The Graves of Saints (15 page)

There were things emerging from the blasted husk of Basilica San Domenico.

Gabe blinked to clear his vision, thinking that he must still be in shock and that something must be wrong with his head, for the winged figures rising coming from within the church faded in and
out of sight as if they were there one moment and gone the next. They seemed to be made of charcoal smoke, phantom harpies who beat their wings as they darted from the black void of the church and
into the sky above the square. He cocked his head back to watch their ascent, blinking again as they shimmered in and out, vanishing and reappearing. Demons made of smoke.

‘
Meu Deus
,’ he prayed in a whisper.

But as he watched more and more of the smoke demons emerge, he knew that God had turned his gaze away from Siena tonight.

Saint-Denis, France

The helicopter set down a quarter mile from the Saint-Denis cathedral. Even from the air, Beril Demirci had been able to see the cracks in the street from the earthquake that
had struck just before noon, now twelve hours ago, but nobody was worrying about the earthquake now. Somewhere in Saint-Denis, she imagined structural engineers were trying to figure out whether
there were buildings in danger of collapse, but she doubted many of them would be doing much firsthand evaluation. Not if they valued their lives.

‘This is as far as I go!’ the helicopter pilot shouted, wanting to make himself heard over the chop of the rotors.

Beril gave him the thumbs up, trying to seem competent and knowledgeable but secretly almost as terrified of the helicopter as she was of the horror unfolding in Saint-Denis right now. She had
never been in a helicopter before, and now that she had she hoped never to do it again.

‘Thank you!’ she called, trying to figure out how to turn the latch that would open the door.

As she fumbled with it, someone did it for her from the outside and the door rattled as it slid on its tracks. With only a small satchel as her travel case, she jumped down from the chopper
– could she call it a chopper, or was that silly? – and turned to face the soldier who had opened the door.

‘Miss Demirci?’ he shouted over the noise.

She nodded and he turned away, gesturing for her to follow. The soldier moved at a trot and she kept pace with him, slipping the strap of her bag over her head so that it hung behind her as she
ran. The roar of the chopper increased and then quickly began to diminish and she glanced back to see that the pilot had already taken off, headed away from here as fast as his aircraft could carry
him.

Smart man
, she thought.

Which makes me what?

With the helicopter gone, the sound of artillery shelling grew even louder. It thumped the air and she felt every shot and every impact in her chest, shaking her heart. The soldier led her
toward a cluster of military trucks and smaller vehicles, where a group of other people in uniform was clustered around a folding table. Though her Turkish homeland had its share of military
activity, Beril had rarely seen soldiers up close and knew next to nothing about the way such things were organized. Only by their bearing could she identify these people as officers of some kind,
so she followed her escort and relied upon him.

Her soldier brought her not to the table but to a tall, dark-eyed woman in full military gear. Beril thought her bulky helmet made her head look enormous and out of proportion to her body, but
she bit her tongue. She had a tendency to speak her thoughts unfiltered; it frequently got her into trouble at home and she didn’t want the same thing to happen here. She had been called into
the midst of an unfolding crisis, and knew the focus needed to remain on the horrors at hand. It was simply that she sometimes couldn’t stop her thoughts from racing off on tangents and her
tongue from following.

‘Major Rojas,’ the soldier said. ‘This is the woman you’ve been waiting for.’

The dark-eyed major frowned. ‘Beril Demirci?’

‘That’s me,’ Beril said, her small voice likely getting lost in the roar of nearby battle. She looked around, hoping for some kind of shelter, but the major seemed in no hurry
to take cover.

‘Major Paola Rojas, UN Security Forces. You’ve heard of Task Force Victor?’

Beril nodded.

‘Good,’ Major Rojas said. ‘Come with me.’

She nodded to the soldier, who turned and ran off to wherever he was meant to be next. The major led her past the table where other officers were barking orders into phones and radios, though
they seemed to be having trouble with communications and having to repeat themselves. Runners came up to the table, received orders and raced away. One of the officers poked furiously at a
blueprint or something spread out on the table and tried to make a point the others were ignoring.

‘In here,’ Major Rojas said, and Beril looked up to discover that they were outside a long trailer and the major was holding the door for her.

