Under Pressure (Moonlight Detective Agency Book 4)

by Isobella Crowley

  There was no time to contemplate this since the man himself suddenly lunged from between two overturned desks. He’d finally reloaded his submachinegun one-handed and now aimed it at the troops.

  Russel’s men were faster. An SMG and a shotgun blazed to life, gouged chunks out of the bald guy’s broad torso, and hurled him against the wall, already dead by the time his other arm fell to his side.

  “Nice shooting,” Remy complimented them.

  When they reached the altar, Alice and Riley already seemed to be conferring on what to do. He somehow suspected that the men could see the fairy, now—they’d certainly seen Moswen, so it was very likely.

  At that moment, two of the other four Guardsmen rappelled in through the window and another two emerged from the cellar, having snuck in the back and worked their way up.

  Alice, Riley, Bobby, and Alex all looked confused.

  “It’s okay,” Remy told them, hurriedly, “they’re cool. What we need, though, is to know what the hell they can actually do. Besides…I dunno, maybe shoot Moswen enough to slow her down before Taylor stabs her with the dagger.”

  Riley perked up and her wings flapped faster than usual. “What if we can transfer the spell to those?” she suggested and pointed to the Guardsmen’s guns.

  The troops, for their part, looked antsy but otherwise resigned to the fact that they’d walked into something completely outside their past experience.

  “Well, ah…” Alice began, “I don’t know. The spell is mostly spent. There’s some residue left that still seems ethereally active. But the blood is the active ingredient and we’d need more, and even then, I’m not sure if the magical effects can be stretched like that.”

  The fairy was almost bursting with excitement as she said, “We have a way to extend spell effects. I could combine our magic and maybe make it work.”

  The radio crackled. The voice that came over, though, was not Kendra’s but Volz’s.

  “So,” he grunted, “I’ve been following the discussion, and I recalled that dwarven magic has some similarities to what you’re discussing, also. I might be able to advise you. Yes, I think it could be done. I’ll be right in.”

  Remy shrugged and his gut clenched as awful howls resounded from the other side of the hall. “Okay, let’s try it. Gilmore, if you hear this, let the short guy through.”

  “Roger,” Kendra acknowledged.

  “And,” the dwarf suddenly added, “I won’t even charge the agency extra for the service!”

  Wow, Remy thought. He’s growing more and more like his old self by the minute. Awesome.

  The girls leapt to work to gather any leftover spell components and pitch them into the earthen bowl, while the fairy and the witch discussed magic in technical terms he couldn’t even understand.

  Colonel Russel cleared his throat. “While we’re waiting for this divine boon or whatever it is, are you sure you don’t want us to simply shoot the damn monsters?”

  “Yes,” Remy said instantly. Conrad had wolfed out again, but Moswen handled both him and Taylor with disturbing competence. “Two out of the three are good monsters. Trust me.”

  “Crap,” Alice interjected. “Someone spilled the spare blood.”

  Remy snatched the bowl they’d used previously and scuttled over to a nearby thrall who was unconscious but bleeding copiously. He held the container under the flow and hurried back to her with a reasonable amount.

  “Good,” said Alice and returned to work with the pestle once she’d added it to the other mixture. The blood started to glow with the same white light that shone from Taylor’s dagger.

  A squat form barreled through the doors and ran with surprising speed down the length of the hall toward them.

  “Volz,” Remy exclaimed, “my man! I’m glad you could—”

  Conrad careened toward the dwarf and they almost collided but Volz ducked and rolled at the same time and narrowly avoided him. The werewolf whimpered and collapsed on a pile of rubble and fell unconscious.

  Now, it was only Taylor and Moswen.

  The dwarf, the fairy, and the witch hastily conferred in low voice over the bowl as Remy watched the duel of the vampires and the Guardsmen fidgeted in their half-terrified awe. Impressively, they maintained trigger discipline but were obviously eager to do something.

