September 23
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Octavian sat in a chair beside Nikki's open coffin, holding her hand. He knew it was absurd, clutching the cold, stiff fingers of a corpse as if he were offering comfort to the dead. Even the idea that he might draw some solace for himself from such contact was ridiculous. One glance at her face, perfectly painted and still as a wax figure, should have driven all such sentimentality from his heart. He had lived centuries in this world and many more in Hell, had seen death and sorrow in catastrophic proportions and watched loved ones die screaming. How could he fool himself into thinking it meant anything at all for him to sit here and bid farewell to a woman whose life had been extinguished days ago?
And yet . . .
'I'm alive,' he whispered, running his thumb over her knuckles, studying the lips he had once kissed and which had been sewn together by unloving hands. 'All that time I fought so hard to hang on to something inside me that I could call "human". And then I was human again. Alive. And I had you by my side, and despite everything, I thought we could live in the world the way ordinary people do. That we could just . . . breathe.'
He hung his head, angry with himself. She was gone. He was talking to nobody but himself and it made him a fool.
Only, he didn't feel like a fool.
'Now I feel like I can't breathe at all.'
He released her hand and placed it carefully the way he had found it, over her heart with the other. Her heart did not beat and her lungs did not draw air. There would be no more music from within her.
Anger and grief - the yin and yang of tragedy's aftermath - had been twined together within him ever since he had walked into her hotel room and found her. This morning, grief had come to the fore. When Commander Metzger had come to him before dawn to tell him about the explosion at Bannerman's Arsenal, his numbness had only deepened. Local police river patrol boats had been the first to respond, followed quickly by the state police and Army and UN officials and investigators. Five soldiers had survived the explosion, three of them gravely wounded, but there had been no sign of Charlotte. The lack of any trace at all suggested that she had either shifted or been totally incinerated, and he chose to believe the former. The fact that she hadn't yet reported in made him wonder if she had somehow been caught between the two, in which case it would take significant strength of will for her to reintegrate herself. Charlotte had been one of Cortez's creatures at first, which Octavian found worrisome. If she didn't believe in her own survival, then her consciousness would have scattered along with her being.
Metzger had a different interpretation of Charlotte's absence. He also figured her absence meant one of two things, and that one of those was incineration. But to Metzger, the other option was treachery; he thought it very likely that Charlotte had set them all up, leading the team to Bannerman's Arsenal for the sole purpose of getting them all killed. Octavian didn't buy it. He didn't trust easily, but he had given Charlotte his trust. She had earned it in the fight against Navalica. And he believed it would require an actress of extraordinary skill to have perpetuated the sort of deception that would have been involved.
No, Charlotte was just a girl. A kid who'd been a victim and decided she wanted to take control of her future. He hoped that she hadn't died for that ambition and that he'd see her again, in time. What Metzger might do then was a concern for another day. Even Charlotte's life or death was a worry for later.
Octavian took a deep breath and let it out, steadying himself. He looked at Nikki's waxen features again, thinking the mortician's work was a pale imitation of her true beauty. His thoughts were a jumble of guilt and recrimination and fury. That her fans still gathered in front of the hotel where she had been murdered was a good sign, because it meant they had no idea where she was going to be buried. There would be no wake, only a burial service. It would be a quiet, loving farewell of which he was certain Nikki would have approved. No hours of mourning with an open casket for people she barely knew. No church service. Just words spoken at the graveside, and a body laid gently to rest.
He told himself she would have understood the speed with which all of this had to be done. The federal government had stepped in to expedite the burial at the request of the UN. They wanted Octavian's attention refocused on what they considered more important matters than grief. The swift burial would help to guarantee a private service, but that was only one reason he had agreed. Whatever Cortez had set in motion - whatever his reasons for having killed Nikki - he was closer to achieving his goals with every passing moment. Octavian meant to find him and kill him.
Nikki would have approved of that too.
When they lowered her coffin into the ground it would not be the end of his mourning, but he would no longer feel the need to be at her side. Then there would be a reckoning.
A quick rap on the door, and it swung open. The thin, gray-haired funeral home director ducked his head in.
'Mr Octavian? I'm afraid it's time, sir. May we come in?'
Octavian stood. 'Of course.'
He wiped the dampness from his eyes and felt the static crackle of magic prickling his skin. He glanced down at his hands and saw the dark, purplish energy emanating from them - his anger made manifest without him being aware of it.
The funeral director and two of his broad-shouldered sons stood just inside the room, watching him with wide, wary eyes.
