He sucked on the inhaler, pressing randomly, nothing. Lifting it, he saw that it was a shotgun shell, and his heart seemed to give up alongside his lungs. He wheezed, not even enough air for a cough, his hand slapping down to the floor. At least the asthma would get him first. Better to suffocate than to be torn to pieces by … by whatever the hell those things were.
They prowled toward him, almost lazily, their eyeless faces somehow burning right into the very core of his soul. Close enough now that he could see the way the metal bent like plastic when they moved, concrete as malleable as Play-Doh but still hard enough to crush his bones to powder. The rock-like one reared up, that vast maw opening.
“Thought you’d finished with me, did you?” said a voice.
There was a soft twang and a metal bolt plowed into the neck stump of the truck beast. There was a blazing wave of light and a booming explosion, like a concussion grenade, and the creature was reduced to a mound of rubble. What stood behind it was surely impossible. The girl’s chest was caved in, firelight visible through the gaping hole where her heart should have been. Even now, though, the wound seemed to be closing, flesh knitting back together. The ugly tears on her arms and neck and face were sealing, too, as if time were going backward, white smoke drifting up from her skin. She was gritting her teeth against it, the pain etched into every line of her face, every jutting tendon in her neck.
The concrete creature saw her and uttered a noise that could have been a building collapsing, a feral, industrial roar. It bounded past, running right for her. And over the thunder of its feet he heard the girl say, “I’m whole. End the contract.”
The beast pounced, so heavy that Marlow felt the tremor as it left the ground. The girl just stood there, empty crossbow by her side, those dark eyes never blinking. Then, like it had hit some kind of invisible wall, the creature dropped, landing with a crunch, exploding into dust. It twitched once, then lay still. The truck thing simply froze. There was another metallic bang from the other side of the garage, Marlow squinting to see a figure formed from a fire door and a section of wall fall over like a felled tree. Then there was silence, other than the subdued whisper of the flames and Marlow’s desperate, choking breaths.
He almost had time to feel relieved before he remembered he was still dying.
He clutched at his throat with one hand, slapping his empty pockets with the other, his back arching. The girl scanned the lot, a look of bored contempt on her perfect face. Only then did she look at Marlow, not a trace of gratitude or kindness in those perfect features. Her injuries had stopped healing, some of the nicks and scrapes still dripping blood. But there was no sign of the puncture wound in her chest other than a thick, leathery scar. Her uniform, though, had been unable to repair itself. It flapped open, revealing a black bra underneath.
Not such a bad way to go, his brain told him, and for once in his life he had to agree.
The girl noticed where he was looking, but made no effort to cover up, just opened her mouth and spoke.
“Done?”
Marlow couldn’t have answered even if he’d known what she was asking. His lungs were completely empty. There may as well have been a tank parked on top of him. He tried to shape his mouth around the word inhaler, tried to jab a finger at his throat, screaming inside his head, Please, find it for me, get help.
“You cut that one too close, Ostheim,” she said, and he realized she was talking to somebody else. “We lost Forrest, and Herc.”
“Not quite,” said another voice. Marlow saw the man he’d been fighting alongside earlier, walking over, barely an inch of skin not drenched in blood and smeared with filth. He stood stooped next to the girl, panting, but she didn’t even acknowledge his presence. They both looked at Marlow.
“None,” the girl said in answer to some unheard question. “No other survivors.”
The man glanced at her.
“What about him?”
“What about him?” she replied, her voice the coldest thing Marlow had ever heard.
“Saved your life.”
“No, he didn’t. The contract did. Remember the rules, Herc. Nobody knows.”
Marlow could no longer hold his eyes open and he fell into darkness. He could almost hear his lungs screaming, the loudest thing in the world. Squirming on the floor. It was a coward’s way out.
“Hellraisers don’t grow on trees,” he heard the man say. “We need more Engineers. He can fight.”
“Look at him. He can’t even breathe.”
“Pan.”
