The Midnight Front--A Dark Arts Novel

by David Mack

  He unlocked the door, opened it, then paused on his way out. “Thank you.”

  Her mood was dour as she scribed eldritch symbols with holy oil on Cade’s forehead. “Thank me if he lives.”

  * * *

  Anxious and spent, Anja sat beside Cade’s bed. And she waited.

  After so many months free of demons and their torments, the past several days had been a whirlwind of exhilaration and disgust, one after the other. Every moment of narcotic delight she had enjoyed at the return of power, at the ability to see the unseen and sense the unknown, had come at a cost measured in blood and pain.

  Food hadn’t tasted right since she yoked BUER for its healing gifts. BELIAL always fouled her digestion, but she needed its talents in the astral plane. Yoking ANDREALPHUS for the ability to fly as a bird had cursed Anja with unpredictable nosebleeds. RAMIEL, her hellbeast of burden, was tame by demonic standards; it restricted its harassment to nightmares. And though she would not have found her way to Southampton so quickly without the unerring directional sense of NUMORIS, its penchant for driving karcists to chew off their fingernails and scratch through their own flesh had led her to free it and compel its peaceful departure as soon as she had reached the hospital’s pier the night before.

  Was it worth it? Or did I do all this for nothing?

  The clock on the wall seemed frozen. Anja swore its hands had been locked forever just shy of quarter past five.

  Faint smudges of diluted ink stained Cade’s flesh. Anja’s ritual had required drawing dozens of Enochian symbols on various parts of his body, in order to recall his wandering soul and restore his battle-ravaged flesh. After the ceremony was over, she had done her best to erase the marks with a cloth and a bowl of warm water Adair had fetched at her request. Most of the glyphs were gone, but ink-stained water had pooled along the edges of Cade’s fingernails, in the creases where his limbs met his torso, and at the corners of his mouth.

  His chest rose and fell in a slow rhythm, his breathing almost too faint for Anja to discern. If she didn’t know the depths of his wounds, she would have thought it possible he was merely sleeping, lost somewhere in the uncharted fathoms of dream.

  Outside the door, heavy steps. She imagined Adair pacing in the corridor as the predawn sky blanched before the rising sun. The master needed me to return. But does he want me here? If Cade hadn’t been hurt, would Adair ever have tried to find me?

  Questions impossible to answer. She could ask Adair, but he had a gift for replies that shed more heat than light. It makes no difference, she decided. Why I left, why he asked me to come back. None of it matters now. Home, family, country—none of them mean what I thought they did. She remembered the carnage of Stalingrad. The tragedy in Kharkov. The betrayal at Toporok. Everything I thought I was fighting for turned out to be a lie.

  But not Cade. He had tried to be her friend, no matter how many times she had pushed him away. The American had been a fool. Probably still was. And for many reasons, not all of which Anja could explain, she still disliked him. But he was, if nothing else, genuine. Naïve and too earnest for his own good, but never duplicitous.

  “I know it is not your fault you are ‘special,’” she whispered to him. “Adair told me it was something he helped your father do to you, before you were born.” She took his hand. “I was unfair to you. The truth is … you are a decent man. And I do not hate you.”

  He gasped. She recoiled and let go of his hand as his back arched off the mattress and his eyes opened. His face was a mask of wonder—or perhaps terror—for a few seconds, until he exhaled and relaxed, sinking onto the bed.

  Anja stood over him. “Welcome back.”

  As he saw her, strange emotions glimmered in his eyes—but like dying embers they faded. A shadow of despair fell over him. He rolled away from her. “Get out.”

  “Cade, you were right. We do not need to like each other to be allies. I am sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” His voice quavered with grief. “Nothing matters. Just go.”

  She circled the bed to confront him, only to see tears fall from his closed eyes. Perhaps feeling the weight of her concern, he pulled his pillow over his head, then cocooned himself under his bedsheet. His physical injuries were healed—Anja knew that beyond a doubt. But now she understood he had suffered spiritual wounds beyond her ability to salve.

