by John
‘Rémy said his dad met his mum at a London concert,’ said Em.
The Moor nodded.
‘I persuaded her to leave London, return to the New World. I had hoped she and her new husband would be safe at her family home in Louisiana. But it seems that it was the worst place I could have sent her.’
‘The painting,’ said Em.
‘The painting,’ the Moor agreed. ‘I had sent her to the heart of the viper’s nest. For the one thing I did not know was that the Camarilla had sent the painting as cargo on the same slave ship as the Conjuror. Twice I have failed Rémy’s family. I will not fail him again.’
Em stepped away from the lorry and looked up at the wisps of clouds skirting across the pale yellow moon. For a split second she couldn’t help wondering if Zach was sitting on the jetty in Auchinmurn staring at the same moon. Had she made a mistake in following her brother instead of her heart? Em cut off the thread of these thoughts. Regrets were dangerous.
She turned back to the Moor, who was watching her intently.
‘We’ve read parts of Annie Dupree’s journal and we’ve heard Rémy’s story,’ she said. ‘But what I still don’t understand is who Don Grigori and the Grand Inquisitor are, or what they want.’
The wind rustled the trees noisily, the air warm and heavy. Thunder rumbled in the distance as more lightning shot through the sky, illuminating the red mountains.
‘These beings are more dangerous than you can possibly imagine,’ said the Moor. ‘Centuries of hunting them has taught me that much.’
‘Beings?’ Matt said. ‘As in, not human?’
‘Don Grigori may once have been human,’ the Moor said. ‘But the Grand Inquisitor is from the beginning of everything, a divinity drawn from the darkness and formed in chaos. Some have said he is a fallen angel, banished from heaven when God created his kingdom on Earth. Others believe he is Orcus, ruler of the underworld.’
Matt squeezed Em’s hand to squelch his rising terror. Em squeezed back, harder.
‘When the Grand Inquisitor is loose in the world,’ the Moor continued, ‘his power exceeds that of all the Animare and Guardians put together. Time is a blink of an eye to him. And he has a wicked plan.’
‘What is it?’ said Matt, trying to prevent his voice from trembling.
‘With the help of his Camarilla, the Grand Inquisitor is preparing Earth for something called the Second Kingdom. And the only one who can stop him is a Conjuror.’
Three long fingers of lightning shot across the sky, illuminating the curve of the narrow road and the scrub brush. In that split second, Matt saw four men in commando gear with masks and night-vision goggles, crawling in the scrub towards the truck. They were carrying guns and gas canisters.
‘Camarilla!’ Matt shouted.
The Moor’s head snapped round. Before Matt and Em could react, he had torn the night goggles from one man’s face and broken another’s forearm with a snap kick. A gun fell at the howling man’s feet. The Moor kicked it into the brush.
But as fast as the Moor’s movements were, he wasn’t fast enough. Even as he whirled about to fight off the third attacker, a canister of gas flew through the air, rolled on to the bed of the truck and released its poison.
57.
CAPTIVES
As soon as Matt had regained consciousness, he wished he hadn’t. He stared at the liquid sloshing around his naked chest. He was chained and appeared to be sitting in a pool of warm water. He looked down and shifted from barbed calm to full-on panic when he saw blood in the water. Reaching into the water, he checked he was still in one piece, finding two distinct things that returned his emotional state to one of mild terror.
He was not alone in the tiled pool.
The blood was not his.
Chained at the opposite side of the tiled bath with a bad cut on his forearm, was Rémy, his blood twisting in the water like hundreds of scarlet snakes. A ball gag was shoved deep into his mouth.
Matt started moving, shifting his body forward and back, trying to generate waves with enough power to splash Rémy’s face and wake him. Rémy groaned and moved.
So he wasn’t dead – yet.
Two of them might have a better chance of escaping than one alone.
But where was Em? If she was free, then their chances of escape from this horror were even better.
Rémy moaned. He lifted his head, before it lolled on to his chest again.
