Night of Demons - 02 (34 page)

The barriers were still there, at the same height and extensive breadth. But something had definitely changed about them. They didn’t have a glossy tinge to them any longer, and had turned a darker shade of gray that blended more readily into the surrounding night. In fact, it was much harder to see them. Was the whole thing going to vanish? I could only pray that was the case, although I doubted Hanlon would give in so easily.

Glancing further up the street, I spotted Ritchie Vallencourt. He was active again, half hidden behind the topiary on somebody’s front lawn. And had Paul McKendrick with him, who had also managed to survive the first assault. So I headed over to them, feeling very glad the young detective was still with us.

It had been a real ordeal for Ritchie. I could see it in the dark shadows around his eyes, the startled gleam in them. His skin still had a sallow look, despite the fact that he’d recovered. He appeared to have aged several years since the last time I’d talked with him. Roughly half an hour ago.

The Landing can do that to a person sometimes. Leave you older—and hopefully wiser—between one moment and the next. What must it have been like for him, feeling his whole body waste away? I couldn’t even imagine.

He was trying to put a brave face on it, standing squarely, issuing orders through his phone. But when he finally got to bed—if any of us ever got there—what would it be like for him? What kind of dreams would he descend into once sleep had claimed him?

“Hold your positions,” he was saying. “And stay out of sight, for Pete’s sake.”

So he’d brought more uniforms up here. I wasn’t sure if that was the right move, after what had happened to the first batch. But I wasn’t in charge, and had to accept that. A careful glance along the length of Plymouth Drive revealed the snouts of rifles poking out from behind walls and protruding from rooftops.

He noticed me, and gave me a respectful nod.

“You got them?”

Martha appeared beside him in the shadows.

“All but the important one,” I told him. “What exactly are you doing now?”

He glanced around the same way I’d done.

“Containment.”

“Yeah? I don’t think it’ll work.”

Annoyance spread across his face. Which made me see that his reputation as a tough nut, fairly volatile, was warranted.

“Then what exactly would you have me do? Christ, Devries, I’m just an ordinary man. If you want something better, ask the adepts. Where the hell have they all gone?”

And that was a good point. Martha had been helping us, of course. But Vernon? Levin? The others on the hill who were possessed of really serious magic? They’d come to our assistance readily enough last night. But they were no longer in evidence.

There had to be a reason for that. I glanced across at Martha, who looked puzzled too.

“Okay, I’m on it,” she told me.

Then she turned into a smudge, and vanished.

The rest of us took another hard look at the barrier across the street.

“What is that?” the uniformed sergeant murmured.

Something seemed to be happening to the wall. It had turned an even darker gray since I’d arrived, and parts of its surface had started shifting. Not in any pattern, as had been the case before. This was more like watching water being sloshed around in a rectangular tub. Entirely random, with no proper direction to it. Sections just detached themselves and flowed across each other, merging constantly and changing pace. It was happening to the whole expanse. And could have been mesmeric, if it wasn’t so damned threatening.

“What do you suppose is going on in there?” Vallencourt wondered.

But the barrier was still opaque. What Hanlon had planned was anybody’s guess.

Martha came back. This time, she had Judge Levin with her. She looked upset, apologetic. And the judge was so dour and unhappy he could barely raise his narrow head. He was still in the same brown suit, but had put on a fresh white shirt. Except he didn’t have his robes across his shoulders. Which meant either he hadn’t been planning to use magic, or else things had become too urgent for that.

I couldn’t see his eyes behind those rimless spectacles of his. The angle was wrong. But what was bothering them both? We’d faced a lot that was pretty dreadful in the past couple of days. Could there possibly be something worse?

“Where are the others?” I asked.

At first, there was no response. Martha seemed to have lost the power of speech, and Levin looked too overwhelmed to answer.

He finally pulled himself together. He had dignity, when everything else failed. As he lifted his face to look at me, his glasses tilted, clearing. There was genuine regret in his pale gaze.

And something else. Genuine fear as well. A horror that was swallowing him.

“The rest aren’t coming,” he informed me.

His voice was so diminished I could barely make it out. Not even a whisper, really. Little more than an exhaled breath.

“And in point of fact,” he continued, “I have no business being here either. There is absolutely nothing any of us can do.” I got the rest from Martha, who’d recovered her senses a little by this stage. She had gone to the Vernon residence, the judge’s, Kurt van Friesling’s, and found each of them empty. Then she’d headed for the McGinleys’ home. And found the whole load of them in the inner sanctum, that strange circular room that I had visited before. They’d been pensive, barely moving. Almost dazed, in fact.

