Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods (15 page)

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

I
leaned back against the wall, establishing some sense of place. The elevator car rumbled again, and I tried to steady myself. One hand brushed across a body, though I don’t know whose.

“What’s going on?” Carter asked, the practiced cool gone from his voice.

“Nothing good,” Dorothea said. Hold on.

I could do one better. Breathing in, I reached for the Deeps and smeared the energy on my eyes. The world snapped back into sight, black-on-black.

Dorothea was at the door, levering it open with a crowbar I had no idea she’d been carrying. The woman was quite full of surprises.

“Any of you kids want to give me a hand, here?” she asked. I stepped forward, one hand running alongside the wall as the car continued to shudder. What could be moving it like this?

I grabbed the crowbar, my hands covering Dorothea’s. We pulled again, and the door shook but didn’t move.

“Carter?” I asked. I was taller, but he was clearly the muscle.

The car lurched again, and both Dorothea and I fell. The shock rumbled up my arms as I caught myself, biting my tongue.

Carter sank into his legs, keeping balance. He plucked the crowbar from its rattling on the floor, and resumed trying to open the door.

I spat out the blood and rolled up into a crouch, staying low.

“Get that door open, now!” Antoinette said. I had to agree, even though I had no idea how much of a drop there might be if the car’s cables were cut loose.

Dorothea got up, joined Carter, and the two of them muscled open the door a few inches. Carter took a long breath, then started to glow.

Actually glow. White-gold light rolled off of him, and the doors parted enough for someone to slip through.

Another manifestation of his divine heritage, though not one I’d expected. Nephilim had not been documented as being able to glow for several centuries.

It appeared that my family’s sources were incomplete. Or that Carter’s family was more highly placed within the Nephilim than I’d suspected.

Antoinette went first, as the smallest of our group. I went next, and then tried to hold the door open from the other side as Dorothea squeezed through, her sturdy breadth harder to slip through the door. The car shuddered again, but Carter kept his balance, shouted something in Gujurati, then dove through. The closing door took his shoe with it, but my roommate managed to slip out in time to protect his foot.

Then there was a scream behind me. I turned and saw an Asian woman of unknown background running down the hall, child in arms.

Behind her was some form of wraith, black, with long spindly hands containing seven joints, and buboes all up and down its rod-thin limbs. All wraiths had the faces of children—bald, bloated, and too large compared to their bodies.

One hand grasped the gems in my coat, which had been recharged by the heat of the fire. I raised my other hand, glad for the filling dinner that had replenished my own energy.

I shouted, “Malpirg!,” the Enochian word for “fire.” I reached out beyond the woman and concentrated, igniting the air between her and the wraith. The fire burned blue and white, the power source resonating with the intended effect. Turning heat into fire was a simple task, nearly as simple as such a working could possibly be.

Carter passed on my right, drawing his sword and rushing forward, blade held low. He passed the running mother, then squared up, raising the blade.

“I thought I’d cleared all of these out of this neighborhood,” Dorothea grumbled. I heard the clicks of a shotgun being loaded. My eardrums cringed in anticipation of the echo in the narrow hall.

Antoinette started chanting, her Haitian creole hurried, unsettled. Dinner aside, we’d been running full-bore for a while, and she was not the only one showing the strain. I felt like butter left out on a hot day. Soft, formless.

The fire died out, revealing a crispy but still-moving wraith. The creature moved forward, clawing at the air as if it were swimming, desperate to grab on to something, anything, to feed.

“Carter! Shield incoming!” I reached into the power of the stones once more, but instead of another fire, I formed the thought of a shield, a circular match to the Indian blade Carter wielded against the creature, his cuts keeping it at bay, preventing it from pursuing the woman as she turned into a nearby hallway and shot out of sight.

Snapping, I solidified the power, straps wrapping around Carter’s arm as the shield crackled into existence with the sound of distant thunder.

Carter flinched back from the shield at first, but the straps held on. He settled in, grabbed the handle I’d made, then took a defensive stance. He led with the shield, his sword striking around and from behind his strong defense.

Beside me, Antoinette’s chanting dropped. “None of the spirits are responding. The wraith must have them all scared.”

“That is most disconcerting,” I said. One malevolent spirit was enough to scare all the local spirits into quiescence?

