Angel Souls and Devil Hearts (51 page)

“The last Hellish thing he fought, nearly two millenia ago, was a true vampire, and it wounded him badly. Only the Spirit, that which was divine in him, saved his life. But he had been
tainted by the vampire’s attack. After he was crucified, and finally died, the Spirit left him to continue its work.

“A normal human being killed by one of these vampires would eventually return to life as one of them, a mindless wraith. But the Spirit had also tainted him, his human shell. Whatever had
been divine in him while he lived now merged with the taint of evil, of the vampire. He became a shadow of his former self, a shadow of humanity, and he lived in the shadows between Heaven and
Hell. He was the first of us, forever and always. With an angel’s soul and a devil’s heart.”

“But then, can we expect . . . divine help? Surely he must mean something . . .,” Meaghan began, and Will Cody only looked at Peter for the answer.

“No,” Peter said with certainty. “I’ve thought about that a lot. Heaven has no special place for him, though he carried their greatest gambit to fruition. He’s
tainted by evil, as we all are, imperfect, like the humans we once were.”

“But . . .,” she began, and then was interrupted by the Stranger’s voice barking harsh orders in her brain, in all their brains, for though Beelzebub was down, and thrashing,
he could not defeat the demon-lord alone.

Meaghan
! the voice came into her head.
Warriors of Charlemagne! I need you now. The demon is at the edge of defeat, and you must follow my example. Change your forms, enter the wound
in the demon’s chest, and from there we will kill it!

“I love you both,” Meaghan said, and took off toward the demon.

“Meaghan!” Will called to her even as she grew wings for the first time. “You don’t have to go! You can’t make that change!”

She looked back, smiling, and called loudly, “I know what I am, Will, and what I have to do.”

“She can make the change,” Peter said. “Lazarus trained her, in Hell.” “What about us?” Cody asked quickly, but Peter Octavian was

already pulling him away, dragging him to the north.

“We are incapable, right now, of doing what must be done. Our job

is to survive,” Peter grimly replied.

Salzburg, Austria, European Union.
Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 11:16
A.M.
:

Allison Vigeant had seen the helicopters fly above her, and heard the gunfire and explosions they had rained down upon the battle. She prayed then, that Will was still alive.
As she entered Residence Plaza from the northeast corner, where it led into Mozartplatz, Lord Beelzebub was falling for a second time. Though it looked different, still she remembered the demon
from Venice, remembered its stench and its effect on the air around it. The impact as the demon hit the cobblestone plaza sent her flying to the ground, and Allison’s face slammed hard into
stone with a crack. Behind her, a building was crumbling, and a cloud of dust moved out to envelop her. Had she walked through that alleyway ten seconds later, she would have been crushed.

As it was, she thought her nose was broken. She held a hand up and touched it, and came away with sticky blood which gleamed bright red in the sunshine. It occurred to her again that events as
dark as those unfolding in Salzburg had no right to occur in the light of day.

But for Allison, the day had lost its illusion of safety long ago.

She brushed herself off even as she picked up her steps. Scanning the plaza, she realized how many had died. Peter and Meaghan were standing over the corpse of some kind of demon, and John
Courage had apparently fallen under Beelzebub, for she had seen him attacking the demon’s face before it fell. And then, finally, she saw Cody, coming up behind Peter and Meaghan.

Thank God!

Over the noise of the demon’s screeching, they would never hear her call out, so she picked up her pace. She watched as Meaghan took off, joining a few of Charlemagne’s warriors who
still lived, in their attack on the demon. And then Peter and Cody were headed toward her, practically holding each other up, it seemed. Whatever else had happened, Will Cody was alive, and Allison
could survive any other tragedy.

They were not far away from her now, but still she had to call out several times to get Will to look up. Finally he did smiling despite his pain, despite all that had happened—was
happening—around them. Allison kicked something heavy that clanged hard on the stones. It was a sword made of silver, and she reached down without thinking and picked it up. Beelzebub
wasn’t dead yet, after all.

