The Night's Champion Collection: A supernatural werewolf thriller trilogy

by Richard Parry

  Beer bottles should have some kind of warning label.

  Different sensations started to filter through the pounding on the inside of her skull. Her face was pressed against a coarse fabric. She was going to have a fine mesh pattern pressed into her cheek for hours — hours. The fabric smelled like wet dog, which wasn’t good because she’d probably smell like wet dog too. And, curious, wet dog wasn’t a usual smell for her bed at home, which tended to smell more like lavender if she could get to the wash first, because if Rex did it things smelled like Old Spice which was great for him and bad for her.

  Adalia was sure that if she tried really, really hard she could open her eyes, but that felt like a lot more effort than the potential reward. Probably bright light, which would make her head hurt more, and her mom with that look, the one that said you’ve only got yourself to blame. She might have been unfair about what her mom would have said, but her hangover didn’t care about fair. It cared about bright lights and a world of what-ifs that might never happen. She wished she had a real friend, someone who was normal, who lived in a world without werewolves and vampires and ghosts and insane power hungry maniacs. Someone she could have a coffee with and say to her friend something like, is your mom like overprotective all the time and her friend would nod, and pass over a beer—

  Her stomach lurched.

  —pass over a coffee, and say, yeah, she does that, it’s weird you know, because she made it through being 20 also and seems fine and didn’t burn the whole world to the foundations. Her real friend, the one who was now speaking in low tones because she knew what hangovers felt like, and who had a sensible name like Mary, Mary would be able to make a sandwich without a gun on the kitchen counter, and Mary would know whether green hair went with the jacket she was looking at in Macy’s, except it wouldn’t because nothing went with puffer jackets. And that’s what Mary was for, she was a good friend, uncomplicated, and would have her own small problems, which they would talk about, sometimes just texting, and that would be okay.

  Adalia’s stomach lurched again, and this time it wasn’t Mary’s fault. She could hear water dripping from somewhere, not like a tap left on — Jessie did that a lot, which was annoying, like she didn’t quite turn it off all the way, and didn’t realize she was doing it — but like a slow trickle of water. Not like it was running into a sink, with the sound of water going down a drain, just water running, not a lot of it, the kind of way water might if it was trickling down a wall from a crack or something. Which was weird, super weird, because there wasn’t a lot of water flowing down walls back home, which implied that she and Uncle John were staying at someone else’s place, which made sense, because Uncle John — like Mary — knew a lot about the looks her mom gave, and didn’t like them either.

  Was it time to open her eyes? The rough fabric on her cheek wasn’t getting any softer, which wasn’t great. She heard a metallic clink, not very loud but close, although that was difficult to know for sure since she was lying against one of her ears as well, which meant that she was lying on half of her hair, which was going to be a problem for Day After Adalia to fix, when she was hungover, and Day After Adalia didn’t have the steadiest of hands.

  She opened her eyes.

  This isn’t what I expected.

  The rough fabric she was laying against was a wool blanket, brown and green, which wasn’t a great combination, and it wasn’t made better by being on a bed that wasn’t Adalia’s, in a room that wasn’t Adalia’s. The room wasn’t huge, not like a prison cell tiny but small enough that it felt cozy with the bed she was on, and the concrete walls, and Uncle John chained against the wall opposite her. Day After Adalia looked at Uncle John for a few moments, not processing what she was seeing too well, because it was unusual to see Uncle John unconscious, with a bit of matted blood in his hair, and his face so gray, and chains on his wrists leading up to a ring bolted to the wall, a big ring that looked rusty. This was important, because Uncle John might have been the kind of guy who’d try being chained up just to see if it was more exciting, but the chains would be clean, and there’d be a safe word involved, probably armadillo, and this didn’t look like that kind of setup at all. At. All.