  Something in him had changed … and not for the better.

  * * *

  Kein awoke to muffled thunder, followed by the keening of sirens. Outside his guesthouse in the Wolfsschanze compound, the afternoon came alive with soldiers scrambling in multiple directions to guard posts, all of them shouting in panic and confusion.

  I know this music—this is no drill.

  He rolled out of bed, dressed in a hurry, and raced out his front door into the midst of bedlam. Armored cars sped past in either direction. Alarms wailed from the compound’s PA system and merged with those of medical trucks and fire engines into an earsplitting din. Kein tried to halt a trio of SS officers sprinting past, only to be knocked aside. Then he saw the source of the camp’s hysteria: A black cloud twisted upward from the conference building three hundred meters away, on the other side of the train tracks from Kein’s private house.

  Then he was running with everyone else.

  He reached the scene long after the firefighters and members of Hitler’s elite bodyguard unit. High-ranking officers staggered out of the smoke-filled conference building. Four others were carried out, burnt and bloody. The Führer was nowhere to be seen.

  Kein stopped a passing firefighter. “What happened?”

  “Somebody bombed the Führer’s meeting with the generals!”

  Ignoring the warnings of the firefighters and the SS men near its entrance, Kein ran inside the building, trusting ANDRAMELECH to shield him from fire.

  Moving against the line of wounded men being assisted out of the wreckage led Kein to the main meeting room. Its conference table had been reduced to splinters and fractured planks. All the chairs had been thrown against the walls with such force that not one was still intact. The ceiling had fallen in, leaving wires with half-melted insulation dangling from exposed joists.

  Officers and medics surrounded the Führer, whose trousers were tattered and blackened. Soot smeared Hitler’s face and coat. He was standing and impatiently answering the medics’ questions, which Kein took as a hopeful omen.

  Then the Führer looked up. When he recognized Kein, his face contorted with rage. “You!” He pointed at Kein. “This was your fault!” Everyone in the room and the corridor outside stared at Kein, who preferred to go unnoticed during his sojourns at Wolfsschanze. The officers and medics attending Hitler retreated as he waved his arms and ranted, “You said you’d protect me! That I’d be safe! You call this safe? What are you doing to find the traitors?”

  Kein answered the Führer’s fire with ice. “Everyone … get out.”

  The others moved to comply with Kein’s order, then froze as Hitler bellowed, “He doesn’t give orders here! Only I give orders here! You people obey me!”

  Kein infused his voice with the suggestive force of ESIAS: “I said get out.”

  Even the Führer stood shocked as his underlings scurried out of the meeting room, then cleared the corridor outside. Marshaling every ounce of menace invested in him by the powers of Hell, Kein confronted the suddenly cowed leader of the Third Reich.

  “You seem to enjoy hearing yourself talk, my Führer. Now you will listen to me. In case it escaped your notice, you just survived a front-row seat to an exploding bomb. Do you think that was luck? I assure you, it was not.” He moved closer to Hitler and met the shorter man’s glare with his own. “If the demons I tasked to defend you had not been here, you would now be little more than bloody confetti in this pile of kindling you used to call a conference room. Make no mistake: You are alive and drawing breath right now only because of my precautions.” He brushed a bit of ash off of Hitler’s shoulders. “But if y
ou doubt that, you need but say the word, and I will revoke my protections without delay.”

  Hitler shook with righteous indignation. “Is that a threat?”

  “Of course not, my Führer. I am just reminding you that without my hand to guide them, those demonic bodyguards you take for granted will make a sport of driving you mad. A few days at their mercy, and you will be ready to eat a bullet to escape their tortures. So, for your own sake, spare me your threats, and do everything in your power to make certain nothing happens to me. Because if I die—” He emphasized his parting thought with a firm poke in the center of Hitler’s pigeon chest. “—you die.”

