She set a brisk pace ahead of him, murmuring excuse me or pardon me or, in one case, move it, asshole as she made a path for them. The main doors of the Renaissance were ahead of them. They’d made it.
Val said, “You still with us, Jeremy?”
“I’m cool,” said Jeremy. “Don’t hole the bag. I’d be less cool then, you know?” He was hard to hear, if you had normal ears, but Val could make out what he was saying just fine.
The same concierge they’d seen less than twenty minutes ago sped over. “Is that … are you…”
“My buddy,” said Val, “wasn’t in.”
The concierge looked at Jeremy’s tube, back at Val, and back at the tube. “I’m going to have to call someone—”
“Call whoever the hell you like,” said Danny. She started to move towards the exit.
The concierge reached for the radio clipped to the back of his belt. “Security?” He frowned. “I’ve got—”
Danny moved like oiled smoke, stepping behind the man, and yanked the radio from his belt. She held it up, crushed it to fragments of plastic and metal in one hand, and let the pieces fall to the tiled floor of the lobby with tiny tinks. She nodded at Val. “Let’s go.”
“Let’s,” said Val.
“What’s going on?” said Jeremy.
“Concierge wanted a tip,” said Val.
“That guy is totally obvious about it,” said Jeremy. He sounded scared, and Val would be too. He tried to imagine being inside a piece of black plastic, the only thing shielding you from fiery oblivion a thin sheet of polythene and a shred of fabric and the trust of a stranger who had every reason to want you dead.
Val hefted Jeremy to shift his weight against his shoulder. It’s not that he was particularly heavy, it’s that carrying a body was just damn awkward no matter how strong you were. Like trying to carry a mattress with more personality. “We’re almost out,” he said. “We’ll be gone in just a couple of minutes. If things get crazy, try not to panic or try to get out of the bag.”
“Why would they get crazy?” said Jeremy.
Out through the tinted glass of the main doors, Val saw two squad cars pull up in a shroud of tire smoke, lights on, sirens going, cops pouring from their sides like a small army of ants. Danny looked back at him, then said, “I got this.”
“Val?” said Jeremy. Val felt him squirming inside the bag-curtain supercombo. “What’s going on?”
“It’s cool,” said Val. “Danny’s going outside to make a path.”
“A path? Through what?” There was a pause, then Jeremy said, “Danny’s the hot woman?” Val adjusted his load a little too vigorously and heard Jeremy give a small ooof. “What’d I say?”
“Stop talking for a second.” Val watched as Danny walked out the main doors, cops swarming all over the place. There was a gunshot, glass exploding in the front of the Renaissance. The bullet hadn’t even touched her, she’d just taken a small step sideways. She let the movement continue right up to a car at parked out front, squatted down, and grabbed it. Val could see her strain, the car lifting up, before she put some pepper into it, the car falling on its side with a crump of deforming metal. She reached up and steadied it with a hand, leaning back to stop it tipping over. There was a pause, then the gunfire started, but she just dusted off her hands and looked back at him with a come on look.
Val grinned. A car was probably a good enough barrier, visually or otherwise, for a quick jog to the van. Danny was already running ahead of him, making the back of the van without any visible effort. Val ran out of the Renaissance, Jeremy shouting something, and it was as Val got to the lee of the tipped car he thought, shit — these assholes are just going to follow us. He didn’t really want to kill them, but—
They stand against our Pack.
—there was a certain argument that could be made for that approach because they’d just started shooting. No freeze asshole or this is the police or we have you surrounded, just bullets and a lot of noise. Which called into question the whole authenticity of their uniforms. Carlisle would have pitched a fit. Val looked at Danny, hefted Jeremy’s tube, and tossed it through the air to her. He heard Jeremy yelling as he sailed across the distance, cut short with another ooof as Danny caught him, slinging him into the back of the van. Val looked at her, wanted to tell her to get moving, but there wasn’t time.
