The Devil Dances (32 page)

I stepped out of the trees and into a small circle of Swartzcopf men. I stood in my robes and armor, bident in hand, and all eight wings fully extended. The men, Abraham and his supporters—one holding Vivian down on the ground on her knees, his hands snarled in her hair—all looked on me with their bleach-white faces, their grimaces of horror, their haunted eyes. Vivian herself managed to lift her head slightly but I had never seen such fear in her eyes.

Behind them, several members of the community—the women, the young men, and children who had gathered to see what was happening in the grove—clenched their eyes in prayer before racing off for their homes. The men who remained, all the colony leaders, began murmuring prayers of deliverance and exorcism even as I approached, though I could have told them to save their breath. God was dead, or on vacation, or whatever, and he wasn’t taking their calls. No one was. For all intents and purposes, I was in charge now, which was bad news for them.

They had let the genie out of the bottle; now they had to deal with it.

Abraham, a brave man if a stupid one, got in front of his men. He was wielding a pitchfork clumsily in his burned, bandaged hands, and though I’m sure it gave him some small measure of comfort, I thought it was comical, like a sad spoof of
American Gothic
. “Stop!” he said, lifting the pitchfork threateningly in one hand and reaching for the simple wooden cross he wore around his neck with the other. “I know who you are and I command thee to stop, Ha-Satan! You will not enter this colony!”

“Don’t make me laugh,” I hissed. I swiped my hand out and ripped his cross away. There was only the vague sensation of burning in my hand. As I had suspected, Abraham’s faith in God was wavering, running out. Probably, it had been running out for a long time now. That’s why he had turned to the Craft, the angels, and the Old Ones for assistance. It was still there, his faith, but it was weak. The vampire movies are right about that, by the way. It’s not the symbol, but the faith behind it. Abraham wasn’t putting much stock behind it anymore.

I squeezed the cross in my hand and then dropped the mangled bit of burned wood to the ground at his feet. It had left something like a small cigarette burn in the palm of my hand. “You have about as much faith in God as I do, little man.”

Abraham gave me an enraged look. “You won’t win! The Devil never wins! God will save us!”

“God doesn’t care about you anymore!” I growled and all his men cowered in the dirt. Even Vivian cowered with them, and that hurt a hundred times more than seeing these pathetic ragmen trembling in their superstitious fear. It doesn’t take a lot to beat the Devil. Faith in God—or, barring that, just faith in yourself—is usually enough. But these men had none of that.

“Vivian.”

She raised her head, but she didn’t look directly at me.

“Vivian, come here.”

She stood up slowly, shaking and hovering undecidedly, like she’d rather be with the men who had been holding her prisoner than with me.

“Come on, babe. Trust me.”

She looked up then. I smiled at her, but she shook her head. “Nick… you’re scaring the hell out of me.”

I offered her my hand. “Do you really think I would ever hurt you?”

She looked doubtful but finally took my hand. I pulled her away from the men and against the shelter of my body. I found it was a little difficult to do with all the armor and stuff between us, but I managed. I put my lips very close to her ear and said, “I told you. We’re going to get that house on the edge of town. We’re going to get almost-married. No matter what I am, what I become, I would never hurt you, Vivian. You know that. I love you, babe.”

She laid her head against my chest and I wrapped my free arm around her waist.

Suddenly, Abraham stepped forward again. He still looked frightened half to death to be facing the devil, but something else simmered in his eyes. Malice. Wisdom. “I know the law. Ha-Satan can only
claim
souls. He cannot make them!” He raised his pitchfork in a menacing way, almost driving the metal tines into my face. “You cannot hurt us!”

“You know what, Abraham? You’re right. I can’t actually hurt you. But I
can
stall for time.”

He looked confused. “I don’t understand.”

“That Ophanim of yours walks pretty damned slow,” I told him. “Let’s see which of you is without sin.” I closed my wings around Vivian and shifted to one side.

That left the one remaining Ophanim, just stepping out of the woods, in full view of the men gathered at the edge of the grove. I kept my wings securely locked in place, protecting Vivian from the sight of the angel and its many eyes, but I, myself, watched the carnage unfold.

Abraham looked the angel in its many eyes. I saw his face go slack with disbelief. Then his entire body trembled as if he were suffering a massive seizure. He dropped the pitchfork to the ground. The calcification started at his feet and rushed up his body in a wave, turning the man in his brushed, black suit and hat into a marbled-grey statue of a man, wide-eyed and hunched over just a bit, the posture he would wear for all eternity, his body, soul, and conscious mind locked together forever in a stone prison. The statue would last a few thousand years, I wagered, but eventually the elements would wear it down to dust, and that dust would eventually mingle with the bedrock of the earth and fossilize. Some of that fossilized dust might eventually even find its way across continents, into space, other planets, other universes, but still Abraham would be trapped in it, fully aware and unable to die.

