Angel Souls and Devil Hearts

by Christopher Golden

  Excellent. Hannibal hated phonies.

  The truck slowed down and took a right turn. Hannibal saw the sign for Rudolf-Biebl-Strasse, and snickered at the street name.

  “All units,” Jimenez touched his right collarbone, “move to secondary positions immediately. Rodriguez, lock in holding pattern above Jericho. Austrian emergency personnel will be behind you so, do not, I repeat, do not stop to assist civilians. Sweep the streets, flamethrowers up front. Destroy all hostiles. Move out.”

  Hannibal closed his eyes, knowing that Rolf would be certain to notice and not caring if he did. He listened carefully as each commander detailed his or her unit’s move from preliminary to secondary position.

  Commander Thomas’s unit had encountered fourteen demons of varying sizes on her short trek to Rainberg. There had been no concentrated resistance whatsoever, as the demons seemed to be roaming about with no direction. Commander Gruber’s troops had met with an extraordinarily large water-based shadow in the river, and two of the Ducks had been capsized, several men killed. Still, they made it to Mozart’s Plaza with nearly their entire complement, thanks in large part to the efforts of the SJS soldiers with them.

  Commander Locke’s unit had met almost no resistance on their march from Hellbrun Castle to the stadium. In fact, there had been little by way of destruction, either from demons or from the earthquake, and the area had been the fastest and easiest to evacuate. Commander Surro’s troops had had slightly more trouble, but were lucky to find the bridge intact when it came time for them to cross the Salzach. The two units had combined and scaled the mountainside, encountering a huge number of shadows and setting fire to a large portion of the woods below Nonnberg Abbey, where Maria Von Trapp was said to have been a novice. When Locke brought this up, Surro merely scowled at him over her collarcomm. Nevertheless, and again with the help of the shadows, their secondary position was attained.

  In all, though the total number of troops including the paratroopers had been nearly twenty-five hundred, only thirty-seven soldiers had been lost, twelve of them Austrians who had been killed during earlier evacuations. It had been much too easy.

  “It’s a mousetrap,” Hannibal suddenly said aloud, and this time the strike force did look at him, some with open hostility. Rolf looked ready to pounce if he made a move.

  “What?” Jimenez snapped.

  “It’s a mousetrap, Commander.” And now Hannibal smiled, for though this was not a part of his plan, it would certainly be a joy to watch.

  “Mulkerrin is the cheese, you see,” he said seriously, lecturing. “He’s there, all right, waiting for you. The real thing. But the closer you get, the greater your danger of having your back broken.”

  “There are thousands of us!” Jimenez said.

  “Ah, true,” Hannibal said, “but his reinforcements are endless. He can demolish your troops even if you’re a million miles away, in safety, but to stem the tide of his creatures, you’ve got to kill him.”

  “We’ve destroyed all the creatures we’ve found.”

  “Ah, yes, but now reverse the analogy,” Hannibal said. “For every rodent you kill, there are usually a dozen more lurking about, in their holes, waiting for you to turn your back.”

  Jimenez just looked at Hannibal for a minute, and the vampire knew that the commander was trying to decide what to believe. Hannibal watched as he looked over at Rolf, obviously seeking a second opinion. When the mute simply nodded, Jimenez swore loudly, even as he thumbed his collarcomm.

  “Do it!” he ordered. “Move in, fry anything that gets in your way, and watch your asses. It’s possible we’ve been flanked. Rodriguez, when the front door goes down, your people hit the silk.”

  There was one thing Hannibal admired about Jimenez, though he was loath to admit it. The human had a no-bullshit attitude and didn’t rely on moronic military jargon, code words and the like. He was all soldier, and showed not a trace of the officer he’d become. He played by his own rules. It was a shame the commander hated shadows so much, or Hannibal might have made him one.

  On the other hand, Hannibal realized, that could still be amusing.