'It's all right,' Octavian assured them. He tried to dispel the power seething around his hands but only managed to diminish it. 'As you say, it's time.'
He bent and kissed Nikki's forehead, as he had so often done when they embraced. Then he kissed her lips, so softly. And then he turned away, striding past the funeral director and his sons, and out the door. He thought the old man might call him back, ask him if he was certain that he did not want to stay while the casket was sealed, but none of the funeral men said a word.
All that was left was to bury her.
Nikki's fans were cleverer and more tenacious than Octavian had believed. Somehow, the word had gotten out. The gates of the cemetery were guarded by state and local police. Octavian had thought it unnecessary, but now he was glad the cops were there. As he rode in the back of the black sedan the funeral home had provided, following the hearse that carried Nikki's body, he stared out the window at the hundreds of fans who lined the last quarter mile of the road to the cemetery's gates. He hoped the presence of armed police officers would be intimidating enough to keep the burial private.
As the funeral procession turned into the cemetery entrance and passed through the arched, wrought-iron gate, Octavian saw a pair of teenagers holding each other and crying as they watched the hearse go by. A part of him wished he could let them in. He thought Nikki might have liked that as well. But the gathering that was about to take place was not only a funeral.
It was a war council.
Through the tinted glass, the graveyard looked like another world, a dusky stone garden of tombs and markers. The stillness of the place made him catch his breath, as if time had frozen outside the confines of the car. Then he noticed the way the wind shook the branches on the trees and the illusion was broken.
The procession turned left along a narrow, rutted road that led over a rise. The hearse pulled up onto the grass on the right, nearest the gravesite that had been prepared for Nikki's interment, and Octavian's driver pulled around it, parking further along on the left. The rest of the procession - fewer than a dozen cars - followed suit. The mourners had been asked to meet at the funeral home in order to form the procession to the cemetery, but Octavian had barely paid attention to them when he had come out and climbed into the sedan. He had sat in the back behind tinted glass and waited while funeral home employees carried Nikki's casket out and loaded it into the hearse.
Now, as he exited the sedan, blinking back the brightness of the autumn morning, he had his first good look at those who had come to bid her farewell. Despite the chaos of the night before and the morning, Leon Metzger had come to pay his respects. But Octavian sought other faces, other friends and allies, and as he crossed the broken road and started across the lawn to the place where the priest stood waiting, he saw them.
Kuromaku wore a charcoal-black Victorian mourning coat, nearly knee-length. His face might as well have been carved from stone, but Octavian felt strengthened by the sight of him. He had arrived with Allison, whose gray dress was nearly as somber. Her dark sunglasses revealed as little as Kuromaku's mask of stoicism. They had wanted to be with him at the funeral home but he had refused, wanting his last farewell to be private, even from his closest friends.
Amber Morrissey seemed to have come alone, but Octavian knew that was as much an illusion as her human appearance. Thanks to her encounter with chaos magic in her hometown of Hawthorne, Amber required a glamour that made others see her the way she wished them to see her . . . as the young woman she had been before Navalica had begun to transform her into a Reaper. But since it was Octavian's glamour, he could see through it easily enough, see the thing that Amber had become. He had used sorcery to slow her transformation, but the combination of his power and Navalica's had turned her into something else - something new. With her hard, burgundy skin and long hair like purple spines, she remained beautiful. Somehow even her long, vicious talons did not erase her loveliness. Neither human nor Reaper, she nevertheless had a Reaper's abilities . . . to become a wraith and sail on the wind, to become as intangible as a ghost, to reach into human beings and tear out their souls.
Octavian couldn't see him, but he knew Miles Varick had come down from New England with Amber. Like Amber, her former professor had been changed by the chaos magic Navalica had unleashed in Hawthorne. Octavian thought of him as a hungry ghost, a man turned into a vampire and then killed in the maelstrom of anarchic magic. Now he haunted his old home town, caring for the ghost of his mother, but he could drink souls and dark spirits the way a flesh and bone vampire drank blood.
'Chaos,' Miles had once said, 'is where new things are born.'
He and Amber were two very unsettling examples.
Octavian scanned faces, heartened at the sight of so many old allies, some of whom he might even call friends. Santiago had made the trip, as had two others who had fought beside Octavian and Kuromaku in the years when they had taken part in wars just to have a chance to fight for something worthy. One of them, Taweret, was a slim Egyptian who had been dragged from her dwelling on the shores of the Nile more than eight hundred years earlier and made a vampire. She had often said that her parents must have been able to see the future, for they had named her for the goddess of vengeance. The other warrior stood nearly seven feet tall, a mountain sculpted of equal parts muscle and flab. Kazimir had died in this shape and - though in time he had learned that he could have altered it - he had chosen to maintain it. Many had called him a giant, and the Shadow warrior had embraced the idea.
