by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor
“Tessa, this is my sister, Marie. And this guy is Gus, Tony’s first partner when he joined the force.”
“Nice to meet both of you.” Tessa smiled.
“You must be the one,” Gus said, a little in awe.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Tony told me about this beautiful woman…a very classy woman. And she resembled a picture I had of a woman from World War II—I’m a big history buff. You’re her. I can tell…He was—is—very fond of you.”
“Yeah,” said Alex. “I’m not used to seeing my partner all tied up in knots over a woman.”
Marie laughed. “Tough Tony Flynn…no. I always thought he was part of the he-man woman-haters club.”
Alex chuckled, then winced. “Sorry—still hurts a little. But yeah, Tony was a founding member of the he-man club.”
“He just has to pull through,” Tessa said.
Gus clasped her hand in his. “He will.”
A nurse came into the waiting room. “Detective Flynn can have two visitors for five minutes.”
Gus squeezed her hand and looked at Alex. “I think the best medicine for Tony would be to have Tessa go in.”
Alex nodded. “You go on.”
“Are you sure? You’re his partner.”
“Yeah, but he’s crazy about you. Go on, Tessa.”
Tessa rose tentatively and steeled herself for what was behind the double doors leading to intensive care. She followed the nurse, who spoke soothingly to her.
“He’s going to look a little frightening. There are tubes everywhere, but I’ve been working here a long time and have seen plenty of miracles. You talk to him. Don’t think he can’t hear you.”
The nurse led her into an alcove where machines beeped, and green and red lights blinked from computers. Tony Flynn was breathing with a respirator, which whooshed as it inflated his lungs. Tubes ran down his nose, and IV poles dwarfed his broken body.
Tears flowed from Tessa’s eyes. She nodded her thanks as the nurse left her alone.
Tessa moved toward Tony. His black hair was matted with dried blood, and his face was ghostly pale and unshaven. His hands were curled, lifeless, on the bed. Tessa knelt by his bedside and took his right hand in hers, kissing his fingertips.
“Flynn…” she whispered, “I can’t believe this happened to you. I would give anything, I promise you, anything to trade places with you.”
It was unnerving just hearing machines instead of his voice. “I have so much to tell you, so much to explain to you. But I can’t do it while you’re lying here like this. Please know, my darling, that I love you. I love you in a way I haven’t experienced before.”
She laid her cheek down on his hand, tears falling onto the sheets. “I won’t be able to bear it if you don’t pull through, Flynn. You have to come back to the land of the living for me. For us.”
Almost imperceptibly, his forefinger moved. He touched her cheek.
“You can hear me?” She raised her head and looked at his face, which seemed as blank as before. “I know you can hear me. I love you.”
She listened to the machines and willed him to pull through until she saw the nurse coming to signal her that time was up. Tessa stood and leaned in close to his face. “Don’t give up. Come back to me.”
Then she left the beeping machines, the computers, the IV poles and her lover, and walked out into the waiting room.
Tessa’s life was consumed by two things: finding Lily and visiting Flynn’s bedside. She spent a good part of every night at the hospital. Alex was released, and he would come each night and sit with her. Gus took the daytime shift. They were determined never to let a visiting time pass without one of them going in to see Flynn.
By the third night after the shooting, Tessa and Alex were getting worried. The doctors were trying to bring him out of his coma. They’d been told that the longer he stayed in his comatose state, the less likely he would come back without some kind of permanent damage.
“He’s like friggin’ Sleeping Beauty. Let’s hope he wakes up. He finally has something to really live for. You know, he fessed up to me,” Alex said.
The two of them were alone in the waiting room, a small TV on the wall playing a rerun of some bad sitcom.
“What?”
“He’s in love with you. My boy, Tony Flynn, is crazy about you. Of course, I knew that a long time ago, from the first time he stepped in your club two years ago. He may have acted all tough, but I could see he was a goner.”
“That’s sweet, Alex but he’s got the heart of a warrior. I have to hope that helps him right now.”
