Chapter 11
Khan stood back from the angels as they
lowered the gate into a cavern in the mountains not far from Segue.
How clever of the angels to find a place inaccessible to humanity,
as well as ever steeped in Shadow. Places like this, where darkness
had long reigned, hovered on the edge of the Otherworld, its
cave-dwelling creatures as skittish and wary of light as the fae.
kat-a-kat-a-kat. The gate demanded,
Open me!
And how foolish to put a gate to Hell
at its mouth.
Another group of angels had rigged a
makeshift forge, and nearby, an anvil, black, with a horn on one
end, much like the one he’d used to create the gate.
The hammer rested on the anvil. How he
hated the slippery, contrary thing, but he’d wielded it on
Kathleen’s behalf, and now he would wield it on Layla’s. Strange
how each of her lives echoed the other.
“I found this in the warehouse,” Custo
said, coming up behind him. Khan felt no sear at his approach. In
this place, Shadow was stronger than even Custo’s angelic
light.
“Leave it, and move out of my
way.”
Next to the hammer on the anvil Custo
placed the black flower Khan had created as a trial piece for the
blooms that adorned the gate. Three petals, one for each of the
worlds, surrounded and protected an inner core, a soul. The iron,
of course, was black—black for deep Shadow,
black for Death. He’d welded the flowers onto the vertical bars
along a clinging vine. They had represented his hope that Kathleen
could survive in Hell, her spirit intact, until he could find
her.
Then she’d found him.
“I thought you might try the flower
first, then move on to the gate.” Custo, who’d agreed to kill Layla
if The Order found this tactic to be ineffectual.
Khan turned to face him.
“Shadowman, if it wasn’t me, it’d be
somebody else,” Custo said, his gaze steady, though a sick
desperation rolled off him. “The gate has to be
destroyed.”
Khan stoked Custo’s discomfort.
“Haven’t you killed enough innocents?”
Khan knew Custo’s past. The life he’d
led before his passing had been filled with as much violence as
good. If not for his last selfless act as a man, his existence in
the Afterlife could have been very different. And now he was
preparing to walk the fine line between darkness and light
again.
“I gave you the hammer. It’s my
responsibility.” Custo regarded the hellgate and shuddered.
“There’s no way that thing can remain on Earth, but I don’t want
Layla to die. I’ll help you in every way that I can. Just tell me
what to do.”
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat
Movement brought Khan’s attention
around. An angel walked toward the gate. He moved slowly, as if in
a dream, sickness and terror in a dirty cloud around him. The angel
stretched out his hand toward the handle, fingers reaching. The
gate had him in its thrall.
“Bran!” Custo barked.
The angel stalled, confused. Looked
around.
And then he was dragged back by two
other angels. He went limp, his gaze filled with horror and longing
as they moved him out.
No one was impervious to the gate’s
draw.
Custo turned. “What can I
do?”
Khan picked up the black flower and
shoved it, bare-handed, into the glowing coals of the fire. Heat
the metal, bang it down.
“You can take your friends and get out
of here.”
“The Order will not leave you alone
with the gate.” Custo shook his head. “Not with your Layla in the
balance.”
“Fine. Just you then. The rest are to
wait outside.”
Khan stared at the hammer, taking in
its shape and the small line of shadow along the inside of its head
and shaft cast by the glow of the fire. He summoned old darkness
from the depths of the cave and gathered the cold, wet stuff to him
for strength.
He reached for the hammer. His hand
passed right through.
Taking a deep breath, he tried for it
again. And clutched at nothing.
Shadow billowed off his shoulders in
great cracking waves, but still he couldn’t grasp the
shaft.
“Shit,” Custo said under his
breath.
Khan could sense the confidence
shifting within the angels in the cavern. They would all have to
learn patience. Either that, or prepare for war.
“After you gave me the hammer, it took
hours to lift again for myself.” Hours of acute frustration. Each
time he’d had to set it down during the creation of the gate, he’d
known it would be a trial to pick back up. “And I did not have a
choir of angels breathing down my neck.”
