Captive Soul (31 page)

Andy—her ass had been hanging in the wind since the day she first started shoving water around. She had all these amazing specialized skills she was supposed to know and learn, and only vague descriptions in books that left her guessing. Even better, she was supposed to teach what she didn’t really know to all the water Sibyls showing up at Motherhouse Kérkira.

“Okay, okay.” She started pushing people back. “Get away from me or I’ll never stop blubbering.”

Jake Lowell glanced at the inch or so of water now coursing around the basement floor, then looked at John with something like relief that Andy might get the sprinklers under control in a few.

She wiped her face, then slowly shut off the flow to each spigot.

“They’ll have to be repaired,” she told Jake.

“I’ll add it to the list.”

John saw the look in Andy’s eyes, and in Jake’s. This was an old conversation between them, and a comfortable one.

“I haven’t knocked out any walls,” she said.

“You haven’t,” Jake agreed.

“I don’t like the look on your face, Jake. There’s still stuff you aren’t telling us.”

“I was waiting.”

“For what?”

Jake shrugged. “A chance we could get through this without needing paddles and canoes.”

Andy squeezed water out of her hair and made sure to drip some on Jake. “Fuck you, you scrawny winged Dracula.”

Jake grinned at her, lots less demon, very human.

“Spill it,” Andy said.

Jake slowly stopped smiling, and before he spoke, he looked positively grim. “I don’t believe this information was completely lost to the Mothers. Nor is it lost on them that the universe tends to provide for its own needs. Much as when you manifested your talent, Andy, other, younger water Sibyls began to appear.”

Dio had balanced herself so perfectly on the exercise ball that the rubber could have been bolted to the floor, but after Jake spoke, the whole ball started to shake. “What are you saying?”

Jake held up his hand and counted off. One. “Each Motherhouse had the birth of a Sibyl gifted with projective talents after centuries of only the most minor abilities in this respect.” Two. “All of you were of similar age.” Three. “Andy miraculously appeared with her abilities.” Four. “She, too, was of similar age—”

“They knew we’d be needed,” Dio said, coming off the exercise ball she’d been sitting on and walking to the stone wall beside her, her back to John and Jake and her quad. “That’s why the Mothers let me fight.”

The undertone in her statement made John angry and sad all over again.

That’s why they let me fight … not because they thought I was worth anything
.

“And why they let me be claimed,” Camille said, with almost the same undertone.

“And they still didn’t train you,” John said, wishing he could call up the Sibyl Mothers and have some long … discussions.

“They didn’t know how to train me,” Camille said. “They still don’t know how.”

“They’re probably scared shitless we’ll wipe them out.” Bela came off her ball and kicked it back toward the exercise equipment. “
I’m
scared shitless we will.”

“We’re weapons to use against unbeatable numbers and insurmountable power,” Camille said. “We’re—”

She left off again, gazing at her sister Sibyls, who didn’t seem to be able to go where she needed them to go.

Jake said it for them, in his analytical Astaroth tones. “You are sacrifices for the greater good.”

“Kinda like the self-destruct cycles on spaceships in all the sci-fi movies,” Andy mused, looking up at the ceiling. “The doomsday device. They deploy us, knowing we’ll scorch the earth and wreck the world, but some people will survive.”

“That’s my take on it,” Camille said. “I was able to learn some basic barriers and self-protections from Elana, which I’ll start teaching you tomorrow, but even with those, if we use projective energy at the level we’ll need to use it, there’s not a huge chance that we’ll all walk away.”

Dio faced them again, her anger evident in her expression and tone. “So when this all goes to hell in a hand-basket, we’re supposed to sacrifice ourselves to rescue these women who—who just put us aside?”

Bela paced, hitting puddles of water as she walked. “Not just them.”

Andy’s laugh was real and bittersweet at the same time. “Don’t you all get it? We’re supposed to save the world. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we were made.”

John watched the four women, hoping one of them would kick up more of an objection to this idea. Most of his hopes were pinned on Dio, who seemed to have the most anger, or Bela, who had Duncan to think about.

But really, he knew better.

They were Sibyls, no matter how their own had treated them, no matter what anybody else thought about them. When they’d taken their oaths to protect the weak and to fulfill their roles as mortar, pestle, broom, and flow of their fighting quad, they’d meant every word.

Bela raised her eyes to Jake.

“The time may come,” she said, glancing at John, “where we’ll have to count on you and your friends to make sure we can do what we have to do.”

Fast, fast rage gripped John. He glared at Jake. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll have my sword and pistol out protecting them. I won’t get in the way.”

Not a single one of them looked like they believed him, especially not Jake, but at least Jake was nice enough to say, “Duncan may not be so cooperative.”

