Waking Nightmares (45 page)

Authors: Christopher Golden

BOOK: Waking Nightmares

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Together, they watched as a pair of wraiths grabbed Norm Dunne and flew him upward. He ascended toward his goddess and she imagined him in ecstasy. He held the iron chest in front of him. The chanting rose to even greater volume and the rain tapered slightly, as if Navalica’s focus on the chest had slowed it.

Dunne held the chest toward her, this thing that she needed so that she could never be harmed again, never be thwarted, never be caged.

Navalica took the iron box from him, and then gestured toward the wraiths, who backed up several steps and let Norman Dunne plummet to an abrupt death in the town square below.

Amber flinched in horror, remembering the man’s amiable nature, his pride in his work, and his gruff love for his son.
I’m sorry, Tommy,
she thought.

As Navalica opened the chest . . .

THE
goddess would destroy the traitors’ magic—their little binding spells and ritual oils. Navalica smiled, suffused with a power that she had only dreamed about in her long imprisonment, sometimes remembering while she slept what she really was, only to have the dream flit away upon waking. She hated them all for what they had made her.

Weak.

But the sigils for the ritual tattoos would be lost to history once the scrolls where they had written down the ritual were destroyed. The ingredients for the dyes, the measurements of the oils needed to brew the draught that had protected them from her . . . they would never be used again.

She would be worshipped. She would be fed. Forever.

Navalica laughed, full of such joy as she had never known. She opened the iron box, and her joy faltered. Her eyes narrowed. What was this? Where were the elements of the ritual? Where were the scrolls? Inside the chest was only darkness.

No. The air inside that box moved. Navalica turned it so that it would catch the light of her burning hair, and she saw the mist swirling inside. She did not understand.

And then the mist rushed out at her, taking shape . . . taking flesh . . . and she saw it had a face. Red hair, a beautiful girl, glittering fangs . . . a vampire. She stank of old blood and bitter oils and dead flowers. Her face and arms were a labyrinth of sigils, tattooed into her skin with ancient dyes made from Chaldean earth. Navalica knew those sigils; they spoke of a magic long forgotten, a sorcery that had been old when she had first set foot upon the soil of this plane.

Navalica screamed with a terrible fury. She reached for the vampire but her hands could not touch the bitch; the sigils and oils had seen to that. The chaos storm was her heart, the mad churning of her mind, and a dozen bolts of lightning lanced down and struck the vampire girl, who did not flinch away, but grabbed hold of Navalica’s head, her fiery hair burning the bitch’s hand.

Eye to eye, Navalica stared at her, full of hate and rage.

She grunted, and looked down just in time to see the vampire’s fist dragging her bright blue heart out through the ruin of her chest.

No!
she thought.
Not again!

The goddess fell to her knees as the vampire flew away. The flesh of her chest knitted itself quickly, but already she felt the storm begin to wane, so much of her strength lost to her. But she was still strong enough to kill the vampire, she thought. To destroy her.

With a gesture, she had the attention of her Reapers. She pointed, and they swarmed, filling the sky, blotting out the storm for a moment, and then flying in pursuit of the vampire.

Weakened, but drawing strength from her rage and the chaos she herself had created, she tried to stand and failed. The Reapers would bring her more of the bright, sweet human sustenance that had sped her awakening, but without her heart, the storm would slowly die. The chaos would fade.

She could not allow it. The vampire could not be allowed to complete the ritual.

Again she struggled to stand, staggering to her feet, her heel bumping something. Metal scraped against the stone of the clock tower’s ledge. Navalica looked down and saw the iron box still there, left behind in the vampire’s haste, and she began to laugh.

Fool. The vampire had weakened her, had taken her heart, but she could not complete the ritual without something within which to trap it. To cage Navalica’s essence.

The goddess laughed, glancing around, and then she saw them, just outside the town square—the vampire and three others, one of them the sorcerer she thought she had already killed. These were the forces arrayed against her?

She stepped off the clock tower, riding the wind, mind awhirl with murder.

These four were nothing.

MILES
opened his eyes. He felt strangely at ease, cradled in a warm softness that gently rocked him. Someone played piano in a room nearby, and he realized that he knew the song, but only when the voice began to sing in lovely, melodic French, did he recognize the voice as his mother’s. He went completely still, not even breathing, listening with a melancholy heart that brought the sting of tears to his eyes.

