King of Hell (The Shadow Saga)

by Christopher Golden

  King of Hell

  A Novel of the Shadow Saga

  by Christopher Golden

  Copyright 2014 by Christopher Golden.

  First Edition.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, events, dialog, and situations in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the author.

  Cover art copyright 2014 by Lynne Hansen

  http://LynneHansen.zenfolio.com

  http://www.LynneHansen.com

  For more information about this book, contact: PubCRDG@gmail.com

  Visit http://www.ChristopherGolden.com

  DEDICATION

  In memory of my dear friend, Rick Hautala.

  "In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  King of Hell

  A Note from the Author

  Other Christopher Golden Books Referenced in King of Hell

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Salem, Massachusetts

  The trouble with living as long as Peter Octavian had was that the past waited around every corner, draped in shadow and cobwebbed with forgotten faces and bittersweet memories. A path once teeming with possible offshoots narrowed and became rutted and overgrown, until at last it arrived at a dead end. Octavian had acquired enough magic to make himself nearly immortal, yet in a world of more than seven billion, he felt cast adrift, alone and rudderless.

  On the Friday of the first week of October, he drove his gray, second-hand Audi through the gates of Greenlawn Cemetery in Salem, Massachusetts. The wrought iron gates stood open, but they held an unsettling sort of promise, as if someday they might close and trap him inside, keeping him among the dead. It almost cheered him to think so, to imagine being laid to rest here amidst the evergreens and the sloping grass and the headstones and tombs.

  Listen to yourself, he thought. What an asshole.

  He reached for the radio knob and turned up the music. 92.5 The River was running a Nikki Wydra retrospective — playing her entire catalog — and it seemed right to him that her voice should accompany him on this errand. The wistfully sad opening chords of "I Am the Answer" emanated from the car speakers and the music clawed its way into his heart. He could remember the night that Nikki had written the track. Often she had come away from working on a new song with a kind of frenetic buzz and searched the house for him, horny and not shy about it. He could still remember the first time he had seen her, playing her guitar and singing in a dive bar in New Orleans.

  An image flashed across Octavian's mind, splashed with crimson: Nikki, in bed as if sleeping peacefully, save for the light spray of bed across the sheet and the spatter upon the carpet of her Philadelphia hotel room. He tapped the Audi's brake, squeezing his eyes shut as he caught his breath. It didn't seem fair that he could remember the scene of her death with better clarity than their first meeting.

  "Fair," he said aloud, scoffing as he drove along the main road that wound through Greenlawn. No such thing.

  He drove past the duck pond and turned uphill, traveling along a thin lane of broken pavement. The knuckles of tree roots showed through the blacktop in some places. Halfway up the slope he pulled to a stop in a pile of leaves the wind had swept into the gutter between grass and macadam.

  The handbrake squeaked as he set it. He popped the door and stepped out, leaving the door hanging ajar. Nikki's voice on the radio followed him as he went around to the front of the Audi. Pine needles crinkled underfoot and then he crunched through the leaf-strewn gutter and onto the lawn. The gravestones were silent as ever, the names of the dead etched on their faces in stark remembrance. Nothing of the spirit remained in these places, Octavian knew. Even when ghosts managed to cling to the flesh and blood world, they avoided cemeteries, not wanting to be reminded of their morbid condition. Not wanting to see the evidence that dead had no cure.

  Haunted by the anguish in Nikki's voice, Octavian stood and stared down at the gravestone in front of him.

  MARCOPOULOS.

  He let out a long breath and ran a hand over the slick stone, just above the tiny canyons made by the stroke of each engraved letter.

  "Hello, old friend," Octavian said.

  He knew that George Marcopoulos was not there, but thought that perhaps somewhere the old man's spirit might still endure and might perk up at the sound of his voice. Peter Octavian had been a warrior, a vampire, a prisoner of Hell, and a sorcerer. He had fought demons and witches and ancient gods and encountered all kinds of spirits — he knew better than to question the existence of ghosts.

