The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel (11 page)

“And keep our exit open,” Ian told him.

Yasha grinned crookedly. “Don’t I always?” He looked at me and his grin broadened. “Scream if something jumps at you.”

I tried for a grin; it felt more like a grimace. “Don’t I always?”

There was another keypad mounted on the wall next to the doors.

“Same code?” Ian asked Ollie.

“Yes.”

Ian keyed in the code, the lock clicked, and we were in.

 • • • 

Ian had insisted that we take the stairs.

Ollie had started to complain, took one look at Ian’s face, and kept his mouth shut.

I took the stairs whenever I could. Not because it was good for me . . . well, actually that was the reason, but not why you’d think. Ever since Ian had told me about getting trapped in an elevator by three shapeshifters who’d chosen to be giant rats for the evening, I had a newfound appreciation for the StairMasters at the company gym.

The stairwell and elevator doors opened into a single, long hallway that ran the length of the building. Ollie’s unit was at the far end, next to the lovely dead-end concrete wall.

“Same code?” Ian asked Ollie.

“Yes.”

Ian sprinted to the end of the hall, leaving me and Ollie to keep up. He punched in the code on yet another keypad, reached down, and lifted the rolling steel door.

We were hit in the collective face by dust and that pungent, musty smell that always signaled “really old stuff” to my nose. I sneezed. I was allergic to dust and mold, which wasn’t a potentially fatal condition—unless you found monsters for a living, creatures that generally didn’t lair in hypoallergenic conditions. People who sneezed didn’t sneak very well.

Ian looked around inside the unit; his expression a perfect mix of disgust and disbelief. “Ollie, we need to have a serious talk about your choice of inventory.”

So this is where Ollie had stashed the Egyptian mummy that had been in his shop—and two more to keep it company. There was also a more modern coffin that was hopefully empty, though thankfully closed. There were also chests, unidentifiable things, and various-sized cardboard boxes.

The dearly departed residents of his storage unit didn’t bother Ollie at all as he squirmed his way to the back. We didn’t need to tell him to hurry. The inside of Ollie’s storage room wasn’t the only thing that resembled a tomb. It was entirely too quiet out here, too. A mausoleum kind of quiet. Just like Yasha had never been to Siberia, I’d never been in a mausoleum, but I instinctively knew what one felt like. The creeps were the least of what I felt.

The sound of intense rummaging came from behind Ollie’s mummies.

“Got it,” he announced.

Have you ever noticed that when one big thing went right, everything else went straight to hell in a take-out box?

There was a heavy thump on the roof directly above our heads, immediately followed by more thumps farther back toward the elevator. Someone was on the roof, several someones, actually.

I froze. “Our guys?”

Ian’s gun in his hand told me otherwise. Shotgun blasts from the front of the building where Yasha was confirmed it. The big Russian was good, and a werewolf, but there was only one of him.

Ian ran down the hall to cover the stairs and elevator. “Move it!” he shouted back at us.

My survival instincts had kicked in, and they sure as hell weren’t telling me to run
toward
gunfire, but the way we’d come in was the only way out.

Before Ian could reach the end of the hall, both the elevator and stairway doors opened and three white camo-clad and armed men stormed through.

Not men.

Ghouls.

They’d look like men to Ian and Ollie, but my seer vision screamed—

“Ghouls!”

My brain did a quick flashback to SPI orientation. Ghouls ate human flesh, preferably while it was still alive; but in a pinch, corpses would do.

But either the pictures in the company manual hadn’t done these things justice, or proximity magnified fear. Ghouls looked more or less like humans, but the resemblance ended there. Their eyes were solid black, but would roll over white like a shark when they fed. Their jaws were longer and their mouths wider to make room for jagged teeth. Their skin was a pasty whitish gray. But a more applicable problem in our case, they were next to impossible to kill. We’d had a ghoul from time to time back home, but I’d never run into a whole passel of the things.

