“Blade!” I called. “Get behind me!”
With an angry scream, the creature swiped a clawed hand at Blade’s face. Her sword flashed into a parry, catching the creature’s wrist. Though talons didn’t rend flesh, the force knocked Blade to the floor. The creature pounced, her jaw of nail-sharp teeth diving for Blade’s throat.
“Forza dura!” I cried, aiming my cane.
The explosive force blew the creature into a graffiti-smeared wall. Blade’s sword went along for the ride, clattering beside her. The creature recovered and watched us from a snarling crouch.
“Alexandra, listen to me.” I pushed power into my entrancing wizard’s voice, remembering how I had been able to reach Father Vick when the demon possessed him last fall. “You’re a bright young woman in her final year of high school, not the monster that’s taken you over. If there’s the smallest part of you that can hear me, stand your ground. Don’t allow these impulses to drive you. They are not you. Do you hear me? They are not—”
The creature’s muscles bunched up and she sprang at me, not a spark of humanity in those glowing red eyes.
I backed from her bounds and fired twice, missing high. My heel caught what felt like a sack. I lost my balance backwards. The cane tumbled out of my grasp as I slammed into the floor. When the creature was almost on me, she buckled off course, skidding over the trash-strewn floor.
She righted herself and rounded on Blade, who had rammed into her side. A pair of spear-head-sized blades flashed in the punk rocker’s hands.
“Come and get some,” Blade said.
She ducked and spun beneath the creature’s leap, finger blades flashing up. The creature screamed as she passed overhead, blood spraying from her stomach. Staggering to a stop, the creature turned around. Blade, whose face was stippled red, grinned back at her.
She’s dancing with death, I thought.
As I pawed behind me for my cane, I saw that I had tripped over a blood slave, their bodies littering the room in shapeless mounds. Against a far wall lay the creature’s latest victim, his neck obliterated.
The hybrid charged again. Blade ducked, but the creature didn’t leap this time. At the same moment I grasped my cane, her lowered head cracked into Blade’s, the sound resounding throughout the cement space. Blade was out before she even flopped onto her back, finger blades spilling from her grasp.
“Protezione!” I shouted, bringing the cane overhead and aiming between Blade and the creature. A light shield glimmered into being, the creature’s jaw smashing into it in a spray of sparks.
“Respingere!” I cried.
A force pulsed from the shield, shoving Blade toward the doorway and the creature deeper into the basement room. But I had sacrificed too much energy. The shield faded out. I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled forward until I was standing between Blade and the creature.
Straining to see through wisps of Thelonious’s creamy white light, I aimed the revolver at the creature’s head.
35
Panting, blood and adrenaline souring my mouth, I stared at the creature across the room. The creature glared back, torn and blood spattered but healing. I wasn’t going to be able to stop her. Not with three bullets. Not with my powers running near empty and no useful spell items to speak of. Maybe not even with my powers running at full.
The vampire and werewolf parts of Alexandra seemed to be having a boosting effect on one other. Strength, brutality, the uncanny ability to heal… Damn near invincible is right, I thought, remembering what Dr. Z had told me back at their apartment.
I holstered my revolver in the front of my pants and drew my cane into sword and staff. My best chance was to keep her off balance with low-level blasts while attempting to sever her head at the neck. The hybrid’s death would also mean the death of the young woman inside her, but I probably wasn’t going to be alive long enough to weigh the morality of that decision.
I cleared the aluminum cans from around my feet and widened my stance.
The creature crouched back on her hands and haunches, nostrils flaring. Distracted, she broke eye contact to sniff something near her hand—a cast-off drug envelope. When she raised her eyes again, I could feel the violent hunger radiating from them, could see it in her drooling mouth.
She needed her fix.
I chanced a glance around the room. My gaze hit on more drug envelopes, cans, empty snack bags. A flicker of hope took hold inside me. I didn’t have my spell items, no, but perhaps I didn’t need them. A few small investments of energy, a few lucky breaks…
I sheathed my sword and stooped slowly to retrieve one of the drug envelopes. I ran a finger around the inside of the brown package, my skin picking up a faint coating of dust. The creature sprang.
“Fuoco!” I shouted, blowing on my coated finger.
The spell that I used on dragon sand to create fire was an amplifier. Now, a burst of energy entered each tiny granule sailing off my finger, intensifying its chemistry a hundredfold. I held my breath and scrambled back from the pluming white cloud as the creature plunged into it.
She emerged on the other side in a stagger, eyelids sagging, jaw hanging to the side. She blinked around languidly, but the muscles of her face were already beginning to tighten. I didn’t have much time.
I jabbed my cane around the room, calling everything conductive. Cans, metallic snack bags, scattered change. They tumbled and skittered inward. With another incantation, I arranged the items into a casting circle around the creature, pushing as much energy into it as I dared.
The creature stared at the garbage glowing into formation around her feet, an angry roar building in her chest. Her muscles bunched up to spring.
“Serrare,” I called.
The circle snapped closed. The creature rebounded from a manifested wall of energy. A wall the casting symbol was now sustaining. Exhausted, swimmy-headed, I tamped down my power and leaned back against a wall. I’d gone to the very brink. One more invocation and Thelonious would come sweeping in to pay the ladies of Frederick Douglass a visit.
