Incarnate (A Spellmason Chronicle)

by Anton Strout

  With a bit of panic awakening in me, I wanted to soothe myself and went to lift my hands, but discovered I could not. Fatigue fully rolled away from me as a dawning realization hit me hard—I was chained in place.

  My eyes shot open, my heart pounding in my chest. My “hospital bed” was nothing more than a steel table I was laid out on within a small square room that was not much more than four walls, a single door, and a large mirror off to my left. A blinking red light, that of an active camera, sat high in the corner of the cold, gray space. As I sat up, I discovered that indeed my hands were cuffed and chained to the table beneath me. Between my feet the contents of my backpack were laid out on the steel table, including my notebooks and the inert stone form of my great-great-grandfather’s tome.

  “Hey!” I shouted out to the camera, met only by the tinny echo of my voice. That went on for a full twenty seconds before finally dying out, the silence that followed it deafening, but thankfully it didn’t last long.

  A light went on behind the mirror to reveal the officers from the earlier incident in the streets. Now that I wasn’t fleeing the detectives, I finally got a good look at the two of them. Both were in the smart-looking suits from earlier, both of their outfits torn here and there as often happens in gargoyle encounters. The male was about a foot taller than the woman, who looked to be about my height. I pegged him at late thirties or early forties from the hints of gray at the temples of his military-length black hair. The woman was more olive in complexion, but the dark red of her long hair was not a color found in nature.

  The two of them headed to a door set along the same wall as the one to the room I occupied, both of them limping, but the woman walked with a more pronounced limp than the man I had dug out of the pile of bricks. They exited their room and when they came into mine seconds later, I could hear the woman hiss with her efforts to walk, indicating she was in more pain than her limp alone suggested.

  “How are you feeling?” the male detective asked while the other one shut the door.

  I looked down at the dozens of Band-Aids covering my arms and chest. Several showed hints of blood soaking through them and they stung, but nothing seemed fatal.

  “This has to be the worst hospital ever,” I said, adjusting my butt on the cold table to relieve a tingling numbness that had set in.

  “This isn’t a hospital,” the man said, moving underneath the camera in the corner.

  “I kind of figured that one out for myself,” I said.

  He reached up and tugged at the cable running to the camera from the wall until the line came free. The indicator light on the camera went dead.

  “What gave it away?” the woman asked as she turned from the door. “The lack of get-well cards?”

  “The décor,” I answered, and pulled at the cuffs connecting me to the table. “And the jewelry.”

  “Clever girl,” the man said, taking a chair at the foot of the table. “I’m Detective Maron. This is Detective Rowland.”

  “A pleasure,” I said.

  The female detective went right to my feet at the end of the table and rapped her knuckles on Alexander’s stone book and my notebook. “You mind telling me what these are, Miss . . . ?”

  “You’ve gone through my backpack,” I said with a smile. “You tell me.”

  “That’s a bit of a problem,” Detective Maron said. “You weren’t carrying any ID.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it got knocked free of me when I was busy saving you.”

  My words didn’t have the effect I had hoped for, and he leaned back in his chair, arms folded over his chest. “Well, was it?”

  “Answer this, Detective. Would you carry ID on you if both the police and those monstrosities were after you?”

  “Speaking of which,” the woman said, her voice sharp. “You didn’t seem all that shocked or surprised when you saw that winged stone creature.”

  Her partner nodded. “Most people just flee when they see them,” he said. “But not you.”

  I shrugged, the cuffs and chains jangling. “Maybe I’m just more stupid than your average person.”

  “This isn’t the first time we’ve seen you, smart-ass,” the woman shot out. “You’re involved with those things somehow.”

  “I’ve seen you before, too,” I said to the two of them. “Before tonight, I mean. At the Cloisters. You were the first officers on the scene.”

  “Correction,” the female officer said. She hobbled her way off to my right to lean up against the wall, looking none too pleased. “We were the only ones on the scene.”

  “That is, until the alarms went off,” the man added. “Someone or something smashed one of the stained glass windows on the side of the tower. Then every officer from the Upper West Side to Inwood suddenly took an interest and came running, only to find us there with nothing but our dicks in our hands.”

  I shot a skeptical look over to the female officer.

  “You don’t want to see hers,” the male officer whispered, leaning in. “Trust me.”

  “You want to know why I don’t carry ID?” I asked, looking to Detective Rowland. “Why I ran from you? It’s simple. I don’t take kindly to having guns pointed at me. Of course I ran.”

  The anger in her eyes didn’t let up, and I decided it was best to change the subject.

  “No offense,” I said, and turned my attention back to Detective Maron.

  “None taken,” she said. “We’ve got better things to be offended about, like the fact that when we radio a call in, the only response we get is laughter.”

  “Excuse me?” I said. “Do they not realize what you’re dealing with out there?”

  Rowland shook her head. “We’re the joke of the department,” she said. “You think either of us wanted to get stuck with this shit show?”

  Maron shook his head. “Mulder and Scully ain’t got nothing on us,” he said.

  “What does she mean by shit show?” I asked him.

  Detective Maron sighed. “Do you remember when all this started?” he asked.

