The Graves of Saints (41 page)

‘We ask him, see if any of that information is in his head,’ Octavian said, before turning to Charlotte. ‘And then you kill him.’

Charlotte and Allison exchanged a look, and then Charlotte smiled.

‘I can get behind that.’

Octavian nodded and started toward Cortez, but as he did he heard a whisper beside him and turned toward Keomany. He frowned, certain she had spoken, but still she did not so much as glance at
him. Her words had been barely audible.

‘Keomany, did you say something?’

Slowly, with a dry rustle, she turned her inhuman gaze upon him. For the first time he saw emotion on that strange face, in the pinch between her brows and the narrowing of her eyes and the
disturbed wrinkling in her smooth apple skin.

Octavian shuddered, unsettled by her regard.

‘I said “I’m sorry”,’ she rasped.

He frowned, not understanding, even though he felt the ground shaking beneath his feet. Even though he’d noticed that the last of the devil-bats seemed to be gone, and the serpents as
well.

Then a thick root thrust up from the earth beneath Cortez and twined around the vampire, joining the other roots and vines that had held him upright. The ground beneath him shimmered and
Octavian saw a distant blackness there, as if the soil had become a window into nothing.

‘No!’ Charlotte screamed, and she dove for Cortez with her arms outstretched, even as the roots began to drag him down through that portal and out of their world.

Allison grabbed her, wrapped her arms around Charlotte and held her there so that she would not tumble into whatever limbo lay beyond that shimmering nothing. Octavian had taken a single step
forward before he had brought himself up short, knowing that there was no chance. He could only watch as Cortez was dragged down by the twining, tugging roots, and as the shimmering dissipated and
the vines and roots withdrew, leaving only solid ground.

Octavian turned and grabbed Keomany, dragging her toward him, forcing her to look at him. Magic surged inside him, crackling and misting and rolling off of him in waves.

‘What the
fuck
are you doing?’ he demanded.

This time she did not look away. ‘What must be done.’

Saint-Denis, France

The stairs cracked beneath Santiago, the stone shifting. A chunk of masonry crashed down a few steps higher. Anger flared inside of him. He would not be killed by falling stones
or quaking earth, but he and Taweret had come to stop more utukki from being born and he refused to fail.

Down below in the cellar crypt, the hole that had appeared in the floor had vanished. There were cracks but the shimmering portal into which the demon father had been drawn had disappeared.
Roots whipped about, sliding on the stone floor even as they began to withdraw into the cracked floor.

‘What is this?’ Taweret called to him over the groan and rumble of the earth. ‘Something the mages have done?’

Santiago didn’t know the answer and had no time to consider it. A huge slab of stone crashed down from the ceiling at the bottom of the steps and the tremors showed no signs of ceasing.
The woman on the stairs cried out, her belly distended, another utukki only moments from birth. He’d thought the removal of the demon father might stop more from being born, but her screams
told him otherwise. Without the mages, there was only one way to end this and he could not count on falling masonry to do the job. Before she was buried here, Santiago had to save her from her own,
personal Hell, and to save her, he had to kill her.

He knelt by her, stone cracking beneath his knees. Once, he felt sure, she had been beautiful. Now she was pale and sweating and dirty and her eyes rolled back to show bloodshot white as she
wept and moaned.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

The stairs shook and with a loud crack, split open wider. The roots shot up through them and wound themselves around the girl, even as the edges of the crack began to shimmer and a silver-black
sheen filled the gap like some kind of liquid mirror.

‘No!’ he shouted, reaching out to grab hold of her arm as the vines pulled her down inside that portal.

Santiago thought of her spending an eternity in some other world, some other Hell, giving birth to utukki forever. He couldn’t let her meet that fate alive and he tried to hold her back,
hauling on her arm, reaching down to hook a hand beneath her other arm. Then one of the vines wrapped around his wrist and tugged. He fought it, tried to tear himself away, but beneath him the step
cracked again and another portal began to shimmer into existence. Thick vines shot up, snaking around his waist and throat and yanking downward.

He tried to shapeshift, but his body would not respond to his thoughts. Something in the touch of those vines, some poison bit of magic, had confused his mind. Panicked, he turned toward Taweret
just in time to see her dragged down through a third portal.

