“Alex?” Harmony’s voice was groggy.
“I’m here.”
Once apart from her, Alex tried again to think logically, to order the strange information that was pouring in via his standard five senses and his extra senses as well. Hadn’t the article in the paper mentioned some freak meteorological events in the area where the ghouls were seen? Could this storm have been created by Saint Germain? Did the wizard have his father’s powers to control the weather? And was that why it was affecting him so strongly?
Tezcatlipoca—Lord of the Smoking Mirror.
Alex blinked, wondering where the thought had come from. This was the land of the Aztecan death god, the storm-bringer, Smoking Mirror.
“Merde.” Saint Germain. Tezcatlipoca. Neither name was on his Christmas-card list. “Harmony,” he said urgently. “We must leave—now. Get dressed.”
“What?” Her voice was slow, drugged, her eyes glazed. She had been deeply affected, too, and was slower to recover.
The air around them began to vibrate and then shimmer. Unwilling to touch her, Alex sent her a sharp mental jolt, commanding her to awareness. He hated doing it, knowing it must feel like being slapped. Her glazed eyes opened and then focused as mental and physical responsiveness returned to her power. Like him, she seemed to have a difficult time reeling back her sensations, identifying which parts of arousal were hers and which belonged to him, but she was definitely trying. He attempted to put up a barrier in his mind, ending the strange mental translocation that was confusing her. The withdrawal from her thoughts, though only partial, left him feeling cold and lonely and very, very frustrated.
“What is this?” she asked, alarm finally focusing her eyes and lending her better muscle coordination as Alex pulled her to her feet. They both snatched at their clothes. A quick shimmy had her skirt back in place. She didn’t bother with the camisole but pulled on her blouse and knotted it at the waist.
“A storm,” he answered, pulling his shirt over his throbbing scars. But that wasn’t all it was. This was nothing natural. It was coming fast now, and it trapped the rays of moonlight that dared to shine on it and bounced them back and forth between the watery mirrors caught in the flickering clouds. Finally, as if deciding that all was bright enough, the storm parted and sent out a beam ahead, questing over the ground like a giant’s flashlight.
“What the hell is that?” she demanded again as she hunted for her shoes. “It isn’t lightning, is it? Is it a plane? A helicopter?”
“It’s trouble,” Alex said grimly as he zipped up his pants and picked up his pistol. It was trouble that might follow him wherever they went, as storms so often did if they got a lock on him.
“This can’t be natural, can it?” Harmony asked, concern growing in her voice as her wits sharpened. “Is it a weapon of some kind? Maybe something experimental that the military is testing?”
“Yes. I think it may be.” But this wasn’t from the military. Too late, he understood that they had wandered into some kind of trap.
A finger of light strobed in their direction, stabbing the ground near the gazebo. The smell of electrical burning filled the air.
Alex pulled Harmony down the steps, half carrying her because she hadn’t had time to put on her sandals and the rocks in the street would cut her delicate feet. He carried her body with ease like—
—like a pirate carrying booty.
Harmony looked quickly from side to side.
“Was that voice real?” she asked in a whisper. Her eyes had grown wide. “I thought I heard it earlier—in the bar.”
He hadn’t heard any alien voices in the bar, but he had definitely felt the alien presence of something not human when he had begun making love to Harmony, and something had put the thought of Smoking Mirror in his mind. Perhaps it was some kind of ghost trying to warn them. That had happened to him before, once in New Orleans and once in Madrid, and it was the most benevolent of the explanations that occurred to him.
“It was real, but not a voice,” he answered. He moved quickly, keeping to the deepest shadows, trying to get a sense of who or what was invading their thoughts. He also wanted to know if it was targeting him and she was accidentally intercepting its messages, or if it was after Harmony. Was she the prize it sought?
Or was she bait? For him? If so, she had to be unknowing.
