(35)
Duncan didn’t think he’d ever seen a raid like this one—but he’d planned it and Nick Lowell signed off on it, since Blackjack was apparently on his way to Russia through one of those mirror-transport-channel things. Without Blackjack’s shenanigans, the whole unit worked together pretty well to pull together intel and details. They decided to move just after dark, so the Sibyls wouldn’t be so visible to the public.
Samuel Griffen owned the Garment District warehouse they’d targeted. Recon patrols reported that the building had elemental shields the Sibyls hadn’t encountered before, elegant but also simple, more or less hidden in plain sight. Two Rakshasa had been sighted and confirmed on premises, visible through a third-floor window. The smaller kind, not the big bastards, but it was a start.
The place had been polished up to house a business—Panthera Security. Panthera, as in part of the scientific classification for tigers.
Cute
, John growled.
The Panthera Security building faced an alley near Times Square. The NYPD had shut down traffic, and plainclothes officers had sealed off the entire block. The Sibyls and the OCU were staging at the far end of the alley.
Duncan had his badge, his Glock—and four women in leather jumpsuits and face masks on his right flank, carrying swords and knives. Three more Sibyls—Riana, Cynda, and Merilee—had his left flank and made up the rest of his part of the raid team. One of them had a freaking bow and arrow, but whatever.
Apparently Sibyls didn’t hold grudges long. At least not these two bunches.
My history with Riana’s triad is complicated
, Bela had explained, and that was good enough for Duncan.
In addition to the Sibyls next to him and six more triads positioned around Panthera—two on the adjoining roofs and four on the ground—Duncan had thirty-six OCU officers at his command. And two Curson demons, flying in with their Astaroth demon brother and three of his winged buddies.
“Not the easiest set of tacticals,” he admitted to Bela as she strapped a body armor vest over her leathers, then covered that with a black NYPD raid jacket.
“The demons will take care of themselves.” She zipped her jacket, and he wished he could pull off her face mask to see her better. “Worry about the officers.”
Duncan gave her a thumbs-up and checked his ranks. OCU SWAT lined both sides of the alley, decked out in boots, black fire-resistant coveralls, and body armor. They all wore black gloves, black face covers, black Kevlar helmets, and night-vision goggles. Their assault rifles had been loaded with elementally locked bullets, and they carried a big payload of flashbangs, too, since the cats didn’t seem to like noise. Duncan had them add a few Stingers and tear gas grenades in case the cats had their human helpers armed.
If everything went according to plan, OCU SWAT would shoot straight and do the heart piercing, and the Sibyls would manage beheading, burning, and dispersing.
Duncan’s pulse picked up.
“Form up!” he called to his team as he fastened his own vest, careful to leave the dinar on the outside. “Take positions, and get behind your safe lines.”
The SWAT officers broke into their assigned teams, four at a time, joining with the Sibyl ground groups, then moving off a few paces to stand behind marks on the pavement—safe lines traced just out of sight of the building’s windows. When the Sibyls attacked Panthera’s elemental barriers, humans needed to be farther back, so the energy wouldn’t kill them.
In minutes, the front and back entrances to Panthera had been covered, with officers close to the door, but also staggered with the Sibyls in a wide arc to prevent escapes. The sky exit had eyes on it, though until the Sibyls broke Panthera’s elemental barriers, they couldn’t deploy teams to the roof directly.
On Duncan’s elementally shielded radio, teams reported.
Ready
.
Ready
.
Ready
.
“Ready,” Bela said, her voice sending Duncan’s senses into supernova. He really didn’t like this next bit, letting her get so far away from him with no cover, but this was what Sibyls did. What Bela did. Duncan had to respect that.
There were no kisses during major police operations, so he gave her a fist bump and said, “Do your thing, Angel.”
Bela led her quad into the open, with Riana’s triad following. They fanned out, like the triads on the surrounding roofs and, Duncan assumed, at the back of the building.
Duncan stayed inside the mouth of the alley, behind his safe line, wishing he didn’t have to.
John’s awareness filtered into his to say,
I could shield us with the dinar, but …
“Yeah.”
