The hell is this thing?
From deep in its throat, a series of bass sounds emerged, like air pumping from a thick sac. And it did not sound friendly. Restoring my shield, I struggled into a backwards scoot. The creature pursued and was met by a wave of enchanted light. Caroline moved up beside me as the creature swooned, then thudded to the ground.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I nodded, even though my sternum felt bruised and I was sucking wind. Taking her offered hand, I gained my feet and peered down at the feathered creature. It was at least eight feet from head to tail, with that reptilian jaw of carnivorous teeth. But its upper appendages appeared more wings than arms. Whatever it was, it didn’t resemble any supernatural creature I’d ever seen or read about.
When Bree-yark joined us, I noticed with relief that he was holding onto Arnaud.
“Someone wanna tell me what a dinosaur is doing in 1776 New York?” he asked.
“Dinosaur?” I echoed.
Thoughtful ridges formed along Bree-yark’s brow as he circled the creature. “Raptor, from the looks of it. Don’t let the feathers fool you. Pretty common in the late Cretaceous period.” When he caught Caroline’s and my quizzical looks, he said, “Oh, yeah, learned all about dinosaurs on the Science Channel.”
I trusted him, remembering how much cable TV he watched when he stayed at Gretchen’s. But was this why the city had cleared out? An infestation of predatory dinosaurs? Though it didn’t make a lick of sense, I peered around anyway to make sure no more of the feathered raptors were approaching.
“Native to North America,” Bree-yark added.
“Yeah, but not two hundred fifty years ago,” I countered, force returning to my voice.
“More like a hundred million. And that’s what I smelled all right.” Bree-yark’s nostrils flared. “Prehistoric funk.”
Before we could begin to dissect the meaning, Broadway disappeared. In the place of a building-lined street, a forest rose around us, bright moonlight filtering through a thick canopy. Sword and staff drawn, I jerked around. Caroline was beside me, fae energy glimmering from her hands.
A grunt sounded about ten feet in front of us. A large frond fell away, revealing Bree-yark, who’d hacked it down with his blade. He still had a hold of Arnaud. Dropsy rotated side to side from the goblin’s belt, her light illuminating flying insects and an understory of ferns too giant to seem real.
Beyond the ferns, yellow eyes glinted.
“Heads-up!” I called as the rest of the raptor pack broke from their hiding and crashed through the brush. Thrusting my sword at the lead one, I shouted a force invocation. The whoosh through my mental prism was more air than ley energy, the emerging force barely enough to knock the raptor off balance and ruffle its feathers.
I need to scare them, I thought. Give them something they’ve never seen before.
Taking the shield I’d cast between us, I flattened it and rammed it toward them. The collision of raptors and wall created a predictable curtain of sparks. The raptors retreated from the light show in a chorus of bass sounds. But they didn’t flee, the prospect of warm-blooded prey too enticing, apparently. Caroline followed up with a beautiful aurora borealis that swam around the raptors, dazing them.
“This way,” she called.
I turned in time to see her cloak flutter behind a tree. But Bree-yark was stalking toward the enchanted raptors as if he meant to send them all back into extinction. Grabbing the scruff of his coat with one hand and Arnaud’s arm with the other, I pulled them after me, high-stepping through the undergrowth.
We rounded the same tree as Caroline…
…and stumbled back onto Broadway. I didn’t stop to look back. I broke into a full run, feet pounding the dirt lane for all they were worth. Bree-yark followed at my heels. We caught up to Caroline at the intersection with Garden, where she was waiting. I braced an arm against the cornice and peered back now, terrified of what I would see. But there were no trees or raptors, not even the one we’d put down. Just the empty thoroughfare, one side ruined by the Great Fire of 1776.
Bree-yark swung his stocky frame toward Caroline and bared his teeth.
“All right, you blasted fae,” he growled. “What’re you playing at?”
“It’s not her,” I said. “There’s a time bleed.”
