Rita Dollans moved her wheelchair closer to the television screen so that she could see. Her body had been racked with rheumatoid arthritis for years and she had great difficulty getting the chair precisely where she wanted it, but she managed.
And now she eagerly waited to hear what the Lord had to say.
Denise Kelleher cradled her crying infant in her arms, rocking him ever so gently. She wanted to hear the message, and as she bent forward to pick up the remote from the coffee table, as the little girl’s face filled the screen, and the child prepared to speak…
Her baby went quiet.
Almost as if he wanted to hear the message, too.
Dillon Ratner looked at his watch as he sat in the waiting room of the Toyota dealership. He’d been there for well over two hours. He’d brought a book and had read several chapters, but was now tired of reading and tired of waiting.
He was about to get up and check on the progress of his Camry when he noticed how quiet it had become in the dealership, everyone around him transfixed to the image of a little girl on the sixty-inch flat screen that hung on the wall.
Curious, he reached up, pulling the headphones that were attached to his iPhone from his ears.
And was assailed by the message.
The message had started to crawl into Peter Vestmore’s mind. He hadn’t any intention of even listening to the sickly-looking kid, wanting instead to check on an eBay bid he’d made for an original The Good, the Bad and the Ugly movie poster, but there was something in the little girl’s eyes, something in the strange, foreign words that she was speaking.
Something that made him start to scream and the blood begin to gush from his nose, now that he had looked.
Unable to look away.
And the message of the dying Grigori poured out over the ether, transmitted through the child and into a digital signal picked up by Algernon Stearns’ cameras, broadcast to a waiting world.
The message reached out to those who were watching and listening, grabbing them in a steely grip, as it started to fill their brains with the sad lament of the Grigori’s passing.
And all who saw and heard this mournful dirge were touched as they had never been touched before.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Even trapped within the sphere of magickal energy, Remy could feel what was happening.
He could feel the Grigori dying, their life energies leaking out of their bodies, their psychic communication—their terrorist act against an unsuspecting public—flowing from their dying minds and into the child-shaped golem and out across the ether.
It was the most horrible thing that he had ever seen, and he had seen much on this world since he’d decided to walk it.
The child had begun to speak….
The machines beneath her bed had started to hum ominously, gauges and dials illuminated as the first inklings of death energy began to flow.
The sorcerer gasped at his first taste, face twisted in ecstasy as the trickle of accumulated life force was delivered. His exoskeleton sparked and glowed with unearthly power, the hum of the great machines growing louder and louder, like a hive of angry bees.
Remy again attempted to summon what strength that he could, pushing against his magickal confines in the hopes that he might free himself to do something—anything—to prevent this travesty.
The magick struck him down once more, like the crack of a million whips on his nervous system. The pain was everywhere, and he dropped back to the floor of the energy sphere that held him aloft.
He lay on his stomach, too weak to rise, waiting, when he noticed something.
It was the flicker of lights that caught his attention.
Remy watched the figures in the control booth start to scramble. He perked up, watching, waiting for what could be an opportunity.
The lights went dim again, the hum and pulse of the machinery beneath the child’s bed sounding a bit strained as its flow of power began to be tested.
It’s the power, Remy thought, pushing himself up into a sitting position. Something was straining the electricity to the building—to the studio.
The look on Stearns’ face was priceless: ecstasy replaced with shocked surprise, blending into absolute rage. If Remy hadn’t felt like a hundred miles of bad road, he would have laughed.
“What’s happening?” Stearns screamed over the labored hum of the infernal machines. He looked to the control room. The PA crackled that the entire building was experiencing some weird power fluctuations and that they were looking to fixing it.
“Fix it now!” Stearns shrieked, as the lights grew dim and the robotic cameras ceased to function.
And when the cameras stopped, so did the deadly Grigori transmission and so did death.
The room went completely dark and stayed that way, a sudden silence like a death pall falling over the room. Something was happening, more than just a power failure, and Remy hadn’t a clue as to what it was. And from the looks of it, neither did Stearns.
“What is this?” Stearns demanded. He lumbered over to the Grigori, who had dropped to their knees, blood pooling beneath them. Remy could see that they were somehow still alive, but just barely.
“What is happening?” Stearns screeched, reaching out with a gauntleted hand to grip the shoulder of Armaros. The angel was too weak to speak, tumbling onto his side as the room began to quake.
Dust rained down from above; loose tiles dropped from the ceiling. Remy could feel a change in the air, a sudden drop in the temperature and air pressure that made his ears ache.
“You!” Stearns screamed, pointing one of his armored fingers at him. “This has something to do with you. Doesn’t it?”
Remy wished that he could take the credit, but he barely had the strength to stand, never mind being behind whatever this was. Stearns reached up with his other hand, manipulating the sorcerous energies that surrounded Remy, shattering the sphere and letting him drop to the floor.
“You will stop it this instant,” Stearns warned, his metal-clad feet stomping across the floor toward him. He grabbed Remy by the front of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. “Do you realize how much is at stake?” Stearns bellowed, shaking him.
