Pandora's Box: Book 3 of the Crystal Raven Series

Barely a choir and a half were in place when the trouble started in Turkey. They finally discovered to their horror the destination of the Eaters of the Dead when an agent arrived from the devastated town of Cide. Four hundred thousand vampyres, more beast than human, rose out of the Black Sea. A tide of death, they rolled onto the undefended coast. Led by two behemoths of unimaginable size, the horde fell on the sleepy town, rending stone and brick and flesh in an orgy of destruction. Inside an hour, nothing living remained along a twenty-mile stretch of coastline. Their own agent had barely escaped with his life, and might be the only survivor.

Residence of the capital woke up to the rumble of tanks rolling through the streets, making no effort to negotiate with or win over the populace. Coups were not unknown in the country, and Military rule was a long tradition that made democracy seem no more than a passing fad. When the column reached the Presidential Palace and the Grand National Assembly, they were razed, as was the Supreme Court building and the National Radio Station. Other strange troops arrived on foot before loyalist troops could mount a counter-assault, moving on to the newspaper offices, the university and the telephone exchanges. By dawn, the city was cut off from the world, the airport shuttling in an endless sea of strangers.

The first mosque began to burn.

The hydro went out as one by one major generator plants were blown in coordinated assaults. Radio stations and telephone exchanges, cell towers and bridges came under attack during the long night of terror. Kicking and screaming, Turkey was being dragged back into the Stone Age….

Word had to have leaked out, Gabriel thought as he looked down the draw of the valley. Even in a country that controlled its media, cell phone or an internet connection had to exist somewhere. No one could shut down a country completely. No matter how fast a squad of vampyres could travel, word had to have found its way out to the world beyond Turkey’s borders. He frowned down at the shrinking shadows, knowing that in those folds of land and rocks, an army of vampyres waited. If the vampyres were not concerned about word leaking out, it meant that something larger was going on in the world, something bad enough for the vampyres to feel they could move openly. And that thought sent a chill down the old soldier’s spine.

Even if word could get out, Gabriel knew it would not do any good – the nearest staging area would be in the Balkans with miles of enemy-held territory between them. A force would need wings to reach them in time, he thought as he turned to study their own lines. Or helicopters. The memories of Nam came back to him unbidden. Waves of helicopters flying above enemy-held jungles, dropping men and munitions where and when they willed. There were enough helicopters within reach, forces that belong to the NATO alliance – American, British, French and German – and Russian and dozens of friendly Middle Eastern nations. But who would have the political weight to pull all these forces together with little or no questions asked?

He looked up as he heard his name and saw Angel coming towards him. Gabriel waved at the angel to let him know he had seen him. They came together halfway between the wall and the buildings.

“I think I can get you out at first light,” Angel explained. “There is a fishing village down the coast.”

“Good,” Gabriel nodded. “Do you think the Vatican’s strictures about letting civilians know about the Brotherhood matters now?”

“I never saw the need,” Angel shrugged. “Jean-Claude always said it was about maintaining the balance – if the general populace panicked, we could have another witch hunt on a global scale. I always thought it was more to do with retaining control than with security.”

“If unscrupulous governments were to start harnessing demons as weapons,” Gabriel returned Angel’s shrug. “I don’t think I would even trust my own government.”

“Controlling demons -.” Angel stopped. “The kids. They would search for children like Ember. Hell, you mortals would turn peanut butter into a weapon if you could.”

Gabriel laughed. He had never heard the angel curse before. These must be the End Times indeed. Either that or those teenagers were corrupting even him.

“I never was much of a choir boy,” Angel muttered.

“I’ll be ready a half an hour before dawn,” Gabriel concluded. “If we survive another night.”

“Don’t worry,” Angel replied. “Wandjina says Jean-Claude has something cooked up for them tonight. I guess he’s another one who likes playing with ghosts.”

The second probing raid, because that was all these were, began with the rumble of diesel engines. When the first tank rolled out of the darkness, the sentries had raised a ragged cheer, mistaking them for a human relief column that had broken through – maybe the Turkish resistance. And then the first 88 mm gun opened up, slamming a shell into the ancient fortress. The alarms were not needed after the initial salvo, men and women rushing to the walls with nothing capable of stopping three tanks.

“What the…!” Gabriel breathed.

“This is new,” Alvaro replied dryly.

“When did they get so smart?” Cantara complained. “Ember, get down off the wall. You’re not going to take out a tank with your fists.”

“Look!” Ember ignored the djinn, pointing across the field. “Over there!”

