by S T Branton
“Thank Kronin,” I said. “How many were there?”
“Kind of a lot of people, actually.” She looked up and to the left as she recalled the memory. “At least eight. Maybe as many as ten. They were all dressed pretty much the same, and I think they were mostly men, if not all of them.”
I tried not to think about that too hard. “Did you see anything on the inside?”
She shook her head. “They had an access door, but I was too chicken to make my way in. I’m not nearly as strong as you, and I don’t have a super-sweet sword. In Were mode, I’m pretty damn strong, but I can’t fully trust myself yet not to lose control. I didn’t want to risk her getting hurt. It’s weird coming from a Were, but I’ll always rather be safe than sorry.” She fidgeted slightly. “Hopefully someday I’ll be better at this and can actually help in a meaningful way.”
“What are you talking about?” I touched her shoulder. “You’ve already helped me like crazy. Who was the one who busted me out of that apartment the other day? I saw that whole fight from where I was sitting. You kicked some serious ass.”
Maya laughed sheepishly. “I was just doing what had to be done.” She glanced at me, worried. “Speaking of, what are we going to do now? I wish I had more details to give you, but I can say it didn’t look very good.”
“The only thing I can do. I go rescue her.” I peered around the edge of the cardboard cutout’s shoulder, as if I could really glean anything at all from the massive, formless crowds. “Give me the address, then head back to the loft.” The fact that my best friend had been compromised and possibly hurt because of me filled me up with an unrelenting rage. I wasn’t sure who yet, but someone was going to pay for this.
“I’ll just take you there,” Maya said. “Come on. Let’s go while you’ve still got your freedom.”
I hesitated. “I don’t know if you should come. It’s going to get hot, real hot.”
Maya shook her head. “I appreciate that. Really. But this isn’t something you can just run into by yourself. And you don’t want to waste all that training you put me through…or do you already forget that I almost kicked your ass a few days ago?”
I paused, looking around the toy store. “You have a point, but there’s something I haven’t told you.”
“Oh, yeah,” Maya whispered. “What’s that?”
“I was hardly trying.” We exchanged smiles, and I could feel an ounce of tension leave my shoulders. “All right, let’s get the hell out of here.”
***
Leaving FAO Schwarz, I followed Maya through the bustling crowd of midtown. Thankfully, I was hidden in plain sight. Once out on Fifth Avenue, Maya hailed a cab. I hopped in, keeping my head low, the visor of the Mets hat covered my eyes. I wanted to hear everything, but wisdom told me to keep my trap shut for the duration of the ride into Brooklyn. The cab slowed, and Maya dropped the driver some cash, telling him to keep the change.
The faded sign above the boarded-up shop window proclaimed the building to be a music store, but it was clearly not that anymore. Even the boards were old and stained, some of them warping from exposure.
I cased the place as thoroughly as I could without arousing immediate suspicion. Maya’s initial observation had been more or less completely accurate—the only point of entry was a small window on the side, through which I could see almost nothing.
“I think a lot of them must have left,” Maya whispered. “There’s way less ambient noise in there now. You want to take our chances with it? This might be the best-case scenario right here.”
“Okay.” I was already palming the heavy hilt of my sword, eyeing the spot where the Gladius Solis could slice away a clean section of the pane. The glass fell in, sending a crash through the silence. “So much for stealth.”
But we did it anyway, climbing through the glass-studded frame. As it turned out, the store space inside was so open and yet so small that stealth would have been nearly impossible without the use of some serious god-magic. Neither of us had that, so we found ourselves face to face with a bunch of vamps just hanging out together behind the boarded windows.
A single chair occupied the room directly in front of the main display area. Pieces of rope and tape hung off the sides and the back, but it was empty. I knew in my heart that she had been kept there the same way I thought she’d been kept in Dorias’s apartment with me. Only now, I knew her ordeal had been much longer and likely more terrifying than I anticipated.
