White Mountain Rising (Veil Knights Book 7)

by Rowan Casey

  Still, no one else on the platform came to their aid. By now it should have been clear who the enemy in this fight was, but Hannah was to be disappointed. She ached and tasted blood, having bitten the inside of her cheek from one of the slaps.

  The four added a few more kicks to Daniel’s midsection then the woman scooped up the trumpet, studied it for a moment, and headed for the up escalator.

  Hannah limped – she had some sort of strain from the fight -- to Daniel’s sagging form and checked to see if he was seriously hurt. There were tears in his eyes and blood steadily dripping from his chin onto his pants and ground. With the attackers gone, finally others began to gather around the old man, helping him to his feet. Somewhere in the distance, heard above the rattle of an approaching subway, were police sirens. That meant the teens had to get on their feet and get away quickly. They were already wanted and if someone could connect this fight to their BOLO, they were in deep shit. She crouched down and looked into Daniel’s eyes.

  “Can you move?”

  “Yeah.” His voice sounded wounded and he was clearly trying to control the pain he felt.

  “Then get up, the police are coming and we can’t be here,” she pleaded. Their backpacks were retrieved and it hurt to carry them.

  He rose to his feet, letting out grunts and a moan of pain. She sympathized and felt fairly banged up herself. Some knights they were! She wondered if their ancestors trained or were they divinely gifted with combat skills.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “We can’t be seen going down the tunnel, so we gotta get out of the station,” she insisted and began moving. It hurt and all she really wanted to do was curl up in a ball and sleep but her instincts screamed at her and she moved. With a single glance, she saw Daniel keeping, wincing and wiping at his chin.

  The sirens grew in volume as they reached the top of the station and at first they broke into a run until Hannah grabbed the back of Daniel’s shirt, forcing him to slow down. “You already look like you’ve been in a fight, don’t call more attention to yourself,” she hissed.

  He jerked his head once in acknowledgment then, lowered it; and, hunching his shoulders, he headed off towards Flatbush Avenue. While hiding in the mall crowds made perfect sense; again, his posture practically radiated, “I’m a suspect!” but Hannah grit her teeth and followed along. The first two police cars rounded a corner, lights and sirens filling the air, and pulled up at odd angles to the station. By the time the first officers entered, the battered pair had crossed the street and were entering a store. She didn’t look to see what it was, nor did she care, because it meant they were free. For now, anyway.

  Daniel stalked his way through the mall and made a beeline for Starbucks. She hustled to keep up, wincing every third step or so. She was somewhat winded and certainly sore, but her heart was beating strong and there was an inner feeling of radiating energy that made her feel, well, powerful. It had to be her activated powers but what good was having this extra energy if she didn’t know how to channel it? It certainly did her no good in the fight that just saw them lose the trumpet and get their asses kicked. She needed to train and maybe that Jessie fighter would be willing to show her a few things. That is, if the apocalypse could be forestalled, which was looking less likely now that the trumpet was in the hands of the White Mountain goons. And what did they want it for? What was their connection to this mess? At that moment, she didn’t really care because even thinking hurt. She hoped the energy came with a healing factor like Wolverine so she’d feel better sooner than later. As it was, she was glad her darker skin would mask the bruises better than Daniel’s pasty white flesh. They had the horn in their grasp and now it was gone and they were beaten by the very people who had given them sanctuary.

  He finally slowed, taking his place on line, behind five other people, and rifled his pockets for cash. Daniel was rigid and his body radiated pain and emotions but they didn’t make eye contact. She went to the where they kept milk and sweeteners, grabbed a thick handful of napkins from the dispenser and brought them back to the line. With a few quick dabs, she got the glistening red blood that pooled at the tip of his chin then studied his face. He’d definitely be spotting bright bruises within the next few hours.

  “Go clean up, I’ll order. What do you want?”

  “Whatever, we’ll share something large,” he muttered and staggered off to the bathroom. When her turn finally came, she ordered the Venti Cookies & Cream Frappuccino and went to the end to wait for it. He emerged just as her name, “Kenisha,” was called and they wandered away from the crowds to an empty bench. She took a sip, the cool, gritty liquid refreshing against her tongue.

  “You okay?”

  He took a long pull on the straw, let the drink rest in his mouth, then made a loud swallow. Finally, he said, “Yeah. That sucked.”

  “Big time,” she agreed.

  “We had it! We found it and were so damn close,” he said, letting the anguish fill his voice. “Now the old man’s hurt, they have the horn, and we’re shit out of luck.”

  “Why did they show up like that? How do they know about the horn?”

  He took another drink, visibly trying to slow down and savor it. This might be their dinner at the rate things were going. “I have no clue. We didn’t talk to them about it at the home and why on Earth would some religious group want it?”

  “Can we ask Grimm?” The drink was already half-gone and she wanted it to be endless until both were sated; but they needed the energy boost. They were sore and tired and now they had new issues to contend with.

  “What if he doesn’t know? How’d they know where we were? What good is the horn to them if we’re all out there looking for the other treasures?”

  “Too many questions,” Hannah said.

  “Yeah. Right. Okay, let’s think about this and make a plan. What’s the first thing we need to do?”

