Harsh Gods (39 page)

Father Frank slipped into his own coat, nodding once toward the door. I nodded back. With the phone clamped to my ear, I hit the hallway at a jog.

“Forget the girl,” Lil said. “You need to let Mal get there first. He’s got the telluric seal. He slaps that thing on Tarhunda, it’ll lock him in his body. A poor man’s binding. It shuts down all his power.”

“I can’t let Malphael get to Halley,” I said, charging through the empty church hall. “He’ll kill her just like he’s killed everyone else the Rephaim’s touched.”

“Mother’s Tears, Zaquiel, we’re dealing with a decimus here. Accept the sacrifice and let the Gibburim handle it. He’s got more protections against the Idol-Riders anyway.”

“He’s also a child-killing maniac,” I growled.

The breath from Lil’s exasperated sigh crackled across the line. “I know you’re all buddy-buddy with Terael, but Tarhunda’s a different story. You rush in before Malphael hits him with that seal, you might as well be committing suicide.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I muttered darkly.

I hit the stairs leading out of the basement with Father Frank close behind, and honestly didn’t know how he did it at his age. His boots thudded on the risers as we raced to the top. At the side entrance, I shouldered the door with such force, it rebounded on the stopper. I caught it jarringly on my elbow so it didn’t hit the priest. The impact shuddered through my fingers and I nearly lost the phone.

“Spare me the melodramatics, flyboy,” Lil said. “Just be smart for once and—oh, fuck. Hold on.” In the background, tires squealed. The Sebring’s engine cycled higher. The Lady of Beasts spat a string of profanities accusing the Gibburim of sex acts Caligula would have spurned.

Outside, thick clouds hung pendulously over the city, backlit by the gray and watery light of impending dawn. I didn’t want to think about what time it was, and how long that left Halley in the hands of Kramer and his bat-shit crazy master. Unlocking my door, I folded myself into the Hellcat, reaching across the seats to open the passenger side. Lil’s music poured from the phone—some kind of Middle Eastern hip-hop, about as unexpected as the Dixie Chicks.

“Lil—talk to me. What’s going on?”

“I said hold on,” she muttered. More screeching tire sounds. A horn blared and Dopplered. The thrum of the Sebring changed as she downshifted. “He’s on to me. I’ve got to go.”

The roar of another vehicle vied with the sounds coming from her car.

“Lil?”

Father Frank latched his seatbelt and gestured toward the road. His brows shot up as a howl of animal fury rose deafeningly from my phone.

“
You sonofabitch!
” Lil bellowed.

A crash—equally deafening—made me jerk the receiver from my ear. When I put it back again, the line was dead.

Numbly, I blinked at the screen.

CALL ENDED

We sat in the Hellcat, the only sound the impact of ice pellets dragged from the drifts by rising gusts of wind.

Father Frank broke the silence first.

“If I know anything about that woman, it’s how well she can take care of herself, Zack. She’ll be fine.”

“Yeah,” I responded. I still felt stunned.

Another gale scoured the street, casting swirling patterns across the windshield.

“Storm’s starting back up,” he observed.

“Nothing to do about it.” Whether I meant the unnatural storm, or Lil’s uncertain fate, even I wasn’t sure.

Hitting the locks, I keyed the ignition and threw the car into reverse. The tires spun a little on the powder, then finally gripped. I backed us over the curb, the wrist-sheaths of the daggers tugging the lining of my jacket as I worked the wheel. The solid weight along my forearms offered subtle reassurance. I was going to hurt these guys when I found them—Malphael and Terhuziel both.

It was only a few blocks to the Davis home. I wasted no time getting us there. Parking as close to the house as the drifts would allow, I got out of the car and handed the priest my phone and keys.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Walking.”

“In this?”

“The Mayfield Gate is just up the hill. Pretty sure I’ll find a Crossing there—someone died outside that gate the other night. Lots of trauma.” I didn’t bother explaining how I knew—and if I was wrong about the Crossing, there was always the relic ring I’d claimed from my stash.

Father Frank pocketed the keys, but he didn’t look happy about it.

“What about the phone?”

