The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel (38 page)

Startled shouts and curses spread as sections of the crowd were buffeted with the downdraft generated by the wings of a huge red dragon that had dove down, leveled off over Broadway, and damned near plucked me off the street like an owl going for a field mouse.

I frantically scanned the sky, but I couldn’t see her for the glare of the TV lights; however, I could hear and feel her powerful wing beats as she gained altitude and momentum for another run.

Tiamat didn’t get the chance for a second pass.

Vivienne Sagadraco must have seen the blast of wind flow and ripple over the top of the crowd and been able to track her sister’s path of attack. She simply dropped off of the edge of One Times Square, spreading her wings just short of full extension. The boss was diving to intercept, but she was so large that dropping from the roof of a twenty-five-story building was like a bird hopping out of a tree.

The boss had the advantage of surprise, and she would only have it once.

The two titans collided in midair, barely three stories above the packed crowd in front of the main stage. The collision produced a shock wave that shook the steel gantry holding the stage lights, and rocked the street itself like an earthquake. People directly beneath the two battling dragons were knocked to the ground from the force of the downdrafts from their wings.

Vivienne tried to maneuver Tiamat higher and farther away from the crowds. When her sister didn’t comply, Vivienne redoubled her attack with a roar that overpowered a million voices and the stage’s probably million-amp sound system, but that only I could hear.

I shot a glance at the countdown clock at the bottom of the pole the ball would descend.

One minute, thirty seconds.

Tia broke away, the boss in pursuit. The red dragon banked to the right, the row of spikes at the end of her tail grazing one of the digital billboards, sending a spray of sparks down onto the crowd. With two beats of her mighty wings, Vivienne Sagadraco swooped beneath her sister, jaws snapping at Tia’s underside, forcing her upward to escape. The two massive dragons battled, climbing higher into the night sky.

Forty-five seconds.

I ran toward the female grendel who had ignored the roars and shrieks overhead and was nearing the pens closest to the stage. She leapt over a parked ambulance that was in her path, and when she landed, her weight cracked the asphalt beneath her taloned feet, the shock wave knocking more people to the street. Seen or unseen, the grendel was going into the crowd. Her clawed hand went to the front of her collar.

To turn off the cloaking device.

Oh no. No!

I ran toward her with no idea what I was going to do when I got there. The boss was busy fighting her sister, so my original plan was scuttled. It was just me. The grendel spun, slashing at me with her claws, catching on my armor, hooking it and me.

Thirty seconds.

Yasha surged past me, biting, tearing into the hand and arm that the grendel had used to reach for the disk on her collar. The people around us saw a K-9 officer snapping and biting something that wasn’t there. I saw a werewolf savaging a monster.

“Rabies!” a woman shrieked.

Twenty seconds.

The grendel broke free, long strides taking her directly to the foot of the stage, to the people packed together in the metal pens, sheep for the taking.

The grendel stopped, reached up with her undamaged hand . . .

“NYPD! Freeze!”

It was directed at me, not the grendel. Yasha and I had finally gotten the attention we didn’t want but couldn’t avoid.

I ignored them and kept running toward the grendel, prepared to throw myself against that hand or somehow knock her off balance, anything to stop her.

Almost there.

Seven seconds.

I lunged, my shoulder slamming into the back of the grendel’s armor-scaled knee.

Almost instantly, a downdraft knocked me off my feet as a giant claw grazed my back, sending me into a roll and throwing me against the bars of a crowd pen. I screamed in pain and frustration.

Five seconds.

I scrambled to my feet and stopped in open-mouthed amazement as Vivienne Sagadraco locked the talons that had knocked me out of the way securely around the grendel and swept her off the street, powerful beats of her wings working like the afterburners of a fighter jet as she fought for altitude. High enough and it wouldn’t matter if the grendel disabled the device. No one would see.

Tiamat was nowhere to be seen.

Four seconds.

Booted feet caught up with me, and a cop grabbed my arms and pulled me aside.

“I’ve got her,” he called to the others behind him.

I barely heard him as I stood and watched Vivienne Sagadraco carry the grendel farther up into the sky until they were barely visible, even to me. My eyes blurred with tears.

