The foliate head was a throwback to the pre-Christian days of the country when people worshipped the elements, and of course, the Horned One who went by many names: Cernunnos, Dhu’l Karnain, Ammon-Zeus, Janicot, Atho, Herne the Hunter, or simply the Horned God. There were elements of Pan, Puck, Faunus, Jack-in-the-Green, the Holly King and other impish sprites in the iconography of the Horned God, but with the god’s ”vitality” owing more to do with the sexual proclivity that accompanied his worship than it did the magic of the seasons or the sun or the moon, the Horned God served as the foundation for the Christian concept of the Devil, earning him many more names in the process.
One of those was Sataniel.
Another was Osiris.
The line of reasoning sent a chill through Locke’s heart.
His mind raced, trying to remember everything he had ever heard about the Horned God.
He kept coming back to a single thought: those who held to the old ways and still offered worship to the Horned One were cast out as witches, accused of worshipping the Devil, and burned for their sins.
Burn with me, burn, burn, burn …
He felt his legs buckle and clutched the railing to stop himself from falling.
They had just held their most sacred gathering in a chamber dedicated to the Horned God, and had drunk poison from his chalice.
Brannigan Locke stared in horror as the door beneath the relief opened and one of the Seven slipped out. The creature’s thick-browed, atavistic face was devoid of anything approaching expression or emotion. It wasn’t until it drew closer that Locke saw the full intensity of the hate in its eyes. It was as though a veil had been pulled back revealing the true nature of the vampire. It glided toward him was a grace that belied its clumsy form. Locke had never truly trusted or been at ease around the creatures; you earned mythologies, like the old truism about smoke and fire went. The Seven had earned every one of the stories that had sprung up around them. It was naive to think otherwise.
The vampire’s footfalls didn’t make so much as a sound on the marble floor as it came at him.
Locke didn’t react.
At least not visibly.
He pushed with his mind, trying once more to hide himself. It was stupid and arrogant of him to believe he could manipulate the mind of one of the oldest entities on the planet, but that didn’t stop him from plunging into the darkness that was the vampire’s mind.
A single thought blazed across the creature’s consciousness: They come!
The excitement behind the thought was palpable.
And for a fraction of a moment the vampire’s mind lit up ablaze, swollen with light and colour and the cackle of fire, and amid the flames Brannigan Locke saw two figures walking hand in hand through one of the old gates of the London Wall. It took him a moment to recognise it as the Ald Gate. One of the men was tall and impossibly beautiful, more radiant than all of the flames converged, while the other was barely recognizable as Nathaniel Seth, the Brethren’s operative responsible for this cataclysmic chain of events they were trapped in now. Locke recognised him, though he knew him by a different name, Geb, after the Egyptian Earth God. It was an affectation, of course. Nathaniel Seth was no more divine than Locke. But the vampire did not think of that wreck of humanity by either name, instead recognised the man as Cain. The flames intensified, so much so he could almost feel their heat fire his blood. Cain. The first murderer.
And then he was brutally expelled from the vampire’s thoughts.
The dislocation was violent and disorientating.
That disorientation saved his life.
With less than three paces between them, its emaciated white hand reached out toward Locke, as though to stroke his cheek. It was an intimate gesture, tender almost, but it was that very tenderness that caused Locke to reel back away from it.
His heels tripped on the bottom stair.
Locke fell backwards, scrambling. He reached out beneath him instinctively, as the vampire’s claws tore through the air where his throat had been.
The transformation that came over the creature was as shocking as it was sudden. It tossed its head back, jaw distending, skin shrivelling and the stretching across the broad planes of its cheeks and brow as the bones beneath elongated, sharpening. He didn’t have eyes for anything else. It was horrifically similar to the transformation that overcame McCreedy when he unleashed his Anafanta and became a wolf, only now the beast let the killer inside rise up. The agony of the transformation became a cruel smile as the creature’s lips peeled away from feral incisors. The teeth were crusted yellow with age but that didn’t lessen the cruelty of the smile they lurked behind. Truly, now, in its purest form, the creature became a vampire of legend. Gone now was the atavistic throwback with its ugly features. In its place stood the true guardian of the Cripple Gate. It moved with unerring grace that belied the sheer economy of its movement. There was not so much as a whisper of unnecessary motion. Beneath the suit of clothes that only moments before had seemed loose-fitting muscles bunched now, corded with hunger. There was so much strength pent up within the gatekeeper it was scary. Locke was no seven stone weakling, but the vampire was Goliath to his David.
It slashed at the air again.
Locke rolled away from the blow, barely fast enough to duck beneath the scything claws. Still, the thick, dirt-smeared nails racked across his throat, drawing blood. Half an inch deeper and he would have died there and then. His eyes flew open at the sting of the barbed nails.
It was instinctive, fight or flight.
Lying sprawled on his back against the sharp ridges of the stairs, neither was practical or even particularly possible. Locke threw himself to his right—the creature’s left, banking on it being the vampire’s weaker side. With no weapon at hand it was the best he could manage. The creature’s claws raked across the marble stairs where his head had been only seconds before. Like a turtle helpless on its back, Locke struggled to stand but the vampire wouldn’t give him the room.
