Dust to Dust (19 page)

“If that's true,” Scott said, “if we go digging around
in the catacombs, don't we stand a chance of releasing him?”

“I think he is already halfway out,” Rainier said. “We have to imprison him again, or kill him if we can.”

Melanie stared at the bones of the long-gone Capuchins and shivered suddenly. “I'm going back to the hotel,” she said quickly. Rainier turned to follow her, but Scott looked around first and saw that the priest had gone to stand just outside the door to the church.

Night had fallen, but Father O'Hara was standing against the wall beneath an overhang, lighting a cigarette.

“Go on, catch up with Melanie,” Scott told Rainier. “I think I'll look around a little more.”

Rainier nodded. In his way, he seemed as protective of Melanie as Scott felt—even though he knew full well that she was capable of taking care of herself and was in fact worried about
his
abilities.

He waited until Rainier was out of sight and then hurried to join the priest.

“Excuse me, Father O'Hara?” he said.

The man started. He looked at his cigarette and grimaced. “I'm sorry. You know me?”

“You were talking to my friend earlier. Rainier Montenegro,” he said.

“Yes, yes.”

“You two were talking about Bael. Balor.”

The priest arched his brows. “Are you a believer, son?”

“I believe that—that there are things in this world beyond our customary comprehension. Actually,
Father, I wanted to ask you if you know about something called the Alliance?”

The priest's breath caught for a fraction of a second, before he took a drag of his cigarette to camouflage his hesitation. “Your friends are part of the Alliance,” he said carefully.

“How does one join?” Scott asked.

“One doesn't.”

“Look, I'm supposed to be hunting down a demon alongside two people who won't let me be a part of their little organization. Am I a fool? What am I supposed to believe in here?” Scott asked, surprised at the passion in his own voice.

Father O'Hara looked at him. “Belief is each man's destiny. We all have free—”

“Will. I know,” Scott finished for him, realizing that the man wasn't going to give him any help.

And then he did. He reached into his pocket and drew out a card. “You can find me if you need me. I even have a cell phone. The Church has entered the brave new world.”

“I'm asking you for help
now,
” Scott said.

“No, you're asking me about your friends, and it isn't my place to talk about them,” Father O'Hara said. “But when you truly need me, you may call on me.”

Scott smiled. He liked Father O'Hara. “All right. Thank you.”

He left Father O'Hara with a wave and started back toward the hotel. He didn't see Melanie and Rainier, but there were plenty of little shops, cafes and bars where they might have stopped along the way.

He looked up at the sky as he walked. The moon would be full in the next night or so, he realized.

He stopped walking, aware that he had wandered off the main road. He had gone down an alley, though he didn't remember changing direction. He had been distracted by the moon.

Or maybe he had followed it.

He was at the rear of a building. At one time, he thought, it had been a church, though it seemed vacant now, with broken windows and only half a spire remaining. The odd thing was that the walls seemed to be alive with constantly changing shadows.

He wasn't alarmed at first, just curious. Then he heard the chattering, like the whisper of the wind at first, then growing louder, like the call of a flock of strange birds. He searched the sky again, only dimly aware of the light and traffic of the nearby street.

All at once the shadows seemed to swoop down around him, and suddenly he wasn't certain what they were at all. They were huge, black-winged…Bats? He heard the sound of high-pitched evil laughter behind him, and he spun around.

A girl was standing there. She had a strange smile on her lips, and her eyes were alight. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress, a torn and tattered garment, and her hair was tangled, part of it tied on top of her hair with a ribbon.

More laughter, this time deep, but with the same malicious tone. He turned again. Behind him stood a man. He wore a top hat and Victorian frock coat, as if he'd stepped off the screen of a Jack the Ripper movie.

The swooping and chittering continued. The black-winged shadows seemed to be everywhere.

Suddenly silence fell, and a crowd stepped out of the shadows, though there should have been no room for them there. They wore various forms of dress, as if they had just come from a bizarre costume party at which “tattered” and even “decayed” had been on the must list.

“Bona sera,”
the girl said, and she laughed at him again. “Oh, ducky,” she added, her accent decidedly British, “you do look quite delicious.”

And then she moved.

“I
still don't think I understand, much less accept, what's supposedly going on here,” Melanie told Rainier. “There have been natural disasters throughout history. The ‘big one' is expected somewhere along the San Andreas fault any time now. There are active volcanoes all over the world, and hurricanes and tidal waves have always plagued low-lying areas.”

“Natural disasters have always occurred, yes,” Rainier agreed. “And they always will. But the thing is, prophecies have always held power over the human mind. And there's no prophecy more common than the one about the end of the world. It's just that we have a habit of thinking that the end will come as a huge cataclysm, not something that occurs slowly. The planets will align and boom—a solar flare will shoot down to earth, bursting it with a single firestorm. I believe in what we're doing, though I don't know what is coming. But I think there's a seepage of evil from the bowels of the earth, and I'm pretty sure that's just the beginning.”

