The Graves of Saints (29 page)

‘Hey, Ed,’ she replied.

Tori laughed quietly, apparently enjoying the peculiar awkwardness of it all.

The ghost of Miles Varick slid into the air. Amber and Cat both watched him rise, which only seemed to confuse Tori and the foreman all the more. The ghost drifted over the top of the wall
toward the huge apple tree, staring down at something that lay there on the ground, hidden from Amber’s view by the wall. Yet she knew what it must be.

‘She’s getting stronger,’ Miles whispered in that spectral voice.

Cat whipped around to stare at him. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Your Miss Shaw,’ the dead professor replied. ‘She’s growing stronger.’

‘How do you know that?’ Cat demanded.

The spectral face turned quizzical. ‘Why, she just told me so. Can’t you hear her?’

Cat turned to Amber. ‘Can you hear her, too?’

Amber shook her head – she couldn’t – even as Tori demanded to know what was going on. Just as she couldn’t see the ghost, she couldn’t hear Miles
or
Keomany. While Cat quickly explained, Amber at last moved around the wall and entered the clearing. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw the extraordinary figure lying prone on the ground,
roots thrust into the soil. Her thoughts went to wood nymphs and other folkloric forest sprites and spirits, but Keomany Shaw was so much more. The dead earthwitch had been reborn as some kind of
avatar for Gaea, a thing of wood and leaf and even fruit, and yet somehow – to someone who had known her – she was still recognizably Keomany, as if someone had constructed this
beautiful growth as a living memorial to her.

‘What’s she saying?’ Amber asked, which caused Cat and Tori’s conversation to halt abruptly.

‘Yeah,’ Tori said, searching the air for a spirit she would never see. ‘What
is
she saying?’

They all turned to look at the beautiful, impossible figure of wood and bark and leaf that lay curled upon the ground, a garden shaped like a woman.

The ghost of Miles Varick drifted downward until he appeared to alight on the grass beside the new body that Gaea had grown for Keomany. The spirit smiled kindly down upon the elemental, then
looked up at Cat and Tori, though he had to know that Tori could not hear him.

‘She wants you to know that it’s really her, that she’s here with you, alive and aware,’ Miles said, his voice like the whisper of the wind. ‘And that she loves you
all. She’s weak, now, because there are terrible things happening to the earth just now . . . to Gaea.’

‘What can we do—’ Cat began.

Miles held up a hand, listening to something that might have been Keomany’s own ghost or the elements themselves.

‘She says you shouldn’t worry for her or for yourselves. She can protect you as long as you are here. And she doesn’t want you to fear for Gaea, either. “The goddess is
getting angry,” she asks me to tell you. The goddess is getting angry, and Keomany is getting stronger.’

Oriyur, Tamil Nadu, India

The building in Oriyur looked nothing like a church. But nothing in the tiny village of Oriyur looked like much of anything. No one visited the village except for traders and
the occasional Christian pilgrim seeking the burial place of Saint John de Brito, the Portuguese missionary who had traveled the whole area in the late seventeenth century, spreading the word of
his God.

The pilgrims came in pursuit of legend more than fact. Elsewhere there were schools named after him, but here one could find only the place where his execution was said to have taken place. And
perhaps the deed had been done on that very spot. As to the disposition of the missionary’s remains, however, there were many opinions. Some said that his body had been returned to Lisbon, to
the halls of his fathers, and others that it had been buried in Calcutta. Locals insisted that Saint John de Brito had been buried right there in Oriyur, and many still blessed his name.

But the small, crumbling shop with its stone foundation received very little attention. No one still drawing breath in this world remembered that the stone foundation had once been a church,
under construction at the time of the saint’s execution. No one knew of the space beneath the stones, the chamber there and the stone box within it, or that the box contained the severed head
of the martyred missionary.

It was said that on the day of his murder, the nearby sand dunes had turned red with blood. Nobody knew it, but that was a bit of melodrama, an apocryphal tale.

When the ground shook and the little shop collapsed and the stone box in the basement of the forgotten church began to disgorge massive, lumbering creatures made of brightly burning cinders and
the bones of the damned, that ancient fiction became reality.

