Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods

by Michael R. Underwood

  Antoinette had lamb saag, which looked somewhat like shredded grass, but turned out to be rather tasty when she shared a spoonful with me. Carter vacuumed up his aloo gobi before he could think to offer any to either of us, and then promptly ordered another round (kaali daal).

  “So, when you think Captain Hobo is going to show up?” Carter asked.

  “Carter,” Antoinette said, chiding.

  “What? She’s a badass, but she still smells.”

  “She’s saved your life how many times, and you focus on how she smells due to the duty taken upon herself to protect the citizens all but written off by society?” I asked.

  “But she does smell,” Carter said, leaning back, his arms crossed.

  “You’d smell too if you spent nights on stakeouts and guard duty in abandoned subway tunnels,” Dorothea said, cresting the stairs from the restaurant.

  “Sorry.” Carter uncrossed his arms, shifting in his chair. He looked down at his food and took a long drink of water.

  “Luis and Yvette get home okay?” Antoinette asked.

  “As well as could be expected. Esther trashed their perch, so I took them to some other folks I know to get them set up temporarily. We’ll take a collection, and they’ll get by.”

  “Let me know if I can help,” Antoinette said.

  “Thanks. We’ll be fine. But if you want some clerks, I know some people with retail experience.”

  Antoinette nodded. “We can chat after all of this is sorted.”

  Our server tromped up the stairs. “Miss Dorothea. Something to eat?”

  “Hell yes, Parvati. Extra-spicy chola, garlic naan, and a tall glass of milk, please.”

  Parvati nodded and stepped back down toward the kitchen.

  Dorothea took the last seat at the table, and gestured to the food. “Good, right?”

  “Very,” I said. “Thank you for the recommendation.”

  “Gotta eat after a good fight. And no reason not to enjoy yourself when you’re putting your life on the line. I helped out the family that owns this place, few years back. Queens doesn’t see a lot of action, not compared to the Bronx, but the manananggal that was kicking around here hadn’t gotten that memo, apparently.”

  “Manananggal?” Antoinette asked.

  “Filipino monster,” Dorothea said. “Similar to the pennangalan. They can detach their top half and fly around. Mostly go after pregnant women. Nasty. They take some killing. It came after Parvati’s sister when she was pregnant with her second kid.”

  “Well done,” I said. I’d read of manananggal but never encountered one directly. The Filipino population in the cities of North Dakota was insufficient to give the creature the cover it preferred.

  “So,” Antoinette said, “what’s your plan for getting us to the Queens Bearers without signaling Sister Dearest?”

  Dorothea waved the question off. “Let an old woman eat first, at least. I’m not young like all of you. When a woman fights off hell beasts, she works up an appetite.”

  “They’re not hell beasts,” I said.

  At the same time, Carter said, “Those were not of the Pit.”

  “Holy crap, they can agree!” Antoinette said, a smile on her face.

  I matched the smile.

  We nibbled at our food while Dorothea waited for her order and Carter wolfed down all of the rice while waiting for his second plate. I may have helped with the rice. As I said. Taxing.

  The second round of food arrived, and Dorothea would allow no questions while she ate. When the chola was demolished and Carter had finally eaten his fill, napkin on the table, his chair scooted back so he could stretch out and slouch, Dorothea resumed.

  “So here’s the thing. When I told you I had a quiet way in, I wasn’t strictly telling you the truth.”

  At once, Antoinette, Carter, and I all asked, “What?” in varying tones and volumes.

  Dorothea dabbed her mouth, then set down the napkin. “Don’t get all worked up. I can do it, I just haven’t decided specifically how to do it. I’ve gotten into and out of way worse situations, and I needed you to come with me for those people right then, no time for arguing or negotiating. You did what you promised, now I’m going to keep up my end. I just need a little bit of time to digest and think.”

  I stood, pushing my chair back. “While you’re digesting, my sister could be tearing apart an entire borough looking for that Heart. Think faster.”

