Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [112]
He sat staring at the controls, and then looked up again at the faces. He recognized the ones closest. They were the faces of men and women he had fought beside while he was with Michael. They were the faces of slaves and victims he somehow remembered out of so many he had tried to free. All of them were dead now. He knew it instinctively, not just from their apparitional appearance, but from what he felt inside, too. They were ghosts, and they were there to haunt him.
But what did they want?
Two new faces came into view, sliding through the crowd until they were right up against the driver’s window. His throat tightened. It was his older brother Tyler and sister Megan, gone all these years, their faces unchanged, frozen in time. They stared at him blankly, dead-eyed and directionless, but aware, too. They knew he was there, inside the Lightning. Like all the others, they had come looking. Like all the others, their need was a mystery he could not decipher.
He squeezed his eyes shut. They were not going to disappear like Michael and his father. They were more than smoke and mist, more than insubstantial specters, more even than ghosts conjured by imagination. They were creatures of magic and spirit life, brought to him to achieve something, and they would not depart until he responded to their presence.
He opened his eyes and stared out at them. Sometimes you had to confront the dead as well as the living, the past as well as the future. Sometimes the two were so inextricably interlocked that there was little to distinguish between them. It was so here. Mountain spirits or something more insidious, there was a joining that reasoning and common sense could not undo.
He seized his staff, opened the door, and stepped outside the AV to confront whatever waited.
The outside air hit him with a blast of cold that nearly knocked him backward, an icy rush that cut right to his bones. The wind was blowing hard, something he hadn’t realized before because its force was having no effect at all on the ghosts crowded around him. They neither advanced nor gave way as he emerged, but held their ground and swung their blind gazes in his general direction. A few lifted their hands as if to touch him, but their efforts were feeble and more demonstrative of need than intention. Shivering in the sharp chill of the wind, he brought the black staff around in front of him, letting the natural light reflect off its surface. The wind howled in response—or perhaps it was the ghosts—and the deeply etched runes flared with inner light, with their infused magic, fiery and bright.
The spirits of the dead fell back, and for an instant Logan believed they would disperse. But in the distance behind them and farther up the road, a strange darkness had begun to gather. More ghosts were emerging from its roiling mass, pressing forward to join those already surrounding him. He watched them approach, half disbelieving what he was seeing, half recognizing the inevitable.
The dead had not appeared of their own volition; the dead never did. They were either summoned or sent; he knew that much from his time as a Knight of the Word.
But what was the source of the darkness to which they were responding?
He gripped the black staff and started forward, pushing through the gathering of spirits, their white emptiness giving way, their ephemeral presence dissipating and re-forming as he passed. Only a confrontation with their source would resolve what was happening. If he was to break free of this—whatever this was—he would have to face down the thing that was causing it, the darkness from which these spirits emerged. It hung thick and impenetrable as he approached, but even as he reached its edges he still could not put a name to it.
He brought up the staff, its magic already summoned and flowing over him in a bluish light, encasing him in its armor. He felt the warmth of its protection enclose him and was reassured. He lashed out at the blackness, ripping at it as he would a piece of cloth. It split apart