He looked at the tipped car, braced his foot against it, and pushed. The vehicle toppled with a groan of metal and the rainy tinkle of crushing safety glass. It gave a pause to the action, firing stopping for a moment. He saw cops ducking low, refilling weapons that were dry, shouting at each other, and generally being disorganized. Not cops, then. He looked around, took in the traffic stopped dead — nothing so unusual about that in New York City — and people running and screaming around. A man’s body was spread out in the street at the edge of the fire zone, blood pooling around him. Definitely not cops.
That was a little unusual for New York City, no matter what you read online.
“Hey!” said Val. “I don’t know how you guys think this is going to end, but—”
Two of the “cops” started firing on him, and Val ducked down in behind the tipped car. Val tapped his earpiece. “You with me, Jessie?”
“Jesus,” she said. “Don’t tap it, it sounds like a really clumsy horse inside my head. It’s not a Star Trek communicator. You just speak. Like I’m doing.”
“Bullets,” said Val, “are all around me. I’d rather not … uh. You know.”
“Hulk out, I know,” she said. “You remember what we talked about?”
“The Street Fighter thing?” Val closed his eyes, put his forehead to the metal frame of the car in front of him. “Do we have to?”
“We had a deal, Everard.” Her voice was crisp, professional. “I’m up here on overwatch, you’re down there in the mud. The way we make them miss a step—”
“I remember,” he said.
“Say it then.”
“The way we make them confused,” said Val in a brief lull, “is to make them afraid.”
“Give me your best Hadouken,” she said. “I can see people with their phones out. This will be on YouTube inside sixty seconds. Psychological warfare, one Millennial at a time.”
“I still don’t know why it has to be Street Fighter.” Val wiped sweat from his face.
“This only works if you do what I say,” she said, “and I’m telling you to do a Hadouken. You pick the target.” Her voice crackled in his ear. “I need the practice.”
“Are you … is this boring you?” Val tapped the earpiece again. “Tell me you’re bored.”
“A little,” she said. “Hey. You’ll be famous, and not for turning into a hideous beast that eats people this time. Trust me. And don’t hit the damn earpiece again, or I’m going home.”
Val sighed. What the hell. He waited for a pause in the firing, grabbed the edge of the car, and pulled himself up. There was one “cop,” complete with pedophile mustache, who was leveling his sidearm at Val. The shot rang out, but Val twisted sideways, then reached his arms back behind him. He let the twisting motion turn him around, both palms facing the other man, and shouted, “Hadouken!”
The silence lasted maybe half a heartbeat, then the man’s chest exploded in a shower of gore. His body toppled to the ground. Val looked at his hands, then back at the fallen man.
“Not bad for a first try,” Jessie’s voice said in his ear. “You have to really want it though. I didn’t feel it.”
The “cops” were looking at Val, then they all ducked down as one. Val heard what the fucks and how the hell did he do that and even one guy who said was that, was that fucking Street Fighter. Val bounced on the balls of his feet, loosening his shoulders. “Which one of you assholes wants the next one?”
“I’ll take it,” said a burly man, standing up. He had a gun the size of a Howitzer in his hand, and started to level it at Val.
The movement came easier this time, Val twisting back fast a
nd smooth, then returning his torso back the same way, palms out. “Hadouken!”
The burly man’s head disintegrated in a shower of meaty chunks, his gun clattering to the asphalt.
The others looked at that, then scrambled for a car. One made the passenger seat before Val’s next Hadouken collapsed the windshield and the man’s face at about the same time, bloody pieces of safety glass showering in and out of the car. His body fell outside of the car. The last two men were in the car, one behind the wheel, and he was already hammering the gas before his door was closed. The car started to peel away in a scream of tires, rubber smoke filling the air.
“Last one,” said Jessie.
“Gas tank,” said Val, then he did one more Hadouken. The back of the squad car exploded, the fireball lifting the rear up and tumbling the car end over end to land on its roof, smoke and fire and metal raining down around it.