  Dorothea took a long drink from her water. “So we need to do two things at once, which is what makes this tricky.” She held up a finger. “One. Get to the Bearers so we can protect them. Two. Do it so Crazy Bitch doesn’t find us, or them. One I can do, no problem. Two is the harder part. If we’re on defense, we’ll know the terrain, have the advantage of numbers again.”

  “Numbers didn’t do us much good at the park.”

  “But it did. We won the fight, boy, just not the war. And if she comes at the Raksha while we’re there, believe me that we’ll have numbers even more. Most of them don’t like fighting, doesn’t mean that they can’t fight. And three kids who know their neighborhood are as dangerous as a gangbanger with a .22, if the kids are smart enough. And these kids? They’re plenty smart.”

  Carter tipped his chair back, keeping full control even as he approached a likely tipping point. “Excellent, so you’ve got the kids from Home Alone or something. You willing to get them killed for this?”

  “Where else are they supposed to go? They live here too,” Dorothea said. “That’s how it is here. Trouble doesn’t often come knocking, but when it does, Queens faces it together.”

  “I thought that was Brooklyn,” Carter said.

  Dorothea shrugged. “Them too. New York’s had a few bad patches the last decade or so: 9/11, Irene, Sandy. Folks are gruff on the day-to-day, but when things get tough, we know we’re all in this together.”

  “That’s good to know. Have you had enough time to think to tell us what your strategy is, or should we just head to an apartment tower and start knocking on doors?” I asked. The food was a pleasant enough distraction, but it was a distraction. And Esther was never much for distractions.

  Dorothea took another sip of her milk, then nodded.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Queens is a big borough. In terms of sheer area, it’s ten times the size of the nearest town to the Greene compound, and one thousand times the population. There’s a huge range between the up-and-coming neighborhood of Astoria, Woodside’s one hundred cultures mashed up next to one another in a residential district, the doing-okay apartment towers in Forest Hills, and the not-doing-so-hot streets of Jamaica. Add to that the fact that Queens just sort of bleeds into Long Island, and it all adds up to make one of the most heterogeneous urban areas and what turns out to be the most ethnically diverse county in the nation, possibly the world.

  Though it seemed likely that Hong Kong or one of the bigger Indian cities like New Delhi might have it beaten out, I’d not taken the time to make a serious comparison.

  The Queens Raksha lived in Forest Hills, which sat somewhere in the middle of the income distribution for Queens. It was a far cry from the clean upmarket brand-saturated streets of the Upper West Side or the glamour of Times Square, but it was all still New York.

  We walked onto a full subway train, but at the sight of Dorothea, a half-dozen people got up out of their seats, deferring to her in a way I’d never seen before, even for other older women or parents with children.

  There was a secret code to the city, an insider set of understandings, which I’d clearly only begun to discover even existed, let alone being party to them myself. Perhaps I never would.

  The E ran express to our stop, which meant I didn’t have too much time for the claustrophobia to set in. Having a seat to myself rat
her than being crammed in like standing sardines in wool coat packaging also helped, to be sure.

  We filed out at the Kew Gardens stop, not clustering up, since “A white kid, two black women, and an Indian guy walk out of a subway together” wasn’t quite inconspicuous enough, even in NYC. The younger three of us could usually get away with it, and it was possible, I suppose, to rely on the assumption that people would take Dorothea for Antoinette’s mother, despite the fact that they looked nothing alike.

  Regardless, we assembled on the street. I’d not spent any amount of time in Kew Gardens before, so I took the sights in as new. Already in the distance I could see several apartment towers in a cluster, like a gigantic brick stand of trees.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked as I scanned the streets. The most notable elements were the slightly suburban feel to the neighborhood and a preponderance of signs in Cyrillic. Russian population led me to start flipping through my Russian folklore Rolodex, appraising possible creatures that might be in the area, spirits accessible to Esther for when she struck.

