What frightened Peter, what made this creature so different from the others, was its intelligence. Eyes, nose, and mouth, where many of the other creatures had none. Personality, character, where the others were mindless savages.
And it smiled at him.
Not an evil smile, though the face was evil incarnate, but a knowing smile. A nudge, a wink, a nod that said, Yes indeed, thing of the world, everything and nothing is true. Wouldn’t you love to know what I know? Peter could almost hear the words in his head.
Perhaps he did.
“I called him to me and he came!” Mulkerrin shouted as he was lifted from the ground by his wraiths. “HE CAME! WHAT POWER!”
Peter moved. Above him the second hand came through, struggling still against the pull of the other side, the other world—against the hold that hell had on the demon. The rest of the head was emerging and he could see what looked like another horn, halfway between the ground and the creature’s head. It might have been its phallus.
Peter heard Meaghan scream at Alex to shapeshift into flames. His friends were going to be killed.
Bolting to where Sheng’s remains lay, Peter picked up the silver sword Cody dropped when the demon had grabbed him. He had always wondered at their vampiric metamorphosis, at how they could incorporate clothing and objects into their physical forms, and then shift back perfectly, shirt still buttoned, gun still loaded. He had never even considered what might happen if he absorbed silver in his shifting. A foolish question, for silver was poison. Silver was pain.
Silver sword in hand, Peter changed and the sword melded into him. He became something new, forged in pain, a creature with wings and claws and fangs. A griffin, perhaps, or something that only lived in his mind, but his mind created the form he needed.
Then he was beyond pain, beyond rage, beyond fear. He shot into the sky toward the fleeing sorcerer and struck out at the wraiths that carried him with claws laced with silver. The mist-things reacted instinctively and fled, shrieking, while Mulkerrin and the Gospel fell the forty feet to the stones below.
A huge hand reached for him, closed around him, and for a moment he despaired. But then it was gone, and only action remained. Peter tore into the slant hand with hands and teeth, with razor-sharp extensions of himself filled with silver. His own pain was a terrible static filling his every nerve with hissing, steaming heat. Silver was poison to anything not of the earth, not of their plane. Perhaps because they had once been human, his kind could withstand the pain, overcome the poison.
There was so much they didn’t know.
The thing was bellowing pain, and Peter was free. He looked up at the head, bending toward him, and the smile was gone, replaced by a terrible, grim satisfaction and the certainty of triumph.
Peter! Meaghan’s thoughts broke through the chaos in his mind. How?
Clear out! he ordered, ignoring her question. We’d all he dead without you, hut get hack or you’ll he killed.
Cody! Alexandra balked.
I’ll take care of Cody.
As Alex and Meaghan backed away, barely escaping the swat of a huge claw meant for him, Peter swooped in to where Cody fought, blood bubbling from his mouth and shoulders. Peter realized they were broken. He lashed out with his silver claws, but the hand did not let go. Cody was still trapped.
Cody, make the change!
There was no response. Somehow this thing had prevented Cody from changing, but now Peter couldn’t even be sure if Cody was conscious, or alive, to make the change.
Peter dove in again, stopping this time and digging his talons into the demon’s flesh, scraping and cutting with the silver deep into the creature’s hand. The lingers tensed up, crushing Cody further. The shadow bellowed above them and its other hand came down to bat Peter away . . . but the list in which it held Cody relaxed.
C’mon, Will, make the damned change.
Cody was burning, the lire that he’d become engulfing the demon’s hand. And then he was falling, and Peter could do nothing more for him as he regained his normal shape and hit the rocks by Mulkerrin.
What Peter had thought was the creature’s penis was actually a bony horn protruding from its left knee, which had now come through along with the foot. They could see much of its chest and shoulders. From the waist down, except for the lower left leg, it was still invisible.
But not for long.
