Angel Souls and Devil Hearts (19 page)

“You could have gone on without me,” she said.

“No,” he answered, a hand on her shoulder. “I need you for this, remember? And I have to conserve my strength for the battle; it would have been a huge drain to try to fly you
up there.”

She nodded, and the car arrived. As they got in, John turned to snarl at the operators again.

“When we’re out, shut her down again,” he said. “We won’t be back this way.”

Then the doors were closing, they were moving up the mountainside, and reporter that she was, Allison couldn’t hold the questions back any longer.

“Why won’t we be back this way?” she asked.

But Courage took it the wrong way. His face fell, disappointed, and it was a moment before Allison understood. Her question had been motivated by innocent curiosity, but in it he had heard
suspicion, and now that she thought of it, she had reason to be suspicious. After all, if she needed the cable car to ascend, she couldn’t conceive of a form of descent that would not require
the car . . . unless she weren’t coming back. It was an awkward moment between them, but John seemed finally to decide to ignore the less palatable implications of her question.

“There is only one way in, but there are many ways out,” he said.

“In where?”

“Inside the mountain.”

Allison raised an eyebrow, then looked out the window of the rising cable car, at the peak high above. When she turned back to John, he read the question in her eyes.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said, and she laughed.

“Give me a break, John! My boyfriend is Buffalo Bill! Man, get a grip, would you?”

Courage smiled and shook his head, but Allison felt a tightening in her chest as she thought of Will, trapped in that fortress. She shook it off, for the moment. They’d get him out. For
now, her curiosity was getting the better of her.

“Well?” she asked.

John Courage joined her at the front of the cable car, looked up at the peak and put a hand on the glass.

“Inside that mountain,” he said softly, “is a king.”

It was only seven or eight minutes before they reached the top, and the view all around them was breathtaking. They were in high Alpine terrain, but the cold was not what
Allison had imagined it would be. Still, it was early summer, and she didn’t want to think about being up on that mountain in January. From the cable car terminal, they hiked up the mountain
to the top of a steep, dangerous-looking trail. To Allison’s surprise, there were still tourists on the mountain, as well as two employees who seemed quietly annoyed at having to baby-sit
them. The employees didn’t bat an eye as she and Courage crested the hill.

“Their friends at the bottom must have radioed up not to bother us,” John said. “That’s good. Still, now that the car’s running again, it’s going to be almost
impossible for them to keep these people up here.”

“I’m sure they’ll be happy to be rid of them,” Allison said, noting that the squabbling of the tourists was already getting results.

They started down the path, Allison stumbling from time to time, and came across a number of dead birds along their way.

“Ravens,” Courage told her. “According to the legend, the king sleeps in the heart of the mountain with one hundred of his most loyal soldiers, and when Europe needs him most
and the ravens no longer fly at the summit he will return. Magic works strangely at times,” he said sadly, “but I didn’t expect it to kill the poor guys.”

Allison thought about the implications of those words, the suggestion that Courage at least knew a heck of a lot about magic and how this king had come to be under the mountain in the first
place, and perhaps Courage had even been the one to put him there, to cast the spell about the ravens, whose death he now regretted.

Agh! There was so much she didn’t know, but she was certain he wasn’t about to tell her. They made their way along the face of the mountain, and their path grew more rough and narrow
as they went, until finally it petered out altogether. Still, they went on, picking their way along a windblown ledge for a few minutes, with John holding Allison’s elbow to keep her
confidence up, until they came upon a crevice in the mountainside. The ledge they were on continued on the other side, but they weren’t going that far.

“Fifth floor,” Courage joked, “cosmetics, lingerie, young miss. Going down!”

Allison wasn’t laughing.

“You’re kidding, right? You’ve got me climbing along a mountainside and now you want me to crawl into a crack in the ground?”

“What did you expect?” Courage asked sincerely. “An escalator?”

“Well, maybe a ladder at least,” she said weakly, looking upon the fissure with dread.

“For vampires?” he laughed. “Well, I’ll go you one better.”

