It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.
Kenji.
“I can hear you.” It was like I could breathe again. “I’m on—”
“I know exactly where you are.”
Oh crap. “I’m on TV?”
“No, the boss is keeping me posted. She sees you. Look up at the top of One Times Square.”
“One Times Square? Where the—”
“The building with the big-ass ball on it? The one they’re about to drop?”
I looked. I saw the ball.
And I saw the dragon that was Vivienne Sagadraco perched regally—there was no other way to describe her—shimmering majestic blue in the spotlights trained on the dazzlingly lit ball covered with Waterford crystal.
Magnificent came to mind.
And invisible.
A million people here and billions around the world were watching that ball, but it was obvious that no one could see Vivienne Sagadraco.
My shoulders sagged in relief. “You fixed the cloaking device.”
I heard the pride in Kenji’s voice. “Affirmative. Me and the boys.”
“And girls!” I heard shouted in the background.
My words came in a gush. “It’s just me and Yasha. The teams were captured by ghouls and spawn and . . .” I stumbled on, unable to say “possibly eaten.” “Calvin and Rolf are in the old Forty-second Street subway station, and Ian is alone fighting a ghoul that’s not a ghoul, and—”
“The teams are fine.”
“What?”
“Roy, Sandra, and Lars just reported in. They ran into a little trouble clearing out the nest. They’re on their way up to the old station, as I—”
That son of a bitch vampire lied.
“Go get Ian!” I screamed.
Heads turned. A woman wearing an FBI hat, screaming into a headset, tended to make post-nine-eleven New Yorkers antsy. I quickly turned my head away and lowered my voice a few octaves. “He’s in the closed pedestrian passageway. Calvin knows . . .”
I was talking to dead air.
“Kenji?”
No response.
“Kenji? Shit!”
I had my paintball gun, and the boss would be able to see a marked grendel, but I couldn’t use it. At this moment, I had no doubt about the reactions of real cops to fake guns that they didn’t know were fake—especially in Times Square on New Year’s Eve where alert didn’t even begin to describe the readiness state of the thousands of cops and feds in, around, and above the crowds. The moment I drew my real-looking paintball gun, six or ten of the gazillion cops would be on me like white on rice. Ian had been right. A real-looking fake gun could get you killed quicker than the real thing—or get my face ground into the asphalt while a real monster materialized and started eating people.
Hope flickered to life, and even severed communications wasn’t going to crush it. There were a mess of folks depending on me. Ian was one of them. Whatever had happened to him—or whatever was happening to him—his sacrifice sure as hell wasn’t gonna be in vain. And if I failed, I’d fail knowing that I’d done everything I could possibly do. No regrets.
I knew what I had to do.
Vivienne Sagadraco could fight the grendel. I couldn’t. The boss knew where I was, so my job was to show her where the grendel was by the only other way available to me—by getting as close to the thing as possible, and grabbing it if I had to.
I spotted the grendel. “Bring it, bitch,” I spat.
I suddenly smelled sulfur and was nearly knocked off my feet by a blast of air.
My lizard brain knew sulfur was bad, so it didn’t consult with the rest of my mind on how to react to a downdraft on a night with no wind.
I dove behind a police cruiser as massive claws ripped through the space where I’d just been, leaving three, long gashes across the cruiser’s hood.
Startled shouts and curses spread as sections of the crowd were buffeted with the downdraft generated by the wings of a huge red dragon that had dove down, leveled off over Broadway, and damned near plucked me off the street like an owl going for a field mouse.
I frantically scanned the sky, but I couldn’t see her for the glare of the TV lights; however, I could hear and feel her powerful wing beats as she gained altitude and momentum for another run.
Tiamat didn’t get the chance for a second pass.
Vivienne Sagadraco must have seen the blast of wind flow and ripple over the top of the crowd and been able to track her sister’s path of attack. She simply dropped off of the edge of One Times Square, spreading her wings just short of full extension. The boss was diving to intercept, but she was so large that dropping from the roof of a twenty-five-story building was like a bird hopping out of a tree.
The boss had the advantage of surprise, and she would only have it once.
The two titans collided in midair, barely three stories above the packed crowd in front of the main stage. The collision produced a shock wave that shook the steel gantry holding the stage lights, and rocked the street itself like an earthquake. People directly beneath the two battling dragons were knocked to the ground from the force of the downdrafts from their wings.
