He hissed icy air in through his teeth and stood up straight, spine rigid.
“Walker?” Father Cornelius asked, reaching for his arm.
The evil slid into him so easily, as if it had blazed a trail before and now possession had become effortless. Walker screamed, but only inside. On the outside, he felt the grin that tore the edges of his mouth and he heard the laugh that came from his own throat.
Mr. Avci pointed a gun at his temple, too close to miss, and Walker felt gratitude and transcendence. Inside, he waited for the bullet. Outside, he heard Kim shout and saw her lunge and knock Avci’s gun hand aside. The gunshot echoed off the mountain, the sound bouncing around inside the maelstrom.
Walker could taste the blood seeping from the torn edges of his mouth, but he could not control his hands as he reached out and grabbed Father Cornelius’s skull in his hands. The demon relished that moment, and Walker felt its pleasure.
“Good-bye, holy man,” it said through him.
Father Cornelius clawed at him, trying to fight back.
The priest yanked back a fist and Walker caught a glimpse of frayed twine and of the black shard that dangled from it. He gasped as he felt the sudden release, and fell to his knees as the demon left him. Left him utterly. A giddy relief swept him and he threw his head back and gazed with love at Father Cornelius, not caring about the pain at the corners of his mouth or the taste of his own blood.
“Thank you,” he said, staring at the priest but thinking of Charlie. Thinking of the life he’d given up hope of living. “Father, thank you so—”
The priest’s eyes glittered with orange light.
Father Cornelius snarled as he turned on Kim. She swore and began to stagger backward, but he struck her with a blow that sent her sprawling off the trail. Mr. Avci raised his gun again, but the priest grabbed him by the wrist and twisted, snapping bone. Avci shrieked in pain and the gun fell into the snow.
Walker drew his own gun, aimed it at the old priest’s face.
Father Cornelius laughed. The sound came from somewhere far away, like the hideous whisper in a nightmare from which there could be no waking.
“Go on, then,” the demon said. “Murder another one.”
Walker gripped the gun. His chest ached as it rose and fell. The copper tang of blood in his mouth made him want to retch. He hesitated two seconds, perhaps three, but then the old priest turned and sprang away from them, darting into the snow with strength and speed no man could have.
He pulled the trigger. The priest had already become a ghost in the storm, but Walker saw him stagger as the bullet caught his right shoulder. The wound did not slow him. Walker fired twice more, but by the time the echo from those shots faded, the figure had vanished completely, lost in the swirl of frozen white.
Father Cornelius was gone.
TWENTY-ONE
An hour or so later—it was difficult for Meryam to keep track of time now—she fell to her knees in the snow. Adam tried to help her up. Failing that, he tried to comfort her, but she weakly pushed his hands away, sucking air in through her nose. She whispered tiny prayers, quiet pleas, not caring what facet of God might be listening but hoping some higher power would hear her, and take her pain away. Take her fear and regret.
Instead, her stomach convulsed and she retched, heaving a torrent of stinking vomit into the snow. She hadn’t eaten much, but it was all there, along with plenty of stomach acid and a smattering of blood. It relieved her to know that Adam wouldn’t see that blood—people had an instinctive urge to look away from vomit. There would be no questions about that blood. It occurred to her that he might not have asked even if he’d seen it. They both knew the cancer had invaded her, that it was eating her from within, slowly killing her. The demon from the ark had not been the first poison, the first evil, to infect her.
“Hey,” he said in her ear. Gently. Kindly.
His hand had rested on her shoulder and she hadn’t even noticed. Now she leaned into him, shuddering as she choked back her tears. She took his hand and began to rise.
“Meryam, you can rest,” Adam said, studying her face. “We have time.”
She steadied herself on him and stood, holding on as a gust of wind tried to push her backward. “We don’t have time.”
Adam held her face in his gloved hands. Nose wrinkling at the taste of bile in her mouth, she tried to smile at him in spite of the balaclava covering most of her features. She had come to hate the storm and the heavy clothing that erased so much of their identity.
“We threw the charms away,” he reminded her, and then he turned toward the others, who had stopped a respectful distance away while she puked up her guts. “All of us. It’s been an hour or more and it hasn’t come after us again. More than that… I can feel it and I know you can, too.”
She was still turning it all over in her mind, trying to make rational sense of the theory Kim and Walker had presented. The way they’d worked it out, the demon’s spirit had been trapped inside the coffin and its bitumen encasement. Its malevolence had settled into the bitumen, had driven the people on the ark insane and possessed them and forced them to murder and despair, just as it had done to the people Meryam and Adam had brought into the ark thousands of years later. Adam had suggested the possibility that it had been inert, somehow—almost hibernating—but that they had woken it by breaking the encasement around its coffin.
The rest—what Walker believed about the demon influencing Olivieri, convincing them to wear the charms—that much seemed irrefutable. Back inside the ark, the demon had grown strong enough to influence or possess whoever it wanted. Now, this far from the place where its remains had been turned to cinders, it could still exert its evil, but it could only possess someone who remained connected to it through contact with one of those bitumen shards.
Meryam glanced at Walker and Kim, and poor Mr. Avci cradling his broken hand against his body. Mr. Avci didn’t need her sympathy. He was still alive. They all were—him and Walker and the brilliant, lovely Kim Seong, and even Adam—the four of them were going to make it. Meryam might still be walking, but she was just as dead as the people they’d left bleeding in the snow. The others were going to live. They were the survivors, not her. And she hated them for it.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, noticing for the first time that the blizzard had calmed. The snow still fell and the wind still blew, but not with the same level of rage. “I’d like to think it can’t get inside us now, but even if that’s true, Father Cornelius is still out there. So are Hakan and Calliope, if they’re alive. So we’re not safe. Not yet.”
Adam gave a curt nod. He didn’t want to hear it—she knew that. Adam wanted her to let him pretend the danger had passed, but Meryam could not give him that. No matter how much she loved him.
“Let’s go,” Adam said.
He slid an arm around her and helped her along the trail. Meryam would have liked to do it on her own, but they both knew she could not. Her strength had ebbed so low that she barely knew where she was going at this point, and throwing up had weakened her further. So she leaned against him, and nothing mattered but the touch of his body against her and her living long enough to make sure he got out of this. That was the engine that drove her, the fire that burned inside—making sure Adam made it home alive.
“I love you,” she rasped, but the wind kicked up and her voice betrayed her.