“I have never run from you,” Ceridwen replied.
With a flutter of her eyelids and a tugging deep inside her, an ache in her loins, she reached into the wood floor and drew it to life again. Vines burst from the floor and twined around Morrigan’s legs, reaching up to encircle her arms, trapping them against her body. Thorns pushed out from the vines, slicing her flesh. It would not hold her for long.
Ceridwen heard Conan Doyle scream Danny’s name. She turned her gaze for just a moment from her conflict with Morrigan. In horror, she watched the demon boy impaled and then cast aside. She saw Arthur, grimly determined, bathe himself in the magicks spilling from Sweetblood’s chrysalis. As Morrigan struggled to be free of her bonds, Ceridwen saw Conan Doyle passed a hand across his face.
His features shimmered, a glamour dissipating, and Ceridwen felt a stab of despair in her heart as she saw what he had done. Gore streaked the left side of Conan Doyle’s face, dried and crusted there. Where his left eye had been there was now a small silver orb that crackled with magick.
The Eye of Eogain.
Conan Doyle had torn out his left eye and replaced it with a magickal construct, with the weapon he would need. Had he brought it into the house in his pocket, or in Eogain’s yellowed skull, Morrigan might have gotten hold of it. But now it was his, rooted into his mind, into his brain.
He threw his arms out, let the power of Sweetblood wash over him, and the light around that magickal eye began to pulse, to churn.
“Noooo!” Morrigan screamed.
Ceridwen turned in time to see the Fey witch tear herself loose from those mystical vines, their thorns cutting her flesh to the bone. Morrigan seemed not to notice the pain of those wounds, nor even to remember that she had been fighting Ceridwen moments before.
Conan Doyle had said something about the door still being open. Ceridwen understood. He meant to send The Nimble Man back to his limbo world, and the possibility drove Morrigan to utter madness. She shrieked like the ancient sidhe and thrust herself across the room, staggering into the air, buoyed by a rush of magick so powerful it seemed to give her flight.
Ceridwen would not allow it. Conan Doyle had left her to deal with family business, and so she would.
As she raised her elemental staff, the sphere at its apex lengthened and thinned, wooden fingers closed on its new shape, and now it was a blade, sharp as diamond. Ceridwen screamed as she lunged at her aunt and drove the spear into her side, burying it deep. She thought about how many of her people had died because of Morrigan, about the grief that hung so heavily upon her uncle, her king. She thought about her mother’s death in the Twilight Wars and all of the heartache that Morrigan had ever brought to Faerie.
Her aunt screamed and fell to the floor, writhing, struck to her core with the purity of elemental magick. Her black heart was poisoned by it. Ceridwen pulled the spear out of her and thrust it into her again, stabbing her chest and belly again and again. There was no honor in it, but there was so much pain.
Dr. Graves appeared beside her. In her peripheral vision, Ceridwen saw him, took in the look of concern and dismay upon his spectral features, and raised the spear to impale Morrigan again. Graves reached out and his ghostly fingers encircled her wrist.
He was a phantom, nothing more. He could not have forced her to stop. Yet somehow the next blow did not fall. Ceridwen looked down at her aunt, Fey blood bleeding out across the ravaged floor, tiny animal mewling noises coming from Morrigan’s mouth, and she felt nothing. Yet she wished that Dr. Graves was more than a wandering soul, that in that moment he could have had flesh so that she could have touched his arm, leaned on him, just to feel something warm.
“Conan Doyle,” Graves began.
Ceridwen spun to go to Arthur’s aid, but even as she did the remnants of Sweetblood’s chrysalis exploded in a blast of magickal light that blinded her and knocked her back. It passed through her and she had to catch her breath, her every sense excited beyond reason by the touch of this power. She blinked, tried to see through the brilliance, but could not make out even the silhouette of The Nimble Man and the man she had once loved.
