The Graves of Saints (40 page)

The ground continued to shake and Octavian glanced back to see vines wrapping around the corpse of the antlered god and drawing it down into a shimmering hole in the ground. A root shot skyward,
twined around a giant serpent, which flailed as the root twisted more tightly and then dragged it back down.

‘What the hell is going on here?’ Allison demanded as they raced around the stone vampire.

Octavian did not need to reply. The answer waited for them amongst the cracked stone vampires. Allison staggered to a halt.

‘Holy shit,’ she muttered. And then a small laugh bubbled up from within her. ‘Keomany?’

Three people stood in the clearing ahead of them, dark silhouettes against the brightness of the army’s lights. Charlotte’s copper-red hair gleamed. Her clothing was torn and ragged
but she had passed the point of caring. Cortez did not so much as stand but hang erect, propped into an upright position by the vines and roots that bound him and wound around him. The holes that
Octavian had shot through him had not yet healed, as if pieces of him had been shunted into a parallel reality. Octavian thought that might be precisely what had happened.

Keomany stood with them, a woman of leaf and husk and thorn, unsettling and yet strangely beautiful. As Octavian and Allison raced up toward them, Keomany turned and he saw the pale, translucent
phantom that hovered behind her.

‘Is that a—’ Allison began.

‘Ghost, yes,’ Octavian replied.

Then they were all together. Once upon a time Charlotte would have hurled herself at Octavian in celebration of their survival. Now she only glanced at him with haunted eyes and turned back
toward Cortez as though she thought he might somehow still be manipulating them all.

The ground rumbled and roots tore devil-bats from the air. Several hundred yards away, a forest of vines and roots seemed to be overrunning the huge chasm in the ground, sewing the breach
together as if it were a torn seam. The ground itself appeared to surge and flow, and it all seemed to require no more effort from Keomany than maintaining the magical shield around their perimeter
did from Octavian.

He stood before the elemental, the earthwitch reborn as something new and perfect, ignoring Cortez. Octavian stared into her eyes. They were not human eyes and yet he felt sure he could see her
essence there.

‘It’s really you,’ he said.

Her smile managed to be both beautiful and grotesque. ‘It’s me,’ she said, and her voice was like the wind scuttling autumn leaves across the grass.

‘I told her what we’re facing,’ Charlotte announced, still staring at Cortez.

Octavian studied Cortez, this vampire who had been his secret enemy for so long. Then he turned and reached out to Charlotte, touched her arm and found her skin ice cold.

‘What are you waiting for?’ he asked.

Charlotte blinked and turned to stare at him in confusion. ‘Say that again?’

‘Why haven’t you already killed him?’ Octavian said.

Trembling with emotion she tried desperately to hide, Charlotte glanced at Allison as if the other Shadow might come to her aid.

‘You?’ Charlotte said, pulling away from Octavian’s touch. ‘We were waiting for you. He killed Nikki.’

‘Nikki was my friend,’ Keomany said, as if this fact had been lost to her and now bubbled up from the depths of her memory.

Octavian glanced at Cortez. With Medusa toxin coursing through him, there would be no escape for him, but he did not plead for his life. He hung there, glaring with bitter hatred and a tinge of
madness in his eyes, and listened to them speak of his execution with imperious disdain. Octavian believed his presence tainted the very air around them, that he was a stain on the world that
needed to be removed. The desire to burn him, to eviscerate him, to break his bones and make him suffer, made Octavian’s hands twitch and a familiar, brutal magic swirl around his
fingers.

He turned to Charlotte. ‘I loved her. In my heart, at least, she was my wife.’

Charlotte gazed at him, sharing his pain. ‘I know.’

‘But Nikki’s pain is not my pain. What he did to her was done to her, and she is dead. But you’re still alive, Charlotte, and I want you to be able to live, now. If destroying
Cortez will help you do that . . .’

Her grim expression cracked and he saw the pain and heartbreak of the teenage girl she had been showing through the hard veneer she had adopted.

Another devil-bat screamed across the sky above them only to be dragged from the air by whipping vines and pulled into a portal in the earth, which vanished after swallowing the monstrosity. The
ground still shook, but there were fewer and fewer of the demons from the breach.

The ghost of Miles Varick drifted toward him, manifesting more fully. If not for the bright lights, he would have looked almost solid.

