“There’s nothing on the news channels,” the extra security guy added. His name was Doug Munn and he’d been a sniper in the 75
th
Ranger Regiment, with an impressive list of combat deployments to his credit.
I felt a buzzing, even through the headsets we were all wearing and the noise of the engine and rotors. Deckert reached into his shirt pocket and pulled his phone. After glancing at the screen, he pulled off one side of his earphones and shoved the phone up tight to the same ear to listen. After a moment, he spoke to us.
“Benson says there is a large cop presence in the Park, near the Loch path, just past the ball fields.”
“He’s there now?” I asked, feeling another memory just under the surface when he mentioned Loch.
“Yeah, heard it on the scanner and swung by to check it out, but he can’t get close. Lots of CSI types and quite a bit of higher brass. They’re keeping everyone, especially reporters, far away.”
I pulled one of my earpieces away, able to hear Benson’s voice over the sound of the helicopter.
“I think I see the Commissioner
,” he said. An electronic
whoop-whoop
sounded—like a police car might make.
“Gotta go. Call ya right back.”
Deckert bemusedly looked at the phone, then up at Doug and me. The phone buzzed suddenly and he answered it, putting it on speaker.
“
I’m back,”
Benson’s voice announced without preamble.
“Ask him if he still sees the commish,” I said.
Deckert relayed the question.
“Oh yeah, he’s here alright,”
was the reply.
“Where?” I spoke loud enough for Benson to hear me.
“Two feet in front of me and man, does he look pissed!”
The sounds of cursing came through, along with what sounded like the phone being dragged through a field. A different voice spoke next, one that I knew.
“Gordon, you there?”
Police Commissioner Rielly barked.
“Yes Commissioner,” I answered, giving Deckert, Doug and a now-alert Tanya a shrug.
“
Where have you been the last twenty-four hours?”
I raised my eyebrows at Tanya and she nodded. “Albany, Commissioner, why?”
“
You got witnesses?”
“Ten or twelve,” I answered.
He sighed. “
Where are you now?”
It seemed counterproductive to be telling an authority figure our location when I was trying to stay out of sight, but the NYPD is a different beast altogether and despite not liking the man, I had come to at least respect him. Tanya gave another nod, agreeing with my thinking.
“In a helicopter, headed to the city,”
I answered.
“Tell the pilot to bring you here… to the North Meadow in Central Park
,” he said.
I leaned up and relayed the request to the pilot, but he just shook his head.
“We can’t land there! City would have our asses,” he yelled to me.
“
Put him on
,” Rielly directed. I handed the phone up and the pilot, who looked annoyed, grudgingly accepted it. The co-pilot took the bird’s controls and the pilot concentrated on the phone. Then he sat straight up, eyes straight ahead, nodding. “Yes sir! Got it!” he said, handing the phone back to me with an angry jab.
Flying straight past the Downtown Heliport, the pilot flew further up Manhattan and five minutes later, we were setting down in Central Park in a makeshift landing zone marked out with road flares. We jumped out of the chopper, Tanya speaking to the pilot a moment, and we all ran bent over till we cleared the rotor wash. Benson stood like a wall, surrounded by police types including The Man himself, Commissioner Rielly.
“Commissioner, what’s going on?” I asked as we approached. His suspicious cop eyes looked us all over, me particularly, for a second. Then his harsh demeanor shifted to something slightly softer, say from diamond to granite.
“We got six dead bodies and if you don’t have an airtight alibi then I’ll throw the whole damned department at you till I get you dead or locked up,” he said.
“We’ve been in a meeting with Senator Gleeson, Congressman McFeeney, and the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, plus our attorney and four Secret Service men,” Tanya answered him.
He looked at her a moment, then ran one hand through his short, military-style hair. “Actually, I’m glad to hear that, although it terrifies me at the same time. I suppose you didn’t have anything to do with the three Asian guys with auto weapons who got whacked outside the same deli your friend Gina Velasquez and her daughter were in?”
“Asian guys? Gina? Are they alright?” I asked. He just nodded, still watching my reactions, then turned and waved for us to follow him, marching swiftly over the green grass of the softball fields till he got to the bare dirt of the infield. The majority of the police activity was here. As we approached, the wall of cops parted and we could see behind them.
Six forms, more or less, were splayed on the ground, the brown dirt stained bright red all around them. In the center of the arc of bodies, a small round circle was spray-painted onto the dirt. The circle was filled with the galactic black of night, like a puddle of ink, one that pressed on my aura with the weight of the damned.
“All Hell broke loose here early this morning,” the commissioner said, waving us forward.
Chapter 5
The bodies, or what was left of them, were in a loose arc around the edges of the circle. They were all dressed in robes over street clothes with the exception of one woman who was naked, her dead eyes staring up at the sky. She seemed intact, the sharp angle of her head and neck indicating the likely cause of death. The others—well, the others were a mess.
Two bodies had massive holes in their chests, open cavities empty of their hearts. They looked shocked. To the right of them was a body that seemed normal till you got to the head, which was grossly misshapen. Elongated, smashed in, and curved to the left side, as if it folded around a blunt object that hit it with unimaginable force. The next one had no head and no arms. A glance around found the missing body parts on the other side of the circle, thrown casually on the ground. The final body was a bloody mess, the entire chest and torso crushed in.
“They look like the terrorist bodies in that school. That’s why I was worried it was you. Who else could do this?”
“Lots of supernaturals could accomplish this, Commissioner,” Tanya said, looking it over with a professional eye. I suddenly worried about all the blood and gore on the scene. She hadn’t eaten in a while.
