Winter (The Manhattan Exiles) (27 page)

Aine tried not to stamp her foot like a child.

“One scratch from their tusks and a hunter is poisoned unto death,” she retorted. “Your plastic mask would be useless. And,
mortal
, I’ve bested one of the Dread Host already.”

Bran put his hands on his hips and scowled. In spite of herself, Aine thought of her mother.

“No,” the detective said.

Richard was more canny. He took his gun from his belt and held it out, metal beak pointed carefully at the floor.

“Here.”

“
Nay!” Aine tried not to shudder, but her muscles quivered in reaction.

“
Well, then,” Richard replied evenly. “What good are you to me? I admire your courage, Aine, but you’ll just get in the way.”

“
I have a knife.”

“
You saw what happened to Winter when he got too close. And Winter’s been fighting ghouls for most of his life.”

Aine refused to be cowed.

“I’m coming.”

Richard drew himself
up until he loomed. “You’ll only make things more difficult.”

“
You’re wrong. You need me!” Aine allowed herself a small show of temper, clenching her fingers into tight fists. “I can rekindle the Wards!”

Bran was studying the time
piece on his wrist. At Aine’s declaration he looked up. “I thought they were broken.”

“
They are.” Richard sheathed his gun, impatient. “Solemn’s lip crumbled away. They don’t work anymore, that’s the problem.”

“
They’re broken, not dead. They’ve had a chance to regain strength in your 'fridge'.” She shaped the foreign word carefully. “Now they’ll want a wee bit of blood, to sate them. Fay blood. My blood.”

“
You’re human,” Bran said for the second time.

“
Aye. As if I could forget, now I know.” She showed him her bitterness, and then she showed him her thumb. “It’s Mending, albeit much more slowly than I’m used to. And I can still smell the iron. Gloriana’s gift has not yet entirely left me.”

Bran looked down at his wrist again.

“Thirty minutes, Richard,” he said.

“
If I can rekindle the Watchers near the rift,” coaxed Aine. “Mayhap we can keep the Host back altogether.”

Richard wanted to refuse her. Aine could see the regret and determination in the set of his mouth.

It was Bran who changed Richard’s mind.

“
If she’s right,” he murmured, “you won’t have to open that bag after all.”

Richard tensed. Aine could see the muscles in his jaw bunch.

“Alright.” He relented. “You win. Get the statues.”

Richard gave Aine his walking stick and a gas mask.

“
The stick might buy you a few minutes,” he said as he lead the way through train tunnels. “The mask could save your life. Use it.”

Aine wrinkled her nose. She wore the mask over her hair, but wasn’t eager to pull it
down over her eyes and mouth.

“
It stinks,” she said. “And itches.”

Square lights flickered overhead as they navigated along the iron road. Aine trotted at Richard’s side, the Watchers tucked neatly into the front pocket of Lolo’s burlap apron, nestled amongst several more gas masks. The apron hung over her shoulders, down her front and down her back, and itched almost as much as the bug-eyed hood.

Bran paced steadily at their heels. He held an electric torch in one hand, and one of Richard’s modified guns in the other. As he walked, he played the torch back and forth over the walls and the iron road, chasing away shadows cast by the dim lighting overhead.

When Richard stopped, Bran shown his light directly over the boy’s shoulder.

“Here?” he asked, tracing a gentle bulge in the tunnel wall. Thin rivulets of brown water ran over the swelling, eroding dirt and muddying the ground around the rails.

The mud was patterned with a collage of many different shoe prints, and Aine couldn’t help but notice a smear of old blood at shoulder height across the wall.

“Not exactly here,” Richard said. “They come from around the corner. This is where we set up, generally. Winter picked the spot. The bend in the wall gives us an advantage.”

Bran considered.

“What’s around the corner?”

“
Dead end. The tracks split and bumper.”

Bran’s light danced over the wet walls.

“River’s on the other side,” he said. “Just like I said.”

Aine stopped poking in the mud with Richard’s stick and scoffed.

“It’s a foolish idea,” she said. “No fay is going to open a portal in running water. The magics would go awry.”

“
Which is exactly what happened,” Bran retorted. “Unless Winter
meant
to free the Dread Host from eternal damnation.”

“
The tear’s not in the river,” Richard interrupted. “It’s in the ceiling.”

Both Aine and Bran looked up at the flickering light box above their heads.

“Not this ceiling,” said Richard, obviously exasperated. “Around the corner. You’ll know when it opens.” He lowered himself to one knee in the mud with practiced ease. “Which will be any time, now.”

Aine knew the detective still didn’t believe. Pitying Bran, she squatted against the wall behind Richard and wriggled out of Lolo’s apron.

“Hang on, hang on.” Bran craned his neck, fanning his light back and forth around the tunnel. “Okay. It’s not the river, it’s what’s overhead. I’m turned around. What’s overhead?”

Richard didn’t answer. Aine didn’t think he’d even heard. The boy had his gun out, braced in two hands, waiting. He’d wedged the duffle carefully between his foot and the tunnel wall. His mouth was relaxed, his expression intent. He seemed very much at home and unafraid, kneeling in the dirt, waiting for death to arrive.

Aine looked away from the resignation in his eyes. She bent her head and began to unpack the Watchers, murmuring gentle words of encouragement to the old Wards as she freed them from burlap.

“
Holy fucking hell,” said Bran. “It’s the Monument. He tore a hole beneath the fucking Washington Monument.”

Richard smiled.

“A spear in the heart of God,” he said.

