They all had a plan. Antoine. Bernard. Pender. They all saw me as the chaotic element that could disrupt the other team, but I was also the veneficus, the uncontrolled poison. I didn't belong to any of them.
Certainly not Antoine. Why had I run from him for all these years? Because I was afraid of him, or was it because the Chorus knew how fear worked on me? They knew my secrets, knew which strings to pull.
I hadn't backed down when Antoine had challenged me in Paris. Was I going to start now?
"Okay," I told him. "I'll take your deal."
Before even they could read the lie, I split the Chorus open, tearing them like I was rending roses. Petals falling through my fingers. They keened and whined, fighting the assertion of my Will, but I dug through them and tapped the storehouse of the energy I had stolen.
Antoine narrowed his eyes slightly as he sensed the bloom of power. Nicols raised a hand to shield his eyes from my abrupt brilliance. The nearest zombie increased his speed, his head twitching back and forth. A light-blinded moth, unable to stop its suicide dive at a hot bulb.
I gathered what was left of the Hollow Men, and raised it through my frame, letting it bleed through my lungs and heart and throat. A twisted knot formed over my head, a ball of lightning that thrust angled shadows across the field. I let the outer edge of the ball spit flares like an aroused sun as if I couldn't quite keep the sphere of power in control. As if my Will wasn't completely focused.
I waited for Antoine to tire of Watching my engorged Will, to turn his head and Witness the demolition of the dead. I waited for him to look away. As his attention shifted, I released the ball of coalesced Will.
He knew he had made an error the instant my Will realized itself. Phosphorescent streamers erupted from his frame as the energy wave struck. He held his ground, clothing vaporizing and skin tearing as the annihilating angel of my Will flayed him. His muscles and fat started to sizzle and burn, and then the true weight of the spell hit him and he was hurled from the field.
In the time it took to exhale, Antoine was thrown more than a hundred yards. What was left of his body inscribed a shallow arc across the landscape, a low-flying meteor of burning tissue. The arc of fire that filled his wake dispersed in a crackling rush and the trees bent with the echo of the atmospheric discharge. His body crashed into a parked car in the shopping mall lot.
The nearest zombie was blown into ash. Behind it, others were knocked down, while those still further afield were disoriented. Their magnet was gone, swallowed by a rush of fire and fury. The only bright light remaining was the ambient swirl of energy coming off Antoine's burned shell. It was enough to turn their hunger, and they drifted away from the field, staggering toward the smoking wreckage of the car.
I grabbed Nicols' lapel and dragged him away from the circle. "Let's go. Before he gets up."
"What?" His feet stumbled as he tried to keep up with me. "He's still alive?"
The Chorus read a vibration. I knew it. I knew it well. "Yes," I said. "And I've just made him angry."
XXIII
Nicols drove aimlessly and recklessly for a half hour, speeding down two-lane highways that cut through the forested hillsides, that bisected communities smaller and sleepier than Ravensdale. He fled, inchoate sounds issuing from his mouth, with no destination in mind. His hands: one gripping the wheel like a drowning man clinging to a life preserver, one beating against the molded circle. Finally, on a road that appeared to run straight until it was swallowed by Mt. Rainier, he pulled over to the shoulder and got out.
He paced back and forth in front of the vehicle, shouting and raging. In an unintelligible dialog, he started arguments, screamed denials, spat accusations, and choked on the rebuttals. He smoked two cigarettes: the first, in a short series of violent inhalations; the second, in a reflective frame of mind. As he finished the second, grinding it out on the fractured shale, he summoned me from the car with a rigid index finger, indicating exactly where he wanted me to stand.
"Tell me everything," he said as I got out of the car. "I want to hear it all."
I told him about the shipping container, about Kat, about the poison I had been carrying for the last decade. I told him about Bernard and Julian, and the theurgic mirror they built; I told him what happened in the Arena, and what transpired after.
He started to chew on the end of another cigarette when I finished, staring at the ground between us, not seeing the rock. "This library-Van Groenig's."
"Van Groteon."
"Right. You think this is where Bernard found what he needed to build this. . mirror device?"
"Yes," I said. "A man can be swayed with a single book-it takes only a page to convey a secret. But it takes a bunch of books to synthesize the record of human experimentation. Libraries are dangerous; we ably demonstrate that we have a predilection for destroying them-Alexandria, Dr. John Dee's, le Comte de Saint Germain, the Nazis."
"Where did this library come from?"
"During WWII, Hitler was obsessed with the occult; he wanted magickal tools, objects that would make him invincible. That would win the war for his side. Himmler, who was even more obsessed with the occult, had a group charged with collecting artifacts, relics, books, and the like. The Ahnenerbe-SS.
"After the war, most of the artifacts in Nazi collections disappeared. A lot of relic hunters have been chasing rumors and myths for the last fifty years, trying to track down the grimoires, the black-magic reliquaries, the holy and unholy relics-you name it, people have been looking for it."
"People like you."
"Like me. Like my clients. The Watchers have a lot of them; you can be sure of that. But not all of them. There's money and influence to be made in finding the lost artifacts first."
"So Van Groteon beat your friends to it?"
"Somewhat. Gustav Albrecht Van Groteon was an industrialist who made a fortune for himself and his family in the new Austria following WWII. He managed to get his hands on the majority of Himmler's personal library. Van Groteon wasn't an occultist; his interest in the books was more. . protective. He thought that if a non-practitioner had them, then there was less chance of them being used for the wrong purposes."
"But they were."
"Not during his lifetime. The Watchers honored his desire and left the library in his care, though I'm sure they had additional safeguards. Claudia-Van Groteon's granddaughter-doesn't have the same reverence toward the occult texts as her grandfather. I've done business with her; she had to have some scarab rings done by Elsa Schiaparelli.
"I've been to the family house on Glanzinggasse and I've seen the library. It's a very impressive collection. Bacon, Jabir, Agrippa, Flamel, Beato: a lot of alchemical tracts and heretical treatises on magick. I could have sold a number of those books for six figures each, and I'm sure the same thing has occurred to Claudia. She has very expensive tastes."
"And she sold the lot to Bernard." Nicols lit another cigarette.
"No, I think she sold it to the Watchers. She knows they're the only real buyers. Any other party would have just brought their wrath down on her. As long as the library was in her possession, they knew where the books were, and they could keep a Watch on them. They weren't floating around.
"If she ever tried to sell the books to someone like Bernard-some small-time Swiss alchemist-they would have swooped in and taken everything. She would have gotten nothing. No, they probably paid a pittance of what the library was worth, but she got paid at least. And, in her situation, I'm sure the money was already spent."
"So the Watchers gave the books to Bernard."