The Midnight Front--A Dark Arts Novel

by David Mack

  Queasy from the mingled odors of incense and slaughter, Cade looked for an excuse to step out of the basement killing jar. “Master? Should I search the house?”

  “Aye. Grab the basics. And if they have anything exotic, take that, too. Never know when something rare might come in handy.”

  After the battles in Calais and Le Havre, Cade had internalized the routine: Slay the members of a Thule coven, then raid their stronghold for its best and most unique magickal supplies. This lair gave up a wealth of useful ingredients: fresh beeswax, virgin parchment, various herbs and unguents. It was a better haul than they had taken from other covens.

  Minutes later, the master and Anja met Cade in a room upstairs. Adair inspected the provisions. Those he deemed suitable vanished into the hands of AKROTH, his invisible hellbeast of burden; the rest he threw into the fire under the hearth. Then he wrapped his wand in red silk. “Well, then. You two finally know how to protect each other in battle.” He smiled at Anja. “And the way you threw water under those wankers’ feet—” He grinned at Cade. “—and then you hit it with lightning! That’s teamwork. Well done, both of you.”

  Their synergy had been accidental, but Cade shrugged and said, “It was her idea.”

  “I thought as much.” Adair gave Anja’s chin a paternal nudge. “You’re the keenest blade I’ve ever honed.” He pointed at Cade. “Keep doing as she says. You might live through this.”

  “Yes, Master.” Out of the corner of his eye, Cade noticed a peculiar look from Anja. When he shifted his gaze to acknowledge it, she turned away.

  Adair walked to the door. “Let’s move. We need to lay low and gear up for a real battle.”

  “A real battle?” Cade looked at the mangled, scorched bodies. “What was this? A sissy slap-fight?”

  “I’ve let you cut your teeth on small covens.” He led them out of the coven’s lair, a large house on the outskirts of Cherbourg. “Now we go after the plonkers.” He added with a fretful look, “I won’t lie: After this, it gets ugly.”

  The master mumbled to himself as he quickened his stride.

  Several yards behind, Cade kept a slower pace, happy to steal a moment alone. After months of sneaking and hiding with Adair and Anja in the most dilapidated corners of northwestern Europe, Cade had come to find that the one thing he missed most about his old life was privacy. He wondered if he would ever know such a privilege again.

  Anja invaded his solitude, falling into step by his side. She didn’t look at him as she asked, “Why did you praise me for what we both know was an accident?”

  “You saw how much it pleased him. He wants to believe we can fight as a team.”

  “Your lie will bring him no comfort if we fail in our next battle.”

  Cade waited until she met his stare. “Then maybe you should actually talk to me, so we can plan our attacks and defenses.” She turned away in denial, but he wasn’t done. “Stop treating me like the enemy. We need to be allies. I want us to be friends.”

  “What you want means nothing.” She strode ahead of him. “This is war.”

  * * *

  Surviving an ambush had taught Niko a valuable lesson: Trust no one. Getaway vehicles and support from the Maquis had provided a safety net for his first few assaults on Thule covens, but a spy within the Resistance meant that the luxury of backup had become a danger. Of course, it was just as perilous for him to act alone, but at least now he was able to take the enemy by surprise. It had worked in Nice, Marseille, and Lyon, all of which he had rid of Thule covens in a matter of weeks. Now, excepting Paris, only one target remained in Niko’s assigned territory.

  A late-night thunderstorm scoured the coven house outside Toulouse. Lightning stuttered across the sky, creating stark snapshots of flooded streets. The tempest had driven the locals to take refuge behind closed shutters, leaving no one to bear witness to Niko’s return.

  He stopped in front of the house. It was warded by sigils and defended by spirits: he felt their energies from several meters away. Neither would stop him tonight.

  All day he had watched the house from a safe distance. Starting in the late afternoon, the coven members had begun to arrive, just as Niko had suspected they would. Dabblers tended to be more beholden to the prescribed dates and hours for magickal operations than were expert karcists. A glance at an ephemeris a week earlier had enabled Niko to predict when the Toulouse coven would meet again. And here they were.

