Contractor (54 page)

awful thing. He didn’t realize he’d miss the

night until it never came.

If he didn’t have his cell phone, he

would have lost track of time entirely. He’d

found spare cell phone batteries with a half-

charge in an electronics store. He felt like a

scavenger picking his way through a post-

apocalyptic New York. Add in the fact that

everyone was trying to kill him, and it was

almost like a video game.

Kind of sick to think about it like that,

really. But it was either laugh, or cry.

He didn’t see Rachel or Eleanor. He’d

seen people use similar spells—defensive

shields of crystal or ice, or rocky golems to

bash at extractors—but neither an Astor nor

an Ashworth. He suspected Henry was

keeping them from the front intentionally. As

far as Daniel was concerned, Henry was

therefore the greatest man to ever live.

The three armies surrounded Manhattan.

The military and the magicians decided to

establish their beachhead at uptown by

pushing across the Harlem River. The Vorid

decided that they weren’t giving up land as

easily as they had been—and that initiated

the first major head-to-head conflict between

the armies.

What happened was beyond Daniel’s

wildest expectations.

First was the onslaught of birds. They

came not in flocks, but like a swarm of silver

locusts. There were so many it was like a

cloud was passing over the sun. The mass

stretched over the entire bay.

Even bombing raids only made a dent in

the bird population. Army positions were

overrun. Daniel tried to fight them, but it was

essentially the worst possible scenario for

him as a combatant. With his growing

powers, he was strong enough that he could

sit in the middle of them without much

worry—they ignored him to attack other

targets—but he couldn’t kill them fast

enough. He was one man trying to hold back

an ocean.

As magicians abandoned their positions

and retreated, he saw normal men and

women left behind. Without magical

protection, they froze in the grip of the dome.

Alone, it was impossible to save them all—

the birds latched onto frozen souls like

resting moths and sucked out their lives.

That was when the Ivory Dawn

unleashed its secret weapon. Rachel had

given him enough of a description to know

what they were like, but he wouldn’t have

needed it to figure out that the things that

came forward were demons. Some were like

minotaurs, huge men with the heads of bulls.

Another kind were what she’d called

harpies, bird-people with talons and sharp

claws on the hands at the end of their wings.

He saw something that looked like a grim

reaper, complete with scythe.

They were strong. They were fast. And

they weren’t packing just the destructive

power that Daniel thought they would. They

came clad in steel and light. It was almost

like magic mixed with technology. An army

of corrupted angels met the press of the

extractor-birds.

One demon she forgot to mention were

the dragons. At least, he thought they were

dragons. Some were snakelike, while others

were like bulky dinosaurs, but they all

shared the same reflective scales in varying

shades of green and blue. And they all

breathed fire.

Alfred Hitchcock’s worst proved no

match for the legions of whatever Hell

spawned the monsters. The dragons turned

the clouds of birds to ash with enveloping

streams of fire. The harpies picked off

overseers with coordinated aerial attacks.

Daniel saw a minotaur crush an extractor’s

head in with one magic-powered fist. They

weren’t invincible; he watched one Dragon

be cleaved in two by an overseer’s grey

sphere, and enough extractors could

overwhelm the minotaurs and harpies.

Nonetheless, they drove a hole in the Vorid

lines, allowing Daniel and other magicians

to attack the overseers that were controlling

the majority of the birds from the back.

It wasn’t long before the army had

established a stable front in Harlem with full

control of the northern tail of Manhattan

Island. Daniel kept his distance from the

worst of it. He didn’t want to find out what

would happen if he had to fight a dragon

after he saw one swallow five extractors

whole without so much as a blink.

They came when he was sleeping.

Three and a half days of warfare had left

him strung-out; if he hadn’t been sleeping so

lightly, always with his armor on, he might

have been dead. Something grabbed at his

senses. He snapped awake just in time to see

needle-like claws jab at his face.

Daniel threw himself to the side. The

hand stabbed clean through the wall behind

him. He rolled to his feet. The thing staring

back at him was small, only four feet tall, but

bone-thin. It was entirely black. Its face was

flat and featureless.

At first, he thought it was a Vorid—but

then it smiled at him. Its eyes lit up like a

jack-o-lantern. He noticed sharp, tiny horns

protruding from its skull. He couldn’t scry it

at all—it might as well not have been there

for all his magical sense helped him.

It ran at him, but it was slow. Daniel

dodged and punched at its face.

His hand slipped through it like it was

made out of smoke. Once he passed by, it

turned to attack him again. If it wasn’t for his

improved reaction time, Daniel would have

taken a claw in the back. They skipped apart.

"What the fuck are you?"

Its breath was like chlorine. "A

Nightmare."

"What’s that, exactly?"

"…hmm." The thing cocked its head. "It will be more fun if you know what we are.

Demons, summoned by humans. We make

excellent assassins against your kind."

Daniel’s eyes widened. "How did you

find me?"

The thing sniffed the air. "Scent. A little

hair from where you’d fought before, and

now..."

Daniel barely got out of the way as a

second nightmare attacked him from behind.

He dashed around them, grabbed his gear,

then flung himself out a window he’d opened

for an emergency exit. In an instant, he was

blocks away. He sprinted, and sprinted some

more.

