Chapter 60

December Twenty-fifth 10:52 a.m. EST 4:52 p.m. local time

In the absolute darkness of a shipping container, Marcus's eyes came open. Through the thin metal walls of his shelter he could hear the alarmed and frightened voices of the sailors. A few seconds of eavesdropping told him both that they had finally arrived in Genoa and that he had come too late.

After freeing himself from the container, he slipped out of the ship's hold and into the city, slipping unseen through the population like a ghost. As he ran to the south, his body rippled and shifted into the form of the mastiff. On four legs, he made the four hundred kilometer run to Rome in slightly under two hours.

He began to encounter military patrols just outside of Torrevecchia, the northwest district of the Eternal City. He easily avoided the confused and terrified young men and women of the multinational force, but came to a stop when the city came fully into view. The sight of the thick columns of smoke and the heavy aroma of fear filled him with rage, anguish and despair.

Retaking human shape, he set course for the Pantheon. As he ran swiftly through the city, his arms broadened and thinned below the elbows, forming sharp, chitinous blades that were both stronger and more flexible than steel. When a feral crossed his path, a few rapid swipes of those blades separated heads and limbs from quartered torsos. This, however, was a relatively new section of the city, and he didn't linger to hunt down any of the lesser kin that he could sense down side streets and in nearby buildings.

The plaza in front of the Pantheon was sparsely populated with feeding ferals, and the large but ill-fitting bronze doors that gave access to the ancient building's cella hung broken in their frame. He spent a few moments reducing the ferals to quivering cubes of flesh and bone before entering the one-time temple that was now a church and the tomb of some of the city's most celebrated sons.

The interior was in shambles. A few dozen mortals had attempted to take shelter there beneath the dome, but ferals had smelled their fear and forced their way inside. The carnage was spectacular.

A muscle tightened in his jaw at the sight. He then vented his rage on the hapless ferals, slicing them into chunks far smaller than was necessary to snuff out their unnatural lives. Once the building had been cleared, he stood beneath the oculus and exercised his will. Blood ran in rivers toward the center of the room, carrying more solid gobbets along in the stream. When all the remains of ferals and humans had been gathered into a large mound in front of him, he made a sweeping gesture with his arms and forced the grisly refuse outside.

He spent a few minutes righting toppled statues and restoring torn tapestries before moving to the final resting place of Raphael. With a thought he caused the shattered pieces of the artist's bust to reassemble and fuse and then placed it back above the painter's tomb, his fingers tracing over features that didn't quite match his memory of the artist in life. When he was satisfied that he had erased all of the damage that he could, he moved to the bronze doors. With a groan of tortured metal, they straightened in their frame. Pulling them shut behind him, he went out into the plaza and dragged a delivery truck over to block access to the building until the crisis was over.

With a final loving caress down one of the sixty-ton granite columns that fronted the ancient temple, he went back into the night. He ran in ever widening circles around the Pantheon, clearing an area that soon encompassed Piazzo Campo de' Fiori and Piazzo Navona. He then backtracked to the northwest until he reached the bridge that led to the Castel Sant' Angelo.

A number of the ephemerals that currently inhabited his city were using the tomb turned Papal fortress turned museum as a stronghold. Heavily armed, they had mowed down a number of ferals that had attempted to cross the bridge, and reopened fire any time one of the beasts rose again. Marcus could not allow such careless spewing of lead in and near the monument. Besides, he needed to feed.

None of the defenders noticed when he came among them. One by one, they fell limply to the floor behind the ramparts as he absorbed that which gave them life. After tossing their weapons into the Tiber, he finished off the ferals that littered the bridge and surrounding area and then headed for the Coliseum.

After the Coliseum came the Baths of Caracella, followed by the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano and the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Ignoring the Galleria Borghese - the seventeenth century building was entirely too recent of an addition to be worthy of his attention - he then ran swiftly to Vatican City.

His arms returning to normal, he fell to his knees in front of the pile of rubble that marked the place where the Sistine Chapel had once stood. Tears of fury and grief ran down his cheeks, fueled by the lingering almond-like scent of the explosives that had been used to shatter the chapel's supports.

Although it was not anywhere close to being the oldest building in Rome, the chapel represented one of the few pieces of the city's history in which he had directly participated. Intrigued by the scope of the project, he had used his coercive abilities to gain a position as a plaster mixer on Michelangelo's night crew. Nearly every evening for almost four years, he had made his way through the labyrinthian corridors of the Apostolic Palace, exchanging jokes and small talk with the men who worked for Perugino, Botticelli, Rosselli and the other wall frescos painters, to the chapel. There, he had watched in awe as the Great Artist painted by the light of oil lamps.