“But we get Daniel off this island,” he added. “I’m not bringing the prince anywhere near this fight.”
“I got a place in Upper Saddle River,” Tilcook said. “Walls, security cameras, Dobermans, and a crew of jacked-up beef heads with Uzis. You have my word, Cal; me and the boys will defend the kid with everything we can throw. So long as you take all of us with you when you go back to Aandor.”
“Done,” said Mal.
“Wait a minute,” Cal said.
“For what, Cal? For gods’ sakes, Dorn’s on the Chrysler Building with a river of magic to power his spells. There’s no telling what he’ll throw at us next. These tremors are not a coincidence.”
“We can shut Dorn down,” Allyn said.
Everyone looked to him, almost relieved that someone had a plan. Allyn bent down and used his iron rod to scratch a map of New York City into the platform dust.
“When Lelani destroyed the henge anchor in Central Park, she set free the lay river on its natural course through the city. I am speaking metaphorically, of course—the energy flows through multiple realities weaving in and out of universes. The main one in this area is part of the same branch from upstate where we originally came into this universe … we’re ‘downstream’ of it and it runs through Manhattan island lengthwise like a braided river, splitting into offshoots, some wide and others meandering trickles. But I got a good feel of the course from the copter ride and the roof of the hotel. If I get ‘upstream’ of it—here,” he said, pointing to the Bronx, “I can divert its flow; dry out the braid that feeds Dorn and maybe divert its course into another branch. One that would give Lelani the advantage.”
The ground shook again.
This time it was followed by the sound of screams filtering through the venting grates that led to the streets above. In the blackness of the tunnel, they heard scraping of the heavy metal coverings coming off their manholes, the clang of metal hitting the tunnel walls. The familiar howls of the golems echoed down the track. Everyone looked at each other in terror.
“This plan is logical,” Lelani said quickly. “If I were to take position here”—she pointed to another area in Midtown along the second main branch of the lay river—“I could counter Dorn. Forbidden magic requires a lot of power. His store would dwindle while I drew his ire, and while he’s distracted, you could all escape.”
“No,” Cal said. “I’m going after him.”
Lelani looked as close to panicked as Cal had ever seen. “My lord, it would be suicide to go up against a wizard of his caliber, much less two if you count Symian, without a wizard of your own. If we could but reach Seth…”
“The idiot’s gone AWOL,” Cal said. “We can’t depend on him. Even if he were here, what good is he? Seth’s been getting by on luck so far. He has no talent for magic, for fighting…”
“The boy’s been hobbled by an enchantment,” Allyn said, defending the boy.
Lelani’s eyes grew to pleading dimensions. “My lord, even if what you say is true, even if Seth were incompetent and was killed in the attempt, tactically, it is still the correct move. A wizard would draw the attention of the defending wizard. He would have no choice but to address the attacking wizard, leaving the soldiers to battle among themselves with no interference. Wizards aren’t omniscient, but they are paranoid about someone one-upping them when distracted. You need a wizard with you…”
Cal put his arms on Lelani’s shoulders to calm her down. He gazed deeply into her eyes and said without words that he hadn’t any choice. He had to do this as a husband reclaiming his wife, a father reclaiming the mother of his child, as an officer of the city of New York defending his jurisdiction, and as a knight defending his prince. Live or die, he would go and engage the enemy tonight.
“He will be most vulnerable when his power is used up,” Lelani said. “Perhaps I can distract him when you storm the building.”
“We don’t even know that Cat and Tory are there,” Colby said.
“Not important,” said Malcolm. “We kill him, game over. I doubt most of the henchmen have any love for Dorn. We have a bigger bargaining chip than they do. They’ll trade Cat for their lives. It’s like chess.”
Cal was not pleased to hear his wife spoken of as a game piece, and yet Mal spoke truly. Dorn would not relent. Tilcook would flee with Daniel and defend him with his life, mostly for his own interests. It was the best plan they could concoct on the fly. And it sure was about time he retrieved his wife.
