The Lucifer Messiah (18 page)

“The next grand gathering is on the horizon, the fifty-first since the Morrigan slew Apollo.
Sated from fifty feasts, the tyrant willfall.
You are the one, a trickster from the north, across the western ocean. You will topple the Keeper. You are Lucifer, the dawn bringer reborn.”

Sean snarled. He had heard most of it before, and he had thought he would never have to hear it again.

“I've told you, I am not what you want me to be. I never will be.”

“And I have told you. The prophecy remains, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. The Morrigan believes that you are Lucifer, and she will stop at nothing to keep her throne. She will kill you whether you believe in the Book of Nestor or not. If you ignore that peril, you merely aid her in her quest.”

“She'll try. She has tried. I can handle her.”

“Look around you, my son. Look at all of us. Our own people. Our own kind. They await you. They will follow you. You need only to step forward. The words have already been written. They are beyond dispute. The Mor-rigan knows this. That is why she fears you so. Why she hates you so. The mantle of the Keeper is yours to claim. Speak to your flock.”

Half a smile on his mucus-stained lips, Argus lifted the
veil and opened the curtain that separated the antechamber from the great hall of the ruined cathedral. His face invited Sean to step up with him. Outside, the strange and hideous figures had gathered.

Sean did step forward. All in the cathedral fell still. Even the chattering and the wheezing from the things cocooned in the church eaves, and suspended from the rafters, quieted.

“Lucifer. Lucifer speaks,” someone, or something in the crowd whispered.

But no words came to him in that instant. Standing at the edge of the broken altar, Sean saw the teeming masses, strange and weird beings of every size and shape. Human mingled with beast, and with things even stranger.

He had seen them all before. In Russia, when he had first learned the secret of what lurked within him. And he had seen them in the myriad forms under which he himself had traveled the world, those many years since.

He saw himself. And he despised the image.

Argus, noting his trepidation, moved closer to him. He reached out his tiny hand toward the arm of the unnaturally young man. But there was no arm to touch.

In a moment of horror, a sight that even the gathered masses themselves could not bear to watch, the body of Sean Mulcahy fell to pieces. As though shredded by a thousand unseen scythes, the flesh of his skin split and ruptured. His blood spilled to the floor. His bones tore themselves from their joints.

Like a heap of human scraps, the sundered pieces of
his flesh collapsed into a sopping pile, his clothes left to fall to the church floor.

Gasps and screams from the assembled broke the silence his arrival had heralded. Argus fell to his knees to see after the grisly remains. Charybdis was at his side in an instant, and Arachne as well.

“What has he done?” Arachne questioned, never expecting an answer.

One came anyway, disembodied, eerie, but the voice of Sean Mulcahy nonetheless.

“What I must do.”

A moment later, the pile of bloodied clothes sprang to life. Hatched from a nest of mire, sent forth within a spray of loose, gray feathers mixed with blood, a dozen birds darted upward. They were pigeons, or so it appeared, they moved so fast it was hard to be certain. The birds surged toward the rafters, one after another until there remained on the floor only a vacant heap of red-stained clothes.

The broken boards of the ceiling afforded them an exit, one and all. Then there was no sign of Sean Mulcahy left in the cathedral.

“Now what shall we do?” Charybdis questioned of her master, stunned as all the rest by the incredible display of the man they sought for their savior.

“What can we do? He is beyond our powers,” Arach-ne said.

Argus remained pensive. Undaunted, as ever.

“No. We must persuade him,” the child-who-wasn't answered. “And perhaps his friends will help us.”

V
INCE'S CAR WASN'T GOOD FOR LONG TRIPS.
J
ERSEY
wasn't even too far, and the
old bucket of bolts,
as he called her, only barely made it back to Manhattan. Night had already fallen over the city by the time he parked, three blocks away from Maggie's, for safety's sake. Some of the street lamps were out along the roundabout way he took to get over to her block, but he preferred it that way.

The darker, the better.

The things he had heard from Frankie, cloistered away in that “hospital” out in Sussex, half-insane and scared of his own shadow, had bothered him for the whole ride back. It couldn't all be true, that would be too much. But there
was_a
kernel of truth in it. There had to be. Too many weird things had been going on lately for it to all be demented raving. Sorting out the fact from the fiction, or whatever you wanted to call it—that was the trick.

One word stuck in his head. One word connected everything.

Morrigan.

That was what Sean had said, himself half-dazed
and muttering at the time. What the hell was Morrigan? Something that had scared the hell out of one of the toughest wiseguys Vince had ever known, and something Sean kept repeating when Sam Calabrese's name had come up.

Vince wasn't a pencil and paper kind of guy. He preferred to think things out in his head, or sometimes, to think out loud. He did that as the events of the past days tumbled through his mind. Maybe it was because of such, or maybe it was just fatigue, but for whatever reason, he didn't see the figure that lurked behind him as he turned the corner to Maggie's.

“Morrigan. Morrigan,” he repeated, right up until he heard the rustle of leather.

He turned, and he cursed himself for an instant that he had let his guard down.

The figure darted out from behind a row of parked cars. Even in the tricky evening light, Vince could make out his distinct features. It was Rat.

The ex-cop wasted no time. He was outside Maggie's place. He had led the bastard right to them. His revolver flew out of his shoulder holster. He cocked back the hammer with a twist of his callused thumb.

Rat moved quickly, lithe and slinky like his namesake. He was between two cars, then behind another. Vince could hear him breathing, heavy and wheezing. He could see the shine of his shoes, reflecting the cold streetlights, and he couldn't miss the glint of sharpened steel in his grip.