Marlow made out the scuffing of feet, the sound of somebody walking away.
“Pan!”
And that was it. One last squeaking, pathetic, airless breath. Marlow wished his last thought could have been of his mom, of his brother, of the things he loved. Instead, the very last bubble of oxygen he would ever breathe was expended wishing he could tell a girl whose life he had just saved to go screw herself.
ICE QUEEN
“Pan!”
She turned away, partly so she could scan for an exit, partly so Herc wouldn’t see her face. It was taking every ounce of strength she had to stay upright, her body a broken engine on the verge of stalling. Everything hurt. Everything. Especially her chest. Although hurt was the wrong word. It wasn’t pain so much as a grinding, awful sense that this time she’d gone too far. Her heart pulsed weak and wet and the vertebrae in her spine scraped together. There was a trapped nerve in there, and it felt like somebody jabbing her repeatedly with a scalpel. She wasn’t taking in enough air because one of her lungs hadn’t fully reinflated. Her contract had worked, but only barely. A few more seconds, maybe, and they’d have had her.
The underground parking lot was hell on earth, literally. The scattered remains of the demons lay beside the corpse of the driver, identical only in the absence of life. The truth was he didn’t know how lucky he was, to be dead, to be cold. There were far worse places the living could go when their hearts stopped beating and their bodies started cooling. She’d almost found out exactly how bad those places were.
No time for that. No time for what-ifs. There would be a SWAT team down here soon, and she didn’t want to be around when they started firing bullets or questions at her. She couldn’t take the exit ramp, the whole world would be watching by now. But there was an access door in the far wall. Half a door, anyway, with a demon-shaped hole in one side where something had pulled loose. It hung off its hinges, swinging in the currents of heat that circled the parking lot, beckoning her like a finger.
“… zztt … oing?”
The earpiece was history and she plucked it out, chucking it. She walked toward the door, going as fast as the wreck of her body would let her. The molten heat of the adrenaline was cooling into solid metal in her limbs, weighing her down, the reality of the situation bleeding back in. Had she died back there? She rubbed the scar on her chest, the mottled skin completely numb. The thought frightened her. It terrified her. Because for an instant, when the demon’s blade cut through her heart, she’d felt the world dissolve, felt something take hold of her soul, wrench her down through the fabric of reality into whatever waited for her below. Only an instant, then the contract had kicked in. But it had been close.
It always was when you traded for the big one. When you traded for invulnerability.
She stepped over the dead driver, her foot almost slipping in a puddle of blood. She didn’t even know his name, even though he’d been working with them for weeks, even though she’d shared a Wendy’s breakfast sandwich with him that very morning. Not a man, not a human, just a corpse. It’s all he ever was. And better to think of it that way, better to stay cold than to burn in the fire of regret and guilt and shame.
Forrest, though. He was different. Not a driver, not a bodyguard like Herc. He’d been an Engineer, the same as her. She could still see him being dragged into the molten ground, screaming even though his head had been obliterated. She could still hear him. She would hear him for the rest of her life—
him and all the others. Just one more name in the Book of Dead Engineers.
“Sorry,” she said, then regretted it. It wasn’t her fault. He’d known what the risks were when he’d made the deal. He’d known the price he would have to pay. If she took responsibility for him, then she’d have to take responsibility for the rest of them, and then she’d be buried by guilt, her soul as tormented as theirs.
Ostheim should never have let them get so close to the end of the contract, though. This was his fault.
Behind her she heard shuffling, a grunt, a pathetic wheeze, and she didn’t have to look back to know what was going on. She did anyway, if only to scowl at Herc as he lifted a hunk of plastic between his fingers, inserted it into the kid’s mouth. An inhaler. He pressed it a few times, massaging the boy’s chest. Then he hefted the unconscious body over one shoulder. He fired a look right back at her, one that said, What you gonna do about it?