Ian opened fire. The pair that’d come up in the elevator were hit and went down, one of the bodies trapped between the closing elevator door. Half a second later, both ghouls were trying to get up. Ian put another bullet between the eyes of the third ghoul that’d come up the stairs. He went down twitching, but the twitching didn’t stop. Still twitching equaled not dead, or in his case, not dead again. More ghouls were coming through the stairway door.

Ollie was pushing his way out of the occult junk pile between the two upright mummies and was clutching what looked like a big gym bag. I reached in to grab him and the bag and pull them both out when one of the mummies fell out of the unit—and on top of me, knocking me to the concrete floor.

That mummy saved my life.

The unit’s steel door slammed down, missing me by inches, and severing the mummy’s legs at the knees. Ollie screamed from inside. I jumped up and grabbed the door handle, desperately trying to pull it up. It didn’t budge. I panicked. The door must have locked.

“What’s the code?” I yelled over Ollie’s screams.

I jerked on the door again. Though if the door had been locked, it still would have had some give. This thing was anchored to the floor. I wasn’t a weakling; something was keeping that door down.

Drowning out Ollie was the scream of metal being torn back as dust fell from the ceiling.

The roof.

Above Ollie’s storage unit.

I pulled on that door with every bit of strength I had. What seemed to be fused to the concrete floor a second before now flew open.

The metal roof had been peeled back like a sardine can, exposing bright blue sky—and Ollie being hauled through the opening by two white camo-clad ghouls. They were attached to a hovering helicopter by a pair of quickly retracting zip lines pulling them up into the big chopper’s open door. One ghoul had Ollie, the other had the bag with the arm.

Ollie was screaming, but I couldn’t hear him over the rotors.

I pulled my gun and aimed it at the ghouls, then the helicopter. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t get a fix on either one. The ghoul was holding Ollie in front of him like a human shield. The ghoul with the arm was safely behind the ghoul with Ollie. He saw me and grinned, his jagged teeth yellow against the white of his camo. Silver bullets wouldn’t kill these ghouls, but they’d definitely kill Ollie.

The helicopter flew up and away before Ollie and his captors were even inside.

And I hadn’t even fired a shot.

7

NORMALLY it wouldn’t be easy to kick yourself while sitting in the backseat of a vehicle—even an SUV. But I had an advantage.

The seat next to me was empty.

Ollie wasn’t there.

Because I’d failed.

I’d failed as a SPI agent; but worse than that, I’d failed Ollie as a friend. I’d never come right out and said that we’d protect him, and Ollie hadn’t asked for it, because it’d been implied. He’d been depending on us, and since I’d been standing five feet away when the ghouls had ripped the roof off of that storage unit, that meant I was supposed to protect him.

I’d screwed up.

The first time I’d ever had a real gun out in the field, and I’d blown it. I might as well have had a squirt gun full of tequila. As a result of my inaction, Ollie was dead, or—knowing that ghouls preferred their human prey alive and kicking when they started to eat—right now he wished he was.

“. . . they were headed northeast toward Queens,” Ian was telling whoever he’d called at headquarters. “Looked like a Sikorsky Jayhawk. Check with our guy in the coast guard and see if one’s been decommissioned and sold lately.” His eyes flicked to the visor mirror, glancing back at me. “No. No injuries.” He paused, listening. “Yes, we’re proceeding to Green-Wood. ETA . . .”

“Ten,” Yasha told him.

“Ten minutes,” Ian said into his Bluetooth headset. “I’ll be meeting James Tarbert. Yeah, a guy who sells mummified monster heads. Check him out and give me a heads-up if there’s something I need to know.”

Not “
we’ll
be meeting” or “
we
need to know,” but “I.” Looked like I’d had a chance to be a real partner, and I’d flunked the test.

Ian gave Yasha directions and then retreated into a full-blown silent treatment. Now I knew why Ian Byrne didn’t want to work with me. I slouched down in the seat. And right now I agreed with him; I didn’t want to work with me, either.

After a few miles, Ian spoke without turning. “You didn’t have a clear shot.”

