Morgan ran faster than he'd known he could, but by the time he reached them, it was already over. For a long moment, everyone remained frozen in place. A woman, kneeling on the ground in front of Raphael, face buried in her hands. Vadim to one side, staring at his boss in shock. Raphael himself, a gun dangling from his slack hand.
And Tomas, sprawled face first on the ground.
He's dead, Morgan thought. And though he knew that had always been true, this time he could see that it was final. It didn't seem fair Morgan hadn't been there to witness it. It didn't seem right at all.
Then, like a DVD taken off pause, everyone jerked into action.
Raphael must have heard Morgan approaching. He spun to face him, semi-automatic raised and steady.
"Oh god..." Anya said. She was looking at Tomas, lying on the concrete. There was very little blood around him. No heart to pump it. And then Morgan saw it, the thing Raphael had stooped to pick up from the ground. It looked obscenely red against his white skin.
"You vicious fuck!" Morgan snarled.
Raphael dropped the heart in the centre of the sprawl of runes that had been chalked onto the concrete. It sat on top of Nicholson's diary, plump and glistening.
"I wasn't expecting you quite this soon," the old man said, turning to Morgan. "But it may be for the best. You deserve to witness this."
"You don't get to kill Tomas," Morgan said. "That's not something you get to do."
Beside him, Anya muttered what might have been agreement, but he didn't look at her. This was between him and Raphael. In some strange way, he knew that it always had been.
"I'm sorry if you cared for him," Raphael said. "But he chose his death - both times." He pointed at the knife, lying beside Tomas's slack right hand, and Morgan saw that it was caked with blood.
"You made him do it," Morgan said, his voice shaking.
Raphael shrugged, but he didn't deny it.
The woman kneeling beside Tomas's body finally looked up. Her face was streaked with tears but her expression was hard. She didn't take her eyes from Raphael as she backed towards Morgan and Anya. "He's trying to end the world," she said. "The book and... and Tomas, were two of the Ragnarok artefacts. All he needs now is the third."
Raphael smiled, and Morgan instantly knew that he already had it.
"Is that what this whole thing's been about?" Morgan said. He swept his arm around him, a gesture that took in the city and everything that had brought them there. But really he was talking about Tomas. "You want to end the world, you fucked-up freak? You think you can do that?"
Raphael nodded, stooping again to pick up the knife by Tomas's hand. "I can and I will. I know all this is new to you, Morgan, but haven't you seen enough to believe?"
The fear liquidising Morgan's guts told him he had. He looked at the acres of grass around them, a little faded after weeks without rain. At the sky, blue from horizon to horizon except for one small white wisp of cloud in the far distance. He could hear insects and birdsong. It didn't seem like the kind of day when the world would end.
He looked back at the old man. "Why would you do that? Why the hell would you want to?"
"Do you know what Ragnarok is?"
"Yeah, some Norse myth."
"The most important one. The final battle between the gods and their enemies, a war which both sides lose. When Ragnarok comes, the wolf Fenrir swallows the sun, the seas boil and mankind is reduced to a remnant of a remnant. The old gods die - but something takes their place. Something better. The Aesir were tainted by betrayal from the start. The new world will come and it will be better than the old. That's why, Morgan. Because my Master promises both an end and a beginning."
"Bullshit," Morgan said. "Don't try and make this into something noble. I saw that church and I saw Marya. You didn't start worshipping Satan because you wanted to make the world a better place. You're a fucking monster and you sold your soul so you wouldn't get caught."
Raphael's face twisted. "And if I do like children, if I love them, who made me this way? It was God who created me as I am - and then told me it was a sin. It's God who fills everyone with desires he forbids us to satisfy. And his Church? The Church that sixty years ago smiled and turned away as his chosen people burned? If you want hypocrisy look at them, not me. They knew what I was and they didn't care. Do you know, Morgan, do you know what my bishop said to me on the day I was ordained?"
Morgan shook his head, speechless in the face of the old man's rage.
