New Title 1 (12 page)

“I’m offering you help.” Penemue held out one finely manicured hand. “I may be your only hope.”

Clancy took a step backward, shaking his head. Something was wrong here, and he didn’t like the fact that Penemue was resisting going to the station.

“Sorry. Don’t move, Jackson. I’ll be right back.” He turned, thrusting one hand under his jacket and onto the grip of his pistol, and began to walk toward the street. He hoped his car was still intact.

The earth began to jolt again. One of the dig lights shifted, its wide beam passing over Clancy as it rolled to a new position.

He turned, pulling his pistol free, expecting to find Penemue lunging for him, but the provost’s back was turned as he stared at the field.

Clancy followed the man’s gaze, his throat tightening.

Something was pushing its way through the night sky—the dirt—the very light beams that crossed the ruined field. The stars spun, the earth quaked, and the air split, revealing a multitude of multicolored, pulsing, floating monsters that put the earlier snake-creatures to shame with their grotesquerie.

“Oh, shit.” Clancy took two steps to the left, to avoid hitting Penemue, and began firing with terrified abandon.

XVI

The glass display cases had broken, and Todd envied Jack Langthorn his hard-soled cowboy boots and Andy Markham his sturdy running sneakers. His own Italian loafers weren’t designed for stepping on broken glass. He could still feel pain. Usually pain didn’t bother him—feeling anything was better than feeling nothing—but tonight he didn’t have time for distractions. The heaviness he’d felt hanging over campus all autumn had reached its crisis point, and thousands of possible futures frothed around him, seeking a new state of equilibrium.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” Markham asked. He’d found a candle in the rubble, part of one of the displays, and was lighting it with Jack’s lighter.

“I suspect those bones were buried in the Gudruns’ time,” Todd said, looking around. “I’d like to know why.”

“I take it you don’t figure that was the family graveyard,” Jack said.

“I think it was a sacrificial garden.”

“Here.” Markham handed him the candle in a pewter candlestick. “Sacrifice to what, Edward?”

“Maybe one of the old gods. The Gudruns were Norwegian?”

“You’re not going to tell me they were sacrificing to Odin, are you?”

Todd shrugged, leaning over a jumble of household goods and carefully moving them around. “I don’t know. We’ll have a better idea when Amon returns.”

The fallen items seemed mundane enough: dishes and cups and knick-knacks, some of them apparently brought over from the old country. He stepped over the mess and continued looking.

“Hand me my lighter, would you?” he heard Jack ask. The two men began a back-and-forth, something about smoking and health, and Todd tuned them out, walking deeper into the attic. His impressions of the available probabilities were growing increasingly unclear. All he was going on now was instinct.

He didn’t even know what he was looking for. He just knew that he’d recognize it when he saw it.

Another bookshelf had tilted over in the back of the attic, a barrister-style glass-fronted unit that hung open. Its collection of leather- and cloth-bound books had spilled onto the floor. Todd crouched, setting the candle to one side, and inspected the titles in its flickering light.

Some were in English, but most were in a language he couldn’t read. Norwegian, if he had to guess. The answer could be in one of them, but how would he know?

A number of angels and devils spoke all the tongues of humankind, but Jack had already expressed reservations about conjuration. Besides, the chaos rippling around campus made Todd cautious. Until a new equilibrium resolved itself, any action, however minor, could have a catastrophic effect on the future. And conjuration was by no means minor.

“Did you find something?” Markham asked, his steps crunching on broken glass.

“Do you read Norwegian?”

“I’m afraid not.” The former priest stepped past him and crouched on the opposite side of the pile. He picked up a book and paged through it.

The scent of tobacco drifted through the attic. Todd glanced at his companion.

“You lost the argument.”

The older man sighed.

“He says he’s trying to quit. I wish he’d try a little harder.”

“You’ve asked me about my beliefs. Let me ask the same of you.” Todd picked up another book, flipped through it, and set it aside. “Why were you laicized?”

“Oh, nothing juicy, I’m afraid.” Markham glanced up from his book. “I was performing exorcisms my bishop hadn’t approved, using methods he didn’t like, and I’d published several papers he considered theologically suspect.”

“Did he go to the pope?”

“I volunteered for laicization before the matter could go that far, and I’ve stopped publishing under my own name.” Markham chuckled. “The people who need me manage to find me.”

“Then you still practice exorcisms.”

“In extremis, I’d still be expected to perform the sacraments. And most of the people who seek my help are in extremis.”

“What’s your friend’s role? He’s not a priest.” Todd tilted what appeared to be a Norwegian Bible toward the candle and opened it. Names were handwritten in the flyleaf, along with a series of dates.

“Oh, Jack really pisses off the Church. He practices Christian magick—mostly folk spells, with a little Santeria on the side, and high magick when the folkways don’t work.”

“You don’t object?”

