Midnight's Angels - 03 (10 page)

The adepts were looking genuinely shocked. None of them had planned for this, but they’d had no say in the matter. Woodard Raine -- direct descendant of the Landing’s founder, and the last in his bloodline -- was more powerful than any of them. So powerful, in fact, that even the basic rules that governed magic arts did not apply to him. I’d seen that demonstrated a while back, without even realizing what I was looking at.

But he was also totally and irredeemably nuts. As crazy as a fox at a hen convention. And so they normally avoided him, having practically no contact with the man. Pretending that the things he did were not even an issue. Which was easy enough most of the time, since Woody was agoraphobic, staying inside his vast, sprawling home and showing little genuine interest in the doings of this town.

That didn’t seem to be the case, on this occasion. It appeared that he was trying to play a part.  It was his magic that had brought us here, I was in little doubt of that. It seemed that he’d done it intentionally. Although to what end, I had not a clue. I rarely do, when I’m around him.

Looking at the other washed-out faces, I guessed everyone else shared that same opinion.

Gaspar Vernon might have been visibly shaken, but he puffed his cheeks out. Samuel Levin held his ground, but seemed to draw in slightly on himself, his whole frame very tight. And the normal cocksure expression was gone from Kurt van Freisling’s face.

As for Willets, he’d been here before. I’d brought him myself, almost at gunpoint. And the memory of that encounter was etched on his features in a scowl that was both apprehensive and full of distaste.

For us normal human beings, Ritchie Vallencourt seemed unsure where he had wound up, but looked pretty certain that he didn’t like it. He proved that by pulling out his sidearm. And then his apprehension got a great deal worse. Because his Browning automatic vanished from his grasp as soon as he’d raised it. That had to be Woods again. The Master of the Manor disapproved of firearms being waved around on his property.

I ignored all that. Shoved my hands into my pockets, gazing at the window he was standing behind. I was perfectly used to Raine, and was unimpressed by his conjuring tricks.

His eyes were the only part of him that were remotely visible. They were larger than they ought to be -- he’d altered himself several times the past few years. And were shaped like a cat’s, although you couldn’t see the slitted pupils from this distance. The man behind them, I already knew, was medium sized and slight of build, a fairly unprepossessing figure. But a sensible man doesn’t judge books by their covers, nor adepts by their physical size. Raine’s sorcery was truly massive, and his madness made the way he used his power genuinely impossible to predict.

“What’s up, Woods?” I asked.

It only came out as a murmur, but I knew that he could hear me.

“I was about to ask the same of you, sport.” His cut-glass tones came skirling out of the thin air around me. Several of the adepts jumped. “Everyone seems so busy this evening. And … why do the inhabitants of my town keep on disappearing?”

“How’s that?”

“A lot of them seem to have vanished. I can’t sense them any longer. A handful in the other suburbs, and now a whole big load in Tyburn. There seems to be almost no one left there anymore.”

I exchanged glances with the rest. They looked alarmed. And then a couple of their faces became blanker. I knew that they were reaching outward with their powers, trying to confirm what we’d been told.

He could simply be imagining it, couldn’t he? The thoughts that came out from his so-called mind were as tangled as a dozen balls of string all mashed together.

“Those two angels we were after,” Judge Levin explained to me. “We chased them as far as Tyburn. And we were just about to catch up with them when Raine brought us here.”

His bespectacled gaze burned furiously. He seemed convinced that, if Woody had not interfered, he and the rest might have stopped anything happening. Which was misplaced anger, to put it mildly. From what I’d seen last night, I doubted it would be anything like that easy to stop these intruders. And by his expression, Willets agreed.

Martha Howard-Brett and Gaspar Vernon both came back. That is, their consciousness returned to their bodies. They jerked, then their expressions changed, looking appalled to the very core. We’d never had much time for the inhabitants of Tyburn, but Martha’s eyes were sparkling with dampness.

“All gone to the Dweller’s side,” she told us. “Women. Children. Everyone.”

Levin blinked with disbelief. “An area of that size? The whole population?”

“It seems to have started with the biggest coven,” Gaspar Vernon explained huskily. “Once they were changed, they spread out and started taking down the rest like some contagious plague.”

And what did that mean for the rest of us? A chill spread through the group. But Willets pulled himself together quickly, cleared his throat and turned back to the window in the distance. He proceeded to fill Raine in, explaining to him about the Dweller and its deadly agents. And that got a pretty typical response.

“My word. That’s shocking.”

But, by his tone of voice, he might have been talking about a problem with greenfly.

“You can’t sense those people anymore because they’ve been drained of their humanity,” the doctor finished up. “They’re still there physically, but they belong to the creature out there now.”

“And can we get them back?”

“We’re not sure.”

“You have no ideas at all?”

