The Graves of Saints (39 page)

Something shifted in the rubble as Santiago descended through the jutting, broken beams and inside the pile of debris that had once been the city’s most beautiful structure. With a
thought, he rebuilt himself from mist to man, feeling the comfortable weight of flesh and bone. As malleable as it might be, he preferred the solidity. Santiago would never have admitted it, but
the ephemeral nature of shifting to mist frightened him. The lack of substance made him feel like nothing, as if he weren’t even real, and such thoughts were far more terrifying than
demons.

Taweret appeared beside him, sculpted from mist and then flesh.

‘This way,’ she said, striding elegantly across the debris, as confident of each step as a dancer on a stage.

Santiago turned in a full circle, taking in the wreckage of the basilica. Columns jutted from piles of rubble and partial walls still stood, bearing the ornamentation and iconography that
represented the wealth and faith of the reborn church. If the woman they were seeking really still lived – the woman this Father Laurent said had been touched by the father of all of these
utukki – that was its own sort of miracle.

Off to the left the rubble shifted again, but Taweret was already headed in that direction. She had noticed it as well. Now, as Santiago followed her, he saw a strange formation ahead, where the
debris seemed to have been piled up around a wide hole like the mouth of an anthill. It was here that the rustling noise had come from.

‘Taweret,’ he said, attempting to warn her.

The demon wriggled from the hole. As it slipped free it turned on Taweret, a high, chittering noise coming from somewhere inside the creature. The utukki took flight, darting at Taweret, who
caught it mid-flight and drove a fist through the hard shell over its chest, rooting around in search of delicate organs. The thing struggled for several seconds and then went limp, hanging from
her arm, dead and leaking rank-smelling ichor.

Taweret glanced at him. ‘Down?’

‘Down,’ Santiago confirmed.

Taweret did not hesitate. She lay on her belly on the debris anthill and slid headfirst down the gullet of the thing, into what could only be the utukki’s birthing room. Santiago did not
blame her; the idea of descending feet first into the hole without knowing what awaited him below was not a pleasant one, but he wasn’t sure coming face to face with one of the utukki in such
close confines would be much better.

She won’t
, he thought, suddenly sure of it. They were being born into the world, but there’s an interval. He recalled Father Laurent had said something about it. They had a
few minutes before the next one was born and he wanted to take full advantage of that.

Santiago swore silently as he lay on the edge of that anthill on his belly, then reached down inside the jagged gullet of the thing and dragged himself in. He might have tumbled straight down
but he had the strength to keep himself from plummeting, and his clothes caught and tore on sharp edges of fallen stone and glass and shattered wood. As he moved deeper, the walls of the hole were
slick with a viscous, putrid substance he could only imagine must be some kind of demonic afterbirth, and he lost his grip and slid the rest of the way.

Tucking his head up, he tumbled out of the hole onto the filthy stone of an ancient stairwell, where Taweret crouched in the gap between debris and steps, waiting for him. The edges of her lips
crinkled in what might have been amusement at his oafishness, but he took no offense, certain he had looked foolish. Now he scrambled to his feet, glanced around quickly, and started down the
stairs. She turned and had begun leading the way, grateful that lights of some sort still burned up ahead, either candles or oil lamps, deep in the cellar below. Shadows could see much better in
the dark than humans, instinctively altering the composition of their eyes to adjust for anything but total darkness, but he was still glad of the light.

‘Do you hear it?’ Taweret asked.

Santiago frowned. He’d been so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he hadn’t been paying enough attention. Now he heard the slow, ragged breathing that came from further down the
stairs and the low moan of pain that interrupted it. A quiet laugh followed the pain, a sound of madness and surrender.

He shifted to see past Taweret, even as she continued down the steps, and he could see the young woman splayed in the stairwell. Her belly gleamed in the lamplight, distended and lined with blue
veins. Her legs were wide open, thrust so wide she looked as if she had been split by a warrior’s axe. Blood slicked her thighs and, holding his breath a moment, Santiago could hear the slow
drip of it running down the steps. He had no idea why she was still alive.

