Incarnate (A Spellmason Chronicle) (9 page)

Alexandra

M
y mind swam up to the bare hint of consciousness even if my eyes resisted opening. I hoped there was a special ring of hell for those who created hospital beds, and I hoped its abyssal equivalent was made of jagged glass, steel wool, and pain to match the kind I was currently in.

I’d hated hospitals ever since my childhood stay when I had my tonsils out. Through my current haze of clouded thoughts, my only fond recollection of that time was Rory sneaking Ben & Jerry’s in to me until the nurses caught on and kicked her out.

I went to laugh at the dreamlike memory, but something about my body definitely didn’t feel right. There were bandages across my face and arms, bringing the events of my evening back to me: gargoyles, cars flying through the air, the shotgun blast . . . After all that, I
had
to be in a hospital bandaged up, didn’t I?

As my brain focused in, I assessed my situation to figure out what exactly seemed wrong. For one, the bed beneath me felt less like the painful hospital kind and more like the hard coolness of a steel slab, which, thanks to every police procedural show on TV, reminded me of a morgue freezer drawer.

With a bit of panic awakening in me, I wanted to soothe myself and went to lift my hands, but discovered I could not. Fatigue fully rolled away from me as a dawning realization hit me hard—I was chained in place.

My eyes shot open, my heart pounding in my chest. My “hospital bed” was nothing more than a steel table I was laid out on within a small square room that was not much more than four walls, a single door, and a large mirror off to my left. A blinking red light, that of an active camera, sat high in the corner of the cold, gray space. As I sat up, I discovered that indeed my hands were cuffed and chained to the table beneath me. Between my feet the contents of my backpack were laid out on the steel table, including my notebooks and the inert stone form of my great-great-grandfather’s tome.

“Hey!” I shouted out to the camera, met only by the tinny echo of my voice. That went on for a full twenty seconds before finally dying out, the silence that followed it deafening, but thankfully it didn’t last long.

A light went on behind the mirror to reveal the officers from the earlier incident in the streets. Now that I wasn’t fleeing the detectives, I finally got a good look at the two of them. Both were in the smart-looking suits from earlier, both of their outfits torn here and there as often happens in gargoyle encounters. The male was about a foot taller than the woman, who looked to be about my height. I pegged him at late thirties or early forties from the hints of gray at the temples of his military-length black hair. The woman was more olive in complexion, but the dark red of her long hair was not a color found in nature.

The two of them headed to a door set along the same wall as the one to the room I occupied, both of them limping, but the woman walked with a more pronounced limp than the man I had dug out of the pile of bricks. They exited their room and when they came into mine seconds later, I could hear the woman hiss with her efforts to walk, indicating she was in more pain than her limp alone suggested.

“How are you feeling?” the male detective asked while the other one shut the door.

I looked down at the dozens of Band-Aids covering my arms and chest. Several showed hints of blood soaking through them and they stung, but nothing seemed fatal.

“This has to be the worst hospital ever,” I said, adjusting my butt on the cold table to relieve a tingling numbness that had set in.

“This
isn’t
a hospital,” the man said, moving underneath the camera in the corner.

“I kind of figured that one out for myself,” I said.

He reached up and tugged at the cable running to the camera from the wall until the line came free. The indicator light on the camera went dead.

“What gave it away?” the woman asked as she turned from the door. “The lack of get-well cards?”

“The décor,” I answered, and pulled at the cuffs connecting me to the table. “And the jewelry.”

“Clever girl,” the man said, taking a chair at the foot of the table. “I’m Detective Maron. This is Detective Rowland.”

“A pleasure,” I said.

The female detective went right to my feet at the end of the table and rapped her knuckles on Alexander’s stone book and my notebook. “You mind telling me what these are, Miss . . . ?”

“You’ve gone through my backpack,” I said with a smile. “You tell me.”

“That’s a bit of a problem,” Detective Maron said. “You weren’t carrying any ID.”

I shrugged. “Maybe it got knocked free of me when I was busy
saving you
.”

My words didn’t have the effect I had hoped for, and he leaned back in his chair, arms folded over his chest. “Well, was it?”

“Answer this, Detective. Would
you
carry ID on you if both the police and those monstrosities were after you?”

“Speaking of which,” the woman said, her voice sharp. “You didn’t seem all that shocked or surprised when you saw that winged stone creature.”

Her partner nodded. “Most people just flee when they see them,” he said. “But not you.”

I shrugged, the cuffs and chains jangling. “Maybe I’m just more stupid than your average person.”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve seen you, smart-ass,” the woman shot out. “You’re involved with those things somehow.”

“I’ve seen you before, too,” I said to the two of them. “Before tonight, I mean. At the Cloisters. You were the first officers on the scene.”

“Correction,” the female officer said. She hobbled her way off to my right to lean up against the wall, looking none too pleased. “We were the
only
ones on the scene.”

“That is, until the alarms went off,” the man added. “Someone or
something
smashed one of the stained glass windows on the side of the tower. Then every officer from the Upper West Side to Inwood suddenly took an interest and came running, only to find us there with nothing but our dicks in our hands.”

I shot a skeptical look over to the female officer.

“You don’t want to see hers,” the male officer whispered, leaning in. “Trust me.”

“You want to know why I don’t carry ID?” I asked, looking to Detective Rowland. “Why I ran from you? It’s simple. I don’t take kindly to having guns pointed at me. Of
course
I ran.”

The anger in her eyes didn’t let up, and I decided it was best to change the subject.

“No offense,” I said, and turned my attention back to Detective Maron.

