by T. S. Mann
After a long silence, Electra finally spoke. “It’s ... surprising to see you here, Mother Eagle. I didn’t think you ever left the Aerie anymore.”
“We all must go where Unity leads us, child.”
“Of course.” Electra glanced over at the unconscious paladins. “New recruits?”
“Brother Falcon and Brother Kestrel both came to us from the Atlanta congregation several months after your ... departure. Falcon is studying to be a congregational leader and is presently acting as my second. Kestrel is a demon hunter who came to Boston to hone his combat skills. The boy, Brother Shrike, is a neophyte recruited from Salem after his Insight last year and squired to Brother Kestrel. Opinion is ... divided on whether he will make it.”
“Shrike? You’re running out of birds to name your soldiers after, Mother.”
“Don’t be facetious, Electra. It is a very old tradition in Boston to name our warriors after birds of prey, and all traditions have power, even if you have chosen to flout them.” Mother Eagle took a sip of her wine. “For what it is worth, we have kept the craft name Peregrine available in case you should ever ...”
“I won’t,” said Electra firmly. “You said this was a test? Did I pass?”
Mother Eagle sniffed somewhat diffidently.
“Barely. Mr. Ratcliffe’s voice stress over the phone should have aroused your suspicions, to say nothing of his demeanor once you arrived. Yet, you walked right in without performing more than a cursory sweep of the building. And only Mr. Ratcliffe’s intervention saved you from a protracted physical contest against a better-armed opponent. Quite frankly, it pains me to see how your skills have degraded since you left us to enter the service of that ... librarian.”
Electra grew impatient. “Why are we here, Mother Eagle? What’s the point of all this?”
Mother Eagle idly rubbed the side of her glass with a finger. Electra noticed the gesture but sensed no occult significance, though she stayed ready to duck just in case. The older woman finally spoke.
“Electra, despite the ... unfortunate past you have with our congregation, we currently share a common goal: the destruction of the blasphemy which calls itself Lindsay Forrester. We have the power to locate it almost immediately, but we lack the proper tool. You have the tool we require, but you don’t realize it. Or perhaps Doctor Ellington’s ethical blind spots have rubbed off on you and you simply refuse to acknowledge it.”
Electra stared at her impassively. “Go on.”
“The nephilim’s veiling spells were thorough but not perfect; our seers were able to divine some details of what happened earlier tonight. Two mundane cultists went strange during the summoning ritual it attempted. Two brothers, twins in fact, with the provocatively biblical names of Matthew and Luke. Their last name is still unknown. The nephilim took Luke along when it fled, and you took Matthew and, I assume, delivered him to Parker Ellington for indoctrination into the Invisible College.”
“Oh honestly,” she snapped. “The College doesn’t do indoctrinations, at least not in Boston. And frankly, I don’t think he’s bright enough to even be College material.”
“Regardless, it seems you don’t realize the significance of the boys’ connection, and your current mentor has not felt the need to share it with you. All twins are sympathetically linked, far more so than other blood relations. Thus, a scrying ritual performed on one could easily lead directly to the other, despite the obfuscation that accompanies strangeness. If the Unity Blade had possession of one twin, it would be a simple matter to track down the other, and with him, the nephilim.”
Electra’s eyes widened. Of course! Why hadn’t Ellington thought of using Matt to track down Luke?!? But as she thought about the magic required for such an effort, she shook her head.
“No, it wouldn’t work.”
“And why not?”
Electra opened her mouth but hesitated before answering. She wondered why the old woman was playing dumb.
“The connection exists, but Lindsay could have taken Luke anywhere in Boston or farther, and anyway she’s probably veiled him. Using Matt as a scrying focus to find his brother would require you to spend so much juice that it could ....”
Electra stopped as the ramifications of such a ritual hit her. Then, she narrowed her eyes and regarded the old woman coldly.
