The Devil Dances (33 page)

“What are those?” I said, looking at them.

Cernunnos smiled that lascivious smile full of malice and secrets. “My brothers… my people. The future lords of Planet Earth. When I am God, they will be my foot soldiers, my knights, my counts and barons and dukes. I have promised them escort to Earth.”

The tentacles exploring the ground wriggled closer to the toes of my boots, leaving in their wake an oily slime, and I took a wary step back. I saw Vivian shirk as well at my side.

“You mean… other Old Ones?”

Cernunnos snorted with satisfaction. “Do you fear them, Lucifer? You who rule over the dark and the damned? Do you fear a few old gods?” His smiled grew into a hungry grin full of jagged yellow teeth. He laughed. “An
army
of old gods?”

I remembered my own words to the Swartzcopf: when you open one door, it opens the door to other things. I really wish I hadn’t been right. Dear Christ, I thought, even as the sky darkened further and the wind picked up, the howling, moaning gales blowing my long blond hair all over my face and knocking me back a few steps. Forks of crimson lightning split the sky, and a growl of thunder sounded not far off.

He was going to let them out. He was going to let them
all
out…

“Nick…” Vivian warned, glancing around at the suddenly thrashing treetops.

“Stay there. Don’t go near that portal, Viv.” I didn’t wait for Cernunnos to get any closer. I didn’t wait for anything else to come through that split in time and space. I transferred the bident to my left hand, underhand-style, and hurled it at him like an Olympic decathlon star throwing a javelin. The bident was perfectly weighted and found its mark in the beast’s lower belly like a heat-seeking missile.

Cernunnos threw back his antlered head and roared into the storm, rumbling the ground under my feet and charging the air around us with his pain, and for one heart-stopping moment I thought I’d actually hurt him, but he knocked the bident away fairly easily. He glared at me with insult, his little yellow eyes flashing with power and maniacal rage.
“You throw toys at me?”

He lunged, his huge hands grappling my robes and lifting me effortlessly off my feet. My huge, black wings beat around him, adding to the nearly hurricane-strength wings blasting around the two of us, bending trees nearly flat, blowing down fences and ripping off roof tiles by the bucket loads, but he shook his head, about as bothered by them as an elephant is bothered by fleas. I thought, for sure, that he would pummel me into the ground, but he suddenly stiffened up and his fingers released their hold on me so I could drop down to my feet in front of him.

Vivian had the Morning Star, and she was driving it into his side. She was bent almost double with the work, her shoulder muscles bunching and flexing, her teeth gritted, her long red hair swirling over her face. “Fucking loser, go back where you belong!” she screamed as she drove the tines of the bident even deeper into the god’s flesh so he screamed in raw agony. His clawed hands went to grab at it, but when he gasped the shining gold, vibrating metal, they started to burn and he jerked them away.

Morgana was right, I realized. The bident really did hurt him. The blood of God was eating a giant black hole through Cernunnos’ flesh; I could see a spiral of black gangrene burning around the entry of the tines. I raced to Vivian’s side and grabbed the long staff just behind where her hands were gripping it. She looked at me with burning black, hate-filled eyes, and I nodded. I knew how much this meant to her, how much being victimized enraged her.

“Push!” I cried over the storm, and together we started pushing, trying to force Cernunnos back toward the portal.

Cernunnos’ roars turned to screams and he lurched back a step. I considered it a modest victory.

“Come on, babe, show me what you’ve got!”

Again, we pushed. Again, he stumbled back a step, not far, but one step back was better than one forward, I reasoned.

Cernunnos snorted, “Do you really think you and your bitch of a sister can harm me?” One long arm lashed out, just barely missing the top of Vivian’s head. “Do you think two little Lucifers can so easily defeat a god?”

“Yes!” I screamed. Vivian turned to look at me, the obvious question in her eyes, but I added, “He lies. He’ll say anything to keep us from sending him back to the void. Push!”

Again, we pushed as one. Again Cernunnos lurched back, this time closer to the shining black tentacles that were groping blindly along the ground, looking for some kind of handhold. They gave me an idea and I said to Vivian, “Use your power! Set the fucker on fire!”

Above us, the storm intensified, the wind raking debris against our faces, blowing grit in our eyes. It made the gravel under our feet skitter dangerously.

She nodded, lowered her head, and put everything she had into the next push. Cernunnos only lurched back an inch or so, but the bident suddenly grew much hotter in my hands. Cernunnos roared and tossed his giant, antlered head from side to side, the debris from the air catching in his giant rack. We hadn’t gotten him all the way to the portal, but that no longer mattered.

We’d pushed him to within reaching distance of the tentacles, and as they started curling around his ankles, Cernunnos snorted and stomped, trying to free himself. “I lead you!” he screeched at them. “I will lead you to a glorious victory! I will make princes of you all!”

“He’ll enslave you,” I yelled over the storm. “Do you really think the Horned God will share his victory with you? The god of greed and earthly pleasures? Do you really believe he’ll give you a place at his side?”

The Old Ones were losing faith in him fast. The tentacles were climbing higher up his legs.

“Push, Vivian!”

We gave it one last try. Cernunnos lurched backward, and with the tentacles gripping his legs, his rack threw him off balance. He started falling backward into the void.

A big part of me thought,
Well, this is it. We’ve finally won.
But as the monstrous creature toppled back, I realized that Vivian was far too close and Cernunnos’ desperation far too great. His hand flailed out and he snagged a handful of Vivian’s viciously whipping hair. As the tentacles yanked him back through the portal, Vivian lost her grip on the bident, slid backward on her ass on the ground, and started going, head-first and screaming, with Cernunnos into the void.

