The Graves of Saints (22 page)

Octavian couldn’t see him, but he knew Miles Varick had come down from New England with Amber. Like Amber, her former professor had been changed by the chaos magic Navalica had unleashed
in Hawthorne. Octavian thought of him as a hungry ghost, a man turned into a vampire and then killed in the maelstrom of anarchic magic. Now he haunted his old home town, caring for the ghost of
his mother, but he could drink souls and dark spirits the way a flesh and bone vampire drank blood.

‘Chaos,’ Miles had once said, ‘is where new things are born.’

He and Amber were two very unsettling examples.

Octavian scanned faces, heartened at the sight of so many old allies, some of whom he might even call friends. Santiago had made the trip, as had two others who had fought beside Octavian and
Kuromaku in the years when they had taken part in wars just to have a chance to fight for something worthy. One of them, Taweret, was a slim Egyptian who had been dragged from her dwelling on the
shores of the Nile more than eight hundred years earlier and made a vampire. She had often said that her parents must have been able to see the future, for they had named her for the goddess of
vengeance. The other warrior stood nearly seven feet tall, a mountain sculpted of equal parts muscle and flab. Kazimir had died in this shape and – though in time he had learned that he could
have altered it – he had chosen to maintain it. Many had called him a giant, and the Shadow warrior had embraced the idea.

Like Santiago, Taweret and Kazimir had sometimes chosen sides based on reward rather than righteousness, but in the blinding light of the modern world, they had been more cautious about their
allegiances. Thanks to Octavian, they had each signed the Covenant and been none too happy about it. In truth, Octavian had not been certain they would come, but he was very pleased to see
them.

There were a handful of magicians in attendance, including the German necromancer that he himself had been forced to bring back from the dead two years before, trying to find a way to return the
risen Afghani war dead to their graves. That had seemed a serious crisis in those days, but the definition of ‘serious’ continued to change.

Octavian saw Nikki’s manager and her lawyer, as well as two members of her old band who had arrived with their wives or girlfriends, and who looked very wary of the strange mourners around
them. There were several faces he vaguely recognized and assumed were old friends who had learned of the burial and persuaded Allison to approve their attendance. Octavian had invited those he felt
ought to be here and those he needed and had left others to Allison’s discretion.

As he walked toward the grave the group of mourners parted to create a path, so that he arrived at the casket much as a bride approaches her groom at the altar. But he had come to bid her
farewell, not to promise her forever.

The priest, a friend of Allison’s who had come down from the New York headquarters of the American Catholic Church as a favor to her, raised his arms in a symbolic embrace.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming to this committal service for our sister, Nikki,’ the priest began.

Octavian exhaled, relieved that he had not used her given name. She would not have wanted that. In her heart she had never been Nicole.

‘The passing of a loved one is always painful, always sad, and it can create a profound emptiness within us. We must fill that empty place with our love and our memories and the knowledge
that Nikki would want us to find new joy and kindness and contentment in our lives, and that she herself has gone on to find new joy and kindness, and the ultimate contentment, in the life beyond
this one.’

Octavian smiled sadly, looking not at the casket but at the green veil drawn across the grave. As if he had opened a previously locked mental door, worries began to flood in. He thought of
Charlotte and of the crises still raging in France and Italy, and of Cortez laughing somewhere. The priest kept talking and he vowed silently to Nikki that he would listen, that he would breathe,
that he would be with her until she had been laid to rest, give her all of his attention.

The priest began to read from the Bible, holding it in one hand, even as he shook holy water from a small vial, droplets spattering the casket. A drop landed on Octavian’s hand and he
exhaled again, a large weight seeming to lift from him. Nikki had gone on ahead of him, but they were still connected. Once upon a time, no one could know with real certainty – no matter what
faith they declared – that there were such things as Heaven and Hell, or spirits or demons or angels. But he knew firsthand, and since the Venice Jihad, years ago now, the whole world had
known the truth. It amazed him how many were unwilling to accept it, but it was the truth nevertheless.

The spirit did linger on after the flesh had gone to rot.