The night was stubborn, reluctant to give over its darkness to the growing light, but even it could not hold back this strange beam and the lightning that began striking the ground. The claps of thunder that followed shook the air with enough force to make Alex think of earthquakes and volcanoes.
Alex put her down once they reached smooth pavement. Harmony finished putting on her sandals and then gasped and clutched her ears as a prolonged rumble of thunder rolled over them. It was so strong that it made his heart stutter as its own rhythm was replaced by that of the storm.
“I feel sick—dizzy.”
“It’s a fluctuation in the electromagnetic field. Into the church,” he ordered, breaking off from his run toward the inn and dragging her back toward the old brick church. It was the tallest of the town’s buildings, but also the sturdiest and had the thickest walls. There was also bound to be a basement area where they could shelter from the worst of the tempest.
Lightning struck about ten feet behind them, a deadly warning, but Harmony’s steps still slowed as they neared the church.
“Oh, God!” Her head whipped to the right and she began to sway. “I can hear them! It’s getting stronger.”
Alex didn’t ask what had upset her. He could clearly see the onrush of rats, snakes, and scorpions coming up one of the side streets, scurrying toward them in a panicked, stinging, and biting horde.
“They’re running from the storm’s floodwater. They’ll ignore us,” he said, but knew that what they were fleeing was being charbroiled by something unnatural, the same something that had driven off the bats. He heaved Harmony onto the steps of the church. A thick expanse of old planks blocked their way inside. “Stand to the side while I open the door.”
Harmony pressed herself against the wall, eyes focused on the approaching multitude of scorpions and rats that had spilled into the main street. The rats’ screeching hurt his ears.
“Hurry. They’re close.”
The church was locked and the door heavy, but a portal was only as strong as its hinges and latch, and these had aged. Knowing he’d need his right hand for shooting, Alex leaned into the door with his left shoulder. He broke his clavicle forcing the door, but he got them inside before either the lightning or the terrified animals found them.
Alex shoved the door shut as soon as they were inside, then leaned against it, breathing hard and fighting off the waves of pain that radiated down his arm and into his neck as he shoved the bones back into place. It was bad at first, but he knew from experience that he could heal very quickly when there was a storm in the air.
“Thank God the church was open,” Harmony whispered. In the dark, she had not seen him force the door, though she must have heard the scream of the hinges tearing loose even over the thunder. Or maybe she hadn’t. The rats’ squealing had been very loud.
“Yes. Thank God.” His voice echoed, too loud, too eerie. “Come sit down.”
“Gladly. I’ve never felt anything like that. My God! I’ve got a headache too big for Excedrin.”
“I hurt as well,” he admitted.
“Thank God you thought of the church. I don’t think I could have made it to the inn. My muscles just seemed to give out all of a sudden. Could it have been the storm?”
It had partially been the storm, but mostly it had been him. His arousal had almost killed them both.
“Just rest. We’ll leave when the storm passes.”
At his words a silence fell, but they had only a few moments of relief from the deafening noise and then all around them the darkness began to rustle.
“I hear something. We’re not alone.” Harmony’s voice was softer than
a whisper and her body had stiffened. Her eyes were wide.
“No, we’re not.” He swore in French. A thought about the church—a really nasty one—occurred suddenly, and he cursed his earlier inattention. This town wasn’t just a trap. They were being herded someplace. And where had the worst of the lingering magic been in Lara Vieja? The old church. “It’s the crypt, of course. I should have thought of that. That’s where they’d be.”
“More rats?” she asked, doing her best not to sound alarmed. “We can get up on the pews. Maybe they won’t notice us if we’re still.”
A horrid but familiar odor touched Alex’s nose.
“No, it’s something worse.” Alex forced himself to move toward the small table where a few votive candles flickered in pools of spreading wax. This wasn’t the way he had planned on explaining why he was in Mexico, but he was going to have to say something. He was going to have to trust that his eagle was ready to fly. “Come here. We don’t have a lot of time.”
