The Graves of Saints (21 page)

‘Let me by,’ she said.

‘What are you doing?’ Omondi asked, and she could hear him in her ear just as well as she could through her commlink.

Charlotte turned to him, tired of being ignored.

‘I know it’s hard, Sergeant. I look like a nineteen-year-old girl, but I could kill you right now, before you could even aim that weapon. You’re struggling between wanting to
treat me like an ally or a kid and seeing me as the enemy. I don’t blame you. But I’m telling you they’re gone, and they left us a present. The blood I smelled – the dead
things I smell, right now – it’s coming from down there. Considering we have no idea what’s really waiting down there, and since I’m a hell of a lot harder to kill than any
of you, I’m going down ahead of you. Unless you want to give me that condescending look you’ve been giving me for the last few minutes again?’

Omondi furrowed his brow thoughtfully, then gestured for the other soldiers to step back.

‘Lead the way, then,’ he said. ‘But be careful.’

Again with the concern
, she thought. Omondi really was having a hard time figuring out how to feel about having a Shadow on his team. She wondered if he had worked with Allison Vigeant
and, if so, whether he’d been quite so conflicted about her.

Charlotte gave Omondi a nod and went to the stairs. Moonlight lit the way, but it could not reach underground. As keen as her vision was, she did not refuse when a soldier offered her his
flashlight. Shining it ahead of her, she picked her way amongst the debris and descended. Sergeant Omondi and four or five others followed her down, keeping their distance.

At the bottom of the steps was a corridor that led straight ahead, and she followed it. The stone walls and supports had held up rather well. She glanced into three rooms as she passed and found
them similar to the one above, with the detritus of an abandoned vampire nest, but the blood ahead smelled fresh – perhaps only hours old.

The smell lured her to the end of the corridor, where a heavy door hung open. The smell of ancient gunpowder lingered in the air, and she realized that this must be one of the vaults where
Bannerman had stored part of his arsenal. The stink of death sat heavily in the air as she stepped over the threshold into the vault and moved her flashlight beam across the room.

Charlotte counted six corpses. Four of them had been haphazardly lumped into a pile like nothing more than human rubble, just another part of the ruin. The other two had been gutted, their
viscera decorating the room like party streamers. They had not even been dead long enough for the blood and stinking waste to stop dripping from their hanging intestines. Charlotte’s stomach
lurched and she nearly threw up. Even after all she had been through, much of her was still human enough to recoil at the sight.

‘Charlotte, what’ve you got?’ Omondi asked. All of the impatience had left his voice. There could be no denying the stench that came from the vault now.

The dead people were all dressed in some kind of worker’s uniform, but she only glanced at that detail for a moment. Something else drew her eye. Her light had caught the edge of a smear
of blood on the far wall. She panned the light across the wall and read the single word painted there, a haphazard afterthought. A bloody celebration.

Xibalba.
She didn’t recognize the word, but she wanted to make sure she was reading it correctly, so she took a step deeper into the room and felt something tug at her ankle. Tug,
and snap.

Some part of her brain recognized the significance of that snap, of the wisp of string that coiled back into the shadows like a broken spider-web. In an eyeblink, she was shifting, flesh and
bone turning to mist.

‘Charl—’ Omondi began.

And the vault exploded, buckling the ceiling above, sending a ball of raging white fire rolling up through cracks in the ground. The remaining walls of Bannerman’s Arsenal were blown apart
and the woods ignited with flames that began to spread.

In minutes, the fire could be seen for miles up and down the Hudson River.

The goblins, it seemed, had finally claimed all that remained of Pollepel Island.

September 23

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Octavian sat in a chair beside Nikki’s open coffin, holding her hand. He knew it was absurd, clutching the cold, stiff fingers of a corpse as if he were offering comfort
to the dead. Even the idea that he might draw some solace for himself from such contact was ridiculous. One glance at her face, perfectly painted and still as a wax figure, should have driven all
such sentimentality from his heart. He had lived centuries in this world and many more in Hell, had seen death and sorrow in catastrophic proportions and watched loved ones die screaming. How could
he fool himself into thinking it meant anything at all for him to sit here and bid farewell to a woman whose life had been extinguished days ago?