Not much by way of shelter, but at least it would muffle the noise of war. Beril went up the few steps and found herself inside some kind of communications center. Video screens showed flashes
of explosions and glimpses of horrible things, all in some kind of night vision she had only ever seen in movies, but each image was fuzzed with static and slashed with jagged lines that reminded
her of lightning.

There were four people already in the trailer. Two were technicians who were cursing and trying to get their equipment to function more effectively. The other two were an odd pair, a young male
soldier clad in what she now recognized as UN fatigues and a very old man whose hair and beard were a frost of tight white curls and whose skin was the color of cinnamon. The old man wore a kind of
tunic, beige and faded, a pair of loose brown trousers, and conspicuously expensive but well-worn hiking shoes that were startlingly discordant with the rest of his appearance.

‘Beril Demirci, this is Sergeant Ponticello, also Task Force Victor,’ Major Rojas said. ‘And maybe you already know Mr Chakroun.’

‘Not Yousef Chakroun?’ she asked, catching her breath a little.

The old man’s eyes crinkled and he nodded in greeting. He and Sergeant Ponticello had been sitting in office chairs that seemed bolted to the floor around a small table, but now both men
began to stand. Chakroun looked exhausted and somewhat bedraggled, but she presumed a man of his age must always have an air of weariness about him. The Moroccan mystic was rumored to be at least
ninety-six.

‘No, please. Don’t get up,’ Beril said.

‘Miss Demirci,’ Chakroun said. ‘Octavian speaks highly of you.’

Beril shook her head. This was too much. It had been startling enough for her to get a phone call from Peter Octavian, a more powerful mage than any she had ever encountered – or heard
reputable stories about – but the idea that Chakroun and Octavian had discussed her made her feel slightly faint.

She found herself smiling. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Don’t say,’ Major Rojas cut in. ‘Sit down and help us figure out what the hell we’re supposed to do.’

Chastened, Beril nodded and slid into a seat at the small table. Break table? Lunch table? Or was this tiny, round surface efficient for whatever official business took place in this –

Stop. No tangents.

‘Tell me,’ was all she said.

Major Rojas remained standing. It was clear that she wanted action, not words, that it upset her to be here while not far away demons were attacking Italian and UN troops and trying to get past
the military blockade to kill more civilians. Many hundreds were already dead, some killed in the earthquake but most slain by the creatures emerging from the bowels of the basilica – Beril
knew that much – and some must be getting past the guns and soldiers.

‘Mr Chakroun arrived nearly seven hours ago. He’s been able to pinpoint the breed of demon—’

At the mention of the word, the two techs glanced at the little meeting table nervously.

‘—but we haven’t managed to identify the source.’

Chakroun leaned toward her across the table. A faint scent of spice wafted from his clothes, or perhaps from his body itself. ‘We don’t know where the little ones are coming
from.’

‘Little ones?’

‘Oh, there is a big one. No doubt about it,’ Chakroun said.

‘We haven’t seen it yet,’ Sergeant Ponticello added. ‘Mr Chakroun tells us—’

‘Tells them,’ Chakroun said with a sniff.

He passed his hand over the table in a swift, circular motion, and a kind of mist rose up from the surface, shifting and drifting and then coalescing into something horrible. For the first time,
real fear raced along her spine, a cascade of icy shivers. The demon had an insectoid body, but fat as a slug, with long upper arms that ended in sharp talons. Its mouth was a maw full of rows of
black teeth like long needles, and there were eyes all over its upper half.

Beril felt sick to her stomach.

‘Is it . . .’ she began. ‘I mean, I’ve seen woodcuts of it, I think. Is it a Tatzelwurm?’

‘Think of it as a cousin of the Tatzelwurm,’ Chakroun said. ‘The Akkadians called these creatures
utukki
.’

‘Akkadians?’ Beril said. ‘But why would a demon of Middle Eastern origin appear in France?’

Major Rojas sighed in frustration. ‘It found a way in. That’s all. It’s here, and now we deal with it, and its offspring – if that’s what the others are.’

‘They must be,’ Chakroun said. ‘Otherwise we would have seen other adult utukki.’

