by Chris Vola
Xansati cleared his throat violently. “If I wanted to take Arthur’s statue, as you call it, I could have gone to Green-Wood Cemetery and dug it up myself. I know exactly where he buried it.” He grimaced while his body twisted uncontrollably in a long spasm of pain. “Arthur and I never wanted to collect all of the statues to create a weapon,” he said once he’d recovered enough to speak. “When he came to me with the first Brooklyn jaguar, it was because he’d been studying the statues for centuries and had grown to fear their power. This was during the First World War, when he’d seen the soldiers returning from Europe, in boxes or worse, and it became clear to him how humans would use the statues if they could figure out how to harness their energy. He sought me out because I was the last of the original tribe and he thought, correctly, that I would want to keep our relics out of the wrong hands.”
“I know about Arthur’s obsession,” Ryan said, annoyed. “I know about the years he spent searching for the statues, before he disappeared. But I also know about the experiments. Why did you let that happen? Sounds like those were definitely not the right hands.”
Xansati sighed. “I was curious. For six hundred years I’d just assumed the jaguars were magical, that they were infused with powerful spirits, like the medicine men would talk about. But after I lost contact with Arthur, a part of my mind became restless and I wanted to see if there was a technological explanation for what they could do. Why only some of us in the original tribe could touch them, why they could allow some of us to leave our villages and remain Ànkëlëk-ila. So I told the Committee about them. And at first, we did learn a great deal. But when I found out about the studies that were being funded by outside elements, what they were doing to our own species, the chemical by-products they’d isolated, I took the statues back. But it wasn’t enough. I had to completely separate myself. That’s why I brought them here. I thought they’d be safe. I never wanted to retrieve the seventh statue. The worst thing that could have happened was for it to resurface. All that did was stoke the Committee’s desire to complete its ultimate goal of not only using the statues as a weapon, but of turning dead warriors into living weapons, ones that could be deployed whenever and wherever their masters see fit, whether those masters are the Committee or the American military. I didn’t expect them to come after me so soon. I thought I would have more time to strengthen this place. I also didn’t expect people whom I trusted, people whom I considered to be my friends to turn on me like this.” He pointed weakly at the projectiles riddling his body. “I was stupid and I failed.”
“So you’re saying that if anyone took the seventh and came after me for the eighth, it was the Committee? They’re the ones who found my girlfriend, tortured her, and destroyed both of our lives?” Ryan asked.
Xansati nodded, grimaced again.
Ryan tried to wrap his mind around what he’d just heard. What Xansati had said was in line with Derrick Rhodes’s research, with what Rodney had said about a cleansing, with the tracking chip that Van Pelt had wanted to put inside Jennifer. Creating a legion of super strong, invincible mercenaries seemed right up the Committee’s alley, as did buying off Xansati’s followers.
But there was still one major point of contention.
“What about Nicki?” Ryan asked.
“Who?”
“Don’t lie to me. I’m sure the Great Spirit, or your ancestors, or whoever you’re going to be meeting in the next few minutes won’t be happy with you if you do. Young girl, dark hair, curvy in all the right places, talks too much, B-negative blood. I saw you with her a few days ago, in an apartment on West 29th Street. You obviously found her attractive.”
Xansati was silent for a moment, as if deep in thought. Suddenly his eyes widened. “Stella?” he asked. “How could you know about her?”
“I met her online, thought she was just a donor out to make a little money on the side. The second time I saw her she told me that the people she was working for had taken the woman I love and were going to kill her unless I gave Nicki—or Stella, apparently—the statue. So I followed her to Manhattan, tracked her to the building where you two were—”
“I ran into her on the street a couple of months ago,” Xansati said. “Somewhere in Harlem. Or, I should say I smelled her. The scent was irresistible. I asked her if she might like to go to dinner, but she knew exactly what I really wanted. It clearly wasn’t her first time dealing with our species. It was the best meal I’d ever had.”
Ryan couldn’t argue with that. Nicki’s blood was how he imagined freebasing pure cocaine would feel.
“But she was only ever food to me,” Xansati continued. “And maybe a little, what do you call it, stress relief. After a while I thought that providing the apartment on 29th Street for us to use might have been a bad idea, because she started coming on to me, strong, telling me she loved me, and that she was going to leave her fiancé in Brooklyn so she could be with me full-time.”
“Her fiancé in Brooklyn?”
“Yes,” Xansati said. “She said she lived with him there. A much older man. She showed me a picture of him. Didn’t seem like her type. But what did I know?”
“What did her fiancé look like?” Ryan asked.
“A black man,” Xansati said. “Salt-and-pepper dreadlocks. I think she said his name was Fred.”
Not Fred, Ryan thought, but close.
Frank had been pimping Nicki out the whole time.
He thought back to the night in Prospect Park that now seemed like it had taken place in a different century, how he’d told Frank about Seamus, about how Frank had said he was going to make a few calls to some old contacts and try to figure things out.
Ryan now had a good idea who those contacts were.
Xansati groaned and coughed out a gob of pink fluid. “Do you know why Arthur turned you?”
Ryan shook his head.
