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Chapter Twenty-six

The glow came from the walls of the djevo.

The curtains had been pulled aside to reveal shelves built into the three walls surrounding the altar. The shelves were crowded with row upon row of tiny glass bottles: it looked like a liquor cabinet for a 747.

Except those little liquor bottles the flight attendants dole out don't glow in the dark while these little containers looked like tiny jars of captured fireflies. Little living pulses of bioluminescence flickered, trapped inside ranks and files of glass prisons.

Only . . . 

Only they weren't fireflies . . . 

"Zombis," I whispered to myself, "zombi astrals!"

I had come down here looking for shuffling corpses, wondering where Bois-Chèche could hide that many bodies. Now it suddenly made sense.

The zombi astrals were an efficient way of keeping the Loa as hostages: trap their spirits in a specially prepared bottle and harness their ti-bon-ange as a power source. From the look of things, she had not only trapped the astral forms of the Ogou and Gédé clans, she had hooked these zombie batteries up in a paranormal parallel circuit to augment her own magicks!

Which meant I was not only on a mission of mercy to rescue the imprisoned Loa, I was sent down here to throw the circuit breaker on Bois-Chèche's power source. I reached for the nearest bottle and twisted the cap off—or at least I tried to. The cap didn't twist. It didn't pull, either. In fact, it didn't move at all.

"Ccsssééééjjjttthhe!"

"Bitch, bitch, bitch . . ." I could hear her approach—she was emerging from the hallway and entering the peristil, now.

I pulled and twisted harder.

Nothing.

I dropped the bottle and grabbed another. It was stuck just as tight. I bounced it off the altar table but it rebounded like shatterproof plastic.

The machete! I turned and ran toward the pole but Chalice Delacroix's body was already there, waiting for me.

"Cséjthe," she crooned, "you keep running away."

"Yeah," I said, trying to figure my maneuvering room, "take a hint."

"But I don't want you to run away. I want to be with you. We have so much to offer one another."

"Like what?"

"Like the world," she purred.

"You mean, what's left of it after you're done?"

"And, of course, there's this . . ." She ran her left hand over the ripe brown curves of Chalice's body. The other she kept behind her back. She seemed to get a bigger thrill out of the caress than I might ever hope to.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Who would you like me to be?"

"I wish you were still Chalice Delacroix."

"And so I am."

I sighed. "We both know that you're using her as a meat puppet. The real Chalice Delacroix is not anywhere in the vicinity. Four hundred years ago you pulled the strings in Cachtice castle and laid the blame for your unnatural appetites on Elizabeth Báthory. For a while I thought you might be Katarina Beneczky, but that was probably no more your real name then than Chalice Delacroix is your real name now."

"Such a clever boy."

I shook my head—and used that gesture to break eye contact for another scan of the room. "Not so clever, really. First I peg you for the true Witch of Cachtice. Then I discover that you are not only not the real Countess Báthory, you're probably not her undead maidservant, either. Or maybe you're both—seeing as how you can leapfrog from one person's body to the next. Did you start out in the countess' body and then escape to Beneczky's when the party wound down? Or did you arrive on the scene wearing Katarina's face and form and pull the strings from the shadows?" Another thought occurred. "Or did you move around, dressing in the bodies of the various servitors in Castle Cachtice?"

"Castle Cséjthe," she corrected. "That was so long ago, why does it matter now?"

"Because I want to know who you really are. Or what? Now I'm supposed to believe that you're Marinette Bois-Chèche, the Queen Bitch of the Voodoo pantheon."

"As I said, such a clever boy!"

"If I am it's because I've finally figured out that Bois-Chèche is just another mask, too."

"Really?"

I shook my head. "I've dropped that particular word from my vocabulary this past year. No, I don't think you're Loa, at all. I don't believe any single Loa has the power—or even the motivation—to imprison all the other Loa and their multiple aspects. Certainly not a lesser aspect like one of the Marinettes. The only thing you have in common with them is your ability to mount a human host and use their body as your own."

A thought struck me. "Or maybe you don't . . ."

"Maybe I don't?"

I tried shuffling a little to the left: I really wanted to know what she was holding behind her back. "The Loa mount living humans to use as their 'horses.' Maybe you can't do that unless they're dead. More reason to peek behind the mask."

"Is my real name so important?" She turned slightly, keeping her right hand obscured.

"It is if you're a demon."

She laughed. "And knowing my name would give you power over me?" She shook her head. "I have many names!"

"Trot out the list. I got all night."

"Ah, but I do not. Tempus fugit." She shrugged, her right hand still hidden behind her back. I glanced at the machete still buried in the pole. There was no way to grab it without stepping within her reach.

Unless . . . 

My right hand twitched and I tried willing the weapon to my hand. Hey, I figured if I could translocate my own body and the ghost of my dead wife was really just the psychokinetic feedback of my own virus-enhanced gray-matter, I should be able to pull the old Luke Skywalker/light-saber/Jedi mind-trick.

"We have much in common, Christopher." She took a half-step toward me. "More than you have with any of those others."

I shook my head. "You're not human. I don't think you ever were," I elaborated. "As I said, you've got the mojo to imprison entire clans of Vodoun spirits and channel their energies to augment your powers. You've been around for at least four hundred years and I'm betting even longer than that." Come to me, I thought at the machete, come to my hand. "Not a problematical lifespan for a vampire and your last vessel seemed to meet all the prerequisites . . . but you change bodies like Bruce Willis changes hairpieces." Come to me. "And you don't use blood for physical sustenance. You use it ritualistically and there's some kind of power connection involved."