  The good news was that the light wasn’t bright, a single dim bulb set into the ceiling, still bright enough to look like the Eye of Sauron but not bright enough to hurt too much. This particular Eye of Sauron flickered a bit, like the power here wasn’t that good, but stayed on, which was better than good because there were no windows. Day After Adalia started to get up, slow and steady which was good because everything was a little on the spinny side, and took the room in. Her cot — not really a bed, just barely promoted over a camp stretcher — was against a wall. Uncle John was chained against the opposite wall, right next to the door. The other two walls were bare, one of them having a crack running all the way along it, water seeping out and running down to the floor, where it vanished through another crack. Everything was old concrete and older brick, and she felt that the air would have been too cold for comfort if the alcohol wasn’t still setting her blood on fire and making her thirsty.

  Whoever had put her here had thought about that, because a small bedside table, no more than a metal shelf on four legs, sat next to the cot. It had a bowl of candy, and two water bottles. She grabbed one of the water bottles, draining it in less than three seconds, and then looked at the candy.

  Who puts a bowl of yellow M&Ms next to your bed? She wanted a burger, or anything fried really. She took a handful anyway and munched on them, which might have been a mistake, as her stomach wasn’t on board, but she kept them — and, blessedly, the water — down. Day After Adalia patted her pockets — they’d left her with her jacket, and her clothes, which all smelled of beer, which was better than it could have been but worse for her stomach than even the Old Spice would have been — and found her phone. Temporary elation melted into disappointment when she saw she had no bars. Not even the hint of a bar, or perhaps the smallest bar hiding somewhere. She wasn’t surprised, just disappointed, because this was a prison, what with the chains and Uncle John’s matted blood and the blanket that smelled of wet dog, and the prison was probably in a nuclear fallout shelter, and they weren’t known for good coverage. Were they?

  She was where she was supposed to be though. She could tell by taking a tiny peek into the Other Place. They’d put Day After Adalia in a room in the belly of the city — not a fallout shelter after all — under Penn Station, under Madison Square Garden, and that was the plan all along, to get in here and break the vampires against the wheel of the Night. The order was wrong, because her mom and Val weren’t here, and neither was—

  —her stomach lurched for a different reason, and she felt confused, like she shouldn’t want someone who’d lied to her, even if he loved her, but also hungry and thirsty for a thing she shouldn’t have, and wondered if this is what heroin addicts felt like—

  —Maks, and the three of them would increase the odds of getting out. Day After Adalia didn’t feel strong enough to have a conversation with a cup of hot soup, let alone someone like Kaylan, who was so strong, and getting out of this might need more strength than she could get from a bottle of water and a bowl of yellow M&Ms. She grabbed another handful of them anyway, because they were cheerful, and then leaned forward.

  “Uncle John,” she said. “You need to wake up.”

  He didn’t move, and so she stepped a little sideways into the Other Place, and saw that they’d hit him hard, so hard on the side of the head that he would be feeling worse than her when he woke up. She looked at the threads that stretched up and away from him, the hundreds and hundreds that connected him in this moment to the other moments that came before and after. Adalia found the one she was after, that one, the one that was taught and fragile at the same time, like an old spider’s web, with dust and dirt caught into it. She ran her fingers against it, light as a moth’s wing. She wet her lips, then leaned forward and breathed against that thread. Saw it tremble, li
ke it was frightened, then strengthen as the dust fell off it, and saw it relax, and she felt herself relax as well. And felt a wave of exhaustion hit her, rested her head on her hands, and tried not to throw up.

  “Why…” Uncle John coughed, shook his head, winced, and coughed again. “Why are you leaning forward?”

  Adalia leaned back. “You were unconscious.”

  He nodded, as if that were a normal thing, and for Uncle John and his trips to bars it may well have been. “Why are there chains on my wrists?”

  “We’re prisoners,” she said. “I think.”

  He nodded again, but slower this time. His eyes strayed over the room, lingering for a while on the water bubbling down the wall, and longer again on the bowl of M&Ms. He shook his wrists, chains jangling, but she could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. Plenty of slack in the chains though, letting him move around a little, and he snared himself the remaining water bottle, opened it, and offered it to her.