“Yes,” Cal said. “Til, let Colby take a couple of your men to The Plaza … just in case Cat and Tory are still being held there.”
“Wait,” Lelani said. She rummaged through her satchel for something and came up with a polished egg-shaped black stone marbled with red streaks, which she handed to Colby. “Keep this opal with you for protection.”
“Prote … from what?”
“Symian cast the spell that made you what you are. Should he be vanquished, you might die along with him. This enchanted stone will act as a surrogate and maintain the spell just in case.”
Another tremor hit, the worst one yet. More metal covers flew off their manholes and the howls of the golems shot an icy streak of fear down everyone’s back. There were more this time … a lot more.
“Everyone move!” Cal said.
And they took off.
CHAPTER 44
NEW YORK STATE OF MIND
The streets were sheer anarchy. The golems crawled up through the manholes, service tunnels, sewer drains, and basements, smashing through asphalt in some cases—hundreds down the canyons of Manhattan’s grand avenues and streets as far as Lelani’s eyes could see. People ran in every direction, into each other, panicked and unsure of sanctuary and ignorant that the creatures’ objectives did not involve them. The beasts, once engaged, though, defended themselves viciously against assaults whether intentional or not.
A city bus swerved to avoid a burning car—it smashed into two golems as they climbed onto the street from below, and the beasts retaliated, shattering the windshield, killing the driver. The bus careened into a diner. Police fired upon the creatures, incurring their retaliation and spurring them into a frenzied bloodlust like angry wasps disturbed on a scorching afternoon. It was worse than anyone could have imagined.
Lelani had seen anarchy like this once before—the invasion of Aandor City. It had been only two weeks since that day for her. She’d experienced enough anarchy to last her lifetime, and she wondered what offense her gods ascribed her that she should continuously witness episodes of carnage on these massive scales. And how, she wondered—how would she stop a sorcerer of her world from killing her cohorts and thrusting this city into further pandemonium?
“My God,” Callum said, standing beside her and Malcolm. The captain’s eyes were haunted by the chaos wreaked upon the city he loved. The three of them had traversed the tunnels below and fought their way through golems up to the surface on Lexington Avenue. There they took refuge in an abandoned bus. The captain had hoped to procure the vehicle for the trip south, but it had a busted axle. The streets were jammed in a vicious gridlock with the masses pouring through the cars like ants on a graveled path.
“How is this possible?” Mal said. “You need laboratories, gestation chambers to create this many monsters so quickly.”
Lelani had been trying to find a flaw in the creatures since they first attacked at the hotel. They were a hybrid of beast and human, and all female. But whereas the first ones to attack looked identical, almost related, many of the creatures now pouring up into the streets were of different sizes and coloring, indicating their source material had become more varied. This gave credence to Lelani’s theory of how Dorn created the golems.
“He dropped the catalyst for the golems into the sewers,” she said. Lelani turned her thoughts inward. She did not want to think about from whom Dorn procured material for the first batch of golems. Her commander already looked haunted enough.
“As Dorn channels more
energy, he pushes their creation farther and farther out. These creatures will soon rise throughout the island, from Battery Park to Inwood.”
“Thousands,” Cal said in horror.
“And they are confused,” Lelani added. “The iron, steel, and concrete under the streets block a clear signal to the prince. The minute Tilcook’s vehicle emerges from the train tunnels with Daniel, they will eventually catch his scent.”
“Will killing Dorn stop this?” Mal asked.
“Most likely. Even incapacitating him would stem their further advancement. He must have some type of fealty connection with them.”
“You have to get to your lay line and be ready for Allyn’s switch,” Cal told her. “You’re much faster without us. Mal and I will head to the Chrysler Building.”
Lelani nodded. “One thing, my lord…,” Lelani added. “Do not trust your firearms in the Chrysler Building. It is saturated with magic. Combustion science does not play well around magical energy. Your guns may jam on you.”
With that said, she bolted from the bus and galloped west on Fifty-first Street, confident that everyone was too panicked to notice a girl running thirty miles an hour. It broke her heart to pass so many in need of rescue, but she could not risk it. Everything depended on her and Allyn.
