She leaned back against the rough brick wall, and with her fingertips she tentatively explored the shelf of her ribs, her legs, her arms, the back of her skull. Her protective Craft had worked. She had a few bruises, one so deep it would surface slowly over the next several days, but no broken bones.
Her shoulder bag, with its needles and beakers and burners and silk and other implements of Craft, was a greater loss than any of her injuries, but there had been no other option. A savage assailant, hurried and carrying hostages, would not pause to collect their luggage. If the Blacksuits believed the gargoyle who stole their witness had taken her, too, they wouldn’t seek her out, and she would be free to work. Besides, leaving her belongings should dispel any suspicion on Justice’s part that Tara was kidnapper rather than kidnappee.
Still, she hoped she saw that bag again.
She waited, listening with shallow breath to the furor above as Blacksuits burst into Shale’s room. It took them seconds to digest the chaos, and perhaps a minute to notice the fire escape opposite, bent and twisted where Shale hoisted himself up. The frame had not been designed to support a thousand pounds of gargoyle.
On cue, three black glass forms leapt from the infirmary window and clattered against the fire escape. Limbs surged like pistons as they climbed. Soon they reached the rooftops and vanished, continuing their hunt.
As a courier and Guardian of Seril, Shale knew how to evade pursuit. The Blacksuits sought a gargoyle carrying hostages. Shale, unburdened, could outpace and outmaneuver them.
So far, everything was going according to plan.
Tara smiled grotesquely, then winced at the pain in her side.
*
Abelard closed his eyes and ran, following the red glow of the coolant line. He tripped over a toolbox left by a maintenance monk and banged his knee against a sharp piece of unseen metal. If either metal or fall injured him, he couldn’t feel it. The shadow creature’s claws had torn holes in his leg, and numbness spread from them. With each heartbeat his feet grew heavier. Behind, he heard the shadow’s limbs clatter over stone and metal, accelerating.
He could not rely on speed to escape, but in fifteen years of working in this boiler room, playing hide-and-seek and capture-the-wrench in its maze turns and dead ends, he had seldom relied on speed.
He leapt from the floor’s edge onto a scaffold and climbed down a quick ten feet through a narrow gap between a wall and a water reservoir. Before reaching the boiler room he stepped off onto a side passage. His hands shook as he unclipped a wrench from his belt and threw it underhanded back into the gap. It clattered off the scaffold as it fell to the boiler room floor, sounding a great deal like a scared young man fleeing a predator. He retreated twenty feet into the side passage, where a ladder descended into another part of the boiler room. With one hand on that ladder’s top rung, he crouched, turned, and set the bull’s-eye lantern before him.
There had been no light in the hidden room save the glow of what he felt certain Tara would have called Craft. This thing grew in and fed on shadow. Real light might blind or injure it. Abelard had no reason to suspect his plan would work, but he needed to try something. He couldn’t run forever.
He stilled his breath and readied his fingers on the lantern’s cover. Calm. Careful. Wait.
Exhale.
Above, almost inaudible, tiny claws scraped across metal. Closer, descending the scaffold. A distinct inrush of air, amid the hundred metallic sounds of boiler and turbine and piston. Was the creature smelling for him? Could it see in the dark? How well? How smart was it? Why was it taking this long?
He tried to pray, without bothering to think who might answer.
Clicking, clattering, closer.
The hiss of foul breath deepened and grew louder. It had drawn even with the side passage.
He flicked open the lantern’s lid, and hoped.
A beam of fiery light lanced through the cloying darkness. Narrow at the lantern’s aperture, twenty feet out the beam was broad as the tunnel’s mouth.
The shadow creature had grown. It nearly filled the eight-foot-tall passage, and longer, thinner thorn-limbs trailed beyond. Smoke rose from its body where the light touched. Jagged mandibles snapped open, and fanged mouths loosed a horrible, inhuman cry.
Don’t be smart, Abelard whispered. Be fierce, be cruel, vindictive, but, please, Kos, don’t let it be smart.
Scuttling on many sharp limbs the creature launched itself down the hall toward the lantern. Shadow-flesh shriveled as it moved. Light tore steaming gaps in its body.
Abelard breathed a silent prayer of thanks and descended the ladder as if in free fall.
