None did, however, since they were on a back street for the moment. They very illegally cut across Bruckner Expressway and did their best to vanish into the mostly commercial district beyond.
Remy started to fall behind. He was in better shape than he’d been for years but still not quite up to running a marathon.
“Hold.” He panted. “Need…breath.”
Conrad slowed and gave him a moment. “Sir,” he suggested, “I think it’s about time we thought about calling another Uber, anyway. We seem to have gotten clear of the police, for now, not to mention the cartel.”
“Good idea,” he admitted and pulled his phone out. “It’ll go on your tab this time, though.” He looked at the lycanthrope and for the first time, realized that he was practically nude, save for the torn remnants of his pants which hung from his waistband like a grass skirt.
“Especially,” he then added, “since we’ll have to deal with your wardrobe malfunction before we do much of anything else.”
Absent-mindedly, he wondered how Taylor was doing.
Chapter Ten
Moonlight Detective Agency Offices, Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York
Taylor stood with her arms folded gingerly over her midsection, about two feet behind and to the left of her own computer chair. In the seat sat the dwarf Andrew Volz, the agency’s technology specialist, whom Remington had brought on board more or less accidentally a month and a half before.
“Ha!” He laughed and continued to grin under his red facial hair as his finger dashed madly over the keyboard and clacked away. “Oh, this is rich. The lack of proper challenge is offset by the pleasure of seeing exactly what pointless, stupid nonsense the humans have come up with this time.”
She almost smiled. “I often feel the same way, albeit usually not about technology. What you said applies to most human behaviors, really.”
Since they’d hired him, his main duties had consisted of getting the office outfitted with state-of-art advanced gadgetry to efficiency-bolstering alterations, as well as basic troubleshooting.
Of course, he did have other skills which also came in handy for a detective agency, such as hacking.
“Now,” she instructed, “scroll down and let me see all this account’s transactions for the last six months. Of course, we’re mainly interested in the ones going back and forth between Israel and the United States, but it will be helpful to know anything else she might be up to.”
The redheaded dwarf chuckled under his breath. “No problem at all, miss.”
The vampire nodded with approval. She was fairly computer-savvy, but Volz was practically a savant. During the investigation that had led them to capture Alex, he’d even managed to crack into the FBI’s database and slip out without them even knowing their security had been breached.
Currently, they viewed a bank account registered to someone named Salma Tarif—supposedly an Egyptian woman who had arrived at John F Kennedy International Airport about six weeks before.
However, while they had finagled proof from the airline that she had departed from Cairo, all her foreign communications and financial transactions had gone to and from Dimona, Israel, which suggested that she’d gone to Cairo by land or sea and obtained a fake Egyptian ID.
If she was not simply Moswen Neith’s alter ego, she was at very least a lackey or co-conspirator.
“Hmm,” Taylor mused, her eyes and brain taking in the account information quicker and more efficiently than a human’s would have been able to. “She’s been a busy girl. Look at all these mysterious transactions…personal gifts and dividends payments from bullshit front companies.”
“Aye,” Volz affirmed. “So it would seem. She took some precautions, but I think she left most of this business in the hands of so-called human ‘experts’ in her employ. If you’re right about how old she is, she might not completely understand the intricacies of modern technology.”
She drummed her fingers on her arm. “I am unlikely to be wrong. Moswen was imprisoned in the Negev at least two hundred years ago, and between what Alex has told me, and what I…saw when our minds locked, I suspect she might truly date all the way back to ancient Egypt.”
The thought made her uncomfortable. She was centuries old herself and not easily fazed nor intimidated. Even when outnumbered by wily opponents, few could match her. But a vampire of almost prehistoric lineage was nothing to be taken lightly.
“All right,” she said and returned her attention to the screen before them, “move on to the next name on the list.”
There were still four more accounts they needed to hack and examine. All of them belonged to persons—or, at least, to false identities—whom she had heard of over the course of her own investigations.
Such things had kept her busy for a long time now. She was glad Remington was handling the Surrly business as well as their more mundane cases and had to admit it was good to have him around.
Volz continued to scoff and brag as he easily slashed his way through the feeble protections employed by the various banks and credit unions.
“The simplicity of human computer systems is truly fascinating,” he monologued. “It’s like watching a child build a sandcastle on a beach, proclaim himself an architect, and then having the opportunity to throw water on it or kick it over.”
“Now, now,” Taylor chastised him, “that’s mean.”
He laughed again. “Well, in all fairness, theirs is a species that has the distinct disadvantage of an absurdly short lifespan. How much knowledge can one really acquire, not to mention pass down to their children, in only seventy or eighty years? But even considering that handicap, they simply don’t display much of a knack for engineering or programming of any kind.”
Taylor had once been a human, if a very long time ago, and still had cause to present herself as one when dealing with mortals. Since she made it her business to protect the poor creatures from preternatural depredations, she found that his pompousness was beginning to annoy her.
“I would say that humans do the best they can with what little they have, relatively speaking.” Her voice took on a slight edge.
