Nightwise (13 page)

Inside the kitchen I heard the door to the dining room explode and fly across the room, clattering. There was another scream and the snarling, mixed with the whine. Something was hovering at the edge of my memory, but I didn't have the time to pause and shake it loose.

I stood and brushed the last of the salt off my hands and began to sprint toward the mouth of the alley.

“Come on, this way,” I said. “Time to put that P90X shit to the test.”

Behind us I heard the things chasing us crash into the ward I had placed on the kitchen door. From the howls of anger and pain, and the fact that nothing was shredding our flesh, the protective spell had held. The things would have to backtrack, and that would give us precious minutes.

We ran out of the alley and made our way onto John Street, turned left, and sprinted across Cliff Street. Cars honked and drivers flipped us off. We kept heading west, our feet splashing as we ran.

“What did he want from James?” I shouted above the rain and the bellowing cars.

“Who?” Trace said.

“Slorzack,” I said. “You said he used and manipulated James. To what end, exactly?”

We crossed Gold and headed for the intersection of John and William Street. A few blocks up was the Fulton Street subway station and, I hoped, escape.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Trace shouted back at me as he jogged against the downpour. “We got invisible monsters that shake apart people like nothing chasing us, wanting to eat us, and you want to keep talking about that evil bastard!”

“He is most likely the one behind those things,” I said, wiping my wet hair out of my eyes. The cuts on my cheek and hand were stinging, but the worst part was my thudding heart and my four-packs-a-day lungs. They were beginning to burn, and my breath was coming in faster and faster gasps. “The more I know, the better chance I have of getting us out of this alive.” Suddenly, the horrible boom of multiple collisions thudded over the hiss of the rain. Something tore through the cars that were ahead of us on William. The windows exploded in blooms of blood, brains, and bone chips, like the dye packs in stolen bank bags. An instant later, the car windows shattered, and there were howls as the rolling coffins jumped the sidewalks and crashed into buildings. Pedestrians screamed and scrambled for cover. I managed to grab Trace and pull him back, narrowly missing one of the out-of-control juggernauts.

“I'll … be … damned, they … flanked us,” I said, pausing to gasp for breath. “They … knew. They knew where we were headed.”

“Why didn't they just jump us up the street, then?” Trace said, staring at the twisted knot of mangled cars that now blocked the intersection of William and John. Panicked civilians were running everywhere. A few were trying to snap pictures or video with their cell phones.

The things chasing us moved through the debris and the rain, snarling, without a single piece of broken glass crunching, without the slightest indication of a shape or form, moving between the raindrops. They were cunning, completely invisible and intangible, making them effectively invulnerable. I didn't think they got tired, and they had a taste for blood. It was a brilliant summoning, but luckily not by a master.

I slid my hand into the satchel and took out a sealed plastic container in the shape of a cylinder. I had taken it from one of the kitchen's fridges.

“Because they're enjoying the hunt,” I said. “You remember when I told you to run awhile back?”

“Yeah?” Trace said, nodding, his breath a white mist trailing from his mouth and nostrils.

“Do it again. Now!”

We hauled ass heading south, toward the Wall Street subway station. The irony of how this whole mess had led me right back to Wall Street was not lost on me. We ran two blocks, passing One Chase Manhattan Plaza—the temple of the god of credit—on our right, and past Our Lady of Victory Church, the home of an equally venerable god, on the left.

The howls behind us, closing, were colder than the rain. We weren't going to make it to the subway unless I tried something. I stopped, turned toward our unseen assassins, and opened the container. This was a long shot, but it was all I had left.

“What the hell!” Trace had stopped about half a block ahead of me and was staring in disbelief.

I tried to forget the rain, forget the cold and the ice of fear in my bowels, forget the hangover, the low blood sugar, the DTs, and the fire in my lungs. I tried to forget the world. I could do this—I was one of a handful of badasses in the Life that could do this, and of those limp wands, I was the only goddamned rock star in the lot. Elvis-fucking-Mandrake-Presley.