  Of course I remembered, being that I was the cause of much of it. “It was the night the gargoyles awoke,” I said.

  Maron made a sound like a negative game-show buzzer going off. “Wrong.”

  I sat up at that. “It wasn’t?”

  He shook his head. “There’ve been reports for years of all kinds of weird shit going down in the city,” he said. “Crazy stuff.”

  “Dispatch is used to getting its fair share of bizarre calls,” Rowland added from the spot against the wall. “Elvis sightings, river monsters, vampires . . . Dispatch logs the calls, everyone has a good laugh, but nothing ever gets done about it.”

  “But over the past ten, maybe twenty, years, there’s been an increase in all this nonsense,” Maron continued. He tapped at his temple. “Can you guess why?”

  I thought for a moment. What would increase the paranormal activity in a place like Manhattan? From what Caleb had told me, much of the arcane community had been around for decades—centuries in some cases—so why now?

  “There aren’t more arcane things happening,” I said. “It’s just that there are whole new ways for it to become faster public knowledge. Cell phones. Camera phones.”

  Maron nodded. “This whole gargoyle mess was just the tipping point for the police department,” he said. “It was easy to ignore crackpot phone calls reporting crazy sightings decades ago, but when people started taking blurry night shots of winged creatures in the sky over Manhattan, those calls got flagged and noted down. Then six months ago you have video footage of dozens of these stone monsters appearing suddenly, and they can no longer be ignored.”

  “So they only put you two on it?” I asked. “Seems like putting a Band-Aid on a missing limb, if you ask me.”

  Rowland laughed, shaking her head at me like I was stupid. “Do you have any idea
how the city of Manhattan works?” she asked.

  I shook my head. Other than rudimentary zoning laws I’d dealt with as part of my family’s real estate business, I hadn’t a clue.

  “It doesn’t work,” she continued. “The fact that they’ve tasked anyone to deal with this gargoyle bullshit these last six months is nothing short of a minor miracle.”

  “Why you two, though?” I asked. “Some kind of Special Forces training in your background?”

  Detective Rowland looked away from me. I turned to Maron, and while he met my eyes, his face was crimson in a full-on blush.

  “You could call it special training,” he said. “Of a sort. I catch a lot of shit for playing World of Warcraft in my downtime.”

  “And you?” I asked Detective Rowland.

  She sighed, but rolled her eyes and looked at me. “I read a lot of paranormal romance,” she said. “Apparently in this police department that’s enough to render the two of us experts.”

  Marshall had logged countless hours playing World of Warcraft, so I turned back to Maron. “Have I got someone for you to meet.”

  “Your little blue-haired friend, you mean?” Detective Rowland asked.

  I blanched at the mention of Rory. Things were so nerdy-chatty for a second there that I had forgotten where I was and the circumstances I was there under. As if being chained to a table wasn’t enough of a reminder. I fell silent in the hopes of killing that air of familiarity.

  “Yeah, we know about her,” she said. “Funny how you two keep showing up wherever the chaos goes down.”

  “Maybe she and I are just fans of the old Disney cartoon about gargoyles,” I said.

  Detective Rowland gave me a crooked smile that looked like it might be followed with a punch to my face. “Why don’t I believe you?”

  I shrugged. “You’ve got trust issues . . . ?” I offered.

  Detective Maron picked up my notebook in his hands, flipping through it. Unlike the protective measure of stone transformation Alexander had put upon his spell book, there was no kind of warding to stop the detective from looking through mine.

  “These look like notes for some kind of spell craft,” he said. “Would that be a fair assessment?”

  The bandages on my face were soaked with sweat, the walls of the room felt like they were closing in, and the cold steel around my wrists burned against my skin as I realized this was probably a freak-out. I had never been arrested for anything in my life, and I certainly didn’t talk to random strangers about the arcane legacy of my family.

  “Do I get to call a lawyer or anything?” I asked, trying not to hyperventilate.

  The woman limped over from the wall to stand beside her partner. “Depends,” she said. “Are you going to tell us who you are?”

  “Not . . . just yet,” I said, trying to get myself together before I seriously lost it. “I can’t. I need to think things through. I just need time to figure out what I want to tell you about those creatures, how I want to handle you . . .”

  “Handle us?” Detective Maron repeated, amused. “May I remind you that you’re the one handcuffed to the table here?”

  “What are you?” Detective Rowland asked, raising her voice in anger. “Some sort of cultist puppet master controlling these creatures? They’re tearing up our city and you’re going to pick and choose what you want to tell us? You have no idea the kind of trouble you could be in with us. Right now, you’re off the grid here, sunshine. You’re a Jane Doe. We can make your life here a world more difficult if you don’t cooperate.”

  My panic subsided the angrier she became with me, a mix of fear and my own anger filling me in response.

  “I don’t react well to threats,” I said, calm.

  Detective Rowland leaned against the table, getting so up in my face I could smell her faint perfume. “And I don’t take kindly to whatever those things are tearing up my city! Move them to Jersey or Philly. Thanks to their existence, me and my partner have this citywide rampage to contend with.” She laid her hand down on top of Alexander’s stone spell book. “Now, you’ve got answers and I want them, or I’m going to beat you with this chunk of rock here.”

