Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods (14 page)

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

T
he next thing I remembered was Antoinette’s voice and someone’s hand on my arm, pulling me up.

“Jake? You okay?”

I blinked my eyes open, processing the world through too-bright lights and a catalog of pains.

“Did we get them?” I asked, my voice croaking.

“Yeah, we got ’em,” another voice said. Carter. The brightness faded, revealing the warehouse room.

Finding my feet, I saw my three companions standing around, joined by the two former captives. The Exxeven’s stench had begun to dominate the room, loam and mold and other scents of the deep underground.

“So, what now?” I asked.

Dorothea looked back to the civilians. “Now I get these people home, and you three take a breather. I’ll meet you at Delhi Heights, around the corner from the Jackson Heights station. Tell them you have a reservation under ‘Dorothea’—they’ll know what to do.”

I was still processing consciousness, but Antoinette was on top of it. “Got it. You sure you don’t want backup in case Esther comes back for these folks?”

My vision settled on the former captives. One was a young Hispanic man who couldn’t have been older than sixteen, though he had a tired, haggard look. The other was an African American woman with half her head shaved, the rest grown out naturally. Both captives had fresh bruises on their faces and hands. Apparently Esther hadn’t been gone too long, since the bruises looked human-made, not from the Exxeven.

“Thank you,” the woman said. “I think those things were an hour or so away from eating us.”

“They don’t eat humans. Not usually. They’d have to un-make you into slurry first.” I caught myself. “You’re very welcome.”

“Who the hell is this guy?” the Hispanic youth said, seemingly out of genuine curiosity rather than incredulity.

“You don’t need to know,” I said. “Dorothea will take you back home. And if you ever see that woman again, run. Just keep running until you can’t or until you find a group big enough that they can blow her to pieces. Do you understand?”

The youth’s head rocked back before his body language settled again. “You don’t need to tell me how to take care of myself, gringo.”

Antoinette squeezed my arm. I ignored it. “Clearly you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. There are forces more terrifying than corrupt police, greedy gangsters, and the casual apathy of your fellow New Yorkers. I’m sorry I cannot do more for you, but I can give you wisdom, and you should listen.”

“Forget you, man. Dorothea, let’s get out of here.”

Dorothea gave me a look that I took to be some kind of comfort, then circled up with the former prisoners, leaving me to Carter and Antoinette.

“Not helping,” Antoinette said in a low voice.

“He can refuse to listen at his own risk.”

“That kid just nearly died. Cut him some slack,” Carter said.

I jumped in as soon as he finished speaking, almost cutting him off. “And we nearly just died saving his life. Dorothea should give us the benefit of the doubt.”

“Calm down, Jake,” Antoinette said.

I took a long breath, still aching.

“I know. Let’s go get something to eat, unless Carter would rather not have Indian.”

“What I eat at home and what most Indian buffets make don’t have a lot in common, man. But I like aloo gobi and garlic naan as much as the next guy.”

My stomach grumbled in response. “Agreed.”

I waved to Dorothea, who nodded. “See you soon, kids.”

Letting the “kids” comment pass, we exited the building, staying on our toes the entire way to Jackson Heights.

When we arrived at Delhi Heights, Antoinette gave Dorothea’s instructions, and the server nodded, leading us straight past the normal dining room, around a switchback, through a locked door, and up a set of stairs to a dining room. Beaded curtains closed it off from other rooms that I took to be part of an apartment. Doubtless, the proprietors were close acquaintances of our increasingly-seemingly-connected Broadway Knight.

The combination of chicken tikka masala, naan, and heaps of basmati rice did wonders for my mood, easing the general sense of exhaustion, anxiety, and pain. I’d not been eating as heartily as when I’d been at home, due to the fact that the food courts were priced somewhere between extortion and exploitation.

I’d do well to remember that our fat-rich diet was at least partially to fuel our magic, and not just because meat-and-potatoes fare was expected from the Upper Midwest. All magic was taxing, as mental exertion burned energy just as much as physical exertion. The brain itself consumed a substantial percentage of the glucose produced by the body. The more rarefied the power source, the less strain on the system. Blood was better than stored power, and Deeps greater than any other power save the divine spark.

And the strain of reaching to the Deeps meant that my family’s sorcerous magic was even more exhausting, which led to the body burning fat reserves for energy during extended magical combats. As a result, the Greenes were as thin as rails as a matter of course. For me, the dreaded freshman fifteen made me look healthy, since upon my arrival at campus, I was so emaciated that more than one person on the street had offered to buy me lunch.

