Fire and Ash

“They didn’t want us to see that the whole staff was infected,” said Nix.



Joe nodded. “You know Jane Reid, Monica. She’s addicted to secrets.”



He turned the last corner and suddenly stopped dead as if he’d struck a wall. Then he took two clumsy steps backward.



Benny and Nix stared in abject horror. They all stared at Joe.



At his stomach.



“No . . . ,” whispered McReady.



A knife was buried nearly to the hilt in Joe Ledger’s stomach. Blood pumped out of the wound and poured down the front of the ranger’s body.



A figure stepped out of the side passage.



Grimm barked in fear and surprise.



Nix screamed.



It was Brother Peter.



The right hand of Saint John.



Except for the saint himself, he was the most dangerous of the Night Church’s army of killers. An unsmiling monster with the face of an angel. A master killer.



The hallway behind him was crowded with reapers, who each had red handprints tattooed on their faces.



“R-run . . . ,” cried Joe in a voice that was little more than a whisper. He dropped to his knees and his rifle clattered to the ground. “For God’s sake . . . run. . . .”



83



GRIMM TENSED TO LUNGE, BUT Joe snaked out a restraining hand and clung to the dog. There were too many of the reapers. They would butcher the mastiff. But Grimm snarled and thrashed, incensed by the smell of fresh blood, craving carnage and revenge.



Brother Peter looked at them all and nodded to himself.



“I saw you little birds fly away in that big black machine,” he said softly. “Then I heard you come back. I thought my trick hadn’t worked.”



“What trick?” demanded Benny. Then he got it. “Your ultimatum . . . that was fake?”



“A necessary lie. I wanted you to take this sinner away from here.” He spat on Ledger, who huddled groaning and bleeding on the floor. “We didn’t want him here when we moved on Sanctuary. We knew what he was searching for and how desperately he wanted to find it. So we gave him a few useful little clues.” He pointed a finger at McReady. “But we did want her. We wanted you and this sinner to go find her and bring her back. You’ve been so resourceful that I had no doubt at all that you’d rescue the doctor and bring her—and her blasphemous cures—to me. And you have.”



He did not smile, but cruel lights danced in his eyes. He was enjoying this.



Benny looked past him. The men with him were huge, and they were all armed. Lilah and Nix’s guns were still in their holsters. The only way they’d have time and a chance to draw those guns was if he used himself as a shield to buy them two seconds. Would he last that long?



Benny was sure that Brother Peter would cut him down. He had no illusions about being able to beat this man. Would dying to slow Peter down be worth the sacrifice?



If Nix and Lilah couldn’t kill Peter and at least half the big reapers with bullets, then they would have no chance at all with their blades. It was a terrible moment, and Benny racked his mind to find some way out of it. What would a samurai do in this situation? What was the warrior-smart thing to do?



Joe coughed and rolled away from them, curling his body into a ball, face to the wall. Blood pooled under him.



“Odd,” said Brother Peter to the fallen ranger, “but we were all so frightened of you. You are the closest thing to a boogeyman that we reapers have.”



Joe said nothing. His body twitched and shuddered.



“Turn him over,” said Brother Peter to his men. “It’s fitting that he see how futile are the sins he has committed.”



Grimm lowered his head and kept uttering a menacing growl.



“Why can’t you leave us alone?” asked Nix. “Why is it that people like you always think they can force everyone to do what they want?”



Brother Peter placed one hand on his chest, fingers splayed. “I am a servant of god,” he said. “I do his will. I don’t want you to do anything.”



“Then let us go.”



A few of the reapers chuckled, but Brother Peter snapped at them. “No, my brothers. Don’t mock her—she’s young and doesn’t understand. None of them do—except for this fallen sinner and that great blasphemer there.” He pointed to Dr. McReady. “She understands.”



“How do you even know who she is?” asked Benny.



“I met her in the same way you did, little brother,” said Peter. “As a picture in a book. A book you stole from one of my reapers.”



“The Teambook . . .”



