by Mel Odom
Lilith smiled, and it was a cruel expression stippled in moonlight and shadows.
“I told you that she would be trouble. Better to leave her now. Or kill her.”
The thought had crossed Warren’s mind. Violent solutions to problems tended to be normal for him these days. Before the Hellgate had opened and the demons had arrived, that had never been the case. He’d run from every fight he’d ever faced. As a result, he’d been taken advantage of by nearly everyone he’d trusted.
“There’s something out here,” Warren said.
“How do you know?”
“Because I feel it.” Warren lifted his metal hand. “In here.”
Naomi started to say something, then she glanced at the hand and closed her mouth. He’d already proven that he was much more adept at the arcane forces the demons wielded. Now that he had a new hand, his power had taken on new turns that he hadn’t had access to before.
“All right,” she said finally. She pulled her long coat more firmly around her. “But I hope we find it soon.”
Another of the zombies dropped into one of the unseen bog holes barely covered by ice. The sharp crack sounded just before the zombie plunged into the black water. This one didn’t come back.
Only a little farther on, gray smoke plumed against the dark, star-filled sky. The feeling that pulled Warren lay in that direction as well.
Lilith walked beside him again. “You’ll want to hurry,” she stated calmly. “You’re being followed.”
Hellgate: London
Exodus
Goetia
Covenant
Diablo
The Black Road
Pocket Star Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Flagship Studios, Inc. Flagship Studios and Hellgate: London are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Flagship Studios, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8011-9
ISBN-10: 1-4165-8011-5
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
For Dr. Gary Wade, who keeps my
world clear and in focus
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Bill Roper and the Flagship team for bringing a great game into the world and letting me play in it. And to Marco Palmieri, the editor who made it all work.
HELLGATE LONDON® COVENANT
PROLOGUE
OUTSIDE OF CHIPPING ONGAR
EPPING FOREST
ESSEX, ENGLAND
JANUARY 8, 2025
T his is madness, Emily. You’ve got to come away from here before it’s too late. The demons aren’t your friends. They’ll never be your friends.” Rob Houghton pleaded with his sister, but he knew she wasn’t listening to him. She was listening to that inner voice she claimed to be attuned to these days.
The Burn, the strange power that came from the Hellgate that had opened by St. Paul’s, hadn’t made it this far outside London yet. But everyone knew it was coming. Demons occasionally prowled the forests and screamed through the skies of the outlying areas.
As the Burn crept outward, it terraformed the land, rendering it into a hellish landscape that only the demons thrived on. No one in the scientific think tank that Rob had worked in until the demons arrived on All Hallow’s Eve had been satisfied with what they believed the Burn to be.
Some believed the Burn was changing the land into a proper environment for the demons, but that was refuted when it was pointed out that the malevolent creatures handled themselves quite well under regular planetary conditions. Others believed that the demons weren’t causing the change at all; rather, it was their presence in the world that left a cancerous boil on the earth.
Rob’s own beliefs held that the Burn was simply another weapon in the arsenal the demons had. By unleashing the Burn, the demons destroyed potable water and vegetation, all things livestock and wildlife needed to survive. He was convinced that it was supposed to eliminate the natural food chains the world supported.
To the south, he could see London. He thought he could almost see the Hellgate, the interdimensional portal that allowed the demons free egress into the world. He could definitely see the ever-circling dark clouds filled with ominous green lighting that hung low over the metropolitan area.
Chipping Ongar was a small town outside Greater London. Rob’s mother had grown up there before she’d gone off to university to meet their father. As children, Rob and Emily had visited their grandparents there often. They’d maintained a small farm outside the city. When the horror swept over London, Rob had found his sister in all the confusion at the university and gotten her out of the city.
They’d lived on their grandparents’ farm since the invasion. Their grandparents were long dead. Their parents had never made it out of London.
For a time, Rob had believed that they could wait it out. That had been over four years ago, and there was no relief in sight.
Even worse, Emily had fallen prey to the twisted mystics that had risen up to embrace the demons and their arcane powers.
“Emily,” Rob called again.
She turned toward him and he could scarce bear her gaze. When he’d taken her from university, she’d been twenty, not truly innocent anymore—because college served to wear some innocence away—but not worldly, either.
She was petite and slender, possessing a boyish shape made popular by modeling agencies, Hollywood, and adverts. Her natural red hair was cropped even with her jaw, parted in the middle, and she’d had ash-gray eyes.
Rob was bundled up in the winter’s cold. A thick parka with hood, thick gloves, and insulated coveralls barely kept him warm as the wind cut into him. Gusts carried new-fallen, powdery snow up in what looked like sugar confection whirlwinds. The white powder gleamed in the cracks of bark on the tree trunks. Cold moonlight beamed down through the skeletal branches.