‘No!’ Santiago roared, until the vines choked off his words.

His fingers scraped smooth stone, searching for something to hold onto, and then he felt himself falling.

He could see the silver-black edges of the portal diminishing above him, and then that limbo darkness swallowed him up.

Siena, Italy

Dr Jessica Baleeiro watched Kuromaku’s hand vanish into the earth. At the last moment, he dropped his katana and tried to find purchase on the rutted ground, but another
root twisted around his arm and yanked it backward, and then he was simply gone. The shimmering darkness that had opened up beneath him faded as if it had been nothing more than a mirage, but what
Jess had seen had been no illusion. The samurai had been taken, not just dragged into the ground but, if her glimpse into that strange pool had been any indication, out of this reality
entirely.

The gigantic Shadow – Kazimir – had also been taken, and now she fell to her knees and looked out over the smoking ruin that had been made of the road and the hill and of the city of
Siena in the distance. No more dark shapes darted across the sky. The smoke demons were gone, leaving death and destruction in their wake.

Stillness reigned.

The breach had been sealed. The demons had been removed.

And so had the vampires.

Languin, Guatemala

Octavian held Keomany’s wrists, thorns drawing blood from his palms and fingers. Charlotte cried out as roots thrust up from the ground and dragged her down into a
shimmering pool of mirror-smooth blackness that reflected the moonlight. Allison fought, tearing free of whipping vines, and tried to run for it, beginning to shapeshift into a falcon . . . to take
flight. Other roots thrust high, blocking her path. One impaled her and she screeched in pain even as the roots cocooned around her.

Shouting, Octavian released Keomany and turned, magic boiling around his hands. Pale blue light churned around his fists and lanced outward, slicing through vines and roots, trying to set
Allison and Charlotte free.

One of them struck him from behind, a dagger-sharp root that punched through his left side. Staggering forward, the pain distracted him for mere seconds, but they were enough. As he bled and
fell to his knees, the roots encircled him tightly, holding him down. No portal opened beneath him but once again he felt his ribs constricting, bones snapping. With a cry of rage he unleashed a
burning magic that scorched the roots to ash.

Freed but injured, with no time to waste on healing himself, he turned to do the same for his friends . . . just in time to see Allison’s face looking up at him, her eyes pleading as she
vanished inside that mirrored portal, just before it closed. Of Charlotte, there was no sign at all.

Octavian rounded on Keomany, letting that destructive magic blaze around his fists and leak from his eyes.

‘Make it stop!’ he roared at her, the magic radiating out of him. ‘Bring them back!’

Keomany had become something inhuman, yet he could still see the emotion that tore at her. Those bizarre plant eyes were full of sorrow.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Peter, but this is what Gaea wants. Only earth magic from now on. Nothing from Hell, or any other dimension.’

Octavian reached out a hand and the magic flowed out of him, wrapping as tightly around Keomany as the roots had twined around him moments before. With a thought he lifted her from the ground,
hearing the crinkle and snap as bits of her broke inside.

‘Refuse her!’ he shouted, mind a maelstrom of unwelcome thoughts of his friends suffering the torments of one Hell or another. ‘Bring them back or I swear to
you—’

‘I’m sorry,’ Keomany said . . . and then she went limp, the light going out of her eyes.

Only then did Octavian see the long roots that trailed beneath her, connecting Keomany’s body to the earth . . . to Gaea.

‘No!’ he shouted, shooting a lance of green light from his left hand, snapping those roots and severing her connection to the soil.

Too late.

The figure he held aloft with crackling magic had become little more than an effigy, a dry husk devoid of any trace of her consciousness. The way it hung in the air, withered and stiff, he knew
that Keomany had fled that body and returned to the earth.

When he dropped his hands and let the husk fall to the ground, it cracked open and emitted a puff of dust, dry and papery and dead.

Octavian stood alone, bathed in the brightness of the army’s lights. He heard the wind in the trees not far away and only then realized that the rest of the noise had died away. The ground
had ceased its trembling, the tanks had stopped their shelling, there were no screeches overheard from devil-bats . . . because there were no more of them. All of the things that had emerged from
the breach had been forced from this reality, with only the collapsed crevice that had once been the Languin Caves as evidence they had ever been there at all, a scar on Gaea’s perfect
flesh.