Remy couldn’t help but smile. “Was at stake,” he corrected.
He watched Stearns’ face twist with rage and he figured that he just might not survive what was sure to follow when the building around them shook with so much force that the sound of shattering glass could be heard drifting inside the soundproof room from outside.
Stearns lost his balance, releasing Remy as he fell.
Remy landed atop some broken ceiling tiles; the room continued to shimmy and shake beneath him. If they were in Los Angeles, he might have believed that the big one had finally arrived, but this was Boston.
Stearns lurched around the studio, desperate to salvage something from the events that were unfolding. He went to the child sitting on the bed. It was as if she had been frozen in time, her body rigid, eyes fixed to where the cameras had been focused on her.
Stearns started to disconnect himself from the machines, attempting to detach the cables that would have fed him the precious life energies as they’d flowed through the child.
Remy managed to rise to his knees, his body now more numb than pained, fooling him into thinking that he was better off than he actually was. Holding on to the corner of a small desk, he stood, swaying from side to side as the building did the same.
Glancing up, he saw that Stearns’ technicians were still running about, trying to fix the situation, but Remy doubted a solution was forthcoming.
At first he thought it was a trick of his eyes, a lingering effect of Stearns’ sorcery, but he soon came to realize it was more than that. There was something wrong with the shadows in the room, puddles of darkness expanding like liquid as the building violently shook again.
Stearns had frozen as he knelt before his damnable machine, and that was when Remy began to feel it.
This was more than
a mere temperature shift or a change in air pressure. The air had become incredibly heavy as the darkness became even thicker, darker even than darkness should be….
And Remy found himself thinking of a world composed entirely of shadow, a world he had visited not too long ago, a world that still held a dear friend.
A world he had every intention of returning to once he was able.
The darkness had become all-encompassing, every existing speck of light swallowed up by the hungry dark. It was even getting difficult to breathe. An attempt to summon even the slightest hint of angelic fire, to throw some light within the studio, met with total failure as the air grew heavier.
The silence had become almost deafening. And then the room seemed to explode, the very structure of the place tearing itself apart as Remy was thrown into the air by the disintegrating environment.
The atmosphere of the room felt suddenly different, and as he again attempted to get back on his feet he found that the floor of the studio had become dramatically uneven, with what appeared to be metal girders rising through the floor. It was almost as if the building had been twisted by the hands of some unspeakable force.
Through the thick clouds of swirling dust, Remy saw the hint of light, an unearthly glow that drew him toward it. The unknown source illuminated the twisted remains of the studio, showing a place that no longer resembled the room it had been mere minutes ago. Remy wasn’t quite sure what he was bearing witness to, but it was as if another space—another room entirely—had somehow been crammed into the studio.
The little girl’s bed had been mercilessly tossed across the room by the traumatic upheaval, and Remy found the golem child curled in a ball on the floor. He knelt down beside her, pulling her into his arms. She was crying, as a small child would, and he could not help but comfort her.
“I don’t understand,” she kept repeating over and over, and Remy shared her confusion.
Kneeling on the floor, he saw now that the glow was coming from beneath a set of double doors that hung strangely askew at the top of a set of broken stone steps. Stearns stood at the bottom of those steps and started to climb.
It was when the doors came suddenly open, flying from their hinges in an explosion of light and sound, that Remy realized what he was looking at. He knew these doors and the broken stone steps that led up to them.
A striking figure stood just inside the doorway, his body glowing in its efforts to contain the power that was now housed within it, a power that Remy had known intimately, for it had belonged to him for many millennia.
Konrad Deacon stood in the entryway to his home, glaring at Algernon Stearns, who lay upon his armored back like a turtle unable to right himself.
“Hello, Algernon,” Deacon said, wings of fire unfurling. “It’s been a long, long time.”
They had temporarily stopped in the stairway, Angus needing a quick breather, before continuing on up to the television studio, when the building started to shake.
“Okay,” Francis said as the lighting flickered.
The temperature dramatically plummeted, and Francis was nearly overwhelmed with an odd sensation reminiscent of dropping down in an elevator.
“Did you feel that?” Francis asked.
“Yes,” Angus said, in between heavy breaths as the hallway went entirely to darkness. “And it isn’t anything normal.”
A dancing orange flame suddenly appeared, hovering above Angus’ outstretched palm, shedding some light in the stairway.
The building was rocking, a powerful vibration moving through the stairs and the metal handrail beneath their grips.
“Earthquake?” Francis suggested.
“Worse,” Angus answered, as cracks began to appear in the wall. “Much worse.”
And then they heard it from somewhere in the stairwell below them: a horrible roar unrecognizable to anything that existed in this world.
“I’m guessing that’s part of the problem you’re talking about?”
“A part,” Angus said. “We might want to get out of this stairwell as quickly as possible,” the sorcerer suggested as they listened to the new sounds of something large and growling dragging its considerable weight up the concrete stairs.