The power came. I reached into the sopping-wet apron-satchel and pulled out a hunk of raw ginger. It resembled a gnarled hand. I took a bite of it and swallowed, the numbing fire of it scratching and clutching at my throat. The power flared in me, strengthened by the ginger. I held the root like a wand as I cast the contents of the container, raw minced garlic, into the air before me.

“Non habetis accessum ad hoc dimensionis. Tu es ingrata! abire, ardens!”
I shouted into the storm. The lightning came, drawn to my words as if to copper. The garlic caught fire in the air, hissed, and popped. The invisible things howled in pain. I turned and ran, dropping the garlic container and laughing at the storm, in spite of myself. I saw Trace sprinting ahead of me toward the subway entrance, a huge gray stone building on the right with wide arched windows high up and a skeleton of pipe scaffolding enclosing it. It looked a bit like an old train station. He stood at the doors, looking inside and then back to me.

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you laughing?” he shouted, eager to begin his decent into the underworld.

“It worked! Son of a bitch if it didn't actually work,” I called back, grinning. Something growled and snapped with fangs that did not touch this world but grabbed my coat tight. I spun and tried to slip out of the trench coat as a second invisible thing clamped down on a sleeve my arm had been in a second before. I tugged on the remains of the coat, and the captured sleeve and tail tore free. For an instant, I caught a whiff of something—it smelled of rancid, decaying organic things—methane, rotting meat. Then the whimper in the middle of the angry snarls. In that instant, when I was close enough to our invisible assassins to catch that whiff of them, I named them, and I knew how to beat them, if I lived that long. I took the tatters of my raincoat, rolled away from the savage ghosts, and ran toward an umbrella-wielding silhouette making its way to the subway entrance. Trace was shouting something to me, but I couldn't hear it over the storm, the howls of the phantom killers, and the blood pounding in my ears. I needed seconds, and I didn't own them anymore. There was one more trick, and it was a dirty one. I crashed into the stranger with the umbrella.

“Hey! What the hell, man?” Mr. Umbrella said. He smelled of menthol cough drops. “Watch where you are going!”

I draped the trench coat over him and rolled away again. I didn't want to see his face. I ran as fast as I could to the doors. I heard the snarling, the shredding, and the screams. Trace's face was a frozen mask of horror. He looked at me like I was an alien thing, a monster.

“Y-you…” Trace stammered. I shoved him through the doors and into the echoing halls of the station.

“Go, go, go, go!” I shouted, and pushed him ahead of me. We ran down the escalators. I heard the tone signaling a train was preparing to leave.

“What is the busiest street on the island?” I asked Trace as we thudded down the moving staircase.

“What?” he said. “Uh, Forty-second Street, I guess.”

We reached the lower platform. The uptown train was ready to depart. The warning tone was sounding, and the final streams of passengers were flowing through the open doors.

“Times Square, right?” I added, “We have to get on that train.”

As we ran toward the turnstiles, shouting and gunshots sounded on the upper level. The MTA cops hauled ass to respond but didn't have time to do more than curse as Trace and I jumped the turnstiles and sprinted to the train. We fell into seats, gasping as the tone sounded, the doors shut, and we began to move.

“We … We … made … it,” Trace gasped, then laughed and started choking and coughing. I shook my head and slid back the wet hair plastered to my face. I'd lost my ponytail holder somewhere on the run. I'd lost my wallet, my cash, and, worst of all, my cigarettes. We both looked like drowned rats—me more so without my trench. My T-shirt with Alan Moore's bearded face looming out at the world, my jeans, and chucks were all saturated. A small lake was forming on the plastic bench around my ass.

“The pack is still out there, still hunting us,” I said. “They won't stop until they kill us or we dispel them.”

“Pack of what?” Trace asked.

“Inugami,” I said. “I'd guess about four of them, and since they can't possess people and they still seem to be pretty feral, they must have been summoned in a hurry and not properly enshrined yet.”

“This is the same kind of crazy shit James and Slorzack used to talk about for hours,” Trace said. He paused, leaned on his lanky knees, and stared at the scarred floor. “You killed that man with the umbrella, led those things right to him. They tore him apart in front of me.”