  “Not get caught,” she said immediately. He nodded slowly in agreement.

  “There’s going to be half-a-dozen videos about that fight the police will look at. It might be only a matter of time before someone somewhere recognizes us and connects us to the house fire,” he said. He was processing, talking things through, which she appreciated. There was something orderly to his thinking that she was coming to welcome.

  “They’re from the White Mountain people. We know from the other night they stay at the house so the first question is how many houses are there in Brooklyn? Can’t be many since neither one of us ever heard of them before this week.”

  Hannah pulled out her phone and frowned at how much battery power was missing. Quickly, she ignored emails, texts, and voicemails, of which there were several of each, and queried Google. There were two houses in all of Brooklyn, the one they stayed at and one in Park Slope, farther away. The map also noted there were six throughout Manhattan itself and several seemed to be in Queens. They were more prevalent than she had imagined. Holding out the phone, Daniel studied the map and grunted approval.

  She realized he hadn’t turned on his phone since briefly earlier in the day, cutting himself off from the world. His paranoia about being traced made a certain amount of sense, but she couldn’t live without her phone. Right now, it was a true test of inner will to treat her social media apps as if they came loaded with electroshocks. Avoiding them made the most sense now, despite her frequent use of them every hour of every day prior. Before any of this happened, she lived vicariously through her friends’ Instagram and Snapchat feeds, taking a dozen or more silly selfies each day, playing with the filters and posting them at will with whatever was on her mind that instant. Her twitter account had over 1200 followers and she herself was following about twice that number. As it was, she made a point of trying to save for a battery charger she could keep in her school backpack, but now she was spending that precious money on coffee drinks.

  “You want to go back to the house, hope we found the right one, and demand they give it to us?” she asked, hoping the in
credulousness in her voice emphasized the absurdity of the idea.

  “Yeah, that’s not going to work,” he agreed. “They didn’t do it on their own. They were under someone’s orders. What was the name of their leader?”

  She sipped, noting how quickly the drink had gotten low. “The Moderator.”

  “Damn weird name for a religious leader,” he said.

  “They’re not your usual religion,” Hannah said.

  “True, most don’t resort to beating up old men. Okay, so this Moderator, he wants the Horn, which means he knows it’s valuable. How? Grimm and Marilyn didn’t say a word about anyone else in the world knowing about the treasures.”

  “That also means he probably knows about the Veil,” she added. That gave her pause. Why would he want the Horn if not to do only one of two things: seal the cracks in the dimensional barrier or shatter them? If it were the former, she could live with some rough bruises and figure things out later. If it were the latter, then he had to be stopped. There was little doubt in her mind that if he sent people after them, he might have others threatening the quests of Jessie, Sam Drake, "Lady Luck,” John Seton, Rick Fury, Rex Bishop, and the twins. If only they could warn them, but Grimm neglected to hand out ear buds and microphones like she saw on countless television series. What they really needed was someone sitting behind a computer terminal in some high tech facility, probably a hot chick, who could locate information within seconds and hack traffic cameras and all the other modern day wizardry that never felt real. They never had lag time, connection failures, or mistyped a word.

  Instead, they were cut off, feeling abandoned. Success or failure rested with each of the knights. Of course, Merlin wouldn’t just send everyone running around the world if he didn’t have some confidence in their collective success. Still, he might have been counting on their successes from previous incarnations dating back to the original Knights of the Round Table. Just how many times had Sir Bors the Younger been summoned back to action? Just how often has Earth been threatened to such a degree that Merlin had to act? And just how bad had things gotten with the Veil to require him to ally himself with Morgan Le Fey, who she now had come to know was not normally on Santa’s Nice list.

  If Merlin and the knights were real, was Santa Claus? Just thinking that showed Hannah just how loopy and exhausted she was.

  Daniel was also brooding, no doubt about these same possibilities - Santa Claus excluded - and no doubt their thoughts were running along parallel lines. Not that it gave either one of them a clue as to what to do but they had each other while most of the others were pretty much on their own.

  “We need to go back to the library, look up whatever we can about the Moderator and his cult,” Daniel announced.

  “It’s Saturday and they’ve got to be closed by now,” she said.

  He grunted at that. “Okay, we go in the morning.”

  “Which begs the question, where do we go tonight? We can’t go back to the station.”

  They both fell into a funk of silence, mulling over their options. She let him slurp down the now-melted final dregs of their drink. She wanted something else to fill her stomach, even if it was just a salty pretzel. What she really wanted, truth be told, was a shower and a gooey pizza, but that wasn’t going to happen. Their options felt smaller by the second and her internal energies were fading. She felt exhausted down to her bones.

  Which is exactly when she looked up to see Charlene loom over her.

  10

  Daniel

  He had no idea how things had fallen utterly to shit. The teen thought it providential that they found the horn as quickly as they had but then again, he had faith that once they were activated by Grimm, things had been set into motion. Each action was a domino purposefully tipping onto the next and the next leading them to finding the trumpet. Time and again, Daniel took flimsy clues and made some guesses and was proven correct, giving him confidence with each positive outcome. Then those bastards from the White Mountain showed up, beat him and Hannah, and stole the trumpet. How this fit into with the domino pattern didn’t make sense; an unanticipated move, upsetting the pattern. With every passing incident, Daniel was increasingly convinced there were forces in motion he couldn’t see, even with his sight, but there nonetheless, guiding them along.