But he’d become a little more demon every minute John made use of that projective energy.
“Not unless we have to, John.”
Out on the street, Bela and Riana raised their arms, and the ground shook under Duncan as it gave up its power. New York City rumbled and bumped, then the energy settled into a steady grumble, flowing toward Panthera so hard Duncan thought he could feel it in his teeth. He could smell it, too, rich, fertile, and sweet.
Camille went next, lifting her hands and letting off a torrent of fire. Cynda followed suit, and fire glowed from other key locations. They directed it at Panthera, and flames coated the front of the building, hissing and popping. Smoke drifted overhead, blocking out the city lights, until wind howled down from the cloudy sky to whip the flames and batter at the building’s windows. That was nothing—nothing—compared to the waves that hit it. Sheet after sheet of water crashed into the place, somehow joining with the fire and making it stronger.
Pressure built against Duncan’s ears. His eyes watered. He kept swallowing, but his throat got drier by the second.
He glanced at the safe line.
What would all this energy feel like on the other side of that line?
Skull-cracking
was the only description he could think of.
The building made a deep, low groan, and Duncan’s pulse shot to full throttle.
“That didn’t sound right,” he barked into his radio, but nobody answered him. He tried a few more channels and codes. The thing had gone dead. Duncan jammed it back in his belt—and that sound came again, only deeper this time. Like a foundation cracking, and beginning to shift. Whatever the Sibyls were breaking, he didn’t think it was the elemental barriers.
Blood thumped in Duncan’s ears, fighting the pressure as he leaned close to the safe line and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Bela, break off!”
All the rumbling and blazing and whistling and splashing covered his command, but Sibyls had sensitive perception. Duncan knew Bela heard him—but she gave him no response. None of the Sibyls in his line of sight so much as twitched.
Shit
. John’s anxious voice rattled through Duncan’s mind.
This is wrong
.
“Break off, damnit!” Duncan forced himself over the safe line. His dinar lifted off his neck, pulling toward Panthera so hard the chain cut into him.
Duncan grabbed the coin and slammed it against his chest.
He got it now. The Sibyls weren’t stopping because they couldn’t. Panthera’s shields were drinking everything they hurled at it—and they couldn’t stop the flow and couldn’t get away.
“I’m coming, Angel.” Duncan tried to take a step toward Bela but lurched forward, towed by the unbelievable elemental magnetism beginning to center on the building. He had to go to one knee and keep his head down to keep from flying forward and smashing into Panthera’s front doors.
“John.” It was hard to talk. “I need you.”
But John was already there, and Duncan’s dinar glowed with a hot, painful power. He coughed as his wounds blazed into aches and throbs. Finally he could throw off enough of the energy to move now.
So much noise—
Four steps to get to Bela.
Duncan kept his head down.
Three steps. Two.
He thought his eyeballs might explode.
One step—
“Bela!” He tried to grab her arm, but her energy punched him like a fist, and he staggered backward.
Duncan didn’t even get his breath before he launched forward again, this time forcing his way around her until he could see her face.
Her dark eyes streamed with tears, wide and wild and panicked. Tiny red dots formed in the whites and on her cheeks. Her lips had darkened to a pale, terrifying blue.
Not breathing.
Every nerve ending in Duncan’s body fired. He shouted into her face, into the wind and fire and water and earth, his thoughts spinning
Live wires—
Can’t grab them—
Live wires
.
A memory, his and John’s, after a blast had taken down poles and lines in the desert. A sergeant going nuts as wires danced and sparked and set everything on fire.
Knock them down, knock them down, get them on the ground!
Duncan yelled that out loud as he backed away, then hit the deck and rolled himself at Bela’s legs. He slammed into her just below the knees and she went down hard. Duncan rolled away and came back again, using his body and legs to knock down Dio and Camille.
Unearthly bellows rose over the energy still flowing, and Duncan looked up in time to see golden glowing Curson demons fall out of the sky. They bowled down Andy and Riana’s triad, then lunged for the nearest Sibyl group farther down the street.
Winged demons dove and struck the Sibyls on the roof, then took off toward the other Sibyl teams.