  As the huge attack force began to converge on the fortress and the strike force abandoned their vehicle to walk the last half mile—knowing that being inside the truck would be a liability—around them, before them and especially behind them, portals that had been opened during the earthquake now spewed forth hundreds of demonic creatures. New portals began to open in the side of the fortress wall itself, demon-creatures leaping from within to tumble down the slopes out of control, savaging whatever soldiers were in their way when they finally regained their footing

  And while Jimenez barked orders into his collarcomm, Hannibal began to change. By the time Jimenez turned to seek his help, all he saw was Rolf Sechs diving through a cloud of mist, trying to grab at it as it drifted away.

  Hell.

  Twenty-Four Days, One Hour, Sixteen Seconds

  After Departure:

  Meaghan Gallagher knew very little about her current situation, but there were two things of which she was certain. She and Lazarus were in Hell, which for the first time in her life she really thought of with a capital H, and her one, true love, Alexandra Nueva, was dead.

  It was not a simple bit of knowledge, but rather one she had come to understand over days, weeks. Her first love, Janet Harris, had been killed by the sorcerer Liam Mulkerrin. They were now in search of her second, Peter Octavian, whom, though she had never been certain of his death, she had never expected to see again. She felt nothing regarding a possible reunion with Peter, except a slight glimmer of hope that they would somehow escape this place in time to prevent Mulkerrin from turning Earth into a world overrun by monsters, a world like that darkened plane they had passed through on their way to Hell.

  First Janet, then Peter, and now Alex, whom she’d loved most, and best. Alexandra had been an angry woman at first, and a vicious one, but their initial coupling had led quickly to Alex remembering her humanity, regretting many of her actions, and allowing love and kindness back into her world. Meaghan had fallen in love with her easily after that. It had been Alex who’d engineered Meaghan’s leadership of the shadows, not anything of her own doing. It had been Alex who had brainstormed the Shadow Justice System. It had been Alex who pushed Cody back into the limelight, forced him to become everything he was capable of.

  Alexandra Nueva had been the rhyme and reason behind so much of the new existence for their people, and behind Meaghan Gallagher’s entire existence. And now she was dead. Of course, at first Meaghan had argued with Lazarus. She knew that there were very few things from which shadows would not recover. But Lazarus brought her again and again back to the moment when she had seen the horrible, burning faces in that hole sucking Alex’s flames in through their mouths and nostrils, flames that were Alex herself, body and soul. She had been consumed by dozens of different creatures, split apart and digested in so many pieces. Only now, after countless days, could Meaghan really admit the truth.

  Her lover was dead. The hours of begging Lazarus to return to that spot, to attempt to revive Alex—that was all over. After it had happened, they had continued down the ever-steeper, ever-narrower tunnel, until it had indeed become a hole. As mist, then, they had floated down that well, finding nothing for hours, perhaps more than a day. Once in a while, tired of keeping the one form, or perhaps too comfortable in it, they would shapeshift into bats so that they could rest, tiny claws stuck to the rock walls of the hole.

  Twice they had floated on past “throats” similar to that which had consumed Alexandra—killed her—but they were mist and passed so quickly the hands and mouths could not touch them. In the end, the hole began to widen, and turn so that eventually it became a tunnel again, and when it did, they changed into their human forms and took turns sleeping, something neither had had to do in a long time. Lazarus’s patience grew ever shorter in dealing with her outbursts concerning Alex, and he became more and more concer
ned with the barrenness they’d found thus far in Hell. Their prospects of finding Peter and escaping with him seemed to grow more dim with each passing hour.

  As the days had passed, Meaghan lost her faith in Lazarus. Once he had seemed so powerful to her, so filled with knowledge. She had respected that, feared him in a way. No more. Though she was certain there were many things about their plight that he kept from her, she knew there was also much he had been unprepared for, unaware of, and she didn’t look to him for answers anymore.

  Now, as they made their way through the tunnel, after weeks of traveling, Meaghan found it quite strange that she had no need of sustenance, and apparently neither did her companion. Had she gone so long without blood in her own world, she would have been a ravenous lunatic by now. Perhaps, she considered, though they felt each moment pass, though their bodies told them when another day had ended, perhaps the bloodthirst was still governed, through some tenuous connection, by the far slower passage of time in their own world.

