Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods (7 page)

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

A
fter a short subway trip (that being short for me—used to trips between eastern Queens and Manhattan, as opposed to Manhattanites themselves, who probably regarded it as a nearly unbearable journey, their world compressed to a single island), we reached the East Village. The people around us came from all walks—still early enough in the day to get professionals headed to work; laborers shuttling to wherever there was construction to be done or jobs to be had; harried mothers with double-long strollers and wailing children; and beatific mothers wearing their babies in a self-assured style.

“And you’re certain that he’s not
that
kind of agent?” I asked as we made our way to the subway exit. “This is New York. I’m told there are many of those here.” Some rushed or merely selfish commuter opened the emergency exit gate, which activated the ear-piercing alarm that would persist for half a minute while the impatient culprit quite handily escaped the hearing loss himself.

Carter rubbed at his temples as we oriented ourselves. Carter found his bearings, then led us along East 8th Street, passing pizza parlors, chain pharmacies (they always seemed to come in twos—where CVS went, so too would there be a Duane Reade—like twinned stars), and other shops on the way to the hipper sections of the neighborhood. Bars began to dominate, interspersed with avant-garde buildings like the Preschool of the Arts—a massive fortress made out of thousands of glass panels that looked as if it had been carved into existence by the deliberate stroke of a gigantic sculptor.

Walking past a row of apartment buildings that alternated haphazardly between red and white, Carter stopped us. “This is it. Apartment 3.”

“And does he know to expect us?” I asked. One thing my family had in common with New Yorkers is that they didn’t like being called on without notice. My father greeted unannounced visitors with a double-barreled shotgun on his hip and a ritual knife in his boot.

“It’ll be fine,” Carter said. “He said that his agent would be expecting us. That was while you were outside, hopefully reflecting on how to keep your mouth shut.”

I looked to Antoinette for support, but none was forthcoming.

Focus on what’
s important,
I told myself. Carter’s and my childish bickering was not it. First, stop Esther and save the city. Then conspire so that I never have to listen to Carter’s inane cartoons again.

Carter pressed the buzzer at the front door, and a moment later, a matching buzz answered and Carter pulled the door open without effort. I allowed Antoinette to go first, and as I stepped in, Carter let the door swing closed on me. I reached out to hold it open, and found it far heavier than Carter had let on. I fell back a step then widened into a powerful stance and forced the door open long enough to slip through.

Childish.

The hall itself was spartan, dirtied tile on the floor and faded wallpaper on both sides. We found number 3 at the far end of the hall. Carter again stepped forward, claiming the role of chief door opener perhaps due to his strength, or perhaps to avoid having to acknowledge that I existed, consistently two steps behind him.

Carter rapped on the door three times, then took a step back. Antoinette stood to his left, and I took the place between them.

I heard one, two, three locks and clasps release, then the door swung open to reveal an Adonis in a skintight T-shirt.

New York City contained far more truly beautiful people than I’d ever seen at home, and this agent was no exception. He looked not at all unlike the models I saw in the magazines left in the common room at my dormitory: casual strength and flawless features.

He held before him a bracelet adorned with a half-dozen gemstones, enough to create a potent protective charm. If we weren’t welcome, the bracelet would have the power to knock us all the way to 7th Street.

The silence broke when he said, “You have terrible timing.”

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“I have class in twenty minutes, and it’s not exactly around the corner,” he said, slipping on a pair of worn sneakers. “You want to talk, follow me.”

He slung a bag over her shoulder and stepped out into the hall to close and relock the door.

“Someone’s after the Hearts. We were sent to help keep you safe,” Antoinette said.

“The Gardener said this would keep me safe,” the man said, holding up the bracelet to display the gems. “I’m not sure why he sent you.”

“Most likely to get us out of his finely-coiffed hair,” I said.

“That seems like him,” he said, starting off for the front door at the archetypal running-walk of native New Yorkers.