The pain in Conan Doyle’s head was sheer agony, like nothing he had ever felt before. It was as though someone were hammering a railroad spike through his skull, a shattering bit of trepanning. He screamed even as the chrysalis burst, and he clapped his hands to the side of his head. In the orbit where his left eye had been, he felt the Eye of Eogain move and pulse of its own accord. It seemed to swell, pressing against the bones of his skull, expanding. He knew his head would crack wide open at any moment.
“Good God, no!” Conan Doyle cried, and he fell to his knees.
Another wave of power from the disintegrated chrysalis passed through him. The pulse of it nearly killed him. The Eye of Eogain gathered up all of Sweetblood’s magick, and siphoned all of Conan Doyle’s own magick as well.
“You are nothing!” The Nimble Man roared above the blaze of light and sound. “You are only a man.”
Conan Doyle forced himself to look up at the damned one. The Nimble Man had grown so large that his head and shoulders had crashed through the ceiling above, debris raining down around him. His mane of raven black hair was swept back by some unearthly wind and several black feathers swirled and eddied on the floor. His ruined wings were still dying.
What will he be like when he has regained his full power?
Behind him, Conan Doyle could see the slit in reality, the door into that limbo world where he had been an eternal prisoner until now. Morrigan had cast the spells, performed the ritual, spilled the blood and the power to open it, but she had not had a chance to close it. And now Ceridwen was dealing with her.
Gray mist still clung to The Nimble Man, residue of that limbo, detritus from nowhere. And Conan Doyle saw that the wind that ruffled the damned one’s ravaged wings and jet black hair did not originate in this room, or even from this world. It was a vacuum, the void of limbo, tugging at The Nimble Man, trying to draw him back to where he belonged, back to the place where the Creator and all the devils in Hell had abandoned him.
“Only a man?” Conan Doyle screamed into the maelstrom that now began to whip around the room, Sweetblood’s power and the pull of that doorway merging, twisting together. “There is no such thing as only a man! And you, pitiful thing, will never be free until the Lord himself wills it!”
All of the magick churning in the ballroom began to stream into Conan Doyle’s body and he absorbed it, twitching, wracked with pain. He thrust it outward in a burst of magick that required no spell, only thought. His own magick enhanced with Sweetblood’s power, Conan Doyle reached toward The Nimble Man, not with his own hands, but with fingers of glistening energy the hue of a forest’s heart. Those tendrils of power lashed out, snatching at The Nimble Man.
But that was merely a distraction. For Conan Doyle’s magick touched more than the damned one. Shimmering emerald energy whipped at the gray web of strands coming from that limbo realm. The Nimble Man had, all along, been in the process of extricating himself from its hold, as though dragging himself up from quicksand. Its grasp was still upon him, but it was weakening.
“Can you feel it, abomination? Can you feel your prison calling you back?” Conan Doyle snarled between gritted teeth.
He used his magick to strengthen limbo’s grasp on The Nimble Man. The emerald energy that he wielded wrapped itself more tightly around the damned one and Conan Doyle tried to force The Nimble Man back into the dimensional doorway.
The Nimble Man began to laugh. He glared at Conan Doyle with savage eyes and bared his hooked, ebony fangs.
“Arrogant speck. You will exhaust your power soon enough. Mine only grows. When the one outweighs the other, we will have a reckoning, you and I.”
Even with Conan Doyle’s assistance, the gray clutch of limbo was not enough to draw The Nimble Man back through the portal. It seemed he would need a bit of a push.
“I think not,” Conan Doyle whispered.
The damned one screamed in rage and pain and staggered backward. He glanced down at the magick that pounded into him over and over. Gray wisps of limbo encircled him, constricted him, binding his arms and wings. Conan Doyle screamed as the magick scraped the inside of his skull, scouring his eye socket. It pulsed as it jetted from the Eye of Eogain, pummeling The Nimble Man, knocking him back further. Closer to the doorway, to that slit in the fabric of reality.
The Nimble Man was smaller now. Shrinking.