“It will. That and hearing your voice. When I go in there, I call him a pussy and tell him to fight.” Alex choked up. “I tell him I don’t want another partner. So he’s got to pull through.”
“He’s strong. But you know, there’s something about him. From the gossip I’ve overheard it sounds like his ex-wife really took him for a ride.”
“Yeah. Tony is a guy who operates on principle. There’s the good guys. There’s the bad guys. It’s black and white. You do the right thing—even if that means breaking the rules. Or you do the wrong thing. It’s all very simple to Tony. Diana operated in moral shades of gray. He’s different. He’s really just the most decent man I know.”
Tessa nodded. “I could see that.”
“Well, just because Tony Flynn operates that way doesn’t mean the rest of the world does. So, in the case of Diana, he could have handled the fact that the marriage wasn’t working out. When you’ve got a woman who wants to dine at Gracie Mansion and you’ve got a guy who thinks gourmet is found in cardboard take-out, maybe it’s not such a good match. But what killed him, what really killed him, was she started sleeping around on him. Had an affair with a judge—someone she worked with. And then came this doctor dude, whom she eventually left Tony for and married. Ink wasn’t even dry on their divorce decree.”
“He must have been devastated.”
“Not so much over her. I mean over the principle of the thing. He wondered how he could have been so wrong about her character.”
“Poor Flynn.”
“That’s not the half of it. I mean, look around the world, Tessa. We deal with creeps and perverts, dealers, murderers, rapists—and that’s all before breakfast, if you know what I mean. So he’s this good guy swimming in a sea of bad guys. Me, I just accept that’s the way it is. Him? I think it really bothers him that the good guys don’t always win.”
“You know, Alex, I’m not all good.”
“I saw you at the warehouse, Tessa. I was passed out for a lot of the gunfight, and it’s not in my report that you were there, but I know you were there. And I know if you were there, you may be mixed up in some stuff. But if Tony trusts you, then we’re cool.”
“I’m on the good side. It’s just a little bit complicated.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I hear you. Real life tends to be complicated. But you’ve proven yourself to me by caring about him. We’re cool.”
Tessa leaned over to Alex and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”
“Now, don’t be all kissing me and stuff. I’ll have to tell Tony. Maybe that’ll pull him out of his coma. Make him all jealous.”
Tessa laughed. “I have to go, Alex. But I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You got it, Tessa.”
Tessa rose, and with a glance backward at the ICU, walked down the hall and out of the hospital. Maybe the NYPD thought the score was even, having caught the manufacturers of Shanghai Red. But Lily was still missing, and Marco was loose in Manhattan.
It wasn’t even at all.
Chapter 18
Tessa was in a long, dark tunnel leading to King’s lair when she was jumped. Two men, one with a dull-edged, rusty knife to her throat, pulled her to the ground. They were filthy, and both of them reeked of alcohol. One started unfastening her pants as she struggled.
She knew, especially since they were drunk, that she could kill them both, feed on them a
nd be done. But killing two of King’s followers wasn’t a move that would endear her to King, so she tried to reason with them.
“Let me go,” she told them, struggling against their hands and arms. “I’m here to see King. I’m a friend. Don’t do this. You don’t want to do this.”
“Shut the fuck up, whore. Don’t you tell us what we want to do. Right, Mickey? We know what we want to do.” And with that, the man with the knife howled like he was insane and held the knife to her throat again. She felt a tiny trickle of blood. This asshole was so drunk he might just slice her jugular by accident. And she wasn’t going to let that happen.
She felt the other one’s hands reaching into her pants, and Tessa decided she had had enough.
“Remember, boys. I offered to be friends.” With lightning speed she reached up with her hand and snapped the wrist of the man who held the knife to her throat. He shrieked in pain, fell to the ground and curled into a fetal position, nursing his broken wrist. She jerked her knee upward, finding her target—the nose of her would-be rapist—and then grabbed him by the hair and smashed his face into her knee a second time. Blood poured down his face, and she guessed he was going into shock.