“He will if you explain it to him.” John knew he had to be as red as a damned beet, but he couldn’t help it.

“He might try to do something stupid and heroic,” Jake said.

“Yeah, well …” It was John’s turn to look away, because his brain was whizzing through ten thousand ways to save their lives.

“This is all serious, and we have to deal with it,” Bela said, “but we also have patrol.”

“We probably don’t have to worry about dying tonight.” Andy gave one of the exercise balls a good kick and sent it spinning. “We haven’t found shit-all on these assholes for weeks.”

Bela fidgeted where she was standing, then finally spat out what must have been on her mind all evening. “We’ve got a better chance tonight. I cracked the elemental code on that tooth.” She touched her pendant. “I modified my charm to help me detect muted energy, even at fairly low levels.”

John felt a pleasant shock, then something he hadn’t expected: anticipation.

“Well, let’s go, then,” Andy said. “Anything to get my mind off all the rest of this crap.”

Bela looked at Jake again, and Jake started to change.

John hadn’t ever seen the man in his demon form before. He had to see the transition.

Jake pulled off his shirt and dropped it on the mat where he was standing. His eyes shifted from blue to golden, and his lips pulled back to show large, pointed fangs, top and bottom, and a mouthful of sharp teeth. Claws curled out from his fingers. His skin went pearl white, and a few seconds later, a double pair of white, leathery wings unfurled from his back. He gave John a nod and a snarl, flapped those massive wings once, sending the exercise balls scooting and floating, and then popped out. Just vanished. Poof. Gone.

John didn’t like that. He stared at the ceiling, the walls. Wherever the bastard had gone, he was probably getting help in case he had to snatch John and Duncan out of play in a battle when the women tried to do their thing.

Wonder if Rakshasa and Astaroth are an even match in one-on-one combat
.

Because if Jake tried something like that, they just might get that question answered.

(
 33 
)

Camille walked down the dirty pavement with John and her quad, listening to the creak of her battle leathers in the cold night air. She was letting Bela take point with Andy because of Bela’s modified charm, but also because she didn’t think she had ever been so tired in her life. Dio had already fallen back to take sweep-up, but Camille usually had a sense of where she was. No such thing right now. She didn’t even know what day it was—well, night, now.

The last few days had blurred together completely. The time she spent working with Elana had pushed her to her limits, taken her straight to the edge. She hadn’t seen daylight the entire time she was underground, and even though she didn’t have nearly the problem with enclosed spaces that most fire Sibyls did, it still had been a little much.

Everything in the New York City night seemed too loud, too bright, too everything—especially the stench at the docks when they finally stopped walking. They were right back where they had started weeks ago, staring into the darkness with treated lenses, swapping binoculars back and forth, but Bela had eyes free, her charm gripped in her hand as she studied the dock entrance.

“Can you do this, beautiful?” John’s concern was evident in his tone, in the way his hand rested gently against her back.

She wanted to fold into him and let him carry her home. “I can make it. I have to. As soon as we find what we’re looking for, I’ll crash until we absolutely have to get up again.”

“So we’re agreed,” Andy said, hanging the binoculars around her neck. “We find them tonight. We have the OCU stake them out, keep them under watch. We sleep, we eat, we learn barriers, and we go after them.”

“Simple but elegant,” Bela said. “I’m sure they’ve been watching us for days and weeks. Maybe we can return the favor. And I’m not seeing anything on this dock.”

They moved on to the next dock, and the next. Camille held John’s hand even though that was not proper patrol procedure, because she just didn’t care. She had missed him so much, and the thought that there might be a rift between them made everything feel too hard.

When they came up empty at the fourth dock, she let herself look at him, and the handsome outline of his tanned face, and the way his dark hair spilled into his green eyes as he scouted for whatever he could see in the dark.

She really was in love with him. No question about that. It just didn’t seem reasonable or rational to discuss that right now, and maybe not ever.

It figured that just when she’d finally worked out that she was probably supposed to die to save the world, at last she had something she really, really wanted to live for.

He must have felt her gazing at him, because he looked at her. His face shifted from focused and stern to soft and totally hers in a split second, and she knew he wanted to kiss her. He wanted to make love to her. The way he let her see that with no shame or hesitation took another little piece of Camille’s heart.

“You better stop staring at me like that in public, beautiful.” His voice was so quiet, pitched for only her to hear, and she loved the shivers it gave her.

“I’m tired,” she said, squeezing his fingers, “but not that tired. Save some energy for me when we get home.”

“Always.”