“Right.” Custo turned to the angels
gathered around. “Everybody out.”
“He’s not to be trusted,” said
Ballard.
“If Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Custo
returned, “a gate to Hell can’t be destroyed in five minutes. Get
out or I’ll help you out.”
An angel lifted his voice to argue, “He
can’t even pick—”
“Yet he managed to build the gate,”
Custo shot back. “Get out.”
Khan poured his attention into the
hammer while the cavern was vacated. The tool was not meant for fae
hands and defied his attempts. The power to wield it had come from
something else, deep, deep inside him. He searched for that space
of quiet, for the time he’d spent with Kathleen. He thought of the
red-gold fall of her hair, the shift of her features when she
smiled, the natural pink to her lips.
He grasped for the hammer again. His
Shadow hand passed through the tool, and he wasn’t surprised. It
was the wrong tack; he’d try another.
Layla.
He’d held her in his arms, her skin
smooth and silky under his hands. Her body, warm like the earth,
arching for him. Shuddering in pleasure. He recalled the salt of
her sweat, the flash of her eyes. He drew from her dream, the child
Layla, his glimpse into her life, her young gaze full of
loneliness. Layla who’d needed a protector, yet had overcome her
fears to brave wraith nests and Shadow. Layla, Layla . .
.
“Layla,” he said in an invocation and
reached.
The wooden shaft was smooth in his
grip.
Rose hid her bad hand in her lap when
she came to a stop at the security entrance to The Segue Institute.
The deformation had extended to her thickening wrist. Corded sinew
ran down from her elbow across her forearm. She’d attempted to
paint her striated and . . . rather pointy
fingernails a pretty pink, which made her bad hand look a little
less disturbing, but a glove would be better still. Definitely
before she reunited with Mickey.
She rolled down the window of her
stolen delivery truck as two soldiers approached, one on either
side. She had half a mind to floor the gas and bust
through—Find her! the gate said in Rose’s
head—but the enclosure surrounding the place was made up of thick
concrete and metal barriers. At full speed, the truck would crumple
like a soda can.
Well,
fudge.
“Ma’am? May I see your driver’s
license?” But the soldier thought, Trouble.
He looked at the other soldier, who touched something around his
throat and mumbled a series of numbers Rose couldn’t quite make
out. It must have been some kind of code for trouble, because his next thought was that it would take
ninety seconds for backup to arrive. Survive, he thought. She had no idea what he meant by
wraith.
What was a wraith? It did not sound
polite, particularly directed at her.
“If you’ll just open the gate.” Rose
tilted her head, smiled, did a double bat of her eyes. She mentally
nudged him with the command. If she pushed too hard, his mind might
break like that of the poor fool who’d refused to give up the
truck, and then he’d be a drooling baby and no good to her at
all.
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat
Yes, yes. She was trying. Some things
took a little time, a little subtlety. Movement rustled the trees
along the road. The backup?
If this soldier would
just cooperate . . .
“I have a truck full of groceries to
deliver.” She insinuated truth into her sentence and pushed harder.
“Open the gate, please.”
The soldier blinked at her with bleary
eyes. “Can’t. The lockdown command was already sent. No one goes in
or out until Adam Thorne clears it.”
kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat
She’d think a whole lot better without
the gate in her head. She pushed hard on the soldier. “Well, is
there another way to get in?”
He swayed on his feet.
“Lockdown.”
The second soldier approached.
“Sullivan, you’re relieved of duty.”
Rose guessed her time was up. The gate
would just have to wait, and so would the girl it wanted her to
deal with. Rose would think her entry through and then come back.
Maybe sneak through the woods and climb over the wall. For now,
though, it was better to go back than wait and find out what a
wraith was and what the backup was going to do about it. She wasn’t
too excited about being shot at from all sides.
“Mike!” the soldier shouted, as the one
outside her truck window fell to the ground. Minds were such
delicate things.
’Course the road was too narrow to make
a three-point turn easily. And she couldn’t very well back down the
mountain with the hulking cab behind her. She’d go right off the
edge and that would be the end of Rose Petty. Nobody wanted
that.
