Younger Gods 1: The Younger Gods (16 page)

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SEVEN

T
he top floor was more ruined than any of the ones we’d seen before. Entire sections of wall had been torn out, revealing steel girders, exposed wiring, and everywhere, blood.

Two bodies lay in sections in the central hall. They were both Rakshasa, with gray furred skin and tigerlike faces—pronounced snouts, large whiskers, and amber eyes. One held the haft of a broken spear, the other lay several feet from a sword not unlike Carter’s.

Carter stopped, leaned against the wall, and dry heaved. Dorothea tucked the neck of her sweater up, and waved her shotgun forward. “Keep going.”

I clapped Carter on the back, a tiny part of my mind reveling in his discomfort, calling up all the times I’d been exiled from my own room. But Schadenfreude had no place right now. “Hold your nose closed and look up.” I wrapped his free arm around my shoulder, and we moved through the hall as Carter’s distress continued.

Dorothea stopped at the corner, where the hall broke right and left. She spoke in a language I did not know. I had not even the first sense of how to differentiate Hindi from Gujarati or any of the other hundred or so languages from the subcontinent but trusted that Dorothea would have spoken in English if she wasn’t confident in her proficiency.

Down the hall to the right, someone answered, presumably in the same language. Dorothea moved down that hall, her shotgun down, but still ready. “She’s come and gone. Bearer wasn’t on this floor. Quickly now, boys.”

Carter recovered his poise and we jogged down the hall. The other speaker was a small Indian woman carrying a bow, arrows slung at her waist. A cut along her eyebrow was hastily bound with a butterfly bandage, still bleeding, and her bow arm was burned, the shirt gone below the bicep.

“Bitch’s already been here and gone. We moved the Heart when she hit the tenth floor. If you go fast, you might be able to catch her before she can catch our runner,” she said, out of breath.

“Where’s the runner headed?” Dorothea asked.

“Three blocks down, to another tower, 67-21. Sveta is in 5F, she runs that building. Now go!”

Dorothea spun on the balls of her feet and started jogging again. “Come on, boys. Don’t let a middle-aged woman make you look bad.”

We thundered down the stairs, more concerned with getting to the Bearer than with catching Esther along the way.

“I’m done with the goose chase. We go where we know we’re needed, got it?” Dorothea said. I saw no reason, nor had I any interest, in arguing.

We encountered no resistance leaving the building, though we drew a substantial amount of attention running down the sidewalk. Antoinette caught us on the ground floor, and followed as we sprinted out toward the other tower. Dorothea had hidden her gun, and Carter spirited away his sword, but we were still quite the sight. I scanned the thin crowds for my sister, looking for the confident stride, the gait that resembled the villain’s in Carter’s favorite kind of “slasher” films. It could only be described as inexorable.

We turned the corner and made our way toward the cluster of towers, assembled like man-made mountains in a huddle, four arranged in a rough circle, two more beyond.

Sirens cut into the air, startling but not at all unexpected. “Faster, children!” Dorothea said, pouring on the speed. The sirens grew closer, the Doppler effect matching their pace as they followed us down the pathway that led past a gatehouse and to a circular drive that connected the four towers. An exit road led to the far two.

“Which one?” I asked between deep breaths to keep my lungs working, legs pumping.

“Middle left!” Dorothea said, pointing at the tower.

A middle-aged black man stepped out of the gatehouse and waved at us, but we dashed straight by him, making our way around the beams designed to stop cars, not people. Which would hopefully slow the police down, as well.

“What are we going to do about the police?” I asked, speaking between breaths as my calm failed, taking my breath control with it.

“Don’t get shot!” Dorothea said.

“Great plan. I’m really reassured!” Antoinette said.

We made it to the door of the tower, and still no sign of Esther, or of the runner.

“What if we leave a trap for Esther here?” Carter asked as he opened the first of the two glass double doors leading to the lobby.

“Too many bystanders,” Dorothea said.