It seemed to happen almost in an instant, then. Gray matter erupted from the doorway, sliding over The Nimble Man like a shroud, or a birth-caul. One of his arms broke free and those long, terrible claws grasped at the air, found purchase in the wood floor, and then scored long gashes in the wood as limbo swallowed whole this creature who had been cursed and damned by Heaven and by Hell.
There was a sound like paper tearing, and then The Nimble Man was gone, lost inside that limbo realm, gray clouds gathering at the doorway, obscuring any view within.
Some of his pain had subsided, but not all. The magick erupting from the Eye of Eogain ceased, but Conan Doyle could not rise from his knees. He barely managed to lift his hands and whisper. “Goddef yr brath iachu,” he said in Welsh, exhausted. And then, as he crumbled to the floor, he added a Gaelic curse. “Go n-ithe an cat thú is go n-ithe an diabhal an cat.”
The doorway closed.
Epilogue
The roiling energies in that room began to subside. Brilliant colors faded to nothing, and the room was enveloped in darkness. Conan Doyle blinked several times and then through his one good eye he found he could see light.
Moonlight, coming in through the windows.
Beyond the glass the crimson fog had departed.
Wincing with every movement, he glanced around. Morrigan was dead. The ghost of Dr. Graves hovered above her corpse, and Ceridwen knelt there, beside the remains of her aunt. When Conan Doyle looked at her, she smiled.
Clay sat against the splintered mirror glass of the far wall, recovering. He held in his hands the wing The Nimble Man had torn off, but even as Conan Doyle watched, it merged into his malleable flesh and he was whole again.
Eve lay on the floor, blood in a pool around her. Conan Doyle had seen her take terrible punishment before, and it always left him heartsick. Her arms were broken and her throat had been torn out. But even as he watched her, she twitched. An hour or so and she would be mostly whole. A handful of hours, and she would be herself again.
The one that concerned Conan Doyle was Danny. A demon he might be, but there was no telling what The Nimble Man’s attack had done to him, what might have been damaged within him. He lay crumpled against a wall, and though the moonlight was dim, Conan Doyle thought the boy’s chest rose and fell with new breath. He would need their attention, and quickly, but he was a demon. Conan Doyle did not think Danny could be killed that easily.
One hand fluttered up to his bloody eye socket, where that silver ball rested now. None of them had emerged from this conflict unscathed. But they had survived.
“You ridiculous, stupid little man,” a voice whispered in the gloom behind him.
Weakly, Conan Doyle turned.
Lorenzo Sanguedolce stood above him, newly emerged from the shattered remnants of the amber chrysalis that had hidden him away from the world for more than half a century. Sweetblood had not aged a day in that time. His swarthy features were made sinister by the thin beard he wore, a style gone out of fashion long ago. His eyes were heavy with disdain.
“Hello, Lorenzo,” Conan Doyle whispered.
No one else said a word. With a quick glance around, Conan Doyle saw that the rest of the room had been frozen, as though Sweetblood had pulled the two of them out of time, or trapped them in a stolen moment.
His former mentor crouched in front of him. Sweetblood reached out to grasp his head and Conan Doyle was too weak to resist. The arch mage bent to whisper in his ear.
“You little fool. You could never surrender yourself to mystery, Arthur,” he said, in a hiss accented with centuries of European influence. “You could never leave well enough alone. This is why I severed our relationship, why I refused to continue to be your teacher. It may be that I would have been found without your interference. But neither of us will ever know the truth of that.
“So let me tell you what you and the Fey bitch Morrigan have been a part of, both of you unwittingly.”
Conan Doyle shivered, the dread in his former master’s words too much for him to bear. Sanguedolce was afraid, and that was something Conan Doyle did not think possible.
“I first felt it in the year Sixteen Hundred and Twenty Seven,” the mage went on, whispering, sharing these secrets only with Conan Doyle, as he had done when they were teacher and student. “It was more powerful than anything I had ever encountered. Have you heard of the Demogorgon?”
Conan Doyle nodded, dazed, heart thundering, throat dry. The Demogorgon was a demon of legend, one of the oldest such references in ancient texts, but even so references to it were scarce. Lactantius in the fourth century. Milton. Dryden. Several others.
