Shadows Fall (42 page)

Charging down the path, Charlie’s glow sticks lit up the scene of David awkwardly hauling himself up and Hester lying huddled on the ground. She lay in a rapidly rising puddle of water, and she was too still.

“Stop!” Charlie shouted and reached for his service weapon. He swore when he realized his gun was gone. He’d unsecured it when he heard the footsteps, and it must have gotten knocked out of the holster when David had crashed into him.

David seemed to notice Charlie was unarmed at almost the same moment, and he poised to bolt. Charlie didn’t have any options left, so he put his head down and sprinted, tackling the guy so that they both went down, hard, a few feet past Hester.

Though David was all arms and legs with no muscle tone, he fought like a rabid dog. He used every inch of his body, flailing, kicking, twisting, and biting. All Charlie was really trying to do was get a good hold on the guy so he could restrain him. An inhuman screech pierced the air between them as David brought a bony knee up and clipped Charlie hard in his dangly bits. Hell if that didn’t snap the last bit of his control.

With a solid grip on thin shoulders, Charlie reared back and head-butted the guy with all the force he could summon. David’s head snapped back, and he went out like a light. A quick glance at his chest told Charlie that he was still alive. Good. He wanted that nutjob alive to stand trial for his unspeakable crimes.

Blood trickled down David’s forehead, and it looked like he’d be out for a while. Keeping one eye on the water level, Charlie crawled over to Hester. She stirred as he checked her breathing and pulse, and she allowed him to help her to a sitting position. Wincing, she touched a spot on the back of her head, and her fingers came away bloody.

“Shit,” Charlie said. “I have a first aid kit in my pack. Let me bandage you up.”

Hester waved a dismissive hand at him, and she was already trying to stagger to her feet. “Take more than a bump
prey miri ser'o
to stop me.”

“How many times do I have to tell you people that I don’t speak Romany?” Charlie asked with a surprising fondness.

“On my head,
gajo
. Try to keep up.” She angled her head in David’s direction, though she surely couldn’t see past Charlie. “That man. He’s…”

“Yes. He’s the one. Which means if we go in the direction he was coming from, we have a chance of finding Titus.”

“Then we must go now. This water, it…steals breath.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I just need to get David up so that he doesn’t drown before I have the chance to send his ass to—”

Charlie’s voice was cut off when something he couldn’t see came down in front of his face and wrapped around his neck, tight. His hands instinctively clutched at it, and he felt the slippery wetness of a soggy rope, being wrenched tighter and tighter by a startlingly strong grip.

White spots swam before his eyes, his lungs screamed for air, and his brain was fuzzy with disorientation.
David
.

Charlie had been so worried about making sure Hester was alive that he hadn’t tied David up first. Jesus, fuck, the guy had to have a hard head to be conscious so soon. Compared to Charlie, David was no bigger than a minute, but his freedom was on the line, and he was being fueled by breath in his lungs and a giant-sized dose of crazy. The odds were
not
in Charlie’s favor.

Spinning around, Charlie ping-ponged against the walls of the tunnel, trying to dislodge his attacker. David yelped when he made contact with the concrete a couple of times, but his grip never loosened. The shadows before Charlie stretched and spread, plunging him deeper and deeper into the darkness surrounding them. Chaos descended, and the world lost its light.

And then a gunshot tore through the silence, and the pressure released.

Falling to the ground with a tremendous splash, Charlie coughed and sputtered until he was finally able to draw an adequate breath. As pure, sweet—stale, moldy, underground—oxygen flowed back into his body, his vision started to clear. He looked around frantically, trying to assess the damage.

David was flopping around like a fish in the shallow water, screaming and clutching his leg, and Hester stood above him with the smoking gun trained on his head. The picture was so beautifully absurd that Charlie barked out a laugh. Hester flicked a glance at him and raised a brow, her lips twisting in that familiar sneer. “You going to tie up this trash or do I have to do everything?”