“We came to a joint decision several hours ago,” the judge broke across her. “Our involvement last night helped to save the town, for sure. But we could see that picking off these individual demons wouldn’t solve the central problem.”

“Hanlon?” I asked.

“No. Not him, but what he stole. At the center of this nightmare lies the Wand of Dantiere itself. Of course, we didn’t even know of its existence until recently. So we decided to combine our powers and delve into its origins, its past.”

And this sounded familiar. Magic left footprints, I already knew. It left a trail on the night air. If you had sufficient spells and knowledge, you could follow it back to its source. And find out how and why it was created. Its strengths and limits, and intended purpose. Willets did it the whole time. It was how he’d clued me in on Saruak.

The fear was growing stronger in the judge’s gaze. And the blood was draining from his lips.

“It was created to do all of this. And ultimately, one more thing.”

I didn’t like the way he said that. He paused briefly, drawing his thoughts together before going on.

“The wand was created back in the ninth century by an alchemist and necromancer by the name of Emile Dantiere. The man was privately wealthy, but also eccentric and obsessed with darkness. And he chose to make his home in one of the filthiest slums in Lyon, a place so dank and dangerous even troops thought twice before going there. He hoped that way to keep what he was doing hidden from the outside world.”

Levin stared across at the barrier, his face seeming to draw in traces of its shifting darkness.

“For four decades he lived and worked there. And we’re talking about an era when the average lifespan was less than that. There’s little doubt he used his magic to prolong his years. He used it for a lot of other things as well.”

“What exactly was he doing?” I asked.

“What any sorcerer of his kind does. He was searching for ultimate power.”

It had been practically the turn of the ninth century—the judge explained—when Dantiere started to make the wand. And by that time, he had gone completely mad.

“I think that’s part of the solution to all this, and why it’s happened now. Whatever else Lucas might have been, he was not clinically insane. He must have used the wand thousands of times, without ever once understanding the kind of brutal force that he was holding in his grasp. He probably thought it was a conjuring device like any other. But he couldn’t have been more wrong.”

“You’re telling me,” I asked him, “that its real power can only be got at by a man like Dantiere himself?”

“A raving lunatic. Exactly.”

“Hanlon.”

“Yes.” The judge straightened up a little. “That’s what we’ve been seeing this entire time. It’s not that our visitor’s been growing stronger. More likely, the wand has been opening up to him, revealing itself in its true form.”

And to me, that sounded like the same thing as…

“It likes him?”

Levin nodded stiffly.

“You’re talking about it like it was alive.”

“It is, Devries.”

That staggered me. Despite which, I could see that the judge wasn’t finished yet.

“Okay,” I asked him. “What’s it really for?”

His gaze became extremely distant. And his face went slack.

“Emile Dantiere was killed before he ever got to use it, thank the Lord. One of his neighbors realized he was up to something truly evil, and so crept into his home and stabbed him while he slept. The wand got passed on from hand to hand—after that—without anyone ever recognizing its true potential.”

He stared around at us.

“By the time he created it, Dantiere had grown so violently insane that he had come to hate all living things. The ultimate purpose of the wand is to bring on the end, the Apocalypse.”

“The end of everything we know,” said Martha.

And it was now in the grip of a modern-day madman who really wanted that.

Almost as soon as she had spoken, Paul McKendrick mouthed a curse, his thick silver eyebrows coming up. And our attention swung to the point where his gaze was fixed.

It wasn’t a matter of tight focus either. The whole barrier was changing shape.

The front section was no longer rectangular. Its outer edges had become distorted, shapeless. And the central part, where the gates had been, was growing taller, oozing upward as I watched. The whole thing seemed to have taken on a life of its own. I reminded myself there was a consciousness behind it.

“What’s it doing?” Martha blurted.

Except if she didn’t know by this stage, who else was supposed to?

The distorted mass became slightly translucent. And, for the first time since the walls had gone up, the outlines of Millwood House became vaguely apparent through them.

I squinted, trying to understand what I was looking at. It didn’t make any sense, at first. And then I finally got it. I’d been trying to pick out proper shapes. The truth was, there were none. I was looking at a tangled jumble, nothing more than that. We hadn’t heard the tiniest sound. But the whole mansion had been demolished. There was not an intact portion standing anywhere.

Not a wall still upright, even part of one. The place had been ripped apart completely and reduced to shattered rubble. The really strange thing was, it wasn’t strewn around the way you might expect.

This was not mindless destruction, like we’d seen throughout the rest of town. There’d been planning behind it once again. The wreckage was piled up in a solid block, some fifteen feet in height. And at the very top was a deep indentation. I struggled to figure out what I was really looking at.

