Captive Spirit (3 page)

“No, thanks.” The words burst out of Bela’s mouth before she had a chance to consider them.

Damn, damn, damn!

Was she out of her stupid mind?

She had known this would be the hardest part of what she came here to do, and she had just blurted it out instead of working her way up to it.

A thin column of smoke rose from Mother Keara’s shoulders. The chamber heated up again as the old woman once more grew wary—and looked freshly angry. “You’re not plannin’ to live with us until you determine which girl makes the best match with yer energies?”

Bela swallowed despite her dry throat. When she trusted herself not to sound like an idiot, she said, “I know which fire Sibyl I want.”

This time it was Mother Keara who remained silent.

Even though Bela’s earth energy had gone still as she calmed down, an earthquake rattled in her belly.

Knock it off
. Bela realized the voice in her head sounded like a blend of her dead fighting sisters.
You’ve seen more battles than some of the Mothers
.

Mother Keara was staring at her like she might be judging the temperature necessary to roast her for breakfast.

Suck it up!
screamed the ghost voices of Nori and Devin.

“I claim the only fire Sibyl here who knows as much pain as I do,” Bela shouted, just to be louder than her hallucinations. “I claim Camille Fitzgerald.”

Thicker smoke rolled off Mother Keara, a startled wave of it, and Bela knew she had shocked the old woman. It took Mother Keara a full minute to recover enough to growl, “No. She’s not stable. And she’s not reliable in battle.”

“I don’t care.” Bela’s anger came flowing back, and the ground shook for a few seconds until she got herself under enough control to add, “Camille lost her triad just like I did, to murder and in battle. We’ll have grief as a starting point, and we can help each other heal.”

Mother Keara kept up her intense scrutiny, but she obviously hadn’t considered that reality until Bela brought it up.

Point for me
. Bela was still shaking, but she almost gave a victory shout—way too prematurely.

After a time, Mother Keara said, “Camille’s been locked away here since she lost her triad. No visitors, no datin’, no socializin’—just trainin’, and too much work inside her own head.” Her tone grew more reflective. “Much as you were doin’ at Motherhouse Russia … but Camille might refuse you.”

Bela folded her arms. “She’s a Sibyl. Some part of her heart wants to fight, just like mine. Stop dicking with me and let me talk to her. If she says no, I’ll back off—for a little while.”

Another few seconds of silence passed between them, during which Mother Keara’s fire energy built, and built, and built. Her stare burned into Bela, and Bela could almost taste flames and soot.

Could death by fire be slow and torturous?

Probably.

Would a Mother really bake a fully trained Sibyl on the spot, just for being a disrespectful asshole?

Possibly.

Bela kept her arms folded and her eyes narrowed. No way was she backing down.

You’re nuts
, whispered the ghosts in her head.

Without warning, Mother Keara’s fire energy ebbed. “You have a problem with rules. I can see that. If you never do what you’re told, if you never take the calm, easy roads through the world, it’s no wonder those old hens in Russia don’t give you the time of day.” She let out a breath laced with smoke and sparks. “I suppose next you’ll be going to Greece and asking Dionysia Allard to be yer air Sibyl. She’d as soon blow you to Athens as look at you, since you let her sister die.”

Bela didn’t flinch, at least not on the outside. “You think I’m scared of a little wind? Damn straight I’m going after Dio, because I owe Devin that much. It’s the only amends I’ll ever be able to make, if I can convince Dio to fight—and I’m not stopping there.” She held out her right forearm and jabbed a finger at the subtle, wavy lines connecting the tattoos of mortar, pestle, and broom—the lines that signified the recent reemergence of the fourth and perhaps most dangerous type of Sibyl, those who controlled the powerful element of water. “I’m going to Kérkira to get Andy Myles. We’ll be the first fighting quad in twelve centuries.”

The expression on Mother Keara’s face shifted from intrigue to ridicule to stunned vacancy. Bela expected the old woman to argue, but she stayed quiet instead.

That was probably bad.

The silence got longer and wider. It lasted so long that Bela wanted to sing or scream or throw a punch—anything to smash the motionless, heavy quiet.

At last, Mother Keara averted her eyes and seemed to be studying a point on the wall over Bela’s left shoulder.

