A cool wind blew a scent of sea, from Baffin Bay, not far off; mosquitoes buzzed. Somewhere overhead, a gull shrieked.
Bleak said, “Wait here, Loraine.”
“No,” she said flatly.
“You have to help this man. There'll be medical supplies in their admin building, there. Could be others alive.”
“Bleak...Gabriel...”
“Just... wait...here,
“ he said, with all the conviction he could project.
She looked at him. Then she pointed. “It's that way.” She went to the admin building to search for bandages, medical supplies.
Feeling the breeze ruffle his hair, and reaching out to feel the environment on a much deeper level, Bleak strode toward the artifact—the quick stride becoming a jog, then flat-out running, as he reached the spiraling ramp and saw, at the bottom of the dig, two men close by the artifact.
One of them, Forsythe, was attaching something to a pagoda-shaped, green-gold metal artifact rising from the pit.
“Gulcher!” Bleak shouted. “He blows that thing up, you'll be up to your neck in competition!” He jumped from one ramp down to another, cutting through the curves of the spirals, heading directly toward the center, forcing his way through a labyrinth. Gulcher turned toward him, frowning. Forsythe was making an adjustment.
Bleak almost stumbled over the body of a white-coated middle-aged man. And immediately saw the man's ghost, appearing beside him, sitting on the rim of the ramp, looking confusedly at his body. Shot through with bullet holes.
“Come with me!” Bleak shouted at the ghost. “Join the others! The one who killed you is there!”
He ran past the ghost, calling out through the Hidden—and summoning its energies, to coalesce inside him, as he went. Until he was just a few strides from the two men and the artifact.
That's it,
he thought.
The artifact.
That thing was a big part of the secret behind his life, behind who he was—dug up, exposed, but still cryptic, part of its origin still a mystery.
Then General Forsythe turned to face him—grinning. His hand on a switch, which was black-taped to a plastic explosive, wired to a side panel on the artifact.
“Close but no cigar,” Forsythe said. “It's all ready to go.”
Bleak was already concentrating the energy of the Hidden around the artifact—creating a cushion. Holding its few moving parts in place. Forsythe growled to himself as he attempted to press the button. Which wasn't working, as long as Bleak could keep the locking field in place.
But Bleak knew he couldn't stop him this way for long.
“Gulcher—,” Bleak said, taking a step closer, forming energy bullets in the palms of his hands. “That thing blows up, they'll swarm over the planet and that means you too!”
“Oh, a few eggs will be broken, but it'll be a fine omelet,” Forsythe said, reaching for something behind him. A gun he'd left lying on a segment of the artifact. “I had hoped to come in exclusively—
through you and your brother—but this way will work, in a pinch. Once the artifact is down, I'll be able to come through completely, way ahead of...what did you call it? Our competition. I may have to divvy up the world, but there's so much life to be sucked up here, I won't mind so much. And so...”
He swung the submachine gun toward Bleak—who threw the two energy bullets, left and right, striking the submachine gun.
Forsythe shouted in pain and dropped the weapon—then he realized that Bleak couldn't still be controlling the bomb and throwing energy bullets too, and he turned, lurching toward it...
And Gulcher stepped in, smacked Forsythe hard in the jaw, with his right fist.
Forsythe went over backward, falling in the dirt. He glared up at Gulcher. The voice that came out of Forsythe wasn't Forsythe's. It phased in and out of audibility, almost warbling.
“You little... worm. That... will get you an... eternity in my jaws.”
“I'm sick of all you fucking big shots,” Gulcher said. “I want to know if what he's saying is true. That assholes like you will be all over this planet.”
“All over it, yes,
“ Forsythe said, staring at Gulcher... getting control of him again.
“And scraping scum like you from our boots. “
Bleak focused, concentrated...and called, within himself, to his allies. The artifact's power was more concentrated here, but Bleak could still contact the Hidden.
Forsythe stepped over to Gulcher, put his hand on his head—and hissed,
“Down!”
Gulcher went limp—and slumped to the ground, against the cowling of the artifact. He sprawled against it, making odd little sounds...
As Bleak concentrated, adjusting field strength, Forsythe went on, in his normal voice, reaching for the bomb, “Not only is it true, Gulcher, but this explosive is strong enough to take you right out of this life—and right into my jaws as I come into this world.”