“That’s a wrap,” Jessie’s voice was calm, cool. Professional. “Nice work, Ryu.”
“I was … more of a Ken guy,” said Val.
“They’re … aren’t they the same thing?” Danny’s voice cut across the conversation.
“No,” said Jessie. “They’re rivals. And friends. It’s complicated.”
“Let’s go,” said Val, taking a last look at the burning car, the tossed and crumpled remains of men. “You coming down now?”
“On my way,” said Jessie.
Val shrugged, then walked towards the van. He looked inside, Jeremy safe in his tube, tube tucked into the metal cage. Danny waiting in the back, animal tension still radiating from her like heat from a furnace. He waited until he saw Jessie approaching from across the street, then slipped in beside Danny, closing the rear doors of the van.
Our Pack is strong.
“Yeah,” he said. “When we work together.”
Together. All of us, for all of us.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN
Maksimillian watched the woman with the green hair—
She could join our Pack.
—leave the Starbucks, holding a bag and a harried expression. Neither sat right on her. Maksimillian had watched a hundred million people over the long years of his life, and he had grown to know with mechanical accuracy, like one of those very expensive watches made by the Shveytsarskiy, when people were right or wrong.
Not right as in, whether they had the correct answer, but right as in, whether they were comfortable in their own skin. The woman with the green hair wasn’t happy in her own skin. The green hair might even have been a piece of it, an attempt to be more right than wrong, but the bag was the giveaway.
It wasn’t that it was a messenger bag. That wasn’t the problem here. The problem was that she was carrying a bag, through the streets of New York City, dodging people, rushing, trying to make the subway. She was carrying a bag, and she should have been carrying the world instead. That, right there, was what Maksimillian Kotlyarov—
She gave us a new name.
—saw in her steps as she hurried along. In his hands he turned the paper cup that she’d given him, long since empty and cold, and looked at where the tip of her pen had carved his new name in fat black lines. She hadn’t written Max like he was some kind of Amerikanskaya. She had written it as Maks, like she knew how that heavy old name he’d worn for so long was supposed to start in mother Russian. Like she could see into the heart of him, see who he was, and keep something special about him just as she had remade him in an instant.
Why was she hurrying? Perhaps she was running late, her shift brimming over its allotment of hours, her own Pack waiting somewhere, worried, in this city of izvergi. They were right to be worried, because they were hunted. The orange ball of the sun had fallen below the lip of the horizon, the remaining light in the sky a burnished red. None of the sun’s radiance hit the ground, and now was when the vampiry would come out. When her biggest need for a guardian angel would come. The vampiry didn’t need to fear anything until the coming of the next terrible dawn. And there — right there — Maksimillian picked out the two people in dark clothing following her, a man with his hair done in a purple Mohawk, the woman with eyes blackened like a panda’s. It wasn’t the way they looked that gave them away, it was the way they moved, weaving between the people around them like predators. Always finding a place to stand where there was none. And when there was someone there, that person would move, shy away from them instinctively, like the hare hid from the fox. Both wore black leather coats — they have all been watching the same movies, da? — and Maksimillian could tell from the way the leather moved, the way it clung to them, that it was not made from the skin of a bull. More seams than large sheets of hide would need — this had been put together from smaller prey. They walked the streets, wearing the skins of their kills. They walked after the woman with the green hair. They walked without fear, this close to sunset. Kaylan had made them strong, and powerful, and with that strength and power, they had lost their fear. Kaylan would want the woman with the green hair to change the vampiry, to allow them to be fearless in the sun as they were fearless in the dark.
He would teach them fear.
He swung down from his fire escape, tugged his jacket straight, and moved after them. After the two people who hunted—
We are not for hunting.
—the woman with the green hair. It was easy to follow, pulled along in this sea of people, deep ocean currents of them as they surged along, into the darkness of the subway. He couldn’t keep the green hair in view, not all the time — she might go around a corner here, or be lost in a surge of people there. It didn’t matter. He knew her scent, a trail laid out in breadcrumbs of vanilla and coffee and the rich smell of a young woman’s hair. Maksimillian followed, just another man trying to get home.