Picking up on my thought, she turned to me with a grimace. “Like if you walked into a trashed deli with rotted meat on the floor. Not appetizing at all,” she said. The commissioner looked puzzled at her comment but I saw Deckert’s sudden realization of the meaning flash across his face. “Plus the whole sulfur and brimstone stench,” she added as an afterthought.
I was wrestling with making a smartass comment or not when the vision hit.
I glanced around at the cops and CSI types, but they were all using tablets of one flavor or another.
“Hey Doug, you got any writing gear in that go bag of yours?” I asked the ex-sniper. He nodded and reached into the black gear bag slung on his side.
“Wow! A sketch pad
and
colored pencils,” I said. “Hey Deckert, can we keep him?”
Deckert just shook his head. “Nope, he’s mine. But if you’re good, I’ll grant visitation rights.”
Kneeling down, I used my folded knee for a desk, flipping to a clean page and choosing the black pencil to start. My right hand started to move on its own, sketching nine boxes, comic-strip style. The first box started to fill in with six figures in robes around a glowing blue circle. Part of me wondered at the automatic use of the blue pencil. The view was from slightly above and a little behind.
The second box showed a naked female figure inside the circle, as well as the awestruck faces of three of the robe-wearing people. Two men and a woman. The men looked amazed and delighted, the woman surprised and scared. The view was from behind the female in the circle; the only details were of a nicely toned, youthful female physique.
The third square showed one of the men, a bearded individual, leaning forward toward the female in the circle, his eyes reflecting lust and desire that was just beginning to change to surprise, as his foot could be seen slipping.
In the fourth, the bearded male was in the arms of the circle dweller, his eyes reflecting pain and shock as she crushed his upper body with her embrace, blood erupting from his mouth.
I could feel Tanya, Deckert, and Doug looking over my shoulder as the sixth box revealed the naked female backhanding the other male, his head deforming around her fist while her other hand choked out the female robe wearer.
The view changed to the other side of the circle for the seventh block picture showing the naked female with both arms elbow-deep in the chests of two men, her bloody hands protruding out of their backs and clutching their torn hearts.
In the eighth, she had her head back, her jaws unhinged like a python’s, inhumanly sharp teeth lining her mouth as one of the bloody hearts fell toward her maw. The remaining male was turning to flee.
“That explains where the hearts went,” Commissioner Rielly’s voice said from behind me. My audience had grown.
The ninth and last box showed the final robed male having his arms yanked out of their sockets from behind and for the first time, we got a good look at the naked demon woman’s profile.
“Brianna Duclair,” Tanya whispered.
“I thought Duclair was killed in New Hampshire?” Rielly asked.
“So did we. She got yanked into an open Hellhole like this one. Looks like she came back… or something wearing her skin came back,” I answered.
“Holy shit. What do we do?” he asked.
“Circulate her photo with strict
on pain of dea
th instructions not to go near her. As you can see, she will eat your men,” Tanya answered.
“So what do we do when we find her?” he asked.
“You get us, Commissioner... Chris and me. We will take care of her, or whatever she’s become,” my vampire replied.
“What about this circle?”
“If we can get a screen around it, I’ll close it right now. Too many media and cameras out there watching,” I said, pointing back to the police lines a hundred yards away. A bearded man with a telephoto-lens-equipped camera was just taking a picture of us as I spoke. Grim instantly sent a burst of aura at his camera.
The bearded guy yanked the camera from in front of his face and looked to be swearing as he studied its controls. A young woman next to him conferred with him about the camera before looking back up and meeting my gaze.
“We’ve got portable screens,” Rielly said, snapping me back to the situation at hand.
Closing the portal wasn’t difficult, just draining, and it had already been a busy day. Nothing tried to come out and the small, two-foot diameter and perfect circular shape made the closure straightforward. I just had to expend a lot of aura to do it.
When I had finished, I was tired and extremely hungry. Tanya was drooping with exhaustion in the glare of the mid-October sun. It was still early afternoon, and she had in effect pulled an all-dayer.
A car waited for us, on the other side of the police tape, one of Deckert’s guys driving it.
“Take her back to rest. I need a restaurant like right now. You can send someone else to pick me up,” I told Mr. Deckert. He didn’t look happy and he started to argue.
“He wants to think about Brianna’s return. He thinks better when he’s eating,” Tanya suddenly said.
Still unhappy, Deckert also understood my metabolism waited for no one. The fact that I was shaking with hunger might have helped convince him.
They dropped me at West 77
th
Street and I found a burger place near the Museum of Natural History. I ordered three double stack cheeseburgers with cheese fries and a chocolate shake.
The first bite was awesome. The second was interrupted by someone sliding into my booth across from me. Twenty-something, brown hair, brown eyes, light brown skin: It was the girl who had been standing next to the photographer. Her eyes were fixed on me and she smelled of fear. It took a second, one I used to swallow my bite of burger, but then I understood. She was afraid of me.
Chapter 6
Actually, she was terrified of me, which made her sitting down one of the bravest things I had ever seen.
“Mmister Gordon?” she stuttered. She grimaced even as she stumbled over my name, dissatisfaction with her own performance easy to read on her features. Her eyes narrowed, an angry look replacing the hesitant look. Oh goody. An angry person at my table.
I took another bite and looked around. Sitting at the counter was the bearded photographer, and he was trying to covertly aim a cell phone our way. Grim blasted the cell phone before I could swallow.