Across the field, a glowing slit rent the air, leaving a rip in the time/space continuum until the scene looked like a painting with a tear in its canvas. It was unnerving. Not only did it make the foreground look like a painting, but it also made those watching feel like one-dimensional characters. She stepped out, silver and shimmering and translucent. She was so achingly beautiful that all firing stopped and silence fell over the battlefield. The Soul Leech came from an Earth where vampyres had hunted humanity into extinction and now hunted each other. In time her species had migrated, perhaps from Hell, perhaps from another planet, and had risen to become the dominant species. They existed for one purpose – consuming the souls of vampyres.

She paused in front of the lead tank. The Soul Leech was signing. From the wall, they could see her lips moving but could not hear her song. She sang only for the crew of the tank. As she sang, dust drifted up from the vent, an exhaust as wispy as a plume of cigarette smoke. A soul-rending banshee wail rose from the tank, a chorus of four or five voices filling the night air with their pain. She fed, and the dust became a plume so thick it looked from the walls as if the tank was on fire. She sang, and the wails of pain grew so loud those listening could not shut it out, no matter how they plugged their ears. She sang, and those who heard her song died.

The Soul Leech turned towards the second tank. It’s driver, realizing what was happening, put the tank in reserve, mowing down half a dozen of his own troops in his panic. It did no good. Her silver voice rose above the sound of the engine and the cries of the wounded and dying. Their sacrifice allowed the last tank to lead a panicked rout off the field.

Wandjina appeared singing a song of his own. Circling the Soul Leech, he dropped a small thread of woven reed as he danced and chanted. Starting slowly, a lazy sing-song that was strangely spell-binding, he moved about her without fear, entrancing her as she had entranced the vampyres. Faster and faster, he moved, spinning his web around the silver lady. And when the eye could no longer follow his motion, he and the Soul Leech disappeared. They had survived for another night.

April dragooned the girls to help with the twenty wounded and nine dead from tonight’s raid. Medical facilities and even supplies ran on the thin side, most of their medicine and equipment having been caught on the runway when the vampyres overran the airport. They had two surgeons and only one nurse, and barely enough equipment to set up a single operating theatre. Even with the Wiccans’ help, it was stabilize and get back to the patients later. And even then, they would lose several more patients before this was over.

Gabriel looked in on the wounded before meeting Angel. He felt guilty about leaving his troops behind like this, but as Grand Master of the Brotherhood, only he could muster its military wing in time. If it could be done.

Angel was waiting outside the main building. “You ready?”

Taking up his pack, he replied, “as ready as I’ll ever be.”

And with that, they were off. Angel flew up into the mountains to rise above the vampyres’ lines. Following the lay of the land around the base of the mountains, he flew above a small cliff face and away from the siege lines. Their destination was five miles down the coast, where a small isolated fishing village gave passage out to the Black Sea. Here a captain and crew waited to smuggle Gabriel to Greece. The flight itself was forty-five minutes as the angel flies. Before he could get used to un-planed flight, Gabriel was being set down on the dock by his pilot. With the morning sun streaming over the water, the setting was more suited for a postcard rather than a war zone. Already several men had risen, and their small boats dotted the bay.

In the foreground, a fair size fishing boat was getting ready to set sail. They had already missed the tide, and the captain was anxiously pacing the deck waiting for their passenger. After a quick goodbye, Gabriel rushed up the gangplank. Too right they had waited for him with what he was paying them for this passage. More than his weight in gold and enough to pay his way to the coast of Greece a hundred times over. Still, with what he had heard was happening in the interior of Turkey, he did not blame the captain and his crew for being anxious to be underway. A vampyre invasion was never pretty.

The passage, in daylight hours, was uneventful. Gabriel would not want to be out in these waters at night. Fishermen were telling him of miles of dead and rotting fish, and of catches that had shrunk to minnows and fingerlings. God alone knew what the Eaters of the Dead had left down there during their crossing, and not needing air like other living creatures, the Devil alone knew how many still lurked below.

In Greece, a contact met him at the dock. A short ride to a traditional airport soon saw him boarding an airplane, the only way man was meant to fly. He was even able to get himself a decent whiskey and a meal that almost filled that hole in his belly. Let’s see Angel top that. It was a Greek meatloaf with a hard-boiled egg in the middle that was surprisingly edible – at least more so than that breakfast Aiko had whipped him up. It was a good thing Alvaro was on a steady diet of blood, her cooking was enough to put a man off his feed for months. Face it, he needed new friends, and maybe this time someone from this world.