“None taken,” she said. “We’ve got better things to be offended about, like the fact that when we radio a call in, the only response we get is laughter.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “Do they not realize what you’re dealing with out there?”

Rowland shook her head. “We’re the joke of the department,” she said. “You think either of us wanted to get stuck with this shit show?”

Maron shook his head. “Mulder and Scully ain’t got nothing on us,” he said.

“What does she mean by
shit show
?” I asked him.

Detective Maron sighed. “Do you remember when all this started?” he asked.

Of course
I remembered, being that I was the cause of much of it. “It was the night the gargoyles awoke,” I said.

Maron made a sound like a negative game-show buzzer going off. “Wrong.”

I sat up at that. “It wasn’t?”

He shook his head. “There’ve been reports for years of all kinds of weird shit going down in the city,” he said. “Crazy stuff.”

“Dispatch is used to getting its fair share of bizarre calls,” Rowland added from the spot against the wall. “Elvis sightings, river monsters, vampires . . . Dispatch logs the calls, everyone has a good laugh, but nothing ever gets done about it.”

“But over the past ten, maybe twenty, years, there’s been an increase in all this nonsense,” Maron continued. He tapped at his temple. “Can you guess why?”

I thought for a moment. What would increase the paranormal activity in a place like Manhattan? From what Caleb had told me, much of the arcane community had been around for decades—centuries in some cases—so why now?

“There aren’t
more
arcane things happening,” I said. “It’s just that there are whole new ways for it to become faster public knowledge. Cell phones.
Camera
phones.”

Maron nodded. “This whole gargoyle mess was just the tipping point for the police department,” he said. “It was easy to ignore crackpot phone calls reporting crazy sightings decades ago, but when people started taking blurry night shots of winged creatures in the sky over Manhattan, those calls got flagged and noted down. Then six months ago you have
video footage
of dozens of these stone monsters appearing suddenly, and they can no longer be ignored.”

“So they only put you two on it?” I asked. “Seems like putting a Band-Aid on a missing limb, if you ask me.”

Rowland laughed, shaking her head at me like I was stupid. “Do you have any idea how the city of Manhattan works?” she asked.

I shook my head. Other than rudimentary zoning laws I’d dealt with as part of my family’s real estate business, I hadn’t a clue.

“It
doesn’t
work,” she continued. “The fact that they’ve tasked
anyone
to deal with this gargoyle bullshit these last six months is nothing short of a minor miracle.”

“Why you two, though?” I asked. “Some kind of Special Forces training in your background?”

Detective Rowland looked away from me. I turned to Maron, and while he met my eyes, his face was crimson in a full-on blush.

“You could call it special training,” he said. “Of a sort. I catch a lot of shit for playing World of Warcraft in my downtime.”

“And you?” I asked Detective Rowland.

She sighed, but rolled her eyes and looked at me. “I read a lot of paranormal romance,” she said. “Apparently in this police department that’s enough to render the two of us
experts
.”

Marshall had logged countless hours playing World of Warcraft, so I turned back to Maron. “Have I got someone for
you
to meet.”

“Your little blue-haired friend, you mean?” Detective Rowland asked.

I blanched at the mention of Rory. Things were so nerdy-chatty for a second there that I had forgotten where I was and the circumstances I was there under. As if being chained to a table wasn’t enough of a reminder. I fell silent in the hopes of killing that air of familiarity.

“Yeah, we know about her,” she said. “Funny how you two keep showing up wherever the chaos goes down.”

“Maybe she and I are just fans of the old Disney cartoon about gargoyles,” I said.

Detective Rowland gave me a crooked smile that looked like it might be followed with a punch to my face. “Why don’t I believe you?”

I shrugged. “You’ve got trust issues . . . ?” I offered.

Detective Maron picked up my notebook in his hands, flipping through it. Unlike the protective measure of stone transformation Alexander had put upon his spell book, there was no kind of warding to stop the detective from looking through mine.

“These look like notes for some kind of spell craft,” he said. “Would that be a fair assessment?”

The bandages on my face were soaked with sweat, the walls of the room felt like they were closing in, and the cold steel around my wrists burned against my skin as I realized this was probably a freak-out. I had never been arrested for anything in my life, and I certainly didn’t talk to random strangers about the arcane legacy of my family.

“Do I get to call a lawyer or anything?” I asked, trying not to hyperventilate.

The woman limped over from the wall to stand beside her partner. “Depends,” she said. “Are you going to tell us who you are?”

“Not . . . just yet,” I said, trying to get myself together before I seriously lost it. “I can’t. I need to think things through. I just need time to figure out what I want to tell you about those creatures, how I want to handle you . . .”

“Handle us?” Detective Maron repeated, amused. “May I remind you that
you’re
the one handcuffed to the table here?”

“What are you?” Detective Rowland asked, raising her voice in anger. “Some sort of cultist puppet master controlling these creatures? They’re tearing up our city and you’re going to pick and choose what you want to tell us? You have no idea the kind of trouble you could be in with us. Right now, you’re off the grid here, sunshine. You’re a Jane Doe. We can make your life here a world more difficult if you don’t cooperate.”

My panic subsided the angrier she became with me, a mix of fear and my own anger filling me in response.

“I don’t react well to threats,” I said, calm.

Detective Rowland leaned against the table, getting so up in my face I could smell her faint perfume. “And I don’t take kindly to whatever those things are tearing up my city! Move them to Jersey or Philly. Thanks to their existence, me and my partner have this citywide rampage to contend with.” She laid her hand down on top of Alexander’s stone spell book. “Now, you’ve got answers and I want them, or I’m going to beat you with this chunk of rock here.”