It’s dark outside. It has to be between ten and eleven.
Rémy moaned again. This time, he raised his head and stared across the pool as if in a trance. Matt watched his eyes squint and then open wide as he realized that he was not alone.
Matt called out tentatively in his mind.
Em, can you hear me?
For the second time that day, he got no answer.
Rémy’s eyes were red-rimmed and one side of his cheek was puffy and covered in dried blood. He must have put up a fight when the vicious gag had been put in place. They stared at each other across the water.
Matt concentrated on Rémy’s emotions, reading his rapid heart rate, his intense surge of feelings, and did his best to interpret them. Focusing on someone else’s situation kept him from reflecting on the fact that he shared the same predicament.
‘We all walked into a trap,’ Matt said as gently as he could. ‘They knew we were coming.’
Rémy shook his head. He tried to shift the ball to the front of his mouth again, but only succeeded in getting it lodged further back in his throat, sending him into a paroxysm of coughing. He slipped further down into the water.
‘We met the Moor on the road to Seville,’ Matt went on. ‘Well, he kind of met us. But then Don Grigori and the Camarilla found us. He and Em are here somewhere, I think. I hope.’
Em?
Still no response.
Matt spotted the tray and the surgical utensils on the table behind Rémy. In a surge of horror, he wrenched madly at the manacles on his ankles and wrists.
Mattie?! Are you OK? Your panic is making me sick.
Matt had never been so glad to hear his sister’s voice in his life.
Em, thank God. We have to get out of here before Don Grigori shows up to slice up our privates. Where are you?
Not sure. I’m in chains. In a cellar, I think. It’s hard for me to see. It’s so dark. Don Grigori obviously doesn’t know we’re telepathic or he would have kept one of us unconscious. So there’s that.
Oh good. You’ll be able to hear my silent screams.
*
Across the other side of the pool, Rémy struggled to get Matt’s attention. He guessed Matt was talking to his sister in his head. He took some comfort from that.
‘Em’s fine,’ said Matt, noticing Rémy’s expression. ‘Can you use your voice at all?’
Rémy shook his head. He tried to hum and the pain that shot through his jaw was like a knife in his brain. He wondered if they had broken his jaw when they strapped him up. It felt as if his mouth was on fire.
‘No worries, man. We’ll think of another way.’
Rémy watched as Matt ran his fingers along the rough tiles that lined the pool. It looked like he was trying to dislodge a piece of tile, perhaps to scratch out some kind of image. But whoever owned this place had kept these baths in perfect condition, and he wasn’t having much luck.
The quiet of the bath was interrupted by the electric buzz of a thousand flies, growing louder, as if a missile was about to crash through the cellar walls. Matt yanked on his chains frantically. Rémy did the same.
Big wet bluebottles swarmed into the cellar through every crevice and crack in the stone walls. They surged through the barred windows and the openings around the door. They hovered around the ceiling, swirled round the oak barrels and, in seconds, carpeted the floor and papered the walls in hissing, sucking blackness.
The cellar door opened and Don Grigori floated down the plank steps. Rage shot adrenalin into Rémy’s every muscle. He rattled his chains with fury
and tried to yell, pushing sounds up from his chest, but nothing. Only more pain in his jaw and his already aching limbs. He no longer saw the man on the outside, but the murderous monster Don Grigori had become. Instead of perfect coiffed blond hair, Rémy saw Medusa’s locks of coiling black snakes. Don Grigori’s head and face were a series of sharp flat planes and soft decaying angles, not so much a face any more as a dark hollow.
But it was the sound of the pipe that broke him, cutting into his mind and tearing open his soul. The pipe held the keening of all the families Don Grigori had destroyed, all the voices he had silenced and the lives he had cut short. The castrato was a satellite, broadcasting the anguish of past, present and future: mothers pleading for their children, men begging for sons, children crying out for anyone to save them from the horror. Then the keening became his mother’s voice, singing her very last song as she dangled from the edge of the broken balcony, covered in flies.
