Under Pressure

by Isobella Crowley

  With a scowl, he whipped his keys out and pressed the remote starter. In another half a minute, they were both in the car, had pulled out into the street, and were a good quarter-mile away.

  He didn’t hear sirens. The mortuary had probably called the cops by now, of course, but they most likely treated it as a minor incident to be resolved later via security cam footage or something.

  “Well,” he admitted, “that was easier than getting the fairy dust, at least.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Kingsbridge, The Bronx, New York

  Taylor’s love for her Tesla’s self-driving function was never more evident than when she had no wish to be followed.

  She smiled in contented relaxation and merely rested her fingers on the lower part of the wheel. The car conformed to the convoluted and irrational course she’d plotted to her destination.

  Hours before, Alice had spoken the truth. Eccentric rich people did collect such things as the Apples of Eden. They merely didn’t necessarily keep them in their own houses.

  Before Remy and Kendra had returned, she and Alice had discussed ways of undoing Volz’s enchantment. The witch was confident it could be done, but it might take some time.

  “We have to crack the spell open,” Alice had described it, “and let it slowly run dry.”

  They hadn’t yet asked Bobby whether she wanted to be cured. There would be time for that later.

  They’d been obliged to distract Kendra for a while Bobby accepted the fairy dust and sent Remy and Riley off to their next objective. After that, finally, Taylor had trusted that things were moving along well enough for her to pursue her leads on the apple and the twig.

  She had a moderately high estimation of her chances of success. Of course, she also had a well-concealed derringer at her hip, loaded with two .45 caliber silver rounds plus two to spare and an eleven-inch hunting knife strapped to her leg.

  A sword would have been a comfort, but the one she’d used for years had broken in her fight against Starik Greyhammer, and the smith to whom she’d sent her specifications had only started work on a replacement. It would likely be another two months before she received it.

  The vampire drove down a side street in an unremarkable commercial district of Kingsbridge across from Manhattan and not far from the freeway. The street was a dead-end, and almost at the very end was a small, chalky-colored, nondescript storefront with a larger warehouse-type building slightly behind it. There was no parking on the street itself, and she would rather have her car sighted elsewhere than her actual destination, anyway.

  Taking manual control of the vehicle, she retraced her route and parked on the last perpendicular street facing away from the business. From there, she walked to the storefront at the dead end, carrying only her hidden weapons and a purse with her personal ID info—and an empty plastic baggie.

  The sun itself no longer hung in the sky. Only the scarlet, amber, and purple glow of its recent presence remained.

  The thick glass of the door was tinted almost jet-black, and nothing advertised that the place was even open. There was a buzzer, though. She pressed it.

  Above her, she heard the faint whiz of a small dome camera examining her. The door swung open and she stepped inside.

  Almost the entire store consisted of the lobby, a spacious room paneled with marble and limestone of grey, off-white, and rich brown. Thick, square, blocky marble benches lined one of the walls, opposite the low front desk. It had a stone façade, too.

  On the façade, square, runic letters read “Gurnshagg & Smithsire.”

  “Hello,” Taylor greeted the person behind the desk, a long-faced dwarf with silver hair and a huge nose. “I’m here to collect something.”

  He leaned forward as he looked at her. His bushy eyebrows and even bushier mustache bristled and twitched. “Madam, I do believe I recognize you. But we must go through security protocols. All customers are treated equally.”

  She let herself scowl a little. “Very well. I had hoped we could skip the most time-consuming ones, as I am a repeat customer and have my documentation with me.”

  In fact, she was fairly sure she recognized him, too. The last time she’d been there—the most secure bank in New York—someone else had been training him.

  A guard—a large dwarf holding a heavy diamond-edged ax and with a revolver that fired shotgun slugs hanging from his belt—drifted out from behind one of the pillars to watch the proceedings.

  As she approached the desk, the teller suddenly produced a stack of papers along with a thick, old-fashioned ink pen. “This is our new standardized withdrawal security form. After you’ve filled out all the required information, we’ll run this documentation of yours.” Almost as if he anticipated her protest, he quickly added, “If you have time to come here and retrieve something so important, then surely you have a few minutes to write down important information.”

  With a frown, Taylor accepted the papers and the pen. “The last several times I was here, all of this was expedited via your computer system. Why the regression to inefficiency?”

  “Security reasons,” the teller stated. “There have been so many unnecessary acts of violence lately. It’s almost as if the people in charge like to promote an atmosphere of paranoia, backstabbing, and plotting against each other.”

  Glancing up, she saw that the dwarf’s nametag read Kelldarm.

  “I see, Mr Kelldarm,” she responded and her hand flitted across the pages to inscribe all the redundant details they required. “Next time I speak to Mr. Gurnshagg himself, I shall have to ask him for more details.”

  The teller almost fidgeted in discomfort at this but stopped himself. Instead, he turned, made a quick phone call, and muttered words in the dwarvish tongue in a low voice into the receiver before he hung up.

  She finished the documents in minutes and displayed her documentation. He made a show of slowly and carefully examining each piece of ID and checking the account numbers against what was displayed on his computer. Then, he made another phone call.