But his finger stopped a quarter inch from the detonator.
He seemed paralyzed...as Bleak focused the Hidden's energies around Forsythe...from all sides. Pressing...
Then Forsythe, slowly and painfully, turned to face Bleak—and the thing inside Forsythe started pushing back. The field, in the conflict, became visible. The violet-blue shape of giant hands around Forsythe, closing in on him, to squeeze the intruder out—and the red-energy outline of Moloch, flickering in and out of visibility, showing itself, exerting all the strength it could send through the crack it used to penetrate the human world. Bleak felt it writhing in his field of control.
And he felt himself faltering. The thing was sickening to be in contact with. It was so profoundly nonhuman, its appetites so vast, so alien, he felt an ineffable repugnance that made him recoil in sheer existential horror. He grimaced—and went to his knees, struggling to keep the energy field in place, to increase the pressure. Trying to get help from the refined energies the Spirit of Light had opened to him. But still the defiant pressure grew.
“Now!” Bleak shouted. “Cronin—tell them! Do it now!”
And then they were there, those Bleak had summoned: the ghosts of the scientist who'd died in the dig pit, and the marines who'd died in the compound, and Krasnoff, and Scribbler, and the three sentries who'd died at Facility 23, and Cronin himself. They all appeared around Forsythe, standing in a ring facing him, their hands lifted, touching the field...adding their psychic strength to it. A circle of ghosts acting as an astral magnetic coil to increase Bleak's power.
The field compressed around General Forsythe; staticky and flaring with internal conflict, becoming darker, more intense, as it closed in around him...pressing the possessed man from all sides. It wouldn't crush his body. Refined, it would pass through the physicality of his body, like a net through water. And it
was a
tightening net, dragging psychically through the general.
Forsythe screamed as the energy net closed inescapably around him—squeezing, pressing.
Then there was a flash of blue-white light. And it was done.
They'd forced out the spiritual alien, the intruder—
pushed it
out of the man, into the open.
Bleak saw it for a moment, just the portion of it that had entered the world, hovering there, a rearing bulk of glossy green-black, largely taken up by a leechlike, circular, serrated mouth, with more serrated mouths inside it. Poised over Forsythe like a giant Venus flytrap...staring furiously at Bleak with its single polyp eye the color of bloody phlegm. It squealed, ear-piercingly, just once...
Then it contracted, shrinking from yards across to a pinpoint in a second...and snapped out of the world with a crisp
crack!
that echoed through the dig site.
General Forsythe fell flat on his face, in the dirt.
He lay in the grit, squirming, babbling to himself. “What did I do what did I do what did I do what did I do I can still feel it I can still feel it I can still feel it what did I
do do do do do DOOOOOOOO...”
Bleak stepped over to the plastic explosive, pulled out the wires, dismantled it, as the ghosts moaned softly to one another and faded as if blown away on the rising wind. Cronin was the last to go. “Good-bye,
wein Jungen...
good-bye...”
“Thanks for coming back to this tired little world, Cronin,” Bleak said. Feeling a sudden stab of loneliness. “See you someday. Thanks for always being there, and...” But Cronin was gone.
Then Bleak stepped back and looked at the artifact. This thing limited his power. It had granted him, and ShadowComm, by accident or by someone's strange design, more power than their kind had in the past. It helped keep the predators of the Wilderness at bay—but even without that, would it be good to get rid of it? Or had Newton been right...that they weren't ready?
Gulcher lay there, against the artifact, muttering to himself.
Bleak figured he should kill Gulcher. But Troy Gulcher looked stricken; as shattered, as impotent, as Billy Blunt and Forsythe.
What about Sean? Where was he now?
Turning away from the artifact, the wind blowing dust in his eyes, heartsick, Bleak tried to tell himself that Sean might be wandering the world as a ghost...or reincarnated. But he knew different, deep down.
He knew that his brother was somewhere in the Wilderness.
Sean.
Keeping to the shadows of the Wilderness, trying to hide from its predators, and trying to remember why this had happened to him.
***
AN URBAN RIVERBANK, A warm, sticky night in New Jersey. Twenty-three hours later.
