We were playing into their grubby little hands.
“Entering from Central Park South,” I heard a familiar voice report over one of the feeds.
Vega?
I ran over to where Cole was standing in front of the GPS display, barking coordinates. “You sent Detective Vega out there?” I asked.
He pushed me aside with a forearm and leaned over one of the communication technicians seated at a computer. He said something into his ear that I couldn’t hear.
“Hey!” I grabbed Cole’s shoulder. “I asked you a question.”
“She’s on the perimeter team,” he shouted. “We were short one.”
I was about to ask why in the hell he’d put her on the perimeter team when I remembered something else I’d said at the briefing. The perimeter team would be unlikely to see major action. They would be in place as a containing force. I swore and sprinted toward the tent door.
“Prof!” Cole shouted. “I can’t let you go out there!”
Yeah, I know, I thought cynically. I’m the face of this thing. But I’m also the reason for the current clusterfuck.
“Tell your team not to shoot at the white light,” I shouted back.
I broke out into a humid, halogen-suffused night and took a moment to orient myself. Armed NYPD officers stood around the perimeter of the plaza. A block away, news vans huddled. Voices rose in earnest at my appearance, and several cameras aimed their lenses at me.
“How’s it going so far, Mr. Croft?” a reporter called.
“Will you be joining the action?” another one wanted to know.
Awful, and I don’t have a choice.
I wheeled toward the distant popping of automatic gunfire. Vega had said she was joining the combat from Central Park South, a street that bordered the bottom of the rectangular park. Police officers shouted after me as I left the plaza and accessed the street at a run. At the next block, I jumped a police barricade across a stone staircase and descended into the park itself.
“Protezione!” I said.
White light burst from my staff and hardened into a shield around me. I would stand out, but I would also be protected from both friendly and enemy fire—assuming the goblins weren’t bearing magical weapons.
The steep staircase deposited me onto a busted-up asphalt path. Trees pressed in from all sides. More gunfire sounded ahead of me. Away to my left, I picked up a burst of goblin speech.
“Vega!” I called.
Arrows clattered off my shield.
Shit. I reinforced my protection and plowed into the woods ahead. Leafy limbs batted at my shield. I stumbled over something and went down. I knew without looking that it was a body.
Please don’t let it be hers, I thought desperately.
I turned and held up my staff. White light illuminated a row of small sharp teeth and the staring squash-colored eyes of a goblin. Its muscled torso had been ripped open by gunfire. Beyond the black talons of an outstretched hand rested the creature’s short bow. I hesitated for a moment, never having seen a goblin up close. Even in death it looked menacing.
Another hail of arrows got me moving. By the growing volume of goblin chatter, I guessed more were emerging from underground—just as I’d feared. Gunfire answered in staccato bursts.
“Fall back!” I shouted. “Fall back!”
But a fresh series of horn blasts obscured my cries.
I saw the next body before I could trip over it. One of ours this time. With a force invocation, I rolled the body onto its back, arrow shafts cracking beneath the weight. I let out a relieved breath even as my stomach clenched at the sight of the young man’s lifeless face.
I pulled the helmet from his head, donned it, and activated the communication system. “This is Everson Croft,” I said. “We’re outnumbered. I’m ordering everyone to fall back. I repeat, I’m ordering everyone—”
Feedback blew into my ears, and the power box exploded. I swore and tossed the smoking helmet aside. Cupping my hands to the sides of my mouth, I shouted for Vega again.
Behind me, something broke through the brush.
I turned and nearly screamed. The hairy giant that loomed over me grunted, pointed ears flattening back from a short brow and huge red eyes. Bugbear, a voice stammered in my head. It’s a frigging bugbear. Eyewitnesses frequently mistook the creature for a bigfoot—an easy mistake to make. Only a bigfoot didn’t brain its victims and tear them limb from limb.
From a fanged mouth, the creature let out a horrid cry.
I raised my sword, but the shock of the encounter had cost me the precious second I’d needed to cast. Muscles hardened across the bugbears hairy torso and a club came crashing toward me.
I criss-crossed my sword and staff in front of me at the same moment the club collided into my shield. Sparks blew against my face, and the impact hurled me backwards. I ricocheted from tree to tree like a giant pinball. At last, I crashed to a stop. The woods reeled around me as I sat up, but the glimmering shield had held, sparing my life.
“Not gonna survive a second round, though,” I mumbled.
I chanted quickly to reinforce the shield. The bugbear screamed again, limbs breaking with his next charge. Too soon, his fierce red eyes shone above me, club raised overhead.
“Respingere!” I called.
The pulse from my shield knocked the bugbear onto his heels. Without my feet planted, the counterforce sent me backwards. The shield and I broke through a sweep of reeds, and then we were … bobbing?
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.
The shield fizzled and burst apart. Warm water soaked through my clothes. I splashed until I was standing shin deep in the muddy shallows of a pond, my sleeves dripping wet.
Beyond the tall reeds, the bugbear unleashed another scream.
I waded across the finger of water at the pond’s tapering end and splashed onto the opposite shore.
“Protezione,” I tried.
Brown light popped around the staff’s opal before blinking out.