  Consequently, it meant that I missed what Dorothea had said.

  Too embarrassed to ask again, I merely stepped to and followed the older woman as she crossed the street, bearing for the apartment towers.

  The towers looked similar on the outside. Once we were inside, they became a labyrinth. I lost track of where we were three times before we made it to the elevator.

  “How does anyone get where they’re going in this building?” I asked.

  Dorothea turned around and narrowed her eyes. I stopped, watching and waiting for her to speak.

  “Keep quiet. We already stand out like a sore thumb,” she said.

  “That might be as much due to your bag lady costume as anything,” I whispered.

  Carter failed to restrain a chuckle, but Dorothea was unmoved. She turned around again and resumed, leading us around yet another corner and (finally) to a bay of elevators.

  “When we get there, you just keep an eye out for your sister and let us do the talking, okay?”

  “Understood,” I said, well familiar with the request. Again, my attempts at giving context seemed to have gone awry.

  The elevator chirped weakly, a battery fading or speaker malfunctioning. The part of my brain that had been perpetually terrified since seeing the first body on the news echoed fear in my mind. It’s her. She’s already gotten to them. The building itself is afraid.

  I gulped, and stepped into the elevator. The door closed after us, and before we could start ascending, the entire structure shuddered.

  “Crap,” Dorothea said.

  Then the lights went out.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I leaned back against the wall, establishing some sense of place. The elevator car rumbled again, and I tried to steady myself. One hand brushed across a body, though I don’t know whose.

  “What’s going on?” Carter asked, the practiced cool gone from his voice.

  “Nothing good,” Dorothea said. Hold on.

  I could do one better. Breathing in, I reached for the Deeps and smeared the energy on my eyes. The world snapped back into sight, black-on-black.

  Dorothea was at the door, levering it open with a crowbar I had no idea she’d been carrying. The woman was quite full of surprises.

  “Any of you kids want to give me a hand, here?” she asked. I stepped forward, one hand running alongside the wall as the car continued to shudder. What could be moving it like this?

  I grabbed the crowbar, my hands covering Dorothea’s. We pulled again, and the door shook but didn’t move.

  “Carter?” I asked. I was taller, but he was clearly the muscle.

  The car lurched again, and both Dorothea and I fell. The shock rumbled up my arms as I caught myself, biting my tongue.

  Carter sank into his legs, keeping balance. He plucked the crowbar from its rattling on the floor, and resumed trying to open the door.

  I spat out the blood and rolled up into a crouch, staying low.

  “Get that door open, now!” Antoinette said. I had to agree, even though I had no idea how much of a drop there might be if the car’s cables were cut loose.

  Dorothea got up, joined Carter, and the two of them muscled open the door a few inches. Carter took a long breath, then started to glow.

  Actually glow. White-gold light rolled off of him, and the doors parted enough for someone to slip through.

  Another manifestation of his divine heritage, though not one I’d expected. Nephilim had not been documented as being able to glow for several centuries.

  It appeared that my family’s sources were incomplete. Or that Carter’s family was more highly placed within the Nephilim than I’d suspected.

  Antoinette went first, as the smallest of our group. I went next, and then tried to hold the door open from the other side as Dorothea squeezed through, her sturdy breadth harder to slip through the door. The car shuddered again, but Carter kept his balance, shouted something in Gujurati, then dove through. The closing door took his shoe with it, but my roommate managed to slip out in time to protect his foot.

  Then there was a scream behind me. I turned and saw an Asian woman of unknown background running down the hall, child in arms.

  Behind her was some form of wraith, black, with long spindly hands containing seven joints, and buboes all up and down its rod-thin limbs. All wraiths had the faces of children—bald, bloated, and too large compared to their bodies.

  One hand grasped the gems in my coat, which had been recharged by the heat of the fire. I raised my other hand, glad for the filling dinner that had replenished my own energy.