  In horror, Remy saw that Taylor had changed. Her white skin had turned a shade halfway between midnight-blue and charcoal-grey, and her eyes were totally red, her skull gargoyle-like and distorted. Her hands were webbed and sprouted blood-colored talons. A pair of leathery wings tipped with hook-like protrusions extended from her back, and the voice that emerged from her throat was not human.

  No longer a petite, dark-haired woman, she now resembled a demonic, humanoid bat-creature.

  Is this what she feared so much? Becoming a monster and not being able to come back? he agonized. Don’t make me have to fulfill that vow I made.

  “Ha!” Alice’s voice announced. “Success! You military guys, gather around, now. I don’t think you’ve ever seen firepower quite like this.”

  Remington glanced back as the men popped the magazines out of their guns and Alice and Bobby dabbed the bullets within with the enchanted substance. It only took a speck of it for each weapon, and when they reloaded, the entire weapons began glowing faintly with a bluish-white light. He merely hoped the bullets would confer enough of the power that they didn’t have to run up and club Moswen with the butts.

  And that they’d have a chance to take a clear shot.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  New York Public Library Main Branch, Midtown Manhattan, New York

  Remy looked at the troops. Russel and his men were, for the moment, awed by the effects of the spell.

  “Man,” said the guy with the repeating shotgun, “this is trippy. These are still going to…uh, fire, right?”

  “They should.” Alice shrugged. “It’s not like I plugged the barrels or gummed up the internal moving parts.”

  The colonel stepped forward. “Right, then. Prepare to take ʼem out.”

  Remy spun toward him. “No, goddammit! You’ll hit Taylor. The one who looks like a…bat-woman-thing. She’s on our side!”

  Russel’s jaw muscles tightened. and his eyes narrowed. “They both look like godawful monsters from hell who have no business in our goddamn library,” he stated flatly.

  With a glance over his shoulder at the pair of vampires, he saw, with mounting alarm, that Moswen had brought an elbow down on Taylor’s neck to half-crush her on the floor and that now, she looked toward the humans.

  Her eyes, blazing yellow, glowed with an even more awful intensity and she suddenly gestured with a clawed hand.

  All around the hall, her thralls—the five or six who were only wounded or unconscious—sprang up, once again animated by her malicious will. The Egyptian had realized that Russel’s men were there to kill her, and she intended to neutralize them while she killed Taylor herself.

  “Shit!” Russel growled. “Remington, out of the way!”

  One of the servants pounced on him, and he realized it was the guy with the buzzcut whose head he’d used to disassemble a chair. The bastard wasn’t dead, after all. He wound his arms around Remy’s neck and chest from behind and grunted while he blinked half-congealed blood from his eye.

  The investigator caught his arm and tried to throw him over his shoulder, but he didn’t quite have the right angle and the man headbutted him in the side of the face. He didn’t manage to put much force into it, but he happened to connect with the shiner he had acquired earlier at the morgue.

  “Fuck!” he exclaimed and struggled to free himself.

  The guy was strong, but he had been injured badly enough earlier that now, he was running on proverbial fumes. Moswen’s command literally forced his body to do things it ought not to be capable of.

  Remy jerked his right foot back, twisted it behind the man’s ankle, and threw himself straight back to trip the man and crush him as they
both impacted with the floor. He rolled off immediately, slugged the thrall hard in the jaw before he could react, and managed to send him back to dreamland.

  His opponent successfully thwarted, he dashed toward the rear of the hall and cleared himself from the line of fire as the other thralls circled the walls and columns. Russel’s men took potshots but were unable to cut loose as yet.

  From this new vantage point, he finally had a clear look at Taylor and Moswen, and his gut roiled with tension and primitive dread at the sight of their battle.

  This, then, was what had happened in the depths of the subway tunnel near the warehouse. It was the awful clash between ancient and terrible monstrosities that had left his partner almost dead and driven Moswen into remission for weeks. Finally, it had inspired Taylor to fly halfway around the world simply to put an end to her own nightmares.

  The slavering jaws drooled. Knife-like claws slashed and jabbed. Bizarre protrusions from their mutated bodies whipped or joined in the effort to slay one another. Not only could his eye barely follow the speed and ferocity of the movements, but his brain constantly tried to reject the horror of what he saw.