“Oh, of course. How silly of me. You would have to spend so much juice to cover the whole city that the backlash would kill both brothers and probably cause Luke, wherever he was, to explode. That would not only give away Lindsay’s position, it might even seriously injure her. And since you’ve already decided that the two boys are iredeemably contaminated by the Beyond, sacrificing them both to find Lindsay isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.”
“Don’t be judgmental, child. Lindsay is an agent of the Adversary. One or both of those boys you’re so concerned about are probably agents of the Adversary as well, whether they know it or not. Any member of our order would be honored to sacrifice his or her life to defeat an enemy like Forrester. Do you seriously expect us to balk at sacrificing some collateral damage that is most likely a nephilim-in-waiting?”
“No, of course not, Mother! That’s why I left you – the fact that you view everyone in the entire world as ‘collateral damage’ in a fight against any enemy you can never defeat!”
Her voice rose. “Yes, alright, we have to fight against the Beyond – the Adversary, if you want to call it that – wherever it appears. I understand that. But it’s impossible to permanently end the threat of the Beyond; it’s just ... too damn big. And it’s insane to throw away innocent lives in a futile effort to do so. Even to kill monsters like Lindsay.”
As Electra finished her rant, she sat back in her chair and wondered whether Mother Eagle would kill her now, since she had basically just rejected the old woman’s entire belief system. She had seen the old woman kill for lesser insults, after all. But tonight, Mother Eagle just clucked her tongue in disappointment.
“As I feared. You have spent too much time among the Collegians. Ellington has infected you with his ... sentimentality.”
“Maybe. But if so, it was by my choice.”
Off to her right, Electra heard a groan. The three paladins were starting to wake up. “So, what happens now? Are you going to kill me? Or just mind-rape me into helping you?”
“Electra!” The woman seemed scandalized by the suggestion. “I would sooner cut off my sword arm then harm or hinder you in any way! You may no longer follow our traditions, but you still fight the Adversary, and you fight it well. Why would I seek to impair you when you do our work for us?”
Mother Eagle turned to look directly into Electra’s eyes, despite her blindness.
“But understand this – time is short. The nephilim missed a window of opportunity on Halloween, but November 2nd is the Day of the Dead, which is nearly as auspicious for ritual work. If the blasphemy cannot be located between now and then, you must decide whether your sentimentality is reason enough to risk letting it succeed in whatever goals it has.”
Mother Eagle reached down for the dog’s harness and then stood up, a white cane appearing in her other hand as if from nowhere.
“Whatever our differences, you are still one of the finest paladins I have ever taught. And while you may now choose to call yourself Electra Dellamorte, to me, you will always be Sister Peregrine, and no amount of maudlin naivete from the Invisible College can change what you truly are.”
Her words were earnest and carried an almost maternal pride.
“If you change your mind about helping us to stop the nephilim, you know how to reach us. If you don’t, well then, I hope you will have the integrity to accept responsibility for your decision to tacitly assist it.”
The old woman allowed her seeing eye dog to lead her to the center of the room, where the three paladins were slowly climbing to their feet. The black guy took a step towards Electra with a murderous gleam in his eye, but a gesture from Mother Eagle’s cane stopped him. Th
en, she raised the cane into the air, waved it in a circle three times, and intoned the words “Sanctum sanctorum,” before turning back to Electra.
“The door will lock itself behind you. The lights and other electrical devices will switch themselves off where appropriate, and the security system will activate thirty seconds after you leave. Do inform Mr. Ratcliffe that I thank him for the wine and that he need not fear any retaliation for his earlier actions. In these troubled times, I find his loyalty to you quite refreshing.”
Mother Eagle and her groggy but mobile paladins left the bar. Electra stared after them for a long time. Then, she picked up the glass of wine that Eddie had left for her and drank it down in one gulp. For several seconds, she studied the empty glass as she thought about what her former mentor had said. In the background, the Allman Brothers finished their song.
Oh Lord, I feel like I’m ....
The last word was obliterated by the scratch of the needle as an empty wine glass smashed against the player.
CHAPTER 6:
LUKE'S STORY
Meanwhile, somewhere very different...