And yet . . .

‘I’m alive,’ he whispered, running his thumb over her knuckles, studying the lips he had once kissed and which had been sewn together by unloving hands. ‘All that time I
fought so hard to hang on to something inside me that I could call “human”. And then I was human again. Alive. And I had you by my side, and despite everything, I thought we could live
in the world the way ordinary people do. That we could just . . . breathe.’

He hung his head, angry with himself. She was gone. He was talking to nobody but himself and it made him a fool.

Only, he didn’t feel like a fool.

‘Now I feel like I can’t breathe at all.’

He released her hand and placed it carefully the way he had found it, over her heart with the other. Her heart did not beat and her lungs did not draw air. There would be no more music from
within her.

Anger and grief – the yin and yang of tragedy’s aftermath – had been twined together within him ever since he had walked into her hotel room and found her. This morning, grief
had come to the fore. When Commander Metzger had come to him before dawn to tell him about the explosion at Bannerman’s Arsenal, his numbness had only deepened. Local police river patrol
boats had been the first to respond, followed quickly by the state police and Army and UN officials and investigators. Five soldiers had survived the explosion, three of them gravely wounded, but
there had been no sign of Charlotte. The lack of any trace at all suggested that she had either shifted or been totally incinerated, and he chose to believe the former. The fact that she
hadn’t yet reported in made him wonder if she had somehow been caught between the two, in which case it would take significant strength of will for her to reintegrate herself. Charlotte had
been one of Cortez’s creatures at first, which Octavian found worrisome. If she didn’t believe in her own survival, then her consciousness would have scattered along with her being.

Metzger had a different interpretation of Charlotte’s absence. He also figured her absence meant one of two things, and that one of those was incineration. But to Metzger, the other option
was treachery; he thought it very likely that Charlotte had set them all up, leading the team to Bannerman’s Arsenal for the sole purpose of getting them all killed. Octavian didn’t buy
it. He didn’t trust easily, but he had given Charlotte his trust. She had earned it in the fight against Navalica. And he believed it would require an actress of extraordinary skill to have
perpetuated the sort of deception that would have been involved.

No, Charlotte was just a girl. A kid who’d been a victim and decided she wanted to take control of her future. He hoped that she hadn’t died for that ambition and that he’d see
her again, in time. What Metzger might do then was a concern for another day. Even Charlotte’s life or death was a worry for later.

Octavian took a deep breath and let it out, steadying himself. He looked at Nikki’s waxen features again, thinking the mortician’s work was a pale imitation of her true beauty. His
thoughts were a jumble of guilt and recrimination and fury. That her fans still gathered in front of the hotel where she had been murdered was a good sign, because it meant they had no idea where
she was going to be buried. There would be no wake, only a burial service. It would be a quiet, loving farewell of which he was certain Nikki would have approved. No hours of mourning with an open
casket for people she barely knew. No church service. Just words spoken at the graveside, and a body laid gently to rest.

He told himself she would have understood the speed with which all of this had to be done. The federal government had stepped in to expedite the burial at the request of the UN. They wanted
Octavian’s attention refocused on what they considered more important matters than grief. The swift burial would help to guarantee a private service, but that was only one reason he had
agreed. Whatever Cortez had set in motion – whatever his reasons for having killed Nikki – he was closer to achieving his goals with every passing moment. Octavian meant to find him and
kill him.

Nikki would have approved of that too.

When they lowered her coffin into the ground it would not be the end of his mourning, but he would no longer feel the need to be at her side. Then there would be a reckoning.

A quick rap on the door, and it swung open. The thin, gray-haired funeral home director ducked his head in.

‘Mr Octavian? I’m afraid it’s time, sir. May we come in?’

Octavian stood. ‘Of course.’