“What if it could only target her?” Carter asked, a smile on his face as he held open the second door.

“What could do that?” I asked, coming through last.

“Let me handle it. Get to the Bearer and get them out of here however you can,” Carter said.

Dorothea pushed Carter along. “That’s martyr talk. Not the time or place, boy. Get.”

“It’ll work, I swear!” he said, grounding his feet as Dorothea pushed him through the foyer. Three people were assembled by a bench, a family bundling up in puffed coats. I gave them my best smile. They looked away, focused on their boots.

“Let’s just get to the elevator,” Antoinette said, moving up and putting a hand on Carter’s shoulder. He relented, moving forward.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-EIGHT

W
e reached the fifth floor without encountering signs of blood, maiming, or other wanton destruction. Tension I hadn’t realized was there bled out of my shoulders as we walked through the halls of the fifth floor to knock on the door of 5F.

Dorothea knocked three times, then leaned in and said something, again in a language I didn’t know. If I were to continue living in Queens, I would need to become a far quicker study at languages. However, that would have to wait in the mental room that was labeled “Wise courses of action to embark upon having already survived the week.” Perhaps I could start with Tagalog under Tessane’s tutelage.

The door opened, revealing a woman wearing a gold-and-red sari, holding a very large sword. Far too large for a woman her size, but she moved the blade like it was a paring knife. “Good,” she said in English through a bright Indian accent. “She just beat you here. Are you ready to go?”

“Who beat us here? Where are we going?” I asked.

Dorothea waved us all in. “You don’t need to understand, Jake. Just try to keep up. This is Sveta. Sveta, the kids.”

The woman nodded and led us down a narrow hall that I expected to open out into a larger room, but never did so. The entire apartment was no more than three hundred square feet. We passed one door immediately, then congregated in an instantly-crowded area beside a bed. The apartment had several posters of contemporary films, some Indian, some American. A small altar stood shoved up against a bookshelf, and a kitchen beyond.

The place was incredibly cramped. I’d had more space to myself as a child at the compound than this woman had as an adult. Turning to look back over the room, I realized that there was another Indian woman on the bed, curled up in the covers, rendered nearly invisible under the chocolate sheets and her brown hooded sweatshirt. She held something clutched very close to her chest.

The Heart. It glowed golden, with flecks of gray, but the light refracted in on itself, contained like a closed circuit, plasma under a microscope, or a nebula in a marble.

“Is she hurt?” I asked, trying to catch someone’s attention. It was the only good reason I could imagine that someone on the run from a catastrophically dangerous sorceress would be curled up under the covers.

“Yes, she needs to sleep,” the woman, Sveta, said. “That’s why this is going with you.” Sveta crossed the two steps to the bed, leaned over, and whispered something to the other woman. The covered figure unwrapped a chain from around her arm and passed the Heart to Sveta.

In the middle of the bundle was an ochre-colored sphere, racked through with stars and brushstroke arcs of color, like an entire nebula contained in a bauble. The Heart of Queens. If we only could manage to keep this one artifact out of Esther’s hands, the city and the world might yet be spared.

“Okay, time to go. Who’s good at climbing?” Sveta asked.

“What?” Carter, Antoinette, and I all responded at once.

Sveta went to a door and opened an overburdened closet. Ropes, harnesses, and other unidentifiable equipment spilled out. She sorted through the pile and tossed them at us, seemingly at random. “Can’t go back down the elevator, and she’ll have something guarding the stairs. My friend used a great deal of power getting here, and the magical trail will be very easy to follow.” Sveta threw a pile of clasps and cord at me, which I caught. However, I had no idea what to do with them. “Our best option is to go up and across to another tower before the Greene woman can find this apartment.”

“She’s tracking the power here?” I asked.

Dorothea worked with a harness of her own, extending here, pulling there, clasping and retying. “Yep. And unless you want to try to take your sister head-on in an enclosed space with a thousand bystanders, put the harness on.”