Vivienne tried to maneuver Tiamat higher and farther away from the crowds. When her sister didn’t comply, Vivienne redoubled her attack with a roar that overpowered a million voices and the stage’s probably million-amp sound system, but that only I could hear.
I shot a glance at the countdown clock at the bottom of the pole the ball would descend.
One minute, thirty seconds.Tia broke away, the boss in pursuit. The red dragon banked to the right, the row of spikes at the end of her tail grazing one of the digital billboards, sending a spray of sparks down onto the crowd. With two beats of her mighty wings, Vivienne Sagadraco swooped beneath her sister, jaws snapping at Tia’s underside, forcing her upward to escape. The two massive dragons battled, climbing higher into the night sky.
Forty-five seconds.
I ran toward the female grendel who had ignored the roars and shrieks overhead and was nearing the pens closest to the stage. She leapt over a parked ambulance that was in her path, and when she landed, her weight cracked the asphalt beneath her taloned feet, the shock wave knocking more people to the street. Seen or unseen, the grendel was going into the crowd. Her clawed hand went to the front of her collar.
To turn off the cloaking device.
Oh no. No!
I ran toward her with no idea what I was going to do when I got there. The boss was busy fighting her sister, so my original plan was scuttled. It was just me. The grendel spun, slashing at me with her claws, catching on my armor, hooking it and me.
Thirty seconds.
Yasha surged past me, biting, tearing into the hand and arm that the grendel had used to reach for the disk on her collar. The people around us saw a K-9 officer snapping and biting something that wasn’t there. I saw a werewolf savaging a monster.
“Rabies!” a woman shrieked.
Twenty seconds.
The grendel broke free, long strides taking her directly to the foot of the stage, to the people packed together in the metal pens, sheep for the taking.
The grendel stopped, reached up with her undamaged hand . . .
“NYPD! Freeze!”
It was directed at me, not the grendel. Yasha and I had finally gotten the attention we didn’t want but couldn’t avoid.
I ignored them and kept running toward the grendel, prepared to throw myself against that hand or somehow knock her off balance, anything to stop her.
Almost there.
Seven seconds.
I lunged, my shoulder slamming into the back of the grendel’s armor-scaled knee.
Almost instantly, a downdraft knocked me off my feet as a giant claw grazed my back, sending me into a roll and throwing me against the bars of a crowd pen. I screamed in pain and frustration.
Five seconds.
I scrambled to my feet and stopped in open-mouthed amazement as Vivienne Sagadraco locked the talons that had knocked me out of the way securely around the grendel and swept her off the street, powerful beats of her wings working like the afterburners of a fighter jet as she fought for altitude. High enough and it wouldn’t matter if the grendel disabled the device. No one would see.
Tiamat was nowhere to be seen.
Four seconds.
Booted feet caught up with me, and a cop grabbed my arms and pulled me aside.
“I’ve got her,” he called to the others behind him.
I barely heard him as I stood and watched Vivienne Sagadraco carry the grendel farther up into the sky until they were barely visible, even to me. My eyes blurred with tears.
“We did it, Ian,” I whispered.
“You have the right to remain silent,” the policeman said. “Even though I know you can’t.”
What?
Three . . . two . . .
It was Ian.
. . . one.
Wearing a NYPD jacket and hat.
The crowd erupted and confetti came down.
I stared in relief and wonder. “How did you—”
“Later.”
Over the past two days, we’d come close to dying any number of times. Coming that close makes you think. It was making me think right now about what I suddenly wanted to do and damn the consequences. I was shaking with terror and relief . . . and well, all that feeling had to go somewhere. Besides, everyone else was doing it.
I put my hands on either side of Ian’s face, stood on tiptoes, and kissed him.
His lips were soft, he was warm, and damn, it was nice.
When I broke away, I was short of breath.
Ian was looking down at me, a mischievous grin flitting across his mouth. “Happy New Year, partner.”
Over the sounds of celebration all around us came the joyous howl of a wolf.
TWO DAYS LATER
IT was nine o’clock on Monday morning, and it wasn’t exactly business as usual at SPI headquarters—for a lot of reasons.
The bull pen smelled like new office furniture and electronics. It was amazing what cashing in a couple of trinkets from a dragon’s hoard could buy. The boss had everything delivered yesterday. Pre-assembled. On a Sunday. On New Year’s Day. Like I said, cash speaks. Loudly.