Under Pressure

by Isobella Crowley

  Somehow, he got it right. Singh related the rest of his tale and relaxed a little while he also recognized that he wouldn’t have to leave out all the juicy details.

  He explained how, while he strolled down the sidewalk in a less-traveled direction a little past twilight, he froze where he was when he noticed a scene that simply didn’t look right. Although he was very sure he was concealed as he barely glimpsed the warehouse’s lot between a damaged fence and a tree, he was still immediately seized with fear.

  Four men in dark suits and glasses had stood in a group and it looked like at least one of them carried a gun in two hands. Singh wasn’t sure what type but the whole picture was of something seriously bad about to take place.

  Then, worse yet, two of the men had guided a…thing—humanoid but not fully human—out of the back of a truck and into the warehouse itself. It bulged, hunched over, and its skin seemed to give off a faint, chalky-white radiance as though its veins were lit with moonlight. The creature struggled, moaned, and growled and seemed barely controllable in its bestial fury.

  He had glimpsed all this in the space of about one second. Then, he’d turned away and hurried back the way he’d come, moving as fast as he could without making too much noise. Since then, for the next few days, he’d barely left his apartment, terrified that the men might have seen him.

  Remington dusted his trousers as the Sikh gentleman finished. “I see… Thank you, Mr Singh.” He made direct eye contact. “I’d like to reassure you that your story is known to no one except Detullio and myself unless you’ve told anyone else. Have you?”

  “No,” he responded immediately. “I have not even told my wife or my parents.”

  “That’s probably for the best.” He stood. “If these people did know you saw them, they probably would have already acted by now. Go about your usual routine as though everything was fine. My people and I will deal with this problem directly. I can assure you of that.”

  Singh exhaled as he, too, rose to his feet. “That will be a great relief.”

  “I would imagine so.” Remy glanced at the business card still in the man’s hand. “The card is yours. Keep it on your person but don’t show it to anyone. If anything happens, call us. Now, which direction is this warehouse in and on which street?”

  The tall man told him as they walked to the door with Riley wafting surreptitiously behind. On the threshold, Remy shook his hand.

  “Thank you, Mr Singh. Again, be careful but try not to worry. We have things well in hand. Enjoy the rest of your day.”

  “I will try. Good luck.” He nodded and closed the door.

  The investigator ran a hand through his hair again as he strode away from the building toward the parked Tesla. The interview had gone well, all things considered, and he looked forward to being able to fulfill his promise to Singh and be done with this crap.

  As he opened up the car, he noticed that Riley was smiling. Beaming, rather. She looked overjoyed or at least extremely amused.

  “So,” he inquired, “what has you so happy all of a sudden?”

  “Um…” She blushed and shrank back as though trying to get out of having to answer.

  He didn’t feel like letting her off the hook. “No, I’m curious. Tell me.”

  “It’s only,” she began, “the way you acted with that man. All serious and smart. It’s like that expression I heard—you’ve ‘got your shit together,’ I think is how it goes.”

  Remy, to his own surprise, burst out laughing. “I suppose I do, at that. I’m capable of it when I must.”

  She nestled against his neck as he closed the door and settled into the driver’s seat. “And you’re good at it. It seems weird to me in a way, but being around humans, I can see how it’s a good thing.”

  “Thanks. In fact, hell,” he confessed, “the poor bastard probably thought I was from a Three-Letter Agency and the business card was only a front. It makes me wonder if getting some sinister black shades might make me even more dashingly effective as an investigator than I already am.”

  The thought glowed warmly within him like the aftereffects of a good meal. There was no time for daydreaming, though. They had a scary abandoned warehouse to investigate.

  Chapter Eight

  A Warehouse in Flushing, Queens, New York

  “Well,” Remy said in an almost inaudible voice, “if sketchy characters are indeed corralling Snow White victims in this neighborhood, I suppose this would be the place for it.”

  Riley made a low humming sound. She hovered close to his ear so he barely heard it. “Yeah, I think so. It smells bad here.”

  He sniffed. “Your sense of smell has never let me down. All I smell is…wet sidewalk, I guess.”

  The warehouse was a few hundred yards away. There were, fortunately, no men in dark suits and sunglasses standing around with violin cases, nor any mutated drug addicts. Both Remington and the fairy were crouched behind a low wall in a nearby parking lot, well out of sight. Unless the potential criminals had a well-camouflaged sniper or something up on the roof, they should be able to conduct their surveillance without risk.

  The car was safely and inconspicuously parked another couple of hundred feet farther back behind a hedge.

  Riley came to rest on Remy’s shoulder. She still seemed rather tired. “What’s strange, though,” she said, “is that the smell isn’t only coming from the building. It’s all over here. It seems like some of it is under us.”

  His tongue moved over his teeth and he rubbed his jaw. “That’s…intriguing. I don’t particularly look forward to another sewer adventure, but it might be better than barging headfirst into the lion’s den. Either way, my clothes will probably get fucked.”

  And either way, they had to know more about the warehouse.

  It hadn’t been all that long ago when he would have been perfectly comfortable with the whole headfirst-barging tactic. He still had half a mind to attempt it now, actually, but bitter experience had begun to teach its lesson.

