Of Saints and Shadows (1994) (51 page)

“Help him,” Peter screamed to them, and Meaghan immediately transformed, leading Alex into the air, racing up the monolithic creature’s body. They tore into the demon’s huge fingers, attempting to loosen its grip on Cody.

“Get this asshole off of me!” Cody yelled, his face tight with pain as he tore into the fingers himself.

Turn to mist!
Alexandra’s voice filled his head.

“I can’t!” he yelled in a panic. “I don’t know why, but I can’t change at all!”

Mulkerrin was summoning the mist-wraiths, which were gathering about him, as he prepared to take his leave. Above them, the gargantuan demon’s face broke through the portal, and for the first time Peter believed it might truly
be
Beelzebub.

Unlike all the other demons they had seen, the ugliest, most disgusting, and perversely constructed creatures a mind could imagine, this creature terrified Peter Octavian. It looked down upon him, its face a crimson ruin, with furrows and rocky growths, two horns on each side of its head, eyes bright with a light reflected from nowhere, and he met its gaze. For a moment he felt as if Mulkerrin’s spell had not faded, for he was frozen solid by his terror.

What frightened Peter, what made
this
creature so different from the others, was its intelligence. Eyes, nose, and mouth, where many of the other creatures had none. Personality, character, where the others were mindless savages.

And it smiled at him.

Not an evil smile, though the face was evil incarnate, but a knowing smile. A nudge, a wink, a nod that said,
Yes indeed, thing of the world, everything and nothing is true. Wouldn’t you love to know what I know
? Peter could almost hear the words in his head.

Perhaps he did.

“I called him to me and he came!” Mulkerrin shouted as he was lifted from the ground by his wraiths. “HE CAME! WHAT POWER!”

Peter moved. Above him the second hand came through, struggling still against the pull of the other side, the other world—against the hold that hell had on the demon. The rest of the head was emerging and he could see what looked like another horn, halfway between the ground and the creature’s head. It might have been its phallus.

Peter heard Meaghan scream at Alex to shapeshift into flames. His friends were going to be killed.

Bolting to where Sheng’s remains lay, Peter picked up the silver sword Cody dropped when the demon had grabbed him. He had always wondered at their vampiric metamorphosis, at how they could incorporate clothing and objects into their physical forms, and then shift back perfectly, shirt still buttoned, gun still loaded. He had never even considered what might happen if he absorbed silver in his shifting. A foolish question, for silver was poison. Silver was pain.

Silver sword in hand, Peter changed and the sword melded into him. He became something new, forged in pain, a creature with wings and claws and fangs. A griffin, perhaps, or something that only lived in his mind, but his mind created the form he needed.

Then he was beyond pain, beyond rage, beyond fear. He shot into the sky toward the fleeing sorcerer and struck out at the wraiths that carried him with claws laced with silver. The mist-things reacted instinctively and fled, shrieking, while Mulkerrin and the
Gospel
fell the forty feet to the stones below.

A huge hand reached for him, closed around him, and for a moment he despaired. But then it was gone, and only action remained. Peter tore into the slant hand with hands and teeth, with razor-sharp extensions of himself filled with silver. His own pain was a terrible static filling his every nerve with hissing, steaming heat. Silver was poison to anything not of the earth, not of their plane. Perhaps because they had once been human, his kind could withstand the pain, overcome the poison.

There was so much they didn’t know.

The thing was bellowing pain, and Peter was free. He looked up at the head, bending toward him, and the smile was gone, replaced by a terrible, grim satisfaction and the certainty of triumph.

Peter!
Meaghan’s thoughts broke through the chaos in his mind.
How?

Clear out!
he ordered, ignoring her question.
We’d all he dead without you, hut get hack or you’ll he killed.

Cody!
Alexandra balked.

I’ll take care of Cody.

As Alex and Meaghan backed away, barely escaping the swat of a huge claw meant for him, Peter swooped in to where Cody fought, blood bubbling from his mouth and shoulders. Peter realized they were broken. He lashed out with his silver claws, but the hand did not let go. Cody was still trapped.

Cody, make the change!

There was no response. Somehow this thing had prevented Cody from changing, but now Peter couldn’t even be sure if Cody was conscious, or alive, to make the change.

Peter dove in again, stopping this time and digging his talons into the demon’s flesh, scraping and cutting with the silver deep into the creature’s hand. The lingers tensed up, crushing Cody further. The shadow bellowed above them and its other hand came down to bat Peter away . . . but the list in which it held Cody relaxed.

C’mon, Will, make the damned change.

Cody was burning, the lire that he’d become engulfing the demon’s hand. And then he was falling, and Peter could do nothing more for him as he regained his normal shape and hit the rocks by Mulkerrin.

What Peter had thought was the creature’s penis was actually a bony horn protruding from its left knee, which had now come through along with the foot. They could see much of its chest and shoulders. From the waist down, except for the lower left leg, it was still invisible.

But not for long.

Peter landed near Alex and Meaghan, who had dragged Cody’s form out of range of the creature, at least for the moment. Cody was not moving, but Peter could see that he was healing rapidly. The creature he had become disappeared in flame, and then Peter was there, hand on his belly, doubled over as the silver sword clattered to the ground.

Meaghan rushed to his side and helped him to his feet.

“I’ll be okay in a second,” Peter said.

“Do we have a second?” Alexandra asked as she tended Will Cody’s wounds, and they all looked up at the face of hell, towering above them.

Hannibal’s house was a ruin. Ca Rezzonico, next to it on the Grand Canal, had one wall destroyed and was burning from the inside out. Peter could see that many of the other Defiant Ones had started to arrive on the scene, but did not know what to do any better than he.

