The Graves of Saints (26 page)

‘You can’t do that, Major,’ the priest insisted.

‘What choice is there?’

‘How are you going to kill her?’ Father Laurent asked. ‘You shelled the basilica already, took down half of its stones, and obviously she still lives or there would be no more
of these things. So how will you get to her?’

‘Someone will have to go in.’

Father Laurent blinked and shook his head, then pointed at the shimmering barrier. ‘In there?’ He gestured toward Chakroun and Beril. ‘These mages only just now managed to put
this barrier up. Even if you could get someone inside, on their own they would be dead in minutes.’

Major Rojas nodded. ‘Agreed. But Shadows could do it. They could pass right through the barrier and make it down into the basilica’s sublevels without the demons even knowing they
were there. If the woman can be saved, they can save her. And if she cannot, they can at least give her the mercy that will end this for her and for us all.’

‘Shadows,’ Father Laurent said, nodding, though a ripple of nausea passed through him. ‘I see. And where are these Shadows?’

Major Rojas glanced upward, searching the late afternoon sky outside the barrier.

‘On the way, Father. On the way.’

Siena, Italy

Jessica Baleeiro had found peace in Siena, at least for a little while. Across centuries of Roman and Florentine rule, the city had been largely ignored, its coffers lacking the
funds to modernize. Yet in time that lack of modernity had been Siena’s saving grace, as tourism began to flourish, so many wanting to get a glimpse of the well-preserved fragment of history
the city represented. Its tiled roofs and gothic towers had made it a window into the past, full of charm and character.

Now, Jessica stood on a wooded Tuscan hillside and watched the past being erased. The city’s signature bell tower crumbled in the distance. Rain fell from a menacing gray sky, but even
against the clouds the smoke demons were visible, circling the peaked roofs that remained standing, crashing through upper-story windows to ferret out those hiding in fear for their lives . . .
dragging them back out through the jagged, broken glass. Screaming.

Even from here, miles away, Jess felt sure she could hear the screaming.

The rain had plastered her hair to her scalp. She used a hand to wipe the water from her face and turned away, not wanting to see anymore. For the rest of her life, she would not need any help
remembering the sight of those winged harpies darting about the rooftops of Siena, all charcoal smoke and no substance. Bullets slowed but did not kill them . . . disrupted the substance of their
being, or so one of the dark-suited professors working with the military had said.

Hundreds more had died since then, and the death toll would have been much higher if there had been more demons. Help, it was said, was on the way, but meanwhile the entire city had to be
evacuated. That was another reason why Jess didn’t want to look at the skyline any longer. Every time she saw someone else dragged from a building, the guilt hit her hard. She and Gabe were
doctors; they were supposed to be helping.

We are
, she told herself.
We are doing what we can, the best we can
.

As if he himself were a ghost summoned by her words, she felt him approach behind her, felt her husband’s hand on her shoulder.

‘You have to focus,’ he said. ‘I can’t help other people if I think I’m abandoning you.’

Jess relaxed against him, feeling the warmth of his breath on her neck and the strength in his broad chest as he wrapped his arms – carefully, so carefully – around her.

‘You’re not abandoning me,’ she promised. ‘Just because I can’t be of much help, that doesn’t mean I’d deprive these people of the things that you can
do for them.’

Gabe’s eyes shone. ‘We’ll be all right,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she lied.

He kissed his fingers and touched them to the tight splint on her left arm. She smiled to perpetuate her lie, hoping he would believe that it wasn’t as painful as it truly was. The sling
took pressure off of it, but she had not wanted to take a heavy dose of the painkillers the army medics had with them. There were others who would need the drugs far more than she did.

‘We’ve got to get these people out of here,’ she said.

Gabe nodded, glancing around at the makeshift camp on the hillside, overlooking Siena. There were SUVs and several transport trucks that the Italian army and the UN security forces had brought,
along with three ambulances that had been commandeered from the city. Refugees were spread out, some of them with jackets over their heads to hold back the rain, though most of them just let it
soak into them, numb with shock and loss. Medics helped or carried people in and out of the back of one of the ambulances for treatment. Gabe had already done more than a dozen battlefield
surgeries. Given what little supplies they had available to them, she thought it a miracle that it appeared seven of those men and women would survive.