Touch down in Africa was a few hours later. His destination was a remote location in the bush, where the world’s only unexplored canyon hid one of the thirteen academies. The canyon was not much to look at, a mere hole in the ground rather than a miles long rent across the face of the Earth like the Grand Canyon. Some believed it to be the deepest since no man had ever climbed to its bottom, others that it was not a canyon at all – not even a gorge, only a hole. Blink at the wrong time, and you would fall into it head first before you realized it. Blink, and you might never hit bottom, only scream for the next hundred years.

Getting out to this hole in the dirt was his first difficulty. Unless he intended to walk the entire way, he needed to rent a four-by-four, and that wasn’t always possible, depending on the state of the economy and the stability of the government at any given time. Gabriel had not been by this way in over a decade and had begun to wonder if it might not be worthwhile hiring a guide. One patch of ground out in the African savannah looked much like another, and this area did not even have the decency to grow a tree or two for a landmark.

In the end, he decided to go it alone. Sometimes not having to explain was worth the extra time. How would he explain climbing into what many only half-jokingly referred to as the Maw of Hell? There was a reason why this Academy was located in such a remote location, and not all of it had to do with the instability of the region over the last four centuries. Africa was the cradle of civilization, and over its long history, more gateways to Hell had been opened here than on any other continent. More gateways translated into more demon incursions, and a need for greater vigilance. There lay the reason it was the only Academy ever to be attacked.

The drive out was not too bad. He reached the site as the sky was darkening into evening, and as he looked up, his thoughts were hundreds of miles distant to where his companions were facing their third night of siege. He wondered if they would face another assault tonight, and how they would hold it off? This new reliance the vampyres had on modern weapons had frightening implications. It was like the Russian Imperial Army encountering the Japanese after centuries of meeting nothing but swords and bamboo sticks. The surprise had caught them unprepared, and they became the first European army to lose a war to a non-European nation. Gabriel did not want to be the first Grand Master to lose a war to the vampyres.

His climbed down over the lip of the canyon was no more difficult than it would be for any man in his sixth decade. He did not worry about missing the Academy Zulu in the darkness, its sentries would find him long before he came close. Falling, perhaps forever, was another thing altogether.

A hand from the darkness touched his shoulder.

“Jumping Jehovahs, lad,” Gabriel complained. “You nearly gave me a heart attack. Give a body a little notice – a hello or a who goes there.”

“Visitors are not common here,” a pair of white teeth smiled at him.

“Diop, you old croc,” Gabriel breathed in relief. “I thought they would have fed you to an imp years ago.”

“They fed you to him first,” Diop deadpanned, “and it died of a sour stomach.”

“Is old Methuselah still running things?” Gabriel asked.

“Who else?” The other countered.

“Take me to him,” Gabriel instructed. “And quick. We are not all cliff apes!”

Climbing down to the academy involved a series of rope swings and one strand walkways, all easy to cut to prevent access, and just as easy to miss in the darkness. Gabriel had no qualms wearing the safety harness like any new cadet during their first three years here. It was a long bloody way down, and as far as anyone knew, the first man to fall was still falling. No man had ever been to the bottom to find out, Gabriel kept reminding himself, and he did not want to volunteer for the job.

The entrance to the Academy Zulu Africana was a small cave adit barely large enough for two men to fit through. Once beyond the forty-foot entrance tunnel, its walls and ceiling dotted with murder holes, the passage opened into a wide chamber where the Brotherhood guard could muster during an attack. Currently, a large contingent of cadets, plebes and Brotherhood monks stood guard. Since the severing from the Church, the Academy had been home to most of the Brotherhood’s African core – only those out on assignment or missing-in-action not currently housed here. It was, in a word, packed to the rafters.

The Academy was small, perennially short on space, and Gabriel was anticipating a cramped night in the back of his four-by-four. Such was the life of a Brotherhood soldier, living in the lap of luxury in exciting and exotic locales.

Methuselah had another name at birth – even he had forgotten it. He was so old his chestnut skin had a greyish tinge, and his hair had gone from silver to a translucent white. He was tougher than ancient mahogany and sharper than Damascus steel.

“Grand Master now is it?” Methuselah challenged.

“We all have our burdens to bear,” Gabriel replied, scowling. He never wanted to be Grand Master. He was a field commander plain and simple.

“And you require our help?” Methuselah replied, all teasing leaving his voice.

“I’m calling for a full muster,” Gabriel explained. “We have an opportunity in Turkey to end the war with the Vampyres once and for all. And with what we face in the near future we have to take the chance. Is there a place we can talk.”