Haze (18 page)

She fidgets one last time with her sword hilt. ‘Let’s go show how valuable this pack of bastards can be.’

FIRE IN THE BELLY

We arrive behind bars. Beyond them is an empty street and vacant car park. The morning sky is cloudless, hazy. I turn around confused, and then work it out: the bars form a wrought-iron fence around the back entrance to the club. Cameras perch on top, angled at the street, red lights blinking. We’ve arrived behind them at the rear door, undetected.

The haze isn’t just LA smog—it’s smoke. Traffic hums a few blocks away. Nearer is sporadic gunfire, breaking glass. The riot has moved closer already. My hand is slick with sweat, making it hard to grip my katana.

The door into the club is huge: heavy timber with steel bracing, made to withstand a mediaeval siege. It’s unlocked. As soon as Mya cracks the door a fraction, a low bass note spills out…
doof…doof…doof
. We mute our phones, and Ez sends a quick message to the Rephaim covering the other entrances. Mya creeps inside, sword first. Jones is behind her, then Zak, Ez, me and finally Rafa.

I step into the dark hallway, freeze. I’ve been here before: almost every night in my dreams until a week ago. Except in my dream the stench of sweat, cheap aftershave and cigar smoke wasn’t this foul. The scratched wall panelling is here; so is the faded orange carpet covered in cigarette burns and stains that could be beer or blood or other bodily fluids I don’t want to think about. At the end of the hallway is the door to the nightclub. The one Rafa kicked in before we threw ourselves into the fray. Except it wasn’t me with Rafa, it was Jude—but I’ve had the memory of it stuck in a loop in my brain for a year. Mutilated bodies splayed around the club, torn apart by hellions. The smell of death and blood. For a week I’ve known it wasn’t a dream. Now I feel it.

My head spins. I think I’m going to throw up. Men and women died in that room.
Horribly
. The music is so loud it vibrates in my chest, even with the door closed. I shouldn’t be here. I’m not equipped to be here.

‘Keep moving,’ Rafa says. The others have disappeared. He guides me towards concrete steps and we make our way down, hugging the cinderblock wall.

The music from the basement is faster, just as monotonous. There’s a scuffle somewhere below us. A thud. We round the corner in the stairwell. Zak stands over a body on the floor—human as far as I can tell from this angle. Mya is pulling a keypad apart near the door and Jones holds a surveillance camera in one hand. Wires hang from the wall above his head. Hopefully he was quick enough to disconnect it before anyone saw him.

There’s not much light down here: a dull fluorescent tube bolted to the ceiling. I peer at the guy sprawled on the concrete. He’s big. Samoan maybe, wearing a suit and tie like he’s the maitre d’ of the kind of restaurant I can never afford to eat at. Only someone Zak’s size and with his inhuman speed would be able to take him down without a bullet. Blood is trickling from the side of his head. He was hit with something hard: a sword hilt or maybe Zak’s fist.

Zak catches me staring. He bends down, puts two fingers against the man’s neck and nods at me, which I take to mean the guy is alive. Then he grabs the back of his jacket and drags him under the stairs, out of sight.

Zak clips the guy’s phone to his own belt and relieves him of his handgun. ‘Happy?’ he mouths.

I give him a tight smile.

Mya uses a small pair of pliers on the keypad wiring. There’s a click, and a tiny light on the panel flicks from red to green. She sends a message on her phone and we wait under the stairs out of sight.

Less than a minute later, footsteps descend. Bright red stilettos click past our faces. Mya steps out into view, eyes the woman up and down. ‘Classy.’

The blonde woman—Jess, I presume—is wearing the world’s tiniest nurse’s uniform, complete with hat and stethoscope. She’s busting out of it in all the right places.

She nods a greeting to others. Familiar, but wary. I’d still like to know how an undercover LA cop knows the Rephaim.

‘Where do you keep your badge?’ Rafa asks, deadpan. Jess slips a hand into a lacy red bra and produces her police ID.

‘Impressive.’

I don’t know if he means her outfit or the fact she could fit anything else in that bra.

‘Where’s your back-up?’ Zak asks.

‘You’re it,’ Jess says. ‘I’m solo until I’ve got something to report.’ She looks at me. Waits.

