“Relax. A member of Cheyne’s coven came up with a wonderful idea. That we should enlist the help of the Gargoyle.”
I scratched my head. “As in those ugly concrete statues that stick out from half the buildings in York?” I asked. “How the hell could they help us?”
“They listen.” Myleene told me with a wink. “Unmoving, unseeing, they are inhabited by an old, unloved spirit. This spirit was banished in ancient days but allowed to continue existing because he isn’t malevolent. Just solitary. So, they gave him a habitat. And built millions of statues in his image to let him roam at will. Now he inhabits all of them, his vast conscience able to pick up any sound at all.”
Belinda clapped her hands. “People talk.”
Ceriden looked ecstatic. “Oh! I could use him. Imagine the scandals!”
Myleene held up a finger. “Yes, but the gargoyle demands a high price in return for his assistance.”
“He has already proven his worth,” Giles said with satisfaction. “The price is not too high. Our enemies are loose of tongue. What they say, we hear. Already we know things about Gorgoth, and the Destroyers. And Kinkade learns more every minute. Every second.”
“Kinkade?” I said. “That’s the gargoyles name?”
“Yes, Logan.”
“And what is the price?”
“When this is all over, providing we win, Kinkade wants to inhabit the body of a female movie star for a year. Without her knowledge,” Eleanor shook her head. “We have agreed to his terms.”
Ceriden looked interested. “Which one? I know a few. Maybe I could soften her up a little.”
“She won’t know,” Eleanor snapped. “Weren’t you listening? And he hasn’t decided yet.”
Ceriden flapped a wrist. “Well, maybe I could assist right there. Julia’s a good bet. Or Nicole. Or maybe he should go for someone who’s already pretty vacant,” he laughed.
I pursed my lips, waiting for him to run out of steam, then leaned forward with my gaze fixed on Myleene. “So,” I said. “What do you know?”
27
HONOLULU, HAWAII
Tanya Jordan had lived in Honolulu her entire life. All the locals knew her. It wasn’t a good day if the old men who drifted down to Waikiki Beach to catch the sunrise didn’t see her bronzed figure jogging past as the first golden rays graced the horizon. It wasn’t a good day if the newspaper-reading businessmen didn’t catch sight of her stretching outside her – and, coincidentally, their – favorite Starbucks a little after seven in the morning. And it sure as hell wasn’t a good day if the construction workers didn’t get a saucy hi and a wink when she jogged past them as they sat in traffic with their tanned arms resting on their open car windows.
Tanya Jordan was more than an easy-going, familiar figure. She was a local idol, known and talked about by everyone.
Today Tanya did nothing different. She was a creature of habit. The beach run, followed by an exhausting stretch, the three shot, skinny, iced Vanilla Latte with the long straw, the peaceful but brisk stroll home.
The shower. She flicked on the news. Headlines blared at her, shouting about a lethal tsunami in Hong Kong, an earthquake somewhere in the Pacific, unrest in Miami. She flicked the news off. She stood naked in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror and checked for white spots, for growths, for wrinkles.
After a light lunch she connected to the internet, checked her e-mails, deleted a ton of spam, and logged on to her bank account. Everything was the same. Constant. That meant everything was good. Tanya hated it when things changed. Her $750,000 was still there, conned from the sweating hands of her cornered ex-husband who once thought it a pleasure to beat her senseless two or three times a week. The high point, he used to tell her later, was when she blacked out, because that was when he realized he was more than a man.
Eventually she’d taped him, confronted him, divorced him, and then set him up with half a dozen other women. Together they had trapped him, conned him, and walked away with a million each.
Now, outgoings were constant. Life was good. Tanya walked to the local market and bought fresh fruit and vegetables every day. She walked home. She washed the food, made a pasta meal, and sat in front of the TV.
This was the sum of her day. Every day. Monday to Saturday. On Sundays she threw in an extra evening run around sundown.
Today was Sunday.