Black. Cold. Waxy. Slimy. Bright. Flames. “Luke! Stay down!” Burning. Agony. Giggling. Buzzing. Flight?!? Darkness. Silence.
Luke Sullivan awoke from what felt like a long and troubled sleep with the discomfiting sensation of having had a nightmare so bad that he didn’t dare remember it. He rolled over and immediately hissed in pain. Wherever he was, the ground was rough and rocky, and he quickly realized he was naked except for a pair of black silk boxers, the same ones he always wore to coven meetings because he thought they made him look dangerous and sexy. Presently, he felt neither. Gingerly, the boy picked himself up and looked around, still feeling dazed and half-asleep.
There was no visible light source, but somehow Luke could somehow still see around him with perfect clarity. He stood on a barren, rocky plain under a pitch-black sky. The ground was slate-gray. Or so he assumed, anyway – he still couldn’t figure out how he could see without light, but his body seemed to be its normal coloration for bright daylight.
He shivered. There was a brisk cold wind blowing over him, and he rubbed his arms with his hands in a vain effort to keep warm. Turning around, he noticed a wide cliff about thirty feet behind him. Seeing no other landmarks, he walked towards the edge, occasionally cursing when he stepped on a jagged pebble.
At the edge, he looked over and down. The cliff face stretched down as far as he could see, dissolving into absolute blackness hundreds, perhaps thousands of feet below. It also stretched as far as he could see to both the right and the left, curving slightly in each direction to form a massive arc, maybe even a circle of incredible size. As he bent over the edge, he noticed the wind that whipped past him seemed to flow over the edge and down into the depths below.
He also felt a funny tingling in the pit of his stomach, a faint urge to step back a few feet and then take a running jump, just to know what it felt like to fly. He’d had that feeling before, as a kid at Sunday Mass, when they’d arrived late and had to sit in the balcony section. He remembered leaning forward to look over the balcony edge at the hanging lights just even with it, and he remembered wanting to know what it felt like to leap from one to another. He had read somewhere that it was an evolutionary quirk leftover from primate ancestors who were always wondering if they could make it to the next tree branch.
“Don’t fall in,” said a voice from behind him which startled him so badly that he nearly did just that.
Luke flapped his arms to regain his balance, and he quickly stepped back from the edge, turning as he did in the direction of the voice. It was an old man – a very, very old man by the look of him – sitting in an old-fashioned wicker wheelchair. He looked ninety if he was a day, and he had that eerie trait of the very aged that always creeped Luke out the most: the way their bones seemed to shrink within their bodies, causing their skin to bunch up all over. In this case, the old man’s face was so scrunched up with wrinkles that he looked like he’d been carved out of an apple and then left to rot.
The man (who seemed vaguely familiar, though Luke was sure he’d have remembered if they’d ever met before) wore a thick woolen sweater and a heavy blanket to keep his legs warm. His gnarled fingers extended out of a pair of ratty, fingerless gloves.
Attached to the right side of the chair was a small, sickly green oxygen cannister with a tube leading up to the man’s nostrils. It hissed softly every time he took a breath. The little hair he had left was snowy white and grew in tufts over his ears and a few wisps on the top of his head. His eyes were sharp, though, and as green as Luke’s own.
Suddenly conscious of his lack of clothing, Luke started to cover himself with his hands, but then he realized how ridiculous that was, so he put them on his hips instead.
“Where did you come from?”
“An adequate question. Better ones would be ‘where am I?’ and ‘why am I here?’”
Luke shifted uneasily. “Okay, where am I and why am I here?”
“You are at the edge of the Pit, where the Reaper makes its home. You are here to decide whether you are going to live or die.”
Luke swallowed at that, and the old man continued.
“Don’t be afraid. Everyone comes here eventually, but a few rare individuals find their way here before their appointed time and are permitted to leave again, though even they must eventually return at the end of their lives. You are one of those rare individuals who get to make multiple trips.”