  54

  AUGUST

  A river black as coal flowed past the Royal Victoria Hospital’s pier, its surface rippled by a breeze. Cade watched the water slip past. Once he might have seen poetry in it. Now all he saw was liquid obeying gravity and being disturbed by air that moved because the earth turned. Even the moon was nothing more than a ball of rock reflecting sunlight, an orb as bereft of romance as it was devoid of air. They were all just gears in a clockwork universe long deserted by its maker.

  Footsteps drew near across the pier’s groaning planks. Their cadence Cade knew well. Unwilling to invite conversation, he kept his eyes on the river as Adair sat beside him on the wrought-iron bench inside the pier’s gazebo.

  A rustling of papers. Adair pretended to read them, then feigned a reaction to a question Cade hadn’t asked. “These? These are your discharge papers.” He folded them and tried to hand them to Cade, who ignored the gesture. Adair continued as he tucked the orders inside his own coat. “Your doctors say there’s nothing wrong with you. Not physically, anyway. They want your bed for someone who really needs it. Can’t say as I blame them.”

  The silence between them drew out like a blade.

  Adair took out a pack of cigarettes. Lit one. Offered it to Cade, who took it and filled his chest with a long drag. His head swam from the nicotine rush, a sensation he hadn’t felt in months. As he exhaled through his nose, Adair lit another Lucky, then set the pack and his lighter on the bench between them. “You haven’t said a word in weeks. Not since Anja brought you back. Have you gone mute, or are you just being a cunt?”

  Cade blew smoke into Adair’s face.

  “Right. Cunt, it is.” Another drag. “If we had years to burn, I’d say ‘Go with God’ and leave you to it. But we don’t have time for this shite. The war’s not done, and neither are we.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “He talks! Halle-fucking-lujah! It’s a miracle! Now that the ice is broken, maybe you can tell me what your problem is, you scabby bastard.”

  Cade pulled on the Lucky until it burned nearly down to his fingertips; then he flicked its smoldering end into the river. “My problem is that none of this matters.”

  “None of what? The fuck are you on about?”

  “This. The war. The world. Life. It’s all pointless. All of it, all of us. Everything we do. Everything we care about. None of it means shit.”

  Adair watched him with paternal concern. “What happened to you out there?”

  “In Normandy? Nothing. Just the mission.”

  The master discarded his own expired cigarette. “After that. Anja says you did some astral projection, took a long holiday. Where’d you go?”

  Cade stared across the river, into the darkness. “I met my bonded spirit. He took me up to Heaven. Then into Hell.” He aimed an accusatory look at Adair. “Ever seen them?”

  “I’ve had a vision or two.”

  “They’re wastelands. Bleak, eternal, and completely barren of human souls.” He studied the guilt and regret that played across Adair’s craggy face. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  A sad nod. “Aye.”

  “Where are they, Adair? Where are all the human souls?”

  He shot a sidelong look at Cade from beneath an arched gray eyebrow. “Where do you think they are?”

  Dredging up the truth freighted Cade’s words with sorrow. “They’re gone.”

  Sympathy softened the master’s rough baritone. “Aye. Our souls are as mortal as our flesh. No afterlife for us—no eternal paradise, no Flame Everlasting. Just oblivion.”

  It was still impossible for Cade to wrap his mind around it. “But … why?”

  “It’s the way the world was made. We all shine with Empyrean flame, each of us blazing a billion times brighter than any angel ever did … but we don’t last.”

  “But the scriptures go on and on about the glory of the angels, about how beautiful and powerful they are.”

  Adair nodded. “When they’re reflecting the light of the Divine, they can be the most amazing things you’ll ever see. But that’s not their nature.”

  “So those boring gray shades I saw—”

  “Are their true essences. They don’t dazzle on their own, but they were never meant to. That’s why the Divine made us.” Reading Cade’s perplexed reaction, he added, “The angels were made in the image of God, as we were. But each of us represents only one aspect of the Divine. Angels were cast in the mold of God’s eternal form, but after SATAN’s lot rebelled they all lost their free will. Humanity was made to reflect God’s creative force—but like sparks cast off a bonfire, we’re only meant to burn for a moment in the darkness before we fade away.”