  Finally, he turned to her. “All right, Ms Steele, you’ve passed the first step of the protocols. Before we allow you into the vaults, are you armed?”

  She nodded. “I have a derringer pistol and a knife on my person.”

  The dwarf stiffened. “Why didn’t you declare them when you first walked in?”

  Taylor shrugged with exaggerated casualness. “Weapons aren’t taken until the first gate is about to be opened, anyway. It would be pointless to declare them prior to that.”

  With a scowl, he directed the guard to move closer and remain alert as she removed her humble implements of death and place them in a plastic box, to be returned to her before leaving.

  “Of course,” the teller could not help adding, “one such as you, who intimidates the council even when unarmed, hardly needs these little things anyway. One suspects that part of the reason so many other entities keep trying to overthrow you—destabilizing our city in the process—is merely for the challenge.”

  Stony-faced, the vampire said, “I had thought that dwarves valued forthrightness over bitter sarcasm, Mr. Kelldarm.” She thought she could see a faint smirk on the guard’s face at that one. The clerk did not respond.

  Finally, they opened the first gate, an archaic contraption of stone and metal, to reveal a cart that ran along a rail into the depths beneath the nearby warehouse. She stepped into the cart. It faced the second gate, which only opened after the first was shut.

  The contraption wheeled forward, slowly at first but picked up speed as it descended the incline. The air grew cool and musty once she was underground. The cart scraped to a halt in front of the third gate.

  Here, a dwarf and a gremlin came out of two doors on either side of the rails. The former was another beefy armed guard and the latter was dressed in a robe, armed with a wand, and held an open book in one hand.

  “Stop,” said the dwarf, although Taylor was already still.

  The gremlin passed
the wand over her while reading an incantation from the tome. A faint tingling spread across her skin as though something teased it and tried to gain access to her deepest core.

  “Ohhh,” the gremlin sighed and its eyes rolled around in their sockets. “Dark magic! Not super strong but all over her.”

  Taylor folded her arms over her chest. “I’m a vampire,” she pointed out. Somehow, she’d come on the one night when the staff was composed entirely of new guys.

  The gremlin made a whining sound in its throat and flipped through a few pages of its book. While he did so, the dwarf guard listened to someone speaking to him via earbud. He nodded as the diminutive mage found the right passage.

  “Yes!” the gremlin exclaimed. “Uh…you okay! Go now.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The third gate’s central mechanism rotated in a circle, then split down the middle to reveal, at last, the vaults. The cart moved ahead another hundred yards before it stopped at the end of the tracks and the gate closed behind her.

  Beyond was a stone labyrinth like an underground tomb complex with heavy steel doors of varying sizes in the walls, each bearing a circular lock.

  A particularly short and rotund dwarf wearing suspenders over a white shirt and with a blue-black beard and bright violet eyes appeared to greet her.

  “Good evening, Ms Steele.” He waved and smiled. “I hope you didn’t have too much trouble with the recent hires. We’ve had to buff up security of late.”

  She stepped forward but stopped a few paces beyond him in the direction in which her vault lay and politely waited for him to lead. “The inconvenience is an acceptable price to pay, Mr Gurnshagg, but I don’t understand why filling out paper forms is now required.”

  “Oh.” The dwarf chuckled. “That’s only to waste time while our computers run a few extra scans of the security camera footage. We have better measures in place now to detect forged records in the public databases, not to mention telltale signs of face-stealers posing as legitimate customers.”

  She smoothed her eyebrows with her fingertips. “Fair enough. I’m here for the apple.”

  He was already waddling in the proper direction. “Really? Fascinating.” He did not ask what she planned to do with it as his bank never interfered in clients’ personal affairs, but it was clear that he would not mind if she chose to discuss the matter.

  She did not, however. Until the spell was cast, it was better to remain tight-lipped.

  Hers was one of the smaller compartments in the rear corner of the complex, above another and toward the ceiling. Mr Gurnshagg fetched a stepladder and climbed it to reach the locking mechanism, which only he and his closest associates knew exactly how to operate.

  “Mkayyyy…” he said to himself. His tongue stuck out slightly over his beard as he fiddled with dials and counted fractions of seconds, his small but thick hands working with surprising deftness.

  After about two minutes, the door clacked loudly and came loose from the stone around its edges. “Ha, success.” Gurnshagg chortled. “Your possessions are within, madam.”

  Thanking him and helping him move the ladder without having to dismount it, she glanced into the dark stone cavity before she reached in to take hold of the apple’s stem. She drew it out into the light.

  By now, it was mostly rotten and dried out, a shriveled brown lump that resembled a prune—or perhaps something like a pinecone or a bee’s nest more than an apple. She fluffed open the plastic baggie she’d brought with the other hand, dropped the ancient fruit into it, wrapped it up with the extra slack, and tucked it into her purse.

  “That is all,” she said. She pushed the stepladder back so that Gurnshagg could shut and re-lock the vault. “I or my estate will contact you in the next two to three days on the matter of whether I’ll need the vault again.”

  “Quite right,” the dwarf acknowledged and quickly sealed the door.

