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I flipped my oxygen switch and took a couple of deep breaths. I was having sparklies that didn’t have a thing to do with bad air.
Roy keyed his mike. “Benoit to teams. We have likely grendel activity. ” He looked down at his GPS. The other two team commanders had the same device. It showed the positions of all three team leaders with pulsing red dots. “We’re approximately one block from the center of Times Square. ”
“This is Anderssen,” came the Scandinavian commander’s voice through our comms. “I am being told that we can be at your location in twenty minutes. ”
“Roger that, Lars,” Roy said. “We’ll proceed, but we’d appreciate the company when you get here. ”
“Niles checking in,” Sandra said. She didn’t sound happy. “I’m thirty—repeat three zero—minutes from your location. ”
“Sandy, darlin’, looks like you’re gonna miss the shindig. ” Roy’s expression didn’t match his tone. He wasn’t happy, either. “I’ll try to bring you a souvenir. ” He took his finger off the mike switch. “Circle the wagons, folks. I want eyes on every patch of dark down here. If that mama monster laid her eggs down that tunnel, there’s a heap of meanness waiting for us. We’re taking this nice and easy. ” He caught Rolf Haagen’s impatient scowl. “You’ll get your chance to play with ’em, son. Don’t jump the gun and you’ll get the fun of surviving, too. ”
“Unless you’re in a hurry to get to Valhalla,” Ian said.
Rolf shrugged. “My ancestors can wait another day to meet me. ”
I was willing to wait until the other team got here and the cows came home, but the monsters weren’t so patient.
Yasha raised his head and sniffed the air. He growled.
A few seconds later, the rest of us smelled it, too. It was the dead-fish-at-low-tide stench from Ollie’s office. It wasn’t quite as overpowering, but it was definitely the same overripe odor.
Rolf’s nostrils flared as he breathed in the scent, and a slow smile spread across his face. “Definitely grendels. ”
“Yasha, can you follow that stink?” Roy asked.
The Russian werewolf didn’t dignify that with a response. He sniffed in a semicircle then started down a side tunnel.
There were no steel and concrete columns where Yasha and his nose led us, just plenty of pipes and claustrophobia.
“It looks like Hell’s jungle gym down here,” Ian whispered.
The larger pipes, the circumference of fifty-five-gallon drums, were stacked two and three high, mounted on metal frames that kept them off the floor and separated from each other, creating what was essentially a wall of pipes. The aisle between them gave us enough room for three of us to walk side by side, but left us next to no room to maneuver. And I wanted room to maneuver worse than I think I’ve ever wanted anything.
“Do grendels climb?” Roy asked Rolf.
“And jump,” he replied, his sharp blue eyes sweeping the rafters of smaller pipes above our heads. He silently extended the spear to its full length, locking it in place with the barest of clicks; the other Scandinavian spearman followed suit.
The tunnel broadened into an open area, if you could call something the size of two subway cars sitting side by side open. The pipes curved at various points, in seemingly all directions, basically turning the place into a maze. Beyond where we were standing, all I could see was a lot of dark.
The tiny hairs on the back of my neck quivered, sending a shudder down the length of my body. I breathed through my nose, trying to stay calm.
Roy’s attention never wavered from the shadows in front of us. Some of our people found that patch of dark mighty interesting, too. Experience must breed a sixth sense when it came to things that went bump in dark places.
I couldn’t pick anything out from the shadows yet, but they were close enough that I could smell the leftovers of what they’d been eating—a sharp, coppery tang. Blood. Then I detected a shimmer in the dark, like a heat mirage on a road. It was too dark to see the actual grendel, but my seer vision was picking up the effects of the cloaking device.
Oh hell. Here we go.
“Cloaking device in use,” I said. “From ten o’clock to two. ” The shimmer darted through the dark into the forest of pipes, so fast that my mind couldn’t confirm what or how many my eyes had just seen.
Grendels are sprinters, Anderssen had said.
I swallowed hard. “It’s moving. ”
Calvin and Rolf took up position with Roy on the front line. Yasha dropped back to stand with me and Ian.
Ian had his gun up, tracking the shadows to our rear. “I’ve got a couple of ghouls playing hide-’n’-seek back here. I can see them. No cloaks or veils, so they’re not being too shy. ”
Liz immediately staked out that patch of concrete as her own, the nozzle of her flamethrower glowing with an eager blue flame. The second Scandinavian spearman joined her.
Roy was perfectly still. “How many grendels?”