“I’ve seen God work through him often enough to keep my reservations to myself. I stopped trying to second-guess the Lord a long time ago.”

Todd turned the Bible toward him. Markham set down his own book to take it, holding the page high to catch the faint light.

“Can you read any of that?” Todd asked.

“Well, it looks like the last names are Gale and Thorvald, and they’re in the same handwriting, with the same dates on them.” Markham’s finger tracked the dates up. “This must be their wedding date. This last one’s in another hand, so it’s probably their death date.”

“The nephew wrote it?”

“Or a friend of the family.”

Todd nodded, wondering when Amon would return. He was eager to hear the demon’s news, and he wanted Amon by his side as a spiritual counterbalance to the two Christians.

Markham began flipping through the Bible. Todd picked up the next book, a much-annotated cookbook in English.

“Jack!” the laicized priest said abruptly, standing. “It’s Leviathan.”

Todd heard Jack say something. Floorboards creaked and glass crunched as the other man crossed the dark attic, appearing in their tiny circle of light. He’d thrown away his cigarette, but the smell of tobacco clung to his clothes as he took the Bible.

Todd stood to look over his shoulder.

The text was in Norwegian, but he could tell that the chapter was in Job. Someone had underlined words and jotted numbers in one corner. A long, twisting serpent was drawn around the edge of the page in faded ink.

“Where else is Leviathan mentioned?” Jack asked, flipping the pages. “Somewhere in Psalms, right?”

“Yes, but I don’t remember which one.”

“I’d take a guess and say 74.” Jack held the page open. More ink drawings covered the pages, crude but evocative.

“Leviathan is commonly considered to be another name for the Babylonian goddess Tiamat,” Todd mused. “Or the Nordic Midgard Serpent. It’s associated with water, not earth.”

“But Tiamat was the guardian of the underworld,” Jack pointed out.

“Well, at least this gives us a serpent link,” Markham said thoughtfully. “That giant snake out there is associated with Leviathan, or
is
Leviathan...or the Gudruns thought it was, anyway.”

“Good.” Jack closed the Bible. “If it’s nephilim, it can be banished.”

“I don’t think that creature is any member of the mal'akhim,” Todd demurred, remembering Amon’s warning. “Amon didn’t recognize the bones as belonging to either heaven or hell. Whatever they were consecrated to isn’t part of the Host.”

Jack and Markham exchanged glances, and then the biker sighed, handing the Bible back to his friend. He gave Todd a weary look.

“Don’t tell me. You think it’s an alien.”

Todd burst into startled laughter. 

“You don’t really believe in aliens, do you?” he asked.

“Most people find it easier to believe in aliens than in angels and devils,” Markham said. “What was that old book?
Crop Circles of the Gods
, or something like that?”

“
Chariots of the Gods
,” Jack corrected him. “And I know people who take it as gospel. Except for the ones who think crop circles are angelic signatures, of course.”

“Celestial graffiti?” Markham tsked. “Must be those pesky rebel angels.”

Todd brushed dust off his slacks, finding the whole idea ridiculous. He’d never heard the nephilim or b'nei elohim express any concern about souls on other planets. If aliens existed, they had their own mal'akhim.

“I think this is the information we needed,” Todd said as the attic shuddered again. Glass skittered and clinked across the floor. “I daresay your Leviathan is linked to these earthquakes.”

“Seems to me it might be worth taking a closer look at the bones,” Jack suggested. “They gotta be linked to all this.”

Todd nodded. As of yet, he’d only seen the field from a distance. With luck, the police in the area would have been called away for emergency duties.

 “Let’s go.” Todd picked up the candle and closed his eyes, ignoring the frothing possibilities and concentrating on finding one static door. It was there, motionless because he had located it, and he swung it open to a spurt of flames and ringing of bells.

“Perceptive filters,” he said, before the other two could object. “Energy interpreted in a manner your senses can process.”

“Or maybe just plain hellfire,” Andy added.

“What about your little friend?” Jack asked.

“Amon will find me, no matter where I am.”

XVII

Alison stared at the oak cross, which shuddered each time the earth shook. Peter and Jarret had headed back outside to help with the rescue attempts, leaving her in the chapel with the other students who were too hurt to help but not so hurt that they couldn’t sit in the pews to pray.

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t think of any explanation for the snake-thing except that it was some kind of monster. And if it was a monster, then it needed to be stopped. Except the big question in every horror movie was “
how
?” Every monster had a weakness or vulnerability, but that snake thing wasn’t exactly a vampire or werewolf.

Of course, if this was the apocalypse, then nothing was going to stop the monster except Judgment Day, but the world hadn’t ended yet, and you couldn’t just sit around on your hands until the Final Trump sounded, could you? Because what if you were wrong?

She wished Dr. Todd were here. He’d know what to do about giant killer snake-monsters. And he’d know if it was the end of the world or not.