Jess had helped in Siena, when the demons had first appeared. She and Gabe had rounded people up, gotten them indoors, then hustled them from building to building, keeping out of sight of the
smoke demons. Together, a group of them had stayed alive until the military had begun to show up and the evacuations had started. It had been while they were running for the back of an army
transport that she’d broken her arm. A smoke demon had darted down from the sky, long talons extended, reaching for her. One of the soldiers had fired at it and another had tackled her to the
ground, protecting her with his own body.

She’d broken her forearm and the pain had made her cry out so loudly that for a moment she did not hear the screams of the soldier who had saved her, as he was torn from atop her and
carried off into the sky.

A shudder went through her.

‘Are you all right?’ Gabe asked, his brown eyes so full of love and worry.

‘Just a chill from the rain,’ she said. Jess had told so many lies today that one more would not hurt. She glanced over at the one tent that the army had set up. ‘What’s
going on over there? Do they have a plan?’

‘To get us out of here or to stop those things?’ Gabe asked, sneering slightly as he nodded toward the broken towers of Siena and the gray, darting harpies that preyed on those left
behind.

‘Either one.’

As they both watched the tent, a pair of soldiers emerged. Through the veil of rain, Jess thought one of them might be an officer. Gabe had been invaluable to them. Lives had been saved because
they had a surgeon with trauma experience right there with them in the midst of the crisis, but the rest of the refugees had to be moved far, far from here.
Including
us,
Jess
thought. If Gabe wanted to stay and continue to help, she would fight against it. She would beg if she had to. Somehow she knew that if he stayed here, he would die. They would both die. The
certainty rested in the center of her chest, just above her heart.

The army had told them reinforcements were on the way and that all refugees would be evacuated to one of several nearby cities, where staging areas were being set up. The wounded would be taken
to hospitals. And all of that would have offered Jess some comfort, but Gabe had shared with her things that he had overheard from the wounded he had doctored.

The smoke demons had been more solid at night. In the dark they had seemed more savage, but when dawn had broken they had become more sluggish and seemed less inclined to expand their attacks.
Even now, she cast a glance toward Siena’s ruined cityscape and saw that they were sticking close to the center of the city, not straying more than half a mile or so from the tower. But the
day would only last so long.

‘I don’t want to be here when night falls,’ she said.

Gabe exhaled loudly and nodded, but he said nothing about leaving.

‘No more word about reinforcements?’ she asked.

‘Only that they’re coming,’ Gabe replied, his brows knitting thoughtfully. ‘Colonel Neroni says they have a plan. That they’re bringing . . .’

‘Bringing what? Are they going to nuke the town or something?’ Jess asked, having visions of mushroom clouds that made her forget to breathe.

‘No, no. Nothing like that,’ Gabe said. ‘They’re bringing in some kind of magician. A sorcerer.’

Jess blinked, shifting in such a way that the pain in her arm flared up and she winced.

‘Are you kidding?’

‘Not at all. Don’t look so surprised, Jess. That’s what they do in cases like this, don’t they? Fight fire with fire? How many stories have we seen on newsfeeds in the
past ten years where there were sorcerers involved?’

Jess turned and looked at the dark, haunting, awful figures circling the half-fallen tower again. As she watched, one of them dove across the street toward a darkened window, crashing through
into the building. These were demons. How else to fight them than with magic? And how could she even begin to doubt that sorcery existed when she could glance out across Siena and see demons made
from nothing but gray smoke?

‘Does the colonel think the sorcerer can stop this?’ she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Gabe stood behind her, now, arms circled protectively around her, the two of them looking out over this place where not long ago they had been so at peace.

‘You know something similar to this is happening in France,’ Gabe said. ‘I guess they’ve managed to create some kind of barrier there to trap the demons inside.
They’re hoping they can accomplish the same thing here.’