Like Santiago, Taweret and Kazimir had sometimes chosen sides based on reward rather than righteousness, but in the blinding light of the modern world, they had been more cautious about their allegiances. Thanks to Octavian, they had each signed the Covenant and been none too happy about it. In truth, Octavian had not been certain they would come, but he was very pleased to see them.
There were a handful of magicians in attendance, including the German necromancer that he himself had been forced to bring back from the dead two years before, trying to find a way to return the risen Afghani war dead to their graves. That had seemed a serious crisis in those days, but the definition of 'serious' continued to change.
Octavian saw Nikki's manager and her lawyer, as well as two members of her old band who had arrived with their wives or girlfriends, and who looked very wary of the strange mourners around them. There were several faces he vaguely recognized and assumed were old friends who had learned of the burial and persuaded Allison to approve their attendance. Octavian had invited those he felt ought to be here and those he needed and had left others to Allison's discretion.
As he walked toward the grave the group of mourners parted to create a path, so that he arrived at the casket much as a bride approaches her groom at the altar. But he had come to bid her farewell, not to promise her forever.
The priest, a friend of Allison's who had come down from the New York headquarters of the American Catholic Church as a favor to her, raised his arms in a symbolic embrace.
'Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming to this committal service for our sister, Nikki,' the priest began.
Octavian exhaled, relieved that he had not used her given name. She would not have wanted that. In her heart she had never been Nicole.
'The passing of a loved one is always painful, always sad, and it can create a profound emptiness within us. We must fill that empty place with our love and our memories and the knowledge that Nikki would want us to find new joy and kindness and contentment in our lives, and that she herself has gone on to find new joy and kindness, and the ultimate contentment, in the life beyond this one.'
Octavian smiled sadly, looking not at the casket but at the green veil drawn across the grave. As if he had opened a previously locked mental door, worries began to flood in. He thought of Charlotte and of the crises still raging in France and Italy, and of Cortez laughing somewhere. The priest kept talking and he vowed silently to Nikki that he would listen, that he would breathe, that he would be with her until she had been laid to rest, give her all of his attention.
The priest began to read from the Bible, holding it in one hand, even as he shook holy water from a small vial, droplets spattering the casket. A drop landed on Octavian's hand and he exhaled again, a large weight seeming to lift from him. Nikki had gone on ahead of him, but they were still connected. Once upon a time, no one could know with real certainty - no matter what faith they declared - that there were such things as Heaven and Hell, or spirits or demons or angels. But he knew firsthand, and since the Venice Jihad, years ago now, the whole world had known the truth. It amazed him how many were unwilling to accept it, but it was the truth nevertheless.
The spirit did linger on after the flesh had gone to rot.
He could not know for certain if he would meet Nikki again in the next life, but he knew that if he could, he would seek her out. For now, that would have to be enough.
The priest gave his final blessing, inviting those who were so inclined to pray with him. As low voices joined in prayer, Octavian slipped his hand from Allison's and approached the casket. He knew he ought to have waited for the priest to finish, but the desire for some contact, a final goodbye, made him ignore protocol. He stepped up and laid his hands on the smooth metal surface. No one moved to stop him and he closed his eyes, listening to the last words of the prayer.
A low grinding noise came from not far off, the sound of stone against stone.
'What the hell-' he heard Santiago say.
The priest faltered only a few lines before the last amen.
Allison shouted his name. Octavian opened his eyes just as the first gunshots rang out. Kazimir and Taweret were already in motion, grabbing hold of humans and hurling them to the ground without worrying about being gentle. Kuromaku reached into the air at his hip and his sword appeared from nothing. The metal whisper of the blade being drawn carried, even as more gunfire punched the blue autumn sky.
'There!' Amber shouted.
Octavian spun and saw the open door of a crypt, saw the gun thrust from the darkness, bucking as it spat bullets.
Someone cried out and he saw it was the priest, who clutched at his arm and staggered to the ground beside Nikki's casket.
Nikki's casket.
Octavian heard the bestial snarl but did not recognize his own voice at first. He felt himself shaking with rage, felt the magic flowing through his bones. His skin prickled and his vision turned red, tinted by the power that poured out of him, misting from his eyes and sizzling the air around his hands.