“How do we stop it?” he asked, to nobody in particular.

“Where’s the book?” Meaghan asked, turning his face so that he could focus on her. She could see that he was baffled. “There’s got to be something in it that can help us!”

“Mulkerrin had it when he fell,” Peter answered, then looked back at the demon.

“What is it, Peter?” Alexandra asked him, waiting for Cody to open his eyes. “What is that thing really? All these things? Demons, or something else? And why does silver affect them all the same way it does us? Are
we
demons, Peter? Did we come out of hell like that thing?”

“NO!” Peter yelled, more to the hellspawn itself than in answer to Alex’s question.

But then he did answer her.

“We’re nothing like these other things, like this thing,” he assured her, seeing how deeply the questions disturbed her. “There is humanity in us, no matter how deep we have to go to find it.”

HAH!

The booming voice came from above them, and they all looked up again. The demon was leaning forward, putting its weight on its left foot, on the rubble of Hannibal’s house. Only its buttocks and right leg were still trapped, and its face was tight with the effort of pulling free. With the grip it now had on their dimension, the shadow’s flesh was emerging faster than before. Still, it looked at Peter.

It spoke to them. One sentence only, after the huge, rumbling laugh that had drawn their attention. Ca Rezzonico crumbled to the ground as the words became tremors. The ground shook, and flame, of a color they had never before seen, shot from deep in its throat.

YOU HAVE NO
IDEA
WHAT YOU ARE!

Those were its words, and the pain in them, for Peter, for all of them, was that the words were true.

Peter felt like he had woken up from some complacent dream, a dream where he’d rested after saving Cody, where he simply waited for Beelzebub, or whatever it was, to emerge into their world. But he dreamed no longer. He didn’t know if he could prevent it, but he wasn’t about to let the invader violate their world without a fight.

In less than a second Peter was at Mulkerrin’s side. Though he could barely believe it, the sorcerer was alive. Near him lay the body of Sister Mary Magdalene, her corpse torn open by Alexandra’s fury. Peter looked up for a moment and saw his own reflection in the shimmering mirror surface of that portal.

There is something human in there! he thought.

Two paces away, he saw the book. Grabbing it, he knelt at Mulkerrin’s side and slapped him awake, not trying to be careful.

“Priest!” he said, then got no response and began to shout. “Mulkerrin, Liam Mulkerrin. How do I send it back? How do we close the portal?”

The sorcerer did not respond, and Peter slapped him again, looking up to see that Beelzebub’s foot was only yards away. If he were not straining to pull his other leg through, he could surely have stepped on Peter where he knell, or at least have made a grab for him.

“Damn you!” Peter screamed at Mulkerrin’s prone form, slapping the book against the earth. “You wanted power? Here it is. You called it and it came to you, you said. Well, do you have the power to send it back? You called it and—”

I called it and it came to me.

That’s what Mulkerrin had said.

“Meaghan,” he yelled, and in a breath she was by his side. “Take this.” He handed her the book.

“What? What are you going to do?”

He ignored her as he hefted Mulkerrin off the ground, placing him on one shoulder. The priest had to be dying because he was aging in front of them. He looked more than eighty years old now, and Peter realized that magic had kept him young. While the creatures he had so hated were given the gift of immortality, Mulkerrin had used his powers to steal a little bit from the things he most despised.

Peter turned toward the demon, and Meaghan grabbed his arm.

“What are you going to do?” she said again, and he whirled to face her.

“Our world is one of order. According to our legends, hell is a place of chaos. But over here, we have rules. We have a lot of them. If we didn’t have them, these spells, the magic by which the church has held demons in their control for so long, would be nothing but words. The silver, that’s another thing. Somehow, whatever put together this world gave it rules—natural or supernatural, whatever. And one way or another, everything abides by them.”

He looked around and saw his people, several hundred beings whom legend had dubbed vampires but who he knew were so much more. They were watching, waiting, as the terrible wind battered them with the stench of brimstone. The door to hell had been opened. Who could say that once this creature, this Beelzebub, was through, it would close?

“PETER!” Meaghan yelled over the sound of the wind, clearing his head. He looked at her and saw she didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Mulkerrin called it and it came to him.
To him!
Do you understand? He said it like it was important, like it was part of the spell. Maybe, if he’s gone, it won’t have an anchor here!” Peter responded.

“HOW IN HELL CAN YOU KNOW THAT?” she screamed.

Peter saw the pain in her face and he felt it, too. For them to lose what they’d found in each other, after what was really no time at all, especially for an immortal, it wasn’t fair.

“I can’t,” he answered, almost too low for her to hear.

“Fine, then just kill him.”

“I don’t think that will be enough.”

“My God, Peter,” she screamed, and he sensed the reaction of the others nearby, their astonishment that the name of the Almighty could roll so easily off her tongue, an invocation they’d believed fatal to their kind. “You can’t mean to go through . . .”

He put Mulkerrin down and took Meaghan in his arms, the book pressed between them. They kissed, but unlike any they had previously shared, this kiss held not a trace of the desire that had once driven them. It was a sad, pure gesture, and when Peter drew back his head, he could see that Meaghan was crying, tears of blood.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

Peter looked up to see Alexandra helping Cody to his feet, and he felt better knowing Will was going to be okay. Together, the three of them would have to deal with the new order of things. It was going to be a new world for them.

“Come back to me,” Meaghan said.

Peter nodded yes, though he knew it couldn’t be. He didn’t even know for sure if what he was doing would close the tear that Mulkerrin had rent in the fabric of their world. But in his heart, Peter felt it. Something spoke to him there, urged him on.