Incarnate (A Spellmason Chronicle) (30 page)

“Lexi,” Marshall said. “Let’s think this through.”

I shook my head. “You can stay here and think. I’ve got someone I need to help. Or would you rather watch him die?”

Marshall sighed. “Of course I want to help,” he said. “But we are seriously outnumbered here.”

“No, we’re not,” I said. Without another word, I turned and snuck out across the track and lifted myself up onto the platform where the gargoyles were assembled.

I looked back at my friends down on the track. Caleb and Rory were already in motion, but Marshall was just staring at me. “How are we not outnumbered?” he whispered in a panic.

The gargoyles closest to me stirred, some looking over at us the way a human might look at a fly buzzing around them.

“Come on,” Rory said as she jumped up onto the platform, her boots echoing as they hit. “Can’t let Alexandra have all the glory or insanity, can we?”

“Fine,” Marshall said, finally moving, “but if she gets us killed, I’m
not
forgiving her.”

“Me, either,” Caleb said, unbuttoning his coat, already going through the vials lining it.

“Fair enough,” I said, starting my way through the crowd. “I, for one, am going to try my best to see that no one gets killed.”

As the four of us came down the platform, the gargoyles parted to either side of us. If stone statues could look mildly amused at our presence, this was the right crowd for it. Every last one of them towered over us and it took all of my courage not to feel trapped in the middle of them.

As we approached the dais, we caught the Butcher’s attention and he smiled at us, his evil grin all the more chilling coming from the carved stone angel he was.

“Nathaniel Crane,” I said as I went. “Or should I just call you the Butcher of the Bowery?”

“That, or Robert Patrick Dorman will suffice,” the Butcher said. “Nathaniel Crane was the name of that gargoyle I had just killed when you and your gargoyle stumbled across me.”

“And why did he have to die?” I asked. “What was his crime?”

“I asked him into my flock here and he refused,” he said. “I have no truck with those who oppose me.”

“Your crimes against the arcane community and your own stone kind are far worse than anything that gargoyle did, I assure you.”

“You’ve clearly done your homework since we last met,” he said. “Still, it’s a pity those sheep at Union Square didn’t take care of you the other night.”

“You preach to those people like you’re a god,” I said, pointing up at the collection of Titans behind him on the platform. “You stride among them like one, and they worship you for simply existing. And what do you offer them in return? You lure people here under the promise of the Life Eternal and then use them for your rituals. And worse, you’re using blood magic to do it.”

“Well, you
did
tell my servants you were not going to help us, Ms. Belarus,” the Butcher said.

“Haven’t you already helped yourself enough already?” I asked. “Forming your little cult, stealing the Cagliostro Medallion . . .”

The Butcher cocked his head at us. “You know about that, do you?”

“We saw what happened at the cemetery,” Caleb said. “And to my friend Fletcher.”

The Butcher gave a deep laugh. “I attempted to return to the cemetery in the park, hoping to give the O’Shea family crypt a more thorough search for the medallion. Your friend died because he tried to bar my way. Although his blood did prove useful in attempting to discover the medallion’s true location. And yet for all my efforts, the Cagliostro Medallion is not in my possession.”

“I saw the way you tore oh so thoroughly through the O’Sheas’ family plot the first time,” I said.

“But despite my thoroughness that time and my last, that which I sought out was
not
there.”

“So you killed Fletcher just to aid you in your search,” Caleb said, not holding his contempt back

“It will be mine,” he said, spreading his stone-feathery wings. “Do you know how long I spent without form or function before I was given this stone vessel?”

“I imagine for a notorious hedonist like yourself, it must kill you to not be able to take a human form,” Marshall said as sharp as ever.

“No,” the Butcher said. “I don’t think you people
can
imagine my desire.”

“I don’t give a crap about your desires, gargoyle or otherwise,” I said. “Let these people go. Now.”

The angel looked genuinely surprised and amused.

“You come and make this stand before me, and just expect me to do your bidding?” he asked with a laugh. “You
did
look around you, yes?”