“Well, well, well.” A gap-toothed vamp moved toward me, grinning. He was greasy and pale, hanks of lank black hair hanging over his face. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
I glared daggers into his smug, sallow countenance. “What did you do with her?” The Gladius Solis stood at attention in my hands. I was already sinking into a fighting stance.
“Who?” The rat bastard played dumb, but he glanced knowingly at the chair as he spoke. “You mean the blonde chick? You just missed her.” His smirk turned cruel. “She was a tasty little treat. Almost too bad the boss made us keep her alive.”
“Where is she?” I willed my body not to tremble with rage.
“Let me guess,” he said. “If I tell you, you won’t kill me. That’s not the kind of deal I’m into. You get a lot more bargaining power when you’re harder to kill.”
“Fine by me,” I said. “Let’s do this the old-fashioned way.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Right on cue, Maya’s howl pierced the air, drawing the attention of several vamps. They descended on her, flocking behind me to neutralize the new and unknown threat. Undaunted, she grabbed the first oncoming vamp she saw and threw him across the room. His body cracked into the far wall and fell to the floor, unmoving.
“Would you look at that?” I observed. “I guess there’s more than one way to kill you guys, isn’t there?” I didn’t turn to look at Maya, but I could hear her wreaking all kinds of havoc with that absurdly long Were reach. My vamp stared transfixed over my shoulder, brushing a lock of his gross hair out of his face. I thought he was impressed, maybe even afraid. Then he laughed.
“That thing is your backup? This is going to be even easier than I thought. The boss warned us you might be coming and that you’d have that overrated toy sword. Didn’t say anything about a mangy bitch to go with it.”
I scowled. “She’s making pretty short work of your buddies from the sounds of it.” I hazarded a quick glance over my shoulder and saw Maya flinging vampires around like Mardi Gras beads. “I can’t exactly say I’m intimidated.”
He laughed some more, his sharp face twisting with amusement. “That doesn’t mean shit. After we lost so many men hunting down that idiot out west, Lorcan had to make more. So a lot of these guys are young blood. Fresh meat, if you will. They’re gonna get cut like grass under that sword of yours.”
“And what makes you think you won’t?” I asked him. My blade blazed to life. “This sword doesn’t discriminate.”
The smile on his face morphed into something grotesque. “Simple. I’m an OG, baby. The very first batch. There aren’t many of us left, but I’ve been biding my time. Waiting for my moment. Looks like it’s finally here.”
A snappy reply was on the way out of my mouth when he began to change for real. The greasy hair peeled away to reveal yet another bald, skeletal pate. His eyes sunk inward, becoming like glowing embers in two dark pits. Every inch of excess flesh shriveled up and disappeared until I was practically staring into the gaping maw of death itself. The vamp coiled down and sprang at me, teeth gnashing.
It was ugly as sin.
I backed up, swung my sword in a wide, gleaming arc that struck a mangled rib from my opponent’s ribcage. He reeled back, hissing. The fangs in his mouth dripped with something that could have been regular old drool as easily as it could be poison.
Maya hurled another body so furiously that it came crashing into our fighting space, putting it between me and my opponent. He snatched the body up in his bony talons and threw it at me himself before rushing
headlong into a grapple. I dodged the corpse and slammed the flat of my blade against his grasping hands. At first, nothing happened. But I bore my weight down, and a thin line of smoke rose from the surface of bone against fiery gold.
“Give up,” I demanded. “Tell me where she is. What the hell do you want with her?”
Those baleful, gleaming eyes betrayed nothing but hatred in the depths of their sockets. No pain, no fear, no remorse. Just an innate desire to destroy all that opposed him, even as his bones crumbled beneath the might of Kronin’s sword.
“Where is Jules?” I shouted. “Where did you send her? You must know Dorias is dead by now. I killed him!”
The vampire sneered. “Dorias was weak and vain, a fool who thought he could exploit the most powerful among us. He paid the price for his hubris, and so will you.”