"There is power in the blood."

"Yeah, that's what everyone says: you, Mama Samm, Dracula, Jimmy Swaggert . . ."

"Vlad Dracul?" She smiled. "I had heard the stories, of course, but I had not noticed until now."

"Noticed what?"

"How much alike the two of you are."

I forgot about the machete for a moment. "Take that back!"

"Your pride, your arrogance . . ." she sighed, " . . . that fatal romantic streak . . ."

"Fatal . . ." I mused, returning to the subject at hand. I twisted my own hand a little more and fancied I could see the machete quiver a bit. "You waltz into a castle where the mistress is a closet sadist and suddenly there's a shortage of virgins and a surfeit of blood. If the countess had been half the sorceress she was accused of being, she never would have been caught and imprisoned, much less held until her death. She was your instrument before, during, and even after the trial."

She smiled. "Some instruments beg to be played."

"Flash forward to now. I don't know who you were and what you did during the centuries in-between but I bet a little research—" I stopped and cocked my head, the possibilities spinning in my mind like a dark pinwheel. "So what was it like inside Hitler's bunker?"

Her mouth made a little moue of a smile. "Not nearly as entertaining as the gas chambers at Birkenau and Majdanek."

I was speechless. It's no secret that the good die young, but I had never really appreciated how evil could live on and on until just this minute.

"So much death," she cooed, "so much destruction. I thought that my reign was about to begin." Her eyes and her mouth softened in fond remembrance. "Hiroshima . . . Nagasaki . . . 

"For ten thousand years I have waited for a lever large enough to unhinge the world. A taste here, a sip there, always waiting for the final feast of souls. I thought the splitting of the atom would open the Fifth Seal. But like every other dark technology, the means always required more pawns than I could co-opt."

"Until now," I said, finally finding my voice. "You are Lilith, Mother of Demons!"

She laughed. "A fanciful theory for a man who didn't believe in vampires a year ago and still doesn't believe in ghosts, even now."

It almost felt like a physical blow. Suddenly the machete was forgotten as my hands clenched impotently. Jenny's absence was now like a hole in my heart, personal delusion or no.

After a moment I said quietly: "I believe in evil. Always have. And while I can't explain or believe everything I've seen or been told this past year, I've learned that I can generally trust my instincts."

"Instincts," she snorted, "you men of the twenty-first century aren't so different from your Cro-Magnon ancestors."

"Who knew you," I retorted. "Called you by many names: Lilith, Erishkaigal, Hecate, Medea, Medusa, Pandora, Tiamat—from ancient times, the Whore of Babylon."

"Sounds like you've got it all figured out." She reached out and pulled the machete from the great wooden post with her left hand as if plucking a petal from a flower.

"The important stuff," I agreed. "I know about the tri-part combinant virus, about what it's really engineered to do. And I know that you can't win: even the dead are rising up to stop you. Even now your mercenaries are being routed, your plague trucks burned, your labs destroyed. Maybe I can't stop you from getting away but I think you will be a long time plotting to get another foothold in this world."

"I was wrong, Cséjthe." She smiled, the triangular points of her teeth seeming to elongate in the eerie violet light. "You are really not so clever, after all." Her right hand came out from behind her back. It held a syringe.

I took a step back.

"Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds," she said.

"Yeah?" I couldn't take my eyes off the syringe. I dared not. "You don't strike me as very Shiva-like. There's a greater resemblance to Kali. Is that who you really are? Are the gray men your New World cult of thugees?"

"As you said, I have many names. You would need to speak them all to banish me back into my cave."

"Cave," I said. "That would match up with the legends of Lilith." So now what? Should I say "Lilith be gone"? I said it.

She laughed. "As I said, I have many names. You, however, have only one. Cséjthe stand still." The hand holding the syringe came up.

I took a second small step back: so much for her own powers of invocation. "Let me guess. All that research, all that work. The virus samples intercepted. Destroyed. Your troops in disarray. The plan is finished." I cocked an eyebrow. "Unless . . ."

She nodded. "Unless . . ."

"You infect at least one person before you leave this night," I concluded. "Better to have multiple infection sites, varying ways of introducing the virus to dense population centers. But one person could still be enough to start the viral chain reaction."

She nodded again. "I would prefer the surety of my former plan but I will work with what you've left me."

I took another step back. "Which is me. You want me to be your Typhoid Harry."

"I would infect myself but this body is already dead. It cannot host the virus and sustain it." The syringe came up, the machete stayed down. "The infection is relatively mild. It doesn't hurt, really." She nudged the plunger and a drop swelled at the tip of the needle. "Just a little prick."

"Isn't it always," I retorted. "Even when it comes to bringing the world to an end."

"If it isn't you, Cséjthe, then it will be one of your friends who discovers your bloody remains." The machete came back up.

"Oh, now that's not so bad. I was afraid you were going to talk me to death."

Anger and madness flashed in her eyes and the machete flashed up over her head, where she held it aloft for a long moment. Then, she smiled. "Company's coming. What does a girl have to do to be alone with you?" She gestured. Spoke a word that sounded ancient, felt substantial. The air behind her began to shimmer.

"Did you ever stop to think that if I am the woman foretold in the Bible, it would be your Christian duty to help me fulfill the prophecy and hasten God's Day of Judgment?" She took a step toward me.

"Did you ever stop to think," I countered, taking another step back, "that the Council of Trent elected to retain the Book of Revelation by just one vote back in the sixteenth century?" I watched the striated patterns of the biceps and triceps quivering under her chocolate skin.

Coming . . . I set myself.

She looked a little confused. "Your point?"