She was perhaps ten feet from them when the black, dripping, lance-like thing rose from behind them. It wavered in the air above their heads, and Allison screamed even as she threw the sword
toward them.

The scorpion sting tail of the demon-lord Azag-Thoth whistled as it shot down toward the heart of the demon-lord’s murderer, Will Cody, but when it found its mark, slashing through Peter
Octavian’s arm on the way, Will was gone. Leaping to the side, he used all of his strength to bring the sword down across the tail of the torn-open serpent-thing, which had slithered behind
them, leaving a trail of gore. Cody sliced off the stinger portion of the tail with a burst of green flame and a terrible spray of black fluid.

Peter had been wounded, and Allison and Will met over him where he lay in the street. Octavian’s eyes were open.

“It’s just a scratch,” he said. “Poison, though, even to us. I’ll be sick for a while, but I’ll live. A youngster like yourself, however . . .”

Allison looked at Peter and saw that, though he was kidding Will, he was also serious. A sting from that creature might have killed the old storyteller.

“God!” she yelled. “Please just let this all end!”

Meaghan had the answers now, the answers she and Peter had fought so hard for, answers that Cody had searched for years to find, that Alex had died for. And she was proud. The
Stranger had sacrificed himself once so that others might be cleansed of an evil taint, and now he was prepared to do it again.

Could she do any less?

Blind and screeching its pain, Lord Beelzebub had nevertheless understood its vulnerability, understood something of what the Stranger was doing. It rose unsteadily to its feet. John Courage had
dug his way into the demon’s face and disappeared there. He was completely inside the demon’s head, and he had instructed them to enter the rapidly healing wound that was open on both
sides of the thing’s body, blown through its incredible hide by the missiles of a human army.

In the thing’s pain, both external and internal, they backed it south. Now, blind, it teetered on the edge of the seemingly bottomless crevice that Mulkerrin’s final earthquake had
opened up.

And fell in.

Claws grasped the edge of the crack in the plaza, lodging themselves where shattered cobblestones had once lain. The demon pulled its head and shoulders out of the hole, a new, green-black
mucous pouring from the hole where its face had been. Its roar of agonized fury resounded off the crumbling buildings on the edges of the plaza, even as vampire warriors closed in on the
creature’s back. Still it hauled itself out farther, until its chest was on the ground and it only needed to pull its legs out.

And that was when they struck, Meaghan and the six surviving warriors of Charlemagne. They flew, transforming themselves in the air, all seven of them screaming their pain as their bodies turned
to the one thing that would most certainly kill them over time: the poison metal, silver.

Meaghan nearly lost consciousness as she slammed into the wound in the demon’s back, but the voice of John Courage in her mind snapped her back to reality.

Now
! it said.
Follow me
!

She realized then that he was there, inside the demon’s chest cavity. He must have torn his own path from the creature’s head to its chest, down its throat perhaps, and then out
again before he could be consumed. Then the Stranger, who was no longer a stranger to her but someone she had known all her life, began to tear at the demon’s guts from inside, ripping a hole
large enough for all of them to fit inside, and revealing two huge, pulsing organs that Meaghan recognized immediately for the demon’s two hearts.

And finally she understood John Courage’s plan. If the demon could not be sent back to Hell, banished from Earth once and for all time, and they were not certain they could truly end its
life, then they had to be certain that it would never threaten human or vampire again. If Lord Beelzebub did not die, it would wish it had. After the suffering the demon had put Peter and infinite
others through, on infinite planes and dimensions, Meaghan could think of no end more fitting.

Come, take my hand
, John Courage said, in the cramped confines of the demon’s flesh, which burned and steamed at the touch of their bodies, melting from around them. The creature
shuddered and bucked where it lay, half-in and half-out of the crevice in the plaza, but they were tightly packed inside it.

And Meaghan reached out and took John Courage’s hand, then slid her other hand at an awkward angle until one of her vampire brothers could grasp it. They gave themselves over to him, to
the Stranger, and with his mind leading them, they began to flow, quicksilver, a liquid metal that burned everything it touched.

