Authors: Edward Lazellari
“My God,” Callum said, standing beside her and Malcolm. The captain’s eyes were haunted by the chaos wreaked upon the city he loved. The three of them had traversed the tunnels below and fought their way through golems up to the surface on Lexington Avenue. There they took refuge in an abandoned bus. The captain had hoped to procure the vehicle for the trip south, but it had a busted axle. The streets were jammed in a vicious gridlock with the masses pouring through the cars like ants on a graveled path.
“How is this possible?” Mal said. “You need laboratories, gestation chambers to create this many monsters so quickly.”
Lelani had been trying to find a flaw in the creatures since they first attacked at the hotel. They were a hybrid of beast and human, and all female. But whereas the first ones to attack looked identical, almost related, many of the creatures now pouring up into the streets were of different sizes and coloring, indicating their source material had become more varied. This gave credence to Lelani’s theory of how Dorn created the golems.
“He dropped the catalyst for the golems into the sewers,” she said. Lelani turned her thoughts inward. She did not want to think about from whom Dorn procured material for the first batch of golems. Her commander already looked haunted enough.
“As Dorn channels more energy, he pushes their creation farther and farther out. These creatures will soon rise throughout the island, from Battery Park to Inwood.”
“Thousands,” Cal said in horror.
“And they are confused,” Lelani added. “The iron, steel, and concrete under the streets block a clear signal to the prince. The minute Tilcook’s vehicle emerges from the train tunnels with Daniel, they will eventually catch his scent.”
“Will killing Dorn stop this?” Mal asked.
“Most likely. Even incapacitating him would stem their further advancement. He must have some type of fealty connection with them.”
“You have to get to your lay line and be ready for Allyn’s switch,” Cal told her. “You’re much faster without us. Mal and I will head to the Chrysler Building.”
Lelani nodded. “One thing, my lord…,” Lelani added. “Do not trust your firearms in the Chrysler Building. It is saturated with magic. Combustion science does not play well around magical energy. Your guns may jam on you.”
With that said, she bolted from the bus and galloped west on Fifty-first Street, confident that everyone was too panicked to notice a girl running thirty miles an hour. It broke her heart to pass so many in need of rescue, but she could not risk it. Everything depended on her and Allyn.
And what of Seth?
Seth had ignored all attempts to contact him throughout the hotel battle. Lelani had believed her old schoolmate had changed—that he wanted to be better—mature and responsible, and address the shortcomings of his past. But he’d disappeared, and now at their hour of most need, he was nowhere to be found.
As she approached Fifth Avenue, she saw Colby Dretch and the two gunmen Tilcook sent with the detective beset upon by a beast. They had been on their way to The Plaza. Colby and the mobsters fired at the beast before them, but the creature just absorbed their bullets and growled through a fence of sharp teeth. She pulled two arrows from her quiver and let them fly into each of the golem’s eyes, driving the arrows back into its brains. Colby looked over his shoulder and smiled in relief.
“Thanks, kid,” he said.
“They search for the prince. Do not engage them, they should leave you be.”
“Hard to avoid … they’re everywhere,” Colby said.
“Aye, and the city’s response is inflaming them. Let the unchallenged creatures walk past and you should be all right.”
Lelani acknowledged Colby’s gratitude and bolted south on Fifth Avenue. As far as the eye could see, it was anarchy … and it would only get worse. The spell would not stop making golems until it had exhausted itself, and that depended entirely on Dorn. As long as he channeled power into the sewers, it would continue to spread.
After a few minutes, she reached her destination. Lelani looked up. Gray and massive, the Empire State Building—the supreme erection of its era—pointed up at the gods like an accusing finger. She prayed silently that the elevators were still running.
CHAPTER 45
OUR “THING”
Tony Two Scoops drove the Escalade with the panache and verve of a man who’d spent a lifetime transporting contraband and evading the police. Tilcook sat in the passenger seat, cigar between his fingers and an Uzi on his lap. Behind the driver sat Daniel, Brianna in the middle, and Reverend Grey on the shotgun side. Another Escalade carrying Scott and Clarisse was right on their tail.
