The Thirteen Hallows (26 page)

Sarah threw herself backward with a horrified scream. Huddling in the corner, she drew up her knees and wrapped her arms tightly around her naked body. A series of flickering images were seared behind her closed eyes.

Owen’s stretched throat…

The blade of the Broken Sword pressed against his flesh…

A thin line of blood trickling from the wound…

“Sarah?”

The young woman moaned.

“Sarah?”

She was going mad—maybe she already was mad. The sights and scenes of the last few days had driven her over the edge. It had gotten to where she couldn’t distinguish between hallucinations, waking dreams, and reality. There hadn’t been two demons…there were no such things as demons…and it hadn’t been a demon in the bed. It had been Owen, just Owen. But her madness had made her attack Owen, hack at him with the cursed sword, made her—

“Sarah!” A stinging slap across her face rocked her head from side to side. “Sarah! Snap out of it.”

Sarah opened her eyes. Owen was kneeling on the floor before her, wild-eyed, pale, and terrified. There was a horizontal scratch on his throat, beads of blood edging it, but he was alive. Alive!

She threw her arms around his shoulders and hugged him close, holding on to him for dear life. And then the tears came, great heaving sobs that racked her body. “I thought…I thought…I saw a demon…and then I thought I’d killed you.”

Owen felt tears on his own cheeks and blinked them away. “I’m fine.” He pulled back and attempted a smile. “I blew the horn, and that helped.”

“I was fighting a red demon. I’d killed two.”

Owen came to his feet and hauled Sarah upward. “Maybe I should be insulted.”

Sarah looked at him blankly.

“You can’t tell the difference between me and a demon.”

She looked at him. Really looked at him, taking in his beautiful body, and she realized that despite everything that had happened in the last few days, despite the fact that she was on the verge of losing her mind…she was falling for him.

“We have to go,” Owen warned as he quickly dressed and gathered their things. “If we hurry, we can still catch the midnight bus. We need to get you to Madoc”—he stopped, gesturing toward the sword and the horn—“so we can…I don’t know,” he finished in a rush. “All I know is that we need to go to Wales. That’s where this begins.”

And Sarah knew that’s where it would end.

They never made love. It was always sex.

Raw, unemotional sex that satisfied carnal needs and stirred ancient energies. Just before she climaxed, Vyvienne pulled away, images of the Astral still buzzing in her head. She pressed her hands against her warm breasts, feeling the skin trembling with her pounding heartbeat.

Ahriman sat up in the bed and observed her, fingers steepled before his face as he watched the woman intently. He had seen her come awake from her Astral travels in this fashion on a couple of other occasions and knew that the news was always bad. But surely that couldn’t be the case this time. Vyvienne had unleashed three simple dream elementals on Miller.

In her weakened state, Miller would be particularly vulnerable to the primitive intelligences that fed off the shadows of dreams and wishes that percolated into the Astral world. Vyvienne used images plucked from Miller’s subconscious; they were designed to terrify the girl. She’d think she was fighting demons. She would hack the demons to pieces…and when she awoke from her waking dream, she would discover that she had just stabbed Owen Walker to death.

“I failed,” Vyvienne said, pouring a glass of water from the jug on the bedside table. She swallowed it quickly, wishing it were something stronger. “She’s strong, master. She doesn’t know how strong, she doesn’t even understand the nature of the power, but it’s coming to her, in fragments.”

“Is she of the line?”

“She is…but I’m not sure where. I can’t follow her lineage.”

Ahriman took a few deep breaths, allowing his mind to gain calm control over his body’s fury. “What happened?” he asked eventually.

“They’re staying in a hotel somewhere in central London. I’m not exactly sure where, the Astral is terribly confused. But the dream shapes found her. She absorbed the first two with the sword. She attacked the boy as we planned. She saw him as a demon, and she very nearly slew him, except that he blew the horn, and that shattered the spell. It also sent ripples through the Astral that spun me away.”

“They lead a charmed life, that pair,” Ahriman muttered.

“More than charmed.”

The Dark Man looked up sharply. “You think they are protected?”

“I would not be at all surprised.”

“There are no protectors left these days,” he muttered. “The last one passed on over seventy years ago when he had distributed the Hallows to the present Keepers.”

“Well, someone is watching over them.”

He spun away angrily and crossed to a large wooden chest, tugging it open to pull out a long-bladed knife and a small revolver. “Can you pinpoint their location for me in London? We’re running out of time. I’ll have to do it myself.” He fed five rounds into the cylinder on the revolver, then eased the hammer down on the empty chamber.