“You are strong, child,” the old woman said, as if to affirm her previous judgment. “That I won’t be denyin’, to you or to myself.” She brought her green eyes back to Bela’s, and her voice dropped to a rough whisper. “But now I’m speakin’ a darker truth. You are also insane.”

(2)

August, three years after the fall of the Legion

Duncan Sharp gripped his Glock and edged toward a darkened brick corner of the Tobacco Warehouse in DUMBO—Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Over his head, vehicles whizzed across the old suspension bridge connecting lower Manhattan with Brooklyn. The bass rumble of suspended subway cars blocked the rush of blood in his ears. The smoke-gray twilight weighed against his shoulders and face, cool and heavy at the same time. The East River slapped at its banks, but from Duncan’s vantage point at the edge of the shell of the warehouse, his world went dead quiet.

His focus narrowed to the few yards of shore and concrete and brick making up this edge of Empire–Fulton Ferry State Park.

I’m coming for you, John
.

Duncan’s back scraped against rough, aged brick as he inched toward the building’s edge. Three intact walls. One concrete floor.

No place to hide, John
.

Duncan had tossed his jacket near Central Park. His overshirt had been pitched on one of the Manhattan Bridge’s pedestrian walkways. His badge hung around his neck, resting against his sweat-soaked T-shirt. His jeans were just as wet, and his heart was still punching his ribs. It had been one hell of a chase, on foot, across parts of two boroughs, but it would end here, now.

Taking down a buddy was the worst thing any cop ever faced, but Duncan Sharp had been a homicide detective for four years, a street cop before that, and a soldier for the eight years prior to hiring on with the NYPD. He could do this. He
would
do this. No request for backup. No courtesy call to the Eighty-fourth Precinct or the park police. If John Cole died tonight, it would be Duncan’s bullet that killed him.

It was the least he could do for the son of a bitch who had been his best friend since he was seven years old.

For one long gut-kicking moment, Duncan remembered being a grubby scrub-kneed kid in rural Georgia, playing hide-and-seek with John Cole in his grandfather’s endless cornfields. Fun. Innocence. Freedom.

All gone now, wasn’t it?

Here in New York City, the time for games was long gone. Five women had been murdered, a bloody trail almost six years in the making. Duncan had found John Cole’s latest squeeze, the heiress Katrina Alsace Drake, in pieces in her penthouse apartment. And he had found Cole beating it out the window and down the fire escape holding on to some weird, curved dagger. No way Duncan could risk a shot into the crowded streets, so he had kept visual contact and humped it across miles of city streets—and the bridge.

To the psychotic bastard he had last spoken to on the slopes of the Hindu Kush near Kabul, Duncan said, “Can’t hide, sinner.”

It was a line from an old gospel song, from the music that formed the soundtrack of their childhood, before the Army at eighteen years old, and the war, and everything that had gone so unbelievably wrong in Afghanistan.

“I’m not being chased, Duncan.” Cole’s desperate voice echoed through the warehouse shell. The sound of it made Duncan’s insides tighten. “I haven’t been running from you. Damn it, don’t you get it? I’m doing the chasing—of the creatures who slaughtered Katrina. Get out of here before they use you against me.”

“Bullshit.” Duncan reached the corner and tensed for action. “Hit the concrete, hands over your head.”

Cole spoke again, closer now, maybe on the other side of the bricks from Duncan. “I can give you contacts at the Pentagon. They’ll explain. Water slows them down, but not for long. Get out of here.”

Duncan swore to himself and tightened his grip on the Glock.

Fuck
. He didn’t want to do this.

“Don’t make me shoot you, John.”

Please
.

Duncan pivoted and swept around the corner of the building weapon first, moving from grass to the warehouse’s concrete floor—and came face-to-face with John Cole.

Cole eyed Duncan, then the gun.

He got down on one knee, arms over his head. “Christ, Duncan. You never stop, do you?”

Cole still had hold of that curved dagger. Duncan thought it might be Roman. It looked old as hell, but lights from the Manhattan skyline played off the polished blade.

No blood
.

Must have wiped it off while he was running
.

“They smell you by now.” Cole sounded defeated. “They’ll be here in seconds. One of us won’t make it out of here.”

