Incarnate (A Spellmason Chronicle) (10 page)

“Easy,” her partner said, sitting forward in his chair. He grabbed her hand from the top of the book. “Chloe, let’s not forget . . . the woman
did
save us from that monster.”

Rowland wasn’t pleased, but she shut her mouth and stepped back to her spot on the wall, still fuming.

Detective Maron watched her for a long moment until she settled before turning back to me. When he spoke, his voice was soft and calm.

“How about you give us a break, Miss Whoever-You-Are?” he asked. “We brought you here after you passed out. We bandaged you up . . .”

Detective Rowland might have stopped fuming, but not me. I was full of a growing rage and cut off Detective Maron as I held a hand up to him and turned to lock eyes with his partner.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Detective Rowland, if I don’t seem terrified by your bad-cop routine,” I said. “You two don’t have the first idea of what the hell is really happening out there. You want my name? Fine. It’s Alexandra Belarus, the last and
only
Spellmason. You want a piece of me? Get in line. At the moment I’ve got witches and warlocks hunting me, and gargoyles trying to tear me apart. Right now New York’s Finest seem to be the most reasonable of the bunch. But if you’re threatening me? You can get back out on the streets and try dealing with those things yourself.”

Detective Rowland, despite her injuries, lunged for me, which was not what I expected. Shocked and more than a little scared, I scrambled as far back on the steel table as I could until the cuffs stopped me.

Maron was up and out of his chair, pulling Detective Rowland back from me. Watching the two injured detectives wrestle with each other might have been comical had my heart not been trying to pound out of my chest.

After a moment of struggle, the fight went out of Rowland and she stumbled back, spinning toward the door.

“Take her down to overnight,” she said over her shoulder.

“Wait—you’re
keeping
me here?” I asked. “I gave you my name!”

“Giving your name is not giving your cooperation,” she said, opening the door. “Enjoy your stay, honey. Maybe you’ll prove more cooperative after a night in jail.”

Rowland slammed the door behind her, leaving Detective Maron to remove my cuffs from the chains attached to the table. Apparently he, too, had said all he had to say, and escorted me from the room into the hallway of the station house.

Awesome. A night in prison. That was surely something new to check off the arcane bucket list. Strangely, relief washed over me, killing my anger, fear, and panic. Most people would probably dread something like this, but me? Frankly, incarceration seemed like a good way to make sure I got some forced downtime from the world of hunting gargoyles, at least for an evening.

“Lead on,” I said to the detective as he led me down the hallway. “And you can skip the wake-up call. I plan on sleeping in.”

Stanis

“Y
ou okay?”

Aurora’s voice echoed up and down the squat, rounded tunnel we walked along under the streets of Manhattan. The slosh of the shallow river that rose to our knees was the only other sound as she, Marshall, and Caleb splashed along with me through it.

“In what way?” I asked. “You mean did those
grotesques
from last night harm me? My intent in ensnaring them was not to harm them, but to distract and draw them away so the rest of you had time to escape.”

Marshall clapped me on the arm. “Two out of three escapees wasn’t bad,” he said.

“I’m glad you escaped harm,” Aurora said. “We were worried about the odds with there being a whole gang of them.”

I gave a grim smile. “The day I cannot outfly a handful of fledgling
grotesques
is a day I do not see in my near future.”

“I wasn’t really asking about the other night,” Aurora said. “I meant just now. You weren’t moving at all. You looked . . . I don’t know . . . like a statue. “

“My apologies,” I said. “I know it makes you humans more comfortable to feign motions such as respiration. Forgive me. I was distracted, and I also do not care for confined spaces such as this.”

Marshall laughed.

“Hey, at least you’re made out of carved materials,” he said. “So at least your clothing isn’t knee-deep in sewage water. I smell like rotting trash and the inside of a tauntaun. I’m going to have a lovely aroma when we get into the police station.
If
we get in.”

“Oh, we’ll get in,” Caleb said from where he searched fifteen feet ahead of us. He turned his eyes up to the top of the tunnel, shining a light onto some numbers along a nearby pipe. “Somewhere between here . . .” He sloshed through the sludge to the next set of numbers, double-checking a map he held in his other hand. “And here.”

I moved underneath the spot, examining the top of the tunnel near the pipes. “Very well.”

“You sure this is the right spot?” Marshall asked. “We’re not going to come up in the basement of a restaurant or shoe store, are we? Although, frankly, I’d prefer either to breaking into a police station.”

“Pretty sure,” Caleb said. “From what my contacts told me, this would have been the precinct house where they would have taken her into custody. My friends couldn’t find a record of her here, or anywhere for that matter, but that doesn’t mean she’s not being detained.”