Raine paused for thought.

“Then we’d best destroy them,” he decided, “before this gets out of hand.”

Kill all those who’d been transformed? I had never heard him talk like that. It got shocked stares from several of the group, and a bristling response on my part.

“We’re talking about hundreds of people, maybe thousands. We can’t massacre them out of hand.”

I was relieved to see that several of the adepts nodded. Woody still took a little while absorbing that.

“So what are you suggesting?”

“We have to at least try,” I breathed, “to find some other solution.”

“And if you can’t, old chum?” asked Raine.

Even I had to admit, there was no simple answer to that. There would have been absolute silence around me, except that I could hear Lehman Willets cursing underneath his breath.

And I sympathized.

It turned out that none of the adepts accompanying me could use their powers while they were still on Woody’s property. When they tried to move themselves by sorcery they couldn’t. And so the whole load of us had to make our way on foot back to the gates. We lumbered through the twisted undergrowth until we had reached Plymouth Drive again. Descended to the first bend in the road.

We could see Tyburn off in the distance from this section of the hill. And it had been turned into a pretty alarming spectacle.

It’s normally the dimmest suburb in the Landing, come nightfall. There is less illumination at the windows of its houses than in any other part of town, and a lot of its streetlamps stopped working long ago. But by this hour, there was total darkness over the whole place. A scattering of faint yellow light was still visible on its outer edges, sure. But as we watched, even that started going out.

We couldn’t see the flickering of the angels down there. So this had to be the things that they’d created, scurrying along from house to house, extinguishing what light remained.

I wondered if the witches of Tyburn were accepting this readily, or if any of them were trying to fight back. But it seemed academic by this stage. The entire neighborhood was gone.

The air seemed far colder around us than it should have done. And we were all silent. That is, until Gaspar Vernon finally managed to find a voice.

“I compared this to a plague,” he said unsteadily. “And that’s exactly what it is. What do you say we contain it?”

He stared around at his hushed comrades.

“I think the time’s come for another Spell of Sealing.”

Levin’s mouth dropped open.

“What?”

“The largest one this town has ever seen. Which will require the powers of all of us. Even you, sir.”

And he reached out toward an astonished looking Willets.

They were going to include him. I was rather pleased to see that. It was high time that the doctor put aside his past and started to rejoin the human race … or what passed for it around these parts.

The stunned look left him and he nodded carefully. The adepts formed a circle and began to chant. This was no longer a place for normal people. There was nothing more that Vallencourt and I could do here.

We watched them for a few more seconds. Then we headed back on down the hill, to where our cars were parked.

* * *

The spell was fully in place by the time we’d headed down through Clayton to the Tyburn borderline. As before, the barrier they’d thrown up had the same shifting quality as the surface of a bubble. The difference was that this one stretched off as far as the eye could see in both directions. It magnified the rows of houses we were looking at, giving them an even more unreal quality than was usual.

You see disrepair of that kind almost nowhere else in town. Mortar had dropped out of walls. Dandelions sprang up through the stonework of porches. And there was not a plant growing anywhere that looked like it had been introduced to a pair of clippers its whole natural life.

It wasn’t a wreck, don’t get me wrong. But it was just plain scruffy. This was a community that focused on one aspect of its life to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

They mostly had jobs, and I understood that. Local ones, of course. They raised families, did many of the regular things that people do. But it was like they did them at a slight remove, their hold on reality a tenuous thing. I’d noticed the same quality about the adepts sometimes. And it’s another reason that I never use witchcraft. It pulls you steadily further from the real world, until you’re only holding on by the ragged edges of your fingernails.

Before he was promoted to sergeant, this had been Ritchie Vallencourt’s beat. God knew how a cop managed to function in a place like this. But this guy had. And he was staring at it now as if he barely recognized it.

“It’s so damned empty,” he breathed.

I looked where he was looking, knew exactly what he meant. Tyburn people were night folk. Their adherence to magic made them shun bright light, preferring the darkened hours. The sidewalks would have usually been bustling, people on their way to ceremonies mostly. We were staring down a main street. And it was completely quiet, with nothing moving.

“They were transformed, not killed,” the sergeant pointed out. “So where the hell’ve they gone?”

He got his answer the next second. There was a sudden blur of movement at a distant intersection. A shape sprang into view and then headed in our direction quickly. We tensed up and drew our weapons.

As it got closer it seemed to divide, and we figured out what it was. Not one shape but two. A pair of running humans, untransformed as yet. A man and a woman. Each of them seemed to be carrying a bundle. I could see legs swinging, so these were two small children. And their parents were running for all four of their lives.

By the time they’d reached the final intersection, it was clear that they were terrified.

And with good reason. Other shapes had begun appearing in the street behind them. Several dozen of the things.