  “Easy,” her partner said, sitting forward in his chair. He grabbed her hand from the top of the book. “Chloe, let’s not forget . . . the woman did save us from that monster.”

  Rowland wasn’t pleased, but she shut her mouth and stepped back to her spot on the wall, still fuming.

  Detective Maron watched her for a long moment until she settled before turning back to me. When he spoke, his voice was soft and calm.

  “How about you give us a break, Miss Whoever-You-Are?” he asked. “We brought you here after you passed out. We bandaged you up . . .”

  Detective Rowland might have stopped fuming, but not me. I was full of a growing rage and cut off Detective Maron as I held a hand up to him and turned to lock eyes with his partner.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Detective Rowland, if I don’t seem terrified by your bad-cop routine,” I said. “You two don’t have the first idea of what the hell is really happening out there. You want my name? Fine. It’s Alexandra Belarus, the last and only Spellmason. You want a piece of me? Get in line. At the moment I’ve got witches and warlocks hunting me, and gargoyles trying to tear me apart. Right now New York’s Finest seem to be the most reasonable of the bunch. But if you’re threatening me? You can get back out on the streets and try dealing with those things yourself.”

  Detective Rowland, despite her injuries, lunged for me, which was not what I expected. Shocked and more than a little scared, I scrambled as far back on the steel table as I could until the cuffs stopped me.

  Maron was up and out of his chair, pulling Detective Rowland back from me. Watching the two injured detectives wrestle with each other might have been comical had my heart not been trying to pound out of my chest.

  After a moment of struggle, the fight went out of Rowland and she stumbled back, spinning toward the door.

  “Take her down to overnight,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Wait—you’re keeping me here?” I asked. “I gave you my name!”

  “Giving your name is not giving your cooperation,” she said, opening the door. “Enjoy your stay, honey. Maybe you’ll prove more cooperative after a night in jail.”

  Rowland slammed the door behind her, leaving Detective Maron to remove my cuffs from the chains attached to the table. Apparently he, too, had said all he had to say, and escorted me from the room into the hallway of the station house.

  Awesome. A night in prison. That was surely something new to check off the arcane bucket list. Strangely, relief washed over me, killing my anger, fear, and panic. Most people would probably dread something like this, but me? Frankly, incarceration seemed like a good way to make sure I got some forced downtime from the world of hunting gargoyles, at least for an evening.

  “Lead on,” I said to the detective as he led me down the hallway. “And you can skip the wake-up call. I plan on sleeping in.”

  Eleven

  Stanis

  “You okay?”

  Aurora’s voice echoed up and down the squat, rounded tunnel we walked along under the streets of Manhattan. The slosh of the shallow river that rose to our knees was the only other sound as she, Marshall, and Caleb splashed along with me through it.

  “In what way?” I asked. “You mean did those grotesques from last night harm me? My intent in ensnaring them was not to harm them, but to distract and draw them away so the rest of you had time to escape.”

  Marshall clapped me on the arm. “Two out of three escapees wasn’t bad,” he said.

  “I’m glad you escaped harm,” Aurora said. “We were worried about the odds with there being a whole gang of them.”

  I gave a grim smile. “The day I cannot outfly a handful of fledgling grotesques is a day I do no
t see in my near future.”

  “I wasn’t really asking about the other night,” Aurora said. “I meant just now. You weren’t moving at all. You looked . . . I don’t know . . . like a statue. “

  “My apologies,” I said. “I know it makes you humans more comfortable to feign motions such as respiration. Forgive me. I was distracted, and I also do not care for confined spaces such as this.”

  Marshall laughed.

  “Hey, at least you’re made out of carved materials,” he said. “So at least your clothing isn’t knee-deep in sewage water. I smell like rotting trash and the inside of a tauntaun. I’m going to have a lovely aroma when we get into the police station. If we get in.”

  “Oh, we’ll get in,” Caleb said from where he searched fifteen feet ahead of us. He turned his eyes up to the top of the tunnel, shining a light onto some numbers along a nearby pipe. “Somewhere between here . . .” He sloshed through the sludge to the next set of numbers, double-checking a map he held in his other hand. “And here.”

  I moved underneath the spot, examining the top of the tunnel near the pipes. “Very well.”

  “You sure this is the right spot?” Marshall asked. “We’re not going to come up in the basement of a restaurant or shoe store, are we? Although, frankly, I’d prefer either to breaking into a police station.”

  “Pretty sure,” Caleb said. “From what my contacts told me, this would have been the precinct house where they would have taken her into custody. My friends couldn’t find a record of her here, or anywhere for that matter, but that doesn’t mean she’s not being detained.”

  “It doesn’t?” Aurora asked.

  Caleb shook his head. “No,” he said. “There’s some unaccounted space here at this precinct. My people say it’s for some of their wild-goose chase files. If what we go through on a daily basis doesn’t count as that, I don’t know what does.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Aurora said. “If they took her into custody, why didn’t she call her family? Why didn’t she call me?”