by Ben Zackheim
“Meaning Rebel,” I joked.
“No.” He left it at that.
I’d find out what he meant ten minutes later.
Chapter 26
We wove through some cliques of young, coiffed New Yorkers. The building was an eyesore but it was also a peek at the way New York used to be. Rough around the edges of the edges. The whole city used to look like that, minus the Upper East Side. Graffiti and tags had covered everything back then. Personally, I liked it better. It made the place more interesting. New York still had its rough parts, especially when it came to the supernatural, but it had been tamed by billionaires who want their front yard to be well-groomed. It just so happens that their front yard is all of Manhattan.
The door was covered by a pull-down gate. Both sides of it were bolted by heavy-duty locks. I flipped one of them up. Six pounds. Someone didn’t want people to get in.
“Check the roof,” I told Fox. He glared at me. “Please.”
He soared into the sky and disappeared over the edge.
“Whoa!” A group of Jersey girls stopped in their tracks behind us. “Did you see that? Take me with you, sweetheart!” she called out to the sky. “You a vampire too?” she asked me, ignoring Rebel.
“No, but she is,” I lied, pointing my thumb at my partner.
The girl wasn’t impressed. Her disinterested eyes passed over the woman who could tear her to pieces with a thought. “I don’t roll like that,” she said.
Fox landed softly between us.
“Locked up tight up there,” he said.
“Will you take me flying?” the girl asked him, snagging his arm. “I’ll make it worth your time.”
“You don’t have anything I want,” Fox said. He didn’t even turn around to look at her.
“Come on, gorgeous! Take me for a ride!”
He turned and said, “Go.” All the girls screamed and ran off, slapping the sidewalk with a dozen stiletto heels. They sounded like marbles falling. When Fox turned back to face us he looked normal, but I knew he’d pulled his hunting face on the poor things. They wouldn’t sleep right for years. That shit is like looking at the rot at the core of all existence.
“So how do we get in?” Rebel asked, pleased with her favorite vampire.
Fox folded his fingers around one of the locks and yanked it off like it was made of paper.
“Through the front door,” Fox said.
“Like civilized people,” I said while winking at a couple of tourists who crossed the street to avoid us. They trained their cell phones on us as Fox tore the second lock off. Rebel and I were used to the attention. There were a bunch of videos of us on missions. A whole group of people were trying to figure out who we were. We had to be careful, but we weren’t obsessed with being too secretive. Nothing stays hidden for long. Not anymore.
We lifted the gate together, Fox yanked the front door open and we followed him in. By the time we entered he was nowhere to be seen in the darkness ahead.
“Where the hell did he go?”
“He knows something about this place that we don’t.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It would be great to get the heads-up on what he knows once in awhile. You know. Like teams do.”
“So you think he’s part of the team now?”
“Not even close if he keeps disappearing.”
We pointed our flashlights at the dark and came up with nothing. An old counter. Some shelves on the wall. Some chairs that hadn’t felt an ass in decades. The ceiling was a series of pipes and stray wires. And the air was dusty. I had to kill a few sneezes. It didn’t feel like anyone was there, but I didn’t want to blow it. We needed to find Tabitha if we wanted to stay ahead of the Vamps.
I pulled a Glock out of its home. It felt like a one Glock job. Feelings can be wrong. There was a single door at the back of the small space. I nudged it open with my foot while Rebel shined the light in the room.
But it wasn’t a room. It was a stairwell. Going down.
“This building has a second and third floor,” I said. “Where are the steps going up?”
Rebel shrugged and then followed me down the steps. She ran her fingernails over the wall gently. She liked to do that. Said it got her ready for battle.
“Cut it out.”
“Don’t you feel it?” she said.
“More feelings? Are we all following our feelings tonight?”
“Something big is coming up,” she said. I had to admit she was right. Not out loud, mind you. No way. But there was a heaviness to the air like the world had taken a big breath and held it.
Instead of scraping the old walls, she clicked her nails together and made a sound like breeding beetles. I didn’t bother saying anything. I felt like the next words we uttered would be in front of whoever, or whatever was waiting for us at the bottom of the steps.
The stairs ended in a small landing with a 3/4 height door. The kind you see in old Colonial houses. Then I remembered this was a mob building. It could have been a speakeasy at one point. And the second and third floors, with their hidden stairwell, could have been a place to hide the booze and the people drinking it.
“You first,” Rebel said, smiling.
The door didn’t open easily It hadn’t been used for a long time from the looks of it. I pulled it open and it scraped a semi circle in the dust on the floor. I crouched down, pulled out my pen light, and marveled at the space on the other side.
“Wow,” I said.
“What?”
“How far underground do you think we are?”
“Far enough underground for me to kill you and leave you here and feel like you got a proper burial if you don’t tell me what you see.”
“I see the drama of the undead.”
Chapter 27
It was a theater.
We crawled through the door and emerged near the middle row of seats. The old mahogany chairs with red velvet armrests glowed in my flashlight’s glare. The brass trimming on the rails and steps were rubbed raw by the hands and feet of thousands of people.