Peter landed near Alex and Meaghan, who had dragged Cody’s form out of range of the creature, at least for the moment. Cody was not moving, but Peter could see that he was healing rapidly. The creature he had become disappeared in flame, and then Peter was there, hand on his belly, doubled over as the silver sword clattered to the ground.
Meaghan rushed to his side and helped him to his feet.
“I’ll be okay in a second,” Peter said.
“Do we have a second?” Alexandra asked as she tended Will Cody’s wounds, and they all looked up at the face of hell, towering above them.
Hannibal’s house was a ruin. Ca Rezzonico, next to it on the Grand Canal, had one wall destroyed and was burning from the inside out. Peter could see that many of the other Defiant Ones had started to arrive on the scene, but did not know what to do any better than he.
“How do we stop it?” he asked, to nobody in particular.
“Where’s the book?” Meaghan asked, turning his face so that he could focus on her. She could see that he was baffled. “There’s got to be something in it that can help us!”
“Mulkerrin had it when he fell,” Peter answered, then looked back at the demon.
“What is it, Peter?” Alexandra asked him, waiting for Cody to open his eyes. “What is that thing really? All these things? Demons, or something else? And why does silver affect them all the same way it does us? Are we demons, Peter? Did we come out of hell like that thing?”
“NO!” Peter yelled, more to the hellspawn itself than in answer to Alex’s question.
But then he did answer her.
“We’re nothing like these other things, like this thing,” he assured her, seeing how deeply the questions disturbed her. “There is humanity in us, no matter how deep we have to go to find it.”
HAH!
The booming voice came from above them, and they all looked up again. The demon was leaning forward, putting its weight on its left foot, on the rubble of Hannibal’s house. Only its buttocks and right leg were still trapped, and its face was tight with the effort of pulling free. With the grip it now had on their dimension, the shadow’s flesh was emerging faster than before. Still, it looked at Peter.
It spoke to them. One sentence only, after the huge, rumbling laugh that had drawn their attention. Ca Rezzonico crumbled to the ground as the words became tremors. The ground shook, and flame, of a color they had never before seen, shot from deep in its throat.
YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE!
Those were its words, and the pain in them, for Peter, for all of them, was that the words were true.
Peter felt like he had woken up from some complacent dream, a dream where he’d rested after saving Cody, where he simply waited for Beelzebub, or whatever it was, to emerge into their world. But he dreamed no longer. He didn’t know if he could prevent it, but he wasn’t about to let the invader violate their world without a fight.
In less than a second Peter was at Mulkerrin’s side. Though he could barely believe it, the sorcerer was alive. Near him lay the body of Sister Mary Magdalene, her corpse torn open by Alexandra’s fury. Peter looked up for a moment and saw his own reflection in the shimmering mirror surface of that portal.
There is something human in there! he thought.
Two paces away, he saw the book. Grabbing it, he knelt at Mulkerrin’s side and slapped him awake, not trying to be careful.
“Priest!” he said, then got no response and began to shout. “Mulkerrin, Liam Mulkerrin. How do I send it back? How do we close the portal?”
The sorcerer did not respond, and Peter slapped him again, looking up t
o see that Beelzebub’s foot was only yards away. If he were not straining to pull his other leg through, he could surely have stepped on Peter where he knell, or at least have made a grab for him.
“Damn you!” Peter screamed at Mulkerrin’s prone form, slapping the book against the earth. “You wanted power? Here it is. You called it and it came to you, you said. Well, do you have the power to send it back? You called it and—”
I called it and it came to me.
That’s what Mulkerrin had said.
“Meaghan,” he yelled, and in a breath she was by his side. “Take this.” He handed her the book.
“What? What are you going to do?”
He ignored her as he hefted Mulkerrin off the ground, placing him on one shoulder. The priest had to be dying because he was aging in front of them. He looked more than eighty years old now, and Peter realized that magic had kept him young. While the creatures he had so hated were given the gift of immortality, Mulkerrin had used his powers to steal a little bit from the things he most despised.