“Shadowside. It’ll kill it,” I reminded him. “Also, Bobby’s number is in there. You don’t see me in about an hour, give him a call. Tell him Kramer’s holed up in the Garfield Monument—and let him know he’ll need a SWAT team to take down what they find in there.”

If he has any hope of taking it at all.

That part, I chose not to share.

He scowled at the mobile device, then lifted his eyes to peer speculatively up the hill. The clouds grew darker up that way, and I caught a flash of greenish lightning in their roiling depths.

“I don’t like this,” he said.

“I don’t either, but it’s what I’m doing. Can you ballpark the location of the monument in the cemetery?” Tapping the side of my head, I explained. “I should probably know it, but there are these inconvenient holes in my memory.”

“From Mayfield?” He closed his eyes, consulting some internal map. Papery lids fluttered as he sketched a hand through the air. “Toward Euclid. Bank left. Maybe a thousand feet from the entrance. It’s on a hill overlooking the skyline. Damned thing’s big. Hard to miss.”

“I’ll count on that.”

Thrusting my hands into my pockets, I hurried toward the main road. Father Frank looked glumly at Tammy’s house, mustering the courage to give her the news.

“Hey, Zack,” he called after me. I paused on the corner. The priest’s earnest brown eyes sought mine through the flurry of flakes already starting to fall.

“Yeah?” I called back.

“Bring her home.”

Dark clouds boiled in the sky above Lake View, deepening as I closed on the gates of the cemetery. A swirling vortex spun slowly outward, swallowing the early morning light with ever-expanding arms of shadow. Ugly cascades of lightning—all the colors wrong—flickered near the heart, punctuated by basso rumbles almost too deep to process consciously.

“Thunderer of the Northern Hills,” I mused. “Not even bothering to hide any more.” I tilted my head back. The actual source of the disturbance was lost behind trees as tall as my apartment building. My gut told me the ominous lightshow was connected to Terhuziel’s ritual to overtake Halley.

I listened to my gut and hurried.

Running the final twenty feet despite treacherous patches of black ice, I approached the oily stain of trauma where I expected to find the Crossing. Waves of vertigo seized me the instant I hit the leading edge. There was something here, all right, but it didn’t quite feel like a death. Teasing my sight open to see precisely what I was dealing with before I blindly plunged through, I halted, numb with shock.

Déjà vu didn’t begin to cover it.

This whole time, I’d expected Fish-Knife Lady’s death to form the crux of the Crossing, the terror and panic of her final moments imprinting the replay that sundered the boundaries between the realms.

I’d been wrong.

Fish-Knife Lady and her male counterpart sketched the barest of silhouettes in the fabric of the imprint. My figure, on the other hand, blazed like Industrial Light and Magic had been hired to paint a Jedi phantom on the sidewalk—except, with wings.

Pain and terror had stamped this Crossing, but it wasn’t from the woman whose life I’d drained.
I’d
made the Crossing—my desperate struggle to survive burned into the very fabric of the Shadowside.

With queasy fascination, I watched the echo of me get stabbed, over and over again. The shadow-Zack stumbled backward, mortally wounded. The imprint flickered, and I was dragging myself to my feet, face distorted with fury. Again the action stuttered, and I had Fish-Knife Lady by the throat. My eyes—blue even in the washed-out palette of the Shadowside—blazed with ferocious light.

The color spilled suddenly to a vibrant green—like copper sulfate poured upon a flame. The hue hung startling and ugly against all the hazy grays and then—swift as a heartbeat—a shadow rose behind me. It trembled quick as a fever-dream. I could half-believe I’d imagined it.

Red mist. Winged.

In that quick flash, the figure of the Nephilim overshadowed the image of me just as Malphael’s form had overshadowed David Garrett.

“No,” I breathed.

My pulse thundered—half with the backwash of emotion raging from the fresh Crossing—but the other half was stark and very personal terror. This was the path I’d set myself on the instant I’d paid the blood price to the Nephilim icon.

I didn’t want it.

That didn’t change a fucking thing.

Gulping a swift breath, I threw myself into the morass of pain and horror imprinted outside the cemetery gates. The air splintered as I bulled my way from one side of reality to the other.

In the midst of the transition, all I could taste was the cloying power of Nefer-Ka.