Elemental energy crushed out from Panthera each time it lost a connection with a Sibyl, harder, harder, like a bubble expanding. Hand on his dinar, Duncan could see it, building, moving, and he knew what it meant.
His thoughts broke down to fragments.
“Cover!” he yelled to Nick and Creed and the Astaroths.
“Cover!” He waved his arm at the officers behind safe lines who could see him. He scrambled to his knees and threw himself toward Bela.
With a huge suck inward, Panthera dragged everything not set in cement straight toward its walls—
And exploded.
(36)
Bela tasted rock dust in her mouth and spit it out.
Why was she underground?
Why couldn’t she see anything, hear anything, sense anything?
She moved the earth and rock over her head—ah. Stars. A sky.
Water arced in a fountain to her right, splattering toward her.
She had blood on her face. Still nothing from her ears or her elemental senses. They felt numb.
Something cut into her right hand, something she’d clenched tight in her first. She opened her fingers.
A little piece of copper.
Bela held on to it and sat up. Fell back. Sat up again, so woozy she barely kept her balance. On either side of her, piles of brick and rock and metal and rubble blocked her view.
She remembered rolling on the ground, gasping, retching, trying to breathe. She had crammed her hand in her pocket to get the copper charm to focus herself, make herself stronger, then—
“Oh, Goddess.”
She said that, felt the vibration, but she didn’t hear it.
Bela slipped the copper charm into her pocket, grabbed the nearest piece of stone, and hauled herself to her feet. Her left arm hung useless and twisted at her side. Broken ribs creaked when she moved. The pain made her scream, and the scream made her spit a mouthful of blood all over the dust at her feet. She closed her eyes and pulled at earth energy to heal what she could—
Nothing.
When she looked around, she saw a jagged, wide field of rubble where Panthera had been, and the street in front of it.
I’m the only one standing
.
Red lights flashed—emergency vehicles, trying to reach either end of the devastation.
The building had blown up.
The fucking elemental trap of a building had locked her in place, drained her dry, drained them all dry, numbed her elemental senses completely, and blown up.
Bela didn’t hear her own snarl, but she felt it.
If any of the damned building had still been standing, she would have drawn her sword with her good arm and hacked it all the way down to the ground. She’d never experienced a trap like that. Never read about it. Never even imagined it—but she should have.
Projective energy. Drawing it in, sending it out. The trap constructed in the building had taken everything out of her, everything out of all of them, then used their own power to blow them to hell.
And the thought came back.
I’m the only one standing
.
She reached out with her senses again, desperate for any hint of Camille, or Dio, or Andy, or Duncan.
Silence.
No heartbeats. No breathing. No life essence anywhere near her.
She had no sense of Riana. Not Cynda. Not Merilee. No Nick, no Creed, no Jake.
They weren’t here.
Their life energy just—wasn’t.
It was gone.
All of them … gone.
I’m the only one standing
.
No
.
No!
Bela threw her broken body toward the nearest pile of rocks and used her good hand to dig against the jagged stone. Each movement hurt like falling on iron spikes, but damnit, there had to be somebody here, somebody alive other than her. Bela pulled and shifted and clawed rubble until her nails split, until her palm and fingers got so raw each pebble and bit of metal seemed to burn straight through her skin.
Come, on, Camille. Andy? Dio?
Duncan …
Bela ripped another bunch of rocks loose and found nothing but bare ground underneath, and the thought came back and this time it wouldn’t leave, couldn’t leave, because it was true, because nobody she loved was still here, because she couldn’t find anything, couldn’t sense a single bit of life, and it was too much, too much, too much.
I’m the only one standing
.
She screamed so loud and long it drove her to the patch of ground she’d cleared, to her knees, and she puked blood until it came through her nose. She fished the copper charm out of her pocket for comfort, to have something of the earth and Duncan and her quad next to her. Then she leaned forward, holding herself up with her one arm, hacking and choking, her torn, bleeding fist clenched around the copper charm, and she wished she could die. She wished she could hear herself sobbing and screaming and swearing, because at least that would make sense.
When her forehead touched the earth, a shimmer of power flowed into her—enough to stop the choking.
Damnit
.