  The midnight hour drew near. That was when the dabblers would start preparing their circles for the night’s experiment. Niko wasn’t going to let them get that far.

  He pulled off his hood and let the storm wash over him. The rain brought relief from the region’s muggy heat. Reaching out with demonic talent, he extended his senses into the thunderhead. Gathering its power, he raised his fist and focused his thoughts as Master Adair had taught him. “Ut fulgur gladium meum!”

  Niko swung his arm toward the house—and called down the demon MOLOCH in a stroke of lightning. An earsplitting boom and a white-hot flash split the coven house in half. Its sigil of protection was broken, its guardian spirit banished, its shattered frame ablaze. Burning victims tumbled out of the inferno. Some screamed and staggered; others crumpled to the ground. In the time it took the storm to douse the flames on their backs, most of the dabblers were dead.

  This had been a crude, noisy means to an end, one that had defied all of Adair’s warnings against drawing attention by using magick in too public a manner—but Niko resented being ambushed, and he intended to make an example of this coven as a message to the enemy.

  Smoldering timbers flew into the air from the middle of the collapsed house. More debris followed, hunks of smoking wood and furniture ejected from the wreckage as if hurled by a giant. Niko stood his ground in the downpour and prepared himself to face the coven’s handful of competent magicians, who were fighting their way out of the house’s now-buried cellar.

  Three figures holding wands emerged from the flames and smoke—a white-haired older man, a young man with a shaved pate, and a flaxen-haired woman in her thirties. They parted to flank Niko as they stalked away from the burning house. The white-haired man, who had led the others out of the cellar, spoke with a German accent. “You should not have come back.”

  “You should not have stayed.”

  The dabblers charged, wands blazing through the storm.

  The youth on the left hurled orbs of green fire; the woman turned raindrops into ice needles that sped toward Niko with deadly accuracy. Their master lobbed lightning with one hand and invisible blows of bone-crushing force with the other. It was an expert attack, too much for Niko to stop all at once. Frozen shards sliced into his thighs as he deflected the fireballs and absorbed the lightning—only to be knocked backward, launched through the air by whatever unseen fist the coven master controlled.

  Niko landed on his back and slid down a street of mud. He mustered his shield just in time to dissipate another volley of jade fire from the bald apprentice.

  Then with a wave of his left hand he snapped the bald man’s neck with the barbed whip of BANOG, and a thrust of Niko’s right hand flayed the flesh from the woman’s head with the winged blades of ZOGOGEN. The two adepts collapsed in the mud, and their master froze as he realized they were dead.

  Then he fired a bolt of red lightning from his wand, a blast mighty enough to wipe a normal man off the face of the earth. It crackled and sparked against Niko’s shield—and then Niko reflected the pulse at the coven master. The white-haired amateur’s shield fizzled and popped like a balloon, knocking the man on his ass in the mud.

  A crowd of villagers spilled into the road, drawn from their homes by the magicians’ duel. In no mood to contend with the superstitions of farm folk, Niko waved the entire group to sleep with the power of NEBIROS. Then he turned his attention to the coven master, who lay in the road, still steaming from his self-inflicted wound.

  Niko kneeled on the wounded man’s chest and seized him by his
shirt’s collar. “You were here the last time I attacked this house, yes?” He accepted the German’s pained but silent nod as confirmation. “Who told you I was coming?”

  “The Red Woman—the leader of the Paris coven.”

  “And who told her?”

  “A spy, she said. Inside the Resistance.”

  Niko pressed the tip of his athamé under the man’s jaw. “A name, damn you! Give me a name.”

  In spite of the blade at his throat, the German was defiant. “She never said. You want a name? Ask her.”

  “I plan to.” Niko drove his knife into the man’s jugular, then into his brain. “I hope she’s as helpful as you’ve been.”

  14

  AUGUST

  Five minutes past midnight, the streets of Caen were quiet. Cade huddled with Adair and Anja in a doorway on Rue Guillaume le Conquérant. His shirt collar was starched and snug around his throat. Seeing himself in the garb of the enemy made his skin crawl. He turned an imploring look at the master. “You’re sure there’s no other way?”

