I sensed the Russian werewolf’s “oh shit” and his German shepherd legs moved faster, and I ran to catch up.
“There you are. My sister’s seer eyes.”
I lunged forward, grabbing a handful of Yasha’s fur, pulling him to a stop, and went down on one knee beside him.
“There’s a voice in my head,” I quickly said in his ear. This was weird, even by SPI standards. Hopefully anyone watching would think that the FBI agent and her K-9 partner just had a really close working bond.
I didn’t feel like I was being watched, that I was in the center of a cross-haired target. I knew it for a fact. Running wouldn’t help, neither would hiding, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to do both.
“Most countries have a monster that they use to frighten their children. Behave or it will get you while you sleep. Most myths are based in reality. And what are a country’s citizens but grown-up children? Fortunately for me, some fears never die.”
Tiamat. Babylonian dragon goddess of chaos. Vivienne Sagadraco’s sister.
Inside my head.
At least her voice was.
Reason, or what I had left of it, told me that she was here. Not among the crowds. She was a dragon; she’d want to be above it all, enjoying the game she’d started, watching the pieces move about on the colorful, life-sized game board that was Times Square.
The one-sided conversation continued.
“Primitive man lived in fear of the horrors that preyed upon them in the night. Man fears nothing in this modern age. In their arrogance, they deceive themselves into believing that science has told them all they need to know. They have lights to keep the darkness at bay, but their primitive fears are still there. They have forgotten what it is like to wonder what waits, red in tooth and claw, just beyond the light of their fires—or the lights of their cities. Their imaginations have been dulled by science—that explainer of all things. They do not know what hunts them, they do not believe how quickly they will die . . . but they soon will.”
Silence. The silence of bad things about to happen.
I jumped as a crackling in my ear almost burst my eardrum.
“Mac? Can you hear me? Mac, come in.”
It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.
Kenji.
“I can hear you.” It was like I could breathe again. “I’m on—”
“I know exactly where you are.”
Oh crap. “I’m on TV?”
“No, the boss is keeping me posted. She sees you. Look up at the top of One Times Square.”
“One Times Square? Where the—”
“The building with the big-ass ball on it? The one they’re about to drop?”
I looked. I saw the ball.
And I saw the dragon that was Vivienne Sagadraco perched regally—there was no other way to describe her—shimmering majestic blue in the spotlights trained on the dazzlingly lit ball covered with Waterford crystal.
Magnificent came to mind.
And invisible.
A million people here and billions around the world were watching that ball, but it was obvious that no one could see Vivienne Sagadraco.
My shoulders sagged in relief. “You fixed the cloaking device.”
I heard the pride in Kenji’s voice. “Affirmative. Me and the boys.”
“And girls!” I heard shouted in the background.
My words came in a gush. “It’s just me and Yasha. The teams were captured by ghouls and spawn and . . .” I stumbled on, unable to say “possibly eaten.” “Calvin and Rolf are in the old Forty-second Street subway station, and Ian is alone fighting a ghoul that’s not a ghoul, and—”
“The teams are fine.”
“What?”
“Roy, Sandra, and Lars just reported in. They ran into a little trouble clearing out the nest. They’re on their way up to the old station, as I—”
That son of a bitch vampire lied.
“Go get Ian!” I screamed.
Heads turned. A woman wearing an FBI hat, screaming into a headset, tended to make post-nine-eleven New Yorkers antsy. I quickly turned my head away and lowered my voice a few octaves. “He’s in the closed pedestrian passageway. Calvin knows . . .”
I was talking to dead air.
“Kenji?”
No response.
“Kenji? Shit!”
I had my paintball gun, and the boss would be able to see a marked grendel, but I couldn’t use it. At this moment, I had no doubt about the reactions of real cops to fake guns that they didn’t know were fake—especially in Times Square on New Year’s Eve where alert didn’t even begin to describe the readiness state of the thousands of cops and feds in, around, and above the crowds. The moment I drew my real-looking paintball gun, six or ten of the gazillion cops would be on me like white on rice. Ian had been right. A real-looking fake gun could get you killed quicker than the real thing—or get my face ground into the asphalt while a real monster materialized and started eating people.
Hope flickered to life, and even severed communications wasn’t going to crush it. There were a mess of folks depending on me. Ian was one of them. Whatever had happened to him—or whatever was happening to him—his sacrifice sure as hell wasn’t gonna be in vain. And if I failed, I’d fail knowing that I’d done everything I could possibly do. No regrets.
I knew what I had to do.
Vivienne Sagadraco could fight the grendel. I couldn’t. The boss knew where I was, so my job was to show her where the grendel was by the only other way available to me—by getting as close to the thing as possible, and grabbing it if I had to.
I spotted the grendel. “Bring it, bitch,” I spat.
I suddenly smelled sulfur and was nearly knocked off my feet by a blast of air.
My lizard brain knew sulfur was bad, so it didn’t consult with the rest of my mind on how to react to a downdraft on a night with no wind.
I dove behind a police cruiser as massive claws ripped through the space where I’d just been, leaving three, long gashes across the cruiser’s hood.
