Run, warned Tom again, get away from him. Go—now!
“Have you come to let the darkness take you?” The man wore a strange little smile as he spoke those words, and he seemed oblivious to Nix’s pistol and Benny’s sword. “The darkness wants to take you. The darkness wants to take us all. Do you not agree?”
“Um . . . no?” replied Benny uncertainly. “Not today, thanks.”
Saint John’s eyes were filled with a strange light, as if he could read Benny’s thoughts. Benny thought it might have been ordinary madness, but there was something else, too. Something he had never seen before, and it chilled him to the bone. It was a light of absolute fanatical belief. Not a simple faith, like Benny had seen in the eyes of way-station monks like Brother David, nor the desperate hope that was always present in the eyes of Pastor Kellogg back home. No, this was something else. This was a kind of insanity. And this man seemed to be engaged in his own inner conversation with things only he could see. Gods? Monsters?
Chong had quoted a passage to Benny after the Gameland affair was over. It was something a German philosopher named Nietzsche had written more than a century ago. “‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster,’” Chong recited as the four of them walked away from Tom’s grave and the column of smoke that rose above the dust and fire and ash of Gameland. “‘And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.’”
The very thought of that had chilled Benny back then, and it returned now as a cold breath on the nape of his neck, because he was absolutely positive that it explained what he was seeing right now. This man—this complete stranger and utter wacko—was someone who had looked far too long into the abyss. Benny knew this with an intuitive flash, because looking into his eyes was like looking into the very same abyss. Into a bottomless well of horror and death. These thoughts, complex as they were, tumbled through his mind in less than a second.
Behind them, somewhere in the woods, Benny could hear more shouts. Riot’s voice, and Sarah’s. Then the roars of the quads as the reapers hunted them.
Saint John nodded gravely to Nix.
“Nyx,” he said, his eyes taking on a dreamy quality, “daughter of Chaos, mother of Darkness and Light. Mother of the Fates, Sleep, Death, Strife, and Pain. Sweet mother of all shadows.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Benny could see the gun trembling in Nix’s hand.
Saint John said, “Please . . . forgive me my weakness, but I beg you to tell me—are you her? Did Mother Rose call you from the darkness in our hour of need?”
“Look, just back off,” warned Nix, taking her pistol in two hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but we don’t want trouble.”
“Trouble?” The man looked mystified. “You, of all that walk this earth, have nothing to fear from me—or any of our kindred.” He suddenly smiled, and for a moment that smile seemed genuinely happy.
Nix cleared her throat. “Mister, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Whoever you think we are—we’re not. We’re not part of whatever you’re doing, and we don’t want to be. We just want to leave, okay? Don’t try anything and don’t try to follow us or I swear to God that I’ll shoot you.”
The man who called himself Saint John of the Knife nodded, as if Nix had said something he both understood and liked. “Yes, yes, Goddess, I understand that the darkness is yours to give, and I welcome it with all my heart. I am a reaper, and I am yours body and soul until the darkness closes around us all!” His words, strange as they were, had the cadence of a church litany, and that made Benny’s skin crawl. “Kill me now, or come with me to spread darkness to the heathens out there.” He pointed to the field. “And then I would be so honored to kneel before you and accept your gift. A bullet, a knife . . . each is a path to glory.”
“Nix,” Benny said cautiously, “let’s go.”
They began backing away from Saint John. At first he smiled, apparently thinking that they were going to lead him in some kind of insane charge out onto the field, but when he saw that Nix and Benny were merely increasing the distance to go around him, his expression changed. At first it was lit by an expectant hopefulness, his smile lingering; and then his face grew confused.
“Holy one,” called Saint John, “where are you going?”
“Far, far away from here,” said Nix, “you incredible freak.”
Even as she said it, Benny knew that it was a mistake.
A terrible mistake.
The reaper’s expression changed once more; the confusion melted away to reveal harsh lines of an ice-cold rage.
“You are not her,” growled Saint John in a low, feral voice. His pale face grew flushed, and his dark eyes filled with a dreadful light. “You steal the name of my goddess and you profane everything that is holy.”
He spat onto the ground between them.
“I never said that I was.”
Benny pulled her arm. “Nix, come on.”
“And you, boy,” growled Saint John, “you damn yourself by speaking her holy name, and you do it in the presence of a saint of her son’s sacred Night Church. No fire exists in hell to burn that blasphemy from your soul.”
“Hey, look, pal,” snapped Benny, “we’re not blaspheming anyone or anything. And if that’s what it sounds like, then we’re sorry. Like she said, we’re not who you think we are, so we’re just going to leave. Pretend you never saw us. You go ahead and do whatever it is you were doing, and we’ll be out of your life and—”
Saint John spat again and took a threatening step forward, his fists balled. “Where are you from? Are you scouts from Sanctuary?” His eyes flared, and he bared his teeth. “That’s it, isn’t it? You think you can spy on the holy children of my god in order to lay a trap for us?”
“Still don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” said Benny, “and we’re still leaving. Adios.”
“You pathetic maggots,” sneered Saint John. “Do you think Sanctuary can hide from us? Do you think it can withstand us? We are the fists of God on earth.”