Duncan ignored the delusional crap. Cole was still as buff as he had been in their Army days, but minus the black suit and white collar. The former priest was wearing torn fatigues.

No bloodstains that I can make out …

A chain with what looked like an ancient Afghan dinar hung around Cole’s corded neck. He had long black hair now, loose at his shoulders. Duncan couldn’t see the man’s laughing green eyes in the growing darkness, eyes that had broken the hearts of dozens of nurses and officers and barmaids from Fort Benning to Bagram, but he was willing to bet they had a lunatic gleam.

“Drop the knife and get on the ground.” Duncan kept the Glock trained on Cole’s head.

Cole didn’t move. “If you run now, I can hold them off. You have no idea what’s happening here.”

Duncan had a little bit of a clue. If he wasn’t way lucky, Cole’s “friends” at the federal level would interfere after the arrest, like they had been interfering in the investigations all summer. Sealing Cole’s records, refusing to provide information on his whereabouts, stopping just short of ordering the NYPD to quit trying to track and apprehend a dangerous serial killer.

Whatever Cole had gotten into that last day in the mountains of Afghanistan, it was major. And apparently the government would just as soon no one knew about it—or about John Cole—at all.

But Cole was a murderer, and he had to be stopped.

“Drop the weapon,” Duncan growled, this time through his teeth. “Now.”

A sound like foot-long nails scraping down a chalkboard echoed through the three-sided warehouse ruins.

Duncan felt the grating noise in his bones. His nostrils flared. His skin prickled.

What in the living … ?

Claws on brick?

Claws … ripping into brick?

Was that even possible?

Every aspect of his consciousness tried to tear away from Cole and look to his right, toward the East River, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off the suspect he had chased through half of Manhattan.

Cole kept his hands and that knife over his head, but faster than a blink, he was on his feet and facing away from Duncan, staring toward the riverside warehouse wall.

The air was getting colder. Duncan’s breath fogged in front of his face—in August, for God’s sake. A nasty smell, something like ammonia and dung, made him cough.

The spine-curling rake of claws on brick came again.

This was weird shit.

Duncan didn’t do weird shit. He didn’t believe in weird shit, he didn’t accept weird shit—this needed to stop. Whatever was clawing the brick, he’d shoot it along with John Cole if he had to.

A feral howl, utterly out of place in New York City, drove Duncan to wheel toward the wall.

His skin was
crawling
now.

“What the hell was that?” Duncan asked Cole, more reflex than anything else.

“Last chance, Duncan.” The former priest gazed into the darkness, bringing his dagger down to the ready position. All of the worry and anxiety had left him. What remained, Duncan knew, was the raw, toneless voice of a soldier about to die in a firefight.

“
Run!
” Cole shouted. Then he leaped between Duncan and the far side of the warehouse.

Brick shattered as the riverside wall exploded inward.

Cole’s body shielded Duncan from the worst of it, but Duncan turned his head and took a load of rock shrapnel in the temple. Too-bright light flared through his vision, and his head hurt like a bastard—then stopped.

Not good
.

Am I dead?

But he was still standing, and his dulled eyesight took in Cole, who hit the ground hard, not five feet from him. Flecks of stone stung Duncan’s forehead, and a cloud of dust rained across the whole space.

Blood and sweat blurred Duncan’s vision even worse, but he steadied himself, turned back to the wall in a shooting stance—and wondered if the blast had knocked him out.

Because he had to be hallucinating.

Cole was prone on the debris-strewn concrete, his knife a few feet away from him. The skyline of Manhattan still rose in the background, split by the big suspension bridge. The world looked completely normal—except for the three human-sized cats slowly creeping toward him from the ruined wall.

Giant tigers, a white one, a black one, and a golden one
.

Except they’re walking like men
.

His heart just … stopped thumping. The blood thundering in his ears went silent, and his whole body turned polar cold.

The things coming toward him—how far? Thirty yards? Twenty?

They had as much skin as fur, human-like faces, wicked claws, and fangs. Their striped fur glowed in the rising light of the moon, and the stench of ammonia made Duncan’s eyes water.

From the concrete, a bloodied, groaning Cole was getting up, grabbing for his knife, urging Duncan over and over again to run.

