Chasing Embers Page 2

  When he exhaled, a long-suffering, pained snort, the air grew a little hot, a little smoky. He met Fulk’s gaze, waiting for the first glimmers of doubt to douse the man’s burgeoning triumph. As Fulk’s beard parted in a question, Ben reached up with his free hand and gripped the blade protruding from his flesh. The rip in his jacket grew wider, the seams straining and popping, the muscle bulging underneath. The exposed flesh rippled around the wound, shining with the hint of some tougher substance, hard, crimson and sleek, plated neatly in heart-shaped rows, one over the over. The sight lasted only a second, long enough for Ben to wrench the claymore out of his forearm.

  Hendrix climaxed in a roll of drums and a whine of feedback. The blood stopped dripping random patterns on the floor. The lips of Ben’s wound resealed like a kiss and his arm was just an arm again, human, healed and held before his chest.

  “Your antique can hurt me, but have you got all day?” Ben forced a smile, a humourless rictus. “That’s what you’ll need, because I’m charmed too, remember? And as for my head, I’m kind of attached to it.”

  Flummoxed, Fulk opened his mouth to speak. Ben’s fist forced the words down his throat before he had the chance. The slayer’s face crumpled, and then he was flying backwards, over the bloody floor, past the bar with its broken bottles, out through the dirty square window that guarded Legends from the daylight.

  Silvery spears flashed through the rain. Teeth and glass tinkled on asphalt. Tyres screeched. Horns honked. East 7th Street slowed to a crawl as a man dressed head to toe in black leather landed in the road.

  Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed. Ben retrieved the newspaper from the bar, thinking now was perhaps a good time to leave. As he stepped through the shattered window, he could tell that the cops were heading this way, the bartender making good on his threat. Who could blame him? Thanks to this lump sprawled in the road, the month’s takings would probably go on repairs.

  Stuffing the Times into his jacket, the rain hissing off his cooling shoulders, Ben crunched over to where Fulk lay, a giant groaning on a bed of crystal. He bent down, rummaging in the dazed man’s pockets. Then he clutched the slayer’s beard and pulled his face towards his own.

  “And by the way, it isn’t sleeping dogs, Fulk,” he told him. “It’s dragons.”

  Then he took flight into the city.

  TWO

  The hour after nightfall found Ben on 12th Avenue, looking up at the western face of the Javits Center. It was cold for spring, the clouds torn into rain-wrung shreds, the stars too weak to penetrate the pervasive neon glow. Insomniac City buzzed on. 12th Avenue was a ceaseless, sluggish river of light. The traffic sloshed by, grumbling towards the Lincoln Tunnel or south along the West Side Highway – what the natives cheerily used to call Death Avenue – and deeper into the heart of Manhattan. Exhaust fumes washed over the Hudson, an urban, imbroglio scent, carrying the heady notes of fast food, dead fish and garbage.

  Ben’s heightened senses amplified each sound and smell, his impressions above and beyond the human, but such innate gifts had their downside. The stench of crack in DeWitt Clinton Park. The taste of smog in the back of his throat. A heated domestic on West 31st – all these things could be niggling distractions. Learning how to muffle them was something of an art, and tonight his attention was solely for the plate-glass fortress before him. Everything else was a background hum.

  For all that, he didn’t want to be here. After the De Luca job – effectively shutting down a rival gun-smuggling gang for his last well-heeled crook of a client – the breather in New York was a welcome relief, his boredom, for the meantime, alleviated. Even if it was steeped in whiskey and the absence of Rose, it was good not to break heads for a while. Take stock. Lick wounds. But if Fulk was right and Ben had been asleep, then the bar fight had served as an alarm clock, shaking him out of his torpor. Even if he had no clue what the slayer was on about, it was obviously important enough for Fulk to stage a direct attack in broad daylight – the first such attack in fifty-five years – and that was hard to ignore. Ben told himself that curiosity alone had sent him speeding to 12th Avenue on this chilly night, a need to see the crime scene for himself, but he wasn’t so tanked that he couldn’t hear the fear beating beneath it. A fear that owed its genesis to Fulk’s claim.

  The Pact is null and void, Garston. You’re not the only one any more.