We have no home. We destroyed our own Pack.
He shook his head. Maksimillian hadn’t killed his own Pack. He couldn’t do that any more than water could be fire. It would be wrong, impossible, like breathing rock. He listened again for that inner voice, the voice that had been there since before everything else. It felt like it had ridden just behind his eyes forever, as all the ages of men had come and gone and left nothing but crumbled ruins as the faint footstep of their passing, a print in sand to be washed away at the next tide.
It said nothing, did nothing, and so Maksimillian kept walking.
The subway platform was packed, close, a mass of people. The Mohawk and the Panda pushed through, trying to get to the woman with the green hair. She was oblivious, headphones in, still looking harried, phone in hand. Probably a message for her Pack, or perhaps just changing the tunes piped into her ears. He would make sure she got on her subway car, and that these two did not. He could feel the arrival of the car, the rumbling under his feet, the skree-skrit as the subway car clattered against the tracks, well before anyone with normal ears could. The blast of air and noise as it arrived at the station didn’t make any of the people here look up, not a hint of surprise as this magical car came to take them home.
We have no home.
Maksimillian’s hand found the elbow of the man with the Mohawk as people churned about them, pushing on to the already crowded subway cars. The man whirled, tried to yank his hand free, but Maksimillian kept his grip like iron. “A moment, friend.” He let his teeth show, perhaps as a smile. Perhaps not.
The man looked down at his hand, then at the Panda woman, then at the woman with the green hair. His face was so pale, so much time since it had seen the sun. “You—”
“Da,” said Maksimillian. “You think, this is crazy man on subway, like other crazy men. That I ask for loose coins like nishchiy, try to buy a small meal. Or alcohol, to make the night warmer.”
“What?” said the man.
The subway station was emptying, water down a drain. Maksimillian smiled wider. “You have come here for her.”
Mohawk looked to Panda. “Go. Get her.” He turned back to Maksimillian, eyes narrowed. He tried to pull his arm free again. “You�
�re making the last mistake you’ll ever make.”
Maksimillian nodded, as if he was agreeing. “Da. I have made many mistakes.” He watched Panda hurry towards the subway cars, to capture the woman with the green hair. Dragomir had said that couldn’t be allowed.
“You—”
“But I do not think this is one of those,” said Maksimillian. “I think that this,” and he gestured with his free hand to the emptying station around them, “is first right thing I’ve done in long time.”
Mohawk gave his arm a violent tug, pulling free at last. The leather of his coat ripped, leaving Maksimillian with just a torn fragment in his hands. Maksimillian lifted it to his face, breathed in the scent of it. It had been a person once, this leather a part of their skin. Soft. He let it fall to the ground. He reached out his hands, grabbed the front of Mohawk’s coat, and twirled the man like a dance partner. The other man’s feet slipped across the concrete as Maksimillian spun him, let him go to sail through the air, colliding with Panda as she was making the subway car. They both went down in a tangle of limbs, the subway car’s doors hissing shut with a thunk no more than six feet in front of them.
Both were on their feet in a moment. Panda looked to Mohawk. “We need to get her.”
Mohawk shook his head. “I think … this is more important.” He pulled a gun from under his coat, pointing the weapon at Maksimillian. “You’re strong, friend.”
“Da.” Maksimillian shrugged. “I think there is question you must ask. Knowing what you know so far. The strength, da, but also, how do you say it, being in right place at right time. With all of this, what am I?” Maksimillian clenched his fists, almost stepped towards them until he saw a flash of green hair through the subway car’s windows. He pulled back behind a column, the tiles covered in small scrawls of mindless graffiti. He rested his head against it.
She must not see us. She must not know us.
He waited a few moments for the car to pull away, the noise fading off into a distant rush of speed. Always hurrying, these Amerikanskaya, even their machines hurried. He frowned. What am I?
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