A Girl’s Best Friend (Moonlight Detective Agency Book 3)

by Isobella Crowley

  We are vastly fucking outnumbered. I don’t care how kickass these two think they are, we cannot fight forty-some dwarves and deal with God knows how many vampiric thralls. If only there were some really clever way to—

  “Uh,” he said tentatively as the gears in his mind suddenly spun into action, “quick plan, you guys. How about we retreat and attempt a ‘let’s you and him fight’ type of situation?”

  If the fairy heard him, she gave no indication. Neither did his other two companions, who were halfway into their transformations. By now, he could actually feel the bestial rage rising from them both.

  Do I have to do everything myself? They’ll still try to protect me though, right? So all I need to do is lure the whole brawl back until it crashes into Moswen’s merry band of dickheads, and—

  “Slay them all!” Grayhammer bellowed.

  Pandemonium erupted when the front line of dwarves attacked. They moved faster than such stumpy-looking creatures rightfully should have been able to, their axes, hammers, and maces raised in killing positions. None of them had guns or crossbows and Remy somehow suspected that their leader had insisted they die at close, intimate range.

  At the same time as the dwarves attacked, the two werewolves pounced. The darker one—Conrad—surged into the fray and launched himself at the dwarf who blocked him from the cartel leader. His powerful jaws closed around his skull and wolf and dwarf went down in a tangle of violence.

  Presley, on the other hand, kept lower to the ground, moved more slowly, and targeted a dwarf near the center of the formation who’d taken a step or two ahead of the others. The old lycanthrope bit his target’s leg off and shoved him back to turn him into an obstacle which temporarily cut the dwarven lines in two.

  “Riley!” Remy yelled when he realized that the butler had perhaps bought them a precious moment. “Do something to slow those guys down. The dwarves on the left.”

  “Yes,” she responded and elevated quickly, alert once again. Her hands flowed and twisted, and pale light shone from them to form a wall that became a wave. This tide of light engulfed the left half of the dwarven platoon and they all snarled and grimaced as their pace slowed to a crawl.

  That left the right half, where Conrad had punched a hole in the ranks directly in front of their hulking commander.

  “Hey!” Remy snapped. “You—the big ugly prick. Yeah, I remember you. What’s with all the guys you have out in front of you? Are you scared to fight us again?”

  Grayhammer’s dark and smoldering gaze locked onto his face. “Die,” he rasped. The battle had hardly begun but already, he looked on the verge of losing control. “You will die. Shut up!”

  He shoved forward and his subordinates slowed and moved aside to allow him to pass.

  For a brief instant, the investigator congratulated himself. Then, he realized that his success simply meant that a huge, angry, semi-invulnerable asshole was about twelve feet away from him and gaining.

  He spun on one heel and bolted in the other direction at a full sprint.

  “Nooooo!” Grayhammer’s voice echoed. It was almost painful to listen to. “Come back. You have to stand and face what’s coming.” Already, his thunderous footsteps were in pursuit.

  Somehow, he thought as the dark tunnel zoomed by around him and his lungs filled with the fire of exertion, I don’t think that guy is a very happy person.

  He had almost forgotten how much distance he could clear when he ran at top speed, and in the thick darkness, his sense of space was distorted.

  When he rounded the broad bend in the tunnel, he almost tripped over his own feet in near shock. He was, once again, only twelve feet from those who wanted him dead.

  Moswen clearly understood the concept of escalation. From sending two thralls after him the first time, she had upgraded her second attempt to more like fifty.

  “Merciful Buddha and Zoroaster,” he sputtered, hopped in place to kill his own momentum, and tried to pivot more or less in midair.

  The horde, having sensed the proximity of their target minutes before, had already worked themselves into a foaming frenzy. Dozens of human faces contorted with the same awful desperation and violent need to rend and tear that he’d seen in Alex weeks before. Not one of them would stop until he was dead.

  He ran back toward Grayhammer and his army.

  This is beyond crazy enough to work. It’s more like plain crazy because we don’t really have any other options, do we?