That night, the dunes were red indeed.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Octavian sat in silence in the back of the sedan as it crawled through late afternoon traffic, the sky beginning to bleed daylight in small increments. Evening was still quite a
way off, but the hour of long shadows had arrived and the slant of the light turned the world to phantoms.

‘You know this could be nothing,’ Allison said, her words clipped and blunt. She had been a reporter in a previous life and whenever he forgot that fact, this tone would appear to
remind him.

‘I know.’

He stared at the back of the driver’s head. The man did not glance back, nor did Corporal Song, who sat in the front passenger seat and stared straight out through the windshield. Song was
either intimidated by them or still pissed about the way they had pushed him around earlier; probably a little of both. Octavian didn’t like him, but neither did he blame the man. Song was a
soldier, and pretty soon they might be in the midst of combat, side by side. Octavian figured it would do them all good to remember that.

‘I mean, he would’ve said anything—’ Allison went on.

Octavian shot her a dark look. ‘He said what he knew. You were in the room and you doubt that? Under the circumstances I have no doubt that he believed what he told us, and that he told us
all he had to tell us. I was satisfied of that . . .’

The rest of that sentence hung in the air unspoken, but they both heard it.

. . . before I let him die.

Allison glanced out the window for a moment before nodding. ‘I agree. But Task Force Victor have been all through the places where Cortez and his coven were supposed to have nests in
California and they’re all abandoned. Why are we assuming this one in Seattle will be any different?’

‘We’re not,’ Octavian replied, staring at the back of the driver’s head again. ‘But it’s all we’ve got.’

Allison fell silent, then, and he understood why. He knew that she must be feeling just as useless as he was, that she had become a creature of action, that in the midst of crisis, idle time
made her want to crawl out of her skin. That was, in fact, the sole reason that they were on the way to the airport right now; Octavian could not stand to be in his twelfth-floor hotel room a
moment longer. After today he hoped never to return to that hotel. Hoped never to come back to Philadelphia. There would only be pain here for him from this day forward.

In the front, Song shifted in his seat and frowned, putting a hand to his right ear to cut out the ambient noise of the car engine and the city rolling by around them.

‘This is Song. Come again, Commander?’ The Chinese soldier listened for a moment. ‘Thank you, sir. I’ll pass that on.’

‘What’s going on?’ Allison asked.

Song turned to look over the seat at them. ‘We sent a team to sit on the location, monitor activity—’

‘You were supposed to wait for us,’ Octavian reminded him.

‘They weren’t going in, just observing,’ Song said. ‘But there’s nothing to observe. The building there used to be a music company – offices, a pressing
facility for CDs, even studio space, apparently – but there’s no music there now. No building, either.’

‘No building,’ Octavian repeated.

‘It burned down,’ Song explained. ‘Within the past week. They’re contacting the Seattle police and fire departments, and of course they will sift the remains of the
building.’

‘You won’t find anything useful,’ Octavian said, thinking hard about Cortez’s strategy. So many of his nests had already been abandoned. He had blown up Bannerman’s
Arsenal and now burned down this place in Seattle. Where had they all gone?

‘We have to try,’ Song replied.

‘If you add all of these supposed nests up . . .’ Allison said.

‘That’s a lot of vampires,’ Octavian finished for her. ‘I was just thinking the same thing. They’re going somewhere, which means Cortez has some kind of plan that
we haven’t stumbled upon yet. All of this stuff he’s doing to divert my attention is just that . . . diversion. He’s trying to keep me away from wherever his real plan is going to
go into action.’

Realization sparked in Allison’s eyes. ‘And where has he kept you away from so far?’

Octavian nodded. ‘Europe. All of this – Nikki’s murder included – has kept me from responding to these incursions in person, the way I normally would have.’

Song had been too polite to intrude up till now, but he scoffed at this.

‘I’m sorry,’ the soldier said, ‘but you are jumping to some very large conclusions. I will admit it seems like this Cortez is antagonizing you with a purpose and that the
abandonment of his nests hints at some larger ambition, but there has been nothing to even suggest a connection to the incursions in Europe. We know what has caused them. You dismantled the magical
hierarchy keeping our world’s defenses in place, and the appearance of the chaos goddess you fought in Massachusetts let the demons of a thousand Hells know there might be a way through. This
isn’t Cortez’s doing, Mr Octavian. It’s yours.’