  It was a strange and chilling vision, one that to Cade seemed designed to deny the human race even a glimmer of hope. “But if our souls die with us … what difference does anything make? Who cares if we’re good or evil? Kind or cruel?”

  “It makes as much difference as we decide it does.”

  “But if we don’t go to Heaven or Hell—”

  “Then so what? So there’s no endless garden of treats for the good boys and girls; no eternity of getting rogered by demons for the miscreants. Just the same empty silence at the end of the line for each and every one of us. But why does that change anything? Morality that has to be bought with bribes or coerced with threats is just shite. The one is nothing but greed, the other just fear. Truly moral behavior comes from a place of love. It’s about empathy. Compassion. Mercy. Seeing the Other in yourself, and yourself in them. We all have to serve something in this life, but we get to choose what it is. For some, it’s love; for others, country. But we choose.”

  Cade remembered a conversation years earlier, when Stefan had told him much the same thing. Without asking, Cade pulled another Lucky from Adair’s pack and lit it. “If there’s no afterlife for us, why do all the religions promise it?”

  “Salesmanship, mostly. Makes the rabble easier to control. After all, if a million starving people knew there was nothing waiting for them but the grave, that this one life was their only shot at being happy, you think they’d let the rich and powerful walk all over them? Fuck, no. Heads would roll. And the elites can’t have that, can they? So they force-feed the masses bullshit by calling it sugarplums.… That’s the way it’s always been. And very few people ever see the truth with their own eyes the way you did.”

  Nettlesome questions still nagged at Cade. “I see what you’re saying, and I understand why most people don’t know better. But the angels all know the truth, don’t they?”

  “Of course.”

  “Even the Fallen?”

  A derisive snort. “Especially the Fallen.”

  “Then why do demons make deals for human souls they can never collect? I mean, they let us summon them. They grant us powers and knowledge. They even let us yoke them. And all they ask in return is that we promise to let them roast our eternal souls for a thousand years here, ten thousand years there. But if our souls are mortal, and they know it—what’s the goddamned point? What do they get out of all of this, if not souls?”

  Adair chortled with genuine amusement. “Congratulations, lad. You’ve just discovered the great cosmic joke of magick. There have been karcists who lived hundreds of years and went to their graves without the truth you now possess.” He paused to light a ne
w cigarette. “At heart, all angels and demons want the same thing: to increase the quotient of human suffering, misery, fear, and anxiety. But they go about it in different ways.

  “Thousands of years ago, the angels concocted a message of repression and spoon-fed it to us. Made us believe God would punish us if we indulged our desires and enjoyed the physical pleasures of this world. But they knew not to take something away without promising something better in return: freedom from suffering, and eternal life in the world to come, if only we deny ourselves all the joys and beauties of this one.

  “The demons? They love to stir up chaos. To them, mucking with God’s universal order is an end in itself. But they come into their own when they deal with karcists. They bully us into making pledges of eternal suffering and damnation—not because they could ever make good on their threats, but to ensure that people like us don’t fully enjoy the time we have or the power we wield. They’ll extend our lives for centuries and let us shape the primal forces of reality—as long as they think they’ve tainted our every moment with fear.”

  Cade’s mental picture of the cosmos felt as if it were coming into focus for the first time in his life. “Angels and demons … resent us. Because we have free will.”

  “Now you’re getting it.”

  “They hate us because we imagine. Because we create and reshape reality.” More pieces of the puzzle revealed themselves. “And demons don’t let us summon them, or command them, or yoke them. They submit because they have no choice—because they have no free will, but we do. Our spark—it’s what gives us the power to control them. And that’s why they despise us.”

  “Good. Keep going.”

  “The angels are still loyal to God. That’s why we can’t compel their service, because they answer to Him alone. But they and the demons exact their grudges against us by playing on our fear of death … and our envy of the one thing they both take for granted: immortality.”

  Adair rewarded Cade’s summary with mocking bow. “And there you have it, lad. The secrets of magick and the universe, in a nutshell.”