“Let me see your hands!” the soldier
shouted at her. More soldiers in strange armor approached the
vehicle from the front, angling in groups of two on either side.
That was about ninety seconds, all right.
For Pete’s sake, this was a
bother.
Her bad hand twitched. All right, all
right. She’d just have to do this the hard way.
It was late afternoon by the time Layla
led Talia around the outside of the west wing of Segue’s hulk. Once
Talia had put a baby in Layla’s arms, she hadn’t wanted to give him
up again. Both children, Michael and Cole, were little lumps of
wonderfulness, so soft, so perfect. The fit in her arms, the sweet
smell of their skin—it was its own kind of magic, and she’d been
utterly caught in the spell.
She’d spent so much time with the
babies that Layla had had little more than a peek at the pile of
research Talia had amassed on her behalf. At the top of the stack
was a tablet labeled Jacob Andrew Thorne,
wraith. And here Layla had thought Adam’s brother had died
in a tragic boating accident. Interesting reading, she was sure.
She’d have snatched it up if not for the little tickle of panic
about the shadow on the Segue building.
Talia. The babies. The shadow had to
come first, before something else happened.
The photo op took them outside of
Segue, down the grand front steps, and to the left, along the
foundation. Kev and company followed close behind as protection.
Adam frowned down at them from the veranda, one baby strapped in
some kind of carryall on his chest, the other in a stroller, which
he rocked back and forth. Mr. Thorne Industries in the role of dad.
She almost snapped a picture of him like that, for
Talia.
Layla’s neck goose-bumped with the
memory of the flying wraith, but she pressed on, leader of the
pack. As soon as she rounded the corner of the building’s base, the
storm of darkness crowded her sight. She reeled back a few steps,
cringing, while the rest of the group looked at her . . . yes, as
if she were crazy.
“You don’t see it.” Obviously. Or they
wouldn’t be standing so close to the shadow.
Talia looked up, squinted, flicked her
gaze around. “Where exactly am I supposed to look?”
Hello? It was
everywhere. Layla took a deep breath. “Do
you see any shadows?”
“Little ones. Under the windows?”
Talia’s breath came in a puff of cold air.
“No. A big, black blotch covering half
the building. God, I can even feel
it.”
Talia gave her a sorry expression.
Polite, but not believing.
“It’s there,” Layla said and raised the
camera. It was a Nikon D40. Nice, but not as good as hers. “That
shadow has been bugging me since I snuck into your
woods.”
“Layla, I know Shadow,” Talia said. “If
there were anything unusual here, I’d see it.”
Uh-huh. Layla would have to explain.
“When I was a teenager I got into a kind of live-in prep school for
disadvantaged youth. Northfield.” She found the manual mode on the
Nikon and set the exposure for maximum contrast. “Took a
photography class. The teacher explained about perspective. How
every person has a different one. How we all see things a little
differently.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Kev said. “A
camera will catch whatever it’s pointed at.”
Typical response.
“Perspective is not about what’s in
front of the camera. Perspective is about the eye looking through
it.”
At sixteen, that brief explanation had
been a major “aha!” moment in Layla’s life. Maybe the creepy stuff
she saw was just her perspective. Maybe she just had to learn to
see things another way, and the frightening visions would stop. To
a certain extent, it had worked until now.
Kev frowned. Talia looked
uncomfortable.
“It’s easy: I am simply going to take a
picture of what I see, and I see Segue half lost in shadows. What
do you want to bet I can catch it on film?”
Layla lay down on the grass, which
crunched beneath her, the cold leaching through her sweatshirt to
cool her back.
Talia crouched beside her, while Kev
stepped back to talk into his earpiece.
The framing required some light to
contrast with the shadow, as well as the clear sky overhead. If she
was very good, she might be able to capture a sense of castle, too.
Because to her, that’s what Segue looked like. She inhaled to take
in the deepness of the dark and the crisp solidity of the white.
The blue above augmented the two, revealing their stark
differences, not just in light, but in texture and
depth.
