The motion put his face within inches of hers. She leaned back and swallowed, trying to pretend she hadn’t felt a light trill in her chest.
“That’s crazy talk, sweethea—uh, yeah, even if those doors were open, it’d—”
A lurching groan sounded from the panels in the ceiling, which began to slowly open to the Newark sky with a loud, steady hum of motors.
Jarek’s eyebrows drifted upward. “Huh. Guess now’s the time to go for it.”
She was opening her mouth to express just how wholeheartedly she disagreed with that line of thinking when he started across the walkway.
Shit.
She traded a shocked look with Michael, and they both set off after him across the metal walkway. She stepped lightly, hoping the noise from the opening panels would cover their tracks.
Dozens of armed Reds filled the area below them. All it would take was one wrong glance and they’d be screwed, but all eyes were trained toward the splitting ceiling.
Halfway across, a flicker of movement drew her attention to the opening panels. A figure was plummeting through the gap toward the ground fifty feet below. Despite the fatal height, he didn’t flail or cry out; he simply waited to land, arms and legs at ready positions as the air attempted to rip his long coat from his body. His long, rust-red coat.
Could that be—
The man’s eyes flared with a violent scarlet glow, clearly visible even across the enormous room. She watched with morbid fascination as he slammed into the concrete floor with a thud and the sound of crumbling stone. A small cloud of dust and pulverized concrete shot up around him.
Like everyone else, she’d heard plenty of ghost stories about the raknoth over the years, but as she watched that figure stride out of the dispersing debris cloud, fiery-red eyes alight and apparently unperturbed by the bone-shattering force of his landing, she couldn’t deny what she was seeing.
She was looking at a raknoth, and she could only assume it was the Red King.
The King’s attention settled on a group of Reds waiting nearby in silence. Even from across the room, she could feel the tension as the raknoth approached them. Above, a large, vaguely avian airship began descending into the hub, presumably the ship the King had jumped from.
One of the Reds stepped forward from the cowering huddle. For a second, it looked like the King might speak, but then he grabbed his subject by the hair, yanked the man’s head to the side, and plunged his teeth into the side of his neck.
The sounds of the descending airship and the men below covered Rachel’s gasp.
The Red King’s eyes pulsed brighter. Crimson blood rolled down the man’s neck, yet he didn’t fight as the King lapped it up.
Shock and revulsion filled her.
Then the Red King’s head snapped up like a predator catching a scent, and revulsion shifted to alarm.
The King pushed his meal back toward the other men, who caught the bloody man and steadied him. The King paid no mind, sniffing at the air.
Shit. Had he sensed them? Had he sensed her?
Jarek signaled they should move.
She took two steps after him, and then something slammed against her mind like a falling iceberg. The presence was vast and powerful and alien, and she barely managed to hold her defenses together under its devastating attack. It could only be one thing. She sank into her mental space, scraping and clawing to find some purchase, but the raknoth’s mind was relentless in its drive.
This wasn’t a fight she was going to win. Her cloak. She needed to activate her cloak.
Keeping all but the barest scrap of her mind fixed on holding the Red King’s telepathic invasion at bay, she struggled to find her comm with slow, awkward fingers. With painstaking concentration, she swiped a command over the comm’s surface.
The mental pressure vanished as the cloaking glyph on her necklace activated. She gasped, feeling the weight lift from her.
It was only then she noticed that she’d fallen to the walkway. Michael was clutching at her arm with wide, panicked eyes.
“Have to go,” she said, her voice a weak croak.
Below, the Red King was pointing up at them, and dozens of Reds were turning toward them as the raknoth bellowed, “Bring them to me!”
8
As much as Jarek didn’t understand what the hell had just happened, he was pretty sure about a few things.
Thing one: they were totally exposed in the middle of the walkway with several dozen armed men all staring at them, probably moments away from getting their shit together and opening fire (although Red-Eyes down there had said “bring them,” not “kill them”).
Thing two: they needed to run, and one-third of their party already looked as if she’d just run a hundred miles with lead bricks for shoes.
Things one and two added up to thing three: they were at least a little bit screwed.
“Come on!” He helped Michael haul Rachel back to her feet. “Move, move!”
A roar filled the room, every bit as ferocious as a lion’s. Below, the Red King darted forward with alarming speed. After a few steps, the raknoth gathered himself and Jumped—with a capital J, Jarek’s mind noted—toward their little walkway huddle.
He numbly registered that the leap would carry the raknoth across the sixty or seventy feet between them to land on the walkway. Then he raised his MP5 and fired.
“Mikey!”
Michael fumbled with his weapon, but he wasn’t going to be fast enough. The Red King was on the downward arc of his trajectory now. Jarek fired another burst, and another. He could tell at least some of the shots were landing by the raknoth’s small, mid-flight jerks. The bullets didn’t seem particularly bothersome, but Jarek could have sworn they sent ripples of green across the raknoth’s skin like some kind of reactive armor.
He let loose on full auto, hoping to at least cut the King’s flight short. Even a raknoth had to fall prey to simple physics, right? Maybe so, but it wasn’t enough.