It was that deadly blade that lunged at him a moment later, once, then twice. Both missed, but only by inches.
The dark man moved so fast, a strike, then a feint. Vince tried to get a clear shot, but he was like a whirlwind, in three places at once.

His next cut sliced open a gash in Vince's leg. He let loose a scream from deep in his belly. He turned, determined to shoot at the next thing he saw.

But there was nothing.

For a terrible, long moment, Vince scanned the block. Rat had vanished. He listened. He heard nothing, just the usual groans and chatters of the city at night.

For a second, as he turned toward Maggie, he caught a wisp of a high-pitched whine. It ended quickly, though, when a dart pierced the wet skin at the back of his neck, and he fell to the pavement.

From behind a pile of cans and bags there arose the being some called Scylla, and others knew as Rat. The one some knew as a woman, and others referred to as a man.

There were two more such darts still in his hand. Despite his speed in eluding Vince, he stumbled as he approached the fallen man. A colorless drool seeped from his mouth as he breathed. Dark, crusty film infested his hands, like a fungus that had also spread to his face.

“Worthy foe, I have to say,” Scylla whispered, lifting the body from the pavement and easing it into his own car. “Another few minutes, and you'd have outlasted me.”

S
CYLLA WAS BREATHING HEAVY.
H
E COULD BARELY
open the door when he heard the knock. He opened it, heedless of the fact that the slumped and unconscious body of Vince Sicario was on the floor in full view.

“Charybdis, my dear. I haven't the words,” he sighed, the tall woman slipping through the doorway.

“Have I not always been there for you, Scylla?” Charybdis answered, seeing her long-estranged lover for the third time in two days. The rat-faced man was coughing. He looked drained.

Charybdis had received the call almost an hour ago. Scylla had stalked and stunned his prey, the man known to be the friend of Lucifer. The man he had been hunting for days. But his symptoms had overcome him before he could finish his task. He had made it to the small and dingy Times Square flophouse where he'd been sleeping of late. Now he needed help.

“The master bade me seek out and snare this Vince Sicario individual. I have done so, but I am no longer able to carry on. The molting has overtaken me. I must rest,”
Scylla said, collapsing to the floor next to Vince.

“I will watch over you,” Charybdis said.

Rat tried hard to shake his head and raise his hands.

“No. You mustn't,” he said.

Charybdis knelt down, stroking her hand over his pus-drooling face. She felt his ear start to come loose and so aborted the gentle touch with a sigh.

“I will not leave you, not after we've been apart for so long. The Morrigan can wait. Lucifer can wait. Let them all wait. We have,” Charybdis replied.

“My love,” Scylla muttered, smiling. “I have not done this for the Morrigan, or anyone else. Do you not see? This is my answer. I have done what you asked me to do. For us. But you must finish the work that I have started. This is the trickster's friend. This is the key to finding Lucifer. To freeing …”

Scylla fell unconscious, in his lost lover's arms.

“I will do as you ask, my cherished,” Charybdis said, her hand on his heavily crusted face.

In a moment, the rodent-featured man fell fully into slumber, content to rest in the cocoon that would soon grow over his entire body.

Charybdis merely smiled. She laid a soft kiss on the raw, ooze-slathered space where his ear had been.

Vince awoke as he was being set down. It was gentle, but even a gentle move made his sides hurt, and his head throb
even more. The scarf that had been his blindfold was pulled off by a woman, he thought, but his eyes needed a moment to adjust.

He was in a small room. It was dark, and his bearer was lighting candles in several places. The floorboards looked charred. There were piles of musty clothes lumped in the corner, beside what appeared to be a dresser of some sort.

There were no chairs, but he had been set against a wall, on a part of the floor that appeared to have been swept clean. As his eyes became used to the lowlight, he made out the figure of an African female. She did not speak and went about seeing after the place. He was about to say something when she turned for the only door and exited.

“What in the name of … ?” he exclaimed, to an empty room.

It did not remain so for long, however.

As if in response to his expletives, the door opened from the outside. The child Argus entered.

“Who the hell?” Vince began.

“Please do not be hostile Mr. Sicario. We mean you no harm,” came the response, strangely accented and spoken in the peculiar voice of a youth.

When Argus neared, Vince could see that he was addressed by a mere toddler. The boy did not appear well, though. He was naked, and he limped along with his weight almost totally supported by a cane, as though both of his legs were broken. The child's skin was covered by hundreds of cancerous growths, interrupted in a few places by massive tumors that completely distended his flesh. His
little eyes gleamed a strange reddish hue.

“What the hell is goin' on here? Who are you?” Vince managed.

“Many questions, not very much time. You owe us a debt, do you not? My people have done you a service. That man who stunned you, he was under orders to bring you into the custody of others who would ultimately have killed you,” Argus answered, though with much trouble. He appeared to be in pain. Even drawing breath seemed to drain the strength from his tiny body.

“Rat?”

“Is that what she was called here? Her actual name is Scylla, though she was known by many names to your kind. I am called Argus, by the way.”

“She?”

“Yes. I know. She appeared quite masculine to you. Merely an illusion, I assure you,” Argus said, coughing.

“This doesn't make any sense,” Vince replied, heedless of the introductions, his head still throbbing.

“You may be surprised to learn that I agree with you, but now is not the time for that discussion. You are in no danger here, I assure you. The poison in your system is mild, but it has not yet worked its way out. Sleep. Tomorrow we will talk again.”

Vince wanted answers, despite the ache in his gut, the cut on his leg and the pain in his skull. Argus, however, did not seem up for the conversation. His words finished, he trudged back out of the room, and closed the door behind him.