The Diabolist (Dominic Grey 3) (28 page)

It got her off the train, but the old couple stopped to rest, and Anka panicked. She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, and caught a glimpse of a long black cloak swishing her way.

Oh God
.

A group of teenagers ambled from the rear of the platform towards the station, paralleling the tracks. She joined them, trying to blend long enough to merge into the crowded station. Dante must have noticed and signaled, because she saw a man in a brown bomber jacket snap to attention and start towards her. She looked over her shoulder and saw Dante behind her, closing in.

She would never make it to the station. To her left, there were at least a dozen more tracks. To her right, only two tracks remained before the far end of the station, but a train was approaching on the next track over, seconds away.

Without further thought, she jumped down into the track on her right, gasping as she landed with a thud. Someone behind her shouted as Anka jumped over the electric rail tracks, made a desperate grab for the top of the next platform over, and scrabbled to climb up as the train approached, horn blaring and brakes screeching. She pulled, but wasn’t strong enough to lift her body up.

She hung there in horror as the train drew closer, almost stopped but still fast enough to crush her. She twisted and flung a leg up, trying for the top of the platform.

Her leg only reached halfway. She couldn’t do it.

The train was almost on her, and she screamed. Then she felt herself lifted up by her arms and set down on the platform as if she were weightless. She cringed as she looked up, but it was some random giant of a man in a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt, helping her to the top.

Before she had a chance to thank him, she saw that Dante had pulled himself out of the same tracks, ten feet behind the man who had saved her, just ahead of the train. She screamed again, and her savior turned and saw Dante approaching. Dante’s hand reached inside his duster.

“Hey, pal,” the towheaded man said to Dante, “why don’t you—”

His next words gurgled out of his mouth as Dante whipped out a knife and gutted him. The American slumped against the train, and the crowded platform devolved into chaos. Anka swallowed her terror and took advantage. She darted into the crowd, her small size now a boon.

She could
feel
Dante behind her as she wove in and out of the mass of people, knocking over a magazine stand as she raced into the cavernous station.

She knew she wouldn’t make it to the surface. She had to think of something else, somewhere to hide, but her mind could focus only on not letting Dante catch her. She careened around a corner and entered a tubular tunnel.

Bad choice. The tunnel extended as far as she could see. Her heart slammed against her chest, her body electric from fear-laced adrenaline. She risked a backwards glance and saw him thirty feet behind her, knife in hand, people melting to the sides as if he were parting the Red Sea. Dante knew about the hidden places underneath London, and he would take her and disappear down a tunnel before the police could help her.

She didn’t have another option, and she ran with everything she had. Pushing and dodging through the crowd, she regressed to her time on the street when she would run from the police, stolen pretzel or jam-filled pancake in her tiny hands, eyes cast downward for someplace to hide. Though she couldn’t risk another backwards glance, she could hear footsteps thumping behind her, the shouts of alarmed pedestrians.

She came to a convergence of tunnels filled with people and food stands, the crowd of people giving her one last chance. She dove into the crowd, then slipped down one of the emptier side tunnels, knowing she had seconds before Dante figured out which one she had chosen.

Just beside a kebab stand she noticed a square, two-foot high metal door set into the base of the tunnel wall. She had seen these before, storage units for the businesses in London’s crowded subterranean complexes. The proprietor eyed her as she stopped right in front of his stand and said, “Please help me. You never saw me.”

Anka folded her hands in the prayer position, put a finger to her lips, then dropped to the ground. The tiny door was unlocked, and she squeezed herself feetfirst inside the claustrophobic space, not risking a glance to see if Dante was watching, pulling the door shut and stuffing herself into the musty darkness.

She scrunched past the boxes and containers of foodstuffs and then stilled, nauseous with fear, her skin prickling as cockroaches and other unseen things skittered across her hands and face.

V
iktor’s mind burned on the way back to York. He would not have thought Darius capable of murder, but Viktor had witnessed countless cult members commit murder and other acts considered abhorrent outside of the cult setting. And he knew from long experience that ambition, personal tragedy, and insecurity were gateway drugs.

All three of which Darius had in spades.

Still, Darius was part of Viktor’s past, and people in one’s own past did not murder Satanic cult leaders and use a manipulative pseudo cult to strive for religious hegemony.

“I’d like to make a detour,” Viktor said to the driver, as the rain lashed the windshield. “Are you familiar with Glaisdale?”

“It’s just over the moor. There’s a good pub if that’s what you’re after. You fancy a drink for the journey back to York?”

“Not tonight,” Viktor said.

“Where to, then?”

“I’ll show you.”

The driver took the next turn into the foothills. Though it was dark, Viktor imagined the brown smudge of moor in the distance, and knew they were passing through a land of moist dales and peat bogs and long sloping ridges, stunning when the purple heather was in bloom and beautiful in a stark and lonely way the rest of the year. Just before they entered the village
of Glaisdale, Viktor instructed the driver to make a few more turns, bringing them to the top of a low hill.

Viktor pointed at a gravel pullover. “Here.”

The driver did as Viktor said, then craned his neck towards Viktor. “Mate? There’s nothing around but this dodgy weather.”

“I need fifteen minutes,” Viktor said. “Keep the meter running.”

“Fine by me.”