“I think I’ve got something.” Bela sounded uncertain, but the words brought Camille to full alert. She turned toward the mortar of her triad, who was slowly approaching the edge of the sixth dock.

“What does it look like?” Andy asked. “I’m not seeing any demon trace with the goggles.”

Bela kept walking, stopping, then walking again. “It’s not anything I can see. Their elemental charm disperses most traces. This is more a sense that something was here.”

Camille joined Bela. She lifted her fingers to her dinar, then extended her other hand toward Bela’s hand and the charm she was gripping in her palm. “Can I try to boost your awareness with some fire energy?”

Bela gave her a wary look, but Camille knew she was thinking about last year, when the four of them had managed to combine their sentient talents enough to track demons all over Manhattan. They’d had no idea how dangerous it was … but it worked.

“This is small potatoes,” Camille told her. “I can control it.”

Bela nodded, and Camille put her hand over Bela’s. Carefully, keeping in place the rudimentary self-protections she had learned from Elana and doing what she could to extend those to Bela, Camille drew a measured amount of fire energy into her, through the dinar, and sent it back out again along her arm and down her hand, into Bela’s skin and into the charm Bela was holding.

When her energy touched Bela’s charm, Camille felt the impact in her teeth.

Bela sucked in a breath, blinked, and said, “Unbelievable.”

Camille looked in the direction Bela was looking, and she could see it, too. Red demon trace. Yellow demon trace. Green demon trace. Stomped and restomped paths of elemental energy, hundreds and hundreds of them. Too many to count, too many to even begin to follow—but the strongest traces led off the docks and back into the city, in the general direction of Central Park. The air took on a whispering, sulfur-ammonia stench. Created. Eldest. Asmodai. Other things Camille couldn’t even identify. The size and scope of it made the city seem distant and strange behind them, like there couldn’t possibly be so many lives this close to such a massive amount of perverted energy and danger.

Camille let go of Bela’s hand and stopped her pull on the fire energy.

If she was tired before, she was bone-deep exhausted now.

Bela let go of her charm and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. “That was a hell of a lot of trace. What have they been doing, importing demons and Created?”

“No idea,” Camille said, “but it’s not good.”

“I’ll call it in.” John pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Jack and the guys will get in touch with the Port Authority, see who has been shipping in this area, and nail down which of our friendly neighborhood crime lords has hired himself some nasty, furry buddies.”

“At least we’ll know whom to kill,” Andy said, maybe because she was really ready to kill something. Camille wasn’t even sure Andy would be that discriminating at this point.

John stepped away from the Sibyls so his secure cell would have a prayer of working, and she heard him relaying in quick, terse sentences what they’d found.

“What do you think, Camille?” Bela asked. “The park? Farther north—or maybe west? With all that we just saw, they could be hiding out in Jersey.”

“I know they’ve been concealing themselves, but the East and West Ranger groups have covered just about every inch of that territory while we’ve been watching the docks and hunting at night.” Camille frowned, trying to decide if she was blowing that area off too easily. “They might be in Jersey, but not in the numbers those traces suggested.”

“They’ve got a central location here in Manhattan,” Andy said. “I feel that in my guts.”

Camille checked her own instincts. “I’m with you on that.”

Bela gave it some consideration, then pointed toward the center of the city. “Let’s start where everything seems to start, then. The park.”

“We’ll focus on the stronger traces and where they go.” Andy smiled. “That works for me, following the insects back to their nests, like good exterminators.”

“They’re on it,” John said as he stuffed his phone back in his pocket. “Nick and Creed Lowell had already mapped this area out pretty well—this is one of Ari Seneca’s high-activity areas. Blackmore’s pulling together strike patrols to move in and check all of his known sites and listed properties.”

Camille’s heart stirred, giving her the tiniest flood of energy. After all this time, finally, some definite progress.

“We’ll go in near Columbus Circle and walk the boundary,” Bela said as they headed through Manhattan toward the park.

Camille couldn’t help thinking it would be hard to get that close to home and not run to the brownstone to her quiet little room with its quiet little walls and paintings and tuck herself in for the rest of the night.

Just walk the park. Let John call in what you find—
then
you can sleep
.

It seemed to take ten hours to get to the entrance, but Camille knew that was her fatigue talking. She walked beside Bela and made herself keep pace in case Bela needed her to enhance the charm again. John was right behind them with Andy, and now and then Camille caught the windy rush of Dio’s energy. She was glad Dio had their back. Dio could be hard to tolerate in so many ways, but she was loyal, sharp, alert, and maybe the best fighter in the whole quad.