We hopped to in order to follow, and were out the front door in an instant, bearing west on St. Mark’s.

“So who is this woman that’s got everyone’s pants in a twist?” the agent asked as he speed-walked down the street.

“My sister.”

The man raised one perfectly-groomed eyebrow.

“Sorry,” Antoinette interjected. “What was your name?”

“I’m Nate,” he said. “Your sister?” Nate hopped between threads like a veteran weaver.

“You might call me the white sheep of my family. My sister has grave designs for this city, but if we can keep even one of the Hearts from her . . .”

“Sure,” Nate said. “It’s like a Horcrux thing in reverse. I got the briefing.”

I, apparently, had not. “Horcrux?” I asked.

Carter said, “He’s culturally illiterate.” I didn’t need to look to see his smirk.

“How’s that working for you?” Nate asked.

“Poorly,” I said. “But being versed in popular culture is not what will save this city.”

“Maybe say that a little louder. That’d be great,” Carter said, gesturing toward the people on the street.

Nate kept moving. “You don’t think I’m actually going to let you shadow me all day, do you? I have things to do.”

“You were chosen as the Bearer for a reason. It is a sacred duty, and for the sake of all New Yorkers—” I said, but Nate cut me off again.

“I know my duty. Every damn day I regret taking tall, dark, and creepy’s offer, but whatcha gonna do? Here’s the deal,” Nate said as we waited for the crossing light to turn. “You work around my schedule, and what I say goes. I’m the Bearer, you are just the muscle.” Looking at me, Nate added, “Plus whatever he is.”

Everything about him was electric, foreshortened, like he was coiled energy let loose on the world. The light turned, and he set off.

“That’s fine,” Antoinette said, hurrying to catch up. “But we also need to go after the other Hearts. So one of us stay with you, the others will go, until we can account for all of the Hearts and can make a real battle plan.”

Nate asked, “So, who’s it going to be? You, white sheep, or the Nephilim knight here?” Nate gestured to Carter with the epithet.

“It seems likely that Esther can track my movements when she needs to, so it should not be me. Perhaps Carter should stay with you?” I said.

We wove through the crowds on the sidewalk, leading us toward Broadway, and presumably NYU. I checked my watch: 9:52. We were unlikely to reach any NYU buildings before ten.

Carter said, “Fine. Just don’t go picking any fights.” He looked straight at me.

“I have no desire to enrage an entire pack of lycanthropes, thank you very much. I’ve not much sense when it comes to people, but I’ve enough for that.”

“Good. If someone’s going to kick your ass, it should be me.”

“Aren’t we a happy little family?” Antoinette gestured to Carter. “Give me your phone. We need to be able to get in touch in a hurry.”

“I have your number,” Carter said.

“I’m not going to count on”—Antoinette looked at his phone—“CREDO to have signal where we’re going. This will only take a minute.”

Antoinette kept walking as she fiddled with the phone, an onyx gemstone in her hands. I stepped forward and helped clear the sidewalk for Nate so that he would be able to walk without worry of blindly colliding with an equally-distracted pedestrian heading in the opposite direction.

We approached the train station, and Antoinette handed Carter back his phone. “That does it. I’ve twinned the gems, so make sure to keep this near your phone. It’s like Bluetooth, okay?”

Carter nodded. He slipped the onyx into his coat pocket along with the phone. He reached into a different pocket and handed Antoinette a three-inch-tall burnished statuette of the Shiva Nataraja, the lord of dance.

“Show this to the alpha. She knows what it means.”

Nate coughed to grab our attention, speeding ahead of the group. “This is all great mysterious portentousness, but if Slumdog Millionaire is escorting me to class, we need to start running. I can’t afford to be late again.” And then he set off down the street. Carter leaned forward and dashed after her, a short wave pointed back in our direction.

“Well, that was bracing,” Antoinette said, turning to me. Time to catch a ferry.”

“The boat, not the fae?” I asked for verification.

