“Yeah,” I said, sighing. “I’m starting to see it that way too.”
There was another pause on her end. “Listen,” she said, “you make some really aggravating decisions sometimes, but you try to do right. I know what they’re saying about you is bullshit.”
I thought about how that aggravation ran both ways but was too touched by her words to say it.
“Thanks, Vega. That means a lot. Especially coming from you.”
“Just—” she started, but the room shook and the line went dead.
“Vega?”
A growing rumble sounded outside, like thunder. I hung up and made my way back to the conference room. On the flat-screen television, a white cloud had appeared among the skyscrapers. An answering explosion sounded, and one of the helicopters burst into flames. It went down in Battery Park, creating another small plume. More shots thudded and boomed.
“The war has begun,” Arnaud said. “It is now or never, Mr. Croft.”
The vampires along both sides of the table were watching the screen in rapt attention. But opposite me, Arnaud was holding out the ring again.
“Hey, uh, shouldn’t we get out of the top of the tower?” I said.
Arnaud didn’t answer. His eyes sharpened and pressed into mine.
Trust in the one I least trusted? It wasn’t like I had a goddamned choice anymore.
“All right,” I said, my stomach in a nauseating fist. “I agree to renew the Pact.”
Across Arnaud’s lips, a smile clicked on and off. He set the ring flat on the table and slid it toward me. The ring bisected the eight vampires and came to a rest in front of me. I pushed it on. The ring fit as I’d remembered, squeezing the base of my middle finger. A chill energy coursed down my body, and I imagined it circling the room, binding us all in the agreement.
The conference room shook again.
“The mayor has made the opening move,” Arnaud announced. “Phase one of the war has begun. Go now. Assemble your slaves. Be ready to mobilize them. This is for our very existence, gentlemen.”
Arnaud spoke with the authority of a general. The vampires stood and filed from the room, the Undertaker’s eyes lingering on me. My attention remained fixed on the screen. Several of the tanks were in flames, and two sections of the Wall appeared to be smoldering.
“Come, Mr. Croft,” Arnaud said. “Let’s go to my office for a live view.”
Zarko appeared and opened the conference room door for us. I pulled my gaze from the screen and fell in behind Arnaud. We followed Zarko to the end of the hallway, where he opened the office door. As I stepped past him and onto the plush carpet, I thought about my two prior visits. The first time, Arnaud had nearly sunk his teeth into my throat before banning me from the Financial District. The second time, he had coerced me into a deal that had led to Vega’s son being imperiled.
Third time’s a charm? I thought cynically.
I joined Arnaud beside the window that took up the far wall. Through the brown-tinted glass, we looked over the battlefield. Smoke billowed here and there, probably from artillery fire and downed helicopters. Along the Wall, automatic weapons popped. Gas jetted out as an antitank missile took flight. Its target, an armored vehicle rolling down Broadway, exploded in flames.
“Sadly, it’s a recurring scene in our history,” Arnaud remarked, as though watching a television documentary. “A city come to storm the fortress walls, to drive our kind from their midst. But that is the advantage of immortality, no? One eventually knows what to expect.”
Zarko appeared with two glasses of scotch. I shook my head, but Arnaud accepted his glass and took a thoughtful sip. I looked over at him, incredulous. How could he be indulging at a time like this?
A helicopter chopped past our view, gunfire bursting from a pair of muzzles. I shouted and reared back.
Arnaud swirled his glass. “At ease, Mr. Croft. The windows are made of reinforced laminate. The building is similarly blast resistant. It would take several direct hits for us to become imperiled, and the city’s forces presently have their hands full.”
The helicopter appeared again, this time spiraling beneath a trail of black smoke. Below us, it collided into a neighboring skyscraper, fire mushrooming from the impact site.
I peered up at the sky. “What’s to stop them from dropping a giant bomb?”