“It wasn’t by chance that he found you in the hospital. And you hadn’t been exposed to a mysterious South American illness that had been brought to the city on that boat. There was a statue on board, the one that Arthur buried in the cemetery. It had activated during the trip. Its radiation killed everyone who came near it, except for you. You were immune to it.”
“Then why was I so sick?” Ryan asked.
“Your cancer had taken a turn for the worse,” Xansati replied. “It was as simple as that. Until he found you, Arthur and I thought I was the only one alive who could handle the statues when they started to glow, who knew how to channel their energy. There were some other Ànkëlëk-ila and medicine men who were able to touch them when I was young, but they’re long gone. For everyone else, human or tribal, they’re instant death.”
Ryan nodded, picturing the burned corpses in the passageway.
“We still don’t know whether it’s genetics or environmental factors, but either way, you are among the rarest of the rare. And your purpose has come. You need to take the statues with you, get them as far away from Manhattan as you can. You need to find—”
Ryan felt a rush of air as a dart whizzed by him and struck Xansati in the forehead. Xansati’s mouth shut and he trembled for a few moments and then went still. His eyes rolled back, then turned pink. But instead of liquefying they hardened and kept their shape, like two neon pebbles gazing into nothingness.
“God,” a voice behind Ryan groaned. “Enough is enough. I don’t have all day for this sob story. Oh, and drop the knife.”
Ryan turned and faced Karl, who was standing a few yards away, wearing his usual sweatpants, his hair a disheveled mess, holding a pistol in one hand and a large duffel bag in the other. He tossed the bag and watched it land at Ryan’s feet.
Although touching the statue had made Ryan feel stronger than he had in weeks, he wouldn’t be able to get to Karl faster than Karl could get a shot off. Ryan dropped the knife.
“Pick up the statues and put them inside,” Karl said.
“You were working for the Committee the whole time,” Ryan said, trying to contain h
is fury so he wouldn’t do anything rash. “Congratulations. You fooled me. And Vanessa. Did Van Pelt promise you the same thing he promised Rodney? A leadership role in the new tribe?”
“Vanessa was my friend,” Karl said, his voice rising an octave. Ryan saw that his eyes were bloodshot and wet. “She was more than that. I would have done anything for her. When I heard the explosion a few minutes ago, I ran here as fast as I could, to try to help her. It was like I could sense that…” He trailed off for a moment, tried to choke back a sob. “But now she’s gone.”
“Then why not just walk away?” Ryan asked. “Mourn her and move on. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“I read all of the documents you brought to Vanessa’s apartment,” Karl said. “I’m not stupid. Those rocks are worth a lot of money to a lot of different people.” He motioned at Xansati with the barrel of his pistol. “I heard him say that you can touch them. So let’s go. Put them in the bag.”
“No problem,” Ryan said calmly. He bent over and picked up the still-glowing statue that he’d taken out of Xansati’s hand. As he did, he felt the same electric rush as before, coursing through his body with pharmaceutical precision. His mind was racing as he moved to place it in the bag.
How had Xansati been able to use the jaguar to scorch the bodies that were lying outside the chamber? Had he been able to focus the energy inside himself and somehow force it back out through the statue in a series of concentrated bursts? Or did the statue choose its targets at random?
An image flashed through Ryan’s brain. He remembered the parchment that Vanessa had found rolled up in the handle of Arthur’s knife. The drawings of figures holding the statues, the light radiating from their bodies.
Ryan slowly lifted the jaguar and held it with both hands a few inches in front of his chest. Two parallel bolts of energy raced through each side of his body, immobilizing him with their intensity, joining together with an audible clicking noise near the middle of his spine. The statue began to vibrate while turning a lighter shade of green.
“What the fuck?” Karl stammered, aiming the pistol at Ryan’s forehead, his voice frantic. “What are you doing?”
Suddenly the statue became scalding hot and Ryan was forced to let it go. But it didn’t fall to the floor. Instead, it hovered in the air and moved closer to Ryan’s chest, as if it were drawn to him by some kind of magnetic attraction. Ryan and Karl watched in stupefied silence as the jaguar shrank to about half its original size, then flattened and changed from a solid into something supple and gelatinous as it pressed against Ryan’s chest. It melted through his shirt and corroded his body armor before finally fusing to his flesh like melted iron in a mold. It cooled and hardened as quickly as it had heated up, so quickly he couldn’t feel it.
But he could feel everything else.
He could smell each of the bodies in the passageway, whether they were human or dead warrior, every location on those bodies that chemicals had decomposed, the places where fire had met skin. He could taste the thick, badly circulating air, feel slight variations in the current with each of Karl’s quickening breaths. He could see every bead of sweat that was pooling around Karl’s temples, every one of his glistening pores.
The only thing that Ryan could compare the sensation to was when he had been turned, but this was on another level, and without any of the corresponding terror and disorientation. Whatever the statue was doing to him, it felt right. Better than right.
He took a step toward Karl, who fired all of his remaining darts at Ryan’s face and neck. They glanced off Ryan’s skin as if they’d been made of paper. Karl threw the gun down and turned to run, but Ryan grabbed his wrist before he could take a step. Ryan felt the adrenaline inside him manifesting as heat that quickly spread from his chest and down his arms, collecting in his hands.