She snapped the shot, tweaked her
angle, bracketed the exposure, and shot again. Pulled back, one
more time. Until she downloaded the images, she couldn’t be sure,
but she thought she had it.
The viewfinder was suddenly filled with
a blur of movement, and then she was hauled up.
“Hey!” she yelled as she made a grab
for the camera. Kev’s better reflexes snatched it out of the air
while simultaneously propelling her toward the Segue building.
Talia was already a couple of yards away, almost rounding the
corner.
“We’ve got to get you inside,” Kev said
as he hurried her up to a jog. “I’ve just been notified of an
attack.”
His tone sobered her up real quick. Was
it time to die? “Wraiths?”
“Something,” he answered. Sounded like
a dodge. “We’ll have to examine the bodies before we’ll know for
certain.”
The sudden emergency had her blood
pounding hard while her skin went clammy. Two attacks in one day.
Wraiths throwing themselves against Segue security. How could the
Thornes possibly cope with this kind of constant assault? The
castle was under siege.
They entered on the main floor of the
old hotel. Adam met them in the wide, connected corridor of elegant
rooms. Talia already had a baby in her arms and was doing a nervous
bounce.
“What’s going on?” Talia
asked.
“We’ve got action at the main gate. A
woman. Caucasian, about five-two, a hundred pounds, brown hair.
Blue coat,” Adam said, but wouldn’t quite meet Layla’s eyes. “She
took out six of my men before disappearing. She has to be in
Middleton by now or we could track her on the thermal-imaging
cameras.”
Hundred-pound woman besting six
soldiers with guns. Had to be a wraith.
Why wouldn’t Adam look at her? “Was it
the flying kind?”
Adam finally darted a glance. “You mean
a wight. We’re working on new capture
strategies. Barrow-tech. Khan suggested it the other day to Talia,
and the angels have confirmed that barrows are the way to
go.”
The wraith situation was just getting
worse and worse. The public needed to know specifics about this
threat—not the rumors and misdirection in the media. The public had
a right to know about these monsters, including this new breed, the
wights. Layla had no idea how to write her article, one that would
instill more fear than hope, but at the very least, knowledge was
power.
“I’d like to visit the attack
site.”
“No.”
“But . . .”
“No.” The heavy look he gave her shut
her up. Adam needed to see to the dead. She respected that. And she
wanted his full attention to argue her case about the wights. It
was just too damn important. The world was different
now.
Then came a wait for news. Layla joined
Talia and the babies in the library, close to the action, but
comfortable. Talia spread a blanket on the floor and the little
ones ogled up at the ceiling or attempted to roll
over.
Layla’s internal panic slowly morphed
through the long minutes into a generalized, slightly sick anxiety
that had her jumping every time Adam stepped in the room. She
decided to distract herself, snagged a laptop from a cubby, and
downloaded the images she’d captured with the camera.
Two shots were blurry. It had been hard
to hold the camera perfectly still when she was lying on her back,
looking up at the hulk of the building. Another captured the
shadow, but the crop of the image made it plausible that something
mundane was casting the reaching darkness.
But there was one image that stopped
her. Yes. There. That’s what she was talking
about.
Shadow, capital S, was cloaking one half of the building. More than
that, the building itself seemed to twist out of its right angles
as if the walls were trying to shrug out of the darkness. The
building was writhing, warped by the dark swamp overtaking
it.
At Layla’s shoulder, Talia frowned at
the image. “My mother was an artist, hugely gifted.” She paused,
cleared her voice. “I’ve been watching to see if you have a similar
talent. Maybe this is it.” She paused again. “I know this is it.”
Layla shook her head, denying the
comparison. “I’ve never been that much into art.” She couldn’t
imagine creating Kathleen’s masterpieces. That gene had definitely
skipped her. “But I’ve messed around with a little photography,
when I could steal time.”
“You need to steal more; that photo
could hang in any gallery.” Talia bit her bottom lip as she
considered the image. “And I was right there. I didn’t see that at
all. Your perspective is definitely different.”