  And that, of course, was impossible.

  Wasn’t it?

  “Just what the hell is going on?”

  The hole in the face of the Javits Center, lined top and bottom with jagged glass and fluttering with police tape, was a sixty-foot-wide gaping maw that couldn’t answer him. His senses, however, retained their upside. He healed quickly, as Fulk had seen in the bar, and along with his ability to smell junkies in a park a mile away and hear a hissy fit three blocks over, Ben could also see the broken panes on the third floor as if he was using a telescope. It only took a little concentration to focus in on them; a blink of his inner, nictitating membrane to switch from everyday, human vision to the vision bestowed on him by birth.

  If anyone in the passing cars noticed the dull golden sheen in his upturned gaze, they would surely put it down to the street lights, the headlamps of other vehicles or the sleepless neon dome sheltering the city. Manhattan was no place for secret manoeuvres. Too many people bustled on the streets for Ben to enter the centre and take an up-close look, inspect the Nubian Footprints exhibition for himself. Much as he wanted to, he had no choice but to chew over the Times and content himself with this outside view, extraordinary though it was. The wind off the Hudson stoked the embers of his hair as he scanned the shattered façade. The article proposed that the thieves had smashed through the centre’s eastern side by way of a small controlled explosion and an ultra-light airborne craft, snatching the Star of Eebe and making off over the river. Scanning the hole, Ben wondered whether the article was simply the product of a baffled police department and an insatiable press, both of which had to offer some theory to the New York populace. In the long shadow of 9/11 and other, more recent, terrorist attacks, the NYPD would hasten to calm the public’s fears about any explosion in the Big Apple, no matter how minor, how local it seemed. This probably explained the evening edition’s colourful headline, the Chelsea precinct quick to present the baying media with the possible reason for the blasts.

  “Except that there weren’t any.”

  There was only the wind to hear him, the wind to confirm or deny it, but the shattered glass above him reflected the naked truth. He was long in the tooth and sharp enough to see that no explosion had caused the destruction before him. No smoke had stained the Javits Center. He saw no trace of melted glass. Shards glittered on the sidewalk and in the road, most of it swept behind a feeble-looking and unattended police barrier propped in the lee of the building. The debris supported the article’s claim that the thieves had fled the exhibition this way, but the fact seemed as lonely as an abandoned lighthouse. Whoever – he suppressed the thought whatever – had broken in and out of the centre last night, they had done so with nothing more than balls, weight and velocity.

  That raised all kinds of questions. Questions that Ben didn’t like. He reached into his jacket and flipped out the Times, once again scanning the piece. Now it read more like a Hollywood film script than anything approaching the truth. Was this a case of smoke without fire? Was the latest Fulk just trying to scare him? Put him on the back foot with lies?

  You’re reading your own death warrant.

  But that would only be true if…No, that was bullshit. He wasn’t about to believe it.

  Ben looked up at the dark, silent maw in the face of the Javits Center. Now it was grinning down at him, each plate-glass fang gleaming with secrets, hinting at events that were logically absurd. The wind blew. The river reeked. The endless traffic shuddered by. His sixth sense buzzed with change regardless. Change and danger. Change and threat.

  His breath struggled from his throat, his lungs f
eeling tight and shrunken. He rubbed his neck without realising he was doing so. In all the confusion, the slayer’s boasts and the fight in the bar, Ben realised he had overlooked a part of that threat, a grim implication in Fulk’s mockery.

  Is it because of your woman? Is that why you returned?

  His breath escaped him in a single word.

  “Rose.”

  The bike wove in and out of the traffic, a fly buzzing through a herd. Tail lights watched the Harley Davidson roar up behind them like devil eyes, an infernal blur winking out as the bike sped past. Low in the saddle, helmetless, Ben squinted into the wind. The steer skull hanging from the crossbar rattled and danced in the churned-up spray and billowing fumes. The squeal of brakes on either side – joined by a symphony of horns and profanities – promised police attention, and sooner rather than later, but Ben refused to slow down. The thought of Rose in danger outweighed all other concerns.

