The Graves of Saints (38 page)

The vampire screamed as those rips shot through him, and Octavian saw it as justice. He had opened breaches in the flesh of the world and now Cortez had been speared through by other dimensions.
For a moment he hung on the air, impaled by slender fingers of another reality, and then they vanished and he collapsed to the ground.

The sky erupted with the sound of the tanks shelling the outside of the wall Octavian had erected around the breach. The ground trembled and he realized that his barrier must have wavered for a
moment when he had attacked Cortez, giving the army hope that they could break through. But for their own safety he would not allow that.

‘You think you understand magic,’ Octavian spat, striding toward Cortez. The vampire looked pitiful, with his dark, mournful eyes and his sculpted goatee. ‘Did you really think
you could resurrect these ancient gods and they would make you one of them? That somehow you’d be king of the world?’

Cortez stared down at the holes in his chest and gut. They were knitting closed, but far more slowly than any ordinary wound. Octavian felt sure that the vampire would try to shapeshift and
escape. Charlotte had not been able to shoot him with the Medusa-laced bullets, but Octavian would not allow Cortez to elude him.

But instead of trying to turn to mist the vampire looked up at Octavian, weak and disoriented but with a kind of lunatic pride in his eyes.

‘I have no dreams of my own,’ he whispered, and his voice seemed different. Somehow familiar. ‘I’m a servant, not a king.’

Octavian froze, cocking his head to one side. He stood above Cortez, ready to kill him . . . ready to draw on the most ancient of magicks to do so . . . but the words made him hesitate.
Don’t do it
, he thought.
Don’t give him time to scheme
. But if Cortez was speaking the truth, if he was only a servant . . .

‘Who do you serve?’ Octavian demanded.

Cortez dragged himself up to his hands and knees, a wounded dog.

‘The one king,’ the vampire said, and a ripple of rancid orange light flowed from his hands across the grass beneath Octavian’s feet.

Octavian jumped aside, but the spell did him no harm.

Cortez started to rise. ‘The King of Hell.’

A rustling came behind him but Octavian turned too late. Powerful hands clamped on his arms and shoulders and he tried to pull away. In the distant glow of military spotlights he saw the rigid
gray faces of two vampires he had turned to stone, somehow reanimated by Cortez’s magic. They held him tightly, stronger by far than he was, but Octavian struggled only a moment. Emerald
light sparked and swirled around his fists and misted around his eyes. He needed no spoken words to turn them to rubble.

Still, in that instant he wondered. In a handful of days Cortez had gone from an unknown enemy to a renegade vampire to a lunatic with delusions of Hellish grandeur, but now to discover that he
was a mage? Where had he learned such magic? It had taken Octavian a thousand years in Hell. Cortez might not be his equal, but he had skill and power.

Someone called his name and Octavian turned to see Commander Metzger stumble into the circle of stone vampires, helping Sergeant Galleti along beside him. Galleti clutched at her abdomen, and
blood dripped from her hands. Both soldiers took in the scene before them and their eyes widened. As one, they separated and began to raise their weapons, turning them toward Cortez.

‘Now, Prodigal,’ Cortez spat, face etched in pain from the holes in his torso, where moonlight still shone through.

The words sank in just as Octavian released the concussive spell that had been building in him. The animated stone vampires shattered and crumbled to the ground even as he turned toward
Charlotte. He saw her copper-red hair and those ice blue eyes glinting in the distant glow of the spotlights and the pale shine of the moon, saw the intricate design of her tattoos beneath torn
clothing, and saw the way she raised the assault rifle in her hands and turned the barrel toward him . . .

Her body jerked like a marionette. Her eyes were wide.

‘It isn’t . . .’ she said, unable to finish. She didn’t need to. He understood.

Either now, or long ago, Cortez had made her his puppet.

The coven master grinned. ‘Fire.’

‘No!’ Charlotte screamed, but her finger tightened on the trigger.

Octavian threw up a shield to defend himself and the bullets that struck it became smoke. But he heard the wet thump as they struck human flesh and the cry of pain and spun just in time to see
Metzger stagger backward, his chest torn up by close range gunfire. Galleti had caught only one bullet, but it had passed through her neck and now she clutched at her throat, trying to stop the
gushing blood, her torn-open abdomen all but forgotten.