‘That’s not the only reason we waited for you,’ the specter said.

Octavian glanced at Keomany.

The elemental nodded. ‘Miles reached into the vampire—’

‘He what?’ Allison asked.

Octavian glanced at her. ‘I explained this to you. The darksoul in vampires, the part of you that’s demon . . . he can rip it out.’

‘He eats it,’ Charlotte said, her tone almost a warning to Allison.

Allison swore softly, glancing at Miles warily now.

‘It’s not any different from you drinking human blood,’ the ghost said, his phantom figure fading slightly.

‘Enough,’ Octavian said, turning to the ghost. ‘What made you stop?’

Miles drifted nearer to Cortez. Octavian saw the ghost run out his spectral tongue and lick his lips. He pushed his hand through Cortez’s chest, the ghostly substance of him passing
harmlessly through flesh and bone, and tugged out a fistful of squirming, oily black mist.

Cortez roared in pain, or perhaps it was anguish.

The ghost turned to look at the rest of them, focusing on Octavian. ‘There’s more than one of him.’

‘More than one darksoul?’ Allison asked.

‘Yes,’ Miles replied. ‘One is his, but the other is an intruder.’

‘How is that even—’ Charlotte began.

‘Would you like to see it?’ the ghost asked.

Octavian took a step closer, staring at Cortez. ‘Absolutely.’

Thrusting both hands into their captive vampire, the ghost of Miles Varick seemed to be twisting and tearing at something inside him. Cortez screamed again as Miles drew out one hand, forcing
the separation of Cortez’s darksoul and the intruder, the parasite that had taken up residence there.

Octavian stood riveted by the sight. He had only ever seen a vampire darksoul up close once before, and it had been his own. The thousand years in Hell had aged him to the point where he had
retreated inside a strange cocoon, within which he underwent a process no other Shadow had ever undergone, his flesh separating itself from the two external forces that had so deeply altered him.
The sliver of divine spirit that had been inside him had ascended into some kind of Heaven and the demonic part of him – the darksoul – had plotted against him and been destroyed.

Now that Miles dragged the darksoul out of Cortez, the last thing Octavian expected was to recognize it.

‘No way,’ Allison breathed.

Keomany turned to stare at her, then seemed to notice the look on Octavian’s face.

‘You know this creature?’ she asked.

Charlotte spoke, asking what was going on, but Octavian barely heard anything his companions said. As far as he knew, he had been the first Shadow to be imprisoned in Hell for so long, the first
to undergo the metamorphosis which divided the three elements of a vampire’s existence into individual entities. But he knew of at least one other Shadow who had been lost in Hell . . . who
had been a part of the effort to rescue Octavian from the inferno and had been lost there and, out of necessity, left behind with The Gospel of Shadows.

‘Lazarus,’ Octavian whispered.

‘No
fucking
way,’ Allison said.

The darksoul hissed and lunged at Octavian, twisting its insubstantial form in the grip of Miles Varick’s ghost. It snapped and hissed again, lashing out with long, mistlike claws. The
ghost grabbed the darksoul by its wrist, opened his mouth impossibly, inhumanly wide, and bit the hand off halfway up the forearm.

Opening its mouth in a silent scream, the darksoul turned its hate-filled glare upon Octavian. Savage as it was, there was intelligence there, and it was consumed with hatred. Behind the ghost
and the darksoul, Cortez still hung from the vines and roots that held him up, but he dangled there now like a broken marionette, moaning softly.

‘What . . .’ Octavian began, but he went silent as he recognized the foolishness of any question that might follow.

Lazarus had sacrificed himself for Octavian, traded his own freedom to return Octavian from damnation for the good of humanity and Shadows alike. He had been in Hell now even longer than
Octavian had been. Of course he had undergone the same metamorphosis. But if the darksoul was here, where was the divine part of Lazarus . . . and where the human?

Was the flesh and blood man trapped in Hell? The question horrified Octavian more than any other he had ever considered. As a Shadow he had barely survived there. As a man . . .

No. He must be dead.

‘Is Lazarus still alive?’ he asked, knowing it was impossible. Praying it was impossible.

The darksoul began to laugh, twisting and lunging to escape the grasp of the ghost. It snapped its jaws like a mindless beast, but Octavian knew that it was not mindless. If it did not speak, it
chose
not to speak.