But it wasn’t a normal theater. Each row of seats had a lot of leg room. It was more like the United Nations.
“Very nice,” Rebel said. “Probably used for meetings of some kind.”
I flashed a light down on the stage area. What we saw wasn’t a stage, but a platform with two large thrones. Old, splintered thrones. Even burnt in some places. The thrones had seen some hard days and no one bothered to try and cover it up.
When I could pull my eyes away from the ugly things I saw the wall of portraits behind me. Some were drawn, some were photos.
One photo made my heart stop.
One photo was of my dad.
I only had passing memories of my parents. I was eight when they died. I had zero photographs. They were private people. It made it hard to find out anything about myself or how I ended up training for Spirit with Skyler. The old man couldn’t tell me anything because he claims that revealing the secret would activate a spell that would make him spontaneously combust or some kind of bullshit.
“What is it?” Rebel asked from behind me. “Who is that? He looks like you. Oh, shit.” Rebel is sharp in a number of ways.
“Yeah, it’s my dad.”
“But that photo is old. Look at his hair. That’s 30s or 40s. Your dad couldn’t have been that old. Maybe your grandfather?”
I took the frame off the wall and checked it for a note of some kind. Anything. And, of course, there was nothing. I popped the picture out and peeled it off the frame board. ‘1934’ was written in browned pen in the lower right corner.
“I told you this was a mistake,” Fox said. His voice slithered from the darkness.
“The truth is never a mistake,” I said.
“You know that’s not true,” he said.
“Who is this?” I demanded, holding the picture up to my best estimation of where he was. I was wrong. He floated down from directly above me and gently touched the ground.
In pun
ching distance.
“You know who it is, Kane,” he said.
“This thing is 80 years old. It can’t be my dad.”
“It is.”
“Was he a vampire?”
“No, he was a mobster.”
“What happened to him? Where is he? Where’s my mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit,” I said. Rebel could see I was getting close to losing it. She put her hand on my shoulder but I shook it off.
He backed away a step. Out of reach. Of Rebel, not me. “I didn’t know your father personally,” he said. “I only know what people have told me.”
“Like Skyler,” I said.
“Yes. He told me your father was a mobster. I guess he was in the Three Pointers Gang but I didn’t know that. If I did, I never would have told you about Tabitha.”
“That’s why you tried to call tonight off,” Rebel said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah. It was stupid of me to help you. I should have known that any digging into New York mobsters could lead to Kane’s father.”
“It’s a good thing I found out,” I said, stepping up to him and jabbing a finger in his chest. “Now I want to know more.”
“Look,” he said. “I told you. All I know is what Skyler and couple of other vampires have told me. Your dad was obsessed with us. He knew we were out there and he wanted to be one of us. I may have met him once at a Manhattan fundraiser in the late 20s but I can’t be sure.”
“You said on the boat that he fell from grace. You said I could end up in the same boat. What did you mean?”
He hesitated.
“Don’t even think about it, Fox.”
I didn’t know if he would lie, fly away or even fight. I could tell that he didn’t want to be there. I could tell he’d do almost anything to get out of telling me.
But he didn’t have to do anything.
The bullet ended the conversation for him. Fox’s chest exploded in a mess of red.
He fell to the steps with a sick thud.
Chapter 28
Rebel and I rolled behind the seats, ducking low.
I gestured to the scaffolding above the thrones.
She pulled out her kukri blade from the sheath on her back and scooted down the aisle, staying low.
I needed to get a bead on the guy. I never shoot blind. I have a record to maintain. But to do that I needed him to shoot again.
He wasn’t shooting again.
Why wasn’t he shooting again?
Rebel raised her hand over the seats to get him to reveal himself. He didn’t take the bait. Which meant he was gone.
Or it meant that he was changing tactics.
I looked over my shoulder to see how bad Fox had been hit. He was gone. A blood-stained handprint slashed across the wall, ending where my dad’s photo had been hanging.
The shooter dropped on me from above. He wrapped his legs around my neck and pulled me down with him. He rolled over on top of me, blocking my view of him with one hand while he put his gun to my forehead to end me there and then.
Rebel smacked him off of me with a kick that sounded like thunder. I shook my head to gather my senses and saw our attacker dip behind the seats two aisles down.
It was the skull helmet guy. The guy we’d fought in Hel and the museum.
Was he back to steal something new from under our noses? Or did he just want to off us this time?
I got my first good look at him as he stood to face us.
His whole head was covered in a white carbon fiber helmet. The skull face I’d seen from a distance was actually the laser-cut structure of the helmet. It was carved to fit snug up against the guy’s face so it wrapped tight around him. There was no ornamentation on the white surface. Not even eye holes.
His overcoat was loose enough to hide an arsenal, which I’d bet my right nut was exactly what he was carrying. His white chest plate was like a big fat target for a shooter like me. I’d have to work hard not to aim at it. It was likely designed to make his enemies aim at its bullet-proof surface.