“I could,” Vyvienne said, and then added with a smile, “but there’s no need.”

Ahriman looked up.

“I saw a leaflet for the festival on the bed. They’re on their way here.” She beamed. “They’re coming to you.”

Ahriman Saurin allowed himself a rare smile. He had always known that his cause was just and that the gods—the old gods, the true gods—were on his side.

And just to prove it, they were shepherding the two outstanding Hallows directly to him.

Tony Fowler and Victoria Heath stood in the middle of the devastated bedroom. The young manager hovered nervously in the doorway, watching the two police officers intently, terrified that they might suggest closing down the entire hotel. He hadn’t wanted to phone the police, but too many of the guests had heard the screams coming from the room. And now the young man who’d registered for the room had vanished.

Heath and Fowler arrived ten minutes after the incident was finally reported.

Sergeant Heath consulted her notebook. “Several of the guests reported seeing a female who answers to Miller’s general description in the hallway. We also have a report of the couple being seen together in the elevator. They got out on this floor and walked in different directions.” Closing the notebook with a snap, she shrugged. “Hardly the actions of someone who is a prisoner. Maybe it wasn’t them,” she added.

“It was.” Tony Fowler traced the line in the torn sheet with his pen and then looked at the long, straight gouge in the wall. Metal had struck the wall above head height and scored a deep groove to about chest height. The mark was recent; plaster dust and a long curl of wallpaper lay on the floor beneath it. A tiny tracery of delicate beads of blood was speckled with the white plaster dust.

Closing his hands around an imaginary sword hilt, he raised his arms above his head and simulated slashing downward. If he had been standing too close to the wall, the blade would have struck it…which meant that someone was cowering on the floor. But who: Owen or someone else? Miller had been in this room, he was convinced of that, but what had happened, and why had they ended up here in the first place?

The only blood in the room was the few droplets on the floor. There were also traces of semen…and the detective had a hard time trying to wrap his head around the possibilities of the petite Miller raping Walker. It seemed completely improbable, yet the mixture of fear and adrenaline did strange things to a person’s body. He knew that from personal experience. Tony looked over at his partner, still a rookie compared with him. Perhaps her fresh eyes saw more keenly than his weathered ones.

“Well, Sergeant, what do you make of it?”

Victoria Heath shook her head. “I’m not sure. Assuming Miller was here, was Owen Walker with her? Or was it another man?”

“Descriptions from the witnesses suggest that it was Walker,” Tony Fowler said shortly.

“She’s running, so why stop here? And it looks like they had sex. Which leads me to believe that it was consensual. Stockholm syndrome, perhaps.”

“Where the hostage becomes emotionally attached to their captor. Maybe,” Fowler said. “But they’ve only known one another for a very short period of time. Can it happen so quickly?” he wondered. “Besides, she’s never had a proper relationship. As far as we can determine from her background check, there have only been two casual relationships with boys since her late teens. Her mother saw to that.”

He looked around the room again. What exactly had happened? Guests in the neighboring rooms had reported hearing terrible grunts and shouts; however, they too had thought it nothing more than wild sex.

Why did no one get involved anymore? When had civilians become so afraid? The world was slowly sinking into quiet apathy.

“I wonder if Walker made a run for it and there had been a struggle. But if so, then how did they get out of the hotel without being seen?”

Sergeant Heath suddenly crouched and lifted the end of a sheet to reveal a printed rectangle of paper. Not touching it, tilting her head, she read, “The First International All Hallows’ Eve Celtic Festival of Arts and Culture.” Glancing up, she added, “Some sort of music festival, I think. Buses departing from Marble Arch, every hour,” she read. “It’s being held in Madoc in Wales, starts tomorrow. Maybe it’s significant.”

“Page could have been there for days,” he said shortly.

Still not touching the paper with her fingers, the sergeant ran the end of her pen through a perfectly circular spot of blood. The blood smeared. “What do you say it’s the boy’s blood?” she asked. “I’ll lay money we find his fingerprints on it.”

“Could be nothing. On the other hand…”

“It’s another straw.” She smiled.

“And I’ll clutch at them all…because that’s all I’ve got.”

And then there were only three.

Three outstanding Hallows, all of which would be delivered to him within the next few hours.

And then there would be nothing to stop him.

Thirty feet from the iron-studded wooden door, Ahriman could feel the first trickles of power, like insects crawling across his skin, a magnetic energy that raised all the hair on the back of his arms and sent shivers down his spine.

Fifteen feet from the door and he was aware of the force of the power as a tangible presence in the air, swirling and shifting around him, the air itself brackish and tainted with the electric of what the uninformed called magic.