The rain had slackened, but the wind had turned into a gale, whipping up leaves and whistling through the trees. Enough light from the moon seeped through the clouds to illuminate a stone path just off the road. Viktor hunched and headed down the path under a canopy of gnarled yew, crossing a brook on stepping stones and then following the path up a short hill.

Shoes soaked and caked with mud, he emerged from the trees at the crown of the hill. A stone archway greeted him, flanked by the remains of a wall. Through the archway he saw the ancient chapel, a mass of granite capped by a bell tower. Tombstones littered the courtyard around the chapel, stained green by hardened moss, tilted and sunken into the earth.

Viktor picked a wild rose from a vine snaking up the archway, then walked towards the chapel, memories stirring at the smell of damp earth and old stone. The wind was worse on the hill, a constant rush and whoosh, slamming into Viktor as he left the pathway and tramped through the knee-high grass. He wove in and out of the headstones, stopping when he came to a moss-covered stone engraved with a Celtic cross. It was part of a forlorn trio of family graves.

Spurts of rain splashed onto Viktor’s head and face, the sky a leaky faucet. As Viktor laid the rose on Eve’s grave the memories rushed forth, no longer a repressed whisper, spinning in his gut like a tornado as his finger traced his beloved’s name on the headstone.

Eve’s visions had started the morning after the ritual. Her eyes had returned to their normal robin’s-egg blue, and Viktor chalked up the sudden dilation
to extreme stress or fear, both of which Viktor’s quick research confirmed as a possible culprit.

When Viktor woke in her apartment, he found her whimpering on the floor, clutching her pillow to her chest. She was staring at the wall, eyes wild, rocking slowly back and forth.

Eve! What’s wrong?

He went to her, bringing her into his arms on the edge of the bed.

He came, Viktor.

Who, love?

Her voice barely cracked a whisper.
Ahriman
.

Prickles of gooseflesh ran up and down Viktor’s arms.
There’s no one here, Eve. It’s all in your head. We didn’t finish the ritual.

We didn’t have to. I disrupted it, and he’s terribly angry with me. He’s been here all night. He’s like nothing we could ever imagine, so beautiful and terrifying.

Viktor threw back the blinds, flooding the room with sunshine.
Let’s find someplace nice to go today, perhaps that walk by the river you love. You’ll forget all of this by noon.

A small, saddened smile crept to her lips.
Viktor, my Viktor. I love you more than I thought I was capable of loving. But we shouldn’t have done that. I never cared for the occult at all, you know. I only cared for you.

Viktor dressed both of them, slipping her into slacks and a sweater. The daylight seemed to help, though she barely said another word. He felt as if she were only half present, lost in a dreamworld that only she could see. By nightfall she wouldn’t let Viktor leave her alone.

Help me, Viktor. Make him go away
.

It’s in your mind
, Viktor said gently.
It’s not real, Eve. What’d you take this morning?

Nothing. I’m afraid to make it worse
.

Maybe a sample would help steady your mind?

No
.

Viktor was taken aback. Eve never refused pills.

It was the worst week of Viktor’s life. Eve barely slept, and when she did she would awake screaming within an hour, claiming the nightmares were so visceral they made her physically ill.

Darius tried to see her, and Viktor told him what was happening. Darius grew very pale.
We have to reverse the ritual
, Darius said.
I can do it
.

That’s hardly what she needs.

Darius reached up to take Viktor by the shoulders.
This isn’t a game. We botched the ritual. She entered the circle. Where is she?

She doesn’t want to see you.

I don’t care what she wants! This isn’t about me and you, it’s about Eve and Ahriman.

There’s no Ahriman, you fool!

Darius struck him across the face.
Just because you don’t have faith doesn’t mean that other people don’t, or that it isn’t real. Ahriman exists whether you like it or not, and he’ll tear her to pieces.

Viktor stood in front of Darius for a long time, his hand on his cheek where Darius had slapped him. He knew his friend was in love with Eve and that he deserved that slap.
I’ll grant you
, Viktor said finally,
that Eve’s beliefs are the ones that matter, not mine.

You have to let me do this,
Darius said.
We have to reverse the ritual.

Eve wouldn’t entertain the idea. She wanted nothing more to do with rituals or magic, and Viktor didn’t blame her. But the visions continued, and Viktor grew more desperate. He took Eve to three different psychiatrists, Oxford professors with PhDs from the best universities in the world. Each prescribed a different drug, telling Viktor the same thing: that Eve was schizophrenic and needed help.

Eve’s family had a history of mental illness, and Viktor believed the ritual had triggered something in Eve’s mind. She began a regimen of Haldol and then Stelazine, but she still grew worse, afraid to be alone or in the dark, sleeping during the day with the blinds thrown wide. Her family came and talked to the psychologists, and she was dangerously close to being sent away.

Near the end of summer Viktor woke to find Eve naked in the street outside her apartment, brandishing a knife and screaming at the top of her lungs as she moved in circles, as if stalked by a predator. When Viktor approached she tried to stab him. It took him the rest of the night to calm her.

Viktor decided to try one last course of action. He would take her to London and hope against hope the bright lights of the great city would take her mind off what was happening, shake her back to normalcy. If that didn’t work, he would take her to the ends of the earth, to a sun-drenched beach in the South Pacific or to America, as far from this sodden island as possible.