Until he heard the shifting and the scraping even further below and looked past Taweret to see the massive demon lolling there at the bottom of the stairs. Its eyes gazed up at her in some kind
of infernal adoration, and suddenly Santiago knew the woman remained alive because the demon wished it, because she was its host, mother to its children.

Taweret took a step beyond the woman.

‘Stop,’ Santiago said curtly.

She turned to him, frowning; Taweret did not take kindly to instructions.

‘If it kills us both, who will release her?’ he asked, gesturing to the helpless, damned madonna on the stairs.

Taweret seemed to look at the ruined woman for the first time. She stared a moment at the slick, bloody wound the woman’s vagina had become and she shuddered, turning slowly away. Santiago
noticed that the woman’s belly had grown. As he watched, it bulged further and something squirmed inside. The woman seemed barely conscious, but with the demon-child moving within her, she
opened her eyes wider and let out the most pitiful noise. Had her throat not been raw from days of this, it might have been a scream.

‘What’s your name?’ Santiago asked, kneeling beside her.

‘I don’t want to know her name,’ Taweret said, her accent thick. ‘Do what must be done. Release her.’

‘Someone should remember her name.’

‘
Kill
her, Santiago. Kill her before she has to suffer the birth of another of those nightmares, or get out of my way.’

Santiago knew Taweret was right, and it was not as if he had ever hesitated to take a human life in the past, when the moment called for murder. It just troubled him that she might die without
anyone ever knowing who it was who had suffered here.

Then her head lolled to the side and she looked at him with eyes that might have been pleading or might have been empty, evidence of a mind hollowed out and driven mad by torment.

A quick snap and it would be done. After that, they would try to kill the demon father. He only wished they had been able to bring the mages with them to try to take this curse from the woman,
but they would likely never have made it all the way to the basilica alive.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, reaching for her throat.

The world shifted. The stairs cracked and buckled and thrust upward, throwing Santiago and Taweret against the wall. The damned madonna rolled to one side and slumped and slid down half a dozen
steps, much closer to the demon that waited in the crypt below.

‘What is—?’ Santiago managed, before the ground surged and bucked and split again.

Pieces of broken masonry rained down overhead. A chunk struck his shoulder, breaking bone that he reknitted instantly. He heard a terrible, ragged, wheezing scream and looked down to see that a
massive piece of stone and mortar had crushed the woman’s legs. More than ever, mercy demanded that he take her life, but even as he started downward, Taweret staggered in front of him.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said, leaping the distance and alighting right beside the broken woman.

The demon moved, lurching to its feet and then practically gliding up the stairs toward Taweret.

Santiago shouted for her to defend herself, but he needn’t have bothered. Before Taweret could even turn, the ground shook again and thick roots burst up through the shattered steps,
wrapped around the demon and began to haul it down into a hole that appeared in the stairwell. For a moment he thought the steps had fallen away into some kind of abyss, but then he saw the way the
darkness down in that hole shimmered and flexed and flowed, and he knew that it was not a hole at all.

It was a portal.

The twisting roots thrust the demon down into that portal as if feeding it into the ravenous maw of another world.

Languin, Guatemala

Octavian turned the antlered god’s eyes to stone. It started with pain, as his ribs began to crack in its grip. The death god raised him up, a hundred feet off the
ground, and studied him with the cruel purpose of a dark-eyed child bent on tearing the wings off of insects. Octavian couldn’t breathe and he felt a couple of ribs give way, and as the pain
roared through him the magic erupted from him like a scream. One of his arms was pinned beside him but the other remained free and he lifted his hand and a bolt of vivid light lanced from his
fingers. He gave no conscious thought to the spell but some unconscious part of him chose, and as the antlered god jerked backward, trying to twist his face away from the attack, that emerald
lightning struck its eyes.

The death god’s eyes went dry and dark for a moment, then solidified to cracked gray stone. Its head drooped, dragged down by the new weight of its eyes, and it used its free hand to reach
up and scrape at its eyes like an animal, perhaps thinking something had obscured its vision instead of taken it away completely.