Startled shouts and curses spread as sections of the crowd were buffeted with the downdraft generated by the wings of a huge red dragon that had dove down, leveled off over Broadway, and damned near plucked me off the street like an owl going for a field mouse.
I frantically scanned the sky, but I couldn’t see her for the glare of the TV lights; however, I could hear and feel her powerful wing beats as she gained altitude and momentum for another run.
Tiamat didn’t get the chance for a second pass.
Vivienne Sagadraco must have seen the blast of wind flow and ripple over the top of the crowd and been able to track her sister’s path of attack. She simply dropped off of the edge of One Times Square, spreading her wings just short of full extension. The boss was diving to intercept, but she was so large that dropping from the roof of a twenty-five-story building was like a bird hopping out of a tree.
The boss had the advantage of surprise, and she would only have it once.
The two titans collided in midair, barely three stories above the packed crowd in front of the main stage. The collision produced a shock wave that shook the steel gantry holding the stage lights, and rocked the street itself like an earthquake. People directly beneath the two battling dragons were knocked to the ground from the force of the downdrafts from their wings.
Vivienne tried to maneuver Tiamat higher and farther away from the crowds. When her sister didn’t comply, Vivienne redoubled her attack with a roar that overpowered a million voices and the stage’s probably million-amp sound system, but that only I could hear.
I shot a glance at the countdown clock at the bottom of the pole the ball would descend.
One minute, thirty seconds.
Tia broke away, the boss in pursuit. The red dragon banked to the right,
the row of spikes at the end of her tail grazing one of the digital billboards, sending a spray of sparks down onto the crowd. With two beats of her mighty wings, Vivienne Sagadraco swooped beneath her sister, jaws snapping at Tia’s underside, forcing her upward to escape. The two massive dragons battled, climbing higher into the night sky.
Forty-five seconds.
I ran toward the female grendel who had ignored the roars and shrieks overhead and was nearing the pens closest to the stage. She leapt over a parked ambulance that was in her path, and when she landed, her weight cracked the asphalt beneath her taloned feet, the shock wave knocking more people to the street. Seen or unseen, the grendel was going into the crowd. Her clawed hand went to the front of her collar.
To turn off the cloaking device.
Oh no. No!
I ran toward her with no idea what I was going to do when I got there. The boss was busy fighting her sister, so my original plan was scuttled. It was just me. The grendel spun, slashing at me with her claws, catching on my armor, hooking it and me.
Thirty seconds.
Yasha surged past me, biting, tearing into the hand and arm that the grendel had used to reach for the disk on her collar. The people around us saw a K-9 officer snapping and biting something that wasn’t there. I saw a werewolf savaging a monster.
“Rabies!” a woman shrieked.
Twenty seconds.
The grendel broke free, long strides taking her directly to the foot of the stage, to the people packed together in the metal pens, sheep for the taking.
The grendel stopped, reached up with her undamaged hand . . .
“NYPD! Freeze!”
It was directed at me, not the grendel. Yasha and I had finally gotten the attention we didn’t want but couldn’t avoid.
I ignored them and kept running toward the grendel, prepared to throw myself against that hand or somehow knock her off balance, anything to stop her.
Almost there.
Seven seconds.
I lunged, my shoulder slamming into the back of the grendel’s armor-scaled knee.
Almost instantly, a downdraft knocked me off my feet as a giant claw grazed my back, sending me into a roll and throwing me against the bars of a crowd pen. I screamed in pain and frustration.
Five seconds.
I scrambled to my feet and stopped in open-mouthed amazement as Vivienne Sagadraco locked the talons that had knocked me out of the way securely around the grendel and swept her off the street, powerful beats of her wings working like the afterburners of a fighter jet as she fought for altitude. High enough and it wouldn’t matter if the grendel disabled the device. No one would see.
Tiamat was nowhere to be seen.
Four seconds.
Booted feet caught up with me, and a cop grabbed my arms and pulled me aside.
“I’ve got her,” he called to the others behind him.
I barely heard him as I stood and watched Vivienne Sagadraco carry the grendel farther up into the sky until they were barely visible, even to me. My eyes blurred with tears.
“We did it, Ian,” I whispered.
“You have the right to remain silent,” the policeman said. “Even though I know you can’t.”
What?
Three . . . two . . .
It was Ian.
. . . one.
Wearing a NYPD jacket and hat.
The crowd erupted and confetti came down.
I stared in relief and wonder. “How did you—”
“Later.”
Over the past two days, we’d come close to dying any number of times. Coming that close makes you think. It was making me think right now about what I suddenly wanted to do and damn the consequences. I was shaking with terror and relief . . . and well, all that feeling had to go somewhere. Besides, everyone else was doing it.
I put my hands on either side of Ian’s face, stood on tiptoes, and kissed him.
His lips were soft, he was warm, and damn, it was nice.
When I broke away, I was short of breath.
Ian was looking down at me, a mischievous grin flitting across his mouth. “Happy New Year, partner.”
Over the sounds of celebration all around us came the joyous howl of a wolf.
