Sabrina's Clan (28 page)

They were focusing on Riley, because she appeared to be the most vulnerable one in the room. Riley stuck to the story with brilliant insistence. “I don’t know what happened. I didn’t see. I looked up when the crash sounded and saw the big rock smash on the floor…No, I didn’t see the smaller one. I was watching the big one…No, I don’t have any enemies. I’m a housewife…No, I don’t have any idea what happened.”

Everyone repeated the same story. They were playing Monopoly, betting real money, a dollar for each Monopoly dollar. No, they had all been sitting at the table. No, no one left before the rock hit. No, they had no clue what this was about.

The detectives were baffled. Jake knew unsolved mysteries were part of a real detective’s daily workload. Not everything got wrapped up as neatly as it did on TV.

They just weren’t letting go. Perhaps their instincts were working overtime, too.

Jake got to his feet and faced the senior of the pair, a black man with a nearly pure white goatee. “Detective Novak, yes?”

Novak looked at him sharply. “You said your name was Jake, right?”

“Jacob Summerfield. You’re from the 97
th
Precinct?”

Wariness touched Novak’s face. “Summerfield Investments,” he said flatly.

Jake nodded. Uniformed police were generally only interested in upholding the law. When a cop reached detective level they started to learn the politics that made the system work, even if they were too low on the hierarchy to do anything about it. Novak clearly understood what his family name meant, which would make this easier.

“Captain Donnelly runs the 97
th
, I believe,” Jake said.

Novak’s face hardened. He already knew where this was going. “You know Donnelly?”

“My uncle and Donnelly went to high school together,” Jake told him. “I used to play football with Michael.” Michael was Donnelly’s oldest son and Novak would know the name, at least.

Novak nodded. There was a bitterness in his eyes Jake understood only too well. He was a smart man and he knew Jake would have his investigation shut down and his knuckles rapped if he pushed this too hard.

What he didn’t know was that Jake had never used his family influence in this way before and he didn’t know for certain his bluff would hold. Uncle Graham was a law-abiding man and as far as Jake knew, he had never deliberately bent legal processes around him because he found it inconvenient, which was how he would look at what Jake was doing now.

Jake kept his gaze locked on Novak, waiting for him to fold.

Novak grimaced and sighed and put his notebook away. “We’ll have to follow up in a couple of days, with questions down at the precinct. People remember things later, when the shock has worn off. You understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” Jake told him. Due process had to be followed, even if it was the most superficial process.

Novak jerked his chin at the other detective, who was scowling. He had heard the conversation and he didn’t like it any more than Novak did.

Jake didn’t care. He just wanted them to leave.

Novak murmured to one of the uniformed cops, who also scowled. Then he nodded and waved at the other four. They were leaving, too.

Novak looked at Jake. “I’ll need contact information. No one will be staying here for a while.” He looked at the gaping wall, baffled and angry.

“I have an apartment on Fifth,” Jake told him.

“We’ll be heading for Albany,” Nick said, his hand on Riley’s shoulder. He looked like a man who was barely functioning. He sounded vague and distant. Jake had seen 911 victims with the same blank, bewildered look.

“I’m probably going to go home to Scotland. Early,” Nyanther said, exaggerating his accent. “Some holiday…” he murmured under his breath and sighed.

Novak looked like he wanted to say more. A lot more. He shook his head and rounded up everyone and left.

Nyanther shut the door after him.

Riley jumped to her feet. “There are burner phones in Sabrina’s kitchen. Damian, let me have Chloe. I’ll get her settled. You get the weapons. Nyanther, Jake, we’ll need everything you have in the basement. Everything that can be carried in backpacks, so long knives only.”

Damian handed Chloe over. The little girl was sniffling, her chest hitching.

Jake scrubbed at his hair. “I get we’re going after them, but…how?”

Nyanther put the tablet he had been holding the entire time the police had been there on the table. “With this,” he said. “Sabrina calibrated it. While the fucking monster was holding her.” His tone was bleak.

“They’ve been here in the city all along,” Riley said. She sounded just as bleak and angry. “Right here in Manhattan, hiding in basements and empty buildings, I imagine. Who notices when the homeless and a few junkies disappear?”