  “Riley”—he glanced at her—“can you fly over and around the building and do recon? Determine if anyone is in there or if there’s any change in the smell or any magic emanating from the place. Stuff like that.”

  “Yes,” she replied, although she did not sound or look enthusiastic.

  He couldn’t blame her. “If there’s any danger, fly up and out and meet me at the car. I don’t want to risk you needlessly. The whole idea is to make sure we don’t blunder into a trap again.”

  She seemed to gather strength from the air as she spread her wings. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”

  Remy crept over to a thick juniper bush nearby and stood behind it. That looked less suspicious than crouching under the rim of a low wall and it still offered him good concealment and a halfway decent view.

  He watched as the small, greenish-silver form of the fairy drifted through the air toward the brooding, dilapidated building and became almost invisible when she reached it. Five or six minutes elapsed with no fireworks.

  Footsteps alerted him that someone was coming down the sidewalk and he looked up. A guy in a sweater and earmuffs walked his Pomeranian. Remy pulled his phone out and pretended to be checking it but ignored the man, who took his dog out into the empty street to go around him.

  Keep walking, my friend. He wished he could say it aloud. Neither of us wants your dog to flip out at one of the Fair Folk buzzing toward my shoulder.

  Both man and canine were safely a couple of hundred yards away when Remington caught sight of Riley again. She flew in a straight line but didn’t appear to be fleeing—a good omen.

  “Okay,” the fairy stated, “there’s no one in the building, but it seems like some people were there recently. And the awful smell is even stronger. I could kind of taste magic around, but I would have to examine it more closely to know more than that.”

  “Hmm.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m tempted to suggest that—”

  To his surprise, she interrupted him.
“No, I don’t think we should go in there. Not when it’s only you and me. It’s hard to explain, but…even if no one is present, that’s a bad place. Please, trust me on this.”

  A little startled, he said, “So be it. Instead, let’s go after these other traces you mentioned. The ones under our feet.”

  Five minutes of searching led them to a rundown brick building, little more than a shed, which was mostly hidden behind trees, bushes, and strategically placed debris. Behind the rusty door was a staircase leading down.

  “Yes,” said Riley, “it’s coming from down here. It seems to be empty, though.”

  “Empty means safe, right?” Remy adjusted his tie. “I don’t see a condemned sign, so if a ceiling falls on us we can always sue the city of New York. Down we go. It looks like an old service entrance. I wonder what this leads to.”

  They closed the door behind them and descended four flights of stairs to what he decided was an abandoned subway tunnel. The fairy generated a soft silver glow to light the way before they finally paused in a place that looked unpleasantly familiar.

  Everything was made of rusted metal, the ceiling high enough to accommodate a train, although none had passed through there for a long time. Gashes were visible in the surrounding iron and curious dark stains on parts of the walls and floor.

  Remy brooded over the scene. Yeah, I’ve definitely been here before. No, scratch that, we were here before. Myself, Riley, Conrad, Presley…and even Taylor. And about eighty pissed-off cartel dwarves and vampiric thralls. What a jolly soiree that was.

  “The bloodstains,” Riley continued, “smell like vampires, more or less. But we already saw these when we were looking for Taylor, didn’t we?”

  “Yeppers,” he conceded. “It’s so strange, though. We must have missed something. Taylor hasn’t been herself since she came back from that incident. It makes me worry that Moswen…did something to her before we joined forces.”

  An icy nausea rose from the pit of his gut at the prospect. There was no way that Moswen could have turned her. He refused to even consider such a ridiculous thought. If Taylor were now the servant of a hostile vampire, he would already be dead.

  But what, he mused, if it was something subtler? A curse or a disease or something similar that had slowly eaten away at her. It might explain how she’d grown aloof and chilly, even by her own standards. Not to mention morose, hesitant, and willing to foist unpleasant tasks onto Remington’s shoulders.

  And, of course, the fact that she had disappeared to God only knew where without telling anyone about it.

  The fairy looked ready to lower herself onto his shoulder and call it a day. But as Remy stared at the old bloodstains and shivered in the darkness and cold of the tunnel, an idea came to him.

  “Riley,” he almost sputtered and snapped his fingers, “remember when we were looking for Surrly’s missing dwarves and we found them all ripped apart in that other tunnel? You were able to do that…uh, thing you did where you generated a hologram of what happened there in the past?”

  “Yes.” she agreed at once. “I could do it again. Although I’m so tired.”

  “That is understandable,” he conceded. “But if you’ll do it anyway, I’ll buy one of those awful sugary beverages masquerading as coffee and let you have a couple of sips.”

  That prospect seemed to perk her up.

  The fairy waved her hands in alternating patterns and finally clapped sharply. A section of the tunnel about forty feet square was suddenly illuminated in what looked like pale starlight. After a moment of haziness, two figures cast in similar frosty light materialized on the scene.

  He stepped back and decided to get out of the way of the holographic encounter. It couldn’t harm him, but it’d be easier to observe it from the sidelines.