One of the mages was painting complicated sigils in the air that would have protected them all behind a magical barrier, but Octavian was not thinking defensively. He saw his fellow warriors rushing toward the crypt and felt their fury, remembering a hundred battles he had shared with one or all of them. But this was a fight he would not share.
'Get back!' he shouted. 'Kazimir! Santiago! All of you, back off!'
Kuromaku and Allison halted, but the others kept on. Octavian raised a hand, contorted his fingers, and reached out with the power inside him. At the last moment, with a twitch of his ring finger, he altered the spell from concussive magic to defensive, throwing up a wall into which all three of them crashed, falling backward.
The light around his left hand turned a deep, emerald green and he thrust it outward. The air rippled as the spell burned through it. The entire front of the crypt blew in, the roof collapsing, the shooter crushed in a sliver of a moment.
A moment's quiet fell upon them.
'Go,' Octavian said, nodding to Allison. 'See who's stupid enough to try something like this.'
He turned to seek out the priest, thinking to heal the man. Amber ran toward him, her human guise falling away so that anyone looking at her would see her true face, her wine-dark beauty and ferocity. The hungry ghost of Miles Varick materialized behind her.
'It isn't over!' Amber shouted.
Octavian twisted round, scanning the cemetery but seeing only mourners and funeral home employees and police, out at the gate.
'What do you-'
'The ghosts,' Miles said. 'The haunters say there are-'
The thump and crack of breaking stone echoed off of grave markers and tombs as the doors of a dozen crypts were smashed open from within and bizarre figures emerged, men and women in skintight black from head to toe, with only strange lenses over their eyes to break the smooth covering. They carried handguns.
They opened fire.
Allison snarled, knocked off her feet by a bullet that struck her in the side.
'Son of a bitch!' she roared, holding her bleeding side, unable to shift. 'It's Medusa! They've got toxin!'
Octavian hit the one who'd shot her with a spell that turned him to stone. That's what Medusa had gotten him.
'Who the hell are these fucks?' Santiago yelled.
And Octavian knew. The UN were supposed to be the only ones with the Medusa toxin, but the vampires who'd gone after Charlotte had shot her with a bullet laced with the stuff. They were covered in head to toe to protect them from the sun.
'They're vampires,' he shouted back. 'Cortez sent them.'
Sent them to do this today. Not enough that he killed Nikki, he had to desecrate her funeral.
Bullets flew. Santiago shifted to mist. Kuromaku ran to protect Allison. As one of Cortez's vampires turned to shoot him, Kuromaku lopped his gun hand off at the wrist. From behind the blank black mask of his sunsuit, the vampire roared, and Kuromaku cut his head off. As the vampire fell, he began to turn to dust inside the suit. Two more came at Kuromaku and Allison, but Octavian turned them to stone, careful not to hit his allies with the same spell. Enraged, his heart thrumming in his chest, screams of fury building in his lungs, he followed that spell with pure force, hurling concussive magic that obliterated the vampire statues, turning them to a different sort of dust.
Humans screamed and warriors roared. The band members and their wives were lying on the ground, dead or just keeping their heads down. The manager crouched behind a grave marker for cover. One of the cousins had been shot and another mourner knelt beside him, muttering terrified and empty assurances.
Taweret took a bullet in the thigh and fell.
''Maku, shift!' Octavian shouted. 'I've got Allison.'
Kuromaku wouldn't want to, Octavian knew. But he did as he was asked. A moment later he coalesced behind the last line of marching vampires and began to cut them down one by one, silent and lethal. Octavian counted at least forty or fifty vampires still there.
Bannerman's Arsenal, he thought. They had abandoned the place, and this was where they'd gone, slipping into the crypts during the night and lying in wait.
Police were shouting and shooting. There were sirens. None of that would matter. The fight wouldn't last long enough for them to make a difference. Octavian wracked his brain, trying to think how he could save his friends and the other mourners, how he could destroy Cortez's creatures without hurting innocents and allies. Another vampire shot at Allison and Octavian raised a hand, froze the bullet in a tiny pocket of time, and then threw it back at the leech. It punctured the suit and the vampire fell. There would be no turning to mist to get out of here. Not for her.
He sketched at the air like one of the lesser magicians and three other vampires turned to stone.
A bullet punched through his neck, tearing flesh and severing blood vessels. Choking, grasping his throat, he felt the hot blood splashing his hands. A moment of panic ensnared him as he crumbled to the ground, pain searing him. The copper stink of his own blood filled his nostrils.
