Sabrina's Clan (29 page)

Nyanther shook his head. “I am Neal Straithairn. You
are
Jacob Summerfield. We just happen to be more than either of those things.”

“I’m starting to understand why you hate this modern world, Ny,” Jake said and put the Jeep in gear. “At least when you were wearing woad, everyone knew exactly who you were, even if they didn’t like it.”

He drove back to the apartment that was technically his home, tiredness, fear and the dull aching fury swirling in a sickly mess in his mind. He needed a few hours’ sleep. Everything would look a bit better after that.

He hoped.

He tossed the cell phone on the table by the front door and went through to the kitchen to pick up the mail the concierge would have put on the counter for him. This place felt sterile and empty, compared to the warm, lived-in colors of the apartments in Soho.

Graham was sitting on the stool in front of the kitchen counter, reading. He looked up as Jake came in and shut the book with a decisive snap and pulled off his reading glasses. “You took your time.”

“How long have you been waiting?” Jake asked. There was a coffee mug in front of his uncle and dried coffee rings on the counter that spoke of heavy-duty consumption.

“I got a call from Bear Donnelly last night, around ten. His detectives got called to an incident in Soho that he thought I should be aware of.”

Jake sighed. He should have expected this. Novak had been pissed about the pressure Jake had applied. Of course he would bitch to Donnelly. Donnelly would protect his detectives and pass on the complaint.

“Did you really use my name to get a detective to back off from an investigation?” Graham asked quietly.

“I mentioned your name,” Jake said carefully. “I didn’t say anything that could even be implied as me saying they were to stop.”

“Don’t
play with me!
” Graham shouted, his fist landing on the closed book and making it jump. Suddenly, his pale face was red and angry. “You’ve grown up knowing exactly the power and influence the family name can leverage. You made the police halt an investigation they didn’t think was finished. Yes or no?”

The exhaustion that had been dragging at him drained away. Jake looked his uncle in the eye. “Yes,” he said flatly. “I did. They were hassling my friends.”

Graham’s mouth opened. Then he closed it and his jaw rippled. “Your friends,” he said flatly. “Like Sabrina Castillo?”

Jake inhaled deeply. “Yes.”

Graham got to his feet. “And the other one. The man with the dark hair. I don’t know his name. Yet.”

Coldness replaced the heated fury that had been building in him. “You’re
following
me?”

“There are
photographs
!” Graham shouted. “I had to spend thousands to buy them all.” His mouth curled down as he examined Jake. “Your mother’s bohemian ways left their mark. You have the same wild streak in you. I thought you’d gotten it out of your system. Ten years of bumming around the globe with surfing radicals and hippies and I kept my mouth shut. Every man has to sow his wild oats. Only, this…this…” He shook his head. “You’re not who I thought you were.”

“I never was,” Jake said stiffly. The coldness was building. It was a fury of another kind. A slow, considered anger. “That’s the mistake you made, uncle. I have never been what you wanted me to be, even though I’ve spent years trying to fit in.” He shook his head. “I won’t do it any longer. I’m done. Quit.”

Graham stared at him. He had blue eyes almost the same color as Jake’s. Everyone in the family said his father had had the same color eyes, too. A family trait. Blue eyes, blond hair, Anglo-Saxon white good looks and success.

It was the antithesis of who he was.

Graham laughed. “You don’t get to
quit
. What do you think this is? A job? A career you can flush down the toilet as soon as it gets challenging? The corporation is yours, Jake. There is no one else. I’m just a caretaker until you are ready to step into the big office. By rights, you should already be running it. I let you drop out for years. That ends now. Today. Right here.” He pushed his forefinger against the counter to emphasize each word. “You will cease with all this nonsense, including your so called friends in Soho. You will take over the running of the company from today. You will support the family in the way that has been expected of you since your parents died.”

Jake shook his head. “No. You can have the fucking company. I don’t want it.”

“You don’t get to choose,” Graham said flatly. “Whether you like it or not,
this
is your life. Not the one you think you have in Soho.”