  I shouted, “Malpirg!,” the Enochian word for “fire.” I reached out beyond the woman and concentrated, igniting the air between her and the wraith. The fire burned blue and white, the power source resonating with the intended effect. Turning heat into fire was a simple task, nearly as simple as such a working could possibly be.

  Carter passed on my right, drawing his sword and rushing forward, blade held low. He passed the running mother, then squared up, raising the blade.

  “I thought I’d cleared all of these out of this neighborhood,” Dorothea grumbled. I heard the clicks of a shotgun being loaded. My eardrums cringed in anticipation of the echo in the narrow hall.

  Antoinette started chanting, her Haitian creole hurried, unsettled. Dinner aside, we’d been running full-bore for a while, and she was not the only one showing the strain. I felt like butter left out on a hot day. Soft, formless.

  The fire died out, revealing a crispy but still-moving wraith. The creature moved forward, clawing at the air as if it were swimming, desperate to grab on to something, anything, to feed.

  “Carter! Shield incoming!” I reached into the power of the stones once more, but instead of another fire, I formed the thought of a shield, a circular match to the Indian blade Carter wielded against the creature, his cuts keeping it at bay, preventing it from pursuing the woman as she turned into a nearby hallway and shot out of sight.

  Snapping, I solidified the power, straps wrapping around Carter’s arm as the shield crackled into existence with the sound of distant thunder.

  Carter flinched back from the shield at first, but the straps held on. He settled in, grabbed the handle I’d made, then took a defensive stance. He led with the shield, his sword striking around and from behind his strong defense.

  Beside me, Antoinette’s chanting dropped. “None of the spirits are responding. The wraith must have them all scared.”

  “That is most disconcerting,” I said. One malevolent spirit was enough to scare all the local spirits into quiescence?

  “I can’t mix it up with a wraith,” Antoinette said. “I feel fucking useless.”

  “Just keep an eye—”

  “Coming through,” Dorothea said. The big w
oman slid by me, hobbling forward with a limp. She snapped her shotgun up and into firing position.

  “The echo!” I said by way of protest.

  “Cool it, kid,” she said, unperturbed. The woman raised the gun. “Down!” she shouted. Carter dropped to the floor, the shield covering his head and shoulders, and Dorothea fired. The report of the gun echoed off the walls, but it was muted, far less than the deafening bite that it should have been given the size of the hall.

  Scorch marks scarred the wraith’s too-big face. It crossed its arms in a protective gesture as Dorothea shot again. This blast took off one of the creature’s arms, which dissipated in a sulfurous burst.

  Dorothea stepped back, popping open the weapon. Smoking shells clattered to the floor, and she pulled two more out from a pocket, holding them between her knuckles.

  “Stop gawking and shoot, kid,” Dorothea said.

  I snapped back to attention. The wraith had recovered, slashing at Carter with its one claw. It crashed into the power-forged shield, and I felt the cracks as much as heard them. I was used to Deep-forged materials, not these lesser power sources. I was still thinking like a Greene, and there was no time to retrain my fighting mind to accommodate for lower-grade power.

  As I reached out again, the energy felt farther away, as if hidden beyond a foggy valley. But through the muddled feeling, I felt the comforting cold, and grabbed once more.

  If my forging was terrible, then let it be terrible. I pulled the last of the gem’s power and fastened it around the base of the creature, where its torso misted out into nothingness. I clenched my fist and solidified the energy, attaching a truck-tire-sized sphere to the creature. Gravity caught up with the spirit, and it dropped to the floor. The power-forged sphere cracked but held for the moment. It would have to be enough.

  “Now!” I shouted, pointing at the wraith.

  Carter jumped on the opportunity, lunging. His blade pierced the oversized nose of the wraith, bursting out the far side of its head. The creature’s black form sizzled, then evaporated around Carter’s sword, leaving blackened score marks on the blade. I let the power dissipate, and realized I was hyperventilating.