“And why digital money?” the dwarf ranted and seemed to ignore her comment. “It can be deleted and has no real, actual existence. Really, it’s nothing but light particles on a screen, representing a kind of promise to be exchanged for true wealth.”
The vampire had to admit he had a point there. “Yes, it makes human money incredibly fragile but also quite convenient. Lugging around heavy bags of stones is a hassle.”
“But I thought you were strong,” Volz interjected and chuckled. “I kid. And I don’t intend to sound too condescending. Sometimes, I simply think humans would have an easier time of things if they’d acknowledge us and accept our guidance. Storing wealth and value in gems, for starters, inconvenient or no. It’s worked splendidly for dwarves for the last few millennia, after all.”
Sighing, she glanced at the clock. Business hours were long gone. Bobby had shut the reception desk down and gone home sometime before, and Alex had recently gone to bed. Finding an affordable place for him to stay had proven problematic thus far, so they’d merely converted one of the closets into a bunk and threatened to mail him to Moswen by certified mail if he interfered with any of the office supplies overnight.
Then, she stopped. Her sense expanded outwards. Something was wrong. She didn’t know what, but…
Footsteps came toward the back office from the repurposed closet, and the door burst open to reveal none other than Alex.
“Taylor!” He fixed her with a frantic gaze. His eyes bulged, his body shook, and his muscles seemed to tighten every two or three seconds.
She immediately shifted mental gears. Her usual frame of mind grew colder, harder, and sharper and a calm yet intense focus set in. “What is it, Alex?”
“It’s Moswen,” he exclaimed. “My brand—it’s burning. Not like before when she had full control, but she’s coming. I can feel it.”
Tay
lor had no reason to disbelieve him. When they’d captured him, she had expended great effort to remove most of Moswen’s influence from the brand on his chest. He was no longer her slave and she could not track him except in the broadest of terms.
But enough of her venomous essence remained for him to notice when she was on the move.
Without hesitation, she stepped around her desk, reached under it, and retrieved her sword, pulling it free of its scabbard in a single fluid motion.
It was loosely modeled on a Japanese katana, although slightly shorter and sturdier, having been designed to function as a military-grade machete if necessary. The handle consisted of black polypropylene encasing the tang and bound with leather cord to improve the grip.
She’d had it custom-made by a reliable smith about seven years before, and it had held up well enough, despite a few slight chips in the edge from the last time she’d used it extensively. That had been a few months before during the junior vampire Gabriel’s ill-advised attempt to murder her and take over New York. She’d ended up cutting his head off with it for his trouble.
As Volz hung back and braced himself for combat if need be while Alex gulped and cowered, she stepped out through the doorway and onto the main floor of the office. The front entrance thumped open in time with her first footfall.
Four—no, five—vampiric thralls streamed in. They screeched and howled with crazed and bestial anger. It was a tactic that might create fear and confusion in an inexperienced opponent.
In her case, all it did was indicate to her exactly how many of them there were a moment before she saw them and informed her of the fact that her foes would attempt an all-or-nothing bum rush.
They might not have known that she would be there.
At the front of the gang was a man, thirtyish and strong-looking, who wielded a crude machete-sword of his own with a blade that looked like it had been sprayed with silver nitrate. Silver was not fatal to vampires except in extreme quantities, but it could slow her and make her temporarily sick if it got into her bloodstream.
Taylor noticed something else in the split second before the man was on top of her—he was a willing thrall. That essentially meant he was one of those humans who had knowingly pledged service to a vampire, either out of cowardice or ambition or simple madness.
She preferred to spare the lives of those mortals who acted under pure compulsion and who served only because their minds had been ensnared and knew not what they did.
When dealing with these types, though, she had no such inclinations toward mercy.
The man, urged on by Moswen’s borrowed power, moved with both speed and force, but he was neither as fast nor as strong as a true vampire. Moreover, his movements were easy to predict.
The vampire stepped under, around, and through his attack, and her sword followed even before her assailant knew what had happened.
The blade moved in perfect time with her graceful step and sliced cleanly through the left half of the thrall’s neck and part of his upper chest and shoulder, despite the minor nicks along the edge. With a squawk, he stumbled before he sank to his knees. It took him a moment, in the heat of his battle-lust, to realize he’d taken a mortal blow. Blood sprayed from the wound.
Taylor caught sight of the red fountain out of the corner of her eye, and the smell washed over her, tantalizing and intense. The savage old hunger threatened to overwhelm her. She quashed it with a fast and willful thought and committed herself to the fight.
The next two advanced in tandem, a man and a woman. The latter also held a silver-coated machete, while the man was armed with a makeshift meteor hammer consisting of a chunk of pig iron welded to a chain.
The idea, in his case, was probably to break enough of her bones to briefly cripple her before she could regenerate and allow the others to move in and remove her head or heart.
With mild surprise, she watched as the pair tried to feint their way around her. A blindingly fast movement of her arm put the point of her sword through the woman’s face, spitted her head on the blade, and killed her instantly.
She expected the man with the chain weapon to circle behind her and try to attack that way, but he did not. Instead, he barreled past her toward the door of the rear office.