“A time what?” he barked, his anger seeming to shift to me now.
“Another time catch is seeping into this one somehow,” I said.
He jabbed his blade in the direction we’d just come from. “Then why can’t I see it?” he demanded.
“Because this is the view from this time period,” Caroline explained. “Just as our view from the prehistoric period was all forest. Though the two share a boundary, you can’t see one from the other.”
I moved my gaze along the blackened plots again until I arrived at St. Martin’s. A shaky understanding sunk in. “So the church site isn’t actually here,” I said. “The time bleed displaced it.”
“Which explains why the energy here is so weak,” Caroline agreed.
I tuned into my wizard’s senses again. With an intense focus that made my head throb, I could just make out a membrane about a half block up Broadway. I’d been standing on the boundary when the first raptor attacked.
“How does that even happen?” Bree-yark asked.
“The time catches move in something like orbits,” Caroline said. “Arnaud distorting the energies and then abandoning them may have displaced the 1776 orbit, pushing it into another time catch.”
“But instead of an apocalyptic collision,” I said, “they became stuck together, creating the bleed.” Though I had no experience with such things, I couldn’t imagine that was a stable arrangement. I looked from Caroline to the demon-vampire. Maybe Arnaud hadn’t been bluffing after all.
Bree-yark peered up and down the empty streets. “So everyone became dinosaur chow?”
“Or fled,” Caroline offered. “As visitors, we don’t feel the boundaries. For the inhabitants, though, a repulsive force keeps them in their respective periods. Even so, bleeds can occur along the boundaries.”
I rubbed my bruised chest. “Yeah, no kidding.”
“And the boundary is in flux,” she continued. “After so many contacts with creatures of the prehistoric age, the surviving inhabitants of 1776 New York may have decided to relocate far from the boundary.”
“Then it’s just a matter of us avoiding the boundary, right?” Bree-yark said. “Following it around to wherever the real church site is?” He was shifting his weight like he was anxious to get going. Frankly, so was I. The sooner we got there and completed the tasks, the sooner we could recover the Upholders and go home.
“Caroline?” I prompted.
She was peering up Broadway at the church site—or where the church site appeared to be. She angled her face westward, as if following the boundary line through the burn zone and the former encampment of British soldiers, their field of white tents gone now. At the Hudson River, I lost sight of the line.
“I see no other way,” she said.
Taking lead again, I headed east. The boundary ran at an angle to the northeast, which meant backtracking down Broadway and cutting over to Nassau.
After a few blocks, the line pushed us east again, this time to William Street. Still reeling from the knowledge I’d battled an actual dinosaur, and having no interest in a rematch, I kept a healthy distance between us and the line. At the next street, I paused to gauge whether we needed to detour another block, which would take us still further from St. Martin’s.
“I don’t quite get how this works,” Bree-yark said, arriving beside me. “The boundary runs across the street up there, right? But we can still see past it?”
“Yes and no,” I answered distractedly. “That’s how the street would look if it were there.”
“And someone on the other side looking this way? Same thing?”
“Same thing. The time catch plays on a loop, remember. It
knows what it’s supposed to look like at every point in its trapped time and from every perspective. Right now, it’s filling in all that missing information.”
As I set off east again, Bree-yark muttered behind me, “And I thought the Fae Wilds were screwy.”
At the next block, I stopped and swore.
“What is it?” Caroline asked, coming up now.
I pointed north and drew my finger back and forth across the street. “The boundary line cuts straight across here, separating us from the rest of Manhattan.” And that included my grandfather’s farm, which was two miles north on Bowery Lane. Blowing out my breath, I looked toward the East River. Beyond Queen Street, I could make out its wharves, and beyond them, moonlight glinting off the water itself.
“What about going straight through the prehistoric period?” Bree-yark asked. “We’d come out the other side eventually, right?”
“Eventually being the kicker,” I said. “It could be a hundred feet or a hundred miles.”
