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"He is tricky, my lord. Michael was never to be trusted."
"Crafty is what he is. But now we know. The gate is no longer at Lutetia. He must have found a way to move it." The Visitor brooded for a while. "This Barlow resolution must be crushed. But do it gently. You shall convince the Conclave they cannot go on without filling the position. The spirit of the Coven demands a Regis. They will come around, as the weeks and months go by and still Charles remains absent. You shall refuse at first, but they will press you to accept. You will be named Regis."
"As you wish, my lord."
"Once installed, our real work can begin. Without Charles, without Lawrence, they will be looking for a new leader. You shall step into that vacuum. They will come back to me. They will beg me to lead them once again, and through you, Forsyth, our real work can begin...."
Without warning, Bliss was suddenly thrust back into the void.
"What happened?" Dylan asked. "Why are you back here?"
"I don't know... I got upset... He must have felt something...." She told him what she'd heard.
"You have to go back there. Make yourself. Do it."
Bliss concentrated. She tried as hard as she could. She wrenched away the line that separated her from the real world, forced herself to see the world as the Visitor did.
And this time, she was right in his mind.
But he wasn't talking to Forysth anymore.
Instead she saw what he saw. Bodies. Corpses. Piled on each other. Children, really. They were lying in an auditorium. They had drunk something. A potion. A poison. Mixed by a devil. She saw a thin spectral boy holding a guitar, and a beautiful but hard-looking girl with dark hair, and another boy, handsome and clean-cut and worried. They were all that stood against this disaster. This massacre of innocents. So many kids... Red Bloods... slaughtered.
Then she saw the demon: he was in the form of another boy. A good looking kid but with an ugly sneer to his lips. He had caused it. Another of Lucifer's children.
The images continued, one after another: death, destruction, hate, war. The devil's handiwork.
Then, just as abruptly, the visions stopped. Bliss woke up. She was sitting at her desk, alone. She was shaking so much she had dropped her pen. What had happened to Charles Force? Had he been destroyed as they thought? What were they talking about? What gate did the Visitor want to destroy?
And those visions she saw, who were those children? Was that the future? And what would the Visitor do once Forsyth was named Regis? What were they planning? Horror did not even begin to describe what she was feeling. Dylan was right: she had to find a way to stop it, whatever it was, from happening.
She closed her eyes. "Dylan?" she called. "Dylan? Are you there? Where are you?"
But there was no answer, inside or out.
ER 33
Schuyler
Oliver tracked Schuyler and Jack to the bottom of the Eiffel Tower, having triangulated their location from the GPS signal on Schuyler's phone, which was now working since they were outside the isle Saint-Louis. His costume was torn and singed, it seemed a year ago since he and Schuyler had stepped off of that bus. Schuyler's heart leapt when she saw him. Oliver! Safe! Whole! This was more than she dreamed possible.
They were both weeping as they hugged, and held each other close.
"I thought you were dead," she whispered. "don't you ever, ever do that again. Ever."
"I could say the same to you," Oliver said.
He told them that after they had left the party, there had been chaos. Leviathan and the Silver Bloods had begun to set fire to everything, scorching treetops and coming dangerously close to the building itself. It looked as if the massacre in Rio was happening all over again. But then Charles Force appeared and fought them off one by one, leading them out of the grounds. Then they had disappeared. It looked like they had all gone underground.
"Yes," Jack said. "Charles was leading them to the intersection. A portion of the glom that the Silver Bloods can enter but can never leave. A space between worlds."
"Limbo." Oliver nodded.
"So what happened back there?" Schuyler asked, remembering the strange phenomenon they had experienced.
Jack shook his head. "I'm not really sure. But whatever it was, I think Charles somehow managed to reverse the process, to stop the tearing and repair the wound. Otherwise none of us would be standing here."
But Jack did not say what they all knew. That while the Silver Bloods had failed, it had not been without a small victory. Charles Force was gone. He never made it to the surface, and the catacombs were empty.