“It doesn’t?” Aurora asked.

Caleb shook his head. “No,” he said. “There’s some unaccounted space here at this precinct. My people say it’s for some of their wild-goose chase files. If what we go through on a daily basis doesn’t count as that, I don’t know what does.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Aurora said. “If they took her into custody, why didn’t she call her family? Why didn’t she call me?”

“Why didn’t she call any of us?” Marshall asked.

“Perhaps she was unable to do so,” I said.

“That means someone up there is denying Alexandra her rights,” Caleb said.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“I’ve been arrested enough times to know what rights she should have,” he said. “She’s either not being allowed her call or she’s not being processed through the system like a regular person would be.”

“Then we’d better hurry up and find her,” Marshall said.

“Agreed,” I said, and reached over my head. Spreading my clawed hands, I pressed them against the stone at the top of the tunnel. There was much resistance, but as I forced more strength into it, bits of it crumbled down onto me, revealing layers of smooth gray beneath them.

Marshall coughed as dust formed all around us. Aurora and Caleb covered their mouths and noses as they waited it out.

When the dust finally settled, Caleb looked up into the hole. “Concrete,” he said.

Aurora stepped over and tapped at it with the bladed tip of her pole arm. “This is going to take me a while to chip through,” she said.

I shook my head and eased her away before holding up my claws. “It will not be a problem,” I said.

I slammed my claws into the concrete, tearing away chunks of it.

“Easy,” Caleb called out, looking over his map. “We need to break through, but we’re not looking to cause a scene. If my sources and map are right, I
think
I’ve got an unused part of the station, but we still want to go in as quietly as we can. Got it?”

“Understood,” I said. Finesse was not always the way of the
grotesque
, but for the sake of my friends I slowed my pace and worked with caution. After several minutes I had dug my way through the outer layer until I hit another, this one seeming less substantial.

Caleb came back over when he heard the change in the sound of my digging. “That’s going to be subfloor and probably tile on top of that,” he said.

I looked down at him. “Any suggestions on how I should handle it?”

He clapped me on the shoulder. “Not a one,” he said. “You’re going to have to break through and that’s probably going to make some noise. I say just go for it and let’s get up in there.”

“Grab and go,” Marshall said. “Subtlety be damned.”

The subfloor was just beyond my natural reach, but having cleared a large enough space in the concrete for me to pass through—wings closed—I leapt up while locking my arms above my head like a medieval battering ram. The floor above groaned from the first impact, but did not give. I landed with a splash in the tunnel, squatted as low as I could, and forced all my power into my next leap. Arms still locked in place, they tore through the floor above, and to my surprise so did my whole body.

I perhaps did not know my own strength, suddenly finding myself in the dark of a room up above. As quick as I was through the opening, I spread my wings to slow myself before I crashed through the floor above
that
. The cacophony of metal chairs and tables knocking over all around me filled my ears, but I managed to still land myself without a sound next to the hole.

“Everything okay up there?” Aurora called out from below.

“I believe so,” I said, staying still in the darkness for a moment, listening.

“Great,” she said, passing her pole arm up through the hole to me while keeping hold of one end of it. “Hold that right there.”

She turned, grabbed Marshall, and lifted him up to the pole. When his hands wrapped around it, I pulled him up into the room where his feet scrambled to one side of the hole before he was willing to let go.

I lowered the pole back through the hole where Aurora was reaching for Caleb, who brushed her hand away.

“I’ve got this myself,” he said and jumped up, catching the pole. I pulled him up the same as I had Marshall, then did the same for Aurora until the four of us were securely in the room.

“Where are we?” Marshall whispered.

“It looks like my contacts didn’t screw me over,” Caleb said. “It’s a storage room in a disused section of the precinct. If they’re keeping Alexandra off the books, this was my best guess as to where they’d keep her.”

“Let’s hope you’re right,” Aurora said, going to the one door. She cracked it open, the dull light of the corridor coming into the room. Her head disappeared as she looked out of it for a second. “Come on.”

Marshall and Caleb followed after her and I went last, having to constrict my body as best I could to maneuver through the doorway. Once in the hall, I moved after the line of humans as they headed past several dark, empty cells, searching each of them with their tiny handheld sources of light.

At the farthest down the hall, Aurora stopped, her light shining to the back of the cell. I walked up behind the group of them to find Alexandra lying with her back to us on a metal slab that hung off the wall. The rise and fall of her shoulders was slow and steady.

“She is asleep,” I said.