You are my sunshine…
Rémy made one more furious attempt to wrench free, his howls choking in his throat. Tears streamed down his face.
I’m sorry, Mom… I wasn’t stronger than you after all.
That’s enough, both of you. He hasn’t cut off your balls yet!
Rémy’s head snapped up. Perhaps his mind had cracked like his mother’s, but he could swear he’d just heard Em in his head.
Matt stared at him across the water.
Rémy, did you just hear Em? Can you hear me?
Rémy looked across the pool at Matt and nodded.
Em’s voice came again. Say something, Rémy.
Rémy fought the shrilling sound of Don Grigori’s pipe, the buzzing of the flies.
Can you… hear me? Em? Matt?
Matt sagged a little against the bath.
We hear you.
Rémy looked at him in wonder. I’ve only heard music in my imagination my whole life. I can hear your words as if they were notes of music.
Good enough for me, Em’s voice replied. I’m working on a plan. Stay tuned.
Rémy prayed Em was right as Don Grigori floated behind him and lifted the straight razor from the tray. He dipped it into the warm water and stood with it over Rémy’s head.
‘Your escape from me in Chicago was a costly mistake,’ the castrato murmured in his honeyed, high-pitched voice. ‘I failed to factor in your aunt. More fool me. But she is gone now, as is your mother. There is no one left to help you.’
Rémy blazed hatred at the creature before him. Don Grigori laughed.
‘Of course, your mother should have destroyed the painting when she had the chance, that day in the archives. But she wasted the day sobbing for her poor husband, lost so tragically beneath the wheels of that skidding car. If she’d been a little stronger, she might have stopped us back then.’
He switched his gaze to Matt.
‘It was clumsy of you and your sister to animate in our vault in Old Worm’s that day. Did you think us so foolish as not to be prepared for such a breech? We have been watching you ever since. But before I despatch you, I have promised your suffering to a friend.’
A man with bushy eyebrows and a baggy old cardigan jogged down the wooden steps and over to Don Grigori, carrying a set of clean white robes and a leather strop. He set the robes reverentially on a bench near the oak barrels. Rémy recognized him as one of the clerks from the shop.
‘Thank you, Hector.’ Don Grigori slipped into the robes and took the leather strop from the man’s outstretched hands. He sharpened the razor against it. ‘I will try to be accurate and swift in my cuts.’
‘You can kill us,’ said Matt shakily, ‘but you won’t last long once we’re gone. Every Animare and Guardian will be after you and your Camarilla. They’ll destroy you all.’
‘I’ve escaped this world more times than you’ll ever know,’ Don Grigori murmured. ‘I feel quite confident that I will do it again.’
In a flash, the castrato was in the water and on top of Rémy, his legs astride Rémy’s naked body, his robes floating out behind him in the water. Rémy flailed against the chains, the invasion, rusty manacles cutting his skin, his blood swirling into the fly-infested water.
Don Grigori twisted Rémy’s head to look at the Conjuror’s mark. Then he stretched down into the water and gently, obscenely, cupped Rémy’s genitals in his cold, thin fingers. Rémy railed against the assault.
Grinning, Don Grigori squeezed.
‘A fighter. Like the last one of your kind that I despatched so poetically aboard his lost and forsaken ship. Your mother was a fighter too.’
The mention of his mother was all the spark Rémy needed to ignite Em’s plan. The castrato lifted the razor above his head. Rémy closed his eyes and opened his mind to Em and Matt. Their imaginations fused into one blinding source of power.
The water began to bubble and steam rose from its depth. The flies rose off the pool all at once and swarmed above the scene in confusion and uncertainty. And Don Grigori paused, startled, as Matt began to sing in a husky croon.
‘What—’
Rémy’s chains snapped on his arms first. He stabbed his fingers deep into the castrato’s eyes, grabbed his hair and plunged his head under the water. While Don Grigori gasped and groped to the surface, Rémy dislodged the ball gag. With a triumphant howl, he shattered Matt’s manacles. Matt was out of the bath in a flash and laying a punch square on Hector’s jaw, the flies swarming up from every surface and attacking his naked body, leaching on to his skin in a sticky mass.