“Yes,” I said, “I did, and yes, they did. Now, since the Inugami have been summoned half-assed and don't demonstrate their full range of abilities, it means we're dealing with someone other than the Inugami-Mochi, and that is most likely why we are still alive right now.”

Trace shook his head in dismissive disgust. “You and Slorzack, man, are cold-blooded bastards.” The subway shuddered to a stop. “Chambers Street,” the conductor's weary voice said.

“You rather it was you, bit to death, bleeding out at the entrance to a New York subway? You feeling all Jesus on me? Because I'm pretty sure you could have gotten their attention and you could be dead now, instead of that poor bastard. That what you want?”

“No,” he said sullenly. “Fuck you anyway, Ballard.”

“Relax,” I said. “It will take the pack awhile to reorient itself and get a fresh lock on you.”

“Me?” Trace said.

“You said the cops came to see you,” I said. “They had a search warrant, right? All nice and legal. They searched your apartment, and they took things they could use to create a magical sympathetic link to you, a resonance. The magical law of contagion: Once two items interact, they are bound, linked.”

For a second, I wondered if Didgeri had set me up by arranging this meeting with Trace, but I tamped down that thought. Trace was right, I was a cold bastard.

“The cops?” Trace said. “NYPD flatfoots? They are part of this bullshit occult underworld?”

“Some are,” I said as the door chimed and shut. I was starting to shiver from the wet clothing. “Just another form of dirty cop. They join up with one of the badge cults, some are born into them. Some of the cults actually fight to keep the force clean and wage perpetual war with the other cop cults. It's complicated.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Trace said, rubbing his eyes. And these origami chasing us…”

“Inugami,” I corrected.

“Yeah, whatever. Tell me what's tracking me, what's trying to kill us,” he said, almost pleading.

“Okay,” I said, “and then you are going to answer all my questions about Slorzack and what he and Berman were up to. And remember, you asked.”

The train lurched ahead, squealing out of the station. More people were getting on now as we crawled toward the close of the business day. The other passengers ignored us, they ignored my words. Live in a city like this long enough, and your brain starts to produce novocain.

“How to make an Inugami, or dog god,” I said. “Take a beloved household pet, a dog that loves you unconditionally and thinks you are the most wonderful thing in the universe, the way only something as stupid, loyal, and innocent as a dog or a child can. Bury it up to its neck in graveyard soil, or soil mixed with the ashes of the dishonored dead. Place food and water just outside the reach of the poor dog and wait. When it's going mad from hunger and thirst and about to die, you chop off its head.”

“Jesus,” Trace said. “Who the hell thought something like that up?”

“The ritual originates in Japan,” I said, “home of tentacle porn and dirty schoolgirl panty vending machines. That's the basic ritual to make one of these things, but the Inugami-Mochi perform much more elaborate rituals to create theirs. Makes them more powerful, smarter, and more ruthless. Believe it or not, we got lucky.”

“Inugami … Moochie?” Trace said, shaking his head.

“Close enough,” I said. “Very old, very powerful families in Japan create Inugami the way the Dutch used to breed new kinds of tulips. They keep the dog gods as family pets, use them as servants, assassins. Some of the oldest families are tied to the Yakuza as Shugenja—the Japanese mob's sorcerers.”

“This … this is just too much for me,” Trace said. He was close to crying. “Rabid ghost-god-dogs, ninja wizards. I … I never wanted any of this. I loved James. He was cute and well-off and cultured. I wanted a life with him, but not all this … madness.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It's not a life for everyone. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone I liked. And it's Yakuza, not ninja; they get kind of testy about that. Why did Slorzack want him?” I asked.

Trace closed his eyes and shook his head. “At first it was kink and attraction,” he said. “But then Slorzack saw James had real connections, real power. I think that was his plan all along. They started doing magic together—what the hell do you call it?”

“Workings?” I offered.

Trace nodded and continued. “Workings. Slorzack knew a lot more than James about most things, but James knew something Slorzack was desperate to learn about. They talked about it a lot, and Slorzack was always trying to wangle more information about it out of James. It made James happy to hold it over that creepy old bastard's head. Once Slorzack let James whip him just to get a scrap of a some weird formula about it.”