Peter turned toward the demon, and Meaghan grabbed his arm.
“What are you going to do?” she said again, and he whirled to face her.
“Our world is one of order. According to our legends, hell is a place of chaos. But over here, we have rules. We have a lot of them. If we didn’t have them, these spells, the magic by which the church has held demons in their control for so long, would be nothing but words. The silver, that’s another thing. Somehow, whatever put together this world gave it rules—natural or supernatural, whatever. And one way or another, everything abides by them.”
He looked around and saw his people, several hundred beings whom legend had dubbed vampires but who he knew were so much more. They were watching, waiting, as the terrible wind battered them with the stench of brimstone. The door to hell had been opened. Who could say that once this creature, this Beelzebub, was through, it would close?
“PETER!” Meaghan yelled over the sound of the wind, clearing his head. He looked at her and saw she didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Mulkerrin called it and it came to him. To him! Do you understand? He said it like it was important, like it was part of the spell. Maybe, if he’s gone, it won’t have an anchor here!” Peter responded.
“HOW IN HELL CAN YOU KNOW THAT?” she screamed.
Peter saw the pain in her face and he felt it, too. For them to lose what they’d found in each other, after what was really no time at all, especially for an immortal, it wasn’t fair.
“I can’t,” he answered, almost too low for her to hear.
“Fine, then just kill him.”
“I don’t think that will be enough.”
“My God, Peter,” she screamed, and he sensed the reaction of the others nearby, their astonishment that the name of the Almighty could roll so easily off her tongue, an invocation they’d believed fatal to their kind. “You can’t mean to go through . . .”
He put Mulkerrin down and took Meaghan in his arms, the book pressed between them. They kissed, but unlike any they had previously shared, this kiss held not a trace of the desire that had once driven them. It was a sad, pure gesture, and when Peter drew back his head, he could see that Meaghan was crying, tears of blood.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too.”
Peter looked up to see Alexandra helping Cody to his feet, and he felt better knowing Will was going to be okay. Together, the three of them would have to deal with the new order of things. It was going to be a new world for them.
“Come back to me,” Meaghan said.
Peter nodded yes, though he knew it couldn’t be. He didn’t even know for sure if what he was doing would close the tear that Mulkerrin had rent in the fabric of their world. But in his heart, Peter felt it. Something spoke to him there, urged him on.
He turned toward the portal, where all that held the demon back was the pull of its own world on its right leg, just at the knee, and its huge tail, which they had not seen before. On its face were the signs of its struggle to break through, its concentration utterly and completely on escaping into this new world. And then what? Peter had to wonder, and the thought chilled him.
He went to lift Mulkerrin again. . . .
And the priest was gone.
“NO!”
“Above you!” Meaghan yelled.
Peter looked up to see Mulkerrin, broken and twisted but alive, borne aloft by the mist-wraiths he had dispersed before.
“Keep the book safe,” he said as he changed, and then his thoughts took over as he flew after them. You may need it very soon. Just get out of here, as quickly as you can. Get them all away. Use that hook! Find out what we really are!
Meaghan ran back to where Cody and Alexandra were standing. Rolf and Hannibal were there, too, and many others. She held tight to the book and watched the sky, the terrible sky from which hell was emerging, and where the man who had remade her—even before she’d been reborn—into a new being, a being with a destiny, was fighting to save a family that had denied him.
The griffin-thing again, but without the silver claws, Peter attacked the wraiths in flight, one talon latching onto Mulkerrin’s arm while the other tried to bat away the wraiths. Abandoning their master to Peter’s grasp, they attacked him as was their nature, seeping in through his eyes and fanged mouth, filling his body. From where she was, Meaghan could see Peter become bloated, as if he would explode, and then he burst into flame. Black smoke that might have been the wraiths seemed to stream from the fire, almost as if it were escaping. But the lire leaped over it, and the wraiths were gone.