“Just one that I could see,” I said. “Could be more. ”
“Adult?”
I had no clue. I shook my head. “Moving too fast. ”
The Cajun actually shrugged under his armor. “We knew it wasn’t gonna be easy. ” He already had a huge handgun in one hand; and with his other, pulled out the biggest Bowie knife I’d ever seen. He saw my eyes widen and grinned. “Gator gutter. In case one of ’em wants to slow dance. Calvin, lay down some light, both directions. ”
Calvin lit two flares, and with a major-league effort, threw one ahead and one behind, far enough to show us anything that’d be coming at us.
With Ian and Yasha flanking me, I froze as an adult grendel—shimmering with the effects of Tarbert’s cloaking device—stepped out of the shadows and into the flares’ light. No one else could see it.
Oh shit.
It was the one from headquarters. The male. With no wounds, scars, or indication that he’d ever been in a dragon fight. His scales glowed like blood-dipped armor in the flares’ light. His gleaming yellow eyes were locked on me. I was the one that got away.
My paintball rifle was pointing down, my index finger against the trigger guard. The grendel knew I could see it. I knew that if I so much as twitched, he’d be gone back into the shadows—or on top of me. I stayed absolutely still, kept my eyes locked on the grendel, and tried to speak without moving my lips. “Roy, male, dead ahead, twenty yards. ”
In one smooth and deadly move, Roy brought his pistol up and fired three shots precisely where the thing’s head was . . . had been.
The Cajun snarled. He knew he hadn’t hit it, and that it’d been gone before his bullets even got there. “Faster than a speeding bullet,” he said between clenched teeth. “Bunch up, people. I want coverage in every direction. You’re now weapons free. ”
I’d learned that was military-speak for “If you see it, kill it. ” Problem was, I was the only one who could see it.
I held my breath and waited for the grendel to put in another appearance.
I didn’t have to wait long.
Four of them, six, nine, then a dozen and more. From every direction.
Ghouls, not grendels. Nest guardians.
They weren’t veiled, so everyone could see them.
They were also smart, swift, and sadistic. Though with something that liked eating its dinner while it was still alive, that last one was a given. In my opinion, it also said a lot about an adversary who hired them as her thugs-on-call—and as nannies for newborn monsters. They’d ditched the white camo for black, and had likewise ditched any effort to disguise themselves as human.
The team opened fire with enough silver to bring down double their number.
Naturally, the ghouls fired back.
Whether I heard, saw, or just felt the air get heavy over my head, my lizard brain told me to look up. Now.
I did.
A ghoul leapt.
I didn’t think. There was no time. Suddenly everything went into that slow-motion thing that was your brain’s way of giving you one chance to figure out how not to die horribly. With roars and unearthly shrieks, the ghouls on the ground rushed us. I dimly heard the team opening fire all around me. My hand moved with agonizing slowness, going for my real gun, but hitting something else on the way there.
My headlamp switch. Scalding bright light flash-fried the ghoul’s vision as I jumped aside, so instead of landing on me, the ghoul pancaked on the concrete floor. Ian double-tapped the ghoul in the back of the head.
I barely heard the gunshots with all the adrenaline pounding through me. I tried to look everywhere at once, desperate to find the grendel, and my headlamp spotlighted another ghoul about to jump. Ian fired exactly where my beam pointed. I might not be a sharpshooter yet with a gun, but I could aim the hell out of a flashlight.
“Stay together!” Roy shouted.
Like I was gonna cut myself from the herd. I scanned the tangle of pipes for more targets. They were everywhere, but they were too fast. I panicked. Where the hell was the male?
“Lars, we are under attack,” Roy said through his comms. “Ghouls and grendels. ”
There was a hiss then a roar as an arc of fire erupted from Liz’s flamethrower, sweeping flaming death across three of the ghouls. The things ran and leapt out of range, with no damage whatsoever. A pair of ghoul arms reached through the pipes, grabbed the second spearman by an armor strap, and jerked him repeatedly against the wall of metal. The man was flush against the pipes, too close to use his spear. He dropped it and drew his pistol, firing through the spaces at what had him pinned. Calvin snatched up the spear and drove it between the pipes. The spear jerked in his big hands, the point caught in something on the other side. Calvin pulled the spear’s trigger, immediately followed by a muffled thump and a high-pitched scream.
One less ghoul.
The floor shook beneath our feet. The still-cloaked male grendel landed squarely in the middle of the aisle.
Behind us.
I fired my rifle in a steady stream of neon yellow directly at the thing’s head.