  The autumn wind blew dry orange leaves across the graves as he walked around to the back of the stone. During the time Octavian had lived in Boston, George had been his closest friend and confidante, a man of quiet wisdom and enormous heart who had never allowed himself to be frightened off by things he did not understand. He had died a quiet death, sitting by the fireplace in his rocking chair — the kind of death so few were granted — and Octavian still missed him terribly.

  On the back of the stone, two names were carved. George J. Marcopoulos. Valerie Moustakis Marcopoulos. Dates provided the parameters of their lives but the only thing that mattered to Octavian that morning was the symbol that separated the two names. ~

  It linked them for eternity, husband and wife buried there together. In the centuries Octavian had been upon the Earth he had been in love many times, but he did not know if he had ever loved a woman so fiercely that he would have chosen eternity with any of them. Death always seemed to come for them before he could find out. Before Nikki there had been Meaghan Gallagher, whose memory still made him ache with loss. But Meaghan had died a hero in a moment of self-sacrifice, and Nikki . . .

  "I miss her, George," he whispered, glancing up at the gray October sky.

  In truth, he missed them all. Over his long life he had lost friends and lovers and fellow warriors, but only weeks ago he had lost nearly all of his remaining friends in a single night. Weakened by supernatural incursions from infernal dimensions, the soul of the Earth — the goddess spirit worshipped by so many under the name Gaea — mustered her strength and channeled it through an avatar, causing the planet to fight back. All over the globe, portals had opened in the ground and dragged every demon and vampire through, shunting them into parallel worlds with no more effort than it would have taken to throw out the trash. It had ended a savage battle between the forces of Hell and those who sought to preserve humanity, and Octavian had been at the very center of it all.

  "I never asked for this," he said, leaning against the headstone. "Not any of it. All I ever wanted to do was make my father notice me, and he's been dead almost six hundred years."

  He uttered something halfway been a laugh and a sigh.

  You wanted to be a warrior, he reminded himself. And you got your wish.

  As a young man he had drunk too much wine and listened to the nightingales sing just inside the walls of Constantinople, fighting the invaders side by side with his dearest friends, Gregory and Andronicus, who had teased him mercilessly when they first learned of his claim to be the bastard son of the emperor of Byzantium. The last emperor, he thought, now. His name had been Nicephorus Dragases, and his claim had been the truth.

  When Karl von Reinman had approached him and offered to make him a better warrior, to give him the power to kill as many Turks as he could ever wish, Octavian had jumped at the opportunity. As a boy, he had been warned that such bargains always came with a price. For him, the price was dear: fear of the sun, the abandonment
of all he'd loved, and that hunger. Years had passed since he had evolved beyond vampirism but he could still remember the bloodthirst screaming inside of him.

  Von Reinman's coven had been his family for ages — Una, Xin, Rolf Sechs, Alexandra Nueva and the rest. He'd drifted away from them from time to time, gone off to charge into battle with other warriors, newfound brothers and sisters. War called to him. The tiny spark of humanity left inside of him tried as best it could to keep him on the side of the heroes . . . whenever a distinction could be made between the two sides in a conflict. He had met Kuromaku, then — a Japanese vampire, a samurai, and now his chosen brother.

  Other faces drifted through his mind, like playing cards tossed to the wind. Ted Gardiner. Frank Harris. Meaghan. Will Cody. Allison Vigeant. Rafael Nieto. The priest, Father Jack Devlin. Nikki. George Marcopoulos. The earthwitch, Keomany Shaw. Keomany, whom Gaea had chosen as her avatar, who had helped to heal the Earth and, in doing so, purged it of demons and the demonic, including vampires, among them Kuromaku, Allison, and a girl named Charlotte, a young vampire he had taken under his wing.

  His friends.