It froze, chest heaving with grunts of anger and confusion, nostrils flaring. Short of breath, black spots in his vision from oxygen deprivation, Octavian tried to muster up another attack. His
thoughts whirled, searching for any spell that might work on a demon such as this. Attack magic – some simple concussive blow – would do nothing. Monsters this ancient and powerful were
not as affected by simple magicks so he needed something else. But his thoughts raced and focus eluded him. The black spots were not just on his eyes but in his mind. Pain burned in his chest and
back and he could hear his own internal voice screaming in his head and he knew any second the antlered god would put two and two together and realize that the tiny, fragile thing in its grasp was
the one who had made it blind.

It started to tighten its grip.

‘Peter, strike now!’ a voice cried.

His vision fading, he looked up to see Allison; she dropped through the air, shifting from falcon to female overhead, and lunged at the death god’s throat. Moonlight glinted off of the
long talons that her hands had become, just before she landed and thrust them like daggers through its flesh and began to slice and tear.

Its grip loosened a fraction, giving Octavian room for a single breath. In that instant he thought of Hell and the most primal of the magicks he had learned there, in its deepest pits. Dragging
his other arm free, he clapped his hands together and held them out in front of him, as if he might dive upward out of the antlered god’s grip.

The magic that surged through him seared his bones and he screamed as it built into a raging ball of silver-black energy around his joined hands. It felt as if he were tethered somewhere, like
some umbilical still connected him to Hell, and the maelstrom of infernal power that roiled there came flooding up through him. For the second time that night he spoke a language known only to the
first beasts of Hell.

The death god reached its free hand to drag Allison from its neck, but she hung on, ripping open a long flap of flesh. Thick, dark ichor spilled from the wound. The god clenched its fist in
reflex and Octavian felt his broken ribs stabbing him deep inside. Grinding his jaws together he managed to grunt the final syllables of that spell and a shaft of silver-black light erupted from
his joined hands. That light lasted only a moment before it vanished, revealing a gash in the flesh of reality, a rip that showed a glimpse of another dimension beyond.

That bolt of nothing punched a hole through the death god’s cheek, up through its head and out the top of its skull, right between the antlers. Octavian’s arms dropped and he had a
moment to see the rip in the world healing, reality flowing back into the breach, and then the death god began to collapse. He saw Allison leap into the air and shift back into a falcon even as the
god’s hand fell open, releasing him.

Octavian did not flail as he plummeted toward the ground. He breathed evenly, forcing away panic and pain, and contorted his fingers to summon a sphere of emerald light. His fall slowed gently
and then ceased completely, and he found himself hanging a dozen feet above the circle of vampires he had turned to stone, cradled delicately in the grasp of his own magic.

The stone vampires woke something in his mind.

Cortez
! he thought, heart flooding with hatred. Exhaling, he summoned a healing magic that bathed his body in a golden mist, and as he descended to the ground he could feel his ribs
knitting back together. A pleasant heat replaced his pain. When he alighted, he was himself again and he spun around in search of Cortez, watching the shadows around the vampire statues.

‘You bastard!’ Octavian snarled. ‘Where are you?’

The flap of wings made him twist around, ready to burn a vampire bat from the night sky, but it was not Cortez attacking. The falcon cried out and spread its wings, its flesh expanding and
reconfiguring, and Allison landed on her feet beside him.

‘Over there,’ she said, indicating a statue to their right.

He gave her a small nod and felt the strength of the bond between them. They had never been lovers but she might well be the best friend he still had in the world. Along with Kuromaku, she was
the closest thing he had to family.

Side by side, they stormed across the field in the brightness of the army’s lighting array. A horrible screeching came from above and Octavian glanced up to see a devil-bat swooping toward
them. Before he could even defend himself, the ground shook and a thick vine thrust from the earth, whipped into the sky to coil around the monster, and dragged it down into a shimmering patch of
darkness, which closed up again the moment the devil-bat had been fed into it.