Harmony’s body moved jerkily, but it moved. Panic hadn’t paralyzed her. Yet, it was hard to know how much more she could take. She was, after all, only human.
“Light the other candles,” he ordered. Light would reassure her, and this would give her something to do while he tried to explain what was about to happen. An occupied brain was less likely to panic. She would need help, he was sure, because the mental tie between them was failing in the growing storm, and he wouldn’t be able to aid her much with what lay ahead if it failed. Already his head was filling with white noise, masking her thoughts and even muting her aura until it was only a dull glow. He hoped it wouldn’t actually storm inside the church.
To her credit, Harmony didn’t argue or ask questions. Perhaps she was still sufficiently mentally attuned to him and sensed that they were in real, if as yet unidentified, danger.
“Here. Take this gun.” When she was done with the candles, Alex handed her the small pistol he kept in his boot and then drew his .45. He regretted not bringing a spare clip with him, but who would have thought that he’d want more ammunition than could be carried in the full loads of two pistols?
“You have two guns?” she asked.
“There is something very, very bad coming up those stairs,” he said. Alex kept his voice calm, doing his best to dislocate the alarm that he sensed gathering in her reptile brain and threatening to invade her thinking mind. A bit of caution was good in a tense situation, but floods and riptides of adrenaline could paralyze a person, and he needed her able to respond quickly, to defend herself. To run if all else failed. “I need you to stay calm. Panic would be unwise.”
“How bad?” she asked.
Alex stopped talking and inhaled through his mouth, tasting the air, trying to tell how many of the enemy they might be facing. He smelled the scorching stone where the lightning danced, but something else as well. To the nose of an uninitiated, it might seem like rancid grease on the top of a cold stew. But this lard didn’t come from mutton or beef. It was almost human. That was a strong hint that Saint Germain—or someone else just as evil—had been there.
“The worst thing you’ve ever seen or imagined,” he said truthfully.
“Great. Lucky me. I guess this is destined to be a night of firsts.”
Harmony’s words were unhappy. The gun felt fine, though—much better than being without one in this situation. That was rather odd, because she’d been raised as a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist.
Harmony’s parents married late and she came from a family of mostly elderly, squeamish people. Added to that, she had worked all of her adult life for a nonviolent ecological group, so she couldn’t explain why she had taken so readily to guns and shooting. Forbidden fruit maybe. Or perhaps it was the cool factor of being a female and carrying a gun. Miguel Santos, her first boyfriend, had certainly made shooting seem fun. It had become part of their regular Saturday routine back in high school. They would hike into a deep wood whose only path was along a deep stony creek. She would bring a picnic lunch and he would bring the rifles and a box of ammunition.
In any event, though badly frightened by what was happening, the small handgun Alex handed her didn’t feel as alien as it might have, and she had no problem opening it up to check that it was loaded. She looked up from the pistol and found Alex actually smiling at her. His eyes were as black as midnight and danced wildly in the candle’s flickering light. She found that her desire for him had been driven back by the storm and danger but was not entirely gone. Something about this man appealed to her at a fundamental level, the same place that said she needed air and water to survive.
“I’m so glad I found you in time. God knows what might have happened if I had lingered another day on the road,” he said, turning toward a dark opening that presumably led down to the crypt. “Now, chérie, the matter is fairly simple really. You must kill the things that are coming for us. Kill, not wound. It’s one to the head, one to the heart—and don’t hesitate because they seem vaguely human, for they will try to kill you. Or worse.”
“Worse?” These were hardly the words of a guardian angel.
“Yes. I don’t know precisely what is coming, but none of these creatures is a vegetarian, and they carry a…disease. One you don’t want.”
“But—” The first of the things—the monsters—came boiling out of the dark before she could say more. It arrived in a flurry of limbs that passed over their heads and landed spread-eagled against the wall where it clung like a spider. Alex spared it only a glance, but Harmony spun around, able only to stare in disbelief. The creature’s hairless head pivoted around until it was facing backwards. To turn like that required the dislocation of every vertebra in the neck. The eyes glowed as they looked in their general direction, and its jaws full of needlelike teeth snapped open and shut with an audible click. Something that looked like a giant stinger jutted in and out of its mouth.