He could not know for certain if he would meet Nikki again in the next life, but he knew that if he could, he would seek her out. For now, that would have to be enough.

The priest gave his final blessing, inviting those who were so inclined to pray with him. As low voices joined in prayer, Octavian slipped his hand from Allison’s and approached the
casket. He knew he ought to have waited for the priest to finish, but the desire for some contact, a final goodbye, made him ignore protocol. He stepped up and laid his hands on the smooth metal
surface. No one moved to stop him and he closed his eyes, listening to the last words of the prayer.

A low grinding noise came from not far off, the sound of stone against stone.

‘What the hell—’ he heard Santiago say.

The priest faltered only a few lines before the last amen.

Allison shouted his name. Octavian opened his eyes just as the first gunshots rang out. Kazimir and Taweret were already in motion, grabbing hold of humans and hurling them to the ground without
worrying about being gentle. Kuromaku reached into the air at his hip and his sword appeared from nothing. The metal whisper of the blade being drawn carried, even as more gunfire punched the blue
autumn sky.

‘There!’ Amber shouted.

Octavian spun and saw the open door of a crypt, saw the gun thrust from the darkness, bucking as it spat bullets.

Someone cried out and he saw it was the priest, who clutched at his arm and staggered to the ground beside Nikki’s casket.

Nikki’s casket.

Octavian heard the bestial snarl but did not recognize his own voice at first. He felt himself shaking with rage, felt the magic flowing through his bones. His skin prickled and his vision
turned red, tinted by the power that poured out of him, misting from his eyes and sizzling the air around his hands.

One of the mages was painting complicated sigils in the air that would have protected them all behind a magical barrier, but Octavian was not thinking defensively. He saw his fellow warriors
rushing toward the crypt and felt their fury, remembering a hundred battles he had shared with one or all of them. But this was a fight he would not share.

‘Get back!’ he shouted. ‘Kazimir! Santiago! All of you, back off!’

Kuromaku and Allison halted, but the others kept on. Octavian raised a hand, contorted his fingers, and reached out with the power inside him. At the last moment, with a twitch of his ring
finger, he altered the spell from concussive magic to defensive, throwing up a wall into which all three of them crashed, falling backward.

The light around his left hand turned a deep, emerald green and he thrust it outward. The air rippled as the spell burned through it. The entire front of the crypt blew in, the roof collapsing,
the shooter crushed in a sliver of a moment.

A moment’s quiet fell upon them.

‘Go,’ Octavian said, nodding to Allison. ‘See who’s stupid enough to try something like this.’

He turned to seek out the priest, thinking to heal the man. Amber ran toward him, her human guise falling away so that anyone looking at her would see her true face, her wine-dark beauty and
ferocity. The hungry ghost of Miles Varick materialized behind her.

‘It isn’t over!’ Amber shouted.

Octavian twisted round, scanning the cemetery but seeing only mourners and funeral home employees and police, out at the gate.

‘What do you—’

‘The ghosts,’ Miles said. ‘The haunters say there are—’

The thump and crack of breaking stone echoed off of grave markers and tombs as the doors of a dozen crypts were smashed open from within and bizarre figures emerged, men and women in skintight
black from head to toe, with only strange lenses over their eyes to break the smooth covering. They carried handguns.

They opened fire.

Allison snarled, knocked off her feet by a bullet that struck her in the side.

‘Son of a bitch!’ she roared, holding her bleeding side, unable to shift. ‘It’s Medusa! They’ve got toxin!’

Octavian hit the one who’d shot her with a spell that turned him to stone. That’s what Medusa had gotten him.

‘Who the hell are these fucks?’ Santiago yelled.

And Octavian knew. The UN were supposed to be the only ones with the Medusa toxin, but the vampires who’d gone after Charlotte had shot her with a bullet laced with the stuff. They were
covered in head to toe to protect them from the sun.

‘They’re vampires,’ he shouted back. ‘Cortez sent them.’

Sent them to do this today. Not enough that he killed Nikki, he had to desecrate her funeral.

