The needle trembled to thirty, the vehicle rumbling as if it were going uphill. It was the load. Bertha was pulling several hundred pounds of equipment. I turned around, craning my neck to see the hitch to the trailer. I might have tried to crack it with a focused force blast, but without my cane, I’d be more likely to derail both truck and trailer.
I straightened and looked into the side mirror again.
The wolves were closer, tongues lolling as their huge paws slammed the crossties.
Bertha continued its sluggish acceleration into the yellow lights of the Thirty-fourth Street station. The columned landing was empty. From one story up, where the Sixth Avenue line ran, I could hear the dull echoes of a PA system and the din of commuters.
Shouts rang out: “There he is!” “Stop right there, Croft!”
NYPD officers were pounding down a stairwell and leaping busted turnstiles. I ducked low as I passed them. Shots popped off, flashing from the hood of the truck. I was almost clear of the station when a hard explosion rocked me. Bertha wobbled and canted left. A metallic keening sounded. In the side mirror I caught sparks spitting from her lower body.
Damn, they blew a tire.
The speedometer, which had been creeping up to forty miles per hour thudded back to the low thirties. Behind me, the wolves began to gain. Up ahead, NYPD officers would no doubt be scrambling to head me off. There was no going up an emergency staircase now, no making my way to the piers jutting into the Hudson. The New Jersey plan was scrapped.
That leaves the vampires, I thought grimly.
Fleeing to them would make me look guiltier than sin, yeah, but when the alternative was death…
Problem was, I was three miles from the Wall Street station. Not only that, I didn’t know what I would find when I got there. Given the vampires’ vast security apparatus, I had to assume they’d barricaded the station to prevent infiltration from below. But I had a more immediate problem.
In the upcoming station, an assortment of abandoned maintenance vehicles were clogging the tracks. I was on a collision course.
I stood and aimed a hand at them. “Vigore!”
Hot energy erupted from my palm. The vehicles capsized in a wave, derailed, but now littering the track. Seizing Bertha’s steering wheel in both hands, I ducked low as her large front fender plowed into the pile-up. Metal banged and whined. I braced for derailment, but Bertha held on like a champ, her mass heaving us through to the other side of the mess. The blown wheel in back clunked as I depressed the accelerator and urged us back up to speed.
In the rearview mirror, the wolves had arrived at the downed vehicles and begun leaping them. Something on one of the upturned trucks caught my eye: a cylindrical gas tank.
There she blows, I thought.
Bertha decelerated as I climbed onto the crash bars. Over the top of the equipment that rocked and jostled on the flatbed, I lined up my right palm with the tank and yelled, “Forza dura!”
The force of the invocation threw me back into the cab. Reclaiming the steering wheel, I peered into the side mirror. The vehicles, having been blown skyward, were now crashing down in a deafening wave. From inside the cacophony, a wolf yelped.
Should slow them, but I missed the damn tank.
The thought had barely formed when a white flash appeared amid the wreckage followed by a deafening detonation. An orange fireball swallowed the thrown vehicles and stormed down the tunnel. I crouched as it roared past, flames searing my arms and hunched-over back. I held my breath to the strangling heat while slapping out a small fire atop my hat.
After a moment, the flames receded along with the piteous cries of the wolves. With a choked gasp, I inhaled the stench of burning diesel and focused on the tracks ahead. They switched here and there, throwing us from local to express tracks and back. I had no control over the switches, just the steering to ensure Bertha’s rubber tires remained aligned with the rails.
It was a matter now of staying the course.
The next station was empty as well as the one after that. I had no way of knowing what was happening above ground, but my guess was that the NYPD, having sent the bulk of its force to Midtown, was now struggling to get officers into the Broadway line south of me, where many of the entrances remained sealed. If that held, and with the wolves no longer in pursuit, my chances of reaching Arnaud’s district were starting to look decent.
I checked the speedometer and then my watch. At our current speed, we’d be at the Wall Street station in under five.
