by Layla Lawlor
Small conduits of power flickered around her, like the electric licks of a Van de Graaff generator. Even as I watched, another one snapped to her.
As Tweed's hand slipped on the reins of his own power, she was replenishing hers from his. Taking control. Taking over. Drinking directly from the city, as he did.
Something tumbled from above: tiny at first, growing larger. I flinched away as it smashed into the street less than twenty yards from us. It was the orrery, all its fine clockwork sprung and smashed.
"I have to get up there, ma'am," I said. "My friends are up there."
"You could simply wait, let it work itself out." Her eyes were half-closed, almost blissful as an ever-growing number of energy conduits poured into her.
"No," I said. "I can't."
St. Clair's lip curled. "You're a fool."
"I know." She showed no sign of going anywhere; she seemed perfectly content to watch things disintegrate from down here while sucking up stray energy. An argument occurred to me that might work on her. "If you take me back up there, I can cut him away from the rest of his power system. He'll be helpless."
"Hmm." She studied me speculatively. Then her shadow wrapped around me, and took me away in another painful burst of sensory overload.
We emerged into tilting chaos. With the opposition subdued, Tweed and the Tigers had changed their focus to trying to stabilize the slowly disintegrating platform—or just hanging on for dear life. Tweed stood at the center of a ring of Tigers, his eyes closed. I could see how the power lines were all warping towards him. He was shifting the power web, rearranging it to distribute the stresses and repair the damaged parts.
I fully expected Muirin to have been killed in my absence, was braced for it, but she was clinging to the railing and Millie had an arm around her, supporting her weak efforts. When Muirin made a move away from her, Millie pressed her into the railing more tightly. Millie's present motives seemed to be equal parts keeping her a prisoner and protecting her from the Tigers in the vicinity.
No time now to worry about which side Millie was on. No one had noticed me and St. Clair yet, but we couldn't have more than seconds until they did.
And I saw my target. Tweed's rearrangements were reworking all the disparate strands of power into one central cable, arcing to feed directly into him. Lines ran from that to everywhere: up to the sky, out to the city.
"Can you take me ... up?" I whispered to St. Clair, pointing above us.
For answer, her hard hands gripped me, and a fraction of a second later we were there, borne on wings of shadow. Even as we began to fall, I looked down and saw Tweed looking up at me, power flaring out from him, a wash of energy that would have wiped us from the sky like swatting a bug ... had it reached us.
I swung the sword at the cable.
As ever, there was little resistance—not none, though, not this time. The sword vibrated in my hands and I got a sudden painful shock. I nearly dropped it, and St. Clair nearly dropped me, but we both hung on.
We were falling now, tumbling through a sky filled with light. All the energy strands were rolling back, withering, wisping away. A rumbling crack that seemed to come from the sky merged into a far greater rumbling all around us. The platform really was going over this time.
"Muirin and the dogs," I gasped.
"Ferme ta gueule! I'm not risking myself for a dog!"
St. Clair slowed our fall to a leaflike glide and dropped us gently to the carpet of Tweed's penthouse. Not that we were any safer there—it was tilting at a steep angle, and showers of glass fragments hissed past our feet. I could think of nothing else but the Titanic, breaking in half and going down.
Millie half-ran, half-fell toward us, supporting Muirin with an arm around her, and surrounded by Tigers. I pointed the sword at her. She shook her head impatiently, waving me off. "There's a door up here," she panted. "Now's the time to get out if you're going."
"Madame—" But St. Clair had vanished. Going after Tweed? Saving her own ass? "Pick a side, why don't you," I snapped at Millie as she grabbed my arm and pulled me after her.
"I'm in the middle here," Millie shot back. "I'm a Gatekeeper; that means a lot to me. I'm also beholden to Tweed and I have no intention of violating that."