Aine’s ears popped. Her hair prickled painfully at the roots, and her teeth ached. A carrion wind blew around the bulge in the wall and over her head.

The
sluagh
came roaring through Winter’s mistake.

“Pick them off one at a time,” Richard said calmly. “They come like that, one at a time. I think it has something to do with the way the rift works.”

“
Really?” Bran replied, equally cool. “Because that’s two ugly sonuva bitches I see coming ‘round the bend, side by side. No.” He fired once, and then again. “Make that three.”

“
Masks!” Richard barked, no longer quite so unaffected. His gun spat tiny twinkling sparks as it fired. “Aine, put on your mask!”

Aine wanted to refuse, but the cold mist heralding
dóiteáin domhain
rushed down the tunnel ahead of the Dread Host, coating the walls with frost. She felt the skin on her face tighten as perspiration turned to tiny flakes of ice.

She yanked the mask over her eyes and nose and mouth. Hunching her shoulders, she bent over the Watchers. Her hands shook, from the sudden cold, or from the shock of gun fire.

“Mother, help me,” she prayed, silently begging for the courage of her ancestors, as she had the very first time she’d been called on to perform a ritual.

Then she remembered Darlene Francis buried in cold mortal soil, and courage became despair. She stared blankly down at the three carved f
aces, grief freezing on her eyelashes and fogging the lenses of her mask.

“
Aine!” Bran shouted. He sounded very far away, muffled by the snap of angry guns. “If you’ve got a plan, now would be the time!”

Richard didn’t say anything at all.

“Aye. Aye, yes.” Aine reached for her knife. “They want blood. It’s the blood that wakes them.”

Her flesh was going numb, and she was glad of it. She drew her blade along the inside of her arm in the usual manner, pressing deeply. Blood burst forth, spraying the wall.

“Jesus!” Bran was closer, nudged almost against her back. She could smell
sluagh
, see the beat of leathery wings out of the corner of her eye. Too many wings. “You’ll bleed yourself dry!”

Aine let the blood from her h
eart vein flow over the hungry Wards, bathing them liberally, until they were more red than amber.

Then she pressed her opposite hand tight over split flesh, squeezing, willing the flow to stop.

“The Mending will still work,” she whispered. “The Mending
must
still work.”

Her head spun.

“Mother, help me.”

Aine tilted against the wall,
and slipped slowly into a crouch in the dirt. Her fingers were slick with blood. Her grip began to loosen.

Blood grew into a small puddle between her knees.

“Aine!” Richard fell almost into her lap. She couldn’t see his face, only his frightened stare through the wide lenses of his mask. His own hand closed over her wrist. He dropped his gun.

Aine giggled helplessly, but the laughter of the
sluagh
prince overshadowed her own.

The prince was very large, and not at all beautiful. It pushed Richard aside as though the boy weighed nothing at all. Richard yelled and fought, but too late. Aine couldn’t hear Bran’s gun anymore, and she knew they were lost.

“There you are,” the
sluagh
said. “I’ve found you. But, what are you up to, child?”

It closed its clawed hand around her wrist, just as Richard had done, and clenched down. Her entire arm went numb.

Aine screamed.

The
sluagh
’s head exploded, splattering the wall, the tracks, and Aine. The rest of the prince went up in a rush of
dóiteáin domhain
, a cold pillar of flame. Tiny cracks ran in spider webs across the lenses of Aine’s mask.

Using her good hand, she yanked the mask off.

“Don’t do that!” Bran fell to his knees at her side. His own mask was cracked and peeling, his shirt pocked with rips and burns.

He reached for Aine’s mask, and tried to shove it back over her head. Aine couldn’t help but notice his hands were shaking. He appeared to have lost his gun.

“Nay!” she cried. “Look! The Watchers! It worked!”

“
You’re covered in blood,” he protested. “Caked in it. How are you still alive?” He ran those shaking hands over her arm, searching.

“
Bran,” she insisted. “Look! Down the tunnel!”

Reluctantly, Bran turned.

The pressure of his fingers fell away.

“
Christ Almighty,” he said. Then he reached up and pulled his own mask off. “It worked.”

A curtain of shimmering amber light sprung from the Wards, splitting the tunnel from ceiling to floor, and from wall to wall. Where the curtain brushed the tracks it smoked and fizzled, but didn’t fail. Aine wondered at the strength of the old magic against new iron.

“
Aye, and if my blood was truly fay,” she whispered to the gleaming Wards. “What marvels might we have wrought together, then?”

“
Oh, I think you did great. That’s a very pretty force field. Even keeps the bad air away.” In one smooth motion, Bran cradled her in his arms like an infant, and then rose. “Tell me again how you’re not bled out? Because for a moment there you looked more dead than the ghoul.”

“
It sealed the wound.” She remembered the lilt in the
sluagh
’s voice when it spoke. “It saved me.”

“
So it could eat you. Luckily Winter’s Wards decided this was a monster-free zone. And I don’t think the monsters approve.”

Aine turned craned her neck, then had to squeeze her eyes tightly closed when the world spun. She inhaled deeply.

“Going to faint, honey?” Bran asked.

“
Put me down.”

“
Not this time,” said Richard. “You’re in no shape to run should the Wards fail again.”

Aine slitted her eyes. Richard and Bran stood side by side. They watched angry
sluagh
through the glittering amber curtain. The
sluagh
stared back, wreathed in fog.

Aine shivered. Somehow she’d convinced herself that the Drea
d Host were unlikely as a mortal hell. Now she realized she’d been very wrong.

“
There are so many of them,” she murmured. “Why are they still here?”