I looked at the harness again. “I don’t know how this works.”

Sveta stepped over and said, “Here, let me.” Which is how it came to be that a woman I’d known for all of one minute began taking every physical liberty with my body, wrapping cords and clasps around what seemed like every inch of me. I was thankful that it was winter, and we had coats, lest the intimacy be such that my physiological response would have more clearly shown.

Shouting reached us from down the hall.

“Out the window, now!” Sveta said. Dorothea was already on the balcony, working with the black-corded rope.

Antoinette went first, scaling the rope with ease. I turned and watched the door.

“What about her?” I pointed back inside, to the woman in the bed.

Sveta’s words were short, clipped. “She knew the risks.” Our hostess watched the inside as well, flat of her sword laid across her left arm. She’d grabbed a woolen coat from somewhere, wrapped around the bright sari to block some of the cold. “Hurry!”

“Carter,” Dorothea said, handing him the rope.

“Can’t we bring her with us?” I asked.

“Her job’s not done, Jake,” Dorothea said. “Sveta, you’re next.” The Indian woman sheathed her sword (somehow), then jumped ten feet straight up and grabbed the rope.

Putting that aside, the seventeenth amazing thing for the day, I looked back to the door and heard the shouting grow in volume, joined by the skittering of nail on tile and the growls of an unknown beast.

“Kid, you’re up.” Dorothea’s words brought me back inside the room. She held a rope out in my direction. “Clasp this to that, then hold on,” she said, pointing at a green metallic clip. I did as she said.

Dorothea hauled with all of her weight, squatting to the floor, her face going red as she lifted me from the balcony. From above, I saw Antoinette pulling the rope from the roof, quickly joined by Carter. Sveta scaled the rope with alacrity, hand over hand, and I tried to match her but quickly gave up, clutching to the rope with every bit of strength I had. Heights were another thing we didn’t have much of back home. Standing on a balcony was one thing. Swinging in the chilly wind nearly two hundred feet above the ground was something very, very different.

“Jake!” Antoinette said. I looked to her.

“Keep your eyes on me, okay! Just hold on, and relax!”

“How am I supposed to relax when I could plunge to my death at any moment?” I asked.

“You won’t! Especially if you relax!” Carter added.

From below. “Calm that shit down, kid, or I will drop you,” Dorothea said.

I took a long breath, my eyes locked on my friends at the roof, pulling on the rope. Refusing to look down again, I was safely hauled to the top of the building. With Carter’s help, I pulled myself onto the roof.

“All clear!” Sveta called down.

“Start pulling, now!” Dorothea called, her voice seeming more distant, masked by the wind.

The rope was wound through a pulley, bolted to a smokestack on the roof. I imagined that it’d been installed specifically for escapes like this.

We assembled in two lines of two, hauling on the rope. Carter and Sveta pulled at the front, anchored by Antoinette and myself, respectively.

Wood shattered, and Dorothea yelled, “Faster!” We pulled harder, hands moving faster. I kept my eyes locked on Sveta’s hands, timed my motions so that three hands were always pulling at any given time on our side. Moments later, Dorothea crested the lip of the roof, looking down. A shotgun report cracked through the air, firing down.

The older woman tumbled over the lip, and rolled to her knees. Behind her, the rope slipped, one side cut. “Go! Now!”

Sveta took off, running across the roof lengthwise. The roof was black tar, with a smattering of lawn chairs, grills, and other items left up by residents for warmer weather. Or, in the case of the overflowing bowl of cigarette stubs, for all seasons.

Between the furniture and the waste, what I did not see was a way out. “How are we getting away?”

“Just follow me!” Sveta said. And so I followed. But my patience was eroding. I’d not had time to catch my breath since we stepped off of the subway, if I could call a sweaty, cloying experience inside a metallic tube with hundreds of strangers and their pathogens a chance to “catch my breath.”

Checking over my shoulder, I saw Carter keeping pace, and Antoinette lagging behind, helping Dorothea along. At the lip, there was nothing. No one.