I lunged at her and managed to snag her wrist, but her momentum was so great, my boots slid in the loose gravel. With nothing to grab to sustain us, I unfurled my wings, all eight of them, and the darkness around us immediately lit up like noontime, so bright in was painful to look upon, even for me. The creatures in the void, dark, hungry, hideously deformed and inhuman, began to burn and scream. My wings caught the storm’s updraft and dragged me up so that for one moment I hung suspended like a human kite as I attempted to pull Vivian back from the edge.

“Nick… oh, God!” she screamed, her voice echoing hoarsely as her head was bent viciously back into the portal. “Don’t let me go!”

I ground my teeth and pulled with both hands. Vivian lurched toward me, but some of the glistening black tentacles had slithered up and over her body. One slid up the side of her face and across her mouth like a gag and she mewled piteously as it left a slick brown trail of mucus in its wake. I sank my fingernails deep into her wrist. I hung on for dear life, the witches’ marks on both our wrists burning viciously.

Vivian belonged to me. She was my soul to keep. “I’m not letting you go…” I grunted through my grinding teeth and yanked. I expected her hand to be ripped right out of my hold, but I think the marks had welded us together in some preternatural way, grounded us in a way that could not be undone.

Cernunnos gave one last hearty yank of her hair. Vivian screamed around her gag and her eyes went saucer-wide. Her neck cracked alarmingly as the crown of her head broke through the watery surface of the portal, but then a strong gust of wind caught my wings and yanked us both back, my heels sliding in the gravel. She slid free at last, and I spied Cernunnos’ clawed hand still nested in her long, blood-red curls. The bastard just wouldn’t let go! It was like he knew he was doomed, and he was determined to take Vivian with him one way or another.

I pulled even harder in this cosmic tug-of-war and Vivian screamed as some of her hair was yanked out. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Don’t… let… me… go!” she moaned through her grimace of pain.

“I won’t, Vivian,” I told her. And then with no alternative left to me: “You’re his daughter! Use your power!”

I felt our marks spark, burning like red-hot brands on both our wrists. Vivian let out a howl and I saw her beautiful red hair catch fire—not fire as in
burn
, but as if the very strands themselves were living, writhing flames. Her head suddenly bore the halo of a crackling inferno. The tentacles crawling all over her face shrank away and the thing in the void that it belonged to screamed with the mewling voice of an angry, thwarted baby.

By then, the portal had begun to shrink. I hung on, my heels planted in mounds of gravel, even as the tentacles slid loose over her body and lost their hold. I had seconds left, if that, before the portal disappeared. It shrank even more around Cernunnos’ wrist, and I heard his last bellowing shrieks of fear and anger as the closing doorway sliced through the flesh and bone of his wrist and his hand dropped, still spasming, into the dirt.

Vivian, her hair burning like a candle flame, slid in the gravel and landed on her back. The flames died down, leaving her hair smoking, but otherwise untouched. Her eyes were wide open, her mouth gaping in a scream of unknowable horror at the things she had briefly seen on the other side of the portal, but nothing came out for some time.

The wind gave out as the clouds began unraveling above us and I dropped to the ground beside her, my armor and wings melting away, the last bleating vestiges of Cernunnos’ dreadful scream echoing in my ears. I wrapped my arms protectively around her. She put her arms around my neck and cried, long and hard, her voice wailing on the wind like a siren until it finally gave out and all she could do was shake and gasp in soft, hoarse sobs. We lay like that a long time, clinging to each other like lost children, until the horror finally let us go.

It wasn’t yet high noon, but the gunfight was already over.

I offered to drive Mary and some of the women who had lost husbands into town, but she and the others had decided to stay in Zion, despite the damage, and despite what their husbands had done. Mary said that, eventually, a local investigator would be out to look into things, but that they, the almost all-female survivors of the Swartzcopf colony, would take care of the matter, tell them the men had run off, or left the community. The police wouldn’t look into it. They never did, she said. Meanwhile, she and the other women would need to rebuild the colony, and attend to the young girls like Sarah, the girls who desperately needed their mothers as the births of their unnatural children quickly approached.

Sitting at the kitchen table, I let Mary doctor my various wounds. My cuts and scrapes were mostly taking care of themselves, but I knew she needed the busy work, needed to feel she was doing something. I told her about John, and what he had been; she sat digesting that a long time. She didn’t really understand the concept of the Arcana; she could barely believe the evil witch had been festering in her own community.

I asked her what she planned to do with the children of Cernunnos when they were born, if she and the other women would be destroying them as Elise Knapp had said was done in the past. Mary hesitated, and looked up at me, and said she felt that enough killing had been done in the colony. I wasn’t sure if I liked her answer, but I was going to make a point of avoiding this place from now on, I decided.

Before I left, I threw a new circle of protection around the colony to safeguard it against any last vestiges of Cernunnos’ influence. As I did so, I wondered about those children. I wondered what would become of them, ultimately. I had a fantasy of small, cloven-hoofed Amish children wild running through these haunted woods. The idea seemed both horrific and prosaic at the same time. A little bit like nature itself, I suppose.

Near the edge of the Knapp property line, where the gravel gave out to the grove, I found a pair of crushed round glasses—Isaac’s, I think. I went and picked them up. I thought about him in those last moments, fighting beside me. He’d found Caleb in the end, and he was where he wanted to be, I suppose. I knew I should be happy for him, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I could have done more in the end. Or done better.

Story of my life.

I tucked the glasses away inside my brand new coat, and walked back to where Daisy was parked on the gravel, packed with our things. We were ready to go.

I leaned against the side of the Jeep and waited while Vivian stepped onto the front porch, carrying her school knapsack over one shoulder. She gave Mary a one-armed hug. The two women exchanged some private words I couldn’t hear at this distance, and Vivian kissed Mary on the cheek. Then she stepped down off the porch and headed toward me.