“Resources, for one. I doubt they have anything like that in their arsenal. Money, for another. It’s already going to cost the mayor a pretty piece of his budget to restore Central Park. Now imagine having to rebuild lower Manhattan from the ground up. Not even the federal government will spot the city that kind of capital.” City Hall was hidden by a cluster of intervening skyscrapers, but a wedge of its park peered out. By the tenting, I guessed there was some construction going on. “No, the initial assault is meant to punch some holes in our defenses in preparation for the next wave,” Arnaud went on. “Ah, and here it comes.”
I squinted past the Wall. Though I didn’t possess Arnaud’s preternatural vision, I could see the tide of foot soldiers racing down the north-south corridors. More than a hundred of them. And too fast to be humans.
“Werewolves?” I asked.
“I knew Penny was amassing an army before her untimely bullet wound, but I must applaud her ambition. She apparently got her hands on some enchanted item or other. A half wolf couldn’t have managed this kind of control otherwise.”
Automatic fire popped from the Wall. The advancing wolves were undeterred, converging toward several sections of the Wall that looked to have been damaged by tank fire.
“You, ah, planned for this, right?” I asked.
“The wolves, yes,” Arnaud said, taking another sip of scotch. “But not necessarily the numbers. We’re looking at the population of much of New England. It seems we’re going to be getting our hands dirty, after all.” Without looking, he handed his half-empty glass over his shoulder, where Zarko was standing. “Come,” he said to me. “You too, Zarko.”
“Hey, uh, I’m sort of weaponless.”
With Grandpa’s ring secure on my finger, I was no longer so concerned about the vampires. Werewolves were another story. Arnaud stopped and looked me up and down.
“I may have something for you in the armory,” he said.
“Armory?”
Without a word, he and Zarko sped from the office. I pursued them down the corridor and into the elevator. We descended and stepped into a bunker-like basement. I had to run to keep up as they traversed a long corridor. Another elevator carried us up a short distance.
We stepped out into a warehouse-sized space. Colonies of blood slaves moved among rows of storage shelves. They no longer wore business attire, but suits of glittering chainmail. Several carried medieval weapons. As though summoned, one of the blood slaves darted over and stopped in front of us, chainmail hugging his body like a second skin.
“Isn’t it beautiful? Titanium-silver alloy.” Arnaud ran his fingers across the blood slave’s chest, which, along with the shoulders and neck of his suit, featured extra plating. I noted he was wearing a blue armband with the corporate logo for Chillington Capital. In his hands, the slave clasped a pair of punching daggers—also silver. “Neither of our kinds react well to the element,” Arnaud went on, “but it is especially toxic to wolves. Imagine their shock when they seize this man by the throat. Zarko, be a dear and find a suit for our friend.”
Zarko bowed in consent. “This way, Mr. Croft.”
I followed him to an open dressing room with racks and racks of armor. Locker room-type benches crossed the space in rows. Zarko left and reappeared a moment later with a chain mail suit.
“I believe this is your size,” he said.
I accepted the suit and stripped down to my shirt and boxers. The suit was cold going over my skin, but much lighter than I’d expected. Zarko turned me around several times, tugging the chainmail here and there, before securing the waist with a thick leather belt. I sat to don the chainmail shoes. When I stood a
gain, I jogged in place and circled my arms a few times.
“Not bad,” I said. “What about offense?”
Zarko led me to the other end of the room, past racks of conventional weapons, to a display case that stood apart from the others. “These belonged to wizards once,” he said.
“Donations, I assume?”
I could feel Zarko’s grin behind me as I peered down on the items. There were wands of various woods and sizes, which I immediately eliminated from consideration—they took too long to train. No amulets for me, either. God only knew what kinds of enchantments hid inside them. I moved down to the weapons. There were no sword canes, but my gaze lingered on a pair of maces. I opened the case’s glass lid and picked one up. It was light in my grasp, easy to wield. I looked over the flanged metal head. Its ambient energy suggested silver in the alloy. Between the sharp edges were cloudy blue stones.
I held the mace away from me and said, “Illuminare.”
The weapon stiffened in my grip as a new energy coursed through it. The stones glowed, dimmed, and then burst with blue light. With another Word, I willed the light into a shield. I moved the mace into various defensive positions, assessing the shield for strength.