Then Michael’s gun roared out beside him.
The raknoth gave a savage cry as he came up short of the walkway, dropping down, reaching, reaching . . . and caught the edge of the walkway with a single inhuman hand. It was a sickly shade of green with the texture of reptilian scales, each finger sporting a vicious-looking claw.
The walkway groaned under the sudden load, the metal under that monstrous hand deforming from the impact.
How strong was this thing?
Jarek leaned over the railing and emptied his last few rounds into the King’s face. He caught a glimpse of sandy blond hair and mostly human features, aside from the disturbing glow of the eyes and the darkening patches of green, before the raknoth tucked his face away from the gunfire.
This time, he was positive the bullets had hit, and just as positive they had barely affected the raknoth, aside from making him sprout new splotches of green scales across his neck and face.
Thing four: the raknoth were every bit as terrifying as the stories he’d heard.
The Red King yanked himself up and made a grab for Michael’s leg with one hand. Michael jumped back. The raknoth clamped onto the walkway and began pulling himself up properly.
Rachel thrust the tip of that oddly winding staff into the Red King’s face an instant before the end detonated with a booming flash of light.
There was a screech of metal and an angry roar.
Jarek tried too late to shield his eyes, his vision already bleached with light. Something pressed against his side, and he heard Rachel’s voice through the ringing in his ears.
“Move.”
He didn’t argue. As his vision began to resolve, he saw Rachel ahead, pushing Michael along ahead of her. The Red King was blessedly nowhere in sight.
Of course, the King’s absence cleared the line of fire for all the Reds below.
He kept his head down and ran as at least a dozen weapons opened fire together. Rachel dropped back, yanking Michael with her, and put herself between the guns and their little band.
It was almost comical to see the small blonde tugging around the big black guy, but when the spent lead slugs began clanking down to the walkway in their wake, Jarek decided that Michael had good reason to comply.
The air unmistakably chilled around them as they ran unharmed through the swarm of lead.
They reached the end of the walkway and fled into the cover of the next hallway.
Jarek bent over and braced his hands on his knees. Thing five: apparently arcanists were pretty damn real and also a little scary themselves. He’d heard plenty of rumors and hearsay, but he’d never really believed. His views were changing pretty quickly. As usual, Pryce had been right. Now Jarek just had to stay alive long enough to tell him so.
They ran down the hallway side by side.
Michael hissed, “Was that—”
“Telepathic attack,” Rachel said. “Yeah. Pretty freaking strong one too.”
She still looked more than a little pale. Pryce had insisted on multiple occasions that arcanists couldn’t simply bend nature to their wills for free, that there had to be some equivalent, thermodynamically feasible exchange. Apparently he had been right about that too.
“That was the Red King?” Michael said, panting now.
Jarek swapped his spent mag for a fresh one as he led the way around a corner. “That or there happens to be another one that’s decided to run around in a ridiculous coat and call himself a—shit!”
A stairwell door burst open ahead of them and two men swept into the hall, weapons raised. Jarek raised his MP5, but Rachel stepped in front of him and Michael. She pointed her staff, and the two Reds went tumbling back through the doorway to crash into more allies, judging by the disgruntled cries.
Rachel slammed the stairwell door shut, wedged it closed with her foot, and applied the tip of her staff to the latch. The air in the hallway grew cooler even as the metal around the door handle glowed red-hot. A muffled yelp came through the door—probably someone burning their hand on the opposite handle, he thought with a grin. As suddenly as it had appeared, the red glow drained out of the door and the temperature in the hallway returned to normal.
Moving on instinct, he pushed Michael forward and lunged to yank Rachel aside.
She glared at him. “What the f—”
Muffled gunfire barked out, denting the door beside them. A few bullets tore their way through.
She looked from the door to him. “Right.”
The gunfire ceased, and something—maybe a boot—slammed against the door. The door held. Rachel had melted the components of the door’s latching mechanism into one solid piece, effectively locking the door for good unless someone hit it hard enough to shear through the fused metal. Someone like an angry raknoth, for instance.
“Not half bad,” he said. “Let’s move.”
The monotony of the hallways didn’t help with the directions, but he was at least eighty, maybe seventy percent sure he was leading them southwest. They’d be fine.
A loud crash echoed down the hall, not unlike the sound an angry raknoth might make kicking down a locked door. Jarek led them down the next stairway and picked up the pace, waving Michael and Rachel onto the ground floor.
Down the hallway. Another left. Another right. They had to be getting close.
“I sure hope you guys can both swim,” he said.
Michael glanced over. “Why does that—oh.”
Jarek smiled. “Oh, yes.”
Ahead, the top left half of the next hallway was lined with translucent polymer windows. The windows afforded a view into a small indoor dock. There were only a few boats sitting in the dark water, all small and in varying states of disrepair, but it wasn’t the boats he cared about.
He pulled open the first door they came to and hurried the others in, uncomfortably aware of the proximity of voices behind them now.
The water would feed into the Passaic River. More to the point, it would feed out of the Red Fortress. The only problem was the bay door that would in all likelihood be locked. Luckily, he’d had the foresight to swipe Seth Mosen’s comm, and he was reasonably sure its ID would grant them access, assuming the bay door didn’t require an additional code.