‘This is Gabe,’ Ez says when nobody else speaks. I nod hello, feel the pressure of the knife against my hip, the weirdness of all of us crammed into this small space, a sickness in my stomach. Jess stares at me for a long moment before nodding in return.

Mya clicks her fingers. ‘Let’s do this.’ She catches Jess’s attention. ‘Will you be all right out here?’

Jess nods. ‘Just get those kids. You remember what I told you about the layout and what’s in there?’

‘Every word.’

Rafa opens the door into the basement. Soft red light and pulsing music spill out into the stairwell. He looks inside, gives the all-clear. We creep forward.

The basement is sectioned off with red curtains, like a garish hospital emergency ward. The air is thick with pine freshener, cigarette smoke and a smell I don’t want to name.

Using her blade, Mya lifts back the first curtain. Beyond it is a double bed covered in satin sheets and children’s toys. Rafa checks the curtain on the other side. It’s empty like the first, though the bed is stripped, the linen crumpled on the floor. There’s a break in the music. It lasts only a second, but it’s enough to hear a child whimper.

My stomach twists.

Children are bought and sold here. Hurt here. These empty beds are bad enough. I don’t want to pull back one of these curtains and see—

Too late.

Mya has found a pale middle-aged man sitting on the edge of a bed holding a stuffed white rabbit. He flinches when he sees us. He mouths something but we can’t hear him. The throbbing bass is too loud. My heart hammers in time with it.

Mya is on him, quick and silent. She slams him back on the bed, one hand around his throat and the other covering his mouth. He thrashes with surprising strength. She lets go long enough to drive a fist into his stomach. I force myself to look around. There’s nobody in here with him. I’m so relieved I almost weep.

Mya rolls the man onto his stomach and puts him in a headlock, cuts off his air supply. The others move on. I stay. He goes limp and the white rabbit finally escapes his clutches. Mya drops his head onto the bed and looks up at me, wipes the guy’s spit off her arm with disgust. She reaches under the bed and pulls out a length of rope. I help her tie him up. Under the bed again, she finds duct tape, which I roughly plaster over his mouth. Mya uses the tip of her katana to make a small hole for him to breathe through.

I taste bile. We move on.

Rafa and Jones have found two more men. One in his twenties, the other older. Both freshly worked over. The younger one’s right eye is already closing up. Rafa’s knuckles are red. Jones wipes blood from his hand on the curtain and takes the duct tape I offer.

In the next cubicle, Ez is sitting on her heels in front of a young boy. He can’t be more than seven or eight, all bony limbs and pale skin. He’s wearing shorts and a Spider-Man t-shirt, both two sizes too big. Thick black hair hangs down over his face; his huge brown eyes are vacant.

Something hot and violent rips through me. Blood pulses in my temples, faster now than the drums pounding in the music.

Ez is trying to get the boy’s attention, but he’s too far away. Drugged, or catatonic with fear. She smooths his hair and brushes the back of her fingers against his cheek. The boy closes his eyes, slowly. When she looks up at me I recognise what I see in her face: outrage.

Rafa slips between the curtains, glances at the boy. The muscle in his jaw twitches. Twice.

Mya points to the stairwell where Jess is waiting and Ez scoops up the boy, heads in that direction. The plan is to get the kids upstairs to the portico and wait for our signal. We keep going, checking each cubicle until we reach Zak and Jones. They’ve found a door behind a curtain of beads. There’s no camera in sight: nobody wants to be filmed in this cesspit.

Rafa takes up a position on one side of the door and locks eyes with me. I take the other side and we part the beads. I steady my breathing, brace for whatever might be in the next room. Zak slams the sole of his boot into the door and it flies inwards, smashed off its hinges. Rafa follows its trajectory. I’m right behind him.

Three men scramble backwards, reaching for handguns. The door hits the table they were just sitting at, smashing glasses and sending the whole thing skittering across the tiled floor. A thin girl in a floral dress cringes in the corner, her hands covering her head.

I charge in, register the men are human. Am I capable of killing them? The guy closest to me has chambered a bullet and is about to fire. I need to decide. Now.

He points the gun at my face.

I duck as he fires. It’s deafening. I change my grip on the sword and slam the hilt into the side of his head before he can recover from the recoil. A sickening sound. He crumples to the floor. I kick the gun back towards the door where Mya scoops it up.

Rafa took down the other two before either could get off a shot. One of them has lost a hand: no doubt the one pointing a gun at him. There’s a lot of blood and screaming.