“I can’t mix it up with a wraith,” Antoinette said. “I feel fucking useless.”

“Just keep an eye—”

“Coming through,” Dorothea said. The big woman slid by me, hobbling forward with a limp. She snapped her shotgun up and into firing position.

“The echo!” I said by way of protest.

“Cool it, kid,” she said, unperturbed. The woman raised the gun. “Down!” she shouted. Carter dropped to the floor, the shield covering his head and shoulders, and Dorothea fired. The report of the gun echoed off the walls, but it was muted, far less than the deafening bite that it should have been given the size of the hall.

Scorch marks scarred the wraith’s too-big face. It crossed its arms in a protective gesture as Dorothea shot again. This blast took off one of the creature’s arms, which dissipated in a sulfurous burst.

Dorothea stepped back, popping open the weapon. Smoking shells clattered to the floor, and she pulled two more out from a pocket, holding them between her knuckles.

“Stop gawking and shoot, kid,” Dorothea said.

I snapped back to attention. The wraith had recovered, slashing at Carter with its one claw. It crashed into the power-forged shield, and I felt the cracks as much as heard them. I was used to Deep-forged materials, not these lesser power sources. I was still thinking like a Greene, and there was no time to retrain my fighting mind to accommodate for lower-grade power.

As I reached out again, the energy felt farther away, as if hidden beyond a foggy valley. But through the muddled feeling, I felt the comforting cold, and grabbed once more.

If my forging was terrible, then let it be terrible. I pulled the last of the gem’s power and fastened it around the base of the creature, where its torso misted out into nothingness. I clenched my fist and solidified the energy, attaching a truck-tire-sized sphere to the creature. Gravity caught up with the spirit, and it dropped to the floor. The power-forged sphere cracked but held for the moment. It would have to be enough.

“Now!” I shouted, pointing at the wraith.

Carter jumped on the opportunity, lunging. His blade pierced the oversized nose of the wraith, bursting out the far side of its head. The creature’s black form sizzled, then evaporated around Carter’s sword, leaving blackened score marks on the blade. I let the power dissipate, and realized I was hyperventilating.

Leaning against the wall, I checked to make sure we were all still there. I’d blocked out the other civilians, who were huddled at the end of the hall. Why hadn’t they gone?

“We were too late,” I said. “She’s here.”

“No kidding,” Antoinette said, stepping out of the hall. Behind her were three children, all perhaps five, two Hispanic and one Asian. They were frozen with fear. The Hispanic boy’s trousers were wet, and after seeing the stain, I smelled urine.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said to the boys. I was far from sure that was true, but it was the thing to say, the humane thing to say.

“Let’s go find your parents,” Antoinette said. “Jake, you want to come with me?”

I joined her, and Dorothea and Carter followed us.

“You think that thing was Sister Dearest’s fault?” Carter asked.

“Hope so. Thought I’d cleared those things out this summer. This f—” Dorothea caught herself. “This city. Sometimes I don’t know if it can ever be safe.” She cracked her neck, kneading at it with one hand. She looked older in that moment, like a ship in a low tide, exposing the wear on the hull.

We left the elevators and wound through the halls. Two turns later, we found more blood.

Smears on the walls. A still body on the floor. And boot prints in the blood that continued on down the hall.

The Hispanic boy started screaming.

I took two more steps toward the blood, looked at the boots. The print left in the pool looked too much like Esther’s to do anything but set my heart to a constant vibration.

“This is bad,” I said.

“Fuck,” Dorothea said, forgetting the children. Their worries had eclipsed bad language. “Jake, you, me, and Carter go after her, now. Toni, get the kids to 7G. Ask for Caroline.”

Antoinette nodded, turning the children around. “Let’s go this way, okay? It’ll be safe this way.”

We took off down the hall, Carter in the lead, his long strides eating up yards at a time. I hustled to follow, and Dorothea, despite being the shortest by six inches, kept pace seemingly without effort. The woman was a bundle of mysteries as diverse as the city.

The bloody footprint grew fainter as we wound through the halls, but it led us far enough to take the stairs. Which was exactly far enough to be tremendously unuseful.

“How many floors does this building have?” I asked.

“Twenty,” Dorothea said.