TWO DAYS LATER
IT was nine o’clock on Monday morning, and it wasn’t exactly business as usual at SPI headquarters—for a lot of reasons.
The bull pen smelled like new office furniture and electronics. It was amazing what cashing in a couple of trinkets from a dragon’s hoard could buy. The boss had everything delivered yesterday. Pre-assembled. On a Sunday. On New Year’s Day. Like I said, cash speaks. Loudly.
About half of the desks and chairs had been brought up from the loading dock area, but were presently on the side of the bull pen that was the farthest from where welders were repairing various levels of the catwalks and railings.
I’d never considered welding to be that loud of a construction-type activity, but then I didn’t have the preternaturally sensitive hearing of a werewolf.
Nor had I made the mistake of trying to drink the entire SPI Scandinavia team under the bar at the Full Moon on New Year’s Day.
When Rolf Haagen had said he wanted to go, kill, and return to drink to our victory, he wasn’t kidding—and apparently the bionic Viking had the liver to back it up. Wouldn’t have surprised me if his liver had been man-made, too. Nancy and Bill had opened the Full Moon just for us yesterday, and SPI’s agents from both sides of the pond had put an impressive dint in their single-malt scotch inventory—again, courtesy of cashed-in dragon hoard trinkets. The Scandinavians had invited us to Oslo for a Nordic-style monster hunt, and to consume vast quantities of aquavit. Hopefully they intended to wait and consume the latter until after we’d done the former. Though with that group, there was no telling.
Yasha gingerly rested his elbows on his desk and carefully placed his head—still wearing sunglasses—in his upraised hands. The sound he made was a mix of soft mournful howl and puppy whimper.
“You did it to yourself,” I reminded him.
I’d come into the office today because Ian had promised to start my training.
Kenji had CNN and the Weather Channel streaming live on two of his computer screens—his being one of the few undamaged areas in the bull pen. I would have asked him to turn it up, but decided to be sensitive to my coworker’s self-induced suffering and walked over to Kenji’s desk.
“Amazing how people can explain away anything,” the elf tech said, when I’d gotten close enough for him not to yell. I guess he was being considerate of Yasha, too.
I watched and listened, and was just as amazed. Jim Cantore was busy explaining how a nearly tornado-force downdraft could form on a virtually cloudless night with no major weather system within a hundred miles. Over on CNN, the earthquake that thousands had felt in Times Square and Midtown Manhattan on Saturday night was being blamed on a buildup of steam that had inexplicably released. Workers had been dispatched below the streets to find the culprit. Good thing our folks had cleaned up after themselves in the grendel nursery and old Forty-second Street station. And last, but certainly not least to the people who had been standing underneath it, the exploding section of Times Square billboard had been a short in electronics caused by yet another downdraft—or a large bird. They didn’t have that one nailed down yet.
Conspicuously absent was any mention of monsters or giant dragons.
I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye at my desk.
Ian. Putting something over the back of my chair.
He saw me see him and stepped back with a crooked grin.
As I got closer, I saw what it was and laughed out loud.
“For the fastest tagger in the West . . . Side,” Ian said.
I groaned at the bad pun.
Yasha groaned
, too, but not for the same reason.
I had a new piece of desk flair. Slung over the back of my office chair was a Wild West–style gun belt, with an oversized holster on each hip; but instead of a pair of six-shooters, the holsters each held a can of spray paint.
I grinned like an idiot. “I love it.” I felt myself blush a little. “Thank you.”
“There’s also that.” Ian indicated a pink box with a gorgeous silver bow. “That wasn’t there a few minutes ago.”
“Moreau,” Yasha said. He was sitting upright now, but he didn’t look inclined to take off his sunglasses anytime soon.
There was a smell coming from the box—a really nice one for a change. And familiar. I smiled and bit my bottom lip.
There wasn’t a card or a note, but I knew who it was from.
I looked up at the newly repaired windows of the executive suite. Vivienne Sagadraco, the dragon lady, founder and director of SPI, and my boss, stood framed in the floor-to-ceiling glass, her cane now more of a fashionable accessory than an orthopedic necessity. She smiled and bestowed upon me a single nod of her regal head. Her dragon aura did likewise.
I returned the smile and opened the box.
Cookies.
Iced and not iced, nuts and no nuts, and all with some form of chocolate. Except in one corner, separated from the others were delicate cookie confections, completely coated in . . . you guessed it, powdered sugar.
Needless to say, I ate one of those first.
I held out the box to Ian. “Want one?”
“I believe I will.”
“Yasha?” I asked.
He held up both hands.
“Understood. Why don’t I go put these on the break room table to share?”
“Is good idea.”
“Three whole words,” Ian said, impressed. He clapped the Russian on the shoulder. “Looks like you’ll make it, buddy.” He walked with me to the break room. “Heard from Ollie?”
“Oh yeah. He made it to the Full Moon just fine, and got home yesterday morning to find Detective Burton from the First Precinct waiting for him.”
“I supposed it’d be too much to ask that he arrested Ollie?”
The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel Page 29