  She shook her head. “I’ve had one.”

  “Great,” he said, and drained the bottle. “How much did we drink last night?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Was it a lot?” He played with the plastic bottle. “It feels like it was a lot.”

  “They hit you in the head,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “That wasn’t very nice.”

  “No,” she agreed. “I … I fixed you. I think.”

  “Uh huh,” he said. “Can you open the door?”

  “In a bit,” she said. “I don’t feel great.”

  “Do you know where we are?” he said.

  “Penn Station,” she said. “Underneath it.”

  “Every time I go into Penn,” he said, “there’s a legion of panhandlers trying to use me like an ATM. Someone must have seen something.”

  “It’s possible,” said Adalia, a twinkle of memory coming to her, “that we walked in here by ourselves. Before they hit you in the head.” Someone had been yelling into her ear — the bar was so loud — about a private club. A place they could go, the guy knew a guy who knew a guy on the door, get them in no problem. Boutique place.

  He gave her a sour look. “We drank a lot, didn’t we?”

  “I don’t think I like tequila,” she said. “It makes Day After Adalia regret all the decisions in her life. I wish Mary were here.”

  “Who’s Mary?” said John.

  “My friend,” said Adalia, not really listening to him anymore. She closed her eyes. The Other Place nagged at her, and she glanced into it. Then she sighed, opened her eyes. “They’ll come for us soon,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “The fucking vampires,” she said, “who else?”

  “I was hoping for Val and Danny,” said Uncle John, “and if I’m being honest, I’d like to see Liselle again before I die.”

  “Oh,” said Adalia. “She can’t come here.”

  “She can’t?”

  “No,” said Adalia. “We’re in Kaylan’s House.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN

  Val heard the knock on the door, cracked open an eye, and stared at the red numbers on the clock. 0900. One of the best things about being one of the Night was never having a problem getting to sleep, or sleeping in general. He seemed to sleep whenever, wherever, Danny too, and when he’d mentioned this Carlisle had given him a look that felt rougher than it needed to be. He’d wanted to grab a little shut-eye before they hit the nest, but sleeping through the night and not getting attacked by a hundred vampires wasn’t the plan. They were supposed to move when John and Adalia got back.

  Something niggled in the back of his mind. John and Adalia. John and Adalia.

  Speaking of Carlisle, that knock sounded like her. He kissed Danny—

  Pack mate.

  —on the shoulder, and she grumbled. “What time is it?”

  “Nine,” said Val, “which means coffee.”

  The knock sounded again, and Val slipped out of bed, both feet hitting the floor at the same time. He stretched — heard an appreciative growl from Danny — and snared a robe. He pulled the door open.

  Carlisle pushed in past him without even pausing. “They haven’t come home.”

  “Good morning,” said Val. “What a lovely day.”

  She glanced at him, snorted, and said, “Everard, get your ass out there. That clown Miles hasn’t come home, and neither has the eighth wonder of the universe.”

  “They’re the same thing,” said Val, “if you ask John. Wait. Adalia hasn’t come home?”

  “No,” said Carlisle.

  Val felt his pulse quicken, felt—

  Our cub.

  —like he needed to start running. Made himself pause, look at Danny, took in her wide eyes, then said to Carlisle, “Get the rest of them ready.”

  • • •

  Val’s coffee was growing cold. He hadn’t touched it since pouring it. “Give me the rundown.”

  Jessie nodded, pointing at the board. It was a whiteboard, magnetic, with scrawls all over it running between photographs that had been printed and held in place with small colored circles. “Miles took a few photos of The Garden before he disturbed the swarm. Doesn’t tell us much, except,” and here she pointed at a blurry shot of a doorway, and another, “that they came from there.” She paused, looked at Val, then said, “The picture’s not great.”

  “Photography’s not his thing,” said Val. “Still, if he’d had more than his phone—”

  “He broke my camera,” she said.

  “Cool,” said Val.