“
Get out … not here for you … Duncan, go …
”

The words didn’t compute at all. Nothing in Duncan’s mind was working very well, but he sighted the creatures and squeezed off nine rounds. Triple-tap for each beast, chest level, right in the hearts.

The tiger-things flinched but kept coming. Fifteen yards. Fourteen. Thirteen.

Holy God
.

Duncan fired again and again, barely processing the sound of his own gunfire. A raking, maddening tickle started in his brain, like something was rifling through his thoughts and memories. Images flashed from his childhood, from his life as a cop, from his military service. No order. No logic. He shook his head, still holding his Glock even though some part of him knew the magazine was empty.

I’m unconscious
.

This isn’t happening
.

Tiger-men who reacted to bullets like they were spit-wads—that shit didn’t exist in his universe.

Nothing happened, except that the black tiger-thing closest to Duncan … changed.

Took on a more human form. The light from its fur—no, skin now—let Duncan see the man’s black hair and black eyes. His high cheekbones and darker complexion. For a few seconds, the thing actually looked familiar.

Then it looked too familiar.

Cropped brown hair. Fashion-plate suit. Big smile. The thing had turned into Calvin, one of the Brent brothers, one of the few men Duncan called friends in his adult life. But Cal Brent was a desk jockey now. His brother Saul was in narcotics—and now the tiger-thing shifted into Saul, long hair, earring, T-shirt, torn jeans, and all.

Right in front of him. Raising his tattooed hand … only the hand had tiger claws.

The Saul-thing swung its fist, claws out.

The blow staggered Duncan and sliced the flesh on his left side, neck to chest. He heard Cole swearing. There was a scuffle, and the tiger-man backed off. Duncan felt somebody grabbing him, pulling him upright. Duncan’s mind swam laps around his skull, but he couldn’t make sense out of any of this. The cut on his left side burned like somebody had a torch to his neck and shoulder.

A bloodied, dirty hand jerked at his arm, and Duncan swung the muzzle of his useless weapon into John Cole’s face.

The green eyes of his first—and for so long, his only—friend pierced Duncan’s brain fog. He lowered his weapon.

John’s eyes were dull with grief and narrow with fear. “I can’t let you die,” he said as he gazed at the cuts on Duncan’s left side. “Not you. Anybody but you.
Fuck
, Duncan! Why couldn’t you listen, just once in your life?”

Time was moving funny, and the world seemed sideways and unreal to Duncan now. He was hearing John on two levels, as a grown man and a fugitive, and as the little boy he had known way, way too long ago. Was John seeing Duncan as a cop now, or a kid in a cornfield?

“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to find some way to heal yourself and keep this fight going.” John’s tone turned grim as he pressed the hilt of that Roman knife into Duncan’s free hand. “Use this if you have to cut them to get out of here.”

“John—” Duncan started, but Cole kept talking.

“And keep this around your neck at all times—
forever
, you understand? Get in touch with Jack Blackmore through the Pentagon. He’ll tell you what you need to know.” John pulled the chain and coin over his head, thrust it out, and dropped it over Duncan’s head. As Duncan felt the coin bounce against his chest and dangling badge, John gave him a huge, sudden shove.

Caught off guard, Duncan sailed backward.

His Glock clattered against the concrete as he crashed shoulder-first onto the rough warehouse floor. Bone cracked. Fresh bolts of pain stole his awareness, and his breath left in a rush. It was all he could do to kick his legs enough to get to a sitting position and reorient himself. The knife was still clutched in his good hand. That had to be worth something.

The tiger-things ringed John, and none of them looked like Cal or Saul Brent anymore. They looked like cover models for a bodybuilding magazine, if you didn’t count the paws and claws part. And they were laughing.

Then they were growling.

They roared and fell on John, tearing and snarling and ripping and howling, howling so loud Duncan thought the sounds would bash his ears off his head.

He raised the knife and lurched toward the bloody, awful scene, shouting even though his throat was trying to close. His badge and that damned coin necklace seemed to weigh four thousand pounds. Closer. Almost there.

“Off him,” he managed. “Get. Off!”

Fighting a weird repelling force, kind of like a magnet shoving away the wrong charge, Duncan sliced at the nearest tiger-thing with the knife.