And what of Seth?
Seth had ignored all attempts to contact him throughout the hotel battle. Lelani had believed her old schoolmate had changed—that he wanted to be better—mature and responsible, and address the shortcomings of his past. But he’d disappeared, and now at their hour of most need, he was nowhere to be found.
As she approached Fifth Avenue, she saw Colby Dretch and the two gunmen Tilcook sent with the detective beset upon by a beast. They had been on their way to The Plaza. Colby and the mobsters fired at the beast before them, but the creature just absorbed their bullets and growled through a fence of sharp teeth. She pulled two arrows from her quiver and let them fly into each of the golem’s eyes, driving the arrows back into its brains. Colby looked over his shoulder and smiled in relief.
“Thanks, kid,” he said.
“They search for the prince. Do not engage them, they should leave you be.”
“Hard to avoid … they’re everywhere,” Colby said.
“Aye, and the city’s response is inflaming them. Let the unchallenged creatures walk past and you should be all right.”
Lelani acknowledged Colby’s gratitude and bolted south on Fifth Avenue. As far as the eye could see, it was anarchy … and it would only get worse. The spell would not stop making golems until it had exhausted itself, and that depended entirely on Dorn. As long as he channeled power into the sewers, it would continue to spread.
After a few minutes, she reached her destination. Lelani looked up. Gray and massive, the Empire State Building—the supreme erection of its era—pointed up at the gods like an accusing finger. She prayed silently that the elevators were still running.
CHAPTER 45
OUR “THING”
Tony Two Scoops drove the Escalade with the panache and verve of a man who’d spent a lifetime transporting contraband and evading the police. Tilcook sat in the passenger seat, cigar between his fingers and an Uzi on his lap. Behind the driver sat Daniel, Brianna in the middle, and Reverend Grey on the shotgun side. Another Escalade carrying Scott and Clarisse was right on their tail.
Driving north in the train tunnels, they had gotten ahead of the sprouting crop of golems and exited at a service ramp used to bring in equipment for track repairs and such. Behind them, columns of smoke rose through the glass and steel canyons of Midtown. The only thing to contend with in Harlem as they approached the Third Avenue Bridge was the slightly above-average gridlock of Manhattan traffic. As Tony put it so eloquently, “The day I can’t outwit a bunch of civilians beating it home for Wheel of Fortune is the day I hang up my fuzzy dice fo-evah.”
Tilcook had decided the George Washington Bridge was too risky … they could get locked into traffic which had been known to stay stationary for hours at a time. Instead, they would drop Allyn off at his destination and take the Major Deegan to Westchester and cross over the Hudson at the Tappan Zee.
As they drove, Allyn tried to piece together what elements he would need to build his henge. It would have to be bigger than anything he’d done before. Fortunately, his destination was currently a construction site and there would be a lot of material there. It was a really a question of manpower, which Tilcook claimed he’d take care of.
“You think Captain MacDonnell’s going to be okay?” asked Daniel. “Maybe we should have sent more guys with him?”
“I ain’t got three boys combined who are deadlier than Callum MacDonnell,” Tilcook said. “Used to hack through a bull’s carcass with one pass of his sword back in the day. I know ’cause I provided them for him from the kitchen to practice. Saved me a lot of work.”
“I gotta know…,” Daniel continued, “how did you get to be a made man in the family when you can’t possibly be Italian.”
Daniel’s knowledge of mafia culture bordered on fanatic, Allyn thought. The boy attributed this to his stepfather’s love of GoodFellas and The Sopranos, the watching of which was one of the rare occasions Daniel and Clyde could occupy the same room and pretend to have something in common.