A spark of warmth ignited in her chest. A wall to hold them in. To buy time for the military to figure it all out, and for the refugees to make good their escape.

But then the spark went cold and a sick feeling twisted in her gut.

‘What about the people still inside when the wall goes up?’ she whispered. ‘What about them?’

Gabe said nothing, but he didn’t have to.

She knew the answer.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

‘That’s enough!’ Octavian snapped.

Metzger and Allison turned to look at him, both blinking at him in surprise. They looked as if they were waking from some kind of trance, and he thought that perhaps that wasn’t far from
the truth. If so, it was a trance of violence and blood.

The vampire, Holzman, was seated in a hard-backed wooden chair, hands cuffed behind him and his ankles cuffed together. A third set of cuffs linked them, so that he sat with his back arched,
feet bent under the chair and arms thrust down behind it, totally exposed and vulnerable. With Medusa toxin running through his system, he could do nothing to free himself. His vampiric strength
was great, but these cuffs were a reinforced alloy made especially for prisoners of unnatural strength. Holzman wasn’t going anywhere.

‘What’s the problem?’ Metzger asked, eyeing Octavian warily.

Locked down onto the chair, Holzman spit a stream of blood and snot onto Metzger’s trousers. The commander backed off, swearing, and Holzman bucked against the chair, testing the cuffs and
the strength of the wood. Pointless, Octavian thought. He might be able to shatter the chair but he would not break the cuffs. Even if he did, Private Song stood a few feet away with an assault
rifle slung over his shoulder. With the toxin in him, Holzman would die instantly if Song decided to punctuate this interrogation with bullets.

‘Look at yourselves,’ Octavian said, glancing from Metzger to Allison, who seemed uneasy with herself. She dropped her gaze. ‘This isn’t some gulag. Shouldn’t we be
in a concrete cell somewhere, or an abandoned warehouse? Isn’t that where we do this sort of thing?’

Anger reddened Metzger’s cheeks. ‘Are you fucking kidding me? You’re worried about the décor?’

Octavian shook his head. He glanced again around the room – an ordinary hotel room, except for the fact that they had a centuries-old vampire locked down onto a chair and had spent the
better part of an hour questioning and beating him. Torturing the vampire ought to have broken a whole host of international laws, but Task Force Victor had successfully argued in front of the UN
Security Council that vampires were not human and therefore not afforded any such protections.

Metzger had initially had one of his own people, a thuggish-looking Brit, doing the dirty work. The man had beaten Holzman and cut his flesh and even burned him in places. With Medusa having
stolen his ability to heal himself, Holzman had bled considerably onto the plastic sheeting that the Brit had put down under the chair. After forty minutes or so, Allison had offered to take over
and Metzger had sent the Brit packing, but she had not fared any better.

‘Pain isn’t working,’ Octavian said quietly, studying the eyes of the bleeding vampire. Holzman grinned slightly, cracking the charred skin of his cheek.

Allison nodded and slid onto the bureau, the casualness of the action adding to the absurdity of the situation.

‘I agree it’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘But what are we supposed to do? If we try deprivation or isolation or sound, not only do we need to move him to a place where that
kind of thing might actually work, but it takes time.’

Metzger fumed, glancing back and forth between them, stunned and apparently furious that they were discussing their torture strategy in front of the creature from whom they were attempting to
elicit information. Octavian did not smile, but he did take a certain amount of pleasure in the commander’s frustration.

‘We don’t have that kind of time,’ Octavian admitted.

Allison shrugged. ‘So, we just start stabbing him until he talks or dies?’

Octavian turned to study Holzman’s impassive features. Though he might not be able to heal himself, and though he had cried out in pain during his torment, he had never given any sign that
he might break. At the moment, they had no idea if Holzman even knew Cortez or if he was just being difficult on principle.

‘Give me the room,’ Octavian said.

Metzger gaped at him. ‘What?’

Octavian walked over to Holzman, staring down at the vampire, all sense of amusement leaching from him. He had been patient, had let Metzger try his own methods, but now Octavian had run out of
patience.