The Graves of Saints (34 page)

‘I wanted him to let us go in alone,’ he said.

Charlotte’s mouth hung open. ‘Why the hell would we want to do that?’

‘We wouldn’t want to,’ Octavian said, gesturing at the soldiers who were even now responding to barked commands from their superiors, racing to their vehicles and to the other
three helicopters. ‘But these guys are cannon fodder and there are more on the way. For the moment, we should have the element of surprise. I’d go in by myself if—’

‘Not gonna happen,’ Allison snapped.

‘If not for that,’ Octavian said, his anger abating for the first time. ‘But if the three of us go in quickly and quietly, I could cast the spell to erect the same kind of
barrier they’re using at the other incursion sites and get whatever’s coming through the breach contained. A lot of these guys wouldn’t need to die.’

‘Why wouldn’t Metzger agree to that?’ Allison asked.

Octavian gave her a hard look. ‘He wants Cortez. If I throw up that barrier and Cortez is there, odds are he’s going to be on the inside. It’s not a solution, just a temporary
measure.’

‘I get it,’ Charlotte said, feeling her heart darken again. ‘And I agree. We don’t need a temporary solution. We need to get Cortez and kill him. If he’s really
running the show it’ll all fall apart and we’ll worry about picking up the pieces after he’s dead.’

‘And if we don’t find him right away?’ Octavian said, turning his ire upon her. ‘If we don’t find him by sunrise? Or tomorrow? Or the next day? How many men and
women will die because we wanted Cortez dead more than we wanted them alive?’

‘That’s not fair—’ Charlotte began.

‘Charlotte,’ Allison put in, ‘nobody wants Cortez dead more than Peter.’

The pit of Charlotte’s stomach turned to ice and she glared at Allison.

‘He raped me. Killed me. Nearly killed me again,’ she said.

Allison reached for her hand but Charlotte pulled back as if scalded.

‘I’ve been there,’ Allison said. ‘Exactly where you are. Tortured. All of it, thanks to Hannibal.’

‘Hannibal’s dead, right?’ Charlotte asked.

Allison nodded.

‘Well Cortez is still walking around.’

Octavian had fallen silent, but now she saw that he was looking around the tarmac at the soldiers rushing into action and he had a darkly thoughtful look in his eyes. Abruptly he climbed into
the back of the chopper and turned to face them from within.

‘Move it,’ he said. ‘Quickly. And turn your commlinks off.’

Allison and Charlotte were aboard in seconds and Octavian slid the door closed. The helicopter pilots had all been sitting in the cockpits of their aircraft waiting for orders, so he greeted
them but said nothing more.

Octavian rapped the ceiling twice. ‘Take us up!’

The pilot gave him a dubious look, which didn’t go away when Octavian repeated the order in Spanish. Allison darted forward between the seats, her flesh rippling and fur bursting through
her skin as she shapeshifted into a tiger. Showing the pilot her teeth, she gave a low growl, more menacing than a roar because it was laden with purpose.

‘Take us up,’ Octavian repeated.

Rigid with fear, the pilot complied, watching the tiger out of the corner of his eye. The radio crackled and voices cut through, first with inquiries and then with angry shouting, but the
presence of the tiger caused him to ignore anything but Allison’s jaws and growled threats. Octavian told him their destination and then they were on their way, Allison remaining up front
with the man, just in case his fear eased up enough to cause him to do something foolish.

‘What changed your mind?’ Charlotte asked as they sped through the night sky, the whump of the rotors loud and brutal.

Octavian glanced at her and then at the Allison-tiger in the front. ‘I realized there was a way to keep the troops safe and still go after Cortez now instead of trapping him inside a
barrier.’

‘How?’ Charlotte asked.

His eyes were narrowed, but she felt sure she saw golden sparks dancing across them.

‘Simple enough,’ he said. ‘When I put up the barrier . . . we’ll be inside.’

Lanquin, Guatemala

Allison thought Octavian’s plan more than insane – it was suicidal. Or it would have been, had any of them been ordinary. Even with his magic and their
shapeshifting, she thought it was still foolish, the kind of risk only a lunatic would take. But she didn’t share these observations with him. After all, it hadn’t been her partner that
Cortez had murdered. And if Octavian was going to trap himself behind a wall with a bunch of demons and an open gate to Hell, then she was going to be there to back him up.