‘I don’t understand,’ Charlotte said. ‘Was this thing inside of Cortez all the time, pulling the strings?’

‘I was thinking the same thing,’ Allison replied. ‘Did Cortez kill Nikki, or was it this . . . whatever we want to call it?’

Octavian remained silent. He turned to study Keomany, looking at the smooth red apple-skin that created the illusion of flesh on some parts of her body, though her arms were little more than
tightly woven leaves and branches and husks that looked like corded muscle over bone, but with the skin stripped away. Keomany stood inhumanly still, swaying slightly in the breeze.

‘What do you—’ he began.

The elemental turned her face away from him and he frowned. The ground still trembled and the vines and roots still shot from the ground in the distance, pulling demons down into shimmering
patches of earth that could only be doorways into a parallel realm. Gaea had brought Keomany back to life as her harbinger, her avatar, and perhaps her warrior, and Keomany had begun to rid the
world of the monstrous evils that did not belong here, pushing them out of this reality entirely, perhaps back to where they had begun. Through Keomany, Gaea had begun to heal and cleanse the world
by force.

But part of Keomany was still just the woman from Vermont who sold handmade candies at her confectionery shop, Sweet Somethings. Part of her remained human, and Octavian felt sure it was that
part of her that could not meet his eyes.

‘Keomany, look at me,’ he said.

Gazing into the distance, toward the banks of lights the Guatemalan army had brought in, she behaved as if he had not spoken at all. Frustrated, Octavian looked back at Miles’s ghost and
the darksoul that squirmed in its grasp. Beyond them, Cortez looked sickly and barely conscious, as if at any moment his body might collapse in upon itself. He seemed hollow, now.

Charlotte stepped nearer to the ghost and the squirming darksoul. Confusion etched on her face and pain in her eyes, she studied the thing’s slim, sinister features. It flowed like black
silk, but Octavian knew that face and it belonged to Lazarus.

‘Was it Cortez who killed me?’ Charlotte demanded, her voice cracking. ‘Who raped me and tortured me? Or was it
you
?’

The darksoul only smiled.

‘It’s not going to tell you anything,’ Allison said. ‘And how can we threaten it? What can we possibly do to it?’

Octavian narrowed his eyes in thought, then turned to look at Miles. The ghost wore a thin, empty smile that had a tinge of madness and a sort of furious hunger with which Octavian was all too
familiar. The ghost studied the lunging, struggling darksoul with predator’s eyes, but he would not act as long as Octavian needed the thing alive.

Bitter fury roiled inside Octavian. He had wanted to avenge Nikki, and Charlotte had sought her own vengeance, but now they no longer knew how to define that vengeance. Kill Cortez? Destroy the
darksoul?

He glanced at Charlotte, again saw the pain in her eyes, and knew there was a simple answer: do both.

‘Miles,’ Octavian said, turning to the ghost. ‘Are you hungry?’

The ghost quivered with anticipation, but there was a trace of self-loathing in his eyes.

‘Always,’ he replied.

‘It’s yours.’

Miles Varick’s ghost did not ask for elaboration. Opening its jaws wide, the hungry specter darted forward and tore a chunk out of Lazarus’s darksoul. It did not cry out as the ghost
ripped it apart, feeding itself shreds of silken darkness, but Octavian saw the panic in its eyes, and then nothing.

‘What the hell is this?’ Allison shouted.

Charlotte cried out for the hungry ghost to stop, but it was over in seconds. For her part, Keomany did not even glance up. She still would not meet Octavian’s gaze.

‘Peter, what the fuck?’ Allison snapped. ‘We need to know—’

‘What?’ he interrupted. ‘How it got inside Cortez? Why it was there? Whether it was controlling Cortez? You saw its eyes, Allison. You know as well as I do that we
weren’t going to get any of those answers. Here’s what we know: Cortez, or that damned parasite, was taking orders from someone else that he referred to as the King of Hell. At the end
of the day, that’s who we want. That’s where we get our revenge, not to mention putting a stop to all of these incursions, because it sounds like whoever this self-proclaimed king is,
he’s got a lot worse planned than what we’ve seen so far.’

‘And how do we find all of that out?’ Charlotte demanded with a snarl that bared her fangs.

Octavian pointed at Cortez, still suspended upright by the vines Keomany had summoned. The vampire was blinking and glancing around groggily, as though waking up from some enchanted slumber.