Peter had destroyed them, but not without a cost. Mulkerrin was falling, and if what Peter said was true, his death could undo all that they were attempting. Meaghan prepared to rush to catch him, but slopped herself as she saw Peter.
Half flame, half griffin, or simply a creature on fire, Peter screamed in agony as he beat his wings after Mulkerrin’s falling form. Only seconds before the priest would become a part of the rubble that had been Hannibal’s home, Peter was there, straining skyward, breaking Mulkerrin’s fall. Or trying. They both hit the ground. Meaghan wanted to run to him, but Alexandra grabbed her and hugged tight.
“You can’t!” she said. “Look!”
Above them, the demon had pulled its right leg through. It set its foot down now so that Peter and Mulkerrin lay between its legs. Only the creature’s tail held it back, and it relaxed a moment. It looked at the immortals gathered around, and Meaghan thought the face looked confused.
It must be wondering why we haven’t run, she thought.
And then it looked down.
“PETER, GO!” she screamed as the demon raised its newly freed foot, a three-toed doglike haunch with tufts of black hair crowning each digit. It would crush them both. Peter might be able to change and get away, but Mulkerrin never would.
Peter had only one move, the one he’d planned. It was no longer a matter of choice.
GO! She screamed in her mind.
And he did.
Under Mulkerrin, he returned to his own form, to the face he’d worn at the fall of Constantinople, when Nicephorus Dragases became immortal. With the speed of his heritage, he threw the sorcerer over his shoulder and leaped toward their mirror image in the portal, headfirst.
Mulkerrin’s feet went in first, and from unconsciousness, the pain of the passing brought him awake, screaming, as the demon’s foot slammed down, cutting off the onlooker’s view of the scene.
The ground shook with the footfall, drowning out the priest’s wailing, but Meaghan knew they were gone.
It began. As slowly as he had extricated himself, bellowing all the while, scrabbling and clawing at the earth, tearing up the street, the demon was drawn back to hell. Where it belonged.
I COULD HAVE TAUGHT YOU! it yelled. YOU MIGHT HAVE RULED THIS WORLD IF ONLY YOU KNEW YOUR TRUE SELVES!
But mostly it saved its breath for the effort to escape.
Meaghan turned to them. Blood streaked their faces and she could see that they, too, had been crying.
“What now?” Alexandra asked her.
Meaghan smiled, feeling suddenly brave, and hopeful. “I think Cody knows the answer to that,” she said, looking at him expectantly.
He was back to normal, though slightly weak, but it took him a moment before he got her meaning, and when he finally did, he laughed out loud. “Now,” he said to Alex, “we get to deal with the press.”
“Reporters?” Her eyes went wide.
“Darlin’,” he said, “it’s a brave new world, and an old showman like myself can’t turn away the spotlight once it’s shinin’. Besides, Tracey and Sandro are probably halfway to Rome by now. We don’t have much of a choice.”
As they spoke Meaghan let her gaze wander back to the ruins of Hannibal’s house. Many of their kind had started to wander toward the mess, lost in Cody’s “brave new world.”
“Will,” she said without turning, and the tone of her voice quieted them, “one thing. They’ve got to know we were human once. It’s in us. That’s what Peter’s actions have always meant.”
She faced them, then, and her eyes were sad but strong. “Never let it be said that we have no souls.”
Epilogue
“MEAGHAN, HONEY, WAKE UP. YOU’RE GOING to miss your plane.”
The insistent nudging, both physical and vocal, finally roused her from a much-needed sleep. She stretched and yawned, then turned onto her back and looked up at her lover. Both of them were naked, and the room still smelled from their lovemaking of several hours earlier. Sleepily, Meaghan reached up for a hug, and when it came, she pulled Alexandra down onto the bed with her, their breasts pressed together and their mouths meeting in a hungry kiss.
Of Saints and Shadows (1994) Page 36