  He knew many people, but over time it had become less common for him to allow someone a place in his heart. When he did, he nurtured a fierce devotion to them. Now they were all dead or gone except for Keomany, and Gaea had changed her so fundamentally that he was not sure his friend still existed inside nature's avatar. There were those who would rush to his aid if he should call, most recently Amber Morrissey and Miles Varick, neither fully human, but Octavian refused to summon them. They had earned the right to live out whatever sort of life they could create.

  Once upon a time, Octavian himself had been shunted into Hell, or at least one of the nightmarish dimensions that had informed stories of the netherworld since humanity's earliest imaginings. Though a mere five years passed on Earth, he had spent a millennium in Hell and during that time he had learned a thousand years worth of dark magic and bright sorcery. For the past two weeks he had searched for some way back, something that would open a passage for him to invade Hell and bring his friends and allies back into the world of their birth. He had consulted other mages, both powerful sorcerers and academic dabblers, and cast a hundred spells, none of which had worked. He could neither open a portal nor transport himself from one dimension to the next. Peter Octavian might have been the most powerful mage in the world, but he had begun to grow desperate. He would not rest until he had freed his friends from Hell or forced Gaea to return them.

  No matter what the cost.

  "Maybe you're wondering why I've come to see you," Octavian said, running his hand along the top of the gravestone. He smiled. "It has been a while, I know."

  Octavian went around to study the engraved letters again. Smile fading, he began to contort his fingers into strange figures, sketching at the air and then tapping at the palm of his left hand. He knelt before the stone and traced his right index finger along the deep contours of each letter, whispering a spell in ancient Chaldean. He knew variations in everything from Latin to Chinese, but he found that with such magic the oldest tongues still worked the best.

  "There," he said, and sat back on his haunches.

  Pressing two fingers to his forehead, then his lips, and then to the smooth marble, he whispered a single word —"ignite" — and the letters burst into flames. For several seconds he just watched the blue-white fire burning and imagined what it would look like at night, his dearest friend's name blazing brightly even in the darkest hours. It seemed only right.

  "You never wanted anyone to think of you as remarkable," Octavian said. "But you were, my friend. You really were."

  He stood and brushed grass off the knees of his jeans. His brows knitted as he realized that the music from his radio had stopped, replaced by a commercial. For the moment, Nikki's voice had left him. But as long as he still had her music, she would always be a part of him. For that matter, so would George.

  Octavian exhaled sharply, glanced at the ground, and then spared one final look at the gravestone.

  "You were the kindest, wisest, and most humble man I've ever known," he said. "I'd like to think I learned a great deal from being your friend. Once, in another life, I wanted my father to be proud of me and he barely knew I existed. Now I just want to be worthy of the faith you put in me. Wherever my path takes me now, it's unlikely to lead me back here. But I will remember you. I swear it."

  With that he turned and strode back to his car, stepping over the leaves and pine needles. He slid behind the wheel, shut the door, and turned the car around to drive back toward the cemetery gates. The radio advertisements ended and the retrospective of Nikki's music returned. The sound of her guitar filled the car and Octavian opened his window to let it float out across the granite and marble fields. Then her raspy, sexy voice rose above the sound of the guitar. The tune was called "Tell My Sorrows to the Stones," and the serendipity made him shiver.

  Driving out of the cemetery, Octavian sang along.

  Istanbul, Turkey

  The following Wednesday, half a world away, Octavian walked the grounds of the Topkapi Palace and paused to look out over the Bosporus strait. Even with the steamship plying the wind-tossed waters, the sight transported him back in time to a simpler age. Violence still defined the world, but in those days it had not been so muddied with doubt and recrimination. Enemies waged war and to the victor went the spoils, and the reins of control. The consequences of war had been more localized then.

  He could remember only fragments of his youth in Constantinople, recalled only vague shadows where the faces of his mother and friends ought to have been. But there on the bank of the Bosporus, in the shade of trees less than half his age, his history seemed close enough to touch if he could only reach a little further, concentrate a little harder. He found himself thinking of the smell of roses.

