Authors: Edward Lazellari
Cal hardened his heart to the feeling. As much as he’d like to pick up intelligence, it was too dangerous, and there were several other creatures unaccounted for and they needed to leave. “I’m sorry, Allyn. We can’t risk it.” He stabbed the creature with Bòid Géard.
The creature whimpered as its life drained, and again, Cal felt the sorrow of a loved one passing. All Cal wished for was a fair opponent and a field of battle and a good sword to fight by. “Damn sorcerers and their spells,” he whispered.
“Amen,” the reverend said.
The elevator had reached their floor. As the door began to open, Allyn cried out, “BACK!”
Most of the party backed away in time. Most, but not Daniel or Timian, who was still in an alcohol-induced haze. They stood dead center of the golem’s line of sight as the elevator doors parted. The beast pounced on the slightly closer Tim, their momentum driving them back into the corridor wall. The sick crunch of jaws breaking bones filled the hallway. Malcolm, Lelani, and Cal were on the thing immediately, driving their weapons into its flesh.
Clarisse screamed in abject terror as Tim’s limp form dropped to the floor, his neck dangling at a sick angle. She dropped Bree like a sack and ran toward Tim. Colby and Allyn held her back while the three warriors finished off the beast.
Bree cried loudly—Cal didn’t know if it was the shock of being dropped, or if she had reached her limit of all the death and blood that had become so pervasive in her young, innocent life. It was not lost on Callum how much Bree needed her mother right now. The thought of his daughter never seeing Catherine again tore at his soul. Daniel comforted the little girl—drawing her to him in a hug he seemed comfortably skilled at providing. Cal remembered the boy’s dossier … the four-year-old stepsister, Penny—left behind to fend for her herself with a newly widowed, psychologically compromised drug-addled mother.
They finally let Clarisse reach her man. She fell to the floor beside him, tears falling wildly. “Oh, my Manly-Mann,” she cried. She pulled his body to him with the last of her strength and shook her head violently—her long hair whipped into a blur of despondency.
“He was—unlucky,” Lelani said to the reverend.
Grey gave her a dire, yet stoic look. “We make our own luck, sorceress. It was his choice to drink five cocktails today.”
“FUCK YOU!” Clarisse screamed at the reverend. “You did this! That thing is after the kid, but it went for my Manly-Mann instead. This is your fault!”
Grey would not look at Clarisse. He turned to Callum with tired, deflated eyes that confessed Clarisse was not entirely wrong.
“The luck a cleric bestows in a blessing has to come from somewhere,” Lelani whispered to Cal. “They would have us believe the gods pick those most deserving of punishment.”
“Please don’t do that again,” Daniel said. He looked shaken. “I don’t want anyone cursed because of me.”
They heard a door crash from one of the other stairwells on the floor. Colby and Lelani grabbed Clarisse; Daniel picked up Bree.
“Everyone in the elevator!” Cal shouted.
2
The freight elevator doors closed just as the golem leaped into the service corridor. Cal hoped that steel doors, concrete walls, and the steel box they were riding down would be enough to buy time and get to the Fiftieth Street loading bay. All of the golems should be upstairs where Daniel had been only moments before.
Metal wrenched loudly above the car. Cal knew it was too good to be true. A reverberating thud on the roof shook the elevator. A muscular talon-tipped arm crashed through the ceiling. Everyone screamed and dropped down as far as they could go.
“We’re all going to die!” Clarisse screeched.
Mal swung his two-sided ax across the car, slicing the hand off at the wrist. Lelani’s arrows, point-blank, hit the golem in the jugular and through the eye. Black blood rained over the group.
“Don’t get it in your mouth or eyes,” the preacher yelled. Everyone covered their heads with their jackets and shirts.
Cal jabbed it with his sword. The beast grabbed him and pulled Cal toward its maw, but lost strength as the magic drained out of it.
“How many of these freaking things are there?” Daniel cried out. Bree and the kid were shaking. Cal knew he was going to have to pay a fortune in therapy for the girl.
The doors opened on the ground floor. The way was clear. Mal, Lelani, and Cal led the way down the service corridor, tense and paranoid, and moved toward the loading bay. Cal went through the double swinging doors first. A catering truck filled with food and a large wedding cake was backed into the elevated dock. The bay was relatively empty otherwise.