“You don’t need her anymore!” I said desperately. “Give her back to me!” As I readied my sword for another strike, I had the wind knocked out of me from behind. A pair of arms fastened themselves around my neck. I grabbed them and lunged forward, flipping the rest of the attacker’s body down in front of me. He snatched for my hair and came perilously close to scalping me, but I snapped my head up just in time. “Maya! Can you give me a hand?”
Half a second later, Were-Maya came barreling into the fight like a wolf in a china shop. She bypassed the vamp that had tried to tackle me and went straight for the skeletal monstrosity, hitting it with a full-body tackle. They went down in a heap of bones and claws and teeth on the bare floor. Whatever inhibitions she’d had about lethal fighting before seemed to be completely gone; she tore into him with wild abandon.
The old vamp was strong, but he lacked the vigor of a newly minted werewolf. Maya effectively dismantled him piece by piece. It would have been a grotesque spectacle if all his flesh and blood hadn’t already withered away.
I wanted to ask him about Jules one last time, but Maya had disconnected his head before I got a chance. So, I turned to the guy who had flung himself onto my back, and I knelt down on his chest until he coughed. “Where the fuck is the girl you were holding here? What happened to her?”
In response, the vamp spit sourly into my face. Anger momentarily clouded all my senses, and I clocked him hard across the face with the hilt of the sword. A trickle of blood ran down the corner of his mouth.
“One more chance,” I growled. “Tell me what you know about Jules.”
“Jewels?” He narrowed his eyes. “I got two of ‘em, if you wanna see.” Gritting his teeth, he tried to flip me over, but all he got for his efforts was a crack in his sternum. I left him there wheezing and met Maya as she walked away from the heap of ashes that used to be a vamp. She slipped back into human form as she approached me, a talent she’d been practicing during training.
“I won’t lie,” she said, shaking out her curly hair. “As much as fighting still skeeves me out, it’s really cathartic, in a way.” She looked past me. “What’s with him?”
“He’s busted up. None of these assholes would tell me anything about how to find Jules.” I spoke flatly. Usually I tried to be a little more upbeat for Maya, no matter the circumstances, but I couldn’t muster a mood other than worry and guilt.
Maya stood over the vamp on the floor, inspecting him with a critical eye. “One of the things we learned in vet school,” she said, “is that sometimes, the humane thing to do is put beasts out of their misery.” Her eyes flicked to me. “I’m just saying.”
Hmm. Perhaps the doctor has a warrior’s spirit after all.
I stepped over piles of crumbled vamp dust on my way out of the store. Just before I followed Maya out the way we came in, I gave the place one last onceover, just in case there was something we’d missed. Part of me hoped I would see another silk scarf, a button from Jules’s shirt, anything to let me know she really had been there. But the place was swept clean.
Lorcan might have been a terrible recruiter, but his clean-up team was on point.
“Prick.” My feet hit the ground outside, and I paused for a second to breathe in the relatively fresh, cold air. Looking up at the sky, I wondered what the hell we were going to do.
Maya had her nose in the wind. She shook her head, looking distressed. “I’m sorry, Vic. I should have—”
“No. It’s not your fault.” I shoved my hands in my pockets, my mind spinning. “There’s got to be something we can do. I need to figure out where Lorcan screwed off to. If she’s alive, he’ll know where she is.”
We started to walk in the direction of home slowly, each of us lost in our thoughts. I almost didn’t hear the voice calling out to us from around the next corner.
“Psst! Hey! Over here!”
Maya picked her head up. “Is that guy talking to us?” She nodded toward the side of a shuttered liquor store, and I recognized the lumbering form immediately. He beckoned us closer.
“Frank?” Looking both ways for witnesses, I jogged over to him. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Just doing my part,” he said, puffing out his chest. “Now listen, I’ve got a tip from the grapevine. Figured I’d send it your way—before you came looking for it. You remember that place in the Meatpacking District that you went and blew up or whatever? Well, the vamps are all moved in again, and I hear the head honcho is there now, too. Had to give up his swanky digs downtown. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
I folded my arms. “You’re not the only one I’ve got to knock around from time to time. You’re positive about this? A hundred percent?”