Charlie grinned wickedly at her, still chuckling. “My fuckin’ hero.”

Though still dizzy from his own head wound and lack of oxygen, Charlie leapt to his feet and only staggered a little. He tied David up with his own rope, in a sort of modified hog-tie that left just enough room for him to sit upright and not drown in the storm water that was creeping up to midcalf level.

Hester gave Charlie a funny look, and he executed a mock bow. “Junior rodeo, cowboy up!” he said with a wink. “Come on, we need to find Titus before the water gets any higher. I’m gonna call for backup.”

She nodded and took the lead by some unspoken agreement. Charlie speed-dialed Sonny, silently begging the guy to pick up the phone.

“Hey man, where are you?”
Sonny said without preamble.

“Sonny, I’ve got no time. Listen carefully. I tracked down Sever. He’s kidnapped Titus and taken him down into the storm system. I have him tied up down here, and I’m going after Titus. I need you to call for some back up, then get the hell over here and take Sever in.”

“Charlie, what the fuck are you—”

“No time, I’ll explain it all later. You understand what I need you to do?”

“Yes. Tell me where you are.”

Charlie quickly read off their coordinates from his GPS and then rang off. If they had any trouble finding him, the Captain could always activate the tracking device on his phone. The important thing was that Sonny knew he had David and that they were down in the tunnels.

They reached the bend where David had collided with Charlie, and they followed it, making a hard right. The tunnel opened up into another sort of antechamber with two more tunnels leading away from them. Without hesitation, Hester charged into the one on the left. Charlie grabbed her arm to still her, then put himself in front. “We don’t know what else is down here. You’re already hurt.”

“So are you,” she mentioned, but she didn’t argue.

The tunnel she chose was short, maybe thirty feet at the most, and it opened into an even larger junction. Moonlight bounced off the walls, causing Charlie to look up. There was a large metal grate above their heads—the Starbucks drain. “We’re here,” he breathed.

He looked around desperately, but saw nothing but water and a few piles of accumulated leaves and garbage. “Where is he?”

“Close,” Hester answered, but she was also glancing around like she hoped to catch a glimpse of Titus.

Then Charlie had an idea. It would be just the right amount of sick and wrong for David to have taken Titus directly under the Starbucks. He did own a competing coffee shop, after all. Titus had a special kind of hatred for huge chains, preferring to keep his money and his patronage with local businesses. Charlie was banking on David having somehow figured that out and done this out of spite.

He pulled his GPS out and located the exact coordinates for the franchise. “This way,” he muttered absently. He walked through the middle tunnel opening, which spilled them out into a dead end. It was a large, possibly naturally occurring cavern, only partially reinforced by stone, concrete, and metal. It was as large as Charlie’s whole apartment, if he took the cumulative square footage and stretched it out like a long hallway, and it was lower than the tunnels so water was rapidly spilling into it. The storm water had already risen to around a foot and a half.

“
Fuck!
” Charlie shouted. “I thought for sure this was it. It would have been a sick kind of irony.”

He turned to Hester, and he saw that her eyes were dilated and she was staring out into the cavern. “He’s here,” Hester said.

“Where? There’s nothing here but water!” Charlie couldn’t help the impatience that colored his voice. This was nothing but an empty hole filled with water. How could Titus be here? The only way anyone could be here was…

Wait.
Grappling with his pack, Charlie pulled out another road flare and lit it, holding it up high above his head. He saw something small sticking out of the water, but he couldn’t quite tell what it was. He squinted and stepped a little closer, and then he figured it out. It was a hand.

“No,” he said quietly, and his own voice made him jump. The whole situation felt like a nightmare. He dropped the flare and jumped off the ledge into the cavern. “No, no, no, no, no…”

He kept up the chant as he sloshed through the water, slipping and righting himself but not stopping until he reached the far end where the hand was. His heart was thumping painfully in his chest, and he prayed he was wrong as he plunged his hands into the water to find whatever—whoever—was attached to the hand.