Alone.

Raging and grieving and confused, he thought of Allison and Charlotte and then his thoughts strayed further afield, wondering what had become of Kuromaku and Santiago and the others and knowing
– deep in his heart – the startling truth. They must also be gone. All of his friends, nearly all of those left in the world who cared about him at all, were no longer
in
the
world.

‘Peter?’

Octavian spun, magic springing to his fingertips, ready to kill. But the voice belonged to one already dead.

The ghost of Miles Varick manifested a few feet away, pale and translucent, barely visible in the bright lights, like the ghost of a ghost.

‘We should go home,’ Miles said.

Octavian stared at him, heart breaking. Nikki was dead and his friends were all gone. Cortez was gone, as well, and he imagined Gaea had put a stop to the incursions in Europe and India just as
she had done here. The hunt and the battle had both come to an abrupt end, but he felt frozen, unsure in which direction he ought to take his first step.

‘Peter—’ the ghost said again.

Octavian nodded. ‘I agree,’ he said, turning toward the dead man. ‘I’m just not sure there’s anywhere left for me to call “home”.’

September 26

Brattleboro, Vermont

The sun shone brightly but the crisp autumn air brought a chill with every gust of wind. Children raced across the field toward the tractor that pulled the hayrides through
Summerfields Orchard, laughing and bumping each other, all trying to be the first one on board. The smell of cider donuts baking filled the air, along with the rich, earthy aroma of crops ready for
the harvest. Girls from the high school were face-painting to raise money for new cheerleader uniforms. On a small stage, a trio of scruffy twentysomething boys played folk music that came straight
from their hearts.

Tori Osborne felt like crying inside.

People laughed and the tractor rumbled and a little girl cried, upset because her parents wouldn’t buy the pumpkin she wanted. Tori walked past them all, waved to Jenny and Tom, who were
working at the outside window where people were lined up to pay for their apples. She glanced over at the picnic area to her right, where families were spread out, enjoying the day. Just a handful
of days until October arrived and they would have to start decorating for the haunted hayride, and Tom and Jenny would be out with Ed building the hay maze.

She wasn’t in the mood for ghosts and goblins, but Cat had insisted that they had to give the customers what they wanted. If their seasonal regulars couldn’t get what they wanted at
Summerfields, they would go and become regulars somewhere else. Tori had tried to argue that the country – the world – had had their fill of the supernatural, but Cat felt strongly that
people would find comfort in the make-believe haunts and frights, that they would want to go on pretending that there wasn’t any real reason to be afraid of the dark, even though they all
knew the truth.

‘Hey, Tori!’ called Becca Farley, a regular who’d dabbled in earthcraft but lost interest after a time.

Tori put on her best smile and waved back, trying to look busy and purposeful so Becca wouldn’t take offense that she kept walking, turning left toward the entrance to the store. Customers
sat on the stone wall in front, sipping coffee and guarding their purchases, in no hurry to lug their pumpkins and bags of apples and bottles of maple syrup across the street to the field that the
orchard used as a parking lot.

She walked into the store, passing through the big double barn doors, and instantly she felt better. Exhaling, she took in her surroundings, and knew this was where she belonged. The two
registers dinged and clanked off to her left, while to the right, down a short ramp, the cider donuts were being baked fresh and served up hot, almost faster than the bakers could get them out of
the oil and sprinkle them with sugar and cinnamon. Fruits and vegetables and homemade chicken pot pies and harvest-time arts and crafts and Halloween decorations were on display, and selling
well.

They had reopened yesterday, a Friday, two days after Keomany had vanished from the orchard, leaving only a husk behind. Since that time, Tori had stayed shut up inside her house while Cat had
come down here to the store to take charge of every aspect of the business. The orchard had loyal and hardworking employees, and Tori and Cat both knew how lucky they were, but in these past days
it had been made clearer to them than ever. People had died here – not in the store, but on the property – but their employees had not only shown up for work, they had actively
campaigned in town, letting friends and strangers know that Summerfields had endured a tragedy but was reopening for business and that its owners needed the community’s support.