“You cut the rope?” I asked, hoping my voice would carry. Sveta slowed to a stop at the far end of the building.

“Damn right I did!” Dorothea said.

At the edge of the building, Sveta pulled off her coat, twisted the ends, and the woolen cloak became a thick bundle of rope.

I gasped with surprise.

“You Greenes aren’t the only ones with tricks,” she said, then finished with a positively leonine smile. She tossed the rope over the side of the building, waiting for it to unfurl. Then she held it out at arm’s length by the end, squeezed, then twisted. The rope snapped taut, hanging as if secured.

“How?” I asked. “Did you anchor the rope with a sympathetic tie?”

Dorothea put a hand on my elbow. “Doesn’t matter, kid. Let’s go.”

“I’m sick and tired of being brushed off! Don’t say it doesn’t matter!” Once the anger started pouring, I found myself unwilling to stop. “I wouldn’t ask if it didn’t matter. It’s bad enough that I’m being railroaded around the city, used entirely as a weak counter to my sister’s power, my ideas disregarded and my life constantly at jeopardy. If I’m laying my life down, I think I at least deserve some answers to some simple inquiries!”

Sveta said, “We’ve prepared for situations like this for years. The rope is anchored to an air spirit, it will hold. The rope will get you down, then you need to put distance between you and her. Play for time. Remember that the whole city is on your side.”

Dorothea continued. “I get that this is hard on you, Jake. But first we need to get the Heart out of here, okay?”

“Of course. I . . . There’s just so much I don’t know. I’m used to being able to understand everything, to know not only what, where, when, but why and how.”

“Welcome to the real world, Jake. We’re lucky if we know one of the five per issue.”

I turned and saw that Sveta and Carter had vanished, and Antoinette had the rope in one hand, standing at the ledge. My face was hot, a sharp contrast to the chill of the evening. I felt the sting of winter on my nose and at my ears, and quite rapidly felt embarrassed by my untimely outburst.

I turned for the rope. My motion was cut short by a strained voice ripping across the open air.

“Sheep! I’ll read the story of my victory on your entrails!” Esther. She’d made the roof.

Dorothea had her shotgun up before I could pivot on my feet. She spoke in a low voice. “Have to buy time for Sveta. Can’t let your sister go down the rope. You go ahead. Get down as fast as you can. I’ll catch up.”

“But—”

“Just go already, kid. And when the time comes, remember what you’re fighting for,” Dorothea said, turning away from me and raising her shotgun. Esther was halfway across the roof already, just walking.

I stepped onto the lip and took the rope in hand, Dorothea’s cryptic reminder echoing in my head. I tugged, and the rope held fast. I grabbed it with my other hand, reached out with one leg, and then jumped, eyes closed.

The rope caught me. Or, more accurately, I caught myself, and the rope held.

I looked down, seeing Sveta and Carter at the ground. Antoinette was half of the way down.

“Faster, kid!”

I descended, knees locked on the rope, hands moving slowly. At this rate, I would not make it halfway before Esther reached the edge of the roof. Even if Dorothea could delay Esther, there might still not be time.

My options were bad and worse, so I chose pain over weakness.

“This is a terrible idea,” I said to myself, cutting open a vein in my left arm, making a fist with my hand. I let the blood flow out, and focused on the hot, stinging pain.

I released my fist, then clenched again, willing the blood to change form and create a mass of gelatin directly below me on the ground. And then, I let go of the rope.

My colleagues on the ground moved away from the mass, getting clear of my likely impact zone.

The world whipped past me, howling of air covering up all other sounds. For a safer landing, I spun myself as I fell, looking back up at the lip of the roof. Black bursts of energy moved against the early-evening sky, and I saw muzzle flashes from Dorothea’s shotgun.

Just before I hit the semisolid blood, I saw Dorothea plunge over the roof, hands flailing, gun flying out ahead of her.