The ancient mystic waved his hand over the mist-figures and they dissipated. Beril stared at the place where they had been for a moment and then leaned back in the chair, wondering what Octavian
was thinking, calling her to come here. Yes, she knew a great deal of magic and could wield it with some confidence, but this was war. She had never been a warrior.

‘Hey,’ Sergeant Ponticello said, snapping his fingers in front of her face.

They had been talking to her but her mind had been elsewhere. She glanced at the techs, catching them staring, and the two men turned around quickly. The many screens continued to fuzz and
distort, the images becoming worse instead of better.

‘I’m sorry,’ Beril said. ‘I just don’t know why I’m here. What can I do that Yousef Chakroun cannot?’

Chakroun reached out and put his hand over hers. ‘Beril, listen. I have befuddled them, clouded their primitive instincts to keep them from straying far from here, to give the soldiers a
chance to destroy them. But I am an old man. I haven’t the power to destroy them or even to fight them properly. Octavian tells me that you have spent your life studying the occult, that you
have the knowledge and the skill and most importantly the heart to fight the utukki.

She shook her head. ‘No. I really do not. Octavian is the true mage. I can fight them, perhaps even destroy some of them, but there are so many. Even if I could kill them all, I have never
faced a creature as powerful as whatever brought them into our world.’

‘People are dying out there,’ Major Rojas said. ‘Soldiers and civilians. Husbands and wives, mothers and children. We’re doing the best we can at holding them, but no
matter how many of them we kill, more just keep coming. We might be able to hold them like this for days if we have to, but if there’s no end to them, at some point they’re going to get
through. I don’t like sorcery. I’m not going to lie. But magic’s the only thing short of bombing the hell out of Saint-Denis that’s going to put a stop to this.’

‘We don’t know if bombs would do it, Major,’ Sergeant Ponticello said, his Sicilian accent strong. ‘However the utukki got into our world, if there’s a passage,
bombs could just rip it wider.’

‘Exactly,’ Major Rojas said. ‘We need you. Help us hold the line. Help us destroy these things.’

A loud rap came on the door and then it was yanked open. The same soldier who had been Beril’s escort poked his head into the trailer.

‘Major, you’re going to want to talk to this guy. We’ve got a priest out here who says he’s seen the demon that’s causing all of this.’

Chakroun said something in his own language, nodding in anticipation.

‘Well, bring him in.’

The soldier ducked out and then the door opened wider. Her first impression of the priest was of bruised wisdom. Thin and drawn, face battered and his arm in a sling, he looked defeated. But
then he raised his eyes and surveyed the people in the trailer, and she saw the courage and anger in him. His gaze rested a moment on Major Rojas, likely sensing her command status, but then the
priest focused on Chakroun.

‘My name is Laurent,’ the clergyman said. ‘I woke in a tent hours ago, being treated by a nurse. I’d have come right away but they wouldn’t let me out and then no
one would listen.’

‘We are listening, Father Laurent,’ Chakroun said softly.

‘You saw the demon?’ Major Rojas added.

‘I believe I was there the moment it broke through,’ Father Laurent said.

‘And the others, the offspring?’ Chakroun asked. ‘You know where they come from?’

A look of horror passed across the priest’s features.

‘I do,’ Father Laurent said, visibly shuddering. ‘God help me, I do.’

Hannah had lost track of the hour, and even the day. She had lost track of the number of times she had fallen unconscious and woken again. She had lost count of the demons that
had slid from inside of her. Every time her eyes fluttered open into bleary awareness of her surroundings she would begin to cry. Tears had dried on her cheeks and she could taste their salt on her
lips.

Then her breathing would quicken again and she would feel new convulsions in her belly and realize it was this that had woken her from blessed oblivion. Another monster was about to be born. She
lay on the stairs with rubble strewn around her, half-naked and bruised and violated, and she wondered how many times she could give birth before the blood and fluid that slid from her would be too
much.

I should be dead by now
, she thought, more than once. More than a dozen times.

Whatever infection or curse the thing from the crypt had afflicted her with, it must also be keeping her alive. In a moment of clarity, her thoughts coalescing for a moment out of pain and
anguish and disgust, she realized that it was only logical – if the creature in the bowels of the cathedral meant for her to be the host for its children, whatever sickening magic made that
possible must also keep her alive. She was less mother than she was doorway.