The angel turned its vapid, thousand-eyed gaze on one of Abraham’s staunchest followers, and he, too, seized up, his fingers grasping the useless cross in his fingers, mouth open in a soundless
O
of a scream. A third man turned to run, like the others who were beginning to run away, but made the mistake of looking back over his shoulder at his leader. He froze up in mid-step and in his half-turned posture.

By then, I’d felt that the angel had done its work. I opened my wings, lifted my bident, and drove it into the frail body of the angel, just between its shoulder blades, amidst its many, blinking eyes—eyes in blue and green and brown, eyes of all kinds, some even like animals. I ran it through without mercy or hesitation. Abraham was right. I may not have had dominion to kill human beings, but angels? Angels were on the top of my to-do list, all right. Its holy, blue blood showered the earth in a hot, burning spray and the thing lunged forward with a mournful wail, the tips of its eye-covered wings closing around it as it shuddered and crumpled to the ground, itself seizing up into a winged statue of a crouching, weeping angel.

With a grunt of effort, I pulled the bident from it, and it began to crumble into dust.

“It’s okay now,” I told Vivian, still clutching me, her face hidden against my chest. “You can look.”

She turned and beheld the medusa garden of stone men. Her eyes were big and crazed with fear. “Oh, Christ, what did you do, Nick?”

I grinned over what I had wrought. It felt so damned good to take revenge on these men, to even the score between us. More than good. It felt
right
. “I told you long ago I would protect you. I’ll never let anyone ever hurt you again, Vivian…”

She covered her mouth like she was going to be sick and took a step back from me.

“Vivian…” I began.

But she shook her head. “Don’t…”

I was about to ask her what was wrong when I saw a glimmer out of the corner of my eye and a portal opened, some swirling darklight that didn’t belong to this world. As I watched, one huge, hoofed foot broke through the darkness and clunked down to the ground, then the rest of Cernunnos’ hulking form stepped back into this world.

I edged away from the portal, dragging Vivian away with me. I was confused. Abraham—the beast’s tether to this world—was gone. Cernunnos should not have been able to pass through.

He turned his hideous, bull-like head and surveyed the damage I had wreaked on his master and his followers. He snorted steam through his nostrils, then swung his fugly face around to me as his eyes narrowed to mean little slits of red light. “Lord Lucifer… what have you done?”

I realized my mistake, then. I hadn’t killed Abraham. In fact, nothing ever could. Abraham would live forever. That meant Cernunnos’ anchor to this world was assured. Nothing would ever banish him again.

Well, shit.

he sky darkened, and the morning went to midnight in seconds.
Lightning-like veins of burning crimson cracked across the leaden black sky. The wind picked up, swirling debris around us. Cernunnos advanced a step toward me and I lowered the Morning Star until the wickedly jagged prongs were level with his chest—the one weapon I knew he feared. It had put him away once; it could do so again, and we both knew that.

Cernunnos stopped and glared at me. I experienced a burning mixture of fear, excitement, and uncertainty, and I wondered if my grandfather, the first Lucifer, had felt this same way as he took on the legions of other-gods for his Lord’s sake. He had led the army that put God on the Throne. In a way, the Lucifers were really a line of God-makers.

Cernunnos laughed as if sensing my doubts, but I noticed he didn’t advance another step. “I don’t fear you, Lucifer. You have no power to harm me. You are no god.”

“Maybe not,” I answered, “but I know this pig-sticker sure can fuck up your day.”

Behind him, through the portal he had opened, I could see a shifting, almost sentient darkness laced with spikes of light and color. Some of the patterns of light sported colors that just didn’t exist on Planet Earth, and many almost seemed to take on faces—distorted faces full of multiple eyes and gaping, toothy mouths, none of them friendly. I heard low moans and high, almost catlike squeals of rabid laughter pealing forth from that darkness. It sounded like a legion of angry, hungry gods. No, I corrected myself, a
pantheon
of ancient, powerful deities from space who had once ruled the Earth and who wanted to rule it once more.

A part of me—a big part, I admit—wondered just where Cernunnos went to when he wasn’t in this world. Some plane of existence beyond space or time? That question was quickly answered when I spotted something slithering out of the portal and across the ground. It was oily black and snakelike, and only when it coiled over, looking for some form of purchase, did I recognized it as tentacle-like and lined with human eyes that seemed to laugh at me. More of the tentacle-things slid out of the long oval portal, grasping along the sides and top, hissing like snakes as they explored the limits of what they could do to escape their unearthly prison.