  Stealing the bike had only been an afterthought. It was no great trick to rummage in the slayer’s pockets and relieve him of his keys. He could’ve reached the Javits Center more quickly, of course, but the direct route, during rush hour on Friday night, would’ve seen Ben make his own headline, and across the front of the very rag that currently spurred him to action. He wasn’t sold on the whole “discretion is the better part of valour” thing – sometimes risks were necessary – but he was mindful of the Lore and the limits it placed on him. All the same, as he choked the throttle, gunning the engine to greater speed, he knew that Rose would’ve heard him knocking on the door of her Brooklyn apartment right this second if he hadn’t needed wheels to get him there.

  Thundering south down West Street, Chelsea’s tenement blur giving way to the West Village and then to glittering SoHo, Ben tried to collect his thoughts and calm his galloping heart. On his right, the velvet Hudson, scored by ferries and reflected skyscrapers, an inverted city under the sea. Even the water here was radiant.

  Ben’s kind liked the water, its cool boundaries a long-time favourite habitat. Coastal areas, river valleys, waterfalls and forest pools – even the occasional loch – all provided primal comfort, a place to drink and bathe. But right now, if someone poured the Atlantic over Ben’s head, he didn’t think it would soothe him. If Fulk had meant to put the cat among the pigeons, then his work here was done. Ben hoped he wasn’t starting at shadows, or worse, that rushing to the rescue wasn’t just an excuse to see her, to win through where unanswered calls and emails had failed. The cynic in him – an old friend greased by days of Jack – thought it likely that Rose would see his sudden reappearance in her life as a last-ditch effort to save their relationship. A relationship that screamed over like an umpire screams out. How could she trust him now?

  The traffic ahead was slowing, cars, trucks and coaches backed up at the tollbooths feeding the Brooklyn – Battery Tunnel. Ben wanted Vinegar Hill across the East River, and the bridge would take him there quicker. Whizzing between the crawling cars, blind to the red lights and the fanfare of horns, the Harley left the freeway, veering past the park. The Statue of Liberty loomed from the water, and Ben imagined that great green goddess glancing down at her tablet of law and shaking her head as he accelerated.

  Navigating traffic, he didn’t notice the limo until he swerved on to Greenwich, plunging into the shadow of skyscrapers, a canyon of glass and light. The traffic flocked here, forcing him to slow down, the bike growling between cabs and executive cars, a sluggish mix of weekend partygoers and workers keen to get home. The limo pulling up beside him only stood out because of its make. It was an old model, a British classic, a Rolls-Royce Phantom IV, its sleek black body distorting the light from the nearby storefronts. Ben could recall when the cars had appeared on the London streets back in ’52, delivering the young Queen Liz to her first royal engagement at Westminster Abbey. The Phantom was designed to be an exclusive vehicle, transporting aristos and heads of state, and as far as he knew, there were only a handful left in existence. Like most guys, he read the occasional car magazine. It didn’t surprise him that in this day and age some big shot had sold a Phantom into private use – but still its appearance nagged at him, something familiar (and unwelcome) in the sight. The vehicle’s smoked windows mirrored his face back at him, his anxious expression sliding over glass.

  The limo was close. Too close.

  He kicked the bike forward, frowning. You could shake this city and watch the freaks fall out. He wasn’t about to let one of them slow him down. Reaching into his jacket, he flipped out his mobile phone, deciding to give Rose a heads-up. He prayed that it was her night off; she didn’t usually work weekends. Yeah, he knew she’d ignore the call, but at least he was trying.

  Turning right on to Vesey, one hand punching buttons, he didn’t notice the Phantom growing in his rear-view mirror. The limo slipped silently forward, its bumper nudging his back wheel. The bike lurched and the phone skipped along his fingertips before falling to the blacktop and cracking into pieces. He heard the small crunch as wheels rolled over it. Ben shot a glare over his shoulder – and his curse died on his lips as he saw that the Phantom’s windscreen was also a sheet of smoked black glass. The mascot on the bonnet was not the traditional silver figure-head, the famous Spirit of Ecstasy leaning forwards with arms spread, her dress billowing out behind her, resembling angel’s wings. He’d read somewhere about other figures – a Pegasus and Nike – but he was damn sure he’d never read about a bare-breasted hag riding a broom.