It did.
“No, no . . .” He swiped the comm past the receiver again, which refreshed the same message: “Please enter your personal access code.”
“Stupid”—he kicked the wall—“shit!”
“‘I know what I’m doing,’ he says,” Rachel said. She was leaning on her staff, looking like she desperately needed a nap or some form of sugar. “‘Trust me,’ he says. What’s the plan now, asshole?”
He bit back an angry retort and held up a finger, thinking.
The controls were digital, but the locks themselves were mechanical, and he’d seen what Rachel could do to locks.
He nodded at Rachel’s staff. “You pop the locks, we lift?”
She spread her hands in a gesture that said What the hell else am I gonna do?
“That’s the spirit, Goldilocks.”
He met her glare with his best grin. He was tossing away Mosen’s comm and the knife he had no easy way of carrying into the water when he caught motion through the translucent panes of the dock’s inner wall. The sounds of approaching Reds echoed oddly off the water’s surface.
“Shit,” he whispered. Then, louder, “They’re coming. Everyone in. Now.”
He dropped down into the dark water, trusting that they’d follow. The coolness of the water embraced his tired body. It was deeper than expected; he found the bottom only at the lowest point of his plunge. The waves of Michael and Rachel entering the water rocked him on the way up. He surfaced and moved to find a handhold on the side of the pool.
Michael surfaced and managed to get his own handhold just before the door opened, letting in the sounds of numerous Reds in the hallway outside. Rachel was flailing a few feet away, encumbered by her staff and her leather jacket.
Michael tried and failed to reach her.
Jarek caught her fingertips and pulled her to him, trying to convey the strongest shush he could with his eyes. Her expression was hard to read in the darkness as he drew her in and wrapped his arm around her waist to keep her afloat.
Her body pressed against his, warm and soft in contrast to the stagnant water. Above them, footsteps plodded toward the water and paused.
He stopped breathing.
“Clear,” a voice said after what felt like minutes but must’ve been only a second or two.
Grumbles. Shuffling footsteps. Sounds of the Reds moving on. Then, finally, silence.
She let out a careful breath against him, and his focus precariously teetered away from listening to the retreating Reds. His senses filled with the sweet scent of her closeness and the racing of her heart against his sternum.
“We clear?” she asked, the air of her whisper teasing lightly at his wet cheek.
They were, as far as he could tell, but instead of saying that, his lower anatomy decided to go with, “Are you seeing anyone?”
She pushed away, electing to go back to her sorry version of treading water.
“Seriously, dude?” Michael hissed from the darkness.
Jarek allowed himself a small grin. “I know! Jesus, guys, can we act like professionals here and just focus on getting this damn door open?”
“You have problems,” Rachel whispered from the darkness.
“Tell me about it.” He began swimming toward the bay door. “Like this door, for instance. If you can pop the locks, I can hold it while you and Mikey scoot under. We should probably go down together.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Is that a no in the ‘seeing someone’ column, then?”
There were a few swishes from Michael’s direction. Then, again, “Seriously, dude?”
“Not my fault!”
“Can we just get this over with?” Rachel asked.
“You’d like that, w—” Before he could finish, she took a deep
breath and vanished beneath the dark surface of the water. “Shoot. Let’s go, Mikey.”
He dove down, guiding himself along the surface of the bay door with his hands in the dark. On his way down, he felt more than heard a pair of sharp clicks reverberate through the door, followed a second later by another pair. The arcanist must’ve done her job, then.
He grimaced in the dark as his hands tracked down along a steadily grimier door. Finally, he found the bottom and arranged himself into an effective pulling position.
It was only then that he realized the hiccup in his plan. Down there in the nearly complete darkness, they weren’t going to be able to see one another and make sure they’d all made it through. But that was assuming the door even opened in the first place. First things first.
There was no hope of effectively coordinating with Michael. He dug his fingers under the slimy edge of the bay door as best he could and heaved. Even partially submerged in water as it was, the door wasn’t light. He pulled harder, and it began to budge upward, inch by inch. He adjusted his grip, shifted his footing, and pulled again. Halfway through his pull, the door began moving faster, and he assumed Michael had found his side and pitched in.
By the time the door was high enough for him to maneuver underneath it and prop it on his left shoulder, a good thirty seconds had passed. His lungs were burning with exertion.
The water outside of the bay door was slightly lighter, but not enough to afford any real visibility. So he remained crouched at the bottom, pinned under the heavy door, heart racing and lungs burning, hand outstretched as he waited for some sign of the others’ passing.
Something brushed against his hand. An arm. A leather-sleeved arm. Rachel. A small hand found his, tugged once in the direction of the river, then let go.
Did that mean Michael was already on the other side? He must be. Maybe.
He considered inching his way over to check, but the door was heavy, and he was running out of air. He’d made the decision to try anyway when the weight on his shoulder shifted and pressed down harder. That had to have been Michael leaving his post on the other side of the door. That was the only explanation, right?
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 7