“Yep,” she said.

“Indeed.”

And so we went.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

“S
o, Staten Island?” I asked. “I admit, I’ve never been.”

“You don’t get seasick, do you?”

I’d never been on a boat larger than a rowboat.

“I couldn’t say. But if it must be the ferry, then so be it.”

Antoinette smiled. “You’ll be fine.”

I was not fine.

In a cruel joke that some more limited in their thinking would take to reflect the Younger Gods’ disapproval of my breaking from the fold, the rolling crash of the Hudson River made a slow-shifting, nearly tectonic display of the ferry deck and set my stomach off like it had been thrown into a tornado. It was as if the god beneath the Eastern Seaboard itself was disturbed from its fetal sleep, wary of the ritual and its imminent birth should we fail in our task.

Antoinette was amused. She stood with feet wide, rolling with the movements of the deck, her hand on her phone.

But I, child of the terrifying, monstrous Greene family, spent the majority of the trip with my head over the rails, stomach threatening to rebel.

I did my best to roll with the movement of the ship, the changes in relative down pulling my stomach from side to side as the ferry cut its way through the water. But even as I moved with the vessel, my eyes locked on the horizon, my stomach still rebelled.

“We couldn’t have taken the bus?”

Antoinette stifled a laugh. “The Staten Island pack has very specific rules on how visitors are to present themselves. And that doesn’t include crossing to the island by bus.”

“Alas. What else do I need to know for meeting this pack? I imagine that the Gardener’s antipathy toward my family may be mirrored by the pack, and it would be folly for my family to triumph merely due to the Greene reputation hamstringing our ability to gather allies.”

“You might have been thinking about that when you called the Gardener a coward. Didn’t your parents teach you when to shut up?”

“I’ve grown quite confused as to which lessons of my family I should follow, given that they’re a clan of murdering sociopaths. The result seems to involve a great deal of awkwardness.”

I looked to the horizon, trying to calm the storm in my gut. We were pulling into the harbor.

“When we get there, let me do the talking. They don’t react well to strangers, so we’ll need to introduce you after making our hellos. And try to keep a lid on the crazy-old-man act, can you?”

“Sadly, I do not really know what you mean by that.”

The ferry stopped, and the crowd started filing off the boat. “Here we are,” Antoinette said. She put a hand on my back. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Once we get on dry land, perhaps.”

Two more pats, and I stood, slowly, then followed my guide to the island of Staten.

Antoinette led us to a bus stop, where we picked up the S74 bus. Apparently, a bus on the island was fine, but a bus
to
the island was not. I fidgeted with worry for most of an hour as we made our way to Latourette Park.

As we disembarked from the bus, I looked up at the park, which dominated the middle of the island, taking a seemingly circuitous but surprisingly rapid path through the buildings until we reached a hill where the trees raised high, a stand of nature that seemed to have resisted all modernity like a battered castle wall.

“Where is this pack located?” I asked as we hiked up a path that grew rapidly steeper only twenty yards in. Antoinette picked her way forward, moving slowly, but with confidence.

“Up this hill and then a few minutes into the forest. But they’ve already seen us.”

“You’ve seen them watching?” I asked. I tried to match her footfalls as best I could, crouching to lower my center of gravity and maintain my balance. I’d never been an agile child, and as I inherited my father’s height, growing taller only served to distribute my clumsiness equally across my full six feet. It was dry ground, which was better than being on the churning, rolling mass of the ferry, but going from an upset stomach to tricky footing was a combination that promised several forms of disaster.

I prayed that it would, in this case, fail to deliver said disaster.

“No, but I can feel them watching.”

“That is an extraordinary sense with which I am not familiar. Can you describe the feeling, so that I might be attentive for it?”

“It’s not like that. It’s just that my skin is crawling and I feel like I’m being sized up for dinner,” Antoinette said.