“No one anticipated this,” Nick said mildly, as if he was rebuking her for being so hard on herself. “Gargoyles have never attacked like this.”

“They’re desperate,” Jake said. “Valdeg said they just want to be left alone. Do you believe him?”

“No,” Riley said flatly. “He took Sabrina. If they really wanted to be left alone they should have left us alone. This was provocation, pure and simple.” She rocked Chloe, who was finally settling down, her thumb in her mouth and her head on Riley’s shoulder.

“Don’t let your concern for Sabrina cloud your judgment,” Nick said gently.

“My judgment is just fine,” Nyanther growled. “I will destroy the little one first. I will grind him to pebbles with my bare hands. Then I will toss what remains upon a fire that I will watch until it is nothing more than cold ashes.”

Nick shook his head. “Stop it, all of you. Don’t you understand? They did it this way to make us react just like this. They want us going off half-cocked, angry and afraid and not thinking straight. They’ve set up the end game. They want to kill us all. They want this over.”

Coldness settled in Jake’s belly and chest as he absorbed what Nick was saying. “They know us that well?”

“They cannot speak, but they are smart,” Nyanther said and blew out his breath. “We all fell into the same mistake humans made two thousand years ago. We forgot they can think for themselves.”

“They’ve been
watching
us?” Jake breathed.

Nick frowned.

“How else would they know that taking Sabrina would stir every single one of us?” Riley said slowly. “They won’t kill her straight away because it would remove any protection she gives them. We will be much more cautious about approaching them while we know she is still alive.”

Damian dumped four backpacks on the dining table. Monopoly money fluttered to the floor. “I’ll take Chloe somewhere safe.”

“My apartment,” Jake said.

“You think the gargoyles don’t know about your apartment?” Nick asked dryly.

“That’s…it’s part of my other life,” Jake said helplessly. Fear was gripping his throat.

“They don’t make those sorts of distinctions,” Riley said gently. “Look.” She waved toward the ruined wall.

“My family…will they be safe?” Jake asked. “They don’t know about this world, they have no idea…have I put them in danger?”

No one answered him. Riley just looked sad.

The fear expanded.

Nyanther settled his hand on his shoulder, heavy and comforting. “Come and help me with the knives,” he said, his voice rumbling. “This
is
something you can do.”

Jake nodded and followed Nyanther down to the basement, his mind reeling. When Nyanther turned on the bright fluorescents down there, for the first time Jake noticed his back. “Christ almighty!” he breathed, holding Nyanther still so he could look at the two parallel scores across Nyanther’s back. They were healing. For them to not have disappeared already was frightening. “You were scratched! The toxin!”

“I’m immune,” Nyanther said. “It’s nothing.”

“How could you know you were immune?” Jake said. He was starting to feel sick with the swirl of repetitive fright and anger churning through him. “It’s not like you’ve been bitten since the first time.”

“I didn’t know,” Nyanther said flatly. “Now I do.” He went over to the bench where all the knives were laid out and sorted them quickly. “Don’t look at me that way.”

“The
risk
…” Jake breathed.

“Damian survived because of my blood. There was barely any risk,” Nyanther pointed out. He gripped the edge of the bench, his knuckles whitening. “Jake, you have to snap out of your stupor. We have to go find the bastards. I need you thinking and alert.”

Jake swallowed. “Why did they attack now, after nearly a year of leaving us alone?”

Nyanther shrugged. “We’ve been searching locally. Maybe we scared them.”

“Because we were getting too close?” Jake said slowly.

Nyanther leaned on the bench, staring down at it. “We quartered Long Beach last week. Neither of us really thought they would be there.”

Jake shook his head. “Too crowded at this time of year and nowhere safe to nest during the day. I still don’t think they’re there.”

“We haven’t been anywhere else,” Nyanther pointed out.

“We must have been somewhere where they saw us, which means it was somewhere we went after sunset. It’s the only thing that could have scared them into reacting like this—seeing one of us and thinking we had found them. So where have we been?”

“It could have been Nick or Damian or even Riley they spotted,” Nyanther said.

“They took Sabrina, not Riley,” Jake replied. He steeled his mind against seeing her face, the terror in her eyes as she had been ripped out of Nyanther’s grip.