“And we might emerge into another part of 1776 New York,” Caroline added. “These realms aren’t uniformly shaped. They twist and contort.”
“Any boats around here?” Bree-yark asked.
“Probably at the harbor.” His question got me thinking. “Hey, since we’re already on this side of Manhattan, would you mind if we took a row out to Governor’s Island? That’s where I left the Upholders. Could be a clue as to what happened, where they went.” I was thinking reveal spell, but they could even have left a message. “If not, we can access Brooklyn and see how far the boundary extends over Long Island.”
With both of their votes in favor, I led the way down King Street.
And found myself in the middle of a stampede.
21
Bodies rammed into me, sending me one way and then just as suddenly the other. Through a harsh whiteness—daylight, I realized—shouting faces jostled past my dazzled vision. The road had gone from packed dirt to mud-slick cobblestone, and I jerked my arms around like someone ice-skating for the first time.
The next hard collision sent me crashing into a pair of empty barrels along the roadside. A family of speckled pigs scattered as I landed ass-down in what I hoped was mud, my back slamming against a plank wall. My vision went gauzy, as much from the impact as the sudden displacement.
Pulling my cane against my chest, I stared at the human stampede.
They bore a crude look that matched the ungodly stench rising from the street. There were men in dirty hats and coats, women in patched skirts, and children with worn-through pant knees and shoddy shoes—when they had anything on their feet at all. But their common direction suggested purpose. Ahead of them, above a mad collection of leaning buildings, stood a dark column of smoke.
Usually people run away from a fire, I thought blearily.
The harsh clanging of bells made me turn. Men in red flannel coats and floppy hats were running a pump wagon up the street. They cleaved the crowd, which was beginning to tail off now, and disappeared around a corner.
Fire brigade?
“Are you all right?”
A pretty woman with blond hair approached. She wore a homely blue dress with large buttons down the front and a bow at the waist. Her arm was hooked inside a thin man’s, a brown scarf wrapping the lower half of his face. A kid with a surly expression followed. I assumed the family had seen me go down before I realized I was looking at Caroline, Arnaud, and Bree-yark, all three glamoured to the gills.
“Fine,” I said, coughing out a relieved laugh. Using a toppled barrel, I pulled myself upright. My British army uniform had become plain brown trousers and a patched homespun coat. “How about you guys?”
“When you vanished, we followed,” Caroline said.
“Yeah, don’t do that again,” Bree-yark added in a scolding voice.
By the time I’d shaken the gunk off my pants, the stampede had dwindled to stragglers, the shouting and clanging rolling out like a spent wave. I looked around at a small dirt park bordered by cobblestone roads and a crowd of rickety wooden buildings. We’d clearly crossed into another time catch.
“I didn’t even see the boundary,” I said.
“That’s because it was under you,” Caroline said. “A seam in the road.”
As I looked down at my mud-spattered boots, I remembered a brief, helpless sensation of falling.
“Someone wanna tell me where this is?” Bree-yark asked.
Before I could answer—because I had an idea—Caroline said, “New York’s Five Points neighborhood, around 1860. At the time it was a poor quarters of low-skilled laborers and immigrants, mostly Irish.”
I was going to ballpark mid-1800s and the Bowery. It paid having an expert on the team.
Caroline peered toward the smoke now. “The crowd’s in a race to reach the building before the fire brigade gets there or it burns to the ground.”
“Why?” Bree-yark asked.
“To claim whatever’s inside.”
The goblin grunted as if that sounded fair enough.
“It appears we’re sticking to another time catch,” Caroline said to me.
I nodded, wondering just how many time catches ours had collided into. That couldn’t be doing anything good for the stability factor, but at the moment I was more concerned with getting back to 1776.
Venturing from the spilled barrels, I shifted to my wizard’s senses. I’d only gone a few steps upon arriving here, so the boundary had to be close. But where was the damned thing? I peered up and down the street, then tilted my head back, expecting to find the seam between me and the washed-out sky.