After another moment, I nodded and dispersed it.
I reached into the case for the second mace, this one featuring a single blue stone at the weapon’s apex. I looked from the stone to a blood slave trotting past in full armor.
“A test?” I asked Zarko.
“Very well,” he replied.
I aimed the mace at the armored blood slave and shouted, “Vigore!”
Like with the other mace, this one took a moment to process the peculiarities of my energy. Following a brief sputter, the weapon kicked in my hand and channeled the force. The emerging blast nailed the blood slave in the side and sent him skittering across the floor.
“I can use these,” I said, fitting the maces into my leather belt.
Though not my sword and staff, they were worthy replacements. I glanced over the rest of the weapons, but nothing grabbed me. Beyond the end of the display case, a large round door stood in a steel section of wall. It looked like the entrance to a bank vault.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“Our contingency plan, Mr. Croft.”
I turned at Arnaud’s voice to find the vampire transformed. Gone were the beige playboy suit and Italian leather shoes. He strode up in full armor, a burgundy cape flowing behind him. Banded mail gleamed over his forearms and chest. Beneath his chainmail suit, which flared into a long skirt, metal boots rang over the floor in a martial rhythm. He could have been Vlad the Impaler, on whom the original legend of Dracula was based.
“Contingency?” A horrible thought struck me.
“I know you believe me a monster,” Arnaud said, picking up on the emotion, “but even I have my limits. As a werewolf-vampire hybrid she would have made a powerful weapon, yes, but you will not find my daughter inside. She is far, far from here. And though I’d rather not say where that is or what she is doing, I assure you that the mayor would be proud.”
I relaxed at the knowledge that Alexandra was safe, likely in school somewhere.
“As for the contingency, there is an element of kinship there, I suppose.” Arnaud lowered a studded metal helmet over his mane of white hair. His pale, predatory eyes peered from a pair of slanted holes. “Though let’s hope we never need it,” he said. “Have you found what you needed?”
I nodded, touching my two maces. “This is just a defensive stand, right?”
“Asserting our rightful place in the city,” Arnaud reaffirmed. “Men!”
The blood slaves fell into formation behind him. From a side room, two more slaves appeared, straining to lead an armored warhorse. I stepped back as the giant black animal snorted and reared its head. I could see by its sunken red eyes that it had joined the ranks of the undead.
Arnaud accepted the reins and climbed deftly onto the horse’s gilded saddle. Another blood slave handed up a long sword, which Arnaud held at his side. He trotted the horse toward a barren wall opposite the elevators. The rest of us followed. The horse stopped in front of the wall and pawed the floor with a thick hoof, its coat covered in an oily lather. From deep inside the wall, a pair of clunks sounded. Without warning, the entire wall fell out before a set of heavy iron chains caught it.
Black smoke and battle sounds flooded in. Through a hazy light, I could make out several downtown buildings. One was on fire. The wall clanked out the rest of the way, like a drawbridge.
Arnaud canted his head toward me. “Try to stay close, Mr. Croft.”
The wall banged down to become part of a broad ramp that descended to Wall Street. Arnaud raised his sword straight overhead and aimed it forward. “To battle!” he cried as the horse charged outside.
“To battle!” the blood slaves echoed and followed.
I joined them, and we poured down the ramp.
27
Led by a vampire on an undead horse, our nightmare force emerged onto Wall Street. Around us, stone buildings rose steeply into smoke and coughing antiaircraft fire.
In the adrenaline-pumping confusion, it took me a moment to get my bearings. The Federal Hall building coming up on our right helped. It was the site of the fae’s lower portal. The private security forces and blood slaves that ringed the building were facing inward, in case anything tried to come through.
We veered left, pulling my eyes from the building. South?
“I thought the fight was at the Wall!” I shouted up at Arnaud.
“The other executives are taking their battalions there,” Arnaud said. “However, there’s been a breach in the subway line. A pack of wolves mean to attack from the rear. We’ll head them off at Bowling Green Plaza.”