It suddenly occurred to me. A barrier like this worked both ways. We could not get in to help these people. And there was no way they could get out. In trying to stop the plague from spreading, the adepts had trapped the last survivors.

Ritchie was already on his cell phone, trying to raise Judge Levin. But apparently with no success. What the hell were those guys doing? They ought to be able to sense this.

I stepped up and thumped at the barrier with both fists. It let out a hollow ringing sound, but didn’t budge.

The family had reached it by the time I’d registered that. Both of the parents were dressed in black. They were in their late twenties, and would have made a handsome-looking couple. But the terror on their faces had flensed that away.

I’d no idea how long they had been running, but they looked breathless and exhausted.

And I was afraid at first that they would run headlong into the barrier, not even taking in the fact that it was there. But they noticed it at the last moment, realizing what it was. They skidded to a halt. And then gazed at me helplessly.

The man freed up a hand and pressed his palm against the inside of the wall.

“Can’t you help us?”

The child under his arm, a small boy, started whimpering. And that really tore at my insides, like some wild animal was chewing through my gut. I’d had a son as well. I’d had a family. And they’d been trapped behind a wall like this one, on the day that magic had taken them away from me.

It made no sense, I knew it. But something in me snapped. And I threw myself against the barrier, pounding at it with my shoulder as hard as I could. The only results I got were more of those hollow booming sounds. Like trying to push your way through several inches of plate glass, albeit that it was yielding very slightly.

I swiveled around, bruised and breathing heavily. Ritchie had gone to the radio in his car and was trying to raise the judge by way of a dispatcher. But he still seemed to be getting nowhere.

“What’s going on?” I yelled furiously.

He shook his head.

And this was incomprehensible. Adepts like Levin and Willets and Vernon constantly noticed disturbances like these, casting out their inner powers the length and breadth of this whole town. So how come they didn’t understand we needed help here? But then I thought I got it.

Perhaps they couldn’t make out what was going on beyond the barrier. But they were still aware of me and Ritchie, surely? So I tipped my head back, calling to them at the top of my voice.

“
Hey!
For God’s sake,
fix
this!”

There was no response. What were they thinking of?

The young parents were practically hysterical, the children in their arms both shrieking out loud. The scuttling shapes in the background were still coming. And there was a new development I didn’t like one little bit. Their mouths were wide open, like before. But this time, they were letting out creaking, clicking sounds that reminded me all over again of insects.

“Please!” the woman was shouting at me. “Don’t leave us in here!”

I could hear her perfectly clearly. But there was not a thing that I could do to help. I stared into her face, torment welling up inside me. In another few moments, they’d be overwhelmed. Would turn into the same kind of creature as the mindless horde approaching them.

My mind had practically gone blank. My body felt like it was drifting. If I’d been able to risk my own life to save theirs, then I’d have done that. But I wasn’t even being given that option. I’d been turned into a helpless spectator. And my teeth clenched, but I couldn’t even look away.

The others were still bounding across, their bare palms smacking on the asphalt. I wasn’t even breathing, by this time. The woman started screaming, and that seemed to tear my head apart. I slammed at the barrier with everything I had. Except that simply wasn’t good enough.

When suddenly, it parted in front of me.

What the …?

I hadn’t done that.

The family came tumbling through, the woman crashing up against me and the man falling to his knees on the blacktop. The translucent wall closed again next instant, sealing itself up. Several transformed humans slammed against it and bounced off.

We paused, satisfying ourselves that none of them were getting through. Then we untangled ourselves from each other.

“By the Goddess, thank you, sir, so very much!” the woman gasped. She started crying.

But I knew perfectly well that it hadn’t been me who’d saved her. Probably, one of the adepts had finally taken notice. Except I had no idea why they’d been so long about it. Me and Ritchie hustled the whole family in the direction of our cars. I had a hand around the woman’s shoulders, and could feel how badly she was shaking.

“Are there anymore?” I asked.

She was still in tears and didn’t answer. Had buried her face in her daughter’s hair and seemed to be shutting everything else out. But her husband managed to take in my question, and fumbled around for a reply.

“When it started, there were plenty of us,” he murmured dazedly. “Those things were mostly coming from Morgana Park, but we outnumbered them. We tried to fight back, using magic. When that didn’t work, we tried to run.”

He paused and shuddered visibly.

“I guess the rest got picked off. But I didn’t see it. I was too busy trying to get my kids out.”

And then he stared at me with eyes as round as coins.

“Some of those things … they look like people that I know. What
are
they?”

There was no time to explain. I was about to tell him that. When the point was illustrated with horrible clarity. A familiar glow came into view on the darkened street behind us. Then a second one.

Two of the angels were headed this way. And I had not the faintest notion if the barrier would hold them.