The light from the hovering flame showed them that they were near an entrance to one of the upper floors, and Francis darted toward it, pulling open the door.
What they found on that particular floor was not at all what they had expected.
“What the fuck is this?” Francis asked, totally taken aback. It looked as though they were in the hallway of some great old mansion run through a fun-house mirror. Everything was skewed to a bizarre angle.
“It’s what I suspected,” Angus said, moving the flame around to pierce the darkness so that they could better see their environment.
“Which is?”
“We’re no longer in Stearns’ building,” the sorcerer said.
“What the fuck are you talking about, we’re no longer in the building?”
“Right now we’re no longer inside the building,” the sorcerer repeated. “Outside that door, yes, we’re in the building…. Down the staircase a floor, where we heard the unnatural sounds…probably not.”
“You’ve fucking lost me,” Francis said.
“Don’t ask me how,” Angus started to explain. “But I believe that Konrad Deacon has returned, and in doing so has somehow transferred his estate back to this realm, occupying the same space as Stearns’ office building.”
“So the two are sort of smooshed together,” Francis asked, eyes darting around the corridor. He slowly removed the Pitiless pistol from within his jacket.
“If you want to be scientific,” Angus responded.
The shadows in the hall appeared to be moving, shifting, flowing along the walls and floor. There were sounds coming from the ever-expanding pools of blackness.
“Anything to say about that?” Francis asked, watching the flowing darkness.
“Nothing other than it appears as though some of the shadow world where Deacon has been living seems to have leaked through along with his house.”
“That can’t be good,” Francis said, watching something large and covered with black spines erupt from the shadow pool, leaping from one body of darkness to disappear into another.
“It’s not good at all,” Angus agreed, his fingers beginning to crackle with defensive magick. “Especially if it’s still leaking.”
“Leaking is never good.”
“No.”
Francis felt what little hair he had left on the back of his neck suddenly stand straight on end. He didn’t have time to utter a warning or to tell Angus to get away; the former Guardian angel just reacted, spinning around and firing at the large, serpentine shape that had silently risen from a body of shadow that had formed behind them.
The pistol roared angrily, a seemingly endless supply of bullets entering the thick, trunklike body of the snakelike thing that appeared to be molded from tar. Seemingly unfazed by the gunshots, the creature lunged, its cavernous maw open to consume at least one, or maybe even both, if it were lucky. Francis dove from its path, continuing to fire into the serpent’s shiny black face.
Angus clothed himself in a shield of crackling blue energy. The monster’s snout struck the obstruction violently and made its already sunny disposition all the more pleasant. Frustrated, the serpent reared back, opening its mouth wider, its jaws unhinging as if getting ready to swallow an egg.
The gunshots weren’t helping matters, and Francis slipped the pistol back inside his jacket and went through his duffel bag of weapons in the hopes of finding something that could damage the beast of shadow.
The serpent clamped down upon Angus’ bubble, its curved obsidian fangs actually penetrating the energy sphere. It pulled back savagely, dragging the bubble, and Angus with it, toward the body of liquid darkness from where it had originated.
Francis found an ornate short sword and lunged at the beast. It was probably only supposed to be us
ed for special rituals, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and he swung the sword with all his might. The razor’s edge bit deeply into the oily black flesh of the monster, but it failed to slow its progress. With horror, Francis watched as the serpent disappeared back into the bubbling liquid pitch, dragging the energy sphere, with the screaming Angus inside, down beneath the shadow.
At the edge, Francis looked down into the still surface, not a ripple showing what had just transpired. He considered diving into the pool in search of the sorcerer, but decided against it. He didn’t like the sorcerer that much, and, besides, he suspected that Angus had already met a nasty fate.
He stepped away from the edge, not wanting any surprises. There were strange noises coming from other patches of expanding shadow all around him, and he figured it would probably be in his best interest to get the fuck out of there and try to find another section of the office building that didn’t have a leaking problem.
Turning his back, he returned to the duffel, tossing the short sword back inside, and was just about to take hold of the handles when he again sensed something happening behind him.
Francis barely had time to turn as the great serpent surged up from the lake of darkness, a shriek of ferocity escaping from its cavernous mouth. Leaving the duffel, Francis leapt toward the corridor in front of him, evading puddles of darkness that littered the floor as he ran. He chanced a quick glance over his shoulder and was shocked to see the upper trunk of the shadow beast pitch forward, landing heavily on the floor outside the pool to lie perfectly still.
Hesitating, he watched the thing. The serpent appeared dead, and Francis had to wonder if eating Angus had somehow poisoned it. He stepped closer to the dead monster to retrieve his bag of weapons when he saw movement ahead—not from the shadow beast, but from the now bubbling pool.
What the fuck now? the Guardian angel wondered, dashing ahead to quickly snatch up his bag and get as far away as he could before some other nightmare emerged.
And something did rise from the tarlike body of liquid, coughing and sputtering as it reached to grab hold of the edge of the floor. It was Angus, but there was something bubbling up from below behind him.