Even as I maneuvered to stay alive I hoped I’d have a chance to see the armor up close. It must have been lightweight because the fucker moved like Rebel. He was as fast and smooth as a red chili omelet with a double espresso breakfast.
Rebel nodded at me and threw her blade. Her aim was famous for missing as often as my punches did. That was okay. Her move did its job.
The armored guy leaped straight for the ceiling. He grabbed a pipe and pulled himself up, disappearing into the shadows.
But not before I got a shot off.
His foot snapped back slightly before getting sucked into the darkness.
“You got him,” she said.
“Just stay down,” I whispered. “He has the advantage again.”
I could feel his eyes on us from above. Why wasn’t he shooting? I guessed he was tending to his wound.
What happened next was 100% avoidable and I never let Rebel forget it.
Rebel was hard to read. I never knew what she was going to do when she got a gun in her hand. So when she pulled it out and fired off a few into the ceiling, I had no idea why. She knew as well as I did that he’d moved somewhere else in the blanket of black above us.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
She looked at me like it was a stupid question that she had to dumb herself down to answer. “Cover fire?” she finally said before getting shot in the shoulder. She fell onto the wide, carpeted theater steps and threw some cuss words together that had never been heard in the history of humanity. Poetry, really.
She frowned at the ceiling, breathing through her mouth heavily, spit flying from between her teeth. She made a fist and a light peeked out from between her fingers. When she released them a small ball of light floated above her palm.
He shot her again. I couldn’t tell where she was hit. I shot the spot where I guessed he was perched and hoped it was close enough to let me get to my partner.
She didn’t wait for me. Instead she flipped her little ball of fire at my face. I instinctively caught it and immediately regretted it. It burned like lava. As I fumbled it, Rebel yelled, “LIGHT IT!”
Oh yeah. We’d practiced this. I was grateful for the reminder.
I threw the ball into the air before it hit the carpet and aimed for its core. I shot and the thing blew wide open, releasing a blinding light that Rebel and I were ready for.
We covered our eyes.
I hoped that he hadn’t.
I heard a grunt of pain and surprise above us and opened my eyes. The secondary effect of the spell was that the light faded but lingered in the room. It could keep illuminating a space for five minutes.
Suddenly the ceiling was a web of very well-lit pipes with a slippery motherfucker perched in the middle.
There was a loud bang and smoke began to fill the room. This guy was all about hiding. I managed to get a shot off before my vision was blocked by the smoke and heard him fall to the ground.
I ducked low and crawled to Rebel.
“I’m okay,” she lied. “Get that fucker.” She pulled a small vial from her belt pouch and took a sip of one of Skyler’s brews. He liked to share them with her because she played to his ego. He never gave me the potions that took pain away. I only got the potions that fixed the surface wound and then caused slightly less pain.
I stayed low and crept down the stairs, looking for any sign of movement.
“What do you want with us, Bonehead?” I asked him, wherever he was.
It was risky to reveal my location but I also knew he could have taken us out five times if he’d wanted to do so. The fact that he hadn’t may have meant that all of this was foreplay for a conversation.
Or a test.
“You know what I’m looking for,” he said. “Hand it over and I won’t kill you.”
“My virginity?” Rebel yelled from higher up in the theater. Bleeding and sassing. That’s my girl.
“The s
hield,” I said. “Who do you work for? Maybe we can work something out.”
“Nice try, asshole,” he said. He stood on the edge of the stage’s shadows. He was going to take me on hand-to-hand. I’d lose that fight. So I did what I told Rebel I’d do the next time I was about to get my ass kicked.
I started to open my Swap Portal and crossed my fingers.
“I’m just as curious as you are about what the hammer and shield can do,” I said. “Come on. Work with me. I’m not saying we won’t kill each other once we see what they’re capable of, but we can cross that bridge then.”
He was silent as he took two steps toward me. I made myself into the smallest target I could manage.
He didn’t see the open portal. He jumped at me and disappeared into it.
Then someone landed on me.
The poor sap, whoever it was, would want a good explanation for why he was suddenly in New York City.
“You mind telling me what the hell is going on?” Coleslaw asked, pushing himself off of me.
Chapter 29
The Traveler shook himself off like I’d given him cooties.
“What am I doing here, Kane and Rebel?”
“You sent the bad guy through the portal, Kane?” Rebel asked. I shrugged. “Nice.”
“What portal?” Coleslaw asked.
“The Swap Portal,” I said, standing up and brushing myself off.
“You have the Swap Portal?”
“And the Vault Portal,” Rebel said as she examined the room for more trouble.
Coleslaw’s eyes opened wide. “Why would one human have two Solos? There are only two in the world!”
“Really?” I said. “Wow, thanks for telling me. And thanks for the vote of confidence, too.”
“It’s not that, it’s just…” He got distracted by the blood on Rebel’s clothes. Without a word he walked to her and put his hands on the wounds.
“Where were you when I swapped you here just now?” I asked.
“I was at the church,” he said.
“Alone?” I was worried about who I’d left with bonehead.