Bullets flew. Santiago shifted to mist. Kuromaku ran to protect Allison. As one of Cortez’s vampires turned to shoot him, Kuromaku lopped his gun hand off at the wrist. From behind the
blank black mask of his sunsuit, the vampire roared, and Kuromaku cut his head off. As the vampire fell, he began to turn to dust inside the suit. Two more came at Kuromaku and Allison, but
Octavian turned them to stone, careful not to hit his allies with the same spell. Enraged, his heart thrumming in his chest, screams of fury building in his lungs, he followed that spell with pure
force, hurling concussive magic that obliterated the vampire statues, turning them to a different sort of dust.

Humans screamed and warriors roared. The band members and their wives were lying on the ground, dead or just keeping their heads down. The manager crouched behind a grave marker for cover. One
of the cousins had been shot and another mourner knelt beside him, muttering terrified and empty assurances.

Taweret took a bullet in the thigh and fell.

‘’Maku, shift!’ Octavian shouted. ‘I’ve got Allison.’

Kuromaku wouldn’t want to, Octavian knew. But he did as he was asked. A moment later he coalesced behind the last line of marching vampires and began to cut them down one by one, silent
and lethal. Octavian counted at least forty or fifty vampires still there.

Bannerman’s Arsenal
, he thought. They had abandoned the place, and this was where they’d gone, slipping into the crypts during the night and lying in wait.

Police were shouting and shooting. There were sirens. None of that would matter. The fight wouldn’t last long enough for them to make a difference. Octavian wracked his brain, trying to
think how he could save his friends and the other mourners, how he could destroy Cortez’s creatures without hurting innocents and allies. Another vampire shot at Allison and Octavian raised a
hand, froze the bullet in a tiny pocket of time, and then threw it back at the leech. It punctured the suit and the vampire fell. There would be no turning to mist to get out of here. Not for
her.

He sketched at the air like one of the lesser magicians and three other vampires turned to stone.

A bullet punched through his neck, tearing flesh and severing blood vessels. Choking, grasping his throat, he felt the hot blood splashing his hands. A moment of panic ensnared him as he
crumbled to the ground, pain searing him. The copper stink of his own blood filled his nostrils.

Cold with rage he clapped one hand over the entry wound. Blue light glowed so fiercely that he felt the static prickle of it at the exit wound as the flesh healed.

He rose and kept rising, floating off the ground as his body was enveloped in crackling green light. As if hurling stones, he threw concussive blasts at the vampires around him, crushing them to
a pulp inside their suits and then hitting them again until the suits split open, exposing them to the sun.

And they burned.

He heard a vampire screaming and turned to see Miles Varick’s ghost holding tight to a vampire, his spectral fangs sinking into the thing’s throat. Miles held on, mouth pressed to
the black-clad neck like a lamprey, sucking out both blood and darksoul. Nearby, a wine-purple wraith darted through the air, descending upon another vampire. Amber thrust her hand through the
vampire’s chest and ripped out a squirming bit of darkness that might have been its heart or the demon-soul that existed inside all of their kind.

Enough vampires might kill Amber, but they could do nothing to a ravenous, monstrous ghost who wanted only to drain their vitality from them. Other mourners were far more vulnerable.

Even as he had this thought, he heard someone chanting a spell in ancient Chaldean. Spinning, he saw a young sorceress named Holly Nevill facing half a dozen approaching vampires. She stood over
an old man named Groff, who had crumbled to his knees, clutching at his heart. Bullets slowed as they approached the two; Holly was holding her own. Then the necromancer came up beside her,
shouting something else, hands out in front of him, fingers into horns, thumbs touching together. The asshole was trying to take control of the vampires. They were dead, or at least had died, once,
and he thought his necromancy could make him their master.

His magic disrupted Holly’s defenses. The bullets came right through. At least one hit her, because she went down, but the necromancer took three or four shots to the chest and pelvis, one
to the leg, and one in the temple. He went down like a crashing kite and Octavian knew there would be no bringing him back this time. His own necromancy had made it possible before, and on that
occasion the necromancer hadn’t had a bullet in the brain.