“Let these people go,” I repeated. I kept my eyes on him, refusing to look at the vast number surrounding us. “If these two humans are guilty of anything, they’re guilty of being too trusting, or perhaps they need the kind of help that
you
can’t provide.”

“Or they’re stupid,” Caleb whispered.

“Not helping,” Marshall said, slapping his hand over Caleb’s mouth.

The Butcher looked unconvinced. “And you think we will just hand them over to you?” he asked.

“Pretty much, yeah,” I said, the conviction of my words as unwavering as my grip on the spell book.

“And why would I ever do that?” The joy in his voice at how little a threat he perceived us as drove me over the edge and I snapped.

“Because you forget where you are and who you are talking to,” I said, straightening as I opened the spell book. “This station was constructed by Alexander Belarus, and you are dealing with the last Spellmason. My last visit here I was run out, but now that I’ve had the time for greater focus on my true calling? Well, let’s just say I don’t run anymore.”

“You ran from here?” The Butcher chuckled. “What made you run?”

“That’s on me,” Marshall said, raising his hand and stepping forward. “I triggered something. Kind of a defiling-the-temple kind of thing.” He pointed to the statues all around the platform, ending up at the towering Medusa behind the Butcher. “Made a few enemies in the process.”

“But what once were enemies,” I said, reading from the book and snapping my will out to all corners of the station, “are now allies.”

The stone soldiers lining the walls came to life at my command. Behind the Butcher, the Titans on the platform writhed into motion and stepped out from behind the decorative wall that separated them. With a singular thought, I set all of the stone creatures to converge on the mass of gargoyles, whose wings unfurled as they took to the air or ran at the advancing stone soldiers.

“Holy crap,” Marshall said. “Are you controlling
all
of them?”

“Yes and no,” I said, checking the spell book, figuring it out as I went along. “Alexander set
some
protective parameters on them centuries ago. Like attacking you when you retrieved one of Stanis’s soul gems for us. All these statues . . . they’re not soulful in the same way
grotesques
are, but they understand my intent.” The Medusa on the platform swung her snake tail, snapping one of the gargoyles in half, tumbling it off the platform onto the tracks. “And boy, do they pack a punch.”

The Butcher himself was preoccupied with the Titan of Atlas, who had sprung to life right behind him. While it took several gargoyles to deal with one soldier at a time, the Butcher seemed fine going at it one-on-one with creatures at least three times his height. Atlas reached down to pick the Butcher up by his wings, but the gargoyle raked his hands down the creature’s arms. Deep gouges appeared and, grabbing on, the Butcher gave a twist of his wrists, snapping off Atlas’s entire forearm.

“Jesus,” Marshall said from directly behind me out of harm’s way. “Someone’s been eating his Wheaties.”

“We need a plan, Marshall,” I shouted out to him. “Now!”

I knew Marshall to be a tactician and a planner, which was what I needed. With all the stonework in my control, it was hard to concentrate on much else going on in the subway station.

“Are we looking to win this fight?” he asked. “Not sure how great the odds are on that.”

“Get us and those people out of here,” I said, and set several of the stone sentinels to swatting some of the flyers out of the air. Broken gargoyles tumbled out of the sky, crashing into walls or back down onto the platform where they shattered on impact.

Marshall stepped out from behind me and ran forward through the crowd.

“Rory, Caleb!” he shouted out through cupped hands to our friends who were already locked in combat. “I need you to free those people!”

“On it,” Rory called out. She slid her pole arm between the legs of the gargoyle she was locked in combat with, and twisted, tripping him. As soon as he was down, Rory ran for the horizontal pillar where the two people were chained down.

Caleb ducked under the swing of another gargoyle and ran past it in the same direction, vials already flashing out of his pockets.

Rory made her way down the platform with her dancer’s grace, dodging the uncontrolled lashing of gargoyle wings, twirling out of claws’ harm as she went. When she got to the pillar, Rory brought the blade of her pole arm down hard on the chains binding the man’s hands. The weapon’s blade cut through the links with ease.

Caleb simultaneously poured two of his concoctions together and spread it over the chains binding the legs of the female. The metal fizzed and hissed as gray smoke shot up from the reaction and the woman’s legs came free.