As the seconds ticked by, my body felt like an exposed nerve. I marked off each station until I was coming up on Canal Street. Two weeks before, I had turned it into a ghoul crematorium. The station had yet to be cleaned. Bertha bumped over heaps of charred bones and through drifts of ash, the particles billowing up into the headlight beams.
I coughed as we thudded onward.
Only two stations from Wall Street. As Bertha rumbled through the Fulton Street stop, I rose from my seat to get a better look at the tunnel ahead. It ran around a bend, straightened, and then…
“Oh, shit.”
I slammed the brakes hard. Too hard. The load in the flatbed trailer pushed against Bertha’s rear, displacing the tires and metal wheels from the rails. I fought with the steering, but there was no correcting it. The truck and trailer jackknifed. I used the crash bars to brace myself as we capsized.
Bertha crashed and came to a sudden rest on her side. I’d managed to stay inside the cab, shocked but not hurt. I craned my neck to peer down the tracks. One of Bertha’s headlights illuminated what I’d seen a moment before: an imposing steel wall and a line of government security guards standing in front of it. Their eyes glowed above their aimed pistols.
Distant commands sounded behind me—NYPD officers entering from the Fulton Street Station. Crackling power rushed to my prism, but I held back. The second I cast, I’d be shot dead.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said tiredly, showing my hands. “I surrender.”
“Music to my ears,” a familiar voice said from the wolves. It was Flint, one of the wolves who had decked me in the West Village. On the outer edge of Bertha’s light, his lupine teeth flashed. If his brother was among the dozen-odd wolves stalking toward me I couldn’t see him.
“Where’s Tweedledum?” I asked.
“I’d be worrying about yourself right now,” Flint said with a snort. “I don’t get you, Croft. You had official protection. Why’d your dumb ass throw it away? What’d the vamps promise you?”
“Nothing,” I growled. “It’s a goddamned lie.”
“But at the first sign of heat, look where you ran.” He glanced around. We must have been at Liberty Street. Aboveground—and below ground too, evidently—stood the forbidding Wall.
“Like I had a choice,” I said. “The mayor’s office planted that story about me. But you probably already know that.”
“All I know are my orders.”
“To bring me in?”
His delayed response told me everything. “Yeah, to bring you in.”
I was being thrown to the wolves. Literally. Flint stepped forward, reached down, and seized my arm. His grip was crushing. I hooked an elbow around one of the crash bars and grabbed my wrist with the other hand.
“Let go,” he ordered.
“No.”
He would pry me away eventually, but my powers needed time to recharge. Then I’d figure out how in the hell to use them. I braced for a shoulder-dislocating jerk, but Flint’s grip relaxed. He raised his face and sniffed. I noticed some of the other wolves doing the same.
Flint was opening his mouth when automatic gunfire broke from the tunnel behind me. Wolves shouted and went down, smoke blowing from their wounds. Silver rounds.
A spray of blood hit me across the face. Flint released me, seizing his throat as he fell.
Within seconds, it was over. Pounding boots replaced gunfire. Men in body armor appeared, wrestled me from the toppled maintenance vehicle, and began running me t
oward the steel barrier. They weren’t NYPD, which the wolves had realized too late. I recognized them as members of the vampires’ private security force, the ones who guarded the Wall.
Behind me, single shots cracked as the mercenaries finished off the survivors.
Hydraulics sounded, and the steel barrier shuddered and rose. The guards hustled me into a corridor, the tracks replaced by cement flooring. After a couple of turns, we stopped in front of an elevator door. I stared at my dazed and blood-spattered reflection in the metal, dimly aware I’d lost my fishing hat.
The doors slid open, and my mirror image was replaced by a familiar figure. Immaculate, pale-faced, and featuring short, straight bangs, the blood slave flashed a wicked grin.
“Welcome to the Financial District, Mr. Croft,” Zarko said. “Mr. Thorne has been expecting you.”
25
Still stunned from the chase, I rode the elevator with Arnaud’s head blood slave in a buzzing silence. It was only when the doors opened on the top floor, and Arnaud’s musky scent whisked in on the icy, climate-controlled air, that I realized we were in the vampire’s building.