Tanya jogged along the beach, feeling the light sand particles between her bare toes. A fresh breeze skipped off the ocean, cooling the sweat on her arms. She concentrated on the cool stretch and flow of her body, on the freedom and perfection of exercise.
She pushed her limits. The exertion made it hard to think, which was good. Her blonde hair fluttered out behind her, its streaks of grey a testament to why she didn’t want to think.
But think she did. Her recurring memories were as inevitable as the Hawaiian sunrise.
Her ex-husband had killed the child in her stomach three months before it would have been born. Even then the child had a name – Alyson. Her husband had known what his fists could do, but the knowledge had not stopped him. The man was a monster and deserved so much more than simple extortion.
Tanya lived every day with every hateful detail. And each day she tried to get past it, tried to move on. And live.
But each day she failed.
Now her muscles caught fire, her heart hammered. Images were vanquished by pain as she slammed along the beach, chasing the waves up and down the surf line, chasing the setting sun.
A man was pacing her, she realized. Tall, with eyes the colour of her ex-husband’s dead heart, he looked eastern European. He ran beside her, watching her.
She slowed. He jogged a few paces, then turned and ran backwards, still staring. He didn’t speak. She stopped, suddenly feeling self-conscious in her Lycra shorts and top, an odd sensation that she, a Hawaiian native, couldn’t remember experiencing before.
Perhaps it was the man. The force of his black gaze.
“I am Leo,” he said in a desolate voice. “I am Sorcerer.”
“That’s good,” A quick look around confirmed her worst fear, that she was alone on this stretch of beach.
“Good?” Leo echoed. “Just good? Do you know what I endured to receive His power, Tanya Jordan?” The mention of her name chilled her. “Do you know the hell I went through? The people I had to murder? The innocents? No? Let me show you.”
The man raised his arms in the air. Tanya backed up a step. Cold waves splashed across her feet. Tanya noticed the man’s arms were crisscrossed by deep wounds. She swallowed in fear as several shadows suddenly shot straight up from the sand and began to writhe around him.
“Did you hear about Hong Kong, Ms Jordan? Did you hear about Montreal? About the Louvre? That was me. And now that we know who you are, and what you may become, I have been blessed with a new task.”
“Who I am?” Tanya backed away and moved her back foot around to present a slimmer target.
My God, she thought. Where did that idea come from?
Something sweeter than terror began to sweep through her body.
“You are one of the pieces of Eight,” Leo sneered at her. “Don’t you know?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
But Leo didn’t seem to hear. He turned his attention to the darkening ocean, and suddenly sent his shadows flying out over the rippling waves. “And after Hong Kong,” he spoke to the ocean. “Comes Honolulu.”
Immediately Tanya heard a sound deeper than thunder from beyond the rolling horizon. She tucked a strand of hair around her ear and out of her eyes. What the hell was that noise?
“Time to die,” Leo’s voice was more terrifying than the deepest cavern of Hades. Tanya flinched as he gestured, then screamed in disbelief as a dozen shadows twisted towards her. Like mini-whirlwinds they ate up the beach, flinging sand everywhere before coalescing into dark figures.
The first punched her in the stomach.
Unimpressed, Tanya felt a su
rge of absolute adrenalin. She had been punched before. The blow did not hurt, it just made her angry. It was time to fight back
Then power exploded through her, resonating out of every pore, slamming through every nerve ending. She spun and leapt and ducked so fluidly she might have been a ballerina, or a warrior-monk. Without strategy, and without previous knowledge, she put together combination after combination, evading the shadows, punching and kicking hard at the twisting figures, fighting her way towards their controller.
Leo. Self-proclaimed sorcerer.
Just another pig-bastard who punched women.
Hatred fired her blood and made her crazy. But skill and mastery controlled her movements. She fought like a dancer would dance her greatest routine, like a composer would write his perfect symphony, like a painter would create his ultimate work of art.
With grace and fluidity and perfect ease of movement she fought her way to Leo’s side. His eyes, closed in ecstasy all this time, suddenly flew open in shock.