Antoinette had lamb saag, which looked somewhat like shredded grass, but turned out to be rather tasty when she shared a spoonful with me. Carter vacuumed up his aloo gobi before he could think to offer any to either of us, and then promptly ordered another round (kaali daal).

“So, when you think Captain Hobo is going to show up?” Carter asked.

“Carter,” Antoinette said, chiding.

“What? She’s a badass, but she still smells.”

“She’s saved your life how many times, and you focus on how she smells due to the duty taken upon herself to protect the citizens all but written off by society?” I asked.

“But she does smell,” Carter said, leaning back, his arms crossed.

“You’d smell too if you spent nights on stakeouts and guard duty in abandoned subway tunnels,” Dorothea said, cresting the stairs from the restaurant.

“Sorry.” Carter uncrossed his arms, shifting in his chair. He looked down at his food and took a long drink of water.

“Luis and Yvette get home okay?” Antoinette asked.

“As well as could be expected. Esther trashed their perch, so I took them to some other folks I know to get them set up temporarily. We’ll take a collection, and they’ll get by.”

“Let me know if I can help,” Antoinette said.

“Thanks. We’ll be fine. But if you want some clerks, I know some people with retail experience.”

Antoinette nodded. “We can chat after all of this is sorted.”

Our server tromped up the stairs. “Miss Dorothea. Something to eat?”

“Hell yes, Parvati. Extra-spicy chola, garlic naan, and a tall glass of milk, please.”

Parvati nodded and stepped back down toward the kitchen.

Dorothea took the last seat at the table, and gestured to the food. “Good, right?”

“Very,” I said. “Thank you for the recommendation.”

“Gotta eat after a good fight. And no reason not to enjoy yourself when you’re putting your life on the line. I helped out the family that owns this place, few years back. Queens doesn’t see a lot of action, not compared to the Bronx, but the manananggal that was kicking around here hadn’t gotten that memo, apparently.”

“Manananggal?” Antoinette asked.

“Filipino monster,” Dorothea said. “Similar to the pennangalan. They can detach their top half and fly around. Mostly go after pregnant women. Nasty. They take some killing. It came after Parvati’s sister when she was pregnant with her second kid.”

“Well done,” I said. I’d read of manananggal but never encountered one directly. The Filipino population in the cities of North Dakota was insufficient to give the creature the cover it preferred.

“So,” Antoinette said, “what’s your plan for getting us to the Queens Bearers without signaling Sister Dearest?”

Dorothea waved the question off. “Let an old woman eat first, at least. I’m not young like all of you. When a woman fights off hell beasts, she works up an appetite.”

“They’re not hell beasts,” I said.

At the same time, Carter said, “Those were not of the Pit.”

“Holy crap, they can agree!” Antoinette said, a smile on her face.

I matched the smile.

We nibbled at our food while Dorothea waited for her order and Carter wolfed down all of the rice while waiting for his second plate. I may have helped with the rice. As I said. Taxing.

The second round of food arrived, and Dorothea would allow no questions while she ate. When the chola was demolished and Carter had finally eaten his fill, napkin on the table, his chair scooted back so he could stretch out and slouch, Dorothea resumed.

“So here’s the thing. When I told you I had a quiet way in, I wasn’t strictly telling you the truth.”

At once, Antoinette, Carter, and I all asked, “What?” in varying tones and volumes.

Dorothea dabbed her mouth, then set down the napkin. “Don’t get all worked up. I can do it, I just haven’t decided specifically
how
to do it. I’ve gotten into and out of way worse situations, and I needed you to come with me for those people right then, no time for arguing or negotiating. You did what you promised, now I’m going to keep up my end. I just need a little bit of time to digest and think.”

I stood, pushing my chair back. “While you’re digesting, my sister could be tearing apart an entire borough looking for that Heart. Think faster.”

Dorothea took a long drink from her water. “So we need to do two things at once, which is what makes this tricky.” She held up a finger. “One. Get to the Bearers so we can protect them. Two. Do it so Crazy Bitch doesn’t find us, or them. One I can do, no problem. Two is the harder part. If we’re on defense, we’ll know the terrain, have the advantage of numbers again.”

“Numbers didn’t do us much good at the park.”

“But it did. We won the fight, boy, just not the war. And if she comes at the Raksha while we’re there, believe me that we’ll have numbers even more. Most of them don’t like fighting, doesn’t mean that they can’t fight. And three kids who know their neighborhood are as dangerous as a gangbanger with a .22, if the kids are smart enough. And these kids? They’re plenty smart.”