The skin on Karl’s arm where Ryan was holding him began to bubble, then fall off in wet clumps until Ryan was gripping bone. Karl let out a feral screech that was cut short by the index and middle fingers of Ryan’s free hand jabbing through his neck and out the other side.
Ryan let go and Karl fell to the ground with a dull thud.
He stood still for a moment while warm blood puddled around his feet, waiting to be overcome by a coughing spell, a spasm of vertigo, or an anxiety attack, but nothing materialized. He felt stronger and more focused than he’d ever been, and he didn’t care why or how it had happened.
There was no moment of indecision as he calmly strode to the platform where Xansati was lying, collected the remaining statues, and put them in the duffel bag, as he walked out of the chamber and briefly paused in front of Vanessa’s corpse before heading back up the tunnel toward the museum.
He knew what he needed to do.
He needed to go home.
31
He watched the familiar shoreline flash by across the East River as he sped southward on the FDR Drive—the mouth of Newtown Creek that separated Queens and Brooklyn, the crumbling industrial yards of Greenpoint and Williamsburg being swallowed by under-construction residential towers and office buildings, the Williamsburg Bridge looming thirty blocks ahead of him, a landscape that Ryan never thought he would see again. But now he found himself returning to it with the same sense of urgency as when he’d left.
He slammed on the van’s brakes as the traffic suddenly began to bunch up near the East 23rd Street exit’s off-ramp and swerved a little into the adjacent lane, where he was greeted by the fierce horn blasts of a cab and a small Toyota coupe as they maneuvered around him. He instinctively reached for the duffel bag on the passenger seat next to him. Its contents had shifted but seemed intact.
“Focus on the road,” he mumbled, reminding himself that he’d never been behind the wheel of a vehicle as large as the eight-passenger Ford E-150 that Karl had left running in the Cloisters parking lot, that he hadn’t driven a vehicle of any kind in more than a decade, that a traffic stop would result not only in a major delay but also the unnecessary loss of life for any officer who tried to detain him.
Though he still felt physically rejuvenated by the statue that was affixed to his sternum, the adrenaline-laced certainty that had consumed him had been replaced by the problematic reality of the paths he might choose to take.
More than anything, he wanted to retaliate. But as strong and unbreakable as he felt, he knew that if he walked into Van Pelt’s office, there was a good chance that he wouldn’t walk back out alive, and if he did, it would be with a target on his back. Putting any legitimate dent in an organization as formidable and connected as the Manhattan tribe would take weeks or months of preparation, time that he might not have. He had no idea whether the statue’s effects were temporary, and if they were, how long they would last.
Then there was Frank. The ancient hustler always looking for his next scam, the next big payday, always at the expense of anyone he knew he could use, as Ryan had learned the hard way. Whatever hand he’d had in helping the Committee bring down Xansati and in trying to locate the eighth statue, it was almost certain that it had been monetarily motivated. Ryan was motivated to separate his former father-figure’s spinal column from his body, but that might involve a significant manhunt through Brooklyn, which also meant time.
The most prudent move, he decided, was to retrieve the eighth statue from the bridge. Derrick Rhodes had talked about traveling to Iceland. Maybe Ryan would go there and dump the duffel bag into a mile-deep fjord. Maybe he’d do the opposite of Arthur and scatter them across the vastness of a continent.
Instead of continuing to the bridge, as he’d originally planned, he got off the highway at the next exit and drove onto the Houston Street off-ramp.
Before he disappeared, he needed to make a quick stop.
32
When Ryan stepped out of the elevator, Jennifer was standing in the doorway of Vanessa’s apartment, arms folded over her chest. As he approached, her facial expression changed from one of relief, to confusion, to complete disbe
lief. Her eyes narrowed and her nose wrinkled as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing and smelling.
“Where’s Vanessa?” she asked. “What is that on your—”
“Shut the door,” Ryan said, cutting her off as he walked past her and into the apartment. He made his way through the kitchen and into the dining area, where a laptop sitting on the table was open with a Twitter news feed live-streaming on its screen. He scanned the ceiling and the walls and crouched under the table, looking for any object, obvious or discreet, that might be a camera or a sound recording device.
Jennifer had followed him into the room and was watching him. “Okay,” she said firmly, “you need to stop and tell me what happened. From how weird you’re being, I’m assuming it’s bad, but there hasn’t been anything on social media, which has got to be a plus. Also, why is there a Batman logo tattooed onto your chest? And why do you smell so … amazing?”
“Where’s my backpack?” Ryan asked, standing up and placing the duffel bag on the table.
Jennifer rolled her eyes, unsatisfied with his evasion. “It’s in my bedroom, where you left it,” she muttered.
Ryan hurried through the apartment and came back into the dining room a minute later wearing the T-shirt and jeans he’d had on before Vanessa had given him the body armor. He placed the backpack on the table, opened it, and rifled through it until he found the flash drive. He glanced up at Jennifer, who was still hovering in the entranceway. “You might want to sit down,” he said.