  Suddenly Meaghan was sure this was the truth. Which would mean that, though weeks had gone by in Hell, less than a day had passed on the other side. Why, the battle had barely begun! Though she knew her certainty might be somewhat premature, Meaghan was excited. She and Lazarus would now be able to tell time in their own world based upon the bloodthirst. Their suffering would be their clock.

  She was about to tell him when the tunnel began to widen drastically, and she saw that they were coming into a cavern ahead. Unlike the stovepipe where they had first arrived, and the tunnel in which Alex had met her end, the solid rock path they had been following had very little light. There had been few of the fiery cracks in its walls, but luckily there had been enough for their vampiric vision.

  The cavern they entered now had plenty of light. Flames licked the walls of the enormous, empty space. At the opposite end, the cavern opened onto the edge of a flaming pit at the bottom of a stovepipe. It might have been the pit they’d appeared in originally, or it might not—Meaghan could not say. At the edge of the pit stood a naked man, or something like a man. They approached with caution, yet before they had taken half a dozen steps in his direction the man turned and motioned for them to come closer.

  “Take a look,” he said, motioning to the pit. “It’s really quite fascinating.”

  And they did. In the pit, atop huge stones red with fire bodies writhed in ecstasy and torment. Like those they had seen tumbling through the stovepipe so long ago, some looked human while others were not even vaguely humanoid. It was impossible to tell how many different beings were in the pit. Meaghan refused to consider the implications, to wonder how these creatures had gotten to Hell and what their crimes had been. She would not bow to the Judeo-Christian myths she had been taught as a girl.

  “That would be wise,” the man said, and she flinched.

  He had read her mind! This could not be one of the damned, whatever they were, she thought. This was a true demon, not like the shadows they had battled before, not like those creatures who had been enslaved by Mulkerrin’s magic.

  “Everything you see is real, tangible,” the demon went on, apparently ignoring her thoughts now. “But the logic behind the Suffering, which is what we prefer to call them, the reasons for their presence, their purpose, is nothing you could ever hope to understand.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Meaghan noticed movement, and far across the pit she saw a shadow-demon, apparently slave to the true demon, the size of an elephant. It plowed through the damned, the Suffering as the demon called them, with its huge snout. Every so often, it hung its head back, chewing—its jaws munching the bodies—and swallowing, not for a moment distracted by the shrieking and moaning all around it. The thing digested the sufferers and, as the three of them looked on, shat them out whole, covered with some kind of waste. The thing moved on, and the shit-covered sufferers shrieked insanely, knowing that it would be back for them again.

  Meaghan was finally able to turn away, and she felt quite sick in her stomach. Even though she would have found an open artery quite attractive at the moment, the shit and blood that swirled in this enormous pigpen disgusted her beyond words.

  “It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it,” the demon said, and giggled, reading her mind again.

  “Lazarus?” she asked when she realized he’d not spoken a word since they’d emerged from the tunnel. She turned to find him with his back to the pit, though keeping the demon in his peripheral vision. Standing there, erect and proud, his face more sad than repulsed, he gave Meaghan a sense for the first time of an innate goodness in this vampire. Though many others, herself included, tried hard, there was something in Lazarus she had not ever sensed in their kind. At that moment, he looked almost—No. Meaghan stopped that line of thought. No matter what good could be found in her people, no matter what words could be used to describe them, she found it impossible to think of any of her kind as “holy.”

  Lazarus smiled at her then, dispelling the image. He looked as if he were about to speak, finally, but his mouth snapped shut, and they both turned their full attention back to the demon at the pit’s edge. It was changing.

  “Really,” the creature said, “this was just for you two. I didn’t want to scare you off, you know.”

  The demon grew then, its true form bursting through the skin facade it wore. A ripple of horns like daggers stood along its spine, and its talons hung nearly to the ground. The thing’s hair burned, and the face fell down around its neck like a scarf. Its true head was cloven halfway to the snout and flames leapt from inside the beast’s skull.