“My reaper was on the way to the wreck to plant it near the plane, where Ledger could find it, but instead he met you. That was a very fortunate encounter, and my reaper had been given several contingencies. Either plant the evidence for Ledger to find; or kill anyone from Sanctuary who comes near the shrine and plant the book among their possessions. You provided another alternative—killing the reaper, and that only made the story more plausible. You took the book back to Sanctuary. How perfect. It couldn’t have worked better if you’d rehearsed it. Then that bit of staged drama by the ravine. If you hadn’t gone after Sergeant Ortega, you would eventually have found another set of those coordinates. There are four sets, all carefully planted. It was inevitable that you find one, so we watched and waited and adapted our plan to what you sinners did.”



Benny felt sick, but at the same time none of this truly surprised him. Tom had always warned against coincidences, and now he understood why.



McReady said, “Look, mister, I don’t really know who you are, but I know enough about the Night Church. You think that we’re acting against your god’s will by trying to preserve life. But everything I learned as a doctor, every oath I took, was to preserve life, to hold all life as sacred. How is that a sin? How is acting according to my beliefs a sin, even if they’re different from yours?”



“Because your oaths were made to a false god,” said Brother Peter.



It was a pointless argument and everyone knew it. The reapers would not be swayed from their beliefs—if they could, they never would have invaded this facility. They were too deeply entrenched in their hatred of life.



“You’re going to kill them all, aren’t you?” said McReady flatly. “The people in the infirmary . . . you’re really going to slaughter them.”



“We are going to release them from their torment,” corrected Brother Peter.



“No—I’ve released them. I’ve given them the cure. They’re going to get well. Most of them, anyway. They don’t have to die now. You can’t just kill a bunch of sick people while they’re tied to their beds. It’s inhuman. . . .”



“It’s the mercy of Thanatos. . . .”



“All praise to his darkness,” echoed the reapers.



“But if their bonds are what’s troubling you, don’t worry,” continued Peter. “We’ll cut them loose so they can freely accept the kiss of the knives and the forgiveness of the darkness. Just as we released the thousands imprisoned on this side of the trench above us. We set all captives free.” He pointed back the way the reapers had come. “We even found a lonely wretch in a solitary cage back there and set him free—in both body and spirit.”



“You what . . . ?” said Benny, looking past Brother Peter.



“In a cage?” echoed Lilah, her face going pale. “Chong—?”



“I’m afraid he was unable to tell me his name. I left one of my reapers to unlock his chains so he could go unfettered into the darkness that waits for us all.”



The scream that filled the hallway was terrifying. It was torn from such a deep place, such a shattered and broken place, that it lacked any trace of personality or language or humanity. It did not—could not—have come from a human throat.



And yet it did.



Lilah shoved Nix aside and leaped at Brother Peter, driving the spear through the air toward his heart. It was such a murderous blow that it would have torn a red hole straight through his body.



But Brother Peter was not there.



He moved so quickly that his body seemed to melt out of the way of the spear. Instead Lilah’s spear killed the reaper behind him, punching through stomach and spine and driving the man down to the floor.



Brother Peter lashed out with his empty hand; it caught Lilah on the side of the face and drove her to her knees. The impact was terrible, and anyone else would have collapsed there and then, but the rage in Lilah was too hot, the grief too awful. She dove at Peter’s legs, wrapping her arms around them and bowling him over. He fell, a cry of genuine surprise bursting from his mouth.



Benny snapped out of his shock at the same moment the reapers did. Two of them darted in to help Brother Peter, but Benny’s kami katana flashed and slashed, and the hands slapped against Lilah’s back but they were no longer attached to the reaching arms. Jets of red splashed the struggling figures.



In an instant the hallway was a circus of murder and mayhem.



“Grimm,” croaked Joe weakly, “hit, hit, hit!”



Reapers with axes and swords ran forward to try and kill Joe—the man they all feared—but Grimm met their charge. Benny had a split second’s view of heavy weapons chopping down and heard the heavy clang of knife edges against armor, the yelp of a dog, the scream of a man. Then he had no more time to do anything but fight.