In the early throes of winter, Central Park’s normal dirt and grass and smells seemed muted in favor of the limestone-copper scent of wet rocks and the fertile, loamy odor of rotting leaves. The darkness seemed a little darker, especially around the playground area. They skirted along the south entrance, turning at Grand Army Plaza and heading up toward the zoo. Now and then Bela glanced across the park in the general direction of the brownstone, and Camille wondered if she was tired, too, and thinking about meeting up with Duncan and cuddling until morning.

When they were about even with Wollman Rink, Bela finally stopped walking, glanced at Camille, then glanced west toward the brownstone again.

Camille felt the beat of her own pulse pick up all over again. “Are you getting something?”

Bela tilted her head. “I don’t know.”

Camille moved a little closer to Bela, fishing around with her own senses. “When did the feeling start?”

Bela gripped her charm. “Almost the minute we got into the park. I keep thinking it’s more in my head since we’re close to home, but really, what I’m sensing is that way.” She pointed across the park toward Sixty-third and the brownstone.

Camille took hold of her dinar and offered her hand to Bela, and together they both looked in that direction.

“I don’t see anything,” Bela said, her mouth twisting in a frown of absolute frustration.

Camille saw nothing but the park, yet—

Something was there. Something so slight it might have been a moth’s heartbeat—but it wasn’t normal. Just the slightest bit out of place.

“I feel it,” she told Bela. “I just can’t tell where it’s coming from.”

Camille looked back at John and Andy. Both had hands on weapons, waiting.

She didn’t see anything else but leafless trees and, farther, the city’s buildings, windows glowing like thousands of stars.

Channels everywhere …

The world had so many different kinds of channels.

Camille looked down at the frosty ground.

Channels and tunnels.

Years ago, when she’d lost Bette, the Asmodai that killed her had come out of the earth in Van Cortlandt Park at the gatehouse—from yet another remnant of the Old Croton Aqueduct. She’d just spent days herself in chambers and tunnels related to the old waterworks.

“Maybe they’re underground,” Camille said, not adding,
Like the Bengals, just in a different place
. “Bela, can you sense any tunnels around here?”

Bela closed her eyes, and Camille felt the ripple of Bela’s terrasentience move outward, then reach down, deeper than she went when she was just sampling soil for trace and footprints. The frustrated expression on her face increased, and lines formed on her forehead from the effort she was exerting.

A second or so later, her earth energy brushed past Camille as it returned, and Bela opened her eyes. “Something’s down there, but it’s muted, too.”

Camille’s insides twitched. The night seemed to get a lot darker and colder, and the buildings surrounding the park seemed that much taller and farther away. “Protected?”

“Pretty sure, yes.” Bela frowned. “Not good.”

Camille wondered if the Bengals had carved out large spaces and used some sort of muting charms and energy themselves. For now, she couldn’t assume that.

“John,” she said, “we think we’re standing on tunnels with deliberately muted energy.”

He immediately stepped back from Andy and got on the telephone again.

“Let’s go toward the brownstone,” Bela said, gesturing at the ice rink. “I still think there’s something bigger in that direction.”

“Something’s off,” John said. “OCU did initial hits on Seneca’s main places, but they’re all empty. People have been there—lots of people, it looks like—but the houses and warehouses are empty now. They won’t know about demon trace until later, after you guys can get there.”

“Let’s head toward the house and whatever you’re worried about,” Andy said to Bela and Camille. “But don’t push it. We seriously don’t want to engage, not until we know what we’re dealing with.”

Evil
, Camille thought as they moved out. That was the only word that came to her. They were dealing with evil, and it was under them and behind them and beside them, and she didn’t know how long she’d have to teach her quad the boundaries they needed to know. The Rakshasa and their allies were planning something, and it felt huge, and it felt … soon.

“That’s fucked up,” Bela muttered, elbowing Camille as they went wide of the ice rink, which should have been deserted at this hour.

The place looked pretty crowded, both the bleachers and the ice.

“Men,” Andy said. “Humans, it feels like.”

“Yeah,” Bela agreed. “A load of them. Why haven’t the park police run them off?”

Camille studied the mass of people skulking around the rink. “Maybe it’s some sort of planned meeting and they’ve got a permit.”

John was a few steps back, using his cell again. “I don’t think it’s a party,” he growled to whoever had answered at OCU. “Forty, maybe fifty guys in dark clothes. Yeah.”

Camille sensed that some of the men at the rink were watching them pass by even though she and her quad were keeping to the shadows as best they could. Some murmuring broke out among the men. The tone sounded tense. Maybe a little surprised.

“Let’s blow our asses out of here fast,” Andy suggested, and they picked up speed, running now.

Camille crossed first into Heckscher Playground, trying to get through the open spaces as fast as she could.