  It lifted its hands, and fire sprang up from the pit, singeing their faces and shooting up through the stovepipe in a terrible torrent. It lasted for several seconds, and when it ended, a shower of bodies began to fall, their flesh slapping into the pile and onto the rocks with the sound of raw meat dropped into a sizzling pan. When the demon finally turned its three eyes back on them, all the humor had fled its demeanor, and only a cruel cynicism remained. Meaghan thought it strange that she had never worried about the creature’s attacking them, but Hell had been affecting their thought processes from the beginning. She promised herself that they would be more careful.

  “Lord Alhazred,” Lazarus said, bowing, and the demon’s eyes narrowed.

  “How do you know my name?” the demon-lord demanded, but Lazarus ignored the question.

  “I bear the greetings of the Stranger,” he said, and the demon blinked several times, surprised, and then sneered.

  “Do you, now?” it said, with a voice like an echo in an empty room. “It has been a long time since we have seen the Stranger, down here,” the demon said to Lazarus though it continued to look at Meaghan

  “He is well,” Lazarus said. “However, he needs your assistance.”

  “Does he?” Lord Alhazred said, and Meaghan noticed the demon’s penchant for responding with questions.

  “You are surprised?” Meaghan asked, quickly, earning a sharp look from Lazarus and a noticeable twitch in the huge horn that now protruded from between the demon’s legs.

  “Should I be?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Should we think so?”

  The demon-lord stopped then, staring at her, tired of its own game.

  “What do you seek?” it asked.

  “One like ourselves, Peter Octavian by name,” she said “also known as Nicephorus Dragases.”

  “He’s a prisoner?”

  “We don’t know,” Lazarus said, trying to regain control. “He came here a long time ago, with another named Mulkerrin. Mulkerrin has escaped, and the Stranger wishes to send him back to you, but to do so we need this Octavian.”

  “I remember the arrival, I admit,” Alhazred said and nodded, finally giving up its game of questions. “But they weren’t my responsibility.”

  “Can you help us?” Meaghan pushed. “Will you?”

  “A request from the Strang
er?” The demon-lord laughed shrilly, cynically. “Of course I’ll help.”

  It gestured toward the tunnel from which they’d emerged, and then it disappeared. A portal appeared in its place, burning red with flame rather than silver like those they had seen before. Meaghan was immediately concerned. This demon-lord seemed malicious enough, and she suspected malevolent was closer to the truth. Could this portal be a trap?

  “Oh, it’s safe, foolish vampire,” the mind reader said and laughed. “It would be in bad form to destroy agents of the Stranger. This is the fastest way for me to help you. Through there you’ll find many more of the Suffering, but if you ask the other lords, you may find your friends’ point of arrival. From there, well, you never know.”

  The creature turned back to its work, raising its hands so the flames leapt up again, bodies raining down in their wake.

  “How do they come to be here?” Meaghan forced herself to ask.

  Lord Alhazred turned around, shaking its head.

  “Silly thing,” it said. “The Suffering are always here, no matter where else they may be.”

  Lazarus grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the portal. The passage was not as painful as she had expected. And of course, nothing compared to what the Suffering endured.

  Salzburg, Austria, European Union.

  Wednesday, June 7, 2000, 7:11 a.m.:

  Knowing.

  That was the strangest thing about it. The knowing. He knew, for instance, that dozens of feet above the chamber in which he lay, the sorcerer Liam Mulkerrin worked his magic, marshaled his forces. The fortress was like a small village surrounded by stone walls, and it was nearly filled with his soldiers, living, breathing human beings whose bodies had been invaded, possessed, by the spirits of those who had once been posted to that place. The spirits themselves were not evil, but the semblance of life Mulkerrin offered them in exchange for their service was irresistible.

  He knew.

  Soldiers manned the open windows, though many were hundreds of feet atop sheer walls. Huge, mindless slave demons patrolled the battlements of the fortress and prowled the many halls of the lower levels even as hundreds of their kindred poured out of new passages onto the Earth plane, tearing into those who would lay siege to Mulkerrin’s base.