They had become a virus, Meaghan realized, a deadly virus infecting the demon’s system. Sharing Courage’s knowledge, and each sharing the pain the others experienced by keeping the
body of silver they had adopted, they flowed into one enormous pool, then split into two groups, each surrounding one of the demon’s hearts.

And, in the heat and stench of evil that was the heart of the demon for all intents and purposes, seven vampires including Meaghan Gallagher and the shadow king, a stranger known as John
Courage, made the ultimate sacrifice.

Meaghan was dying; she knew that. When the poison they had become had killed them all, the silver would cool and the demon’s hearts would be preserved, would burn forever in the shell of
its body.

Meaghan
! John Courage’s voice called out to her mind, and through her pain, Meaghan Gallagher managed to feel pleasure.
I’m sorry it came to this. You were too young. Had I
thought of it sooner
. . .

But you didn’t
, she thought, hoping that he could understand her still.
It doesn’t matter. It’s done now, and I can feel the pain of vengeance, the pleasure of
sacrifice.

And I’ll be with Alex again, won’t I?

This very day,
the Stranger thought.
I promise you that.

And then Meaghan Gallagher died.

Without a howl, a scream, a cry, even a whisper, the demon-lord Beelzebub reared up on its hooves, which had little purchase in the depth of the crevice, and, sliding farther
down, fell on its back on the other side of the hole. Its hands beat the air silently, then lay over the hole at the center of its chest. The demon began to pant, to strain against its pain, and
then its hands leapt away from its chest as if burnt.

Cody knew when it was done because the demon stopped moving completely. Seconds later, it began to rot, and soon it was a dozen streams of viscous flesh and blood, which ran across the stones
and joined together in the indentations its legs had made in the ground as it fell, running eventually into the crevice that Liam Mulkerrin’s earthquakes had opened at the south end of
Residence Plaza.

Cody’s bones were already knitted, but he was in pain, and his flesh wounds would take longer to heal, especially his eye. He and Allison helped Peter to stand, and they made their way to
the edge of the hole. Looking down, they could not see the bottom, could not see where the demon’s remains would eventually rest, and Cody said a prayer to God, his first in a long time, that
the humans would be smart enough to seal the crevice up tight somehow.

When he looked up, only puddles of blood remained of Beelzebub, that and two perfect ovals, each six feet long which looked for all the world like nothing more than huge eggs made of silver. But
God forbid they should ever hatch.

And they wouldn’t, for even now they were shrinking. The living silver that was his brothers and sisters was contracting as it cooled, crushing the demon’s hearts, and small holes
had appeared from which the essence of the creature, its last blood, sprayed in spurts, its acid so much stronger than the rest, eating its way down into the stone and soil of the plaza. And Cody
knew it was also eating away at the silver, even as the silver poisoned it. The hearts were shrinking not simply because the living silver was contracting, crushing the hearts to a pulp, but
because the silver itself was being eaten, consumed by the acid before it burst out through the tiny holes in the “eggs.”

After a time, the hearts were completely gone, the silver melted down into two pools each three or four feet across. It cooled and hardened on the stones, and that was all that remained of those
who had sacrificed themselves, one of whom had given himself up for his people a second time.

Cody looked at Allison and Peter then, his lover and his brother. Seeing them there, in the sunshine, his heart was a little lighter, and though tempted, he did not turn to look back at where
the demon had died. Instead, he thought of the future, of the new world they must face. There would be more blood, more fighting. They would be forced to hide from the humans, and to hunt Hannibal
and his new coven.

But they would not be alone. And they had the strength of faith now. So long ago, it seemed, Peter had said, “Find out what we are.” Now they knew, and it was that knowledge that
would sustain them. They could love one another now, without reserve, without the specter of an assumption of their own evil hanging over their heads.

There were still many vampires out in the world, and it would be a race now, between them and Hannibal, to gather those survivors. But Cody and his clan had a message of hope and truth. Though
they were products of Heaven and Hell, they were, like the first among them, inherently good. The true vampire’s bite had given the Stranger a devil’s heart, but he would always have an
angel’s soul.