The fine-grain trembling was starting up again. Exhaustion, fury…it didn’t matter what was driving it. Jake closed his eyes. “No. I refuse,” he said stiffly. “I don’t want money. I don’t want this life. I don’t
want
it. Do you understand?”

“You’ll never see Brandy again,” Graham said flatly.

Bitterness, hot and acid, burned in him. “You won’t let her in my life, anyway.” He turned and headed for the door.

“I can make you, you know,” Graham called out after him. “That same power you used to cow Donnelly’s lieutenant can be used against you!”

Jake kept going.

“If you walk out that door, you’ll wish you’d never been born!” Graham shouted.

“I’m already there,” Jake said.

He stepped out the door and shut it.

Nyanther put down the welding mask as Jake rattled down the stairs. “You should be at home, sleeping,” he said sharply. He shook off the heavy gloves and dropped them on the bench beside the mask.

Jake dropped his ass onto the bottom step and pushed his face into his hands. “This is home,” he whispered. All the way here, fighting the morning traffic, he had been focused on that one true feeling.

Nyanther crouched in front of him. “What’s happened?”

Jake sighed and told him.

Nyanther sat on the step next to him, his hands on his knees, staring into middle distance. There was a deep furrow between his brows. “How likely is your uncle to follow through with his threat? Can he
make
you do this?”

“He would have to chain me up and tie me to the desk to do it, but he doesn’t have to go nearly that far. There are more efficient ways to keep reluctant people towing the line. He’s been using those ways for years, on me and on others in the family that kick up.” He thought of his cousin Rebecca and how she had cried against his shoulder thirty minutes before her wedding to a man she didn’t want to marry.

“Leverage and coercion,” Nyanther said. “He has leverage over you?”

Jake nodded.

“Brandy,” Nyanther murmured.

Jake’s insides squeezed. He closed his eyes. “I am so fucked,” he breathed.

Nyanther squeezed his knee, making him look at him. “Do you trust me?” he asked.

Jake snorted. “That’s the most stupid, the most…of
course
I fucking trust you!”

“There might be a way out of this,” Nyanther said slowly.

Hope soared. “
Might
?” Jake said, trying to squash his blooming anticipation.

Nyanther examined his hands. “It’s high risk.
Very
high risk.”

Jake considered him. “What sort of risk?”

“If it goes wrong, you’ll never see Sabrina or me again.”

Before Jake could answer, a steady, loud beeping started up, coming from the bench.

Nyanther surged to his feet. “The tracker!”

* * * * *

“The older satellites this tracker uses have to reposition themselves every twelve hours,” Nyanther said as Nick and Jake stared at the red glowing dots on the screen. The tracker was still sitting on the bench. It had only taken Nick and Riley a few minutes to arrive back at the apartment from their borrowed hotel room.

“I forgot about the recalibration,” Nyanther added. “I’m used to continuous adjustments, the way the modern ones do.”

“I didn’t know satellites adjusted at all,” Riley said as she stowed her katana carefully under her raincoat. “They just sit there in space.”

“If they didn’t, the location they send you to, that they think is the same location, would shift by about two feet, every day,” Nyanther said. “At the same time the older satellites reposition, they update any coding, in a batch process.”

“So the metrics Sabrina scanned took twelve hours to update?” Riley asked.

“We wasted a whole night searching?” Nick asked.

Riley rolled her eyes. “When you can smell them at half a mile? We had redundancies, Nick. It wasn’t wasted.”

He stared at her. Then, shockingly, he smiled. “None of us would have stayed home, anyway. Sorry.”

Jake turned his attention back to the two glowing, pulsing dots. “They’re near Pearl Street, after all,” he said. “So why didn’t you smell them, Nick?”

“Seawater,” Nick said. “Rain, sewerage and salt. There are all sorts of possibilities.” He resettled his coat so it wasn’t lopsided, pulled down by the weight of his sword. “Ready?”

Jake pushed the second of the long folding knives into his jacket. “More than,” he said flatly. He glanced at Nyanther.

Nyanther didn’t smile.

The fear that had been trembling on the brink of life bloomed and bit into his nerves.