I was leaning the left side of my face against the cold window. “It doesn’t make me feel better, but thanks anyway.”

“Wind, target position, helicopter speed—it all factors in. Besides, if you’d shot the ghoul, he probably would’ve dropped Ollie, and that wouldn’t have been a survivable fall.”

I slowly sat up. That hadn’t occurred to me. Way to go, Mac. You could’ve converted Ollie from ghoul captive to rooftop pancake. Fat lot of good my back home gun experience had done me. Being able to clear a line of beer cans from an old washer would never save anyone’s life, and I’d never actually heard of a deer taking a hunter hostage and using him as a shield while being hoisted into a helicopter. So I could hit a target. Big deal. That didn’t teach me when to shoot, when to hold my fire; or if I did shoot, the why and how of that decision, a split-second choice that could mean life or death for another SPI agent, me, or a friend who was in the right place but at the worst time. Shooting targets was one thing. It was another thing entirely to shoot something with two legs—even if it was a ghoul.

When I glanced back up, Ian was regarding me solemnly in the visor mirror. “Your gun is for self-defense. You’re the agency seer. Saving Ollie or anyone else isn’t your job.”

“And it’s not your job to spot ghoul commandos,” I told him. “But if you could, you’d do it, or anything else you needed to do. So maybe saving people should be at least part of my job.”

Ian started to speak, and I raised my hand. “
If
necessary,” I stipulated. “Or if needed.”

Ian’s phone beeped with an incoming call. I couldn’t hear the caller’s voice, and Ian kept his responses short. “That was our wayward backup,” he told me and Yasha. “They were delayed by a frozen fuel line. They’ve gone ahead to the cemetery, and are establishing a perimeter around our subject. He just arrived.”

Finally, something was going right.

“Was he carrying anything?” I asked. “Like a monster head?”

“No head.”

“That would have been kind of conspicuous. Hopefully he won’t send us to another storage unit.”

“Pull over here,” Ian told Yasha. “Keep the engine running; I won’t be long.” He gave me a look in the visor mirror.

I raised both hands. “Staying put.”

I tried to see where he was going, but I lost him behind a mini mountain of snow, courtesy of the New York department of sanitation, that was piled on the side of Brooklyn’s McDonald Avenue and topped by un-picked-up bags of garbage courtesy of the same city, same department. Between the weather and the holidays, public service was running a little light on the service.

After about five minutes, Ian got back in the SUV and handed me a respectable-sized bouquet of dark pink roses. “Here, hold this.”

I met his roses with open-mouthed befuddlement.

“We need a reason to be in a cemetery,” he told me. “A reason that’ll ensure no one will get too close or ask any questions.” He pulled what looked like a tourist brochure out of the glove box and unfolded it.

I saw the words “Green-Wood Cemetery” on the cover. I blinked. “A map? Of a cemetery?”

Yasha pulled out into traffic, such that it was. Though first he had to yield to a woman on cross-country skis who was making better progress than the cars.

“Green-Wood’s quite the tourist attraction,” Ian said. “They even have concerts.”

“You’re kidding?”

He folded the map to show one section and passed it back to me. I laid the bouquet across my arm like a pageant winner so I could take the map.

“Tarbert is supposed to meet Ollie on the cemetery’s Nut Path off Hemlock Avenue,” Ian told me.

“So the owner of a monster head wants to meet on a path named Nut,” I said. “That’s appropriate.” I studied the map. Most of the avenues and paths were named after trees, bushes, flowers, and their various pieces and parts. There was a lot of twisty pavement on that map, so the cemetery’s founders had to get creative with the names.

Yasha drove slowly past a pair of cast-iron gates on Twentieth Street near Prospect Park. The gates were closed, but there was a sign. “Use main entrance,” Yasha read.

I squinted at the sign. “You can
see
that?”

“My eyes, they are very good.” Yasha looked in the rearview mirror and flashed me a tooth-filled grin. “The better to see you with,
moja dorogaja
.”