Docia knew she ought to keep still, but her heart was in her throat and she didn’t trust these creatures one bit. She wrenched her head around, seeking Ram. What she got was an eyeful of a battlefield, what looked like humans on the ground throwing those balls of red flameless fire at the winged forces. Where had they all come from? she wondered. Both the human attackers and the winged defenders? With all those miles of property insulating them from the roadways, how could they have gotten past those protective walls, the mounted cameras, all without a single hint of warning?
But as they gained more sky and the property below sprawled away, they flew over the drive and all those many columns leading up to the house were now naked of their prospective Gargoyles. She saw yet others, right before her eyes, on the parapets of the building changing from crouched stone critters into large, powerful fighters of all manner and appearance. It was as though a force of demons had been called forth into life to fight for the property they were guarding.
“It is better if you do not look down, my lady,” the creature holding her said with such peculiar refinement, his accent sounding aristocratic. She turned her head to look into his eyes and, for the first time, realized that this one’s eyes were a warm, oceanic green, like clean equatorial waters that danced along the edges of pristine white beaches. It was so incongruous a sight, set as they were in all that dark and grisly gray.
Suddenly the beast jolted hard to the left, banking in a superiorly nauseating maneuver that just barely dodged a streak of red energy that came so close, she felt its warmth against her entire exposed side and her mouth filled with a tang equal to that of having licked a row of batteries. That wasn’t exactly helping her nausea any. And normally she took great delight in the screaming scariness of the worst roller coasters the eastern seaboard could dish out, but seeing as how there was no seat belt … no, not much fun factor involved.
“Hup!”
That was the only warning she got before the Gargoyle’s next evasive maneuver, this one circling them around the soaring tops of some bony oak trees as he tried to put some objects between them and whatever was chasing them. And it was a chase, she realized, because the house was a pretty good distance away by then. What she had deemed as open air had not been as far off the ground as all that after all. Well, if you could consider twenty or thirty feet not all that high. And he moved so fast, cutting corners and streaking over underbrush so that it flashed beneath her in indiscernible streams first one way and then another. His wings hit branches, shearing them off at the ends, but none of it slowing him down as he built up speed.
And then a massive ball of searing red light struck them from in front, or what would have been front had the creature holding her not jerked himself around at the last minute, snapping his wings in full extension over her so the shot hit his armored webbing more than it hit her.
But that armor burned away nonetheless, leaving a gaping hole in the monster’s wing. And just like that they were falling, and she was screaming as the ground rushed to reclaim the laws of gravity. Her poorly abused body and psyche could take only so much. She passed out somewhere around the point of terminal velocity.
When Jackson and about half a dozen cops from both Saugerties PD and Windham PD pulled up to the gatehouse, they were ready for just about anything … except what they found. The gatehouse looked as if it had been vandalized, the windows smashed in all around it; the expensive line of monitors that had no doubt kept tabs on equally expensive cameras set around the property were bashed in, strewn across the floor; and the entire little building looked as though it had been jumped in a dark alley and had the shit beat out of it.
The sound of guns leaving holsters echoed in the night, clouds of rapidly increasing breath rising from the group in faster plumes. They could tell, just as Jackson could, that this was extremely recent damage. The smell of burned monitors still hung in the air, and there was something … just … something in a cop’s gut warning him to watch himself.
“I’d say that’s exigent circumstances, boys,” Jackson said grimly.
“Yup,” someone agreed.
Jackson found the gate release, but pressing the button did no good, since it seemed the power had been ripped away from the gatehouse as well.
It took three frustrating minutes to find the manual release and to manpower the gates open enough for them to move through. Jackson had been just shy of trying to scale the bastards the hard way, even though the design of the metal would not have been conducive to an easy climb. But putting a few minutes’ faith in his colleagues paid off, and he tried to remind himself to keep a cool head. It was by sheer luck and a really good argument on his part that they had even let him come along on their fishing expedition. As it stood at the time, all they were there for was a well check. They all knew he was way too close to the situation, that it wasn’t a good idea to have him close where emotions could get in the way of making legal progress in the situation. And they were probably right. He was tired and frustrated and impatient as all hell to see his sister safe and sound, but everything they were looking at was giving him that sour feeling in his gut that just the opposite was going to be true.
They moved up the long drive in force, a tense readiness in every last one of them. When the drive proved far longer than anticipated, it wore on them more and more … until they saw the first branch felled in the middle of the drive. It was thoroughly dusted with snow, but they could see the whitish-yellow wound on the end clear enough that bore witness to its having been ripped out of its position in life. But there had been no violent storms lately to account for it. It didn’t make sense, Jackson thought as he looked up into the tall trees. Given the thickness and size of the branch, it would take a few men with chain saws to clear … and it was clearly a stress fracture that had ripped it free. What, other than a storm or fierce winds, could cause damage like this? And his puzzlement only grew when he found the matching wound on the near tree up so high that one could get dizzy looking at it.