I lead the way down a narrow hallway, tracking other terrified voices. There’s a door halfway along, locked. I kick it once, twice. It flies open and the screams intensify. It’s a bathroom. There must be twenty children huddled on the tiles, crying. Boys and girls. Pale. Underfed.

I block the doorway protectively, forcing Rafa to look over my shoulder

‘Get them out,’ he says in my ear.

Thumping music comes from above us now as well. I hope it’s loud enough to drown out the screams. And the gunshot.

Mya is covering the door we came through. The girl in the floral dress leans against her now, her face pressed into Mya’s shirt.

‘Come on.’ I gesture wildly for the kids in the bathroom to leave.

Nobody moves. Twenty pairs of eyes are locked on my sword.

‘Now!’

They flinch. I hate yelling at them but this is taking too long. I move my sword behind me. ‘Come ON!’

A girl with a tear-stained face jumps up. I step out of the way so she can get through. She runs to Mya. One, then another run past me. And then the rest bolt as a group, jostling and crying.

I take a shaky breath, move on to the next door, yank it open. No kids this time—a staircase and a wall of pounding music. The club’s up there. Zak joins me, filling the doorway. His size is reassuring.

Rafa checks the other rooms while Jones fleeces the injured guards. He stomps mobile phones and strips ammunition clips from their guns. The four of us gather at the foot of the steps. Mya materialises a few metres away. Ez must be with Jess and the kids now, upstairs, waiting for the all-clear. As soon as they step outside the portico cage onto the street, they’ll be on camera, and we need the place empty of Immundi by the time that happens—before Jess calls for back-up.

‘What?’ Mya has to shout to be heard over the music.

‘No Immundi down here,’ Rafa says.

She points to the room above us.

She can’t be serious.

The camera outside the basement door has been down for at least five minutes. Where’s the security? This isn’t right. Even I can tell this is a trap and I’ve never done this before. We should go. Get the kids to safety.

Mya watches me, waiting for a reaction. Of course she knows it’s a trap; they all do. She just wants me to be complicit in the decision to go upstairs. I check Rafa. He’s ready. This is what the Outcasts do, right? Hunt demons? I tighten my grip on my sword. What did Rafa tell me before we went for Maggie?
When it’s happening, don’t think. Just go with your instincts
. Right now, my instincts are telling me to get the hell out of here. But I can’t back out—I won’t give Mya the satisfaction. So I nod, and she messages the others.

We climb the stairs two at a time, swords pressed flat against our legs; Rafa in the lead, me right behind him. I can do this. I’ve killed a hellion, fought a Gatekeeper, been in a brawl at the Imperial…

But that was then. This is different: this is me
looking
for trouble.

The music up here is deafening. It’s too loud—like someone’s trying to hide the noise of the riot up the street. The carpet comes into view along with a forest of chairs and table legs. The place stinks of booze and nicotine. Rafa holds up a hand and we wait for his signal. A yellow light flashes over his face. I have another wave of déjà vu. I grab the handrail to steady myself.

Rafa clears the stairs first, nods for us to follow. We’re at the back of the club. A dozen men sit around the dance platform, ties loose and shirts untucked, watching a redhead in stilettos and lacy underwear. She’s wearing a police hat and has fake police badges placed strategically on her breasts. Right now she’s hanging upside down on the pole, her free leg stretched back over her head until it almost touches the platform.

The man behind the bar whistles sharply over his shoulder when he sees us.

We spread out to cover the room. Two guys in expensive suits emerge from a door at the far end of the bar and take up positions near the stripper. They’re short and wiry. Their heads are too big for their bodies. They remind me of monkeys…except there’s nothing playful about them.

‘Get those idiots out of here,’ Rafa shouts at me over the noise.

I think he means the new arrivals, but then one of them sneers and I realise my mistake. It’s not just that his eyes are black: his teeth are pointed and, when he gestures at me, his black lacquered nails are way too long.

Immundi.

How could anyone mistake them for anything other than demons? I know there are some freaky people up the road at Venice Beach. But still.

The Immundi are the same height and build as each other, with the same round face. One has jet-black hair, the other platinum. Their forearms flick out in an oddly synchronised movement. Straight blades, about half the length of a katana, slide out from their shirtsleeves as they move towards me.