“The comet is almost overhead,” John Hobbes announced.
His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others—Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She’d be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they’d be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They’d come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they’d walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man’s-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they’d simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself.
And now here she was, just another pawn. Evie wanted to cry. From fear. From exhaustion, yes. But mostly from the cruel uselessness, the damned stupid arbitrariness of it all.
“ ‘A great sign appeared in heaven, the sky alight with fire, a woman clothed with the sun and crowned with the stars. And her heart was a gift for the Beast, the heart of the world, which he would devour and become whole and walk upon the earth for a thousand years….’ ”
The half-dollar rubbed against Evie’s hand and she thought of James, and as she did, a horrible, desperate thought took shape. No. She couldn’t. There had to be something else.
The dead were coming. They were coming for her.
Shaking, Evie removed the pendant from around her neck and held it in front of her. “Into this vessel, I b-bind your sp-spirit….” She shook so badly she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to get the words out.
The dead kept coming. All she could see were hollow eye sockets in shadowed, skeletal faces. Dead white fingers reaching toward her. Blackened mouths oozing black juice down mottled chins.
“Into the fire, I commend your spirit,” Evie said louder.
Hands reached for her. Dead fingers splayed over her toes and she kicked them away, screaming, careful not to lose her balance and topple into the unholy throng. The room brightened. How long till the comet? A minute? Thirty seconds?
The hissing howls of the Brethren were deafening. They spoke in a thousand tongues. But beneath the cacophony, she could hear a few moans. Beneath their rage, she could sense their fear. Their urgent, overlapping growls bounced around the room. “Kill her, kill her, kill her. You are the Beast, the Beast, the Beast, The Beast must rise….”
“That coin is no holy relic, Lady Sun,” John Hobbes taunted.
Evie gripped the half-dollar tightly, feeling the grooves against her palm, both comfort and punishment. Her only physical tie to her brother.
“It is to me,” she croaked. She shouted above the din. “Into the darkness I cast you, Beast, nevermore to rise!”
The souls of the Brethren cried out. Fire licked at the walls. It was like some macabre painting come to life. The Brethren screamed as, once again, they were engulfed in flames. She shut her eyes and hoped. The pendant shook violently in her hand. The hissing was gone. In its place came a skin-crawling symphony of screams and shrieks, guttural growls and barks, sounds she could not and did not want to identify. She smelled smoke. When she opened her eyes, she saw the screeching souls of Brethren being dragged backward as they were sucked into the walls, which were engulfed in the flames of long ago.
Naughty John remained. He’d gotten stronger, thanks to the ten offerings. Perhaps too strong to be contained. And Evie was afraid that whatever she had wouldn’t be enough after all.
“I’ll break you apart,” he growled, lunging at her.
Evie held the half-dollar high. “Into this vessel…” she shouted, stronger this time.
His form flickered, the flesh moving through a series of contortions Evie could only imagine must have been quite painful. Black blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth. His teeth loosened and tumbled out. The mighty claws retracted.
“I-I… bind, I…” Her awe overpowered her memory.
“Destroy me, and you’ll never know what happened. Or what is to come,” John spat out on broken breath.
He meant to distract her. Trickery. Deceit. “Into this vessel, I bind your spirit….”
John Hobbes cried out. He fell to his knees. His skin crawled as if filled with scrabbling rats. “You’ll never know… about your brother,” he said.
Evie went cold. “What about my brother?”
A cackle started low in his chest and became a cough. A few droplets of black blood sprayed Evie’s face and she fought the urge to scream.
“What about my brother?” she shouted.
“You’ve no idea… what has been… unleashed.”
“What do you mean?”
John Hobbes grinned. Blood stained his remaining teeth. “Ask… James.”
He thrashed and his wings nearly upended Evie, who dropped the pendant. With a cry, she dove for it, but so did he; his hand was quicker. They wrestled, the Beast gaining the advantage. He was above her; the comet was so close. A claw peeked through the skin of his right index finger, and then a second poked through his middle finger—enough to cut her open, enough to take her heart.
Evie forced her hand onto the pendant from the other side, her fingers touching his. “Into this vessel, I bind your spirit. Into the fire, I commend your spirit. Into the darkness—”
“You lose….”
“I cast you, Beast, nevermore to rise!” Evie finished.
John Hobbes’s blue eyes showed true fear for the first time as Solomon’s Comet blazed overhead and his form was sucked into the half-dollar pendant, which shook and glowed red in Evie’s hand until she was forced to drop it. A great column of fire shot up from its center and was joined to the comet, the brightness like an explosion. Then, as quickly as it had come, the comet was gone, as was the pendant, which was now nothing more than ash. The night sky darkened and quieted again. A smattering of fresh stars showed in the haze.
Evie heard another hiss and scrambled to her feet. Flames burst from the blackened walls, and this time not from a long-ago memory. This was a real fire. The heat of it made her eyes sting, made it hard to take in a breath without coughing, and again Evie felt a sense of panic. How would she get out? What should she do? For a moment, she stood perfectly still, numbed by her fear and the horror of the evening. She looked up at the sky, as if waiting for it to make a decision for her. Thick black smoke wafted up, blocking the stars. No. She had not come this far, sacrificed what mattered most to her, in order to lie down now. The ceiling buckled, raining down plaster. With an almost animalistic howl, Evie bolted for the door, her hands up to ward off any fiery debris. She ran through the basement and up the stairs on shaking legs, screaming for Jericho.
“Evie? Evie!”
At the sound of Jericho’s voice, Evie felt renewed hope. “Jericho! Keep calling!”
She followed Jericho’s calls to the room where he had fallen through. She grabbed a flashlight and shone it into the hole. It wasn’t so deep—she could see that now. When he’d fallen before, he must’ve hit his head. She reached an arm down, and it was enough leverage for Jericho to pull himself up.
“We’ve got to beat it and fast,” she grunted out.
“What happened to…?” He rubbed his eyes.