Though Arnaud wore an earpiece, he used it to communicate with his human security forces—the vampires were psychically linked to one another as well as to their slaves. So when Arnaud shouted for his battalion to split up, I understood the verbal order to be for effect. He was enjoying playing general. The slaves coursed around us like quicksilver, disappearing into the canyons that ran every which way in the oldest section of the city.
“Your hand,” Arnaud called, reaching toward me.
I seized his plated arm shield, and he hefted me up behind him. I seized him around the waist, the muscles of the horse’s flanks surging like giant pistons. We emerged onto Broadway. Ahead, an attack helicopter pivoted around and came at us low. In a deafening burst, gunfire blew up chunks of asphalt.
“They’re trying to strafe us!” I shouted.
Before the lines of blown asphalt could reach us, Arnaud pulled the steed left, onto a narrow side street. The helicopter roared past. An explosive bout of antiaircraft fire sounded behind us.
The horse snorted and sprinted on.
“It seems the wolves are emerging,” Arnaud said over his shoulder.
He took a sharp right, and the small gated park near the Bowling Green station appeared ahead of us. Werewolves in their creature forms were bounding up from the subway entrance and emptying onto the brick plaza outside the green. Blood slaves swarmed in to meet them.
With the preternatural speed of both creatures, the action was hard to follow. Claws and teeth flashed, blades glinted, smoke and blood erupted from locked and rolling bodies.
The blood slaves were outsized but not outmuscled.
Before I was ready, Arnaud charged his warhorse into the park. I worked one of the maces free from my belt while holding tight to Arnaud. The werewolves were wearing what looked like Kevlar suits, but Arnaud found their vulnerabilities with swift, precise strokes of his sword. I watched one werewolf fall away, his decapitated head hanging on by a thread of sinew. The horse trampled the wolf’s body. Other wolves retreated from the bite of Arnaud’s sword to regenerate—only to be piled upon by blood slaves armed with punching daggers.
But for every wolf that fell dead, two more seemed to appear from the subway.<
br />
I twisted one way and the other, swinging the mace desperately. One blow caught a wolf across the jaw. Blood blew from his mouth like spindrift. Slaves pulled the wolf from the horse’s right flank, where he’d embedded his claws. I nailed another wolf behind the ear.
This is insane, I thought, swinging at a third lunging wolf. I need eyes on every side of my head.
By sheer luck, I glanced up in time to catch something plummeting toward the park.
“Protezione!” I cried.
The mace stiffened in my grasp and a blue shield appeared around us an instant before the mortar impacted to our right. The blast kicked us to the side, burying us in a wave of stone dust. Wolves and blood slaves that had been thrown skyward thudded down around us.
The horse bellowed, hooves hammering the blood-slick bricks as it struggled to stay upright. I squeezed Arnaud tighter as he fought to bring the horse around. A second mortar landed, slamming into the park on our other side. The horse was blown from its feet, and I lost my hold. I rolled over several times, coming to a rest against a mangled blood slave.
I peeked above his body. Through the thinning haze, I could make out the old U.S. Custom House across the plaza. I drew the other mace from my belt. The stone steps to the entrance would give me higher ground and protection from the rear. I’d be in a better position to cast.
Shouting to reinforce my shield, I crossed the plaza at a run, ears still ringing from the twin blasts. I veered around blood slaves grappling with giant wolves and pounded up the steps. At a landing where a pair of columns climbed the building’s tall edifice, I turned to take in the scene from my new vantage.
Not good.
Arnaud and the blood slaves had recovered from the mortar shells and were re-engaging the wolves, but there must have been a second breach. A new wolf horde was swarming in from the east.
“Arnaud!” I shouted.
From his mount, the vampire turned his blood-streaked face. The eyes that met mine burned red from his helmet. Sword poised above his billowing cape, he could have been an angel of death. Arnaud wheeled the mount toward where I was pointing and saw the new front. From windows in the surrounding buildings, gunfire erupted. The vampires’ private security force!
Purge City (Prof Croft Book 3) Page 18