  Most alarming of all was the Phantom’s number plate. It was personalised, mud-stained and Very Bad News.

  CROWS

  “Shit.”

  Again the Phantom drew up beside him, its engine impossibly soundless. When the rear passenger window rolled down, it did so like silk over oil, in one slow, deliberate movement. The darkness beyond watched him intently, without eyes, without judgement, simply with cold, unblinking awareness. Goose bumps rippled up and down his arms. The proximity of magic, black, malefic, and strictly forbidden under the Lore, drew bile into Ben’s throat like thick shake up a straw. The rolled-down window, revealing that lightless, depthless void, spoke fear into him like no words could.

  Still, words came, like snow gusting over a grave.

  “Draco Benjurigan.”

  Twisting the throttle, Ben sped between a Winnebago and a crowded tour bus. Fingers pointed in gleeful alarm. A driver honked and shouted. Hair a flaming streak in the night, man and bike arrowed over Broadway, narrowly missing a collision with a Porsche. Smoke squealed from his rear wheel, the steer horns clacking as he swerved and zipped up Park Row, a crouched, streamlined figure heading for the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The Phantom shot after him, a smooth black bullet. A glance into his rear-view mirror confirmed its relentless pursuit. And now the traffic was pulling over on either side of the road, as though for an ambulance or fire truck, making it clear that the Rolls was employing some mumbo-jumbo to influence the surrounding drivers. Ben wasn’t sure what, but he’d bet that most of them experienced a pressing need to slow down and stop: an imagined flat tyre, a faulty fuel gauge, an important file left at the office…When he roared on past a police car, idling in traffic a lane over, the cop behind the wheel barely looked up. The Phantom was a missile locked on his tail and the creatures inside it wanted a clear shot at him.

  The bike whined, screaming up the ramp to the bridge. The lanes grew wider here and the evening traffic edged along the freeway, crawling from Lower Manhattan and out over the river. As Ben zipped through the jam, diesel and sweat thick in his nostrils, he heard a series of crashes behind him, the Phantom’s patience coming to an end. Trucks kissed bumpers with sedans. Buses crushed station wagon doors. Horns bawled. Tyres shrieked. Tail lights tinkled. The traffic parted like the Red Sea for Moses, pushed over to the hard shoulder by an arcane force and sardine-canning there in squealing, dented rows. The Phantom swept unchecked through the gap, black, deadly and silent.

  Shadow thrown before him by its headlig
hts, Ben took advantage of the miracle, growling along the bridge. He sped under one of the great Gothic arches, straight down the middle of the three-lane span. Suspension cables whipped by above him like rays from a steel moon. Below him, a tugboat chugged lonely through the night, its lights dim in the glare of the city. Ahead, Brooklyn, calling to him with faint hopes of safety and forgiveness.

  He risked a look back, pleased to see the Phantom falling behind, empty road stretching between them. The Harley pulsed between his legs as he pushed the engine to the limit. He patted the bike’s fuel tank like he would the neck of a faithful horse, confident that he’d made good his escape.

  Damn CROWS. You’ll need more speed than that to catch a—

  A scaling scream rubbed out the thought. His head whipped around, back to the bridge ahead. Shock squeezed the air from his lungs. Slowly, inexorably, a car pulled out in front of him – pulled as if by a scrapyard magnet – the Buick screeching from the pile-up on the shoulder and into the middle of the road. The way that the driver, a blonde in her early thirties, scrabbled at the wheel told Ben that her obstruction was far from intentional. In the back seat a couple of children watched him approach with bright, dime-shaped eyes.

  Ben choked the brake. The bike popped a wheelie, wings of smoke enveloping his body. Speed wobbled under his wheels. Rubber painted the asphalt. The bike lurched, a bucking bronco with Ben clutching the reins. In a widening pool of headlights, the bike threw him from the saddle and tossed him, rolling, into the road. The blacktop bit at his arms and legs. Blood filled his field of vision. Free of its rider, the bike crashed over on its side. It spun across the empty lanes trailing sparks, exploding against the bridge railings. Flames spluttered. Steer horns flew. Smoke fouled the air. A girder screamed, busted outward. The city peered in through the breach, her distant lights jealous of the fireworks.