“Pearl Street,” Nyanther said. “The Mexican place where you two tried to melt your brains with the chilies. It’s the only place we’ve been out in public since…” He sighed heavily.

“Since she was fired for being seen out in public with us,” Jake said heavily.

Nyanther looked at him. “We know where to start.”

* * * * *

“There are many abandoned subway stations down at this end of the island,” Nick said as they drove slowly along Pearl Street, the wipers working intermittently to remove the misty rain from the windscreen. “There are tunnels that were built during Prohibition, more tunnels built during the cold war and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there are fallout bunkers that people have forgotten are there. There have been people who build structures living on Manhattan since the sixteenth century. No one knows every rat hole, sewer and tunnel anymore. Pearl Street makes sense.”

“I’m not getting any sort of reading on this,” Riley said. “It looks like one of those weather radar things on TV. I never could make sense of them, either.”

“Let me,” Nyanther said, holding his arm out, between the two front seats. “I at least know what a sub-routine is.”

“Elitist,” Riley said. She gave him the tablet.

Nyanther settled back, studying the screen and tapping. “She captured scent, body heat, sound…three other criteria as well. One of these
must
work.”

“We still don’t know what the range is,” Jake pointed out. “We might have to be standing ten feet away for anything to register.”

“That would make the device utterly useless,” Nick said dryly. “As
I
can smell them half a mile away.”

“The other elitist,” Jake murmured and heard Riley snuffle back laughter.

“What if they’re not here…or not here any longer?” Nick said, voicing exactly what had been bothering Jake since they had left the apartment.

“Then we keep working outward from here, until we find them,” Riley said calmly.

“They took Sabrina to stop us doing exactly what we’re doing,” Jake said.

“That was their mistake,” Riley replied. Her tone was serene. It didn’t hide the steel beneath.

* * * * *

They didn’t find the gargoyles that night, even though Nick insisted they drive through every road and alley they could fit into. They quartered Battery Park and Staten Island then moved higher into the Wall Street canyons. Jake drifted in and out of sleep and suspected Riley did, too. As Nick and Nyanther needed no sleep, they continued on.

When the sun was threatening to rise, Jake woke to watch the glimmer in the east. “She’ll be terrified we can’t find her,” he breathed.

“They’ll be moving to stone sleep soon,” Nyanther said softly, next to him. “She’ll be safe enough, even if she can’t get away.” His hand found Jake’s and squeezed. “We’ll find her.”

When the sun lifted above the horizon, Nick turned the Lexus toward Soho and shook Riley awake.

“Jake, you need to take your cell phone to your apartment and leave it there,” Riley said, looking through the seats at him. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes.

“You really think the police will track our cell phones?”

“I don’t want to take the chance,” she said flatly. “We’ve set them up to think we’re harmless victims of something as bizarre as a falling meteor. I want them to see no evidence that disputes it. So your cell phone, which has spent the night in Sabrina’s apartment, now goes back to your apartment. You’re exhausted after the exciting night and you’re sleeping for the day.”

“I
will
be sleeping. I just don’t intend to sleep
there
.”

“Nyanther’s will stay in the apartment. Ours will go to the hotel where Damian is with Chloe.”

“In the meantime, we use the burner phones and the dark net to do any real talking,” Nick said. He hesitated. “Never thought that thing would be useful,” he added to himself.

Nyanther smiled as he played with the settings on the tracker. It was a feral expression. “And I thought
I
was hidebound.”

Nick growled softly.

When they got back to the apartment, Nyanther walked with Jake out to his Jeep. “Be careful, driving,” he told him. “You’re on the tail end of exhaustion.”

“I’d rather take a taxi,” Jake confessed.

“It wouldn’t look normal,” Nyanther warned him. “We don’t know who is watching.”

“Then I can’t even kiss you. Great.” Jake climbed into the Jeep, irritation clearing away some of the tiredness fogging his brain.

Nyanther gripped the door. “This will soon be over,” he said in his deep voice.

“The pretense never stops, does it?” Jake said, looking at him. “Even when the gargoyles are dead and gone, even if you stay, we still have to pretend I’m the heir to an empire I don’t want and you go on pretending you’re Neal Straithairn.”