  “Positive.” The gruff Scot tugged the jacket sleeves of the black Waffen-SS uniform, then straightened the red armband on Cade’s left arm, to make sure its white circle and black swastika were centered. “Right. Where’s the hat?”

  Holding the black peaked cap by its brim, Anja handed it to Adair. As soon as he took it from her, she made a show of wiping her hand across the front of her shirt.

  The hat felt heavy on Cade’s brow as Adair patted it into place. He imagined that its weight came from the metal in its eagle pin and death’s-head insignia, as well as its braided chin strap, which marked it as the cover of an officer. “Shouldn’t I be armed?”

  Adair shook his head. “No weapons inside.” A downward glance. “Boots fit?”

  “They pinch like a vise. I can’t feel my toes.” In truth, he appreciated the sensory distraction. His ten yoked demons had filled his nightmares with itching sensations so that, in his sleep, he had scratched his lower legs raw with his own toenails. Now the scabs prickled and burned, inviting him to claw at them again and exacerbate the damage.

  With a few final tugs, Adair cinched the uniform’s belt and corrected the angle on the leather strap that crossed Cade’s torso from his right shoulder to his left hip. “Remember: Say nothing unless someone speaks to you first. And if anyone asks, you are…?”

  “Untersturmführer Dietrich Hoffmann, Fourteenth Company, SS Division Totenkopf.”

  “Good. Which spirit did you yoke to fix your German?”

  “CAELBOR. He lets me speak, hear, read, and write.”

  A nod. “Good choice. And your target is…?”

  Cade’s patience waned. This was the third time Adair had quizzed him on the mission’s details. “I climb the rear stairwell—”

  “Which is accessible only from…?”

  “The northeast end of the second-floor hallway. On the top floor, I find the binding circle that controls the spirits inside the building, then I change the glyph inside the circle from that of the coven’s patron to mine. The demons do the rest.… And what’ll you two be doing?”

  “Making sure no one but you walks out that door and lives.” The master slapped Cade’s back hard enough to start him walking. “Off you go. Chop-chop.”

  Cade had no choice but to keep going. Turning around would only draw attention to himself as well as Anja and Adair. He put on his best air of confidence and walked toward the row of three-story buildings on the far side of Rue Saint-Manvieu.

  As he approached his destination, the door opened. Green light spilled out, silhouetting a pair of drunk German soldiers who stumbled into the street, hanging on to each other as if that made their blundering any less awkward. They tripped over the curb and caught each other just shy of pitching chins-first onto the pavement. When they recovered their stride, they looked up, saw Cade, and almost knocked each other over trying to stand straight while lifting their right arms in the Nazi salute and slurring in near unison, “Heil Hitler!”

  He returned the salute as if it were an irritating obligation, which it was. “Heil Hitler.”

  Out of anxiety he avoided eye contact with the two men. As they scurried away from him, disengagement seemed in retrospect to have been the right tactic. Over the past few months, he had observed a fair number of Nazi officers interacting with their enlisted men, and most seemed to regard the lower ranks as either objects of scorn or as walking, talking furniture. Channeling their example in a display of contempt had felt true to form.

  To Cade’s advantage, it fit his mood perfectly.

  He slipped inside the building. Just past the door, curtains obstructed the view of the corridor beyond. Cade pushed past them and was greeted by what appeared to be a tall, beautiful woman with ebony skin, brown eyes, and a wild mane of black curls. She wore a negligee and exaggerated makeup. Her perfume was musky, her gaze intense, her smirk seductive. She caressed the lapel of Cade’s jacket. “Welcome, Untersturmführer,” she said in flawless German. “Is this your first time here?”

  Calling upon his demonic agent of tongues, Cade replied, “It is. I’m told you have delights to suit every taste, no matter how exotic.”

  “True. For a price, of course.”

  “Of course.” He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a fistful of reichsmarks that Anja had liberated from the Thule coven’s lockbox in Le Havre. “What will this get me?”

  “Let’s see.” The dark lady plucked the paper currency from his hand. As she counted his tribute, he looked more closely and saw, concealed in her curls, two small but telltale horns on her upper forehead—marks of a succubus. She finished tallying the cash. “For this? Anything you can imagine.” She turned, walked down the hall, and beckoned him with a crooked finger. “Follow me.”