I peeked back through the reeds. In the faint moonlight, I could see the rustling trees that marked the bugbear’s progress. I took several crouching steps backwards before the sounds of gunfire and goblin chatter stopped me. Escaping the bugbear meant fleeing into the heart of combat. Without my protection, I wouldn’t make it ten yards before an arrow or bullet found me.
But I had to locate Vega. Had to get everyone out of the park.
Red eyes appeared above the reeds. They shifted from side to side before narrowing in on me. A low growl rumbled across the water. I readied my sword, but I wasn’t dealing with a fire-soaked ghoul. This creature was at full strength and had all of his senses. I would get one thrust or swing. Anything short of a lethal result, and I was looking at an express train to the afterlife.
Yeah, screw that.
I turned and ran. I’d take my chances in the combat zone—and take Harry here with me. The bugbear crashed into the water at my back. With any luck, he would eat bullets before I ate arrows. Right now, I was eating a whipping series of tree branches, and they were slowing me down. I panted out a Word of protection, but no shield would take shape.
Something whistled near my head. An arrow.
“Vega!” I called, more from desperation now than anything.
“Croft,” she shouted back.
My heart jerked as I veered toward her voice. She was alive! My new route took me around and down the hillock I’d been ascending. I scrambled and slid past massive boulders.
“Vega,” I repeated.
“Over here,” she said.
I found her in a protected pocket where three boulders came together. She was sitting against the far boulder, aiming an automatic rifle toward the opening. Her helmet was off, and I caught a shine of blood along her hairline. I glanced over my shoulder before crouching beside her.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She winced. “Got clubbed in the head.”
“By big, bad, and hairy?”
> “I emptied my pistol at it. Not sure whether I hit it or just scared it off. What in the hell was it?”
“A bugbear,” I said, looking back again. “And you’re lucky. Not many live to tell the tale.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not feeling very lucky.” She rubbed her right knee, the leg straight out in front of her. “Twisted something when I went down. I can’t put any weight on it.”
“Where’s your helmet?” I asked, searching around. “I need you to contact the others, clear them out.”
“The blow cracked it in half. Communication’s shot.”
“Crap,” I muttered. “How are you fixed for ammo?”
From feet away, a scream sounded. Terror threw me in a half spin. The bugbear’s silhouette filled the opening to our sanctuary, red eyes pulsing. He screamed again, an arm pumping his club overhead. I raised my sword in a sad effort to parry the inevitable blow.
A deafening burst of gunfire resounded through our space. The bugbear danced like a giant epileptic and fell backwards. He crashed to the ground with a solid whoomp.
“Holy crap,” I whispered, watching the creature’s chest deflate.
“Fully loaded until just then,” Vega said, answering my earlier question.
I lowered my sword. “Nice shooting.”
“Thanks, but we’ve got bigger problems.”
“Yeah, I know. The goblin horde.”
“Worse.”
“Worse?” Something gave my gut a hard twist. “What could be worse?”
“Command and control was ordering our evacuation when I lost communication. Cole—”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “He ordered your evacuation?” Even as I asked, I realized the only gunfire I was picking up now was sporadic and distant.
Thank God for that.
“He’s ordering a napalm strike,” Vega finished.
I choked on a fresh fit of panic. “A strike? When?”
But I could already hear the distinctive bat-bat-bat of rotary blades. Attack choppers were incoming.
20
I now understood why Captain Cole had tried to stop me from leaving the command-and-control tent. He had just ordered his helicopter division to drop a few hundred pounds of liquid hell. It didn’t change anything, though. I still would have seen that Vega made it out of the park.
“If I support you, do you think you can stand?” I asked her.
“Not like I have a choice.” Gripping the automatic rifle in her left hand, Vega let me underneath her right side and grasped my neck. I wrapped an arm around her upper back, and we stood together.
“The shortest way out is the way I came in,” I said.
Vega drew a sharp breath between her teeth as she took her first hopping step. With me stooping and her limping, we made our way down the hillock. With each step, I braced for the sting of an arrow, but none came. I listened for goblins, searched the surrounding trees for their movement. Vega seemed to be doing the same, the rifle aimed from her abdomen. I guessed the thundering of the approaching helicopters had driven them back into hiding.
Vega and I were squelching through the mud around the pond when something heavy crashed away to the west. Another bugbear? The explosion that followed told me no. Fiery light broke through the trees, accompanied seconds later by an intense, oily-smelling heat. Crap, they were dropping the napalm.
“Path is just over there,” I panted. “We’ll take the stairs out.”
The next explosion was closer, the heat like raw blisters over my skin.
Vega grunted as we burst onto the crumbling path. We were paces from the staircase when she staggered. I squeezed her perspiring body to my side to keep her from falling.
She swore. “My good leg’s giving out.”
“Muscle fatigue,” I said, sweat pouring from my own body. I peeked back and beheld an apocalyptic scene. A large swath of park was in black-red flames. The helicopter’s first pass had targeted the park’s lower west side, but I could hear them circling, coming in from the east. They would drop their remaining tanks in the vicinity of where we were standing.