The two of them set to work freeing the other ends of the restraints. I turned away from them, needing to focus on the Butcher, who had just finished taking down his second of the Titans single-handedly.

“Hey, Robbie!” I shouted, hoping to taunt him. “Think fast!”

The Butcher twisted around, ignoring the other Titans converging on him. I whipped my mind out to the fallen pillar-turned-altar, sliding it out from under the two freed humans and shooting it toward the Butcher. His wings flew open and he leapt into the air as the pillar slid through the now-empty space.

“Not so fast,” I said, pressing one end up and the other down, launching the piece end over end into the air, hoisting the weight of it with my will, driving a mental spike into the center of my brain.

The Butcher shot straight up to avoid it, but I was just a hair faster and the tumbling pillar caught his legs. It sent the gargoyle into an uncontrolled spin that drove him into the station’s wall off to my left. He fell hard onto the subway tracks, but with a flap of his wings he stood once again in seconds. He leapt up onto the platform in a flash and I braced myself for his charge, but it never came.

Instead, the Butcher ignored me where I stood and ran off across the platform in the opposite direction. I started after him as he ran toward one of the still-standing support pillars.

No, not toward.
Through.

The gargoyle threw his shoulder into the pillar at a full run, cracking its foundation. His momentum carried him forward, the base of the pillar breaking apart as the rest of the column reaching the ceiling high overhead showered down on the platform. I stopped in my tracks, which saved me from one of the heavy pieces crushing me. The others landed hard on the platform, bits of dust and broken, jagged pieces of rock showering down from the ceiling above.

As I crawled over the broken pillar, the Butcher was already running off in a different direction across the platform, going for another one of the support pillars.

I lashed my power out at the base of the pillar, holding it steady in place, and when the Butcher struck it, it didn’t budge. The gargoyle seemed to sense the resistance and instead drove his claws into the pillar itself. As he twisted his hands within it, much of it began to crumble away. While I was able to maintain control over some of the pieces, the damage became too extensive for me to hold on to. The weight of the column above it was too much, and the whole pillar collapsed in sections down to the platform.

Over the sounds of fighting all around me, the greater crackle and crunch of the station’s ceiling giving way filled my ears. A quick look around the platform had me assessing the situation as fast as I could. Caleb and Rory were hobbling halfway down it with their two rescue victims in tow. Even fighting one-handed with a pole arm as she held the blond girl up, Rory was still able to parry away any attacks that came at her while Caleb drove other gargoyles back with concoction after concoction flying out of his jacket. Nearby, Marshall was dodging his way toward me.

“Go help Rory and Caleb!” I shouted to him. “We need those people out of here, now! Not sure I can keep this place together.”

What little color remained in Marshall’s face drained away, but he nodded, reversed direction, and chased after them.

I released the pillars from my power. At this point they were a lost cause and I had larger issues to deal with.

Huge chunks of the ceiling began to fall away. Despite my grandfather’s superior stonework, the place simply could not withstand such an assault. Dirt and rubble poured down after the stonework had fallen away, and as if some sort of subterranean clouds had parted, there were suddenly lights shining down on me. Above, I could see the sign for Macy’s hanging on a building as the ever-widening hold collapsed in to reveal it.

The cries of people above and the honking of horns filled the air.

There were no parting words. No villainous cackle. No “I’ll get you next time, Gadget!” The Butcher simply signaled to his men and shot up and out through the collapsing ceiling of the station. Within seconds, he was gone and the rest of his people moved to follow.

Through the chaos of their departure, I realized I had a bigger problem. The flurry of wings and debris above gave way to the sight of innocent passersby falling as the sidewalk above crumbled away beneath their feet. With swift reaction, I called to the Titans and stone soldiers alike to catch them, working hard to finesse the creatures so nobody got crushed in my rush to action.

I was feeling really good about how it was going—the soldiers catching and then setting down the people out of harm’s way—until the sound of two cars colliding took my attention away from it. The lights of a vehicle flashed into the now-massive sinkhole, and my heart fell. None of my soldiers would make it over to it in time.