*
The vampire’s fangs pierced Cat’s wrist, sharp as a bee sting. The pain was brief; his lips fastened reflexively on her wrist and euphoria spread from the wound as he began to suck. Pleasure tingled into her fingers, back up and around to her heart, from there to her entire body. Perfection enveloped the world. Knots within her soul untied, or else were sliced open by the sword of bliss.
Were her eyes open or shut? Was she still sitting up, or had she slumped against the vampire as the joy of him took hold? Was she even breathing?
Paltry, everyday concerns. Ecstasy ruled her soul.
She wasn’t supposed to be here. She had a duty, someone to protect. A woman. A woman who had told her a story.
The red sun’s bulk settled beneath the horizon, and the sky outside the window dimmed. Far away there came a crash of broken glass, followed by a cry Cat heard with spiritual ears: the cry of Justice, a summons to all Blacksuits to pursue a Stone Man who had abducted a witness and a Craftswoman.
Tara.
Tara had told Cat to check on the vampire. Here he was, unharmed, healthy, glorious. Hungry.
His eyes were open.
She saw satisfaction, confusion, and revulsion superimposed on his face. Roused from sleep, he found his teeth buried in a strange woman’s wrist. He was hungry, and his will was weak. He did not push her away. A beast within him woke, stretching and yawning in his red eyes. One clawed hand rose feebly from beneath the sheets and hesitated, uncertain whether to seize her or thrust her from him, unsure whether she was real or a predatory dream.
Cat tried to think through the rush. Why had she left Tara’s side? Her orders had been to watch the Craftswoman. Cat’s memory was hazy, but she recalled a story, a suggestion, a sudden desire.
Tara had done something to her. Twisted her.
The vampire’s hand rose, curved, to grasp the back of her neck.
Pulling her wrist from his mouth was as hard as turning from the gates of paradise. She fell back off the bed and sat down hard on the tile floor. The vampire snarled and rose to a crouch, silhouetted by the last rays of the setting sun. Her blood stained his lips and his chin.
“What the hell were you doing?”
Cat’s mouth fell open.
“What. I mean.” He wiped the blood off his chin with his fingers and regarded it in fascination and disgust. “Seriously, woman. What is wrong with you? Haven’t you ever heard of consent?”
She pressed her back against the wall and slowly stood. Blood pounded in her ears. The wound in her wrist had closed when his fangs left it, but it still hurt.
“I could have killed you,” he said.
“I…” Words were hard, imprecise. Fog clouded her mind.
“Wait.” Red eyes flicked from the crown of her head to the bottoms of her boots, and back. “I’ve seen you before.”
“Before.” She nodded. “When you spoke with … Tara.” She spat the name.
His tongue flicked out, and the blood on his lips disappeared. He wiped his chin on his wrist, and licked that clean, too. “Where is she? Why are you here?”
Shaking her head did not clear her mind. “I’m … She made me come here.”
“You’re an addict,” he said, with the distaste Cat reserved for words like “pusher” and “pimp.” “You’re an addict, but even an addict would know better than to give an unconscious vampire their blood. You’ve been … not drugged.” His eyes narrowed. Vampires could see beyond the normal range of human sight, she knew. “Something’s worked through your mind. Made you vulnerable.”
“Tara did something to me. I wouldn’t have left her alone otherwise.”
How could you let someone into your mind, Tara had said with mock horror, before she bound Cat in chains forged from her own need. Gods and goddesses, that bite had felt so
good.
“Alone? Where?”
Cat didn’t answer. Justice depended on her, and she let herself trust Tara, let herself be betrayed. She shuffled unsteadily along the wall to the door, turned the handle, staggered out, and ran, lurching, down the hall. Justice railed in her mind for control, and she yearned to slip from the dead dry aftermath of the vampire’s bite into her suit’s cold embrace. If she did, though, Justice would know her sin. She could be dismissed for such a lapse, cut off from the the suit forever. She could not allow that.
“Wait!” The vampire—Captain Pelham—followed her out of the room. He wore boots and breeches already, and pulled a loose, unlaced shirt over his head as he jogged to keep pace. “I’m not staying in that bed one more minute. Something’s happened, and I want to know what.”
“That,” she said, trying to ignore the clenching nausea of blood loss, “makes two of us.”