“Surprise!” Tanya kicked at his chest, spun and back-kicked his left arm which cracked and made him scream. Her routine never stopped, never changed, but continued with lethal grace, like the flow of a violent but beautiful stream. A sweep cracked his shin, which turned into a side kick that took out a rib that became an elbow to his throat, which turned into a leaping front kick that slammed his head back, which became a standing front kick that made him stagger.
And so on. Nonstop. She was a dancing, fighting force of nature that was as elegant as it was unstoppable. As poised as it was lethal.
“I am…a Destroyer,” Leo panted, forced back, his arms hanging limp, his knees shaking. “You cannot beat me. Gorgoth will annihilate you!”
Tanya paused for three seconds, studying her adversary. The sudden emergence of this strange power stunned her, but for now she pushed the shock to one side.
“Here it comes!” Leo cackled and pointed past her. Tanya turned to see a tidal wave almost on top of them, about a minute away, a wall of water maybe three feet high, not devastating by any means but enough to cause panic. To create mayhem.
Which is what this Destroyer and his cohorts wanted.
They were terrorists. Nothing more than scum in a toilet bowl.
Tanya used her minute well. The dance continued. In only half her time she reduced Leo to a broken, lifeless mass of bleeding flesh.
She used the remaining thirty seconds to get clear of the wave.
28
YORK, ENGLAND
Our training continued mercilessly. It seemed surreal that we six, standing within the walls of a typical English garden, were preparing to save the world. I missed my old life, our home. A hateful inner voice pointed out that I might have missed some contact from Raychel.
“The link is still missing,” Eleanor said to me. “It will come.”
It has to, I thought. A power without aim and purpose is no power at all. I tried to quell thoughts of failure by concentrating on the news Myleene had revealed earlier.
Kinkade the gargoyle was proving himself a fantastic asset. And how could he fail? Everyone talked. How could anyone know that countless three hundred year old stone statues were listening in?
Kinkade was sending constant updates, like a BBC World News ticker. Every time someone somewhere uttered one of countless flagged names or phrases the gargoyles presence would flicker to life, listen and report. Say Gorgoth, or Aegis or Destroyer. We had you. We were like the NSA on steroids.
His reports filtered down through a dedicated witch’s coven. Focusing their might through inert metals – a trick of augmentation understood only by those blessed with extremely crooked noses – they had concocted a spell that allowed Kinkade to pass information through them. Spoken words were turned into instant e-mail by cyber-geeks and transmitted to Cheyne at the Library, to Eldritch in Miami, and here to Myleene.
Loki was old news. Emily Crowe was a major shock since almost all of us respected Supernatural’s rock-chick music. To suddenly find out that their lead singer was a Destroyer bent on ending our world was a major mind-blower. Crowe was currently in Paris, close to where the Louvre was burning. The other Destroyers- Jondal and Leo- were so far just names; we knew nothing more about them.
More updates rolled in by the minute. The seventh Destroyer, Trickster, had not yet surfaced, but was held in high regard by his peers, whispered of as being one of the wiliest of Gorgoth’s Destroyers.
We learned Ashka was moving steadily through York, asking questions about Dean Logan. About Aegis. We weren’t too worried. Look up at any building in the city of York and you are likely to see a gargoyle. We felt confident we knew what she knew.
And Gorgoth? Well, finally, we knew everything. And it all made perfect sense. And it was so far beyond terrible.
It was then I noticed Belinda, watching me from the kitchen doorway. Her t-shirt shouted: bitchslap me back to Heaven!
After a few seconds she spoke. “Guys, you’d better wrap it up. Latest from Gargoyle News says that Jondal has hit London, and was responsible for a bomb that went off today. It’s bad, guys.”
29
YORK, ENGLAND
Imagine the cosmos long before Earth was even a twinkle in God’s eye. Imagine nothing but vast, eternal space for untold millennia.