  The massive dwarf boss barreled directly toward him. Drool streaked from his mouth to catch in his beard and his eyes almost shined with the prospect of revenge so close. His equally massive hammer made a low, unpleasant humming sound as it pulsed with dark energies, and his four magic rings glowed slightly even in the deep shadows of the tunnel.

  Immediately behind him were two other dwarves, only slightly smaller than he. Something about the way they were outfitted and the general look of them suggested that they were elite bodyguards of some kind. Remy would be within pounding distance of all three of them within about two seconds.

  At the same time, the vampiric thralls were gaining to the point where he could hear the projections of their breath in his ear and feel the slight disturbances of the air as their clawing hands reached toward his neck.

  Riley fluttered toward him also and tried to shout something, although her high-pitched little voice was completely drowned in the echoing racket of the underground corridor.

  “Here goes fucking nothing,” Remy gasped.

  Somehow, he pulled off a lightning-fast, three-point maneuver composed of stopping, darting a few inches to the side, and still retaining enough of the leftover momentum of his sprint to hurl himself forward again. He tumbled in midair and rolled ahead at top speed.

  Grayhammer’s raw-throated bellow and the thralls’ compulsive howling mingled into a single horrific cacophony as the world spun. Thick hands and thicker weapons passed over his head or behind his ass and stumpy legs passed him.

  Then suddenly—and almost miraculously—he staggered to his feet, half-balanced, with open black air before him. All of the violence and death lay a few feet behind.

  “Remy!” the fairy yelled as she descended within shouting distance.

  He lacked the breath to respond but motioned her to follow him as he ran farther toward the other dwarves and, more importantly, toward Conrad and Presley.

  A hasty backward glance confirmed that his effort had been rewarded. In a storm of cursing and incoherent shouts, Grayhammer and his two henchmen had bulldozed into Moswen’s servants, and almost before either party fully understood what was happening, they had turned on each other.

  Three or four thralls were already dead, and the dwarves seemed poised to claim several others, but the sheer numbers of the augmented humans gave them powerful advantages themselves.

  He turned his head slowly forward in mid-jog and assessed the rest of the scene. First, to his dismay, some of the thralls had simply darted around Grayhammer to the sides and now scampered along the walls, trying to reach Remy.

  Second, the werewolves were still on their feet and had rejoined each other and worked back toward him and the fairy. The remaining dwarves, however, had formed into two separate spearheads to attack them from both sides. The ones to the left lagged slightly behind thanks to Riley’s slow spell, which already had mostly dissipated.

  Unfortunately, everyone was about to crash into each other right in the middle of the tunnel.

  “Riley—” Remy panted and struggled to get the words out quickly enough. “Disguise us—cloak—illusion. Get these assholes to all—fight—” He pointed the fingers of both hands at each other, twirled his arms in an interlocking motion, and hoped she’d get the message.

  Trick these bastards into killing each other instead of us.

  It seemed, briefly, that the fairy squinted in bewilderment, but the basic facts of their situation were obvious enough that she must have understood. She shouted in a language beyond his knowl
edge, raised her hands, and worked her magic.

  Total chaos engulfed them all once more.

  Forms and light shifted to a background track of screams and growls and clanking weapons and somewhere amidst the battle, Remy was driven toward one of the tunnel walls by a rabid thrall.

  It was a woman, jittery and lean and inherently scary in part simply because she looked ready to do anything to keep her mistress happy.

  “Stay where you are,” she hissed and lunged.

  He caught her by the wrist and hair and dragged her forward, over his hip, and swung himself back as he flung her headfirst into the metal girders beside the wall. She squawked and crumpled.

  As he turned out of the movement, Presley—surprisingly strong and majestic for an old, white-haired wolf—stood on his hind legs with a squirming dwarf in his forepaws. He growled and lobbed his foe into an oncoming battery of thralls, who tripped over the heavy body or were pushed aside.

