Great, another fallback plan, I thought morbidly.
I checked my coat and pants pockets but they had all been emptied.
“Oh, here,” Croft said, lifting a large paper bag from beside his desk and handing it to me. Inside was the SIG Sauer as well as magazines for my pistol and M4, which I’d lost back at Bashi’s. “I took this off you too.” He reached into a tan corduroy jacket slung over his chair, produced my wallet, and held it out to me.
“You lifted my wallet?” I said half jokingly as I took it from him.
“I found your military ID inside, which made me realize you’d been possessed or transfigured rather than popped into existence wholesale. That’s why I brought you back here.”
“Where is here, anyway?” I asked, sticking the wallet, weaponry, and other items into my pockets. He had even bagged my scarf, bandage mask, and ear plugs.
Croft turned toward his hologram. “We’re in the West Village. In fact, in this building right here.” He pointed to a block, and the hologram zoomed in on an apartment building that looked like a four-tiered wedding cake. “Top floor.” He waved his hand through the image, and it zoomed out again, but with the apartment building now glowing purple. If I hadn’t been so pressed for time, I would have studied the 3D representation more closely. The detail was amazing.
“And Chinatown’s here?” I asked.
“That’s right. You planning on going back to Bashi’s?”
“You talk like you know him.”
“I, ah, met him once,” he said, massaging his right pinky finger. “That was enough.”
“Well, I need to pick up a weapon I ditched there. Then I’m going to look around, see if anyone knows where they went. If I can get into the White Dragon’s general proximity, I can pick up his scent again.” I didn’t want to think about how long those odds were. Instead, I pulled the wooden cube from the bag and held it up by its leather thong. “Any idea what this is?”
Croft took it and turned it over in his fingers, examining the inscriptions. “These are symbols of protection,” he said at last, “but I’m not feeling any magic in them. Where did you get it?”
“From the same sorceress who turned me into this.”
“Interesting relationship you two have,” he said, handing the cube back.
“You’re telling me,” I muttered as I pocketed it.
“Take this too.” Croft tossed me the plastic water bottle with the wolfsbane concoction. I caught the bottle and slipped it into a pocket inside my coat. “In case the last dose starts to wear off.”
“Thanks for your help.”
“Oh, I’m coming too,” he said, slipping into his corduroy jacket.
I stopped at the top of the ladder and turned. “Why?”
“Man, I was really hoping you’d say, ‘The more the merrier.’ But since you ask, the Order wants me to keep tabs on you while they look into the consequences of the Great Wolf’s line being wiped out.”
“But why keep tabs on me?”
“The wolfsbane is only a temporary fix.”
“I thought you said it was good for forty-eight.”
When Croft dragged a hand through his hair, I narrowed my eyes at him in suspicion. “Under the best-case scenario, yes,” he said with a sigh. “But we may not be looking at best case right now.”
“The hell is that supposed to mean?”
“These episodes of control loss … They’re getting worse, aren’t they.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “They have been.”
“Look, bonding spells are really hard to pull off—even for a practiced magic-user. I’m probably a good fifty, sixty years from even attempting something like that. I mean, you’re marrying what is essentially the power of a divine entity to a person. That requires tremendous constitution on the part of the person but also tremendous precision on the part of the practitioner. It’s like trying to balance a refrigerator on a single nail hammered into the floor.”
“Are you saying the sorceress screwed up?”
I thought of Nafid’s great-grandmother scuffing blindly around her cluttered shrine, worshipping a rotting wolf’s head. Maybe the White Dragon had been right about her.
“I’m saying that if she was off by even this much”—Croft held his first finger and thumb a few millimeters apart—“then the fridge slips a little, a little more, until finally…” He clapped his hands together.
“The wolf nature overtakes me,” I said coldly.
“Without a human constitution to mediate the powerful impulses, you’ll descend into savagery. Which is why I need to stay with you.”
“To chaperone me, in other words.”
“Pretty much. But I’ll just be observing.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” I muttered, thinking about the mess Baine had caused.
“Unless I see innocents endangered,” he amended. “Otherwise, you’re free to pursue your objective, I won’t stop you. Of course, I can’t help you either. That’s coming from the Order.”
“Fair enough. How long are we talking until I can’t control this anymore?”
“The wolfsbane should slow the process, but judging by the episode a little bit ago? Not long.”
“We’re wasting time then.” I put on my mask and scarf. “Let’s go.”
25
“Next block, next block!” Croft shouted at the cabbie from the backseat.
The driver, who barely understood English, smiled, bobbled his head, and continued edging past the police barricade as he turned onto the stretch of Mulberry Street that ran between the park and the front of Bashi’s converted tenement building. Ahead, police cruisers were clustered in the road, red and blue lights flashing. On the sidewalk beyond, investigators moved among the covered victims: the teenagers I’d gunned down.
“Great,” Croft said, sliding down in his seat. “He’s going to drive us right past the crime scene.”
I lifted my mask above my muzzle. “Stop!”
I hadn’t spoken to the driver to that point, and my monstrous voice startled him. He braked hard, his eyes moon white in the rearview mirror.