He motioned for the others to join him. He was halfway down the stairs when a golem dropped down onto the sidewalk just outside the truck port. Cal stopped, and the group slammed into him from behind.
The beast was hunched, its massive forearms before it, knuckles braced on the ground like silverback gorilla. Saliva slobbered from its snarling mouth. Three more dropped next to it, adopting the same posture and blocking their escape. Cal was about to order retreat when two golems crept up the service corridor behind them. Lelani cast a spell that shut and bound the steel doors to the hotel. It would only hold the ones in the corridor for a minute.
The beasts closed in slowly, talking to each other in whatever passed for a language, careful not to leave any gaps. Their gaze returned often to Daniel, their programmed target, as though in anticipation of a reward, like the culmination of a sexual act.
Cal wished he’d taken Bree from the boy’s arms. It was the first time he believed he’d lose the prince.
“Prelate?” Cal asked.
“I cannot bind them all,” Allyn whispered back, a desperate strain nestled in his voice.
Cal prepared to attack—Malcolm and Lelani read his body language and made ready to follow.
Three black Cadillac Escalades screeched to a halt behind the creatures. Five middle-aged Mediterranean types—in retro casual bowling shirts, leather jackets, silk slacks, loafers, and pinkie rings—spilled out of the vehicles. In addition to the gold jewelry dangling from their wrists and necks, all held assault rifles. Three men armed with flamethrowers poked up through the moon roofs on the tops of each Escalade. They collectively let loose a tsunami of fire, cutting down the golems. The creatures screamed as the hail of bullets and flame liquefied them where they stood.
The golems still in the hotel finally broke through the steel door. Allyn bound them with his iron rod, and Mal, Colby, and Lelani made short work of the beasts. When all the beasts were dead, a very large man stepped out of one of the Escalades. He was six feet at least and pushing three hundred pounds, impeccably dressed in a cream-colored sharkskin suit with carnation in the lapel, had tightly wound salt-and-pepper hair that looked like the early stages of growth on a Chia Pet, and yellowed gnarled teeth when he smiled. He was smoking a thick cigar.
“Holy shit!” Colby said. “Dominic Tagliatore?”
“The mobster?” Allyn said.
“Son of a bitch!” Mal quipped.
The man approached the group, stopping before Callum, puffing on a thick Cohiba.
“You know those are illegal,” Cal said.
Tagliatore shrugged in that way that said
Forgetaboutit.
“You’ve changed,” Cal added.
“Own a lot of restaurants,” the fat man said, patting his ample belly.
“I’m confused,” said Lelani. “There was no Dominic Tagliatore in the original rescue party.”
“Sweetie…,” the fat man said, pointing his cigar at her and with a flirtatious wink, “… you can call me Tilcook.”
CHAPTER 42
BRINGING UP BABY
Gone.
Lord Dorn could not sense the golems anymore. The last of them had been defeated. He thought for certain with the wards down, his creations would make short work of the guardians. He had underestimated his opponents. His earlier elation waned, and the pressure of the headaches returned. A dark cloud covered his thoughts. He blew apart a window, reentered the building through an empty office, and climbed the stairs slowly back to the observatory. Hesz, Kraten, Lhars, Tom, and Catherine MacDonnell watched silently as he entered, measuring his mood, which was clearly not victorious.
“How’d we do?” asked Tom.
We?
thought Dorn. How fared
we
? The plan was Dorn’s, its execution as well—yet Tom took it upon himself to share some of his master’s failure. Since Dorn could not very well punish himself, he was grateful for a volunteer. The power of the lay line swelled within him. He said the words and made the hand gestures and shot Tom out of an east-facing triangular window. The man arched over the city before he lost momentum and plunged seventy stories into the icy waters of the East River. Everyone in the room remained quiet. And tense.
It occurred to Dorn that the problem with the attack was perhaps not the plan itself, but its scale. Symian trudged up a stairwell carrying a bag full of sandwiches, bottles of water, and soda. He stopped when he saw all their expressions.
“Did I miss something? Where’s zombie Tom?”