“Great. Just great,” Carter said.

I grimaced. “Sadly, we should be able to hear screaming when we reach the right floor.”

“Kid’s right. Let’s get moving,” Dorothea said, lumbering up the stairs.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX

A
s we huffed up past the fourth floor, Carter asked, “So, what did you do before you were a Knight?”

Dorothea spoke through steady, slow breaths. “I was a beat cop. My screwup brother, Ronald, bless his heart, got himself into trouble, ended up on the street. I’d visit him week after week, tried to get him to move in with me in my place in Brooklyn. But he had to do everything on his own. Went off his meds on his own. Got himself addicted on his own. Got himself killed on his own.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. My long legs made the scaling easier than for some, but it was more concentrated activity than I was used to, layered on top of the strain of magic use.

“Thank you. I couldn’t help him, but by the time he passed, I’d come to know the community around him, the other folks carving out lives, lost between the cracks. And then Ji-hun, one of the Broadway Knights, offered me a chance to make a difference, try to help other people the way I couldn’t help Ronald. So here I am,” Dorothea said, waving at the stairwell as we reached the sixth floor. “That satisfy your curiosity?”

Carter nodded. “Sorry for your loss.”

“Yeah, thanks. Let’s see if we can keep a few families from getting as screwed up as mine, shall we?”

We got to the seventh floor before we heard the screaming coming from above. Piling out onto the ninth floor, we saw more streaks of blood, burned, sulfurous marks from the passing of another wraith. And more bodies.

Esther had abandoned all pretense of stealth, which meant that the police would be arriving soon. Though I did not like their odds against wraiths and whatever else Esther might have up her hand-stitched sleeves.

Thinking over the incredible amount of power she’d thrown around in the last days, I wondered how long she’d been preparing, how many favors the family had called in, sacrifices made.

But if she was telling the truth about waking the unborn, there was no reason to hold anything back.

The voices led us to the eighth floor. Carter took the lead, advancing sword-first. If Esther had given up on stealth, so too could we. I merely hoped that any residents who were armed wouldn’t lash out at us and ask questions later on.

I at least did not appear armed, though I had one hand on the dagger I’d taken from Antoinette’s store, in the pocket of my coat. With the gems depleted, I would need to draw blood for more workings.

We cleared the first hall, following the sound of screaming. On this floor, the paint on the walls was more cracked, the floor dirty, speckled with trash and slush. We turned the corner, and clarity combined with fear, scrambling over each other to be processed first.

A half-dozen entropy spirits were attacking the residents and walls of the floor. They had the shapes of cockroaches, pigeons, rats, and other vague forms that I couldn’t pin down.

In cities, especially in older buildings, the forces of entropy were sufficient, the decay long-running enough, to generate their own spiritual signature. This building was old enough, and poorly kept enough, that now the building itself was being turned against the inhabitants. But this was another distraction.

Dorothea grumbled. “And here we are without the Laroux.”

Carter stepped forward. “You want me to swat these things?”

“Let me handle the spirits,” I said. It came out more confident than I’d imagined, and perhaps more confidently than was justified, considering that I was fast approaching the limit of my stamina, especially if I wanted to have any reserves to face my sister.

So instead of drawing blood, I spoke to the spirits directly.

I remembered the voice my father used when speaking with spirits, reaching to the bottom of my register, and granting each word my full weight.

“I am a scion of the Greene. Leave this place, or be destroyed.”

Half of the spirits paused, turning to face me. The other half continued clawing and pecking at a Hispanic family. The father swung a baseball bat at the spirits, but the creatures were canny enough to dodge and strike around his unpracticed swings.

“Be gone!” I said, waving one arm as imperiously as I could manage. Father had always made it seem so powerful. I felt like a boy playing dress-up.

The mass of spirits was seemingly not impressed. They coalesced and continued to attack the residents. Seeing my failure, Carter charged. He bat and swatted at the spirits with his sword, which was rather like trying to clean up a dusty room with an umbrella. But it kept them from attacking. Dorothea closed and fired at the floor. I recalled the label “street sweeper,” which I’d seen assigned to shotguns at some point in the past.

But watching would not help these people. I took the job that Antoinette had done downstairs. I ran into the engagement, then slid past, squeaking along the wall behind Dorothea.