Humans, Tigers, hounds—all together, we scrambled across the shaking, sliding floor, united by our mutual sense of self-preservation. Millie slithered to a stop at the edge of the swimming pool, now empty of most of its water. Shoving Muirin at me, she jumped down inside. There was an unusually large drain hole in the bottom, covered with a grille, which Millie began hauling on.
Once she got it open, I handed down Muirin to her. Hounds and Tigers surged into the swimming pool, sweeping me up in the flow of their furry bodies. Millie, with Muirin, was already through the hole; at this point it was every woman and Tiger for herself. We all jammed up in the bottom of the swimming pool, splashing in shallow water stinking of chlorine. I had an awful moment when I thought I was about to get smothered; then one of the hounds—so covered in blood I couldn't see the color of its collar—snarled and slashed at the Tiger that had just landed on top of me, clearing a momentary gap so I could slither down the hole.
It wasn't like the usual instantaneous passage through the doors, and it made my brief, painful trips with St. Clair seem like a vacation in comparison. It was like tumbling down a black tunnel, total darkness mixed with flashes of that same agonizing sensory overload. I was buffeted and battered, but the pain wasn't physical; I felt as if some external force was trying to tear my brain apart.
I stumbled onto wet, slick cobblestones, hurting in body and mind. Wherever we'd come out was almost completely dark—so dark, in fact, that without my enhanced vision, I'm not sure if I would have been able to see at all. Around me, I recognized Millie and Muirin, the dogs and the Tigers, only by their auras. Small blue threads of energy flickered like heat lightning around the edges of my vision. The only light came from the sky, and even that was dull and dark. The great, terrible crack running down the middle of it had widened until the sky was nearly half black—or, rather, the unlight of the between space.
I looked around at what I could see of the brick-fronted buildings, the cobbled street, and I knew exactly where we were. We were in Tweed's New York. I didn't remember the exact dates of Tweed's ascendancy through the New York political machine, but this must be sometime in the 1860s or 1870s. It made sense that Tweed's private escape route would take him here.
And he'd completely tapped it out. This was what a dead neighborhood looked like. I didn't need my second sight to tell me that the only energy here was what we'd brought with us and what was currently leaking in from the increasingly unstable city around us.
"Where do we go from here?" I asked Millie, who was kneeling with a hand on Muirin's back. Muirin just sat there, looking dazed.
Millie shook her head. "I've no idea. I've never been through this door; I just knew it was here because I was there when he built that place."
The cobbled street shuddered under us. Tigers were still pouring out of the door—on this side, it was some kind of utility opening in the side of a building, with a metal flap over it—but the flood stopped with a Tiger that screamed and then crumpled. Only her torso was on our side of the door. A great pool of blood spread down the street, glowing faintly to my eyes.
"St. Clair said the city was breaking up," I said, my voice thin.
"So the doors are going to stop working." Millie hauled Muirin to her feet. "If this is Tweed's bolt hole, the next door won't be far. He wouldn't want to run six blocks with something chasing him."
She seemed a lot more confident the next door would be working than I was. But the alternative was being stuck here forever—or, I thought, looking up at the sky gradually rolling back, falling through the cracks into the between space. None of the Tigers were trying to go between themselves; in fact, handfuls of them kept popping out of the between into our reality, reeling and sick.
"Look,"
Muirin said hoarsely. She pointed ahead of us.
Wet footprints on the street. Two pairs.
"Tweed and St. Clair," I muttered. He'd given up trying to repair the collapsing magic network and fled. St. Clair had gone after him.
The wet footprints led to the doors of a mansion. Tweed's old house, maybe? I couldn't see well enough to tell what it looked like, beyond an impression of size and grandeur. The street still shuddered beneath us, the tremors growing more violent and frequent, at times nearly throwing us to the ground. The bright flashes at the corners of my vision were also coming closer together. The sky was almost completely fragmented now.
The door to the house stood open, admitting us into a dark foyer. The room must have been beautiful in its heyday—I had a sense of great space around us, and when I stumbled into an end table in the dark, I heard the crash of something expensive and fragile shattering on the polished marble floor. Now, though, a feeling of desolation and abandonment hung in the empty halls. It wasn't frightening; there was nothing left here to be frightened of. It was only sad.