“But didn’t you say that you
knew Shadow?”
“I can draw from Shadow, like my
father. Darken a room. Cloak myself and others. But I can’t cross,
and I can’t use it to create illusion. And I’ve never seen the
Twilight trees my mother painted.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying the veil was thin for my
mother. And clearly it’s thin for you, too.”
“But not for you?”
Talia dropped her gaze. “My mom was
very ill her whole life.”
Layla caught the subtext: Kathleen had
been near death, so the veil was thin. Reincarnated, Layla had that
same experience, and now she was set to die, too.
“That’s why the ghost could get to me,
isn’t it?” Finally the attack in the west wing made sense. In a
weird way, she was almost a ghost herself, just hanging on for that
fateful moment.
Talia reluctantly inclined her head.
“Yeah, we think so. I’m so sorry I didn’t anticipate the danger. We
had no idea.”
Layla gripped her shoulders to ease the
tension there. “You can’t anticipate everything, I guess. And you
did scream her into submission, so I’m not complaining. One
question: Khan has pulled me through the Shadowlands a couple of
times now. He never showed you?”
A side of Talia’s mouth tugged up. “He
offered, but being only half mortal, I’m too scared I won’t be able
to cross back. The fae are very limited in some ways. Their world
is circumscribed, more so than for humanity.”
“How does Khan go back and forth so
easily?”
“Ah. Khan’s very powerful. Maybe the
most powerful. And I’m only half fae.”
They started bringing in casualties,
and later Adam returned to the library to discuss the findings.
Once again, he looked deeply tired and Layla wondered how long he
could sustain this kind of constant pressure and
concern.
Talia went to him and put her head on
his shoulder, lending him her strength.
Layla stood, worried and helpless.
“Well?”
Adam sighed. “None of the dead
exhibited the telltale wraith bite marks on their faces. The
prevailing wounds were claw marks across the belly or
throat.”
Layla shivered. She’d seen the bodies
of people killed violently before, but it always made her very cold
and heartsick.
“At least their souls weren’t taken,”
Talia said.
Adam acknowledged this with a weary
nod.
“Souls?” Layla asked.
Talia looked over. “Wraiths feed on
souls to sustain themselves. The souls become trapped within until
the wraith is killed.”
The WHO claimed the wraiths fed on a
form of metabolized energy.
But, souls?
Clearly the situation was much, much
worse. Layla needed to take a look at Talia’s wraith research. And
even then, she didn’t know what to report in her article—if she
survived to write one. Khan had said she would agree that a little
deception was called for. If the soul part was true, then reporting
it to the frightened masses would be like announcing
Armageddon.
Layla was confused on one point. “So
this wasn’t a wraith attack?”
She looked from Adam to Talia, both of
whom shot each other glances heavy with meaning.
“What?”
They looked back at her.
“Oh, God, what now? I’m already going
to die. What could be worse?”
“Maybe we should wait for Khan,” Talia
said. “He’ll be back tonight.”
“You tell me now, so I can yell at him
later. If there is a later.” Layla gripped her thighs for
control.
Talia pulled a chair from a big table
and sat across from her. “You know he’s been looking for Kathleen
since she died.” Two worry lines formed between her brows. “Looking
everywhere.”
Talia glanced over her shoulder at
Adam, as if for support, then faced Layla again. Layla had no one
behind her. The absence had been omnipresent in her life, but she
felt it fresh now.
“Kathleen died, but when Khan breached
Heaven to find her, she wasn’t there.”
Because Kathleen had been reborn as
herself, Layla Mathews, the one who was doomed to die at
twenty-eight. Okay, she got that.
“If Kathleen wasn’t in Heaven, he was
going to go after her in . . . Hell.”
Layla flinched. What had Kathleen done
to deserve Hell?
“So he built a gate.”
Oh, God, the gate.
“And the gate was opened.”
“For a second! Not even a
second.”
“And a devil escaped.”
“Like with horns?” She hadn’t seen
anything like that. But then, it had been so dark. And Khan and
been there, so close. Oh crap, she was shaking.