Carter tipped his chair back, keeping full control even as he approached a likely tipping point. “Excellent, so you’ve got the kids from
Home Alone
or something. You willing to get them killed for this?”

“Where else are they supposed to go? They live here too,” Dorothea said. “That’s how it is here. Trouble doesn’t often come knocking, but when it does, Queens faces it together.”

“I thought that was Brooklyn,” Carter said.

Dorothea shrugged. “Them too. New York’s had a few bad patches the last decade or so: 9/11, Irene, Sandy. Folks are gruff on the day-to-day, but when things get tough, we know we’re all in this together.”

“That’s good to know. Have you had enough time to think to tell us what your strategy is, or should we just head to an apartment tower and start knocking on doors?” I asked. The food was a pleasant enough distraction, but it was a distraction. And Esther was never much for distractions.

Dorothea took another sip of her milk, then nodded.

“Here’s what we’re going to do.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

Q
ueens is a big borough. In terms of sheer area, it’s ten times the size of the nearest town to the Greene compound, and one thousand times the population. There’s a huge range between the up-and-coming neighborhood of Astoria, Woodside’s one hundred cultures mashed up next to one another in a residential district, the doing-okay apartment towers in Forest Hills, and the not-doing-so-hot streets of Jamaica. Add to that the fact that Queens just sort of bleeds into Long Island, and it all adds up to make one of the most heterogeneous urban areas and what turns out to be the most ethnically diverse county in the nation, possibly the world.

Though it seemed likely that Hong Kong or one of the bigger Indian cities like New Delhi might have it beaten out, I’d not taken the time to make a serious comparison.

The Queens Raksha lived in Forest Hills, which sat somewhere in the middle of the income distribution for Queens. It was a far cry from the clean upmarket brand-saturated streets of the Upper West Side or the glamour of Times Square, but it was all still New York.

We walked onto a full subway train, but at the sight of Dorothea, a half-dozen people got up out of their seats, deferring to her in a way I’d never seen before, even for other older women or parents with children.

There was a secret code to the city, an insider set of understandings, which I’d clearly only begun to discover even existed, let alone being party to them myself. Perhaps I never would.

The E ran express to our stop, which meant I didn’t have too much time for the claustrophobia to set in. Having a seat to myself rather than being crammed in like standing sardines in wool coat packaging also helped, to be sure.

We filed out at the Kew Gardens stop, not clustering up, since “A white kid, two black women, and an Indian guy walk out of a subway together” wasn’t quite inconspicuous enough, even in NYC. The younger three of us could usually get away with it, and it was possible, I suppose, to rely on the assumption that people would take Dorothea for Antoinette’s mother, despite the fact that they looked nothing alike.

Regardless, we assembled on the street. I’d not spent any amount of time in Kew Gardens before, so I took the sights in as new. Already in the distance I could see several apartment towers in a cluster, like a gigantic brick stand of trees.

“Where are we headed?” I asked as I scanned the streets. The most notable elements were the slightly suburban feel to the neighborhood and a preponderance of signs in Cyrillic. Russian population led me to start flipping through my Russian folklore Rolodex, appraising possible creatures that might be in the area, spirits accessible to Esther for when she struck.

Consequently, it meant that I missed what Dorothea had said.

Too embarrassed to ask again, I merely stepped to and followed the older woman as she crossed the street, bearing for the apartment towers.

The towers looked similar on the outside. Once we were inside, they became a labyrinth. I lost track of where we were three times before we made it to the elevator.

“How does anyone get where they’re going in this building?” I asked.

Dorothea turned around and narrowed her eyes. I stopped, watching and waiting for her to speak.

“Keep quiet. We already stand out like a sore thumb,” she said.

“That might be as much due to your bag lady costume as anything,” I whispered.

Carter failed to restrain a chuckle, but Dorothea was unmoved. She turned around again and resumed, leading us around yet another corner and (finally) to a bay of elevators.

“When we get there, you just keep an eye out for your sister and let us do the talking, okay?”

“Understood,” I said, well familiar with the request. Again, my attempts at giving context seemed to have gone awry.

The elevator chirped weakly, a battery fading or speaker malfunctioning. The part of my brain that had been perpetually terrified since seeing the first body on the news echoed fear in my mind.
It’s her. She’s already gotten to them. The building itself is afraid.

I gulped, and stepped into the elevator. The door closed after us, and before we could start ascending, the entire structure shuddered.

“Crap,” Dorothea said.

Then the lights went out.