Now something glitters in the limitless black. Life, of a fashion. An immense darkness, slightly lighter than the black nothingness that surrounds it. Vast beyond imagination, it is one being among many.
What is it? It is nothing that can be described.
What is it called? It has no name other than the one we give it.
Where is it from? It came before existence. It is from the outside.
It rolls in space, it turns, and it glides. The cosmos is its realm, a limitless place outside our universe, but a place that will always exist. The creature has not noticed humanity more than once, fleetingly, because it sees ten thousand years as but the blinking of an eye.
Now, imagine this creature is the first of its kind to visualize a new concept called evil. In fact this creature invents evil. It brings forth from its immense maw the very concept of wrongdoing and, happening upon a new place called Earth, it plants the first drop of badness in our world. It invents Heaven. And Hell.
For its own amusement.
It is the creator of evil. If you can imagine that, you can imagine the being that is Gorgoth.
30
YORK, ENGLAND
I had learned all this last night. We knew now why there were no written texts about this creature. Who could write about a creature that existed in limitless space? Apart from HP Lovecraft, I suppose, but then he was dead.
My grasp of the situation was that this eternal creature, having planted the initial root of evil eons ago, had missed the next few thousand years of our existence. Now it had returned as a new creature to us, but one older than our imagining.
Imagine the catastrophic consequences if something so colossal and powerful managed to punch its way through to our world?
Now Belinda turned on the portable TV in the kitchen and balanced it on top of the fridge. We all crowded around to watch.
“Outside the temporary ticket booth at Kings Cross station this is the scene-” the red Sky News banner flickered across the screen. Jeremy Thompson, looking shocked and disheveled, was talking animatedly as the picture cut past him and focused on what I could only describe as utter chaos.
Black and grey smoke billowed into the air. Concrete walls were smashed and battered and blackened behind the smoke. Eager flames licked at everything in sight.
No one spoke. I felt tears spring to my eyes. The people didn’t deserve this. It looked like a terrorist attack.
“Jondal,” Myleene told us. Belinda flicked off the TV. “The Destroyer called Spirit. He has the power of invisibility, and the ability to inject hate into people’s minds. I have no doubt that they will catch someone for this bombing, but our intelligence says it was Jondal.”
> “His power turns good people bad?” Lysette said.
“In Barbados he made an entire community consume itself.”
Ken, the surfer dude from ‘Frisco, was explaining it all to Kisami, using hand signals. His last gesture left no doubt in anyone’s mind what he thought of Jondal.
“I need a beer,” Ken said, opening the fridge. He pulled out a six-pack, and then offered one to Kisami. “Coming, man?”
“Ah, yis,” the little Japanese guy bleated.
Ken smiled around at everyone. “Hear that? Been teaching the little guy some pure American English.”
Ken pushed through us. I felt pity for the poor guy. He was only trying to lighten the mood, but didn’t have the social skills to appreciate there were times you just simply shouldn’t.
“I want only those people from last night,” Myleene sounded as overwrought as I felt. “In the conference room. Now.”
***
I found my seat as Myleene’s Sony Vaio signaled a newly arrived e-mail.
“Kinkade?” I asked, pouring a glass of water.
“Gargoyle’s chattier than a nest of sparrows. It seems like he’s enjoying his first contact in five thousand years.”
I watched Myleene read the e-mails as the others filed in. I felt absurd, sitting with these people, hiding the knowledge that I was a sure-fire failure, so I sipped my water and stayed quiet.
Belinda spoke up quickly. “Okay, some things have started to make sense now guys, but still not the involvement of the Hierarchy of Demons.”
“Because they need this world as much as we do?” Devon’s question was a mix of sarcasm and understanding.
“Correct.”
Felicia held up a small hand. “Didn’t I hear Ryan and Ken reporting that they’d already had a run in with the demon, Dementia?”
Myleene nodded. “Yes. It’s another one of those things we can’t explain, I’m afraid. Dementia is the worst kind of demon. She is devilry incarnate, and crazy to boot.”
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