Zarko led me down the hallway toward Arnaud’s office. Well before we arrived at the forbidding double doors, however, the blood slave stopped and turned toward another office. Producing a key, he unlocked and pushed open the door to an executive-level suite.
“There’s a washroom in back, where you’ll find a change of clothes,” he said.
“What do I need to change for?”
I followed his gaze down my front. My sweat-sodden shirt was half unbuttoned, the sleeves and stomach stained with soot from the tunnels. Grease smeared the thighs of my pants.
“A high-level meeting,” Zarko answered.
“With Arnaud?”
He leaned forward just enough to give a single sniff. “You should avail yourself of the shower as well,” he said before stepping back, bowing, and closing the door behind him.
Vampires and their decorum.
But Zarko was right; I smelled like a bag of garbage left out in the sun.
Inside the bathroom, I found a dark suit hanging from the door beside a huge walk-in shower. I stripped off everything except my amulet and turned the controls to hot. Steaming water washed over me. I soaped and rinsed while I chanted Words of healing, blood and the filth of the tunnels sliding into the drain.
The shower was restorative, but I kept a keen vigil on the locked bathroom door. I had escaped the NYPD and wolves, yeah, but I wasn’t exactly safe. I was in the stronghold of a killer—and naked in more ways than one. I bore no ring, no silver, nothing to keep the vampires off me. If Arnaud decided he wanted me dead, I was dead. Simple as that.
That I was here at his invitation offered little comfort. He would protect me only as long as he could use me. I didn’t know what he had in mind, but I had a feeling I was about to find out.
I cut the water and grabbed the towel hanging on the shower’s back wall.
I also have a feeling I’m not going to like it.
“Mr. Croft,” Arnaud said with exaggerated pleasantness.
He stood from the head of a long, coffin-shaped conference table. He wasn’t alone. Eight other faces turned toward me. I recognized them from the news and covers of business magazines. They were the heads of New York’s giant financial institutions. Unlike Arnaud, they wore dour suits, ties cinched to their throats. Like Arnaud, they were all vampires.
I stiffened as their hungry eyes fixed on me.
Arnaud opened a hand toward the empty chair at the other end of the table, directly opposite him. “Please,” he said, “come in and join us.” He nodded at Zarko to close the door.
I willed myself forward, hoping my tailored vicuña suit radiated the control and confidence I presently lacked. The vampires’ predatory gazes followed me as I fumbled to pull the chair out and sit. I scooted forward with just as much clumsiness, then cleared my throat.
“Thank you,” I said in a hard voice, which came out false-sounding.
“Several of you remember the wizard Asmus Croft, with whom we joined forces in Europe some centuries ago,” Arnaud said, adjusting his earpiece as he sat again. “Everson Croft is his grandson. I’ve had the pleasure of his—how shall we say—collaboration in recent months. And here he is again.”
To my right, a graying vampire with a lean undertaker’s face made a noise of interest. He looked like a creature who lured children into alleyways with promises of candy, then stared, smiling, into their dimming eyes as he strangled the life from them. His cheeks began to dimple.
I quickly averted my gaze.
“Did I not anticipate this day, Mr. Croft?” Arnaud asked over his steepled fingers. Before I could answer, he directed himself to the others. “You see, when the poor boy and I last spoke, I told him that should we ever meet again, it would be because he had come to me.” His eyes cut back to mine. “Mr. Croft was dubious. Fortunately for him, we were monitoring the encrypted police frequencies to know he had arrived at our doorstep.”
The vampires sniggered in a way that said they knew the stupidity of mortals all too well.
“I also anticipated the developments taking place in the city, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First, I want to make one thing clear. As long as Mr. Croft is here, he is under my protection.”
He spoke the words as though staking a claim. I understood then that the suit I wore was more than a clean change of clothing. In vampire society, it was a mark of ownership.
I shifted, the silky fabric suddenly stifling.