  From behind, a slim, dark-clad form—undoubtedly Taylor—walking into the center of the shining space. Another larger form exploded from the edge with such speed and ferocity that he flinched, despite knowing that he was merely an observer.

  Remy held his breath as he watched the two humanoid figures battle, their movements impossible for the human eye to follow half the time. Both landed blows and their fight strayed beyond the edge of the glowing arena and returned to it.

  As the spectacle progressed, he noticed two odd things. First, where he pressed against the wall to the side, he felt the gashes in the metal and wondered if mere fingers—even those of vampires—could have caused such damage. Had they perhaps used weapons?

  Second, he could not make out the faces of either combatant. The transparent silver light thickened into a golden-amber haze around the head of the larger vampire and a deep crimson fog over Taylor’s face.

  He glanced at the fairy. She struggled to maintain the spell and he saw that she squinted and trembled at the same time that the image fuzzed like an old-fashioned TV set whose antenna needed adjustment.

  “Wait…” Riley breathed heavily as the two foes separated in the center of the phantasmal hologram, both bleeding, and seemed to shout at one another. “I can’t… I’m losing it…”

  A crackling sounded and the forms went indistinct seconds after the larger vampire seemed to grow even more and to change somehow. In the next moment, the holograph flashed out like a dying light bulb and the entire picture vanished when the spell came to an end.

  “Shit,” he said. “Well, this is certainly where Taylor and Moswen finally went toe to toe. But what the shit was all that? I couldn’t tell what was happening at the end.”

  “I’m sorry.” The fairy panted, obviously both half-exhausted and embarrassed. “It started to…not make sense, and I couldn’t keep watching it. Something went out like a candle.”

  He motioned her over to rest on his shoulder. “You did what you could, and I appreciate it. But now. it looks like we’ll have to switch to Plan B. Once we decide what Plan B is, anyway.”

  They emerged cautiously from the tunnel, took their time, and peered through the rusty door at the top of the staircase to ensure that no one was watching them or waiting for them. To their relief, the coast was clear and they hurried back to the car.

  Remy suddenly wondered how wise it had been to take one of Taylor’s vehicles. Someone with the proper talents or connections might be able to observe the license plate and find out who the owner was. And if they thought that she herself was snooping around, they’d be much more likely to bring out the heavy artillery.

  For now, though, things seemed to be fine. He retrieved his phone once they were safely in the Tesla.

  Riley rubbed her eyes as she watched him. “Do you really think she’ll answer?”

  With a frown, he tapped the appropriate speed-dial icon. “I’ve always been an optimist by nature. It gets a man through the winters and such.”

  After a pause, the phone rang and continued to ring. His companion had drifted over to the far end of the dashboard and didn’t really hear the details when the ringing changed to a message before the phone went quiet altogether.

  She glanced at him. “What is it? Anything?”

  He sighed, pinched his nose, and re-pocketed the device. “Confirmation of the inherent stupidity of optimism—an international dial tone. Not only is Taylor unable or unwilling to answer, but she also isn’t even in the United States. At this point, I’m fresh out of ideas as to where the hell she is or what she might be doing.”

  Disgruntled, he leaned back in the car seat and allowed his head to tilt back and his eyes to roll toward the heavens. It took about a minute before he could bring himself to start the car.

  Riley rolled over on the dashboard and caught his eye. “Okay, so what do we do?”

  “Work the case.” He shrugged. “I don’t think we’re up to invading that place’s basement yet, especially since we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. The other option is to do what we always do. Go places worth going to and talk to people who might know something until it all makes sense.”

  Jerusalem, Israel

 
; The shopkeeper had clearly been surprised to receive such an unusual request. His initial reaction was fear and hostility, exactly as she’d expected.

  But Taylor was the persuasive type. It did not take long for her to make progress with him and soon, she would have what she wanted.

  “Madam,” the man said when he began to calm, “it will take me a short time to find this, but I will find it. Please be patient.”

  He was a slight man, physically speaking, but despite his diminished size, he gave off a vibe of alertness, intelligence, and a kind of wily energy—the type who might well kick the shit out of a gang of young toughs who tried to mug him, much to their astonishment. He wore spectacles and had a neat silver beard.

  Judging by the minutiae of his dress and the symbol he displayed on his shop sign, he was very likely an Egyptian Coptic Christian, perhaps with Jewish relatives, come to the holy city to escape the political turmoil in his native country.

  She gave a slight smile and a minor inclination of the head. “Of course. I am not in a hurry.”

  In fact, the sooner she had the object, the better. But with herself now half a world from her home, an extra ten minutes of waiting made little difference.

  The vampire busied herself by examining the curious items all around her. Much of it was basic and ornamental, of slight interest due to being old or obscure but of little value beyond that bestowed by sentimentality or curiosity.

  Other objects were more interesting. She identified ceremonial vestments and chalices that had been used in medieval-era churches and synagogues and mosques, chairs and headdresses, and wands or scepters that had belonged to magicians of real power. The traces of their arcane talents still wafted from their possessions like steam from a hot spring immediately after the sun had set.

  The shopkeeper returned. His wary eyes scanned the storefront before he came around the counter, holding a small item bundled in sky-blue cloth in his right hand.