Authors: Christopher Golden

Waking Nightmares (43 page)

BOOK: Waking Nightmares

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“How did all of this happen?” Charlotte asked with a wave of her hand that took in all of Hawthorne. “I mean, how do you get from ancient Chaldea to some New England beach town?”

Octavian hesitated, glanced at Amber, and then rolled up the scroll and set it next to the iron chest.

“Amber’s family,” he said.

Her face might have taken on an almost alien cast, with its wine-red skin and ceramic perfection, but her metamorphosis into a wraith did not mean she was incapable of showing her emotions. Shock widened her eyes, and then he saw her features collapse into confusion and regret.

“I don’t understand,” Amber said.

Octavian glanced at Keomany before replying.

“Maybe you know this, and maybe you don’t. If you trace the branches of your family tree backward, somewhere along there you have a family who were among the original settlers of this area.”

Amber nodded. “Dmitri Poulos. He was a sailor.”

“Greek,” Octavian replied. “That makes sense. But the names don’t really matter. They’d have changed with marriages a hundred times. Probably more. In the midseventeenth century, Dmitri Poulos arrives and makes his home here. Maybe he had a wife with him, but more likely, he found one among the other settlers, one of their daughters, I’d guess. Or in his travels, he met a girl in Boston or Providence or some other port, and brought her home.”

“Adele Perrault. She was French-Canadian,” Amber said, but now he could hear the fear in her voice, the desire for ignorance.

She was afraid of what he would say next, and Octavian wished he could tell her there was nothing to fear. But she was right to be frightened of this truth. It would hurt her. Scar her. Change her, even more than she had already been changed.

“But he would have had his mother with him, or grandmother, I suppose.”

Amber shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Octavian smiled sadly. He reached out and touched her hand, and when she flinched he was not certain if it was because of the sexual current that flowed through them all, or because she had seen herself in the mirror and despaired of ever being touched so tenderly again.

“Yes,” he said. “The woman was with him.”

Charlotte hurried to glance out the window again, checking on Norman Dunne. “Can you speed it up, for fuck’s sake? If it’s gonna hurt, just do it. Spare her the suspense.”

Octavian knew what the vampire meant. Sometimes it was less painful to thrust the dagger in, rather than forcing his victim to endure its slow penetration.

“That woman wasn’t Dmitri’s mother,” he said.

“You mean it was Navalica?” Keomany asked. “How can that be?”

The wind seemed to gust harder, sweeping the hot rain deeper into the house, where furniture and carpets were already ruined. The house shifted and creaked. But Octavian told himself it was only his imagination, that like the ocean, the goddess’s magic ebbed and flowed. It would soon sweep them into a sea of chaos, if they could not stop her. But she was not here in the room with them. She did not know what magic was arrayed against her, and that was their one hope.

“When she had few left who would worship her, she went mad and turned on her people. That’s the nature of chaos, of course. Entropy. The center cannot hold. She was too powerful for them to destroy, but they were able to weaken her. Her priests, the Chaldean mystics, knew magic that would contain her, and that is what they did. They removed her heart, the essence of her godhood and her power, and they sealed it inside an iron box with a recording of her history and the components they used for the ritual to bind her. But they could only bind her heart, not her flesh.

“To be certain that none of them would betray the others, that no one would try to free Navalica to curry favor with a mad goddess, they cast a complex web of spells, enchantments to make Navalica forget who she was, and to make the high priests forget as well.”

Octavian looked at Amber. “But not only to forget. These enchantments made the high priests believe that Navalica was their responsibility. That they were family. Drained of her vitality, she looked like an old woman, and she has been in the care of the descendants of those priests—all of them under the same spell—for more than twenty-five hundred years.”

Amber stared at him, her bloodred lips open in a tiny pout. Though her metamorphosis had given her the appearance of some kind of infernal succubus, in that moment he saw that she was still just a girl.

“Gran?” she said, her lips trembling. And she wept, silent tears sliding down that perfect wine-hued skin. “Gran was never . . . I mean, she was never
her
?”

“She didn’t know what she was,” Octavian said. “How could
you
have?”

“And the Reapers . . . the wraiths . . . There aren’t any others, are there? No one else has been changed the way my parents have.”

Octavian shook his head. “I don’t think so. From what I’ve read, this is what happens. Living with her, constant exposure to the chaos inside her, causes the transformation. When it happens, the wraiths . . . what you call the Reapers . . . must have faded away, or left this plane. They went elsewhere, wherever that is, until Dunne opened the chest and Navalica started to wake. If I’ve got this right, it shouldn’t have happened to your parents for decades yet, not until more generations were completely assured. But this plane is changing. The barriers that kept the supernatural out have deteriorated. Somehow, Navalica began to stir, and the ocean currents dragged the chest toward her, her magic working without her being conscious of it. And then Norm Dunne hauled it up from the bottom.”

“So I would have been one, too, if you hadn’t tried to help,” Amber said.

“This is help?” Charlotte asked. “Turning you into this?”

Amber glared at her, and Octavian saw a true threat there. She wasn’t a small-town college girl anymore. Vampire or not, Octavian thought Charlotte would do well not to test her.

“He did what he could,” Amber said. “If not for Peter, I’d be her slave, along with the others. My parents would be out there right now, killing for her.”