On the other side, I waved to the people. “Run! This way!” I said, picking the right-hand pathway arbitrarily.

The screaming cluster followed me down a hall with doorways on both sides, until I saw a door open, its owner peeking out at the commotion.

“Quick! Shelter these people!” I shouted more than asked, stopping at the door. The young man was wearing silk nightclothes, his eyes as wide as golf balls.

He cocked his head at me, then looked to the people. A conveniently-timed inhuman scream echoed down the hall, and the man opened his door wider, letting the people in.

“We’ll tell everyone when it’s safe to come out. Be careful,” I said, then turned and started running back to the central hall.

Carter and Dorothea had cleared out the spirits. The room was left a mess, the spirits’ corpses having become refuse and decay around the room, but it was safe enough.

“What next?” I asked. Dorothea reloaded her shotgun, while Carter wiped the ectoplasm from his blade.

“Keep going up, I bet,” Dorothea said. “If I were her, I’d leave a decoy a few floors below where she was actually going.”

I nodded. That’s what I would do, as well. “Once more to the stairs?”

And so we went. Four flights later, I was sweating, and Dorothea was breathing hard. A flight after that, we heard another set of screams layered over chaotic thumping.

Carter dashed up the last flight of stairs, taking them two at a time. I followed as best I could, breathing heavy. I reached the landing as Carter kicked open the door, revealing a pair of wraiths tearing at a wide Asian man with a beard, who stood between the creatures and two toddlers, holding a spatula in his hands as a meager weapon.

My roommate leapt into the fray, cutting high at the creatures’ darkly infantile faces. The spirits withdrew, attempting to squeeze into the hall to flank him. But Carter kept them boxed in, filling the room with his cuts and thrusts, pushing them back with each strike. It was quite impressive. His prowess and devotion to the cause far outstripped his annoyances, though I was perhaps not mature enough to let the latter go unnoted.

“Dorothea, this is all you!” he said. He’d pushed them up toward the ceiling, clearing the line of fire.

“Duck!” the Broadway Knight said, and Carter obeyed, just as she fired, the shot tearing into the spirits. I caught my breath as the two worked, watching for the moment where I would need to help, to draw blood once more. But the moment did not come. Dorothea reloaded and fired again, which left the creatures weak enough for Carter to dispatch.

We ushered the family to their apartment, and Carter once again used his miraculous power to close the man’s wounds. Their questions and worries poured out like a waterfall.

“What is going on here?” asked the man. The children clutched to his legs, knuckles white, their faces hidden behind his knees.

“There are terrible creatures here, and a woman more dangerous than any you’ll have met. Take your children to an interior room that can be locked or barred. We will do our best to extricate and banish the forces of darkness and keep your family safe, good sir,” I said.

“What?” he answered.

“What’s your name, sir?” Dorothea asked, slipping into what must have been her policewoman voice.

“Frank.”

“Frank, I’m Dorothea. I’m undercover NYPD. These people are helping me sweep the building of the criminals. Grab a bat or something and get your family to safety like my associate said. I need you to protect these little girls, just like you were when we arrived. Can you do that for me?”

The man nodded. He was clearly in shock, but his instincts had already led him to fight rather than abandon the children. He would hold. He had to.

Dorothea continued to talk the man down, gave him assurance that help was on its way.

Once the man was stabilized, he led the children to a bathroom and grabbed his best weapon, a hooked cane umbrella. It would have to do.

I imagined similar scenes playing out throughout the building. Families torn from their everyday lives and tossed into this nightmare, collateral damage incidental to Esther’s true purpose.

At this rate, the entire building would be having a nervous breakdown within minutes. Perhaps that was part of Esther’s plan. A chaos resonance for her to draw upon in her greater working to seize the Heart. We returned to the stairs once more.

I stopped at the top floor. “I don’t hear anything.”

“That’s either good, or really bad,” Carter said.

Dorothea stopped, then turned and looked out the window at the night sky. The city was like a painting from up here, distant but vibrant. She narrowed her eyes, then looked back to the door above. “It’s bad. She’s here. Watch the Rakshasa. I’ll go first so that they recognize me. Friendly fire isn’t, and all that.”

Dorothea shouldered the door open, and we followed.