“How the hell can she sleep at a time like this?” Marshall asked.

“Let’s find out,” Aurora said. She grabbed her pole arm near the bladed tip and slid the shaft of it between the bars. It took the full extension of her arm and pressing herself up against the bars to reach Alexandra with it, but she managed to nudge her friend right between the shoulders.

Alexandra shrugged it away, and gave a slow rollover. Shock ran through me when I saw her face and arms. They were covered in bandages.

Alexandra laid her hand on the end of the pole arm and lowered it to the floor, her eyes fluttering open. She followed the length of the shaft until she saw Aurora and the rest of us standing there.

“Hey, guys,” she said with words that were heavy with sleep. “Nice of you to make it.” Her eyes went from her friends to mine. She sat up. “You’re here, too? How’d
you
get a visitor’s pass?”

“None of us exactly came in through the front door,” Caleb said. “Which explains why we all smell a bit like sewage.” He pointed to the bandages all over her body. “You’re pretty cut up there. You okay?”

Alexandra gave a slow, sleepy nod. “You should see the other guy,” she said. “Oh, wait, you can’t. His shiny marble head got blown off by a paranormal romance reader.”

Caleb nodded back. “I’m going to pretend that makes some kind of sense,” he said and turned to me, slapping his hand on my shoulder. “If you would do your Man of Steel bit on these bars here, we can get the hell out of here.”

“Of course,” I said.

Aurora pulled her pole arm back out of the cell as Marshall and Caleb stepped away from the area. When Aurora was done, she, too, moved and I came forward, wrapping my hands around the bars of the cell.

“Wait,” Alexandra said, standing up.

“As you wish,” I said, and dropped my hands from the bars.

“At the risk of sounding rude,” Caleb started, “what the hell, Lexi? Time is of the essence here.”

“I was half-awake when you asked how I could be sleeping at a time like this,” she said, coming over to the bars, sliding her arms through them, and resting them along one of the horizontal crossbars. “After yesterday’s fiasco, I think my body and brain just needed a break so it all shut down once the cops brought me in.”

“They caught up with you?” Aurora asked.

“Actually, I caught up with them first,” she said.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but when I drew those
grotesques
away, it was so you and your friends would have time to escape.”

“Well, not
all
the creatures went after you,” Alexandra said. “One ended up staying behind and it attacked the detectives. Those
grotesques
were there for us . . . for
me
. I just couldn’t let anyone die at their hands.”

I managed a smile. “Of course,” I said. “I did not think to count on your nobility.”

Caleb stepped forward. “Yeah, yeah, look, nobility is great and all, but we
really
need to get going, Lex. Our arrival made a little noise and we’re not going to be alone for long.”

“We don’t need to hurry,” Alexandra said as calm as could be.

“We don’t?” Aurora asked.

Alexandra shook her head. “The detectives brought me in,” she said, “but no one’s formally charged me with anything.”

“That’s great,” Caleb said. “You’re not on record. We can get away clean on this.”

Alexandra shook her head. “I’m not running on this one,” she said.

Caleb grabbed her hands, shaking her. “Why the hell not?”

“These detectives . . .” she started, then took a moment as she struggled to find the words. “They didn’t book me when they brought me in. Why? They just want answers, the same as us. They’ve been a bit pissed off in the way they’re going about it, but after having slept it off for a day here, I get it now. It’s all clear. There’s an increasing number of
grotesques
coming onto
all
our radars, and the intentions of a wider and wider variety of them are not fully known. I’m sick of running when what we really need is more people on our side.”

Aurora handed her pole arm to me. “Let me see if I can find them, then,” she said, and headed up the corridor.

Caleb opened his mouth to speak, but words eluded him.

“You wish to protest, Caleb?” I asked.

He pressed his open hand to his chest. “I just don’t want to get shot,” he said.

“That
is
a compelling point,” Marshall added.

“I need answers,” Alexandra said. “Like how that one
grotesque
—the one that
didn’t
follow Stanis—knew about me.”

“Plenty of
grotesques
know about you,” Marshall offered.

“Ones that I capture and bring to Stanis, yes,” she said. “But this one was different. He knew I was a Spellmason, what my power could do. He implied he was part of a larger group, one that’s organizing itself under the guidance of some master who taught them something about me.”

“How would your name be getting around?” I asked. “I do not believe the
grotesques
of Sanctuary would share such knowledge of you with outsiders.”

A long silence followed, broken only when Marshall let out a long sigh.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I can’t stand it. I have a pretty good idea how your name’s been getting around.”

Alexandra looked at Marshall, but he would not meet her eyes.