Luke looked around. He was practically naked, standing in a nightmarish landscape, talking to a scary old man about dying. This had to be a bad dream. The old man stared at him, breathing deeply for a moment. The oxygen tank hissed. Faintly, Luke picked up an antiseptic odor that seemed to emanate from the man. It reminded him of his late grandmother’s nursing home. Something in the air there always made him nauseous when he visited as a child.
“You are thinking, I suspect, that this is just a nightmare. I assure you, it is not.”
Luke’s eyes widened in response.
“No offense, sir, but I’m naked, on what looks like an alien planet, next to a bottomless pit, talking to an old man who appeared out of nowhere and who knows what I’m thinking. That sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would happen in a dream.”
The old man barked a laugh that dissolved into a wheezing fit. Then, he smiled at Luke. It was not a warm smile.
“If you choose, you may tell yourself that you are dreaming now. You may even persuade yourself to believe that. If you do so, you will die. Only by accepting what is happening will you have any hope of survival.”
Then, he crooked his head sideways, like a vulture examining prey. “Tell me, do you think what happened in the church was a dream too?”
“I ... I don’t know. Maybe.” If that had been a dream, it had been a vivid and terrifying one. “But even if that was real, it still doesn’t explain how I got here.”
“You are in a transitional state. You had not yet processed your experiences when you awoke briefly in the church. You are doing so now.”
Luke didn’t understand any of that, so he ignored it and looked around once more.
“Where’s Matt? Is he okay?”
“I don’t know. Why do you care? Guilty conscience?”
Luke whipped back to face the man. “Excuse me?!?”
“Don’t be coy, Luke. You chose to get involved with Lindsay’s cult. You chose to get Matt involved with Lindsay’s cult. It follows that if anything happens to him because of your choices, it will be your fault. Is that not enough reason for any decent human being to feel guilty?”
Luke’s bristled in anger. “Matt’s a big boy. He can take care of himself. And it wasn’t my fault! Lindsay had me fooled just like everyone else!”
“In other words, ‘I am not my brother’s keeper.’ How typical. And it’s hardly surprising that Lindsay fooled you easily. You were perfect for her needs. Young, cynical, broody, antis
ocial, emotional stunted.”
The old man’s eyes sparked with malice. “Tell me, Luke, does your brother have any idea how close you were to killing yourself when Lindsay found you?”
“Shut up!” Luke snapped angrily but also with a hint of fear and shame in his voice.
“So much going for you,” the man continued, “and you were going to throw it away in a moment of teenage angst!”
His voice suddenly rose in pitch into a whining parody of Luke’s own.
“My mommy doesn’t understand me! My brother is on the football team and I’m in the art club! None of the pretty girls will go out with me! Everybody thinks I’m gay just because I read poetry and play Dungeons and Dragons and wear black nail polish! Boo-hoo-hoo!”
“Shut up!! You shut your damned mouth!!!” Luke took a step towards the old man, but he just laughed.
“Oh, that touched a nerve, didn’t it!”
The laughter turned into a wracking cough and then a wheeze, but old man’s eyes never lost their glint.
“And I haven’t even gotten to the real reason you hate yourself, have I?”
Luke’s heart raced. The old man knew so much about him. If he even knew that ....
“Tell you what, Luke. If you really want to know the truth about why you’re here – if you have courage to face the truth – then go back to that cliff and look down into the Pit again.”
“I’ve seen it already.”
“Look. Again.”
Luke tried to stand against the ferocity of the old man’s gaze but couldn’t. Nervously, he moved back to the Pit and slowly inched towards the edge. He furtively glanced back at the old man once more, as if afraid he was going to creep up behind and shove Luke over the side.
Then, Luke peered again into the depths below. He looked and looked some more, but he could see nothing except inky blackness at the bottom. He tried to make out any forms or shapes within that blackness but couldn’t.
Then he realized: the blackness itself was what was important. Wind wasn’t blowing into the Pit, it was being sucked down into something similar to a black hole. And as he focused his attention on the darkness itself, he heard – no, felt – it call out to him.