Fierce winds tore at me the instant I stepped through. The storm raged on this side, as well, though the ice and snow were conspicuously absent. I pulled my wings tight around my body, creating a living shield. It was that, or get blown halfway down the darkened echo of Mayfield like a runaway kite.

Flying in this wasn’t going to be easy.

Working to get my bearings after the ominous revelation of the Crossing, I put as much distance as possible between myself and the replay of my fight with Fish-Knife Lady. The cemetery gates sketched weird figures of stone and iron against the boiling sky, half again as tall on this side as they stood in the flesh-and-blood world. The enervating atmosphere already bore down on me, made weightier by the nearby presence of the Rephaim decimus. I needed to find the Garfield Monument and cross back over quickly, if I wanted any strength left. So I took a few steps back, made a running leap, and launched myself headlong against the punishing storm.

Staying airborne took real work, and I pounded the currents with my wings. The swirling blasts yanked me this way and that. Each time I corrected, I arrowed higher in an effort to get above the turbulence.

The warped and shifting echo of Lake View spread out beneath me—no snow on this side, but the washed-out hues of the faded grass conveyed a similar effect. Flickering echoes of half-forgotten tombs danced like shadows against the landscape, while memorials imbued with greater significance squatted substantially among the acres of rolling hills.

The taste of ozone hung sharp in the air, with lurid flashes igniting deep in the churning black eye of the storm. I aimed for that swirling heart and soon caught sight of the huge Gothic tower.

As promised, the Garfield Monument perched on a hill overlooking the Cleveland skyline. The lightning crackling near its peak made it seem more like the lair of Dr. Frankenstein than the mausoleum of the twentieth President. I flew straight toward the tower, hoping Terhuziel’s domain was as limited as Terael’s. If the wounded godling had managed to spill out beyond the walls of the building, I wouldn’t see the boundary until I’d crossed within his sphere.

The instant that happened, I’d have a decimus thundering angrily in my head. So I worked to shore up my ranks of mental barriers.

Muscles across my shoulders and back burned from the effort of fighting the wind. Catching a current, I circled higher, peering down at the tower to plan my attack. From a dizzying vantage point, I spied a way in from the air.

The leering gargoyles ringing the peaked roof of Garfield’s tower overlooked an observation deck, open to the elements. I could drop from the sky and gain access that way, rather than fight my way up from the ground. It was exactly what I’d been hoping for.

Human-shaped smudges, bleary and indistinct, traced a restless pattern on the observation deck—lookouts. I couldn’t tell how many. Four? Five, maybe. From this perspective, living beings cast uncertain shadows, shifting like flotsam on some great tide that ceaselessly carried them near to focus, then dragged them right back out again.

However many there were, I needed to get the drop on them.

On my second pass, I spotted a defensible corner that put my back near two walls. Perfect. I tucked my wings and started to dive, dodging flashes of lightning. The distance closed rapidly and I was already lining up for my landing when I crashed shatteringly through the edge of the domain. It extended invisibly about a hundred feet beyond the tower.

No warning.

No convenient gleam of a force field.

I hit it like a bug against a windshield.

The damned thing was
solid.

My controlled dive spun into a free fall. About halfway down, I recovered, beating the currents with desperate strokes. I managed finally to pull out of my tailspin and regain a little height, exploring the leading edge of the domain with more caution. The lip of the tower stood maybe eighty feet away, but the vast, invisible wall kept it out of my reach.

Still hoping for a stealthy approach, I sought any weak point along the outer boundary. It didn’t take long. The edges shifted dramatically, pressing hard against me one instant, contracting feebly the next. Terhuziel’s power was still in flux, and that was a good thing for me.

I waited for the invisible obstruction to waver again, all the while fighting the wind to remain aloft. The instant I felt a variation, I darted forward. The narrow aperture closed around me, nearly catching the tip of one wing.

But I was through.

I expected to be assaulted by the Rephaim the instant I passed within the boundary. Terhuziel’s power saturated the air, making my wings feel like lead, but his attention wasn’t focused on me. At least not yet.

I sped toward the open deck.

Fifty feet.

I tried slapping up a cowl, hoping to at least obscure my presence, but it was next to useless. Every stroke of my wings shredded the fragile shroud of energy.