. “Those stairs don’t look very safe.”

“Wait.” Jarret reached out and grabbed Peter’s hand, steadying the light and adding his own to it. “What’s that?”

The three students stared in dismay at the dark stains on the concrete. Finally, knowing that somebody had to, Ally edged closer. The shaking in the ground made the rock and rebar crack and grind so loudly that probably the serpents wouldn’t even feel a car drive up, but she walked softly, anyway.

When she was close enough to know for sure, and to smell the stench coming from the social sciences cellar, she turned and gave her two friends a frightened look.

“Blood?” Peter whispered. She nodded. Peter waved her back, and she tiptoed to them with relief. They all moved several yards away, huddling close.