“Whatever,” said Benny.
“Sanctuary will fall, as every other town has fallen, as all evil must fall. The reapers will open every red door and wash its streets in blood. You cannot hope to defy the will of the only true god. Thanatos—all praise to the darkness.”
Saint John reached into the billowy folds of his shirt and drew out two knives, and he did it so quickly and smoothly that they seemed to appear magically in his hands. Benny had seen enough skilled knife fighters—Tom, Solomon Jones, Sally Two-Knives, and others—to recognize that this man was a master of these blades.
Nix saw it too, and she stopped backing away and settled into a wide-legged shooter’s stance. “Don’t be stupid,” she warned. Her voice did not sound like that of a fifteen-year-old girl. Benny knew that she was deadly serious.
The reaper held his ground but pointed one of the knives at them. “You are heretics and blasphemers, and in the name of Thanatos—praise be to the darkness—I curse you. Do you hear? Do you possess enough wit to know that the mouth of hell has opened to consume you? I curse you with pain and suffering, with loss and heartbreak. You will never know love and you will never know peace and you will live long years with no darkness to gather you in and give you rest. This I swear in the name of my god.”
“I don’t want to kill you,” said Nix, “but if you try anything, I’ll shoot you in the leg.”
Her voice and her hands shook as she spoke, but Benny knew that she’d pull the trigger if she had to.
Saint John studied Nix’s face.
“So be it,” he said softly, and slowly resheathed his knives. Then he pushed up the sleeve to reveal his left forearm, and with his long right thumbnail he cut a deep red line in his flesh. Blood welled, nearly black in the shadows under the trees. The reaper smeared blood on his fingertips, spat on the blood, and then flicked it at them. It did not reach them, but that didn’t seem to matter to the man in bl
ack. His face was alight with triumph, as if what he had just done sealed his threats into the fabric of reality. “May you live long,” he snarled, as if that was the worst thing one person could wish upon another.
Then Saint John of the Knife turned and melted like a bad dream into the darkness that lurked under the tall trees.
Benny and Nix stood there, sword raised, gun pointing, mouths hanging open.
The birds and monkeys were silent in the trees, and the whole forest seemed to hold its breath. Drops of blood glistened on leaves that trembled and swayed. Nix lowered her pistol and began to tremble all over. Benny wrapped his arm around her, but he had his own case of the shakes and wasn’t sure he was able to offer any real comfort.
“What just happened?” breathed Nix, her voice small and fragile. She used her thumb to gingerly uncock the pistol’s hammer and lower it into place. “I mean, seriously . . . what just happened?”
“I—I don’t know,” Benny admitted.
“Did I provoke him? Did I just make it worse?”
“No,” Benny lied. “I don’t think so.”
They backed away from the spot where the man—the reaper—had stood. Then, after five paces, they turned and ran as far and as fast as they could.
33
THE MAN CALLED SAINT JOHN STEPPED OUT FROM BEHIND A TREE AND watched the two teenagers run away.
When he’d left them, he’d gone into the woods and then circled around on their blind side, standing downwind of them so he could study them. He could have come up behind them and cut their throats, and his hands ached to do just that, but he was caught in a moment of indecision.
Before he had confronted them, Saint John had heard the boy call the girl “Nyx.”
Nyx was the mother of his god.
He rubbed at the cut on his arm and frowned in doubt. His vexation with them had been righteous but hasty. Were they, in fact, heretics who profaned her holy name?
Or . . . was this some kind of test?
He chewed on that. It would not be the first such test laid before him. He remembered that night a few days after the gray plague started when he found a wretched woman being chased through the streets of a burning city by a pack of abusive men. Saint John had seen such horrors a thousand times as the world crumbled and died, but this one instance drew his attention. On some level too profound for him to fully grasp, the events were part of a test of his faith and his resolve. It was a subtle test, and even after all these years he could not understand every aspect of it; but what was important was that he recognized it as a test.
Against his habits and better judgment, Saint John had helped that woman. He saved her from the men by opening red mouths in their flesh. Their souls flowed into the darkness.
The woman appeared to flee from him, but soon Saint John found her hiding in a church. Hiding with twenty-seven angels. Twenty-seven celestial beings who had chosen to take human form, pretending to be orphaned children.
They had adopted Saint John, and he had adopted them.
Had he not accepted the challenge of that first test, Saint John would never have met the woman who would become the pope of his Night Church.
Mother Rose.
And the twenty-seven angels?
They were his first reapers.
Saint John raised his arm to his mouth and slowly, sensually licked up each drop of his own blood. It was hot and salty, smelling of copper and tasting like iron. Saint John’s eyelids fluttered closed for a moment. Even his own blood was so delicious. All blood was delicious.
He wondered, not for the first time, if there were really vampires in the world, and if they were not merely men like him whose minds had been opened by God so they could appreciate the perfect taste of blood.
He decided that this was probably the case.
In the distance he heard a scream that rose louder than the roar of the quads on which his reapers went about their sacred work. Was it male or female? It was hard to say, because there is a level of pain so pure that it strips away gender and identity, and that was what he heard now.