“Ah. I’ve been feeling like that since I realized my sister was back in town. Perhaps that is why I cannot tell now. Hmm. Isolating variable stimuli in preternatural senses. That reminds me of an essay I read in Alexander’s treatise on the phenomenology of night-dweller attacks. Or was that Hufford?”

“Don’t care, Jake. Concentrate on not falling and dying.”

I opened my mouth to respond, then slipped on a loose rock and tumbled fifteen feet down the hill, scraping, banging, and bruising my knee, side, arms, and ego on the way down.

In a matching display of equipoise, I said, “Aaah!”

I picked my head out of the dirt cloud I’d kicked up to see Antoinette sledding down the hill after me on her sturdy boots, plowing aside small pebbles before she jumped down to a patch of dirt next to me.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I took stock, wobbling up to my feet. Red-hot pain cut like sandpaper across my knees and shins, and I felt something warm and damp at my face. My hands were raw, scored with dirtied cuts, so I wiped my face on my coat, stinging pain revealing that I’d been right about a wound at my cheek.

“I will live. That serves me right for not being more attentive to your advice.”

Antoinette smiled. “That sounds smart. Let’s take our time. A few minutes probably won’t be the end of the world, here.”

Which was likely correct, though it was difficult to think of doing any less than my best at my fastest while Esther was on the loose. But it was the steady hand that plucked the quintessence from the fire.

“Please, lead on,” I said, gesturing up the hill.

Slower this time, we made our way up the incline. I set aside pride and climbed on all fours, leaning into the slope for better balance, scuttling up the hill in my most careful climb, keeping pace with Antoinette fairly well.

When we reached the summit, I pulled open my bag and dug about for antiseptic and some bandages. I cleaned my knees and my face while following Antoinette into a stand of trees.

“These are old trees. I didn’t think any this ancient remained in the city.”

Antoinette walked by an ancient elm, patting it as she went. “The forest protects the pack, and the pack protects the forest. The nature spirits are stronger here than anywhere else in the city. The parks have some heavy hitters, but SI makes the rest of them look like lightweights.”

“I had no idea.”

“Most people don’t. In fact, most New Yorkers don’t ever come to Staten Island at all. That’s the way the pack likes it,” Antoinette said.

I took note. Cultivating an atmosphere of solitude was certainly relevant to my interests. Perhaps when I was done with college, a relocation to Staten Island was in order. Assuming the pack would allow my presence. Which was first assuming they didn’t rip my throat out in a few minutes.

As if to validate my concerns, a howl cut through the air, freezing me in place. A chill wind accompanied the howl, billowing my coat as if to suggest that it was no more protection from the wolves than the cold.

“Was that?” I asked.

Antoinette gave me a look. I took it as a yes.

“Let me do the talking.”

I was hearing that a lot this week—“Let me do the talking.” “I’ll handle this.” “What he means is . . .”

As if I needed the reminders that my interpersonal skills left something to be desired, that my upbringing had left me singularly unprepared to interface with the world at large. The constant repetition rather made me feel like a hanger-on, a vestigial limb. Despite my access to devastating supernal power, I was not to speak to this person, or that person. I was just the hired gun whose gun happened to be the raw power of creation instead of an AK-47.

It was tiresome, but it was better than getting my throat ripped out.

The bushes around us rustled, and within a second, five lupine figures emerged from the brush. The largest were nearly the size of mastiffs, though two were closer to golden shepherd in their build. Their coats were matted with twigs, mud, and leaves, as if they’d been playing. Or hunting.

A medium-sized wolf in the middle of the pack raised its head, and a shadow passed over its body. When the shadow resolved, the wolf was larger, thicker of limb, less furry. Several more shadows passed in quick succession, and the wolf became a woman in stuttering jumps that tricked my eyes. When the shadows receded, a woman with high cheekbones and prominent Native American coloring faced Antoinette, wearing a camouflaged hooded sweatshirt and well-worn jeans.

“Who are you?” the woman said, her voice husky, thick with restrained power.