 

A step. She took a single step toward him first.

She ran her tongue around her lips in a lascivious
gesture, and saliva dripped from teeth she must have had filed to sharp, jagged points.

What the hell kind of gang was this?

She started to walk toward him. He thought about what Lucien had told him about the gang in L.A., about the man going insane in Naples. Had this entire group gone in some way insane together, a form of murderous mass hysteria?

“Stay away from me,” he warned the girl quietly.

To his amazement, she let out another cackle, and then she seemed to…fly at him. He had no trouble lifting an arm and batting her away to crash hard against the building.

But he wasn't prepared for the sudden onslaught that followed.

What seemed to be dozens of crazed costume-freaks suddenly came at him, grasping him, tearing at him. He fought them off, using skills he'd never learned but that came to him as if he'd been born with them. Another young woman planted firm arms around him while he back-kicked a man who had leaped on his shoulders. She stared down at him, insanely laughing, then she licked her lips and snaked her tongue over his cheek in a manner far more reptilian than human.

It felt like sandpaper. Horrible. Repulsive.

She drew back suddenly, hissing like the snake he'd just compared her to, staring at his chest, though he didn't know why.

It didn't matter; it was his chance.

He strained, bursting free from her grasp and hurling her away. Despite his strength, he was afraid that he
could lose the battle because of the sheer number of his attackers, but then, suddenly, he wasn't fighting alone.

Rainier and Melanie were there with him. He moved like a whirlwind then. When the mob wasn't atop him, his strength was easily enough to keep them at bay. One swing of either arm sent an attacker flying. It was only when they clung to him like flies on a corpse that he struggled. They seemed determined to tear at his flesh, and ridding himself of them once they had taken hold was like divesting himself of glue. One of the young women grabbed at him, screaming in agony as her hand brushed his chest, yet not letting go.

“Don't let them—bite you, Scott. Keep them away!” Melanie cried as she tore away an old hag who was trying desperately to sink her teeth into his arm. Melanie didn't seem to care that the woman was old; she threw her so high that she fell onto the broken spire of the ruined church, which pierced her clean through.

Jack the Ripper let out a bellow of rage and came at him. Scott shot out his fist, catching the man in the face. He flew backwards and was impaled by a bent piece of wrought iron that had once protected a church window. He stared at Scott, then collapsed like a rag doll.

“Scott!”

He didn't have time to reflect on the fact that he had just killed a man—albeit a man clearly trying to kill him—because Rainier's voice warned him of another attacker, this one about to leap at him from the shadows. Scott ducked as the man's own impetus sent him flying past, then lashed out with a kickboxing move, sending
the man crashing against a tree in the shadows near the wall.

Suddenly Scott heard that strange chattering again, saw the shadows rising above the ruined church and the alley, above the trees that had clung so tenaciously to life here.

Melanie grasped his arm and dragged him back toward the busy street. “Come on, let's go!” she commanded.

“Wait!” he demanded. “What the hell was that?”

“Let's go!” she cried again.

They quickly reached the street, Rainier right behind them. But as soon as they reached the sidewalk, Scott stopped. “Melanie, we have to report this. I was attacked. I killed a man, and—”

“We can't report it,” Rainier said. “Oh, hell, Melanie, explain it to him.”

“We can't let ourselves get caught up in an investigation. If we were to go to jail…” she said, then stared at him, her huge blue eyes entreating. He saw that strange flicker of gold in them, and for a moment he was uncomfortable. He couldn't help caring about her, was certainly obsessed with her. But she scared him, as well. The way she had fought, the fact that she had killed a woman and didn't seem to care…her secrets…And it wasn't just that at that moment he was a little bit afraid of her, he realized. He was also afraid
for
her. And that made him truly afraid for himself, because he didn't want to lose her.

“Look, Melanie, the police will find the bodies, and they'll investigate. Something happened back there.
We could wind up in serious trouble if we don't go to the cops and tell them that we were attacked.”

“There's a bar just down the street with quiet booths and a mainly Italian-speaking clientele,” Rainier said. “I think we all need a drink.”

Over Scott's protests, the other man urged them down the street and into the bar, then found them a corner booth in the back. The canned music was loud, affording them a certain amount of privacy. Scott ordered a Jack Black, neat, while Rainier opted for beer and Melanie chose red wine. Scott downed his first drink in a single swallow, then ordered another. Melanie watched him anxiously.

“Is that what the Alliance does? Kill people—yes, I know they were trying to kill me first—but kill them and then disappear?”

“Only when it's the only way,” Rainier said.

“Please, Scott,” Melanie murmured.

“That wasn't one person running amok or some gang possessed by black mist or a demon or…whatever. That was a crowd of crazy people in costume, and they were out for blood,” Scott said, staring from one of them to the other.

“And we handled it. Together,” Rainier pointed out.

Scott finished his second drink. “You're just not going to let me past that wall you two are hiding behind, are you?” he demanded.

