“He’s not packing silver,” he growled, his advance becoming more confident.
The wolves were fifteen feet from me now, close enough that I could see follicles of hair growing from their foreheads and jowls. They couldn’t hold their wolves inside any longer. The hunger for pack justice was too powerful.
A little closer… I thought.
“I’m warning you, Croft,” an officer said.
I extended the coin out in front of me, its edges crackling with blue light.
“On my order,” I caught the same officer mutter.
It had to be now.
“Illuminare!” I bellowed.
The energy that stormed through my restored prism emerged from the coin as a dazzling explosion of light. For an instant, the tunnel turned bright white. The wolves recoiled with snarling cries. I could see the officers now—eight of them—arms thrown to their faces.
A blind shot went off, ricocheting from the wall to my left.
“Vigore!” I cried.
Power branched from my other palm and slammed into the wolves. They cannoned into the officers behind them, flipping them like bowling pins. When they landed, several officers pawed around for their weapons, stunned and blinded. The men were harmless as long as they remained that way. The wolves, with their senses of hearing and smell, were another story. I spotted the two staggering onto their hands and feet, more wolf now than human.
Replacing the coin around my neck, I turned and pressed both hands to the wall.
“Forza dura!” I shouted.
In an explosion of mortar, the wall toppled away. I scrambled over the collapse and into the sewer-like stench of the Broadway line. Following the successful operation two weeks before, armed teams had swept the lines and destroyed the handful of remaining ghouls. Restoration work had already begun. I emerged through the dust to find a string of lights running along the tunnel above step ladders and large wire coils. No workers, fortunately.
I dropped onto the tracks. A few blocks to the north, lights glowed where the Broadway line shared the Forty-Second Street station with the Seventh Avenue line. The station was inside the cordon and could still be manned by police. I sidestepped away from it and broke into a run.
I’d have to take my chances south.
My plan was to go about fifteen, twenty blocks, then climb one of the emergency staircases located halfway between stations. I’d blow open the hatch beneath the sidewalk and try to blend into the street scene, somewhere in the Twenties. From there, I’d work my way south and west toward the piers with Jersey-bound ferries. The last step—catching a boat—would be the most difficult, but I’d worry about that when I got there. Which was feeling far from certain.
It was my phobia, dammit. After only a hundred yards, my lungs were already heaving for air. My chest wasn’t allowing enough oxygen in or poisonous CO2 out.
Growls sounded from the service tunnel behind me.
And then there was the matter of the werewolves.
I’d read about the effects of bright lights on their brain synapses and had been counting on a longer recovery time. Now I listened in horror to the sounds of cinderblocks grating and toppling. So much for that theory. The wolves had just joined me in the line.
Ahead, a door to an emergency staircase appeared, but I was still inside the cordon. If any of the downed officers had recovered enough to radio out, the street would be covered. I shed my coat—the lion’s share of my disguise—and slung it in front of the door. With any luck, the wolves would stop and sniff it and then expend time deciding whether or not I’d ascended.
I ran on. With each gasping breath, a cramp gored my side; spots danced around my vision. From around a bend, the yellow lights of another station glowed into view. Crap. I was coming up on Thirty-fourth Street, a station the Broadway line shared with an intersecting line.
But as I started to slow, I spotted a parked vehicle ahead.
What in the…?
The vehicle pointing away from me looked like a cross between a large dune buggy and a truck. A flatbed hitched to its back was loaded with equipment. I took quick stock of the large tires balancing the vehicle on the tracks, two sets of smaller metal wheels in place to keep it from derailing. It was a MTA maintenance vehicle, no doubt parked outside the station for easy access. Someone had spray-painted BERTHA on the side of the truck in big balloon letters.
A set of keys dangled from Bertha’s ignition.
Oh, hell yes.
Heart slamming, I climbed through the crash bars and slid behind the steering wheel. Behind me I could hear clawed feet pounding the tracks. The smelly coat hadn’t fooled the wolves. I seized the key in the ignition, said a quick prayer, and gave a twist.
No response.
“Oh, Bertha, please don’t do this to me.”
I could hear the wolves’ harsh panting now, echoing down the tunnel.
I looked around the cab for something I might have missed. The automatic gearshift beside my right leg was slotted in Drive. I pushed it to Park and twisted the key again. Bertha’s engine chug-a-lugged for several agonizing seconds before turning over with a throaty roar.
“Yes!”
I yanked the gearshift into Drive and pressed the gas. The metal wheels whined against the rails, and Bertha rumbled forward. I waited for the speedometer to edge past twenty before allowing myself a glimpse into the truck’s side mirror. For a blessed instant, the tunnel curving away behind me was empty.
And then it wasn’t.
The two wolves, in full wolf form, were speeding toward me like they were on a greyhound track, eyes burning with the hunt. In comparison, I felt like I was moving through thick mud.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” I pled, putting more weight on the gas pedal, which was already to the floor.
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 had been blown skyward in a wave and were now crashing down. 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. Prince Street … Canal Street. The upcoming station was City Hall, which, two weeks before, had been the ghoul crematorium. The station had yet to be cleaned out. 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 toward 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 stri
pped 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.”
Purge City (Prof Croft Book 3) Page 16