“They can’t snatch her while she’s in custody, right?” Tee said.
Caleb nodded. “Them’s the rules.”
She peered through the SUV’s window, across the park, to where the priest — he was the Iron Knight, if Tee remembered correctly (the dick) — sat smoking a cigarette on a bench with his back to them. Still no sign of Izzy, but those massive doors could swing open and vomit her out into the Iron House’s clutches at any moment. “And you got the Culebramobile still?”
“Parked around the corner, yeah.”
Spirits started to gather around them, summoned, Tee imagined, by the imminence of action. They could probably smell it on her a mile away, all that love and ferocity she burned with, all Caleb’s rage, all that was about to happen. Tolula zipped through the air nearby and Tee allowed herself a tiny smile. “So … we snatch her before they can.”
Caleb nodded again. “I like it. I’ll swing the van into position, keep it idling on that corner. If the Knight is in place already, it won’t be long, so even if they peep me, it’ll hopefully be too late for them to do anything about it.”
“Bet,” Tee said, blinking through the rising urgency of the moment, the panic that it would go horribly wrong, grasping for some sense of determination, of hope, beyond it all. “I’ll get her to you. And these guys” — she glanced at the growing crowd of spirits gathering around them — “will run interference.”
Caleb smiled. “You’re trembling.”
Tee shrugged. “I’m terrified. I love her.”
He held out his fist. “I know. We got this.”
Tee dapped it. “Hell yeah.”
“This is happening,” Tee said to herself, stepping forward into what felt like a war zone but was actually, for the moment, a quiet Brooklyn street that happened to be in front of the detention center. “This is happening.” She knew she was speaking, but her words felt a million miles away, washed and faded beneath her pounding heart, each impossibly loud breath, her rising terror.
No.
She would step up. She had to. For Izzy. “For Izzy,” she whispered to herself, a shivery mantra. “For Izzy.”
She knew it was happening because the spirits had started swarming, Izzy’s name slithering from their wispy shadows like a zephyr: Isake … Isake … the way they always did when one of the ’shapers was in trouble. And a Lincoln Town Car that had been idling by the park suddenly lurched forward and in front of the facility.
That was when Tee stepped out from the corner she’d been peeking around.
“For Izzy,” she said again, louder now, as the screech of the Culebramobile’s tires sounded from behind her, Caleb gunning the engine, roaring forward. “For Izzy.”
The priest — the Iron Knight — was standing now, saying something frantically into his cell phone, stepping into the street in front of the double-parked Lincoln. That massive door swung open, and Tee broke into a run toward where she knew Izzy was about to be, the shadows swirling and sprinting along with her like an unstoppable tide, some blitzing ahead and swooshing past the priest, who must’ve felt that ill breeze and spun, eyes tight and suspicious.
Caleb revved the Culebramobile past Tee down the street, sideswiping the Town Car hard into the boxy sedan parked beside it with a metallic wrenching. Tee kept running. The priest had followed the spirits a little down the block; now he spun around at the sound of the crash and gaped.
Izzy stepped out of the door into the chilly December air, free, finally free, her concerned gaze landing on the damaged cars, and then Tee smashed full-on into the girl she loved, and the van door opened in front of them. “What the hell!” Izzy yelled. And then they were inside the Culebramobile, and Caleb was already screeching off — the street a jumpy blur outside the slowly closing van door.
“We in!” Tee yelled, although Caleb clearly had gathered that much. “Go!” (He already was.)
“What the hell!” Izzy yelled again. “Seriously, guys! I don’t —”
“Hold tight,” Caleb called, swinging hard around a corner along the side of the detention center. Tee and Izzy both went flying into the side of the van. Tee looked up just in time to see a tall man in all black step into the street up ahead: the Iron Knight.
“This dude,” Caleb muttered.
The priest held both hands up, and something long and black came zipping toward them out of one, then the other.
Chains.