The decaying dock where Bleak had met with ShadowComm before.
They were all here now, more than Bleak had ever met. Every one of them watching Bleak closely as he walked up with Loraine Sarikosca at his side.
He and Loraine hadn't had much time to talk, since the events at the artifact. Since the artifact had been reburied and left to do its job as well as it might. They'd been too busy to talk. Supposedly. Coordinating with Swanson. But maybe they'd just avoided it.
Oliver was there, scowling beside Pigeon Lady—covered in blue-gray fluttering, some of the birds real, some familiars. And Giant was there, and the others—as well as some Bleak didn't know. A' young, plump, cocoa-colored woman in a Gypsy dress, but no Gypsy; a tall albino with long white hair and a black suit; a small blond girl with a python that wasn't really a python twined around her waist... and many others.
“We've been trying to find Shoella,” Oliver began.
“She's not in this world at all,” Bleak said. “But she hasn't died. She's in a pocket world of her own creation—trapped there. It's pretty bad. I think she's probably found a hiding place there. I'm hoping to find some way to get her out.”
“Oh, fucking hell,” Oliver said. “She's trapped. And you had nothing to do with that?”
“No. That was her doing, man. Hers and...CCA.”
“CCA?” Oliver said. “I heard some stuff. About a predator named Moloch chewing through those assholes. And CCA let some people go. But Scribbler...”
“Scribbler didn't make it,” Bleak said. “But he's freer now than he's ever been.”
“Yeah? And you want us to help Shoella?” Giant asked, looking at Bleak with rank suspicion.
“With that—and with other things. Troy Gulcher is still out there. He disappeared from the hospital—and the familiars that were released by Moloch, those are still floating around the world for Gulcher to use. And there are others—lots of other black souls that Moloch empowered. They're hostile to us. They're a whole different species of shadow. They'll find us and kill us if they can— because they don't want anyone to have the power but them.”
“Maybe or maybe not,” Oliver said. “How do we know any of that's true?”
“You saw the one that summoned the fire imps,” Bleak pointed out. “You think he was alone? You think he'd stand with us?”
“Why should we trust you—and her?” Oliver nodded at Loraine. “She's an agent of CCA.”
“CCA no longer exists,” Loraine said. “But some of us were hoping to...to work with you. In some other way.”
“With Breslin in charge?”
They all laughed at that.
Loraine smiled. “I know. But he's been taken down a few pegs. There is some...testimony. Behind closed doors, in Congress. Not for public consumption but—he's being reined in. He'll be gone next election.”
“Believe that when I see it.”
“About believing,” Bleak said. “I want you to go ahead and look into my mind—Loraine's too, i£°z she's willing. Send your familiars to look. See if you can trust me.”
The ShadowComm drew off, in a group, to confer. Bleak and Loraine waited. A tugboat hooted on the river; a siren moaned in the distance.
“Gabriel,” Loraine said, in an undertone. “We haven't had much time to talk.”
“We'll talk later, Loraine,” he said gently. “We have to think about what all of it means—if it's true about you and me. It's a big responsibility. It's so rare. But...maybe we can't do it this time around.” Meaning, in this life. “Maybe it'll have to be...”
Then Giant walked importantly up to them, the others following him. “Pigeon Lady will look.”
“Okay,” Bleak said.
Loraine hesitated. “Will this be like...when Forsythe...”
Bleak shook his head. “No. That thing was predatory. It's different. It's intrusive but—not like that. Not violent.”
“All right—then let's do it.”
Pigeon Lady walked up to them—as the others backed away. Then the pigeons covering her seemed to explode, outward, toward Bleak and Loraine...the ones that weren't real pigeons, the familiars, flew right at their faces, blocking their vision, covering everything, a flurry of wings and glittering pink eyes and gray-blue feathers that filled the world.
Bleak closed his eyes and felt them flying
into
him, and through him, as if his body were a man-shaped building, and the birds were flying through its open windows, seeking.
He smelled them, acrid; felt them, sharp-clawed.
It was over in twenty seconds. Another burst of flurrying—and they were gone. All that remained was a slight headache...and a faint nausea. “Oh,” Loraine said, swaying.