Cool skin touched his fingertips and he grabbed on, pulling hard. There was a liquid
whoosh
as he yanked the body from the water. There was indeed someone down there.
Titus.

Much to Charlie’s horror, Titus’s body felt limp and cool, and he could see that it was bleeding from dozens of wounds. There was no movement there, no life, but Charlie wouldn’t accept that. He hauled Titus into a fireman’s carry and trudged back across the cavern. With Hester’s grim-faced assistance, he managed to get Titus up onto the ledge and then climb up after him.

Charlie and Hester worked together, dragging Titus as gently as possible out of the connecting tunnel and into the much drier antechamber. Charlie spared a brief glance at Titus, still and pale, with red lacerations marring his perfect skin. With death hovering, he was startled at the resemblance between Titus and Brandon.

He’d seen this part in a hundred different movies, the part where the hero gets there too late, someone takes a pulse and says ‘he’s gone,’ and they just fucking let it end. Charlie wasn’t going to let Titus end; he wasn’t going out like that.

Shoving his emotions aside, Charlie leaned over Titus and placed his hands over one another on the man’s chest. He began pumping in earnest, keeping count in his head—thirty times according to his first responder training. When he finished, he opened Titus’s mouth to check his airway, blocking out the sight of how blue his lips were, then tilted his head back and pinched his nose.

He lowered his mouth to Titus’s and blew, watching in his periphery as his chest rose and fell. He repeated the action again, and tried not to agonize over the fact that the last time his lips touched Titus’s, they’d been happily making out in his bed.

Watching Titus’s chest carefully, he saw no signs of breathing. He shook his head when Hester gave him a questioning look, and a few tears slipped down her cheeks.

“Come on, T,” he growled, and repeated the compressions, then the breaths. Nothing.

Charlie’s fingers curled into the black material of Titus’s shirt as a wave of pain hit him. Sorrow washed over him like a physical blow, and it was almost enough to make him collapse.

Yet he kept on going. Compressions. Breaths. Check. Compressions. Breaths. Check. He jolted when he felt a gentle flutter of a touch on his shoulder. Hester was looking down on him, her eyes mournful but pleading. It was plain that she wanted him to stop torturing them all, to let Titus go.

Charlie mouthed the word ‘no’ even as he slowly withdrew his hands from Titus. He hung his head and let the tears come. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Titus’s chest give a jerky rise. His heart leapt into his throat with dizzying speed and he got right up in Titus’s face. He tapped those soft cheeks, hoping to bring Titus back to them.

“Titus? Breathe, baby. Do it again for me.”

Those beautiful blue eyes blinked open, then widened, and Titus had to turn his head to cough up what looked like liters of water…but he was alive.

Charlie snaked his arms underneath Titus’s back and pulled him into a fierce hug. “Thank God,” he whispered, not even bothering to contain his relieved sobs. Titus’s wet, crackling breath was music to his ears, as were the coughing fits he was wracked with every few seconds. Those things meant life.

Frowning, Charlie realized that Titus wasn’t hugging him back, wasn’t doing anything, so he gently laid him back down and stroked his face. “Tell me where it hurts, babe.”

One corner of Titus’s mouth tipped up in a sweet ghost of a smile. “Everywhere. But you’re here now. It’s all good.” He turned his head and gave Hester another small grin. She came over to sit on his other side.

“It takes more than the likes of him to take a good gypsy boy down,” she said with pride in her voice.

Titus let out a watery chuckle, but then his eyes clouded with pain. “Lost…a lot of blood,” he said to Charlie.

“Yeah, we gotta get you to a hospital. Think you can stand up?”

Titus licked his lips and shook his head. “Can’t… move. Dav—David poisoned me. That’s how he does it. He paralyzed me so I couldn’t move, but could still feel the pain. It’s worn off a little bit, but I can’t move anything more than my head, my fingers and toes.”