The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel (37 page)

“Let her go, and the wolf—and I’ll stay.”

My heart kicked me in the chest. “No. You can’t.”

Ian never took his eyes from the creature that’d slaughtered and eaten his partner. “The offer stands. You said you wanted vengeance.” His eyes glittered in challenge. “How bad do you want it?”

“You do drive a tempting bargain, Detective Byrne.” His thin lips creased in a vulpine smile. “Agreed.”

“Ian, no!”

The creature stepped aside with a flourish, clearing the way to the street. “But they will only have one choice of exit.” His smile broadened. “And
she
will be waiting for them.”

Ian hefted Rolf’s broadsword. “Mac, go. Yasha, stay with her. When you get to the street, get the hell out of Times Square.”

Yasha took my hand in his huge mouth. His fangs went beyond massive, but he never broke my skin. I also couldn’t pull away.

The moment we were on the stairs, the steel doors slammed at our backs, the chains rattling on the other side as they wrapped the handles.

Leaving Ian alone with his worst nightmare.

28

ME and Yasha were alone on Forty-second Street with a million people.

The noise levels were deafening. My stomach lurched, and my breath came in gasping puffs in the freezing air. The shouts and cheering of a million people forced their way inside my head, the happy and blissfully ignorant cheering of people who had no idea what was stalking among them.

My partner was sacrificing himself to give us a chance to escape. I saw it as a chance to stop an invisible and virtually indestructible monster from wading into that crowd and turning those cheers to screams. I wasn’t going anywhere. The cops might have the firepower to bring it down, but they couldn’t see it. And once the blood started flowing and bodies flying, panic would spread from the epicenter that was the grendel. People would die who weren’t anywhere near her as a panic-spawned stampede started in the desperation to escape Times Square.

And all that could keep those people from becoming corpses was a seer and a werewolf. I didn’t have a plan, but I wasn’t going to stand by and let innocent people be slaughtered and trampled.

The stairs up to the surface from the pedestrian passageway had led to a now-mangled grate that the grendel had torn off and tossed aside. Yasha and I were in a fenced and boarded-up construction site where there didn’t look to be any constructing going on. I wondered if Tia had arranged with any city businessmen she might have had in her pocket to have it cordoned off as a staging area for her special guests. The crushed padlock on the
inside
of the boarded-up chain-link gate, and the steel chains that had been pulled apart like so much taffy turned my theory into a safe bet.

There was a narrow crack between two of the boards. Yasha stuck his snout to the opening and started sniffing. I looked through.

Scaffolding flanked both sides of the building site. TV camera towers. The crowds had been blocked off from the area underneath, giving me and Yasha the cover we needed. The space between the two towers led right into the section of street kept cordoned off and open for emergency vehicle use. If something went wrong in a crowd of a million people, the good folks of the NYPD wanted a way in and out.

We started scanning the pens the NYPD always put in place on New Year’s Eve to keep the crowds contained in manageable clumps. It looked like herds of cattle in a stockyard to me, and I imagine the grendel saw it much the same way.

If we couldn’t stop that grendel from appearing at midnight and wading into the nearest crowd pen, adding a werewolf to the mix wasn’t gonna make a hill of beans worth of difference. I was wearing my armor, which was good for personal protection, but bad for blending in with a crowd. Then I saw two of the law enforcement folks patrolling Forty-second Street. Their gear was similar enough to mine that I could look like I belonged. However their armor had NYPD on the back.

Something akin to an electric shock ran up my arm that had been touching Yasha’s fur, and in place of Yasha the werewolf was Yasha the kinda/sorta German shepherd. I could still see Yasha’s werewolf aura, but it was like a nimbus around his dog disguise. Good call. The only way Yasha could conceivably fight the grendel was as a werewolf, but to get out into Times Square called for every SPI werewolf’s less threatening disguise—K-9 cop.

Yasha looked up at me with golden eyes, eyes that told me that whatever I was going to do to try to stop this, he’d be right there with me, and he’d go werewolf in the most public place imaginable if necessary to kill that grendel and save lives. I prayed it wouldn’t come to that, but I had no idea how it could possibly go any other way. Then with one emphatic downward nod of his muzzle, a dog told a human to stay. Yasha pushed the gate open with his muzzle, squeezed through, and was gone.

Apparently, he had a plan or at least an idea. The clock was ticking, and it wasn’t in our favor, but I stayed put.

Only a minute or so later, Yasha padded back to me; in his mouth was a dark blue ball cap with FBI in bright white on the front. I was already dressed more or less like a commando in solid black, with body armor that was similar enough to what I’d glimpsed through the fence to blend in. I took off my helmet and put on the hat, running my ponytail out the hole in the back. Not as good a disguise as Yasha’s, but I was as official looking as I was going to get.

We quickly went out onto Forty-second Street.

Yasha stood tall, his head held high and alert, like a K-9 officer on patrol who belonged there. Hopefully, I was the only one of the million people here and billions watching who could see that the upstanding K-9 trotting purposely in front of the cameras, God, and the world, not only wasn’t on a leash, but in reality was a nearly seven-foot-tall werewolf.

Finding our target would be the easy part. Even among a sea of humanity, a towering monster would stand out to me, even if she was invisible to everyone else.

Then I saw her.

The mother grendel.

I was ashamed to admit it, but I stood there and gawked in open-mouthed horror.

The female was a head and a half taller than her mate, her shoulders broader, her arms and legs more heavily muscled, her fangs bigger, her claws longer.

Better, stronger, faster.

Rolf and his bionic stump would hate that he missed out on this one. I wished the crazy Viking was here; he’d have a plan. It’d be just as crazy as he was, but at least he’d have one.