  A little beyond the lycanthrope, the darker, lither form of Conrad sprang again and again through the dim space, never in one place for more than a second. His fangs and claws rent the flesh of dwarf and enthralled human alike.

  While Riley pushed their attackers into one another and manipulated appearances at will, dwarven axes descended into gibbering thralls’ heads and thralls ripped out the throats of cursing dwarves.

  “Damn.” Remy breathed deeply. “We might actually get through this.”

  Remembering the electric baton he’d brought, he yanked it from his waistband, clicked it on, and drove it into the face of the next thrall to attack him, who shrieked and recoiled, his hair smoking.

  He turned back to the fray.

  “No!” a familiar voice thundered. “No, nooooo!”

  He looked behind him.

  Grayhammer had battered his way through half a dozen thralls and now shoved another aside as he strode toward Remy, crazed and murderous.

  A white flash interposed itself. The investigator staggered back as Presley and the dwarf leader struggled, the werewolf’s jaws and one front claw locked around the shaft of the accursed hammer.

  Briefly, it looked like the two might be evenly matched but the lycanthrope began to shrink back and down. The sheer solidity of the dwarf’s brutish frame and the pulsating dark magic of his weapon would crush the old lycanthrope in seconds.

  Remy lurched forward and waved his hands and the baton in an effort to get the dwarf’s attention. He succeeded.

  With a sound like gargling rocks, Grayhammer shoved Presley aside and swung his weapon with unnatural speed.

  “Crap!” Remy cried and fell back. The hammer missed his skull by about an inch. He crawled away on his hands and knees and noticed that both werewolves were moving toward him as well.

  Much like it had been at the harbor, his only hope was to distract the dwarf leader enough to where the lycanthropes could kill him before he was aware of them. Riley’s magic was useless against him.

  “Uh,” Remy shouted, not sure what to say yet, “Hammer guy! I fucked your girlfriend before we jumped you at the harbor. Yeah! Or your daughter, if you have one.”

  Grayhammer stormed forward and swung again. His terrible weapon crushed a heavy steel girder as though it were a whole-wheat cereal product. “Puling wretch. Miscreant dog, disavowed by all true men. Your words are as feeble as an old woman’s piss!”

  Conrad leapt out of the general melee and tried to bite into their adversary's neck from behind, but the towering dwarf knocked him away with a quick backhanded punch.

  The other dwarves were converging. While there were still at least twenty thralls, Grayhammer’s men were the more disciplined fighting force and were overcoming the chaos that Riley had helped create.

  He tried not to despair, but things did not look good. The four of them were still outnumbered and they’d already spent most of their energy to simply survive for this long.

  “Kneel!” the enraged dwarf commanded. Spittle flew from his lips. “Don’t prolong this. Succumb, you piece of shit.”

  Suddenly, Remy had the odd sensation that someone was looking at him. Not Grayhammer but someone else. He looked up and down the length of the tunnel.

  There, toward the end in the direction in which they’d been going before the dwarves had cut them off, stood a lithe black silhouette with one hand holding a sword. There was a lull in the fighting as all heads turned toward the new figure.

  He would have laughed with relief if his lungs had been up to it, but all that came out was a feeble hacking sound.

  “Well…” He gasped. “It’s about frickin’ time.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  An Abandoned Subway Tunnel, Lower Manhattan, New York

  Taylor had not fully recovered and strenuous motions still caused some pain in her belly. The huge gash had closed, but the tissues within were not entirely mended.

  But she could fight and she would.

  It took particular types of sounds—or especially large amounts of deafening noise—to awaken her from slumber. Presley knew all the tricks and could rouse her in an instant if need be as he’d done earlier when Alex had called.

  The distinctive signature of bloody combat was one such sound.

  She’d woken in a state of brief disorientation, one which brought back dim memories of her distant life as a mortal when sleep was plagued with nightmares and fog. It happened sometimes when she was injured.

  But her mind had not taken long to catch up. A battle raged almost directly outside her sanctuary. The implications of that were not lost on her.