  A woman jogged by, hair in a ponytail and apparently entirely unself-conscious about the lavender hue of her matching zippered sweatshirt and sweatpants. The outfit hugged her tight curves in a way designed to inspire admiration or at least her own pride, but she watched Octavian carefully, perhaps wary of any man who might be strolling the grounds outside the palace on his own. He smiled at her but she averted her eyes and jogged on.

  Maybe she senses danger, he thought. Good for her. Best keep running.

  The massive sprawl of the Topkapi Palace loomed behind him and he turned to study its strange silhouette. Octavian could not deny the grandeur of its towers and chimneys and arches, but still it seemed nothing more than an elaborate, ornate blight on the banks of the Bosporus. The Ottoman Turks had taken Constantinople in the spring of 1453 and renamed it Istanbul. Thirteen years later, the Sultan had completed construction on the Topkapi Palace, and so to Octavian the place was little more than a crumbling monument to the defeat of his people and the deaths of so many he had once loved. He had killed a great many Turks in the months that had followed the conquest of the city, but even he could not kill enough of them to drive them away. The sun still rose and fell. The world still turned. Other empires had come and gone. But he still felt the bitterness that came with defeat.

  "Fortune, good night," he whispered to himself, staring at the palace. "Smile once more. Turn thy wheel."

  King Lear, he thought. You can always count on Shakespeare.

  Octavian turned toward Gulhane Park, further along the bank. Its green trees towered overhead and he could see a round fountain jetting water into the air. Children played amongst the trees and several families picnicked. Older couples walked their dogs and athletes rode bicycles or ran along the broad paved path that ran down the middle of the park. Once there had been a zoo there, just as there had been in New York's Central Park, but the age of such public displays had passed. Now the many acres of greenery had been set aside purely for peace and wonderment. He could see that it was the perfect place for a picnic, set between the water and the palace.

  There was harmony here, a quiet joining o
f nature and human purpose.

  Octavian set it on fire.

  He summoned the blaze from deep within himself, filtered his anguish through the ancient sorcery he had accumulated during his time in Hell. It burned up from his heart and from his gut, tapping into raw magic that had become a part of him, woven from spells he knew so well they required only a thought. Hands in front of him, Octavian looked down at the green fire that crackled around his fingers and he watched as it turned red, a crimson so dark it seemed nearly black.

  A thin, gray-haired woman in a long, brown wool coat was the first to notice him. She held her purse close against her body and froze, then began to back away in fright. Octavian had a long history of inspiring terror, but it had been a long time since the fear he instilled had been warranted. Today, though, he thought, this woman should be afraid.

  He started with the trees, lifted his arms and let the red-black flames unfurl from his palms. Fingers contorted, he thrust his open hands toward the treetops and loosed torrents of occult fire that engulfed them. Half a dozen trees turned to gigantic torches, the fire roaring as it consumed leaf and branch and trunk. Octavian unleashed all of the grief and loneliness and rage that had been building in his heart, and when the people in the park began to scream and set off running, he did not listen.

  His breath came in deep, ragged lungfuls and his hands shook as he turned around in search of other targets. An overturned baby stroller drew his attention and he scanned beyond it, saw a young mother racing away with her squalling infant in her arms. Not that direction, he thought. Not yet. It wasn't the people he'd come here to kill . . . it was the park. The trees. The pure nature of it.

  Men were shouting to his right and he strode in their direction. A young policeman appeared in his stiff uniform, face rigid with panic but still courageous enough to move toward the crimson fire instead of away. Octavian respected that, though he was unsure if the man had a warrior's heart . . . or a fool's. Off to the left, nearer the water, the fire spread across the grass to ignite abandoned picnic blankets and a football that had been left nearby. For a moment, Octavian felt profound regret, but then the policeman shouted at him and he remembered why he was here. He hadn't been the one to set this in motion; that had been Gaea.