Arnaud stared around the table. Each vampire nodded his understanding of the claim, some more reluctantly than others, it seemed—especially the undertaker vampire beside me. Harsh energies moved throughout the room. A reinforcement of hierarchy?
When at last the energy settled, Arnaud’s gaze returned to me. I read the glint in his stare: Do not test me, Mr. Croft, for I am the only thing keeping them from your wizard’s blood.
I nodded, hardly aware I was doing it.
“Now to the business at hand,” he said, breaking his eyes from mine. “The day has come, gentlemen. With one hand, City Hall is prying away the financial ties that have kept the city in our debt, and with the other, it seeks to drive the proverbial stake through our chests.”
“The blasted werewolves are behind it,” the youngest-looking vampire seethed.
“Now, now, Damien,” Arnaud said. “Let’s not fall victim to reductionist thinking. The werewolves have a role, yes, but there are many forces at work. The election, the upcoming bailout, the war against supernaturals—indeed, we’re facing a perfect storm. One that will wipe us out if we do not keep our heads.”
“You don’t think Penny has awakened?” Damien persisted.
When Arnaud replied, vehemence scored his voice. “Penelope Lowder is not our concern.”
I considered the vampire’s question. Had Penny recovered? Had she been the one to link me to the vampires? The idea had flickered through my mind back in my classroom. There was certainly motive, namely that I had almost killed her. And then there was the age-old enmity between werewolves and vampires, as well as a more recent enmity between Arnaud and Penny. He had rejected her as his mate, and hell hath no fury…
But something didn’t jibe.
Maybe it was the thought of Penny recovering from a prolonged coma and going directly on the offensive. A campaign of this scale would take time to plan and prepare and with no assurance of success.
Unless she’s been awake this whole time, I thought.
I looked around the table. Could the eradication program have been a pretext to a larger war between werewolves and vampires?
“And no, Penelope has not awakened,” Arnaud said to Damien, killing my idea. “Do you think I am so foolish as to not be monitoring the situation? Regardless, the wolves see opportunity in our predicament. As do the fae. We are beset on all sides.”
Though he’d brought the fae up, Arnaud didn’t seem to
suspect them of outing the vampires.
“Something to share, Mr. Croft?” he asked.
I couldn’t think about the fae without thinking about Caroline. The idea that she may have played a role in my betrayal savaged my heart. Still, a competing instinct to protect her persisted. Sensing the emotions clashing inside me, Arnaud arched a slender eyebrow.
“No,” I said quietly.
“Very well.”
Arnaud dropped his gaze. I didn’t realize a control pad was inset in the table above his lap until he tapped something. The paneled wall behind him rotated to become a large flat screen. The screen showed a satellite image of skyscraper-packed lower Manhattan, its northern boundary demarcated by the Wall. I noticed that the streets beyond the Wall had been cleared for several blocks, and…
I squinted forward. Was that a line of tanks?
“We are under siege,” Arnaud confirmed. “Tanks rumble down from the north. Attack helicopters circle the skies. Gunboats have yet to appear, but they’re coming. Fortunately, we keep an impressive military stock of our own. Defensively, we have land, air, and sea covered.”
Along the top of the zoomed-in Wall, members of the vampires’ security force manned what appeared to be anti-tank missiles. On the roofs of skyscrapers, anti-aircraft guns swiveled, tracking the helicopters’ movements. The waterfront was manned as well, it appeared.
“Feeling safer, Mr. Croft?” Arnaud asked.
“For right now, yeah,” I admitted. “But we’re cut off. Nothing comes in or goes out.”
“If you’re worried about sustenance, you needn’t. My fellow executives and I have our associates.” Arnaud was referring to the blood slaves, from whom they could feed indefinitely. “As for you, we have independent sources of energy and clean water, as well as a large store of nonperishable goods. While you’re inside our district, you’ll want for nothing.”
But what do you want? I wondered.
Instead, I asked, “What about the supernaturals? The wolves and the fae?”
The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 69