He turned away even as Galleti dropped, moments from death. Charlotte screamed in sorrow and fury and she tried to fight her own body as she took aim at Octavian again. With a gesture and a
muttered word he turned the gun to molten slag in her hands. Burning and melting, it fell from her grip.

Again he spun on Cortez, intent upon pushing him back into some parallel dimension piece by piece.

‘
Who
sent you?’ he screamed. ‘Who is the King of Hell?’

Magic coursed through Octavian, straining to be unleashed, and at first he had assumed the tremors to be coming from within him. But then the ground shifted and roots thrust up from the soil,
spawning vines that slithered toward Cortez.

Keomany
, Octavian thought, distracted for a moment.
At last.

Then he saw that Cortez had not noticed the roots and vines. The coven master no longer seemed interested even in defending himself, smiling as he tilted his head back to gaze at a part of the
night sky beyond and high above Octavian.

A terrible moan filled the air, like the sky itself had a malevolent voice.

A dozen feet away, Charlotte screamed for him to run.

Octavian turned, a pit of dread in his gut as he realized that the trembling he’d felt had not come from inside him, but from the footfalls of a giant.

The resurrected, antlered death god towered so high above him that its head was beyond the reach of the army spotlights. But its eyes burned a hellish crimson as it bent down toward him, a huge,
gnarled hand reaching for him. Viscous fluid dripped from its open, jagged maw and the slits in its face through which it breathed.

Octavian gaped at it. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding me.’

He unleashed the magic that had been building within him in a single burst of concussive power straight at its hand and the death god snarled and clenched its fist, proving that he’d
caused it pain.

But its other hand closed around him, ripping him from the ground like a child plucking a flower from her mother’s garden.

Octavian cried out as it began to crush him. As he felt himself lifted higher into the darkness above the reach of the army’s lights, the mad god tilted him enough that he could see Cortez
down below.

Even from that height, he could see the vampire begin to applaud.

Siena, Italy

Kuromaku stood on the back of the military transport as the smoke demons pierced the air with their harpy’s scream and bent their wings to make another diving attack upon
the survivors who were attempting to retreat to the barrier that Octavian’s surrogate mages had thrown up around Siena. On a tank forty feet away, the gigantic Kazimir stood like some mad
king, shouting at the sky. The smoke demons would come again and Kuromaku would hack them apart with his katana. Kazimir would grab and break and rend them with his bare hands . . . or else his
hands would pass right through them as if they were nothing more than mist. Either way the creatures would fall or drift away and then slowly coalesce and rise into the air once more. They
weren’t defeating the enemy, only buying time for the survivors to get to the magical barrier and, hopefully, slip through to the other side – and that was if the mages could maintain a
doorway without letting the whole wall come down, setting the smoke things free.

Kuromaku only knew the warrior’s way, but this was not a war he could win. Two Shadows and a handful of soldiers? They would be lucky just to get out of Siena alive, and the barriers that
had been erected here and in France – and that must by now have gone up in India – were a temporary solution. The breaches would continue to worsen and widen if they weren’t
sealed. He knew Peter Octavian well enough to know that his old friend must have been confident that he could manage the task eventually, but meanwhile, Kuromaku felt useless.

If his sword could not kill his enemies, what was its purpose?

‘There!’ Kazimir shouted.

Kuromaku turned to see two of the winged things diving toward his transport. Several wounded soldiers lay in the back, seen to by Jessica Baleeiro, the doctor they had rescued but whose husband
had been taken by the harpies. The smoke creatures plummeted from the sky, taloned hands extended hungrily, drawn to the men who were already bleeding – already dying.

No bullets flew, no gunshots pierced the early morning sky. The soldiers took cover as best they could in the open back of the transport. Some held on tightly to the framework of the
truck’s flatbed while others aimed their weapons, perhaps intending a final, useless attempt to defend themselves. Dr Baleeiro bent low over one of her patients, twisting toward Kuromaku with
a worried look in her eyes.

She needn’t have worried.

