Crow stared up into the face of pure evil, and he could feel the hope run out of him like water from a punctured barrel. His mind twisted and struggled, trying to accept what he was seeing, and he knew terror on every level of his consciousness, from the coldest facets of his logical mind to the primal instincts buried deep within every cell. This was the face of nightmare defined, this was the dark at the top of the stairs, this was the monster in every child’s closet. This was the darkness of the human soul released and given immea-surable power; this was the human potential taken to the ultimate degree of corruption. This was the fear of death and all the monsters out of legend. This was the devil himself.
Here was the architect of all their grief, all of their loss.
Here was the cruel intellect whose awful desires had conceived the campaign of hurt against the town and its people.
This was Ubel Griswold reborn, the god of the dark new world to come.
2
Griswold looked slowly around at the devastation he wrought. He stood in a fiery temple whose smoky pillars seemed to lift the entire heavens. Beneath his skin the vermin of the earth writhed in constant agony so that his skin appeared to shimmer. When he looked out upon what his hand had made, he was well pleased.
Crow lay nearest, groaning, hands clamped to his stomach;
Val was fifty feet away, slumped against LaMastra’s corpse. Ruger’s dead body lay over the rim of the crater and near it the werewolf crouched, still weak and bleeding, its yellow eyes filled with fear and hate. Mike was the farthest away, his sword hilt inches from his hand; his eyes were wide and staring and all hope was struck from his face.
Ubel Griswold threw back his head and laughed. It was a sound too deep, too loud, too jarring to be real. Crow jammed his fists against his ears and cried out as blood burst from his nostrils.
Griswold took a single step forward and the whole clearing shook; another step and the sound was like the fall of an artillery shell. Crow felt his body lift and thump down with each cloven footfall, and his mind rebelled against such a creature. The world was never meant to endure the weight of such a thing as this, and Crow knew that if it was here, if had been allowed to manifest itself, then everything was lost, that all sense and order were gone from the world.
Griswold eyed them all with amused contempt. “What a collection of useless shit,” he said in a voice that boomed like thunder.
Crow remembered that voice, that thick accent, from a million years ago.
“Did you really have the conceit to think you could stop me? That you could stop my Red Wave?” He stamped down a yard from Crow’s head and the shock wave threw Crow five feet into the air. “I was leading armies before this sewer of a country was even born! I was with the Aryan hordes that burned Rome! I’ve walked a thousand battlefields, ten thousand!” He spat, and the spittle was alive with beetles and maggots. “You all deserve death just because you’re too stupid to be allowed to live. ” Griswold said all this in a voice filled with contempt, but his face was bright with pleasure.
He was enjoying this on a profoundly sexual level; this was better than anything he’d felt in thirty years. To smell blood on the air, to taste the richness of pain on his tongue—it was wonderful.
He bent toward Crow and pointed one taloned finger, and as Crow watched in helpless horror the finger extended, became one of the multijointed limbs that had sprouted earlier from the mud. The claw stretched toward Crow and touched him, but the touch was light, a caress. “Yesss. I know you. I know your blood. Your brother squealed like a little girl when I gutted him. ”
He sneered with malicious delight as he turned toward Val. “I know you, too. I had your uncle. Very tasty. He screamed for mercy, did you know that? He begged and screamed and pissed in his pants, and I took him anyway. Weak, cowardly piece of garbage. But his blood was oh so sweet. And when Boyd killed your brother . . . I tasted that, too. It was delicious. ”
He turned again, this time to the werewolf, who tried to stand erect, but failed and slipped back down to all fours.
The werewolf snarled at him and Griswold shook his head slowly. “You disappoint me,” he said. “You were supposed to be at my side, and yet you turn on me. I even brought your woman here to be my sacrifice—a sacrifice I would have shared with you, and yet you kill my servants. That will cost you. ”
Finally Griswold turned to Mike. “And you. My son. My betrayer. Dhampyr indeed! I may not be able to kill you, but I can hurt you. I can make your world a screaming hell until you take your own life. I will delight in finding ways to torment you, dhampyr. Perhaps I’ll lock you and your other father in the same cellar and see what happens. He isn’t evil, it seems, and that means he can kill you and it won’t harm me at all. Very droll, don’t you think? Yesss, I will lock you away together and wait until he gets hungry enough. That will be sweet. ”
Crow saw Mike stare across the clearing to where the werewolf crouched, saw the sight of the creature register on Mike’s face, and Mike scrambled into a defensive crouch.
“I used his body once. I wore it like a suit of skin and in it I used your mother. Oh . . . she was sweet, my little dhampyr!
Would you like to know the things she did? Would you like to know the things she liked? Would it shock you? Would it make you scream the way I made her scream?”
Mike snatched up his sword and rushed at Griswold. The sword flashed and Griswold reached down from his towering height and simply smashed the boy into the mud. The sword fell from his hands and he lay gasping in the muck, his eyes wide and staring from the enormity of the pain.
Griswold sighed. “God! I’ve wanted to do that since you were born, you worthless waste of blood. ”
“Leave him alone!” yelled Crow as he lurched to his feet, took one decisive step toward Mike, and immediately fell flat on his face. He coughed and blood flecked his lips.
Griswold’s laugh shook the world. In the air above tens of thousands of crows screamed as the echo assaulted the sky.
Around him the forest was ablaze.
Then Griswold bent down and from behind the ridge of the crater he lifted the limp, sagging body of Sarah Wolfe.
Crow looked up and tried to call her name, but his voice was only a faint croak. Sarah stirred in Griswold’s grasp, but did not wake. Blood trickled from both of her ears; her eyes were half-open and sightless with shock.
“Ah, my sweet,” Griswold murmured, stroking her with a long talon. He sniffed at her, smelling her blood, and his eyelids fluttered as if he had just inhaled the most potent of opi-ates. “You are a gift for a god. Just a little sip, just a taste, and then I can leave this place. Just a tiny drop of your blood and I will leave here forever and this world will be mine. ” He sniffed her again and then caught sight of Crow worming his way brokenly through the mud. “Did my son tell you what is going to happen? Oh, I know he looked into that schwartze musician’s mind—do you think he could have done that without me letting him? It amused me to have him look and to feel his pain at what he saw. Do you know what he saw?