“My information ain’t never off the mark.” He raised his hands. “And wait, there’s more. I heard they got something down there they think is gonna bait you into showing up. Or, someone, I should say.”
“What?” I went on red alert.
“Yeah. Word is there’s some lady down there, a real piece of work. All I know is, she’s blonde, and they nabbed her a while back.”
I nodded grimly. It was as I suspected. Lorcan was going to use Jules as bait. He wanted me to confront him.
And foolish or not, I was happy to oblige.
As I turned to grab Maya and head out, I glanced over my shoulder at Frank one more time. “Why are you doing this for me, Frank? I’m not an idiot. I know we’re not friends.”
“Well…” He shifted his considerable weight. “Maybe it ain’t about you, kid. You ever think of that? This ain’t just your city. It’s mine too. Been for a long time now. And I know for a fact these guys aren’t trying to make it better.” He frowned, not meeting my gaze. “I’m not gonna give it up without a fight.”
I was silent—genuinely silent. Then I said, “Thanks, Frankie.”
His frown deepened. He tipped his hat, like a detective from some old black and white movie. “Get out of here,” he muttered. “I don’t know how much time you got, or what they’re planning to do with that dame if you don’t save her.”
“Do me a favor,” I told him. “Keep your head down. I have a feeling this trouble’s about to get real serious.”
Frankie gave me a tight smile. “You and me both.” Again, he waved us off. “Now scram.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
We made our way back to the loft to regroup and plan the next move. Maya seemed exhausted from her latest transformation and went to clean herself up, while I stepped out into the hall. There was a phone call I needed to make—no matter how much I was dreading it.
My normal phone was in my hand, but at the last minute, I remembered and pulled out the burner Deacon had given me. That simplified things a little—his was the only contact on it, which meant I couldn’t waste time stalling and pretending to be distracted. I knew he’d probably have some choice words for me, and maybe in some ways, I deserved them.
But it couldn’t be helped. We’d ended on a bad note, with me killing the mayor and all, and I didn’t want to leave things that way before going to face Lorcan. The enormity of the situation loomed in front of me. I was feeling invincible and
smaller than ever at the same time.
I started to pace as I held the phone to my ear, gripping it tightly. It seemed like years before Deacon answered, and when he finally did, his voice was blank, totally inscrutable. “Yeah.”
“Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”
He was silent for a moment that felt like an hour. Finally, I had to break the tension.
“I know you’re pissed, I can’t blame you, Deacon, but I can’t stop, either. You’ve gotten a little taste of this, but you only know a fraction of what’s real, okay? It’s like I said before: you have to trust me. Just trust me. I wouldn’t do shit like this if I didn’t have a damn good reason. And I didn’t kill the mayor.”
“Are you kidding me? I saw the footage. Everyone’s seen the footage. That sure as hell looks like Inglewood to me, and it looks like you on the other end of that knife. Hell, I walked in just after you did the deed. I really need some answers, Vic. I want to help you.”
“If you want to help me, then you’re just going to have to trust me,” I repeated. At this point, the sentiment probably sounded no better than a broken record, but it was the only ammunition I had. Even if I had the time to explain everything to Deacon in detail, I wasn’t about to have him tag along to my showdown with Lorcan. Plus, he was an agent of the Bureau already. How much could he end up compromising by choosing to dig too deep into the Forgotten?
His smooth voice had gained a subtle edge of frustration. “I thought this was going to be a partnership, Vic. One of those things where we work together. But I’m still constantly feeling like I’ve been left in the dark about a lot of very important things, like the fact that you had a knife in the mayor’s office.”
I chewed my lip. “I didn’t when I went in there.”
Deacon hesitated. “You know what? I don’t think I even want to know.” There was a long moment of silence. “Why don’t you just come in? Do it on your own terms. I’ll pick you up. We can talk it through.”