Coming . . .   

"It wasn't my vote!" I said, jumping back as the machete flashed down into the space I had just occupied.

"Abeko!" cried a familiar voice as I stumbled back further, driven before the figure-eight patterns of the whirring blade. I couldn't look away lest I be pureed but Bois-Chèche, or whatever the hell her real name was, seemed to stagger a bit.

"Abito!" the voice called harshly, and: "Abro, Abyzu, Ailo!"

"Don't look now," I gasped, barely avoiding the machete for the seventeenth time, "but I think your pager is going off."

"Alu! Amiz! Amizo! Amizu!"

"I have power enough," she grunted back, "to destroy you all!"

"Ardad Lili! Avitu! Batna!"

I ducked the blade once more. "Yeah? Well apparently only enough to do us one at a time. And only while you're wired up to your ever-Gédé power source. So, tell me the truth before I pull your plug: are you AC or DC?"

"Bituah!" cried the voice that I finally recognized as belonging to the angel I had once called Mikey. "Eilo! Gallu!"

I sneaked a glance past her shoulder and caught a glimpse of the granite-faced creature on the far side of the peristil. He was leaning forward, his hands spread wide and pressing against the shimmering air. His great white wings fanned out behind him, straining with effort while the great sword quivered, point-first in the ground like a martyr's cross. "Geloul!" he shouted, "Gilou!"

My distraction from the closer blade had immediate and painful consequences: the tip of the machete sliced across my forearm in a fiery line.

" 'Ik, 'Ils, Ita!" cried the angel.

"You can say that again," I muttered.

"Die, damn you!" the Whore of Babylon shrieked.

It suddenly came to me, what had been missing from my life for so long, now. "Pleasant conversation," I murmured, barely avoiding the blade again.

"Izorpo . . . Kalee . . . Kali . . ."

I stumbled back against the altar table and flung out my injured arm to keep my balance. There was a sizzling sound behind me. I didn't fall because I had run out of room to fall back in. Or to. Or something. I dodged left.

"Kakash . . . Kea . . ."

She swung to her right. This put me in line with the blade.

My whole left side went numb as the great knife cracked a couple of ribs and then bit down into the flesh between. I tried to grab the blade and got the point through my left palm for my clumsy efforts.

"What?" she taunted, as I spun in the opposite direction, trying to roll away and staunch the twin gushes of blood. "No witty repartee?"

"Damn you!" I gasped, half distracted by sizzling sounds that were increasing all around me. "Now I'm gonna need a tetanus shot!"

"Kema . . . Kokos . . . Lamassu . . ."

There was a muted popping sound. And then another. And I staggered as a wave of dizziness washed over me.

"Odom! Partasah! Partashah!"

My vision began to haze—first red and then purple and I knew I had just run out of time. I threw my arm about in a last-ditch effort to delay a fatal thrust.

"Patrota!"

More popping sounds.

"Petrota!"

Sounds of breaking glass.

"Nooo!" the creature called by all of these names, and more, moaned.

"Podo!"

My blurred eyesight suddenly resolved into sharp focus and I grabbed the blade with my right hand.

"Pods!"

It felt like holding a flattened, red-hot poker but I did not let go.

"Raphi!"

Strength returned to my arm, my body. My head began to clear.

"Satrinah!"

I stole a glance over my shoulder and saw shattered glass vials scattered across the table, crisscrossed by spattered patterns of blood.

"Talto!"

I tossed my left hand back and watched as a thin spray of crimson spackled two shelves of zombi astrals on the left wall. The glass trembled, popped, and shattered. A haze of red lights misted toward us.

"Thiltho!"

"No! No! No!" Babylon's Bint shrilled.

"Zahriel!"

I jerked the machete from her grasp, slicing my hand to the bone as I did. Hurling it aside, I spun to my right, smearing my bloody palms across the remaining bottles on the right and rear racks. I barely had time to duck as three-dozen vials exploded, freeing purple pinpoints of light.

"Zefonith!" Michael shouted triumphantly. I looked back in time to watch as the angel pushed through the invisible barrier that had held him at bay. He pulled the sword from the dark ground and brought its fiery blade up to an attack position as he rushed toward us.

Chalice Delacroix's body rose into the air as she flailed her arms and kicked her legs. Judging from her body language and the red and purple firefly lights that swarmed and swirled about her form, the levitation act wasn't her doing. She opened her mouth and started to scream. Twin streamers of crimson and violet flashed down her throat and muffled her cries. Her staring, bulging eyes began to glow an unearthly green and great tears, yellow and thick like oily piss, ran down her cheeks and dribbled from her chin. The eerie emerald light spread to the whites of her eyeballs and grew in intensity. There was a final POP! as if a large zombi astral bottle had shattered and the lights in her eyes flashed and went dark. Her head lolled to the side, her body went limp. Chalice Delacroix fell to the ground as Michael ran up, his sword raised for a killing stroke. The mist of red and purple fireflies spun in a galactic farandole and dispersed, scattering across the hounfort and peristil, and zipping out through the corridor in the direction of the stairs.

"Wait!" I yelled, throwing my arm across her body to shield her from the angel's sword. Michael's reflexes spared me the irony of surviving a demon's machete attack only to lose my arm to an angel's sword.

"She's dead," he intoned. Picture Lurch doing voice-overs for Dr. McCoy in Star Trek—The Original Series, of course.

"Then what's your hurry?"

"The demon Lilith will have left a shadow of corruption upon her soul. Better she should perish here and her soul be remanded to heaven than have it slowly succumb to the spiritual cancer that will surely follow."