Enough, even, to stop the bleeding from her hand and fingers, and begin to knit her broken ribs.
Damnit
.
Enough … to let her see a pulse of poisoned green energy, right in front of her eyes.
Bela raised her head and sank back on her haunches, gripping the copper piece. She pulled with her power, and more energy came to her, into her body. Into the copper. It seemed so easy now to use her terrasentience to draw on the earth and turn it outward. Had she ever had difficulty with that?
The Rakshasa energy was so obvious and strong, blasting through the numbness in her mind and heart. She pulled herself to standing again, then staggered across the cleared patch in the debris, toward Panthera.
Oh, yeah
. A lot of elemental traces now. Some thin—the new demons? Three thick—the oldest Rakshasa? One of those thickest of all—
Strada.
Bela stared at the trace, at his tracks all across Panthera’s ruins. Old ones and new ones. Lighter and darker.
She forced her feet to move toward the darker tracks. A steady stream of them, leading toward Times Square.
She followed them, doing what she could with her power to keep her body going, but really, she didn’t care about that, as long as she stayed alive long enough to do what needed to be done. Hunting Strada … that made sense. She couldn’t help anyone here, because there was no one to help—Goddess, no, she couldn’t think about that. No. But she could hunt. With everything Bela was made of, everything she had left inside her, she would
not
let this demon get away to kill more people.
She’d run a sword through that bastard cat’s heart, rip off his ugly white head, set him on fire, and blow him to eternity.
After that, she’d let herself think.
After that, she’d let herself truly understand that she’d lost Duncan and her quad and her friends.
After that, the pain could kill her, and she knew it would.
“You took everything away from me.” She couldn’t hear herself, but talking made her feel more clearheaded and put her crushing grief to the side—at least for a while. “Now it’s my turn.”
Bela tucked her copper charm inside her leathers so it touched her skin. Then she gripped her sword with her only functional hand and followed Strada’s tracks. Her legs kept moving even though her ribs and arms burned as if fire Sibyls had attacked her. Her feet kept falling, one in front of the other, long after she lost all sense of where she was going or how long she’d been walking.
Times Square came and went, just a blur of lights and cars and night crowds and sounds that should have been there but weren’t. The three thick traces separated at Avenue of the Americas. Smart move. The fuckers.
Bela tracked Strada north. Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall—bright, happy-looking, so many people. Everything seemed the same, but nothing was. Bela moved and hurt and bled and healed what she could, what she had to.
At St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Strada’s trail got a lot stronger.
Bela had to let go of her sword hilt on Park Avenue. She ripped at the sleeve of her leathers with her teeth, tearing a strip long enough to bind her broken arm to her weapons belt. Keeping it still eased the agony some. The pain that was left kept her awake.
Her mind chipped and dug back through the day. She tried to avoid seeing faces. Duncan. Andy. Dio. Camille. Oh, sweet universe, why them, all of them and not her? Riana, Cynda, Merilee—her friends, but some of the Sibyls who died tonight, she knew only their names and faces, nothing about their lives. Half the OCU officers, she’d never met. Her thoughts circled through all the painful things, finally landing where she wanted. In the townhouse basement. When she and Duncan had studied the maps and operation plans and all the information Nick, Creed, and Riana’s triad had gathered about Samuel Griffen’s properties. One of them was on East Fifty-ninth, near Lexington. If Strada thought Panthera was the only location compromised, he might take shelter there.
Goddess, she hurt. More earth energy soothed her, but it lasted for just a minute. Strada’s tracks glowed so brightly now, they hurt her eyes.
Why did the moon seem so dim?
Bela put her hand on the bricks at the mouth of an alley and bent over, trying not to collapse.
He’d turned in here—but why?
Because he knows
.
He knows somebody’s following him
.
Her lips pulled away from her teeth.
What he doesn’t know is who
.
Dull traffic sounds made their way into her consciousness, seemingly miles away. Her ears and the rest of her senses woke up a little. Her Sibyl body was healing itself, no matter what she wanted.