  “Not cool,” she said, looking like she wanted to say more. “Anyway. Back on topic, we’re at the start of the day, which sounds like an excellent place to begin. Jeremy?”

  The vampire nodded, taking over from her at the board. “Look, I know what’s in there. Been there. Got a room and everything.”

  “You got any photos?” said Val.

  “It’s not very cozy,” said Jeremy. “It’s why I was staying at the Renaissance. That and, of course, they wanted me to eternally damn my immortal soul by turning another person into a blood sucking member of the legion. But mostly because the Renaissance has nicer carpet.”

  “So no photos?”

  “No,” said Jeremy. “Got some great pics of the Renaissance, though. The view is amazing at night—”

  “The pit,” said Val. “What can you tell us?”

  “Right,” said Jeremy. He pointed to a diagram of what looked like corridors and rooms. “Here’s what I can remember of the entrance level. It’s not,” he said, “to scale.”

  “Son,” said Rex, “I don’t think anyone’s criticizing your artwork.”

  “Great,” said Jeremy, “because it’s not to scale. Anyway, as you can see, there’s a main entrance. That’s behind a tie shop. Sells great ties, if that’s your thing. The corridors branch out a little after that, so I think we’ll need to split up.”

  Carlisle stood up, nudged Jeremy, and took over. “We’re pretty sure that Miles and Adalia are there because that’s where their phones are. Find My Friends might be the biggest invasion of privacy ever invented, but it’s useful in this situation.”

  “Their phones are on?” said Danny. She pulled out her phone.

  “No,” said Carlisle, “they were. Last place we saw their signal was The Garden.”

  Val felt something heavy growing in his chest, something that felt like despair. He reached for Danny, held her hand. She gripped his fingers with strength, something angry and hard and scared in her face. When he spoke, he tried to keep his voice level. “So we don’t know if they’re alive.”

  No one said anything for a moment, and then Jeremy leaned forward. “If it helps, you can’t turn someone into a vampire during the day. Even underground.”

  “You can’t?” said Jessie. “That’s useful intel.”

  “And they don’t usually take people back there unless that’s the end state. It creates an uncomfortable series of rumors to drag dead b
odies out of the same place, day after day. My guess is they’re wanting to turn them into information fountains.” Jeremy shrugged. “You’d do a lot if you craved human blood and couldn’t get it.”

  “The good news,” said Jessie, “is that Ginger and his team have agreed to go in with us.”

  “Who’s Ginger?” said Val.

  “Colombian weapons dealer,” said Jessie.

  “Cool,” said Val, feeling a little lost. “How do we know him?”

  “I bought a bunch of explosives from him,” said Sam. “And a rifle.”

  “Great, great,” said Val. He looked around. “There’s not a lot left to say. We need to get our people back. We were going there anyway, but this makes things a little harder.”

  “A little?” said Carlisle. “Jesus, Everard—”

  “I know,” he said. “Look, I know.”

  She glared at him a moment longer before her gaze softened. She looked at Danny, then said, “We’ll get them back.”

  “One thing is bothering me,” said Rex.

  “Just one?” said Jessie.

  “Why’d they let us sleep? Why didn’t they take us out?” Rex looked at all of them in turn.

  “Ransom,” said Carlisle.

  “No,” said Jeremy.

  “I like the ransom angle,” said Jessie, “because—”

  “No,” said Jeremy, again. “See, the reason they didn’t attack is because they don’t need to.”

  “Break that down, son,” said Rex.

  “They have a girl with amazing powers,” said Jeremy. “As a point of fact, she is not a hostage for ransom. You guys are. Against her good behavior. While you’re alive, they can threaten her with killing all of you, and she might do what they want.”

  “I’d die for her,” said Danny.

  “That’s exactly what they’re counting on,” said Jeremy, “or more likely, that Adalia knows you’d die for her.”

  “And what is it that they want?” said Danny. “What do they want with my little girl?”

  “Probably something small, like ending the world,” said Jeremy. “I think this provides, uh, a little extra incentive to hurry.”