In the quiet between notes, the rest between one line and the next, he heard the silence inside his chest. It occurred to him that he had not yet started to breathe again, and that he felt no particular yearning to do so.

Sitting up, he found himself in bed—his own bed, in his home, where he had grown up, where his mother had taken care of him and where he, eventually, had taken care of her. A golden glow suffused the room, a persuasive light that might have been twilight or the last moment before dawn. The music made him ache with longing, but he felt it only the way he had felt the keenest emotions all his life.

“Mother,” he said, testing his voice in the room. He could hear it inside his head, but it made no echo, did nothing to fill the empty corners.

He slid off the bed and frowned, for he did not hear the shush of his skin against the sheets. A trickle of icy dread ran down his spine and made him shiver. He swallowed hard, but thought the feeling might only be the memory of swallowing. The weight of dread upon his shoulders was terrible, but he forced himself to reach out and touch the sheets. He smiled, for he could feel their softness, but when he tried to press down on the fabric, to muss the sheets, to grab a snatch of the fabric in his fist, his fingers passed through as if the bed were an illusion.

Miles bit his lip, took a long, shuddering breath, and stared at his hand. He closed his eyes and hung his head and let himself relax into utter stillness. A stillness only possible for the dead.

He remembered now. The red-haired vampire. Her black eyes with the tiny red pinpricks for irises. Her teeth like razors in his throat. Pain and sorrow, as he felt life leave him. And hope, as he gazed at Keomany as she tried to use her elemental magic to remove the taint of chaos upon his soul, so that he could go to his natural rest.

The singing in the other room ceased abruptly, the last piano notes lingering in the air. He opened his eyes and his breath caught in his chest.
No breath,
he thought.
No chest.
But he could still feel. His body no longer had the weight it once had, but the memory of its uses stayed with him like that last note of music hanging in the air.

The house moaned, buffeted by the storm. His surroundings had changed. Whatever ethereal place he’d been in when he first awoke to his new awareness, he had moved from there and back into the world of the living. The rain still beat on the windows, blue lightning arcing outside, lighting up the room, turning his outstretched hand into even more of a phantom limb. Transparent blue light washed right through him.

It isn’t over,
he thought.
The evil is still here.

“Miles?” a voice said, from the doorway.

Hope fluttering in his ghost heart, he turned to see his mother standing in the hall outside his room. For a moment he thought Tim McConville might be with her, but whatever message Tim’s ghost had been trying to send him earlier, it must have been delivered. Or perhaps it no longer mattered, now that Miles himself was dead.

“Ma,” he said.

He hurried to her, and if his feet did not exactly touch the floor, they certainly felt like they had. His mother’s ghost embraced him, and he felt her arms around him, and he took solace from the knowledge that they were together.

After several long minutes, he asked the only question that seemed to mean anything to him.

“What now?”

His mother stepped back and looked up at him. He had been taller than her since the year he turned twelve, and she had joked about him being able to eat beans off her head, whatever that meant. It had always made him laugh.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think . . . I think we wait here until we’re not scared anymore.”

Scared. Miles felt a painful hollow in his gut. Yes, he was scared. Frightened of what came next. He wondered if that was why Tim McConville had come to see him all those times, searching for someone to tell him not to be afraid . . . or that it was all right to be afraid. He wondered if the little boy who had never gotten to grow up was still afraid, or if he’d been able to finally put his fear to rest.

“We’ll be all right,” he told his mother.

She smiled. “I know, sweetheart. We have a piano.”

Miles laughed, thinking of all of the songs she had taught him. Her students at the high school had called their French and music teacher Mrs. Varick, but in her heart she had never stopped being Toni Pelletier, whose parents had come to America from Saint Paul de Vence, in France. She had been a good mother.

“That’s all we need now, is it?” he asked. “Music?”

His mother smiled and hugged him again. “It’s all we ever needed.”

Miles smiled, still confused and afraid but a little less of both. He kissed his mother’s hair. He opened his mouth to make a joke about eating beans off the top of her head, but the joke never came out.

A sharp pain stabbed him in the gut. He grunted, clutching at his abdomen as he stepped back from her.

“Miles, what is it, darling?” His mother’s fear pervaded the room.

Another pain twisted inside him and he shook his head. Was this supposed to happen? He knew this pain, this pang.

“I don’t . . .” he began, but then he faltered and looked at her and a fresh pang stabbed at him. A chilling rush of horror swept through him.

“Are you . . . Mom, are you
hungry
?” he asked.