Octavian smiled thinly. There were times he wished he still had fangs to show, and this was one of them. He hoped that the glint in his eyes would be enough to warn Song to hold his tongue.

‘Octavian didn’t give birth to these demons, you imbecile,’ Allison said. ‘And he didn’t ring the damn dinner bell. To insinuate—’

‘Stop,’ Octavian said, holding up a hand and glancing at her. ‘Thank you, but stop.’ He looked at Song. ‘Nikki’s in the grave now, Corporal. And we have no
solid leads on where to find Cortez. I could spend the next year hunting him, or more. The next hundred years, if he decided to make it really difficult. So while I’m waiting for something
helpful to turn up, I’m going to do what Commander Metzger has wanted me to do all along. We’re already headed to the airport. Call ahead and tell them to put a little more gas in the
tank. We’re headed to Europe. Italy first, and then France.’

He glanced at Allison, who nodded to confirm that she intended to accompany him, though he’d had no doubt at all.

They sat silently together, these old friends, as Song used his commlink to radio their intentions ahead. After a minute or so, with the traffic now flowing around them and a view of planes
taking off and landing in the distance as they approached the airport, it was clear that Song’s conversation had shifted. He wasn’t doing the asking anymore, but the answering.
Apparently Commander Metzger was back on the line. He had gone ahead of them by more than an hour to make sure that all would be in readiness by the time they arrived and it sounded as if he were
giving Song difficulty over their decision. Octavian didn’t understand that. The commander had been hoping he would go to Europe to deal with these demons since the first incursion began.

‘What is the problem?’ he asked angrily.

They had slowed to a stop in front of a massive chain link fence with a guard shack in view. Now the gate rolled open and the driver sped the sedan through the opening. Seconds later they were
on the tarmac.

‘You might want to hear it from Commander Metzger,’ Song replied.

‘Hear what?’ Allison demanded before Octavian could get out the same words.

The sedan rolled to a stop. Song glanced back over the seat at them.

‘Maybe you’d better hear it from him,’ the soldier said.

As Allison started to argue, Octavian popped open his door and climbed out, tall limbs unfolding from the rear seat. A small jet stood parked nearby, in the shadow of a wing of the airport.
Lights blinked on the plane and on the runway. Soon the day would turn gray and the gray would slide into night, and then the lights would be brighter, calling travelers home to safety. But safety
was hard to come by these days.

Commander Metzger stood waiting for them by a second sedan, which was parked much nearer to the jet. A small coterie of soldiers had gathered nearby, including Sergeant Galleti. There were
travel bags and weapons cases on the ground behind them and as Octavian and Allison approached, Metzger made a whirling gesture with his finger, the wings-up, let’s-take-off command that
anyone could recognize. Galleti and the others grabbed their bags and picked up weapons cases and marched toward the jet. Its stairs had already been lowered and in the twilight its interior was
fading from gray to black shadow.

‘You’ve changed destinations, I hear?’ Metzger said.

‘Seems like the right thing to do,’ Octavian replied. ‘If that barrier’s still holding in France, we’ll go to Siena first.’

‘They’re both covered,’ Metzger said. ‘You’ve already got people helping us in Saint-Denis with more on the way, and the team you’re sending to Siena left
hours ago.’

Octavian cocked his head, confused. ‘You’ve been trying to get me to go—’

‘There’s a third breach,’ Metzger cut in.

‘Oh, shit,’ Allison whispered.

‘The middle of nowhere in India,’ Metzger went on. ‘Our people generated that list of saints who were beheaded. This location, as remote as it is, drew a hit on that list.
Saint John somebody. Portuguese missionary.’

Octavian exhaled. ‘All right. India it is.’

The driver of their car set down the rucksacks they’d packed. There weren’t any weapons for them; neither of them needed a gun, though Octavian wouldn’t have minded one loaded
with Medusa toxin-laced bullets.