"Are we talking Predestination? Or just rolling the dice based on House odds?" I knelt and slid one arm beneath her back, the other under her legs. "Because I'm heavily invested in the Free Will portfolio and that means it's not my place to make that sort of decision for another person." I glanced up at the sword that remained poised above the two of us. "Somehow I don't think it's your place, either." I shouldn't have had the strength to lift her but the Loa had imparted some preternatural strength and energy reserves as they passed through me to attack Lilith Bois-Chèche. The sword came down slowly as I staggered to my feet. I had no sooner regained my balance than I nearly lost it again as the ground erupted nearby and Baron Samedi ascended from the bowels of the earth.

The dark man in top hat and tails (sans red threads) eyed the angel and the flickering play of flames along the great silvery blade that he held at his side. "Damn, Hefe!" he said, "you're a bit out of your element, aren't you? This here is my home turf."

"Our ground," corrected the corpse of Captain Worthington as he climbed out of the hole that the baron had created upon his entrance. "Muh men and Ah have stood post here for more than one hundred and fifty years. Tonight we have met the enemy in combat and retaken this ground."

"Very good, Captain." Mama Samm came huffing and puffing across the dirt floor from the far end of the peristil. He saluted her and she returned the salute without the slightest hesitation. "I bring word from Sally Crow."

The Confederate corpse stiffened—there was a joke there somewhere but I was too tired to figure it out just now—and the dark ground all around the hounfort and peristil erupted as dozens of Civil War soldiers ascended from the earth. "Attention!" barked the remains of their commanding officer.

"At ease," the old fortune-teller said gently. "The juju woman who cursed you has lifted her judgment. She says, your wrongs are forgiven you and that your faithfulness and valor have secured your rewards. You may go home, now. Go home to your homes and families."

Soldiers unknown and unknowable removed their tattered caps. Death grins softened to smiles. Some trembled, others bowed their scabrous heads as she continued. "Go home. Linger there awhile to remember the people and places that you fought and shed blood for. And when you are ready for the true honors and glories that you have won," she raised her massive arms, "kiss your great-great-grandbabies in their sleep, leave a scattering of ashes to bless the ground, and report to the One who commands all those who fight for causes just and right."

A wind sprang up as the dead men turned and began their leave-taking. It blew through the corridor as arms were clasped, moaned across the dancing ground as comrades embraced for the last time, and swirled about each soldier, causing ragged garments to flap, bones to click and clack, desiccated flesh to crumble. In moments each mummified myrmidon was rendered into columns of ash and grit and powder, spun into dust devils of decay and dissolution, and lifted on a chariot of air that carried the last earthly remnants of their physical existence up and back out through the corridor—from whence, I assumed, they would be blown to those places where their progeny lived and loved today.

I wondered briefly which ones would come home to empty fields or parking lots or shopping malls and which would find their descendants in apartment complexes and strange-looking houses far from the lands they'd known. I had only a moment for the question to form before the ground began to shake again.

Now what? No one appeared and the ground continued to tremble. "All right, already," I said, "come on in."

"No one is coming," Baron Samedi said. "This place is beginning to descend."

"Descend?"

He nodded. "It is a place of death and now is its time to die. You must leave now or perish with it." He reached out and took one of Chalice's limp hands in his own. "Come, child. Awaken and walk with me."

She stirred in my arms. Opened her eyes as a sleeper newly awakened might. "What . . . ?"

"No time for questions, now," the baron said. "Come with me and we will find your place among the dead."

"The . . . dead?" She looked from him up to me. "I don't understand."

"Can you walk?" I asked. "We've got to get out of here." A table-sized chunk of ceiling crashed down just twenty feet away from us. "Right now," I added.

"She no longer belongs to the land of the living," the baron argued.

"Doesn't mean she belongs in the realm of the dead," I countered. "And I can speak somewhat knowledgably to that subject." I turned and found my path blocked by the big angel. Beyond him I could see Deirdre, Father Pat, and The Kid coming out of the corridor. "Am I gonna have to go around you or through you, Mikey?"

He reached out and plucked Chalice from my arms, handing me his sword in her place. "I can carry her to safety this day," he said softly. "I cannot speak to her future."

"Can we help?" Deirdre called as we turned and began to move in their direction.

"Yeah," I said loosening up into an ungainly run, "don't block the exits!"

"Hey," I heard J.D. say off to the side, "lookit what I found!"

There was no time to pay him any mind, we were all running back for the corridor and the stairs beyond as the poteau mitan snapped with a loud bang and the ceiling fractured like thin ice. Concrete began to fall in earnest and I quickly found myself dropping back into last place. Everyone else was ahead of me and the baron had apparently exited the same way he had entered.

Just as the angel ducked through the doorway to the corridor about five tons of cement came crashing down to cut off my escape route. I had two choices left. Find the baron's tunnel—if that was how he actually traveled beneath the earth—or translocate on the run.

Aside from my fundamental doubts about Loa locomotion, I tend to be a bit claustrophobic. "Death is but the doorway," I murmured, dodging hundred-pound cement hailstones, "to new life . . ." The aftertaste of Loa power hummed in my veins and I could feel the transdimensional shift begin with a clarity that I had never felt in previous attempts. "We live today," I shouted, "we shall live again!" There was a growing thunder rumbling toward me from behind: the subbasement was turning into a concrete waffle iron and the lid was about to close! "In many forms," I cried, putting on a burst of speed, "shall we return!" I leapt into the void between the atoms of the cement rubble that was avalanching my way.

It felt like running into a stone wall.

The ceiling caved in.