He was right. They needed Engineers. They needed them all the time, the way a butcher needs a yard full of chickens. The kid, he’d appeared out of nowhere, had maybe—maybe—distracted one of the demons long enough to let her ruined flesh knit itself back together. But he was still just a boy, and a dying one at that, if his pitiful breathing was anything to go by.
But that was always Herc’s problem, his big, stupid, bleeding heart.
Pan reached the door, pushed through into a concrete stairwell, a haze of smoke making her eyes water. There was a choice of down or up, but the thought of heading even deeper beneath the earth after what she’d just felt made her stomach want to explode out her mouth. She headed up, running for a couple of steps before her battered heart slowed her to a walk.
“Place should be big enough to make us invisible,” growled Herc behind her. “Cops’ll be setting up a perimeter outside, but we should pass as civvies.” He coughed. “You might wanna lose the crossbow, though.”
“Yeah?” She doubled around the bend, snatching in breaths as she continued up. “I lose the bow, you lose some teeth.”
“Just saying,” he replied. “Nothing quite says crazy like a big-ass seventeenth-century weapon hanging off your back.”
She ignored him, reaching the door to the ground level. There was an alarm going off, she realized, and she could hear footsteps and screams from the other side. A stampede. Perfect. She opened the door a crack, peeking past to see a corridor, people flowing out of wards, bare feet slapping on the floor. A few orderlies and security guards were doing their best to herd them toward the back of the hospital. Herc was right, the bow was a little conspicuous. But there weren’t more than a dozen of these things in existence, and Ostheim only owned three.
She grabbed the collar of her tattered Kevlar shirt and pulled, the Velcro tearing. Shrugging it off, she wrapped it tightly around the bow, leaning on it like it was a walking stick, standing there in nothing but her bra.
“Well, that’ll take their minds off the crossbow if nothing else,” said Herc, his eyes scrolling over every inch of the stairwell except her. Even past the blood and dirt she could see him blush.
“Perv,” she said, pushing through the door into the crowd. It didn’t take one of the guards long to pick her out, his eyes widening as he executed the perfect double take. She didn’t need much help looking like a patient, coughing violently as she was swept along with the tide. Another guard was standing at the end of the corridor, ushering everyone to the left. Pan used her crossbow to hold herself up, limping around the corner to see a big double door up ahead, splashed with sunlight. The sight of it almost brought tears to her eyes. Probably would have done if the heat of the fire hadn’t singed her tear ducts shut.
There was a line of cops outside, beady eyes assessing everyone who left the building. Pan did her best to look the way normal people probably looked when they saw death, her face crumpling, her hand covering her eyes, her shoulders lurching like she had broken down into sobs. It wasn’t exactly an Oscar-worthy display but it must have done the trick because they waved her on toward a posse of waiting ambulances and first responders.
Pan ducked between two trees at the side of the road, hopping over a low metal fence onto the street beyond. There was a rustle of leaves and Herc appeared, trying to maneuver himself over the iron spikes, the boy still slung over his shoulder.
“Little help?” he said.
“Your new boyfriend,” Pan replied. “You love him so much, you carry him.”
“Do you always have to be such an icy bitch?” He stumbled, almost fell, clutching the kid like a sack of potatoes. A couple of teenage boys walked past holding skateboards, both of them ogling her, oblivious to everything except her exposed bra. She pulled the shirt off her crossbow, gave them something else to ogle, sent them skittering. They were on a side road, a couple of cars parked next to the curb. They weren’t exactly flash, but they’d do. She made for the closest one, used the butt of the crossbow to shatter the driver’s-side window.
“Do you always have to be such a miserable old git?” she replied as she popped the lock, the central locking clunking.
“Do you always need thirty seconds to come up with a riposte?”
Herc opened the rear door, slid the kid inside. Pan waited until the big guy had straightened before shaking her head at him.
“That’s a lot of effort for a skinny kid,” she said. “You should have left him up there, with the paramedics. Saved yourself some bother.”