Despite the bone-aching cold, Emily only wore what amounted to a halter top and hip-hugger shorts. She went without shoes even though the snow reached her mid-shin. They were clothes probably every university girl had hidden away from her parents and older brothers.
Now, though, Emily embraced her sexuality. She claimed that clothing interfered with her ties to the arcane forces that the presence of the demons had loosed in the world.
Rob didn’t believe her. He was a scientist. He believed in things that could be weighed and measured. Magic was something for role-playing games.
Not all of the Cabalists, as they called themselves—and Rob called them cultists—had the same control over their bodies. Plenty of them that Rob had seen wore winter clothing.
“Rob,” she said in that eerie voice she’d developed. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Neither should you,” Rob countered. He watched the shadows closely. The demons liked shadows because they could use them to hide in.
“You’re cold,” Emily said. “You should get back to the house.”
“Not without you.”
Quietly, her face serene, she turned her gaze back to the full moon. “It’s not going to be safe out here for you.”
“Then it w
on’t be safe for you, either.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Rob shook his head vehemently. “I’m not leaving without you, Em.”
“All right,” she told him, and sounded just for a moment like the little sister he’d pulled from university four years ago. “Follow if you must, but run if there’s any trouble.” She started walking.
“Trouble?” Rob made himself follow. “What trouble?”
Emily didn’t answer. She strode through the snow as if it weren’t there. Her exposed skin turned blue-green, and Rob noticed that it suddenly looked scaled in the moonlight. He’d seen the effect on other occasions, but never was it so pronounced as tonight.
Several of the cultists had taken to grafting the parts of slain demons onto their bodies. They claimed that the demon parts helped them amplify their powers. Rob didn’t think that was true. As a geneticist, he didn’t know how that could be true. The recipient of a transplanted organ didn’t suddenly experience a DNA change. And that was the comparison the cultists offered. Except their change was on an arcane level, not a genetic one.
“There will be trouble,” Emily stated.
Unconsciously, Rob shoved his hand into his coat pocket and felt for the massive Webley .455 revolver his grandfather had prized. Until he’d left London, he’d never touched a firearm. Now he not only knew how to use them, but he’d practiced till he was proficient with the Webley.
“Then you shouldn’t go,” Rob protested.
“I have to.”
“Why? Who said?”
“I said.”
Startled, Rob pulled the Webley from his coat pocket and took aim. Even with gloves on, the pistol was so big it accommodated the gloves easily. He aimed at the shadow next to a bare elm tree.
“Who are you?” Rob demanded.
“It’s Seeker Orrus,” Emily said. “The one I came to meet. Put away your weapon, Rob. It’s not needed here. You’re among friends.”
Rob kept his weapon where it was. It suited him there. And he definitely wasn’t among any friends that he recognized.
Seeker Orrus remained by the tree and surveyed Rob from under hooded eyes. He was tall and lean to the point of emaciation even in the winter clothing he had on. His head looked heavy for his thin shoulders. He leaned on a tall staff.
“You have nothing to fear from me,” Orrus said.
“I’m safeguarding my sister,” Rob replied.
The tall, thin man barked laughter. “Your sister is far more capable of protecting herself than you are.”
“On that we disagree.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Orrus said. “She’s here because I asked her to be.”
“Why?”
Orrus lurched out from the tree. Evidently he’d suffered an injury in the past that left him at least partially crippled. When the moonlight stripped the shadows from the man’s long face, Rob thought he was going to be sick.
The cultist had braided small demons’ horns from the bridge of his nose all the way to the base of his skull. Weird tattoos in a half-dozen colors covered his shaved scalp. One of his eyes was yellow and far too large for his head. Ridged scar tissue around the eye socket showed where someone had removed bone and tissue to make it fit. Two more horns, these downturned, jutted from either side of his chin. His breath leaked away from him in a slow pour of gray fog.
“Because she has done something no one else in our sept has been able to do,” Orrus declared. “She’s touched the mind of a demon.”
Rob kept his pistol pointed at the man. “I don’t know what kind of tripe you’ve been filling my sister’s head with, but—”
“This isn’t their doing,” Emily said. “I truly have touched the mind of a demon. I called Seeker Orrus here tonight to help me work through this.”
“Work through what?” The pistol had grown heavy at the end of Rob’s arm. His hand shook and his shoulder ached from the weight of it.
“I dream of the demon,” Emily said in a quiet voice. “I dream of the demon every night.” For the first time in months or years, she looked distraught. “I can’t tell you what it’s like, Rob, but I’ve got to gain control of this…or it’s going to destroy me.”
Pain tightened Rob’s throat. “What you need is to get out of here. If you get out of here, Emily—”
“I will only dream of the demon somewhere else,” she interrupted. “Seeker Orrus believes he can help me.”