  The nameless demon in female guise led him to a staircase in the center of the corridor, then up a flight to the second floor. Splashes of blue-green light painted the walls above the gel-wrapped sconces, and a haze of opiate smoke lingered from chest height to the ceiling. In either direction, the hall was lined by doorways, some open, some shut. Peculiar sounds emanated from the hidden spaces—snapping whips, whimpers of pain, moans of suffering and delight, a symphony of perverse appetites being sated.

  They stopped before an open doorway. She sent Cade ahead with a balletic sweep of one dark arm. “After you.” He nodded and stepped inside. The room was lavishly appointed, with a large bed and brocaded curtains drawn in front of towering windows. Between the bed and the windows stood an antique end table, atop which rested a china basin. The succubus snapped her fingers, and at once the bowl was half filled with steaming water. She faced Cade. “In three minutes, you will hear a knock at the door. Bid your visitor ‘enter’ three times, then open it. You will see no one there, but when you close it again, she—” The demon studied him with a curious leer. “—or he—will be with you.”

  “I understand. Thank you.”

  She shut the door on her way out.

  Cade moved to the door and put his ear to it. All was quiet. With the sight of SATHARIEL he gazed through the door and confirmed the way was clear. Having no desire to meet whatever monster the madam had in mind for him, he opened the door and slipped into the hallway.

  Treading toward the stairs at the far end of the corridor, he succumbed to morbid curiosity and used the Sight to spy on the assignations transpiring around him. Most were banal couplings, young Nazi officers and senior enlisted men being pleasured by demons in a variety of feminine shapes. Some of the officers were being serviced by two succubi at a time, while others preferred to watch two succubi pretend to pleasure each other.

  Cade knew the demons’ moans to be empty; the Fallen were not capable of taking pleasure from such encounters. All the men seemed oblivious of the fact that, come dawn, the succubi would be dispatched as incubi, to plant the Nazis’ demonically corrupted seed into other clients around the world, so that women and girls could birth monsters.

&nbs
p; By contrast, the two German officers pleasuring each other while a succubus stood in the corner, present apparently only to conceal their forbidden tryst, seemed almost innocent.

  Such pedestrian sights Cade could forget. It was the horrors interspersed among them that burned themselves into his memory as he continued toward the stairs.

  In one room, a Nazi in full regalia savagely beat a succubus that wore the form of a young woman crowned with a saint’s halo. The louder she cried, the harder he laughed.

  Cade halted when he saw through a closed door what looked like a Wehrmacht officer raping an angel—its white-feathered wings spattered with blood, his fist closed on and pulling its flowing golden hair, while he thrust himself into the Seraph from behind. Then Cade perceived the even uglier truth beneath the illusion—the withered shape of the succubus, like a child’s charred corpse, hidden inside the phantasm of the angel.

  Behind the last door before the stairs, a fiftyish man handed a photo to a malevolent, sable-haired beauty. “My daughter,” he told the succubus. “Can you look and sound like her?”

  In the blink of an eye the demon changed into a blond woman, then handed the photo to the Oberleutnant and said with affected subservience, “Will this do, Papa?”

  A predatory grin. “Perfect, sweetheart.”

  Cade swallowed his revulsion and continued up the northeast stairs, more eager than ever to reach the third floor and leave the brothel’s repugnant spectacle behind. He stole upward with bated breath, unsure what defenses awaited him. At the midflight switchback, he paused. There was sound from above, scuffling steps on the tiled floor, huffing pants.

  Heavy breathing inside a brothel. That never bodes well.

  He drew an obsidian blade and continued up the steps.

  Once his eyes reached the level of the floor at the top of the stairs, he searched for the source of the footfalls. At the end of the corridor, a hellhound padded away from him, its muscled bulk rippling as it moved. It would have been invisible to Cade had he lacked the Sight. The monster was near the end of the hall, where it would have to stop and turn around. At most, Cade had a few seconds to act. Neither fire nor lightning was viable; he didn’t want to set the building ablaze while he was still inside it. That left him few options, but he was out of time.