Benny whirled and kicked one of the screaming reapers so that he fell backward into the knot of others; and Benny lunged again, thrusting his blade in and in again, first on one side of the man and then the other. Two reapers shrieked as red mouths opened in their chests.



Then the others surged forward, shoving the dying men at Benny, using them to block as they advanced. Suddenly Nix was there with Dojigiri, and the ancient blade cut low and high and low again, savagely slashing across knees and thighs.



In a wider hallway the reapers would have already won, but the confines of the narrow hallway made it impossible for the killers to surround them. Nix and Benny fought side by side, slashing the way a samurai does—not chopping with muscle but stroking the long length of their katanas, using the smooth draw of the edge to make the steel bite deep. Somewhere—a million miles away—Dr. McReady was screaming.



Benny was vaguely aware of Lilah and Peter rolling over and over on the bloody ground. The reapers of the Red Brotherhood surged forward, and suddenly it seemed as if the world was full of knives. He and Nix blocked and parried and retreated, fighting with all their skill simply to stay alive. These killers had rebounded from their immediate shock, and now Benny could understand why they were the elite of the Night Church. Each one of them was a superb fighter; any one of them might be enough to beat the two teenagers with swords and end things right here and now.



He caught a glimpse of Grimm. The dog was still on his feet, still fighting, his armor splashed with blood. Men, none of them whole, lay on the ground around him. A reaper had picked up Lilah’s spear and was trying to kill the mastiff with it. Grimm ran and jumped at him, propelling his two hundred and fifty pounds and forty pounds of spiked armor into the air. The reaper fell backward—and his body seemed to fly apart.



McReady’s screams took a sharper, higher note as something slammed into the back of the last reaper in the hallway. Something that bore him to the ground with such ferocity that the man’s head smashed against the stone floor. Something that leaped like a mad ape at the next man in line and tore at his throat with broken fingernails and strong teeth. Something that roared and howled and growled out a single terrifying word.



“HUNGRY!”



The Red Brothers turned.



Benny and Nix stared.



Grimm barked in fear.



The creature bared bloody teeth at them.



Nix was the only one who could find her voice.



“Chong!”



84



BROTHER PETER WAS LOCKED IN a death struggle with Lilah, but he managed to shout an order to his startled men.



“Kill it!”



It was the wrong thing to say.



Yes, it snapped everyone out of their shocked tableau; but it switched the focus of the fight to the wrong place for a fraction of a second too long.



As the reapers lunged forward to subdue the savage monster that was Chong, they momentarily forgot Benny and Nix.



Tom Imura’s young samurai made them pay for that inattention.



Without a word, without even a shared look of agreement, Benny and Nix attacked. Their blades whipped and slashed with all the speed they could muster, all the skill they possessed, all the rage that burned in their hearts. They did not try for killing blows. That required more time than this fragile moment of opportunity offered. Instead they cut at tendons and muscle, across the backs of knees and the backs of arms. Men and weapons crumpled. Screams filled the corridor, the echoes punching the struggling figures from every direction.



Benny heard a meaty thud, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Lilah pitch sideways, reeling away from Brother Peter’s vicious punch. It was the second blow he’d delivered, and tough as she was, Lilah was still a teenage girl, while Brother Peter was an adult man in the full prime of his physical strength. She rolled against the wall, dazed and bleeding from nose and left ear.



Grimm attacked the knot of reapers from the side, slamming sideways against them to use his shoulder spikes. The Red Brothers stabbed at him and broke their blades on his armor.



A few yards away Brother Peter staggered to his feet. He was bloody and panting. One eye was puffed nearly shut, and there was a ragged bite mark on his cheek from when Lilah had savagely bitten him. He had a long, shallow cut across his chest that caused the whole front of his shirt to hang down, exposing muscles that were sharply defined beneath bloody skin. For all those injuries, however, the young reaper seemed unconcerned. He still held one short knife, and as he rose he drew another from a concealed pocket inside his clothes.