The eyes were what you remembered, Robert wrote. Hard as steel, so cold you could feel them burn your skin, but empty of everything human when they looked at you.
There were rumors about him even before Robert’s letters. A demon whose special skills lay in tracking down Knights of the Word, he had been hunting and killing them for years. She did not know how many the old man had dispatched besides Robert, but it was more than a handful. Eventually he would come hunting for her.
But she would not be so easily trapped, she thought, and her hands tightened anew on her staff.
She darted from her hiding place and sprinted back down the street and then onto a side street, dodging debris and the shells of burned-out cars to reach the entrance to the hotel that lay just outside the Anaheim compound perimeter.
*
FIFTY YARDS BACK from where the once-men battered at the main gates of the compound, the old man stood watching. Wrapped in his gray cloak and shadowed by his slouch-brimmed hat, he had the look of Gandalf until you got close enough to see his face and feel the weight of those eyes. Then you knew for certain he wasn’t a wizard seeking to convey the One Ring to Mount Doom, but a creature fallen under its terrible spell, his soul forever lost.
The old man didn’t know about Gandalf or the One Ring and wouldn’t have cared about either if he had. He was a demon, and humans were his prey. He had been there at the fall, when the first real cracks had begun to appear in civilization’s weakening facade. He had been there in the time of Nest Freemark, when the gypsy morph had come into being. He had been there for centuries before that, a constant presence in the fabric of the world. He had been there long enough that he had forgotten completely the shedding of his human skin. As a demon, he viewed humankind as anathema, a plague upon the earth, an infection that required eradication.
But the old man was different from others of his kind. He was driven not by base instincts. Most demons self-destructed early and spectacularly, turned mad by their emotional excesses. His own struggle was of a different kind. He was not motivated by a desire for revenge or personal gratification or to prove himself or leave his mark upon the earth. What drove him, what consumed him as no fire could, was an insatiable desire to expose the deep and pervasive failings of humanity, and so prove irrefutably that his choice to remove himself from the species had been the right one.
He had made the decision early on to trade his humanity for a demon soul.
He had never felt comfortable in his temporal skin, never accepted that he was meant to be nothing more than a brief presence in the firmament of life, here for only a moment, gone forever. Embracing the Void was a fair exchange for the depth of power his new identity offered, and he had never regretted his decision. He found his demon life fascinating. He was given countless opportunities to explore the nature of his former species. Peel back the layers of their skin and the discoveries proved endlessly surprising. All that was needed on his part was to figure out fresh ways to go about testing his theories.
It had taken him centuries to find the perfect way, but in the end, with the collapse of civilization, he had done so.
The slave camps had been his idea, his laboratory for experimentation.
Breeding and genetic alteration could tell you so much about a species. The possibilities were unlimited; the results were quite astonishing.
It was amazing to him even now what he had been able to do. Destruction of the human race was the ultimate goal, but there was no reason to rush the process.
Still, he was growing weary. His studies had been long and difficult, and he no longer possessed the physical or mental strength that had served him so well in the beginning. Neither the intensity of his purpose nor the hard edge of his determination had diminished. But time had drained the reservoir of his energy and, in truth, his interest in humans was waning. He was beginning to see them differently these days. They had become more of a distraction than an opportunity. There were only so many ways you could examine them, force them to reveal themselves. Sooner or later, they simply ceased to have importance.
He had even put aside his Book of Names, the list he had so carefully compiled of all those he had killed or caused to be killed over the centuries.
Somewhere along the way, not so long ago, he had simply lost interest in record keeping. The dead no longer mattered to him. Now it seemed that even the living didn’t matter. He was reaching the point at which he’d have to forgo experimentation and simply get on with extermination.
He looked at the once-men that attacked the compound gates.