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Framed

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Chapter Twenty-six

The glow came from the walls of the djevo.

The curtains had been pulled aside to reveal shelves built into the three walls surrounding the altar. The shelves were crowded with row upon row of tiny glass bottles: it looked like a liquor cabinet for a 747.

Except those little liquor bottles the flight attendants dole out don't glow in the dark while these little containers looked like tiny jars of captured fireflies. Little living pulses of bioluminescence flickered, trapped inside ranks and files of glass prisons.

Only . . . 

Only they weren't fireflies . . . 

"Zombis," I whispered to myself, "zombi astrals!"

I had come down here looking for shuffling corpses, wondering where Bois-Chèche could hide that many bodies. Now it suddenly made sense.

The zombi astrals were an efficient way of keeping the Loa as hostages: trap their spirits in a specially prepared bottle and harness their ti-bon-ange as a power source. From the look of things, she had not only trapped the astral forms of the Ogou and Gédé clans, she had hooked these zombie batteries up in a paranormal parallel circuit to augment her own magicks!

Which meant I was not only on a mission of mercy to rescue the imprisoned Loa, I was sent down here to throw the circuit breaker on Bois-Chèche's power source. I reached for the nearest bottle and twisted the cap off—or at least I tried to. The cap didn't twist. It didn't pull, either. In fact, it didn't move at all.

"Ccsssééééjjjttthhe!"

"Bitch, bitch, bitch . . ." I could hear her approach—she was emerging from the hallway and entering the peristil, now.

I pulled and twisted harder.

Nothing.

I dropped the bottle and grabbed another. It was stuck just as tight. I bounced it off the altar table but it rebounded like shatterproof plastic.

The machete! I turned and ran toward the pole but Chalice Delacroix's body was already there, waiting for me.

"Cséjthe," she crooned, "you keep running away."

"Yeah," I said, trying to figure my maneuvering room, "take a hint."

"But I don't want you to run away. I want to be with you. We have so much to offer one another."

"Like what?"

"Like the world," she purred.

"You mean, what's left of it after you're done?"

"And, of course, there's this . . ." She ran her left hand over the ripe brown curves of Chalice's body. The other she kept behind her back. She seemed to get a bigger thrill out of the caress than I might ever hope to.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Who would you like me to be?"

"I wish you were still Chalice Delacroix."

"And so I am."

I sighed. "We both know that you're using her as a meat puppet. The real Chalice Delacroix is not anywhere in the vicinity. Four hundred years ago you pulled the strings in Cachtice castle and laid the blame for your unnatural appetites on Elizabeth Báthory. For a while I thought you might be Katarina Beneczky, but that was probably no more your real name then than Chalice Delacroix is your real name now."

"Such a clever boy."

I shook my head—and used that gesture to break eye contact for another scan of the room. "Not so clever, really. First I peg you for the true Witch of Cachtice. Then I discover that you are not only not the real Countess Báthory, you're probably not her undead maidservant, either. Or maybe you're both—seeing as how you can leapfrog from one person's body to the next. Did you start out in the countess' body and then escape to Beneczky's when the party wound down? Or did you arrive on the scene wearing Katarina's face and form and pull the strings from the shadows?" Another thought occurred. "Or did you move around, dressing in the bodies of the various servitors in Castle Cachtice?"

"Castle Cséjthe," she corrected. "That was so long ago, why does it matter now?"

"Because I want to know who you really are. Or what? Now I'm supposed to believe that you're Marinette Bois-Chèche, the Queen Bitch of the Voodoo pantheon."

"As I said, such a clever boy!"

"If I am it's because I've finally figured out that Bois-Chèche is just another mask, too."

"Really?"

I shook my head. "I've dropped that particular word from my vocabulary this past year. No, I don't think you're Loa, at all. I don't believe any single Loa has the power—or even the motivation—to imprison all the other Loa and their multiple aspects. Certainly not a lesser aspect like one of the Marinettes. The only thing you have in common with them is your ability to mount a human host and use their body as your own."

A thought struck me. "Or maybe you don't . . ."

"Maybe I don't?"

I tried shuffling a little to the left: I really wanted to know what she was holding behind her back. "The Loa mount living humans to use as their 'horses.' Maybe you can't do that unless they're dead. More reason to peek behind the mask."

"Is my real name so important?" She turned slightly, keeping her right hand obscured.

"It is if you're a demon."

She laughed. "And knowing my name would give you power over me?" She shook her head. "I have many names!"

"Trot out the list. I got all night."

"Ah, but I do not. Tempus fugit." She shrugged, her right hand still hidden behind her back. I glanced at the machete still buried in the pole. There was no way to grab it without stepping within her reach.

Unless . . . 

My right hand twitched and I tried willing the weapon to my hand. Hey, I figured if I could translocate my own body and the ghost of my dead wife was really just the psychokinetic feedback of my own virus-enhanced gray-matter, I should be able to pull the old Luke Skywalker/light-saber/Jedi mind-trick.

"We have much in common, Christopher." She took a half-step toward me. "More than you have with any of those others."

I shook my head. "You're not human. I don't think you ever were," I elaborated. "As I said, you've got the mojo to imprison entire clans of Vodoun spirits and channel their energies to augment your powers. You've been around for at least four hundred years and I'm betting even longer than that." Come to me, I thought at the machete, come to my hand. "Not a problematical lifespan for a vampire and your last vessel seemed to meet all the prerequisites . . . but you change bodies like Bruce Willis changes hairpieces." Come to me. "And you don't use blood for physical sustenance. You use it ritualistically and there's some kind of power connection involved."