The Nightmares followed him

everywhere. It was hard to figure out how

many there were, but he guessed about five

or six. A few swings of his bat and fists

quickly taught him that his magic was totally

ineffective.

He wasn’t sure how their ability

worked. That was probably the thing that

frightened him the most. If they could slip a

hand inside him, who knew what they could

tear out? There was only one sure way to

protect himself: run like a bitch.

A long bath in the river didn’t help the

scent issue. He tried slathering himself with

soap. It didn’t make a difference. He waited

in different locations—inside buildings, on

rooftops, or in skyscrapers. They always

found him, and they could fly, too, zipping

along like little black ghosts. Walls and

doors meant nothing to them. They passed

through normal objects at will.

The Nightmares didn’t always trail

directly behind him; as it was sunny out, they

were easily seen against the pale grey sky.

They waited until he stopped moving. Then

they attacked all at once, drifting up through

the floors or from behind.

They kept away when he fought the

Vorid. He suspected that the Vorid’s brand

of magic could probably make short work of

them. They were not front-line warriors. But

Daniel killed quickly, so that never put them

off for long.

The only real safety he had was

distance. They didn’t pursue him outside

Manhattan; it seemed that mission control

just wanted him out of the way. But he was

never entirely sure. He went from fitful

sleep to almost no sleep at all. The monsters

had a fitting name.

He kept on the move, smashing and

blasting his way through the Vorid in

Harlem. Whenever he needed a break, he

retreated near the edge of the dome, several

miles out onto Long Island. He spent a few

hours storing extra supplies in a building he

appropriated as a sort of safe house. The

simple work helped relieve some of the

stress.

Soon after the first major demon assault,

Daniel saw a new faction of magicians

wearing deep blue tabards. It was good to

know that the Ivory Dawn had allies willing

to come to their aid. Rachel had told him a

bit about other magicians. If he remembered

right, that was the Order of True Flame from

Western Europe.

Their combined army pushed forward,

creeping down along central park, extending

sorties further into downtown. The black

pillars were so dense they were almost at

every other intersection. The streets past

96th were packed with extractors. From

what Daniel could tell, the fortress was

hovering almost directly above Times

Square. He wondered if it was just

coincidence, or if the Vorid did it

intentionally.

He was eating well enough, and his kills

gave him a good stamina jolt, but the lack of

sleep and constant activity was starting to

take a toll on his head. He felt an exhaustion

that a nap and a meal wasn’t fixing. He

wasn’t sure how long he could maintain his

hyper-alert state.

His supposed allies were starting to piss

him off. Not only did they attack him on

sight, despite his having expressly gone out

of his way for them, but they even sent

demons after him. Still, he didn’t dare stop

his efforts. The man he saved might be the

one to save Rachel. The overseer he killed

today was one less that could hurt her.

Occasionally he saw a flash of purple

light here and there around the city. Gabby

was hard at work. Daniel kept a polite

distance. He didn’t know if she had her own

set of Nightmares already, but it was

probably for the best, just in case they were

contagious. Sometimes he wondered why she

shot his offer down, but there was nothing for

it.

He hadn’t seen any contractors aside

from her. They must have known better than

to get involved with what was obviously a

total mess. Or they were dead.

****

The forward command post of the Ivory

Dawn was the top floor of an apartment on

the north end of Harlem. The cramped,

wood-paneled rooms were a bustle of

magicians from both the Dawn and the Order

of True Flame. Their European allies had

taken three days to arrive, but they came just

in time to bolster their defense against the

swarm of aerial extractors.

Rachel leaned in a corner of the

operations room. The walls were coated

with maps and pins. Computers were a

luxury inside the Vorid dome; they didn’t

have a man to spare for every monitor, so

they were back to paper and pen. A table at

the center of the room was layered with

reports.

Around the table were the leading forces

of their defensive effort: Eleanor, and Henry;

Matthew Aiken, the son of the magician that

governed the southeastern United States;

Madame Flemmet, their liaison to the True

Flame; and finally, Lenhard Rothschild, the

head of the Order himself.

Rachel remembered Rothschild from the

congress. He was young compared to Henry,

only thirty or so, with short-cut blond hair.

He had a sharpness about him that reminded

her of Daniel, but he took himself infinitely

more seriously.

Rothschild also had a serious case of

tunnel vision. He refused to consider the

contractors allies. Rachel had been working

on Henry for three days, and she felt as

though he’d almost come around, and then

this idiot had arrived. The sins of the past

were still fresh in the minds of the

Europeans. Admittedly, that was where the

war had actually taken place.

Still, that didn’t excuse him in Rachel’s

book. After dismissing his three dragons,

Rothschild had personally summoned the

seven Nightmares that were even now

hounding Daniel, despite the fact that every

report made it clear Daniel had been

working his ass off to help them.

But she knew this would happen. That’s

why she told him to stay in Boston.

She rubbed her hands on her face. She

knew he was lying as soon as his promise to

stay put left his mouth. But what could she

do? He was stronger than her, and getting

stronger by the minute. They needed him.

Despite the fact their whole force had

standing orders to attack him on sight, he