Raphael's anger extinguished as quickly as it had taken light. He smiled, a bitter twist of his lips. "He said 'be discreet'. God made my Master too, then cast him out of Heaven for being as he was. He doesn't demand anything of us that we're not able to give. And in His name I'll destroy this world of lies and let another take its place - one where everyone can live according to their natures. Even you, Morgan. Especially you."
A spark of sunlight flashed from the knife as he raised it, and another when he brought it down. The blade slid through Tomas's heart without pausing and stuck fast in the pages of the book beneath.
Anya ran forward, shouting something incomprehensible. But Raphael still had the gun, and when he shot a bullet into the concrete at her feet, she skidded to a stop. "Too late," he said. "It's already begun."
At first, Morgan thought he was the one who was trembling. Then the shaking tumbled him to his knees, and when he put his hands on the ground to push himself back to his feet, he felt the vibration through the skin of his palms.
There was noise, too. Not the growling rumble he'd expected but something high and desperate, an almost animal sound that seemed to be coming from the earth itself.
"What's happening?" Anya said, turning wide, frightened eyes to him.
"I've got no idea." But even as he said the words, Morgan knew they were a lie. Some part of him, unacknowledged and long buried, understood exactly what was going on. The force shaking the ground resonated in his own body, in his chest. Sharp flashes of memory lit up in his mind. His sister's face, slack and pale when they pulled her from the water. John, gasping as Morgan stabbed him in the chest. The compassion in Tomas's voice when he told Morgan that death wasn't the end. Death, which was all Morgan ever seemed to bring to those around him. And there was death here - he felt it with a sense he hadn't even known he possessed.
When the first bodies started to rise out of the ground, Anya screamed, but in a secret corner of his mind, Morgan had been expecting them.
He staggered to his feet. The sky was still the same clear blue and the earth was rich and moist and brown where the fingers scrabbled from beneath it. They were nothing but bone, covered in the ghost flesh of the people they'd once been.
Morgan wanted to run but there was nowhere to run to. The ground was churning with rising corpses all around. Even the concrete beneath his feet was beginning to crack and he saw the white dome of a skull pushing up through the widening gap. He reached for Anya's hand and she didn't pull away. Her fingers biting into his wrist felt like his only anchor to reality.
Raphael smiled. "A million were slaughtered in the siege of Leningrad alone. Twenty million killed in the Soviet Union, an army of the dead to cleanse the world of the living."
There were hundreds, thousands of them now, filling and covering the green spaces of the park. Vadim screamed as they surrounded him. His gun fired a brief burst of bullets into old brown bones, and then he was lost to sight.
Raphael didn't even look at him. His eyes were fixed on Morgan. And then, suddenly, they widened and shifted, moving down towards the ground between them, where Tomas's heart lay impaled on Nicholson's book.
But now the book was burning. Smoke curled up from it, thick and dark and vile smelling, even from ten feet away.
"What -?" Raphael said. And as if it had just been waiting for him to open his mouth, the smoke moved. Faster than any wind could possibly have carried it, it turned and curled and rushed into the old man's throat.
His gagged, fingers clasped
to his own neck. Morgan could see that he was trying to shut his mouth, but somehow the smoke wouldn't let him. The book burned on and on, rancid smoke funnelling into Raphael until it was entirely consumed. And then Raphael's face began to change.
His bones seemed to melt beneath his skin, bending and reforming into new shapes. The wrinkled skin sagged and then tightened until not a single line remained. And the fire from the burning book dyed his white hair orange and his blue eyes a curious amber. His stooped shoulders straightened, bringing up an entirely different face to gaze serenely at Morgan.
The man who was no longer Raphael smiled. "Aren't you going to welcome me back, son? I have been gone a while."
"Nicholson?" Morgan said. "How...?"
"Raphael thought he was manipulating me, but he was the one being used. He thought he was setting himself up to rule the new world, when really he was just ushering it in for its true king. Like a modern John the Baptist, I suppose, head lopped off and served on a plate before the good stuff starts."