Keep singing!
Don Grigori reared out of the water, gasping and wrenching away from Rémy’s grip. Rémy’s song kept the flies at bay, just like his mother’s had in her final moments. They swarmed instead round the castrato, encasing and protecting him as he raised his pipe furiously to his lips and began to play. The water began to boil and darken before Matt and Rémy’s eyes. The flies seemed to draw courage from the sound, dive-bombing Rémy again, filling his mouth and choking off the music.
Nursing his jaw, Hector turned and scrambled for the stairs. Matt was fast on Hector’s heels, yanking him back and knocking him out cold on the floor.
‘Not so fast, you little shit…’
Rémy spat out the flies and sang louder. Long, web-like cracks raced across the ceiling, raining dust and rock on top of them. Don Grigori played harder. The flies pressed down, filling every inch of space in the cramped little room, squashing their fat, hungry bodies against every part of Rémy and Matt.
We need an exit, Em, and fast. Or we’re going to drown in flies!
Don Grigori’s pipe was inciting the torrent of flies as they dive-bombed every inch of space around Rémy, their bodies creating a wall that separated him from Matt.
I’m working on it!
58.
THE FINAL CUT
Rémy’s singing was rising in pitch. He was holding his notes longer, breathing more deeply, effortlessly filling the room with a heavy silver fog. Don Grigori tried to match the pitch of his pipe to Rémy’s voice, his eyes burning with fear and loathing. The higher the wall of flies grew between him and Matt, the higher Rémy’s voice soared. The flies fell from Matt’s body like he was shedding his skin. With a growl of rage, Don Grigori played on, darkening and thickening the water in the pool to the smell and consistency of sulphurous tar.
This is what hell smells like.
‘Keep going!’ Matt shouted, swatting at the remaining flies. ‘Rémy, you’re winning!’
Don Grigori’s pipe changed pitch. The tar rose up out of the pool in the shape of a great golem, eyes blazing red as if Don Grigori had made his evil visible. The flies encased the beast, their bodies merging, giving the creature great black wings so that it was able to lift itself from the pool and cover the ceiling. The beast’s dark mass loomed above the boys, separating them from Don Grigori on the other side of the room.
Rémy felt Matt sketching in his wide-open mind, twisting the music into ink, marking out something cold and hard which materia
lized in his hand. A sword with a black handle, its blade etched with the Conjuror’s mark. Next, a full set of black leather armour clothed Rémy from head to foot. Rémy lunged at the monster, swinging the blade, sending a limb-like chunk of tar flying against the wall, branding its shape into the cold, hard stone.
*
Matt stuck his fingers in the repulsive tar-like substance and began to draw for himself now, a set of medieval armour with a black-handled sword, its silver blade etched with the same mark.
Looking sick, man…
Not letting you have all the fun…
Rémy let his voice rise up to the heavens again. He slashed and lunged into the heart of the creature with his sword. The beast’s eyes burned like the flames of an imagined hell. Rémy swung at them, detonating one glowing eyeball and sending it spattering in Matt’s direction. It hit the ground with the sound of sizzling flesh.
Together they hacked their way into the belly of the beast. In seconds, they could see through to the cowering Don Grigori on the other side. They could see the panic strip the castrato’s face of all colour, his eyes darting from side to side, searching for a way out of this hell of his own making.
A thunderous rumbling shook the entire space as if they were at the epicentre of an earthquake. Chunks of plaster rained on them from above. The entire cellar groaned.
Rémy thought of his mother and her years of suffering and study. All for him. He thought of Tia Rosa and her life of sacrifice. All for him. And finally he thought of his dad, whom he had known so briefly, who had loved him and his mother more than his own life. His voice shifted to a growling version of Tia Rosa’s favourite song.
‘When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark…’