Rob hesitated, but he didn’t shift the pistol aim from the cultist.
“Please,” Emily whispered. “Rob, permit me this. I can’t bear this much longer.” Fear showed in her eyes along with the pain. “I can’t do this on my own.”
“I can help her,” Orrus said. “You can’t.”
Knowing he was defeated, Rob lowered the pistol, but he didn’t put it back in his pocket. “What are you going to do?” With his surrender, the wind suddenly seemed colder.
“I’m going to help her break the link,” Orrus said.
“Then get it done.”
The cultists’ choice to remain in the open surprised Rob. The arrival of seven more members of Orrus’s group joining them in the moonlight under the bare branches of the trees also surprised him. Tiny snowflakes fell.
Two of the new arrivals, both male, didn’t wear any more clothes than Emily did. The flesh of both of them looked like it was covered with scales as well.
At Orrus’s bidding, Emily sat cross-legged on the ground. The cultist leader squatted in front of her.
As he watched, Rob wondered again at how much all life had changed since the arrival of the demons. Their metropolitan lives—his job at the R&D department at Gardner’s Genetics—was gone. His kid sister had gone from a literature nut studying the works of Neil Gaiman and Ian Rankin to some kind of weird sorceress.
The thing was, Emily was a sorceress. Rob had seen her work magic: move things with her mind, summon fire from nowhere, and read minds with uncanny accuracy. He’d learned to be afraid of her, and he regretted that because he’d felt certain she’d sensed that about him.
What Rob hated most was the helplessness he now felt. When they’d first left the city, they’d both foraged for things to eat. Then, slowly but surely, she’d developed her own interests with the cultists. Even after arguments about it, something they’d never done before, she hadn’t given up her studies of the old books that the cultists had let her borrow to make her own copies.
But he wouldn’t leave her. He’d made that promise to himself when he’d gotten her out of the city and they’d both lived.
Orrus took an object from his robe and put it on the ground between Emily and himself. It looked like a jade figurine of a lighthouse.
“This is my foci,” the cultist said in a soft, soothing voice. “Through it, I will access your thoughts and bring more control over them to you.”
“Yes.” Emily sat in a lotus position. Her hands were upraised on her knees.
“Stare at it,” Orrus crooned. “Stare at the foci and feel the dream within you. Unleash its power. You don’t even have to provide energy to feed the dream.”
Rob thought the man’s words were worthless. It was just noise to make himself feel important.
“Feed the dream to my foci,” Orrus said. “I’ll help you contain and bring it forth. We’ll see your dream together. Then we’ll conquer it and build safeguards for you.”
The jade lighthouse glowed. The lambent green barely showed against the white field of snow.
“People have dreamed of demons before,” Orrus said. “Many times. There’s always a great deal of energy expended to do something like this. Always, unless the dreamer gets the upper hand, the energy only flows one way.”
Rob barely restrained his anger. He couldn’t believe Emily bought into all of this. But the powers are real, aren’t they? It isn’t all crap. But if she hadn’t been messing about with those arcane forces, she wouldn’t have been in the shape she was currently in.
“That’s it,” Orrus s
aid. “Only a little more.”
The jade lighthouse suddenly glowed as bright as a star. Snow around it started to melt, and it sank a couple of inches. The heat was intense enough that the figurine melted the snow for several inches in any one direction.
The hairs on the back of Rob’s neck stood up. His stomach turned sour. This didn’t need to happen. Emily already believed too much in the power of the demons.
“Reach for the dream,” Orrus said. “Bring it forward.”
A green, smoky incandescence drifted up from the jade lighthouse. Figures writhed within the two-foot-wide smoke cloud.
“How many do you see?” Orrus asked gently.
“Two,” Emily said. “The demon and the woman he has taken for his own.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I can hear bits and pieces of their conversations.”
“Concentrate harder,” the cultist said. “I’ll help you.”
As he stared at the smoke and the figures within it, Rob discovered he was able to see as well. The green smoke cleared and became sharper all at the same time. Unbidden, he stepped forward toward Emily.
“Don’t touch her,” Orrus said.
Angered, Rob stared at the cultist.
“If you touch her at this point, you could cost your sister her life,” Orrus told him. “Is that what you want?”
“No.”
“Then listen to me. This is very dangerous work. For both of us.” Orrus focused on the glowing lighthouse. Despite the cold air that blew snow around him, sweat covered the cultist’s forehead. “Emily.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where you are?”
Emily hesitated. She frowned a little, and Rob was instantly reminded of the little girl his sister had one day been.
“Underground,” she answered.
“Underground where?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you doing there?”
“Searching for something.”
“What?” Orrus remained patient.