"There is power in the blood."

"Yeah, that's what everyone says: you, Mama Samm, Dracula, Jimmy Swaggert . . ."

"Vlad Dracul?" She smiled. "I had heard the stories, of course, but I had not noticed until now."

"Noticed what?"

"How much alike the two of you are."

I forgot about the machete for a moment. "Take that back!"

"Your pride, your arrogance . . ." she sighed, " . . . that fatal romantic streak . . ."

"Fatal . . ." I mused, returning to the subject at hand. I twisted my own hand a little more and fancied I could see the machete quiver a bit. "You waltz into a castle where the mistress is a closet sadist and suddenly there's a shortage of virgins and a surfeit of blood. If the countess had been half the sorceress she was accused of being, she never would have been caught and imprisoned, much less held until her death. She was your instrument before, during, and even after the trial."

She smiled. "Some instruments beg to be played."

"Flash forward to now. I don't know who you were and what you did during the centuries in-between but I bet a little research—" I stopped and cocked my head, the possibilities spinning in my mind like a dark pinwheel. "So what was it like inside Hitler's bunker?"

Her mouth made a little moue of a smile. "Not nearly as entertaining as the gas chambers at Birkenau and Majdanek."

I was speechless. It's no secret that the good die young, but I had never really appreciated how evil could live on and on until just this minute.

"So much death," she cooed, "so much destruction. I thought that my reign was about to begin." Her eyes and her mouth softened in fond remembrance. "Hiroshima . . . Nagasaki . . . 

"For ten thousand years I have waited for a lever large enough to unhinge the world. A taste here, a sip there, always waiting for the final feast of souls. I thought the splitting of the atom would open the Fifth Seal. But like every other dark technology, the means always required more pawns than I could co-opt."

"Until now," I said, finally finding my voice. "You are Lilith, Mother of Demons!"

She laughed. "A fanciful theory for a man who didn't believe in vampires a year ago and still doesn't believe in ghosts, even now."

It almost felt like a physical blow. Suddenly the machete was forgotten as my hands clenched impotently. Jenny's absence was now like a hole in my heart, personal delusion or no.

After a moment I said quietly: "I believe in evil. Always have. And while I can't explain or believe everything I've seen or been told this past year, I've learned that I can generally trust my instincts."

"Instincts," she snorted, "you men of the twenty-first century aren't so different from your Cro-Magnon ancestors."

"Who knew you," I retorted. "Called you by many names: Lilith, Erishkaigal, Hecate, Medea, Medusa, Pandora, Tiamat—from ancient times, the Whore of Babylon."

"Sounds like you've got it all figured out." She reached out and pulled the machete from the great wooden post with her left hand as if plucking a petal from a flower.

"The important stuff," I agreed. "I know about the tri-part combinant virus, about what it's really engineered to do. And I know that you can't win: even the dead are rising up to stop you. Even now your mercenaries are being routed, your plague trucks burned, your labs destroyed. Maybe I can't stop you from getting away but I think you will be a long time plotting to get another foothold in this world."

"I was wrong, Cséjthe." She smiled, the triangular points of her teeth seeming to elongate in the eerie violet light. "You are really not so clever, after all." Her right hand came out from behind her back. It held a syringe.

I took a step back.

"Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds," she said.

"Yeah?" I couldn't take my eyes off the syringe. I dared not. "You don't strike me as very Shiva-like. There's a greater resemblance to Kali. Is that who you really are? Are the gray men your New World cult of thugees?"

"As you said, I have many names. You would need to speak them all to banish me back into my cave."

"Cave," I said. "That would match up with the legends of Lilith." So now what? Should I say "Lilith be gone"? I said it.

She laughed. "As I said, I have many names. You, however, have only one. Cséjthe stand still." The hand holding the syringe came up.

I took a second small step back: so much for her own powers of invocation. "Let me guess. All that research, all that work. The virus samples intercepted. Destroyed. Your troops in disarray. The plan is finished." I cocked an eyebrow. "Unless . . ."

She nodded. "Unless . . ."

"You infect at least one person before you leave this night," I concluded. "Better to have multiple infection sites, varying ways of introducing the virus to dense population centers. But one person could still be enough to start the viral chain reaction."

She nodded again. "I would prefer the surety of my former plan but I will work with what you've left me."

I took another step back. "Which is me. You want me to be your Typhoid Harry."

"I would infect myself but this body is already dead. It cannot host the virus and sustain it." The syringe came up, the machete stayed down. "The infection is relatively mild. It doesn't hurt, really." She nudged the plunger and a drop swelled at the tip of the needle. "Just a little prick."

"Isn't it always," I retorted. "Even when it comes to bringing the world to an end."

"If it isn't you, Cséjthe, then it will be one of your friends who discovers your bloody remains." The machete came back up.

"Oh, now that's not so bad. I was afraid you were going to talk me to death."

Anger and madness flashed in her eyes and the machete flashed up over her head, where she held it aloft for a long moment. Then, she smiled. "Company's coming. What does a girl have to do to be alone with you?" She gestured. Spoke a word that sounded ancient, felt substantial. The air behind her began to shimmer.

"Did you ever stop to think that if I am the woman foretold in the Bible, it would be your Christian duty to help me fulfill the prophecy and hasten God's Day of Judgment?" She took a step toward me.

"Did you ever stop to think," I countered, taking another step back, "that the Council of Trent elected to retain the Book of Revelation by just one vote back in the sixteenth century?" I watched the striated patterns of the biceps and triceps quivering under her chocolate skin.

Coming . . . I set myself.

She looked a little confused. "Your point?"