The grendel was taking full advantage of her invisibility to do a little window-shopping before midnight, stalking down the emergency vehicle access path, perusing the people in the metal pens like they were cattle for the slaughter. I wondered if the NYPD knew how accurately those metal pens helped make the comparison.

A voice reached me. The voice of a small child; small, but loud. A little girl in red coat and hood was perched on top of her daddy’s shoulders, hitting the top of his hatted head to get his attention where she wanted it. On us.

“Daddy, Mommy, look at the
big
puppy!” she shouted. “What big teeth he has!”

She wasn’t fooled by Yasha’s K-9 disguise. Just our luck. A little seer in the making.

I sensed the Russian werewolf’s “oh shit” and his German shepherd legs moved faster, and I ran to catch up.

“There you are. My sister’s seer eyes.”

I lunged forward, grabbing a handful of Yasha’s fur, pulling him to a stop, and went down on one knee beside him.

“There’s a voice in my head,” I quickly said in his ear. This was weird, even by SPI standards. Hopefully anyone watching would think that the FBI agent and her K-9 partner just had a really close working bond.

I didn’t feel like I was being watched, that I was in the center of a cross-haired target. I knew it for a fact. Running wouldn’t help, neither would hiding, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to do both.

“Most countries have a monster that they use to frighten their children. Behave or it will get you while you sleep. Most myths are based in reality. And what are a country’s citizens but grown-up children? Fortunately for me, some fears never die.”

Tiamat. Babylonian dragon goddess of chaos. Vivienne Sagadraco’s sister.

Inside my head.

At least her voice was.

Reason, or what I had left of it, told me that she was here. Not among the crowds. She was a dragon; she’d want to be above it all, enjoying the game she’d started, watching the pieces move about on the colorful, life-sized game board that was Times Square.

The one-sided conversation continued.

“Primitive man lived in fear of the horrors that preyed upon them in the night. Man fears nothing in this modern age. In their arrogance, they deceive themselves into believing that science has told them all they need to know. They have lights to keep the darkness at bay, but their primitive fears are still there. They have forgotten what it is like to wonder what waits, red in tooth and claw, just beyond the light of their fires—or the lights of their cities. Their imaginations have been dulled by science—that explainer of all things. They do not know what hunts them, they do not believe how quickly they will die . . . but they soon will.”

Silence. The silence of bad things about to happen.

I jumped as a crackling in my ear almost burst my eardrum.

“Mac? Can you hear me? Mac, come in.”

It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

Kenji.

“I can hear you.” It was like I could breathe again. “I’m on—”

“I know exactly where you are.”

Oh crap. “I’m on TV?”

“No, the boss is keeping me posted. She sees you. Look up at the top of One Times Square.”

“One Times Square? Where the—”

“The building with the big-ass ball on it? The one they’re about to drop?”

I looked. I saw the ball.

And I saw the dragon that was Vivienne Sagadraco perched regally—there was no other way to describe her—shimmering majestic blue in the spotlights trained on the dazzlingly lit ball covered with Waterford crystal.

Magnificent came to mind.

And invisible.

A million people here and billions around the world were watching that ball, but it was obvious that no one could see Vivienne Sagadraco.

My shoulders sagged in relief. “You fixed the cloaking device.”

I heard the pride in Kenji’s voice.
“Affirmative. Me and the boys.”

“And girls!”
I heard shouted in the background.

My words came in a gush. “It’s just me and Yasha. The teams were captured by ghouls and spawn and . . .” I stumbled on, unable to say “possibly eaten.” “Calvin and Rolf are in the old Forty-second Street subway station, and Ian is alone fighting a ghoul that’s not a ghoul, and—”

“The teams are fine.”

“What?”

“Roy, Sandra, and Lars just reported in. They ran into a little trouble clearing out the nest. They’re on their way up to the old station, as I—”

That son of a bitch vampire lied.

“Go get Ian!” I screamed.

Heads turned. A woman wearing an FBI hat, screaming into a headset, tended to make post-nine-eleven New Yorkers antsy. I quickly turned my head away and lowered my voice a few octaves. “He’s in the closed pedestrian passageway. Calvin knows . . .”

I was talking to dead air.

“Kenji?”

No response.

“Kenji? Shit!”

I had my paintball gun, and the boss would be able to see a marked grendel, but I couldn’t use it. At this moment, I had no doubt about the reactions of real cops to fake guns that they didn’t know were fake—especially in Times Square on New Year’s Eve where alert didn’t even begin to describe the readiness state of the thousands of cops and feds in, around, and above the crowds. The moment I drew my real-looking paintball gun, six or ten of the gazillion cops would be on me like white on rice. Ian had been right. A real-looking fake gun could get you killed quicker than the real thing—or get my face ground into the asphalt while a real monster materialized and started eating people.

Hope flickered to life, and even severed communications wasn’t going to crush it. There were a mess of folks depending on me. Ian was one of them. Whatever had happened to him—or whatever was happening to him—his sacrifice sure as hell wasn’t gonna be in vain. And if I failed, I’d fail knowing that I’d done everything I could possibly do. No regrets.

I knew what I had to do.

Vivienne Sagadraco could fight the grendel. I couldn’t. The boss knew where I was, so my job was to show her where the grendel was by the only other way available to me—by getting as close to the thing as possible, and grabbing it if I had to.

I spotted the grendel. “Bring it, bitch,” I spat.

I suddenly smelled sulfur and was nearly knocked off my feet by a blast of air.

My lizard brain knew sulfur was bad, so it didn’t consult with the rest of my mind on how to react to a downdraft on a night with no wind.

I dove behind a police cruiser as massive claws ripped through the space where I’d just been, leaving three, long gashes across the cruiser’s hood.