This wasn’t a fight he could win.
Not like this.
Not with brawn.
The guardian was more than his match physically.
Brannigan Locke squirmed on his back, desperately trying to see beyond the vampire’s bulk. The Villain Kings had been cautious with their planning; there was none of the ostentatious ornamentation he would have expected in the great halls of stately homes or great palaces of the city; no glaives, Lochabers, pikes, partisans or claymores; no maces or mauls, nor flails or even plain old fashioned morning stars; not even a shield offering the heraldic device of the house in which they had gathered. It was useless. The place was empty. Again he was struck by the realization that their enemy knew them, and knew them well enough not merely to isolate Dorian from the others, but to remove anything he might be capable of manipulating with his mind. Telekinesis was useless without an environment to interact with.
He crabbed backwards, two steps up the staircase.
At any moment—surely—the door to the Conclave would burst open and McCreedy and the others would come charging out. There was no way on God’s earth he could maintain the suggestion now. They would know he was gone. And when they did they would come running.
The vampire’s clawed fist slammed into the marble stair beside his head, powdering the stone.
Locke crabbed up three more steps, palms and heels scuffing on the stairs.
His heart pounded, the blood pumping through his veins. He was scared. Fear drove his blood. His pulse drummed in his ears. The vampire looked at him then, naked hunger in its eyes. Its tongue laved across sharp teeth and its smile spread slowly wider, becoming ever more predatory. He was in no doubt that the creature could hear every drumbeat of his heart and could smell the blood in his veins.
Locke saw the final moments of transition in its eyes as the last vestiges of humanity were supplanted once and for all by the beast within. And as everything human died, the Cripple Gate vampire dropped to the floor and crawled closer
on all fours, nails drumming one-two-three-four one-two-three-four on marble slabs.
Locke pushed back up four more stairs, rising halfway toward the first curve in the grand staircase.
Behind the creature’s shoulder, moonlight caught the glass chandelier, refracting in a moonbow across the far wall, red and yellow and green and blue, though the remaining colours bled into one and other.
Locke pushed out at the vampire’s mind again but there was no penetrating the darkness this time. The words ”They come!” rang out like a promise. He recoiled from them, his gaze fixing on the teardrops of glass hanging from the chandelier. Could he wrench one of them free with his mind and turn it into a weapon? Possibly, but in truth it would be like David hurling a pebble at the giant Goliath … but that, of course, was the entire point of the story wasn’t it? A pebble had felled the giant. It wouldn’t happen twice; this wasn’t a parable. Still, what choice did he have? He pushed his gift at the glass tears, willing one to work its way free of the chandelier. The entire chandelier began to shiver against the chain that suspended it from the ceiling. The shivers quickly grew in urgency, becoming frantic. And as they did so the glass began to glow, softly at first. Locke thought it was the moonlight catching in the facets but as the red deepened to the colour of a molten flame he knew it wasn’t. Even from the staircase he could feel the heat radiating off the glass chandelier. The glass surface of the teardrops began to slump beneath their own weight as the heat undermined the integrity of their structure. Each teardrop stretched and thinned to a point where those on the higher tiers of the chandelier began to bleed into the ones below, coming together to form whisper-thin six-inch-long blades of molten glass.
And all the while his mind filled with the same heat.
Burn with me, burn, burn, burn …
He pushed at the chandelier with his gift, setting it to spinning on the chain, faster and faster as the chain shortened, then twisted back on itself. The hanging glass blades rose on their own orbits, gravitational forces pulling them away from the metal links that anchored them to the chandelier even as they cooled and hardened.
The Cripple Gate vampire reared up, scrambling forward six steps in a wild leap, and lashed out. Its nails raked across the side of Locke’s face. He barely had the presence of mind to lurch away from the attack; he had been fixated upon the chandelier, allowing himself to become trapped in the glass. Even as the nails bit deep, slicing through his skin to get at the bone of his temple, the first of the glass daggers wrenched free of the metal link anchoring it to the chandelier and speared down toward the beast’s back. In the split second that followed the first of the whisper-thin glass blades penetrating the vampire’s back, thirty more blades tore free of the chandelier and fell in a deadly rain.
Locke bit back on the agony of the vampire’s nails dragging against the bone of his skull and used his gift to guide each and every one of them into the Cripple Gate vampire’s body. He didn’t need to speed their fall, merely direct it. The height of the ceiling meant they plunged into the vampire with a force far greater than any he could have delivered with his own hands.
The beast seemed not to notice, not at first, but its ignorance couldn’t last as it was opened up wider and wider. Thirty-one six-inch glass spikes pierced its flesh, each tip narrowed to a perfect single molecule by his telekinetic manipulation, crucifying the beast. It roared and raged, thrashing beneath the unexpected brutality of the assault.
And then one pierced its heart.
There was no blood.