“He’s seen us, Pan. Seen them. Can’t take the chance he won’t talk.”
“Left him to die, then,” she offered. “Not like he’d be the first. Hell, we’ve lost a dozen Engineers in as many months, what’s one more corpse for the cleaners to bag up?”
This time Herc’s eyes narrowed, his face turning to stone. He didn’t reply, just stared at her. If looks could kill, and all that. She had to turn away, her own cheeks heating, suddenly ashamed. She hissed out a humorless laugh to cover it.
“I’m glad you find this so funny, Pan,” Herc said, pushing past her, his disgust oozing off him in waves. He folded his body into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, and started ripping out wires from the dash. She stood there a moment longer, chewing on the stew of emotion that bubbled up from her stomach, wanting to punch Herc in the face, wanting to scream her lungs out at the sky, wanting to curl up beneath the car and cry and cry and cry. And it was only because she couldn’t work out which of those feelings scared her more that she walked robotically to the other side, opened the creaking door, and clambered in.
Herc fired up the engine, revved it.
“You had to pick a goddamned Honda?” he said, and it was almost an apology. “Come on. We need to get hold of Ostheim before he sends the whole Pigeon’s Nest down here looking for you.”
Pan didn’t answer. She just stared out the windshield, watching the world start to roll past, happy to be cold, to be hard, to be made of ice.
CALL THEM CHOICES?
“He’s coming around.”
Marlow rose from a dream of demons and dead things, clinging to the voices like they were a life raft. He wrenched open his eyes, felt like he’d been punched in the brain by the bright white light, screwed them closed again. When he took a breath he heard the familiar rattle and clank of his lungs. He eased his eyes open again, seeing blurred shapes there, two of them. He tried to sit up but found that he was in a narrow hospital bed, rows of thin plastic straps holding him tight. He was almost angry until he remembered his last thought—that he was never going to wake up again.
“What the hell?” he said, his mouth dry, his tongue getting stuck to his teeth. He blinked the two figures into focus. One was the big guy from the parking lot, cleaned up now but still covered in bruises, grazes, burns, and scars. He was sitting on a metal chair to the side of the bed, and when he heard Marlow speak he stood up, running a hand through what was left of his gray hair.
“So,” he said, his voice a low rumble, “you’re back. Wasn’t sure you were gonna make it for a while ther
e. How’s he doing?”
“Good,” said the other figure, stepping up to the man’s shoulder. She was a woman in a red overcoat, in her fifties maybe, white-blond hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. She held a clipboard in her hand, one page lifted. “Couple of lumps and bumps.” She let the paper drop, looked at Marlow with an easy smile. “Nothing that won’t heal.”
“Maybe I’ll heal a little quicker if you loosen these up a bit,” he replied, struggling to lift his arms.
“Just a precaution,” said the man. “You…” He seemed to chew on the words. “You saw a few things, back there. Things we don’t really want you sharing.”
Creatures, made of rock, concrete, metal, dead flesh. A girl who died, who had a hole punched through her heart.
A girl who came back.
Marlow looked past the man and woman, seeing a huge room, easily a hundred feet each way. There were windows on all four sides, flooding the space with sunlight. He squinted, trying to see anything through the golden haze. Was that the Chrysler out there?
The man followed his gaze, then shared a look with the woman that Marlow couldn’t quite place. She nodded and walked away into the giant space. There were other people there, just a handful, milling between various stacks of boxes and complicated-looking pieces of equipment. One thing in particular caught his eye, something that looked like one of those huge machines they used in hospitals, like a giant tube you slid into. An MRI scanner or something, emitting a loud hum. It was on the other side of the room, but he could make out a pair of legs stretched from it, toes flexing. Was that a scar on the shin? An injury, bone sticking through the flesh. And his heart flipped like a pancake when he realized who it was.
This time, when the man saw where he was staring, he grinned. Just about the most terrifying grin Marlow had ever seen, with his lips chapped and burned and one of his upper front teeth missing.