Saint John nodded his appreciation. Most of the reapers were ordinary folk—believers, true, but in no other way exceptional. They were blunt.
Whoever sculpted that scream was one of the special ones. One of his angels—of which only nine were left on this side of the darkness—or one of the recruits who had fully embraced the way of the blade and the glory of the red mouth.
He smiled and nodded to himself.
He began to walk through the woods, following the footprints of the girl who called herself Nyx and the boy who served as her knight. He did not hurry. The world’s clock had run down, and haste was irrelevant.
In all it had been a good week’s work. Twenty-five hundred of the heretics had gone into the darkness at Treetops. Only six hundred of them escaped the burning of their town. Of those, four hundred reached the mountains of southern Nevada. Barely two hundred made it to this patch of wild forestland in the arid Mojave.
Saint John doubted that a hundred heretics still remained on this side of the darkness.
Soon red doors would open for each of them. The reapers were doing everything he and Mother Rose had trained them to do, and they did it with the unquenchable diligence of true faith.
A quad motor growled behind him, and Saint John turned to wait as one of his reapers hurried to find him. When the machine came into view and Saint John saw who was riding it, he smiled.
Brother Peter.
Peter had been the first of the twenty-seven angels to embrace the way of the blade, and it had taken no urging at all. Peter was a natural, a prodigy. The number of heretics he had ushered into the darkness was legion, second only to Saint John himself.
The quad pulled up and Brother Peter turned off the engine, allowing a soothing quiet to settle over the woods. He placed a hand over the angel wings on his chest and gave a slight bow of the head.
“Honored One,” he said softly.
Peter was in his early twenties and had grown up tall and powerful, but his face was unmarked because he had never, in all the years Saint John had known him, smiled. Not once. His scalp was tattooed with a tangle of thornbushes through which centipedes crawled.
“How goes the crusade?” asked Saint John.
“Carter split his people into six groups. He probably thought that would make it easier for them to escape, but it made it easier for us to hunt them. We opened the red doors of two of the groups. Brother Alan and Sister Gail are going to take the third in a pincer movement, because that group went into a valley, and Brother Andrew is hunting a fourth near the creek.”
“And the other two?”
“Our people are looking.”
“That is well.” Saint John approved of Andrew, who was a recent convert and a former town guard from Treetops. It was he who had provided Brother Peter with a map to the tree-house city where Carter and his people had lived until a week ago. The knives of the reapers had been bloodied from tip to pommel that night, and every day since.
“I met Brother Simon a few minutes ago,” said Peter. “He asked me to tell you that Mother Rose has called a meeting of the team leaders.”
“Where?”
Brother Peter paused. “They are to meet her at the Shrine of the Fallen in two hours.”
Saint John was a long time in responding. He folded his hands behind his back and seemed to be interested in the dance of a pair of dragonflies.
“I want you to be there,” he said softly. “But don’t be seen. I want to know everything that is said at that meeting.”
“Yes, Honored One.”
“And I want to know if anyone—anyone—enters the shrine itself.”
“Mother Rose would never allow it. It’s her shrine,” said the young reaper. “Even I’ve never been inside.”
“Nor have I,” murmured Saint John.
The two reapers regarded each other for a silent moment.
Brother Peter frowned. “Why call a meeti
ng there, of all places? Why a place she has expressly forbidden anyone to visit? I—don’t understand.”
Saint John’s smile was small and cold. “God speaks to each of us in a different way. Who is to say what secrets he whispers to our beloved Rose?”
His smile was warm, but his tone was cold.
After a long silence, Brother Peter nodded. “There are times I do not entirely . . . understand what Mother Rose does, Honored One.”
“Oh?” said Saint John.
“Perhaps I am too simple a man, but sometimes I cannot connect her actions with the needs of our holy purpose.”
A faint smile played over Saint John’s lips. “I’m sure God forgives you for such doubts.”
The younger man bowed. As he straightened he said, “There is another matter, Honored One.”
“Oh?”
“I was patrolling the forest beyond the shrine, looking to see if Sister Margaret dared to lead any of the heretics that way . . .”
Saint John nodded encouragement.
“ . . . and I found five reapers who had red doors opened in them.”
The saint spread his hands. “We knew that Carter would fight. He is stubborn in his heresy, and there are many like him in his group.”
“No, Honored One, I do not believe that Carter or any of his people killed them. Whoever took them did it quietly and with great skill.”
“What level of skill?”
Brother Peter’s face was as bland as ever, but his eyes were alight. “Possibly as good as me. And around the bodies I found animal tracks.”
“A dog?” asked Saint John.
“A very large dog.”
“Ah,” said Saint John, raising his eyebrows. “You think he’s back? The ranger?”
“Yes, Honored One, I do . . . although that confuses me. Am I mistaken, or did not Brother Alexi swear that he killed the ranger? Did he not swear before God that he smashed the life out of him with his great hammer?”
“He did say so,” agreed Saint John.
Brother Peter began to add something to that, but he bit it back. However, Saint John nodded as if the rest had been spoken.
Mother Rose had said she witnessed her pet giant kill this particular heretic. This mercenary who served the evil ones—the doctors and scientists; this killer who preyed on the reapers.