“We did it, Ian,” I whispered.

“You have the right to remain silent,” the policeman said. “Even though I know you can’t.”

What?

Three . . . two . . .

It was Ian.

. . . one.

Wearing a NYPD jacket and hat.

The crowd erupted and confetti came down.

I stared in relief and wonder. “How did you—”

“Later.”

Over the past two days, we’d come close to dying any number of times. Coming that close makes you think. It was making me think right now about what I suddenly wanted to do and damn the consequences. I was shaking with terror and relief . . . and well, all that feeling had to go somewhere. Besides, everyone else was doing it.

I put my hands on either side of Ian’s face, stood on tiptoes, and kissed him.

His lips were soft, he was warm, and damn, it was nice.

When I broke away, I was short of breath.

Ian was looking down at me, a mischievous grin flitting across his mouth. “Happy New Year, partner.”

Over the sounds of celebration all around us came the joyous howl of a wolf.

TWO DAYS LATER

IT was nine o’clock on Monday morning, and it wasn’t exactly business as usual at SPI headquarters—for a lot of reasons.

The bull pen smelled like new office furniture and electronics. It was amazing what cashing in a couple of trinkets from a dragon’s hoard could buy. The boss had everything delivered yesterday. Pre-assembled. On a Sunday. On New Year’s Day. Like I said, cash speaks. Loudly.

About half of the desks and chairs had been brought up from the loading dock area, but were presently on the side of the bull pen that was the farthest from where welders were repairing various levels of the catwalks and railings.

I’d never considered welding to be that loud of a construction-type activity, but then I didn’t have the preternaturally sensitive hearing of a werewolf.

Nor had I made the mistake of trying to drink the entire SPI Scandinavia team under the bar at the Full Moon on New Year’s Day.

When Rolf Haagen had said he wanted to go, kill, and return to drink to our victory, he wasn’t kidding—and apparently the bionic Viking had the liver to back it up. Wouldn’t have surprised me if his liver had been man-made, too. Nancy and Bill had opened the Full Moon just for us yesterday, and SPI’s agents from both sides of the pond had put an impressive dint in their single-malt scotch inventory—again, courtesy of cashed-in dragon hoard trinkets. The Scandinavians had invited us to Oslo for a Nordic-style monster hunt, and to consume vast quantities of aquavit. Hopefully they intended to wait and consume the latter until after we’d done the former. Though with that group, there was no telling.

Yasha gingerly rested his elbows on his desk and carefully placed his head—still wearing sunglasses—in his upraised hands. The sound he made was a mix of soft mournful howl and puppy whimper.

“You did it to yourself,” I reminded him.

I’d come into the office today because Ian had promised to start my training.

Kenji had CNN and the Weather Channel streaming live on two of his computer screens—his being one of the few undamaged areas in the bull pen. I would have asked him to turn it up, but decided to be sensitive to my coworker’s self-induced suffering and walked over to Kenji’s desk.

“Amazing how people can explain away anything,” the elf tech said, when I’d gotten close enough for him not to yell. I guess he was being considerate of Yasha, too.

I watched and listened, and was just as amazed. Jim Cantore was busy explaining how a nearly tornado-force downdraft could form on a virtually cloudless night with no major weather system within a hundred miles. Over on CNN, the earthquake that thousands had felt in Times Square and Midtown Manhattan on Saturday night was being blamed on a buildup of steam that had inexplicably released. Workers had been dispatched below the streets to find the culprit. Good thing our folks had cleaned up after themselves in the grendel nursery and old Forty-second Street station. And last, but certainly not least to the people who had been standing underneath it, the exploding section of Times Square billboard had been a short in electronics caused by yet another downdraft—or a large bird. They didn’t have that one nailed down yet.

Conspicuously absent was any mention of monsters or giant dragons.

I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye at my desk.

Ian. Putting something over the back of my chair.

He saw me see him and stepped back with a crooked grin.

As I got closer, I saw what it was and laughed out loud.

“For the fastest tagger in the West . . . Side,” Ian said.

I groaned at the bad pun.

Yasha groaned, too, but not for the same reason.