Impossible. It was impossible. Yet the thing hung on the wall in front of her.
Harmony raised her small pistol and sighted on the thing’s head. It quickly repositioned itself so it faced downward. The flesh of its neck surrendered to gravity and gathered in folds at the chin. Had the bony protuberance not been there, the skin would have slid over its head like a cowl. Its mouth opened and it made a noise that she had never heard outside of a nightmare, a vibration of dead and decaying vocal cords. Its skeletal arms flexed twice. It was getting ready to spring.
“Marymotherof God,” she whispered, her aim wavering for a moment.
“Non. This one plays for the other team. Shoot it. Now.”
Harmony didn’t ask for clarification of Alex’s instructions. There was no need, because it was suddenly as though he were still with her—not just in her mind now but actually in her body—guiding and steadying her hands. She put a round into the creature flying at her at an unbelievable speed, and watched with unnatural emotional detachment as the bullet entered and then vacated the thing’s head. It rocked backward in the air and then hit the floor with a squishing sound. It raised its shattered face and looked her way. One eye was gone. It didn’t bleed, but a bit of what looked like beef jerky and clotted jam dribbled down its cheek. Something in its ruined expression finally was reanimated and it seemed to again recognize her. Then it did something awfully human. It raised its clawed hand to its head and touched it. It mewled as if hurt.
Ha-a-armony, it seemed to wail.
The thing knew her name.
Kill it, something whispered.
Horror and panic tried again to touch her, but she pushed it back. Or Alex did. Coldly, methodically, she lowered her pistol and put a second bullet in the monster’s heart.
Beside her, Alex, who was facing the opposite direction, did the same. Repeatedly. Belatedly understanding that the attack wasn’t over, she shifted her aim back toward the crypt and repeated the horrible process of killing these…these things. This time, she did so without aid. Alex was gone from her mind. He’d left, somehow taking her fear with him.
Silence fell like an avalanche. Outside, the lightning had stopped, ending as abruptly as it began. Almost immediately, Harmony felt herself mentally reconnecting with Alex. For a moment she resisted the joining, and then relaxed and let it happen. He didn’t push in rudely, just hovered near the surface, waiting for an invitation.
“That better be the last of them. I am out of ammunition.” He sounded matter-of-fact when he finally spoke. This definitely was not an angelic being.
“Were those things infected with the disease you are trying to stop?” she asked shakily. The candles wavered madly and reached for the door as though wishing they could flee the scene. She didn’t blame them. It wasn’t the first time killing had been done in a church, but that didn’t make it any less blasphemous or shocking. Her first impulse—second and third as well—was to run out into the night and not stop until she found the sunrise.
Alex blinked once and shook his head as though clearing it. Harmony realized that her ears were ringing from the gunfire.
“Yes. They are part of the plague. Though I did not know that things had…taken this form. Not in an actual city. I’d heard talk of this happening long ago in Sicily, but…” He trailed off. “Surely even he is not that mad. He wouldn’t bring them into populated areas. He’d be found out.”
“I don’t know what he’d do, because I don’t know who he is. And I think all I want to know right now is what we do next,” Harmony said, taking a step in the first monster’s direction. She was unable to look away from the thing she’d killed. Its mouth was open, unhinged like a snake’s jaw. Beyond the teeth it had filed into points, it had some sort of scorpionlike stinger attached to its tongue. “Is this…it looks like some kind of…” She couldn’t think what it looked like. “Are they escaped lab animals? Mutated chimps from a genetic experiment maybe, or…”
But surely chimps couldn’t talk—couldn’t cry her name.
“Don’t touch it! It isn’t just an animal,” Alex warned. He added: “And I don’t know if they’re contagious.”
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