“Ahh!” Caleb yelled, swerving to the side but still catching the first one full-on with the windshield, which cracked but didn’t give. The second one blasted straight through it, past Caleb, past Tee and Izzy, and smashed out the back window. The windshield hadn’t shattered though, the chain had somehow burrowed its own hole with a spiderweb of tiny cracks splintering off it. “This … dude …” Caleb said again, veering away from the row of parked cars he’d been shredding and back into the middle of the street.
Up ahead, the priest had retracted his first chain and was lifting his arm to send it out again. Instead, Caleb gunned it. The Iron Knight realized what was happening a second too late. Tee saw his face go from stone-cold killer to holy shit, and then a tremendous thump sounded, and he was just a long sprawling figure flying upside down into the air.
“Oh my God!” Tee gasped.
“What the hell is happening!” Izzy yelled, still trying to right herself and catch up to what was going on.
Tee glanced out the back window just in time to see the priest land on a parked car and slide off into the street.
Caleb slowed to a halt at the corner. “He down?”
“Yep,” Tee reported.
“For the count?”
“Ah …”
Izzy crawled up onto the seat beside Tee and looked out the window. “Sure looks like it.”
The priest lay in a muddled heap, moving ever so slightly. Then he rolled over.
“Wait,” Tee said.
He got up on his knees, shook his head, and stood.
Izzy grimaced. “This Terminator ass motha —”
“Hell no,” Caleb said, throwing the van into reverse.
“You’re going back?” Tee said.
“We finishing this,” Caleb said, but another car swung around the corner before he could accelerate. It was a black SUV, and it was moving fast.
“Careful,” Tee cautioned.
Caleb twisted around and squinted at the street behind them. “Are they about to —”
The priest turned too, caught the full force of the SUV’s front grille, went flying forward this time — not up and back like before — and rolled about a hundred times. “Ahhhh!” everyone in the van yelled at once. The SUV kept coming, faster now, and then swerved slightly as it approached where the Iron Knight lay crumpled. It had adjusted, Tee realized, so the tires lined up directly with the man’s head. She squeezed her eyes shut just before it hit, heard Izzy go, “Ughhhh!” and Caleb mutter something under his breath. And then the van’s engine growled, and they lurched forward and screeched off as the sounds of sirens grew louder around them.
Juan Santiago was having trouble expressing himself.
That was nothing new, really — he’d always been better with rhythms and melodies than he had with words — but this felt like a whole new level of complete uselessness. The gray sky filled the windows of Uncle Neville’s Cadillac, and occasional flecks of slush speckled them and the traffic heading back toward Brooklyn. And the strains of some song on the radio and the strange warmth of people around him who loved him, people who wouldn’t hurt him, mingled with the gnawing shock of his best friend’s betrayal. It was all one — a million different dissonant pieces came together to form this impossible moment, and none of them made sense, none got along. It was like trying to write a song with a bunch of random notes — no key or chord sequence, no bass line: just chaos.
Worst of all, this was a moment when Juan needed to make sense, maybe more so than any other time in his life.
“I still don’t understand,” Sier
ra was saying, reeling from a whole different angle of the same betrayal as Juan. She’d been saying some version of that refrain for the past fifteen minutes as they inched along the Jackie Robinson, with graveyards stretching out to either side and the towers of Manhattan in the distance. And Uncle Neville and Nydia exchanged concerned glances in the front seat. And it all just seemed like a blur, like Juan was very, very far away or it was happening behind some filthy glass that he could barely see through. “I don’t know,” he kept saying, or he thought he was saying it over and over. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
The pounding rage still simmered through him from before, but now it was a mess — didn’t know where to point itself, because the pain of being betrayed had mixed with the pain of being locked up, and neither made any sense. And through it all, a strange, incongruous joy kept surfacing, because in spite of it all, he was free, he had made it, and there was a sky overhead and people who loved him and —
A dark brown hand slid on top of his, sent a tingling warmth ricocheting through Juan’s whole body, through even his dimmest thoughts.
Bennie.
She had waited for him. Had come to visit him. Had written him. She admired him, she’d said, and he couldn’t believe this beautiful woman who he’d known all along but somehow, like an ass, never truly seen, this brilliant, wise woman admired him. He’d done something noble, she’d said, staying along with Anthony to make sure he was okay. And then thoughts of Anthony and the Iron House tumbled back in, sullying the moment.
