Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [103]
“You think so?” he said. “Yes, my gift to the world kills many of the weak dullards who people this world, but that was just a side effect of its true purpose. They weren’t its real target. I trained my influenza to affect Fables in a different way, and it’s already done its work among you. Don’t you know me by now, witch? I don’t kill outright when I can attack you through your offspring. My bug has wormed its way in and taken all of your children away from you — not those you’ve already had, but those you might have had from now on. Fabletown is barren, old woman, from this day forward. Call it the most oft-repeating motif in the never-ending concerto of my life. I steal children. That’s what I do. That’s what you created me to do.”
“Then that’s what I’ll undo when I take Fire back from you.” The witch spread her thin arms and gathered all of her fell powers around her. Max raised Fire to his lips, but he was too late.
Outside, over the past hour, black storm clouds had piled up over the city, building in fury. Now they released it. Ten thousand windows shattered from the thunderblasts, and hard rain pounded down from the heavens. The fevered and infirm thrashed in their sickbeds, crying out from nightmares, and then died in greater numbers that night than ever before. A dozen fires were started by lightning strikes throughout the five boroughs. Murders and suicides increased by a factor of ten, and a hundred other deaths were attributed to inexplicable acts of God. But no god played any part in them. Every calamity in the city was caused by the overflow of dark energies emanating from a gray stone castle on Central Park.
The battle lasted for hours, and the forces it unleashed spilled over into other worlds as well. Great strongholds shuddered and cracked, releasing ancient and fearsome beasts, things long bound and imprisoned, to wander again through dark lands, feeding and destroying wheresoever they went. Ripples of terrible possibility spread out from the battle’s epicenter, birthing new horrors that had never existed before.
By dawn, long after the spent storms had dissipated, city firemen found that the castle named Twilight had been razed while its former occupants, masters and servants alike, were discovered more than a mile away, huddled together, dead in the park. The firemen uncovered evidence that a fire had blazed so hot through the night that the mansion’s stones themselves had begun to burn. And, most bizarrely, at the center of the destruction they found a little old lady in a green print dress, unconscious but unharmed.
It was more than a year before she woke up. In that time she’d been identified by relatives, with impeccable credentials, who quietly had her transferred to a private clinic in town. Her first words upon waking were, “I couldn’t beat him.” Later, among those most trusted in Fabletown, she’d had the opportunity to elaborate. “He was too strong, so ultimately, the best I could do was to open a door that sent him tumbling into the deepest abyss and then away through the farthest netherworlds. He’ll likely be a long time finding his way back, but he will return, for I fear nothing in any realm can harm him now.”
Then she remarked, “And know now that it’ll be much worse the next time, because he’s sampled all that I could bring against him. Even as I kept his own attacks at bay, I could perceive him studying mine, learning from them.”
The last dreg of the influenza had played itself out in the meantime. Armistice was signed in Europe, the boys came home, and all of the nations of the world vowed to make war no more, because at last