I guess that makes me a lunatic, too
, she thought. But the knowledge didn’t change her mind.

Fortunately for her, Octavian’s plan began to unravel moments before they reached their destination. New voices had crackled to life on the helicopter’s radio. The pilot continued to
glance at her in fear and she had begun to grow very comfortable with the shape of a tiger, with the muscles corded across her back and the feel of her lip curling back to reveal her teeth when she
growled at him.

Then she noticed that the sound of the helicopter’s rotors had changed. They had an echo, now, or a parallel. Shifting at the speed of thought, she transformed into her usual guise and
turned in the seat to glance out the window. Octavian caught her eye and must have seen the alarm there, because he turned as well.

‘We have company,’ Allison said, spotting a pair of helicopters that were buzzing after them, quickly gaining. She glanced at the pilot. ‘Our friend here must have been taking
his time.’

‘Maybe you’re not as terrifying as you think,’ Octavian said.

‘He wet himself,’ she replied. ‘I’m pretty terrifying.’

In truth, she felt badly about the pilot wetting his pants. The poor guy would carry that humiliation his whole life.

‘What now?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Octavian replied. ‘We’re here.’

Allison twisted around again and peered out the windshield. He was right. What had been the Lanquin caves was now a deep canyon, a scar on the flesh of the world. It had to go on for at least a
mile, but they were descending and with only the moonlight she could not get a good view of what awaited them.

Then the lights began to go on, huge banks of them popping on at once as generators fired up.

‘What the fuck?’ Charlotte said, scrambling to the side window.

Long trucks were illuminated, lining the narrow way that led off of the main road, along with a dozen military transports and two enormous artillery guns on flatbeds.

‘The army’s been busy,’ Octavian said.

‘They couldn’t have beaten us here,’ Charlotte muttered.

‘They didn’t. These are reinforcements, coming from elsewhere, and they’ve just rolled up,’ Allison said. She turned to look at Octavian. ‘Our timing
sucks.’

But by then he wasn’t looking at her. He had slid over to peer out the port window.

‘He’s down there,’ Octavian said.

Allison looked as well, but how he could see a single vampire amidst the horrors rising from the newly splintered earth she had no idea. The caves were a chasm and in the light, monsters were
rising. Some had already emerged, massive devil-bat creatures larger than any winged animal known to man. They swept in and out of the field of illumination, casting long and jagged shadows. Huge
serpents swayed in the depths as if summoned by music, and she saw one slither out of the gash in the earth and vanish into the shadows.

But other things were rising from that chasm as well. She could see huge shapes moving in the constant play of shadow and light. At first their size made it impossible for her to accept what it
was she saw, but then she realized that these enormous shapes were the heads of giants, just beginning to emerge as if being born from the womb of some ancient Hell. One head gleamed in the light,
the yellow of long-buried bone, and the other was adorned with a forest of sprawling antlers.

‘Oh, my God,’ Allison whispered, and though they were words she had not spoken in a very long time, she meant them as a kind of prayer.

‘They’re not your gods,’ Octavian said, as if he’d never indicated that Cortez might be below.

And how could he have known such a thing with all of the horrors at play down there?

Yet even as Allison wondered, the helicopter banked slightly left and she saw what he had seen. Not far from the chasm, whose fetid odors now began to invade the interior of the chopper, she
spotted a large gathering of small figures that might have been human beings if she didn’t know better. Dozens of them – perhaps more than a hundred – had arranged themselves in
three concentric circles with a single figure at the center. As the chopper dropped lower she saw the gleam of light on their flesh and realized that the vampires, what remained of Cortez’s
enormous coven, were all naked and in motion, engaged in a strange, shuffling dance.

A ritual.

And look what they have summoned
, she thought.

With a flash and a ripple of color, something huge burst from the trench, escaping the reach of the army’s lights almost immediately. Octavian swore under his breath. While Charlotte was
asking what he’d seen, Allison watched it spear upward through the darkness. Moonlight and the glow from below glinted off of its undulating body as the huge thing slithered through the air
in a serpentine ribbon, trailing feathers of gold and green and red. It arced toward them, and Allison cried out for the pilot to bank left, but it didn’t matter. The thing veered off,
driving straight into the windscreen of the nearest of the choppers behind them. It coiled around the craft, rotors snapping off as they struck unyielding flesh, and then together the helicopter
and the feathered serpent plummeted to the ground.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Charlotte demanded.