John’s hands slid under her arms and lifted her from the ground. Allison shrieked and struggled until she saw that the ground was no longer under her. She berated him as he lowered her
into the hole in the ground, afraid he would drop her, certain he would drop her. And when he was kneeling at the edge of the crack, his arms extended as far inside as possible, and while Allison
was yelling “Don’t let go! Don’t let go,” that’s just what he did.

“Now, don’t move a muscle,” he ordered as she dropped mere inches, her feet landing on a rocky shelf in the darkness of the hole.

“You son of a bitch,” she snapped, angry and embarrassed. “You scared the daylights out of me.”

When John had lowered himself down, they began to work their way along a stone path that sloped gently into the mountain. In minutes, Allison felt blind, and the darkness had become total.

“I can’t see a blessed thing,” she said, scared though his hand held hers tightly.

“Are you sure you want to?” he asked, and Allison nodded.

John’s hand suddenly burst into flames, a torch of flesh, throwing flickering illumination around the cavern they’d found themselves in, and down into the blackness to their right.
It looked like a nasty drop, and Allison realized why Courage had wanted her in the dark. Luckily heights were one thing she’d never had a problem with, and she did have him there to watch
out for her should anything go wrong.

She noticed that up ahead a pile of huge stones lay in their path, effectively putting an end to the shelf they were walking on. She wondered what John would do about that, but he didn’t
even seem to slow down as he neared the rocks.

Even with the light from John’s flaming hand, it was dark. Ghostly shapes flickered on the stone walls inside the crevice, and the world fell away into nothing only feet away.

Allison was afraid.

It was a difficult realization for her. After everything she’d been through in her life, she’d promised herself over and over that she’d never be afraid again. It was a promise
she never kept. As a child, her parents had beaten her badly, for punishment rather than recreation, but it was still terrible abuse. Her mother had once broken her nose; blood had shot from her
nostrils, and the old woman had actually hit her harder, as if that would stop the bleeding. She only thanked God that they hadn’t been pedophiles, or she might have killed herself one of the
many times she considered it.

The authorities had taken her away from them. She was an only child, and then she’d been set adrift in the foster care system, some of whose chosen parental replacements were no better
than her originals. But finally she had found a home with Rory and Carole Vigeant. When she’d gone undercover for CNN, in an elaborate ruse that included the very public termination of her
job, she had used names from her past. Terry and Shaughnessy had been the last names of two foster families that she had particularly liked, so she became Terri Shaughnessy. Later, when she was
working her way into the circle of volunteers, people who willingly gave up their blood and their lives to the Defiant Ones, she had been Tracey Sacco—her birth name, which she hated.

The Defiant Ones—what a joke. She had originally thought they were some kind of death cult, and they turned out to be vampires. Some were as evil as legend claimed. Others, unfortunate
victims of an ancient, insane church conspiracy. She had watched a woman she knew be ravaged by Hannibal, who had raped her, held her captive, and was now a “respected” member of the
shadow community. Then, later, she had met Will Cody, Peter Octavian and the rest, watched them fight for their lives, and fallen in love with Will.

And now she was following another vampire, one she barely knew, into the bowels of the Alps, where supposedly a hundred powerful vampires slept, and she would have to give her blood willingly to
one of them in order to wake them up, to loose them upon an unsuspecting world. In order to do that, she had to put all of her faith in a man who wouldn’t even tell her his real name . . .
but then, she’d never been terribly forthcoming with her own. But what frightened her the most was that not far away, her lover’s life, and thousands, perhaps millions, more, depended
on their success.

Trust me, he says
. As if she had a choice.

“There are two ways to do this,” John said as they stopped short at the stone blockade across their path. “Hard and fast, or easy but slow. And we can’t be wasting time.
Step back a few yards, Allison, and lean against the wall. I’m afraid it’s going to be dark in here for a minute or so. Whatever you do, don’t move.”