  He soon identified another problem. Taylor, in her increasingly maddened and frenzied need to rip Moswen limb from limb, had almost forgotten about the dagger. Stabbing the Egyptian with it did not seem to be a priority.

  In that moment, the thralls pounced. Their dark forms moved in but the Guardsmen’s guns blazed and roared as they tracked their movements, and clouds of vaporized blood filled the air as half of them were annihilated.

  It looked as though the bullets, like the guns themselves, glowed with luminous ether.

  The surviving thralls retreated as quickly as they’d attacked. In the opening, Remy ducked out into the hall and stared at the vampires, waving his arms over his head.

  “Taylor!” he shouted, desperate to get her attention. Somehow, he had to pull her enough out of her battle-rage to take notice of him and to bring back enough of her humanity to reason with her.

  Another thrall—one of those whom Conrad had knocked unconscious earlier—lurched from underneath a reading table to Remy’s right and shouted in fury.

  He pivoted away and to the side, evaded the man’s powerful but obvious swing, and seized his arm and collar in the same motion. With as much strength as he could muster, he hurled the thrall head over heels behind him. As he jogged forward, the air cracked behind him when one of Russel’s men opened fire to drop the thrall where he stood.

  The space before his vision opened again to disclose the terrible struggle between the two vampires. Both become almost totally bestial and their strange and ungainly forms thrashed and stamped around. The white glow of the dagger flashed now and again amidst the movements of the dark forms.

  The taller form of Moswen, a terrible Egyptian tomb-statue come to life, seemed to gain the upper hand and almost crushing the other while she loomed above. Her jackal’s ears perked up while her snake’s tongue trailed hideously from drooling jaws.

  But the smaller and even more energetic shape that was Taylor shifted from under her adversary. Her barbed bat-wings slashed at Moswen’s arms, her red eyes crazed and wolf-like snout snarling in defiance.

  They’ll kill each other. Remy was close to despair.

  “Taylor! Taylor!” he shouted again. “Don’t make me fulfill my vow because so help me, I will. You’re better than that, though!”

  Behind him, the few remaining thralls converged on Russel and his men. “Hurry!” one of them yelled between well-placed gunshots.

  The undead bat-creature finally looked at him. As she turned her head, she withdrew the dagger and held it before her breast.

  It saved her life. Moswen, seeing her opening, plunged her claw toward her opponent’s heart, but the twisted hand stopped as if it had struck an invisible boundary and seemed to flash with white flame. The jackal-beast shrieked in awful pain.

  “Now, Taylor!” Remy bellowed.

  The hand holding the dagger lashed out in the next moment, the sacred knife was no longer in its mistress’ hand but buried to the hilt in the center of Moswen Neith’s chest. Air seemed drawn from every corner of the room in a brief silence like that which came before a thunderclap.

  He raced toward Taylor, held her gaze, and mouthed the words, “Trust me.”

  The Egyptian screamed when she recognized what had befallen her, the sound so cacophonous that it almost knocked him over. It was terrifyingly suffused with hate and pain and mindless animal panic.

  Remy launched himself at Taylor, his arms out.

  The vampire cringed and hissed as he bowled into her, wound his arms around her arms and wings in a warmly powerful hug, and pulled her away. She did not resist, thankfully. Understanding seeming to dawn within the ruby eyes, and the two of them catapulted a few yards and rolled away.

  As they moved away from Moswen, Remy briefly saw the other vampire claw desperately at the dagger, but she seemed unable to touch it of her own volition and moved as if underwater. Coils of blazing white light encircled her body to trap her and burn away her strength.

  “Now!” Colonel Russel ordered. “Open fire!”

  The deafening roar of at least half a dozen guns fired at once filled the chamber and drowned out even the Egyptian’s final scream of agony. Remy came out of his roll on the floor beside Taylor and snapped his head up.

  Their adversary staggering back as streaks of white light—the trails of Teremun al-Harb’s holy power clinging to bullets and pellets and slugs—tore into her, cut through her, and destroyed her like the rabid animal she was.