Driving north in the train tunnels, they had gotten ahead of the sprouting crop of golems and exited at a service ramp used to bring in equipment for track repairs and such. Behind them, columns of smoke rose through the glass and steel canyons of Midtown. The only thing to contend with in Harlem as they approached the Third Avenue Bridge was the slightly above-average gridlock of Manhattan traffic. As Tony put it so eloquently, “The day I can’t outwit a bunch of civilians beating it home for
Wheel of Fortune
is the day I hang up my fuzzy dice fo-evah.”
Tilcook had decided the George Washington Bridge was too risky … they could get locked into traffic which had been known to stay stationary for hours at a time. Instead, they would drop Allyn off at his destination and take the Major Deegan to Westchester and cross over the Hudson at the Tappan Zee.
As they drove, Allyn tried to piece together what elements he would need to build his henge. It would have to be bigger than anything he’d done before. Fortunately, his destination was currently a construction site and there would be a lot of material there. It was a really a question of manpower, which Tilcook claimed he’d take care of.
“You think Captain MacDonnell’s going to be okay?” asked Daniel. “Maybe we should have sent more guys with him?”
“I ain’t got three boys combined who are deadlier than Callum MacDonnell,” Tilcook said. “Used to hack through a bull’s carcass with one pass of his sword back in the day. I know ’cause I provided them for him from the kitchen to practice. Saved me a lot of work.”
“I gotta know…,” Daniel continued, “how did you get to be a made man in the family when you can’t possibly be Italian.”
Daniel’s knowledge of mafia culture bordered on fanatic, Allyn thought. The boy attributed this to his stepfather’s love of
GoodFellas
and
The Sopranos
, the watching of which was one of the rare occasions Daniel and Clyde could occupy the same room and pretend to have something in common.
“When you wake up a blank slate, you kinda fill in the blanks yourself,” Tilcook said. “My family over there is from the southern Kingdom of Udine—similar to Italy … even our language. So I gravitated, I guess, to Italian kitchens looking for work. I found a gig in North Caldwell working for Vincenzo Tagliatore. A good man … lonely after his wife and son died. He unofficially adopted me. He introduced me as his cousin from Sicily, knowing it would be easier to get a gig in one of the New York restaurants. I made my bones cooking for others, then opened my own place, then two, three …
“I really set out to do an honest business, kid. But once you get a little money, they start putting a target on your back. I ain’t just talkin’ Cosa Nostra,” Tilcook continued. “I mean the government, the agencies, the permits, the access, the suppliers. Got to a point where I realized if I was going to keep my head above water, I needed to supplement my business with some underground entrepreneurship.”
They crossed over Harlem River and onto the Major Deegan heading north.
“Don’t believe the hype about makin’ it in America, kid,” said Tony in the driver’s seat, his toothpick bobbing up and down as he spoke. “You gotta get permission from the establishment to rise beyond a particular point. Everybody with a lot of money is a little dirty. Can’t be helped.”
“How then did Malcolm succeed without resorting to dubious activities?” Allyn said.
The two men remained silent for all of three seconds before turning red faced with hard laughter. Two Scoops pounded on the steering wheel like a man trying to restart his own heart.
Allyn did not see the joke. He didn’t like the lesson they were giving the prince. Bad enough Allyn failed to raise the boy with some moral guidance; Daniel was already enamored enough with the romance of the criminal underground.
“Padre, you jokin’, right?” Two Scoops said. “People like Malcolm Robbe sell their soul to the government to get the kind of business they have. He’s tight with the powerbrokers, thick as thieves with the Pentagon.”
“You think he never bribed a congressman?” said Tilcook, still smiling. “One guy we own took money to pass a bill that netted that dwarf a billion clams.”
“He’s a dwarv,” Allyn corrected.
“You don’t think Mal’s personal security, made up of ex-military and secret service, just opens limo doors?” Daniel said, incredulously, to Allyn.
It was one thing to hear it from Tilcook and Tony, but even the prince bought into their cynicism. How was he to rule a kingdom with these types of notions? “Malcolm has a lot to protect,” Allyn said, disturbed by the implication.
“EXACTLY!” cried Tilcook and Two Scoops in unison.
“I got a waste management business, twelve restaurants, a used car dealership, and minority interest in three strip malls and two strip clubs,” said Tilcook. “And a few hundred high-yield loans out to civilians trying to latch on to their piece of the American dream. I have to protect what’s mine.”