“Every myth has a source, Arthur. As you’ve come to know so well. The Demogorgon is a god-eater, a thing of power even beyond my imagining. Your Nimble Man would be a mote in its eye, that is the extent of its power. It dwells in the terrible abyss, or so the stories say. But they do not define this place.
“Well, I have found it. Or, rather, it has found me. For more than three centuries, I searched for answers. When I discovered them . . . The Demogorgon had been here before. That is the source of the myth. But it left this place long, long ago. When I touched it, when I sensed it, out there in that terrible abyss, in a place at the farthest reaches of the universe . . . it felt me. Just as I sensed its power, so it sensed mine. God-eater, yes. And magick-eater as well.
“From the moment its mind first touched my own, on that long ago seventeeth century night, it has been coming this way, making its slow but certain progress across eternity. It is coming here, Arthur. And if it reaches the Earth, no force in all of Creation will stop it. The world will not be overrun with monsters, it will not be cast into darkness, or its civilizations crushed. It will be over, you understand? Over.
“For my own protection, and for the sake of this entire damnable world, I hid myself away, shielded my magick and my presence, so that the Demogorgon could not sense me anymore. It had lost interest once before. I hoped I could make it lose interest again.
“But now . . . well, you’ve made a mess of it, haven’t you? You and your friends and your enemies alike. Not only have you woken me, but you have done so with such flagrant use of my power that it can be nothing but a beacon, a homing flare that will draw the attention of the Demogorgon and bring it here. It has pinpointed us now.”
And with this, Lorenzo Sanguedolce at last hesitated. His eyelids fluttered and a look of pain and sorrow became etched upon his face. He shook his head. “I can feel it even now. It may take years, decades, perhaps a century or more. I do not know. But the Demogorgon is on its way.
“I will try to fight it. Just as I know you will. But I fear that the end is inevitable. The clock is ticking toward the fate of the world.”
Sweetblood turned Conan Doyle’s head in his hands, gazed intently at him. “And I’m afraid that I’ll be needing this more than you will,” he said, and then he plunged slender fingers into Conan Doyle’s face and plucked the Eye of Eogain from his skull.
Conan Doyle screamed, and darkness swallow
ed him.
He blinked. But only one eye moved. The other was so swollen and crusted with gore that it only ached. There was nothing there. Not his own eye, nor the Eye of Eogain.
He lay on his back on the floor. In the moonlight he could see Ceridwen above him, her exquisite face drawn with concern. The ghost of Dr. Graves hovered beyond her, standing sentinel over him.
“Arthur?” she ventured.
At the sound of her voice, other figures moved into the circle around him. Conan Doyle could see the silhouette of Eve, though the dark was merciful in not revealing her wounds. Clay was beside her, stoic and strong. The shadowy form of Danny Ferrick shuffled nearer, the outline of his horns almost elegant in the moonlight.
“My love?” Ceridwen whispered.
“I’m alive, dear Lady,” he rasped. “I’m alive.”
They all were. It was nothing short of a miracle. But Sweetblood’s words had kindled a terrible dread in Conan Doyle’s heart. He knew that his allies, his agents . . . his friends . . . all had lives of their own. Even the restless spirit of Dr. Graves had business to accomplish before he would go peacefully into the soulstream, past the gate that separated this world from the hereafter. They would want to return to those lives, to those plans, now that the threat had been averted.
And, for a while, perhaps, he would let them.
But eventually . . . probably quite soon . . . he would reveal to them the words that Lorenzo Sanguedolce had whispered to him. And then they would realize that they must stay together. Even if the Demogorgon was years away, they would have to prepare, to gather others like them, to combat the darkness so that when the time came, they would be ready.
The clock is ticking toward the fate of the world, Sweetblood had said. Yet Conan Doyle did not believe that fate had already been written. Destiny, he knew, could be decided by those who were willing to grasp it in their hands and build their own fate from it.
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