‘My signal to get the hell out of here,’ the pilot said in heavily accented English. Nobody called him on his facility with the language; they were too preoccupied with not
dying.

‘Not yet,’ Octavian said. ‘Get us lower.’

The pilot scoffed. ‘Or what, you kill me? I die if I stay.’

The chopper continued veering left for another moment and then straightened its course, heading due south, away from the trench and the evils issuing from it. Octavian started arguing with the
pilot but Allison’s focus was elsewhere. She craned her neck to see behind them and to the right, where three of the devil-bats – horned, leathery things with fifteen-foot wingspans
– were attacking the sides and front of another chopper, staying well away from its rotors.

‘What about Metzger and Galleti and the others?’ she asked. ‘They’ve got to be on one of those. Maybe the one that just went down.’

Charlotte stared at her. ‘Why do you care? I mean, after all Task Force Victor did to you?’

Allison would have explained to her, would have said that Leon Metzger was a good man and that his unit was doing important work, that he didn’t deserve to die because he had followed
orders and kept Allison on the TFV’s most wanted list. But then the chopper already on the ground exploded and the blast shook them, even this far away.

‘The second one’s going down,’ Octavian said, his voice cold and grim.

‘Shit,’ Allison whispered.

They watched quietly as the helicopter under siege by devil-bats lost altitude. One of the creatures had laid itself across the windshield, and the other must have gotten in the way of the
rotors after all, because they were tangled with strands of its slippery viscera. They still spun, but slowly, and as Allison watched it descend she prayed that some of those aboard would survive
the landing.

What then
? she wondered.
What would become of them on the ground
?

‘Tell the last chopper to land or turn back!’ Octavian snapped. Then he reached up and grasped Allison’s arm, tugging her toward the rear of the chopper. ‘Come on. Enough
of this.’

He grabbed the latch and hauled it back, then dragged the port gunnery door open. The chopper swayed with the change in air pressure and the pilot shouted at him, but Octavian was past
listening. Allison understood. They’d passed the point of no return a long, long time ago.

‘Go!’ Octavian shouted.

Charlotte needed no further urging. She leaped out of the helicopter, shapeshifting as she hit the open air and began to plummet. Allison expected an eagle or hawk but instead the girl became a
sparrow, perhaps thinking herself small enough to reach the ground unnoticed.

Octavian took two running steps and dived, his hands seeming to ignite with emerald flame as he did. A shimmering disc of magic took shape beneath him and a moment later he was standing atop it,
lowering himself to the ground as if riding an elevator to the ground floor. Allison turned to mist and drifted after them, spun away in the wake of the helicopter for a short time before she could
descend swiftly to the ground, where they could all greet the horrors close up.

As she restored her flesh, she heard chanting, the voices of dozens of vampires raised in either worship or incantation.
Or both
, she thought with a shiver. Shrieks of devil-bats joined
the chanting and the sound of retreating helicopters, but above the cacophony she heard her name and turned to see Charlotte running toward her, red hair flying in the breeze.

‘The second chopper didn’t explode,’ Charlotte said, coming to a halt and immediately gesturing back the way she’d come. ‘If there are survivors, they’re not
going to last long without help.’

Allison started rushing back in that direction with her. They hurried across sharp grass and past copses of trees.

‘I don’t get it,’ Allison said. ‘You were the one who didn’t think I should care what ‘—’

‘Medusa!’ Charlotte said, shooting her a sidelong glance as they ran. ‘In vampires alone we’re outnumbered about fifty to one. If any of Metzger’s people were on
that chopper, their guns are loaded with Medusa bullets. We need those guns, need the toxin.’

Shouts came from up ahead, punctuated by gunshots that echoed through the night. The wreckage of the helicopter loomed and Allison heard rending metal and breaking glass as the pair of
devil-bats that had survived their encounter with the machine continued to beat and tear at it to try to get to the human meat at its core.