“I’m not seeing a boundary,” I said, trying not to sound as panicked as I felt.
“No, I don’t sense one here either,” Caroline said. “But we’re in a different part of the city than where we entered. This would have been country in 1776. In fact, there was a large pond right over there.”
I remembered circling the pond on the way to my grandfather’s farm.
“You’re familiar with Columbus Park?” Caroline asked.
Two years earlier, I’d projected from my prison in Arnaud’s vault to a clay golem I’d animated and that remained under my control. I arranged to meet Caroline at a pavilion at the north end of Columbus Park. There, she restored my magic and glamoured my thoughts for my final showdown with Arnaud, where I cast him to the Below. Shortly after, Caroline disappeared into Faerie, never even having said goodbye. Now her eyes looked as if they hoped to ignite some spark of nostalgia between us.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling the same discomfort from earlier. “I know it.”
“Well, this is the park’s humble beginnings.” She pointed to a plot in the center of the converging streets where the pigs I’d scattered were now rooting in the mud. Squalid kids played at the other end, while women pulled gray linen from a line near a public water pump. Thanks to Caroline’s glamours, none of them paid us any attention. “This eventually becomes the park’s southern end and the start of Chinatown, which puts us about a half-mile north of where we left 1776.”
“But if we’re near a boundary,” Bree-yark grunted, “what’s with all the people?”
That was a great point. I peered toward the smoke, where the distant clamoring continued to build. The sheer size of the crowd suggested people here weren’t having the same boundary problems as the 1776 New Yorkers.
“They may not be dealing with boundaries,” Caroline said. “The seam Everson disappeared inside was small. The periods could be sticking at discrete points, making it less likely there’s a bleed.” She turned to me. “Queen Street will take us back to the intersection where you dropped out.”
“And you think we’ll find a boundary—or point, rather?”
“It’s where we should start.”
“Hey!” Bree-yark cried. “Get back here!”
The goblin had taken a few strolling steps away from us, and now he broke into a run. A boy of nine or ten was fleeing ahead of him. The urchin had snatche
d something of Bree-yark’s, but it wasn’t until flashes began going off in his arms that I realized it was Dropsy. Caroline conjured a mist of fae light, but the boy broke through it and ducked around a corner.
“Bree-yark!” I called, right before he disappeared from sight too.
“Go,” Caroline said. “I’ll stay with Arnaud.”
Drawing my cane into sword and staff, I started after the goblin. I soon arrived at the corner he’d rounded to find ramshackle buildings crowding a narrow lane. Several of the windows above featured propped elbows and grim faces. I spotted my teammate at the lane’s far end, where it curved from view.
“Bree-yark!” I shouted again, this time trying to push power into my wizard’s voice, but I was half-gagging from the stenches.
When he ignored me, I raised my sword—I’d knock him down if I had to. But the blade was jostling too much, and an errant shot could take down one of the teetering structures along with everyone inside. I upped my speed instead, adjusting my strides to avoid seeping channels of raw sewage.
Where the lane ended, a soot-covered church rose. Half a double door was rebounding from the urchin’s headlong entrance. Bree-yark, who had gained on him, was almost to the door himself. Before I could shout or cast a barricade, the goblin lowered his shoulder and barged in after his quarry.
A disintegrated faith littered the church grounds like fallen ash. In its place, a malignant energy had crept up the walls, causing the spire with its broken cross to look like an infernal horn and the smashed windows to stare madly.
Dammit, Bree-yark.
At the church’s threshold, I gathered what little ley energy there was, hardened the air into a defensive shield around me, and peered into the darkness. The goblin’s panted breaths echoed ahead, each one jarring as if he were descending a staircase. Drifting in on cold, unseen currents came whispered voices and hushed giggles. The unnatural sounds sent goose pimples rushing the length of both arms.
“Illuminare!” I shouted.
Night Rune (Prof Croft Book 8) Page 14