*
Abelard heard a crash of broken glass above as the lantern shattered. Perhaps he had injured the shadow beast, perhaps not, but at least the light had slowed it. He needed every advantage he could seize. Sister Miriel kept the boiler room dimly lit so as not to damage the night vision of Technicians or maintenance crews bound for darker areas of the Sanctum. There were shadows enough here to nourish his pursuer.
He took his bearings, compression chambers to his left, yes, good, and the coal bins to his right, and ran. His cigarette he plucked from his mouth and gripped between two fingers. He needed fresh air in his lungs. Metal distended and tore behind him as the creature descended the ladder.
Winding through tubes and pipes, Abelard chose his escape path, clockwise through the compression chambers that ringed the boilers, and in through a narrow gap between a compressor and a stone wall. His heart lurched in fear as he imagined squeezing through a tight passage with the creature bearing down on him, but the next opening was three hundred feet farther along. Too far.
He turned a hard corner as a mass of shadow scrambled, slipped, and fell to the floor a few hundred yards behind him. Enough of a lead, he hoped.
He ran fifty feet. A legion of centipedes chased after, legs tickling rock and metal, the floor, the walls, the ceiling. A hundred feet, and the shadow’s speed redoubled. It smelled him. Two hundred feet, made in a mad rush, cigarette in one hand and the crystal dagger stuck through his belt.
The dagger had pinned the shadow creature to the altar. Could it harm the thing again, hold it down? Abelard hoped he did not have a chance to learn the answer to that question.
Two hundred fifty feet. Breath hissed through numberless mouths, near, so near. There, the narrow gap. He leapt into it. Cobwebs parted before him. A spider landed on his hand and fell away.
The centipede army drew even with the narrow crack and stopped. Its bulk closed out the dusk-red light. Long, thin arms slid through the crack after Abelard.
Metal caught his robes and he pushed through; fabric ripped as he tumbled into the room beyond. Or, as his torso did.
Long hooks of shadow snared his legs, and pulled him back.
Screaming, he fell. In desperation he planted one foot on either side of the crack and resisted the creature’s pull with all his strength. This only slowed his slide. He clawed for the dagger at his belt. His fingers closed around its hilt, and he stabbed at the tentacle gripping his left leg.
The crystal blade slid through the shadow and cut Abelard’s shin. He cursed, but did not drop the dagger. The creature’s strength grew as his faded. Nightmare mouths gaped above him, filled with nightmare teeth. Living shadow bubbled out through the passage, swelling in the vast dim space.
He was about to die.
In such moments, time expands. To Abelard’s surprise he found the sensation almost pleasant. He was about to be eaten by a giant shadow beast, through no particular fault of his own, and there was nothing he could do.
As the night-mandibles reared to descend, he raised his cigarette to his mouth and inhaled.
Its tip flared.
Flared.
Light hurt this thing, enough at least to anger it. What would fire do?
As the mandibles struck, Abelard plucked the cigarette from his mouth, held it as if the ember were a blade, and stabbed blindly into the shadow.
A roar shook the boiler room. Abelard sprawled back, legs his own again, cigarette still clenched in his fingers. The creature convulsed, outlined in orange flame that chewed its slick sharp edges to crumpled ash. The fire died as it consumed, and Abelard doubted it would kill the shadow, but he didn’t care. He was free, and safety near.
Lurching to his feet in a confusion of ripped robes and bloody limbs, he sprinted for the ladder to the maintenance office.
*
The sun set as Tara crouched in the basement stairwell. She imagined the chase above, Blacksuits swarming over rooftops in search of their winged quarry, who hid and ran, zigged and zagged, fast and brilliant. Night deepened and behind thick clouds the moon rose, granting Shale power and speed. The Blacksuits could not match him. When Professor Denovo defaced Seril’s Guardians and rebuilt them for police work, he would have reduced their dependence on the moon for power—a sensible design decision that left the Blacksuits slower and weaker than their stone adversaries at night.
When enough time had elapsed, Tara touched a sigil on her wrist. It glowed with inner fire, and she saw in her mind’s eye a map of the city from above, marked with a bloodred dot: the location of the tracking glyph she had cut into the back of Shale’s face.
He would never have told her what she needed to know. Nor could she hope to follow him across the rooftops when even Blacksuits could not keep pace. Besides, she believed him when he claimed not to know where his Flight was hiding. They planned to seek him when night fell.