Cold with rage he clapped one hand over the entry wound. Blue light glowed so fiercely that he felt the static prickle of it at the exit wound as the flesh healed.
He rose and kept rising, floating off the ground as his body was enveloped in crackling green light. As if hurling stones, he threw concussive blasts at the vampires around him, crushing them to a pulp inside their suits and then hitting them again until the suits split open, exposing them to the sun.
And they burned.
He heard a vampire screaming and turned to see Miles Varick's ghost holding tight to a vampire, his spectral fangs sinking into the thing's throat. Miles held on, mouth pressed to the black-clad neck like a lamprey, sucking out both blood and darksoul. Nearby, a wine-purple wraith darted through the air, descending upon another vampire. Amber thrust her hand through the vampire's chest and ripped out a squirming bit of darkness that might have been its heart or the demon-soul that existed inside all of their kind.
Enough vampires might kill Amber, but they could do nothing to a ravenous, monstrous ghost who wanted only to drain their vitality from them. Other mourners were far more vulnerable.
Even as he had this thought, he heard someone chanting a spell in ancient Chaldean. Spinning, he saw a young sorceress named Holly Nevill facing half a dozen approaching vampires. She stood over an old man named Groff, who had crumbled to his knees, clutching at his heart. Bullets slowed as they approached the two; Holly was holding her own. Then the necromancer came up beside her, shouting something else, hands out in front of him, fingers into horns, thumbs touching together. The asshole was trying to take control of the vampires. They were dead, or at least had died, once, and he thought his necromancy could make him their master.
His magic disrupted Holly's defenses. The bullets came right through. At least one hit her, because she went down, but the necromancer took three or four shots to the chest and pelvis, one to the leg, and one in the temple. He went down like a crashing kite and Octavian knew there would be no bringing him back this time. His own necromancy had made it possible before, and on that occasion the necromancer hadn't had a bullet in the brain.
Holly might still be alive. The priest as well. Allison and Taweret were filled with toxin and vulnerable, and there were too many humans still to protect.
It occurred to him that he might not be able to save any of them.
'No, no, no,' he muttered, pummeling another vampire until it split like ripe fruit and burned in the sun. It felt so much better than turning them to stone.
He spun around, taking stock, counting vampires and counting allies. He needed a spell that would kill the vampires without hurting anyone else and he was coming up dry. Still, he kept fighting, moving methodically now, quickly, turning vampires to stone or ice. He saw Kuromaku slashing and killing. Saw Kazimir appear behind a vampire and do the same, grabbing hold of the leech and tugging off its head, ripping its suit open, exposing it to the sun.
Police cars roared up. Cops piled out, hiding behind their doors, guns at the ready, looking for an opening even though there was nothing they could do without the Medusa toxin. Brave or stupid, Octavian didn't know.
It was a matter of numbers now. Numbers and speed. He kept moving. Amber and Miles dropped from the sky and destroyed one at a time.
Too many.
God damn you, Cortez. Too many.
Magic burning through him, crackling all of him, he turned to another vampire, about to destroy it. The ground seemed to shift and buck beneath its feet and then a thick tree root burst from the soil and speared the vampire through the chest, piercing its heart. The vampire gave a gasp and dust came out of its mouth. It began to molder to dust inside of its sunsuit, dead. Disintegrating.
Octavian glanced around, thinking of Holly and Groff and the other two magicians he had invited here, but none of them was still standing.
The ground erupted. Voices rose in shouts, some of victory and others of fear, as the roots thrust from the soil, some twining around the vampires and dragging them down and others skewering them through the heart. Several hung impaled on roots that had thrust so high they were like grotesque trees.
In moments, it was done.
Someone else had done what Octavian could not - killed the leeches while leaving his allies untouched.
He felt the magic dissipate from him, fizzing against his skin as it burned off. He dropped a few feet to the ground, landing in a crouch. Gazing around him, he saw his friends surveying the damage and the police rushing forward to try to aid the fallen and make sure all of the vampires were dead.
Octavian frowned as he approached one of the roots that jutted from the cemetery grounds. He touched the wood, brows knitted, and then looked down at the soil beneath it. An earthwitch, he thought. But unless Gaea herself had stepped in, which he doubted, that made no sense. He'd only ever met one earthwitch powerful enough to do something like this.
He blinked, a hitch in his breath, and fell to his knees. He touched the blades of grass and then pushed his fingers into the loose dirt around the root. When he spoke, it was in a whisper.
'Keomany?'