The barrier was pulling itself into an upright shape, some kind of irregular column. It dwarfed by far the pile of shattered bricks behind it. And it kept on growing, so tall that my neck practically creaked. A dark gray pillar, maybe forty feet from top to bottom. It reached high enough to blot out several stars.

Then it started to resolve into a different shape. One that I recognized almost straightaway. I had seen this before, and not so long ago. Massively enlarged—but it was Hanlon, still transformed into his Death persona. I think I cursed as well, at that point, sick to my stomach of this maniac.

The bare skull was there again, its sockets peering down at us, the fixed grin still in place. The bony fingers and the black robes too, the whole thing vastly magnified. But there were a few differences.

Where there’d been lightless hollows in its eyes before, there were now flames. They burned a ruddy crimson color. You could practically feel the heat from them the whole way down here.

Where there’d been bared teeth, the canines had extended to long, sharply pointed fangs. There was a fluid dripping from them that I didn’t doubt was venom.

There weren’t merely bony fingertips this time. Long, curving nails protruded from them, cruel-looking, like talons. And—between the thumb and index finger of the right hand—I could see the Wand of Dantiere, as tiny as a toothpick in that giant grasp. It looked insignificant from this distance. But I’d been around magic long enough to not be fooled.

The moon was up behind him, like some muddled reflection of his face. At first, Hanlon merely stood there, casting his massive shadow across us. But I didn’t imagine that would last for very long. My gaze swung to Levin.

“Is there nothing you can do about this?”

Fear and sadness jostled for position on his features. I had never seen him look so helpless.

“Once begun, this can’t be stopped,” he said. “Only the person holding the wand can control events from this point onward. Dantiere intended it that way.”

“I can’t accept that!”

But his shoulders slumped.

“You might have to, I’m afraid.”

I thought of everything we’d been through. And it had been full of pain and loss, for sure, but we’d come out the right end of it. Found solutions to each problem. So I wasn’t about to accept that verdict. There had to be some way to prevent this.

Then I remembered who else was here, and my attention went across to Lauren.

“You’re not bound by Regan’s Curse,” I told her. “You can still get out of here.”

I had already started wondering—if the End of Days was coming, then would it be confined solely to the Landing, or would it spread out to the normal world? At least, if it was the former, she still had a fighting chance.

There was a strange thrumming noise above us. That was the creature moving its cloaked arms, the air around them being pushed aside. The wind from it brushed across our faces and made the shrubbery around us clash.

She could still get to safety. Or the hope of it, at least. But Lauren shook her head. She kept on staring at the skull above us. Her own face had taken on a peculiar glow.

“No, Ross. I told you—I’m not leaving without him.”

Which was pretty crazy, given what was happening. Except…I understood craziness of that kind, and respected it. She was still as determined as she’d ever been, and even tougher-minded than she’d been a bare few days ago.

“If you stay, you might not be leaving here at all,” I pointed out.

A stern expression crossed her features. “There’s always that chance.”

Okay then. I kept on staring at her.

“Any ideas?”

“Me? ’Fraid not.”

Me neither. I peered back at the enormous figure.

Maybe it was the fixed grin, the kind that all skulls have. But it looked delighted with itself, like it had done something exceptionally clever. My flesh crawled. Who was this really? Some nut who got his jollies bringing suffering down on innocent folk. Whatever he had turned himself into, that was the image I held in my mind. I wasn’t going to back down from him, the way the adepts had. Like most bad guys, he relied on that.

He thought he had already won, and I could see that clearly. He looked down at us again, every motion languid. Then, with a decisive air, he settled onto the pile of rubble. That was its purpose, I could see. It was intended as some kind of throne.

He sat perfectly upright, his off-white, bony chin raised. I suppose the word for it would be “imperiously.” The flame in his eyes seemed to burn a little brighter. Then he raised the wand. Its tip winked in the moonlight.

“Jesus Christ!” I heard Vallencourt murmur.

The figure lifted its arm as high as it was able. And drew the wand across the night sky like a pencil. It couldn’t be actually touching the heavens—anyone knew that. But it still left the faintest mark. A thin line, traveling downward. A barely visible abrasion on the purple darkness, almost like a narrow scar.

I was trying to work out how that could even be possible, when it deepened and then split open. A strong, moaning wind began to push out through it, carrying all kinds of odors. Foul ones. Most of the guys around me ducked their heads.

Then something started shifting in the bottomless darkness beyond the gap. And when I looked closer…

No, not simply one thing.

A load of them. An amassed army.