He wiped the dampness from his eyes and felt the static crackle of magic prickling his skin. He glanced down at his hands and saw the dark, purplish energy emanating from them – his anger
made manifest without him being aware of it.

The funeral director and two of his broad-shouldered sons stood just inside the room, watching him with wide, wary eyes.

‘It’s all right,’ Octavian assured them. He tried to dispel the power seething around his hands but only managed to diminish it. ‘As you say, it’s time.’

He bent and kissed Nikki’s forehead, as he had so often done when they embraced. Then he kissed her lips, so softly. And then he turned away, striding past the funeral director and his
sons, and out the door. He thought the old man might call him back, ask him if he was certain that he did not want to stay while the casket was sealed, but none of the funeral men said a word.

All that was left was to bury her.

Nikki’s fans were cleverer and more tenacious than Octavian had believed. Somehow, the word had gotten out. The gates of the cemetery were guarded by state and local
police. Octavian had thought it unnecessary, but now he was glad the cops were there. As he rode in the back of the black sedan the funeral home had provided, following the hearse that carried
Nikki’s body, he stared out the window at the hundreds of fans who lined the last quarter mile of the road to the cemetery’s gates. He hoped the presence of armed police officers would
be intimidating enough to keep the burial private.

As the funeral procession turned into the cemetery entrance and passed through the arched, wrought-iron gate, Octavian saw a pair of teenagers holding each other and crying as they watched the
hearse go by. A part of him wished he could let them in. He thought Nikki might have liked that as well. But the gathering that was about to take place was not only a funeral.

It was a war council.

Through the tinted glass, the graveyard looked like another world, a dusky stone garden of tombs and markers. The stillness of the place made him catch his breath, as if time had frozen outside
the confines of the car. Then he noticed the way the wind shook the branches on the trees and the illusion was broken.

The procession turned left along a narrow, rutted road that led over a rise. The hearse pulled up onto the grass on the right, nearest the gravesite that had been prepared for Nikki’s
interment, and Octavian’s driver pulled around it, parking further along on the left. The rest of the procession – fewer than a dozen cars – followed suit. The mourners had been
asked to meet at the funeral home in order to form the procession to the cemetery, but Octavian had barely paid attention to them when he had come out and climbed into the sedan. He had sat in the
back behind tinted glass and waited while funeral home employees carried Nikki’s casket out and loaded it into the hearse.

Now, as he exited the sedan, blinking back the brightness of the autumn morning, he had his first good look at those who had come to bid her farewell. Despite the chaos of the night before and
the morning, Leon Metzger had come to pay his respects. But Octavian sought other faces, other friends and allies, and as he crossed the broken road and started across the lawn to the place where
the priest stood waiting, he saw them.

Kuromaku wore a charcoal-black Victorian mourning coat, nearly knee-length. His face might as well have been carved from stone, but Octavian felt strengthened by the sight of him. He had arrived
with Allison, whose gray dress was nearly as somber. Her dark sunglasses revealed as little as Kuromaku’s mask of stoicism. They had wanted to be with him at the funeral home but he had
refused, wanting his last farewell to be private, even from his closest friends.

Amber Morrissey seemed to have come alone, but Octavian knew that was as much an illusion as her human appearance. Thanks to her encounter with chaos magic in her hometown of Hawthorne, Amber
required a glamour that made others see her the way she wished them to see her . . . as the young woman she had been before Navalica had begun to transform her into a Reaper. But since it was
Octavian’s glamour, he could see through it easily enough, see the thing that Amber had become. He had used sorcery to slow her transformation, but the combination of his power and
Navalica’s had turned her into something else – something new. With her hard, burgundy skin and long hair like purple spines, she remained beautiful. Somehow even her long, vicious
talons did not erase her loveliness. Neither human nor Reaper, she nevertheless had a Reaper’s abilities . . . to become a wraith and sail on the wind, to become as intangible as a ghost, to
reach into human beings and tear out their souls.