Bela drew on the earth enough to stand. She slipped her fingers inside her leathers and retrieved the copper charm. When she squeezed it tightly and used what little earth power she had, she could sense people moving nearby, and plants, and animals. All that life touching the earth, all around her. And in the alley …
Strada was waiting.
Bela’s ears buzzed, and her hearing grew more acute. The strains of a Pink Floyd song drifted to her.
Daddy, what else did you leave for me …
Yeah. She could work with that.
Duncan and Andy, they were all about gospel and folk. Camille liked modern stuff, and Dio had her classical collection. Screw all of that. Give her hard rock. Classic rock. Pink Floyd was just fine with her.
All in all, you’re just a …
Vicious, vengeful fury powered Bela’s walk into that alley.
… another brick in the wall …
With each step she took, her mind worked with the copper charm, moving through it, getting the measure of it, understanding it down to the atoms and molecules, and shaping it with her pain. Then she put it in her mouth, to keep it touching her, and settled it between her cheek and gum.
When she found that bastard—
But there he was.
Bela blinked, not trusting her vision, and some of her powerful fury drained out of her.
At the walled end of the alley, at the terminus of the tracks she’d been following, stood a man, not a demon.
Tall and muscular—black eyes, black hair, tanned, expensive gray silk suit. She couldn’t tell if the man had Hispanic or Italian heritage, or maybe Native American or Middle Eastern. Whatever it was, it made him easy on the eyes, if you didn’t count the poisoned green energy clinging to his skin.
Rakshasa could imitate human form, but only for a few seconds. That’s what Dio had told them, Bela remembered. So she gave it a few seconds. Blood dripped down her broken arm, and her good arm, too. She tasted a little in her mouth and spit it out.
The man stayed a man.
Yet the longer she stared at him, the more she could see a hint of white tiger, a suggestion of golden-eyed monster.
“We have a natural human form.” Strada’s voice was lightly accented and deep in this form, not full of growls and snarls. “We can hold it without limits, unlike shapes we borrow. Does mine please you?”
Hearing the bastard talk jarred Bela out of her shock and brought her back to her purpose. She drew enough earth energy to catch her breath and slow her bleeding again. “You killed them. My quad, my lover—my friends.”
Strada laughed, and if Bela hadn’t known what he was, if she hadn’t been listening with her ever-healing Sibyl hearing, she would have found it natural. Even attractive. “Your loved ones killed themselves, or rather you did, when you attacked my business and my family. The trap I used—old and basic, but very effective.”
Bela smiled at him, and she waited until he smiled back.
Then she said, still smiling, “I’m going to kill
you
now, and I’m going to make you suffer.”
Strada moved so quickly he seemed to be at the alley’s end in one second and standing in front of her the next. His iron-strong hands grabbed both of her elbows, and the pain of his grip on her fractured arm made her hiss and groan.
The demon-man let go of her good arm, grabbed her sword hilt and weapons belt, and ripped them away from her. He threw them against the alley wall.
Bela glared at him as her sword clattered to the ground. “You look like a man, but you still smell like cat piss.”
He laughed again and ran a thumb along her cheek. “Such a beautiful creature.” With his other hand, he squeezed her broken arm and made her scream. “All the Sibyls, so lovely. So powerful. Could I turn you, I wonder?”
He tried the thumb trick again, and Bela moved her head fast enough to bite him and draw some of his foul-tasting blood, which she spit in his face. He snatched his hand back, pulling at her wounded arm until she let out another shout of pain.
Strada’s expression was part angry, part intrigued. “
Now
I understand, my dear. The real question is, if I turned you, could I control you?”
Claws brushed her cheek instead of fingers.
Bela lowered her head, fighting waves of revulsion.
The claws moved to the back of her neck, and the suited man’s chest she was staring at shifted slowly to a broad swath of white tiger fur.
She shifted the copper charm to her tongue and reached deep, deep into the ground with her terrasentience.
When Strada squeezed her broken arm again, Bela tore a gout of energy from the center of the earth and spit the charm at the Rakshasa bastard with all the force of a volcano blowing its cone.
His golden demon eyes widened, and his tiger mouth opened.
His paws fell away from Bela and patted his chest, like he couldn’t quite believe the blood spreading across his fur.