“Hey,” Bennie said, her face close to his, her breath against his cheek. “Hey, hey, hey.”
He blinked up at her, felt the pain and confusion swirl within him, put his head down on her shoulder and sobbed.
Hands rubbed Juan’s back, Bennie’s, and then Sierra’s too, and then even Nydia reached from the front seat and patted his shoulder, and he was surrounded by love, soaked in it; they wouldn’t let him fall.
He snorted and shook his head, lifting it away from Bennie’s shoulder, hoping he hadn’t snotted all over her puffy jacket. Accepted the tissue someone passed him and horked into it a few times, finally allowing himself a chuckle and then glanced around.
“I wish I could make sense of it,” he said.
“Did he mention the letters?” Sierra asked, immediately back in detective mode now that he’d calmed down.
“What letters?”
“The letters I wrote him? On the typewriter Neville gave me for my birthday. I wrote him like a damn book on that thing.”
“Uh … no.”
“That’s weird,” Bennie said, back on the case too. He could see her turning over possibilities and theories in that scientist brain of hers. He wished he was half as smart as she was. Wondered if she could really be with a guy like him.
“What’d you write about?” he asked, trying to at least act like he was able to stay focused.
“I told him,” Sierra said, looking pretty shell-shocked herself. “I told him everything.”
“Everything?” Bennie asked.
Sierra nodded her head to the side, as if the entire sprawling past six months of her coming into her own as a shadowshaper and then the head of Shadowhouse and then creating a whole new house from the ashes of two old ones was just hanging in the air around her. “Everything.”
It was pretty incredible, Juan marveled, what his sister had done, what she’d become. He’d realized it over and over while he was locked up — how rare and amazing a person she was, how he needed to tell her more often that he was proud of her. This wasn’t the time, though — it would just seem like he was delirious and overwhelmed, which, to be fair, he was. He’d wait till some moment when she would really hear him and let it sink in.
“Did he respond?” Bennie asked.
Sierra half shrugged. “Kinda? I mean, he wrote back, yeah, but he never really said much about all the shadowshaper stuff. Like, he acknowledged it, but didn’t … really …” She slowed down, probably about to realize something crucial that everyone else had overlooked.
“What?” Juan asked, impatient. People should just say what they were thinking as they thought it, not make everyone else wait till they had it all figured out, dammit.
Sierra shook her head. “No, just … it didn’t really bother me that much, that he didn’t mention it, because I knew it was a lot to lay on him in a letter, you know, and there was no way to really feel out where he was at about it, but like … it is odd, right? Like, someone drops this whole epic story about how they’re part of a magical crew dealing with dead people and moving murals, and you’re just like, okay, cool. I guess I kinda figured you were filling in the gaps, Juan.”
“Me? Ha, no. I never mentioned it, and he never asked, so …”
“That is weird,” Bennie said. Her hand still rested on Juan’s, and he was more grateful for it than he knew how to express. It felt like he’d float away if she let go, out into the chilly gray sky, and never be seen again. And folks would just shake their heads and say, Ah, Juan — he just floated away…. All that mess at Rikers was too much for him, even when he got free….
“I thought one of the things you liked so much about Anthony was that he wasn’t all enmeshed in the whole thing,” Nydia said.
“Yeah, well …” Sierra shook her head. “Obviously that backfired.”
A sullen silence took over the car.
“Shit,” Bennie said. Everyone looked at her. “Crane said he had something we want, right? And then everything with Anthony happened, but like … Anthony’s not a hostage.”
“Not if he went to their side,” Juan said with a low growl in his voice.
“Not if he did it by choice,” Sierra pointed out. “We don’t know …”
“Either way,” Bennie said.
“Izzy!” Sierra, Bennie, and Juan all said at once.
“Tee hasn’t checked in,” Sierra said, glancing at her phone.