Kuromaku took two running steps, dancing over the prone forms of the wounded, and launched himself into the air. The katana whickered through the air, glinting with morning light as it hacked
through the two smoke demons. He landed beside the doctor, turned and cut them again, then a third time, so that pieces of them spilled away into the air like a dispersing cloud of insects.

Something had changed. He had felt it in the resistance against his sword. And now as he watched the remains of the demons pulled away and swirled onto the wind, he realized that these two were
not coalescing again. They were not rebuilding themselves.

Kazimir roared with delight and Kuromaku glanced over to see him rending one of the smoke demons to pieces, tearing off a wing even as he bent its head too far for it to survive. The giant was
killing the thing.

‘That’s new,’ Jessica Baleeiro said, standing beside him, hanging on to the framework in the rear of the truck.

‘I don’t understand,’ Kuromaku said.

‘I do,’ she replied. ‘I noticed it yesterday. They’re more solid while the sun is out. Sluggish, too. If this means you can kill them . . .’

Kuromaku nodded slowly. ‘It does. But there are only two of us, and hundreds of them, with more coming. There is no way that we can kill them all.’

‘But this helps, right?’ the doctor asked. ‘We’ll reach the wall?’

Kuromaku had no time to reply. He heard the horrid screech of the harpies again and turned, bringing his katana up. Three of the smoke demons were bearing down on them, jagged wings bent,
charcoal flesh less transparent in the daylight. The truck bumped and swayed over rutted earth but he kept his footing, watching their descent, seeing every facet of his attack in his mind before
he began to move.

‘Stay down,’ he said.

The katana felt warm with the memories of all of the battles they had fought together over the centuries. He flexed his fingers on the handle.

The ground shook beneath the truck. Dr Baleeiro grunted and tumbled on top of one of her patients, who cried out in pain. One of the soldiers swore loudly and gunfire stitched the morning light.
Kuromaku had a moment to mentally curse the transport’s driver, and then he realized that the shaking had not ceased. The ground beneath them had bucked and now continued to tremble.

‘Holy shit!’ Dr Baleeiro said, pointing.

Kazimir called out for him to look, but Kuromaku did not need the instruction. He stared in fascination as the earth itself erupted, rock and soil driving upward toward the three smoke demons
and colliding with them . . . flowing over them . . . enveloping them and dragging them back down into the ground.

‘What is it?’ Dr Baleeiro called.

Kuromaku stared as huge roots the width of mature trees shot from the ground, spiked skyward to coil around other smoke demons and dragged them down as well . . . down beneath the earth. Where
the demons were pulled underground, the soil glowed with a shimmering silver light, as though they were not being buried in the dirt so much as removed from the world.

And put where?
he wondered.

‘Are the mages doing this?’ the doctor shouted at him. ‘The ones who came with you?’

Kuromaku could not be certain, but he doubted that very much. This was something else. Something more.

Saint-Denis, France

The sun had risen but the barrier that kept the insect-like utukki demons trapped in the ruin of Saint-Denis also held in much of the smoke from the fires and devastation. Air
passed through, but not without some resistance from the tense magic of the wall, and so the smoke filtered slowly. Inside the protective dome, what remained of Saint-Denis lay in shadow created by
the smog of its destruction.

Santiago and Taweret had moved through the barrier as mist. There had been a trick to it, a slow persistence required, but they had managed the task and then drifted side by side through the air
above the fallen roofs and broken steeples of Saint-Denis. Utukki crashed through the tiny windows of top-story garrets and burrowed into wine cellars in search of survivors. As they floated
swiftly across the city, Santiago heard the occasional scream as the demons found someone who had remained hidden until then. He had no muscles to flinch, but his consciousness recoiled at those
screams as he imagined men and women or even children who had evaded the monsters so long that they might have believed themselves to be safe. But none of them would be safe until he and Taweret
put an end to this.

Through the smoky haze, they drifted toward the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Most of the western façade had collapsed, eclipsing any chance of entrance through the front doors. But they
didn’t need to worry about the rubble, for this corner of the basilica had shattered so completely that the church below lay open to the elements and to intrusion from the air.