He returned his focus to the driveway. They all walked along the edges of it, out of some innate instinct, perhaps, so as not to be caught in the middle of the road in case something was planned for them. There were columns lining the road, most of which were bare on top, some of which were occupied by frozen grotesques in stone. They were a bit disconcerting, and it took a moment for him to figure out why.
They weren’t covered in snow.
What the hell?
Sure, it was snowing only lightly, those thick tufted snowflakes that were taking their time to make it to the ground, dancing in wending, lollygagging patterns, but it was enough of a snow to have left that branch covered in a decent white fuzziness.
So why were the stone gargoyles bare of most of it? He tried to rationalize it, tried to reason that maybe the stone was somehow warmer than the tree branch had been. But knowing how gray and dark and dreary the day had been and how freezing cold it was at present, he couldn’t trick his brain into understanding an impossibility. Nor could he come up with any other plausible explanation for it. So all he was left with was the act of tucking it aside in his brain. It was a trivial thing, he told himself. It very likely had nothing to do with what they had come there for.
By the time they made it to the last turn before the house, half of them were winded and some were exhausted, the act of jockeying a desk all day not that conducive to stamina and good health.
Jackson didn’t have that problem. Sure, sitting in a patrol car eight hours a day wasn’t the healthiest thing in the world, but he knew how to countermand that with time in the gym. And Chico had kept him running every minute they were out of that car.
Had. Jackson shoved aside the emotions connected with that, along with the overwhelming and crippling fear he faced that he was on the verge of losing yet another person he loved. It was everything he had felt in Landon’s office as he had stared at that gorgeous redhead’s face and tried to process her initiating the worst thing he had ever heard in h
is life.
The thought sent new steam in his stride, and he was the first to see the house clearly. It was enormous and intimidating … an edifice of gray stone topped with more of those disconcerting stone gargoyles. They looked like demons frozen in time, their glares downward warning all comers that they were the protectors and guardians of this place … or so the mythos of gargoyles went.
Well, apparently they had been doing a shit job of it, because along the right side about half the house had been ripped asunder. As though a massive wrecking ball had been taken to it. And again, it had to be recent because there was barely any snow on the rubble left behind. Jackson let his colleagues knock on the front door. He headed straight for the damage path. And it was a path. The closer he looked at the house and trees around him, the more he saw that the damage extended into the trees, both low on the trunks and high in the broken, kinked-up branches, some of which dangled downward, creaking as they hung on by a thread. It was as though a huge bomb had gone off … a bomb with a strange sort of progressive damage path. He reached the edge of the rubble and stepped into it, all the while holding his weapon at the ready, keeping his eyes moving constantly, eating up information whether he could make sense of it or not.
And all of what he was seeing was sickening to his stomach. However this mess was caused, if his sister had been here …
Of course she had been here. He could feel it in his bones. Not to mention the Lincoln Navigator that had led them there had been sitting in the large driveway, along with about a half dozen other cars of equally expensive make and model. When he thought of Docia being there against her will, in a remote location, with people who appeared to have endless resources and wealth … it took a tremendous feat of willpower not to jump to wild conclusions but to focus just on his immediate surroundings.
He leapt from one piece of rubble to the next, carefully dodging the wretchedly bent skeletons of rebar jutting from inside the pieces of stone. He pulled out his flashlight as he reached the cavity of the building and was greeted with almost complete darkness, save the distorted flames of what had once been a pair of gas fireplaces at the far end of the room but were now just mangled pipes of burning gas. He moved into the building, the darkness intensifying as he left the bright, direct shine of moonlight behind. The beam of his flashlight lanced over a table and the remnants of what looked to be a recent meal. Plates, food, and glasses were scattered and shattered everywhere. There was a strange dark stain splattered here and there. Not blood. It was more purple than it was red. He didn’t let himself be comforted by that. There was too much else around him giving him cause to have ramped-up adrenaline.
“Jackson.”
Jackson jumped out of his skin, nearly losing his footing as the fierce whisper came out of the dark from behind him. He swung his light and his gun around and found Leo’s face to go with the familiarity of his voice … once he had another moment to recognize it. Hard to do that when his heart was pounding in his ears.
“You know, it’s not often a bad guy calls you by your first name,” Leo mused with his usual snarky attitude, pushing Jackson’s weapon aside. But Leo was also holding a weapon in his hand, the austere black of the Talon part of the reason he blended so well with the darkened room.
“Leo! What the hell are you doing here?” Jackson hissed at him. “And fuck you. I don’t care if the jackass coming out of the darkness knows my grandmother’s name. You’re lucky you didn’t get shot, you idiot.”
“As if you’d ever get the drop on me,” Leo said dryly. “Like I just did on you. Besides, I got here first.” He couldn’t have put more smirk in the sentence if he tried.
“All right, then, tell me what happened here,” Jackson gritted through his teeth, knowing now was not the time to play smart-ass tug-of-war with Leo.