“You really should play nice,” she said, and stood up. From down the tunnel, she could make out the figure of King. “Damn,” she muttered under her breath.
King walked more quickly, and soon he was standing with her between the two wounded men.
“What is the meaning of this?” he asked, fury registering on his face. “In my domain. In my haven!”
“King…I—” Tessa started to explain.
“Silence.” He cut her off. “I was talking to them. I saw them attack you. That’s not what we’re about down here, gentlemen. Just because we live below the ground doesn’t mean we become no better than sewer rats.” He kicked at one of them. “Get up and get out of here.”
“I can’t,” the man with the broken nose wailed.
“Get up,” King commanded, kicking the man even harder with his boot. “Before I add to your injuries.”
Both men recoiled and rolled away, finally standing and backing off down the tunnel toward the light of a distant station.
King turned to Tessa in the darkness. “What brings you back here?”
“I think you know.”
“Yes. I heard through the grapevine. Your lover is near death in the hospital, but before that happened you took the law into your own hands and dispatched many undead to their own destruction.”
Tessa nodded, cringing as she thought of Tony being “near death.”
“Don’t you have something to add, Tessa? We had a bargain, a deal.”
She knew there was no withholding. “I saw Marco. He is alive. And he has Lily.”
“How did he look?”
“Exceedingly healthy, unfortunately. And as evil as ever.”
“I like to reward truthfulness.”
“Thank you, King.”
“I’ve heard a rumor—unsubstantiated, mind you—about your friend Lily.”
Tessa played it cool, but her heartbeat quickened. “Oh?”
“St. Margaret’s Church. Beneath it are catacombs. Lily is being held there. For safekeeping. Until Marco can get his hands on you—his real trophy.”
“Well, King, I don’t intend to let that happen.”
“He will never give up. He has to be destroyed, you realize.”
She nodded.
“Can you do that? He was your husband, after all.”
“He was also the bastard that turned me.”
“Indeed. Of course, if I reach him first, I will be only too happy to drive a stake through his heart. Be on your way, then. And I’m sorry about those two.”
“You can’t control everyone in your kingdom.”
“Just as you cannot control who you are. The truce remains.”
Tessa bowed to him, then turned and ran down the tunnel toward the light, determined to rescue her friend, and thankful Manhattan’s vampire hunter was still on her side.
Tony Flynn’s eyes fluttered. Foggy on morphine, the first face he saw was Gus’s. Then he felt panic. He couldn’t talk. He was in a hospital. A machine was filling his lungs with air. His eyes fluttered closed.
“Nurse!” he heard Gus call out. “Nurse! He was awake!”
Three nurses scurried into the room, moving Gus aside. One called for a doctor.
“You’re sure he was awake?”
“Yes. I’m positive.”
One of the nurses said to Flynn, “If you can hear us, open your eyes.”
From the recesses of his drug-induced state, Tony Flynn forced his eyelids open for a moment. He saw a blond nurse. He heard Gus’s voice. He couldn’t talk with the breathing tube in, so he moved his lips, mouthing, Tessa.
The doctor came in. “Detective Flynn, can you hear us? Open your eyes, if you can, or move your index finger.”
Flynn opened his eyes. He searched for Gus, locking his eyes finally on his old friend and mouthing Tessa again.
“Relax there. You’ve been shot. You’ve lost a lot of blood, but you’re in the hospital, and you’re going to be okay.” The doctor turned to Gus. “Do you know what he’s mouthing?”
Gus leaned over the bed. Tony again moved his lips.
“He’s asking about his girlfriend, Tessa.” Gus moved a lock of hair off Flynn’s forehead. “She’s fine, Tony. She’s fine. She’s been here every day. Every night, actually. She sits out there in the waiting room with Alex for hours and hours and hours, just to come in here for five lousy minutes every hour or so. You picked a good one, Tony. She cares for you very much.”