“Go for it,” Vega said, already knowing what I was planning.
I stooped and placed my shoulder against her stomach. She folded over my back until I could get an arm around her thighs and lift her fireman style. I trudged forward, gaining speed, and hit the staircase at a jog.
“Shit!” she cried.
I thought the jostling motion had hurt her leg until I realized arrows were clattering against the steps around us.
Shit is right, I thought.
I glanced back to see the short, stooped silhouettes of two goblins at the bottom of the steps. I high-stepped as an arrow tore a chunk of fabric off my pant leg. I felt Vega moving her rifle around into a shooting position. I paused at a landing midway up the staircase so she could aim. At the same moment gunfire burst from my back, something knifed into my right calf. I went straight down with a holler. Vega tumbled from my back.
“Nailed them both,” she shouted above the roar of the choppers.
“And one of them nailed me.” I turned my leg over until I could see the dark shaft of the arrow. It was in there good.
“We’ll take care of that once we’re out,” she said, crawling toward the final flight of steps.
When she looked back to make sure I was following, the fire reflected in her eyes showed her fear—not for herself, but for her son. The idea of him growing up motherless. I nodded and crawled after her, remembering the fear and sadness my own mother had felt in her final moments.
Fresh detonations shook the earth. A chopper swept low. More napalm tanks crashed and tumbled into the woods behind us. Too close. We weren’t going to survive their explosions.
I said a quick prayer and shouted, “Protezione!”
Light sputtered around my staff’s orb, then, breaking from its water-logged lethargy, came brilliantly to life. The light wrapped us in a spherical shield as fire roared from the woods and engulfed us.
“Respingere!” I cried, channeling the force toward the landing downstairs from us.
In a whoosh of flames, the counterforce launched us into a weightless parabola. We cleared the park and were soon plummeting toward the street. The sphere shattered into sparks on impact. We rolled over asphalt, my sword and staff clattering in different directions.
Vega and I came to a rest near the far side of the street. I looked up, road-rashed and reeling. Beyond my splayed legs, fire consumed the lower park and presumably the remaining goblins and bugbears.
I let my head fall back again. “Holy hell.”
Thelonious’s creamy white light lapped around the edge of my consciousness, my incubus sensing weakness. I had expended all of my energy with those final invocations. I looked over to where Vega was scooting past me. Using her arms, she lifted herself onto the curb. She sat there without speaking, in shock, firelight glistening over the skin of her face.
“You all right?” I asked.
“I owe you, Croft,” she said, her voice distant.
For a moment, I thought she said I love you. A conflicting brew of emotions swam through me, casting up strange vapors, until the words resolved into what she’d actually said.
“Let’s just call it even,” I replied.
“No. I mistrusted you … one of the few good guys in the city.”
From the direction of Grand Army Plaza, footsteps pounded up the street. I turned my head to find Captain Cole flanked by two NYPD officers. A block beyond them, more officers were working to keep the press in their cordoned-off zone. Half of the cameras were aimed at the inferno, the other half at me.
Cole arrived in front of us, his expression either one of concern or anger, I couldn’t tell. Everything was going hazy. His gaze fell to the arrow in my leg.
“Ambulances are on the way,” he said.
“How many did we lose?” I asked, not wanting to know, but needing to.
“You don’t have to worry about that right now,” he repl
ied.
“How many?” I repeated.
“Thirty-six men.”
Thirty-six. The number echoed numbly in my skull.
To shift my attention from the dark mage, I had buried myself in the Central Park operation. I had poured in everything—my resources as an academic, as a wizard—to assess the monster threat, to determine the safest, most effective way to combat it. But I’d been kidding myself. With specters of revenge whispering around me, I’d missed things that should have been obvious. The goblins’ tunnel networks under Paris were storied. Why couldn’t their race have done the same under Central Park? And now, because of such oversights, more than a third of the Hundred were dead. Men with wives and children…
“I’ve already spoken to the mayor,” Cole said. “He’s meeting with advisors to determine the next step.”
The first ambulances rounded the corner and slowed toward us. Beneath the strobing lights, rear doors opened. Attendants in blue coveralls emerged. Thelonious’s growing presence made me waver as I pushed myself to my feet. I couldn’t even feel the arrow in my calf anymore.
“Her first,” I slurred, nodding at Vega.
The attendants wrapped her in a foil blanket and, squinting from the heat, helped her into the closer ambulance. Her eyes lingered on mine until the doors closed. I bent to retrieve my sword and staff, slotting them back together. When two more attendants approached me, I turned away in a limping half circle, the creamy waves really storming in now. I didn’t fight it.
“Croft,” Cole barked. “Where are you going?”
“To catch a cab,” I said faintly.
21
Foul smoke laced the air outside my apartment the next morning. Hungover and sore, I limped up the street alongside a truck delivering morning editions of the Gazette. That the delivery was late told me printing had been delayed to carry the news of last night’s operation. I didn’t know how the mayor had spun the bungled job and didn’t want to. Adjusting my sunglasses above my fake beard, I looked down where I wouldn’t catch any headlines.
Purge City (Prof Croft Book 3) Page 13
