A Whisper of Southern Lights by Tim Lebbon

One
    THERE WAS HELL ON EARTH, but Gabriel did not care.
    It had been over two decades since his last meeting with the demon Temple. That had ended badly for both of them, and since then, Gabriel had been hiding in a dilapidated timber shack in the mountains of British Columbia. In that solitude, he had tended to his injuries and dwelled on the clashes past and those yet to come. His longevity had ceased to amaze him—the decades, the centuries rolled by—but the memory of his slaughtered family still shocked him numb. So long ago, so far away, and yet their deaths were fresh wounds on his soul. Something made sure of that. Made him remember afresh every day. He had defied time, and as if in revenge, time chose not to heal those dreadful wounds.
    But over the past three years, as war rolled from one continent and hemisphere to the next, Gabriel had begun searching again. Europe was on fire, the Far East was in turmoil, and it was a good time for evil.
    Gabriel knew that Temple would be out there. Drifting, plotting, killing when the mood took him, offering his services to those who could present the greatest satisfaction in return: a most challenging murder.
    So, Gabriel had immersed himself in the war, seeking Temple in every place he visited. He travelled to Europe on a ship carrying tanks and anti-aircraft guns. They dodged the U-boats stalking the Atlantic, and upon arrival in England, he went directly to France. The BEF had been harried back to the beaches and port of Dunkirk, and Gabriel worked his way inland as hundreds of thousands were rescued and ferried back across the English Channel. He sat in a hayloft in France and watched sixty British prisoners machine-gunned to death. The shooter was not Temple. In Belgium, he stalked a small group of British soldiers as they made contact with a fledgling resistance, but the demon did not join their fight. In Germany, there were a million places Temple could be, but Gabriel found him nowhere. In Dortmund, he heard whispers of a demon haunting the mountains of Switzerland, and he spent months following a shadow. Sometimes, his wounds started to ache and he thought he was close, and there was a mixture of fear and elation because he knew this could be the end.
It can’t go on forever,
he thought.
There must be an end, whether fate demands it or not.
He also knew that there must be a reason, but he had ceased trying to discern what it could be. The whispers dried up, the trail grew cold and he found himself edging farther eastward. In Russia, the war and cold killed millions, and Gabriel searched mountains of corpses for the man with many faces. He heard tales of an immortal fighting with the Russians at Stalingrad, and he spent weeks wandering that frozen, dying city. He walked its perimeter, dodging bullets and bombs and escaping capture by both sides. He saw corpses being eaten and men and women executed for theft. The place was next door to Hell, but he was fast, and he knew how to hide.
    He did not find Temple. And he began to despair.
    With hundreds of thousands dying each day in Germany, Russia, Britain, France, Italy, North Africa and the Pacific, where was he supposed to look for an assassin? He could wander the streets of bombed cities or the turned soil of death camps, but the chance of them crossing paths when whole nations were in turmoil was remote.
    It was early in 1942, whilst he sat in a bomb-blasted garden on the outskirts of a small village in southern Italy, that the land began talking to Gabriel for the very first time.
    He had always known the meetings between himself and Temple were far from coincidence. Something brought them together, something guided them, but it was never seen or heard, felt or touched. It was a trace left behind by the man with a snake in his eye, an echo of the carved tree trunks in that woodland clearing of centuries before. But Gabriel had never known its nature.
    With the sun scorching down and a soft breeze stirring the air