Hesz shook his head ever so slightly and swiftly—almost a twitch. The gesture actually gladdened Dorn. His men were looking out for each other. They would need to. The pressure in his head grew—his reason slipping. It stirred in him a panic that one of these times when he descended into these episodes he would not emerge whole again. He would be lost to madness, deserving of only a dungeon cell in some wretched asylum without even a pot to piss in.
Scale.
He pulled out the flask with the golem elixir. In there were hundreds of Catherine MacDonnell’s viable ova, all waiting to be born by his hand. With the power surging through this building, he could bring them all forth. But the elixir was capable of so much more—it was forbidden magic—exponential. The radiation made it hyperpotent, boundless—limited only by how much stock he could provide it. Catherine had another ovary. He leered at her. She sat bound and unresponsive against a wall on the floor staring off into another universe, lamenting the loss of her family. She noticed him observing; her back stiffened, her expression changed, and she pressed herself more tightly against the wall.
“My lord,” said Symian delicately. “We may need her for an exchange. Less damaged than more. This building—this city—is overflowing with females. Let me bring you some.”
Hesz and Kraten backed away from the half-troll. So much for solidarity.
In genius lies madness, and it was at this moment at the precipice of another dark episode that Dorn came up with a truly wicked thought. He struggled to retain reason and then stopped, realizing reason would only talk him out of a necessary action.
“How many females?” he asked in a rough gravely voice. His hands pressed into his temples as though the switch to turn off the pain lay beneath the bone.
“My lord?”
“In this city … how many?”
“The population swells to fifteen million during the day, my lord,” said well-read Hesz, sticking his own neck onto the stump. “Half are female.”
A smile that he knew would frighten the devil himself squirmed its way onto Dorn’s lips—teeth gritted and cheeks stretched wide with dementia, he thought his face would rend itself apart. His reflection in the marble looked half mad, the veins in his forehead distinct and pulsing.
“Subtract those who are older than young and younger than old,” Dorn said. It was becoming harder to speak.
“Millions,” said Symian. “My lord, I don’t…”
He turned to Catherine MacDonnell with the most devilish look and asked, “Their monthly blood … where does it go?”
“I don’t understa—”
“The shedding of your moon blood … your unseeded spawn?”
“No,” Catherine whispered. “Women don’t flush … we throw it away … in the tr—”
“Every one of you?” Dorn said mockingly. “Every last woman in New York? Every discard, inventoried and logged!” he spat at her. The pain had become unbearable.
Dorn found the water closet. Symian held the scrolls open before his master. Dorn poured the remains of the elixir into the toilet and flushed it. As the water swirled he chanted again in that dark language that sucked the soul from the world. Only this time, it fed like a vampire on a cornucopia of limitless energy coming from the lay line. Dorn continued to chant, channeling more and more of the magic down the building and through the pipes that brought the enchanted elixir to the sewers of New York. The spell would spread through the miles and miles of mazelike tunnels, the repository of all discarded things.
CHAPTER 43
AN OFFER HE CAN’T REFUSE
Underneath the Waldorf Astoria hotel, the guardians and their new saviors caught their respective breaths under the cover of an old abandoned railway platform, away from golems or the attention of the local authorities. The station was left over from a bygone era when the Central Railroad owned most of the land that covered Park Avenue north of Grand Central Station. The remnants of track stretched east and west into blackness, beyond the meager uses of the Metro North commuter rail and Amtrak. One such spur of track stopped under the Waldorf, used by presidents and dignitaries of past eras to move about veiled from prying eyes.
“I think that was the last of them,” said Callum. He looked over the group to make sure everyone was all right.
Clarisse was still in shock over Tim’s demise, but physically unharmed. Daniel, Scott, and Allyn looked shaken in that way civilians do when they’d just escaped imminent death. Colby and Lelani were cool and collected as always—centaurs were a tough breed, and ex-NYPD were hard to rattle, whether dead or alive. Bree was at Callum’s side, leaning against him, arms wrapped around his leg, head resting on his thigh. He stroked her hair gently, thinking of all the television he and Catherine had never let her watch to shelter her from violent programming.
Tilcook had always been a big man, even among the palace kitchen staff. In his youth, he could carry a side of beef alone to the carving table and carve it into its respective cuts expertly in under thirty minutes. No one handled a cleaver better than Tilcook. Cal wondered about the life of excess and debauchery that added the extra hundred pounds these past years.