She didn’t argue as John’s flaming hand returned to normal. He took a deep breath, and she thought for the first time about the strain such a sustained combination of forms might
cause . . . and then she couldn’t hear him breathing anymore. In fact, though she wasn’t about to move forward in the dark to test her theory, she didn’t think he was even there,
in front of her, anymore.

“John?” she called, and sure enough, there was no answer. It didn’t occur to her that there were many forms he could take in which he couldn’t answer. What did occur to
her was that she did not hear rocks being moved, thrown over the side, stones grinding out of the way. The nothingness, which stretched out, away from the wall for several yards and then fell away
into nothing, began to coalesce into something tangible. The lack of substance, the knowledge that there was nothing in front of her, and so much mountain above her, began to make Allison feel
claustrophobic. And worse, she became disoriented, her center of gravity moving forward, her equilibrium unbalanced as if she actually wanted to go to the edge of the ledge, and past it, as if that
were, somehow, right.

Once before she’d felt something like it, standing on one of the observation decks of the Empire State Building in New York City. But it had been a beautiful sunny day then, and
she’d been with the Vigeants, her adoptive parents. Her body had felt strange, “funny,” she’d said, but she hadn’t been afraid then, hadn’t been alone in the
dark.

“John? John!” she yelled, slamming her back against the wall, bending over slightly to counter the magnetic draw the edge, the danger of it, held for her body. Could he possibly have
brought her down here only to leave her?

No. That’s idiotic. What purpose would it serve? And besides, she knew he was good, could sense it in him.

But then where was he?

Her eyes searched around her, frantically trying to pierce the darkness, trying to force her brain to access some hidden reserve, to
see
. . .

And then there came a roar, loud but muffled, as if it were beyond the stone barricade, and a terrible crashing, scraping, plowing sound as something shattered that barricade, tearing it down,
sending stones ricocheting off the opposite wall, over the cavern, only to knock and skitter their way down into . . . whatever was down there. Allison automatically flung her arms up to protect
herself and was glad she did when several small stone shards hit her and a good-size chunk of rock slammed into her shoulder, throwing her to the ground.

At first she sucked on her right hand, which was bleeding, but then she gave up and rubbed vigorously at her left shoulder where she’d been hit. She sensed it, sensed him, for she knew it
was John, standing over her. But it wasn’t him really, at that moment. Whatever stood there, it was huge, and its breath was heaving, panting, and it wasn’t at all comfortable on two
feet. A gorilla? she wondered. No, more likely a bear. But when his left hand burst into flame finally illuminating their path once again, he was just John Courage again, and she understood what
he’d done.

The path they wanted was not along the ledge, beyond the barricade, but behind it, where the rocks had been piled up against the wall. He must have turned to mist and found his way through the
rocks, only to transform again inside, taking a shape with the size and strength to drive through the barrier. A whole lot faster than trying to dig from outside. She wondered for a minute why
there was such a good-size opening at all. Why take the chance, she wondered, when only vampires were inside? But then she remembered why she was there. Blood from a willing, human female. They
needed to be sure their sacrificial lamb could get inside.

John was quiet now, and he looked exhausted, which didn’t really surprise Allison. They made their way into this new tunnel, which went forward half a dozen feet, then turned a corner and
down a crumbling, rocky slope for another dozen, after which it came to an end at a huge wooden door. The door was strapped together with iron, but it had no handle or knocker as far as Allison
could tell. Somewhere, she heard a trickling sound, like a brook running, and she thought of melting snow from high up on the mountain.

John pounded on the door, but there was no response. Once again, he held up a fist and slammed it against the door, again and again, but still they heard nothing but their own mutterings and the
echo of his “knock.” Courage kept it up, knocking every minute or so, louder each time, though it seemed impossible.

And then they heard it, a rustling of movement behind the door, light footfalls on stone and then, finally, a voice, low and ominous, in a language Allison didn’t think she’d ever
heard before. Even so, she knew what its question must have been. John Courage replied in that same language, though it didn’t seem to her that his reply included his own name, and certainly
not hers.