"Its king?" Morgan said. He looked at the army of the dead, silent around them. "All of that, everything you did, so you can rule this?"
Nicholson rested a hand against Morgan's shoulder. It was warm, and almost comforting. "Not just me. There were three artefacts, Morgan. Three. My book, Tomas's heart - and my son."
"I'm the artefact?" Morgan said. And then he smiled in bitter self-knowledge. "Of course I am. I'm the very last thing you made."
Anya released Morgan's hand suddenly, stepping back. Nicholson grinned at her, an absurdly cheerful expression. There seemed nothing of Raphael's darkness about him.
"You're so much more than that," Nicholson told Morgan. His hand was still on his shoulder and now he moved it to lay against his cheek. "Three artefacts for a new world, and a new Trinity to replace the old - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
"I passed through death, you see, as all god-kings must, to gain their full power. The ghost of Tomas, his poor sad spirit, occupies and animates these shadow men around us. And you, Morgan, my handsome son. I killed myself on the night of your conception. Raphael arranged for your mother's murder, three days before you were due to be delivered. Thanks to us, you were born out of death, and you've carried it with you all your life. You are death, Morgan, the spirit of death made flesh. And you will ride at the head of my army to conquer the world for us both."
Morgan backed away. Nicholson's hand slipped from his cheek and the dead parted to let him through. He shook his head. "No, I don't want this. I never asked for it."
"It doesn't matter. You were made this way. And all your life, hasn't everyone around you died?"
"That wasn't my fault."
"No it wasn't. It isn't your fault - it's your nature, just as doing all this was in mine. I'm so proud of you, son. Lead my army. It's what you were born to do."
Morgan felt the power blooming inside him, and he knew Nicholson was right. This made sense of him, when nothing else ever had.
"But you worked with that bastard Raphael," Morgan said. "How could you?"
Nicholson's eyes blazed, bright with conviction. "Raphael was a tool, nothing more. A means to an end. But he's gone now - punished for his sins in the worst possible way, trapped impotent inside his own hijacked body. It's just us now, and we can remake the world into whatever we want."
"Don't listen to him!" Anya said. But she sounded afraid, and a part of Morgan liked that.
"Why not?" he asked her. "He's the first person who's ever told me the truth."
"Him?" the other woman said. "He's been manipulating everyone from the beginning. Look at what he did to Tomas!"
Morgan's heart jarred. Yes. But Tomas had lied to him too. "Tomas killed himself," he told her. "I saw the knife. Tomas got a choice - unlike me. No one's asked me what I wanted, ever. Not till now."
Anya reached out to him. "You're better than this, Morgan!"
He knocked her arm aside. "Don't give me that! You've never liked me, don't pretend you did. You only care about me now because of what I can do."
He thought, briefly, of the other Anya, who had seemed to care about him. But she'd been using him too, hadn't she?
All his life, people had either used or rejected him for being something he didn't choose. And they always would. If he was what Nicholson said, then he'd never have a place in the world. So why not reject them, and it? He'd thought he had no family, but he'd been wrong. Nicholson, his real father, wanted this for him. He was proud of him. Nicholson accepted him for exactly what he was. Who else had ever done that? And what was so great about this world, which had always treated him so badly? What was there here worth saving?
Why not wipe the slate clean and start again?
All around, as if they knew the decision he'd made, the risen dead fell to their knees. There were so many that he couldn't see an end to them. Distantly, in the city outside the park, he could hear screams, and he wondered how far the influence of Raphael's spell had spread.
"They're yours," Nicholson said. "Here - take it."
He held something towards Morgan, a silver circlet with a white stone set in its centre.
"Morgan!" a voice said, and he saw that it was the woman who'd been crying over Tomas's body. "Listen to me. Nicholson's already failed. Tomas didn't die broken-hearted, he killed himself to save me. The ritual was flawed - this isn't inevitable."