"Found it!" Millie's voice echoed oddly in the open space around us.
I could follow her aura, but I didn't have to; the lightless flickering of between space was visible to me. This door, too, had been left open. Tweed was careless in his panic. I thought of the severed Tiger, thrashing and bleeding on the cobblestones, and then I forced myself to plunge through.
The transition was just as long and painful as before, but when I staggered out, I found myself somewhere I recognized. The lights had nearly all gone out, leaving us in the will o' the wisp glow of a single guttering gaslamp, but this was the lobby of the train station where we'd entered the city—how many days ago? Fresca and Geraldine's delight and curiosity came back to me, and I wondered where they were, if they were somewhere safe, if the disintegration of the city was going to take us all with it.
"Millie! Muirin!" I called. "I know this place. There's another door over there." I pointed, remembering even as I did so that it was the other kind of door, the song-key sort used by the resistance. Hopefully they'd still work too. "It's a song door. You'll have to sing a song to go through. Millie's seen how they work. Go find Fresca, Muirin, please!"
"Where are you going?" Muirin demanded, sounding slightly less weak, and very annoyed.
I didn't answer, just bounded down the stairs with the sword. Truth be told, I wasn't sure if this was the right thing to do. I only knew that Tweed escaping into the real world would be very, very bad.
Could he? The city's shadow ghosts weren't supposed to be able to manifest in our world; Lily-Bell had told me that. But the Tigers could, for short periods of time. And Millie had been able to live there indefinitely.
Would cutting Tweed off from his power supply leave him too weak to survive in my world? Or was the great manipulator, the energy vampire, about to be unleashed onto the 21st century?
The lower platform was completely dark but for my second sight. The train car was gone, but there was a lever on this end just like the other, and I pulled it. While I waited, I sank down to sit with the sword across my knees. I was still bleeding sluggishly from my torn-up hip and leg.
Creiddylad thumped down next to me. I hadn't even noticed she was following.
"Hey girl," I murmured, stroking her ears. "Ready for one last fight?"
The great hound leaned her bloody, matted body against me and swished her feathered tail.
The train car lurched out of the darkness. I climbed on, and Creiddylad limped after me. I half expected Muirin or Millie to come after me, but they were nowhere to be seen. They'd either done as I asked, or they had run into other problems. Either way, I was on my own, it seemed.
Well, not entirely on my own. I rested a hand on Creiddylad's warm side.
The trip on the train had seemed shockingly fast the last time. This time, in darkness, with every passing moment grating on my nerves, it was impossibly slow. When the car stopped moving, I peered out carefully and then, gripping the sword, flipped up the top.
Nothing. But I heard voices from up the tunnel.
I banished the sword's light with an effort of will. It didn't want to go dark, trying to react to the threat, but I managed to successfully dominate it, which I filed away in my brain to think about later. Then I crept up the tunnel with Creiddylad at my heels, and peeked around the corner.
Ruddy light streamed through the open trapdoor, the lurid red of a flaming sunset—I'd completely lost track of the passage of time in the real world. Tweed stood on the steps, framed against the light with his back to it.
St. Clair, at the bottom of the stairs, was just struggling to her feet from some kind of altercation. I watched her pull something out of her chest—a knife or dagger that wisped away in her hand. She shook her hand and threw her shoulders back.
"Go on, run!" she shouted at him. "Run, whore's son. Run and leave the city to me!"
Tweed roared at her. It was an animal sound, a bellow of inarticulate, unthinking fury. His aura was wan and flickering, almost transparent in the sunset's glare, but I could see the humped shoulders, the great shaggy head. I couldn't see his face with the light behind him, but two tufted ears framed his top hat.
I wasn't sure what to do. He was on the verge of leaving; nothing I could do was going to change that. So I came out of hiding, the sword flaming to life in my hands. Beside me, a low growl rumbled in Creiddylad's long throat.