  Then, as Russel himself drew his pistol and fired it into her forehead, she exploded. Her demoniac body simply burst apart into a thousand burning chunks that already turned to the ash and dust that millennia should have reduced her to.

  An angry, yellowish-amber light seemed to rise from the shower of debris like an avenging phantom, only for the white glow of the binding spell to engulf and dissolve it and blot it out. In an instant, it was gone forever.

  Silence filled the library.

  “Oh,” Alice gasped, far away in the corner. “Oh, my. It’s over, isn’t it?”

  One of the soldiers began to laugh, a low, dry sound as the adrenaline in him crested and crashed to leave him glad to simply be alive.

  “Yes,” said Russel, “I think it is.”

  The investigator sat and his face suddenly split into a big, stupid grin. “Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “Six out of five stars. Better than expected—would recommend!”

  He extended a hand, his thumb sticking straight up.

  Chapter Thirty

  New York Public Library Main Branch, Midtown Manhattan, New York

  The smoke cleared and Remy heaved himself to his feet, groaning with the efforts of a long day. The partial beating he’d taken from Buzzcut the Thrall and his bump on the head earlier also seemed to come back to haunt him now that the adrenaline was wearing off.

  The National Guardsmen and their commander were chuckling, clapping each other on the shoulders, and in general, admiring their handiwork.

  Russel’s face had taken on a wistful, almost dreamy cast, and his nostrils opened wide to receive the aromas. “Ahhh,” he sighed. “The smell of gunfire. It’s been too long, my friends.”

  Remy turned to the side, looking for Taylor. He saw a dark form, briefly, crawling behind a column and then up the wall, seeking refuge in the farthest, darkest corner of the hall.

  Is she okay? She’s not badly wounded, is she? Damn. She probably only needs a minute to herself after everything that went down.

  For a moment, he was almost sick with worry and concern. But Taylor had recovered from both severe physical damage and massive psychological trauma before. He would check on her soon. But for now, he trusted that she had herself under control.

  He trudged toward the rear corner where everyone had congregated in a loose crowd.

  Bobby stepped forward. “Well, Mr Remington,”
she commented and shook her head slowly, “I never thought I’d see anything like this when I signed up to be your receptionist. Even the Inquirer couldn’t have predicted this. It’s been…interesting.”

  He smiled and put a hand on her forearm. “That’s one way to put it. I wasn’t sure how you’d handle all this, but, well… I don’t think we could have done it without everyone doing their part.”

  Moving past her, he came to Riley and Alice, who were already in the early stages of another magical discussion.

  “I don’t know,” the witch admitted. “It was only supposed to be a binding spell, but it seemed that it weakened Moswen severely in the process. That probably had something to do with it.”

  “Yes,” the fairy agreed, “I think so. We mixed different kinds of magic—yours, mine, and Volz’s—but on the same frequency, so it probably tripled the power of the spell and made her completely defenseless.”

  Volz grinned. “Once again, dwarven ingenuity turned the tide. Hah!”

  Remy added his two cents’ worth. “And a barrage of that kind of firepower, besides, would have done about the same thing to a normal human without magic involved. I don’t think we’ll even need to worry about entombing her, after all. Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure she’s flat-out dead.”

  Alice’s eyes went distant for a second, then she nodded. “Almost certainly. There’s no way she can physically revive in her current, uh…state.” She glanced at the pile of cinders across the hall.

  Looking back at Remington and Riley, she added, “And the residual effects of the magic seem to have completely dispersed her spirit. Still, I’d suggest we bury her remains as originally planned, just to be safe.”

  “Okay.” He shrugged. “Someone will have to find a push-broom and a nice big bucket.”

  He glanced at Alex, who had basically passed out by now, slumped against the wall and drooling on the floor. He would have been an excellent candidate for the job if he wasn’t intoxicated beyond all reason. Hell, he might even enjoy being able to personally confirm that Moswen Neith was now fertilizer and well past the point of ever hurting him again.