  He was sore all over and now felt like a failure. His stomach roiled, as much from hunger as from fiasco and he wanted to lash out at pretty much anything that interfered. Daniel doubted he’d ever felt so angry at another human being before today and he desperately wanted payback against those White Mountain thugs. Of course, he was a skinny, white teen, not exactly built to hand out a beating like a Tyson Fury. But still, he longed for that - to hulk-out and smash.

  The Moderator orchestrated the theft; that was clear. Even without the sight it was obvious these were merely flunkies. So, who was this mysterious man without a name? Daniel and Hannah both concluded he knew about the Horn and its power, its relevance to the crumbling Veil. Neither had a clue what his endgame would be and that troubled him.

  He was mulling things over for the fourth or fifth time when his reverie was shattered by a fresh curse from Hannah. Looking up, he couldn’t believe he was staring at Charlene, Hannah’s nemesis from the home, flanked by four other girls. There was pretty Yaamini, the Hispanic girl whose name he never learned, the timid one, and another Hispanic, tall and thin. They looked unharmed from the fire and some part of him was glad about that.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Hannah was asking.

  “You think you’re the only bitch to go off on her own? That Y they stuck us in didn’t have gates and locks. It was pretty easy to go out for the day and look what we found.”

  Hannah stood up, looking up at the heavyset girl, hatred in both of their eyes. Something dark was shading Charlene, he noted. She didn’t have demons crawling over her or whispering in her ear, but she did had a shimmering of dark tones that showed her mood and dangerous mindset. The other four girls were exactly as they appeared to be, hangers on and followers, their own auras varying shades of green for envy and darker tones for their own anger. They’d do as Charlene commanded, and that was likely to also cause fresh problems. He really didn’t want any other trouble. All he wanted the trumpet and a good night’s sleep, not necessarily in that order.

  “You two are in deep shit,” Yaamini chortled. “They think you set the fire.” Her accusatory finger seemed to elongate and poke at him. He blinked and she was back to normal.

  “Police are looking for you both,” the new Hispanic girl said. “Bet you do jail time since someone died.”

  “They deserve it,” the other Hispanic teen said, her voice tinged with hatred.

  “Doesn’t matter to me, as long they get into deep, deep trouble,” Charlene said. “But first things, first. You have some karmic payback coming your way.”

  “Do we really have to do this?” Daniel asked, the weariness evident in his voice.

  “Yeah, I think we do,” Charlene said, making it absolutely clear there would be a fight.

  “We do this here, security will arrest us all,” he pointed out and that seemed to give the girls pause.

  Hannah slowly rubbed her hands. “I just got my ass beat and am looking to work out some anger. You’ll do, but he’s right. You want a fight, we do this away from the cameras and these people.”

  Tossing Daniel her backpack, she spun on her heel and headed for the subway passageway. Once again, they were going below street level, down where the platforms were hard, the air was humid, and the danger of falling onto the tracks was great. Charlene beckoned to the others and suddenly there was a gang of teens headed for the subway. To anyone looking, they appeared to be a single group kids out for the day. Daniel, knowing better, took up the rear, keeping an eye on them, hoping someone wouldn’t try and provoke the fight earlier than planned. He also didn’t want a sneak attack from behind. He was sore, but not stupid. While Hannah was right about staying away from th
e cameras, he was filled with that building rage which quickly needed an outlet. He did notice the quietest girl, the timid one from the first fight, tapping at her phone. She was no doubt sending a notice to someone else from the Home meaning word of their whereabouts was about to become common knowledge. His flight instincts kicked in, stepping ahead of his rage, he wanted to grab Hannah and run; but his partner was angry and very determined to have this battle. Had he even tried to talk them out of it, he was afraid they’d all gang up on him, even Hannah. Now he had a better idea of how her reckless behavior landed her in the home. She could really be a danger to herself.

  The token booth was empty, so everyone shimmied under or over the turnstiles in the relatively empty station. He made certain his face was not visible to the cameras, should they even be working. Vibrations could be felt through his sneakers from a train just departing which left even fewer people around. He suspected this was not going to be a one-on-one fight; the moment Charlene was in danger one of the other girls was going to join in. It was therefore his role to prevent that from happening while secretly hoping someone would need a beating. Daniel didn’t know where these protocols came from or how everyone seemed to know their roles. It’s not like they taught a course on street fighting in gym or Guidance handed out a pamphlet on the matter. No, this came from life and experience.

  Hannah reached the platform first and spun about, refusing to show her back now that they were standing on the concrete field of combat. To his eyes, she was tough, short and curvy but tough. While Charlene was taller and heavier, and just plain mean, he suspected Hannah’s inner-fire and activated abilities gave her the edge. If he could afford it, he would put money on her. Not that anyone was taking bets on this battle royal. He stepped backward a bit and placed the two backpacks against an iron pillar and hoped no one would make off with them when he was distracted.