The debris comprising the circle rattled as the creature took up her attack against the field. As with the door, the field wouldn’t be able to contain her for long, but I was shooting for long enough.
With the creature’s next strike, the aluminum cans shuddered and the field wavered.
“Cease,” a voice commanded, its power propagating through the room.
The creature halted her assault and stared past me. I turned to find Lady Bastet stepping through the ruined doorway, Vega close behind, her pistol drawn. I laughed in weary relief.
“All hail the cavalry,” I said.
In one of Lady Bastet’s hands, a clutch of what appeared to be dried wolf’s bane plumed smoke. In her other, she carried a bejeweled flail, with which she beat the air in rhythmic strokes.
“I bound you once,” she said in ancient Egyptian, striding forward. “I tied your lupine and vampiric natures together. Fastened them with intricate knots. As each struggled to free itself, they only pulled the knots tighter, allowing the child to live a life unencumbered. But a foreign substance broke those knots, undid what had been done, and your lupine and vampiric natures fed. By the grace of Mut, I will bind them again. I will free the girl inside.”
A snarl curling her bloody lips, the creature watched Lady Bastet circle the field.
Vega came up beside me. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, just weak.” I pulsed energy into the symbol to help sustain the casting circle. I nodded toward Blade, who was struggling to sit up, a hand to her head. “Would you mind checking on her?”
Vega nodded and went over to Blade.
“Sleep, slumber, dream,” Lady Bastet chanted.
I eyed the creature, who didn’t appear on the verge of any of those. But the smoke from the wolf’s bane had begun to change, the strokes of the flail shaping it into small hawk-like spirits. They sprang from the air and into the casting circle. The creature screamed and swiped at them,
but they evaded her hands. One by one, they thinned and slipped into her nose and mouth. In weakening fits of coughing, the creature sagged to the floor.
“Release the circle,” Lady Bastet said.
I looked from the slumbering creature to her and back. “Are you sure?”
“Release it,” she insisted.
I did as she said, drawing energy until the field collapsed. Lady Bastet caught the creature’s head and, kneeling, cushioned it with her thighs. She brushed the dank hair from the creature’s temples, then pressed her palms to them, incanting in whispers, her head bowed.
I walked over to where Vega had helped Blade to a wall, against which the vampire hunter now sat. An angry gash cut across Blade’s brow, and her eyes looked bleary. “So who are you guys?” she asked. “Magic Inc?”
“Something like that,” I said. “Here.”
I applied enough healing energy to Blade to stabilize her. Then we all watched Lady Bastet work. A turquoise aura enveloped the creature, who lay supine, legs straight, arms across her chest, as though the energy were swaddling her. Muscles trembled and jumped and she bared her teeth, but her eyes remained closed. I sensed the battle raging inside her, the vampire and werewolf parts of her makeup resisting Lady Bastet’s magic. But Lady Bastet worked meticulously, moving from one binding to the next. What bindings the creature pulled free, Lady Bastet refastened. And I recognized the pattern of the bindings as one large plaited knot. I had a flash of an Egyptian goddess on the banks of the Nile, weaving strips of palm leaves. Now, when the creature parts of Alexandra strained, the fibers pulled taut, securing the larger knot.
At last, Lady Bastet sat back with a sigh.
“It is done,” she said.
The aura dimmed, and the creature it had once held was a young woman. Her dark auburn hair was distressed, her body bruised and bleeding, but she was the girl in the photo. Alexandra Mills. Shedding my coat, I stepped forward and placed it over her. I then lifted her limp body into my arms.
“Looks like she needs a hospital,” I said.
“No, the binding is too fresh,” Lady Bastet said. “Western medicines may undo it. I can care for her at my place.”
We left the basement, Vega helping Blade up the stairs and out to the street. When we reached the sedan, I set Alexandra in the back seat, and Lady Bastet got in on the other side.
“This is where I split,” Blade said.
“Can we drop you off somewhere?” I asked.
“No need.” She nodded toward an old blue paint truck rumbling toward us. As the truck pulled up beside us, Bullet leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door. Blade sheathed her samurai sword into a scabbard on her back. “A pleasure working with you,” she said as she climbed into the truck. “Even if it cost us thirty grand.”
“Now will you tell us who hired you?” I asked.
“Nope.” She waved from the window. “Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t,” I said. “Take care.”
It certainly didn’t hurt to know a few vampire hunters in the city.
When I dropped into the passenger seat, Vega was staring at her smartphone, the glow paling her tense face.
“What is it?” I asked.
She turned the image for me to see. I squinted a moment before I understood what I was looking at. Hands twisted my heart. It was a close-up shot of her son’s neck. A small blue vein had been pricked, as though by a pin, and a thread of blood leaked from the vessel.
Beneath the picture, someone had typed, “Better hurry. The scent alone is intoxicating.”
36
We dropped Lady Bastet and Alexandra off at the rug store. While Vega waited stiffly in the car, I carried Alexandra inside, setting her on a cot Lady Bastet had unfolded in the back room. “Tell no one she is here,” Lady Bastet warned me as I left.