But it was only when he stepped into the tiny windowless cell that the power washed over him completely, laving his naked skin like warm oils or a lover’s touch, the power bitter and tart on his tongue.

He found it awe-inspiring to think that this was only a fragment of the energy, leakage from the thirteen handmade lead-lined sealed caskets. The velvet-and-leather boxes had been arranged in a circle, equidistant from one another, around the walls of the cell. Each box sat in the middle of a perfect circle, surrounding a protective pentagram, inscribed with the symbols of the archangels and the thirteen names of God.

Ten of the velvet boxes were locked and secured with wax and lead seals incised with the ancient talisman known as the Seal of Solomon.

He deliberately avoided looking at the three empty boxes; their emptiness mocked him. He turned to look at the monitor, which revealed Vyvienne in the dungeon, where she was taunting Don Close, Keeper of the Knife of the Horse man. She was tantalizing him with her naked body, using her flesh to drive the man wild, promising him what he would never have in return for the location of the artifact.

Three relics—Dyrnwyn, the Broken Sword; the Knife of the Horse man; and the Horn of Bran—and he would have done what magicians and sorcerers throughout the ages had all failed to do: collect the Thirteen Hallows.

The infamous twelfth-century Scots wizard Michael Scot had managed to collect three of them before his mysterious and untimely death; Francis Bacon had disposed of his, believing that it had brought him nothing but ill luck; Dr. John Dee had lost one of his wives to the Hallows; the notorious Francis Dashwood, founder of the Hellfire Club, acquired two in his long life, both through gambling; and in the late nineteenth century, Samuel Liddell Mathers, one of the founding members of the Golden Dawn, also acquired two of the Hallows, although they mysteriously disappeared when he left London to set up his group in Paris. Mathers had always suspected, incorrectly, that Aleister Crowley had stolen the Hallows.

Sitting on the cold stone floor, altering his metabolism to counter the chill that seeped up through his buttocks, Ahriman looked with pride at the ten ancient artifacts, each at least two thousand years old, though some of them were obviously older and had been ancient even before they were consecrated. He ran his long, thin fingers across the nearest box, which held the Cauldron of the Giant, a tiny three-legged copper bowl. Blue-white sparks leaped off the box, stinging and nipping at his blackened fingertips. Carefully he eased up the wax seal and pushed back the lid, allowing a little of the pent-up energy to spit from the box in a yellow green light and spiral upward toward the ceiling. It hovered just below the blackened stones, a thin thread coiling and uncoiling, then abruptly dissipating in a crackling explosion that sent hair-thin electrical discharges down onto the boxes holding the Hallows. Copper green threads buzzed around the lead boxes, outlining them in emerald before they fizzled out, unable to penetrate the combination of ancient lead and even older magical seals. The Cauldron had been the second Hallow he had collected.

It had been so simple. Once he had discovered the identity of the Keeper, he’d taken the car ferry from Holyhead to Dublin and then driven up to Belfast. In a pub on the Falls Road, he’d met the wizened and crippled Gabriel McMurray, the Keeper of the Hallow. Twenty-four hours later McMurray was dead, and even the RUC, hardened by years of the Troubles, had been horrified by the state of the corpse.

Ten Hallows.

Three to go.

The killings had become progressively easier, and he had become stronger with each death. Ahriman looked around the circle at the Hallows. He knew them all intimately and recalled in exquisite detail the deaths of their Keepers. Here was the Spear of the Dolorous Blow, the Halter of Clyno Eiddyn, the Chariot of Morgan, and the Mantle of Arthur.

Once ordinary everyday objects, they had been imbued with extraordinary power, and when he possessed all thirteen, then he too would have access to that power. He would become godlike.

How long had it taken him to reach this point? he wondered. Ten years, twenty…more? He was thirty-five now, and he had first learned of the Hallows when he’d been fifteen, but it took five more years before he had even begun to comprehend their extraordinary history and incredible power.

Twenty years: a lifetime spent pursuing a dream. Those years had taught him much, taken him across the world more than once, usually into the wilder, less hospitable portions of the globe, and his search had given him glimpses into the Otherworld, a place that humankind—petty, blind humankind—could never comprehend.

He replaced the small metal pot and sealed the box, then opened a second box and lifted out the small leather satchel known as the Hamper of Gwyddno. The first Hallow he had acquired. It had happened ten years ago. He had been twenty-five.

Turning the leather purse in his hands, feeling it tremble with energy, he remembered the first time he had seen it.

He had been fifteen.