“I’m already calling Caleb,” Nydia reported from the front seat. “It’s ringing.” Juan heard the tattoo artist’s muffled voice at the other end of the phone. He sounded out of breath.
“Wait,” Nydia said. “Slow down, man. What? What? Is Izzy out? Is she okay? Yes?” She nodded and gave a thumbs-up to the back seat, and everyone erupted into cheers.
“Wait, wait, wait! Guys! Quiet down, I can’t … what?” Everyone got quiet. “Ah … let me put Neville on. This sounds like his department.” She passed Neville the phone, shaking her head.
Juan, Sierra, and Bennie looked back and forth at each other with furrowed brows.
“First of all,” Neville said, tucking Nydia’s cell between his shoulder and his ear while he drove. “Don’t say anything about what happened. Not one word. Clear? I don’t want to know, and I definitely don’t want to say it over the phone. I just need to know what you need right now, and then I’m gonna tell you how to get it. And you better write it down on a piece of paper, yes, like a caveman, because the next thing I’m probably going to tell you to do is get rid of that phone you’re using.”
“What happened?” Sierra whispered.
Nydia shook her head. “Didn’t say, but Nev’s right, it’s better we don’t know. All I know is, they were in some kind of, ah, car accident? But they’re okay. And they need to get rid of the Culebramobile.”
Juan blinked at her. “Like, keep it out of sight for a while, right?”
“Ah, no,” Nydia said. “Like, lay it down in its final resting place. Probably with gasoline and a big fire.”
Juan rested his head back on Bennie’s shoulder and tried to make the whole world go away around him.
“Got it…. Okay, yeah…. No, I’m writing it down — my memory sucks. Yes, on paper. Alright, Uncle Neville. I promise.”
As Caleb talked in the front seat, Tee held Izzy’s face in her hands and took her in like a deep gulp of a delicious drink after a drought.
“Yes … I swear. Is that Bushwick? Okay, yeah. We can make it there.”
The
y were nestled in some shadowy corner of Prospect Park, far away from the sirens and screeching tires and cops and freaky priests being hit by cars. They were alone, almost. And Izzy was alive. She was alive and okay.
“I don’t think there’s any way to do a quick paint job before we go, no. But I promise I’ll stick to quiet backroads and avoid high-traffic areas…. Sure. Yeah, I think so too…. No doubt, no doubt.”
Izzy’s face looked tired, her eyes more sunken-in. Or was that just Tee’s imagination? It didn’t matter. She was okay, mostly. In one piece anyway. She was real, and she let herself be held and gazed at and drunk in. Tee would take care of her; she’d nurse her back to being okay; she’d scare away the nightmares; she’d make it better, whatever it was. Or she’d try anyway. And she’d be there beside Izzy to keep her company even if she couldn’t fix what hurt. She said as much, in a desperate, tearful whisper, and Izzy nodded, tears streaming down her face, eyes closed, taking it in. Taking it in.
“And this, ah, associate of yours, he know we’re coming? He’s … okay, okay, cool. Not a problem. Gotya. And look — tell the others for me that it seems like there’s, um, someone else in play. No idea who, but he, er, he doesn’t like the Iron House much, let’s put it that way…. Yeah, anyway, I’ll keep you upda — don’t? Okay, no worries. I’ll just … yeah. Okay, talk to you la — hello?”
Still caressing Izzy’s face, Tee dug her cell phone out and handed it over to Caleb as he turned around.
“Girls, I need your — oh. Thanks.” He took it, looked at Izzy.
“Hers is dead,” Tee said. “So it shouldn’t matter.”
Caleb nodded, turned back around. “That dude is no joke,” he muttered, popping out the battery and SIM card of Tee’s phone.
Isake, Isake, Isake. Tee let her girlfriend’s face become everything for just a few more breathless moments. Soon they’d be back out in the cruel, impossible world again, and who knew what would happen? They could be torn away from each other, killed … it was too much to think about. But right now, in this moment, Tee had Izzy, and Izzy had Tee, and Tee’d be damned if she was gonna let whatever terror lay ahead ruin that.
Shadowshaper Legacy Page 9