  She’d found her feet in an instant, drawn her sword, and climbed through the trapdoor, not quite sure what to expect but prepared to deal with it nonetheless.

  Now, she stared at a whirlwind of carnage that exceeded anything she’d seen since the last major human war she’d dabbled in. Her brain processed and cataloged the information.

  Remy and Presley had come looking for her, either in a misguided effort to protect her or out of a desperate need for her help. Unwittingly, they had led Moswen’s thralls to her doorstep.

  And Grayhammer, the head of the dwarven cartel whom the investigator had mentioned, must have gleaned the general location of her safe house from that asshole Surrly. Somehow, everyone had converged there at the same time.

  She stood at the end of the tunnel and sent her will out to compel everyone to turn and look and notice her.

  Then, she plunged into them.

  Two yards away, a dwarf—seemingly an elite guardsman of some kind—struggled against two human fanatics enslaved to Moswen Neith. All three were momentarily frozen in indecision while their thoughts collided in a tangle and they attempted to decide which of them the vampire would regard as the greater foe.

  She made no such discrimination. With a deft movement, she switched the sword to her left hand as she closed on them, pivoted to the side, and brought the blade up in an upward-arc backhand stroke. It cleaved through the bowels of the first thrall and slashed the throat of the great dwarf in the same motion.

  As the two of them collapsed amidst spurts of their own blood, the second thrall tried to flee. She launched herself above him and impaled his head on her sword, wrenched him around, and flung him aside as she landed.

  It had all happened in the space of about a second.

  “It’s Taylor. Ha!” Remy’s voice wheezed.

  “It’s Taylor,” another voice echoed and rose from a rumble to a crackle in only two words. “Get her. Kill her!”

  She advanced and registered the presence of Remy, Conrad, Riley, and her butler, all struggling but still alive. Some of the thralls, still acting presumably on Moswen’s command to capture Remington, ignored her approach and lunged at her partner.

  The thralls closer to her, though, had little choice but to notice her. And Grayhammer and his dwarves had opted to give her their full attention. She repaid them in kind.

  Heedless of the sting in her gut, she flashed into them. Her blade soared an
d struck to slice flesh and bone. The rapid motions severed entire bodies and she stepped between their ruined pieces and kicked open the wounds made by her sword before gravity could separate the tissues. Four thralls and five dwarves died in seconds.

  Farther down the tunnel, Presley and Conrad flung themselves against the humans that targeted Remy, confident that Taylor would buy them time to fight their own battles.

  On the other side of the battery of foes that Taylor efficiently dispatched, Starik Grayhammer stood, momentarily frozen with drug-addled hate bordering on awe, and decided to step up his game.

  The vampire stabbed a hapless thrall and flung him aside by his head. His neck snapped for good measure and she turned her focus onto the dwarf. He produced a glowing white syringe and plunged it into his own arm.

  So that’s Snow White, Taylor acknowledged as she brought her sword up to parry the clumsy ax-strike of a cartel soldier. Let’s see if she’s as bad as everyone says.

  Her sword deflected the attacker’s weapon and before he could react, her foot pounded into his nose and drove the bone shards into his brain. He stood dribbling blood from his nostrils for a moment, not yet aware that he was dead, before he fell.

  As soon as Taylor had seen the huge dwarf called Grayhammer, she’d known something was wrong with him. It was clear that it wasn’t only an imbalance of personality but also a willful disturbance of chemistry. The man was higher than a kite on some drug of preternatural origin.

  Now, the second dose of Snow White had already begun to kick in. She could actually feel him descend into a psychotic maelstrom of white-hot rage. Every vestige of rational consciousness fell away like a cast-off robe and left only a rabid urge to murder.

  Foam appeared around the rim of his mouth. His pupils were barely focused and like some sub-humanoid creature, she suspected he was losing the use of his vision while gaining augmented powers of smell, hearing, and proprioception.

  Not to mention speed and strength. Even she might not recover from a single good blow from his hammer. Especially since it seemed to flow and pulse with a malign enchantment she could not quite identify.