The vampire flash-stepped toward him and pushed him from the rear to thrust his own momentum into overdrive while she stuck a foot in front of his legs. With a grunt, he sprawled forward at an angle and pounded into a stack of shelving a few feet to the side of the office door.
The last two thralls attacked in the next second. She spun to face them and turned the movement into another broad yet precise slash, having ascertained the closer one’s trajectory based on sound and slight disturbances in the feel of the air.
The blade cut through the thrall’s makeshift spear first, and his ribs and sternum second. He fell back from the blow’s impact and his eyes bulged as the blood from his severed heart leaked into his gashed lungs.
One more thrall was still in motion and therefore still a threat. Smarter than the others, he had scampered up along the wall, lizard-like, and bolted toward the office.
They’re going after Alex. They aren’t here for me at all.
She was about to throw her sword at the thrall—a slightly risky proposition, although she had all but perfected the difficult technique by now—when he, pretending to ignore her, shoved a hand into his pocket. It emerged clutching a plastic baggie, which he crushed in an offhand motion that flung a cloud of dust and granules into her face.
Stunned for an instant, she tensed and froze beneath a wave of pain and nausea. Silver dust, battery acid foam, and mere sand. Her eyes reddened and her vision blurred.
Almost at once, she recovered well enough to fling herself after the man, aware of his position but unable to operate at peak performance. She was almost close enough to cleave his spine when he plunged through the door.
The third man with the meteor hammer whom she’d flung into the shelves bolted to his feet and wound his chain around her neck. In the same motion, the metal links hooked against her sword and pulled it back to trap its blunt edge against her own shoulder.
“Volz!” she cried, half-strangled. The vampire summoned her full strength, took hold of the chain, and swung the man. They both spun through the doorway into the office.
The dwarf and Alex both attempted to fight the wall-climber. The thrall had kicked the man in the stomach and hurled him against the desk and the assassin and Volz now wrestled. Dwarves were strong, but Moswen’s thralls seemed powerful enough that it was impossible to guess who would win.
Taylor suddenly bent, still grasping the chain in one hand, and threw her attacker up and over her back and onto her desk. He recovered faster than she would have liked, left his weapon, and rolled off the surface. Before she could attack, he surged at Alex.
The Australian, to his credit, ducked and slipped under the man’s clumsy grasp. He headed toward her.
Annoyed, she seized him by the collar of his shirt.
“Hey!” he protested, “what are you—”
She tossed him upward at a slight angle.
He careened through the ceiling and plaster dust immediately rained on all of them while he rolled off to the side somewhere within the rafters, conveniently placing him out of the intruder’s reach.
The vampire locked gazes with the now unarmed man. “You still have to go through me,” she stated, “to get to him.”
With a loud bellow of desperation, he thrust toward her, probably in the full knowledge that he was essentially dead and seeking only to delay her in the hope that his companion would overpower Volz and complete the mission.
He failed. Taylor met him head-on and ran her sword through his solar plexus while she struck him on the collarbone with her off-hand. She pulled back sharply and down to crack his spine while the blade dug through his torso, effectively breaking him in half backward. He crumpled without a sound.
She turned as Volz pinned the last thral
l’s arms behind him and drove the man’s head sharply into the corner of her desk. He screamed in pain and fell, twitching and badly wounded but not quite dead.
The dwarf stepped back, panting, as she swiped her sword down through the thrall’s trembling throat. His blood spattered over the desk, floor, and walls.
“Is that it?” he asked. “Are you sure there are no more?”
Taylor gestured to the main floor with a nod of her head. “Go check.”
“Yes.” He nodded and ran out to do as she’d instructed.
Taylor looked up. “Alex, we appear to be in the clear. You’re not too badly hurt, are you?”
“Uh…” The Australian groaned. “That’s kind of a fucked-up question when you think about it, considering you hurled me through the ceiling. But I don’t think anything’s broken. Why don’t you take me out of the attic and have a look?”
She climbed onto her desk and from this elevated position, reached into the large hole in the plaster to pull him out and lower him to the floor, holding him as if he weighed no more than a puppy.
“Shit,” he sputtered and brushed dust and cobwebs from his hair and clothes. “It might be a few minutes before I notice any wounds, at this rate. But I don’t seem to be dead.”
“Good,” she said. “Not that I place that much value on your life for its own sake, but as long as you continue to function as our early warning system, you’re useful to have around.”
He pursed his lips. “How nice to be useful.”
The vampire left him where he was and strode out toward the lobby. Volz, nervous but handling himself well enough, had closed the front doors and now checked the rear exit.
“Well…” He breathed deeply. “I do think that’s the end of it for now.”
Slowly, she nodded her agreement. “Another strategic feint, which even had a decent chance of depriving us of our little anti-Moswen alarm. She’s close, though. I can almost sense it.”
Volz raised part of his unibrow. “How close? And how soon?”
“She’s not coming right now, fear not,” she reassured the dwarf. She pulled a few tissues from a box on one of the desks and used them to wipe most of the blood from her sword. It would need proper cleaning shortly.
A Girl’s Best Friend (Moonlight Detective Agency Book 3) Page 11