Read Online A Whisper of Southern Lights by Tim Lebbon - Free Book Online Page B

rolled onto my back and scurried backward, trying to hide the grave with my body while brandishing the bayonet.
    Gabriel stumbled his way through the bushes. He was bleeding and battered, rips in his clothing matching the rents in his flesh beneath. But there was something in his expression that set my skin afire. Something like victory.

Thirteen
    “IT CAN’T END LIKE THIS,” Gabriel said. He lay staring at the sky, the piercing blue framed by the tops of trees. Birds spotted the sky, their shadows distorted by heat. “It can’t end like this.”
    This journey had a reason. Its culmination had meaning. It was not simply another chase to reach some unfortunate assassination victim before Temple. Gabriel had been on countless quests like that, and many of them had ended badly for him. But this had been different. Amidst so much chaos and pain and death, he had allowed himself to hope. Something had muttered to him in that garden back in Italy—the land, the voice of history, or maybe God—and he had foolishly assumed that this would finally give him an advantage over the demon.
    But there was no advantage over Temple. He was a monster. As he held Gabriel down and drove the bamboo point into his stomach, he had whispered in his ear, telling Gabriel about the noises his family had made as they died, the pleas, the tears they had shed.
    Gabriel’s thrashing simply made the pain worse.
    He raised his head and looked down at the bamboo protruding from him. Two in his stomach, one through the meat of each thigh, all of them driven into the damp ground to pin him there like an exhibit. Temple had fooled him into dropping his defences. Flashed him his hand, asked Gabriel what scared him, while all the time they both knew what would appear there.
    “Bastard!” Gabriel shouted.
    He would not die. He had taken a lot more than this and survived, and something had happened to him all those centuries before to ensure that he would always be there to pursue Temple. But though he would not die, neither would he live again in peace.
    Peace. A strange idea. Gabriel guessed that if he did ever defeat the demon, he might have a day of peace before time finally caught up with him. It was a day he craved more than any in existence.
    He reached down and grabbed one of the sticks piercing his stomach. It was slick with his sprayed blood. He tried to pull, but the pain was too much, and he knew that he would be far too late.
    As Temple had entered the jungle in pursuit of Jack Sykes, Gabriel had asked him the question that had been vexing him for days: “Why did you come here?”
    “Same reason as you,” Temple had replied. “I was sent.”

    Gabriel had never seen a ghost.
    He heard nothing, but he sensed the movement from the corner of his eye. He turned and looked across the surface of the ground. There was a body obscuring his view, the eyes long since taken away by rats or lizards. Beyond that, the air at the edge of the clearing shimmered as a tall shape appeared.
    Gabriel closed his eyes. Was he really dying? Would he at last meet his wife and children again?
    When he looked, he saw Jack Sykes standing there, dead. His eyes were wide and shocked, his throat ripped out, and his expression told that he had been driven insane before death.
    “What did you see, Jack?” Gabriel asked.
    The ghost walked across the clearing. At first, it seemed solid, but it passed through a dead man hanging low between two squat trees. It paused for a second, tilting its head as though it had heard screaming.
    Why come back here?
Gabriel thought.
Not for me.
Surely not for me.
    He looked around, expecting to see Temple appear at any moment to revel in another victory. But he guessed that the demon knew nothing about this ghost. He was used to his victims going down and staying down. Fear did that to a soul.
    “Can you hear?” Gabriel whispered. “Can you speak?”
    The ghost ignored him. It moved across the clearing and paused before a man crucified