“This is insane,” Keomany muttered.

Octavian squeezed Amber’s hand, glancing up at Keomany. But beyond the earthwitch, he saw Charlotte watching him, and the urgency in the vampire’s eyes startled him. He had taken too long. Sympathy for Amber, an attempt to be kind and gentle, had felt like the right thing to do, but he wondered what it might have cost them. Even now, the wraiths might be committing murder. And he had no idea what Navalica might be doing. Breaking down the barrier between worlds? Searching for her demonic spawn? He felt certain of only one thing: the infection of her chaos would be spreading.

He nodded at Charlotte. The girl might be a rogue vampire, but she had made it clear where she stood in this battle. Another rogue, one who believed the teachings of Hannibal or this new coven master, Cortez, would have surrendered immediately to the rush of chaos, to the insatiable hunger it created, and rejoiced in it. But Charlotte fought, and he was happy to have her on his side. Professor Varick’s death had been regrettable, but she could not be blamed for that any more than the dogs driven mad by chaos could be held responsible for turning wild.

Octavian reached into the chest and began to remove its contents and set them out on the coffee table. The scrolls he placed on the floor in front of him—it would take him only moments to master the spells therein—and he arranged the stone jars of dye and the ampoules of liquid in even rows. The tiny bone knives and the pair of iron needles were last.

“You said her heart was in there?” Keomany reminded him. “But we didn’t see any trace of organic tissue. Do you think Dunne took it out? Did something with it?”

Octavian’s pulse quickened with her nearness. He breathed through his mouth so he would not inhale the scent of her. He thought of Nikki and wondered how she could possibly understand the world he had brought her into, and whether she could forgive him having rough, hungry sex with Keomany the way he forgave Charlotte for murdering Miles Varick.

A foolish question. Of course she could not. She would never understand the dark currents that ran behind the veil of the world or what had to be done to combat them, no matter how many times he pulled back that veil to show her.

“I think it must have been a real heart once upon a time,” he said. “But she is a goddess. An entity like Navalica is not of flesh and blood the way we understand it. Her heart went into this box, but it was just as much her spiritual heart, her core, as it was a physical thing.”

“And so, whatever we do,” Charlotte said, “it has to start with ripping her heart out?”

Amber made a small noise. She looked up, wiping away tears, coming to terms with having her entire life redefined.

“I’m on board for that,” she said. “All of this . . . this is my legacy. My family’s entire history is wrapped up in keeping this bitch down. I’m not going to turn away from that now. Especially after what it’s done to my parents, and to me.”

“Good,” Octavian said. “Because I have a plan.”

“Finally,” Charlotte muttered.

Octavian glanced at her. “Go and get Dunne. We all have a part to play in this. Even you.”

THEY
took the police car. Keomany drove, with Amber in the passenger seat and Octavian sitting in the caged backseat next to Norman Dunne, who held the iron chest in his lap. He had his eyes closed and rocked in the seat, murmuring to himself, a tiny smile at the edges of his mouth. The man’s mind had been polluted by Navalica, and it pleased him to serve his goddess.

The wind and rain buffeted the car, but Keomany kept her hands tight on the wheel.

“It’s hard to see,” she said. “I wish I could clear us a path.”

“You need to conserve your magic,” Octavian reminded her.

She gave him a sharp look in the rearview. She didn’t need reminding.

“Do you think Charlotte will be all right?” Amber asked. She turned to look through the grating of the cage, her skin a deep purplish-black in the darkness inside the car.

“There’s very little that can kill a creature like her,” Octavian replied.

Amber nodded thoughtfully, wondering, he presumed, what it would take to kill her, now that she was no longer human.

Octavian closed his eyes a moment, thinking, running it all over in his head. When he breathed in, he could taste her magic, and he could feel the rough caress of chaos on his skin. It prickled his flesh, made him keenly aware of his body and his carnal desires, in all forms. He forced his breathing to remain steady, but he could feel Keomany in front of him, so close, and he had seen the way she had been reacting to his presence, perhaps unconsciously, back at the Morrissey house. The way she stood, as though magnetism drew them toward each other. The way she licked her lips with nervous anticipation. Octavian felt as though they prowled around one another in hungry circles.

When Navalica had been defeated and the chaos magic swept from Hawthorne and cleansed from their bodies and minds, he would have to decide if any of that attraction had been genuine. But not now. For now, he hated Navalica for making him jittery with sexual energy, for making him feel such bestial lust.

The plan,
he thought.
The magic. Focus.

In truth he did not need to go over the words in his head, to sketch at the air in rehearsal for the finger-contortions and hand gestures that would sculpt the magic he summoned into its proper shape, into the spells that would end this, if all went well.

If.
Two letters. The most troubling word in the English language.

There were so many ways his plan could crumble into catastrophe, but he had not shared those concerns with the others. If it had been only Keomany, he might have been more up-front with her about the risks, but with Amber and Charlotte—he just needed them to perform the tasks he had assigned to them, and trust that he knew what he was doing. That he could win.

Keomany slowed, the tires skidding in the slick, sticky rain. She pulled to the curb and killed the engine.

“We’ll have to walk from here,” she said.

BOOK: Waking Nightmares

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