Sabrina blinked back sleep. It had taken her without her realizing it. One minute she had been standing with her back against the cold bricks and now she was groggy, sleep still dragging at her as though it wanted to pull her down beneath the surface once more.

She had her arms up in front of her. That was the soft thing her head was resting on.

What were her arms resting on?

With a gasp of horror, she flexed upright and reared back from the curved stone she had been leaning against. The back of her head slammed against the brickwork and she thrust a hand out to the side, holding herself up and away from the
thing
she had been leaning against.

It was asleep. The stone was cold and impersonal like any other stone. The idea that she had been leaning against it, touching it…she shuddered.

Her horror had woken her properly and her mind spun back into life, as she reconsidered her position. Had anything changed?

The big gargoyle had pulled her out of the apartment, his claws clamped around her arm like oversized handcuffs. Sabrina could remember Riley saying gargoyles didn’t fly. They glided. They could lift themselves up into the air with their leathery wings, but they much preferred to drop from a height and let the wind carry them.

That was what this big one had done. Her weight hanging from his arm hadn’t bothered him in the slightest and she had been carried across rooftops and between the tall buildings of downtown Manhattan, before they had dropped into a deep open gutter, where she could smell dirty river water.

There had been an ancient, rusted iron gate guarding the entrance. It had been tossed aside. The gargoyles had waddled into the sewer, the smaller one, Valdeg, leading the way, the larger one dragging her alongside.

She thought this larger one was the one they called Andurag. It wasn’t Lirgon, for Riley had killed Lirgon and this one was not a leader.

The stench in the sewer made her gag and heave. Once, she stopped to vomit, while the little one hissed impatiently, his wings opening and closing with sharp snaps

They turned off from the sewer, stepping up into a dry, rocky tunnel where there was no light, not even the minimal pilot lights that had lit the sewers. Sabrina stumbled along in the dark, falling constantly. Her knees throbbed and the one hand she could throw out to hold herself up was scraped raw.

Andurag kept dragging her along. Valdeg said nothing.

After a while that might have been hours or merely very long minutes, they stopped. It made sense they could see in the dark. They were nocturnal creatures. They knew when they had arrived at whenever they were going.

She was pushed up against a cold, cold wall. In the dark, she could see nothing of where she was. When nothing happened, she lifted her hands to see if she could feel her way along.

She touched warm leather, that rippled under her touch. She heard the thing rumble in its chest and snatched her hand back, feeling as if she might throw up again. The creature was in front of her. It had been sitting still in the dark, right in front of her nose.

Carefully, she reached out to either side and rammed her knuckles up against solid wall on both sides. She ran her fingertips over it and felt the sharp edges of mortar, separated by smoother, yet still rough stone. This was brick and mortar. She ran her hands down to level with her knee, feeling the regular pattern of brick face and mortar lines.

Behind her, it was the same.

She was standing in a three-walled room about three feet across and two and a half feet deep, while Andurag guarded the front. By sitting in front of the room, he was effectively blocking it, because he was so big.

Why didn’t they just tie her up?

An image of the big hands and claws flashed through her mind. They might be able to pick things up, like her arm, yet the manipulation of very small items, like rope or handcuffs, was clearly beyond their abilities.

There was not enough space in the man-sized alcove for her sit or lie down. There were rocks and debris beneath her feet and she patiently pushed them to one side with her feet, until she was standing on flat ground.

Then she had begun to wait. The gargoyles had attacked just after sunset, so that left the rest of the night before they would return to stone sleep. She decided that when they were asleep, she would try to climb out from behind Andurag.

Standing in one spot, with no relief, for hours on end, was almost unbearable. Her hips and back and legs began to ache. She would give anything to be able to sit, even for a minute. Lying down would be heavenly.

As she shifted her weight from foot to foot, trying to stretch and restore circulation to her deadened limbs, she heard whispering.

She stopped and listened.

It wasn’t coming from Andurag, so it had to be the little one whispering into the dark. She didn’t recognize any of the words. It wasn’t the barking, coughing and rumbling speech of the gargoyles. The speech was much uglier than that. She didn’t know why it was ugly. It just was, in the same way Spanish sounded pretty, even though she didn’t know Spanish, either.