“I have no idea. I just got here about five seconds before you,” Leo said with a shrug. “I heard you coming up behind me and thought you were trouble. But, clearly you’re about as harmless as a butterfly. I could swear I taught you to walk more quietly than that.”
“How did you find this place?” Jackson demanded.
“I told you, man, you ought to stick with me,” Leo said. “Now you got a bunch of cops tramping all over the place, intent on ruining the crime scene. How long do you think they’re going to stand there ringing that doorbell before they remember the electricity is out? I figure that’s about as long as we have to find any clues about what happened here before they muck up the works.”
Unfortunately, Jackson was on the verge of agreeing with him. For the first time in his life, he had begun to feel very restricted by the laws he had sworn to uphold. Sure, there had been frustrating moments here and there when they’d tested him, when he’d been tempted to fudge it a little, but this time, in this particular situation … the frustration was reaching an all-time high. But there was also a sense of satisfaction in knowing that going the legal route had gotten him there at almost the exact same time as Leo, whose methods had no doubt been far from legitimate.
But he also knew that the moment the cops took this place over, especially out-of-county cops, they were going to shut him out. They’d let him come this far because they didn’t think Docia was in any kind of danger, that he was just being an overprotective older brother. But everything around Jackson was screaming otherwise, and they were finally going to agree with him that something was very, very wrong. That agreement was going to be like a gate slamming down on him.
“What do you think this is?” Jackson asked, flashing a light over the dark, purplish stain near his feet.
“No idea. But the whole place smells weird. Like … lilacs. Lilacs are months out of season, and it’s not as though anyone’s been spraying a frigging air freshener to freshen up this mess.”
“Let’s go deeper into the house. The only thing making me happy right now is that there’s no body count. Not that I see, anyway.”
“I’ll lead,” Leo said, moving forward before Jackson could agree or disagree.
“Leo! You’re not a cop!” Jackson hissed, following him at the ready. “You can’t—”
“Shh!”
“Did you just shush me?” Jackson growled, his voice low and soft.
“Gentlemen, may I be of assistance?”
Both men jerked around, their flashlights streaking over the tall, lanky man who had somehow come up behind them. They could hear the resounding banging on the front door as the cops outside tried to gain invitation.
It was odd, but the man did not react to two strangers in his home holding guns on him. Not even the twitch of an eye. It was the first thing Jackson noticed about him.
“Police! Hands where I can see them,” he barked, stepping in front of Leo, blocking his friend’s line of sight.
“Douche,” Leo whispered at his back.
“Officers,” the man said, gently exposing both his palms, “I’m not armed. I was just coming to answer the ruckus at the door.”
Jackson sighed. “Leo, for Pete’s sake, let them in already.”
“Nope. I’m not supposed to be here, remember?”
Jackson decided then and there to kill his best friend. Maybe even twice.
“Sir, can you tell me what has happened here?” he barked at the stranger.
“First, let me introduce myself. I am Henry Kamin. This is my home. I welcome you readily, Officers, so there is no need for your weaponry.”
“Like we’re going to take your word for it,” Leo said dryly.
“Shh!”
“Did you just shush me?” Leo demanded of Jackson, who ignored him. Jackson reached out and pushed a hand down over Leo’s, forcing him to lower his weapon. He did so himself, but only slightly.
“You’ll forgive me, but this place looks like a war zone. I’m not certain it’s all that safe.”
“It wasn’t,” Kamin agreed with a nod and a grim set to his lips. “But it is now. In fact, I have a call out to the local police, which must be you. We’ve had an
incident. Some sort of horrible gas explosion. We were able to manage the worst of it, as you see, and have evacuated most of the house except for myself and my personal guards.”
He held out a hand, and as if he’d conjured them, three very strong men appeared out of the darkness. Another oddity, Jackson stuffed into his mind, was that no one had thought to light so much as a candle or spark a flashlight. These men were walking around in the dark as if it were nothing to them.
“Stohn, Hagen … can you see about getting some lights?” Kamin directed, almost as though he had pulled the idea right out of Jackson’s head. “Forgive me, we’re still recovering and haven’t had a chance to touch all our bases yet.”
Jackson watched the ones called Stohn and Hagen move away, the enormous men seemingly more than capable of repelling the Axis forces single-handed. He did notice that Stohn was injured; his left arm looked terribly burned.
He should have offered ambulance services, called for more backup. But that ranked very low on his list of priorities.
“Mr. Kamin, I am looking for a girl. Her name is Docia Waverly. She was last seen in the company of the men driving that vehicle parked in front of your home.”
Jackson watched his aristocratic features very carefully, looking for the slightest flinch, for a shift in his eyes as he prepared to lie to him.
“Of course. Miss Waverly was here, but when all of this happened my friends decided it was safer to take her elsewhere.”
“Where elsewhere?” Jackson demanded. He was taken aback that the man would admit to her being there. It immediately made him complicit in any crimes that might be perpetrated against Docia. If anything happened to her, if she turned up hurt or … worse … they would come back to him and demand answers. As it was, Jackson wanted some of those answers now.