Coming . . .   

"It wasn't my vote!" I said, jumping back as the machete flashed down into the space I had just occupied.

"Abeko!" cried a familiar voice as I stumbled back further, driven before the figure-eight patterns of the whirring blade. I couldn't look away lest I be pureed but Bois-Chèche, or whatever the hell her real name was, seemed to stagger a bit.

"Abito!" the voice called harshly, and: "Abro, Abyzu, Ailo!"

"Don't look now," I gasped, barely avoiding the machete for the seventeenth time, "but I think your pager is going off."

"Alu! Amiz! Amizo! Amizu!"

"I have power enough," she grunted back, "to destroy you all!"

"Ardad Lili! Avitu! Batna!"

I ducked the blade once more. "Yeah? Well apparently only enough to do us one at a time. And only while you're wired up to your ever-Gédé power source. So, tell me the truth before I pull your plug: are you AC or DC?"

"Bituah!" cried the voice that I finally recognized as belonging to the angel I had once called Mikey. "Eilo! Gallu!"

I sneaked a glance past her shoulder and caught a glimpse of the granite-faced creature on the far side of the peristil. He was leaning forward, his hands spread wide and pressing against the shimmering air. His great white wings fanned out behind him, straining with effort while the great sword quivered, point-first in the ground like a martyr's cross. "Geloul!" he shouted, "Gilou!"

My distraction from the closer blade had immediate and painful consequences: the tip of the machete sliced across my forearm in a fiery line.

" 'Ik, 'Ils, Ita!" cried the angel.

"You can say that again," I muttered.

"Die, damn you!" the Whore of Babylon shrieked.

It suddenly came to me, what had been missing from my life for so long, now. "Pleasant conversation," I murmured, barely avoiding the blade again.

"Izorpo . . . Kalee . . . Kali . . ."

I stumbled back against the altar table and flung out my injured arm to keep my balance. There was a sizzling sound behind me. I didn't fall because I had run out of room to fall back in. Or to. Or something. I dodged left.

"Kakash . . . Kea . . ."

She swung to her right. This put me in line with the blade.

My whole left side went numb as the great knife cracked a couple of ribs and then bit down into the flesh between. I tried to grab the blade and got the point through my left palm for my clumsy efforts.

"What?" she taunted, as I spun in the opposite direction, trying to roll away and staunch the twin gushes of blood. "No witty repartee?"

"Damn you!" I gasped, half distracted by sizzling sounds that were increasing all around me. "Now I'm gonna need a tetanus shot!"

"Kema . . . Kokos . . . Lamassu . . ."

There was a muted popping sound. And then another. And I staggered as a wave of dizziness washed over me.

"Odom! Partasah! Partashah!"

My vision began to haze—first red and then purple and I knew I had just run out of time. I threw my arm about in a last-ditch effort to delay a fatal thrust.

"Patrota!"

More popping sounds.

"Petrota!"

Sounds of breaking glass.

"Nooo!" the creature called by all of these names, and more, moaned.

"Podo!"

My blurred eyesight suddenly resolved into sharp focus and I grabbed the blade with my right hand.

"Pods!"

It felt like holding a flattened, red-hot poker but I did not let go.

"Raphi!"

Strength returned to my arm, my body. My head began to clear.

"Satrinah!"

I stole a glance over my shoulder and saw shattered glass vials scattered across the table, crisscrossed by spattered patterns of blood.

"Talto!"

I tossed my left hand back and watched as a thin spray of crimson spackled two shelves of zombi astrals on the left wall. The glass trembled, popped, and shattered. A haze of red lights misted toward us.

"Thiltho!"

"No! No! No!" Babylon's Bint shrilled.

"Zahriel!"

I jerked the machete from her grasp, slicing my hand to the bone as I did. Hurling it aside, I spun to my right, smearing my bloody palms across the remaining bottles on the right and rear racks. I barely had time to duck as three-dozen vials exploded, freeing purple pinpoints of light.

"Zefonith!" Michael shouted triumphantly. I looked back in time to watch as the angel pushed through the invisible barrier that had held him at bay. He pulled the sword from the dark ground and brought its fiery blade up to an attack position as he rushed toward us.

Chalice Delacroix's body rose into the air as she flailed her arms and kicked her legs. Judging from her body language and the red and purple firefly lights that swarmed and swirled about her form, the levitation act wasn't her doing. She opened her mouth and started to scream. Twin streamers of crimson and violet flashed down her throat and muffled her cries. Her staring, bulging eyes began to glow an unearthly green and great tears, yellow and thick like oily piss, ran down her cheeks and dribbled from her chin. The eerie emerald light spread to the whites of her eyeballs and grew in intensity. There was a final POP! as if a large zombi astral bottle had shattered and the lights in her eyes flashed and went dark. Her head lolled to the side, her body went limp. Chalice Delacroix fell to the ground as Michael ran up, his sword raised for a killing stroke. The mist of red and purple fireflies spun in a galactic farandole and dispersed, scattering across the hounfort and peristil, and zipping out through the corridor in the direction of the stairs.

"Wait!" I yelled, throwing my arm across her body to shield her from the angel's sword. Michael's reflexes spared me the irony of surviving a demon's machete attack only to lose my arm to an angel's sword.

"She's dead," he intoned. Picture Lurch doing voice-overs for Dr. McCoy in Star Trek—The Original Series, of course.

"Then what's your hurry?"

"The demon Lilith will have left a shadow of corruption upon her soul. Better she should perish here and her soul be remanded to heaven than have it slowly succumb to the spiritual cancer that will surely follow."