“When you wake up a blank slate, you kinda fill in the blanks yourself,” Tilcook said. “My family over there is from the southern Kingdom of Udine—similar to Italy … even our language. So I gravitated, I guess, to Italian kitchens looking for work. I found a gig in North Caldwell working for Vincenzo Tagliatore. A good man … lonely after his wife and son died. He unofficially adopted me. He introduced me as his cousin from Sicily, knowing it would be easier to get a gig in one of the New York restaurants. I made my bones cooking for others, then opened my own place, then two, three …
“I really set out to do an honest business, kid. But once you get a little money, they start putting a target on your back. I ain’t just talkin’ Cosa Nostra,” Tilcook continued. “I mean the government, the agencies, the permits, the access, the suppliers. Got to a point where I realized if I was going to keep my head above water, I needed to supplement my business with some underground entrepreneurship.”
They crossed over Harlem River and onto the Major Deegan heading north.
“Don’t believe the hype about makin’ it in America, kid,” said Tony in the driver’s seat, his toothpick bobbing up and down as he spoke. “You gotta get permission from the establishment to rise beyond a particular point. Everybody with a lot of money is a little dirty. Can’t be helped.”
“How then did Malcolm succeed without resorting to dubious activities?” Allyn said.
The two men remained silent for all of three seconds before turning red faced with hard laughter. Two Scoops pounded on the steering wheel like a man trying to restart his own heart.
Allyn did not see the joke. He didn’t like the lesson they were giving the prince. Bad enough Allyn failed to raise the boy with some moral guidance; Daniel was already enamored enough with the romance of the criminal underground.
“Padre, you jokin’, right?” Two Scoops said. “People like Malcolm Robbe sell their soul to the government to get the kind of business they have. He’s tight with the powerbrokers, thick as thieves with the Pentagon.”
“You think he never bribed a congressman?” said Tilcook, still smiling. “One guy we own took money to pass a bill that netted that dwarf a billion clams.”
“He’s a dwarv,” Allyn corrected.
“You don’t think Mal’s personal security, made up of ex-military and secret service, just opens limo doors?” Daniel said, incredulously, to Allyn.
It was one thing to hear it from Tilcook and Tony, but even the prince bought into their cynicism. How was he to rule a kingdom with these types of notions? “Malcolm has a lot to protect,” Allyn said, disturbed by the implication.
“EXACTLY!” cried Tilcook and Two Scoops in unison.
&nb
sp; “I got a waste management business, twelve restaurants, a used car dealership, and minority interest in three strip malls and two strip clubs,” said Tilcook. “And a few hundred high-yield loans out to civilians trying to latch on to their piece of the American dream. I have to protect what’s mine.”
“What about the prostitution? The drugs?” Allyn asked.
The car skidded to a stop. Allyn’s heart leaped into his throat. Did he fail to observe a rule of etiquette because of some old familiarity with the man the world knew as Dominic Tagliatore?
“We’re here,” Two Scoops said.
“The place you says is packed with fairy dust,” Tilcook added.
So engrossed was Allyn in the prince’s moral degradation, he didn’t even realize they’d arrived. He stepped out of the car onto the construction lot that was being converted into a ballpark for kids. Across the street a giant sign that hung on the retro-style façade of the new ballpark read Yankee Stadium. But where he stood now was where the old Yankee Stadium had been for the better part of a century. This place was saturated with magic.
A well-built man in his forties with perfect black hair, brown eyes, and a Roman nose exited the car behind them and joined the reverend. Tilcook lowered his passenger seat window. “You going to be okay, padre?” he asked.
“Yes … I’ll manage.”
Tilcook waited a moment with the window down, staring straight ahead at the beautiful Indiana limestone retro exterior of the new stadium. The new classic design was an homage to the 1923 stadium that Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle had played in. There was no shortage of greatness here.
“I ain’t never gone after someone’s kids or spouse,” said Tilcook, holding his cigar and looking at the stadium across the road. “I ain’t never pushed dope in a school or encouraged any of my people to target kids. I ain’t never had a man’s legs broke if he only needed a week to get me my money back, and even then, I took his car if it was worth anything ’cause you can’t bank broken bones. And the only bastards I ever clipped deserved it worse than I ever will even on my worst day.”
The Lost Prince Page 43