Tony Flynn couldn’t recall everything that had happened. In flashes of memory, he recalled Tessa and guns and people who seemed subhuman. He didn’t understand, but it was enough, for now, to know she was okay…and that she had been by his side.
Chapter 19
Technofreak: I worked as fast as I could, Nightlady. Attached R the plans for St. Margaret’s Church.
Nightlady: Thanks, Hack.
Technofreak: U sure U want to do this alone?
Nightlady: I have to. Let me open the files. Just a minute. Oh, these R perfect. Look at all those catacombs. Kind of creepy.
Technofreak: Not for the claustrophobic, that’s for sure. Just thinking about being stuck down there makes me freak out!
Nightlady: I’m not exactly looking forward to it, but I’ve got to find her. Thanks, Hack. Wish me luck.
Technofreak: U know I always do. Fight the good fight. And Nightlady?
Nightlady: Yeah?
Technofreak: I read about your detective in the paper. I’m sorry. Is he going to be okay?
Nightlady: I’m not sure. Do you believe in prayer?
Technofreak: In my own way.
Nightlady: Pray for him.
Technofreak: I will. Amen.
Tessa printed out the architectural plans for St. Margaret’s Church and studied them. The catacombs fanned out in a circular pattern from a central chamber under the altar of the church. Individual rooms and long tunnels crisscrossed and wandered beneath the surface of the earth. And somewhere in that labyrinth, Lily was being held.
Tessa dressed in black leather. A gun would be useless down there; bullets would ricochet off walls, and add danger. But she would take her daggers, and a flashlight. She could see well in the dark, but she couldn’t be sure what she’d find.
She braided her hair and was about to leave her apartment, when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Tessa? It’s Alex.”
She sat down in a chair, half expecting him to tell her that Flynn was dead.
“Yes?” The panic in her voice was palpable.
“He woke up.”
“Oh my God.” Relieved tears flooded her eyes. “Is he going to be okay?”
“It’s a long road, but yeah. The doctor says this is the first step. And…I took a bullet for the guy, but guess what?”
“H
mm?”
“You were his first waking thought. He can’t talk yet. They’re going to try to take him off the respirator. See if he breathes on his own. But he can mouth words. And ‘Tessa’ is the only word that stubborn son of a bitch is interested in.”
“Are you at the hospital now?”
“Uh-huh. I’m going to stay here for the night. You going to come over?”
Tessa felt torn in two. “I have to help another friend who’s in a world of shit, Alex. But I’ll try to get by as soon as I can.”
“You need any help?”
“No. I’ll let you know if I do. For now, I think I can handle it. Do me a favor though?”
“Sure thing.”
“Tell him I love him.”
“Oh God…gotta get all sentimental with him.” He laughed. “Good thing you’re so beautiful. I can never resist a plea from a lovely lady.”
“Thanks, Alex. He’s lucky to have you as his partner.”
“Well, don’t tell him this or anything, but I’m the lucky one.”
Tessa hung up the phone. She was energized, knowing Flynn was going to make it. Now she needed to get to Lily.
St. Margaret’s Church, the size of a small cathedral, was down by Wall Street. Tessa stood on the rooftop of an office building opposite the church, the wind at this tip of the island of Manhattan battering her as it blew in off the water. A small graveyard with headstones circa 1900 stood out back, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. The spires of the stone church itself rose toward the heavens, which looked surprisingly barren since 9/11. From the Wall Street building, she could gaze down into the well-lit pit of the site of the former World Trade Center, a scarred graveyard of a different sort.
Descending through a rooftop door she had jimmied open, she took an elevator to the ground floor and walked through a hollow-sounding lobby, a revolving door and then out to the street. Half a block up stood Saint Margaret’s, one of the city’s oldest churches. Tessa gazed at the stained-glass windows, which depicted the passion of Christ. On the front of St. Margaret’s was a rose-shaped stained-glass window, a replica of Notre Dame’s.