"Are we talking Predestination? Or just rolling the dice based on House odds?" I knelt and slid one arm beneath her back, the other under her legs. "Because I'm heavily invested in the Free Will portfolio and that means it's not my place to make that sort of decision for another person." I glanced up at the sword that remained poised above the two of us. "Somehow I don't think it's your place, either." I shouldn't have had the strength to lift her but the Loa had imparted some preternatural strength and energy reserves as they passed through me to attack Lilith Bois-Chèche. The sword came down slowly as I staggered to my feet. I had no sooner regained my balance than I nearly lost it again as the ground erupted nearby and Baron Samedi ascended from the bowels of the earth.

The dark man in top hat and tails (sans red threads) eyed the angel and the flickering play of flames along the great silvery blade that he held at his side. "Damn, Hefe!" he said, "you're a bit out of your element, aren't you? This here is my home turf."

"Our ground," corrected the corpse of Captain Worthington as he climbed out of the hole that the baron had created upon his entrance. "Muh men and Ah have stood post here for more than one hundred and fifty years. Tonight we have met the enemy in combat and retaken this ground."

"Very good, Captain." Mama Samm came huffing and puffing across the dirt floor from the far end of the peristil. He saluted her and she returned the salute without the slightest hesitation. "I bring word from Sally Crow."

The Confederate corpse stiffened—there was a joke there somewhere but I was too tired to figure it out just now—and the dark ground all around the hounfort and peristil erupted as dozens of Civil War soldiers ascended from the earth. "Attention!" barked the remains of their commanding officer.

"At ease," the old fortune-teller said gently. "The juju woman who cursed you has lifted her judgment. She says, your wrongs are forgiven you and that your faithfulness and valor have secured your rewards. You may go home, now. Go home to your homes and families."

Soldiers unknown and unknowable removed their tattered caps. Death grins softened to smiles. Some trembled, others bowed their scabrous heads as she continued. "Go home. Linger there awhile to remember the people and places that you fought and shed blood for. And when you are ready for the true honors and glories that you have won," she raised her massive arms, "kiss your great-great-grandbabies in their sleep, leave a scattering of ashes to bless the ground, and report to the One who commands all those who fight for causes just and right."

A wind sprang up as the dead men turned and began their leave-taking. It blew through the corridor as arms were clasped, moaned across the dancing ground as comrades embraced for the last time, and swirled about each soldier, causing ragged garments to flap, bones to click and clack, desiccated flesh to crumble. In moments each mummified myrmidon was rendered into columns of ash and grit and powder, spun into dust devils of decay and dissolution, and lifted on a chariot of air that carried the last earthly remnants of their physical existence up and back out through the corridor—from whence, I assumed, they would be blown to those places where their progeny lived and loved today.

I wondered briefly which ones would come home to empty fields or parking lots or shopping malls and which would find their descendants in apartment complexes and strange-looking houses far from the lands they'd known. I had only a moment for the question to form before the ground began to shake again.

Now what? No one appeared and the ground continued to tremble. "All right, already," I said, "come on in."

"No one is coming," Baron Samedi said. "This place is beginning to descend."

"Descend?"

He nodded. "It is a place of death and now is its time to die. You must leave now or perish with it." He reached out and took one of Chalice's limp hands in his own. "Come, child. Awaken and walk with me."

She stirred in my arms. Opened her eyes as a sleeper newly awakened might. "What . . . ?"

"No time for questions, now," the baron said. "Come with me and we will find your place among the dead."

"The . . . dead?" She looked from him up to me. "I don't understand."

"Can you walk?" I asked. "We've got to get out of here." A table-sized chunk of ceiling crashed down just twenty feet away from us. "Right now," I added.

"She no longer belongs to the land of the living," the baron argued.

"Doesn't mean she belongs in the realm of the dead," I countered. "And I can speak somewhat knowledgably to that subject." I turned and found my path blocked by the big angel. Beyond him I could see Deirdre, Father Pat, and The Kid coming out of the corridor. "Am I gonna have to go around you or through you, Mikey?"

He reached out and plucked Chalice from my arms, handing me his sword in her place. "I can carry her to safety this day," he said softly. "I cannot speak to her future."

"Can we help?" Deirdre called as we turned and began to move in their direction.

"Yeah," I said loosening up into an ungainly run, "don't block the exits!"

"Hey," I heard J.D. say off to the side, "lookit what I found!"

There was no time to pay him any mind, we were all running back for the corridor and the stairs beyond as the poteau mitan snapped with a loud bang and the ceiling fractured like thin ice. Concrete began to fall in earnest and I quickly found myself dropping back into last place. Everyone else was ahead of me and the baron had apparently exited the same way he had entered.

Just as the angel ducked through the doorway to the corridor about five tons of cement came crashing down to cut off my escape route. I had two choices left. Find the baron's tunnel—if that was how he actually traveled beneath the earth—or translocate on the run.

Aside from my fundamental doubts about Loa locomotion, I tend to be a bit claustrophobic. "Death is but the doorway," I murmured, dodging hundred-pound cement hailstones, "to new life . . ." The aftertaste of Loa power hummed in my veins and I could feel the transdimensional shift begin with a clarity that I had never felt in previous attempts. "We live today," I shouted, "we shall live again!" There was a growing thunder rumbling toward me from behind: the subbasement was turning into a concrete waffle iron and the lid was about to close! "In many forms," I cried, putting on a burst of speed, "shall we return!" I leapt into the void between the atoms of the cement rubble that was avalanching my way.

It felt like running into a stone wall.

The ceiling caved in.

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Framed