Back in the car, I focused on my cane, tapping into what remained of the hunting spell. My cane vibrated and then jerked in my hands. Good. Still connected to the file. But probably not for much longer. I powered down the window and aimed the cane outside. The spell tugged northwest.
“That way,” I said.
Vega peeled from the curb. At my directions, we ended up on Second Avenue near where we had aborted our earlier pursuit of Moretti’s men.
“Hold this course,” I said.
“I need you to be damn sure about this.”
“I am,” I said, but I understood what she meant. With her son imperiled, every second mattered. And in the time it had taken for us to deal with Alexandra, Moretti’s men should have circled back. The spell should have been pulling us south, toward Little Italy. Not north.
When we reached the East Seventies, Vega blew out her breath. “This isn’t right. What in the hell would Moretti’s men be doing way up here? We’re getting into the Russians’ territory. I’m going to ask you again. Are you sure you’re—”
“Turn right!” I cried, clutching the bucking cane in both hands.
Vega slammed the brakes and cranked the wheel. The sedan skidded over the slick road, grazing a parked car, then leapt forward again, blowing through the next intersection. Three blocks later, with the night sky beginning to pale over the East River ahead, the cane steered us left onto an affluent street. A tree-filled park rose outside my window.
“Slow down,” I said. The cane was rotating toward an opening in the tall security gate ahead. “There,” I said, nodding at a driveway and what appeared to be a guard house beyond.
“I don’t believe it.” Vega slowed to a stop and cut her lights.
“What?”
“You don’t know where we are?”
I looked around, trying to get my bearings. It was a corner of the city I rarely visited. The closest intersection was with East Eighty-seventh Street, which was telling me something.
“Wait a minute. Is this…”
Vega nodded, her eyes hard. “The mayor’s mansion.”
“Budge is involved in this?”
“Apparently.”
“I don’t get it. He’s working for Moretti?”
Vega narrowed her eyes at the guard house. “More likely Moretti’s men are working for him.”
I clenched my brow, trying to make sense of the development. Now the shock of revelation opened everything wide. Alexandra was the stepdaughter of someone powerful, but not Mr. Moretti.
“Budge is the stepfather,” I said numbly.
“Meaning his wife’s the mother.”
I thought of the soft-spoken woman at the gala. “Penny is Chastity Summers?”
“That’s what Arnaud meant by the truth not being far from me,” Vega said. “Little Italy is close, but City Hall is a hell of a lot closer. Practically across the street from police headquarters.”
Vega pulled out her smartphone and began tapping the screen.
“Who are you calling?”
“I’m replying to Arnaud, telling him we know who the mother is.”
Moments later, her phone blipped with a response. Vega sighed harshly through her nose.
“What?”
“He wrote back, ‘Is that your final answer? Tick-tock, tick-tock.’ ”
Vega started the engine and veered into the driveway.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“Making sure,” she said.
“Shouldn’t we, you know, strategize?”
“There’s no time.”
She pulled up to the guard house, stopping in front of the mechanical gate barring our way. The man inside the booth, though big and bulky, didn’t look as mercenary as the guards for the Financial District. Then again, he was a public employee.
“Detective Vega with the NYPD,” Vega said, holding up her ID. “I need to see Mayor Lowder immediately.”
The guard consulted a console, the screen glowing green against his face. “Is he expecting you?”
“No, an emergency came up.”
“He usually consults with the police commissioner for those. But I can ask him
.” He picked up a phone and punched a button. “Good morning, Mayor. There’s a Detective Vega here to see you regarding an emergency.”
“Tell him it concerns his family,” Vega said.
“It has to do with your family.” The guard scratched his chin. “All right, sir. Thank you.”
When the guard stooped down, I called power to my prism, ready to cast. But instead of a weapon, he reappeared with a clipboard, which he asked Vega to sign. Vega passed the clipboard back. The gate blocking our way rose while a row of bollards beyond sank into the driveway.
“That seemed too easy,” Vega muttered as she crawled the sedan forward.
I uttered an invocation, and a shield glimmered thinly around the car as the mayor’s mansion rounded into view. The city used to give weekly tours of the mansion before the Crash, but I had never been back here. The yellow two-story house looked plantation style, with its wide front porch, second-story balcony, and line of stately columns. A handful of cars sat in spaces out front, including the sports car Moretti’s men had been driving.
Vega parked beside it.
“What’s our plan?” I asked.
“Let me do the talking.” Vega drew her sidearm and got out. I climbed from the passenger side and strained to reshape the shield so that it protected the two of us. My powers had recharged on the drive up, but remained short of full strength. “Notice anything strange?” she asked.
“No guards?”
“Bingo.”
Shots cracked from the sides of the house, sparking off the shield.
“Vigore!” I shouted, directing the force into a cluster of bushes to the left of the porch. In a burst of leaves, one of Moretti’s men somersaulted skyward. Vega aimed and shot twice. Both bullets found their target, silencing the man before he crashed to the ground. The man on the right side of the house stood to run. Vega shot him once in the back. He face-planted on the lawn and went still.
Blood Deal (Prof Croft Book 2) Page 20