“Now turn around, ” I said, showing him with a black talon.
The cabbie nodded rapidly and performed a jagged three-point turn. He took off back the way we’d come. Back outside the barricade, I guided him to the street that ran along the south side of the block.
There wasn’t a police presence in the rear, but that didn’t mean they weren’t inside. The victims were all piled in front of the ripped-away steel door after all. It wouldn’t have taken much detective work to find the bullet casings in the garage and more dead bodies beyond. The kitchen staff I’d been counting on for info was probably being questioned.
Croft was apparently thinking the same. “Sure you want to do this?”
“I want to at least see if my M4 is still there.”
“If you’re worried about being ID’d from your weapon, I have a friend on the force I could talk to…”
“Thought you weren’t supposed to help me.”
“Well, I wouldn’t so much be helping as tip-toeing around some complications.”
“I’m actually more concerned about a lack of firepower. Right here,” I told the driver. He pulled over sharply, anxious now to be rid of us. The last thing we needed, though, was to get stranded in Chinatown with the NYPD nosing around and the White Hand on high alert.
“Maybe you should stay in the cab so he doesn’t drive off,” I said.
“I’ll have him idle around that corner,” Croft said, reaching over and plucking a hair from my ear.
“The hell was that for?”
“To keep tabs on you.”
I glared at him, then grumbled and got out. As the cab droned away, I approached the damaged gate and peered into the alley. I could see the blood that had poured from my hip as well as the kobolds’ blood farther down, but their bodies were gone. Someone had removed them.
I raised my nose and sniffed. I wasn’t su
re if it was the concoction I’d drunk or some lingering effect of the silver, but my senses didn’t seem as sharp now. Even so, I caught wafts of human scent.
Edging through the gate, I hurried up the alleyway, careful to stay in the shadows, alert to every sound. When I arrived at the place where I’d lost my M4, I swore. Not there. Someone—or more likely a team—had picked up the bullet casings too. I wondered now if the idea was to limit the police activity to the dead White Hand enforcers out front. Cleaning up the evidence would keep the police out of Bashi’s place until he could work his paid contacts in the department to wipe his name from the investigation.
I eyed the garage door I’d emerged from earlier that evening. Closed now.
Someone’s probably inside who can tell me where Bashi took the White Dragon.
“Yeah,” I muttered, “someone armed with silver bullets.”
The Blue Wolf had a weakness, and there it was—silver. That it had come from a kobold’s gun suggested the White Dragon had been expecting me. Had Centurion tipped him off?
I could be walking into a trap. But if I left now, I’d have nothing.
I pressed an ear to the garage door. Hearing no one inside, I dug my claws underneath the door and lifted with my legs. The metal bent and folded. When there was enough space, I sniffed to ensure the garage was clear, then drew my SIG and ducked inside. A black Hummer sat in the space abandoned by the SUV, its engine still warm.
Someone was here.
Leading with my pistol, I wound my way up the spiral staircase. At the wall I’d kicked through, I stopped and peered into the dining room. The table had been cleared, and I could hear water running in the kitchen. I stepped through the wall and pressed my back beside the doorway leading onto the corridor I had come down earlier. A quick look showed that it was empty.
I darted past the corridor and stopped to listen outside the swinging doors to the kitchen. The water shut off suddenly. The clinking of dishware followed. Sounded as if the kitchen staff was back to work.
I parted one of the swinging doors slightly. A woman with black hair and a formal white shirt stood to my ten o’clock, most of her back to me. She was loading dishware and pots from a deep sink into a dishwasher. Alone.
I eased through the door, hunkered behind a large prep island, and came up quietly behind her. In a single motion, I pinned her arms to her sides and cupped her mouth with my other hand, muffling her startled scream.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said.
She writhed and kicked my shins.
I gave her a firm shake and clamped her harder. I hated doing this, but there was no other way. “Listen,” I growled. “I need to know where Bashi went. Tell me, and you’ll live. I’ve already killed twenty people tonight. I’ll have no problem adding you to the tally.”
The last part was a lie, but I’d sold it. Eyes wide, the woman nodded and murmured beneath my hand.
“In a whisper, understood? Anything you tell me is going to be in a whisper.”
I waited for the woman to nod again before relaxing my hand from her mouth. “I don’t know,” she gasped. “I swear.”
“Where might he have gone?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“How long have you been working for Bashi?”
“T-two years.”
“Doing what?”
“Working in kitchen. Cooking, cleaning.”
“Okay. So you work at this address. Where else?”
I didn’t know how many properties Bashi operated out of, but if she even worked at one other one, that would be a start.
“Just here,” she whispered.
I shook her again. “Where else?”
“Just here, just here. I swear.”
She was too scared not to be telling the truth. And it made sense. If Bashi was as paranoid as he sounded, he would keep his support staff compartmentalized. Damn. I’d hoped to avoid any more armed men tonight, especially since silver had entered the equation, but I wasn’t going to have a choice.
I cocked my head toward a doorway opposite the swinging doors. “What’s back there?”