"Ignore her," Nicholson said. "Be who you're meant to be. Be my son. Take the crown."
The arm Morgan had been reaching towards his father hesitated, hovering in mid air.
The certainty in Nicholson's eyes faded as he stared at Morgan's hand, and Morgan saw doubt there for the first time.
He frowned and pulled his hand back to look at it. He saw immediately what had caught his father's eye. When the pain had faded he'd forgotten it was there, but it stood out, an inflamed red against his brown skin: the imprint of Marya's cross, which had burnt where it touched him.
He guessed what Nicholson must be thinking. The cross was a symbol of the God he'd rejected. Did he think Morgan had somehow got religion, that this was a sign of some sort of pledge?
But when Morgan looked at it, he didn't think about God. He'd never been raised to believe in him, and in the last week he'd seen plenty of evidence for a source of evil in the world, but little enough for the other side. He didn't think about God, he thought about Marya, and what Raphael had done to her.
The dead were all around, and he searched their faces, trying to see hers among them, or any of the other people who'd been lost along the way. He couldn't find them in the throng but it didn't really matter. He thought he knew what they'd say.
Marya would tell him that maybe it was in Raphael's nature to want her as men weren't supposed to want little girls. But she had a nature too, and wants, and Raphael had denied them by satisfying his. Nicholson rejected Raphael now, but he hadn't stopped him. How many other little girls had Raphael hurt, in all those years he was doing Nicholson's work?
And Morgan thought that maybe God should have made the world so everybody wanted matching things, and no one had to be hurt getting them. But then he pictured Richard, with his sad half smile as the rocks fell all around him and he accepted an end he hadn't asked for. Richard might tell him to imagine that world, where you were born only desiring one person and that person was born desiring you right back, and everything you wanted from life you got, because you'd been made only to want the things it was possible to have.
Richard would say that was a clockwork world. God would wind it up and set it off and no one in it would mean anything, because no one would decide anything for themselves.
And Tomas had never really spoken to Morgan about big, important things like that. But Tomas had behaved as though the choices he made mattered, and he'd make the right ones even when it was hard. When Tomas cut out his own heart, it was for someone else's sake.
And then there was Morgan's sister. She'd been so angry when he saw her in the mirror, but he wondered n
ow if the anger had really been aimed at him. Had it been for the diary he was carrying, his father's preserved and twisted soul? Morgan had spent years blaming himself for her death. If what Nicholson said was true, it turned out he wasn't responsible. But it wasn't like no one was.
Nicholson had made him this way. All the people who'd died around him - it was Nicholson who'd killed them. Nicholson was his father by blood, but Mary had been his sister in every other way that mattered, and Nicholson had taken her away from him.
Morgan drew his hand back from the crown and clenched it into a fist. "You're right," he said. "None of this is my fault. It's yours."
Nicholson didn't pull the crown away. The white gem glistened milky in its centre, like a sightless eye. Nicholson's own eyes sparkled amber and suddenly much colder, much less friendly. "You think God can save you? Do you think he'll welcome you into his kingdom? You'd be no more welcome than I. When I made you, I didn't include a soul."
"I don't know what a soul is," Morgan said.
His father took a step closer. "Then think of the power, Morgan. All yours if you want it."
But Morgan didn't want power. What he wanted was meaning. If he took the crown and accepted this birthright, he would get that - his life would have been for something. It wouldn't just be some collection of random shit.
He looked out over his army. Their blank faces were raised to him as they knelt. They were just empty vessels, with nothing of the people they once were left inside them.
Taking the crown would give him meaning, but the meaning would be this: he was nothing but a weapon created by other people, and the only thing he had to give was death. It was better not to know anything than to know that.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the gold chain holding Marya's small cross. The metal scorched his hand, hotter than ever, but he didn't let go. "Maybe God didn't have much to do with creating me," he said. "But someone gave me a choice about this, and I don't reckon it was you. So no, I won't take it. I won't lead your army. And I won't be your son - not in any way that matters."
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