That was too much for Tweed. He turned and bolted. I ran after him, past St. Clair, up the stairs.
The clearing around the ruined house was bathed in the bloody light of the setting sun. Tweed bounded away from us. He'd gone down to all fours. As he ran, his top hat fell away, withering to nothing, then his waistcoat slithered off his widening shoulders and melted into the grass. Muscles rippled beneath his sleek, striped fur.
I thought he was going to make it. He almost did. I couldn't have caught him, and the sun hovered on the rim of the world. Sunlight is powerfully destructive to the supernatural, something I'd learned through my association with Drew. My second sight showed me the energy smoking off him, like steam on boiling water, with every long loping stride he took through the sun's dying fire.
I could see the trees through him.
Another long stride, and he was as transparent as water, a wavering heat-outline of a beast. The shadows of the forest's edge were only a few steps beyond, the sunset only seconds away. But it was too many steps, too many seconds.
He wavered and disintegrated. The last threads of Boss Tweed smoked away into the world and he was gone.
I stood in the doorway, breathing hard, and let the sword swing down to its rest position. It was inert in my hand, just iron now.
St. Clair had joined me, watching Tweed run himself to nothingness. I turned to look at her as the sun slipped below the rim of the world. "Now what?" I asked. My voice rasped with exhaustion.
"Now we go back and see what's become of Shadow New York," she said, and smiled tightly. "Are you coming with me?"
I only had the strength to shake my head. All I could think in that instant was home. My car was here. The house was only a short drive away.
St. Clair tilted her head in acknowledgment, and slipped back down the steps without a word of goodbye. The gateway began to shimmer. I hopped out of it quickly, and it closed with a snap.
I stood there for a moment, too numb and shell-shocked to think, and then gradually it began to dawn on me that Fresca and Geraldine were back there in the ruined city, and I had no way to contact them or get to them.
I touched my pocket, feeling to see if I still had the iron key. I didn't, and I couldn't remember who I'd left it with—was it at Seth's apartment, or with some member of the resistance? St. Clair herself? Everything from the past few days was a blur to me now.
"Fuck."
There was a soft whine. A furry body brushed my leg.
"Hey, girl. I thought you went with her."
Creiddyla
d leaned her head wearily against my leg. I stroked her tangled ears.
"Guess it's just you and me now, kid."
I took one final, long look at the vanished door, while dusk settled around me. There was nothing else I could do here, no way I could help anyone back in the city. I turned away.
Chapter 29
The walk through the woods might have terrified me a week ago. Tonight, all I felt was aching exhaustion. It helped that I could see almost as well as by daylight. Every tree and shrub was delineated in pale fire, with the small forest animals showing up as blazes of color.
I tried a few times to banish my second sight, but it wouldn't go. Forcing it would have taken more energy than I had; it was all I could do to keep myself stumbling along. Sometimes I leaned on Creiddylad, but she was almost as wobbly as me.
My car was still parked where I'd left it ... how many days ago now? I threw the scabbard into the backseat and, with fingers shaking from cold and shock, fumbled with the screwdriver that was the only way I could get the thing to start. It wouldn't turn over at first, but eventually coughed its way to the welcome shriek of its slowly dying engine.
My phone had been intermittently vibrating in my pocket as it downloaded every text and update and missed message that had accumulated while I was elsewhere. I pulled it out to check for anything from Fresca, not actually expecting it, but there was actually a text sent just a few minutes ago.
Kay! Where are you! We're at Seth's. PLEASE GET THIS MESSAGE
My hands shook; tears blurred my vision. It took me a minute to get myself under control enough to reply.
Back in Ithaca. Long story. You okay? Grandma with you?
Fresca's text came back immediately: She's fine. We're fine. You?
I'm all right. Gonna drive home now. Talk later.
God. I rested my arm over my eyes for a few minutes before Creiddylad's cold nose bumped the back of my neck.