Scott looked at Melanie expectantly. “I can't,” she said miserably. “I've told you that—”

“Yeah, yeah, your life is your life,” he said, and stood up. Melanie started to rise. “No, don't worry
about me. I won't wander off the beaten path again. Enjoy your drinks—and don't try to follow me.”

He left them and started to turn back toward the hotel, then paused.

He headed back to the abandoned church and the alley, instead, unable to believe that he hadn't heard any police sirens while they'd been in the bar. Surely someone—one of the survivors, maybe—must have reported the carnage by now.

But when he arrived, there were no shadows.

And there were no bodies.

“Impossible,” he breathed aloud.

He checked the wrought-iron bar, but there was nothing there. No flesh. No blood. Nothing but a small pile of dust.

He bent down and searched. There wasn't even a speck of blood to be seen.

“I
am
losing my mind,” he told himself.

But he wasn't. They had known. Somehow Melanie and Rainier had known the bodies would disappear, that there wouldn't be anything left for the police to find.

Tired and disgusted, he headed back to the hotel, went to his own room, crashed down on the bed and prayed for sleep.

Mercifully, it came quickly and hard.

Despite the depth of his sleep, he woke instantly when Melanie came in.

She didn't come right to him. He could sense her standing in the door, hesitant. He knew that she was worried about his anger, perhaps even worried about re
jection, and despite the fact that he knew he was right to be furious, he wanted to take her into his arms. No matter what secrets she was guarding, he couldn't bear to see her hurt.

But he held his emotions, his desires, in check and didn't move, only watched her through half-closed eyes.

In a few moments she left the doorway and came to him, sitting on the side of the bed. “You're awake, aren't you?” she asked softly.

He opened his eyes fully and looked up at her. She was still so hesitant.

“Scott…you're acting like a child, you know.”

That wasn't what he had expected to hear. He shook his head. “You're forcing me to play a game in which I'm the only one who doesn't understand all the rules,” he told her.

“What if the rules don't really matter?” she asked.

She looked so forlorn, as if the truth hurt her more than the silence could ever hurt him. He reached for her, drawing her down beside him, and simply held her.

“What if we fail—and cause the end of the world?” he inquired.

“We can't fail,” she told him. “We simply can't.”

He lifted her chin; she looked as if she were about to start crying.

He was such a wimp, he told himself. It was the time to press his point, to demand to know what was going on with her and the Alliance.

But he didn't. He just held her against him. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, and he must have been
right, because she stayed. And because she stayed, the slow—building warmth between them began to deepen until it was unbearable. He ran his fingers down the length of her arm, then cupped her chin and kissed her. She kissed him in return. Slow, deep, long, wet and arousing. Passionate. Then they were both struggling to rid themselves of their clothing as quickly as possible, desperate to feel the fire of flesh against flesh. Hands, lips, kisses and caresses, were everywhere at once, until they tangled in the sheets, making love as if the world was indeed going to end any second, and if they didn't learn every nuance of one another now, they would be lost for all eternity. He was staring at her face as he erupted in a staggering, volatile climax, made that much more powerful because, absurd or not, he loved her. The whole damned world and all its secrets could explode, and he would die happy in her arms. He fell to her side, drawing her against him. He didn't question her; she didn't offer any answers. He felt the thunder of his heart ease and the cool air rush over their damp nakedness, and it was enough. They were silent, drifting together into sleep.

When he awoke, he was immediately aware that she was no longer at his side. He rose up on one elbow, looking around the room. She had never closed the door to the common room, and now light poured in from doorway, enough for him to see her standing at the wall that separated the two rooms.

“Melanie?”

She didn't answer him. He rose carefully, silently, and went over to her.

She had taken the pen from the bedside table and was drawing on the beautifully papered wall. It occurred to him that they were going to have one hell of a room bill, but he didn't try to stop her. Her eyes were open, but he knew that she was completely unaware of what she was doing.

He moved closer, trying to make out what she was drawing.

It was the church. Sister Maria Elizabeta's church. The sister herself was standing in the doorway, as if she were protecting the church against intruders.

Scott frowned as he peered closer and realized that she was actually protecting the outside world, trying to close the door against an army of bones and swirling dark mist trying to escape the sacred confines of the church.

“Melanie!” Filled with a sudden inexplicable urgency, he caught her by the waist and spun her around to face him.

She blinked, and suddenly she was back in the real world.

“Scott?”

“Melanie, we have to get Rainier, and we have to get to the church. Now!”

She turned and studied her drawing.

“Oh, God.”

Scott was already searching the jumble around the bed for his clothing. He separated pieces, tossing her the cocktail dress she had worn, finding his own briefs and jeans and climbing into them. She was just as quick, scrambling around for her shoes, but she let out a cry.

“I need jeans and flats. Wake…Rainier and give me two seconds.”

He didn't need to wake Rainier; when he banged on the man's door, he found Rainier awake, a light on by the sofa and the pile of guidebooks and maps he had been studying.