I had a new piece of desk flair. Slung over the back of my office chair was a Wild West–style gun belt, with an oversized holster on each hip; but instead of a pair of six-shooters, the holsters each held a can of spray paint.

I grinned like an idiot. “I love it.” I felt myself blush a little. “Thank you.”

“There’s also that.” Ian indicated a pink box with a gorgeous silver bow. “That wasn’t there a few minutes ago.”

“Moreau,” Yasha said. He was sitting upright now, but he didn’t look inclined to take off his sunglasses anytime soon.

There was a smell coming from the box—a really nice one for a change. And familiar. I smiled and bit my bottom lip.

There wasn’t a card or a note, but I knew who it was from.

I looked up at the newly repaired windows of the executive suite. Vivienne Sagadraco, the dragon lady, founder and director of SPI, and my boss, stood framed in the floor-to-ceiling glass, her cane now more of a fashionable accessory than an orthopedic necessity. She smiled and bestowed upon me a single nod of her regal head. Her dragon aura did likewise.

I returned the smile and opened the box.

Cookies.

Iced and not iced, nuts and no nuts, and all with some form of chocolate. Except in one corner, separated from the others were delicate cookie confections, completely coated in . . . you guessed it, powdered sugar.

Needless to say, I ate one of those first.

I held out the box to Ian. “Want one?”

“I believe I will.”

“Yasha?” I asked.

He held up both hands.

“Understood. Why don’t I go put these on the break room table to share?”

“Is good idea.”

“Three whole words,” Ian said, impressed. He clapped the Russian on the shoulder. “Looks like you’ll make it, buddy.” He walked with me to the break room. “Heard from Ollie?”

“Oh yeah. He made it to the Full Moon just fine, and got home yesterday morning to find Detective Burton from the First Precinct waiting for him.”

“I supposed it’d be too much to ask that he arrested Ollie?”

“Yeah, it would. Burton just took him in for questioning. In the end, he couldn’t charge Ollie with anything other than being inconveniently absent for forty-eight hours.”

“How’d Ollie explain that one?”

“House-sitting for a friend who was out of the country. Ollie was extra helpful and gave him the name and number of said friend, Humphrey Collington, for verification.”

“Let me guess, one of Ollie’s aliases.”

“His favorite. And since the police had completed their lab work in Ollie’s office, he was free to open his shop.” I put the cookies on the break room table, the official permission and invitation in office kitchens everywhere to “eat these.”

I chuckled. “Remember when I said that if Ollie hadn’t been kidnapped, he’d be giving tours of the monster murder scene at twenty bucks a pop?”

“He’s not.”

“He is. Assured me that while he agreed that it was disgusting, he was just trying to make up for lost revenue.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Apparently money—at least for Ollie—is the best therapy of all.”

“Did you tell him we had his rug?”

“Yeah, he doesn’t want it back.”

“Good choice.”

“Not really. He’s having another one made just like it.”

There was an awkward silence as I knew what I wanted to ask, but not how to bring it up.

“Vivienne doesn’t know anything about the ghoul,” Ian said simply. “Either what it is or where it went, other than it was probably Tia’s second in command, her boots on the ground, so to speak. Our interrogators haven’t managed to get any good leads from Charles Fitzpatrick. Either he’s good at being questioned, or he simply doesn’t know anything. The boss thinks, and I agree, that he was only told what he needed to know. The rest of the organization has gone to ground. No sign of them. Vivienne thinks that since she carried off and killed the grendel, and that she runs the group that destroyed all the others, Tiamat will be back. She’ll want revenge and not just from her sister.”

I’d learned that the boss had badly wounded Tia out over the Hudson River, and to make it back to Times Square in time, she’d been forced to let her escape. Glad didn’t even begin to describe how I’d felt about that decision.

“The boss told me that if there’s anything her sister has, it’s time,” Ian was saying. “So we shouldn’t expect immediate retaliation.”

After Ian had agreed to stay behind with the ghoul in exchange for my and Yasha’s freedom, he’d tried shooting the creature, only to have his silver bullets bounce right off. He fell back on the only other weapon he had.