“What about the prostitution? The drugs?” Allyn asked.
The car skidded to a stop. Allyn’s heart leaped into his throat. Did he fail to observe a rule of etiquette because of some old familiarity with the man the world knew as Dominic Tagliatore?
“We’re here,” Two Scoops said.
“The place you says is packed with fairy dust,” Tilcook added.
So engrossed was Allyn in the prince’s moral degradation, he didn’t even realize they’d arrived. He stepped out of the car onto the construction lot that was being converted into a ballpark for kids. Across the street a giant sign that hung on the retro-style façade of the new ballpark read
Yankee Stadium.
But where he stood now was where the old Yankee Stadium had been for the better part of a century. This place was saturated with magic.
A well-built man in his forties with perfect black hair, brown eyes, and a Roman nose exited the car behind them and joined the reverend. Tilcook lowered his passenger seat window. “You going to be okay, padre?” he asked.
“Yes … I’ll manage.”
Tilcook waited a moment with the window down, staring straight ahead at the beautiful Indiana limestone retro exterior of the new stadium. The new classic design was an homage to the 1923 stadium that Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle had played in. There was no shortage of greatness here.
“I ain’t never gone after someone’s kids or spouse,” said Tilcook, holding his cigar and looking at the stadium across the road. “I ain’t never pushed dope in a school or encouraged any of my people to target kids. I ain’t never had a man’s legs broke if he only needed a week to get me my money back, and even then, I took his car if it was worth anything ’cause you can’t bank broken bones. And the only bastards I ever clipped deserved it worse than I ever will even on my worst day.”
He turned to the reverend, his expression saying he neither sought nor was in need of redemption. Dominic Tagliatore, aka Tilcook, was comfortable in his skin and with the things he’d done since arriving to this universe. Allyn nodded in accord. The window slid up.
Before it closed completely, he heard Daniel start to say, “He is a minister, guys. Cut him some…”
That the prince would advocate on his behalf gave Allyn hope. The boy had it in him to see other points of view—to be a peacemaker.
Through the tinted rear window he caught Daniel’s gaze. In the boy’s eyes he thought he read the question,
Do you know which god you serve?
Allyn blinked, astonished by the thought until he realized his own eyes were superimposed over Daniel’s in the window’s reflection. His own troubling thoughts rebounded on him—his inner doubts, projected and multiplied as exponentially as the golems beneath Manhattan ever since Allyn remembered Aandor.
Allyn looked around this empty lot in the South Bronx. He was so far from home. He felt lost. His wife’s support was gone, his home, possibly his church, and now he was at risk of losing the love of two gods if he did not choose one. There wasn’t even the satisfaction of making a difference in his young monarch’s life, the very reason he accepted this mission. Who did he serve?
“What the hell is going on, Johnny?” asked a ruddy-faced foreman in an orange reflective vest, blue jeans, and hardhat.
The man Tilcook had left with Allyn, Johnny Maronne, apparently had some pull with the construction unions in New York. They’d ordered all the men to stay past quitting time for a special rush construction job. Allyn looked around the park and saw plenty to work with. Concrete road barriers and tubing, piping, gravel, unearthed boulders, wood, and machinery to move it all around. But the men were reluctant, many of them having started work at 7:00
A.M.
and wanting to go home to their families. The task would be highly unorthodox as well; no one built henges anymore and their hearts would not be into it.
“Introduce me to the men,” Allyn said to Johnny.
“Why?” Johnny asked.
“I want to shake their hands.”
As Johnny began introductions, Allyn greeted each worker with a handshake. As they shook, he infused them with a mild conversion. Instilled with the light of Pelitos, they would perform all of Allyn’s requests to the letter, eager to please Pelitos’s representative on earth. The sensation would last a few days, and end in a mild hangover, but that couldn’t be helped. He instructed them to begin building concentric circles, to plant the concrete dividers on their ends like long towers. Shortly, with but a few components in place, Allyn already felt the river of mana shift as he closed off one braid of the stream. It would take almost an hour to complete with the help of these men. He hoped it would be in time to save Manhattan from utter destruction.