Adam sniffed. “Nope. The devil is a
woman. Caucasion. Five-two and about a hundred
pounds.”
Layla stood, knocking over her chair.
“That was her !”
“Yep,” Adam said.
“She killed those men.”
“Yes.”
“Because I opened the gate.” Stars
formed before her eyes. She needed to sit.
“Put your head between your knees,”
Talia soothed and drew her down, shoved a chair under her butt.
“It’s going to be all right.”
“Not for those guys. Where’s Khan?”
Layla spoke to the floor. She needed to see him. Now. He was
superstrong. Mr. Powerful. He could get rid of the devil woman,
right?
“Khan’s got a day job now,” Talia
answered. “Busting up the gate.”
“But Custo was doing that,” Layla
argued.
Adam shook his head. “When Custo tried,
he hurt you. If he were to continue, it’s likely that you’d die.
The hope is that since Khan built it, he can tear it down
again.”
Layla lifted her face. “Aren’t I about
to die already?”
Talia grabbed hold of Layla’s hand so
tight that Layla could feel a heartbeat in the connection. “I lost
you once. I’m not letting you go again. Neither is
Khan.”
“We’ll keep you safe,” Adam added.
“This isn’t our first battle against an otherworldly creature.
Custo’s wife, Annabella, had a real keeper for a while.
Bloodthirsty thing, he was.”
“But why’s the devil here? She’s after
me, right?”
“Well, yes,” Adam said. “It’s in her
best interests, and the gate’s, to get to you. The gate was built
for you, and so it’s connected to you. The concern is that if she
manages to . . . to kill you, or if you die by some other means,
like an accident, then the gate will never be able to be destroyed.
And since a gate to Hell is not ideal for
the mortal world, it’s necessary that it be destroyed
immediately.”
Which was what Khan was doing. A gate
to Hell? He was the man for the job. He could destroy it. Okay.
Fine. She could wait until night.
What time was it?
Talia squeezed her hand again. “The
good news is that this devil has no chance against Khan. None
whatsoever. We just have to hold out until he gets here, until he
finds her.”
“What about the babies?” Tears finally
spilled. If Talia or the babies or even Adam were hurt . .
.
“Segue has excellent security,” Adam
said. “None of my alarms on the interior grounds has been tripped.
You set off a dozen on your first visit to Segue. I think the devil
backed off for the moment and is reconsidering her approach. She’s
not very subtle.”
“She’s a devil! She doesn’t have to
be.”
This time Talia answered. “A devil is
just a bad person who died and was sent to Hell. Nothing more than
that, though, like Custo, she very likely has some extraordinary
abilities.”
“Security cameras got footage of the
assault,” Adam added. “I’ve sent a screen shot to the FBI already.
If she died recently, they should be able to identify
her.”
“She’s just a bad person,” Layla
repeated.
“No horns,” Talia confirmed. “But very
bad.”
And Khan could destroy her as soon as
he was done with the gate.
kat-a-kat-a-kat:
The gate tittered at her, like a metallic giggle.
Layla drew back from Talia. Let go of
her hand while Hell laughed, at home in Layla’s head.
kat-a-kat-a-kat: Best
to give yourself up now.
No.
kat-a-kat-a-kat: You
don’t belong with them. You belong to me.
No.
kat-a-kat-a-kat: He
can’t destroy me.
He will. He can do
anything.
“Layla?” Talia’s face loomed before
her.
“I think I’m going to head back to my
room.” Layla forced a smile. “Take a shower. It will probably be a
long night.”
“How ’bout I walk you there?” Talia
said, glancing over her shoulder at Adam.
Layla felt her lack afresh. She braced
herself against the hollow feeling. A little time and Khan would be
back. She looked at the painting of Twilight over the mantelpiece.
“I need to be alone, but, um, could you have someone bring that
painting up?”
Khan’s appearance in the window last
night was too unsettling and she needed to talk to him.
Bad.
The rattle in her mind receded as she
fled to her room, but she knew with sick certainty that the gate
still stood.