  Fortunately, getting out was a much faster process than getting in had been, and not even Kelldarm could find a way to impede her. As she passed through the first gate and into the lobby, he peered at her as if to discover what she had retrieved, but the single small object in her purse did not catch his attention.

  “My weapons, please,” she told him.

  In silence, he handed them back to her and she strapped them into their appropriate places. Then she nodded and strode out.

  When the vampire emerged into the frosty air, her shoes lightly tapping the damp pavement, the sun was entirely gone.

  She almost wanted to stop, spread her arms, and hurl some kind of prayer skyward to whatever deities governed the night, such was her relief. She’d never spent as much time having to operate continuously during the daytime as she had these last few days, and it was taking a toll on her. And she’d not really rested since the plane back from Israel.

  Only about twenty steps away from the bank, her senses discerned subtle movements, both above and around her. They were quick, stealthy, and deliberate.

  It was no great surprise. The setting of the sun had made things easier not only for her but for others too.

  Taylor turned right down the first alley she came to. This technically moved her farther from the sounds, so it ought to give the appearance that she simply tried to sneak away. In fact, her goal was to move the impending confrontation to somewhere out of public sight and potentially, with fewer innocent bystanders.

  A few hundred feet into the dark corridor, she reached a slightly wider area where the back corners of four unequally-sized buildings receded from a dusty space containing a dumpster, a sewer grate, and not much else.

  She stopped in the center, put herself in plain sight, and pulled her coat more tightly around her as if frightened. Her purse still dangled from her right arm.

  The barely audible movements grew in strength, and faint chattering and whispering noises seemed to converge on her position. In the next moment, the attack came.

  Four figures burst out at once. Two bounded from the shadows on the ground, while two swooped down from the surrounding structures.

  The vampire took a split second to assess the situation. The two land attackers were thralls, probably higher-end ones. The two airborne ones could only be full vampires.

  She darted forward, seized the arm of the smaller of the two thralls—both had been strong thirtysomething men—and flung him into the legs of the other to trip him. Without slowing, she pounced upward to seize the clothes of one of the undead and hurl her against a wall. The other passed her and landed near the grate.

  The woman Taylor had thrown was a little larger than she was with long, flowing black hair. The man’s hair was shorter and white. Both would have been dark-complexioned in life but were wan and sallow in undeath.

  Of the two vampires, she recognized the male as Oroche, a peripheral member of Scalion’s coven. Since she hadn’t heard anything from the group in months, she’d assumed that by now, Moswen had either destroyed the coven or taken control of it. But perhaps neither was true.

  The female looked vaguely familiar, but she did not know her name and assumed she was probably another castoff of Scalion’s. She’d already recovered from her tumble and now circled her prey.

  “Taylor,” Oroche whispered, “we followed you. You’ve been up all day, haven’t you? You must be tired.”

  The thralls were back on their feet and advanced from different directions, the larger one taking the direct approach. Taylor’s foot lashed out, caught the big man in the chest, and thrust him stumbling back into the dumpster.

  She turned her head to the vampires. “Only two thralls, Oroche? You’re moving down in the world.”

  “They’re not mine, you idiot,” he snarled. “Besides, we’ve upgraded from Scalion.”

  That answered all her questions. This was Moswen’s work.

  He and his lady companion half-leaped, half-floated to flank her from each side while the second thrall attacked from the rear. She took a step back, whirled, and seized the
human to hurl him into the female vampire. Both tumbled aside.

  In seconds, Oroche was upon her and swiped at her with a small, sickle-like blade as well as his nails and feet. Anticipating his next step, she blocked it with her foot and in an instant, drew the derringer and fired both rounds point-blank into his face.

  He fell back with a scream and pawed at his eye and cheek. Silver could only kill vampires in large quantities, but two silver bullets would cause him enough pain and nausea to keep him out of the fight for a precious moment or two.

  The big thrall returned to the action and stepped in front of her as she strode toward the other two foes. The man tried to trap her in a giant, crushing bear hug. She did not move but drew the knife from her leg-sheath and slashed the arteries and tendons running up his torso and down his arms.

  He gasped and groaned in pain as his arms fell limp. His eyes bulged when she stabbed him in the skull before she roundhouse-kicked the side of his head. He catapulted seven feet to the side, already dead when he crashed to earth.

  The female vampire hurled the remaining thrall at Taylor. She sidestepped, ducked, and vaulted high to slice the knife’s blade through the man’s collarbone and about half of his neck. He fell to his knees and gurgled.

  The vampire drew back and hissed. “You bitch! You think you’re so—”

  Taylor kicked her in the knee with sufficient force to crack it. Her adversary shrieked and crumpled but launched a claw-attack toward her breast. She dodged it with an easy swivel of the hips, grasped the woman’s hair, and rammed her knee into her back to break her spine.

  She flopped limply, although her head was still suspended by the length of hair in Taylor’s hand which made it easy to saw through her neck in two quick motions. The body sagged and she tossed the head aside.

  By now, Oroche had recovered, although his left eye looked milky and amorphous. In the unlikely event that he lived that long, it might take half the night for his eyeball to completely repair itself. His cheekbone was still a little warped as well.