In that moment of dissolution the vampire’s eyes flared impossibly wide and its jaw stretched around a scream as age stole across its skin. The furrows across its brow became deep creases, the deep creases darkened into fissures, the white of bone suddenly bare in stark contrast to the crusting skin that clung to it. The fine lines around its lips cracked and crumbled stretching the vampire’s mouth wider and wider still as the desiccated flesh flaked away to leave a leering rictus that stretched across its entire face. The perfume of decay filled the antechamber as the Cripple Gate vampire’s face collapsed in on itself in dust and death. Whatever enchantment that had held back the erosion of years from its living corpse failed and entropy tore it apart in the silence between two heartbeats. The dissolution wasn’t confined to the beast’s face. Everything powdered down to dust, flesh, bone and cloth, until all that remained was ash.
Brannigan Locke lay on the stairs, gasping for breath. His heart hammered against his breast bone. He gritted his teeth and pushed himself to his feet.
He could taste the vampire’s remains on his lips. The ash coated his suit like a second layer of skin. Great clouds of dust billowed up as he dusted himself off.
They come! The cry rang through his head again, more forcefully than ever. And then, like a ghost, the damned demand: Burn with me, burn, burn, burn.
His head swam with those hellish voices, each one sounding over and over again, made so much worse by his gift. It seemed in that moment, that second, he heard every single voice in the city crying out in answer to the voice. His mind, open, vulnerable, he staggered, punch drunk, down the steps one at a time. He almost fell as he reached the last step. He wiped the back of his hand across his lips, tasting again the dust of the dead vampire on his tongue. Through the door he saw Dorian leaning up against the railings, looking up at the sky. He wasn’t there, not inside his own skin, that much was obvious from the set of his body. Still, Brannigan Locke reached out with his mind, touching the emptiness within his friend. It was unerringly like that first contact with the Cripple Gate vampire’s mind.
He began to run toward Dorian, then for the second time in as many minutes stopped dead in his tracks. They—whoever they were—would expect him to rush to his friend’s aid. He needed to think differently, to act instead of merely reacting. Anything else made him predictable. Anything else would surely cost him his life. Instead of rushing out into the street Brannigan Locke reached out with his mind first, probing the street for the familiar energies of other minds. A mind had its own unique energy signature, and was easy to distinguish if you knew what you were looking for.
Whether it was arrogance on their behalf, or simply that they believed they had the measure of him, the Brethren made no attempt to mask their presence. He felt the sudden electrical spikes of their thoughts bristling. He didn’t read them. He didn’t need to. Their energies were as black as anything he had ever encountered. They were all out there, waiting. Their nervous excitement was palpable. It infected their thoughts. They weren’t expecting him, he realised. He kept catching glimpses of the red wolf. They thought that McCreedy with his heightened senses would be the first out of the door. They had planned for it. He had to make a choice, and fast. He could spring whatever trap they had laid for McCreedy and trust that it was geared toward the red wolf’s talent, much as whatever fate had befallen Dorian was almost certainly fashioned around his. With luck it might not hold him. It was a risk, but faint hearts never fair maidens won and all that.
Or he could use his head: warn McCreedy somehow and find another way out of the building.
The shattered chandelier and scattered ash ought to be enough of a warning, he decided. McCreedy was headstrong but he was no fool. Still, he wasn’t about to leave anything to chance; he crouched and wrote one word in the ash. It said all that needed to be said.
Trap.
The God Particle IV
Chapter Fifty-Six
The sky was still that grey of not quite dawn.
Fabian Stark’s bronze lion felt the change in the air pressure moments before the distant sky began to burn. As the sheet of flame spread it brought colour back to the city; first the blush of red to the clay rooftops of the tenements, then the rust to the leaves of the highest branches and the pinkish glow deep in the granite façades of the old buildings. The bronze lion looked up at the façade of the Greyfriar’s building. The woman stood in the window. Lamplight flickered behind her, casting shadows out into th
e street. She stared implacably at the burning sky. He couldn’t read her mind, but, this once, he didn’t need to. He followed the direction of her stare outwards. It wasn’t the river she was looking at, nor was it the glorious parliament building, but rather the palace at the other end of The Mall. Of course she couldn’t see it from Holborn; too many buildings, too much smog and the mist of rain, but he knew the city well enough to know precisely where she was looking. And why not? She was almost certainly wondering if her beloved husband was alive here.
Why else would she have come through?
Why else would she have dominated the poor tallow girl? She reached in for her name … Emily.
It was all for love.
Not pure innocent love, but a darker, twisted variant where it has turned into a canker and rooted deep into the very core of her being, and every bit as lethal. Whoever claimed love a boon obviously didn’t grasp loss.
He had seen her back in her own realm.
She wasn’t evil.
Not that evil was a relevant concept in this world or any other.
She was a desperate woman. Desperation made monsters out of the most loving people. A fool in love? A woman scorned … all of these truisms had a root in the truth. She might not have lost her love to infidelity or been cast aside for some greater passion, but she had lost him. And loss was every bit as powerful as love itself when it came to matters of the heart.
That begged the question: How far would she go for that love?
The answer stood in the window of the old house, staring out over the street. But what could he do? Was it even his place to interfere?
Stark’s lion tossed back its mighty head and roared, causing the woman to look down at him. She had a part to play in all of this, that much he knew for certain, and holding a lonely vigil at the window was not it. He needed to draw her out if she were going to play her part.
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