“Walk-in pantry and freezer.”
I patted her down, relieving her of a smartphone in her back pocket. “I want you to go into the pantry, close the door, and remain there for twenty minutes. Do you understand?”
She nodded quickly and was turning to go when a bullet splintered one of the swinging doors and cracked past my head. I shoved the woman down behind the prep island and hunkered beside her with my pistol. More shots cracked past us. My nose picked up the bite of silver.
“Stay down,” I told the woman as I jammed in my ear plugs.
I fired around the island, then peered out. The space between the batting doors showed the dining room filling with armed men. I looked down at the cowering woman. Had she been placed in here as bait? My gaze cut to her smartphone on the counter. Damn, it was on—and probably connected to wherever the men had been lying in wait, listening to our exchange.
But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was trapped. And even if I had it in me to use the woman as a human shield, I could tell by the intensity of gunfire that she was expendable.
During a lull, I popped up and fired twice, dropping one of the shooters.
As I came back down, a grenade clattered along the tile floor, coming to a rest off to our right. I shoved the woman around the island and crouched over her. Shrapnel tore across my low back and exposed shoulder as the explosion shook the kitchen and blew a wave of dust around us.
In the ringing aftermath, I grabbed the woman’s arm and pointed to the back door. “Is there an exit back there?” I shouted.
She blinked at the dust caking her lashes and shook her head.
“Okay, crawl into the freezer, but leave the door open a crack!”
I didn’t want the metal hull to protect her from the projectiles only for her to suffocate inside. She coughed and crawled over the blood-spattered tiles as the shooting resumed.
Shards of metal dropped from my healing wounds. No silver in the shrapnel, anyway. But it was still in the bullets winging past. If even one of them nailed me, I’d be in the hurt locker big time.
To my left stood a huge stainless steel fridge. Keeping the island between me and the doorway, I crawled over to it, seized its sides, and ripped it from the wall. The condenser tubing in back crashed as I heaved the fridge around and shoved it in front of the swinging doors—one of them barely hanging on now.
The large refrigerator covered the opening save for a one-foot-high gap on top. Rounds thudded into the stainless steel, but the fridge was built like a tank. Nothing was getting through.
I turned and made for the back door. If there wasn’t a rear exit, I would have to improvise. Beyond the door, a short corridor ended at a wall with a fuse box. To my left, cold air fogged from the freezer’s cracked-open door.
I was contemplating the fuse box when I heard a familiar clatter behind me. And then another, and another. My assailants were shot-putting grenades over the top of the fridge, loading the kitchen. The woman started when I swung the freezer door opened and joined her inside.
“Might want to plug your ears,” I said, closing the door again.
She got her fingers into her ears just as the grenades began to detonate. Concussions rocked our bunker. The explosions went on for several seconds, shrapnel tearing through the kitchen’s back door.
When the detonations stopped, I signaled for the woman to stay put as I opened the door wider to listen. I didn’t know if any of my assailants had military training, or if they were just hired guns, but after an assault like that, the room would typically be breached. Sure enough, I could hear the refrigerator scraping over the tile floor, making room for the men to file through. Another man would be acting as a spotter through the top of the gap.
“Behind the island,” I heard someone mouth. “Blood trail.”
As footsteps entered the kitchen, I open
ed the fuse box and hit the main switch. The lights went out. From the kitchen, whispers sounded, and the footsteps became retreating shuffles.
Only one of the men put two and two together, but by the time he opened fire into the back corridor, I was on the island, my talons ripping through his neck. I landed on one of the retreating men’s backs, my four-hundred pounds smashing him head-first into the tiles. A third man swung his rifle toward the sound. I seized the barrel, wrenched the gun from his grip, and drove the stock end into his gut. He wheezed and went down hard.
Righting his weapon, I aimed past the fridge into the dining room, cutting down two men scrambling for cover. The rear one glanced back, his final image a blue-haired creature illuminated by gunfire. The wolf in me relished that. A third man escaped down the corridor toward the front of the building.
I took off after him. Needing info, I couldn’t let him get away.
Halfway down the corridor he heard me and spun to shoot. But I was already on top of him. I smashed the weapon from his hands, then seized his wrists and drove him to the floor, my right knee mashed into his gut. Unable to breath, he thrashed his head back and forth. Though he was dressed in street clothes, his rifle and body armor were military grade, and his blond hair had been brush cut.
“Who do you work for?” I growled. “Centurion?”
If they’d been in the pay of the White Dragon once, then it stood to reason they were under contract again—this time to eliminate me. But then why wouldn’t they have done so on the plane? Had their game been to keep me from Orzu long enough to flip me to their side. I eased off the man’s gut to allow him to answer.
“Fuck Centurion,” he grunted.
“Where did Bashi take Orzu?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
I flashed a black talon in front of his face. “Would losing an eye spark your memory?”
But before the man could answer, footsteps echoed from downstairs in a room-clearing sequence. Two sets began climbing the stairs, flashlight beams lancing ahead of them.
Blue Curse (Blue Wolf Book 1) Page 19